The starting point

Ken: So welcome to the fall retreat here at Mt. Baldy Zen Center. As you all know, the topic for the retreat is, There is No Enemy.

Now, I’ll be quite up front with you about exactly what we’ll be doing. I have some ideas, but we will see as it unfolds, because this will be this first time I’ve actually approached this topic in a retreat. And as Carrie said earlier, in a certain sense you’re all guinea pigs. But basically everybody who ever comes to retreat with me is a guinea pig because I very rarely do the same thing twice, so it’s always a bit of an experiment.

This phrase, there is no enemy, came up very much from my own experience. A bit over a year ago, I experienced a very significant shift in my practice, which was very deep and very disconcerting, because I’d just finished a ten-day retreat in New Mexico with a group of eighteen people, teaching them mahamudra. There’s a three-day break between retreats where I was hanging out with a couple of people who were there for both retreats, and then I was to do another ten-day retreat with a different group of people on dzogchen. And in the middle of this break, everything just shifted in me. And I no longer had any idea was I was going to teach in the second retreat. So it was very irritating—or not exactly irritating, just like, “Okay, now what?”

And the shift had a lot to do with really experiencing that there was just nothing to push against. And it was sometime during that time this phrase just came to mind, there is no enemy.

And I looked it up on Google and there was nothing. It is actually not a common phrase at all. Though it is now the name of an album put out by a rock band in Des Moines, Iowa. So if you look it up on Google, that’s what you’re going to get. And Google’s full of that stuff. But the album, or the group, is very honest, they say, “This is an album name, it is not a philosophy.” So I’m going to say, “This is a philosophy, not an album name.” [Laughter]

Opposition is deeply conditioned in most of us

Ken: For most of us, there’s definitely a posture of opposition deeply, deeply conditioned. I was reading something on more of this brain imaging stuff and running some experiments on brain imaging with people watching sports. How if they’re watching a sports event between two teams from two different cities that they didn’t belong to, they just watched it and there was no particular brain activity in a certain region. But when one of the teams was from their city, then a whole other area of the brain lit up. Now, it’s very uncertain what the lighting up of the brain actually means in these PET scans. There’s a lot of speculation. But it does possibly suggest that this tribal identification, “us vs. them,” is very, very deeply conditioned in us, both biologically through evolution, psychologically, emotionally, etc. Yet it’s functional in a certain way in that it creates group cohesion which enhances survival, etc. But it also is the source of a great deal of suffering for ourselves and others as all of us know.

So what we’re doing in spiritual practice, generally speaking, is trying to find a way to come to terms with this experience we call life. And all of you are here because you think that by attending this retreat it’s going help you in some way: either learn some skills, or build some capacities, or gain some insights or something like that, which will help you negotiate this experience in a better way. And I’m going to leave “better” here very, very undefined.

Does all spiritual practice lead to the same experience?

Ken: Now, we run into all kinds of things in the context of spiritual practice, many of which I’ve come to question quite deeply. One which I let go of a long time ago was the idea that all spiritual practices lead to the same thing. You know, there’s one enlightenment and, you know, it’s the same for everybody who experiences it. “Ah, well maybe, but I don’t think so.”

A few years ago I received an email inviting me to participate in a film project that was going to discuss the common vision of non-duality that was present in all spiritual traditions. I’m not that well known in North America, so I was very surprised to get this invitation. So I emailed back said, “I’m very happy to, feel quite honored by this; however, in the spirit of full disclosure what you’re taking as a fact, I regard as a question.” Fifteen minutes later my phone rang. “What!?” was basically what the other person was saying. And we had a rather difficult conversation, which basically ended when I said, “Look let’s get down to basics. If you and I take a slice of pie from the same strawberry pie and each of us eat it, we actually have no idea whether we have the same experience or not. And if that’s the case for strawberry pie, I can’t see it’s going to be any different for non-dualistic vision, or whatever.” And there was sort of a grunt at the other end and we concluded the phone call. And an hour later I got an email saying that, “You’re right, you’re probably not the right person for this movie.” [Laughter] How to win friends and influence people: do not study with me.

So, I think it’s very important to keep that general aim in mind. In Buddhism, the aim is generally described as ending suffering. And people have many, many ideas about what that means. And a lot of people think you reach a state where you simply don’t suffer anymore, and so it’s a case of achieving a state. That may happen for some people. I’ve heard people describe that for them. I’m not sure that it happens for everybody. I’m not sure that it can happen for everybody. And my own feeling is that when we talk about ending suffering, it’s about learning how to live life a different way. So that the ending of suffering takes place moment to moment.

And to give you a very simple example of that, how many of you have had the experience of getting carried away by a thought and getting into quite a negative state because of that? [Laughter] Okay. So, there, ending suffering means being able to just experience that negative thought and not get all wrapped up in it and allowing it to propagate, etc.

Now I’m feeling somewhat sheepish teaching this retreat because I had a two-week experience of getting completely wrapped up with certain thoughts about AT&T. And I spent two weeks absolutely in full rage. Angry enough that people were hanging up on me at the other end of the phone, because they managed to do everything that irritated me. And eventually their corporate process ground through so everything got fixed and it’s all working now. So now I feel rather sheepish about the whole thing. But, yeah, I mean we create an awful lot of suffering not just for ourselves but for other people by not being able to experience certain things.

So one of the central theses of this retreat, and it’s something that I’ve certainly found through my own experience, is that the notion of enemy—of something opposing us—arises because in the interaction with whatever that is, a feeling comes up in us which we are unable to experience, for whatever reason. And, you know, me being without the internet was an intolerable experience for me. Because I do a lot of work through email and things like that so I just felt like. And if I’d been smart I would have said, “Oh, I’m without internet for a few days. Cool.” But since I’d been away for a month and I needed to catch up with like 300 emails I wasn’t too cool about that.

So there’s that experience in our selves that we can’t experience and whatever is bringing up that experience we label as enemy. And now we try to get that out of our experience completely. So one of the things as a kind of framework this evening, I want to offer a kind of systems perspective on this. I’m going to give you three definitions here: a definition of relationship, a definition of conflict, and a definition of enemy which we’ll be using in the context of this retreat.

Definitions: relationship, conflict, and enemy

Ken: The definition of relationship is this:

A relationship is the experience of interaction between two worlds. One’s own world of experience and another’s world of experience. It’s the experience of that interaction. That’s what a relationship is.

Now there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I could say about relationships which I probably am not going to here. I’m doing a program in February in the Bay Area specifically on relationship and conflict so in the middle of February, so there I’ll go into a lot in great deal. But for our purposes, a relationship is the experience of interaction between two worlds.

Conflict can only arise in the context of relationship. If there’s no interaction, you can’t have any conflict. That’s something people forget about conflict. They say, “I don’t have any relationship with that person, I’m fighting with them all the time.” Oh, yes you do. [Laughs] You have a very intimate relationship with that person.

Conflict is the experience of resistance to change when two worlds, two or more worlds, interact.

And it’s very simple. You know we have person A here and person B here. Person A has their world of experience and person B has their world of experience. When they interact, they’re in a relationship but the moment they start to interact a third world is created. We’ll call that world C.

Now, the question is what is C going to look like? Person A assumes C is going to look like A. Person B assumes that C is going to look like B. You have conflict. Now if both of them can say, “Oh, C’s going to be like C,” and they can both move into it, then you have a relationship, no conflict. But that doesn’t usually happen because either A wants to hold onto certain things that actually aren’t going to operate in C. And B wants certain things to operate in C which may or not happen. And so one or other or both resist the change and that’s what generates the conflict. It’s a systems view of it. Yes?

Student: Does it have to be between two people? What about conflict within yourself?

Ken: Oh yes, because there you have one part of you and another part of you, two worlds. So, I just gave the example of two people but they could be two corporations, two nations, a person and a group, one part of yourself and another part of yourself. I mean absolutely. That’s why I say it’s a systems view. You have one world here, another world here, they start to interact, that defines a relationship, but in the interaction they create a third world and how do they both change that. Part of one resists moving into that third world so conflict is generated. Okay?

An enemy is anything we have to remove from our world of experience.

Anything we have to remove from our world of experience.

Student: Can you define “remove”?

Ken: Well it’s in our world of experience. We want it out of there. Okay, now, a very simple example. You’re building something and you hit your thumb with the hammer. What do you want to do with your thumb at that point? Get it out of your world of experience. [Laughs] You know, not really possible but you know like, “Guh vuh, fine now I feel better,” because it’s hurting. You know or you burn your hand on a stove. So very often there are feelings, physical sensations, etc., that we just want to get rid of. How many of you have been engaged in a project and there’s one person you just want to get off the project. [Laughs] You know, get them out of your life. See this is what defines an enemy. So it is anything which we want to, or have to get out of our world of experience. And so there’s a kind of pressure or urgency there, that’s how it feels. That’s what makes it an enemy. “I can’t tolerate this.”

So, we’re going to be looking at the relationship we have with our experience. That’s going to be a very important part of this retreat because and I can speak from very, very long personal experience here with my own body. For various reasons it has been a source of consistent and sometimes very very considerable pain and discomfort for me. And I can tell you for very long periods of time I just wanted that pain to go away. Didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And it set up this very very strong opposition which was completely ineffective. It didn’t allow anything to resolve and I had to work quite deeply in changing my relationship with that. Because when we want to get something out of our experience we’re actually creating an imbalance in our experience. And that imbalance creates problems for ourselves and problems for everybody that we interact with. And that is how suffering comes about. It is primarily through trying to avoid, or control or manage what actually is arising in our experience.

About this retreat

Ken: Now how are we going to do this? Well over the next three days, each day we’re going to focus on one part of a process. The first day it’s going to be about bringing attention to what arises. The second day will be about taking that a step further. Letting that attention penetrate and into what arises so experience it more deeply and learning how to hold attention in the reactive processes that arise. And in the third day will continue that work of holding attention in the reactive processes which is where the sense of enemy often arises, right there. And then start to explore what happens. How to receive what is there when the reactive process falls apart. Because the reactive process does fall apart. Not all, every case but in many cases and when it falls apart we discover very very different possibilities of being able to relate to our experience. So that’s the general framework we’re going to be using. Day 1, day 2, and day 3. The demarcations aren’t absolute cause there are basically four components over three days so we’ll just work that out as we go forward.

For tomorrow morning for your meditation practice I just want you to practice resting in attention so probably for most of you that’s going to mean just resting in the experience of breathing. So just very simple meditation, not trying to do anything fancy, because we’re still coming and getting settled in the retreat. So tomorrow morning when you get up we’ll be in the zendo together. Just rest in the experience of breathing, keep coming back to that, and all of you I think have seen the way that I like to explain meditation. You this is the experience of breathing, this is attention. You rest attention in the experience of breathing. It falls off, something happens. There’s always a moment of recognition, come back, rest in the experience of breathing, falls off again. So you’re going to return, rest, recognize, return, rest, recognize, return, rest and that’s meditation.

Now there are two points here which I think never hurts to remember. First is I’m talking about resting in the experience of breathing rather than focusing on or concentrating on something. Because I find that actually increases the sense of opposition. “I’m focusing on this.” When you rest in the experience of breathing you actually can just be in that experience and so there’s less separation.

And the second thing is that rather than try to hold attention there, you rest. Something comes along and distracts us—it happens all the time—you recognize and return. So this principle of returning and resting, returning and resting rather than try to hold attention I found more productive for most people in terms of actually building a capacity of attention, because that capacity comes through the resting quality. So return and rest, return and rest. And don’t be at all disturbed about of the number of times you have to return. If, for instance, in a half-hour meditation you return a hundred times it means you were distracted for very very short period of time. You gotta look on the bright side of things. [Laughs]

It’s easy to create enemies

Ken: Now, a couple of quotations just to end with. First one is a quotation from my commentary on the Heart Sutra in which I tried to describe how easily anything becomes a source of division in our lives. Hello, I’ve got the wrong page. That’s annoying. Oh no, yeah that is the wrong page. Now I’ve got to find it. Oh, there it is. No, that’s not it. Trouble is I don’t know where anything is in this book. Okay. Fortunately it’s not too long a book so I should be able to find it, in theory. Pardon?

Student: Problem when you’re looking.

Ken: Yeah I know it always disappears doesn’t it.

Ah here we are.

First it was an opening, then a memory, then an idea. Unnoticed, it became a belief and then an ideology. Now it’s a casus belli, and you are ready to wreak havoc on all who disagree.

An Arrow to the Heart, Ken McLeod, p. 131

Anybody recognize that?

So, it’s very easy to create enemies, almost anything works. And that’s something to be on guard against. And how do we deal with this? Well. This is a collection of poems, very loosely termed poems, written by Thomas Merton from when he was reading Chuang Tzu, right? Yeah. He was working from an old translation because it was the only one that was around when he was doing this, and just read these passages and then recast them into these rather loose English poems because that’s how they spoke to him. This one’s called Cutting Up an Ox and basically is the theme will be working with tomorrow.

Prince Wen Hui’s cook was cutting up an ox. Out went a hand, down went a shoulder, he planted a foot, he pressed with a knee, the ox fell apart. With a whisper, the bright cleaver murmured like a gentle wind. Rhythm! Timing! Like a sacred dance, like “The Mulberry Grove,” like ancient harmonies!

“Good work!” the prince exclaimed, “your method is faultless!”
“Method?” said the cook laying aside his cleaver, What I follow is Tao beyond all methods!

When I first began to cut up oxen I would see before me the whole ox all in one mass.

After three years I no longer saw the distinctions.

But now, I see nothing with the eye. My whole being apprehends. My sense are idle. The spirit free to work without plan follows its own instinct guided by natural line, by the secret opening, the hidden space, my cleaver finds its own way. I cut through no joint, chop no bone.

A good cook needs a new chopper once a year—he cuts. A poor cook needs a new one every month—he hacks!

I have used this same cleaver nineteen years. It has cut up a thousand oxen. Its edge is as keen as if newly sharpened.

There are spaces in the joints; the blade is thin and keen: when this thinness finds that space there is all the room you need! It goes like a breeze! Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years as if newly sharpened!

True, there are sometimes tough joints. I feel them coming, I slow down, I watch closely, hold back, barely move the blade, and whump! the part falls away landing like a clod of earth.

Then I withdraw the blade, I stand still and let the joy of the work sink in. I clean the blade and put it away.”

Prince Wen Hui said, “This is it! My cook has shown me how I ought to live my own life!”

The Way of Chuang Tzu, Cutting Up An Ox, Thomas Merton, p. 45