Shooting arrows in the dark

Ken: The title of our program is Ideology and Wisdom. Now, when Joanne and I were discussing my coming up here for another visit, I explained to Joanne that I am not particularly comfortable coming to a group of people and talking about something, because I have no idea whether what I’m going to talk about is of the least bit of interest to people. And for me, it’s like shooting arrows in the dark. The problem with shooting arrows in the dark, you may actually hit something, but you’ll never know it. So I asked her, what would people be interested in? And she got back to me a little bit later and said that somebody, Steve, I think? Yeah. Where’s Steve?

Student: He’s not here. [Laughter]

Ken: He’s not here. Oh, okay. Well, anyway, he was interested in learning, or understanding, how the development of compassion leads to the understanding, or experience, of the nature of mind. And I looked at this and I went, “Oh dear,” because from where I am now, that is almost 180 degrees—or one way of looking at it is it’s 180 degrees—of the direction of how things work. There’s a bit of a cart and a horse problem there. That needs some qualifications.

So I started thinking about this, and one of the themes that I’ve been mulling over for some time now—because I think it’s very important in our current world situation—is ideology and the effect ideology has. And I chose to contrast that with wisdom. So I thought, “Okay, that’ll make an interesting program.” And then I’ve been thinking about it solidly for the last six months, and I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to do today. Because it’s one of those occasions, which happens periodically, where you come up with a good idea for a program, and you think about it, and absolutely nothing comes together.

A Sufi story

Ken: So, with that introduction—that’s called managing expectations—I’m going to start with a story which might have some bearing on this topic, conceivably. This is a very, very good book. Do you know it? Okay. We’re sharing secrets up here. The Tales of the Dervishes, by Idres Shah. Every spiritual tradition has its area of expertise. Christianity: best music in the world. Islam: best architecture. Sufis: best stories.

Once upon a time a man was contemplating the ways in which Nature operates, and he discovered, because of his concentration and application, how fire could be made. This man was called Nour. (One of my Iranian students in L.A. informed me that Nour means light.)

He decided to travel from one community to another showing people his discovery. Nour passed the secret to many groups of people. Some took advantage of the knowledge. Others drove him away, thinking that he must be dangerous, before they had time to understand how valuable this discovery could be to them. Finally, a tribe before which he demonstrated became so panic-stricken that they set about and killed him, being convinced that he was a demon.

Centuries passed. The first tribe which had learned about fire reserved the secrets for their priests, who remained in affluence and power while the people froze.

The second tribe forgot the art and worshipped instead the instruments. The third worshipped a likeness of Nour himself, because it was he who had taught them. The fourth retained the story of the making of fire in their legends: some believed them, some did not. The fifth community really did use fire, and this enabled them to be warmed, to cook their food, and to manufacture all kinds of useful articles.

After many, many years, a wise man and the small band of his disciples were travelling through the lands of these tribes. The disciples were amazed at the variety of rituals which they encountered; and one and all said to their teacher, “But all of these procedures are in fact related to the making of fire, nothing else. We should reform these people!”

The teacher said, “Very well then. We shall restart our journey. By the end of it, those who survive will know the real problems and how to approach them.” When they reached the first tribe, the band was hospitably received. The priests invited the travellers to attend their religious ceremony, the making of fire. When it was over and the tribe was in a state of excitement at the event which they had witnessed, the master said, “Does anyone wish to speak?”

The first disciple said, “In the cause of Truth, I feel myself constrained to say something to these people.” “If you will do so at your own risk, you may do so,” said the master. Now the disciple stepped forward in the presence of the tribal chief and the priest and said, “I can perform the miracle which you take to be a special manifestation of deity. If I do so, will you accept that you have been in error for so many years?”

But the priests cried, “Seize him!” and the man was taken away, never to be seen again.

The travellers went to the next territory where the second tribe were worshipping the instruments of fire-making. Again a disciple volunteered to try to bring reason to the community.

With the permission of the master, he said to the community, “I beg permission to speak to you as reasonable people. You are worshipping the means whereby something may be done, not even the thing itself. Thus you’re suspending the advent of its usefulness. I know the reality that lies at the basis of the ceremony.”

This tribe was composed of more reasonable people. But they said to the disciple, “You are welcome as a traveller and stranger in our midst. But, as a stranger, foreign to our history and customs, you cannot understand what we are doing. You make a mistake. Perhaps, even, you are trying to take away or alter our religion. We therefore decline to listen to you.”

The travellers moved on.

When they arrived in the land of the third tribe, they found before every dwelling an idol representing Nour, the original fire-maker. The third disciple addressed the chiefs of the tribe, “This idol represents a man, who represents a capacity, which can be used.” “This may be so,” answered the Nour worshipers, “but the penetration of the real secret is only for the few.” “It is only for the few who will understand, not for those who refuse to face certain facts,” said the third disciple.

“This is rank heresy, and from a man who does not even speak our language correctly, and is not a priest ordained in our faith,” muttered the priests. And he could make no headway.

The band continued their journey and arrived in the land of the fourth tribe. Now a fourth disciple stepped forward in the assembly of the people.

“The story of making fire is true, and I know how it may be done,” he said.

Confusion broke out within the tribe, which split into various factions. Some said, “This may be true, and if it is, we want to find out how to make fire.” When these people were examined by the master and his followers, however, it was found that most of them were anxious to use firemaking for personal advantage, and did not realize that it was something for human progress. So deep had the distorted legends penetrated into the minds of most people, that those who thought they might in fact represent truth were often unbalanced ones, who could not have made fire, even if they had been shown how.

There was another faction who said, “Of course the legends are not true. This man is just trying to fool us to make a place for himself here.” And a further faction said, “We prefer the legends as they are, for they are very the mortar of our cohesion. If we abandon them, and we find that this new interpretation is useless, what will become of our community then?” And there were other points of view as well.

So the party travelled on, until they reached the lands of the fifth community, where fire-making was a commonplace, and where other preoccupations faced them.

The master said to his disciples, “You have to learn how to teach, for man does not want to be taught. First of all, you will have to teach people how to learn. And before that you have to teach them that there is still something to be learned. They imagine that they are ready to learn. But they want to learn what they imagine is to be learned, not what they have first to learn. When you have learned all of this, then you can devise the way to teach. Knowledge without special capacity to teach is not the same as knowledge and capacity.”

The Story of Fire, Tales of the Dervishes, Idries Shah, p. 29

Now I’m going to ask a very nasty question. How many of you recognize yourself in this story? Oh, that’s very nice. Where do you recognize yourself?

Student: Oh, at pretty much every stage.

Ken: Okay. Say a bit more. You recognize yourself at every stage.

Student: I could say probably at present, I recognize myself as somebody who would like to think I have more wisdom than I probably don’t. [Laughs] I probably represent most of those tribes.

Ken: Okay. Thank you. Right here. The one behind you. No, you held up your hand. One of the rules here is, people that come to my retreats, whenever I say, “I have a question,” make absolutely no movement whatsoever. [Laughter]

Student: I’ll talk, I’ll talk. I was struck by, you have to learn how to teach from a person who does not want to be taught. So I would regard my own habitual patterns as maybe the person inside who does not want to be taught.

Ken: Is that what it said? That was right at the end, right?

Student: Mm-hmm. You have to learn how to teach from a person who does not want to be taught.

Ken: [turning pages] “First of all, you’ll have to teach people how to learn.” No. “You have to learn how to teach, for man does not want to be taught.”

Student: Oooh, “For man does not want to be taught.”

Ken: It’s the human condition. We don’t want to be taught.

Student: I’ll still use that.

Ken: Okay. Fire away.

Student: The one inside who does not want to be taught. The one who wants to change or to teach that person has to learn from how the habits resist.

Ken: Exactly. Very good. Okay. Somebody over here. Yes, please.

Student: Well, I recognize myself in making it more complicated, or knowing that there is something I want to learn or understand, but I don’t really know what it is. And so there’s kind of a mystery surrounding it that can lead to practices that are just practices. And a kind of a hunch that there’s something here, but not really getting it.

Ken: This is very important. [Pause] How many know why you’re here? Yay. Why are you here?

Student: That’s a big question. The short answer is just cause I wanted to see the face behind the voice that I’ve heard in the virtual world. [Laughter] That’s the short answer.

Ken: Okay. But you’ll have to bear with me here. Why did you want to see the face behind the voice?

Student: Because I thought, maybe that I could gain more from seeing you in person in this sort of setting than I could just alone.

Ken: And what are you trying to gain?

Student: Awakening in a general sense, appropriate action.

Ken: Why?

Student: The thing that I think about is, I don’t want my quest for knowledge or freedom from suffering to … I don’t want to fool myself. And I think that …

Ken: You’re interested in awakening, to be free of suffering. And you don’t want to fool yourself on this path.

Student: Yes. And cause more suffering, while I’m doing that.

Ken: So this may be an absurd question: Why don’t you want to cause more suffering?

Student: Life is hard enough as it is. And so I don’t want to pile … so that’s one aspect of it. Another is, I consider myself very fortunate, very lucky. And I think if I’m so fortunate—let me think how to say this—being so fortunate in a world where most people are not, one, I feel like if I suffer, it’s in my head, almost. So I want to be able to address that, and—

Ken: Very interesting. First part of what you said, life’s hard enough, you don’t want to increase suffering for yourself or for anybody. That makes sense. The second part is very interesting. You’re discounting your own suffering. We don’t need to go there just yet. We may come back to that later. But, thank you. Just in this few minutes, we’ve touched on all the major themes for today. [Pause] What’s your name?

Gita: Gita.

Ken: Gita. You can sense something, you can sense a direction. And you move and attempt to move in that direction. But there aren’t any signposts. What do you rely on? Well, we rely on what other people tell us. This is a good person to talk to. We maybe rely, you know, why don’t you read this book. At the same time, we have our own internal compass, though it can be fairly difficult to read, sometimes. So, all of that’s there. And what we get from other people is heavily influenced. It’s really dependent upon the culture and the context and the environment. So if they’re stuck on something, what they tell us is inevitably going to reflect what they’re stuck on. We have difficulty sensing or reading our own internal compass. We don’t know what to do. What do most people do in this situation?

Student: Vajrayana.

Ken: No. But what have most people done in this situation, historically?

Student: They turn to an ideology, don’t they?

Ken: Well, a belief system. They start making a belief system—I’m going to distinguish between belief and ideology—but you’re absolutely right. That’s the direction to go. In other words, make up a story. And that’s what we find described in The Story of Fire. All of these different stories were made up. So, we’re going to start now with a period of meditation. Is there a gong anywhere?

A meditation practice

Ken: Let’s see how to approach this. Everybody here has some form of practice right? There isn’t anybody this is their totally first exposure to meditation? Good, okay.

What I want you to do, we’ll take a few minutes, settle down with the breath and I’ll talk you through a process there. And then, I want you to consider what you know, and what you believe. And this can be a little tricky. You have to remember: 600 years ago everybody knew the world was flat. That’s what they knew. And they knew that the sun went around the Earth. So this distinction between you knowing, and belief, we need to explore that a little bit. Let’s just start resting in attention. I’m going to talk you through a certain process here, which you may find helpful.

[Gong] So begin by resting in the experience of breathing. And when I say that, I don’t mean watch the breath, but rather rest in the experience of breathing itself. Breathing takes place in the body, so to rest in the experience of breathing means you begin by resting in your body, and in the experience of the movement of the body as you breathe. Not only the movement, but the sensations of that movement and the sensations of breathing. [Pause]

So feel, maybe it’s the stomach expanding or the chest expanding when you breathe, and collapsing when you breathe out. [Pause] And you may also notice there’s a very slight movement of the back. As you breathe in, the back usually straightens just a little bit. With a very slight bending forward as you breathe out. It has to do with the expansion and contraction of the lungs. [Pause] And then there’s another motion connected with the expansion and contraction of the stomach. [Pause]

Rather than focus on each of these sensations separately, open to the experience of them all, simultaneously. [Pause] You may find when you do this, that your attention collapses down onto one or other sensation. When it does, expand from that sensation to include all of the others. [Pause] Maybe there’s a slight movement of the head associated with the movement of the back. The chin moving up and down, probably not more than half a millimeter or so. [Pause]

Feel the tension or the relaxation in various muscles in your body. Don’t try to change them, just experience what’s there. [Pause] Feel the texture of your clothes touching your body, where there’s constriction, where they hang freely. [Pause] Maybe your hands are resting together, maybe they’re resting on your legs, so there’s a sensation in hands and legs, right there. This is also part of your experience of breathing. The sensation of the weight of your body sitting on cushion or chair, feet in contact with the ground. [Pause]

Include all of the physical, tactile, kinesthetic sensations. So you’re aware of your body from the soles of your feet, to the crown of the head, from the pores of your skin, the surface of the skin, to everything inside. [Pause] The body breathes.

In addition, we have the aural sensations, the sound of the traffic outside, tires in the rain, the sound of my voice, maybe some other sounds, but not too much else today. And you also have all of the visual sensations. Sitting, probably good to do this with your eyes open. So there’s all the play of light and color and shape and form; these things we call other people. The room itself with the light on the floor and the ceilings. Maybe softly in focus as we let our eyes rest; maybe we see it clearly, but it’s still all light and color and shape and form.

So include those sensations along with everything in your body and everything that you hear. So you rest in this field of sensory sensations. Just do that for a few minutes. [Pause] Again, if you find your attention collapsing down to one sensation—maybe the sound of a car going by, maybe a pattern on the person’s shirt who sits in front of you—as soon as you become aware that you’re focusing on one thing, gently expand your attention back to every sensation that comes in through your senses. You can include smell and taste as well, though they tend to be ephemeral and subtle. So sit for a few minutes, opening to this field of sensory sensations until you can rest, get a sense of resting in everything. [Pause]

That collapsing down is natural, it happens, just expand from that. Some people, when they collapse down, they try to exclude the object that they’re focusing on, from their attention. That just complicates things. Just expand from that object back to everything. [Pause]

And if you’re feeling adventurous, you could move your head slowly and look around the room, and see what it’s like to experience the world this way. You don’t need to move quickly. As you move your eyes and move your head, continue to see everything in your visual field. [Pause] And when you rest in this way of experiencing the world, you may notice some shifts taking place in your body, nothing you can really pin down, but a kind of energetic shift. Just include that experience too. [Pause]

Now include all of your emotions. [Pause] Anger, desire, loneliness, joy, love, faith, despair, irritation, resentment, guilt, pride, jealousy, shame. [Pause] There are probably a few I haven’t mentioned, but you get the picture. As you continue to rest in the field of sensory sensations, just include any emotions there. You don’t have to go digging. If there’s nothing there, that’s fine. But anything that’s there, just include that experience. [Pause]

Maybe you’re hoping for something that’s going to happen tomorrow or next week. Just include the experience of hoping, the feeling of that, and how that feeling takes expression in the body. Maybe there’s something you fear, feel ashamed about, or someone you feel very tender towards, or proud of, all of it. Just include all of those emotions and all of the stories that go with them. When you start to include the stories, you may find yourself being distracted by them, but if you just include them as stories, and stay connected with all the physical sensations, you’ll find you can just let them run around, and they do their little thing. [Pause]

And also all your beliefs and all your values. In other words, in addition to the world of sensory perceptions, we now will open to the world of internal material and all of its complexity, subtlety and variety. And again, you may find yourself collapsing down on one thing or another. When that happens, just include everything again, expand and include. [Pause]

So you have the external sensations and the internal material, and all of this together forms a field of experience. We can let go of inside, outside, and just rest in this field of experience. [Pause] Now I’m going to ask you to do something which may feel a little strange. This field of experience: open your heart to it. Open your heart to everything you experience.

And people sometimes ask me, “How do you do that?” Well, just imagine someone you like, and open your heart to them. And then do exactly the same thing with everything you experience. And again, when you do this, you may find that some different physical sensations arise, and just include them. Maybe some other emotions arise, just include them. Maybe some stories arise, just include them. [Pause]

And one final step: I’m going to give you a question. Don’t try to answer this question, just pose the question. And when you hear the question, you may experience a shift. Rest in that shift. You may be tempted to think about the question, but that’s not going to be so helpful. Just experience the shift and rest in it. So we have the field of sensory experience, including all of the bodily sensations, the visual, and aural, so forth. We have the internal world of thoughts and feelings, values, and beliefs. We have all of the stories, hopes, aspirations, ideas about ourselves, and about the world. We have this whole field of experience. And we let our hearts open to it. And now we ask the question: What experiences all this? And there may be a shift; include the sensations of that shift, and rest in that experience. What experiences all this? [Pause]

Look in the resting; rest in the looking. [Pause] Thoughts may come. Just include them in your experience. [Pause] Remember: a floating white cloud does not obstruct the infinite blue sky. [Pause]

If you find that your level of attention decays, just relax and start again with the body sensations associated with breathing. And then just gradually expand, including more and more, opening your heart and asking, who experiences? Or, what experiences all this? It’s better to start all over again than try to reconstruct something that’s in the process of falling apart. [Pause]

[Gong]

What was this like for you?

Student feedback

Student: I’ve been asking myself that question a lot recently. I don’t know. I feel like sometimes somebody just needs to whack me upside the head or something. But there’s nothing there. I don’t know. There’s just the thoughts and the feelings and the experiences that come and go.

Ken: Okay. And there’s nothing else there.

Student: Not that I can perceive.

Ken: Okay. Thank you. Anybody else? We’ll come back to that. Tom?

Tom: I found it Interesting when you mentioned the occurrence of light floating through your thoughts, that immediately a light came through from the lower left to the upper right. And it repeated itself. And the scene or sensory perception that I was having didn’t change, but seemed to be illuminated in some form of brightness. And I have great difficulty in explaining what the brightness was. And then after a while it went away.

Ken: Things come; things go.

Tom: Correct.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Lynea?

Lynea: When you said to open your heart to everything you’re experiencing, for some reason, all of a sudden, I thought compassion is not the same as knowing.

Ken: Say a bit more.

Lynea: Maybe I’m misunderstanding compassion. At least in my experience, compassion is relational, and at least conditioned to be an interaction or response to a person. And knowing includes everything. So maybe they’re the same if one is compassionate with everything, including the mundane. Maybe.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Yes.

Student: Well this is back to a little bit of basic, but it was very helpful for me with experiencing the sense perceptions. And, I’ve always had a little bit of a doubt in my mind or a question with all the Tibetan teachings that say, well, you know, the mind is another sense perception, thoughts, and feelings and emotions. And today I really felt that I had direct experience of that being a sense perception, just like vision or aural and everything.

And it was really helpful for me to have that experience with collapsing. Like you said, collapsing around a thought and then opening up to the whole experience, seeing that just the same as when I collapse around a visual experience. So, I found that really, really helpful. And then when you ask the question, “What experiences this?”, I didn’t go immediately to thoughts or answering, like I often do. I just had this experience of just kind of settling on the cushion. And there was this sense of, again, no real words, but maybe something about knowing, but I didn’t know what that means.

Ken: Okay. Knowing has come up again. Janet.

Janet: My experience, when the question was asked, “What experiences this?” was a surge of energy and a shaking, a kind of brightness and shaking.

Ken: Okay.

Student: I had a similar experience to that. It’s very hard to talk about this experience, but it was, it was just very expanding. There was this incredible feeling of awe and I felt that my heart was already open to the experience when you said that. But then when you said it, it was like this whole other huge opening, just this huge feeling of joy and awe. And I think that’s compassion.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else?

Student: I attended a retreat last month and it was on the four immeasurables. And the teacher during that mentioned cultivating versus uncovering. And that was a mindblower to me. So during the meditation today, I found a little space in during that retreat and I’ve been losing it, little by little, on my own. And today sitting in this meditation, when you said open your heart, I felt that flood of warmth, flood of feeling, and a great sadness overcome me. But it felt like, again, that just opening, that uncovering, something that’s already there flooding out. And it was comforting and bad at the same time. But at any rate, that kind of uncovering, things do come out. And I can attest to how her experience was, because I could see her body shake. [Laughter]

Ken: Okay. Sean?

Sean: I hope this doesn’t complicate things even more.

Ken: They could get worse?

Sean: They could get worse. [Laughs] It usually does. In the experience of most of the senses, they seem to be very much of the moment. You know, I hear something that’s happening now. I feel something that’s happening now. With mind as a sense, my experience is that, that sense is different because it seems to try to create a narrative out of sensations that have happened in the past, or might happen in the future. In contrast to that, when you asked about, I don’t remember if it was “what” or “who is experiencing?”

Ken: What is experiencing. I made a mistake the second time when I said “who” but it should be “what.”

Sean: That also seems to happen in the moment, which leaves the mind out.

Ken: Very inconvenient, isn’t it? [Laughter]

Sean: Which leaves the mind out, and makes it a little bit more like one of the other senses, which is not what I usually make of my investigation of, where is the experience? Usually there’s no experience, there’s no experiencer, or no experiencing, place. That was a little startling for me to see how much it was like smell, or, one of those slightly more ephemeral senses, taste. And that’s not where I’ve gone with that one before.

Ken: Okay. Yes. Another comment here. Thank you. That doesn’t make it too much more complicated. Please.

Student: So when you suggested “open your heart,” one of my experiences, my felt experience, was fear, like I’m experiencing now. And I sat with that and I felt very constricted for a few moments. And then all of a sudden, I just kind of opened up and I became very expansive. And so that was then, when you asked the question, “What is your experience?” there with that same kind of expanded sense throughout that. So it was quite an amazing shift.

Ken: We have a number of different experiences, some similarities, some overlaps. And those of you who chose not to describe your experience, I’m just going to operate under the assumption that you also had your own experiences. [Laughter]

My question. You experience nothing there, but just thoughts and feelings and sensations coming and going, right? You experience this, “Oh, mind is just another organ, damn.” Something like that. That must be very irritating to you. [Laughs] And there were some conclusions: you were saying there’s joy, and a feeling of awe, etc. And then you said, “Well, this is compassion.” That’s a conclusion, let’s just leave that part out. There was joy and awe, okay? Do you have a use for any of this? [Pause] Peter?

Peter: Well, yeah.

Ken: Yeah, well, yeah, Ken. That’s sort of like the sentence isn’t it? Well, duh![Laughter]

Peter: Sort of feels like there’s a lot of freedom and space. I’m not compelled in the sense of my automatic reactions.

Ken: Okay. So you sense a certain freedom, which comes from not feeling compelled by automatic reactions, right? That’s, that’s a very nice articulation. Do you have a use for that?

Peter: Every day.

Ken: Pardon?

Peter: Yeah.

Ken: Yeah well go on. What use do you have for this?

Peter: To experience and express wow more clearly, more often. Just freedom not to be attached to outcomes as much, in the sense of getting upset, or grabbing or attaching to things that I want.

Ken: Okay.

Peter: It’s easier to just be present and experience the other beings more fully.

Ken: All right. Okay. Anybody else? Sylvia.

Sylvia: I think I have exactly the opposite reaction, that I actually feel burdened.

Ken: Responsibility?

Sylvia: Responsibility, yeah.

Ken: Say a bit more.

Sylvia: Opening like that, it is more vulnerable to the immense amount of suffering in the world. And then I feel like, okay now, better get busy.

Ken: So you feel a responsibility, or an obligation, comes with this way of experiencing things. Am I understanding you correctly?

Sylvia: Yes.

Ken: Okay. Thank you. Anybody else? Okay.

Student: So when I experienced the way you just took us through, I feel like it’s the only place in my life that I stop.

Ken: That you stop?

Sylvia: That I stop! And that makes me feel really alive.

Ken: So, you’re dead most of the time?

Sylvia: I might be. [Laughter] You know, when I’m thinking about the future, and hopes and fears, and all that stuff that my mind does, working, and running around. I’m not sure I’m always alive at those moments. And I think when I sit on the cushion and meditate in that way—not the kind of meditation where, just also following my thoughts, but really directly experiencing—I stop and I feel alive.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Yes. In a minute I’m going to start picking on the people who haven’t contributed. [Laughter]

Student: I feel a sense of frustration. Like there’s a mirror that I’m trying to look behind. Or like, there’s something there that I just can’t fathom, that I want to put my head around something.

Ken: Okay. But I want to come back. You had this experience of thoughts just coming and going, but there’s nothing there. Do you have a use for that experience?

Student: [Pause] Not right now. [Laughter]

Ken: Okay.

Student: I work much better with phrases or affirmations, or like she was talking about, the four immeasurables, reminders, slogans, whatever you want to call them. I think that’s part of the reason that I feel frustrated.

Ken: Thank you for that. Do you have a use for this experience, or this way of experiencing things, in your life?

Student: To me, part of the hope that I have is that by being able to be present, that I’ll be able to act appropriately instead of forcing myself down whatever path it is, but that I think I should do.

Ken: I’m going to push this a little bit, if it’s okay with you.

Student: That’s fine.

Ken: Okay. You may find yourself tipping off a cliff at times. You’re sure? I believe in honesty in advertising. Okay. So there you are. Thoughts and feelings and sensations are coming and going, and there’s no one there. Okay? If I say to you, “That’s what it means to be present,” do you have a use for that?

Student: [Pause] Um, I have a—

Ken: What are you experiencing right now?

Student: [exhales loudly]

Ken: Yeah. Good. Stay there. Tom? And I mean, stay right there.

Tom: I find the use that you’re looking for, the ability to not be hidebound in the moment, allowing myself the avenues to look on the other side of the mirror, where he was having trouble looking and finding avenues on the other side of the mirror, and maybe behind the mirror, behind me, to adapt to whatever is happening in the moment that I’m looking at.

Ken: So I have a question for you. What if there is no mirror?

Tom: Well, I’ve never noticed there was a mirror. That’s my problem. I mean, what I’m seeing is: I was using his mirror metaphorically.

Ken: Okay.

Tom: And I’m able to encompass what’s spinning or floating or whatever, around in my head at the moment, and grabbing a useful bit to use for whatever it’s to be used for.

The metaphor of making fire

Ken: Okay. Got it. Thank you. Okay, let’s go back to our story. Now, this meditation that I led you through, is actually the four foundations of mindfulness, in a slightly different form. And, in the terms of our story, this is how you make fire. So, our friend, Nour–who was it that stole fire from the gods?—

Student: Prometheus.

Ken: Prometheus, he’s a bit like Prometheus.

Nour passed the secret to many groups of people. Some took advantage of the knowledge. Others drove him away thinking that he must be dangerous. Finally, a tribe before which he demonstrated became so panic-stricken that they set about and killed him, convinced that he was a demon.

The Story of Fire, Tales of the Dervishes, Idries Shah, p. 29

Well, Prometheus was punished by the gods for stealing the fire, but it was the same kind of thing. When a different way of experiencing things is introduced, people react in these ways. Some people have a use for it. Some take advantage of the knowledge. Others seek to get rid of it. They don’t trust it, they don’t understand it, they don’t understand how to use it. So they just drive it away. And some people’s reaction is so extreme that they kill the source of it. And we have a long history of that in human society. But the knowledge persists in some way. And then other things start to happen.

The first tribe, which had learned about fire, reserved the secret for their priests, who remained in affluence and power while the people froze.

p. 29

Now I think we all know of various societies in which this was true. And there’s still some societies today. There was a period when this was completely true of Judaism, before the destruction of the temple, in which there was a very small, privileged, priest caste that held the secrets. And when the Romans got totally fed up with everything that was going on in that part of the world, they resorted to their extreme solution: they dismantled the whole thing. They did the same thing to Carthage. They had to dismantle that city; and that led to the Jewish diaspora. Then a completely different form of Judaism developed, Rabbinical Judaism, because it was the only way it could survive without the central organizing structure of the temple.

Now my question is—this is portrayed as a problem—is there a reason why knowledge might be restricted to a privileged few? Joe.

Joe: You started by talking about Nour. And the first thing that came to my mind was ignorance, ignorance.

Ken: Oh, this is, N-O-U-R. Okay?

Joe: Being a dyslexic, it works for me. And what came to my mind was without fire, without light, without knowledge, and being without knowledge, being kept without knowledge, is power to some drives, nations, political parties, sex. And what we are working for is the ability to share our fire, knowledge, and light.

Ken: Fair enough. Thank you. But the question I’m asking: Is there a reason why knowledge might be restricted to a privileged few?

Student: Capacity.

Ken: Say a bit more, please.

Student: Each being has a different capacity to understand knowledge, according to their own development.

Ken: And what I’m inferring here, is that something unfortunate happens if that capacity is exceeded. So what happens?

Student: Choices one, two, three and four.

Ken: [Laughs] Okay. Thank you. We’ll go a bit further. Over here?

Student: I read the Lotus Sutra a while back and I’ve been puzzling about it ever since. And the part that puzzles me the most is this expedient means that the Buddha pronounced. And, that seems to me, that that’s exactly what you’re talking about—it seemed dishonest to me when I read it—is that you’re tricking people into doing the right thing. But I’ve sort of lived with it, and I see that you can only meet people where they are. You can’t make them any place else in spite of your best hopes, wishes, and aspirations. And so I guess that’s what I learned from that. And it seems to me, that’s kind of what you’re saying here.

Ken: I’m not sure what I’m saying yet. I’m just exploring this thing, but I got your point. Okay. Yeah. Over here. Lisa.

Lisa: Even if you can’t teach the knowledge, you could at least let people experience the fire.

Why restrict knowledge and practices?

Ken: Well, we’d like to think so. My training has been in the Tibetan tradition. There’s been a long history in the Tibetan tradition of knowledge and practices being restricted, and then opened up. And then other knowledge and practices being restricted, and then opened up. It’s gone on for centuries. And one of the questions—having been raised in a liberal democracy—was, “Why?”

And your comment about capacity, I think speaks to it, but it’s a little more complex, and it’s complex for two reasons. One, there is the nature of spiritual practice. And the second, there’s the nature of culture, and how a society is organized. And it’s quite difficult sometimes to unravel these.

[Sound issues]

In Buddhism, we talk about emptiness. And we talk about the two truths, what is ultimately true or absolute truth, and relative truth which I prefer to call what is apparently true.

[Sound issues]

It’s the details that count. I’m reading this book on animal translation, i can’t remember the author’s name, but she says “It’s all about noticing the details.” Where was I? Yes.

We have emptiness. Now, how many of you believe in emptiness?

Student: [Laughter] [Unclear]

Ken: No, no, this is not true. I’m sure. Probably at least 50% of you actually believe in emptiness in some way.

Student: What does that mean, “I believe in emptiness”?

Ken: You believe that there is this experience called emptiness which you can attain to somehow if you work hard enough in your practice.

Student: Oh that’s a different question.

Ken: That’s a different question, I’m told. Okay. So in that sense, how many of you believe in emptiness? Yeah, there you are.

A different way of looking at this, is that, at some point or other, you come to know—somehow, and I’m going to leave that, cause it’s a little mysterious—that there is absolutely no way of knowing what this experience is. And people say, “Well, that’s ridiculous, we experience all of this.” But what is this experience? And we have our nice Buddhist rendition of it: it’s form manifesting from emptiness. But other spiritual traditions have their version of it, different explanation, etc.

And you see things, you know, “How do you know that you aren’t a dream in the mind of God or a god?” And Zhuang Zhou, I think, I expressed it very nicely. “Last night, I dreamt that I was a butterfly, flying around the bushes, beautiful flowers, light, sunlight shining. It was lovely. And today I’m Zhuang Zhou. But how do I know that I’m Zhuang Zhou and I dreamt that I was a butterfly, and I’m not a butterfly dreaming that I’m Zhuang Zhou?”

And the fact is there is no way of knowing that. This is extraordinarily important. In Buddhism we have a long tradition of this that goes back at least to Nagarjuna. And if you want to express this in philosophical terms, it means that we cannot make any ontological statement. And we can’t verify any ontological statement. We can’t say, “It is this.” Now, if that’s the case, what is social interaction?

Sylvia: [Unclear]

Ken: Well, if you were a butterfly dreaming that you’re Sylvia, what is this life? Now, I have found consistently that whenever I’ve talked about emptiness, invariably, there’s one person in the room who starts to argue with me. Is this usually you?

Sylvia: It has been 20 years ago, but I’m over it now. [Laughter]

Ken: I’m so sorry to hear that. It would have been fun.

Sylvia: I was reminded … [unclear] last night how you and I used to spar, but I’m over it.

Ken: Well, when I first started teaching, I would trot out all the usual logical things like, wham bang, you know, knock them all down. And I observed that this was generally completely useless to the person who was raising the fears, the arguments and the objections. And then I began to observe that in most cases, this person was simply expressing something that was being felt in the whole group. So I started to pay attention to what were people feeling. Now, in the sutras it says that when Buddha talked about the perfection of wisdom, the arhats and the Pratyekabuddhas, the Shravakas, those are all the lesser vehicle practitioners, had nose bleeds, heart attacks, and coughed up blood. [Laughter] They found it so shocking because their world was being destroyed. Right?

Sylvia: Absolutely. I was really mad at you, too. [Laughter]

Ken: There’s a long line. [Laughter] Because it destroys the whole framework of social cohesion. It brings it into question, let’s say. So, what I came to appreciate was the level of fear. And it’s something that you just might make note of—any of you who are in group situations—when anybody starts to argue with you extremely rationally, it’s almost always an expression of fear. But you don’t recognize it as such immediately.

Now, when people are faced with that kind of fear, they tend to do one of two things. With the removal of the way that they understand their world, they either fall into despair and depression, or they say, “Then it doesn’t matter what I do.” And they become essentially amoral and self-serving, though this is usually justified as working from some kind of higher knowledge, or something like that. This is why the deep truths were usually restricted in earlier societies, because those things happened. And it was felt to be very, very dangerous.

Now, with the restrictions, people being who they are, then everything else that people have mentioned also happened. It became a source of power and privilege. And they found it was actually much better to hold on to the fire and not let other people be warmed. Because if they let other people be warmed, then other people would say, “Well, this isn’t such a big deal. We can use this knowledge and now function better in our lives.” So it became increasingly restricted and whole societies and priestly castes, etc., formed exactly out of that.

Now, you said something about meeting people where they are. This is very true, but it raises some interesting ethical questions. And there’s a story, I can’t remember where it’s from, it’s from one of the Theravadan sutras. A man comes home and sees that on the first floor of his house, a fire has started and his children are playing on the second floor. And of course he wants to get them out of the house. So he says to them, “Don’t bother going down the stairs, jump out of the window. I’ve got some wonderful toys for you to play with.” The children are interested in the toys. They do what their father says and everybody lives happily ever after. Is this ethical?

Student: It’s good for me.

Ken: [Laughs] But he didn’t tell them the truth. You see the problem?

Student: It’s like a Mark Twain story.

Ken: Which one?

Student: I think that was the Mark Twain story, it’s a dilemma. It’s the question of, if it’s appropriate, do you have to be truthful all the time? The mother’s on her death bed, and she hasn’t been told that her son’s a murderer. She thinks he’s just a virtuous person. And one of the neighbors is arguing for the case, she feels obligated to tell the mother just before she dies, that everything about her son is wrong. And the other is arguing that, why do it now?

Ken: I haven’t heard that one. Okay. That actually is a slightly different ethical dilemma.

Student: Just that whether the truth is the best means.

In search of truth?

Ken: Yeah. Well, this gets at one of the themes I wanted to touch on today. How many of you here are in search of truth? [Laughter]

Sylvia: You told me last time I was addicted to truth. So I have to raise my hand.

Ken: It’s very interesting seeing you after all these years.

Sylvia: Yeah just like when you were here in January, February, you informed me.

Ken: Okay. Still. So how many of you are interested in truth?

Student: Interested?

Ken: Well, you know—

Student: You keep changing the question.

Ken: Well, what did I say the first time?

Student: “In search of.”

Ken: In search of, yeah. How many of you here in search of truth? Okay. Hands up. Let me see you. You’re going to get off lightly. What are the rest of you here for? [Laughter] No, no, what are you in search of? This is really important. If you’re not in search of truth, why are you here?

Student: We had a long conversation about this last night. And a word that I actually wasn’t that familiar with, a Hindu word, is it lila? Where they were talking about the play? It was in search of that. Well, not even in search of it. Because when you first asked, are you in search of truth? I didn’t have any ring on that one. When you asked if I’m interested in truth, oh, that’s a whole other question to me, because I find it fascinating, the whole process of everything that we try to do, even the implements, and the stories, and the vanishings, and all of that.

Ken: But what are you in search of?

Student: I don’t know.

Ken: That’s fine, that’s fine.

Student: That’s not such a place I sit.

Ken: Okay, anybody else? That’s good. We’ll come back. Back here?

Student: Yeah. At this point of my life, I see it more of, as a compulsion. [Laughter] And so therefore it’s choiceless and there’s no more searching. But there’s something moving in its own way towards something that I can describe, but at different points in my life in different ways. But there’s a definite, there’s no choice in it.

Ken: Okay, this is very helpful. We’ve been working for about two hours right now. Let’s take a 10-15 minute break. And then I want to come back to this topic and explore it in some depth. Cause, it will be very helpful. Okay?