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

December 12, 2010

Anxiety and reacting to reactions

Ken: Sunday, December the 12th, Against the Stream, Sutra session. While we were setting up, I took the opportunity to ask various people some of the things they would be interested in hearing or talking about today. So I’m just going to go through those ones that I can remember fairly quickly. Anxiety. Right. How was your meditation?

Student: That was nice.

Ken: It was nice. Okay. What was nice about it?

Student: I don’t know. Being able to sit with myself.

Ken: Being able to sit. This is so important. Yeah. Can you say anything more?

Student: I don’t know. In the beginning, I felt like I was making myself more anxious. Worrying. And then I just, breathe a little and let it go, I guess.

Ken: Very good. A Zen teacher once was asked about his meditation. He said, “Sometimes I get all caught up in everything, and then I take one breath, and I’m back with my treasure.” Meditation is very, very effective for anxiety. Anybody here prone to anxiety or panic attacks? Yeah. Oh, a lot of people. Okay. The reason that meditation is very effective for these is that it trains us to stop reacting to our own reactions because that’s what anxiety is. Something happens and we go, Oh, I’m worried about that. Oh, I’m worried about being worried about that. Oh, I’m worried about being worried about being worried about that and it just spirals out of control. And it can actually spiral extremely quickly. And so it goes from anxiety to panic, etc. And in meditation, it’s exactly what you described just now. You just go, oh well. And you come back to the breath. But by doing this over and over again, we actually train ourselves to do it. And we train ourselves to interact with our own internal experience differently. And that puts an end to the anxiety cycle.

What lies beneath anxiety

Ken: Now we need to go a little bit further because it’s not all, you know, roses. There are a few thorns in there. A psychologist once said to me, anxiety is to emotions, what froth is to beer. There’s all this stuff going on. We feel anxious about it, but there’s something much more substantial underneath that we’re avoiding.

Now as we practice meditation, and we just sit and we dissipate a lot of anxiety, sooner or later you’re going to start hitting that stuff. And that may be like, this is not what I bargained for. It’s not a bad thing, however, because when we’re ignoring things like that, that tends to put our lives totally out of balance. And the way this resting meditation, works is that we won’t encounter that stuff until we’re able to experience it. That’s how the practice works. And when we start experiencing some of that uncomfortable stuff, then something very significant becomes possible. And that is, we become capable of experiencing feelings and not having to do anything about them.

Now, one time a few years ago, something happened that really made me angry. I mean, unbelievably angry. It’s kind of alive, but it was really angry and I knew enough how to work with it, and I sat, I just sat. And it was like every cell in my body was angry. You just don’t do anything with it. About 45 minutes later, like, okay. I began to recover, some kind of peace of mind. I was really, really upset. But I didn’t kill anybody. So that was a good thing. And I probably saved an awful lot of grief. And so don’t be afraid of your emotions. Many of us are. And another friend of mine pointed out, being afraid of emotions is—I won’t go into all the details of this—it’s like being afraid of the past, because that’s where they’re all rooted. But that’s how we are. But by practicing meditation, we’ll actually build up the capacity so that we can experience what’s going on in us. And that is the key to freedom, okay? Right.

Death and impermanence

The end of building is ruin.
The end of meeting is departing.
The end of accumulation is dispersion.
The end of birth is death.

Really cheery thing, you know. It’s a summary of a form of meditation or a topic of meditation that’s very highly regarded in a Buddhist context, and that’s meditation on death and impermanence. Now, how do you meditate on death and impermanence? How do you meditate using such a verse as this? Well, there are different ways and there are different forms of meditation. One form of meditation is just resting with the breath. We’ve been doing that but there are different forms of meditation, and meditation on impermanence is a way of cultivating in us an awareness of how things are in the world. I mean, everything does change. Nothing stays the same. That’s what’s summarized in this verse. I mean, every building falls into ruin. I remember once arranging to meet someone at a restaurant in Santa Monica. This was years ago, and it was at 25th and Wilshire or somewhere like that. And we got there and we looked at each other and said, where’s the restaurant? There was this big hole in the ground. It is gone. It’s a pity. It was a good restaurant. “At the end of building is ruin, at the end of meeting is departing.” You know, we meet here today. What’s going to be the end of this? We’re all going to go our separate ways. Maybe we’ll meet here in another month, but that’ll be a different meeting. Every meeting ends in parting. And so every relationship you have is going to end. Every relationship you’re going to have is going to end. It may end with the death of your partner or your own death, or may end before that. But absolutely every relationship is going to end.

Ken: Now somebody was asking about the four N’s? That was you. Just to fill everybody in on the picture, the four N’s is a short verse in Buddhism. And it was one of the favorite verses of my teacher. He quoted it all the time, which is the only reason I know it.

“The end of accumulation is dispersal.” Boy, did we get a dose of that a couple of years ago. You know, people build up all these savings, but they don’t stay that way. People build up hoards of things and they end up frittering them away. And the end of birth is death. You know, life is terminal, we’re going to die. You’re not going to get out of this alive. That’s just a fact.

Learning to live with impermanence

Now, the purpose of these meditations is that they actually help us to relate to life much more realistically. Let’s just take the relationship example. If you know that every relationship you’re going to have is going to end, what’s the logical way to relate to that relationship? Well, no, it’s not fear. Yeah, joyfully. You savor it because it is something that’s only going to be there. There’s a wonderful Portuguese expression. Guests always bring pleasure. If not in the arrival, then in the departure.

So in the seemingly very depressing topic of change and impermanence, there’s actually a very positive way of relating to life, and life as it actually is. So, in meditation there are a number of ways you can do this. You can think of all of the examples and just go over them. That’s one way. And that’s a somewhat reflective analytic, you know, and you’ll wander off about things. You keep coming back and you just keep thinking about them. And gradually the truth of these four statements will sink in and, you go, “Oh, you know, I am going to die.” What a drag. William Saroyan, who’s a writer, said it beautifully: “You know, we all know that we’re going to die. But I really thought, in my case an exception would be made.” Another way of meditating on them is just to take any one of them or all four, one by one. “The end of building is ruin.” And you just say that statement to yourself. There’s a body reaction and you sit and you just experience that body reaction. There’s also an emotional reaction, and you sit and experience that. There are all kinds of stories that come up too. And you just rest in the experience of the statement if you wish. And you can do that with all four. That’s another way of meditating. Now, if you come from a mathematical background there’s another way, and that is to try to think of an exception to disprove the statement. Can I think of anything that has been built that didn’t fall into ruin? It’s another intellectual exercise. But it can be very effective because afte four or five years of trying to think of one, you may get convinced that that’s actually the case. So these are different things. The point of these practices is to instill that way of seeing and experiencing the world very, very deeply in us. And that, as I was trying to point out earlier, brings a certain kind of freedom. Okay.

Guilt as a form of pride

Ken: You asked about guilt and morality.

Student: Well, specifically with respect to the guilt, I realize that I’ve made some very painful decisions in my life. Went through all the pain, like the horrible agony of those decisions, but never really allowed myself to get the goods, like to experience what it was I was after by making those decisions because I felt so guilty. So in other words, I did it, but I didn’t let myself. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

Ken: You bought a winning lottery ticket. You never cashed it in.

Student: Exactly. So what I’m trying to do, because I know last time you talked a little bit about a practice where you kind of go toward those. I’m trying to let go of the guilt, and I can’t figure out a practice that’ll help me. I don’t want to intellectualize it. I want to really get it.

Ken: You want the good news or the bad news? [Laughter]

Student: The good news.

Ken: Okay. Guilt is a form of pride. Oh, you want the bad news now?

Student: What?

Ken: What makes you so special?

Student: Okay.

Ken: What makes you so special that you aren’t entitled to the good results of your actions? Ah, a pregnant silence.

Student: I’ll have to sit with that one for a while.

Ken: There’s your practice.

Student: Okay, so how do you do that without thinking?

Ken: Well let me run through this in a little more detail because I was giving you the headlines there. I think guilt is a form of pride. That’s just my take on it. Why? Because when we feel guilty, we feel we have broken some law or taboo or something. We’ve done something. Okay. But it is worse than that. Not only have we broken some law, but that law has cosmic or universal significance. And so I have broken a cosmic law by this action. And that’s just pride. I’ve done something that is contrary to the workings of the whole universe. It’s a little inflated, isn’t it?

Student: I get that part. I don’t get the pride part.

Ken: Well, that makes you extraordinarily powerful. You’ve upset the workings of the whole universe.

Student: Okay, I get it.

Ken: It feels like that, though, doesn’t it?

Student: It does. Yeah, it really does.

Ken: So that’s the first thing. We’ve got to get this into perspective. We just did what our mother told us never to do, that’s all. It wasn’t the workings of the whole universe. You follow?

Student: Yes.

Ken: Okay. So there’s all that exaggeration going in. Now I’m making somewhat light of it, but this stuff is really deeply conditioned and can just churn us up terribly. And I know this from my own experience. Don’t feel like I’m just …

Student: No, I don’t.

Feelings want to be felt

Ken: So, the general way of practicing that I encourage, and you can do this with all kinds of things, is: when you have something that has an emotional charge, don’t try to reason it out. And there’s a reason for this. Emotions are not rational. What gives you the idea that you can reason with an irrational process? It doesn’t make any sense. So what do we do? Well, you experience it because emotions …you know a feeling, above all else, wants to be felt. The feeling’s reason for existence is to be felt. So if you don’t experience a feeling, you’re denying its reason for existence. And it gets a little upset about that and keeps knocking at the door, so to speak. So you just feel it. Now, this can be challenging. If you go on to Unfettered Mind’s website and type in, “Seeing from the Inside,” in the search thing, it’ll come up, you’ll find a page called Five Step Mindfulness, Seeing from the Inside. And it’s a five-step practice, which I’ve gone through a few times here And it’s similar to what I was saying. So we start off with guilt, and then you feel all of the body reactions to guilt and all the emotional reactions and all the stories around it. We just breathe and experience it until you can rest in feeling horribly, irrevocably, irretrievably, irredeemably guilty. They’re just there, and what happens here. And this goes back to what I was saying to you. You discovered this is an experience. It’s just an experience. It’s what you’re feeling. And that’s where the pride drops out. And now, because you aren’t so churned up emotionally, you’re probably going to be able to relate to or negotiate the situation with a bit more clarity. Okay?

Student: Yeah.

Morality without absolutes

Ken: No morality. You had a question about it?

Student: I heard a person once say there is no morality. And then I’ve heard myself repeat it without really understanding what that meant.

Ken: Well, it struck a chord in you.

Student: Sounded good to me because it sort of lets you off the hook in a way, but I wanted to know if there was, you know, something to it?

Ken: You feeling guilty about having no morality?

Student: I wanted to know if there was something to that. Like, I wanted to understand that in a deeper way, if there is anything to it.

Ken: Well this actually ties in with Ken’s question about some of the structures of Buddhism in today’s age. It’s actually a very big topic. So how much time you got? I don’t know what the person who said this meant, but I’m going to offer an interpretation and then talk about that. So when people say there is no morality, they often mean there is no external absolute system of morality or something like that. But the fact that you feel guilt says, right there —and how many other people here occasionally feel guilt? Yeah. Okay. So, you know, we’re moral beings. I mean, morality is part of the way we relate to things. If there were no sense of morality, if there wasn’t any morality, then we wouldn’t have feelings of guilt. And, you know, maybe the world would be a better place. I’m not sure, but the fact that we feel guilty means that there are things that operate in us, and they’re important, which tell us when we’re doing something that is questionable. Now where does the basis for making those things come from? Well, most of it comes from our background, from how we were brought up.

And we see this because people who grow up in different societies have different senses of morality, and people who all grow up in different families have different senses of morality. I mean, I was reading an article on soccer, connected with the World Cup, and it was very interesting because it was discussing how different teams, different nationalities, the way they play soccer is reflected. So the Spanish, for instance, they regard soccer as an art. And so there they have an extraordinarily precise and accurate passing game. And they’re really beautiful to watch because it’s a form of art for them. The Italians, on the other hand, regard it as survival. So, you know, they take dives and do all manner of things because it’s a matter of of surviving. Well, you’ve got two completely different sets of morality or moral issues operating in soccer just from that and it went into a few other countries, I can’t remember. So the Spanish would never take a dive in soccer, and the Italians do it all the time. Go figure.

And my great uncle, who is an extremely moral Presbyterian Scot, he had a very interesting thing when it came to games: if you could deceive your opponent and get away with it. That was absolutely part of the game. So if you’re playing Scrabble, you put down a word that isn’t a word. Well, if you could just convince your opponent that was a word, that was fine. It’s very interesting. so I think it is fair to say that there isn’t a universal moral code or what have you. But we have to be very careful even there, because of killing. A murder is proscribed in virtually every society, and it makes a lot of sense because if people killed each other very easily, then societies, the propagation of the species, would be seriously in doubt and so forth. So people look for these universal moral principles. But the moment you try to actually say, oh, well, it’s this, then it starts to run out. But this doesn’t mean to say that there isn’t morality because we are constantly checking: is the way that I’m relating to the world or this person or whatever appropriate in this situation, or does it rub up against something? And in order to provide people with guidelines various institutions, the tribal institutions or cultural institutions, whatever, come up with these moral codes. And they can be like the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, or ten non-virtuous actions in Buddhism. It just goes on and on. But most of these are presented to people in the same way that we would train children. This is good. That is bad. And if you do good, you’ll get rewarded. And if you’re bad, you’ll get punished. This is a very childish approach to morality.

Acting without regret

Ken: As we develop in our lives, we become capable of what I think is a more mature approach, and that is “What’s the right thing to do here?” And the right thing to do is determined by a huge complex of different factors. What the situation is, what our relationship to the situation is, what our skills are. For instance, if I came across an accident, not being trained in first aid it would be immoral for me to try to to render help. But if a doctor came, it would be immoral for him not to. So there are all of these complexities, factors, that come in. And here we come to what I think is a very deep principle in life, and that is: “How do I negotiate the situation so that I will have no regret?” Now, first off, that seems very selfish, but it isn’t usually. In practice, it doesn’t work out as selfishness because we know we are intimately connected with the world we experience and the people in it. So when we say I have no regret, it means how do I act appropriately in the context of all of those different relationships and so forth? And it’s not about being good or being bad or anything like that. It is how do I act in this situation so I have no regret? And I’ll give you two examples.

One time I was skiing with a friend and we were riding up on the lift. He was describing how he felt a moral obligation to meet with an old friend of his that was coming into town, but he resented it. And should he really meet with the friend or not etc., and he’s going back and forth. Why did he have to come to town? It’s all his fault. But as we rode up on the lift, I pointed out to him that this obligation wasn’t coming from his friend. It was coming from his own sense of what it meant to be a friend. And it was coming from him, and all our obligations actually come from us. And once he once he got that then he was at peace with it. You follow?

Accepting what is true

Ken: This second example is a very touching one. A woman in one of my meditation groups in Orange County asked to speak with me after the meditation, after the group left, and she described the situation. She had a son who was in his early 20s, whom she knew was addicted to crystal meth. And of course this is really heartbreaking. And she tried various interventions and nothing had worked. And he’d moved to Santa Barbara. And she knew also that he was thinking about getting into dealing to support his crystal meth habit. And people had told her that if he gets caught for dealing, it’s a much worse sentence than it is for possession. And she knew her son wasn’t going to be a good dealer. He’s going to get caught. And someone had advised her to arrange for her son to be arrested for possession before he gets caught for dealing, because that way he goes into the system and he will get treatment for his addiction, which you’ve not been successful with. So the question is, “What do I do?” As a meditation teacher, you get questions like this. Well, this is this is a horrible dilemma. I mean, no mother should be in that position, but she was.

And so we discussed it for some time. For some time, about half an hour. About half an hour into the conversation, she finally looked at me and she said, “I’m just looking for a good solution here.” And I looked at her and said, “Look, there isn’t a good solution. I know you’d like to find one, but this is a horrible situation and you care about your son very deeply, obviously, and you’re trying to do the best thing for him. But there is no good solution to this. There’s no nice way that this ends.”

And something in the way that I said it or something just went in and she just went, “Oh.” And this is what I found. When we see and accept what is true, mind and body relax. And that’s what happened here. And you could just see it in her body. She went, “Oh,” and everything in her body relaxed. And then she just looked at me and said, I know what to do. I have no idea what she did. She never told me. But that’s a moral decision. And you come at it by accepting everything in the situation completely. That’s really important. And that’s where our meditation practice comes in. It gives us the capacity to do that. And in accepting that completely, we find a place to rest. And in that rest we find clarity and then we go on from there. Does it always work out? No. Sometimes there’s a mess. But we’ll always learn something from it. But that’s what I found in dealing with morality.

Student: Okay. Thank you.

Shame and Glee

Ken: Right now. Shame and joy. All right. Yes, these are very interesting. I said very briefly that shame and joy are connected with power. So where did these come up for you?

Student: Actually, I went to a teaching a couple of weeks ago, and part of the guided meditation was, “So what blocks your confidence?” This voice goes, “Shame,” and I was like, “Who said that?”

Ken: Well, it’s one of those voices from out there, right?

Student: And then later I started exploring it and it was definitely there. Shame.

Ken: Shame. Okay. So you could experience it physically?

Student: Yeah, definitely.

Ken: Okay. Well in terms of practice, I would suggest the same thing that I was suggesting here. The five-step practice, which I think you know. And shame is not a nice one to sit with. It’s hot and sticky and it really churns up your body when you’re really open to it. Do you know what I mean?

Student: Oh yeah.

Ken: It’s not a fun one. But you keep going into it and experiencing; I mean, you’ll feel like your body is being pricked with hot pins all over it, something like that. But it’s actually not from the outside in it’s from the inside out. That’s how it is. And it feels like you’re going to explode in this hot stickiness. Does that sound?

Student: I was, when I was sitting with it, I remembered the instruction you gave about being able to, at the same time, experience the corresponding aspect. And actually what came up was non-dual kindness. Loving kindness.

Ken: Yeah, but you’re getting a little ahead of the game there. That’s a nice dodge. No, you should listen to Mullah Nasruddin.

Mullah Nasruddin was a magistrate at one point, and this person appeared to him and all the person was wearing was his underwear. He said, “Why are you appearing before me in your underwear?” And the fellow said, “I’m a visitor to your town and I was robbed. And I’ve come to you because it’s somebody in your town and you’re the magistrate. And I’d like you to find the person and arrest them.” And Nasruddin said, “I can’t take your case.” “Why not?” “Well, you still have your underwear, so obviously it was not somebody in our town. We do things thoroughly around here.”

So you’ve got to experience the shame completely before you look for a way out. And that is actually really important. It’s what I was saying earlier: Feelings want to be felt. So the least you can do is be generous to them. This is not to get lost in them. That’s important. Getting lost in them doesn’t help at all, but you experience it completely until you can rest in the experience of it. Then, as you say, you bring in the other side of it, which is joy. And because shame is a reaction, it’s not really joy, it’s glee.

Shame and glee are the things, because shame is a reaction. It’s feeling bad about something. Glee is the experience you have when you feel very good about something. And so that and when you bring those two together, then you open up the whole spectrum in there and something shifts. But don’t be too quick to get away from the shame before you do the job thoroughly.

Student: Yeah, I think I know what you mean about that.

Ken: Okay, good. All right. Now, Ken asked about … say your question again.

Buddhism in the West

Ken (Student): Stephen Batchelor talked about the the structure of Buddhism that is in the West right now, and he questioned what is its validity, future or necessity.

Ken: Validity, future or necessity? Is that right?

Ken (Student): Yeah.

Ken: Well, it certainly has a future. It’s not going to disappear. Validity. Necessity. Yeah, well, I come at things a little differently. With the possible exception of Japan, possible, Buddhism came to the West from cultures which were largely feudal in their structure. That’s certainly true of the Tibetan tradition in which my training is. And as Idries Shah says in Knowing How to Know, when you bring in something from another culture, you necessarily bring with it all the ways of thinking along with it. And one of the consequences of that is that I have seen very, very few people and I’ll make it stronger, I’ve not seen anybody engage Tibetan Buddhism who didn’t didn’t regress psychologically for a while. Because you have to go back to an earlier culture or your earlier period in our culture in order to relate to it. Many people found themselves being taken back to their Catholic upbringing because the institutions are very, very similar. And that’s probably a necessary step, but hopefully it’s not a permanent shift. But there are people I know for whom it seems to be that they’re really stuck and it’s not good. There then comes a very, very difficult period where you take that training that you’ve had. And and I’m not excusing myself. I mean, this is a process I went through myself, and now you form your own relationship to it in a way that’s appropriate for this culture. That’s a very, very individual matter. And it’s not a particularly easy one. One of the reasons it’s not particularly easy is because it feels like you are betraying things that you held that were most dear to your heart. That’s usually difficult. But this is how your own relationship with it evolves or matures. And another person I know, Michael Meade, you know, talked about this with the Dalai Lama and asked, “What should Western Buddhism look like?” He says, “I don’t know. That’s your job, not mine. I’m Tibetan. It’s not up to me to decide what Western Buddhism is. That’s your job.” That was interesting.

And Michael Meade put it differently. The conference I was at about 10 years ago, he said it isn’t about American Buddhism. It’s about American Buddhisms plural. Because there’s going to be many, many different ones, many different forms. And through that process of taking what we’ve learned and then adapting it to our lives and our culture, Buddhism as a whole is going to evolve, and many of the things we saw that we took will be let go. Some of them will be kept, others will be changed. There’s going to be a lot of things. So, If you take any particular facet of Buddhism from, say, Sri Lanka or Japan or China or Tibet, you can see how it’s evolving. And there’s going to be wonderful anachronisms and idiosyncrasies that happen, for instance, and this has happened in the Tibetan tradition. In the Tibetan tradition, if you’re a lay practitioner of high rank, you wore white. Where everybody else was wearing mauve, you know, a burgundy because they were ordained monks. But you’re a lay practitioner. But why do you wear white? Oh, because Indian lay people wear white clothes. This has no relevance in Tibet, of course, because it’s a completely different climate. But that’s where it came from. And that’s an anachronism that has persisted for a thousand years. So there can be little oddities like that. You know, a thousand years from now, people will be behaving in strange ways in the West and it’ll come, you know, and these things are remarkably persistent.

The courage to mess with it

Why are railway tracks the width that they are? Because that was the width of Roman chariots who built the roads, etc. And you can trace the whole evolution of it. So these things will have a future. They will evolve in different ways and they will change. What is important for us as individuals, practitioners, because I always find it’s best to deal with things at the individual level rather than the collective, for us with whomever we study and practice, learn what they have to teach us as deeply as we are able to. And with that knowledge and understanding then really take it in, and as you take it in, it’s going to change. Certain pieces will fit. Other pieces won’t. And you have to have the courage to mess with that. And a lot of people don’t. They think, “Oh no, I have to do it this way.”

It’s really important to have the courage to mess with it. If you’ve really learned the principles very deeply how you mess with it will be fine. You’re not going to do anything bad, you’re not going to become an axe murderer or anything like that. And something different and probably something good will emerge. And I’ve done this in a lot of different areas, both in my own practice and in teaching. One of the things that I instituted in retreats that I teach is that I interview everybody every day about their practice.

They are very short interviews, typically five, eight minutes, something like that. But I see everybody every day and I borrowed that a bit from the Zen tradition, but it’s not the way that it works in Zen because their interviews have a different purpose. But the reason I did this is that I found that people consistently would struggle for a whole retreat, or months or even years, with something that could be cleared up in a three or four minute conversation. And I wanted to have those three or four minute conversations. But this requires something different from the student. Students can’t just sit there and just listen to everything they have to tell me about their practice. They have to tell me what they are experiencing. So it becomes very alive. And, you know, in terms of traditional teaching, it goes off the rails immediately because it’s not about fitting into this box. It’s about what are you experiencing? What frameworks or tools can I bring to that? How can they be adapted so that you can further your progress in developing a different way of experiencing the world? You know, it becomes very, very alive. And that to me is what’s important. The practice is to be alive and both student and the teacher are active participants in the process. Okay. Right. It’s 12:30 already. How long do we go, to 1:00? 12:30. Good grief. You’ve just wasted another whole hour. We have time for one more question. Oh, there we are. Way back.

Adapting practice to experience

Art: A bit more about what you mean by, oh, mess with that stuff, okay. The courage to mess with it.

Ken: Well, Art, since you asked this question, give me a meditation practice. Or give me something that you want, you feel you you should be messing with or is something that’s messing with you. Because that’s where it usually starts, isn’t it? Yeah. Much better to discuss specifics than abstracts.

Art: Sitting as the embodiment of awakened compassion.

Ken: Sitting?

Art: Sitting, which is an instruction you gave me.

Ken: I gave?

Art: Yeah.

Ken: I’m not responsible for whoever said that. I know what you’re talking about now. Ah, okay. Sorry, I thought I interpreted what you were saying in a completely different way. Okay. What Art’s referring to is a way that I have messed with a certain meditation in the Tibetan tradition called yidam practice or deity practice. And, this is, you see, these extraordinary forms with many arms, many legs and many heads and so forth. some fierce, some peaceful and things like that. And, you know, there are very complex practices based on them. And what happens time and time again is that people get caught up in trying to visualize everything very, very clearly, largely because they’ve been instructed. You have to visualize that all perfectly clearly until it’s so vivid it’s like you’re seeing it. So people sit in their meditation like this. Dezhung Rinpoche, one of my teachers, said, you do this practice and then you get a headache. As in messing with this, let’s take one. The one that was my teacher’s favorite one was the meditation on Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of awakened compassion, and there are several different forms, but the usual one is four arms and radiant white body, utterly peaceful and so forth. But rather than try to visualize that, I just ask people an innocent question.

And you can try this right now. Just sit for a moment and imagine you are the embodiment of awakened compassion. What’s that like? What is it like to be the embodiment of awakened compassion? Well, people react to this differently. Some people go, “wow.” And they just feel like they’re in the world for the first time. And other people go, “No way. I’m not having anything to do with that.” So there’s all of these different reactions and things that go on. So rather than be stuck on trying to visualize this form, which is meant to give you the idea of what it feels like, I just go straight to what does it feel like? And, you know, I pushed it a little bit. They’ll bring up a situation in their lives and I say, “well, what would the awakened body, what would the embodiment of awakened compassion do in that situation?” Talk about morality, you see. And there’s a wrenching inside, “But I don’t want to do that.” Yeah, well, you can’t have it both ways. So this is a way that you mess with the meditation. You take these principles and you really see how they work for you, and you explore and engage them and try different things out. And in that process, discover or find your own path. That’s what I mean about messing with it. Okay. Now, there are a couple of things that are important here.

The first one is do not try this at home. That is, if you’re going to do this kind of thing, it is really helpful, and I would even say important, that you do it with regular consultation with someone who knows you and knows these practices and knows what you’re trying to do, because it is extremely easy to fool ourselves. You know, just like that little exit from the shame. It’s very, very easy to do that. And one of our teacher’s responsibilities is to point out where we are avoiding something. And so when we start messing with these practices, there’s all kinds of ways that you can construe them so you never feel anything uncomfortable. Well, that’s not the point. That’s just idealism and escapism and so forth. So I think it’s very important that you have that context. And the second thing is: only do this if you have to. Only do this if you have to. In a lot of ways Buddhism is presented as how wonderful it’s going to make your life. And in that category, it just becomes another form of self-help.

Only do this if you have to

Ken: I’ve been writing a set of practices for people, and I really had to wrestle with this whole issue of motivation. And as I was writing these practices, it finally became clear to me that these practices are only for people who have to … go back to Rilke, In his Letters to a Young Poet, the young poet says, “What does it take to be a poet?”

And he just writes to him and says, “If you have a choice about this, then don’t be a poet. It’s not a good way to live, I can tell you that. But if in the darkest hour of the night you ask this question and the answer is, ‘Yes, I have to do this,’ then that’s it. You have no choice.” And so you are a poet. And something like this operates for spiritual practice as well. And I’ve looked at my own path and like most of you probably it’s not been particularly easy. Trungpa says Dharma practice is like one insult after another. Yeah, I can relate to that.

And they weren’t very nice insults. They were big insults, too. But for some reason I just kept at it. Not because it made any sense. If I’d had any sense, I wouldn’t have. Suzuki Roshi says the same thing, and he says “If I’d had any sense, I wouldn’t have stayed at the monastery. All the sensible people left.” It’s important to be in touch with that part of yourself. That, you know, here’s something that means this much to you, that you’re just going to do it. When everybody else is saying you’re nuts. But you’re not nuts. It just means that much to you. And the other part that I’ve already mentioned is find someone who is genuinely interested in you and has the knowledge and skills to guide you. That’s really important.

Okay. Our hour is completely wasted,so let’s just close. Just sit for a few minutes. I’m going to say a few lines and maybe some good can come out of this.

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]

Thanks for your attention. I’ll be back in January. Second week in January.