Milarepa’s Song

Ken: Milarepa’s Song was this exchange between Milarepa and Lady Paldarboom. This is part of a much longer story. You notice in the introductory paragraphs she said, “Dear teacher I have done nothing at all to prepare for this next life.” Lady Paldarboom came up from a wealthy family. Basically, she and a couple of friends, if I remember correctly, decided it would be cool to go and see what this yogin was like.

They were a little frivolous. And Milarepa said, “Okay, that’s fine. You can have your fun now. But what’s going to happen when you get old and die? You’re not going to be as beautiful as you are now.” And he just ran through all this stuff. Nobody had ever talked to her that way before.

So, she said, “Well, here’s someone who’s not simply enchanted with me like everybody else.” And so she asked him for some instruction, and Milarepa was quite pleased with that.

If you practice the dharma sincerely in my tradition, you don’t need to change your name. One awakens with a full head of hair. You don’t have to cut your hair and make other changes.

Milarepa’s Song to Lady Paldarboom

So, this is very much about a practice which is based in experience and does not have to do with adopting a monastic tradition, or even the sadhu tradition, or a specific form of life.

By the way, how many of you’re familiar with the Kumbh Mela? Okay. One of the assistants at HBO, where I do some consulting work, an Indian woman, made a movie of the Kumbha Mela, a little documentary. It’s very interesting to watch. The Kumbha Mela is a Shaivite festival which takes place, I think, every 11 years. It’s the only time that you can be initiated into the cult of Shiva. So, hundreds of men, possibly thousands, I don’t know, come and are initiated. They’re of all ages and all walks of life and everything. And it’s a massive pilgrimage to this one location. The numbers are incredible. Within a two-week period, 11 million people come and go, and the logistics are just crazy.

These are people who give up—whether they’re doctors or barbers or whatever they are—they just give it all up and they’re initiated into the Shaivite cult. And they either go naked or with very few robes, and they wear ashes, and that’s it. And that’s their life from then on. And I realized as I was watching it, this was exactly the milieu in which Buddha taught. And this was the kind of thing that was happening.

There were lots of these different groups which followed a teacher or tradition and people simply gave up everything to practice. And so this is the way of the sahdu. The first Buddhist monastics were the Buddhist form of that sadhu approach to practice, where you just gave up everything. You got three robes and then a begging bowl, and that was it. You lived your life from there.

Practicing within the context of your life

Ken: So, when Milarepa says, “One awakens with a full head of hair. You don’t have to cut your hair or make other changes.” This is not about being initiated into a particular form of practice with a ritual form of life. It’s about practicing within the context of your life, whatever it needs to be, which at this juncture is probably the predominant form of practice in the West. Whether it will remain so or not, who knows? It’s very difficult to tell. In Tibet, it didn’t, of course. The monastic form of practice became the predominant one, and possibly the same could be said of Southeast Asia.

He sang this song with four examples and five points about meditation and mind practice:

Ah, Lady Paldarboom,
fortunate and devoted student,

Take the sky as an example,
Practice without any sense of limit or position.

Take the sun and moon as examples,
Practice without any sense of clarity or distortion.

Take this mountain as an example,
Practice without any sense of movement or change.

Take the great ocean as an example,
Practice without any sense of depth or surface.

To bring out mind,
Practice without any doubt or hesitation.

Milarepa’s Song to Lady Paldarboom

Sounds simple enough.

Be like the sky

Ken: Let’s go through these one by one. So, you sit. [Pause] It says, “Take the sky as an example.” So, just be the sky.

Practice without any sense of limit or position.

What’s that like? The Tibetan, if I remember correctly, is center and periphery literally, but I decided to translate it as limit or position because the circumference of a circle is kind of a limit. And that’s what that word periphery refers to. And the center of course is the place where you are. Now, this may seem like a silly question, but where are we? Sue’s looking at me with the utmost suspicion. Anybody can tell me where we are? David?

David: At the center of our experience.

Ken: That’s a very evasive answer. [Laughter] A long time ago now, I was skiing with my nephew in Mont Tremblant. He was asking me, “What do you exactly teach, Ken?”

And I said, “Well, let’s see if I can demonstrate.” I said, “Jamie, where are we?”

He said, “Well, we’re on the ski lift, Ken.”

I said, “Yeah, I know. But where’s the ski lift?”

“Well, at Mont Tremblant, Ken. What are you doing?”

I said, “Okay, yeah, Mont Tremblant. So, I got that. But where’s Mont Tremblant?”

He said, “Well, it’s north of Montreal.”

“Okay, where’s Montreal?”

“Well, it’s in Quebec.”

“Okay, where’s Quebec?”

“Well, it’s in Canada, and that’s in North America, and that’s on Earth. And Earth is in the solar system. And the solar system is an arm of the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is a galaxy in the universe.”

“So, where’s this universe?”

And Jamie went, “I don’t know.”

I said, “That’s my problem too. I don’t know either.”

Now this may seem silly in a way, but the fact is that all position is relative, and we actually have no idea where we are. We also have no idea where things stop either.

So, I’d like you just to sit with that sense for a few minutes right now. No idea where you are. No idea where things start or stop. This is like the sky. [Pause]

What’s that like? How many of you find it relaxing? How many of you find it disturbing? What’s disturbing about this? Okay, Sonya, what do you find disturbing about this?

Sonya: Well, there’s two things that happen. There’s a sense of it’s very expansive right here. And there’s also a sense of boundlessness.

Ken: As in, “Oh my God!”

Sonya: Oh my God! Yeah. Where were the boundaries?

Ken: Okay. Yes?

Student: I once had a middle-ear blockage while I was scuba diving. I completely lost all sense of orientation. There was no up; there was no down; there was no sideways; there were no benchmarks. They got me into a room and walls didn’t make sense. It’s very disorientating.

Ken: It’s extremely disorienting. Yes. So, this is a little bit like that.

Student: It is and it isn’t. I’m more relaxed with it now. It’s more that I’m remembering that in terms of the idea of not having any kind of benchmark. It’s really very difficult to conceive of at all if you’ve never actually experienced it.

Ken: I agree. It’s difficult, but that’s precisely what we’re aiming for here. So, that’s a good start. Okay, so no idea of benchmark and no reference point. Right? Okay. Carolyn?

Carolyn: I found it very freeing.

Ken: You found it very freeing. Okay. Who else found it disturbing? Amanda.

Amanda: I guess it just kind of takes me to insignificance really quickly.

Ken: How do you become insignificant?

Amanda: Well, the universe is so vast.

Ken: Okay, so it sounds like you’re a little intimidated by the scope of it all.

Amanda: Yeah, well, I just think I get lost.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Peggy.

Peggy: I think it helps me understand why religions have creation myths.

Ken: Yeah, it’s to bring comfort. Okay. So, that’s one aspect of meditation practice, or this form of meditation practice: sitting with that total openness. So, you’re not concerned about being somewhere; you’re not concerned with things starting or stopping, not having any reference point whatsoever. And one can feel the grasping, the wanting to hold onto something that comes up. What you do in your practice is to just let that run and keep coming back to being like the sky.

Be like the sun and moon

Ken: Then the next one: “Take the sun and moon as examples, practice without any sense of clarity or distortion.” Now this line refers to the knowing quality of mind. Some of you may observe four of the five elements are here. He didn’t actually use wind or air. The sun and moon are connected with the fire element. And the fire element is connected with the natural knowing of mind.

Now, when we normally practice, we’re trying to avoid distortion or any clouding or diminishing of this knowing quality. We want it to be as clear as possible and we make that kind of effort. I was talking about that this morning. What I’d like you to do right now is just to sit and without any concern for whether the knowing is clear or distorted. Just let it be what it is. [Pause] What’s that like?

Student: Pretty simple.

Ken: Say a bit more. You say it’s pretty simple?

Student: Well, it was. I don’t know there’s much to it.

Ken: Right? What was your experience?

Student: I was looking that way and I was breathing.

Ken: That was it. Okay. Did somebody over there say it’s pretty amazing? I thought I heard someone say that. Okay. My imagination. Anybody else? Yes.

Student: It felt effortless.

Ken: Felt effortless? Okay. Can you expand on that a bit?

Student: Well, when I’m trying to maintain clarity, it takes some effort to do that. But I wasn’t trying to do that. It was just very peaceful.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else?

Student: Relaxing.

Ken: Relaxing. Okay. Yes, Sonya.

Sonya: Yeah, it was really about becoming that experience. I’m right in the experience.

Ken: So, you’re right in the experience.

Sonya: Right in the experience versus watching the experience. You’re in the experience right away.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Yes.

Student: Perhaps along the same lines, a feeling of presence.

Ken: Feeling of presence. What’s that?

Student: I don’t know. Just feeling like being in the moment.

Ken: I want you to describe your experience without using two words: being and presence. What do you experience in your body? [Pause] Calm, okay. Anybody else? Carolyn.

Carolyn: I’ve got a question mark space.

Ken: Pardon?

Carolyn: Question mark space, you know?

Ken: Like a big, “I don’t know”?

Carolyn: Yeah.

Ken: Question mark space. That’s a new one. Thank you. Okay.

Be like a mountain

Ken: “Take this mountain as an example, practice without any sense of movement or change.” I don’t know about you, but one of the things that often goes on in my meditation is this kind of running commentary. “Oh yes, you’re settling down now. This is pretty good balance. Don’t push it. Don’t tighten up yet. That’s just about right. Slipping a little towards dullness. Open it up a bit. A little too energetic there. Just relax. Stay cool. Don’t tighten up now. Oh damn, there was a big distraction.” [Laughter] So, one or two of you also have this experience? Okay, so what are we doing? We’re tracking change like crazy, aren’t we?

Student: We’re riding our bikes.

Ken: Now. How many of you ride a bike that way?

Student: At the beginning, yes.

Ken: Not for very long. What happens if you do ride a bike that way? We could learn from that. So, I’d like you to just try sitting now for a few minutes, letting go of any sense of movement or change.

Student: I just thought I was doing so great because I was so good at it.

Ken: Well now’s time for your next step. It’s just like Trungpa said, “Meditation practice is one insult after another.” [Laughter] So, sit without any sense of movement or change. [Pause] Well what’s that like?Julia?

Julia: I found myself dropping vigilance.

Ken: Dropping vigilance. Say a bit more please.

Julia: Change could always bring in something unwelcome. So, we got a sense of guarding or vigilance against that.

Ken: Ah.

Julia: That just dropped.

Ken: So, you dropped that defensive posture. Okay. And what difference did that make in your experience?

Julia: Relaxed it.

Ken: Okay, more relaxed. Anybody else? David?

David: Two parts. First part was freeing, second part got stuck on an intellectual tic in that I think any sensory input we receive is a change, otherwise we wouldn’t notice it.

Ken: Did you notice the motorbike?

David: Absolutely.

Ken: How did you work with it? What did you do?

David: I just observed it. It changed in pitch. It was change.

Ken: Exactly. You observed it. So, you observed change. What would it be like to hear it without observing it?

David: It would be music.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Franca.

Why did we start with questions?

Franca: Why did we waste the last two days with questions and riding bikes and stuff? Why didn’t you just tell us this in the first place? Everybody’s all relaxed and having a good time. [Laughter]

Ken: Is this what you’re referring to Susan?

Franca: Actually it’s a serious question.

Ken: I know. What do you actually want to know?

Franca: I want to know why you’re introducing this now, and I have the sense that if you had started with this, it would’ve been a different experience for everybody.

Ken: Go on.

Franca: Higher energy, more energy having done that.

Ken: What else? Higher energy. More energy—

Franca: And more stability, more calm.

Ken: Well, yes in the energy. Yeah, but that’s taking into account that we’re adjusting to the retreat. But let’s go specifically: why did I have you messing around with those questions? What effect did messing around with those questions have on you? “None whatsoever, Ken. It was a complete waste of time.” [Laughter]

Franca: For me, it was like toys in the waiting room. I played with them a little bit and they were like wow, look one of these, and kind of played with it a little bit and then I just put it away because it wasn’t interesting anymore.

Ken: See? Not at all. It was a complete waste of time.

Franca: It was not not at all. But it just sort of occupied me for a while. The playing is not unimportant. Playing was actually very important.

Ken: I agree. What if you took the question seriously?

Franca: It’s not to say I didn’t. What do you mean? The question you’re just asking me now or the questions—

Ken: Questions yesterday.

Franca: Yesterday. I did take them seriously. I don’t find it works for me to bore down on things and to get really serious in the sense of intensive and relentless over it. I find it’s actually better to just kind of play with things and then put them away.

Ken: All right. You have something to say?

Student: I have something to add actually.

Ken: Please.

Student: It did occur to me this morning at breakfast that this practice might actually be a lot easier with possibly no short-term memory, especially what we just did.

Ken: Well, yes, but there’s the little difficulty of remembering why you’re doing it.

Student: But you wouldn’t need to.

Ken: Something I’m missing there. So you wouldn’t need to?

Student: Every moment would be new. You come alive to every moment. I find myself wrapped up so much in what’s just happened. Trying to come to grips with what just happened before. What’s happened right now. I’m catching up.

Ken: You are pursuing the past. Okay. Yes?

Student: Isn’t there some relationship between being able to experience something and then being able to also think about it? And isn’t that the relationship and being able to consider the questions that you asked as well as being able to do the meditation?

Ken: I think that comes into it. But let’s take a step back for a moment. Now, pretty well everybody here has practiced before and you’ve been exposed to a lot of different teaching and practice. Let’s just take a hypothetical situation. If I were just to come in and say, “Okay, I want you to sit as if you were the sky,” with no introduction, no framing or anything like that. What would happen?

Well I think a number of people would say, “Why?” or “What’s the point of doing that?” So, my intention in having you consider those questions, and not just the answers, was to establish some connection with your own motivation for practicing in a certain way, which is profoundly disturbing to much of the conditioning in us. As you heard people say, “Like the sky is like there’s no reference.” That’s disorienting, disturbing, it’s also relaxing, and freeing but it’s unnerving at the same time.

And one of the things we’re doing in spiritual practice and practice of dharma is moving into a way of experiencing in which our ordinary conditioning provides no way of understanding what we’re doing. So, we have to have a reason, we have to know why we’re doing it. It has to be meaning in it for us. And that’s why I introduced that. So, now, yeah, I’m interested in exploring what I experienced, or what I know, what is right, or how to do, and becoming clearer about that intention opens the possibility of being able to put energy into this kind of practice.

And when we’ve been within a certain frame of practice for a long period of time, we get used to certain kinds of practices because we’re exposed to them over and over again. And we’ve been interested in this for a long time, so we tend to forget all of that. That actually is a little bit of a problem.

One of the things that I’ve found both in my own practice, but also in working with others, is that we’ll reach a point in practice where things seem to go or do go flat. And we lose our interest in practice or it may have become so much part of our lives, we do it, but there’s no energy in it. And it’s not that our capability is diminished, it’s just something is missing. And frequently, what has happened is that a certain intention that we’ve had with respect to practice has been completed, but we weren’t aware that it had happened. And revisiting these fundamental questions is a way of revisiting our intention and keeping it clear and sharp because that’s actually really, really important.

Dzogchen retreat experience

Ken: Several years ago I did a dzogchen retreat. And the meditation instruction was very simple, and this literally was the only meditation instruction we received. At the beginning of the retreat, the teacher who was teaching the retreat said, “Okay. During your meditation periods, do nothing. And we’ll meet at 10:00 each day for a teaching.” And then he said, “Well, we also need to meet in the evenings because we are not going to get through the text. But in your meditation, just do nothing.”

It turned out to be a very profound retreat for me. But it was a three-week retreat. Mine lasted about 14 days, then I started to get itchy. And my thoughts turn to people such as my own teacher, who spent many years in the mountains, and in particular to Longchenpa, who is the author of the text that we were studying, who spent 14 years in a cave outside Lhasa doing nothing. Now since Franca asked this question, I get to ask her. Do you like being productive?

Franca: Doesn’t make me happy.

Ken: But do you like being productive? Yeah. What would it be like to be totally unproductive? Let’s say for a week. At the end of the week you have accomplished absolutely nothing. And if somebody says, “Well, what’d you do last week?” The best you can say is, “Nothing.” What would that be like? Not what would you like it to be like, but what would it actually be?

Franca: I don’t know. I’d been on that retreat, but I wasn’t totally unproductive.

Ken: Yes, I know.

Franca: Dishwashing duties and little things like that.

Ken: I know there were some flaws in the retreat structure. [Laughter]

Franca: And I brushed my teeth. And I made productivity out of things in my day.

Ken: Exactly. Yes.

Franca: Little dramas for myself.

Ken: Exactly. So, that’s a week. What would it be like to be like that for a month? You begin to feel it? Not just Franca. Does everybody begin to feel it? Okay. What would it be like to intentionally do that for a year? Yes, Pam. Doesn’t compute at all, does it? What about 10 years? That’s a very sizable portion of one’s adult life.

Student: And why? So, we’d be enlightened?

Ken: No.

Student: That would be far too productive. [Laughter]

Ken: Now what would you have to let go of? Are you getting the drift?

Student: When you say nothing, you mean actually not even meditating? Just curious what nothing now means. Or just me sitting in the chair doing nothing.

Ken: Yes.

Student: Yes to which?

Ken: All of that. Oh, you get up in the morning and you sit. Then it’s time to brush your teeth and wash up; you go and do that; you prepare a little breakfast; then you sit down. A few hours later you get hungry; you go and have a little bite to eat. You sit down.

Student: It makes me horrified to think. Actually it’s starting to sound very relaxing. I think I’d be preparing myself 16 meals a day. [Laughter]

Ken: Sue?

Sue: I actually had an experience of doing nothing for a period of six-plus weeks, which was imposed upon me.

Ken: I remember you told me. Yes.

Sue: For health reasons it was imposed upon me, and the instructions were to do absolutely nothing: do not meditate, do not read, do not exercise, do absolutely nothing. And my biggest question first of all is, what am I going to do if I can’t meditate? At least I can meditate, right? So, I can’t meditate. So, I just decided just to be present and mindful and relaxed right into it. And it was the most amazing experience of non-doing, and waking up to what’s there when you stop doing. So, had it not been imposed upon me, I’m not sure, because the doing always comes up, right? But I always had this voice from the doctor saying, “Don’t do anything, don’t do anything.” Right. And it was just incredible. I say, go for it. Really.

Ken: Yeah. But you had to let go of a lot. Yeah. This is why I explored those questions, because to really do this practice involves letting go of everything. To do nothing for six months or a year, particularly in our society, you have to let go of significant career ambitions, your identity of who you are and your place in the world, the opinions of others, how you were regarded, and plus all of the internal agendas that keep us moving and doing things. So, it’s quite nontrivial, and for that we have to be very clear. Now, as Sue said, it was imposed upon her: do nothing or you’ll die, basically.

Sue: You’ll be very sick. You won’t get better.

Ken: And you’ll never get better. And in a certain sense, from the spiritual point of view, you won’t actually experience what life is until you stop doing things. A few people, when it’s been imposed upon them, have found doing nothing a source of very deep wisdom and compassion. There’s something about British jails that does this because three of the great leaders of the last century: Mahatma Gandhi, Anwar Sadat and Nelson Mandela, spent very, very long periods of time in British jails.

Student: Julia, put us in jail, would you?

Julia: I was thinking that the food isn’t great, but it’s fine. And they’re not these ghastly brutal environments—unless you’re in the H-blocks in Northern Ireland—that you have in US jails. You have your own room and you can keep a budgerigar, and I mean, really it’s quite humane in many ways.

Ken: The British sense of fair play, right? But you are not able to do anything and there’s something in that experience which gives rise to wisdom and compassion. Margaret.

Margaret: I was thinking this whole idea of doing nothing, it’s such an assault on our sense of self, isn’t it? Everything you’re talking about—

Ken: It’s a total assault.

Margaret: Everything we feel about ourselves because we identify ourselves so much in terms of what we do, even if it’s just a particular way we have of making a cup of tea.

Ken: Yeah, it’s a complete assault. That’s right. Yes, Franca.

An ongoing practice of doing nothing

Franca: I have another question though. Also a serious one, is, why aren’t you doing nothing now? You said it was this fantastic experience.

Sue: Well no, it was more than an experience. It was an opening to effortless doing, which now I have integrated to a certain extent in my life. So, my doing is effortless. And doing does itself, right? And the wisdom is just there. And that’s what it was an opening to: that you don’t have to effort from the ego, from the self, in the way that we think we do.

Franca: So, you’re saying that you’ve got it and you don’t have to do nothing anymore?

Student: She brings her nothing with her.

Franca: Is that what you’re saying?

Sue: Not that I don’t have to do nothing anymore. I mean, opportunities to step out and do nothing are very a powerful reminder. Sometimes life can pick up, sometimes I can get caught up, but for the most part I pretty much increasingly have learned just to step out and stop. And then start again from a place of non-doing. But a prolonged period, like going on retreat, really reinforces that you don’t have to do anything.

Franca: How about you?

Ken: I find it’s an ongoing process. One comes to understand various possibilities, and then that’s built on, it’s refined. And it also deals a lot with some of the other things we’ve been working with in this retreat. When you rest, and rest completely doing nothing, you become aware of all of the stuff that pushes. And at every stage, what I find is that about every six weeks, there’s another thing to let go of, and to work through the process of letting go. So, I’m no longer driven by that. So, I find it more of an ongoing process.

Student: But you keep adding new ones, right? I mean, you drop one off, “I don’t need to do this anymore.”

Ken: Yes. And as I drop, so then I have a little more freedom, because I’m not being driven by that. And then I discover another one over here. No, I don’t necessarily add something else. I discover another area where something is driving, and not letting things rest. So, I see it as an ongoing process of constantly letting go. Maybe by the end of my life I’ll actually do nothing. Yes.

Student: Ken, my experience with that was that I had this perfect storm crises: burn-out, divorce, and I arranged inside my company to just leave and go to Asia. And I was gone a total of nine months and one period was away six months. And in Asia I devolved from workaholic type—an obsessive, nobody can do it as well as I can do it, and I need to watch them—into being awake 16 hours a day. And over a period of time accomplishing nothing but basically what Longchenpa was doing in the cave: get up in the morning, wander down the beach aimlessly, get hungry, eat, wander, get hungry, eat, wander, get tired, go to sleep.

When I got back after living in Asia like that with no direction, no intent other than just dealing with this stuff that had occurred, letting something happen inside. When I got back to the business, the first impact was that it was still running quite well. Second, the people there, somehow they just kind of glazed over as far as that whole transformational experience.

“Hi, John.”

“I’ve been in Asia now for the last six months.”

“Yeah, welcome back. By the way, da, da, da, da, da, da.”

It was like they just didn’t relate. And the hardest part of adjustment was that instead of being the first one there, they had to get used to me wandering in about 11:30, taking a long lunch, hanging around that afternoon a little bit, and then going home.

Ken: This is your own business?

Student: My own business. Because remember, it ran quite well for six months. And I could tell, because they’re all clocking in at 8:30, and taking the hour for lunch, and going home at 5:30. I could tell that was an adjustment, but they adjusted, and I adjusted. That’s what that was like for me.

Ken: Thank you. So, the importance of doing nothing. Well, we’re not going to get through this whole thing today, but that has its advantages too.

Be like the ocean

Ken: We did the movement and change, right? Okay.

Student: Well, we didn’t do, we said we started there.

Ken: We didn’t actually do it? Okay, we did, yeah.

Student: You forgot to say that it was earth.

Ken: Okay, it’s earth. Next one’s water. The ocean is kind of a little giveaway there.

Take the great ocean as an example, practice without any sense of depth or surface.

How many of you find in your meditation practice that you’re concerned with going deep? And you don’t feel you’re really meditating if you’re staying on the surface?

Okay. I just want you to sit now. And just let that go completely or as much as you’re able to anyway. You’re not concerned about whether your practice is deep or shallow, whether you’re spread out over the surface or you’re down in the depths, it’s just whatever it is. Just sit for a few minutes. [Pause] What’s that like?

Student: It’s again not trying to find a reference point.

Ken: Not trying to find a reference point. Okay. Anybody else?

Student: I actually kind of did this a few days ago where I was going around, I think I mentioned it to you, where I was saying to myself, “I don’t care what I experience,” or I’m not trying to control everything. And I actually practiced very differently then. There’s some kind of shift that happens where there is experience, experience in a very different way than otherwise.

Ken: Not trying to control. Yeah, just underlined that one. Okay. Anybody else? Yes, Randy?

Randy: I think it’s similar to what was just said, and that is, that it’s just fine as it is.

Ken: Sometimes a little difficult to accept that, isn’t it? Yeah. Anybody else? Let’s turn to the last one: “To bring out mind, practice without any doubt or hesitation.” How many of you doubt your abilities? Okay. How many of you find yourself hesitating to do this kind of practice? Yeah, most of you, even those of you aren’t putting up your hand.

Student: When you say “this kind of practice … “

Ken: Just sit and do nothing. For a lot of you, it’s like, “Ehhh, not sure I want to do that,” or “Not sure I know how to do that.” Hesitation often comes because we doubt our abilities. So, we can do this in a couple of ways. Just sit for a few minutes now, knowing that nothing you do is going to make any difference. You can slack off, you can push; it’s not going to make any difference. You may doubt your abilities, but there’s actually no point in doubting your abilities. It’s not going to make any difference. You can hesitate or you can plunge in, but it’s not going to make any difference. So, you just sit like that. [Pause] What’s that like? Peggy.

Peggy: I think it’s very poignant. Permission is something that I have a hard time granting myself. And so, to have permission to not work or to do nothing, it’s freeing, but it’s also just, it’s sort of divine and joyful.

Ken: Anybody else? Franca.

Franca: I’m reminded of the mare and the bandit and her foal which, makes me think this is like error in that moment. She knew she was going to die, that the mare was going to die, but there was no doubt, no hesitation. She simply suckled her foal or licked the sac off her foal. That’s effective action. That’s just seeing what to do and doing it, in this case, practice.

Ken: Okay, what was it like? That’s a wonderful explanation.

Franca: I was busy having my insight. [Laughter] I’m not into multitasking. I’m studying to become a slacker like you.

Ken: I’m sorry, but to become a slacker, you have to slack and you weren’t.

Franca: But I didn’t do two things at once.

Ken: Anybody else, Meg.

Meg: Like a huge burden is gone.

Ken: Say a bit more please.

Meg: Nothing you can do will make any difference. So, it’s just this weight of always get it right or relax enough or tighten, all this stuff. So, if that’s gone, then you just sit there. The sensation was like a weight off.

Ken: Okay, anybody else?

Student: So, you have to do another thing, and then forget it all, and then you can do it? [Laughter]

Find your own way

Ken: Each person, I feel, has to find their own way because we’re all different. What we have in the various teachings is the accumulated experience of people over the centuries which says, this is useful, this is useful. It’s helpful to be able to do this in terms of capacity, help to be able to lift this. It’s helpful to know how to do this so we can learn a great deal.

But when it comes to practice, that’s when we internalize everything that we’ve learned and actually find our own path. It can be helpful to have the guidance or feedback from someone who has some experience, but even there it’s not a case of following that person’s path. It’s a case of finding one’s own. So, one may find at the beginning, there’s a lot of just doing nothing. And then after a while, “Oh, I need to actually learn some things and be able to do some things.” And so it may go through some cycles like that. Other people may say, “Well I need to develop this ability, this ability, this ability.” Then move on from there into doing less and less.

I don’t think there is one way for everybody. I think there’s a certain convergence of practice as practice matures. But the actual path of practice for any individual seems to differ a great deal. So, I don’t know what you have to learn, what you have to forget. You will know what prevents you from being open, present, relaxed, awake. And as you become clear about what that is in any given moment, then you’ll know what tools or methods you need to practice in order to work through that particular thing.

Some things can be worked through by literally letting them evaporate. Others are sufficiently crystallized that, while that may work, you may die before it actually happens. So, one needs a more explicit way of working with that to get some movement, some energy flowing there. But this is very, very individual I’ve found. Mary.

Mary: Do you think most of the people who go for very long retreats in the mountains end up at the do-nothing stage no matter where they started?

Ken: No. The records don’t suggest that. The records suggest that people who practice in the mountains encounter all kinds of difficulties too. Gampopa used to say of one of his students, he said “He insists on regarding thought as enemy. His meditation’s very good, but if he stopped regarding thought as enemy, he would’ve woken up a long time ago. But he won’t listen to anybody.” So, that’s a mountain yogi who’s stuck on practicing a certain way. So, this can arise in any circumstance. Just because we’re in the mountains it’s no guarantee that things go right.

Student: No, I meant the really long retreats in the mountains.

Ken: No, I think a lot of those people went crazy. This becoming free of sense of self is completely non-trivial work. And one of the reasons why I think it’s important to work with someone who has a broad training in at least one tradition, is because, in the course of that training, that person will have absorbed a wide variety of methods and tools for dealing with a lot of different situations and configurations. And that breadth of practice experience is very important.

Practice instructions

Ken: Oh, we’re late again. Okay. Well we got about one third of the way that I thought we would today, but that’s fine because we will continue. This evening, I want you to, in your practice, to work with what we’ve just gone over and also what you were doing this afternoon. And I think you can see that there’s a fairly close connection between the two. So, the nature of practice changes for us. This is allowing yourself to rest in doing nothing. It sounds very simple and for some of you it may very well be very straightforward. For others, you may find that that kind of unstructured openness allows or creates the conditions for you to become aware of various kinds of drives or impulses which prevent you from just resting, doing nothing. And that of course I’d like you to bring up in the practice interviews.

Within Milarepa’s initial instructions here, there are also the tools for working with that. If you find yourself concerned with, “My meditation isn’t deep enough now and I need to go deeper,” then be like the ocean. And if you are thinking, “Oh, my mind isn’t very clear right now,” then be like the sun and moon, and don’t be concerned with being clear or distorted. So, there’s a constant letting go. And you may find something in you that says, “No, I want it to be this way; I want it to be that way!” So, that’s how the practice is.

What we were working with this afternoon—in the sense of just opening to the totality of your experience—this you may find very helpful. We were working first with a sense of vision, and some of you—I know because I was watching, and some of you I worked with—in the sense of sound, but you can also work with it in the sense of touch. You could also work with it in a sense of thought and emotion, just working the same way internally, just open to all of it, not trying to control or focus or work on any part of it. Just open to the whole experience. We will continue this theme in a number of ways tomorrow. So, again, we’ll do the Heart Sutra.