Student questions

Ken: Well, this is our last class, and we have a number of things to do. The main topic for this evening is the development of experience or understanding in mahamudra practice. This is a tricky topic for various reasons. So that’s one thing to do.

The second thing we have to do is add a little bit to last week’s class, which was meant to be about how you take this practice into your life. I talked a good deal, for most of the class actually, about the efforts to make in creating the conditions in us so that we are clear and present, but I think it would be helpful to go a little further with that.

The third thing is to take up questions as we’ve done in the past. The fourth thing is to talk about what we might do in the future or what you’re interested in doing in the future. So perhaps as we did before I think we’ll start with questions. Are there any about your experience, practice? What all this means, etc.? Susan, you’re on.

Awake in my experience and bored?

Susan: I’ve been having some experiences off the cushion that have been interesting to me. So I have a question about one aspect of it, which is, I periodically—I guess I would call it—during the day, I’ll wake up into my experience and I will recognize thought. And I can differentiate between what the thoughts are as I recognize them. And a lot of them have to do with the three marks of existence. Like there’s a lot having to do with supporting my notion of self, of who I think I am, and like that.

Then even things like where people tweak me or push my buttons, it’s an effort, it doesn’t come naturally, but I can start recognizing what that is. But the most difficult one, actually, is thoughts that are entertainment, because I was thinking of something that happened a really long time ago and I was in another class of yours. I think it was the mahamudra class. And I was really proud of myself because I was in the DMV applying for a new license or something. And I decided to be awake in the DMV. And I remember getting really mad because I didn’t get enlightened. I was just really bored. [Laughter]

There’s something similar going on with this. What if I’m in my experience and I’m bored? So there seems to be a useful function for entertaining yourself. [Laughs] I mean, I’m not bored always.

Ken: You’re in your experience and you are bored.

Susan: Well, I don’t get the most exciting life all the time.

Ken: [Pause] Well, you said this had to do with the three marks of existence: impermanence, suffering and non-self. [Pause] Well, boredom is basically an awareness of self, isn’t it?

Susan: Oh, wait a minute. Does that mean, I think I’m boring? What’s that mean?

Ken: You said you’re awake in your experience or you are in your experience. But I think that that may not be quite the right description. You have experienced a shift in energy or attention, but I doubt that you’re actually in your experience, because the dominant feeling is: “I am bored.”

Susan: Let me put this the way I think I understand it. If one is directly experiencing where you are at any moment to moment, and it’s a boring situation [laughter], I think there’s something I’m missing.

Ken: Well, right there; you’ve set it up. Okay? So we’ll approach this another way. Who’s bored?

Susan: Whoever is exper—

Ken: Don’t give me a theoretical answer. You know, that’s pointless. Who is bored?

Susan: Me. No, I don’t know.

Ken: Take a look. [Pause] Okay. When you look at who is bored, what do you see?

Susan: Nothing.

Ken: That’s pretty interesting. Isn’t it? Are you bored now? [Laughter]

Susan: Well, not at the moment. But for example, when I’m stuck in traffic, I’m bored. And if I completely drop into being in traffic, it doesn’t change anything. I’m just there.

Ken: Who is there?

Susan: Nobody, ultimately.

Ken: Do you know that at that point?

Susan: Yeah.

Ken: You do? Then who is bored?

Susan: Whatever in me that wants to be entertained.

Ken: And what’s that? Not in psychological terms. What is it? Who wants to be entertained? What wants to be entertained? We can go back. We can make this very simple. Rub your finger on the cloth of your slacks. Who experiences that? Is it your finger which senses? Or is it your leg which senses? What is it in your leg which senses? What is it in your finger which senses? Where is that experience?

Susan: But the experience is still there. I mean …

Ken: Yes, that’s a sensation.

Susan: And it has qualities to it that you can describe. That’s the world. That’s form.

Ken: Yes. Are you saying boring is form?

Susan: Yeah, why not. You mean a situation, it can elicit boredom, but it’s not inherently boring. Is that what you’re saying?

Ken: I think we can put boring as an emotion. Whenever you’re bored, who is bored? Look right at it. This is very irritating to do. Because in the context you’re describing—stuck in traffic—boredom is arising because you don’t want to be there. It’s a way of avoiding experiencing being there. Now, everybody can do this I think it is safe to say, since everybody lives in L.A., all of you have been stuck in traffic at least once in the last week. I got stuck in traffic twice today.

Okay. So we do the practice. We’ll do the short one. So just imagine you’re in your car. You see all of those red lights in front of you. Traffic slows down. Bit by bit everybody comes to a halt. You look down the freeway and it’s red lights as far as you can see. We all know this experience. You’ve got a three hour drive ahead of you. And an hour later you’ve gotten 20 feet. [Laughter]

You turn on the radio and there’s a short in your electrical system. Your iPod isn’t working. There you are. Nothing to entertain. Now, do the practice. Don’t chase after the past, which is such things as: “Why did I take this route? I should’ve got off,” etc. Don’t entertain the future, which in this case is something like, “When is this going to clear up?” And don’t dwell in the present. Just rest. What happened, Susan?

Susan: I’m right there in my car, just inching along.

Ken: Right. Are you bored?

Susan: Not in that individual moment. No, I’m not.

Ken: Exactly. That’s the practice. Remember—I think it was a week or two weeks ago—I talked about what it was like to do absolutely nothing? One respect of doing nothing, it’s totally boring. You don’t get to be anybody. You don’t get to be entertained. You don’t get to do anything. You’re just there. How much do you have to let go to just be there? Not just for a few hours in traffic, but for a few days, or a few weeks, or a few months, sitting in a cabin somewhere, same old routine every day, no change, nothing. What qualities would it take to actually do that? Can you feel the level of agitation in you, which actually doesn’t want to rest that way?

Susan: Well, see, here’s my dilemma. I actually think it would be easier to do that than to be stuck in traffic.

Ken: Why? What’s the difference?

Susan: Because the situation that I’m in …

Ken: [Laughs] What did you just see?

Susan: It was more interesting to me. It offers more.

Ken: You’re looking for it to offer you interest. But when you’re stuck in traffic, you don’t have it. So now you have a chance to do nothing, and you don’t want to.

Susan: [Pause] Okay. [Laughter]

Ken: It’s not romantic, is it?

Susan: Am I taking up too much time? Can I just—

Ken: No, I think this is extremely useful from my point of view, because I doubt if there’s anybody in this room who has this question [laughter]. Because it’s not just being stuck in traffic. You know where I get irritated? Lines. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s complete self obsession. That’s what boredom is. It’s obsession with self.

Susan: Does the Dalai Lama get bored?

Ken: You’ll have to ask him. [Laughter]

Susan: But you know what I mean? Like the book describes, you know, you get to some of those last stages of—

Ken: Well actually you don’t even have to go to the last stages.

Susan: You are in non-meditation, okay?

Ken: I’ll settle for simplicity.

Susan: That would be good. So you’re completely open. There’s no separation between yourself and experience.

Ken: Do it right now. [Pause] Don’t chase after the past. Don’t entertain the future. Don’t dwell on the present. Just rest. Are you bored?

Susan: No. But I wasn’t bored before I did that. [Laughter] I mean, I’m asking a serious question.

Ken: I’ve answered you very seriously. When you feel boredom, you’re entertaining the future, by definition.

Susan: I’ll practice that more and see if that’s my experience.

Ken: I’m okay in traffic jams, it’s lines that I’m still working on. But whenever we say to ourselves, “Nothing is happening, this is boring.” We’re actually experiencing something and we don’t want to experience it. Every time we don’t want to experience that. And boredom is a mechanism that tells us there’s something else to do. And now we’re getting into a fight with ourselves. Of course we lose that one, we always do.

Susan: So, in a non-meditative state, there are no qualities to experience?

Ken: You mean in no meditation? [Voices overlap] Simplicity, one taste, whatever. Look, there’s everything to experience. There you are in your car. There’s all of the sensations, physical, visual, tactile, auditory. There’s all the thoughts, all the feelings. There is all that to experience all the time.

Susan: This is starting to make sense to me. Thank you.

Ken: Okay. Kate.

Kate: In your example about sitting in traffic, and you gave an example of pursuing the past would be saying, “Why did I take this route,” and so forth. And entertaining the future, “I’m going to be late,” and all that stuff. What would be an example of dwelling on the present?

Ken: “I’m bored. I’m stuck in traffic. I don’t like this. When is my car going to run out of gas. Why won’t the radio work?” [Laughs] Right? Or it could be equally, “Oh, cool. This is a really good time to practice. I’m going to practice now.” And, “This is really neat. I’m really glad I’m stuck in traffic.” That’s dwelling on the present.

Kate: Well, so what’s the difference between dwelling on the present and being in the present?

Ken: Dwelling on the present here means thinking about the present. So you’re not really there, you’re just thinking about it.

Kate: Okay. So being in the present is—

Ken: It is actually experiencing, resting in it. And of course the deeper you rest in it, the more you see what it is. And the more you see what it is, the more you’re able to rest in it. Follow?

Kate: Yeah. So it’s like getting caught up in your thoughts would be dwelling on the present rather than experiencing, resting. And then, you know, thoughts are arising, and you are—

Ken: Yeah. Thinking about things, it’s not practice.

Kate: Okay.

Ken: Other questions, John?

One taste: the meaning?

John: Dakpo was talking on the one taste. Page 91 he says:

The qualities have arisen if, after mingling mind and perceptions, you’ve attained miraculous powers, such as being able to conjure and multiply.

Clarifying the Natural State, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, p. 91

Otherwise, you have to consider that your path is “feeble.” I can’t quite get around that. Is that a particular Tibetan thing?

Ken: That’s in Clarifying the Natural State? [Pause] Well, not being proficient at one taste,” it’s difficult for me to comment on this. phrul ‘gyur (pron. trul gyur) in the Tibetan, which is conjure and multiply, here basically means—the way I would have read it—is to change appearances and to to emanate, to send emanations. So that’s what they mean by multiply. What that actually means experientially I don’t know. And I would hesitate to conjecture. It’s also not clear whether it is talking about the dream state or the waking state there.

One of the efforts that I’ve made in translating things is to try to understand what is being said when it’s being expressed in mythic language. This may be mythic language, pointing to subjective experiences. Let’s say, when you are very clear and there is no sense of self—there’s that kind of understanding, so there’s no opposition to experience—then experience becomes very malleable, very fluid because you weren’t having to experience it from a particular perspective, i.e. the conditioned self.

John: It just would seem that conjuring up or having this particular multiplying state would be directly opposed to what they’re trying to encourage in a meditation. That of one-point where you simply allow it to appear rather than the conjuring, conjuring up, if we’re to take conjuring to be that.

Taking practice into our lives

Ken: Okay, this takes us into the area I wanted to talk about, and that is taking practice into our lives. We begin with a sense of self and experience that arises in opposition to the self, I and other, whether the other are people or objects, you know what I mean? When we experience things that way, our experiences are inevitably distorted by the three poisons: attraction, aversion and indifference. So, the appropriate form of behavior at this stage of practice is being ethically sound, because the ethical principles inhibit us from acting out of attraction, aversion and indifference.

And the reason we want that to be inhibited is because acting out of attraction, aversion, and indifference creates disturbances in our life and experience, which undermine the practice. And that’s one of the main purposes of many of the moral codes, is that they create the conditions in which we can practice effectively. Now, as the tendency to interpret everything in terms of self diminishes, then it becomes possible to work in different ways. And if you read in The Lamp of Mahamudra … Of course, I can never find this when I’m looking for it.

He talks about the five ways of acting: as being like a wounded deer, and being like a mountain lion in the wilderness, and so forth. And these are all various metaphors for creating the conditions for practice. And, be like a spear stabbing into empty space. Okay? Now as your practice becomes stable—as you’re able to experience things in clear open attention, without any sense of self, which is basically at the level of simplicity or one taste—then you may engage in activity to enhance your practice.

Now, don’t forget. They’re talking about people who basically were living in seclusion. They didn’t have a lot of interaction, so they would come down out of their retreat and see how it actually worked in their lives. Well, we live in the multiplicity of life and the complexity of life. So we don’t have to go anywhere to do that. We’re engaged in it all the time.

And I think Susan’s first example is a very good one. There I am stuck in traffic, I’m bored. There’s no practice going on there. There you are. You don’t have to do anything except pay rather minimal attention to the traffic. You can’t change lanes, particularly in the traffic jam. So you can actually just be totally present, experience everything. And then the inevitable things are going to arise, “I am going to be late for the meeting.” Can you experience that and all of the anxiety and fear associated with it as simply a movement in mind? It’s a wonderful situation because there’s absolutely nothing you can do except get out of your car. And that usually doesn’t work very well. That’s just indifference, which is basically about what boredom is about.

What about desire? Well, take a stroll down Rodeo Drive, shopping malls or whatever. See all of these things. Experience the forces of attraction arising in you. Can you actually experience them completely or do you get lost in them. Go to a place where the scenery is something you don’t like. Can you experience that?

Many years ago in the old office, there was a woman I was working with. I was teaching her the opening practice, the primary practice where you just open to everything. And one of the streets connected right by the office was perfect for practicing it because it had all of these trees, which formed a natural frame, so you could just walk down the streets. I said, “We are going to go down,” and we practiced that. And it took her a little while to get it, and then she was able to do it. Then everything became very interesting. Even the trunk of the tree, seeing all of those different patterns in the trunk. And a plain lawn becomes very interesting because you see every blade of grass, and each one has a slightly different color.

So, we came back. And to get back to the office involved going down an alley, which was telephone wires and garbage cans. I said, “Okay, do the practice,” because normally those bring up a bit of aversion in us, right? And so she just opened up to everything. And it was amusing because she was a little bit annoyed because she could realize she could have that exactly the same ecstatic experience looking at garbage cans and telephone wires that you can looking at sunsets, or beautiful paintings, or clothes, or whatever.

The object makes no difference. It’s how you experience it. And there’s an intention there. So that’s what we mean by enhancement. We actually experience doing, and living, and doing ordinary things in the world with that kind of attention. And we see, and it enhances the practice because it shows us very vividly and very explicitly how many stories we are making up about the world all the time and how irrelevant all of those stories are.

Now, if you want to go further, then you start doing outrageous things which attracts a great deal of negativity. And so, somebody says, “Do this,” and they get very angry with you, or maybe they pick a fight with you and you see if any anger comes up in you.

I heard this outrageous story about Trungpa Rinpoche—just this last weekend—one I hadn’t heard before. Trungpa Rinpoche goes with some of his students into a biker’s bar. And they were drinking beer. And after a while, he has to go to the restroom. On his way to the restroom he passes the pool table. And just as some biker is about to take a shot, he nudges his arm so he misses the shot. And the biker turns around, looks at him and says, “You do that again and I’m going to kill you.” So Trungpa Rinpoche goes to the restroom, comes back, the same biker is about to take another shot, Trungpa nudges him again.

The biker grabs him by his tie and things, because Trungpa is of course wearing a suit, puts him up on the bar and pulls out a knife. He says, “Okay, man.” Trungpa Rinpoche reaches into his pocket, takes out a water gun and squirts him in the face. [Laughter] End of incident. I don’t recommend you try this. [Laughter] But, in all that intense emotion, can you stay present?

That’s aversion, the same thing with attraction. So be with someone that you are desperately attracted to, can you actually experience the attraction and be right in that experience? In some respects it’s more difficult than being in the anger because we don’t like the anger. So we’re happy to be in the anger and not be acting on it. The attraction is all that stuff I want. “I want, feed me,” etc., so that can actually be more difficult for many people.

And here you’re working at a different level of practice because you’re deliberately engaging emotions to enhance the level of your understanding, your experience. That’s very tricky because if you aren’t able to stay, then you get into trouble very quickly. So I’m not recommending this. The point here is that you actually live this way.

You become an ongoing response

Ken: And what does it mean to live this way? It doesn’t mean to live in any thoughts or ideas. When you’re cooking, you’re cooking. And you have the wonderful story of Uchiyama Roshi describing someone who was cooking in the monastery and stirring this big pot of rice for making soup for the monks. And he had this vision of Manjushri appearing above the pot. What did he do? He picked up his ladle and started to beat Manjushri, you know, the bodhisattva of awakened intelligence. Why? Because he was cooking. He didn’t have time for Manjushri! [Laughs]

Now as Uchiyama says, he said this story fascinated him, even though all of that appeared above his pot were a bunch of hungry ghosts. There he is stirring the pot, “I want this food! I don’t want to give it to him. I’m hungry. I want it myself.” Okay? Can we be in that experience? And when you do this, when you develop the capacity—because it’s primarily about capacity, though there is an element of willingness at this level too—then all of the usual agendas and ordinary ways of functioning cease to operate. And that’s very, very unfamiliar for a start.

Somebody asks you a question, “What to do?” And you look for an answer and there’s nothing there, because your mind is completely clear and empty. Yet a response arises. And any sense of you having to do anything with this is, you don’t. You don’t have anything to do with this. Very few people actually want to live that way, but that’s what this practice is about. And what does it mean to live that way? What it means is that you become simply an ongoing response to what is arising.

And it’s like you’re the conversation in the world. Back and forth, back and forth, but there’s no sense of achieving anything or making anything happen, because this is just this natural response. And all of us know that natural response where we do something, which is totally appropriate, without thinking, because it’s just the natural way, it’s just a natural thing to do, but it’s living that way in every moment. That’s basically what this practice is about: developing the ability and creating the conditions and getting the stuff out of the way, so that there’s simply a natural response to everything that arises in each moment. Michelle?

The three bases: willingness, know-how, capacity

Michelle: You said something a little bit ago that triggered a very powerful association for me. When I was a child, I was always the smallest person in class. And my last name started at the beginning of the alphabet. And I was the best student. And the result was that I was always in the front row, no matter whether they seated you by height or alphabet or role model. And so I was 11 before anyone found out that I was virtually blind. I was getting hit on the field with baseballs and nobody figured out that I couldn’t see them. And I remember when I got my first pair of glasses, being on the bus and looking out the window and saying, there are blades of … [unclear].

Ken: Okay.

Student: Sometimes though I’m in my stuff—it could be traffic or an incident at work—and I’m aware enough to know—I remember this happened quite a few times this week—where I’m basically feeling awful and trying to move into that experience. But I’m just feeling so much aversion to that feeling that I’m sort of in this place of just sort of feeling it, but I really want to be relieved of it. And so I think I just need to be in my experience so that I can be relieved of it. Anyway, it’s just this cycle. And then the only thing, well, not the only thing, sometimes if it’s not too bad a situation I can rest and find that place.

But one time I was in traffic, and it was really bad. And the way I ended up sort of cutting it was, I thought, “What if where I’m going is even worse? What if this event I’m going to just sucks?” So all of a sudden it opened everything up and I felt, “Traffic isn’t that bad.” [Laughter] But it was a technique. It was like cutting it. And often I find that have to cut it with something like that. And I can’t just somehow drop into it and just magically find it. Does that make any sense?

Ken: Yes. Part of the difficulty you’re experiencing is because you want to make your experience better. And I understand. You want to make your experience better. It’s unpleasant and you want to make it less unpleasant. It’s a difficulty because you’re still operating out of desire. You follow?

So maybe there’s some know-how too. So let me cover all three bases. One is willingness. We’ve discussed this before. It’s a question Darren brought up in the second class, I think. As we become more awake, we have less and less choice about what we experience, right? Whatever’s there, that’s it, we don’t get to choose. So, we need to be willing to do that.

And a colleague of mine was complaining about his students not making efforts in practice, etc. And I said, “You’ve got to face the fact that most people don’t want to be aware. They just want to feel aware!” [Laughs] Okay? That’s what they want the feeling that they’re aware. They don’t really want to be aware, because that’s where things get massively inconvenient to all the habituated functioning. So that’s all in the area of willingness.

And if you take it into the area of refuge, for instance, refuge is an expression of willingness. That it doesn’t matter how good all of this stuff is, it still doesn’t work. And so I’m prepared to go where I have to go to be present. Do you follow?

Then the second piece is know-how, and that has to be tied to the willingness. The point isn’t to improve experience. The aim of this practice, the aim of all practice, is to develop the ability to experience whatever is there, whatever is arising. And the reason we want to do this is because when we can’t experience what is there, bad things happen. Or we set in motion bad things.

Maybe they don’t show up for five or 10 years down the line, but then they do. Maybe you aren’t old enough to know that yet, but okay. [Laughs] And I did not mean that in a condescending way. I know this very well, stuff I put in motion five or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, showing up now and biting. And I can easily trace it back to not being able to experience a very specific feeling or incident or situation.

So that’s the aim of the practice. And so the know-how we need to focus on, not how do I make it better, but, how do I experience this? You feel the difference there? Good. Now, for my money, the best way—and this is just for me, but that’s all I can give you—when I’m having difficulty experiencing something, is to go to my body. Forget about every way to make it better, just, “Okay, what am I experiencing in my body?” That gets me out of all of the stuff spinning around in my head.

And usually there’s a lot of discomfort in my body. So it’s not a particularly pleasant place to go to because that’s just how my body is. A lot of other people may have different things. But that’s what I’ve trained myself to do, to go to my body. And from there I can start opening. But if I don’t go to my body, I’m just lost in thinking and reacting and emotion and all this stuff You may be familiar with it.

And so we come to the third point: capacity. You’ve heard me say here a number of times, it takes time and effort to build capacity. You’ve done a couple of retreats and that’s excellent. If you have found they’ve helped you build capacity, that’s wonderful. But that’s what you’re doing is building capacity. And so you come back out of retreat, come into your life, and you experience things more vividly and that’s massively inconvenient. Right?

Okay? But you’re a little more present and the point isn’t to make all of that better. Okay? Now, one of the things that traps us is that as we experience things, whatever’s there, then we don’t react. We actually are much more likely to respond. So things actually do get better. So it gets into the idea that we can make things better and we get sucked into that. And then we lose the intention of the practice. And we have to keep coming back again and again. No, this is not about making things better because once I make it about making things better, as in Susan’s question about boredom, then we get trapped by the thing itself. ‘Cause now we’re trying to get away from it. We’re trying to use the practice to get away from it. And that’s not what it means to wake up or be awake.

So we have to let go of that. And that’s massively inconvenient, it’s my favorite phrase these days. [Laughs] It’s not about making it better. It’s about experiencing just what it is. And there’s lots of things that’ve happened in our lives, which we don’t want to experience. We have a fight with our spouse or partner. We don’t want to experience the hurt and the pain and the fear and the panic that’s usually connected with that. That’s hard.

There’s a difficult situation at work. And we have to say something to our boss and we don’t know what the outcome is going to be. We don’t want to experience that. We see something we really like, and we just want to have it. We don’t want to experience the wanting. We just want the thing. So we don’t have to experience the wanting. Making sense to you? Question back here.

Open to your whole sensory experience

Student: So, then it’s the wakeful meditation? So, I’m trying to connect this to life experiences rather than just the meditation itself, where you don’t want to experience things?

Ken: I’m talking about life experiences.

Student: Right, so in that moment where you were talking about having an issue with your boss, and you don’t want to have to deal with it. Do I drop into that moment?

Ken: Yeah. If you can, it’s going to make all the difference. Because if you drop into that moment … what most people do in those kinds of situations for a difficult conversation is they gear up and they use anger to gear up for it, to develop the energy, to overcome—

Student: The defense, defending your position.

Ken: Yeah. And so, they go into the conversation angry,

Student: Right.

Ken: Usually not a good result. So if you can just actually drop, and open to the whole thing, and experience what’s there? Your own anger, your own frustration, the boss’s anger, or whatever, the unfairness in the situation, the whole thing, and you actually can be in the experience. You may find yourself speaking from a very, very different place. And because you’re right in awareness and attention, and not speaking from anger, you may find people hearing and listening to you in a very different way too. But there’s not a guarantee of that.

Student: So, what happens when you feel like it’s more of a global dissatisfaction in life? I’m at this growth place, where I want to change all these things in my life, and I’m feeling large dissatisfaction. I don’t know how to drop in. You know, if I’m headed into something, into a moment, I may drop in and say, “Okay, what’s that feeling?” But when it’s so globally big …

Ken: Then something you can do in your meditation practice or anytime during the day, “Okay. I’m feeling global dissatisfaction.” Existential, by the sound of it. What are you experiencing in your body? That’s where you start. Okay? Where it is. “What am I experiencing in my body?” And just rest in that experience until you can actually be in that experience.

Don’t focus down on a particular part of the body, open to your whole sensory experience. But that includes all the tactile and kinesthetic sensations in the body, internal and external. And what’s going to happen when you do that is you’re going to—not initially but gradually—become aware of the emotions associated with that dissatisfaction, which can be anywhere from quite deep-seated anger or resentment, to sadness, feelings of helplessness, all kinds of things, fear, anxiety, etc.

And when you can be in that and the body, then you can also include the stories. In other words, you sit in the whole mess. What a lot of people want to do is they want to become clear. And then bring that clarity to the situation. This rarely works in my experience, because it’s still basically about avoiding the situation. You open to the experience of the situation and find clarity and rest in it rather than trying to bring clarity and rest to it. But that’s not what most people want to do. This make sense to you?

Okay, Steve. And then I want to go on and make sure I cover the topic. It’s the last question ’cause you’ve been trying to ask one for some time, I’ve noticed that.

Steve: I was going to ask just quickly about what you were just talking about. When you say, “not wanting to improve experience.” There’s all this new, big movement about positive, making things positive. You’re creating a split, right? The moment you’re trying to improve experience instead of being there. And then, when there’s split, there’s conflict if there’s opposing forces. Is that sort of …

Ken: Well, when you create an expectation, you’re no longer present.

The coaching voice

Steve: So, my question before, it’s just about the practices. I find that in instructed meditation or guided, or where there’s instruction. For example, we have this in the breath, and bring in the awareness, then bring in the thoughts and then ask the question. There appears a voice that’s like the coach voice, “No. Don’t let anything in yet. You’re just breathing now.” Okay. “Now no thoughts yet, you’re in the second part.” So I just wondered what … obviously I just go back, but that’s become a little bit loud. A coach voice, I think it’s your voice. [Laughter]

Ken: Well, you see, I wasn’t completely honest. I’ve learned how to manifest, emanate. [Laughter] [Pause] You’re learning. And so you need to remind yourself, and that’s what that voice is. It’s reminding you. And as you practice more and more, then the process simply becomes what you do. And then you’ll probably find that that coaching voice isn’t as insistent, because you’re just doing it.

Steve: And you still would be going through a process of steps without sensing them as such a discreet thing?

Ken: Yeah. It would become quite a natural flow. And this is building skill, developing skill. And this is what practice is for. So that you train and train and train until it just happens. And then you train more. So that happens more and more of the time. And then you train some more. So that just happens. You actually never have to think about it. You don’t have to think, “Oh, I need to do this now.” It just happens. That is the purpose of practice. And that’s essentially what they’re talking about at the level of one taste or something, something arises and bang you’re awake. It’s because of the training.

Now, what is the training here? It’s doing nothing. Something arises, you do nothing. Do nothing, do nothing until everything that arises, you don’t have to do anything. It is really weird, but that’s how it works. Raquel, when something arises, do you do something? Most of the time? Yeah.

Building capacity and attention

Ken: Let’s take a look at this quickly in time we have left. These are all of the very detailed descriptions in both books, but I want to focus on—what I think would be most useful—there’s the summary in the Lamp of Mahamudra on page 45.

The stage of one-pointedness, which is the first phase of mahamudra practice, is primarily about building capacity and attention. So that the clear, open knowing, which is—to use the technical terminology, the union of shamatha and vipashyana—is just there. Now, how do we train that in the circumstances of our lives? We return to it again, and again, and again.

You begin by training it in your meditation periods so that you can recognize it. Once you can recognize it, then you start resting in it. And that resting becomes the union of resting and seeing, as we’ve talked about a couple of weeks ago. Once you’re able to recognize that union of resting and seeing, usually by then, you’ll find that it begins to show up unexpectedly in your daily life. Whenever it does, you let it be there. And then you start training so that you’re actually dropping into it.

And that’s why Susan’s question at the beginning of this evening was very important. If there’s a judgment, if there continues to be a judgment about the quality of the situation, you haven’t dropped into the union of resting and seeing. Whether it’s boredom or interesting, it doesn’t make any difference. And you can do that right now. Just open to everything you’re experiencing in this room.

Now, true mastery of one-pointedness is that when you do that kind of opening, you can just rest there, and it just continues. It has that kind of momentum. So one way of thinking about this is what you’re really doing is just building momentum in your practice. And we do that by coming back to it again and again. You know its like, you have this big, big wheel and you just push a little bit, push a little bit, push a little bit, and it begins to move, you keep pushing it a little bit. And then it begins to roll by itself. That’s what it means to build capacity.

Now, when there’s sufficient stability in that, a shift takes place. So not only are you in the union of resting and seeing, there is a recognition of what you are. Now, you remember we started this class with the two questions: What am I? and What is life?

At the stage of simplicity, there’s an increasingly and ongoing recognition of what you are. What are you? Nothing whatsoever. That is what we are: nothing whatsoever. There’s an awareness that there’s no entity of “I”. Now this completely screws up our habituated functioning, of course, because it’s all organized around a sense of “I”. So, simplicity is a progressive accommodation, integration of that knowing. We are nothing whatsoever, which is at the same time, an awareness.

That’s why Natsok Rangdrol writes:

Simplicity means recognizing your natural face as ordinary mind and realizing it to be devoid of ground and root.

Lamp of Mahamudra, Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, p. 45

gzhi med rtsa bral (pron. zhi mé tsa tral) in Tibetan. And there’s absolutely nothing there. Now, as that knowing permeates more and more of one’s experience, you come to understand what life is. What is life? Experience. Everything is just experience, and the experience and the awareness arise as one. The experience is the awareness; the awareness is the experience. It’s not, there’s awareness of experience. Awareness and experience arise because there isn’t any self which is standing apart.

So, you can say there’s just awareness, or you can say there’s just the experience. It’s the same thing. But if there’s just experience, then whatever you’re experiencing is just that. There’s no good, bad, right, wrong, etc. Does this mean that you do crazy things? No, it doesn’t. Because even at the stage of one-pointedness—actually which I sometimes prefer to talk about as single mind—even at that point, you become acutely aware that every thought and action that you do, sets in motion a process in you, which develops into, or molds and shapes what you actually experience. You see that.

So, you don’t do crazy things because you know what’s involved with that. Instead, as I said earlier, you become an ongoing response to what is arising. And it’s a much more appropriate response because it is completely devoid of judgment, appraisal, and all of the habituated distortions. You’re actually seeing things as they are.

And then again, at a certain point, that way of experiencing the world acquires sufficient momentum. It’s just that, it just is happening all the time. And this is where you move into no meditation. Now you’re living awake. And that’s why he writes:

One taste means that the dualistic fixation of samsara and nirvana is liberated within awareness.

p. 45

That is, you’re not seeing things in terms of samsara nirvana anymore. That’s released, and you’re just in whatever is arising.

Nonmeditation means that all defilements of conviction and habitual tendencies are purified.

p. 45

Bad English—are cleared away. So there’s just an ongoing process. And if you go down to the next paragraph:

The distinction between the meditation and postmeditation (that is between what you’re doing in your formal practice and how you are in your life) of one-pointedness lies in abiding and not abiding.

p. 45

You’re resting in your formal practice and you’re not able to rest in life at this point. In simplicity, the distinction becomes, whether, it says here, “being or not being mindful.” But as some of you may have heard, I want to get rid of this word, mindful/mindfulness. It’s about recall or remember. And there are certain problems with that word, but it is very explicit. What are you recalling, or remembering? What you actually are. You’re aware of that in each moment, that’s what’s happening in simplicity.

Now, in simplicity you’re beginning to get it in your meditation period, you don’t get it much during your life. But as you continue with the practice it becomes more and more available to you. So at the the point of one taste or one flavor, that knowing is not only in your formal practice, but it’s also in how you’re experiencing the world, knowing that you are nothing at all.

Beyond one taste, meditation and postmeditation are intermingled; so there is no distinction.

p. 45

So, I hope this gives you the flavor. Now, the reason that’s tricky going through all of these things is that people try to gauge their progress and say, “Okay, have I got this yet?” Or “Have I had that experience yet?” And they think, “Oh, I have got to work really hard so I can have this experience now.” And this really screws up people’s practice. So it’s a very mixed section of teaching. It can be helpful because it’s a way of recognizing things, but it can be quite unhelpful because it creates expectations and takes you out of practice.

So, read it if it is helpful to you, fine; if it isn’t, don’t worry about it. Because the main effort at this stage for most of us, is very much building the capacity, both in our formal practice, in our daily lives, of returning again and again to just the recognition of mind nature. And if you haven’t had the opportunity to recognize mind nature, then returning again and again to the union of seeing and resting.

And that will inevitably mature into the recognition of mind nature and then, maintaining that in everything that we do is the practice. And through that, we come to know what we are: nothing whatsoever, yet awareness is present. And what life is: the arising of experience. And of what we are and what life is, are not different. Then we begin to live with some kind of wakefulness.

And basically, it means we end up fighting a lot less with things that arise in life, which is why the Dalai Lama writes this book The Art of Happiness. It does produce happiness, but that’s very much the result, not the path. And so trying to be happy is, as some teachers point out, “If you’re going to try to be happy, you have to make the basic assumption that you’re not happy.” And that logic actually applies right through mahamudra. If you’re going to try to be aware you have already taken the position that you’re not aware. That’s not true.

So, it’s very much a case of returning, again and again to what you already are. And you can do that by returning to the open clear awareness. You can do that by returning to what you’re actually experiencing right now. In the end they’re not different. Okay and that concludes our class.