Student experiences with doing nothing

Ken: What’s it like doing nothing? Donna?

Donna: Boring. Every time I would get to the point of starting to feel nothingness or something, something would happen. Either I would go into this angst, panic or fear place and as I pop back out, I start doing the instructions more. There was one time I just felt this incredible grief and sadness.

Ken: So you decided to go for a walk.

Donna: Well, honestly, I find myself trying to stop it because I’m in a group. I don’t want to just burst out into tears.

Ken: Nobody’s going to mind, except possibly you. Okay. So there’s stuff. Would that be a fair summary? You said it was boring?

Donna: Yeah. After the second hour. [Laughter] But I did notice that different things could bring me to awareness, awakeness, without my trying. I was falling asleep, and somebody would wake me up. Things like that, which I was surprised there was quite a bit, without making the effort to come back, that you could come back. I see now that it’s very much a natural part of our being, of everyone, that possibility that we are all pretty much the same.

The thought came to me that there’s no need to be special more than how we are. But I did get to the place of being very restless toward the end and wanting to go eat lunch, and tired of doing this. But then when I acknowledged that and let that be there, all of a sudden, it’s gone.

Ken: Stuff comes and goes, is how I’m understanding it. Yeah. Okay. Caroline?

Caroline: My analogy would be when you’re skygazing and your eyes are trying to see things. It felt like my mind and my body and everything was trying to do something.

Ken: Trying to manufacture something.

Caroline: Yeah. Stories, discomfort, anything.

Ken: Seize on anything.

Caroline: Yeah. I found that there was a buildup for me, where I got more and more irritated. [Laughs] Yeah, I was just irritated.

Ken: What were you irritated at?

Caroline: That I couldn’t stop it.

Ken: You couldn’t stop what?

Caroline: Just all this stuff.

Ken: Ah, okay. Anybody else. What was it like to do nothing? Ann?

Ann: My mind was very quiet. What was arising was quite a lot of physical pain. Sometimes, I was able to rest in it for a bit, but then things would arise that had me thinking that I didn’t like it. So it would be mostly coming and going around that.

Ken: What kind of physical pain?

Ann: Related to a chronic thing that I have going on.

Ken: Take a look at this book.

Ann: I took a look at it today.

Ken: Was it helpful?

Ann: Yeah, I’ve actually been doing Feldenkrais. And also, I found what made a lot of difference was doing qigong between the sessions, that made a huge difference.

Ken: Which suggests that it’s more of an energy thing than a physical thing when you’re circulating the feeling, something about the system.

Ann: Yeah.

Ken: Okay, anybody else? Eugene.

Eugene: What happens is that I’m meditating, as you say, and stuff arises. For me, it’s usually some physical sensation that feels uncomfortable and I, in the past, generally would want to fix it. Recently, I’ve been working with giving myself permission to just let it be as it is.

I found it interesting today that I didn’t have to do anything, and that was it. “Don’t do anything.” And I was, in some sense, able to just kind of let go, and it was okay. And again, just kind of arising over and over again, but with the sense that I didn’t have to do anything. It kind of surprised me.

Ken: It’s kind of a new possibility.

Eugene: Yeah, right.

Ken: Ajahn Chah was one of the great Theravadan teachers in the 20th century. One of his meditation instructions was—put a chair in the center of the room, sit down in it, and see who comes to visit.

You had various visitors today. Some of them were like the man upon the stair. How many of you know about the man upon the stair?

Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. I
met him there again today.
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

Antigonish, Hughes Mearns

[Laughter] Some of you had experience like that. Thing was there, but it wasn’t there, but it wouldn’t leave you alone, etc. Right, Donna? And these people or these creatures come in and make a mess of things for awhile, maybe knock you out, and they’d leave. What happened? Then you’d be back, some more would come along, slap you around, and knock you out. And they’d leave. What happened there? Something like your experience, Donna.

With Caroline, it’s the ones that come in and go, “ee, ee, ee,” and it would get very irritating and just never leave her alone. All kinds of guests. As Eugene is pointing out, most of the time, because we’re very well brought up to be polite, we think that when guests come, we have to entertain them. We have to do something. [Laughter] The idea of just letting them come in and make a mess of things and leave—it’s a Portuguese thing.

Guests always bring pleasure. If not at the arrival, then the departure. [Laughter]

Reflections on dzogchen

Ken: This evening I’m going to give you an overall perspective of what we may try to do in these few days we have together, starting with some thoughts and reflections that may or may not be helpful to you. We’ll just see. We are meant to be practicing or learning about this meditation, or philosophical system, called dzogchen, which is a Tibetan term, of course. It is probably best translated as the “Great Completion.”

For a long time, it was translated as the “Great Perfection,” but more and more people have moved to the “Great Completion,” moving away from the idea that things are perfect, which is a very Western notion—and quite a problematic one—to the possibility that things are just complete in and of themselves, which has a very different flavor.

Dzogchen is like any other system. It prides itself on being the ultimate system, the highest system and so forth. Part of the rhetoric, or propaganda there, is that there are no paths or stages in dzogchen. There is there! Except that Kongtrül in his summary of dzogchen in his encyclopedia says that this system has no stages, but for the purposes of elucidation, we discuss the 16 stages of dzogchen. I love this kind of writing. It just makes me chuckle.

One of the frameworks that is used very often and that I found very helpful in the Tibetan tradition—you will usually see it translated as “view, meditation, and action.” That’s how Garma C.C. Chang translates it in the Songs of Milarepa. Probably, the majority of translators would use that terminology, and it’s okay. But I prefer to translate the same three words in Tibetan: “outlook, practice, and behavior.” We’re going to look at dzogchen over the next few days from this perspective.

The first couple of days, two or three days, will be taken up with outlook. We will then spend a little time on practice, but there’s very little practice to do in dzogchen, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it. Which is nice. And then we can look at behavior. That was a joke for anybody who has just missed it. Something is wrong with my timing. [Laughter]

Student: You just have to make it explicit. Do nothing.

Ken: No, I said we’re going to spend very little time on practice.

Student: We came here for the practice.

Ken: That’s why I thought everybody would get the joke, but they didn’t. Anyway.

The outlook, practice, and behavior framework

Applied to science

Ken: This framework is a very useful one for examining any system or discipline. Just as an example, many people have difficulty understanding where the role of human morality comes in in the practice of science. And the fact is that it actually doesn’t. It is an external element to the practice of science. Scientists may adopt it as a code of ethics, but it’s not intrinsic to the scientific method because the outlook of science is, “only that which can be measured, exists.” That’s the philosophical outlook, which is fine.

When science is ever probing into a new area, the first thing it tries to establish is some form of metrics, to be able to measure things, because if you can’t measure it, you can’t talk about it using the scientific method. The actual scientific method, that is the practice of science, many of you are familiar with.

You have a bunch of data. You develop a model, which explains ideally all observable data to date—that’s one requirement—but also it has to predict future behavior in a way that can be tested. It also has to be the simplest such explanation—that’s Occam’s Razor.

So you develop this model, which predicts future behavior in a way that can be tested, you make some experiments, and you see whether the new data fits with the model that you came with, in which case you’re not very happy because now you’ve got to come up with another experiment, or it doesn’t fit with the new model, in which case you’re much happier because now you come up with a new model and you get to be famous.

That was another joke. I’m really off on my timing tonight. [Laughter]

The behavior associated with science is that it is a quest. It’s an investigation for more complete models, better predictive models and so forth, and that’s what you do. But there is no recognition of intrinsic human dignity or human rights or anything like that within that framework.

Which is why we had in the 20th century, principally, the atrocities of vivisection of the Nazi concentration camps, the atomic bombs, all the nuclear stuff and pollution, etc., because the underlying view of science is—more knowledge is better, and it doesn’t matter how you get it.

The outlook or view of dzochen

Ken: In dzogchen, it is a very different perspective. And we’ll talk about the view, the practice, and the behavior in connection with dzogchen. But I want to do this not so much as presenting stuff to you, but more as a process of inquiry.

All of you come here with various belief systems. Some of them may have been explicitly adopted—philosophies that you’ve been exposed to, which you personally value, seek to put into practice, and behave in accordance with those philosophies.

But they’re philosophies, they’re systems of ideas that may be backed up by somebody’s experience in the past, or they may simply be speculative. They may derive from the distillation of human experience, the many different possibilities, but they’re something that you’ve received and now you’re trying to live by them, etc.

Some of those can be quite explicit. Some of them can be very implicit: that is, we’ve soaked things up from our family, from our upbringing, in the course of our education, from our culture. And we may not realize it. One of the more subtle ones that pervades Western culture and has come to pervade world culture in, what I think is a highly problematic way, is the belief in progress.

There is zero evidence that there’s progress, but the majority of people believe in it. And that’s an example of a subtle belief system, a subtle philosophy. If you stand up these days and say, “What’s the point of progress?”, the best thing that’s going to happen to you is you get ignored. You may get pilloried or stoned, except that those are a little out of fashion. The questioning, and things like that, is not popular in today’s world.

There’s all kinds of stuff we get from our family: beliefs about ourselves, which go into our outlook on the world, internalized perspectives of our parents that don’t occur naturally. I’ve come to the conclusion through my work with people that any negative self image is always learned.

If you feel you’re unlovable, or unworthy, or etc., this is because somebody regarded you that way and you learned it from them. I don’t think anybody sees themselves that way naturally. And those are other levels of worldviews or outlooks we have, so there’s an awful lot in this whole subject of outlook.

The dzogchen outlook is a little extreme. Experience isn’t expressively groundless. It’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

There’s a basic space for a single timeless awareness

Buddhahood Without Meditation, Dudjom Lingpa, Richard Barron (translator), p. 189

Eugene: Could you say it again?

Ken: There’s a basic ground or a basic space for a timeless awareness. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

Student: That can go on a t-shirt.

Ken: That’s what I thought. All experiences, embraceable, and openness. Well, I’m going to translate these into English—

Student: That one’s a little more comprehensible than the other two.

Ken: There’s a way of transcending into great natural freedom. If I’m using a fairly reasonable translation, let’s take a look at these and try to translate them into English.

Caroline: What was the last one?

Ken: Transcending into great natural freedom. You want the Tibetan too, Caroline?

Caroline: Sure!

Ken: Okay, here you go. I think you should put it in the imperative.

Alicia: But It’s not progress. [Laughter]

Ken: Two different definitions of progress, though I still feel you have a point in that statement, Alicia. Okay. So, four points. Here I’ll read directly from Tibetan.

Coming to know definitely that all experience is inexpressible emptiness to discern that there is a single timeless awareness, natural timeless awareness in self-arising space.

Student: Natural awareness in a timeless space?

Ken: Timeless awareness. Richard Barron translated what I usually translate as “pristine awareness” as “timeless awareness.” I actually like “timeless awareness.” It’s quite good. I’m always worried about “pristine.”

Student: Single nature.

Ken: Single timeless awareness. Sorry, let me retranslate it: “A single timeless awareness in a natural, i.e., self-arising, space.”

To embrace all experience equally without falling into any partiality. So that’s basically saying: “All experience is the same.” And “to transcend or come to a great natural freedom,” the usual translation for that is “spontaneous presence.” “Natural presence” is how I prefer to translate it. “Spontaneous presence” always makes me think of “boing!” Flowers after the rain going “boing, boing, boing.” It’s very noisy. [Laughter]

Student: How can you bring that at the end of a talk?

Ken: I haven’t started yet! A natural presence, which is a natural clarity that is present from time without beginning and effortless.

Student: Couldn’t spontaneity mean “freshness,” too?

Ken: Yeah, it does have that. It’s just a personal bias on my part. When you think of a person who’s being spontaneous, you think of whee! [gestures], no?

Student: Why are we friends? I go “whee!” All the time!

Ken: I don’t mind you going “whee!” all the time. I just don’t like the word “spontaneous” being used in this context. [unclear] That’s why I prefer the word “natural.” It can be just as fancy, but it’s not limited to being fancy.

Student: So you can be spontaneous without going “whee!”

Ken: As I say, it’s my personal idea. Okay, page 188. This is in Dudjom Rinpoche’s outline that he constructed for it. These are all wonderful high-sounding phrases, “aspire,” etc. And when we hear things like that, most of us immediately start constructing yet another belief system, right there. So I want you to forget all of that and just rip up those notes and throw them away.

Student: And do it spontaneously!

Ken: You can do that one spontaneously, because you all have your own belief systems already, and there’s no sense adding another one in here. Because then you get into a war—it’s my belief system against your belief system.

I want you to approach this retreat and this practice that we’ll be doing as an exploration of your experience. You will find out, through your exploration, what’s true for you. What’s true in your experience. Already some of you will have found something out from this very simple instruction: do nothing. It’s like, “Oh, I can’t.” Or “I don’t know how to do that.” Or maybe it’s “I don’t want to do that.”

Willingness, know-how, capacity

Ken: It’s going to be one of those three or some combination: “I can’t,” “I don’t want to” or “I don’t know how to.” This brings me to another framework, which I want to give to you, that comes from the basic shamatha instruction. We will refer to it, as it is now known, as “McLeod’s WKC model.” This was officially named by somebody in Atlanta, so I’m not the guilty party. The WKC model: willingness, know-how, capacity.

“I don’t want to”—that’s the willingness part. “I don’t know how to”—that’s the know-how part, and “I can’t” is the capacity part. Starting from where we are, all three are areas that we need to pay attention to. When we sit during the practice sessions, you do nothing. If you can sit just awake and undistracted, that’s fine. That’s all you need to do. How long does that last for most of you? Caroline?

Caroline: Oh, about 1/64th of a second.

Ken: 1/64th of a second! That’d be about 20 milliseconds. No, it has to last a little longer than that, because you can’t detect that amount of time.

Caroline: It’s right on the edge.

Ken: Yeah. Anybody else? How long does it last? Claudia.

Claudia: It varies.

Ken: Give me a range here.

Claudia: Total loss, partial loss?

Ken: Partial loss.

Claudia: Four minutes, maybe five.

Ken: Two minutes. Okay. Anita. How long are you good for in this practice?

Anita: Today?

Ken: Yeah, today.

Anita: Thirty seconds.

Ken: Thirty seconds. See, people are being impressed. You didn’t think that was very good but you’ve got people over here being impressed. [Laughter] Nava how about you?

Nava: I’m around Caroline’s figure.

Ken: All of you, look at your experience today and ask, is it a matter of not wanting to sit there, awake and undistracted? I.e., is it a problem of willingness? Is it a problem in know-how—you actually don’t know how to do that? Or is it a problem in capacity, you simply don’t have the resources? Even though we haven’t discussed what the resources might be to do that. Anita?

Anita: Which of those three is falling asleep?

Ken: Falling asleep. Actually it could be any of those three. It could be any of them. I would usually say it’s more likely to be a problem in capacity, but it could actually be any three of them. Let’s take a quick survey, you get to vote as many times as you want, because it could be all three. How many feel that they have a problem with willingness in this practice? There’s the unwilling crew over there.

Student: Yeah, sometimes.

Willingness

Ken: Okay. Well, let’s just take a few minutes on this. Donna, unwilling. Why don’t you want to do this?

Donna: I can’t, ’cause I’m afraid of it.

Ken: Okay. Claudia.

Claudia: I knew what was there and I didn’t want to deal!

Ken: You just don’t want to deal with it. Okay.

Claudia: I could feel it coming up and I just … …

Ken: All right. That’s good. You don’t know how to deal with it, or you don’t want to deal with it?

Claudia: Today it was willingness.

Ken: Okay. You don’t want to. Franca. What do you want to do?

Franca: I’m seeing some things that would come to my attention that I would rather ignore.

Ken: Okay. Caroline?

Caroline: It’s just too hard. I’m tired. Why do we have to do this?

Ken: You came here. You traveled a long way!

Student: And she slept at La Quenta Inn.

Caroline: I did! And that was terrible.

Ken: So this represents a change of mind or something? [Laughter]

Caroline: Are you serious?

Ken: Yeah, I’m being deadly serious.

Caroline: You know what it is, though? For me, I cycle through all of these because whenever it’s hard, I’m going to find some excuse.

Ken: So do you want to do it or not?

Caroline: I do want to do it.

Ken: Okay. So you’re no longer part of that group. [Laughter]

Student: I’m afraid to die. I mean, I’m afraid that horrible part of me will be gone when I let go.

Ken: You are afraid that horrible part of you will be gone? You don’t want to do it because you—

Student: I’ll give you what happened in the activity. I think that was the big moment of everything. Not feeling [unclear] no barriers, nothing. And then I have this voice telling me what I’m doing, okay? What’s happening, right?

Ken: I would say: “Oh, now you’re completely present. Aren’t you good?” [Laughs]

Student: So wonderful. Yeah. I couldn’t get rid of that voice. It always … …

Ken: You put your hand that you didn’t want to do this.

Student: That’s what I think, that all the three were there, it’s the capacity, the willingness, and everything was there.

Ken: We’re just discussing the unwilling part. What’s the part of you that doesn’t want to do this?

Student: There was this big moment of recognizing the fear to let go of that.

Ken: How many of us experienced a bit of fear on this one? Just this group over here. We could really neatly divide this room up. Okay, how many don’t know how to do this? I think that’s the problem. Eugene, what’s the problem?

Eugene: I think, I don’t know if I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m trying something.

Ken: Okay, let’s just take a quick review. Okay. The instructions were very simple. [Laughter] Just go and sit down and do nothing. What part of this don’t you understand? [Laughter]

Student: It’s much easier when you give us the five-stage “how to do nothing” bit.

Franca: You’re withholding that from the rest of us. If I could just find the template, I’d probably be enlightened by now! [Laughter]

Ken: Franca, I hate to tell you, but you installed it on the website.

Franca: I did? The five stages of doing nothing? I don’t read that shit. [Laughter]

Ken: It’s up to you. I mean, I just gave it to you, and I can’t believe you’re serious.

Franca: Where is it?

Ken: It’s the article I wrote for Tricycle after 9-11, right, Caroline?

Franca: That was like, really long! [Laughter]

Ken: What part of doing nothing do you not know how to do?

Eugene: I guess what I’m trying to do—do nothing. [Laughter]

Ken: Oh, am I doing nothing? You know, there is a very interesting technique they use in acting school, which is all the people in the class sit in the audience, and one by one they have to go up on stage and do nothing. And it’s quite difficult, apparently. Okay. Who else? Ann. What part of “do nothing” do you not understand?

Ann: No, it’s a little different for me. I share Eugene’s thing about relief. It’s very relieving.

Ken: Yes.

Ann: It’s just that I have a body and I can’t stay there because it just keeps handing out all this stuff.

Ken: Yeah.

Ann: But I like it. I don’t like the body part, but I like the relaxation of it.

Ken: So, if I understand you correctly, then when you’re doing nothing, you don’t know how to be with your body.

Ann: I don’t know how to stay there. I can’t stay there, I keep popping up.

Ken: Yeah. What time duration are we looking at here?

Ann: Minutes, maybe?

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Yes, Donna.

Donna: I guess I had thought, until last night and today, that doing nothing was resting in the breath. I thought I was doing nothing then.

Ken: No, you’re resting in the breath.

Donna: When you took that away last night, if I allowed that unstructured time, then my head really takes over. At least resting in the breath, I focus on something.

Ken: Yeah, that’s right. Without that it’s total chaos.

Donna: Right.

Lack of capacity

Ken: Okay. How many lack of capacity?

Student: I mean there’s a fine line between those two, isn’t there?

Ken: No, actually there’s a very good line between those two. It may be both, may be lack of know-how and lack of capacity. It’s not an either-or. We’re not being Aristotelian here.

Student: Okay, I think I’m more—

Ken: The lack of capacity side? Okay. Eli. Lack of capacity?

Eli: I think so. In thinking about it today, it seems to me it’s like any other muscle or any other thing that we’re learning to do, that is working with it, and perhaps, building the energy to be able to hold that place. It feels to me that’s how I lose it—I’m there, but it disappears, and I’m not always sure that it’s even because of another thought. I’m just not in that place anymore.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. Yes?

Helen: I think that there’s something about when you rest, truly rest, then all of a sudden, your energy starts to come up and it changes the resting. You can’t stay there.

Ken: It’s very inconvenient, isn’t it?

Helen: Is that capacity? I mean, I don’t know!

Ken: That’s a very interesting point, Helen. That’s more know-how because, as you say, when you rest, then there can be, not for everybody, but sometimes, there’s more energy there. And you don’t know how to be with that energy. Okay. So, we’re getting the picture. Anybody else, Gary? What’s your …

Gary: Probably all three.

Ken: Capacity?

Gary: When you said we could do anything this afternoon, I kind of played hooky. There was a lot of movement for me—hiking and walking and so forth. But there are the certain patterns I have. I have to be under capacity with energy, that if my energy comes down and these patterns start taking over, it’s just thoughts. I can actually feel when the thoughts come up, my body starts to have a certain flavor to it, and then I start to get frustrated with it.

For me, I think energy has a lot to do with it. And when you look at it, it’s sort of like an oxymoron: do nothing—do doing nothing. [Laughter] The patterns I have kind of worked with that. The movement, when I’m moving and walking, I think I have an easier time being in my body. When I’m sitting, I can get the energy blocked and thoughts will go to town. I find this very challenging.

Ken: That’s lapping over to the know-how. Okay. Anita.

Anita: Here’s a snag I ran into last night. My mind starts going off in a lot of different ways, I notice that, and I want to practice doing nothing so I want my mind not to do that. I’m thinking about how to get my mind not to do that. Then I’m resisting what my mind is doing, and then I’m not doing nothing cause I’m resisting. For about an hour.

Ken: This is very good. This is very much in the know-how category, and the answer is on page … [Laughter]

Anita: Finally! [Laughter] Is this a special edition?

Ken: She gets special treatment. It’s on page 44, Anita. I will read it: “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” Preferences.

Anita: So, I’m preferring my mind not to move.

Ken: You’re preferring it one way over the other. “Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.” Sound familiar? Okay. This is the know-how bit.

Anita: So, there’s a way that you can be with the mind chatter while doing that?

Ken: Just stop preferring. I really like this retreat, because the instructions are so simple. I can even understand them and give them to you. Just stop preferring. That’s it!

Anita: Sounds difficult.

Ken: What’s difficult about it?

Anita: It’s counter to all my previous conditioning.

Ken: Ah, that was the belief systems that I was talking about a little earlier.

Anita: And habits?

Ken: Yeah, all that stuff. Right, okay. The reason I find this division into willingness, know-how, and capacity useful is that it allows you to know what kind of effort to make.

If the problem is lack of capacity, learning more and more tricks just doesn’t help. This became vividly clear to me in rock-climbing. Learning how to hang by this finger, this finger or this finger, or a combination of those, is useless if you actually don’t have the strength in your arm to actually hang or to rest, or what have you. You can learn all those wonderful tricks. No good! You have to actually build the capacity.

Similarly, one of the quotes that we have up on the website is, “If you’re rowing in the wrong direction, rowing harder doesn’t help.”

Eugene: It could make you stronger.

Ken: Yeah. It’s like Yogi Berra. When somebody said “Yogi, I think we’re lost.” “Yeah, but we’re making great time.” [Laughter] You may have oodles of capacity, but if you don’t know how to apply it then you can end up as many people do, rowing harder in the wrong direction. And I think a lot of people here know that and have had this experience.

Eugene: So, they’re not sequential.

Ken: No, no, no. These are not—that’s a very good point Eugene—they’re not sequential. These can operate at any time, and one or more can be present. They’re just three different aspects.

Then there’s the question of willingness. Let me tell you a little story, some of you know this already, about spiritual practice.

A group of people came to a Sufi master and said ,”We’d like to study with you.”

The Sufi teacher said, “Okay, are you willing to put aside laziness and work hard?”

And everybody in the group said “Yes”.

“Are you willing to take a lower place with humility and forego pride and recognition?”

They said, “Yeah.”

“And are you willing to venture into what you don’t know and let go of what is comfortable for you?”

“Yes.”

The Sufi master sighed and said, “Okay. I’d like you to come next Tuesday evening and meet a group of people who’ve been studying with me for three years.”

Next Tuesday, the new group came, were seated, and opposite them was this group of students. And the teacher said to his older students, who’d been studying with him for three years, “How many of you would rather be lazy than work hard? Stand up.” Everyone stood up.

“And how many of you would rather have recognition and pride, rather be humble and take the low place?” They all stood up.

“How many of you would rather stay with what is comfortable than venture into the unknown?” And they all stood up. He turned to the new group and said, “So you see the result of studying with me is that you’ll be worse off than you are now. Please think about this.”

What’s the problem, Cindy?

Cindy: Yeah, I was just imagining feeling that way.

Ken: Go on.

Cindy: I just had this flash forward and thought, “Oh my God.”

Ken: Can we turn the clock back?

Cindy: Is it too late to go?

Ken: Well, no. Did you rent a car? Who drove here?

Cindy: We own the car. It’s just the gas at this point.

Ken: Any other thoughts on the story? Does anybody else have a sort of flash of recognition here? Nope. Okay.

Student: They’re honest; they’ve learned to be honest.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. Let’s review. How many of you want to know that experience is groundless? [Laughter]

Student: Stand up!

Ken: I had to get a readout. Nobody wants to know that experience is groundless. How many of you want to experience a single timeless awareness?

Student: Can I just experience it in a limited time, for a single moment?

Ken: Then it wouldn’t be timeless, would it?

Student: It’s not going to be single.

Eugene: It could be timeless while you’re experiencing it.

Ken: How many of you want to embrace everything that is possible to experience openly?

Student: No. Torture.

Ken: How many of you want to leave what you know to experience a great natural freedom?

Student: Oh yes.

Student: What was that word again?

Ken: Transcending. [unclear] I think we have a problem with communication. Okay, so what do we want to do for the next five days?

Student: Nothing. [Laughter] If you hadn’t told the Sufi story, everybody would have been cool.

The primary practice

Ken: I don’t think so. [Laughter] Okay. Tools. There are a number of tools we have available. First tool covers both know-how and capacity. And many of you know this from me or from other sources, but I will just take you through it quickly.

This comes from a friend of mine who studied dzogchen quite a lot. He calls it the primary practice, and it has four or five steps depending on how you approach it. If you put the books down, we’ll go through it, and then I’ll go through it again so you can take notes.

Franca: You say “take notes” and everyone sits up.

Ken: And you’re folding your arms. Sorry about this cough. It’s come back again. You can begin work with any one of the senses. Most people find it easiest to begin with sight, but equally you can begin with the sensations in the body. You could begin with hearing. Smell and taste are sufficiently ephemeral that they are difficult places to start.

Just as you’re sitting, open to the experience of everything that you see. By that, I mean, don’t look at any one thing, just whatever you see, receive it within the whole field of vision. When you do this, your eyes may move around a bit and you may find yourself looking at one object or another. And whenever you do, just expand from that object back to the whole field of vision. So you can sit for a little while, receiving everything in your whole field of vision.

When you do this, you may find there’s a little physical shift, like an opening or relaxing or something, a little energy shift. And that’s fine. That just tells you that you’re on the right track.

While you’re doing that then, in addition, include anything that arises as sound and smell, taste, and also the sensations, the tactile and kinesthetic sensations in your body. The touch of your clothes, any internal tensions, sensations of sitting on whatever you’re sitting on, and so forth. So that you’re completely present in the field of sensory sensations. Let’s stay there for a minute or two.

Then include not only the sensory sensations, but also everything that you’re thinking, feeling or believing: all three levels. You may not be aware of all of the things that you’re believing, but include them anyway. These are mental sensations if you wish, emotional sensations.

Don’t move from the physical, from the sensory sensations to the mental and emotional; rather stay in the field of the sensory sensations and include all of the mental and emotional sensations. When you do this, you get a sense of a field of experience, which is a little arbitrarily divided into outside and inside. You open to the whole field of experience, all of the sensations.

Again, you may feel a little shift energetically. That’s fine. You may have some funny visual phenomena going on. That’s fine too. The next step may sound a little odd, but let’s give it a try.

Here you are in this field of experience. Open your heart to all of that experience, in the same way that you open your heart to a person, just open your heart to that field experience. Everything.

And the last step is: I’m going to ask a question. I’m going to say a question, which I want you to say to yourself. When you say this question, you will experience a shift. Don’t try to answer the question, just experience the shift and rest in the shift, including everything that we’ve done up to this point, all steps.

The question is: what experiences all of this? What experiences all of this? Okay, relax. Look around the room.

So the four steps are: first, open to the field of sensory sensations. Second step—include the field of mental and emotional sensations. Personally, I find it helpful at that point to let the sense of internal and external drop away so it becomes a field. You can put that as kind of a sub-step if you wish.

The third step—let your heart open to everything you experience. Open your heart to everything you experience. And then the fourth is—ask: “What experiences all this?” and rest in the shift. Okay. Questions, comments. Caroline.

Caroline: Is this doing something?

Ken: Yes, of course. We established that some people are unwilling. Some people don’t know how, some people lack capacity, and some people have various combinations. What I’m doing now is offering some tools to address each of those points.

Caroline: To do as needed.

Ken: You can really do it either way. You can do as needed, or you can work these techniques for a while. If you want to build the strength, you may just do pushups for a while and then be able to to climb rocks. You go to the mountain and think, “I’m not strong enough to do that” and do pushups, and it doesn’t really help you that much. Follow? Other questions or comments?

Ann: So you just keep doing this whenever you …

Ken: Yeah. It’s a practice in its own right, and it’s a very complete practice. It addresses know-how, in that it’s quite explicit instructions about opening. You’re moving away from preferences I’ve just described. You will periodically find something that’s a little difficult to include.

As you go through this process, just opening to the experience of these sensations you’re actually transforming energy, which is how it builds capacity. As your capacity builds, you will naturally become aware of things at deeper and deeper levels. That’s just how it works, because the attention has a higher level of energy so it penetrates deeper into the system. The end result is that you can rest in the totality of your experience.

Ann: So when you find something that’s difficult, then going to the step of heart, would that be …

Ken: You may choose to do it, it may be too difficult to do that. You just include the sensations that tell you it’s difficult.

Franca: I was a little bit confused about the mental formation. Are you saying whatever arises in the way of thoughts and beliefs for that particular situation or just …

Ken: In general, whatever thoughts, stories, emotions are flying around. You include them. They may be related to this, they may be related to that.

I was giving a talk at a Buddhist center in L.A. covering for another teacher that asked me. His wife was having a baby. Somebody was having some difficulty with the practice, and he was very much trying to control his thoughts.

I said, “Do you control your thoughts?”

He said, “Sometimes.”

Then I said, “Pound for pound, an amoeba is the most vicious animal in the world.” Everybody laughed because, were you planning to think about an amoeba tonight? So, we don’t control our thoughts. Anything can arise at any time.

In fact, I probably have more control over what you’re going to think than you do. Just a comforting thought. Okay. Other comments, questions. What was your experience with this when we did it?

Letting go of preferences

Eugene: Someone asked the question. You said, going beyond preferences is one of the main parts of the know-how.

Ken: Letting go of preferences. You try to go beyond, that’s going to be difficult. You mentioned this in your own experience earlier, Eugene, when you said you had these physical sensations you were noticing, and instead of preferring them to something else, you just let them be. And you found that the experience shifted.

You don’t do this because, “Oh, if I do this, then I’ll have this experience,” that’s not going to work. But, “Oh, this is what I’m experiencing now. This is what I’m experiencing now.” That’s it. We don’t have any call on what actually arises in experience. We don’t control that.

As soon as we prefer one experience to another, we’re setting up a division. You follow? That’s in the know-how category. “This experience, I don’t like this.” Okay. Now I get to experience not liking this sensation.

Ann: One thing that happens sometimes is that the experience passes and that’s what makes it possible, or that’s what was making it possible to stay a little bit longer, ’cause it actually passed.

Ken: Were you hoping for it to pass?

Ann: I don’t know, I don’t think I was …

Ken: No. This is a very subtle point. It’s a very important one. As you say, the experience passes and then you can just rest again. But once you start approaching your practice as, “Oh, there’s this experience. So if I just experience it, it will pass,”—you’re back into the old game.

Ann: Right, okay.

Ken: This is why we say “do nothing,” because as soon as you set up a preference, you’re starting to do something.

Franca: One of the reasons I think when we plan to do that, why it doesn’t work, because we’re not with it. We’re in the future looking for the result. Like if you’re truly with whatever it is and not looking for the result, just be with it, then it seems to go.

Ken: Yes, but be very careful about harboring that wish that it go. Suzuki Roshi talks about this in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind as gaining ideas, and they’re insidious. They’re absolutely insidious. They can be very, very subtle. And part of practice is letting them go again, and again, and again, so you actually are experiencing what is arising. Just what’s there, right now.

This is why we have the three gates of freedom in Mahayana: nothing to hold onto, hopeless, and empty.

Franca: I don’t have any control over my thoughts.

Ken: That’s right.

Franca: You know, like wanting to avoid my hopes.

Ken: Pardon?

Franca: You know like wanting to avoid having thoughts, hoping to get rid of an experience, and hoping to have an experience. You seem to be saying that we should not hope and not want, but these are thoughts.

Ken: Don’t believe them. That’s all. As you say, you can’t stop them from happening, but when they arise, do you relate to them as facts or thoughts?

Franca: That’s not completely clear.

Ken: Claudia?

Claudia: I don’t have a question.

Ken: No, she has a question. She just …

Franca: My next question is: I’m wondering what Claudia’s question is. [Laughter]

Claudia: I don’t have a question. I don’t know why he thinks I do.

Ken: I’m wrong. Okay, fine. What’s your next question?

How do you open your heart?

Franca: How do you open your heart?

Ken: Do you have a husband?

Franca: Stop it! [Laughter]

Ken: Do you? Can you open your heart to him?

Franca: He’s not here!

Ken: Can you?

Franca: Sometimes. [Laughter]

Ken: How do you do that?

Franca: I have no idea!

Ken: But you know the experience, right? Okay. So imagine your husband walked in and you haven’t seen him for a few days. You just open your heart. Can you do that? Or we’ll make it a little easier for you. He’s hurt and he comes in here. Can you open your heart? Just answer yes or no.

Franca: Yes.

Ken: Okay, good. Helen, could you hold up your gomden [meditation cushion] for Franca please? Do exactly the same thing with a gomden now. Okay? Thank you.

Franca: But what if—and you know me, and you love him, and, you know me really well … …

Ken: Yes, but did you get it?

Franca: Oh, absolutely. Yes.

Ken: Yeah, okay. That’s it.

Franca: I got it as soon as you said, “Do you have a husband?” But how do you teach that?

Ken: You teach it exactly the way I just taught you. People have this idea: how do I do it? You take them to the experience and then they know how to do it.

In the spring the Mount Baldy retreat was canceled but a couple who wanted to do it got to LA before they got my note that it had been canceled. So I met with them that Friday or Saturday, I can’t remember. And went through exactly this practice because it’s part of the power retreat.

One of them, said: “Open your heart to experience?” And so I led her straight to the thing like I just did, “Now do it with this little table.” And she just looked at me after and said, “I didn’t know you could do that.”

Everything is experience. We have our ideas about different experiences. I can do this with this experience and I can do that with that experience. But if you can do this for this experience, you can do this with that experience too. And if you can do that with that experience, you can do that with this experience.

Because in the end, they’re just experiences. We have all of these categories in our mind. And so the way that I teach that is I don’t try to tell them how to open your heart. I connect them with the experience of opening the heart and then just have them apply it. Does that answer your question? Okay.

Claudia: When did you add this part?

Ken: Ruth added it, I’m not quite sure when, before the retreat. I confer with John and Ruth from time to time. They’re constantly revising their stuff as I’m constantly revising mine, and we just go back and forth.

Claudia: This is very nice.

Ken: Yeah, I’ve been working with that in some other areas, as you know. So he’s brought it into this. Yes, I’m pretty sure it came from Ruth, though.

Helen: I’d like to go back to preferences?

Ken: Yeah.

Helen: Because it seems to me that our natural human tendency is to want pleasure and not pain. Maybe they just kind of happen: from babies all the way through. To not have preferences, it seems like it requires training or whatever this whole thing is. And it’s sort of an imposition, in a way, on who we are.

Ken: You look at them either way, Helen. You’re quite right. We prefer to have milk from our mothers than not to have milk from our mothers. It’s very simple. So it goes back to can you prefer to have a warm, loving mother than a cold, prickly mother? [Laughter] If you go into attachment theory they think the cold, prickly mothers produce very different kinds of children than the warm, pleasant mothers. So, absolutely.

I see a few people that had cold, prickly mothers. [Laughter] We’re no longer children and we’ve gone through the evolution of growing up. And there are a lot of ways that we learned to relate to the world, which served us very well in the course of growing up, but don’t serve us very well right now. That’s why you’re all here. Is anybody here supremely and blissfully happy all the time? What are you doing?

Caroline: I came to be unhappy. [Laughter]

Ken: This is easily arranged. Gary, what do you do with that bear?

Gary: What?

Ken: The bear. What’d you do with it? Just put them in Caroline’s room, would you? Anyway. Because of our preferences, we actually create a lot of suffering for ourselves, and often for other people. There’s a lot of struggle.

This is not how a child learns through its life. This is how we, whatever stage of life we’re at, are exploring going beyond the conditioning with which we grew up. This is very much another stage of development, if you wish. Not everybody wants to embark on it, which brings us back to the willingness point again, and I’m going to say a bit more about that in a minute.

One of the things that actually turns out to be quite magical, and it is what is described here, is when you just drop the preference and open to all experience, which is actually that business about not having preferences. It is also embracing samsara, nirvana in openness, embracing all experience in openness. It’s just another way of saying “having no preferences.” Then we find that we experience the world in a different way. You follow?

Guru yoga

Ken: So that’s one technique, primary practice. Another technique is guru yoga.

Guru yoga is primarily about building capacity, and can also be very helpful for developing willingness. All the answers are in here, on page 34. There is a six-line guru yoga prayer, which comes from the Kagyu Ngöndro. I’ve always liked this prayer. It’s a prayer I learned back in the early 1970s, and I’ve done it a lot.

Actually, I was never able to make the transition to any other guru yoga prayer. I translated it several times, and this is so far the best I’ve been able to do. Of course, the big bugaboo is “Okay, who’s my guru?” One way to think of guru yoga is—this is how you form an emotional relationship with what is true. In the Tibetan tradition, you regard your guru as Buddha.

The typical modern interpretation of that is that it means that your guru is infallible. This is not what it means at all. What it means is that you regard this person—or your experience of this person, to be more accurate—as how you experience awakened mind right now. Or to put it in slightly different vocabulary, it’s how awakened mind is able to speak to you.

And it’s your own awakened mind, not that anyone owns these kinds of things, but it’s how awakened mind speaks to you. That’s what it means to say you regard your guru as Buddha. It doesn’t have anything to do with infalliblity.

When you look at it this way, then devotion arises quite naturally, and obviously, from this point of view, it doesn’t have to be a living, breathing person. It can be a historical figure. Someone that is a source of inspiration for you. It may be someone you actually have met or you hold in high esteem or regard.

There’s an old saying in the Kagyu tradition: “You see Karmapa, you never see the lower realms; you live with Karmapa, you never see the higher realms.” In that, you see Karmapa—you are are tremendously inspired, etc. Your heart opens, and there’s great faith, and it’s very good for your spiritual practice. If you live with Karmapa, you see him as an ordinary being, and you get into all the usual little morals, etc.

So, in guru yoga, the guru is a symbol for what is true, or what is ultimately true, or awakened mind, or however you want to put it. And through prayer, you are letting your devotion, your feeling for it, if you don’t want to use that term, find expression through the act of prayer. This reinforces, strengthens that feeling; there’s very, very much a component of opening the heart and this happens quite naturally.

You’re praying for these things like, “Let self-fixation go, free of me, stop ordinary thinking, no mind, there’s no beginning, confusion subside on its own, all experience is pure being.” Because you’re praying for these things and putting your emotional energy into this, you actually start wanting to do this, and that’s where it moves in the direction of cultivating or developing the willingness to go in this direction.

At the same time, because you’re doing this over and over again, and you’re using emotional energy, the emotional energy through this is being transformed into attention, so that when you do guru yoga over a period of time, you do have a much higher level of attention because you’re transforming that emotional energy into attention.

The way this is done—you can just use this prayer and do it informally. And at the end of the period of prayer, you imagine whoever you’re using as the focus for your guru yoga dissolving into light and coming into your heart, and you and this person being no different whatsoever. And then you sit and do nothing, again. You may find that it’s a different experience.

If you want a more formal practice, then at the end of this text, supplementary practices, page 52, you’ll find a guru practice based on Sukhasiddhi, in which you have a choice of a couple of prayers at the back. This is the more traditional, more elaborate form of this practice.

That’s a tool to address willingness and capacity. And this is a suitable tool for some people more than others depending on people’s inclination in the division of things. It’s a good tool for desire types. They can just open.

A third tool addresses the know-how part. How do you do nothing? I’d like to talk you through this. It’s very simple. It won’t take us very long.

Sit as if you’re sitting in meditation. Breathe in naturally, and then breathe out. And as you breathe out, follow the out-breath. When the out-breath stops, as it always does, don’t force it in any way, just be natural, wherever the outbreath leaves you, rest right there. The in-breath will happen, but you don’t need to worry about that. Just rest, right where the out-breath leaves you, and do nothing, right there.

You follow the out-breath, and wherever the out-breath leaves you at the end of the out-breath, rest right there. What do you experience then?

Ann: A shift to more openness.

Ken: A shift to more openness. Yes. So that’s where you rest. Okay, Eugene?

Eugene: I felt peacefulness at that point. And then I panicked, because then I forgot to breathe. I was concerned.

Ken: If you just let the body go, it’ll breathe quite happily. It’s been doing this for a few years, it knows how to do that. But the panic, yes, you can run into that, that’s right. Then you do this again, and maybe you stay a little longer in the panic, and it’s perfectly fine to stay in the panic. You don’t have to do anything about it. Helen?

Helen: I think it helps to keep your attention going.

Ken: Yeah, it’s a way of placing the attention, and then you just rest. Now, when you’re doing this, you may end up doing nothing for 250 milliseconds, 500, and that’s fine. You do it over and over again, and gradually you learn how to rest in doing nothing.

So, these are some tools. Some of them are more traditional, some less traditional. Use them in whatever way you find helpful to you, as a way of deepening your level of attention you’re capable of, so that you can explore your own experience.

The great completion means experiencing everything

Ken: That is, creating the capacity, the willingness, and the know-how to just rest and do nothing. And it’s in the resting and doing nothing that things are going to arise. They always do. And that’s going to lead into an investigation and exploration of experience. You don’t have to do anything, it will all come to you, right? Maybe more quickly or more vividly than you want.

You already started to describe that, you start to rest and you’ll get deep sadness, you hit the fear, or you have an intuition that there’s something there “I don’t wanna experience.” You all knew it was dzogchen. Dzogchen means the “Great Completion,” the “Great Completion” means everything. I can say you all came here with the intention of experiencing everything.

So get started. Now, if things are too hot, let me know. That will be the subject matter of our individual interviews. There are ways of working with aspects of experience that are too hot, and we all have those in us. And part of it is developing the willingness to experience those, learning how to experience those, and developing the capacity to experience those. Eugene.

Student’s questions

Eugene: This may be a little too intellectual, but it seems like know-how and capacity are pretty close.

Ken: This is what somebody was saying earlier. When we learn how to do something, then we are able to do something we couldn’t do before, but there is a difference between learning how to do something and developing the strength, or whatever, to be able to do it. I mean, I know how to lift a car. I just don’t have the ability, the capacity in terms of strength to do it. But I know how to do it. You follow?

Student: You could teach? [Laughter]

Ken: I could teach what?

Student: Those that can do, do. Those that can’t do, teach.

Ken: Yes, and you know what the third line is. Those who can’t teach, teach teachers. [Laughter] Dan.

Dan: Does capacity in this practice and in general, does that generally mean attention?

Ken: Yeah, it does generally mean attention. Attention has to be understood to have two components, which we know as mindfulness and awareness. It’s not just mindfulness. It’s not just what the Theravadans refer to as concentration. It’s a word I really have a lot of trouble with.

To use the traditional definitions: one component of attention is being able to be with the object, mind joining with the object. And the other component of attention is the awareness thing. It’s knowing what’s going on. It’s the knowing what’s going on that allows the balancing to take place.

When both of those are present, that’s what is called samadhi, actually. There are many different definitions of samadhi; that’s one of them. That actually comes at the end. It comes about through resting, not through focusing, both aspects.

That’s why I put a great deal of emphasis on resting. All the power of practice comes from resting, in fact. So the more that one can rest completely, the more capacity one has to experience what is arising. That’s what I’ve come to. Okay?

Dan: It seems like this is like a low know-how, high capacity to practice.

Ken: Yeah, I understand.

Dan: Assuming the willingness is there, of course.

Ken: Yeah, you could look at it that way. My own experience is that there’s quite a lot of learning, learning in terms of recognizing when you’re doing something. One is able to see more and more subtly the ways that one is doing things and the progressively let them go. I’m not sure it’s quite so low know-how as that. I mean, in theory, yes, it sounds like that, but in practice …

Dan: Cause I know what you mean by doing nothing. It’s not, it’s really not possible to do nothing. I mean, it’s something, the wind is blowing. The trees are growing, the dog is barking. Something’s always happening. I think what you mean by doing nothing is it comes down to some notion of a constructed self.

Ken: Well, it certainly includes that. It goes a bit further. The wind blows. Just because the wind is blowing, doesn’t mean to say I’m doing something.

Dan: Well, you could be doing something or not.

Ken: Yeah. And it’s possible to experience it and do nothing. And that’s what I’m referring to. Okay, Caroline.

Caroline: Just a question about the experience of doing nothing. The way I’ve been experiencing it or noticing is that often I just have a little impulse … [Laughter]

Ken: To do … ?

Caroline: To change something.

Ken: That’s exactly right.

Caroline: So that’s why I’m thinking of doing nothing. It’s just observing that impulse.

Ken: I’d like to change the word observe to experience. Because “observe” sets up a duality. So, the impulse arises and you experience it. And you do nothing.

Caroline: But as soon as that impulse arises, things get complicated.

Ken: Yes. And this is where both know-how and capacity come in, because in the beginning, the impulse will arise and you will find yourself doing something. And then you say, “Oh, I’m doing something,” and you come back and rest. But as you practice this more and more, you’ll find, “Oh, there’s the impulse! That was nice.” And nothing will have happened.

Caroline: So that’s how I was thinking of doing nothing.

Ken: Yeah. But it’ll develop quite naturally. If the impulse arises, “Oh, I’m not going to do that.” Now you’re doing something. [Laughter] Okay. There’s another question. Helen?

Helen: So, by resting though, you do mean being attentive.

Ken: Yeah, absolutely.

Helen: Not gone.

Ken: Not gone.

Helen: Cause that could be a form of resting, isn’t it?

Ken: No, you’re sleeping then.

Helen: Yeah. Okay. Well I wondered if …

Ken: You’re doing something. You’re sleeping!

Helen: But attentive, being attentive is doing something, isn’t it?

Ken: No. You’re awake and present. That’s all. You’re awake and not distracted, and being not distracted isn’t doing anything. Awake and not distracted, that’s it. Other questions? We’ve gone way over time, but this is all quite important in laying a basis.

Nava: I have a question, but I could ask it tomorrow. It’s about advice for the time of activity, if you could speak to that.

Ken: Well, thank you. Yes, that’s very good. And thank you.

Student: What was the question?

Ken: When we’re not meditating, right? Or not practicing. Okay. Thank you. That is something I’d rather deal with. The periods of practice that we have, 5:30 to 7:00 or 7:30, we can describe as practicing unmixed with activity. Practicing presence, practicing attention, whatever you want, unmixed with activity. Not doing anything else.

The rest of the time when we’re eating, when we’re going for walks, having a shower, resting, you know, in the beds or whatever, you can describe as practicing mixed with activity. And the more you can do of that, the better. So you go for a walk. Even though you’re walking, don’t do anything while you’re walking, and it’ll be a different experience.

Or if you’re using guru yoga or something like that, you can just take your favorite guru yoga prayer and do it while you’re walking. So you’re walking becomes mixed with guru yoga or the opening exercise that I led you through. As we go on the retreat, you’ll find you drop into natural awareness. You can also find you drop into natural awareness while walking or while doing simple activities. And this is how you mix it.

If you want to actually do something during that period, the usual instruction (it’s a very good one) is to regard everything as a dream, or as a reflection. I’ll be saying quite a bit more about that tomorrow night, so we’ll leave that there. That’s all part of the [unclear]. So thank you. Okay. Let’s break here.