Daydreaming and Practice

Daydreaming (from SUS07: Sutra Session (questions) 00:15:37.90 - 00:21:22.00)

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Ken: Okay. One more person. What happened when you did this? No takers? Yes.

Student: I started just daydreaming about a peripheral neutral ...

Ken: Ah, okay. You’re very good at running away. [Laughs] I should study with you. [Laughs] Okay.

So, now we have three different things going on. We’re going to do this again; we’re going to spend a little more time with it.

Breathing in, I experience the situation.
Breathing out, I experience the situation.

Now you’re not trying to change the situation or do anything about it. Just experience it. And one person starts daydreaming. Well when you start daydreaming, you’re not practicing. Now there’s nothing you can do about the daydream as long as you’re in the daydream. You’re in another world, but the daydream doesn’t last forever. It usually lasts for only a few seconds. And there’s this moment of recognition like “Oh, I’m daydreaming.” What you do at that moment is the most important thing in practice. At that moment when you say “Oh,” you come back to your practice, or you go on with the daydreaming; those are the two options. If you go back to the daydream you’re not practicing. If you come back to the practice you are. That’s it.

And so what practice consists of is making that choice each time. I come back, I come back, I come back." Now we’re working with an uncomfortable situation so this requires that you actually have the intention and are willing to experience that discomfort. And the reason that most of us are willing to do this is because we know that avoiding the discomfort creates even more discomfort later. So, we come back and at least we’re going to explore--experiment--experiencing the discomfort right now. So that’s what we do in this case.

And then the second gentleman, he said, “Oh that leads to this problem, which leads to this problem which leads to this problem.” And suddenly you’re seeing this whole situation in a very different light, right? Now, that can bring us a lot of understanding and insight that may very well be useful, but it’s a more subtle way of actually avoiding things. So what I would like you to experiment with is, “Oh, okay there’s that situation, yeah and there’s that one." And rather than keep following them she noticed that that’s happening. Just say, “What am I experiencing in my body when I open to this situation or open to all of these situations? What do I experience in my body?” I’d like you to explore that. Is that okay? Do you have a follow up question here.

Student: I think there’s a realization sometimes that the problem isn't really--there's not intensity to it but the intensity is coming from somewhere else.

Ken: Okay, so you go to where the intensity is and then go to the body. Okay. So what’s very important is that you end up in the body. Okay.

And then we have the third comment: this person is actually feeling the physical reactions associated with the situation. That was your experience, right? Okay because now we’re going to introduce the second step. The first step is:

Breathing in, I experience the situation.
Breathing out, I experience the situation.

The second step which evolves quite naturally out of the first one is:

Breathing in, I experience my reactions to the situation.
Breathing out, I experience my reactions to the situation.

Our reactions may be daydreaming. It may be following the sequence. It may be physical reactions. For other people there’ll be a whole bunch of emotional reactions.

What I’ve found here is if we’re going to work with this in the way that’s most fruitful, the best place to start is in the body. So we’re going to do this again. I want you to take the same situation that you worked with. We’ll do it a little bit longer. Last time we only did three breaths; we’ll take it up to five or eight. And what I want you to pay attention to is, how your body reacts. What happens in your body when you allow yourself to open to this situation. Any questions before we try this? You game for this? Okay. So let’s do this together.

The Carrot and the Stick

From: Then and Now 4
Full transcript
Audioclip

Pat: Well, I never expected to say this and sound so cynical, but maybe it's because right now I'm in the middle of chasing a lot of stuff to do with the war. But I'm a little suspicious because whether it's Christianity or Buddhism or any of this stuff--it just seems like you spent a lot of time these last couple of weeks about how we all have this buddha nature. We all have this capacity, and so much of Christianity is we all have the capacity to have this godlike quality. But yet the reality is ... as a human being what we have is maybe moments where we actually--if you're lucky--get to be awake; where you're lucky you get to have spiritual practice; where you're lucky you get to be compassionate, kind and all those things. 

But yet these traditions and these practices are set up to encourage to you to do it as a life time--yet constantly. Why don't we then teach that what we are going to get, or be or do are moments? Rather than teach that we should try and have 100 percent of spiritual practice. But by the way, you're probably only going to get five minutes. Because it's a set up to constantly feel like--and the truth is we're just a bunch of losing jerks [laughter] and I think we'd be better off if we started out with that premise. Because then every time you got five minutes, you'd feel like a winner.

Ken: That's basically as far as I'm concerned, the point of this chapter.

Pat: But the book starts out saying, "Oh, guess what, you know, you have buddha nature." Well the fact is maybe I do, maybe I don't. But most of the time I may have it within me, and I love that thing we talked about last week; it's always there, it's constant, you can find it. But in a way I might find it more often if my expectation is for five minutes in a lifetime. Do you know what I mean? We're always chasing this ideal rather than starting with the premise that we're violent jerks.

Ken: I agree with you. There's the carrot and stick approach, right? Now if you have a donkey--the carrot approach is you hold a carrot in front of the donkey. And the donkey starts to move towards the carrot. What do you do with the carrot at that point? You pull it further away. I don't like the carrot approach. Because the attention of the donkey is on the carrot--it's not in the present, it's on the expectation and you never get there.

Now the stick approach is a little different. The stick approach is you get a good solid stick and you whack the donkey on the rear. And the donkey goes, “This is not a good place to be, I need to do something,” so it starts to move. And once the donkey starts to move, you don't keep whacking it. It's totally different from the carrot approach. And so the donkey learns that if he relates to his present condition he can do something about it and then he is in a different state. He just has to keep walking, that's all.

And people say, why do you talk about all the difficulties? I talk about all the difficulties because referring to Joseph Goldstein’s point--it's the difficulties, the discomfort in our life which actually motivates us, causes us to do something. It's not the comforts that cause us to do something it's the discomforts, the struggles. "Why am I having such a hard time, I've got to do something about it."

And the difference between the two chapters [chapters 1 and 2 of Jewel Ornament of Liberation] could be described as this: we all have the potential to do something about it, but the opportunity to do something about it is relatively rare. Okay. And I think you're right, the opportunity is relatively rare, so when the opportunity arises, make use of it. Does that make sense to you?

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The carrot and stick story also appears in session 4 of Awakening from Belief and in Bringing Practice Alive.