Two Temptations

Reflecting on Seek Knowing, Not Truth by Ken McLeod showed me how often I succumb to the temptation of looking for an explanation when something hurts or feels confusing. I want an interpretation or a framework so that I can feel oriented. The habit of seeking "truth" is a pull towards certainty, a wish to pin things down, reach the right conclusion, and to feel nourished and protected by it.

I’m also prone to the other temptation he describes: a collapse into distrust, cynicism, and, sometimes even nihilism. If every formulation is limited, then why trust anyone or anything, why commit to anything, why not retreat into bitterness and despair, or decide to do whatever I damn well please?

And yet I know that practice points in a different direction altogether—towards meeting the movements of fear, projection, and reactivity directly, rather than trying to secure them in belief or dismiss them in cynicism. Practice asks me to know what is here without turning it into something to cling to or a target to attack.

Then there’s Ken's description of lineage, not as the handing down of truth, but as the passing on of methods. This way of viewing lineage feels so alive. It leaves room for respect without idealisation, and for discovery without self-importance.

From Seek Knowing, Not Truth

A king, disenchanted with his subjects’ dishonesty, decided to force them to tell the truth. When the city gates were opened one morning, gallows had been erected in front of them. A captain of the royal guard stood by. A herald announced, “Whoever will enter the city must first answer a question which will be put to them by the captain of the guard.”

Mullah Nasrudin, who had been waiting outside the gates of the city, stepped forward first. The captain spoke: “Where are you going? Tell the truth … the alternative is death by hanging.”

“I am going,” said Nasrudin, “to be hanged on those gallows.”

“I don’t believe you!” replied the guard.

Nasrudin calmly replied, “Very well then. If I have told a lie, hang me!”

“But that would make it the truth!” said the confused guard.

“Exactly,” said Nasrudin, “your truth.”

“Why do I have to experience this?”

That’s where it all starts, isn’t it? The this may be many things: suffering, loss, confusion, an unnamable angst, etc. Right away, you have to make a choice. Do you look for a formula that explains this (i.e., look for “The Truth”) or do you look for a way to know this completely? Watch out. In going after “The Truth,” you are sailing headlong into the Straits of Messina where Scylla and Charybdis—two monsters from Greek mythology—lie waiting.

The reliance on formulaic or conceptually based “truth” is one of the diseases of modernism. It takes expression in the two great religions of today: fundamentalism and materialism. Both seek to justify themselves through reason and logic. Materialists use the belief that “Only that which can be measured is real” to define their world. They worship science, which sees “The Truth” in the construction of models that account for what is measured. Fundamentalists (religious, economic, or political) use the recorded word of God, of Buddha, of Mohammed, Adam Smith, Lenin, or whomever, to define their world. Belief in the recorded word leads to “The Truth”, but it is usually belief in just those passages that embody their inherent prejudices. Both materialism and fundamentalism are closed systems that rely on conceptual processes, restrict the scope of inquiry and reflection, and marginalize other perspectives. Like Scylla, they are multi-headed monsters that attack anything (outside or inside) that asks basic questions about their approaches to life.

Opposite the Scylla of modernism lies the Charybdis of post-modernism, the questioning of any claim to objective “Truth”. Post-modernism sees all worldviews as constructions that arise from historical processes, and, as such, as a function of power rather than truth.

Because there is no objective reality, worldviews are constructed. Constructed worldviews embody the power and interests of those who build them. Therefore, they are inherently oppressive. Because they are oppressive, they should be taken apart (deconstructed). Deconstruction shows that all worldviews are relative. Hence, there is no objective reality. Because there is no objective reality, worldviews are constructed. Constructed world views…

This circular thinking leads nowhere and people are sucked into a whirlpool of nihilism, cynicism, and despair.

Many cultures and traditions find these waters difficult to navigate. Islam today faces exactly these issues and I’ve based the above critiques on this essay.

Buddhism has never postulated a “Truth” existing apart from experience itself. The respective lineages offer tools for a more mundane aim: to know whatever arises in experience, free from the projections of thought and emotion. Whether through the Theravadan practices of bare attention (mindfulness), the Mahayana practice of awakening to experience (bodhicitta), or the Vajrayana practices of direct awareness (mahamudra, dzogchen), the aim is one and the same: natural knowing that is not separate from experience.

Many people don’t know what to make of this possibility. Unable to fit natural knowing into their usual frame of reference, they react with suspicion and fear. In looking for a reference point that is more familiar, they conceptualize the result of practice as “The Truth” or some other ideal. Modernist tendencies kick in. “The Truth” becomes an object, either of scientific investigation or of belief.

To counteract this objectifying tendency, students are often told just to trust the lineage as the guarantee of transmission from an enlightened master to a perfectly devoted disciple. Two problems now arise. First, the sanctity of transmission sends a hidden message: what was once discovered cannot now be discovered again. Second, disillusionment inevitably sets in when the teacher turns out to be something less than their idea of an enlightened master and the student fails to be the perfectly devoted disciple. Unable to trust either their own experience or the lineage, they succumb to the bitterness of post-modern cynicism and despair.

Lineage is not the passing on of “The Truth” from one generation to another. It is the passing on of the methods, the tools, with which you uncover and live this natural knowing. Then you see that things are neither true nor not true, they just are. You see that things always change, that emotional reactions to change are suffering, and that you are not an entity that exists in opposition to experience.

You see that this knowing is there for anyone who makes the same efforts. It is not the result of reasoning. It is not the result of belief. It is not the property of those in power. Nor can it be used to oppress or control. Increasingly you appreciate not only the wisdom and understanding of those who have come before you, but their courage and efforts in letting so much conditioning and projection fall away. In this way, a clear open appreciation of lineage arises in you and a door to still deeper knowing opens.

A Chinese master lay dying. A close student, fearful that his teacher would die before he had understood what is ultimately true, came to him, and asked, “Dear master, please tell me the first truth.”

The old man smiled and said, “I will.”

Days passed, and the master’s life continued to wane. Again, the student approached. “Please, master, please tell me the first truth.”

“I will,” said his teacher, “but this is not the time.”

Soon after, the signs that death would soon claim him were clearly evident. Desperate, the student approached him a third time with the same request.

With his last ounce of strength, the master looked gently at him, gazing with an extraordinary clarity deep into the student’s eyes. In a barely audible whisper, he said, “Ah, if I tell you the first truth, it will become the second,” and then he died.

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Leave No Ashes

In this short passage, Ken points to two aspects of practice. One is to experience completely, so that life is lived fully with few echoes or reverberations. The other is to do completely, to give full attention and leave nothing half-done or trailing behind.

I feel these as distinct yet inseparable. To experience completely asks for openness to whatever is here, pleasant, neutral, or painful. To do completely asks for wholehearted responses to life experiences. A key here is balance: openness can become inward, passive, or ungrounded, while wholehearted response can become driven, performative, or self-important.

This passage reminds me of the famous line in the Heart Sutra: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. It also brings to mind the two wings of Mahayana practice, emptiness and compassion. Taken together, they point to a balanced practice: emptiness or wisdom prevents compassion from collapsing into sentimentality, attachment, or the need to fix everything, and compassion prevents wisdom from hardening into abstraction, coldness, or nihilism.

The Rocky Path of Not Knowing

This is an amazing half hour with Ken McLeod on mahamudra, beginning with students’ questions about the single mind, the absolute, and whether there is anything at all to hold on to.

Rather than offering a philosophical answer, Ken brings the inquiry back to direct experience, showing how the wish for certainty or belief can itself become an obstacle.

Again and again, he points away from explanation and towards the unsettling, vivid knowing that appears when we stop trying to resolve experience into something we can believe in.

From Learning Mahamudra 4

Ken: Some traditions have really cheery ways of looking at things. Dilgo Khyentse was once asked why do we practice? And he said, “To make the best of a bad situation.” [Laughter]

But here’s something from the Sufi tradition:

I have heard all that you have had to say to me on your problems.
You asked me what to do about them.
It is my view that your real problem is that you are a member of the human race.
Face that one first.

Your Problem, Reflections, Idries Shah, p. 79

So, how’s it going as a member of the human race? [Pause] Let’s take the first part of this evening and hear about some of your practice experience, questions, challenges, or insights.

Chuck: Claire and I have been wondering for the last 15 years about the last sentence on page five.

Ken: Who and you? Claire. Oh, in this book?

Chuck: Yes. The mahamudra book.

Claire: The last paragraph on page five.

Chuck: And then there’s the next paragraph on the other page:

This essence is not something that exists within the mind-stream of just one individual person or just one buddha. It is the actual basis of all that appears and exists, the whole of samsara and nirvana.
(Then on the next page it sort of follows along with it.)
The Great Brahmin Saraha stated: “The single mind is the seed of everything. From it, samsaric existence and nirvana manifest.”

Lamp of Mahamudra, Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Erik Pema Kunsang (translator), p. 6

What does all that mean?

Claire: And is there an absolute?

Ken: So that’s the real question, is there an absolute?

Chuck: That’s her question.

Ken: Okay, what’s yours?

Chuck: Mine is, what does it mean? I’m primarily interested in the one: “The single mind is the seed of everything. From it samsara and nirvana manifest.” Now, does this mean each one of us? Is that what it’s trying to say? It seemed so lonely. [Laughter]

Ken: May I be glib first? It’s only lonely if there’s somebody there.

Chuck: [Laughter] I see. So, there isn’t even a single mind seed?

Ken: Well, no, there isn’t. This is a very good question, Chuck. Let me respond to Claire’s question first, because that’s a little easier. At least for me, it’s a little easier. It may not be actually easier, but for me it is. Is there an absolute?

Claire: Is that single mind?

Ken: Yes. Well, in a phrase that became a cause celebre in the last decade, it depends what you mean by is.

Claire: Actually, it depends on what the meaning of is is.

Ken: Okay. It depends what the meaning of is is.

Claire: “It is the actual basis.”

Ken: Okay. It says, “It is the actual basis.”

Claire: It says, “It is the actual basis of all that appears and exists, the whole of samsara and nirvana.”

Ken: Yeah. Now, it’s one thing to have a philosophical discussion, and we can go into a philosophical discussion, but in my experience it’s relatively useless. What I would like to invite both of you to do is: when you read this, there’s something that happens in you. Okay. Claire, you’re first. What happens?

Claire: I would love there to be an absolute. I would like to have something to believe in, because I don’t believe in any of this, as you well know. [Laughter] If you’re a buddha and I’m a buddha, and we both experience emptiness, are we both experiencing the same thing?

Ken: Ah, now you move on to Chuck’s question, which is the more difficult question.

Claire: You haven’t answered mine.

Ken: Well, you just took care of yours by revealing what the real question is, which I appreciate. Thank you. It’s wonderful that you should ask this question because a week or two ago, I received an email inviting me to participate in a documentary film—to be interviewed—on the subject of the vision of nondual truth. And there were going to be representatives from the Buddhist tradition, and the Christian tradition, and the Sufi tradition, and Jewish tradition.

And the purpose of the documentary was to show that—while it may be expressed differently in different traditions—the vision of non-dual truth was the same in all traditions. And so I emailed back the producer and said, “I’m very honored and a little surprised that you’re asking me to participate. And I’d be very happy to. But you should know that what you take as a premise, I take as a question. And this may affect your interest in having me participate.”

So literally 10 minutes after I sent the email, my phone rang, “What do you mean?” [Laughs] And so we had about a 15 or 20 minute discussion, the core of which was something like, “Ken, when there’s no duality, there’s no experiencer and there’s no experience.”

I said, “Oh, are you out cold?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you out cold? Are you unconscious when you’re experiencing non-dual truth?”

“No.”

“Oh! So, there’s some awareness of some kind. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, awareness is an experience.”

He went, “Hmm, okay.”

“And how can I tell whether the experience you’re having of non-dual truth is the same as the experience I’m having of non-dual truth? We can’t even tell whether the experience of the strawberry pie you were eating and the experience I’m having when I’m eating strawberry pie, is the same experience. We can’t even know that. How can we tell whether our experience of non-dual truth is the same?”

So, there is no way—there is absolutely no way—of determining whether the experience one Buddhist is having is the same as the experience another Buddhist is having, or if the experience you’re having is the same as the experience Chuck is having, etc. There’s absolutely no way of knowing that.

Claire: Well, then what does that mean? What does this mean that it is the “seed of everything?”

Ken: Okay. Now this goes back to something that we discussed in the first class. What is the one thing you know?

Claire: That I’m aware.

Ken: Exactly. Yes, that’s the only thing. Now in your world, in the world which is illuminated by your awareness, which is not the world of stuff—it’s the world of your experience—how are things? How are things in your world?

Claire: My world is a good world.

Ken: Why are you here?

Claire: Why am I here?

Ken: So it’s basically a good world, but there’s something that gnaws at you, right?

Claire: [Pause] I think you’re a good teacher.

Ken: [Laughter] Why is that important to you?

Claire: The reason that I’m here, I think, is rather serious. And it has to do with this question. I would love to find something to believe in, because I don’t believe in nirvana, and I don’t believe in samsara. I don’t believe.

Ken: Why would you like to—or love to, as you put it—find something? Why would you love to find something to believe in? If you found something to believe in, what difference would that make?

Claire: Well, it really wouldn’t make any difference at this point in my life, but it would be interesting for me to know that, yes, there is a basis for all the things that I do. My awareness is what it is, my insight, the clarity which I nurture and have had experiences of—

Ken: That there’s some basis for that. What difference would it make knowing that there was some basis for it?

Claire: I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Ken: But it gnaws at you, doesn’t it? Yeah. Okay. That’s all I wanted; that it gnaws at you. Okay. So by this, what I’m trying to point out here is we know we’re aware; we’re aware of our world. And as we’ve talked about before, that world consists of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. And there’s something out of balance.

Claire: There’s something out of balance?

Ken: Yes. And the reason I can say that is there’s something that is gnawing at you. Okay? So, you’re here out of an interest in finding a way to address an imbalance that you experience.

Claire: Yeah. Perhaps. It’s better said than I’ve said it. [Laughter]

Ken: I think that was an agreement, don’t you? Okay. I’ll take that as a yes. That is why we study and practice Buddhism. Each of us has come here, and each of us undertakes this, because there’s something in each of us, and it may or may not be the same thing. That’s all conjecture. It’s something that gnaws; it disturbs. Sometimes it’s something that we can feel as being really upsetting and we’re really out of balance. And other times it’s just this little thing that keeps pushing at us or keeps us from resting. But it’s all the same reason. Now, what do you do about that?

Claire: Are you asking me?

Ken: Yes.

Claire: Sit.

Ken: Why?

Claire: Why? Because it’s the only thing that …

Ken: What does sitting do?

Claire: Because sometimes when I sit, or after I’ve sat, I have an insight into something that’s bothering me or gnawing at me. But this thing that I’m talking about now is much deeper than any of these others.

Ken: Yeah. But because of your experience with sitting—that has helped you to understand and to know things differently so that imbalances are addressed—you suspect that if you—

Claire: There may be an answer.

Ken: Okay, may. Fine. And so you’re willing to engage that path just on that basis, and that’s about it. Now, here’s the important point. Would believing in something actually help you in this?

Claire: [Pause] No. No, it wouldn’t. [Laughter]

Because what I do believe in is the ambiguity of not knowing.

Ken: Yeah. The not knowing provides a path, doesn’t it?

Claire: Yeah. But it gets rocky sometimes.

Ken: Oh, it does get rocky, you know. It also gets muddy, and sometimes it gets very, very narrow. Okay. Now, Chuck, your question: Is there one or many or something like that?

Chuck: Yeah.

Ken: Okay.

Chuck: “The single mind is the seed of everything.”

Ken: Now, does that mean the seed of everything in my world of experience, or the seed of everything in everybody’s world of experience? Is that your question?

Chuck: Yes, I think it should say for each individual.

Ken: Why?

Chuck: Because of what you were saying before; we have no idea whatever anybody else is thinking or what their world of experience is.

Ken: Is this okay with you?

Chuck: No.

Ken: No, it isn’t okay with you. What’s not okay about it? I think you said it earlier. It’s really lonely!

Chuck: Right. Yes. It’s one of these things that gnaw at you.

Ken: Okay. What experiences loneliness? [Pause] Or, may I go a step further? [Pause] Is what experiences loneliness, lonely?

Chuck: Not after it gets used to it. I mean, I’ve had times where I maybe go out on a long trip or something alone, and you start out, you feel a little bit alone.

Ken: Yeah. But I want you to look at—

Chuck: But then it clears up and—

Ken: But I want you to look a little deeper, okay? Let’s go back. What experiences loneliness?

Chuck: Well, this thing called “I,” I guess.

Ken: Is that what experiences loneliness?

Chuck: I think it’s a bodily experience and a mental experience, yes.

Ken: An emotional experience, yes. Okay. What experiences that? Now, this is important. [Pause] Go back to something that you and I messed around with many, many years ago. We did this a little bit the other day. So, just rub your hand on cloth. You experience texture, right? What experiences the texture?

Chuck: My awareness.

Ken: What experiences texture? Now, you look, right? What do you see?

Chuck: You don’t see anything.

Ken: Okay, so when you see nothing like this, you’re looking right at what experiences texture, right?

Chuck: Right. And that’s what experiences loneliness.

Ken: Yeah, but is it lonely?

Chuck: I don’t think so.

Ken: No. [Pause] Good. See what I’m pointing to?

Chuck: Yeah. On the exercise of capacity, I got to a point where I was looking at experience experiencing me. And then it’s all experience.

Ken: Yes. And what experiences that? Okay. And it becomes undefinable, right? That’s where you rest.

Chuck: I see.

Ken: You see. This may be revealing too much, but what the hell.

Student: We won’t get it anyway.

Ken: I hope somebody will get it. We have these questions. What is life? What am I? So forth and so forth. And our conditioning is such that we think there’s an answer; life is this and I am that … fill in the blank. And we further think that if we knew what filled in the blank, then everything would be fine. But this isn’t the case. It isn’t the case at all.

Just as Claire came to see in our little interchange that she started from the perspective, “I would love to believe,” but then saw that actually believing in something would be a hindrance in the very inquiry that she was engaged in. Any cognitive answer to these questions—I am … fill in the blank, life is … fill in the blank—is a stopping of awareness. It’s a block. It stops.

Well, this is very interesting. One of the genius aspects of Buddhism is that it encourages very, very explicitly, never stopping at anything. And it’s got all these tools; whatever you stop at, it blows it out, so that you can continue, just like the exchange I had with Claire. And that’s what all of that logic is about. It’s not about trying to prove anything. It’s about blowing up whatever’s blocking your path.

Chuck: I see. And then just looking.

Ken: And then you continue. What does this mean? It means that the answer to such questions as What am I? and What is life? is not a cognitive statement. It is the experience of awareness. That’s not the kind of answer we’re used to looking for. Do you follow? And what we’re doing in such practices as mahamudra, is developing the know-how, the capacity, and, hopefully, the willingness we have, to be able to engage that way. Because anything which says, “Okay, it is this,”—that’s a stopping point and everything dies right there.

So, when you’re reading these passages, don’t try to understand them intellectually or cognitively. I know this sounds a bit strange, and part of the problem is this was translated like 15, 20 years ago so the English is not as good as it could be. It’s not as clear as it could be, as you know. If you try to understand them intellectually or cognitively, it just ties you up or stops you. Rather, whenever you come across—and this is why I think your question here was very good—when you come across a phrase which throws something up in you, then move into that experience because something is waking you up there.

So open to that waking up, which is going to feel like, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on!” [Laughs] But that’s the sign that you’re waking up. Because there’s something there that has just removed, or undermined, or negated, or questioned, at least, something you actually believe in or want to believe in. And so here’s this statement which is saying … And that’s what all that jarring is, and confusion, and things like that. But that’s the waking up process.

Chuck: So just sit on it and meditate.

Ken: Yeah. And don’t meditate on it. Just be in the experience. And that’s essentially what we’re trying to do is learn how to be in the experience of whatever’s arising. This goes back to the point that I think Darren was raising last week or two weeks ago. When you’re awake, you don’t get to choose what you’re aware of. Someone could say, “That’s a real bummer.” But that’s just how it is.

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Working With Numbness

Lately I’ve noticed an absence of emotional response in some situations that seem as though they should evoke horror, grief, or alarm. This numbness has a strange familiarity and I began to wonder how often I've felt numb without noticing or acknowledging it.

At first, I found myself looking back and wondering whether the numbness was tied to something old that had been suppressed. But in meditation, I noticed that the sense of disturbance came afterwards, with the thought that I should feel something. In other words, I found myself turning an experience into a problem to be solved.

In this exchange between Rita and Ken from A Trackless Path 2, even though Ken describes numbness as “basically a protective mechanism,” he cautions against judging too quickly or forcing an interpretation. Perhaps there is simply very little emotional movement. He shifts the emphasis from judgement to allowing.

The part of the exchange that goes deepest for me is Ken’s question about control and manipulation. Rather than going right into the experience of numbness, I put on the evaluation hat, analysing why it didn’t match an idea of how I thought I should respond. In retrospect I see how I've been swallowed—caught by a demand that experience conform to expectation.

Mindful of Ken's reminder to be clear about intention, when the sense of numbness arises, I've begun to work with Seeing from the Inside, also called the five-step practice, my first resort when there's disturbance.

From A Trackless Path II-4

Rita: If you’re sitting with things that are difficult, sometimes your experience of what arises is very vivid. It’s all there and there’s a lot to work with. Then sometimes maybe the next time you sit and everything’s pretty clear, and maybe the next time you sit, you just feel numb. And it’s a familiar numbness, because you’re aware that you’ve been keeping something suppressed, because you feel like you shouldn’t be feeling this. So there are a couple of ways to work with that. One would be to sit with the numbness, and let it unfold itself as it will. And the other would be to poke it a little bit by bringing to mind those things that you know that you’re suppressing in that moment. And so I’m wondering if they’re both kind of equal in ways of working, or if one is better than the other?

Ken: I don’t think one can say one is better than the other. There are additional ones, in addition to those two. When we start to practice, we learn various techniques, methods of practice. Some traditions, they train you in just one and then you learn how to apply that in everything. In others—and I’m thinking of my own training in the Tibetan tradition—you’re trained in hundreds, so you always have these arrows in your quiver and you pull them out.

The first step is to learn the techniques and learn them well enough so that you really know how they work and you develop facility with them. The second level of training is to train probably in a fewer number of techniques to the point that they just happen whenever you encounter certain things. That is, they become second nature. The third level of training is to remove everything inside you that prevents that technique from manifesting when it needs to.

As one trains in these, one is developing a great deal of knowledge about one’s self, about how the technique works in you, what works and doesn’t work, and there’s even a kind of evolution of the notion of what “this works” means. So as you mature in your practice, it becomes increasingly important to be clear about one’s intention. Because intention itself evolves. And I don’t mean you’ll always have a good reason, “I am doing this because,” that’s at the rational level. As one’s experience of practice matures, it can become much more intuitive in a felt sense rather than a conceptual sense. So, there’s “Oh, I need to go in this direction.”

And one of the things that I’ve learned, actually from Jeff here, is—one has to be a little careful with this—to explore one’s relationship with resistance. I’m going to put this in a kind of oxymoronic way. “How can I experience resistance without encountering resistance?” That is, you were saying there’s something in you that is causing some difficulty or disturbance. Okay, how can I experience that or work with that without creating more resistance, or making things more imbalanced than they are? Or maybe I need to make them more imbalanced. But it becomes an exploration of experience. And it’s an exploration of experience that is informed by the accumulated experience and understanding. It doesn’t come out of a vacuum, if you follow. So, there’s something you experience, you sense that is there, creates or generates a numbness which is basically a protective mechanism. So okay, experience the numbness. Maybe that helps. Maybe you poke at it. Maybe that helps. Maybe you just sit and wait because nothing works.

Within your question there’s another whole consideration and that is, to what extent are you trying to control or manipulate your experience? And one of the purposes of this retreat actually is to provide the opportunity of actually exploring not manipulating one’s experience in any way, and what’s that like. Because certain approaches to practice you get very used to directing experience in a certain way. Is this helpful?

Rita: Yes.

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A Key Principle in Practice

In this passage from Mind Training in Seven Points, Ken distills a key principle in Buddhist practice: move into the experience of whatever is arising, right now.

In a few sentences he moves across several traditions. Theravadan practice speaks of the courage to endure what arises. Mahayana reframes experience as dream-like. Vajrayana instructions are equally direct: sit and be with everything, never lose attention for a moment, and don’t try to make anything different. Mahamudra conveys the principle in three pithy points: no distraction, no control, no work.

Methods and practices can easily become the focus. Yet all of them are training the same capacity — the ability to remain present with what is actually happening, even when it is uncomfortable. The practice, again and again,is simply to move into what is arising and be there.

From Mind Training in Seven Points 2

Ken: The key principle in all Buddhist practice is to move into the experience of whatever is arising, right in the present. In the Theravadan tradition this is characterized as the courage to endure what arises. In Mahayana, we cheat. Everything's a dream. In Vajrayana, or direct awareness techniques, sit and be with everything. Never lose attention for a moment. Don't try to make anything different. The mahamudra instructions—no distraction, no control, no work—mean you're not distracted by anything. You don't try to control your experience in any way. And you don't work to make some kind of experience happen, or some kind of ability happen. You're just right in what is. It's the same right across all Buddhism. Move right into the experience and be there. The whole point of all of these different techniques is to develop that ability. Whether it's Soto Zen, Theravadan, Vipassana, visualization meditations, six yogas of Naropa, dzogchen. It all comes down to that point.

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Zombies and Vulcans

In this passage from Then and Now, Ken jokes that if we tried to eliminate emotions entirely we might become like “zombies.” His quip also brings to mind the Vulcans from Star Trek, who are often portrayed as having a high degree of control over their emotions.

But Ken’s point goes in a very different direction. Practice is not about eliminating or controlling emotion. The question is whether emotions like attraction, aversion, pride, and jealousy organise around a solid sense of self, or whether they can be experienced openly as movements in mind.

When our capacity of attention is weak, emotions swallow us. Anger becomes my anger. Pride becomes my pride. We are carried away before we even know what has happened. But as attention develops, the same emotions can arise without taking over the whole field of experience. They are still felt, but are experienced as movement or energy rather than identity.

Ken’s image of emotions as waves in the ocean points to something simple yet profound. Waves are the nature of the ocean. Like emotions they arise naturally. The question is how we experience their movement. The aim of practice is not to be emotionless like a zombie, nor to control our emotions like a Vulcan. It is to develop the capacity to experience them completely. When that capacity of attention is present, emotions no longer swallow us. They arise, move, and pass, and we are no longer confused by them — mistaking them for who we are or what the world is.

From Then and Now 7

Kyle: I can understand the benefit of experiencing the emptiness and the emotion at the same time, but is the ultimate goal of the practice to ultimately go without the emotion? Because it seems that if the emotion doesn't really exist, and things like anger and other emotions like that can cause so many problems. Wouldn't it just be easier just to—

Ken: Get rid of them?

Kyle: Yeah.

Ken: Oh yeah, easier said than done, isn’t it?

Kyle: Yeah. Well, obviously you'd have to approach it in a very careful way. Would there be a way of doing that without ultimately—maybe I don't want to use the word suppress, but—

Ken: Well, we might become a nation of zombies. They don't have any emotions. That's not the point. We live. We breathe. We have thoughts, we have emotions. Very broadly speaking there are two kinds of emotions: there are reactive emotions and emotions which are responses. The reactive emotions are organized around a sense of self. They are things like attraction, aversion, preference, indifference, pride, jealousy, greed and things like that.

They arise and when they arise, because we don’t have the sufficient capacity of attention, they swallow us, so we get angry or we get proud, or what have you. But as you practice and you develop a greater capacity in attention then you are able to experience the arising of the emotions without being distracted, without being swallowed by them and then they just become an experience and that’s where what I was talking about comes in—one experiences them as just being no thing, just a movement. And it's very, very different because you’re not confused by it.

So saying, "Okay, let’s get rid of the emotion," it's a little bit like saying, "Well, you know, it would be nice if the ocean was always calm without any waves on it." Because one way of looking at the emotions is that they are simply mind waves. But it’s the nature of the ocean to have waves. It’s the nature for mind to move, to have waves.

The question is, is that all organized down to the sense of self, with all the destructiveness of that, or can it be experienced openly and freely so it doesn’t cause the locking or the reactivity that is the basis of suffering?

So what we’re doing in Buddhism is actually not trying to get rid of emotions but trying to develop the ability to experience them completely, so we’re never confused by them.

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Six Mornings, Six Worlds: A Guided Meditation

This long, guided meditation on the six realms, offered by Claudia Hansson, reflects ordinary, everyday experience: alarms, coffee, traffic, work, family. Long before anything significant happens, we may have already settled into a particular way of meeting life, and the world takes shape from there.

Each realm can be sensed first in the body: heat, tightening, hunger, dullness, ache, surge, ease. From there, the world appears in a corresponding way: hostile, insufficient, flat, fragile, competitive, or perfectly ordered. Lightning fast, the realm is already in place, shaping what can be seen, felt, and responded to.

Anger projects a world of opposition, greed a world of lack, instinct a world organised around survival, desire a world of enjoyment, jealousy a world of competition, and pride a world of superiority and certainty. The emotion and the world arise together. When a reactive emotion is operating, the world appears in a way that seems to confirm it. Lurching from one realm to into another, as we do all the time, makes their fluidity obvious. I like to think of the six realms not as identities, but as whole worlds of experience projected by reactive emotions. These arise and pass, often many times in a single day.

The striving that comes with a realm keeps it going—pushing against, grasping for, shutting down, chasing enjoyment, proving oneself, or maintaining position. The practice is to recognise which realm is operating, without judgement and without perpetuating the striving. No counter-move or improvement strategy is needed. When the striving drops, the realm loses its power. Recognition doesn’t vanquish the realm, but it can loosen whether it takes over and how completely.

From Monsters Under the Bed 5

Claudia: As Ken mentioned, what I’m going to do is try to do a guided meditation with you. So, I’d like you to get into a posture that’s comfortable. For this, I would recommend probably closing your eyes. [Pause]

So, let’s begin simply by moving our attention to the breath. Feeling the body come to rest. Feeling relaxation in your shoulders, in your arms. Noticing and experiencing the breathing happening in the body: how the breath moves, naturally on its own. You don’t need to control it. Finding its own pace. Now we’re going to shift our attention, keeping the breath in our awareness.

We’re going to imagine beginning our day in the hell realm. The alarm goes off; that’s your first irritant. You slam your hand down on the top of it. The alarm clock falls on the floor. You drag yourself out of bed, take your shower, get dressed. Go to have cereal and open the refrigerator, and one of the kids drank the last of the milk. You feel in the pit of your stomach a fire starts to burn. Your body starts to tighten up. You slam the refrigerator door, grab a piece of toast, and out the door you go.

You get in your car. You notice it’s raining. That really pisses you off. It’s going to slow the traffic down. You make your way to the closest Starbucks to grab some coffee. You’re standing in line. There’s a high school kid in front of you. A bunch of the kid's friends walk in the door and join ahead of you in the line. [Laughter] Now the fire in you just surges up. [Laughter] The world is out to get you. You finally get your coffee.

You get in your car. You grip the wheel. You feel tightness in your chest. Your shoulders are rigid. You try to keep a space between you and the next car because it’s raining. And every time you have a space, somebody cuts in right in front of you. You know they think they’re better than you.

You make your way to work. You get to work. And of course, the person that you least want to see is right in your face. And so you begin your day rigid, stuck–body angry and hot. Nothing is very pleasant about this life.

So, take a couple breaths. We’re going to begin the day again, shifting to the hungry ghost realm. The first thing you hear in the morning is one of the kids yelling, “Where’s the cereal? I can’t find the cereal! We’re out of milk!” Right away there’s kind of a wrenching. You feel your day hasn’t even begun and somebody wants something from you. You need a little peace and quiet. You have a sense you’re not going to get it. While you’re in the shower, your partner comes in, tries to have a conversation with you. Complaining that you’re spending too much time at work, “We’ve got to have a conversation about things.”

You just want to get to work, but all these people want something from you. You feel a deep hunger in your body already, and the day has barely begun. You get in the car to go to work. You just really want a little peace. Everybody around you wants something from you. You get to the Starbucks. All the kids—happy, talking—they don’t pay attention to you. They’re not going to give you the time of day. A person in line at the Starbucks screws up your coffee drink; that’s not going to help fill you up very much.

The need in your body is starting to ache. Your need is growing stronger as you jump in the car. Nothing seems to make you feel full. It’s like your life is a bottomless pit. Everyone around you wants something from you, and you can’t get what you need. You feel the strain as you get in the car to drive. You go to pull into a parking place; somebody beats you in. They even want your parking place now. You are hungry. You just want to get your coffee, get to work, do your job, and even that isn’t working very well.

The first thing in the door at work somebody comes at you with a pile of work that they want done. You want to explain that you need some time to catch up on all the backlog at work. But you know it’s hopeless. You’re never going to get caught up. You’re never going to feel like it’s done. That need is just going to keep growing. And that’s the way your day is.

So, take another breath or two. Now we’re going to be shifting into the animal realm. Your alarm goes off. You turn it off. It’s just another day. You feel, “Oh well, I’ve got to survive here. Nothing very interesting going on.” You take your shower. You eat the same thing every day for breakfast. You go outside and you notice it’s raining. “Oh well.”

You get in your car. You drive to Starbucks. You don’t even notice that the school kids are jamming in line in front of you. You just want your coffee. Your body feels heavy, dull, nothing coming in, nothing going out. You’re just doing what you have to do. You can’t feel your heart. You can’t feel much of anything.

You pretty much ignore everything that’s going on around you. You put your body in autopilot, and you drive to work. You don’t know what you passed. You don’t even notice when somebody pulls in front of you. If you need to put on the brakes, you put on the brakes. You can’t really afford to have your car wrecked, so you do what you have to do to survive here.

You manage to get yourself safely to work. The same people are there, day after day. The same annoyances. “Oh well.” Your body’s just kind of numb. You don’t really care much one way or the other. You just do what you have to do to survive from moment to moment.

Take another breath. Now we’re going to begin in the human realm. You wake up in the morning. You go to give your partner a hug. Just want to feel that connection with that person. And they kind of stiffly hug you back and say, “I had a really bad night.” [Laughter] And right away, you notice a little ache in your heart. It’s like, “Well, that didn’t feel very good.”

But that’s kind of the way it is in the human realm. If you have kids, you send them off to school. They’re already fighting. You look up at the sky and you notice it’s raining, and you say, “Well, I’m glad it’s raining. It’s been dry around here. Feels kind of good.” And you get in your car, and the first thing you notice is there’s a bad accident on the road from the rain. And a sadness moves over you, sinks into your body. You know somebody’s suffering. You feel some empathy that somebody’s life is going to be messed up for a while one way or the other.

You go to the nearest Starbucks. You have a clerk there that you kind of feel a connection with. So you kind of like that person. You have a little conversation with him. And they do a better job of making your coffee drink, so you really like to have them wait on you. So you pace yourself so that person’s going to be the one, so you can have that little conversation that makes you feel good in the morning. And a bunch of the school kids come jamming in the door and kind of screw up your whole plan. And you get the other clerk that isn’t very friendly and that doesn’t make you such a great drink.

You sigh, and you feel that in your body. You missed that connection. There’s a little bit of sadness there. You get in the car. The commute traffic’s really bad, people are jamming in all around you. You can feel yourself kind of getting frustrated with the whole situation. But you know, that’s kind of the way it is. Some days are better; some days are really crummy.

You get to work. And you have people that you really care about at work that you’re really connected with. And one of those people comes up to you and says, “I need to talk to you for a few minutes.” Sits down and tells you that they’re moving on. They’re going to move out of town. They’re going to be quitting their job, and they’re going to be going away. You feel in your body right away that sense of loss. You know it’s hard to keep those friendships active when people leave. Your heart aches a little bit. You start grieving before the person even leaves.

And that’s the way it is in the human realm. You want those connections. You want to have a little fun, a little enjoyment in life. But nothing is permanent and things constantly keep shifting. And a lot of sadness flows in and through your body.

So, take another breath. Now we’re going to begin the day in the titan realm. You wake up. This is an important day. You need to get to work. You’re going to be doing a presentation. And you’re going to be really good at it, because you want that next promotion. So you’re all business this morning. You get yourself dressed and you pick your clothes just right, so you’ll look really good. You grab something quick to eat. You notice it’s raining, but you’re not concerned. You know you can handle that. You feel strong. Your body feels good. You feel a sense of power moving through your body.

You get in your car. You notice there’s maybe an accident on the road. And you think, “Well, those people probably weren’t paying attention. But I’m careful, I can do this.” You get to Starbucks to get your coffee. Bunch of school kids start to cut in on you. You just walk right in front of them. [Laughter] You’re powerful. You’re not going to put up with that. You get your coffee. You make sure it’s made the way you want it. Because you tell the clerk that’s making your coffee exactly the way you want it—so it’s right.

You get behind the wheel of your car. You feel good. You feel strong. And then you look over in the lane beside you, and you see somebody with a brand new, beautiful Lexus convertible. And there’s a little pain that rises up, cause you know you’re not quite at the top yet. You’re good. And you’re going to do it. But that person, they probably’ve got it. So there’s a little bit of envy that starts to move in your body. And you can feel that. It’s like a burning desire.

You want it all. This is a juicy world. And you want to get it. So, you’re moving with all the energy you can bring to force to get what you want. And you’re pretty much going to step on anything in your way. So, there you are in the rain in your car. Somebody starts to hedge in. “Oh no, that’s not happening in my lane!” You step on the gas, and you move forward. And you feel that surge of pleasure that comes up when you’ve done it. You aced them out! And it feels really good.

You get to work. And you get ready for your presentation. And another person who’s doing a presentation the same day—and you know they’re your competitor—and you look to see what they have. And notice that one of their ideas is pretty good. So, you tell them, “Oh, that’s, yeah, that’s good.” You don’t say too much. But when you get in to do your presentation, you just casually bring out that idea into your presentation. You steal their thunder, and you do it really well. So when they get ready to make theirs, they’ve sort of lost their little pitch. When it’s over, you feel really good because you know you were the shining star that day. And that’s how your day goes in the titan realm.

Take one more breath. Move into the god realm. You don’t have an alarm clock. The cook’s already in the kitchen, taking care. The nanny’s dealing with the children. You don’t have to worry about that. You just wake up naturally in the morning. You run the company. So you get in when you feel like getting in. You feel a sense of real luxury around you. You take your time getting dressed. You have a huge walk-in closet. Lots of shoes and lots of clothes to choose from. You take whatever you need, whatever you want. You’re very confident. You know that what you do is really good. You get yourself dressed.

You get in your luxurious car. Or if you don’t feel like driving, you have your personal assistant drive you to work. When you get to work, you run this company. Your decision is always the right decision. You’re confident and you know it. In your body there’s a sense that you’re just on top of the world. You don’t notice who works around you. You don’t have to go to Starbucks, because people bring you coffee. So you don’t have to stand in any lines.

This is the god realm. Everything is wonderful. And you feel that surge all through your body. You’re right. You know it. You don’t have to listen to anybody else. And you don’t. And that’s the way your day is in the god realm.

Take a few moments to come back to your breath. And gently open up.

---

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How Mind-Killing Operates

In Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky set out a framework for understanding how mass media supports institutions by shaping perception and behaviour without the need for overt coercion. Through their “propaganda model,” they show how market forces, internalised assumptions, and self-censorship work together to manufacture consent rather than invite genuine inquiry.

Ken draws on this analysis and takes it into more intimate territory. He noticed that the same mechanisms that operate in media and institutions can also operate in our own minds.

In a retreat called Warrior’s Solution, Ken introduced the phrase mind-killing. He described it as using a person’s reactive patterns to dampen their own capacity to feel, question, and experience, so that attention is diverted away from what is actually happening and toward compliance with an internal or external system.

It works by exciting familiar emotional reactions—fear, desire, identity, survival—and organising thinking through frames, reductions, polarities, and exclusions that prevent genuine inquiry. The result is loss of contact with lived experience, especially bodily and emotional knowing. In that state, a person can end up enacting the interests of a system, or a pattern, rather than responding freely to what is present.

In this long passage from A Trackless Path, Ken outlines six methods of mind-killing. Framing narrows what can be questioned. Marginalisation dismisses what doesn’t fit as unimportant. Seduction and alignment promise fulfilment or survival if we comply. Reduction collapses complexity into a single emotionally charged issue. Polarisation splits experience into opposing choices that leave no room for nuance or exploration. None of this requires force. It works because it resonates with habits we already have.

I see this most clearly in my own life when a way of working starts to feel unquestionable. Discomfort is explained away. Signals from the body are overridden. Thinking feels authoritative and is mistaken for clarity. Meanwhile, something vitally important has dropped out of the picture.

From A Trackless Path I - 9

Ken: I want to talk a bit about something which a few of you have probably heard me talk about directly and probably a few more have picked up on the podcasts. I’m going to add a couple of dimensions to it. And this is the topic of mind-killing. And this is, in a certain sense, an elaboration of comments I made earlier on institutional thinking.

The main emphasis I want to put—and what I want you to bring attention to in your own work—is how this operates inside you. Everything I have to say also applies to organizations, institutions—whether they’re families, workplaces, governmental systems, nations, media—what have you. But I want to put the emphasis on how this works inside us.

Now there are six methods which I got from the book by Noam Chomsky called Manufacturing Consent. In some work that I was doing not too long ago, I came across another four—which go back a lot further than Noam Chomsky—which go back to Francis Bacon. So I want to discuss these ’cause they all operate.

The first six come in three sets of pairs. The first pair is marginalize and frame. Now George Lakoff has written quite a lot on framing. He has a couple of big books on it but the two that are intended for more popular audiences are Don’t Think of an Elephant and The Political Brain. I’ve read them both. I think Don’t Think of an Elephant is actually clearer than The Political Brain but The Political Brain touches more points.

When I say to you, “Don’t think of an elephant,” what do you think of?

Student: An elephant.

Ken: Yeah. And what framing refers to is how a topic is framed. And you can frame topics in a lot of different ways. Each frame will allow certain ways of thinking to proceed and certain kinds of questions to be asked, and will not allow other kinds of questions to be asked or even other ways of thinking to be entertained.

So, for a very long time—I’ll give you an example from my own experience—having read and studied a number of texts in Tibetan Buddhism about the importance of posture, in particular the seven points of posture of Vairocana, I became convinced that you couldn’t meditate unless you use that posture. Most of the other people in the retreat didn’t have too much trouble with it. But I did. And I managed to make myself extremely ill, really quite ill, trying to do this. Of course, I didn’t stop there. I continued to insist in trying to meditate that way. And it wasn’t until my body just really was lying in pieces around my apartment that I thought well maybe I should try meditating in a chair. That’s how deeply that frame was set in me.

And so one of the things I’d like you to explore is what frames, do you present the whole notion of practice, to yourself? What does it allow and what does it not allow? Now very similar to Paul’s question earlier—and it’s one of the reasons I was pushing him a bit on that—is that you get into this, “It’s this way or this way!”, and so that’s what’s allowed. You can either go this way or this way. That’s it. And you can’t see the other possibilities that go in other directions. And that’s why studying these frames, becoming aware of them in ourselves, can be quite important. I’ll give you a couple more examples.

Many years ago a Buddhist teacher that I knew a bit, moved to L.A. and I invited her to come to a retreat that I was teaching at Mt. Baldy. Now her background was in Theravadan and Zen. Actually Rinzai Zen which tends to be fairly strict. And she would see people at Mt. Baldy reading in the dorms. And they weren’t Buddhist books. She’d see people going jogging at lunchtime. And jogging at a retreat? Right, Nancy? Unthinkable, isn’t it! And we’d do these insane interactive exercises in the afternoon—stuff I’d make up to illustrate various points.

And early on she just said, “Ken, what’s going on here?” But in the meditation hall she came to appreciate, from the energy, that there’s some pretty serious practice going on. And at the end of the retreat, she came to me and said, “You treat people like adults. [Laughter] You don’t treat them as children to be kept in line. I thought that was really weird when I first got here but it works.” And you can feel the frame operating there. This is the way it has to be done. And all of these other things aren’t allowed.

It works for some people but it doesn’t work for everybody, and she’s absolutely right as you can probably tell from this retreat. There’s nobody standing with sticks, whips, or machine guns saying, “You have to practice now.” And yet it’s pretty evident that there’s a lot of serious work going on. And when we sit together, there’s a lot of energy in the room. And I know from the conversations I have with you in the interviews, that there’s very definitely non-trivial emotional material being met. So the work’s taking place.

So this is another example of frames. And internally, whenever we find ourselves thinking things have to be done a certain way, or this is the way that you’re meant to be or something like that, this is the operation of a frame. Now many frames developed because they supported practice. But it is good, I think, from my perspective to question, “Is this actually supporting practice or is it doing something else?”

Julia, you have some experience with this. Would you mind saying something? I’m sorry to put you on the spot.

Julia: That’s okay. I’ve been working on and off over the last couple of years with a particular practice. And I’ve found that I find myself in a dynamic where I’m driving myself. And the practice becomes a tyrant and I am submitting. Or it becomes something I have to do because if I don’t do it, there will be some kind of terrible consequence. And then I stop. And I came up with the idea a while ago—we haven’t had a conversation that we’re going to have about how one avoids this kind of dynamic in practices that are intended to be done fairly intensively—but this idea of this sort of relentless drive that can take over, how one can avoid that. And the model I’ve had in my own head has been a sort of an agricultural model where you sort of cultivate and plant and weed and tend and harvest and then rest. So I’ve been doing it rather cyclically.

But it took time for me—and very closely with what I think of as what I call the machine culture that we live in—where we’ve moved from an agricultural to an industrial society. And machines never go to sleep. We’re all being required to live our lives because of the way the machines work rather than the other way around, it seems to me. So I know for myself and for many people I see, there’s a dynamic of just this relentless driving. You know, da dum [making machine sounds], and this and this and this 60 hours a week whatever that is. That definitely got into my practice.

Ken: I want to point out something that Julia’s done here. She found herself working in the frame defined by machine. And she’s explored changing the frame to one defined by agriculture. It changes the whole relationship with the practice. It may not be the right frame for the practice but it’s a very clear example of how shifting the frame changes the relationship, changes the way you approach the practice, etc.

So what many of our internal patterns do and what they did when they formed was to set the frame. And that initial frame was a way of approaching the world so we could get through what was a very difficult situation. But now we continue within that frame and it limits and denies and actually kills other possibilities. That’s why it is a tool of mind-killing.

Now, with that as a basis I’m sure you can look at lots of the stuff that’s happening politically in this country in terms of healthcare debate and economic things and see how—even with the Iraq War, etc.—how framing was used simply to eliminate all kinds of discussion.

Another technique which is used—and it’s quite closely related to framing—is marginalizing. In marginalization, ideas or perspectives that threaten the operation of the system are dismissed as unimportant or inconsequential.

So one of the ways that that can play internally is: “My body’s in pain when I’m meditating.

"That doesn’t matter. Keep going.”

And what it does is, it kills the possibility of actually listening to your body. A number of people have come to me from various forms of Theravadan training—and this isn’t universally true in Theravadan training of course but frequently enough that I’ve run into it a number of times—where emotional material has come up and they’ve been told, “Ignore it. It’s not important.” That’s an example of marginalization. And sometimes, yeah, it’s a little bit important. [Chuckles]

So in terms of internal processes, when you find yourself saying to yourself, “Nah, that’s not important” or “That doesn’t matter”, get curious about that sometimes. You’ve heard me talk about the small stammering voice that is asking the questions. Well, this is usually how the small stammering voice is treated. “Nah, don’t worry about that. Not important.” Marginalization.

The next pair …

Claudia: Can I ask a question? I’m interested in the relationship between language and the words that we use and framing. I mean we talked a little bit about metaphors but—

Ken: Yeah. Well, we think in metaphors, actually. Logic is above the level of metaphor. There is quite an astonishing episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Picard encounters an alien whose language is all in metaphor. It referred to various literary metaphors. And they couldn’t figure out how to communicate. Philosophically it was just, I thought, brilliantly done.

But you’re absolutely right. Language plays an extremely important role here. It’s one of the reasons why I pay so much attention to language. We reveal the metaphors and the ways of thinking and how we’re marginalizing things and how we’re framing things by the language that we use.

Claudia: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking—that sometimes it’s hard to see your own frames.

Ken: I think it’s often very difficult to see your own frames.

Claudia: And one way to go at that is by looking at the language that you use when you talk about things because that can make you curious.

Ken: Yes. I would actually go a step further and ask yourself the question, “What questions does the language I’m using prevent me from asking?” And to take this one step further, this is one of the reasons why it is very important to have interaction with someone else around your practice, because both people have their set of frames, their ways of thinking, etc. And it is only in the interaction—what you were referring to earlier, Claudia, about sutra—that the frames are called into question and actual connection can take place.

And that’s where real learning comes in. And it’s one of the reasons I’m asking you at the end of the retreat to stand up and speak because now you interact with everybody else. And it’s different. It’s no longer just inside. It’s now out and interaction makes it come alive in a way that it can’t come alive if it’s just held inside.

So the next pair is seduction and alignment. Seduction says, "If you want to realize your dreams do this." And what’s happening there is the system is presenting you with the illusion of realizing your dreams to get you to behave in a certain way.

So, I have a very good friend who, by her own admission, loves to live in the story. And I’ve known her for many years. She’s been very helpful to me. But when she dies she’s gonna be Snow White in the glass case. And people will come from miles around to … [laughs]. This is the dream. And it got her into really, really serious trouble a couple of years ago. Really serious trouble. And it’s been very difficult for her ever since because now she knows she can’t live in the story. But she’s had a very successful life up to that point from living in the story. But it’s all about this internal operation of seduction.

One of my students, a stockbroker, was in a group I did in Orange County on basic meditation. And he came in one meeting and said, “You know, I just got another award for some very large amount of sales as a stockbroker, and it doesn’t mean very much to me. And I can’t figure out why.”

So I looked at him. I said, “Congratulations.”

He said, “What?”

I said, “Congratulations.”

He said, “Why?”

“Now you know. They lied.”

He said, “What are you talking about?”

“Weren’t you told that if you sold this very large amount of stocks you would be happy and feel fulfilled? And your life would be rich? And everything like that?”

He said, “Yeah.”

“Do you feel that way?”

“No.”

“So you know. They lied.”

That’s the dream. That’s what seduction’s about. You’re presented with the illusion that your dreams are going to be fulfilled. If you behave according the the demands of the system. We do this internally to ourselves all the time.

Alignment in one way isn’t as extreme, but in one way it’s more extreme. With alignment you’re told you have to do this in order to survive, in order to exist. And I run into this many, many times with people, that they’re doing something and I say, “Well, why don’t you stop doing that? It’s not working for you,” and, “Why don’t you do this instead?” And they say, “Well, I wouldn’t know who I was.” Their very definition is locked up there. And it’s a prison. It kills the ability to see other alternatives. You run into this very frequently in people who’ve worked in a single job for many, many years. And it becomes their raison d’etre.

So seduction and alignment. And then you have reduction and polarization.

In reduction, complex issues are reduced to a single emotional issue. So a person comes, and says, “I’m having a lot of difficulty with my practice. My body hurts, etc. My mind’s all over the place. I’m not sure this is the right form of practice for me doing this very complex visualization, etc. It’s really hard and I just can’t hold the image, etc.”—like that.

And the teacher says, “Well, you want to get enlightened, don’t you?!” [Makes exasperated sound.]

One single emotionally charged issue. Anybody experience something like this? That’s reduction. And there are many other forms. Very often we’ll do this to ourselves internally. And it eliminates any possibility of discussion and negotiation, exploration, etc.

I mean this has happened to me many times, actually. I remember one teacher that I was talking with, and I was saying I was having a difficult time with certain meditations, and I found that resting with the breath just really helpful. Reply: “There’s no breath in the bardo.“ [Laughs] Reduction. Jeff, please.

Jeff: But reduction can be a good teaching method. I’m thinking of a couple of years ago here …

Ken: Oh, dear.

Jeff: As you explained, I was having waking nightmares as I was walking around. And you said, you looked at me, “Well, you gonna quit?” [Laughter]

It was effective.

Ken: You’re quite right. All of these can be effective in helping people to move. At the same time they can be, and frequently are, used by parts of us and by other people to kill the ability to explore and come to terms with our own experience.

And so when I said that to you it wasn’t with the intention of getting you to conform to a system or my way of thinking. It was intended to give you a shock so you’d really take a look at where you were in your practice. And I’m glad it was effective because whenever you use such a technique there is always a risk. If the person isn’t able to make use of it then all the experience is being hit or being cut. If they are able to make use of it, then it becomes an opening—or a renewal or something like that. But there’s always that risk when you use such techniques.

Any of you can recognize this? Reduction. Do you want to say a word about that, Gary?

Gary: Well, not as to practice but I had a friend who died about six months ago, but he got me involved in an email debate regarding politics, and he accused me of being a socialist. And so once that happened the discussion pretty much was over.

Ken: Yeah. I read in an online community—I think it was connected with Wired—the very perceptive comment, that in this community the first person to bring up Nazi Germany in an argument, it was a de facto recognition that they had lost the argument. ’Cause now it was going for reduction. I thought it was a pretty smart community.

Okay. Polarization is a little different from reduction in that complex matters are split into just two choices, and the limiting of it to those two choices prevents any other discussion or any other consideration. So, right and wrong is one way to polarize things. And it precludes any possibility of a nuanced discussion or even a nuanced response. So it’s this or that.

So, those are six methods. And as I’ve said, look at how these operate inside you. In particular, look at how patterns or a particular pattern presents things to you. Does it say, “Do this and you will know happiness beyond your wildest dreams?” Or is it saying, “This is right and this is wrong. You can’t think about anything else.”

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Compassion Beyond Despair

This exchange takes place in a conversation between Ken and translator Bill Porter (nom de plume Red Pine, known for his translations of the Diamond Sutra, the Heart Sutra, and many other classical texts). A student asks: “Where do Buddhism and politics meet?”

This burning question has been coming up again and again in recent conversations I've had with other practitioners. How do we live in a world that feels increasingly unstable without retreating into personal practice or collapsing into outrage and despair?

Before the political question is raised, Ken tells the story of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Having vowed never to fall into despair, Avalokiteshvara works for eons for the welfare of beings. When he pauses to assess the results and sees that suffering has not diminished, his head shatters. What eventually sinks in from this story, Ken says, is that true compassion goes beyond despair. It is not concerned with achieving some final end state, but meets what is arising now, without attachment to outcome.

Bill’s response is direct: "You can’t do anything more political than be aware of your own experience." Any benefit to society flows from that.

Ken then draws a careful distinction between ideology and practice. Institutions and groups fight for survival and may even use religious language to justify themselves, but this is very different from the work of transforming one’s own experience. That distinction feels crucial. It may be tempting either to condemn distorted forms of religion or to try to fix the world through righteous certainty, but the story of Avalokiteshvara reframes the terrain. If we expect compassion to result in visible change in human affairs, despair seems inevitable. If we want others to conform to our vision, we risk adding one more rigid position to an already fractured field.

We would like the world to make sense, but today’s world often feels like madness. It's easy to forget that periods of peace have arisen throughout history, only to end when power and dissatisfaction tear them apart. The bodhisattva vow is clear about not succumbing to despair, but the price of sanity is to be deeply aware of the pain of the world.

The message I take from this rich exchange between a student, Bill and Ken is that a practitioner’s path is neither withdrawal nor indifference, but the discipline of remaining present, with very clear eyes, in a world that does not make sense. From there, whatever action arises may not fix or resolve a situation, but it need not deepen the madness. Perhaps that is where practice and politics meet: in the bodhisattva’s commitment not to let despair fracture the mind.

From Anything Is Possible 2 (AP02)

Ken: There’s a story or a myth associated with Avalokiteshvara our hero of the Heart Sutra. Now, as many of you probably know, Avalokiteshvara is the bodhisattva who is the embodiment of awakened compassion. And the story is told that when he was a student of Buddha Amitabha, who was his guru, he took the bodhisattva vow, and as his personal expression of the bodhisattva vow, he vowed that if he should ever fall into a state of despair, his head would burst into 1,000 pieces.

So with this very strong motivation, he started working for the welfare of beings. Whenever I say this now I’m mindful of Bill’s translation of the Diamond Sutra saying a bodhisattva who conceives of sentient beings is not a bodhisattva. Still working on that one. So for three incalculably long eons, he works for the welfare of sentient beings. And then he stops to take a break and see how he’s doing. He’s still attached to the idea of progress you see. And he looks, and he sees that there are more sentient beings suffering in samsara than when he started, that they’re suffering from poverty, and that their reactive emotions are stronger than before.

And he says, "What’s the use?" And his head burst into 1,000 pieces. Amitabha appears on the scene says, "Hmm, you broke your vow. Now you’re going to have to come up with a new one." And he heals him, and then the story says that the 1,000 pieces of his head became the 1,000 arms of one of the forms of Avalokiteshvara. And as he formulated his new vow, he saw that sentient beings needed help fast, they needed help with reactive emotions, they needed help with poverty. So this black hung, the letter hung, appeared in his heart and became what is now known as the six-armed Mahakala, which is the wrathful emanation of compassion.

And I’ve heard this story many, many times. My teacher Kalu Rinpoche told it many times when I was translating. And over the years, it gradually sunk into me that one way to understand the story is that true compassion goes beyond despair. And so it’s not concerned with achieving or arriving at some kind of end state. It is meeting what is arising in terms of suffering or struggle in the present moment with no attachment to a goal or an end state that will one day be reached. And that story then became very, very powerful for me.

Student: Yeah. This is related. I’ve just spent about a year and a half in Sri Lanka. And I know you’re aware of the situation there, but where does Buddhism and politics come together? Because it was very confusing to me to be there and listen to the way the Buddhists talked about the Tamil Tigers. The head monk would actually get on the TV and say, "We have to kill them all." And I was just struck by that, but how does one be political in a larger sense outside of being aware of one’s own experience?

Bill: Well, you can’t do anything more political than be aware of your own experience. And any benefit—if you want to look at it as an external benefit to your society—won’t come about without that awareness. Somebody once asked Confucius about the same situation. And he said, if you want to bring peace to your country, you have to bring peace to your state. And if you want to bring peace to your state, you have to bring peace to your village. And if you want to bring peace to your village, you have to bring peace to your family. And if you want to bring peace to your family, you have to bring peace to yourself. And so any Buddhist political program can’t go beyond dealing with your own experience, and in transforming that experience to compassion, to what Ken was talking about in terms of what Avalokiteshvara does.

One can criticize other Buddhists as being, "Well, you’re just not a real Buddhist," but that’s doomed to create more disharmony in the world—that sort of attitude. Maybe it’s just the way I approach things, but I like what Confucius said. I work on myself. I figure the better person I am, well, my family, my community, my country will be benefited that way, not by me getting on a soap box and criticizing those people and supporting those people and creating more division.

Ken: It’s a complex and difficult question. Buddhism as it was originally developed was not terribly concerned with politics. It was concerned with individual freedom. Nevertheless, in the time of Buddha he found himself involved in a lot of political situations.

There’s a set of recordings on dharmaseed.org which is a very good website. It’s got a lot of recordings from various, mainly Theravadan teachers. One of them is Stephen Bachelor, who some of you may know, and he does a series of lectures on the life of Buddha in which he completely demythologizes the life of Buddha. He makes use of a concordance that a Theravadan monk did of the Pali Canon earlier in the 20th century, and is able to reconstruct with some precision, the political machinations that were going on in the life of Buddha.

It’s very, very instructive. And at one point Buddha’s cousin, Devadatta, and the son of one of the kings got together and said, “Well, you knock off Buddha, and I knock off the old king and we can take over the whole thing. You become the spiritual leader, and I become the temporal leader.”

Now this plot actually didn’t work. Devadatta didn’t succeed in knocking off Buddha, though he did try, but the young king did manage to succeed in killing his father, or at least imprisoning him—I can’t remember precisely. So even though, Buddha had little interest in politics, he found himself embroiled in these situations.

And fast-forward a couple of thousand years to the Second World War in which we find the Japanese regarding themselves as the instruments of karma and inflicting a great deal of suffering on China and other countries, figuring they were just cleaning the world up. And this, to my mind, is equally as specious a justification as we had in the Crusades when Christians regard themselves as acting on the will of God. I think we have to, at least for me, distinguish between that kind of ideology or ideological position from what Buddhism is talking about as practice. What you’re talking about in terms of those ideologies is how various institutions and various groups of people are fighting for their survival one way or another, which is a very, very different matter. And they will use Buddhist formulations or Christian formulations or Islamic formulations, whatever, to justify, but this doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is actually the practice of the religion. And so I think one has to approach this very sensitively, but also with very, very clear eyes.

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Open to One Thousandth at a Time

In What Am I Protecting? I spoke of areas of experience that were walled off for decades. This exchange from Anything Is Possible speaks to a dimension of that same territory—when something is not just defended, but unbearable.

When difficult experiences are walled off, a web of reactive patterns grows up around them. One of my patterns was the conviction that no one could be trusted. Because this ruled my life, seeking psychological help felt very risky. I tried once, as a young adult, and it backfired. The experience of placing trust in another person intensified the wound.

Over time, I noticed that my behaviour consistently produced results that differed greatly from my intentions. Nearly a decade later, I confided this to a friend who became my first contemplative teacher. More than a decade after dipping my toes in the waters of meditation practice, something in me was ready to approach experience in another way, and trust was no longer such a no-go proposition. By then, I had stumbled, quite unexpectedly, across Unfettered Mind, and Ken suggested I work with the five-step practice and with mind training. These gave me a way to begin forming a relationship with what had felt untouchable—not as a substitute for professional help, but as a way of making contact. Very gradually and slowly, I could allow attention to inch toward what had been too hot, too painful.

There is something deeply astute in Ken's observation that what we could not experience at the time remains as undischarged emotional reactivity. He is explicit that people generally need sensitive support to work with trauma, and that over-exposure can re-traumatise. That caution feels essential. A key is not to force anything open, but to form a relationship very gently, appropriately, as capacity allows.

To my surprise, in my sixth decade working with a therapist proved unexpectedly fruitful. Practice had not replaced therapy; it had made therapy possible. For others it may well be the other way around.

Forming a relationship with the experiences we have banished requires patience. And sometimes it begins with opening to only one thousandth of what could not be experienced.

From Anything Is Possible 2

Student: Connected to both what Bill said about healing, myself being connected to all of society, and also the talk about politics, I'm going back to what you said about memory, and when you gave the example of thinking of a mild irritation, and then switching over to saying, "I'm glad about it," and it disappearing, that worked very well for me, but when I start to think of more serious irritations like PTSD, which you raised, how is that? I'm not sure I have the question formulated except how can Buddhist practice relate to some wound that is so deep as PTSD?

Bill: What's PTSD?

Ken: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Student: And I just want to add to it that as a psychotherapist that works with them, a more appropriate label for that acronym or words for that, is post-traumatic soul disorder.

Ken: Well, even with PTSD, one way of looking at it, certainly not the only way, but one way of looking at it is something happened which we simply did not have the capacity to experience. So there's an undischarged emotional reaction. And that may be because of the physical trauma, that may because of the emotional trauma and whatsoever.

And in a certain sense, when that happens it's like a part of us is now unavailable to us and it goes back to Bill's idea of drawing a line around it. It's something that happened and we can't touch it. It's just too hot, too painful, or what have you. The approach in Buddhist practice would be gently and appropriately to start forming a relationship with that part. Now with a mild irritation that was very easily done, as you pointed out. With something that is deeply, deeply painful, it has to be done much more carefully. And there are two or three techniques with which I'm familiar.

One can apply the Anapanasati Sutra, the Full Awareness of Breathing Sutra to this. The Full Awareness of Breathing Sutra in using the breath and opening to, as you breathe, allowing yourself to move into however much of that experience you're able to and doing that very gently. So if you can only open to one thousandth of it, that's what you do.

Thich Nhat Hanh has a technique for this. It's a five-step process, which consists of holding that part, tenderly in attention, and even starting with just a very, very small amount of it so that you gradually form a relationship. And he knows of what he speaks because he comes through having been driven out of Vietnam from both sides, 'cause he was equally unpopular with the Americans and with the Vietcong.

There's another technique in the Mahayana tradition called mind training which is a way of forming a relationship with any aspect of our experience from which we are alienated. Because in that aspect of experience from which we are alienated, there is some suffering. And in mind training, you're taking that suffering and you give your own understanding and joy and support, and you just do this again with the breath, taking in the suffering, giving your own joy. And in this way you start a process of mediation with that which forms a relationship.

In the case of something as deep as post-traumatic stress disorder, I think it's highly advisable to, if one is undertaking those kinds of techniques, to do it in conjunction with seeing someone you can talk about it with. Because it's very easy to over-expose oneself to these experiences and thus re-traumatize. So I think one has to be quite careful here, but I've worked with a number of people with both of those techniques and it's been very helpful.

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