Ken: This is the second talk, or rather a summary of the second talk at the mahamudra retreat. Unfortunately, the original talk did not record properly, so I am replacing the recording with this brief summary.

In the approach that I’m teaching at this retreat, I’m seeking or encouraging you to ask your own questions or to find answers to some fairly basic questions about life. And four questions that I considered in this talk were:

How do I know what I experience?
How do I know what is true?
How do I know what is right?
How do I know what to do?

It would be good if you took a few minutes to contemplate each of those questions and your own answers to them. And I want to suggest that the four reminders: the precious human existence, death and impermanence, karma, and the shortcomings of samsara—which are very traditional teachings about motivation—could be viewed as a set of possible answers to these four questions. For instance, how do I know what I experience? Well, the only way we can come to this is to look at, what do I experience? We look around.

In the precious human existence teachings, it’s taught that we are free from various unrestful states of mind, of experience, that prevent spiritual practice from taking place. Such as: constantly being swallowed by anger, or greed, or survival issues, constantly distracted by sensory pleasures and the desire to satisfy them, inability to understand people, lacking faith, not having the opportunity to practice, and so forth. So, how do I know what experience? It is an invitation to consider what you actually experience and what you’re doing about it.

Then the second question, how do I know what is true? Well, there are very few things that we know about life that we can say are true. In fact, we don’t know whether we’re dreaming or actually alive. We could be experiencing a dream in what we ordinarily know as a waking state. And philosophers from the very beginning have considered this question, and there is actually no way of knowing. However, there is one thing we do know because the evidence is very clear. Whatever we are experiencing now is going to come to an end. Usually we call this death. That’s one thing that we know is true.

And when we take this one thing that we know definitely and allow it to inform our lives, our lives take a very, very different form. They’re shaped very differently by that knowledge. It’s not particularly dreary or morose or depressing. In fact, when we really take into account our death, we tend to pay far more attention to life itself.

Then the third question, how do I know what is right? Well, this is the dilemma that goes way, way back in human existence and concerns the governing of society as well as how does the individual comport himself or herself. From the Buddhist point of view, it isn’t so much about obeying a set of moral principles that have been handed down to us by some authority figure. Rather, the use of karma invites us to look at the actual consequences of our actions, how they initiate a process of evolution that shapes what we experience in the future and how we interact with people.

And when we consider this deeply and carefully, we see that whatever energy we put out in the world comes back and is reflected back to us and shapes our experience. So we need to be very careful about what we put out in the world. And so the teachings of karma show us a way that we can shape our lives simply through how we act and interact with others. And this way we know what is right.

And then how do we know what to do? Well, this is a possible answer. Here again, are the teachings on the six realms. The six realms describe how the world appears to us when we are in the grip of reactive emotions. In this case, those projections lead us to interpret our experience very differently from what it is and the result of that is that our actions are always inappropriate or miss what is really going on because they are based on our projections.

So, how do we know what to do? It’s answered more negatively here by saying, well, don’t act in any of the ways projected by the six realms. Step out of the six realms and then see what is appropriate.

This was the basic thrust of this talk. We spent a lot of time actually considering these questions in some discussion, but I hope this brief summary will serve to replace this. Thank you for your understanding.