The One You Feed - Shozan Jack Haubner: Living with Leonard Cohen and a Zen Sex Scandal

Episode Date: December 5, 2017

Subscribe in iTunesPlease Support The Show with a DonationShozan Jack is a fascinating guy. He grew up in a Catholic home, studied philosophy, has been a stand-up comedian and has authored two books and many essays. He's got the gift of striking your funny bone in one sentence and then in the very next sentence, striking the center of your heart and mind in a profound way. In this episode, which is part 2 of a two-part interview, you'll hear him talk about his experience living as a monk inside of a Buddhist monastery, being a monk alongside Leonard Cohen, dealing with a sex scandal at his monastery, and what it has been like to transition into living his life back in the world and the many teachings with great wisdom along the way. -------------Shozan Jack Haubner is the pen name of a Zen monk whose essays have appeared in The Sun, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and the New York Times, as well as in the Best Buddhist Writing series. The winner of a 2012 Pushcart Prize, he is also the author of Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk.His latest book is called: Single White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex (Although Not Necessarily in That Order)In This Interview, Shozan Jack Haubner and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHis new book, Single White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex (Although Not Necessarily in That Order)How Leonard Cohen spent his time as a Buddhist monk in the monasteryThe union of contrary thingsHis take on Leonard Cohen's last albumThe opposite of despair for Leonard Cohen isn't happiness, it's clarityThe sex scandal involving his teacherHis experience leaving the monasteryWhat's next for him in his lifeHis conversation with a Christian priest about fighting demonsSuffering = pain + resistanceLetting feelings come and goHe calls himself the "middle manager of the middle way"The middle way involves dissolving the distance between self and other, in complete giving, in either receiving or initiating.Also, the middle way is not picking one thing OR anotherThe importance of walking your path when it comes to learningHis experience taking AyahuascaPlease Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How are we supposed to behave in a way that is spontaneous and free but doesn't harm others? 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 really know really.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 iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you

get your podcasts thanks for joining us this is part two of our interview with Shozan Jack-Hobner, whose writing has won a Pushcard Prize and has been published in the New York Times, Tricycle, The Sun, The Best Buddhist Writing Series, Lion's Roar, and other publications. His first book, Zen Confidential, Confessions of a Wayward Monk, was chosen as one of NPR's Best Books of 2013 and won an Independent Publisher Book Award. His new book is Single White Monk, Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex, although not necessarily in that order. Here's part two of the interview. All right, we are back with part two of our episode with Shozan Jack Hobner. We're not going to go through the whole parable again, because Jack made such a mess of it in the first episode that I don't want to

put everybody through that again. No, I'm just kidding. It would be repetitive to do it. Thank you, sir. Let's jump back in. And so I want to start with, I can't help but bring it up, particularly since you include it in your book, and you made it fair game. So Leonard Cohen was my dream guest. He was the guy I wanted most on the show. And it's funny, I think I mentioned that to you and you told me, well, good luck. His monk name is Great Silence. And that sort of made me realize like, okay, this probably isn't going to happen. But you talk about Leonard Cohen in the book because he was a fellow monk at the monastery. Yeah, that's correct. He was actually a monk before I was there. So he took lay ordination, which meant he wasn't living full-time on the grounds when he was ordained. Then he

kind of ducked out of his very busy, influential life as an artist and an entertainer and a writer and a thinker and went up to live at the monastery where I lived. And this is before my time. He's there for about, I think it was about six years, kind of on and off. And he had his own little cabin up there and he wrote one of his albums up there. And so he was a pretty consistent practitioner for maybe, I want to say like 40 years. And he had a very close relationship with my teacher. Yeah, you talk about in the book, you mention how your teacher was very old, and you watched Leonard take care of your teacher in certain ways, and how powerful that was for you.

Can you talk about that? Absolutely. I mean, you know, part of the thing I wanted to cut, the subtitle of the book was Death, Failure, and Bad Sex. And one of the things I wanted to cover, we talked about it in the last uh first part of this episode was failure um and success and leonard cohen was probably the most um outwardly successful man i've ever met um i mean he's a legend right great

artist a profound artist but when he was around us monks uh he was one of us. This is not exactly to your point, but we'll get back to your point. It was really helpful for me to see that, to see a great artist humbling himself before something that was greater than him. And it wasn't my teacher as a person or me as a monk. It was what my teacher was devoted to and what we were devoted to as monks. A monastery is a great leveler. It was wonderful watching Leonard come into our practice space and throw himself into meditation, just like any of us would. He never pulled rank because, when I was around, he never pulled rank because of his

status. That was a great lesson. There's something bigger than our personal life, our professional life. Watching him and my teacher, kind of how they related to each other. Oftentimes, they would just sit in silence for an hour, two hours. Leonard would be sitting on the couch and legs crossed, just kind of looking forward, kind of hunched because I think his back was hurting at that time. He was very diminished physically. So he was kind of this little elfin, gnomic rabbi figure, puckish grin, nice teacher. We were always trying to find the right chair for him because he was so old and he's just, the meat was gone in his legs and his sciatic was like a red-hot nerve 24-7. So he had this nice chair for him, and he'd be sitting in that chair.

And the two of them would just sit in silence together. Every once in a while, Roshi would say something to Leonard, and Leonard would say something back. It was a really beautiful thing to witness. You say, I'm going to just read again, how do you say his monk's name, Jikon? Jikon, yeah. Jikon. So that was Leonard's monk name. He said, watching Jikon serve our teacher unabsequiously and with intelligence, care, and respect helped take the sting out of my own failures as a writer and as a man. You learn that there is something greater than artistic success when you see a great artist humbling himself before it. I think that's

just such a great thing to see. And then you talk about that he and Roshi had a similar project, a shared vision. Roshi taught it, Leonard sang about it, and you describe it as the union of contrary things, and then their separation again and the struggle in between. Can you talk a little bit more about that? That's a big one, but the final song on Leonard's final album, which I was fortunate enough to meet with him before he died at his house, and he played his album for me. The last song is called Treaty Reprise,

and that's referring to an earlier song on the same album. It's called Treaty, and, and that's referring to an earlier song on the same album. It's called Treaty, and in it, Heath Leonard says, I wish there was a treaty we could sign. I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine. Roshi was always talking about the union between, can sound a little bit complex and esoteric, but if we return to that principle of relationship and not looking at the world as me and you... Let me give you an example. I used to go into koan practice with my teacher, and you would do your bows before him, and then you would give him your koan, which he had actually given you. So the koan is a kind of problem that the teacher's presented you with that doesn't

have a logical, rational answer. So it's a pretext to get in the room and interact with the teacher and for him to see where you're at and for him to help you in your practice. And for a long time, he would shake my hand. That was the teaching he was giving me, just reach out and shake my hand. And at one point, I had this insight or an experience where we were two halves of one experience. And I'd always been looking at myself as being me, separate from the things I'm interacting with and the world I'm living in. I'm just one half of a

full experience. And I think there's a lot of stuff in Leonard's music and in Leonard's art that is straight out of Roshi's teachings. Shinzen Young, who's a teacher, I believe, of Vipassana tradition, translated for Roshi many, many years. My teacher Roshi was Japanese, and he didn't speak impeccable English. So Shenzhen would translate for him at retreats and Shenzhen's got a great clip on YouTube. People can look it up where he's talking about Leonard Cohen's song, I think it's Love Itself. And he completely dissects how that song is an artistic version or representation of my teacher's kind of

classic Taka-to-zen model. I will definitely have to check that out. I mean, I like Shinzen. We had him on, and I'm going to do that this evening, probably. You go on to say that about Leonard, was he an artist consumed by despair? No, his work was shot through with the opposite of despair. But in Leonard's world, the opposite of despair was not hope. It was clarity. Yeah, that was the sense that I got after

listening to his music for a while. There's sort of a schoolboy understanding of Leonard Cohen. Actually, one of his reviews, they said, you know, if you buy this album, purchase some razors along with it because you want to slit your wrist. Right, exactly. Which I would argue that's a superficial understanding of his music. I think there's a catharsis in how he expresses things honestly and with heart, especially at the end of his life, like he had this late career revival, which is so inspiring, because there's a quality of humbleness to it before something that's so much greater than himself. He uses images from the Bible, as well as his Jewish heritage, as well as his practice

with our teacher, Roshi, as well as his work with Ramesh Balsakar, I think was his name, an Indian Vedantic guru. Indian Vedantic guru. And he's offering us these humble poems and songs that I think are really subtle spiritual teachings. A lot of times you listen to something in his later work

that sounds like a love song, but if you sit with it and contemplate it, he's actually, I think, speaking to issues that are a lot bigger, principles that are a lot bigger than just a personal life. Love with a capital L kind of thing. Yeah, and I love what you said there with, you know, that it was clarity, because I've never been able to explain why or what it is about Leonard Cohen

that I find hopeful and inspiring. Because again, at a superficial level, it's construed as depressing, but there's a clarity or something that shines through it that I've never really been able to put into words. I think that's about as good as I could do, you know, what you said there. And it's just, it is powerful stuff. And I loved just knowing, you know, his life in Zen and all that was fairly well known, and his humbleness. You know, I got to see him on one of the tours, and it just was magical. I mean, he really was a special person. Yeah, he really was, and he gave everything he had to those tours. And I remember him telling me that without his Zen practice, he could have never done it.

And I kind of got it, you know. In Zen practice, you're just throwing yourself into these intense retreats, and, you know, you do things you didn't know you could do, you know, and he said his practice really gave him power and a desire to give back, just give fully to his audience. I got that sense. I mean, just one last point. You were talking about the clarity and what it is that resonates with his music that isn't negative or nihilistic. And I just want to say, as a man, he always had a smile on his face, and he was always asking the people in the room what they needed. That was my experience of him. So I always got the sense that he had a clear eye that he was looking at society and life with,

and he was sort of bringing these insights to us with a smile and an attitude of generosity and not bitterness or resentment. You can kind of hear that. I mean, it's great to know that that translated into his life, because you could certainly hear it in the music. And there's a sly humor that runs through so much of it. Yeah, he is the funniest songwriter of the last century. Yeah, I am sad to see him go, but what a good life. Yeah.

Let's turn our attention to really what the second half of your book is about. And it is largely about the monastery that you were at and the teacher who was there. The teacher was involved in a, I guess I'll call it a sex scandal, for lack of a better word. Can you talk to me maybe just a little bit about the basics of what, you know, the facts there? And then I think we can go a thousand directions from there. But maybe just start with people who aren't familiar with that story. Marushi once told me that a Zen master is not a saint, but sometimes it's helpful to act like one.

One of the things that I was attracted to about him as a teacher was that he never once provided a prescription for behavior for me. So what I took away from that after many years of working with him was, I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. I'm not going to tell you what's right and wrong. You do what you got to do, but you better believe you're going to have to take full responsibility for it. That was the sense I got from working with him. The other thing was, he was not a teacher who said sex is bad ever. It's part of life. And if you're married, sex is going to be part of your relationship with your wife and part of your practice if you have a strong practice. So there

was no part of life that was forbidden or off the table. The question was, how do you practice within all the situations that arise and that you help give rise to in your life? So he had, and that you helped give rise to in your life. So he had, over the years, touched his female students. I don't know how many. I know there was a large enough number that it was a problem over the years. There was a wide range of responses amongst the women to this touch. And I really discovered that once the scandal finally broke, I discovered

how hard it was to, boy, come up with any totalizing ideas about the situation. Ultimately, I learned poorly, but I tried to learn to just listen. You know, one person would tell me something. She would say that Roshi taught her a really important lesson about letting go of her ideas of good and bad when he touched her. And she's profoundly grateful and considers him the most important person she's ever met. And then she looks me in the eye and says, you know, are you going to tell me that experience is not valid? Then I have another student come to me and say, you know what? He touched me and it was really horrible. And it turned me off to Dharma. And I left the center and I haven't really practiced that in a sense. Are you going to tell

me that still tell me that he's a great teacher? So all this stuff came out in 2012 when a former monk wrote a blog for a website saying this teacher was doing this touching all these years, and I'm blown the lid on it. And then that story just exploded. It hit at a time, I mean, it's exactly like this time, I mean, with Harvey Weinstein. And now Hollywood is going through its whole scandal now. I mean, you know, there's something in the air that's bringing, probably the internet on some level, because it gives people who are disaffected a chance to speak up. In the Buddhist communities in America, there were many

of these scandals. I mean, they are almost the norm. Almost a cliché, yeah. They are a cliché. And ours came at a time where the culture really wanted to talk about scandals in Eastern-based spiritual communities. And so, I mean, the story went briefly viral. I mean, it was in the Daily Beast. It was in the Atlantic, I think. It was a big New York Times article about it. And it had a huge impact on our community, and it raised a lot of questions and a lot of issues that a lot of us are still kind of grappling with. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello

my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really no really yeah really no really go to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We were talking earlier about good and bad and all of that and going beyond those certain things.

And I think for you, you talk about it being the koan of a lifetime for you, right? The Christians ask, how can bad things happen to good people? And then your version of that is, well, how can good people manifest bad things? Or how can this teacher who was so profound in his teaching, so loving and kind to me and other people that I saw also do these really bad things? Like, how does all that come together? And how do you make sense out of that? I mean, I don't think it's new, like you mentioned, to Buddhist communities. I mean, the other classic example would be Trunko Rinpoche, right? And the fact that he kind of drank himself to death, right? And I've, you know, I've talked to some people who are students of his who were like,

I don't have an answer. Like, what can I really say? He was a profound teacher, and he had these real problems. And I just find it fascinating. It sounds, though, like you are no longer part of that monastery, and that this had some role in that. Yeah, that's true. Okay, you just threw out a lot of stuff there. We could add an episode three unpacking all of it. So two parts. First, Trungpa inspired me to think of, you're mentioning Trungpa inspired me to think about this. He was a Trigam Trungpa Rinpoche, actually a profound teacher, and supremely gifted, almost probably a genius in making esoteric Tibetan Buddhist principles totally accessible to Westerners by translating them

almost into psychological concepts that we could grasp. Very wild personality. There were certainly instances where he behaved in a way that was surprising to a student, but had a positive impact on them. And let's say that way was sexual. Then there could be another instance where he behaves in the same way towards the student, and it has a negative impact. The question isn't just how do good people do bad things, but how are we supposed to behave in a way that is spontaneous and free but doesn't harm others? We have actions from our end, and we never know how they're going to impact people on the other end. And processing this experience with my teacher really makes me step back a little bit and check myself, listen more than I talk, pay attention to the person across from me. Because it's a really, really, really deep question.

What is good? What is bad? What do people owe each other? What is the proper relationship between a student and a teacher? Is it the job of a teacher to push buttons? When is the teacher gratifying him or herself rather than pushing that student's button? I mean, they're really questions that are not going away. And one of the reasons I wrote that chapter of the book and that part of the book was to talk about it.

book, and that part of the book was to talk about it. And I apologize. I can't bring these issues up without mangling them, because they're much deeper than I go. But I think it's important to talk about that, because I think it's going to happen again. There's right out there right now, you haven't told us exactly how many downloads you have, but we assume there's a lot of people listening to your podcast. And there's probably somebody out there saying, you know, my teacher is touching me, and I'm allowing it to happen, and what do I do with that? What do I owe him? Is this something I need to do? I think it's important to talk about these things,

especially talk about these things within these communities. So to the second part of your question, one of the reasons I decided to go ahead and share this experience, and I tried to just share my experience around Roshi as a teacher and my community within the scandal and not speak to anybody else's experience because I got put in my place so many times within our community and the many meetings we had around this issue for doing just that, speaking to other people's experience and interpreting it a certain way. So I thought it was important to write this book. Sharing these things made it such that something that I'd been thinking about for a while,

ever since my teacher died, kind of came to pass, which is that it's probably time for me to move on. And some people were uncomfortable with me writing about these things within our community. And there was a bit of a showdown about it. And I made the choice, you know what, a lot of things are coming together in this moment. They're telling me it's time to go. And go I did. So now what? Do you have any idea? You tell me. Podcast host, I think you'd be great.

I've been thinking about, you know, I mean, I bought a car and I drove to Northern California and I hung out by the ocean for a while. Then I house sat for somebody in San Francisco for two weeks. Then I drove across the country and stayed with my parents for a little bit, met up with a friend, did some traveling. You know, I sat in a monastery for 13 years, actually 10 years in a monastery and three years at a temple. Just spent a lot of my time kind of staring at one spot on the floor with a soft gaze, breathing in and out. And I've really been enjoying traveling and being in the human world again and sweating in traffic and worrying about money and thinking about having a relationship with a woman again and bringing my practice off the mountain and into the world. Yeah, it's a different way to live. It's certainly, I'd like to get some time on the

other side of it. You know, I've always thought, you know, I'd love to live in a monastery for a period of time. But yeah, it's kind of, in your book, you sort of describe it as both exciting and terrifying. Exciting and terrifying, yeah. It's becoming of, in your book, you sort of describe it as both exciting and terrifying. Exciting and terrifying, yes. It's becoming slightly less terrifying. I mean, I have to preface this all with that, you know, a Zen Buddhist monk does not stay in the monastic training center forever. So the path is to go to do your training.

You start out as a student. Then you become a monk and you shave your head. You take tantra. You get a new name. You get your robes. And you begin to, Initially, when you're just a student, you're taking responsibility for yourself and your practice. When you become a monk, you're beginning to take responsibility for the context that the practice takes place in, and you have specific responsibilities depending on your role. And the environment is teaching you to step out of yourself and to begin

to take responsibility for things around you and to treat them the way you would treat yourself. And eventually you have to go off the mountain out of monastic environment. And, and they call it, um, the ox herding pictures, which is a famous Buddhist parable.

You're in the marketplace again. Uh, you're the man with no rank living, um, and that manifesting the, quote, real world. Well, I'll certainly be interested to see where it takes you. I assume writing will remain a part of it. Indeed it will, yeah. Let's talk about an interesting story that you tell. I can't remember it exactly. You're

mentioning that you were with, I believe he was a Christian teacher of some sort, and you guys start talking about demons. Does this ring a bell? That was when I was sick with pancreatitis, and I left the monastery for several months. For the longest I'd been away, I had to go on Zonka, which means you're officially leaving the monastery. It wasn't easy, but I had to go. And I was in Hartford, Wisconsin, staying at my parents' place. And there's a nice, interesting, beautiful church called Holy Hill out there.

It's kind of this bucolic setting with a church perched at the top of it. I kind of ran into a priest there. And yeah, it's an interesting word of advice. I'm not sure what exactly you're thinking of. Well, I thought it was interesting that he talks about, you know, fighting demons and that you're asking him like, well, how do you fight these demons? And he says, how should I know they're your demons? Yeah. Then you go on and you say, and this line, it goes back to the wolf parable a little bit, this idea of not ostracizing the bad wolf or caging the bad wolf, but you cannot defeat your demons,

for they thrive on the fight itself. Yeah, it's like an addiction. You start, I mean, sometimes you manifest the demons, like when you're really angry and filled with a sense of self-righteousness, right? You know, they overtake you. Other times you're pushing them away and trying to ignore them, and they come back stronger. The practice that I learned was just you let thoughts and feelings arise. You don't hold on to them. You don't push them down. You let them come and go like the weather.

But that has been my experience is that, oh, yeah, like your little demons, your little inner demons, they're just looking to mix it up. They're just looking for that energy, that aggressive energy to pull you in. It's like trolls online. It's what your demons are like. If you engage with them, that's all they need. No matter what you put out there, they're going to twist it to their advantage and pull you in deeper. So your demons are like your inner online trolls.

Yeah, I think that's great. I think it's this, and it's what you said a second ago about, you know, meditating and letting thoughts and emotions come and go. It's, I'm getting a real taste in my own life about how much resistance causes me pain and keeps me ensconced in that sort of very small sense of self. And it's a realization I think I go through at a slightly deeper level every year. I'm like, it's just all about what I'm resisting. And then I seem to forget that for a while. And then, but I just, I think Shinzen Young is the one who has put it into equation, you know, suffering equals pain times resistance, you know. That's pretty beautiful. Yeah, it really is. And I just more and more, like, I just recognize that, like, it is my resistance to what's happening that is really responsible for the vast majority of my suffering in life.

And yet, it's a hard thing to let go of. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it's very subtle, but I mean, my feeling is, you know, the teachings tell me that you don't—if you resist it, you're in trouble. You have to teacher talked about, he had this quote that, you know, the true monk is the person who makes it their business to make the two mutually opposing activities. So the activity of living and the activity of dying, the activity of good and the activity of evil, both completely their content. I sit with that a lot because much of my suffering arises from life being a certain way and me resisting it, fighting it, trying to change it, wishing it was another way. Yep. And then there's the, you know, feeling bad about myself because

I resist things and on and on and on. Let's talk about, you refer to yourself, I think, as a middle manager of the middle way, which made me laugh. I love the idea of the middle way, and I think different people have different interpretations of it, but talk to me about what the middle way means to you. Well, I mean, it relates specifically to this model that my teacher taught, again, where you, you know, the self isn't fixed or solid. You've got an inside and there's an outside, and you give yourself completely to the circumstances that you're in. And that doesn't necessarily

mean like you give your, you write a check to the Zen Center for all your life savings or something. I mean, we're not necessarily talking about traditional, say, Western Judeo-Christian notions of giving, but if you're sitting there doing your dishes and you want to go check your email instead, maybe you just give yourself to the feeling of the plate in your hands, the activity of scrubbing the mull off your dishes. So the middle way is collapsing the distance between self and other, dissolving that distance, and the two come together. It's not picking one thing or another, you know? The mind is like a pinball, and it's just bouncing from one thought and idea to another. And when you give it what it wants,

it wants something new. So you're always chasing things when you just obey that little dog inside you that's always yapping. The middle way for me is the practice of dissolving that sense of self in complete giving. And my mentor taught me there's two ways you can give. You receive or you initiate. So my teacher was manifesting this principle when he would shake my hand. Because when you think about it, when you shake a hand, you're reaching out, you're initiating, and you're receiving their hand. So the two halves are becoming one, and the sense of self is dissolving in a sense of we, right? Then, of course, you separate, and now you're separate again. So you can't stay in that unity or that connection symbolized by the touching of the. So you can't stay in that unity or that connection,

symbolized by the touching of the hands. You can't stay in that heaven realm forever. You've got to come back to the world. My roshi used to say, you know, there are no toilets and no restaurants in heaven, you know? So the messy part of human existence is the eating and the shitting is beautiful. The middle way, we don't reject the human world, and we don't attach to the heaven world. It's the middle way, right between the two paths. Just like the Buddha, who, historical Buddha figure, he lived the life of a glorious prince. I mean, you read about his early life, which is somewhat apocryphal and somewhat mythical. You read about his early life, and it was like he was living at a combination between like a Hugh Hefner mansion meets a cultural center or something.

I mean, he had all the pleasures that he wanted. He was a Kardashian, basically. With a super high IQ or something. He had everything you could possibly want. Power, money, sex, talent. But he didn't find happiness there. So he threw all that aside. He went into the forest and he starved himself.

They said if he touched his belly, he could grab his spine. He was so thin. And what he found is his ego survived that experience as well. So his ego was fed by the life of being a Kardashian, and his ego was fed by the life of being a spiritual renunciate. So he decided to practice the middle way, right down the middle between these two extremes. As this show has gone on, I think more and more that has become the teaching for me that I just see it in so many aspects of life that, like you say, that

right down the middle of the two opposites is not a mediocrity. There's just a wisdom in rejecting the extremes. Although I'm drawn to them in a certain way, I certainly think that they led me astray many times, and I can see so much of human suffering coming from being at one extreme or the other. In a lot of ways, my work at the monastery actually brought me to certain extremes, and then I was able to relax. Okay, I went there. You know, and then I'd go to an opposite extreme. Okay, I went there. Sometimes you actually do have to go to the extremes in order to find the middle way. I mean, that's another thing we can learn from the Buddha's life, you know? It's a path. I mean, he didn't just wake up one morning and say,

you know what? Middle way. I mean, he had to go to the extremes, you know? It brings me back to what I was thinking, talking about earlier. You can do what you have to do in life, but you'll have to take responsibility for it. And gradually, maybe you mature and ripen and develop and realize it's not so interesting or sexy or profound to chase the life of a Kardashian. profound to chase the life of a Kardashian. Maybe it's just a different version of ego gratification if I chase a purely spiritual path that completely rejects the world and says it's bad. Like, maybe there really is a possibility to wake up right here and now in the present moment, no matter what I'm doing, no matter what situation I'm in. Whether it's standing at a line at Trader Joe's, you know, and part of you wants to, I mean, I'm speaking from personal experience, but I want to get on Facebook and on my phone.

If I'm going to do that, maybe I do that, but bringing a quality of attention and focus to it and waking up in the present moment instead of chasing pleasure or virtual success. Success. In the last episode, I promised ayahuasca. Oh, boy. We're not going to go into the whole thing. You got involved in that at least at one time, and people can read the book, and it's not really a big deal. that at least at one time and people can read the book and it's not not really a big deal but what i'm going to talk about though is one of my favorite one of my favorite parts of the book where you're describing this friend of yours who he says you know he insists that the plant has no side effects but i have noticed at least two very troubling developments since he started doing these ceremonies a fondness for t-shirts with howling wolves on them,

and a tendency to sign off his emails with love and light. Yeah. It just cracks me up. That sort of sums up my feelings about a lot of the Americanization of the ayahuasca practice, which actually runs many, many, many millennia back, and is very deep-taking hallucinogenic plants as part of a ritual and part of experience and and i did take ayahuasca a few times more out of curiosity than anything and found it to be a very very interesting experience um and we whether that would be a whole podcast in and of itself um it's not something i'm pursuing as a practice. block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer? We talk with the scientist who figured

out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic

Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, Not Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition

signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It complements practice in interesting ways, and I think I needed to jolt. After 13 years of Zen monastic life, I wanted to try something a little bit different. When you're in the Zen circles, those circles inevitably overlap with the ayahuasca circles, because people with spiritual practice outside of the conventional traditional practices in America tend to meet each other. Yeah. We had a guest on, Spring Washam, who's part of the Spirit Rock teaching

community, who also leads ayahuasca retreats in Peru, and we were just talking about how, like, the controversy that she's stirring up with that, and it's just an interesting... Oh, yeah. You're right, you do come across these same sort of circles, and it's an interesting discussion. Yeah, it's a very interesting discussion. I mean, I wouldn't recommend ayahuasca to anyone, at least not in the same way that I would recommend zazen or meditation, although i wouldn't necessarily even recommend that if people find it and they want to do it i think you know go for it for me it was very interesting very profound and i'm still processing it you know when you take a plant or ingest a substance that changes your mindset the temptation is to fall in love with that change and to fixate and attach to it and start

projecting all kinds of stories around it. And none of that is Zen by any stretch of the imagination. But I also think that in a lot of Zen communities, there's a kind of uptightness about ayahuasca. You know, then people can be a little bit anal retentive sometimes. And I'm not saying that ayahuasca is part of Zen practice or even my practice, but it was very interesting as a Zen monk to participate. I mean, I went to Peru and did it three times there. I did it two times in another context, and I don't know if I'll do it again. But, you know, to participate in an ancient spiritual shamanic ceremony in the jungle as a zen buddhist monk i would not take that experience back yep yeah i think it's definitely you know everybody's got to find what what thing works

for them and to save myself getting into lots of trouble the one you feed is not officially endorsing taking ayahuasca or not taking ayahuasca there you you go. There you go. Save the comments. I get it. Anyway, thanks, Jack, so much for coming on, for doing two episodes with us. I highly recommend Single White Monk, Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex. It's funny. It's spiritual. It's a great book. Nice work. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And thanks for having me on. It was really fun to come and talk to you again. It was really fun to come and talk to you again. It was definitely fun to talk. So thank you for doing it.

We'll talk again. Thank you. Okay. Take care. Okay. Bye-bye. Thanks everybody for listening. And thanks to Casper Mattress for supporting this episode.