Student feedback on meditation

Ken: What’s it like in your meditation practice when you don’t fight as much?

Student: It’s more peaceful, but after a while, I went towards dullness and I got sleepy. I was trying to be a little bit more awake, but thinking about resting in silence was less conflicted or negative than going, “Oh, pay attention to your breath again. Come back to your breath. You’ve got to come back to your breath.” So, I liked it, but after a while I did get a little sleepy.

Ken: Yes. And that’s the balancing. If you just do, “Pay attention, pay attention,” then you gradually get tenser and tenser in your meditation and you get tired. To rest, in the beginning, we are going to slip into dullness, and so we need to keep coming out of that. We are really working at developing the ability to rest and to be awake at the same time. There’s going to be a lot of back and forth, but if you put it all on this side, then you just get tense and tired. And if you put it all on this side, just resting, then you end up going to sleep. So, you’ve got to go back and forth. Okay. Anybody else?

Student: It was a lot like what I was saying about pain. When I didn’t fight whatever was happening, it just felt a lot better. [Laughter] But, you know, it also reminded me that for a long time, I thought that I could only meditate if I had absolute silence around me, and I would go crazy because of all the disturbances around me. Right now, there’s a 200-unit development being done just 25 feet from me. And the guy across the street decided to put on new decking, and they decided to rip up the streets near me. I realized that I wasn’t going to meditate at all if I let all of that stuff disturbed me. So, I’ve actually incorporated all of that. I’ve been experimenting with just incorporating all of that into my meditation and I guess it’s a way of not fighting it, it’s just there. I go on with my meditation and it helps an awful lot.

Ken: Probably helps in a few other areas of your life, too. Yeah. Every now and then, I like to tell people to meditate on a street corner. When I first came to this part of the world, there’s a group down in Orange County that would invite me. And they would close off the sound with the double-sealed glass doors, things like that. So, there’s absolutely no sound. The irony was they had one of these old answering machines, so when a phone call came in, they had the ringer turned off. But you could hear the grinding and crunching of gears. [Laughter]

There’s a long tradition of practice and sometimes it’s helpful to keep a bit of perspective here. How many of you play basketball for relaxation? Not many? No. Other sports? No. Okay. So, how many of you play tennis? Anybody? A few people. Okay. Baseball? Football? [Laughter] Anyway, so I’m picking a bad analogy here, but I’ll just push forward with it anyway. How many play golf? A few more play golf. Okay. How many of you are in the Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson category? Okay.

Learning from the professionals

Ken: One of the things we have to remember is that people like Tokmé Zongpo, and in the tradition in which I was trained, in the mahamudra tradition, people like Tilopa and Saraha, these were people like Michael Jordan and Phil Mickelson. Or, if you take tennis, like Ralph Nader. Not Nader, sorry, Federer. Roger Federer, that’s what I was thinking of. Where did that come from? [Laughter] Nadal, that’s who I was thinking of. There we go. Steffi Graf or Andre Agassi. They are playing the same game as we’re playing, but they’re playing it at a whole different level. And they pour their energy into their practice and they practice and practice. And we can learn from them. We can learn a lot from people who are operating at that level.

We should be realistic. We’re not living like Tokmé Zongpo. This person took monastic vows and this was his life; he poured all of his energy into it. We’re struggling to raise a family, hold down a job and make ends meet one way or another. You know, the phrase that I used yesterday, “the full catastrophe.'” So, in our meditation, because we lead very active lives, our mind is very rarely going to be perfectly quiet.

My retreat director, who was a wonderful person, I don’t think he’d lain down for 40 years. Certainly during all the time we were practicing in retreat, he had his house outside the retreat center. Ever since he did his three-year retreat, he’d sleep sitting up. So, he just sits in his meditation box, and when he gets tired he goes to sleep, then wakes up, and continues his practice. He probably sleeps four, six hours a night, if that. Then he’d come to teach us, check in on us now and then. He’d come in once or twice a week to give us instruction, when it was time to give instruction. The rest of the time, he just practiced. And after he taught three or four retreats, he went off, got permission from his teacher and did nothing but practice for another 10, 15 years, just sitting, very awake, very, very present. That’s his life.

He would say that if he had to go and teach at the main center or go into town or something like that, when he came back, it took a while before his mind became quiet again. This is a person who is a real pro meditator, but after any disturbance at all, it would take 20 minutes for the mind to settle down. If he’d been active or things like that, it would take two or three days before it was down to that really fundamental quiet that he was used to.

Now, we live very, very active lives. So, the idea that we’re going to have a perfectly quiet mind is not very realistic. And, this is very important: despite what it says in a number of texts, it’s not actually necessary. It’s very important to realize this. Yesterday I talked about being able to rest in the silence, even when there is sound. And that’s like what you were referring to. You started to experiment with that by the sound of it, and to be able to rest in the stillness, even when there is movement. If you learn that, you learn everything that that you need to know. It takes practice.

And there’s the old saw, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice, practice, practice. The practice of meditation is to our lives, what practicing scales is to playing a concert or playing in a band. We do this thing where we just go back to the breath, back to the breath, back to the breath. And in the process of that, we are learning various skills and building certain capacities, and laying down certain patterns of responding to thoughts and sensations that arise. When those are deeply practiced enough, when we encounter situations in life which would normally provoke reactions, our practice just kicks in and things go in a different direction.

Practice until it becomes second nature

Ken: There’s a story about a young prince who wanted to learn how to fight with a sword. It could be anywhere, but we’ll say it’s Japan. And he heard about this great sword master who lives alone in the woods. So, he goes and says, “I’d like to study with you.”

And the sword master says, “Well, okay, fetch some water.” So, he went off to fetch some water. And, “Get some firewood.” And he would just give him these directions to go and do this.

After three months of doing this, he went to the master and said, “I appreciate the kindness of taking me in, but I really came here to study swordsmanship. But all I’ve done is fetch water and chop wood.”

The sword master looked at him and said, “Hmm.” He gave him a stick and said, “Carry this with you.” So, he did. “Now go and get some water.” [Laughter] So, he would continue to chop wood and fetch water and do other chores around the house in the woods. And one time he didn’t take the stick with him. And there he was by the stream, filling the bucket, and the sword master jumped out and whacked him on the back. After that, he always made sure he had a stick with him. He never knew when his swordmaster was going to jump out and attack him, but he got very, very good at sensing when something was about to happen and blocking it with the stick.

He did this for many years. Then it was time for him to return to take up his role as a prince. He really wasn’t sure what he’d learned. After many years he heard that his swordmaster had died. He felt very badly about that. So, he came back to the house in the woods. And now he was a prince and he was carrying a sword, etc. He heard this sound behind him, and, without thinking at all, just drew his sword in one motion, turned round and cut. Then he realized that he’d cut through a leaf as it had been falling. He went, “Hmm, I guess I did learn something after all.” [Laughter]

So, that’s a dramatic story but that’s what meditation practice is like. We practice, we practice, we practice, and then it comes awake in our lives in different situations. And it’s not something we think about, “Oh, I’m going to use my meditation practice now.” If you’re there, you’re already about five minutes too late. We practice this so letting go of thinking, coming back to the stillness, being able to hear the silence, becomes second nature. And so, trying to understand this or how to do this is all beside the point. It’s a case of just working at it and working at it until it becomes second nature.

An experiment in attachment

Ken: And all of the instructions that Tokmé Zongpo gave, you train in these until this is simply how you relate to the world. For instance, let’s take verse 21:

Sensual pleasures are like salty water:
The deeper you drink, the thirstier you become.
Any object you attach to,
Right away let it go.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 21

Well, most people’s understanding of this is, “Oh, I’m feeling attachment now. I have to let this go.” It’s not how it works. If you do that, you’re always going to end up fighting with yourself. How does it work? What I want you to do right now, we don’t quite have enough flowers, but I want you to take any object, preferably one that you like, that you happen to have with you. I just love this striker right now. It’s what I’ve always wanted. Okay, are you with me?

You can do it with something that you hate too, if you wish. You know, this is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t matter. We are going to work with an emotion here, and it can be either attraction or aversion, it doesn’t matter. But pick one. I’m going to talk about this in terms of attraction or desire. If we had flowers we could hand out flowers. You are holding a flower in your hand and it’s beautiful and you really like it. If you want, you can do it with something imagined. It could be a person that you know, or an object you have, your car, flowers in your garden, a piece of clothing, your new iPhone, whatever.

Start off just by looking at it and feel how much you like it and how much you want it. Okay? That’s desire, that’s attachment, whatever you want. Now, I want you to look at it again. Let the feeling of desire, wanting, arise and open to the experience of desire itself. How do you experience desire? How do you experience it in your body? There’s usually a physical movement towards the object in some way. You are trying to move towards it. There may be a trying to hold it or maybe you feel something in your heart. Part of the wanting is a physical sensation in your heart or other parts of your body. It could be a tightening in the throat, maybe something in the hands.

Feel the emotional sensations, which could be like an ache or a hollowness or butterflies in the stomach, or something like that. And it’s going to be different for each one of you. But what are the actual physical sensations of desire and the emotional sensations of desire? Open to those as completely as you can, and as you’re experiencing those, look at the object or call the object or person back into mind, whatever you’re working with. What, if anything, has changed there? Anyone notice a shift? Yes?

Student feedback

Student: Rather than my mental world being one where it just seems to have collapsed down on the wanting of this thing, where it feels like that is me and that’s pretty much what I am. Experiencing the wanting itself provides, the way I describe it, it’s more space. It’s like what you were saying about the silence and the sound or the stillness and the movement. It provides a space where it’s like, “Oh, I can just be here with that thing, with whatever is coming up.”

Ken: Yeah. And it’s different, isn’t it?

Student: Yes.

Ken: And so when you look at the object from there, what’s your experience with the object?

Student: It’s more just the object itself. It seems clearer. It’s the object minus the stories.

Ken: Okay. Very good. Anyone else? How many of you can connect with the experience that was being described. Okay, good. Somebody over here?

Student: What I experienced was that the object that I so desired, that I just so wanted to grasp, I couldn’t grasp it. It was beyond grasping it. All I could do was behold it and enjoy it. The more I tried to grasp it, it wasn’t possible. And the effort to do so wasn’t even enjoyable.

Ken: But if you just let go of that, then you could just enjoy it. It’s another aspect of the shift. So, when Tokmé Zongpo says, “Any object you attach to, right away let it go.” This is what he’s talking about. He’s talking about the method that you use is to open to your experience of wanting. And when you open to that experience of wanting, then the wanting itself simply becomes an experience. And loses its drive in the ways that were just described, which opens up the possibility of appreciating or enjoying the object rather than having to have it, which is a very different experience. And you aren’t confused, or your sense of the object isn’t distorted by your own wanting.

Now this is not always spelled out in the text, but this is why we’re going through this in this kind of minute detail. But they don’t mean intellectually, “Oh, I’m just going to turn off my attachment.” Because that doesn’t work at all. It is, you open to the experience itself that changes your relationship with everything. That’s how you let go of attachment is by opening to the experience of attachment.

The difference between a method and a result

Ken: I just wanted to give you that one example. That is how to read and understand this text. Tokmé Zongpo is describing the result of that kind of effort. A lot of people misinterpret these texts as the methods that you do. No, these are the results of doing certain things. And getting clear about the method in contrast to the result is, I found extremely important. This is one of my pet peeves.

I told you earlier that I’m always motivated by anger. I go and hear certain teachers and I just leave there and I’m quietly fuming and making sure I’m holding no sharp objects. I will listen to a talk for an hour, hour and a half, and what the person does is just describe results. And everybody’s sitting in there thinking they’re describing method and they go home and they try to do what they’ve just heard and they can’t. It’s very, very frustrating.

A tremendous amount of Buddhist teaching is simply the description of results. People try and practice it and it’s hopeless. Just to give you another very trivial example, suppose you have someone who’s a little anxious and you say to him, “Relax.” What happens? [Laughter]

Student: They say, “Oh.” Right?

Ken: But if you say to that person, “Take a deep breath. Now let it out slowly. Do it again. Take another deep breath. Let it out. Breathe it out slowly. Take another one. Let it out slowly.” That person is going to be more relaxed now. If you tell them, “Just relax!” They immediately get more tense. So, many people have difficulty with their meditation practice because they’re trying to practice results instead of methods. So, that’s something to pay attention to. And if it doesn’t make sense, ask your meditation teacher, “How do you do this?” And keep pushing him or her until they really tell you, because they should know. Yes, you have a question?

Student: And the method is?

Ken: Well, it depends on what you’re trying to do. The question is what is the method? One of the things that I said was that the method is, rest in the experience of breathing. Whenever you recognize you’ve been distracted, return your attention to the experience of breathing. Here the result was: let go of attachment. I ran you through the method, which is when you recognize that you’re attached to something, open to the experience of attachment. And that changes your relationship and moves in the direction of letting go. It won’t happen immediately, but if you do this enough, something starts to take place. Does that clarify things for you? Okay. Yes?

Student: What does it mean to open to the experience of attachment? I’m very attached to my son and I’m thinking I’m supposed to let him go. Everybody tells me it’s good for him, if I let him go, and it’s good for me. But now you’re telling me I have to open to the experience of attachment.

Ken: Okay, that’s a very good example. Thank you very much. When you say, “I’m very attached to my son.” I imagine there are at least two components in that. And I’m going to just step out on a limb, and you can saw it off if you want.

I imagine one of the components is that you care very much about how he grows up and how he develops, and you care very much about his welfare, that he’s strong, healthy, etc. And that you’ll do almost anything that you can to ensure that. Okay?

And I imagine another part is you want to have him around because you like having him around. [Laughter] You just want to have him there and you don’t want him going off and doing things. You just want to have him around. So, which of those would you say is attachment?

Student: The one that wants to have him around.

Ken: Yeah. In the Theravadan tradition, there’s a wonderful explanation of the four immeasurables: loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. And it is presented in terms of parenting. Loving-kindness is the wish that your son be healthy and strong, be fully in his life, okay? And that is wanting the other to be happy, which is basically the idea of loving-kindness. Okay?

Compassion is being present with your son when he’s in pain. And sometimes you can’t do anything about the pain. It’s something that you don’t have any control of. And all you can do is just be there with him. And if you try to make it go away, that doesn’t really work. In a certain sense, he needs to experience it. But by your being willing to be there with him in his pain, he learns how to experience his own pain. You with me? That’s compassion.

Joy is celebrating his growth and his success in life. So, he wins a prize at school, he climbs a mountain, he does something like that. And you applaud and celebrate him. You take joy in his accomplishments. That’s joy.

Equanimity is letting him go when he’s ready to enter life. Not wanting to have him around, not needing to keep him around for you. Does this help to understand? Attachment or attraction, however you want to translate it, that’s where we want somebody in our lives to fulfill some need in ourselves. We actually don’t let them be their own person because we just want them to fulfill that need for us . That’s what is being talked about.

Now the next three verses we are going to do very quickly because it’s 11:00. Let’s take a 10 minute break right here and then we’ll come back. We’re going to do the next three verses and jump into the six perfections.