Experiencing whatever arises

Ken: The subject matter for our time together here is mahamudra. That of course is the Sanskrit term. A translation of the word maha is very simple, it means great. Mudra is a little more difficult to translate because it has a wide range of meanings. It can mean a ‘gesture’ such as [demonstrates] or it can mean ‘seal’ as in the stamp that you put on something, and, it has additional meanings. In Vajrayana, you have the four mudras of which mahamudra is the fourth. So one way to translate it is the great seal. And now what does this mean? Well, a seal in times of yore would be like a stamp from a king on a letter and basically that served as a passport. And when you show this letter, and it had the king’s stamp on it, then it gave you the freedom to go into that part of the country or into another country. It allowed you to go anywhere. And that’s one explanation of what the term mahamudra means. It’s the great seal that stamps all experience. So in this context, the word mahamudra means a way of knowing all experience so that you can experience anything.

Now, why is that important? Well for a moment I want to revisit the four noble truths, but in a way that may be a little different for some of you. I’m going to do this as a series of questions. How many of you experienced struggle in your life? Let’s see [laughter]. Okay, that’s the first noble truth. We usually hear this in terms of suffering, but I’ve been toying with this translation as struggle because everybody relates to that. Now the second one’s a little more complicated. How many of you have observed what is different between when you are struggling and when you aren’t struggling? Okay, what have you observed? What’s the difference? I’m going to throw out some ideas here. You tell me if this conforms with your experience. When one isn’t struggling, one tends to be open, relaxed, open to experiencing anything, actually able to experience lots of things, things come and go. There can even be a sense of flow, etc. And when one is struggling, one’s experience tends to be very limited. It’s constricted and you work hard to control what you’re experiencing and new things or extra things are accepted with difficulty. Does this accord with any of your experience?

Okay, so now we have to go a little step deeper. What’s happening when we struggle? Well, my own experience is that when we’re struggling, what we’re really doing is we’re struggling to avoid experiencing something and we can struggle really, really hard to do that. It’s usually some feeling or experience or association or possibly even some memory or something. And we don’t want to go there and we now struggle with whatever’s arising in our lives so that we don’t have to experience that. This accord with anybody’s experience? So that’s the second noble truth. The origin of struggle comes from not wanting to experience something, which now leads to the third noble truth. There’s a solution here. You just have to be able to experience everything. Anything that arises, then you wouldn’t have any struggle, would you? That’s the third one. The fourth one is how do you do that? And traditionally that’s described as the noble eightfold path, and there are many, many formulations and variations in that. But basically if you look at how the full path is described, it is doing everything you do in your life in attention. So it’s a continuous, consistent practice of attention.

So you can see that in this context mahamudra is another way of approaching exactly what the four noble truths are talking about, just being able to experience whatever is arising. Now, I don’t know about you, but I do know about my own experience here that’s completely non-trivial; all too frequently I find in my own life that stuff is arising sometimes internally, sometimes externally, and I don’t have the capacity of attention to experience it, and that’s when I fall into reactivity and then there’s always a mess to clean up after that. It sounds very simple and in a certain sense it is very simple, but simple doesn’t equal easy, and this is one of the reasons why, at least in the Tibetan tradition, so much machinery is developed in terms of various forms of meditation practices. So you get deity practices and you get yogic practices and you get all kinds of stuff, and all of that machinery has been developed over the centuries because this is not easy. Yet on the other hand, and I’m not being glib when I say this, there’s absolutely nothing to it. It’s very straightforward. So that’s one way of looking at mahamudra practice.

Teachings are answers to questions

Ken: Now, I want to briefly explore another way. One of the things that I’ve come to appreciate about Buddhism in general, and the Tibetan tradition which is my own training in particular, is that the teachings are an extremely well-formulated set of answers to certain questions, but the answers have been around for so long that it’s not clear what the questions are. I will give you one example of that. There’s a teaching in the mahayana called the two forms or two aspects of non-self, non-self of the individual and the non-self of experience, usually translated as phenomena but I prefer the translation experience. Any of you familiar with this one? You’ve heard of this one before. Okay, so the question is what is the question or what are the questions that that’s the answer to? Reflecting on this, the non-self of the individual is an answer to the question, what am I? And the answer is no thing. And then the non-self of experience is an answer to the question of what is life? And it’s the same answer, actually not a thing. So one of the things I would like to invite you and actually encourage you to do during this retreat is to look at the various teachings and practices that we’re going to be doing and what they’re pointing towards, and ask yourself, what questions for me are these possible answers?

And what are my actual questions? This is probably something that I will ask you in the interviews. What are the questions which bring you here? Now, to borrow a term from the Japanese tradition, these are the great questions. They’re not how do I get a new job, or how do I get ahead in my job? They’re more along the lines like, what am I doing here? I’m experiencing life, but what do I do with it? I always think of Mark Twain at this point. He said, “They say we’re here to help others. I can go along with that, but I’m not clear why the others are here.” So I mean, these are very, very old questions, but they’re also timeless questions. Not everyone chooses to deal with these kinds of questions or engage these kinds of questions in their lives, but I suspect all of you, by virtue of your being here, are engaging them in one way or another. So my intention for this retreat is to see if we can explore the questions and see what those are and out of that to look at possible ways of answering them.

Stepping into the mystery of life

Ken: Last weekend before coming here, I was at a conference that Franca and her husband organized and I had a conversation with one of the participants there, and it was a very interesting conversation because we started talking about truth and at a certain point in the conversation, the way that he used the word “truth” changed and it was no longer an abstract ideal but it referred to a visceral experience. I found that very interesting because when we engage such questions as “What am I doing here?” or “What am I?” or “What is life? ” we know very well that the answer to those questions or answers to those questions are not concepts. They’re not sentences. Because if the answers to those questions were sentences, they would’ve been answered many thousands of years ago. But the fact that they keep coming up indicates that there isn’t a sentence. There isn’t an idea which answers them. The answers to these questions are an experience, an experience which cannot be put into words because if it could be put into words, it would’ve been. This means it’s a mystery, and I’m using mystery in a very specific sense here. Not to refer to something that cannot be known, but to something that can be known but cannot be put into words. This is the old meaning of mystery.

So, what we’re doing here over these next few days is exploring or stepping into the exploration of the mystery of life, the mystery of experience, the mystery of being, whatever you want to call it. For that we need certain tools, certain resources if you wish. One way to look at this is three things: You need the willingness to do so because nothing happens if you don’t have that willingness. And again, I’m going to take it as a given that that willingness is present to a greater or lesser extent in all of you by virtue of the fact that you were here. The second thing one needs is know-how. How do you explore this mystery? How do you accumulate the skills and abilities that one needs to explore this mystery? There may be other aspects of know-how, but those two comprise a good start. Well, that’s my job. My job is to provide you, to the extent that I can, with the know-how, or if you have some know-how already, to help you understand how to use it more fully or more deeply, more effectively as the case may be. And there are very definitely skills and abilities to be developed here. And the third quality of resource is capacity. That’s your job: developing the capacity to be able to experience the mystery of being or the mystery of life. That’s not something anyone else can do for you—it’s like developing muscles. The only way you can develop strength in your muscles is for you to exercise. Other people simply can’t do that for you. People keep trying, it doesn’t work.

So those are the three things that we’re going to focus on. Willingness, know-how and capacity, the three resources we need in order to explore and come to know this mystery, which we call life, being, whatever. And that is really the intention of our time together here these next few days.

Let mind, breath and body settle

Ken: Tomorrow morning we’ll be getting up at six and we’ll be practicing before breakfast until about eight. First day is always the day of adjustment from the demands and the pace of our regular lives. So my recommendation, in terms of practice, is that you take the first part of the day anyway to rest, to let your mind settle, to let body, speech, breath, and mind settle. This actually is a very profound teaching in the Shangpa tradition, which is another transmissions I’ve received.

The main text on it is called the three natural settlings. You learn how to let the body settle and let the breath and speech settle and let the mind settle. Now, different traditions approach this in different ways. What I’ve found increasingly is, when you’re sitting, pay a lot of attention to what you’re experiencing in your body, perhaps better than “pay attention” is to open to the experience of what is arising in your body when you sit, and I mean this very, very much at the physical level. This is much better taught in the Theravaden traditions than it usually is in the Tibetan and even Zen traditions for that matter. But I found it’s extremely important because you simply cannot rest unless you’re resting in the body. When you rest in the body, you’ll naturally feel how the body wants to sit.

The body actually will want to sit straight, but you may or may not have the capacity to do that at this point. And your body will tell you what it can do, exactly what it can do at this point, and you let your body do that. That’s how you begin to settle in the body. As you let your body rest the way it knows how to rest, you’ll find it changes, perhaps slowly and little by little it’ll come to rest in different ways until you’re resting in very often the traditional meditation posture, but now you’re doing it without any strain. It is that the body has grown into the posture rather than you imposing the posture on the body. There’s another reason it’s very important to open to the experience of the body. How many of you experienced thoughts in your meditation? Okay, one or two. One way to understand thinking is, it is how we get away from what is being experienced in the body. We become aware of stuff in the body, may or may not be what we like, and we are into thought land. This is very helpful to understand because it also points a root.

The most reliable way I know of to cut through the thinking process is to come back to what you’re experiencing in the body, not to do anything about it particularly, just to come back to it. And open to that experience. It may be pleasant, it may be unpleasant, it may be neutral, doesn’t matter. Just come back to precisely what you’re experiencing in the body. Very often when you find yourself lost in thought, you’ll find that your body’s posture has actually changed in some way. Maybe there’s some rigidity in it. Maybe there’s some … Pardon? Slouching. Thank you, slouching. So that translates into a dullness in the mind. So whenever you recognize that you’re not in clear attention, come back to the body. In my experience the body never lies. It tells you precisely and accurately exactly what’s going on. And as I said earlier in my comments this evening, the point of practice is to develop the ability to experience precisely what is going on. It’s also a theme that runs through all of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching.

The practice of meditation is the study of what’s going on. What’s going on is very important. When you rest in the body that way, you’ll find that the breath settles quite naturally. If you find at any point that there’s a tension between the breathing and the body, it means that something else has crept in. So you need to go back to the body and let it breathe the way that it wants to, and it knows how to do this. It’s been doing this for quite a while, it probably does it better than us. There are a few people who train to such a high level of attention that they can interrupt and take over the automatic process of breathing, the autonomic nervous system. This is a little bit problematic because now they have to remember to breathe. So it’s a form of practice we don’t really recommend. When you rest in the body and the breath is settling naturally, you create the conditions for the mind to rest also, the mind to settle.

It’s very important to work this way from the body to the breath or from the body then include the breath, and then include the mind, rather than trying to work the other way around. In theory, it’s possible to work the other way around. In practice, I find it almost always results in some form of suppression, but I find the other way avoids that problem and that’s why I recommend it. So this is the form of practice that I want you to do starting tomorrow morning. There’s another saying in the mahamudra tradition, short sessions, but many of them. When they say short sessions, they mean one to two minutes. And it is very easy to sit clear and present for a minute or two, or maybe it’s only 30 seconds, and then you relax and then you do it again.

So you practice this in very short sessions so that when you are resting, the body is relaxed and settled, the speech, breath is relaxed and settled and the mind is relaxed and settled, very clear, very stable. Not because you’re trying to make it stable and clear, but because it is naturally stable and clear if you give it a chance. And in the beginning when we give it a chance, we can go there, but usually only for very short periods. So that’s how we practice very short periods and gradually build up the ability to rest that way for longer and longer and let that occur quite naturally, as it will. Okay, I think that’s everything for this evening except for the qi gong which Julie is going to do.