Building capacity

Ken: I talked earlier about willingness, know-how, and capacity. Today is going to going to be primarily about different ways of building capacity. The traditional and probably most widely practiced method for building capacity is known as shamatha, which means, if you translate it literally, resting in peace, though it doesn’t have the connotations that that phrase has for us in Western society. There are a lot of misconceptions about shamatha practice, and I’m not going to try to correct them all this morning. That would be a little ambitious.

Suffice to say that the resting mind is something we can cultivate and that quality of resting has two characteristics. One is stability and the other is clarity. Both are important and one doesn’t have a meditation practice if either are absent. One of the better analogies is riding a bicycle. The reason this is a good analogy is that when you ride a bicycle, the bicycle is actually never perfectly still. It’s always moving from side to side, even when you’re going at relatively high speed, so that the wheels are actually operating as gyroscopes and so there’s a self-correcting mechanism in the bicycle itself. There’s still a little movement from side to side.

Forget perfect meditation and get used to correcting imbalance

Ken: So, what we can take from this is, forget about having the perfect meditation. That’s a really useful thing to get rid of upfront. Forget about having perfect stability or perfect clarity or perfect meditation and just get used to balancing. So I want to qualify that a little bit. When we think of balancing, we think of weighing something and getting an exact amount of some flour or something like that.

When my parents emigrated from England, all my mother’s recipes were in weights, not volumes. So everything had to be weighed. You had the kitchen scale and you’d pour flour in and you’d have the weights up there. It said one and 3/4 pounds of flour, you had one and 3/4 pound weights, and you poured the flour in until it exactly balanced.

This is not the way to practice meditation, trying to find the exact balance, though a lot of people try to do that. Instead, I would encourage you, in this aspect of practice, to become adept at detecting and correcting imbalance.

I think we’ll do a little demo here. Everybody stand up. This is the Karate Kid 1 version of shamatha practice. Why do I say that? Because you’re going to stand like this. [Laughter] Remember that? So, stand like this. If you have any difficulty don’t do this; you can watch and you’ll learn just as much from that. Now, is anybody falling over? Well, actually you haven’t fallen over yet, Mary, you’re doing fine.

Mary: Yeah, but I’m close.

Ken: Yeah, well, I think we’re all close. Now, how many of you are in balance? How many of you are busy correcting balance? Okay? And what is the result of correcting balance?

Student: We’re still upright.

Ken: Yes, you’re still upright. Okay, thank you. This is how you practice meditation. [Laughter] Okay, so actually we can go further with this exercise. Maybe we’ll do that tomorrow.

Busyness

Ken: So, there are two things that happen in practice which erode the quality of attention. One is, you get caught up in thinking; and the other is, you fall asleep. These are two instances of the general principles of busyness and dullness. Now there are many degrees of busyness and there are many degrees of dullness. And as your practice becomes more refined, you’ll be able to be become aware of and be able to correct more and more subtle expressions of busyness and dullness.

The general principle is very simple. When your mind is moving in the direction of busyness—which can be anything from very subtle thinking to daydreaming and everything in between—it indicates that there’s tension in your system. That tension is usually some form of contraction in which you are avoiding experiencing something. You’re starting to struggle. One addresses this imbalance by relaxing. Of course, as soon as you relax, you’re going to become aware of what you are trying to avoid, but that’s too bad.

Dullness

Ken: The dullness, on the other hand, is a way of also avoiding something—in which the mind just gets thick—and the quality of knowing, at first it’s like a mist moving in and then it’s like a fog and then it’s lights out, different degrees of dullness. Energy is draining out of the clarity aspect actually. And the way that you address this imbalance is that you energize; you put more energy into your practice.

So your meditation practice consists of noting what is happening—or as we were talking about yesterday, listening, though this is not so much listening but sensing—and then taking the appropriate step to address the imbalance. It may be relaxing; it may be energizing. Energizing can be done by sitting straighter. If you’re resting with the breath, just experiencing the breath more fully is one way of energizing. If you’re working with direct awareness, then you open and experience everything around you; that energizes. There are various other ways too. Relaxing may involve relaxing the posture a little bit. It may mean lowering the gaze of the eyes a little bit. It can mean not trying to control your mind as much, just letting it do its crazy thing and just relax.

Now, what often happens—if you go back to the analogy of bike riding—is you overcompensate. And so you try something too hard and of course then you just crash down on the other side. So practice is usually best done with small adjustments until you feel your way to that balance of stability and clarity. And how your body is, is going to be a very good indication. Body will give you a lot of information, so it’s good to listen deeply to the body.

Now a second thing that happens—and this is particularly true of people in the beginning stages of practice though it’s an aspect of practice that comes up again and again—is that people try to hold too fine a balance. Go back to this exercise. If you try to stay absolutely still, you will fall. In the same way, that if you try to hold your mind absolutely in the perfect balance of clarity and stability, you won’t stay there very long. If you find some balance, and the balance may look like this, just let the balance run. Because all the time you’re doing this, you’re actually refining it and you’ll find that as you just let that process run, you’ll become more and more attuned and be able to make those adjustments and so come to rest in clarity and stability more and more precisely. But when your ability to practice only allows you to do this, and if you try to hold here, you’ll have a great deal of trouble.

Absolute confidence in our fundamental nature

Ken: So, recognizing when your practice is good enough and letting it just be there is important. This is a version of equanimity or you can also say it’s a version of contentment. This plays straight back to a theme we were discussing yesterday, which is the theme of trust. Suzuki Roshi once said, “Our practice is absolute confidence in our fundamental nature.” This is a very profound instruction. We tighten up in our practice usually because we aren’t trusting our ability to work or be able to be present with what’s arising, which means we are not confident in our fundamental nature. As Trungpa Rinpoche once said, “The basic view in Buddhism is that everything is workable.”

Whenever you find yourself tightening up in your practice, or in your life for that matter, it’s usually a reflection of the belief that something is not workable. So, you’re trying to keep it away. Now, practicing shamatha, practicing this resting kind of meditation, is to meditation practice what practicing scales is to a musician. You run up and down these scales endlessly. You can throw intervals to whatever instrument. You practice scales and you become familiar with every note on your instrument, how to make every note, and how to move into that note out of that note. And what you’re doing when you’re practicing scales is developing capacity.

And that’s what you’re doing when you’re practicing this kind of meditation. You’re developing your capacity to rest in clarity and stability. Now, in the beginning it feels pretty boring, just as practicing scales feels pretty boring. That’s because we’re looking for some form of entertainment. In another analogy, this is like working out in the gym. You’re just lifting weights, you’re building capacity.

What I’ve found over and over again in my own practice, but also in my work with others, is that we’ll come across some facet of Buddhism or the dharma and we can sense there’s something there, but we don’t quite get it. Now, I don’t know about you, but my tendency then is to try to figure it out intellectually. Does anybody else do this?

I am actually very good at that, which is both a curse and a blessing. But I found in every single instance, when I figured it out, it doesn’t help at all. The only thing it’s useful for is explaining it to others. And people say, “Oh, that’s a really good explanation. Now I understand it.” And I know I’ve cursed them. Now I’ve caused them a big problem. [Laughter] Now they understand it; they don’t know it. Understanding something intellectually can help us know something, but relatively rarely.

The other side of the coin is that when you build sufficient capacity, then it’s very easy just to know. Because knowing, particularly the kind of knowing that we are seeking to cultivate in this practice, depends on having a certain level of energy in attention. And if we let go of our efforts to try to understand the perfection of wisdom or mahamudra or you name it, and just quietly work at resting very, very deeply in the body and in what arises in the totality of experience, then we find that we come to know a lot. And that knowing arises quite naturally because it is the nature of the mind to know.

Devotion

Ken: So, that’s one method of developing capacity; that’s one that is most commonly taught. The second method is to use various practices to transform energy. This afternoon we’re going to do a practice outside, which is about transforming the energy of sensory perception into attention. And it’s a fun practice. It’s also a very useful one. In every tradition that I know of, there are practices which are used to transform the energy of emotions or emotional energy into attention.

Specific practices vary from tradition to tradition. In the Theravadan tradition, one of the practices is the practice of loving-kindness, of metta. in the Mahayana tradition, the principle practice for this is compassion. In the Vajarayana, and in a number of other spiritual traditions such as Pure Land, Christianity, and I would say Islam as well, the principal practice is devotion. So I want to talk a little bit about that today. Those of you who attended the mind-training retreat last year know about how to work with compassion because taking and sending is a method of transforming emotional energy through compassion into attention. And many of you have studied and practiced loving-kindness, metta practice, and you’re familiar with that.

The practice of devotion may or may not be so familiar and there are many misconceptions. So I want to talk a little bit about that. Now, every one of these practices, whether it’s loving-kindness, whether it’s compassion or devotion, there are certain pros and certain cons associated with each. The big pro associated with devotion is that it reaches very, very deep into the system. So you can tap very deep emotional energy. And part of the reason for that is that it taps into a lot of early ways that we had of relating to the world. In a certain sense, as a child one is devoted naturally to one’s parents. And that’s also the big con, or the big danger, in that devotion practice, if not approached with a sufficient understanding and maturity, it can simply reinforce parental or family projections. They just get transferred to the teacher. This can be problematic.

In Tibetan society, they didn’t regard this as a problem because the religious systems are set up as alternate families. So you have phrases such as Only Father Marpa and Only Mother Labkyi Drönma. These are two of the great teachers, and they’re referred to. Then there’s the Indian guru who is one of Labkyi Drönma’s teachers, whose name is Padampa Sangye. Padampa means Holy Father. And so you had those kinds of epithets. The guru in the Tibetan tradition was very, very much regarded as a parent. You moved from your secular family into your religious family.

My experience has been that those kinds of transference of family projections—which may have worked within the Tibetan cultural context—cause fairly significant problems when we try to approach that way in Western practice. There’s been a lot of messes in a lot of centers coming from that. So how do we practice devotion here?

I want to distinguish between devotion and worship. And this may be a somewhat arbitrary parsing of language, but I think it is helpful. Worship, I’m using to indicate a sense of honoring something that you see as outside yourself. And there’s some kind of transactional bargain in that. But to understand devotion in the way that I’m trying to convey this, we have to look a little bit at, what is a teacher in Buddhism, particularly in this way of approach.

Well, there isn’t any entity teacher, which I think is wonderfully ironic because we’re endlessly talking about Buddhist teachers and good teachers and qualified teachers, etc. But there isn’t any entity teacher. When we talk about having a teacher or working with a teacher, we’re talking about a relationship in which certain qualities manifest and certain things are taking place. And so from this perspective, when you’re practicing devotion—even though you may use this kind of language, and I’ll be referring to a prayer in a minute—it’s not like you’re praying or fostering devotion to or for some thing. That would be moving it in the direction of worship.

In the experience-only school of Buddhism, the basic perspective is that everything we experience is our own mind. And that seems a bit strange perhaps, but tomorrow we’ll move into that a bit more deeply and maybe it won’t seem so strange. But one of the best analogies is the example of a dream. When you are dreaming, everything you experience in the dream is an arising in your mind. So you can look at a tree, you can look at a house, you can look at another person, and what you’re seeing is your own mind manifesting as a dream, a tree, a house or a person.

And there’s a practice in the Tibetan tradition called dream practice, in which you learn to recognize when you’re dreaming. And then you look and see, wow, all of this stuff is there and this is just my own mind. It’s a little weird, but very helpful for being able to appreciate that, in a certain sense, this experience is no different. Well, the teacher and the interaction with the teacher is part of that experience. So, one way to regard the teacher and that relationship is, this is your own mind telling you how to wake up.

And when you’re practicing devotion, what you’re doing is developing the capacity to open to that aspect of your experience, just to open to it, which makes it more possible to receive. And this relationship is quite explicitly recognized in the practice because during the practice itself one imagines or feels one is praying or practicing devotion for one’s teacher who may be alive or dead or even fictional, mythic. At the end of the practice one always dissolves the figure that one is working with into light and feels that it merges and becomes one with your own mind. So it’s returning it to what it actually is, which is one’s own mind.

Six-line guru yoga prayer

Ken: Now on page nine in the text, in our chant booklets, I have this six-line prayer which possibly, because it’s one I’m most familiar with, but it is my favorite guru yoga prayer. I can’t remember who wrote it. I know that Jampal Zangpo added a line to the original version, so it became a seven line prayer rather than six. But it’s a very simple prayer. It’s very complete. It covers a lot.

Treasured teacher, I pray to you.

That’s usually translated as precious teacher. But I like the alliteration. I also like the emotional quality of treasured better than precious. Now, in the way that I’ve been discussing this, it’s the relationship that’s treasured. It’s this relationship with this aspect of your own experience that’s treasured.

Give me energy to let self-fixation go.

So in all of this, you’re actually praying or yearning for the energy—which we can understand in terms of capacity—so that all of the various understandings that are described here just happen. Now all of you know that when something very difficult happens to someone that’s close to you, a friend loses their job or maybe loses someone close to them or is going through some pain in relationship or something like that and they come to you.

What happens quite naturally is that you let go of your concern with yourself and you just open and you’re there for them. And often those moments or those times are quite magical and there’s a very special quality to them. One way of understanding what happens there is that because of your connection with a person, because of the distress they’re in, the level of energy in you just goes up and the letting go of self-fixation just happens. You don’t decide to do it, it just happens. So none of these things are unnatural processes. They’re actually quite natural when one is sufficiently present and has the capacity.

The same is true of being free of need. There are many, many degrees to that. The same is true of ordinary thinking. If Trungpa had been translating this, he probably would’ve said “materialistic thinking.” I once asked Trunpa, “What’s the Tibetan for cutting through spiritual materialism?” I could read Tibetan at that point. Cutting through, I could pretty well guess it’s the Tibetan verb gcod pa (pron. chö pa). But I couldn’t find spiritual materialism in any dictionary.

And he said, “Well,” he had a very high pitched voice, “spiritual practice, that’s dharma. Materialism is non-dharma. So that’s chos min (pron. chö min),” which is non-dharma, “gcod (pron. chö).” How outrageous. So just cutting through non-dharma is what cutting through spiritual materialism is. But the ordinary thinking that goes on all the time constantly drags us into, to quote Niguma, “samsara’s sea.” So if we can let go of that or if we can develop a level of energy so that ordinary thinking subsides, then we’re just present.

Give me energy to know mind has no beginning.

Now this is a perfect example of something I was talking about earlier. How many of you tried to understand this? How many of you have succeeded in understanding? Okay. Now let me ask a different question. How many of you know mind has no beginning? Very different from understanding. I’m going to make the claim that most of you probably know that mind has no beginning. You just don’t know it at this point. Bear with me, Franca.

Franca: My pleasure.

Ken: I doubt it. Just rest for a few minutes and look at anything in your field of vision. It can be any object or any person, doesn’t matter. And bring your attention to the quality of knowing that you’re seeing. So you’re looking at an object. I’m looking at a water bottle right now. [Pause] And I know that I see the water bottle. Now just rest in the knowing quality. When does it start? You might now shift your gaze around the room, so you look at a lot of different things. You’re no longer looking, in my case at the water bottle, people, light, various features of this room.

I can shift my attention to listening. So I can just hear the sound of the stream, the sound of birds, sound of my voice. And I can shift to physical sensations. If I want to get fancy, I could probably experience all of those all at the same time. What happens to the knowing quality? When does it start? When does it stop? Meg?

Meg: It’s constant.

Ken: It’s constant and it’s constantly changing, right?

Meg: We’re always changing.

Ken: Yeah. So it’s constant. When does it start? That is, “Mind is unborn.” It doesn’t start, it’s just there. Okay? That wasn’t so difficult. “Mind has no beginning.”

Give me energy to let confusion subside on its own.

This is all manner of confusion, including the confusion of subject-object duality. So this goes very deep. And,

Give me energy to know all experience is pure being.

Again, that’s one of those things that is totally pointless to try to understand, though people have written tomes on this subject. The mere fact that it’s pointless in trying to understand it has not stopped anybody that I know of from trying to help other people understand it. It’s all totally wasted.

Teacher: the aspect of experience that tells you how to wake up

Ken: Okay, so this is a very simple prayer and you may find this a form of practice. Now, what do you do? Who is your teacher? And, how do you direct this prayer to your teacher? Well, as I said before, the teacher is that aspect of your experience which is telling you how to wake up. And you can imagine that taking whatever form is inspiring to you, which allows you to feel an emotional connection.

Let me say a word about this emotional quality. This isn’t love per se. It has three aspects to it. The first is that there’s something about your relationship with this person or this aspect of your experience, which makes sense and allows you to make sense of things that were difficult for you.

And then the second quality is that it elicits a yearning, a longing. You know there is something to know. You may not know how to know it, you may not be able to know it at this point, but you can feel it or feel the potential or the possibility. And there’s a yearning. And that yearning is an aspect of the devotion.

And the third quality, to my mind, what the other two mature into, is there’s an opening. When you think of this person or this connection or this relationship, this aspect, something in you opens. And that opening can actually be quite profound. It can be kind of a lucid clarity. It may initially just be a form of relaxation, but a profound relaxation. So letting those three qualities arise, opening to your experience with them and reinforcing or cultivating that experience through expressing such sentiments as this prayer: that is essentially the practice of devotion.

And you’ll find that when you do that, the quality of your attention shifts. And that is the point of the practice of devotion, is to transform this emotional energy into a different quality of attention. And the way it’s usually practiced is you let yourself feel this and repeat this kind of prayer to facilitate that process. And then dissolve the focus of devotion into your own knowing, into your own mind and then just rest in that heightened level of attention. So that’s a form of practice that some of you may find helpful. Do you want to ask a question? Meg.

Meg: You’ve used the phrase “Give me energy” here and in other places, and I haven’t seen that phrasing before.

Ken: You’re right, probably.

Meg: I think it might’ve been in other situations, “Bless me to … ” Actually this really works for me.

Ken: Franca’s going to explain why I use… [laughs]

Franca: It’s byin gyi brlobs (pron. jin gyi lob) which is the Tibetan that is usually translated as bless me. And Ken started getting curious about, well, what are we really saying here? And bless me is a little strange for a number of reasons, which you can all imagine. One of which is it’s from blesser.

Ken: No, it’s not from the French word, blesser, to wound. Its etymological origin was the scattering of blood. That’s how you blessed objects, you scattered blood on them. Pardon? Blessed objects, you scattered sacrificial blood on them. You made them holy.

Franca: So Ken thought about—I know this because we’ve talked about it a lot—for a long time very deeply, what’s really happening when you’re asking for this? And you remember in the Tara about the grace-waves? That’s kind of where Ken got with it, although he didn’t necessarily use those words. But I know you’ll understand that it was a sense of a kind of an opening of energy. Almost as though it were a transference of energy, although that’s on the ultimate level, not really true either, but since it’s something that’s already part of you. But it’s got more to do with energy. And so Ken hit upon this translation, which definitely gets people curious when they have a Vajrayana background, because it doesn’t immediately jive with what we’re used to.

Ken: In the Tibetan phrase byin gyi brlobs (pron. jin gyi lob), brlobs is related to the word for wave. In fact, in one of its forms, it is the word for wave, wave as in an ocean. Other translations have been used like, give me the grace-waves. byin is related to the word for generosity. So waves of giving. But then as Franca said, I said, “Okay, what is actually happening here?” And what is actually happening is that energy is being generated some way. From a conventional point of view, you can think of energy coming from the teacher, but that isn’t actually what’s happening as Franca pointed out. But a lot of people do that. If you look at some of the Hindu yoga teachers that go around, people just go around them to soak up the energy. It is the same phenomenon. Other questions?

Practice instructions

Ken: For this morning’s practice, I want you to let go of the questions that we’ve been working with up to this point. Explore resting or explore developing capacity. And one of the ways that I’ve described is to do that through resting: resting completely in your body, letting your breath rest, and letting your mind rest, and actually explore what it is like to rest completely.

We sit in the posture which allows us to rest completely, because the key here is not to rest and go to sleep, but to rest being awake. And so if you approach practice that way, it becomes quite interesting. What is it like to rest completely? When we rest completely we get to feel all of the stuff underneath. If your hand’s rigid and this is a bumpy surface, you don’t actually feel the bump. You just feel the highest point and you rest on that, and that may or may not be comfortable. But if the hand’s resting, then it feels all of the texture, all of the bumps, everything underneath. And you may find when you do that, certain things come up and you can let them be there. And they resolve and then you can rust even more deeply.

So that’s one approach. Another approach is to explore the practice of devotion, which I’ve outlined albeit a little quickly. And what’s that like? What is it like to open to that kind of emotional energy in yourself? You may find it useful to do one of the half hour periods and another other half hour periods, and you may find that you have more familiarity or more of a relationship with one than the other. My aim here is to give you, by the end of the day, two or three different techniques for developing capacity so that you can find the one which actually works best for you. Pam?

Pam: What would you do exactly to do the devotional?

Ken: You begin by letting the mind settle. And then take some figure or person, it can be someone you know, your actual teacher, someone you find very inspiring, and that can be either a historical teacher or even a mythical figure. And let yourself feel that kind of opening. And you can imagine them in front of you or in your heart. And then you just pray to them like this, repeating the prayer over and over again. For that you’ll have to memorize it, but that will only take you about five minutes. So you read it over half a dozen times. By then it’s starting to go in.

And you let yourself feel that rational appreciation that I was talking about, and then the yearning that it elicits, and the opening that it elicits. And you rest in that experience as you pray. And prayer in this way is heart-wrenching. And that’s the point, because it’s letting yourself feel how deeply this is important to you and how open you are with this. It is heart-wrenching, but that’s where the transformation of energy takes place. Did that help? Okay.