This life is a movie, and the purpose of life is to turn around and see the projector. So much of the modern mindfulness movement is focusing on mindfulness as a thing that I do, and it doesn't really point us to the total connectivity of our lives. It's not a path out of the world; it's a path deeply into the world. And I think this is a really important flavor of Zen.
Now I want to... I'm going to just... let me... can I tell you a quick story, personal? When I began the path of meditative training nearly 40 years ago, I had no idea. You don't need to have practiced in order to have realization or awakening. It's so easy for us to think it's down the road, but it can't be. There is only now. But also, I think it's really true: freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. In other words, the pain of heartbreak can open the heart, and when the heart is open, we're really alive.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is an authorized teacher in the Zen lineage. He is a poet, a novelist, creator of the Way app, and an incredible voice in the space of Zen. Henry Shukman, thank you for being here.
It's great to be with you, Andre.
Your voice has an incredible sound, especially for guided meditations. I am looking forward to having this episode be a solid introduction into the world of Zen, which I think has become quite commercialized. That term, however catchy it is, has been put on many different packages as a branding for well-being. And I would love to dive deep with you today. So to start very simply, what is Zen?
Yeah, that's a great question that Zen itself has been trying to answer for thousands of years, because the heart of it is unnameable. But at the same time, it's this very moment exactly as it is right now. So Zen, in a slightly less obscure way of putting it, it's one of the many forms of Buddhism. It's a form of Buddhism that has got Taoism in it as well. And what that means in practical terms is that among the various kinds of Buddhism that there are — Tibetan, you know, Theravada, Vipassana, and so on, many, many forms of Buddhism — actually Zen, I think it's fair to say, is the simplest, simplest in the sense that there's very little kind of extraneous material. You don't have a lot of beliefs. There aren't, you know, pantheons of bodhisattvas and Buddhas and sort of semi-divine and divine entities. It all comes down to the practice.
That's really what Zen focuses on. And the practice is, number one, meditation as the growth point, as what allows us to grow as humans, and number two, life, ordinary daily life, as a kind of extension of the meditation. And in a way, Zen almost doesn't really want to exist. There is a view that if when we really get Zen deeply, Zen kind of self-destructs, you know, like a Mission Impossible tape, it vanishes. When we really get the message, what it's trying to communicate, it's kind of not there anymore. The Zen part is not there anymore. So, I don't know. That's probably rather obscure, but that's...
No, that's direct. How would you articulate the goal of Zen and Zen practice? What is the promise that it brings?
Yeah. Look, so I got to acknowledge there are different kinds of Zen. Okay. So they probably all answer that differently.
In the school that I've trained in mostly, Zen, they're fairly explicit about it. There's the hope, there's the possibility that we can go through a radical realization where we discover that what we've been all along is not invalidated, but it's a small part of the overall picture. That, you know, the sense of I being basically inhabiting this skin bag, this particular body, you know...
Me too. Right, exactly. That this is not what I am fundamentally. Yeah, I totally... you know, this body, mind, heart, this is what I think of as me, but at the same time, the sense of this body being separate from all else is an illusion.
And it's actually possible for us humans, and many traditions recognize this, of course, it's possible to recognize a much deeper self that is all-inclusive, that is timeless, that is spaceless, that is infinite, that has always been here and is unnameable. Actually, you can't... there is no word for it, but you can experience it. And Zen, as I've known it, trusts that all of us can recognize that. And, you know, we call it awakening, some, or realization, some, or recognition, some might call it enlightenment, but I don't know, we're a little tentative with that word because it sounds quite grand. But we can recognize it, and it's, you know, often a turning point in a life to do so. But that's really, in a way, stage one, because the next part is how do we live it? How do we manifest what we've realized in our daily life? And that's, in a way, that's more important, you know. So that would be a very headline, topline level of stating what it's all about for Zen.
Yeah, we'll dive deeper into the iceberg that's under the water, so to speak. But for a bit more context in terms of the origination of Zen before it kind of bifurcated into many different disciplines, could you give us the spark notes of how it came from India to China to Japan and the many different forms it took? What's just like the overview of how it came to be?
Yeah, totally. So there's history and there's a bit of mythology, and they're really hard to tease apart. But basically, between about... so Buddhism develops, you know, in the fourth or fifth century BCE in northern India with Shakyamuni Buddha and Siddhartha Gautama and his rigors and his training and his realization of the middle way and his coming to a, you know, profound awakening, becoming the Buddha, the awakened one. And in Zen's view, the heart of what he realized got transmitted or transferred from India to China in about 500 or 527, officially they reckon, in CE, you know, the Common Era. And it was this figure called Bodhidharma who is said to have sort of brought the practice of Zen Buddhism, which was called Dhyana Buddhism — this is their view, it's really about meditation, meditation Buddhism brought rather than lots of practices and liturgy and sutra studies, doctrinal study — just the core practice of sitting still as a human being that was brought from India to China. This is the Zen official biography kind of thing in around, yeah, 527 CE by Bodhidharma.
In China, Bodhidharma, there's various adventures and episodes in his life, but the fundamental one was that he sat for nine years on his own in a cave, and that was how he planted this Zen form of Buddhism in China. This is all, you know, legend, history, something. And out of Bodhidharma's practice, you know, he had various disciples, and they started to spread this form of Buddhism. There had already been Buddhism coming into China, and probably actually really Zen was the culmination of that process over several centuries. But I think it emerged as a kind of distinctive expression of Buddhism probably around 600, which was, yeah, founded on this real simplicity that you don't need a lot of beliefs, you don't need doctrine in the end, you don't even need scripture, sutras. You just need to examine your own experience, and you can come to know it in a new way. You can come to understand the relationship between me and the world in a radically different way that relieves a lot of the pains of the human heart, you know, and it allows our hearts actually to grow exponentially and be much more open. And yeah, we will be concerned and motivated by compassion for the sufferings in this world. So it's not a kind of, you know, withdrawal. It's very much about a deeper engagement with the world coming out of the realization that we can have.
Sorry, is that a... you know, actually I could carry on. That got us to China. But then it spreads, you know, it spreads to Japan, it spreads to Korea, it spreads to Vietnam, you know, there are other forms of Zen that exist to this day that are not... this is not just the Japanese expression of it. You know, in China they called it Chan actually. So, you know, it's... and like I said earlier, it's got a mix in it of Taoism, you know, which has perhaps more emphasis on... as a result of that mixture, there's more emphasis on, say, artistic expression. You know, one of the things that attracted me to Zen as a poet, as a writer, was that it has such a great, rich history of poetry, of landscape painting, of calligraphy, you know, and of tea ceremonies. It's got these artistic expressions kind of woven into its history. And as a, you know, 20th, 21st century writer and poet, for me that was like a natural kind of meeting ground that I found in Zen that I wouldn't have found so strongly in other kinds of practice.
Do you think that's in part your sort of inherent resistance to authority and tradition? There's something beautiful about the directness of the path and how it doesn't require often parsing through a lot of dogmatic language or even tradition at times to just sit with the directness of the experience it's offering.
That is exactly right. Yeah. And, you know, I'd had a... I mean, I grew up in a fairly convention-bound culture already in the UK, you know, back in the '60s and '70s when I was a kid. England was still quite... I don't know, it was quite a kind of conformist, convention-based kind of society compared to, say, California or something at the same time. And I didn't need to adopt another one. I didn't want to go into another set of cultural trappings. I actually really wanted something that could meet, you know, my own experience directly and wasn't exactly, as you say, wasn't going to require kind of a whole slew of doctrinal study, which is really kind of adopting yet another culture. I didn't really want that. And Zen didn't offer that. It was just about meeting human experience directly, this very moment, coming back to it again and again. You know.
I would love to fast forward and jump straight into the heart of your work, your most recent book, Original Love, and the premise of what that is. Because I think that we have culturally programmed the opposite — that we are fundamentally sinful creatures in the Western Abrahamic faiths, at least the way they position it. So what is the proposition, not only of the Zen tradition in which you share, but of so much of your work about who we are?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what I've come to find, you know, is that we've got our surface sense of self that's trying to manage its existence in the world. Underneath that, we've got a kind of deeper soul self that has a calling and that is kind of wired to grow and wants to grow and loves to grow and loves enriching experiences and loves love, you know, and is fearless, and that's beautiful. But deeper still, there's what is sometimes called original nature or fundamental nature. And that's what I really mean by original love. It's a discovery that we're not separate. We're not separate from anything. That there's a different order of experience always right here, where, you know, at the same time we're exactly who we think we are — this body, this mind, this heart — but we're also, yeah, boundless, timeless, infinite, and without size, without dimension, without history, without future, although history and future allowed, you know, but fundamentally they're just happening now. And in this kind of primordial present moment, because we're not separate in any way, because we're part of a great reality that is all-inclusive, it's like love. To find it is like discovering an ultimate belonging. And it just fills the human heart with relief and joy and love to know it. And it also can reorient us to lives of love and service and compassion, probably always imperfectly, but it can make that reorientation happen. So, man, it's not just an original nature, it's an original love. That's what I feel.
So yeah, to bring that back to the notion of original sin, you know, I don't accept that fundamentally, you know, we're wrong, defective, bad, and that we've got to be redeemed from that. I actually just don't believe that. I think maybe superficially we could use some help, you know, and certainly I have done and continue to actually, and I think this is an important point. But deep down what we are is already, you know, an infinite, boundless, nameless reality, one of whose [aspects] is unconditional love. So that's a long answer, but that's really what I think it comes down to. An unconditional love that is in our deepest nature. And finding that is the journey of a lifetime. It's such an amazing thing to get to know that this isn't some thing I've achieved because of my arduous, you know, self-mortification or my rigorous spiritual practice. It's always been here. It's not an accomplishment.
Yeah. You know, I think an amazing doorway into starting to glimpse that nature, our true nature for ourselves, which is the most important, instead of, you know, studying in a book, reading it, hearing it in a podcast, is first off to examine how scattered our minds are. And I think a lot of us understand the notion of bodies that are in shape, that are fit. You know, we have full industries, multi-billion dollar industries focused on getting people in shape, from the gyms to the wellness institutions, and we get that. But the mind, because it's more invisible in nature, we don't understand that it needs the same level of attention, especially this day and age, maybe even more so. They're fundamentally connected. But what is the connection there, you think, between working with the mind, our identification with our thoughts, and then deeper on the path getting to glimpse our true original nature? But start us a bit earlier on the journey. Most of us feel really swayed and identified with this voice in our head.
Yeah. It's so true. Yeah. No. Well, I think, you know, in my book, Original Love, actually, I parse out these four main areas of development that we can go through in our spiritual lives. And of course this could be sliced and diced many ways, I totally acknowledge that, but I think these four — I call them 'ins' like refuges — I think they are a reasonable way of looking at it. And the first is mindfulness, you know, and mindfulness means becoming aware of what's actually going on around me and within me. And most of us, and myself totally included, you know, when I began the path of meditative training, you know, for nearly 40 years ago, I had no idea that I was actually listening to a voice in my head so much of my waking hours, and it was not a very friendly, kind, supportive, helpful voice. It was doing, you know, a lot of like, 'you got to do this,' 'you failed at that,' 'you're no good,' you know, and 'this is awful' and all that kind of disturbing language was going on. And even when it wasn't disturbing, it was still chattering away, commenting, and, you know, a running commentary. To become aware of that is a big shift, because the moment we notice, 'oh, I'm aware, here I am aware, and there's this voice,' that's already created a little bit of a gap between me and the voice, whereas previously, just exactly as you said, I'd been totally identified with it, that somehow this voice is me being me. Well, it's not. It's thought arising in a verbal form, you know, which happens a lot for a lot of the time for a lot of people. So, becoming mindful allows us to be aware of that voice and to have a little break from it, gap from it, distance from it, and space around it. And we start to find that we can actually inhabit that space rather than the voice. It's a great relief.
I think such a liberating aspect of that is when you start to have some distance between you and your thoughts and emotions, you feel more free in your life. And so much of what we thought we were going to externally gain and would be the cause of our freedom externally — whatever sort of arrangements, career, relationships, whatnot — we can approach those things less under the illusion they're going to provide us the solace we once thought they would. And so let's keep going down these 'ins'. So what would be the next 'in', so to speak?
Yeah. Yeah. Can I just add something to that? Because it's like we get so locked into this world before us and we're so preoccupied with it, and then when we stop doing something we get preoccupied with the cloud of thoughts that come up. So it's finding that actually we can let go a little bit. We can put down the tasks. We can put down the thoughts and there's this great space. So that's right on. Okay. Second 'in' is, yeah, it's about really... I needed to state this. It's about support and connection. And I needed to state it because so much of the modern mindfulness movement is focusing on mindfulness as a thing that I do. It's just for me and it's just my own sole responsibility. And it doesn't really point us to the total connectivity of our lives, that we're already in a great field of connections and of support. You know, look at a human body, all the factors that have to come together for a human being to exist. All of that is a form of support and infinite connection allowing us just to exist. You know, then we've all got families. We may have varying relationships with them, but we are part of a family. We're also part of the whole human family. We're also, you know, nourished every minute by breath, by the food we take in, by the water we drink. Yeah, and the air we breathe and, you know, the earth we stand on, all of that, and the warmth that we need constantly, every moment of our lives, we're actually bearing the fruit of so much support, we're expressing so much support that is making us exist. So to be acknowledging that seemed to me really important, that mindfulness too is not an isolated solo pursuit. It's not like me just going to the gym and doing reps, you know. It's actually helping me recognize that I'm part of infinite networks and that I'm not alone. And that's why in the old traditional Buddhist view, yeah, there was practice. Doing your practice is critical, but so was community. What they call Sangha, you know, it's the third refuge. There's places where the Buddha said... he was asked, 'is Sangha... I've heard you say, Buddha...' somebody said to him, one of his disciples, 'I've heard you say that Sangha is half of the holy life. Would you agree with that?' 'No, Sangha is the whole of the holy life.' It's all about community and connection. So for us to just remember that, that's why the second 'in' is in. And that is in my scheme, in my book, Original Love. And also, by the way, on the app we work through these 'ins' — we call them zones in the app — in the same way. But let me just say that that is not only in the visible and kind of material level of connections we have with friends and guides and coaches and whatever, therapists, whatever we might have, you know, teachers, mentors. It's also in a kind of less tangible form as well, I believe, which some call the archetypal realm. You know, shamanism can take us to it. Dreamwork can take us to it. Meditation actually can open us up to more receptivity to a kind of archetypal, imaginal realm, as some call it, which is a little bit like Jung's collective unconscious, where there's levels of connectivity that we don't see but we're truly part of. And I think that's really important. I feel it's like soul work, recognizing a deeper part of ourselves that has, as I said earlier, has its calling in this world, in this life, and wants to grow. And, you know, this art comes from it and self-expression of different kinds. You know, I think that's a really important side of our spiritual lives, and we don't want to get too sterile, like kind of slightly dry mindfulness. You know, no, it's a rich thing, you know. So that would be the second 'in'. Yeah.
Amazing. We'll keep riding the train. What's the third stop?
Yeah, the third stop is like... it's actually what Buddhism calls samadhi, or sometimes translated concentration. I don't think that's a good translation myself. It's more like absorption. And it's when we get into flow states, basically. It could be flow states from activities, but it can also be, if we have a practice of meditation, in meditation you can drop into these really beautiful flow-like states where, you know, and even novice meditators will know this, where, you know, we're used to finding it a bit of a grind, kind of hard, and 'what am I supposed to do? Follow my breath? I can't do that. Be aware of the present moment. Oh no, I'm just lost in thought.' But then we'll suddenly get these moments when we don't exactly know how or why, but suddenly we're clear, we're calm. Experience is very rich and beautiful, and it's like we're effortlessly doing the practice. We're suddenly, 'oh my gosh, this is what it's all about. I never knew I could find this clear, free, easy awareness that's really attentive.' That's samadhi, that's flow states in meditation, and it's beautiful.
What are jhanas, and so how does that go in here?
Yeah, they fall into this category. Jhana states are these... it's a set of slightly different flavors of absorption that you can learn to bring on in meditation. There are some subtle, kind of slightly technical methods for getting into jhana states, which are progressively more refined and powerful states of absorption.
Would you rank them? I suppose it's futile to, but like on levels of deepness or profoundness of experience, I'm curious to hear your... maybe it relates to your own personal experience in altered states. But what are a sample platter of these different states one might find themselves in as they do this work?
Yeah. Well, you know, I've got to say right off the bat that I believe these are real natural human states. They're not like... altered in the sense. Yeah. In a way they're not, they're built into us, I think, to be able to drop into them. I had them as a kid. I found out later when I did some jhana training, said, 'oh my gosh, this used to happen to me.' I had very severe eczema as a kid, right through my childhood, chronic and severe. I was sometimes hospitalized for it, and, you know, like skin problem, and it was very, very difficult to live with actually. It was, you know, the itch, the pain, the burning, it was very, very difficult. And but at times, usually when I was in bed at night and couldn't go to sleep because of the itching, I would suddenly find myself in this different state where it felt like I was kind of held in this sort of glowing cloud or something like that, and that all the pain and all the itching would have stopped, and it was beautiful and very, very peaceful. And when I first did jhana training many, many years later, and suddenly the gear shifted and I was in this beautiful glowing peaceful state with this sort of rippling field of energy all through me. And when I described it to the trainer I was working with, the meditation teacher I was working with, I said, 'Oh, hey, this thing happened that used to happen to me as a kid. It's so beautiful.' They said, 'Oh, yeah, that's first jhana and second jhana.' You know, and so that's how I knew that these aren't artificial or something, you know, they're real deep in us, but they...
Just a note on that. I think it's really an important point that these actually aren't altered states. They are from the perspective of an identified conventional self, but from the perspective of our true self, these are natural states, and actually the identification with our ego and thoughts is actually the altered state.
That's beautifully put. Thank you. Exactly right on. And, you know, they can get more refined. So the third jhana, it's all about this joy and well-being. It's very peaceful. Fourth jhana, you know, you're in equanimity and it's all-pervasive. And then you get... those are the first four. And then there's another set of four that are considered the formless jhanas, because one is about boundless space, one is about boundless consciousness. And they get emptier and more refined as you go.
Could we dive into one? So boundless space or boundless consciousness. From the subjective intrinsic experience of that, what is that experience like? How would you describe that?
Yeah, it's very beautiful. You know, boundless space, there's a sense that, you know, you can feel that from your heart outward there's just one space and it has no limit. And it's very... the heart is always engaged actually because it's so beautiful and you feel it's all... everything's encompassed in one great space, you know. And then boundless consciousness is everything is encompassed in one consciousness. It's also very... it's sort of moving. I find I almost get a little tearful in them because they're so beautiful. And it's amazing to me that so much peace and joy and love could come with so little. Like it's not because you're in a, you know, much as I love a fabulous home, it's not because you're in one. You could be sitting in a hut and find this. You could be, you know, virtually penniless and you could find such deep contentment in your very own being. I find that so beautiful.
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Yeah, we just had one of the most prolific Vedanta teachers on, Swami Sarvapriyananda, and he was sharing about... there's this great non-dual book called I Am That.
That book is actually in my... I read it every day. Yeah.
Oh, amazing. Yeah. Nisargadatta Maharaj, and he had this experience where he went off to the Himalayas and had this enlightening experience and realized he doesn't need to be up there. He could go back into the slums, which is, you know, stricken with poverty, and actually there is nothing wrong with it, and live the rest of his life in that place, in that state. In the deepening of these jhanas and having it more be embedded in your day-to-day experience, home isn't a place that you try to seek externally. It becomes more and more the place and the presence you are wherever you go. And I think the most important thing on the spiritual path is to actually have a taste of this. Not just reading the menu but having the meal. It's like in the intrinsic experience of this where it becomes self-evident. Maybe you're looking at a view, you're out looking at the horizon and suddenly this experience of someone perceiving something outside of yourself dissolves and it just becomes one thing, which I know you've had obviously, I'm sure many, but earlier on as well with a sunset experience.
Yes. Well, look, we're jumping ahead a tiny bit now because in my view these jhana states aren't quite the same as realization, and which is the fourth 'in'. So, but I need to get to the fourth 'in' to explain why I think...
We'll keep on going then. Should we do that?
Yeah. So the formless... yeah, the formless jhanas are getting... that's as close as you can get to realization or awakening without awakening. Okay, that's Henry's view, and it's pretty consistent with a lot of Buddhist views as well. It's a little complex because the word samadhi has got different meanings. In the Vedantic world there are at least three levels of samadhi, and only the first one is the Buddhist view of samadhi, where samadhi is you haven't yet realized, you haven't yet had realization, but you're in a very deep beautiful state. And whereas in the Vedantic view, yeah, the two other forms of samadhi are the same as realization. So you got to just... yeah, the terminology gets a little tricky, and it also gets tricky because these are all very refined states of mind anyway. But here's the thing: in the fourth 'in', there's a decisive thing that happens which you don't need to have happened for the jhana states. You've seen through your sense of self. It's not just that the sense of self has gone quiet, which it definitely does in jhana, but you've seen through it. You've seen that it was actually never here the way you thought to begin with. And this can happen in different ways. I mean, the first thing actually I got to say about realization is it's actually not contingent on practice, which is a pretty radical thing. You don't need to have practiced in order to have realization or awakening. You don't even... you can practice a lot and not have realization slash awakening. It's a different order.
Now I want to... I'm going to just... let me... can I tell you a quick story, personal again?
Yeah, let her rip. You know, when I was 19, before I'd done any practice at all, I had a moment of quite significant realization, awakening that landed on me. And I had no idea what it was except that it was the truth. It was the truth of my life. And I was... yeah, I was standing on a beach watching the sun go down. And I was looking at the light on the water and I noticed that it wasn't just one brightness. It was like pieces of brightness, scales of brightness on the water moving over this totally black surface of the water, bright and black. And I couldn't... is it bright? Is it dark? I was trying to figure it out. And all of a sudden, me and what I was looking at stopped being two things. There was only one world, one reality. And both the water and any sense of Henry were both that reality. So the distinction had gone. And actually I dropped right in then to this unbounded, empty substance that was no substance, that was what the universe was made of. And I knew to the bottom of my being, all through my bones, that I was made of the universe and I was not separate from it and never had been and never could be, because we were one thing that was not really a thing, but it was absolutely one. And I sort of emerged from that, you know, realized I was a person standing on a beach again. And then I was just enveloped by the sense of all of this, this whole life, this whole world, all of us. It's a dream, a most beautiful, sublime dream. And it's all made of love. Like an immemorial love just enveloped everything. And, you know, it was... I knew it was real, and I was so blown away by it that I felt I had fulfilled my life, that whatever the purpose of this life had been, which to be honest I'd never thought about really before. I'd never really thought, what's my purpose? I'd just been following what I was told. Studying and sports, gymnastics, I did whatever, you know. But in this moment, suddenly it just was like a wave of love just enveloped me right after that experience, you know, and it was like I've had a purpose in this life. It was to realize exactly what I've just realized.
And actually years later I heard Yogananda saying in an old documentary, you know, 'this life is a movie, it's a motion picture, and the purpose of life is to turn around and see the projector.' And when I heard that I thought, oh my gosh, that's so beautifully put. That's exactly how I felt when I was 19 and this thing happened. But you know what I really want to say, is really important here for me, is that actually my life didn't end then. I could have died happily that night knowing my life was fulfilled, but it didn't end. And a few weeks later I went back home. I'd been far away from home when this happened. I went back home and it was when I went home that actually I got overwhelmed by the unacknowledged trauma of my childhood, which I had put a lot of effort into suppressing. I'd evolved these adaptive personalities, subpersonalities, parts so that I could deal with the very difficult aspects of my childhood, traumatic, complex childhood trauma that I grew up with. But I'd managed to kind of avoid feeling it because it was too much through my childhood with adaptations.
When I went home at 19 after this experience, all those adaptive strategies had been ripped away. I was wide open, which was very beautiful. I was so open and full of love and very aware of suffering in the streets around me. I was in South America at the time and so on. As soon as I got home, literally almost walked through the door of my father's house, but actually an hour later, I was just overwhelmed by these terrible memories and emotions in my body of my childhood that I had not been able to feel as a kid, had avoided, suppressed, buried.
But the awakening opened me so I could feel them. But at that time I had no resources and I didn't want to feel them. I thought it was a catastrophe that I could be feeling these terrible things and I thought I'd lost that marvelous awakening and I went into despair.
And I think this is, I really feel this is a crucial part of this whole process that we humans can go through of awakening. It's also healing. It's always, I think, going to be both awakening and healing because for me, I was a very reluctant sort of client, patient, needer of healing. I didn't want to know about it even then at 19. And it took me, well, several years, three years, four years of being really unhappy, drinking, you know, at university and kind of dragging myself through life, gradually finding a little more joy with music. Actually, I was a musician and writing again and, you know, but then I found meditation and almost as soon as I started meditating, I realized, man, I'm unhappy, you know, and I started therapy and I started dealing with all the trauma in my childhood. And, you know, it's been a kind of twin journey of awakening and healing, how to live more consistently and get actually even more deeply into whatever that was that I opened up to, but also be dealing with this suffering, troubled, traumatized human being. And I think the mercy of this path is that it doesn't leave either behind.
I think a lot of us are under this assumption that these two things are fused. That like the spiritual or contemplative work will solve the parts work, the healing work, the growing up.
And I think they are intrinsically linked, very complementary but not the same. And, you know, it's something we talk about quite a bit because I think it's really important to have a holistic understanding of what awakening means, right? And under just the meditative contemplative lens, we can wake up beyond the idea of being identified with our thoughts and emotions. We can have these more formless jhana state experiences. And it doesn't fix the... in some ways it can make it even...
harder to take seriously these like characterological stuff.
I think it makes it easier to work with because we're less reactive to them. In your case, it made space for that to come to the surface, right?
Yes.
But any other thoughts you have there on the importance between the two and how they're both essential but they don't necessarily solve one another?
Yeah, I think it's really important to state, like you, because I think, you know, in a therapeutic context, I've never been in a therapeutic context that really deeply understood awakening, and they didn't really know that, they didn't really understand it. And I've also been in meditative contemplative contexts that didn't really understand trauma and thought that they were the fix for everything. So I love this. There's an... in early Chinese Buddhism from the sixth century, there's a document that talks about the path of practice as a cart track, not a path. You know, we talk about, like, often talk about like spiritual paths. It's the path up the mountain or something. But this idea, the cart track says no, it's not a path. It's a track. Meaning there are two wheel tracks. And it says the first wheel track is the foundations of mindfulness. And by that it means this early Buddhist training. You gradually develop your mindfulness and it expands. It gets deeper and deeper. You get into jhanas, maybe you get a realization, but it's a gradual cultivation of the human mind, body, heart system.
The second wheel track running parallel to it all along, just like a cart track, is awakening. So rather than it being a journey to the mountain, up the mountain, awakening is alongside all the way, which I think is accurate. It's also because it's always here. And it also, it's not affected by, in a certain way, it's not affected by the practice, the gradual cultivation and development that we probably all need to do to some degree, which is a beautiful thing as well. But what happens is that the more we're working on the gradual developmental side, the more open we become to maybe having glimpses of the awakening side. The more we might glimpse the awakening side, the more space there is to work with the gradual, I call it, healing side. And somehow I think this is a really helpful metaphor. It's not a single journey to the destination. In a certain way, all the traditions are right. The destination's here all along. But to actually glimpse it and integrate it, we probably need to do all this gradual work basically on ourselves and on our relationships and on our trauma, on our history, on our collective trauma, on our ancestral trauma, let alone, of course, our personal trauma. And so I feel that, coming back to purpose, you know, I feel in some way purpose of my life anyway has been to clarify the deepest level who I really am, but also to work through all the things that I would think of as obstacles to that, because they're part of the path. They're not obstacles. They're the meat of the path. They're the nourishment of the path, is all our trauma. Yes, my personal trauma, but also collective. And now also, at a certain point in my path, I was called, I was asked actually by my teachers to start sharing and teaching myself. So it's also been part of my path to be sharing this, you know, to the best of my ability and in full humility because I'm still a student as well.
Yeah. No, it's great. It's easy to simplify awakening to a bumper sticker, you know, but in many ways it's been said the matured intellect is the capacity to hold paradox, conflicting ideas. And what I love the way that you phrased what you just shared is that it's like awakening is the path. It is the two tracks. It is the process instead of this one place you'll get to one day.
It's always here. It's all inclusive. Your purpose isn't someday when or just in relation to the world, but it is your being, your presence. And I think that when you shared your sunset story, that moment of insight and awakening.
Like that level of fulfillment, that ontological experience of completeness, of wholeness, of undividedness, you could say, is integrity also.
Yes, the root of integrity being integer, you know, the undivided whole sense within.
Yeah.
And I think so much of our endeavors in life are in pursuit of that, whether or not we articulate it.
And so I just, I love that we acknowledge that because the reality is it's so easy to hear this on a podcast, read it in a book, go back into our life under the presumption that things aren't the way they should be. I think this insight equips us to meet life fully and the inevitable challenges and health issues and societal troubles and suffering and some sorrow with an open heart and actually more capacity to be an effective agent of change in the world.
Yeah, I totally agree. And I found on my own journey that how I show up as hopefully an effective agent of change, that's changed. That itself has changed. I mean, for example, for 10 years, I was just, you know, hardcore running a Zen center in Santa Fe, Mountain Cloud Zen Center. That was, I thought I'd be doing that till I died. But COVID came, the center shuttered. Right around then, I had a head injury which really affected my cognitive capacity. Actually, I also had a very difficult, you know, situation with somebody who was very dear to me getting into a very, very, very, very challenging, long-term, life-threatening, difficult situation which was heartbreaking. And all of these, they all happened at the same time. And I had to change how I was teaching. And that's where I came up with this terminology, original love, and that map of practice, which of course it comes out of the traditions, but it was a slight, slight simplification and reforming of the view. And I couldn't... I was much less... I just had to live from my heart. I couldn't live from my head anymore because it had had a blow struck to it and my heart had had a blow struck to it. I just had to get into my heartbreak and live from my open heart. And that's what I aspire to be doing, you know, really. I aspire to do it all the time.
You know, I have my moments, but I have moments both ways, you know.
Doing it better and worse, you know. But, you know, that wasn't what I was doing for 10 years of teaching. Kind of some of it was there, because I'd been through quite a deep other realization experience in the course of my Zen training, which was different from that beach moment. I had had a number of, yeah, a number of significant milestone moments, but one of them blew everything away. It was just everything, everything just totally gone. And thereafter, every moment being a new world arising, arising, arising, you know. And that was very heartful as well. And that's why I was asked to become a Zen teacher, actually, really, because this was a real shift that really knocked away a lot of my, you know, neurotic trouble was actually really blown away by that. And I thought that was it till I died. But I was wrong, because then this, you know, the COVID stuff and the head injury and the heart blow, it took me to another place again, which is living from my heart fully or aspiring to, as I said.
So there are innumerable paths to come to that realization. I'm curious, as somebody who is one of the few teachers authorized in your lineage out here in the West and who understands through that lens more than most people, I'm curious, how would you articulate what distinguishes Zen as a path? What is like, what's truly its flavor comparatively? As there are so many different conversations and lineages and disciplines that we explore on the show, what would you say is really the heart of what distinguishes Zen as Zen?
Yeah, you know, that's... I'll try to do that with the caveat that I don't know the other traditions as deeply. And so because a lot of them, the deeper you go, you know, they're so complex and there's nuances, and so I don't want to caricature any other tradition. But I'll say this about the Zen that I've been trained in: it has this view that all of us can have these moments of realization, and that that's not the end. That you can get them more deeply. There's a sequence of pictures called the ox-herding pictures in Zen, which mark out a path of practice and spiritual development. And, you know, the first one, the ox-herder recognizes that they've lost their ox. And so the second one, they go looking for it and they pick up the hoof prints of the ox and they follow the hoof prints. The third one, they catch a glimpse of part of the ox, like the hindquarters showing out of a bush or the horns over a fence or something, and suddenly they know there's a living being. There really is a living being, and that's a moment of realization of awakening.
There's a there there. It's called kensho, seeing your original nature. Kensho, sudden staggering moment. Oh my gosh, it's real. But it's only a glimpse, and it's only part of the beast. There's a long process of training till you get to see the whole ox and you get hold of it.
You just saw the ass. Exactly. But now you see the whole thing and it doesn't go away. And that for me was what happened with that deeper experience I was talking about. It became present and accessible always. Then you train it. That's the fifth picture actually we got to. And the sixth one, you ride it home. And then the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth. No more ox. The ox disappears from the pictures. It's become second nature. And you're no longer concerned with the journey of awakening. You're concerned with a journey of helping and of service in this world, however you may be called to express that. And I think there's such deep wisdom in that notion that actually, because it seems all-encompassing to get this deep awakening and be able to live with it. That seems like a total path in itself. But Zen sort of says, no, that's a phase and you can go beyond that. One of my Zen teachers actually is a great guy from the Philippines, Ruben Abito Roshi. He always would say it's like Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear, to infinity and beyond.
And the beyond is right here, now. Us having this conversation, you know, which is both ultimate reality right here and exactly this, you know, I'm a little bit thirsty. I'm going to have a sip of water. We're dialoguing, talking about the ten ox-herding pictures right now. Who knows what we'll talk about next, but, you know, this is it. So it's a real emphasis on not checking out. It's not a path out of the world. It's a path deeply into the world. You know, and I think this is a really important flavor of Zen. It's not, I'm going to escape this world of suffering. No, I'm going to realize its true nature and re-enter it ever more deeply.
How do koans as a technology come into the picture here?
Thank you for asking that. I was hoping we might get to them.
It's a really... it's a... yeah, koans, they're a distinctive feature of Zen. They're not unknown in other traditions, but let me say just a tiny bit. A koan is a little phrase, sometimes a question, sometimes it's a phrase describing something that somebody did from the history of Zen and early Buddhism. So you have koans from the time of the historical Buddha, and you have koans from the early great days of Zen, the sixth century, seventh, eighth, ninth centuries in China. Mostly they're from those time periods.
And what they do is they kind of encapsulate one practitioner's deep awakening, but they do it in very paradoxical ways that make no sense to the intellect, to the ordinary mind. So, for example, there's a famous one. You know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand? What is the sound of one hand? Now, you know, people might... I've had people, you know, when I was teaching with koans, people might come and go, 'There, that's the sound of one hand.' Uh, no, it's okay. That's fine. You know, whatever, you've presented something, but that's not what this koan is. Some people can clap with one hand too.
But this is actually like, it's a paradox. It's inviting us into awakening. Basically, that's what it's doing. It's inviting us into this, actually, this undivided organism of this present moment where nothing's separate. So one hand, two hands, ten thousand hands, you know, it's actually all one. But it's inviting us to realize that for ourselves. So that's just one example. There's hundreds of them.
What would you extract from that? What is the sound of one hand? And you're, because as a teacher in this lineage, you've had to pass hundreds of koans.
To sort of be like authorized to teach in the way you do. And the way that you're describing it is like these paradoxical puzzle-seeming phrases don't make sense to the intellect, but they point to, once you're in the state, sort of an obvious realization becomes self-evident as to the nature it's referring to or pointing to.
So in that example, how would you... if I was your teacher and I proposed this koan, you know, a thousand years ago, what would be an answer that you would give to that one?
I have to be a little careful here.
