What is an unfettered mind?

Ken:

One day Wuzhao was working as the tenzo (that’s the chief cook) at a monastery in the Wutai Mountains. When the bodhisattva Manjushri suddenly appeared above the pot where he was cooking, Wuzhao beat him. Later he said, “Even if Shakyamuni Buddha were to appear above the pot, I would beat him too.”

How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment, Uchiyama Roshi, p. 23

Commenting on this, Uchiyama, who’s a contemporary Zen teacher in Japan, that’s probably died by now—I did meet a person who studied with him for a year. I really like this book very much, called From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment or Refining Your life. He says:

When I thought carefully about Wuzhao beating Manjushri when he appeared above the pot and going right on with the cooking, I felt miserable about my inability to do the same thing, even though all that appeared above my pot was some “hungry ghost.” I worked hard after that to chase away the ghosts whenever they showed up.

p. 24

Well, I guess we should start at the beginning. What is an unfettered mind? Well, starting at the beginning means jumping off a cliff. It is your mind exactly as it is right now. And I imagine one or two of you are probably saying, “Get serious, you’ve got to be kidding.” An unfettered mind isn’t something that we acquire or develop or make. It’s actually a question of knowing there isn’t anything more to do. It’s to know it. And to know it in the way that I’m talking about here, it doesn’t mean to understand it. Perhaps somewhat arbitrarily I’ve begun to make a distinction between understanding and knowing.

Just to use an extreme example: any of us could go on the internet and type in appendectomy into Google, Yahoo or whatever, and in a relatively short time understand quite precisely how to do an appendectomy, how to remove an appendix. Well, with a possible exception of one, maybe two people in this room, I doubt if any of us actually know how to do an appendectomy. So the distinction I’m making here is: I’m using knowing to refer to a living experiential knowing, and understanding, more conceptual, somewhat removed.

I find that there’s an expression—which has come into usage over the last few years—I find it particularly prevalent among younger people, and I always find it rather amusing. By younger people, I mean anywhere from teenage up to 30, so please excuse me—but they ask you a question and you give them an answer. And astonishingly frequently you get, “I know that.” Now it’s very, very interesting because the first thing you want to do is, “Well, if you knew that, then why did you ask the question?” But what I think is happening there is that for whatever reason, they ask the question because there’s something that’s inaccessible to them. And when you respond to that, then something clicks inside and they realize, “Oh, there it is. I know that.” So I think it’s very interesting, even if it can be a little infuriating sometimes.

How Buddhism uses the word mind

Ken: We want to go much further than that in this retreat. And if our mind is unfettered right now, the natural question is of course, why don’t I know that? Or, why do I experience things the way that I do? Which is I think for most of us, a disturbing number of fetters if not chains, locks and stocks and what have you. And that’s the question. What’s going on? Why don’t I experience it? Now, I need to clarify one point here, which is a potential source of misunderstanding … a potential source. We use the word mind in Buddhism, and we use it differently from the way it is used in ordinary English.

When we say in English, a person has a “good mind,” we generally mean that they have some gray matter. They’re intellectually acute. And when we say a person has a “good heart,” we generally mean that they’re benevolent, compassionate, open, responsive, well-meaning, and so forth. And so we have in English this division between mind and heart, intellectual or conceptual processes and feeling or emotional processes.

But when we talk about mind in Buddhism, we are using the word mind to translate the Sanskrit word, usually citta. There are several other words for mind in Sanskrit, manas and so forth. I’m more familiar with the Tibetan, and there are at least three words that come here: sems (pron. sem), which is the Tibetan for citta; yid (pron. yi), which is the Tibetan for the Sanskrit word manas; and blo (pron. lo), I’m not sure what the Sanskrit word for that is. And these all have slightly different flavors. For instance blo bzang (pron. lo zang) which would mean good mind, using the word blo generally means a good intellect, an intelligent person. But it can also mean good character. And if you put it with sems or something like that, sems bzang po re, it generally means refined mind, a certain nobility. But all of the words in Tibetan, for some reason—and I presume in Sanskrit, though I don’t know Sanskrit—they don’t have the same concept/emotion split that we have in English.

And when my teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, was asked about, “What is mind?” he would use the Tibetan phrase: mi dren dgu dren (pron. mi tren gu tren) which translated literally means not remembering, many remembering. One way one constructs words in Tibetan is you juxtapose opposites to get a range. So for instance, to get the concept for temperature, you juxtapose heat and cold. So the word for temperature in Tibetan is hot-cold. So you describe the scale. So when Rinpoche says “not remembering, remembering” or “not recollecting, many recollecting” he’s basically saying, “Mind is everything we experience.” It’s experiencing. And this of course includes not only the thoughts and concepts, it includes emotions and feelings, but it goes beyond that, includes all the sensory sensations that arise in sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. It includes the experience of knowing itself.

So when we use the term mind in Buddhism, we should think of not the intellect at all. That’s the potential misunderstanding. Think of it as experience. If I can find this passage in here. Yes, here we are:

… we assume that there exists a world which you and I experience in common with all other human beings, that this world existed prior to our births, and that it will continue to exist even after our deaths. But again (says Uchiyama) this is nothing more than an idea.

p. 27

That’s an idea we happen to be very, very deeply attached to and take as a really fundamental belief. And it’s amply supported and encouraged actually by the prevalence of the scientific paradigm—which tells us that only that which can be measured actually exists—anything else is a figment of our imagination. But when you actually think about it, this goes on to explain this, but let me just elaborate on this a bit. What we actually experience are simply: thoughts, feelings, and sensations. And out of that we construct the idea that there is a world. And this is a very, very different point of view, but it’s one that I would like you to at least entertain for the next four days. You don’t have to believe it at this point. In fact, I don’t really encourage you. I’d just like you to entertain the possibility. Uchiyama goes on to say:

Not only that, we wind up thinking that we live and die within this world of fabrication. (He has a certain wry humor, this guy.) This is an utterly inverted way of looking at one’s life. My true self lives in reality. (And when he says true self, we can understand that in the vocabulary that we’re using here to mean our mind, what we actually are.) My true self lives in reality, and the world I experience is one I alone can experience, not one anyone else can experience along with me.

p. 27

That is to say, I’m thinking of something right now. Can I share that thought with you? I can tell you what the thought is about, but I can’t share having the experience of thinking the thought with you. And we eat together and we all eat the same food, but we all have our individual experience and we can’t share that. Those are things each of us individually alone experience and we cannot share that with others. The world in which we actually live is a world that we cannot share with others. We can talk about it, we can do all kinds of things like that, but there’s no possibility of exchange.

Somebody says, “I’m having fun.” Well, can you share that fun? No, you can do something which may provoke the experience of having fun in somebody else, but you can’t share the fun that you’re having with somebody else. So it goes on to say, “To express this as precisely as possible, as I’m born, I simultaneously give birth to the world I experience. I live out my life along with that world. And at my death, the world I experience also dies.” Now what he says, this is how things are. For most of us, this is a very radical way of looking at this experience we call life.

From the standpoint of reality, my own life experience, which in Buddhist terminology equals mind. You note that he’s saying mind is experience. And reality—which means the phenomena or the experiences I encounter in life—can never be abstractly separated from each other. They must be identical. However, to take what I have just said and conclude that everything must therefore be in my mind would be to fall into another philosophical trap.

This is wonderfully illustrated by a story of a monk who went to his teacher and said, “I think I’m ready.” In the Zen tradition, when you reached a certain point in your practice, you left the monastery in which you’ve been trained, and you wandered around visiting a number of other teachers and practicing on your own. And this was to round out your experience. You can’t learn everything from one teacher. So this monk goes to his master and says, “I think I’m ready to go.” The master says, “Hmm, that may be. Come, I’ll see you to the monastery gates.” And they arrived at the gate and beside the gate there was a very, very large rock, a boulder. And just as the monk was about to depart, the master said, “You see that boulder there? Yeah? Where’s that boulder?” And the monk turned to him and said, “Well, it’s in my mind, of course.” And the master said, “Hmm, that’s going to be a really heavy thing to carry around on your trip. Perhaps you better stay a little longer.”

Not a belief system

Ken: So to take what I’ve just said and conclude that everything must therefore be in my mind, that’s one philosophical trap. On the other hand, to conclude that mind is totally dependent on the environment would be to relegate the matter of mind to a sort of naive realism. This is exactly the stance of many, many scientists now who regard consciousness, this faculty of being aware as an epiphenomenon or possibly an emergent phenomenon of chemical and electrical processes that take place in the body. So that’s a kind of naive realism. So we’re not going in either of those directions. The teachings of Buddhism are neither a simplistic idealism nor some sort of environmentalism. And they’re neither because in Buddhism, it’s not about developing a philosophy, philosophical theory. It’s not about developing a set of tenets or beliefs by which you live your life.

I had an experience of this recently in a conversation with a person I met in Toronto when I was there. And she knows nothing about Buddhism. And she said, “I thought Buddhists were meant to be unattached, then why do you do X, Y, and Z?” And it’s a very natural question from people who say, “Well, if that’s the belief, then you shouldn’t behave that way,” which is exactly how many religions function. In Buddhism we’re not positing belief systems and trying to adapt our behavior so that we’re living out those belief systems. The way that I view Buddhism at least, is as a set of tools by which we can come to know how things are or what we are. And then how we live and act comes out of that knowing, and that’s the fundamental effort.

A set of buddhist tools

Ken: So this morning, in the time that remains, I’m going to run through a set of tools which are suitable for us. Some of you’ll be familiar with many of these already, but maybe there’s some new material and then I’ll give you some instruction. [Pause, sound of flipping pages] I’ll come back to that. Okay.

There are, to my knowledge, in the Tibetan tradition, three distinct methods by what which we come to know what we are—we come to know the unfettered mind. One is called finding the practice on the basis of view. The second is called finding the view on the basis of practice. And the third, and this will infuriate you, is called finding the practice on the basis of view. Now, I’m going to explain.

In some traditions—and I’m thinking principally of the Gelugpa tradition, though they may not completely agree with this characterization—you develop through very, very careful study and training, primarily philosophical training, as refined an understanding—and I want to emphasize understanding in the sense that I used the term earlier—of emptiness, of how things are, as one can, and then use that understanding as a basis for practice. And there are many, many people who approach their practice that way and many teachers teach it and in some extent it’s present in almost everyone. But it’s the idea of getting some kind of understanding and then using that understanding as the basis for practice.

There’s certain advantages with this approach and certain disadvantages. One of the advantages is that most people find understanding things conceptually far more easier than knowing them through the experience of practice. So it’s an easier place to start. It’s not true for everybody, for many people. One of the disadvantages is that it can be actually quite difficult to let go of the conceptual mind.

In the Kagyu tradition in which I was trained, and again, this is just an example of one tradition, but many other traditions take the approach of finding the view on the basis of practice. And that is in this approach, you just start doing it. And as you do it, you run into one problem after another or one blind alley after another. And either through your own efforts or through consultation with the teacher, you keep refining this and through the process of refining your practice, you come to know how things are.

And then the third approach is to elicit by one way or another, an experience of how things are in the student—a non-conceptual, a direct experience of how things are in the student—which they then can use as a basis of practice. So you see that’s a very different way of saying, “finding the practice on the basis of view.” It’s very different from the first one. One can uncharitably call this approach the “zap approach,” and people go around, and they’ve had some taste of this, trying to get zapped by one teacher after another.The advantage or the pro on this one is that you actually have some experience or something pretty close to experience. The disadvantage is that you think it consists of just getting repeated zaps and you never get around to doing the actual work. There is work to be done.

So the techniques I’m going to run through here are a mixture of the latter two. The first one I used to teach a long time ago, and Khenpo Tsultrim, a Kagyu teacher, puts a lot of energy into refining people’s understanding of the view, and it’s getting a very clear understanding of things. But I remember teaching a retreat—I think it was in the early 90’s in Vancouver—using some of Khenpo Tsultrim’s methods. I just said, “This is not working,” and I haven’t taught that way since.

Letting the mind settle

Ken: So the first one is letting the mind settle. This actually comes from the Shangpa tradition, a teaching called the three natural settlings. One is to let the body settle. Second is to let the breath settle. And the third is to let the mind, again, I want to emphasize when we say mind here, we mean the whole way you’re experiencing the world, not just the intellect. What does it mean to let that settle? Well, an example that’s used in this tradition is: years and years ago, long before there were combines and all these farming machinery, you’d go out and you’d cut grains of the stalks of wheat and you’d bind them up. So you’d see these bunches, sometimes quite big bunches, but they’d be bound up. Now what happens when you cut that cord? It goes, “whoosh.” Okay? That’s what it means. So when you sit, you just go … [pause] you just let things settle.

Now, this goes back to something I said last night. If you want to learn how to do something, do it 10,000 times. This takes a little practice and we run into all kinds of stuff and we just go [sound of exhalation]. So initially you’ll probably only do that for a relatively short period, like one to two seconds, and then stuff will come up. And what you do is you pull yourself out of that stuff and then you settle again. Now Gail and I taught a retreat earlier this year. Was it really earlier this year? It seems like centuries ago. It’s been a full year. The theme of that retreat was Finding Your Way. And I really want to emphasize that in this approach of letting the mind settle, finding your way to let the body settle, finding your way to let the breath settle, and finding a way to let the way you experience the world settle. And settle just means let it find its own equilibrium, balance, whatever you want to call it.

One of the reasons I’ve asked Jeff to be giving the work and body movement in the afternoons, is that I think you’ll find from his work that it’ll show you ways to interact with your body, which will allow your body to find ways to settle, and to allow you to let your body find ways to settle. Because letting the body settle is very, very important. And we’re so used to, “You sit this way!” and there’s a certain hardness in the posture which actually prevents any really deep settling in the mind and in everything else. Once the body settles, a lot of other things can actually start to happen quite naturally.

Dropping the mind

Ken: So, that’s one approach. A second approach I’ve just called dropping the mind. You can think of this as going to your favorite ridiculously high cliff and holding out your mind and just going [pause]. Just let it drop. Now, the instructions for this, many of you will have heard this before, are: Don’t chase the past. Don’t entertain the future. Don’t dwell on the present. Rest. Those are instructions for dropping the mind. It’s for dropping any idea of a way to experience the world, just let it drop. Now again, when you do this, if you do it together right now, you just go: Don’t chase the past. Don’t entertain the future. Don’t dwell on the present. Rest. And there’s a little shift that takes place. That’s the mind dropping.

Now, unfortunately, our relationship to the mind is a little bit like those paddles with the ball and the elastic, and you go, “bang,” and it comes “bang” right back. Or you can think of it as bungee jumping, and just “boing”, so we let the mind drop, but we don’t actually let go of it. So it comes “boing” back, and now we’re back into our ordinary way of experiencing things. Again, there’s two things we have to do here. One is, practice this 10,000 times and weaken that string or the rubber band. And there are techniques for doing that, but that’s another subject. Of course, when you actually experience that rubber band breaking, it’s a little bit scary, but it’s kind of interesting.

Opening the mind: the primary practice

Ken: Third one: opening the mind. Well, many of you are familiar with this one too, you know this as the primary practice. If you’ve used that terminology before, it comes from a friend of mine. In this one, it’s actually a four-step process or a five-step, depending on how you want to count. I can just run through it very quickly with you.

Pick an object in front of you in your visual field. A smaller object is probably better to start with, and focus your attention on it. That is to say, let your attention rest on that object. And then, expand your field of attention so that you include everything in your visual field. And I’m doing this very quickly; one can do it more slowly, of course. And when you can see everything in your visual field, then include all of the other senses, taste and smell, sound and touch. So, you’re in your whole sensory field. So the first step is focus.

The second step is field. The third step is include the internal material. It’s all the thoughts, beliefs, stories, emotions, feelings, all the stuff, which you think takes place inside us, but it just takes place actually. We include all of that. So we have a sensory field and all the internal material and, as I mentioned, we ordinarily think of this as inside and outside. Just drop the boundary of inside and outside so that it’s just one realm of experience. You feel another shift there.

And then the last step is just to ask the question, “What experiences this?” And you find there’s another shift there. And each of these shifts, you don’t try to do anything except rest in the shift. So that’s a step-by-step process of opening the mind to the totality of experience.

Now, where people run into difficulty with that is they have an insufficient capacity of attention to do one or more of the steps. But this is something you can build. And in your individual meditation sessions, some of you if you’re using this, may choose to sit down in front of these rocks, they’re very good. They’re granite, so there’s all of these fine little things. And you just look at the rock until you can see every individual crystal of rock in it, or you look at the path until you can see all of the rocks, or you look at a tree until you can see every branch and every leaf in the tree, all at the same time. This is one way of practicing opening to sensory field. Or if you walk over to the waterfall, waterfalls are neat. You can do two things with waterfalls. One is you can look at the waterfall until you can see every drop that’s falling at the same time, which is quite neat. And the other is to listen to the waterfall until you can hear every sound that the waterfall is making, from the deep bass notes to the very high little trebles, and hear all of that at the same time. And then you can do both together.

That’s all working with the sensory field. And then when you can really stay in that, then you start opening to the internal material. And again, you’ll get pulled around all over the place, but gradually you’re able to stay more and more in the internal field. And then, dropping the boundary between inside and outside. And then, what experiences this? These are all different shifts and each requires a higher capacity, higher level of attention. So you can actually develop that.

Some people find that one or more of the various practices included in the primary practice work very well for them. One is just looking into the mind, and so you let the mind become settled. And for this particular technique, you need fairly stable attention, otherwise, it’s like trying to see the reflection of a lake in a lake that’s ruffled by the wind. You can’t see clearly. But if you have fairly stable attention, then you just look at mind. Look at experience or look at experiencing and just say, “What is this?” We find this in traditional teachings. For instance, in the mind training, there’s three instructions which capture this. Well, actually, I’ll refer to the Mahamudra Prayer, which some of you’re familiar with.

When you look at object, you don’t see object, you see mind. When you look at mind, you don’t see mind, mind’s nature is empty. When you look at both, clinging to duality is naturally released.

Aspirations for Mahamudra

And that describes the technique of looking into mind. So you look at an object and you say, “What is this?” And you actually realize, oh, I don’t know whether there’s anything there. All that I can know is that there’s a certain experience arising for me. Okay, well, what experiences that? Not much actually, to be more precise, nothing whatsoever. “Look at mind, there is no mind, mind’s nature is empty.” Then you look at the two together. So there’s the object, there’s the mind—which isn’t there anyway—and when you engage both of those together, then you find there’s a shift in your experience, which is a release of duality.

Letting the mind go

Ken: Next technique: this is probably the one that many of you were waiting to hear. It’s called letting the mind go. Somebody gave me a placard the other day, I can’t remember where it was, I think it was in Vancouver. It said, “I let my mind go, and it didn’t come back.” In this one, you just let the mind go. You have all of this stuff running, and it’s all the time, right? Thoughts, yeah, stop just running. And our best efforts to control it or focus, they’re always frustrated. We’re constantly distracted. So we stop fighting completely, just let it go. We sit down and you do absolutely nothing. Now sounds easy. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds because it means really not controlling your experience at all. So you can play with that one if you want.

Two other ones that I jotted down, these are more or less included in what we’ve already talked about, but I’ll just mention them. Just as opening the mind leads to a certain experience, focusing the mind smaller and smaller and smaller also leads to exactly the same experience. So you can let your mind rest on an object, and then that object gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Now, when you get down to 10 to the minus 35—which if you actually get that far—is basically, according to theories, where you’re getting down to the actual structure of space and time itself. I think well beyond that point, you may find yourself just resting in experience.

So 10 to minus 35 millimeters, it’s very small. But the nice thing about when we do this kind of exercise, we don’t have the same problem that one runs into in quantum physics. At a certain point, you aren’t able to divide things by half because they start falling into discrete packets, which is what quanta are. Quantum is a discrete packet. But in working with our own mind, we don’t have that problem at all. We can arbitrarily divide things by half forever. So you have no reason, no excuse for going as small as you wish in focusing the mind. Whatever you’re focusing on, cut it in half, then cut it in half again. You can enjoy that one Harry.

Joining the mind with the object

Ken: And this last one we’ve also discussed a bit—it’s included, but it’s a technique in its own right—that’s joining the mind with the object. And people say, “How do you do that?” Well, it’s very simple. Just let your attention rest on the object. And you see, as soon as you do that, your mind joins with the object. Unfortunately, there’s another object that the mind doesn’t let go of immediately, and that’s your sense of self. So you just rest there. I think this is captured by a Chinese poem: “I went to the mountains and meditated, and I sat until there was only the mountain.” That’s letting the mind join with the object. It’s not an exact rendition, but it was to that effect.

Now, I don’t expect you to do all of these. In fact, that would be quite counterproductive. I’ve given you six or seven different techniques, and there are many more. I’ve given you six or seven here. And these are all tried and true traditional methods, and I just want you to either pick one or play with a couple and find one which you can work with, which speaks to you. And then I want you to use that and really practice it. This is where the 10,000 times comes in. And how to practice this—one of the differences in the way that I find it most fruitful for myself to practice and also for many of the people I’ve worked with—is to use the principle of returning to what is already there and resting. And all of these techniques are basically a way of returning to what’s already there.

In many traditions, you’re encouraged to hold attention. Given the complexity of our lives and amount of stuff we have going on, I find that encouraging people to hold attention almost always results in some form of suppression and some form of hardening internally, which is counterproductive. So my suggestion is to approach this as constantly returning, constantly returning. So with all of these techniques, you’re going to work the technique. You’ll experience a shift, rest in the shift. And a couple of seconds or maybe 30 seconds or maybe a couple of minutes or whatever, you’ll find that that shift is dissipated and you’re back in your ordinary, confused mind, attaching to everything. And when you recognize that, then you do the technique again and you rest. So it’s returning, using the technique to return and rest, return and rest. And don’t try to recover; don’t try to hold on.

When the 16th Karmapa visited us in retreat, quite a strange experience actually, but he gave us pointing out instructions. And he prefaced them by saying, “This is what I’ve come to understand from my study and practice of mahamudra in the Kagyu tradition and dzogchen and Kalachakra,” which are the three big systems in the Tibetan tradition. And he said, “Look, and when thoughts arise, relax, then look again. And when thoughts arise, relax. And so you move into the shift, when it dissipates, relax, then move into the shift, when it dissipates, relax.”

And the only thing I would add to that is when you move into the shift, in the shift rest, don’t do anything more. So you look, and you rest in the looking, when it dissipates, just relax, look around the room briefly, move your body a little bit and then look again. Or use any of these techniques like: let the mind settle again, drop the mind again, let the mind open again, look at the mind, whatever. Okay, questions. That’s about three retreats-worth of instruction right there, isn’t it? Thanks George.

Student questions

Diane: In all the different methods, except for one or two, what comes up for me is I think, how will I actually do this?

Ken: Which of the one or two that you—

Diane: Well, that’s my point, that the common denominator for all of these is, try really hard. Look from everything until you see every drop of the waterfall, I automatically sense that there will be an active looking, straining. And in the instruction of drop the mind or let the mind go, I’m sitting here thinking, well, those are the easy ones. Just don’t do anything and just hang out until the bell rings.

Ken: [Laughs] Yeah, okay, I got your point. The key thing to note is when you’re doing a technique—has something hardened in you? If it does, it’s the wrong technique for you. So I think for you, Diane, actually, I would suggest dropping the mind. Don’t chase the past. Don’t entertain the future. Don’t dwell on the present. Rest. And that’ll last for a period of time, anywhere from one or two seconds to a few minutes possibly. And then you’ll notice there’s a difference, and then you relax, and then you do the same thing again.

Diane: Can you make a distinction then between dwell and rest?

Ken: When I say “dwell on the present,” it means you are thinking about things like, “Oh, this, and this, this, this and this. Oh, what’s happening in my body right now? It’s too hot here. It’s too cold here.” So you’re dwelling on what you’re actually experiencing. In this instruction, you let the breath settle, let the body settle, let the breath settle, and then you just say, “Okay. Don’t chase the past. Don’t entertain the future. Don’t dwell on the present.” And right there, there’s usually a little shift, and that’s where you rest. Okay? Any other questions?

Student: Can you repeat number four? [Unclear] … letting go. Letting the mind go.

Ken: Oh, I have that as number five.

Student: Oh, okay.

Ken: I don’t have them numbered, actually.

Student: That’s the one I’m looking for.

Ken: Letting the mind go—oh, you’re a brave person. Okay, you really want to do this one?

Student: Well now I’m not sure.

Ken: [Laughs] Okay, I’m going to have fun thinking about this one with you. So you sit, let your body settle, let your breath settle, let your mind settle a little bit, and then don’t do anything. Thoughts come, you don’t do anything. The mind rests very deeply, you don’t do anything. Earthquake happens inside or outside, doesn’t matter, you don’t do anything. Thunderstorms outside, inside, you don’t do anything. You let the thunderstorm rage. Old pains, old joys, new pains, new joys, let it run.

Student: No, I don’t like that one. [Laughter]

Ken: You don’t like that one? Why don’t you like it?

Student: Well, I actually don’t think I’d be very good at that one.

Ken: Oh, you’re not going to be good at any of these. Forget that! [Laughter] This is called practice. It’s not a … [laughs]

Student: But I think I would harden. I mean, I think I would repress. Oh, a thunderstorm, not do anything, I mean—

Ken: But the instruction is to let it run so you don’t get to suppress it.

Student: Oh, you let them all run?

Ken: Yes.

Student: Oh, yeah that’s … [laughter] How does that not become dullness?

Ken: How does it not become craziness? How does it not become totally active mind, dullness, sleep, everything like that?

Student: If you don’t do anything—

Ken: Yes.

Student: You’re constantly not doing anything. So then …

Ken: [Laughter] I love it.

Student: Wait, if you just let it run, I mean, isn’t that the same as just being in your daily life and not being in attention? How we just … we are not in attention. We let everything or just run, and we’re … craziness.

Ken: Well, it’s not quite the same. And you know why it’s not quite the same? In your daily life, when stuff starts to run, how long do you stay doing nothing?

Student: [Laughs] Yeah.

Ken: So here you’re just going to let it run—

Student: So you’re not escaping.

Ken: Do nothing. There’s another technique—this comes from Ajahn Chah actually—and it’s along the same lines, but it’s a little different way of approaching it. Put a chair in the center of the room, sit in the chair and see who comes to visit. You don’t have to entertain any of the guests. You don’t actually have to talk with any of them. You’re just going to see who comes to visit. And they’ll come and they’ll hang around and they’ll go. So you just sit in your chair and see what happens. That better? No. [Laughs] Harry, we get a mic over to Harry? And just leave the mics on, please.

Harry: Part of my understanding was that, of meditation, when the mind wanders, bring it back to the object of attention, and therein some mind muscle, because that’s the effort. So with this method, there’s not that building the mind muscle part. So could you comment on that?

Ken: Yeah. This is not Gold’s Gym of the mind. There are two aspects or two facets to practice. One is, as you say, building muscle and the other is using it. Well, we’re using it here. They actually are very intimately related. And you may find, and I’m being a little too glib when I say we’re using it. You’ll find, just as I think Raquel was sensing, that actually doing nothing was going to require developing and using mind muscles in a very, very different way. Fair enough?

So what I invite you to do is just to try one of these techniques and see what happens. Yes. In the way that you’ve approached meditation generally, it’s: bring the mind back, bring the mind, bring the mind back. And this, just to quote John Lennon, “let it be” approach is a little … how do I do that? Because there’s very little to hold onto. So one of the things that you may find yourself working with—and that’s why I read the passage from Uchiyama at the beginning—you may have a few ghosts appearing above your pot, or maybe Manjushri or Shakyamuni. What are you going to do? All of that stuff, and it’s trying to sort out all of that stuff that’s produced this fettered mind. But there’s a mind which is completely free and open in here, and this is an invitation to come to know it. Okay? Marianne.

Marianne: Would I choose a technique that I felt that I had more proclivity towards? Or because if my mind is always jabbering away all the time, and so that would be maybe a place that I could naturally sit and just watch it without trying to alter that state, or pick a technique that sounds very difficult and challenging—like dividing things in half multiple times? What do you suggest as being most productive or enlightening or … ?

Ken: Yes. [Laughter] All of the above. We’ve got three periods of meditation next. You could actually probably try two techniques in each of those three periods. By the end of the morning, you should know. Okay? I mean, if you want to work that hard, that’s possible. You may find, just try three techniques and oh, here’s one. I like this one, or this one works for me. But I want you to explore.

Marianne: The point of it is to find that moment of focus, that shift and rest in it, and then watch what arises as the mind arises and letting ourselves—

Ken: No, it’s just not about watching the mind. You see, you’ve already set up an idea of what it should be like. What if you let that idea go right now? How would that be? There, right there—what’s that? Yeah, there you go. Okay. You’re getting the point. It’s about letting go. It’s not about producing a certain experience, and you can feel how something in you, it wants to have a technique that you can hold on to, right?

Marianne: I do, being …

Ken: Yes. There you go. Okay, let’s break here. We have 15 minutes. Who’s on han? Okay, so if you could sound that Chuck, we’ll be able to start meditation on time at 10:30. And so that gives us a bit of a break. Okay.

Sky-Gazing

Ken: Sky-gazing is very simple. Find a place where you can look into the open sky without the sun in your eyes because harmful to your eyes. And you just look at the sky. Now we’re fortunate here because the sky’s clear, most of the time. The more open it is, the less stuff like trees, mountains, rocks, things like that, the better. And you just look into the sky. And it’s not that you just rest your eyes, you actually look into the sky. You find that it’s very difficult to hold thoughts and so forth. Your mind naturally becomes clear. And when you do this, there are three skies that you’ve become known to.

First is the sky that you’re looking into. But as you keep looking into the sky, you’ll find that a quietness begins to open up inside you. That’s the second sky, which is, I can’t remember the actual name for it. And in looking into the sky there, you find yourself also looking into this peaceful sky. And clouds and things may arrive, we call them thoughts and feelings, but they may arise. We just keep looking. And then you discover or uncover what’s called the secret sky, or the hidden sky, which is basically the unfettered mind, which is the mind which just knows. Now, that doesn’t happen necessarily in five minutes. That may take five years, usually not that long, but you just look up, and you’ll find you get distracted or things … then you just go back to looking at the sky. Okay, so thanks for reminding me about that.