The relationship between practice and life

Ken: I want to continue what I started last night. Last night I gave a relatively high level description or pointers concerning conduct, behavior, in one’s life. These are relatively traditional approaches, and as is usually the case in traditional approaches, you get very high level principles and relatively little practical application. You have to figure all that stuff out yourself. So, this evening, I want to come down a little closer to earth.

The first was something I think I mentioned yesterday or today, I can’t remember. And that is the relationship between practice and life. Now, quite deeply embedded, the way Buddhism is presented, is that you’re not truly alive unless you’re in retreat. And you’re not doing anything really worthwhile unless your meditating, practicing.

Student: Are you saying that’s traditional?

Ken: Well, I don’t want to even say it’s traditional. I just want to say this attitude is very deeply embedded in the way Buddhism is presented. And there are reasons for that. I don’t really want to take time to go into some of them. But it goes back—I think I was talking about this yesterday—to the very origins of Buddhism. It developed as a way of approaching life for people who were withdrawing from civil society. That’s how it started.

In the mid-’90s, I was considering how to expand Unfettered Mind. And one of my students was a management consultant in Orange County, and I was discussing this with him. I was describing a certain idea I had. And he just looked at me and said, “It’ll never work.”

I said, “You don’t know that much about Buddhism. How do you know it will never work?”

He said, “Ken that’s a 2,500 year history of disgruntled monks that don’t get along with each other. It’ll never work.” And he’s absolutely right that one of the very strong aspects of Buddhism is that it’s about individuals finding their own way. And while large Buddhist institutions have formed and existed for many centuries, there have been relatively large numbers of people who pursued their own path. In each generation they’re usually regarded as black sheep. Then they turn out to have set the standard for the next generation, time and time again. And that’s in all traditions of Buddhism.

So, in a certain sense, it’s a way for the individual. And I want to keep that in mind in what we talk about, because one of the things that always distressed me was the extent to which people would feel they had to lead two lives. There was their practice life and their regular life. There’s often all of these questions about the relationship between these two. And they had to take time from their regular life to lead their practice life. And it often created a great deal of internal tension in people and quite often tension in families, and so forth. And I never thought any of this was very productive.

The very vocabulary of Buddhism is biased in this direction. In Tibetan tradition you have the words thun (pron. tün) and mtshams (pron. tsam). Thun means your formal meditation or formal practice period, and mtshams means in between. So you have your formal practice period and in between. Now, where’s the emphasis here? In between refers to everything we normally call life. That’s between practice sessions. So, you already had the idea that somehow you’re meant to squeeze your life in between practice sessions.

This was probably okay in a small monastic establishments or—as was the case when Buddhism first developed—where you have very small groups of monks who basically practiced on their own. They went and begged for food on their own. And then they would get together once or twice a month to renew their vows and provide a bit of support and checking up on each other. But it was all really individual stuff otherwise. So that way of approaching things, you have your formal practice period and in between made sense because most of your day—say three quarters of it—was formal practice periods. There was stuff that went in between. But this approach really makes you feel that you’re a second class citizen and most of your time you’re actually living, so to speak.

And then you also have in the Tibetan tradition, the terms which come from Sanskrit I’m sure: mnyam bzhag (pron. nyam zhūg) and rjes thob (pron. jé tōb). Mnyam bzhag refers to the composure or equipoise—or however you want to put it—of formal practice where you’re sitting and you’re resting your attention and doing some form of practice. It very specifically refers to the experience that arises at those times. So that mnyam bzhag we call composure, usually translated something like that. And then rjes thob or rjes shes (pron. jé shé) is called ensuing attainment or ensuing understanding. It’s what you carry from that experience of formal practice.

Again, you can see how the bias is in one way. And then you have this term in Tibetan called lam khyer (pron. lām kyer). I don’t know the Sanskrit for it. I find it an extremely difficult term to translate. Literally it means to carry on the path. And the idea here is, how do you carry your experience of composure or formal practice in the in between periods and keep it going? And again you can detect the bias that you’re only really alive when you’re in formal practice.

I think all of these built-in attitudes are problematic in the circumstances in which all of us live and practice. So the way that I prefer to approach this now is, there is only one practice and it’s the practice of attention: the cultivation and stabilization of attention. If you want to get really fancy about it—as a friend of mine does—there’s the cultivation and stabilization of attention, which leads to the stabilization of awareness, which leads the stabilization presence.

And you can sort the practices as to where they work in that. That way of looking at it—stabilization of attention, awareness, and presence—then that’s what practice consists of. And you have two kinds of practice: practice in which you’re not engaged in any other activity, and practice where you are engaged in activity. And both are equally important.

The purpose of practice unmixed with activity

Ken: There’s a Burmese teacher in Northern California who for many years taught only practice engaged in activity. She had her people do absolutely no sitting meditation. They would come to her place for a retreat, and they would be given tasks to do. And along with the tasks there would be a question such as, “As you’re doing this task, what is your experience of like, dislike, or indifferent?” And when you met with her for an interview, you got grilled.

So you’re cleaning the toilet. Which parts did you like, which parts did you not like? And so, all of the time you were engaged in these tasks, you were to be bringing attention to what you are actually experiencing. It was very effective. But over time she came to appreciate that the sitting practice, that is practice unmixed with attention, allowed another level of attention to develop, which reinforced that practice. And that’s why they’re both important, because practice unmixed with attention is where you develop. It gives you the optimum conditions to develop stability.

But there are so many people who are really good when they’re sitting on the cushion. And when they get up, they’re complete jerks, because there is no understanding or comprehension of actually bringing that quality of attention into day-to-day life and interaction. So they’re very brave at sitting, and then they’re completely reactive in their ordinary life. And this is not just lay people. You see this actually, to a disturbing extent, in many Buddhist institutions, monasteries and so forth.

Why taking practice into life doesn’t work

Ken: So what that’s led many people to consider is, “Okay, how do I integrate my practice into my life?” And that sounds like a perfectly reasonable question. “How do I take my practice into my life?” But when you consider that question, there’s still a bias towards practice implicit in it. That’s a small problem. The large problem is, it doesn’t work. It absolutely doesn’t work because what people do with this, is they generate stable attention. They may have had experiences of clarity, insight, peace, calm, all that good stuff, and they try and take that to their lives. In doing so they are contradicting the basic principle of practice.

When you are sitting in meditation in formal practice, and something comes up in your practice, like some kind of emotion, what do you do in formal practice? What have you been doing for the last 10 days? Please say something otherwise I’ll be very angry. [Laughter]

Student: Nothing. [Laughter]

Ken: And in experiencing it, what happens? We aren’t finished yet. I told you there would be tests. In experiencing it, what happens?

Student: It dissolves.

Ken: You experience it. You don’t bring peace and clarity to it. [Laughter] I said peace and clarity, not piece of clarity. It’s not pie we’re talking about. Okay. And when you experience it, you say, “It dissolves,” another way of saying that is you find peace and clarity in the experience.

Student: Eventually, sometimes after great effort.

Ken: Well of course. That’s why you practice. It depends on the volatility of the issue. About a year and a half ago, some stuff came up and it took me about 30 days to find peace and clarity in the experience. That was interesting. Daily meditation, every meditation was quite interesting. So that’s what we do in practice. We open to the experience—and it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing mindfulness, or primary practice, or even yidam practice—it’s what you do.

So in this wording, “I’m going to take my practice and integrate into my life,” you’re going to take this good experience you have and bring it to your life. Well, there’s an old saying among military strategists, “The best battle plans last until first contact with the enemy.” In almost all battle situations you have your plan, the enemy has their plan. You mount your plan, and the enemy does something different. And from then on it’s improvisation. Caroline?

Caroline: Are you saying people want to bring the results into their lives? Because I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just, you know, during the day have moments of just being open and paying attention.

Ken: I think you put it very well. What people generally try to do, is to bring the results of their practice into their life.

Student: I find it strange to hear that people can practice very well on the cushion and then leave the cushion and be completely different.

Ken: Well, this is because you’ve been subjected to a horrible form of training, but she doesn’t take that approach. [Laughter] It doesn’t make any sense to you, but the majority of training is like that.

Student: Then what are they doing?

Ken: What are they doing in the practice?

Student: Yeah.

Ken: They’re pushing and they’re pushing hard, in many cases. And then they try to remember what to do in the rest of their lives. And of course, how many of you have found that trying to remember to be mindful effective? [Laughter] Anybody found this: remembering to be mindful?

Student: It is already too late.

Ken: It is already too late, yeah, [laughter] by a minimum of 500 milliseconds. It’s all gone. So people ask me time and time again, “How do I integrate my practice into my life? How do I integrate my practice into my life?”

And I say, “Well, do this.” And it never works, because they simply don’t remember. And the thing is, you can’t remember. When you’re practicing and a thought has grabbed your attention, how effective is remembering to be mindful? Well, let’s not quibble. Is it possible to remember to be mindful? No, it’s not. So, this is completely … I don’t like to paint anything black and white or anything like that. I don’t have any strong opinions about this. [Laughter] So, this is utterly and completely the wrong approach.

The question is, how do I bring my life into my practice? Let’s get you to look at things differently. The practice is about attention. So, when you say, “How do I bring my life into my practice?” It means, “How do I start approaching my life in attention?” What?

Student: That turnaround, bringing mind into your practice. I have this memory with both my sons of trying to do prostrations. And then as toddlers coming and inserting themselves between me and the ground, just as they used to in pregnancy. That was my life [laughs].

Ken: Yeah, exactly. Whoops, don’t want to crush you dear.

Attention mixed with activity: no vacations

Ken: So what this leads to, of course, is the practice of attention mixed with activity. Now, do you want the bad news about this? There isn’t any good news. [Laughter]

There is a direct corollary about, this, that nobody really wants to acknowledge. Once you take this approach, there are no vacations. Any vacation is self-indulgence.

Student: Is what? [Laughter]

Ken: Self-indulgence.

Student: Okay, I thought you said something else.

Ken: What did you think I said?

Student: Never mind. [Laughter]

Ken: Now I am curious. That’s okay. So that’s very important: there are no vacations. Every aspect of your life is a place where you exercise attention, and includes such mundane things as: changing diapers, cooking, driving to work, making love. It gets worse, because when you start doing this, really practicing attention in all these activities, you begin to see at a whole other level, what proportion of your life is driven completely by reactive patterns. And it’s just bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce from one reactive pattern to another.

Student: Is it like that in meditation too?

Ken: At the beginning, yes. And at the beginning of this practice, it’s the same, definitely. In meditation, that is officially the first stage of meditation. It’s when you see it’s just bounce, bounce, bounce. I love the quotation from Gunaratana, in Mindfulness in Plain English. I won’t get it exactly right. He says, “At some point in this process, you’ll come to the conclusion that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a jibbering madhouse running pellmell down the hill, utterly out of control. No problem. You aren’t any crazier than you were yesterday. You just know it now.”

And this is when we start experiencing our life in attention. This is what we find out. None of it makes any sense. It’s just a mess. So that’s the first stage. And there’s all kinds of fun, highly technical names, such as Recognizing Monkey Mind, that’s the official name, or Mountain Stream Bouncing Over Rocks first stage of meditation.

So it’s exactly the same in what I am suggesting here. Now, we do exactly the same thing in this life practice as we do in formal practice. That is, whenever we note we are distracted—which in the beginning, those moments will be few and far between—we do exactly what you were saying a few moments ago, Caroline You just drop back into attention, in the way that most of you know that I teach basic meditation. The principle is, return to what is already there. You’ve heard me say this any number of times. So you do the same thing in this practice of life.

“Oh, I don’t know why I was saying that.” And you just return to what’s already there. What’s already there is your body. And so you keep coming back to that. And after a while you can come back to the body and feelings and so forth, it is just exactly the same. But you’re doing this practice. And many people find it very helpful—because the habituation of reactivity is so deep, and the associations that trigger reactivity are so present in our lives—to build in some reminders.

Reminders

Ken: One of my students, many years ago down in Orange County, I gave him a very simple thing. Take a breath whenever you open the door. It’s like a reminder. I used to stay overnight at his place, because I had an office in Orange County. The next time I went down, he had green post-its on every door in his house. That’s not just the doors from one room to another, every cupboard door [laughter] because he realized after a couple of days, he just wasn’t remembering it at all. So he had all these green post-its: “Open door, take a breath,” a very simple practice and very effective.

And you can make up these. And what you’re doing here is building in interrupters in your life. Interrupting the continuous operation of habitual patterns or reactive patterns. So you start dropping into attention consistently in your life. And something begins to change in exactly the same way that something begins to change when we do this in formal meditation practice. And you know, there are hundreds of these.

Telephone meditation

Ken: Thich Nhat Hanh’s very good at this stuff. There’s the telephone meditation. Always answer the telephone on the third ring. The way he does it, he builds off one of these gathas or verses. A phone rings the first time, go, “Calm.” Sit there, wait for the second ring. Then you say, “Smile.” Then you wait for the third ring, you say, “Present,” and you pick it up. Now, what are the chances of the conversation going better if you’re calm, smiling, and present, as opposed to “Hello!” I completely failed at this with one of my HBO clients because whenever she does answer the phone, it’s allways on the first ring. And it is “Yes!” [laughs]

I have a very good friend in Los Angeles, who’s a very good friend and a very bad student. [Laughter] She started off as a student and she proved to be a hopeless student but an extremely good friend over the years. But when she calls you, you pick up, “Hello.” And she never identifies herself. She just starts straight into the conversation, like, “Hello. I was thinking that we should get together.” She just assumes you know who this is. [Laughs] Very disconcerting. I’ve made zero progress in that one too. So this is kind of basic level stuff.

The primary practice: do it all the time

Ken: The next level I want to move to is primary practice. I’ll be broad-minded about this. There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be doing primary practice all the time. Is that sufficiently broad-minded? I mean, we’re sitting here right now. You can experience the whole room and everything in it, and the sound of my voice, all at the same time. That’s quite possible. How many of you were doing it? But that’s what I mean about making life practice. It has certain practical benefits.

A friend of mine was talking on the phone. He said, “I’m really glad I was doing that opening to all experience thing. I was laying down on my bed and I caught a black widow spider out of the corner of my eye.” So, you tend to notice a lot more. It’s very, very good to do at meetings. Because when you do it at meetings, you will stay in touch with what is actually happening in the room. And that will just happen. And you will feel the flow of energy and feelings. Often you may not be able to put it into words, but you go, “Oh, okay. I can’t do that right now,” and so forth. But that’s not how most people are working in meetings.

Very good negotiators actually do that. That’s why they’re good negotiators. You can do it while driving. I would limit it to opening to all sensory experience while driving. That can be very beneficial, and just be a little careful about this. I was doing this one day while it was raining as I was driving down the 210 Freeway. I kept getting entranced by the pattern of raindrops on the windshield and I’d keep coming back to everything. So be a little careful about it until you get there. But obviously, if you have that kind of open awareness, so you are aware of where every car is around you, that’s going to help you when you’re driving. You’d be aware of things that are happening on the side of the road while your attention is on what’s happening in front of you.

How many have you seen that, the basketball. You know what I’m talking about?

Student: Simulated?

Ken: Where they’re throwing basketballs.

Student: Basketball awareness test.

Ken: Yeah, it is on YouTube, I’m pretty sure. The British transportation authority made a commercial out of this, which they use to point out how difficult it is to see a cyclist at night when you’re driving, because your attention just isn’t on the shape or the movement, or patterns associated with a cyclist. So, what happens in this thing? You have it here? We do. Well, we can do it afterwards. But, the …

Student: You probably you shouldn’t say much more.

Ken: Yeah, probably shouldn’t say much more. Okay, so do you want to set it up? No, not now. Art will show this to you afterwards.

Attention can be highly selective. So practicing broad attention, inclusive attention, in life—it’s not only, is it your practice—it also makes a very significant difference to how things actually unfold in your life. If you’re having a conversation with someone, and you open to the whole experience of that conversation—including the room that you’re in and everything that is arising in you—you will be far more aware of when something the person says triggers a reaction in you. You’ll pick it up so much earlier. And start working with it so much earlier, that the whole course of the conversation will change.

And over time, you’ll become very sensitive to nuances in body language, in tone of speech, and where what they’re saying and the emotional energy that’s behind it either match or don’t match all of that stuff. And this leads into the third—if you’re keeping count, I’m not—things that I want to talk about. If you approach your life with this kind of open awareness, it means in everything you do, you’re including your whole life.

Compartmentalizing life creates imbalance

Ken: There is a very strong encouragement in our society to compartmentalize: work, you do work stuff; home, you do home stuff; social life, you do social life stuff, and never, these things aren’t meant to meet. The result, not infrequently, are very significant imbalances in our lives. And more problematic is we actually develop different personalities and identities. So people can be extremely present and competent and very easy to get along with in the work environment and total maniacs at home. Or sometimes they’re very good with their families, and complete maniacs in the office. What’s going on here?

If a work decision comes up, and let’s say it’s a fairly significant one, open to your whole life. Because that work decision is going to have implications elsewhere in your life, in all likelihood.

My old office partner was an executive search person, head hunter. He’s very good at his work and quite thorough in vetting candidates and making sure they really wanted this job, and they’re a good fit for the organization. This was usually at the C-level, so he was working with very high level executives. But on one occasion, he had successfully negotiated a deal with this executive from the East coast to become, I think the CFO or something, may have been a CEO, of a gambling company in Las Vegas. All the salaries and bonuses, stock options, all this stuff had been negotiated, moving along, all the usual stuff.

And two days before the deal was to close, he got a phone call from the executive saying, “I can’t do this.”

And this had happened to my office partner before. He didn’t lose his temper, says into the phone, “Okay.” He’s out a couple of hundred thousand dollars on this one. He says, “What’s going on?”

“Well, I was having breakfast with my family, and my 12 year old son said, ‘Dad, I don’t want you to run a gambling company.’ And that was it.”

So in all of the months that had gone, he had not included his whole life. He presented the news to his family, and his son said, “I don’t feel good about it.” And every father wants to be an inspiration to their son. So that was it.

So my purpose of bringing this up is that including your whole life, whenever you’re confronted with any kind of major decisions in any area of your life, is very important. You have stuff coming up in your family, include your work life, and so forth. And in this way, there will actually be some relationship.

One other example, a woman I coached at HBO. When I first started coaching her I said, “Okay, if there’s one thing you want to change about your work life, what would it be?” It is part of goal setting, what you do in the coaching world, if you don’t do it in the dharma world.

And she said, “I want some more time with my family.” And at this point she had four year old twins.

So I said, “What time do you leave work?”

“Mmm, 7:00, 7:30.” It’s the entertainment industry, they start at 10:00, but they go to 7:00, 7:30.

I said, “Okay, that’s easy.”

She said, “Why?”

“You have a hard leave at 6:00.”

And she just go straight to the shock in front of her, “I can’t do that.”

I said, “Sure you can. There aren’t any guards with machine guns posted at the doors. Just walk out at 6:00.”

“But, but, but but … ” And then she said, “Well, I can’t do that. People give me work at 5:30 and I have to get it done before I leave.”

I said, “Yeah, that’ll continue for a week. But after you keep leaving at 6:00, then they’ll give you that work at 4: 30. You can get it done before you leave.” So I went to see her the next week and said, “How did it go?”

She said, “Well, first day was a little scary. I literally tiptoed out of the office to see if anybody was watching me leave, but nobody said anything. And I had a nice evening with my family. So I did it again the next night.” And later she said, in all our coaching, it was the single thing that made the biggest difference in her life. And it was exactly as I said, within a week or two, everybody else had got used to it. She reorganized her work, so she got all her work done and she got to spend time with her family.

So this kind of compartmentalization is very, very problematic because it means that when we’re in one world, we are completely ignoring the other. And that’s how the imbalances arise. So people would say, “I can’t possibly do this.” The next day, it’s simply a matter of doing it. And you find that you can.

Your mind is your life

Ken: Now, I want to go a little further with this opening thing. One of the perspectives we’ve been working with is that: life is what you experience. What you experience is your mind. And if you now apply the transitive law of mathematics, you get: your life is your mind. And then you can do the reciprocal law: your mind is your life. This is actually very important.

Translate this into ordinary terms, it means your life consists of only what you experience. Not more and not less. The only thing you can know, is what you experience. In particular, you cannot know anything about anybody else. Because, what is your experience of another person? Art?

Art: A projection.

Ken: No, your experience of another person. What is your experience? Let me ask the question a slightly different way. What is another person in your experience? Dan?

Dan: You experience what happens to you.

Ken: I think we can be a little less convoluted than that. Donna?

Donna: They are part of your experience.

Ken: Yeah, but let’s get down to the basics.

Student: How you feel about them, what you think about them is projection.

Ken: Your experience of another person are: sights, sounds, sensations. And on top of that, all of the emotions that you associate with those and all the stories you associate with that. Okay? That’s your experience of another person. You don’t know anything about the other person. If you want, in psychological terms, you have this representation of the other person. That’s what you’re relating to. How many of you have experienced relating to the representation, and it not quite fitting with the other person? [Laughter] And what would the results of that be?

Student: Interesting.

Ken: Interesting. Okay. I usually have a graphic to accompany this, so you’ll just have to imagine this. Draw a circle, doesn’t have to be a big circle. That’s your world of experience. Draw another circle that just touches that circle. That’s the other person. That’s their world of experience. There is a point of contact, which you can label as the point of contact. That point of contact is in your world of experience. And everything else is in your world of experience. That’s all you actually know of the other person, is that point of contact. Everything else, as several of you just pointed out, is projection.

Student: I don’t understand when you say the point of contact is the only thing you can know of the person. How can you know even that much?

Ken: Oh, because you have these sights and sounds, that’s the point of contact there. You hear the sound of their voice …

Student: So, your experience is the point of contact.

Ken: You experienced the point of contact, yes.

Student: I’m getting hung up on that.

Ken: I’ll do a demonstration with Larry in a minute. If you take the attitude that the other person is a black box—that is, you cannot know what’s inside—then you only have your experience. And you apply what we’ve been talking about in the course of this retreat. You open to that experience. What do you find in that field of experience when you do that? Anybody? When you open to the field of experience, what do you find in that field of experience?

Students: Sight, sounds, associations, stories, projections, thoughts …

Ken: And you’re opening to all of that? I’m getting worried.

Students: Nothing. The stage on which that occurs, the frame.

Ken: What do you find in that? Okay. How many of you have done any sky-gazing? Okay. So there, you’re looking at the sky. What do you find in your experience at looking at the sky?

Students: [Laughing] Nothing. There’s lots of stuff up there.

Ken: This is fascinating. It’s just fascinating. What is aware of the projections? What is aware of nothing? You find knowing don’t you? [Unclear] When you open to experience, you find knowing. Are you with me?

Students: Now we are. We have a point of contact. [Laughter]

Ken: I think we have to stay here for another 10 days. Start this all over again. I can stay. How many of you can? [Laughs] So you find a knowing. Now, there are various fancy Buddhist terms for this knowing, like rigpa, like pristine or timeless awareness or, you know, all this stuff. But there it is. Now a lot of people miss this knowing because it is not conceptual. It is immediate and direct. And it’s very interesting. People are scared out of their minds to live their life on the basis of that knowing.

I was giving a guest lecture at Claremont in my friend Jeremy’s class at the business school. After he’s trained them for about seven or eight weeks in various forms of mindfulness practice, he has me to come in and talk about mindfulness and attention in conflict and relationship. I usually do part of the class in the form of role-plays. And in one of these classes—these are all people who have businesses and have jobs, this is part of the MBA program—one person was describing a difficult situation. His father had died, and he found himself in partnership with his father’s partner in the business. So here he was in his late 20s, early 30s, and he’s in partnership with a 55 or 60 year old man. A little difficult situation. He has his ideas about what he wants to do with the company, mainly take as much out for his retirement as he can. And he’s got this young guy who wants to grow the business. So it’s a difficult situation.

So we entered into role-playing, with one person playing the partner and him playing himself. And there’s a particular exercise I do with this, which involves asking questions. But in order to know what question to ask, you have to be right in touch with your own experience. You can’t figure it out conceptually. So we hit this point in the role-play and he asked questions and it didn’t work because he wasn’t in touch with his experience. So I guided him to be in touch with his experience and the right question just popped up like that. And he went, “What the hell happened?” It was the first time he’d experienced doing something without thinking. Now, this is the direction in which you are moving towards living your life. Yes.

Franca: This is a big question because doing something without thinking can also mean … You used the example of that translation of The Iliad.

Ken: “It just felt so right.”

Franca: “It just felt so right.” How do you tell the difference between those two experiences? And I don’t know how many people remember this.

Ken: No, it’s the only way. Let me come back to your question.

Control is an illusion

Ken: When you open this way, bit by bit, you will have the opportunity for direct knowing. Then you have to learn to act on that direct knowing. Larry can we do a little pushing? So this is a tai chi exercise. You just have this one point of contact for holding a butterfly. We don’t want to crush the butterfly, and we don’t want to let it go either. And so typically it looks like this. Just move around, and you can go anywhere you want. See, he’s trying to push me over. [Laughter]

Larry: Waiting to see if he asks me one of those hard questions. [Laughter]

Ken: Okay. Now we’re going to do this a different way. Larry and I are going to think about what the other person is doing. And we’re going to try to anticipate what the other person is doing. Okay?

Student: [Laughter] Butterfly gone.

Ken: Actually, we’ve been quite careful, we haven’t crushed the butterfly. What’s happening? [Unclear] Okay. Now, I’m not going to think about it. You can do whatever you want, Larry. I’m not going to think about what he’s doing. Go ahead. So, what happens?

Student: You are less engaged.

Ken: Are we less engaged?

Students: No. More. You’re more responsive.

Ken: Yeah. I’m talking to you. I’m not even thinking about what he’s doing. He still hasn’t pushed me over. Okay? Thank you.

You open, and you experience the point of contact in your whole world. And there’s a knowing there. But if you collapse down, then everything stops. And that’s most of our lives. That’s what we’re doing, we’re collapsing down and doing this. But if you just forget about trying to know what is going on in the other person, and trying to figure out what’s going on in the other person, and you open to your own experience, then you get the snaky back and forth. Which I think, you have to admit, is a little more interesting than us sitting there like this.

Now, there is one small problem with this, just a very small problem. Do I get to control what Larry does? Does Larry get to control what I do? Does anybody have a problem with this? [Laughs] That’s the problem.

Student: You weren’t controlling before either. When you were trying—

Ken: Absolutely we were, weren’t we? We weren’t going anywhere, and we weren’t going to go anywhere, because you were trying to control everything.

Student: But you still do have control.

Ken: No, you don’t have control. Control is an illusion. Trying to control is what stops everything. So, to actually live one’s life this way is a practice.

Avoiding mistakes

Ken: Let me get to Franca’s question now, which is how do I avoid making mistakes? Right?

Franca: It’s more than that.

Ken: Well, how do I avoid doing things out of reactive emotions?

Franca: Well, that particular image describes a very particular kind of frame. This is not just your day-to-day reactivity. This is when some great gust comes up and it just feels, as the line said, it feels so right to do this. I just know what the right thing to do is. And when dust settles, you see that it was not the right thing to do at all. But it felt exactly like the right thing to do. It wasn’t a thinking thing.

Ken: Yeah, exactly. You have the four steps of standing up. You know these.

Show up: that is, you enter the experience, the situation. You don’t try to manipulate it from afar. You open to what is happening: which means you don’t shut down to anything. In that opening you find a knowing. With that knowing, you serve what is true to the limit of your perception. You never have complete information. Let me say that again. You never have complete information. This is two applications. You never have complete information about what is happening outside of you. You never have complete information about what is happening inside you.

Student: What was three again?

Ken: You serve what is true to the limit of your perception.

Student: I thought three was, you find knowing.

Ken: No, that’s part of three. Three is you serve what is true to the limit of perception. You don’t serve yourself. You don’t serve the other person. You serve the whole. And that is an action. Serving is an action. You do something. And for those of you legalistically inclined, I have to have to include this, not doing something is doing something. Four is, you receive the result.

Student: You don’t get to skip that one.

Ken: No, you don’t get to skip that. Now, there are basically two things that can happen here. If you have seen clearly, then what you do works. It serves what is true. If however, you have not been able to see clearly—either because of some lack of information about what’s happening outside, or because you aren’t able to be in touch with yourself inside—then the situation may blow up. And when it does, you will get to see what you couldn’t see before. And you receive that result and go on. There is no guarantee in life that everything’s going to work out.

Eugene: This is not a [unclear] process.

Ken: Exactly Eugene, because as soon as you see the results, now you show up, exactly, you show up in the next situation. And if it’s a mess you show up in the mess. This happened to me very badly in a consulting job where I had advised a certain strategy, and it crashed, and crashed badly. It really hurt my main client in the process, which is not a thing you want to do. But she was very good about it. She said, “Okay, we’re in this situation. What do we do now, Ken?”

And so we actually were able to use that crash to be able to demonstrate that there were two noncommunicative cultures in the organization. It wasn’t the best result. It would be better to have done something else. But we were able to use that. And that gave us leverage for a whole bunch of other stuff. But it took a very, very long time to get over the problems that that crash caused. So things happen, but you take what you’ve got and now you work with that. You never can tell how things are going to work out. Caroline.

Intuition

Caroline: I asked you once before, if you could sort of define intuition in relation to all of this. Could you do that again?

Ken: Geez, what did I say? I haven’t got a clue.

Caroline: That can be something that you can go with quite powerfully.

Ken: Well, intuition is a form of knowing. First off, intuition is a very vague word in English. What it actually is referring to is not clear at all. But we can look at it as a form of knowing. Sometimes it comes from a body sense of things. You know, you come into a situation and your body says, “This is really not a good place to be.” Everything looks just fine but your body is picking up stuff. How many of you had had that experience? You’ve all had that experience.

So in some cases, intuition simply means trusting your body, what your body’s telling you, which many people pay zero attention to and can’t even detect. There’s also an emotional intelligence, an emotional mind that operates. So everything can sound very nice, but it just doesn’t feel good or feel right. Or conversely, everything can sound horrible, but somehow we know this is the direction we need to go. What I suggest here is not simply relying on intuition, but opening to the totality of your experience, and resting in that until you find clarity.

Caroline: So intuition isn’t total experience.

Ken: I don’t think it is necessarily a total experience.

Caroline: It is not rational, its not conceptual.

Ken: It’s not conceptual. Yeah. Dan.

Ideal conditions

Dan: This knowing, traditionally it’s taken specialized environments, such as the one we had this week, to come in contact with that. Now, to bring that to life, do you recommend the first type of attention then moving on to this?

Ken: What do you mean by the first type?

Dan: Well, you’re talking about bringing attention to everything you do. That’s something different, is it not?

Ken: Not really, because as I pick up this book, I can be aware of everything around me. I mean, first is just bringing attention to, then you work with the openness. This is straight application of the principles of mindfulness and awareness from shamatha practice: being present with the object of attention and then aware of everything. And actually practicing that, making that how we actually live, so that all the time you are aware of everything around you. So, you are aware of where people are in the kitchen, so you don’t bump into them. So, to me, there’s just the one practice of attention.

Dan: When I’ve gone to apply this, I find that the more… I started sometime ago dividing my morning practice into my sitting practice and going outside walking, as a kind of a transition to the day. And I also use it in driving, where it works quite well until I turn on the radio, and then it doesn’t work so well. And also in an office, in a closed-in space where there is a lot happening, awareness practice is very difficult.

Ken: I didn’t say it was easy. And it’s more difficult in certain environments than others, no question. That’s how you’re living your life. Bring that life into your practice. Now the alternative is you create the ideal conditions, which is what yogins and people do, but that’s not what any of us are doing.

Dan: No we are not.

Ken: We’ve chosen to live this way.

Dan: Yes, we are.

Ken: And in doing so, we have actually chosen how we’re going to practice.

Dan: Say it again.

Ken: And in doing so, we have chosen how we’re going to practice. That’s our practice environment. That’s it. Don’t change your life. Practice it. So, there you are in the office, open to everything. It will be a little confusing at first, but you may be surprised what happens.

Dan: Okay, thank you.

Ken: You bring in another point: a lot of people want to create the ideal conditions for practice. And if our life is our practice, bringing our life into our practice, that translates into creating the ideal conditions for our life. I’ve known a couple of people who do that. Two women, they gave two different presentations on how to approach life so that it worked for you. I really didn’t like either of their presentations because it was all about how do you exploit the world to create the life that you want. And it always involves praying on other people’s greed and fear for your own profit, which just rubs me the wrong way ethically.

So we have our life. Bringing that life into practice, that may lead to changing something. Bring the life that you have now into your practice. Okay. So I’ve discussed about opening, and this is a direct application of what we’ve been doing in this retreat. Open to the whole, and there’s that knowing. And what makes it very difficult here is that you’ll end up doing things which have nothing to do with your self-image or who you think you are, etc. And some people find that difficult. Marsha.

Marsha: On the question of bringing your life into your practice. So, would you approach that the same way you might approach a hot potato and you’re like a reactive emotion? Would you do it in a titrated way at first? Say for instance, I’m a school teacher, which I am, and I see 125 to 150 kids a day. It’s just like organized chaos.

Ken: Not so organized.

Marsha: Not so organized sometimes. So to be completely aware all the time, that’s a huge bill. Good to try though.

Ken: Yeah. So you’re going to develop the ability to do it. So you take places to start, and work from there. And they’ll bleed into each other. So yeah, on a practical basis, start working with something you can do. Build ability and you can do more. This is what I call, finding suitable practice fields.

Working with reactive patterns

Ken: Now there’s one more topic I want to touch on, which I mentioned to many of you in the interviews. There are many different terms you can call this, but it’s a way of working with reactive patterns. It is a way of working with reactive patterns, but this is a fairly broad principle. A little background: every reactive pattern, I think it can be argued, developed, at some point in our lives, as a survival strategy. When we encountered a situation—and it may be a one-time situation, or it may have been an ongoing situation, I’m just lumping those together right now—which we could not experience completely. When that happens, we always split in two, or two parts develop. I call these the expressive and the receptive. One could also call them the active and passive.

So typical pairings, bully/coward, bully is the expressive, coward is the receptive. The tyrant/helpless pair, one is total control and the other is, “I can’t do anything.” That split always occurs. Both are present in us, but we usually identify with one, and only flip to the other when we’re pushed to the wall. So the bully/coward is an easy one. If you meet and challenge a bully, they become a coward. And conversely, when you corner a coward, they become a bully. And you can do it with any of the other pairs. It works the same way.

So usually we identify a reactive pattern by identifying one pole, the pole that’s actually working. So maybe, whenever we encounter conflict, we feel sad. Other people, whenever they encounter conflict, they get angry. But we feel sad. That’s the receptive pole. The other people who encounter conflict, they get angry, energized. That’s the expressive pole. Whenever you identify a pole of a reactive pattern, include the other pole in your awareness.

It may take you a little while to get in touch with the other pole, but it’s always there. When you include both, there are a couple of effects. One is, you can’t escape into an extreme position. So it keeps you in the experience. I’m assuming if you want to be there, at least that’s your intention. The second thing it does, is it allows you to find the appropriate balance in the situation. And the appropriate balance is always something that moves moment to moment. But by including both poles, you don’t get locked into one side. And so you can actually be constantly correcting imbalances and moving wherever you need to move.

That’s made possible because when you include both poles, and this is the third thing, it opens up the spectrum between the poles. Ordinarily, when we are locked in the pattern, it’s either this or that, and we lose any touch with all these gradations, these shades of gray. When you include both poles, all of the stuff in between becomes accessible. And so your responses to situations will be far more precise and nuanced.

Now, this is not a conceptual process, even though I’m describing it. All you have to do is—in exactly the same way, I think it was last night, I was saying— place attention on the crown of your head and the soles of your feet. And as soon as you do that, you become aware of your whole body and everything in it. And your attention doesn’t stay there and there; it’s everything in between. You know what I mean? So, you’ve encountered a situation where you’re really sad about it, but it’s also a boundary violation. So part of you is angry; so now you include that anger.

And now you experience the situation in a very, very different way. You’re stepping out of being locked into one side of the pattern. And so this raises the level of attention, so that you are actually out of the pattern, and can see the spectrum and can operate and respond to the situation from a higher level of attention.

So these are, I hope, things you can actually use to bring your life into your practice. You start living this way, situation by situation. One of the things that comes out of this is that—because of the higher level of attention, because of the inclusive attention, where your including everything—you will see and know things that other people don’t. And so you will act in a way which just seems totally straightforward, in fact it seems like the only thing to do. And other people will say, “How did you know how to do that?”

But it’s simply because you were including more, and the more you include the less choice you have. And I like to say that the illusion of choice is an indication of the lack of freedom. When you see things really, really clearly, there’s usually only one course of action. All of those of you who are in various professions, know this to be true. When you have a high degree of expertise and awareness of a situation, you see that what a lot of things that other people consider viable options are simply not viable. And the range of viable options, when you consider everything, comes down to very, very few. Okay. I think that’s about it. This helpful? Questions? Art.

Art: You just said about including both polarities when you have an inkling you’re in a reactive pattern allows you to open up to the spectrum of choices. If I find myself in a situation and I only see two extreme options, is that a good indication that I’m in a reactive pattern that I don’t know about?

Ken: Yep. That’s a pretty good indication. When you only see one option, that’s a pretty good indication. If you see two options, “I can do this or that.” Well, there’s going to be a feeling associated with this one.

Student: Yes.

Ken: There’s going to be a different feeling associated with that one.

Student: Yes.

Ken: Include both those feelings. And the rest of you will go, “No, no, we don’t want to do that because if I include both those feelings, there’s going to be a whole bunch of other feelings that I don’t want to even touch.” Then just like that, you’ve experienced that.

Student: I’ll remember that [laughs].

Ken: Good thing we’re 50 miles away [laughs]. Other questions. Caroline.

Caroline: When you only see one option, you’re trying to work it backwards? Is that what you’re doing? What if that one option is the product of an narrow mind?

Ken: Well, that’s what I’m saying. Sometimes a situation develops, and you think, “This is the only thing I can do.” And the indication that it’s a reactive pattern is the presence of rigidity, stickiness, unwillingness to explore, and the fourth one would be urgency.

Caroline: But as soon as you’re willing to explore, haven’t you opened up more options?

Ken: I said, “unwillingness to explore.” That’s the negative.

Student: I’m sorry. You said, “rigidity, unwillingness to explore, urgency and … “

Ken: Stickiness.

Student: What does that mean?

Ken: Stickiness? It’s not clean.

Student: If we apply this to what Franca is remembering from another retreat, when the person in the story, who only felt there was one option, and that was to shoot the arrow.

Ken: That was from The Iliad. It’s a translation of Homer.

Student: She’s asking, how do you know?

Ken: Opinions differ on this. I can only speak from my own experience. In my own experiences, I don’t know. And there’ve been a number of situations where I thought I was completely present, active, and I found out not quite so. Big mess. And then just as Eugene pointed out, I had that situation resulting in quite serious messes. And I thought I had considered all the options. I thought I had asked the right questions. I thought I had brought in the right people to advise, etc. And the one, as soon as it blew up in my face, I went, “You never asked that person.” That person was one of my advisors. I hadn’t seen it before, because when we are in the thrall of a reactive pattern, we can only see what the pattern presents to us.

And that’s what Franca is referring to. It’s from the Trojan war, where after a few years, the Greeks and the Trojans have decided, “This war is pointless, let’s just agree to disagree. And we can all go home and start firing again.” And the gods up in the heavens, up on Mt. Olympus, Pallas Athena, in particular, saying, “They’re quitting already. I want them to fight for years. This doesn’t work for me.”

So she invests her spirit in Pandarus, who’s a Greek archer, who is watching the Greek and the Trojan leaders sign the agreement that will end this phase of the war. He says, “This is wrong, I’ve got to stop this.” And in the translation, he pulls the bow string back, and, “It just felt so right.” And he shoots the arrow, and it kills one of the Trojan leaders. And there’s another 10 years of Trojan War.

And we have that feeling: it just feels so right. When you’re really present—maybe my experience is changing here—you may be clear about the course of action; there’s also an openness that accompanies that.

Student: That you don’t control.

Ken: Yeah.

Student: There’s another correlation, interesting correlation, talked about—freedom being no choice. But also in the grip of pattern, it looks like there’s only one thing to do. There’s no choice. “I had no choice.” I’ve heard people say that after they made a complete mess of things. And then they just say, “Well, I had no choice. I had to,” whatever it is. So there’s another weird correlation between those two things too.

Ken: Yeah. That’s a very, very different feeling, because one field is very constricted and the other field is very open.

Eugene: This is a way of coming to a point of action, which may or may not be right. But it’s a way of taking in as much of situation and then—

Ken: That’s right. Yeah.

Student: That’s interesting because there’s a sense that it is free of expectation on both sides.

Ken: That’s actually a very good point because when you’re acting out of the reactive pattern, there is a big expectation. When you’re acting out of direct presence, there’s so much “this is what has to happen,” that there isn’t any expectation, so that there is a difference. That’s a very good point.

You’re quite right, Eugene, that this is a way of acting. And because of the necessarily limitations in our perception, may not always be exactly the right thing. But it’s a way of proceeding so that you are bringing full attention to what you do. Yeah. Caroline.

Caroline: When I first heard of you saying that a long time ago, I thought it was cataclysmic. It was—

Ken: The end of the world?

Caroline: It was a shootout at the O.K. Corral over and over again. But it’s what we do in conversation. When I figured that out, it was like, “Oh, I’m learning every moment I’m engaged with someone or something.” It’s not the O.K. Corral from morning til night.

Ken: No it isn’t.

Student: Actually, when I said that about expectation, I meant it in a different way. There’s this assumption that if we act in presence, things will turn out okay, the way we want them to. And the examples you’re providing is that that’s not necessarily so. It’s not in accord with our expectation. It’s more in accord with how things are.

Ken: That’s right.

Student: Then it’s like conversation, it’s just open.

Ken: That’s a good point. Thank you. We should close here.