A course on mahamudra

Ken: Tonight, we will begin a six week course on mahamudra. A couple of practical points. First, we have a very wide range of experience in the room, from people who are really just beginning a meditation practice, to people who’ve been working with this, and other kinds of meditation, for many years, like 10, 15 years. One may ask, is this a good idea? And actually it is a good idea, because particularly in the question and answer periods—which we’ll have quite regularly—when new people hear more experienced people struggling with the same problems that they’re experiencing, it’s either totally depressing or totally inspiring. [Laughter] And then the other piece is that it’s always good to have a few people with very little meditation experience or exposure to this in the room because they keep everybody honest. They ask the questions that everybody thinks they already know the answers to. So, this is very good.

Second thing, is that we’re recording all of this. We make the recordings of these classes available on the internet through our website. And we’ve received enough feedback by this point that people very much appreciate it. And one of the things they really appreciate about it is that they get to hear the actual interaction between me and any of you who are actually asking a question—which is something that you don’t often get, the interaction—and how various meditation points are brought out in that interaction. So, I want you to know that so that you’re aware of the fact that this is going to be recorded, and potentially anybody in the world could be listening to this. Is that sufficiently daunting?

A third point connected with this is that while listening to these recordings isn’t the exactly the same—well it isn’t the same at all as being here. For those of you who do choose to listen to this, we would not be adverse to receiving some donations to defray the costs of actually recording it. You can make that through the website also.

Translating the translations in teaching texts

Ken: Now, the two books that we’re using for this are, this one called Clarifying the Natural State by Dakpo Tashi Namgyal, which is readily available through Amazon and other sources. And the second book, that summarizes the first book, is Lamp of Mahamudra by Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, which has been around for a good 15 years or so, but I’ve learned recently it is not available anymore. Is it out of print? Yeah, okay. I’m a little surprised at that because I know some other people are retranslating it. So, there are some copies available on eBay.

There are many, many books on mahamudra, a number of the very important ones have been translated into English. The quality of the translations varies widely, as we’ll see, just going through these two books. And part of the purpose of this course is really to translate the translations so that they are more accessible.

There are a lot of reasons why the translations vary widely in quality, but also why, in English, this material can sometimes be a little difficult to approach. And that is—to go back to the phrase many of you have heard me say before— not only is the fact that they’re written in a language which is completely different from English in every way, but it’s also a form of practice, an approach to practice, which doesn’t have any real correlates with material in spiritual practice in the West; so it’s very different than that. And finding the vocabulary in English is very difficult in some cases.

The third reason is that we’re working with a tradition of teaching which has been practiced for … well actual Buddhism has been practiced for 2,500 years, which is a long time by most standards. And the actual teachings we’re going to be working with—the formulation in terms of mahamudra—goes back at least 1500 years, back to the early years of the common era. I think one can trace the actual mahamudra formulations back to about 300 CE. Even if you would want to do it in relatively modern terms the texts—which I used in retreat—most of them are written 1,000 years ago.

The Lamp of Mahamudra was written relatively recently, that is about 100 years ago. This book goes back, I’m not sure when Tashi Namgyal’s dates are, but this book goes back 300 or 400 years anyway. So, this is not new stuff. And one might ask, what relevance does it have for us today? Well, as I was saying, part of the difficulty here is one’s dealing with things that have been practiced for many, many centuries.

And as my friend and colleague Stephen Batchelor says in the beginning of one of his books—I’m paraphrasing this a bit—”In its institutional forms, Buddhism has provided very powerful answers to questions of the spirit, but sometimes the power of those answers overwhelms the stammering voice which asks the questions.” And one of the things that I want to bring out in our work together in the next six weeks, is the relevance of these teachings to whatever stammering voice may be asking some questions inside you.

The importance of your own spiritual questions

Ken: And if I can digress a little bit, I’ve been trained in actually three different traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. One which was probably the least known—and that was very dear to my teacher’s heart and it’s also dear to mine—is the Shangpa tradition, which started in Tibet in the 11th century with an individual by the name of Khyungpo Naljor, who at the age of 57, took what was then extremely perilous journey to India. And why? Well, he’d been trained very thoroughly and had some renown as a Bon priest in Tibet—Bon being the native religion of Tibet. But he had not been able to answer his own spiritual questions.

And so he started to study with a dzogchen teacher—which is another of the direct awareness traditions—and studied dzogchen and became quite proficient at dzogchen, but still had not answered his spiritual questions. And he then decided he would go to India, but his parents said, “Who is going to take care of us?” So, he put those plans aside and went to study with a mahamudra teacher; and that didn’t work out.

So, he studied with another mahamudra teacher who after few years said, “Well, you know everything that I know.”

And Khyungpo Naljor said to himself, “Well, that means you know nothing, because I know nothing either.”

So, here was a person who had studied all of these different, very profound contemplative traditions, but had not found the answers to his own questions. So, at the age of 57, he set off for India and studied with what actually turned out to be 150 different teachers—which arguably the two most important were Niguma and Sukhasiddhi, two women from which he received lines of transmission—which did actually answer his spiritual questions, or through which he was able to.

So, one of the things that I want all of you to do is to consider—and consider very deeply and carefully—what are the questions that the stammering voice inside you is asking? And bring that up in our discussions, in our Q and A periods, because if the work we do together here doesn’t speak to those questions, then what’s the point? And I’m sorry, I’m not a mind reader. I will not be able to know what those questions are without you finding them. And from my own experience, it can be difficult to know what they are ourselves. We have to listen very, very deeply. And part of the purpose of meditation practices is to be able to learn to listen to that kind of depth, so that we actually know what we’re looking for. Because we can’t find it until we know what we’re looking for.

The view of mahamudra

Ken: So, there are two things that I want to do this evening, and see how I do in time covering this. The first is to take a look at the section, which I asked you to read from Lamp of Mahamudra, the section on the view, which is translated into somewhat highly formal and somewhat inaccessible English. And on the basis of that, then in the latter part of this evening, to take a look at the basis of basic practice in mahamudra. Now we’re going to go through this material extremely quickly.

There are, I think, three people here this evening that studied the Lamp of Mahamudra with me, about 15 years ago. Is that right, Chuck? And we spent about two and a half years studying this one book. Granted, we were only meeting monthly; we weren’t meeting weekly. That did have the advantage that people could actually do a little meditation practice between that. Didn’t always as I recall, but they did have the opportunity to. And we can go through it very slowly, very thoroughly. Basically I worked from the Tibetan and retranslated the whole text. I haven’t had time, but I will dig out the Tibetan for this.

Let’s begin with the view, and see if I can say something about this that may be helpful to you. The Tibetan tradition has been around for about 1,200 years. The teachings that we’re going to work with tonight entered the Tibetan tradition about 1,000 years ago. Yeah, just a little under 950. That’s a long time. And Tibet was relatively isolated from the world, certainly in the last few centuries. Until the Chinese invasion, was completely isolated. One of the consequences of that is it became a closed system, because it didn’t have to speak outside to any outsiders. And a closed self-referential system could be very difficult to understand. So, part of my intention this evening is to see if we can find a way into this closed system.

So, we have this wonderful title:

Ground mahamudra, the essential nature of things. The meaning of its view, briefly stated in terms of confusion and liberation.

Lamp of Mahamudra, Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Erik Pema Kunsang (translator), p. 5

What does this mean? What are we talking about? Well, the first thing I’d like you to consider is that this whole section is an attempt to answer some very basic questions. And maybe these are questions that are important to some of you—I don’t know—but the questions might be something like, What am I? What is life? What is this world?” Which we can actually abbreviate to: “What is this? What is this experience?”

Now, for many people those questions excite no interest. “Why would you mess with that? What’s the point? Just get on with it, live life.” But for a few of us—possibly because we don’t know how to live life [laughter]—they become rather important. Because if I’m going to live life I’d like to know what I’m doing here. And, in order to know what I’m doing here, I’d like to know what here is. So, that for me anyway, is one of the reasons I’ve approached this practice. And I think if you read this section as formulating an answer, or an attempt to formulate an answer to those questions, it may be a little easier to understand. We can turn to the first sentence here:

Your natural essence cannot be established as either samsara or nirvana.

p. 5

Now I think that most of you can discern quite easily that the question that’s actually being answered by that sentence is: “What am I?” Okay. Because it’s talking about your natural essence. Natural essence would be like, “What is this? What am I when I get right down to it?” But then, we find this very disconcerting reply, “cannot be established as either samsara or nirvana.” Not clear that everybody knows what samsara and nirvana means. And even if we did, it’s not very clear what the sentence means. But let’s not try to sort that out right now. Let’s just plunge on and see what else we get.

Not confined by any one extreme, free from the limitations of exaggeration and denigration, it (that is to say, what we actually are) is neither tainted nor spoiled by such designations as pleasant or unpleasant, being or not being, existent or non-existent, permanent or annihilated, self or other, and so forth.

p. 5

Well, this is a very elaborate way of saying: whatever you are, you can’t describe it in any way. It can’t be described in any way. That’s kind of contrary to the way that we normally approach things. You meet somebody and they say, “Who are you?” And you give them a name. And they say, “What do you do?” It usually means your profession, though one person I know says when he answers this question—”What do you do?”—he says, “I breathe.” Which is something that we do in life. You know, we don’t breathe, we don’t live. And we have this idea of being defined as this thing. If you look at that a little more closely you see those are just labels, and concepts, ideas. When we’re asking the question, “What am I?” we’re really going a little further than just what labels apply to me, but, “What am I actually?”

So, what Tsele Natsok Rangdrol is saying here is that—what it seems to be saying at least in English is—you are some kind of essence. Now this drives the Theravadan Buddhists nuts. Like, there isn’t any essence. So, you have to read quite carefully here. Let’s just take essence as a placeholder. See what it says.

Actually, we can approach this in a slightly different way. Right now. Ask yourself the question, “What am I?” [Pause] What happens when you ask that question? “What am I?” “What am I?” What happens? George.

George: It feels wide open. You can’t put your finger on anything.

Ken: So, you experienced a shift, opening, and can’t put your finger on it. Okay. Anybody else? Valerie.

Valerie: Honestly, what happens when I just did that is that I experienced a mind/body split. [Ken laughs] I think, I think there’s my body, but then there’s my consciousness or something.

Ken: So, you experience the shift too. You become aware of your body and then of something else.

Valerie: I’m something besides the piece of meat.

Ken: Piece of meat. Yes, okay. Right. And anybody else? Hunk of flesh that I call my body, right? Nobody? Lynea.

Lynea: It takes a few moments to actually ask the question. But then space.

Ken: Okay. So, you asked this question, there’s a shift, and you find yourself looking at nothing. Something like that? If I asked you about what consciousness was, you’d probably got into trouble fairly quickly, wouldn’t you? Yeah. Scientists are doing this like crazy and they’re getting into trouble all over the place. Okay. So, this is very interesting.

Now, how many of you are comfortable with that answer?

“What am I?”

“Nothing whatsoever.”

But that’s exactly what he’s saying here. It is not established as a certain kind of entity. No matter how it manifests, it has no true existence. It doesn’t exist as some thing. It is a great emptiness that doesn’t arise, dwell or cease. If you took this seriously it’d be a little scary. [Pause] What do we actually know about ourselves? I maintain, there’s only one thing that we know about ourselves. Anybody? Art.

Art: That right now in this moment, we’re experiencing something.

Ken: Yeah. We’re aware. Arguably, we don’t know whether we’re alive or dead. We don’t really know whether we’re asleep, or dreaming, or awake. We may think we’re well, but we may actually be sick, or we maybe sick and think we’re well. The only thing we actually know is that we’re aware. So, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that there’s some kind of connection between being aware and whatever it is that we are. Is this making sense? This gets very strange—it gets very strange now—because on the one hand, we have this awareness, and on the other hand, when we ask the question, “What am I?: we experience this open, empty space. What do you do with that? [Silence] Anybody? What do you do? [Silence] I can sit here all night. It’s fine. All right. You just can’t stand the tension. I know [laughs].

Student: I get nervous and start making up stories.

Ken: You get nervous and start making up stories. Why do you do that?

Student: Force of habit.

Ken: Well, there’s definitely that, I agree, but I think there’s another reason.

Student: It feels uncomfortable. It feels …

Ken: Yeah, it feels uncomfortable, or something like that. So, let’s take a look at the next section, Ground Mahamudra, and the middle paragraph there:

It is a single essence with different manifestations or with different aspects appearing.

(And the last paragraph)

This nature present as a …

p. 6

Well, it just goes into terminology there. So, we have this essence. We have this quality of space and we have this quality of knowing. But there’s something uncomfortable about this. So, I’m going to pick up a little bit from Art. What would your life be like if you actually knew that you were nothing but empty space? And you went around, engaged your life like that. What difference would that make? Well, before we get to there, how does that prospect strike you? Deborah.

Deborah: I think it would be very relaxed.

Ken: Well, that just begs the question, why don’t you do that? If it’s so relaxed, why don’t we do that? Because, I mean, my mistake, is there anybody who does this actually all the time? [Laughter] Just relates to the world as if they’re empty space all the time? If there is, please come up here and take my position. [Laughter] Why don’t we do that?

Deborah: When I begin to feel that openness, I start to conceptualize it. I can’t leave it alone. I start to relax into it, and then my mind is busy making things up about it.

Ken: Why does that happen? [Pause] Is anybody else curious about this? Okay. Deborah’s going to give us the answer. [Laughter]

Deborah: Because it’s not what we’ve been taught and what we’re used to. And so it seems very frightening.

Ken: Ah, blame the education system. [Laughter] Is that the problem?

Deborah: And it’s really hard to let go.

Ken: Of?

Deborah: Myself.

Ken: Oh, now you’ve introduced a very interesting idea here. This notion of a self, which you seem to feel you hold on to. What is this self?

Deborah: It’s what I think I am. It’s the thing I use to deal with the world. And it becomes very concrete.

Ken: Why did you do that?

Deborah: It seems like you have to do that in order to deal with the world, but then you forget and you let it …

Ken: Why do you have to do that in order to deal with the world?

Deborah: Because to deal with everyday life, you have to have opinions and likes and dislikes and prejudices and …

Ken: Those likes and dislikes and prejudice, they help you deal with things?

Deborah: You have to make decisions and discriminate.

Ken: The right decisions?

Deborah: No, [laughs] probably not.

Ken: So, you have to have this thing that helps you make the wrong decisions. [Laughter] I’m having a hard time with this. It doesn’t sound like it makes much sense.

Deborah: No.

Ken: So, why do we do it?

Deborah: It seems to be the way we do it.

The basic split

Ken: Yeah. Okay. So, this all comes under the next section: The Basic Split. We have this very interesting situation. And just in these few minutes of reflection, we think, “Oh, what am I? … Open space.” “What’s the one thing I know about me? … I’m aware.” That would lead to the idea that somehow this open space is aware. We won’t go into that too much, but that would be the idea. But then we look at how we actually function, and we don’t do that at all. We go around in this kind of confusion, with all of these—as Deborah’s saying—ideas and opinions, and thoughts, and stuff, which we feel we need to function in the world. But they don’t really help. In fact, when we look, we see that actually they lead us to do all kinds of wrong things. Things that aren’t in our interest, or go against them.

So, we seem to have this kind of basic split here. There’s this open awareness on the one hand, and all of this stuff on the other. And where did this stuff come from and how did it get going? Why is it there? Well, in Buddhism, we don’t really try to answer the question, “How did it all get going?” And the reason that we don’t—and this is a rather graphic simile or comparison—it’s like a person who has an arrow in his eye asking, “Who shot it?” [Laughs] If we have an arrow in our eye, that’s basically the last question on our mind. The first question is, “Can I get this out, please?” So, what Buddhism focuses on is: here we have this situation where something’s wrong, and how do we fix it?

And what’s wrong is there doesn’t seem to be any reason for all of this stuff, yet there is all this stuff that makes problems. So, in reading this section on The Basic Split, even though the language can suggest this, it’s not a causal explanation, it’s not saying: “This is here because of this, and this is here because of that, and that is because of this, and this is how the whole thing got started.” It’s not saying that at all. Though many people would read it that way. Basically it’s a description of how things are right now.

We have the paragraph about this cognizant quality, and cognizant is just a fancy word for aware. So, this aware quality or this wisdom aspect—and we give it various names, these are all very traditional names—that corresponds to what I was talking about, that open, aware aspect. But there’s also what is called here, the ignorant aspect—that’s the stuff part. And it doesn’t seem to come from anywhere, but it’s just there. And it prevents us from functioning, and knowing how to function and live our lives in that open, clear awareness.

And what follows is a traditional description, which goes back centuries and centuries in Buddhism. But very, very briefly, you have this fundamental not knowing, which we’ve been running into. I ask these questions, and one doesn’t know. One experiences not knowing. And what happens is, because we don’t know, then we misinterpret what we actually experience. And that open space, we don’t know it, and we misinterpret that experience as a sense of self—as a thing. And we’ll go into more detail on this later in this course. And everything that arises in opposition to that sense of self, we regard as something other. So, we get into this polarity of I/other, subject/object duality.

And then after that, it’s the full catastrophe. Anything that supports that sense of self we like, we’re attracted to. Anything that doesn’t support that sense of self, that threatens that, we’re averse to. And stuff that doesn’t make any difference, we don’t care about. And so now we have three basic emotional reactions that start to really poison our experience. They taint the way that we experience. We don’t experience things as they actually are. We experience things as they relate to this fiction or idea we’ve made up about ourselves.

So, when you see things about “the seven thought states resulting from delusion,” and then “the forty thought states from desire,” and so forth. I don’t want to go into the details of that stuff, but it’s describing the traditional formulation of the structures of thought that form the basis of how we experience what arises in our lives. And I want to skip over now to just before How the Essence Remains. And the paragraph immediately before, we find the sentence:

Growing more and more used to fixating on them as being permanent, solidifying and clinging to them as being real, you experience the various kinds of pleasure, pain, and indifference of the three realms and the six classes of beings.

Lamp of Mahamudra, Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Erik Pema Kunsang (translator), p. 9

Now, what “the six classes of beings” is really referring to, is six basic emotional reactions: anger, greed, what I call instinct—which is just doing whatever comes on the basis of one’s conditioning—desire, jealousy, envy, and pride. Now each of those reactions causes us to experience the world in a very specific way. When we’re angry, whatever arises, we experience as the enemy. So, everything’s an enemy when we’re angry, and that’s the hell realm. That’s how we experience things. So, even someone we love very much, when we’re angry, we see them as someone we hate and have to fight.

So, the hell realm–we have all the imagery of the six realms–it shows people just fighting, and being assaulted with weapons, and burning up. Anger is hot, and so forth. Hate is cold, so you have the cold hells. But all of these are depictions of the internal experience of these emotions, and the world they project. How many of you know anybody who hates somebody very, very deeply? Run into that? It’s like ice, isn’t it? A coldness. And such people are very inflexible. They can’t move. It’s like they’re frozen.

And then greed—when we’re subject to greed, we’re looking at the world and there’s never enough. So, this becomes the world of the hungry ghosts that live in deserts, and so forth; there’s never enough. And instinct is the animal realm, where you’re very good at what you’re conditioned, and you can’t do anything outside of that. Then desire, of course, is the human realm. In the human realm, as the realms go, it’s not bad, but it’s very frustrating because you can actually enjoy things, but they don’t last. So, then you work really hard to enjoy them again, and you get caught in that whole cycle.

And the titan realm is the realm projected by jealousy, because you look around and you see everybody has more than you. Or enough people have more than you, and so you feel the sense of deficiency inside. And so you’ve got to prove yourself and achieve things. It makes you very competitive. And then pride projects the world of the gods, where you feel you’re above it all: I’m right, and that’s just how it is.

Now, of those six realms, how many do you experience in any given day? Okay. It’s moving around, right? Okay, that’s samsara. That’s what samsara is. Samsara is the Sanskrit word, the Tibetan word is ‘khor ba (pron. korwa), and it means, to move around. And you move around from one of these realms to another, moment by moment, hour by hour, or sometimes minute by minute. And if you’re really upset, sometimes second by second. That’s what samsara is. It’s experiencing life solely in terms of these reactive emotions. And living in each one of these realms, and moving from one to another, one moment to the next. So, that’s what it says:

… you experience the various kinds of pleasure, pain, and indifference of the … six classes of beings.
(Six classes of beings is another word for the six realms.)
You spin perpetually through the causes and effects of samsara as though on the rim of a water wheel.

p. 9

You just go round and round. I think the analogy we’d use, you’re a hamster on a treadmill.

So, that’s what the stuff does. And basically, that’s why we’re all here. We’re here because, at some level, we’re fed up with the stuff. Now I say, at some level, because it may be different for different people. Some people may be just becoming aware that there is stuff, and wondering if there’s an alternative, and that’s the first level of being fed up with it. Other of us have been stalking around with it for many years, and we’re totally fed up with it because we see it just produces the same thing over and over again. And doesn’t get any better, and usually just gets worse.

Clear awareness and the stuff

Ken: So, I’ve become very interested in this other aspect—this open, clear awareness—that seems so unproblematic by comparison. And it’s actually a little difficult trying to put these two aspects together. Now, the title of the next section, How the Essence Remains, is a very good example of what I regard as a bad translation. I know what they’re trying to say. Let me see if I can convey this to you a little bit. We have this open, clear awareness which we can get in touch with when we ask questions like, “What am I?” or, “What is this?” And we experience that shift. And we have the stuff.

What’s the relationship between these two? [Pause] Anybody? Anybody thought about this? What’s the relationship between that open, clear awareness, that nothing whatsoever, and the stuff? Rami.

Rami: I don’t know if this is where you’re going, but in some sense they exist at the same time. You have them both at the same time. So, they’re just there.

Ken: That’s very interesting, isn’t it? Which do you choose most of the time?

Rami: Most of the time you choose the samsara.

Ken: The stuff, right? Okay. So, this next section, How the Essence Remains, is exactly what Rami is referring to. The stuff arises, but that open, clear awareness doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t go anywhere. Now, that’s simultaneously wonderfully reassuring and profoundly frustrating. Just as a rough analogy—many of you heard me say this before—you can go to somewhere where it’s extremely quiet. I mean, no noise whatsoever. A still lake or out in the mountains, or deep in the woods. No wind, or maybe just a room in your house, and you experience silence. There’s no noise.

And then you could put on some music, or maybe some people start playing, or something, or maybe somebody drives by in a motorcycle with a boom box playing, and suddenly there’s all this noise. Where does the silence go? Well, it’s like that open, clear awareness. The silence actually doesn’t go anywhere, even though we use such phrases as, “The silence was broken.” Well, the silence isn’t broken. Silence doesn’t go anywhere; it’s there. We just stop hearing it. And we might think about that. When we get involved in the stuff, maybe all that’s happening is that we just stopped knowing that open clarity.

And one way we might think about mahamudra is that it’s about developing the ability to know that open clarity all the time. So that one doesn’t keep getting caught up, totally caught up, in the stuff, and taking that as all that there is, ’cause that’s what we do. It’s just like the motorcycle going by. When we hear that, we don’t hear the silence, all we hear is that noise and we go, aren’t there ordinances about that kind of thing? And then we completely forget the silence. We stop hearing the silence. [Pause]

Now in this section, they use all kinds of fancy vocabulary:

In the ultimate sense, this primordial nature is vividly present as the inseparable three kayas.

Lamp of Mahamudra, Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Erik Pema Kunsang (translator), p. 9

Well, except for the word kaya, it does sound like English. But it’s not at all clear what it actually means. So, let me try to explain. We’re going to come across the three kayas over and over again. It’s a Sanskrit word that could be translated as form, dimension, aspect even though it’s not a very satisfactory thing.

Vivid but seemingly not there

Ken: One way to do this: pick your favorite emotion. For some of you, it’s probably anger. For some, maybe it’s desire. Possibly for some of you it’s love, maybe compassion, it doesn’t matter. Just pick your favorite emotion and feel it. [Pause] And if it helps, pick an object, so you can actually feel the emotion very clearly. Now, just as we asked earlier, what is this? Look at that emotion and say, what is this? It’s a vivid experience, but what is it? And I think when you look at it that way, you actually don’t see anything, which is very strange because the emotion is arising vividly at the same time. It’s a vivid experience of emotion, yet when you actually look at it, there doesn’t seem to be anything there.

And it gets even more perplexing than that, because the vividness and the being nothing there, aren’t really two different things. Somehow they’re the same thing, in a weird sort of way. Okay, those three things are what are meant by the three kayas. That, in this experience that we have, when we ask, what is it?, there doesn’t seem to be anything there. Just the way we were discussing earlier. Yet experience arises vividly. I mean, there’s a bunch of people in the room, we have sounds, we have light, lots of color, so forth, all very vivid, very clear. And that vividness, clarity, and that openness, we can’t really break them apart. It’s like they arise together.

Now if you knew that moment to moment, if you really knew that experientially, not intellectually, ’cause that’s not the kind of knowing we’re talking about. We’re not talking about understanding. I’m talking about knowing this moment to moment, knowing that whatever arises, arises in a kind of open space, then we’re much less are likely to get caught by the stuff. So, there’s a promise, or at least a possibility, of some kind of way out of this dilemma that we experience. And that’s what’s being presented here.

Then he goes on in the next section:

You might think, “Isn’t it illogical that the single all-ground explained above should split into both samsara and nirvana?”

Lamp of Mahamudra, Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Erik Pema Kunsang (translator), p. 10

He’s going a little bit further than I have in what I’ve been trying to explain. He’s saying that, that open clarity that we’ve come to, can arise in two ways. It can arise in our experience as an open clarity, or it can arise as stuff. And what we’re really trying to do in mahamudra, is come to know that the stuff and the clarity are all just things that arise. And we don’t have to get caught by any of it, attached or upset by any of it. And when we open that possibility, then we open the possibility to being able to experience things just as they are, without all of the opinions, and prejudices, etc. that we’ve accumulated.

And I think most of us know by this point in our lives, that would be kind of a relief. It might actually make our lives a little bit easier. So, you find the stanza:

Covered by the web of disturbing emotions,
One is a “sentient being.”
Freed from disturbing emotions,
One is called “buddha.”

p. 10

And remember, the word buddha simply means “awake.” And this is why some of us use the vocabulary of, in ordinary life for “asleep.” And what we’re seeking is to wake up, so that we know how things actually are. [Pause]

Devotion

Ken: How do you do this? Well in the next section, you get one way. That is, you find a teacher and you work with that teacher very closely. And through that interaction, something happens in you—a seed of experience is planted, or you’re ripened in some way. And there are formal ceremonies through which that is done. Those are called empowerments. And then you do these certain practices, the general and special preliminaries.

And then he talks about using devotion to your teacher as an important part of the path. Now, here’s where we run into the effect of when a culture has been isolated for hundreds of years. This is one way. And it’s the way that was practiced in Tibet for upwards of 1,000 years. And so you can be pretty sure that it works, at least for some people, otherwise it wouldn’t have lasted.

Now, this idea of devotion is a somewhat problematic one in today’s world, but I’d like to put it into a larger context. Every spiritual tradition that I know of, has a way in which emotional energy is transformed into attention. In Theravadan tradition—a tradition of Southeast Asia—the way that emotional energy is transformed into attention is through the cultivation of metta or loving-kindness. In the Mahayana, compassion is used. That was also the technique used in Christianity, though that’s largely been lost—or that connection. And Hinduism, to a significant extent, experience of happiness, joy, bliss is used to transform emotional energy into attention. That’s actually what a lot of yoga is aimed at, though that aspect has become pretty obscure in a lot of the ways yoga is practiced now in the West. In the Vajrayana, which is the Tibetan tradition, devotion was the way in which emotional energy is transformed into attention.

Now, all of these methods have their pluses and minuses. One of the principle problems with devotion is that it tends to reinforce projection. So, my own feeling is that the use of devotion, as a way of transforming emotional energy into attention, is really suitable only for very mature practitioners. It’s not really suitable for beginners, because they’ll get caught up with their projections.

And then the last section I’d like to go over, and do a little bit of translation, starting with the paragraph that begins:

In this context, the view is the mind-essence–

Lamp of Mahamudra, Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Erik Pema Kunsang (translator), p. 12

I’m going to retranslate this as, “In this context, the view”—or the way we approach what we’re doing here is that you—instead of mind-essence just put you.

You are a natural purity that has been [paraphrasing]”naturally present from time without beginning.”

What you are is independent of past, present, and future.

You are not something that arises, dwells, or ceases.

You are not something that comes and goes.

What you are is unaffected by all the stuff. What you are doesn’t need to go through any process of spiritual maturation.

You can throw around terms like existence or nonexistence, but this doesn’t affect what you actually are, in any way.

You can throw around terms like being or not being, permanent or annihilated, good or bad, high or low. None of these apply to what you actually are.

What you are can’t be refuted, and it can’t be proven. That’s not something you can accept or reject, can’t change or alter it in any way. What you are is a total freedom. What you are is simultaneously the vivid awareness of everything you experience, and everything you experience. What you are is simultaneously the vivid awareness of everything you experience, and everything you experience.

So, perhaps you get the flavor here. Now, that’s all well and good. If you go right to the end of this section, you find this paragraph on the three kayas again, which we’re not going to dwell on right now. We’ll come back to it.

Practice: uncovering our capacity to know

Ken: But we get the idea that, “Okay, so things aren’t what they seem,” and “If this is what I am, why don’t I know it in each moment?” And that is the question that leads to practice. Because the reason we don’t know it, I think fundamentally, is because right now we don’t have the capacity to know it. And what we’re doing in practice is developing the capacity. And what practice means is that there’s a way of working–of which meditation is one component, a very important component, but one component—there’s a way of working, which increases our capacity to know. And where we start in this is with the practices that increase our capacity for attention, because it is through attention that we come to uncover our capacity to know.

Practice instructions

Ken: So, I was going to go through the whole section of meditation in clarifying the natural state, this evening. But I think what I’m going to do—because we’re almost out of time—is to go to the section which is a practice I want you to be doing while we go through this course. [Pause] Now, I think I’m going to discuss this relatively quickly, but at three levels. And what’s very important here: this practice is about increasing your capacity. So, if you don’t have the capacity to practice at one level, then you’re going to practice at another. If you don’t have the capacity to practice at that level, then you’re going to practice at the third. They’re the three levels. We should be able to cover everybody here. What I don’t want you to do is to try to practice at a capacity that is higher than you can actually do. Because if you do, it means you’ll end up doing nothing, except getting frustrated, and confused, and irritated.

On a personal note, I’ve always found meditation practice extremely difficult. And Kalu Rinpoche, my teacher, always encouraged us to go right to the heart of the matter. He was not interested in getting lost in some of the complexities of meditation practice, or different kinds of meditation practice. He always just went straight for the heart, straight for the essence. But I wasn’t able to do that. And part of me really wanted to meditate resting on the breath.

Whenever I asked Rinpoche if I could just meditate resting on the breath, he would always say to me, “There’s no breath in the bardo. There’s no breath after you die, so why are you wasting your time?” [Laughter] And he was quite right. But in all honesty, it wasn’t the most helpful thing to me, because I did not have the capacity. So, I meditated on the breath anyway [Laughter]—I felt terribly guilty doing so—because it was all I could do. I had my own difficulties. That was all I could do. So, do what you actually can do.

There are an awful lot of people who think they’re practicing mahamudra and dzogchen but—as more than one teacher said—are actually practicing the meditation of a groundhog. [Laughter] And that’s what they end up becoming. So, I’m going to start with the subtler form and work down. But I really want you to take this to heart.

Posture, hands, eyes,

Ken: When you practice meditation, posture is quite important. I said earlier—when we were beginning meditation period, before we had our class—you sit in attention. What that’s going to mean, if you’re sitting in a chair, like I am, you’re just going to sit straight. Now, I suggest you don’t try to hold yourself straight like this, because you just get tired. Just let your body be, find its own straightness. Straight back is actually quite important because the straight back allows the energies of the body to move and circulate, and come into balance, which creates the conditions for awareness, and presence, and balance, in the body. And that’s very helpful. If you’re sitting on the floor—sitting on a cushion—which is the traditional meditation posture, then let your your legs rest flat on the floor, making kind of a triangle. You want to use a cushion, which raises your butt off the floor, so that you can actually sit with a straight back without straining.

I find it’s best to position the hands, you can do it in two ways. One is to position the hands on your thighs, so that your elbows are directly below your shoulders, so there’s no strain in the back. The other is the traditional meditation posture of placing one hand on top of the other. And there are some people who say it should be the right on top of the left, and there are those who say it should be the left on top of the right. It’s obviously very important. [Laughter] You hold your hands like that.

And this is what Nyishul Khenpo, another one of my teachers, would say, “And there are those who say your thumbs should rest just touching. And there are others who say your thumbs should be spaced just far apart enough that you could slide a piece of paper through.” That’s obviously another extremely important distinction. He says that when he heard that, he said, he realized that people will argue about anything. But what is important, if you’re sitting in this posture, is that you hold your elbows out a little bit. Not like this, this closes in the chest so it constricts the breath. You hold your elbows out a little bit.

And you’ll find when you sit like this, that in the beginning, you may have a tendency to put your chin out, or up, or something like that. But, what I find very helpful, is to imagine that you’re hanging from the top of your head. Like there’s a hook right there. And when that happens, then your chin will come in slightly and your head will move back on your spine. So, your head, spine are just all lined up. And this is the whole point of the posture, your spine is supporting you, and you got your shoulder yoke here, that’s being supported. So, you’re actually sitting the way you’re meant to. Your being supported by your spine, and everything’s hanging from your shoulders. Instead of what a lot of us do, and which I did for many years, is I would be like this. You see how that is? I’m holding myself up. How am I holding myself up? Holding myself up with my shoulders; do you know how tiring that is? But I bet at least half of you would walk around your lives doing that all the time.

So, you get the feeling for this. There is a natural straightness, and there’s a firmness in the posture, but there’s also a relaxation in the posture, and that’s very important. There are a couple of other little things to take note of. One is to curl the tongue slightly so that the underside of the tongue rests about half an inch back from the upper teeth. A couple of reasons for that: it reduces the formation of saliva, but it also completes a circuit of circulation of energy in the body, so that mind and body come into balance. It may feel a little odd, but you get quite used to that quite quickly.

Last point is eyes. Now, there are all kinds of things about certain gazes when you’re meditating, but what I’d like you to do with the eyes when you meditate is exactly what you do with your ears. Everybody’s going, what does he mean? What do you do with your ears when you meditate? Anybody? [Unclear] So, try doing the same thing with your eyes. Just do nothing with your eyes. And you’ll find that they come to rest in a certain way on their own. But it’s a lot harder to do nothing with your eyes, because we’re so used to paying attention to things and looking at things, you know, whether it’s computer screens, or traffic, or reading, or what have you.

So, you just rest. And what’s very important in the physical posture is it just has that quality of resting. [Pause]

Three approaches to practice

Ken: And then …

Don’t pursue the past.
Don’t entertain the future.
Don’t think about the present.
Just rest.

[Pause] Again. Set your posture so you’re sitting straight, yet relaxed. Let the breath settle so it’s also natural. And …

Don’t pursue the past.
Don’t entertain the future.
Don’t dwell on the present.
Just rest.

Now, when you do that, what do you experience? Anybody? Rami.

Rami: I think what happens is your body naturally relaxes.

Ken: So, there’s some relaxation. Yes. What do you experience in your mind or your awareness?

Rami: Once I’m able to just let go, it’s nothing, just empty. It’s just quiet.

Ken: There’s a shift isn’t there?

Rami: Yeah.

Ken: Yeah. Okay. That shift is the meditation practice. And the way that that shift comes about is:

Don’t think about the past.
Don’t think about the future.
Don’t think about the present.
Just rest.

There’s a shift. Now how long does the shift last? In the beginning, a second or two, right? So, you do it again. And it lasts another second or two, and then you do it again. Okay? Now this is what you’re going to do in your meditation periods. You’re going to keep doing that and they’re going to be very short. And sometimes you’re just going to think, oh, this is so tiring! It doesn’t last at all! I guess I can’t make it go on any longer. That’s not going to help things at all. So, if you find yourself feeling a little frustrated or whatever, just relax and just rest with the breath.

Just rest in the experience of breathing. [Pause] Don’t watch the breath. That’s not what I’m saying. Just rest in the experience of breathing. Use the same posture, and so forth. And after a while, you may feel, okay, I can do it again. Now you go back, and do that a few more times. When that shift takes place, you just rest there. But most of us don’t do that. We immediately start trying to make it deeper, or make it last longer, or do something. So, a large part of the practice is just letting that shift take place, and letting it be just as it is, without mucking it up. Don’t try to hold onto it. That’s very counterproductive. If it goes, it goes. Rest. Then do it again.

In this approach to practice—to meditation—you don’t try hold onto a certain experience or a certain state. You go through that sequence, mind opens, you rest there. It lasts as long as it lasts, when it goes, it goes. Then you rest. Now, if you’re able to practice that way, that’s great. But, you may not be able to practice that way, or you may not be able to practice that way all the time. That’s fine. When you run out of juice, so to speak, or maybe you can’t connect with this, then what I want you to do is what I was saying earlier:

Body like a mountain.
Breath like the wind.
Mind like the sky.

This is the second level.

“Body like a mountain.” And the key point in body like a mountain, is that a mountain exerts no effort.

“Breath like the wind.” The key there is the wind just flows. Nobody controls it. So, the breath is completely natural. It’s just the wind coming and going.

And, “Mind like the sky.” Well, in mind like the sky, thoughts may arise, just as clouds arise in the sky. That doesn’t disturb the sky at all. So, you just rest there. If thoughts arise, they arise. Now you may get completely lost and confused. In that case, nothing’s happening. Then you come back, reset, and do it again. So, in this practice—body like a mountain, breath like the wind, mind like the sky—there’s also that returning, returning.

Again, don’t try to hold. And it’s just a jumble of thoughts, and you’ve lost any sense of presence, or awareness, or attention, then just relax, look around the room.

And then the third level of practice is resting in the experience of breathing itself. So, you experience all of your body, and how it’s involved in breathing. It’s a very grounding practice.

The purpose of all three of these practices is the same. It’s to get you used to just resting, and being able to rest calmly. And when you do this, be gentle with yourself; have a sense of humor; it really helps. And in terms of the amount of practice, minimum half hour. It can’t really produce any kind of results unless you practice at least half hour a day. And if you can do longer, or you can do more than one session, so much the better.

At rest in vivid clarity

Ken: But in all three approaches to practice, what you’re looking for is a vivid clarity in which you’re at rest. And if you slip into a kind of dullness—whether it’s with the breath, or the mind like the sky, or not chasing after the past, the future, or the present—when you step out of that vivid clarity, just stop. Rest for a few minutes, just sit there, and then come back. And in any given such session, you may run out of juice. And if that’s the case, then just rest with the breath for the rest of it.

There are two aspects of practice and we’ll go into more detail later, but there’s the resting, and there’s the clarity. What we’re aiming for is resting and clarity together. Not just the resting, not just the clarity. Okay. So, it’s quarter to 10. I’ve gone over.

Student questions

Ken: We’ll just take one or two questions quickly before we close, if there are any questions. No? Lynea.

Lynea: What’s the difference between loving-kindness and compassion?

Ken: Loving-kindness is the wish that others be happy. Compassion is the wish that they not suffer. So, in a certain sense, there’s potentially more involvement, and more engagement, with compassion. Okay? There’s a question back here? Molly.

Molly: You may cover this later, but it talks about interrupting the practice.

Ken: Yeah, I will cover that later. I mean, basically what it’s talking about, if by any chance you find yourself being able to stay for long periods in clear open awareness, interrupt it, don’t wait for it to run out, just step out of it. That’s actually quite useful. Learning how to break your meditation sometime.

So, we’ll have a lot more to say about that as we go forward, but what’s really good here is to just practice for a short period. What I mean by a short period, I mean, like one to two minutes. So, there’s a very, very good quality of attention. And then stop before it goes bad. Take a few seconds, and then do it again. This is a very, very good way to practice. Okay?

Molly: Thanks.

Ken: And you can do that with all three levels. Okay. That’s it. Okay, Kate, last question.

Kate: Is the difference between this and shamatha practice that there’s no object? The breath, in other words.

Ken: Shamatha is a word for resting calmly, resting peacefully, and it’s a particular kind of meditation. And that’s what we’re discussing, it is exactly that kind of meditation. As you can read in Clarifying Natural State, there are many approaches to shamatha, to that resting meditation. One is using an object, one is not using an object. One is using a concrete object, or not a concrete object, the breath isn’t a concrete object. And you can read through, and you’ll see all of the different methods.

My own experience with people is that many people are able just to move directly to being able to work without an object, just with awareness itself—and there are other techniques I will introduce later—or be able to work with the breath. These are the ones I found that are most effective for people. But it’s all about cultivating that initial quality, resting with that clear, awake attention. And then that’s where we’re starting to build our capacity. And then we introduce other ways of working with it, so that the capacity of that attention is greatly enhanced. So, it becomes possible to know what we are. Okay? All right. Let’s conclude here with the dedication prayers.