Friday

Mudra: A Tool for Chaos

By Craig Warren Smith

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news…Chaos is the great space of emptiness that occurs before genesis. … This space provides an opportunity to reconnect with what lies under the chaos and negativity — inherent awakened nature. Another way chaos is good news is that when things seem very bad, there is a big opportunity for something good to take place.” – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche¹

Mudra is for NOW

In 1974, the same year Trungpa Rinpoche introduced Mudra Space Awareness (Mudra) to us hippies, he uttered the iconic phrase, “Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.” It was not just a bumper sticker. It was a prediction. He warned us that chaos was coming within the scope of our own lifetimes. Trungpa wasn’t just prophesying capitalism’s demise. He conveyed a kind of Dante’s inferno in which one would enter the gates of hell and then resurface the better for having gone through.

Trungpa wasn’t just prophesying capitalism’s demise. He conveyed a kind of Dante’s inferno in which one would enter the gates of hell and then resurface the better for having gone through.

Anticipating the breakdown of modern society, he transmitted two upayas (skillful means in Sanskrit) that are fierce and intense enough to transmute the chaos now triggered by Covid-19. These tools are the evocative, haunting poem “The Sadhana of Mahamudra” and Mudra Space Awareness, which is the embodiment practice of the Sadhana of Mahamudra where the words of the Sadhana become postures. Thriving on groundlessness, Mudra must come out of the shadows of Shambhala Buddhism as an essential response to the imbalances that lie at the root of this dark age. The end-goal is to activate transformational “gestures” (“Mudras”) within ourselves and through those gestures, uproot materialism embedded into our lifestyles and by extension, all social institutions that define business-as-usual in the 21^st century. Continue…