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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What Am I Protecting?

The principle, don't protect any area of your life from your practice, has become central to how I practise, but the first time I heard it, I felt cold fear and hot shame. I knew immediately that there were many areas I was protecting.

In the retreat, Mind Training in Seven Points, Ken talks about finding a method of practice for this. The method I’ve come to rely on starts with the question, “What am I protecting?” For me, systematic reviews using frameworks like the six realms tend to lead to procrastination or resistance, whereas simply sitting with the question or praying does not. From there, I work with the five-step practice or, more recently, taking and sending—turning toward the places I would rather not look. I “let practice work on me,” as Ken often advises, until something releases. And then I go back and ask, “What am I still protecting?”

I’ve come to recognise the rigidity Ken describes. Working with whatever tightens when attention turns toward it has not been easy. Some of these areas feel non-negotiable, defended, off-limits. It can take years, even decades, for a protected area to be recognised and then to soften and release.

However difficult it may be, I know in the marrow of my bones that this principle matters deeply. If practice doesn’t reach into the places I would rather exclude, then it isn’t really practice at all.

From Mind Training in Seven Points 6

NOTE: In this passage, Ken mentions the The Mind Training Prayer. His translation, made several years after this retreat, is called Opening a Path to the Sea of Awakening Mind. Another translation can be found in The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva.

Ken: Then the third principle is usually phrased in the negative. Don’t be partial in your practice. And as Kongtrul writes in here, some people are really good at getting along with other people, but they have no patience when they get ill. And other people are the other way around. They can bear illness very easily and patiently and very constructively, but they really don’t get along with anybody. And maybe you can do those things, but somewhere else you’re falling down. And as it says elsewhere in the book, it’s very important for mind training to touch every aspect of your experience.

Another way that I put this is: don’t protect any area of your life from your practice. The area of life that you protect from your practice is reinforced. Two things happen. When you protect an area of life from your practice, and you continue to practice, because you practice, the general level of energy in the system increases, because that’s what practice does. It raises the level of energy, because you’re cultivating attention. So, energy pours into that area that you’re not paying attention to, and it pours into the blocking mechanism. Both of those get stronger. So, that area of your life gets more and more walled off from your conscious attention, and operates more and more strongly.

The result is various forms of imbalance. And we have seen this time and time again. Various teachers who can be very, very capable in giving instruction and guiding people in certain contexts. But you put them in another context, their desire for sex, money, fame, power, or whatever, is just right out of control. And the way that you see this is that, when you interact with a person if you hit an area where they are rigid or inflexible, that is an area that they’re protecting from their practice. It’s a good rule of thumb to have in mind.

So, one of the suggestions—just a slight diversion here—but something I wanted to say this evening. From my perspective, this is a very special group. The quality of practice is very solid, and I was noting that again in the walking meditation. So, for the record, you’re doing very well. And for the record, don’t let it go to your head. [Laughter] But it’s very solid here. And because of that, I want to push you a little bit further. Just as I said before, I’m going to raise the bar. [Laughter]

Okay. Now, some of you have been working with some quite personal issues—and appropriately so—that are coming up in the taking and sending. And that is very important. At the same time, this third principle, of making sure all bases are covered, is also very important.

Now, in a question that came up, I think yesterday, I sketched out "a" framework of practice that I used in my own practice of taking and sending. Going through the eight hot hells, and the eight cold hells, and the four kinds of hungry ghosts, and the different kinds of animals, and the four major and the four minor suffering of the human beings, and the suffering of the titan realm, and all the different problems in the god realm, and the different types of gods, etc., etc. That’s one possible framework.

Now, from our perspective, all of those—that whole Buddhist cosmology—represents the total possible mind states that any of us might experience in our lives. So, by meditating on every one of those, explicitly, you’re actually covering the whole range. And that’s a very traditional method of doing so.

I have a prayer with me which Jamgön Kongtrül wrote called The Mind Training Prayer. It’s never been translated into English that I know of. And he just goes through every conceivable emotion. He goes through the six realms. Then he goes through the five afflictions. Then he goes through the—I can’t remember all the other things—but one category after another. So, if you know these categories—and Buddhism is a tradition of lists, as some of you know—they’re very useful because they give you a framework.

And if you’re interested, I can sketch out the eight hot hells, that’s about hot anger, you know, the explosive kind. The cold hells are about hatred, that cold anger which freezes you inside. And then the hungry ghosts are—and I detailed this in Wake Up To Your Life—the various kinds of obscurations, where you look and you never see that there’s enough in the world. And it brings up all kinds of greed. But there’s another kind of obscuration, you have everything you need around you, but nothing satisfies. And that’s also represented in the hungry ghost realm.

And in the human realm, the four major sufferings are: birth, old-age, illness, and death. The four minor sufferings are: being with people you don’t want to be with, not being with people you do want to be with, trying to get what you don’t have, trying to keep what you do have.

I remember working with a student in Southern California, and I presented these because he was doing his meditation on the six realms. He looked at those, just those four, and he said, “That’s what I spend my life doing.” And these are the four sufferings of the human realm. And so I can go into that if anybody’s interested.

But you can use another framework. One that I thought of in preparing for this evening’s talk is to go through every socioeconomic status that you can think of, right from a homeless person on the street to Bill Gates—the corporate executive elite—and so forth. And just go through every one. You’re going to cover all the bases that way.

And some of you may think of other frameworks, but what I want to encourage you to do now, is to come up with a framework which is going to cover the whole range of human experience, and start working through that systematically in your meditation. Deborah.

Deborah: [Unclear]

Ken: No, not really. The six reactive emotions cover most. And that’s just the six realms. Okay? But really getting into all of the different kinds of desire, different kinds of pride, different kinds of jealousy. But some framework, so that you cover the whole range of experience that you’re ever likely to encounter in yourself. This is a way of not protecting any area of your life from your practice. Janneke.

Janneke: [Unclear]

Ken: You can start at the bottom and work up. You can start at the top and work down.

Janneke: How much time [unclear]?

Ken: Well, that depends. I mean, we have eight meditation periods in the day. So take six of them and put one on each realm. Or put five minutes on each realm in each session. Either way is fine. And some people work better shifting the focus of the practice fairly frequently, because it keeps them awake and engaged in the practice. Other people do better taking one topic and really going into it deeply. And that’s individual variation; there isn’t a right or wrong there. So find the way that works for you.

But what I want to emphasize now is developing a method of practice for yourselves—and I can help you with this in the interviews if you wish—which ensures that you cover a whole range of human experience. Okay? Any questions about that?

Student: [Unclear]

Ken: You’re not protecting any part of your life from your practice. For instance if you think, “I’m willing to do taking and sending with every aspect except control.” You know, “I like to have control of my life. So, I’m not going to give away control, and I’m not going to take lack of control.” Okay. That’s what I mean about protecting an area of practice. And god’s realm is a lot about control.

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Busy Doing Nothing

This passage comes from the Five Elements, Five Dakinis retreat, where Ken explores different qualities of experience through the language of elements and dakinis. The element here is void, and the corresponding dakini points to a way of meeting experience when familiar reference points fall away.

Ken speaks about void in very ordinary terms. For example, void shows up as space in a day, space between commitments, space where nothing is planned or scheduled. Without that space, he says, nothing new can come in.

In session 6 of the retreat, he described how we tend to react when that space opens. Void may not feel spacious or free at first. It often shows up as dullness, heaviness, or sleepiness—not because we’re tired, but because dulling out is a way of not having to feel groundlessness. When there’s no structure to support us, confusion and bewilderment surface. We don’t know what to do, or who we are. That disorientation feels deeply uncomfortable.

One way we try to escape it is by doing something—anything—that restores a sense of orientation. Living in a culture organised around usefulness and output, productivity becomes a reliable way to steady ourselves. This is why Ken is so blunt in saying that meditation produces nothing. It offers no task, no identity, no payoff, and doesn’t sit easily in a life organised around doing.

Void—emptiness or spaciousness—is what makes everything possible. But to encounter it, we have to be willing to stay when orientation drops away—not filling the space, not dulling out, not reaching for something to stand on. That willingness to rest in not-knowing is the practice. And without it, very little in our lives can genuinely change.

From Five Elements, Five Dakinis 9

Ken: Where is there space in your life?

One of the things that has taken me a long time to learn, but I actually do it now, is I space things out in my day. I space things out in my day so I very, very rarely have two meetings back to back. That makes a tremendous difference. I can have actually quite full days and never feel rushed.

Another thing which I’ve learned to do, which I’ve advised people—particularly if they are in high-pressured jobs where unexpected things happen all the time—is schedule unscheduled time. That way you always have time for something if it comes up unexpectedly.

This is also good for one’s personal life. There’s a person I used to work with who had something on his social calendar every night of the week. That’s how his partner liked to live his life, and my client was just being run into the ground. So I said, "Okay, take out your calendar get a red magic marker please. And I want you to put an x through two nights of every week."

And he went, “I can’t do that!”

I said “Yes you can. You simply take your hand and you go like this.”

And he went, “Mmm, but what if somebody calls?”

“You tell them you’re busy. You are. You’re busy doing nothing that night.” He said it made all the difference.

So scheduling time where there is nothing in our lives is very very important. Meditation time is a time where there’s nothing in our lives. I’ve started to work with a group of people in their 20’s and early 30’s. And, what do you produce when you’re meditating?

Nothing. You produce absolutely nothing when you practice meditation. So in terms of a life and a culture and a society which is bent on being productive, meditation is a complete waste of time. It produces absolutely nothing. For this reason it is impossible to reconcile meditation with a productive life. And if you try to squeeze meditation into your life, it will be squeezed out because it’s not productive. The only way that you have a meditation practice is if you say to yourself, “I want this time to do nothing.” And you make it a priority along with everything else in your life. Nothing else works. But if you approach meditation from the idea of being more productive, wave good bye to your meditation practice.

So we need space in our lives because if our lives are full nothing new can come in. It’s as simple as that.

In relationships you need space. If you’re a guest your host needs space. A good guest knows how to get lost for periods of time, so there isn’t a constant demand on the host.

So study void. Void is what makes everything possible. If there is no emptiness or open space in your life then very, very few things are possible.

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The Activity Of Awakened Mind

The story of Ananda's awakening at the First Council touches me deeply. He is excluded, turns away in sadness, and then responds without hesitation when his name is called. There’s no deliberation, no strategy, no attempt to prove anything. Just a simple, immediate response: “Yes?”

Ken describes this as the activity of awakened mind—doing what needs to be done without preconception or self-reference. Mundane and ordinary though it may seem, Ananda's response inspires and sets a direction: to be present enough so that when life calls, one can respond without rehearsal—not from habit or identity, not from a need to help or fix, but simply because that’s what the moment requires.

Ken connects this way of living back to rituals, not as performances, but as training in attention. Offering torma to gods and demons acknowledges what pulls us into reactivity. Offering to dakinis and protectors nourishes the capacity to respond without thought, without delay, without “me” in the middle.

Seen this way, the activity of awakened mind is something we already touch, many times a day, and perhaps don’t notice. The practice, as Ken often reminds us, is about removing what gets in the way, so that when the moment comes, turning and saying “Yes?” is possible.

From Mind Training in Seven Points 5

Ken: Tibetan Buddhism, by and large, places a very heavy emphasis on ritual. You had rituals and ceremonies for almost everything. Any time anything went wrong in your life—for that matter any time anything went right in your life—you did a little ritual. So, these torma offerings are rituals, in which you prepare a bunch of stuff, and you recite a liturgy, and you do a visualization, and make an offering.

What is being acted out in the ritual is, in the case of giving torma to gods and demons, you are giving your attention to those things that hook us into reactive behaviors. Gods and demons are symbols, essentially, for those aspects, or those things that arise in our experience which feel good to us—those are the gods—and those things that feel bad to us—those are the demons. And ordinarily, when something feels good, we just feel good, and we attach to it, we want more, we’re attracted to it, and so forth. When something unpleasant happens, then we want to push it away, get rid of it, kill the messenger, and so forth.

By doing these little rituals, what you’re in effect doing is acknowledging, “Oh, that happened,“ and “Oh, that happened.” So you’re just noting it. And disengaging from the habituation which causes us to make a big deal, one way or the other, out of it. That’s the essential idea here. I’ve thought about this for many years, and I’m still at a loss as how to translate that ritual-based practice into the way we live life here in the West. If any of you have any ideas about that, I’m very open to them.

And then, offering torma to dakinis and protectors. Dakinis and protectors are symbols of the activity of awakened mind. And what does this phrase, the activity of awakened mind, mean? It means when we do something naturally from just knowing what to do without any preconception. We do this all the time, actually, we just don’t notice it. The story of Ananda’s enlightenment is relevant here.

Ananda was excluded from the conference following Buddha’s death, the conference of the senior students who were all arhats—a degree of enlightenment—who were going to decide what was going to be preserved of the Buddha’s teaching. It was very unfortunate Ananda was excluded from this, because he’d been at all of the Buddha’s teaching throughout the whole life of Buddha Shakyamuni, and he had a phonographic memory, so he had it all. And the story is told—this is the Zen version of the story, the Theravadan version is a little different—that Mahakashyapa, who was one of the top arhats, said, “No, you can’t come in because you’re not enlightened.” Ananda turned away very sadly, and Mahakashyapa said, “Ananda!”

And without any thought whatsoever, Ananda just turned around and said, “Yes?” And those kinds of simple responses, where we’re just right there, that is what the dakinis and protectors are symbolizing. You walk into a situation, and you see what needs to happen, and without any thought you just do it. That is the manifestation of the awakened mind. There is no sense of, “I am going to do this for this person.” It’s something that just happens like that. [Finger snap]

So, what you’re doing here, again, in these little rituals, is nourishing that quality in your own experience. In essence the offering of torma is an offering of attention to, on the one hand, those aspects of experience which pull us into reactive patterns, and on the other hand, those aspects of our experience and activity which are an expression of being awake.

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Three Components of Emotional Reactions

Ken’s description of the three components of a reaction—physical sensation, emotional tone, and the stories that arise—feels spot on. For me, the body and emotional sensations usually arrive together, almost as one movement: for example, a pounding or trembling with fear, a hollowness in the belly with shame, an ache around the heart with grief. Those cues show up before any story rushes in to explain what’s happening.

When I first heard Ken talk about these, I suddenly understood how strongly I was influenced by stories and how utterly convincing they were. My fabricated narratives felt immediate and unquestionable: "She thinks this," "He wants that," "I must have done something wrong." But with practice the stories have become less elaborate, and have much less authority. Body sensations and emotions are now far more accessible than they were before.

Ken emphasises that the story is the least reliable part of a reaction. In one talk he recommended using Byron Katie's four questions to pull the rug out from under stories:

Is this true?
How do I know it is true?
How do I feel when I hold this view?
What would life be like if I let this go?

The practice of pausing to ask these four questions has helped me see that my stories are attempts to manage discomfort, rather than a window into truth. And when I can stay with body sensations and feelings without rushing into interpretation, the reaction becomes easier to meet, and the sense that it is “caused” by someone or something else loses its grip. There's more space around the whole experience, and more choice about how to respond.

From Five Elements, Five Dakinis 3

Ken: All reactions have three components. How they manifest physically in the body: typically there’s a kind of tensing or contraction. There can be actual physical sensations in different parts of the body. Your stomach feels churned, or like it does butterflies. There can be a constriction in the throat. There all kinds of possibilities—your heart can beat faster. There are always some—and sometimes some quite strong—physical components to the reaction. And most of the time we aren’t aware of them, which means we aren’t really aware of the reactive process taking place.

So in this set of practices that we’re doing, stay very much connected with your body—what is actually happening in the body. Again you don’t have to analyze it or explain it, but be aware of it and actually experience it.

The same is true at the emotional level. Maybe looking into someone’s eyes triggers fear, maybe it makes you anxious. Maybe you feel squirmy. The sense that someone is seeing you without any judgment may make you acutely aware of your own judgment.

I think one of the things came up earlier is the feeling of being special. And I have one student in L.A. who’s working with that particular issue at this point. She’s very chagrined about it. Because she sees how much of the way that she relates to the world is coming from holding a feeling that she is in some way special. So it allows her to negotiate a lot of situations very easily. But at the same time there’s a certain pride and feeling of superiority. So that’s something you may watch for. Maybe a feeling of being naked, revealed, exposed. And there could be a whole other set of reactions connected with that.

And there are the stories that come up, which is the third component of reaction. This is the component of reaction that we most often notice and believe immediately. We don’t question it at all. And again someone looking at us, really seeing us and seeing us without judgment, we may say to ourselves, “What do they know?” Or, “What does she want?” These are what I mean by stories. And again those thoughts come up. We don’t even question them—we just take them as fact.

But if we’re in touch with the physical and the emotional we may appreciate the fact that these are simply thoughts and ideas and may not have that much grounding in reality. And so now we can experience things very, very differently and experience all of that as, “Oh, this is how I’m reacting to this possibility.” All the discomfort, all the stuff is in me, even though there's a tendency to project it out there.

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