Dealing with extremes in experience

Ken: As we’ve done in the past with these two verses, let’s take a look at the conceptual understanding and any translation points that you want to ask about. Any questions out there? Okay. Then we move on to, what was it like to reflect on this? Anybody got anything on that? Well, intellectual understanding is straightforward. It is fairly straightforward for these.

When you are down and out, held in contempt,
Desperately ill, and emotionally crazed,
Don’t lose heart. Take into you
The suffering and negativity of all beings—

Even when you’re famous, honored by all,
And rich as the god of wealth himself.
Don’t be pompous. Know that the magnificence of existence
Has no substance—

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verses 18, 19

So, everybody seems to understand that conceptually, right?

Student: The line: Know that the magnificence of existence has no substance. That line got me a little confused. I wasn’t sure about the magnificence of existence. I guess maybe I should think more about the magnificence word, but it seemed like the mystery of existence. I don’t know. Could you explain that line?

Ken: I’ll try to, yes. That’s verse 19. These two verses are about two extremes. One is, when everything’s going wrong in your life, what do you do? The second verse is about when everything’s going right in your life.

Now, in the mahamudra tradition, these are referred to as the bad fall and the good fall. I’m not quite sure why the word fall is used, but at a certain stage in your practice, everything either collapses or everything suddenly becomes just wonderful. And the tendency is to believe what is happening.

So, in the second one, Even when you’re famous, honored by all, and as rich as the god of wealth himself, well, these are all wonderful things. You can get whatever you want, and go wherever you want, and wear whatever you want and eat whatever you want. And it’s very tempting at that point to think, “Oh, all of this is real. This is mine. I’ve arrived!”

Yet in the way that we were discussing last week, all of that is simply an experience. It happens to be a very pleasant experience, but it is simply an experience, and that’s what the line has no substance refers to. The magnificence, I had to struggle to find that word. The Tibetan is dpal ‘byor (pron. paljor), which means what is brilliant and rich or splendid and rich, is the idea in the Tibetan. So, magnificence I thought is more or less in the same ballpark. So, does that make more sense to you? Okay. Joe?

Joe: This is intimidating.

Ken: Yes, isn’t it? Well, I’m having to get used to it, so I think you can too. Just don’t believe it, that’s all. Yeah, it’s just a stick you’re holding in front of you. Nothing’s happening to it. Yeah, it’s just a stick that you’re holding in front of you. Nothing’s happening with anything.

Joe: I’ll try that. [Laughter] I had this experience with these two verses separated out from the rest of the text. I realized that for me, I was either in one of those states or the other unless I was entirely present, which is a bare minuscule portion of the time that I exist. And I sort of came to call it the “I’m fabulous/I’m fucked dichotomy.” [Laughter]

Ken: Okay, I got it.

Joe: But going back to what you were saying about balance, about what you said about bicycle riding, in the past. If I can become more and more aware of judging my experience on these two bases, seeing—rather, not judging it—seeing me be in these two areas, back and forth. And I can compensate, I can regain balance.

Ken: Okay. Well, I’d like to ask a clarifying question here if I may. Do you mean finding a state that is a kind of balance between, how did you put it, “fucked and fabulous?” Is that what you mean?

Joe: That is neither of those, yes.

Student: Two halves [laughter].

Ken: Okay. There’s a little danger in here I think. The first verse is very explicit: everything’s going wrong. Okay? You’re down and out, you don’t have any money. People hold you in contempt. You’re a homeless person and nobody’s stopping to give you any cash by the roadside. In fact, they’re all making rude gestures at you. Not only that, you’re ill. You’re not even sure whether you’re sane or not. Okay? It’s pretty bad. All right? Now, what’s the balance point there?

Joe: I am not sure if I can explain it that way. I guess what I meant to say was that I have never felt myself in all of those positions at once, but I can feel myself in one of them, at least at almost any given time.

Ken: Okay, well, just for a moment, imagine yourself in all four of them at the same time.

Joe: Okay.

Ken: Okay. Now what?

Joe: They’re still all stories that I’m telling myself about my situation.

Ken: Okay, very good. Because I was concerned that you might be going in a different direction, and that’s what I wanted to clarify. They’re are ways of interpreting or understanding our experience, which reinforces a certain image of ourselves, right? Now, what Tokmé Zongpo is saying here is that when our experience of life is like this, what do we do in practice? We use our experience as a basis for, excuse me, taking in the suffering of others. What does that do?

Joe: What actually happens to me is [pause] I seem to spread out.

Ken: Okay, go on.

Joe: Somehow the repetitive storytelling, which is the identity which marks the state to me, stops.

Ken: Does anybody else connect with this? Okay. Anybody else want to say something about this, Julia?

Julia: Yeah. When I reflected on this, I got to the point of realizing about not taking it personally. And that anything can happen to anyone at any time. That came up for me realizing that this was just what happened or what could happen.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else?

Student: I found that in moving into taking and sending, I got present, got out of my mind and into my heart, I found that to just be an opening.

Ken: Alright, Peri?

Peri: Well, it created an opening and then as I took in the suffering of all beings, I opened and then opened more to the experience, and then I dropped the stories and dropped the “I”.

Ken: Okay. Kate?

Kate: Well, I had a situation in my life this week where I used this. Something came up. I knew what I needed to do and I knew that I was going to be, in a sense, held in contempt by somebody—that they weren’t going to understand. And when I did taking and sending, which is how I kind of read this, and all I can say is it got me out of myself. I was caught in my own story. It wasn’t even so much that I believed the story, but I was still caught in the story. I didn’t believe it 100 percent, but I was still caught in it. But when I went to this practice, I wasn’t focused on the story anymore. I focused myself I guess, in a direction of opening, and taking in suffering, and giving out something positive. And it feels like I am not caught in myself at that point.

Ken: Okay, anybody else? Nava?

Nava: It made me know very well what’s happening. I was sick last week. Every time I felt very bad, immediately I did that practice, and immediately I knew exactly what is that suffering, not only for me, but for everybody.

Ken: Yeah, for everybody.

Student: You once told us to distrust those moments when we were feeling so, like everything was rosy, [laughs] and because the next moment the fall would be much more hard on us. And I find that I can be over pampering a bit so that it makes those difficult times easier to accept, when you just can be with them on that level, I’m trying to say.

Ken: Okay,

Student: I saw it as, I felt it like an opportunity to wake up, because when you’re suffering like that, you believe it. You’re completely caught into it. You don’t see anything else. It’s poor me, and everything around me is terrible and I’m falling apart. If you see yourself and everyone else in that same soup, somehow you’re not preoccupied anymore with how it’s just affecting you, but you can feel everything and respond to everything.

Ken: Anybody else relate to that? Clint?

Clint: Not in response to that. I went to the body. The first part, crazy, held in contempt and felt very taut and tight, constricted, constrained. And then the second part just, I wasn’t even aware of my body, just something dissipated or disappeared

Ken: In the second verse?

Clint: In the second half, I mean in the taking in the suffering.

Ken: Okay, so a lot of people experienced a shift when you did this. Okay. Now, Joe talked about finding balance. What I want to suggest is that you find that balance within the experience, not by trying to change it. What is the imbalance then? Ordinarily we think of good balancing bad, but most of you have described finding a shift.

When you imagine this being down and out, held and contempt, desperately ill, emotionally crazy, then you think, “Okay, take in the suffering of all beings, all their negativity too.” And something shifts. Okay. What happens? What happens there? Now don’t try and think this through, just go through that meditation, that practice, and there’ll be a little echo of it, and then just open as best you can to that echo of that experience. What actually does happen there? Okay? Isabel.

Isabel: I’m not sure this is what you’re referring to, but the shift that happened for me was that what I could see more clearly is, in the practice is that what I normally do, especially when I’m in a bad place, I guess, is that I sort of create a contrasting reality, a fantasy of how I’d like it to be. And it’s a form of resisting what is. And when I do this practice that evaporates and I feel myself just settling down into what I’m actually experiencing.

Ken: And what happens then?

Isabel: Well, the opening, less of a sense of separation from anything, gosh, some clarity. A sense of clarity.

Ken: Okay, all right. Diane?

Diane: Yeah, I was going to mention the separation also. I mean, there’s no sense of separation. And the other part of it is you’re initially sort of looking through, I always think of this concept of looking through a keyhole. You’re sort of looking through a keyhole initially, and you’ve got this laser-like focus on whatever calamity or whatever’s wonderful in your life. And then it’s like opening the door, and there’s no door, and there’s the full field of vision and it’s just completely different. You lose that separation.

Don’t fight with your experience

Ken: Yeah. Okay. Now, so what’s been coming up here is, no separation from experience. At least that’s how people have been describing it. One of the things that I’ve talked about before is fighting experience. And when things are unpleasant, I think it’s fair to say we are biologically, and emotionally, and socially conditioned to fight that experience.

We want to change things. If you’re poor, you earn money. If you’re injured, then you try to find a place to rest and feel better. I mean, there’s some very, very powerful programming in us to move us to fight the experience just so the organism can survive in many cases.

But when we do that, we make what we’re fighting into something more real than it is, and now it becomes overwhelming. And so actually the overwhelm comes from being separate from, not from being one in it. And so I’m very happy to hear how your practice has developed a sufficient level of attention that you can take this and actually feel that shift. Now doing this in actual life situations, what’s that like?

Isabel: It is a lot more awkward, sort of felt like a toddler going, “Oh, can I walk or not?” It’s much more difficult to stay present with your experience.

Ken: Why is that?

Isabel: Well, the patterns are so much stronger if you’re in the presence of a triggering situation. The patterns are so much more present and pulling away from …

Ken: Yeah. Peri?

Peri: Seems so counterintuitive. I always have this image of being shot with an arrow, and you can’t pull it out because of the head of the arrow. And so you’ve got to push it through.

Ken: [Laughs] Such a nice image.

Peri: Not what I want to do that [laughs]. That’s how it feels to me.

Ken: Yeah. So, when it happens in real life, our first impulse is to go like this. But actually, to use your image, we have to, as you say, push it through. Okay. George?

George: In real life, you might not recognize it either. It’s suddenly so daunting, so intense that you go blank almost.

Ken: You’re quite right. Okay, Joe, did you have a comment?

Joe: No.

We need to practice many times

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Okay, so there are a couple of things here. One is the reason we practice this is so that when it comes up in real life situations, we just do it. And it’s not a case of remembering to do it because you’re already playing catch up then. It’s just that you just do it, and there’s no other way but that. You just have to practice it and make it as such a part of you that it comes up.

And again, this refers to a line in the mind training teachings you may recall: “You are proficient if you practice even when you’re distracted”. And really, the Chinese have another way of saying it: “To learn something, do it 10,000 times.” You just do it over, and over, and over again until it’s just part of you. In martial arts training, there’s another way of looking at it which is: you learn the technique, you do it so that it just happens, and then you get rid of all of the emotional stuff that prevents you from just doing it. So, you’ve actually got three levels there.

Now this underscores the need for actually practicing. And, you can tell, this isn’t fun to practice. And the way that you do that is not to rely simply on your meditation sessions, because simply speaking, it’s not enough, particularly in the way that we work here. If you’re in a retreat situation where you’re meditating 8 to 10 hours a day, then you’re doing this 8 to 10 hours a day, it becomes quite deeply instilled. But even in those circumstances, there’re many, many people who can practice and have a very, very deep level of attention. But as soon as they’re engaged in life, there’s nothing there, or very little there.

To get it to the point where it’s actually just there in you requires not only doing it a lot, but dropping into it again and again. And so again, from the mind training teaching, they say: “Use phrases to train in all situations.” One of the famous phrases is, “May others experience all gain and victory. May I experience all loss and defeat,” typical mind training instruction. “May all the happiness go to them. May all suffering come to me”. And you just carry this around like a mantra.

One of the exercises that I wanted to do—but we didn’t have time at the Probing Presence, the weekend program, or the Saturday program—is to do a role play in which you’re having a conversation with someone. But while you’re having the conversation—and the conversation can be about anything—you’re saying to yourself, “May all their suffering come into me. May all my happiness go to them.”

You just have that, and then you switch it halfway through the conversation. You say, “May I be happy and I don’t care about them.” And you have that going and just observe how the dynamics of the conversation shift. Not because of anything different that’s happening out here, but because of what’s happening inside. And it’s actually quite a marked shift that takes place.

From improv theater, they do this kind of thing where you have a conversation and you’re saying to yourself, “I love this person. I love this person. I love this person.” And then you switch in the middle and say, “I hate this person. I hate this person. I hate this person.” And everybody gets that there is a shift there, but they can’t see what it was, but it’s just the whole energy shift.

So, we can train that way, and this is what it means in daily life situation. We do this all the time. So, when we’re walking down the street and we see somebody suffering, we say, “May their suffering come into into me.” And if we’re feeling good, you walk down the street giving away your happiness all the time. And that’s how you make it more and more a part of you so that you increase the probability that it will actually happen.

An experiment: losing intentionally

Ken: Now you can take it a step further. This is where it begins to get quite difficult. How many of you play any kind of competitive sport? Not a lot of people here. Oh, okay. Have you ever tried to lose intentionally? Randy?

Randy: With the kids.

Ken: With the kids maybe. I know one mother who would never lose to her children. But what would it be like to lose intentionally?

Student: Clashing and friction.

Ken: Yeah, It really rips up patterns. The first time I tried this, I was visiting my parents, and somebody came over and we were playing table tennis. And the score was 15/15. And I thought, “Okay, this is a good time to practice this. I’m going to lose intentionally.” The next thing I knew, the score was 19/16 in my favor. [Laughter] Patterns just took over, “Nope, you’re not.” [Laughs] And I played better.

And there was a friend I played tennis with quite a lot. So, I really worked at this. And I found that the only way that I could lose intentionally was to—if I tried to hit the ball so that it went just outside, it always fell in and I usually scored a winning shot—the only way I could actually lose intentionally was to make sure that the ball hit the back of the fence without hitting the ground first. That’s the only way I could be sure. So, at a certain point, I would just hit the ball really hard. And then my friend would say, “You’re a little sloppy today.”

But it really rips up the patterns inside to do it. So, if any of you play any kind of competitive sport, you can think of any area of competition, any of you play cards or anything like that, I recommend that you try this because you’ll actually taste what it’s like to lose, what it’s like to do this. And that’s really helpful. And somebody would say, “Why would you do that?” You are training in yourself the ability not to have to win.

And if you don’t have to win in a situation, you have more freedom. If you have to win, you don’t have any choice about how you work in that situation. But if you don’t have to win, you open up tremendously greater possibilities of how you can actually act. Okay.

Student: Isn’t there a difference though, between not having to win and purposely losing?

Ken: Yes. And here, this is the mind training version of it, where you’re deliberately doing it in order to train that ability in yourself. You try it next time you go into the ring. [Laughter]

Student: Well, I have done it, not in an actual match, but in sparring I’ve let myself lose.

Ken: And you’re not doing any more matches, are you? No. Oh, too bad. [Laughter] But what would it be like to do it in an actual match?

Student: I wouldn’t. No, it’s the nature of combat.

Ken: Yes.

Student: It would require a different intention in walking in the ring and I just haven’t done it.

Ken: Yes. Right. And it’d actually be quite difficult.

Student: Right. I’ve done it in sparring though. Yeah. I’ve done it in sparring with the intention of not winning.

Ken: And how does it feel?

Student: Well, actually it feels very generous. It feels fine.

Ken: Yeah. It gives you much greater freedom, right?

Student: It’s a gift.

Ken: John?

John: There are other competitive instances—we’re not all so sporty—that might be good to point out because it probably come up more often than—

Ken: I agree. I was just suggesting this is a place to practice it. But if you have other places where you know you’re competitive … how many of you get into arguments? Occasionally. [Laughter] Okay. How many of you have intentionally tried to lose the argument? Ah, Kate, what are you experiencing there?

Kate: Well, I realize that I don’t think I ever have intentionally tried to lose. There have been times when I have decided to just stop arguing.

Ken: That’s different.

Kate: I know. And that’s even very hard. I always think if I say it one more time or one more way, I’m going to get my point across.

Ken: As William James said, “We all think that if we say it more slowly or louder, we’ll get our point across.” [Laughs] So, what would it be like to engage the argument and then lose it?

Kate: I think that would be really difficult for me.

Ken: Okay. So, that’s your practice assignment, everybody. Over the next week, I want you to engage in an argument and lose it, and not by just stopping arguing, actually lose it. Nobody will come next week, I can see that. I’m going to be here by myself.

Mind training reduces the tendency to separate from experience

Ken: Okay. Now that was all point one that I wanted to comment on here. Point two is: One of the ways that taking and sending works is that it moves us out of the tendency to separate from the experience. Now, we’ve been talking about this primarily in terms of negative experiences, but it actually works both ways.

When a negative experience arises, an unpleasant experience arises, we tend to push it away. And the instruction here is imagine taking in the same kind of unpleasantness from all sentient beings, and now we’re just flooded with it, and we get to experience the actual unpleasantness more completely. And this is what everybody’s been commenting on up to this point. When we experience it completely, number one, we find we can experience it, that we don’t actually need to push it away. And when we do that, we find also that it’s just an experience. And that’s where the transformation takes place.

“Oh, this is just an experience.” That’s where, when you describe there was a shift, there was a kind of openness, there was a relaxation, all of those things. It’s coming from that. That’s not an intellectual process. At first, it’s an emotional process but as you train in this more and more, then it comes out of immediate awareness. “Oh,” and it’s like, there.

Now, the same thing happens with pleasant experiences. What do we tend to do with pleasant experiences? We tend to hold onto them. Can you hold onto something that you are?

Student: No.

Ken: No. You can only hold on to something that you regard as something separate from you. So, in the very act of holding on, you were regarding it as something separate. You follow? And so when you say, “I’m going to give this to everybody,” there’s a letting go that takes place. The irony is you actually move into and become one with the experience of pleasantness. And now you know that it’s just an experience in the same way, and in a strange way, you can’t give it away.

You give it away and there’s all of that rubbing against the patterns. But does it actually go away? Strangely enough, no. But a certain restrictive quality releases. Does anybody know what I’m talking about here? Okay. What was your experience with this? Anybody want to talk about this on the pleasant side? Nobody was talking about that one.

Student: Yeah, I did a dance workshop this weekend, and I found this applied very immediately to that, because we were dancing both pleasure and grief. And at the end of the workshop, I felt very touched by the other people that I had been with. And I did a dance giving away what I had gained during the weekend to them. And it was an amazing experience for me, to just do that.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else?

Student: I always think about mandala practice doing this, where the more I gave, the richer I got, until, I always describe it feeling like I was dripping diamonds, sweating diamonds, something like that.

Ken: Yep. Mandala practice, for those who are unfamiliar with it, it’s a practice in which you give away the universe, and all the wealth and splendor and happiness enjoyed in the universe. And you do this a 100,000 times, or 1,000 times, or whatever.

Okay, now I want to throw in a caution here. All of us have experiences that we can’t stay present in or haven’t been able to. That’s what originally produced the reactive patterns which mess up our lives. And one may feel that, “Oh, I should just go straight into these and open them up.” This actually isn’t such a good idea, because if you go into negative experiences that you’ve had and take in say, the same negative experience from other people that resonates with your own, you run the risk of reconditioning or reinforcing the trauma in yourself, and that’s really not a good idea.

So, the whole practice of taking and sending rests on a couple of requirements. One is that you’ve developed a sufficient level of attention that you can take in some negative experiences and you can give away positive experiences. And the second is that you know enough about practice to practice intelligently.

One of the things that I’ve mentioned earlier in previous classes is the importance of having suppleness in your mind. When you find yourself meeting an experience and trying to do taking and sending with an experience, and your mind goes hard like brittle. Do you know what I mean? It becomes inflexible. It’s probably not a good idea to push that very far. In fact, it’s not a good idea.

At one point in the retreat, Rinpoche said, “In Tibet we used leather bags to store things, and some leather bags we used to store water and other leather bags we used to store butter. And after a while being leather, the leather would get hard. Well, if the leather bags had been used to store water, you could knead the leather, and work the leather, and get it soft again so it wouldn’t break and leak, and it could hold the water again without any problem. But the leather bags that stored butter, because the butter got right into the leather, when they got hard, you couldn’t do anything with them. You had to throw those bags away and get another one.” And he said, “Don’t let your mind get like that because you don’t get another mind, unfortunately.”

And that’s a very, very important piece about practice. So, when you’re working with these, these are very, very demanding practices. Taking and sending cuts right to the way ego is, the way the sense of self is preserved. So, it’s very important to approach that with a supple mind, and not that hard mind because there’s just like rock meeting bone and good things don’t come from that. Now, anything else about this. Peri?

Peri: I have a small question about the intention of verse 19. When we were just talking about it, you put it in the context of holding on. And so I’m a little bit confused, because at least the way I read it, and the way it penetrated for me, this line, the approbation or the warning is “Don’t be pompous.”

Ken: Yes.

Student: And, it didn’t resonate for me as, “Don’t hold on.”

Ken: “Don’t hold on?”

Student: Yeah. And actually Deborah brought up that same point over dinner that it didn’t seem like a taking and sending, an explicit taking and sending verse.

Ken: That is, he isn’t saying, “Give it away.”

Student: Yeah. But anyway, that was my question about that.

Ken: Basically he’s making these two verses do double duty. That’s one way to look at them. When things are going really badly in our lives, we develop a negative self-image. And when things are going positive in our lives, we develop a positive self-image. And so that translates as an inferiority complex and the superiority complex, and that’s exactly what the Tibetan says.

The don’t lose heart could be translated as don’t get depressed, and don’t be pompous, it’s the word for pride, proud, arrogant, thinking you’re superior. You with me? Okay. Then what is implicit in verse 18 but is not said explicitly is: don’t believe any of this, it’s just an experience. What is implicit in verse 19 that isn’t said explicitly is: give it away.

You see, you have: Take into you the suffering and negativity of all beings. That part is explicit, and the other piece is implicit about not believing it. Whereas here it says: Know that the magnificence of existence has no substance. That’s the not believing part of it. And I would say that the implicit part of it is give it away. So, even though it’s not an explicit taking and sending instruction, that’s how I would view this. He’s making it do double duty. Do you follow? Yeah. Okay. Right. Julia and Deborah. Okay, go ahead.

Deborah: The way that this verse resonated for me was that it was talking about emptiness. Knowing that existence has no substance.

Ken: That’s right.

Deborah: Which is why I thought it didn’t feel like taking and sending to me, it felt like emptiness. And that sent me on a whole trip to Verses from the Center and Nagarjuna, and all kinds of things. But it felt like you had to understand this emptiness in order to be able to have the compassion arise.

Student questions on emptiness and compassion

Ken: I can understand how you take that interpretation. I think it’s helpful to remember that the two great themes of Mahayana are compassion and emptiness, and they’re not regarded as separate. So, wherever you’re talking about compassion, you’re talking about emptiness implicitly. And wherever you’re talking about emptiness, you’re talking about compassion implicitly.

And that’s why I was offering this interpretation, as these verses are doing double duty. He’s only got four lines, he doesn’t have enough space to say both things in both verses. But let’s look at this from a practice point of view. Which is more helpful to you when you’re depressed, or you’re feeling really bad about things, taking in the suffering of others or regarding your own suffering is empty?

Deborah: Well, I’ve not done tonglen as a practice. I would have to say that regarding my own experiences, empty would be helpful to me.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else on that one? Kate?

Kate: I have specifically done tonglen when I was depressed. And for me, it really cuts through the depression, the tonglen does.

Ken: Right, okay, and in a way that emptiness—

Kate: Well, in a way that emptiness doesn’t. And maybe that could just be because I can’t feel the emptiness. Emptiness is still somewhat of a concept to me, it’s not in my bones. So, tonglen gives me something to do that shifts my experience.

Ken: Okay. Now let me ask the other question. When you are caught up in how good things are, which is more helpful to you, regarding them as empty or giving them away to others?

Deborah: That actually was my experience too, is that regarding it as empty, somehow it creates—how can I say this—it’s sort of just an immediate—

Ken: It opens things up?

Deborah: Yeah. It immediately shifts everything, without having to do anything, in a way. I guess as Kate was saying, in dealing with negative states, it doesn’t work the same for me either.

Ken: Now ideally or theoretically either should work in either situation. But I think Tokmé Zongpo is actually tapping into something that is deep, because my own sense, my own experience is that when I’m struggling within myself, I find taking and sending more helpful in finding a place to be in the experience, and not completely caught up in it. And on the other hand, when things are going well, reminding myself, well, this is just an experience, opens it up. So, I think it’s actually onto something.

Even though you have in the mind training teachings, “Suffering is the dance of what is.” If you can relate to it that way, fine. But whenever I read that instruction, particularly when I was in retreat, I just wanted to put a big X through it, because I really couldn’t relate to suffering as the dance of what is [laughs]. Does this make sense to you? Just a second John, Julia’s next.

Deborah: Yeah, it does make sense. At this point though for me, it just seems more helpful to see everything as contingent, as conditioned.

Ken: Yes.

Deborah: Once I see that, then I can let go of it, and I see the emptiness of nature, and it’s so much easier.

Ken: And what arises at that point?

Deborah: What arises?

Ken: When you see the open dimension of experience, you aren’t attached to it in the same way. What arises for you in terms of how you regard others?

Deborah: Oh, it’s a lot more equal.

Ken: Yeah. Okay, that’s fine. Then you’re moving in the direction of compassion. You’re starting off with equanimity right there, and that’s all that’s important. For some people, their route is going to be through emptiness, to emptiness and compassion. For some people, their route is going to be through compassion, to emptiness and compassion. It doesn’t matter. One isn’t more correct than the other. And that’s one of the nice things about Buddhism. We have all these different routes.

What is important, and this seems to be what you’re doing ’cause you did a lot of work with Verses From The Center. Yeah. So, you trained that in. What is important is that you find a route to emptiness and compassion. You don’t stay on the emptiness side. You don’t stay on the compassion side because it’s really the union of the two that’s essential. Okay. Julia, you had a comment.

Julia: I don’t know if this is exactly, or similar, to what Deborah’s saying, because I have a sort of different language around it. But what this evoked for me was thinking about the eight worldly concerns.

Ken: Go ahead, expand on that, would you?

Julia: Well, I was thinking the first verse is all about blame, loss, pain, and so forth.

Ken: Unhappiness, loss, obscurity and disdain. Yes, contempt, actually we could also use contempt for disdain. Okay.

Julia: And then the second verse was all about the upside. Pleasure and—

Ken: Happy, gain, fame and respect. Yeah.

Julia: Yes. But when I was thinking about the second one more than the first verse, I was thinking about the second verse. What I realized were all of those things were things as you were viewed by other people, and they were not to do with your own experience. And I don’t know if that—

Ken: Well, desperately ill?

Julia: No, I’m talking about the second, I’m talking about fame and praise and being rich, that’s with reference to other people, right? I’m rich because I’ve got more money than somebody else, so it was all sort of externally located somehow. And I’m just talking about the way I reflected on it and meditated on it. And then it seemed to me that I sort of felt a lot of compassion because so much time is caught up in those activities in life.

Ken: [Laughs] You may recall that the four minor sufferings of the human realm, not the four major, the four minor sufferings, are: trying to be with the people you want to be with, trying to avoid the people you don’t want to be with, trying to get what you don’t have, and trying to keep what you do have. And I remember one of my students when I had an office in Orange County, I presented them with these, and he said, “This is how I spend my life!” [Laughs]

Julia: That kind of took me to compassion, just that reflection.

Ken: John?

John: Back on giving away happiness, as opposed to considering that it’s all a dream or ephemeral. It seems like a much more positive thing to give it away. For instance, if I’m feeling terrific, and today’s beautiful, and I’m being treated properly, I give it all out, is to me something nicer to be doing. Really just an experience.

A discussion about spiritual bank accounts

Ken: Just an experience. [Laughter] What you’re raising here—if I put this in a traditional context—it’s kind of interesting. We haven’t talked much about it, and I think it will come up later in the 37 Practices, but might as well move into it right now. There is in the Mahayana tradition this phrase in Tibetan—I don’t know what it is in Sanskrit—tshogs bsags (pron. tso(g) sā(g)),which means gather the accumulations. That’s the usual translation tshogs is an assembly or a group of things and bsags is the verb to gather.

This was a term that came in almost certainly from the large monasteries, which in traditional societies, monasteries were the first banks in the society. It’s where the wealth of the society was stored. The surplus from the harvest, all the peasants paid tribute to the monastery, and so they stored up these large amounts of grain so that when there was famine, they could redistribute it to people.

The idea here is, the two accumulations, two gatherings—and I really don’t like these translations but these are old translations—are merit and wisdom or pristine awareness. And you gather merit by doing good. And what this does is, it increases the propensity in you for being able to do virtuous activity. But it also leads to a clearing of mind because you feel lighter and clearer when you do good, you with me? And then the gathering or accumulating awareness or wisdom is knowing things just as they are. You practice that and you accumulate more and more wisdom.

Now the problem with this whole way of relating to things is, it feels like you have these couple of spiritual bank accounts in the sky, and you make deposits, and earn interest, and everything’s great. But the way that I understand them is that they’re both about accumulating momentum in this. And what you’re saying here is that for you, you find that the practice of giving away things rubs your patterns more deeply. And so that may be the more effective practice for you, and generating the habit of goodness, and openness, and generosity, etc. That’s where the juice is in your practice.

John: I’m not thinking how meritorious it is.

Ken: I know you aren’t. Yeah. But it has that effect. You can relate to that with some passion, which is a really good thing, to be able to put our emotional energy into our practice. When it talks about regarding everything as emptiness, we say regarding in English, but that isn’t really what is meant here. It means experiencing them as empty, which is a very, very powerful experience. But if you’re just thinking that they’re empty, that’s just a concept. Yeah. Okay. Any other comments? Now, what difficulties did you have in experiencing this? In doing this practice? What difficulties did you encounter? None? Susan?

Susan: Maintaining sufficient attention and awareness to sustain it.

Ken: What happened in your practice?

Susan: Strong effort kept it there and weakening energy let the pattern flow back in.

Ken: What were you fighting?

Susan: I just wrote it up to, well, I was fighting the pattern. I was in the middle of it and it feels like an ongoing process. It’s not like it could be resolved in one meditative experience; it has to be done over and over.

Ken: You’re quite right. But what I’m interested in, in your experience here, is your use of strong effort. And if I understood you correctly, it sounded like when you let the effort lapse a little bit, then something flooded in, so I’m wondering what you were trying to hold at bay.

Susan: Well, the pattern was pretty unpleasant.

Ken: Okay, so what were you fighting? Let me put it this way. Just do the practice right now. And in addition to doing this, experience the unpleasantness of the pattern. [Pause] What happens?

Susan: The power and energy in the pattern sometimes surges so that attention and awareness temporarily drop out, and then I can bring them back.

Ken: Okay. The pattern itself is another source of unpleasantness, right? What if you include that unpleasantness in the meditation?

Susan: Well, I did.

Ken: And?

Susan: Well, it was very similar to what people were reporting in the beginning.

Ken: Something opens up?

Susan: Yeah, something opens and—

Ken: Okay. So, that’s what I think you were keeping at bay, was the unpleasantness in the pattern itself.

Susan: Maybe I misdescribed the experience.

Ken: Okay.

Susan: More has to do with … a high level of energy in order to …

Ken: Can I make a suggestion? Okay. Forget about everything that you’re thinking. Just describe what you want in your own words. Forget about all the jargon. Yes, that’s good. That’s a good start. [Laughs]

Susan: Okay. In order to have the experience of the unpleasantness dissolving into open awareness, it is not something that I’m capable of sustaining, so eventually the power of the pattern comes back in and grabs my attention.

Ken: Does anybody want to help Susan here? Say the last sentence again, you can’t sustain … ?

Susan: I don’t, for whatever reason I was going to use energy.

Ken: Sure, fine.

Susan: I also used effort. I haven’t a sufficient level to power sustained attention and awareness so that the pattern completely will go away forever.

Ken: Ahhhh. [Laughter]

Susan: Well I said I know it’s a process so I have to keep doing it over and over.

Ken: Okay. I knew there was something in here. Okay. Now does anybody want to work with Susan? She just made it a whole bunch clearer. Okay. What’s the stumbling block here? Anybody?

Nava: She has an agenda.

Ken: Okay, here we go. You’re on Nava. [Laughter] Talk to Susan.

Nava: [Pause] Is there something that you want here in this process? Something that you want? That you want?

Susan: Yeah. It’s sort of a long-term goal, to be able to operate both on and off the cushion, out of awareness more than I’m not.

Nava: How are you going to do that?

Susan: Practice, practice, practice, right, right now.

Nava: Right now. How are you doing it?

Susan: Gosh. Well, hopefully I’ve got—

Ken: No, you listen to her. Say it again Nava.

Susan: How am I going to do it now?

Nava: Right now. What are you doing?

Susan: Trying to muster whatever level of attention and awareness I’ve already developed and operate out of that.

Nava: How does it feel?

Susan: Feels good.

Nava: Can you explain more? Can you talk more about it?

Susan: I feel like I’m in touch with some kind of deeper, more open sense of knowing.

Ken: [Pause] Susan, what do you have to muster?

Susan: You want the first thing that popped into my mind?

Ken: Yeah, of course we do.

Susan: My wild and unruly mind.

Ken: Okay. Suppose you forget about mustering, just forget about that completely. And just experience your wild and unruly mind. What happens? There it is, all over the place.

Susan: Well, since I know I’m experiencing it, then I’m not caught up in it. So, there must be something else going on as well.

Ken: So, what do you have to muster?

Susan: Nothing.

Ken: [Laughs] Thank you, you’re doing really well. We’re just a bit short on time. You’re doing very, very well Nava, and if you’d had more time … you get the point? Yeah. Okay. Now this is a very important point because it’s easy, very, very easy for us to get into this kind of struggle with experience. And we may think, “Oh, I’m accepting it here,” but then there’s another struggle going on here and think, “Okay, well I’ll accept it here.” Then we find that we struggle in there. And wherever the struggle is, that’s where we have to move into the experience. And what we run into, time and time again, is, “But that’s not the direction that I want to go in.” Maybe, but that’s the direction that the present experience is pointing to. Go ahead.

Susan: So, where is my struggle that you’re perceiving?

Ken: The struggle that I was sensing in you, you said it, “so that the pattern will go away completely and never come back.” [Laughs] Okay. Well—

Susan: Isn’t that what you say is going to happen someday? [Laughter]

Ken: Well, let me come back to that point. Okay? But as somebody over here said, “She has an agenda.” Okay? So, you have this idea of how things are meant to be, and yet here is how things are, and you’re going to make this push this. That’s effectively what you were doing, on quite a subtle level. And this is what I mean. We do this on more and more subtle levels. So, when you were using the language of mustering, and being pushed out of attention by the forces, not having enough energy. I could feel the struggle you were engaged in. Well, now you move into the experience of that struggle. But “I don’t want to go there. I want to get rid of this.” I’m sorry. That’s what it is. Now, does that make sense to you?

Susan: It does. Because I think I was experiencing it almost as a war between awareness and the pattern.

Ken: Exactly! That’s right. And there isn’t any war between awareness and the pattern. Now I just want to close with your last, didn’t I say that it would all go away? Well, when did I say that?

Student: In your book.

Ken: Not really. Let’s distinguish between the effects of practice, or the results—I should be precise here—some of the results of practice and the intention of practice. The intention of practice is to be present in whatever is arising in experience. And to be able to experience it—as a friend of mine puts it—”free from the projections of thought and emotion.” So, what we’re aiming is to develop a sufficient level of attention, of energy in the attention, so that we can actually experience whatever arises for what it is. It happens that the result of that is that the pattern disengages, as many of you have experienced over and over again.

And sometimes, when we experience patterns very deeply, they just stop arising in the same way. But that’s not the intention of the practice. And this is a very important point. If we make that the intention of the practice, then we get engaged in exactly the kind of struggle that you were describing, Susan. And this is one of the challenging points. We keep having to come back to the intention of the practice, “Can I experience this? Can I experience this?” In fact, that’s how they approach it in the Theravaden tradition. “Can I experience this? Can I experience this? Can I experience this?”

There’s no sense of changing it into something else. And taking and sending isn’t to make everything nice. It’s a way of experiencing this, whether it’s great richness, and everything’s lovely, and actually experiencing it, or utter despair, and illness, and craziness, and all of that stuff, and just experiencing that. And that’s a very, very important distinction. And you find the same thing happening, right in basic meditation. If you make the intention of the meditation to have a quiet mind, how well does it work?

But, if you make your intention and practice: “I’m going to use the breath as a way to stay in the experience of whatever arises,” then you find that the mind actually grows quiet. Why? Because you’re not fighting experience. So, wherever you find yourself fighting something, it means you’ve slipped into a subject/object framework. Necessarily, you can’t fight, there isn’t any fight when there is no subject/object framework. You follow?

And this you’re going to come across at level, after level, after level. And it always happens the same way. We work through a level of practice and then we find ourselves doing the same damn thing at the next level, and we have to learn it all over again. Okay?

Susan: My mistake was, in a way, being goal oriented? And basically it’s just cultivate awareness and experience as it arises.

Ken: Yeah. Well, we do slip into this. I don’t even really want to call it a mistake. It happens. The principle that I’d like you to take from this is that, “Whenever I find myself struggling, let me experience the struggle.” If you’ll allow me. In the first three-year retreat, well, on both three-year retreats, but I’m talking about the first one here. We had to do these very complex visualizations, yidam meditations, and we did three in a row, three months each: five deity Cakrasamvara (Tib. bde mchog lha lnga, pron. demcho(k) lha nga) practice, and then the five tantric deities, and then Vajrayogini.

Well, one person in the retreat just hated these because they’re very complex. You have 10 deities or 5 deities or 8 deities, and they’re all standing in different ways, and the different colors, and you’re trying to visualize yourself as all of this. And it’s, just like, saying mantras and long liturgies, etc., just goes on and on. So, when we hit the third one, he said, “To hell with this!”

And at the beginning of every meditation session, he would read through all the liturgy and then he’d close his book and he’d just sit in his box, his meditation box, didn’t say any of the mantras, didn’t do any of the visualizations. And he said of all those three big meditations, he said he felt he had the closest connection with the third one. Why? He didn’t fight what he was actually experiencing. “I hate this!” And so that was it. You look totally unconvinced here. [Laughs]

Susan: He fought it to the point where he wouldn’t do it. Isn’t that really fighting it?

Ken: Yes. And then he let go. And in that opening, he actually formed a connection with that particular deity that he hadn’t formed with the others. Okay? There’s another story. It’s Saraha, who’s one of the great Indian masters, and I think it was Saraha. And he had meditated actually on the same deity for three years, day and night, and hadn’t had so much as a good dream. And so he said “To hell with this!” And he threw his rosary, his mala, down the toilet, which is like, really! You don’t do that in Indian Buddhism. It’s the worst thing you could possibly do! He just said, “To hell with this” and went to sleep.

In the middle of the night, he had this vision of Vajrayvogini holding his mala, giving it to him and saying, “You have to meditate without duality. Keep going.” So, he was doing exactly the same thing. He was struggling but not experiencing. He was struggling against this instead of just being right in the experience. That’s what she meant, so handed back the mala. But you can see it’s the same process. When he gave up, he just let go. Then all of that effort was just right there. She arises in his experience.

And the only way we learn this actually, and I’m sorry, it is the only way. The only way we learn this, is by doing the best we can until we literally can’t go any further, and something lets go. You can’t plan this or strategize this, you’ve just got to pour your attention in. So, I’m sorry, you just got to do it that way. Okay, let’s stop here then. We’ve already gone late. Thank you for your patience.