First webchat meeting between Kenneth Folk and IntegralDoc, 7FEB2010

Kenneth: Hi Kyle.

Kyle: Hi Kenneth...do you like Ken or Kenneth?

Kenneth: Thanks for asking. I prefer Kenneth. How are you this fine day?

Kyle: Excellent. How about yourself?

Kenneth: Happy and healthy, but cold. It's about 18 degrees in New York including wind chill.

Kyle: Yikes. I can barely imagine, I've been a California boy my whole life.

Kenneth: Where in CA?

Kyle: Living in Sacramento currently, but have lived up and down the state. LA till 12 then Bay Area, Santa Barbara for college then back to Bay Area.

Kenneth: Nice. My sister lives in San Louis Obispo County, and her daughter, my niece, is at Santa Barbara City College.

Kyle: Very nice. I had a lot of friends who went to SBCC. Very good school, especially if she's looking to transfer into UCSB.

Kenneth: I hope she does. Right now she's interested in competitive cheerleading and apparently SBCC has a great coach.

Kyle: Cool.

Kenneth: Did you go to UCSB?

Kyle: Yeah UCSB. Studied Eastern Religion. Loved it. UCSB is where I met Alan Wallace and started getting introduced to the philosophy and meditation techniques.

Kenneth: Ha! Eastern religion! No wonder you got into meditation. I like Wallace's idea of a university for the study of the mind from the inside out, complete with funding and fellowships.

Kyle: Are you familiar with Alan at all?

Kenneth: Not much, although I heard his Buddhist Geeks interview and I know that he is a hardcore samatha/jhana teacher.

Kyle: Yeah. He was a little too revolutionary with some of his ideas for the university but he's a pretty amazing academic and his instruction is very good.

Kenneth: Which ideas got him into trouble with the powers that be?

Kyle: Wanting to incorporate first-person experiential "research" into the study of religion. They weren't having it. So when it came time to fill the endowed chair they went a completely different direction and got a top-notch Buddhist scholar for the position.

Kenneth: Ah, yes, it's heresy to include reality in academia. I'm surprised Wallace lasted as long as he did! Tell me about you and what's up right now in your practice.

Kyle: Absolutely. I'll jump right to practice and you can ask any specific questions you might have about me as we go.

Kenneth: Perfect.

Kyle: So like I said in the message I sent you I recently got done with a 10-day Goenka retreat. Found it to be very beneficial and more than anything I was hoping it would be a catalyst for me to implement a more rigorous daily practice into my life. So far so good.

Kenneth: I love this part from the message you sent me: "I think I spent most of my time in 3 characteristics territory observing intense sensations in the right side of my neck, shoulder, and arm move around, pop, burn, twitch, twist, etc."

Kyle: Right so while in retreat I was having very intense experiences in my upper right quadrant, neck, arm....felt at times like someone had hung two huge lead balls on my scapula and was trying to pull them both out of my back...lots of twisting, posture concerns, burning.

Kenneth: Nice. Lots of kundalini activity.

Kyle: Correct. That's what I would assume. A few times the energy felt as though some sort of final "resolution" was going to occur. One of these times I can vividly remember being extremely scared of where it was going as the energy felt as though it was ready to shoot right through the back of my neck out of my head. Became really short of breath and tried to just watch with as much equanimity as possible.

Kenneth: Right. Not unusual to flesh out the lower nanas while on retreat even if you've already had the A&P. Did you read The Enlightenment of Gopi Krishna?

Kyle: No I have not. Not even heard of it actually.

Kenneth: You'd love it, I reckon. It's about a guy who got into all kinds of difficult kundalini experiences while meditating without much guidance.

Kyle: Excellent this sounds very good.

Kyle: I can close my eyes and tune into the energy in my neck, shoulder anytime and watch it dance around.

Kenneth: This is what I like to hear.

Kyle: It's really starting to bore the sh*t out of me though. “OK, I see you doing your thing there...great, thanks, for coming/playing, now what?”

Kenneth: Boredom is your friend. It means you're about to move on. As long as the "wow" factor persists, it's easy to hang around and indulge some particular phenomenon. Can you say something about how the energy appears/feels to you? Colors, shapes, flows of energy, chakras, meridians, that sort of thing?

Kyle: At this point it isn't causing me the enormous pain/discomfort it was causing me while on retreat..it's just sort of there and I'm watching it as closely as possible. Appears/feels? The boredom is there, curiosity/intrigue is there, fear, anxiety. No colors, shapes that I've been aware of yet. The energy is flowing in little disturbed eddies.

Kenneth: How do you know the energy is there? Is it quasi-tactile?

Kyle: I know the energy is there because I can sense it with touch...feel it. So yeah quasi-tactile would be a good way to describe it.

Kenneth: OK, that makes sense. One way that I work with this kind of energy is by moving the attention left and right across a center point, almost like one of those old radar scanners, so that the flows and nexuses of energy show up when the beam crosses them.

Kyle: Left/right pushing/moving energy upwards?

Kenneth: You don't want to push or manipulate the energy in any way, but rather move the focus of attention much as you would wave a flashlight beam around in the dark.

Kyle: OK, gotcha. Makes perfect sense.

Kenneth: Yes, I thought you'd relate to that.

Kyle: So one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you was that I feel like the Goenka practice has opened some doors for me but also leaves me out in the cold somewhat without further instruction on where to go from here.

Kenneth: Exactly. Goenka practice is stealth kundalini yoga and doesn't give you the conceptual framework of chakras or nadis, etc.

Kyle: OK. I feel fortunate that I do have some little background/knowledge in this stuff but not nearly enough to feel confident to move forward on my own with it and abandon instructions I was giving from retreat that I have found to be useful.

Kenneth: OK. The most important thing to know is that you will only get into trouble if you seek to manipulate your experience. This is the gift of the Buddhist approach. As long as you observe passively, you can observe whatever is there, including flows of energy. This has the effect of further developing this naturally occurring energy in the gentlest way possible. It doesn't mean that you won't have absolutely horrible experiences, of course, but since it's natural and organic, it's possible to deal with it and still have a normal daily life.

Kyle: OK. This is good advice. So rather than forcing energy to move this way or that, and go through these meridians and chakras, just keep watching and it will do its thing as it is supposed to do and just watching is what "I" need to do?

Kenneth: Yes, please! If you take one thing away from this session, I hope it will be this admonition to avoid manipulating your experience. By watching, you are dis-embedding from these phenomena. Using the strata of mind model, the problem is that we think we are our experience. But anything "I" can take as object (objectify) is not "I" by definition. "I" must be the one who is looking. So by objectifying, I am pulling back, pulling myself up to the next stratum of mind on the tree. Of course, I am now identifying with (I'm embedded in) the new stratum of mind, which I must objectify in turn in order to break the identification with it.

Kyle: ...and eventually you have objectified everything and are left with.......
Right. I understand. Getting distance and dis-identifying myself from it. Excellent.

Kenneth: You've got it! When you have objectified everything, you have reached developmental enlightenment. After that, there are two movements. The first is to stabilize in the new world, which includes but is not limited to continuing to cultivate access to the newly available strata of mind. The second movement is to raise your center of gravity (COG in integral/Wilber-speak) so that your default reaction is to come from higher strata of mind rather than lower.

Kyle: I'm a big Wilber dork so I'm with you on the “include and transcend” idea of growth/development.

Kenneth: Fantastic. So, first we access and penetrate a finite number of strata of mind. 2nd, we stabilize. 3rd, we condition ourselves to become spiritual, emotional, and social grownups by "living" our enlightenment. "Back into the marketplace with help-bestowing hands."

Kyle: Agreed, and like Daniel says so nicely in his book back to morality training.

Kenneth: Yes, restraint is necessary all along the way, but most importantly, we want to spontaneously come from a place where the appropriate behavior is likely to arise. For example, my biology causes me to feel threatened when people disagree with me. But they aren't really threatening me; it's a trick of the mind, or a vestigial response. If we divide the developmental package into three sections, we can talk about the Personal, the Transpersonal, and the Transcendent/divine perspectives. Personal corresponds to the first four jhanas, and it's where we spend our entire lives unless we do this work. Transpersonal corresponds the the four arupa or immaterial jhanas and what I call the no-dog or the Witness. It's a useful state in and of itself because it's upstream from ordinary personal suffering, but it has its limitations; it is a dissociative state. It's bad for interpersonal relations. The third perspective, the transcendent, is the place we would like to have as our COG. It corresponds to the 5 Pure Land or suddhavasa jhanas. When we come from that perspective, it's like no-dog goes to dog park, becomes a dog-lover and a seeing eye dog.

Kyle: HaHa. OK. I've had witness type experiences before. You say it is bad/hard for interpersonal relations to be coming from witness state..is it therefore difficult to live in world when you're COG is in this strata?

Kenneth: Yes, this is where you are tempted to spend all of your time in a self-contained bubble of transpersonal OK-ness. But it's a developmental phase, so you work through it and get into the good part. There is kundalini movement that is correlated with this development. The energy, which during the no-dog phase is bunched up around the third eye chakra, softens, becomes more diffuse, moves up out of the crown chakra, circles back down and reconnects with the other chakras, especially the heart chakra. This is the fabled opening of the heart, and it's a very real, experiential phenomenon that coincides with a new depth of understanding of what compassion can be.

Kyle: Gotcha. Is there anyway to tell what strata someone is working through based on the location of the energy that they are working with/most dominant in the body?

Kenneth: Yes. If you track your progress using the 20 strata of mind model, for example, you can know where you are with some degree of certainty all along the way. False diagnoses are common, of course, but it all becomes clearer over time. I use a cluster of diagnostic criteria, including what jhanas people report, what insight knowledges they report, and what energy centers seem to be most active in the body.

Kyle: So any ideas on what makes most sense for me going forward based on where I might be at?

Kenneth: You'll be surprised... I recommend the 3 speed transmission. :-) I would continue to develop concentration and investigation (samatha/vipassana), inquire into the nature of the "knower" of this experience, and also look at the "space" in which all of this is happening.

Kyle: I am good with that. Which I take to be start as big as possible and move in as needed.

Kenneth: Yes, I always like to ring the nondual bell first. That's because we are simultaneously learning two "views," which from the point of view of logic are mutually exclusive. We are training to become better human beings. But we are also learning to switch the view all at once to completely abandon the self-improvement project and surrender to the Absolute... which means that primordial awareness recognizes itself in this moment.

Kyle: I agree, why run away from it if you can already tune into it?

Kenneth: Yes, and why develop it when you can see the perfection of this moment? So, we do both, because no-dog is a dog lover.

Kyle: Yep. This might be exactly what you are telling my not to be doing because it is a forcing but are there techniques that speed this process up...more beneficial/efficient than what I'm currently doing?

Kenneth: What exactly are you doing?

Kyle: So I'm doing Goenka style body scan head to toe, toe to head trying to feel sensations in each part, which I don't have a problem doing at all. I get distracted/stuck/interested in what is going on in neck/shoulder region and end up staying there for long periods of time to watch what is going on. I'm not noting...just bare sensation the best I can.

Kenneth: That practice is not what I would recommend for you at this time. It is heavy on the investigation and light on the concentration. In order to make progress, you have to access and penetrate a finite number of strata of mind. The limiting factor in your practice from now on is likely to be concentration, not investigation. You are already a very adept investigator. If you are not penetrating all of the strata of mind, it is simply because you are not accessing them. For you, the first priority is to continue to deepen concentration. You can do this by following the breath, and you can do it by practicing with a kasina object.

Kyle: Interesting. What leads you to say that the level of investigation is OK?

Kenneth: You can see/feel the energy flows and you are able to describe sensations in the body with precision.

Kyle: OK. Gothca. It's not possible or advisable to use those energy sensations as object of concentration?

Kenneth: Actually, it's both possible and advisable. I would do that along with your other practices. It's especially fun to walk around in daily life while paying attention to this energy. Every physical thing, whether animate or inanimate, has a corresponding energy body. Noticing this energy world is very high level practice.

Kyle: OK. Not sure how much more time you have available but would it be possible to talk a little more about the breath awareness practice or kasina object practice you are recommending?

Kenneth: Sure. For kasina practice, I just take a cream colored cereal bowl, prop it up against the wall or on a chair, sit about 6 or 8 feet away, and stare at it. That's the whole practice. Everything unfolds from there on its own.

Kyle: Easy enough. I can do that.

Kenneth: For breath practice, just take the sensations of the rise and fall of the abdomen as object, and become absorbed in them, occasionally noting some specific sensation to keep yourself honest.

Kyle: Rising falling?

Kenneth: Yes, rising falling, but make sure your are aware of softness, coolness, warmth, tension, stinging, burning, etc. If you can answer the question "what?" clearly, you are definitely paying attention.

Kyle: Oh, OK. Not just those two things exclusively. No prob. I can do that too.

Kenneth: Perfect. Want to call it a day?

Kyle: Yeah. So I'll work with these suggestions. What have you found works best for how often you meet with people?

Kenneth: Most people like to meet once or twice a week, along with posting a practice journal on the forum.

Kyle: That sounds good to me. So I should start a thread where I can put a daily practice journal?

Kenneth: That would be wonderful. It helps everyone to see the progress others make.

Kyle: and it keeps you honest.

Kenneth: It does keep you honest!

Kyle: Best to get in touch with you through website to schedule another meeting?

Kenneth: Perfecto.

Kyle: Thanks so much Kenneth this has been great. I'm looking forward to working with you.

Kenneth: The pleasure is mine, Kyle.

Kyle: You watching the super bowl today?

Kenneth: No, I'm going to let the Superbowl go by. I'm an NBA fan. Go Kobe!

Kyle: I knew that..saw you were a Lakers fan, as am I. Have a great day...stay warm. Talk with you soon.

Kenneth: Ha, warm is a distant hope. :-) Talk to you soon, Kyle!