[Buddha-l] Joni Mitchell and Trungpa

[John Whalen-Bridge]

There was some discussion a few weeks back about Joni Mitchell & lyrics
to "Refuge of the Road."  Just found an interview in which she discusses
several meetings with Trungpa & crazy wisdom pedagogy:  

Joni Mitchell
by Dimitri Ehrlich 
Interview Magazine April 1991


How's the art world treating you?
Well, the thing about the art world is that everyone wants to pigeonhole
the artists. And the problem I've run into is that to align my myself
with a gallery means to really curtail my freedom. I paint in, like,
four different styles, but they want you to get a recognizable style
going, like Lichtenstein or something. But in a way, everything you
appreciate goes into you and comes out sooner or later. It creates the
mulch for later work. 
I like that idea. Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan lame, once said that
everything in life is fertilizer: you scatter it on the field of
awakening. Rather than saying that everthing you hate about yourself is
shit and that you're going to get rid of it.
He loved the word "shit," didn't he?
Trungpa did some very weird things.
Oh, yeah. He was the bad boy of Zen. I wrote a song about a visit I made
to him called "Refuge of the Road." I consider him one of my great
teachers, even though I saw him only three times. Once I had a
fifteen-minute audience with him in which we argued. He told me to quit
analyzing. I told him I couldn't - I'm an artist, you know. Then he
induced into me a temporary state where the concept of "I" was absent,
which lasted for three days.
Wow, that's very rare. Immediate transmission.
Immediate, and from then on it was my decision whether to make that my
life. But you can't function from there as an artist.
Did you ever tell him how much you learned from him?
Yes. At the very end of Trungpa's life I went to visit him. I wanted to
thank him. He was not well. He was green and his eyes had no spirit in
them at all, which sort of stunned me, because the previous times I'd
seen him he was quite merry and puckish - you know, saying "shit" a lot.
I leaned over and looked into his eyes, and I said, "How is it in there?
What do you see in there? And this voice came, like, out of a void, and
it said, "Nothing." So, I want over and whispered in his ear, "I just
came to tell you that when I left you that time, I had three whole days
without self conscious-ness, and I wanted to thank you for the
experience." And he looked up at me, and all the light came back into
his face and he goes, "Really?" And then he sank back into this black
void again.
How would you sum up Trungpa's effect on your life?
Well, who knows? His particular lineage uses a teaching device that
involves shocking you. Trungpa stopped me in my tracks. Made a space.
Wham. He pushed back all this stuff, and it stayed pushed back for three
days.
I once asked a Tibetan lama about duality. He just took my head in his
hand and smacked our heads together. It was, like, bonk. He said, 'You
think too much."
You are a bright cookie, you know that? Your questions have almost been
too cerebral for me.
Sorry. They have been a bit dense.
But on the other hand, I like what most might consider stupid questions.
As in, What's it like to be a singer?
Um, that's not a bad one. I could answer that. 

Full interview cached at:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:KALBJTqVOXkJ:www.jmdl.com/articles/v
iew.cfm%3Fid%3D132+Joni+Mitchell+Chogyam+Trungpa&hl=en

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