In this particular passage, Ken lays out a practice progression—from easing reactivity to questioning the very existence of “I”—which I recognise as describing my own arc of practice. In the beginning, I treated meditation like emotional first aid: I hoped learning to pause, to breathe, to not get caught, would help me manage anger.
But with time, and lots of study, contemplation, and practice, the motivation for practice shifted from self-improvement to something deeper, and the ground under “me” has indeed begun to shift.
Practice exposes more and more layers of reactive patterns, but at the same time, the capacity to rest and look has also increases, as Ken describes here.
I’ve come to appreciate why he places such emphasis on cultivating stable attention. Here are a few of the many ways instability shows up:
- Attention keeps drifting off into thinking.
- Attention latches onto one sensation, thought, or feeling and becomes narrow or tense.
- Awareness becomes dull or fuzzy. There’s a vague sense of presence but no clarity or precision.
- Sometimes experience feels bright and immediate; othertimes flat or distant.
- Practice begins with a clear purpose, but within moments that intention fades or fragments.
From Then and Now 16
Most of you here have been exposed to teachings of mahamudra and dzogchen. These are advanced teachings, even though they're given out to all kinds of people. But a lot of people who receive them don’t appreciate their subtlety or where they fit in the progression that I'm describing. I can describe the progression in another way, and that is in terms of attachment to ideas about the world.
So, we start off thinking, “Well, you know, life isn’t bad, but I'm having a certain kind of difficulty and if I could just learn a few skills then everything would just be great. If I could learn not to react so much, then my life would be great.” So, sit down and learn how to meditate. And it's true. I learn how not to react so much.
But in the process of learning how not to react, which is basically letting go of thoughts and feelings as facts and just experience them as thoughts and feelings. In developing that ability we become aware of a much deeper problem: that all of that reactivity is organized around a sense of self, and serves to protect that sense of self. And so we go, “Ah, there's a bigger problem here. I didn't realize this. Well, if I could just let go of the sense of self, you know, then I wouldn't react at all. That'd be so cool.”
So now meditation and one's practice takes on a different tenor. And you begin to develop not just a calm mind, a mind which is less reactive, but you also develop a certain ability to see into the nature of things because an intellectual understanding that there is no self doesn't change anything as you well know. It has to be a direct experience. So you're beginning to move into the realm of direct experience and direct awareness, which is a beginning to approach rig pa and awareness and all of those things.
And so, you come to a point where you go, “Wow, I don’t exist as a thing.” And that’s a very definite experience. Some people say, “That’s totally cool,” some people say, “This freaks me out.” People have different reactions to that experience. But, it opens up more possibilities.
But again, it reveals a deeper problem. And that is, “Well, if I don’t exist as a thing, then what is all this? And where does confusion arise? And where does being awake arise? If there's no entity which is me what do all of these things mean?” That's a really difficult question.
This leads to another level of exploration which is basically what bodhicitta and mahamudra and dzogchen are about: there is just this experience which is simultaneously vivid and empty. When one can actually experience that moment to moment in a completely non-conceptual awareness, that's what you're calling rig pa. Now, that's the progression as a progressive letting go of more and more.
In Gampopa's writing, when you get to The Perfection of Wisdom you'll see he does write about mahamudra and madyamaka. He doesn't write explicitly about dzogchen. It's implicit in this approach but here this is a path, a graded path, a step-by-step path where the dzogchen and mahamudra teachings in the vajrayana take the perspective: this is present in us right now. It doesn't have to be grown, you don't have to go through a process, you can relate to it right now.
That’s a different approach. It's a very effective approach. And usually in the Tibetan tradition one worked with both approaches simultaneously because there were abilities that needed to be cultivated. As you well know, one has to have a certain ability in attention otherwise one simply can't practice dzogchen. One can think one's practicing dzogchen but you're not. That's where a lot of people are today.
Related posts:
Practice Intensely With Little Fanfare
Things Aren’t What They Seem