Free The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 by Chögyam Trungpa

You can enter yourself into the middle of the queue, if you are queuing, because this queue is made out of small particles, or people, rather than one thing.
    Student: Doesn’t alaya consciousness provide the ground of continuity?
    Trungpa Rinpoche: In order to have alaya consciousness, you have to have change taking place all the time. This common ground idea, or alaya, is not ground in terms of solid ground, but perpetually changing ground. That’s why it remains consciousness—or the unconscious state—it is a changing process.
    Student: This morning there was some confusion in our discussion group about the place of technique in dealing with the problems of everyday life and in meditating, and whether there should be any techniques at all.
    Trungpa Rinpoche: Whether there shouldn’t be any techniques or there should be techniques, both remain techniques in any case. I mean, you can’t step out of one thing because you have gotten a better one, you see? It’s a question of what is needed. Any kind of application becomes a technique, therefore there is continual room for discipline.
    S: Is the technique of “no technique” a fiction? In fact, do you always have to apply some technique?
    TR: When you talk about “no technique” and “technique,” when you begin to speak in terms of “yes” and “no,” then that is automatically a polarity. And however much you are able to reduce your negativity into nothingness, it still remains negative as opposed to positive. But at the same time, being without the sophisticated techniques of everyday life, the practice of meditation is in a sense more ruthless. In other words, it is not comforting and not easy. It is a very narrow and direct path because you can’t introduce any other means of occupying yourself. Everything is left to a complete bare minimum of simplicity—which helps you to discover everything.
    If you present the simplicity of nothingness, the absence of technique, the so-called absence of technique, then that absence produces a tremendously creative process. Nothing means everything in this case. That helps you to learn not to be afraid to dance and not to be afraid of too many things crowding in on you. It helps keep that guideline of simplicity. Whereas if you already have complex techniques and patterns, if you already have handfuls of things, then you don’t want to pick up any more. Any new situation that comes in becomes overcrowding. But all of these tactics, so to speak, are fundamentally still acts of duality, of course.
    S: Is that all right? Is that the best we can do at this point, to act within that duality?
    TR: Well, there’s no other thing to work on; the best we can do is just work on what we have.
    Student: Some people reach a sort of meditative state without knowing it. I met somebody who was emphatically against even hearing about meditation, and yet he was often in a meditative state. But if I told him, he would be furious.
    Trungpa Rinpoche: Well, that’s always the thing: even if you start with the bare minimum, complete nothingness, it tends to bring you something anyway. You end up practicing some kind of teaching; that automatically happens. Before you realize where you are, you have technique; before you realize where you are, you have religion, so to speak, you have a spiritual path. You see, you can’t completely ignore the whole thing, because if you reject everything completely, that means there is still a rejecter. As long as there’s a rejecter, then you have a path. Even if you completely ignore the road, there still will be a pair of feet, and they have to tread on something. That automatically happens. Things always work with this kind of logic. If you commit yourself to collecting a lot of things, you end up being poor. But if you reject—not exactly reject, but purely accept everything as bare simplicity—then you become rich. These two polarities, two aspects, continue all the time. It is a natural thing.