The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (72 page)

WILLIAM BURROUGHS, ALLEN GINSBERG, W.S. MERWIN, CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE, ANNE WALDMAN, PHILIP WHALEN, AND RICK FIELDS, DAVID ROME, JOSHUA ZIM

Rinpoche:
Want to say something?

Burroughs:
Well, as I understand it, you’re a little bit, shall we say reluctant to admit all these sorts of psychic practices like astral projection, feeling colors with your hands, and telepathy, and so on. My feeling about these things, frankly, is that they’re simply fun, like skiing or gliding, learning Mexican cooking or something like that. Do you seriously object to these practices?

Rinpoche:
Well, I wouldn’t say “reluctant,” actually, but the question seems to be that these phenomena we experience are made up in our psychic level, which we can’t actually share with somebody. They’re not as real as a dollar bill. So that seems to be the problem, always. And, also, there’s a tendency to get into a new world, a new dimension that nobody can share, that people in the street can’t share, can’t experience. And further, how much are we making these things up, or are they actually happening? That’s the kind of question. No doubt a lot of experience occurred. They do function on an individual level, but do they in terms of public phenomena? Somebody might see a TWA jet flying overhead, which is everybody’s common knowledge. These other things are not exactly common knowledge. It may be common knowledge to a certain particular circle. That seems to be the problematic point. Are we going to encourage people to pursue something that is purely in their minds or to pursue something they can actually share? And half of the world, or even more than that actually, 99 percent of the world, haven’t realized who they are to begin with, so it’s quite a burden.

Burroughs:
Yes, but the simple consideration I was making was that these things are fun and they are limited. The man in the street can’t do hang gliding, he can’t do ballooning, he can’t do mountain climbing, but is that any reason why those who can shouldn’t? And I think the same thing applies to astral travel and other things that are fun. They’re not supposed to be any final answer.

Rinpoche:
Absolutely not. Everybody is on their own anyway in this world. If they feel rejection from their parents, or if they feel acceptance and enlightenment from their teacher, why not?

Burroughs:
I guess all I am saying is that enlightenment should be fun. It isn’t always, to be sure.

Ginsberg:
Now you’re proposing astral travel as enlightenment?

Burroughs:
No. I proposed it simply as fun, that’s all, like any sort of travel.

Whalen:
Why should enlightenment be fun or anything else? Why shouldn’t it just be enlightenment? Like it usually is.

Burroughs:
Incentive learning. People are more interested in doing something that’s fun than not fun. Allen, what do you have to say on this question?

Ginsberg:
Well, I’ve never experienced astral travel except in dreams. I ain’t never seen no flying saucers, and all the acid heads that come up to me with all sorts of Tarot with wings and hydra-headed birds coming from Mars with a message of apocalypse, are generally speed freaks so I get turned off to late-nineteenth-century-style magic.

Burroughs:
Yes, there’s a great turn off in the whole literature of occultism. Such atrocious writing, and there’s this sleazy, second-rate thing that’s being put down. I mean the whole literature of Theosophy and so on.

Rinpoche:
I think that has been a problem, always. I think the whole reason why that thing started was a need to introduce another dimension in thinking, and that was the closest they could come up with. You know, it’s such an extraordinary thing. I have experienced astral travel myself, by flying TWA.

Burroughs:
May I ask if you’ve ever tried to read Aleister Crowley?

Rinpoche:
Yes. In fact, one of the closest students of Aleister Crowley happens to be a good friend of mine. And we talked a certain amount about it, not a great deal. He’s rather discreet about the whole thing, but that area is very interesting.

Burroughs:
Well, he did say something very profound. He was simply requoting the Old Man of the Mountain. He said, “Do what thou wilt. That is the whole of the Law.” Well, now, one person in twenty million knows what they want to do, so this is no invitation to unrestrained behavior.

Rinpoche:
Aleister Crowley himself felt the experience of torturing death. Finally, the magic of the world descended on him, which is interesting drama in some sense. There is something operating. Buddhists would say it is karma or karmic force. Or tantrics would say it’s the act of the vajra principle or whatever.

Burroughs:
Well, this is simply a quote, a restatement of Hassan i Sabbah’s dying words, “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” That means if nothing is true everything is permitted and if all is illusion then you can do anything you want.

Rinpoche:
That’s true, but we can’t jump out the window from the Empire State Building.

Whalen:
The thing is, do you want to do anything? What do you want to do?

Burroughs:
You are bringing up the whole question of motivation.

Whalen:
No, I’m bringing up a question of what do you want to do right now? What is it that you want to do? Supposing that we’re all these illusory bodies sitting around here, which we are, and so are you, what is it you want to do?

Burroughs:
It cannot be put into words.

Ginsberg:
When I first knew Bill in 1945 or 6 he was studying Korzybski’s
Science and Sanity.
Do you know that book or of it? General Semantics. The words are not the things they represent, which is like a Western presentation of the fact that the word “table,” for example, is not the same as a table. So that a goose in a bottle is a verbal construction and you can get it out the same way you put it in.

Rinpoche:
That always puzzles me. How to take the goose out.

Ginsberg:
You put it in the bottle. You take it out of the bottle.

Rinpoche:
I’m not so sure.

Ginsberg:
The point was that Bill said then that his thought process was primarily visual and pictorial rather than verbal, and mine was primarily verbal. I was always astounded by that actually. When interrogated he says that he doesn’t even have the pictures sometimes. And that you can turn it off or turn it on.

Burroughs:
Yes, it’s no problem to make your mind as blank as a plate. It’s simply a question of sufficient knowledge, obviously. If you understand your brain mechanism fully you can say, “turn off the words.” Very simple. It’s a tape recorder, anyway. Yes, Korzybski used to come in and slap a chair saying, “Whatever this is, it’s not a chair.” That is, it’s not the verbal label “chair.” Another of his great statements was, “You think as much with your big toe as you do with your brain, and probably much more efficiently.” These, of course, are Buddhist commonplaces.

Ginsberg:
Or are they?

Burroughs:
Of course they are.

Rinpoche:
Well, I think rather Zennish.

Burroughs:
Just suppose we had a machine to wipe out everyone’s past conditioning. This is quite possible in terms of present-day technology. So people don’t have to do any sort of meditation. They just go to the machines. Their whole past condition, their whole bad karma, is wiped out of their brains. It must have a place in your nervous system through which it manifests itself for it to be manifest in you.

Rinpoche:
I think the question is why the nervous system developed in the beginning for it to happen that way.

Whalen:
Your nervous system comes out of that lunacy to start with.

Burroughs:
Yes. And of course we have a nervous system that is already divided by the two sides of the brain. Gregory Bateson has talked quite a bit about the two sides. I think that’s a very, very important point. You talk about compulsive verbalization, but where is it coming from? It’s coming from the other side of the brain, perhaps.

Rinpoche:
Well, I think the point is, who’s the maker of that up there? How does the whole thing happen to be that way? And what kind of mind is going on behind it? Well, it’s a question of taking at face value who actually had the brains to assemble such a machine in the beginning.

Burroughs:
Have you read Wittgenstein? He says that no proposition can contain itself as data. In other words, the only thing that’s not prerecorded is prerecordings themselves.

Ginsberg:
Well, do you think given sufficient money you could get a machine that would resolve problems of echo, of language, of the word, and problems of conditioning?

Burroughs:
It’s not exactly a question of a machine. It’s a question of the interaction between the machine and the individual. We’ve got machines. We might as well use them. Which isn’t to say that you’ve invalidated the meditative position. But simply that there can be an interaction between that position and shall we say, data provided by machines which would make it much more efficient, much more precise, and also much more available to large numbers of people.

Ginsberg:
But in a way acid is that too. As soon as people get their conditioning wiped out, they freak out. So as soon as you’ve got your conditioning wiped out, as soon as you turn off the machine, you’d walk right out in the street and stop and have a Coke.

Burroughs:
Not necessarily. See, you’ve got a series of tape recorders in your brain, and you know that you can wipe out a recording.

Rinpoche:
I think the problem is that you still have the tape recorder in your brain.

Burroughs:
Suppose you put a magnet on it and it was wiped out?

Rinpoche:
But you still have the tape, empty tape, which is willing to pick new channels. That is always the problem. We can wipe them out, but we still have the machine that’s running around willing to respond to all kinds of things.

Burroughs:
I was not proposing some very easy way of doing it; I was simply saying that we can use machines, perhaps, to make it more efficient and more available.

Rome:
Well, with due respect, some of the earlier metaphors and notions of meditation that you presented about blank mind or getting rid of the sum of past conditioning were a rather static, or decided notion of what meditation is. Whereas I think the tradition of Buddhism is really interested in the process of how it goes on right now, how we handle what is there.

Burroughs:
Presumably if you were able to wipe out past conditioning you’d be able to go on from there, wherever you went on to.

Zim:
Presumably without wiping it out you’d also be able to go on. Wiping it out is a curious intention.

Burroughs:
Most people are not able to wipe out and get beyond their past conditioning. As Bernard Shaw says, “Those who are ignorant of history will suffer its repetition,” and that goes as well for any individual.

Zim:
But then you’re stuck with this question of where this intent to wipe it out comes from. And that still remains.

Burroughs:
No, there is no question there at all. It is simply biologically inappropriate to be reacting to past and future dangers, that’s all. It is advantageous to be rid of your past conditioning. You don’t have to say anymore than that. You take some guy who’s been in battle ten years ago and he’s still in battle fatigue. He’s still reacting to that situation and there can’t be anything more biologically disadvantageous than that. And the same thing with people who are reacting at the present time to infantile traumas that happened forty years ago. And they’re completely crippled by this. This is very disadvantageous.

Rinpoche:
But knowing how to walk and talk and breathe is part of past conditioning. How do you sort those things out?

Burroughs:
You don’t have to. Walking and talking and breathing are quite advantageous. Reacting to something that happened to you forty years ago is very disadvantageous. The techniques exist whereby that can be wiped right out of the brain. And once its wiped out it’s wiped out.

Zim:
Then you’ve swallowed the whole idea of wipe out. That’s become another element of conditioning. Let’s say you were lucky enough to wipe out your traumatic experience of ten years ago without wiping out knowing how to walk and talk and breathe, and still so what? What do you do then?

Burroughs:
What you want to do. “Do what thou wilt. That is the whole of the Law.” You find out what you want to do and you do it.

Rome:
Are you sure that you’re still going to want to do something?

Burroughs:
Maybe you’ll just have a lot of people who couldn’t move at all. So we say, “Well, what the hell. We tried.” There’s no way of knowing. That is why Rinpoche has spoken about a leap in the dark. You try it, say, “Well, we’re going to wipe out the whole past conditioning for these people.”

Rome:
Now wait a minute, you’re going to wipe it out for them or wipe it out for yourself?

Burroughs:
Well, I’ll be quite content to wipe it out for myself. I would be glad to be the first experimental subject and see what happens. You see, you cannot say, “I will decide ahead of time what will happen if I make a leap in the dark.” And you have spoken very much about the leap in the dark, have you not?

Rinpoche:
The dark in the sense of having no idea what’s going to happen.

Burroughs:
It may be good, it may be bad, it may be simply indifferent. Well, I’ve been talking too much. Let someone else talk for a while.