Introduction: ability, principle and technique

Ken: In 1989, I’d been in Los Angeles for a few years and a friend of mine had given me a book called The Unfettered Mind, which is a translation of three short texts. I think actually all three are letters from a Rinzai Zen master named Takuan to two or three master swordsmen samurai in Japan. They were the heads of particular schools of swordsmanship. And like much Japanese writing, because of the way things are expressed in that culture, the meaning is not particularly obvious. But it was very clear when I read the book that it was not only about being totally awake in your life—which is kind of a good thing when you’re in the middle of a sword fight—but it was expressing a number of subtleties. It’s a very impressive book.

And the translation’s not at all bad. And I was having dinner with a friend in 1989 because it became clear to me that I needed to start my own nonprofit organization, some kind of vehicle. And I said over dinner, I said, “What I need is a name like ‘unfettered mind.'” And they said I can’t, it’s already taken, because it’s the name of this book. And the person I was having dinner with said, “Well, how do you know you can’t use it?” So I called up a friend of mine who’s a paralegal and said, “Can you use the name of a book for your organization?” He said, “Well, as long as nobody else has, yes.” And nobody else had. So it’s from this book that I took the name for this organization, which has worked very well as the name. When I had an office in one building, people would poke their heads in and say, “Do you sell those?” And so it’s worked very well as the name, but I’ve never actually taught the material in this book.

So that’s what we’re going to work with this weekend or these few days. Now, this is going to be kind of interesting to do this with you. The material is actually at a very high level, and by that I mean that to really practice and live this way requires two things. No, let’s say three things. It requires a certain ability, it requires a deep understanding of principle, and it requires technique. And you might take note of those three things: ability, principles, and technique or techniques.

To give you an example of what I mean, it’s often easier to explain this in terms of physical activity. So let’s just take something all of you’ll be very familiar with, pole vaulting. In order to be a good pole vaulter, the ability is a certain muscular strength, particularly in the upper body. You need that ability because as you’re being accelerated, you’re going to be pulling yourself up and throwing yourself over the bar. So if you don’t have a certain physical ability in the muscles in the upper body, you’re just not going to be able to do that. And it also requires an ability in coordination.

So those are the examples of abilities. And in terms of principles, well, you have to understand how the whole thing works. And I don’t know whether you’ve ever watched pole vaulting, but they use these fiberglass poles which bend, and so you’re actually just putting yourself on one end of a slingshot and being shot over this thing. So you have to understand the principles by which you can be successful in this: the way the body needs to be held, the way you need to position the body at different points in the vault, and you have to have technique. You have to know how to run. You have to know how to develop the speed you’re going to need. You have to know how to plant the pole without losing momentum. You have to know how to align the body and to turn it at various points. You have to know how to orient yourself in space. These are techniques that you can train in.

And we have the same kind of thing when it comes to living awake, living in attention and living awake. The primary ability that we need to cultivate is the ability in attention, which is how I view what Buddhist practice is actually about. It’s various techniques or various methods rather—not to confuse the terminology too much here—various methods to develop and extend attention, develop depth and strength in attention and to extend attention into all areas of our lives. And it’s relatively easy to develop attention just sitting.

But when it comes to developing really deep attention, the primary way that really deep attention is developed is actually through resting. And the more deeply you rest, the more of your internal material you run into. And learning how to navigate, that’s quite important. And when it comes to extending attention into all areas of your life, then a different quality is needed. And that is a kind of willingness not to protect anything in your life from the exercise of your practice.

So you need two different kinds of courage, you might say. One, the courage to rest very deeply and actually meet all of that internal material, and the courage to live without protecting anything, which a lot of people find quite difficult. This is why such people as Milarepa said, well it’s easy to get a glimpse of what is true. It’s really difficult, it’s a lifetime task, to live out of what is true. So ability is primarily about cultivating attention.

And then there are principles. Well, one principle is that, how we experience things ordinarily is not how things are. And acting on that principle and applying that principle in all areas of life requires us to instill that very, very deeply. One of the standard instructions in this area is regard everything as a dream for instance. And that’s a relatively high-level instruction. High level in this sense, meaning that it doesn’t give you much in the way of specifics, but it covers vast areas of practice and of life. And so we need to train those principles and train them very, very deeply. And as we go through this, I’m going to be giving you a number of principles which you can start instilling into yourself. And basically instilling those principles gives you a deep understanding of how to work with things.

And then we have techniques. These are specific methods, things we need to become skilled at. One technique that I like, I find very useful, is listening to the sound of my own voice when I speak. It doesn’t always stop me from saying something stupid. But it certainly alerts me to when I’m saying something stupid much more quickly than anything else I’ve noticed, because I actually hear myself saying something stupid or offensive or out of balance with the situation. That’s a technique. The qigong we’re going to be doing is a technique.

There are various ways of sitting. Those are techniques. There are ways of placing attention. Those are techniques. And tomorrow in the main teaching period, I’m just going to give you a whole bunch of techniques, and I don’t expect you to do all of them. What I want you to do is to explore them and find a particular technique that works for you and then really work on it during the time we’re here.

A saying from the Chinese is: “If you want to learn to do something, do it 10,000 times.” And that’s actually just a really nice way to approach things: just do it 10,000 times. And people go off and meditate and they say, “I can’t put my attention on the breath, it always falls off.” Well, they haven’t done it 10,000 times. After they’ve done it 10,000 times, they’ll actually know something about how to do that, and then it’s much easier to give them instruction. Usually for that one, I say, “Don’t bother coming back to me on that one until you’ve done it at least a million times.” Attention always falls off the breath. So that’s what we’re going to work with.

And the notion of unfettered mind is really simple. It’s a mind that is free. And the question is: free to do what? Well, very simply, free to respond. I think one way of defining what Buddhist practice is, is cultivating attention to the point that one can experience whatever arises. Now, at this time we can’t do that. Anytime you find yourself just reacting to somebody, getting angry or needing to possess them or being jealous, it’s because something has arisen in your experience which you can’t experience. It can be very, very fast, but that’s what causes us to blurt something out or to do things that we regret and so forth and so forth. So the idea is to cultivate a level of attention so that we can actually experience whatever arises, and then we don’t need to fall into reaction. We can just experience it. And this means that we are free to respond to what the situation actually requires, not what the situation is provoking in us. And so the result of practice is to become an ongoing response to the pain and suffering of the world. We don’t become Superman, we don’t become anybody special.

Or if we go to the three marks of existence, we don’t get to live forever, even though a lot of people would like to think you can get that from practice. We never get our emotional needs met and we don’t get to be anybody. So why’d you sign up? But what we do become is an ongoing response to the pain and suffering of the world. Well, that’s not bad. So that’s what we’re going to focus on in this retreat then, is exploring what that’s actually like, what it’s like to have a mind, or be so clear, or how to cultivate the clarity and stillness in a certain sense—I want to be careful about using that word—so that we can know how things are. And the appropriate response just arises; it’s not that we are thinking it out or making it happen, and so forth. And an important part of that is how we are in our bodies. So I’m going to ask Jeff to say a few words about what he’ll be doing in the movement sessions.

The movement sessions

Jeff: We’re not going to dance about. Okay? Basically, what I’ve noticed is that any kind of reactivity that we have going on, we experience on a number of levels, but one place that it definitely occurs is in our movement, and how we’re organized for movement. So, for instance, right now I’m trying to explain something to you, and that’s a simple intention, but at the same time, I have tension in my chest, a little tension in my throat, tension in my stomach, intentions that are going on simultaneously that have nothing to do with my actual intention right now in the present moment. What we’re going to do in these movement sessions is look at how to actually be present in your present intention of movement. We’re going to look at it in two different ways.

The first part we’ll use tools that I’ve generated and learned from others over a long history of being a choreographer and professional dancer and having a rather unique training in that. It was not about self-expression, but it was about using movement and awareness to try to discover what is and then try to express what is.

So for instance, tomorrow I’m probably going to ask you to come up with just some simple movements that you do in your life, like put on a coat or pick up a cup and carry it to another place. Just simple intentions that you do frequently. And then I’m going to ask you to form another intention in your body that you might have in your own self or seen in other people, like carrying your head forward or having your chest retracted, or having your chest thrust forward. And then adding that and then trying the same intentions so you can see a little more clearly what actually goes on when you bring attention to those underlying patterns that are always there and how they have nothing to do with your present time intention and how it affects your movement.

And you can bring that right back into practice, into sitting practice. You sit down with a simple intention to rest your attention on your breath and all sorts of stuff goes on. Same thing shows up in movement. Another aspect of that first part of the class will be trying to help you expand your awareness of what actually goes on while you’re moving. What goes on in your relationship to space, what goes on in your relationship to time, how you change your pressure, your actual sense of whether the space that you’re moving through is dense or whether it’s open and the difference that you experience if you’re moving into dense space or open space. And we can create dense space or we can create open space, and it really changes your experience.

Second part of the period will be drawing more directly on my Feldenkrais training using Awareness Through Movement lessons. They’re similar in that you create a simple intention of movement. We add a constraint. So, “Lie in this position while you try to do that movement,” and you bring your attention to what gets in your way. And the way you can become aware of what gets in your way is by a different way of approaching resting, by doing it really gently. The harder you push, the more difficult it is to actually experience what’s going on. So these Awareness Through Movement lessons are really slow, subtle, and extremely difficult because of that. Because it drives you nuts frequently to lie there and do really small movements and try to be aware of them. And that driving you nuts is part of the lesson. Become aware of what gets in your way. Okay?

The first two or three years that I did that particular training, I was incensed every time I did one of those. I just thought the teacher was a fool. They’d just tell me what to do and I would do it for them. I was a very well-trained dancer, and they would never tell me I had to figure it out for myself. And that’s what the lessons are about. Figure it out for yourself. I don’t usually entertain questions from people unless they’re really dire and they’re going to hurt themselves. It’s for you to sit there and keep coming back to the intentions, to the best of your ability, to find your way through, to discover a new way to do it.

So if you’re to look at that through what Ken just mentioned, the ability, principle and technique. The ability is in your ability to form a simple intention and bring your attention back to it over and over again. The principle is that your whole self is involved in every single movement you do. It either helps or it gets in the way, but it’s always there. All of you, every single movement you do, it’s there. And so the principle is to bring your attention to what is actually going on. Find ways to do that. And the technique is to approach it through resting, through being gentle, easy, so you can actually begin to discern differences. Any questions?

So Ken has asked me to try to say tonight what I might normally say during a lesson so that I’m keeping talking to a minimum. That may or may not be successful. The biggest thing that I want you to try to do in these lessons is to approach them really gently, slowly. And whenever you run into resistance, you back away. You don’t try to push through. It’s not like you’re trying to accomplish something. You’re trying to discover a different way to go about your intention. So it’s: gentle, easy, back off, be curious, try a different way.

Qigong

Ken: Okay, thanks very much. So that’s the framework for what we’re going to be doing over the next four and a half days. As I say, this is a bit of an experiment. Gary says he’s here out of curiosity. Well, I’m always trying something new. I enjoy doing that. You guys get to be the guinea pigs once more. So if everybody’s clear about that, I think we’ll stop here for the evening and get a good night’s sleep. I’ll meet with everybody and Chuck, who’s going to be leading the qigong to go over the qigong movements. So, if you’re familiar with them, you’re welcome to stay and refine your understanding of them. If you’re not familiar with them, I would ask you to stay so that you can become familiar with them. It’ll take us about 20 minutes to half an hour. It’s not too long. And now there isn’t anybody here who absolutely doesn’t know how to meditate, right? Everybody puts up their hand. Yes, but … [laughs] so tomorrow morning when we meet, during the first two sitting periods, just let your attention rest in whatever way is most familiar to you. And then at the first teaching period I’ll start giving you directions as to things you might explore. Okay? So have a good night’s sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.