In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind.

May 9, 2010

Making war with experience

Ken: May 9th, Against the Stream in Hollywood. Today’s Mother’s Day. I’d prepared a few remarks, but I’m not sure that they’re relevant. If they are, I’ll just work them in. But what I prefer to do, as many of you know, is, start with your questions. Now, some of you came in a little bit late, but as I said, you come here because you find practicing with the group helpful. And you also come here, probably with the vague idea that, “Maybe I’ll learn something, or something will be useful, so I’m interested in learning.” What are you interested in learning? And then we can talk about that. So, we have a microphone here, and you can let the world know exactly what you’re interested in learning. It’s all right, we keep it quite anonymous.

Student: The advice you gave this gentleman about falling asleep during meditation? Would the same advice follow if you were dealing with negativity rearing its head a lot?

Ken: Well, you’ll have to forgive me, but I’m a bear of very little brain. What’s negativity?

Student: I’m sometimes obsessed with work, traffic, relationships, world problems, things like that.

Ken: So there are a lot of thoughts about work, traffic, various other things flying through your mind. Okay. So what’s the problem?

Student: They seem to take over.

Ken: Okay. So they take over. What’s the problem?

Student: Well, I would like some—

Ken: Why?

Student: Because they end up spilling over into what I have for relationships with those four or five subjects.

Ken: Sorry, I didn’t hear the last part there.

Student: They seem to spill over into how I interact with those other four or five subjects.

Ken: I don’t follow here. You’re a very articulate person, you’re not doing a very good job today.

Student: Can I ask? If I get obsessed with something where I work that I can’t seem to either deal with, or it just keeps staying right there and I’m not dealing with it, I want to turn off the chatter.

Ken: Oh. Okay, that helps. Thank you. There isn’t an on-off switch, is there?

Student: Not that I found yet. No.

Ken: Well. Since there isn’t an on-off switch, then there’s nothing you can do to turn it off.

Student: So I deal with it, right?

Ken: Well, this is why I asked you, “What’s negativity?” We have experience that’s arising all the time. Many of the problems we have in life, many of the struggles, come or arise because we want what we’re experiencing now, or how we are experiencing things, we want them to be different. Most of the time, the way we want them to be different is, we want whatever’s going on out there to change. And we think, “If all of that changes, then I’ll be happy inside,” or at peace, or free, or whatever word we want to use.

But the world is very uncooperative. I’ve found the world to be very uncooperative. It doesn’t change when I want it to change. Do you have the same experience? Okay. I just thought it was me. So, one of the ways that I found works a little better here is, how can I experience this and be at peace at the same time?

So here you have thoughts screaming about work, and traffic, and heaven knows what else is going on in your life. And there’s this cacophony going on in your head. Or, I’m not sure it’s in your head, but that’s what we say, right? So, rather than trying to make it different, that’s what’s going on. He goes to sleep; you have this cacophony. How can I experience this and be at peace at the same time?

Well at first, that sounds like a completely insane question. There’s all this noise. How do you expect me to be at peace with all this noise? Right? Insane question. That’s why this is a very good place to meditate, because there’s lots of traffic noise here. Now, during the meditation period, how many of you are bothered by the traffic noise? I had the same problem. I moved into an apartment several years ago, and it’s just off La Cienega. There’s a corner store, and then there’s an alleyway, and then there’s my house. You think this traffic noise is bad? I thought, “Ah.” And so for the first little while it was like, “Okay, here I am meditating.” Vroom, vroom, , vroom, vroom. It just goes on, and on, and on. And there’s the police sirens, and the motorbikes, and the trucks, and everything just to add to the mix.

Well, I could go out to La Cienega and put up a big sign saying, “Stop. Meditation in progress.” But it wouldn’t work. I might get in trouble with the LA City Council, or something, if I really pushed that one. So, you sit. You just let it all be there. And that’s one of the capabilities that we either build, or it’s one of the possibilities that we discover. Oh, I can just be here in this mess.

If you go on to YouTube and you type in Stephanie Nash and Shinzen Young, you’ll find an interview with Shinzen Young, who’s a teacher who’s been in LA for centuries. But in this interview with Stephanie, he describes—and this is completely over the top as far as I’m concerned—he describes his experience at a Zen monastery in Japan, where they were doing sesshin, which is really intense meditation. And it was hot and humid, there were all kinds of flies and mosquitoes, and he wasn’t really used to meditation. So his legs were really, really hurting, and he said it was just horrible. It was just really, really horrible.

These sesshins are usually a week long, sometimes ten days. Sometime around the sixth or seventh day, he just found himself in this stuff, with his legs hurting, and the mosquitoes biting, and hot and humid and sweating. And, I think there was some noise, or something, going on, too. And he was utterly quiet inside. And, he went, “Wow. I didn’t know that was possible.” So you might just look that up, because he describes it much better than I’m describing it.

The big thing here—I don’t know whether Shinzen takes this approach, but this is what I’ve come to through my own practice—is not to make war with what is arising in your experience. Because, it’s very difficult to separate you and your experience, so it’s kind of like fighting with yourself. And whenever you fight with yourself, one of you loses. And so there you are, and there’s all this noise. Okay. And you might think of fall leaves just blowing around. And you don’t try to change it; you don’t try to make it quiet. You say, “Okay. This is how it is today. So I’m just going to sit here and experience this.”

And, you get tugged off in one thought, tugged off on another, and you come back. And strangely, I’m not going to say this is going to happen every time. I don’t think it happens every time. But, as you do this over and over again, your relationship with experience begins to change. And all of that stuff’s going on and you can just sit there quite quietly anyway. Not observing it, I don’t buy that observing mind stuff. Never found that worked for me. This is why I say forget everything people have said, just don’t pay attention to it. And I’m actually quite serious about this. Because meditation is how you are discovering your way to be free, essentially, free from being bothered by that cacophony. Right? Now there’s lots of useful experience and there’s lots of useful teachings.

How many of you have ever tried to paint or play a musical instrument? So most, okay. Now, we hear somebody play a musical instrument and we go, “Oh, I’d love to play like that.” Are we ever going to play like that? No, because that’s how that person plays. And it’s the same with painting. “Oh, I’d love to be able to paint like that.” But if we pick up a paintbrush, and I’m hopeless at that, or we play a musical instrument, piano, or guitar, or violin, doesn’t matter. The only way we’re going to play it is the way we’re going to play it. And there are lots of things we can learn. We can learn by imitating somebody else and see what that’s like. But in the end, it’s going to come down to how we’re going to play it. And we’re going to make the music we’re going to make. We’re not going to make anything else.

It’s the same as meditation. Somebody meditates like that, so, “I’d like to be able to do that.” Maybe we can develop that capacity, but that may or may not be our path. And you’re going to build up certain abilities in the same way with the musical instrument. You know, you practice all the scales, and you get those skills and abilities going. But in the end, it’s about how you’re going to live, and how you’re going to be with you.

So I think it’s a very good way to approach meditation. It’s just, “Okay, here I am. How do I experience this?” You may find that, if you’re playing a sport, building up some physical strength is helpful. You may find with meditation that building up some strength in your attention is helpful. And if you do skateboarding, for instance, it’s really good to be flexible. It’s very difficult to skateboard if you’re not flexible. So, you might do some exercises which increase your flexibility. Now, people very rarely do this with meditation, but it’s a really good thing. You meditate in really different places and see what that’s like. What’s it like meditating under a waterfall? What’s it like meditating on top of a mountain? What’s it like meditating at the corner of Hollywood and Vine?

I was doing some free form dance a few years ago. And one time the person who was leading this put on heavy metal-techno-industrial-rap, or something like that, just argh. And she said, “Okay, dance.” And everybody’s going, “What? This is just noise!” But she was teaching us versatility. So, that’s enough of an answer to that question, I think. Okay. Anybody else? I don’t believe it. I know you have questions. What about yours?

Mothers and the four immeasurables

Student: I just want to know what you were going to say about Mother’s Day.

Ken: Oh, you want to know what I was going to say about Mother’s Day? Well, why do you want to know that?

Student: Just curious.

Ken: Oh, no. That kills cats. You have to go a step further than that.

Student: I like to listen. I have questions. But I like to work them out.

Ken: Your own way.

Student: Through my own experience. But, I’m curious what it is that you are prepared to talk about today.

Ken: All right. Well, I am going to start off in a very strange place. This is a book of poetry by Robinson Jeffers, who’s a fairly dark guy.

“And what wul ye leive to your ain mither dear?
My deir son, now tell me O.”
“The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,
Mither, mither.
The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,
Sic counseils ye gave to me O.”

Such Counsels You Gave To Me and Other Poems, Robinson Jeffers

NOTE: This poem is the epigraph and the source of the title for Robinson Jeffer’s book. The epigraph is from the poem  Edward, which appears in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 1 edited by Francis James Child.

That’s pretty dark. Now, why would I start there? Well, we have on the other side of the scale, teachings in the Tibetan tradition, which says that, “Regard all sentient beings as your mother,” or your grandmother, same difference. And, “Recall the extraordinary kindness that your mother has done for you,” or “is extended to you,” or whatever. And so here we have two totally polar opposites.

And, this is kind of the postmodern dilemma, because we have all of these different perspectives on things. And, which one do we take? Because in earlier societies, one very, very rarely thought negatively of one’s parents. It just didn’t happen very often. If one had a difficult upbringing, that was just your upbringing.

I remember, Jamgön Kongtrül the Great, who was a 19th century teacher in Tibet. Now, this was in reference to his father. His father was a bön priest and was extremely strict with him. I mean, really, really strict. He was so strict that we would definitely call it abuse today—no question. When he was sitting in meditation, if he moved, he was just beaten. And he said later in his life, “I did learn how to sit still.” But there’s no sense that he thought negatively of his father, that was just how his father brought him up.

Throughout the 20th century we’ve come to see that there are certain things which are more helpful to children, certain things that are less helpful to children. So the whole view of child rearing, and how a child should be raised, and hence the whole view of parenthood, has changed very significantly. And there are all kinds of opinions about this, what’s the right way and what isn’t. What this has done, interestingly enough, is made it possible for a lot of people to hold their parents responsible for how they are. So we went from one extreme, in which you had a certain philosophy of parenting, or mothering, which may have been one or the other, but that was just how it was for you, and you took responsibility for your life. And on the other is, we have all kinds of ideas about it. And if your mother doesn’t do it right, then she’s responsible for how you are.

And again, this is in the context of the father, but I remember a student of mine who was a successful business consultant from Orange County. And he came to me once and said, “My son,” who was in his teens at this point, “You know what he said to me the other day? He said, ‘Dad, do you know what a mistake you just made in parenting? Do you know how many years of therapy it’s going to take me to work through this?'” And he said, “What do you do when your son says that?” And it was a genuine question.

I said, “It’s very simple. You look at him and you say, ‘You’re right. I screwed up. Now it’s your problem.'” [Laughter]

“No, no, no, I couldn’t say that.”

But this is where I’ve come out on this. We are raised a certain way, and it may be better. We may have had good parents—that’s fine—good mothers, or we may not have.

I heard a report on NPR that brought this all home to me. I found it quite amazing. I came in in the middle of this, but it was a brother and sister, and they were well into their adult years. They were 40 or 50, or so, and describing their mother. I think they grew up in Ohio, or Oklahoma, or somewhere. Now, this was not a good mother very, very clearly. And there are all kinds of things they were relating. But the one that stuck in my mind was—and she was a single parent—the father had died when they were very young. And she would say to her children, “You know, when your father died, all my friends told me to put you in an orphanage, and I didn’t. And that was the biggest mistake of my life.” It’s like, argh, what do you do?

Well, when she was about 30 years old, the sister in this family just let loose on her mother about all the ways that she had been a terrible parent. And, I just gave you one example, but there was a long list. And here’s what happened. The mother just looked at her, completely stunned, sat down on a chair and started to cry. And what she said when she was crying was, “Well, I did my best.” And at that moment the daughter saw that, yes, she had been a terrible mother and she had done her best. Her best was awful, but it was her best.

My general impression is that mothers always do their best. And whatever they do, they’re passing on what they learned, for better or worse, from generation to generation. And I look at my sister, who I haven’t had a lot of contact with, but she had some serious problems with her own psychology. But she set out, for her own reasons, to be a really good mother. And when I see her kids—my nephews, and they’re all nephews, five of them—they are incredibly solid inside. There is a quiet, non-arrogant confidence that all of them, and they all have a great deal of confidence in their abilities to meet the world. From my perspective, that’s pretty good child rearing, pretty good mothering. And, so, I think she was successful in being a really good mother.

And why is this important? In Buddhism, we have what are called—they’re known by various names—in the Theravada tradition, Southeast Asia, they’re known as the four brahmaviharas, or the four abodes of brahma, to translate that. In the Tibetan tradition and the Mahayana tradition, they’re known as the four immeasurables. But they are four, what I call, higher emotions: loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. Now, the extent to which we are able to meet what arises in our experience is very, very closely related to the extent that we are able to experience loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. And I’m going to explain why in just a little bit. But what I want to do is to talk about how we come to know these.

Loving-kindness — a place in the world

Ken: Now, in the Tibetan tradition, the standard way, or the one that you find in most of the texts, to develop loving kindness, is to recall the kindness of your mother. And there’s a great example that’s given about this. A thief, a bandit chief, who was a very cruel and savage man, and he had his gang. And they would attack caravans and just plunder and kill everybody and take everything that they were carrying. These were traders, so they’re carrying lots of goods sometimes, gold, and silver, and silks, and they would just steal it all.

But in one of these raids on a caravan, the bandit chief slashed a pregnant horse, a mare, with a sword. And the wound of the horse caused the mare to go into labor. And, as she gave birth to her foal, and even though she was dying from the sword cut, she started to lick the foal, and nudge the foal to its feet, so it would live. There she was dying and she was being a mother. And the bandit chief saw this, and it so touched him, that he gave up his raiding ways after that and started to practice.

So, we are encouraged, in the Tibetan tradition, to think about this. And yet, what I found, not only when I was in the three-year retreat and we’re all doing these meditations together, but also teaching people these meditations, is they would run exactly into the sentiment that Robinson Jeffers describes. You know, “You didn’t do a good job, Mom, and I’m paying the price.” And there was tremendous negativity to work through.

And this went even further. I remember in the three-year retreat, the three-year retreat is quite demanding. I was very fortunate because my parents—most of us were in our late 20s, early 30s, at the most when we were in the three-year retreat—and my parents had just said, “Well, this is what you want to do? Fine.” But they were actually quite supportive of it and they’d met my teacher. But several other people in the three-year retreat had come in very, very much against their parents wishes. Like, “What are you doing with your life? You are wasting it. You’re going to sit in a box for three years. You’re not going to accomplish anything. What kind of skills and abilities will you develop? etc., etc., etc. Actually that is an expression of loving-kindness from the parent, even though it may not sound like it.

And what I found, what I observed, is that everybody had to work through their relationship with their parents at some point in the three-year retreat. And of course, you couldn’t leave the three-year retreat to go and talk it out with them. You just had to sit there and deal with all of this stuff inside you. So the way that we are brought up makes a tremendous difference to us. And, however it is, however it was for us, we keep in mind that it is the nature of mothers that they do their best, and that’s it. The rest of it is our responsibility. Now what makes this so important?

The whole notion of mothering is used in the Theravadan tradition as a way of understanding these four emotions and practicing them. Loving-kindness is taking care of the child—providing her or him with what they need to live. So the mother provides a place for the fetus to grow, birth, milk, warmth, comfort, connection with the world, etc. All of these are experiences of loving-kindness, or expressions of loving-kindness. And without all of those, we die. Very simply, we die. What loving-kindness does is it gives us our first experience of not being separate from the world. That’s putting it fairly deeply, but that’s what it is. And we know this.

How many of you at some point in your life, probably when you’re young, ran into some kind of difficulty, and somebody extended some kindness to you with no strings attached. Does anybody remember something like that? What was that like for you? Most of us remember that, whether it was a parent, or an uncle or an aunt, maybe it was a school counselor, or a teacher, or somebody. Most of us remember that very, very vividly, because there we are, and somebody is giving us a place in the world. Well, that’s what mothers do. And that’s the essential gesture of loving-kindness.

When we’re kind to somebody, no strings attached, we just extend that kindness, the number one thing we’re saying to them is, you’re a person. You’re a person, and you have a place in this world. It’s very, very important. The social expression of loving-kindness is courtesy, just treating people with good manners. And it goes a very, very long way.

Compassion — being with suffering

Ken: And then there’s compassion. When we’re very small and we’re running in the playground and we trip over and fall, we have this strange experience, and we don’t know how to relate to it. And the first thing we do is we look at our mother to get the clues. How do I relate to this new experience I’ve just had? Now this continues throughout our life.

I’m working with an executive at a media company here in Los Angeles, and I have a very close relationship with the head of HR. She’s brought me in. And in our first meeting with this executive, she has a very close relationship with this executive, and has been working with him for many years. Any time there is a little hitch in our conversation, you know what he did? He looked to her to see how he should relate to this experience. It’s exactly the same thing.

So, how our mother responds at that point is crucial. If she goes, “Oh!” We go, “Oh, this was a bad thing.” And now we relate to it as a bad thing, and then we start to cry, etc., etc. Then if our mother goes, “Look at you!” And we go, “Oh, this is a good thing,” and we pick ourselves up and go on playing. The willingness to be with us in whatever we’re experiencing, that’s compassion, particularly when what we’re experiencing is pain. Not to fix the pain, not to make it all better—that’s more the loving-kindness part—but just to be with us.

Long before I did the three-year retreat, actually to earn money to do the three-year retreat, I did a year of foster parenting, and ran a home. We had three kids there all the time, others would come and go. And one of them was a 12, 13 year old boy, a good kid. And, one day there was a knock on the door. And I opened the door, and there was a policeman with this kid. He got picked up for shoplifting, which is, something kids do. So we process everything, call in the social work etc., etc., get through all of that stuff. And by this time, it’s time for him to go to bed, so he goes down, and he wasn’t too happy with stuff. So I went down, his room was in the basement, and so I went down and sat down beside his bed. He was just lying there. He was pretty unhappy about stuff. I said, “Life gets more difficult, doesn’t it?”

He said, “Yeah.”

“You want to talk about anything?”

“No.” So the two of us just sat there. He was lying on his bed. I was sitting beside it for about 20 minutes.

I looked at him and said, “Are you going to be okay tonight.”

He said, “Yeah. Thanks, Ken.” Okay? There’s just somebody who’s willing to be with him in that pain. Now, how many times does your mother do this? And sometimes it’s really, really hard, because when the child’s in pain, basically mothers go berserk. All they want to do is just take that pain away. But sometimes they know that that’s not the best thing for the child. The child actually needs to learn to relate to that. That’s really, really hard, sometimes, really hard. Moving from loving-kindness to the compassion, where you’re just with the child and the pain and not trying to make it better. And by providing that space for them to learn how to relate to it. And a lot of that we learn from our mother.

Joy — confidence in our abilities

Ken: And then the next one is joy. How many of you can recall your mother, or your parent, or your father, or whatever, or somebody, celebrating success that you experienced? What was that like for you? Yesterday I was having dinner with a client at her home and she has a daughter. Now, her daughter likes to build things. I’ve known these people for years. So I hauled out this erector set, which nobody uses these days, because you have all these nuts and bolts and washers and things and are really intriguing. So she wants to build a windmill. And this is one of the designs where they don’t give you any instructions, they just give you the picture. So it took us a few hours. At the end of it, she just felt so good about herself because she’d put this whole thing together. And when we have a success like that, when somebody takes joy in us exercising our ability, that is how we form a relationship with power. It is somebody else celebrating when we are successful in exercising our own abilities, that’s how we form a relationship with power. Confidence, the ability to do things in the world. Well, guess who does that most of the time when we’re young?

Equanimity — letting go

Then we get to the fourth one, equanimity. So the child starts off. The mother takes care of her needs, is with her in her suffering, is with her in her joy, and celebrates her success. And through this, the child grows in ability, and starts venturing out into the world. This is one of the more difficult periods of motherhood, because they have to let go and have confidence in the child’s abilities—this is equanimity—and not judge.

I just had an email question from this retreat I’m doing on Tricycle. And this is exactly what the mother’s anguish is. Her son is having a really difficult time in life, in his early 20s, and she wants to do something for him, but she doesn’t know whether she should or not, etc. It’s very, very difficult. But it’s just really, really uncomfortable, really, really painful for her, because she doesn’t know how her son’s going to be. And this is a very, very difficult thing, because every parent actually wants the best for their child. And when they see the child going in a direction that they think is going to be really not good for them, then they experience pain. And some parents are more skillful handling that, others are less skillful. But through it all, there’s absolutely one thing in common, they all want the best for their child. And so these are some of the challenges they face.

And the extent to which we know that we have a place in the world, are able to experience our own suffering without being freaked out by it, have confidence in our own abilities, etc., are able to venture out into the world, these are all due to the extent to which our mother has exercised loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. And she has done her best, her best. And when it comes to our turn, if it does come your turn as a mother, then it’s the same thing. Yes, it may have been like this mother who said, “Yeah, the worst mistake I’ve made in my life is not putting you in an orphanage.” Well, at least she made that mistake. That was her best.

We take responsibility because it’s up to us now to work through whatever we have. But we recall, and we remember, and we transmit to the next generation everything that we found helpful, and useful, and beneficial to us, from our mother. In this way, we actually improve the world. So that’s what I had to say. You’re welcome. Did you find that useful? Okay. We have time for one more question. Yes.

Taking success and failure off the table

Student: Hi. What do you suggest you do when you’re meditating if there’s something you’re nervous about: an event, a project, something that’s—

Ken: You’ve got a big presentation tomorrow, and you’re nervous about it. That kind of situation?

Student: In two days.

Ken: In two days. Well, it’s very much along the lines that I was saying to Ken at the beginning. The first thing is, does getting all stewed up about this presentation help you?

Student: No.

Ken: No. You know that, right? Okay. So you can view your meditation period tomorrow and the next day, because that’s all the time you have left, as practicing. Now, you can try and talk yourself out of it. You know, “I’ve got everything in shape. It’s all perfect,” etc., etc. But I find that that doesn’t work. What’s the presentation? There’s another little technique that I’ve come across, which is sometimes helpful, but I’m not sure it’s the right setting.

Student: What is the topic?

Ken: Or where is it? What’s the venue?

Student: A comedy club.

Ken: You’re doing stand up? Oh, wow, good, my hat off to you. I understand. I don’t think my suggestion is going to be very helpful. I’ll give it to you anyway.

Student: No. Please do.

Ken: Imagine everybody’s on a toilet. [Laughter]

Student: Talking about mothers, my mom always tells me to do that. That doesn’t help me, though.

Ken: Okay. I’ll throw that one away.

Student: Anything else? [Laughter] I guess the key point with this is, I’m putting more significance on this show versus—

Ken: Well, here’s a suggestion I gave to someone who’s doing a week long retreat, a sesshin, Zen tradition, really, very demanding retreats. He came to me and said, “I’m thinking of doing this sesshin, but I’m not sure whether I should or not.”

And I said, “Well, why?”

He said, “Well, I’m not sure I’ll be successful.”

I said, “how long is the sesshin?”

He said, “Seven days.”

I said, “Well it’s very simple then. You leave on the sixth day.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, you can leave on the first day, you can leave on the second day, third, fourth, fifth. But if you haven’t left on any of those days, you absolutely leave on the sixth day.”

“Okay, I get it, Ken, but why?”

“Because that way, you know going in, you’re going to fail. You know you’re going to fail, so it’s off the table. You don’t have to be afraid, or be anxious about being successful or not. You know you are going to fail. It’s decided; it’s done.” He gave me a really, really dirty look, very like the look you’re giving to me right now. And he left.

A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call. “I wasn’t successful at failing.”

Now you think I’m nuts. But there’s a teacher, or was a teacher, in Thailand called Ajahn Chah. And he was one of the greatest teachers in Thailand in the last century. Most of the Western teachers in the Theravadan tradition studied with him. I never met him, but he was quite, quite extraordinary, from what I gather. And one of the senior Western teachers today, very senior, when he was a young monk at Ajahn Chah’s monastery, during the three months of the rainy season, they just practiced, but a different monk gives a talk every evening.

So during his interview that day, Ajahn Chah said to him, “Why don’t you give the talk this evening?” And it was usually like a 45 minute talk and then everybody slept. Well, he was very nervous about this, and he didn’t have very much time to prepare because this was the afternoon and he had to do it that evening. So he went up and sat in front of everybody. And he was a very junior monk, he was a young Westerner. And here are all of these Thai monks and a number of Westerners, many of them who’d been meditating for decades longer than he has, and very steeped and knowledgeable about the dharma. And he’s giving a talk. So he was a little uncomfortable about this. And so he got through his talk in 45 minutes. And Ajahn Chah, who’s at the back of the hall, says, “Keep going.”

“What?”

“Keep going.” So he starts, and he talks for another 10 or 15 minutes and then stops. Ajahn Chah says, “Keep going.” He was there for four hours. Half the time just going uh, duh, um, ah, ah, ah. And it was about midnight when they stopped. Of course, he was experiencing all kinds of shame, and embarrassment, and guilt and stupidity, everything under the sun.

This Westerner, who became, as I say, a senior teacher, said, “You know, I never worried about giving a bad talk after that.” So this is probably totally unhelpful to you. [Laughter] But I’m a very bad person to ask these kinds of questions. Anything else?

Student: I’ll quit a couple minutes before I’m supposed to finish.

Ken: Well, that’s it. The other thing—I’m saying this a little more seriously—whatever it is, whatever you do, just enjoy it. Just you go and enjoy it. Whether it’s good, bad, brilliant, crazy, just enjoy it. Okay?

All right, let’s close here then. Let’s just sit for a few moments.

Goodness comes from this work we have done.
Let me not hold it just in me.
Let it spread to all that is known,
And awaken good throughout the world.

[Gong]

Thank you for your attention. I’ll probably be back next month, so see you then.