Observing or listening?

Ken: I want to do three things. I’m not sure that we’ll get all of them done. The first thing is very directly related to practice and is going to be very important in the days ahead. In some psychological and some spiritual and even some Buddhist traditions, there is the notion of the observing self or the observing mind. There’s actually a term in Tibetan for this, so ba (pron. so wa), which is the word for watchman, the person in the watch tower. Watch what’s going on. While this is quite explicitly mentioned in some of the Tibetan traditions, in the three traditions of direct awareness practice that I’ve been trained, it is not mentioned at all. Or if it is, it is with the idea that this is a mistake.

Now, not all of us can move into direct awareness at the drop of a hat. Those of you who can do not need to listen to the next few minutes, and so I just ask you to patiently not observe anything. But when it comes to the body, experiencing what’s going on in the body, I’ve come to prefer the word listening to observing. And you can think of this in the context of a conversation. If you’re engaging in conversation with someone, what’s the difference between observing what they are saying and listening to what they’re saying?

Student: Being engaged?

Ken: Yes, I’d go a little bit further than that, actually. You’re moving into direct connection with the conversation. You are not standing outside it at all. You are in it. And you are in it with a posture, figuratively speaking, which could be described as patient curiosity. The curiosity aspect comes from the fact you’re really trying to understand what’s being said. You’re interested. Generally, if we’re not interested, we don’t listen. So curiosity may be too strong a word, I don’t know. But that’s what occurs to me today. Now often when we are curious, we ask questions and we get involved. And of course, as soon as we ask questions, we’re no longer listening. And that’s where the patience comes in. So it’s patient curiosity.

So if you just take a few moments right now and bring your attention to what you’re experiencing in your body. And, just for a few moments, explore listening to your body with that posture of patient curiosity that I described. [Pause] One could also call this deep listening, so you’re not just listening to what’s going on, but there’s a deeper listening, almost a sensing, of what else is going on underneath. [Pause] There’s no sense of trying to control or direct the experience, which means that there’s a quality of just opening to it, not trying to make it into anything that it isn’t. [Pause]

So let’s hear from a couple of people. What was that like or what is that like? For some of you maybe it’s the same old, same old, but maybe it’s not for others. I don’t know. Anybody?

Student: I tried to just listen to what was happening and where it was happening. And at one point I had a scream.

Ken: A scream?

Student: In my toe area, so I just kind of paid attention, listened to what was that like. Was that constant?

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Yes, David.

David: I think I’m used to listening to my stomach or abdomen. And as usual, I kind of went there and there that was. But it’s almost like there’s not a tradition to listening to the rest of it, so it’s sort of flat and quiet.

Ken: Well, that’s a very good point. We’re listening to the whole body, all of it. I’m very glad you brought that up. That is the kind of thing that I would just assume, so it’s not listening to any one part. And for the most part, I find that if we focus on any one part that can be problematic. So I encourage people to be aware of their whole body. And one way of doing that is simply be aware of the crown of your head and the soles of your feet simultaneously. And that way you’ll just be aware of your whole body. And then listen to, experience, whatever is there. But always keep that open attention, which is including the whole body so you aren’t focusing down on one experience or another. Anybody else? Yes.

Inclusive attention

Student: Just a question. Is that sort of like an ecstatic practice for the whole body? Instead of focusing or doing an inventory of all the parts, it’s everything at once?

Ken: Yes, it is. I’m going to talk more about ecstatic practice. Maybe I’ll try and squeeze that in tonight, certainly tomorrow. Another term I use for this is working with inclusive attention. So it’s not a full-blown ecstatic practice. That principle is that you include rather than focus down. And in my own practice, I’ve generally found that that is more fruitful. But one has to always remember that different approaches work differently for people. And I don’t want to say that’s the only way to do it. But in my own experience, my practice became much more effective when I started just including things in experience rather than focusing on. Okay?

Student: I’ve been struggling with this for about three weeks now with various aches and pains, but what I feel it as is an inability to get my posture right so that I never feel like I’m right.

Ken: Yes, and that’s one of the reasons I’m recommending listening to your body. How does your body want to sit?

Student: God knows.

Ken: Well, you don’t know. Is it possible that your body does?

Student: It may be, but it’s hiding it so far.

Ken: Well, is it hiding or are you not listening?

Student: I know I’m listening. I’m always listening.

Ken: Okay, so then from your perspective, the body’s not revealing it. Okay. One of the things you might explore is, how do I want to ask this? There’s a reason that your body’s not revealing it. Do you know that reason?

Student: No.

Ken: So that might be something to explore. I mean there are all of these little wrinkles in here. Okay. Would that be fruitful to you?

Student: I’ll try.

Ken: Okay, good. Anybody else on this point before we move on? Yes. Carolyn?

Carolyn: I have a question because I felt this this morning also, that my body wants to go back. It doesn’t want to go back because I have a little kink in my spine, and it wants to be where the kink is, but it doesn’t like the kink. I mean, does that make any sense?

Ken: Yes, at least I think I understand you. So there’s the tension there that the body’s trying to work out in some way.

Carolyn: My instinct is to want to work it out by going backwards, but my body doesn’t really want to do that, but then the kink is just there.

Ken: Okay, so if you listen to your body, what does your body want to do?

Carolyn: It wants to be in the kink.

Ken: It wants to be in the kink.

Carolyn: It wants to be as it is I think because this morning and this afternoon is the same. I’m getting the same result.

Ken: I’m not quite sure what you mean when you say, “It wants to be in the kink.”

Carolyn: It means it wants to be in the posture where it happens to have a little knot in the middle there. But I don’t want the knot.

Ken: Well, that about says it, doesn’t it? So there’s a conversation going on here, right? What if you listen a bit more deeply?

Carolyn: Well, a minute ago I actually just stretched up. And I do feel better. But it was a more aggressive move.

Ken: Was your body happy with the stretch? Yes. And you may find this in your practice. In some traditions one is encouraged to sit very, very still. And I remember Dezhung Rinpoche, when we were studying shamatha practice with him. After he’d gone over the basics of posture and everything, then he leaned forward and said, “When I was a young monk, we were being trained to meditate. We were led into the main temple and we sat down on the benches and the string was strung. And we all sat so that our noses just touched the string, very straight. Every time the string moved, we were all beaten.” I said, “This is not how you learn to meditate. This is how you learn to sit still.”

Now, I don’t want you writhing all over the place. But when you sit, you may find various tensions coming out in your body and your body wants to move in certain ways. It’s one of the reasons why I’m talking about listening to it deeply. Listen to it deeply, and your bodies may be saying, “I’d like to stretch.” Or, “I’d like to just be a little bit over here.” Because what’s important here is finding ease in the body, which means not just holding it rigidly in position.

Now the body is not at ease like this. It isn’t. It gets quite tired quite quickly that way. It’s also not at ease like this. It also gets tired. So explore your posture, and you may find as you do this how your body knows how to sit straight and at ease, or you may also find out how the body can see growing into that ability to sit straight and at ease. And it may not be perfectly according to tradition, but it’s what works for you. And so I encourage you actually to explore that.

Now that same deep listening also applies to our emotional states. It’s a little more difficult. We need a higher level of attention in order to do that. And as that becomes available to us, we will often, I would perhaps say generally, find that there are quite close connections between what we’re experiencing physically and various kinds of emotional material. The reason I’m emphasizing this is that mahamudra practice is not at all about observing what arises in experience. It’s about being awake in the experience. So you may be able to use this notion of deep listening as a first step into the experience. Okay.

Mahamudra: being awake in experience

Student: Would you say again what you just did about mahamudra. That it’s not about—

Ken: Mahamudra is not about observing experience. It’s about being awake in experience. If you go back to what I talked about briefly last night: we struggle because we are either not able or not willing to experience something. And so we try to control what we’re experiencing so we don’t have to experience that. And that may differ from moment to moment, day to day, and so forth. One way to describe Buddhist practice, in general, is that is developing the capacity to be able to experience whatever arises, which is very, very different from observing whatever arises. Okay?

Second thing I want to talk about, we go back to the prayer we do at the beginning of the meditation session. The next stanza is:

The three jewels are the reliable and definite refuges.
Give me energy to trust them

Prayer to the Perfection of Wisdom

What do I trust?

Ken: Again, we have another instance of, this is an answer to a question. What is the question? This one I don’t think is too hard. One possible question—maybe you come up with some others—is: what can I trust or what do I trust? This opens up the whole topic of trust.

Now, I remember my colleague, Yvonne, describing a conversation she had with Suzuki Roshi—the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind—asking him what did he trust? He said, “Nothing.”

Now, there are two ways of understanding this. And to understand the two ways, we have to turn to Alice in Wonderland. Alice and the White King are watching the race between the lion and the unicorn, and the White King asks Alice, “Do you see anyone coming?”

And Alice says, “I see no one.”

To which the White King says, “What sharp eyes you have! And in this light too.”

Now our ordinary conception of trust is like, can I trust this person or can I trust this bridge to bear my weight as I walk over it? If you’re rock climbing, can I trust this rope not to break if I fall? Can I trust so-and-so to keep his word? And there seems to be a necessary element of duality there. We trust something. That’s not the sort of trust that we’re talking about here. In the same way that I described listening as patient curiosity—which moves one into an intimate relationship with whatever you’re listening to—the trust in the way that we talk about it here is an opening to, and a sensing of what is possible, without trying to control or direct.

An opening to, and a sensing of what is possible, without trying to control or direct. And so trust, in this context or in this way of looking at it, is very much about quality of attention and the quality of letting go without expectation. Ordinarily, the way we think of trust, there’s a quality of expectation. But trust that we’re talking about here has no quality of expectation.

Then what do we trust? Refuge is the basic formulation in Buddhism of faith, confidence, trust: go for refuge in the three jewels. In the Tibetan tradition, these are interpreted on several levels. And in the beginning, as the Dalai Lama himself has said, it’s basically a theistic projection that one thinks of Buddha as a savior in some sense. And he said on this occasion, “Most Tibetans I know would be much happier practicing another religion, because that’s not Buddhism at all.”

A different way of looking at the three jewels—buddha, dharma and sangha—is that buddha refers to the ineffable quality of experience. By that I mean that when we look at what experiences, any sense of it being some thing runs out through our hands like sand. And so one aspect, one unavoidable aspect of experience, is that it isn’t solid. It’s very difficult to say what it is. There’s nothing to point to.

The three jewels

Ken: In more usual Buddhist parlance that’s referred to as emptiness. So you could also say that the buddha in the three jewels refers to the emptiness of experience. But experience isn’t simply empty, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything. Inherent in emptiness is this clarity or lucidity or this possibility of knowing, potential for knowing. And in this interpretation, that’s what the dharma refers to.

And then in the space of emptiness and the illumination of clarity, experience arises without restriction. That’s what sangha refers to. In the space of emptiness and the illumination of clarity, experience arises without restriction. And that’s what sangha refers to.

Now we have this question: “What can I trust?” And in the meditation this evening, you might spend some time with “What do I trust? What can I trust? And because of death and impermanence and other such factors, we find that it’s very difficult to find anything outside of us that we can trust. They tend to disintegrate with time. So many of us find that the only thing that we can find to trust is our own knowing, which takes us right back to some of the questions we were talking about this morning.

And this formulation of the three jewels as emptiness, clarity and unrestricted experience is again a possible answer to the question: “What can I trust?” “What is my own knowing?” That’s something I’d like you to explore. When you explore this, be quite honest with yourself. You may not notice what you actually trust. In other words, what you actually take refuge in.

A student of mine comes from a pretty wealthy background, and she dresses extremely well, even in the most casual circumstances. So about six years ago now, I made the suggestion that maybe she shouldn’t trust clothing and that she might try wearing something else. That took four years. It was a very painful effort for both of us, but I won.

Watch for that kind of thing in yourself. We have these inadvertent and often unconscious places where things have to be a certain way for us, and there is absolutely no negotiation. As I said, that was a four-year negotiation because where you have that kind of definiteness in the way you relate to the world, that’s something you trust that it’s always going to be that way. Yes?

Student: For me, that’s just not lining up with your definition of trust at all.

Ken: Not the original definition I gave, but I’m talking about how people ordinarily, but I want you to move us into the definition that I gave.

Ordinary trust

Student: So how would you define ordinary trust?

Ken: Oh, thinking there is something outside that we can rely on all the time. That’s the expectation that’s present in the conventional notion of trust. Is that clear?

Student: Why simply turn the meaning into its opposite? It just doesn’t actually make a lot of sense to me.

Ken: Oh dear. Because I work this way. [Laughs]

Student: Okay. I can understand that you can’t trust anything in that sense.

Ken: Yes, fair enough. Here’s how I arrived at this. I like the word trust because there is an emotional quality in it, which I don’t find in such words that are alternative translations such as rely on, things like that. And so I started to explore my own experience of “What am I doing?” And particularly in practice. When I’m trusting a certain practice such as mahamudra, dzogchen or something like that, or compassion or taking and sending, what am I actually doing? And the emotional quality is that I’m allowing myself to open emotionally.

But when I really looked, it wasn’t that then I was expecting something to be there, which I could lean on and trust in the conventional sense. But the actual opening and trusting for me was just what I described. It was an attunement to what is, and what is possible, without trying to direct or control it. That’s what I found. And that’s how I came up with that definition and why I’m distinguishing it. And it’s very, very closely related to faith, which I also define as the willingness to open to whatever arises.

Student: But it’s not trust in the thing that you’re trusting.

Ken: No, it’s not the trust in you. Actually you aren’t even trusting that there isn’t any thing in you that you’re trusting. It is more a way of relating to things. Does that clarify?

Student: Can I just refer back to the notions of truth and trust? Because for me, the truth of the body and what I trust is sensation. That is absolutely trustworthy. And I mean sensation devoid of story, the truth of the body is sensation.

Ken: Okay. Yes.

Student: And there’s an inherent trust in that for me.

Ken: That’s something you’ve acquired through your own experience, right? Yeah. Okay. And so you’ve learned how to listen to that deeply? Yeah. Okay, and that’s fine.

So, what is it like to trust emptiness? What is it like to trust clarity? And here we come back to Suzuki Roshi’s remark, “I trust nothing.” Because it is possible to trust nothing whatsoever, which is not a statement of cynicism, but a statement in which you trust opening to whatever is there without any sense of expectation. And that’s why I said there are two ways to understand Suzuki Roshi’s comment. And much of the practice we’re concerned with in these few days is precisely about trusting nothing whatsoever.

Student: Is that the same as emptiness?

Ken: Yes. But I found actually that formulation is less abstract than emptiness. And to do that, we need, as I mentioned last night, a certain capacity and there’s a certain skill. But this evening, one of the things I would like you to explore is: “What do I trust? What can I trust?”

How do I relate?

Ken: Then the next stanza:

The beings in the six realms are as kind as my parents.
Give me energy for loving-kindness and compassion.

Prayer to the Perfection of Wisdom

I’ve thought about this one quite a lot, and I have a couple of ideas about what the question here might be. But I’d be very interested to hear what you think the question might be that this is the suggestion or an answer to. Any thoughts? Julia.

Julia: How do I relate to other people in life?

Ken: Okay, how do I relate to other people in life? Anybody else? Yes.

Student: How can I respond to, overall, the pain, to my own pain, to other people’s pain?

Ken: Okay, so in a sense, how do I relate to pain? Okay. Anybody else? Yes.

Student: What are my commitments?

Ken: How did you get there?

Student: I thought about, well, I guess I think about every day about loving-kindness and compassion. And when I interact with other people, I have a commitment to have those two things present.

Ken: So if I can change the wording of your question, and you can tell me if I’m understanding it correctly, what are the values that I live by?

Student: Yeah.

Ken: You look doubtful.

Student: Yeah, sort of. That’s pretty much, it’s not all-encompassing, but yeah, that’ll do.

Ken: Commitment is larger for you, isn’t it? Okay. Yes.

Student: To me, it almost seems to flow from the refuge. It has something of a flavor of, where do I act out of this trust? Something like that.

Ken: How do I act?

Student: It flows from this [unclear] before. It has something to do with flowing from the refuge.

Ken: All right, so it is coming from, so this is what I trust. How do I act on that trust? Something like that.

Student: Something like that. But what arises from that.

Ken: What arises from that. Okay. So there are several possible questions, and there may be other possible questions for some of the previous stanzas as well. When I thought about it, I came out in a very similar place to Julia and Earl. It’s “How do I relate to things?” People being within the category of things. Now, this is a very interesting answer to that question. Relate to things with loving-kindness and compassion.

Now, generally speaking, as I’ve mentioned before, at least in Tibetan Buddhist training, one is simply told, loving-kindness and compassion, these are important qualities and you cultivate them. But in keeping with how I would like you to be approaching this, there’s a question here. “How do I relate to things?” or “Qhat are my commitments?” Or whatever the question is for you.

I would like you to start, in this case, with the answer. You go to the question and then consider the question very deeply. It is very hard to get away from the fact that Buddhism sees human nature as inherently good. It’s not a blank tablet. We’re not simply a complex of conditioned drives, whether that’s sociological or cultural or biological conditioning. Buddhism sees human nature as essentially good. That is, the nature of awareness is emptiness and its manifestation is compassion.

And we can take that as an article of belief, but I think in doing so, we do ourselves a disservice. I think a more fruitful way is to explore as deeply as you’re able: “How do I relate with others? How do I relate to experience? How do I want to relate to experience?” And again, in posing that question, I don’t mean in the sense of aspiring to an ideal because that often produces strain in us. But, “How do I want to be able to relate to people, to things, to experience?” Naturally perhaps, and see where that leads you.

There’s a story that Rinpoche tells, which I think is in Words of my Perfect Teacher, about a very harsh and cruel bandit chief. There were lots of bandits in Tibet, it’s very harsh country. And so you had—as was quite common in sparsely populated regions—small groups of people who made their living robbing other people, particularly the caravans and the nomads. And on one occasion, this bandit and his gang attacked a caravan. And in the course of the attack, the bandit slashed a pregnant horse.

And the shock of the sword cut caused the mare to go into labor. And she gave birth to this foal. And even though she was now dying from loss of blood, she raised her head and started to lick the foal as animals usually do right after birth, cleaning the foal so she could get up. And when the bandit chief saw this, he was overcome because here was this mother mortally wounded, and her only thought right at that moment was for her child, for the foal. And this awoke something in him so that he actually stopped being a bandit that day.

And it’s things like this that make me concur with this principle in Buddhism, that human nature is essentially good, that there is an element of compassion, a potential for compassion in everyone. Sometimes it is so blocked by trauma or conditioning that it may never surface, but I certainly haven’t encountered any evidence that it isn’t actually there. But again, that’s my own reflection. And what I invite you to do here is to engage in yours.

What is possible?

Ken: The third or the last stanza of this is also an answer or a possible answer to a question. Anybody like to take a stab at that one? Or what’s the question that this verse suggests for you?

In the end, my mind is nothing but being as truth. (Which for those of you who’re technical, is the translation of dharmakaya)
Give me energy to attain a stable understanding.

Prayer to the Perfection of Wisdom

Meg?

Meg: What is my mind?

Ken: I think you have to go further. That’s too Buddhist a question still. We use mind in Buddhism in a way that we never use it in ordinary English. I invite you to go a step further.

Meg: What is experience?

Ken: Possibly. Anybody else?

Student: What is my true nature?

Ken: Yes, that’s very similar. Okay, there are two other questions that suggest themselves to me here. And they’re related. “What can I know or what’s possible?”

Student: You rarely agree. This was one of those rare occasions where we actually came up with the same thing. [Laughter] So shocked.

Ken: Endure. What’s actually possible?

Student: Could it be, “How did I get here and where am I going?”

Ken: Well, I’m not sure whether that question is that, but I think those are very good questions. “How did I get here and where am I going?” Well, yeah, I think the second one. This could be an answer to that. So In this morning’s talk and this afternoon’s talk, we’ve covered seven or eight questions and just had a couple more thrown into the ring. Realistically, I don’t expect you to work through all seven or eight this weekend, but you might pick one or two of these and work with them deeply because we don’t often get the opportunity. Which one you choose is entirely up to you. Some of these questions are going to be more pressing for some of you than others. I suggest you take a question that is pressing for you, one that has some resonance, possibly even some urgency.

And coming at practice from the perspective of the question is probably going to help you to practice with energy and interest. Because now you are coming out of your own interest and not simply following what is very definitely a very profound tradition in which things have been worked out very, very deeply. But it may not be the answer to your questions. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re also having the interviews so that you have the opportunity to explore those questions. And I can perhaps be able to help you shape or adapt or use some of the various methods in the mahamudra tradition to explore those questions that are relevant for you. Okay. I think we’ll have to stop there. Just those two things. Okay, so this evening let’s just do the Heart Sutra together.