Wisdom is an interesting word

Ken: The topic was ideology and wisdom. Wisdom is a very interesting word in English. How many of you are wise?

Student: [Laughter] It depends on the situation.

Ken: Okay. How many of you know someone who is wise? Let’s do this with a different word. How many of you are promiscuous? [Laughter] How many of you know someone who is promiscuous? Both of these words are words that we never apply to ourselves. [Laughter] It raises the question, with respect to promiscuity, that the operational definition of promiscuity is someone who sleeps with more people than I do. [Laughter] What’s the operational definition of wisdom?

Student: Someone who knows more than I do.

Ken: Or who seems to handle life better, or something, than I do. There’s no sense of comparison built into the word, but the way the word actually functions, there’s that comparison. I just think that’s an interesting thing to note. Because I translate, I have to pay attention to these kinds of things.

When we use the word wisdom, we never think of ourselves actually cultivating it. We want to be wise—but because we never refer to ourselves as wise—wisdom is something that’s unattainable to us, just by the way the word is used in English. If I said “know-how,” how many of you have know-how in particular areas of your lives? Ah, see? No problem with that word, but wise? Very different? Okay.

Now what we’re talking about with respect to wisdom: When you’re able to rest and relax in whatever you’re experiencing at the time, what changes? Let’s do this as a kind of meditation. I want you to take a problematic issue in your lives. It doesn’t have to be catastrophically traumatic. That won’t be particularly helpful. But it should be something that’s got some juice in it, for you. Something that makes you uptight, or causes anxiety, or some form of disturbance. On a disturbance scale of zero to ten, we’re really looking for something in the six to eight range, not the nine or ten. You don’t have to go there today, another time. But something in the six to eight range. Five, maybe, but not less than that. Everybody got something? Okay.

A guided meditation

Ken: So we’re going to go through this in the same way that we did with the question. Let mind and body settle a little bit. [Pause] And then allow this question, or this issue, or this problem, to surface. And as it surfaces or as it comes to mind, just breathe in, experiencing it to the point that you’re able to without losing attention, without getting completely absorbed or swallowed by it. And then breathe out experiencing it. And breathe in, and out.

And as you do this, become aware of how your body reacts. Butterflies in the stomach, or maybe the sense of a towel being wrung in your guts. Maybe something happening in your throat, an ache, or a band of steel around your heart. There are all kinds of possibilities. Maybe tension in the shoulders or elsewhere in your body. Just notice how your body reacts. Breathing in, I experience my body reactions. Breathing out, I experience my body reactions. [Pause]

And notice all the emotions that come up with respect to this issue: anger, dismay, revulsion, anxiety and nervousness, jealousy, greed, pride, you know, all kinds of things. Breathing in, I experience the emotional reactions. Breathing out, I experience the emotional reactions. [Pause]

And notice, too, all the stories. “I don’t deserve this.” “How could this happen to me?” “How could they say something like that?” “The world isn’t fair.” “I’m never going to have anything to do with that person again.” “This is the end of my life as I know it.” All kinds of stories. You’ll have your own, I’m sure. Breathing in, I experience the stories. Breathing out, I experience the stories. Just letting the stories run, but you’re still sitting here, aware of the problem or issue, aware of your body, aware of the emotions, aware of the stories, aware of the whole mess.

So just sit there, and see if it is possible—I know this is somewhat disturbing for you, because I asked you to choose something somewhat disturbing, but see if it is possible—to find a way to rest in that experience, to rest with this situation in your life. Rest doesn’t mean you’re saying it’s okay, but it’s something that’s in your life. Can’t really get away from it. Being agitated is not terribly helpful. Is there a way you can just rest with it?

And that invites a deeper exploration of how you’re relating to it. You may find that adjusting your physical posture a little bit in some way helps you to rest with it. You may find that opening to certain emotions helps you to rest with it. You may find that relying on a different story, different interpretation, helps you to rest with it. Don’t force any of this stuff, just explore. And if you find a place to rest, just rest there for a moment or two. There’s the problem and there’s rest. And somehow the two are present together. [Pause]

And as you rest there in that calm, explore the possibility of relaxing, being at ease there. Now you may find as soon as you start to relax, you feel everything more intensely. So there’s an edge to work there, carefully. But see if you can actually relax and be with this problem. Just explore that. [Pause]

And see if you can find a way to experience this problem, or this issue, and be at peace at the same time. And given the very limited timeframe we’re working in here, maybe you can just glimpse the possibility of that. Maybe you can go further, maybe you actually experience that, but it may be just glimpsing the possibility today. [Pause] And so you let yourself move in that direction, experiencing the problem and being at peace at the same time. Perhaps it’s unimaginable. Okay. Then that’s what you’re experiencing now. [Pause]

[Gong]

Student meditation experiences

Ken: Okay. What was your experience here?

Eleanor: At first, my shoulders stiffened up and I could feel a lot of tension. And gradually my body relaxed more with the out-breath than with the in-breath, the in-breath was much sharper, even to the very end I could still feel a little bit of tension, but my body completely relaxed on the out-breath.

Ken: And your relationship with the problem or issue?

Eleanor: My relationship? I’ll have to see.

Ken: Yes. But during this period, do you notice any difference between … I’m looking for a before and after thing here?

Eleanor: Oh yes. It seemed less acute.

Ken: Less acute.

Eleanor: As the session wore on.

Ken: Did your perception of it change in any way?

Eleanor: Yes, actually, I think it did. I think I felt less troubled by it. It seemed to be, at the end it was perhaps less of a challenge.

Ken: Less of a challenge.

Eleanor: Less of a challenge.

Ken: So you can see how to proceed with it.

Eleanor: Exactly.

Ken: Okay. Very good. Anybody else?

Tom: I will go one step further from what Eleanor said. When I envisioned the problem that I was envisioning, and I worked on it as you said—in, out, in, out—after a while, it just evaporated and consequently, hopefully, in the future it’ll be gone from my psyche.

Ken: So you have this problem and now you feel you don’t really have to do anything about it. Knock on wood. Okay. Good. Anybody else? Gita?

Gita: The problem that I was looking at gives me a feeling of helplessness. And I found that I was actually able to rest feeling completely helpless in the face of this problem. So the problem is still there, and it’s still the same, but it’s very different to be able to just say, “I’m completely helpless here.” And to be able to rest with that.

Ken: It takes away a lot of fight, doesn’t it?

Gita: Mm-hmm.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. Anybody else? This is, for my purposes, this is very helpful. Because it’s all about me, you see. [Laughter] Just so there’s no confusion here, you know? In each of the three responses, can you recognize an element of wisdom? In Eleanor’s response, when she relaxed, she saw a way forward. And Tom’s experience, it was, “I really don’t need to worry about this, I don’t need this one to stay around. Right now it doesn’t. Maybe it’ll come back, but I see that I don’t actually need to do anything about this.” And then Gita’s, here’s a situation. And, “Oh, I can’t do anything about this.”

Now, one of the things that I’ve found, both through my own experience, but also working with students and people over the years, is that when we see and accept what is true, mind and body both relax. Even if what we see is painful, mind and body both relax. So, in Gita’s case, if you’d been talking with a friend about this, your friend might’ve said to you, “You know, when I listen to everything you have to say, I don’t think you can do anything else.” And if you could take that in, you’d go, “You’re right”, and you’d be where you are right now. Like, “Okay, nothing I can do here. Don’t like it. But that’s how it is.”

Opening to experience and being at peace

Ken: So these are all different elements of wisdom. And there are other, many other aspects to wisdom. How does this come about? This comes about by opening and joining with the actual experience. Doesn’t come from thinking about it, though for some people, thinking about it is how they join with the experience. It comes from actually joining with the experience, opening to it so you experience it completely.

And going back to the story about fire, this is how you make fire. This is what spiritual practice is actually about. I asked the question, “How many of you want to be at peace with your life?” This is how you find peace. You find peace by learning how to experience whatever’s arising and be at peace at the same time. That’s a skill that requires some capacity, requires a certain amount of willingness, but it’s something that we can develop. Some people more than others, there’s always a bit of talent around these things, but it’s very, very doable in most cases. Well, I don’t want to say all because there can be some really gnarly stuff. But in terms of the fire story, that’s how you make fire.

Now, when you do this, as we heard these three people describe, there’s an experience of an opening, okay? It may not be the opening you had in mind, but there’s an experience of an opening, which changes. And one way to look at wisdom, and to look at being awake, or whatever word we want to call it, is being able to open to the experience of something, so that something else opens. A way opens. And that way may be: “This is just stuff, I can let it go,” or, “I actually see a way forward,” or, “There isn’t anything to do.” Those are all possible openings. Many, many other possibilities, of course.

Now, ideally, we leave it there and go on to the next thing. But here’s what usually happens. First, it was an opening, then a memory. Because when you’ve experienced an opening like that, how many of you like to go back to it? How successful are you in going back to it? You can’t go back. During that dzogchen retreat I was telling you about, I had certain experiences. I actually can remember them quite vividly. And I can’t go back there. There is no way. Nothing is ever the same, twice.

T. S. Eliot writes about that in Four Quartets. We get on a train, we’re a different person when we get off. Simply because of the passage of time. You can never go back. So, first there’s an opening; then there’s a memory. And we try to hold on to it. But we can’t hold on to it, so now it becomes an idea.

And we see this in the course, in the history of religions all the time. There’s an opening. Somebody remembers it, tries to convey it to another student. They call it something: buddha nature. It’s a word that means something to the person who uses it, but to the student it’s an idea. What does the student do with it? Thinks about it. We have this wonderful koan from the Chinese: does a dog have buddha nature? To which the reply in Chinese is mu. Now, mu basically means no or nothing or no thing.

Personally, I think if you’re to translate this into colloquial English, it would be like, you’re going to one of the great masters and saying, “Does a dog have buddha nature?” And he goes, “Haven’t got a clue. No idea.” Now, if you were to go to one of the great masters and say, “Does a dog have buddha nature?” and he says, “I’ve got no idea.” What would you do? Francesco?

Francesco: I know my dog has buddha nature. [Laughter]

Ken: You know your dog has buddha nature.

Francesco: I’ve seen it.

What is Buddha nature?

Ken: May I offer an observation or a hypothesis? It may be a way you interpret something you see. Because I have a question. You can ask me. You can ask me, “What is buddha nature?”

Francesco: What is buddha nature?

Ken: I haven’t got a clue. [Laughter] And I’m not joking. I have given many, many talks over the years about buddha nature. I have many, many very good replies. But if you ask me, “What is buddha nature?” I don’t have a clue … anymore. One time I did know, but now I don’t.

Francesco: Can I tell you my interpretation of it?

Ken: It’s your interpretation of buddha nature? Is that what you’re going to talk about? I don’t want to go there right now. If we have time at the end, we’ll come back to it, but I can’t promise, okay? Because I’m on a roll here, you see, and it’s all about me, anyway. [Laughter]

First it was an opening, and then a memory, and then an idea. Unnoticed, It became a belief. That may have some relevance here. How many—no, nobody’s going to answer this in the affirmative right after that. But I’ll just say it: How many of you believe in buddha nature? [Laughter] You see? By the time it becomes a belief, it’s quite removed from the experience.

It doesn’t stop there. It then becomes an ideology. There were serious schisms, still are, in Buddhism about buddha nature. I have a good friend who’s a Theravadan teacher. And when I say some things, he looks at me and says, “Oh, you Mahayana essentialists.” The first time he said that to me, I just had to laugh, because the Mahayana people are always beating up the Hinayana people as not having emptiness, etc., etc., etc.

And I discovered that the Theravadans have been beating up the Mahayanaists for centuries, too. “Oh, you people believe in buddha nature. But we know there’s no buddha nature because there’s no ground to anything. How can there be a buddha nature? You’re just allowing the concept of soul to sneak back into Buddhism. But that’s not the true Buddhism, we have the true Buddhism.” So beliefs become ideologies.

Encounters with different belief systems

Ken: Now something very important happens here. What do you experience when you encounter someone who doesn’t share your belief? Yes. Say a word about that.

Student: Me?

Ken: Yes. Your expression spoke volumes, I’d like you to translate it. What happens when you encounter someone who doesn’t share your beliefs?

Student: I feel shock.

Ken: Shock.

Student: Shock. Just for a second.

Ken: And then?

Student: Well, then I try to go into acceptance.

Ken: Ah, so something happened between the shock and the acceptance.

Student: Softening.

Ken: No.

Student: No?

Ken: No. Radical hardening. [Laughter] Which you’re working really hard to undo with acceptance, but you wouldn’t have to if that hardening hadn’t taken place.

Student: Oh yeah, the shock was hardening is what you said.

Ken: Yeah, so there’s the shock and then there’s [vocalization expressing hardening]

Student: Right.

Ken: They just became the enemy.

Student: Yes.

Ken: [Finger snap] Like that. Now, this is one of the central problems in the world today. The West is a little further ahead than much of the rest of the world in terms of: How do you live in a society where people have fundamentally different beliefs? You know how the West came to that?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: No, I’m talking about Western Europe here. It was really before America got settled. America was being settled at the time. You have to go back to a period of time called the Thirty Years War, which followed the Reformation. Martin Luther’s reformation of Catholic doctrinal principles had pervaded Germany, and France was a Catholic country. Now there were various economic reasons, as there always are for wars. But those countries went into a 30 year war, which became polarized completely around Catholic versus Protestant. They couldn’t tolerate each other’s belief.

There was a similar thing that went on in England with the civil war, the War of the Roses, which was bad enough. But the Thirty Years War on the continent was horrific. It’s estimated that between a third and a half of Germany’s population died. And the war only ended because both sides were exhausted. They said, “We can’t fight about this anymore. We don’t have anything left to fight with, we’ve run out of people to kill.” And they said, “I guess we’ll just have to learn to live together.” That’s how difficult it is for societies with different beliefs to come to terms.

We’re seeing a similar war being waged now between beliefs in certain things, and old traditional beliefs and old ways approach. Neither are wrong in and of themselves. Some of those ways of life have existed for centuries. But now, because of the globalization, things like that, these different belief systems have come into unavoidable contact. Before, they would just avoid contact. And the result is war, which will probably go on for quite a long time until both sides get exhausted, and say, “Okay, learn to live together in a different way.”

The difference between belief and ideology

Ken: This is the unhappy story of human history. This is why I wanted to talk about it a bit, because that’s just at the level of belief. Something quite different starts to happen at the level of ideology. Because at the level of ideology, the belief has hardened to the perspective that you have the right answer, that your way is the right way. Your way is the way the world should be.

And one of the products of the Age of Enlightenment was the emergence of the justification of the slaughter of people who didn’t share your belief in how the world should be. This was pioneered by the Jacobins in France, and reached its full flowering in the Stalin and the fascist regimes of Hitler, and Mussolini, and so forth, and the communist regimes of Lenin and Stalin, etc. Where you could kill people in order to make the world better, and produces such idiocies as, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” This is ideology speaking.

And the difference between belief and ideology, is that in belief, even though you experience that shock—and it was wonderful what you offered here, because the first thing you did was trying to accept—there’s still an element of compassion, of acknowledging the experience of the other, in belief. In ideology, that has closed. And that’s what allows the justification that you can remove these people from society, do whatever you want to them, and torture and things like that. And that’s why, in my view, ideology is so dangerous. And whenever I run into people with very, very fixed opinions and views, I get very, very careful, because the more fixed those views are, the greater is the potential for violence.

So what I wanted to do here was to trace how wisdom, when it is not something living, something that is coming up in each moment, and because of that, unrecoverable. It’s each moment, you can’t go back. But when you try to hold onto it, there’s just this slippery slope of: a memory, an idea, a belief, and we usually don’t notice that transition to an ideology, to a casus belli, a reason for war. And I’ve used very dramatic examples. But we don’t have to go to international affairs.

How many of you have experienced not being on speaking terms with your parents or your siblings? [Laughter] Casus belli. You know? Okay?

The value of compassion

Ken: Now, the core of this is compassion. I came to this through a few different routes. The three principle ones: After reading Brian Victoria’s book, Zen at War, in which he describes how many of the very highly regarded Zen teachers fully supported the completely bogus notion that the Japanese army was the instrument of karma—which was completely analogous to the crusades being regarded as the instrument of God’s will, equally as bogus—I asked myself the question, “What is the quality that allows us to see the problems in our own culture when we don’t have the opportunity to step out of it?”

One of the great advantages of stepping out of one’s own culture is you get to see your own culture through different eyes. That’s why living for a while in another country is just a really good thing to do, if you have that opportunity. But historically there have always been people who have never left their home country, who could see the shortcomings of the culture. Suzuki Roshi was one of them. Suzuki Roshi was a pacifist during the war. He did not support the war effort, and he was judged harshly. Before he came to America, he was judged as a stupid country priest, and was not particularly high ranking in the Japanese hierarchy. He was very low ranking actually.

But he came to America, and we all know what he accomplished here, which was quite extraordinary. So he was a product of his own culture who could see the shortcomings of it. What is the quality? And I realized it wasn’t insight. It was compassion, because compassion puts you in touch with suffering, wherever it is, even if it is caused by your own culture. And we see this in Sub-Saharan Africa today, in the work against female genital mutilation, and so forth. We see it, it used to be the case in many Islamic cultures, where you had people who could see things very, very clearly. And for long periods of Islam’s history, they had multi-cultural societies, and actually governed them fairly well.

And a friend of my mother’s in England, I would really have liked to have known her when she was young, she was quite remarkable. But she said to my mother once, “If you ever commit murder, come here.” And it was just that flowering of love and compassion. She was an old Yorkshire woman, but she could just see things how they were. So that was one strand. Compassion is essential. It’s the essential quality to be able to see the suffering created by your own culture. And we can see the absence and the presence of that in American culture, in all kinds of different quarters.

The second strand was Karen Armstrong’s book, The Battle for God, which is a very detailed history of fundamentalism in the Abrahamic traditions. And in that, along with other writers—John Gray, who’s at the London School of Economics, and approaches things from a completely different point of view but—comes to the same conclusion: that the definitive spiritual quality is compassion, because it puts you in touch with what the other person is experiencing.

And the third strain was my experience of a completely disastrous retreat a few years ago. I thought I’d do a few days retreat, because I wanted to revisit a practice that I was going to be teaching that summer. And somebody opened up the gates of hell, and let them into my cabin. I couldn’t do any kind of meditation for the five days. It was absolutely impossible. It was so devastating, I really figured I should give up teaching completely after that. As it turned out, I had arranged to meet an old colleague in the town, just outside the place where I’d done the retreat. So this was rather fresh on my mind when I met him. So we sat down and caught up a little bit. Then he said, “How are you Ken?” I said, “Well, I got a little bit of a problem right now.” I described it. Now, this is wonderful. You know what he did? Any guesses?

Student: He laughed?

Ken: He laughed. He laughed long and he laughed hard. When I finally picked him up and put him back on his chair, [laughter] he gave me a wonderful line, which he had learned from Lama Yeshe: “The only reason we seek to know emptiness is so that we can be compassionate.”

So when I had this request from Joanne, “How does compassion help you understand mind nature?” it’s actually the reverse. When you have an experience of buddha nature, or mind nature, or emptiness, or the perfection of wisdom, or original purity, or ordinary knowing, or awareness itself, or … Shall I go on? You get the idea. There’s 50 billion names for this.

You know you are not a thing. That’s very problematic. Because you’ve been going on through your life, not sure of who you are necessarily, but pretty confident you are someone, and something. And then suddenly find out you aren’t. Now, that’s very disturbing to a lot of parts of us. A lot of parts of us just get up and they stage a rebellion right there. But It does create some interesting possibilities. It means you are free to respond to any situation, in whatever way that situation requires.

This is what I feel skillful means, or as your translation is, expedient means. I don’t like the term expedient there, it’s too manipulative, carries that thing. I don’t really like the translation skillful means either, but we won’t get into the translation problem now. Because when you have that quality, or when you know that in your own experience—and you can say that the whole point is to experience that you don’t exist as you think you do—then it becomes possible to respond to anything, in the way that’s appropriate for that situation.

In what Gita offered in this reflection, she saw that there was nothing to do except accept the situation as it is. That’s the response. and you can be at peace with that. In other situations, you can move in and do something. But it’s no longer about addressing the discomfort in oneself. It’s about seeing how things are out of balance, and what you can do to move them into balance, or towards balance, at least. So in this view, emptiness is the means to compassion, which kind of turns things around from the rhetoric that one usually hears.

How religions avoid compassion

Ken: As I was engaging these reflections, I found that I came to something else. Every one of the world’s great religions screws up when it comes to compassion. Every one of them has their own distinctive way of avoiding compassion. How does Hinduism avoid compassion?

Student: The caste system.

Ken: Bliss. I’m talking about the spiritual practice. That would be a very interesting thing to look at the social institutions involved, because you get the same kind of thing coming out of it. But I’m looking at the emphasis in the spiritual practice. Hinduism avoids compassion by focusing on bliss. How does Christianity avoid compassion?

Student: Righteousness?

Ken: I think that’s being a little unkind, I would say devotion, devotion to Christ. How does Judaism avoid compassion? I had to ask a Jewish friend of mine this, but he answered it in precisely one millisecond.

Student: Guilt.

Ken: No, there has to be an actual spiritual practice. Guilt isn’t much of a spiritual practice.

Student: I was raised with that as a practice.

Ken: Yeah. Well, you and Catholics, you know?

Student: [unclear]

Ken: Very close, debate over the Torah. Now there’s an extraordinary amount of wisdom in Judaism. But what did they love to do? Endless debates over the minutiae of the interpretation of the Torah. You know, volumes and volumes and volumes for centuries. How does Buddhism avoid compassion? How does Buddhism avoid compassion?

Student: Emptiness?

Ken: Emptiness, non-self, etc. Let’s go in that direction.

Student: You mean when it turns into nihilism?

Ken: No, it just gets you, as … [unclear], you think that emptiness and non-self is the answer to everything. It’s not, it’s the means to the answer. Compassion is the answer. You follow?

Student: I thought they were … [unclear].

Ken: Oh, in theory, yes. But as Yogi Berra wonderfully said, “In theory there’s no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is.” Because if you look at where people actually put their time and energy, it’s the rare individual who puts their time and energy into compassion. They put far more time and energy into emptiness.

This goes back to Atisha. Atisha had three great students—I think I’ve got it right, and I can never remember their names—they’re in The Great Path of Awakening. And on one occasion, he asked his attendant “What’s student A doing?” And by this time, all of these were notable teachers in their own right. “So what’s student A doing?”

“Oh, he’s giving a lecture on the abhidharma.”

“Okay. Very good. What’s student B doing?”

“Oh, he’s supervising the construction of a new monastery.”

“Oh, very good. What’s student C doing?”

“Student C is sitting in the corner of a room with a towel wrapped around his head, sobbing his eyes out.”

And Atisha took off his hat, and bowed in that direction and said, “He’s cultivating compassion.”

Compassion never subscribes to ideology

Ken: So, a couple of points to wrap up. I have to speak individually because each of you have to decide this for yourselves. Among the more useful questions I’ve found in practice is, “How can I experience this and be at peace at the same time?” If you engage that question, and engage it deeply with any of the tools that we’ve discussed today, or with any of the other tools that you know—yidam practice, taking and sending, mahamudra, etc., etc., any of these tools—it’s possible you will come to an experience of resting, of being at peace, in which any sense of “I” as a separate entity in the way that we were discussing, vanishes. If you’re able to open and embrace that experience—which is different from holding onto it, by the way—you may discover that you come to a point of view of the world, that there absolutely is no enemy.

And that raises the possibility of being able to respond to whatever arises in your own experience out of the fusion of compassion and awareness, because as someone said, “Aren’t they the same?” Yes, they are, at a very, very deep level. Compassion is how awareness expresses itself. So, as you’ll see described in the traditional texts, in sufficiently convoluted language that it makes it very difficult to understand, compassion and awareness are like the sun and the rays of the sun. Can’t separate the two. And as long as you have compassion in your heart, then you will never subscribe to ideology.

Joanne, is there a copy of Wake Up to Your Life here, in the bookstore? Oh, that’s fine. Yes. Great. So I want to close with this. Some of you may have heard me read it before, so you’ll just have to put up with me doing it again. But it’s all about me, so I don’t have to worry about that. And for those of you who are interested, this is on page 300. It’s a quotation:

I only ever cared about the man. I never gave a fig for the ideologies, unless they were mad or evil. I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling. I believe that almost any political system operated with humanity can work. And the most benign of systems without humanity is vile. The trick, I suppose, is to find the system that gives the least leeway to the rogues. The guarantee of our virtue is our compassion. And if you allow this institution or any other to steal your compassion away, wait and see what you become. The man is everything. And if your calling is anything, you will always prefer the man to the collective, because the collective is humanity’s lowest. And the collective is most often spoken for by people who are nothing without it.

The Secret Pilgrim, narrated by John le Carré on Books on Tape (out of print)

Any guesses where that’s from? Yeah, you know. Any guesses? It’s from a novel by John le Carré. George Smiley’s speech at his retirement from the British secret service. Not exactly the setting you’d expect to find something like that. I heard this when I was listening to Books on Tape. And I went back into the book. I couldn’t find it in the book, so I had to transcribe it from the tape. I was told afterwards it actually is in the book. I just didn’t find it. I find it an extraordinarily powerful way of saying, “This is what’s important.”

So that’s what I’d like to leave you with. It’s 4:30. If you can stay a little bit longer, what I would like to do in terms of closing, is hear from each of you one thing that you’ve taken out of today. I’m not looking for expressions of appreciation, I’m looking for what you have taken from anything we’ve discussed or worked with today. Just go around and you can start.

Student feedback

Student: I’ve always had trouble with the term compassion because it tends to make me feel guilty, like I should be doing something that I’m not doing. And this has given me a different way to think about it.

Ken: Okay.

Student: I think that I can approach a co-worker with some compassion tomorrow. Thanks.

Student: I can use it directly in the treatment that I have with kids.

Student: About letting the breath carry me, and some sort of equilibrium to being open to them, and me sharing the moment in an experience, not as self and other.

Ken: Okay.

Student: I think just the reminder and practice of being present in the moment and experiencing that. What was your last line? How can I experience this and be at peace at the same time? That kind of thing.

Student: I’ll be taking a variety of practices that you taught today.

Student: I liked sitting with the catastrophic moment, and realizing that I actually can do that.

Student: I’ve been struggling to understand emptiness, and now I realize it doesn’t really matter, because I feel lots of compassion.

Ken: [Laughs]

Student: So I’m just going to leave the emptiness alone and let it come.

Student: I can transform a problem without destroying the person involved ahead of time. And it allows me to actually come to terms with the issues rather than the emotions.

Student: I think a very useful part for me was that a part of me can feel angry and another part can feel comfortable, or feel sad, but it’s not all of me.

Ken: Yeah, you can have all of these different things at the same time. Yeah.

Student: I really liked your drawing of the five buckets.

Ken: [Laughs]

Student: I got a lot out of that. I don’t have a clue what Buddha nature is either. Thank you.

Ken: [Laughs] Okay. That’s fine.

Student: A number of things helped me recognize a certain pattern that was affecting my motivation for practice. So I think it’s been rekindled a bit.

Student: The ability to open further the doors of the mind.

Student: I like the idea of being able to bring up the experiences that I never felt before, and that those can be released. And I think I can work with that and make that work for me.

Ken: Okay.

Student: I think I felt fairly stuck when I came here. And I think applying slowing down, keeping it simple, and applying compassion toward myself and my practice will help open things up again.

Student: I think for me it’s that, confirming that what it really is about is to just keep opening to my experience from moment to moment, and just be with it, just be with it and open to it. And that answers that question that I asked about how to be at peace with the world, and be in the world rather than in a mountain cave. So thank you very much.

Student: I found the point at the very end, about how emptiness is a pathway to compassion, very kind of startling and very helpful.

Ken: Right here.

Student: I found your model of the parts of “I” useful. It’s something that would be very practical to be able to recognize and catch myself, not be totally caught up in that.

Student: I had a moment of being able to feel the constrictions and discomfort, and at the same time the peace that was surrounding it.

Student: This concept of openness, I hope is a little bit more embodied instead of a concept. And it feels like it is awareness and it is compassion. It’s two sides of one coin. I don’t need to divide them out.

Student: I liked the most your example of Freud and your example of things that he said, because you have all those selves popping out all over. All I can do is laugh about it. [Laughs] And to me, what better teaching? Thank you.

Student: I think the most important part was, how to just be with my compassion, you know, when I can’t do anything to better the situation, but how to just be in this.

Student: Actually two things, just being able to be open to difficult feelings with the possibility of being peaceful at the same time, and also your diagram of all of the different nuclei. As someone said, “challenging the self.” I mean, where is the self? That’s very powerful for me.

Ken: Okay. Thank you all very much. I don’t think there’s anything else. [Applause]

A couple of things. I have two things that I’m doing on the internet, which may be of interest to some of you. One is a monthly seminar on teaching for people who are either teaching or interested in teaching. We just had one last month. We had a few technical problems, but I think we ironed those out. You were on that one weren’t you, Janet? Yeah. And so the next one I think is at 11:00 on May 9th. If you go to the website, you’ll see A Never Ending Journey, because that’s how I find teaching is. So you can just register for that if you’re interested. A second program, which we also have a second session on, is called Probing Presence Online. And it’s about a number of tools that I developed for students in LA who wanted to be able to get together and discuss their practice.

But what happens in that kind of situation is that people are very uncomfortable with one person becoming the teacher, even if it’s only for a little while. So this is a way that they figured out to interact with each other without anybody moving into the teacher, or anybody being pushed into the student role. It’s helping each other move deeper into their experience and understanding of practice. So, we’re talking about those tools. And, again, I think the next one’s May 23rd, so if that’s of interest.

The website is unfetteredmind.org or dot com. They both go to the same place. And there are other programs that I have up there: a retreat in May, and a retreat in the summer. If you’re interested in the summer retreat, you gotta register by tomorrow because the deadline is April 30th, but I’ll be figuring out what we’re doing with that retreat on Tuesday. So you can read the information there.

And the last item, so I don’t bore you completely: Wake Up to Your Life, which is this book, which you open at your own risk. As Dorothy Parker once said of a book, “This is not a book to be taken lightly. This is a book to be hurled across the room with considerable force.” But please, if you do that, make sure there’s nobody in your line of fire, because it’s a big book. But there’s now a recording of the whole book, which I did with a student of mine who has a studio in LA, and it’s a two CD set. And you say, “How did you get all that onto two CDs?” We cheated. They’re MP3 files. And a lot of people have told me that they find it much easier to understand the book, to understand what was written, when they hear me speak it, as opposed to reading it. So there are some, I brought some CD sets with me because they’re easy to carry, and they’re available outside. If you want to download it directly into your computer you can do that by going to cdbaby dot com.

Student: What’s that?

Ken: CDBaby.com, which is actually a music site. We may not have made the right choice, but there it is. And just type in the title of the book and it’ll take you to the page for that. So you can either do it from the CDs or from CDBaby and put it on your iPod and get thoroughly bored. Okay.

[NOTE: Now available HERE]

So anyway, that’s about it. Thank you very much for your attention. It’s been a pleasure to be with you. And I very much appreciate the level of interest, and also your willingness to engage in questions. I’ve been with some groups and it can be very difficult to get this kind of interaction. And it’s very important—and I’ll just say this as a final note—it’s very, very important for you to interact with your teacher, or with other people, about your practice. And the reason that it’s important is that if you never interact with anybody about your practice, basically what you’re doing is you’re taking everything into your world and you never know whether you actually know anything or not. But when you interact with someone and they ask you a question, particularly if your teacher asks you a question, then you’ve got to stand in what you actually know. And a lot of people don’t want to do that because they find that intimidating. But that’s where the real learning takes place.

If you look at sutras, every sutra is a question and answer period with Buddha. And what is happening in the sutras is that interaction is taking place, and through that interaction, the student’s actual understanding and experience is being refined by the interaction. So, true learning only takes place when there’s that two way interaction. If you’re content just to take things in, you think you can do it that way, just do your meditation, etc., etc., you’re missing something really, really important. So I encourage you to make life hell for your teacher, because it’s the best thing you can do for you. Okay? Palden will kill me, but that’s too bad.