A working knowledge

Ken: Friday, October the 23rd, There Is No Enemy, afternoon session. Did I read the poem about the wheel? Right? Okay, I thought I hadn’t. That was last weekend when I read it to a bunch of people I was training and teaching.

Duke Hwan of Khi,
First in his dynasty,
Sat under his canopy
Reading his philosophy;
And Phien the wheelright
Was out in the yard
Making a wheel.
Phien laid aside
Hammer and chisel,
Climbed the steps,
And said to Duke, Hwan:
“May I ask you, Lord,
What is this you are
Reading?
The Duke said:
“The experts, the authorities.”
And Phien asked,
“Alive or dead?”
“Dead a long time.”
“Then,” said the wheelright,
“You are reading only
The dirt they left behind.”
Then the Duke replied:
“What do you know about it?
You’re only a wheelwright.
You had better give me a good explanation.
Or else you must die.”
[Well, you can get away with that kind of thing if you’re a Duke.]
The wheelwright said:
“Let us look at the affair
From my point of view.
When I make wheels,
If I go easy, they fall apart,
If I am too rough, they do not fit.
If I’m neither too easy nor too violent
They come out right. The work is what
I want it to be.
You cannot put this into words:
You just have to know how it is.
I cannot even tell my own son exactly how it is done,
And my own son cannot learn it from me.
So here I am, 70 years old,
Still making wheels!
The men of old
Took all they really knew
With them to the grave.
And so Lord, what you’re reading there
Is only the dirt they left behind them.

The Way of Chuan Tzu, Duke Hwan and the Wheelwright, Thomas Merton, p. 82

It’s not recorded what happened, of course.

Now, what I want to do this afternoon is come at the topic of this retreat, There is no Enemy, from another point of view. So you may feel like I’m saying the same thing over and over again, but I think it’s helpful to look at things from different points of view. And in order to do this, I need to talk a little bit about philosophy.

Now, the etymology and origin of the word philosophy, it’s from two Greek words, philo and sophia. Sophia is the word for wisdom or knowledge. Philo or pilo—I don’t know exactly how it’s pronounced in Greek—is one of the words for love.

So, what philosophy means is love of knowledge. But in ancient Greece where this was taught, this is not knowledge in the sense that we ordinarily think of knowledge now, which is basically scientific knowledge or knowledge about things. In both Greek and Roman. thought to know something meant above all else, you knew how to do it. So it was knowledge in action.

So, I can say I have the knowledge of how a violin works. The knowledge that I have of how violin works would not be regarded in ancient Greek or Roman thought as true knowledge. Why? Because I can’t play a violin, or at least if I did, you would not want to be in the same room, because I haven’t developed that working knowledge of how to play a violin. So in the original sense of this, this meant the love of a working knowledge. And what was the working knowledge of? A working knowledge of life, which is very much what we’re discussing. This is the original meaning of philosophy, and it was only really, well, it started in Greek times, and I do have to lay some of the blame on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But there are deeper reasons. But it was really in the end of medieval times, beginning of the Renaissance that this divorce came into Western thought between knowledge as the ability to act, know-how and knowledge is a kind of theoretical thing, knowledge about things. And there’s actually a fair amount of speculation, a great deal of written about how that came about historically, but we’re not going to go into those details today.

Reason operates in the servce of emotion

Student: I’m sorry, I have to ask, this is the Age of Enlightenment you’re talking about?

Ken: Well, the Age of Enlightenment actually is quite a bit later. The Age of Enlightenment is in the 17th century, I believe. The Renaissance, we’re talking about 12, 13, 1400. Yeah, 13 or 1400. And the so-called Age of Enlightenment, please, is regarded as the Age of Enlightenment because here is where Western thought came to the brilliant conclusion—excuse my cynicism—that reason trumps emotion, and it was one of the fundamental errors of thought, and you can trace the antecedents of that back to Greek thought. Reason never trumps emotion. Reason always operates in the service of emotion, and people just refuse to admit it.

How many of you know someone who insist on logic and understanding and deciding things logically? And so things have to be right. Anybody know this kind of person? What’s the dominant emotion in this person? Anger. Anger. Because when you rely on reason, reason is a weapon you use when you do not want to acknowledge your anger, and by insisting on “it has to make sense” and … Well, there’s always fear underneath, but by insisting that things be reasonable or logical, you force the other—it’s a form of mind killing—you force the other person into negotiating with reason. You just happen to be better at it than they do. And so you always win, but you never have to engage the emotional clash because it’s all being decided on the basis of cold, objective logic.

That’s complete bullshit. You just moved the battle onto your ground so you never have to acknowledge your anger. And the only reason I know this is I was very expert on it. I couldn’t figure out why everybody got angry with me, and I eventually figured out that it was because I was actually expressing anger in a very non-angry way. It took me a little while to figure that one out. I mentioned this to an academic a few years ago and he just turned green. I mean, he really didn’t like it, but he could see it in himself.

A larger picture: outlook, practice and behavior

Ken: Okay, so I am presenting this whole topic as a potential way for navigating life, and what I want to do right now is step back and talk about a bit larger picture about a framework which comes up in Buddhism—or late medieval Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism—which I’ve found very useful, and it’s translated in various ways. The way that you’ll usually see it translated is outlook, meditation, and action. Usually I prefer to translate it as … sorry. You’ll usually see it translated as view, meditation and action, which are very literal translations. I prefer to translate the framework as outlook, practice and behavior. Those are personal choices, but the import is the same.

These are three components of what you might say, an approach to how we live. And the outlook or view is how we regard the world, how we look at our experience. I’m speaking very broadly here. Practice consists of what we do as a way of cultivating skills and abilities and capacities, and behavior or action is how our understanding takes expression in the world. In other words, it’s how we live.

Now, in our times, and this has been going on for some time, these three have been really split into three very, very different disciplines, if we can call them that. Outlook devolved into theology and academic philosophy. Practice pretty well disappeared from the scene, in the Age of Enlightenment actually. But survived in a sense in spiritual and Catholic and other religions as observances, and to some extent, rituals. And behavior devolved into moral codes or the whole subject of morality.

And the connection among them and how they supported and interacted with each other largely disappeared. You have relatively few academic philosophers nowadays who feel that they have to live what they’re writing about in their academic papers, and it would be very interesting to make them do that. People are able to practice the observances of a particular religious tradition and behave very, very differently in their lives, etc. So as I say, for many people these things have broken down completely. But originally, and where I’m coming from is that all three areas work together for the sole function of helping us navigate our lives. So there is no point in studying philosophy or looking at things from that perspective unless this is how you’re actually going to use it, and you’re going to look at the world this way, and you’re going to interact with the world from that perspective. Mary.

Mary: I think I might be totally off, but I’ve been studying these few pages about the mahamudra and it talks about outlook and practice, but not behavior.

Ken: Which is that you’re studying? I can’t read that from here. Oh, this is somebody else’s translation of the mahamudra prayer.

Mary: It’s your translation. Look on the back page.

Ken: This is a very old one. Oh, good God. You’re right. Dear, dear, dear. Okay, the action here, behavior, you’ll find right at the end because the bulk of this is, and you’re right, this is the framework for this prayer. It starts at the bottom of page five. Yeah, I’m not sure whether it starts with the second to last verse or the very last verse, but let’s say it starts with the very last verse on page five.

While the nature of beings has always been full enlightenment, not knowing this, they wander in endless samsara. For the boundless suffering of sentient beings, may overwhelming compassion be born in my being.

Aspirations for Mahamudra

And now you’re finding what comes out of that compassion. So those last three verses are the action portion. Okay, so you’re right on target.

Applying the outlook, practice and behavior framework

Ken: Now, a very good way to look at any approach to life is to break it down into these three components, and no doubt the scientists will take issue with this, but I’m just going to do it for the general discipline of science, which pervades our society, but in a way which people don’t appreciate either how far or what kind of influence it actually has.

An example: science

Ken: The outlook in science is only that which can be measured exists, because if you can’t measure it, you can’t really talk about it. The method of science is the scientific method, which is: you develop a model, which is called a theory, which explains all observations to date. It has to explain all observations to date. Secondly, it has to be on the basis that you have to be able to make testable predictions about future behavior. That’s why string theory is not regarded as a science. It’s not come up with any testable predictions yet. And then you test those predictions, and if you get new data, then you get to come up with a new model. And if everything goes according to predictions, then you get to write a paper, but you have to come up now with more testable predictions, and you keep coming up with testable predictions until you get something which doesn’t conform with a theory, and then you get to make up a new theory. And then Occam’s razor comes in here, is that you opt for the theory, the simplest theory, which explains all of the observable data.

Student: Simple enough, but not too simple.

Ken: Exactly.

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: I guess. Well, we’re not getting into that. Then the action is you do whatever you need to advance scientific knowledge. Because that’s the value. Now, when you hear science presented in that form, it’s very easy to understand how the atrocities of Auschwitz were possible. Because the scientists who were using human subjects as experimentation were advancing scientific knowledge.

I have a good friend who’s a kidney specialist and he works for a very large pharmaceutical company right now. He used to work in a teaching hospital, but he was lured into the corporate environment and he’s been working his butt off. But he says it is really, really interesting from a moral perspective because he’s a scientist and he’s being hired as a scientist, and yet he’s a doctor and a doctor’s ethical code is very, very different from a scientist’s. A doctor is to take care of patients. A scientist is to advance knowledge. Okay, how do you advance knowledge when you have to do double blind experiments on people, and some people are going to possibly be hurt by the experimental process. And this has been very, very thoroughly thought out, and there are codes of ethics for this, and they’re very complex and very subtle, and we’ve had some fascinating conversations, but it’s where these two ethical systems collide. Yes.

Student: I think that the scientists you’re talking about in Auschwitz were actually medical doctors,

Ken: And it made it even worse.

Student: It makes it horrible even if they’re just scientists. But I would disagree with your first premise.

Ken: That only that which is measurable exists? Yes.

Student: Okay. I think that the actual premise is only that which is measurable can be in the domain of science.

Ken: So we’re using “exists” in a different way.

Student: Okay. It’s an important distinction because domain decides what subject matter you can profitably engage.

Ken: Yes.

Student: Usefully engage.

Ken: But when you’re in that domain, it follows exactly the same thing. And if morality is restricted to that domain, then it goes through, as I described. If you embed it in a larger system, which is what that wording is doing, then you have a different conception of morality. But that different conception of morality is coming from the larger system. It’s not coming from within the system. You follow?

Student: Yes, I follow. No, I agree. I think it’s a big leap to say that scientists will be amoral because science is an amoral tool that does not explicitly engage in its domain ethics.

Ken: They will be amoral if they forget that they exist in a larger system.

Student: Yes.

Ken: And that’s my reason for defining it this way,

Student: Yes, and that will apply even more fully when you take the technologist subset of scientists.

An example: There Is No Enemy

Ken: Yeah, you’re probably right. Now, I’m just offering this as an example. You can apply the same framework to Christianity. We have several different systems within Buddhism. Mary just mentioned the mahamudra system, which is uses this framework. And what I want to do now is to use this framework in the context of There Is No Enemy, at least I want to try to do it.

What is the outlook or the view of There Is No Enemy? Well, and again, as I’ve said at the beginning of this retreat, some of this, I’m just thinking out loud. Oh dear, I’m not even going to get this out of my mouth, Lisa.

Lisa: Maybe the outlook is love your enemy because you’ve created it.

Ken: That would be in the area of action, or it might be in the area of practice. In the area of view, what I’m tentatively engaging is, an enemy is an experience, not a fact, or an enemy is a way of experiencing things, not a fact.

Now, you may recall at the beginning of this retreat, I talked about three definitions. And I can’t believe I’m actually tying this stuff back. I’ve never been able to do this before. I must be getting smarter. It must be. It’s the only explanation. Relationship is the experience of interaction between two or more worlds. Conflict is the experience of resistance to change when two or more worlds interact. So when the experience of enemy arises, what you are experiencing is very strong resistance to change. It is so strong that the only thing you can think of is to get rid of this experience and which is why it becomes an enemy. Roger, you have a question?

Roger: Yes. I was going to ask if the outlook had to do with the idea that there is no exchange.

Ken: Yes. In the world of experience, there is no exchange, and that’s why enemy is an experience. Yeah. Okay. Now, the practice consists of coming to know that an enemy is an experience, not a fact. In particular, as I think I mentioned at the beginning of the retreat, we see something as an enemy because our relationship or interaction with it brings up a feeling or something that we are unable to experience. We may be unwilling or don’t know how or don’t have the capacity, but for whatever reason, we’re unable to experience. And so we have to get rid of that thing. And so the practice consists of developing a sufficient level of attention that we can actually experience that uncomfortable feeling. And maybe it consists of developing a level of attention, level of willingness, level of skill, whatever, to experience that. Then enemy disappears because we no longer have to get rid of that. If you follow. That’s what I see as the core of the practice, the specific practice. There are many practices we could do, but the five-step practice that I gave you this morning, I think is a very effective way of doing this.

There are other practices which could be used, taking and sending, deity practices. If you really have a high level of attention, you can use things like mahamudra and dzogchen, etc. But from a practical point of view, I found that this five-step practice really works in a lot of situations that the others are a little difficult to apply. Okay.

Spiritual practice is not about making society better

Student: I experienced some resistance to that. Could you apply that to the case of those experimental doctors and people in the camps?

Ken: Now? Who do you want me to apply it to?

Student: Well, it’s very easy to see that the inmates would view those doctors as the enemy.

Ken: Yeah, okay. I’m hesitant to go here right away because, and I probably shouldn’t have brought up Auschwitz and things like that because this was very, very extreme where all of the normal rules of society had broken down completely.

Student: I was going to bring up the term degree.

Ken: But since I opened the door, my responsibility, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Can I take a stab at it?

Ken: I would be happy for you to,

Stephanie: Because I thought about that similar issue. Okay. Hitler was an enemy to all good people everywhere. He needed to be stopped. And then I remembered Ken mentioning what we talked about this afternoon, with the flip flops between shame and pride, or anger and sadness. It wasn’t the victims in Auschwitz that created those doctors. It wasn’t necessarily the Jews that created the Hitler. Sometimes the relationship doesn’t work that way, but you could say at a societal level, the German people’s shame led to the desire to feel conquering and invincible and powerful, and that collective nationwide thing led to the emergence of what then existed and stormed the earth and needed to be stopped. And so I think this experience turned into something that was very real and very solid to us, but it arose out of those experiences.

Roger: I agree with that.

Ken: What we have to stay focused on here, spiritual practice is not about curing the ills of the world, it’s not about making society better. These are all ideas that many of us want to attach to it. Spiritual practice is about how do we navigate life? And that’s why I asked you when you first posed this question, who do you want to apply this to? Do you want to apply it to the doctors or do you want to apply it to the inmates of the camps? Because there will be a different application. The doctors, in order to do what they were doing had to view things as enemies. And the inmates definitely, they—

Chris: Redefine them as not being human.

Ken: Exactly. And that’s how they got out of it. They’ve redefined them as subjects for experimentation in the same way that we treat animals. Okay.

Chris: Well, I think talking about Auschwitz makes … it’s such an extreme case. I brought up this issue last year or tried to, when I asked about dealing with convicts, and was it Jeff? I think Jeff didn’t want to talk about it because it was too hypothetical. But really, I was trying to bring up an issue that’s closer. I think convict life is closer to our life than Auschwitz.

Ken: But again, I want to remind you, spiritual practice is not about how we make society better. It’s about how you or I or any individual navigates their life. It’s a very personal thing, and I think once we start speaking of it in the collective, we’re talking about a very, very different thing. We’re talking about a social phenomenon and very different forces and things come to bear compared to individual.

Now, there’s a quotation from Peter Drucker about this, which is on my computer. I’ll bring it up tomorrow. But it’s to the effect that when we’re talking about being part of society, then we can only exercise freedom in areas that don’t matter.
But when we’re talking about the spirit and our spiritual aspirations, then we can’t accept the constraints of society. They’re two very, very different things. Do you follow?

So let’s take some convicts, since you bring up that example. There have been a number of people in jail, some of them for quite horrible crimes such as rape and murder, who while in jail, they’re there, they have a life sentence, they’re never going to leave and being incarcerated that way, they go, “Okay, what am I going to do? This is my life.” And realizing that this is their life: the jail, the courtyard, the gangs in the jails, the ever present potential for abuse from the guards, the subjection to the often arbitrary bureaucracy of the prison system, etc. This is their life. There is no other possibility for them. Then they contact the Prison Project, or a number of other similar projects that have been developed by Buddhist organizations. They start to study meditation and practice. There’s Zen people who help, and there’s a Theravadan network, and I think there’s a Tibetan also. And there have been a number of articles that appeared in Shambala and Tricycle and other places where people in these situations have come to experience freedom, and they’re never going to get out of jail. And they have learned how to use the same practices that we’re discussing here to navigate that life. And they become very, very different people within it. And so they cease to regard the circumstances, the gangs and the other inmates as enemies, if you see what I’m going at. So it can be applied that way.

To take it in a very different direction Timothy McVay was executed eventually after the Oklahoma bombings. And the people who had lost family members in those bombings were surprised that when they saw him being executed, they did not feel any better. And that puzzled them because they had been told things like, “This is justice,” etc., and “You’ll feel better when justice is done.” But they didn’t, and their experience became the basis for a movement that is called Reconciliation Not Retribution. Reconciliation Not Retribution. And a group of them started to engage a dialogue with Terry Nichols, who was Timothy McVay’s accomplice.

And they had very difficult and very painful discussions. “How could you do this?” And Terry Nichols had to respond to them. And so a dialogue took place, and they found that through the experience of that dialogue, they understood what was going through Terry Nichols mind. And through that dialogue, Terry Nichols came to understand the full impact of the suffering that he had visited upon these people. Everybody changed in that, and after that experience, they were able to let go and move on in their lives. And again, this is moving away from the notion of enemy. In the first case in Timothy McVay, they removed him from their experience, but that didn’t solve anything. In the second they incorporated [Terry Nichols] into their experience and came to a different relationship with it by ceasing to regard this person as their enemy. And everybody changed in that. If you want to see a pretty good movie about this: Grand Torino, it’s probably the most solid movie I’ve seen out of Hollywood for a very long time. But it touches on this in a non-trivial way. It’s Clint Eastwood, of course.

Student: Dead Man Walking, would you think Dead Man Walking?

Ken: Yes. Up to a point. And that was very much the experience of that nun working with that particular killer. Yes. And so, what we’re looking at here is when you step out of the polarization of experience—so these things are seen as immutable facts—and you come into seeing the whole conceptual framework as a way of experiencing things, then it becomes more mutable, and other possibilities emerge, and they can be quite remarkable. Now, people who want to keep things fixed hate this because it’s so threatening to fixed outlooks, but in terms of how a particular individual navigates their life, it opens up all kinds of possibilities. Chris. I’m going to have to start teasing him about this

Chris: Just a brief addition about saying there’s no exit. What you’re doing is you’re forcing the two parties to hold both poles.

Ken: Yes, that’s exactly right. Yep. Agnes.

Agnes: Ken, I’m kind of lost here. There’s a gap there. You were talking about using empirical research, test hypothesis to advance knowledge.

Ken: Yes. Right.

Agnes: Then we are going to this outlook and applying it to There Is No Enemy. Somewhere, I got lost there. How does that hypothesis testing …

Ken: No. What I was using was in order to illustrate how this particular framework works; that is the outlook, practice and action or behavior. I was using science, the testing hypothesis as an example of all three components, and it was just an example. Then I dropped it, and then I turned to There Is No Enemy, and I’m in the process of applying the same framework to that. There’s no connection with the [first] example. I used it as an illustrative example, and I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.

Agnes: Okay. I got caught up on the validity issue.

Ken: I know you’re a scientist too. Sorry. That’s okay. Yes, validity. That’s what’s important, isn’t it? Is it statistically significant. I’m teasing you.

Agnes: And then I have another problem. I thought you were talking about quantitative, how about qualitative research? Then the whole …

Ken: Exactly. Thank you. Okay, so—

Chris: Wait a minute.

Ken: I knew I was going to run into trouble. Yes. Do you want to square off about this, Chris?

Chris: No, actually, I just thought of something that just came to me in this discussion of science. There is intuition involved, a gut feeling.

Ken: We’re not talking about what actually happens, because you’re absolutely right, that is how people come up with theories, how they come up with experiments and things like that. We’re talking about the actual method of science. Okay.

Chris: It just struck me as—

Ken: The reason I’m not a good mathematician. I wasn’t creative enough. Mathematics is one of the most creative of … well, whether it’s a science or not, it’s another whole thing. And so yes, there’s creativity, there’s intuition, all of those things. I can’t remember who said it: “The most important words in science are not ‘eureka,’ but ‘That’s funny.'”

Chris: Yeah. I’m glad you said that because I was feeling a little unhappy with the characterization of science and the scientific method, and I won’t go into detail, but I just will point out that Francis Bacon, who you were quoting the other night, is widely regarded as the father of the scientific method, which was about opening up inquiry against religious …

Ken: I don’t have any argument with any of this.

Student: Yeah. What the hell are you all talking about?

Student: Can I just add one thing? There’s a great book by Neal Stephenson or a whole book series …

Ken: The Baroque Cycle? Oh, yeah.

Student: And he does a great job of—as they waded into the abattoir—of figuring out what was going on in these animals, as he showed, I think Robert Hooke just came into this. His eyes just gazed over. He says, “Oh my God, what have we done?” Essentially. But so internally … it’s really funny and horrifying. It’s really good.

Ken: Yeah, sure.

Student: Yes, it’s made up.

Ken: It’s a 2,400 page novel. It’s …

Student: Really good.

Ken: Three 800 page volumes. It’s a riot because it’s a love story. It’s adventure, it’s comedy, it’s satire, and it’s also very, very deep philosophically. So, if you have the time. Basically if you start, you’ll find yourself staying up all night for a month. You won’t be able to put it down. The Baroque Cycle.

Student: Everyone’s giving feedback, but what was the point you were trying to make? Because now I am a little lost.

An enemy is an experience, not a fact

Ken: Yeah. I was offering this framework of outlook, practice and behavior as a way of looking at things and seeing how they hang together, and as an illustrative example, which I will never use again, [laughter] I was using science. Now, some objected because I was not embedding science in a larger setting, and some objected because I was not bringing in the creative intuitive aspect of science, and some were objecting because they didn’t understand anything about science anyway, and what the hell we were all talking about, etc. But it was an example. That’s all.

Student: Could you start over? [Laughter]

Ken: Yeah. Well, okay.

Student: Outlook.

Ken: Outlook.

Student: She’s serious.

Ken: Yeah. An enemy is an experience, not a fact.

Student: Nothing to do with science. Isn’t the outlook, “There is no enemy”?

Ken: Yeah. I’m taking it to the next step. That’s all. And you’re right. The outlook is “there is no enemy.” Why? Because an enemy is an experience, not a fact. Okay, thank you. I think I’m doing pretty well here. [Laughs]

Student: Keep going.

Ken: Practice. It’s a process by which you come to experience an enemy as an experience, not a fact. And the main one that I’ve suggested to you is the five-step process that I introduced this morning.

Student: It’s a process by which … ?

Ken: You come to experience what is currently in your experience as an enemy—or arises as an enemy for you—arises as an experience rather than a fact. In other words, it’s the actualization of the outlook in your own experience. How do you like that? That was a nice sentence. That was a good—

Student: Similar.

Ken: Boy. This is wonderful.

Student: Is this is similar to the difference between the doer and the deed?

Ken: No, no. That’s a whole nother thing. Yeah.

Student: That is equals insert five-step process. Insert five-step process here. [Laughter]

Ken: Practice: insert five step process here. Okay, good. Now—

Student: Unscientific mind at work?

Ken: Okay, wait. No, no, no, no. We’re stopping right here.

Student: I was just pointing, and you said “practice [unclear]”.

Ken: Stop.

Student: The process in which outlook is actualized.

Ken: That’s right.

Student: Getting insane here. [Laughter]

Student: I didn’t want to cut you short. You just said quote, “Practice is the process in which the outlook is actualized.”

Ken: In one’s own experience. Yes.

Student: In one’s own experience. And that five-step process that you mentioned is a process which enables one to actualize that particular goal. So they’re not necessarily equated.

Ken: Well, there’s the general and the particular, that’s all. And okay, now let’s move on to action. He said as he crawled across the ground.

Student: [Unclear] a lot of rewriting when you write.

Ken: You know full well that it doesn’t work that way. Okay, action. Well, it’s six minutes. Action is going to be diverted, saved by the bell. Just do it. [Laughter]

Ken: Well, let me see. I can’t read my own writing here. Oh, that’s right. To implement this, to act this way, there are two fields of action. One is with our own internal experience, and the other is the way we interact in the world. And you may argue that the internal process is part of practice, but so be it. I’m not going to quibble about that. I’ll go into this in more detail tomorrow. We don’t have a lot of time tonight. I’ll just mentioned these as headings, basically.

Internally it’s extremely important not to regard any internal pattern as an enemy. And the reason for that is that all of those reactive patterns—well, maybe it’s too strong to say all of them—but a very large number of the reactive patterns that operate in this originally developed as survival mechanisms. They’re how we negotiated our survival in unreasonable situations. Unreasonable being something arising in our experience, which we did not have the capacity to experience. Thus, the patterns are programs which are key to the single objective of survival, and so if you approach them with the intention of eliminating them, you automatically trigger them.

Student: Repeat.

Ken: If you approach a pattern with the intention of eliminating it—wiping it out, whatever you want—you automatically trigger it. So, we’ll go into a fuller discussion of that tomorrow. On the external, the action framework that I found most useful are the four stages of conflict, which are—well, I’ll give you my new wording for them—we get rid of those big, long words that I used to use: settle enrich, compel and end. And you could put sever instead of end. Go either way with that,

Roger: These are the four—

Ken: Stages of conflict. Now, we don’t have time to go into those this evening because it’s 5:30. It’s dinner time, but with all of the questions and discussions, you’ve just made my life easier. I have all my material for tomorrow morning already prepared. Yay. I’m just going to, well, it’s interesting. I’m a little surprised at how much stuff this is kicking up, but that’s good. I’m just going to read something from Uchiama, and this is about managing expectations.

I’ve been pursuing a life of mendicant begging for many years now.

[Uchiama is a very interesting person. He was one of the very few Japanese monks who actually practiced mendicant begging in industrial Japan. He’s talking about 1952, which was a very difficult period in Japan. This is still quite soon after the second World War, and they were still very much in the process of rebuilding their society.]

On one occasion in 1952, I was walking up the long hill of Takagamine toward Antai-ji, exhausted from the day’s efforts. I kicked up a stone or a piece of glass in the dark and cut my toe. It was not much of a cut, so I paid it no mind other than to daub a little iodine on it when I got home. In a couple of days, a thin layer of skin formed over the cut, and I went out begging again without putting a bandage on it. It was raining that day, and though the area around the cut got wet, I failed to clean it well when I got back to the temple. Skin formed around the cut, although inside it began to fester and swell. Finally, the pain became worse, and I developed a high fever.

It got so bad that I could no longer lie face up because the pain from the toe went directly to my head. I piled up several quilts and laid on them. Though it was cold November, I could not stand clothing or blankets because of the fever and pain all through the left side of my body. I kept naked cooling myself with a cold air and suffered through this without a drop of sleep for three days and three nights. I frequently thought, well, if I’m going to die, then I will just die. But anyway, I was unable to see a doctor, particularly during those days. The money I received from begging just would not have been enough to pay a doctor’s bill. However, an elderly lady who lived nearby did bring me some licorice bulbs. She had dug up and told me that if I ground them up, wrapped the mixture in paper and applied it to my foot, it would help bring down the fever.
I did, as she suggested, reapplying the dressing frequently.

Through this experience, I realized that when I stopped fighting the pain and just let it be inside of me, the burden of the suffering would be lifted.

[That is you open to the experience of the pain, stop fighting it, stop making it the enemy, and now you actually stop suffering, though you are still in pain. Okay?]

I’ve always felt this was an extremely valuable experience in my life. However, despite that, if I had to encounter such terrific pain again, I would only be fooling myself if I thought that this past experience would be any help in breaking through the new pain. Nothing ever occurs twice in life, and the next time I encounter such pain, there will be nothing for me, but to live through it just as I did before or could be the next time, will not be able to endure it. I may just give up and cry for help, but even then, the one certain thing is that the only person to live through the suffering will be me.

No matter what happens to us in our lives, there is no real alternative other than to live through it then and there by ourselves. This is an unescapable reality. I cannot imagine anything more important in our lives than to completely resolve ourselves to the absolute nature of this truth.

How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment, Dogen, commentary by Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi, p. 79