The difference between the world and my world

Ken: So, the next three verses cover an area in which there is an immense amount of confusion. And the confusion, I think, has two or three different sources. One, to some extent, is overly literal readings. The second source of confusion, somewhat related to that, is just what we’ve been talking about: confusing method and result. The third source of confusion for this is something I touched on on Friday night and a little bit yesterday. Now we need to go into it in more detail. And that is, the difference between the world and my world.

On Ted.com there’s a presentation by the Chief Belief Officer of a very large Indian corporation. I don’t know how many American corporations have a Chief Belief Officer, but this one does. And he starts off his talk, I can’t remember the name of it, and if anybody’s interested, just send me an email and I’ll send you the link to it. You’ll probably find if you type “Chief Belief Officer” into TED, you’ll probably come up with it. So he starts off his talk by talking about Alexander the Great, who left Greece with an army and conquered Persia, and then went on and conquered what’s now Pakistan, and made his way through the Khyber Pass right into India. He conquered all of this territory.

And he ran into what was probably a Jain priest—it’s not clear what particular tradition this priest belonged to—but there’s this person who just is sitting in meditation. And Alexander the Great says to him, “So, what are you doing?”

He said, “I’m sitting here doing nothing. What are you doing?”

He said, “I’m conquering the world.”

And they look at each other, and they both think the other person is completely nuts. [Laughter]

And then he goes on, this Indian belief officer, to describe this myth, I think it’s about Krishna. No, what’s the Hindu deity starts with R? Rama, yeah, and maybe it’s Vishnu or somebody, I can’t remember. But they’re arguing with each other about who’s the fastest, who’s the strongest, who’s the best—typical titan realm stuff.

So, he said, “Okay, we’ll see who can race around the world three times the fastest.”

And so, I think it’s Vishnu who gets on this magnificent dragon or something like that, and starts tearing off and going around the world. And Rama goes into his room and walks around three times. And Vishnu eventually comes back.

And Rama said “I won.”

“Well, how’d you do that so quickly?”

He said, “Well, I walked around my world.”

Now, there’s a very big difference between my world and the world. The world consists of other people, jobs, careers, families, interactions where we exchange, trade, buying and selling things, doing things together, making families, making careers, building buildings, tending gardens and things like that. That’s what the world consists of. What does my world consist of? What does your world consist of? Yes.

Student: Experiences, thoughts, sensations.

Ken: Experiences, thoughts, sensations. Yeah, we can put it into thoughts, feelings, sensations, which are all experiences. You’re quite right. That’s it. That’s what your world consists of: thoughts, feelings, sensations.

And before the break, we did this little thing with this object. And that was the little bit of transition from the world, where there’s an object that I want, to my world, which is the actual experience I have when I look at this object. And part of that experience is the desire or attachment or aversion or whatever else that comes. And when we make a point of moving completely into my world, that is opening to all of those sensations, all of those experiences, then we find that our relationship with the object has transformed, has changed.

And this is extremely important, because Buddhism is really talking about my world or your world. It’s not usually talking about the world. It is talking about life as experience, not life as things. It’s a very, very important distinction. And it will help you understand a lot of aspects of Buddhist teaching and a lot of aspects of Buddhist practice. And hopefully in a way that is helpful for you.

Now, if we turn to verse 22: Whatever arises in experience is your own mind. So you’re going to look at me and say, “This striker is your mind, Ken?”

No, when you’re looking at it, the striker is your mind, actually. But where is the striker here? The striker is a name that I give to a certain set of experiences: of a certain weight that I feel in my hand, texture that I feel in my thumb and fingers, visual impressions, there’s a certain shape, a certain color, different colors. And when I put all that together, I give it the name “striker.” But all of those different sensory sensations, where are they?

An experiment in seeing

Ken: Now, this is a very simple thing. It drives everybody nuts. I can’t remember whether we did this last time I was here, but if this is a repeat, I apologize. But some of you are new, so it’s okay. So I’m gonna hold this up. What do you see when I hold this up? Anybody? A piece of paper. Okay. Anything special about this piece of paper?

Student: Pink. Blank.

Ken: The paper is pink and it’s blank. Okay, now, is that what you actually see? This is gonna get very nasty in a minute. Is that what you actually see? What do you actually see?

Student: Light coming back off that?

Ken: No, I don’t think you see the light. You’re now jumping into a scientific explanation, but I don’t think you see the light jumping off whatever it is I’m holding. I don’t see any light. What do you actually see? Yes.

Student: Well, I see the back of the book because in my mind, I already know it’s the book.

Ken: But that’s the whole point. You see, you know that it’s a book. So you say, I see the back of the book, but what do you actually see?

Student: A rectangle.

Ken: A pink rectangle. How many other people see a pink rectangle? Okay. And from that, we infer there is a book. I’m being really picky here. Okay? But I do want to go through this step by step, because I want to make sure we cover the point. So how many will concur that they see a pink rectangle? Okay.

Student: You’re inferring it’s a pink rectangle. You’re inferring it’s a rectangle.

Ken: Yes. If I hold it like this, then it becomes a parallelogram and a trapezium and all kinds of things like that.

Student: No, I’m saying that the words we’re relying on are the words that we’re all agreeing on.

Ken: Yes. We’re agreeing on “pink,” and we’re agreeing on “rectangle.” There are tribes who only see in two colors. So they would see this as like black-and-white-gray or something like that. They wouldn’t actually see pink. So pink is also a learned thing, but we’re not going to go into all that. So, pink rectangle. Now, my next question is a very simple question [laughs]. Yes, exactly. How many of you have the experience of seeing a pink rectangle? See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? It’s the next one that’s bad. Okay, where is that experience? Where is the experience of seeing? Where is the seeing?

Student: In the mind.

Ken: In the mind? Where’s that?

Student: In the brain.

Ken: Oh, I’m sorry. Seeing is not in the brain. The seeing is not in the brain. I know a lot of people think that. Yeah, it’s over here by me. See? But it’s not in the brain, because otherwise, if I do something like this [pause], then you should still see it if it’s actually in your brain, but it stops. So where is the seeing? Is it inside you? Hee, hee, wherever that is. But is the seeing outside you?

Student: Well, no.

Ken: No. [Laughs] It’s not outside. Okay?

Student: It’s a relationship.

Ken: Well, I’m just going very, very slowly here. Everybody knows where this gong is, and this table is. And so we all have agreed that we have this experience of seeing. I just want to know where the seeing is. It’s very straightforward, isn’t it? [Laughter] So we’ve established that it’s not outside, and we’ve established that it’s not inside. Would anybody go for it’s in between. Yeah. Okay. So where is “in between” here?

Student: Perhaps what is having the experience is the witness.

Ken: Yeah. Well, that’s fine. Where is the witness?

Student: Plato called it the “self behind the self.”

Ken: Yeah, but where is it? It’s a very straightforward question. I just want you to put this in time and space. Actually, I don’t even want you to put it in time. I just want you to put it in space. Where is it?

Student: I have no idea, but I’m stuck on the brain. I’m not convinced that it’s not in the brain.

Ken: Yeah, I know there’s been a whole bunch of stuff about the brain. But the idea is that somewhere in the brain, there’s this little homunculus, which actually is where the seeing is. But, that isn’t how it works. Because let’s suppose the seeing was in the brain. Okay? How do you experience that? Because it’s you who experiences the seeing. It’s not the brain.

Student: Where is you?

Ken: Don’t ask me that. You are here.

Student: When we close our eyes, the experience stops also. And the other question is: where is the buddha?

Ken: Yeah. Well, we’ll get to that one later this afternoon. We get to: where is buddha? Okay. We get caught up. The brain is simply an organ through which we process thought. And there’s a great deal of confusion about the brain being the mind. And it’s not the mind. The brain is an organ. It’s a very important organ, granted. But the seeing doesn’t take place in the brain, because that doesn’t answer the question of how it’s possible for me to see. It moves the question, but I still have to ask, “Okay, so if the seeing takes place in the brain, then how do I experience that seeing? [Unclear] Okay, you said, “A person who doesn’t have a brain can’t experience seeing.” A person who doesn’t have a brain is unlikely to be having this conversation. [Laughter]

Student: But a person can have part of a brain and still not experience seeing.

Ken: Yes. And there are all kinds of strange things that have happened. A person can have their visual cortex removed, and then some of their auditory functions will take over the function of seeing. And so the brain is actually very plastic. It can make things happen. But, that is even more the point. It doesn’t take place in a certain physical location.

Student: It’s still in the brain.

Ken: No, something’s still happening in the brain, but the seeing isn’t in the brain. Let’s take another example, okay? You don’t have to do this, but you can imagine it. You take a pin and you stick it in the back of your hand or on your leg. Where do you feel the pain? Now, when I was doing my master’s in mathematics, I asked a bunch of grad students I was hanging out with, and they all very blithely said, “Oh, I feel the pain in my brain.” But that’s not where you feel the pain. If you stick a pin in the back of your hand, you feel the pain in the back of your hand. It’s the same thing. What actually experiences that right there?

And my point here is, it’s a mystery. We can’t say it is any where. And this is one of the most significant things about my world versus the world. We have no idea where my world is. And yet we have this extremely rich, complex, fascinating, mysterious set of experiences out of which we construct the world. Do you follow? And this is my point here. So what we’re talking about in Buddhism is my world. It’s the world that I actually experience.

So when we turn to verse 22: Whatever arises in experience is your own mind. Now, you know, thoughts arise. Well, that’s our mind. Feelings arise. That’s our mind. Sensory sensations arise. That’s our mind. But we are so habituated that when certain thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise, then we make it into an object. And now we regard the object as something different from us. And that’s putting it into the world.

But when you just open to the actual experience of an object, all you have are sensations, sensory sensations, emotional sensations. And now you experience the object differently, not as an object out in the world, but as an experience in your world. Do you see the distinction I’m trying to make here?

Now, when we hear in Buddhism, “Everything is in your mind,” they’re saying all experience. And in fact, the word for mind is often better translated as experience. And when people asked my teacher, you know, “What is mind?” He would say, “Experience.” And the Tibetan word for that, it’s mi dren dgu dren (pron. mi tren gu tren). mi dren means no mental activity; dgu dren means much mental activity. And in Tibetan, you form abstract concepts by opposing opposites. So to get temperature, you have hot, cold. So when you say no experience, much experience, you’re saying all experience. That’s mind. It’s experiencing.

Now, when we say, “What is mind?” What happens when we ask that question? What happens when you ask the question, “What is mind?” or, “What is my mind?” What happens to you? Confusion? Okay? You have to go very slowly here. Before the confusion, confusion’s the third thing that happens. Stops. Okay, describe that would you?

Student: Well, just instantaneously when I do that, it’s like, bam. It just stops.

Ken: Just stops. Okay? And what do you find yourself looking at?

Student: Nothing.

Ken: That’s what it feels like, isn’t it? But what you’re actually doing there is looking right at your mind. I know you don’t believe it, but it’s true. And what do you see? And this is what’s so wonderful. You see nothing whatsoever. And yet that is exactly the space in which all experience arises. And as soon as there’s any movement, we glom onto the movement, a sensation or feeling or thought arises, and the sense of that space is lost, and we collapse right down onto that. You follow?

So even right now, as I look here, I’m actually looking at my mind. Another analogy for this is the mind is like a mirror. Now, I don’t have a mirror here. How many of you have seen a mirror? Okay. So somebody who’s seen a mirror, hold up your hand. Okay? So who wants to take the microphone here? You content to stay with the microphone.?Okay, so hand it to somebody who’s willing to take the microphone. Somebody who’s seen a mirror. Okay? This man over here, right here, okay. You’ve seen a mirror? I disagree with you. I don’t think you’ve seen a mirror.

Student: I mean, we’re talking about concepts and symbols here, because a mirror is a concept. And have I seen the concept of a mirror? Possibly not, but I know what I mean when I say “mirror.” And so in that sense, I’ve seen a mirror.

Ken: Yes. But what do you actually see when you look at a mirror?

Student: We’re into the world of concepts here again.

Ken: Yeah. Just tell me, when you look at a mirror, what do you see?

Student: It depends on whether I’m looking at the reflections that I’m getting out of the mirror, or whether I’m looking physically at the mirror as the sliver of glass with some silvering on the back. And that kind of thing.

Ken: So for the purpose of the discussion, we’ll just imagine you’re standing in front of a mirror and you’re looking at it, what do you see?

Student: Usually myself.

Ken: Exactly. But you know there’s a mirror there, right? Okay. That’s exactly where the analogy comes in. We see a reflection. Now, cats have a difficult time with this, because cats don’t really understand that they’re seeing a reflection. They think they’re seeing another cat. That’s why they swat and other things. Dogs are a little smarter. They can see that there’s a reflection of them. They aren’t confused that way. So you see this reflection, you know it is not you. You follow? That it is just a reflection, and you know it’s not somebody else. And so you infer that there’s a mirror there. But that’s what I mean when I say we don’t actually see a mirror. And you’re quite right, there’s a conceptual argument, etc.

Now, exactly the same thing is happening right now. Look around this room. You are looking at your own mind. You don’t see your mind in the same way that you don’t see a mirror, you follow? But this is all experience, all of the visual sensations that are arising, arise “in your mind.” They can’t arise anywhere else. So you are actually looking at your mind right now.

Now, most of the time, we don’t function this way. We think, “No, I’m looking at this person and this person and this person.” And we’re in the world of objects. We’ve moved out of the world of experience into the world of objects. we’ve moved out of my world into the world. But if you step back into your world, my world, then I’m looking at mind.

And this is what is meant in Buddhism, when it says, “All experience is mind.” It’s not some weird epistemology or deduction. It’s just: what we experience is our mind, including our sensory experiences. We project all of these ideas of objects, people, things like that. We interact with them and relate to them and things like that. But it’s all experience.

Now, when you sit back for a moment and you just give me the benefit of the doubt—which I imagine some of you’re having a little difficulty doing right now—and you just look around this room and you say, “This is all my mind.” Just take a few moments and do that. Look at the people, all the visual sensations. And you can also include everything that you hear because that’s also arising as an experience. So that’s your mind too. And the physical sensations of your body on your seat, and clothes on your body, and so forth, that’s all your mind. And now when you look at things this way, what happens? Is it different? Yes.

Student: It feels like a hologram.

Ken: It feels like a hologram. Okay.

Student: It makes me a little dizzy.

Ken: Yeah, it’s disorienting in a little way. Yeah. Okay. Anybody else? Marie?

Marie: I just thought of this instruction I heard once about the sense fields being windows.

Ken: Yeah. All of that itself, there’s experiences, there’s just a whole set of experiences. They don’t move out of my world at all.

Now, when you shift into that way of experiencing, your relationship with what arises in experience is qualitatively different. And if you explore it a little bit, I think you’ll find it’s far more intimate. Because, okay, this is my mind, I can’t get away from you [laughs]. We’re connected. And so if somebody does something which I find unpleasant, I have to deal with it. I can’t just turn around and walk away, because it’s my mind.

In verse 22 it says: “Know that and don’t generate subject-object fixations.”

And you can explore doing this, just moving into this way of experiencing things, because it reduces the sense of subject and object. There’s just experience. And you can explore what is it like to operate in the world that way. And sometimes if you’re having a conversation with a friend, just move into that and see what happens to the conversation. You may find it moves in an interesting direction. And just try it here and there, and experiment with it. Play with it.

The purpose of Buddhist practice is to end suffering

Ken: Now the next verse is:

When you come across something you enjoy,
Though beautiful to experience, like a summer rainbow,
Don’t take it as real.
Let go of attachment.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 23

The purpose of Buddhist practice is to end suffering. It’s very important to remember that: it’s to end suffering. What is suffering? Well, yesterday, I think I suggested that suffering is what arises when we struggle with experience. It’s a struggling with experience. So something beautiful comes up in our lives, and many of us move into a struggle with it. We want to hold onto it. We want to make it last longer. We want more of it, or something like that. We enter into struggling. Okay? So now let’s go back and say, look at everything as just experience. You know, looking at everything as: this is your mind.

Now, how can you make anything here more? You know, how can how can you bring it closer to you? How can you have it more? All of that stuff, it just becomes meaningless. And so when it says, “Don’t take it as real, let go of attachment,” they aren’t saying, “No attachment, bad, bad, bad!” That’s not what they’re talking about. It’s moving into this way of experiencing things. And then you find that attachment, that sense of trying to make it more me or whatever disappears because it is already you. It’s already that way. This goes back to what I said the other day. You can’t wake up a person who’s pretending to sleep.

And then verse 24, it says: All forms of suffering are like dreaming that your child has died.

Now, Tokmé Zongpo is not being very gentle with this verse. The death of a child is probably the most painful experience in the human condition. The research shows that death of a child comes slightly above divorce in terms of intensity of pain. It’s devastating. It’s so painful, especially when the child is young. But even when the child is old, like parents whose children have been killed in Iraq or something like that, it’s still devastating.

So, Tokmé Zongpo is going right for the jugular here. He’s not saying—and this is very important—”Don’t feel anything when you encounter such intensely painful experiences.” And that’s how a lot of people interpret these verses, “Oh, look at it as confusion: I shouldn’t feel anything.” No. What he’s really saying is, “Feel it completely.” Which is very, very different.

And many of the times when people lose someone very close to them, initially, they aren’t able to feel it completely, because it’s simply too much of a shock to the system. And the grief comes two, three months later as the shock wears off. And the system now is prepared to allow those feelings in. And where people stay stuck, when they lose someone that’s close to them, is because they’re not able to experience it completely. So they live in the past as if it hadn’t happened in some sense. It’s very understandable, but it’s also very unfortunate.

So, Tokmé Zongpo is saying here, when suffering arises, take this example: it’s like your child has died. You’re thrown into a mass of confusion. And what he’s saying is: step out of the world, and step into your world, where now there’s just this really intense experience of physical and emotional pain. That’s what would be arising if your child dies: really intense physical and emotional pain. I say physical, because the emotional pain of such a happening in one’s life, there is pain in the body from the power of the emotions.

And you open to that, and you experience that to the best of your ability. What happens here is you step out of confusion. You don’t step out of the pain, but you do step out of the confusion. You experience it really, really clearly, and it hurts. There’s no question about that. It hurts, but that hurt is a sensation. And so when you step out of that, now you can be in the experience and not lost in confusion, which is where the suffering is. So he’s hitting some very, very powerful ideas here. Yes.

Student questions

Student: I’m seeing, or feeling, a connection here between what you just said about looking about the room and seeing your mind and, as it comes to feeling, it seems like you’re doing the same thing, only feeling instead of seeing.

Ken: That’s exactly right. Yeah. You’re moving out of the world, which is people out there, into my world, which is all of these visual sensations. And you’re moving from the world, “my child has died,” into my world, which is all of these physical and mental feelings. Yeah.

Student: I’m looking at this, and I think I’m confused because in the second line it says, Taking confusion as real wears you out. And then it says, Look at it as confusion. So it seems like, on the one hand, I mean …

Ken: Okay, let, let me try and sort that out for you if I may. Okay? “Taking confusion as real,” means relating to those intense feelings of pain and loss, etc. as facts in our life. As, “I have lost something.” You follow?”

“Look at it as confusion” is to step out of taking it as fact and opening to it as sensation. Okay? And that may not be completely clear in the translation, which is why we’re discussing it. And so you move from this world of fact to the world of sensation. Okay?

Now, people oftentimes feel that something is being taken away from them when you ask them to make that transition, that you’re kind of dismissing the significance of their loss. No, that’s not what’s going on here. What one’s trying to do is to help them be in their experience of a loss in a way which is not going to cause them so much pain and turmoil.

And it’s tricky. I mean, if you’re actually in a counselor position, you can’t do this too quickly. You try and do this too soon, you run into just a wall of resistance. This is a very sophisticated, fairly advanced instruction. So here we have a group of experienced practitioners, so I feel comfortable talking about this. But I wouldn’t do this with someone who just lost their child. That would be insane.

Several people here have mentioned chronic pain. I think we can take chronic pain as a suitable example here. One way of relating to chronic pain, and I think you used this word yesterday, is as antagonistic. Like, okay, there’s me against this pain. And okay, that’s exactly what Tokmé Zongpo is referring to in the second line: Taking confusion as real wears you out. And when you are subject to chronic pain, you know, as long as you’re fighting that pain, you just get more and more tired. It really does wear you out.

However, if you can find a way to say, “Okay, this pain is there, I’m not gonna get rid of it, it’s just, this is my lot in life. How can I just experience this as sensation?” And in a certain sense, make friends with the pain and think, “Oh, well, this actually is just an experience. I don’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s just an experience.” And now the toll that it takes on you is significantly less.

In the three-year retreat, we were doing the weird forms of Tibetan yoga. And I injured myself quite badly trying to do this, and basically tore this muscle away from the bone. I won’t tell you how I did that, you’d think I was insane, but that’s the way it was. And the pain was absolutely excruciating. I have never experienced such intense pain. Now, in meditation retreat, we sit in boxes, you live in a box, it’s to produce [unclear]. You’re meant to sleep sitting up as I described in my retreat. So there I was. I came back from the yoga session, realized I’d hurt myself, and the pain was just beginning.

I sat down and the pain was horrific. I thought, “I think it’s gonna be better if I lie down.” The pain was so intense, it took me half an hour to move from my seat to a lying down position, because I had to move so slowly. When I laid down, it was worse. So it took me another half hour to get back [laughs]. And there was nothing I could do about it. We didn’t have any aspirins, we didn’t have anything like that in the retreat.

So the only thing I could do was to just put my attention on the experience of pain. And then I noticed that here is this pain. It was like searingly hot, but it was so intensely hot, you couldn’t tell whether it was hot or cold. You know what I mean? And then it just became a sensation. And as long as I kept my attention that way, there was no suffering. I just had this incredibly intense sensation. And the moment I stepped out of that, then I was in pain again. You know, eventually I figured out how to heal it. But that’s another story.

So, one of the things I learned from that is that when pain is just pure sensation, it’s very easy to work with. But when there’s emotional stuff wrapped up in it, it gets a lot harder, really a lot harder. So when you’ve got chronic pain, or when the pain is some deep-seated emotional thing, the same thing works in principle. It’s just really a lot harder because you’ve got to work through all of the emotional issues associated with the pain and not simply the sensations. So stepping out of the confusion or seeing your confusion as confusion, as sensation, is just more difficult. And sometimes it’s not possible, and then you just suffer. Okay. Yes.

Anger: three levels of ability

Student: I have a question. You’ve been encouraging us to open to our experience, and in some situations that seems helpful and others maybe not so skillful. So I can understand, I can appreciate when one is grieving it is helpful to open to that experience, you know, to experience that. And it may abate. There are times I’m thinking of the number three regarding reactive emotions. If one is angry I’m not sure at times if it’s so helpful to open to that. If it means experiencing that even more fully and then it can become like a raging fire. And then there’s some propensity to act on that.

So I’m just, wondering what you would encourage us to do in that situation. And I’m sure it depends. But if someone—you’ve talked about your own anger, for instance—if someone recognizes, if I recognize my own reactive, a part of me that’s reactive in the moment, what would you do? I can conceptualize about it all day, but in the moment, what’s going to be really helpful in dealing with that?

Ken: Well, it depends very much on one’s ability. And the Tibetan tradition recognizes three levels of ability. And these are not uniform, in that if you’re able to do X at level one, you may not be able to do Y at level one, because we’re very complex. I really don’t want to use higher/lower, but I almost have to here because I suppose it is higher/lower.

The highest level of ability is to be able to experience what arises. Okay? And let’s take anger. Okay? So anger arises. Now when anger arises—there’ll be a few individual variations here, but I’m expert in this, so I know what I’m talking about—there’s a feeling as if you’ve been pierced by a hot iron rod and its flames filling your body and coming out the pores of your skin. Okay? I’m speaking personally [laughs].

Student: I can relate.

Ken: You can relate. Okay, so we’re on the same page. I’m very glad. That’s accompanied by all kinds of physical sensations: contraction around the throat, stomach, heart, wherever, tremendous release of energy in the system where you just want to destroy everything around you. You know? Are we still on the same page? [Laughter] Am I getting a little too extreme for you?

Student: It’s all right.

Ken: Okay. Now, a few years ago, quite a few years ago now, I had an interaction with someone and it hit some old stuff, and I was over the top in rage. It was over dinner, so I said, “I need to leave.” And I went up. I was staying with some friends, so I just went up to the room I was staying in, and I sat down, and I can tell you every cell of my body was on fire with anger.

It was a very interesting 45 minutes. I just sat there, and it wasn’t dissipating. I mean, every cell, right from the end of my toenail right up to the hair, whatever was left there, and everything in between was just absolutely afire in anger. After 45 minutes, I felt a little more sane, but I did not want to meet the person that had provoked the anger. So I said to the person who was hosting me, “I need to stay somewhere else tonight.” And I called up a friend and went and stayed with them.

Now, something deep had been triggered, of course, but I was able to stay in the experience. And because I was able to stay in the experience, nothing was ever acted out. I knew what was safe and what wasn’t, and I acted on that. I was stepping out of the confusion by stepping into the experience. Now, granted, I have had a fair amount of practice. I knew what to do, and I knew what effort to make.

If you have the time and the ability to do it like that, that’s very good. There was never any question of me acting it out; I probably would’ve killed the person. So it was probably a good thing that I didn’t. But by experiencing it so completely, I got in touch with much older anger in my system, which I’d never been able to experience before. So I’m less likely to have that kind of reaction again in the future. Do you follow?

Student: Yeah. I—

Ken: Okay, now let me finish. That’s one level. Now, if you’re really, really good, when that kind of energy arises and you’ve practiced very deeply, what happens—and I’ve actually had this experience in the three-year retreat—your mind just becomes as clear as a mirror. There is no anger in the system. Somebody hit me and my mind just went like, clear like a mirror. Everybody else watched and they could see that there was no anger in me at all. What happened there? It’s not something I decided to do, but it was the result of the training we’d done in the retreat. So that’s where the anger is just transformed into clarity. It just happens.

Otherwise, you just experience it. And one of the techniques for helping to experience the anger as completely as possible is taking and sending. Taking and sending, this practice where you think, “May all the anger of everybody in the world come into mine. May they be free of anger. May whatever joy and happiness and peace I know, go to everybody else, may they enjoy that.” You do this exchange. And the purpose of this exchange is actually to help you experience your anger completely. Again, there’s no question of acting on it, but by experiencing it completely, then you leave no trace.

The third level is where you aren’t able to experience it completely. And then you commit yourself to certain ways of action where you’re not going to act violently. So that’s where the various ethical codes come into operation, where you have committed yourself saying, “No, I’m not going to hit anybody, period. Doesn’t matter what the situation is, I’m never going to hit anybody.” So you commit yourself to a certain course of action. And that’s why we have those three methods, because we have no idea what we’re going to run into in the next moment in our lives.

Somebody could say something, it could set us off, and it could set us off in an area where we’re not trained. And we don’t even have the ability to just actually accept the experience and work with it, as in taking and sending. So we have that fallback situation: No violence. Period. Done. And that’s how the ethical system is constructed in Tibetan Buddhism. You have those three things so that you don’t act out on this stuff because acting out on it is really, really problematic. It hurts you and it hurts the other people. It creates all kinds of problems. Does this answer your question?

Student: That helps. I find it hard sometimes to differentiate between what is advocating and what may be pushing at finding that middle way. And, everybody’s different. Some people will react and others are very comfortable with responding to that behavior of advocacy, whereas others may really feel imposed upon in response. So trying to find that middle way and, and how to—

Ken: But now you’re moving it into the area of skill.

Student: Yeah.

Ken: And yes, there are skills that you can learn: how to handle situations, difficult situations, in ways that don’t provoke further reaction. And you don’t end up compromising your own principles. And there’s real skill to be learned there. Now, do you learn those skills in meditation practice? Not really. Those are things you can learn from other people. What meditation practice does, and this is extremely important, it gives you sufficient attention that allows those skills to come into play. So you just aren’t reacting automatically.

And when we train in a skill, one thing is to learn the skill. And then the second step is to train in it so the skill just happens when the situations arise. The third step is one that’s often left out. The third step is to get rid of everything in us that prevents that skill from arising when it needs to. So when we talk about training of Buddhism, we’re very—

Student: Can you repeat that last thing?

Ken: To get rid of everything in you that gets in the way of that skill operating when it needs to. Which can be like, I suppose, it’s skill in a certain kind of conversation. But somebody says something, and it reminds you of something that your mother said that you absolutely hated. And suddenly all of your training is out the window and you’re relating to your mother [laughs]. It doesn’t work. That’s what I mean about getting rid of all of the stuff in you that prevents that skill from operating when it needs to.

Student: Isn’t that like trying to get rid of your thoughts?

Ken: No, no, no, it’s not. It’s forming a different relationship. I should be careful when I say “get rid of.” It’s forming a different relationship with it so that when that stuff is provoked, you don’t fall into confusion.

Student: Okay. Thank you.

Ken: But is this challenging? Highly. Are we quarter past 12 already? I haven’t touched the six perfections yet. Okay. Yes.

Anger and compassion

Student: Well, when you’re talking about anger and rage and that sort of thing, it reminds me of how I feel every morning when I read the newspaper.

Ken: Ah, yes.

Student: Can we talk about that? We were talking about this kind of—

Ken: Do we have to talk about it?

Student: Well, we don’t, I don’t know. That’s what came up in my mind. I say all of these things that you’re talking about are, are manifesting globally, chronically, daily.

Ken: Manifesting in American society, yeah. Okay, two things. What is the basis of your anger?

Student: Outrage at the injustice?

Ken: Why do you care about justice?

Student: I’m sorry?

Ken: Why do you care about justice?

Student: It’s painful. It offends my sense of right and wrong.

Ken: Yeah. I’m going to go a step further and I’m going to say your anger is a reaction to your compassion.

Student: Yes.

Ken: Okay. And what happens is that our compassion is so intense that we can’t stay with it. And we exit from it into anger. When we see that pain, the pain that many people are experiencing, you know, the 99% thing. Somebody sent me a link to the website, which is short testimonials of the 99%. And some of the stories that people are facing in their lives, it’s just horrendous. And that brings up our compassion. And the compassion is so intense we can’t stay with it. So we move to anger because it’s more comfortable there.

So what I suggest is whenever your anger comes up, remember it’s coming from your compassion and go back to your compassion. What that will do in terms of manifesting in your life, I have no idea. But you’re going to be much less confused if you connect with where it’s really coming from in you. It’s because you care about people, you care about the society, you care about what’s happening. The anger isn’t coming from a bad place. It’s a way of exiting from the pain you feel in that caring.

Student: So I stay in my compassion and I’m trying to picture where that goes. Do I like explode with compassion?

Ken: I doubt that you explode with compassion. I imagine it will take a bit of work, but it’ll probably end up moving you in some way. And I have an idea what that would be.

Student: Thank you.

Ken: You’re welcome. All right, so we’re gonna have a full afternoon, that’s all. Go ahead.

A clash of cultures leading to confusion

Student: All right. So I understand your separation, or the distinction, between my world and the world, which I find to be very helpful. And I understand a lot of things that you’ve talked about and the tools you’ve talked about regarding dealing with my world. My confusion lies in the relationship between my behavior and other people’s behavior between my world and the world. So specifically, and I could say that maybe this is the strongest disturbances that I have in my practice, which are some specifics.

So while I imagine there’s been many enlightened beings in India and Tibet, it’s still a place where women are second-class people. And even in, from what I understand, a lot of the Tibetan tradition says women need to be reborn as men to really achieve enlightenment. There are rinpoches who have engaged in some pretty dastardly behavior, like the gentleman who founded Naropa and Shambhala Centers, who knowingly passed HIV to another person who got infected and died.

So this is one set of questions which caused me to question the reliability of the practice if all of these enlightened beings have never engaged in challenging these issues. And then the other side of it comes, perhaps in our world, rather than looking at ancient Buddhism or those practices even in contemporary times. I wonder how this impacts my behavior in the world. What do I take away from the compassion that I’m able to relate to, as opposed to the anger on top of that?

And I don’t know if this is what engaged Buddhism is about, and I don’t want to say that one is better than the other. But it’s this relationship between what does my world bring towards the world, particularly if I’m meditating on compassion and suffering across all sentient beings.

Ken: You’re caught between a traditional culture and a modern culture. In a traditional culture, the view is that to realize the highest in human potential, you emulate examples from the past. In the modern culture, your potential is realized by exploring and experimenting and discovering what you yourself can do. It’s forward-looking, not past-looking. Many people, in encountering traditions such as the Tibetan tradition, or other Asian traditions, which are only just now beginning the transition into a modern framework, get caught in exactly this way.

You say these “enlightened beings.” Hmm. I haven’t met any enlightened beings. I’ve met people with extraordinary abilities. I had two conversations with Chögyam Trungpa. Talking with Chögyam Trungpa was like talking with outer space. It was just phenomenal. You’re talking to this person in front you and you feel you are on the edge of outer space, and it’s just infinite in there. You hardly know how to relate to it.

Now, from the modern culture, we take a certain idealism because modern culture is filled with ideals. And we rather naively apply these to various elements in the traditional culture. And that’s what I mean about being caught.

Now we are, in the end, human beings. In fact, we have to go further than that: we’re animals. We are born, we live, and we die, as physical beings, the same as a cat, dog, horse, worm, whatever. We’re animals. And we are made up of millions of years of evolutionary history, all of which has basically only one objective. And that is survival.

And we have this ideal about being open to everything. Well, just to show you how these two clash: two cavemen go for a walk. As they’re walking along, they hear a strange noise. One says to the other, “That’s interesting.” But the other isn’t there, because the other one has already run away. Whose genes survive? Okay, so this business about opening to everything is nonsense. You’re just going to get killed. You’re just going to open to the thing, and that growl, that noise, was the growl of a saber-toothed tiger. And now you’re lunch. Your genes don’t survive.

We talk about natural awareness and innate awareness and things like that. I’ve got to tell you, the kind of awareness that we’re cultivating is, above all, not natural, because it goes against our biological, psychological, emotional, cultural, sociological conditioning, education, everything. It goes completely against all of that stuff. That’s why it’s so damn much work. And yet, when we start uncovering that possibility in us, we find that it does bring an end to what we call suffering: struggling with experience.

Now at this stage, I no longer have any confidence that the experience that I have of awakening or emptiness or non-self or compassion or whatever, is the same as the experience that you would have. In fact, I think it’s extremely unlikely that it is the same. And in any event, there is no way of knowing, because you cannot, you know, you take a sip of water as you just did. You have a certain experience. I take a sip of water; there is absolutely no way of knowing if we have the same experience. And that’s the difference between the world and my world. My world is my world alone. Your world is your world alone. And we have no idea whether our experiences match up.

We look at the behavior of people that have practiced, and here’s where our idealism comes in, we want models to emulate. We look to these people as role models, as ideals, as symbols, as examples of what we hope to be one day. And then we see them screwing up, sometimes in quite tragic, quite horrible ways.

In the late 80’s, I invited a Tibetan lama from England, a really very, very good person. And there was a lot of this stuff going on at this point, the kind of behavior you’re talking about. And he was just very straightforward: “When a teacher sleeps with a student, the teacher-student relationship is over.” The teacher has violated the relationship, not the student. And so there isn’t any teacher-student relationship.

Now I’ve talked with people who’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of situation, and I’ve also talked with teachers. And I’m going to put this on tape, and I will probably regret this. But you asked this question. Do you think the sex is good?

Student: It’s divine.

Ken: No. No. Do you think in those situations they have good sex?

Student: Not necessarily.

Ken: No, not necessarily. And when you think about that, then what do you feel? Because at bottom in these situations, you’ve got two people who are experiencing loneliness and trying to find some way out of it. That’s what’s actually going on.

Student: But one of them is supposed be a leader.

Ken: Yeah. And that’s our projection. As I said earlier, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve practiced. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve trained. None of us know what is buried inside us. None of us know that we aren’t going to run into circumstances which are going to bring out things that are totally contrary to everything that we’ve trained and practiced. And we can think, “No, no, I’m above that, etc.” But we actually don’t know.

And yes, these people have certain responsibilities. And in my view—I’m not in any way condoning their behavior—they’re abrogating their responsibilities, absolutely, without question. But they’re human because we’re animals. And that’s just how it is. And if you think, “Oh, I shouldn’t practice this because this person behaved that way,” then you’re cutting, you’re closing the door to your own development. And there’s no need for that.

Yes, this is very important stuff. I think it’s somewhat important because something has led me to devote my whole life to doing this. I could have done other things. Have I been perfect in every way? No, absolutely not. I’ve made mistakes, some quite bad mistakes. And I sit there and I think, how did I do that? That’s so contrary to everything I’ve been practicing. And I’ve had to work with that and come to understand how is that possible and discover the vulnerabilities in me.

And I have benefited extraordinarily from a lot of stuff in Western psychology, which understands these things in ways that were never ever understood in more traditional societies because they weren’t explored to that depth. And that’s helped me to understand. Not only to understand, but also to how to work with myself, so I’m unlikely to go in those directions again.

And when I hear a person saying, “I can’t have faith in this practice because so-and-so is behaving this way,” my heart wants to cry out because such a person is closing a door on their own spiritual growth because they’re attached to a completely unrealistic ideal.

So I in no way am condoning those behaviors. Yes, when you’re in a teacher’s role, you have a certain responsibility. And when you step out of that role, yes, people are taken advantage of and people are hurt very, very badly. And I’ve worked with people on both sides of that one, and so I know what that’s like. But that has nothing to do with the fact that we inherit a body of teaching, which is extraordinary in its richness and its depth and the possibilities it opens to us.

And somewhere you have to find something that you trust. And that’s very difficult for many people. And it’s far easier in many cases to say, “I don’t trust this and I don’t trust this, and I don’t trust this,” because of all of these different reasons. Because the actual experience of trusting is so frightening and so scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen. And you’re right on the edge. And we look for security, we look for guarantees, we look for surety. But let’s be realistic. There is none, particularly when you engage this kind of work. There is none because none of us know what is actually inside us.

Student: I understand what you’re saying and I hear you. And in some ways there’s a risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Ken: Somewhat, yes.

Student: I think the comment about anxiety over trust is well taken. I think more than an individual, perhaps it’s the institution, or the institutional nonresponse to the individual that concerns me, just the same as you’d find in the Catholic church. But, I think probably the way I’m taking this, particularly because of your teachings over the last day and a half, is that these are tools and skills that may have been used in one particular way over a particular history, but that doesn’t define how they can be used in other ways.

Buddhism is a concept

Student: And maybe that brings me to the second part of the question, which was, in our contemporary world the relationship between this work that has to do with my world and how I behave in the world where there is a tremendous amount of oppression. And I’m wondering whether that’s something you can comment on or if you know of other people who are working to look at how Buddhism might apply and inform actions in the world.

Ken: Well, I’m going to be a little picky, so unlike me, if you knew me better. Okay? Personally, I’m not the least bit interested in how Buddhism might be applied, because I don’t know what Buddhism is. It’s a concept; it’s an idea. Through your practice and training, you may come across ideas, you maybe come across methods, which you can see would be helpful. And there are people who are doing things like that.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, in the early 80’s, encountered the notion of mindfulness. And it so inspired him that he set as his personal objective to make mindfulness a household word. 30 years later, he succeeded. And there’s vast amounts of research being done on mindfulness where it wasn’t even on the radar screen. Is mindfulness Buddhism? No, it’s one small element, a very important element, but it’s only one small element. So I don’t know what Buddhism means in that context, but there’s plenty of material in Buddhism, which can be presented in ways which are helpful to people. There are plenty of things that could be helpful to us as individuals, and they’re all concerned with ending suffering.

And Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work, mindfulness-based stress management, mindfulness-based pain reduction, it’s been helpful to probably hundreds of thousands of people. You have other people who—and there are at least three different prison projects taking place in various parts of the country, some of them nationwide—are providing meditation instruction for people who are incarcerated. And the US has got one of the highest incarceration rates amongst the developed nations, so it’s a huge number of people. And again, the object there is to end suffering.

So it’s a matter of individual choice. Every one of these things comes from one person who says, “This is what the teachings mean to me. This is what I’m going to do with them.” And from that one person meeting, coming together with a small number of other like-minded people, extraordinary things can happen. But regarding Buddhism as this thing, which is going to make this change, this is not how change takes place. It always comes because one person was inspired by one thing.

Please. And then we’re going to take a break for lunch.

Student: I just want to piggyback on what Ken was just saying. September 30th and October 1st in New York City, there was a non-conference, they don’t want to call it a conference, but it was Jon Kabat-Zinn and the Center for Mindfulness in Healthcare, Medicine and Society had a gathering called Creating a Mindful Society. And their talks, many of the talks are online for free right now, but just over the next two weeks, you can stream it for free. And I can give people the website and everything. They’re bringing it into law, into all these different realms, into politics, into all these different places. But there’s a website for the next two weeks. You can listen to the talks, which are incredibly sincere and intelligent.

Ken: Yeah. And as you say, it’s happening organically all over the place. A good friend of mine teaches attention as part of an MBA program. And he’s been voted the best professor three years in a row because people say this is the only course in the MBA program that teaches them what to do with the stuff in their heads. It’s had profound influence in psychology and psychotherapy already and will continue to exert significant influence. There’ve been many programs with attorneys. I participated in some of them myself, but now it’s going to a different level.

So it’s all happening. But it all comes because one person gets an idea and starts trying to implement it. And this is the last point I’ll make before we break for lunch, is that, all this, actually, does anyone have a copy of Wake Up to Your Life here? Thank you. I come from a very particular point of view here, and it’s not something that everybody shares. This is a quotation from an author, and I’ll tell you who it is afterwards, and where it comes from:

I only ever cared about the man. I never gave a fig for the ideologies unless they were mad or evil. I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling. I believe that almost any political system operated with humanity can work. And the most benign of systems without humanity is vile. The trick, I suppose, is to find the system that gives the least leeway to the rogues. The guarantee of our virtue is our compassion. And if you allow this institution, or any other, to steal your compassion away, wait, and see what you become. The man is everything. And if your calling is anything, you will always prefer him to the collective, because the collective is humanity’s lowest and the collective is most often spoken for by people who are nothing without it.

John le Carré

Any guesses as to where that comes from? No. No. John Le Carré. [Laughter] George Smiley’s speech, at his retirement from the British Secret Service. So if it’s good enough for the Secret Service, I can live with it. Pardon? I think it’s Smiley’s Progress, I can’t remember. But I was listening to it when I was driving somewhere, on Books on Tape. When I heard this, I went, “What!?” I thought it was wonderful.

We have to have institutions in our society. We can’t possibly operate our society without institutions, but institutions necessarily move us out of our humanity. And so I think the crucial question in the 21st century is, how, I’ll put it in first person: How do I as an individual live in a society that is populated by institutions and stay in touch with my humanity? That I think is the crucial question for the 21st century. Okay. We’re breaking for lunch and we’re going to have a pressed afternoon, but I’ve enjoyed your questions so I hope this is okay.