The subject/object framework of perception

Ken: Earlier, I talked about the falsity of the subject/object framework of perception. I want to return to that, to lay a foundation for the focus of the practice today. This morning, we’ll go through the stages of dying. And they are usually described in terms of the dissolution of the five elements, which many of you are familiar with. But before we go there, we’ll look at subject/object. You okay, Julia?

Julia: I’m redirecting that spider. [Laughs]

Ken: Away from you, right? Now … thank you, Robert. [Applause]

Robert: That’s nothing compared with the rattlesnake Steve and Curtis got.

Ken: [Laughs] Yeah, but they enjoyed that. It’s the first rattlesnake we’ve had up here, isn’t it?

Robert: I haven’t seen one up here.

Ken: Yeah. I know they’ve had them before but it’s the first one I’ve come across while we’ve been here.

Student: It’s the first one I’ve picked up. [Laughter] When I finally ran into it, I screamed, “Holy shit!”

Student: Where was it?

Student: That was down by the lower cabins.

Ken: This way. Oh, oh, up there. Okay.

Student: The circle where everybody’s sleeping.

Ken: Ah! Okay, back to subject/object. One of the principal illusions that we live in is that we are born into this world, and when we die, we leave this world. That is, the notion, or the idea—and even the perception—that there is a world that exists apart from us.

Now, I’m going to come at this in two or three different ways. When you dream, where is the world that you experience when you dream? That’s a little difficult to say, but all of you probably have had dreams of looking over vast vistas, one time or another, large buildings or something like that. And the tendency is to say, “Well, it’s in my mind.”

On one occasion, the monk approached his teacher and said, “I think I’m ready to go off on my own.” And the teacher looked at him very carefully and said, “Hmm, perhaps. Let me accompany you to the gate of the monastery.” And they arrived at the gate, and outside the gate there was a very, very large boulder, like the ones we have here. And the teacher said, “Just before you go, where’s that boulder?” And the monk turned and said, “Well, it’s in my mind.” And the teacher said, “I think you better stay for a while. That could be a very heavy thing to take with you.”

So, we have this dream world, and we experience it, sometimes very vividly, but it doesn’t exist anywhere. And in that dream world, when we are in the dream, most of us, experience “I” and “the world.” Yet when you wake up from the dream, you know very well that that whole perception of I/other in the dream world was false, that the world that you were experiencing in the dream was an arising in experience and didn’t exist apart from the experiencing of it. Everybody with me?

I think the problem goes back to Descartes who posited mind/matter dualism that has been a central confusion in Western thought ever since.

Student: Oh, Descartes he’s got such a bad name lately. [Unclear]

Ken: Well, we won’t go down that one.

Student: Nevermind then.

Ken: Now, as I pointed out the other day, when we say, “I see a piece of paper.” But when one asks, “Where is that seeing? Where’s that experience?” the sense of I/other, outer, subject/object, etc., becomes much less clear. Everything in our life is an experience. And we label various groups and collections of experience—book, carpet, person that I know, etc., and we form a whole relationship. It can be with a thing or with a person. But it’s still actually just an experience. So, it is more accurate to say that when we are born, the world we experience is born with us. There is never any separation. And the only separation is due to the way that we interpret what arises in experience.

One can practice living one’s life with that view. It’s quite interesting, really, and it cuts through an awful lot of problems. If everything that I encounter is an experience for me, then everything I do contributes to the world that I experience, it can’t go anywhere else. And so all of our actions now become far more significant. Whatever we put into the world, we are going to experience. So, one of the immediate consequences is that we pay much more attention to how we act.

So, right now, just consider that everything before you is just an experience—the sound of my voice, the play of light and shadow, the perception of what looks like other people, which are complicated or complex sets of experiences. When we approach the world this way, one might think you’d feel more alone, but you actually feel less alone. There’s a more intimate relationship because you’re dissolving the sense of I and other. And if you hold that way of regarding things, you’ll generally find that you will oppose what arises in experience–i.e., you’ll fight–much less often. You’ll recognize the futility in opposing, because there it is in your life—what choice do you have but to experience it? So, in one way, you begin to take a gentler approach to everything. And in another way, we become much clearer about things, because if this is one’s world of experience, then who is responsible for it? Well, it can’t be anybody else. So, the whole notion of balance and response to, rather than reacting to, naturally emerges important principles.

The five elements

Ken: Now, this world of experience that I’m sketching for you can be viewed as being composed of the five elements. The five elements are earth, water, fire, air, and void. This way of looking at things is somewhat similar to the medieval theory of humors. It’s very different from the scientific worldview which decomposes matter into atoms, and atoms into subatomic particles, and then down to quarks, and now, as far as I know, down to strings. Maybe we’ll get down to threads, but …

Student: Sutures.

Ken: Sutures, okay. But one of the characteristics of the scientific worldview is that the world that science studies–there’s no knowing in it. Knowing is only in the observer. So, there’s a very powerful dichotomy.

In the view of the world as experience, we have earth element, which is anything which has solidity, structure, order, firmness–that’s the earth element. In the body—bones, muscles, fingernails—those are the things that have substance, solidity. In mind, it is the … what’s the word I want? … steadiness of experience. It seems to be there, continuous.

Water is about flow, but flow with cohesion. So, we have water and all forms of liquid, dew. In the body: blood, lymph. In the mind: flow of feeling, emotion.

Fire element is the idea of warmth. So, the warmth we experience in the sun, in fire. Absence of warmth we experience in ice. In the body, it’s the warmth of the body, what’s generated by metabolism. In the mind, it’s the knowing quality. Water is also–I left this out–the clarity quality.

The element air: movement. But in contrast to water, it’s movement without cohesion. You only become aware of air when there is motion. If I hold my hand still, I don’t experience air. When I move it, I can feel air. Water is different; you can put your hand in water, and you sense it directly. In the body, air is the breath, of course; also the subtle energies. I suppose electricity would be regarded as air—flow of electrons—I don’t know.

Student: And the body?

Ken: Well, that’s the electro-chemical interactions that take place all over, particularly in the brain. And in the mind, it’s movement, movement of thought, for instance, thinking.

And then void. Void in the world of experience is space. It’s very important. You have a cup and if it doesn’t have any space in it, you can’t pour tea into it. The sky. In the body, space in the knuckles which allow the joints to move.

Student: Sinus cavities?

Ken: Yeah. All of the hollow organs. And in mind, it’s the space in which experience arises. So, one can look at any experience as being composed of these elements, some combination of them, and in Buddhism, in the Abhidharma, there’s quite an elaborate description of how much fire there is in red versus how much fire there is in green and so forth. This is what experience is composed of. And there are many other ways we can look at this: void is empty space, air is thought, fire is passion, water is tacit understanding, earth is belief—another way of looking at it. Many different applications to any aspect of our experience.

Now, one way to think about the five elements is as a spectrum, very much like the light spectrum, where we have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo. Six colors. But even though we say there are six colors in the spectrum, there are all of the colors in between. It’s a continuity. And what the light spectrum is, is a range of energies. And one can think of the elements in the same way, as a range of energies, of different degrees of crystallization. So, void is pure energy, which begins to take subtle form as air, a more explicit form as fire, when you feel the radiance. Water, there’s some kind of connection. And then earth, it’s solid, fully crystallized energy.

When we die, the world that we experience, which means everything— the world of sensory objects, our body, and our capacity, our consciousness, our capacity to know and interpret experience—all of this, composed of the five elements, dissolves. Or, the energy breaks up in exactly the same way that when you shine light, or a lamp, or the sun on a piece of ice, all of the energy that’s stored in the ice begins to move around, molecules break up, and the ice breaks up and becomes water. And if you pour more energy into it, then it becomes steam. And if you pour more energy, it becomes, actually if you put enough into it, it becomes plasma, and then it just becomes pure energy. Everything dissociates. That’s a kind of analog. That’s what happens when we die. That’s why it says in the verse we recite in the morning, “The external world will be destroyed by fire and water.” It’s not really destroyed by fire and water; it breaks up into fire and water and air and so forth.

So, on page nine in the book I gave you, you have the process by which the elements dissolve. Now, the first thing is that the earth element starts to break up, it loses its solidity. That’s experienced as loss of mobility in the body, you can’t move the body. When something breaks up, there’s a momentary intensification of it, and that’s experienced as a crushing weight. It feels like your body is so heavy. That’s the sign that the earth element is breaking up. Yeah?

Student: Maybe it’s the space that has left at first, and so there’s a density then that happens. The space that was present was keeping the vitality in the earth element able to move, and the space leaves first.

Ken: I haven’t heard that explanation. I don’t know, but I’ve never heard that explanation. I’m not sure how it’d correspond with the rest of the movement, but let’s continue with this. So, you experience this extreme heaviness in the body, and that’s why you feel you can’t move it, because it’s too heavy to move. And the person stops moving at this point in the dying process. Subjectively, the solidity of experience breaks up. So, everything becomes unsteady, like a mirage. So, when it says, “Consciousness is like a shimmering mirage.” That’s how you actually begin to experience things. The steadiness of our perception, the steadiness of consciousness, disintegrates. Chris?

Chris: Ken, in your book you mentioned that your teacher suggested that it’s not just the simple dissolution of the energy, that there in an increase, like you mentioned with the crushing weight. Is that what is held on to at the time of death? You know, the energy that you are attached to or what? Where is the energy coming from? I didn’t really understand the description. You know what I’m saying?

Ken: Yeah. Just before something changes, it manifests its nature very powerfully. That’s what I’m talking about. Like in the process of release, it manifests that solidity, not for very long, but very powerfully.

Chris: Okay, so just a natural process.

Ken: Exactly. Then the water element dissolves. Now, in this, in the body, you lose control of the fluids. You urinate, tears flow, mucus drips, saliva dribbles from the mouth, etc. This is a sign that the water element is breaking up. The experience is one of intensified water, which is like a wave, a flood, just being swept away in the current of a stream. And the way that one’s perception or consciousness changes is that everything becomes cloudy, or hazy, or smoky. Things lose their clarity.

And then the fire element dissolves. The external sign is that warmth begins to recede from the limbs. The internal experience is one of intense heat. And the way one’s perception changes is that brightness of knowing, which is the fire element, it just starts going in flashes. That’s why it’s called like sparks or firefly. So, it becomes intermittent.

And then the air element dissolves. This is where the breath begins to become very coarse, stops, and subjectively one experiences intense air, which is like a wind, being swept away. And subjectively, now consciousness feels very dim, it’s like a glowing ember. So, you only can see things very dimly. Harry, you have a question?

Harry: Does the dying person experience these things? Suppose someone had severe brain damage. Will the dying person experience these things regardless? Can you elaborate on that?

Ken: Well, I don’t know that I can, because I don’t know. I think it would depend very much on the nature of the brain damage, depending on what areas of perception had been damaged. So, in terms of those kinds of things, that might happen in a very protracted way. These are general principles, they can vary according to circumstances, which order. So I can’t give you a straight answer to that. Helena?

Helena: When I was nursing in critical care and, of course, a lot of deaths and many people there on the machines were dying, there were some depending, if someone was in very, very deep coma, you could not tell that they were dying, but in the later stages, yes, we would see the changes.

Ken: You would see the changes? Okay.

Then, the element of void, this doesn’t really dissolve. This is, now everything is just consciousness, and consciousness goes through a subtler process of disintegration. First, all of the sense faculties—you lose your ability to see, hear taste, etc.—it’s already been pretty diminished just by the previous dissolution of the elements, but now there’s no longer ability to perceive through the senses. So there’s just consciousness. And what one experiences at this point is all of the proceeding subjective experiences in kind of a jumble, like the mirage of the haziness, smokiness, and the flashing of consciousness, so all just a jumble. And that eventually dissipates, and one’s left with an experience of a sense of self, a pure sense of self.

At this point, everything associated with anger begins to break up, because the sense of opposition to experience begins to dissolve. And this is accompanied by an experience of brilliance or luminosity, which is described as white brilliance. So, it’s an experience of light, because you don’t have any frame of reference now. It’s just experience of consciousness. And then that too breaks up. And because it’s breaking up and one’s moving more and more into just pure energy, the experience of brilliance is even more intense. That’s why it’s called a red brilliance. It’s not actually red, it’s just more intense. Whereas the white brilliance is like the moon, the red brilliance is like the sun, just much more intense.

And here is where desire breaks up, or attraction, trying to feel connected with, all of the mental structures that support desire. And then all of that breaks up, and there’s an experience of what’s called black brilliance, which is just total blackness, consciousness, but there is no subject/object. There’s just nothing except blackness. There’s quite a vivid description of this in The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, and it’s either Gampopa or Rechungpa comes to Milarepa with this experience through their meditation and totally disoriented. If you can imagine being in a field of total blackness in which you can’t tell what is up or down, there’s no sense of I/other, there’s just blackness. And that too dissolves into pure being. And I’ll say more about that this afternoon.

Janneke: If one could stay present during all of these stages of dissolution [unclear] is that waking up?

Ken: Yes. That’s exactly, that’s the point. Yes?

Student: How has this knowledge been developed, how is it known? Beause it seems to me to be unknowable.

Ken: Well, it’s actually very knowable. And it’s developed through the experience of people who have gone through the process of dying in their meditation. Because when, and this is very much the point of these practices, when you’re able to hold attention in the dissolution of the sense of self, you go through exactly the same process. And what is being described here is the death of self.

Student: Death sounds like an opportunity to wake up.

Ken: Death is your last opportunity to wake up.

Student: That’s a lot of pressure.

Ken: It’s your world. Chris?

Chris: Coming from a psychological background, issues about the self, I find interesting in this process.

Ken: Well, the term self in psychiatry, particularly Freudian analytical work, and what we talk about in Buddhism are totally different things, and shouldn’t be confused at all. They’re very different.

Chris: Well, I was thinking about Wilber.

Ken: Oh, Ken, yes. What about him?

Chris: Well, he has a self too.

Ken: Hmm, sorry to hear that. Pardon? The big self? Oh yes. Yeah.

Chris:These are … and also other transpersonal … since you brought it up.

Ken: Well, one has to pay attention to what is being referred to, not the words themselves. And here, when I say it’s the death of self, it is the death or the disintegration of the process of interpreting experience in terms of I and other. That’s not what Ken’s talking about, this capitalized Self. Not … totally different kettle of fish.

Student: So, you’re talking about really just self in terms of just identity.

Ken: Yeah, very much so. Yeah. Dave?

Dave: What I’m gleaning from this is that other religions that believe in heaven or some kind of life after death, what I’m gleaning from this is, is that that may be based on wishful thinking. [Laughter]

Ken: Well, Buddhism and there are various schools of Buddhism that posit things that are analogous to heavens, etc., etc., and they are, within Buddhism, regarded as forms of wishful thinking. So, yes.

Dave: But the Buddhism that we are practicing basically believes that once this dissolution occurs, that’s it, there’s no soul that lives on or anything like that.

Ken: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

Dave: How far would you go? [Laughter]

Ken: I would go only as far as what I can know in experience.

Dave: Pardon?

Ken: Only what I can know in experience, that’s as far as I would go. Or it’s as far as I can go. So, this process that I’m describing here, let’s take a different context—end of a relationship, which is a form of death, right? Death as something in one’s experience is dying. What’s the first stage of that? The rug’s pulled out from under your feet? Well, first your whole order, you know, the structure of your world is disrupted, isn’t it? And then, once the structure of the world is disrupted, then you have all of those feelings to deal with that were all nicely taken care of in the structure. And then these tremendous yearnings, this passion, this fire comes out, and you have to … and longing and grief. Pardon?

Student: And anger. [Unclear] [Laughter]

Ken: Yeah. And then your ideas about what a relationship is, everything like that, all of those change; all of these things dissolve one by one. So, this is why I’m trying to give this, not as something that happens to me separate from … my whole experience is going through this process. So when the earth element dissolves, it’s not just the earth element here, the earth element in everything that I experience is dissolved. And all of that experience, which is felt to be other is dissolving, and you might say the framework in which I’ve seen it as I and other is dissolving, and now there is no separation, it’s just that experience and knowing are no longer different. Follow?

Now, what happens after that? I don’t know. Maybe more experience arises. There is nothing which has actually died here, but, and I think this is very important, Buddhism is not about beliefs, it’s about knowing. So, you bring your attention to what you can know. What happens next? You’ll find out. Janneke?

Student questions

Janneke: What is all that stuff that happens in the bardos?

Ken: I’m not opening that can of worms. I mean, I’ll open it a little bit in a minute. Michelle?

Michelle: Do these stages square with what people report who’ve had near-death experiences, or who actually physically have died and, you know, somehow managed to come back to life?

Ken: Yeah. Pretty, pretty well. Peggy?

Peggy: So, if one were to practice in the way that we’ve talked, what this retreat is about, and is in great preparation for the dying events, is it experienced any differently? I mean, for example, the dissolution of explicit sense of self, is that already taken care of?

Ken:

The best yogins have four ways of dying. As space within and without mingle together when a vase breaks, so body and mind dissolve into the emptiness of dharmakaya. It is also like the flames that subside when firewood is consumed, or the light that fills the sky when a knowledge-holder dies, or like a dakini whose death leaves no physical body behind. (These are the superior ways of dying.)

The mediocre yogins have three ways of dying: like a small child, free from the reckoning of dying, or not dying at the time of death. Dying like a wandering beggar, free from fear of circumstances. Dying like a lion in unpeopled mountains after having cut attachment to circumstances.

For inferior yogins and ordinary people, there are two points …

Mirror of Mindfulness, Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Eric Pema Kunsang (Translator), p. 27

And then it goes into this dissolution.

So, if according to these teachings, you’ve dissolved, dismantled the fixation on other completely, fixation on the elements as other, then everything just breaks up. If, on the other hand, you haven’t been able to do that, but have trained in the practice, so that, for instance, you can recognize and stay in the experience of recognition of mind nature, then one can experience all of the dissolutions and recognize what is. And as Janneke said, you’re awake then, because you don’t have the body, all the momentum of the body, to drag you back down.

And it’s very much—according to these teachings—a matter of establishing that degree of stability in one’s experience. Most of you who’ve had some experience of mind nature through your practice and so forth, well, you will recognize it when you die. How long you stay with it depends on the strength, or not so much, the momentum in your practice. This is why, among other reasons, that I constantly recommend that you keep dropping into it, over and over again during the day. Jessica, you had a question? No? Okay, I thought there was one. [Unclear] It’s okay.

Student: One thing about the bardos, because I’ve been really listening to the Tibetan Book of the Dead over and over, and trying to make some sense out of it. But what I came out with was basically a very positive statement, because you can continue to go through these horrendous stages. You always feel the [unclear] to merge in, you know [unclear]

Ken: Yes. You just have to wake up. Now you just have to wake up in a dream. You just have to wake up right now. It’s not so easy.

Student: It’s more positive than I had thought.

The meditation practice

Ken: Well, yeah. In terms of your practice, what I want you to do is to go through these stages. Now, the more vivid you can make these stages for yourself, the more you’re going to get from the practice. So, it involves a fair bit of imagination. Now, what do you experience? I mean, if you were to lie down on the ground and somebody were to put, you know, 10 or 12 concrete blocks on you, what would you experience? Yeah. Pain, but there would be a little bit of fear, right? Okay. And if you can make this imagined practice sufficient that you can actually bring up the fear, and then use your ability just to stay present in the fear.

So, you stay present in the experience, because, as in every other aspect of our lives, if you react to this stuff as it arises, then you move out of knowing, and you get lost in your confusion. And the purpose of training is to be able to stay present in these experiences. And is the same when you feel like you’re being carried off by a wave or by a rip tide; there’s fear there. Or if your way of experiencing things, all goes hazy and confused, fear arises. Now, these may seem very dramatic. And in a sense, they are very powerful, but we actually experience the same kind of thing all the time in our life.

How many of you have experienced being crushed by your anger? Anger. How many of you have experienced being carried off by your desire? How many have experienced being burnt to a crisp by either anger or desire? [Laughter] Robert Frost’s poem:

Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
From what I know of human desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But I have seen enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

And one can interpret that as talking about internal processes as much as external.

So, even though we’re talking about the great matter of life and death, becoming intimately familiar with these experiences of the dissolution of the elements and the fears and experiences associated with them, you will recognize them in your life. How many of you get caught in trying to think your way out of a problem and you end up in a complete puzzle—that’s air. That’s what happens, you know, just all thinking. That’s what happens at this point. And I know some of you have asked me, “What do you do, then?” You just sit, and you are in the tornado, you’re in the hurricane, just be in it, don’t try to control anything. And that way you experience all the movement without getting caught up in the content. And this is moving into a more intimate relationship with our experience. So, work at these, make them as vivid as possible, and enjoy. Yes?

Student: In practice, when we were in Santa Fe and did some of the process stuff, I remember that half an hour sometimes wasn’t enough. So, I’m just wondering, can we stay through qi gong?

Ken: No, I think it’s good to die three times. The thing is, if you move through this, lots of people think that if they spend longer, then they’re going to get more into it. That may be true, but it also creates much more likelihood that you’re going to get lost and stuck somewhere. And I’ve generally found that if you move through things systematically, the first time or two through, it may not be as deep, but the mind is more awake. And so as you begin to get familiar with the material, it actually becomes more vivid, because you are more awake and you don’t get into the dullness. And that’s how it’s going to be anyway. You aren’t going to be able to say, “Oh, I would just want to hang out here in the dissolution of earth a little bit longer.” No, it happens, and then the next one happens, next one happens. And how quickly these happen depend very much on circumstances of course. Okay. Steve?

Steve: I think we were talking about this yesterday in the circle, and someone mentioned how someone was dying, and they were just so stubborn that they were able to hold on and to get better. And I have a feeling I know what you’re going to say, but like, what happens when you believe that your identity can take you through it? You know, that that identity can fight its way through?

Ken: In other words, you can live forever. Well, work with it; see if it’s true. Go through this process, and see if it’s actually true. Peggy?

Peggy: The good news to me about this process is that it does remind me of the times when I not resisted whatever the pain was, and that, it always is remarkable to me where I get at the other side. And it’s the resistance that is so hard.

Ken: Yeah, that’s right.

Peggy: Like familiar processes in a way.

Ken: Okay. Yes, Beth.

Beth: When people actually die today, unless you get hit by the bus, they would normally go to hospice care, you know, drip of morphine, all that. I would think that would so dull the experience of dying that it’s hard to tell what’s happening. The way people die … [unclear].

Ken: I don’t really know about that. I know that when Karmapa died, he was on morphine. It didn’t seem to dull him at all, but then he was a little unusual. Once everything is dissolved down to consciousness, drugs will cease to have any effect, because the consciousness is no longer being affected by what is happening in the body. That’s already done. Up to that point it may dull the experience. I know that a number of lamas, when they were hospitalized and they realized they were going to die, insisted that all the drips be taken off. They wanted to die awake. So, I don’t know the answer to that.

Student: One of my specialties is geriatric, and that’s one of the issues, and one of the most fundamental ethical principles in terms of prescribing is what you’re talking about. The use of analgesia is analgesia, not …

Ken: Not stupefication.

Student: And the purpose of any kind of medication is to facilitate their sense of who they are. That’s one of the most essential principles in hospice care, at least from my training.

Student questions about the practice

Ken: Thanks. Okay. Any questions about the practice? Peter?

Peter: I just had a question about people dying in their sleep. I know my friend’s father died. He knew he was going to die, but when he did die, I mean, in the last couple days, but he just died in his sleep. When do you become aware or you become [unclear].

Ken: At some point in the process, they could easily have gone through this process in a dream and gone through the same process. One doesn’t necessarily become aware. One can be lost in reactivity the whole time. Pardon? Okay. Rami?

Rami: I just want to ask you, as far as the dissolution of explicit sense of self [unclear] in the social ignorance structures, I don’t understand how to work with those.

Ken: Yes. there are subtle states. And in the untrained person, they last that long [Snaps fingers]. They go by very quickly. In terms of the practice, as I suggested to Jessica, you die once every half hour. And towards the end, when the void element dissolves, in terms of your meditation, when the mind is still, you may have the experience of not being engaged in the six senses and just resting. That’s analogous to the dissolution of the explicit sense of self. When the mind becomes even more still, there is just a sense of I am. A felt sense of I, that’s analogous to the implicit sense of self. And the mind can actually become so still that there is no sense of I. This is not emptiness, it’s just the sense of I has subsided, and that’s analogous to the the dissolution of the ignorance structures. It’s not the same as, it’s just analogous to. And so, just going from “I am” to a felt sense of “I” which is subtler, to “just being” and then, at the very end, just rest in the totality of experience. [Laughter] He’s got it.