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

practice, but at the same time very fruitful. That’s how the Buddha designed the path. And it seems it has been working for twenty-five hundred years. Nobody has gone utterly crazy except those people who didn’t follow his path.
    Student: How do you reconcile what you said in your first talk about being willing to waste time and what you talked about tonight about 25 percent expectation? I mean, a rock doesn’t expect anything. It’s just sitting there. That’s what you said in your first talk. Then tonight, we’re expecting something.
    Trungpa Rinpoche: That’s also wasting time. Expecting something is wasting your time as well, because you are not going to get anything.
    S: So wasting time is not part of your feeling, then. You don’t feel like you’re wasting time.
    TR: It doesn’t really matter what you do, you’re still wasting time. You don’t have to make a martyr of yourself, saying, “I feel great because I’m wasting my time. I’m being a perfectly good Buddhist and a good meditator, because I’m wasting my time.”
    S: So wasting time with that attitude . . . that really isn’t an attitude that you want to cultivate.
    TR: Wasting time’s not an attitude. It’s just a fact.

THREE
     
    The Star of Bethlehem
     
    T O UNDERSTAND THE relationship of awareness and being, we have to look into the notion of being at this point. There are all kinds of approaches toward being. Being good, being bad, being sensible, being crazy. Beatitude [be-attitude]. All kinds of notions of being. But when we talk about being in relation to awareness, we are talking about unconditional being. You just be. Without any questions about what you are being. It is an unconditional way of being.
    Unconditional being is a state of mind that is involved with a certain attitude. You might say, “Could that be unconditional mind if it is involved with an attitude? If it is also an attitude, we couldn’t define it as unconditional being.” True. But oddly enough, even unconditional being requires an attitude in order to develop to the unconditional level. We have to make some condition in order to develop unconditionality. We cannot begin perfectly. Otherwise it would cease being the beginning and become the end, an achievement.
    The reason we refer to this whole process as the beginner’s level is that it is the level of clumsiness, the level of messiness. It is unstructured, confused, and so forth. There is confusion, messiness, untidiness—and constant dichotomy, constant reference point. But at least we are moving in the direction of unconditional being.
    We are gazing at the star of Bethlehem on the horizon. It is far, far away, but still there is hope. A spark of luminosity is there. The land may be dark, the sky may be gray and black. It might be chilly, and we might be cold, uncomfortable, tired, and restless. But nevertheless, the star of Bethlehem is over there. Human beings hope. The final hope that human beings could ever be hopeful of is enlightenment, the star of Bethlehem on the horizon.
    The buddhas, tathagatas, and great teachers have developed skillful means throughout the ages. Their approach is to hold up enlightenment like a carrot in front of a donkey. There is a carrot thousands of miles away shining, and you have to walk and walk and walk and go get it. The donkey doesn’t have the carrot at this point, at the beginner’s level, but he has to be inspired. So a faraway inspiration is provided. Something is taking place way off there on the horizon. There is a big space, a huge desert landscape.
    The point (apart from all this poetic imagery) is that we need hope, the powerful hope of attaining enlightenment in this lifetime. We need that hope because of having to relate with the constant chatter that goes on in our mind, the emotional ups and downs of all kinds that go on, the disturbances that we experience, the constant, ongoing process taking place in our state of being. We need a reference point