Most thinking is in the service of habituated patterns

From: A Trackless Path 9
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Audioclip

Tom: So I'm sitting in my practice and some material comes up. And my understanding is that I'm to sit in awareness with that material. How can I get to the bottom of this without doing a bunch of thinking and noodling on this?

Ken: The way you get to the bottom is not doing thinking. And the reason is that most of the time thinking is in service of habituated patterns. The Age of Enlightenment suggested that reason trumped emotion. It's absolutely not true. Emotion determines the framework in which thinking takes place. And so when something comes up in your life, if you think about it, and we're all intelligent people, we find ourselves where we can think of arguments on this side and arguments on that side and arguments on three or four different sides. 

And, you know, there are all of these wonderful schemes about, you know, weighting, things like that. I don't know about you, but whenever I try these, I'm always cheating in the weighting. And that's the emotional stuff running. You know what I mean?

So this thinking process is extremely unreliable. To give you an idea of how unreliable it is, World War II, the British Admiralty resisted the use of convoys for a very long time. Because their statisticians assured them  that convoys made of large numbers of ships are more subject to attack. And so it would be less effective than single ships trying to sneak across the Atlantic. But the U-boats were so ineffective that they eventually said, "The hell with this," and they started using convoys 'cause that wasn't working. And they found that large numbers of convoys would get through.

When they went back and examined their data and analysis, the statisticians had made the error that the probability of finding a fleet of a hundred ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was for all intents and purposes the same as the probability of finding one. This is the kind of thing that if you just rely on thinking you can get into. 

So something comes up, and rather than relying on thinking, what I suggested to you is you go to the body, first. And you become aware of and open to the physical reactions that arise in connection with that issue. Now what happens is that as we do this we start hitting those physical reactions, story number one pops off, story number two goes off. We're just flooded with stories. And the function of those stories is to dissipate attention so that the issue is not actually felt or experienced.

Now what we do in practice then is as soon as we notice we're off in another story, okay, come back. Come back to the body. And as we do this over and over again we'll begin to be able to stay in the experience of the physical reactions which may be various kinds of tension, discomfort, openings. All kinds of things are possible. It can be pleasant, unpleasant. They're aren't any rules.

As we develop the capacity in attention to be present with those bodily sensations, body sensations, we'll then find ourselves beginning to experience the emotional sensations associated with that. And that's similarly challenging, especially if it's a deep issue. And again there will be lots of stories. But they won't quite have the same power 'cause you've already taken a step.

Eventually we're able to be in the body sensations, the emotional sensations, and all of the stories and associations. Now we are in the complete experience. Being in the experience this way we know the stories to be stories, not true. And that is how we get out of the mind killing. And that's essentially what's outlined in Seeing from the Inside, that practice. That is actually how you get out of mind-killing, by coming as deeply as you're capable of into your own experience. Because what mind-killing is doing is shutting you down from the possibility of experiencing what is arising for you.

Note:  Here's a clip & quote on mind-killing

The Purpose of Meditation

From: Awakening from Belief 1
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Ken: The purpose of meditation, or one way to regard meditation, is building a capacity of attention. I don't know whether you've had it explained that way to you before, but you're building a capacity of attention. Why is it important to have a capacity of attention? Well, arguably, a reasonable translation of the term samadhi, which I imagine some of you have heard, is attention.

Now, those of you who are familiar with such esoteric teachings as the five paths, and the ten stages, and all of that stuff, may recall that at the end of the tenth stage the bodhisattva enters vajra-like or diamond-like samadhi and becomes enlightened or awakened--becomes buddha. Let's put this into English. The fundamental effort in Buddhist practice is to develop a sufficient capacity in attention so that you can experience your own non-existence.

Student: Could you repeat that?

Ken: That's fine. The essence of Buddhist practice is to develop sufficient capacity in attention so that you can experience your own non-existence. That's exactly what Buddha did under the bodhi tree. Such a relief--don't have to be anybody. It's a little counter-intuitive.

So, all forms of mediation practice--and it doesn't matter what--they're developing attention. Sometimes they develop attention very directly, as shamatha does. Sometimes they're getting rid of the blocks in the way of developing attention--things like death and impermanence. Many of the purification practices in the Vajrayana, sometimes they're developing energy, which you're going to use to power attention. Guru yoga is an example of that, loving kindness, compassion are examples of that. And there are also esoteric methods of developing states of attention, states of energy--but it's all about developing attention so you can actually experience what is.

Note:  Click here to read about the Awakening From Belief retreat

The big scheme of the practice

From: Awakening from Belief 6b

Ken: I want you to go through situations where reactions come up and feel where the reaction arises. And you'll notice that by all of the sensations that arise in your body, and emotions and things like that. If you suddenly get lost in thinking it's a very good indication you've hit reactive material because everybody uses the intellect to get away from feeling. If you go to sleep that's also a good indication you're hitting reactive material because that's a great way of checking out: "I don't have to feel anything." 

Student: What if you've forgotten what you were reacting to? 

Ken: Well, you've gotta go back and do it again, and the way practice works here it's exactly the same way that shamatha works. You sit down in shamatha, you breathe, get lost in a thought, after a while you go, "Oh yeah, that's right I got lost in a thought," and you come back and you breathe again, breathe, breathe, breathe, get lost in another thought, "Oh yeah." But as you do this over a period of time, you begin to move back until a time comes when you're sitting there resting with the breath, and a thought comes up and you realize, "Oh there's a thought." But you don't get lost. You're just, "Oh." And it goes up and it goes poof, and you go, "Hmm," and you're just there the whole time. 

And that's actually developing a capacity of attention so you can experience a little reactive process, because a thought is a little reactive process. So we're doing this on a larger scale now. You just keep coming back, keep coming back, keep going through the same situation. You're going to get lost, confused and all kinds of uncomfortable feelings will come up, etc., etc. You keep going through it, and this way gradually you're going to hit whatever that reactive process is based on, which is some kind of uncomfortable feeling.
If you hit that--and you may or may not--just rest in that feeling, because at this point you don't know that it's a feeling. It feels like a fact to you. That's why you run away from it. That's why the reactive patterns kick up, just to get away from it. 

So you need to develop your capacity of attention just to experience it, just to rest in the experience of it. That may take  anywhere from five minutes to ten years, and when know--and I don't mean intellectually, I mean experientially--when you know it to be a feeling, then everything changes. 

So that's the big scheme of the practice.

The Capacity to Feel

The Capacity to Feel (from Sutra Session 20 00:48:58.00 - 00:57:02.00)

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Eight minutes about

• the capacity to feel,


• "feel whatever arises, don't believe any of it",


• "we move into victim when we believe them" (our feelings),


• Toltec teaching and book - Be impeccable with your Word,


• doubt: "great doubt, great awakening; little doubt, little awakening; no doubt, no awakening",


• "I am not able to handle it" - no, it is about "how are you are going to do it, we don't have any choice to it", and the


• experience of life, what do you do with it, be an active agent: "oh, I can't be an active agent there", "first I have to be able to experience it ... that's where it starts".

Finally, this is non of Ken's teachings, but I hope he also finds this slogan by Scott Campbell funny:

Zurich, Paradeplatz, 2012-02-21

Rhythms of practice

From the second of Ken's talks on the Eightfold Path...

Rhythms (from 8FP02 01:07:35.01 - 01:11:30.01)

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Very much connected with effort is our capacity. And we build capacity by exerting ourselves and stretching ourselves in our exertion, and then resting. If we just push all the time we wear things out, we wear out, and we break down. And that doesn't matter whether it's physical, emotional, or mental, or spiritual.

I was listening to a report, on I think it was NPR. It was actually BBC World News, about the Colonel who heads the bomb disposal unit in the British Army who's retiring or quitting his job. And he said that in earlier times people could do this because they weren't meeting that many bombs to dispose of. But now they would be disarming or disposing of fifteen to thirty devices a day! And every one of these is a life-threatening situation.

He says when people do this, they can only do this for a certain period of time, and then they need a break. [Laughter] And apparently it takes six to eight years to train somebody with a sufficient level of experience that they can do this work. Can you imagine having to bring that quality of attention to something of that frequency when your life is on the line over and over again? So where it's really costly, they recognize the importance of taking a break.

And I found this in my own practice certainly. You can push, but at a certain point something sets in, and if you push now you break something in you, and that is not helpful at all. It's never helpful. That's when you step back and you learn to work with the rhythms of practice.

And the last point I will make on effort, in terms of capacity--I came across this in a book I was reading--there are four dimensions to capacity. One is strength: how much effort you can actually make. Second is endurance: how long can you make the effort. Then there's flexibility: how many different ways can you make the effort; how many different situations. Because some people can be very very good here and just hopeless over there. And the fourth is resilience: how quickly do you recover.

And all of these are best trained by stretching yourself and then resting. Stretching yourself, and sometimes the periods of stretching may be several days or something like that or several hours. Depending--that you'll work out. But it's that rhythm of pushing and then stepping back, pushing and then stepping back that builds your capacity and builds your ability to make greater and greater efforts.

So again, you can feel in all of that, or see in all of that how much to bring attention into the experience of making an effort. And see, you know, is energy flowing into this naturally and joyfully? Then it's good.

Negativity

Negativity (from 37P 03: 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva 00:34:08.00 - 00:39:49.00)

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Give up bad friends.

One could look at this very literally which Thogme Zongpo undoubtedly means. But in the way that we were talking last time one can also look at it as, "What do you do with negativity in your experience?" And here there are three ways of working with it. And which way you use depends on your ability with respect to that particular experience of negativity.

If you have sufficient capacity in attention, you can experience the negativity and not lose attention. And when that happens, what is negative opens up and releases, and the energy locked in it becomes available to you in your practice.

And you can actually experience that with people. If you are present with them, not reacting, their negativity can release and a very different kind of relationship and different possibilities can open up in them. I know that many of you have experienced that kind of thing, either being with someone who had that transforming effect on you or you had that transforming effect on them. So that's where you can actually drink the negativity and it enriches you, which is vajrayana level practice.

If you don't have a sufficient capacity to do that, then trying to do that is actually counterproductive. So then you use...you make the enemy into a friend, an ally. Which is analagous...you're going to have this fight and you meet this person and you say, "Why don't we go down to the pub and have a drink?" And you end up buddies so you change them. The principle practice that you have for that is taking and sending. And in any experience of negativity there is a sense of separation and alienation and in taking and sending you actually bridge that.

But if you don't have the capacity to form a relationship that way, and I was actually working on an area in my own practice and discovered this quite hard area I don't have any relationship with. My work's cut out for the next few months. Oh, it looks like fun ahead.

If you don't have the capacity to form a relationship with it, then it's actually best to limit contact. Because you can't experience it without getting lost in it. It's not where you want to end up. It's a practical thing to do in the short term.

Now, look at these not as absolute injunctions but pragmatic advice. These are not the ten commandments, which is God's word engraved in stone. They've been trying to engrave it in stone and it's on all the courthouses all over. These are instructions. These are practices, which doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want. But how do you use them?

Well, if you hang out with certain people and you get distracted. They want to stay up late and drink and have a good time. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that it weakens your intention in your life. That's all. So look at this in pragmatic terms. Is that a useful response?

A Nation of Zombies

This clip from Then and Now, session 7, mentions zombies, but reminded me of Dr. Spock's species, the Vulcans! Since our human emotions are here to stay, is there a middle ground between suppression and being engulfed and overwhelmed by them?

Zombies (from TAN07: Then and Now (class) 00:47:15.05 - 00:51:03.06)

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Kyle: I can understand the benefit of experiencing the emptiness and the emotion at the same time, but is the ultimate goal of the practice to ultimately go without the emotion? Because it seems that if the emotion doesn't really exist, and things like anger and other emotions like that can cause so many problems. Wouldn't it just be easier just to--

Ken: Get rid of them?

Kyle: Yeah.

Ken: Oh yeah, easier said than done isn’t it?

Kyle: Yeah. Well, obviously you'd have to approach it in a very careful way. Would there be a way of doing that without ultimately--maybe I don't want to use the word suppress, but--

Ken: Well we might become a nation of zombies. They don't have any emotions. That's not the point. We live. We breathe. We have thoughts, we have emotions. Very broadly speaking there are two kinds of emotions: there are reactive emotions and emotions which are responses. The reactive emotions are organized around a sense of self. There are things like attraction, aversion, preference, indifference, pride, jealousy, greed and things like that.

They arise and when they arise, because we don’t have the sufficient capacity of attention, they swallow us, so we get angry or we get proud, or what have you. But as you practice and you develop a greater capacity in attention then you are able to experience the arising of the emotions without being distracted, without being swallowed by them and then they just become an experience and that’s where what I was talking about comes in--one experiences them as just being no thing, just being a movement. And it's very, very different because you’re not confused by it,

So saying, "Okay, let’s get rid of the emotion" it's a little bit like saying,"Well, you know, it would be nice if the ocean was always calm without any waves on it." Because one way of looking at the emotions is that they are simply mind waves. But it’s the nature of the ocean to have waves. It’s the nature for mind, to move, to have waves.

The question is, is that all organized down to the sense of self, with all the destructiveness of that, or can it be experienced openly and freely so it doesn’t cause the locking or the reactivity that is the basis of suffering?

So what we’re doing in Buddhism is actually not trying to get rid of emotions but trying to develop the ability to experience them completely, so we’re never confused by them.

WKC: Willingness, Know-how and Capacity

Willingness, Know-how and Capacity -- this is a framework that Ken McLeod presents over and over again in classes and retreats.

WKC (TAN34) (from TAN34 00.50.35.9 - 00.54.31.3)
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"Now how this happens in practice--it takes time. One has to work at it over and over again usually best done for relatively short periods. So you really practice that clarity aspect and that's why I had you over the last couple of weeks just dropping into that clarity because we live in the world the way we do we're not monastics, we don't live in monasteries, we don't live in secluded environments. The way we approach practice of this type isn't developing states of attention and trying to hold onto them or stabilize them that way but developing the facility of returning, returning, returning, returning and resting. And you know that that's the way I've taught you in meditation, rest in the experience of breathing whenever you find yourself distracted. Return to the experience and just rest there. So it's resting in the experience of everything. And it's the same with this clear mind. When you can, know that clarity, then you just drop into it and rest there. Whether you're washing dishes, gardening or talking with someone or actually practicing meditation. You just drop into it and rest and when it dissipates it dissipates you let it go. And then you drop into it again. So there isn't any sense of trying to hold onto something or work at something. You just drop into it and rest. And that's where you get don't be distracted, don't fall into distraction, or like I've said, no wandering, no control, no work. And you do that and if you have the opportunity to do retreats then you can do this for like ten days at a time or three weeks at a time. We did a Dzogchen retreat which is what people do. You just keep doing this all the time and you build up a momentum. It becomes cumulative and you begin to let go of things more and more deeply and things can really open up.

But it all depends on three qualities which you've heard me talk about before. One is you have to be willing to drop into that clarity and it's not the way, it's not the mind from which we ordinarily function and being willing to drop into that clarity involves letting go all kinds of conditioning and habituated ways of doing things and ways that we're very, very comfortable with.

The second quality that you need is to have the know-how to do this. There's a skill involved so you aren't falling into this kind of self-delusion. A lot of people think they're doing something when they're really just thinking. So that is something I have been trying to teach you through this whole course and through the retreats.

And then the third thing is developing capacity and that is what I was referring to a few moments ago, where you actually build up the level of attention that enables you to do this first in relatively simple situations like meditation or doing routine manual tasks and then gradually in more involved situations where there are strong reactive emotions are parading or you're having conversations or interactions with people and you still have that same ability to drop into that clarity, rest and actually function from there. And that takes years and years of training to do that. But that's basically what were involved in. Okay, how is this for you? Is this making sense? Somewhat helpful?"