[ … ]  During the retreat I wrote down dreams and the elaboration of dreams that takes place spontaneously in the waking state.  I used an exercise in association:  take a walk and later write down what you were thinking when a deer crossed the road or when you sat down on a rock and killed a biting fly.  One of my first acts in my retreat hut was to improvise a fly swatter from an old whisk broom, and I think this no-killing obsession is nonsense.  Where do you draw the line?  Mosquitoes?  Biting flies?  Lice?  Venomous insects?  I'd rather kill a brown recluse spider than get bitten by one.  And I will not coexist with flies.  Interesting point here:  The Miracle of the Centipede which disappeared as I was about to kill it with a sledge hammer.  That was a nice miracle.  Chapeau, Trungpa Rinpoche.  Because that centipede was only half an inch long, and they don't get much bigger in that climate.  And that's a bearable size. --doesn't keep me awake knowing it is in the room, so why kill it?  On the other hand, a centipede three inches long is already an abomination in my eyes.  Little spider in web at window. He's alright.  But I hear a rustling on the shelf above my bed.  I light the candle and there is a spider about an inch across and a brown spider at that.  Might be a brown recluse.  Any case, too big to live in my vicinity.  I feel better after it is dead, knowing it can't get on my face while I am sleeping.
     The Retreat Diaries are not a sequential presentation.  By sequential presentation, I mean Monday with all dreams and occurrences noted, then on Tuesday and so forth.  Here Thursday and Friday may be cut in with Monday, or the elaboration of a dream cut in with the dream itself in a grid of past present  and future.  Like the last words of Dutch Schultz.  Some of Dutch's associations cannot be traced or even guessed at.  Others quite clearly derive from the known events of his life.  The structure is that a man is seeing a film composed of past present and future, dream and fantasy, a film which the reader cannot see directly but only infer through the words.  This is the structure of these diaries.
     [ … ] The diaries consist of bits of dreams and poetry and associations cut in together; I can't cover every association, just give a few examples.  I was thinking about Bradbury Robinson, an English friend who was then going in for mystical Christianity, when a deer crossed the road.  Spanish subtitle on the film Rashomon.  The woodcutter had deceived the police and stolen a ring.  And some spaced-out Buddhist has put the fire extinguisher under the Coleman stove.  I can see burning fluid falling in a sheet of flame somebody tries to reach the extinguisher.  Move the extinguisher to a better place [ … ]
     Somebody has written on a piece of cardboard in the woodshed:  "How can I please myself when I have no self to please?"  Sorry, young man, I think you are kidding yourself.  As long as you talk to yourself, you have a self.  The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.
     "Maya am I?  You don't get rid of me that easily."         
    I have always felt that the essence of self is words, the internal dialogue.  Trungpa agreed, with reservations, but does not  give the matter of words such basic importance as I do.  Don Juan, on the other hand, says that suspending the internal dialogue is the crucial step out of a preconceived  idea of the self.  Tales of Power, p. 22: "To change our idea of the world is the crux of sorcery.  And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it."  The exercise he recommends to stop the internal dialogue is to walk with   
the eyes slightly crossed, covering a 180-degree area, without focussing on anything.  This floods out the internal dialogue.  Unfortunately I had not read Tales of Power at the time of my retreat and have had no opportunity to perform this exercise.  It is not really practical in a city, owing to the constant barrage of word and image [ … ]