Three centuries later, there was a great... became a great Zen master, Joshu, or Jaozhou in the Chinese name. He was a young man, or youth actually, a teenager. He asked his teacher, 'What is the way?' And his teacher said, 'Your ordinary mind is the way. Your ordinary mind is the way.' And then Joshu said, 'Well, should I try to find it? Should I be trying to find it?' And the teacher said, 'If you try to find it, you're going away from it.' And then Joshu said, 'Well, what should I do? How will I ever know if I found it?'
Henry Shukman, welcome to Beyond Meaning. You're officially the first guest on the show, and this is a better beginning than I could have hoped for. So, thank you for agreeing to appear and speak with me.
Well, I'm honored and happy to be with you.
Great. I was wondering how I should open this podcast. And then I was speaking with our 10-year-old boy, Alexi, and I was telling him that I'm about to interview a real authentic Zen master. And basically, I asked him whether there were any questions that he would like me to ask you. And so the one thing that really stuck out the most was he would like to know, being a real Zen master, does this mean that you get to have a Zen garden?
That's a great question. As you were speaking, I was thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I don't feel at all authentic or real or anything. I'm just a totally normal, ordinary person and doing my best to live wisely, you know.' And I do not have a real Zen garden. I have a garden, you know, and I love it and I love digging in it and moving rocks around. But I would say, you know, really this whole world is a real Zen garden. It really is. That we, you know, and how much we tend to it, that's questionable, but it really is, you know, to be appreciated and loved and cherished and seen for its beauty, you know, that's our whole project really as humans, I believe, you know.
For people who may not be familiar with your story, your teachings and work, how would... could you describe what it is that you do and how you've come to be doing it?
Yeah, I'm really trying to help all of us, you know, live kinder, happier, wiser lives, you know, including myself. I'm still working on it. And I found the practice of meditation to be really a central cornerstone, keystone habit for a lifetime. I think if we can get the habit of daily meditation locked in, many things will change around that. You know, our other habits that aren't so helpful will tend to attenuate and fall away, and other habits that are helpful will tend to gather in as well. So I do believe that...
Well, the project of trying to help people find their way to meditation if they want, and to stay with it, and to be tasting its many kinds of benefit, which are not all the same, you know, is really what I'm trying to do. So that, you know, as I work on myself and my own life and bring whatever well-being I can, you know, in my little world and the wider world that engages with what I'm offering. Basically, I'm just trying to help in some way with the troubles and turbulence and aggression and anxiety and difficulties of being human, you know, do my little bit to help.
Yeah. And what I've gathered from your books, you've had a long journey basically of healing through therapy, different kinds of meditation, different kinds of practices, and you've more or less ended up in the Zen tradition. And so I'm curious to hear a little bit about that journey and also about the different kinds of meditation, I suppose, because recently we had a community call where we discussed meditation, and it seems like every person you ask has a different idea of what meditation is. And actually, let me read a sentence from your book, Original Love, which I'd love to talk to you about in a bit. There you write, 'Meditation is not really anything separate from being human. In a sense, it's not really even an activity.' So what is meditation and what different kinds of meditation are there?
Yeah. Okay. So I would say fundamentally, yeah, it's what is left when we stop doing the activities that we're ordinarily caught in, when we just are still and quiet. So we're not talking outwardly, we're not engaged in outward activity, we're just being still. That's the heart of what meditation is. Now most of us will find if we try to do that, I mean we can do that, but we'll find that our minds haven't really stopped, that our minds will still be busy trying to solve problems, remembering things, imagining things, you know, and planning. And so there's a further step in meditation, which is recognizing the activities of our minds, and then gradually over time of just noticing the activity of our minds with an awareness, awareness that is a little bit different from our ordinary awareness that we have when we're engaged in daily activities. It's slightly different awareness because it's not engaged in activities. It's an awareness that comes out of being still. And then we notice how much activity there may be in our minds. And gradually over time, doing this every day, there'll start to be gaps in that internal activity. And then we can, you know, and certainly there are methods that can help us taste those gaps sooner, you know, rather than later. And then we can start finding that there's a sort of underlying peace in our very own being. And that's really what we're learning to experience more consistently through meditation.
And yes, I have trained deeply in Zen particularly, but also in some other schools of meditation. You asked sort of a little bit how I got into it. So I could just say very briefly that as a youngster, I had a hard time with a very difficult skin condition throughout my childhood from the age of six months, and it brought with it a lot of shame and anxiety. And in my early adulthood, I was quite depressed as well. And it was only when I started to meditate that I could really acknowledge my own mental health issues, because I really hadn't wanted to acknowledge them until then. You know, I tried to keep them to one side and just stay busy, and sort of so I could try to forget about them, but really they were there nonetheless. And meditation allowed me to start addressing them. And that's, you know, that's been critical because then I could also embark on some therapy, and that has also been tremendously helpful.
But there's another side to it as well, which is that I happened to have a marvelous experience when I was 19 years old of suddenly understanding my place in this world in a completely different way. One in which I was not separate from anything. It's as if I jumped from one view of reality where I was the me I take myself to be, viewing the world outside of him and always trying to make that world the way I wanted it and avoid the things I didn't want and get the things I did want, a constant sort of struggle really. Suddenly that view just was gone, and in its place I found that I just wasn't separate from anything. I was part of everything, and everything in fact was part of everything. There was a different level of reality where there was not separateness, and it was tremendously healing just to taste that. It was like discovering that all along I'd been slightly wrong in how I was perceiving things, and that actually one little shift in the angle of light and I could see the world in such a different way, and it was one that was just in a sense everything was well, you know, actually on that level.
And so then as I proceeded in meditation, I began to really want to understand that experience years later. And I found my way to Zen after a few years of another method. And Zen, I recognized, did understand that very experience I'd had. It knew about that and it was concerned with it and interested in it and had a method for actually going further, going deeper, going even further than that experience, more into the nature of reality.
Yeah. So it seems like you had a sort of carrot and stick situation where you had the difficulties of a very physical and psychological suffering on the one hand, and then you also had basically a mystical experience on the other, and then it was essentially a journey of healing the one and cultivating the other. And I suppose some people who would be listening to this podcast would have had one of the two at least, either intensive suffering or some peak experience. But then the landscape in between them seems so complicated and multi-layered. You have meditation and different kinds of meditation and practices and schools and traditions. So what general structure revealed itself to you? If you are to orient essentially a novice, somebody just embarking on this journey, what would you tell them about the general structures that they are going to encounter on the path so that they can orient themselves better?
Yes, that's lovely. I mean, I would say, you know, I like your view of it, like carrot and stick. I mean, I'd say that's probably true for many of us, you know. And I mean, I think even Buddhism almost frames it that way. There's, you know, Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Zen master, he used to say the four noble truths of Buddhism, that, you know, suffering exists, it has a cause, and the cause is craving, the cause can be ended, and here's the path, the eightfold path that will lead to its ending. In a way, that's carrot and stick. You know, the stick is the suffering and its cause, and then the carrot is it can be ended and here's the path, you know. So it's sort of, Thich Nhat Hanh used to say the four noble truths are saying there is suffering and it has causes. There is universal well-being and it has causes. Basically that's how he framed it. And so carrot and stick, you know.
And what I've come to feel really in the world of meditation is that, and this is what really my whole book, Original Love, is really about. It's about there are different paths. They're all closely related, but they have slightly different purposes. They're not all one and the same. So there's a whole world of practice around mindfulness, which is basically therapeutic healing. It's about taming our anxieties and de-stressing and getting our nervous systems in better shape, more balanced, you know, more supple and responsive and well-toned rather than jammed into an accelerated position all the time, stressed out, you know. So that's great.
There's a whole world also of discovering deeper connectedness, you know, and discovering that underneath our surface life of name and gain and trying to get things, or what Wordsworth called getting and spending, beneath that surface life that we're also engaged in, there's a kind of deeper life where we contact something some call the soul, like a deeper level of our personalities, a sort of truer, somehow more authentic self that has very different concerns. It's much more concerned with beauty, with spiritual things, and with deeper connection with others. Sometimes it feels connected to forces in nature and nature itself, and so on, and to uncover that more connected part of ourselves. That's a whole other kind of practice, and you know, mindfulness and meditation can help with it, but it's a slightly different target zone from foundational mindfulness, you know.
And then there's the whole world of flow states and absorption practices, and you know, what we call samadhi in Buddhism, this deep absorption, beautiful states of mind that we can cultivate in our meditation, which are wonderful, and that's another world of practice. And then the fourth one I say, you know, is awakening, which is also not like any of the others. Yes, closely related, but it's a dramatic shift, it's a sudden shift from one way of seeing where I am me, which basically I am in those first three kinds of practice. I remain me. There's no... I don't have to suddenly discover I've never been here the way I thought. I can work with who I feel I am in mindfulness. Likewise, in the deeper connectedness, I'm still, you know, I'm still a person. There's no doubt about it. And but I am feeling myself in a very different way, but it's still kind of me. And likewise, in cultivation of flow, my sense of self may get quieter, but I haven't radically discovered that I've never been a self the way I thought.
In awakening, we do discover that. Suddenly we see that what we have taken ourselves to be has just been a figment of our imagination, and somehow what's really been going on is something, you know, well, we can get it on different levels really, at different depths, but you know, there's no time, there's no space, there's no separation. It's just one unfolding happening now, just like this, and that's really what we are, you know.
Hey there, Simeon here, and I wanted to say thank you to everyone supporting my work. This conversation would literally never have happened without you. So, thank you very much. And if you are not yet part of the community, I invite you to join through Patreon or YouTube members. By supporting my work, you will get the chance to submit your own questions for future guests on the show, and you will gain access to exclusive videos and content. Also, we host our community group calls, which are always a fantastic experience and a great way to connect with other seekers from around the world. I would love for you to join the community. And in any case, thank you very much for spending your time here with me. And now, back to the conversation.
Yeah, also with basically the last section of what you said is particularly interesting to me and also I think to other people that I've spoken with from the Secret to Seeker community. It is about how the two things of awakening to one's true nature beyond name and form and self and so on, how is this to be integrated with healing the very conventional, very particular person? I had a particularly memorable moment as I had a tough period of going to therapy for a number of years which really helped me, and I was meditating more or less consistently by that point. And when I shared with my therapist about this, first she congratulated me that I just have this paradigm of being mindful of whatever is occurring within the body, within the mind, and not getting attached to it or identifying with it. But she said, you know, this is great, but it's just not enough because these things that come and occur, they bring messages. They need to be heard and understood and healed. So it's not enough to just see it, even though that's a tremendous step. And so I feel that a lot of people, myself included, get into a confusion of how to integrate the practice with actually taking care of the self, or in other words, how to integrate the path of no self with, let's say, self-love essentially. So what are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, that's a wonderful point, and it's really the heart of the whole matter, is exactly that. It's one thing to discover our complete belonging in the universe and as the universe and not be separate. That's wonderful. But how on earth do we apply that to leading an ordinary life? Well, the Zen answer is we do this long course of training in koans, which are these little riddles or paradoxes that the Zen tradition has coming from way back. Some of them come from the time of the Buddha in India, and many of them come from China during the Tang dynasty, which was 600 to 900 CE, common era. And by going through all these koans, each one is a kind of touchstone of how that, if I may use the term, original nature or awakened nature, how it shows up in this very ordinary world. Every single one is somehow basically that.
And by revisiting them again and again, by doing, you know, in our tradition there's 500 koans or something, and you have to sit with them and you have to share your view with a teacher, which usually is something you do, not something you say, that trains us in basically these two very different worlds come together, and we can have a kind of experience. One master, Yamada Koun Roshi, he's called, he put it like this, you know, somebody's starting to practice, it's like we're sitting in a room and it's made of dark glass, and gradually as we practice, the glass starts to get a little paler, you know, it's still opaque, but it's paler, more light comes through. And then when we have a moment of this kind of sudden revelation of a larger reality that we're part of, it's like a hole has been made through the glass, and we suddenly see, oh my gosh, there's a world outside. There's a real world outside, and I had not seen it before.
Then we continue with the training, and that makes the hole larger. And then at a certain point there might be another hole and another hole, and gradually the whole structure of this glass chamber is getting paler and more and more holes, and eventually it falls down. And that's when we realize the world of, quote unquote, original nature and this totally ordinary world of making a cup of coffee in the morning, taking your child to school, making breakfast for your child, and working in the ways that we work and having our relationships. All of that is exactly the same as this world of awakening. And then we realize that the great sort of reality is showing up all the time. It's showing up just like this, you know, and there just isn't... it isn't two views anymore. That's the goal really of the longer term path of training.
And then, but then again, that's kind of only a beginning because then, well, how do we live that? How do we live that? And you know, of course, we'll get caught. We'll forget. Our old habits of heart and mind will catch us again, but it's easier to recognize and put them down. So that's the Zen view. Okay, I'm talking rather a long time, but I think it's such an important point. That's one view.
So I would say in my own experience, I kind of... I do agree with that. But along the way, I have needed to do different kinds of therapy. I've had, you know, I had a lot of trauma wiring from my childhood, and it's taken a while to work with it in different ways. And the combination of a part of awakening and a part of healing, really truly they have come together for me. And I just live more and more from my heart, and you know, feeling a gratitude and a compassion and even a peace in the midst of the sufferings of the world, you know. And I know that that's not an unrealistic, idealized perspective. It really can become quite different for us.
And the thing with these awakening experiences is that every time we have one, we seem... we feel we've seen everything, and yet a few years later we'll have another one if we keep on a path of practice, and then, oh my gosh, there's so much I hadn't seen, and then again, you know. So in other words, it's a continual unfolding, it's a continual stripping away, and to be staying sort of humble and ready to learn and open to, you know, whatever there still is inside us that needs to be healed and open to new ways of serving and living and loving in the world, you know, I think is a great privilege.
Yeah. Concerning koans, this is something that's... it's such a traditional cornerstone of Zen, and even though Zen is becoming more and more popular in the West, still I feel koans are a bit of a mystery for most people. And I find it interesting that before getting deeply engaged with spirituality or meditation in general, you were, as you still are, an author and a poet, and you grew up with a passion for poetry. As did I, by the way. And I find something interesting in the experience of becoming familiar with a poem which is not immediately transparent. A poem that, you know, days or months or even years after reading it, suddenly it clicks for you and you realize, oh, that's what he meant or she meant. And I find that this is particular to poetry, but also to great scripture as well, with certain statements that seem completely opaque, even absurd, until they click for you. And I feel this is a major element of koans as well, and I feel that Zen has basically taken this element and developed it to its extreme, where in order to click with a koan you need to develop a very particular state of consciousness, I suppose. You are the person who introduced me to koans. So could you share a bit about what they are and how exactly they're being used, and what is the particular utility of working with koans instead of simply following the breath, let's say?
Yeah. Yeah. That's a lovely question as well. Thank you, Simeon. You're a very deep and thoughtful person. Thank you. It's great to be conversing with you. So let me just back up a tiny bit. I want to say about... I think you're absolutely right. I love the analogy between poems and koans because I totally agree about poems. You know, we may enjoy them on a certain level, and as we become familiar with them over years in some cases, we can see them in a whole new way. Something new is revealed about them. And I feel the same. I'm not a great scripture buff, but I've noticed that with scripture too, and with sutras, you know, I can suddenly, oh my gosh, that's what it was saying.
You know, the difference with koans is that when they click like that, and this is also the reason why they can seem inscrutable and difficult and enigmatic and paradoxical, is that when they click like that, it's because we've come back not to a special state of mind. We've come back to something we don't normally recognize that's always here in our consciousness. It's a level of our very own consciousness that does not make separations, that does not create opposites. And that kind of experience without opposites, without separation, is actually always present. But we're just not at all conditioned to see it. We're so conditioned through language and socialization and everything. We're so conditioned to precisely not see that.
And so koans, their hope is to be not understandable except from the perspective that we all have, where this deep inner level of our own experience, where, you know, there's no time and there's no space, then they're clear. So their purpose is to keep showing us that level of reality by means of the ordinary things of the world, because koans are usually about something very ordinary.
The big distinction between Zen and other Buddhist schools that I see, it's a lot in common of course, but this particular thing is really different, is that Zen seems to believe this world that we're living in is our great teacher. And so any object, any creature, any thought, any piece of writing, any utterance, any sound, any smell, any sight is actually sort of awakened nature already showing itself, and it's inviting us to join it. So there's a famous koan where a student asks, you know, what is my awakened nature? And the teacher says, it's that tree out there in the garden. That is the heart of who you are, that tree out there.
So, you know, you think, well, nah, I don't even want to hear it. It doesn't make any sense. I don't want to know about that. Tell me something practical that I can sit with, you know, like how do I follow my breath? How do I get a little closer to the impermanent nature of all things or something? And Zen is just, no, we want you to understand who you really are through personal experience, you know, and that's its method. And it's not for everybody, but a lot of people I have found may not get a koan right away. I mean, most of us won't get a koan right away, but nevertheless, we sense something about it that feels right.
And if we can get over a little frustration or a little friction with the koan, if we can just let that be and it'll gradually subside, the koan can still take us to quite a deep state of kind of an awake calmness. That's lovely. I consider it a form of samadhi, you know, a deeper mindfulness, even though it may not yet have really triggered a clear awakening to the non-separate nature of everything.
Yeah. So just to ask a clarifying question, because this is something I've only recently had a glimpse of, and I'm wondering whether this is what you mean, that it is not that koans make us put together the pieces intellectually of a particular way of seeing the world, but it is that they cut through all the different constructs that we do with our thinking and our intention to, you know, be this or be that and attain this or that, and it is that they puncture this and reveal something which is always here and does not need to be constructed.
I think that's beautifully put. That's exactly right. Yeah. They're already there. They come from, by the way, most of them are a little snippet from the life of one of these awakened adepts in the time of the Buddha or later, you know, and it's something that they said or they did that often just doesn't really make any sense, you know. So sometimes you can sort of understand, but it's almost better when they don't make sense, and then you just sit with it because whatever clarity, whatever level of human nature it was spoken from or the action was done with, we have it too.
So the koan is like a message from the awakened nature of some master 1300 years ago to our own awakened nature that we have just as much as that old master did. And the koan is like a little message asking our minds to just go quiet and let this awakened nature show itself.
Yeah. And so I'm not as deeply engaged with the Zen tradition as you are. So when I hear you talk about koans, the closest reference I have is essentially Bob Dylan and his lyrics. I think in a great way they function in that, I mean, they have this absurdist quality to them which sometimes makes no sense though. But if you hear them at the right moment, they open something within you. And I find here, so this is another question, because Bob Dylan, for example, has this interesting blend of profundity and humor in his work. And I wonder whether I'm mistaken that I also see some of that in Zen koans as well. I feel there is a great element of humor in them, and I would see some reason for this because great jokes have this element of once you get it, you know, this suddenly unlocks something and causes an immediate reaction, and if you don't get them, you just don't get them. And so I see some of that in koans as well.
Yeah, I think that's a very good observation. I totally agree with you. I mean, some of those Bob Dylan lines do sound very like koans. They could be koans. Yeah. And I think the analogy with jokes is absolutely right as well. And there are some literary theorists who have compared actually how jokes work to how stories work. A good story will be, you know, some say a good story is somebody's... a character is presented with an opportunity to grow, to change, to shift, and they either take it or they don't take it. And that's the story.
And it's an interesting way of looking at it. It's like with a joke that there's something somebody doesn't recognize, you know, and we as the listener have been thinking things a certain way, following, following, following, and then all of a sudden, oops, there's a totally different way of looking at it, you know, and that's the joke, to get, man, I didn't see that coming, you know, but it was inevitable. It was inevitable, but I didn't see it, you know. And koans, I sometimes think they're a bit like that, but the main character that they're talking about is us. So we are the central character in any koan.
And maybe this is also true with great poems, that they're speaking to us. They're inviting some shift in us from how we see things, how we think about things, and how we think about ourselves, to, ah, suddenly seeing it in a different light. And koans do this. Yes. Did I answer your question?
Yes. Yes. And I've been contemplating... but yes, I put myself on the spot a little bit. I just want to share an experience I had with a guided meditation of yours with a koan. I did a number of them, and they were all very... just the way that you lead meditations is very special, and I'm deeply grateful for your offerings. But from all the meditations I did, there was one particular one with one koan that really clicked for me. However, I'm not sure whether it clicked for the right reasons. And so I just want to lay it out.
The koan was about a monk who had, I think, given up on Zen training completely, and then he goes into the marketplace to a butcher store, and the butcher is cutting up the meat, and he hears one of the clients in the line ask the butcher which one is the best piece of meat, and the butcher says every piece is the best piece. And once I heard that, it completely... it is the one koan that I really feel I got in the sense that it made me feel that every moment of experience is the best moment of experience. So of course this is still an intellectual thing. So I suppose it is not exactly the... it is an intellectual interpretation, but it did help me.
Because for example, in preparation for our podcast today, I felt myself feeling more and more anxious because I have this list of questions that I have for you, which are... oh, so I mean, I would so love to hear your thoughts on each one of them. And I was thinking, now, how can I make this conversation the best conversation possible? How can I make it flow perfectly and get the best answer to the best questions? And it's just the perfect conversation. And the more I thought about it and planned it out, the more anxious I began to feel. And then suddenly I remember that koan, every piece of meat is the best piece. And this completely punctured that sense of anxiety that was building up. So I mean, not completely, but a great deal. So I'm sharing this experience to hear how close I am to the traditional Zen way of working with koans.
Yeah, that's very beautiful. When you said it was purely intellectual understanding, I didn't feel that when you were telling the story. I felt that you had experienced some shift. Yeah. That when you suddenly went from, gosh, which is the best one, they're all the best one. I mean, I must ask you really, but was there a moment when you really felt, here now, this is actually the only piece of meat? This right now is what there is.
