Morality in Buddhist practice

Ken: Friday, October 20. No, Saturday, right? Saturday, October 24th. There Is No Enemy. Morning session. Yesterday afternoon we went through outlook and practice. Practice we’d basically done before and we’re just starting into action. And I’d offered a couple of observations on that. Can you just scratch that out because not as accurate as I would’ve liked it to be. So I’m going to tell you it’s take two this morning.

Student: Is there a name for this framework?

Ken: Yeah, it’s called outlook, practice and behavior. Outlook, practice and behavior. That’s how it’s referred to in the Tibetan tradition. Actually, ita sgom spyod gsum (pron. ta gom chö sum); ita is the word for outlook, sgom is the word for practice or meditation, spyod is the word for action or behavior, and gsum is the word for three. Everything works backwards in Tibetan, and that’s how it’s referred to. That’s the only name I know it by. Okay.

So, what I said yesterday; this is for internal and this is for external. And after that I was thinking about it and went, “That’s nonsense, it’s the same for both.” There are a couple of points which need to be noted. So, there’s a way of proceeding here, and I don’t really want to talk theoretically because I’m not very good at talking theoretically. So this is rather pragmatically oriented. How do you actually go about acting in the world, and how do you go about working with your internal material? That is, how does this philosophy, or what does this philosophy, there is no enemy actually look like in action. A part of this, of course, is what constitutes morality in this philosophy? And I think that will sort of come out in the wash as we go through this.

The function of morality in Buddhist practice, and really in general, needs to be understood because of the—let’s basically say—Christian heritage, but certainly the Protestant heritage. We generally regard morality as prescriptive. Thou shalt do this, thou shalt not do that. And so we tend to relate to morality as a set of principles which we’re given, which we have to adhere to. And this is very unfortunate, particularly for any of us who have authority issues, and I may be the only one in the room with that.

Now, as a colleague of mine, Ajahn Amaro, pointed out a number of times, in Buddhism morality is more descriptive than prescriptive. It’s descriptive of how a person who is awake or present, whatever term we want to use there: acts or behaves. And that’s one component. It is how a person who is engaged in the development of such understanding behaves in a way that supports that development. So morality has both components. It is a description of what it looks like to be present and awake, and it also provides guidelines for behavior, which are consistent with the effort that one is making.

Now, to give you an example of this, which some of you may be familiar with, I refer to a book I mentioned earlier, The Great Path of Awakening, which is a translation of the mind training in seven points. And it’s very, very clear in that book—it doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on outlook, it presents that a bit at the beginning and then a great deal on practice. And then the last two sections, which contain the bulk of the instructions are about commitments and guidelines. Commitments here refers to ways of behavior that are crucially important to adopt, because if you don’t, then you’re seriously or irrevocably undermining your efforts. And one of these is, if I remember correctly, is pay attention to difficult points. And one of the difficult points is one’s relationship with one’s teacher. And if you undermine that relationship, then you’re really closing the door on your own spiritual practice and unfolding. So that’s a really important thing. So it comes under the classification of commitment. And then there’s about 17 instructions, which come under the topic of guideline. And the guidelines are things that are just really helpful to do. So don’t lose your temper at AT&T.

Student: Which one was that?

Ken: Well, it’s number five or six: don’t lash out, you see. And another one is don’t wait in ambush. Somebody does something and you sit “Oh,” and you sit there. “Ha ha ha. Oh, got ’em. ” So you’ll find all of these up on my website if you go to the mind training section, we have an illustrated guide to this.

Student: The typo story?

Ken: Yes, exactly. The typo story that I related is an example of setting an ambush. Yeah. [conversation about microphone] Agnes, you had a question?

Agnes: I have a little confusion. When you talk about prescriptive versus descriptive. Now, the eightfold path, I thought that’s kind of like outcome, the final outcome.

Ken: It’s descriptive.

Agnes: That is descriptive.

Ken: Yes. And that’s the right way to approach it. Okay. And thank you for bringing that up because it’s a very important point. The eightfold path is a description of how a person who is awake conducts his life. Now, many people see right action or right speech … let’s take right speech. The four qualities of right speech, if I can remember them: it’s gentle, truthful, relevant, and I think the fourth one is kind.

I may have got one of them wrong. Now, what people do is they try to do that and they just tie themselves up and not often because in order to do that where they are at that point, they have to suppress, and it’s just not helpful. The way you actually practice right speech is you bring attention into the action of speaking. And the simplest way that I’ve found to do that, and also at least for me, the most effective is to listen to myself or listen to the sound of my own voice as I am speaking, as if I were listening to another person.

So rather than just talking, I am talking and listening at the same time. Now, this is very effective because as soon as some personal agenda or an edge creeps into my voice or fear creeps into my voice or whatever, some reactivity creeps into my voice, bang. I’m aware of it because listening to it, you can hear that in other people. You can hear it in your own voice. When I slip into one of my parents’ patterns, so I start sounding like my mother or my father, then I know I’m not in the room, somebody else is, and I can hear it. So, “Oh,” and that serves as the wake up call. That’s how you practice, right speech. You don’t practice right speech by trying to say something kindly, gently, relevantly, etc. You’ll hear whether it is that or not immediately if you listen to the sound of your own voice when you speak. And it’s the same thing with action, same thing with right thinking, right practice. You bring attention into those efforts and then you become aware immediately of whether they’re out of balance or not. This is a very, very important distinction in my mind.

Okay? Does that answer your question, Agnes? Okay. What I’m going to present can be regarded as descriptive, and you also may find it a useful way to proceed in given situations.

How training works

Ken: Now, one of the important points about this, which people often overlook is the aspect of training. Now, how many of you can remember what it was like to read?

Student: Remember what it was like to read?

Ken: Yeah.

Student: Small steps.

Ken: But can you actually remember it? No. Maybe a few people can remember it. Putting the letters together to form words, and sounding the words, and things like that. I mean, how many years since you’ve done that? Unless you’re reading a foreign language. Putting those letters together to form words and sounding them out is not how you read, it’s how you learn to read. Very important distinction. Reading starts to happen when you’ve accumulated enough skill and familiarity with that. So you can actually read, and now you can absorb the meaning.

But before then, you’re just doing this very elementary step, learning how to make the sounds. And we can take another step in looking up words in the dictionary or asking somebody, “How does this construction work?” And this is all in the process of learning to read. It’s not the activity of reading. And we could do the same thing with driving.

For instance, when the standard transmissions were more common, there was:

“Oh, okay, clutch, brake, accelerator.”

“Why can’t I use this foot on the brake?”

“No, that doesn’t work too well; it could cause real problems.”

Shifting the gears, before there was synchronized transmission, you had to do double clutching. There were a lot of basic skills to learn. Only when you had mastered that kind of body coordination with your feet and your hands, the gear shift and everything like that, could you actually start to drive. So what I’m doing here is distinguishing between two phases. One is learning how to do something and then is the activity itself. So what happens a lot in various disciplines is that those two phases are not clearly distinguished.

There’s a great deal of work done in artificial intelligence where they thought that for teaching a machine, the first steps were putting the letters together to make words. That would constitute reading. No, that was learning how to read. And they couldn’t understand why the machines couldn’t read. Well, they hadn’t actually taught them to read. They had taught them to learn how to read. And it also shows up in practice. In spiritual practice, many people make the error that learning the step-by-step process constitutes the practice. No, that constitutes learning how to practice or learning how to act.

So what I’m going to go through in rather probably excruciating detail is how you put the pieces together here. Now through that process, you will then have a basis to actually to act according to this philosophy or to exercise morality. But that’s something that’s going to come from familiarizing yourself with the very basic building blocks that I’m going to give you this morning. And you only begin to move into the actual practice of morality here when that stuff has become second nature to you. In the same way that you look at a word, you don’t think how to sound it, you just sound it, or you know what the word means as soon as you look at it, or you read a sentence and you know what it means, that’s reading. So have I been clear about this distinction? Okay.

The four steps of standing up

Ken: So, in the beginning you’re going to feel like you’re taking step by painful step, but you do this enough times, they just start to come naturally. So first four: you’ve come across them in other contexts, perhaps. Here I give them the name—or a friend of mine gave them the name—the four steps of standing up. And they are:

Show up.
Open to what is.
Serve the direction of the present
Receive the result.

Now by chance, I came across how these actually arise in Buddhist teaching, and it’s really, really deeply buried in a body of teaching known as The Five Teachings of Maitreya. And I’m not going to go through the details of digging that one up, but I happened to do a weekend program with Harada Roshi. He talked about these, and it was the first time I’d heard any Buddhist teacher actually talk about them. And I said, “Where did those come from?” I was curious. I was familiar with these from other sources. And he said, “It’s kind of basic Buddhist thinking, isn’t it?” I said, “Well, yes, but where does it come from?: And he went, [gestures] and then he came out with this piece from his own training, linking these with the five aspects of pristine awareness. And I went, “Oh my goodness,” because I was familiar with that particular description of the five aspects of pristine awareness from a summary of The Five Teachings of Maitreya that I translated and studied fairly closely. Gary

What does “true” mean?

Gary: I was just curious. When we did Power and Presence, I think you mentioned these, and the third step was, serve what is true.

Ken: Yeah, I’ve changed it.

Gary: I was wondering what is behind the change?

Ken: Because I don’t like this word true anymore. I don’t know what it means.

Gary: Isn’t that the logic you use to win the emotional argument that you want to be very—

Ken: Well? Yeah, that’s one of the problems with it. I’ll give you another example why an abstract notion of truth is problematic.

This king had invited the sage to his court and asked him to give him instruction, and the sage gave him a long exposition about truth, and the king was very, very impressed and really took it to heart and said, “Okay, yeah, truth is really important.” And he ordered guards to be stationed at all the gates to the city, and people were to be asked why they were coming to city. And anybody who didn’t tell the truth was going to be hanged.

Well, when the sage heard about this, he went, “Hmm, problem.” So he left the city, came in and was stopped by the guards, and the guard said, “Where are you going?”

He said, “I’m coming here to be hung.”

Well, the guards weren’t too bright, but they realized that they were a little bit out of their depths, so this got kicked up. The king eventually went through all the things and sage drawn up in front. The king says, “We need to talk.”

So this is why I don’t like that notion of true, because you get into all of a whole bunch of stuff. Let me go through these, and I think it may become a little clearer.

Show up

Ken: The first stage, first step, showing up, means you come into your experience, you come into the situation, whatever it is, you’ve got stuff coming at you from outside. Okay. This is what’s happening. In mind training instructions there’s one which it says, don’t put—changing the Tibetan idiom, which wouldn’t mean anything to any of you—don’t put the horse’s load on a pony. A horse can carry a lot more than a pony can. So when you put the horse’s load on a pony, you’re just trying to get rid of something you don’t want to deal with and putting it on somebody else’s shoulders. So, the first instruction in standing up is you show up. Now, it doesn’t matter whether stuff is coming up internally or externally, the only question is do you meet it?

In many social or work or family situations, people love ducking stuff; let it go to somebody else. And that often creates problems in those environments. And when we duck stuff that’s coming up internally, it creates problems for us. “Oh yeah, I have this little issue. I’m not going to deal with it.” Or worse: “I’m going to ignore it.” It always comes back to bite us. So, that’s the first step is you meet what is arising, you show up. And that has a lot to do with willingness, and I want to emphasize that is not always an easy step there. I can think of issues in myself which are very, very difficult for me to really sit down and experience. We all have stuff, and it takes willingness, and you can also say, a certain amount of courage.

After the first three-year retreat, several people asked me, “Well, was it a success?” Well, I developed my own criteria for success. There were seven of us in the first three-year retreat, and in the three-year retreat, at some point you find yourself looking in the mirror and seeing what’s actually there. And the question is, do you deal with it or do you turn away from the mirror? And in the first three-year retreat, I think it’s fair to say that everyone, people that I was in retreat with when that happened, they chose to deal with what they saw in the mirror. And I think that’s a pretty reasonable criterion of success.

Open to what you experience

Ken: The second step is open to what is, or to be a little more precise, open to what you experience. Again, I want to move away from that vocabulary of what is, because it sounds like you can really say definitely what is, but you can’t. Open to what you experience. Now, how do you do that? The five-step method I gave you yesterday is one way you do that. There are other ways. Those of you are at the Power and Presence retreat last fall. Yeah, it was a year ago. That’s right. I taught the primary practice. That’s another method. There are many, many other methods, but they all involve some form of opening. And so you open to everything you experience, and that’s very important. And this is something you can practice, not just in meditation or in formal meditation. You can practice it all the time. And a great place to practice it, by the way, and we’re coming up to this time of year, is shopping malls at Christmas. You don’t like that, Peter?

Peter: I hate shopping malls. I avoid them at Christmas especially.

Ken: Yes. Well, okay, and the reason it’s a good time to practice that is there’s so much stuff. And you know the best kind of store to practice this in?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: That’s good, but not as good as what I’m thinking. A glass store. Why? Because everything is reflected in everything over and over again, and you just stand at the store window until you can see absolutely every bit of glassware and every reflection in every reflection, in every reflection, it gets pretty rich. You do that for a while, you read the Huyan Sutra, it’ll make sense because basically that’s what the Huyan Sutra is describing. So, open to everything you experience.

Now, if we just use the primary practice as an example, that means you open to everything you experience through the senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. You open to everything you’re experiencing mentally or emotionally, all the emotional stuff, all the stories, everything like that. You open emotionally to experience itself, and you open to the experience of awareness. Now in a difficult situation where there’s an enemy or something you don’t like, that gets pretty interesting both externally and internally. Roger.

Roger:
I wanted to ask about the five-step. It seems to me like there’s a point at the, maybe the third step where the calm part that I keep getting kicked out, and it’s actually when things start to feel calm. There’s sort of a leap that takes place towards this optimistic, hopeful attitude, which seems to kick me right back into the whole thing. So I wondered if you could say something about that.

Ken: I think Alexander Pope said it:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man, never is, but always to be blessed.

An Essay on Man: Epistle 1, verse III, Alexander Pope

Or if you want the Alice Wonderland version of it, “Jam every day.” Oh, sorry. “Jam every other day. Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today.”[Laughter] You see why this is compulsory reading? Okay. So, this is very a good point to discuss briefly. So, there you are, and you’ve been opening to all the internal material and all of the reactions, and finally you’re finding, “Oh, I can just experience this and not be completely knocked all over the place,” right? And you go, “Oh, this is really good.” Now, the definition of mindfulness—just ignore all the academic definitions that are being developed—the traditional definition of mindfulness is: the mind joining with the object of attention. Okay. It is nothing about focusing or looking at, it’s the mind joining with the object of attention. These guys were really smart. And so when the mind joins with the object of attention, mind and body relax. That always happens.

So there you’re, you’ve been struggling, struggling. Now, you actually have joined with your experience. You relax. And now there are certain reactions to relaxing. One is, “Oh, I’m getting somewhere. This is good.” Which is enough to knock you back into the conceptual framework right there. But that’s probably not the one that’s knocking you back. The one that’s probably knocking you back is when mind and body relax, you experience things more deeply. So you go, “Oh, I can just experience this.” Uh! [shouts] You do. You do experience it more, and now you’re going through another cycle. That’s why I said you’re going to cycle back again and again. Your experience doesn’t indicate that you’re doing anything wrong whatsoever. In fact, it’s quite the contrary. You’re finding a place to relax, and now you’re opening to the next level of it, and that will just continue, three, four, or five centuries. Carolyn,

Carolyn: I have some idea of what it means to experience attention when I’m meditating, but I’m still not sure how, and maybe this, I’m asking for prescriptive, I apologize.

Ken: Don’t apologize, just won’t do any good. That’s all.

Carolyn: How to do this in the real world, when I am also going to be acting, in other words, when I can just stop and pull back and think about it, and as if I’m in a position of meditating, I can imagine having attention, but it’s difficult for me to imagine being in attention when I am active.

Train until you can act without having to think

Ken: Okay. This is exactly what I was talking about at the beginning. These steps that we go through, pull back, set attention, etc. This is analogous to A R T, arr tuh. It’s analogous to that. It’s not how we operate in life. Obviously can’t do it that way. This is where training comes in. And after I’ve spelled art a few times, then I know that when I look at that word, I just say, “art.” You train in coming into attention, coming into attention, coming into attention. Situation comes up. You just come into attention. You don’t think about it at all. That’s what it means to train. So this business about stepping back and going through this stuff, this is like, “Oh, I’m going to walk.” It’s equivalent to doing it like that. That’s not how we walk. We’ve learned to walk. It’s become something that we do without thinking. And that is the point of training, is so that that movement into attention becomes how you respond to situations. And so you just train and train and train, not just on the cushion, but you train in simple situations in your life. And so it just becomes how you do it. Gary.

I’m really glad you bring this up, because a lot of people, they think … you have all of these mindfulness exercises where you take this raisin and you spend half an hour eating a raisin, and that’s mindful living. That’s nonsense! You may learn something from that process, but you’ve got to learn so that fullness of experience that you experience through that slowing everything down becomes your natural way of relating to life.

Gary: Is there a connection between this first phase of learning and the story last night about the dust left behind?

Ken: And I agree it should be dust. I think dust reads much better than dirt. Yeah, maybe you can learn some basics from the dirt.

Gary: I think in both cases it begs the question, and how do you make the leap to the doing?

Ken: Well, it’s not a leap. And this again is an important point. It isn’t a leap. When you look at a person who is well-versed in something, you go, “How can they do that?” Well, there’s a very simple answer. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. And when you put the effort into practicing, this stuff becomes how you relate to the world.

There’s a martial arts teacher in LA, probably fairly old now, whose name is Animal McYoung. I never met him, but when I was training in martial arts, the person who was instructing me, he was in the laundromat. And he turned around and somebody was holding a knife to him, and he thought it was one of his students with a rubber knife, and he just went ch ch ku ku and that was it. He realized it wasn’t a rubber knife, this was actually someone, but that was the result of training. And we need to bring the same level of training. I mean, what we’re doing here, this isn’t child’s play. This is life. And we’re here learning how to navigate life. And when we say develop skill, it means develop skill. It’s not just learn how to do something like scraping a bow across the violin. It means being able to play. And so you have to develop that level of skill, and you’re going to have to put in that kind of practice to make this stuff so that it just happens naturally.

Putting more hours into practice

Ken: One of the examples I like to use is Cal Ripkin Jr. Now, he was ironman of baseball. Some 4,000 consecutive games or something like that, no injuries, etc., phenomenal shortstop, etc. Every day he fielded 1,000 balls. Wow. That’s why he was such a good shortstop. He practiced. And we think we can do this just by meditating half an hour a day, and people think, “Well, I need to put more hours into meditation.” No, you need to put more hours into practice. It means you have to practice it in every little moment. Just trying stuff out here, trying stuff out there until it becomes how you relate to the world. And that’s what constitutes the leap. It’s those hours and hours of practice gives you a versatility, but you won’t experience it as a leap. Other people look and say, “How can he do that?” And because of all of that practice, it just happens naturally.

Gary: So this is not a good place for a dilettante.

Ken: Oh yeah. This is not dilettante stuff.

Student: Have you read Outliers?

Ken: Well, I haven’t read it. I read a devastating review in The Guardian, so I decided not to because he makes several fundamental errors in that book. His other two books are better, and he’s got a fourth one out now, which I don’t know. But there are a lot of errors in logic and attribution, and things like that. So after reading this review, I thought, nah. I knew the point. He’s saying 10,000 hours, but that’s just a number for someone who’s talented. It may be a thousand for someone who’s less talented, maybe 50,000. So, one can take the idea that yes, you need to put in a certain number of hours to do it, but there’s more to it than that.

Student: [Unclear]

Mastery requires repetition, feedback, and correction

Ken: Outliers. This is about learning any skill. To really master it. The thing is—and this is why retreats such as this are really important—mere repetition isn’t enough. You have to be getting feedback and constantly correcting. That’s how you refine things. Now, the feedback may come from another person or, you may be able to pick up the feedback yourself, but just doing something over and over again as in one of the quotes we have up on the website, “Rowing harder doesn’t help if you’re rowing in the wrong direction.” And I know this from my own practice experience. I spent years and years and years trying to push, and hardened, really hardened a lot of stuff in me from that effort. And eventually things became so hard that I couldn’t move anymore. And then because I couldn’t move anymore, I had to start learning to rest. And then I realized that that whole effort of pushing against stuff that was immovable was absolutely the wrong way. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve been working with many of you, encouraging you to rest in attention, not to push in it. Because if you just do the pushing side, it’s problematic. Equally, if you just do the resting side, it’s problematic. You end up sleeping a lot. So this business of learning how to do something requires feedback and refinement, things like that. If that isn’t happening, then the 10,000 hours or the 10,000 times is pointless.

Student: He does talk about feedback and there’s a lot more to it.

Serving the direction of the present

Ken: Okay, so short story. I haven’t read the book. Okay, moving right along here. So now we come to the third step, which is serving the direction of the present. Now, the direction of the present is something that you will discern to some extent—maybe completely, maybe only a little—through opening to experience. If you want to read a very interesting—well, the subject matter is very interesting; the book is not very well written—Radical Hope. Can’t remember the author, but it’s about Crazy Foot, Crazy Crow, Plenty Coups, who was the Crow Indian chief, the last of the great Crow Indian chiefs, and how faced with the onslaught of white settlers and the white men in America, how he negotiated that situation and ended up preserving the core tribal lands of the Crow in a way which Sitting Bull did not do for the Sioux. And Sitting Bull regarded him as a coward and then a cooperator. But he did it very, very much through discerning the direction of the present, even though he had no idea where it was going to lead. And so this takes a great deal of courage, and it’s what the book describes, a courage, which comes from a certain clarity. Gary.

Gary: Wasn’t he also guided by a dream?

Ken: Yeah, Gary says, “Wasn’t he also guided by a dream?” He had a visionary experience where he was eight or nine years old, which the medicine men of his tribe couldn’t understand at all. They could get something from it, but later they realized what it had meant was that all the buffalo had been replaced by cattle. He had that dream, which showed him that this change was going to come, but the actual way that he proceeded was listening, listening, listening. Like the chickadees, you remember. So there’s the direction of the present. Now, what constitutes the direction of the present? When you open to everything, the totality of your experience, you’re going to sense where imbalances are.

That’s something that we sense, and it actually has to do with the way the five pristine awareness function. In here in particular, what’s usually translated the sameness pristine awareness, which I now like to translate as balanced pristine awareness. But we feel, and it’s not a deductive or cognitive process necessarily. It can be a visceral, an emotional intuitive. Those are words we use in English, but we sense, I’m just going to say we sense where the imbalance is and the direction of the present is to move from that sense of imbalance in the direction of balance.

The four stages of conflict: settle or pacify

Ken: Now, as soon as we start to do that, we may encounter opposition. It’s conceivable. And what comes into play here are the four stages of conflict. The four stages being old terminology, pacification, enrichment, magnetization, destruction. I’m trying to find simpler English translations. So, settle, enrich, compel, and end or sever.

Now, settling means the conflict is resolved utilizing the resources that are at hand. Sometimes this just means rearranging the furniture. Literally. I had a recent example in my business consulting. One of my clients is going to be retiring at the end of this year. She is a senior executive, and a dispute came up between this particular division and the corporate headquarters, which involved her area, and her CEO threw her under the bus, and she was devastated. Here she was the point of retiring, and she was just sacrificed. And she was not only devastated, she was also pretty angry. But she’s been working with me for several years, which in this situation was a very good thing. And she sent off a note which said, “This wasn’t necessary. It could have been done another way. We had it all managed.” And she refrained from sending anything else. And then just happened she and I had a meeting the next day, and so we talked about it, and came to the decision to just let everything sit for 24 hours. I got an email the next day from her, which included the email from her CEO, who apologized for what he’d done and said, “We need to correct this and come up to my office and we’ll work it out.” And that was a perfect example of settling. She had just said, “Okay, this could have been done another way.” She didn’t attack, she didn’t do anything. He sat with it, saw the problem, that his behavior came and the relationship was reconstituted and the whole conflict was settled. That’s an example of settling. And when you’re able to settle things that way, the relationship is actually strengthened. You’ve worked through a difficulty. Do you have a question?

Student: I was thinking about the question a moment ago about, how do you do this in action? I mean, that explains kind of a slow motion action of “I’m going to settle and sit.” And what came to mind was the story of Captain Sully and how he landed the plane on the river and serving the direction of the present. And he was almost uniquely qualified to do that. He was obsessed with safety. His whole career, had studied fighter pilots and found that many of these young men who were extremely valuable to the military, not just for their lives but for the cost of their training, died because they failed to eject on time because they were caught in the conflict between getting in trouble for losing a $60 million jet and dying. And they would hesitate the half second too long that they had between that conflict internally and then eject too late. And because he had this knowledge. So it’s the skill and the practice and the knowledge side of it when those birds hit his engines, and he realized he kind of had three choices. He could try and make it back, or two choices he could try and make it back to the airport and possibly fail with fully loaded gas tanks and blow up whole neighborhoods and kill everybody on board. Or he could succeed and make it to the airport, or he could try something else. And he immediately said, forget saving the airplane. Airplane’s gone. Don’t want to kill all the neighborhoods. I’m taking it down to the river. But because he was able to focus acutely on what was happening and sacrifice goals that could not be met immediately, he was able to serve the direction of the present and come out with the best of a bad situation.

Ken: And more on that. He was interviewed and asked, Weren’t you afraid?” He said, “I didn’t have any attention to be afraid. I knew what I had to do. And everything went into doing that.” That was it. Okay. Roger, last question then. I want to continue on because I want to try and wrap this up this morning.

Roger: Yeah, just quickly, my question is on this serving the direction of the present and how this relates to the mind killing. Because one of the things that I’ve noticed is when you said that you encounter opposition to moving from imbalance to balance, it strikes me that sort of a sneaky mind killing technique is this way of saying everything’s fine.

Ken: That’s marginalization.

Roger: That’s marginalization.

Ken: Yeah. That’s right. That’s a perfect example of marginalization.

“Yeah, what’s your problem? Everything’s fine.”

“But I have this …”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. Everything’s fine.”

I did this with Laura last night. She’s like, “Oh, the interview sequences …”

I said, “It’s going to be fine. It’ll all work out.”

She said, “No, it’s out of order and we have to put it back.”

I said, “No. [Laughter] I said, “No, it’s fine. It’ll all work out.” But in effect I was not really listening to you and your concerns.

She said, “Ken, I like things to work out properly.

Student: Did you settle it?

Laura: She said, “Oh, did I settle it?” Well, actually that’s a good question, id I settle it? I think that I settled in a way that is maybe problematic for me in the use of that term. That is, I think that I collapsed in the situation.

Ken: Yeah, that’s my impression too.

Laura: As opposed to pacifying, holding my ground in pacifying. I think I settled. So I think your intention in switching the word is good, but I was going to make that point that some of your adjustments in the terms …

Ken: Yeah, if you can come up with better terms. I’m in the market. I do pay for words. [Laughs] So, settling or pacification. Pacification has similar problems or other problems, so I haven’t found good words. And the term Tibetan, zhi bar (pron. zhiwar) is to make calm or to make peaceful.

Enrich

Ken: So second one is enrich. When you can’t resolve conflict at the level of just settling it and sorting it out with the resources that are at hand, then you enrich the conflict. That is you bring additional resources in. And this is where there’s great scope for creativity. How do you rearrange the pieces, reorder the priorities, bring in extra stuff and so forth. Now, what typically comes into this in situations in daily life, things like money, bribes, paying people off, that’s a great way to settle a lot of conflicts, to resolve them. Education, training, increasing the skill levels of people, facilitation, mediation or other methods. Two people are having difficulty sorting something out. Third party comes in, it may be an uncle, it may be a parent, it may be a trusted friend or something like that. And that presence of that third party allows things to work out. If you go straight to enrichment without trying settling first, you actually weaken the relationship.

Now, if a couple are having some difficulties and one says the other, we need to go to therapy. “Well, can’t we just talk this out.” There’s an element of distrust that can creep in. If however, you go to enrichment after you’ve tried unsuccessfully to resolve things at step one, which is settling and you’re able to resolve things, step two, then the relationship is strengthened usually, so that this is why it’s important to go through the stages.

Compel or magnetize

Ken: Third stage is compel, or magnetize in the old translation, this is where you use your personal power to compel a resolution. Extreme example, you hold a gun to somebody’s head, which is how conflict is resolved in the military. But that’s an extreme example. My personal preference in utilizing compelling—or the older vocabulary of magnetization—is to align myself with the situation and let the situation do the speaking. And then, so it’s not me compelling them, it’s the situation compelling them. And here you speak truthfully: “This is the situation. This is what’s going to happen,” etc. “If we go down further down this path, X, Y, Z are going to happen. These aren’t in your interest, they aren’t really in my interest,” etc. And people go, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I see what you mean.”

End, sever, or destroy

Ken: It doesn’t always work out that way. And then the last one is destruction or ending. This is a unilateral action, which ends that aspect of the relationship. Now, my own experience with this is that the ending in most situations is only temporary because things keep coming back. And in terms of working with internal patterns, it’s not an option because you don’t get to end your relationship with it. They’re there. You continue to have to deal with ’em. And as I said yesterday, ending as far as an internal pattern is concerned, that means something’s going to be killed, and it’s an expert in survival. So by threatening the pattern, you trigger it and it just goes into operation. It can be very sneaky. So this is why going back to the four stages, this opening to things, so you really open to the experience of the pattern. What I have found is things really only end when they die through their own processes, not when they’re killed.

Now, a big example of that: civil war in America, it’s still being fought. We’re seven generations. So we’re actually coming to the end of it. You have to remember that seven generation thing from the Bible. “The sins of the fathers will be visited onto the children nigh unto the seven generations.” It’s how patterns continue. When I read Team of Rivals, which is a biography of Lincoln, I found it very interesting. Well, it was very clear from that—and there are other accounts of it—Lincoln decided to enter the Civil War because he did not want the experiment, which was America, to fail. And the experiment was, it was a new concept at that time that a people could govern themselves. They didn’t need a king to govern them, and he did not want that experiment to fail. And he felt that the disintegration of the union constituted a failure. That was why he fought the Civil War. So I got two things out of that book. The cost of fighting for an ideal, which is exactly what Lincoln was doing. It also raised the question, “What if he hadn’t? What would’ve happened then?” Well, economically the south would’ve crumbled and they would’ve had to abandon slavery because it was not an economically viable system. It had become increasingly problematic, and it would’ve died a natural death, and we wouldn’t still be fighting this war 140 years later. That’s theory, but it’s an interesting speculation.

Student: Which book was this?

Ken: Team of Rivals. It’s very, very interesting, and I think it’s a very good biography. There are two or three others that came out recently. Lincoln was a very, very interesting person. And in the middle of the Civil War, his generals and his cabinet were saying, “It’s God’s will that we do this.” And Lincoln looks at them and says, “When we started this affair three years ago, we thought it was God’s will and it would be over in six months. Here we are, three and a half years later, hundreds of thousands of people dead. So, I don’t think we should presume to know what God’s will is.”

Receive the result

Ken: So, as you go through these stages of conflict, things are going to happen. And the fourth stage in these, how you meet your experience is receive the result. Whatever it is, that’s the situation. And now you’ve gone back to the first step again, that’s the new situation. You meet that and you go through the four steps again. So this is an iterative process. Show up, open to what is, serve the direction of the present. As soon as you take any action, you have a new situation, you receive that result, and now show up, open to what is, and it’s going to be different now , because something’s happened. So, the direction of the present is going to be different.

And this is why we have to be very careful about this notion of balance. I find it very powerful notion, but a lot of people misunderstand it and get into trouble. People think, “Okay, the point here is to maintain balance.” Well, maintaining balance is a static posture, and it actually lasts for only a fraction of a second. And if you want to explore that, you just stand up on one foot, hold out your arms and see how long you are actually still for. And unless you are superbly trained and you’ve got extraordinary strength in your muscles, you’re going to be wobbling all over the place, but you’re not going to fall unless you’ve got something wrong with one of your legs. So you are in balance, but it’s not static. There’s constant adjustment. This is where the richness and liveliness of life comes from, is those constant adjustments.

The direction of the present shifts moment to moment

Ken: So when we’re talking about balance, it’s not about maintaining a static point of balance. It’s about constantly adjusting. So, we’re moving from imbalance to balance, but there’s always a readjustment, readjustment, and that’s what gives life its dynamism and interest, frankly. So, don’t think of balance as a static. Think of it as a working around a hypothetical balance point. And that balance point actually shifts moment to moment. So the direction of the present shifts moment to moment. And what happens is that people get stuck in a certain way of experiencing or seeing or doing things. And because they are habituated to do that, are unable to perceive that the situation has changed, and things move out of balance, etc. And they can’t see that their efforts are hopeless. If you read the accounts of how GM is actually managed, you see this in spades. It’s horrific. Yes. Yeah, I’m late and I haven’t done everything.

Student: Well, I just wanted to comment. What I find in today’s world and society is that we’re having to make rapid, constant adjustment to have that movement from imbalance to balance. And I feel like with all the bombarding of information, electronics, everything that we’re pushed to imbalance more frequently than not. It’s more difficult. Could you comment on that?

Ken: Well, I think it’s true. We have far more information available to us than we actually need in order to function. And we have been told that more is better. It’s kind of the mantra of American society, and these things are just not true. So, figure out what information do you need in order to function. So, simplify things. Nobody needs to watch television news. I mean, television news is becoming a bit of an oxymoron. Like military intelligence, right? Take stock of what you actually need to live, and what your own priorities are. You’re quite right that this constant bombardment and all of these different marketing messages and messages from the culture and things like that, what they require of us is that we become clearer in ourselves.

I faced this quite vividly when I came out of retreat, because when I was in retreat, I had two sets of clothes and they were both the same color. Maroon. I don’t like maroon anymore. I had two sets of robes. That was it. And shopping was extremely limited. “Get me some shampoo,” and the cook would go to the store and buy our supplies, and that was it. If I happen to know a certain brand, I might be able to [unclear]. So after the retreat, there I am, I come out and I walk into a supermarket and there are 50 brands of shampoo. So I start reading one. How do I decide which shampoo is the right one for me? I hadn’t done this for seven years, remember? You know what I did first half dozen times I went shopping. I just went, “Goodbye,” and walked out. I didn’t buy anything. I had no basis on which to make this, and it was just an impossible task for me. I was stuck with this idea, I had to make the right choice. Eventually, I figured it out. I just went, took one, and amazingly enough it worked.

Student: Think this is why I’ve come to hate shopping.

Ken: Exactly.

Student: And I will walk out. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed.

Ken: See. And that’s exactly right. So, what is required of us to meet that situation is to be very clear in ourselves about what we want, and then we just go and say, “Oh, no, that one,” and it doesn’t really matter. Maybe I like the color of the bottle, maybe I like the design on it. Maybe I like the name, fragrance, whatever. But if you’re like me and you get caught up, “I have to make the best decision in every situation,” then good luck. You have a question?

Applying the four stages of conflict: the example of overeating

Student: Could you please give an example of using the four stages of conflict with the reactive process?

Ken:
Oh yeah. An internal reactive process. Yeah. The four stages of conflict with an internal reactive process. Okay. I eat more than I should. Okay. So I’m feeling hungry. Well, the first thing is to show up and say … Let’s be clear: I feel like eating something, not, I feel hungry. I feel like eating something. So the first thing is to show up. That’s what’s happening. I feel like eating something. Now, I’ll give you an example. There’s a friend of mine in Vancouver. Her stepdaughter had an eating disorder and drove her nuts because she would leave the refrigerator door open. And I said to her, “She probably doesn’t realize that she’s even opened it.”

And she said, “Well, that’s ridiculous.”

I said, “No, somebody with an eating disorder, when they’re satisfying it, they’ll be completely unconscious. So, she goes and eats something and leaves the refrigerator door open. She’s not even aware that she’s opened the fridge, and its only after something has shifted inside after eating that, she comes back into consciousness.”

And she checked it out with her and found out that was actually the case. So the first thing is to show up.

“Yes. I feel like eating something .” Open to what is.

“What time of day is it? Oh, it’s 9:30. I had breakfast at 8:30. Do I actually need to eat something?”

You’re getting the picture? And so you open to what is.

Okay, what’s the direction of the present? “Well, actually I feel fine right now. I mean, I feel like eating something, but do I really need to eat something? No. Am I overweight or not?” Things like that. Y

ou open to what is, discern, the direction, the present, and if you choose to eat something, then you receive that result. And if you choose not to eat something, then you receive that one.

Student: So then your reactive process really kicks in.

Ken: Yeah, your reactive process. Oh, that’s right. Sorry.

Student: Are you able to go to the four stages of conflict.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. So there we are. Okay. So with this one, it’s going to be mainly pacification or settling. And settling comes down to here, “Can I experience this? Yes.” Then experience it. That’s the next step.

Student: And if you can’t experience it, you go on to enrichment with potato chips.

Ken: Maybe, but you could bring something else into the mix, because nine times out of ten, the worst time I have this is when I’m writing, because I feel like eating something. You know why, I don’t want to sit and stare at that bloody computer screen. So a different form of enrichment would be to involve yourself in something. So your attention is engaged, and now it’s no longer going into feeling like I’d like to eat something. It’s a different form of enrichment. Now, magnetization is: “If you have another potato chip, you’re going to have a heart attack.” You get the picture. I’m reducing this to a somewhat absurd level, but I hope it illustrates. Yes, Lisa.

Where does compassion come in?

Lisa: I think you hint at it when you say to hold these things tenderly, but what role do you think compassion plays in this process? And it can take effort. And I found that holding it with compassion myself, the whole of it really helps me hang in there. It’s not been discussed very much.

Ken: Compassion comes up this afternoon, but when we use the word tenderly, it’s implicit because compassion is the ability to be present with the pain of another. So it requires two things. It requires the ability to sense or perceive that pain, and it requires the ability of you to be able to be present with it. Two different things. Now, when we’re talking about internal patterns—and this is why regarding them as an enemy isn’t helpful—every one of those patterns embodies, pain. It developed in order to avoid pain. And it involves a distortion or a configuration, which is painful. And so, part of holding it tenderly is opening to the pain of the pattern, or the pain in the pattern. Either way you want to put it, and you can’t do that if you take this really oppositional, harsh posture to it.

And again, from my own experience in the three-year retreat, I pushed, as I said earlier, I pushed and I pushed and I pushed. My body was very, having a very hard time with this, and eventually he just said to me, “Ken, you can go in and get enlightened if you wish. I’m not coming.”

I realized I had a problem at that point. Now that’s when I realized I had a problem. But it was many, many years later before I really started to be present with the pain in my body. And that was a very big step, “Oh, you’re in pain. And rather than cursing and being harsh to my body saying, “You’re too weak, you got to be stronger,” etc. which is where a lot of us go. I said, “Okay, you’re in pain.” And that made a huge difference in my whole approach to practice, learning how to be present with the pain in my system. You follow?

Student: And was that the development of compassion for you?

Ken: Well, I’d formed a pretty solid relationship with compassion. I suppose you can say it’s a form of compassion, just because of the way I was trained in compassion, I hesitate to use it in that sense.

Lisa: When I talk about, for me, in my experience, the opening of my heart to what is, it’s profound in helping me stay with it, as a whole, and I don’t know how to say it other than that. If my heart is closed, I really, I don’t know. It doesn’t move.

Ken: I think you’re quite right. And it’s about opening the heart, and I think I have a little hangup. It’s more my hangup than anything else, of how I use words, that’s all. But I think it’s fair. I find the phrase, “Have compassion for oneself, very irritating.”

Lisa: I think it’s important to find the right … I don’t know, compassion works for me, but it’s an essential element for me to hang in here with the …

Ken: The ability to open and open emotionally to pain that you’re experiencing in yourself, I think it is very important. And not to take that harsh, dismissive attitude. I don’t think that’s very helpful at all because it always involves some kind of suppression. I think this is very important, and I’ll be speaking more about compassion this afternoon.

Now we’re way over time, and I’m only two thirds of my way through. Let me study. Oh, we aren’t going to do that at all. Okay. Forget that. Forget that. Oh, that’s not important. Can you hold your question till this afternoon? Yeah. Okay. I’m going to conclude with, well, that’s more appropriate for this afternoon. So I’ll conclude with this one:

Lin Hu of Kia took to flight pursued by enemies. He threw away the precious jade symbol of his rank and took his infant child on his back. Why did he take the child and leave the jade, which was worth a small fortune, whereas the child if sold would only bring him a paltry sum? Lin Hu said: ‘My bond with the jade symbol and with my office was the bond of self-interest. My bond with the child was the bond of Tao.’

Where self-interest is the bond. The friendship is dissolved when calamity comes. Where Tao is the bond. friendship is made perfect by calamity. The friendship of wise men is tasteless as water. The friendship of fools is sweet as wine, but the tastelessness of the wise brings true affection, and the savor of fools’ company ends in hatred.

The Way of Chuan Tzu, The Flight of Lin Hui, Thomas Merton, p. 116