The One You Feed - Brad Warner

Episode Date: July 27, 2016

This week we talk to Brad Warner about not being a jerk Brad Warner is an ordained Zen teacher and author of the books There Is No God And He Is Always With You , Sit Down and Shut Up and Hardcore Zen. He’s also a writer for the Suicide Girls website, bass player for the hardcore punk rock group 0DFx (aka Zero Defex), star of the movies “Shoplifting From American Apparel” and “Zombie Bounty Hunter M.D.,” director of the film “Cleveland’s Screaming!” and former vice president of the US branch of the company founded by the man who created Godzilla. His latest book is called: Don't Be a Jerk: Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master - A Radical but Reverent Paraphrasing of Dogen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye In This Interview, Brad Warner and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable His book, Don't Be a Jerk and Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master That we become the people we need to become How a person can be a buddha one minute and a jackass the next That once you realize what your "negative" urges are, they become less attractive for you to respond to The answer to the question, "How do you strive to be a better person AND accept life exactly as it is?" That the most intelligent course of action is the one that benefits everyone involved How one of his teachers said that you need to hold an equal amount of faith and doubt The idea that thoughts are just the secretions of your brain the same way your stomach acid are the secretion of your stomach For more show notes visit our website   A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other.  One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear. The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?” The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feed The Tale of Two Wolves is often attributed to the Cherokee Indians but there seems to be no real proof of this. It has also been attributed to evangelical preacher Billy Graham and Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw. It appears no one knows for sure but this does not diminish the power of the parable. This parable goes by many names including: The Tale of Two Wolves The Parable of the Two Wolves Two Wolves Which Wolf Do You Feed Which Wolf are You Feeding Which Wolf Will You Feed It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Once you start to realize what your so-called negative urges really are, it becomes less attractive to respond to them. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers

to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Brad Warner,

an ordained Zen teacher and author of many books, including his newest, Don't Be a Jerk, and other practical advice from Dojin, Japan's greatest Zen master. Brad is also a writer for the Suicide Girls website and a bass player for the hardcore punk rock group Zero Defects. Here's the interview. Hi Brad, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm happy to have you on. When I first started getting interested in Buddhism, it's probably been,

I don't know, it's been a good amount of time, but I came across some of your books very early on, and having been both from Ohio, like you are, and a fan of and a player of punk rock music, I was immediately attracted to your writing. So I've been reading your stuff for a great amount of time now. So it's a pleasure to have you on. Oh, that's nice. Thanks. I'm glad I made a connection there. So we'll get into your latest book, which has a lengthy title, Don't Be a Jerk, and other practical advice from Dojin, Japan's greatest Zen master. A radical but reverent paraphrasing of Dojin's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. We will definitely get into that in a little bit, but let's start like we always do with a parable.

There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops for a second and he thinks about it and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather quietly says, the one you feed. I've heard that parable before. And it's one of those things that trying to explain how the human being, the human animal works. I think we all have a lot of facets in ourself. One of the things that Dogen talks about in his writings

is how there really is ultimately no self at all. So I wonder if he'd take exception to that. Of course, he always turns everything on its head, but I think we become the people that we need to become. And one of the aspects of doing that is by listening to our own intuition, which is sometimes very difficult to do. But I think intuition always knows what the right way to go is. And in Buddhism, we talk about greed and anger and delusion and hatred being the poisons of the mind. But there are also things that don't come into action until we manifest them.

The title of the book is Don't Be a Jerk. And Dogen talks about this idea of ethics from the standpoint of wrongdoing doesn't sit around waiting to be done. It happens in the instant of action. So it's not as if there's a wolf in your head waiting to be fed, so much as what your actions actually determine who you are. You talk in the book at a point, you paraphrase and say, a person is a Buddha when she acts like a Buddha and when she manifests wisdom. When she fails to do so, she's not a Buddha. Thus a person can be a Buddha one

minute and a jackass three minutes later. I think that's true. And that's part of Dogen's philosophy that he says over and over that there isn't this kind of, I think people when they get into meditation are sort of looking for something that will radically transform them in such a way that forever and ever they'll stay just like that. And I've gradually realized that's not true. It's just a constant kind of monitoring that gets a little bit easier because once you start to realize what your so-called negative urges really are, it becomes less attractive to respond to them. And you start to realize, oh, you know, that's going to go wrong if I respond to that. They become less appealing. You actually start to want to do the right thing. But it's not this kind of, you know, and then forever on you're transformed

into this thing that always does the right thing. Right. I think both in thinking of enlightenment, people tend to think of enlightenment that way, like it happens. And then you're, you're that way forever. And then I think just in general, we're all looking for the magic bullet that will suddenly make life like we don't have to do it anymore, or it's not hard anymore, or there's not challenges anymore. And, and I more and more have, you know, as I've gotten older, recognize like that doesn't exist. And that's okay. But if you that's what you're looking for, it can be kind of disappointing. And that's why people are, you know, certainly for myself, you know, for a long time, it was this

thing, then it was that thing, it would be Buddhism, then it would be that thing, thinking that it was going to be the cure. And I guess there is no cure for life, they say, right? Ain't no cure for love, I think is what Leonard Cohen said. That's exactly what he said. But it's a slightly different matter. But yeah, it's true. And people will get really frustrated when they realize that isn't there. And so they'll just keep going from place to place looking for that. I had a question once when I was giving a talk in, I think it was in Georgia, where this person was asking,

what if they make a drug that will make it possible for you to have? And I'm like, they're not going to make that drug. But what if they do? This person wouldn't let go this kind of what if. And you can always kind of imagine a scenario where that happens, but it just, there's no evidence I've seen. And we can scan back through thousands of years of human history, and it just has never happened. So I just really don't believe it's going to. Yeah, I think that everything in life is relative to something else. There is no static point,

you know, being this static point of happiness, just of a mood, of thinking of it as a particular mood state. You know, it just doesn't appear to be the nature of things at all. Yeah, I would agree. So one of the things that you say that Dogen beats nearly to death throughout, is it Shobo Genzo? Yeah, Shobo Genzo, yeah. Okay.

throughout, is it Shobo Genzo? Yeah, Shobo Genzo, yeah. It's a variation on a question that I ask on this show all the time, and I'm semi-obsessed with. It's a variation on it, but I think it's pretty much the same thing. I'll put it in my words, and then I'll let you give your and Dogen's perspective on it. But it is, how do you strive to be a better person, to improve, to work on yourself, and accept life exactly where it is and be present for it? How do you do both those things? Because that seems to be, at least to me, one of the fundamental questions at the heart of a

spiritual life, is that question. Yeah, I think that was Dogen's big question he had that Shobo Genzo is kind of an answer to. He entered monastic Buddhist practice. And as you're probably aware, I think a lot of people are aware that one of the tenets of Buddhism is that we're all perfect just as we are. We start off with this kind of perfection. And he said, well, if we're all perfect just as we are, then why do we need to do these practices? Why do we need to meditate and do all this stuff? And gradually, he comes to understand that it's just that way. He gives a metaphor in this thing called Genjo Koan, which is in the book. I did a version of Genjo Koan in which he talks about a master who's fanning himself on a hot day.

And the student says, if air is present everywhere, why do you use a fan? And the master in answer just keeps fanning himself as the answer to that question. You don't understand what air really is. So how you can do that is a kind of balancing act. I think the meditation practice is really important for this because it's not really even that difficult. You spend a certain amount of time each day just very quietly watching yourself. And through doing that, you start to gradually see how your own mind and body operate in a way that I don't think any other activity can really show you as clearly. And through doing that, when you're walking through your daily minute-by-minute business, you start to see what action you need to take at every moment.

And then, of course, you always have the option of taking that action or not. And that's where it gets tricky because you're kind of like, well, I'd like to do that, but I want to do the other thing. And whether that's going to lead to a better place or not is the question. Sometimes Buddhism is almost a kind of enlightened selfishness because you are manifesting a good or some kind of good in the world, but you're not necessarily doing it because you're so sickly sweet in love with the idea of being a good person or whatever. You just realize that it's also the smartest thing for you to do. The most intelligent course of action is always the one that benefits everyone involved,

and not just one person, even if that one person is you. Yeah, and that gets back to the title of the book, Don't Be a Jerk. Sounds like that was your paraphrasing of some of his essential wisdom, which is really about don't be a jerk in the meditation hall or in the monastery where you live as a way of, to your point, helping the greatest number of people. The essay that I took that title from is in Japanese called Shoaku Makusa, which means something like don't enact wrong. And there he says that the problem of evil isn't, like I said earlier in the thing, it's not that there is evil waiting to be done.

It's just that you do what you do in this moment, and it's either the right thing to do or it's not. But it's not an abstract thing. It's concrete action in the here and now that makes for right and makes for wrong. in the here and now that makes for right and makes for wrong. So Zen is a practice that is much more so than other Buddhist ideas, very focused on what we were talking a minute ago, which is that contradiction. That contradiction of, at the same time, I am striving to be better, I'm meditating, and I'm being perfectly as I am. It's that contradiction. And you had a teacher of yours who also said that you need to hold the right amount of faith

and doubt, which is again, another bit of a contradiction. Can you talk a little bit more about that and maybe just share your perspective on how you work with these things that are from our logical brain clearly a contradiction. That quote is from my first Zen teacher who was an American guy and I still hang out with him sometimes when I can. He lives back in Ohio. And I remember him saying that, that you need an equal amount of faith and doubt. And I, he came from an interesting perspective in that he was raised a Catholic. So he had all these Catholic concepts

that he tended to express Buddhism in terms of, which is a little bit unusual. A Japanese teacher probably wouldn't put it that way, wouldn't talk about faith and doubt. But to me, it means you have a kind of a faith in faith in that sense would be manifested as I trusted my teacher. And I think that's the original meaning of faith is a kind of trust. My previous book was called There is No God and He's Always With You. And I looked into that in the Christian perspective, this word that

keeps getting translated as faith in the Bible, in the New Testament especially, the kind of trust rather than a kind of belief. You know, it's come to mean a kind of belief in the supernatural and that sort of thing. But what it meant originally was trust in your teacher who not to be telling you lies. And I could see that my first teacher and my second teacher were both very, very honest people. So I could trust them even when they said things that didn't make a whole lot of sense. And that's a kind of a fine line you have to toe because if you go too far into the faith area, you can get into a kind of a fine line you have to toe because if you go too far into the faith area, you can get into a kind of a culty situation where you're just believing everything because your teacher says it.

So you have to also exercise a little bit of doubt in that situation if your teacher is saying things that just sound like absolute nonsense. And also you have to have a bit of doubt in yourself, which, you know, I know self-doubt is kind of touted as a bad thing. And I think probably in the overall terms maybe it is. But you also can't always be sure that you're right. You know, that's one of the things I kind of learned is I doubt my own mind now. I doubt that some of the things that my mind coughs up and says, this is absolutely right.

Sometimes I go, well, is it? I'm not so sure. So I'm trying to kind of balance the faith and doubt that way. Yeah, you've said in the past along those lines, real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day. Yeah. I have such bad language, don't I? But yeah, it's true. It's part of your charm.

We do bullshit ourselves, and it's really fascinating once you start to see it happening. That's one of the things that this Zen practice kind of took me into. I started to see how I was lying to myself and kind of repeating my own lies to the point where, in order to make myself believe them. And we all do this. We're very good at sort of pointing at politicians or whatever, you know, and saying, oh, they're telling the big lie and telling it over and over. And we see that, you know, Joseph Goebbels did that in Nazi Germany and things like that. But we have a harder time seeing how we do it ourselves. You know, and it's a little bit scary once you start to realize how much you're lying to yourself. You go, oh my gosh, I've been doing that all my life, you know, and then, but it opens up a whole new world. Once you, once you learn to kind of stop believing all that, then you can start seeing what's really

going on around you in a much clearer way. Do you see those things in meditation or do you see those things in the rest of your life as a result of meditating or both? I think it's a bit of both, you know, meditation, the way that's done in the tradition that I follow, it's called shikantaza, which means just sitting. So you're just doing nothing but sitting. So you're taking a particular meditative position that's pretty much the standard one that everybody uses. About the only difference between Zen-style meditation and most kinds of meditations in terms of physical appearances that we leave our eyes open instead of closing them. And that's, you know, everything

else looks the same. But the internal thing is you're not using that position or that exercise to get anywhere. You're not trying to become enlightened or mindful or you're not doing an exercise within your head of repeating a phrase or anything. You're just strictly sitting. So that means that the actual sitting is sort of mostly kind of boring. And it's when you stand up and walk out into the real world that you start to notice the effect. But at the same time, it's not really that the thing is happening out of the meditation practice. The meditation practice kind of continues into your regular life stuff. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless

you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign

Jason bobblehead. It's called really know really and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In the meditation practice that you follow, usually the instructions are starting with counting the breath, and then over time, releasing that attachment to the counting, and then finally releasing the attachment to the breath. And is that the point that you're describing as just sitting? And am I correct about what I just said? I may have just mangled that. No, no, you haven't mangled it. It depends on the teacher. There are teachers who do it exactly the way you've described within the Soto style of Zen, of using the breath counting. My first teacher did that a little bit.

My other teacher, the one who actually ordained me, was very much against that practice. So he started off with the just sitting practice. So you didn't even count your breath or use any sort of props at all, which is another way of doing it. And that's the way I tend to teach it. But that can be very difficult. And you're likely to lose a lot of people if you do that, because the breath counting thing is very helpful. And it's one of the least sort of weird things you can do during

meditation is count your breath because because breath is very stable and it's ordinary and it's good to kind of stick with the stable ordinary thing that that keeps you a bit grounded because the meditation practice can get a little freaky and and once you're kind of flying off into the stratosphere and having cool experiences, this is where people tend to go wrong. They tend to get really into whatever strange experiences that the meditation might be helping them access. So the Shikantaza really begins when you drop everything, Shikantaza being the just sitting practice. But it's very difficult. And I find that I have to be reminded again and again, even now after 30

years of doing it and teaching it and all this other stuff and writing books about it, I find that I still need reminders sometimes that what I'm really after is nothing outside of this very moment, even if this very moment seems to be extraordinarily mundane and not worth paying any attention to at all. So I want to follow back up on that idea of just this moment, but let's stick with the meditation a little bit. So if I was to not be following my breath and just sitting, does that mean that I am letting my mind do whatever it does? Or am I trying to observe what's happening? Or what's the rest of that instruction?

And if it's way too long for this, we can skip that. I'm just very curious. I can try to make it short. It's that you don't really do anything. It's that you don't really do anything. So it's even letting go is something you let go of, which sounds all paradoxical and zen. But yeah, the metaphor I like best is Shunryu Suzuki, who was a teacher, a Japanese teacher who lived in San Francisco, started the San Francisco Zen Center, said that your thoughts are just the secretions of your brain the same way your stomach acid or stomach juices are the secretion of your stomach.

And I think that's a really good metaphor. And I've extended that in a lot of ways when I try to teach it. It's sort of like, if you had conscious control over your digestion, that would probably be a disaster because you'd go, I want to digest the cupcakes first and not the tofu or whatever you've eaten. And you'd start messing around with it and you would make your stomach less able to function in its proper way. And I think that's what we do with our heads often. We get in there and we're forcing our brains to do what our kind of ego structure demands it, and thereby actually interrupting what the brain is actually meant to be doing. So in a way, you're just letting your thoughts do what they want. But at the same time, that can be a little distressing, I think, for people. Because at first, it's sort of boring,

and your thoughts are just kind of going, you know, not making any sense or whatever. But after a while, you start to lose a little bit of a sense of who you are, because who you are before then is dictated by your ego structure manipulating your thoughts in a certain direction. And when you let that go, the thoughts can get a little wild and freaky. And some people find that really, really disturbing, because they're no longer in control. You know, you want to maintain the sense of control and then you realize you don't even have control of your own thoughts, you know, and that, and that a lot of people hate that feeling because it's so against what they've been brought up to think is normal. Right.

But this is different than in some way than kind of what I'm doing moment to moment as I'm walking around. And it is the difference that I'm just not, like when I'm walking around and my brain's going all over, I'm kind of actively trying to direct it a little bit versus when I'm sitting there, I'm kind of just letting whatever happens happen. Well, you do a little bit of both. I mean, there's no real harm. I remember my teacher, my ordaining teacher, said something like, in Zazen, you can have practical thoughts. And I thought, that's weird, because I thought we were supposed to have no thought. I had this idea. So there's nothing harmful, really, in trying to think something through because that's how we figure out a lot of stuff. It's activity, which is kind of this electrical chemical activity, which manifests itself in conscious terms as thoughts and feelings in that.

And if you can let them go and just let them be what they want to be, I think it's much more comfortable. around you're you're no longer deliberating on you know oh god fred is such an idiot and i should do something about him you know and all this stuff that we we do with our brains all the time you just kind of learn to let that go i think all mindfulness and meditation practices tend to have some focus on the the present moment but zen seems to be very, very, like that's the whole thing, is exactly what's happening right now in a way that transcends words. Well, yeah, that's exactly it. There's nothing other than what's happening right now, and that I think you can think that through, and makes perfect sense because I am bringing, as we're talking now, I'm bringing all of my past to bear on this podcast. And so it's real. But at the same time, the past doesn't exist as a thing I can go back and revisit. I can think about it, I can reminisce, but I have to kind of

have a little bit of doubt about whether my reminiscences are true or not. So yeah, Zen does kind of radically focus on this moment as being the thing that we most have to pay attention to. So rather than trying to better ourselves, we simply look at what we are now. And eventually over time, we do become better through doing that. That's the ironic bit of it. that. That's the ironic bit of it. But not because we're trying to become better, just because we're trying to always stay focused on what exactly is going on at this moment, no matter what it is. So you've got your formal meditation practice where you're sitting, just sitting. And then are you working on also to be, it's the word of the moment, right, that some people cringe at,

but are you working to bring that same level of mindfulness to the rest of the moment, right, that some people cringe at, but are you working to bring that same level of mindfulness to the rest of the day? Are you trying to see just this moment as you're up kind of off the cushion also? Well, yeah, I guess you are. I've kind of, as you said, I've sort of shied away from the word mindfulness because it's become kind of a brand name anymore, even though it really is an intrinsic part of the Buddhist practice. And you can find it in the ancient literature that the word nen comes up in Japanese, which is usually translated as mindfulness. But you're looking at what's going on now.

So the character that's used to represent mindfulness in Chinese characters, which the Japanese also used, is the character for now on top of the character for mind. So it's bringing your mind to this moment and never staying away from it. So it's not that you're trying to enhance something called mindfulness. It's just that you're staying with what's going on at every moment and hopefully learning that as a kind of a new habit rather than the older habit, which has you constantly trying to escape what's going on. If I recall, I think you said something probably half jokingly, but that part of just sitting is

the practice is that that is so boring, that when you get up, you're naturally more fascinated with the rest of the world, because there's so much more stimulation than when you're just sitting there. Well, in a way, yeah, I mean, that's true. I've tended to sometimes emphasize the boring aspects of this practice. And I'm almost thinking, well, maybe I should get away from that because some people are getting too focused on the boredom of it. But in a way, you're working on the most boring practice possible, which is just sitting and you're actually staring at a wall. One of the metaphors for boredom is watching paint dry. And that's exactly what you're actually staring at a wall. You know, one of the metaphors for boredom is watching paint dry, and that's exactly what you're doing. Even if the paint's been dry for 50 years,

you're still watching it dry as you're doing this practice. So it can be extremely dull, but that does help you once you get out of that practice to notice how fascinating everything is. And it might be because you start to notice that this wall you're staring at is infinitely fascinating, even though it's not taking its clothes off and dancing for you or whatever, you know, whatever thing you might imagine you'd want it to do. It's actually a fascinating thing. And then you can kind of go through your day and when something actually conventionally interesting happens, you're much more present for

it. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You've said you can always improve your situation, but you do so by facing it, not by running away. complacency, because it so emphasizes the here and now and what's really going on at this moment. It does do that, but it's not advocating complacency as you can't ever improve anything.

It's just that the way you improve things is by first recognizing what they are, including how you fit into it, including how you yourself created this situation that maybe you now think is a situation you want to get out of. So you have to kind of notice that first, and then from there you can move on and make it better. You mentioned several times in the book Robin Hitchcock as your favorite songwriter. This is a tough question, maybe the toughest I've asked you so far. Oh, no. Name either a favorite song, not the favorite, but a favorite, or a favorite album. Again, not the only top, but in the top percentiles.

Oh, God. Yeah, that's the toughest question you've asked me. Because Robin Hitchcock is a guy I've kind of followed since the 80s. I used to put out albums under this band named Dementia 13, which was always just a kind of a cover for me with different people sometimes assisting. And after I'd put out the second of these albums, somebody said, And after I'd put out the second of these albums, somebody said, oh, you sound like Robin Hitchcock. And I was like, ooh. And I went and found a Robin Hitchcock album and listened to it and went, oh, my god, I do sound like this guy. But I'd never heard him before.

So he became a real favorite of mine in a slightly narcissistic way that we share a lot of the same influences, I think, which is a long-winded way of saying, I'm trying to think of the name. He put out in 2004, 2006, a pair of albums which were kind of complementary to each other. I'm trying to remember. A Star for Bram was the second one. And what was the first one? Jewels for Sophia. That's what it was called. I'm a Robin Hitchcock fan, too,

although I've tended to listen more to the older stuff. I haven't kept up as much with the newer stuff. So I'd probably say, I think the album's called Queen Elvis. It's got Last Madonna, The Wasps. And he's still performing a lot of those songs when he does live stuff. So I'd probably say, I think the album's called Queen Elvis. It's got Last Madonna, The Wasps. And he's still performing a lot of those songs when he does live stuff these days. Do you remember the analogy of what he said that you quoted in the book? It was something about the self and how we imagine that the psyche is kind of this individual thing, but it's recycled just like everything else. So we know that our bodies are kind of the constant recycling of things and elements

that are common throughout all of space. We understand that from modern physics and cosmology and chemistry, that we are not really this unique thing. We're just clumps of stuff. And he extends that to the realm of our psyches or our so-called souls, maybe just like that. And I've used that quote two different times in two different books because I think it's such a good way of expressing it. But gosh, I can't remember exactly how he said it. Yeah, well, and what you're getting at there is a little bit of the concept of no self, which is a very difficult concept for a lot of people, myself included at points. I think what's interesting is what I got from your book, and I've read it a couple of other places, is the idea, because at first when you hear that, it's like, well, no, there obviously is a self here, right?

And I think what you're saying is that that stuff is not untrue. It's just not the whole picture. It's not the whole picture, yeah. And we slice it up in different ways. So yeah, each of us has an individual personality and a personal history and opinions and all of that. The problem is when we gather all these things together and say it's self, we're making a kind of mistake. And it's just the way we slice up reality in other ways. slice up reality in other ways. You know, I lived in Japan for a number of years and became familiar with this idea that the Japanese have a single color that encompasses both what we would call blue and what we would call green. So when you're having a conversation with a Japanese person and you're not a native Japanese speaker, you probably often have to ask for clarification on what they mean. It's just because they slice up the color spectrum in a slightly different way

from what English speakers do. So it's not that it's right or wrong. It's just this is reality, and this is the way I've chosen to divide it up. And I think we do that with our self. We put a bunch of things that we experience that are real things into a category and call that category self. And then we extrapolate from that into believing that self is a real thing. And self isn't a real thing. Green and blue aren't really real things. They're just names we give to describe things to each other. But if we imagine that green and blue were actual things that operated in the world, we would go crazy trying

to define how they did their thing. Does blue like green? Is green having an affair with yellow? Or you get into all these weird permutations because you believed in it as a thing that actually exists. And it's the same thing with self. It's just a concept that we carry around that's provisionally useful when describing things to each other. But it doesn't have any ultimate reality beyond that. And that's what ultimately Zen is pointing to, is that ultimate reality that transcends really all words. Yeah, yeah. And that's where you get into the tricky bits. You know, Dogen is a very difficult person to read because he's so contradictory. He'll tell you one thing and then he'll take it back in the next sentence and it becomes very confusing when you're initially reading him.

But he's really trying to point the reader or the listener to something that there really aren't words for, which is difficult to do because the only tools you have for doing that are words. Right. And in Zen you have a practice of, I don't know if I'm saying it right, koans? Mm-hmm. So once you're given a koan, is that something that you contemplate as you sit? Or is that something that you are contemplating outside of or both? How do you work that, so to speak, once you're given one? In the world of Zen, there are two sort of large Zen organizations. There's the Soto and the Rinzai school. And within the Rinzai school, that's

where they tend to give you the koans as the questions, you know, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Or what is the what is the shape of your face before your parents were born? And these kind of absurd sounding questions. Or your classic, if a mime gets hit by a tree in the forest, does he make a sound? Yeah, yeah. Or does mime still suck, you know? You're given these questions and told to contemplate them. In the Soto style of Zen, they don't do that. They don't give you the question and have you concentrate on it. But what they'll do is they'll bring the questions up usually in a public talk or sometimes in a one-to-one talk with your teacher and use it as a framing device to kind of get into the concepts that you're dealing with in your practice. Well, we're near the end of time, I'm going to ask one last question related to what Dogen said.

And it's about the role of nature. Okay. And by nature, I think what we mean is the outdoors in teaching us about life. Can you expound on that? Well, Dogen does talk a lot about how nature expresses reality. nature expresses reality. And there's a chapter in Shobo Genzo, which I've paraphrased as hearing weird stuff late at night or something like that, which he talks about hearing the sound of a stream late at night and how that expresses the Dharma. And I really like that one because it's an experience I've had for myself and it was really profound and useful, but it also was an experience I've had for myself, and it was really profound and useful. But it also was an

experience that came out of being prepared for that experience, which is something that Dogen also talks about. He talks about a monk who hears the Dharma being preached through the sounds of a stream, but he wouldn't have heard that if his teacher hadn't told him years before that you can hear the Dharma being preached in the sound of a stream. So it's this kind of weird, ironic twist on the role of how we learn. You know, we learn by absorbing information. We also learn by somebody who's had an experience describing that experience and kind of helping us to recognize it when it happens to ourselves. So yeah, I think nature is a great way to learn the Dharma.

And I'm saying this from, I'm sitting in an apartment in Los Angeles in Silver Lake, which is kind of a densely populated, very urban part of this sprawling city. So I think nature can be extended to even encompass those things that we encounter in our urban settings. It's not like you have to go out to a mountaintop to find this. It's always there. It's always present. Excellent. Well, I think that's a perfect place to end. Thanks so much, Brad, for coming on. I'm happy to have finally gotten you on the show. And for folks that like their Buddhism a little bit, I don't know if the word is, it's not irreverent, funny, funny, and enjoyable and serious and lighthearted at the same time. We will have links to all your stuff on our website at one you feed.net slash Brad. So thank you so much, Brad. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. I really enjoyed it. Excellent. Okay, take care. You too. All right. Bye. you can learn more about brad warner and this podcast at one you feed.net slash brad