The three levels of chö

Ken: Saraha, one of the great Indian masters about the third century—I like his version. Nagarjuna said the same thing, but not quite as elegantly as Saraha. Saraha said, “People who believe in reality are stupid like cows, but people who believe in emptiness are even stupider.” It’s actually incurable if you start making emptiness an object to fixation and I’ve run into people like that. Nothing goes in, nothing can go in. And that’s what Nagarjuna says, “People who believe in emptiness are incurable.”

So those very briefly are the three levels of chö, we cut through our fixation on reactive processes and all the negativity in them, and then we cut through any residual fixation on positive, open qualities such as the four immeasureables. And then we cut through even any fixation on even the most profound principles. Are you getting the idea here? The essence of practice in Buddhism is no fixation, whether it’s in the Theravadan, Mahayana, Zen, Tibetan, it always comes down to that. No fixation on experience, which if you turn it around means no resistance to any experience, and different traditions will focus on different ways there. As I mentioned earlier, the Theravadan focuses on not resisting experience. The Tibetan tradition tends to focus on no fixation on any experience, but they’re the same. They’re just opposite sides of the coin.

You become what you protect from practice

Ken: Jamgön Kongtrül, who’s one of the great teachers of the 19th century, someone that we studied a great deal in retreat, summed it up by saying, “Wherever there’s a mistake in practice, there is grasping.” And so, for my own practice, whenever I run into problems, which is quite frequently, that’s what I start looking for, “What am I holding on to?” Or to put it another way, “What am I protecting? What am I protecting?” And usually it’s something I’m protecting from the practice. This is a very important point. Whatever you protect from the practice, you will become. It will take you over. And we’ve seen that in some very capable Buddhist teachers who protected something from the practice and it took them over with tragic consequences for them and for their students. Many years of healing involved in that, many years.

As a teacher myself, I’ve taken this very seriously, and I’m just going to say this to underline how important I think this point is. I started teaching in what might be called the flame-out period of buddhism in America. There were a number of Buddhist teachers in different traditions going up in flames. And when I talked to people who were associated with those situations and read accounts of what happened, there was one element that was always there and that was that the teacher in one way or another had shut off all avenues of feedback. There is no one who could give them any feedback. The consequence of that for me, was I’ve always had one or two people in my life since I started teaching, from whom I have no secrets. Frankly, I hate it sometimes, but because I have no secrets from them, I can’t keep anything secret from myself. And they’ll dig if they suspect something, that’s why they’re in my life. And sometimes they do. But it’s one mechanism I put in so that I don’t protect anything from the practice. Anything you protect, you don’t let the practice take you into, you’ll become that. It’s just a matter of time. That’s very important. Quite contrary to chö, in chö we just cut everything. So use whatever you need to cut. Now, two more topics. You are taking it all in, Gail?

Gail: Oh yeah!

Progression in chö

Ken: This next one’s really important for you. [Laughter] Every tradition and every form of practice has their way of describing the progression of the practice and the signs that accompany that. So I want to talk about that briefly with respect to chö.

Stage one: arisings

Ken: In one sense, all of these descriptions are the same because they describe the simultaneous collapse or falling apart of habituated patterns and the unfolding or flowering of awareness and understanding and compassion. Well, in chö, the first stage is called arisings. When you start cutting. either through the practice of taking and sending, through the practice of moving into experience using the four spell-breakers that I outlined this afternoon, the first thing you encounter is the resistance of habituated patterns. Now, while we all have the potential to wake up to be buddha, it’s not necessarily so ordained, and it’s a sad fact that some people’s habituated patterns are so strong that they will kill the person literally rather than let them wake up. Patterns I’d rather die than switch. It happens, addiction is one example. So when you start cutting, there is no telling what you’re going to encounter. One of my students at a certain point said, “Where’s this path going, Ken?” I said, “I don’t know.” You came to me because you wanted to wake up. I don’t know where it’s going. He said, “so you buy a ticket but you don’t get to pick the destination.” Yeah, that’s right.

So, when you start cutting, all kinds of things start happening. You can get sick, people can shower you with wealth. A colleague of mine that became a monk said, “After I became a monk, women were much more interested in me than before.” [Laughter]

So, all kinds of things can come up, and what you’re experiencing at this first stage is the operation of the patterns to keep things as they are. As Hogan alluded to, you start practice and the next thing you know, you just can’t stay awake in your meditation, you just keep falling asleep over and over again. Or when any teacher talks about a certain topic, you just fall asleep. That’s one way it can arise. You can have all kinds of weird experiences, energetic experiences in your body, irrational emotions coming up. Anything can happen. That’s the first stage. What do you do? Keep going. There isn’t anything else to do. Just keep going.

Stage two: appearances

Ken: Then you enter the second stage, which is called appearances. Here you start to see things a little differently and you begin to see this behavior which you’d always taken for granted before, as a pattern. And because you’re beginning to see it, you actually experience it even more intensely and it just permeates your life and you feel totally entrapped by it. This is where the four spell-breakers become very important, because it’s easy to fall back into the belief of the world the pattern is presenting to you.

And what do you do here? You keep going. If you hit this stage, it’s very important to keep going now because if you stop, the energy that you’ve developed in your practice, because you’ve developed a higher level of energy, you’re over the beginning stages, that energy will dissipate and power the patterns even more so that if you stop at this point, you’re going to be worse off than when you started. Tibetan expression, “Perhaps better not to have started, but once started better to keep going.” Often said with respect to ngöndro. [Laughs] So, what you’re beginning to see here is the operation of the pattern, and you do not have the capacity to do anything different, but you’re able now to study it and see it, and that gives you more opportunity to work your practice.

Stage three: effectiveness

Ken: Third stage is called effectiveness. At this stage, the level of attention that you’re bringing to your life is now high enough that it isn’t completely absorbed by a pattern. In other words, you’ve got free attention. And what this does is it enables you to see other alternatives. And as you continue in this, not only do you see other alternatives, you begin to be able to pursue them. You can do things differently. Now, the way this is described, just to give you an example of how wonderfully things are packaged in the Tibetan tradition, this stage is described that the worldly deities now bow down before you and take an oath to work for your welfare. Clever huh, but it’s the opening of possibilities. Now, once you start taking these possibilities, you start doing them, you still have another stage because when you do something that’s different from the pattern, just as I was describing with respect to that guy in the men’s group, the patterns snap back and they close. They’ll reassert themselves very strongly. So you have to keep going.

Stage four: completion

Ken: And you may have a bit of an opening, and then nothing happens for six months. It feels even more closed and more dense and more stuck than you ever were before. And everybody, when they’re going through things like this, say, “I’ve forgotten how to practice. This is hopeless. I’m not getting anywhere. I don’t know why I ever started.” And I’ve only gone through that about, I dunno, 30 or 40 times in my own experience. I have a friend I go to and whenever I start saying that, he says, “Oh, you’re in the middle of another one, are you Ken? Good!” I want to hit him! But that’s what it’s like. But as you keep making the effort, you come up with more and more opportunities to actually cut the operation of the pattern, and that’s called completion, where you can cut the pattern at will. And by this time, your practice usually has sufficient momentum, so you don’t have to worry about keeping it going, it’s just doing it’s stuff. It’s become that much a part of you.

Now, you’re going to encounter those four stages or the equivalence of those four stages whenever you start into taking apart a new pattern. So don’t get the idea that you arrive at some state where everything is suddenly all right, and you’re kind of this superhuman who never feels any kind of disturbance or stuff. Stuff’s always coming up. You’re always going to be bringing attention to it, but your practice acquires some momentum so you can do this, and as it says in the mind-training teachings, you do it even when you are distracted, it just becomes part of the way that you relate to the world.

Elements in the ritual of chö

Ken: Last topic. What I want to describe—just to wrap this whole thing up—is a very brief description of some of the elements in the ritual of chö, ritual of cutting. The reason I’m going to describe this is because within that ritual, there is a whole way of relating to experiences that arises in daily life. The first element is, you invite your negativity. You say, “Come on people, let’s get together. You’ve caused me all of these problems, I’ve been pushing you away all this time, I haven’t been paying any attention to you.” And we have this phrase in chö, karmic debt collectors. That’s pretty literal translation actually. So, “Okay, I’m going to stop avoiding you. I’m going to pay my debt now. So come on, let’s all get together.” You invite all your negativity in. That’s the first step.

So, there you are with all of your negativity, and the next thing you do is you reaffirm your spiritual intentions. And what is important here is you invite all your negativity to do so with you. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re all going for refuge. It’s the only way we’re going to get out of this and we’re going to do this practice. I’m going to give you all your stuff and you’re going to collect everything you want from me, and we’re going to do this for the benefit of all sentient beings, so it’s refuge and bodhicitta. That’s the second element. The third element is that you let go of the world of shared experience and you move into the world of direct experience. The way this is symbolized in the chö ritual is that you let go of your body and you’re just pure awareness and experience. And there’s a fancy process by which that’s done, but that’s essentially it, you just move into the world of direct experience. So you’ve got all of the stuff coming at you from all different directions, and it’s just experience. And you experience it as a dream, an enthralling, enchanting, inspiring, terrifying dream.

The next element—which I guess is the fourth—is that you offer whatever you have, to what inspires you in the path. Three jewels, buddha, dharma, sangha. In the Tibetan tradition, we have guru, yidam, protector, whatever. You imagine them all, and you just offer whatever you have. So, it’s a form of generosity, but it’s really a way of moving into a sense of inspiration.

There’s also a nice twist. One doesn’t often think of it this way, but being chö, it’s kind of a reversal, there’s a price to this offering, and the price is your demand that all of that awakening actually manifests in your life. In Vajrayana parlance, this is known as—never really worked out a good translation, but—fulfilling the obligation. I asked Rinpoche about this one time, I said, what does this mean? He said, well Ken, suppose you want something from me. So you say, Rinpoche, please come over to my house for dinner, and I come over and you greet me very graciously and you give me a comfortable seat. You have some entertainment there, and you bring all this lovely food, give me some presents, and then you say, Rinpoche, couple of things I’ve been meaning to ask you. Now I have an obligation to you, don’t I? So, it’s wonderfully contractual.

So, in making these offerings, you’re asking, demanding, however you want to put it, that this awakening manifests in your life. That’s the arrangement. And of course when you’re filled with inspiration, you increase the ability for it to manifest in your life. This is the way you transform that energy of inspiration into manifestation of awakening. The fifth element is everybody else. Now, everybody else is everything that causes you trouble in your life. And what you do is you give them everything they wanted because that’s why they’re causing you trouble. They want something from you, so you just give it to them. You don’t hold onto anything, so it’s a total letting go. You see how chö reverses everything, you demand things, things that inspire you, and you just give to the things that bug you. Whereas usually it’s the other way around. Now the sixth element, there are always parts of us that we can’t touch. They are too hot, too estranged, too shut down, whatever. Know what I’m talking about? So the sixth element is we throw whatever’s left over in their direction. As we don’t leave them out, we include even those things that we can’t touch at this point, those dark, really frightened or traumatized or belligerent aspects of our personality, which we don’t have the power, the presence or whatever to be able to touch. So what’s important here is we don’t leave anything out.

And having opened to the totality of our experience, we now move to the seventh element, which is not in the regular daily practice and I really think it should be because it’s beautiful, really just magical element in the longer chö ritual. Because having opened to the totality of our experience and letting go of our fear of everything, now everything is transformed and just becomes a source of awakening, enlightenment, and this is symbolized in the chö ritual as everything manifesting as dakinis, which are expressions of awakened mind and those dakinis and thousands and thousands of them gather above your heads and just shower you with energy. And so this is having opened to the experience of everything, now everything returns all of its energy to you. So you’re just filled with this awakening energy. That’s the seventh element. It’s actually called the Dakini Shower of Blessing, or Dakini Energy Shower. And then the eighth element, poof!, it’s all gone, don’t cling to anything. That’s it. Done. Okay, any questions?

Student questions

Student: Are we going to do the ritual tomorrow?

Ken: I didn’t bring all of that stuff. Any questions? Yes.

Student: What do you mean by protecting something from the practice?

Ken: Ah, thank you. One of my students was very concerned about how she looks all the time. So, in typical fashion I said, “Okay, an extra treat. You can do this in a retreat environment, you don’t have to do this out in the world, but one day you put on really just beautiful clothes and make sure that your hair and everything is just perfect. Then the next day you don’t do your hair and you put on some old jeans and a torn t-shirt and what have you.” “I can’t do that Ken!” So, what’s she protecting? Her attachment to how she looks. That’s what she’s protecting from the practice. That’s non-negotiable. You follow? Now, with that as an example, can you identify anything you’re protecting? [Laughter]

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: I’m not asking you to do that, I just wanted to make sure you could identify something. [Unclear] Okay, that’s an example. Any other questions?

Hogan: [Unclear] Very beginning of time, you mentioned that there were five emotions, four Brahmaviharas, plus a fifth …

Ken: Devotion.

Student: In the literature it talks a lot about vanquishment … [unclear].

Ken: Yes.

Student: You outlined various … [unclear], in your way of looking at this, when does a demon cease to become a demon?

Ken: Chö talks a lot about vanquishing demons, and when does a demon cease to be a demon? Well, there are stages in this actually. The first stage is when you can experience the operation of the demon and not be disturbed. That is, if I can use the demon of Dire Consequences that I referred to earlier, Dire Consequences comes up, it gives you all of the stuff. You say, “That’s nice, thank you for sharing,” and you go on with what you’re doing. The demon now has no hold on you. That’s the first stage.

Second stage is when you can use the energy of the demon in some way. So again, using Dire Consequences, “Oh, Dire Consequences again. May all the dire consequences and all of that confusion of all sentient beings come into me. May they be free of it.” So you’re not only free of its influence, you can actually start to use it a bit. Okay?

The third stage is when the demon comes up, it illumines your mind and you just, “Oh, it’s a vivid arising,” and you just wake right up. So the operation of the demon actually becomes something that wakes you up. So, somebody starts to attack you verbally or even physically actually, and your mind just becomes totally clear and present and there’s no anger or ill will or anything. You’re just right there. So those are three ways.

Chö talks about vanquishing demons. How do you actually vanquish a demon? Come on, this is a quiz. This is a test. We’ve talked about this now for a day and a half. Pat, come on.

Pat: You meet it head-on.

Ken: Yes, you experience it, completely. That’s how you vanquish a demon, you experience it. There’s a story told of Milarepa, many of you may know this, that he’d gone off to collect some firewood, and while he was collecting firewood, he had this wonderful vision of Marpa, his teacher, and he came back to his cave full of inspiration, and there were five demons sitting in his cave. One was going through books and the other was talking to the others, and another one was making tea. And as soon as he appeared, they started making all kinds of faces and trying to bug him, and he was bothered.

“What are these demons doing here? They’re interrupting my meditation! I got to get rid of them!

They must be local demons. “I’m sorry I didn’t pay any attention to you before. Yes, I think you’re very nice, now please go away.”

They just stayed. “Okay, well, obviously I didn’t really feel any compassion for you, you know I’m really sorry that you’re in this horrible state of existence and I really feel for you. Now, would you please go away?”

Of course they just stayed. He tried a few other things like a wrathful mantra, he said this is going to scare them off and he started uttering this wrathful mantra, which was meant to kill and wipe out anything and they just looked and went, “Huh?”

And then he remembered what his teacher had always told him. Everything that arises, is just an experience. Just embrace the experience. So he looked at the demons and said, “You’re here! Let’s have tea, come on guys, let’s dance!” And he ran and tried to hug one of them. So that’s how you vanquish demons. You sit down and you have tea with them. Very important. Other questions. Last one. Yes.

Student: Could you just help clarify the idea of paying attention to your demons … [unclear] giving what they want? And then you also said to overcome the obsession, just to recognize that they’re not …

Ken: Yes. And the way that you are not disturbed by them is by experiencing them completely. So they’re one and the same. So, for instance, let’s say jealousy—one came up for me a few years ago. One of the things I do in my spare time is some executive coaching. And I had this phone call back east and I said something in the coaching session, which I was a little concerned about, could have had some negative ramifications. And I got off the phone and I was just feeling this shame. And you know what shame feels like, it’s hot and sticky and everything’s kind of prickly. At least that’s how I experience it. And my first impulse was, “Just, forget about it, Ken, it’ll be all right and don’t worry about it.” I tried to go on with my work and it just kept coming back. So, okay.

It was calling for attention, you see, so I thought, “Okay, let’s experience it.” So I just opened to the experience of it. Well, if I was feeling a bit hot and prickly like it was 95 degrees, it went up to 195 degrees. [Guttural vocalization of pain]. And now I really felt it completely. And it arose and arose very intensely. And then it was done, because when the feeling’s been experienced completely, it’s done, it’s fulfilled, it’s got nothing to do. It’s gone. And it was just like this quick super-surge of white-hot energy. That’s giving attention to it. I didn’t act out on it. I didn’t go and cry on somebody’s shoulder or go into years of psychotherapy or anything like that. Just experienced it. And that’s giving attention, just experiencing it. And when you experience it in all its vividness, then what’s been nagging at you for attention has got what it wanted. Just open attention actually, and you experience.

Student: [Unclear] … and that saying that you need to remind yourself that they’re not true or real and to me, that seems to indicate you’d be … [unclear].

Ken: No. I mean there’s shame in all of the stories that it was telling, “Ken, you’ve blown this assignment, they’re never going to call you back, they’re going to fire you.” There’s all of those stories coming. That’s what the emotion was telling me. And I wondered, should I call this person back and apologize or try to remedy this situation? I thought about that. That’s just going to make things worse, etc. But that’s what the emotion was driving, was all of that activity. “You’ve got to do something about this, you’ve got to do something.” The only thing I had to do about it was to experience it. Once I’d experienced it, then I could look at the situation for what it was. No, it’s not such a big deal. May not have even been noticed at the other end, it was a very small point, and so I could see the situation more clearly. Now, in some situations, when you see the situation clearly you know exactly what to do, and it’s usually different from what the emotion is telling you to do. Is this making sense to you?

Student: Yeah, I think if I’m saying this correctly, when you say the emotion [unclear] you’re saying it doesn’t have a corollary in the world.

Ken: No, what it is telling you about the world isn’t how things are. It’s telling you how it views things, which is usually different from how they are, and that’s a crucial distinction to make, but you only get at that, you only can see that by really experiencing the emotion. You can do it rationally, but then you’re suppressing the emotion and so it just keeps gnawing at you, and people can say, “I know what to do in the situation, but I still feel uncomfortable and I can’t really do it,” or something like that, and it’s because the emotion’s still gnawing at them inside. They haven’t experienced it.

Okay, let’s close here. I believe dinner is ready. For your practice this evening, I want you to continue with alternating the taking and sending and moving into the direct experience. These are the two primary techniques we’re going to be using. If you find the spell-breakers that I mentioned today helpful, by all means use them, they’re very useful, not only in meditation, they’re particularly useful during your life. So don’t forget that.