Student questions

Ken: All right. How are you doing with mahamudra? [Pause] “No answer came the stern reply.”

Joe: I’m finding it quite fruitful, as a matter of fact, and I wanted to check my thinking on one thing, my understanding. So far, we’ve been investigating three different ways of practicing.

Ken: You’d better remind me.

Joe: Not thinking about the future, past, or present.

Ken: Yeah.

Joe: I’m shortening it; the verbs escape me at the moment. The basic practice—

Ken: Primary practice.

Joe: Primary practice, yes. And the one you gave us last week, which was, “No distraction, no control, no work,” which I found the most problematic, because it’s harder to catch something when it comes up, for me, with that formulation.

Ken: The instructions distracted you and you really had to work at it and you couldn’t. [Laughter]

Joe: Well, as long as I could control it, it was fine. [Laughter]

Ken: No problem. [Laughter]

Joe: The part that tripped me up was “no distraction,” because I immediately thought that I was supposed to be distraction-free. And then I came across a realization that maybe the meaning is that there actually is no distraction. It followed that being awake to distraction, if you’re awake to it—by distraction in that case I meant movement of mind—so there actually is none if you’re awake to it.

Ken: Okay.

Joe: Which seemed to be more fruitful again, because it led me back to being present to whatever was happening.

What is the whole world?

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Claire?

Claire: I remember 15 years ago we read Thich Nhat Hanh’s book—I can’t remember which one—

Ken: Oh, Being Peace or—

Claire: It was the one about washing dishes. If you wash dishes, going back to that thing of doing one thing.

Ken: Yeah.

Claire: My world is very small. I mean, if I swim, all I know, see, hear is going through the water. And I see the sun on the bottom of the pool, and I feel my muscles, and I swim. That’s all I do. I can’t do the whole world in my little world.

Ken: What is the whole world?

Claire: I don’t know. I mean, I know there’s a war on because I read the paper. And I know people kill each other, I’m not so happy about that.

Ken: You didn’t hear about the ruler of the universe, did you?

Claire: I never heard about him.

Ken: You didn’t. You missed that. You didn’t listen to the tape either, I bet.

Claire: The ruler of the universe?

Ken: Yeah. [Pause] That was two weeks ago, right? Thanksgiving week, yeah. You should really listen to that recording. It’s very important. We should call it, “The Ruler of the Universe.” You missed the most important one. You missed it. Everybody got enlightened that day. [Laughter] Everybody got enlightened that evening. Okay. What is your world?

Claire: Are you talking to me?

Ken: Yes.

Claire: My world is very small.

Ken: No, that tells me how your world is. You don’t know that yet.

Claire: What I see, what I hear, what I smell, what I taste, what I feel, and the thoughts that come into my head.

Ken: Okay. Is there any other world than that?

Claire: Not in my world. [Laughter] Not in my experience. Yeah, there’s a war on, but I’m not in it.

Ken: That’s right. You read words on a piece of page, or you may watch something on the television screen; you may see pictures. What happens when you see those pictures or read those words?

Claire: They evoke thoughts or feelings.

Ken: Okay. That is your world, the world of those experiences.

Claire: When I have it.

Ken: But you have it all the time.

Claire: No I don’t. I don’t have it when I’m meditating. I don’t have it when I’m swimming. I don’t have it when I’m making a bed or washing the dishes. I just do one thing.

Ken: You have certain feelings and experiences when you make your bed or wash your dishes, right?

Claire: Small world Ken. [Laughter]

Ken: Is it any smaller than anybody else’s world?

Claire: I don’t know how anybody else’s world is.

Ken: Then how do you know your world is small?

Claire: Because it’s what I know.

Ken: Yes. But how do you know it’s small?

Claire: Maybe it’s a universe, maybe it’s a whole universe.

Ken: Maybe. Ah, see, you should have read about the ruler of the universe. Okay. Now, when you say, “My world is a very small world,” you have to be thinking that there is another world compared to which your world is small. What world are you talking about?

Claire: The world that I see on television or reading the newspapers that evokes the feelings about whatever is going on.

Ken: And this is what I’ve been talking about a lot. There’s the distinction between the world that is constructed out of our visual and emotional impressions, sensations, and the world that we actually experience, which is the world of sensory and emotional impressions. Okay? But that world isn’t small. That’s the only world we actually experience. The other world is a world that we construct, project, however you want to talk about it.

Claire: Okay.

Ken: Good.

Claire: Thank you.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else, now that we have that straightened out. Raquel, how are you doing with mahamudra? You’ve just come back from retreat; you should have lots to tell us.

Raquel: My world is not small.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. Your world is not small. Tell us about your world.

Raquel: Well, but my constructed world—I mean not the sensory world that I live in when I’m, the few seconds I’m awake—but my constructed world is, I call it “la-la land.”

Ken: That’s L.A., L.A., right?

Raquel: It’s sort of the world I want to be living in. I sort of pretend that I’m living in the world I want to be living so it’s my actual world. So yeah, for me, this practice has been good. I mean, I have been doing the primary practice quite a bit and so I’ve kind of been sticking to that. And I’ve been mainly trying to focus to work at off the cushion, kind of using it during my day, and …

Ken: And how have you been doing that?

Raquel: Well, I set my computer to tell me on the hour when it’s the hour. So, when I hear that—even if I’m in the middle of whatever I’m at work—I’ll do the practice for a very short amount of time. And then the next hour I’ll do it again. I think I emailed you about this, but I’ve been trying to look at when exactly I fell asleep, and what might’ve triggered that, but that’s been pretty hard to do.

Ken: Happens pretty quickly, does it? Well, that’s a good effort. So you’ve got your computer helping you come back periodically. That’s good. Does it make a difference?

Raquel: I think it does. Yeah, for sure. I’m also trying to do it when the computer is not reminding me. And between the two, I do feel like it’s making a little difference, but then I still am falling asleep.

Drop into wakefulness

Ken: Yeah. Okay. [Pause] When we first started this, I suggested in your practice, that you drop into wakefulness, which, as Joe mentioned earlier, we can do by:

Don’t chase the past.
Don’t entertain the future.
Don’t dwell in the present.
Relax.

And there’s a shift, and we drop into a degree of wakefulness. And it lasts, in the beginning, a second or two. But you keep doing it, and you gradually cultivate a relationship with that. And it deepens, and we’ve talked about how that deepens through bringing in the insight aspect and uniting the seeing with the resting so that when you rest, you see, and when you see, you rest.

Now this is something you work at. And Joe’s referring to another set of instructions: no distraction, no control, no work. You say, “Well, it says no work, then how can you say you work at this?” Well, this is an area where there’s a lot of confusion, because people will get pointing out instructions for mahamudra and dzogchen and think, “Oh, there’s nothing to do. I don’t have to do anything.” And they won’t do anything and nothing will happen. And they actually think that’s meditation. I think we covered that last week when we were going over some of the problems, the faults, the mistakes.

Now, when you drop into that wakefulness, that’s when you are practicing actually: no distraction, no control, no work. If when you’re in that wakefulness, you’re distracted, you fall out of it. If, in that wakefulness, you try to control your experience, you immediately fall out of it. Try to make it last longer, try to deepen it, you fall out. And if you try to work at anything, you fall out of that natural wakefulness. So, you don’t.

But for most of us, because we live very complex and multifaceted lives, we’re very busy and active, so the mind is moving a lot. Then we fall out of it, usually after a second or two. As soon as we become aware that we’ve fallen out of it, then we move back to it, we return, using the same technique. That’s what the work is, returning. So, you have the returning and the resting, returning and resting.

Now, as we do that over a period of time, we begin to stabilize a degree of wakefulness. So, it may last a few seconds. Maybe it gets to the point where it lasts even a few minutes. One of the reasons people do retreats is so that it lasts for longer and longer periods, hours even. When it begins to stabilize, that’s when you start no distraction, no work, no control for longer periods of time. And you actually just go about, if you can, just go about your day in this natural wakefulness. That’s not particularly easy, to develop that, but it’s possible, and that’s what we’re aiming to do. What this is called is—I don’t like the terminology particularly, but this one terminology is taking hold of the practice.

You’re not taking hold of anything, it’s just you’re able to rest in that natural wakefulness. And you learn how to function in that natural wakefulness, so that natural wakefulness is there. And in that natural wakefulness there is no distraction. You don’t try to control your experience, whatever arises is there, and you’re not working at anything. Now, you say, “Well, how do you do anything?” The strange thing is you actually can do things. You can have whole discussions, you know, go for walks. You can even work at problems. That’s a little more difficult, but it is very possible to do things.

So that in order to get to that point, you have to work at that. That work is the work of building capacity. And there are many, many ways in which capacity can be built. You can use specialized energy transformation exercises, which build up the energy level, or raise the level of energy in your whole system, so that fewer things disturb the quality of your attention, so it naturally becomes easier that way. The primary practice is one such method. It raises the level through four or five shifts, and we’ve discussed that.

One can just make a practice of whenever you recognize you’ve been distracted, just dropping back into that natural wakefulness. That’s basically the method of, let’s call it the sutra tradition of mahamudra. And that works fine, and many, many people have practiced it. And it’s a subtle, continual effort, and we’re going to discuss a bit more about that this evening, particularly, how does it work in the context of daily life? Because that’s where most of us are spending most of our time. The retreat situation, most of the time is spent in meditation period.

So, in reading this section, this is page 55 in Clarifying the Natural State, I became a little irritated by the translation in some places. So I want to go through this working somewhat from the Tibetan.

Everything is training

Ken: Now, the first sentence says:

From when you have taken hold of the meditation until the greater One-Pointedness …

Clarifying the Natural State, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, p. 55

There are four stages of mahamudra, which we’ll be discussing in our final class, and they’re called one point, simplicity, one flavor, and no practice. And then each of them has three stages within them. You know, humans have this urge to systematize everything. It’s very strange, but we do. And there’s a certain quite significant shift that takes place between the last stage of one point and the first stage of simplicity. But we’ll discuss exactly that next week. This says until this point:

… you only have an ordinary type of meditation state and post-meditation, not the authentic kind.

p. 55

Let’s talk about a few terms here. You have the meditation and post-meditation. They don’t actually refer to meditation and post-meditation. They refer to when you’re practicing—in formal meditation sessions where we’re practicing without mixing anything—we’re just doing the practice. It’s not mixed with activity; we’re just doing the practice. And then in post-meditation, you’re doing the practice, but it’s mixed with activity, that’s the difference.

Now, for most people—but not for all—they have a certain experience in their formal practice, or in their composure, when the mind is not mixed. You’re not doing any other kind of activity, and it’s resting very profoundly. And the term for meditation here is—it’s better translated in my mind—as the word composure. It means to place in balance, literally. And when you sit for a period of time, mind balances out. It rests. Open seeing arises, resting and seeing come together, and there’s experience, there’s an understanding, there’s a knowing which arises.

Then when you get up from that, you carry that with you to some extent. And in the beginning stages, you carry really an echo of that, or at first, just a memory, then an echo. And as one’s practice deepens, then that experience that you’re having when you’re resting, actually becomes how you experience the world as you go about and take care of things and do things. So eventually there is no distinction between formal composure and what we call ensuing activity—or ensuing attainment—which is what they’re calling post-meditation.

Now, the reason that the greater one-pointedness is mentioned, is that there’s a qualitative shift in experience at that point, because when you shift into simplicity, the seeing component becomes stabilized also. It’s not just the resting component but the seeing component is stabilized. So, your mind becomes very, very clear, and very simple, and you see there actually is nothing to do, just as it is described in: no distraction, no control, no work.

So that’s what’s going on in that first sentence. It’s when you have that unity of seeing and resting that’s authentic or the right meditation. Then he turns around and qualifies this immediately—fortunately—because:

Nevertheless, everything is meditation training if your naturally aware presence of mind does not wander while practicing.

p. 55

And he makes this statement [reading the Tibetan text]. The way that I understand what’s written in the Tibetan here is that you’re practicing, and you remember we talked about meditation, meaning familiarization. You’re familiarizing yourself with this practice as long as you’re not distracted from the basic recollection—which is usually translated as mindfulness—of this natural awareness. So as long as there’s something happening there, you’re practicing.

Now, this makes things much simpler, because you don’t have to be in a profound state all the time, which is the impression you can get from the first thing. And what happens is a lot of people just say, “Well, I can’t do that,” and they throw up their hands, feeling their efforts are futile. But my own teacher said—we didn’t use this language, this language is from a few centuries ago, but he’s saying exactly the same thing in more contemporary language—that when you use such an instruction as: don’t chase the past, don’t entertain the future, don’t dwell in the present, just rest, and you experience that shift, practice is just resting in the shift.

And as long as you’re doing that, that’s fine. There isn’t anything to do. And that in itself will gradually deepen. And to practice that, as Raquel was doing, having her computer remind her to … “Oh, I forgot about that for the last hour. Okay. Come back.” If you can be coming back to that every few minutes, you’ll find that it changes everything about your life. It becomes massively inconvenient, actually, because one doesn’t get to indulge one’s ordinary reactions.

If somebody says something which would normally irritate you and you feel this great surge to be irritated, which can be quite satisfying sometimes, but you just go, “Oh.” Now you’re just awake in your experience. And you can feel all of those experiences or sensations, which would normally move you into irritation, but you’re just resting, you don’t ever get that satisfaction of just being really irritated. [Laughs]

And it’s very hard to describe. The closest I can say is there’s a dynamic quiet or a dynamic peace. It’s not that things are flat. Things are very alive and awake, but things don’t disturb, they don’t grab. And I think we use the quality, they don’t stick. There’s isn’t that stickiness that there usually is in experience. And coming back into that again, and again, and again, that is the practice. This making sense to you, Joe?

Joe: Yeah. I was just thinking of an example of exactly that.

Ken: Yeah, you feel all your energy charging down that channel and you, just, “Oh.”

Joe: All these alternatives, all of a sudden come to mind.

Ken: But you’re not going down any of them.

Joe: None of them. They’re all either contradictory or empty or whatever you want to say. They just, there’s no point in—

Ken: No point in any of them. Massively inconvenient, isn’t it?

Joe: But restful in a certain way.

Ken: Yeah. I know.

Joe: And the consequences are much better.

Ken: The consequences are much better. It’s totally irritating. [Laughs] Okay.

Coming back again and again into wakefulness builds stability

Ken: So, then the next thing. What he’s saying here [pause]. Until you experience no distinction between the formal practice and ensuing experience, your main effort should be in developing the composure aspect, which is formal practice. And resting with this single experience of that shift, that we’ve talked about many times, and stabilizing it so that it becomes constant.

Now, this is the approach that is taken in monastic training, where you have the luxury, or the opportunity, to be in retreat for relatively long periods of time. This is not the circumstances in which we practice, which is why I’ve been emphasizing over and over again: coming back, coming back, coming back. So the coming back becomes a constant thing, and you build up stability by coming back again, and again, and again.

And then during the ensuing attainment, or ensuing experience, to use thought and appearance, thought and sensation, to enhance your experience. Now, what does this mean? Well, we’ll go into it a bit more later. But in the beginning what it means is, anytime you notice something special—like vibrant color, or a loud sound, or something like that—anything special like that almost always triggers a natural wakefulness like, “Oh.”

An especially beautiful photograph, for instance, and your mind is suddenly just more awake, just like that. So, in the beginning, you use those kinds of things, and you recognize the wakefulness there, and you just rest there, just as if you’re doing formal practice. And so, you know, you’ve gone to a restaurant, and you ordered your meal, and you take a bite of the fish, and it’s good. And so, you’re right in that wakefulness.

And as you practice that, you see you’re actually coming back, then you’re able to do it with more and more of your experience. So anytime somebody yells at you, well, that wakes you up. And anytime you feel attracted towards somebody, that wakes you up, so you’re actually using what is arising in your mind. Every time you see a flower, or see a car, or something like that, that wakes you up.

So, you’re actually using progressively more of your experience, to keep coming back into that wakeful state. And when you can do it with absolutely everything—like every thought and every sensation wakes you up—hey, that won’t be too bad. Got it, Rachel? [Laugher] I think you do. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Okay. Now … [Pause]

No distraction, no control, no work

And skipping a couple of lines down, just after the break there:

As for sustaining the essence, it is taught you should remain in these three manners: fresh, artless, and unbound.

Clarifying the Natural State, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, p. 55

[Pause] There are three ways of placing that preserve the essence. It’s saying preserve the essence, but we could also put that into simpler language, say, that maintains naturalness or maintains presence. And they are what have been translated as fresh, artless, and unbound. And these are exactly equivalent to the instructions I gave earlier, last time: no distraction, no control, and no work.

When you’re not distracted, then everything is fresh. When you don’t try to control your experience … here they are using artless in the sense of an old meaning of art, which was to manipulate or control. An artless gesture is a very natural gesture; it’s not contrived. And it comes from stage productions, where you try to make it very beautiful, and so it would look contrived, because you were trying to do it so much. What was Aristotle’s dictum? “The art is to hide the art.”

And then this third one is open or unbound. Well, what is it like not to work at anything? Several years ago, I did a three-week dzogchen retreat. The meditation instruction was very detailed. It was, literally: do nothing. And it was a very good retreat for me. As I said, it was a three-week retreat, and so I did nothing. Well, it was good for about 10 to 14 days for me. And it was a very good retreat, I had a lot of quite deep experiences. It was very helpful in quite unexpected ways. But after about about 12 or 14 days, I started to get a little antsy. “I’m doing nothing.”

And then it was very interesting. The person who wrote the text that we were studying—who was a very great figure who lived in the 14th century, a person called Longchenpa—well, he did nothing for 12 years. I thought of my own teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, who in his mid-20’s went off into the mountains and did nothing. And I began to appreciate these people in a very, very different way, because you have to be truly concerned with having no reputation and achieving absolutely nothing in your life, because you’re not doing anything. And not the least bit concerned what anybody thinks about you. And this takes some incredible kind of courage to actually do nothing in your life. There’s so much that has to fall away before that.

So, here we are, we do our meditation periods, you know, half an hour, maybe an hour. It’s really hard to do nothing for that period of time because we’ve got all this stuff. “I’m not getting my work done,” you know. “Oh, I’ve got to make this phone call,” you know, “I’ve got to arrange this,” you know, all of those come up. We can’t even do this for like half an hour or an hour. What would it be like to go and do it, like, you go off and you know you’re going to do nothing for six months. What would that be like? What would you have to let go of to do that?

So, I’m going into this because that not working instruction means being completely unbound, which is how they’ve translated this. Everything has been completely opened, you’re totally open, you’re not trying to do anything with your life, with who you are. And this is so contrary to our social conditioning that it’s almost incomprehensible. And yet, it is an extraordinarily direct path to the kind of freedom that we tell ourselves that we’re seeking. So, remember that when you get a little antsy in your meditation next time. Just doing nothing for half an hour, 40 minutes or an hour, stuff arises, and you don’t do anything about it. It’s completely nuts, but that’s the path.

Relaxing from the inside out

Ken: So, the next couple of lines are wonderfully concise. It’s where Tibetan is somewhat like a programming language, you know, you can say an awful lot in very, very few words. So, how I understand it is: “To be fresh …” [p.55]—or, for freshness, however you want to say that—there’s a key point with respect to the body, a key point with respect to the breath, and a key point with respect to the mind. The key point with respect to the body is you relax from the inside out.

Now, if you see pictures of Tibetan yogins and how they practice, they sit in what looks like an extraordinarily strained posture. They’re in full lotus, and their arms are actually locked like this, so that their shoulders are raised, so the whole body is hanging from the framework, the shoulder yoke. It doesn’t look very comfortable. It’s actually quite a difficult posture. But what it makes possible is exactly this thing. It’s a difficult posture, but it’s an extremely stable posture, a posture in which you can actually experience things very, very intensely and not be disturbed.

And I practiced it in retreat until I got ill, and then I couldn’t do it anymore. So, I know a little bit about how powerful the posture is. But the key point here is that you start relaxing from the inside out, which is precisely why I got ill, because I ran into stuff that I couldn’t relax into. And it’s this relaxing from the inside out that’s very, very important. We use our ordinary posture, whether it’s sitting in the chair or sitting. But the point of the posture, the point of our practice, is to create the conditions so that we can relax from the inside out. Now that sounds very simple. It’s actually absolutely terrifying because … why are we tense?

Student: Because we’re afraid.

Ken: Yeah, we’re tense because there are things we don’t want to experience, and by holding ourselves tightly, we can’t experience them. But if you relax, then all of those sensations that are being blocked by the tension, start to come out, come out in experience. And that’s what has to happen in this practice. So, this is a very, very profound instruction, relaxing from the inside out. And it’s not all that easy. It’s one of the reasons why we put a great deal of effort into clearing a lot of stuff out of the way, so that a lot of the stuff that’s already tight and things like that, it’s actually cleared out of the way, so that one can relax from the inside out.

You’ve worked through those experiences, and you do that through meditations such as death and impermanence, and karma, and taking and sending, and the development of compassion, the four immeasurables, all of those kinds of things. Then another thing that we do is a lot of energy transformation exercises, raise the level of energy, so that we can actually be in a higher state of attention, and relaxed from the inside out.

And there are a few people—and our meditation director at the retreat is one of these—who didn’t get into all of that stuff. He just sat, and he just let all of that stuff arise, and he relaxed from the inside out. His main practice was mahamudra. Even when I knew him, he probably hadn’t lain down for 10 years. When he was tired, he just went to sleep. And then he woke up. He’d wake up and go back to his meditation. And every now and then he’d comment to you. He said, “I’ve been dreaming of Mahakala lately. I should probably make some few offerings, but I can’t be bothered.” Then he’d go back to his practice. And so that’s what he did. And he was a very good person, not terribly articulate, but when he talked about his experience of mind, he was very articulate about that, because he was so intimately acquainted with it.

So when you’re sitting, you sit in a posture, which allows you to relax from the inside out. And if you find yourself encountering very, very deep-seated tensions, and fears associated with them, don’t be surprised. That’s part of the process. And what do you do with that? Well, absolutely nothing. You let that all come out. And there’s ways to do that more skillfully and less skillfully, but the image that I found very helpful is to feel that all of that stuff is like a flower bud, and the quality of your attention is like the sun. And when the sun shines on the flower bud, then the bud opens quite naturally. And it just opens. If you try to open it up by tearing the petals out, it doesn’t work so well, which is how a lot of people approach their practice. So, this means being willing to, and having the patience, and so forth, to just sit in the state of attention. And that’s where the non-distraction comes from, and let whatever needs to unfold, unfold.

And that’s basically what one’s doing in mahamudra, and dzogchen and shikantaza, which is the Zen equivalent, and so forth. But the essence of all of them is relaxing from the inside out. Associated with that is the key point with respect to the breath, which is: don’t force the breath. If you’re forcing the breath, if you’re trying to control the breath, or working with the breath in any way, then you’re creating tension in the body. So you’re actually working against that internal relaxation.

And when you do this, you may find that the breath varies. Sometimes the breath will be long and deep, and sometimes they’ll be short and shallow, and sometimes it feels like you’re hardly breathing at all. And suddenly you find yourself taking a large breath, and you just let all of that work itself out and play itself out. You don’t try to breathe a certain way, because all of that is the emotional material and all of that tension coming out in its own way in the breath, as well as in the body.

And this is, this approach to practice is very different, for instance, from the more common ways that Hinduism is practiced, which is to control the body and control the breath with the view to precipitating very, very particular mind states, which then are used to relax from the inside out. But it’s very much a case of trying to control your experience. You learn how to do that very, very explicitly.

In Buddhism, you put far more emphasis on just opening and letting things come out in their own way. And then the final point with respect to mind is: leave your mind open. And you’ve heard me say this before. I mean, you can see how similar these are to the instructions I gave earlier in our class. Body like a mountain, which is, you can say that mountains relax from the inside out. Breath like the wind: completely free flowing. And then mind is completely open: mind like the sky. So that’s what’s contained in the instruction be fresh, are those three points.

How is your mind naturally?

Ken: And then, to be artless, to be uncontrived, in one sense, these are saying the same things in different words, very definitely. And another, it’s possibly introducing another level of subtlety. As you see it says:

Leave your mind as it naturally is.

Clarifying the Natural State, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, p. 55

Okay. How is your mind naturally?

Student: Really noisy.

Ken: Is it?

Student: It seems like it.

Ken: Yeah, but this is the point. Most of us don’t know how our mind is naturally. So read “leave your mind as it is naturally.” What’s that? And we arrive at it in the same way that we’ve talked about many times: Don’t chase after the past; don’t entertain the future; don’t dwell in the present, rest. And you get a taste of the mind as it is naturally. It’s just a taste. That is the uncontrived, the artless. That’s what it means to be uncontrived, artless. It’s just, “Oh.”

And another way this is referred to sometimes is: Be like a child walking into a cathedral for the first time. I don’t know whether you remember that, but go to some of the great European cathedrals, or something like that, or Yosemite Valley does this for me too ’cause it’s like a natural cathedral, and your mind is naturally open and uncontrived, it’s just like … [audible breath].

So, experiences of awe put you in touch with that. Now, it sounds absurd, of course, but this is actually the practice. Go around your life being in awe of everything. What would that be like? It’d certainly cut through a whole level of reaction, wouldn’t it? Whatever arises internally and externally, you go … [audible breath], and you see, you’re not doing anything with it. You’re not trying to control your experience. So that’s:

… leave your mind as it is naturally, leave it without it being a definable entity …

p. 55

Isn’t that terrible? lhod ‘dzin med par bzhag (pron. lhö dzin mé par zha(g)). I’d probably translate these as: Let your mind rest naturally. Rest without identifying anything.

Robert Irwin, the name of his biography is: Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Object That You’re Looking At. So it’s exactly this, it’s resting without identifying anything.

So just right now, just look around this room, and notice that every time you chase something, there’s this little thing, “Oh, that’s that, that’s that, that’s that, that’s that, that’s that.” That’s identification. Okay? Now just let that go and look around this room. And the “that’s that, that’s that, that’s that” will probably continue going, but just let it go on just as if it was a thought.

And I think you’ll find your experience shifts in a certain way, and it probably has two qualities to it. One is it’s more peaceful and there’s less strain or struggling. Anybody find that? Okay. And it’s also completely terrifying. Anybody find that? A few people. Like, “I’m not holding onto anything!” [alarmed gasp] Now, remember, I’ve talked about jumping off the cliff, the cliff with no bottom? That’s the cliff.

Student: What’s it …

Ken: I knew that I was going to provoke something.

Joe: That’s what I was asking about in the email. Give it to me again, “Seeing Is …?”

Ken: Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of What You’re Looking At.

Joe: Okay. So, is that maybe what the negative I was talking about earlier, the negative formulation that you gave, which is, “No, don’t, don’t …”

Ken: No distraction, no control, no work.

Joe: Well, those, both, when I think of them, I want to do something. But when I work on: “Don’t think about the past, don’t entertain the future, don’t dwell on the present,” incorporated in all three of those are all the pitfalls, all distractions.

Ken: Yes.

Joe: So, when I work on that, the realization that I’ve become distracted, I’ve gone away, comes much quicker and without an impulse to do anything.

Ken: Yeah. Well, the instructions: Don’t chase the past. Don’t entertain the future. Don’t dwell in the present. Rest. Those instructions are designed to precipitate a shift. So, experience just being, okay? The instructions: “No distraction or Don’t be distracted. Don’t control your experience. Don’t work at anything.” are telling you what to do when you’ve made that shift. Of course, being the rebellious person you are, he says, “Tell me not to do something I’m going to do it!” [Laughs] “I’m going to something, anyway.” Yeah.

But here they’re being expressed positively: Remain fresh, artless, and unbound. Saying exactly the same thing, just different words. Okay? So, not identifying things. Now, this is a very wonderful instruction, because when you’re resting in that open shift, you’ll notice there’s this little commentary that starts out. It says, “Oh, that’s that. That’s that. This is resting. This is insight. This is groovy.” [Laughter] Okay.

Those are all identifications. Okay? Now, can you stop that from happening? No, that’s thoughts; thoughts bubble up. Buy you can just let them be thoughts because that’s what they actually are. They’re just movements in mind, they’re thoughts. But what happens with those thoughts is that we don’t recognize them as thoughts, and we hold onto them. That’s what makes them identification. And there’ll be increasing levels of subtlety, but that’s basically the point.

Now, what happens over and over again is a student will start doing this practice and fumble around and fumble around. And then they’ll have this experience of actually resting in open awareness. And of course they say, “Oh, this is open awareness!” And then of course it’s gone. [Laughs] And so, as you practice this, you begin to recognize that, “Oh, this is open awareness!” for what it actually is, just a thought. And now you’re not distracted by that thought by holding onto it.

And this is why we practice. There’re many layers of working through recognitions—which we first hold onto, identification—but then as we become more used to them we just let them go. Until we begin to get a sense of a knowing, which knows without identifying. And that’s when we’re beginning to touch into what mahamudra is actually about. And as that knowing becomes a constant factor, that’s when we’re beginning to stabilize the actual practice. And then the last way is just rest undistracted. So those are another three instructions.

No blocking, no building: rest

Ken: And then we go over the page, and it says:

To be unbound … To be open …

Clarifying the Natural State, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, p. 56

They translated this as accepting and rejecting. I mean, it’s not wrong, but the actual Tibetan here, ‘gag sgrub med pa (pron. gak drub mé pa); ‘gag is the word to block something, to stop something, and sgrub is the word to build something. So to be open means that you don’t block anything from arising. And you don’t build something in your practice, such as building a visualization, or building a feeling or anything like that. You don’t do either of those, and that’s a bit strange.

Probably different people have different proclivities. And some people will find it easier not to block things, because they’re too busy building things. And others find it easier not to build things, because they’re busy blocking everything. But if you don’t do either, then—and this goes to the point that Darren was raising—you don’t get to have any choice about what you actually experience. None whatsoever. Again, massively inconvenient.

Third point on translation here, and this is the kind of thing that I pay for. I have my $5 words and $10 words. This is probably a $20 word. Yeah. And in Tibetan, you form abstract concepts by juxtaposing opposites. So the word for temperature, for instance, is hot cold, and the word for distance is near far, and the height is short tall. Okay? So, you get the picture? So, this can be quite difficult to translate into English.

In the Prayer on the Four Immeasurables, the last line: May they rest in great equanimity, free from preference and prejudice. You had two there: nye ring (pron. nyé ring), which was near far, which was translated as prejudice. And then the other one was chags sdang (pron. cha(g) dang), which was attraction aversion, which translates as preference. But it only took me about four or five years to find preference and prejudice for those two things. So I’m willing to pay anybody who finds the right translation for stopping or blocking and building or making. So if you come up with a good English word for that, let me know.

So, that’s how you rest. You rest, no blocking, no building. Of course, that leaves you totally open. And then the next instruction is making no effort. You rest. I mean, isn’t this what you’ve always wanted, the excuse to rest without making any effort whatsoever? It’s actually extraordinarily difficult for most of us, because of these parts of us that are just working at things so hard, and they just won’t stop.

The six senses

Ken: And then the final one is: letting the six senses rest naturally, or settle naturally. Now, what are the six senses? Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and the sixth one is thinking. It’s not ESP. [Laughs] It’s the faculty of knowing, or the cognitive faculty. Now you just let that rest, settle naturally. So there you are, you’re looking. Well, the first thing it means is you move into that ecstatic form, like the primary practice, where you’re just open to everything in your senses. You’re not holding onto this experience, or holding onto this experience, or trying to avoid that experience. Completely open, and open in all areas. So that’s another way of thinking about opening. So, you see in these three sentences, you actually end up with nine instructions, three in each one. You can see how compact Tibetan can be.

To make his point, he now does the same thing again. [Pause] Rest fresh … unconcerned is … it’s not incorrect, but it doesn’t quite work in English. Probably the best one can do, but it’s something like you’re not calculating, you’re not thinking about things, you’re not working, that kind of constant appraisal process that’s always going on. Here you just let that go completely. So that appraisal process: How is this? Was that good? What’s that? That gets in the way of experiencing things completely freshly. And then this artfulness or naturalness again comes from not blocking and not building. So you’re not trying to control what you actually experience. And not making any effort, that makes you completely open in the way that I was talking about earlier. So that sums it up.

Now, it goes on and on further taking this into all kinds of examples in the next several pages, which is what I asked you to read. The reason I’ve gone over this in such detail is, whether you’re in formal meditation or in daily life, this is how to be. In formal meditation, you’re practicing being this way unmixed with other activities. And there’s usually plenty enough going on in our mind that it doesn’t feel like it’s unmixed with other activities, but we do our best. And that’s okay to some extent, but then we’re totally open when we practice this way to all of the unresolved and unexperienced material inside us.

So, there will be eruptions and stuff will come up and it happens. And that can be sometimes quite difficult, particularly if we’ve got stuff that we’ve really suppressed in us. And then there’s the quite shocking—or at least some people experience it as shocking—like, “There is absolutely no one home.” And that’s very disturbing, because we think, “Oh, I’m here.” And there we are, sitting in the meditation and as we rest more and more deeply, we begin to see more and more clearly. And then we look; there is absolutely nobody there!

And this raises some minor existential questions, such as, what am I? And you look and you see there is absolutely no one there. And so that can be very disturbing. So that’s the kind of thing that can arise. I mean, it’s very disturbing. It can be very freeing also. But it’s also very confusing, because the fundamental fear of human existence is not of death. That’s the second most fundamental fear. The fundamental fear of human existence is we don’t exist. And that’s actually true. We don’t.

And it’s wonderfully ironic that in Buddhism—all schools of Buddhism are very clear about this—that you’re cultivating the ability to experience what actually is: that we don’t exist, as such. We’re experiencing what we are absolutely most afraid of. That’s why it’s freedom, because we become free of that fear of non-existence. We know it’s true. And not intellectually; we know it’s true experientially. That makes a huge difference, because now it’s very difficult for somebody to insult us. [Laughs] It makes it really difficult for somebody to insult us. The instruction that I give everybody: What do you do when somebody insults you? Agree with them.

Because anything they say about you is as true as anything you think about yourself. Okay? Any conception you have of yourself is false too. Any conception that anybody else has of you is false. There isn’t anything there. And it’s useless understanding that intellectually. You actually have to know it experientially.

Now, for daily life, you do exactly the same thing. There you are, washing dishes, or driving, or at a meeting, and there’s all of this stuff and all this stimulation. And we completely forget that it’s experience, and we move totally into the world that we construct from all of that stuff, which is what it means not to be present, to be asleep. We’re asleep in the world of shared experience when we are no longer aware in any significant way of our actual world. You know, your small world, but which we agreed wasn’t so small. [Laughter] If you insist, Claire.

Now, what happens if you’re awake in that? Well, all kinds of things cease to grab, cease to bother, cease to irritate. We stop suffering. And that’s what Buddhism is actually about, is ending suffering. And the nice thing about that is because when we’re no longer bothered by what’s arising, we stop acting in ways which bothers other people. So, we end suffering, our contribution to the suffering of the world also. And this really takes a lot of practice. And there are all kinds of things you can do, but basically, I’m going to just reiterate the point that I made earlier: practice being woken up by what you experience.

Use your experience to wake up

Ken: Today I had an early morning meeting at a business that I’m doing some consulting work with. So, I got there a little bit early, which was nice. So I was walking from one place to another, and I was very concerned about this meeting, because the agenda they sent out the day before had been greeted with very little enthusiasm; in fact, with a certain amount of negativity. And I’ve known these people, I’ve worked with them for years, but when you’re the outside consultant, you’re always a little nervous. Are they going to fire me now?

As I was walking along, I realized, “I’m thinking about this.” And there’s a stone, a [unclear] stone in front of me. And then Thich Nhat Hanh’s instruction says to me, “Usually when going from A to B we’re so concerned with what we’re going to do at B that we don’t experience going from A to B.” I went, “Oh, okay,” and so I just woke up a little bit right there and said, “Okay, I’m just going to experience the stone, and the pathway, and me walking, and that’s fine.” And of course I became a lot calmer.

But that’s what I mean about using your—it’s a very small example—but using your experience to wake up. Whatever it is, use it to wake up, and come right into, what am I actually experiencing now? And of course, there was all the anxiety and stuff, but when I started to open to the actual physical surroundings, instead of being lost in my head, then I could experience the anxiety as simply movement in mind, and not as, “Oh, the whole world’s going to fall apart. And if I just say exactly the right thing at this meeting,” etc., etc., which is just usually how we’re going about our lives. George?

George: Is that the point of the bubble practice?

Ken: Nope. [Laughs]

George: The reason I asked that is that …

Ken: This is a practice I’ve given George, but that’s a very …

George: Which is imagining a bubble around yourself, separating yourself from the rest of the world.

Ken: Exactly.

George: So isn’t your awareness of what’s going on in the bubble a wake up call?

Ken: Well, yes, that is. But there are other points to the bubble practice. Okay?

Student: May we know them?

Ken: It’s not appropriate for me to go into them. It’s an instruction I’ve given George. Okay? Anyway, it’s 9:30 already. Any questions? Is this helpful, what I was talking about? Does it give you an idea? I know I’ve talked, and there’s a lot of material to cover. Molly.

Closing questions

Molly: I just had a question about—I think it’s in this reading or maybe it was last week’s—purposefully bringing up the emotion.

Ken: That’s when you’ve developed a certain amount of stability, then you bring up the emotion so you can actually experience it as an emotion more completely. Because ordinarily, when an emotion comes up, we experience it as a fact, and it projects a world, and now we’re into a totally different world. And, you know, anger comes up, we don’t recognize anger, we just hate everything around us, and we’re out to kill whatever there is, one way or another.

But when you develop a certain amount of stability, then you bring anger up, and you look at it. And so now you experience it in a totally different way because you’re in a higher state of attention. You go, “Oh, wow, there’s nothing here. It’s just this rather strange movement through mind, which puts us in a really interesting way of looking at the world but doesn’t have any truth to it at all.”

Molly: So when you’re not looking at it, and looking at the identity of it, and watching it disappear, you’re actually stimulating it to make it more there.

Ken: Yes, you bring it up, and then you experience that there’s nothing there, that it’s simply a way of experiencing the world. And there’s no more truth in that particular flavor of experiencing the world. And that the natural awareness that is experiencing the anger isn’t in any way affected by the anger, which is what I think we were talking about last week. Does what feels lonely experience loneliness? Yeah. Okay. Good. One more question, Darren. And then we’ll close for the evening.

Darren:

When full of dread and terror caused by magical displays of gods and demons or the like, recognize the fearful thought.

Clarifying the Natural State, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, p. 73

Is that too vague of a question?

Ken: Read it again.

Darren: The gods’ and demons’ magical displays? Is it a mistranslation?

Ken: No. Gods and demons means any emotional fixation, which takes over our mind; it takes over our experience in the world. Okay? Now, what’s the god that most people—or demon, if you wish—are completely in the grips of these days?

Student: Money.

Student: Greed.

Ken: Yeah. Money, greed, whichever way you want. Right? And that’s it. They cannot see the world in any other terms except money, which is really sad. For some people it’s power, which is equally sad, and equally problematic. So those are examples of two modern day gods or demons, depending on how you want to look at them.

As practice deepens, and you start running into that internal material, and you’re relaxing very deeply inside, then you may find emotional fixations arise, which just take hold of you. And they’re terrifying. And they may even arise in some form in terms of visions or hallucinations, and things like that. And you’re going to go, “What is going on?” And that’s where this instruction applies, that even in those experiences, there is an awareness.

There’s an awareness. And you just keep coming back into that awareness, regardless of what’s arising. And now all of that stuff actually heightens your experience of awareness. So, it’s a deeper level application of what I was saying about, use your experience to wake yourself up. All right. Let’s close here for the evening.