Topic: Thread of thoughts

[erik]

No ordinary apple

Questioner: What is it like to experience the colour and texture of thought?

Khandro Déchen: [pause] What is it like to see this apple? [Khandro Déchen holds up an apple.]

Q: [pause] Like . . . well, you’re holding an apple – and . . . I can see that. [laughs] There seems to be something strange about that . . .

KD: Have a closer look. [Khandro Déchen throws the apple to the questioner.] What is it like now – to see and touch the apple?

Q: It’s cool and waxy . . . It’s very green, isn’t it! This doesn’t seem to be like an ordinary apple [laughs].

Ngak’chang Rinpoche: [laughs] There are no ordinary apples.

Q: What?

KD: That’s what it’s like – no ordinary apple.

NR: No ordinary anything. You become able to experience the colour, tone and texture of thought because you develop the experience of openness in which you can see thought in its spatial context.

KD: Here we are referring to space as the non-dual perception of emptiness and form. You have the apple in your hand – you can actually feel the apple. The apple is close enough to experience – you’re not distanced from it by thoughts about it, or by thoughts of anything else. You simply catch the apple in space, and there it is – in your hand. You have an immediate impression which is almost startling in its directness.

[erik]

Practice in the world

Questioner: Can it be dangerous to meditate in everyday situations—for example, driving a car?

Khandro Déchen: It largely depends on what you mean by meditation. If you find the presence of your awareness in the dimension of the process of driving, you’ll be the safest driver on the road.

Ngak’chang Rinpoche: If your mind is wandering, if your attention is not on what you’re doing, if you’re hang gliding in your imagination while you drive, that could certainly be very dangerous. Have you ever seen those stickers in the back of cars that say things like “I’d rather be windsurfing”? I think that the Buddhist version could run “I’d rather be precisely where I am.”

KD: Often people are off somewhere else, even when they’re windsurfing. If your meditation is something like a trance state in which you enter some other world and cut off the outside world, then yes, that could be lethal. But that’s not the kind of meditation we’ve been talking about. We’ve been explaining the practice of maintaining your presence of awareness—being completely with whatever you’re doing.

NR: In this way, driving your car is the practice. The idea that meditation cuts you off from the “outside world” dies hard, so I must emphasize that whatever methods of meditation are taught in other systems, shi-nè and lhatong are not about turning inward. There’s no inward or outward bias in these practices—just being, in order to heal the dividedness of inner and outer.

[erik]

Addiction

Shi-nè is the treatment for our addiction to thought patterns. If you decide to enter into this treatment, the first thing you may find is that it can be boring. It is crucial to understand this: shi-nè can be boring. Shi-nè can be irritating. It can be frustrating. It can be deadly tedious – especially in the initial stages, and especially if you are an active, intelligent, creative human being. This is because the practice of shi-nè is ‘going without a fix’. The experience has some slight similarity to the ‘cold turkey’ experienced by heroin addicts who abjure from injecting. This kind of comparison may sound a little extreme, but to anyone who has ever entered into the practice with commitment, it will seem fairly apt as a description of some of the very worst moments – especially in retreat. Thought attachment withdrawal symptoms can be emotionally fraught, and can make people want to give up almost as soon as they have begun to practice. But the appalling alternative is to resign oneself to living life as ‘a thought attachment junky’. From the perspective of natural being, the world of the ‘thought addict’ is actually much more distressing than the ‘thought withdrawal process’ of shi-nè. Unlike the dreadful discomfort and distress of heroin withdrawal symptoms, however, ‘thought attachment withdrawal symptoms’ are a fertile field of self-discovery. Whatever you feel when you practise shi-nè, is a fundamental expression of how you are.

When you confront yourself in shi-nè you are brought face to face with underlying insecurity, fear, loneliness, vulnerability, and bewilderment. These underlying tensions distort your being whether you practice shi-nè or not. To avoid the practice of shi-nè is not an answer. In fact, from the Buddhist perspective, no one actually has much choice in the situation. It is not really so different from events which might surround the receipt of an electricity bill. The bill can either be paid, or it can be pushed under the doormat with the pretence that it never arrived. Pushing bills under the doormat is not an answer – one either pays the bill, or one is disconnected. If you find yourself in the midst of a battle, then whether you face the enemy or not is almost not an issue – the chances that an arrow or a bullet will find you are high. However, if you face the ‘enemy’ you can at least gain the measure of the situation.

To practice shi-nè is to begin to live your life rather than letting your life ‘live’ you. To practice shi-nè is to get back into the driver’s seat – to open your eyes and see the world. With our eyes open we realise that we no longer have to play ‘blind man’s buff’ with our emotions.

Clarity spontaneously arises from the discovery of openness within the practice of shi-nè. Loosening one’s white-knuckled grasp on the thought process enables thought itself to be more intimately experienced. We experience the colour, tone and texture of thought.

These qualities arise because we develop sufficient experience of openness in which to see thought in a spatial context. We become transparent to ourselves. Motivation becomes simpler. A natural compassion arises – a compassion which does not need to be forced or fabricated. The first real taste of freedom.

[erik]

Freedom

Questioner: There’s so little time for us here in the West, with job and family and so many demands. How is it possible to find peace and tranquillity in our lives?

Khandro Déchen: Do you think that the East and the West are so different?

Q: I’d think that in a place like India there’d be a lot less pressure than here.

KD: They also have jobs and families. But what about those pressures? What kind of pressures are you talking about? You don’t have to answer too personally if you’d rather not.

Q: No, it’s not so personal. It’s the pressure of society to achieve and to perform, and for your children to achieve and be successful.

KD: Sounds like India to me. But don’t you have a choice as to whether you accept this pressure?

Q: It’s expected.

KD: Well, yes, maybe—but what’s the penalty if you don’t do what’s expected?

Q: You mean we should all just drop out?

KD: Why does that have to be the alternative?

Ngak’chang Rinpoche: That’s simply a polarization.

Q: Well, what else is there?

KD: We don’t see the situation as having to be polarized. I think you can drop out if you like. I think you can be a corporate executive if you like.

NR: There’s no problem with what you do. There’s simply an issue around how you feel about it. There’s no need to be a typical dropout or a typical executive, but I think that the penalty for being atypical can sometimes be isolation. If you interest yourself in anything outside the norm, you’ll be going against the general trend. If you’ve been interested enough to come here tonight, and interested enough to come along on many other occasions, then you must have some freedom and independence from the norm already. All the people here are free enough to be individuals and write their own scripts for how they’ll live their lives. Some of the choices you make are bound to set you apart from one social group or another.

[erik]

Choices

Khandro Déchen: It’s not really possible to live creatively if you’re governed by what’s expected of you. What happens when people close to you expect opposite things from you? What do you do then? It’s really not possible to please all the people all the time. Choices have to be made, directions have to be taken, and you have to accept the whole situation in terms of the person you’re becoming.

Questioner: But I feel that if I lived in a place where spiritual values were important and honored, there’d be less conflict. At least the slower pace of life in India must make it easier to meditate.

Ngak’chang Rinpoche: That depends on who you are. It depends on the style of how you experience your life. What really matters is that enlightenment is our beginningless nature—we’re all practicing in order to realize that. I’m practicing to realize that. We all have flashes of our beginningless enlightenment from time to time. You too.

KD: For some of us that experience is more frequent—for others less frequent, but we all practice to increase the frequency and intensity of the sparkling through which is our innate enlightenment. It’s not the environment that makes the difference, it’s the state of mind.

NR: I can see that there seems to be a sense of spiritual romance about the East.

KD: That’s a fantasy balloon that needs to be punctured.

NR: Absolutely. The idea that India is a peaceful place is a little misleading. Sure . . . there are peaceful tracts of the Himalayas. There are places there that have a wonderful atmosphere for practice. But then, if you go to the highlands of Scotland or somewhere like that, you’ll find equally wonderful places. In India, wherever there are people, there’s usually also quite a lot of noise and bustle. I remember sitting in a quiet place in the woods above McLeod Ganj. A more tranquil spot you couldn’t hope to find—but it wasn’t long before a conspicuous party of Indian tourists arrived to have a picnic about two hundred yards away from me. Now our idea of a picnic may be to go off to some remote and idyllic spot to immerse ourselves in the beauty or grandeur of the scenery. But the popular Indian alternative is a bit different. It gives them more pleasure to turn a woodland glen into an open-air nightclub. I’m making no serious value judgment here, but I know which kind of picnic I’d find more appealing. I think that the industrial environment in which many of us live gives us more of a taste for the beauty of nature than our rather more festive Indian friends. They often love nothing better than to have half a dozen radios wound up to capacity emitting the most fiendish row. Have you ever hear Hindi film music? [laughs]

[Michael]

i love hindi film music, but i recall the first time i was 'assaulted' by it.

we were in an idyllic location, and this loud stuff was blaring out daily. they also play their music at distortion levels, so much so that they also produce it that way as people expect to hear it distorted, even at low volumes.

after about a week of this, i actually passed through the threshold, and began to hear some tracks that I had to admit were quite good. indian always associate this music with the films, so once you have seen the film, it means a lot more to you.

after that, julie began to get into it, and now we have a great selection of really good film music - we like to turn it loud on weekends while we work in the garden - my how the wheel comes around.

but what he says is so true - indians dislike quiet and inactivity, so they bring it all with them where ever that go, which is destroying all the tourist places, where only westerners used to go.

they can send you through the roof! all hours of the night - but try a festival, and you've never knew it was possible, wall to wall solid noise 24 hrs a day. you get used to it after awhile... except julie, she never could.

[erik]

Meditate here now

Ngak’chang Rinpoche: The best place for practice has to be wherever you live, otherwise the path we’re discussing would merely be a cultural manifestation. The practice of sitting is transcultural—it deals with the human condition in all its diversity. The tall pointed hats with long earflaps worn by Lamas represent the retreat cave. The meaning of this is that your retreat is wherever you are. In the noisiest place imaginable—there is silence. Sound manifests within silent space, and the function of practice is to discover silent mind. When mind is silent, there is endless silent space in which sounds sing infinitely separate songs.

Khandro Déchen: Even if you were to find yourself a retreat cave high in the Himalayas, or sit in a soundproof room, you’d start to hear the sounds of your own body. There’d be fluids gurgling. There’d be the sound of your breathing and the background of your ears. These sounds would eventually distract and disturb you as much as any other sounds. You’d be disturbed by this simply because you’d never come to terms with the dissonance of your own subconscious noise. Body sounds would seem as offensive as the din of London traffic. People often say that they’d like to meditate but there never seems to be enough peace and quiet. They say, “If only I could go and live in the country, I’d be able to settle into a meditative lifestyle.” I’m sorry to say that this is just another fanciful idea. The countryside is as full of distracting noises as anywhere else. The sound of a pneumatic drill in the street below your bedroom window or the sound of several thousand crickets—which would be more distracting? Sure, the crickets aren’t there all year round, but then neither is the pneumatic drill.

NR: I gave a course once at a Buddhist center, and the most profound meditative experience anyone had was when a road resurfacing machine passed by below. I heard it coming, and just as it started to annoy the people sitting, I said, “Just find the presence of your awareness in the dimension of the sound.” And they did. It was a wonderful sound. The sound of rooks roosting can be very intrusive—much more so than the hum of distant traffic. The “natural world” has romantic associations for you, but ultimately it comes down to concept—it’s a matter of your attraction, aversion, and indifference to what these various sounds represent rather than to the energy of the sound itself. To imagine that a peaceful place makes meditation easier is ultimately nonsensical.

Questioner: So you’d be better off accepting whatever situation you find yourself in.

NR: Exactly. Wherever you are is exactly where you are, and where can you be apart from where you are?

[erik]

A manic, fast-talking commercial music show

Khandro Déchen: If you have to alter your location to realize you’re not unenlightened, it means that the method you’ve chosen is limited by circumstantial conditions. But if you take the relative view, there are a few things I could say that might apply to how you happen to find yourself in relation to daily practice. If you have extensive experience in practice, you can sit anywhere and integrate the presence of your awareness with whatever arises as a sense perception. But when you’re new to practice, you need to treat yourself a little more gently and take account of the fact that you can easily become distracted. Now this may sound as if I’m contradicting what I said before, and to some extent I am—because ultimate view and relative view often appear to conflict.

Ngak’chang Rinpoche: Our initial comments dealt with the fact that there’s no such thing as a distracting influence. This is the ultimate view. You distract yourself—you can’t blame the noises, as they have no volition or distracting intention in themselves. I made this point in order to discredit the idea that you have to find some peaceful, tranquil spot before you can sit. But from a relative point of view, you do have to find a situation where you’re not intruded upon by noises that have a regular or intelligible pattern. What I mean by this is that if there’s someone next door and they have cranked up their radio on some manic, fast-talking commercial music show, it can be very difficult to keep yourself from tuning in to it. If the couple next door are having a shrill acrimonious row and your walls aren’t particularly thick, trying to let go and let be can be tricky.

KD: The problems lie in the intelligible quality of the sound rather than its volume. Traffic hum and the chirping of crickets are unintelligible sounds, and you should be able to get along with that kind of sound in most of its manifestations. With unintelligible sounds there’s not so much for your intellect to latch on to. Because these sounds aren’t deliberately fabricated by intellect (and because they have no discernible intellectual content), intellect doesn’t key in to them unless you overlay them with concepts of like or dislike.

NR: The intellectual faculties lock like Velcro onto intellectually produced sound unless you have considerable meditative stability. So if you have to battle to keep your attention off intellectual noise, it can become a bit like trying to swim with a few fur coats on.

[erik]

Enjoy the roundness

Questioner: I’ve always been very interested and impressed by Buddhism and what it has to tell us about reality. I can’t imagine a superior outlook on life—but I can’t seem to find time for meditation. I want to meditate and I often promise myself I will get going with daily meditation, but then when I do get going it gets interrupted and I let weeks or months slip by. Can you give me some advice on this?

Ngak’chang Rinpoche: How much do you want to practice?

Q: It’s very important to me.

NR: That’s interesting. I wonder why that is? [pause] Let me see if I understand you correctly. You want to do something. It’s important to you—but you don’t do it. Have I understood you correctly? Was that the gist of what you said?

Q: Yes.

NR: Well, the answer is fairly simple then. When you want to meditate more than you want to use your free time in other ways, you’ll find less difficulty. I must apologize if that sounds somewhat blunt, but it’s a simple statement of the manner in which motivation functions. We could look at it another way. What if I told you, “I want to get thinner, but I keep eating too much and don’t exercise.” Your response might be the same: “You obviously like eating and not exercising more than you’d like to be thinner.”

Khandro Déchen: We’re not making a value judgment here either—we’re just saying, “Enjoy the roundness of your belly as much as the taste of your food.”

NR: Or enjoy your moderation as much as your envisioned thinness.

[Michael]

and if you want to give up smoking, start by not feeling guilty - love every breath of smoke.... then give it up. I did that with throwing up from too much alcohol.

[erik]

The main and the most fundamental Buddhist postulate says that there is no permanence. None. Nothing lasts, nothing is granted. Nothing could ever be granted.

In physical terms, it all is very clear. People are born and they die. Physical things are created and demolished. Physical world is in constant movement.

What would be more natural, under these circumstances, than to seek permanence in people? They ought to be 'reliable', 'trustworthy', 'honest', 'good', etc. They ought to introduce permanence and constancy to the world, and thereby violate the most fundamental statement of Buddhism.

Can they do that?
They carry in their minds constantly ripening karmic seeds, various winds blow through their minds, spirits tinker with their minds, physical change evokes constant flow of reactions.

It is impossible. It cannot work. It never has. It is, and has always been just an illusion.

My Buddhist teacher used to say 'there is nothing inherent about the people and the world'. Indeed, there isn't, but it takes years to physically realise the depth of that statement.

Nothing is granted at all.

[tommy2]

Nothing is "impossible" through the power of faith.

THIS makes humans unique ..... having both mind and soul.

t