The One You Feed - Shozan Jack Haubner

Episode Date: March 4, 2014

This week on The One You Feed we have Shozan Jack Haubner.Shozan Jack Haubner is the author of the wonderful memoir Zen Confidential: Confessions of A Wayward Monk. We loved this book. It was poignant, insightful and absolutely hilarious. With a foreword written by, Leonard Cohen (The Guest We Want The Most), we should have known it would be great.Jack has also won a Pushcart Prize and been featured in the Best Buddhist Writing Series. His humorous essays have appeared in Tricycle, Utne Reader, BuddhaDharma, Huffington Post, Shambhala Sun, Spirituality & Health, and the Sun. A former screenwriter and standup comic, he moved to a Zen Buddhist monastery in the early aughts. He was drawn to the rigors of Zen practice, the deep insight of the tradition, and the fact that Zen monks do not have to refrain from cursing or drinking alcohol. A year into his life as a full-time Zen monk he discovered that Buddhism is fundamentally about "no self." He is still wondering if an exception can be made in his case. In This Interview Jack and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.His interpretation of The Middle Way in Buddhism.Our shadow side.How the problem and the solution are one.How the people in our lives are not a hindrance to awakening, they are our teachers.The role of humor in living a good life.How we turn ourselves into constant self improvement projects and the problems with that.How meditation helps us to know ourselves better.The life lessons of working in a monastery kitchen.Shozan Jack Haubner LinksZen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward MonkShozan Jack Haubner Twitter Shozan Jack Haubner Shambala pageSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You know, everybody's got an inner Gandhi and an inner Adolf Hitler, you know, and what do we do with 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 No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Shozan Jack-Hobner, author of Zen Confidential.

He's a former screenwriter and stand-up comic and eventually moved into a Zen monastery in the early aughts. He was drawn to the rigors of Zen practice, the deep inside of the tradition, and the fact that Zen monks can curse and drink alcohol. Hi, Jack. Welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you for having me. It's an honor. Yeah, well, we're really happy to have you also. Your book, Zen Confidential, was extremely enjoyable. It's one of those rare things that is both kind of on the same page, can be really funny and very poignant and touching at the same time.

That's a rare skill. So we really love the book. Thank you very much. Yeah, it was hell to write, so I'm glad somebody found it enjoyable. Yes, it was great, and we'll get into a lot of it as we go through the interview. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable The Two Wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life there's a great battle going on inside of us between a good wolf and a bad wolf. The good wolf represents things like kindness and love and joy, and the bad wolf represents things like

greed and fear and hatred. And the grandson stops and he thinks, and then he looks at his grandfather and he says, well, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start the interview off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work and writing. Well, first of all, it's a great parable on a number of levels. When I first read it, you directed me to your website. I first read it. I just thought it was a great piece of writing. It's one of those things that kind of jumps off the

page. I sat with it for a little bit and then my contrarian character started to kick in and I found, I'd actually just seen a video on the internet, it was a video going around of this family at a zoo and there was this cage with this big thick pane of glass and there was a big lion behind it, a big lioness actually and there's a little girl of course on our side of the glass kind of playing around with the lion a little bit. And, you know, of course, it's going to get a million hits. Everybody loved it. But the lioness was kind of opening her mouth and pushing it against the glass, and the little girl's putting her hand up to the glass, and the family's laughing, and everybody's laughing. I kind of

seen that video right around the time I discovered the story through your website, The Parable. And what hit me was, and I got to tell you, I've been sort of stuck with this ever since. I thought to myself, okay, is there such a thing in nature as a bad wolf? For example, you've got that lioness. If that pane of glass wasn't there, she'd be devouring that child. Is that a good animal or a bad animal? And in a lot of senses, we anthropomorphize what's natural. And inside of us, we have, I think, metaphorically speaking, both. And somewhere along the line in our process of consciousness, our process of development as people, we label them good or bad. And

that process is completely necessary. Completely necessary. It creates kind of a divide within us between kind of our natural selves and the self that has to function in the human world and maybe function in a more spiritually or ethically advanced way. So I have to say, you gave me a bit of a call on it. You probably weren't expecting to do that, but yeah. Hold on, you probably weren't expecting to do that, but yeah. Well, I think that's interesting, because one of the questions I wanted to ask you was about the middle way. The middle way is a concept in Buddhism that tends to be one that is fairly well known, and I think it's normally sort of talked about, at least in popular interpretations of it, as being sort of right down the middle, not too excessive one way or the other.

But throughout the book, you talk about that in a very different way, and I think that kind of relates to what you're getting at a little bit with the wolf parable. Could you explain a little bit more about how you interpret the middle way? Yeah, I can. I mean, I don't just talk, you know, when I wrote that book, I wrote it, I started writing it, I guess, maybe about a year into my time at the monastery. I kind of dropped the writing path completely, told myself I wasn't going to do it. I was going to concentrate on meditation, manual labor, chanting, doing simple things completely. I was done with the creative path. Then about a year into my training, I woke up one day with kind of a few lines running through my head, which eventually kind of became the whole book. But as I wrote that book, I was sort of, you know, I was in a bit of my honeymoon phase as a spiritual practitioner.

It may not seem like it from the book, but it was more of a honeymoon phase than not. And what I talk about in the book is, in a sense, the middle way is not the middling way, which would mean kind of a tepid... How can I put it? It's not a tepid path as I've explored it. In a sense, you have, as we've been talking about, these two wolves, these two sides within your nature. And in a sense, they have to find expression and they have to find completion. If we don't... You know, Jung talked about the shadow side. If you repress this,

and this is my experience, if you repress it or try and push it off or deny it, it's going to come out in your life somehow. So you have this shadow side. You know, everybody's got, everybody has an inner Gandhi and an inner Adolf Hitler, you know, and what do we do with that? And my experience in Zen practice is, in some sense, and I, you know, don't press me on this because I'm not sure exactly what I mean in terms of specific articulation, but in some sense, the two have to meet and cancel each other out. And that's when you find your fullest expression as a human being. If you repress one and indulge the other or indulge one and repress the other, you got some kind of internal struggle going on, some kind of lack of completeness, some kind of inauthenticity. And, you know, that's where a lot of human

struggle comes in. Yeah, that comes up, and you've got some lines in the book that are really excellent along those lines. I'll just read one of them, because I think for our listeners, though, it gives a sense of what you're talking about. And it says, this is the middle way, not getting stuck in a dream, not getting stuck in a nightmare, but fully and completely waking up right at the zero point where the two meet, dream and nightmare, pray and play, pleasure and worship, Friday night fucking and Sunday morning sacraments. And I thought that was very – and you talk about your mentor in the book and how – and that's what I was really drawn to was this idea of bringing all those things together. really drawn to was this idea of bringing all those things together. And another thing that you had in the book several times, I think your mentor said to you that I wanted to explore further. And I think it ties in is it's say that the cause of separation is the means for

connection. The answer and the problem are always one. Can you unpack that a little bit more? Can you unpack that a little bit more? Boy, I wish I could. Again, bringing it back to the wolf metaphor, we've all got a nature. We've got human nature. And at some point within our process, we have to do it. We have to divide things into good and bad. I mean, you know, for example, I've recently sort of quit smoking again. Now, in matters of like addiction where, for example, nicotine is sort of very clear.

You feed the monkey, you take another cigarette, then you take another cigarette. At some point, the need keeps feeding itself and you have to keep feeding the need, and that's a bad wolf. So in matters of addiction, I think it's very clear. In other matters, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who's a Tibetan teacher, talks about how anger and lust, these are energies, And he talks about working with them. And I found that to be valuable in my practice. Yeah, and if we try and cut off parts of ourselves and deny that they're there, we run into trouble. What I was taught is that what you give to the self is that you give it away. You apply it. So it's a means to connect. I mean, it's kind of funny.

I mean, you know, whenever you have a great spiritual teacher, you're going to find them laughing a lot because the situation is actually kind of funny. I'm separate, and I acknowledge that. I have this I am self and yet that separateness is by definition the opportunity to connect. If I wasn't separate I couldn't connect. We would already be connected. There'd be no difference between us. So in this practice, I've been taught, so you give yourself over and over and over. And when we do sitting meditation practice, we give yourself to the breath, right? So you completely connect with the out-breath.

You give everything inside you to the environment around you, specifically your oxygen. But when you inhale, you take your environment in. You take your whole environment into you and you connect. So my mom always asks me, you know, what are you doing when you sit there? What are you thinking about all day? And, you know, I try to tell her, I'm not thinking. We're doing an activity when we sit there. We're practicing the most basic relationship possible between

oxygen and my lungs, between the carbon dioxide that I release into the environment and my environment. The separation is a means to connect and that's kind of a tricky thing. That's the hard part to get. That's the koan of spiritual practice. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. 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,. 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. And another point in the book, similarly, you talk about, I think it's a really, it's a profound insight that, that most of us miss. And I know I certainly am guilty of missing and thinking about it. And you basically talk that the people in your life don't get in the way of your spiritual practice. The people in your life are your spiritual practice. And I think that's, you talk about it in spiritual practice. And I think that's, you talk about it in a monastery, and I think you also reference what it's like in a family, that those are the people that help you actually engage in the spiritual practice,

and in a lot of ways monitor where you are, how you're doing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because that is a lesson that I will never, ever, ever stop learning, especially as something of a misanthropist. Yeah, it's funny, I mean, everybody has this idea that you're going to go to the mountaintop, and you're going to kind of just get up into that rarefied air, and you're going to walk into the Zendo Meditation Hall, and it's going to be the enlightenment factory. And you're going to go in one end, your sloppy, messy self, and you're going to come out the other end, a fully formed and enlightened being.

And you never really think about the other people that are going to be around you in that equation. And the thing about a monastery is you're packed in really tight with these people. You know, it's kind of like family in the sense that you wouldn't choose of your own accord to be around these people. And yet there they are, and they're in every aspect of your life. And we have this saying at the monastery that, you know, all of us practitioners were like rocks in a bag, getting shaked around, and everybody's knocking off everybody else's sharp edges. And it's really true. I mean, other people, family, coworkers, absolute mirrors for who we are and where we're at. And if we can interact with them skillfully, they'll be our teachers

every time. I mean, that's one thing I've learned at a monastery. I mean, I know when I was not living at a monastery, I always did have this fantasy about moving to a monastery and pursuing the spiritual path. And now that I've done it, it's funny. I come out the other side and I want to just tell people, you don't have to go anywhere. Your teachers are all around you. Do your meditation practice, half an hour of sitting a day in the morning, half an hour in the morning, half an hour in the evening, whatever it is that you need to do to ground yourself. But otherwise, make full relationship with your surroundings and with the people in your life. And the world and the people in your world are going to give you every single lesson you could possibly need.

I mean, there's a reason most of the world doesn't go to a monastery. It's because really we don't need it. All that we need is right in front of us, bothering the heck out of us. bothering the heck out of us. Yeah, and actually, I am one of those people who's harbored that fantasy, like, well, if I could just get off to a monastery and do all that, it would be different. And your book was a very good way of disillusioning me of that idea. And I get it, you know, the way you explain it makes a lot of sense that how a lot of the things that we use to distract ourselves in life from other people and interpersonal situations and problems, you simply don't have them there. So

everything is magnified because there's nothing else to focus on. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like that. I mean, monastery politics are like the way, I think it was Kissinger described university politics in the sense that the infighting is so intense because the stakes are so low. as we were going through that last part, you mentioned that spiritual teachers will tend to laugh a lot. And at one point in the book, you talk about, you bring up the idea of levity, which I think is an underappreciated virtue.

And you tie that then to the human spirit. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you see levity and humor in the spiritual process? Or even in just living a good life? It's interesting. George Carlin used to talk about how he always wanted to make a point with his humor. Humor for me is always a kind of opening.

When I laugh, I'm never unhappy when I laugh, but I'm never, ever, ever in a bad space when I laugh. When I'm in a bad space, I'm clenched tight and I cannot appreciate my life. And when I'm laughing, there's usually some measure of surrender that's going on. And I think that's kind of key. It's a happy surrender when I'm laughing. The situation is much, much bigger than us. And in many senses, I think we're sort of born who we are into

circumstances that aren't necessarily going to change. And being able to accept this and work with this and have some humility about it, and again, surrender to it is the key to, I think, really sinking down into your life and living a deep and meaningful life. And humor, I think, is a byproduct of that, or laughter is a byproduct of that. Humor, I actually haven't given too much thought to. I think it just comes to my character. I think when you fail a lot in life, you tend to drift towards humor as sort of a coping mechanism. My partner, Chris, just raised his hand as being included in that club. I think we all relate with

that idea, and we've got a tendency to make fun of each other right at our most painful moments, which is an extraordinarily great thing to do in a lot of cases, because it does, it opens up and releases that clenching a little bit and does give a sense of levity. You talked about this idea of things that don't change and accepting change. And in the book, you say that you've spent much of your life trying to change who you are, such that who you are has in many ways become a person who tries to change. And then you go on to say, how do you change that? Has being at the monastery helped you with that, that idea of being a continual self-improvement project?

Yeah, I mean, before I went to the monastery, before I really did a spiritual practice, I don't think I had a context for myself. You know, it was in a sense all about me. There was something wrong with me. I was too skinny, or my grades weren't good enough, or I had some emotional problems, wasn't good with girls, not smart enough, not successful.

There's always something that I was not enough or something that I was too much of. And so there's this sense that the real me that I'm pursuing is right around the corner. Life is this big labyrinth. It's this big maze, but the answer, the real me, the great I that I'm going to become is just right around the corner. I just have to read this new book, I have to apply this new method of thinking, you know, I have to chase something new. And it's always, you get a little bit further and then it's something new, you know mean it's a chimera it's a phantasm or a mirage um you know and then there's a sense

that well when i finally become this real me then i can start living finally all my ducks are going to be in a row and i can start living my life of course we know what happens you know you're you're 80 years old and you and you realize you just spent your life trying to become something. And you're always waiting for something right around the corner. You're always waiting for what comes next. But, of course, what comes next is the end. I mean, that's the ultimate what comes next. What meditation did, what Wendell Monastery did was, I mean, this type of Zen that I practice, Rinzai Zen, is

pretty severe. You sit in a meditation hall and there's an officer there and he's going to correct you if you move. He's going to shout at you if you shift. There's all this form and all sorts of rules and guidelines and regulations about what you can do and what you can't do. It's all designed to get you to sit down in one spot and settle into yourself. And what I find happens is stuff starts coming up. And normally, if I was out in the world, left to myself, I would act those emotions out somehow. I would get a cup of coffee so I can get my coffee buzz if I'm feeling agitated

about something. Or I would send an angry email or a passive-aggressive email or I would even just manifest this inner life in kind of a subtle way just shifting in a certain way moving my body in a certain way sitting down in one spot and just getting to know myself get it as these thoughts and these emotions rise up and dissolve away rise up and dissolve away start to realize you start to and dissolve away, you start to realize, you start to get, like I said, you start to get to know yourself a little bit. And you stop taking kind of the me project so seriously. This idea that we're people who always think we have to change. That's what we are. We're on

this constant self-improvement. You called it the We're on this constant self-improvement. You called it the Me Project, this constant self-improvement where we feel like we have to become better than we are. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And this is in one sense where I think that actual, formal spiritual work is really helpful, in the sense that it's a very ritualized, straightforward way of showing you, for me anyway, showing you how to live. I was telling a student this the other day. It's like if you read the old sutras, it's like the Buddha is the ultimate spiritual superhero, you know?

He's this amazing, fantastic figure. I mean, it's very alluring to want to try and change into that being. You come, you sit down in the cushion, and it's a different story. All your rich, crazy, interesting, beautiful, mundane, fascinating, banal humanness rises up and then you play with it for a while and it plays with you and eventually it dissolves rises up and dissolves and you don't get any better and you don't get any worse you you just you just hopefully you're becoming more alive and more awake. I'm Jason Alexander.

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

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. 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, 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. One of the stories in the book that I really enjoyed was the story of you working in the kitchen and, uh, and the character T-Bone. Do you think you could give the listeners a, uh, a mini version of that story? Yeah, I, um, I was terrified, terrified to work in the kitchen when I moved to the Zen Center. Um, after I spent a little bit of time in the kitchen, I got a helper, and it was really just a really eccentric, crazy, classic kind of Zen character barreling through the... Generally speaking, when someone's crazy or lazy, they wind up in the kitchen at a

Zen monastery. the kitchen at a Zen monastery. So we're in this enclosed space, having to work together, and basically over the period, I think he was in there with me for about two months, basically we just started driving each other crazy. And one thing I kind of learned through this process was, first of all, I had to face a lot of my mother issues, I guess you could say. What I learned working in that kitchen was kind of a classic Zen lesson. First of all, I had become my mother in the sense that I was curt and sort of impatient and overly disciplinary towards my kitchen worker. But being on the other side of that equation, I realized what my mother had gone through when she was raising me. And I had to kind of really look at myself and say, I was actually a brat.

I was actually probably, I was certainly worse than my other brothers and sisters in a lot of ways. And, you know, it wasn't all her, even though I was a young man, I was still, I think I was worse than your average child in the same sense that this kitchen worker that I had was just out of control crazy. I mean, he was, you know, he loved to freestyle rap. So he spent all his time kind of creating raps to make fun of me. He would sort of do passive aggressive things behind my back, like hiding the salt shaker in another part of the room. And it was just constant source of aggravation. So he was definitely a very bad worker. And in a sense, yeah, I had to look at myself and say, you know what?

I was not a great kid. And my mom had to put up with that for year after year after year. And so I really came to, yeah, certainly for the first time in my life, I think I grew up a lot when I was in that kitchen. For the first time in my life, I sort of related to the parental point of view instead of the rebellious child point of view. And speaking of the mother part of that, can you tell us about what happened when T-Bone's mother came to visit? Yeah, that was classic. mother came to visit? Yeah, that was classic. This guy was like a samurai when it came to Zen interpersonal battles, and there was nothing he wouldn't do. He was fearless.

So his mother and father came to visit at the Zen Center, and we're all in the kitchen, and we're washing dishes. So at one point I started trying to, feebly, I started trying to fight back with people in the kitchen. So when he would, we had a yo mama thing going. So, you know, your mama's so fat or your mama's so slutty, that kind of thing. So for a while I was speaking to his mother's flatteringly ways. now, of course, I'd never met his mother. I had no idea who she was. But then she came to visit us at the Zen Center. So we're all kind of washing the dishes, hanging out.

I'm trying to put on my good Zen face. And T-Bone just starts mentioning all these things that I had said about his mother. You know, now my mother's here. You seem to have a fetish for large breasts. Do you want to art my mother's breasts enormous? So we kind of, you know, that's sort of funny, you know. But he wouldn't stop. He's going on and on and on.

And the uncomfortable thing was his parents didn't really stop him from doing this. They didn't really say anything to him. I mean, I don't know how you raise a child like this. But, I mean, he had some mental issues, which I won't get into. But, you know, clearly they were very, very patient. But he went on and he listed everything I had ever said about his mother. And believe me, in the Dark Night of the Saltman Kitchen, I had leveled many a foul insult against his mother. And he repeated every last one of them to her in that kitchen.

You know, my mother's here. You said that she deserves the minimum wage for her services at the brothels in Nevada. Would you like to speak to that now? Oh, yeah, that's pretty good. So did T-Bone make it? Did he make it through monastery training?

Did he go on to other things? He's a fascinating character. He's a fascinating character. He is a fascinating character. We're friends on Facebook now, so apparently he doesn't hate me too badly. You know, he's a musical genius. He's actually a wonderful guy. I think, like many of us, he came to the Zen Center when he wasn't at a high point in his life, in his career, his personal life. But in actuality, he's a great guy, a beautiful guy, an amazing guitar player.

So now I think he's actually teaching people how to play guitar. Yeah, and the story, it comes across that you really learned a lot from him, and that part is so well told. I really enjoyed it and laughed a lot during that. I think we're coming up near the end of our time here. Is there anything on the topic of the theme that you'd like to cover that you don't think we have talked about or anything you want to add in general? Well, I think I've babbled enough, don't you? No, I think it's been good. Yeah, I really appreciate being able to

come on and talk a little bit. And I have to say, I have to keep sitting with the good wolf, bad wolf analogy. It's important. We have these flawed, crapping, emoting, fascinating, precious, beautiful, interesting, wonderful human selves. And that's an absolute reality. And within that reality, there's good and bad. There really is good wolves and bad wolves. Like I said, I can't be feeding the nicotine wolf anymore. It's a very clear example of a bad wolf and a good wolf.

And on the other hand, there is some aspect of our shared reality that is beyond good and evil, beyond good and bad, beyond distinction. And how we bring these two things together, I mean, that's our human life. That's our mission, our journey, and our job. So in a sense, the good wolf, bad wolf parable is a bit of a con for me, which I'll keep working on. Well, thank you very much for joining us. Like I said, I really enjoyed the book, and I encourage the listeners to read it. There is a tremendous amount of humor and insight in it.

So with that, Jack, thanks very much. It was good to have you. Thank you, Eric, and thank you, Chris. Take care. You too. Bye. Bye-bye. You can learn more about Shows On, Jack, and this podcast in our show notes at oneufeed.net slash Shozan. And if you don't know how to spell that, that's S-H-O-Z-A-N. And just kind of to, you know, pay us back for the favor of me telling you how to spell, you can go on iTunes Store and pretty much give us a five-star rating across the board. Thanks.