The Role of the Teacher

How does our relationship with a spiritual teacher change as practice matures? In this passage, James Low uses the image of a jigsaw puzzle to explore how what begins as trust gradually becomes direct knowing.

James: As long as the individual is on the path and has not reached an experience of self validation, there will always be a need for some sort of analysis, checking out where she is. The thing has not been demonstrated from the inside out, there is still a need for an external confirmation. Its like doing a jigsaw puzzle when the picture has still not emerged. One has to look back to the illustration on the box now and again. At a certain time it just comes together and there is no need to refer to the picture any more. You just go on knowingly fitting pieces together.

What the teacher of a system provides then is the picture on the box. It is a frame of reference, a meaningful context without which the practitioner may feel lost or even abandon the attempt to practise.

An educated practitioner will also know that the system she is practising is perhaps only one of a family of similar systems. Sometimes it will be helpful to look at these other systems and be aware of their similarities and differences. At other times to do this is of no use. When actually practising ones own system it is important to feel it is the best, or at least to give oneself totally to it.

From James Low, Yogins of Ladakh, p. 190

James' analogy of the jigsaw puzzle illuminates something important about the student-teacher relationship. Initially, the teacher provides the picture on the box. Their words and example give us a way of orienting ourselves when our own experience is still fragmentary. Without that orientation, it can be difficult to know whether the scattered pieces belong together at all.

Also illuminating is James' explanation of self validation. This is not a matter of confidence in one's own opinions or experiences. Rather, it is the point at which what has been understood through the teacher's guidance becomes evident in one's own experience. The understanding is no longer borrowed. It has been, in James' words, “demonstrated from the inside out.”

Related posts

• Making the Practice Your Own
• No Big Deal

How to Interact Around Practice

In this conversation with students, Ken McLeod explains how to be helpful in conversations with others who practice. He’s very clear: don’t offer advice, interpretations, insights, or theories. Forget about telling someone else what you think is really going on with them. Instead, pay attention to your own experience and from there, ask questions that help others understand their own experience more clearly and completely.

This is wonderful advice for conversations of all kinds. How easily I forget this. All too often my conversations with friends or family are mired by my own projections—especially the desire to be perceived as wise or insightful. This is a path right into the blind alley of naming patterns, offering frameworks, or saying what I think the other person needs to hear. Such efforts may sound thoughtful, but they can move the conversation away from the one thing that might actually help: fuller contact with their own experience.

From Interacting Around Practice

Ken: Now, the reason I’m going into this in such detail, Susan, [laughs] is that, in thinking about things this way, there is the key to how you interact with other people when you’re talking about practice. When you’re interacting with other people, you don’t give them theories. You don’t tell them what you think is happening to them or in them or around them, or whatever. Your role is to help them understand their experience, period. Okay? Is to help them understand their experience.

Now, when they understand their experience—and you all know this yourselves—when you understand your experience clearly, do you know what to do?

Student: Yes.

Ken: And this is one of the points about understanding. One can formulate problems in different ways, but often a formulation of a problem doesn’t give you any information about how to resolve it. And in that case, I feel that the formulation of the problem is incomplete because it doesn’t point to anything.

And some time ago I was coaching, or doing a workshop with the legal department of a corporation. And, I’d worked with these people a few times before, and so they knew me and that was fine, and I’d interviewed everybody, and they all got along very well, and they were good in their communications. And the day of the workshop was approaching, and I was beginning to panic. What do I do? Because one of the areas I work on is communications, but they didn’t have any communications problems, nothing major. And being lawyers, they knew all about conflict already, so there’s nothing to do there. "What’s this workshop going to be about?" And I was building up to a fairly decent level of panic. And I said, “There’s something I’m missing here.” And I went through my notes and in my head all of the interviews, and then I realized that everybody had said one thing over and over again: “We have too much work and not enough time.” Oh, okay, that’s what we talk about. Now, too much work and not enough time. That’s a statement of a problem, right?

Well, those of you who have worked in a corporate environment, what can you do about the work? It just keeps coming, doesn’t it? Yeah. Okay. So nothing to be done there. What can you do about time? Anybody figured out how to get more than 24 hours in a day? No. More than seven days in a week? No. Can’t do anything about that. So this is the formulation of a problem that doesn’t point anywhere. And that’s where I started the workshop, divided them up into groups and said, “Your first challenge is to come up with three formulations of this problem that doesn’t use the word work or time.” We got three very good ones, and one of them which we could work with variously, was, “We have difficulty in establishing priorities.” And that just opened up. And so we had a great day in which we discussed how to establish priorities, what were the priorities, and led to very significant reorganization of some of the workflows and things like that.

This is what I mean about a complete formulation of the problem. That’s when you understand the problem. And when you really understand the problem, then you have a direction for a solution. This is what’s contained in the four noble truths. There is the problem, which is suffering. And then you have the genesis of the problem. And you see we’re moving to a more complete understanding right at this point, which is emotional reaction, okay? And the deepest level of emotional reaction—which is that blanking out when an experience arises—that’s ignorance, not knowing. So what’s the solution? Hmm? Oh, okay. I’ll give you the Buddhist term for the solution, but then you’ve gotta translate this into English. Nirvana! That’s a solution. [Laughs] Now, you translate it. What’s the solution?

Student: No self.

Ken: [Laughs] No.

Student: Knowing?

Ken: Knowing! Exactly. Knowing your experience completely. That’s it. So, what is the intention when you interact with each other about your practice?

Student: Each one know their own practice or know it.

Ken: Well, when you’re interacting with a person, your role is to help them know their experience completely. Yes, Janneke? [Laughs]

Janneke: And how does one accomplish that? In terms of the way you interact in terms of the questions—

Ken: Yeah, yeah. I was gonna get there [laughs], because that’s the fourth noble truth, isn’t it?

Janneke: What?

Ken: The way, exactly. It pays to learn this stuff, you know, it’s really useful [laughs]. How do you do it? Now, the reason I’m making such a big deal about the setup, is that if you have this clearly in your mind to start with, you’re going to interact with each other much more productively

Related posts

• Bringing Attention Into Action
• How Meaning Reveals Itself

Bring Your Life Into Your Practice

A question I've heard people ask over and over again is: "How do I bring my meditation practice into my life?" Ken McLeod's response is usually something like: That's the wrong question. Bringing practice into life doesn't work. Instead, bring your life into your practice. He makes this point very powerfully in this passage from the Heart Sutra Workshop, session 4:

Ken: Generally people seek how to apply these practices to their lives. I think this is very problematic. In some traditions of Buddhism anyway, there’s a very, very deep bias regarding life, and it’s entrenched in vocabulary—at least in the Tibetan tradition. You know, you have your word for meditation sessions, which is thun (pron. tun), and then you have the word for the rest of your life, which is thun mtshams (pron. tun sang), which means between meditation sessions. In other words, from this point of view, you’re only truly living when you’re meditating. And this kind of attitude has come up a lot in various groups in the West, and it creates a real tension between people’s spiritual practice and their lives. They feel, “Oh, my spiritual practice—I can’t put as much energy into it as I want because it’s going to take away time from my life.” And so it ends up with a total no-win situation. And it’s very, very destructive. So I don’t like that way of thinking at all. I prefer to think of practice in this way.

Practice is the cultivation of attention. Cultivation of attention, exercise of awareness, whatever you want. During your formal meditation periods you’re cultivating attention unmixed with other activities. During the rest of your life you’re cultivating attention mixed with activities. So when you’re walking, you walk in attention. When you speak, you speak in attention. And so forth.

Which doesn’t mean to watch every word that you say; it just means to listen to yourself speak so you hear the sound of your own voice while you are speaking. Very few people do that. They start speaking, and they stop listening to themselves. They just go on, and on, and on, and say things that they really wish they hadn’t said. If you’re listening to the sound of your own voice as if you were listening to another person, you will very rarely say something you regret. Because as soon as you start down that road, you’ll hear the difference in your voice and something will go, “Oh, I don’t think this is such a good place to go.”

So rather than think of bringing practice to life, think of bringing life into your practice. So that—how do I bring walking into my practice? How do I bring washing the dishes into my practice? How do I bring taking care of my children into my practice? And this is very important because when we think of applying practice to life we think of finding this nice calm clarity, and then we’re going to take that nice calm and clarity and bring it to life. How well does this work? As I said, the best military plans last until first contact with the enemy. If you bring your life into practice, then two things shift. One is, you have no choice but to find that calmness and clarity within the experience of life itself. You’re not gonna bring it to life, you have to find it in your experience. Which is exactly what we have to do anyway.

And the second thing is, it’s a practice. How many times have you failed to practice meditation perfectly? [Laughter]

Student: Six or seven.

Ken: Thousand? Million? [Laughter] That’s why we call it a practice because we don’t expect to succeed—we just keep trying. That’s what you do in your life: you bring your life into a practice. “Okay, I didn’t do that so hot, let me try it again.” So one tends to take a much less punishing attitude to one’s self. Which in turn creates the willingness to make further efforts. Because you don’t—how many have that harsh critic flying around in them? Yeah. So that’s the last piece I think. Take your life into your practice. And work with these tools. You will fail thousands of times. So, you’ve already failed that way in your meditation. It hasn’t stopped you from practicing meditation. You know, so you haven’t walked mindfully down the street. Well, maybe next time; maybe next time.

A passage from one of Ken's sutra sessions describes what has proved to be one of the most powerful ways of bringing life into practice for me.

As a child, I learned that interrupting adults was an effective way to get attention, and I invested a lot energy in mental rehearsals of what to say. This habit persisted into adulthood, and I learned the hard way that both habits were highly problematic! Learning to let go of thinking, in favour of listening rather than constantly preparing to say something and interrupting people to say it, has made a huge difference to my life.

Once you learn to drop into what is actually happening, you also start noticing much more about what is going on in conversations—the moments when attention drifts from listening towards rehearsing a response, and the impulse to fill every silence. You start to become very comfortable not saying anything, because the need to be someone diminishes. It’s so relaxing.

From Sutra Session 10, June 13, 2010. Unpublished.

NOTE: In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind. In these sutra sessions Ken converses informally with students about life and practice.

Ken: The big thing is, what do we do in meditation? Here we sit, and a thought comes up, and we recognize it, and go back to the breath. Right? And we do that again, and again, and again. What we're doing is practicing letting go of the thinking process. That's what we're doing.

Now, when you're having a conversation with someone, if you're like most of us, you start thinking immediately what you're going to say to them even before they finished, right? And that's what prevents people from hearing each other. They've got 20 percent of the attention going to what the other person is saying, 80 percent of it is going to: "How am I going to respond? How am I going to look good? How am I not going to offend them?" etc., etc.

That's all internal stuff, all our internal thinking. So as we meditate more and more, we just keep letting go of that, and we don't even notice that we're letting go of it. And we keep coming back, and just listening to the person. And lo and behold, we may hear what they have to say. And now it's a very different kind of dynamic. So what a lot of people find is that as they practice meditation, after about a month or two—and I get this all the time with people—I say, "How's your meditation going?"

They say, "I don't know. I don't think it's going anywhere. I don't seem to be getting anything out of it. It's just thoughts, and thoughts, and thoughts. And if there aren't thoughts, then there are feelings. It's just a big mess. I don't think I'm getting anywhere."

And I say, "Well, how's your life going?"

And they say, "Funny you should ask. Things just seem to be going more smoothly. I seem to be getting along better with everybody." And they just don't put the two things together, because it's not an obvious cause and effect kind of thing. So as you practice letting go of thinking, thinking, thinking, you may find yourself just being a bit more responsive and a bit more attuned to how things are in your life.

Related posts

• Bringing Attention Into Action
• Recognising Reactivity in Real Time

What Meditation Is For

People sometimes ask what I do on retreat, and what difference it makes to spend that much time meditating alone and in silence. Often the question feels conversational rather than an invitation to elaborate, but when someone is genuinely curious, much of what I would say is in this talk by Ken McLeod. It's the first talk from a retreat on an advanced practice—not where you might look to find the answers to such basic questions—but Ken is teaching a traditional practice from Vajrayana Buddhism to students of Zen, so he starts by introducing meditation from the Vajrayana perspective.

Ken begins with a basic meditation instruction: return to what is already there and rest. Let the body settle into attention. Let the breath breathe itself. When thoughts and feelings carry you away, as soon as you notice, return and rest in attention again. Practice is not maintaining a special state. It is this repeated returning. Ken also explains why meditation can be demanding. What is true, he says, is simple; what prevents us from knowing what is true is extraordinarily complex. We spend much of our lives moving away from experience—trying to improve it, suppress it, explain it, act it out, distract ourselves from it, or turn it into something else. Meditation begins to reveal those movements because, for a while, we stop giving ourselves so many places to go or to hide.

One of his central points is that we are robbed of attention when we are unable to experience what is arising. When a pleasant or unpleasant feeling, sensation, memory or impulse arises and we are able to remain with it, attention stays available. But if the experience feels threatening or intolerable, we recoil from it. If it feels pleasurable or desirable, we may reach for it, try to hold onto it, or merge with it. Both movements are forms of reactivity. Instead of simply experiencing what is there, attention gets pulled into anger, desire, avoidance, distraction, story, justification, suppression, grasping, or some other attempt to manage the experience. In that sense, attention has been “robbed.” Whether we experience anger, desire, jealousy, shame, sadness, or restlessness—the problem is not that these feelings appear, but rather what happens when we cannot experience them directly. We react instead. And the reaction generates another layer of experience, and then another.

Ken’s instruction is to neither analyse our feelings nor to get rid of them. He makes a sharp distinction between experiencing a feeling, suppressing it and acting it out. To experience it is to feel what is happening in the body, the emotional quality of it, and the stories and associations that accompany it, while remaining present in a wider field of awareness. As he puts it rather wonderfully, "The function of a feeling is to be felt."

Over time, this changes the relationship to what arises. Anger does not have to dictate what happens next. Sadness does not have to be escaped. Impatience does not need to be disguised as patience. Even confusion can simply be confusion. Something that seemed to require an immediate response can be experienced instead, and in that experience a little more freedom becomes possible.

This is one answer I might give to the question of what meditation does. It doesn't necessarily make life easier, but we can be in experience without being so completely governed by impulses to avoid, grasp, resist or alter it. As reactivity loosens and the repetitive thoughts and stories that sustain it begin to subside, there is more freedom in how we respond, and a sense of peace when we are no longer fighting or opposing what is.

There is another reason this talk stays with me. Ken places a particular practice from the Tibetan tradition—chö—in a much broader landscape. Some approaches work gradually: you cultivate capacities and qualities that eventually enable you to meet experience more fully. Others transform the way experience is perceived. Still others, including chö, mahamudra and dzogchen, take a more direct approach, beginning with what is already present rather than first working to develop capacities or transform experience. These gradual and direct approaches look very different, but they can be complementary: step-by-step practice can help develop our capacity to recognise and remain in what is always already here.

Perhaps that is why this teaching feels both advanced and introductory. Chö has a fascinating history. Its traditional form involves elaborate visualisations and deliberately entering situations that provoke disgust and powerful fears about death, but the principle Ken begins with requires none of this. Sit down. Let the body settle. Let the breath come and go. Notice what takes your attention. Notice the moment you come back. And instead of trying to make experience different, see what happens when you are willing to be here for it.

For someone who has never meditated, that may be as good an introduction as any I know. For those who have practised for years or decades, it's not a bad place to return to.

From: Chö: Cutting Through Demonic Obsessions, part 1

This excerpt is from the first session in Ken's chö retreat. The full talk covers much more ground including the origins of chö, working with difficult feelings, and the relationship between gradual and direct approaches to practice. I highly recommend listening to the whole session.

Ken: Now when very strong things come up, they rob us of our attention, just [falling sound] and we fall into reaction. And it’s that process that chö focuses on. How are we robbed of our attention? We are robbed of our attention because we are afraid of experiencing what is arising.

And this applies to our ordinary lives. Why do you get angry? Well, we only get angry when we feel weaker than what we are facing. If you feel stronger you don’t get angry. If you feel weaker, in the moment of anger you feel weak and fear arises that something terrible is going to happen. So there’s an eruption of energy into anger in which you try to destroy what you’re facing before it can overwhelm you.

So that’s how we’re robbed of our attention. We’re robbed of our attention because we are afraid of experiencing that uncomfortable feeling inside. And if there’s anything you take from this retreat, I’d like it to be that one understanding, that the problems that we experience in our life, which lead us into this practice in the first place, arise because we are afraid of experiencing just what is right in that moment.

So we withdraw from it, we try to change it in some way, we try to manipulate, shut it down, whatever. And that’s why we react with anger, or with desire, greed, jealousy, whatever. Once those things start they just snowball, moving things more and more out of balance.

So in your meditation practice, as I said earlier this evening, the essence of meditation is resting in what is already there. Now when we first start to practice, when we rest, what do we find is there? A mass of thoughts and confusion. Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter.

And I’ve had many people say after their first practice of meditation, “Oh, I don’t think I’m cut out for this. My mind didn’t quiet down for a moment.” Well, when I first practiced meditation, I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, I couldn’t sit for more than one minute quite literally. I had to resort to extreme measures to sit for two. That’s always the experience—don’t be afraid of that. If your mind is in complete chaos, jumble jumble all over the place, that’s what you’re experiencing right there.

So experience the chaos. Experience confusion. Or as one teacher said, “Remember, confusion is just confusion.” That’s it. You can use the breath to help you with that, that is rest with the breath and jumble, jumble, jumble. Then you come back. But just experience the confusion, don’t try and do anything with it.

That’s the first step in cutting. You cut your ideas about how it should be and how you want to be and you experience just how you are and just what is. And when you do that, then you start experiencing how the body is. All of these different sensations and discomforts and tugs and tensions in the body. That's what's there. And you'll struggle to find a more comfortable position. But there isn't one. And then you'll struggle with all kinds of ways and tricks to play on yourself to make it a pleasant experience. But it isn't.

Just forget about all of that. Again, you cut your ideas about how you think it should be and how you want it to be. And you just experience what is. And as your body becomes accustomed to the practice of sitting, you realize, "Oh, I can't just sit here."

And then you begin to find that feelings come up, unasked for, demanding your attention. And you may say, “Go away feeling, you’re disturbing my meditation.” But they don’t. They demand, they keep coming back, they want. And some people they think, “Oh this is a distraction,” so they sit, they sit very, very hard and they create a kind of quietness but it’s really blocking the feelings. And they can be very good in their practice, but as soon as they start practicing all those feelings come flooding back. And so there’s no real peace there.

What is the function of a feeling? Well, the function of a feeling is to be felt. It sounds almost trivial to say that, but when you refuse to feel a feeling, you’re denying that feeling the opportunity to fulfill its existence. And they don’t take that very lightly. They just keep coming back, because they’ll keep coming back and they’ll go into the body and do everything until you actually feel it.

So I suggest you don’t engage that whole struggle. Feeling comes up, use your breath as a base of attention if you wish, just experience it. Now experiencing it doesn’t mean getting lost in it, acting it out because acting it out is a way of not experiencing it and it certainly doesn’t mean suppressing it. You just experience it, there it is, whether it’s anger, or love, a feeling of accomplishment, jealousy, shame, inferiority, superiority. There it is. You just experience it.

Related posts

• A Key Principle in Practice
• Just Rest
• How Mind-Killing Operates

Be Easy on Yourself

I so appreciate in James Low's willingness to speak honestly about the realities of practice. I suspect that many of us will relate to his personal anecdote about feeling lonely, discouraged, and finding that meditation wasn't giving him any nurturing. He found himself arranging boiled sweets into coloured patterns. When practice feels dry, we invent endless ways to fill the space rather than simply experience what is present. But James doesn't present this as a failure. Instead, he ends with a wonderful reminder: "Don't blame yourself. Don't see yourself as having made a mistake. It's just like this." Very dzogchen as is his often repeated advice to practice the guru yoga of the three ahs.

From From Open to Life, part 18. The passage starts 55:27 minutes into the audio.

Years ago, someone came to see me in my role as a therapist, and they were a nun. The nunnery that they were in was causing some grief for this person, because they said, ‘In the nunnery, everything is controlled. So we get portions of the different kinds of food, so we don't eat too much, and so on. However, if you're sick, you're allowed to get a double portion of tahini with your breakfast. And so some of the nuns are pretending to be sick in order to get tahini.’ And she was incredibly upset. How could they be nuns and do this?

We spent quite a lot of time thinking about, if they're nuns, they don't do bad things, but they do bad things, so they can't be nuns. So what kind of nunnery is this? You go round and round and round, because you start with an assumption that nuns will be well-behaved. But some of these nuns are not well-behaved, because they want more. Why wouldn't they want more? They don't even have their hair.

‘Come on, ladies, give up your hair.’

‘At least give me my tahini.’ Fair exchange.

So you can be disturbed by anything. I did a retreat a long, long time ago. One of the first retreats I did was up in Manali, in a little shack. And every day I did my offerings, and I bought a big bag of sweets, every day putting two sweets and offering them. And after a couple of weeks, I'm looking at the bag of sweets, and I tipped it upside down, and it was like hard-boiled sweets, and they're different colors of wrappers. So I put all the blue ones in a column, all the red ones in a column, all the green ones in a column. And then I moved them around, and I made patterns. I hadn't a clue what I was doing. I was just thinking, ‘I have to do my meditation.’ And it wasn't giving me any nurturing. And I was feeling sad and lonely. Instead of thinking I'm sad and lonely, I entertained myself in this somewhat sad way, you know, slightly autistic. And that's what we do. We fill the space.

Trying to do the meditation, it wasn't going well. I lost my sense of agency. But at least I put the red sweets with the red sweets, the blue sweets with the blue sweets. So when we observe ourselves, we realise these funny things we do, just as a kind of reassurance. And these points are so important. Don't blame yourself. Don't see yourself as having made a mistake. It's just like this.

How to Read “Namtar”

This passage comes from the first talk in Ken McLeod's Learning from the Lives of Lineage Holders series, which focuses on the founders of the Shangpa Kagyu lineage. Throughout his talks on Sukhasiddhi, Niguma, and Khyungpo Naljor, Ken repeatedly returns the question of how to read namtar or spiritual biographies.

Rather than approaching namtar as history—or dismissing them because some events seem improbable—Ken encourages us to ask what they carry. Listening to the series as a whole, I found it helpful to distil his approach into five questions:

1. What freedom or transformation is this story pointing to?
2. Why might this story have been preserved?
3. What is this story telling us? What does it suggest about practice?
4. What is symbolic in this story?
5. How does this illuminate my own practice?

I've been using these questions as supports for reading David Templeman's translation of Tāranātha's The Seven Instruction Lineages. I ask what each mahasiddha story points to, and how I might work with this in my own practice. Read this way, a namtar becomes much more than an inspiring account of an extraordinary practitioner. It becomes a living practice instruction, a way to discover the freedom they were preserved to reveal.

From Sukhasiddhi: A Doorway to Awakening

Ken McLeod: I’m going to take various stories from various teachers’ lives, but I want you to think about them quite deeply, because most of the incidents that are recorded, while they may have actually happened, that’s not why they’ve come down to us today.

They’ve come down to us through the centuries because there’s something in what the record is. And one of the things that I think is very important for us is to be able to read or hear these stories and understand what they carry—and not only understand what they carry, but also know how to work with that in our own practice and in our own lives.

Related posts

• Niguma’s Wishes
• Two Temptations
• The Activity of Awakened Mind
• Why I Read Namtars by Daniel Goleman.

The Dream We Call the External World

One of the mind training instructions is “Regard everything as a dream.”

In this passage from Wake Up to Your Life, Ken McLeod clarifies what this means, and how it relates to daily life. He begins with the reminder that we can not share experience. We can describe it to others, but the only world we can actually know is the one that appears in our own field of awareness.

From there, the instruction opens up naturally. It’s not asking us to believe that the world is unreal, or encouraging indifference or detachment. It’s reminding us to be present to what is right here right now: sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes and thoughts.

Seen this way, “regard everything as a dream” becomes a practical instruction telling us to stop projecting solidity onto what arises and reacting to those projections.

Rather than stripping away its mystery Ken has made one of the most enigmatic mind training instructions seem even more magical.

From Wake Up To Your Life, p. 339

What you experience is yours and yours alone. No one else can experience exactly what you do. Even when you express what you experience in poetry, painting, or writing, no one experiences what you experienced. The experiences elicited in them by the poetry are their experiences, not the experience that originally inspired you.

To help us awaken from the enchantment of the abstraction we call the external world, Buddhism applies a bit of common sense and calls the external world what it is—an enchantment, a dream.

The raw materials of the so-called external world are the sensory experiences that arise in awareness. To undo the obsession with the apparent reality of the external world, use the mind-training teaching

Regard everything as a dream.

When you dream, buildings, people, trees, and animals arise vividly. During the dream, you take the buildings and people to be real; that is, you regard them as an external world in which you move around. When you wake up, however, you know that the buildings and people are simply experiences that arose in the dream.

By carrying the idea that everything you experience in your waking life is like a dream, you undermine the conditioned tendency to project an external reality onto sensory experiences. In effect, you move into a more intimate relationship with sensory experience. Your experience of sensations becomes clearer and more vivid, and you are less likely to project emotional reactions onto them.

This instruction is often interpreted to mean that we should not care so much about what happens and not take things so seriously—a dangerous misinterpretation. When we regard everything that arises as a dream, we actually pay more attention to what we are experiencing and how that experience is arising. Instead of automatically interpreting sensory experience as independent objects, we perceive sensory experience for what it is—sensory experience, neither more nor less.

Habitually, we regard awareness and sensory experience as separate and different, but sensory experience cannot be separated from awareness. By cutting through the sense of separation with the instruction “everything is a dream,” we cut through the conditioning, interpretation, and reactivity that are ordinarily set in motion.

---

---

It's a dangerous business breaking enchantments. When you wake up from the dream you've been living in, there's no telling what you will do. No telling at all.

Mind you, there's no telling what you will do in your next dream, either.

—Ken McLeod, reading from An Arrow to the Heart

Always Already

Some time ago I came across the phrase always already in Adyashanti's book The Direct Way. His frequent repetition of the phrase and the specific order of the words intrigued me. Then I heard James Low use exactly the same phrase again and again in several of his retreat series.

For example, in Open to Life (2025) James says:

You cannot free yourself because you are already free. How will you free the free? The effort to free the always already free is what binds you.

Part 19, 18:02

We are always already in our life. We're already always in whatever's arising. We don't come into our life. We don't come into our experience. We emerge as part of the experience, and therefore we take our place.

Part 18, 09:56

We are on a pilgrimage from here and now, to here and now. We have always already arrived, but because we are wobbly, we are always leaving, and then we have to arrive, and then we have to leave. So the issue is about stabilisation, of relaxation and just being here, but if you rely on anything external, it will be difficult.

Part 17, 12:08

My search image primed, I began encountering it elsewhere too. What seemed like an unusual turn of phrase had entered the vocabulary of several contemporary teachers. The more I encountered always already, the more significant and alive it seemed, as though the phrase itself was arising to show me something.

Eventually I became curious about its origins. The expression appears to have entered English through twentieth-century philosophy, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger. Always already is an English translation of his original German phrase immer schon. Yet the insight it points to is far older. Long before Heidegger spoke of what is always already, teachers in Eastern spiritual traditions were pointing to the same recognition in different language.

Much of ordinary life is organised around acquisition and achievement. We learn skills. We accumulate knowledge. We improve ourselves. It is hardly surprising that we bring the same assumptions to spiritual practice. We imagine that with enough meditation, enough retreats, enough insight, or enough devotion we will eventually achieve awakening. We sit. We cultivate attention. We learn to recognise the habits that draw us back into confusion. Practice matters. It may make it easier to recognise what has never actually been absent.

Gradually, I began to intuit why the words appear in that order. Awareness isn't simply already present now, as though it had arrived a moment before. It has always been so. It has never not been the case. The phrase points not just to presence, but to timeless presence.

Not someday. Not after enough effort. Not when conditions are perfect. Always already.

Understanding this conceptually is one thing. Living it is something else entirely. We expect awakening to arrive as something dramatic or special. Yet teachers keep pointing in the opposite direction—towards what is so close, so ordinary and so intimate that it is easily overlooked.

Too close — you don’t see it.
Too deep — you don’t fathom it.
Too simple — you don’t believe it.
Too fine — you don’t accept it.

The Four Faults of Awareness, Shangpa Kagyu, translated by Ken McLeod.

Always already has become a kind of personal pointing out instruction. Whenever I hear or see the phrase, it reminds me to stop trying to get somewhere else. It reminds me to relax, and to recognise what is always already here.

Related posts

• Truth or Experience?
• How to Look

Freedom from Conventional Notions of Success and Failure

There are joys, too, the joy of freedom from conventional notions of success and failure… the joy that arises naturally when there is no separation between you and what you experience.
—Ken McLeod, Musings, Where Practice Takes You

A friend recently spoke about a book that changed her life. Reading W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor’s Edge as a young woman in the 1960s, she discovered the possibility that life need not be organised around the social expectations of her family and culture. Taking this path did indeed lead to feeling like she lived on a razor's edge.

On her recommendation I read the novel for the first time. Although written more than eighty years ago, how prescient it feels. Many of the attitudes and aspirations Maugham portrays so poignantly have become deeply embedded in many cultures. The questions behind the novel seem even more relevant and urgent now than when Maugham first asked them.

Set in the years following the First World War, The Razor’s Edge follows Larry Darrell, a young American pilot whose war experiences lead him to ask profound questions about the meaning and purpose of life. Returning home, he is expected to marry Isabel Bradley, pursue a successful career, and take his place within the prosperous American upper-middle class. Instead, he finds himself uninterested in the pursuit of wealth, status, security, and comfort. He cannot fully explain what is calling him, only that he must discover this for himself.

Larry’s decisions bewilder those around him. Isabel loves him deeply but cannot imagine a future without financial security and social standing. Willing to give him the pricacy of time and space, she meets him in Paris two years after he begins his search, and realises that his search has barely begun and commitment to it has not changed. After she and Larry end their engagement, he wanders through Europe, studying philosophy and religion while supporting himself as a manual labourer. His actions don't feel like a rebellion against society so much as a response to an irresistible need to know.

Larry eventually travels to India, studies with a spiritual teacher, and experiences a profound shift in understanding—discovering an inner freedom and contentment that doesn't depend on external circumstances. He returns to America, not as a guru or a social reformer, but to a simple life ungoverned by ambition, attachment, or the need for recognition. Throughout Maugham's novel he stands in contrast to the other main characters, whose lives revolve around wealth, romance, reputation, or social prestige. Isabel remains imprisoned by the choices she has made; her uncle, Elliott Templeton by his obsession with status; and her friend Sophie MacDonald is overwhelmed by grief and addiction. Larry alone appears genuinely at ease. His choices suggest that he awakened to a different way of inhabiting the world and meeting daily experience.

When The Razor’s Edge appeared in 1944, it anticipated a growing hunger that would emerge more fully in the 1950s and 1960s. Alongside books such as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Allan Watt's The Way of Zen, it introduced many Western readers to a different understanding of what it means to live well. The relevance of The Razor's Edge has only deepened. In the decades since it was written, humanity has achieved unprecedented levels of material prosperity, technological innovation and consumer choice, hand in hand with severe ecological degradation, seemingly intractable social and political conflict, increasing loneliness, anxiety, and a widespread sense of disconnection. Against this backdrop, Larry Darrell’s choice to live without concern for conventional notions of success feels more relevant than ever. The Razor’s Edge endures both as a portrait of our materialistic and transactional age, and because it asks a question that feels increasingly relevant: if comfort, consumption, and achievment cannot satisfy our deepest longings, what kind of life can?

Related posts

• A Simplicity That Costs Everything
• Looking for Truth
• The Rocky Path of Not Knowing
• Truth or Experience?

What is Compassion?

Marinating in these two passages on compassion from Ken McLeod and James Low because I really want to take this in very deeply.

Compassion is the difference between a faith that opens you to what life brings and beliefs that force you to close down to protect what you cannot or will not question. Compassion enables you to accept and appreciate the experience of those with whom you have differences. In difficult situations, it leads you to find a way that meets the vital interests of all concerned when possible and to minimize the pain when that is not possible. Compassion puts you directly in touch with the human condition. It cuts through beliefs. It goes straight to the heart.

From Compassion, Culture, and Belief, by Ken McLeod.

From Open to Life, part 15.

James is teaching from the dzogchen text Uncovering the Mother of All Buddhas, by Gonpo Wangyal. The passage below starts 33:22 minutes into the audio.

James Low: When we see, ‘My thoughts are the radiance of emptiness.’ They have this formation, but it doesn't establish anything. But when you decide someone is an enemy of the people, the conclusion becomes radical and enacted.

So when we look at texts like this, it doesn't say much about compassion, it doesn't say much about helping other people, it doesn't say much about ethics, because that is inherent in non-duality. If you stay with the co-emergence, if you start with the openness, the welcome, the reception, and you respond into that, you're responding to the vitality of a living presence of somebody who is alive with you.

In ordinary language you might call that intersubjectivity, but it's not really subject, but it gives a sense of it, a pulsation between us. And because I feel you as alive and changing and moving, I can't catch you. I can't catch you. And if I can't catch you, that is the basis of ethics, because I'm not defining you. I have to be with you, because I don't know how you're going to be, so I have to be with you in a receptive way, so that my sense of you is being altered as you reveal more and more of yourself. Now that brings us into quite an ethical proximity, I would suggest.

And then compassion is, fundamentally, not to freeze the other, not to define the other, not to make the other equal what I say the other is, that I've caught you inside my concept. So when we shake loose of that, I don't know who you are, but I'm happy to try to relate to you, to stay with you as you reveal more of yourself. So we're in a process of mutual unfolding, mutual revelation. So that would be compassion from this point of view. It's not addressed very much. It's not like thinking, may all beings be happy, which is a lovely thought, but there's no methodology in it.

How do we make people happy? By not freezing them, by not defining them, by allowing them to breathe and express themselves and be responsive.

Related posts

• No Enemy, No Separation
• The Rocky Path of Not Knowing
• No Dos or Don’ts in a Burning World

Making the Practice Your Own

From A Trackless Path I 13, Ken McLeod

Ken: And what I found is that at some point—and for most people this is after five to eight years of practice, though there’s often another wave around ten to fifteen years of practice when it’s usually deeper and more painful—people who have been trained that way find themselves struggling with the transition, which I like to call making the practice their own.

And it’s a difficult transition because around that period they’re beginning to feel the divergence between what their heart is seeking and this system of practice. And it’s very uncomfortable because they feel that by listening to their heart they’re in some sense either checking out or even betraying the way that they have been trained. And because there are often very significant emotional ties both to teachers and colleagues as well as, frequently, to the material itself, to the scriptures and texts, this questioning initially is usually engaged very, very tentatively, with considerable trepidation. And for good reason. Not infrequently the way many of these organizations and institutions function is that when one raises certain kinds of questions unless one has a really very, very good mentor—and they do exist, fortunately—but in many cases you start asking questions that aren’t customarily asked, and one finds one’s relationship with the whole system changing, sometimes extremely rapidly, which comes as a shock. Sometimes slowly, but you just find yourself being eased out in some way. And for reasons you can’t really figure out because “I was just talking about these questions.”

And now as I said this isn’t universally the case because there are some teachers who really are very familiar with this and are able to provide the right kind of guidance and support through such a transition. And if you happen to have contact with one of those, somebody like that, then treasure them because they’re really wonderful.

But what I’ve come across frequently is people who’ve found themselves outside the tradition of their training, not quite sure how they got there. And at the same time dealing with sometimes quite deep feelings of having betrayed something, but they’re not quite sure what. Or having violated something but they’re not quite sure what. And most of the people I’ve encountered, and I’ve worked with quite a few in this, they haven’t betrayed anything. They haven’t violated anything. What has happened is that they started listening to their own spiritual questions. And they frequently start letting go of certain practices and forming a relationship with particular ones that really mean something to them. Or they may go in quite different directions for a while. But now they’re really engaging in their own spiritual search. And it wouldn’t be incorrect to regard that first phase of their path as learning a lot of stuff, developing a lot of skills, developing abilities which now makes it possible for them to do this more individual search and questioning.

It’s very unpredictable but usually it’s probably over a two to four-year period, there’s a letting go of a lot of assumptions and ideas and tacit understandings, which were part of the institutional setting. And they’re replaced by something that is personally more vital, more visceral, and in many respects, more alive. And alive because there’s a different level of personal engagement. And this is where one moves out of the manufacturing process or a systematic process of, “Do this practice and then this one, and then this one,” into a much more exploratory way of practicing. And it’s important then for the person to be able to find the resources that they’re going to need. And in this process they’re going to re-examine almost everything that they’ve done. And in that process some stuff will fall away as not relevant, and other stuff, as I’ve said before, will take on a renewed vitality, or actually a new vitality.

Now if you look at the lives of most of the great teachers this is exactly what has happened. And it’s often buried in flowery language in the biographies. But most of the really great teachers, the ones who are regarded as holding the tradition, came to that position by doing very untraditional things. Milarepa who is revered in all of the different schools started off by killing 37 people. And it’s not exactly a traditional spiritual path.

Here Ken describes shifts that can occur in waves. You begin to sense a divergence between what your heart seeks and the form your practice has taken. While this can be unsettling and may feel like disloyalty, Ken offers reassurance that this may be sign of engaging the path more deeply because the years spent learning, practising, and trusting a tradition have honed the discernment needed to listen to your own spiritual questions.

When I heard this passage, I could sense this at play in my own life. My first teachers gave me immense gifts. They explained the Dharma, introduced practice forms, and opened the door to the living tradition. A pilgrimage to Tibet and meeting Lama Achuk at Yachen Gar helped me understand that dharma is my life. Yet, once home again, I found myself longing to hear teachings expressed directly in English. Over the long period that followed, I experienced difficult feelings of traitorousness and uncertainty. Eventually the search led to Ken, and he helped me navigate the transition. From the start, he encouraged me to trust my own experience.

Over the years this has continued to unfold in unpredictable ways. The sailboat of practice has passed through storms and languished in becalmed waters before catching the wind once more. And recently I've found myself deep in a second wave of making practice my own.

"So, Ānanda, you should all live with yourselves as your island, yourselves as your refuge, with no other as your refuge; with the Dhamma as your island, the Dhamma as your refuge, with no other as your refuge."

—Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (DN 16), §2.26, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Dhammatalks.org

Related resources

• Working with the Unfettered Mind Website
• Reality is the Best Teacher
• Looking for the Missing Piece
• Trust You Will Ripen
• Two Temptations

Trust You Will Ripen

For me, solo retreats nourish and energise practice in daily life. This year, while preparing, I listened again to Ken’s instructions on the sky-gazing practice.

From A Trackless Path II 14, Ken McLeod

Ken: There are a number of teachings in various traditions on sky-gazing but the one that I’ve been exposed to and feels most complete is one from the Dzogchen tradition in which there are three skies, just to make it complicated. The practice consists of sitting or lying down in a location where ideally all you have is sky in front of you. There were caves that were carefully constructed in Tibet on the sides of mountains so that when you sat in them if you sat in a certain position you saw nothing but sky. There was no other reference point whatsoever.

...

And then you quite literally look at the sky. Now as Tilopa says, “When you look at space, seeing stops. When you look at mind, thinking stops.” It is important to look at the sky, or to put it slightly differently, to look into the sky. So you’re actually looking. You’re not just letting your eyes go into soft focus because there’s nothing to look at. When you do that you actually become passive and probably move in a somewhat dull direction. The looking is active.

And the first sky is what we ordinarily call “sky”; it’s an infinite expanse of blue in front of us. And you look at that or into it. And just because the way the eyes are constructed there will be pixelation, and variation in shades and so forth you know. Pay no attention to all of that, that’s just stuff, and look. If the looking is active you’ll find a couple of things. In the beginning you probably won’t be able to do it for very long ’cause the intensity, the clarity is a little overwhelming, and you just find you’re sort of short-circuiting. But as you do it again and again you’ll build up more capacity. And as you look with that active looking you find it is actually difficult to hold any train of thought. I should mention one other thing on the practical side, at this altitude wear sunblock.

...

So there’s that active looking into the sky. And as you engage that and increase your capacity to hold that gaze into the sky—very hard to hold together the ordinary train of thinking—it just keeps disintegrating. Which of course is part of the purpose of this practice. And you find you’re beginning to experience calm-abiding, shamatha, just resting. But it’s got a little more juice than shamatha and meditation because you’re opening to the sky, and there’s just all that energy of the light coming in filling your whole mind and being with light and energy. So it’s quite a powerful practice.

And as your mind, or the thinking process, crumbles and disintegrates—and it doesn’t do this immediately so don’t get your hopes up—you find, speaking technically, the sensory consciousnesses become less and less dominant in one’s experience. That’s the five associated with the senses except the one for seeing, of course, and the mental consciousness, which is associated with thought. And you’ll find that the seventh consciousness, the emotional mind, which is what I like to call it, also subsides. And you’ll find yourself resting without much sense of “I.”

And basically what’s happening here is that you’re experiencing basis-of-everything consciousness. Sanskrit term for that is alaya-vijñāna. Now in basis-of-everything consciousness there is no explicit sense of “I” or “other” but it is not beyond duality. There’s no explicit sense of I or other, and as Dezhung Rinpoche explained to me, it’s clear, empty, and ineffective. And for those of you who want the Tibetan for ineffective it's lung ma bstan (pron. lung ma ten).

...

Carolyn: It’s interesting that that’s lung ma bstan because that’s the dullness in meditation too.

Ken: Sure, yeah. It’s as Dezhung Rinpoche would say, stong gsal lung ma bstan (pron. tong sal lung ma ten). lung ma bstan is often translated as neutral but there’s no juice to it, that’s the idea. Now, this is a little bit of an aside, but particularly in reference to Carolyn’s comment, it’s important. There are countless meditators over the centuries who mistake resting in alaya-vijñāna for enlightenment and it’s not.

Again Dezhung Rinpoche explained this when he was giving us mahamudra instruction: it’s empty, clear, and ineffective. No juice—however you want to describe that to yourselves. It’s like a block of ice. And alaya-vijñāna to buddha mind is like ice to water. That is, ice is clear, can see right through it, you don’t know it’s there, and it can’t do anything because it’s a block of ice. And when you rest in it, bringing active attention into it, basically the ice melts. And then you have empty, clear, unrestricted experience. And the lung ma bstan, the ineffective becomes unrestricted. So it becomes very, very alive.

Having no mental imagery or experience of "hearing" thoughts, my mind is naturally rather quiet. Rather than a flow of thoughts I experience a stream of sensations and feelings punctuated by silent thoughts. Looking into the sky dissolves the sense of I and other, and each time I do the practice, I recall Ken's often repeated advice: “Don’t work at practice, let practice work on you,” and also a line from T. S. Eliot that he often quotes: “The rest is not our business.”

James Low sums it up like this:

From Open to Life 8

James: If we're not ripe, it's not going to work.

...

So how do we become ripe? How do we become? Well, when we want things to ripen, it's better if they can ripen on the tree, and when the tree is rooted. So we root ourselves in the source, in the ground, in the openness, and we resource ourselves by exposure to the ripening forces, the warmth of engaging in the world, blowing with the wind of circumstances, absorbing the rain of the confusion which can flow on to us very easily, and gradually we ripen. Don't force it. Trust you will ripen. Everybody has buddha nature, everybody has buddha potential, but you have your unique individual story, and your path will not be like anyone else's.

In Open to Life 7 and many other retreat recordings, James also teaches a practice that doesn't depend on an unrestricted view of the sky. It's called the guru yoga of the three ah.

Related posts

• Just Rest
• No Big Deal
• Getting Black and Blue: Learning to Rest in Awareness

Reality is the Best Teacher

A crucial task for you as a student is to be clear about your own intention. If you don’t clearly understand what you are looking for in a teacher or in internal work, you will inevitably accept someone else’s agenda as your own. While you may start internal transformative work on the suggestion or advice of another person, at some point your practice has to become a response to your own questions about life and being. Your own suffering, however it manifests, is the basis and motivation for your practice. To lose sight of it is to lose connection with your reason for practicing. Another person's experience can never answer your own questions. You have to know what you want from your practice. Then you can know what you want in a teacher.

From “The Mystery of Being,” p. 12, in Wake Up To Your Life by Ken McLeod

From time to time, friends talk about a workshop they've attended, a healing modality they've discovered, a new spiritual teacher they've encountered, or a framework that has helped them make sense of their lives. As culture evolves, so do our interests, and the way we talk about them. Lately I've noticed a shift in emphasis. These days, the framing is rarely about becoming your best self or manifesting the life you desire. Today's theme seems to be healing: healing trauma, healing old wounds, healing relationships, healing the self. Underlying much of this language is a wish to feel more whole, more understood, or more at ease.

The Buddhist tradition shares some of those concerns, and also points in a rather different direction. A central question is not how to become a better self, but how to see through the assumptions that make the self seem so solid and separate. I've sometimes wondered what, if anything, to say about this difference.

“How can I feel better about myself?” is a very different question from, “Who or what is this sense of self that I spend so much energy protecting?”

The first question seeks improvement. The second points in a different direction altogether. Many spiritual conversations never seem to reach that second question. They remain focused on managing experience, reducing discomfort, making sense of life, or cultivating a more satisfying identity. There is nothing wrong with these pursuits, and indeed, they may be necessary.

Practice often begins with these very practical concerns. In my case the concern was anger and the suffering it created. I was looking for improvement, for a way to live differently. Over time, however, the question that brought me to practice gave way to other questions.

When I first read this passage from Wake Up To Your Life, I took Ken's words mainly as advice about teachers and spiritual groups. Increasingly, I hear them differently. They point to a simple fact: no one else can give us the questions that matter. Those questions emerge from our own lives, our own disappointments, our own encounters with uncertainty, loss, beauty, love, and death. Reality is the best teacher.

So these days, when friends talk about their spiritual paths, I mostly listen.

Related posts

• Don't Miss the Point
• Bringing Attention Into Action

Looking for the Missing Piece

From Aspirations for Mahamudra, commentary on verse 19 by Ken McLeod

One day shortly after the three-year retreat ended, I went to Kalu Rinpoche for instruction in dzogchen. I had asked for the instruction because, frankly, I thought I might be missing something.

Rinpoche picked up a piece of paper from a pile of pages in front of him and read a pointing-out instruction to me. “Sounds like mahamudra to me,” he said.

He then picked up another piece of paper and read another instruction. “Hmmm, that sounds like mahamudra, too.” Another piece of paper elicited, “That sounds like dzogchen, no?”

I was familiar with almost all the instructions from my studies during the three-year retreat, and began to say so. Rinpoche ignored me and continued to read, mahamudra, dzogchen, dzogchen, mahamudra, back and forth—for half an hour or more.

Eventually he stopped, looked at me, and asked, “Do you understand?”

At the end of his commentary on verse 19, Ken shares this anecdote, which begins with a very familiar anxiety: “I might be missing something.” Shortly after completing the three-year retreat, he still wonders whether there is some crucial instruction, some hidden distinction, some deeper level that he has not yet received.

I find myself relating to this very strongly. Over the years, again and again I've had the feeling that somewhere there might be instructions that would work like a Rosetta Stone, decoding or illuminating experiences that don’t sit comfortably within descriptions of effects and results of practice, and releasing deep reactive patterns that keep reemerging. I've explored more than one ultimately fruitless rabbit hole searching for such keys. Then, through pure serendipity, I encountered Ken's anecdote.

Kalu Rinpoche’s response is wonderfully indirect. He doesn’t answer Ken’s question. He doesn’t explain the relationship between mahamudra and dzogchen or offer a philosophical comparison. Instead, he keeps reading instruction after instruction, refusing to let Ken settle into categories. Mahamudra. Dzogchen. Dzogchen. Mahamudra. Back and forth until the distinctions begin to lose their solidity. It feels as though Rinpoche is responding to Ken’s search for certainty by wearing out the mind that wants to classify, compare, conclude, and know the answer.

This anecdote touched a very tender place. Ken wanted to be sure he hadn't missed anything. I recognised that impulse immediately. My version of it has been, “I want to find a teaching or a practice that provides the missing piece.”

Ken comments that he is familiar with the instructions Rinpoche is reading. His frustration is palpable; he can distinguish one set of instructions from another. But Kalu Rinpoche seems to be pointing to something else. When he finally asks, “Do you understand?” it's not a test of knowledge. It's invitation to stop looking elsewhere. Searching for the perfect map is the very thing obscuring the territory.

Ken doesn't reveal how he answered, and Rinpoche’s question is left hanging in the air. Do we understand? Not the difference between mahamudra and dzogchen, but the nature of the doubt that keeps asking whether there is something else, somewhere else, that we still need to find or acquire.

Related posts

• Don’t Miss the Point
• Bringing Attention Into Action

Luminosity is Not a Light Show

Teachers do their best to convey what cannot be expressed in words, but the words can still get in the way. References to the luminosity of mind have always puzzled me, but Ken McLeod’s explanation in this class on the Ganges Mahamudra helped me "get" what this points to. Luminosity is not a light show. As Ken put it, "There's a clarity which arises as a knowing," and "It's the knowing quality that's always there in every experience. Scroll down to read or listen to the whole passage.

In Your Mind is Mahamudra: Tilopa’s Meditation Advice, James Low explains luminosity like this:

I have now been talking for about 30 minutes. You now have some sense of how I speak and what I say. You might think, 'Whoa, James is a bit strange.' You think 'He is like this.' That is how you gradually develop an image of who James is. How does your image of James compare with James's own perception of himself? Which is more accurate? Perhaps yours. Maybe I am completely deluded.

We don't know because the content of the mind is shifting and changing. In mahamudra, therefore, we do not focus on trying to correct, shape or organise the content of our experience. Instead, we relax and open to the ground basis of experience: the mind itself, which is simply basic knowing or illuminating. This is the sphere in which the luminosity of inner experience and the ceaseless movement of outer experience are perceived.

I am sitting here. I am aware of a sensation in my throat that you are not aware of. This sensation is mine. The sensation in my body is mine alone. You can't access it directly. Even if you were a doctor, you would still have to ask me how my throat feels. You have your memories, plans, hopes and fears. This is the inner content of the mind. Nowadays, this is often described as 'luminosity' in the translation of Tibetan texts, because it is the arising of an experience within the mind.

From Ganges Mahamudra 2

Ken: What would it be like to have such familiarity with that empty, knowing quality of our experience that we could just experience everything and know that it was all just experience? What would it be like to live that way? This is really what we're pointing to. So we come back here:

Space has no color or shape.
It does not change.

And as I said, and it's a highly non-trivial point, because there is nothing there to change.

It does not take on a color, either black or white.
Likewise, your own mind, in essence, has no color or shape.
It does not change because you do good or evil.

So how many of you have a negative self-image? Hands up. Come on, let's be honest here. About half the class. How many of you have a positive self-image? A few. Okay. So you've got no basis for either of them. Well, there isn't any thing there.

The darkness of a thousand eons cannot dim the brilliant radiance that is the essence of the sun.

"The darkness of a thousand eons cannot dim the brilliant radiance that is the essence of the sun." A thousand eons, that's a very long time.

Let's take a more concrete example. Let's take a tomb, which was constructed a few centuries ago. And there's been absolutely no light in the tomb. And you find yourself—like Indiana Jones through a very intricate set of tunnels—in this room. And there hasn't been any light in this room for centuries. And you turn on your cell phone. You light a match or whatever. How long does it take for that darkness to be dispelled?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Where there's light, there's light. That's it.

Likewise, eons of samsara

For samsara, you can read, "habituated patterned existence." You can say your whole life. Okay.

Cannot dim the sheer clarity that is the essence of your own mind.

Now, the term in Tibetan is ’od gsal (pron: ösel). I can't remember what it is in Sanskrit. It's often translated as clear light. It's also translated as luminosity, or pellucidness, or various obscure words. Clear light, which is a literal translation of the Tibetan ’od gsal, is not inaccurate, but it does have the idea that there's some kind of light. Right?

And so, how many of you seek some kind of brilliant light experience in your meditation? Or you think that's what should happen, like the world should dissolve into light. I had a student who was saying, "You know, I'm just waiting for the blue flash of light. It's like a KMart special."

That's not what sheer clarity refers to.

Once again, look at your mind, or we could say, look at your experience, because they're not different. Now, when you look, as we've discussed earlier, you see nothing. But if I asked you, "Is that an experience of blankness?" what would you say? Anybody? Nava, your turn.

Nava: I'd say no, it's not an experience of blackness.

Ken: Blankness, or blackness. Okay, say more. And I know this is difficult to describe.

Nava: First of all, it changed the course of whatever happened before for me. Something stops, and there is movement.

Ken: So, what knows this? [Pause]

Now, right there, there's something which we can't put into words, but that is what the words "sheer clarity" are pointing to. There's a clarity which arises as a knowing, it arises as experience, but—and I don't know really how to put this into words myself either—but it's not blank.

So, when I ask Nava here, what knows this? And I've asked you this with respect to others. What knows this? Well, there is the experience of knowing. There is the experience of being aware. Everybody with me on that one? Okay.

That's what the sheer clarity—I chose the word "sheer" rather than say "clear light," because when we talk about a sheer cliff, it just goes shoom, and it just drops straight down. And so I used the word "sheer" to get at the nothing-to-it quality. And yet, that knowing's there, even though there's nothing to it. Does this fit with your experience? Yeah.

Now, it's a very subtle thing, and it's always there. Even when you're experiencing really turgid dullness in your meditation, where the mind just seems like completely black, all you have to do is ask, "What knows this?" and it's there.

That's what the sheer clarity is pointing to. And we've been emphasizing up to this point the space-like quality, but there's also this—radiant is almost too strong a word because you have this idea there should be something shining out of it. And as one's relationship deepens—and that can be brought out in various ways—it can, as you know it more and more clearly, have a radiant quality to it. But it's not like bright lights going off and wiping everything out. It's the knowing quality that's always there in every experience. Does that help?

And here is Kalu Rinooche's wonderful explanation:

Another aspect of the nature of mind is its luminosity. Normally we think of this term in a visual sense. We think of a luminous body like the sun or the moon which shines and gives off light. However, this is merely a metaphor to give us some idea of what is being hinted at. To say that the mind is luminous in nature is analogous to saying that space is illuminated. … This is not a visual experience per se, but the ability of mind to know, perceive and experience.

We may utilize a metaphor here. The emptiness of mind is the ocean; the luminosity of mind is the sunlit ocean; and the impeded dynamic quality of mind is the waves of the sunlit ocean. When we take the waves of the sunlit ocean as an event or situation, it is not as though we are trying to separate ocean from waves from sunlight; they are three aspects of a single experience. The unity of these three aspects forms the seed or potential for enlightenment. They are the pure nature of mind; the impurity of obscurations , ignorance and confusion overlays what is inherently the nature of mind itself.

—His Eminence Kalu Rinpoche, recognised as the activity emanation of the great Jamgon Kongtrul, author of The Five Great Treasuries.

Related posts

• No Enemy, No Separation
• A Key Principle in Practice

How to Look

From Aspirations for Mahamudra:

Look at objects and there is no object: one sees mind;
Look at mind and there is no mind: it is empty of nature;
Look at both of these and dualistic clinging subsides on its own.
May I know sheer clarity, the way mind is.

Here are instructions from three teachers on how to look at mind. This is gold.

From How to Look at the Mind, Donna McLaughlin

Be with the spaciousness of the sky.

Can you find where the sky begins or ends?

If anything appears in the sky leave it alone the way the sky does.

If something appears in the sky, does it leave a solid imprint on the sky?

Do the appearances leave a solid imprint?

Do the objects do anything to the sky to change it or affect it?

Rest like the sky, open to whatever appears.

From The View and Practice of Trekchö, Part 17, James Low

The passage below starts 3:50 minutes into the audio.

The mind and the content of the mind are not things to be put on different shelves. When you have the mind, you have the content of the mind. Thoughts and feelings are not the problem. They're not something to be got rid of. They are how the mind shows itself. So what is the mind? Then we have to look again and again.

Where do we look? We look at the thought, we look at the feeling, at the sensation. But when I say we look at it, again it's not looking at it like something there. It's looking at it by being present with it.

So we're sitting in the practice. Something is occurring. We're there. What are we there as? We're aware. What is this awareness? It's not consciousness making sense of something, interpreting it, telling a narrative, a cognitive analysis of it. It's just registering or showing the way the mirror shows the reflection of what's inside it.

Awareness shows the content, but the awareness is not a thing. You can't pull it out from the thought. You can pull attention out from the thought.

If you keep getting caught up in thoughts, you can gently grasp your attention and bring it back. In Tibetan it's called dremba, which means like a memory or recollection. In Pali and Sanskrit it's sati.

Sati is the basis for the modern notion of mindfulness. When you're mindful, it means you have a recollection, a re-collecting of yourself moment by moment in the face of the tendency to merge in whatever is occurring. So the Satipatthana Sutra is describing how through attention to the body and the breath and so on, again and again there is the risk of being caught up, merged in what is going on.

And you call yourself back to where you always have been.

From Ganges Mahamudra 2, Ken McLeod

What Tilopa moves to now is: how do you cultivate? How do you create the conditions in your own life so that that possibility grows, evolves, and becomes more and more how you experience things. He says:

Stop all physical activity.

Stop running around.

Sit naturally at ease.

And people would work very, very hard at training their bodies, so they could sit absolutely at ease. It’s not that easy, for many people, you know. You can’t just sit and just let the body be quiet. We always have to be doing something.

Do not talk or speak: let sound be empty, like an echo.

Now, when people say something, we think, “Oh, what did they say?” But when we hear an echo, we don’t pay any attention, it’s just, “Oh, that was …,” like that. So, the way to relate here is to learn to relate to all sound as an echo. So it doesn’t stimulate a reaction in you.

Do not think about anything: look beyond experience.

That’s basically what I’ve been trying to show you how to do most of this evening. And the versification here is rather arbitrary, one could move lines around, because Tilopa now shifts again. When you do these three things: you stop all physical activity, you sit naturally at ease, you stop talking and just let sound be empty, like an echo, you stop thinking about things. Thoughts may come, but you stop thinking about things. And you look beyond experience, that looking quality which we’ve been engaging again and again tonight.

And going a little further, you can say, you learn how to rest, and in that resting you look. And as you develop that ability to look, then you learn how to rest in the looking. So, you look in the resting, and rest in the looking. That’s probably one of the best formulations of mahamudra practice I’ve found yet. It comes from a book called Clarifying the Natural State. Look in the resting, rest in the looking.

When you do this, then you’ll start to experience things like this:

Your body has no core, hollow like a bamboo.

Now, this isn’t a statement of fact, it’s a description of experience. And so you sit, and now you experience, “Oh, my body’s there, but there’s nothing to it.” And that is how you experience the body when the mind rests.

Your mind is beyond thought, open like space.

And several of you touched into that this evening. So, when you start to experience things that way:

Let go of control and rest right there.

That’s the hard part for a lot of us. Because, “Oh, I want to hold on to this.” Well, sorry, but you just started trying to control your experience. Or “I want to go a little deeper.” Uh, you just tried to control your experience.

So what this kind of meditation consists of is moving in and resting. And all the stuff: “I want this! I want that! I want more of this!” and things like that. You gotta just keep letting that go, as it arises.

Let go of control and rest right there.
Mind without reference is mahamudra.

And we could equally say, experience without reference is mahamudra.

Instill this deeply and supreme awakening results.

Related posts

• No Big Deal
• Just Rest
• Getting Black and Blue: Learning to Rest in Awareness