I’ve noticed that non-duality has become a kind of spiritual umbrella term, even a fad. It can sound like a special state, a metaphysical concept, or a badge of accomplishment. Ken has an uncommon knack for expressing such potentially unhelpful terms in plain, experiential English: "nothing to push against," "no separation," "no enemy." This language feels closer to practice and speaks to me much more deeply.
In the opening session of There Is No Enemy, Ken reveals that a shift in his own practice came through “really experiencing that there was just nothing to push against.” Towards the end of the session, and on several other occasions, he says that when attention rests in the experience of breathing, there is “less separation.”
Further into the retreat, in session 5, Ken says, “An enemy is an experience, not a fact.” That feels to me like one of the clearest ways of talking about what others might call non-dual understanding. The problem is not simply that we divide the world into subject and object in some philosophical sense. It is that we turn parts of experience into enemies. We set ourselves against what is arising, inwardly or outwardly, because something in us cannot bear to feel it, receive it, or make room for it.
Seen this way, no separation is the lived absence of opposition, what remains when there is nothing to push against. Distinctions still exist. Pain is still pain, conflict is still conflict, difficulty is still difficulty. But the habitual move of making an enemy, of hardening into self here and problem there, begins to relax.
Ken keeps bringing me back to lived experience. Not to an ultimate truth or absolute view, but to this breath, this contraction, this resistance, my habit of trying to get something out of my world. His use of language helps me sense what becomes possible when there is less and less separation.
From There Is No Enemy 1
Ken: So welcome to the fall retreat here at Mt. Baldy Zen Center. As you all know, the topic for the retreat is, There Is No Enemy.
Now, I’ll be quite up front with you. Exactly what we’ll be doing, I have some ideas, but we will see as it unfolds, because this will be the first time I’ve actually approached this topic in a retreat. And as Carrie said earlier, in a certain sense you’re all guinea pigs. But basically everybody who ever comes to retreat with me is a guinea pig because I very rarely do the same thing twice, so it’s always a bit of an experiment.
This phrase, there is no enemy, came up very much from my own experience. A bit over a year ago, I experienced a very significant shift in my practice, which was very deep and very disconcerting, because I’d just finished a ten-day retreat in New Mexico with a group of eighteen people, teaching them mahamudra. There’s a three-day break between retreats where I was hanging out with a couple of people who were there for both retreats, and then I was to do another ten-day retreat with a different group of people on dzogchen. And in the middle of this break, everything just shifted in me. And I no longer had any idea what I was going to teach in the second retreat. So it was very irritating—or not exactly irritating, just like, “Okay, now what?”
And the shift had a lot to do with really experiencing that there was just nothing to push against. And it was sometime during that time this phrase just came to mind, there is no enemy.
And I looked it up on Google and there was nothing. It is actually not a common phrase at all. Though it is now the name of an album put out by a rock band in Des Moines, Iowa. So if you look it up on Google, that’s what you’re going to get. And Google’s full of that stuff. But the album, or the group, is very honest, they say, “This is an album name, it is not a philosophy.” So I’m going to say, “This is a philosophy, not an album name.” [Laughter]
For most of us, there’s definitely a posture of opposition deeply, deeply conditioned. I was reading something on more of this brain imaging stuff and running some experiments on brain imaging with people watching sports. How if they’re watching a sports event between two teams from two different cities that they didn’t belong to, they just watched it and there was no particular brain activity in a certain region. But when one of the teams was from their city, then a whole other area of the brain lit up. Now, it’s very uncertain what the lighting up of the brain actually means in these PET scans. There’s a lot of speculation. But it does possibly suggest that this tribal identification, “us vs. them,” is very, very deeply conditioned in us, both biologically through evolution, psychologically, emotionally, etc. Yet it’s functional in a certain way in that it creates group cohesion which enhances survival, etc. But it also is the source of a great deal of suffering for ourselves and others, as all of us know.
So what we’re doing in spiritual practice, generally speaking, is trying to find a way to come to terms with this experience we call life. And all of you are here because you think that by attending this retreat it’s going help you in some way: either learn some skills, or build some capacities, or gain some insights or something like that, which will help you negotiate this experience in a better way. And I’m going to leave “better” here very, very undefined.
Now, we run into all kinds of things in the context of spiritual practice, many of which I’ve come to question quite deeply. One which I let go of a long time ago was the idea that all spiritual practices lead to the same thing. You know, there’s one enlightenment and, you know, it’s the same for everybody who experiences it. Ah, well maybe, but I don’t think so.
A few years ago I received an email inviting me to participate in a film project that was going to discuss the common vision of non-duality that was present in all spiritual traditions. I’m not that well known in North America, so I was very surprised to get this invitation. So I emailed back and said, “I’m very happy to, feel quite honored by this; however, in the spirit of full disclosure what you’re taking as a fact, I regard as a question.” Fifteen minutes later my phone rang. “What!?” was basically what the other person was saying. And we had a rather difficult conversation, which basically ended when I said, “Look let’s get down to basics. If you and I take a slice of pie from the same strawberry pie and each of us eat it, we actually have no idea whether we have the same experience or not. And if that’s the case for strawberry pie, I can’t see it’s going to be any different for non-dualistic vision, or whatever.” And there was sort of a grunt at the other end and we concluded the phone call. And an hour later I got an email saying that, “You’re right, you’re probably not the right person for this movie.” [Laughter] How to win friends and influence people: do not study with me.
So, I think it’s very important to keep that general aim in mind. In Buddhism, the aim is generally described as ending suffering. And people have many, many ideas about what that means. And a lot of people think you reach a state where you simply don’t suffer anymore, and so it’s a case of achieving a state. That may happen for some people. I’ve heard people describe that for them. I’m not sure that it happens for everybody. I’m not sure that it can happen for everybody. And my own feeling is that when we talk about ending suffering, it’s about learning how to live life a different way, so that the ending of suffering takes place moment to moment.
And to give you a very simple example of that, how many of you have had the experience of getting carried away by a thought and getting into quite a negative state because of that? [Laughter] Okay. So, there, ending suffering means being able to just experience that negative thought and not get all wrapped up in it and allowing it to propagate, etc.
Now I’m feeling somewhat sheepish teaching this retreat because I had a two-week experience of getting completely wrapped up with certain thoughts about AT&T. And I spent two weeks absolutely in full rage. Angry enough that people were hanging up on me at the other end of the phone, because they managed to do everything that irritated me. And eventually their corporate process ground through so everything got fixed and it’s all working now. So now I feel rather sheepish about the whole thing. But, yeah, I mean we create an awful lot of suffering not just for ourselves but for other people by not being able to experience certain things.
So one of the central theses of this retreat, and it’s something that I’ve certainly found through my own experience, is that the notion of enemy—of something opposing us—arises because in the interaction with whatever that is, a feeling comes up in us which we are unable to experience, for whatever reason. And me being without the internet was an intolerable experience for me. Because I do a lot of work through email and things like that so I just felt like. And if I’d been smart I would have said, “Oh, I’m without internet for a few days. Cool.” But since I’d been away for a month and I needed to catch up with like 300 emails I wasn’t too cool about that.
So there’s that experience in ourselves that we can’t experience and whatever is bringing up that experience we label as enemy. And now we try to get that out of our experience completely. So one of the things, as a kind of framework this evening, I want to offer a kind of systems perspective on this. I’m going to give you three definitions here: a definition of relationship, a definition of conflict, and a definition of enemy which we’ll be using in the context of this retreat.