The Fact of Mystery

The “two truths” of Buddhism are usually translated as relative and absolute, or conventional and ultimate truth. The Tibetan terms are kun rdzob bden pa and don dam bden pa. Ken McLeod is dissatisfied with the usual English translations of these. Looking again at the Tibetan word bden pa, usually translated as “truth,” he found its key sense to be not misleading, and that led him to a very different formulation.

Ken McLeod in conversation with Stuart Goodnick and Robert Schmidt, The Mystical Positivist, 11 July, 2026.

I just did the final edits on an article for Tricycle which sprung out of a dissatisfaction with the usual translation of the two truths in Mahayana Buddhism, what are usually called absolute and relative truth. I’ve always had a problem with absolute and relative because I think they’re deeply misleading, and I usually used ultimate and apparent—what is apparently true and what is ultimately true.

But when I was revisiting this—and it was for some work I was doing on Unfettered Mind’s website—I realized that the word truth was also a problem, that there were ideas in the word truth, especially in English, that simply weren’t present in the use of the corresponding word in Tibetan. And so I did some research on what is the key idea or meaning in the word in Tibetan, and it was the idea of not misleading.

Shortly after I came up with that, I had a conversation with Stephen Batchelor, and I mentioned that I was thinking about this, and before I could even finish, he said, “Yeah, I translate that word as fact.” And I went, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Until very recently, a fact was something that was just a fact. Now we’ve got the business of “alternative facts,” which is a whole other problem.

So now, in what I’ve written in this article, and what I would use in the future, is: the Mahayana outlook—or the Mahayana philosophy, if you prefer—is the two facts. One is the fact of mystery. That is, we do not know what awareness is. We do not know what this life is, what it is. We could be dreaming. We cannot say. We live in mystery, period. That’s a fact. We cannot know it. Nobody’s ever figured it out over ten thousand years, or whatever.

And the other fact is the fact of life. We are in a life. We experience being in the world as being a being in the world that is perceiving the world, and the world acting on it and it acting on the world. And that’s also a fact.

And the analogy I use is like waves and water. The water is the mystery, and the waves, which are simply motion of water, are analogous to life. And it actually works rather well. But it’s a very different kind of way of looking at it from the usual two truths, absolute and relative.

“Absolute” and “relative” truth can easily be misconstrued as pointing to different levels of reality, but the fact of life and the fact of mystery land quite differently. Ken hasn't simply replaced “truth” with “fact.” He has reframed what the two truths point to: the undeniable fact that we are living this life, and the equally undeniable fact that we cannot finally say what it is. The image of waves and water helps make the difference clear. Mystery is not separate from life, just as waves are the motion of water.

Later in the conversation Ken describes faith as “the ability to stand in and meet the mystery.” For me, that points to the practice of meeting experience, meeting life, without pinning it down.

Ken in conversation with Stuart Goodnick, Robert Schmidt, and others on The Mystical Positivist

Related posts:
Truth or Experience?
The Door of Faith

Let the World Show Itself

It's my 7th year as a volunteer life story writer for our local hospice. I spend time with people who are approaching the end of their lives and listen as they tell me their stories.

This work has taught me that I don't know what matters for someone else. Something that seems significant to me may warrant only a passing mention, or they may unfold what seems like an apparently inconsequential detail into something much larger. I can ask questions and return to something that seems unfinished, but ultimately I am there to help someone who wants to tell their story, not to interpret what I'm hearing, or tell them what their story is.

This seems obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to cross the boundary. We hear something and immediately begin to make sense of it. We decide what is important, what caused what, what it means. Instead of listening to what is being revealed, we start telling the whole world what it is.

James Low often speaks about this habit of ours. We fill experience with our concepts, judgments, explanations, and interpretations, rather than allowing it to show itself. Many hours of listening to others describing moments from their lives has made me much more aware of how frequently I do this.

And it isn't confined to listening to other people. I often do the same thing with my own experience. Something happens and almost immediately I know what it is: good or bad, important or unimportant, something I want or don't want, something that shouldn't have happened.

Practice offers another possibility: to remain present long enough for experience to show itself before I tell it what it is. And now here's James Low on this very topic...

From Working with Life and Death, 2018, James Low

We imagine that we see trees and motor cars and other people. But what do we actually see? If I allow myself to receive the world before I tell the world what it is, everything is there and there's nothing for me to do with it.

Once I get into concepts, then I can make a judgment. "Oh, someone's parked their car not very well, now that car can't get out," and so on. "Well, that tree looks as if it could fall over in a storm. If that happened, it could fall on the roof here. I hope they've got insurance."

Our mind can run and run and run with all sorts of thoughts and elaborations, but that's talking about the world. We fill the world with our concepts and, of course, that's a never-ending task. Once you commit yourself to being a stream of thoughts, you can't stop thinking, because then who would you be? So the function of meditation is to relax our addiction to thought and to enter into another domain. It's not an altered state of consciousness. It is exactly what has always been here, but it's as if it's a paradigm shift. By not filling the world with our concepts what is the immediate presentation of the phenomena? We see the tree. When the thought starts to arise in the mind, just relax into the out-breath as if you were focusing on the breath. Take the same focus onto the tree.

Something is there, or something is appearing. Even before we think of it, and grammar is very difficult here because we always insert thing into everything. Something is there, but certainly appearance manifests, appearance shows. Stay with that.

The empty mind receives the world as it is. The conceptual mind tells the world what it is. So this is a major kind of fulcrum point or turning point, and if we open to the world as it is, the whole process of being sick, of getting limited, and moving towards death is just that. Now this may be rather annoying for other people...

Related posts

• How to Interact Around Practice
• How Meaning Reveals Itself
• The Rocky Path of Not Knowing

The Centre of Attention

When I first saw Alex Pansier’s photograph Patterns in The Guardian’s coverage of Bird Photographer of the Year, my eyes kept looking for somewhere to settle. One bird would draw my attention, then another.

Patterns © Alex Pansier

Gazing at Patterns, yet seeing none, brought to mind five questions used by teachers to turn attention towards the mind itself:

Does the mind come from anywhere?
Does the mind stay anywhere?
Does the mind go anywhere?
Does the mind have any shape or colour?
Does the mind have any size or dimension?

Five Questions about the Mind, James Low, Eifel, 2019

James Low says these questions are not problems to solve or trick questions. They invite us to look directly at mind itself. Ken McLeod often suggests substituting the word experience for mind (for example, in the audioclip below), and I've found that very helpful.

From 37 Practices in Four Parts, 8, Ken McLeod

The point of the five questions is not to work out an answer. The questions provoke us to look. Before encountering these questions, I'd never really inquired into the nature of my experience. Suddenly it dawned on me that experience is strangely mysterious, consisting of evanescent sensations, thoughts, and feelings. But what are these? Words fail.

And when a teacher asks, “Who experiences this?” the looking goes deeper and feels even more mysterious. I cannot find anyone, yet awareness is present. When I look for its shape, colour, location or boundary, I find nothing definite or tangible. Yet experience is happening. Knowing is present. And the more I look, the less I can say about where experience, knowing, or awarenes begins or ends, comes from or goes.

Alex’s photograph brought these questions back to me. Attention keeps choosing a focus, one bird, then another. The frame of the photograph supplies a boundary. Yet, when I look at the awareness experiencing the image, I find neither centre nor edge.

Related posts:
No Big Deal
Always Already

What Will Serve?

I've recently participated in the GRACE training developed by Roshi Joan Halifax. I came to the course through my growing involvement in spiritual care, keen to learn about this practical framework for being present with people who are suffering. I did learn, but something else happened as well.

First, a little about GRACE.

GRACE was developed to help people whose work brings them into direct contact with suffering. When developing the framework, Roshi Joan asked what capacities make compassion possible in such situations. She defines compassion as the intention and commitment to alleviate the suffering of others in a non-transactional way, and describes GRACE as an emergent process made up of trainable non-compassion elements:

Gather attention
Recall intention
Attune to self and other
Consider what will serve
Engage and end

Although initially developed in the context of healthcare, GRACE has much wider application. It feels extraordinarily relevant to the world we are living in today.

We're surrounded by situations that invite immediate reactions. News and social media continually present us with suffering, injustice, conflict, and threat. Public discourse rewards certainty and rapid judgment. We are encouraged to take positions before we have taken in the situation, to identify who is right and who is wrong, and often to regard the intensity of our reaction as evidence of the depth of our concern.

GRACE asks for something quite different.

First, gather attention. Come back into the body and the immediacy of experience. Recall your intention: why you are here and what matters to you. Attend not only to the other person but also to what is happening in you. Notice whether something has activated a reaction in you. Rather than rushing to relieve suffering—or your own discomfort in the presence of it—make room for not knowing what should happen. Then consider what might actually serve. Act or not, as appropriate. And when the interaction is over, let it end rather than carrying it into what comes next.

As the course unfolded and in reflection afterward, I found myself recalling Ken McLeod’s Four Steps of Standing Up:

Show up
Open to what is
Serve what is true to the limit of your perception
Receive the result

I don’t want to collapse these two frameworks into one. They arise from different teaching contexts and use different language, but considering them together reveals some convergence. Both ask us to pause the momentum of reaction, take in more of the situation, clarify what is actually being served, act without pretending to complete knowledge, and relinquish control of the outcome.

To show up is more than being physically present. It means bringing attention into the situation rather than engaging it through the filters of fear, anger, expectation, habit or role. GRACE begins in much the same territory with the gathering of attention.

Then comes open to what is. For some of us, this may be the most demanding movement. What is includes the other person and their suffering, but it also includes our own reactions—the desire to fix, reassure or be useful; to withdraw, take control, be right, or simply wishing for the discomfort to stop.

Ken makes a particularly sharp distinction between helping that responds to a situation and helping that arises from our own difficulty in experiencing the pain. If I cannot experience what another's suffering evokes in me, I might try to manage the situation so that I no longer have to experience it. Helping then becomes a subtle exercise in control. Or I may move in the opposite direction and withdraw because I feel helpless. Neither of these is a response to what the situation requires.

The GRACE course explores closely related territory in distinguishing empathy from compassion, while recognising empathy as an important human capacity—the ability to resonate with another's experience. When that resonance becomes overwhelming, our attention can shift from the suffering before us to our own discomfort—an experience Joan Halifax describes as empathic distress.

This is one of many ways our own reactions can begin to shape what we do. Ken’s third step addresses this problem: serve what is true to the limit of your perception. In Buddhahood Without Meditation, Ken puts it directly: “You don’t serve yourself. You don’t serve the other person. You serve the whole.”

That changes the meaning of compassionate action. I am part of the situation too. So are my limitations and responsibilities. So are relationships, history, consequences, power, institutional constraints and everything else operating in the field. I cannot know all of it. To the limit of your perception builds humility directly into action. As Ken points out in Then and Now, we can only act to the limit of what we can see. If things go wrong, the result may show us what we could not see before.

GRACE expresses a similar humility in consider what will serve. We may need to act, but action does not require the pretence that we know everything. Nor does compassion guarantee that an intervention will produce the result we intend.

This brings us to Ken’s fourth step: receive the result.

We act on our best understanding of the situation and receive what follows. The result may be welcome. It may be painful. Something quite small may have mattered enormously. We may discover that we misunderstood the situation. Something we thought would help may not have helped.

Receiving the result means taking in what actually happened without immediately judging it as success or failure, or engaging in self-congratulation or condemnation. The outcome simply becomes part of the situation we are now in.

There is a further dimension in Ken’s formulation. In teaching the Four Steps, he eventually connected them with traditional descriptions of the five aspects of pristine awareness. In There Is No Enemy, he describes how a teaching by Harada Roshi provided the clue. When Ken pressed him about its source, Roshi offered a formulation that Ken recognised as corresponding to a summary of the Five Teachings of Maitreya. Ken remembered this material from Differentiating Ordinary Consciousness and Pristine Awareness, a text by Rangjung Dorje, the Third Karmapa, that he had previously read and translated.

This connection places the Four Steps within a deeper account of how awareness expresses itself. The capacities involved—knowing the whole, seeing clearly, discerning particulars, recognising balance and imbalance, and knowing what to do—are understood as intrinsic to awareness. Appropriate action, then, does not ultimately have to be manufactured by conceptually working out what to do. As reactivity loses its grip, the natural capacity of awareness to respond becomes more available.

Ken puts this very simply in Buddhahood Without Meditation. When there is no separation from the situation, “The situation tells you what the next action is.”

Compassion is often misunderstood as a feeling we ought to generate toward other people. GRACE and the Four Steps offer a clearer understanding. When reaction no longer dominates our experience, compassion emerges naturally from being fully present with suffering, without turning away from it or trying to rearrange the situation to relieve our own discomfort.

That capacity seems urgently needed now—not only in hospitals, hospices and other places of care, but in families, workplaces and communities.

Related posts:
What is Compassion?
Recognising Reactivity in Real Time – Part 1
The Rocky Path of Not Knowing

The Door of Faith

For my Dharma friends—each following her own path, yet traveling together.

Faith, rather than belief, can come into view when our reliance on understanding, control, or connection no longer holds. In these passages, Ken McLeod and James Low approach faith from different circumstances, yet both point toward what becomes possible when familiar ways of making sense of experience fall away.

From Sutra Session 35, July 8, 2012

Ken: A few years ago, I became increasingly unsettled and discontented with being a teacher, in particular a Buddhist teacher. I’ve never, ever felt like a Buddhist teacher. I’m not even sure what that is, and that may sound very strange to many of you.

Do I teach Buddhism? Do I teach the practice of Buddhism? I have for a very long time. But that somehow feels different from being a Buddhist teacher. I just don’t get along with other Buddhist teachers. Sad, but true. [Laughter] Maybe not so sad.

This reached a point where I had to take some action on it, about six years ago. So I took a sabbatical from teaching because I didn’t know what I was doing anymore, so I felt I would just stop.

It was a little bit of a shock to a small number of people who worked with me. They went, “You can’t do that, we need you.” But they discovered that they didn’t, and actually they learned a lot from it, being one of the basic aspects of life, which is impermanence and change. And I’m going to say a few more words about that.

I came back to teaching somewhat differently a year later, but the discontents hadn’t gone away. One of the ways that I began to think about this is the problem with the word teaching. What’s important here isn’t teaching, it’s learning. Learning is far more important, and being with a teacher who’s talking about things is simply one way of learning. Because when we engage in spiritual practice, we’re learning a way of approaching life, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re trying to understand.

Increasingly, the idea that someone else can tell you, “Oh, this is how you do it,” or whatever, this just doesn’t work at all. Each of us have to discover our own way. This is something I’ve come to feel very deeply. For that reason, I moved my way of doing retreats and everything from being a teacher to creating environments in which people could learn—learn through their own experience, learn with the benefit of my own training and experience, but practicing in the ways that were really fruitful for them and not adhering to a system which had developed somewhere else for another population in another country.

That was sort of all right for a couple of years. And then something happened. Describing this to some people I’ve worked with in business circles, they said, “What happened?” I said, “Well, this is one of those Zen things, where everything just drops out of your life and you don’t know where you are.”

That was about three or four years ago. And my immediate impulse at that point was to stop teaching. There was one small problem. I was teaching two retreats back to back and this occurred in the break between the two retreats. And so I had 18 people flying in from all over the country, expecting to learn something or do a retreat with me. So, I couldn’t just stop right then. But I did start to wind down my individual consulting practice as a teacher, and just gradually wound down from there.

This is kind of the end point of that winding down process. Now, why? A number of my students really quizzed me on this one quite deeply. The reason is that I felt that I had nothing to say to anybody. And not just a kind of trivial thing, I don’t have anything to say. No, I really had nothing to say. In fact, I would call friends up and say, just ask me any question about Buddhism, and they’d say, “Well, what are the three jewels?” I don’t know. Ask me another.

I even went to a Tibetan teacher and said, “I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know what buddha nature is. I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what that is.” And he said, “Doesn’t matter.” He gave me some very interesting instruction. He said, “Just cultivate faith to the point that you can’t think, and rest there. Don’t worry about this or that.”

I thought about that instruction for a very long time. Well, what did he mean by that? And I realized that this played straight into my suspicions and discomfort with the notion of belief.

For Ken, faith seems to have come into view when the understandings he had relied on no longer gave him anything to stand on. “I don’t know anything anymore,” he told a Tibetan teacher. The response was an instruction to cultivate faith to the point where thinking stops.

My path into this territory wound through a different landscape: the failure of connection, a persistent sense of not quite fitting anywhere, of being rootless, and of not being able to rely on anyone. For much of my life this felt like a reaction to past hurts, and a lack of something other people seemed to have. But over time, the compunction to sort it out has faded. If there is nowhere to belong, if no relationship can provide unshakeable support, then another possibility begins to appear: to stop searching outside or inside for that support.

Faith, in this sense, is not a feeling that things will somehow work out, nor trust that someone will always be there. It is closer to the willingness Ken describes: to remain open without requiring certainty. And there's a huge sense of freedom in that.

James Low’s way of talking about faith opens this up further.

James: What I found with the university study was that it was just more a vast accumulation of words and concepts and theories. This was the time of structuralism with Levi Strauss and people like that and a lot of psychoanalysis around. And that wasn’t my cup of tea at that stage anyway. So I dropped out of university and went back to India.

Sam: If anything can announce the spiritual poverty of the Western tradition more than Martin Luther and John Calvin, it might be the post-structuralists like Derrida and Foucault.

James: Indeed. It’s like eating a mixture of candy floss and cotton wool. It’s a little bit tasty, but there’s nothing in it.

Sam: Yeah. Okay. So then you moved on. So bring me to your next Dharma perch.

James: So I went back to India and went to Dharamsala briefly for a few months, going to some of the teachings in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, which was just getting going at that time. But it wasn’t my heart’s home. So I went over to Darjeeling and then I met Chatral Rinpoche and Dudjom Rinpoche, Karmapa, Kalu Rinpoche.

Sam: Wow. You got four great ones there. Give me your impression at that point. How did you, meeting Dudjom, how did you not go headlong into his Nyingma school and meeting Kalu, how did you not go headlong into his Kagyu context? And to say nothing of the Karmapa. Who struck you as an important advertisement for what was possible at that point when you met these guys?

James: I think they all did in their very different ways. Chatral Rinpoche was very physical and he didn’t like speaking very much, but he was extremely attentive to what was going on all around him. And I used to go and see him every day—he had a little room just in front of a small temple he built at a place called Jor Bungalow—and he was very, very kind. He got one of the students to teach me the beginnings of my understanding of Tibetan, and we translated a biography of Padmasambhava that I used to chant every day.

And basically, he’s just saying, as all the teachers say, faith is the main entry door. That faith is the method by which you gather yourself together, because we’re all so dispersed with our personal histories, national histories, hopes and fears, all the rest of it. But if you can develop a really one-pointed, deep, heartfelt faith, you come into one point, and then you start to see that the diversity of the different thoughts and feelings that we tend to be endlessly sorting out and making into new patterns, they all have the same nature. They arise, and they vanish. They self-arise, and they self-vanish.

Thoughts come to us. We’re not proactively thinking most of the time. Thought arises and vanishes. Feeling arises and vanishes. Sensation arises and vanishes.

So it was a strong introduction to the dynamic nature of the world, and that the whole dualistic consciousness interpretive matrix is a fruitless effort to stabilise the nature of experience so that you can make sense of it after the event. So it’s like learning about the body through doing dissection in the first year in a medical school. But you can also learn through the body through playing football, playing tennis, or dancing. So the connected body, the body that’s part of the world, is showing the co-emergence of subject and object. Whereas if you focus on trying to stabilise the world, then the subject is always concerned with its agency, with its mastery.

Am I really in charge of what’s going on here? Have I taken account of all the different variables so that I can bring my intention into the world just as I want? But of course, that doesn’t really work out.

From Patterns of Emptiness, a conversation between Sam Harris and James Low, August 12, 2025.

For more on faith and devotion read James' introduction to The Seven Chapters of Prayer and Ken's article Where the Thinking Stops.

Related posts

• The Rocky Path of Not Knowing
• Looking for Truth
• When the Picture Falls Apart

All Gone

James Low’s voice is usually recorded in the context of a retreat or teaching session, but Atmosphere 3, by drummer and composer Mark Guiliana, pairs James' voice with an original musical composition, using a passage from Clarity and Equanimity.

The music changes the space around James’ words, allowing his voice, his pauses, and the words themselves to be heard differently.

Listen to Atmosphere 3 on Waking Up →

If you don't have the app, you can listen by accessing a 30-day guest pass.

Here is the orignal passage that Mark Guiliana set to music:

From Clarity and Equanimity in a Time of Provocation

But clearly, since you were born, you've had a lot of thoughts, a lot of sensations, a lot of feelings, memories, plans, hopes. Where are they now? All gone. All gone.

All that activity making impermanence. All gone. Bye bye.

All these days in school, homework, worried about getting a grade. Bye bye. All gone.

Getting older. All gone. Having kids, they grow up. Oh my god. Bye bye. All gone.

There was never anything to grasp. But how heavy and dull we made our life by grasping, by worrying, by thinking, "It's all up to me. I've got to make it right."

So the key thing in heart of the practice is to observe the nature of experience. What is a thought? What is a memory? What is a sensation? Not as an intellectual enquiry, but as a revelation.

Related posts

• Three Doors in Practice
• A Key Principle in Practice
• Leave No Ashes

An Unexpected Conversation

A complete stranger approached me on the footpath and began to pour out her heart. She was deeply upset by the tragedy in Nepal: the horror of the mudslides, the shock of realising that glaciers can collapse, and her helplessness in the face of it all. She felt there was nothing she could do to ease the suffering of those affected, and appalled that nothing stood in the way of such a thing happening again. After talking for perhaps ten minutes she asked, “Is there anything we can do?”

I took a long breath, and the Medicine Buddha mantra came to me. tayatha om, bekandze, bekandze, maha bekandze, radza samudgate soha. “You can say this mantra,” I replied. “It's the Medicine Buddha mantra. I know it sounds crazy to suggest that repeating some unfamiliar sounds could be of any use…”

Before I could finish, she jumped in. "I see how it helps," she said. "Because it calms me, it could help me stop spewing all this anxiety everywhere."

For the first time she met my gaze, and then asked, "Are you a Buddhist?" I nodded, and she began to describe things she knew about Buddhism: "Everything is impermanent, so you shouldn’t be attached to anything, because it could all be taken away in an instant, as it has been for those people in Nepal."

“Maybe there's a bit more to it." I replied. "I think it's about steering between attachment and detachment, because it’s all too easy to go from ‘shouldn't have attachments' to ‘it doesn’t matter what I do.’”

She took a deep breath. “Yeah, I can see there’s a lot to it,” she replied, and then began talking about mindfulness, being present, being in the here and now. From there she moved to the harm she felt phones and social media had done to a whole generation. "They're never really here because they're always absorbed by their screens."

I laughed. “Was our generation here? Were we present? Maybe not so much,” I said. “A lot of the time we were high on alcohol, drugs, sex, or rock ’n’ roll.”

She laughed. “Yeah, we had a drugged presence!”

Suddenly I no longer felt like a listener. Monologue had become conversation, and we began finding our way through something together.

“I think being present might be more than just paying attention to what's happening right now," I offered. "For me, it has something to do with being aware of the space between thoughts. Taking a breath before speaking really helps. When I remember to do that, I'm less likely to react and say or do something I later regret. Do you know what I mean?”

She looked surprised. Then she began to nod and smile. "If we stopped like that and listened more," she said, "then we'd be more human again, not so intolerant and polarised. We all need to be much more human with everything that's happening around the world."

"I needed this conversation today," she continued, and added that what she needs often seems to "appear out of nowhere." We smiled at each other and parted. As I walked away, I felt grateful that pointers from James Low and Ken McLeod were there just when I needed them.

James Low, Integration is a Central Concept in Dzogchen: Sleeping Beauty or Sleeping Buddha?, Starting at 35:35.

James: In this tradition of dzogchen a central point is to move into experiencing prior to the arising of thought. In the absence of thought there is a givenness of the continuity of our being but it’s not a being you can speak about because it’s not locked in to the normal signifiers: "I’m male, I’m female, I’m from this country," and so on. This quality can be called awareness or presence. Because it has no fixed content, because it’s not resting on a particular pattern of thoughts or emotions or sensation, it’s not vulnerable to the changing pattern of events. For this reason in the tradition it is described as being indestructible.

This quality of being is an openness, an availability, an openness, a welcome. A welcome to whatever arises. This openness is grounded in the awareness that it’s not improved by the presence of good thoughts, kind thoughts or shining thoughts, nor or is it defiled or debased or contaminated by the presence of what we could take to be negative thoughts.

And Ken:

From Sutra Session 1: Bringing Life Into Meditation

Ken: One is always take a breath before you speak. Now, when you’re having a conversation with a friend, how often do you wait? How long do you wait between the time when your friend stops talking and you start talking? One, two milliseconds, something like that. What happens if you start taking a breath right there? Well, the first thing that’s going to happen is you will never be interrupted and you will never interrupt anybody else. That’s quite a change right there.

The second thing that’s going to happen is that people know they’re going to have to be quiet if they want to hear anything that you have to say. Because if they start talking again, you’re not going to jump in. You’re just going to wait. And then when they stop, you’re going to take another breath. So they’re going to start listening. And this is very effective.

Related posts

• Bringing Attention Into Action
• Reality is the Best Teacher
• Recognising Reactivity in Real Time — Part 1

Finding Sangha Outside Institutions

One of the distinctive features of Ken McLeod's website, Unfettered Mind, is that there is no centre, membership, or community to join in the familiar Western Buddhist sense. This was not accidental.

In 2005, as Ken prepared to take a sabbatical from teaching, he reflected on why, years earlier, he had moved away from the Buddhist centre model to work directly with individuals and small groups:

From Releasing Emotional Reactions 7

Ken: And that’s one of the reasons why I developed the model that I did fifteen years ago: seeing people individually and working with people in small groups, and not actually creating a center, but just working with people directly. Because by then I had seen so much confusion and turmoil and problems develop because of the organizational demands of the center on the students, and how it corrupted or distracted them from their practice, and so forth.

And this was a problem in Tibet also. Jamgön Kongtrül the Great was hauled out of a three-year retreat at a young age because he had to teach grammar to the Karmapa of that generation, because he was the best grammarian. So, a huge obstacle to his practice. Situ Rinpoche came to him and said, “I’m really sorry to do this, but you’re the best, so we need you.” He did extract a promise from him to be able to do three years retreat at a later point, but it was about ten years later when he was able to do it.

And so I elected a model in which there wasn’t any center or any organization or anything to get in the way of the teacher-student relationship. Lots of other stuff got in the way, but there wasn’t that, anyway. And that has been successful, and the understanding that I’ve seen grow in some of the people that have been kind enough to work with me has shown me that some good things came out of that.

Now, for whatever reason, that model has run its course. So as many of you know, I’m taking a sabbatical from teaching. And this is very similar to what I did about fifteen years ago, when I gave up another model, a model I never had much enthusiasm for but I just gave it up. And I spent about three months thinking, “Okay, what’s the right model for me to be able to help people?” And I knew it wasn’t a center and I knew it wasn’t a number of things. So I happened on this. And the time has come for me to do that again.

A little later, a student asks whether the absence of a centre might undercut sangha:

**Audio note:** Newcomb’s question is barely audible in the recording.

Newcomb: At Karmê Chöling I’ve just been through the kind of political upheaval and distraction and so on, that I think you mention is involved in centers. And one thing that it did was really test the sangha. I wonder if not having a center undercuts the notion of sangha.

Ken: Well, not exactly. Another of my intentions was, because I’d seen all of that, “Okay, I’ll teach in such a way that no community will form.” [Laughter] On that one, I wasn’t so successful. And there is a group of people that have come together through their work with me, I suppose, and right now they’re struggling in different ways. Art, do you want to say a word about this?

Art: Nooo. [Laughter]

Ken: I think that says it all. And there’s an on-going conversation here. The conversation is really, “What does a community of shared intention look like?” Because most communities that form lose that sense of shared intention and become something else. Which is exactly why you’re experiencing all of that turmoil. And this is a question that’s very deep. But the sangha—the third jewel—is a community of shared intention, not a community of hierarchy or mutual dependence. But a community of shared intention. And what does that actually look like? And that’s a question I’m very interested in exploring. And that’s what Art and a number of other people here are very much in the middle of. That fair? Yeah, they’re actively exploring that.

Five years later, in A Trackless Path, Ken returned to the question of institutions, this time from a different direction, acknowledging what they make possible, but also how they get in the way:

From A Trackless Path 8

Ken: Yesterday I talked a bit about how we come here out of this curiosity. Whether that curiosity about our lives comes from something being out of balance or from experiencing something which doesn’t fit into the ordinary scheme of things. And I think I also talked about how, in my view, every religious teaching, every religious doctrine, every philosophical school, every form of practice comes out of that same curiosity. People seeking to come to terms with how they experience life.

Now, if you look at this from a sociological point of view, there’s a very consistent pattern of evolution: that certain ways of thinking, some of them catch the imagination of other people or speak to them, and so “a teacher” emerges. Maybe evolves into a religious leader which leads to the formation of a sufficiently large group that requires some organization, codification of the teachings, formalization of procedures and rituals and lo and behold you have an institution.

And then those institutions carry teachings and practices over centuries. One of the roles of the sangha, the monastic sangha in Buddhism very explicitly—and this is how it’s often termed—is the holder of the teachings. Because it provides the continuity—when everything else may be in various forms of chaos—by which the teachings are passed from generation to generation. Something that it has done very faithfully for 2,500 years, which is a reasonable measure of time. And the same is true of other religious institutions.

But at the same time, forms are solidified, ways of behavior are formalized and very often with many institutions a certain rigidity and eventually a certain calcification sets in. Certain ways of thinking are permitted. Other ways of thinking aren’t. And so what happens over time is that institutions work for some people and don’t work for others. And this goes on and has gone on for centuries.

But now another kind of problem starts to come up. In the early 90s, when I was going through some fairly significant changes particularly in my relationship with the formal institution of Tibetan Buddhism—and the reason these questions were coming up is that I couldn’t do the standard practices. All of those doors had closed very firmly. And even though I knew how the practices worked, my body, my psychology, whatever, didn’t allow me to work with them. And it was a very difficult period.

A great deal of pain—I mean it was fair to say bitterness. It was in the early 90s. I can actually remember being in my car by the parking lot by my old office asking myself the question, “Where are the records for those whom the system doesn’t work and they had to find their own way?”

Well, the answer is there are no records. And there never will be any records. Because it’s the institutions that determine what is carried from generation to generation. And the records of those people whose path lay outside the institution, they don’t survive historically. Every now and then you may come across something.

So this leaves a very interesting dilemma. That if your path lies outside of established institutions, you really do have to reinvent the wheel in every generation. Occasionally you’ll come across a person outside of that whom you can learn from. But it’s something that comes up again and again.

So, a lot of my own questioning has come out of that experience. And when you’re not in the institutional structure—and I’m using institution in a very broad sense here—you’re able to ask questions. And pursue ways of thinking, pursue ways of practice, that you might not otherwise.

This passage and Ken's earlier reflection from 2005 raise a burning question for me: does being outside institutions necessarily mean practicing alone?

I'm keenly interested in Ken's description of sangha as “a community of shared intention.” People whose paths lie outside institutions still need teachers, peers, conversations, and ways of learning from one another. Perhaps sangha is particularly important when there is no established path to follow. Yet my experience of Dharma communities has been much as Ken describes. Even without buildings, organizational structures and hierarchies, or formal membership they seem to “lose that sense of shared intention and become something else.”

How do people whose paths lie outside institutions find and support one another without creating another institution? Ken leaves that question open. I don't have an answer, but am actively searching for possibilities. Please email me at ann@akalpana.org if you'd like to explore this.

Related posts

• Reality is the Best Teacher
• Looking for the Missing Piece

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.”

In a later teaching James clarifies that “self validation” should not be confused with certainty about the significance of an experience. He says that awareness is “self-validating by clarity, not by proposition.” As I understand this, awareness does not need a thought such as “this is awareness” in order to be recognised; its clarity is already evident in the immediacy of experience. But once we begin interpreting that experience—deciding what it means, what it proves, or what it says about reality—we have moved into propositions. Those propositions or interpretations do not establish anything about how things are.

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

And more recently in Open to the Open, 2026:

It's up to you. Nobody can protect you from your own mind. That’s why meditation is lonely. Because you are being present with something you cannot share with other people. Because it’s beyond language. And if you stay within the delusional waves of language and conceptual elaboration, you’ll be blinding yourself to the open empty mirror. This is Dzogchen. The Great Completion means: all experience is always already within the mirror. It is complete, it can’t leak out, it’s got nowhere else to go. This mirror is like the sky.

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