Āloka David Smith Transcript

Āloka David Smith Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Aloka David Smith. Welcome Aloka.

Aloka: Thank you, thank you Rick. Nice to be here.

Rick: Yeah, good to have you. Aloka is in the UK and I’ll read a short bio of him here and have him elaborate a bit. He was born in Oxford. That’s funny, we just watched that murder mystery “Endeavour” that was set in Oxford. I thought, wow, what a dangerous place to live. Everybody’s getting murdered over there.

Aloka: It’s like the killing fields actually. Morse, Morse that was.

Rick: Right, yeah, it was fun. So he was born in Oxford in 1946 and has been a practicing Buddhist for 40 years. Began training with Zen, practicing with the Venerable Myokyo-ni, a teacher from the Rinzai School at the Buddhist Society in London. This, I’ll switch to the way he wrote it here, “This was my practice for more than five years before traveling to Sri Lanka in 1980. Here I lived for three years as a Theravada monk under the guidance of the Venerable Dhammaloka Mahathera. It was while I was in Sri Lanka that my spiritual breakthrough took place in 1981 and it is this that forms the framework of my first book, A Record of Awakening, published in 1999.” Now Aloka gave an interview with Ian McNay of Conscious TV that covers a lot of this biographical stuff in detail, but there’s a lot of things it didn’t cover, one of which is I didn’t feel that I really heard much about this awakening that took place, this breakthrough in 1981, and I’m sure there’s some other things you’d like to fill in. Also, a biography of Aloka’s life is not going to be the main focus of this interview. We’re going to talk about the concept of paradox and Buddha nature, and there’s a whole other section of information that I’d like to discuss with you. But let’s start with filling out the bio a little bit more and also come around to talking about this breakthrough that took place in ’81, please.

Aloka: Yes, well, in order for me to be a bit detailed on the actual breakthrough, I think it’s important that I do put it in a framework because it didn’t just pop out the blue. Like so many people that you interview, their experiences, they have no sort of practice and these things just open up for them.

Rick: Yeah, not all people, but some people, they’re tying their shoes one morning and all of a sudden, boom!

Aloka: Exactly. Well, you really have to see this in the context of Buddhist practice, if that’s okay.

Rick: Oh yeah, sure.

Aloka: And sort of give you the framework that needs to be put in place in order for such an event to take place. And this for me came after several years of practice, about six and a half years of practice from the beginning. And most of that time, or a lot of that time, was really quite, you know, it’s not an easy path, you know. You just learn to sit with yourself, you learn to, the practice that you take on, that you’re taught, is very much about learning to get to know yourself, learning to sit, learning to get to know yourself, learning to look into yourself, learning to investigate and follow an insightful path, which means if you’re on an insightful path, you really, as I say, you really have to be with yourself and really open to yourself and live the experiences that come up. There’s no sort of ducking and diving, which we can do quite easily in life, or at least try anyway. This way it is about just being very open to yourself and having the experiences and hopefully they lose their edge, they burn themselves out, so that you can move on to the next layer, as it were. And it’s important to see that in this context, because what’s important, you know, to have this practice in a Buddhist context, there is a path, the path that you follow, and a very clearly defined path. It depends on the tradition that you happen to be following, but there is this thing called a path where you work through, as I say, these sort of layers of yourself until such time that it fully matures.

Rick: And it’s fairly well broken down in Buddhism, isn’t it, in terms of all the various milestones that you traverse or encounter on that path?

Aloka: Yes, it depends a lot on the type of practice that you have and how conceptualized it is. If you have, say, for example, the Theravada practice, which on the whole I didn’t, then it is very structured and it is very sort of systemized, and you go from one stage to the next, and that’s all identified. If you’re more on the path that I’ve essentially followed over the years, which you can say is the Zen path, the Chan path, the path of the so-called immanent model as opposed to the developmental model, those are the two models. Development model is one that you develop and you go from step to step. The immanent model is one of accepting that from the very beginning you’re already awakened, so there’s nothing to create, there’s nothing to make. You don’t develop anything, but you learn to just wake up to where you are and where you’ve always been. And that seriously conditions the type of training that you have and seriously conditions the spirit which you engage with.

Rick: And we’ll talk about that when we talk about paradox.

Aloka: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So for me you couldn’t really structure it in that way. It’s really your own personal path and how things work for you and how the things that you work through. I mean I had some very difficult times, times of quite strong depression that I had at the beginning. The first four years were the most difficult where things were, I just seemed to go through so much of my own personal stuff that was coming up, so many challenges just to simply carry on. And but for the fact that I had a teacher who supported me emotionally as well as giving advice, I don’t think I would have stuck at it. It was so difficult. And also having Sangha, which is a very, very important feature, if you’re on this type of path is to have Sangha.

Rick: Meaning a group of people.

Aloka: A group of people, yeah. You cannot, you cannot, with a teacher and a group of people, you can’t do this on your own. You may think that you can, you know, but you proceed and then you hit the buffers and then to carry on through those difficult times without support. Well, personally I don’t think it’s possible to do.

Rick: Yeah, so it’s good to bring that up because a lot of people fall off the path, you know.

Aloka: Absolutely. So you see, you need a framework around you. You need a teacher, you need a Sangha, and you’ve also got to have the correct vision and the right teaching, so it’s all pointing you in the right direction. So if you’ve got that framework around you, then it becomes possible. Then it’s doable, but it’s still not easy by any stretch. And it’s very easy to get it wrong at any time. This is what the teacher is for, you know, we can so easily convince ourselves we’ve got it right, we know what to do, it’s all straightforward, but it’s also just the subtleness, the subtleness of this journey is such that, well, you won’t see the subtleness, you won’t pick it, and you think you’ve got it right, in fact you’ve gone off on a tangent. This is why a teacher is, well, to me it’s non-negotiable. If you don’t have a teacher, I don’t think you’re going to pull it off. So that’s the great value of the teaching, and my teacher in those early years supported me, and that’s my great gratitude towards my teacher, because I would have backed up, it was very, very difficult.

Rick: You know, I might mention that even some of these people who have spontaneous awakenings, they very often go out and find a teacher afterwards to help them make sense of what has happened.

Aloka: Well, yeah, that’s certainly better than trying to work it out yourself. You know, and hopefully the teacher understands where you’re coming from and obviously can help you, and I mean, that is of great value. But just to get to that point, within Buddhism anyway, they say, “Well, you wouldn’t even get to the awakened state anyway, this doesn’t matter, this traditionally, this spontaneous thing that seems to be around quite a lot these days.” I don’t think you find any reference in Buddhism towards that at all. Everything is always done – you find a teacher and you go to whatever, and you take it from day one and go through the system as it were.

Rick: Well, there’s two things about that. One is that I think maybe the times are changing and there are more spontaneous awakenings than there might once have been, and also some of these so-called spontaneous awakenings might not be awakenings at all, they might just be some kind of intellectual realization or something that hasn’t really gone into the bones. So, you know, we’ll talk about that.

Aloka: Yes, yes, with this rising of cosmic consciousness, isn’t it? This seems to be the thing that’s happened over the last few years.

Rick: You know, if these people who say that the planetary consciousness is waking up are right, then we can expect to see more of these spontaneous things?

Aloka: Sure, without question, something’s going on, because it’s not been like this. In my 40 years, there was nothing like this until the last, I don’t know, 10 years or something. These things just never happened. So something’s going on. But you know, I don’t want to sort of go off on a tangent here, but for me, you know, my practice was certainly a lot settled after the last 18 months of being with my teacher. I never actually went to see her at all, I was actually okay. These four years, a lot of stuff fell away, I was settled and quite capable of carrying on without too much support. I mean, apart from having Sangha support which is always with you. And then that brings me to my “Why would I go to Sri Lanka?” because I was very happy with my teacher, with my group, with the training, and I was quite content with my life in London. I had a good flat, good work. And I went to Sri Lanka one year, actually one year I went just for a holiday and came back, and I liked it so much that I went back again. And the second time I went, I made a point of going into a temple which I didn’t really do the first time round. And I met a monk who took me to meet his teacher, this is up in Kandy, who took me just to say hello to him. And when I met him, he leapt off his bed – I was massaging his leg actually, because that’s what you do with masters, you just massage them when you’re talking to them. And he leapt off his bed and he said he was going to ordain me. Now that comes and I immediately said, “Oh no, I’m not the slightest bit interested. I’ve never had a calling, never had any thoughts or ideas or desires to be a monk. I’m quite happy with what I’m doing in London and I have no reason to come here.” But having said that, when he said it, it fitted in with other aspects of my practice that have been with me since the beginning, maybe even before I came to the practice. And this is quite difficult to describe. I always felt that I was being supported, maybe even guided by something other than me. Me as this person who was doing the practice. There was something sort of mysterious going on that I learned to identify and learned to just open up to and learned to trust. And somehow I just felt it was supporting me, especially in my difficult times. And I always felt it was part of my practice that it was with me. What? I don’t know. I always got the sense in the early days that it was something external rather than internal. That changed, but for a long time I always felt like there was something sort of following me.

Rick: A guardian angel or something.

Aloka: Well, exactly, something along those lines. But it was something quite, you know, it was irrational, illogical. It can be dismissed and many people probably would dismiss it because it can never be proved and shown rationally or in any tangible form.

Rick: I know people who perceive those things. I say I know people who perceive those things routinely. It’s like an ordinary reality for them.

Aloka: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I learned to trust it and what I discovered with it was that whenever it sort of showed itself, whenever I felt that it was sort of supporting me or pointing the way in some way, it could never be rationalized as, “Ah, right, yeah, that makes sense. I’m going to…” But it would show me something where it took an act of faith, I thought, learn to trust it without knowing all the logic, if there was any logic, which there never was any logic, but learning to trust and that’s so, so important. Learning to trust.

Rick: And if it’s not some guardian angel you can just think of it as your own intuition, you know, which is getting more developed.

Aloka: I’ll come to that. This is my sort of perception in the early days. And coming to when my teacher-to-be said he would ordain me and I said, “Oh, no, I’m not. You must be joking. I am not giving my life up and coming here to be a part of a tradition I literally knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about. Why should I do this? Give me a reason why.” And I could think of fifty reasons why I shouldn’t do it, but there was only one reason why I should do it, and that I was being told, being shown, that this is the next thing for me to do and just have the courage I suppose to let go of my life and follow something that I was literally had no concept. I couldn’t even conjure up any sort of visions and images about it at all, because I knew nothing of the tradition, but at the same time I knew that, “Uh-oh, here we go, here we go, I’ve got to give everything up.” It was part of my practice and part of what was beginning to open for me and I had to do it. So after fighting it, when I came back to England, I fought it for several weeks and always knowing I was going to give in. Eventually I did give in, so I literally gave up my whole life in England and I went to Sri Lanka with one little bag in my hand. All of my worldly possessions was after having my own place and car and business, I had one little bag like this. Just following – this is very, very important in the context of the whole picture here, it’s very, very important, because this is to do with Buddha nature and it’s about making contact with the unconditioned, that part of you that’s real. Of course, I didn’t know these things at that time. So I went on trust. I knew that whatever I was doing, I knew that it would be okay, because that’s the way things had been working for me over the previous few years. It was an absolute act of trust. I went and I actually found it very difficult initially. I had a lot of trouble with the food. I was very malnourished. I lived in my teacher’s village temple in the middle of nowhere. I used to go begging for my food every day. I always got enough food, but there’s very little nourishment there. It never supplied everything. And I almost came back. I felt like I was going to become ill at any moment. I felt so vulnerable. But my teacher gave me some sort of complete food, like a Complan thing, and within a few days I was absolutely fine again. And he sent me down to the island hermitage, the island right down in the south of the island, where I spent most of my time and where my whole training began to develop. Once I settled there, I took on a particular type of meditation, which was traditional for Theravada. And it was over those next few months where everything inside me just started to open up. It’s like I took a knife. I sat down, become quiet, looked in at myself, just looked at the whole of me and just started to investigate and to cut open, which the tools of this particular training give you fantastic traditional form of insight practice. And I used these tools, which I never did before when I was in England. I had a different training altogether, different practice altogether. And this completely just cut me open and just blew open. And just the sort of wonder and just the fantastic experience of what was being revealed as to my reality, my samsara, my relative life, my relative world, because that’s what it does. I’m beginning to get little tasters to what’s beyond it.

Rick: What was the experience actually? Because you say, “cut me open,” but how would you actually describe the experience?

Aloka: Well, for example, I’ll give you an example. You know, the actual practice is called the three signs of being. I don’t know if you know this, everything is impermanent, everything is suffering and everything is not-self. They’re three truths of the phenomenal world. Everything obeys that law, those laws. So when you settle down, concentration, find stillness, which is paramount – to be still, you have to find stillness, it’s number one, to find stillness – you then take one of those tools, you look at yourself, whatever may be. I never had a formal path, as it were, a formal system that I followed. I just had a very free and open one, whatever showed itself, I would look at. Parts of my personality, things that I was holding on to, whatever was going on at the time, nothing massively important, but just things that I would be … maybe some things were important. And the way it would work is that you would look at this particular attachment that you had, you had an idea, you could see it almost physically, you could see the pictures, you could see the attachment that you had for something that was very precious to you, and so you would look at it and say, “Well, okay, if that’s the way it is, where am I? Where is this person that’s attached?” This thing that seems to be very solid, like a solid entity, like your thoughts are something like a solid form, to look closely at a particular phenomenon and see that in fact it wasn’t something solid, that when you look at it, it’s something that actually is made up of lots of other conditions that happened to come together at that time that created this notion of a reality of whatever you were thinking about. And so that solid thing that you were convinced was a real solid entity, you begin to doubt it. And of course the thing more than anything that you look at is the “me,” is the self that’s doing all the attaching and looking for the self and looking for this person and never finding. And all you find is a lot of conditions that just happen to come together for co-production, they all help each other so that you end up creating this thing that you then hold on to and it becomes “me” and “mine” and my possession, and then all the acts that goes around when you attach and all the anxiety of life and holding on to something, which is what we all experience. But actually finding what you’re holding on to is just a collection of bits and pieces and there isn’t actually anybody there anyway doing the whole thing. So the whole thing just begins to fall apart. It’s a bit like, you know, just a simple parallel. It’s like looking at a car. You see a car, “Oh, isn’t that beautiful? It’s my car. It’s fantastic. I’m in love with my car. It’s the most important thing in my life.” Okay? But then you get close to your ??? or maybe a car that you want to buy. You’ve just got one image of a car, that’s what I’m saying. But when you get close to it, you find, “Well, hang on a minute, this car is actually made of bits that are all bolted together, screwed together, welded together.” So actually there’s no such thing as a car, but a collection of bits. You don’t fall in love with bits, you fall in love with the image that they create when they’re all put together. But the reality is that in fact it’s just a collection of, let’s say, nuts and bolts basically. But then that same sort of image, that same metaphor goes for yourself, that when you look in there and you’re looking for this person who’s so precious, it’s the most important person in the whole world that you’ll do anything to defend and shore up, protect, promote, reinforce. Actually when you look closely at it, you see that it’s just a bundle of conditions. So the thing begins to break up and that has consequences, because your whole makeup is made up of the absolute conviction that you are, “I am this person and I own this and I am this and I am that,” with views of this and that and also physical possessions and mainly possessions, possessions of your own body, so that you get a sense of a solid entity. And the great thing with these tools is they begin to cut off, the whole thing begins to break up.

Rick: And these tools were like a sitting practice, right? Where you’re sitting, meditating for hours on end or something.

Aloka: Yes, you would sit and you would evoke one of the tools. For me, anatta, as it’s called, not-self, is the one that always attracted me most. So anatta, like I say, I’d be so attached to something that’s so precious to me, but then I’d go looking for this person who is attached. “Where is this person? Just let me see you.” And of course, the closer you look, the further away you get from actually finding the thing that you are so utterly convinced is real.

Rick: And you were able to sit and focus and do that in a consistent way without your mind wandering off of, “Oh, the weather here is kind of hot and I should probably be back in England.” I mean, what the mind does.

Aloka: Sure, that’s what the mind does. In time you become capable of when those little things do flit in, and they do, you don’t follow them. You just leave them and they go away. So you never follow them, you don’t get caught by them. So you just let it go and you come back and you stay with that thing that’s very grounded within you that doesn’t move around. So you can look and it all comes with stillness, which is what needs to be learned.

Rick: Let me ask you a question here. I’ve been interviewing some Buddhists lately, or people who do Buddhist practice. Last week was a well-known TV newsman in the US named Dan Harris, and he happened to mention that he had meditated just before our interview, and I said, “Well, how was it?” And he said, “Oh, it was rough, it was really unpleasant, but I just soldiered through it.” And in my own practice it was kind of a different nature, I’ve been doing it for 46 years, and it’s always been pleasant, you know, which I sort of … blissful, enjoyable, restful, rejuvenating. And so, I mean, the old, more fundamentalist me would think, “Well, there’s something wrong with a practice that is difficult and unpleasant. You know, it’s not as good as my practice, which is easy and enjoyable.” But the newer me, having interviewed so many people now, many of whom have had profound awakenings as a result of a practice that inherently wasn’t that enjoyable, is taking a second look at that whole notion, and you know, there’s apparently really different ways of going about it, and you know, different paths can all lead to the same goal, perhaps, or maybe they lead to different goals. Anyway, comment on that if you would.

Aloka: Yeah, sure. Well, it sounds like you’ve got yourself what would technically be called like a – I don’t know what practice is – a samatha, a calming practice.

Rick: Well, I learned Transcendental Meditation in 1968, you know, and I do something a little different now, but along the same lines, but it’s always been kind of smooth and easy.

Aloka: Yeah.

Rick: But fruitful, you know.

Aloka: Well, okay, that’s fine, you know, if it’s something that you enjoy, but if it’s something that is important to you or even burns within you, that you want to get to the bottom of the human condition, “Why is life like this? Why am I like this? Why is there this sense of unsatisfactoriness?” You want to get to the bottom of that, you’ve got to learn to burrow into who you are. You can’t sort of stand outside and have those sorts of experiences, as I was just trying to explain to you. You’ve got to get in there and you’ve got to see the reality of this person that you’re convinced who you are, that you’ve been convinced all your life who you are, because that’s where the trouble is, is this sense of “me.” You see that “me” is at the bottom of the whole thing. So you want to get to know, you need to get in there and sort of winkle it out as it were, or get to see it and break it up, because this is the cause of suffering. Well, okay, that requires you to go on a journey, which is what in Buddhism is called a path, that you go on that journey into yourself. And on that journey some bits are great, as you say, you hit the lovely bits and the bliss and the rapture, and all the sort of heavenly experiences that you can have, but the truth of yourself is that you’re a mixture of lots and lots of stuff, and a lot of that stuff is not nice at all.

Rick: Oh yeah, well that comes up too.

Aloka: Yeah, we have a dark side, and we all have a dark side, even though most of us don’t go near it, because it’s terrifying, it frightens the hell out of us, so we don’t go there. And we spend our life avoiding it, and just being busy and doing things, chasing things. We don’t want to know that, but if you want to know the truth of things, you’ve actually got to turn around and face it and walk into it. And that journey is, well, you know, a walk on the dark side is not, just by definition, is not an easy thing to do. This is why you need support, you need a teacher to guide you, and you need that support around you, so that you can begin to make that journey. And when you make that journey, you begin to wake up to see what you’re doing, that you’ve created this world, you’ve created this angst, this unsatisfactoriness, is actually something that you’ve created, that actually is not created by your parents and by your teacher and by your boss and all of that. Actually you are spending your life, minute by minute, reinforcing it, you’re feeding it. You’re feeding it, but you’re also being caught by it. So what you need to do is to understand that. You don’t know that because you’re so far away from it in your conscious world. As I say, most of us push that out of the way, we don’t want to go there, we don’t want to see that. You begin to wake up. This is called waking up. I really don’t like the word enlightenment, I like the word awakening, because awakening describes it perfectly. Enlightenment to me has got too many connotations. Awakening – you begin to wake up. And awakening isn’t this breakthrough, we say you breakthrough and you’re awakened. Actually awakening starts the moment you take this training on, the moment that you’re prepared to turn around and look at yourself and begin to investigate and to look in. And when these forces begin to well up, rather than run away from them or react to them as we do, as we spend our whole life doing, we learn to just stay with them and open to them. Leave them alone, let them come, learn to bear with them, but don’t feed them. That’s the key. It’s not to feed something. So that in time, if you don’t feed it, it begins to fade. And whilst you’re staying with it and you’re opening and you’re looking, you’re beginning to see what’s going on here, what is going on here. Not what you think is going on, but what really is going on. And when you begin to see what’s going on, that’s called wisdom. And that wisdom will then be like a tool that will help you essentially, I think essentially, learn to say when a habit comes and you’re about to follow one of your habits that may be good or bad, that may be something that you enjoy or not enjoy, but we’re just a bundle of conditioned habits, you can learn. Now you’re beginning to get a vision, beginning to get an understanding of what’s going on here, you can say, “No, no, I’m not doing that. I’m not going to follow that.” That’s the path that you embark upon. Now that path can be incredibly, at times, very very joyful. Suddenly the whole thing can burst open and you can convince yourself you’re awakened, because momentarily you’re transcending the condition into what is the real, which is what is with you all the time. It’s sitting there, it never goes away, it’s permanent, it sits there. And you get little glimpses, and a lot of people say, “I’m enlightened.” But all you’ve got is a glimpse, then the door shuts again and you’re back in with all of your stuff. Now you can choose to go down that path, that actually is for the few, the people that want to get to the bottom of this, “I’ve had enough of this, I’ve had enough of being enslaved to this mind of mine, and the fear that controls my life and everything in my life seems to be based in fear. Everything I do, I’m just either running away or looking after myself, doing something to protect myself all the time.” And that is, you see, the cause of suffering. So on that journey you can, as I say, by all means, you can have these lovely times when everything is all peaceful and lovely, and why not, because it’s a part of your natural makeup. You’re accessing who you really are, because you really are at peace. You’re not in turmoil, your true nature is not in turmoil. So if you put the conditions in place, you know, like in meditation, you can begin to get a little taste of who you really are, but that’s impermanent, it will come and go. If you really want to make it something permanent, something that’s with you when you’re not meditating, something in your daily life, just coming and going, the challenges that we have on a daily basis, so that you don’t get pulled around by your habits, so things as it were just pass through you, you don’t follow all of those ways that you’ve reacted in the past. You’ve got to get to know yourself, so that whatever it is that’s reacting, you learn to see, “Look, here we go again, here I’m off again, I’m feeding those habits that could be very unpleasant. I’m about to say something to somebody, but this is what I do, this is how I look after myself.” You begin to see that this is what you’re creating for yourself, never mind the effect it has on other people. And so you learn to say no, but you’re saying no not just through blindness, but you’re learning to wake up, so you’re actually saying no through wisdom. You actually know that the way to go beyond these habits is not to feed them, and I’m not feeding them anymore. And if you can learn to work with that, and this is a lifetime, don’t give me this sort of five-minute stuff, this is a lifetime, because the stuff, what we’ve got inside of ourselves is accumulated for so long it doesn’t exhaust itself just because you want it to. It takes a lot of commitment, a lot of coming back and coming back. But in time, in time, things begin to lose their power over you, it begins to become less of a bondage, and you begin to get a sense of spaciousness with your life, and on you go. We’re not even talking about enlightenment, like the sort of breakthrough that people talk about, these things can happen. But this is the path, this is the nature of the path. And also you don’t…something I’ve noticed, I’ve listened to a lot of talks, or a number of talks, and just trying to sort of understand them in relationship to how I understand my own personal experience, with how it fits the tradition, is that, you know, believe it or not, you don’t have to have any ambition to be enlightened, you don’t have to make that an issue in your life, it doesn’t even have to cross your mind, it doesn’t have to be a motivation, you just want to be a better person. That’s actually what motivated me. I didn’t like the ugliness that I saw inside of me, and that was my motivation. I wanted to become something like a proper, a true human being, something that could be of use to those around me. I honestly never, ever, it never crossed my mind that I wanted to be awakened, I wanted that great breakthrough that you read about and you hear about. It only actually came to me two days before it happened, actually, and it just came out of the blue. I never even thought about it. So what I’m saying is that awakening experience actually is nothing to do with you, it has none of your business. Your business is to find the equanimity in your makeup, in that relative, in samsara as we call it, the dualistic conditioning that we create, we feed, we nurture on a daily basis, is that we learn to wake up and see this. This is the cause of bondage and of suffering and of the angst of life, and the cause of rebirth that you focus on exclusively, that’s called the path. Its result, because it will, because it’s a natural process, doesn’t require you to do anything to make it happen deliberately. If you did that, I don’t see how it could, because that to me is just attachment and desire to want that to happen. That awakening is the natural fruit of maturity, of finding that equanimity which we can talk about. It’s like a fruit tree, an apple tree that nurtures an apple over weeks and months, and it nurtures it, it feeds it all the time, it feeds it, it grows and it gets bigger until it reaches full maturity, and then it stops giving it any more nourishment, and then it sits there and one day the apple falls off the tree. The tree doesn’t shake the apple off. The apple will fall off when the time is ripe, when it’s ripe, when it’s fully mature and everything has been done, it will just naturally fall off. I think that’s the perfect metaphor for this. And this is one of the things that’s got to me a little bit, that people seem to think that it’s something that you can manufacture deliberately, that you can get to this enlightened experience, and that I know doesn’t pertain to the Buddhist path. You can talk about, people do talk about awakening and its consequences and the experiences that come out of that, fair enough, but that’s not really the path, that’s like an aspiration, something to encourage you and something to give you interest, but it isn’t the actual path itself, it isn’t the actual training. Because as I say, the fruit, because this is a wholly natural process, this is not man-made, we’re part of nature. You know, dharma is a major word in Buddhism, dharma meaning the truth. Another definition of dharma is nature, it’s nature, it’s natural, it’s got nothing to do with it. We think that we’re in control of the world and the universe, but we are just part of a natural, mysterious unfolding. And we estrange ourselves from that, when we find that place of equanimity, which I can come to, the fruit will fall on its own and it won’t fall until it’s ripe, and you will never make it fall by an act of will. And that’s very much a part of the philosophy of Buddhism, which does seem to bump in a bit to some of the things that are going on now.

Rick: Right, so there’s a lot I could have said and questions I could have interjected in all that, but let’s just take your last point. You can never make it fall by an act of will, and yet it seems that Buddhist meditation practice, from what I understand of it, is quite willful. There is an application of individual effort. I am going to sit here, my knees are killing me, but I’m going to continue to sit here by golly, and I’m not going to let this or that distract me. So there seems to be a rather fierce application of will during the practice, at least initially. So comment on that for a minute.

Aloka: Sure, well because somebody says, “I’m going to sit down and I’m going to sit here willfully,” it doesn’t say they’re going to be awakened.

Rick: No, but they’re applying will.

Aloka: You know, there is one feature of the training that’s very, very difficult to pick, to see, to know. What is the difference between commitment to the training and willfulness? And to find the difference, because it’s very easy to be willful, it’s very easy to identify, as you say, “I’m going to sit here for the next 10 hours, nobody’s going to move me, I’m going to do this day after day.” I don’t know what that is. Because people do that, it doesn’t mean to say that it’s right, it’s because people do it, people get things wrong, you know. But at the same time, there has to be this thing called commitment, whereby this training is not, you cannot do this training that’s going to bear any fruit by having it as a sort of a part-time thing that you’re doing, like it’s a hobby, you just flick in and flick out. And when it’s inconvenient, you want to go and do something else, and then, “Oh, I’ll come back to this training, or I’ll come back to my meditation, because it’s convenient for me.”

Rick: Yeah, so let’s say you’re a really committed practitioner, you’re dedicated, and you have a daily practice that you’re really committed to. So when you sit down to do that daily practice, are you applying a lot of individual will or what to make the practice work?

Aloka: No, it’s this thing, this commitment is something you have to feel and find within you. Willfulness can be very, very obvious, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to achieve that.” You can’t do this without, you can sit there and you have a – I think conviction is probably one of the best words, where you know that you need conviction. If you want to get to the bottom of this, if it’s what you want to, you want to understand why you are the way that you are, you’ve got to have a commitment, but an inner commitment, something quiet, it’s like a quiet commitment, whereby – and it’s not just sitting on the cushion, it’s your daily life. Don’t think this is all about sitting on your backside, that’s only a – it’s the single most important issue, part of it. But we have four postures, and this training, what you’re doing essentially on the cushion, which is learning to focus and be still and to open, you have to learn to take that into your daily life, so it becomes something that you experience throughout the day. Now that’s only possible through commitment, and it’s a quiet inner determination that’s not the same as willfulness, which you can experience. It’s something that nobody else in the world need know that you are a committed practitioner. You don’t go around with a thing flashing on top of your head, “Look at me, I’m a serious dharma practitioner, I sit 10 hours a day.” People talk to you in those terms, there’s something missing there, that does smack of willfulness. It’s like, you know, you talk to people who actually are committed, that do sit, and it’s not about sitting hours and hours every day, you do that on retreat – in your daily life, an hour a day is more than enough, you’ve got a life to live. You go on retreat, that’s where you put in a lot of hours. But you go about it in a quiet way, nobody needs to know about it, but it’s just an inner determination that you know is in a different place than this willfulness.

Rick: Okay, so if you’re sitting for an hour a day or longer on retreat and you’re sitting there, the actual practice you’re doing, sometimes the images of strain and struggle and kind of an inner battle come to mind, and that to me would make it a very unpleasant experience, all this kind of struggling with yourself. But maybe there’s a subtler approach and I’m wondering if this is how you would consider correct practice, where there’s just a sort of an intention and if the mind wanders off, you just bring it back but without beating yourself up over it.

Aloka: That’s right, absolutely you don’t beat yourself up. It’s like, you know, for me it’s like every time I sit on the cushion I make a contract with myself, say for the next 40 minutes, which is as long as I sit, I’m going to sit as still and as quiet as I can and just give myself, let go of all the distractions, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional, let them go and come to that place of stillness that we’ve all got, that I know exists, that I’m familiar with. And when these things come in that I’ve already committed myself to let them go, now when they come along it’s not a case of, “Get out of the way, don’t disturb me, I’ve had enough of you,” you can’t go down that road. That is willfulness, that is just suppression if you’re doing that. You have to see them and know them, but know that you’re committed for the next 40 minutes to come to that place of awareness, to come into awareness, awareness without boundaries, that stillness that is our natural condition that you don’t manufacture, that you find that place and you let these things go as much as you can. You don’t get involved with them and you don’t have opinions, you don’t try to do anything weird, but rather simply let them go and do your best. And if it doesn’t work, and it won’t a lot of the time, they’ll win, they’ll come and you’ll be off in your fantasy for the next quarter of an hour, that’s the way it is. Okay, so you don’t start beating yourself up. This is so important, you have to let it go and determine just to come back into that stillness.

Rick: That’s why I asked about it a bit, because when somebody tells me that they sit and meditate and it’s kind of a really unpleasant experience for half an hour or whatever, I wonder, are they struggling, are they straining, are they kind of actually introducing a much more individual effort than is really called for in the situation?

Aloka: Let me give you an example with that. It’s something I always encourage my students to do, because they can come to the group and they have all sorts of different postures and things, and I encourage them to try and sit in the half-lotus. Some people sit in the full lotus, but the half-lotus for most of us Western people is challenging, because we just don’t have suppleness of body. But it’s doable, but very rarely is it just given to you on a plate. You have to sit sometimes for weeks and months, and it’s very difficult. You can’t avoid the fact that it’s damn painful. But what you do, but what you can do there is that you develop a relationship with that experience, you develop a relationship with that thing called pain – my pain, my body – and you learn to sit with it, and you learn to see, you learn to open to it, you don’t run away from that pain, you don’t suppress it and push it away in any way. But in time if you learn to stay with it and stay with it and stay with it and see that, “It’s not my pain, this pain doesn’t belong to me, this actually doesn’t belong to this body, and this body doesn’t belong to me.” And what you can do, you’re not avoiding the experience, but what you’re doing is that you’re learning to take the “me” thing, “me and my pain, me and my suffering,” that when you go down that road, “me and my pain, me and my suffering,” you are compounding. The way I like to describe it is that you make mountains out of molehills. Molehills, that’s life. There’s always going to be molehills, that’s the nature of this realm that we live in, but we make mountains out of molehills. And you learn, and you learn just through learning to sit with that, that can be incredibly…and I know personally speaking, I sat half-lotus for nearly all my meditation years, but it wasn’t given to me on a plate. I really had to sit through that, but I tell you, I learned so much about attachment, I learned so much about me, and I learned how to just bear with, to stay with, and to not identify with that experience, and leave it as a molehill rather than make it into a mountain. There is so much understanding there for you, for you to access, but you have to sit through it. And you sit through it in the right way, you don’t sit through, “Oh, me, why me? My legs, I’m going to be a cripple, I’m never going to be able to meditate again, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.” That’s what you’ve got to see through. There you’re making a mountain, and by golly, you will suffer, you will suffer far more than you need to. This is that inner thing, just, “Okay, I’ll sit with it. I won’t fight it, I won’t run away from it, I’ll just learn to sit with it.” These are the subtleties of the path that you have to learn to cultivate the inner strength. And what that does, as well as the insightful thing, is that when you learn to sit through things, you get inner strength, something that a lot of us don’t have. We run away from things in life, we’ve got money in our pocket, we don’t have to bear with anything that we don’t like, most of us we don’t like in our life. We can buy ourselves out of difficult situations. Okay, that’s probably one of the main reasons why money is so important to us, because it can help us look after ourselves, but you won’t learn anything about yourself, you avoid yourself. This way you learn to sit and you learn to see what you are creating for yourself. But these are the subtleties of this training that you can only do through trial and error, because you will react in the way you’ve always reacted, but you have to learn to let those habits go and go beyond those habits. And that then gives you the experience, it gives you the inner strength, so when the next thing comes along, because there will be something around the corner, you learn to just bear with, bear with. You know there’s a very important concept in Buddhism called kshanti, patience, but patient endurance, patient endurance, that is so critical, so crucial on this whole of letting go of this thing that we are trapped by, this thing that we call samsara that we create for ourselves. This is all part of the subtlety of the path that we learn. And if it’s willful, and you can’t help but being willful in the beginning because you don’t know anything else, but you have to learn to, “Oh, hang on a minute.” You discover that other part of you that has the inner strength to sit and bear with things without getting up there, you know, waving an axe or a hammer or something, “I’m going to beat you.” You’ve got that attitude. All you do is reinforce the self, that’s all you do, and you’re just creating a more entrenched ego, which is not what we’re meant to be up to.

Rick: Yeah, good point. So let me circle back to something you said a few minutes ago. You said that the desire for awakening or something didn’t really become strong until a couple of days before it actually happened. So what actually happened? Tell us about your awakening.

Aloka: Okay, well I’ve just sort of given you… it’s important to put all these other things in place first because I don’t want you to get the impression that it just fell out of the sky.

Rick: Right, no, you really applied it.

Aloka: This is years of, I believe, to be dedicated commitment, so that things fall away and make this event possible. What I did as a monk, I used to sit a lot every day. As a monk that’s what you do, I mean, that’s what you get paid for. You don’t get paid but that’s your job. If you’re that sort of practitioner you will sit a lot, and I did sit a lot a day. But then there was a three-month retreat that I decided to do and just be on my own, a solitary retreat on my own, and so I upped everything for that. And it was only three or four days, three days, before the event as I call it, when I knelt before my Buddha, which is what I do every day, and bow my head and offer this samsara, offer this David thing or Aloka then, David was my other name, continually handing it into that part that I was alluding to before that was with me, opening up, showing me the way, developing a relationship, knowing that that was supporting me, opening up, seeing something that was mysterious, something that was inconceivable, something that I would never ever be able to possess, ever be able to own, only to have respect for, only to have, well, to live in awe and to see the greatness of something that I was beginning to touch. So every time I would kneel and bow my head, as all religious people do, spiritual people do, whatever reason why they’re doing it, for me it was to surrender this “me” thing to that part of me that was supporting me. And whilst doing that and also asking for help, support, because it’s so difficult with these forces coming to you all the time, so difficult, “Please help me, you know, help support me while I sit through this.” And by golly, it was there, it was absolutely there. And it’s only when I was doing that, you know, saying, “I’m going to be sitting all these weeks, please help me,” it just came up and I just said, “I’m not going to leave this cushion, I’m not going to leave this retreat until I’m awakened.” And as soon as I said that, I went, “What? Where did that come from?” Because it was absolutely spontaneous, there was no thought whatsoever, I didn’t plan it, it wasn’t part of the stuff, it just spontaneously came out, which was very interesting that that happened. And I promise you, that’s the first time in all years of practice did my mind ever go in that direction of awakening, ever.

Rick: I think that’s radical. I remember hearing a story about a guy who lit an incense stick and he said, “If I’m not enlightened by the time this incense stick burns down, I’m going to kill myself.” And somehow I guess he managed to get enlightened before it burned.

Aloka: You are setting yourself up here. I wouldn’t recommend this to people.

Rick: No, I wouldn’t either.

Aloka: Because you’re creating a tension there within yourself, “Oh my God, I’ve got to do it.” And as soon as you go down that road, you’re in trouble. As I say, it’s not something that you can make, manufacture. It popped up, it came out, it surprised me, but at the same time I put it to one side, it wasn’t something that suddenly, you know, was sitting in front of me, I just put it to one side. But to make this interesting, to make this, you know, rather than me just get to the bit that you want me to get to, this whole path that focuses exclusively on the conditioned, what is it called, the part of you that’s…I’ve forgotten the word for a moment. It’s what we live in, it’s what we’re caught by. I mean, Buddhists would call it samsara, relative in the absolute. This is the relative. The relative means that it’s dualistic, that it’s a creation. That the whole of Buddhism, as I say, the whole of Buddhist practices focuses on this phenomenon, and that phenomenon, the way it works, the nature that works, is that it’s dualistic and it’s about feeding it. And it’s like something that oscillates all the time like this. You feed “I like, I don’t like, this is good, that’s bad, I want, I don’t want,” etc. And all the time you’re feeding one side or the other and you bounce. If you look at yourself, everything in duality requires the other side. Nothing exists on its own, it has to have an opposite. So the whole phenomenon is this thing that’s going like this, that’s maintaining its existence by being fed with stuff that feeds one side or the other. So that whole thing keeps going. Now when you come to Dharma training, that’s about stop feeding. You’re learning to stop – I’m being technical now – you’re learning to stop feeding it by learning, as I touched on earlier, of not following your habits, by learning to say no to things. And what you’re doing is that you’re no longer feeding something that keeps this thing going like this. So in time, this thing that goes like this begins to lose its massive power, massive grip that it has upon you and begins to come back into some sort of equilibrium. Because if you don’t feed it, this is what will happen. It will come like, “It needs to be fed. Oh, I like, I don’t like, I’m right, you’re wrong,” you know, whatever, whatever. How you engage with it mentally, emotionally, is this thing that we call samsara, you know, the relative. So the whole path of Dharma training, and it’s not seen in these terms, I don’t know if I’ve ever expressed in these terms, is it’s about bringing those two things so they come into equilibrium like this. So you reach the point where you no longer feed, literally you’re no longer feeding. This is called equanimity. Technically it’s called equanimity towards formations, whereby you enter a period, and this is not done by an act of will, this is the natural process of letting go so the thing becomes more and more a sense of equilibrium. And then you reach the real refining part where you literally do not hold on to anything. The thoughts come into your mind, and you think as you think, but you don’t hold on to anything. Everything, you just have complete and utter disinterest in everything, I mean literally everything. And for me this went on for, I think it’s two weeks, three weeks, and of course one of the things that you’re not interested in is you’re not interested in meditation anymore, but still you drag yourself to the cushion and you sit and you do your best to be still and open and all the rest of it. But at the same time, the way I experienced it was a sense of incredible frustration, because I just couldn’t find anything, please let me grab anything, just to give me a bit of interest. And you enter that period, and that’s nothing to do with me, that’s not an act of will, you’ve reached a point now where something else has taken over, something that’s beyond your consciousness, beyond what you do. And you sit in that place until that matures, and of course you don’t know how long that’s going to go on for. I mean for me it went on, it lasted. It kicked in right at the beginning of the retreat actually, and it was a couple of weeks, something like that. I think I wrote in the book, I can’t remember, two to three weeks, two weeks, it was really difficult because I was just so bored and so thinking, “What the hell am I doing this for? I’ve just lost all motivation. Nothing interests me at all.” And you sit there, and when that reaches perfect equilibrium, remember it has to feed itself to live, it falls away, it collapses. And when it collapses, that’s the conditioned, your conditioned mind that you’ve been enveloped by all of your life, falls away, it then opens into what is reality, the unconditioned, your true nature, Buddha nature, the Dharmakaya, Shunyata, all of these words that we wrap around that. So it’s not like you die, you do die actually. In Zen it’s called the great death. You literally die as a person, you literally die.

Rick: Well not physically, but subjectively.

Aloka: Well not physically, yeah. Well fortunately it doesn’t go on so long. It is a complete collapse of your whole conscious makeup, but there’s a part of you that’s not a part of that, and that bit endures. But it’s like you just lose it, there’s nothing there. But there is this knowing, there’s a knowing there which is beyond this samsaric world that’s who you really are, that part of you that never dies, that’s permanent. This dies, but this doesn’t die. And then after a few moments it’s difficult to put a time on it because you’re not in time, but it’s clearly not that long as it were, so to speak. The whole world comes, it doesn’t just come back as a sort of flash, it comes rushing back. You imagine like somebody playing music on the other side of a door and you’ve got the door closed and you can’t hear it, but when you open the door it rushes at you. It doesn’t sort of go like that, but it sort of rushes at you. So the whole of your consciousness rushes back. And then when you recover from that, because – what the hell was that? That was my…the first thought that came was, “What was that?” And so you just relax. I was on the cushion at the time, I was sitting when this happened. You sit there for a few moments and then you begin to realize what’s happened, you know, which is very emotional actually. But then what happens then is that you begin to realize that, “This is it, mate, you’ve done it.” That sounds egotistical, but you know, you can’t help but say that. But then it begins to open up, you begin to find yourself in the Dharmakaya, this is reality, you’re not in your samsaric world. Your samsaric world is marginalized and the unconditioned is revealing itself, it manifests and you begin to see what is reality, who you really are. This is not some objective thing. You’re not watching a movie. This is who you really are. This is who we all are, that we’ve thrown a veil over and got lost in this nonsense that we create and chase after and get caught by. But at that time, and that revelation can go on, it depends on the person, but it becomes clear that this is reality. And then what happens then? You just begin to see your samsaric world, what it’s all about. You know, the Buddha, one of his famous teachings, one of the cornerstones of his teachings is called the Four Noble Truths, is that there is suffering. You don’t have to be very clever to see that one, but there is a cause of suffering, there is a cause of suffering and there is a way out of suffering and there is a path that will take you out of suffering. That isn’t something that he invented, that’s something that reveals itself. That’s the nature of your samsara. You see it, that it’s nothing but suffering. It’s just an absolute mess that has no beginning and no end. And of course what’s totally integral with all of this is the revelation and the acceptance which so many Westerners have a real problem with these days, of rebirth, of karma and rebirth, that it’s just a continuous flow. Many of us Westerners now, because we can’t prove it, therefore I don’t accept it. But you see that this samsaric thing with the energy that it creates, the massive energy, it just rolls on. It’s like a juggernaut that will do, just because your body falls to bits, you know, you think that’s the end? You must be joking. What it will do due to circumstances, another one gets created. And it literally doesn’t have an end or a beginning, and you’re stuck with that all the time. And you can see how it maintains itself. It shows its nature that it is suffering. And the reason why it maintains itself is because of your desire that your roles are touching. That’s why it exists. But then you see there’s a way out of suffering, that actually there is an end to this. This isn’t all doom and gloom, but you have to go about it in a very, very particular way, and that’s called the path. And this is what it will take you to this place, to this equilibrium, where the whole thing falls away and it reveals you awake into your true nature, your Buddha nature, and all the wonders and inconceivable experience of it, which is so emotional, but it’s just so full of insight that it just rains down, for me it just rained down for days, it never stopped, everything just revealing itself, showing itself. And it shows its strata, it shows its stratus of reality, if you like, and it takes you to the ultimate, which is the ultimate of shunyata. It’s all emptiness, it’s all shunyata, but shunyata isn’t some black and white thing. Shunyata, it’s almost like it’s got different strata, and because you experience one of these, “This is shunyata,” well it is, but hang on, there’s a bit more to this than what you think. And the ultimate strata is when you see all phenomena is independent, it’s its own independent thing, but at the same time it contains every other thing in the whole universe, every other element, every other form, whatever that form, not only that, but it contains everything that’s in the past, everything that’s in the future is there in front of you. It’s called interpenetration, that’s the ultimate of shunyata, that’s where you go, you know, as I say, certainly if you go down the path where you take on, you take so much on when you enter this path, that when the fruit finally drops, it’s not just a little taster, as often the case can be, but actually it’s through…and you know what’s touching it now is quantum physics, that’s now beginning to break through. And what quantum physics, I mean I have absolutely no trouble with it, because it’s expressed in reality, this is shunyata. But you know, we’ve got to go beyond putting it under a microscope or making it some objective understanding. For these scientists and these people who are very drawn to this, that are being drawn into understanding it, sooner or later they’ve got to realize this, they really want to understand quantum physics. They’ve got to turn all of their objective stuff that they’re looking into, going out there like all scientists do, one day they’ve got to take that and turn it within themselves, and when they do, then they’ll see it in its completeness.

Rick: Some of them are doing that actually.

Aloka: Well, that’s fantastic, because that’s where it is. It isn’t an objective reality, it’s who you are.

Rick: In fact, there are quantum physicists who have been meditating for decades and are in a scientific way drawing the correlation between consciousness and the unified field and so on. But I wanted to ask you, so this happened to you in 1981, which was 33 years ago, nearly half a lifetime ago for you, and then you mentioned strata of shunyata. So, in the last 33 years, have you been kind of progressing through the strata? What’s been unfolding over 33 years?

Aloka: The way it works, and this is one that defeats so many people, so many people think, “Well, that’s it, I’ve finished, I’ve done it, I’ve seen, I know, put my feet up, put the cigar out, and just cruise for the rest of life.” Actually, it’s only the beginning. Because what you’ve got, the way that it works, is that you have the awakened mind now, which you never had before, and you can’t imagine it, you can’t create it. I don’t care how smart and clever you are in your imagination. You don’t know the unconditioned mind, which is not necessarily a nice way. You don’t know your true nature until you’ve awakened to it. You have that, but also you still have the residue of your samsara. It’s not as powerful as it used to be because you have this thing that’s undeniable, that sits there, that you are incapable of doubt. You can doubt your practice all the way along, “Am I doing it right? Is it right? Am I wasting my time?” etc. Once you break through, you see and you know, and nothing is unshakable, your doubt is unshakable. I mean, there is no doubt, you cannot doubt the path, you cannot doubt what it leads to. So you have that, like a rock as it were, it always sits there. And you’ve got this other fellow over here, it’s quite good to use two hands here, you’ve got this other fellow over here, it’s the absolute and the relative. You have the relative there that still wants a piece of the action, that’s still always poking its nose in, trying to get you to follow your habits, which you do, and you can still follow quite crude habits. But hopefully if you stick at it, if you stick at it slowly, slowly, and learn, you know the way out of suffering is not to feed it, leave it alone, let it fade, it’s not good, it’s not bad, you don’t engage with it, you don’t have conflict, leave it alone, let it burn itself out like a fire that you no longer throw fuel on. If you want a fire to go out, if you don’t throw fuel on it, however big the fire is, sooner or later it’s got to go out. It’s exactly the same principle, if you don’t throw fuel on it, it will slowly, slowly burn itself out. And this becomes ever more prominent because it’s trying to cloud it over, which it succeeds from time to time to some degree, but it’s always freeing itself because it’s the milestone, it’s the real thing. This is not real, this is pure imagination, a pure fiction, 100% fiction. So it has no body, it has no depth and strength to it really, it’s more like a mirage, whereas this is something. So this will, and you know Zen, the way Zen describes it is that the practice after the breakthrough is that you protect the advancing host. This is the guest, this is the host. The guest is always interfering, wanting, but you keep the ship steady, you meditate, you live a lifestyle where you’re not feeding this fellow any more than it can have, and you just dedicate yourself to carrying on with the training. In essence, no different than the first day you started, but now you’ve got a vision, now you see, and of course it’s different, profoundly different, but at the same time it’s no different. It’s no different because you’re learning to let go still, exactly, you’re learning to let go, the same as you did on the first day when you came to the training. So the advancing host, you know, you stay like the Tibetans call it the view, I don’t know if you’ve heard that, the view where you just stay present, you don’t wander off into the future or the past, where your feet are, what you’re doing, drinking a cup of tea, drinking a glass of water, that’s it, nothing special, that’s the view, that’s staying with the advancing host, just leave it alone, because actually it grows itself, you don’t make it become more prominent, it’s a natural irreversible process, and whether you pull it off in this lifetime, maybe, or whether you don’t and you’ve still got this residue here that will then create further lives, nevertheless you will come back to that. So the advancing host…

Rick: So you’re saying that even though this awakening has taken place, there can be further lives because of the residue?

Aloka: Oh yeah.

Rick: Okay. So it’s not some kind of ultimate enlightenment, it’s some sort of stage of awakening?

Aloka: No, it is, and if it is authentic, if it’s authentic, it’s irreversible. You’ve done something now that you can’t turn back. You can hang it out by buying into your old world, by all means, if that’s, “Oh, I’ve had enough of this, I’m going to smoke a cigar every day,” and do that, fair enough. And you may even really cover it over in your life, but it’s awakened and it will in time, however many lives, not many, this guest, this samsara, these habits that you’ve created, the karma that you’ve created will fade. And then that, you know, in Buddhism it’s Buddhahood, you know, that’s the Buddha and that’s those that reach Buddha, he’s not the only one that’s reached that and there’s plenty that have in the time, but there’s a whole path that goes. In Mahayana Buddhism it’s called the Bodhisattva Path, the Bhumis, where you work through, it’s called the Bhumi, the ten stages, where you work through the characteristics of this and the world that it creates, the dualistic world that it creates that you buy into, it begins to unpick it, it begins to unpick, so that it slowly becomes potent.

Rick: So do you have any way of estimating how much of it you’ve worked through in the past 33 years and how much there’s left to work through?

Aloka: No, I don’t. I’d like tomorrow to be nice, but it doesn’t work. You’ve got attachment around these things. You know, we are nothing but creatures of attachment, we do it all the time. This you’ve just got to let go, trust it, go with it, you know, do your best, be as committed as you can, not be half-hearted, but at the same time, you see, it’s so difficult to be whole-hearted, to be whole-hearted, and I think this is one of the ultimate challenges for all of us, to be whole-hearted with what you do, but not want anything in return. You get yourself into that place where you are whole-hearted with your training, but you have no, “I’m not doing this because I want to get that.” You do it for its own sake, which is to become a human being, and you know you’re humanizing, it is. That whole path is just about becoming a human being, for as long as you’re a human being. It’s the innate qualities that our Buddha nature have, so they begin to shine through, of compassion, of love, of forgiveness, empathy, all of these qualities that we all admire in people. You don’t make any of these, you don’t make them, they’re inherent within all of us, they’re an expression of our true nature. And so you begin to experience that and you know how right it is and how good you feel about becoming a human being, and you just want to carry on because it’s a lovely place to be, you know, not like you used to be in the old days when you just spend your life running after things and people and wanting this and wanting that, crashing and banging all over the place, so you get your own way. Now you just let go and allow the thing to unfold, and when it ends, who knows?

Rick: Yeah, I knew you were going to give me that answer, but I just wanted to ask. But aside from that though, if it’s possible, how would you describe the nature of your day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience now as compared to 10, 20, 30 years ago? Do you see a trajectory of … and as you walk down the street now, or as you sit talking to me, what is the nature of your experience as compared to what it was when you first had that awakening, or a week or a year after that awakening?

Aloka: Non-attachment.

Rick: Much more so.

Aloka: Yeah, you’ve just learned to go with things. Things don’t bother you, things sort of pass through you. You have much more of a lightness. You don’t carry this self-burden – that’s gone, even though all of this stuff is associated with the notion of it, because the self is just a creation. It never exists. It’s a phenomenon that manifests when the conditions are right, and when the conditions break up the notion of a self disappears. So that self-notion can still pop around, but it only takes the other part of you just to hang on a minute and just have a quick look and say, “No, no, no, no,” and it just vanishes. And that happens on… I run a group with lots of people and you can imagine things don’t always go the way that you want them to go, and that’s all part of my training, is that I do my best and I can see if there’s any self of me in there, or whether I’m prepared to let things unfold more naturally and help rather than hinder. Whether all the students would agree with that, I don’t know. But certainly where I’m coming from everything is so easy. I don’t feel like I’m carrying anything. I don’t think I’ve been carrying life, to be honest with you, and the desire for life. But at the same time I prepare to live it wholeheartedly. That’s the paradox. The first time we used the word paradox.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll have to get into that.

Aloka: That’s the paradox there, that like I say, you give yourself wholeheartedly, but at the same time you know that it’s all just a game, it’s just a game. Don’t get carried away by it.

Rick: So if you were to take one yardstick by which you could measure the development that’s taken place in the last 33 years, it would be growth of unattachment, spontaneity, smooth ease of living, just kind of a…

Aloka: There is that, and of course what makes that possible is not a thought process, it’s also the growing realization of shunyata. Shunyata is eternal peace.

Rick: I’m not suggesting it’s something you’re thinking about, it’s just the way you naturally function.

Aloka: Yeah, yeah, but everything as it matures and the more you let go, certainly in the beginning it can still be quite difficult in the beginning, but you like after years that the whole notion of shunyata becomes more and more, sits in front of you much more. And when shunyata sits in front of you, then you don’t grab at anything.

Rick: Yeah, okay good. So in the notes you sent to me you said, “I’ve been listening to many non-dual talks lately and have been struck by the difference in how reality is revealed to the non-dual adherent and the Buddhist practitioner. I’d like to talk on this difference, not from theory but from my own direct experience of awakening.” And as you know, it’s a topic that has come up in a lot of my interviews, in fact somebody sent me this t-shirt.

Aloka: Oh, there you go.

Rick: It has “Paradox” on it. And I read in your book about the discussion of paradox and how there are a lot of non-dual teachers out there these days saying, “You’re already awakened, you’re already enlightened, you don’t need to do anything,” so on and so forth. And then you discuss how they’re perhaps just kind of stuck in an absolute view and the absolute and the relative both have to be taken into account. So let’s discuss that whole area for a bit.

Aloka: Well, to be able… this is where I think it’s the freedom of insight, that your insight is an authentic insight, a rounded insight, is that the paradox – here you are, you have the absolute, you’re enlightened nature, everything is perfect, you don’t make anything, you don’t go anywhere, there’s nothing to do, nothing to be, but at the same time you’ve got the relative world where you’re caught up in all the daily activities, where you’re caught up in the self’s desires and stuff. And like for a teacher and for your own understanding of yourself, you run the two side by side, and of course it doesn’t make sense. And I think unless in your training you have specifically… this is what’s really important I think, unless you specifically focus on the relative aspect of yourself, i.e., your samsara, your suffering, and spent literally years looking at it, you don’t wade yourself through that in a short time. If you don’t wade yourself through that and get to know it, then you’re not going to know it, and you have an experience of this thing that suddenly pops out of nowhere, this reality, I’ve seen reality. You have no experience, no knowledge of the relative, of the paradox. You see yourself one-sided, and you can see it. I’ve listened to people, so many people. The thing that immediately gets the bell going for me is when people have their enlightened experience and immediately go and write a book, they make a video and they go out and teach, they immediately become a teacher. As soon as somebody does that, I think there’s something not right here. You’ve missed something here because if you think that you’ve cracked it, that you’ve done it, and you can sit with your cigar smoking, I don’t think it works that way. I think what you’ve done, you’ve had a taste, and I would never put myself in a place of judging people of the authenticity of their awakening. But what so many people don’t seem to realize is that reality isn’t a thing, this is reality. Reality isn’t a thing at all. It has no parameters, no colors, it’s not an object in any way. So therefore you can’t pin it down and say, “This is reality.” You can get a taste, you can certainly get a taste, a touch of it, but hang on, there’s an awful lot more to this than what you’ve experienced. But the difficulty with this, and I totally appreciate this, again from my own experience, that when you get a taste of reality, a taste of something, well, let’s say a taste of something that’s beyond your normal conditioned, dualistic world, the experience can be so, so powerful, like nothing that you’ve experienced in your life. I don’t know what you’ve done in your life, but everything pales into insignificance, that you are so utterly convinced, “This is it, this has got to be the real thing,” that you become so attached to that, that you think, “Well, as I say, I’ve done it, I’m fully awakened, I’m now going to go and spread the word to everybody.” But what you don’t have, that you don’t have the experience of a path. So when these people come along to you and be very inspired by your story and very interested by your story, say, “Of course, fantastic, how do I do it?” And you say, “Well, just let go, because you’re awakened anyway, just let all that nonsense go.” And then you go, “Well, hang on a minute, you might be able to do that, but I can’t, I’m just completely stuck with my self-identity. How do I work on that self-identity so that I can get to your place?” That self-identity, that’s the path, and if you haven’t walked the path, you cannot know it. I don’t care what your enlightenment is. If you’ve not walked the path and seen the subtleties and seen the utter, utter amazing way it is constructed, you think it’s just something very simply put, it is not. The subtlety of it is beyond your imagination, you cannot know it. It is so clever, the way that it has ways of holding you. You can’t know that until you’ve gone on that journey yourself and seen it. So when people come to you, and this is what I’ve been balked so many times, I’ve heard people talk about their experience and say, “Oh, that’s really, really interesting,” and I always wait for the punchline at the end. And there isn’t a punchline, because a) they just talk about themselves all the time, and then you say, “Yeah, great, but how do I do it?” or just wake up when you can’t do it. 99.9% of us can’t do that. Ninety-nine percent of us need help and support and we need to work our way through the thing that’s preventing us from waking up, and that thing is the relative, is samsara, is the identifying with the self, is the world that we create, that we live in, that we’re attached to, that is who we consider to be – this is me, this – that totally consumes us. That’s what you have to work through in order to experience. And that’s what Buddhism is, it’s about working through that relative. It doesn’t care about the absolute, it will take care of itself. Okay, it can be an inspiration, it can be interesting, but hang on, just because you know a bit about it, that’s not going to help you. You’ve got to learn to let go, you’ve got to learn to let go of your attachment, to put it simply. But it’s not a simple thing to do. Truly to let go means you’re letting go of the self, and you’re volunteering dying as a self-entity, as a separate self-entity, you’re giving that up. That doesn’t happen by an act of will, and it doesn’t happen easily. You have to learn to work through it, and it takes years, it takes years. So this is the bit that throws me when I hear this, these people with their wonderfully interesting, inspiring stories, it’s great for them, but I don’t see what use, other than inspiring, I don’t see what use it is, because as I say, most of us, we need help. Please hold my hand and just, I know I’ve got to do it, and I know it’s a paradox, and I know that none of this really exists, because I believe you, but reality is the only thing that real – and all the things I’m caught by that define my life, I know it’s all imagination, none of it’s real, but still, for me it’s real and I can’t let it go. How do I let that go? In Buddhism it’s clearly, clearly, clearly mapped out.

Rick: Yeah, I mean the Buddha didn’t say, “Okay folks, you’re all enlightened, congratulations, you can go home now.”

Aloka: No, he didn’t.

Rick: Right, he gave them practices and techniques.

Aloka: No, I’ll just say that this is where I, because I have my own personal experience here, this is not just an interesting subject, I have my own experience with this. And of course I do take a bit of interest when I hear about other people’s, and people are so much out there and in your face with this, that I’ve got to look at it and compare it to my understanding and see that there’s so much missing here. Okay for you, and I would doubt, while people sit in the Absolute and say to the people that come to their meetings, “Just let go, just let go,” to me that clearly displays to me that they don’t know about the relative.

Rick: I’m not even sure all of them know about the Absolute, I mean I’ve talked to a lot of these people.

Aloka: Well, okay, but they think they do. But this is where the word “paradox” comes in. This is what – they stand on one side, it’s like this. What they can’t do is step to the other side, which is a complete contradiction to what you just said, but actually be comfortable with that, because it is a paradox. This isn’t black and white and two-dimensional and some lateral reality. That’s not how it is, and that’s what I struggle with, with this. And the fact that people, you know, for me, if I can say, “I’m talking to you like this,” whether people want to believe it or not, that’s another thing. But you know in Buddhism what I’ve been talking about and been so open with you is a taboo for most Buddhist traditions. It’s not done, it’s just not. There are plenty of people within the traditions who do break through, but they don’t get up and they don’t talk about it in direct ways. Their teachings express their understanding. They don’t get up and say, “Look at me, I’m this and I’m that.” But because I’m not affiliated or committed to any specific traditions, it’s not a major issue, but it’s something that you don’t do in any of the traditions. And I’ve always struggled with why these people don’t get up and say, “I’ve broken through.” I’ve always struggled with that. I can understand some of the reasons why not, but also it can be incredibly positive to say to people, “I’ve broken through,” and it can be very inspiring. And I now have history of actually coming out as I call it, which goes back whatever it is, fifty…

Rick: 33 years.

Aloka: No, no, no, no, no. I mean I carried this for 18 years.

Rick: Before you said anything.

Aloka: I wrote a manuscript back in the late 80s for my own amusement, threw it in a desk and left it there for years and then took it out some years later, cleaned it up. And to my surprise, somebody offered to publish it. I sent it to Sangharakshita, who’s the founder of what’s now called the Triratna community, it used to be called the FWBO, I mean it’s worldwide. And I sent my manuscript in because I knew he’s the only person I knew that would be able to run over my manuscript and see it from a technical point of view, whether there’s any problems with it, if he saw any sort of something, if things were wrong. And to my surprise he wrote back and he liked what he saw and he says, “Well, maybe I can get this published for you.” And when the book came out, which is 18 years after the event, I went public as it were, and I wrote about, my first book, my record of awakening actually is more, actually talks about that experience. But it took me 18 years before I came out. I didn’t get up there after five minutes and start exclaiming. And what needs to be realized in those 18 years, it was that I was maturing. It would have been so different if I had got out there a few weeks after and started, I don’t know, proclaiming something or other. It’s so different from what it would be now. Because now I’ve had all these years of maturity, of polishing as I like to say, more clarity around the whole phenomenon, the whole experience. And that actually is traditional. People take years and years and years before they come out and as I say, sort of expose themselves like that. But when I see so much of this stuff that’s going on now, they can’t get out there quick enough, most of them.

Rick: Well I’ve even heard stories of people in various satsangs saying, “Geez, I can’t wait till I get awakened so I can quit my shitty job and get out there and be a teacher.” There’s a Tibetan proverb you may have heard which is, “Don’t mistake understanding for realization, don’t mistake realization for liberation.” And I think there’s a lot of people who attain an understanding of the non-dual nature of things and the enlightened nature of the self and all that stuff, and mistake that understanding for realization and actually begin teaching without really having been grounded in the experience. And what to say of a more mature thing that might happen years after an actual awakening. And then they’re saying to people, “Oh, you’re already that, you’re already enlightened, you don’t need to do anything.” It’s sort of like your Aunt Matilda bequeaths you a fortune and someone tells you, “Hey, you’re a millionaire,” and you start running around the street saying, “I’m a millionaire, I’m a millionaire,” but you actually haven’t figured out how to access the bank account, so you’re still living like a pauper. You still can’t afford to pay your rent and whatnot because you actually haven’t gotten your hands on that money. So I think there’s a lot of that too, where people sort of have this kind of, they talk the talk in terms of being enlightened and they kind of understand that essentially we all are, in that sense my dog is, but there’s not the actual living experience of it. And I find that sad because a lot of people are buying into that, because it’s something you can buy into so easily.

Aloka: Sure, be sitting on a cushion for ten years.

Rick: Precisely, you can buy into that.

Aloka: You know, genuine people who are looking to get to the bottom of the human condition, that this is what they really want to do, and their first contact is to come up against something that there is no way it’s not going to happen for them, I’m sorry. You need a teacher. You cannot do this without a teacher, and you need the right support around you while you borrow and when you get to know, so things fall away, so the reality begins to open up for you. That’s the way that it’s done. You’re not going to do this on your own. And if you’ve woken up on your own, and I don’t deny that, that you’ve had a taste of reality, but don’t think that’s the end of it, that is reality. You’ve tasted it, you’ve licked it, you’ve touched it, fantastic. Take it as an inspiration, don’t take it as something to attach yourself to and get out there and say, “I’ve done it.” Take it, “Wow, I’ve touched, you know, I’ve gone beyond all this nonsense, that is fantastic.” Then go and find somebody who can help you mature that, who can help to bring you into the relative, because that’s where you’ve got to go. You don’t have to go into reality anymore, you have to go into the relative. And if you’ve not been guided into it, you won’t wade through on your own, however smart and clever you are, because of the subtle nature of the whole thing and the sheer difficulty of it. You need the right emotional support. This is an emotional journey, this is not an intellectual one, this isn’t cerebral, this whole path is emotional.

Rick: Isn’t there both components to something?

Aloka: Yes, yes, of course there is. There is a place for that, but it’s only a part because it helps to guide you and orientate and you can say, “Yeah, I understand,” and sure, you need that. But when you come to actually put it into practice, you will find that it’s in the body, it’s not in the head. It’s in the body, you’ve got to learn to come into the body, turn away from a lifetime of habits of doing everything in your head, learn to come into your body to be still, to be open, and learn to trust that you find it. You have no logic, it doesn’t fit your conditioning, it doesn’t fit common sense half the time. You have to learn to trust that and go with that, and you’re not going to do that on your own. Somebody who you trust, who can put their arm on your shoulder and say, “Just keep going, just keep going,” and then you get to know the relative, you know? And until you know the relative, you’re not going to know the Absolute, because the Absolute is what you call it Nirvana and Samsara, if you like, they’re not two, but for so many people you just get a taste of the Absolute, somehow it’s something separate and … you know, this … you’re just scratching, you’re just scratching around.

Rick: Yeah, Adyashanti gives some nice talks about that too, I don’t know if you know who he is, how a taste of realization can seem like the whole thing and one can be tempted to go out and teach and consider oneself done and all that stuff, but it’s just a taste and there’s much more. So maybe we’ve covered that topic. You also said Buddha Nature, I’d like to take the opportunity if possible to talk on how Buddhist practice is generally evolving now in the West. Much tinkering is and has been put on the traditional ancient ways of practice, to the extent that I think we are running the serious risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, making authentic awakening increasingly difficult to achieve. And then you mentioned your group, which is a wholly Western group, yet has not added to nor subtracted from the essence of the traditional way of Dharma practice. Go ahead and talk about that a bit.

Aloka: Yeah, well I’d like to use that as a model, my group, which again is something that I have to say, so you get the right picture here. I have never set out to be a teacher, I’ve never set out to run a group. It’s only when my book came out people wanted to come and sit with me and I couldn’t chase them away, they just kept coming back and coming back. And so you sit and then, “Hello, let’s have a day retreat,” and on it goes. And then you have a group and you say, “Hang on, I didn’t start out to do this.” It takes care of itself. That’s part of the mystery of all of this and part of that connection with the mysterious part of yourself. If you open, it will take you, it will take you on the path.

Rick: One thing leads to the next.

Aloka: Absolutely, and you don’t have to do anything about it. And you know, I found myself teaching, which I’ve never had that ambition in my life, and it absolutely terrified me, the fact of getting up and talking. When my book came out, I had to do book launches. I’ve shied away from anything public, getting up in front of people, since I was a young teenager when I didn’t mind. Suddenly the curtains drew and it’s terrified me all my life. But when this book came out I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to get up and talk about this.” And so much fear I had to go through there, but slowly, you know, fear’s about familiarity, you stay with it and eventually it fades away, you don’t feed it, you know, all of those things, and it fades.

Rick: Weren’t you the one who said you used to be a rock drummer?

Aloka: Oh, that was back before I came to the practice.

Rick: I used to also. So you had some experience with audiences anyway.

Aloka: Yeah, but the great thing about a drum kit is you can hide behind it.

Rick: Yeah, you’re in the background.

Aloka: Nobody can see you.

Rick: You’re not the lead singer.

Aloka: If your seat’s low enough and your cymbals are high enough, you can hide there. You’re always in the background. So that never counted.

Rick: You didn’t do solos?

Aloka: Oh, no, no, I didn’t. Well, it wasn’t that good.

Rick: You’re just a rhythm man.

Aloka: I didn’t stick at it long enough to get to that place. It was great. I enjoyed it, it was fantastic. I loved it, but you know, that was something just passing through. And so I just want to tell you where I am today. I’ve ended up, I found myself teaching, but you’ve heard some of my talks. You know, we’ve got over fifty on the DharmaMind website at this moment. And the way I’ve been talking today about me personally, you will hardly ever find anything on there where I talk about myself, but what you do hear exclusively is what’s come out of that, come out of that awakening process. I mean, this is not me that speaks when I sit down in front of the group. I don’t sit there, it just comes as it does for a lot of people. And that’s just an expression of that opening, of that awakening. And that’s been a natural thing for me, that the group has formed, I found myself as a teacher. I didn’t even want to call myself a teacher until about 3 or 4 years ago. I even recall, I never used to ever call myself a teacher. I just found it so pretentious because I’ve got so much to learn, so much to learn. How can you get up there and say “I’m a teacher” when you’re floundering, well, you’ve got issues just like everybody else. So I’ve always had difficulty with it, but now I’m comfortable with it and I’m a teacher because everyone tells me I’m a teacher, so I have to get on with it. But what they get for me is what’s come out of, it’s my own expression of my own awakening. But everything since I’ve come to the Dharma has been within the traditional form. And so I’ve proved to myself that it works, that there’s nothing wrong with it. If it works, don’t fix it. Why would I want to go tinkering with something? If I find myself with my own group and my own disciples, it seems like people want to do things to put their own identity on their group, like us Westerners. So they start tweaking things and they drop things and they begin to take away things that they don’t consider to be important, like the whole devotional side, like bowing for example, or any sense. The way I talk about opening up to what we call Buddha nature, your own true nature, because you can’t prove these things. And this is how the Western mind works, that in time they begin to shore off everything that can’t be written down in a textbook, that you can’t think through, that’s not logical, that doesn’t have just straight lines to it. I think they’ve done it with Indian traditions. I think the non-dual comes from Advaita. I mean, I don’t know that, but the bit that I’ve touched on Advaita is so much richer and so much, “Ah, we don’t need all that Eastern mumbo-jumbo, we just chop it off, we get down to the bare bones.” And they’ve done it in Buddhism with Vipassana, which is an ancient form of practice, and it died really a hundred years, a hundred and fifty, wherever we are now, a hundred years ago, beginning of the last century, and it got revived. And when it came into the Western perspective, just chopping all this traditional Sangha stuff, Theravada stuff away, let’s just get down to the nitty-gritty, and consider all this stuff to be not necessary, that it’s all just flowery stuff, because it’s irrational. You can’t say, “Well, we bow our heads because it’s…” You can say why, but you can’t give a rational reason for doing that, there’s some sort of tangible product to it, and so “Ah, we won’t do that.” And now you get, and I discovered some years ago, that they even throw Buddharupas out, they don’t even bother with Buddharupas. I mean, I came across that one.

Rick: Buddharupa means the statue of the Buddha?

Aloka: The statue, yeah.

Rick: Like you have there.

Aloka: Like my friend here, looking over my shoulder.

Rick: Keeping an eye on you.

Aloka: Yeah, he is too, very close. People don’t know why they’re there, they think it’s just an idol, that it’s just a statue and you don’t need it, but in fact it can be one of the most supportive, one of the most insightful things that you can have in your practice. But because there’s no rationale around it, we’ll chuck it out. And in Vipassana that’s got so sanitized that they’ve thrown out so much, as an example, and I think as I say, with Advaita it’s the same thing. I think it’s a direct parallel actually. It’s what Westerners do. You don’t get this in the East, it’s how our minds … we’re rational, we’re intelligent, I understand everything. If it doesn’t fit my intelligence then I don’t want it. So I can hone it all down and get rid of it.

Rick: Let me ask a two-part question about that.

Aloka: I haven’t got to Buddha nature yet.

Rick: Oh, we’re going to get to it. Two-part question about this. One is, are you pretty confident that what has traditionally come down over the last couple thousand years is what the Buddha would have intended, or did some of the early practitioners add on a lot of frills? So that’s the first part of the question. Second part is, I’m not really familiar with Buddhist tradition too much, but from what I understand there’s a lot of details, I mean a lot of stuff about subtle beings and bardos and all kinds of stuff, and so do we really want all that?

Aloka: No, we don’t, unless you have a particular practice in that way. No, that’s true, we don’t need that, but I’m actually talking about specific practices, techniques.

Rick: So you’re not guilty of throwing out a lot of stuff yourself by ignoring some of that stuff I just referred to?

Aloka: No, it doesn’t apply to our particular training. Our training has a parallel in Chan, in Zen.

Rick: Ah, Zen, so it’s more bare bones.

Aloka: Absolutely, it’s very simple and very direct, there’s very little stuff around it. So that’s very easy for us in the West because there’s not a lot of clutter around it. But being around Theravada and knowing the value of that Vipassana practice and knowing the difference between how traditionally it’s done and how you’ll get monks and nuns now, Westerners who are part of the tradition, how they practice it compared to, it’s just like a conveyor belt. It’s sanitized, it’s sanitized. And there is that, but the bit that’s closer to my heart I have to say, is that again, because it’s irrational, because you can’t put your finger on it, because you can’t give a logic to it, like I’m trying to tell you this, what I now know is my true nature, I thought was out there, is actually my true nature that’s willing to … and I wrote my first book, how it helped me, when I was on the point of insanity. I mean, that’s how big it is. It’s not some superficial side issue like a pet or something. It can be a massive, massive part to the unfolding of your understanding, because ultimately that’s where you’re going. It’s not an alien. Ultimately you’re waking to that true nature. So to embrace it and to acknowledge it, even though you can’t prove it, and it is an act of faith, an act of trust. Trust all the masters through the centuries have told you about Buddha nature, going right the way back. Trust that actually, hang on, did they get it wrong? Have they all got it wrong? Have they seriously all got it wrong? Or are they just trying to wind me up? Or are they lying to me? Or actually, can I give them the benefit of the doubt until I can prove it to myself? You’ve got to have that mind, given the benefit of the doubt, because if you don’t you will never see it. And what’s happening now, because it’s not something rational, it’s not something that you can put into the conditioned world, to me this is the spiritual path. I don’t know how you define the spiritual path. If you’re going to stay in the logical mind from the beginning to the end, you’re never going to leave. That’s not the spiritual path. The spiritual path is to open up to something that’s in the unconditioned, something that you aspire to, that you don’t understand, that you’ll never grasp, but you trust and you know, very often just your own intuition, never mind your own direct experience with that. But the important thing is to open to it and say, “Yes,” and embrace it. And you can, you can begin to recognize it in your life. It is not such a great mystery as we like to think that it is. But because it doesn’t fit the formulas and all the razzamatazz with all of those things, there are people who say, “Oh, that’s just a load of nonsense. We don’t need Buddha nature.” Or either reject it for that reason, because it’s irrational, or “Hang on, Buddha nature says that you’re already enlightened”, therefore you’re going to get people who think, “Well, I’m already enlightened, I haven’t got to practice,” which personally in 40 years I’ve never come across anybody who said that. And if anybody did misunderstand that, that your enlightened nature is permanent and it’s with you and it’s who you really are, then you educate them. You don’t react and block it all off, “Oh no, we can’t go there, it’s too dangerous.” You have to educate people that it’s the cornerstone, the cornerstone of this type of practice, this so-called immanent model that you get in Tibetan Buddhism, in Dzogchen and Zen, Chan. It’s the cornerstone, your true nature, and people are dumping it.

Rick: What have they got left if they dump that?

Aloka: Well, they’ve got their own head and their own ideas, which they’re happy with, but I’ll tell you what, they won’t find their true nature.

Rick: I mean, why do they even bother paying any attention to Buddhism or Buddhist practice if they reject true nature, reject Buddha nature? What else is there to concern yourself with?

Aloka: Yeah, well, because there is a lot of stuff around these days. Meditation is very, very popular, very common. Most of it is derived from Buddhism, or a lot of it is derived from Buddhism, but that whole religious side, “My God, religion, we mustn’t use that word,” that whole spiritual side has been ejected, and you do end up with something that works. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’m not saying that you won’t get anything out of practices like that. I’m not saying that. Of course they work, and people get an awful lot, it can change their lives, but it’s only scratching the surface. It won’t go deep, it won’t fulfill the promise that you will get if you take it on without throwing the baby out. And I know with, I say with my group, how could I possibly throw the baby out when I know that it works? I proved it myself.

Rick: So are these people who are throwing out Buddha nature, are they people who might be just doing meditation practice for stress release or something? Is that what you’re saying?

Aloka: Well, that’s fine.

Rick: They’re kind of dumbing it down?

Aloka: Yeah, sure, that’s fine, but don’t call it Buddhism. You know, don’t hide behind saying, “I’ve got a Buddhist practice, but I’m doing it on my terms.”

Rick: Of course, one thing may lead to the next. They might be doing it for stress release for a couple of years and then begin to realize, “Oh, there’s more to this that is beginning to unfold here.”

Aloka: Fantastic. Well, then they must go and seek a teacher, a traditional teacher where things have been proved, where they haven’t thrown the baby out. And you will go to, well, you’ll go to Theravada, you’ll go to Zen, you’ll go to Tibetan Buddhism, because Theravada doesn’t acknowledge Buddha nature, but Zen and Tibetan do. So if that’s something, then you go there, and if you’ve got a traditional form given to you by the teacher, then that will then be a part of your training.

Rick: And you know, we’ve been throwing around the term “Buddha nature,” but I don’t know if you quite defined it. What is Buddha nature?

Aloka: Well, true nature.

Rick: True nature, your essence, your innermost.

Aloka: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, I mean it’s just original nature.

Rick: That’s what I figured you meant, but I just wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.

Aloka: Yeah, no, no, no, I’m too conditioned into Buddhism. And my fear is that this sanitizing, which has happened in Vipassana, is happening now, to me, is the training that I partake of and have used, and it’s what I give to my disciples, my students. I fear, well I know it’s happening, I know it’s happening, this is not just a theory, I know people are rejecting that. And if they think that somehow they’re going to awaken to their true nature by turning their back on it, it can’t happen. You shut the door. This is subtle, this is subtle. It’s not going to come crashing through the door, any more than you’re going to come crashing through the door. You have to turn to it, open to it, and find what you need to put in place, so the door opens so that you begin to touch, begin to awaken to who you really are. It requires that trust to do that, and if you don’t have that, it cannot happen.

Rick: So this stuff must be fairly widespread for you to be so concerned about it, the people who are…

Aloka: Well, I know it, I know it.

Rick: You encounter it a lot.

Aloka: Well, I don’t get around a lot at all, but I do know that you can read about it.

Rick: It’s out there.

Aloka: It’s definitely out there. So you need authentic teachers who are not going to compromise what are the essential principles of a path that will take you to that realization.

Rick: And do you see a fair number of authentic teachers around, aside from yourself?

Aloka: I don’t go there. They’re around, but there’s a lot. I’d rather not go there because then it becomes…well, I’m making judgments anyway.

Rick: But are you reasonably confident that either in the US or the UK, if there’s somebody who’s interested in all this stuff, if they use a little scrutiny and care in checking out teachers, they’re going to be able to find somebody?

Aloka: Well, they should, and where you start and where you go, you go and find traditional Buddhism, not some Western person who’s got up and devised their own practice, their own path. Chuck this out, put something else, put something new in.

Rick: Or they find a Western person such as yourself who’s adhering to traditional Buddhism, right? It doesn’t have to be a…

Aloka: No, no, exactly, but I don’t know how many people are like me around, because you see, what sets my group apart is that we’re not actually aligned to any tradition, even I’m telling people to go to a tradition, because what they’re getting from me has come from tradition and I haven’t compromised it in any way at all, other than the sort of bells and whistles, the cultural stuff. You know, we don’t pretend to be Japanese or Chinese, we are Westerners, but the form and the practice that we have, I’m very confident to say that it is totally authentic, it is untouched, I’ve not fiddled with it in any way in the name of “us Westerners are different, therefore we got to practice different.”

Rick: You don’t buy that.

Aloka: The only thing I would say, the only aspect I would say, you know, looking at it from that perspective, is the difference between Westerners and Easterners. We are all humans, we’ve all got the same stuff. The only thing is to give more emphasis, for Westerners to give more emphasis on their relationship with themselves, because most of us Westerners don’t like ourselves, and that historically I don’t believe is the case in the East. There was never a subject about people not liking themselves, it’s just, “What?” But we are so heavily created into this individual to get out there and be successful in the world, me against the world, that individual, very, very intelligent, got so much, but what that does is it feeds, it makes the self very heavy, because it’s all self, it’s all self, and we end up not liking ourselves. And I think if there is an emphasis, which is still within the traditions, this is not outside of it, but maybe we need to give a little bit more attention to be aware of our relationship with ourselves and to see that this is nothing more than a path of learning to like yourself. There’s nothing mystical about this, this is nothing more than healing, you know, the fracturedness that we’ve turned ourselves into, the conflict that we have with ourselves. That bit, you can incorporate that in a traditional form without, because it is a part of the … but I think more emphasis is justified, because to me that’s the one thing that makes us different to Eastern people. The rest of it, we’re all still imbued with greed, hatred, and delusion, we’re all as daft as each other, and we’ve all got the same desires and wishes. I mean, it’s the species, it’s the species.

Rick: Anything in the Buddhist circles that would be comparable to the governing bodies that approve physicians to ensure that they have the right training and certification? Is there anything like that that sort of puts a stamp of approval on Buddhist teachers?

Aloka: This to me is the nub of the issue. It’s so difficult and I don’t expect anything that’s new about this. This is so nebulous, this whole thing, when you talk about awakening, of getting your awakening authenticated. Well, traditionally you’d go to your teacher and they would say yes or no, and they may give you permission to teach, you may get a title and stuff, but it is a stamp of approval that this is genuine, and you’ve got it from somebody who is also qualified to give that approval. But you know, how many people are like that in the world? Where can you go? And most of it is all sort of secrecy anyway. It’s very, very difficult, but I would say to somebody, if they are convinced that they’ve broken through and they’ve realized their true nature, go and seek somebody who is also awakened. That may not be an easy thing to do. It doesn’t have to be of your tradition.

Rick: Get a second opinion.

Aloka: Because it takes one to recognize one, and you can go, because you’re not of that tradition, you can go and you can talk about how things have opened up for you. They will know. You know, they’ve only got to look at you and they’ll know. And then they’ll say, “Yes, this is authenticated.” If you don’t, then who’s to say that it’s real? You know, for me, I was given that stamp, actually I was given it by three people who I, as it so happened, who I would consider to have the authority to do that. And when you do that, then fair enough, then you go off and you still may have a lot to do with your own practice. Like I was saying, you know, you’re only starting it in some ways and you’ve got to be very, very careful because you can turn this into a head trip so easily. This can be such an ego trip, the power that it can give you, that we’ve seen so often has really rebounded on so many people. But it’s one of the dangers that you have to be awake to and be alive to and see that you don’t fall into that trap. But if it matures then you can start and express your awakening. Not express your awakening in direct terms, but the understanding, the dharma that comes through that when everything opens up, that becomes your teaching. And I think until you get that authentication, I think you’ve got to be damn careful. But it is unfortunately very, very rare.

Rick: Maybe, you know, at this point in the development of this whole thing in the West, it’s still in a fairly fledgling stage and the kind of things we’re alluding to now will become more commonplace once it has gotten better established.

Aloka: We hope so, we hope so. And you know, a lot of mistakes are going to be made, there are already a lot of mistakes being made and who knows there are going to be more mistakes made in the future. But the more I think, you know, I am a traditionalist, I make no bones about that, I’m a westerner, absolutely, I’ve got no affiliation or fixation on the East and caught up in all of that sort of stuff. I am a westerner, but at the same time I do know the wisdom of the East, I’m prepared to accept the wisdom of the East, and that’s good enough for me. If it works, don’t fix it. Why do you want to tinker with it? Embrace it, get to know it. If you don’t understand it, fair enough, then why should you stay with it, look into it, stay with it until you do understand it. Don’t go off and start fiddling with it, which is what we … this is a characteristic of western people. We want to put our stamp on it, it’s like this. And that to me is the great danger. And if we keep going down that road, you know, this is just going to end up a whole load of nonsense. And the Buddhist path is never going to be fulfilled. It is a very dodgy path, it’s not a simple path and it can be got wrong, there’s nothing easy about this. But if you follow the guidelines that have been in place for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, put in place by truly, truly awakened beings who see everything clearly, isn’t that good enough for you? Have the humility. It’s the thing that us, never mind east and west, the thing we may not like ourselves, as I say, is a western characteristic. The other western characteristic is we don’t do humility. Eastern people do humility, we don’t do humility. “Oh, I want it my way,” the willingness to say, “Look, I don’t understand, it’s a bit too much, but I’ll bow my head to it and I’ll stay with it and hopefully it will clarify and then I will see.” And that is a massive challenge to us western people. We don’t do humility. And humility is a part of the spiritual path. This is not an option. Humility, you have to have a willingness to put your head on the ground, to give yourself up. And if you think that’s a lot of nonsense and you can do it without doing that, I don’t think you’re going to pull it off. And I’ve never come across anybody that has. I’ve never heard of anybody that’s done it, by doing these shortcuts, by westernizing it. I don’t know, they might be there because I’m not really plugged in, certainly not in America. They might be there, but I’ve never heard of it. So why change something that works? Other than your own conceit, that’s why you want to change it.

Rick: “Pride goeth before a fall,” they say.

Aloka: Yep, absolutely. And that’s my, you know, that’s what bothers me, it bothers me a lot actually, because I love this path. I think it’s the greatest thing that any human can aspire to, I would say that, wouldn’t I? But it’s the greatest thing that anybody can do. I think it’s the culmination of human development on the scale of evolution. And I would just hate to see it end up in the dust because of our conceit and because we’re not prepared to bow our heads.

Rick: Ultimately I think, as you were saying, there’s some kind of mysterious guidance that is guiding many of us, not only individually, but perhaps masses of us, and hopefully that will prevail and will steer clear of the rocks that civilization seems to be heading toward.

Aloka: Well we can hope. It’s always been a dodgy thing since the beginning, and it always will be, because what we’re doing is the ultimate thing that humans can do. And for that reason it’s never going to be easy and it’s never going to be for the masses, just for those that have reached that point of evolution.

Rick: And I would say that hopefully the percentage of people in society who have reached that point in evolution will be getting a lot larger and it seems to be getting a lot larger, and that perhaps even if it’s no kind of majority or anything, a more significant percentage will begin to have a societal impact that we so much need and haven’t much seen yet.

Aloka: Well we can get it wrong, we can get it wrong in the sense of getting the path wrong, but that doesn’t stop us becoming a better human being. It doesn’t stop us bringing good qualities to society and changing the values, even though we may not be strictly on the path. It isn’t about becoming a bad person, you can still become a wonderful person that can bring great benefit to people in the world, but it would be just so much better if they were truly on the path that they can then give others as well. So this isn’t black and white, but it would be good so that the thing keeps going, there’s a lineage that goes into the future for people. And if we lose that, then it will go downhill. It’s got to go downhill.

Rick: Okay, well I’m afraid I better wrap it up. We’ve had a pretty good talk here I think. Any final concluding remark you’d like to make or have we pretty much covered it?

Aloka: I think I said what I … there’s a couple of things I wanted to say, which is a lot of people won’t agree with and would be very challenging, definitely challenging. You’ve got to be challenged when you’re doing this. This isn’t about the comfort zone, this is about being challenged. And I like to think, “Well, this is how I see things.” And I am a challenging person, and I think what I’ve thrown out there, so you ask the students in my group, I think they’d probably agree with that, that we need to watch it and we need to watch ourselves, and we need to be challenged and never get into that complacency and think that you’ve cracked it, because that’s a very, very dangerous road to go down. And I hope what I said is challenging, whether people agree with it or not, I don’t know, but there you go.

Rick: Sounded good to me.

Aloka: I’m not out to save the world. I gave that one up when I was 10 years old or something. Just doing my best to offer the way I see things, that’s all.

Rick: Well, you’re one of these people that I would say is living a life well lived, so congratulations on everything you’ve done and are doing. I’m sure you’re not going to let that go to your head because you’ve really been doing it, which breeds humility. So let me just make a couple of concluding remarks. I’ve been talking with Aloka David Smith, who lives in the UK, teaches in the UK. Are you still in Oxford, or were you just born there?

Aloka: No, I was born there. I’m actually based in Birmingham, in the middle of the country, so it’s a very convenient place for our group.

Rick: Yeah, and obviously you have weekly meetings there and so on, and then you give retreats around the country, and even Ireland I think I heard you say. So people, if they live over there or on the continent, might want to get in touch or come to some of those.

Aloka: Sure, they come to the DharmaMind website.

Rick: Right, they can find out all the details.

Aloka: It’s very comprehensive, we’re totally open and everybody’s welcome, as long as they follow the form.

Rick: And I’ll be linking to that. So there’ll be a page on Buddha at the Gas Pump on batgap.com about this interview, and it will have a link to Aloka’s books and to his website where you can find out more. In a general sense, some general concluding remarks on batgap.com, you’ll find a number of ways of finding the past interviews, different indexes, alphabetical, chronological, topical. There’s a future interviews section where you can see who the upcoming guests are, and some other stuff, just pull down the menus and explore. There’s also a discussion group that crops up around each interview, so there’ll be one for this interview, and there is a link to an audio podcast, if you prefer to listen to these in audio rather than sit in front of your computer. There’s a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking. There is a link to be notified of each new interview as it’s released by email, you just subscribe to the email notification, you get about one a week. So that’s about it. Next week is another Buddhist teacher, Shinzen Young, and we’ll talk about him when we get to him. But thank you very much David, I appreciate you taking the time.

Aloka: Thank you.

Rick: Aloka, I mean, I slipped into David.

Aloka: That’s right, Aloka is my preferred name, but I’ve got no great hang-up on it. But yeah, I’ve enjoyed it very much, and I’ve enjoyed being given the freedom to express myself. I mean, I am a talker, I could go on forever, but you’ve given me space to say what I consider to be important things.

Rick: Good, and if people want to hear you say even more, you’ve written four books and there’s like your podcast…

Aloka: Five.

Rick: Five books, and I’ve been listening to some of your podcasts, there are a great many of those, so there’s plenty to dip into if one wants to.

Aloka: Sure, sure.

Rick: Okay, well thank you very much.

Aloka: Great, thanks very much Rick, yeah. All the best.

Rick: See you later. Thank you.