A Sufi story

Ken: First off, no problem is too difficult to be solved by a theoretician.

A man once said to himself, “What is the use of carrying out the observances of the order to which I’m attached, of respecting the adepts, of making donations, and of reading all those books?”

A stranger who was passing by stopped, and as if he read his mind said, “To each outward activity, there is an inward activity. To each inward action, there is an equivalent in a far distant land.”

“But,” said the man, “supposing people stopped following the observances of the path?”

As if in a dream, he heard the dervish say, “This is what would happen if there were no Sufi teachers.” He saw that for an instant the water in the irrigation channels near him had dried up.

“And this is what would happen if there were no followers.” Every piece of greenery in the countryside seemed to have turned brown and withered in a few seconds before their eyes.

“And this is what would happen if the right passages in the books were not being read.” Dead birds began to fall from the skies like hailstones.

“And this is what would happen if enough sincere people did not respect the adepts.” The very earth started to tremble and appeared as if it was about to liquefy.

“Enough!” cried the man, “I will obey, read, donate, and go to the meetings!”

“Alas,” said the dervish as the water of the leaves and the land returned to their normal state.

“Alas, you cannot now benefit through any of these promises.”

“But why?” said the man, “for I’m humbled.”

“Because you attach yourself to a teaching only through anxiety or desire. It is from such as you that the teaching itself must attach itself.”

“But I only wanted knowledge,” said the man.

“And you got what you wanted,” said the dervish, “something useless to you and to us.”

The Man Who Wanted Knowledge, The Dermis Probe, Idries Shah, p. 103


I’m just trying to make Gail’s work easier.

A treasure hunt

Gail: Draw on a map. Learn the map. But now we’re going to hunt for treasure. A treasure hunt involves looking for clues, for tracks, and then knowing what to do, recognizing the track, and knowing what to do when you’ve found it. This is like heading through the jungle or hiking on Kodiak Island, perhaps.

What do you need when you go hunting for treasure?

Student: A shovel.

Student: And from the sound of it, a gun. [Laughter]

Student: Willingness.

Student: The right map. Otherwise you usually don’t find it.

Gail: Remember how useful that map was this morning in relationship to the territory?

Student: I think you need a spirit of adventure.

Student: I was going to say curiosity, but also removing those little pebbles from right in front of your eye.

Student: It’s good if you know the difference between treasure and trash.

Ken: We’re getting a little ahead of the game there. We’re just hunting at this point.

Student: Courage.

Student: Native guides.

Student: A claim and a way to get it out.

Ken: It’s a very dead part of the room.

Chris: Perseverance.

Ken: Every other person over here switch with every other person over here. Something wrong with this? No, right now, there’s something wrong. I don’t see anybody. I refuse to feel that there’s more intelligence and curiosity on this side of the room.

Robert: Openness and observation.

Gail: So of those things that were listed and the things that were not listed, how would they help you to recognize a track and in which direction the animal might be going? How do you recognize that

Ken: You’ve all named a number of qualities: spirit of adventure, curiosity, a few implements, shovel, gun, maybe food, water, all of these things. Let’s take a look, break some of these down. What would food and water correspond to in your meditation practice?

Student: I’d say the learnings and the teachings. Something you can go off of. This is my side of the room.

Ken: That’s it. You and I should switch places. Maybe you could brighten these.

Student: A daily meditation practice and regular going to retreats.

Ken: Okay, could you, there’s a jump there. I would like you to fill it in. Food, water. Food, water.

Student: I think water is the daily meditation practice and regularly going to retreats is the food.

Ken: Okay. Romy?

Romy: Energy.

Ken: Yeah, you need energy. Okay. Spirit of adventure. What does that correspond to?

Robert: Openness.

Ken: Anybody else?

Student: Willingness.

Student: Curiosity.

Student: Yeah, I was going to say wonder.

Ken: How many of you bring that to your practice?

Gail: To all parts of your practice.

Student: Everybody! [Laughter]

Ken: You getting the picture?

Student: Spirit of adventure for me is also having a healthy respect for the demons that guard the treasure.

Ken: Okay, now we’re using an extended metaphor and like any metaphor, if it’s stretched too far, it begins to creak and so forth. But it’s helpful because one of the benefits of using a metaphor is it takes us out of our habituated associations with an activity and allows us to look at it through fresh eyes. And just a little curiosity.

One of the associations I was playing with there was the spirit of adventure that in some way corresponds to devotion, which includes openness and curiosity etc. Just for a moment, feel what it would be like and you’ll have the chance this evening to approach your practice with a spirit of adventure.

Willingness has been mentioned a few times, willingness to experience whatever’s there. And as Rivita so eloquently pointed out everything that’s there. And courage, what would that be like?

Student: What would faith look like on the other end? Faith and meditation. But in this adventure, what would faith look like?

Ken: What would it look like to you? You’re landed on an island, you’re getting out of the boat. What do you need? And feel it in the same way that you feel the role of faith in your practice. How would you put it? How would you describe it in the context of the metaphor?

Student: I can’t articulate it.

Ken: Okay, Chuck.

Chuck: That you’d survive and that you’d find the treasure.

Student: That when you step out of the boat, the land will actually hold you up.

Lynea: I’m confused about what you mean by devotion. Because I feel like you can have devotion without courage and without a spirit of adventure and without those things.

Ken: Say a bit more about that.

Lynea: The way I’m hearing devotion or the way I understand devotion is commitment. You can be committed to something and come back to it regularly without awareness and without curiosity.

Ken: Interesting.

Lynea: On the other end of that, you can have the courage and the curiosity and come back to it. And maybe not necessarily, well, maybe not quite resonate with devotion. I’m not quite—

Ken: Okay. I think what’s important here, we think there’s such a language as English, but there really isn’t. Everybody has their own version of English, and those versions overlap enough to give some semblance of communication sometimes. But you seem to have quite a clear idea. So you use what words are appropriate for you and not try to learn “the right words” because those won’t be the right words for you.

Jessica: The question you asked before Chris spoke about what would it bring to your practice. I think a sense of aliveness. Just like going on an adventure brings a sense of aliveness.

Ken: You know what the definition of an adventure is?

Jessica: I know you’re going to tell me.

Ken: Long periods of complete boredom punctuated by short moments of utter terror.

Jessica: What definition is that?

Ken: That’s one that I heard. I have to turn the heat up!

Gail: So in your practice, how do you recognize a track or a clue? How does it show up?

Students: [Unclear]

Ken: So, an aha, okay.

Student: When you speak of a track and clues, I would say that there’s obviously a connection between those two because without giving clues, you have no reason to begin a track, and without a track, you have nothing to do with your clues. I believe they go hand in hand, what I’m trying to say is that the clues lead you down the track. You don’t have to make your own, you just follow your clues and they will lead you down some sort of path.

Guy: I was going to say tension.

Student: For me, I keep banging into the same thing over and over, for me that’s a clue.

Ken: Oh, I keep running into something. Oh, there’s a tree here.

Student: A track, a clue resonates with my intuition in a way that I recognize it feels right. It’s that “aha” feeling. And at the same time it seems to re-frame something that has been uncomfortable for a while, whether I was really aware of it being uncomfortable or not, it just shifts things. Spinning about something.

For me, there are three things. One, I know I’m on a path, when I get ambushed, I’ll just be minding my own business, watching my breath. And the next thing you know, something leaps out from behind a bush, and I’m gone.

Another one is minding my own business, usually the same scenario, I step on a landmine, and the next thing I know I’m completely over there in six pieces and I look up and it’s like, what was that?

And the last one is walking into your own house and finding out there’s a surprise party. It’s for you, someone turns on the lights, and everyone you’ve ever met leaps out and says, “Hello!” So those are the three types of things that happened to me.

Lynea: Resistance or aversion.

The search for clues

Ken: I want to pursue a couple of these. In what way is that a clue for you?

Lynea: If I’m that strongly resisting something or disliking something, then it usually means there’s something on the other side of that that I haven’t looked at because it doesn’t usually have to do with whatever is bugging me.

Student: For me it’s a persistence because it withstands viewing it from multiple perspectives and still seems legitimate. When I find myself going down a one way street in the wrong direction.

Ken: It’s a clue to something, right?

Student: I think it was Guy who said tension. Did I get the word right? I think that’s true for me, but also the release of tension can be a clue. A clue for me is when I notice or sense a change in my everyday life away from meditation.

Gail: Okay, now we would like to know what do you do when you come across that clue? Do you have a method? Do you use a tool? What do you do?

Ken: Do you ignore it?

Lynea: Certain clues you might do one thing, certain clues you might do another thing.

Student: Metaphors get a little mixed, but to hold it until it reveals what it has to reveal and rest with it.

Ken: So the-sit-and-wait approach.

Gail: Sit and wait.

Student: When I have a clue, I get very excited. I’ve got a lot of energy. So I start moving faster.

Ken: But what do you do with the clue?

Student: I just let it lead me where it needs to lead. I like to test it either within myself or with friends. Like a trial balloon.

Gail: How do you test it?

Student: I might make the same sort of analogies like we’re doing here with the treasure hunt and express that in some way to a friend who I’ve had experience with before in terms of feedback. And then depending on the kind of response I get, I might know if I’m just way off base or whether I might be onto something.

Ken gave me once an advice for a very persistent clue—to take it and drink coffee with it. So that’s one way. But sometimes just nourish it with gentleness. And sometimes just cut its head.

Lynea: Sometimes I’m actually able to sit next to it and get to know it.

Student: For some reason, when I come around the clue I almost pick at it, almost tear it apart, see what’s in it. See what makes this a clue. Why is this so important? Then something else. What makes it tick? There might be something inside. It’s not always on the outside.

Lynea: I try to ask two questions sometimes. One is, what’s at stake if I let go of this clue? If it’s that kind of clue. And the other is what’s my secondary gain? If I keep it, what is it that I’m not seeing that I’m getting from it?

Student: Sometimes I get stuck in my habit of dealing with clues like past success. So then I fight with my clue. Lately, I’ve been working with softening around where I can move around the clue. Maybe it’s kind of sneaking up on it, I’m not sure.

Ken: So there are a lot of different ways of approaching clues, aren’t there? And they aren’t exactly consistent. Everything from having coffee to taking off their head, ignoring, prying, tearing them apart. Reminds me of a verse, which I think I can almost remember, by a person called Ram Tzu. It’s apocryphal, of course. It’s very cynical poetry in a book called No Way.

And the poem goes:

The more elaborate and ornate
The sign post
The more easily do you
Mistake it for the destination.

Except for you, oh, so spiritual ascetics.

For you …

The plainer and simpler
The sign post
The more easily do you
Mistake it for the destination.

No Way for the Spiritually Advanced, Ram Tzu, p. 53


Ken: Is the clue the destination? So what’s another thing you can do with a clue? Might be a good idea to do with a clue?

This is a very old Buddhist image. There’s the moon. What does everybody look at? Does that help you see the moon? But that’s what everybody does, right? So what is something else you could do with a clue?

Student: Help you find the treasure.

Ken: Yes, in theory. See, no problem is too difficult for a theoretician, but there’s a little step in there that you skipped over.

Student: Follow the direction.

Finding the right direction

Ken: Well, before you can follow the direction, what do you have to do? You have to figure out which direction it’s pointing. How do you know? [unclear] I’m going to disagree with that. Some people described running into something repeatedly. I think that was you, Romy. Okay, what’s the direction being pointed to there?

Student: Around the tree?

Ken: Well, maybe, but at least not this direction. Some people described an opening. What direction’s being pointed to there?

Student: Forward.

Ken: How are you going to know the direction that the clue is pointing?

Student: Not until you experience it.

Chris: Pristine awareness.

Ken: Oh, that’s such a big jump.

Student: You’ll have to try it. You have to go on the road and follow and see if it’s right, for a while anyway.

Ken: Yes, but we don’t even know which direction it’s pointing, what the road is. How do you know which direction it’s pointing? Whether it’s telling you not to go this way or to go this way or possibly something else? How do you know this?

Student: I think each clue has a different function, to me at least. Because there’s one that is always coming up that is saying, “Stop for a second and understand what’s going on here, in this very moment.” Once you understand, you get some other clue that tells you where to go. That’s how it functions for me at least.

Ken: I think I may be quibbling here, but it’s important. Rather than experiencing the clue, you have to know what your experience is. Is it about the clue or about you?

Student: Example?

Ken: Well, I think Romy’s example is very good. I’m probably picking this one because it’s so familiar to me. You go [clicks fingers] “wham!” and being somewhat thick-headed, once isn’t enough. Wham! Wham! for me it was like five to 50 times more.

Sometimes I do this [hand gesture], sometimes I get really creative and do this [hand gesture], and sometimes I go like this [hand gesture] and other times I go [hand gesture]. And after a while I would go, “Oh, this isn’t working.”

Why was I doing all of this? It’s because I was not paying attention to my own experience. Somewhere else I had read, “Go in this direction.” I would go and I would run into this brick wall or tree or whatever and rather than pay attention to my own experience, I would just go back and read the book. Yeah, got the directions right. Good. But … [hand gesture].

Deborah: When you say don’t experience the clue, know your experience. If you had have been experiencing the clue, would you have been experiencing the hit? I’m just trying to figure out.

Ken: No, I was experiencing the clue! Absolutely. Bang!

Deborah: Right? So what would that have been if you knew your experience?

Ken: If I’d known… Well, let’s hear from Guy.

Guy: With these metaphors you can get really tangled up. The clue was telling you to go the other way in a certain way.

Ken: What’s happening in me, right? You’ve never done this business … [hand gesture].

Guy: Sure, sure.

Ken: Okay. So what happens in you when you do that? What is your experience? Shock?

Guy: Sure. And then also anger probably.

Ken: Anger, what else?

Guy: Determination. Will. And active will. Hardening, all that stuff that comes with anger.

Ken: Hardening. Okay, so we have shock, anger, hardening, what else?

Guy: I dunno.

Ken: What else? Bewilderment?

Guy: Sure.

Ken: Okay, you getting the picture?

Deborah: I’m getting the connection with something you asked just a minute ago about whether it is the clue or my own patterns that I’m experiencing? And if I get that headbutt repeatedly, there’s a confusion or bewilderment that comes up about whether the clue is beating up on me or whether I’m creating the situation.

I don’t know if that distinction is clear, but it is to me because I just had it happen the last couple days. I’ve been noticing that when everything opens up, I injure my left leg. I mean this is like three times in the past two days. Okay, now you’ve got my attention. Is it the universe saying to me, “You’re not supposed to be that open”? Or is it my pattern saying to me, “You’re not supposed to be that open”?

Ken: Those are two possible, but are there others?

Deborah: There’s another one that when I open I lose attention. I drop out of attention and I think that’s coming through also. But I need to first of all drop some of those patterns that say that the universe doesn’t want me to be that open before I can see that other possibility that I’m losing attention when I open.

Ken: Okay, Deborah’s point takes us back to something that we talked about right at the beginning of this retreat—observation versus assessment.

Romy: I guess I have a question about my own experience of banging into the same thing multiple times. For me, I know there’s something there and I keep going almost on the same path because like you said, I don’t know what to do.

Ken: Okay, really important point that Romy just mentioned. Say it again.

Romy: I keep banging into the same thing because I don’t know what to do. I guess at some point I hope that it becomes clear …

Ken: Here we’re getting to the heart. How many can relate to Romy’s experience? Reach a point you don’t know what to do. Now a lot of people come to Gail or me or somebody and say, “What do you do?” But our idea is for you to have more ability. So what needs to happen? Rivita.

Rivita: At least for me, I need to trust my own experience and really because when I do, I know there’s an inner knowing that this is the right clue, and I will follow it, and I know it. And I would say most people know it inside.

Student: Observation is a very …

Ken: Good starting point.

Lynea: I think for me, when I hit something, humility, willingness to stop and say, “Okay, I actually don’t know what to do” and to get comfortable with that. The willingness to fail, to try something else and to fail at it.

Ken: Lynea has hit on a very important point. If you don’t know what to do and you’re going to learn what to do. This is almost going to sound trite when I put it this way. What is the necessary state of mind for learning?

Student: Open and almost like beginner’s mind.

Chris: This is a quote of yours that I’ve quoted for years. If you need something from somebody, you can’t see them because all you see is your need. And you can go on from there. If you need a clue, or if the clue is telling you something, you got to see what you’re thinking the clue is telling. To let that go. If you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m supposed to do something.” And on and on.

Be willing to experience not knowing

Ken: So people have been saying this in different ways. I’m going to say it a little more explicitly. You have to be willing to experience not knowing.

Student: And that’s the experience that comes to me when I bang into something millions of times. It’s a point where I completely let go. And at that point everything opens up. But my thinking goes, do I have to do this all my life? Just banging into things millions of times? If there is a shortcut, I would love to know it.

Ken: Well, there is.

Student: The alternative is sitting there, you can bang against the wall or the tree or whatever and you can just stay there. So those are your two choices. If you don’t know what to do, it seems to me anyway, which would be like stagnating, which could be good.

The dialogue here reminds me of a metaphor you used in the retreat about reactive behavior. And the metaphor really resonated with me because my daughter was colicky when she was a baby, and we tried desperately to figure out how to calm her down.

The first thing we had to do was calm ourselves down. And then we tried to open ourselves up to her experience and look for clues from her as to what would make her more comfortable. And, ultimately, if I held her like a football, that would work, that would calm her down for a while.

And I see the dialogue here is similar, you have to relax and be open to the clues that you’re getting and in some way see yourself interacting with the clue.

Ken: Thank you.

Student: I thought the question really was about how to tell what direction you should go with the clue? Sometimes we don’t know. But one thing I’m not hearing here, and maybe I’m way off base, is if I don’t know, but I do know I have a clue, then maybe I should rely on that faith and virtuous direction, virtuous action.

I’ve started to notice, in the last few days in particular, that I was expecting certain answers or certain responses from the clue. I started noticing really subtle body sensations or subtle little images. I found that if I paid attention to those, that I really started to move along into some really surprising directions. But they weren’t the directions I thought I was supposed to go.

Ken: Okay.

Romy: Can you elaborate on that? You’re saying that you had these body sensations, so how did you go along with them? I think just the image would help me.

Student: So the big, glaring, and persistent clue was huge anxiety that’s been going on for a while. In this process of interviewing the tribe, asking a question “what brings you here?” but then not expecting a verbal response, instead trying to really pay attention to any feeling that came up and moving my attention to that feeling.

Or if an image came up, moving my attention to the image. I would find myself in my mind going, “No, no, no, no, that doesn’t even look like me. Who’s that?” And then backing away from that and going, “Okay, well what is this image saying, doing?” And it just seemed to keep following and then things would open that were really surprising. Does that make any sense at all? It’s very vague.

Finding your own path

Ken: Okay. We’ve been eliciting a lot of ideas from you. We’ve been saying relatively little. This is how much know how you have available to bring to your practice. And Buddhism is a very powerful tradition, very strong tradition. What we get in the tradition is the distilled experience for whom a certain range of methods worked.

Back in the early nineties, very soon after I’d started Unfettered Mind, actually, I was still working through what was a very difficult period of my own practice, which was the recognition that all of the traditional doors were closed to me. My patterns were so strong. And that every time I went through one of those traditional doors, a mountain fell on me. That’s not much of an exaggeration, actually. I would get quite sick. And I had tried. It was very difficult, very painful.

And I had consistently found that if I did something that wasn’t in any of the books, there’d be a bit of an opening, a way to follow. But I was still very much in “the tradition.” And this confused me. And as I thought about this and I thought about it a lot, the question came to me, “What happened to all the other people for whom the tradition did not work?” Because I refused to think I was the only one. That was a very interesting question to entertain.

The first thing that happens to a lot of them is that their stories don’t get told. And that’s because of the way systems work. But many years later, I realized that something else happened. It reminded me of a saying from Schopenhauer, maybe Schoenberg, one or the other: “A new truth is first met with laughter and ridicule. It is then met with violent resistance. Third stage, it is accepted as common sense.”

And when I looked at the history of Buddhism, you have a history of great teachers, many of whom were regarded as extremely controversial, upsetting, disturbing, etc. And then they’re gradually assimilated because they had a new way of approaching things. It was the same with my own teacher actually.

Kalu Rinpoche was raised and educated, one of the last of the old generation. In any society, religion is always the most conservative element. He lived his life, much of his life, in mountain retreats until his teacher made him teach three-year retreats, which he did pretty well for the rest of his life. Either building them or teaching.

So you have this very conservative Tibetan who when he left Tibet, had never heard of the Second World War and had heard rumors of the First World War. That’s how isolated they were. Who did two remarkable things which caused a great deal of upset in traditional Tibetan circles. One, he taught women equally the way that he taught men. And he taught Westerners a three-year retreat and all of the traditional practices including the advanced ones, which at that point very few teachers were doing. And that’s what he did. And much has followed from that.

My point here is that tradition has two meanings. One, it is the forms and the other it is the understanding. What we’re trying to do here is create the circumstances in which that understanding is kindled and nourished in all of us. It’s not easy.

My own feeling—in comparing experience with many of my colleagues and peers—is that to come to our own understanding, because that’s the only one that matters, it is necessary and probably sufficient when we encounter the various clues in the way that we’ve been talking about, that you move so deeply into your experience that you know. For that knowing is there.

This is what Chris meant, I think, when he said “pristine awareness.” But as I said, at that point, that was a big jump. Every challenge we face in our practice also contains its own direction. By listening to the challenge in every possible way, we can come to know that direction. And how this might be getting a little bit ahead of us.

We may find that when we know that direction, we may feel that we have no idea how to move in that direction. It is not in our repertoire so to speak. But I have also found that the knowledge of how to move in that direction is also present in the challenge sometimes.

And this perhaps is the teacher, it can be really helpful to have possibilities pointed out to us because we couldn’t see them before. But that only works the first or second time. After that, we have to take the responsibility of seeing it ourselves or clearing out what is preventing us from seeing.

In your meditation this evening, this is the phase that I want you to move into. You have your experience, one of the reasons we spent first day of this retreat, focusing on how to be completely in your experience, interviewing the tribe. All of the information is there. You’re not necessarily going to get it through your intellect.

In fact, speaking personally, I found my intellect an exceedingly unreliable tool because it is almost always in service of reactive patterns. I have found my intellect an exceedingly unreliable tool because it is almost always in service of reactive patterns.

A friend of mine, a very good friend of mine, said to me once, “What’s your greatest strength, Ken?” I said, “Being able to express complex and deep ideas very succinctly.” He said, “What’s your greatest weakness?” I said, “Being able to express complex and deep ideas very succinctly.” Follow? Very unreliable, at least for me, helpful to some other people, but not to me.

Sometimes, I think I’m probably quoting Suzuki Roshi on this, from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness. And sometimes our greatest weakness is our greatest strength.” It’s really difficult to appreciate that because it has everything to do with identity.

In your meditation this evening, I want you to look at the clues, the tracks that Gail was pointing you to. What direction are they pointing? How do you move in that direction? And I will give you one hint. Don’t try to think this out. Otherwise, something like this may happen.

When Mullah Nasrudin arrived at the immigration barrier in London, the officer in charge asked, “Where are you from?”

Nasrudin said: “Grrrr … The East.”

“Name?”

“Mullah, ssssss, Nasrrrrgrrudin.”

“Have you an impediment in your speech?”

“Wheee-ee —no!”

“Then why do you talk like that?”

“Pip-pip-pip — I grr — learnt it from English by Radio!”

Radio, The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mullah Nasrudin, Idries Shah, p. 3