The One You Feed - Brad Warner on Hardcore Zen

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Brad Warner is an ordained Zen teacher and the author of many books, including There is No God and He is Always With You, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, and Hardcore Zen, Brad is the creator of the “Hardcore Zen” blog and YouTube Channel and is also a punk rock bass player in the band, Zero Defex. He has published work in Buddhist magazines Shambala Sun, Buddha Dharma, and Tricycle as well as rock magazines such as Alternative Press, Maximum Rock and Roll, and Razorcake.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Brad Warner and I Discuss Hardcore Zen and …His book, “Letters to a Dead Friend About Zen”Absolute truth and relative truthThe Buddhist precepts – there are no universal rules that apply to everythingThe universe is a living entity that is affected by our actionsWhy he wrote this book for his friend who diedIceberg metaphor – what can be seen is what we know about ourselves, but we also have unseen and unknowable parts of ourselves.His thoughts on Buddha being a geniusThe Buddha, the Dharma, and the SanghaA goal of not having a goal is also a goalBeing in a goal-oriented societySeeing things as they are and realizing that we’re wrongThe challenge of accepting our current reality as how it's supposed to be and not how we want it to be.Working with our desires for things to be a certain wayBrad Warner Links:hardcorezen.comTwitterFacebookYouTubeIndeed: Helps you find high impact hires, faster, without any long term contracts and you pay only for what you need. Get started with a free $75 credit to boost your job post and get in front of more quality candidates by going to www.indeed.com/wolf Calm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolf SimpliSafe: Get comprehensive protection for your entire home with security cameras, alarms, sensors as well as fire, water, and carbon monoxide alerts. Visit simplisafe.com/wolf for free shipping and a 60-day money-back guarantee. If you enjoyed this conversation with Brad Warner on Hardcore Zen, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Brad Warner )2016 Episode)Shinzen YoungShozan Jack HaubnerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before we start, I want to give a big shout out to our newest Patreon members. Sam M, Rama G, Colleen D, Maria F, Melanie D, Joan U, and Melissa B. Thanks so much to all of you and thank you so much to all of our other Patreon members. If you'd like to experience being a Patreon member and all the benefits that come with it, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Nobody's going to do Zazen, especially me for 37 freaking years, without wanting something from it. But the fact that you want something from it doesn't have to be all that 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know 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 also the author of many books, most of which have hilarious titles like There Is No God and He's Always With You,

Zen Wrapped in Karma, Dipped in Chocolate, and his 2004 book Hardcore Zen. He also maintains his blog and YouTube channel, Hardcore Zen. And as if that's not enough, Brad is also a punk rock bass player in the band Zero Defects and has published work in the Buddhist magazines Shambhala Sun, Buddha Dharma, and Tricycle, as well as rock magazines such as Alternative Press, Maximum Rock and Roll, and Razor Cake. Hi, Brad. Welcome to the show. Hello. It's good to have you back. You and I talked, it's been probably four years ago. The main

difference between, well, there's lots of differences between now and then, but one of them is that in the intervening years, I've become a much more serious practitioner of Zen. So we've got a little bit more in common there. You know, I'd always sort of considered myself an all-purpose Buddhist, maybe, but I've gotten very specific and very focused in the last couple years on Zen. So we'll have more to talk about there, but let's start like we always do with the 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, and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I think it's an important thing and I think it's a good parable and it's true. It is the one that you feed that wins and you always have a choice of whether to feed your greed and anger and hatred or feed the other parts, you know, the better, the kindness and love and all of that. And I think that's real crucial. The book that we're going to be talking about is not the one that I'm writing now. I've decided that I wanted to write a book about Buddhist

ethics. And that plays into it too. There's a really strong ethical component to Buddhism. And I've been looking at some other sort of non-dual philosophies like Advaita Vedanta and that, and there are ethical components there, but they aren't as strong as in Buddhism. Buddhism really lays the ethics on heavy, you know, sometimes. I think even when I first came across it, I thought that was a bit heavy. But now I realize, oh no, sometimes. I think even when I first came across it, I thought that was a bit heavy. But now I realize, oh, no, this is a really good thing to follow an ethical system to live your life, because it's good. It's good for me. And it's good for everybody else that I encounter. So I think feeding that good wolf is the best thing for everybody involved.

Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I think we could explore that for a while, because when I started initially being really into Buddhism, I was really drawn towards language that talked about a behavior was skillful or it was unskillful, you know? There was this sort of framing that I felt moved things away from an ethical or moral area. And that appealed to me for quite some time. And even at times as I looked at this parable, there's moments where I'm like, well, you know, maybe we've got a skillful and an unskillful wolf and, you know, well, that's kind of a boring parable to have a skillful or unskillful wolf. But more and more, maybe this is what happens,

I don't know, as part of natural part of getting older or what. But as I've gotten older, I've gotten more interested in the ethical or moral ideas and a belief that there is some right and wrong that exists, or at least that I can orient around. Yeah, yeah. Zen is really weird about that, because they'll, on one hand, tell you there is no right or wrong. And on the other hand, Dogen is great for this. He'll tell you there is no right or wrong, and then he'll tell you, do the right thing. The Shouaku Makasa is one of my favorite passages in all of Dogen's, and that's just Japanese for don't enact wrong. And I made that a title of my book before, a few books ago, called Don't Be a Jerk. And I unskillful kind of help get you into that. But you can also say that in a given situation, when you're face to face with somebody and

something has to be done, there is the right thing to do. And there's probably a thousand not right things to do. And trying to find the right thing to do is tricky sometimes because we tend to get very dominated by our own desires and fears and things. And you'll respond based on desire and fear rather than on what's actually the proper thing to do in the moment, which is why we have the Buddhist precepts. The Buddhist precepts are just kind of rules that you can defer to if in trouble and you don't know what to do. You just try to follow the sort of the ethical behavior of the ancient Buddhists, you know, don't kill, don't lie, don't steal, don't, you know, there's a bunch of them. There's a view in Buddhism or Zen in particular, but I think it applies across the board, of seeing that the world is whole and perfect and kind of as it is.

All is well. And there's another way of seeing the world that is more the way we tend to see the world. You could refer to it as more dualistic. Or I sometimes hear it referred to as there's the absolute and the relative, you know, and maybe the answer is just when it gets down to practical things, there is a right or wrong. But how do you balance or keep those two views in mind in a way that's useful? It's tricky, because if you go just by language or an intellectual understanding, you get one sort of answer, and you get another answer if you're actually just in the moment doing things. And I think the point is to go for the answer

that works in the moment doing things. Everybody likes to talk about that, you know, absolute truth and relative truth. And I've never, it's just maybe me, but I've never been comfortable about dividing things that way. I feel like the absolute truth and the relative truth are ultimately the same. So it's not that there's one sort of behavior that works in the absolute realm and one sort of behavior that works in the relative realm. What you want to do for the sake of the absolute is the same sort of behavior that you want to do in the relative context. You want to do right by whatever you encounter, whoever, I was going to say people, but it doesn't necessarily always have to be

people, but by whoever you encounter and in whatever situation you find yourself in, you want to do the proper thing. And that is how the absolute kind of makes its way into the world. I think the absolute is, is always on the side of doing the proper thing. The problem is the proper thing is often difficult. You know, you can't make a blanket set of rules that are going to apply to every situation. This is one of the things that's acknowledged in the Buddhist precept. My teacher had this, God, I wish I could come up with it off the top of my head, but he had this great way of phrasing it, where he does this Q&A in this book that he wrote about the precepts. And he's kind of going on and on about, you know, it's sort of absolute, you know,

there is no absolute right or wrong and blah, blah, blah. And he goes on for that with a paragraph. And then the student says, well, then does that mean we should follow the precepts? And he said, we should definitely follow the precepts, you know. So, even though there is no absolute right and wrong and then things are as they should be always and forever, you follow the precepts. And that's how you get through this, you know, as Prince said, this thing we call life, you know, you're trying to do the right thing by everyone you encounter. Yeah, I was reading something today earlier that was talking about that idea of saying everything's perfect. It was a Zen book, and it said not that everything is perfect in like the way we normally think of that.

It just meant that everything was perfect as in it was complete, and it was as it is. Yeah, yeah. When we hear perfect, we sort of read into ideal. Yeah, you sort of ideal a paradise. It's not necessarily what's meant there. Yeah, yeah. It's just complete. That's sort of the thing that I'm struggling with to try to explain in this book that I'm writing now, which I probably shouldn't overpromote because it'll be a while before it comes out. It's that idea. I was sort of putting some of this stuff on my YouTube page,

and somebody objected to the idea of, what was the idea I put it for? You should always try to avoid harm or avoid doing harm to any living creature or sentient being, as they say in Buddhism. And somebody kind of came back with, well, this means that a parent whose child is being attacked by a wolf can't fight back against the wolf because that would be harming them. You know, people get into these weird, when they hear this, they go into this like absolute area where you can't do anything. And the thing is, if you look at Buddhist ethics, the way they sort of described on paper, you would imagine that Buddhists couldn't do anything, you know, like they would be just stuck not doing anything at all for fear

that they would do harm to something. I mean, Buddhists get even really weird. There's a line that one of my teachers said in a lecture that I was looking at, and he said he's holding this stick that the Zen teachers often hold when they give a lecture. He said, when I touch my stick to the ground, both the stick and the ground feel pain, but they don't say so. That was what he said.

And from the Zen point of view, you can go, okay, I get what he's saying. If you tried to take that out into the sort of mindset that we have where everything is a separate individual object with its own agency and its own feelings and so forth. And you get this idea that, oh my God, a Buddhist can't even touch a stick on the ground because he's afraid he's going to cause harm to the stick in the ground. But that's not the way it is. It's actually a much more practical philosophy, but it acknowledges this other side in which we say that the whole universe is a living entity and everything that we do does kind of hurt it, you know, but we're at the same time, we're trying to minimize that amount of harm that we do

because we know that that's good for everybody. And we know that that's how we eventually make this world a better place. Totally, totally. All right, let's change gears a little bit. Your book that I've took most of my notes from is called Letters to a Dead Friend about Zen. There are a series of letters you wrote. Most of them happened while you were on tour in Europe, and they were written to a friend of yours who died at the age of 48 from cancer. Yeah, that's basically it. That's a good summation. It was this interesting book to write because I'd had this idea for a while that I had been writing some books that I still think are really good, but I was writing these books that were

sort of deep dives into the philosophy of Dogen and trying to explain its relevance to the contemporary world and kind of make it accessible to people. And I was going and doing these tours in Europe and elsewhere and getting questions back from the audiences that indicated that a lot of the people I was talking to, not only, I mean, they were interested in what I had to say, but not only didn't they know who Dogen was, they barely knew who Buddha was or what Zen was, you know. And I thought, oh, I better take a few steps back and put a book out that explains a very basic outline of what this philosophy is. In the meantime, a friend of mine had cancer and died. And it was really devastating because this is a guy I knew since we were both in high school, and we'd actually lived in the same house together for a while. So I knew him pretty well. By the time he got the cancer diagnosis, I hadn't seen him regularly for a few years, but we've been communicating online like people do. And so we were pretty close, And I visited him a couple of times during his last illnesses and kind of saw what was going on. And after he died, you know, would have been a couple years after we met each other in high school. And then when we were living together in that punk rock house,

I was sitting Zazen, you know, every morning and every night in my little room, which was, you know, down the hall from his room. I didn't talk much about Zen to him. I'm not one of these people who kind of fancies himself as into Zen, you know, and wants to kind of tell the world and wear the Birkenstocks and whatever you do to kind of try to indicate that you're into some sort of Eastern spirituality. So we never really had a conversation about it, but he was a guy who was interested in those kind of things. And when I visited him, when he knew, you know, his prognosis, he got it very late in the disease. So he never had a good prognosis. We were always

hoping that something would, you know, something would happen and pull through, but it didn't happen. And so everybody was aware that this is what was going to happen to him and he wasn't going to last very long. But I decided when I was with him on the two times I went up to visit him during his illness, that I didn't want to be one of those people who tries to sell a dying person on their religion, because I think that's obnoxious. You know, that's, I don't, I don't like that, you know, when people do that. So I thought, well, I'm just going to let him move the conversation wherever it wants to go. And in retrospect, I had some regrets of thinking that, well, maybe I could have pushed things a little bit, you know, maybe he was a little bit too shy to go into some of these areas. And maybe

I should have, you know, kind of moved the conversation in that way, because we never did get into the depths that we could have gotten into, because we spent like a week together, two different times. So this book was sort of a way to kind of rectify it. It's sort of a way to say all the things that I felt like I should have said to him, explaining this practice, explaining what it has to do with everything. And I had this funny question when I gave a lecture about this in London, right after the book had come out, where somebody said, of course, you're not a person who believes that your dead friend can actually read these letters. And I said, well, not exactly. I mean, I don't

put it absolutely outside of the realm of possibilities that he might be able to read the letters in some sort of way, although not as, you know, a guy sitting up in heaven with a harp and looking at the book. But there might be a way that what he was receives what I'm trying to give him. So, in that sense, I took it really seriously. Like, I'm actually trying to say this to my dead friend. But I'm also right. I also know I'm writing a book, you know, and I know that most of the people who are reading it are not him. And so I tried to make sure I wasn't saying anything in the book that I wouldn't actually say to him. You know, I tried to put my mind in the mindset that, okay, he can read this, you know, whether I absolutely believe

that or not, it's kind of not relevant to me, really. But I thought, for the sake of the book, I have to write it as if he can read it. And so it makes it very sort of intimate. So I'm telling him, this friend of mine, what I would have said to him. And then the audience gets to look in on it, if they're interested, and see what I have to say to my friend who died about Zen. That's a long explanation of the book. Yeah. Well, I want to dive in and talk about a couple things in the book there that you said. And the first, I'm just going to read just a short little section here, because I really love what you say here. You say, we're like icebergs. What we know is only the little bit that shows above the water. The rest of us goes on forever below, unseen, unknowable.

We can't understand it. We can only try to accord with it. And I'd like you to just elaborate a little bit more on what does accord with these deep, unseen, unknowable parts of ourselves? What does that mean? It's interesting you should bring that up because, you know, certain parts of that book are really real. And that part, actually, I copied from a diary that I was writing right after this friend, right after I got the news that he died. You know, the day described in the early part of the book, what I was, I went to this pizza shop in Hamburg, in Germany, and was sitting there writing in this diary. And that was one of the things I wrote was about the icebergs. And I just basically copied it into the book and

didn't change it very much. But I think that's my feeling about life. Our conscious mind is able to access certain aspects about our self. And if you practice Buddhism, like I know you do, the word self is a loaded word in Buddhism. But there is a sense of personal self. And the personal self is something we, I was going to say we know very well, we don't actually know it very well, but it's among the things that we know, it's the thing that we know best. You know, it's sort of a limited trajectory of a life history and likes and dislikes and things like that, that all come together and we form a picture of ourselves,

which is about as accurate as the pictures that we form of anybody else. You know, this is one thing that struck me during practice one day, like a, you know, a wallop on the head was that I know myself about as well as I know, you know, a close friend, which is,

you know, I don't know that much about, you know, even my closest friends, you know, and, but we do know that and, and we know that aspect,

but then there's this other business that just goes on like i use the metaphor of the iceberg that's that's huge underneath and that that probably is much more meaningful than any of that personal stuff that personal stuff is just sort of weird little reflections of what's going on underneath and to accord with that is difficult because the you know the personal self has its own agenda, has things it wants to do and places it wants to go and stuff it wants to accomplish and all that. But it might not be in accord with that bigger sort of push that's going on.

And that push that's going on is what brought your personal self into existence in the first place. This is me being all weird and zenny, I suppose. You know, the reason you're here, the reason you manifest on this earth as this thing that you are, is for a bunch of reasons that are not accessible to the conscious mind. But you can sort of accord with them. You can sort of try to feel where this is going and, and try to do what's best to make that happen. And it's something I've been working on all my life. And I feel like I've gone wrong in a lot of ways, but one of the Buddhist precepts is don't speak or don't dwell on past mistakes. It's a good one. I'm trying not to dwell on my past mistakes.

It's a good one. But, you know, I've made a lot of mistakes. And as I make those mistakes, I learn from those mistakes. And I try to move things back on track. And that's, you know, what I've always been trying to do, at least consciously, even if I screw up a lot of the times. And that's how I accord with it. But it's always a little bit, it's going on at a level that the conscious mind doesn't have access to. So it's not like you can go, okay, I need to, you know, buy a Prius.

I don't know what people decide they want to do. But maybe it involves buying a Prius. But I think it's much more nebulous and harder to understand than that. It's more like a push towards an end. And somehow I got pushed towards this Buddhist end. And I often wonder, why? Why me? Why Buddhism, of all things? Even after 37 years, because I figured it out today is at least 37 years of Buddhist practice, I still don't feel like much of a Buddhist. And I still don't know why this is the thing that I chose to kind of go for. But I think it's something that, that needed

to be done in the world. And whatever forces are out there that understand these things saw that need and popped me into existence and said, here you go, that's your job. And I went, what? Yeah, something like that. Thank you. 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.

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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 mentioned an old teacher of yours. I don't know if I'll get his name right. Nishijima? Nishijima, yeah. Nishijima, yeah. Nishijima Roshi, your teacher while you were in Japan. And people would ask him what Buddha was, and he would say,

I think Buddha was a kind of genius. And you go on to say, I think that's the best way to understand Buddha. That means he was sort of like a spiritual Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. I think that's a great, great explanation. Say a little bit more about what that means to us. Yeah, I just, I really liked it when he said that. If I remember right, the conversation was with a guy who was, I think he was a devout Catholic, or he was raised a devout Catholic, and he really wanted to understand what Buddha was cosmically. So, I think what he wanted was an answer like, you know, the savior of mankind or something that would be more religious answer, I think is what this, I don't know for

sure, but it seemed like in the conversation, that's what he was reaching for. And Nishijima Roshi came out with, I think he was a sort of genius, you know, I love that because it sort of puts him back on that level because you can kind of say, well, there's a lot of ways you can take that. You know, Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein, we understand that they don't possess magical powers or they aren't celestial beings in that sense. Maybe we're all celestial beings, but, you know, we don't need to go there. But they're people like us. But you also understand that if you wanted to argue about the rules of general and special relativity, with Albert Einstein, or Stephen Hawking, you're probably not going to get

very far, you know, you have to defer to a person like that when it comes to their area of expertise, you know. And same with the Buddha, the same with the great masters in Buddhism as well, is you understand that they're human beings and you don't try to kind of idealize them too much. But you have to understand that if the Buddha said something about ethics, for example, it's probably not going to make much sense to argue your point about ethics against Buddha's point about ethics. So that's why I get funny reactions from the sort of audience that I have for my books, I think, because it's a sort of, you know, it's a snarky punk rock audience, and they're going, well, why are you always quoting these old ancient masters? Because, you know,

aren't you going to say something for yourself or, you know, I'll get that kind of response sometimes. And, and I think, well, no, these, these ancient masters are revered for a reason. You know, they're not, they're not just arbitrarily set up there on a, on a pedestal. It's because they said and did things that were recognized by their contemporaries as important and worth preserving even after they died. Sorry, that's Ziggy, my dog. He's barking at my girlfriend's mom in the backyard. But that's what I mean when I say that he was a genius. I don't

know if Nishijima Roshi meant exactly that, but I think he did. He wasn't really, he didn't like all the sort of supernatural stuff that tends to surround Buddhism sometimes, especially being a Japanese person where that stuff, you know, kind of can get overwhelming, depending on which sort of Buddhist temple you go to. So talking about him in terms of being a human genius was, I think, his way of kind of bringing that down to a more realistic sort of view. And so in your mind, given that, when we talk about the three treasures or the three jewels, right, there's different words we could use. I pay homage to, I venerate, I, you know, we'll say the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, right? And so, you know, when we say Buddha

in that sense, what do you think we're saying there? You know, is that not a phrase you even like? And if it's one that you don't like, or if it's one that you do use, what's that translation in your mind mean? Because where I get hung up is I'll go, well, okay, the Buddha historical figure who was really wise, gave us all these teachings, but isn't that sort of the Dharma? No, well, okay, the Buddha, historical figure who was really wise, gave us all these teachings, but isn't that sort of the Dharma? Well, okay, you know, those two get confused in my mind. They should, I think, probably. You know, the Buddha and the Dharma and the Sangha even are kind of a single thing. You know, the Sangha being the group of practitioners and the Dharma being the teachings and the Buddha being the person. But, of course, if you get into Mahayana Buddhism, if you want to get into the sort of philosophical intellectual history of the thing,

they transformed the meaning of Buddha from being the historical person to a sort of ideal that is believed to be a real thing, you know, not just an idea that pervades the whole universe, kind of a living spirit, if you will, of rightness. We revere that and we honor that in the sense that it manifests in everybody, you know, not just the historical figure. You study Zen, so you know that Zen tends to almost downplay to the annoyance of a lot of other sects of Buddhism, the historical figure of Buddha. Zen teachers often quote the Buddha, but if you actually look at what their quotes are from, they're from Mahayana sutras, which were written long after the Buddha died. And you don't get a whole lot of quotations from the actual

historical Buddha when you listen to a Zen teacher talk about Buddha. So, it's not exactly the sense of revering that guy, although he was a special person. You know, you have to kind of acknowledge that he set something into motion that was very, very important and shouldn't be kind of looked down upon. And the Dharma is that thing. But then, of course, you get into Mahayana Buddhism again, and the word dharma becomes a kind of catch-all term. I was just trying to explain it in a piece of writing I was doing yesterday, and I realized, well, the way that the word dharma is being used in this particular sentence means anything and everything. You know, this cup that I'm holding, well, your audience can't see it, but this cup I'm

holding is dharma. And literally that would be included in all dharmas in some versions. Even aspects of the physical world are dharmas. The one I always had trouble with, if we want to go there, is sangha. Because like I said, I never really fancied myself a Buddhist and I would be with these Buddhist groups. And I know that this is an important part myself a Buddhist, and I would be with these Buddhist groups, and I know that this is an important part of the practice, but I'd be kind of like, I don't want to honor these jokers. And a lot of them weren't really friends of mine or anything, even among the groups I practiced with. I'd be kind of like, I don't want to hang around with that guy, you know, except when we're doing something Buddhist-y together. But then that should be honored too, because these are the people, you know, like it or not, these are the

people who are taking this stuff seriously. And whether you agree with them or whether you kind of mix with them, otherwise, this is who's working on this stuff. It's always a little hard for me, you know, there's this trendy phrase, the Maha Sangha, and Maha means great. And they're talking about the greater group of Buddhists throughout the world. And usually they're referring in America to American Buddhists. And I look at American Buddhism and I go, oh, yeah, you know, there's some stuff in there that I kind of go, well, yeah, that's fine if you want to do that. But I don't think that's what I'm working on. They get very political and stuff sometimes. And usually it's all for a good cause. You know,

I haven't seen many Buddhists supporting causes that I think are bad. But I also think, you know, there's something deeper we're working on here. And if you kind of channel it into a political cause, you get lost in the politics of it. And I'd rather bring it back down to what it is at its core, the reason we're trying to do the right thing, rather than the specific laws you're trying to get enacted or movements you're trying to support and stuff. There's always a core to that that's more basic and important than the specifics, and you can get lost. I'm sorry, I shouldn't go there, though. That opens a whole can of worms

that we're not going to have time for, but. Good. Yeah, because I actually made a decision, you know, after the pandemic and everything started going wonky with everybody that I'm just really going to stay away from that. Like I hadn't been getting it. I'd been trying to stay away from it before,

but dipping my toes in here and there. And then I thought, no, I'm going to stay absolutely out of that. And just work on something much more, I think, much more basic than that. Thank you. 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.

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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. Let's talk about something that I think is pretty basic and yet universal and pretty important. pretty basic and yet universal and pretty important. And it's one of the most challenging, I think, aspects of a serious Buddhist practice. And it's not self, although it can't avoid the

self, but it's really the discussion around desire and goals. There's a lot of saying, you know, particularly in Zen, that, you know, we don't practice meditation or Zazen. We don't do it for any reason. We don't do it for any goal. There's no goal. What we want to do is abandon our goals, right? And then, of course, you get yourself into an infinite loop that goes, well, isn't wanting to be free of desires another type of desire? But I want to talk a little bit about why are we even trying to not have a goal in our spiritual practice? Well, it's a good question because you're right. You can get into this endless loop of the goal of having no goal is also a goal. The way my first teacher, Tim McCarthy, solved that for me is he said, well, yeah, semantically, the goal of

having no goal is also a goal. But when you're actually working on having no goal, it's very different from working on having a goal. You know, the actual practice of it is a whole different way of working on things. And probably the main reason for not having a goal is because everything in our society tends to be very goal oriented. I just started looking at Alan Watts, and I usually used to avoid even mentioning him because, you know, he's very pop culture-y and stuff. But he said some great things. And there's this little video you can find on YouTube that's done by Trey Parker and

Matt Stone, the South Park guys. They animated to a speech that Alan Watts gave in the 60s or something about having goals, you know. and it's about in first grade, your goal is to get into second grade, and then your goal is to get into junior high school, and then your goal is to get into high school, and then your goal is to, you know, maybe get into a university or a college, and then your goal is to get a job. And then, you know, you live your whole life with always something out there that's the thing you're going for. And each time you get it, you know, you might have a moment of elation like, yeah, I did that.

But pretty soon that just becomes another part of the ordinary life. And then you have to go for the next goal. So everything is goal-oriented. And the idea of Zazen meditation is to do this without any goal. So everything is goal-oriented. And the idea of Zazen meditation is to do this without any goal. But of course, nobody's going to do Zazen, especially, you know, like me for 37 freaking years, without wanting something from it. But the fact that you want something from it doesn't have to be all that relevant. You know, you sit on your cushion, you know, wanting whatever that thing is you want. And as that want comes up in your mind, if you're

working on this seriously, you put it aside and go, okay, that's here's where I am now, you know, and want to be better, but here's where I am now. And just keep facing this as it is, and not worrying about the goal. The other problem with goals is, especially when they're spiritual goals, is they tend to just move you in the wrong way. There's this one passage of Dogen's that I was working on a couple of weeks ago where Dogen says something like, no one ever had realization and thought, oh, this is realization. It's just exactly as expected it to be, you know. So, any sort of expectations you have about this, you know, realization, which is a normal,

the standard goal of a lot of meditators and Zen practitioners, any sort of idea you have about it is a false idea anyway. So, there's no real sense in setting your sights on that thing that you just made up out of the same sort of confused, problematic consciousness that you're sort of working to overcome anyway. So you just set aside all goals and just try to see things as they are. The irony of it is that things as they are is quite different from what you imagine them to be. And once you start to catch glimpses of that and notice how wrong you've been, in my own case, I can tell you that when that first started happening years ago in my practice, it was sort of scary because I realized that every idea I had about who I was and the life I was living and what the world was, was completely wrong.

You know, and at first there's nothing, you don't have anything to put in its place. You know, it's not as if you get a download of the right idea and go, oh, yeah, it's like this. You know, that's what sort of religions are good at. You know, they come up with a different sort of framework for you to follow and say, oh, yeah, this is the will of Kolob, or I don't know, I just made that up, or maybe it's Mormonism or something. Anyway, it doesn't matter. You know, whatever it is, you know, you have that idea. But in the Zen form, you're just putting aside any ideas that you have, and you can kind of feel like you're just adrift, like there's nothing. If I can't believe in my

own body and mind, then what the hell can I believe in? And this is one of the reasons the practice is also all about relaxation. It's fun to poo-poo people who talk about meditation as a relaxation thing, but it really is. And part of the reason that relaxation is part of it is you have to be very relaxed when it comes up to your mind that you don't even know who and what you are. You know, and you have to be like, okay, I don't know who and what I am. Now what am I going to do about that? And what it turns out is, you know, spoiler alert, that who and what you are is actually a good thing. You know, there's nothing scary about it. In fact, it's like a foundation. It's like a solid, solid foundation that you find at the bottom of all this when you thought that

you were in free fall. And then you realize, no, I'm standing on the most solid ground possible. And it just seems like free fall because everything I thought about it before was wrong. I don't know if that makes any sense. Totally, totally. Yeah, you said a couple things in the book that I thought really, really summarize this well. You said that practice is for getting you into your true experience. It's for learning how not to be chasing after something other than where you are right now. And then the other thing that you said, and I love this whole sort of couple sentences is, you said, what we're trying to do in Zazen practice is to get into our real experience unadorned as it is and see it for what it is.

What happens when you do that is surprising. For me, when I finally started to understand what my own life really was, I discovered that my ordinary mundane life was much subtler and more beautiful and important than I ever could have imagined. And I think that's such a great way of saying it. The problem with goals by their very nature is they are somewhere else, some other time. They always draw our eyes up and away towards someplace else, something else, instead of right here. And the amazing thing about right here is that if we actually sort of touch it, it's very different than what we think of. We think of right here or right now is generally kind of boring. But when you actually touch it in a deeper way, it's, as you said, it's something much more than that. And you just say, you know, when we try to acquire things that are far away from us, we miss out on

what is very near. We miss out on our real lives here and now. And that's the saddest thing that can possibly happen. Yeah, I think so. And it's something that I personally always have to remind myself, because I'm just like anybody else, I can get seduced by, you know, the idea that there's something better, especially, you know, you look at a time like we're going through now, everything seems to be wonky, and you just want it to be over and resolved and, you know, things get back to some sort of semblance of normalcy. And it's hard to see that as being this is exactly where I needed to be. You know, this is especially difficult in these times, even for me, after all the practice I've done. I've gone there enough to know that that's true, you know, and I've read enough teachers who themselves have gone through very difficult times.

And they say that's true, too. You know, I think about Nishima Roshi. You know, he was practicing Zazen during the Second World War, you know, in Japan. You know, these are heavy times. And people have gone through them and gone, okay, this is absolute reality as it needs to be. This is absolute reality as it needs to be. And there's a kind of deep beauty to it that transcends any ideas you might have about how it ought to be or how you want it to be. Like I say, it's a tough sell, especially right now, as I say, to say this, because I think we all agree that this is not where we want to be. because I think we all agree that this is not where we want to be. But in another sense,

this is part of a process that is an endless process that's been going on for a very long time. And we're just trying to kind of accord with it, just to get back to the thing I said several minutes ago, trying to find our own place in it and our own right action within the situation that we are forced into. I have found Zen training to be very useful for me during quarantine because every time my brain goes, I need to be somewhere else, some Zen voice pops up inside me and goes, no, it's right here. And I'm like, oh, okay, I got to pay attention. The thing that you go on to say, which I think I want to take this point just a little bit further, is the thing that has always sort of been a challenge to me as I look at this basic Buddhist idea of, hey, it's you always wanting things to be different than they are. That's your problem.

If you could stop doing that, you'd feel better, right? Which makes intuitive sense. At the same time, I see this desire just pouring out of us as human beings, you know, and the thought that I'm trying to eliminate that feels like, well, I'm trying to squash something that's essential. And you really make a nice point that, you know, desire seeking is sort of built into our nature. And if we try and battle it out and eliminate that, we're just going to fail. So how do we work with the fact that desire is not going to go away, just because we think it's not a useful tool?

Yeah, it's a difficult one. One of the things Nishijima Roshi used to like to tell in his lectures is, in Japan, you get the same sort of basic Buddhism as you get anywhere else now, because they kind of follow a Western model. And the idea is that the first noble truth is all life is suffering. And the second one is suffering is caused by desire. And the third one is that you cut off suffering by cutting off desire. And he said that that never worked for him because you can't cut off desire. You're always going to be desiring something.

At the most basic level, you desire to breathe air, you know, and eat, you know, and sleep and do things like that. You can't just evade all desire. So you kind of have to put desire into its place. It comes up and you notice it and you go, well, you know, that desire is a desire for something that makes sense. You know, like I'm hungry and I want to eat. And you do that. And the way desire goes wrong is when it becomes greed, I think. And maybe that's, you know, the real key to it. key to it. Maybe the problem isn't so much desire as a kind of greed for wanting things to be different from how they actually are or wanting things to be, you always want things to be better,

but you kind of even put that aside and just allow things to be as they are. And I mean, it's a tricky one because desire can mean a whole lot of things. Not every desire is bad. Desire for world peace is not a bad thing. The desire for a less polluted atmosphere is not a bad thing. You know, the desire for an end to the pandemic is not a bad thing. You know, and I'm glad there's a lot of people working on those projects. At the same time, you know, you want to eliminate a tendency to desire more than what is actually necessary. But that, you know, you can fine tune that in lots of ways. You know, the early Buddhists would have one robe and one

begging bowl and trust the universe to provide for them. And ironically, you don't hear a lot of stories where that fails. You know, they always seem to get by. It's a very difficult thing. And ironically, you don't hear a lot of stories where that fails. They always seem to get by. It's a very difficult thing. And I don't know too many, I might know a couple of contemporary Buddhists who try that, but neither of my teachers ever went that far with it. But you do try to kind of limit it to what's manageable. And for myself, especially in light of recent events, I've really cut down on a lot of things and realized, oh, there's so much, there's so much that I don't actually need. I think there's maybe an interesting consciousness developing during all these shutdowns that if we can accord with it and find our way into it might actually end up really improving the world.

And of course, there's all the negative things, which of course the news is doing a great job of covering, but they're not doing such a great job of covering the positive sort of things that are happening to people as they are forced to limit their movements and limit what they can get. You know? Yep. Yep. Totally. Well, that's the news for you. All right. Well, Brad, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. You and I are going to talk for a couple minutes in the post-show conversation about a statement you make, which is that what most people call spirituality is bullshit. You and I are going to talk about that in the post-show conversation.

Listeners, if you would like to get access to the post-show conversation and other things and the joy of supporting the show, you can go to oneufeed.net slash join. Thanks so much, Brad, for coming on. It's been a pleasure to talk with you again. Thank you for having me. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join.

The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. 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.