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

He says, “Put on your boots. Don’t punish yourself. Wear a coat, a warm coat. If you like, take a cigar along with you. Now let us take a walk, step out of our mud house or our plastic house or whatever we are living in, and walk around. Watch the steps at the door when you go out. It’s rather dark out. Give your eyes time to adjust from the light inside to the dark outside. Let’s step out, but be careful, watch your step. Don’t tread on the dog shit on the sidewalk.” He’s very practical, very careful. He takes you out on this cold winter night, and you can hear every grass stalk covered with frozen dew crunching under your feet. Then, once you have made a relationship with your ground and your vision has adjusted to that kind of night light—maybe it is a new moon and there is no moonlight—then the stars appear very bright. There may be occasional clouds at the edges of the horizon, but there is the star of Bethlehem shining, shivering because of the cold weather.
    So the spiritual friend’s role is to take you out for a walk to look at the star of Bethlehem. “Take a look. We are going to go out there . Our trip begins tomorrow. Maybe we should walk or maybe we should drive or fly or take a train to see the star. Whatever.” Then you get a personal experience, which is mutual between you and the spiritual friend, and then you have a goal, the idea that you want to get to the star of Bethlehem—enlightenment. It is a real experience at that point, no myth. It is not an optical illusion at all. There is the star of Bethlehem out there shining, and it is not a matter of conmanship at all. It’s a real experience, very real. According to the Zen tradition, it is known as a satori experience. Or it can be called the meeting of two minds. A person has shown you a certain way of handling yourself, your emotions, disciplines of all kinds. But the main point here is making enlightenment real, rather than purely a myth.
    Until we’ve had this experience we might think, “It might work, let’s take a chance.” But somehow it doesn’t become practical enough. We’ve been taking those kinds of chances for a long, long time, since we became involved in the circle of samsara. We thought we were going to be made happy one day through our striving, speeding, trying to grasp, trying to create a comfortable nest. We have done all kinds of guesswork, and we are hoping still. We never gave up hope. But somehow it actually didn’t work. It wasn’t a brilliant scheme, shall we say. It was rather a dumb and stupid one, in fact. We can’t blame the historians or the philosophers or the scientists, particularly, or the creator of this universe. We can’t even blame ourselves. It happened by accident, through karmic chain reactions. So let us not take a vengeful attitude toward anybody: “My mother messed up my life; my father messed up my life.” Those blamings and pathetic gestures are becoming old hat and unreasonable. So back to square one. Meet a spiritual friend who shows you the star of Bethlehem, enlightenment, and then start the journey immediately.
    Here the sense of being is that having shared a mutual experience with your spiritual friend, there is something taking place. That’s the sense of being. Whether that sense of being is created artificially or very naturally and organically doesn’t really matter. It is an experience already. It is an experience in any case. Let’s not question its validity from a metaphysical point of view or philosophically, scientifically, or domestically. We don’t have time to make sure, to get a signature on the dotted line, to take out an insurance policy. And it is not only that we don’t have time, but there is something more than that. This is not a business transaction. It is personal experience.
    If you are a mother who has borne a child and the child is starving, you cannot blame your child, your infant, saying, “It’s because you didn’t bring any money