A sense of just experiencing

Ken: Yesterday we talked about change. Everything changes; nothing stays the same. And in your meditation, we talked about change in the world of sensory experience, change in the experience of the body, and change in our sense of ourselves, our relationship with the world, our philosophies, views, values and so forth.

When we open to the totality of all of that, at first there is some confusion, disorientation perhaps, because the sense of “I am this” is difficult to sustain. But as you keep coming back to the totality of change, then the framework of subject/object perception begins to fall away. And there’s a sense of just experiencing. Just experiencing.

Last night, at the conclusion to meditation, I mentioned that meditation on death and impermanence works on many different levels. In the beginning, it provides motivation for practice. And that motivation comes from appreciating that all we actually have is a world of experience. And that everything else that we strive for, and think actually exists, is only an abstraction or a construction from the world of actual experience. And experience is ours and ours alone. Try as you may, you cannot actually share an experience with somebody else. You can tell them about it, but you can’t share the actual experience.

In the middle, meditation on death and impermanence helps us to cut through the reactive patterns that create suffering for ourselves and others. And it does so because we see that much of what we’re holding onto is really quite insignificant in terms of death. It doesn’t have much meaning or value, often not much function in and of itself.

And finally, or in the end, as some of you have experienced, meditation on death and impermanence is a way into knowing or experiencing how things actually are.

Now, one of the predilections of ambitious people, and most of you are ambitious in some sense, is that we want to work at the most advanced level of practice all the time. A friend of mine who’s very bright, has a PhD in Philosophy, is also a psychiatrist, and has put hours and hours and hours into practice, went to see a teacher called Munindra who’s in the Theravadan tradition, one of the great teachers of that tradition, because he was stuck in his practice. And Munindra listened to him describe where he felt he was stuck. And then Munindra asked him just two questions, “Do you understand the basic principles and progress of practice?” My friend said “Yes, I think so.” “Are you ambitious?” “Yes.” Then Munindra shook his head and said, “What a pity.”

Students: [Laughter]

Ken: What a pity! This problem came up over and over again when I was studying with Rinpoche, because of the Tibetan rhetoric around the various approaches–that the Hinayana is like a Volkswagen, the Mahayana is like an ocean liner, and the Vajrayana is like a jet plane. Which do you want to take? Well, I fell into that trap. And after much bruising, I eventually came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter how you got from A to B, as long as you got from A to B. And if you couldn’t handle the jet plane, a Volkswagen worked just fine.

Students: [Laughter]

Meditation: death is inevitable

Ken: So today, I want you to keep that in mind because there’s a tendency to try to work at deep levels of practice when you hear about them, when it’s usually more fruitful to work at the level where stuff is arising for you. Today, we’re going to move on in these practices and engage what is one of the fundamental dilemmas of human experience. And that is that this experience is going to come to an end. This is usually put in the more formal vocabulary of, “Death is inevitable. We’re all going to die.” And unless any of you have evidence to the contrary, there’s absolute certainty about that. It says in the liturgies that we chant, “There never has been a person born who doesn’t die.” Oh, there are a few myths around but in realistic terms, everybody born has died, to date, maybe it’ll change, but so far that’s the case. About that we can have, you know, a 100 percent confidence. There are few things in life about which we can have a 100 percent confidence, but this is one of them.

There is the other side of it, though. We have no idea when we’re going to die. Some people die soon after birth. Some people die in childhood or adolescence. Late adolescence is a good time to die because one feels one is invulnerable and does all sorts of crazy things. Adulthood, middle age, old age, as you move along in life, the probabilities of dying increase until they converge on 100 percent. But the actual moment when we die, we don’t know.

Ten or twelve years ago, I worked with a person who had AIDS. And this is long before the cocktails that postponed the spread of HIV, the virus in the individual, had been developed. So at this point–this is the early 90s–AIDS was a death sentence. And he came to me because he wanted to come to terms with dying. So I started him on exactly this sequence of meditations. And he found this meditation on the uncertainty of death very freeing, because he had found that when anybody learned that he had AIDS, was HIV positive, they treated him as if he was half-dead already. Even though he was a school teacher and he was teaching and still very active in his life and everything but people treated him as half-dead. And he found that hurtful and painful, and he didn’t know how to meet it. But after doing this meditation for a while, he began to realize that, yes, he might die in five years or eight, or what have you, very unpredictable, but those people who are treating him as half-dead, they might die before him. So when he detected this change in conversation, he would just say to himself, “Well, you may think I’m half-dead, but you may be completely dead tomorrow.”

Students: [Laughter]

Ken: And that allowed him a lot more freedom and openness, and helped him a great deal.

Now, this paradox of absolute certainty on the one hand and complete uncertainty on the other–this is the challenge of human experience. If we all knew that we just went along and we died at, say, 87.5 years, and that was that, then we’d plan our lives very, very differently. We’d organize our society very differently. The whole life insurance industry would be dead. The health care insurance industry would be dead, which mightn’t be a bad thing. But, I mean you can see that the whole approach to life would be very different. And if we didn’t know we were going to die, but it could happen at any time between now and the next, say, 1,000 years, well that life would be totally different, too. Very, very different. But this is how it is, we don’t know when we’re going to die but we do know we are going to. So, in your practice, I want you to enter into that dilemma. And the way you do that is spend some time with the meditation on “Death is inevitable.”

The three arguments on death

Ken: Now there are, in the practice, three arguments being presented, if you wish. The first argument is: Everybody else has died, what makes you different? That’s what the section under history is about, and you can go through all the different civilizations. At their pinnacle, the Roman empire, Greek, Russian empire, the Chinese empire, and you can go through cultures when they’ve been at their bottom, the dark ages, the current chaos in many, many parts of the world like West Africa and so forth, very, very disorganized, fractured societies. But it doesn’t matter, because the same thing is true—people live and die. That’s what happens.

The second argument is that there is an ability we can develop which will stop us from dying—physical strength, or great beauty, flawless morality, intellectual prowess, wisdom, courage, dance, music, martial skills. How about spiritual understanding? Well, the fact is, none of them make any difference–not to the fact of dying. My own teacher died, he died peacefully. The head of the Kagyu order, the 16th Karmapa, died of stomach cancer in the hospital in Chicago. By all reports in actually very great pain, though the doctors were amazed at his ability just to be totally relaxed and present in what they knew must be great, great pain.

Student: How old was he?

Ken: Oh, mid fifties. He was born in 1935, he died in ’91 or something like that. Suzuki Roshi, who many of you know through Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, he also died of stomach cancer, actually. Dilgo Khyentse, one of the great teachers, I had the good fortune to meet. Another of my teachers, Dezhung Rinpoche. And these were all, at least from my experience, really quite extraordinary individuals with unquestioned spiritual accomplishments. So, if you’re practicing this so that you won’t die, I’ve got bad news for you. So, it doesn’t matter what ability you develop, you still die. And the verse that I put:

The rich cannot buy it with money.
The hero cannot conquer it with a sword,
Nor can a clever woman outwit it with a trick.
Even the learned scholar cannot postpone it with eloquence.
Here, no coward can sneak away like a fox.
The unlucky cannot make appeal,
Nor can the brave here display valor.

Sixty Songs of Milarepa, Garma C.C. Chang (translator), p 29

So that’s the second argument.

The third argument is that maybe the propensity for death is inherited. When you look through your family tree … well, you know, it’s your grandfather’s fault, he died, so therefore you have to. You’re genetically predisposed to dying. It’s another way of looking at it. And through these reflections, it begins to sink in. “‘I’m going to die, that’s going to happen to me.” People who have enjoyed good health throughout most of their lives have a great deal of difficulty with this one. So that’s one half; the other half is the possibility that you could die at any time.

Now, on Wednesday evening, when we first gathered, I read the story of the person who overheard the angel of death in a cafe, a Starbucks we’ll say, saying “I’ve got a few people to collect in this town.” He thought, “Good time to get out of town.” And so Death was talking to his teacher and said, “Oh, by the way, where’s that student of yours?” “Oh, he should be somewhere around. I think he’s hanging around the Starbucks all the time.” “It’s very strange. I’ve got to pick him up in Chicago next week.” Of course, that’s exactly where the student had run off to, he got out of town.

Death can come at any time. One of my favorite cartoons is one by Gahan Wilson whose Zen practice shows up in his cartoons quite frequently. And this one shows a middle-aged woman standing over a man’s hat, which has been crushed by a meteor. And the caption reads, “Harry always thought he was going to get it from a meteor.”

Students: [Laughter]

Ken: You know, what can you do? So it can happen any time. I drove up here, you know. As I was driving up, I stopped off in Pasadena, so I was coming up the 110, and just as the 110 pulls out of downtown LA, there was a big congestion in the traffic which was quite unusual for that stretch of highway. And eventually I realized that there was an accident involving three vehicles, which caused the congestion. It didn’t look like it had been a fatal accident, but car accidents happen all the time, and you don’t necessarily control that.

Three more reflections on death

Ken: So again, there are three kinds of arguments here. Death can come in many ways. There are all kinds of ways you can die. Again, I don’t have it anymore because I lent it to someone, but I had a little cartoon book, which was called: Unpleasant Ways to Die. It was fascinating, because I would just leave this–in my old office, I had a big coffee table and I would just leave that there. And people would come in, and everybody would react to this exactly the same way. They’d look at it and go [pause] and I’d just leave them. And then, after a couple of minutes, they would sort of go [pause]. At about three minutes into it, they’re just totally into it. One of my favorites was two acupuncturists arguing over this chart. And meanwhile, on the table, there’s this person with needles stuck, it was just …[Laughter]

There’s all kinds of possibilities. You can have fun here. Death can literally come–it can come, literally–at any time. I’ve gone hiking in Yosemite and there’s a very steep hike up to the top of Yosemite Falls. It’s about 3,000 foot vertical climb, and you’re climbing up through rocks. Well, one day there were a number of people on that trail, and I don’t know how many hundreds of tons of rocks had just fallen off the mountain and killed, I think it was about five hikers. Just out of blue air, literally, out of the blue. And there was another person who had a brain aneurysm–totally unpredictable. So, just because you’re alive and healthy right now, doesn’t mean you’re going to get through the day. It may sound very strange to say that, but it’s actually true! I mean, here we are, how far are we from the San Andreas fault? I have no idea where the next earthquake is. Haven’t checked Mount Baldy for earthquakes lately, but it may happen, and none of us may get back to L.A., or wherever we’re from.

And the third. Is there anything in you or your life that prevents you from dying? Is there anything where you can actually … are there circumstances you can arrange, medicines you can take, whatever, clothes you can wear, which will absolutely protect you from dying? Rinpoche used to tell the story of a person who went to a fortune teller, who said, “Oh, you’re going to die in seven days.” He said, “Hmm.” He didn’t like the sound of that. So he went out and got a whole bunch of canned goods, which were all certified to be free of botulism, etc.,etc., got an apartment in which there were no sharp objects of any kind, set it all up so that he was going to be safe for seven days. On the seventh day, he was standing on the balcony of the apartment that he’d rented and he was cleaning his ear, and there was a gust of wind and it drove the implement straight into his brain and he died. Rinpoche had all kinds of cheery stories. But when you think about it, there is nothing that stops you from dying, in any moment. We don’t usually think this way. People say, “How depressing.” Well, maybe, but …

You have the two halves now. One, the absolute certainty of death, and the other is the possibility that death could happen at any moment. And what I want you to do today, this evening, tomorrow morning, is to become as clear about both of those as you can in your meditation. Which means taking it in, really absorbing it, letting it soak in, letting each one of them soak in. And then experience this paradox, as it were, because that is the central dilemma of our human experience.

Now, that paradox is very important. Many of you have been around Buddhism long enough to know something about the Middle Way, which is usually translated incorrectly, in my opinion, as the middle way between eternalism and nihilism. Many of you have heard this. Well, the reason that those translations were chosen, I think, is that the one word in Tibetan is takpa which is the word for permanence and thus eternalism, and the other word is the word is chäpa which means, to come to an end, so that was translated as nihilism. But if you look at the actual definitions, what is called eternalism is actually much more about everything being ordered, everything being determined. And the other is about there being no order to anything, so that it doesn’t matter what you do, there aren’t any consequences. So, the better translation, in my opinion, is order and chaos. And that’s exactly what these two aspects of death present to us. We are all going to die. Well, there’s a certain order there. It could happen at any time: chaos. And our human experience is a combination of order and chaos. If everything was ordered, it’d be pretty dull but at least we’d know what to do all the time. If everything was chaotic, we wouldn’t know what to do, because we wouldn’t know what results anything was going to produce, or even likely to produce. Yeah. Maybe I could stand on my head and get enlightened. I dunno.

Student: We’ll watch.

The dual aspect of death: order and chaos

Ken: Thank you. So, you have this dual aspect, or these two aspects of experience, order and chaos. And by taking in deeply one’s own mortality, the inevitability of death, and the possibility that it could occur at any time–by dwelling in this, the result of that is that you begin to develop a level of attention and a level of understanding in which you can live in this paradoxical nature of human experience. At this point, I’m not going to go into the characteristics of that because I want you to discover it through your practice. Robert?

Robert: When you say chaos, do you actually mean chaos, or do you mean our inability to see?

Ken: In the way that it’s described, it means that you do something, it may or may not produce that result. There’s no surety.

Robert: Is that because of our inability to see it, or because that’s the way it is?

Ken: In the way that we’re talking about it here, it’s more, “that’s the way it is.” The idea that if you could see everything, then you would know everything that’s going to come about, that actually, if you think about it, is an argument for determinism.

Robert: Not really, because if you have free will …

Ken: Ah, see, we get into these messy waters. [Laughs] But if you could predict what is going to happen in the future, if sufficient knowledge of the present allowed you to predict precisely what was going to happen in the future, you’re talking about determinism. Which is, I mean, you have scientific determinism, it’s a very widespread philosophy. Just happens to be wrong, but it’s very widespread.

Student: So it would be, it would be no cause and effect, in essence.

Ken: Well, there’s the two systems. One is, it’s all cause and effect, and the other is, there isn’t cause and effect. And that’s order and chaos.

Now, we’ve been talking up to this point, primarily this morning, about physical death, which is the end of this experience that we call life. But there are other forms of dying, too. Physical death, that’s connected with our survival, but there’s another form of death, which is connected with emotional needs. The desire, wish, or yearning to have our emotional needs met is, in a certain sense, a refusal to die to a world that has passed. And we’re trying to live or maintain that world.

Chris: I’m sorry, I’m confused.

Ken: Are you?

Chris: I just need to hear it again, I don’t understand it.

Ken: Okay, let me give you an example. A person, I’ll give you an example of Erich Fromm. He was one of Freud’s people, right? Erich Fromm made extraordinarily significant contributions to psychoanalysis and was recognized worldwide as one of the leading thinkers, one of the great contributors. He received all kinds of recognition—honorary degrees, academic honors, and so forth. At the end of his life, he felt he was a failure. Why? Because he hadn’t won a Nobel Prize, and all of the other achievements, recognition’s, contributions, everything, tasted like sand in his mouth. So, what I’m suggesting here, Chris, is that here was an emotional need, an ambition, which was instilled or developed at a very early age. And he never died to that world. He only died to that world when he actually died, physically. You follow? That makes sense to you now?

Chris: Okay.

Ken: So, the emotional needs that we carry represent worlds and lives which we are still trying to lead, even though usually those worlds have gone. You know, we have grown past those stages and those lives, those people from whom we wanted to get that, they’re either dead or they’re in other places, and things like that. In other words, those emotional needs aren’t going to be met, but we’re still living as if we’re going to get them someday. So there’s a whole other way. Death is inevitable. We are going to die to the world in which we’re trying to get those emotional needs met. Here, interestingly, we have much more say about when we die.

Dying to the idea of being someone

Ken: And there’s also dying to the idea of being somebody, dying to the idea of being somebody. Again, the example of Erich Fromm. I didn’t bring it with me, but some of you may recall, I think it’s Shelley’s poem, sonnet, Ozymandias about this plaque in the desert, which is in front of two pillars. And the last line is that there is nothing around except desert, everything’s passed. So, this whole notion of being somebody, it’s also based on a denial of death and impermanence. Pardon?

Student: I was just thinking, “I might have been a contender.”

Ken: [Laughs] Yeah. So, in the same way, when you’re doing these meditations on death, what are areas of your life, ideas about who you are or who you were meant to be, which you have not yet died to, and take in the inevitability of having to die to them. And many people face this challenge when they retire. They may have been at the top of their field, and now they are not able to produce the same level of research, or have the same level of strategic insight, or what have you. They have to die to their careers. It’s inevitable. Athletes face this, in most sports, in their mid-30’s, very latest in their 40s. They have to die to being the star of the game, the level of competition is so high that they’re not going to be able to continue to do it. Artists and writers face it at other stages of their lives. All of these identities, you have to die to them. Even parents, when their children grow and leave the home, they don’t stop being parents but it’s very different. And if they tried to look after their twenty-three—year-old son or daughter the same way they did when they were six or seven, well, it doesn’t work too well. It doesn’t stop some people from trying. So, we’re talking about more than just physical deaths here, we’re talking about death in many ways. And in all of those arenas, the moment of death is completely unpredictable. An athlete can have an injury, then that’s it, it’s done. An artist or a philosopher, they can have a stroke, and that’s done. So, things can happen. A parent can, very sadly, lose a child. Everything changes. And these things can happen at any time. So, this is the subject of your contemplation. Questions? Tom.

Student questions

Tom: Is there any particular order that we should do these in?

Ken: Well, what I’ve been pointing to is to experience this dual nature. So get very clear about which one which you might do in one half-hour session. Then in the next half-hour session you might get clear about the other. In the third half-hour session, put them together. Some people may find that just going back and forth between the two within the same half-hour session brings them together. So you’ll need to experiment with the way that works for you. I don’t like to lay it out in detail, because everybody’s different. The main thing, and what I want you to look for is—what gets your attention? What speaks to you very, very strongly? For some people, that’s going to be their physical death, for other people, it could be the potential death of their dreams. And so one can work from one to the other in either direction. And that’s why I’m laying out this broader scheme than just, you know, this way, this way, this way. Okay? Michelle?

Michelle: I’m sorry, I’m confused. When you say, “In both ways,” do you mean death is inevitable, and death coming at any time, or do you mean physical and emotional?

Ken: I mean, death is inevitable and death coming at any time. Those are the two halves. Now, those can operate in terms of physical death, in terms of emotional needs, in terms of identity, and any one of those levels may speak to you more powerfully, okay? This is my usual, you know, mix and match scheme. Julia?

Julia: This idea is a little bit more referring back. Today you were talking about chaos and order, and yesterday you asked this question: Do we scramble around in confusion and discover through our scramble, or do we have a picture or idea that points us in a certain direction? And I wondered if you could elaborate.

Ken: [Laughs] How would you like me to elaborate?

Julia: Does that refer to this idea of order and chaos? Or is it a larger indication around this teaching about providing us with a clear idea of what really is?

Ken: Well, I hadn’t made the connection until you presented it just now, but it actually is an expression of order and chaos. Now, the need is to be able to embrace and be in both, because there is both order and chaos. For some people, it may be best to approach chaos through order. And that is, one starts with a picture, and as you work, you begin to notice not everything fits this picture, but the picture gave you enough of a place to start from, so that you can start taking in what doesn’t fit into the picture, and you can just be present. You follow? And then, for other people, they just sort of scramble around and through this, they notice oh, well, yes, this goes here, okay, and if I do this, this happens, well, most of the time, or some of the time. And so, within the experience of chaos, they discover order, and so both end up in the same place, being able to rest in chaos and order together. But I hadn’t made that connection until you presented it. Okay? Is that enough of an elaboration?

Julia: Yes.

Ken: Thank you. Helena?

Helena: You know I’ve been working with this death and dying and just the existence itself, and we’ve been talking here about the depressiveness and the depression that we all have to die. And I was just thinking, but you know, it’s just a miracle to have been born at all, and it’s more, it’s less likely that we should have life than that we don’t. And it just amazes me that we live in this world as long as we do.

Ken: Okay.

Helena: With all these potential death-producing events around us.

Ken: Yeah. A few years ago, I read Lonesome Dove. Who’s that by? McMurtry, right. It’s a very good book, and one of the things that I got out of it was how in the 19th century when people were expanding into the West, death was literally around every corner. And so many things could happen, much more so even than today. So, this is why, if you look at the verses we opened with, “This precious human form is difficult to obtain and embodies opportunities and resources.” This is, as Taranatha says, a special aspect of impermanence, that we are actually born, or we experience these opportunities and resources, and that makes it very precious, and it’s very fragile. That is, it can end at any time. And so this is an exhortation to make full use of the resources and opportunities that we now enjoy. Okay. Julia?

Julia: In the reflections here, it says,

The four seasons, mere moments, come and go.
Everything is impermanent, bound in the four ends.

The Four Reminders, Jamgön Kongtrül, Ken McLeod (Translator)

Ken: Yes.

Julia: Could you explain what the four ends are?

Ken: If you turn the page …. That’s why I put the four ends there, ’cause everybody asks that question. Michelle.

Michelle: To what does the line that the clever woman outwitting death with a trick refer? Not that I have a feminist streak or anything.

Ken: Well, in a male-dominated culture, how does a woman survive?

Julia: Manipulation.

Ken: Exactly. That’s what it’s referring to.

Julia: Of course I’m not speaking from personal experience.

Ken: No, it’s from your deep anthropological studies, I know. That’s where it’s coming from. And you know, in significant areas of this society, it hasn’t changed. Okay. Let’s close here.