Student questions on translation points

Ken: All right. This is our last class. First glance, looks like we have an awful lot of verses. But the last three practices are very much summaries. And then the last four verses of the text are traditional elements that you’ll find in many, many texts. So, questions about the meaning, translation points, etc. Susan.

Susan: In verse 37, the second line, it says, Wisdom freed from the three spheres. What are those?

Ken: Yup. Do you remember verse 30? [Pause] Now, I’m not sure. Let me just check to see if it’s actually the same. I just translated it in two different words in English just to make life more difficult. Yeah, I did, I’m pretty sure. [Pause]

Student: The Dalai Lama translated it the same way.

Ken: The three spheres?

Student: Yeah. The action, the acted on, and the subject of the action. I think you put it in parentheses.

Ken: Yes, I was a little inconsistent in the translation. It’s the same word in Tibetan, so I probably should change that to three domains. With wisdom freed from the three domains. Anything else? George?

George: In verse 35, what does it mean to crush or destroy reactive emotions when we are resting in our awareness of their arising?

Ken: Yes, here we are: ‘bur ‘joms byed pa (pron. bur jom jé pa), which is as they arise you put ’em down. [Laughter]

Student: Repress all of these things, huh?

Ken: In martial arts, people say, “Well, this is the ancient system and it hasn’t been changed for five centuries, or ten centuries, or something like that.” Well, that may not be the best form, because things are refined over time, and techniques become more subtle and more effective. So I think we have to allow for the evolution of methods.

And you certainly find this in mahamudra and dzogchen—and I think you also find it within the Theravada, but I’m not as familiar with the Theravadan—where there is an evolution in how you work with stuff that arises in practice. In the beginning, it feels like you’re fighting it; in the middle, you’re transforming it; and in the end you’re just letting it play out. So when they use a vocabulary like crushing reactive emotions such as craving, where did you have destroy?

George: That’s another translation.

Ken: Ah, okay. You can understand this in a couple of ways. First off, I think we all know it doesn’t mean to repress them, because repressing them basically leaves them intact, but puts them out of the conscious mind. So, they go on to wreak havoc without us knowing about it.

Let’s take all three lines of this. When reactive emotions acquire momentum, it’s hard to make remedies work. This is a straight application of the Taoist principle, that the earlier you address a problem, the easier it is to remedy it. So if you address things when they’re small, it goes smoothly. You can make adjustments and it can be quite smooth. And if you wait until they’re very big, then it’s just much more difficult and you have to bring a lot more machinery to bear. So, as he says, when they acquire momentum, it’s difficult to make things work.

A person in attention wields remedies like weapons. Well, I think you should think of this more like rapiers than like nuclear bombs

George: Seeing through their non-substantialness?

Ken: Well, that’s one method, but that’s a method that arises naturally. If you’re doing it, if you’re thinking through it, it’s not at all effective. It’s completely non-effective, and actually it’s just a form of repression.

Dealing with reactive emotions

Ken: So, when it says Crushing reactive emotions such as craving as soon as they arise, let’s take a look at what this means in practice. You crave something, or you want something, you’re attracted to it. What do you actually do?

George: You want it, you grasp for it, or want to grasp for it.

Ken: Yeah, but what do you do with that in your practice?

George: You watch it happening. You experience it in your body. You feel it. You don’t take it as being necessarily a real thing, but something that arises in your awareness. So, you’re conscious of it, and you don’t feel like you automatically have to act on it, but it may not go away. So, you may experience it some more, and you may just feel it, but you may not identify with it so strongly. That’s the way I experience it these days.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Dave.

Dave: This is very much what you wrote in your book, the little chart, my interpretation of it. You had a chart where you have the process of the reactive emotion and it begins with sensing and the tone of it, pleasant, unpleasant, whatever. The interpretation, which is tied in with the symbolic associations that evokes. The reactive emotion itself, and then the action, the expression of it. And you made a great point about the sooner you catch it in attention, the more able you are to work with it. Now, I’ve also studied Gurdjieff’s methods a lot, and this is one of the prime sources of fuel for attention, according to that method, and I don’t think it contradicts anything.

Ken: What is?

Dave: Transformation of negative emotions, which requires a certain degree of presence, to begin with, before you can even do it. But the more present you are, the sooner you can catch these things, and transform them. And thereby create more energy for attention.

Ken: Well, that’s all very true. How do you do it? [Pause] Don’t you have something to say, Nava?

Nava: Well, first you need to know what is happening. You need to identify that you have craving or lust, or something, for something, right? That’s where it starts. And then you use one of the remedies.

Ken: Well, name a remedy and tell us how you use it. We’ll take craving, grasping, wanting something.

Nava: I feel it in my body. I feel the warmth, the heat, the wanting to hold it, and I’ll just try to know it very well. And then I’m sure some emotions will come, and I’ll try to feel these emotions. Somewhere in this process there’ll be moments of knowing and not knowing, and that may bring me to some kind of release of the craving.

Ken: Okay, anybody else?

Catherine: What about cutting?

Ken: What about cutting?

Catherine: Well, I learned about that years ago in another meditation thing.

Ken: How do you do it?

Catherine: How do you do it? Yes. Well, that’s what I was going to ask you. But actually, I have a little story about it.

Ken: I don’t want to get off topic yet.

Catherine: Okay. It’s about cutting. Somebody cut for me a reactive pattern that I was in. I was completely immersed in this, really sad because of something somebody said to me. I was not in attention, and I got into this reactive pattern. And someone said something to me and I felt almost like I was in this class, because I heard it and I snapped out of it, just like that. And I came back into attention. It was such a relief.

Ken: So somebody just said something?

Catherine: Yes! And I snapped out of it. It was that they told me the truth, and I recognized it. Then I spent a lot of time in the last week trying to figure out how I could do that for myself. And I was reading your book over and over again.

Ken: Trying to find the answer in the book. [Laughter]

Catherine: It was in the cutting section, and I’m reading it over and over.

Ken: Okay. Thanks. [Pause] The way that you “crush” an emotion, as Nava was explaining, you move into the experience of it. So you have to know that it’s happening. Now you can train yourself—and this is really what our practice is about—so that whatever’s arising, you move into the experience of it. You train yourself, so that’s just what you do. So whatever’s arising, you just move straight into the experience of it, and one’s able to recognize imbalance and one moves straight into the experience of imbalance, as we’ve discussed in previous classes.

Now, when you do this, when you move into the experience, then you experience whatever’s arising completely. And it is by experiencing it completely that it is transformed, released, or however you want to describe it. Some would say that’s how you put an end to it, but there’s a little bit more that’s going on than that. Some would say that’s how it’s released, but released doesn’t actually capture all that is going on, even though it’s the most prevalent terminology in the mahamudra and dozgchen.

Like Dave, I think that the Gurdjieff description is probably the most accurate. When something opens, its energy is there and arises as attention then. And so that’s the transformation, but it’s transformed by experiencing it. Number one thing about this, this is not a conceptual process. You don’t have to think. In fact, if you do think you’re transforming it, you’re not. If the intellect’s engaged, you’re already separated from the experience. And so the best you can hope for is some form of repression at that point.

When you’re right in the experience, then it just shifts by itself. Now, the story you described, Catherine, where somebody said something, people can say things to us or something can happen “outside” us, which will shift the way we’re experiencing it. And so that release and transformation happens spontaneously. But that’s not something you can actually rely on, because you don’t know whether you’re going to have the right person around. You don’t know whether they’re going to say the right thing.

So even though it’s very nice, “Oh, it just went like that.” You can train so that actually happens, but you train that by moving into the experience. So whenever you feel irritated, you experience irritation completely, in the ways that all of you were describing: body, emotions, stories—right in it. Now, most of the time we don’t do that. Why not? Anybody?

Molly: We’re out of attention.

Ken: We either don’t know what’s going on, so we don’t do it. Or, what if we do know what’s going on? Do we do it all the time? If we know what’s going on, why not? Diane?

Diane: As Molly mentioned, we’re out of attention or it’s just too uncomfortable and we don’t want to go there.

Ken: Okay, now there’s an old Buddhist practice called renunciation. What is renunciation? It’s giving up the old way of relating to experience. Dave?

Dave: That’s another way of putting what I was thinking. One of the best remedies for me is to change the process in the interpretive stage and see it as an opportunity. If I drop a glass, and it shatters all over the floor, and there’s broken glass, and something goes off quick enough to see this is an opportunity, then I will experience it fully. And get the burst of attention, burst of energy.

Ken: Yeah. So the formal definition of renunciation, it is the desire, or the wish, that I not suffer. How do you stop suffering? How do I stop suffering? Kate?

Kate: You give up the old way of relating to your experience. [Laughter]

Ken: Which is?

Kate: Which is not being in attention

Ken: Right. And not experiencing, just riding at some distance away, and you’re just going all over the place. Okay? So, whenever you find yourself wanting something, what would be the old way? And what would be the new way?

Kate: Well, the old way would be to not be in attention. I mean to not even probably recognize—

Ken: Oh, we’re going to give people a little bit of credit here. They recognize that they want something.

Kate: Okay. The old way would just be to grab it, right? To try to get it.

Student: Or to suffer for the lack of it.

Ken: Yes, “I want that. I can’t have it,” that kind of thing? Okay. Go on.

Kate: So, it would be just immediately acting out with behavior, and not really having any awareness of any intervening experience.

Ken: And what would be the renunciate way?

Kate: The renunciate way—where you don’t want to suffer—is to recognize that you have the craving, and experience that. Experience, as you’ve said many times, the body sensations, the feelings, the stories, the projections, the memories.

Ken: But the story says, “That’s really uncomfortable.”

Kate: Well, I find that when I have actually done it, it’s not uncomfortable, but I fear that it will be uncomfortable. I mean, I have a fear that it will be, and so I just avoid it. But when I actually do those things, it’s actually not uncomfortable. It feels good to just be able to feel it, be centered in it, and not be running away from it.

Ken: Okay, so you’re on record. Renunciation feels good. [Laughter] George.

George: One of the affirmations I’ve been working with is: to see things just as they are. And the old way is to see the object of craving as really creating craving and something that you want to crave. And it isn’t seeing the thing just as it is. You’re putting a whole thing, a whole old pattern over it. Someone walks in, and you’re immediately attracted. And the old way would be to think you really want this person, and that this person exerts a real draw on you.

And you see that coming and you just see, “Oh, the only thing that happened was this beautiful person walked in the door.” That’s all that happened. Everything else is the old way of reacting to it. And to be able to enjoy the person walking in the door, without feeling you have to have that person.

Ken: Okay. What do you do with the attraction that arises?

George: You have to enjoy it.

Ken: Okay. I bring this up because a lot of people would work with what you’re describing intellectually, and they would say, “Oh, well, this is just what happened, and this is what happened.” And we’re all smart enough to know it’s just what happened. And they won’t deal with the emotional aspect of the experience at all.

George: You can’t escape your experience.

Ken: I agree you can’t. But the reason I’m saying this is that I want to caution you that when this beautiful woman, or this handsome guy, walks in the door and you feel all of this attraction arising, you don’t say, “Oh, that’s just a beautiful person.” [Laughter] That’s not going to work! Okay, that’s not going to work. You have to feel all of the sexual desire, all of the desire for companionship, or how it’ll make you feel to be acquainted with that person, or to have a connection with that person, and how you want others to look at you, and all of the things that go on with it. And so actually experience the whole thing, and know all of those things to be just experiences.

Moving right into the experience of craving

Ken: And again, it isn’t sufficient to label them as just experiences. So, I’m going to go over this again, and again. This cannot be done intellectually. If you do it intellectually, it is just a form of suppression. That’s really, really important. So, when they talk about: Crushing reactive emotions such as craving as soon as they arise, it means moving right into the experience of craving, with all of its heart-rending, tugging, and pulling, and all of that, and be right in it. That’s how you “crush” it. And it is uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable because we crave things because we’re trying to avoid something else, and we’re going to do that.

Now as we gain practice in this, we find that experiencing what the craving is distracting us from becomes a lot less uncomfortable in fact than what the craving gets us involved in. And that’s how it stops suffering. But in the beginning, it’s a new way, it’s a renunciate way of relating to experience. And it takes a lot of practice to catch it as soon as it is arising.

Time and time again, I see people, they go into situations. And what they’re doing, the first thing that they’re doing in a new situation, is taking care of themselves. “I need this, I need this, I need this, I need this.” If you’re doing this practice, that’s not the first thing you’re doing when you walk into a situation. You walk into a situation, and you experience, “I need this, I need this, I need this, I need this.” And you experience it all.

And some of those needs are needs, that is that we feel that they are critical to our survival, which usually takes us back to pretty young parts of us. And some of those are wants, they’re just things we like to have, but you don’t really need. And they take us back to more adult parts of ourselves. But how many of them do we actually need right in that moment? Probably very, very few.

And the way that Tokmé Zongpo would be talking about working with this is that when you go into that situation, you experience all of that, this, this, this, this, and all of those needs. And you just experience them. And let yourself grow quiet within, and then you can actually relate to the situation, whatever it is. So, is this clear to everybody? Deborah.

Deborah: You said that craving distracts us from something else. What does it distract us from?

Ken: Do you ever crave food? Okay. You want a little homework?

Deborah: Okay.

Ken: I’m not sure I’ll take it up with you because this is our last class. So, next time you crave food, ask yourself, “If I didn’t eat X right now, what would I have to experience?” Now, for some people it might be hunger, but in terms of food cravings, there’s often other emotions: loneliness, uncertainty, shame, guilt. So we eat to stuff it down, or distract us. You follow? Okay, Catherine?

Catherine: Recognizing and experiencing the needs and then you’re experiencing everyone. Is this like looking at a catalog and thinking, “I want this, I want that, I want this,” and then not acting on it? Which is what I do all the time.

Ken: How do you feel at the end?

Catherine: Completely peaceful.

Ken: Okay.

Catherine: Yeah. Is that what you’re talking about? Experiencing the needs and wants and then not doing anything about it.

Ken: Well, probably in a large number of cases, when you’re experiencing needs and wants, you realize that you don’t need to do anything about it. So, you’re able to let go. It’s by experiencing them and seeing, “Oh, it’s an experience. I don’t actually have to act on it.” John?

John: Maybe it’ll get to the point where you won’t even pick the catalog up. It just reminded of some interview with Tenzin Gyatso, when they asked him if he’d done anything that he regretted for the day. And he said that he had a cracker in the evening. [Laughter]

Ken: Yes. Well, if he was fasting after the noonday meal, then that was something that would violate his intention, so he regretted it. Okay. Other points? Yes.

Going into experience in daily life

Student: I have a question. How do you go into the experience if you’re teaching a class, or driving a car, or performing surgery? Just carrying on with your life.

Ken: I’m sitting here teaching. Now, while I’m teaching, all kinds of things can come up. George’s beautiful girl can walk into the room. Okay? I can experience things from seeing a beautiful woman. Maybe I get hungry while I’m teaching. Maybe somebody says something that irritates me, this ever happen? [Laughter] Or maybe someone says something, and everybody thinks it’s brilliant, and I get jealous. All kinds of things can happen. But as those are rising, what prevents me from experiencing them right as they arise?

Student: You may have other things to do, like run a meeting.

Ken: So? How does running a meeting prevent you from experiencing what is arising?

Student: Well, my sense is that if you really experience it, you sort of stop.

Ken: How long does it take?

Student: I know where you’re leading,

Ken: [Laughter] What are you experiencing?

Student: A split second,

Ken: What are you experiencing right now? You said, “I know where you’re leading.” What were you experiencing right at that point?

Student: That you can come into awareness of—

Ken: No, that’s what you were thinking. What were you experiencing?

Student: A surge of energy.

Ken: Okay, so experience it. How’s that? How long does it take?

Student: Not very long.

Ken: And how do you feel if you actually experience it?

Student: Connected, present.

Ken: Will this help you run the meeting, or not?

Student: Yeah!

Ken: Okay. I think the reason you asked this question is because the idea is, “I can only have attention on one thing, and I can only think about one thing at a time.” But you can think and feel at the same time. And the fact is that if you are actually feeling what’s going on in you, may be more in touch with the meeting. So how you are thinking about things will actually be closer, will be a more appropriate response.

Now, this is not how we are used to functioning. We’re used to, particularly in meetings, we shut down the body, we shut down the emotions. We have trot out our intellect, and we all know how well that works. Why? Because the intellect is always in service of our emotions anyway. And because everybody has shut down their emotions, nobody knows what emotions they’re feeling. And so, nobody knows what they’re saying. Now, have you ever had that experience in a meeting?

Student: Sure.

Ken: [Laughs] Right. What would a meeting be like? You have a meeting coming up soon?

Student: No.

Ken: Oh, yes, you do! [Laughter] Okay, what I’m going to suggest is at this meeting, you make a point of making everybody be in their emotions and see how the meeting goes. You don’t have to worry about getting fired. You can have fun.

Find a practice that works for you

Student: I don’t know if I’m changing a whole subject or not, but I want to know something about number 36.

Ken: Go ahead.

Student: How does this whole process here differ from just being in a state of constant mahamudra, which then makes it feel like something I can’t do because it’s too hard?

Ken: Do you think you could do this?

Student: Do what?

Ken: What it says in number 36.

Student: Sometimes I can do it.

Ken: Well, okay. If you think you can do this sometimes, we’re not going to call it mahamudra.

Student: Why? I don’t get it?

Ken: Because if you call it mahamudra, you think you can’t do it.

Student: Oh, okay. I’ll take that. [Laughter]

Ken: The reason that we have many different forms of instruction is that one way of describing how to practice works for one person, and another way of describing how to practice works for another person. So, if you find a way that speaks to you and you can use, then just do it. And don’t worry about what it’s called, or whether it’s this or that. If it speaks to you, do it to connect with it.

Student: So, what I was doing was bringing up words without putting any kind of juice into it, in a sense. I wanted to call it by a fancy name, or something, I don’t know.

Ken: But we don’t need to call it by a fancy name. Shakespeare said: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” So, you can call it a fancy Latin name, but it doesn’t change the scent of the rose, does it?

Student: No.

Ken: There are all kinds of instructions, and some are expressed very simply, and some are expressed in very technical language, and some speak to one kind of person, some speak to another. The main thing is: “Do you know how to work with experience? And how to experience it? And if you know how to do that, that’s fine, whatever you call it. Anybody else?

Nava: 37: Direct all the goodness generated by this effort to awakening. Well, I think I know what it means after we meditate. How do you do it every moment?

Ken: Well, whenever you feel you’ve done something good, then just say, “Okay, there was something good. Let me experience that having done something good. And let me experience it so that I don’t experience attachment, pride, whatever.” Just experience it. And that way it does the same transformation process and contributes to the awakening. And one way of doing that is whenever you experience something good, you say, “Well, whatever good has come of this, may all of that good go to others.” You let it go completely. But in order to let it go completely, you actually have to experience it.

And you do that moment to moment. You don’t have to wait until a certain time has passed. You see a homeless person, you give them something, you do it right then. I was at the airport today, and I flew in on El Al, and there was, I don’t know if he was a rabbi, but an elderly Jewish person was trying to get a suitcase out of the carousel. He was having difficulty, so I just reached in and pulled it out, and gave it to him. And you direct that goodness to awakening, just mentally make a note of it.

Nava: Is it in order, first of all, to make a note that you did it, or not to hold on to the feeling that you did it?

Ken: Well, you did it. Okay? It’s not really so much not holding onto the feeling that you did it. It’s that it arises. And rather than say, “Oh, I did something good,” you just say, “Okay, that was good.” It’s more not making a big deal out of it but not ignoring it either. I mean, when you do something good, how do you feel? What do you experience when you do something good?

Nava: Well, you feel good.

Ken: Okay. Now, what happens when you move right into that experience? That feeling good experience.

Nava: I feel good. And that’s it.

Ken: Yes. And when you move right into the feeling good experience. What happens?

Nava: Then it ends.

Ken: Yeah, exactly. And you kind of wake up in a certain sense. Yeah, that’s what they’re talking about here. You feel good, and you move into it, and then you kind of realize it’s no big deal, but you’re a little more awake. Right? But you’re not holding onto anything now, are you? No. So it’s not the mental idea, or the intellectual idea, “I’m not going to hold onto this.” You just move right into the experience. And it has the same effect with good that it has with negative reactions. It transforms it into higher level of attention.

Nava: Yes, I understand that. But you actually need to give it away. I mean, you do it and you actually need to give it. There is a point here that you need to do that step, right?

Ken: Yeah, that’s right. And what’s being said here is, all experience, you transform it as it arises, good, bad, whatever.

Student: So, you mean consciously give it away?

Ken: No, that’s not what Nava was pointing to. If you do something, some kind of virtuous action and you feel good about it, move into the experience of feeling good, and any attachment to it will naturally release right there. You’re not holding onto it. Now it’s the next thing. Now, if you’re not able to do that, then you mentally give it away, which tends to eliminate the tendency to attach to it. But if you can just move into the experience, and let it release, that’s the higher level of working with it. Okay. Susan?

Susan: Kind of along the same line, would you say, are the 37 practices a description or a set of instructions? Because I find that I’m able to make a lot of these efforts that are described naturally out of what’s going on in my own practice. But there also seems to be a conscious effort with some of these. So that’s my question.

Ken: Well, there will be a conscious effort with some of them. You have to start somewhere.

Susan: That’s the training aspect.

Ken: That’s the training aspect. And as you train in them more and more, they become more and more natural. That’s why it’s called practice.

Susan: So, it’s sort of a circular relationship between whatever awareness one develops and whatever naturally arises out of the awareness that’s generated in your practice. And then there’s also consciously making an effort to work in specific ways.

Ken: Yes, you constantly make an effort to work in specific ways, otherwise what is not conscious in this will just run the show, which means our reactive patterns will just run the show, which is what we’re trying to get out of in the first place. So you make a conscious effort. Now, in the beginning, it feels like an effort, but as people have described here this evening, as you do this over and over again, then this way of relating to experience becomes more and more natural, and things become clearer as a consequence.

Susan: Okay, thank you.

Know what is happening in your own experience

Ken: Any other questions on this? Okay. 36:

In short, in everything you do,
Know what is happening in your mind.
By being constantly present and alert
You bring about what helps others.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 36

This is quite subtle. It’s not immediately obvious. How, by knowing what is going on in your own mind—and mind here should be understood as experience—by knowing your own experience, how does that produce what helps others?

When you know what is happening in your own experience, your own experience is going to include the experience of the interaction with anybody you’re interacting with. And if you’re completely clear about what is arising in your own experience, you’re going to know precisely how that interaction either is or isn’t in balance, just by being completely in your own experience.

And then you’ll make the appropriate adjustments. And this happens very, very naturally. But it doesn’t involve having to speculate or figure out what’s going on in the other person, by relying completely on your own experience. And this is something I’ve done with many people in individual consultations. I also do it quite a lot in my business work. In the business, it’s very pronounced, they always talk about the other person. “They’re doing this, and they’re doing that, and they’re doing this, and they’re doing … What do I do?”

And I’ll say, “Well, what are you experiencing?”

“I don’t want to talk about what I’m experiencing. I want to talk about how to fix them!” That’s what I usually get.

And I say, “Well, what are you experiencing?”

“I’m angry!” Okay. And we gradually go into that. And as they sort out what they’re experiencing, then other ways of interacting with the person who’s irritating them begins to open up. And they’re often quite surprised at how they figure out what to do without ever actually thinking about the other person, just by paying attention to their own experience.

There’s one person who was head of a large organization, who is under a lot of attack. And he was saying he was experiencing a great deal of stress, and he was concerned about his health. And he was basically a healthy person. So I asked him to really move into the experience of his body, and asked his body how it was doing in this. And he was rather surprised to find that his body was saying, “I’m fine. I just wish you’d stop beating me up.” And he realized that he was beating his own body up because of his emotional resistance to the various attacks, and the implications of the attacks. And that actually his body was just fine. It was very interesting, because when he got there, he realized it was all at the mental and emotional level that the struggle was taking place. Physically, he was fine, and it caused him quite a bit of consternation, because it meant that he had to relate to those attacks in a different way.

So, when you’re feeling attacked, when you’re having a difficult time with other people, ask yourself, “What am I experiencing?” And you may be quite surprised at the possibilities that open up when you ask yourself that question.

Student reflections on working with verses 34-36

Ken: Okay. Let’s turn to the last four verses. I think we’ve covered that. Are there any questions? We were just focusing on the meeting. In these three verses, was there anything coming up in terms of how you actually work with them in daily life? Or when you meditated on them, really felt them? Was there anything coming up for you? How many of you crush reactive emotions as soon as they arise? Why not?

Student: I was just going to say on these two verses in particular, they seem completely abstract to me. They seem utterly impossible. My reaction to them is a few hundred more lifetimes, maybe?

Ken: Why do you wait?

Student: [Pause] I didn’t experience it that way. It just strikes me as impossibly difficult.

Ken: I understand. Why do you wait?

Student: I’m stumped.

Ken: [Laughs] Okay. You write up reports for businesses, right?

Student: More or less. Yes.

Ken: So I’m going to suggest you write up a report here. You start with one a day, and see if you can move that up to two, and up to five, and up to ten. Reactive emotions. Do you have any favorite reactive emotions?

Student: All of them.

Ken: What’s your favorite?

Student: The one that you just brought up about when you’re feeling attacked. I think feeling wronged and defensive is a really good one.

Ken: Excellent one, excellent one. Okay. [Laughter] So, you make as your practice, whenever that emotion arises, to experience it. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances, it doesn’t matter how justified you feel in the feeling of being attacked. You’re just going to say, “I’m feeling attacked.” And you move right into that experience. So, you just work with that one emotion. That would be excellent. That’s how you work with verse 35. Okay?

And when you’re doing that all the time, so that whenever you’re feeling attacked, you just move right into it and it just transforms, then you pick another of your favorite emotions. Now, yes, what you say is true. If you try to do this with absolutely everything, it feels impossible. So, what do you do? You start somewhere. And that’s why I asked, why do you wait? It’s very, very difficult to do it all at once. But you can always start with one. And if you find that that one’s too difficult and you’re overwhelmed by that, then you say, “Well, I’m going to experience the first reactive emotion each day, then I won’t worry about it for the rest of the day.” But the first one.

This is what I do with people who tell me that they’re always late for appointments. I’ll say, “That’s fine. Just make your first appointment on time.” “What?” “Just make your first appointment of the day on time.” “What about the other ones?” “Don’t worry about the other ones now. Just make the first one.” And this is a very useful technique in practice. If you feel overwhelmed by something, pick something really, really specific, and do that. That’s often the way in. Okay, that help? Good. Anybody else? Practice meditation, actual practice. Dave first.

Dave: I think if our practice was totally dependent on our own efforts, on developing attention, and putting these behaviors into practice and attention, it would be impossible. But I sense, like Peri did a couple of weeks ago, that by practice we’re not only developing, as you put it, proclivities for further practice, but we’re waking up something that’s already there. That may sound very mysterious, but to me that resonates even on an emotional level. But there is a power. I mentioned Gurdjieff earlier, his term for practice was self remembering. We don’t use the word self here, but remembering is a very interesting term, because it’s not just remembering as we normally use it, it is re-membering. [Break in recording]

Catherine: God. I feel so ashamed now. [Laughs]

Ken: Move into the experience. [Laughter] No, seriously. Feel into it. What do you experience? Body.

Catherine: Chest tightening, caving.

Ken: Okay.

Catherine: Unraveling.

Ken: Stomach?

Catherine: No.

Ken: Skin.

Catherine: Tingling.

Ken: Okay. Feel the tingling. Temperature?

Catherine: Rising.

Ken: [Laughter] Let me know when it gets 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay, so you feel caving, chest tingling, hot. Sticky? Texture?

Catherine: Sticky.

Ken: Okay. Now move right into the experience. Emotions.

Catherine: It’s starting to lift a little.

Ken: Well, you don’t want it to lift yet. You want to move into it.

Catherine: Emotions. Sadness. Sadness.

Ken: What else?

Catherine: I deserve it.

Ken: Okay. That’s a story.

Catherine: Okay. Sadness.

Ken: Sadness. What else?

Catherine: Shame.

Ken: Shame. Well, we know that, any anger?

Catherine: I’m afraid to feel anger.

Ken: Ah, feel some anger.

Catherine: It’s making me feel a little better. [Laughter]

Ken: Feel the anger and the sadness together.

Catherine: That’s really hard for me.

Ken: I don’t care.

Catherine: They’re kind of cancelling each other out.

Ken: And what do you experience?

Catherine: More calm.

Ken: Interesting. You got the drift?

Catherine: Yes. That’s the remedy, then.

Ken: That’s how you do it.

Catherine: Anger is the remedy for me.

Ken: No! [Laughter] All of it is the remedy.

Catherine: Okay, but this is good. Thank you!

Ken: Okay. It’s all there, right? Yes. Usually when we’re feeling sad, there’s also some anger. Usually when we’re feeling shame, there is a great deal of anger. We want to whack whatever shamed us. But if we don’t allow ourselves to feel it, then we can’t experience the whole thing. And if we can’t experience the whole thing, it won’t release. That’s why I was naming all of the body sensations we went through.

But when you go up to things like, “I deserve it,” that’s a story. And the function of the story is to take you out of the feeling and stick you into a world where things can never change. And they’re always going to be that way.

Catherine: Okay.

Ken: Is this helpful to people? You recognize this one? And you can accuse me of being heartless, but it isn’t true.

Student: Oh, I know you’re not.

Ken: It has happened before. Okay. Any other questions about actual practice, how you work with this? Now you notice this is not about meditation periods at all. What he’s saying in verse 35 is when reactive emotions arise, move right into them. Verse 36, what he’s saying, know what you’re experiencing moment by moment. That’s how you create the conditions so that whatever you do is helpful to others. And verse 37 is, whenever you feel good about something, move into the experience of it—of feeling good—so it releases, and you’re not holding onto anything.

Dedicating it mentally is the second-best way of doing it. The best way is just to move right into the experience of it. And it transforms, and you’re clear, and you’re not holding onto anything. You know what I mean?

Closing verses

Ken: Okay. Now last four verses:

Following the teachings of the holy ones
On what is written in the sutras, tantras and commentaries, I
set out these thirty-seven practices of bodhisattva
For those who intend to train in this path.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, closing verse

So, he is just summarizing what he’s done, and he’s saying that he’s relied on his own studies. He’s basically saying, “This is okay. I may not have the intelligence and education of others, and they may not be written in fancy poetic form full of abstruse literary illusions.” Tibetans wrote poetry using Indian literary illusions, made it a little difficult to follow.

But because I relied on the teachings of the sutras and the revered
I am confident The Practices of Bodhisattva are sound.

closing verse

“However, I may have made mistakes.” And so, he asks … I use the revered here. What were the translations that you had? It’s usually the superior ones or the noble ones, or something like that.

Susan: Beg the excellent …

Ken: Yeah. The word is ‘phags pa (pron. pak pa) in Tibetan, which is the Tibetan translation of Arya, the superior ones. I decided to put the emphasis in a different way rather than objectively regarding them as superior. These are the ones that we revere. So, it’s putting it into our experience. That’s why I chose that word for it. You follow?

Student: Is this really that straightforward that he’s just writing the way he feels? Or is this more like your explanation of the first few paragraphs that this was the standard form?

Ken: This is a standard form, also, that you give a short summary, and you name your sources, and you ask for forgiveness for any mistakes.

I ask the revered to tolerate
Any mistakes—contradictions, non sequiturs, and such.
(And finally, the dedication)

From the goodness of this work, may all beings,
Through the supreme mind that is awake to what is ultimately and apparently true,
Not rest in any limiting position—existence or peace:
May they be like Lord All Seeing.

closing verses

Which is going back to Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of awakened compassion, which this whole verse text is dedicated to at the beginning. So, this completes our study of the 37 practices. Any questions on the last four?

Susan: What did they use for Lord?

Ken: Here? I think it’s mgon po (pron. gömpo). Yeah, spyan ras gzigs mgon (pron. Chenrezi gön). There are three words, all of which are often translated by Lord. The one that is most explicitly religious is the Sanskrit term, bhagavan or bhagavati. So, you see that in The Perfection of Wisdom for instance. And it has the meaning of what enriches and what destroys, which is like a king. But it’ll only be used with respect to religious people like buddha, or high level bodhisattvas, and so forth. You wouldn’t use it even for high level bodhisattvas, it’d be really only used for buddhas when you’re referring to that level.

The second word, which is the word that’s used here is mgon po (pron. gömpo). It means Lord, but has very definitely the sense of a protector, and can be used not only religiously, but could also be used to some extent secularly, and is used to often refer to the protectors, which is a class of deity. And then you have the third word, it’s the word rje (pron. jé), which is more of a title, or comes up in jetsun, which is how Milarepa is referred to. And it can be both a religious title or a secular title, an aristocratic title, and carries the sense of nobility. So any of those three words could be translated into English by Lord. We don’t have a particularly rich vocabulary. If we’d stepped back a couple of centuries, then we would’ve been fine with all kinds of words, but many of those words have just fallen out of usage for us. Does that answer your question?

Susan: Yeah, I guess I was wondering if it was like a religious word here.

Ken: Well, it is primarily religious. And you often have Chenrezi referred to as a kind of Lord protector because the word Chenrezi, or Avalokiteshvara, means he who looks over the world, so there’s that kind of protector idea implicit in Chenrezi. So, it is part of his name in a certain sense. Other questions about these last four? Anything? Okay.

Preparation for the bodhisattva vow

Ken: Next week we’re going to be doing the bodhisattva vow. We’ll start at our usual time, 7:30, and that’ll be fine. We’re finishing on time for once. Anything else?

Student: Any suggestions on our preparation for the bodhisattva vow and our taking it?

Ken: The more good you do, the better basis you have for the vow. So if you spend this week going out and doing good things as part of saying, “I’m doing this good in order to generate a basis of goodness in myself for the vow,” that’s a very good thing to do. Pardon?

Student: I just said, “Oh,” because it sounds like you’re telling us to think about something.

Ken: Well, I often do. It would also be very good for you to sit quite deeply with the question, “Why am I doing this?” And just keep peeling that down. Of course, one consequence of that is nobody shows up next week. [Laughter] One possible consequence. Any other questions before we break?

Student: Is there anything we should read about the vow?

Ken: Anything you should read about the vow.

Student: Like an article anywhere?

Ken: [Pause] I can’t think of anything offhand, but then I haven’t been looking at what’s out there at all. Any of the larger books on Tibetan Buddhism, I’m thinking of Treasury of Perfect Qualities or Jewel Ornament of Liberation and The Words of My Perfect Teacher. These all have—and many other books have—sections on the bodhisattva vow, and it won’t hurt at all to look at those.

Just to review—and we went over some of this last week—there’s awakening to what is ultimately true, and there’s awakening to what is apparently true. In terms of awakening to what is apparently true, there is the intention to awaken and there’s the will to awaken. And you’ll usually see those referred to as the vow of aspiration and the vow of engagement. But another way to think about them is that one is intention and the other is will. In intention you’re saying, “I’m going to go in this direction,” with will you do it, and whatever you encounter, you’re going to use it to do it. So, at the level of will, it doesn’t matter what arises, you’re going to use it to wake up. So, it’s quite a strong commitment.

And you’ll also find three ways that you can form this vow, form this intention. They’re known as kingly bodhicitta in which you become a king, and you lead everybody to awakening. And then there’s shepherd-like awakening mind. And it’s called that because you push everybody before you, like sheep, so they all get awakened first, and then you get awakened. And then there’s ferryman-like awakening mind, in which it’s like you have a boat, and you all cross over at the same time. So maybe one or other of those strikes some resonance.

Actually, in terms of reading, I do have a recommendation. Read the first and tenth chapters of the Bodhicaryavatara. The first chapter is about recognizing awakening mind and how wonderful it is. And the tenth chapter—and you’ll recognize many of the verses that we will use in the ceremony because they’re taken from the tenth chapter—is a long list of aspirations arising from awakening mind. So that would be very good. The first and tenth chapters.

Catherine: If we don’t have that book, can we get it on the internet?

Ken: It depends on your ingenuity, Catherine.

Catherine: I know. How do you spell it?

Ken: Oh, you can get it from somebody. It’s a long word. But lots of people have the book. Any other questions before we close?