The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the watcher.
    S: How is the watcher a vehicle?
    TR: Well, we don’t have anything else but the watcher for a vehicle. At that point, the only intelligent voice that you have is the watcher. For lack of a better choice, that’s it. Sometimes the watcher is referred to as self-consciousness. In the Christian tradition, it might be referred to as a guilt conflict—whatever.
    Student: If you put 25 percent concentration on the breath and 25 percent on relaxation, and so on—the way you described—does that create a problem with identifying with the breath as you have taught us to do?
    Trungpa Rinpoche: Absolutely not. It provides more possibility of identifying. Take a very simple example. People find it very conducive when they’re watching movies to eat popcorn. Twenty-five percent, maybe 50 percent of their attention is on the screen, and another 25 percent is on popcorn, and another 25 percent is on their companion or their Coca-Cola or whatever. Which makes the whole experience of going to the cinema very pleasurable. That’s precisely the whole point. You develop enormous concentration. You follow the dialogue in the movie and you follow every detail of the story, and you have a good time at the movies.
    Student: It seems to me that once you gave some instruction before we were going to meditate like, “Don’t be the watcher.”
    Trungpa Rinpoche: You can’t be the watcher anyway, but if you try to be the watcher, that just creates further problems. It’s like leprosy: once you have one sore, that expands and develops another, and another sore is constantly developing. So the less watcher, the more clean-cut. But rather than trying to abandon the watcher, you just don’t take part in the watcher’s trip.
    S: Is the watcher your reference point?
    TR: Reference point is the watcher. The reference point referring to itself is the watcher. There is no other watcher other than the reference point. That’s the whole point—that all kinds of reference points become the watcher.
    Student: When I’m meditating I see words, and some of them seem to be other people’s thoughts and some of them seem to be communications from somewhere else, and some of them seem to be directions. And it’s very hard to really distinguish what’s what.
    Trungpa Rinpoche: Why bother?
    S: Just to clarify.
    TR: Why bother?
    S: I suppose I can just try to ride through the confusion, but—
    TR: There’s no point trying to sort out whose confusion is whose. That would be like trying to sort out whose dollar is whose, and every nickel and every cent. The whole thing becomes very complicated. Maybe some analytical disciplines might encourage you to sort out the problem of the universe bit by bit, but we Buddhists are very sloppy, I’m afraid. We don’t bother to count our pennies. We just deal with dollars, or twenty-dollar checks, or seven-hundred-dollar checks. It’s just simply money. It doesn’t matter who each cent came from. That doesn’t seem to present any problems.
    S: I’m a writer. I try to record it.
    TR: Well, you have to write very simply. The possibilities are you might become a more successful writer if you simplify the plot. Make it very clean-cut, which is very intriguing at the same time, maybe very mysterious. That makes a best-seller.
    S: I don’t know. I wouldn’t really know how to simplify.
    TR: Don’t try to. That’s the starting point.
    Student: Making friends with yourself.
    Trungpa Rinpoche: Well said.
    Student: Can you make a distinction between hope and expectation, which is one of the things that you listed for 25 percent attention? You once said it was necessary to give up hope, and I really don’t see too much distinction there.
    Trungpa Rinpoche: Hope is future-oriented. Expectation is much closer to reality, but still not quite getting to the reality. It’s on the verge of reality. Hope is like saying, “I hope I could be the mother of a child.” Expectation means you are already