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

June 13, 2010

Stop and experience what is happening

Student: Referencing Wednesday, you you mentioned something in your talk about dropping in.

Ken: Oh, yes.

Student: And I was wondering if you could expand on that concept of dropping into.

Ken: On Wednesday, I was here and we went through a set of meditations, or different aspects to the same meditation:

Body like a mountain.
Breath like the sea.
Mind like the sky.

And several people said, “Wow, that’s a different way to practice. Had a different experience, just like there.” And somebody asked about, okay, how do you take this into your life? And I said, “What you do now is you learn how to drop.” It’s basically a case of developing facility. Let’s take reading for example. Now, when we learn how to read, we spell out the words, or we spell out the sounds, but that’s just the learning process. As we gain facility with reading, then we just read and we absorb the meaning.

So, in the beginning, when we’re practicing meditation it’s very much learning the mechanics and actually how to sit and let the mind rest. And then we discover, “Oh, I can just sit here and I don’t have to do anything.” And that’s what a lot of people experienced on Wednesday night, just being there and not having to do anything. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. So what you do during the day—and of course this is really hard—is, you stop. And you don’t do anything. That’s what I mean by dropping. You just stop.

Now, how many of you have meetings at your work from time to time? Everybody.How do you like meetings? Everybody hates them. Why? Because nobody listens to anybody. Right? So you just stop. And you might have a chance of hearing what somebody else is actually saying. And it can make all the difference in the world. I train people in how to have good meetings. That’s the first thing that I teach them: listen to each other. And it’s amazing that they don’t all end up saying the same thing 10 times in the course of an hour. Once is enough and then it moves on to something else.

So you stop. And you do it exactly the same way as we do in meditation. Just breathe out, and at the end of the out breath, everything stops. And you rest there. And as I said, 15, 30 seconds, that’s plenty. And you just start doing that periodically during the day. And what you’re doing is stepping out of the ordinary way of relating to everything in terms of reaction and thinking, etc., etc. and just giving yourself a moment to experience whatever’s going on. And if you do it repeatedly it’s like drops of water in a vase or a glass. It fills up and something different will start happening in your life. Does that give you enough? Okay. Your turn.

How meditation changes your life

Student: I can’t actually think of a question.

Ken: Sure you can.

Student: I’m quite new to meditation, so I’m just experiencing it right now. It’s always different, every time.

Ken: Yes.

Student: Okay. I have a question. I don’t know if, as you’re meditating, as you’re doing it more and more, do things in your life start actually adjusting themselves, and changing around? Like things that you don’t expect, things come up that you thought might have—

Ken: You have no idea.

Student: Gone and dead, dead and gone, I should say.

Ken: Yeah. A lot of things change. Yeah. Let me give you an example of a person that I worked with many years ago down in Newport Beach. She ran a business, which consisted of going to these trade shows. And everybody gets all of these things and samples and they want to ship them back to their office but they don’t want all the hassle. So she would just collect everything together, get their address, and ship it for them—as a service she provided. And she had people all over the country doing this at various trade shows. And sometimes things would get lost, but usually they didn’t get lost because you had UPS and Fedex, the tracking numbers, and all of that stuff.

But whenever a customer got on the phone saying, “I gave you this stuff to ship and it hasn’t shown up in my office.” Her attitude was she would just bend over backwards trying to figure out what happened. And and she would eventually figure out what happened and make the customer happy—the customer is always right, kind of thing. But, she had so much going on that this was just getting more and more wearing. And nine times out of ten, the problem wasn’t in the thing being shipped. The problem was in wherever it had arrived, it hadn’t got to that person’s desk. So it was nothing to do with her at all.

And as she meditated, after about four or five months of it—this is just one example, I found it coming up in many, many people—she developed a kind of quiet confidence in herself. It wasn’t arrogant in any way. It was just a quiet confidence, because now she wasn’t reacting to everything. And so when an irate customer got on the phone, “Where’s my parcel?”

She would just look it up and say, “It arrived at your office yesterday.”

“Oh.” And she wouldn’t apologize. She wouldn’t offer to do extra things like that. She’d just give the information straight. So her work got a lot simpler. But because it was coming from a quiet confidence, it didn’t irritate or get her customers bent out of shape. So that’s just one example of how things change.

The big thing is, what do we do in meditation? Here we sit, and a thought comes up, and we recognize it, and go back to the breath. Right? And we do that again, and again, and again. What we’re doing is practicing letting go of the thinking process. That’s what we’re doing. Now, when you’re having a conversation with someone, if you’re like most of us, you start thinking immediately what I’m going to say to them even before they finished, right? And that’s what prevents people from hearing each other. They’ve got 20 percent of the attention going to what the other person is saying, 80 percent of it is going to: “How am I going to respond? How am I going to look good? How am I not going to offend them?” etc., etc.

That’s all internal stuff, all our internal thinking. So as we meditate more and more, we just keep letting go of that, and we don’t even notice that we’re letting go of it. And we keep coming back, and just listening to the person. And lo and behold, we may hear what they have to say. And now it’s a very different kind of dynamic. So what a lot of people find is that as they practice meditation, after about a month or two—and I get this all the time with people—I say, “How’s your meditation going?”

They say, “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I don’t seem to be getting anything out of it. It’s just thoughts, and thoughts, and thoughts. And if there aren’t thoughts, then there are feelings. It’s just a big mess. I don’t think I’m getting anywhere.”

And I say, “Well, how’s your life going?”

And they say, “Funny you should ask. Things just seem to be going more smoothly. I seem to be getting along better with everybody.” And they just don’t put the two things together, because it’s not an obvious cause and effect kind of thing. So as you practice letting go of thinking, thinking, thinking, you may find yourself just being a bit more responsive and a bit more attuned to how things are in your life. Does that work for you? Yeah. Okay. Anything else? Okay. Your turn.

Choosing a meditation practice

Student: For me it’s a problem to decide which technique to use. Yesterday I went to my Zen group and the instruction was thinking the thought of no thought. And that went really well, actually.

Ken: I’m surprised.

Student: I was surprised myself. [Laughter] It was amazing, open eyes, and it was great. But also the week before, I got really great instructions from from a Vipassana teacher about labeling. And it also went very well. Today I missed your instructions. So I was sitting here. What should I do? Should I do this or that? So that was my confusion.

Ken: Okay. Well, a 19th-century teacher in Tibet, he wrote an awful lot. And when we were in retreat, when I was being trained, I studied several of the texts that he wrote. But I came across this little four-liner from him. Four lines? Three lines. In the Tibetan tradition, we have three phases of learning. There’s studying, reflecting, and practice. And he said, “When you study, study everything under the sun. When you reflect, keep an open mind. When you practice, do one thing.” Now, at the end of the three-year retreat, we had been trained in 150 to 200 different meditation techniques over three years. So, you have a problem? I have the same problem.

And in particular, in the Tibetan tradition, you have all of these deity practices. And we’ve done, I don’t know, 20, 30 different deity practices. And some people got along well with one. So, we asked our teacher, “How do you decide which meditation technique to use?”

He said, “Well, usually you can boil it down to about five, right? So you have five. Now if you look at those five, there’s one you’re not really that enthusiastic about. And now you look at those four. And, you don’t like this one quite so much as the others. So basically you you take something that speaks to you and, what I like to say to people, something that speaks to you even when you are completely crazy. And that’s usually what I say about finding the teacher. The teacher is a person who who you will listen to even when you’re completely crazy. The right meditation practice for you is something that you will do even when you’re completely crazy. That’s the right one. And work it, and work it very, very deeply. There’s not a right or wrong here. It’s the one that works for you.

Student: I guess I have to explore. I also think I should maybe explore those two techniques, maybe more until I decide.

Ken: I agree. I think you’re in the study stage. So learn everything you can and then you’ll find something that really speaks to you. That’s the one you go with.

When difficult material surfaces

Student: My question is this, when I sit and as I practice during the day, I can sense a kind of an integration. And no matter what is going on with me, what troubles I may be experiencing, when I sit, it brings me back to the moment. And it settles my mind. But when when I’m struggling with challenges, a lot of things will come up when I’m sleeping. And oftentimes I’ll wake up. And it’s very disturbing at times.

Ken: Two to three in the morning?

Student: Yes. Exactly. And oftentimes I’ll get up, and I’ll sit, and that will sort of pull me back into some perspective. And I’m wondering what might be happening, and how I can integrate this into my practice of meditation.

Ken: Was it from Four Quartets?

… the shame
Of motives late revealed, [and the awareness]
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

Something like that?

Student: Yes.

Ken: Okay. The reason I asked, two or three in the morning? This is when it hits. Because, the way our body-mind system works is that when you go to sleep, basically sleep is is when the body, and mind, and everything, repairs itself. And so there’s just an awful lot of maintenance going on. Now, when you’re doing doing maintenance, the usual safeguards, the usual checks, are all shut down, so that things can move around, and things like that. Right? So the defenses are way, way down, and they’re really way down at two to three in the morning. And if you happen to wake up, or if there’s something really disturbing you, that’s when you do wake up, and it’s really on your mind at that point. And it feels like the end of the world. And things can be so exaggerated at that time.

Now, this is where meditation practice actually is extremely helpful. And there are two suggestions I can make. What most people do is, they can’t sleep, they take a sleeping pill, or do something like that, and it just puts them out. But it doesn’t really help the repair process that much because that really needs to flow quite naturally. And other people get up and start working, or start writing letters, or emails, or doing stuff. And that doesn’t particularly help. But what you’re doing is exactly the right thing to do, is you just sit down, and this can be quite hard, but it’s extremely fruitful, is you open to whatever you’re experiencing. Now you’re you’re actually letting the repair process continue, and you’re experiencing it, which may or may not be very much fun. Because a lot of the stuff that’s emerging is stuff that comes from much earlier in our lives. It’s basic patterns, things like that, that just haven’t been integrated, and run automatically.

And if you can, and sounds like you have the discipline to do this, you wake up and you just sit quietly. And you can actually just continue to lie in bed and just do the same kind of thing, just rest quietly in the experience. You find that after a while, things do just sort themselves out and you go back to sleep. If, on the other hand, you start reacting to what’s arising, saying, “I’m not going to get enough sleep, I’ve got this big meeting tomorrow,” and things like that, and got all that going on. Now you’re just churning things up and that has the opposite effect.

So, how we apply our meditation in these circumstances. And this is a quotation from Thich Nhat Hanh. I really like it. “The practice of meditation is the study of what is going on.” What is going on is very important because it is this old stuff that only comes to the surface like that, that actually, to a very large extent, runs our lives without her even knowing it. So, if at two or three in the morning you wake up and you’re really upset about something, if you can, you just breathe. And basically what you’re doing is experiencing the pain, or the disturbance, or whatever, that you’ve never been able to experience before. And that’s why that repair process hasn’t been complete.

I remember I was writing a book several years ago, and I was stuck on a chapter. It was a chapter on karma. And I’d been staring at my computer screen for two weeks, and I finally said, “To hell with this.” It was in February. I drove up to Mammoth to ski. Well, we had snow for three days. It was miserable skiing, unless you like going up the the only lift they had open, and skiing down in the really, really thick blizzard with zero visibility. And one of those nights, for whatever reason, it was exactly this. I just woke up in the most intense physical and emotional pain. And to the best I could, I did exactly what you described. Just couldn’t sleep. It was a very bad trip in every way.

But the strange thing, and I’ve had this enough times that I’ve come to accept it, even though I can’t say I really understand it completely, is that when I really experience all this stuff—and it can be quite intense—then afterwards it’s like when I couldn’t move my arm like this before, and now I can move it that way very easily. There’s a whole other dimension of freedom in my life that I didn’t even know I was missing. So yeah, there are challenges here, but that’s why we learn these tools, so that we have the capacity to experience what arises when it does like that. But, absolutely, it’s not always easy. Okay? Right behind you.

How practice changes karma and patterns

Student: Hi. One of the things I was wondering about in terms of the karma that we’ve created in the past.

Ken: Yes.

Student: What have you, whenever that may be, this lifetime, or whenever. Our current meditation practice. How will that, or does it—you’re already laughing at my question—how does it change, or can it change by doing another practice?

Ken: It’s a very important question and a concern for many, many people. The short answer is yes, it can be changed, but not in the way that we usually think of change. The way that most of us think of change is, there we are driving down the street and we’re going to change directions. So we just turn the wheel, we go in a different direction. And many people express a great deal of frustration with meditation, because they’ve been going down their life this way. And now they’re practicing, so then they’re going down their life this way. But still things keep happening this way. And I’m practicing now. Aren’t they meant to change? And people still get on my case about stuff and all kinds of things.

The metaphor for change is the wrong metaphor. I think the best way to think about karma is in terms of evolution, that the ordinary way that we function out of reaction leads our lives to evolve in a certain way. And when things become certain, reach a certain level of inconvenience for us, then we start practicing something like meditation. And what we’re doing is initiating a new process of evolution, and it takes time for it to accumulate momentum and to to develop some robustness and some power in itself.

Does it do so? Absolutely. But it does it in ways that we aren’t actually controlling. What we do is we put our consistency into the effort. And that’s why I was recommending over here this business of touching, because not only do we do it in the meditation, we start changing the way that we interact with actual situations in our lives. And that’s very, very important. We can’t depend purely on sitting practice to make these changes. We’re actually initiating, and then nurturing, a different process of evolution in us. And so instead of jumping in and interacting with people with the first thing that comes to mind, we actually listen and deal with our own reactions before we respond, and that makes a huge difference. But it isn’t just like changing the direction in the car. It’s becoming increasingly more and more capable. And that’s why I use the analogy of of evolution. Does this make sense to you? Okay.

And so typically you don’t see a direct cause and effect between the efforts that you put into meditation and changes that take place in your life. They will show up usually sometime later, in ways that you don’t actually connect with the meditation. And there are other aspects to this too. And some of you may have experienced this, but I have many times received teachings on this topic, or that topic, or something like that. And I say, “Oh, that’s such a neat teaching.” And then for some reason, another three, five, ten years later, I’ll come back to that teaching and I’ll go, “Oh, that’s what they were talking about.” It’s the same words, but I understand it in a completely different way. And the reason for that is that over that period of time, things have changed in me. So now I can appreciate it in a different way, and not only appreciate it, but use it in a very, very different way.

And so, to put it into modern parlance, there’s both learning, and we learn something, but then it takes time to develop, for us to develop a facility with it. And when we developed the facility with it, then we can learn another subtlety, and then develop the facility. So it’s very far from a linear process. And the fact that it isn’t a linear process is what confuses people. They say, “How is this affecting things?” But it actually is. Does that help? Okay. Over here.

Student: I guess my comment would be, I know for myself I’m always focused on the future and where I need to get to and how I need to get there. So by sitting and bringing myself to the present, and allowing myself to accept acceptance and just be where I am and just be still, is very fulfilling.

Ken: Okay. Any questions?

Student: No.

Ken: Okay.

Changing habits through practice

Student: I’ve been thinking a lot about something that came up months ago with you. This woman was asking you how how she could make better decisions. And you were saying that our ability to make conscious decisions is actually very limited because our unconscious mind is so powerful. So since then, I’ve been thinking about what what exactly do we have control over, as far as decision making goes?

Ken: That’s your question? [Laughter] Oh, it’s just a trivial little question here.

Student: That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Like, what exactly is the question, I don’t know. But how can we influence our unconscious? I guess would be my question.

Ken: Well. I think actually, trying to influence our unconscious may not be the best way to approach things. I’m going to go back to the answer that I gave to the preceding question. The first thing is, what do you want to change? Okay? I want to change my habit of interrupting people when they speak. Anybody have that problem? Okay. Well, there’s a very simple way of changing that. Train yourself to always take a breath before you speak. Now, if you always take a breath before you speak, you will never interrupt anybody. Somebody’s talking. And you think—you take a breath—”Oh, I was just about to interrupt them.” And they continue talking, and they do it again. And you actually won’t talk until they finish. Not only that, you won’t talk until they have really finished, because while you’re taking your breath, they may start talking again.

Now, there’s a couple of consequences of this. One is, you won’t interrupt anybody. And the second is, when you do talk, everybody’s going to be listening. Because you take that breath, and there’s this pause in the whole conversation. And somebody turns to you and says, “Well, what do you have to say on this subject?” And you go, [pause]. Now everybody is going to be listening. So that starts changing things right there. But you aren’t doing this by trying to change your subconscious, or direct energy there, or be aware of it. And I find this approach much more effective than trying to get in there and jimmy with the works.

It used to be when you opened up your car, you could fix it. Now it’s all these damn computers. You know, unless you want to rewrite the software code, it’s probably a good idea to take it into the shop. And it’s a bit like that in us. There’s a lot of stuff going on. We really don’t understand it. But if there’s something specific we want to change in our lives, then we develop a practice, a way that brings attention. So I gave you one example, which is, taking a breath before we speak.

Another one, which I like is, you want to change the way you walk? Imagine that you’re rolling the earth beneath your feet when you walk, and you will find it changes the way you experience walking. And so there are little things that we can do. And if we approach those as a practice, that is, something we just come back to again, and again, whenever we can. And this goes back to the evolution thing, we just start doing it. And at first we only do it occasionally, but we keep working at it. And then we do it more, and more, until it becomes the way we relate. And that will really change, and it will take care of all of the subconscious stuff, etc. And if there’s anything in the subconscious that doesn’t want to change that way, it’ll let us know at two or three in the morning. Did that help? Okay.

Student: I didn’t hear the the recent talk, or the question on decision making, but it sounds like it might have benefited me. That answer was very useful to me in terms of sort of alteration of habit and pattern.

Ken: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Making major decisions

Student: But I’m wondering if there are sort of, if you have any offerings in terms of helpful approaches for larger decision-making processes and larger changes. For instance, if I am contemplating a career change, and I know that that’s something that needs to be effected in a relatively timely manner. If there are sort of techniques, or processes, that can just facilitate that.

Ken: I could talk for a very long time on that one. But if you go on to unfetteredmind.org, which is my website. And there’s a little postcard with that information. Go to the podcast files, and under I think it’s under workshops, you’ll find Making Things Happen. It’s a workshop I gave a couple of years ago. And there’s probably a lot of stuff in that that you may find helpful.

But to respond directly to your question here, I’m going to give you two responses. One, a little more practical than the other. The big one, and this is how to approach major decisions. This works also for minor decisions, but it’s very good for major decisions. But I usually recommend to people is when you’re approaching a major decision in your life, and career change is definitely one: Open to every facet of your life. Just take some time. Sit quietly, and open to every facet of your life. Don’t ignore anything, and just keep including, including, including. So you sit in what really becomes like this multicolored, multithreaded ball of string, with stuff going all over the place, and stuff pulling you in this place, and stuff pulling you in that way, and that way, and that way. And you sit in that until you can actually be present with all of it. And when you’re actually present with all of it, you’re going to discern, very likely, what feels out of balance and where the tensions are in a very different way.

And through that, through addressing those imbalances, you will find your direction. Now, this is not a logical process. And the reason I don’t emphasize a logical process is, logic and reason are always in service of the emotional agendas, many of which are below our awareness. But by opening to this this way, you actually can include a lot of those emotional pulls and tugs. And that’s why I find it leads to better decisions, because it’s including your whole being, not just your rational mind.

Now, you mentioned career change. One of the ways that I apply what I just said in the business context—I do some business consulting—to people who ask me very similar questions. They’re trying to figure out, “I’m trying to figure out what my next job should be.” What I suggest that they do, rather than trying to figure out what their next job should be. And they’re thinking, “Should I be this or that, or this or that, or work at that firm?” What I suggest that they do is get a picture of their job. That is, number one, who are you working with? What kind of people are they? What kind of education? What kind of income? What kind of things they do? Who are the people you’re working with? Because all of us work with other people. Okay. Where are you working? Is it in an office? Is it outside? Is it with a research team in a lab? I mean, where are you actually working? What kinds of things are you doing? Are you having discussions? Meetings? One-on-one? Are you making stuff with your hands?

And so you get a picture of your job. And I have a whole thing, if you want to email me, I can send it to you, a whole list of questions like this, where you get a picture of your job, and you can see how it’s just opening to the experience of working. And when you get a picture of your job, like who it’s with, where it is, what kinds of things you’re doing, what kind of interactions you’re having with people, then you begin to look for jobs that fit the picture. And it’s a rather different way of approaching it. So those are my two suggestions to you. Okay?

Impermanence and what really matters

Student: I was wondering if you could touch on impermanence for a second. It’s a part of my practice and the teachings that I haven’t had enough time to study. And yet it’s something—

Ken: Because things keep changing, right? [Laughter]

Student: I mean impermanence, almost on an even deeper level, dealing with death, and the fact of the inevitable, that we all are created from the same things and we all end up in the same place. It becomes ever so apparent to me in my practice, because I’ve learned now that I’m not my material possessions. I’m not my clothes. I’ve come to learn that I’m not my thoughts. And as I grow a little older, I realize that I’m not my body as well, as I start to lose my hair, and my feet and my back hurt. I realized that that’s not who I am. So can you talk about how that relates to who we actually are beyond our body, thoughts, and possessions? And if that does relate to impermanence in any way?

Ken: Well, certainly does. That’s great. Okay, I need to dig a little deeper if that’s okay with you. What’s the question behind the question?

Student: Who are we, really?

Ken: No, you’ve asked this question, but it’s coming from someplace in you. So what’s what’s the question behind the question?

Student: That would be maybe, possibly, who am I?

Ken: Who am I? Okay. [Pause] Well, you’re going to find this terribly glib. I wouldn’t worry about it. [Laughter] No, I mean, as I said, that’s a little bit glib. So let me expand on it a little.

What you’ve been doing in your practice is very good. And I want to put it in a slightly different framework which may, I hope, help you. That’s my intention anyway. We train in impermanence, including contemplation of our own mortality. And in the traditional teachings, it’s said to—at least the way I was trained, and this may have some resonance with you—to sever attachment to this life. That sound familiar? Okay, now, the key is, what does this life refer to? It’s usually, at least in the Tibetan tradition in which I was trained, this life refers to the life we’re having now. And when we sever attachment to this life, we’ll focus on things which are really important, like what’s going to happen in future lives. Somehow this never really passed muster with me because I wasn’t really sure that I was going to be around.

Now, somebody asked me the other day, “How do you know you’re not going to experience future life?”

I said, “I don’t know, but all I know is it’s not going to be me. Because I’m a product of this life.” But, as I dug into this more, what I came to appreciate is that, and I’ve taught death, and I practiced them myself a lot, and I’ve taught it to many, many people. What I found happening again, and again, is that people, when they practice death and impermanence, they had exactly the kind of understandings that you’re describing like, “No, I’m not my possessions. I’m not all this material stuff. I’m not even my body.” Because, you know, there’s this sense of something other.

What people found changed is, they stopped, stop is not quite the right word. They found themselves being freed from socially and culturally conditioned notions of success and failure. Where you’re meant to have this great body, and we’re meant to have all this wealth, and we’re meant to be famous and well known. That’s success, right? And obscure, and unhappy, and scraping our way through life—that’s failure, and so forth. And, as they really came to accept that all of the stuff that we’re told is so important wasn’t actually important. So the question about who am I became, what’s really important to me? And they moved out of the socially conditioned life and started living their own lives, which is horribly dangerous, at least as far as society is concerned, because now you’re no longer subject to the usual rules.

They start, “Okay, what’s really important to me?” And that’s the question that’s at the heart of the matter. And in this, you’re in very good company, because the Stoics, back in Grecian times, did exactly the same set of contemplations. They phrased it a little differently, but they used very similar meditations. And they said, “Anything that can be taken away from me is not to be valued.” Okay. Can my material possessions be taken away from me? Absolutely. Somebody can come in and steal them tomorrow. Can my wealth and job be taken away from me? Career? Yep. That can be taken away. Can my health and well-being, or health and comfort be taken away? Yep. Can my family and friends be taken away? Yep. Can my body be taken away? Yep.

So if anything that can be taken away from me is not to be valued, then what do I actually value? And they come out in a remarkably similar position as Buddhism does. The quality of what I’m experiencing now, or my experience now, is the only thing that can’t be taken away from me. And so you come, when you approach, whether it’s through death and impermanence, or through the Stoic approach, you come to, “How am I right now? Am I experiencing this? Am I in this experience? And, am I doing things that are contrary to whatever values I hold in myself?” And this becomes one’s primary concern in life, living in a way which is in balance and doesn’t create imbalance and struggle with our experience.

It sounds very simple, but it’s actually very, very profound. And I brought along these just in case I might need them today. There’s a couple of translations of Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching, and it’s so on this topic. There was one particular, I’ve got a couple of translations here, but this is Ursula Le Guin’s, which is really quite a lovely translation.

Brim-fill the bowl,
it’ll spill over.
(If you make things too full, you just make a mess.)
Keep sharpening the blade,
you’ll soon blunt it.
(So if you keep working at stuff without taking any respite, or really looking at what you’re doing, you’re just going to ruin things.)

Nobody can protect a house full of gold and jade.
(Everybody’s going to try and steal from that. Southern California has been the bank robbery capital of the world for ages.)

Wealth, status, pride,
are their own ruin.
To do good, work well, and lie low
is the way.

Tao Te Ching, Ursula K. LeGuin (translator), p. 12


Does that help? Okay, we’ve got time for a few more, please.

Coffee and meditation

Student: I have a really silly question, I feel.

Ken: Look, as I said on Wednesday night, I have been teaching for 25 years. I can still count the number of silly questions on one hand. So, you may push me over, but I doubt it.

Student: I’ll try. Happy to say that I’ve been working meditation into my morning routine every day. But the first part of my morning routine is a cup of very strong coffee. And I feel, as soon as I have my coffee, my neurons burst into action, and my thoughts are going really strong. And when I sit down to meditate, my thoughts are going, I noticed.

Ken: Well, yes, it’s a little bit of a stimulant.

Student: Meditating under the influence. And I wonder, am I flexing my meditation muscles by doing this, or should I just try to do this before I have my coffee in the morning?

Ken: Okay. It’s actually a fairly complex question. I taught many, many retreats up at Mount Baldy, we rent the facilities. And at one of the retreats, I said, “No coffee.” And my students organized a lynching mob. And I lost. [Laughter] At least we don’t have coffee before the morning meditation. But they just said, “No, we’re not going.” And that was that.

My ex-wife, who has all the same training that I’ve had, and she did a three-year retreat, she would never do anything until she had her morning cup of tea. Tea, not coffee, but same diff. So, you’re going to have to gauge this for yourself. You’re used to a certain stimulus. You don’t feel your awake until you’ve had that. But as you say with that stimulus, then you sit down and your mind’s running 100 miles an hour, and not so good for your meditation. So I would invite you to experiment. Get up in the morning and do some very light exercise. You know, just twisting your body, or a few stretches, or something, so you really wake up. And then sit down. It’s the old cold water technique. Maybe you can try that instead of coffee. You know, wash your face with cold water. It’s much older than coffee. But, you know, actually wake up and see. And just explore what that’s like, and see how that goes. Okay? Behind you.

When attention collapses down

Student: Let’s see. You’ve talked before about collapsing down, I think is the word, the phrase, that you use. But I haven’t noticed any real in-depth discussion or specific discussion, which might include, I’m somewhat curious about your own experience. But, aside from curiosity, from a practical point of view, one of the things you offer is mapping of spiritual growth. One of the questions I’m considering now is, well, what about mapping the fall and growth? In other words, that collapsing down. What is that about? How do we go through it in as best the way we can?

Ken: Okay.

Student: And what might we actually gain from having gone through such a process?

Ken: Okay. What catches your attention?

Student: What catches my attention?

Ken: Something that happens, more or less frequently, that always grabs your attention.

Student: Loud noise. Loud sounds.

Ken: That’s good. Thank you. So we’re sitting quietly. And there’s a loud sound, maybe a car backfiring, or explosion, or siren, or something like that. And all our attention goes whoosh. That’s what I mean about by collapsing down. All our attention moves to some facet of our experience, and everything else is forgotten. Now, very clearly, this serves some very important survival functions. In terms of keeping the whole mind-body thing going. We hear a loud noise, for instance, that often signifies danger, or were keyed to regarding it as something that might signify danger, so that it takes all our attention. That that increases our chance of actually surviving.

The same thing happens with thoughts. Certain thoughts arise and whoosh, just suck all our attention up, just like that. It’s a natural functioning of the human organism. And in that sense, unless we train specifically, it’s always going to happen. It’s something, to use a conventional cliché, is hardwired into us. And it serves many important functions, just in terms of negotiating our lives. But, there are also some problems associated with it. When we collapse down on something, we forget everything else. And we’re primarily in reaction mode. The benefit of reaction mode is that it’s the way that the organism gets us through something that is potentially life threatening, whether it’s really life threatening or not, it’s perceived that way. The big disadvantage is our whole organism is cued to reacting to that one thing, and and everything else is gone. So we may end up doing something that’s actually completely disastrous because it’s out of our awareness.

One of the things that we can train ourselves to do, and it does take training, is to include everything in our attention all the time. So that when something new comes up, yes, there’s that move. But because of our training, then the sense of including starts up almost immediately also. And that’s essentially what we’re doing in meditation practice—and this is why I describe it as training ourselves to experience life a different way—so that something comes up, yes, it’s very important. We need to pay attention to it, but maybe not 100 percent of our attention, maybe only 75 percent. And so we’re aware of the other things around.

So, what are the benefits of collapsing down? It can be life saving. Or, you know, yes, our organism is signaling, here’s something really important. So it’s a way of recognizing potentially what’s very important. What are the disadvantages of it? It tends to be exclusive attention. Another potential difficulty with it is that it can be very, very cued to previous experience. So that how we act in a situation now is based on what happened to us then, not on what’s appropriate now. If you follow. Yeah. So, it’s still something quite important because it’s digging up that stuff in us, but maybe important in a different way from how we might react to it. So, it isn’t a case of disregarding that process, but a way of forming a different relationship with it, so it isn’t the process that runs our lives. Okay. Is there anything you want to follow up on that? I think I’ve responded to your question.

Student: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. Thank you.

Ken: You’re very welcome. Okay. 12:30. We didn’t get to everybody. I’m sorry. [Laughter] Ken’s saying, “Thank goodness.” Okay. So let’s just sit for a moment. And, I think these are all great and very, from my perspective, important questions. And I hope that even though you didn’t get to ask your question, that maybe you got something out of the various discussions and interactions that we had. So just think of all that’s happened here today, this last hour and a half.

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 very much. I’m back here the second Sunday in July. Right?