Past lives?

Art: Yesterday, I was left with the impression you were going to say a few words about past lives, and I wanted to make sure that I heard correctly, and that it was going to happen.

Ken: That was another life. [Laughter] That’s a good question.

Art: Not satisfying.

Ken: Yeah. I don’t know anything about past lives at all, seriously.

Art: How should we read reports about the Buddha and his awakening and his vision of his past lives? Or how would you, how can you read that?

Ken: Oh, you put me in an ethical quandary here. There’s only one way out. What difference does it make how I do it? [Laughter] What difference does it make to you what I do with it?

Art: Because it’s something I reflect on often. And I think that maybe if I understood how you approach it, it might help how I approach it.

Ken: I have no such confidence. I’m going to have to leave this one to you.

Art: That’s interesting. Can you tell me more? [Laughter]

Ken: Here we go! Though, the correct one is, “What leads you to say that?” It’s your life, and I can tell you the result of my own reflections, but I don’t think it has much to do with practice. It’s just where I’ve come to. My hesitation is that by describing where I am, you may use that as a bouncing board, or you may just adopt it. If you adopt it, that’s not particularly helpful to you, you’re just following somebody else. That’s what creates the ethical quandary for me. If you’re going to use it as a bouncing board, you don’t need it anyway, cause it’s right there for you to bounce off anyway.

Art: I know when to stop.

Ken: Before that, that’s how you get out of an ethical quandary. The point here is don’t pick up what isn’t yours.

Belief in reincarnation

Art: It seems that a lot of the reading I’ve been doing in various Buddhist magazines and books have indicated that for one to have a serious practice or to make significant gains in one’s practice, that you need to believe in reincarnation. That stirred up a lot of reaction in me. Once I let that settle, I was wondering if that was true or not, what your thoughts or opinions were on it?

Ken: What kind of reaction did it stir up in you?

Art: Well, let’s see if I can answer this in the shortest way possible. I was raised Roman Catholic. In my grade school, I went to a parochial school and was taught by nuns. In my high school years, I got involved in an evangelical group. Both of those two different experiences seemed to have a lot of shoulds and shouldn’ts, and a lot of doctrine involving how you needed to behave and act in order to not break commandments. There just was a lot of dogma that got in the way. So when I hear in the Buddhist texts about accumulating merit and things like that, it really just sort of brought back all that—the feelings of the trappings of the other religion. And it just brought up a tremendous amount of resistance in me.

Ken: There are two things that I may be discerning here. One is, if I can put it somewhat glibly, the building up your bank account in the sky aspect. And the other is having a belief imposed on your belief system, imposed on you or having to adapt to a given belief system.

Let’s take the belief system first. Why do you feel you have to accept any sort of belief that somebody else has said, “If you want to practice this, you have to believe this.” Why do you feel you have to do that?

Art: Well, on one hand, I don’t feel like I have to. But for the first three or four years of developing a practice, I intentionally didn’t even look at these things because I wanted to just focus on meditating and doing the practice. The benefit that I’ve realized from that—how it’s impacted my life and everything I’ve taken from that—has been so worthwhile that as I look into it more, I’m beginning to wonder, well, if they were right about this, maybe they’re right about that. And—

Ken: Okay. But it seems to me that what you’ve been doing here is you’re getting some instruction, and then you are working with that instruction, and you’re having certain experiences. And those experiences are leading you to understand things about yourself and life in a new light. It sounds like up to this point, you haven’t been accepting—if somebody said, “Well, this is true” you haven’t said, “Okay, I’ll just believe that.” You’ve been testing it. Why don’t you continue with that approach?

Art: That’s certainly my intention, but I don’t know … Some of the material I’ve been reading has made it fairly clear that this is the one thing one needs to accept at face value or on faith.

Ken: What do you think about that?

Art: Because of my past, it is so hard for me to look at that with an open mind. It brings up all this reactivity, a really strong, negative reaction that—

Ken: My suggestion here is that you be curious about the reaction you’re experiencing. I could offer you my opinion on this, but that’s just my opinion. It’s what I’ve come to through my own practice and reflection. I think what’s more important than just getting my opinion, is that you explore this and see what makes sense to you because in the end, that’s all you can really rely on.

There’s some emotional reaction there. It brings up what sounds like some unpleasant memories. You know from your practice how to stay present in difficult experiences. So what about exploring that with the tools that you have?

Art: That resonates with me. I’m just wondering, how can I then do this with as much of an open mind as I can possibly do, if I’m finding myself still slightly agitated or having this negative reaction. How do I—

Ken: I’m not sure how the fact that you’re having a negative reaction means that you don’t have an open mind. I’m not sure how you’re putting those two together.

Art: If the thoughts running through my mind are just a bunch of bull, or it’s just not true.

Ken: Right. What do you experience in your body? You remember, we’ve talked about in the past, we have our physical experience, we have our emotional experience, and we have our cognitive experience, which I call the stories. What you’re telling me are the stories, but that’s only one third. Suppose, I were to say to you, “Yes, Art, you have to believe in reincarnation.” What happens in your body?

Art: There’s a strong sense of rebellion about being told what to do.

Ken: Those are conclusions. I want the actual physical experiences.

Art: I feel like I want to stomp my foot on the ground or throw something, there’s agitation and intention.

Ken: Are there contractions in your body?

Art: Yeah, a tightness. In the chest, in the arms, and in the calves.

Ken: Okay. So, just experience those, just breathe experiencing them. Don’t try to make them go away. Don’t try to change them, just experience them.

Art: Wow. There is such a charge there. That it’s hard not to either suppress it or go on the ride with it.

Ken: Okay. What I want to suggest to you in your practice here, because I’m coming at this not from a theoretical level, but from a practice level, there’s a charge here as you’ve just described. Very gently just sit with as much of the experience of the charge as you can, which may be one-tenth of it. It may be one-hundredth of it. You don’t have to experience it all right at the beginning. You’re going to gradually build up your capacity to experience more and more. We’re just talking about the physical charge right now.

As you do this, you’re going to become aware of emotional material connected with it. It’s very possible that there’ll be some anger, some sadness, or some hurt, and it’ll be easy to get, fall into one or the other, but you keep opening just as I’ve talked before about being in the whole of the physical experience, being all of the facets of the emotional experience. Then you’re going to have a lot more information to actually be in that experience, because what I sense here, and I may be jumping the gun a bit, is that you’d like to get some kind of answer from me so you don’t have to feel this charge.

Art: Yeah, I think so.

Ken: That’s just going to be totally unhelpful here. Okay. Did that give you something to work on in your process?

Art: Yes.

Intellectual questions: a way of avoiding experience

Ken: Next month or at some point, it’d be very interesting to follow this up to the next step. What I want to point out here is that when these kinds of questions come up, which are basically intellectual or conceptual questions, they’re almost always a way of avoiding something—an actual experience in us.

The point of Buddhist practice, at least from my perspective, is to be willing and to be able to experience whatever’s arising. That’s why I took this approach with you because there’s an experience here, which is difficult. Can I experience this? Then we bring the tools and our training to bear on that with a view to just experiencing it. And when we can do that, then we can see what questions remain afterwards.

Art: Thank you.

Doing good now to make the next life better?

Student: It’s quite apparent to me how our actions create a certain kind of consequence in the moment this life, this here now. I did an extensive program with some teachers from the Gelug tradition and there was a lot of emphasis placed on creating good karma now, so that your rebirth would be a good one to benefit other beings.

It has made me question what am I really trying to do with this life? I mean, in and of itself, being a kinder human being would be quite a lot, to be able to let go of reactive emotions would be an incredible achievement, to understand suffering. But it comes down to—are we really looking for the next life to do the good now, trying to make the next life better?

Ken: Your question reminds me of something that Stephen Bachelor said which I like. [Paraphrasing from The Faith to Doubt] In its institutional forms, Buddhism provides very powerful answers to questions of the spirit, but sometimes the power of the answers overwhelms the stammering voice which is asking the questions.

Karma and rebirth as an answer to a question

Ken: The whole formulation of karma—previous lives experienced in this life, future lives, etc.—this is an answer to a question. Do you know what the question is? It’s like jeopardy. What is the question? Do you know what the question is that that whole way of thinking and viewing experience is the answer to?

Student: No, that’s why I’m fumbling. That’s why I’m perplexed. Even as I’m attempting to ask you a question, it’s unclear what my question is.

Ken: I’m going to suggest that the question that that is an answer to is, “Why are things the way they are?” Because we see people who are rich and beautiful and famous who are arguably jerks and don’t seem to deserve it. And we see people who are noble and virtuous, struggling with extremely difficult lives, and all kinds of combinations. And we can’t make head or tail of it.

So we look for an explanation as to why are things the way they are. This is a very elaborate, very detailed, very comprehensive explanation, but it sounds like it doesn’t answer your questions. What are your questions?

What are your own questions?

Ken: You see, there’s a big danger in trying to assimilate the answers to somebody else’s questions. So what questions is the stammering voice inside you asking?

Student: Where am I putting my devotion?

Ken: Where do I put my devotion? That’s an interesting question.

Student: That’s it. That’s a new question for me this morning. It’s one that feels fairly big and rather deep. And, perhaps, one I need to hang out with for awhile.

Ken: I think that’s a very good idea. It’s very important to become clear about what our own questions are. In the earlier part of what you were saying, one of the questions I heard was—what am I actually doing here anyway? And now you’ve added this question, where do I put my devotion, or possibly in another form, what do I trust? If you take those questions as the basis for your practice, then you know that your practice is going to be relevant to you.

Student: Thank you.

If there is no self, what reincarnates?

Art: If there is no self, what reincarnates?

Ken: Recall being really angry.

Art: Okay. I’m there.

Ken: Okay. Let that go. Now recall being really happy or joyful.

Art: Okay.

Ken: What’s the common thread? [Pause] What reincarnated? [Pause] There was anger. There was joy. If I asked you, did you experience anger and then did you experience joy? I’m sure you would say, yes. What reincarnated?

Art: The container—

Ken: The container?

Art: … that had that experience.

Ken: Tell me about this container. I didn’t know experience came in containers. Do it again, but this time really paying attention. What experiences the anger or experiences the joy? What’s the connection?

Art: There’s, for lack of a better phrase, an awareness, other than me, that had that experience.

Ken: This is very interesting. In your question “If there is no self—no ‘I’—then what reincarnates?” you’re saying it’s something other than you that has these experiences. How is that possible? I thought you said “I’m there,” and now your saying it’s something other than you.

Art: Yeah. I don’t know how to describe it other than that. There’s an awareness, a type of consciousness, a witness, or what have you, that is a thread, that had that experience, that allows you to recall that.

Ken: Where were you?

Art: Well, in the moments I was thinking of, I was not terribly present, and really angry at something, or on the other hand, I was at the other end of the spectrum, really happy and excited.

Ken: So, what’s the relationship between the “I” that was angry, and the “I” that was happy?” Same or different?

Art: There’s a really strong urge to say they’re the same. I have a really good narrative that can take you from point A to point B. But there is also a part of me that understands—those are two different people.

Ken: Okay. No self. Yeah, we use a designation “I” that we say has these different experiences, but there is no thing that corresponds to that. It’s a way of talking, right?

Art: Yes.

Ken: So, nothing reincarnates there, nothing from the first state goes to the second state. That’s simply a way of talking. Does that answer your question?

Art: Yes, it did. Thank you.