A Nasrudin story

Ken: One night, Mulla Nasrudin was woken up by his wife and she said, “I think there’s somebody in the garden.”

Nasrudin looked out and he saw this vague whitish movement. So he went back, took out his bow and arrow, took a very careful aim, shot his arrow at what he saw moving and it disappeared. He went downstairs out in the garden, came back and his face was deathly grey and he was quaking in fear. He said, “That was a close call. This is my shirt, if I’d been in it I would have killed myself!” [Laughter]

I’ll let you figure that one out. [Laughter]

Tibetan rituals

Ken: This morning I’m going to talk about chö at a little deeper level than we did yesterday. Tibetan practices in general, once you get out of the scholastic, logical stuff, they tend to be fairly elaborate. Nothing extraordinary about a 10 or 12 hour ritual in the Tibetan tradition. It’s done quite regularly in retreat. Rinpoche asked us to do some rituals which involved us getting up at our usual time around 4 am, starting at around 5 am, going through to 10 or 11 at night, every day for a week. These very elaborate rituals are very powerful, but they contrast very significantly with the simplicity and directness of both Zen and Theravadan traditions. But one can say quite definitely that all of these different approaches are really concerned with moving into the direct experience of what is. In the Theravadan approach they have a very straightforward way of doing it. You just do it. Whatever comes up—as a colleague of mine Ajahn Amaro says—you endure patiently, and that’s the key phrase, at least in his tradition of the Theravada, that you endure patiently. Can I experience this for another one second or two seconds, can I experience this? One aspect of Zen is that you stop the mind. We have all of this stuff going on in our heads about what’s really going on, because we have all of this stuff going on we don’t experience what’s really going on so you just stop the mind. You can use a koan for that, whatever, and you keep stopping the mind and gradually you experience what is.

The Tibetan approach in its ritual forms is you start off by experiencing everything through a symbol and you’re kind of opening up possibilities and avenues in you. It is quite effective though I don’t want to consider how many people have got lost in all of that symbolism and ritual, their carcasses strewn over the centuries, corpses of people who just got lost and never found their way out of it. So, this morning, I don’t want to work explicitly with that very symbolic way of approaching but a little bit more direct.

A direct approach to experience “what is”

Ken: The practice of chö—cutting—or, as my colleague Sarah Harding chose to translate it, “a severing” or “severance”—is about cutting through whatever in us prevents us from experiencing what is. So, this morning I’m going to do take one on this and then this afternoon, we’ll do take two. The first thing is that we tend to view what arises in experience as something Other, and one can say, reasonably, that in the vocabulary of chö, a demon is anything you regard as Other. So we’re going to have a first list of demons here. First thing that we regard as Other is enemies—people that we don’t like—and they are easily regarded as Other because when we consider somebody we don’t like, the emotion that arises in us is anger.

And there’s that immediate polarity, opposition, which is the key experience of anger. So that’s the first one. Second are impediments, things that get in our way. My younger brother has a cartoon which he clipped from The New Yorker and framed. It spoke to him I suppose. It shows this middle-aged man and his wife in their living room and he’s getting up, and it’s a very ordinary living room, there’s nothing remarkable about it. The caption reads something like, “I’m fed up with these obstacles and impediments that keep me from realizing my true nature,” or true objectives in life, and there’s nothing there of course. But these things arise and whenever we encounter an obstacle or an impediment in anything that we’re trying to do, we regard it as something Other. How can I get rid of it? How can I destroy it? Just the very definition of obstacle or impediment has that sense of Other in it.

And not quite as potent as that, but still plenty strong, are interruptions. We regard interruptions as something like, “What are you bothering me for?” How many of you have experienced this in your meditation where some kind of thought or feeling comes up and you say, “What are you bothering me for? Just get out of here.” There’s endless stories about practitioners in retreats in the mountains of Tibet and elsewhere and something kept interrupting their practice. They tried to push it away. Always futile.

And then there’s something else that we regard as Other—our death. I was visiting my mother a few months ago and she’s well into her 80s now, and said, “I am getting okay with being old, Ken. But I just can’t believe I’m going to die within the next 10 years or so. I don’t believe it!” Death is still something very, very Other for her, and of course one of the consequences of it being Other is that we obsess about it incessantly. If you look at American culture as a whole, it is very significantly a systemic denial of death. Take the healthcare system for instance. Eighty percent of the dollars spent in the healthcare system are spent in the last six months of a person’s life. As an economist out at MIT, Lester Thurow, said: “This is not a healthcare system, this is a death-postponement system.” And it comes directly out of wanting to avoid death at all costs and it quite literally is at all costs.

The next kind of demon is termed karmic demon. We tend to think or regard forces in the world and events as things that happen to us, it’s coming from outside. So in Buddhist thought, there’s even the sense of karma is this external force which somehow acts on us. It’s very popular; it’s not an accurate idea, but it’s a popular idea. So, we talk about my karma as if it’s something other than us.

In particular, this whole area of demons includes what are called the four demonic obsessions: obsession with our psychophysical being or the solidity of experience, obsession with the solidity of our emotions. We even regard our emotions as something Other—anger took me over. I’ve been blinded by love, this other force which is somehow acting on us. My faith got me through the situation. We talk like this, there’s always a sense of Other and then there’s obsessions with pleasure and power, kind of a feeling one is divine, eternal in some way. And then there’s, of course, obsession with a sense of self, the inflation that comes from that. And I remember my ex-wife pointing out that in Buddhism, we even tend to regard the mind as something Other. “My mind is not still today.” So, there’s always the sense of Other about these things.

And then there’s the body, that sense of the body being something Other is very, very deep in Western thought. It goes back very deep into the Christian tradition among others, where there’s the mind and the body and you have that great phrase: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” So again, it’s something Other. I have great experience with that particular one myself because in retreat I got quite ill, and I didn’t pay any attention to my body and I just kept practicing happily away—well, not so happily. It became worse and worse and worse. Finally my body said, “Well you can go and get enlightened, Ken if you want. I’m not coming.” And I realized I had a problem! And that was when I started relating to my body as something that wasn’t Other, and that was very important.

And then there’s place, this is a little more subtle, but we regard the world around us and the places that we live as something Other. We think, I come into this place, I go to this place, I leave this place and there all of the energies and associations, forces that are associated with various places, and we regard that all as something Other. And finally there’s our parents, which we can take as a shorthand for all our family conditioning, which is also a very potent force that acts on us and it’s been somewhat reinforced by psychology in the 20th century, that it’s something out there that acts on us. So we have all of these ways, these different aspects of our life but the theme that’s running through all of this is that all of these things are Other and I’m here and these are acting on me in some way and they’re causing problems and difficulties for me. If I could just get rid of all of them then I would be fine.

An experiment with experience and awareness

Ken: Well one of the fundamental perspectives in Buddhism is that the I/Other split is a false duality. Now, people always say, “Well how can you say that? There’s the world out there and there’s this consciousness that apprehends the world. How can you say this is a false duality? Things exist.”

[Ken holds up a sheet of white paper.] What do you see? This is a great mystery, I know. [Laughter] What do you see, anybody? A sheet of white paper. Yes, that’s the correct answer. This is not a trick question. Not yet. You see a white sheet of paper? Okay? So you have the experience of seeing a white sheet of paper. Everybody with me? I want to go very slowly here. So now in one way of looking at this experience from a Buddhist point of view, it’s the 18 elements and you have six sense objects, six sense faculties, and six sense consciousnesses. We’re only concerned with sight right now so we have form, seeing and consciousness of seeing. Now can you experience this white sheet of paper if any one of those is missing? No, there has to be a sheet of paper, that’s the object form. There has to be the faculty of seeing, if one is blind or one’s eyes are covered it doesn’t happen. And there’s a consciousness, I see. So, we can say that seeing is composed of those three things. They have to come together.

Now for the difficult question. Where is the experience of seeing a white piece of paper? Where is it? We have three choices—it’s outside, it’s inside or it’s in between. I mean, those are the only three places it could be, right? Outside, inside or in between. So which is it? Pardon? Inside. Do you see the white piece of paper?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Well, where’s the seeing then? Is it something that just pervades everything? That doesn’t sound right either. Where is it? So we’ve disposed of inside, anybody going to go for outside?

Student: [Unclear ]

Ken: It’s difficult isn’t it? Does anyone want to go for in between? No, you’re smarter than that, in between what, right? Okay, so this is a very simple thing. Here’s a sensory experience, sight, seeing a white piece of paper and yet we cannot say where it is. Now, when you look at it this way, can you separate the experience from the awareness of the experience? Anybody? No, you can’t. And this is why the I/Other split is false.

What we do with the I/Other split is that in all experience there’s this union of awareness and experience, they’re not separable. But in the I/Other split, we appropriate all the awareness as consciousness, me, I, etc. and relegate the object to the sense of Other. One of consequences of this, which I picked up when I was reading a book on quantum physics of all things, is that we empty the world of consciousness. So we only experience a dead world. Everything is an object and we’re the only thing that’s alive. And it’s all coming out of this taking hold and holding on to a sense of I, which is the sole foundation of consciousness in our experience.

Going back to this, where is that experience? You see that many different conditions have to come together for it to arise and the experience doesn’t take place anywhere. Now, that’s the world of direct experience. And in that world there are only three kinds of things, there are thoughts, there are emotions and there are sensory experiences, sensations. You know, thoughts, and we’re conscious of thought, feelings, we’re conscious of feelings, sensations, sight, sound and so forth, we’re conscious of those. Those are the components, those experiences. That’s the world of direct experience.

But as you noticed, I referred to this as a white sheet of paper. That’s a concept. It’s a label that we place on a certain experience. Actually we place it on a set of experiences, we call this a white sheet of paper. And now we construct another world of experience, which we can call the world of shared experience, out of the world of direct experience. Now there’s a very important difference between the world of shared experience and the world of direct experience. Can you trade anything in the world of direct experience with another person?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: What do you experience? Right there. Can you give me that experience?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: What do you experience?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Okay, but just concentrate on the white piece of paper right now. You have an experience of the white piece of paper, right? Can you give me that experience?

Student: I’m pausing because I’m hearing that word, “give,” in a certain way. So, I feel like it’s all about choice and how I hear that word …

Ken: Ah. You may be thinking too much. For instance, if you had a flower in front of you, and I said, could you give me that flower? What would you say?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Yeah, and could you give it to me?

Student: Yes and no.

Ken: Yes and no, yes, you have a choice but you’re thinking too much. If I said, just give me the flower, you can give it to me, right? I mean, yes, you have a choice about whether actually do or not, but it’s possible to. Right? Is it possible for you to give me your experience of the flower?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Does that give me your experience of the flower?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Okay, but when you smile at me, I don’t get any experience of a flower. I get the experience of you smiling.

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Well, I don’t know, last I checked, you know I look at a flower and I look at a woman smiling, those are two different experiences. Maybe I’m very confused here. Those seem to be two very different experiences, and I interact with them in very different ways. You follow?

So, in the world of direct experience, the experience that arises directly for us, we can’t give or share that with anybody else. In the world of shared experience, yeah, I can give this piece of paper to anybody that I want. And they say, I’ve got a piece of paper, and we do this with money all the time But the piece of paper is a construct, it’s a label we put on a certain set of shared experiences. But now something very, very important happens. In this world of direct experience we construct a world of concepts and labels which we use to exchange and interact with other people. And that world exists within the world of direct experience but now we forget about the world of direct experience and take the world of shared experience as what is real. And we say, all of this is here and I am born into this and when I die I leave this; that’s normally how we approach things or view things. And that’s a fundamental misconception. And it’s exactly that kind of misconception that all Buddhist practice is aimed at remedying. Because in the world of direct experience there is no I, no Other, there is just what is. And to go further, we consider a thought. Thought’s a very simple thing in some ways. When you first practiced meditation, how did you regard thoughts?

Student: The truth.

Ken: Truth? I doubt it, well, yes, in a certain way, okay, okay.

[Multiple students speak at once]

Ken: Some people … [unclear] interruptions, you said, the truth? Yeah, they were the truth, right, and this was what was, right? “I’m angry so that’s what is,” yeah. And then we begin to see them as something that interrupts this wonderful peaceful attention that we’re trying to cultivate. But both of these ways, we’re looking at it as something Other. Now, what’s the relationship between mind and thought? It really is not two. How often do you experience thought as mind?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Oh, very good. [Laughs] And that’s what we’re training to, so that when thought arises we know what it is, because when you experience thought as mind, you’re no longer confused, you no longer see thought as The Truth! That’s what is. It’s just an arising. Where is the thought when it arises?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: That’s right, it doesn’t have any location. So even though we feel that we are in a very definite place and we have definite distances between us and all of the colors and sights and sounds and everything that goes on here, none of this is taking place anywhere. It’s just arising. And everything that we ascribe to it, it’s location and time, etc., that’s all stuff we put in it yet that’s what we take as being real. And that’s the difference between the world of direct experience and the world of shared experience.

So, now that we’ve got hopelessly confused! That fundamental imbalance in which we take the world of shared experience of the I and Other as what is, and in many ways cease to appreciate, really, the world of direct experience—that imbalance is the problem. And so various methods of meditation arise to cut through that imbalance, and I’m going to describe how chö approaches that problem.

What is chö?

Ken: In the beginning of the three-year retreat we were visited by a teacher, he’s not very well-known, his lineage used to be one of the great lineages in the Kagyu tradition, a person called Pawo Rinpoche and that Rinpoche was from an old aristocratic family in Tibet. This person had such dignity and was one of the very great scholars of the Tibetan tradition, the Kagyu tradition. We’d only been in retreat for about three months at this time. He sat down and there was such a quality of nobility and presence, it was really quite remarkable, gentleness. And we had just started the practice of chö as part of our daily practices, so we had all of these questions. So one of the first questions is, “What is chö?”

Pawo Rinpoche said, “Oh, I haven’t practiced chö for 20, 30 years. Well, there’s the outer chö, outer cutting, inner cutting, and secret cutting. I hope this is right, it’s a long time.” He went on to explain that the outer cutting is where you use rituals and visualizations working in that symbolic way I described earlier and you imagine all of the forces of negativity and that list of eight demons that I just described to you. You imagine them pouring out of the sky and out of the earth and things like that, and they’re all around you and you make your peace with them. And you work with it symbolically and it’s wonderful, the chants are beautiful, the melodies are beautiful, ringing a bell and drum with it. And then he said, the inner chö is the practice of taking and sending. Now, taking and sending is a particular meditation in the Tibetan tradition which, when you first hear about it, it strikes you as emotional suicide, but it’s a very effective practice.

Taking and sending

Ken: And it consists in this way that it’s described traditionally of taking in the suffering of others. So you experience it and they are free and giving your happiness and joy and sense of wellbeing, whatever form that may take, and giving all that to all sentient beings, so that they experience that. In other words, you exchange with others. The very express purpose of this practice is to undermine the sense of self-importance or self-cherishing, our usual way of approaching the world is I take everything that is good for me and leave everything that is bad for other people.

Who was it, Geshe Ben, who was a bit of a character but he took practice very, very seriously. In the Tibetan monasteries, the way meals were served is, you brought a bowl, and at a certain point in your daily ritual, the cook would come out with this big ladle and he’d ladle soup or yogurt or whatever it was into your bowl and that was your meal. And one time, in the middle of the ceremony, this meal break, the cook came out and was going around with this big ladle and was ladling out soup. And in the middle of this Geshe Ben yelled, Thief! Thief! And when the cook came he covered his bowl and wouldn’t take any soup. And everybody’s like, well, where’s the thief? What are you talking about Geshe Ben? He said, “I’m the thief. I was hoping that when the cook came to me he would dig deep into the pot and it would get all the thick soup at the bottom and that would go into my bowl and other people wouldn’t have it.” It’s the thing we do all the time, you know, and taking and sending is to undermine that tendency where we take what is negative, painful and difficult in the world and give it to others. Now, that’s the traditional explanation or approach to taking and sending.

But I think we can go a step further. When anger arises, how do you regard that anger ordinarily? Something Other, right? How much do you want to experience it? Yesterday I talked about feeding these things with awareness so we can use taking and sending this way. When anything arises, anything that we regard as Other, you do taking and sending. So if a feeling arises, and you go, “Oh, I don’t like that feeling. Can I just get through this meditation period without experiencing it?”

In this approach, you go, “Ah! May I take all the pain and difficulty, uncertainty and anxiety and shame, embarassment in that feeling. Let me experience it. And I give all my peacefulness and tranquility and presence and wakefulness to others who are messed up.” So use taking and sending with whatever arises in your experience. Open, take it in and give to the feeling, or whatever is disturbing you. You know, if It’s your body, if your body’s in pain in meditation, sometimes happens. “Oh, body, you’re in pain.” When the body is in pain, you feel the body as Other. So you go, “Okay, I’m going to take in the pain of the body and I’m going to give to the body, peace and quiet that’s in my mind.” So you just do that taking and sending.

Now ordinarily when we do taking and sending we imagine all of that negativity, pain and unpleasantness coming in in the form of black smoke through our right nostril down into our heart so we experience it and we imagine all our happiness and joy, wellbeing, intelligence and all the other qualities that we like about ourselves as going out in the form of white moonlight out our left nostril and going into it. So you can just do that visualization, it’s a very simple visualization and coordinate it with the breath. So breathe in, it comes in, breathe out, it goes out. Very natural, you don’t actually block the nostrils, you just imagine it going through the right and left. That’s essentially a compassion technique for opening to experience. Yesterday evening, I talked about what is essentially a direct awareness technique of moving into the experience of what is. And that was, what am I experiencing in my body, what am I experiencing emotionally, what am I experiencing cognitively, all the thoughts, memories and associations. It’s very important to do it in that order because otherwise you just get lost in all the thinking. Start with the body then the emotions.

Now what I want to suggest is that for the duration of our time together, you alternate these two techniques. We’re sitting in half-hour sessions approximately so for half an hour you can start with the taking and sending or you can start with direct awareness. Let’s say you start with the taking and sending and you’re just sitting and any disturbance, any difficulty that arises, you start doing taking and sending. And there may be memories and discomforts that come from aspects of your life outside of the retreat. Maybe someone close to you is dying and you’re anxious about that or you’ve got someone suing you and you’ve got some anger about that. You’re under a lot of pressure at work, you know, just little things like that. But if those things come up, you just do taking, sending with them, so you’re using taking and sending to open to whatever you’re experiencing. Now when you do this you may find that whatever is arising just pops and disappears. If that happens, that’s fine then just rest right there.

Because the purpose of this practice is simply to dissolve the sense of separation, and if it just goes, poof! then rest right there. You’re present, there’re nothing more to do. Now if you’re like most of us, it doesn’t stay that way for all that long. Something else comes up, Maybe I’m the only one who experiences that but something else always comes up for me and so then there’s something else to work with. Now this isn’t to be too heavy-handed, you don’t have to work at this really hard, it’s a very light approach, but whatever comes up, when you feel that disturbance open to it by taking it in because when it first comes up you tend to regard it as Other. Just take it in, give to it and there may be very pernicious things, things really bug you. That’s when you really see things as Other, so that’ll give you something to work with over a period of time. So you do that for half an hour, just using taking and sending to come back into presence and then just resting there. And just keep coming back to that resting.

Open to the experience of whatever is arising

Ken: And then, second half hour, forget about the taking and sending, just whatever arises, move right into the experience of it, just be right there, right into the experience. One way that you can do this, you may have your own, what am I experiencing in my body, is what am I experiencing emotionally? What am I experiencing in terms of thoughts, memories, associations and stories? And you just experience it. And, in a similar way, when you actually open to that experience you may find that what was beginning to be disturbing, or distraction, or drowsiness or something, just [snaps fingers] vanishes. And if that’s the case then just rest right there, now you’re in experience, direct experience. Right there. And then some little bit of chatter, or some feeling comes up or some sensation in your body and again you just move right into the experience.

As you do this over and over again, either of these techniques, one of two things is going to happen. When you move into the experience, it may just pop open and you’ll be just right there. That happens quite often. The other thing that can happen is it pops open and there’s something else there. It’s a bit like alien, you know, open it up and there’s something else there. Well you just do the same thing at that point, you move into the experience of that and in this way one peels away or penetrates the layers that prevent us from being in the experience of what is.

Now I said last night that chö is the union of compassion and emptiness so what I’m giving you here are two techniques. One which is based on compassion as a way of opening to what is, and the other way is based on wisdom, direct experience. These are like the two wings of a bird that I alluded to, both are important and actually both reinforce the other. Because the more deeply you’re able to be present with pain, which is the essence of compassion, not having to fix it or do anything about it, but able just to be present, the more deeply you move into experience. And conversely, the more deeply you move into experience, the more you understand that all experience is simply an arising in mind. It’s just something that arises, and there’s no need to fear or resist and you begin to appreciate how much suffering and turmoil and disturbance comes from resisting experience. And so naturally your compassion for others, because you see them resisting experience all over the place, increases.

So, as wisdom increases, so does compassion. As compassion deepens, so does wisdom and we work those two together. I think that takes care of the main points that I want to address this morning.

Student questions

Ken: Questions?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Oh, the secret cutting is the direct experience. Another way—this is not suitable for group practice—is that when you’re all jumbled up in your experience and you have thoughts or pains or whatever coming up, or you’re completely infatuated with compassion or devotion or what have you, then you would yell phat. Your mind stops, just opens. But you have to have a certain stability of attention, if we were doing that here together it would be a little noisy. But when you’re practicing on your own, that’s what you do. Thank you. Other questions?

Student: Why is it termed secret?

Ken: Well, the term in Tibetan is gsang ba (pron. sang wa). It doesn’t mean that it’s being kept secret or kept hidden, it’s just not obvious. The outer one is something you can see doing, the inner one is working with your emotional mind and so forth. The secret is working with what is normally hidden to us, the way things actually are. So it refers to the level to which you are working, not so much that it’s a big secret. That particular framework is used in Tibetan instruction over and over again, almost all practices have the outer, inner and secret, sometimes they have four, outer, inner, secret and ultimate. For instance, you’re familiar with refuge. The outer refuge is the buddha as the historical Buddha, the dharma as the teachings that come down to us, and the sangha as those who have taken monastic vows, which we turn to for guidance and support. The inner refuge in the Tibetan tradition would be explained as buddha as the potential for awakening in your own mind, dharma as the experience of the teachings as they arise in you—such as compassion, insight and so forth—and the sangha as those people we actually meet that provide instructions and support to us. People we actually practice with. Then the secret or ultimate in this case would be, you take refuge in the buddha when you know the emptiness of your mind. You take refuge in the dharma when you know the natural clarity of your own mind, and you take refuge in the sangha when you know that all experience is simply an arising and its nature is empty. So those would be the three levels of refuge. it’s a way of talking about this. Yes.

Student: Something I’ve been wondering a lot about and I’ve been finding in this evening, is in groups, in sangha, I noticed in my own experience of doing the practice that something that really helped was when I started to take in difficulty is to envision that as the entire sangha, whatever I’m imagining sangha to be in the moment, taking that in and then as a sangha we breathe it out. And for me that really helped with it not being so overwhelming that that cloud would become just tar sludge and I couldn’t breathe it out. And I wonder about that now, particularly in group processes say where folks are having what seemed to be disagreements in the moment, whether it’s a board meeting or a family or a kitchen, you know, where they’re just different views and you really want to tap group wisdom and group compassion. And I was wondering if there’s anything in the Tibetan teachings about that group aspect of these two practices you’ve been mentioning.

Ken: Your question reminds me of a couple of things. In the three-year retreat, the first three-year retreat, we were seven men on one half acre of ground which we never left, so there was a little community going on. We had all the usual problems. At the beginning of the retreat, Rinpoche said, “We like to use Tibetan proverbs. A cow flicks her own flies. A monk worries about his own actions.” So, when you explain this, you have a group of cows out in the field, they don’t flick flies off each other, they flick flies off themselves and everybody gets along. So when it comes to our own actions in a group, I take care of how I’m acting, that’s all you can do. Now, in that, you sense some tension, maybe one person feels this is the way we should go, another person feels this is the way we should go, and they disagree and there may be very valid reasons for that disagreement. One person sees it developing this way, another person, but can’t do both. And in that disagreement there’s discomfort and everybody feels it. The approach in taking and sending would be, “Oh there’s this tension and discomfort in the room. I’m experiencing it and I imagine other people are experiencing it. I will take all the discomfort into me … [unclear, then grimacing sound] Don’t like it!” And you really experience the tension, maybe there’s some anger, undercutting, or something like that, you take all of that in. The point about taking and sending, you don’t transform that discomfort into something nice and send it out, you experience the discomfort, you get it. But you’re able to be present, so even in that discomfort you have that quality of peace and presence and maybe you understand this person’s point of view and you understand that person’s point of view and you send out that kind of understanding. And that’s all you do. You take in, you send out, you take in and send out. So you’re actually experiencing exactly what’s there. Because taking and sending and chö are not methods to make a bad situation into a good situation, they’re not about that at all. They’re about developing the capacity to experience exactly what is arising so you can be in that experience. And yes, it can be very overwhelming to take in all of that pain and it can be equally as overwhelming to think of giving away the things that you value and enjoy and find most precious to you. Like, “Aagh! I don’t want to give that away!” But you do.

And the amazing thing is you discover the ability to be in that kind of tension and not be disturbed by it. And I don’t mean not disturbed by it in the sense of ignoring it, but actually to be right in it. And often that ability to be right in it allows another level of understanding to arise so something does change. But that’s not the purpose of the practice, it happens to be a bit of a side effect. The purpose of the practice is to bring you right into it. And if you feel overwhelmed when you do taking and sending, or you feel overwhelmed when you just open to experience and move directly into it, that’s basically a good sign. Because it means that you’re at the edge of your attention and you’re also at the edge of where your habituated conditioning functions. So you’re pushing the envelope. So this is not a bad thing. It’s not the most comfortable place to hang out, but it’s not a bad place.

Student: Thanks. That concrete example and really walking it through really clarifies something.

Ken: But it’s not about thinking and forming concepts. It’s about connecting or moving into exactly what you are experiencing.

Student: What about the overwhelming feeling? I’m breathing in grief. I feel the overwhelming amount of grief. I’m not feeling peace. How can I breathe out something I’m not experiencing? It’s a concept.

Ken: Well, you raise a very important point. You may think this is a bit glib. Can you imagine an apple in this hand? Can you imagine an orange in this hand? Can you imagine an apple in this hand, and an orange in this hand? How difficult is that?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Yeah, okay. Now, breathe in grief, sadness, the whole world, deep ache in the heart, maybe the body feels very heavy, tears start coming out of your eyes. What’s something that you enjoy and appreciate about you? Anything.

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: Something a little more exciting. Do you like to garden, do you like to cook, what’s something you really enjoy? What’s something you feel good about that you’ve done in your life.

Student: I like to walk.

Ken: You like to walk. Okay, where do you live? Yeah, nice place, so you go and the flowers, gardens out in the spring or something like that, right? What do you feel? Yeah, that, okay? Breathe that out, give that.

Student: So, I use my imagination to make myself …

Ken: Use anything which you really like, and you are connected with that. And it wasn’t really an imagination, it was a memory, right, and that’s the feeling in you. Oh, open, clear, alive, full of the beauty of the world. So in the in-breath there you have all of the grief and the out-breath you have all of that beauty and you’re giving it away and it’s that fast. That’s very important. What we tend to do is hold onto experience. And here you can’t hold onto it.

Student: So, it’s okay to create, bring a memory in from …

Ken: Sure. What are you doing with the grief? It’s just another memory.

Student: It seems an experience.

Ken: Yeah, I know, right, and I found that with taking and sending people fall into two kinds. There are people who can really glom onto the experience of pain, misery and grief and get really into that, and they have a hard time sending in it. And there are other people who, they can send like crazy but they don’t want to touch any painful stuff. And that’s a kind of imbalance. So you take in, and it’s just like “Ah” and then on the out breath it’s like “Oh,” and the next in breath it’s “Aagh.” Thank you. [Laughs] Yes.

Student: If I have a direct experience, and I would argue that all experiences are direct experiences, but perhaps we’re not aware of that. But the minute I start categorizing and labeling what I’m experiencing, does it then become a shared experience by definition? Because labeling and categorizing is happening pretty much after experience is gone, right?

Ken: Let’s be very precise here. The world of shared experience arises within the world of direct experience, which is basically what you are saying: all experience is direct. So when thoughts and labels and concepts arise—”That’s a white piece of paper,”—that’s a direct experience, but I don’t relate to it like that. I relate to that as a white piece of paper, not as just an experience which is arising. I relate to it in terms of the concepts. When I forget or am unaware of the world of direct experience, and I’m only in the world of shared experience, that’s where the problems arise.

Student: So, labeling …

Ken: It’s attachment to the apparent reality of the labels, not the labeling itself.

Student: So, if I experience something that I know what it is, it still could be a direct experience?

Ken: Yeah. You can even talk about it in terms of the labels, but you know you’re talking about it in the terms of the labels, and you’re experiencing it in its vividness and its ineffability. Remember when I held up that white piece of paper and asked you where the seeing took place? It was like suddenly that seeing became very vivid, but you couldn’t place it anywhere. It had an ineffable quality. You with me? If we have that sense about everything that we experience, then we’re in the experience of what is, but most of the time we solidify it into “I” and “Other.” You with me? What time is it? Okay, last question then we’ll take a break.

Student: [Unclear] … in the giving and taking, aren’t you just sort of taking your experience?

Ken: Of course!

Student: And you’re giving essentially yourself.

Ken: Yes. As Niguma said to Khungpo Naljor, “In this world of suffering that arises like magic, we practice the dharma which arises like magic, and we’re experiencing awakening which arises like magic. All this through the force of devotion.”

Student: [Unclear] solipsism.

Ken: Yes. Now that’s a common perception that arises, but solipsism is based on a sense of “I am”—everything’s around me. But there is no I, there’s just experience. And that’s the difference between the Buddhist’s world view and the solipsist’s world view.

Student: [Unclear] … object and subject.

Ken: You’re using taking and sending. See, the way taking and works is that we have the sense of I and we have the sense of Other. It’s all screwed up—it’s wrong—but we have it and what we ordinarily do is the “I” appropriates for itself all those elements of experience that support it, and gets rid of all the elements of experience which threaten it, pushes them away. Basic attraction and aversion. What we’re doing in taking and sending is reversing that. So we still have the I/Other, and now we take everything that we would normally try to push away and give away what we’d normally try to keep. You with me? That generates a bit of friction. What happens when you generate a lot of friction? Fire, right. What happens is both things burn up, and then you’re just [snaps fingers]. But you’ve got to generate the friction. So you don’t have to worry about burning things up, you just have to generate the friction. And then you just do the practice. You follow?

Student: I follow but I don’t see an external reality or any … [unclear] external.

Ken: There isn’t. There’s only the world of your experience, but you have an imbalanced relationship with that world.

Student: There still is an external reality?

Ken: There is an external reality?

Student: Well …

Ken: Point to it.

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: I experience a sensation, I experience another sensation, I experience sensation. What I construe as an external reality [snaps fingers] are labels that I put on my sensations.

Student: So, sensation is in effect … [unclear]?

Ken: Yeah? What’s a thought caused by?

Student: Other thoughts. [Laughter]

Ken: And now we’re into the area of interdependence, aren’t we? There’s just what arises, we project the idea of an external reality but all there is is just an experience.

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: You’ll have a very vivid experience, I assure you. But if you put your finger into a candle in a dream, you’d have a similar vivid experience.

Student: But I wouldn’t, [unclear] … wouldn’t burn.

Ken: Burn is an experience too.

Student: I understand.

Ken: Buddhism goes very, very, far here you know. and I’m not recommending you go around burning yourself because there are limits to the depth that our understanding goes, but the principle remains the same.

Student: You mean putting my finger into a candle … [unclear]

Ken: No, it refers to the depth of conditioning. We have not only mental conditioning, we have biological, physical, etc., etc. It’s very, very deep. Never underestimate that. That’s what I tried to do, that’s why my body said, bye bye!

Student: I would suggest that there are a fair amount of cultures that people do put their fingers in candles … [unclear] walk on coals. [Joke from other student] The point is it’s pretty obvious that somebody could walk over coals and not be burned. You’ve probably seen it. The mind clearly has something to do with it. If you believe it’ll burn you, it will. If you believe it’ll not, it will not.

Ken: Well, I’m not going to go too far down that road because some unfortunate things have happened. [Laughter] Work with what your experience is. You’re not going to put your hand in the candle during the meditation period, right? I mean you can if you want but that’s not part of the practice. There are plenty of burning candles inside us. Do you have any shortage of them? Well put your hand in a couple of those and see what happens. Okay? That’ll be fine. Let’s take a 15-minute break. We’ll have meditation at 10:30. Okay. Thanks very much.