Āloka David Smith Transcript - Buddha at the Gas Pump

Questions this interview answers

What is the importance of having a teacher and a supportive community on the spiritual path?
How does Buddhist practice address the sense of self and attachment?
What is the difference between developmental and immanent models of awakening?
How can one learn to trust intuition or inner guidance during spiritual practice?

Key takeaways

A teacher and supportive community are essential for sustained spiritual progress.
Buddhist practice involves investigating and dismantling the sense of a solid, separate self.
The immanent model of awakening emphasizes recognizing one's inherent Buddha nature from the start.
Trusting intuition or inner guidance is a vital part of deepening spiritual practice.
Difficult emotions and personal challenges are integral to the process of awakening.
Stillness and focused inquiry are key tools for seeing through attachments and illusions.

Transcript

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.

🧘 Early Buddhist Practice and the Importance of a Teacher

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.

If you don’t have a teacher, I don’t think you’re going to pull it off.

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.

✨ Breakthrough and the Nature of Awakening

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.

✨ The Path: Facing the Dark Side and Awakening

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

🧘 Commitment vs. Willfulness in Practice

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.

It’s a quiet inner determination that’s not the same as willfulness.

⛰️ Enduring Pain and the Value of Patience

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.

Patient endurance, that is so critical, so crucial on this whole of letting go of this thing that we are trapped by.

✨ The Awakening Experience

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, 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, 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, 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.

Awakening is the natural fruit of maturity, of finding that equanimity.

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.

Equanimity and the Collapse of the Conditioned Mind

But to make this interesting, to make this, 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,” whatever, whatever. How you engage with it mentally, emotionally, is this thing that we call samsara, 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.

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.

✨ After Awakening: The Ongoing Path

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.

After awakening, it’s only the beginning. You still have the residue of your samsara.

Paradox and the Absolute vs. Relative

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.

🕊️ Final Thoughts: Tradition, Humility, and the Future of Buddhism

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.

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.

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.