The One You Feed - How to Bring Zen Into Everyday Life with Shozan Jack Haubner

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

Shozan Jack Haubner is the pen name of a Zen monk whose essays have appeared in The Sun, Tricycle, Buddha, Dharma, and The New York Times, as well as in the best Buddhist Writing series. Jack is the winner of a 2012 Pushcart prize and is the author of Zen Confidential Confessions of a Wayward Monk and Single White Monk. He is also the host of the YouTube channel Zen Confidential. 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! Shozan Jack Haubner and I Discuss How to Bring Zen Into Everyday Life and … His transition from monastic life to real world life Realizing that his growth has taken a different path after leaving the monastery Trusting in life, even when it’s really challenging The differences between the personal and intimate Noticing the moments of waking up that happen in daily life The challenges he experienced when in a leadership role His relationship with his dad Understanding the meanings of self and no self Shozan Jack Haubner Links Shozan Jack’s Youtube Channel Twitter Patreon Page By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Shozan Jack Haubner, check out these other episodes: Shozan Jack Haubner on No Self (2017) Shozan Jack Haubner (2014 Interview)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You don't have to slip into the roles that are waiting for you when you walk through the door at night and go see your spouse, or when you walk through your childhood home and you go see your father. It's a choice. You don't have to get into those roles. 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 making his third appearance, and it's Shozan Jack Hobner, which is the pen name of a Zen monk whose essays have appeared in The Sun, Tricycle, Buddha Dharma, and The New York Times, as well as in the Best Buddhist Writing series.

Jack is the winner of a 2012 Pushcart Prize and is the author of Zen Confidential, Confessions of a Wayward Monk, and Single White Monk. He's also the host of the YouTube channel Zen Confidential. Hi, Jack. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's good to be back. Yeah, I should have said welcome back because this is time number three. You were one of our very first guests and your book was called Zen Confidential and I loved it. You had another book called Single White Monk, which I also loved. And as I was saying to you beforehand, I just love

engaging with your work. You are a great, great writer. You are a funny writer. You've got a YouTube channel now. So it's just been fun to be back in your world. And since you and I last talked, I have gotten very involved in Zen practice. So we have that to sort of talk about also. But before we do any of that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say 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 grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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. You know, it's funny. Every time I know I recently quit nicotine lozenges, right? So I've been smoking for a while on and off. Then I did the nicotine lozenges for a while on and off. And I think that this quote has the most meaning to me in terms of addiction, because, you know, addiction because, you know, when it comes to energies like greed and hatred, I'm not so sure that those wolves are just bad or good. But when it comes to addiction, I have to not feed that wolf at all. So when it comes to nicotine, like nothing, the part of me that craves nicotine Nothing. The part of me that craves nicotine gets even a taste of it. It's over. I'm back to it a few weeks later. But with something like anger, sometimes I give in to that energy and something shifts inside me. Something needed to come out. It's a little bit maybe embarrassing and I may even have to make some apologies or something, but it wasn't necessarily a terrible thing. Greed, I don't know about because that was the other thing I think of the quote, greed. Sometimes I got to get my game on, get ambitious, get a little taste of getting more followers on YouTube or something. I mean,

is that greed? So it's an interesting quote. as an emulkan, we talk a lot about attachment and not being attached to stuff, not being attached to good, not being attached to bad. Yeah. Once again, you've stumped me with your koan. Yeah. Well, it occurred to me as you were saying that when you said I meditate with it, I was like, ah, it could be a koan. I'm thinking about something you said about cigarette smoking recently. And when I say recently, I mean in the last several years. But you were talking about how you sort of picked up the cigarette habit again after coming out of the monastery. And I love what you said. You said smoking isn't just bad for you physically. Like any unhealthy habit, it teaches you that it's okay

to cave into your compulsions. I really like that framework. When we engage in things that we don't feel good about in many different ways, we almost make it easier to do them again in the future. In the same way that one cigarette isn't a problem. Like if one person only had one cigarette in their life, nobody would ever care. It's that one cigarette has a pretty good tendency to lead to two cigarettes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great point. And yeah, I remember when I wrote that, because there was this feeling that I got out of the monastery, I was free again. I was just let out of the clink and I was going to have some fun. So I would bomb a cigarette from somebody. And if you take that cigarette and inhale it, and this whole door opens up this universe of

possibility, like I can do this. Maybe I can lose my temper every now and then. Maybe I can take a drug. Maybe I can do anything. Like, I'm teaching myself that it's okay to behave in a compulsive way. I mean, because I have that tendency. I have that bit of an addictive personality. And when I give in to a straight-up addiction, there's a part of me that gets woken up and starts saying, all right, let's see how far we can take this. Let's see what other areas we can extend this into. Do you think that people who choose a monastic life have that tendency more broadly? I mean, a monastic life is sort of the extreme version, the compulsive version of a normal spiritual practice, right? It's like really taking it to the nth degree.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I think people who are compelled to go on a monastic path are extreme personalities or have maybe been in an extreme decision. And like you go hard one way, and there's a part of you that wants it. that bad wolf wants its piece of steak, you know, and it comes apart. So I found a lot of times monks have addictions. They're really good about attachments. So, and that can get tricky because then you hear monks say like, I'm not attached to drinking. I just like to do it all the time. And I know I have a little bit of an addiction, but I'm not attached to it. I approach it with a sense of humor. And if I don't do it for five weeks, I'm okay. But then somehow their life always comes back to it. They're smoking again or drinking again. It's very

interesting. Somewhere in their mind, they're not attached, but they're totally addicted. So on some level, what's the difference? Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. When you were saying that, it made me think of all the different ways that I was able to say, yeah, I got a problem with drugs and alcohol, but here's why we don't all need to worry about this, right? Like, everybody just step back, we got this, you know? So you got out of the monastery, and I'd like to explore the getting out of the monastery here in a minute, but did you sort of have a little bit of a, the monastery here in a minute, but did you sort of have a little bit of a, I'm going to go crazy period because you had been so sort of regimented for so long? Or did you find that a lot of your monastic habits kind of stayed with you? Or once the context was gone, the habits were gone?

The habits were gone because the habits were largely based on the schedule. Yeah. the habits were largely based on the schedule. Yeah. But the practice was there. The approach, the point of view, the way of dealing with difficulties, kind of the open-mindedness.

I mean, certain things, I think, shift after you do a practice for a while, which you're probably figuring out and realizing, of course, because you're doing this on practice now. But for me, certain things shift and they don't necessarily go back. Yeah. So I can get lazy with my practice, especially when I started out because everything was so new.

I could go for a few days without sitting or something. But the basic tendency, I think, stayed with me. But I definitely did have a period of going a little bit crazy. I felt so free. I was like so ecstatic. I felt like just shot out of the womb and ready to rumble. Really wonderful, actually, on some level. I think you said like coming out of the clink, like people coming out of prison can be an extreme experience.

I do want to get into more of the monastery stuff, but I want to start with an idea that you talk about in a recent video of yours on your YouTube channel, where you talk about that, you know, a lot of us come to practice, you know, I mean, I've been doing Zen pretty intensely for the last number of years, but I was doing other Buddhist practices before that, and a lot of years of different kinds of practices, but that we come to these practices with the idea that the practice will fix us. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about how you orient towards that now, because we are doing the practices for a reason, but expecting to be fixed, quote unquote, fixed is maybe not the best reason. And maybe what does even fixed mean is something we could explore. But I just kind of wanted to dive deeper into that idea. Yeah, yeah, that's something I've really been sitting with developing since I got out of the monastery. Because now, in a sense, the cake is baked. My teacher is dead. So he's

not going to give teachers transmission to anyone. My lineage is, in a sense, almost dead, because my teacher didn't give transmission. Right. So, like I said, my cake is cooked. This is it. This is what I am. And I look at myself. I did my practice in the monastery. I did 13 years. And I find myself thinking like, OK, what what how what next? And there's a sense of sitting with the things I don't like about myself and I don't like about my life. In the past, I think when I was at the monastery and I would sit on that cushion for hour after hour, day after day, week after week, retreat after retreat. that this problems inside myself, this core suffering or craving was going to dissolve.

And this insight was going to sort of wrap my life and change everything. And yes, I would be unhappy sometimes I would experience pain, but basically I would be cured. Basically I would be fixed. It was a really deep kind of idea that I had. And when I left the monastery, got back out into the world, it was like, it's not going to happen. So what now? And so there's a sense of just kind of orienting myself a little bit differently. Like, okay, I have these things that are not going to get fixed about myself. Like, what do I do with that? How do I live with that? If I'm not going to get fixed about myself. Like, what do I do with that? How do I live with that? If I'm not going to totally change myself, then can I work with some of my bad qualities? You know? There's a lot of things you said in there that I'd like to explore. But the starting place I'd like to explore is this idea that your cake is sort of baked. Do you feel that that is just a

choice you're making? Like, you know what, I've put in the dedicated focus on changing myself that I'm going to put in. My teacher's gone. I don't want to find another teacher or I don't want to find another path or I don't want to invest in the work, whatever that is that intensely, or do you truly feel like the capacity for change and growth and you no longer exists? I think it's just going in a different direction now. It's not in formal practice. That's not the direction of my growth anymore.

It's in the smallest moments of my daily life, which were always within kind of a romantic context at the monastery. in kind of a romantic context at the monastery because everything was practice from washing your hands to chopping vegetables to doing koan work with your teacher it was all formal zen practice and i did that and i think it became time for me to go into the world and kind of unlock the dharma in the smallest, most mundane, most boring, trivial, ordinary moments. Yeah. Well, I think for everybody who's on a spiritual path that is non-monastic, I think that's the game that you just described. That's the thing. Like I have come to the deep realization and I've been working on through my spiritual habits programs that I lead in different things that like most people are maxed out as far as time goes, as far as their ability to meditate a little bit

more. Maybe they can increase a little bit more practice in their lives, but the work that's going to be most fruitful is exactly what you're saying. You know, how do we bring these moments of clarity and openness and compassion and kindness to everything that we do? Which I think, you know, Zen, the idea of the sort of work practice is what you're training to do, right? You're training to say, how can I make the most significant thing meaningful by giving it enough attention? Yeah, I think that's completely true. One of the things I realized the monastery was, and then getting out of the monastery, I really realized this was, okay, it seems like what we did at the monastery was your mind is going crazy. You've got a lot of suffering, buddy,

sit down in this spot, just sit there. This cushion is going to be soft and we're going to give you some rules to contain you so that you can just sit there. And I'm not going to give you any instruction. I'm not going to tell you how to do it. There's going to be no special mantra, no prayer to the Holy Ghost. You're just going to sit there and figure out your mind yourself. So you sit there and you sit there and you sit there. And gradually you start to learn that there's a lot of noise inside your head. And 99% of it you can ignore.

And you learn how to just sit and breathe. And when the mind starts bugging you, you can do that breath practice and give yourself to the breath. That's what I was taught at the monastery. So basically, the whole thing about sitting meditation is you're just learning how to do something simple completely. And sitting is like the simplest thing you could do. And that's not your training and it's your tool. So if you can do that, if you can sit in one spot for a seven day retreat for 18 hours a day and sit completely and breathe, you're going to be able to go and chop carrots completely in the kitchen for formal kitchen practice. Maybe you can rake leaves completely.

Maybe you can do the head monk role completely. Maybe you can do koan practice completely. And each one of these activities, what I was taught was, okay, you're giving yourself to it. And that thinking mind that you have, it kind of dissolves and you connect with the activity. Now, 13 years pass, my monastic life is done. Now I have to come out into the world and do that practice. You know, I can go back to do another monastery, do more koan practice and do formal training. But the basic sort of task is always going to be the same, no matter what I'm doing in the

where I am, whether I'm at a monastery or out here in the world talking to you right now. Does that make some sense? Totally. In the same video, you were talking about this idea of Zen will fix us. You say living in the present moment is hard because it requires us to accept the fact that things are never going to be perfect. Arriving at this understanding, making peace with it, and then being energized by it. This is the point and the fruit

of meditation practice. The first two parts of that, making peace with it, you know, arriving at the understanding, that seems not easy to do, but fairly straightforward what you're saying. But how do we become energized by the fact that things are never going to be perfect? Yeah, that's a good one. Because oftentimes when I've got a problem that's pretty deep inside me, and I'm worried and anxious and upset, my mind will start chewing over it. So let's say it's like a money problem. I'm afraid I'm going to not be able to pay this bill or something. And they're going to send me a letter. So there's a kind of really thrumming anxiety around it, right? And if I'm unaware of that anxiety and I'm letting that bad wolf howl inside me, no matter how many different angles I try and solve that problem

from, I'm still going to suffer and I'm probably not going to make any headway on it. If I sit down on my cushion, if I hold the issue with some attention, like, okay, this is the problem. And then I take a deep breath and I'm still holding the problem, but I'm not thinking about it. I am just breathing, right? And I'm doing my practice. I exhale completely and I inhale completely. Eventually, there's this feeling of a little bit more looseness, a little bit more spaciousness, and I'm really focusing on the breath. But there's kind of an intention of I got this issue. I got this issue. I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to solve it. It's red hot, but it's there. I'm holding it. this issue. I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to solve it. It's red hot, but it's there. I'm holding it. Oftentimes, if I do that, something will shift and maybe I'll have an insight into the problem, right? Maybe in this case, it's like, hey, you need to take money more seriously or you need to take it less seriously, right? I'll have an insight into it. Now I feel energized. Now the whole thing has a deeper foundation, right? Now

I've got something to work with. I've got a path. It's not just a problem that I'm hitting myself over the head with. It's kind of a path and it has to do with my life orientation, right? Like I said, take money less seriously, take money more seriously, right? Yeah. The other thing that you said in there that I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into is learning to trust life. And listeners have probably heard me say this several times. I always end up back at this point. You know, I had a spiritual director for a while and I've started to wonder whether it says more about him than me, but I'm going to assume it says more about me than him, which was every conversation we started on, we always ended up at the end around trust. What can you trust in? And I hear people say, you can trust in life. Now, from one perspective, that seems preposterous, right? Life seems decidedly untrustworthy from the perspective of a single isolated human being, because all sorts of bad shit happens to us humans all the time that is profoundly awful, right? There are more awful things happening in the world right now than you and I would ever want to know about at this very second, right? So in your mind, what does learning to trust life mean? I mean, I don't think you're saying that like good things are going to happen to you personally, necessarily. So I think you're speaking to a bigger reality, but I just imagine trying to trust life when the bombs are dropping.

Yeah. I mean, my life is a blissful paradise compared to some people's lives, right? So... Totally, totally. You're asking a really, really deep question. I mean, for myself, I mean, we were talking about surfing a little bit earlier. It's kind of like life is the wave and you have to trust the waves. Sometimes you get thrown off the wave, you know, sometimes you always get drowned by the wave. But I had this experience when I was a young man where it hit me, and this is oftentimes, I've since discovered that this is an experience a lot of people have, especially in the West. But I had this experience that there's something

in this universe rather than nothing. Even if it's all made up in my mind, there's still something. And whatever that is, I'm going to trust it. There's something going on, right? This could have been nothing. There could have been no universe. There could have been no nothing. But there's experience. There's here, call it God, call it chance, call it Dharma activity, Dharmakaya. And we don't always understand it. Like oftentimes I get in my head an idea about how things should be. And I get really upset and traumatized when they don't turn out how I think they should be or how I want them to be. But as my life sort of unfolds and I process these horrible experiences, grow, move forward, move on, keep going, when I'm on my game, it's like the path couldn't be any richer.

the path couldn't be any richer. And the challenges created new dimensions of growth and experience that I have to be strong enough to be grateful for strong enough and humble enough to be grateful for. But it's not easy. It's not easy and not simple. Yeah. There was another line that you wrote about a relationship with a teacher, and you said it was intimate but not personal. And in some ways, to me, that also points to what this trust, at least for me, gets at, which is that there is a way to be intimate with the world. There is an intimacy to the world. There is a unity to the world. There is a unity to the world. When I zero into the personal, just Eric, or just the one person in Ukraine, or just the child being abused right now, right? When I get that personal, there's nothing to trust. When I zoom back out, then I go, oh, well, maybe I can just trust that

life is life. It is doing what it does. It makes me think a little bit about like, I don't trust that we humans are going to solve climate change in time to save ourselves. We might, we might not. But I don't have any doubt that the world, the planet is going to be fine, right? It's going to be okay. Life is going to do what life is going to do there. And so there's something for me in that intimate but not personal phrase that you applied in a different element that somehow applies here for me too. Yeah, somehow that's the key to the whole thing. That was the switch for me, and it still is the switch between the political or the cultural or the societal and the spiritual. It's the difference between the personal and intimate.

societal and the spiritual. There's a difference between the personal and intimate. One can be having, and I have had really, really bad experiences. At a personal level, it's like a horror show. But when my perspective shifts, I'm still intimately in the moment, but I'm not taking it personally. And now I think I've switched over into what I think is a spiritual perspective, which is that you're there, you're aware, you're connected to the situation, but you're not being destroyed by it. You're in it, you're intimate with it, but it's not a living hell. It's just a really interesting experience. Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking about my teacher. I got the sense sometimes that no matter what he was going through, he wasn't necessarily taking it personally.

He was so connected to the moment, so inside of the experience. He was so alive with it. But it wasn't like, oh, this is bad for me or good for me. Yeah. And it really made him a dynamic and interesting character. He's dancing with life. Hi, everyone. I wanted to personally invite you to a workshop that we are offering at the end of October at the Omega Institute, which is in the Hudson Valley in New York, and it is really beautiful

this time of year. It's going to be a great chance to meet some wonderful people, recharge and relax while learning foundational spiritual habits that will allow you to establish simple daily practices that will help you feel more at ease and more fulfilled in your life. You can find details at OneYouFeed.net slash Omega. I'm really looking forward to meeting many of you there. 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

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When I got sober in a 12-step program 25, 26 years ago, right, there was a phrase that when I first got it, it meant a ton to me, and it still does today. And it was this idea of free me from the bondage of self. And I had no idea how deeply connected that would be ultimately to Buddhist practice. But I recognized even then that when I am focused very much on myself, on my small sense of self, my small problems, my everything, that that does cut me off from life. It cuts me off from that energy of life. You know, we talked earlier about being energized by these things. That bondage itself for me is what the entire spiritual path for me has been about is how do I shake that or lessen that? I don't think I'm going to shake it, but how do I lessen it? Because when I do, I don't quite know what all happens, but what I do trust in is when I am able to let go of that to some degree,

that I'm able to handle what life brings me and I'm able to flow with life in a totally different way. Yeah, I remember somebody asked my teacher once what enlightenment was. And he said, to sort of paraphrase and piggyback on what you're saying, the space between the moments where one is able to do that are just much shorter. Oh, yeah. Because the self always arises, the angry, attaching, fearful, huddled up in your shell, turtle self, always arises. But the quicker you can shed that, the more, quote, enlightenment someone has or is or manifests.

I really like that. That's a powerful idea because it speaks to that self-arising activity. It just happens. It's part of what it is. I talk to people about being able to do a behavior and do it consistently over a period of time. And I say that, you know, anybody is going to do anything for a long period of time. Broadly speaking, yeah, of course, you're going to get off track. What differentiates people who look like they have a lot of discipline or staying with something. It's just that the time they get off track is a lot less. So I've become more or less a daily meditator, you know, 95% plus after years and years of on again, off again. And it's not that I don't miss days. Of course I do. It's just that I don't miss weeks and months. I miss a day and I go, all right, well, let's get back on. And so I think speaking to that, you know, relating to how attached we are to self is an interesting way to think about it. Like the space is smaller. Right, right. It's interesting because if the space is smaller, that you're sort of lost in that self, you're lost in thought, then, you know, at some point, I think we sit for a while, we get this insight.

It's like, they call it the backward step. I think Dogen called it. And you get this insight into the fact of what you're doing, like when it works, like, okay, there are times when I'm forgetting myself. There are times when I'm connected to my surroundings. And you notice that. And like, I think these are these shifts that we have in practice. Oh, that is an enlightenment moment. I do manifest enlightenment. Maybe my enlightened teacher arguably manifests more of those moments closer together, but Hey, I had one, right? So, okay, what happened? You know, well, I was giving myself completely to chopping carrots and I forgot myself, completely forgot myself for a moment. And I loved the sound. I was woken up by the sound of the knife hitting

the cutting board. And it was like music. You have these moments. It's back to a little bit what we were talking about earlier, manifesting in your daily life outside of the sort of spiritually romantic setting of a monastery. Okay, how can I manifest more of these moments in daily life? Because they do happen. Yeah, I gave a talk recently, the topic was sort of the confluence of spirituality and creativity. I pulled up a chart. And on one side was sort of like the elements that people study mystical experiences say, here are the elements of a mystical experience. And on the other side of the chart was the things that psychologists refer to as flow. They look very, very similar, right? You know, they're talking about a lot of the same things.

The reason I like that is I think it points to what you're saying is that we all have these moments. We may be looking for something that's really grand and amazing, but we all have these moments. We may be looking for something that's really grand and amazing, but we all have moments where we merge with life. And the more we see that and notice that, I think it provides inspiration and fuel for practice, you know, for continuing on. Yeah. I got so familiar with flow. I keep hearing that and I know what there are like parallels between that and the idea of samadhi. It's interesting to contemplate that and to sit with it. I feel like there's something deeper in spiritual practice than what I know of as flow, but I'm not totally sure,

because I don't know the definition of the flow state. I actually think you're right. I think that they are not exact. But, you know, in a mystical experience, we might say, you know, there's a unitive element to it, right? And in a flow state, as you were saying, the action and awareness, you know, the definition is they say sort of action and awareness are merged, right? Or you lose self-conscious rumination. It may not be the exact same thing, but it's pointing in a similar direction. Or mystical experiences are ineffable. People have a very difficult time describing it. It's why you end up with phrases like flow or I was in the zone, you know, because it's ineffable. Time takes on different elements.

Time is suddenly experienced very differently. So I don't think they're the same thing. You know, the experiences of Kensho or of mystical experiences that I've had are way beyond the flow state of like practicing guitar and having the notes come out, but they're on a continuum somewhere. And Americans were so obsessed with doing and being, and I wonder if somehow bringing practice into our lives doesn't connect with this flow state, which is where we're doing things really well and not thinking about ourselves. Because that's a way in. That's really a way in. And then we can almost pull back and say, what's happening when that happens? What's happening there?

It's beautiful. It's a gift. It's almost like sacred if you want to look at it like that. So what's happening there? practicing something. I'm not thinking about what I'm doing. It's just all of a sudden now there is a piece of music that is coming out of the guitar that did not exist 10 seconds ago. It doesn't even matter if it's a good piece of music particularly. It simply didn't exist. And when I'm able to move out of the ego sense, the ego is, oh, look at this great thing I wrote. When I move out of that and I look at it, what I'm left with is a real mystery, which is like, I don't have the foggiest idea how that happened. Yeah, that's deep. I can't recreate it, you know.

I can't do it on will. And there was no thought process, you know. And so I think it's a way in. Yeah, yeah. It's a way in of thinking about it. And it's a good way to live, I think, as opposed to orienting yourself towards outcomes and metrics and quantifiable results, you know, quantitative results. Just, I mean, that's what we were taught at the monastery, dissolving into activity, like playing your guitar in a flow state with activities you really love.

And then it's like, okay, can I do this when I'm sitting on a bus? Can I be aware of all the thoughts that are going through my head? Yeah. All the places I'm trying to escape mentally because I don't want to be breathing in this potential COVID air, listening to the traffic outside,

crammed in with all these people yammering in German all around me that I don't understand. You know, can I do that flow state here? Can I dissolve into this activity? That's one of the reasons why monastery life was so difficult. It was like training you to be able to dissolve into any activity and hit that flow state or samadhi or something even deeper. Yep. Yep. All right. Let's move directions here a little bit. And I want to talk a little bit

about your later days in the monastery. And I just have to read a couple of things you wrote. One of the things we're not getting in this interview is how damn funny you are. And so I'm going to just read a little bit and then allow you to kind of pick up and take it wherever you want. But there's just a couple passages that had me cracking up. You said, you know what, don't talk to me about workplace dysfunction until you've attended a meeting with your 105 year old non English speaking Zen master and six sycophantic board members that begins with a discussion of the monetary's tenuous finances and ends with the whole group expecting you to raise $100,000 to build a new Zendo meditation hall. And you say, but that was Roshi. He usually slept through

board meetings when roused and asked for his opinion on, say, getting new fire insurance through Lloyd's of London, he would listen to his translator nod and say something like, very good question, but what is fire? And then give a three-hour Dharma talk. So, I just love some of these stories. I mean, of you trying to make sanity out of this place, you know, the 105-year- old non-english speaking zen teacher a lot of great stories from that time but also i think a lot of real stress for you in that time yeah that's a good way of putting it yeah exactly yeah in retrospect great stories but yeah during the time an incredible amount of stress i mean i had forgotten about that story you just read but that happened exactly as you read it. I mean, literally,

my teacher couldn't teach anymore. He got too old and he had a bout of aspiration pneumonia. And so he was kind of, he was retired, but he wasn't really talking about it. So a month passed since he'd gotten out of the hospital. It was like, all right, Roshi, you got a bunch of students up at the monastery, a bunch of monks and nuns waiting for you. What's the plan? And he never really gave us a plan. He never really spoke to it. I mean, he was there mentally, but something had shifted in him where he was over that portion of his life. It was interesting. Part of my experience coming out of the monastery and not going back into a new situation, the new teacher was just watching him exit formal

Zen practice and not really look back, if that makes any sense. I mean, he said, yeah, but, you know, build a new Zendo, raise $100,000. But there wasn't any plan to do anything with it after I did that, you know. And prior to part of Roshi's life, he was really proactive, really involved in every aspect of monastic life. But after he got sick, went through that, came out the other side, it was kind of over. How long from that sort of period of him getting sick coming out of the hospital? You were sort of the abbot at this point? Is that an accurate statement? These terms get so tricky because, you know how it is, Zen is really hierarchical. And a lot of this hierarchy is a little bit mysterious to Western people, because we look at hierarchies,

and we look at like a dominance hierarchy, we look at like the alpha, right? And in Japan, especially when I went there and I visited the monasteries, I saw much more of a dynamic between all the different levels and layers of hierarchy. So it was kind of like this big unit where you needed the Zen master at the top, but there was a bit of a wink, wink attitude around it. Like in America, I think your hierarchies are more set. i don't know if i'm coming across but we take these things more seriously than in my experience the japanese like they would joke about their zen masters maybe even poke fun at them but but then respect the

role you know yeah yeah so we were all waiting for an app so an abbott runs the place like fully i was like a manager i. They called it the administrative abbot because I wasn't allowed to do koan practice because nobody in our community was, just Roshi. And I wasn't allowed to give tesho, which is a certain kind of Dharma talk where you're speaking from the Dharma, not about the Dharma. So these two things, being able to give tesho and being able to give koans would make somebody a Zen master in our lineage. But Roshi, and that's what we came to Roshi for. When he stopped doing those two things, he didn't give anybody else permission to do it.

So we were all just kind of waiting. So I was a manager, but I wasn't really the abbot. Did you expect you were going to be given Dharma transmission and that you would step into that role? Did you have that hope? Did you think it was going to happen, and it just never came to fruition, or not really? For myself, I never did. Okay, okay.

I didn't really presume. I thought my teacher was really, really deep, and I knew I wasn't there. And in order to get transmission, you would have to be able to better him, if you will. I don't know. Yeah. Got it.

Yeah. Answer all his koans and he's got nothing left for you. And that never happened with me. So I didn't think so. Yeah. I thought maybe he would have some sort of plan for his lineage to continue. And I was surprised when that didn't happen. Yeah.

You go on to say about this phase, you say, this is how religions get started. Spiritual communities keep going after the founder is gone. The disciples keep everything the same, even though everything has changed. The living example becomes a ghost haunting the former grounds. The practice becomes a parody. The disciples never grow up. Nobody moves on. So that's kind of where you found yourself. And that's when you made the decision to leave. Is that sort of accurate? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It's my interpretation. It's a little bit harsh, but sometimes we have to be a little bit harsh. I think when you have a teacher who's really, really strong, like Suzuki Roshi was, it's easy for his presence to linger in the community, like long after he's gone. And that leads to developments in the community, like the people in that community becoming like,

I don't know, an alumni association of all the folks that used to train with this teacher. I don't think that that's honoring the strength or the power of that teacher. And so I think when the teacher dies, you know, if he hasn't named a successor and the lineage isn't continuing in that way, you got to let him die. Something seriously has to die, fall into the earth, dissolve so that something new can be born. And even if it's just something tiny and small, if it's real, I think that's a proper continuation of what that teacher started in you. But there is this tendency when you have a really strong teacher to just kind of like keep the thing going that the teacher started

and all the people get together and they argue about what this statement that the teacher said meant and what that statement meant. And they cling to his words and they always quote him like lawyers quoting a precedent from a previous case and never speaking from their own personal experience. And I think that's really kind of the trick is like you have to be small. kind of the trick is like, you have to be small. You can't use your teacher as sort of your justification, your spiritual bodyguard anymore to push everybody out. You have to stand on your own two feet, you know? Yeah. And then you and I talked about this in the last episode. I don't think we need to go into a ton of it again. There was also, as this was all happening, there was, I don't know how you would phrase it. there were allegations against your teacher of impropriety of different sorts, which also really kind of ripped the community apart.

Yeah, they stuck a stake through the heart of the community, really. I would say sexual misconduct. I never experienced it myself personally. I heard different accounts from different women. I heard different accounts from different women. And I would be, I'm comfortable using the term, yeah, Roshi committed sexual misconduct, which can refer to a wide variety of things. But that was always in the community. It was always a problem. It was always almost like a cancer in the background. But it finally came out when an ex-monk kind of wrote about it and published something on a website. And then it just exploded. Like within weeks, it was in the New York Times and all the articles in Japan were coming out about it. So it was like a huge, huge scandal. And not just that, this wound was exposed that had been kind of hidden for the longest period of time. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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I wasn't going to bring up the most famous resident of the monastery, except that you wrote an essay about it not too long ago. So I'm now clear in talking about Leonard Cohen again, which I always want to do because I'm such a huge, huge fan of his. You know, it still blows my mind that you used to sit next to Leonard Cohen and meditate and he was at your wedding ceremony and all kinds of other things. But I just don't want to fanboy out on that. What I do actually want to talk about, though, is something related to him that you were writing. And you were saying how he told you a story about how Roshi's eccentric wife had tried to sue one of his students, a writer who was also Leonard's friend, and that Leonard wound up footing the legal bills for both parties while hiding the fact from each other. And you love that. But you started off by saying, you know,

well, Leonard got a pass. He did not have to choose sides. I both resented and respected him for this. But then you go on to say, here's what I did not understand. I did not have to choose sides either. You choose to choose. Say a little bit more about that. Yeah, I think specifically, just to speak to that quote, you know, everybody comes into practice with their own bag of problems and capabilities, right? Leonard had his, you know, he said himself, he was born under a lucky star, right? He had a bit of a different status in our community. I mean, he was Leonard Cohen, you know, he said himself that he was born under a lucky star, right? He had a bit of a different status in our community. I mean, he was Leonard Cohen, you know, he's never just going to be a guy sitting in his

robes. On the one hand, on the other hand, he really was just a guy sitting in his robes. And in a lot of ways, he was a bad monk like the rest of us and kind of a lay monk who never really jumped in and all the stuff. So, you know, I made a bit of an identity out of being a monk. Like it was all the stuff. So, you know, I made a bit of an identity out of being a monk. Like it was all I had. I wrote my essays about Zen and I was a monk. And I chose to kind of identify with that role and to get sucked in to the drama. And when the scandal hit, for example i like take personally the damage that was being done both

within and without to our community i mean i chose to go through that experience it would have been very very hard for me to sort of pull back and just let the thing unfold. But I could have done that. I mean, instead, I just kind of got totally pulled into the situation. I mean, that experience had a lot of gravitational pull, and a lot of us really got sucked in. Yeah. But I do think it's always a choice. You don't have to respond a certain way when the shit hits the fan. You were in a role where some response, I assume, was required, right? As administrative abbot or whatever, right? As one of the leaders of a community, some response is required. You say, though, at a different point that we're not going to have time to get into all this, but your wife slash Roshi's other attendant, you said nobody did more than her and I to deepen and

solidify the split within our sangha. You picked a strong side. Do you have any sense of what you might have done differently? And I'm not looking for necessarily real specifics, because most people listening aren't going to know the situation well enough. It's more, how could you fulfill the role that you had to play as a leader? How could you do what you thought was the right thing and yet also maybe not land so firmly in one place? Or do you sort of feel like you did the right thing? Both. Had I behaved differently, the outcome of that whole situation and that whole series of events would have been totally different, leading me to say something different now. So in retrospect, I don't think I would change anything that I did. sort of apologizing for the role that myself and other priests had played in the culture of misconduct. In retrospect, though, I hope that it, and I think it did serve the purpose of the people who felt like they hadn't been heard over all these years, where now we were acknowledging them. And in that sense, I think it was good. In another sense, I think you can't speak for your teacher.

And maybe sometimes it's better to stay silent. You get into politics when you start making statements like that. And I'm not sure how ultimately helpful that is. It may have been the case that I and maybe others should have just sat back and let the kind of the community dissolve, fall apart, not try and save it or salvage it or speak to the misconduct. I don't know, in the end. Yeah, when you're reflecting all this, you're sort of talking about two roles, right? You're talking about the role of a monk and a writer, right?

You're talking about Leonard's great writing around this and how great writing suggests it doesn't decide it opens up the problem. It doesn't solve it. That is the work of the artist. But you were not just an artist. Right. You were also in a position of leadership and leadership's job is not to open up the problem and not solve it. Right. Like, unfortunately, when you're in a leadership role, you know, we are called to guide things at one direction or the other. And so I just have a lot of sympathy for, you know, kind of where you were going through all that. Yeah, that's a good point. I think actually what the whole situation exposes that I'm just not a very good leader, more of the artist's mentality, which is to sit with ambiguity rather than to try and lead people through it. Yep. Well, leadership is difficult, particularly when you are a not really given authority, right? You're sort of in a semi-leadership role, and then a tsunami rolls through, right? You may not be leadership material, but I wouldn't write yourself off completely for that one situation because that's pretty rough going.

Fair enough, yeah. What we can write you off as having is the Hobner hex. Right, right, right, right. You know, we know you've got the Hobner hex, which we can get into a little bit, but there's this image of you talking to your father, right? And him describing that when you are a little baby, you are nursing at your mother, happy as could be. And then you sort of just pop up and you're not happy. He says, basically, you're not even happy there, you know, and you're thinking to yourself,

where else would I ever be happy? And your dad's telling you this story because you need to know what you're dealing with, right? You can't change what you are, not some zen monastery it was there from the start the best you can do is make peace with it it's so brutal hearing your dad is a trip is is your dad still alive yeah he's still alive yeah he's very healthy yeah i don't know how he's still alive he lives on a diet of like canned beans and donuts and angel food cake he's healthier alive. He lives on a diet of canned beans and donuts and angel food cake. He's healthier than all of us combined. And Wisconsin, is that right? Yeah. Those hearty Midwesterners.

You also tell about his father's brother, a drunken schizophrenic hobo who got murdered riding the rails. The other hobos lit him on fire and pushed him right out of the moving railroad car. You want to know why your dad asks you? You say, I lean forward all ears. I do. And your dad says, so do I. This is a great, hilarious chapter. And the reason I think you're such a great writer is you do something that I think all my favorite writers do, which is I am laughing and then I am either crying or deeply reflecting sentences later. You know, it's one thing to be funny. It's one thing to be deep. It's a different thing to be both so close together. It's a real gift and you have it, but you're talking about this idea of trying to work with this idea. Your dad's basically saying, look, as a family, we're cursed.

Absolutely. We're not made to be happy. We're not going to be happy. And you talk about that your idea is you're going to teach your dad how to see this differently. And then you go on to say that you needed to take your own medicine. Say more about that. I don't remember what I meant by take your own medicine, but I always had this idea. Say more about that.

I don't remember what I meant by take your own medicine, but I always had this idea, I don't know what it is, that I can somehow solve things about my parents that seem to me to be problems and that seem to me to have blatant solutions, you know, one of which is my dad's ongoing combat with monotheism. So he rejected it when he was younger, but he's still carrying around this sort of apparatus of the theological mindset inside him. He can't get rid of it. So he's always sort of semi-embracing the idea of God and completely at war with it at the same time. And somehow I wanted to just try and flip that switch where he can see what I saw when I first got introduced to Buddhism, especially the idea of no self, right? So I've always had this idea that I can

introduce him to this notion. We always have the same conversations and I always come back around to this point. And then I find a way to present the basic Buddhist teachings to him. And I feel like I've done it perfectly. And I wait for the switch to be flipped. And then I think in this case that I wrote about, he paused and then he said, I want to tell you about Bigfoot. So he told me this long story about how a friend of his had run over a deer in the street and he went to get the deer and he was going to throw it in the back of his truck. And then he saw something flash. He went up the front of his truck and then Bigfoot came behind him and stole the deer. had just told him about Buddhism was so crazy that he now felt like he had a spiritual ally insanity that he could tell his craziest story to about Bigfoot. So it was at that point I just

gave up. I said, you know what? I completely give up on this project of converting my dad to Zen. Yeah. Well, you also talk about, you know, the conclusion that, you know, we are in an alien race that was mixed with monkey DNA. I went backpacking. I don't know, it's been a year and a half ago. And I've wanted to learn how to backpack, like put all your stuff list. So I do all this first night, we hike out, we're standing around the campfire, it's getting kind of dark. And then he just starts in on exactly the same thing that really the only conclusion you can come up with is that we are the results of aliens mating with monkeys, you know, so that we would be a race of slaves. And I'm just having this moment of like, who have I just entrusted myself to? You also say that somewhere in there, I got an earful about how E.T. put the Christ bun in Mother Mary's oven. Is that your dad's actual quote or are you paraphrasing him? I'm paraphrasing. I'm very, very sort of sarcastically paraphrasing his basic premise, which is exactly what your backpacking buddy said, which is, yeah, there's no way that

we made the leap from apes to humans without some supernatural alien DNA. Yeah, it's exactly what my dad believes. I mean, I suppose it's possible. I don't rule anything out, but does seem to me to be less likely. The medicine that I mentioned is, you said, listen to yourself for once instead of trying to get everybody else's attention. You're not trapped in your own special hobner hell, haunted by ghosts who bear echoes of your DNA. Take your own Buddhist medicine, which basically is you are free. That's right. Yeah. You know, whenever I go home and I'm around my family, it's like, I think it was Rob Das who said, if you think you're enlightened, just go spend a

week with your parents. Don't disabuse you of that notion. And then like my dad comes along and like, he has these ways of just throwing this net over my spirit, my soaring spirit and pulling it back down to earth. And one of those is, yeah, we have this Hobner hex. And there's kind of a sort of a craziness and an anxiety in our family. And it's probably in our epigenes. And it extends back to the hobo who got lit on fire and pushed out of the train car. And it extends through. And he'll name several of my nieces and nephews who seem to have the same kind of anxiety and he'll tell me this manifested really clearly in me and then i try and cure him of his opera

hacks with my buddhist teachings of no self and really in the end my dad's on his own path and i need to take my own medicine and just remember like we're talking a little bit about earlier i can be intimate with some of the facts around my personality and my family history, but I don't have to take that personal history and some of these facts from my personality as Bible, you know? I really am free. I really am free of these things. It's deep that you don't have to slip into the roles that are waiting for you when you walk through the door at night and go see your spouse, or when you walk through your childhood home and you go see your father. It's a choice. You don't have to get into those rules. Yeah, I think that stuff is so interesting because

there's no doubt we are a result to some degree of causes and conditions, right? Whether those causes and conditions are the way we were raised, the culture we were raised in, our genetics, those things play a role. But how do we talk about those things in a way that helps us acknowledge what's actually there so that we can see it, so that we can work with it, but not then become subservient to it or not believe it's destiny. It's that balance. And a word that I really like is tendency, right? Destiny, it's that balance. And a word that I really like is tendency, right?

Like I have certain tendencies, but those tendencies can certainly be adjusted. You know, that's all they are. They're a tendency. And that seems to strike some middle ground for me that works well. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, tendencies, they're like cloaks or robes or rolls that we just slip into. cloaks or robes or rolls that we just slip into. We wear and we mask personas, but not fundamentally the sum of our parts. We're manifesting the source, if you will. That's fundamental. Yeah. And that I think really important to remember, rain or shine.

Yeah. There's somewhere in all of these essays, you just had a line that really hit me. It was talking about this idea of no self, right? Which is sort of what you just had a line that really hit me. It was talking about this idea of no self, right? Which is sort of what you just said, which is we're not the sum of all our parts. We're all these different parts, but we're not exactly the sum of them. And we're not some little thing that sits right in the middle and holds them all together. But you used a phrase that I really loved. And you said no self, which means complete self. really loved. And you said no self, which means complete self. Those are two words that seem very different, no and complete. But it really resonated with me. Do you want to say more about thinking of it in that sense? The way I was taught to look at it, I mean, it's very specifically

relates to my teachers when he called to talk at those then he talked about making relationship. And it's kind of a homespun phrase, but it has deep meaning for me anyways. So for example, when we're just sitting on the cushion, how do you manifest no self, right? It's a bit of a canard, right? My teacher was proactive about it. He would say, well, you can't drop the self because the self can't drop the self. That's a vicious circle. You can't just forget the self or use the mind to get rid of the mind. All these things are part of the problem. They're circular. So you have to give the self away. That's how you manifest no self is you give the self away. So you complete the self. You get out of your own way. You give yourself to the breath. So it's always like through your something other than yourself.

That's how you manifest yourself. How else, right? How else? I mean, he used to say, I need 100%. And what he meant by that is like, it's not 95% I'm going to do this activity, whether it was breathing or chopping the carrots in the monastery kitchen or doing your koan practice with Roshi. It wasn't I'm going to do that 95%, but 5% to me is going to kind of be watching. It's got to be 100%. That's no self. And so you give the self completely to whatever the activity is, right? And then you're gone. That's the complete self when there the activity is, right? And then you're gone.

That's the complete self when there's no self, right? But then, amazingly, I was taught that the surroundings always give rise to you again. From that complete self, your tiny little, you know, Eric or Jack arises, that conditional self. It's there again. So that's sort of the nuts and bolts of the Tathagata Zen that my teacher taught. And you can do that in any situation whatsoever. What I like about it is that it's proactive, like you do something.

Yeah, I love this idea too, that you write that the self is standing between me and something else. You're describing a bird. And maybe we'll get to that in a minute, but describing a bird, that the self is the thing that's sort of standing between you and the bird, between you giving yourself and having full relationship with the bird. And I love that idea of making relationship. One of my favorite quotes about enlightenment, to circle back to earlier enlightenment quotes, is I believe it's Dogen who said, enlightenment is intimacy with all things. That has always really resonated with me because intimacy with all things means, as we said earlier, I'm not thinking about myself or I am feeling myself in all things. And that's the way in which I like that idea of complete self speaks to like, oh, I'm seeing all of it as myself.

Yeah. Yeah. In some way. Yeah. Intimate with it. And, and kind of that recognition. I look at you and I, I see myself. I mean, words are a poor descriptor,

but it's kind of my teacher used to talk a lot about how the mother sees her child. And it's like, there's no separation. The child is smiling, the mother is smiling at the exact same time. There's no separation between self and other in that instance. And that was a handy metaphor for him for the intimacy that one is trying to develop through Zen practice with all activities and all things. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to talk for a few minutes in the post-show conversation because you have posed a question that the world

needs to know the answer to, which is, can a computer answer a Zen koan? So we're going to talk about that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to this post-show conversation, all the other ones we've had, ad-free episodes, and the joy of giving a gift to a program that you love, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Jack, thanks so much for coming on. It's always such a pleasure to have you on. We'll have links in the show notes to your Patreon page. I highly recommend. Your videos are great. You're posting essays there, and you are, as I've alluded to multiple times, I think an extraordinarily talented writer. So thank you so much. Oh, thank you for having me on. It was really fun, really invigorating. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the

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