Kenneth Folk Transcript

Kenneth Folk Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Kenneth Folk. Buddha at the Gas Pump, or BatGap.com is the website, is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. If you’d like to investigate all the past interviews and/or support our work, please go to BatGap.com. Thanks. So Kenneth is a personal meditation trainer known worldwide for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. After 20 years of training in the Burmese Theravada Buddhism, Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, I hope I did that right, including three years of intensive silent retreat in monasteries in Asia and the US, Kenneth began to spread his own findings, successfully stripping away religious dogma to make meditation accessible to modern practitioners. Ken just came back from three years in Silicon Valley and has been recognized by Wired Magazine as an influential voice in Silicon Valley’s tech culture, a “power player of the mindfulness movement.” So, welcome Ken.

Kenneth: Thank you, happy to be here.

Rick: Yeah. Do people always call you Kenneth or can I call you Ken also?

Kenneth: Kenneth is my preference.

Rick: Okay, I’ll stick with Kenneth. And Kenneth and I had spoken earlier by email and agreed that we’re not going to spend a heck of a lot of time on his personal story, but we want to spend a little bit just so people get to know who he is and what he’s been through a little bit as a foundation for the meat of what we’re going to talk about, which is, well, we’ll talk about it when we talk about it. So, just give us a sort of a nutshell overview of your spiritual life, you know, where you’ve been and where it’s brought you.

Kenneth: Okay, the quickie version is that up until I was about 23, 24 years old, which was 1982, I had no interest whatsoever in anything spiritual. I thought it was irrelevant nonsense. However, in 1982, I was a professional musician in Los Angeles and I was a cocaine addict like all the other musicians I knew, and I was suicidally depressed. And one night when nobody else was around at home, when I ran out of coke, I was very depressed. And so, in order to assuage my feelings of despair, I took four hits of acid. It seemed like the right thing to do. And I began to meditate. Now, I did have some basic understanding of how to meditate because my older brother, who was also a musician and in the band at the time, had taught me a very simple concentration technique where you just close your eyes and kind of go into the darkness in the visual field and get concentrated. And I had done it a few times before. So, this night, under the influence of my LSD, I meditated and I had a spectacular experience of union with what appeared to be universal consciousness. And it seemed to me at that time to be the most real thing I had ever experienced. So much so that I thought while I was happening, everything that’s happened before was a dream. This alone is real kind of thing. And furthermore, when I came down from that experience, I was no longer interested in taking cocaine. So, this really got my attention. On the one hand, my mind was blown open. And on the other hand, I had this kind of objective validation that something extraordinary had happened because I was no longer addicted to coke. This set me on basically a lifelong journey of being interested in meditation and awakening. And let’s see where to go from there. I have had a series of kind of punctuated evolution events changing the way I see things. My tentative conclusion so far is that awakening is a very real phenomenon. That awakening is a reasonable word to use to talk about it. Enlightenment synonymous with awakening in that context. And that what the old timers of the Buddhist texts were talking about is, I believe, what we’re talking about, what I’m talking about now, when I use the word awakening.

Rick: And what is that? Because in my experience, both personally and talking to people, although there’s a general agreement on what we’re talking about, there seem to be many degrees of awakening and all kinds of possibilities and tendencies for people to jump to conclusions when they have some sort of awakening and assume that it’s a lot more ultimate than it may actually be. So would it be more accurate to say that there are many levels of awakening, and would we want to reserve the word enlightenment for something more ultimate or superlative or something? Or what, let’s get our terminology straight.

Kenneth: Yeah, well you jumped right into the meat of it. Yes, not only do I think there are many degrees of awakening, in other words, awakening is a process, furthermore there isn’t only one awakening. And it certainly is not the case that everyone who uses the word means the same thing. I can tell you what I mean by it, and I can argue the case for my interpretation being valuable. Even the idea that there would be some monolithic awakening that would happen to everyone if they meditated enough. So this is what I jokingly call the pernicious convergence theory. That almost anyone you ask who hasn’t thought very much about this will say, “Oh, of course I know what awakening enlightenment is.” It is… and they’ll tell you the name of their favorite teacher, their spiritual champion. The problem is those champions don’t all look alike. And there’s another problem, which is that I don’t know of any kind of human development that always goes to the same place. So I like to use sports analogies, so I say it’s perfectly obvious to me on the face of it that Michael Jordan, the great basketball player, was actually not a great athlete. And before you become outraged, let me tell you the reason I know it’s true is because he couldn’t possibly beat my favorite athlete, Serena Williams, at tennis. It’s absurd.

Rick: Right, and he would be pretty lousy against Lindsey Vonn in the downhill, you know?

Kenneth: Exactly. We know he wasn’t very good at baseball.

Rick: But they were all great athletes, all three of the names you just mentioned.

Kenneth: They were all great athletes. So we wouldn’t accept this convergence theory in any arena of human development other than spirituality, and we shouldn’t accept it there. What actually happens as I look around, what do I see happening? People train the mind in various ways, and they bring to it their own talent and their own individuality, and they do the training they do, and something happens. So there’s something that we can loosely call awakening, or spiritual development if you like, in the same way that we can talk about physical fitness. But the idea that there would be one way to be physically fit, and that there would be one perfect exemplar of perfect physical fitness, it doesn’t fly.

Rick: I think some people might argue that the sports metaphor doesn’t apply to awakening because we understand that sports means different relative skills that you have to train for, and you can’t be a pro in all of them. But with enlightenment or awakening, we’re supposedly talking about the ultimate reality of the universe, the ultimate reality of existence. And so people would say, “Well, however you come at that, if you actually get to it, wouldn’t you all be experiencing the same thing?” If you put Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and Krishna and all the rest of them in the same room, even though they’re from different cultures speaking different languages, wouldn’t they all actually agree that they were experiencing the same ultimate reality?

Kenneth: Yeah, if one were to posit ultimate reality, then that would be a reasonable conclusion, which is another reason I reject the entire affair. I don’t know that there’s an ultimate reality. In fact, it seems very unlikely to me that there is. So what that would be, that would be if you’re not a theist, if you were talking about ultimate reality from a, I don’t know, Upanishad sort of an idea or some New Age interpretation of Buddhism, that’s what I would call a backdoor into God. You know, fair enough, if you believe that, I don’t buy it any more than I believe that evolution is going someplace, that there’s some ultimate destination of evolution. And to make this concrete, I like to say there is a place where evolution is going. It’s the cricket, the grasshopper, the grasshopper is better because it’s prettier. Look how beautiful a grasshopper is, it’s perfectly adapted to its environment. That’s where this is going. Now, anything that is not a grasshopper just hasn’t gotten there yet. And if it evolves enough, it’s going to get to the grasshopper and stick. And again, you would say ridiculous, and you’d be right. And I would say it’s equally ridiculous to imagine that there is one spiritual right way to be. I’m not buying it. What I see is happening is that humans can develop, they can train the mind to use one lens, let’s look at the brain, in various ways. And something really interesting and I think valuable happens when we do that.

Rick: Okay, let me bounce this back to you. Regarding the ultimate reality thing, I guess one of the reasons people think that is that there are so many scriptures which talk about it in those terms, and then even these days physicists are trying to correlate their understanding with those scriptures. And physics is always looking for the ultimate theory of everything. I think that’s, isn’t that the name of that new Stephen Hawking movie that’s coming out? Something like that. So there’s this understanding in both disciplines, both traditions, that there is some ground state of the universe and both disciplines in their own respective ways are trying to arrive at that ground state. So I’ll let you respond to that before I go on with any more.

Kenneth: I’m not a physicist and I have only a passing acquaintance with the ideas. However, I don’t actually understand that physicists think there’s a ground state of the universe, even though they would certainly like to come up with a theory that would explain how things work. I may be wrong. As far as the ground state of the universe in the spiritual discussion, all I can say is I’m not a believer in that. I don’t think that there is some, well, let’s put it this way. I don’t believe that there’s some ultimate reality that can be apprehended by a human and suddenly all of the filters fall away and there’s complete union between the human and this ground state. That seems to me unlikely and fantastical. Now, not that I haven’t had experience where I was absolutely convinced that that was happening. I have had those experiences and in that moment there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. If you had asked me I would have said, “I just did it. It wasn’t even me.” I would have tortured language to explain that this thing that can’t be talked about is what I’m now talking about. And what I would say about that now, since we know that these peak experiences can be by definition self-validating, you’re absolutely convinced that this is the truth, right. And that feeling of self-validation is also an experience. So I like to think of this giant graphic equalizer of the constituents of experience. So there’s the itching slider, fader, you know. You can slide up the itch. Now that’s very itchy. And there’s the hearing in various ways. One of the faders that you can slide up is self-validation. Now when you peg self-validation to 10, whatever’s happening, you’re absolutely convinced that it is the truth of the universe. To me it’s all experience. So in fact this goes full circle to what do I think awakening is. It’s the ability to see experience as process.

Rick: The ability to see experience as process. We’ll have to have you elaborate on that a little bit more.

Kenneth: When I look at experience and see that all of these things are happening, there’s the seeing and there’s the hearing and the pressure and the coldness and the excitement, engagement, interest, nervousness. All of this is happening. All of those are experiences. There is also from time to time the sense that this is happening to me. This refers back to me as the identity of Kenneth. That’s also an experience. There are from time to time and because I’ve been so actively training in this for so long now, I can more or less on demand have the experience of what seems to be a kind of diffuse universal field of awareness. Now at first glance that might even appear to be the ultimate, in my own experience, the ultimate nature of the universe stripped down to its core. However, when I really get meticulous about, when I get honest about noticing what’s going on, I find that that too is an experience. For me what has happened is that the playing field just gets increasingly leveled. I can no longer privilege the awareness as having somehow more significance than this itch. And that’s simultaneously devastating and discouraging and incredibly liberating.

Rick: Okay. So to play devil’s advocate, and I’m sure you know all this stuff that I’m questioning you on because you’ve been around and read the scriptures and talked to teachers and so on and so forth, but scriptures and various teachers have said, “Well, this ultimate reality,” to use that term again, “is beyond the senses and it’s not something the senses realize, the self realizes itself by itself,” and so on, as the Gita says. And there are whole traditions built on the notion that this whole spirituality thing goes far beyond individual sensory input. It actually is intended to bring you to a place where you as an individual no longer exist and that the reality, the ultimate foundation of things, pure consciousness or whatever, sort of resides in its own nature. And then you eventually integrate that and are able to live that along with activity. And it’s not what I hear you say in here. And you’re being true to your own experience, which is great, and I’m not being true to mine because I’m not living this as fully as I’m describing it. But it’s sort of like, if you take a scientific theory and in order to test it and study it, it may take a long time before you actually arrive at some experimental, experiential conclusion. But you still take theories that you haven’t yet confirmed, and maybe other scientists have said, “Yeah, this is what I experienced,” and you set about to try to refute or confirm their experience. So we have a tradition going back thousands of years of “scientists of consciousness” who put forth these theories, and what I hear you saying so far is that, “Well, I don’t really buy those theories. They don’t jibe with my experience, and I think there’s actually a different thing going on in this whole world of spirituality.”

Kenneth: That’s right. And furthermore, I would say that my interpretation of the early Buddhist teachings, so Theravada Buddhist, and using the Pali texts, and my interpretation of what I learned from my Burmese and American Theravada Buddhist teachers, is not that at all. I don’t believe that’s what the early Buddhists were saying. In fact, I would say that the early Buddha’s main contribution to the literature was to debunk exactly that.

Rick: Exactly.

Kenneth: The idea that there’s some awareness ground state of the universe that is the right way to be or the right thing to understand. My understanding is that the Buddha was pretty good about avoiding making claims about the ultimate nature of reality. He was pretty good at dodging ontological statements.

Rick: In your notes to me you said something along the lines of, “Waiting for the Buddha 2,500 years late. I’m still waiting for the Buddhist revolution to arrive in the West. My interpretation of what the historical Buddha meant by Nirvana, it’s not a cosmic bliss out.” So I think what we’re now talking about is along the lines of that little note you sent me. So, if the Buddha did not mean by Nirvana or Nirvana some kind of opening up to the ultimate reality of things, becoming that, living as that, knowing that, then what did he mean?

Kenneth: My understanding of this, and I think my Burmese Buddhist teachers would agree, but I can’t be absolutely sure of that, just because of the vagaries of language. nibbana means extinction. It’s a complete lack of experience. It’s not a special experience, it’s not a better experience, it’s not some kind of non-experience. It’s actually an experience that simply is a lack of experience. So a way to set this up is to say the very first thing I learned from my teacher, who my main teacher was an American Buddhist, man named Bill Hamilton. He died in ’99. I met him in 1990 and the very first thing he told me is that according to the Buddha there were six realms of existence. There were God realms and human realms and hungry ghost realms and jealous God realms and so on. And it didn’t matter which realm of existence you were reborn into, you would be reborn into many potentially infinite numbers of realms. None of them was satisfactory. In other words, dukkha applied in every case. So even if you were born as one of the embodied gods, the devas, who have nothing but dancing and singing and pleasure feasts and wonderful sensual pleasures and sex and anything you can imagine that’s pleasant for a very long time, these beings can live for eons, that would end. And when it ended, who knows what kind of unfortunate circumstance you might be reborn into. Then there were the disembodied gods, the Brahmas, who were just a mental experience for a very long time, which was so much better than the embodied gods. I mean, it completely trumped them. There was even Great Brahma. Great Brahma would be something that would correspond, I would think, to this kind of universal awareness, which is the ground state of the universe, according to some interpretation of the Upanishads, earlier texts. Even that, if I remember this right, didn’t Great Brahma go whining and complaining to the Buddha, “This is going to end, and what should I do?” So with that in mind, what was the Buddha’s recommendation, according to my interpretation of it? He was saying you need to get off the wheel of death and rebirth. Simply don’t get reborn. Don’t get reborn as a human, a hell being, a god, Great Brahma. And what would it mean to not be reborn? Would it be some kind of special, non-experienced experience? No, that’s Great Brahma. What it would mean is the complete lack of experience at all. That’s what I think he meant by nibbana. Now this is fascinating from a couple of directions. For one thing, because of the milieu in which the Buddha came up, I don’t know that it would even have occurred to him to question rebirth. Of course people get reborn infinite amounts of time, infinite numbers of times, that’s what happens. But now, for us, growing up in our culture, we assume, we don’t assume rebirth, most of us, we assume that when you die, it’s over. So we’re starting with the thing the Buddha was saying you had to work very hard to get to, which is don’t get reborn. That I find interesting. And then the fact that so many of us consider ourselves Buddhist without even considering that most of what the Buddha was talking about we should work toward, we assume as default. However, there was a second part of the Buddha’s agenda, which is basically to make the best of a bad situation. Since the first noble truth is dukkha, there is dissatisfaction. What are you going to do about it while you’re still alive? So how to have a life well-lived within the truth of dukkha? And that is what I’m so much more interested in, because that’s relevant to every one of us, irrespective of whether we’re reborn or we go into nibbana or what nibbana is. Here we are, here we sit, and how do we be okay? How do we be good to one another now?

Rick: Yeah, okay, let me respond to some of that. Well, first of all, probably the Buddha would say, “I don’t care whether these people believe in or understand reincarnation, that’s the way it works anyway.” So they may not think it works that way, but when they die they’re going to discover that they’re going to be reborn again. Or anybody who’s steeped in that way of thinking would probably rebut your point that way. But also, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah, the end of experience, nirvana, extinction. I mean, that kind of extinction can occur in a single meditation. You’ve probably experienced it, where there is no longer any kind of sensory activity going on whatsoever. You become completely absorbed, like a tortoise withdrawing its limbs, as the Gita says. And the idea is to somehow… and the Indian tradition talks about different kinds of samadhi, some of them temporary, some of them permanent. So the idea is to make the temporary thing eventually permanent, so that that level of creation in which there is that extinction is actually lived paradoxically along with sensory experience and activity and life. So that’s the response to that bit, but then there’s a whole other bit you just brought out about enjoying life and just having it be more worth living, right? Go ahead. Respond to what I just said before we get back into that.

Kenneth: You said a couple of things. One, the Buddha presumably would say, “I don’t care whether you believe it or not, that’s how it is.” Well, my response to that would be, “So what?” I mean, I can find anybody on the street who will tell me, “I don’t care what you think, this is the way it is.”

Rick: Yeah, but we take the Buddha presumably as some sort of authority. We’re using him as a case in point of someone who’s actually…

Kenneth: Yeah, but that’s a different can of worms. I mean, I would reject that authority. I would say the Buddha is useful and interesting to the extent that he seems to have given us conceptual frameworks and techniques that are useful to us. So some of what he said, “I don’t buy it all.”

Rick: And he himself said to do that, by the way. He said, “Just because I said it, you don’t have to believe it, you shouldn’t believe it, you should go by what you can verify in your own experience.”

Kenneth: Right. There was the other thing you talked about, nibbana as extinction, and actually none of what you described is nibbana as I’m…none of that is the definition I’m using. So when I say lack of experience, I mean complete and utter lack of experience, in the same way that I went to sleep last night and for some period of time I have no idea whatsoever what happened. I don’t think I had any consciousness during that time. That’s a pretty good parallel. Or being dead, in the very simplistic way of thinking of it, it’s just over. It’s not this special kind of experience, it’s just nothing. Now if you say, “But that is, at least experientially, or in the way of no experience whatsoever, indistinguishable from …” Sorry, I’m losing the word I’m trying to come up with.

Rick: Oblivion?

Kenneth: Oblivion! That’s the word I’m trying to come up with. Oblivion, right! If there’s no experience, there’s no experience. So that’s another thing that I find interesting, provocative, that oblivion and nibbana, from the point of view of the person who’s not having the experience, are the self-same phenomenon with different spin. In the case of oblivion we would say, “Holy moly, there’s not going to be experience, how horrible that is!” Never mind the fact that we wouldn’t be there to notice how horrible it is. In the case of nibbana, as I’m describing it, there isn’t anybody there and yet we’re saying, “Ah, the bliss of nibbana, this is peace!” Never mind the fact that there isn’t anybody there to have that experience.

Rick: Well, but the Buddha supposedly attained Nirvana and yet he wasn’t oblivious. He went on for decades to teach and interact with people and so on. So how do you reconcile that?

Kenneth: It’s a two-tiered society in terms of nibbana because the Buddha didn’t really get to the good part, the parinibbana, the permanent nibbana, until after he died. So the reason, the very fact that there are two words is nibbana and then there’s parinibbana. Parinibbana is when a Buddha or an Arhat dies and isn’t reborn, so it’s just over for that person, he’s off the wheel.

Rick: Like in Hinduism they talk about samadhi and then maha-samadhi when you die.

Kenneth: That could be somewhat of a parallel, yeah. And in the case of nibbana as the Burmese Mahasi Buddhists are teaching it, in my interpretation of what they’re teaching, is that it’s a temporary phenomenon. And yes, you can train, and we do train, to be able to have these moments of cessation, fruition, nibbana, those are synonymous terms in this tradition, and during those moments, those time periods, there is no experience at all, and then that ends because you’re not dead yet, and you go on having experience. But that lack of experience is considered the best of all possible situations. This is an extremely radical idea, and really this is what I mean by waiting for the Buddha. The Buddhist revolution has not arrived yet, because we don’t understand how radical the early Buddha was talking.

Rick: And so if the Buddhist revolution were to arrive, what would we discover?

Kenneth: We might discover that Buddhism isn’t very relevant to us.

Rick: Because it emphasizes so much on lack of experience.

Kenneth: Because it emphasizes getting off the wheel. If the main thing that you’re trying to do is get off the wheel of life and death and rebirth, and as a kind of average, enculturated Westerner, we never thought that was likely in the first place, then the idea that we would work very hard for that, it’s a non-starter. And that’s kind of where I’m at with it. But then there’s this part two of the program, which is a life well-lived within dukkha.

Rick: Yeah, well you know, for what it’s worth I actually agree with this, because there was a time decades ago where I felt like I would love to get off the wheel because life was not that enjoyable. These days I sort of feel like whether there’s a wheel or not, I’m happy to stay on it as long as I’m making a contribution, and I’m kind of a servant of the Divine or whatever. But I’ve heard people say that this off-the-wheel emphasis was perhaps more characteristic of a society in which a toothache could kill you, and if you needed some kind of surgery you were going to get it by biting on a stick to bear the pain, you weren’t going to have anesthesia. It was a much tougher world to live in than we have now. And in our modern society that kind of emphasis is just not going to fly as successfully as it might have then.

Kenneth: That’s a good point. Although it’s probably, I feel obligated to mention that although I am very privileged throughout my life compared to most of the people in the world, if I were more representative of what most people in the world have to endure, I might still be on that bad leg. Since a toothache can kill me, it’s questionable whether this is such a good deal.

Rick: Yeah, I have a friend who went to Nepal to offer free dental work to people up there in Tibet maybe it was, or maybe it was just Nepal. But he was encountering people for whom a toothache meant death, or they developed these severe infections. So obviously yes there are … but that harkens back to what you were saying earlier about all the different realms or lokas in which all sorts of beings might live, and even the really sumptuous, delightful, pain-free ones, there’s still something missing in terms of what’s ultimately possible. But you know, pardon me if I’m talking too much, but there seems to be two emphases to this whole emptiness thing. One is yes, emptiness, extinction, nothingness. The other is more that, in referring to the very same reality, fullness, totality, completeness. And they actually have Sanskrit names to refer to these two different emphases. But it seems to me that with just a slight shift of orientation one can see extinction as emerging into an ocean of totality rather than some kind of oblivion.

Kenneth: Right, right, and why not? If I kind of track my own phases through the years and through the decades, I’ve been through phases where I was very, very much interested in totality, in kind of melding with the divine, or kind of becoming absorbed into awareness. However, at least for me and at least in my current phase, as I think about what was underpinning my fascination with that, my desire to meld with that awareness, it was the belief or the interpretation of that experience as ultimate reality. And actually I’ve gone through phases of it where I would get to, “Oh, I encountered the witness,” an experience that you could call dwelling as the witness. “I am the timeless witness before my mother and father were born, I am.” Now from this point of view, and there’s a state that you can get into, I’m sure you know it, it’s an interesting state. In some ways it feels like an upgrade from my default personality as Kenneth state, because from the point of view of the witness, and let me conjure it up here now, from the point of view of the witness, I have no stake in whether Kenneth lives or dies. The witness doesn’t know time, it’s very quiet. The narrative, I’m half laughing here because I’m putting myself into a witness trance, but I really am doing it. The mind is very quiet, and what a relief. I don’t have to be concerned about Kenneth. Now I can see from my disembodied point of view here, there might be some downsides to it. One thing, if I don’t care whether Kenneth lives or dies, I damn sure don’t care whether Rick lives or dies. And that’s going to be off-putting. So the witness, it’s a point of view, it’s, I’m coming out of it now. It’s a lens, and it’s possible to fetishize that lens, to fall in love with it, and consider it to be the end of my problems. And I did, I did, and I’m embarrassed now to admit that I’ve gone through these phases, but it happened this way. I completely bought in, and I was going around telling everybody, “All you gotta do is learn how to dwell as a witness, look.” And the idea was that you could extrapolate from being able to have the witness trance at all, well then I can do it more and more, and I can get to the point where I never do anything other, I never have any other experience than the witness, and that would be good. Well there’s a fundamental problem with that, if you think the Buddha was right about the First Noble Truth, and about impermanence for example, it couldn’t possibly happen that way. You can’t be reborn as the witness and stay there forever, any more than you could be reborn as Great Brahma and stay there forever. It’s gonna end, and then what? Well the way you just presented that whole witness thing, and even the tone in your voice, you know, when you got into “I am the witness,” kind of implies that it’s something one evokes willfully and that it actually is a bit of a mood, you know, that “I am in the witness state,” that it’s not totally spontaneous and natural. And I would contend that there’s another definition of the witness state, or perhaps another level of it, which is more spontaneous, more natural, in fact entirely spontaneous and natural, that you don’t think about any more than you have to think about breathing. It’s just a dimension of your reality, a dimension of your daily living experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired or even asleep, that witness consciousness could persist and be totally imperturbable under any and all circumstances. So, you know, it should be, to my understanding of what the witness really should mean, it’s as much as an automatic thing, if it has been attained, as your heart beating. And you know, you don’t live, obviously, gratefully and fortunately we don’t have to put any conscious attention on having our heart beat, it just continues on its own. And so would the witness once it’s really been established.

Kenneth: No. I mean, there is this aspect of experience that can be identified, the witnessing, it’s the fader on the giant graphic equalizer, you could say, there is this sense of witnessing and it can happen spontaneously, as you say, but much more likely, that’s kind of like saying you could spontaneously become a great tennis player, more likely is if you train very diligently you would realize your potential as a tennis player. Same thing with the witness, if you train to be able to cultivate the witnessing experience then you can cultivate it, you can have it more often. However, I was going to say you’re right, I think I heard some implication that this is not it.

Rick: I don’t think this witness we’re referring to is the ultimate realization, but it’s a stage.

Kenneth: Okay, good. So I want to kind of go to the next thing in my own development of fetishizing experience.

Rick: Let me just touch one more point on the witness and then let you go with that. And that is that, I think what I’m alluding to is that there is a level of awareness which is so silent that it precedes the mind, it lies, it’s a state before which thoughts have begun to arise, and that can be consciously open to one’s experience in a permanent and stable way, such that while fully engaged in thinking and acting and so on, simultaneously one lives in that field of silence and as that field of silence. And there’s a very real sense that I am not doing anything, I am not involved in activity, I am just sort of this silence, and on a more superficial level I also have my active phase. And again, I don’t think that’s the ultimate realization, but it’s a very real experience, a very real stage of experience.

Kenneth: Right. So if you think of this in kind of predictable phases of development, once one discovers the witness it’s not unlikely that one will fall in love with the witness and try to cultivate that to the exclusion of all other experience and fail. And then, as they’re kind of being more honest and more investigative of their own experience, including the witness, they might discover, especially if they have some guidance, an even more sublime experience of diffuse, what seems to be diffuse awareness, self-aware awareness, which also can be fetishized as the right or the desirable experience, and then there will be some attempt for some period of years or decades usually to cultivate that to the exclusion of all other experiences, or at least to have it as the continuous backdrop within which everything else is unfolding. The problem here, as I see it, is the privileging of that aspect of experience over any other. That’s what I’m interested in looking at very, very honestly, very clearly, with some element of courage, because it hurts to debunk your own stuff. But this is part of my, this has been part of my experience too, to realize that even this wonderful awareness is an experience, however sublime, however subtle, and does not, when I really look at it clearly, when I really intuit it as best I can, when I investigate it with critical thinking, I don’t find any basis to privilege it over an itch or coldness or a thought. It’s an experience.

Rick: Well, you might be comparing apples and oranges. I mean, everybody in the world has itches and coldness and thoughts and so on, but what’s really important is the context in which they have them. I mean, the state of consciousness which has been developed and which predominates in one’s life. The Buddha had itches and coldness and thoughts and hunger and all that, I imagine, as a human being, but he experienced those within a context which is far different, and one might argue preferable, to the context in which the average person who’s in a kind of a muddled, confused state would experience such things.

Kenneth: I have no doubt, very little doubt, that if there was a historical Buddha who said most of the things we think he said in the early texts, that his experience was preferable to somebody who is kind of clueless and unawake. And certainly my own experience of life has improved as I do my practice. However, that’s not the same as saying that in some ontological hierarchy that some experience is better than another or that it’s more, what is it, holier. I mean, really, we have to look at our own religious assumptions, really. If I don’t make these religious assumptions, what I come up with is that any experience has exactly the same status as any other, or at least I’m not in the position to evaluate them. My subjective experience that getting in touch with awareness as awareness is sublime and subtle and exquisite, right, does that mean it should be ontologically privileged? No, I don’t come to that conclusion at all. And for me this is a development, this is an improvement, you might say, on how I saw it before, or a more accurate way than the way I was seeing it before. Because as long as I believed that there was this way of experiencing life that I had access to sometimes and was increasing my ability to access it, but I was a slave to that. If I wasn’t having that experience, on some level I knew I was doing it wrong and I had to work harder to have the right experience even though on some level I understood that was never going to happen. That if the Buddha was right, I was never going to have this persistent experience of anything.

Rick: I imagine that if given the choice you wouldn’t trade your current state for the way you were when you were a cocaine addict. I mean, there must be something intrinsically more gratifying and enjoyable in the way you now live and experience life than there was

Rick: So, there has been a progression. And you had itches then, you have itches now, you were thirsty then, you’re thirsty now, that also. But it’s on a completely different level and you have a completely different orientation to your experiences in life than you did then, and probably than the guys who shot up the newspaper in Paris have in terms of their orientation of life. So, it doesn’t seem to me to be too judgmental to make qualitative evaluations about the different possibilities for our experience and the impact that spiritual pursuit and practice might have on improving our experience.

Kenneth: Yes, I agree. Which is why I go around trying to teach other people to develop themselves, right? Which, as you, I don’t have to explain this to you, but it’s worth mentioning, that’s not the same as saying that awareness is the truth of the universe.

Rick: No, that’s a whole other topic which we could still debate, which we could not only debate intellectually, but which we could continue to conduct experiments through our practice to confirm or refute.

Kenneth: Yes.

Rick: Yeah. And which has, you know, practical implications, because if it is, and if the nature of awareness is sat-chit-ananda, you know, it’s bliss consciousness, then I know you said here in your notes about nirvana not being some cosmic bliss-out, but traditionally enlightenment is described as a very blissful way in which to live because of the inherent nature of consciousness as bliss.

Kenneth: Well I think we should be careful of the use of the word “traditionally” because there isn’t only one tradition, and there isn’t only one way to interpret any given tradition.

Rick: Yeah, and you and I are referring to Buddhist and Hindu things mostly, but there are other traditions all around the world who might be saying completely different things. Having said that, you know, I guess, you know, you talked earlier about the grasshopper and evolution, and if I understood your point about is there a sort of an evolutionary direction to things which is governing the events unfolding in the universe, correct me if I completely misunderstood your point, but having said that, it seems that whatever different ways these different traditions around the world have interpreted or pursued spiritual experience, there’s this kind of underlying drive or emphasis to discover deeper reality, to be dissatisfied with the mundane existence as it’s ordinarily perceived, and to discover what may lie in a deeper and truer realm of life. What’s happening there, are your wires getting tangled up?

Kenneth: No, no, the wires are okay, it’s just that I have a stiff neck, so I’m trying to get some comfort here. Dukkha So yeah, there is this movement, and various people, I think the writer and spiritual practitioner and philosopher Roger Walsh has talked about this, that there is a pull or a drive built into humans to have experiences of altered states, for example, and to have, to kind of push the envelope of their own understanding of what we’re talking about as the spiritual realm in the same way that we have drives to eat and to reproduce and to breathe, for crying out loud. And that makes sense to me, I certainly feel that. We don’t know whether that’s coming from some great consciousness in the sky, or whether that’s just adaptive in terms of evolution and natural selection. People who are interested in exploring new things and are never satisfied, there’s a little something suspicious about this for me, maybe those are the ones who reproduce the most.

Rick: Or not, maybe they’re the ones who take vows of celibacy or something.

Kenneth: In which case it’s going to be a dead end, right? But the very fact that you and I are still here and we are so fascinated by this game, this endeavor, somebody must have passed on the genes.

Rick: Yeah, I’m kind of in the great intelligence in the sky camp, as you can tell. I just sort of feel like it’s built into the very core functioning of the universe, that there’s this evolutionary momentum that’s driving everything along. But I may be wrong, it’s an open experiment, I don’t want to sound dogmatic, we’re kind of playing with ideas here that are a bit beyond our reach, but they’re fascinating in that you kind of have to deal with a bit if you’re going to devote hours a day, year upon year, to spiritual practice. You have to sort of ask yourself, “Why am I doing this? Where is it leading? What is the ultimate purpose of it?”

Kenneth: Yeah, I mean it helps to have some kind of a conceptual framework that can buoy you up in the difficult times, and that conceptual framework doesn’t have to be static.

Rick: No, it can be subject to revision at all times. And if we like to think of this as a scientific procedure, a scientific process that we’re engaged in, then that’s the way it should be, because science doesn’t actually work this way, but ideally it’s supposed to work in such a way that paradigms are allowed to shift if new evidence indicates that they should.

Kenneth: Yes. There’s something else that I’d like to talk about, if you don’t mind, Rick. Mindfulness has become all the rage. So you’ve got the Wisdom 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley, and now it’s kind of around the country and maybe around the world. My experience hanging out with the tech people over the last three years in San Francisco is that there’s a lot of interest in meditation and mindfulness. So mindfulness has become the huge buzzword. However, I think about that scene in The Princess Bride where the guy says, “You use that word a lot. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” I don’t think mindfulness means what people think it means, often. The reason I say that is because sometimes if I ask somebody, “Do you meditate?” and somebody will say, “Well, no. I mean, it seems kind of cool and I’ve tried mindfulness but I couldn’t quiet my mind.” Well, as I understand mindfulness, that would be a complete misunderstanding of what mindfulness is. And in fact, my understanding of the reason we have the mindfulness word relating to meditation is because it was used at various points along the way as a translation of the Pali word sati. Sati is this aspect of a mental factor of bringing attention to an object and knowing as you’re attending to the object, knowing what it is. So there’s these elements of investigation and alertness and interest and I would add self-awareness. There’s this sense, “Here I am,” or “Here is something,” knowing looking at this object. These are all things related to mindfulness.

Rick: So let me just clarify my understanding of what you just said. So if I look at the flowers on your table behind you there, I know they’re flowers and anybody, any reasonable person would know that they’re flowers. So how does that differ from mindfulness practice?

Kenneth: Right. One way that I think about this is when I teach mindfulness, I’ll ask people to note in Mahasi style to name the thing, to name what it is the experience they’re having. If I were to look at the light and say, “Light,” that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is noticing that I’m seeing. Seeing is the experience that’s relevant here. Because we’ve all been playing I Spy With My Little Eye since we were children, it didn’t lead to awakening. So what we want to do is notice the experience is seeing. So there’s this element of self-reflection here, never mind the fact that we’ll probably find out we can’t find the self. But initially it seems this way. There is seeing, there is tightness, there is curiosity, there is hearing. Those are the kinds of experiences that can be lit up through mindfulness. Another way of talking about this, if you say, “Well, some superficial understanding of what the Buddha taught,” the Buddha taught people to meditate so they could become awake. Another way of understanding it is the Buddha debunked meditation and taught people to notice what was going on. So I call this meditation A and meditation B. Actually the Buddha taught both and advocated both as far as I understand it. So meditation A is designed to put you into a state. I meditate in order to get calm. That’s meditation A. I meditate in order to be concentrated, to enter a jhanic state of absorption. It’s all meditation A. So the metric for success is how well did I get calm, how concentrated did I get. Meditation B doesn’t care what state you’re in. It doesn’t care what’s happening. And that’s what I mean by mindfulness meditation. So from the point of view of meditation B, if I’m anxious and noticing anxiety and lighting it up through awareness and saying, “Anxiety, aversion, fear, annoyance, shame,” that is exactly as good as noticing joy, happiness, bliss, love. It simply doesn’t matter what experience I’m having if I know I’m having it in real time.

Rick: So it sounds like meditation A, as you described it, might be considered more manipulative, like you’re trying to evoke a certain state, whereas meditation B is more innocent and you’re just kind of noting whatever is being experienced in a more non-judgmental way or something? Is that correct?

Kenneth: Yes. Although I might add that judgment happens too and could also be lit up.

Rick: So you could just note that.

Kenneth: You can note that. I can note manipulation. And I can say, I can only trace the innocence of it back to the initial agenda, which is to be mindful. I can say, “Okay, I can’t go further back than that. That’s just my value system. It’s worth my trouble to be mindful and therefore I’m doing it.”

Rick: So do you advocate or teach both? I teach both. Okay. But I emphasize meditation B. It’s axiomatic in early Buddhism that meditation, what I’m calling meditation A, essentially concentration meditation, does not lead to awakening. So this is one of the first things Bill Hamilton, my teacher, told me. You can get into all these God realms, which are analogous to these meditation states. So when you’re in a very deep state of concentration, it feels like a God realm. You’re living as a God. But it ends and therefore it’s unsatisfactory. And therefore it’s unsatisfactory. And that’s not awakening. You can be reborn in serial God realms and hell realms and what have you, until the cows come home. You won’t wake up. You’ll wake up when you do meditation B. And this I think is a very important part of the Buddha’s contribution to the literature. He damn sure didn’t invent meditation. People have been meditating as long as we know about people.

Rick: So you’re saying then that meditation B, as you put it, I heard you do it on various recordings on YouTube, just kind of noting, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, you know, that actually can lead to awakening. And I’ll just bundle a couple of questions in here and let you answer. And so, would meditation B be something that you would do all day long or would it be something you just sit and do for half an hour in the morning and evening or something and then just go about your day?

Kenneth: Right. Okay, so I’ll get to the second part of that. In a second, the first thing you set it up by saying that meditation B can lead to awakening.

Rick: That’s kind of what you said, right?

Kenneth: That’s exactly what I said and I would go further. Meditation B is the only thing that will lead to awakening.

Rick: Whoa, that’s a broad statement. So for anybody, anywhere or just in terms of what you understand?

Kenneth: For anybody, anywhere by the definition I’m using. So these things go together, lighting up the objects of experience to ultimately see that all experience is experience, that is awakening, and this process of lighting it up is part and parcel of having the experience that it’s process, it’s circular.

Rick: I guess this kind of gets us back to defining awakening because I interview a lot of people who say they’ve awakened or had profound awakenings or whatever and who have never practiced meditation B. So you might say that they’re not actually as awakened as they think they are maybe, I don’t know.

Kenneth: I might, but I might not. I mean it’s possible that people do concentration meditation, which is meditation A, and because the mind is so well-trained and so powerful that they spontaneously objectify phenomena, which is another way to talk about this mindfulness, and awaken through that effort. So that’s case by case.

Rick: Yeah, and I also know people who have practiced types of meditation that are effortless, that don’t involve concentration and have resulted in awakening. So there just seems to be so many possibilities and one size does not fit all as far as I can tell.

Kenneth: Yeah, me too. And to get to the other part of what you said, which I don’t actually remember, I wanted to address that too.

Rick: About whether you would do this type of sensory noting thing 24/7 or just as a dedicated practice, you know, morning and evening or something?

Kenneth: Yeah. Generally speaking the more the merrier, but practically speaking it is not necessary to do it all day long. The reason I say that is because basically nobody ever does that and they awaken anyway. So here again, the sports analogy I think works great. If you train, you get better. You train a lot, you get better faster. If you really make it your project in life, you can realize your potential, whatever that is. Now this brings up another potentially provocative topic. Can everybody become completely awake? Well on the one hand, there probably isn’t any such thing as completely awake any more than there is completely physically fit, perfectly physically fit. And we all have different abilities and potentials and restraints on our, constraints on our time. So is everybody going to be a brilliant athlete? No, we know that’s not going to happen. In fact, most of us are going to be in the fat part of the bell curve, very average. Is that the case with awakening? Of course it’s the case with awakening. Of course it is. Some people will be spiritual superstars and realize something that other people don’t. Most people couldn’t possibly realize and most people won’t. They’ll be average and some people will be completely clueless. Now the good news is that once we bring this down to earth and stop making a bigger deal of it than it is, it’s actually super good to be an average meditator in the same way that it’s super good to have average physical fitness. Because a couch potato has below average physical fitness and won’t live as long. To me this gets back to the notion of what awakening is and whether it’s actually the cognition and the living experience of a more universal field. I like to use the analogy of electricity, which is a field, an electrical field, and various apparatus, and light bulbs. Let’s take light bulbs of various wattages. They’re all tapping into the same electrical field, but one is a 40 watt bulb, one is a So we’re wired differently, we have different aptitudes, different dharmas, different tendencies. And so to my way of thinking you could take a whole group of 100 people who are actually conscious of that universal field of awareness, they’ve awakened to that, yet they appear very different. They shine with different degrees of luminosity, both literally and figuratively. And most will be in the middle of the bell curve, as you say, pretty average looking people. Some may actually seem kind of dull, some might be real shining superstars, but whatever the case, they’re all plugged into that field in a conscious way, which the average light bulb, let’s say, has not been. That is one of the understandings of awakening that is often presented. That’s not what I mean by it at all. For me it has nothing to do with a field that can be plugged into. It has to do with a real-time…the perception, the experience that even being plugged into that field is impermanent, it’s not referring back to anybody, and it’s unsatisfactory.

Rick: Well you and I just have such different ways of defining things, but this is good because I’m definitely kind of ingrained in a certain way of thinking, and it’s refreshing to play with you about this. To me the field itself is not impermanent. The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be, and that field is accessible, and so if we access it, then we’ve tapped into something which never ceases to be, and which therefore is impermanent. Our body will be impermanent, it’ll die, but once the field is realized, then that…well who knows what happens when the body dies or when you get Alzheimer’s or whatever, but there’s a permanency to one’s experience which dawns, which hadn’t been there before, which now is, and which is a nice way to live. And that to me is awakening.

Kenneth: Yeah, so it’s good that we’re talking about this because it just makes it so clear that people are not talking about the same thing with regard to awakening. In fact, both of us could kind of flip this statement, “I think awakening is when you get beyond what you’re talking about.” So you would probably say the same thing to me.

Rick: Or maybe a both/and thing, where it’s kind of a bit of a larger reality which includes both of what we’re talking about.

Kenneth: Or maybe something that we completely don’t even have access to as humans. I like to imagine, what if I were ten times smarter and, I don’t know, ten times more talented spiritually, what could I experience? And would there be some kind of awakening that’s accessible to me that isn’t accessible now? Yeah, I guess. Now this is related to the question, to what extent is my awakening as I define it dependent on my ability to access various states, experiences, other realities? It’s a great question. Actually one of the most awake people I know by my definition, I don’t think he really has much experience of altered states. He doesn’t have much experience of tuning in to the field.

Rick: But by your definition he’s one of the most awake people.

Kenneth: By my definition he’s very awake because he can see that it wouldn’t matter, that those are just experiences and it’s not about that.

Rick: Yeah. I read an article a few days ago which I found very helpful, which may pertain to this discussion, which was written by someone who’s had very, very clear experiences of all the chakras opening. And what the article presented was that there’s such a great variety among people’s experience because the chakras don’t open sequentially and they can open in various ways, in various sequences, giving rise to all sorts of experiences and realizations and whatnot, if you buy into the whole idea that there are chakras and all, but you know, some people experience this stuff. But it helps if we think of the human physiology as the instrument through which we’re experiencing the kind of stuff that you and I are talking about, then that instrument does, not everyone, no one is using the instrument in exactly the same way, and so no one’s experience is an exact replica of anybody else’s. And that accounts, I think, for some extent to the confusion in discussions such as this.

Kenneth: Sure. Whether you use the meaning-making structure of chakras or whether you use the meaning-making structure of neuroscience …

Rick: Which aren’t mutually exclusive, by the way.

Kenneth: Okay, yeah. Either way, the idea that anyone could use it to its full potential, it seems unlikely.

Rick: Yeah.

Kenneth: And we don’t really even know what that would mean, what would full potential be. I mean, we talked about Michael Jordan before, he actually was a great athlete, and he missed about half the time. He was a basketball player who missed about half of his shots. What a crappy idea, what a crap record, you know?

Rick: Could have done 10% better, maybe some guy a couple of years from now will, you know?

Kenneth: Actually, there are people who do shoot 60%, but they’re not guards. But in any case, they still miss a whole bunch, and that’s as good as it gets for athletes. When I talk about this athlete thing, I like to talk about Hercules, to make the point, because we all like to look at a spiritual hero like Ramana Maharshi, saying, “Ah, there it is. He was the one who got it and realized 100% of his potential.” I doubt it, and I think it’s actually meaningless. So maybe people used to believe that Hercules was real, that he was almost infinitely strong so he could hold up the world when Atlas took a break, and he couldn’t be defeated in battle and so on. Nobody believes that anymore, and there’s some important implications here for us. The elite training centers around the world for athletes don’t talk about Hercules. They don’t say, “Well, we know Hercules doesn’t exist, but it’s useful to imagine perfection because then you can be better.” Nobody says that. I wonder why. I think it’s because it probably doesn’t work as well as accepting the constraints of human physiology and human psychology and gravity and whatever else we have to be constrained by. That seems to be what’s working in making people as good as they can be in athletics. I suspect that that will find a parallel there with this kind of brain development that we loosely call spirituality. If we accept that we don’t even know what perfection is, number one, and number two, that’s not what we’re after. What we’re looking for is to realize individual potential and, frankly, incremental gains for people who are already good at it.

Rick: I totally agree with you. Using my light bulb analogy, we’ve harnessed electricity since the 1800s, I guess, and still look at the newer and more interesting things we continue to do with it, in terms of computers and whatnot. You’re using the same stuff, but actually translating it into more and more interesting and amazing things as we build instruments which can convert that stuff into something. Even sticking to light, there are more and more powerful lasers which take the very same electricity and beam it more powerfully as light. So I think the same applies to spirituality. Who knows what the possibilities are? I interviewed Shinzen Young about a year ago or so, and he made an interesting point, which is that he said that in his experience, certain types of Buddhist practice made one kind of zombie-like, and maybe this is what you were referring to before about people trying to cultivate the witness. But I think one thing that would be interesting to discuss a little bit is how every kind of spiritual practice has some sort of effect. In some cases, maybe the effects aren’t entirely desirable, so I suppose one needs to approach spiritual practices of any sort with a little bit of scrutiny. In your own experience, have you encountered this kind of thing, and is meditation B, as you describe it, pretty much free of negative side effects among those you’ve taught it to? Or do some people find it a little bit dividing of the mind to be trying to work on developing the next iPhone and at the same time thinking, seeing, touching, hearing?

Kenneth: Yeah, it actually is distracting if what you’re trying to do is work on the code for the next great tech thing. It’s useful, I think, to think about attention as a finite resource. I have a certain amount of attention that I can tap, and if I’m really on my game I can get most of it going in one direction. Often it’s just scattered everywhere and it’s not doing anything. So I think of chickens. You know, if you could get a bunch of chickens all pulling in the same direction, they could do a lot of work. But chickens almost never pull in the same direction, and so they don’t get anything done. But with our minds, if we can train the chickens and harness some significant part of the finite attentional resource available to each of us, we can get some stuff done. Now what are we trying to get done? If I’m trying to, if I were a coder and I’m trying to write code for the next great tech thing, I don’t have time for mindfulness while I’m doing that. I have to completely ignore mindfulness and become absorbed in my code. But isn’t that mindfulness? I mean, wouldn’t you be, like, you’re focused like a laser beam on your code, and there are many great scientists and inventors and so on who had that capacity to focus with such exclusivity, such intensity, that they really got something done. They weren’t sort of like scattered all over the place. That to me is like a really symptomatic of a high degree of mindfulness. Or again, maybe we’re defining mindfulness differently. Yes, so that’s in the definition. So for me, that is not at all mindfulness, that’s concentration. And this is, it’s useful to make the point, what do I mean by concentration and mindfulness? Both of which, by the way, are listed in the list of seven factors of enlightenment. So why would concentration and mindfulness be listed? Well, if you think about a cat on the front lawn by a gopher hole, the cat is looking at the gopher hole, waiting for the gopher to stick his head out. Its concentration is superb. The cat can sit there for 10 minutes, not deviating from looking at the hole.

Rick: Yeah, there was a Sufi mystic who got enlightened doing that actually, watching a cat watch a mouse hole.

Kenneth: Okay. Now if you imagine that you’re the cat, you can’t imagine that the cat has a lot of self-awareness. So the cat isn’t sitting there going, “Oh, look at me watching the mouse hole.” The cat is just completely absorbed in the situation. Mindfulness is when the cat goes, “I’m looking at a mouse hole.” That’s mindfulness. So it takes that leap of recursive self-awareness, self-consciousness, that’s mindfulness. And by the way, this question …

Rick: So it’s sort of an introspection or a self-reflection or something that doesn’t happen with ordinary experience.

Kenneth: Yes, I think that’s an essential part of mindfulness. There is a way to illustrate this with a little diagram, which I’ll draw very quickly. If you imagine that on the horizontal axis, the x-axis, you’ve got concentration, gets stronger as it goes to the right. You got that?

Rick: I got it. That’s good.

Kenneth: Okay. If you imagine that on the vertical axis, you’ve got mindfulness going stronger as it goes up. Okay. So you’re neither concentrated nor mindful. That’s our usual experience throughout the day. Now let’s say you want to do pure concentration practice and enter the jhanas, these states of absorption. You’re getting very concentrated, very absorbed, but you don’t have to know that you’re doing it. You just have to be absorbed with the object. You’re the cat on the lawn, completely absorbed in the gopher hole. Now at any point along here, whether you’re very concentrated or whether you’re not, you can investigate the situation through mindfulness. You can notice, I’m seeing. So let’s say I’m not very concentrated, so I’m up here in the upper left and I’m seeing just like right now, seeing, itching, thinking, feeling, curiosity, uncertainty. That’s mindfulness, but it’s not very concentrated. Or I can be very concentrated in my jhanic state of absorption and bring awareness to that and I can say, “Concentration, enjoyment, pleasure,” whatever it is, all the jhanic factors can be lit up through mindfulness. At either place in the upper, the top two quadrants here, mindfulness is in play and this will lead to awakeness, this kind of practice. Down here, mindfulness is not in play and will not lead to awakeness no matter how concentrated you get. So when we talk about, when somebody says, “Is that concentration meditation or is it mindfulness?” Just about any object could be approached using either concentration or mindfulness or a combination.

Rick: Interesting. There’s a whole discussion we could get into, which I don’t know if we want to, about whether concentration should be employed as an actual method or whether it’s kind of more of a symptom of the mind being absorbed in something it enjoys. Like if you’re watching a really good movie, you’re just totally zoomed into it, you don’t have to make an effort. If you’re watching something really boring, you feel like checking your email or making a phone call or something. And so in terms of meditation practices, there might be methods which provided such sort of sumptuous experience to the mind that it naturally absorbed in and became concentrated without actually applying concentration. Concentration became the outcome rather than the method. And I don’t know, we could probably talk about that for an hour, but it’s just a thought to throw in there.

Kenneth: Well, it’s a good one. It’s a good thought and it brings up the question, the practical question of how best to teach meditation. If we’re teaching meditation A, concentration, wouldn’t it be better if we had an object that’s so engaging that we effortlessly become concentrated in it? Yeah, it would. Which there’s a lot of potential for neurofeedback and any kind of biofeedback that’s effective.

Rick: I was a TM teacher for 25 years and I’m definitely not here to plug TM, but that was the principle upon which that was based, which is the principle that the mind has a natural tendency to want to experience greater happiness and that if it’s given the opportunity it’ll just do that naturally without having to coerce it in any way. And that finer levels of awareness are intrinsically more enjoyable, and so if you have the opportunity to go in that direction you’ll just go. But anyway, I don’t want to get into a TM lecture, but that was the basis of it. What were these seven factors of enlightenment you just mentioned? Is that something you came up with?

Kenneth: No, that’s a Buddhist list and I could probably come up with what they are if I try, but probably we should encourage our audience to Google that.

Rick: Check it out, yeah. So in the notes that you sent me there’s one thing we haven’t covered yet, which is, I’ll just read what you wrote, “Objectification. Why does Vipassana meditation/mindfulness meditation lead to awakening?” And then the answer, “Because it makes subject into object.” So what did you mean by that?

Kenneth: What I meant by that is that, and by the way I’m riffing off of not only Buddhism but also a psychologist named Robert Keegan, is a guy at Harvard who has some really interesting ideas in psychology, very similar to some Buddhist ideas. He talks about this iterative process of making the subject into object. So whoever I think I am, if I light that up with awareness, that’s this iterative process of waking up psychologically. And I think the exact same thing is happening when we meditate. There are always filters operating that we’re not seeing as filters. So metaphorically at first, let’s imagine that I have this blue plastic translucent filter over my face. It’s like those filters are called gels that you put over a light in a theater to change the colors. You put a blue gel or a red gel over the light, it makes that color on the stage. Imagine there’s this blue plastic gel strapped to my face. Well everywhere I look, it looks blue, but I don’t know that I’m looking through a gel, so I just assume that it is blue. That’s what I see. And in fact, I’m identified as blue because I am…the filter that isn’t being seen is always acting as subject. This is my assumption here, hypothesis. Now if you say to me, “Kenneth, did you know there’s a blue plastic gel strapped to your face?” And I say, “No, I didn’t know that.” And then I realize, “Oh yeah, there is a blue plastic gel strapped to my face and that’s why it looks blue. Duh.” Now it doesn’t mean that the gel disappears immediately, if at all, but it does mean that something has changed now. I’m no longer experiencing the blue filtering as subject. That isn’t me. That’s something I can look at. I’ve made it into an object. So this is what I mean by objectification, making something into object. And in this important case, making something that was functioning as subject into an object. Every time I do this, I wake up a little bit. If I am feeling anxious and I notice anxiety, that’s a filter that a moment ago I was identified as, embedded in, as Ken Wilber would say. And suddenly I’m no longer embedded, no longer identified. Anxiety, anxiety, and the sensations of anxiety, these are now objects that can be worked on, manipulated by the mind. And I’m not that. I am not what I’m looking at, because intuitively I always seem to be the one who’s looking. I can’t be what’s being looked at. If there’s an I, and that’s a question, but if there’s an I, I have to be the one who’s looking and never what’s looked at. If I do this enough, what I find is that everything in my experience, everything in experience, including the sense that I am the one, including the sense of I, is an experience and can be objectified, it can be lit up, and this is what awakening is all about for me. There are, you can imagine a threshold below which there are some things we simply cannot see and will never see. I’ll never be able to see the process by which my body, my eyes, and my brain somehow are able to convert photons into images that I can understand. I’m not going to be able to see that, fair enough. But there’s this, what I call a developmental window for awakening, which is between what I’ll never see and what I don’t see yet. There’s this gap, and everything that exists in this gap is a developmental window for awakening. Everything I light up in there gets me more awake.

Rick: Yeah, I think I followed that. So it kind of reminded me of that phrase in the Bible of seeing through a glass darkly, you know, and then eventually seeing clearly when, you know, throw in a little William Blake, “When the windows of perception are cleaned.”

Kenneth: Sweet. And just to riff off of that, in this case it means seeing the window. It means noticing, “Oh, I’m looking through a window. I’m looking through a dirty window, I’m looking through a clean window, but there’s the window.” When that becomes part of the field of objects, that’s a moment of awakeness.

Rick: Yeah. Of course, I don’t know if we want to take it this far, but perceptual scientists and neurologists and so on would tell us that what’s … well, some would say there is no world out there. It’s all just sort of within consciousness. But if we acknowledge that there is a world out there, scientists would say that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to what we perceive, that our senses are just sort of these, and our brain are just these sort of input mechanisms and translation mechanisms that make some kind of sense out of something that is completely unlike what we interpret it to be. And you can take examples of other species and how they would interpret the same scene, a bat or a moth or a cat or something. They’re interpreting the very same objective world in a completely different way. So I mean, is this at all germane to what you were saying about …

Kenneth: Absolutely. This is a huge part of it. So there’s a word for that, as you know, “umwelt.” The umwelt is the slice of reality that we can see or the way we’re interpreting the part of reality we can see. So we know we have a different umwelt from a bat because the bat can hear things we can’t hear and we can see things the bat can’t see. We have a different umwelt from a rattlesnake, a pit viper, because a rattlesnake can see into the infrared and we cannot.

Rick: It’s said that birds can actually see magnetic fields and that’s how they migrate.

Kenneth: Perfect, right. So all of this is happening all the time. These magnetic fields are bombarding us just as much as they are the birds, but we have no experience of that. And so our umwelt is this little slice that we can see. This is very much related to something you and I talked about earlier, that I’m skeptical that somehow as a human we would suddenly through our meditation get this unfiltered experience of anything. So that we would get this unfiltered experience of reality with a capital R if indeed there were such a thing, which I also doubt. I don’t think so. We have our umwelt, the part of reality, what we can see in the sense we make of it. As humans, aliens would have a completely different umwelt presumably and would have a different experience of the ultimate, even assuming there was an ultimate.

Rick: All right, let’s play with this a little bit more. If you have the time, I’ve got the beer. Remember that commercial?

Kenneth: Yeah, I think I remember the melody to the jingle.

Rick: Let’s say for a moment that consciousness is the ultimate reality, that there’s this sort of ground state of the universe that’s pure consciousness, and that perhaps it’s equivalent to the unified field that physics talks about, and there are physicists who claim that it is, but who knows. But let’s say there is such a field. Now, cognizing that field, recognizing it, realizing it as one’s true nature and kind of living experientially from that field, would not necessarily equate with, it wouldn’t mean that we’re going to take on completely different ways of perceiving as a human being, because we’re a human being. A bat is a bat, a cat is a cat. And it even plays into what we were talking about earlier, about a hundred enlightened people all actually experiencing somewhat differently and behaving differently in terms of their relative experience of the world, based upon their culture, their learning, their intellectual, perceptual capacities, and so all that’s going to be different. But that is not to say that there could not yet be a common experience of the essential field of pure consciousness, and that that ultimately would define awakening or enlightenment, and that you would not want, it wouldn’t make sense to use any of these relative criteria about perception and behavior and so on, as any sort of defining method.

Kenneth: Sure, okay, yeah, I can see how you could come up with an internally consistent schema that way. If I were to complain about it, it would just be that it seems kind of arbitrary to me. I mean, it has about as much validity to me as saying, “The Christian God is the ground.” And why do I think that? Well, it’s because I think that. Now it’s not that one can’t have these sublime experiences. One really can. And if I have been guilty of misrepresenting myself today, it’s probably been that I haven’t admitted to you what an experience junkie I’ve been through for many years.

Rick: You’ve alluded to it, starting with the cocaine.

Kenneth: Right, right. And finding that I was able to create these, I was able to access or find, stumble upon, sometimes stabilize experiences through meditation that I valued as much as the cocaine or LSD experiences, I’m really good at it. My friend Daniel Ingram once said to a friend of mine, “Kenneth is the best I’ve ever seen at entering concentrated states.” Yeah, and so that’s where I’m coming from. And I really, really wanted some of these states, not just the classic jhanas from Buddhism, but also states of open awareness and something that I would very much have described similar to the way you did, tapping into this field of reality with a capital R, as I might say now, or pure awareness or pure conscious awareness. It’s not actually the same as … it doesn’t feel the same as the classic jhanas, but nonetheless, these are all things that I’ve spent a great deal of time cultivating and exploring and accessing, and my conclusion is that none of them get to be privileged as “the right state.”

Rick: Yeah, well, but again, states implies different … to use the sun analogy, sun shining on water, or sun shining on different reflectors, this reflector, that reflector, this one’s giving a red reflection, this one’s giving a green reflection. The sun is not those reflections, you know? Only if there were a perfect reflector would the reflection approximate or resemble the light of the sun, so the sun is what it is, irrespective of how it’s reflected or not reflected. And, kind of what I hear you saying is that, “Well, I haven’t realized myself as the sun, and therefore I kind of doubt that anybody has or could, and that there is no such litmus test or benchmark or ground state or whatever, and therefore I’m resorting to all these various other kinds of practices and so on.” I mean, I don’t mean to sound insulting, but it almost seems like a little bit of a, you know, “I tried, I never discovered such a thing, so I really wonder whether there is such a thing, and I’m taking a different route,” you know?

Kenneth: Yeah, no, I’m glad you said that, because that’s the obvious answer. Well, gosh, Kenneth, you’re a sour graper.

Rick: I was going to use that phrase, but I refrained from it.

Kenneth: You haven’t been able to do it yourself, and therefore, you know, you don’t know what it is. I don’t think that’s the case. That’s really why I brought up the bragging about, I think that I’ve probably gone further with this than most people, and my conclusion is such as it is. I once had a guy in retreat during a discussion say, he was talking about an experience of what he would consider to be the ultimate union with consciousness, say, and he said, “And you know, if you don’t think it’s the ultimate thing, you simply haven’t had it.” Now what that reminded me of …

Rick: Was he saying he had had it?

Kenneth: That he had had it, yeah.

Rick: Okay.

Kenneth: So what that reminded me of was … I’m mentally checking FCC regulations here so I can tell the story. The first time I discovered sex by myself, I thought, my immediate impression was, “Holy moly, this is the greatest thing ever. I’ve discovered this kind of natural high that doesn’t cost anything, and you don’t even need anybody else for it. Holy moly, nobody else knows about this.” Because if they did, they wouldn’t talk about anything else.

Rick: Sounds like your typical 13-year-old, 12-year-old boy.

Kenneth: Yes. And furthermore, this is what I think when somebody says, “If you don’t think that conscious awareness is the ultimate because you haven’t experienced it,” it’s much more analogous to, “If you’ve experienced it enough, you start to see the joke, you get the joke. Oh, it wasn’t that people hadn’t had sex, it’s that they totally have integrated that into their lives and it’s frankly not that big a deal to them anymore.”

Rick: Which can be said of consciousness, you know? But which is not to say that an unbounded field of consciousness doesn’t exist, but it’s not like you’re going to be shouting it from the rooftops if it’s been integrated in your lives. Because we’re very integrative beings, aren’t we? We get used to stuff and that makes life kind of livable. We get used to suffering, we get used to bliss, but whatever it is, we kind of integrate it and take it in stride and don’t make a big fuss about it after a while. But still, I mean, that doesn’t … Larry’s not going to like that shout, audio guy. But still, that doesn’t refute the possibility of consciousness being the ultimate reality, it just means that it can be lived and integrated in such a way that you kind of take it for granted.

Kenneth: Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t say anything about it one way or the other, whether it’s the ultimate reality. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: And, okay, we’ve kind of come full circle. I mean, there’s a lot, you could take any one point in this discussion and turn it into a whole discussion in itself, you know, fleshing it out and elaborating. And people have been doing that for thousands of years, I mean, there are whole books written about each little point that we’ve discussed here. But it does seem that the modern spiritual scene is very much in a state of evolution and self-scrutiny. Even in the five years since I’ve been doing this show, I’ve seen a lot of change and maturity, I think, in the way people approach this stuff. And it also seems to be building momentum in terms of something that we as a society are interested in. Like you were saying, mindfulness is all the rage out in Silicon Valley. Well, you know, things usually start in California and then they spread west or east. So there’s something afoot. What the personal and social implications of it will be five, ten, twenty years down the line, I’m not entirely sure, but I feel like something good is happening.

Kenneth: Yeah, I do too. I’m glad that people are learning the mindfulness word and people will, like the physical fitness revolution, people will embrace it to whatever extent they will. Probably the overall level…

Rick: So you’ll be the Jane Fonda of mindfulness, huh?

Kenneth: Well, I’ve thought about this. What we really need is a Jack LaLanne of mindfulness. It is not me, that’s what I’m clear about. But I think there may be that, whether it’s a human or whether it’s an app, I don’t know. And we’ll see. But I think the general level of contemplative fitness rises in a way similar to the way the general level of physical fitness rose in the 70s and 80s and now. Awesome. That’s great. Some people will really want to take it far. Some people like you and I will become obsessed with it and take it as far as we can. Most people won’t. We’re looking at the bell curve again. Most people will… Their lives will get a little bit better, hopefully, through their practice. I’m happy.

Rick: But it might just be what the doctor ordered in terms of creating the balance that’s needed in the world to offset these rather dire problems that we’ve cooked up for ourselves, you know?

Kenneth: That would be lovely.

Rick: Yeah. We could go into that. If a lot of the problems we see are due to, as Jesus said on the cross, “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” If a lot of the things that we see happening in the world are due to short-sightedness, lack of self-awareness, greed, small-mindedness, then the kind of thing you and I are talking about would be just the antidote and would affect change at a fundamental enough level to actually ripple out into a significant change on the more manifest levels.

Kenneth: That was really my hope in going to San Francisco and hoping to teach some of the technology plutocrats how to meditate. And hopefully some of them would want to take it as far as they could and awaken. I hope that would change the world because those people are really influential. I don’t really see that happening. In other words, it’s not happening yet. The percentage of plutocrats who would want to get awakened, who would become obsessed with this practice, is about the same I would think as it is in the general population. It’s really, really low. So the truth is, I didn’t find any. I don’t think I kind of made the difference for anybody. And so it’s a numbers game. I’m just going there. There’s a handful of a few hundred people who are really, really influential in Silicon Valley and I got to talk with some of them and introduce them to some of my ideas. Did any of them really take this on in the way that I have? No, of course not. The likelihood of it is really low. So the people I work with now are people who found me. I’m at the point now where I don’t even like to do any kind of a cold teaching. For example, I went to Wikimedia Foundation and taught a series of sessions there to the people who work there. If people were already really interested in meditation then they still were after I left, but I don’t think I converted anybody. I think that’s the reality of how this works.

Rick: Yeah. I think this whole thing, if we are looking at a social transformation, I think it’s going to be much more grassroots and not so top-down. I mean, it’s not like the plutocrats are going to bring it to us. It’s more organic, more fundamental, more grassroots. You know that saying, “The next Buddha is the Sangha,” and I think it is spreading in that way, in a real grassroots level. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” I think that a person doesn’t have to be influential in a political or economic way to be influential. All kinds of analogies we could bring in here, the hundredth monkey principle and all that stuff. But I think that the proliferation of awakening that’s happening in the world on a really grassroots level among, for the most part, totally unknown people is very potent and is really going to percolate up into some kind of significant shift.

Kenneth: I hope so. I’m about half hopeful and half skeptical.

Rick: Yeah, me too, more hopeful than skeptical in my case, I’d have to say. Maybe I’m just naive and overly optimistic, but I really think, as Dylan said, “something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?” There’s something afoot. Well, great, I should let you go. It looks like you’re having trouble with your poor neck.

Kenneth: Yeah, yeah, dukkha, these bodies are not reliable.

Rick: Yeah, you’re probably on the rack in your past life or something. Still working out those kleshas So let me make some concluding remarks. I’ve been talking to Kenneth Falk, and I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Kenneth. You’re a great guy to talk to, and I hope I haven’t talked too much. Sometimes people say I do, but the chemistry in each conversation is different, and somehow in this one we just really started batting the tennis ball back and forth. I’ll be linking to Kenneth’s website from his page on www.batgap.com, as I always do. Have you written any books that you’ve published, Kenneth?

Kenneth: There’s an unfinished draft of my unfinished book that I linked to from my homepage, so people can look at it. There’s a lot there, it’s just not done yet.

Rick: Okay. I tried to get to something you’d recommended to me, and it was like I got this page not found there, so we’ll talk about that. I’ll make sure we link to the right place.

Kenneth: I can’t help my web development skills. In any case, I’ll link to Kenneth, and there’s ways through his website of getting in touch with him if you’d like to be in touch and perhaps participate in some of what he’s offering. This is an ongoing series, as most people watching this probably realize, and if you would like to check out previous ones, there’s a past interviews menu on www.batgap.com, and the interviews are categorized in about four or five different ways. There’s an upcoming interviews menu, you can see who’s scheduled. There is a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. You get about one email a week. There’s a donate button, which I depend upon people clicking from time to time if they appreciate this show, in order to enable me to spend as much time as I do on it. Me and my wife and I, we spend maybe 40, 50 hours a week. What else? I don’t know. Check the site out, you’ll see what else may be there. Really appreciate you listening or watching. Next week we’ll be with Stephen Bodian. You probably know Stephen, don’t you, Kenneth?

Kenneth: I know of him, but I don’t know him.

Rick: Yeah, he looks like an interesting guy. We have interviews scheduled all the way into April now, and we’ll just keep doing this. I hope to be doing this for many years to come. So thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week.