The habit of looking for something solid to hold onto, something to take comfort in—a final account of how things really are—is deeply seductive. In this passage from A Trackless Path, Ken undercuts that impulse.
Resting sits at the heart of this passage, and the way Ken speaks about it is highly precise. When resting is deep, experience doesn’t dim or recede; it becomes more vivid. Knowing and what is known are no longer separate, and the knowing itself can’t be grasped or located. Experience doesn’t disappear; it loses its apparent solidity.
Then he points to what happens next, and to a real pitfall. Because this way of experiencing is so striking, it’s easy to take it as the truth and begin to hold onto it. The moment it’s treated as something to believe in, it hardens, and everything that had briefly fallen away—identity, hope, and fear— quietly creep back in.
The more we chase truth, the further we move from immediacy. When identity loosens, action happens without calculation. Compassion isn’t generated or applied; it arises naturally when separation drops away.
From A Trackless Path 10
Ken: So, we’re always looking for the truth for how things actually are. In a certain sense, it may seem strange to say this, there isn’t any such thing. During this retreat I’ve consistently emphasized letting the mind rest. I'm not even going to talk about mind here. When we rest very, very deeply there isn’t a shutting down of experience, there’s actually awakening of experience. When we rest very deeply we experience everything much more vividly. So that there’s that awake quality.
But in that deep resting, the way we experience is that what arises is not separate from the knowing. Is not separate from mind. And that knowing quality is experienced as having nothing to it. There’s no form, no substance, no quality. Almost no quality we can ascribe to it, which is often referred to as emptiness. But that’s just how we experience it when we rest that deeply.
And because the knowing and the experience are not separate, then experience arises as empty. Which doesn’t mean to say it goes away. It just loses its seeming tangibility.
Now it’s a way of experiencing things. And it is so deep and so vivid that people say, “This is how things are.” Out of that, what tends to happen is people attach to it as being true in some sense. This actually takes us in the wrong direction. Because when we experience things that way, any sense of identity has subsided because of the depth of the resting.
And that freedom from identity, and that freedom from hope and fear because experience doesn’t arise as good or bad anymore—it just is—this is what allows us, or enables us if you wish, to respond to what arises in experience with what we call compassion but is just the natural expression of awareness. And we respond to the experience of suffering and struggle and pain without actually any real thinking. It is just the natural response because of … I don’t know what to say. And that is the direction this practice takes us. The continuing search for truth, or something like that, takes us away from that just responding naturally to what arises.
And in that natural response, because of the quality of experience, our habituated conditioning doesn’t arise. And the lack of separation means that what arises as a response is appropriate for the situation. And that’s why it’s called compassion. It’s also why it ends suffering.
So it goes on to say:
Samsara is destroyed at its root:
I don’t need to discard anything.
My mind is buddha:
I don’t need to hope for anything.
It’s always been this way:
I don’t need to cultivate anything.
Isn’t this a better way to work?
—Recognising Mind as the GuruAnd then we discussed the other lines earlier. But just to review. We look and look at mind. What do we use to look at mind? Well, we use mind of course—knowing. What if any sense of mind drops out? Well, now you’ve got nothing to look with. You’re just present. That’s why he says, “What’s the problem?”
The others are structured the same way.
I have studied with many capable gurus:
Each guru has given me his or her own advice.
All advice comes down to one point—mind.And it would be interesting to go through and substitute heart all the way through this ’cause that would give it another flavor.
Mind [or heart] that is my guru,
I look at you,
Listen to you,
And seek your instruction again and again.Do you get the feel of this? And I’ve talked about very deep listening. In a sense we’re learning how to listen to nothing. And when we can really listen to nothing, then stuff becomes very clear.
So, perhaps this is a little helpful to you.