"Student: I feel that there is real suffering and misery in this world, and all of these things that we've been talking about sometimes feel to me like a thousand-dollar bill that I can't spend to do anything about it. It feels like these points of view don't enable me to do anything actual about pain and suffering in this world.
"Trungpa Rinpoche: I think you could do a lot. The reason why there is the chaos of struggling with pain in the world is that we haven't come to terms with what pain actually is ourselves, personally. If we can come to an understanding of pain in our own innate nature, we will then be dealing with the situation directly, and there will be less pain. The pain becomes purely chaos, orderly chaos.
"The pain doesn't have to be there. If you want to stop the war in Vietnam, you have to stop your pain, your version of the Vietnam war. You have to relate with your own antagonism, your own innate war between you and your projections. If you solve that problem and relate with that transmutation process, then it will become much easier to solve the problem existing on the diplomatic or international level. That problem then becomes just purely a bundle of instances that occurred on the basis of orderly logic, the end result of which was chaos. It is the same orderly chaos that is happening all the time, and one can handle it beautifully at that point. The problem now is that we cannot keep track of the situation. We look at national or international things so much in terms of our own projections that we lose track of the actual political situation.
"S: On the whole, if you can let go of the reference point of the self and relate with the pain directly, we will end up creating less pain.
"TR: I think so, yes. But if you rely on that as a promise or reassurance, you end up destroying the whole thing."
