Wake Up To Your Life Ken McLeod

Ken Mcleod, Wake Up to Your life.

This book has taken me over two months to finish, and I think I have only understood 5% of it. It is very dense, with a lot of information and practise guidelines, along with examples from the life stories of Mulla Nasrudin. But it is different from any other Buddhist book that I have read, in that it focuses on how patterns get created and methods to dismantle them from our lives. He does not use a lot of Buddhist terminology but uses more psychological terms but within a Buddhist framework to wake up to our naked, open awareness.

He defines Buddhism as a set of methods through which we wake up to what we are and stop the cycle that generates and reinforces suffering. He gives central importance to attention. We are what we experience. Presence is knowing, directly in the moment, that we are what we experience. Attention is the strong, stable and volitional attention cultivated in such disciplines as meditation. Active attention is composed of mindfulness and awareness.

Attention is used to dismantle the wall that separates us from what we are. This wall consists of conditioned patterns of perception, emotional reactions and behaviors. The wall has many components: conventional notions of success and failure, that belief that I am a separate and independent entity, reactive emotional patterns, passivity, an inability to open to others, and misperceptions about the nature of being.

To be present in life we have to open to experiences and not try to reactively and automatically control what we experience. We have to let go of the illusion of control, and that can be done through meditation.

Return to what is already there and rest.

He works from a psychological framework when he talks about dealing with reactive emotions.

Reaction is always based on past experience. Elements of any present situation resonate with the past and trigger habituated patterns that formed and developed on the basis of past experience. When patterns are triggered, attention goes out the window.

Pattern based living is described in three forms of suffering.
1. Pain
2. Change
3. Existence

The five elemental reactions arise as attempts to control what is being experienced through rigidity, evasiveness, devouring, busyness and confusion.

Patterns develop through crystallization, habituation, webbing and layering.

After explaining how patterns get formed, he moves on to how to dismantle reactive emotions, through spiritual work.

He defines spiritual work as essentially destructive in nature, since it attempts to return to our original mind which is clear, empty awareness. The practise has three components: cultivating attention and coming into presence, a way of generating higher levels of energy to power attention, and a set of methods that bring attention to habituated patterns. Formal meditation methods are only half the practise, the rest is how you cultivate attention in your daily life. He also emphasizes the need for a teacher, who can help spot patterns that are hard to spot oneself.

The four immeasurable are beyond pattern formations and serves as a bridge to the practise of insight. This helps us see into the nature of experience and penetrate the three deepest habituated patterns: subject object perception, taking subjective experiences as reality, and the fear that makes us turn away from open, direct awareness.

The four immeasurables are
1. Equanimity
2. Loving kindness
3. Compassion
4. Joy

Mind training
1. Tonglen or taking and sending- We exchange our happiness for other people’s suffering. We reverse the habituated way we relate to the world, and put others first and experience the friction generated inside as a result.

2. Cho or cutting. This exercise is to cut through confusion to bring out presence directly, in pain or pleasure, suffering or happiness. It is a way to give up the obsession we have with our lives and identification with our body.
When we die to the belief that we these reactions and obsessions, we are able to cut through the pattern of self.

Once we gain insight and dismantle illusions we see experiences as just arising. The three understandings that make up the nature of unborn awareness are emptiness (nothing there), clarity (what makes awareness possible), and unceasing arising (experience comes and goes on its own).

The book for the first four hundred pages focuses on cracking the egg of ignorance or walking up to our original nature. As Ken Mcleod summarizes it here.

All through this book you have been peeling away layers. With the meditations on death and impermanence, you peeled away attachment to conventional success and saw the rigid structures of patterns and conditioning. Using the mechanisms of the five dakinins and the six realms, you peeled away reactive emotional patterns. The four immeasurables exposed and released raw, undischarged emotional cores. Insight cut through the fabric of dualistic perception and ignorance to reveal the crystal of original mind.

Now you know what presence is: knowing the whole and knowing that what you are is not separate from the whole.

To place attention in the original mind, Gampopa instructs us to

Don’t invite the future.
Don’t pursue the past.
Let go of the present.
Relax right now.

The final chapter has an interesting exercise that we can do for ourselves, to identify and study our own patterns.

1. Observe what you don’t notice, what you don’t question, and what you don’t laugh about. What you don’t notice tells you where patterns keep you in ignorance. What you don’t question tells you what patterns assume. What you don’t laugh about tells you where your identity is invested.

2. Study your life history, start with five year intervals. And then study your parents and children and see how patterns are transmitted.

3. Look at the five circles of your life. The first is where you live, the second is your immediate support system, the third circle is how you earn your living, the fourth circle consists of your social relationships, your parents and relatives, and the fifth circle is the social and cultural realms-where you fit into the socio-economic system.

4. Practise alternation - this method studies patterns and cuts the web of existence.

Obstacles and resistance are signs that your practise is effective, your are hitting something, possibly a pattern and that they are hitting back. Keep persisting and see obstacles as useful. A powerful obstacle shreds your patterns of achievement, identity and superiority.

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