Demons or habituated patterns?

Ken: Kalu Rinpoche once told me—think it may have been his teacher—there had been a problem in the area and a number of lamas had been hired to propitiate the local demons and they had gone up the mountain and banged their drums and rang their bells and chanted their songs. But the troubles persisted. So his teacher was asked to do something. His teacher was a pretty short-tempered guy. As the saying goes, he did not suffer fools lightly, so he went up and did a number of rituals. And then during the break, one of the rituals, he was offered a cup of tea by his attendant. And he looked into the tea, just offered the cup of tea which he was about to drink, to the local deity which was causing all the trouble. The deity immediately appeared in front of him and said, “Thank you, that’s the first sincere offering I’ve had. All these other people who have been playing their drums and banging their bells and causing me headaches and all kinds of things, and so I just made more and more trouble. But thanks for the tea. I’ll leave everybody alone now.” Now there’s a lot of wrapping in that story, there’s also something true in it.

We’ve been talking about working with demons, the kinds of demons that attack us, hijack our lives, carry us into things, into situations in ways that we don’t really want to be there. Yet that’s where we end up. A more modern parlance might be habituated patterns, but it doesn’t make any difference really, it’s the same beast. I’ve got a number of topics I want to cover this afternoon, so those of you who are taking notes, I hope you have lots of ink in your pens. Those of you who are listening, I hope you have lots of capacity between your ears.

First set of tools, which some of you know about already, whether you call it a demon or a habituated pattern, as I said, it’s the same beast. We are entranced, enchanted. It’s as if a spell is cast over us and we see things other than for what they are. And we act in accordance with our perception, not with what is—that’s, you might say, the definition of a reaction. And because we’re acting based on a perception, not what is, what we do usually misses the mark. It’s not appropriate in the situation. So it sets up a whole bunch of responses from the situation, which we react to more, and it just snowballs and we create lots and lots of problems, or this dynamic creates lots of problems. This is called suffering.

In Buddhism, we distinguish very importantly between pain, which is a sensation, just an experience—it may be very intense—and suffering, which is the reaction to experience. And it doesn’t have to be a negative experience like pain, we can react to a positive experience, but suffering comes from a reaction. So when we’re taken over by a demon or habituated pattern, we’re reacting. And we’re reacting because we’re lost in this enchantment. I think it was Keats who wrote, “La Belle Dame sans Merci, Thee hath in thrall!” It’s a poem about a knight who spends the rest of his life wandering around a hill because he fell into such an enchantment. So how do we break the enchantment?

This morning, I mentioned what are called the four karmic demons, demonic obsessions. There is obsession with the apparent solidity of experience. And this was a question raised this morning, this external reality which we’ve constructed out of sensory sensations, but it feels very real, that’s the enchantment, it’s solid. And when I was in Portland the other night, somebody asked a question, “Well, this is all very well for meditation, but what do you do in real situations?”

Regard everything as a dream

Ken: Well, in order to know what to do, what’s an appropriate response, we have to see and experience things as they are. That’s not trivial. And as long as we’re obsessed with the solidity of external appearances, we can’t see or experience things as they are. We will inevitably experience them as something other to be opposed or desired or beaten down or competed against or something like that. So the way we break that enchantment is to regard everything as a dream. Now, this is a very important instruction in Mahayana Buddhism. It’s also one that is more often misunderstood than understood correctly.

A couple of months ago, I was having a conversation with a Buddhist teacher, colleague of mine, about this instruction, and she was saying, “This is a very, very bad instruction, Ken. It’s been around for a couple of thousand years. It’s very bad instruction because when you say everything’s like a dream, people say, well, they don’t have to pay attention to anything.” And that’s the association we have with a dream—it’s not real, so I don’t have to worry about it. But that’s not the way dream is being used here.

Suppose you have a dream, oh, let’s say it’s a nightmare. Jamgön Kongtrül, for instance—one of the great teachers of the 19th century—in his biography he writes about a dream that he had in which he was being chased by a lion. And he was scared—he ran and ran and ran in this dream. Well, the way his dream ended was that as he was running, he saw this temple. He ran into the temple and in the middle of the temple on this huge throne was seated the fifth Karmapa, who was one of the great lineage holders in the Kagyu tradition. And Karmapa looked at him and laughed. This is all in the dream. And he laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed. Kongtrül was sitting there panting, still terrified because the lion had been chasing him. Karmapa said to him in his dream, “Oh, Kongtrül, what good are you if you can’t tell when you’re being chased by a lion in a dream?” He woke up from the dream. Now, when he woke out from the dream, where was his fear? Where was his embarrassment, being laughed at by the Karmapa? What happened to it?

It goes like, poof, right? Was the fear real? Yes. But when you know it just to be an arising, then it has no hold. It was just, “Oh, that was an interesting experience.” Sort of! But it’s the same with pleasure, with love. Those are just arisings too. So, this quality of being a dream doesn’t mean we don’t care about it. We experience it intensely, vividly right there, and we don’t attach to it at all.

One of my favorite stories is of Sasaki Roshi, who is the 96-year-old abbot of Mount Baldy, and he’s still going, still teaching, quite an extraordinary individual. Back in the 1960’s he was doing a sesshin in Vancouver, and this was early days of Zen, people weren’t screened for sesshins, which are fairly intensive retreats. In the middle of the sesshin, one of the persons at the sesshin came in for the interview with a knife. Sasaki Roshi screamed with such force and power that the individual dropped the knife, bowed and left. The senior students rushed in to find out what had happened, Sasaki Roshi told them, and they all bowed and said, that was so brilliant! He said, “Brilliant, shit, I was scared!”

But he was right in it and no clinging to it, no defending whatsoever. So the instruction, regard everything as a dream, doesn’t mean that we distance ourself from experience. It means that we approach experience as if it were a dream. There is nothing to fear here, we move right into it and experience it with all its intensity and vividness, knowing that whatever it is, it’s just an experience. That takes a little guts, but that’s the idea. Generally speaking, experience’s bark is much worse than its bite. In fact, as a friend of mine says, the reason we don’t really move into experience is because we fear what has happened, not what will happen. Which when you think about it that way makes no sense at all. We’re afraid, “Oh, if I do this, then something like X, Y, and Z is going to happen.” So we’re really afraid of X, Y, and Z, but that’s already happened. It can’t possibly hurt us. So that’s the first spell-breaker, regard everything as a dream.

The obsession with our emotions

Ken: The second has to do with obsession with our emotions. When anger arises or desire arises, it feels really real. “I’ll die if I don’t live with that person.” Well, in most cases that isn’t true, but it sure feels that way, doesn’t it? “I will die if I have to go through anything like that again.” And that’s how powerful the feelings are. We often say those kinds of things to ourself. Another one that’s very common in American society is, “I can’t handle this.” Well, you’re going to handle it—maybe gracefully, maybe not so gracefully—but you’re going to handle it. Maybe you’ll push it aside, maybe you’ll suppress it, you’re going to handle it some way. But we say, I can’t handle it. And these feelings that come up, they feel very, very solid. And we believe everything they tell us.

One of my students in L.A. had tremendous difficulty. She worked in a large mental health agency, and she is a very, very good psychologist and administered about 40 psychologists and psychiatrists providing really important help to the community. And this she did very well and very, very professionally, a very competent woman. But whenever she thought of doing something for herself, like moving into a nicer apartment or buying a house or getting a new car, or just anything straightforward, she got tremendous anxiety, actually fear. And the voices would start up in her head, if you do this, bad things are going to happen.

And so, I pushed her a bit on this stuff. You’ll get cancer if you buy that car, you’ll have a bad accident and you’ll never be able to walk again. And so she never did. I kept pushing her in this area and eventually she decided, “Okay, there are these feelings which come up and these feelings tell me these stories, and I believe these stories.” And the stories had a very nice obvious name, Dire Consequences. So she nicknamed this whole complex of feelings Dire Consequences. And being from southern California, she adopted a particular southern California approach so that whenever these feelings kicked up, she said, “Thank you, Dire Consequences, thank you for sharing.” And that’s how she stepped out of it.

So the second spell-breaker is, “The trouble right now is that I believe my feelings.” Now feelings arise and they tell you all kinds of things. Depression, for instance, which is a very powerful feeling, tells you it’s hopeless making any effort in your life, you might as well lie in bed for the rest of your life because that’s all that you can do. Anger tells you whatever is opposing has to be destroyed. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your wife, your child, your boss—whatever—it has to be destroyed.

Desire tells you, “Whatever that is, I’ve got to have it.” If you don’t have it, your life isn’t complete, etc., etc. Very strong. How much trouble have any of you got into believing your feelings? So a few of you have experienced this. So, when you feel these very powerful feelings and you experience what they’re telling you, just say to yourself, “The trouble right now is that I believe this feeling.” What does that do? It breaks the spell. Because it reminds you that this is a feeling and it’s a feeling talking. Is a feeling a fact? No. It’s a fact in that it arises in experience but all of the stories it’s telling you, they’re not facts, they’re just what the feelings say. So that’s a second spell-breaker: Trouble is I believe my feelings. Even when you’re doing meditation, “I can’t sit here any longer.” Trouble is I believe my feelings. You break it right there.

As someone pointed out yesterday or this morning, “This meditation session is never going to end.” That’s a feeling talking. My colleague and friend in Portland, many of you know him, Michael Conklin, was saying that one of his students called him up, and said, “This meditation is just going nowhere. I’m not worthy to do this.” And Mike who is a very charitable person, just laughed. He couldn’t answer the person he was laughing so hard. It’s a feeling—it’s what the feeling is saying: “No good, incompetent, I’m stupid, I’m this.” Trouble is, I believe the feeling. It’s just what it is. None of it’s true. A lot of people feel that they’re unlovable. That’s just a feeling, not a fact.

The many forms of intoxication

Ken: Third: third has to do with intoxication. The old saying is, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Pleasure also. We tend to be intoxicated with pleasure and power. When that arises, we lose our ability to see things as they are, and all kinds of other things set in. Arrogance creeps in very, very easily. Complacency, feelings of entitlement—in the parlance of the six realms we move into the god realm. And a one-liner summary of the god realm is, “I’m right and that’s just how it is.” And it’s a very dangerous realm because it allows us to ignore the pain and suffering in the world because we understood how to live life, and that’s how things turned out, and all these other people, well, it’s their fault they didn’t understand it. It completely frees us from paying any attention to it. And we see that a lot actually in this country. The way you break the spell of intoxication by pleasure and power is through the technique that I introduced you to this morning, taking and sending. Take in the pain of suffering of the world and give your experience of pleasure and power to others. Shatters that illusion very, very effectively.

A story is told of Chekawa, the author of the Seven Points of Mind Training, who visited a friend, and on his friend’s couch there was a book open. Chekawa caught sight of the lines:

Give all gain and victory to others, take all loss and defeat for yourself.

Chekawa was a profound scholar of Buddhism and he’d never come across any instruction like that. So he asked his friend, “What instruction is this?”

He said, “Oh, that’s Langri Tangpa’s Eight Points of Mind Training, or Mind Training in Eight Verses.

“Oh, where would I study that?”

“Go and study with Langri Tangpa at such and such monastery.”

So he set off and on the way there, he found out that Langri Tangpa had died and that there was a big argument about who should take his place, who should be the next lineage holder. When Chekawa heard that, his heart was just broken because he’d heard this wonderful line, “Give all victory and gain to others, take all loss and defeat for yourself,” and yet here were these two people having this argument about who is going to be the next lineage holder. And he said, “This totally contradicts the teaching.”

A person said, “No, no, you don’t understand how this argument is going. There’s one person who’s a brilliant, brilliant young monk and has just got wonderful practice. And the other is a very old, esteemed and highly respected member of the monastery. And each of them is trying to give the lineage positions to the other, that’s the argument!”

“Oh.”

So, he went on and studied. Through his study, came what we now know as Seven Points of Mind Training.

So, take on the suffering of others, give away your own happiness and pleasure. One of my students, old students in Orange County, I gave him this practice to do really in real life because he was a very bright attorney and whenever he was hanging out with people, everybody was always asking him for his opinion on things. And so, there’s always this—you know, he’s in an elevated position. Now, he was contributing this of course, because he was just absorbing and giving all of this wonderful advice, etc., etc.

So, I said, “Okay,” and he’s part of a men’s group, “in this men’s group you’re to say something that is irrefutably stupid.” I give assignments like this to students. That’s just a warning. So he kept coming back to the men’s group and every time I saw him, “Sid you do it?”

“No. Well, I tried this time Ken but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth.”

And finally, on one occasion, a young man was saying something that was very close to the heart, etc., etc. And he had this great insight and he said something that was just totally off the wall. And everybody sort of looked at him and he was feeling horrible, just shame and things like that, which is the point of the exercise, to work through all of the stuff. And they all bonded with this young man and just took him apart. “How could you say something so …” etc., etc. And of course the young man felt so supported and it was just such a very positive experience and everybody looked at it afterwards and they turned to the student of mine and said, you know, “That was a brilliant tactic!” So even though you break your own projections, you don’t necessarily break the projections of others.

The obsession with a sense of self

Ken: Third, or fourth, rather. This is a little more difficult. The fourth demonic obsession is obsession with a sense of self, who I am, what I am, and particularly who I am in the world. We all have ideas about this. Sometimes they’re negative ideas, sometimes they’re positive ideas. But the one thing we can say is they’re usually very fixed ideas.

We have an idea of who we are, and that idea of who we are—that self-image or sense of self—well, there’s a couple of things. One, it very significantly reduces the range of things that we’re allowed to think, feel, and do. And the second is more insidious. That sense of self is always protecting a certain feeling. So, it causes us to relate to the world in a way that we never experience that feeling. But as I said earlier, the function of feelings is to be felt, so when we relate to the world in a way that we never experience that feeling, we’re creating the conditions in our lives where the only thing we’re going to experience is that feeling. In other words, reactive patterns deliver precisely what you are trying to avoid—they’re very good at this. So, you can either pay for it upfront or you can pay for it at the back end. It’s always more expensive at the back end. Now, when you’re functioning out of this and you’re completely wrapped up in this sense of self, inevitably you’re going to run into circumstances which explode that sense of self, and you’ll feel like you are dying. You have been betrayed, the world has betrayed you. Something has gone catastrophically wrong. Does anybody know what I’m talking about? It’s very easy to fall into despair and disillusionment and cynicism and anger and depression and all of this stuff that happens.

That’s all part of the reaction—you’re still in the spell. “How could they do this? Don’t they understand who I am?” and so forth. And the way you break this spell, is you say to this sense of self—which is not what you actually are—”This is what you wanted, this is what you live for. Don’t complain.” That’s a tough instruction. But that’s how you break the spell. On a practical level, I mean that’s very practical, but it’s hard, but on a practical level, I’ve found when anything goes wrong in my own life, and lots of things do, there’s always some way I have contributed to it. And at least up to this point, the way I contributed to it has always been due to the operation of some reactive pattern in me, which I may not have been aware of at the time. But when everything collapses and it’s just a big mess, then I get to see it. This is what I wanted, this is what I live for. That’s how the pattern runs. So I’ve found it very useful when anything goes wrong, when anything comes out different from how I intended it to, I look and see, what’s my role in that? And there’s always something.

So those are the four. Break the obsession with the solidity of experience by regarding everything as a dream, and just say, this is all a dream. And you can wake up into the dream. You break the solidity of emotional reactions by saying, “The trouble is, I believe this feeling. You break the obsession with pleasure and power by, “May all loss and defeat come to me. May all gain and victory go to them.” And you break the spell of identity, self-image by saying, “This is what you wanted. This is what you live for.” Okay?

Now so far, we’ve been talking about how to deal primarily with negative reactive emotions. And as I said this morning, that’s take one. We start there because that’s what really causes the problems in our lives. But the practice of chö goes much further. So, I want to talk about take two and take three, very briefly though. When we are able to cut through our obsession with reactive emotions and those reactive processes, we then find the possibility of experiencing non-reactive emotions or what can be called the higher emotions. Now, reactive emotions are all based on a personal agenda. So I also like to call the higher emotions, impersonal emotions, even though they are intensely personal in another way.

The four immeasurables

Ken: And one could compile quite a list. But there are five which I think are important. Many of you will know four of them. They’re referred to as the four immeasurables: loving kindness or metta, compassion, joy and equanimity. You may recall the lines from The Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest,
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

William Shakespeare

This is the special quality of the four immeasurables, all of them, because when they arise, they unite two people in a moment of presence. When you receive kindness, what do you experience? Having a place in the world—you’re there. That’s the effect of receiving kindness, it’s very important for the child when they’re growing up to have that kind of love and kindness from their parents, what gives them a place in the world. That’s the moment of presence.

When you receive compassion, you experience someone being present with your pain. They may not be doing anything about it, but they are there with you, and so you can be with your pain, a moment of presence. So these are very, very wonderful and very, very powerful emotions. But they’re not based on a sense of I, they’re not based on a personal agenda that way. And the moment that personal agenda, you know, I need you, that undermines loving kindness or I’m going to do something about your pain, that undermines the compassion, and so forth.

So, the immeasurables, these higher emotions, they unite two people in a moment of presence. Loving kindness, very simply, is the wish that others be happy. It’s a radiant warmth. Compassion is the wish that others not suffer. It’s a sense of presence. Joy is taking joy in the success of others. It’s radiant presence. And equanimity is being free of prejudice or preference. So there’s no judgment, you’re just there with the other person. And I could talk for a long, long time about those.

Devotion or faith

Ken: The fifth is devotion or faith. Actually, maybe you can make two there, they’re slightly different. A friend and colleague of mine, Sharon Salzberg, wrote a book, the title of which is Faith. I recommend it. She’s trained in the Theravadan tradition principally and has practiced that and taught it for many, many years, she’s one of the founders of IMS, Insight Meditation Society, on the east coast. It was a joy to read her book because even though we originally met back in 1972 or something like that, our paths had crossed, we’ve gone very, very different paths, strangely, you come to the same feeling about faith.

Faith is the opposite of belief. Belief is the impulse or the wish to interpret what happens to conform to what’s inside that set of ideas. That’s what we do with belief. So it closes things down, solidifies. Faith on the other hand, is the willingness to open to whatever you experience. This is what Sharon writes about in terms of her own life story. It’s really very nicely done. That’s an emotional quality, that willingness. And there’s devotion, which is also a kind of opening based on a sense of appreciation, sometimes gratitude, inspiration. But again, it’s not based on a personal agenda and corrupted by that.

Those are all examples of, let’s say positive emotions or higher emotions. What do you do with those in chö? You cut through. Because even those emotions, those kinds of things, powerful and wonderful that they are, can become objects of fixation. So at this level of practice, you don’t start off there. You start off working through the negative stuff first, but then you will develop very, very deep feelings of faith and devotion or very profound feelings of compassion. And then sit right in the experience of them, just as we were talking about sitting in the experience of the negative emotions, you sit right in the experience of them until you know they are empty and this is how you bring about the union of compassion and emptiness, loving-kindness and emptiness. And then there’s take three. There are the things that are quite beyond this. Things like emptiness, perfection of wisdom, and in Tibetan tradition, dzogchen, Samantabhadra, mahamudra, these very profound principles, dharmadhatu and so forth. which permeate deep discussions of spiritual practice.