This passage from The Retreat Diaries is based on Burroughs' two-week retreat with
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1976. 

Last summer in Boulder I was talking to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche about doing a retreat at his Vermont center.  I asked about taking along a typewriter.  He objected that this would defeat the whole purpose of a retreat, like a carpenter takes along his tools -- and I see we have a very different purpose in mind.  That he could make the carpenter comparison shows where the difference lies: the difference being, with all due respect to the trade of Jesus Christ, that a carpenter can always, while a writer has to take it when it comes and a glimpse once lost may never come again, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan.  Writer's don't write, they read and transcribe.  They are only allowed access to the books at certain arbitrary times.  They have to make the most of these occasions.  Furthermore I am more concerned with writing than I am with any sort of enlightenment., which is often an ever-retreating mirage like the fully analyzed or fully liberated person.  I use meditation to get material for writing.  I am not concerned with some
abstract nirvana.  It is exactly the visions and fireworks that are useful for me, exactly what all the masters tell us we should pay as little attention to as possible.  Telepathy, journeys out of the body -- these manifestations,
according to Trungpa, are mere distractions.  Exactly.  Distraction: fun, like hang-gliding or surfboarding or skin diving.  So why not have fun?  I sense an underlying dogma here to which I am not willing to submit.  The purposes of a Boddhisattva and an artist are different and perhaps not reconcilable.  Show me a good Buddhist novelist.
     When Huxley got Buddhism, he stopped writing novels and wrote Buddhist tracts.  Meditation, astral travel, telepathy, are all means to an end for the novelist.  I even got copy out of scientology.  It's a question of emphasis.  Any writer who does not consider his writing the most important thing he does, who does not consider writing his only salvation.  I-- "I trust him little in the commerce of the soul."  As the French say: pas serieux.
     I was willing to concede the typewriter, but I certainly would not concede pen and paper.  A good percentage of my characters and sets come from dreams. , and if you don't write a dream, in many cases, you forget it.  The actual brain trace of dream memory differs from that of waking memory.  I have frequently had the experience of waking from a dream, going over it a number of times, and then forgetting it completely.  So during the retreat I kept pen and paper by my bed, and lit a candle and wrote my dreams down when they occurred.  As it happens, I got a new episode for the book I am currently writing.  And solved a problem of structure in a dream recorded in these diaries.  I also attempted some journeys out of the body to visit specific people, with results that while not conclusive (they rarely are), were at least interesting and fruitful.  In short, I feel that I get further out through writing than I would through any meditation system.  And so far as any system goes, I prefer the open-ended, dangerous and unpredictable universe of Don Juan (of Castaneda -W.ed.B) to the closed, predictable karma universe of the Buddhists.  Indeed existence is the cause of suffering, and suffering may be good copy.  Don Juan says he is an impeccable warrior and not a master; anyone who is looking for a master should look elsewhere.  I am not looking for a master, I am looking for the books.  In dreams I sometimes find the books where it is written and I may bring back a few phrases that unwind like a