What do you avoid by getting impatient?

Ken: Okay, this is really important. In terms of being able to live awake this is really very important.

Joe: It was my experience that whenever I felt impatience arise, and felt it moving towards anger–and whatever I was unwilling to experience was different or could be different, and it was different many, many times–and I would try to sort of find the lowest common denominator of that thing I was unwilling to experience. And I came up with different formulations such as being unwilling to experience whatever it was at that point. Being unwilling to experience the annihilation of self.

Ken: Go one level above that. What were some examples of the kinds of things?

Joe: I have a daughter who is very demanding of attention. She’s very present. [Laughter]

Ken: She reminds you when you’re not. Yes, children tend to do that.

Joe: Yes, yes. I just don’t want to be there for her all the time. And the feeling I got is that I feel like I’m being erased. I feel like I’m being crushed. I feel like I’m being annihilated.

Ken: Yeah.

Joe: And I don’t like that and it makes me impatient and I’ve learned not to react with overt anger, but I can see myself becoming sullen and what’s that word, negative, but not really … you know what I mean. So there’s that one.

What else? I got impatient with this assignment. [Laughter] It never went into overt anger, but I could feel my impatience and my unwillingness. Well, there were all sorts of formulations such as, “Why do I have to come up with words about this? Why do I have to …?” I want to be right. I know that’s it. “How can I be right here? I can’t be right. Whatever I say it’s always wrong.” So that’s what I was unwilling to experience: that feeling.

Ken: That feeling. Okay, this is very good because last week when we took up people’s experience, people weren’t actually reporting what the feeling or the experience was, they were jumping to various conclusions and stories. And I’ve warned everybody this is very, very fast. I think that’s what you found, right?

Joe: Yes.

Ken: Okay. The conceptual mind is far too slow here. That’s been confirmed by modern neuroscience. What we’re doing in our practice is developing a level of attention which allows us to pick this stuff up before the conceptual mind remembers, or anything like that. Which is one of the reasons why you may have thought, “This dumb assignment, why do I have to do it?” Because your actual conceptual mind was behind it. But you started to be able to pick up those little things like your daughter, as soon as you tuned out from your daughter, she’s there, saying, “Dad, where are you?” And it’s like, “Oh!” And you can thank the mirror neurons for that and what have you.

This is the level of attention that we need if we actually want to live awake. Because that’s how fast stuff is happening all the time. And it’s a non-conceptual awareness, and once we start paying this kind of attention, we discover we can actually live that way. But it means that we are much more in the actual stream of experience that is going on in us, rather than the way we’re used to, which is living in a kind of story. You follow? So this is very good. Anybody else, Lynea?

Lynea: I found that fairly consistently, impatience is related to sort of the same old stories of other things I used to avoid. Does that make sense? Basically it’s either unworthiness or this wanting to avoid a feeling of isolation. And it comes up in very mundane circumstances, even a very basic situation that triggers impatience. I realize that that’s what’s operating underneath it.

Ken: So you’ve been able to see a certain consistency in that. You’ve narrowed it down to three or four core experiences, or recurrent feelings, which, I think you’re quite right, you link to stories which run in us. What’s it like to experience, say, the isolation, even if you just touch into it?

Lynea: It’s physically very uncomfortable. It’s like a bleeding heart; I have to sit in that.

Ken: Yeah. Okay good, anybody else? Chuck?

Chuck: Well along with the isolation I have this feeling that, you know, you’re in a hurry and everybody and everything has come to a complete halt, and you have a feeling that you’re just not going to live long enough for this line to end.

Ken: Waiting in a bank or in a grocery store, or something like that.

Chuck: Right, right. You’re sort of, “Come on, come on!” Pretty soon, “Ohhhh,” you sort of feel like the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. You kind of just sizzle away and die.

Ken: That’s good. Yes, I can resonate with that, and I think you’ve put it very well. This is very primitive stuff. This is very deeply conditioned stuff. Probably in neuroscience, they would say it’s like the limbic system or something like that operating. It’s very, very fast, it’s very deeply conditioned, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on. That is, something in what is going on triggers this whole response and what you’re describing is how grossly exaggerated the response is compared to what’s actually going on.

Chuck: Right, right.

Ken: Which is an indication that it’s a very primitive part of us that is reacting at that point.

Chuck: It has very little to do with the reality of the situation. Five minutes later, I will be outta there and everything is gonna be fine.

Ken: Yes. But for those couple of microseconds, it’s the end of the world. Okay. This is very good. So I’m very glad you persevered in this, because this is what living awake involves. Having that level of awareness operating all the time. So this is not about your daughters, Joe.

Joe: This is not about my daughters?

Ken: [Laughs] No, they’re just useful to you here because they’re very tuned in. So, how many of you want to live that awake? [Laughter] You have something to say here?

How many of you want to live awake?

Joe: I theoretically do, but the actual experience of it seems rather daunting.

Ken: This is like Yogi Berra. In theory there’s no difference between practice and theory. In practice there is. But that’s what’s involved. And there are many misconceptions. I’ve been doing this mentoring group connected with this coaching association that I belong to, and I was asked to do a group on mindfulness and meditation, and so I called it Mindfulness and Beyond because I wanted to go a little deeper. Well, at the first meeting there were 12 people. The second meeting there were eight. The third meeting there were three, and that’s after I sent out an email reminder, which I didn’t for the first two. And I’ve got the fourth meeting in a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know how many will be there. It will probably be more than three, probably five.

In the first meeting I introduced them to meditation practice. I just said very bluntly, “If you don’t do half an hour of meditation for the duration of this group, then you won’t really get anything out of it.” That got a lot of people out of there. But the eight people who showed up the next time, most of them, of course, hadn’t done the meditation, but this time I showed them what was involved in being present in a coaching interaction, and I had two people, I had a couple of people do some role plays there and pointed out exactly where the person had exited, and asked them what they didn’t want to experience at that point. They could feel that. They were really, really shocked because they thought they were just doing a nice smooth thing. So the third meeting, that’s why we only had three. And one of them said, “You mean we have to experience all of this stuff?”

Yeah, that’s what being awake involves. And when we develop a level of attention which allows us to experience that stuff without falling into distraction, then we’re less likely to be impatient. Far less likely to be impatient because there’s so much more we’re able to experience. Chuck?

Chuck: It’s happening whether we’re experiencing it or not. We’re aware of it. It’s going through our bodies, and we have this feeling whether we’re conscious of it or not.

Ken: Yes, that’s correct. It’s happening, but when we’re not aware of it and we are not actually in the experience of it, then it just runs and triggers all kinds of stuff, and one can make a case that we’re not determining our behavior. It’s totally pattern driven when it’s like that. When we’re aware of it, those feelings come up, and because we experience those things the possibility of choice actually opens.

Chuck: I see. And I think that being able to see the situation, you can see other people when they get caught up in their own reactive patterns. You see them standing in line and having a hissy fit and all that. And you can sort of empathize with them instead of …

Ken: You’re quite correct. It increases one’s compassion. Not in the sense of superiority. It’s more like, “Yeah I know that, I know exactly what that’s like.” And you appreciate the difficulties that others have in their lives, and so you become much more tolerant, and you’re also more able to interact with them because you don’t get caught in the confusion. Randye.

Randye: I learned something about myself that I’ve seen in other people many times.

Ken: From this exercise?

Randye: Yeah, quite clearly. Where it came to the forefront seeing it in others, was watching how people respond in a New York City subway car when the car gets stuck between stations in the tunnels, and watching people sit in a car that can’t move and you can’t get out—watching how they respond to it. Many respond with a lot of impatience, and there’s a supreme egotistical arrogance about that impatience. It’s like, “Who do they think they’re doing this to? This is me that can’t get to work on time,” or whatever. And I kept focusing on that question, “What am I avoiding?” I’m avoiding the idea that I’m not the center of the universe. I’m not general manager of the universe. Which I thought I’d resigned that position a long time ago, but each and every time the impatience came up it was the sense of pushing against whatever was happening and not being able to control it.

Ken: Yes, that’s right. The sense of self becomes very acute doesn’t it?

Randye: Yeah, so the question, “What was I avoiding?” I am avoiding the experience of being non-self.

Ken: Ultimately, yes.

Randye: The impatience is the manifestation of that.

Ken: That goes back to what Joe was saying, you experience what is, that’s true. And while that’s quite true, it’s not terribly useful to us unless you have a level of attention. What is really useful to us is to go to the one step earlier where you get the specific flavors of those feelings and start experiencing those, because that’s where you build the level of attention that allows you to experience non-self.

Randye: I didn’t say I was experiencing that. I’m saying that’s what I was pushing against experiencing.

Perseverance

Ken: Good, anybody else? Okay. That’s very good. Now we’re going to turn to perseverance.

And I don’t know which book to use. I apologize because there are certain words that I wanted to look up here, and I simply haven’t had the time to get to them.

The first thing is, this actually is a fairly difficult term to find the right English. And part of that is the continued influence of Calvinism and Victorianism in the English language. The Protestant work ethic and all of that stuff, which makes a virtue out of this joyless work, working hard.

Cara: There are several words in Sanskrit that all encompass perseverance, persistence, and diligence, so I would assume that that would carry over to the Tibetan tradition, at least in terms of the spiritual function of the words.

Ken: I don’t know the Sanskrit but the word in Tibetan brtsön grus (pron. tsöndru), and there are other words that I can think of, and we have a number of words in English but they all have different connotations. So there’s something quite deeply different in the way the various languages …

Cara: Like perseverance makes me think of being chased by a mob or something like that.

Ken: Yeah, well there’s perseverance, strenuousness, diligence, effort, but as one goes through this—I remember many, many years ago when I was first studying this, the synonym for this word is enthusiasm. And this is a totally different way of doing it. So when I was working on this earlier today I thought that it’s not really a translation, but one way we might think about this is working hard. Working hard at something. Which one of the reasons I like it is, it’s Anglo-Saxon English; it’s not Latinate English. Diligence from the French or the Latin roots, which all the other ones are—persevere, strenuous—yes, I think strenuous should be. And diligence, just means working hard. Now there are different ways of working hard, and what I want to do this evening is try to open that up and get a sense of what working hard looks like in a way that doesn’t create further problems, because you can create a lot of problems by working hard the wrong way.

So let’s start into it. It’s the usual seven points, but we won’t even bother with that. The first bit is the argument against laziness and for working hard. I’m going to use that term rather than strenuous or perseverance or whatever. And again it runs through the spiritual, the virtuous, and the practical. Those three things, a lazy person—you know if you’re lazy:

A lazy person is neither liberal nor knowledgeable. He does not work for others and is far from enlightenment.

By strenuousness the positive qualities do not get obscured; the royal treasure of infinite transcending awareness born from wisdom is obtained.

The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, Gampopa, Herbert Guenther (translator), p 181

So it’s using rational processes. I also want to talk a bit about this word laziness. The word lazy is a very pejorative word in our culture, and actually I think it’s pretty pejorative in these other languages. When I was working on the basic meditation section in Wake Up to Your Life, there’s also a long section of traditional teachings on dealing with laziness. When I looked at the remedies for laziness and what they were really aiming at, it seemed to me that what they are really talking about had more to do with unwillingness, of which laziness is simply one expression. And so this notion of strenuousness or diligence or perseverance that is being talked about here, it’s why I want to look at it in terms of working hard. What prevents you from working hard at practice? What gets in the way of that? And there are a lot of things that get in the way of that, and laziness is only one of them.

So I’m not sure what other words would be, we could try using unwillingness. I’m not sure it works in all these contexts, as you’ll see when we go through them, but I don’t feel either laziness or perseverance or strenuousness or any of these terms actually cover the spectrum of meanings that this is talking about. So I just want to alert you to those translation problems. Lynea?

Laziness and passivity

Lynea: What’s the difference between laziness and passivity?

Ken: That’s a very good question, and I’m glad you asked that. Because I think there is a component of passivity that’s being discussed here, too. Laziness is more willful than passivity. I think there’s a bit more active ignoring. Passivity seems to me or could be, yeah, it’s actually a very interesting question.

Do you remember or you may recall a framework I offered some time ago on willingness, know-how, and capacity? Laziness, I would say, is more the lack of willingness. Whereas passivity could be due to a lack of any of the three. If you don’t have the capacity, you’re not going to do it and that could easily look like passivity. If you don’t know how to do it, you’re not going to do something, and that could easily look like…you tend to be passive in situations where that was expected. “I’m just going to sit this one out, thanks.” But that’s not necessarily laziness.

Lynea: For some reason I’m making an association here that may be entirely my own.

Ken: Just to let me encourage you, I got another two or three emails expressing great appreciation for people’s openness here.

Lynea: Okay fair enough. Laziness. For some reason I’m feeling anger relates to laziness, and fear relates to passivity, and I don’t know why.

Ken: Your internal experience of laziness has a flavor of anger with it, and your internal experience of passivity has a flavor of fear. Am I understanding you?

Lynea: My internal experience right now when I hear those terms, so.

Ken: Interesting. Well, okay, that’s what I want to pursue, because I think we tend to get angry at laziness.

Lynea: I’m thinking of anger meaning, “I’m not going to do that,” and laziness and passivity meaning fear of unknown, something unknown.

Ken: You’re looking at laziness as a form of aggression …

Lynea: Yeah.

Ken: … and laziness is an expression of aggression in a certain way, and passivity is an expression of fear. Okay. Well, you left out a couple, what about passive-aggressive?

Lynea: Well, there’s that, too! [Laughs]

Ken: I think there’s certainly merit in what you say. I’m not sure it’s comprehensive. I think that there are, but because I haven’t thought about this, that there may be forms of laziness which aren’t acts, aren’t expressions of aggression, but it’s something I’d like to think about. Randye, do you have something?

Randye: Actually I have a very different take on passive, which is neither lazy nor anger and impatience. I’m thinking of like Gandhi’s passive resistance which was quite effortful. The sit-in strike. There’s intention, there’s purpose.

Ken: Yeah, but I don’t think that’s the kind of passivity we are talking about here at all.

Randye: But I mean it’s a non-doing but it has a purpose.

Ken: Yeah, I think the passivity that Lynea, correct me if I’m wrong, is where you just let things happen to you. Whereas passive, that non-violence approach of passive resistance is very, very powerful because of the intention behind it.

Randye: So that would imply that Lynea’s form of passivity lacks intention.

Ken: That’s a good point. That’s a very good point. Joe?

Joe: There is a strong element of desire and pleasure in my laziness.

Ken: Yes, I think that can be, too, so I don’t think it’s always an expression of aggression or anger. Okay? That’s very good. Thank you.

Cara: But I think in what you’re talking about, Joe, I do that, but then I feel guilty sometimes.

Ken: [Laughs] Joe never feels guilty, he’s beyond that! [Laughter]

Cara: But I think that in those times where you need to take a rest and maybe not be as persistent as you are constantly, then there’s an element of feeling guilty.

Ken: Okay. The essence of working hard in this quite specialized sense, is to strive for the good and wholesome. Now it sounds very simple, but you don’t actually see much of that in a lot of people’s lives, where they’re working hard at the good and wholesome. These are such old-fashioned ideas. You know, you’re meant to be achieving things, you’re setting goals and achieving them. The cultivation of a deep level of goodness and wholesomeness in one’s life is something that is not actually valued in this society very much. Now, I mean behaving is valued, but really what I’m thinking of is when you look at what is presented as what you should be aspiring to or bringing about in your life, it isn’t being a good person. It’s being beautiful, smart, rich, all of these things. But what I’m translating here as a seeking out what is good and wholesome, is something that I don’t see that many people doing. Maybe because I live in the wrong circles or something like that. Yes?

Cara: I think that this is like a constant stumbling block that we have with the word wholesome.

Ken: Okay.

Cara: Because whenever we visit—like from what you just said—I grew up in Colorado Springs where the emphasis is on piety, and within that piousness are all of the things that you’re talking about but with an emphasis on the Judeo-Christian model of that. Seeking and being.

Ken: Yes. There’s a piece, I think it was in the New York Times on the purity balls? There is a seeking of the good and wholesome in that, but it’s very unbalanced or distorted in some way.

Cara: Really. It’s always a bit warped.

Ken: Yeah. I see where they’re trying to go, but they’re trying to go about it in the wrong way, or at least that’s how it seems to me. But it’s fascinating to look at these things. At least, it is for me, anyway.

Cara: I just say that because I think there are people in the world who do work towards a wholesome lifestyle.

Ken: Yeah.

Cara: But the thing that is always a detractor for me within that is that there’s always an element of judgment—at least where I experienced this.

Ken: Yeah, and that’s a very good point. Because, when I’m talking about the good and wholesome here is one that is completely free of judgment.

Varieties of laziness

Ken:

There are three varieties of laziness: (i) lassitude, (ii) idleness and (iii) gross laziness.

The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, Gampopa, Herbert Guenther (translator), p 182

Konchog Gyaltsen’s translations I think are just as problematic. It’s on page 214 in Konchog Gyaltsen where you have listlessness and disregard and gross laziness. Those are his translations, but I think we have to look at what is actually being described.

The first one is where you just lay around and you don’t do much:

… addiction to the pleasures of mental inertia such as sleepiness, restfulness and dreaminess.

p. 182

Sleeping all the time, just lying around, and daydreaming, etc.

The treatment here is to become aware of your death. I think it was Mark Twain who said, “Nothing concentrates the mind like the presence of death,” or the proximity of death. It arouses all that stuff.

The second kind: Guenther uses the term faintheartedness and Konchog Gyaltsen uses the term discouragement. So this form of (quotation marks) laziness—when I read these, I really don’t think it’s the right term at all—is coming from a lack of confidence or faith in oneself, in one’s own potential, which can manifest as a kind of laziness. But I don’t think it’s properly called laziness.

The third one, which is called gross laziness, is actually a form of distraction. It’s where people work very hard but just at the wrong things: they get very rich, they get very powerful, or they do horrible things, but there’s no idea they are just lying around here. You see why I’m really not in favor of laziness here as a translation, because one: we’re talking about things we would normally associate with lazy—just lying around, and doing nothing, daydreaming, frittering time away. And then the second one is a passivity or an inactivity, which is coming from lack of confidence in one’s self or a lack of faith in one’s potential ability. Then the third one is inactivity in spiritual stuff, because to use Cheney’s phrase when he was asked what he did during the Vietnam war: “I had other priorities.” A very interesting statement.

So this business of working hard is remedying—this is really quite a broad spectrum of stuff that we’re looking at. Is this helpful to you? Are you clarifying this at all?

Joe: So laziness in this sense is …

Ken: It’s inactivity or the wrong kind of activity.

Joe: A failure to act in a certain direction.

Ken: Yes, that’s what I get out of it.

Joe: To go to the other term, which is translated in the other book as virtue, as opposed to good and wholesome, am I mistaken in thinking that there is a meaning to virtue which has to do with power? Earlier in English a virtue …

Ken: The Latin root for virtue is man, vir, the word for man. To be virtuous is to be a man in the true sense of being a man, and that’s where the connection is with power.

Joe: Is that present in the Tibetan in the meaning we’re working towards?

Ken: No, not in any way. The Tibetan word is dge ba (pron. gewa). I do not know the etymology of the Sanskrit at all.

Cara: For virtue?

Ken: For virtue, yeah.

Cara: That’s another one where there are like three or four.

Ken: But if you take a look at the Roman, the Latin, implicit in that is, if a person wasn’t virtuous, they weren’t really human. That’s a pretty powerful thing to have operating in your culture. You’re not a full human being unless you are virtuous. That’s quite powerful. Sorry, but I can’t do anything on the Sanskrit or Tibetan.

Joe: It’s a little bit more helpful than good and wholesome.

Cara: I can try to look up the Sanskrit meanings.

Ken: Hugh, if you want to sit right beside that speaker. There’s a speaker where Steve is sitting. Steve can you move over one, and let Hugh sit there? Yes. Is that going to be better? Good. Thank you, Mary.

No vacations in practice

Ken: Okay, so now we turn to the opposite of this term. And I think you’re quite right, it’s not acting in a certain way. But we may not have a single term for laziness in English as it’s being talked about here.

So three kinds of diligence. How are we doing for time? Nine? Good.

Armour, applied work, insatiableness. [Guenther, p. 183] Armor, application and insatiable perseverance. [Gyaltsen, 216] The first one, is very straightforward, it’s the word for armor, like chain mail or leather armor, which is what they used in those days. When I read this, what I get from it—armor, of course, is a metaphor. They’re talking about, or Gampopa seems to be talking about, a certain quality of determination so that you are always making an effort, you’re always working at it in some way. Putting it another way, there are no vacations. Which is true in spiritual practice because spiritual practice is about being present in our lives, and it’s meaningless to talk about taking a vacation. It is a work that we engage all the time.

But you think, “Well, do I have to?” That question doesn’t even arise, because as soon as you stop, then the old habituated patterns take over, and you gotta deal with the mess afterwards. So, that to me is the idea here in armor. And you can read the quotations:

A bodhisattva puts on armour
In order to gather all beings around him.
Since beings are infinite
So is his armour.

The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, Gampopa, Herbert Guenther (translator), p 184

Now, the unfortunate connotation with armor is that it’s something that protects you from the world, from attack. I think it has to be understood here in a metaphorical way in that what it’s protecting you from is your own tendency to be distracted or to dissipate your energy. That’s what it’s protecting you from. It’s not protecting you from the world. Randye?

Randye: I actually read that as support. Like providing a container in which the energy can be held.

Ken: I think that’s a perfectly good way to read it. Anybody else?

Joe: There seems to be a feeling of insignia or a …

Ken: Insignia?

Joe: A banner of truth, not a label but some marking.

Ken: A standard.

Joe: A standard.

Ken: Yeah. Like a battle standard. We can explore the wave the flag and all that. Obviously it’s using a kind of military metaphor here. It’s very interesting. Because then we get this strenuousness or perseverance of application. And it talks about three efforts, three things to work at.

I think you’re beginning to see why I favor the term working hard as a rendering here. Because it works for the armor, it works for application, you’re going to work hard at three things.

Experiencing things vividly and completely

Ken: And now we run into a whole host of translation problems:

(i) to reject conflicting emotions, (ii) to realize the good and wholesome, and (iii) to work for the benefit of all sentient beings.

The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, Gampopa, Herbert Guenther (translator), p. 184

Well, you guys have been working at this for a while. And Konchog Gyaltsen’s is to reject conflicting emotions. [Gyaltsen, p. 216] How good are you at rejecting conflicting emotions? Or reactive emotions? How good are you at getting at that?

Joe: Maybe a little bit better at seeing them, but not at avoiding them.

Ken: Okay.

Cara: It just seems just like everyone else has gone, it’s really loud. I don’t like hearing myself like this.

Ken: We do.

Cara: Thank you. Did my mom tell you to say that? I think that people are getting better at pushing my buttons. That’s what I think. The better I get, the harder it gets.

Ken: Okay. Excuse me. I just want to respond. It could be that, or it could be that you are just more aware.

Cara: Coming back to your first question at the beginning of class, I have been working really hard on some things that you told me to work really hard on, and I’ve had some positive results with that, but I also notice that when my buttons get pushed and I become impatient, I become incredibly rigid. And I actually have a pretty fluid form, I just kind of flounce through the world most of the time, and I’ve noticed that when I get into that armored state, that it’s like I have skin made out of concrete and that’s when I become quite impatient.

Ken: Yeah, good, this is definitely increasing awareness. It gets a little more uncomfortable doesn’t it? Yeah, good. Randye?

Randye: I don’t think I’ve gotten one iota better at avoiding conflicting emotions; however, I might be a teeny tiny bit better at recovering from them a little quicker.

Ken: So this business about avoiding, rejecting is not accurate in terms of what actually happens. You can’t avoid them, you don’t even have control over whether they arise or not. Because we don’t have control of everything that happens today. When something happens, bang. Anger can arise or desire or whatever. It’s just there.

What Gampopa is referring to here is, what is our relationship with the reactive emotion when it arises? Because there is nothing we can do about its arising. Now, rejecting or avoiding easily leads to the idea of suppression, which we know doesn’t work very well.

What I think is being referred to here at one level is not engaging it. But from a spiritual point of view, not engaging it does not mean distancing. A lot of people would say not engaging means keeping a distance. It means experiencing it vividly, without distraction. And the more completely one experiences a reactive emotion, the less you express it or repress it. You don’t repress it or suppress it in the body, and you don’t express it in the world. So, this business of rejecting reactive emotion: in practice, it means experiencing things very, very completely when they arise.

Because, to use your example, Cara, you’re beginning to notice the vividness of this. Like when you’re impatient, you’re really rigid. It’s not something you appreciated before. As you continue to form a relationship and live with that level of awareness, you are going to feel that rigidity. But because you are feeling it, you actually won’t be rigid. And you won’t have to push against the other person, and your body won’t harden up in that way. And this is a bit of a paradox in a way. The more vividly we experience and the more completely we experience what is arising in us, the less that is expressed in life. And so you may feel like you are a complete bundle of reactive emotions, but people will find you so responsive and attuned to them, that they’re amazed. You follow? Okay.

So this quotation from the Bodhicaryavatara on page 184 is what Guenther is talking about:

When one is in the midst of conflicting emotions
One must be firm in a thousandfold way,
And not allow oneself to be assailed by them
Just as a lion will not allow jackals to attack him.

p. 184

But again this is not one of opposition to them, but one of having a sufficiently high level of attention that this stuff can arise and just play itself out in one’s awareness without reacting to it. So both of them have this idea of enduring or something like that. That’s what I was trying to get at with the exercise about experiencing this stuff. When you experience it, that’s how you actually become free of it.

Then the second is the diligent effort, the strenuousness or working hard for the good and the wholesome or to accomplish virtue or however you want to translate this.

And here is where the real meat of the chapter is. He goes through these five ways. I prefer Konchog Gyaltsen’s translation on page 217:

The first is making a constant effort.

p. 217

So, working hard at virtue. I’m going to translate this into somewhat simpler English. The first thing is consistency: you’re doing it all the time. The second is characterized as making effort with devotion. Guenther says here, joyfully, eagerly, quickly, and I think that is closer [Guenther, p. 185].

… means persevering quickly, with joy and happiness.

p. 217

The phrase that I was thinking of was wholeheartedly. So it’s consistent, it’s wholehearted, and I love the image: this elephant jumping into a pool.

The enthusiasm of Kohler’s pig

Ken: How many of you know Kohler’s Pig? I had a picture of it here in the office, when I was in this building. If you go to allposters.com and look up S-O-W-A, Michael Sowa. One of his paintings shows a pig that has run off of a jetty and is jumping into a pond. And there is such a delightful expression of joy. Gail originally sent a card to me.

The pig has so much enthusiasm. He’s just diving into that pond. And I just think of us here. This is where the sense of enthusiasm comes. Because when we are enthusiastic about something, we pour our energy into it, and we don’t think about it. We don’t regard it as hard work. That is the quality that is being talked about here, it’s not perseverance. Uh, uh, uh. It’s that pouring of energy into something because you’re enthusiastic about it.

Student: Exuberant?

Ken: Exuberant can go a little over the top, so I prefer enthusiastic.

The third links up with that very, very closely. When you are enthusiastic about something, you don’t get shaken by impediments or interruptions or things like that, or setbacks. You just say, okay, that’s what happened. Let’s keep going. That’s the quality, and that’s why I’m favoring working hard at something.

Cara: When you say consistency, that’s like a buzzer for me. I think that’s really accurate.

Ken: Okay.

The fourth is making effort without turning back.

The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, Gampopa, Konchog Gyaltsen (translator), p 217

When you’re enthusiastic about something, nothing puts you off. It doesn’t matter what happens. You just find a way through. This not turning back is a finding a way through. We touched on a lot of this stuff when we did the Making Things Happen workshop some time ago. This is operating at the level of will. Do you remember that, Joe: the attention, intention, and will? What Gampopa is describing here is ideally something that’s operating at the level of will. Just gonna do it, and it doesn’t matter what happens, you’ll find a way through or around or under, whatever you have to do. That’s that quality of not turning back.

And the fifth one is important. You’re not doing anything special. So there’s no basis for pride or arrogance or judgment, which links up here. Often people who are working hard at something become somewhat inflated by their own efforts, and may in subtle or in very obvious ways, lord it over other people. This just happens to be something that you’re really enthusiastic about, and there’s nothing particularly special, so there’s no feeling of arrogance or superiority or pride associated with it. And what I hope you’re getting from my description here is the naturalness of this, which we don’t find when you use such words as strenuous or persevere or effort. All of those don’t have that quality of naturalness, that’s why enthusiasm is really good to keep in mind here. Any questions on this?

Igniting the spark in others

Ken: Then the next part is the diligent effort to benefit sentient beings. [Gyaltsen, p. 218] This is working hard, and it refers back to the 11 qualities in Chapter 13, which if you’re in Konchog Gyaltsen’s book, you’ll find on page 199, section C.

These are the moral ethics of benefitting sentient beings. So these are to help others you support meaningful activities, dispel the suffering of those sentient beings who are suffering.

I’m going to translate some of these. Supporting meaningful activities–you engage people in things that are meaningful to them. Show them how to do it without struggling. Showing methods to people who don’t know them, that’s teaching them; teaching them something they don’t know how to do.

Recollecting others’ kindness and then repaying it. When we talk about repaying people’s kindness this should be understood fairly broadly. There are lots of instances of kindness, the kindness of our parents, the kindness of our teachers that we will never repay to those people. It’s not possible. You can never repay your parents for all that they gave you so that you have a life. What you can do is take what was given through all of that and nurture other people’s lives. And that’s how you repay it. It’s not repaid back, it’s repaid forward, in a certain sense. And that becomes very powerful.

One’s willingness to do that comes directly from appreciating what was given. So when people undertake spiritual practice, as their spiritual practice begins to take hold and they can really feel its value, they often become concerned–“How can I thank my teacher, how can I pay him or her back for this?” Wrong way to think, in my opinion. So now you understand the value, so how do you—it’s the word for light—how do you light that candle, light that spark in somebody else?

Student: Ignite.

Ken: Ignite, that’s good. Thank you.

Providing security and guidance

Ken: Protecting others from fears and dispelling the mourning of those who are suffering. You might say a little TLC. Providing people with security. It’s really, really important because it’s very difficult for people to practice and develop spiritually if their lives and their livelihoods are threatened. It’s a very important point.

Giving necessities to those who do not have them, making provisions to bring disciples into the Dharma community, acting according to those people’s level of understanding.

The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, Gampopa, Konchog Gyaltsen (translator), p 199

This is important. When one is teaching or providing any sort of guidance, which can be quite informal, you have to meet the person where they are. You can’t get ahead of them, because otherwise they just don’t understand what you’re talking about.

I was listening to when Red Auerbach, who is the coach of the Celtics who died a few months ago—I think it was a few months ago, maybe it was last year—one of the quotations which I very much appreciated from him was, “It’s not what you say to the players that’s important, it is what they hear.” That’s a really, really good thing to remember: it’s not what you say to others that’s important, it’s what they hear, because that’s what they’re going to act on.

Celebrating effort and success

Ken: Creating joy by reporting the perfect qualities. This I would interpret as celebrating people’s success, celebrating people’s efforts. What happens to you when somebody celebrates your efforts? Cara?

Cara: My head gets really fat.

Ken: What else happens?

Cara: I’m actually working on this a lot right now because I’m constantly begging for people, especially my partner, like when I shove lots of things at him on a constant basis. I just sit there, like, “What do you think, what do you think?” You would think that I wasn’t spending thousands of dollars learning how to bake, because I act like my entire life hangs on the balance of his opinion of my cookies, and I do that with a lot of people. So I see that I’m a little too dependent on…

Ken: Well you can turn it around. What happens when your partner or somebody else says, “These are really, really good.” What happens then?

Cara: I get all smiley and stuff.

Ken: What happens in your body?

Cara: I don’t feel like I’m made out of concrete.

Ken: So you relax.

Cara: Yeah.

Ken: Does it inspire you to do more? If you bring something home and your partner says, “This is just fantastic!” do you get up the next morning and say, “I don’t want to go to the bakery …”

Cara: No, because for my roommate, who thank god is not a Buddhist and who will never listen to this [laughter], there have been times when I’ve given her things and she has liked them, but she’ll make this face at me, and it makes me uncomfortable. I was thinking about this today … it’s awkward.

Ken: So it’s not a real celebration.

Cara: I think it is a real celebration, but for me, for some reason her reaction weirds me out.

Ken: Are you comfortable with somebody celebrating your successes?

Cara: For the most part. I’m still dealing with my own surprise at what I can and can’t do.

Ken: Let’s hear from some others. What happens to you, Lynea?

Lynea: When it’s something that I’m not very good at, or something that I’m trying hard and it doesn’t come easily, I feel very encouraged, and it feels warm.

Ken: Mm-hmm.

Lynea: When it’s something that comes relatively easy or I feel that I’m good at, I feel ashamed and guilty and wish they wouldn’t.

Ken: [Laughs] Why? What’s the difference?

Lynea: I feel there’s some sense of feeling bad at being good at certain things, it’s a big difference.

Ken: That would be interesting to explore. Anybody else? Randye.

Randye: It’s the best energy boost I know.

Ken: Yeah. When people celebrate our successes or our efforts or something like that, it diminishes our sense of separation. We feel we have a place in the world, and there’s a joy that comes in it because somebody is taking joy in us. We feel a joy and that is energizing. Okay, Cara.

Cara: But then we want it. I think that’s where I tried that line. I love how articulate Lynea is, she’s got words, man, and I ramble.

Ken: [Laughs] Now you’re making her feel ashamed. [Laughter]

Cara: Sorry—

Student: It’s easy! [Laughter]

Cara: Don’t you dare feel bad about that. I made a beautiful tart today in class, like it was perfect. And you know my chef is very French, and he has a reputation for being a snob. But I made it and I was like, “Come here, come look at this.” And I don’t know what I want him to do. Do I want him to high five me, do I want him to give me a sticker? I do. I used to teach preschool.

Ken: You want somebody to celebrate.

Cara: No, I don’t want somebody to celebrate me …

Ken: You want him …

Cara: I want him to celebrate me, and when I don’t get that my little bunny ears go flop.

Ken: Okay. There’s some other stuff going on there, but I won’t go into it… [Laughs]

Cara: I’m a sycophant.

Ken: Not exactly. Quiet. We’ve got the psychologist, she’s got you analyzed. But the main point I’m trying to make is that when we celebrate others, we are actually planting the seed of power and joy in them so that they can go out and do things. That’s why a lot of us are not comfortable being celebrated because it makes us conscious of our own power. Other people love the feeling, there are various reactions.

Properly correcting someone who is doing wrong. I would like to translate this into giving people feedback. Learning how to give feedback correctly and doing so, so that people actually hear it and can use it, is a definite skill, and it is immensely useful to people. Because people will go on for years thinking they are doing something the right way or something like that, and no one will ever tell them. But one needs to have the right situation, and have the right relationship and also be skilled in doing this. But I think the world would probably be a lot better place if people had more skill and exercised it in this area.

Learning to be quietly natural

Ken: And the last: refraining from creating fear with miracle powers. You laugh. I’ve seen it lately attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, but I thought the quotation originated with Isaac Asimov: A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Student: Yeah, that’s Asimov.

Ken: That’s what I thought. A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic because you can’t understand how it happens.

So when natives saw people pick up a stick and point it at an animal 100 yards away and you hear this bang and the animal falls down, they thought this was magic. There’s still something a little magical for me when I type things into my computer and then everything changes on the web. How does that happen?

It’s actually the same in spiritual practice. When you’re are able to be as present with your internal process with what’s arising in you, in the way that we were talking at the beginning of this class, you’ll find that you will negotiate situations with a certain ease and fluidity, which will appear to other people as miraculous. They will just like, “How did you do that?”

I remember I was at a conference and it was a very small group, about eight of us I think. And a woman who was highly trained in her area said something that was just outrageous. Really, really disturbing. And one of the people in the group took her to task for this in the most skillful way. I was just floored. He expressed the outrage that he obviously was feeling, and I think that several other people besides me, but there was no sense of blame, there was no sense of criticism. The skill with which he stated where he was, and I just sat there and went, “How did you do that!?” It was like magic to me; this was his level of skill.

So you chuckle when it says refraining from creating fear with miracle powers, but as your ability to communicate and interact with people develops, people will think, “Well, I don’t want to talk with her because she is just so on the money all the time.” So learning how to be quietly natural is also important.

Causing others to be inspired by the teachings. Okay, so those are the things you work at, because this is what moves people forward.

There’s always more to do

Ken: Section C: Insatiable perseverance. [Gyaltsen, p. 218] I hate this word insatiable, because you usually associate that with something that is out of balance and this is not what is being referred to here.

Student: Is it more consistency again?

Ken: Well, it goes quite a bit further than consistency. It’s insatiable in the sense that nothing is ever enough, but not in the wrong way; it’s not referring to the hungry ghost greedy kind of thing. There’s such enthusiasm that you always want to do more. It’s not a poverty-stricken thing, which is what I get about insatiable here. There’s such a big hole in you that you can’t ever fill it up. That’s why I don’t like the term. It is that you have such enthusiasm that you always want to do more. You always want to do more. It’s an expression of a flow of energy into things, not a sucking of energy out of things. Question, Joe?

Joe: I’m trying to search for a way of thinking about this in the sense that you shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking everything is completed. I have arrived …or everybody has arrived …

Ken: Yeah, there’s always more to do. This is wonderfully expressed in the Zen version of the bodhisattva vow, which are known as the Four Great Vows:

Sentient beings are infinite in number, I vow to save them all.
Reactive emotions are endless, I vow to vanquish them all.
Dharma gates are numberless, I vow to enter them all.
The great way is infinite, I vow to engage it completely.

The Four Great Vows, Zen tradition

So, you’re working with the infinite here, and you’re going to embrace the whole thing, and you’re always going to do more, and you always see that there’s more to do. Because it’s the totality of our experience that we are talking about.

The rest of it is the usual stuff. These are developed or cultivated through the operation of pristine awareness or primordial wisdom, etc., supported by emptiness and compassion. The results are that good things come from it. So that’s the perfection of strenuousness or working hard.

Now, what makes it a perfection is when you have no sense of working hard. You’re just doing it. So there’s no sense of working at anything.

Milarepa says when you’re never distracted, you have perfected working hard.

Homework

Ken: The next chapter is the Perfection of Meditative Concentration. Here I don’t like the use of the word concentration; I feel concentration is what you do to oranges. To make orange juice, it has this notion of squeezing down. To concentrate something means you make it more and more dense.

Cara: It makes me think of furrowed brows.

Ken: Yeah. The Tibetan, I don’t know the Sanskrit, I think it is better rendered as meditative stability. I think it’s just about stable attention. That’s what we’ll be doing next week.

What I’d like to do now is to give you something to work on over the next week. And that is to track your experience, what you actually experience when you feel enthusiastic about something versus when you’re having to work hard at something and you don’t feel enthusiastic. And just look at that contrast: enthusiasm, lack of enthusiasm. It can be in terms of your meditation or spiritual practice. It can be in terms of household chores, whatever you do to earn a living, etc. But, where there is energy and enthusiasm, what’s that experienced like? Where there’s no energy and enthusiasm, what’s that energy like? Just get a really good feeling for that. That’s what I’d like you to focus on for next time.

Ken: Hugh.

Hugh: I’d like to say something.

Ken: Please.

Hugh: I’m very glad I was here tonight to share with you all this experience, and I’m very grateful to you Ken for letting me come. I love what you said about enthusiasm. Enthusiasm comes from the Greek, entheos, in God.

Ken: Ah.

Hugh: Enthusiasm is that sense of life, vitality, and joy. And that’s something in my tradition, Catholic Christianity. We’re at a historical moment now where we need to recover this enthusiasm and sense of joy, because too often we’re motivated by sheer duty, gritting our teeth. I mean those of us who take it seriously too often do it by gritting their teeth, and I think the spirit of it needs to be recaptured. And I think that’s what the Church is going through now, the process of recapturing the spirit and recapturing the enthusiasm of the faith. I think that the Eastern wisdom is going to be a very important part of that process for traditional Christianity to recover that enthusiasm. And the analysis of these basic themes of patience and perseverance, and all of these wonderful concepts that we throw around so casually, all of these have to be recognized as nuggets of gold, and we have to recapture that appreciation. And I think that’s what I’ve seen happening here tonight, is recapturing enthusiasm and the joy of belief in a higher being. So I’m very grateful and I appreciate the welcome that I feel from all of you. And thank you.

Ken: You’re very welcome, thank you. I didn’t know that enthusiasm had that etymology, and I love etymology. So thank you very much for that. And we’ll do the dedication, somebody asked for this to be recorded. They wanted to hear a dedication.

Through this goodness, may I come to complete knowing.
May the enemy, wrong action, be overcome.
From the stormy waves of birth, old age, illness and death,
This ocean of existence, may all beings be freed.

I do not cling in any way
To the virtue and goodness I have generated.
In order that all beings may benefit from it
I dedicate it in the realm of totality.

This virtue and all virtue gathered in the three times
I dedicate as all buddhas do
To supreme non-residing awakening.¨
May I attain the state of union in this life.

Awakening mind is precious.
May it arise where it has not arisen.
May it not fade where it has arisen.
May it ever grow and flourish.

The energy of lineage teachers gathers like great clouds;
The abilities of yidams pour down like rain;
The activities of dakinis and protectors ripen like fruit.

Good fortune: may the two aims come about naturally.¨
Through the power of truth of aspirations made with a totally pure mind,
Through the inevitability of dependence and conditions totally formed
And through the force of what is, profound and totally true,
May the brilliance of good fortune blaze forever.