top 10 podcasts

Please enjoy this geeky mix of our most popular podcasts!

Transcript:

Vince: Hello, Buddhist geeks, this is Vince Horn. And I’m joined today, actually I’m really excited. I’m joined today by a close friend and a teacher of mine named Kenneth Folk. Kenneth, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.

Kenneth: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Vince: Yeah.

Kenneth: I’m excited about this too.

Vince: Cool. Cool. So, you’re a long time practitioner. Probably been practicing, what about fifteen, twenty years. Something like that?

Kenneth: About, lets see, since 1982 was my first big opening. So, twenty some, however many that is.

Vince: Long, just longer than I’ve been alive. [Laughs] Let’s up it that way.

1

1. Ordinary People Can Get EnlightenedAuthor: Kenneth Folk - is a iconoclastic dharma teacher who after nearly two decades of intensive practice in the Theravada tradition had a breakthrough which he calls the attainment of arhantship. He is best known for his pragmatic, down-to-earth, and no holds barred approach to meditative attainments, and for his innovative teaching style.

Host: Vincent Horn - is the chief geek at Buddhist Geeks. Long-time meditation practitioner, and sometimes teacher, Vincent has started several organizations aimed at shaping the future of contem-plative practice. His work focuses on the fusion of nascent technology and contemplative wisdom, and has been featured on the pages of Wired, Fast Company, and the Los Angeles Times.

Kenneth: [Laughs] OK.

Vince: And in most of your practice, most of your formal practice has been in the Theravada tradition, so you’ve done a lot of retreats here in the West and also in Asia. Which, maybe we’ll get into that more. And currently you’re a meditation teacher, kind of spare time, online. You do most of your teaching and sharing and there’s a community you’re leading at KennethFolk.com. So if people are interested they can check it out. And then, your main career is actually as a ESL teacher. English as a Second Language. I understand you just finished your Masters. And I remember you starting your Bachelors, so you did this in like, a couple years. You just flew through school.

Kenneth: I did. I started my, my Bachelors four years ago. So I got my Bachelors and my Masters in four years. I was able to test out of a lot of stuff. So, that’s the advantage of starting college when you’re forty-eight years old.

Vince: [laughs] Nice. And I bet you had some of the benefits of the meditation practice to help with the studying and stuff too.

Kenneth: Yeah, I suppose that it doesn’t hurt to be able to concentrate.

Vince: And then, just to say a little bit about how we met. I met you through Daniel Ingram who’s someone we’ve had on the show a few times. And you guys were friends for a long time. And I met you at the annual three-month retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. And it was so cool, you were on staff there. And, I had a chance before I got there, to be e-mailing with you about my practice. And then we chatted before the retreat started. I was there for six weeks. And then afterwards. And it was really nice speaking with you. I felt like I had a lot of support. And, because you have a unique perspective, which we’ll get into, it really helped me figure some stuff out and find a direction to go in after that, which was my first long retreat. So I really appreciated that. And then, since then, I’ve been bugging you and pestering you every once in awhile, saying, “Hey Kenneth, you want to be on Buddhist Geeks?”. And the timing just wasn’t right. So finally, I bugged you enough and the timing was right, so thank you for again, taking the time.

Kenneth: The truth is a feel really honored to be on the show. And I’ve always wanted to be on the show. But it was a matter of, really just not having enough time being in college and Grad school. And so now, the time is right. And because I’m not in school I can devote so much more time to teaching. So if there’s a big influx of business or website or new students, well, I’m in a position now to, to take care of them.

Vince: Nice. So, one thing that I thought would be fun, and I’ve heard you share little bits and pieces of your, kind of your story. I thought it would be cool to go into your spiritual path. You said your first opening was in 1982. It would be interesting to hear, kind of how you got into this stuff and then how it progressed from there.

Kenneth: Good. Well, it will be fun for me to tell the story. Because, although I’ve told parts of it, I’ve never really told the whole thing. So, I might wax eloquent and tell the whole story here.

Vince: Great.

Kenneth: I want to set it up just by saying that I am audacious enough… What I really want to say here is that it’s possible to get enlightened. And I know that, because it happened to me. And it wasn’t

2

entirely by accident. In other words, twenty-eight years of working at it, and it’s an ongoing process… So I’m hoping that by telling the story, other people understand that regular, average people who aren’t wearing robes, and aren’t even Asian. Or whether they’re Asian or not. It is possible for ordinary people to get enlightened.

The first time that, even the concept of meditation entered my consciousness, was when I was in high school in Southern California. I remember watching a film strip. And this particular film strip was about Japan. And they showed some Zen monks, sitting. And the captions said that the idea here was for the mind not to wander. And if the mind wandered for any of these people who were sitting in black robes, cross legged on the floor, they would raise their hand. And then some other guy in a black robe would whack them with a stick. That just struck me as being so remarkable. In the first place, that you would volunteer to be whacked by a stick. And in the second place that you would even care if your mind wandered. So that kind of rattled around for many years, but the truth is that I wasn’t spiritually inclined at all.

So fast-forward until I was twenty-four years old, it’s 1982 now. I was a suicidally depressed cocaine addict in Los Angeles. I was a professional musician, and I had a lot of free time to sit around being depressed and wondered how my life had gone so terribly wrong. I was trying to kick my cocaine habit, and I was not able to do that, it was lingering and torturing me.

One night, having exhausted all of the cocaine in the house, and feeling depressed, I then took 4 hits of LSD, and while I’m neither advocating nor taking any kind of a moral stance on drugs this is what happened to me. So, I took the LSD and I watched a couple movies on Television.

I watched part of the movie Shogun about a European ship pilot who, I believe, was shipwrecked in Japan and essentially adopted Samurai culture. There was one scene that just happened to come on during the short period of time I was watching it. It’s where this European pilot, who has become a Samurai, decides to commit ritual suicide, Seppuku, in front of his Shogun, or his Samurai master. So he takes out his knife, and he’s about to plunge it into his abdomen and disembowel himself. Just as he’s tensing his muscles to do this, another Samurai reaches over and grabs his hand, and prevents him from doing it, because the Shogun had given a signal “No, don’t let him do it.” I thought to myself “What changes would go on in the mind of a person who had accepted death completely in a moment and yet didn’t die?” This seemed extremely profound to me. So I turned off the T.V., I went into my bedroom and lay on my back on my bed, and I had nothing really left to do except reflect upon the unsatisfactoriness of my life.

One last movie reference here. I thought about a movie I had seen called Little Big Man. There’s a scene in that movie where an old Indian chief goes outside, lies down on the funeral pyre, it’s not lit, it’s just a bunch of sticks at this point. So he lies down on it and says to himself “Today is a good day to die.” This goes through my mind, and I thought to myself “Yes, yes indeed, today is a good day to die.” My mind felt so powerful, and so focused in that moment, I really believed, I was absolutely convinced, that I could will myself to death. By the way, in the movie, the old Indian chief doesn’t succeed the first time, he lies down and he doesn’t die, he gets up and goes about his business. But at the end of the movie he does it again and it works, he dies.

So I’m lying there, meditating, I had learned to meditate a couple of years earlier. My brother thought he’d do it as a kind of relaxation exercise, just follow the breath and kind of go into the dark void, behind your eyelids and relax. As I was going about dying, a very scary thing happened. It occurred to me that if I did die, I would be opening myself up to whatever forces were out there. I had a very visceral sense that there were some kind of malevolent forces, some kind of evil that would just wash

3

over me and take over if I let down my guard. I think I also understood the irony in that moment that I had never let down my guard before. So here I was, 24 years old, and somehow I had managed to keep up this wall, to keep something, who knows what, from entering my consciousness and taking it over. I could feel this malevolence clamoring outside the gates, trying to get in, and it was very scary to say the least.

But it occurred to me that this evil was so evil that I thought this must be what Satan is, this religious notion of the devil. Now, I wasn’t the least bit religious. I thought that anything religious was ridiculous. I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t believe in the devil. But somehow here I’m thinking the Devil’s gonna get me. [Laughter] And it was no joke. But it then occurred to me. Well, ok I don’t believe in the Devil, but if there is such a thing as the Devil, there must also be such a thing as God. In which case, if I open myself up entirely, then I don’t know, it would either be a wash, or God would win. And somehow that gave me just enough courage to go ahead and take the leap. So I did. I opened up entirely and surrendered to death. And set about the business of dying once again. And something really extraordinary happened. Looking back on it, or reading later about near death experiences, I realized what I had had was a classic near-death experience.

So, the first thing that happened was I had this kind of instantaneous life review. All the things that I’d done that were bad, so to speak, and all the things I’d done that were good, and the fruit of each of those things, this is something that I would later learn, is an insight into Karma. There was no judgment whatsoever. It was completely accepting. All right, this is how it is. This is what happened. No harm no foul. But these are the Karmic results of what you did.

Next thing that happened, I found myself being drawn up through some kind of a tube toward the sky, kind of maybe a glass tube would describe this, and it was a long glass tube. So, I’m going up and up and it’s going on and on, but it’s fascinating. I’m riveted by this experience. And there were some kind of little semi-disembodied beings on the other side of this glass tube, trying to get my attention, keeping pace with me as I am being sucked up toward the sky, and apparently trying to communicate with me. And I remember thinking, “Well, this was kind of a challenge. I’ve got to find a way to communicate with these beings, but we don’t have a language in common. And so how can I communicate with them?” And it seemed to me it was kind of a quest or a challenge. I should find some common ground with these things, so I could communicate. Well, it didn’t happen. I wasn’t able to come up with any common ground. Eventually I outpaced them and they just disappeared.

So I am being sucked up ever faster, this is accelerating. And I was able to see that there was an end to this thing, and the end of it was white light, or this blinding perfect light beyond imagining. And just about the time I first glimpsed it, because I was going so fast, I was pulled into it and merged with it. And this was by far, far and away, the most extraordinary experience of my life. Because now I was one with this kind of cosmic consciousness. And it was a literally mind-blowing experience. I was thinking this must be what people are talking about when they say “God”. But it wasn’t God as I had understood. It wasn’t this kind of simplistic notion of this big guy up in the sky that is like me only big and powerful. It was everything. And in that moment of merger with this cosmic consciousness, or Godhead, would be a way to describe this. It was as though I knew everything. Or everything that needed to be known was known, and yet there was no reason to ask, because it was all there.

This felt really good, and I thought, “All right, everything up until now, my entire life, has been a dream. And now I am awake. Now this is real.” And almost immediately I realized that it wasn’t going to last. I was getting kicked out of the garden. Later I wrote in my journal, “As I lay naked beneath God’s crushing foot, I asked him to throw me a bone. Nobody’s gonna believe this.” At that time, I’d never even heard anybody talk about anything like this. So I thought nobody will believe this. So, isn’t there

4

something I can take back with me? It wasn’t clear whether there was or not. Nonetheless, I was kicked out of the garden, and found myself lying on my back on my bed. With my minds completely blown.

Now, as it happened, my cocaine addiction vanished in that moment. I just never had any inclination to use it again and I suppose you could say that was the bone. I was thrown a bone, and that was it. My life changed completely in that moment and it set me on a quest to try and understand what had happened to me and to try and get it back, because the glow of it in some sense is, I suppose, never wore off, because I knew that there was this reality beyond my ordinary little self, but that was not accessible to me at that time. And so, I began to read.

I began reading self-improvement books like, there’s a fellow named Dr. Wayne Dyer, I suppose there still is such a fellow, and he write books about how to realize your potential as a human being. So that was a place to start. And then at some point I got on to the Ram Dass book, Be Here Now. This started to really click with me now. So, he was making these semi-understandable references to enlightenment and spirituality in talking about his guru and his, all kinds of really interesting stories but, still not particularly clear. It wasn’t really coming around for me.

For those first few years I really didn’t even know there was something called enlightenment or if i even heard the word it wasn’t clear what it might mean. I began reading Buddhist books so now I was getting ever closer. I remember reading Alan Watts and learning something about Zen meditation and then reading The Three pillars of Zen. I remember reading Ouspensky writing about Gurdjieff. All these hints but most of this, frankly, was way too vague, and not particularly helpful.

It wasn’t until 1990 so eight years after my first opening, I met a fellow named Bill Hamilton in Southern California. He was a Buddhist teacher who taught vipassana meditation, in the Mahasi Sayadaw style, and he started talking about enlightenment as though it were something fairly concrete. And he talked about four paths of enlightenment that could be systematically attained by systematically applying the technique. And there were even subdivisions of enlightenment within each of those four paths. And Bill Hamilton, this teacher, began to almost immediately to broadly hint that he had attained at least two of these four paths of enlightenment. And suddenly this all became real for me. Now, rather than being some vague, airy, fairy, Zen teachers would tell stories about, he was a guy who was saying there is something called enlightenment, and I’ve got it. At least I’ve got some significant amount of it, and am working towards getting more of it. Now notice how this is all sounding much like spiritual materialism there’s something called enlightenment and I’m getting it. And yeah, that’s exactly how I was conceiving it at the time, but I really embraced this practice.

Within a few months of meeting this teacher, he had convinced me to do a three-month retreat at IMS, mediation society, which is where I met Vince. This is back in ‘91 I did the three month IMS retreat and I went through a lot of these stages that were described thousands of years ago in the progress of insight. There are these very precise accounts of what happens when a Yogi meditates, and these things happen in invariable order and it doesn’t really matter who you are. This is a remarkable thing that your mind is actually set up, it has the structure and even if you don’t tell a Yogi what to expect, that you will go through these stages just like thousands and millions of Yogis have in the past.

Now after the three-month retreat I went back home to Southern California from Massachusetts, where the meditation center is, and I gave my report to Bill Hamilton, my teacher. And he listened to it, and fell asleep during part of it, because I got a little too verbose with what I thought about what was happening. And he’s really only interested in what was happening. For example, what were the sensations that you felt when you meditated? It took me years to figure out that my teachers didn’t

5

care what I thought about my meditation. It seems so important to me, but they didn’t care. They couldn’t tell anything by that. They could tell where I was on these maps by what actually happened to me. So, if I said, “When I follow the rise and fall of my abdomen, I feel warmth, tightness, expansion, contraction.” Those really simple terms are so much more relevant to a vipassana teacher than anything you think or I think about our meditation.

Well, after listening to this report, Bill told me that I had gone through 11 of the 16 insight knowledges, or nanas, leading up toward the 1st path of enlightenment. And I hadn’t attained 1st path. I was getting there. I was pretty close. So, what I should do, he told me, is go to Asia and do an extended retreat. Which I did.

I had retired, by the way, from being a professional musician. And I’d like to point out, at this moment, that although my drug addiction went away with my first opening in 1982, my depression did not. And I was plagued by depression throughout these years, to the point of being dysfunctional many times. And I gave up playing music professionally in ‘89 or ‘90. Partially as the result of burn out on that lifestyle and that scene. But also because I was depressed, I couldn’t really do anything. And I was consciously or unconsciously committing myself to my spiritual endeavor, my spiritual quest.

So, I was working as a pizza man, Bill told me, “You should go to Asia and do a long-term retreat.” So, I hustled enough pizzas to save up enough money. I sold my little Honda Civic and I bought a one-way ticket to Malaysia, understanding that I was going to then go to Burma. I didn’t know when I was going to come back. I really planned to get enlightened. In fact, I wanted to get 2nd path while I was in Asia, during that first trip. However long that took. I remember saying to my interview teacher, a Burmese monk in Malaysia, “I’m going to stay in Asia until I get 2nd path.” And he looked at me, in his deep voice he said, “Good plan.” That was real validation for me, because then I understood that not only did Bill Hamilton take seriously the idea that enlightenment was possible and that I could do it. But, Sayadaw U Rajinda also took this seriously. These were very real, doable, things. What happened within about two months of arriving at Malaysian Buddhist Meditation Centre in Penang, Malaysia, under the instruction of the Burmese monk Sayadaw U Rajinda, I did get 1st path. And the way this happened… I had gotten to a point in my practice…

And for those of you who haven’t done a Theravada Buddhist retreat, this is very intensive meditation. So, you get up early in the morning and you meditate, alternating sitting meditation and walking meditation, an hour sitting, an hour walking. Then you eat breakfast, which they feed you. There’s very little for you to do other than meditate. Maybe you’ll spend 10 minutes sweeping the floor of the monastery. And then, back to meditation all day long.

So, I had gotten to the point where I was sitting for a couple of weeks, meditation had become quite uneventful. All of the big, exciting, wow things of my earlier practice had kind of eased up and I was just sitting. This is what they call “knowledge of equanimity” on the map. And one day, after lunch, I was sitting and I got so deep in my meditation, it was almost as though I went to sleep, or just lost consciousness for a moment. And then, suddenly, I perked up and I said to myself, “What was that? Was that it? I think that was it.” It meaning, the 1st path. And I had been alerted by Bill Hamilton that 1st path is actually a great anticlimax. Whereas, the first opening, like what I had with my big unity experience and the white light, that is not enlightenment. That is, as Bill put it… it’s the relationship of a seed to the blossom that will later come to fruition. When you get to 1st path, you’ve completed a certain part of a larger circuit. So you’ve completed a sub-circuit, let’s say. And there’s a sense of stability. You know something happened. You know you’re off that portion of the ride. And, using these words very carefully, because there is the bigger ride, and the bigger ride is what’s over at 4th path.

6

So the day that I got 1st path in Malaysia, I remembered getting up from that sitting and just walking around laughing for about a day. I felt so free and life was good. It turned out that I immediately found out that I had access to four jhanas. Four jhanas meaning, particular, recognizable states of consciousness that are very pleasant. And I found out I was able to jump between them. So these four jhanas would normally rise in order: one, two, three, four. But, I could go from one to four or from four to two and so forth, jumping around. And depth and clarity of these new meditative states was completely different than it had been the day before. So this was some validation that what intuited to be 1st path was indeed 1st path. And Sayadaw U Rajinda, although he didn’t say to me, “Yes, Kenneth, you attained 1st path.” He hinted around to let me believe that he was buying what I was selling, that I had attained 1st path.

From there, I went to Burma. So during that retreat, that was a year long retreat, half in Malaysia and half in Burma. When I got to Burma, I practiced with Sayadaw U Pandita, this cantankerous old Burmese monk, very famous, very well thought of in Burma and around the world and a real master of the technical aspect of meditation. Sayadaw U Pandita really pounded into me what the meditation technique was. It was very important to him that I not space out or get into sleepy, dreamy, states. And we had some conflict about this, because I was actually in the review phase after 1st path. I never attempted to just sit down and say that to him. But I tried, through my reporting, to let him understand where I was. Now, whether he understood where I was or not, I’ll never know, because it’s not his style to be so direct. But, Sayadaw U Pandita didn’t like the way I was reporting and kind of prodded me to be very specific in the way I was meditating and very careful in the way I was reporting. And I think, kind of launched me on toward the next cycle. On towards 2nd path.

Now, even though I had told Sayadaw U Rajinda, in Malaysia a few months previously, that I was going to stay in Burma until I got 2nd path, I didn’t do that. After about a year, I went back to The States and moved to Alaska, of all places. And took a job as an apprentice wood carver in a little town in Alaska and became the village meditation teacher. After a few months there, I went back to Malaysia, back to Alaska, and back to Malaysia and Burma again. And while in Burma, on my third Asian retreat, I attained to the 2nd path of the 4 paths of insight. And when I got back home, Bill Hamilton, more or less confirmed that for me. So, at this point, it was abundantly clear that the 4 paths were real.

A couple of ways to talk about these four paths. One is in terms of what actually happens to you. In other words: What are the physical phenomena involved? And another way is to talk about what would happen to somebody… What would be the affect upon somebody who attained, for example, 2nd path? There are all kinds of stories and myths that have arisen about this. Most of them are nonsense. And it became ever more apparent to me, as I worked my way up through this system, that I was not becoming a superman and I wasn’t becoming a saint and my morality was not becoming perfected. And what was happening here was a very organic process that I’ve more recently come to think of as what I call a physio-energetic process. There is some energy that arises in the body and can be developed in stages. And that’s what’s happening. All of the stuff, all of the stories that we layer on to that, that if you reach this stage, you’re going to act a certain way or you’re going to be incapable of committing various immoral acts, that’s just fantasy island.

So, for me, through the years, these two understanding, these two ways of mapping enlightenment, of mapping developmental enlightenment, have diverged. I’ve completely given up on the notion that you’re going to develop to the point of being incapable of lying, for example, or of being incapable of anger or lust. I’m hoping that we’ll talk more about that later but I’m going to leave that aside for the moment. So, that was 2nd path.

3rd path was not so clear. It wasn’t clear. I don’t know when the exact moment happened. But, I know

7

that at some point I was able to access jhanas, these absorption states that are beyond the first eight. The first eight jhanas are the ones we hear about mostly in Buddhism. But there are five more. And the five more are called the Suddhavasa or pure abodes. And these are said, according to traditional Theravada maps, to only be accessible to those who have attained 3rd path or beyond. So, the obvious implication of that is that if you have more than eight jhanas, you are an anagami, or a 3rd path practitioner. This, for me, sometime in the mid 90’s, I stumbled upon a ninth jhana. So, the first of the five upper jhanas, the pure abodes.

And this is kind of an interesting story, how this happened, because I was experimenting, as I often do, with techniques. I, basically, am very opportunistic. I’ll do anything just to see what happens. I was thinking about something I’d read that, according to mythology, a certain Buddha called Amitabha Buddha, the Buddha of compassion, made a vow. He promised all living beings, to all humans that if we would just invoke his name, we could instantly be transported to the Pure Land, whatever that was, one of the Buddhist heavens. And, so I thought, “Well, here again I don’t believe things just because it’s something to believe in, but I’ll try it.” And I was sitting in my car and saying to myself, “Okay. With all of my sincerity, I’m going to say ‘Namo Amitabha’ in the name of Amitabha Buddha.” I’m going to invoke the name of this Buddha and see if I get transported to the Pure Land. Remember, this is all in the context of being a very depressed adult. So, I tried it, and I found, that I entered a state of boundless gratitude and happiness that seems very much like the Pure Land. I mean I can certainly imagine why somebody would call it that. So, I dubbed it the Pure Land jhana. And I found that I could conjure up that state at will by either remembering this boundless gratitude or, interestingly enough, by focusing on the third eye area which is a chakra, the brow chakra according to some systems. And later on, I realized that that was the moment where I can say for sure I had attained 3rd path.

Kenneth: There’s a kind of a culture that has grown up in Theravada Buddhism that it is shameful to admit that you have attained any of this. That nice people don’t talk about this, kind of in the way that nice people don’t look up ladies’ skirts. This is a shameful thing, and probably this came about from the rules for monks. Monks are not allowed to claim any state or attainment except to other monks. And for better or worse, I think for worse, we developed, especially in the West, what Bill Hamilton called the “mushroom culture.” By mushroom, he said, “Keep them in the dark and feed them stuff.”

Vince: You mean shit? [laughs]

Kenneth: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. So, this mushroom culture has fed on itself to the point where all of us are stumbling all over ourselves trying to let people know what’s going on without saying it. And I really think it’s high time that some of us say this, which is why I’m saying it, and why I appreciate what Daniel Ingram has done, and he’s really been a pioneer in just coming out and say, “Look, I’m enlightened, and it’s a good thing. And I would really like to help other people get enlightened, and I can do that by telling the truth.” So, that’s where I’m coming from when I have the audacity to make these outrageous claims.

I also want to say that the mushroom culture is not in force everywhere. I can illustrate that by telling a story about when I was at Sayadaw U Kundala’s monastery. This was my third Asian trip, and this was the retreat on which I got Second Path. When I would go to interview with Sayadaw U Kundala, Sayadaw U Kundala doesn’t speak English or, at least, he didn’t at that time, and so there was a translator, a Burmese woman. She would translate what I had to say. So, if told Sayadaw U Kundala that I’m experiencing fruitions, which is Theravada Buddhist way of saying, “I’ve attained a path.” And said to him, this is the second time this has happened. It happened some years back in Malaysia, so this is Second Path. And I would ask him very technical questions about how to re-experience the fruitions from Second Path versus the fruitions from First Path, for example. He would explain to me,

8

“Yes, you can do both of those things by making a resolution to experience either one of those types of fruitions.”

So, of course, the translator would tell her friends at the monastery about this Western yogi who was making such progress. The Burmese are very generous and very eager to share their form of Buddhism with foreigners. So, I became kind of a curiosity at the monastery. “Oh, look, here’s this Western yogi who is actually getting it, actually making some progress by our system.” People would come around and give me gifts, hoping to gain merit, because according to the tradition if you give a gift to someone who has attained some level of enlightenment, you gain merit. Essentially, brownie points, Buddhist brownie points for giving the gift. The more enlightened they are, the more brownie points you get.

When I left there, I got a ride to the airport by a very nice man who was a member of the Board at that monastery. And he appararently was well connected in Rangoon, because when we get to the airport, he kind of waved his hand and I didn’t have to wait in the Customs’ line with all the other people at the airport. We just went to the front of the line, walked through, smiled at the armed guards there, and I then walked in to the waiting room at the gate and just sat there, all by myself, waiting for other people to go through customs and come in.

But I was walking away, this man, the Board member, shouted to me and waved, and he said, “You got two, come back for a third.” So, here’s this guy, in the middle of a public airport, not the least bit ashamed to say to me, “You got Second Path.” This was so counter to my understanding of how Western Buddhists viewed these things, with everybody succumbing to the mushroom culture and really frowning upon any kind of disclosure.

Ok, so that was a bit of a digression. Now, we go back to, I’m claiming that I had attained Third Path.

So, now, we’re talking about the mid-90’s through the early 2000’s, and I was really depressed during this time. So I had access to all kinds of remarkable mind states, all these jhanas, and yet, my life was in a shambles, my brain chemistry was scrambled. I was taking Prozac and whatever antidepressants seemed to work best. I tried several. I was taking an anti-anxiety drug at night, in a very low dose, but I couldn’t sleep at night. So, here I am, you’d think that, according to all of the legends about what an Anagami is, a Third Path practitioner, I should have been really together, and I wasn’t.

Let’s go to 2004. In 2004, I found myself at a meditation center in New Mexico. One day, meditating intensively, doing walking meditation, I was walking under a pepper tree out in the desert, I gave myself permission to be enlightened. My teacher, Bill Hamilton, had died in 1999, so this is five years, about five years after his death. On his deathbed in the hospital, he told me, he said, “I’m thinking about, if I ever get out of this hospital bed, I’m going to write a book and I’m going to come out of the closet as having attained Arahatship.” Now, those were not his exact words, and I can’t remember the exact words, but it was very clear to me what he was saying. He had attained Fourth Path, this thing that, as far as I knew, wasn’t supposed to happen. People would—in the Buddhist circles where I hang out in, basically, around the Insight Meditation society culture— people would speak in hushed tones about how some person who, “Oh maybe Dipa Ma was a Third Path, or maybe Sayadaw U Pandita, attained Arahatship.” Very few people were even rumored to be Arahats. So, here was Bill, this regular guy, regular American guy, saying that he had done, he had attained this lofty goal of enlightenment, and I believed him. It seemed like a very credible claim to me from what I knew of him.

So back to the desert, here I am, walking under the pepper tree, giving myself permission, saying,

9

10

“You know what, I’ve suffered enough. If there is some kind of a suffer-o-meter to determine who has the right to be enlightened, I think I’ve finally gotten there. Can I just be done with this already?” And it occurred to me that I actually was. In that moment, I realized I was done with this. I turned to an imaginary Buddha, standing next to me, and I said, “Done is what’s need to be done,” which is a kind of a traditional formula, where supposedly the freshly minted Arahats would walk up to the Buddha, and they would say, that’s something like “Done is what’s needed to be done.” It was done. I knew that this ride, and this is what Bill Hamilton called “the ride.” The ride that had begun on that day when I saw the white light back in ‘82, this thing that had taken hold of me, and had been the most important thing in my life for these 22 years, was over. Whatever it was that I was trying to get to, it was no longer an issue.

So, that was 2004, and this is 2010, so, about six years ago this happened. I’ve never had occasion to doubt that. That particular circuit was completed in that moment. And, interestingly enough, my depression went away. I was able to stop taking my antidepressants and my anti-anxiety medicine, and I haven’t had any trouble sleeping since then. Something very significant happened that day, and although, it was not, by any means, a spectacular thing, and some said it was a joke, because I remember thinking, “Well, you know, big deal. I don’t even know why I went through that. I can’t remember why I was going through that process for 22 years, but it’s over now, and I wonder what I’ll do next? I don’t know what my new project will be.”

I remember walking into my little yogi trailer out in the desert, and writing on my calendar, this as June, 13th, I wrote on my calendar, “I see the elephant.” By that, I meant that, where I had been able to see parts of it, I’d been able to see parts of the puzzle, it finally all came together and made sense to me how the various practices, how they go together. Of course, it’s a reference to the blind men in the elephant where one blind man says, “The elephant is like at tree,” because he’s holding the elephant’s leg. Another man says, “The elephant is like a wall,” because he’s touching the side of the elephant. And one guy says, “The elephant is like a snake.” Well, a blind man can’t see the whole elephant. In that moment, I saw the elephant.

Now, does that mean that I achieved some kind of Superman status and became a perfect being, incapable of any immoral act, blah, blah, blah? No, not at all. Does that mean there is nothing more for me to accomplish in this life, and now I can go around for the rest of my life in a cosmic bliss out? No, it most certainly doesn’t mean that. What it means is that there is an organic physio-energetic process that is inherent to humans, most people will never even begin it. But some people do, and if you are on this ride, you know. It has an end. There is a time when the circuit is complete and the ride is over.

Now, my practice, since then… I’m just as excited about practice as I always was, but it’s a very different orientation. Whereas before, I was out of sync and I was being pulled along by this kind of dharmic gravity, you could say. I didn’t know where I was being pulled, but I knew I was being pulled. Well, that’s over, but now there’s the sense of being in sync with it. So, really, it’s more like kind of rolling down a grassy hill, like you used to do when you’re a kid. It’s effortless, and if I just surrender to it, it goes deeper.

Okay, I’d like to wrap it up by saying that there are two ways, generally speaking to conceive of enlightenment. One of them is developmental enlightenment, which is everything I just described, that was all about developing through time, this kind of spiritual materialism as Trungpa Rinpoche would say, where you get something. You think of this as something you’re going to get. Now, in practice, you don’t get anything. But you can, at least, think of it in those terms. This is a very important aspect of enlightenment and it’s, letss say, one side of the coin or one way of understanding it.

11

There’s another way of understanding enlightenment. Where we have development on the one hand, on the other hand, we have Realization. Now, Realization, this is a very exciting thing. Realization doesn’t happen through time. In any given moment, in this moment, either I’m awake, either awakeness is awake to itself, or it isn’t. If it is, that can be called a realized moment. Now, it isn’t possible to develop through time to that moment, it isn’t possible to develop through time through to this moment. This moment is here, it’s complete. It’s best out of it’s being outside of time. It’s not the future, it’s not the past, and it’s not the present, because it isn’t within the time stream. In this moment, it can be seen that there is Awakeness, there is Awareness, that is aware of itself. That doesn’t require anything, that’s just the way it is. And, the reason is possible to go through a lifetime and not notice that, is because we’re distracted.

Now, since I went through my big process and started to think of myself as this… shortly after my developmental enlightenment, thinking, “Wow, I’m kind of a big deal! Look what I did.” Never mind the fact that I was also able to see that “I am a fiction.” But still there was a possibility of corrupting it, of saying “I accomplished this.” About that time, it was in 2004, shortly after my enlightenment, that I moved to Massachusetts, got on staff there in the maintenance department, which is where I met Vince. It’s also where I met my wife and I began to see that my wife was able to see that this moment, she was able to see the Awareness, the Awakeness. She was able to be awake, in this moment, without having gone very deeply into this developmental process. In other word, she hadn’t yet attained First Path and yet in some ways, I felt like I was a baby compared to her in terms of just being awake. And I began to get really interested in direct path teachings, for example: Ramana Maharshi, and Eckhart Tolle, and Adyashanti, and the Dzogchen masters, Tulku Urgyen and Tsokyni Rinpoche.

I began to ask myself, for one thing, how is it possible that these teachers are teaching a kind of Awakeness that doesn’t involve grinding through 22 years of abject depression? OR are they? I guess the question is what were they doing? Since 2004, I’ve been applying myself to learning the techniques, and the non-techniques, if you will, of the direct path. And I have been asking if there is a way to teach this where Realization and development are taught side by side, and I think there is a way. My own understanding, I think is much more complete since I stopped thinking only in developmental terms and really embraced direct path teachings, and I’d like to talk about how I tie these two things together in my own teaching, which I call the 3-speed transmission.

Vince: Sure. Yeah, let’s get into it. It’s interesting, his is something that only recently kind of formally merged in the way that you’re talking. When I met you, you weren’t really talking in these terms, so this is kind of a recent development. Yeah, so let’s jump into it and also, while you’re describing it, I’d love to hear some of the influences on this, because obviously this is a model or an approach, so that there were certain teachers, aybe some you’ve already mentioned who kind of influenced you in this regard.

Kenneth: Good. The most influential teacher for me in this was Ramana Maharshi. Ramana taught a method of self-inquiry where he would have the yogi ask “who am I?” And he explained, and this is characteristic of all the Advaita teachers, he explained that if you ask “who am I?” and if you let your consciousness turn back on itself and take itself as object, you come to a place that can be called the Witness. I don’t know that Ramana called it this, but some people do. So, you come to this pure witnessing consciousness. This way of seeing is a transpersonal way of seeing, and by that, I mean that it’s not the small self anymore. It’s looking at the world through an entirely different lens. If you do that, if a yogi does that and becomes absorbed in this witnessing consciousness, a couple of things happen: for one, in the moment of being absorbed in that way, you aren’t suffering because you’re not personally involved in the life of this individual. So this Kenneth, from the point of view of the Witness, whether this Kenneth lives or dies, that’s not an issue. So, it’s an immediately freeing point of view.

12

I should say that the Witness is not a nebulous affair. To be locked in to this particular perspective, it’s very clear when this happens and I would urge people to experiment with this. Ask “who am I?” until you get to a point where it seems that there’s only this transpersonal “I” knowing itself. The other interesting thing that happens here with this witness, which by the way, is what I call “second gear practice.” The other interesting thing that happens is that it burns itself out. Ramana called it the stick that stirs the fire and is eventually consumed by it. So this is an extremely important clue on how to get to the point where you can see this awareness anytime, or rather how to get to where you can surrender to this awareness without being distracted. Well, there’s a very pragmatic way to do that, and that’s to dwell as the witness.

About the 3-speed transmission. The 3-speed transmission is obviously a kind of tongue-in-cheek, a pun on a car transmission, and also the Buddhist idea of transmission where you’re transmitting enlightenment from one individual to another. The basic idea is this: third gear is just to surrender to Awareness. In this moment, there is only Awareness. The entire manifest world is arising and passing away within Awareness, in this moment, and that’s something that can be directly apprehended. That is Realization, to see that in the moment. That’s third gear. If you can do that, do that.

Now, it may not always be possible. Maybe the momentum of distraction is very strong, and any amount of my suggesting to surrender to awareness it’s not working. It’s falling on deaf ears. Fine. In that case, downshift. You would downshift to second gear, and second gear is to dwell as the witness. You do that by asking, “who am I?” until you feel the clear sense… you ask, “Who am I? Who am I?” and the answer comes back, “I.” And you stay there, you sit with that, becoming absorbed in that sense, that transpersonal sense of “I,” understanding that not only are you getting a break from the difficulties of being an individual, but understanding that this will eventually burn itself out. The very subtle subject-to-object duality of self taking itself as object, if you will, consciousness taking consciousness as object, even that collapses, and when that falls away, there’s only awareness. So, second gear, dwelling as a witness, is both a short-term fix to suffering because it’s upstream from suffering.

Suffering is only going to happen to an individual, and the Witness is upstream, you could say, from the individual. It has the long-term benefit of leading to the complete collapse of subject-object duality, for at least, a moment, but there are no limits to how many moments this can happen.

Now, let’s say you’re listening to this and you say, “Okay, I’ve tried ‘Who am I?’ and for whatever reason, I’m not getting any traction with that.” Then I say, “No problem, downshift to first gear.” First gear is balancing concentration and investigation, ala vipassana-samatha meditation. Now, the idea here, this is a very mechanistic developmental approach, where you are going to access and penetrate a finite number of strata of mind over a period of years, this takes most people years or decades, getting to ever more subtle layers of mind until you get to the point where you have seen through all the layers of mind and, thus, are no longer confusing them with self.

The way these things can work together is that the higher you get on this developmental scale, the less distractible you are. The less distractible you are, the more likely it is that you will be able to surrender entirely to Awareness. There’s a way that the first gear practice of samatha-vipassana as taught in Theravada Buddhism, there is a way that that can be parlayed into the Witness, and this is one of the most exciting things that I’ve discovered, is how these things tie in, and I’ll tell you exactly specifically how that is.

If a yogi can get to the point where they can develop the jhanas, the realms of absorption, to the level of the sixth jhana, that jhana is called the “jhana of infinite consciousness.” For those of you who don’t have experience with the jhanas, you’ll be surprised once you develop this, how clear these are. It

13

might be easy to imagine that these are just kind of made up or imaginary, but once you experience them, you realize that these are real in the sense that the rooms in your house are real. You can walk from your kitchen to your dining room and you can tell which is which. They look different, they have different characteristics in all sorts of different ways, and you can learn to very skillfully navigate this territory.

So, let’s say you get to the place where you can access the jhana of infinite consciousness. If you do, when you do, and I hope you will, you’ll notice that the predominant characteristic of the sixth jhana, the jhana of infinite consciousness, is none other than the Witness. When you get in touch with that Witnessing consciousness, you can then go to the other jhanas, and notice that this Witnessing consciousness is also present in the other jhanas. In fact, it’s the one thing that looks the same when you go from one jhana to the next, there is this one thing in common. It’s the Witness, the sense of the watcher, this impersonal watcher of the situation.

So, what are you going to do with that? Well, at that point, you’ve made the transition from first gear to second. I initially presented these in reverse order. I said, “Notice Awareness as Awareness now,” that’s third gear. If you can’t do that, downshift to second gear, which is the Witness. If you can’t do that, go to the first gear. But if you’re working your way up, from first gear, that’s fine, too. Once you get to sixth jhana, you do have access to the Witness, and you can dwell as this transpersonal, trans-jhanic watcher. By trans-jhanic, I mean, that you can put the Witness in the foreground and watch the jhanas cycle through your experience in the background. This is a very efficient way, not only to develop further strata of mind, but also to develop the Witness to the point where it burns itself out, and there’s just Awareness, which is Realization.

Transcript:

Vincent: Hello Buddhist Geeks, this is Vincent Horn and I’m joined today over the phone with a special guest, Sally Kempton. Sally, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with the Buddhist Geeks.

Sally: Such a pleasure.

Vincent: Yeah, it’s fantastic to have you on here. I think you’re probably one of the first guests we’ve spoken to that has a background not in Buddhism primarily but actually in Hinduism. So this is going to be a real treat I think for the Buddhist Geeks out there.

Sally: l love speaking to Buddhists as cousins in the spiritual journey. We have interesting differences in vocabulary, but profound similarities as well.

Vincent: Almost like second cousins from a distant mother or something.

Sally: Right. Of course, both Buddhism and Hinduism came out of the same root, though there’ve been a lot of branching since those days! Still, there’s a sense that we’re talking from the same core understanding.

Vincent: Cool. Well hopefully that’s something we can into more because I think, especially from the Buddhist perspective, it’d be really interesting to hear what are those differences and what are the implications maybe even.

But before we do that I wanted to say a little bit about your background so the people kind of have a sense of what you do and where you’re coming from. Like I mentioned before you’ve practiced in the Hindu tradition for many years, many decades actually with Swami Muktananda whose part of the tradition, it’s called Kashmir Shaivism. And recently I guess in the last several years you’ve started teaching more, I guess a little bit outside of the tradition while incorporating facets of it and you’re more now kind of a spiritual teacher in that you teach meditation and you teach what you call “applied spiritual wisdom.” So that’s pretty fascinating that you’ve kind of moved beyond the tradition in a certain way, which would be maybe interesting to talk about that as well.

14

Author: Sally Kempton - is known both for her ability to lead students into deep states of meditation, and for her gift of mak-ing yogic wisdom applicable to daily life. She has spent over forty years practicing, studying, and teaching meditation and spiritual philosophy. A former swami, or monk, she lived and studied for many years with enlightened Indian masters and received training in the Kashmir Shaivism tradition. She writes “Wisdom,” a regular column for Yoga Journal, and teaches work-shops and retreats in the United States and Europe.

2. The Secret of Meditation

Also I wanted to mention that you have a new book that just came out through Sounds True called “Meditation for the Love of It,” which is a really interesting title for a meditation book I think. Maybe if you could say a little bit about why meditation for the “Love” of it?

Sally: Sure. The book came about at a point when, after about 15 years of practice, I began to contemplate what could take my meditation deeper. One thing that came up strongly for me was the recognition that the real secret of unfolding meditation is to do it for its own sake—for enjoyment. So, very often we meditate with a purpose—what Suzuki Roshi called a ‘gaining idea’. Perhaps in the beginning we begin meditating because we want to feel better, to ease the mental static. That is certainly what I did. As we go on we mediate for spiritual unfoldment, perhaps ultimately for enlightenment, however you define that. But there’s another approach to meditation, in which you meditate because you like it. You sit because you are actually having a fabulous time exploring the inner world, exploring your own being, exploring your own consciousness. The real turning point in my practice was recognizing that I could meditate because I was in love with inner world. The book is set up to help people discover that meditation—aside from all its health benefits and spiritual benefits-- can be a profound recreational activity.

There’s another reason why it’s important to enjoy meditation. As we know, meditation makes its most transformational effect on us when we do it regularly. The new fmri studies show that people who meditate for thirty minutes a day over a period of time experienced visible, and positive, brain changes. It’s the regularity that allows this. But it’s hard to meditate regularly if you don’t like meditating! So at every level enjoyment is, I think crucial in your practice.

Vincent: That’s great. It’s so interesting when I hear you talk about that because although I’ve had that same experience in my own practice, when I first started, and I notice this with a lot of people, that starting meditation, it doesn’t feel enjoyable, usually, very much at all.

Sally: Right, it’s hard. You actually have to make a real effort to turn your attention around because, naturally our attention goes outward. Training attention to turn inward is a very big deal. One thing that I like to emphasize with beginning meditators is that they find a meditation modality that has some pleasure in it. So I generally teach beginning meditation by encouraging people to enter into the heart center, because meditating in the heart center can quickly yield a certain kind of joyful, almost sensual pleasure. Whether you’re just doing a very simple breath practice, or practicing with a mantra. or doing a mindfulness practice, when you’re centered in the heart there’s a natural experience of pleasure that you tap into that makes the practice much more juicy. So even from the beginning, you can kind of fill your practice with some level of pleasure. That is important.

Vincent: Thank you. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you got onto this whole spiritual path, or maybe in some ways we could even say spiritual trip.

Sally: Spiritual trip, spiritual journey, yes, yes.

Vincent: Actually, I heard you in an interview with Tami Simon on her podcast“Insights at the Edge” speaking about how you had a pretty profound experience with a Tibetan Lama and then soon after you met your guru, Swami Muktananda. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about that kind of introduction to the spiritual path or to these profound states of oneness that you talked about in that interview.

Sally: In the 1970s, when I started, it was a much more unusual to be a meditator, and there were very few avenues for it. My initial experience came as a spontaneous awakening into love, while siting in

15

my living room while I was listening to a Grateful Dead album. I found myself overwhelmed, out of nowhere, with absolute, all encompassing, delicious love. Along with the love came a knowing that life is supposed to be about love. I had a kind of epiphany-- “Oh my God, this is why people are alive. It’s not just to go through the day, it’s not just to succeed in your work or your romantic relationships. It’s for this.” The experience lasted about 24 hours, and then my normal somewhat neurotic, distracted, basically suffering mind came back. I was a journalist at the time, living a very classic, downtown Manhattan journalist’s life. I spent a lot of time in my head. I started meditating in order to somehow close the gap between what I had seen was possible and what my actual day-to-day experience was.

In pursuit of that I got involved in a western spiritual training and began to do a lot of very rigorous psycho-physical practices, including a form of hatha yoga, lots of visualization, a lot of multi-layered practice. About a year and a half after that I went to a workshop with a Tibetan teacher in Berkeley. At one point, he gave an instruction to focus on the back of your head. I was was confused. I said, “Do you mean the inside of the back of your head or the outside of the back of your head?” And he said, “Just find out who’s looking.” I’d never heard anything like that before. In that moment there was an inner shift into a state of spacious awareness, the ordinary mind retired, it was a kind of classic kensho experience. And again, that experience lasted for quite a while, several days. It completely changed the way I saw the world. As you know, in that state, the ordinary egoic self retires. And that means that on a very deep level, you relax. Your relationships, your interactions—your whole sense of yourself in the world—feel radically simple, relaxed, filled with clarity.

But as that state started to fade, I began having very powerful experiences of what I later came to realize was an awakened Kundalini. The visualization practice that I’d been doing was a Vajrayana practice in which we imagined firey iron balls in the belly and then raised the heat and light up the inner channels to the heart. I’d never been good at visualization. It was hard work and felt abstract to me. But once I had this awakening, those inner visualizations were not work any more. They were actually happening—the light and heat became real inner experiences, spontaneously appearing. I was also experiencing upwellings of extraordinary bliss and insight and understanding. Then a kind of emotional roller coaster started, which is also typical of a strong Kundalini awakening, in which all sorts of buried emotions would come up—things like anger, unworthiness—the usual suspects! I remember a day during my Tai Chi class, when I was practicing push hands with my partner, and the anger that was rising was so intense that I actually had to stop doing push hands because it felt too aggressive.

In the middle of all this, I had a meditation one evening in which the top of my head seemed to blow off and I was in a vast light field. It was both beautiful and scary and it made me realize why you need a teacher, and almost simultaneously, the name Swami Muktananda just came into my mind. He was on a tour of the West at the time, and some friends of mine had met him on a previous trip to the West. I knew he was a Kundalini master. So when he came to Los Angeles, I went to see him, really, to get some advice on my Kundalini. He had an extremely pragmatic attitude towards Kundalini, which again, at that time was very little understood in the West. The only thing that I had ever read about it was that scary book by Gopi Krishna about how his Kundalini awoke and went up the wrong channel and caused him years of discomfort. Muktananda’s position on Kundalini actually comes from Kashmir Shaivism, which we’ll talk about later. He taught that the awakened energy is an expression of the divine energetic creative aspect of the universe, which in the tradition is called Shakti. When Kundalini awakens, it takes you through the process that’s necessary to clear out your body and mind, in order for you to know the vastness of who and what you are. In that sense, he put the whole thing in perspective for me intellectually. But at the same time, I around him I experienced a constant sense of awakened awareness, of kind of vast universal awareness and tremendous love. It seemed like a no-

16

brainer for me to start studying with him.

As I said, my first introduction to the deep traditions had been through Chogyam Trungpa’s work. And there’s a section in one of his early books in which he talks about the gurus of the Kagyu lineage, Tilopa and Naropa and Marpa and Milarepa. He writes about the antinomian, fiery qualities of these teachers. Tilopa, the progenitor of the lineage was almost certainly a Shaivite, as it seems were many of the progenitors of Tantric Buddhism. The scholar Alexis Sanderson traces the roots of many Tibetan tantric practices to Shaivite teachers of the trans-Himalyan region. Muktananda fit that picture. He was a profoundly larger than life figure, with an extremely powerful transmission that was both non-dual and devotional. Around him I would regularly and periodically go into just a sort of natural state of unity awareness, and also very heart-based. And he was also wildly fiery and spontaneous, as well as relational. He was like one of those old-time gurus.

So I entered into a relationship with him that went on until he died, For eight years. I traveled with him, I edited his books, I spent a lot of time with him. And in the process, he put me through a training in the texts of the traditions-- the texts of the yogic tradition, of the Vedanta tradition, and especially of Kashmir Shaivism, which was really just beginning to be known in the West at that time. The first English translations of some of the great Kashmir Shaiva works were just being published by, first, Motilal Banarsidass and then SUNY press. Muktananda had been instrumental in having those books published. So my experience of spiritual unfolding in my time with my guru was actually as much about what those texts opened up in me as it was about closed eyed meditation itself. So that was how it started.

Vincent: Beautiful. And I understand that you were also teaching at some point as a Swami in that tradition, and then it seems like later on decided to drop the Swami title. Could you say maybe just a little bit about that, because I think that’s an important piece of information about your history?

Sally: Muktananda gave me initiation into sanyas—made me a swami--just before he left his body. He was very much interested in founding a cadre of teachers, similar to the Ramakrishna order, which you may not be familiar with. Ramakrishna was a great Hindu teacher of the late 19th century, and his closest disciple, Swami Vivekananda, was actually one of the key people in bringing Vedanta to the West in the early 20th century. And Ramakrishna, before he died, had given informal initiation as Swamis or monks, to some of his close disciples. Muktananda had done that. And—how shall I say—he convinced me, he persuaded me, made it clear to me that he wanted me to become a monk, and to continue teaching after he had left his body. He gave me the name Swami Durgananda, which means the bliss of the Shakti, the bliss of the divine mother. Durga is one of the names of the Goddesses in the Hindu tradition, as you probably know. Then I continued as a teacher in the organization, with his successor Gurumayi for another twenty years, so I actually spent almost twenty nine years in that mandala, twenty of them as a swami and as a teacher. I traveled a lot, taught dozens of classes around the world, a lot of it teaching of these texts. I taught many courses in Kashmir Shaivism and its practical implications.

Around 2000, iI began to feel my path demanded a change of role. When you’re a monk, in robes, you’re in a position that is essentially, apart from the people that you work and study with. It seemed to me very important that I be living a life in which I was facing the same issues that people who have studied with me faced. Like how do you pay your rent and electricity bill, and how you feed yourself, and how you deal with the ordinary interactions of the world. When I first joined Muktananda, I had a very clear recognition that I would eventually step back into the world. With all deep respect for monastic traditions, which I obviously received a lot from, but I ultimately believe that spiritual progress demands that we live in interaction with our society. So I had made a kind of promise to myself that I

17

would not stay in that ashram situation forever, but that I would come back to the world. So leaving the robes felt like a kind of full circle unfoldment—and a deeper way of serving. Strangely enough, when I joined Muktananda, I had been living in Big Sur, California and I took a plane from the Monterey airport to Denver, which was where he was at the time. When I left the organization twenty nine years later, I took a plane from New York back to the Monterey airport to the place that I live now. So there was actually a very full circle quality about it.

Vincent: Very interesting. Going into what you mentioned several times, this tradition Kashmir Shaivism, I found it really interesting reading in your book that it’s a tantric, non-dual school that arose around the same time that tantric Buddhism was arising in India, like 7th – 13th century. And I wonder if you can say just a bit about the history and about the richness, you mentioned some of the texts of Kashmir Shaivism, because I think like you said this isn’t a tradition that many people are that aware of.

Sally: Kashmir Shaivism is becoming more and more known. There are now a few generations of western scholars as well as Indians, who’ve translated some of the obscure texts. And as the teachings and practices of tantra become more and more popular in the West, it naturally leads to interest in the non-dual tantra, which is what Kashmir Shaivism.

Kashmir Shaivism and the Vajrayana Buddhism seem to have arisen in the same area, the trans-Himalyan regions of Kashmir, Nepal, and Bhutan. There’s a lot of evidence that tantric Buddhism was not only influenced by, but actually arose from Shaivite sources. For example, Naropa was from Kashmir, and Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche, seems to have been from Kashmir. And there’s also a tradition that Tilopa, the guru of Naropa, was actually not a Buddhist, but a Shaiva yogi. He belonged to this very wild and interesting tradition of mountain wild-man yogis, crazy wisdom yogis, who lived lived in caves, and did deep practice, and had very very intense realizations of Oneness.

So there was always a cross-fertilization between Tantric Shaivism and Tantric Buddhism. It would seem that Buddhists and Shaivites lived in the same villages or in neighboring villages. In Nepal, there are temples that are both Buddhist and Hindu, and there are deities in Tibetan Buddhism who are recognizably the same as Hindu deities. The Oxford scholar Alexis Sanderson has published textual evidence that core Tibetan Buddhist practices and teachings actually came from Kashmiri Shaivite teachers.

The formal lineages of Kashmir Shaiva teachers really began in the eighth century, The first core text of the tradition is called the Shiva Sutras, you might have heard of it. It means the aphorisms of Shiva. Shiva being one of the major deities in the Hindu pantheon, but Shiva in this tradition is also the name of the absolute consciousness, of the absolute itself. Shiva meaning “that which underlies.” That is Shiva being the ground of being.

The story goes, the myth about that text goes that a sage named Vasugupta had a vision of Shiva in a dream. Shiva said “Go to a certain rock (that rock is in what is now Srinagar), turn over the rock and you’ll find seventy-Vseven sutras carved in stone. One of the reasons he gave Vasugupta for revealing this was that essentially the Buddhist practices had become so strong in Kashmir that people no longer understood that the consciousness that is the source of all is actually a Self, albeit a profoundly transcendent, formless Self. Of course, the doctrine of anatma or no-self vs. atma or self is one of the key differences between Buddhism and Hinduism, and between Tantric Buddhism and Tantric Shaivism. The Shiva Sutras , then, claims to have arisen as a kind of a download from absolute consciousness itself, to remind people that the source of all is not emptiness, but rather is the fullness of divinity. Shaivism is a very devotional tradition, and at the same time offers a radical recognition of the absolute non-duality of every single aspect of the universe from consciousness all the way down to

18

the rocks.

The Shiva Sutras starts with the aphorism in Sanskrit, “caitanyam ātmā,” which means that the nature of everything is caitanya, which means awareness that is utterly free, completely capable of anything, which is innately blissful and innately creative. So, it essentially says who you are is free, blissful, pure, creative awareness. The second aphorism says, “jñānaṃ bandhaṃ,” which literally means that the knowledge that sees duslity binds the individual. Basically, it says that our stories about reality trap us in limitation. As you see, this is the core teaching of very similar to the understanding of most of the non-dual traditions, including Buddhism and Vedanata. What you are is consciousness itself, or pure awareness itself. And your ideas about reality, your concepts about reality, block you from seeing this.

From that beginning came a lineage of teachers who created a series of very profound texts, some of which actually deal in quite a modern way with the fact that the universe is a vibratory energy. The early tradition culminated in the work of one of the great geniuses of the Eastern traditions, Abhinavagupta, who lived in the tenth century and created a powerful overview of all of the tantric traditions of his time. It was called Tantraloka, which means “the world of Tantra.”Tantra says that this world, this physical universe, is a complete manifestation out of the divine source itself, and therefore is not unreal. It’s not illusory. It’s not a dream, as so many eastern traditions tell us. Instead, every single particle of the physical world is at its heart made of sparkling, blissful, energetic, awareness itself. Kashmir Shaivism is absolutely non-dual. It teaches that the consciousness, the awareness at the source of everything condenses itself into varying degrees of density, and that’s what we call the world. So that’s a basic tantric viewpoint. That’s a basic viewpoint of the non-dual tantra. There are, of course, dualistic tantras.

Another of the characteristics of tantric practice is that it very much honors the feminine. As we know, the original traditions of both Hinduism and Buddhism, came out of extremely patriarchal societies. Just as the Buddha wouldn’t give equal place to women practitioners, in the Hindu traditions women are considered inferior to men. The feminine, like the physical body and the world, is identified with Maya, or illusion.

The tantrikas reversed this. Tantric teachings tell us that the dynamic, creative aspect of Ultimate Consciousness is feminine—though of course, they are talking at a level that is far beyond gender. The word for the feminine aspect of Consciousness, of course, is Shakti, which means ‘power,’ or ‘energy’. The tantrikas famously said that, actually the world is shakti. The world is a manifestation of the feminine divine, the inseparable power aspect of ultimate Awareness itself. The tantric tradition sees the feminine as actually the source of dynamism and creativity. There’s a famous tantric statement that “Shiva, the ground of being, without Shakti is no better than shava, which means corpse.” It’s the feminine—the power, the manifesting creative aspect of the divine that gives it its fullness.

So Tantracism is non-dual. Tantracism honors the divine feminine very strongly. And Tantrac practice is very much concerned with forming a relationship with Shakti, with your own internal divine power. Tantric practice literally ‘empowers’ both the physical body and the spiritual body. One of the essential teachings of tantra is that there is no realization possible without accumulating shakti, and expanding your capacity for holding it. That, of course, is one of the things that Hindu Tantracism and Vajrayana Buddhism have in common. They both teach practices fort identifying your own consciousness and even your body with divinity, and they do it through deity practice. Both traditions teach diety practices in which you bring the qualities of a deity--a being of light-- into your own body. And in a sense, divinize your own body. The practice is very much about subtlizing the density of the body and the density of the mind, so that you can begin to experience your identity with awareness itself, with consciousness itself.

19

And of course Tantra, especially the more dualistic forms of Tantra, is also concerned with ritual-- there’s a lot of ritual, but in Kashmir Shaivism, the ritual is internalized. Tantra also concerns itself with mantra practice, with the practice of sacred sound. And again, those are both core to both Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmir Shaivism, along with other Hindu tantric traditions.

But the essential Kashmir Shaiva practice, that I was trained in and that most people agree is crucial to the tradition it’s called the doctrine of recognition. The recognition is the realization that your consciousness, your I-ness, is a contracted form of the self of the universe. In other words, rather than getting rid of the ego or dismissing the I-sense as a concept, the idea is that you tune deeply into the I-sense and you allow it to both expand and dissolve, until you recognize that the true I is the universal I. That is to say, your “I”, when it becomes purified and perfected, will reveal itself as identical with the source of the universe itself. So the idea is not that you separate yourself from the world—although that happens—or that you separate yourself from the ego—although there certainly are stages in the process where that’s important and necessary. But instead you recognize what the “I” really is. Thats, I would say, one of the most radical aspects of Kashmir Shaivism. It’s one of the few traditions in the world that really unfolds that particular understanding.

Vincent: Cool. Yeah, thank you for giving some more detail about that, because when reading your book, that was definitely one of the things that struck me as being philosophically very different is the whole atman and anatman types of teachings. So it’s really fascinating to hear this kind of other side of the street, so to speak. It’s really neat.

Sally: You know, there’s a joke in religious scholar circles that the Buddhists are always dismissing the Hindus as what they call tirthikas, tirthas meaning sacred places. They say that Hindus are always going on pilgrimages to sacred places and bowing down in front of deities. And Hindus dismiss the Buddhists, saying they get stuck in the void. They don’t go beyond the void. Of course, both traditions willfully misunderstand each other, which is often the way of close cousins often.

Vincent: I wanted to get into some of the things that you share and some of the, not necessarily techniques, but just ways of working with one’s own heart and mind. And there was one story that really struck me, actually, where you’d been a swami and you’d been teaching for quite a while and you’d done meditation a couple of decades at this point. You were describing how you were kind of in a dry place in your practice where you’re coming, sitting for an hour, but there was a sense of the enjoyment or the love that you described in your early practice not really being there in the same way any more. And I wondered if you could say a little bit about some of the lessons that you learned, because you actually started to approach your practice in a completely different way. I found it so helpful to hear what you did and found it actually really meaningful in terms of my own relationship with practice.

Sally: This is something that I notice with a lot of long-time practitioners. We get set in a certain way of meditating, and then it becomes part of our routine. Right? You learn how to get into a certain state. If you’re a good meditator you can pretty much count on getting quiet and getting peaceful. But, for many people, it kind of stops there.

What challenged me to go deeper was not so much that I wasn’t enjoying it. I did experience very peaceful states. It was more that I didn’t feel that I was opening. I came into my practice with the understanding that, if I took it seriously, that my awareness, my consciousness would reveal to me its vastness and its love and its beauty in a kind of daily way. But I was kind of stuck in peace. Its ironic to realize that peace can be a stuck state! But of course there are levels of peace. One of the markers for

20

21

me was that it was dry. There wasn’t a feeling of energy in it.

When I decided that I needed to break through, I began to sit every day for longer and longer periods. As you know, that’s what you have to do, of course, when you want to get to a different level in meditation practice. You have to be willing to give some time to this. It’s of course the principle behind Zen practice—if you just sit for long enough there’ll be a gradual opening in your consciousness.

Along with sitting for longer times, I began to experiment with—it’s very hard to put this into words because it was quite subtle —was giving directions to my own mind-field. So, in other words, instead of just being in this space that opened up, I would kind of enter into the field, the consciousness field that arises, almost as though I were walking into it, even though it was my awareness that was entering into it. That’s what I mean by saying it’s subtle. I was meditating in the heart center, which I’d always done, accessing what’s sometimes called the spiritual heart. The area somewhat to the right of the physical heart in the chest area has always been my resting place in meditation. I began to have the sense of a kind of softening or opening inside the heart field, and I would follow that opening and just keep following it as it unfolded. It would be like traveling through realms of increasingly subtle awareness.

One of the things I describe in the book is a recognition that started to open up quite soon of an energy that I related to as the Beloved. A radically loving energy that began to unfold as I traveled more deeply into the heart. This loving energy became very, very powerful both in meditation and out of meditation. So that much of the time—and it’s still true today — my heart would be in a state of kind of melting, opening expansion. There would just be these moments when the heart would demand that I sit and close my eyes and go inside, go into it. Then as time went on, that opening began to unfold itself as an experience of a kind of borderless vastness, as the Big Mind teachers would say, a kind of a vast, Big Heart spaciousness that just goes on opening and expanding and revealing itself as both the heart of myself and others and also as a kind of vast source. It’s a very deeply satisfying and unfolding experience, and it’s kind of gone on unfolding itself.

For me, then, one secret was my focus in the heart, and that’s not true for everybody. There are many people, many students of mine, whose natural resting place for meditation is in the third eye or sometimes in the belly. But to me it’s been the heart, and in my tradition, the heart is seen as a synonym for divine consciousness itself. Actually, there are at least four levels of the heart. There’s the physical heart of course, and then there’s the subtle heart. Within the subtle heart there’s the emotional heart, which is often the first place we hit when we start meditating in the heart center. That’s where all those feelings that have been trapped in our emotional body for a lifetime, can begin to emerge in meditation. There’s no question that emotional purification is part of the process when you meditate in the heart. Beyond the subtle emotional heart is what Ramana Maharshi called the spiritual heart, which is an infinitely expansive doorway into love. And beyond that is the Vastness itself, the realm of pure Awareness/Bliss. In Shaivism,“heart” is one of the names for the Absolute. So, meditating in the heart can actually take you through your emotional stuff into the deeper layer of pure awareness and love, and from there into the expansive recognition of the heart as the heart of all that is.

But the secret for me was to be a little bit proactive, to actually ask questions and even dialogue with the aspects of awareness that appeared to me. I also decided that whatever showed up, I was going to move into it, rather than looking at the visions or the feelings, etcetera, that arose in meditation as objects or as other. I would enter everything that came up. If sadness came up I would enter into the sadness. I would just let myself fully enter the sadness until I got to the place where the energy of sadness would start to expand and become love energy, which is what happens to energies when you enter into them; they all sort of turn into love and awareness. If a block came up, if fear came up, I

22

would go into it. I would kind of make myself one with it.

So that’s basically the essence of the path that I follow, and the path I teach, once somebody’s sufficiently anchored in their own awareness that they can do that. That said, I’ve found that in early stages of meditation it’s helpful to have a fairly clear object of concentration. We need a strong concentrative practice like the breath or a mantra just to anchor our mind. But once we’ve started, to have a deeper experience of the field of our own awareness, then we can enter straight into the field of awareness, the field of consciousness.

So, that’s what it’s all been about for me. Its similar in certain ways, to a lot of Buddhist Vajrayana practice. It’s somewhat similar to Dzogchen practice, although my own practice is—I would call it, you know, kind of kinaesthetic. It’s very much about self-sense, entering into consciousness of the self-sense.

I hope that’s clear enough. These subtle realms are sometimes hard to describe.

Vincent: Well, it’s interesting because my next question actually had to do with the question of relationship, and something that you emphasize a lot in your teaching, and I was hearing words in the way you were describing that dialogue—going into as opposed to making it an object. I wanted to see if you could say a little bit about relationship, because I think you’ve already been circling around it with some of these words.

Sally: Yes.

Vincent: But why is that such a big emphasis in the way that you approach this?

Sally: Well, I think partly because of my own temperament. I believe in, understand, practice with the idea that spirit has at least three facets. Ken Wilber calls it the first, second, and third-person faces of spirit. Abhinavagupta also talks a lot about these three perspectives of spirit. As you know, one perspective is spirit as I, spirit as the self, as your own deep consciousness. Another is spirit as all- that- is—third person spirit. But the second-person aspect of spirit, spirit as the beloved other, to me, has always been the source of juice for me. Its in relationship that we access the sense of being befriended by spirit, of being loved by spirit, of actually being in dialogue with consciousness, with spirit, with God.

The tradition that I was trained in is very comfortable segueing between all these three aspects of spirit. At one moment, you can be in dialogue with God as an other. At another moment, you can be deep in the recognition of your own inner consciousness as spirit. At another moment, you can be seeing the world as infused with consciousness and love. Meditation can move from perspective to perspective very naturally—and does!

One of the things that I discovered quite early on is that when you turn your attention inside, when you begin to meditate in an introverted way, there’s a lot of space between the initial turning inside and the recognition that your self, that your being, is non-dual awareness. In other words, you come across a lot of emotions. You come across subtle states. As you meditate in a focused way, you actually begin to realize that you are coming across aspects of yourself, aspects of your mind-field, aspects of your body, emotions, sensations, etc. You do have a relationship with these sensations. So there is an almost unconscious sense of relationship that most of us have when we meditate.

In other words, if you are practicing with the breath, its you and the breath, right? You are practicing

23

with the mantra; it’s you and the mantra. And at a certain point, that separation dissolves and you recognize that you are the breath, that you are the mantra, that you are consciousness. But along the way you are actually in a dual relationship with your own inner being.

So one of the things I discovered is that, okay, if you are going to be in a dual relationship, rather than trying to prematurely make it non-dual, that it is actually much more productive to treat what’s arising within you as a friend, as a beloved, as a source of insight. So I would begin by taking an attitude towards what is going on within me,that was friendly and loving. In other words, you know, how it is when you are meditating. Sometimes you might feel bored. Or feel a certain impatience to get down to it. You want to get through the preliminaries, get on to the deep part. Truly, we bring all our normal attitudes into meditation, and some of these are not so friendly.

So what I began to do is to take the attitude that my inner world, the place that I entered when I turned my attention inside, was actually a world of energies. Subtle energies that had an enormous amount to show me, to teach me. I found that if I related to what came up as a kind of entity or presence—albeit a presence that was part of me-- and related lovingly, that my inner world would mirror love back to me. It would mirror back openness.

This becomes especially helpful when you feel blocked in meditation. Most of us have this experience at times: You get to a certain point and you’re just stuck, you can’t open further. Maybe the inner world feels gray. It feels dry, it feels harsh, full of thoughts.

Every tradition offers practices--including metta practice and Tonglen—that help you move through this type of experience. But the most effective way of working with the mind, of course, is to understand its real nature as energy. One of the practices that I learned quite early in my meditation was to look at thoughts, not in terms of their content but as energies, as made of subtle energies. This is another practice that Shaivism and Vajrayana Buddhism have in common. Once I started to relate to thoughts as energies, I could also relate to inner sensations as energies. And just saying to a particularly gnarly thought, “Okay, I recognize you. You are made of consciousness. You’re not concrete. You’re energy. You have the power to become anything. In fact, you’re a miniature form of the creative Shakti of the universe. You’re divine consciousness manifesting as a thought! There’s something about speaking to the energies inside you and recognizing them as divine, which is so invigorating to your own inner energy. It’s as if energy inside you wants to be seen, wants to be recognized as what it is, It wants to be loved; just as you or I, as conglomerate individuals want to be seen and recognized and loved. So that’s what I mean by relationship. It really is about being willing to investigate and relate to what comes up as you move through your meditation journey. Being willing to fully relate to your own inner being, and to do it with love, with kindness, with full acceptance that what you experience inwardly is alive, powerful, and capable at any moment of revealing your oneness with all that is.

Transcript:

Vince: Hello Buddhist Geeks. This is Vince Horn and I’m joined today by a very special guest, Stephen Batchelor. Stephen, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today and to speak with us. I really appreciate it.

Stephen: It’s a great pleasure to be here.

Vince: And many people have heard your name in the Buddhist world. You’re a contemporary Buddhist teacher, writer, you’re a former Tibetan monk, and then you’re also a monk in the, is it the Korean Zen tradition?

Stephen: That’s right, yes.

Vince: So you spend a lot of time practicing and a lot of time studying. And then in recent years you’ve started writing a lot on this topic of Buddhist agnosticism or Buddhist atheism. And one of your first books, which I read back in college, was Buddhism Without Beliefs. And then, most recently you’ve written a book kind of following up on that called Confession of a Buddhist Atheist.

Those are two of your books and you’ve written others as well but we wanted to kind of explore some of the material and content from your recent book, because it’s pretty interesting. And I know you’ve gotten both a lot of criticism, and also a lot of praise, for some of the stuff that you’ve been teaching and writing about, and I know a lot of that is related to the way that you look at karma and rebirth, two of the central Buddhist doctrines in the Buddhist tradition—you hear about them a lot. And you’ve approached them rather differently than traditionally. So I was wondering if you could share how you’re approaching these teachings and then how that differs from more traditional approaches.

Stephen: Yes, I’ve noticed how many Buddhists, of all traditions, use the words karma and rebirth as though they refer to one thing; as though if you dispensed with the idea of rebirth, then somehow karma too would also have to be thrown out the window. Now, I find that a little bit odd, frankly, and I certainly have difficulty with the traditional way which Buddhists understand the doctrine of rebirth or reincarnation. It’s the same word in Pali. And what this boils down to is that after physical death some part of you, Vince or Stephen, will continue into another life. Now, again, this is not spoken of in some crude way that literally Vince or Stephen will get reborn, but some element of our consciousness, or something like that, will escape the breakdown of the physical body and find its way into another world

24

Author: Stephen Batchelor - is a contemporary Buddhist teacher and writer, best known for his secular or agnostic approach to Bud-dhism. Stephen considers Buddhism to be a constantly evolving cul-ture of awakening rather than a religious system based on immutable dogmas and beliefs. Through his writings, translations and teaching, Stephen engages in a critical exploration of Buddhism’s role in the modern world, which has earned him both condemnation as a heretic and praise as a reformer.

3. The Buddhist Atheist

or some other means of being born in another realm.

Now, I really just do not understand what that could mean; it simply does not make sense to me. It’s not coherent, and it seems to rest upon our adopting certain metaphysical views, namely that there is some part of our being that is separate, by nature, from the physical body that will continue into another life. And both in terms of what we currently understand through the natural sciences, also in terms of a whole range of philosophical and psychological problems I have with the idea, it’s a doctrine that for many years now I’ve really just put to one side and not really considered to be central to what either the Buddha taught, or how I myself practice the dharma.

Now karma is another matter altogether. I find it quite unproblematic to state that when I die, the effects of my actions will continue in the world. If I have a heart attack now, and drop dead, that doesn’t mean that my books or things I’ve said or done, to other people, through my words, through my deeds, will no longer continue to have an effect. They will. I think this is fairly self evident. So the only difference then, in my view, is that I don’t believe it’s necessary for some subtle bit of me to carry over into another life to experience the fruits of my own acts, but rather I simply see that after our death we have an enormous responsibility to ensure that the world we leave for others, be they our own children, be they our students, or so on, anybody, whoever, man, woman, animal. So I have no difficulty with the idea that after death my actions will continue to bear fruit. The only difference is that unlike some Buddhists, I don’t feel any need to be around when they mature.

And I feel that the important point of the doctrine of rebirth in any case is to give a kind of vehicle for the continuity of our moral acts to continue to bear fruit in the future. I think we can dispense with the vehicle and simply recognize that everything we do in this life will have consequences both now and after we are no longer here. And I think both views are equally potent in establishing a sense of moral responsibility, which I feel is really the main point.

Vince: You mentioned there that you didn’t feel like these doctrines weren’t necessarily central to the original Buddhist teachings and I know part of your book is to go back and sort of look at some of the original teachings and to see what’s common among some of the different sutras. I was wondering if you could say a little about your process there and what you discovered.

Stephen: Well this is a long process and it’s still very much ongoing. My journey through Buddhism started with being a Tibetan Buddhist monk in India around the Dalai Lama where I learned Tibetan, translated Tibetan texts, worked closely with Tibetan lamas for some years and then become a Zen monk for about four more years in South Korea. But since I just wrote, in 1985, I’ve been particularly interested in trying to recover, not only a sense of who this man the Buddha was, but also what was it in his teaching that really stood out that really made people say, “Wow, we’ve got to remember this.” This is something that has a greater value than just what it might achieve in 5th century BC India. This is speaking in a very universal language to human beings. So the more that I read through the Pali texts and the more that I travel through India on pilgrimage, the more these different aspects of the early Buddhist teaching and the Buddha’s life started slowly to come into focus.

Now, one of the things that I think is central to the Buddha’s teaching is that he is extremely suspicious of metaphysics and there are of course these famous questions that he refused to answer: Does the universe have a beginning? Does it have an end? Is it finite? Is it infinite? Are mind and body the same or are mind and body two separate things? And then the last four: Does the Tathagata exist after death or does he not exist after death? Now this latter one, I think, is being tampered with slightly. I think it’s almost certainly the case that what the Buddha meant was “Does one continue after death or does one not continue to exist after death?” Tathagata was simply being the way he referred to himself. So in

25

other words, it just means one.

Now I think if you put those unanswered questions together, you’d get a picture of what, even today, remained as the big questions of life and death, and they’re just as unanswered now, by science, as they were at the Buddha’s time. But in any case, the Buddha wasn’t interested in rejecting these ideas because they were somehow wrong. But he was concerned with people getting involved with that kind of speculation because it would lead one away from the actual practice of the path. The Buddha compares his teaching to a medicine. He compares himself to a doctor. He compares the sangha to a group of people who support you in your recovery. Now, on a number of occasions, that he says as long as you are preoccupied with these big metaphysical questions, you won’t be attending sufficiently to the real task at hand, which is the question of suffering. Not just your own suffering, the suffering of others, the suffering of the world. And the Buddha’s teaching is, some would think that, has to be tested in terms of its therapeutic effectiveness. Not to be tested in terms as to whether it is an accurate description of reality or not.

I honestly don’t think the Buddha was interested in the nature of reality. The Buddha was interested in understanding suffering. In opening one’s heart and one’s mind to the suffering of the world. And then learning to be with that and to respond to that in a way that’s not driven by the habits of attachment and fear and hatred and so on. But responding to the condition of our world in a way that’s unconditioned by hatred, unconditioned by greed, unconditioned by confusion. Which leads us into a more enlightened way of living in the world today. And that he calls the eightfold path. So, my sense is that, at least on the basis of those early canonical passages, we have a sense of the Buddha as someone who is very much concerned with how we optimize the quality of our life here and now. That he certainly spoke of things like nirvana, and what that challenges us to, is really, to see whether it’s possible in our own practice, to bring to a stop those drives and instincts and habits that keep propelling us into forms of speech and forms of action that, in the end, rebound upon us, do not get us anywhere, and generally, cause both ourselves and others a great deal of grief. In other words, the heart of the practice lies with how we are living from moment to moment in the actual world, with what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, are the people, language, our own inner psychology, and the great challenges that face the human race as a whole. How do we deal with those from a perspective that is not dictated to by our selfishness and our attachment and our anger?

Vince: Nice. Thank you. And I know this question is maybe a little strange given what you just said, but you write about, in Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, that the notion of rebirth has, as it’s starting assumption, the duality between mind and matter, and that was one of the four imponderables you just mentioned.

Stephen: Well, that’s absolutely right, I should have mentioned that. I find it very strange that the Buddha quite explicitly says that one should not get drawn into speculations as to whether mind and body are the same or different. And yet, the history of Buddhism shows us very unambiguously that that’s exactly what pretty much every Buddhist tradition has gone and done—nearly all of them (there are, I think, some exceptions in Theravada Buddhism). But, the basic idea is that for there to be rebirth, there must be something that does not cease to exist with the death of the physical body. And I find it very difficult to understand how you can propose a theory of rebirth without adopting a mind-body dualism.

And that dualism, I think, is quite at odds with what the Buddha had in mind. And I think it is also very difficult to square with how we actually understand the nature of the world in which we live. I don’t think there are two separate things, one material and one spiritual, that in some weird way, sort of co-exist. I feel that whatever the stuff of the universe is, it is of one nature. And I think probably nowadays

26

you’d have to reject both the word matter and the word mind as being adequate, except perhaps sort of symbolically, to describe what, in fact, is this extraordinary stuff that has come into being that we call life.

Vince: Nice. And have you found that there are any other thinkers or practitioners who have maybe a better way of approaching this whole paradox?

Stephen: Well, when I wrote Buddhism Without Beliefs and suggested that one might adopt an agnostic position to rebirth, I was very surprised by the response I got. A lot of people, and this continues 13 years later, continue to write to me and say, “Thank you very much for writing that book; it really speaks to me as a practitioner; it makes Buddhism intelligible to me.” But I got a lot of flak from people who found that even to adopt an agnostic position, in other words, to say, “I really don’t know, maybe there is rebirth, and maybe not.” Even an agnostic position was certainly one step too far.

In other words, there appears, in the Buddhist community, to be a fault line that demarcates two quite different camps. One, of what one might call the conservatives or the traditionalists who can’t quite imagine how you could have Buddhism without the doctrine of rebirth. And another camp, which would include, obviously, people like myself, who I would maybe portray as more liberal, more secular in orientation, who have exactly the opposite problem—mainly, they cannot conceive of a Buddhist practice or at least an intelligible Buddhist practice, having to incorporate what looks to them, but looks to me, like an antiquated, pre-modern belief.

So, I’ve certainly got into trouble with Buddhists who’d reject even agnosticism about rebirth, but I feel that my writing, on the other hand, just opened up the door to Buddhism for many people who were either struggling with it and thinking it wasn’t quite for them or who’d simply been put off by the dogmatism that, unfortunately, one sometimes comes across in Buddhist circles. And they found that my writings somehow gave them permission to think in some other ways without abandoning their commitment to the Dharma, their commitment to the Three Jewels, their commitment to their life as a Buddhist. And I’m glad that’s been something I’ve been able to do.

Vince: Nice, thank you. And kind of connected to this I remember reading in, Buddhism Without Beliefs you actually wrote, quote, “An agnostic Buddhist eschews atheism as much as theism, and is as reluctant to regard the universe as devoid of meaning as endowed with meaning. For to deny either God or meaning is simply the antithesis of affirming them. It is founded on a passionate recognition that I do not know, and it confronts the enormity of been born instead of reaching for the consolation of belief. It strips away, layer by layer, the views that conceal the mystery of being here—either by affirming it as something or denying it as nothing.”

I found that really interesting, and then also a little confusing when I picked up the title of your newest book and saw that it was a Buddhist Atheist, and I wondered if your position had changed since then from being a Buddhist agnostic or how if it hasn’t your reconciling that with your thinking on atheism as being harmful in your earlier writings?

Stephen: Well that’s a very good quote you singled out there Vince, and this often happens to one as a writer, one gets “hoisted by one’s own petard” I think is the expression. Well you see, although this might seem a bit odd, I don’t actually find that the two positions are in contradiction. I think an agnostic position is a very very healthy one to hold, and I think for myself agnosticism was like finding an enormous breathing space out of the constrictions of doctrine and dogma basically, that I was free now to admit what I didn’t know and to say, “I just don’t know,” without having to lock onto any particular view. And I found that very liberating and I continue to find that liberating, and in certain areas of my

27

28

practice, particularly meditation and also philosophically. I have to have the humility that, fundamentally, no human being knows the answer to these great questions. I think we need to accept that as a given—that in a way all believers are agnostic. In other words, if I say, “I believe in the existence of God,” that’s not saying that I know that God exists. That, curiously, all belief is agnostic. In other words, we adopt these ideas, and yet we need to have the humility to recognize that although we believe in them, we don’t actually know. Now that, unfortunately, is one of the weaknesses of agnosticism because it is really, when it comes down to it, just a rather honest way of acknowledging the limitations of human knowledge.

So in the new book when I use the word atheist, I am in a way moving beyond an agnostic position. I am saying that, OK, deep down I do not know whether there is, let’s say reincarnation, but to the extent to which I can say anything, to the extent to which we understand, now-a-days, the human body, the nervous system, the brain, the way the organism operates within the context of its environment, the fact that we have such an extraordinary paucity of any hard evidence that people have ever been reborn, let alone live to tell the tale, then I think it’s extremely unlikely that rebirth is going to happen. So unlikely, in fact, that it’s probably quite a good idea just to put that idea just out of circulation altogether. In other words to say, “Frankly, I don’t believe there is rebirth.” Notice I’ve used the word believe. I don’t believe—I am not saying I don’t know, but I don’t believe there is rebirth. So when I say I don’t believe there is rebirth that is not actually denying the more basic point of agnosticism, which is I don’t really know whether there is really rebirth or not, but I don’t believe there is. That’s the shift that I have made I suppose.

You see the other problem with agnosticism is that it’s very open-minded, it’s very good for giving a basis for inquiry. But it doesn’t give us much of a basis for making a firm, intellectual commitment or stand on a particular issue. Everything is: Well, I just don’t know. I do think that, although there are many things we do not know, we have sufficient evidence to be able to say, well, I cannot believe this, I cannot believe that. I cannot believe that there is a creator God who exists independently of the universe somehow, who has brought it into being and is guiding it towards its redemption. I cannot believe that there is a little bit in me somewhere that will sneak out of my body when I die and get reborn in another womb. I simply cannot believe those things.

And I feel it’s important if Buddhism is to evolve into a secular tradition that is able to speak to the kind of culture we live in today, that is able to address issues in our human life that extend far beyond the interest of mere Buddhists. I do feel that a lot of this baggage has not just to be suspended but actually really locked away, put aside, and no longer really worried much about at all.

And I suppose recently one of the big gripes I have with the whole rebirth business is that in some ways it prevents us from a wholehearted commitment to addressing the suffering of this world. I find it strange that many Buddhist seem to think that this world, and what happens in the course of this short life is somehow not as significant or as important as the many lifetimes that will follow after this one and lead us eventually to hopefully Buddhahood or nirvana. Because we really just don’t know that. The only thing we know for sure is that there is life on this planet and it suffers. Now if you believe in rebirth, even if there were a nuclear explosion, even if because of our over-industrialization we end up polluting the planet to the point where life is no longer feasible upon it, from a rebirth believer’s point of view, that wouldn’t really matter. Of course such a person, if they were Buddhist, would have great compassion for that suffering, and so forth and so on, but at some level it actually doesn’t matter that much because after death, after the mass extinction of life on Earth, every single being, every single sentient being who dies in that extinction will get reborn according to their karma somewhere else and things will just pick-up and carry on as before. Now to me that is a rather a dangerous opt-out clause from our great challenge as human beings to address some of the enormous problems and sufferings

that are occurring in our world today and which are very likely to have considerable impact on future generations.

Now the advantage of such a view is that you end up in a win-win situation. If I dedicate my life wholeheartedly and fully to alleviating the suffering of this world with no thought whatsoever of any afterlife, or any reward, then when I do die, and if there is another life, I can think of no better way of having prepared for it. And if there is not another life, then I have done whatever I’ve been humanly possible to do, here and now. And that’s the kind of position I would have now. So it’s both agnostic and atheistic. I don’t think the terms are contradictory.

And if you read the chapter on atheism, I call it ironic atheism. I think the Buddha was not a devout atheist. The Buddha simply did not have any time for the very concept or the language of God, and he dismissed it, really, as just yet another example of how human beings can dream up of all sorts of things, and he put it to one side. So Buddhism is atheistic in the sense that it simply it doesn’t have recourse to God language, but it’s not atheistic in the sense that it has as a central doctrine the denial of God. So as long as we are careful about that and we don’t lapse into the kind of militant atheism which seems to be as much in revolt against God as fundamental believers are enthralled to God, then I think we can be atheist without being militant and that will help us, I hope, to treat the suffering of this world as the only thing of primary importance that the human being living a full conscious life needs to address.

29

30

Author: Daniel Ingram

4. You Can Do It!

Author: Susan Kaiser Greenland

5. Teaching Mindful Awareness to Children

Author: Adyashanti

6. Now That’s Zen

Author: Dave Vago

7. The Emerging Science of Mindfulness Meditation

Author: Diane Musho Hamilton

8. Integral Zen

Author: Jeffrey Martin

9. The End of Self-Referencing

Author: Ken McLeod

10. Pragmatic Buddhism

31