The One You Feed - Shozan Jack Haubner- No Self, an Opium High and a Death Sentence

Episode Date: November 29, 2017

Shozan Jack is a fascinating guy. He grew up in a Catholic home, studied philosophy, has been a stand-up comedian, has authored two books and many essays, was a screenwriter and poet and currently lives as a Zen monk and priest. 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 one of a two-part interview, you'll hear him explain the Buddhist concept of "no-self" in such a way that it finally makes sense, hear how even Zen monks chase success and yes - his experience with an opium high and being given a death sentence (spoiler alert: he's still alive). 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 it's not about good and evil but rather, where do each come from?The idea of no selfWho am I vs. Where am I?That the self is not fixed and it's not solidThe self is porous, co-dependent arising through relationships with our surroundingsThat the worship of success thwarts true fulfillment"No attachment to an outcome"An opium high and a death sentencePlease Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're inextricably woven together with our surroundings, and our surroundings give rise to us, and we give rise to our surroundings. 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 no really

dot com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really no really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts thanks for joining us our guest on this episode is Shozan Jack Hobner. Shozan Jack's writing has won a Pushcard Prize and 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.

So normally at this point in the show, Eric asks the listeners to go to oneufeed.net slash support and donate to the show or something thereof. So instead of asking you to donate, what I wanted to do today was just ask everybody to take an episode of the show that you like and share it with somebody you care about. Because that would be a great gift to us and to them and to you. Because sharing feels good. Okay, don't get me started. Here's the interview with Shozan Jack Hobner. Hi, Jack. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's fantastic to be here again. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on again. You were one of our early guests, so thank you for coming on a show that almost nobody knew anything about at that point. And your book then was called Zen

Confidential, Confessions of a Wayward Monk, which I absolutely loved. And I love the new one just as much. And it is called Single White Monk, Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex, although not necessarily in that order. I heard somebody refer to you as like a Buddhist David Sedaris the other day, which is a remarkable compliment, but I understand exactly what they're getting at, because you have that unique ability to be funny and extremely poignant and heart-wrenching within a sentence or two of each other, and that is just such a gift in art. So I really enjoyed the book. Oh, thank you very much. I'm waiting for the day that someone says, David Sedaris is like a secular Choson Jack

Hopper. He's washed up, I think. I think his best days are behind him. Your best days are ahead of you, so we should be set here. Although I am going to see him this Saturday, so hopefully his best days are at least a few months away from happening, because I hope to catch him on a good night. Anyway, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.

He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, what's up, doc? No, that's not what he says at all. He says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. Yeah, that's a wonderful parable. Thanks for having me on again so that I can misinterpret

it once more. You know, it's funny, I've been thinking about this because I just listened to the Robert Thurman interview you guys did. I loved his answer. He said that you feed the bad wolf to the good wolf. There's an inherent, arguably, and not to be too pedantic, but there's an inherent dualism, or a dualism suggested in the parable, and I never quite know what to make of that. I find myself thinking I'm trying not to throw red meat to either of the wolves these days. I find myself thinking I'm trying not to throw red meat to either of the wolves these days. You know, I remember when I first did my very first Zen retreat, I wasn't even remotely prepared for it. It was, you know, 19-hour days of just sitting on a cushion, breathing.

Interestingly, I just did a Zen retreat last weekend. Really? Yeah, we'll get to that. You know, I know of your pain, yes. Right, that's what I was getting at, yeah, exactly. I mean, a wonderful, deep, purgative, profound experience. And part of it was sitting there and listening to the wolves howl within and starting to come to the realization that what I had thought was a bad wolf maybe wasn't so bad. Maybe I needed to listen a little bit more deeply to what was behind its pleas for food. And a good wolf was maybe just the ego in wolf's clothing. The practice that I did, and I'm so grateful for, and still doing on a regular basis,

I was taught that you have been, I mean, this is an oversimplification, but you sit down on your meditation cushion. You're doing the most simple activity possible when you meditate, and it's just breathing. I was taught that you have an inside world and an outside world. When you inhale, you're taking in the outside world completely, my teacher would say. You have to give yourself completely. Inhale the whole universe.

Then that activity comes to an end, amazingly, profoundly. And then there's a zero moment when there's no inhale and no exhale. And then the situation reverses itself and you exhale and you completely give your interior universe to the outside world. And it sounds a bit heavy until you think about the fact that in a very simple, basic way, when you breathe, you're becoming your surroundings and your surroundings are becoming you. I mean, you take in oxygen and it becomes part of your bloodstream and it goes into your toes and into your heart and it becomes part of your bloodstream and your thoughts. And then when you exhale, your breath becomes part of the world around you. It becomes part of the trees. And in a similar way, things are happening through all of our senses. We're

taking in the sounds from the street. I'm in Los Angeles right now, staying at my old apartment that my sister's now living in. And I can hear the traffic outside and the rubber hits the road. and I can hear the traffic outside, and the rubber hits the road, and there's a sound wave that travels somehow through the air, or maybe my ear reaches out because I don't know what happened, but there's a connection. There's no separation. There's a continuum of experience.

The sound wave hits my eardrum and interacts with my nervous system, and a feeling arises in me. A thought eventually appears that says car, and then I have a memory about a car, and then I think about how I'm thinking about that memory, and there at the top of the experience is what we call the I am self, right? So bringing this full circle to your question about the wolves, if the wolves are a metaphor for the inner life, then what I've tried to do in my practice, get out of the way and let the inner world and the outer world meet completely.

And from that meeting, a new moment arises. So rather than looking at it as a good wolf or a bad wolf in that dualistic way, more than trying to maybe relinquish my notions of good and bad and right and wrong and behave in a completely connected and selfless as a way as possible, and then good and bad spontaneously arise. Right, and I'd like to get into the concept of no-self a little bit, and then I think the tension between good and bad we will also explore as we talk about your experiences at your former monastery. But I want to go right now into, because what you said about the wolves ties very much to something that was not in this book, but I read, which was an essay you did on the abortion question, which is just brilliant. But I'm just going to read part of it because I think it speaks to a lot of what you were saying right now.

And you say, I have come to see that the stumbling block nature of life's deepest questions is not necessarily an obstacle to understanding the human condition. Rather, it speaks to the very heart of it. Ever wonder why so many of the conflicts at the heart of life seem to be logically and ethically unsolvable one way or another? Could it be because they are the very conflicts that generate life? Interesting. You wrote that essay a while ago, but that does sound very similar to what we were just saying. It really does. These are really, really deep questions, and I struggle with them, so I need to be honest about that. I don't consider myself a moral relativist, or much less a nihilist, and oftentimes

I get instincts that something is right or something is wrong, and there's no part of me that's genuine that says, ignore that completely because you're a non-dual Zen practitioner. So that's not the answer either. The longer I've practiced and lived, the more I've come to realize that my knee-jerk notions of good and bad and right and wrong, more often than I'm conscious of, have to do with affirming myself and my people and my ideas and almost have more of a Darwinian flavor than an ethical or moral flavor. And that's something that I have to really consider and sit with. My mentor who introduced me to this practice used to tell me all the time, dude, it's not about good and evil, right and wrong, naughty and nice. It's

about where these things come from. And that's an interesting question. Do good and evil, right and wrong, naughty and nice, it's about where these things come from. And that's an interesting question. Do good and evil have the same source? Is good and evil the right term for these two halves of one experience then, if they do come from the same source? Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really, No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about this idea of no self for a moment. I'm very interested in that. I have studied Buddhism for a long time and, you know, and practiced, you know, to varying degrees. And that is the one sort of topic that I largely just sort of went, well, that's interesting, and kind of got back to the other teachings that felt practical and useful to me. And without going into a ton of detail, I've had some experiences that have caused me to revisit that. So let's talk about this idea of when Buddhism says there is no self, because as I was for many years, it's like, that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. Clearly, here I am, and I feel myself very strongly.

So what is it that Buddhism is getting at when it says that, you know, there's no self, or that there's a small self and a big self, or there's lots of different words for it. Wait, this is a 15-minute interview. I can go now, right? Yeah. I don't have to ask this question, do I? You're not really going to make me go there. Not only do you have to go there, you have to make it succinct in two minutes. So go.

Oh, geez, Louise. This is so far above my pay grade. I will say that the question is humbling, and I'm not a Zen master. I was a monk and then a priest, and there are far more qualified teachers to answer this. But in any event, it was really helpful to me to get introduced to the teaching of not-self, and there's different ways to look at it and different ways to practice with it. So again, I guess I don't want to repeat myself, but maybe I'll return to the earlier analogy. One thing we can contemplate is, and that I was asked to contemplate over and over and over at the monastery, was how does the self arise? So it was interesting. My teacher never asked me, who are you? I mean, I got a collection of essays from a bookstore in

Pasadena once called, Who Am I? You know, existentialists debate the question, and I had asked that question for many, many years. I was attracted to the writings of Nietzsche. I'm not going to do this in five, two minutes, by the way. My no self is revolting against that requirement. So, you know, that was a big question for me for a long time. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

First question my teacher asked me was, where are you? So that's something you can sit with. Where am I? Take who off the table? Where am I? Am I in my body? Maybe, but if I lost some fingers, would that mean myself is gone? Am I within a certain memory, a certain feeling, a certain thought? Kind of, but then there's new feelings and thoughts that arise. Buddhism asks you to question what my teacher would say, you're standing unconditionally on the I am self. Just consider how the self arises and how it passes away. So the teaching is not that there is no self. The teaching is the self is not fixed. It's not solid. That's the mistake we make, and that's the illusion we make. We think that it's fixed and that it's solid, but it's porous. And the world is coming in, and it's giving rise to ourself.

And then we are doing a manifest activity, and we're interacting with the world. So there's something called Enki or Pratikya Samut Sampati, which is codependent arising. If this, then that. So things do not exist unconditionally, 100% on their own. The self is an activity that's constantly dying and it's constantly being reborn. So if I can just once again try and make this as succinct as possible. And I want to talk about this just to make the point that was taught to me that I found to be so valuable in the kind of Tathagata style Zen that my teacher taught me, which is a technical word, but it refers to a really basic

principle, which is basically that the self and all things arise through relationship. They don't exist unconditionally and independent. They are interdependent and arise through relationship so again i'm sitting here in my um old living room on a nice comfortable blue chair and i can hear the air conditioner across the room because it's now over 100 degrees in october in los angeles um so again there's a there's a sound wave and it touches my ear and it travels across the hairs in my eardrum. And this is an intricate system within the ear canal. And the sound wave is being transformed. What happened to that sound wave? What happened to that sound. I know it's inside of me traveling up my spinal cord through my nervous system. It's interacting with my brain and my brain is producing this thought, you know, hot, right? You know, we tend to think of ourselves only as like that person that says hot, right? And we don't even think about the process that's given rise to that thought

that we label as I am, but we're inextricably woven together with our surroundings, and our surroundings give rise to us, and we give rise to our surroundings simultaneously. So ultimately, the teaching of no-self for me is the teaching of relationship and complete relationship as a metaphysical principle that stands at the heart of how we live. And so it's not that there's no self, it's that the self is not unconditional. I mean, certainly you are there and you are feeling some, you know, like you said, sometimes you feel pain, sometimes you feel pleasure, and it's undeniable that you're there. And that's true, there is that experience. But there's something so much deeper that's giving rise to that experience. And at some point, you might ask yourself, where does my connection to

the outside world end? Or where do I end and the outside world begin, and vice versa? And I think that the question of who is it or what is it that these things are occurring to, who is feeling the pain, you know, or it just, you know, that, that, that sense of, and I mean, I think for me, it just, it's, again, it's something I've been, been more interested in recently, but sort of the, the self-inquiry piece, like, well, okay, what, you know, what am I? Starting by what am I not? Like you kind of did, well, am I really the body, you know, am I my thoughts, am I, and do that for a little bit, at least my experience was to end up pretty perplexed as to...

Good, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's awesome, that's what you call not playing, right? Yeah, perplexed is okay. So let's move on from that to now back to something a little bit easier for us to talk about, because ultimately, we're describing an experience that we don't have words for really. But you say somewhere in the book that the worship of success thwarts true fulfillment. That's an interesting phrase from a Zen monk. So it's interesting in that it's a personal experience, right? Because we would tend to think, well, a Zen monk isn't really out after success. But talk to me about that quote.

Well, yeah, I mean, I'm a Zen monk, but I'm an American, too, which means I grew up within the context of the American dream. And a lot of times I've had to look at my own spiritual ambition and say, on the one hand, that ambition can really drive you to make remarkable, brave choices. On the other hand, it can keep you from letting go of this smarmy or more fame-seeking, selfish aspects of your character. In that particular essay, I was really trying to look at how over the years I've had these different ambitions. In that essay, it was basketball. When I was really young I had this overwhelming drive despite being um unathletic and small statured I had this drive to be a great basketball player and you know that drive transformed and morphed into a desire to be a comedian and a filmmaker and a screenwriter and

an artist and and that need that desire, that thirst. And what is that a thirst for? I mean, it's a thirst for approval. It's a thirst for recognition. It's a thirst for affirmation. It's a thirst for success. And I'm not immune to that. And I like to talk about the things that I'm not immune to as a monk and a priest because I think that monks and priests don't always talk about those things,

and that regular, not lay people feel alone in swimming in the, you know, undertow of their own desires. And so I like to talk about those things. And, I mean, this is more of a life lesson in some sense than a monastery lesson, but success and fulfillment are not the same thing. Success is about outward appearances on some level and having the outside world affirm you. Fulfillment is aligning with your deeper purpose, a purpose that transcends your that transcends your status. It's always amazing to me that we all know that on some level, and yet we mostly don't live our lives that way. The lure of success is, or even the lure of success, or just the lure of it's the next thing that I get.

It's somewhere in the book you call it, like around the corner. What's the next thing that I get. It's, you know, somewhere in the book, you call it, you know, like around the corner, you know, what's around the corner, um, is the thing that is going to bring fulfillment and, and how we just, we know it on some level, but boy, is it hard to live that way? Yeah. I mean, I very much believe in throwing yourself into life and engaging with it and not withdrawing from life on the other hand you got to be able to let go of your need for an outcome i remember i did stand-up comedy many years ago and i went to this bar and there was this bartender there and we had a good working relationship and he was the emcee for this open mic night. I remember him looking at me one night and saying,

no attachment to an outcome. That's all he said. No attachment to an outcome. Which I think is... Your Zen Buddhist bartender. One way to... Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a question.

In this country, we're so status driven. We're so driven by our role in society and the amount of money and fame and leverage we have. And, you know, in my own experience of that, you're never satisfied. I mean, I always thought more than anything, I wanted to be a writer and publish books. And now I have two books and I can look at it and kind of laugh and say, now I want three, you know, I mean, it never ends. Right. And they should sell better, and more people should like them, and more Amazon reviews. And I mean, I go through the same thing, you know, with this show is, and I talk about it a lot, mainly just, you know, because I just think, as you said, it's important to talk about is that there's no satiation of some of these things.

You know, if one time you told me we would have gotten as many downloads as we've gotten, I would have said, oh, my effing, you know, like, what more could I? Are you humble bragging? I might be. Maybe I am. Maybe I am. but I'm not given the number, so I'm just going to keep it relative there. I'm not going to say how many, but it's beyond what I could have imagined in the beginning, and yet I'm perfectly capable of being 100% dissatisfied with that if I'm in a certain place. And I'm also perfectly capable of being deeply and profoundly grateful and humbled by that. I can, depending on where I'm at, I can look at that same number completely differently. And I think that's, I tell a story sometimes, I don't think I've told it in a while, but I was in a halfway house when I first got sober and there was a water fountain and I used to call it the serenity fountain. Because the way the building was wired up was that whatever Einstein did it, if somebody on the first floor in the basement turned on the water, nobody else got water on any of the other floors.

And so I would turn that fountain on, I would get no water, or conversely, I would, you know, get no water and I'd look at it and suddenly I would get like a super powerful stream of water. And it was always that way. And there were plenty of days where I just laughed about it. And then there were other days where I got so bent out of shape about the damn thing. And it was the same fountain day after day after day, and it was just such a clear lesson to me early on for me that like, oh, I'm really the one that's deciding. Deciding is maybe a wrong word, but my perception is at the root of how I experience this, and I think that's also a pretty key Buddhist lesson. Yeah, that's a beautiful story, actually. It about sums it all up. You know, it's interesting. I mean, it's very tricky, and it's easy to say the thirst for success is bad. Let me give you an example. Like, if someone emails me and says, I needed company when I was going through A Dark Night of the Soul, and reading a chapter of your

book made me realize that everybody goes through this, and it helped put my heart at rest. I can feel fulfillment in that. That's one thing. Checking my Amazon ranking obsessively is like another, that's the third. Exactly. But yeah, the same activity of writing a book, you know, writing a book isn't necessarily the problem, or having a podcast, or doing public things where it's really easy to get caught up in ego and numbers and attention and money and all that. The activity of writing a book or doing a podcast isn't necessarily the problem in a lot of ways. Holding true to your integrity and your original purpose and not getting too caught up in the winds and the storms of what society throws at you in terms of praise or blame. Yep, and motivation behind it. And, and, you know,

I feel like I say some of these things on the show often, but like, I've gotten to a point where I'm not sure that I'm okay with the fact that most everything I do has some degree of mixed motivation. I don't know how to not have that happen. I just, I'm just like, how can I, how can I spend my time and my energy and focus on? The good motivation and minimize the bad motivation So if I look at it and i'm feeling discouraged like well

We're just not growing as fast as that show or that show, right? I go back to like well What was I why am I doing this? Why did I start doing this and that wasn't why I started doing this and so If I can reconnect with that sometimes, sometimes, that helps. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

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

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead. It's called really know really and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On a similar level of looking forward to everything, I just want to read this and you're one of those folks that I just like to read a lot of it because it's it's just written so well. But you say, my whole life I've been looking forward to something. And now

it hit me like the wake up slap on a newborn's behind. It was almost comical. What the hell have I been looking forward to except the end? That's what comes next. The future is the finish line. That's what's finally waiting for us around the next corner. And I just love that because it is the logical extension of this fallacy that we have that it's the next, you know, if I could just get to this then. Right. I wrote that in the context of an opium high and a delivery of a death sentence. So I should probably unpack that a little bit. I experienced some horrifying pain in my lower left abdomen. It felt like I'd swallowed a fish hook and someone was tugging the line and tearing me open inside. It was quite painful. It was at the monastery and I was on

the premises alone. So finally, I called 911 and they came, picked me up, brought me to the emergency room, took a bunch of tests, and gave me dilaudid to kill the pain which is a morphine derivative in the opium i'm familiar yeah as an ex-heroin addict i'm very familiar oh there you go yeah so i mean in a much smaller way i felt that unbelievable feeling that apparently opium gives you, which is kind of floating in the clouds kind of ecstasy. Just as that was kicking in, a nurse came into the room and she told me that they'd looked at the blood tests and they had my enzyme levels were really elevated. And she went on to tell me that in her, this is lipase enamelase, which are enzymes having to do with the pancreas. And she said, in my experience, this means cancer.

And she said, I don't see what else it could mean. And she said, also in my experience is that it's, you don't outlive this cancer. She said, you know, paparazzi, the opera singer just died from it. And then she kind of smiled cheerily and left the room. So I had been experiencing this. It was funny. I was really trying to figure out what's wrong with me. The whole morning, I was like, what's wrong with me?

What's wrong with me? I think it's really bad food poisoning. And as the pain got worse and worse, I thought, well, I just heard a radio show on NPR where they said you can die from food poisoning. So it must be food poisoning. But then when she told me this, it was like, okay, I have an answer to the problem. It's cancer. And then in that moment, when I got this death sentence and I looked out and I had the morphine

kicking in, I kind of looked through the plastic curtain that was separating my little deathbed from the other death and suffering cubicles in the ER. I saw this real flurry of activity. And I had this moment of kind of being at peace with the fact that my story was coming to an end now. I'm the cancer guy. My life was not supposed to be any other way. I was supposed to be the guy who did a little bit of this, did a little bit of that, brought some pleasure, to be the guy who did a little bit of this, did a little bit of that, brought some pleasure, brought some pain, lived his life, and is now going to die of cancer. And I felt at peace with that. And the idea that I was supposed to have done something more, I was supposed to have been something more, supposed to have found my bliss in some more concrete and tangible way was

balderdash. My life was perfect as it was. It was perfectly me-sized, perfectly me-shaped, and there's no other standard that it could be judged by. It was mine completely. It had its own 100% integrity, and that felt good. It wasn't an ego-inflating thought. It was a humbling, grounding thought that really gave rise to a sense of gratitude. And then you found out it wasn't true.

Then I found out I wasn't dead. Then I got really depressed. I wasn't going to die. I got really depressed. Did you? I was ready for it. I was ready to go. And then the new thing was, I got to get back on my feet again. And it took me months and months and months to pull out of this funk of, why did I get sick? Am I still sick? Is the pancreatitis going to come back? What's wrong with me? And I take different homeopathic or Western medicine stuff, and it would have a side effect that would plunge me deeper into this body and mental darkness. And then finally, I did Zazen in my parents' garage, sitting on a chair with the door open and a pounding rain outside,

and something shifted, and I wanted to sort of get my life in gear again, and I went back to the monastery, and here we are. Here we are. Well, this is going to be a two-part episode, so we're going to wrap this up, but a little teaser for next section, we're going to cover Zen sex scandals, we're going to talk about Leonard Cohen, and ayahuasca. So that's enough to bring folks back for the next episode. So we will end here and pick up again in the next episode. Great. Thank you. See you soon. Okay. If what you just heard was helpful to you,

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