Experience whatever arises

Kerry: I’m Kerry and I live in Los Altos, California, and I have an experiential awareness question. I have no trouble becoming aware of the breathing, my breath. I have no trouble becoming aware of sounds, sensations, pain in the body, wind against my face. I have a little trouble with emotions, not always, but a lot of times I identify with them. Sometimes I can step out and say, “Ah, I’m getting angry,” and I can look at it as an observer. But what I haven’t had, or at least have not been able to recognize, is being able to be an observer of my thoughts. It seems like when I’m thinking and the thoughts that I think, that’s who I am. It’s only after I have the thought that maybe I can have another thought, which says, “Oh, well, you were thinking, so you should be able to observe that.”

Ken: But then you don’t observe that thought.

Kerry: Then I’m not observing that thought.

Ken: There are different approaches in practice. In some traditions, one is taught to cultivate what you’re describing as the observer. In my own training, that was never encouraged. There are definite advantages to cultivating the observer because it it’s like a step towards being able to appreciate that everything is just an arising in experience. In my own training that wasn’t the approach that we were offered. Rather, whatever arises, just experience it. Now, you say you can observe the body sensations.

Kerry: Yes.

Ken: Okay. What observes?

Kerry: I was afraid you would ask that question.

Ken: I don’t want you to actually try to answer it. Right now we’re sitting here.

Kerry: Right.

Ken: There’s visual sensations, some audio sensations. There are some tactile kinesthetic sensations. So we can just open to the experience of those. Then we can ask the question, “What experiences all that?” What happens in you when you ask that question?

Kerry: I immediately go looking for an answer.

Describe emptiness

Ken: I’d like you to try it again and see if you can notice what happens before you go looking for an answer.

Kerry: There’s just emptiness.

Ken: Describe that to me.

Kerry: There’s no words, just the experience. The mind hasn’t kicked in to try and elaborate on it or analyze it.

Ken: So the intellect hasn’t kicked in.

Kerry: Right.

Ken: Okay. So, what is the experience?

Kerry: Just what happens. What I perceive.

Ken: So there’s a stopping of the ordinary process of thinking, etc. And then there’s just experiencing.

Kerry: Right.

Ken: Can you practice that way?

Kerry: I think so.

Ken: Okay. Why don’t you try that?

Kerry: Okay. Thanks.

Flattening thoughts and turning the mind inward

Lobsang: This is Lobsang from Claremont and my questions concern my attempts to avoid negative thoughts and negative thought patterns, especially repetitive habitual ones. So I went to the mind training tradition, especially the book, The Great Path of Awakening, and I found some instructions that were rather puzzling at the end. And since the commentary doesn’t go into a lot of detail in this book and you translated it, perhaps you could explain the meaning of these passages that I found most puzzling? To quote from Jamgön Kongtrül’s book, he says:

As soon as (bad) thoughts arise, flatten them in mind training or emptiness. As soon as disturbing emotions arise, jump on them, round them up, isolate and crush them.

The Great Path of Awakening, Jamgön Kongtrül, Ken McLeod (translator), p. 48

And then there’s another passage that seems to need some clarification for me. He says:

If you follow any thought or emotion, major or minor and let your mind wander outward, your work is in error and you’re no different from an ordinary person. Instead turn your attention right in and look right at your mind. When you look at it, nothing is seen.

The Great Path of Awakening, Jamgön Kongtrül, Ken McLeod (translator), p. 51

These recommendations are supposed to lead to a state of emptiness, which is “the essence of ultimate bodhicitta” [p. 51].

So my questions concern primarily these metaphors of flattening thoughts and turning the mind inward rather than outward. What does that mean in practical terms?

Ken: Okay, there are two questions here and they actually deal with very different aspects of meditation. You prefaced your question with your effort to avoid bad or negative thoughts. Well, can you control how many thoughts you’re going to have in the next 10 minutes?

Lobsang: No, definitely not.

Ken: Okay. Can you control what any given thought is going to be?

Lobsang: I don’t think so. No.

Ken: Can you control whether a given thought distracts your attention or not?

Lobsang: [Pause] No.

Ken: No. That’s quite right. None of us can do that. So when it comes to meditation practice, we don’t know how many thoughts we’re going to have and we can’t do anything about it. We can’t decide not to have a given type of thought because we can’t control that as you just said, and we can’t control or determine whether we’re going to be distracted or not—all of those things. So it’s useless to make any efforts about things that we actually can’t control. So if we can’t do any of that, what do we do in meditation?

In meditation or when we’re practicing meditation, we fall into distraction over and over again. But you may have observed that it doesn’t matter how deeply you fall into distraction. There’s always a moment and it may be a second, a minute, five minutes, ten minutes, whatever, where you go, “Oh, I’ve been distracted.” Is that your experience?

Lobsang: Yes.

Ken: Okay. Everything depends on what we do in that moment. At that moment, we have choice. We can either go with the distraction or continue to go with a distraction or we can return to the practice. Let’s say it’s resting in the experience of breathing. That’s all we can do.

How to flatten thoughts

Ken: When Kongtrül writes,

As soon as thoughts arise, flatten them in mind training or emptiness and as soon as disturbing emotions arise, jump on them, round them up, isolate them, crush them.

The Great Path of Awakening, Jamgön Kongtrül, Ken McLeod (translator), p. 48

he’s not talking about preventing these things from happening because that’s not possible as you and I’ve already discussed. In the first part of this, “As soon as thoughts arise, flatten them in mind training or emptiness.” You may recall earlier in the book an instruction which goes, “Three objects, three poisons, three seeds of virtue” [p. 16]. This is how you “flatten” thoughts in mind training. When an object that you like arises as a thought, for instance, you think of a new car or a vacation or a nice dinner, or whatever, that’s an object. And it’s because it’s something you like, it elicits attraction, which has one of the three poisons: attraction, aversion, and indifference. And as soon as you recognize that—because you can’t do anything until you recognize it—you do two things for taking and sending. You think, “May all of the attraction that other beings experience come into this attraction of mine. May they be free of it. And may all enjoyment that I have experienced with this object, be given to all sentient beings so they experience that enjoyment.” That’s the actual practice of taking and sending. Now you notice what’s happened? Here you had a thought, which is based on one of the three poisons, but as soon as it’s recognized, you transform it into an exercise of virtue.

That’s what Kongtrül means when he says “flatten them.” You’re no longer engaged in that reactive thought. Okay? And we do the same thing with aversion, and indifference.

Flatten thoughts in emptiness

Ken: What does it mean to flatten the thought in emptiness? Allow yourself to think of something right now, just a single thing. It can be a person or an object. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or dislike it, just any one thing. Okay? Now open to the experience of thinking. What happens?

Lobsang: It’s hard to say. There’s nothing there.

Ken: What did you experience when I asked you to open to the experience of thinking?

Lobsang: It suddenly seemed insubstantial.

Ken: That was flattening the thought in emptiness.

Don’t ignore disturbing emotions

Ken: Now, when he talks about, “When disturbing emotions arise, jump on them, round them up, isolate them, crush them,” basically, this is very dramatic language for saying, don’t ignore them. You do the same kind of thing: either use taking and sending, mind training in the way that I described, or practice of emptiness in the way that I just showed you. And you can do this with disturbing emotions too. The energy that they have to distract us is flattened out or is just dissipated. Then we can just return to that resting in that open awareness.

It doesn’t mean declaring war on them in the sense of trying to fight against them. Because when we do that, we actually create more disturbance in our mind and it just becomes more and more agitated. Before we go to the next part, is there anything you’d like to follow up there?

Lobsang: No, I don’t think so. I think it’s fairly clear.

Ken: Okay, good. Now that’s how to work with thoughts and emotions, both with the mind training and the taking and sending of the compassion aspect and the emptiness aspect. The second quotation that you read, I believe comes right at the end of the book.

Lobsang: Right.

Direct awareness

Ken: And it is Kongtrül’s one paragraph instruction on the presence in direct awareness:

If you follow any thought or emotion, major or minor and let your mind wander outwards, your work is in error and you’re no different from an ordinary person.

The Great Path of Awakening, Jamgön Kongtrül, Ken McLeod (translator), p. 51

Now what happens ordinarily when a thought comes up? We start thinking it. That’s what everybody does. And as soon as we start thinking a thought, we’re lost in the world of the thought. You follow?

Lobsang: Right.

Ken: And there’s no wakefulness; there’s no presence; there’s no mindfulness; there’s no awareness. We’re just in that thinking process and that’s when we’re reactive, when the emotions just run.

That’s why Kongtrül says, in this case, “You’re no different from an ordinary person.” This is what everybody does. Instead, turn your attention right in and look right at your mind.

Now we did this just a few moments ago, but we can do it again. So bring something which has an emotional charge to mind. You don’t have to tell me what it is. It could be anger or it could be desire or it could be pride or jealousy. It doesn’t matter. It could also be love and compassion. They work a little differently because they’re higher emotions. So bring that to mind. Okay? Now, I’m going to ask you a question. I don’t want you to answer it. I just want you to experience what happens when I pose this question to you. I don’t want you to try to answer it. So you have that emotionally charged element? Okay. What experiences that? To the best of your ability, describe what you experienced when I asked that question.

Lobsang: Well, it was some kind of emotional charge. I got kind of, well I was kind of caught up in some negative emotions that were…it was kind of a whole complex of things, but there was one primary emotion that was kind of taking me on a trip, so to speak.

Ken: Right.

Lobsang: Can I tell you what I was thinking about?

Ken: You can, but what I’m particularly interested in is, when I asked you, “What experiences that?” I wanted to know what you experienced when I asked that question.

Lobsang: Well, it was kind of an emotional heat experience, actually.

Ken: Like there’s sudden surge of emotional energy? Okay. Now, I want to go to the step further. I want you to look at what experienced that emotional surge. Just look at it. What happens?

Lobsang: Well, for me, it’s kind of a dualistic feeling. It’s like my self concept, or whatever you want to call it, I’m observing what I think I am, rather than what I really am.

Ken: Okay. What observes?

Lobsang: Well, I’m not sure I know. If I answered that question, I’d go to textbook answers and I’m not—

Ken: Exactly. But what do you experience when I ask that question?

Lobsang: Well, just a sense of how involved I am in my own self concept.

Ken: Okay. That’s the fourth thing that happens. There are three things that happened before that. So I’d like you to take another look. So, bring up an emotion, something that’s got a little emotional charge. I’m going to ask you again. What experiences that? Just look and tell me what you experience.

Lobsang: Well, in this case, it was a certain amount of empathy.

Ken: Again, you’re on the fourth thing. The first three happened very, very quickly. So just take a moment to rest with your breath for a few moments, just feel your breath coming and going in your body. Let your body relax. You can put that piece of paper down. You’re not going to need it. Feel your whole body breathing, feel the breath coming in, maybe deep into your stomach. So you experience the mind resting in the breath. Is that right?

Lobsang: It’s getting there.

Ken: Okay. I’m going to ask you the question in a slightly different way. What experiences resting? Okay. Right there. What were you experiencing? It’s very difficult to put into words, isn’t it?

Lobsang: Maybe a little bit of shamatha.

Looking inward

Ken: What happens is when we ask these kinds of questions, the first thing that happens is we look, everybody looks.

Lobsang: Do you mean we physically look inward?

Ken: No, we look there. You were asking me, “What does a look inward mean?” That’s what it means, exactly that. Because that’s what those questions do, they cause us to look inward. Okay? Now, that’s the first thing that happens, we look inward. The second thing that happens is that we see nothing, because there isn’t anything to see. That is, whatever experiences that, cannot be seen. So we see nothing. The third thing that happens is we panic, because we’re looking right at nothing. And we fall out of the panic into something that we’re comfortable doing, like: intellectualizing, analyzing, thinking, conceptualizing in some way. That’s why I said that was the fourth thing that happens. What we’re doing in Buddhist meditation is developing a capacity of attention, so we can actually rest in the looking and in the seeing nothing without falling into the confusion of panic.

Looking, resting, and experiencing what we actually are

Ken: That’s why Kongtrül describes this as the “essence of ultimate bodhicitta” [p. 51] because it is through by looking at nothing and coming to rest in it that we come to experience what we actually are. Does this make any sense to you? I could be babbling here and not making any sense whatsoever.

Lobsang: Well, it, no, it really does. In a sense, I picked the most difficult examples to think about. My sense of it was that, “Oh, I have to pick something, what am I going to pick?” And I picked the most emotionally charged thing first, which was my mother. And well, no, the very first was just an object. The second was my mother. And I think after that, I was probably just basically tossed back and forth on emotional seas. But it sounds like what you’re saying is very similar to his instruction on how you meditate on ultimate bodhicitta. Is it parallel to that?

Ken: It is. He’s talking about the same thing. There are different ways and you emphasize different aspects, but it’s exactly the same.

Lobsang: So those are the four steps of—

Ken: Yeah, at the beginning of the book, that’s right.

Open to experience. That’s: “Regard everything like a dream” [p. 10].

“Examine the nature of unborn awareness” [p. 11]. You look at what experiences it.

“Let even the remedy subside on its own,” [p. 11] which is, when you do this, you start thinking of how everything’s empty, etc., and just let all of that stuff go, and rest in the nature of things.

Lobsang: So what I was doing was actually what you shouldn’t be doing, right? Because my fourth step was intellectualizing.

Ken: This cannot be understood intellectually, or I’d say, it cannot be known intellectually. You can understand it intellectually, but it’s worth almost nothing. The point here is to know it experientially and it’s a very different process.

Lobsang: Well, I really appreciate that. I feel like I understand it so much more deeply now.

Ken: Well, you’re very welcome.