Speaker 1: You don't have to slip into the roles that are
Speaker 1: waiting for you when you walk through the door at
Speaker 1: night you go see your spouse, or when you walk
Speaker 1: through your childhood home and you go see your father.
Speaker 1: Like it's a choice. You don't have to get into
Speaker 1: those rules. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time.
Speaker 1: Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Speaker 1: Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 1: you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving the
Speaker 1: right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining us. Our guest on this episode is making his
Speaker 1: third appearance and it's shows on Jack Hofner, which is
Speaker 1: the pen name of a zen monk whose essays have
Speaker 1: appeared in the sun Tricycle Buddha Dharma in The New
Speaker 1: York Times, as well as in the Best Buddhist Writing Series.
Speaker 1: Jack is the winner of a two thousand twelve push
Speaker 1: Cart Prize and is the author of Zen Confidential, Confessions
Speaker 1: of a Wayward Monk, and Single White Monk. He's also
Speaker 1: the host of the YouTube channel Zen Confidential. Hi, Jack,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be back. Yeah, I should have said welcome back,
Speaker 1: because this is time number three. You were one of
Speaker 1: our very first guests and your book was called Zen Confidential,
Speaker 1: and I loved it. You had another book called Single
Speaker 1: White Monk, which I also loved, And as I was
Speaker 1: saying to you beforehand, I just love engaging with your work.
Speaker 1: You are a great, great writer, You are a funny writer.
Speaker 1: You've got a YouTube channel now, so it's just been
Speaker 1: fun to be back in your world. And since you
Speaker 1: and I last talked, I have gotten very involved in
Speaker 1: Zen Practice, so we have that to sort of talk
Speaker 1: about also. But before we do any of that, let's
Speaker 1: start like we always do with the parable. There's a
Speaker 1: grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it
Speaker 1: for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well,
Speaker 1: which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. You know, it's funny every
Speaker 1: time I know I'm going to come on your show, which,
Speaker 1: like you said twice, the third time, I spend some
Speaker 1: time thinking about this parable, contemplating it, meditating on it,
Speaker 1: and I always kind of come to the same place,
Speaker 1: but this time it's a little bit different. So I
Speaker 1: recently quit nicotine lossages, right, so I've been smoking for
Speaker 1: a while on and off. That I did the nicotine
Speaker 1: lossages for a while on and off. And I think
Speaker 1: that this quote has the most meaning to me in
Speaker 1: terms of addiction, because you know, when it comes to
Speaker 1: energies like greed and hatred, I'm not so sure that
Speaker 1: those wolves are just bad or good. But when it
Speaker 1: comes to addiction. I have to not feed that wolf
Speaker 1: at all. So when it comes to nicotine, like nothing
Speaker 1: the part of me that craves nicotine gets even a
Speaker 1: taste of it, it's over. I'm back to it a
Speaker 1: few weeks later, but with something like anger. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: give in to that energy and something shifts inside me,
Speaker 1: something needed to come out. It's a little bit, maybe embarrassing,
Speaker 1: and I may even have to make some apologies or something,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't necessarily a terrible thing. Yeah, greed, I
Speaker 1: don't know about because because that was the other thing
Speaker 1: I think of the quote greed like sometimes I got
Speaker 1: to get my game on, get ambitious, get a little
Speaker 1: taste of you know, like getting more followers on YouTube
Speaker 1: or something. I mean, does that read? So it's an
Speaker 1: interesting quote. Like as an uncle, we talk a lot
Speaker 1: about attachment and not being attached to stuff, not being
Speaker 1: attached to good, not being attached to bad. Yeah, once
Speaker 1: again you subbed me with your co on. Yeah. Well
Speaker 1: it occurred to me as you were saying that when
Speaker 1: you said I meditate with it, I was like, it
Speaker 1: could be a coon. I'm thinking about something you said
Speaker 1: about cigarette smoking recently, and when I say recently, I
Speaker 1: mean in the last several years. But you were talking
Speaker 1: about how you sort of picked up a cigarette abbit
Speaker 1: again after coming out of the monastery, and I love
Speaker 1: what you said. You said smoking isn't just bad for
Speaker 1: you physically, like any unhealthy habit. It teaches you that
Speaker 1: it's okay to cave into your compulsions. I really like
Speaker 1: that framework. When we engage in things that we don't
Speaker 1: feel good about in many different ways, we almost make
Speaker 1: it easier to do them again in the future, in
Speaker 1: the same way that one cigarette isn't a problem, Like
Speaker 1: if one person only had one cigarette in their life,
Speaker 1: nobody would ever care. It's that one cigarette has a
Speaker 1: pretty good tendency to lead to two cigarettes. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great point. And yeah, I remember when I
Speaker 1: wrote that, because there was this feeling that I got
Speaker 1: out of the monastery. I was free again. I was
Speaker 1: just let out of the clink, and I was going
Speaker 1: to have some funds. So I would vommost cigarette from somebody,
Speaker 1: and you take that cigarette and inhale it, and this
Speaker 1: whole door opens up, this universe of possibility, like I
Speaker 1: can do this. Maybe I could lose my temper every
Speaker 1: now and then maybe I can take a drug, maybe
Speaker 1: I can do anything. Like I'm teaching myself that it's
Speaker 1: okay to behave in a compulsive way. I mean, because
Speaker 1: I have that tendency, I have that bit of an
Speaker 1: addictive personality, and when I give it to a straight
Speaker 1: up addiction, there's a part of me that gets woken
Speaker 1: up and start saying, all right, let's see how far
Speaker 1: we can take this. Let's see what other areas flat
Speaker 1: we can extend this into. Do you think that people
Speaker 1: who choose a monastic life have that tendency more broadly,
Speaker 1: I mean a monastic life is sort of the extreme version,
Speaker 1: the compulsive version of a normal spiritual practice, right, it's
Speaker 1: like really taking it to the nth degree. Yeah, maybe,
Speaker 1: I mean I think people who are compelled to go
Speaker 1: on a monastic path are extreme personalities or have maybe
Speaker 1: an extreme decision, and like you go hard one way,
Speaker 1: and there's a part of you that wants it, that
Speaker 1: bad wolf wants it's piece of stake, you know, and
Speaker 1: it comes apart. So I found a lot of times
Speaker 1: monks have a addictions. They're really good about attachments. So
Speaker 1: and I can get tricky because then you hear monks
Speaker 1: saying like, I'm not attached to drinking. I just like
Speaker 1: to do it all the time. And I know I
Speaker 1: have a little bit of an addiction, but I'm not
Speaker 1: attached to it. I approach it with the sense of humor,
Speaker 1: you know, I And if I don't do it for
Speaker 1: five weeks, I'm okay. But then somehow their life always
Speaker 1: comes back to it. They're smoking again or drinking again.
Speaker 1: You know, it's very interesting Somewhere in their mind they're
Speaker 1: not attached, but they're totally addicted. So some of them,
Speaker 1: what's the difference? Yeah, I think it's an interesting question.
Speaker 1: When you were saying that, it made me think of
Speaker 1: all the different ways that I was able to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I got a problem with drugs and alcohol. But here's
Speaker 1: why we don't all need to worry about this, right, Like, everybody,
Speaker 1: just step back. We got this. You know. So you
Speaker 1: got out of the monastery, and I'd like to explore
Speaker 1: the getting out of the monastery here in a minute.
Speaker 1: But did you sort of have a little bit of
Speaker 1: a I'm gonna go crazy period because you had been
Speaker 1: so sort of regimented for so long, or did you
Speaker 1: find that a lot of your monastic habits kind of
Speaker 1: stayed with you, or once the context was gone, the
Speaker 1: habits were gone. The habits were gone because the habits
Speaker 1: were largely based on the schedule. Yeah, but the practice
Speaker 1: was there, the approach, the point of view, the way
Speaker 1: of dealing with difficulties. How did the open minded and
Speaker 1: necessarily certain things I think shift after you do a
Speaker 1: practice for a while. Would you're probably figuring out and
Speaker 1: we realizing, of course, because you're doing was unpracticed out.
Speaker 1: But for me, certain things shift and they don't necessarily
Speaker 1: go back. So I get lazy with my practice, especially
Speaker 1: when I started out because everything was so new. I
Speaker 1: could go for a few days without sitting or something.
Speaker 1: But the basic tendency I think stayed with me. But
Speaker 1: I definitely did have a period of going a little
Speaker 1: bit crazy. I felt so free, was like so ecstatic.
Speaker 1: I felt like just shot out of the womb, ready
Speaker 1: to rumble. Really wonderful. Actually, on some level, I think
Speaker 1: you said like coming out of the clink, like people
Speaker 1: coming out of prison, can be an extreme experience. I
Speaker 1: do want to get into more of the monastery stuff,
Speaker 1: but I want to start with an idea that you
Speaker 1: talk about in a recent video of yours on your
Speaker 1: YouTube channel where you talk about that you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of us come to practice, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I've been doing Zen pretty intensely for the last number
Speaker 1: of years, but I was doing other Buddhist practices before that,
Speaker 1: and a lot of years of different kind of practices.
Speaker 1: But that we come to these practices with the idea
Speaker 1: that the practice will fix us. I was wondering if
Speaker 1: you could say a little bit more about how you
Speaker 1: orient towards that now, because we are doing the practices
Speaker 1: for a reason, but expecting to be fick quote unquote
Speaker 1: fixed is maybe not the best reason. And maybe what
Speaker 1: is even fixed mean is something we could explore. But
Speaker 1: I just kind of wanted to dive deeper into that idea. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's something I've really been sitting with developing since I
Speaker 1: got out of the monastery. Because now, in a sen
Speaker 1: the cake is baked. My teacher was dead, so he's
Speaker 1: not going to give teachers transmission to anyone. Like my
Speaker 1: lineage is in a sense almost dead because my teacher
Speaker 1: didn't give transmission. Right. So, like I said, my cake
Speaker 1: is cooked, this is it, this is what I am,
Speaker 1: And I look at myself I did my practice as
Speaker 1: the monastery did thirteen years, and I find myself thinking like, okay,
Speaker 1: what what hell? What next? And there's a sense of
Speaker 1: sitting with the things I don't like about myself and
Speaker 1: I don't like about my life in the past. I
Speaker 1: think when I was at the monastery and I would
Speaker 1: sit on that cushion for hour after hour, day after day,
Speaker 1: we give a retreat after retreat, I think I had
Speaker 1: this idea that this problems inside myself, this good core
Speaker 1: suffering or craving, was going to dissolve all and this
Speaker 1: insight was going to sort of wrap my life and
Speaker 1: change everything. And I, yes, I would be unhappy sometimes
Speaker 1: I'm experienced pain, but basically I would be cured. Basically
Speaker 1: I would be fixed. It was a really deep kind
Speaker 1: of idea that I had, And when I left the
Speaker 1: monastery got back out of the world, it was like
Speaker 1: it's not gonna happen, so what now? And so there's
Speaker 1: a sense of just kind of orienting myself a little
Speaker 1: bit differently, like Okay, I have these things that are
Speaker 1: not going to get fixed about myself, Like what do
Speaker 1: I do with that? How do I live with that?
Speaker 1: If I'm not going to totally change myself and can
Speaker 1: I work with some of my bad qualities. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of things you said in there that
Speaker 1: I'd like to explore, But the starting place I'd like
Speaker 1: to explore is this idea that your cake is sort
Speaker 1: of baked. Do you feel that that is just a
Speaker 1: choice you're making, Like, you know, what I've put in
Speaker 1: the dedicated focus on changing myself that I'm going to
Speaker 1: put in my teacher's gone. I don't want to find
Speaker 1: another teacher, or I don't want to find another path,
Speaker 1: or I don't want to invest in the work whatever
Speaker 1: that is that intensely Or do you truly feel like
Speaker 1: the capacity for changing growth and you no longer exists.
Speaker 1: I think it's just going in a different direction now.
Speaker 1: It's not in formal practice. That's not the direction of
Speaker 1: my growth anymore. It's in the smallest moments of my
Speaker 1: daily life, which we're always within kind of a romantic
Speaker 1: context at the monastery, because everything was practice, from washing
Speaker 1: your hands to chopping vegetables to doing co on work
Speaker 1: with your teacher. It was all formal Zen practice. And
Speaker 1: I did that, and I think it became time for
Speaker 1: me to go into the world and kind of unlock
Speaker 1: the dharma in the smallest, most mundane, most boring, reveal
Speaker 1: ordinary moments. Yeah, well, I think for everybody who's on
Speaker 1: a spiritual path that is non monastic, I think that's
Speaker 1: the game that you just described. That's the thing. Like
Speaker 1: I have come to the deep realization and I've been
Speaker 1: working on through my spiritual habits programs that I lead
Speaker 1: in different things that like most people are maxed out
Speaker 1: as far as time goes, as far as their ability
Speaker 1: to meditate a little bit more, maybe they can increase
Speaker 1: a little bit more practice in their lives. But the
Speaker 1: work that's going to be most fruitful is exactly what
Speaker 1: you're saying, you know, how do we bring these moments
Speaker 1: of clarity and openness and compassion and kindness to everything
Speaker 1: that we do? Which I think you know, Zen, the
Speaker 1: idea of the sort of work practice is what you're
Speaker 1: training to do, right, You're training to say, how can
Speaker 1: I make the most significant thing meaningful by giving it
Speaker 1: enough attention? Yeah, I think that's completely true. One of
Speaker 1: the things realized that the monastery was and then getting
Speaker 1: out of the monastery really realized this was Okay, it
Speaker 1: seems like what we did at the monastery was your
Speaker 1: mind is going crazy. You've got a lot of suffering. Buddy,
Speaker 1: sit down in this spot. Just sit there. This quesion
Speaker 1: is gonna be soft, and we're gonna give you some
Speaker 1: rules to contain you so that you can just sit there.
Speaker 1: And I'm not gonna give you any instruction. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna tell you how to do it. There's gonna be
Speaker 1: no special mantra, no prayer to the Holy Ghost. You're
Speaker 1: just gonna sit there and figure out your mind yourself.
Speaker 1: So you sit there, and you sit there, and you
Speaker 1: sit there, and gradually you start to learn that there's
Speaker 1: a lot of noise inside your head and it you
Speaker 1: can ignore, and you learn how to just sit and breathe,
Speaker 1: and when the mind starts bugging you, you could do
Speaker 1: that breath practice and give yourself to the breath. That's
Speaker 1: what I was kind of the monastery. So basically, the
Speaker 1: whole thing about sitting meditation is you're just learning how
Speaker 1: to do something simple completely, and sitting is like the
Speaker 1: simplest thing you could do, and that's not like you're training,
Speaker 1: and it's your tools. So if you can do that,
Speaker 1: if you can sit in one spot for a seven
Speaker 1: day retreat for eighteen hours a day and sit completely
Speaker 1: in breathe. You're gonna be able to go and chop
Speaker 1: carrots completely in the kitchen for formal kitchen practice. Maybe
Speaker 1: you can break leaves completely. Maybe you can do the
Speaker 1: headmuck role completely. Maybe you can do co on practice completely.
Speaker 1: And each one of these activities. What I was taught was, Okay,
Speaker 1: you're giving yourself to it, and that thinking mind that
Speaker 1: you have it kind of dissolved and you connect with
Speaker 1: the activity. Now, thirteen years past, my monastic life is done.
Speaker 1: Now I have to come out into the world and
Speaker 1: do that practice. You know, I could go back to
Speaker 1: do another monastery, do more coon practice, and do formal training,
Speaker 1: but the basic sort of task is always going to
Speaker 1: be the same, no matter what I'm doing, and no
Speaker 1: where or where I am, whether I'm at a monastery
Speaker 1: or out here in the world talking to you right now.
Speaker 1: Does that make some sense totally? In the same video,
Speaker 1: you were talking about this idea of zen will fix us,
Speaker 1: you say, living in the present moment, it's hard because
Speaker 1: it requires us to accept the fact that things are
Speaker 1: never going to be perfect. Arriving at this understanding, making
Speaker 1: peace with it and then being energized by it. This
Speaker 1: is the point in the fruit of meditation practice, the
Speaker 1: first two parts of that making peace with it, you know,
Speaker 1: arriving at the understanding that seems not easy to do,
Speaker 1: but fairly straightforward what you're saying. But how do we
Speaker 1: become energized by the fact that things are never going
Speaker 1: to be perfect? Yeah, that's a good one, because oftentimes,
Speaker 1: what I've got a problem that's pretty deep inside me,
Speaker 1: and I'm worried and anxious and upset, my mind will
Speaker 1: start chewing over it. So let's say it's like a
Speaker 1: money problem, and we're afraid I'm gonna not be able
Speaker 1: to pay this bill or something, and they're gonna send
Speaker 1: me a letter. So there's a kind of really thrumming
Speaker 1: anxiety around it, right, And if I'm unaware of that anxiety,
Speaker 1: and I'm letting that bad wolf howl inside me, no
Speaker 1: matter how many different angles I try and solve that
Speaker 1: problem from, I'm still gonna suffer and I'm probably not
Speaker 1: going to make any headway on it. If I sit
Speaker 1: down on my cushion, if I hold the issue with
Speaker 1: some attention, like, Okay, this is the problem, and then
Speaker 1: I take a deep breath, and I'm still holding the problem,
Speaker 1: but I'm not thinking about it. I am just breathing
Speaker 1: right and I'm doing my practice. I exhale completely and
Speaker 1: I inhale completely. Eventually, this is feeling of a little
Speaker 1: bit more looseness, a little bit more spaciousness, and I'm
Speaker 1: really focusing on the breath. But there's kind of an
Speaker 1: intention of I got this issue against this issue. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to touch it. I'm not going to solve it.
Speaker 1: It's red hot, but it's there. I'm holding it. Oftentimes,
Speaker 1: if I do that, something will shift and maybe I'll
Speaker 1: have an insight into the problem. Right. Maybe in this
Speaker 1: case it's like, hey, you need to take money more seriously,
Speaker 1: or you need to take it less seriously. Right, I've
Speaker 1: been insight into it now. I feel energized. Now the
Speaker 1: whole thing has a deeper foundation right now, that's something
Speaker 1: to work with. I've got a path. It's not just
Speaker 1: a problem that I'm hitting myself over the head with.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a path and it has to do
Speaker 1: with my life orientation. Right, Like I said, take money
Speaker 1: less seriously, take money more seriously. Right. The other thing
Speaker 1: that you said in there that I wanted to dig
Speaker 1: a little bit deeper into is learning to trust life.
Speaker 1: And listeners have probably heard me say this several times.
Speaker 1: I always end up back at this point. You know,
Speaker 1: I had a spiritual director for a while, and I've
Speaker 1: started to wonder whether it says more about him than me.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to assume it says more about me
Speaker 1: than him, which was every conversation we started on. We
Speaker 1: always ended up at the end around trust. What can
Speaker 1: you trust in? And I hear people say you can
Speaker 1: trust in life now from one perspective, that seems preposterous. Right,
Speaker 1: life seems decidedly untrustworthy from the perspective of a single
Speaker 1: isolated human being, because all sorts of bad ship happens
Speaker 1: to us humans all the time. That is profoundly awful. Right,
Speaker 1: There are more awful things happening in the world right
Speaker 1: now than you and I would ever want to know
Speaker 1: about at this very second. Right, So, in your mind,
Speaker 1: what does learning to trust life mean? I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think you're saying that, like good things are going
Speaker 1: to happen to you personally necessarily, so I think you're
Speaker 1: speaking to a bigger reality. But I'm wondering if you
Speaker 1: can articulate it at all. Yeah, that's a really deep question.
Speaker 1: And I'm living in Vienna and Ukraine is like a
Speaker 1: border away, and I just imagine trying to trust life
Speaker 1: when the bombs are dropping. Yeah, I mean my life
Speaker 1: is a blissful paradise compared to some people's lives, right,
Speaker 1: So totally, totally you're asking a really really deep question.
Speaker 1: I mean for myself. I mean, we were talking about
Speaker 1: surfing a little bit earlier. It's kind of like life.
Speaker 1: Life is the wave and you have to trust the waves,
Speaker 1: and sometimes you get thrown off the wave, you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes it was get drowned by the wave. But I
Speaker 1: had this experience when I was a young man where
Speaker 1: it hit me. This is oftentimes I've said, it's discovered
Speaker 1: this experience a lot of people have, especially in the West.
Speaker 1: But I had this experience that there's something in this
Speaker 1: universe rather than nothing. Even if it's all made up
Speaker 1: in my mind, there's still something and whatever that is,
Speaker 1: I'm going to trust it. There's something going on. Right.
Speaker 1: There could have been nothing. There could have been no universe.
Speaker 1: There could have been none nothing, But there's experience, there's
Speaker 1: here to call it. God to call it chance, call
Speaker 1: it dharma, activity, dharma kayah. And we don't always understand it.
Speaker 1: Like oftentimes I get in my head an idea about
Speaker 1: how things should be, and I get really upset and
Speaker 1: traumatized when they don't turn out how I think they
Speaker 1: should be or how I want them to be. But
Speaker 1: as my life sort of unfolds and I process these
Speaker 1: horrible experiences, grow, move forward, move on, keep going. When
Speaker 1: I'm on my game, it's like the path couldn't be
Speaker 1: any rich, and the challenges created new dimensions of growth
Speaker 1: and experience that I have to be strong enough to
Speaker 1: be grateful for, strong enough and hulpful enough to be
Speaker 1: grateful for. But it's not easy. It's not easy and
Speaker 1: not simple. Yeah, there was another line that you wrote
Speaker 1: about a relationship with the teacher and you you said
Speaker 1: it was intimate but not personal, And in some ways
Speaker 1: to me, that also points to what this trust, at
Speaker 1: least for me, gets at, which is that there is
Speaker 1: a way to be intimate with the world. There is
Speaker 1: an intimacy to the world. There is a unity to
Speaker 1: the world. When I zero into the personal just Eric
Speaker 1: or just the one person in Ukraine, or just the
Speaker 1: child being abused right now. Right when I get that personal,
Speaker 1: there's nothing to trust. When I zoom back out, then
Speaker 1: I go, uh, maybe I can just trust that life
Speaker 1: is life, it is doing what it does. It makes
Speaker 1: me think a little bit about like I don't trust
Speaker 1: that we humans are going to solve climate change in
Speaker 1: time to save ourselves. We might, we might not, But
Speaker 1: I don't have any doubt that the world, the planet
Speaker 1: is going to be fine. Right, It's going to be okay.
Speaker 1: Life is going to do what life is going to
Speaker 1: do there. And so there's something for me in that
Speaker 1: intimate but not personal phrase that you applied in a
Speaker 1: different element that somehow applies here for me too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how that's the key to the whole thing. Like that
Speaker 1: was the switch for me, and it still is. The
Speaker 1: switch between the political or the cultural or the societal
Speaker 1: and the spiritual is a difference between the personal and
Speaker 1: intimate one can be having. And I have had really
Speaker 1: really bad experiences at a personal level. It's like a
Speaker 1: horror show. But with my perspective shifts, I'm still intimately
Speaker 1: in the moment, but I'm not taking it personally. And
Speaker 1: now I think it' switched over into what I think
Speaker 1: is a spiritual perspective, which is that you're there, you're aware,
Speaker 1: you're connected to the situation, that you're not being destroyed
Speaker 1: by it. You're in it, you're intimate with it. But
Speaker 1: it's not a living hell. It's just a really interesting experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking about my teacher. I got the sense
Speaker 1: sometimes that no matter what he was going through, he
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily taken it personally. He was so connected to
Speaker 1: the moment, so inside of the experience he was still
Speaker 1: alive with it, but it wasn't like, oh, this is
Speaker 1: bad for me or good for me, And it really
Speaker 1: made him a dynamic and interesting characters dancing with life. Hi. Everyone,
Speaker 1: I wanted to personally invite you to a workshop that
Speaker 1: we are offering at the end of October at the
Speaker 1: Omega Institute, which is in the Hudson Valley in New York,
Speaker 1: and it is really beautiful this time of year. It's
Speaker 1: going to be a great chance to meet some wonderful people,
Speaker 1: recharge and relax while learning foundational spiritual habits that will
Speaker 1: allow you to establish simple daily practices that will help
Speaker 1: you feel more at ease and more fulfilled in your life.
Speaker 1: You can find details at one you feed dot net
Speaker 1: slash Omega. I'm really looking forward to meeting many of
Speaker 1: you there. When I got sober in a twelve step
Speaker 1: program six years ago, right there was a phrase that
Speaker 1: when I first got it, it meant a ton to me,
Speaker 1: and it still does today, And it was this idea
Speaker 1: of free me from the bondage of self. And I
Speaker 1: had no idea how deeply connected that would be ultimately
Speaker 1: to Buddhist practice. But I recognized even then that when
Speaker 1: I am focused very much on myself, on my small
Speaker 1: sense of self, my small problems, my everything, that that
Speaker 1: does cut me off from life. It cuts me off
Speaker 1: from that energy of life. You know, we talked earlier
Speaker 1: about being energized by these things. That bondage is self
Speaker 1: for me is what the entire spiritual path for me
Speaker 1: has been about, is how do I shake that or
Speaker 1: lesson that. I don't think I'm going to shake it,
Speaker 1: but how do I lessen it? Because when I do,
Speaker 1: I don't quite know what all happens. But what I
Speaker 1: do trust in is when I am able to let
Speaker 1: go of that to some degree, that I'm able to
Speaker 1: handle what life brings me and I'm able to flow
Speaker 1: with life in a totally different way. Yeah. I remember
Speaker 1: somebody asked my teachers what enlightenment was, and he said,
Speaker 1: to sort of paraphrase and piggyback of what you're saying,
Speaker 1: the space between the moments where one is able to
Speaker 1: do that are just a much shorter. Oh yeah, because
Speaker 1: it self always arises, the angry, attaching, fearful, huddled up
Speaker 1: in your shell turtle self always arises. But the quicker
Speaker 1: you can shed that, the more quote enlightenment someone has
Speaker 1: or is or manifests. I really like that. That's a
Speaker 1: powerful idea because it speaks to that self arising activity.
Speaker 1: It just happens. It's part of what it is. I
Speaker 1: talk to people about being able to do a behavior
Speaker 1: and do it consistently over a period of time, and
Speaker 1: I say that, you know, anybody is going to do
Speaker 1: anything for a long period of time. Broadly speaking, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course you're going to get off tracked. What differentiates
Speaker 1: people who look like they have a lot of discipline
Speaker 1: or staying with something, it's just that the time they
Speaker 1: get off track is a lot less. So I've become
Speaker 1: more or less a daily meditator, you know. Plus after
Speaker 1: years and years on again, off again. And it's not
Speaker 1: that I don't miss days, of course I do. It's
Speaker 1: just that I don't miss weeks and months. You know,
Speaker 1: I miss a day and I go, all right, well,
Speaker 1: let's get back on. And so I think speaking to that,
Speaker 1: you know, relating to how attached we are to self,
Speaker 1: is an interesting way to think about it. Like the
Speaker 1: space is smaller, right, right, It's interesting because if the
Speaker 1: space is smaller that you're sort of lost in that self,
Speaker 1: you're lost in thought. Then you know, at some point,
Speaker 1: I think we sit for a while, we get this insight.
Speaker 1: It's like they call it the backwards step. I think
Speaker 1: Dogan called it, and you get this insight into the
Speaker 1: fact of what you're doing. Like when it works, like, okay,
Speaker 1: there are times when I'm forgetting myself. There are times
Speaker 1: when I'm connected to my surroundings and you notice that,
Speaker 1: and like, I think, these are these shifts that we
Speaker 1: have in practice, Oh, that is an enlightenment moment. I
Speaker 1: do manifest enlightenment. Maybe my enlightened teacher arguably manifests more
Speaker 1: of those moments closer together. But hey, I had one, right,
Speaker 1: So okay, what happened? You know? Well, I was giving
Speaker 1: myself completely to dropping carts and I forgot myself, completely,
Speaker 1: forgot myself for a moment, and I loved the sound,
Speaker 1: like I was woken up by the sound of the
Speaker 1: knife hitting the cutting board, and it it's like music.
Speaker 1: You know, you have these moments like speeds. Back to
Speaker 1: a little bit when we were talking about earlier manifesting
Speaker 1: in your daily life outside of the sort of spiritually
Speaker 1: romantic setting of a monastery. Okay, how can I manifest
Speaker 1: more of these moments in daily life? Because they do happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I gave a talk recently. The topic was sort of
Speaker 1: the confluence of spirituality and create ativity. I pulled up
Speaker 1: a chart and on one side was sort of like
Speaker 1: the elements that people study mystical experiences, say, here are
Speaker 1: the elements of a mystical experience. And on the other
Speaker 1: side of the chart was the things that psychologists refer
Speaker 1: to as flow. They look very very similar, right, you know,
Speaker 1: they're talking about a lot of the same things. The
Speaker 1: reason I like that is I think it points to
Speaker 1: what you're saying is that we all have these moments.
Speaker 1: We may be looking for something that's really grand and amazing,
Speaker 1: but we all have moments where we merge with life.
Speaker 1: And the more we see that and notice that, I
Speaker 1: think it provides inspiration and fuel for practice, you know,
Speaker 1: for continuing on. Yeah, I've got so familiar with flow.
Speaker 1: I keep hearing that, and I know what there are
Speaker 1: like parallels between that and the idea of somebody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to contemplate that and to sit with it.
Speaker 1: And I feel like there's something deeper in spiritual practice
Speaker 1: than what i'm as flow. But I'm not totally sure
Speaker 1: because I don't know the definition of that flow state.
Speaker 1: I actually think you're right. I think that they are
Speaker 1: not exact. But you know, in a mystical experience, we
Speaker 1: might say, you know, there's a unitive element to it, right,
Speaker 1: and in a flow state, as you were saying the
Speaker 1: action and awareness, you know, the definition is they say,
Speaker 1: sort of action and awareness are merged, right, or you
Speaker 1: lose self conscious rumination. It may not be the exact
Speaker 1: same thing, but it's pointing in a similar direction. Or
Speaker 1: mystical experiences are ineffable. People have a very difficult time
Speaker 1: describing as while you end up with phrases like flow
Speaker 1: or I was in the zone, you know, because it's ineffable.
Speaker 1: Time takes on different elements. Time is suddenly experienced very differently,
Speaker 1: So I don't think they're the same thing. You know,
Speaker 1: the experiences of Ken Show or of mystical experiences that
Speaker 1: I've had our way beyond the flow state of like
Speaker 1: practicing guitar and having the notes come out, but they're
Speaker 1: on a continuum somewhere. And Americans were so obsessed with
Speaker 1: doing and being and I wonder if somehow bringing practice
Speaker 1: into our lives doesn't connect with this flow state, which
Speaker 1: is where we're doing things really well and not thinking
Speaker 1: about ourselves, because that's the way in. That's really a
Speaker 1: way in. And then we can almost pull back and say,
Speaker 1: what's happening when that happens. What's happening there, It's beautiful,
Speaker 1: it's a gift. It's almost like sacred if you want
Speaker 1: to look at it like that. So what's happening there?
Speaker 1: Totally in the same way that like when I'm playing
Speaker 1: guitar and when I'm like really playing, And what I
Speaker 1: mean by that is something is arising. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: not practicing something, I'm not thinking about what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: It's just all of a sudden, now there is a
Speaker 1: piece of music that is coming out of the guitar
Speaker 1: that did not exist ten seconds. It doesn't even matter
Speaker 1: if it's a good piece of music, particularly it's some
Speaker 1: play didn't exist. And when I'm able to move out
Speaker 1: of the ego sense, the ego is, oh, look at
Speaker 1: this great thing I wrote. When I move out of
Speaker 1: that and I look at it, what I'm left with
Speaker 1: is a real mystery, which is like, I don't have
Speaker 1: the foggiest idea how that happened. I can't recreate it,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't do it on will and there
Speaker 1: was no thought process, you know. And so I think
Speaker 1: it's a way in. Yeah, it's a way in and
Speaker 1: thinking about it, and it's a good way to live,
Speaker 1: I think, as opposed to orienting yourself towards outcomes and
Speaker 1: metrics and quantifiable results, you know, quantitative results. Just I
Speaker 1: mean that's what we were taught at the modest dissolving
Speaker 1: into activity, like playing a guitar in a flow state
Speaker 1: with activities you really love. And then it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: can I do this when I'm sitting on a bus?
Speaker 1: Can I be aware of all the thoughts that are
Speaker 1: going through my head, all the places I'm trying to
Speaker 1: escape mentally because I don't want to breathe in this
Speaker 1: potential COVID air, listening of the traffic outside, crammed in
Speaker 1: with all these people you have oring in German all
Speaker 1: around me. Is I don't understand? You know? Can I
Speaker 1: do that flow state here? Can I dissolve into this activity? Yeah?
Speaker 1: That's one of the reasons why monastery life was so difficult.
Speaker 1: It was like training you to be able to dissolve
Speaker 1: into any activity and hit that flow state or somebody
Speaker 1: or something even deeper. Yeah, yeah, all right, let's move
Speaker 1: directions here a little bit, and I want to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about your later days in the monastery,
Speaker 1: and I just have to read a couple of things
Speaker 1: you wrote. One of the things we're not getting in
Speaker 1: this interview is how damn funny you are. And so
Speaker 1: I'm gonna just read a little bit and then allow
Speaker 1: you to kind of pick up and take it wherever
Speaker 1: you want. But there's just a couple of passages that
Speaker 1: had me cracking up. You said, you know what, don't
Speaker 1: talk to me about workplace dysfunction until you've attended a
Speaker 1: meeting with your hundred and five year old non English
Speaker 1: speaking Zen Master and six sycophantic board members. That begins
Speaker 1: with the discussion of the monetary's tenuous finances and ends
Speaker 1: with the whole group expecting to raise one thousand dollars
Speaker 1: to build a new Zendo meditation hall. And you say,
Speaker 1: but that was Roschi. He usually slept through board meetings.
Speaker 1: When roused and asked for his opinion on, say, getting
Speaker 1: new fire insurance through Lloyd's of London, he would listen
Speaker 1: to his translator nod and say something like, very good question,
Speaker 1: but what is fire and then give a three hour
Speaker 1: dharma talk. So I just love some of these stories.
Speaker 1: I mean of you trying to make sanity out of
Speaker 1: this place, you know, the hundred and five year old
Speaker 1: non English speaking Zen teachers. A lot of great stories
Speaker 1: from that time, but also I think a lot of
Speaker 1: real stress for you in that time. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: good way putting it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and in retrospect,
Speaker 1: great stories, but yeah, during the time, an incredible amount
Speaker 1: of stress. I mean I had forgotten about that story
Speaker 1: you just read, but that happened exactly as you read.
Speaker 1: I mean literally, we my teacher couldn't teach anymore. He
Speaker 1: got too old, and he had a bout of aspiration pemumonia,
Speaker 1: and so he was kind of he was retired, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't really talking about it. So a month passed
Speaker 1: since he had gotten out of the hospital. It was like,
Speaker 1: all right, Rosy, you got a bunch of students stuff
Speaker 1: at the monastery, bunch of monks and nuns waiting for you.
Speaker 1: What's the plan, you know, And he never really gave
Speaker 1: us a plan. He never really spoke to it. I mean,
Speaker 1: he was there mentally, but something had shifted in him
Speaker 1: where he was over that portion of his life. You know.
Speaker 1: It was interesting, like part of my experience coming out
Speaker 1: of the monastery and not going back into a new
Speaker 1: situation with the new teacher was just watching him exit
Speaker 1: formal zen practice and not really look back. That makes
Speaker 1: any sense, I mean, he said, yeah, but you know,
Speaker 1: build a new zendo. Raised a hundred thousand dollars, but
Speaker 1: there wasn't any plan to do anything with it after
Speaker 1: I did that, you know. And prior to part of
Speaker 1: Rosy's life, he was really proactive, really involved in every
Speaker 1: aspect of it as to life. But after he got sick,
Speaker 1: went through that came out the other side. It was
Speaker 1: it was kind of over how long from that sort
Speaker 1: of period of him getting sick coming out of the hospital,
Speaker 1: you were sort of the abbot at this point? Is
Speaker 1: that an accurate statement? These terms get so tricky because, um,
Speaker 1: you know how it is that is really hierarchical, and
Speaker 1: a lot of this hierarchy is a little bit mysterious
Speaker 1: to Western people because we look at hierarchies and we
Speaker 1: look at like a dominance hierarchy. We look at like
Speaker 1: the alpha, right, And in Japan, especially when when I
Speaker 1: went there and I visited the monasteries, I saw much
Speaker 1: more of a dynamic between all the different levels and
Speaker 1: layers of hierarchy. So it's kind of like this big
Speaker 1: unit where you needed the zen master at the top,
Speaker 1: but there was a bit of a wig wig attitude
Speaker 1: around it. Like in America, I think your hierarchies are
Speaker 1: more set and if I'm coming across, but we take
Speaker 1: these things more seriously than in my experience, the Japanese,
Speaker 1: like they would joke about their zen masters and maybe
Speaker 1: poke fun at them, but then respect the role. You know.
Speaker 1: So we were all waiting for an appot. So an
Speaker 1: abbot runs the place like fully, I was like a manager.
Speaker 1: I would They called it the administrative abbot because I
Speaker 1: wasn't allowed to do co on practice, because nobody in
Speaker 1: our community was just roshy. And I wasn't allowed to
Speaker 1: give tassio, which is a certain kind of dharma talk
Speaker 1: where you're like speaking from the dharma, not about the dharma.
Speaker 1: So these two things, being able to give tassio and
Speaker 1: being able to give cohans would make somebody a zen
Speaker 1: master in our lineage, but Roshi, and that's what we
Speaker 1: came to Roshi for. When he stopped doing those two things,
Speaker 1: he didn't give anybody else permission to do it. So
Speaker 1: we're all just kind of waiting. So I was a manager,
Speaker 1: but I wasn't really the abbot. Did you expect you
Speaker 1: were going to be given dharma transmission and that you
Speaker 1: would step into that role? Did you have that hope?
Speaker 1: Did you think it was going to happen and it
Speaker 1: just never came to fruition? Or not really? For myself?
Speaker 1: I never did okay, Okay, I didn't really present him.
Speaker 1: I thought my teacher was really, really deep and I
Speaker 1: knew I wasn't there, and in order to get transmission,
Speaker 1: you would have to be able to better him. If
Speaker 1: you will you know, I don't know. Yeah, got it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: answer all his co os, and he's got nothing left
Speaker 1: for you. And that never happened with me, so I
Speaker 1: didn't think so. Yeah. I thought maybe he would have
Speaker 1: some sort of plan for his lineage to continue, and
Speaker 1: I was surprised when that didn't happen. But yeah, you
Speaker 1: go on to say about this phase, You say, this
Speaker 1: is how religions get started. Spiritual communities keep going after
Speaker 1: the founder is gone. The disciples keep everything the same
Speaker 1: even though everything has changed. The living example becomes a
Speaker 1: ghost haunting the former grounds, the practice becomes a parody.
Speaker 1: The disciples never grow up, nobody moves on. So that's
Speaker 1: kind of where you found yourself, and that's when you
Speaker 1: made the decision to leave. Is that sort of accurate? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. It's my interpretation. Um, it's a little
Speaker 1: bit harsh, but sometimes we have to be a little
Speaker 1: bit hard. I think when you have a teacher who's
Speaker 1: really really strong, like Sazaki Roshi was, it's easy for
Speaker 1: his presence to linger in the community like long after
Speaker 1: he's gone, and that leads to developments in the community,
Speaker 1: like the people in that community becoming like I don't
Speaker 1: know an alumni association of all the folks that used
Speaker 1: to train with this teacher. I don't think that that's
Speaker 1: honoring the strength or the power of that teacher. And
Speaker 1: so I think when the teacher dies, you know, if
Speaker 1: he hasn't named his successor and the lineage isn't continuing
Speaker 1: in that way, you gotta let him die. Something as
Speaker 1: seriously has to die, fall into the earth, dissolved, so
Speaker 1: that's something new can be born. And even if it's
Speaker 1: just something tiny and small, if it's real, I think
Speaker 1: that's a proper continuation of what that teacher started in you.
Speaker 1: But there is this tendency when you have a really
Speaker 1: strong teacher to just kind of like keep the thing
Speaker 1: going that the teachers started. And all the people get
Speaker 1: together and they argue about what this statement that the
Speaker 1: teacher said meant and what that statement meant, and they
Speaker 1: cling to his words, and they always quote him like
Speaker 1: lawyers quoting a precedent from a previous case and never
Speaker 1: speaking from their own personal experience. And I think that's
Speaker 1: really kind of the trick, is like you have to
Speaker 1: be small. You can't use your teacher as sort of
Speaker 1: your justification, your spiritual bodyguard anymore to push everybody and
Speaker 1: you stand on your own two feet, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then you and I talked about this in the
Speaker 1: last episode. I don't think we need to go into
Speaker 1: a ton of it again. There was also as this
Speaker 1: was all happening, there was I don't know how you
Speaker 1: would phrase it, their allegations against your teacher of impropriety
Speaker 1: of different sorts, which also really kind of ripped the
Speaker 1: community apart. Yeah, they stuck a stake through the heart
Speaker 1: of the community. Really, I would say sexual misconduct like
Speaker 1: I never experienced myself personally. I heard different accounts from
Speaker 1: different women, and I would be uncomfortable using the term. Yeah,
Speaker 1: ROSSI committed sexual misconduct, which can refer to a wide
Speaker 1: variety of things. But that was always in the community.
Speaker 1: It was always a problem. It was always almost like
Speaker 1: a cancer in the background. But it finally came out
Speaker 1: when an ex monk kind of wrote about it and
Speaker 1: published something on a website, and then it just exploded,
Speaker 1: like within weeks. It was in the New York Times,
Speaker 1: and although it was like articles in Japan were coming
Speaker 1: out about it, so it was like a huge, huge scandal,
Speaker 1: and not just that this wound was exposed that had
Speaker 1: been kind of hidden for the longest period of time.
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to bring up the most famous resident
Speaker 1: of the monastery, except that you wrote an essay about
Speaker 1: it not too long ago. So I am now clear
Speaker 1: in talking about Leonard Cohen again, which I always want
Speaker 1: to do because I'm such a huge, huge fan of his.
Speaker 1: You know, it still blows my mind that you used
Speaker 1: to sit next to Leonard Cohen and meditate, and he
Speaker 1: was at your wedding ceremony and all kinds of other things.
Speaker 1: But I just don't want a fan boy out on that.
Speaker 1: What I do actually want to talk about, though, is
Speaker 1: something related to him that you were writing, and you
Speaker 1: were saying how he told you a story about how
Speaker 1: ros She's eccentric wife had tried to sue one of
Speaker 1: his students, a writer who was all so Leonard's friend,
Speaker 1: and that Leonard wound up footing the legal bills for
Speaker 1: both parties while hiding the fact from each other. And
Speaker 1: you love that. But you started off by saying, you know, well,
Speaker 1: Leonard got a pass, he did not have to choose sides.
Speaker 1: I both resented and respected him for this. But then
Speaker 1: you go on to say Here's what I did not understand.
Speaker 1: I did not have to choose sides either. You choose
Speaker 1: to choose say a little bit more about that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think specifically just speak to that quote. You know,
Speaker 1: everybody comes into practice with their own bag of problems
Speaker 1: and capabilities. Right, Leonard had his you know, he said
Speaker 1: himself and born under a lucky star. Right, he had
Speaker 1: a bit of a different saddus in our community. I mean,
Speaker 1: he was Leonard Cohen. You know, he's just he's never
Speaker 1: just going to be a guy sitting in his ropes
Speaker 1: on the one hand, and the other he really was
Speaker 1: just a guy sitting in his ropes, and in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, he was a bad bunk like the
Speaker 1: rest of us, and the kind of a lay bunk
Speaker 1: who never really jumped in and all the stuff. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I made a bit of an identity out
Speaker 1: of being a monk, Like it was all I had.
Speaker 1: I wrote my essays about Zen and I was a monk,
Speaker 1: and I chose to kind of identify with that role
Speaker 1: and to get sucked into the drama. And when the
Speaker 1: scandal hit, for example, I take personally the damage that
Speaker 1: was being done both within and without to our community
Speaker 1: I mean, I chose to go through that experience. It
Speaker 1: would have been very very hard for me to sort
Speaker 1: of pull back and just let the thing unfold. But
Speaker 1: I could have done that. I mean, instead, I just
Speaker 1: kind of got totally pulled into the situation. I mean,
Speaker 1: that experience had a lot of gravitational pull and a
Speaker 1: lot of us really got sucked in. But I do
Speaker 1: think it's it's always a choice, Like you don't have
Speaker 1: to respond a certain way when found you were in
Speaker 1: a role where some response I assume was required. Right
Speaker 1: as administrative abbot or whatever, Right as one of the
Speaker 1: leaders of a community, some response is required. You say,
Speaker 1: though at a different point, that we're not gonna have
Speaker 1: time to get in get into all this. But your
Speaker 1: wife Slash Roscy's other attendant, and you said nobody did
Speaker 1: more than her and I to deepen and solidify the
Speaker 1: split within our SONGA you picked a strong side. Do
Speaker 1: you have any sense of what you might have done differently?
Speaker 1: And I'm not looking for necessarily real specifics, because most
Speaker 1: people listening aren't going to know the situation well enough.
Speaker 1: It's more how could you fulfill the role that you
Speaker 1: had to play as a leader? How could you do
Speaker 1: what you thought was the right thing, and yet also
Speaker 1: maybe not land so firmly in one place, or do
Speaker 1: you sort of feel like you did the right thing,
Speaker 1: but had I behaved differently, the outcome of that whole
Speaker 1: situation and that whole series of events would have been
Speaker 1: totally different, leading me to say something different now. So
Speaker 1: in retrospect, I don't think I would change anything that
Speaker 1: I did. I mean, it was my imperative to make
Speaker 1: a public statement sort of apologizing for the role that
Speaker 1: myself and other priests had played in the culture of misconduct.
Speaker 1: In retrospect, though, I hope that and I think it
Speaker 1: did serve the purpose of the people who felt like
Speaker 1: they hadn't been heard over all these years were now
Speaker 1: we were acknowledging them, And in that sense, I think
Speaker 1: it was good. In another sense, I think you can't
Speaker 1: speak for your teacher, and maybe sometimes it's better to
Speaker 1: stay silent. You get into politics when you start making
Speaker 1: statements like that, and I'm not sure how ultimately helpful
Speaker 1: that is. It may have been the case that I
Speaker 1: and maybe others should have just sat back and let
Speaker 1: the kind of the community dissolve fall apart, not try
Speaker 1: and say that or salvage it or speak to the misconduct.
Speaker 1: I don't know in the end. Yeah, yeah, when you're
Speaker 1: reflecting all this, you're sort of talking about two roles, right,
Speaker 1: You're talking about the role of a monk and a writer. Right,
Speaker 1: You're talking about Leonard's great writing around this, and how
Speaker 1: great writing suggests it doesn't decide. It opens up the problem,
Speaker 1: it doesn't solve it. That is the work of the artist.
Speaker 1: But you were not just an artist, right, you were
Speaker 1: also in a position of leadership, and leadership's job is
Speaker 1: not to open up the problem and not solve it,
Speaker 1: right Like. Unfortunately, when you're in a leadership role, you know,
Speaker 1: we are called to guide things at one direction or
Speaker 1: the other, and so I just have a lot of
Speaker 1: sympathy for, you know, kind of where you were going
Speaker 1: through all that. Yeah, that's a good point. I think,
Speaker 1: actually what the whole situation exposes that I'm just not
Speaker 1: a very good leader. More and more the artist's mentality,
Speaker 1: which is to sit with ambiguity rather than to try
Speaker 1: and lead people through it. Yep. Well, leadership is difficult,
Speaker 1: particularly when you are a not really given authority. Right,
Speaker 1: You're you're sort of in a semi leadership role and
Speaker 1: then a tsunami rolls through. Right, you may not be
Speaker 1: leadership material, but I wouldn't write yourself off completely for
Speaker 1: that one situation, because that's pretty rough going. What we
Speaker 1: can write you off as having is the Hobner hes right, right,
Speaker 1: right right, you know, we know you've got the Hobner hecks,
Speaker 1: which we can get into a little bit. But there's
Speaker 1: this image of you talking to your father, right and
Speaker 1: him describing that when you are a little baby, you
Speaker 1: are nursing at your mother, happy as could be, and
Speaker 1: then you sort of just pop up and you're not happy.
Speaker 1: He says, basically, you're not even happy there, you know,
Speaker 1: and you're thinking to yourself, where else would I ever
Speaker 1: be happy? And your dad's telling you the story because
Speaker 1: you need to know what you're dealing with, right, You
Speaker 1: can't change what you are not at some zen monastery.
Speaker 1: It was there from the start. The best you can
Speaker 1: do is make peace with it. It's your dad is
Speaker 1: a trip. Is your dad's still alive? Yeah, he's still alive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's very healthy. I don't know how he's still alive.
Speaker 1: He lives at a diet of like canned beans and
Speaker 1: doughnuts and angel food game. He's healthier than all of us.
Speaker 1: A bug and Wisconsin, is that right, those those hardy Midwesterners.
Speaker 1: You also tell about his father's brother, drunken, schizophrenic hobo
Speaker 1: who got murdered riding the rails. The other hoboes lit
Speaker 1: him on fire and pushed him right out of the
Speaker 1: moving railroad car. You want to know why your dad
Speaker 1: asks you? You say, I leaned forward all ears I do,
Speaker 1: and your dad says, so do I. This is a great,
Speaker 1: hilarious chapter. And the reason I think you're such a
Speaker 1: great writer is you do something that I think all
Speaker 1: my favorite writers do, which is I am laughing and
Speaker 1: then I am either crying or deeply reflecting sentences later.
Speaker 1: You know, it's one thing to be funny, it's one
Speaker 1: thing to be deep, but it's a different thing to
Speaker 1: be both so close together. It's a real gift and
Speaker 1: you have it. But you're talking about this idea of
Speaker 1: trying to work with this idea. Your dad's basically saying, look,
Speaker 1: as a family were cursed. Absolutely, we're not made to
Speaker 1: be happy. We're not going to be happy. And you
Speaker 1: talk about that your ideas, you're going to teach your
Speaker 1: dad how to see this differently, and then you go
Speaker 1: on to say that you needed to take your own medicine.
Speaker 1: Say more about that. I don't remember what I meant
Speaker 1: by take your own medicine. But I've always had this idea,
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is, that I can somehow
Speaker 1: solve things about my parents that seemed to me to
Speaker 1: be problems and that seemed to me to have blatant solutions,
Speaker 1: you know, one of which is my dad's ongoing combat
Speaker 1: with monotheism. So he rejected it when he was younger,
Speaker 1: but he's still carrying around this sort of apparatus of
Speaker 1: the theological mindset, and SI can't get rid of it.
Speaker 1: So he's always sort of semi embracing the idea of
Speaker 1: God and completely at war with it at the same time.
Speaker 1: And somehow I wanted to just try and flip that
Speaker 1: switch where he can see what I saw when I
Speaker 1: first got introduced to Buddhism, especially the idea of of
Speaker 1: no self right. So I've always had this idea that
Speaker 1: I can introduce him to this notion. We always have
Speaker 1: the same conversations, and I always come back around to
Speaker 1: this point, and then I find a way to present
Speaker 1: the basic Buddhist teachings to him, and I feel like
Speaker 1: I've done it perfectly, and I wait for the switch
Speaker 1: to be flipped, and then I think in this case
Speaker 1: that I wrote about, He paused and then he said,
Speaker 1: I want to tell you about big was. So he
Speaker 1: told this long story about how a friend of his
Speaker 1: had run over a deer in the street and he
Speaker 1: went to get the deer and he was going to
Speaker 1: throw it in the back of his truck, and then
Speaker 1: he saw something flash in the front just went up
Speaker 1: in front of his truck, and then Bigfoot came behind
Speaker 1: him and sold the deer. And so basically, my dad
Speaker 1: was telling me the story because what I had just
Speaker 1: told him about Buddhism was so crazy that he now
Speaker 1: felt like he had a spiritual ally insanity that he
Speaker 1: could tell his crazy a story to about Bigfoot. So
Speaker 1: at that point I just gave up and said, you
Speaker 1: know what, I completely give up on this project of
Speaker 1: converting My dad to said, yeah, well, you also talked about,
Speaker 1: you know, the conclusion that you know, we are an
Speaker 1: alien race that was mixed with monkey d n A.
Speaker 1: I went backpacking. I don't know, it's been a year
Speaker 1: and a half ago, and I wanted to learn how
Speaker 1: to backpack, like put all your stuff on your back,
Speaker 1: hike out in the woods, and and live out there
Speaker 1: for a few days. There's a guy who offers a
Speaker 1: service to do this to you. He'll teach you to
Speaker 1: do it. It'll help you get your gear lists. So
Speaker 1: I do all this first night we hike out, we're
Speaker 1: standing around the camp fire, it's getting kind of dark,
Speaker 1: and then he just starts in on exactly the same
Speaker 1: thing that really the only conclusion you can come up
Speaker 1: with is that we are the results of aliens mating
Speaker 1: with monkeys, you know, so that we would be a
Speaker 1: race of slaves. And I'm just having this moment of like,
Speaker 1: who if I just entrusted myself to write you also
Speaker 1: say that somewhere in there, I got an earful about
Speaker 1: about how et put the christ Bunn and Mother Mary's oven.
Speaker 1: Is that your dad's actual quote or you paraphrasing him.
Speaker 1: I'm paraphrasing, very very sort of sarcastically paraphrasing his basic premise,
Speaker 1: which is exactly what you're backpacking buddy said, which is, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no way that we made the leap from apes
Speaker 1: to humans without some supernatural alien DNA. Yeah, it's exactly
Speaker 1: what my dad believes. I mean, I suppose it's possible.
Speaker 1: I don't rule anything out, but does seem to me
Speaker 1: to be less likely. The medicine that I mentioned is
Speaker 1: you said, listen to yourself for once, instead of trying
Speaker 1: to get everybody else's attention. You are not trapped in
Speaker 1: your own special Hobbner hell, haunted by ghosts who bear
Speaker 1: echoes of your DNA. Take your own Buddhist medicine, which
Speaker 1: basically is you are free. That's right. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: whenever I go home and I'm around my family, it's
Speaker 1: like I think it was Rob Doss who said, if
Speaker 1: you think you're enlightened, just go spend a week with
Speaker 1: your parents. Yeah, that this appears you of that notion,
Speaker 1: you know. And then my my dad comes along and
Speaker 1: like he has these ways of just throwing this net
Speaker 1: over my spirit, my story spirit, and pulling it back
Speaker 1: down to earth, you know, And one of those is, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have this Hobbner hacks and there's kind of a
Speaker 1: sort of a craziness and an anxiety in our family,
Speaker 1: and it's probably in our epigenes, and it extends back
Speaker 1: to the hobo who got that on fire and pushed
Speaker 1: out of the train car, and it ends through and
Speaker 1: he'll name several of my nieces and nephews who seem
Speaker 1: to have the same kind of anxiety, and he'll tell
Speaker 1: me this manifest is really clearly in me. And then
Speaker 1: I try and cure him of his all perhapses by
Speaker 1: Buddhist teachings of no self, and really, in the end,
Speaker 1: my dad's on his own path, and I need to
Speaker 1: take my own medicine and just remember, like we're talking
Speaker 1: a little bit about earlier, I could be intimate with
Speaker 1: some of the facts around my personality and my family history,
Speaker 1: but I don't have to take that personal history and
Speaker 1: some of these facts where my personality as Bible, you know,
Speaker 1: right right, I really am free. I really am free
Speaker 1: on these things. And it's deep that you don't have
Speaker 1: to slip into the roles that are waiting for you
Speaker 1: when you walk through the door at night you go
Speaker 1: see your spouse, or when you walk through your childhood
Speaker 1: home and you go see your father, like it's a choice.
Speaker 1: You don't have to get into those rules. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that stuff is so interesting because there's no doubt
Speaker 1: we are a result to some degree of causes and conditions, right,
Speaker 1: whether those causes and conditions are the way we were raised,
Speaker 1: the culture we were raised in, our genetics, those things
Speaker 1: play a role. But how do we talk about those
Speaker 1: things in a way that helps us acknowledge what's actually
Speaker 1: there so that we can see it, so that we
Speaker 1: can work with it, but not then become subservient to
Speaker 1: it or not believe it's destiny. It's it's that balance.
Speaker 1: And and a word that I really like is tendency, right,
Speaker 1: Like I have certain tendencies, but those tendencies can certainly
Speaker 1: be adjusted, you know, That's all they are. They're a
Speaker 1: tendency and that seems to strike some middle ground for me.
Speaker 1: That works. Well, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, tendencies the
Speaker 1: other like cloaks or robes or rolls that we just
Speaker 1: slip into, we wear and we masks personas, but not
Speaker 1: fundamentally the some of our parts were manifesting the source,
Speaker 1: if you will. That's fundamental. Yeah, and that I think
Speaker 1: really important to remember. Rain or shine. Yeah, there's somewhere
Speaker 1: in all of these essays. You just had a line
Speaker 1: that really hit me. It was talking about this idea
Speaker 1: of no self right, which is sort of what you
Speaker 1: just said, which is we're not the sum of all
Speaker 1: our parts. Were all these different parts, but we're not
Speaker 1: exactly the sum of them, and we're not some little
Speaker 1: thing that sits right in the middle and holds them
Speaker 1: all together. But you used a phrase that I really loved,
Speaker 1: and you said no self, which means complete self. Those
Speaker 1: are two words that seem very different, no and complete,
Speaker 1: but it really resonated with me. Do you want to
Speaker 1: say more about thinking of it in that sense the
Speaker 1: way I was taught to look at it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's very specifically relates to my teachers what he called
Speaker 1: the takata z and he talked about making relationship and
Speaker 1: it's kind of a homespun phrase, but it has deep
Speaker 1: meaning for me anyways. So for example, when we're just
Speaker 1: sitting on the cushion, how do you manifest no self? Right?
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a canard, right. My teacher was
Speaker 1: proactive about it. He would say, well, you can't drop
Speaker 1: the self because the self can't drop the self. It's
Speaker 1: a vicious circle. You can't just forget the self or
Speaker 1: or use the mind to get rid of the mind.
Speaker 1: Like all these things are part of the problem. They're circular,
Speaker 1: so you have to give the self away. That's how
Speaker 1: you manifest no self is you give the subway, so
Speaker 1: you complete the self. You get out of your own
Speaker 1: way and you give yourself to the breath. So it's
Speaker 1: always like through your something other than yourself. That's how
Speaker 1: you manifest no self. How else right? How else? I mean?
Speaker 1: He used to say I need a hundred percent, And
Speaker 1: what he meant by that is like, it's not I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do this activity, whether it was breathing or chopping
Speaker 1: the carrots in the monastery kitchen or doing your co
Speaker 1: on practice with Roscy. It wasn't nine I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: that percent. But five percent to me is going to
Speaker 1: kind of be watching. It's got to be a d percent.
Speaker 1: That's no self. And so you you give the self
Speaker 1: completely to whatever the activity is right, and then you're gone.
Speaker 1: That's the complete self when there's no self right. But then,
Speaker 1: amazingly I was taught that the surroundings always give rise
Speaker 1: to you again from that complete self. You're timing little
Speaker 1: you know, Eric or Jack arises like conditional self. It's
Speaker 1: there again. So that sort of the nuts and bolts
Speaker 1: of the tetargetazet that my teacher taught and you can
Speaker 1: do that in any situation whatsoever. What I like about
Speaker 1: is that it's proactive, like you do something. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: love this idea too, that you write that the self
Speaker 1: is standing between me and something else. You're describing a bird, um,
Speaker 1: and maybe we'll get to that in a minute, but
Speaker 1: describing a bird. That the self is the thing that
Speaker 1: sort of standing between you and the bird, between you
Speaker 1: giving yourself and having full relationship with the bird. And
Speaker 1: I love that idea of making relationship. Of my favorite
Speaker 1: quotes about Enlightenment, to circle back to earlier Enlightenment quotes
Speaker 1: is I believe it's Dogan said enlightenment is intimacy with
Speaker 1: all things. That is always really resonated with me, because
Speaker 1: intimacy with all things means, as we said earlier, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not thinking about myself or I am feeling myself
Speaker 1: in all things. And that's the way in which I
Speaker 1: like that idea of complete self speaks to like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm seeing all of it as myself in some way, yeah,
Speaker 1: intimate with it and and um kind of that recognition.
Speaker 1: I look at you and I see myself. I mean
Speaker 1: words are a poor descriptor, but it's kind of my
Speaker 1: teaching you to talk a lot about how the mother
Speaker 1: sees her child, and it's like there's no separation. The
Speaker 1: child is smiling the Welsh like exact same time, there's
Speaker 1: no separation between self and other in that instance, and
Speaker 1: that was a handy metaphor for him for the intimacy
Speaker 1: that one is trying to develop through sudden practice with
Speaker 1: all activities and all all things. Yeah, yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: think that is a great place for us to wrap up.
Speaker 1: You and I are going to talk for a few
Speaker 1: minutes in the post show conversation because you have posed
Speaker 1: a question that the world needs to know. The answer
Speaker 1: to which is can a computer answer is in co on,
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about that in the post
Speaker 1: show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to this post
Speaker 1: show conversation all the other ones we've had ad free
Speaker 1: episodes and the joy of giving a gift to a
Speaker 1: program that you love, go to one you feed, dot Net,
Speaker 1: slash join Jack. Thanks so much for coming on. It's
Speaker 1: always such a pleasure to have you on. We'll have
Speaker 1: links in the show notes to your Patreon page. I
Speaker 1: highly recommend your videos are great, you're posting essays there,
Speaker 1: and you are, as I've alluded to multiple times, I think,
Speaker 1: an extraordinarily talented writer. So thank you so much. Thank
Speaker 1: you for having me on. It was really fun, really invigorating.
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