The Tim Ferriss Show - #531: Henry Shukman — Zen, Tools for Awakening, Ayahuasca vs. Meditation, Intro to Koans, and Using Wounds as the Doorway

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Peak Tea. That's P-I-Q-U-E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China. I've lived in China, in Japan. I've done tea tours. I drink a lot of tea. And 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things, chief among them, that gut health is critical to just about everything. And you'll see where tea is going to tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented pu-erh tea specifically pretty much every day for years now. Puerh tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem with good pu-erh is that it's hard to source. It's hard to find

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Starting point is 00:02:05 automatically applied when you use that URL. You also have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is risk-free. One more time, check it out. Peaktea, that's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by You Need a Budget. What is You Need a Budget? You Need a Budget is a cult favorite budgeting app for a reason. The app and its simple four rule method will change the way you think about your money and help you gain total control so you can plan for the things you need and get the things you want without guilt or stress. To give you an idea on the cult favorite side, to date they know of at least seven customers who have customized their license plates to mark the occasion of purchasing a new car in cash. And these fans

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Starting point is 00:04:23 Now I would assume an appropriate time? What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Henry Shookman, S-H-U-K-M-A-N. You can find him on Instagram at MountainCloudZenCenter. Henry teaches mindfulness and awakening practices to a wide range of students from all traditions and walks of life. Henry is an appointed teacher in the Sambo Zen lineage and is the guiding teacher of MountainCloudZen Zen Center. He was introduced to me by my

Starting point is 00:05:06 very close friend, Kevin Rose. That is how this came to be. He has an MA from Cambridge and an AMLET from St. Andrews and has written several award-winning books of poetry and fiction. His essays have been published in the New York Times, Outside, and Tricycle, and his poems have been published in the New Republic Guardian Sunday Times, that's in the UK, and the London Review of Books. Henry has taught meditation at Google, Harvard Business School, UBS, Esalen Institute, Colorado College, United World College, and many other venues. He has written of his own journey in his latest book, One Blade of Grass, subtitle, Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen memoir. And that book was gifted to me by the aforementioned

Starting point is 00:05:46 Kevin Rose, affectionately known as Kev Kev on this podcast very often. The website is mountaincloud.org. You can find both Henry and Mountain Cloud Zen Center on Instagram at Mountain Cloud Zen Center, Facebook, facebook.com slash mtncloudzen. And you can find Henry on LinkedIn, linkedin.com slash in slash Henry hyphen Shukman, S-H-U-K-M-A-N. Henry, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Really, truly honored and humbled to be with you. I'm excited to dig in. And as I mentioned before we started recording, I think we will run out of time before we run out of material, but we must start somewhere. So I wanted to start in perhaps an odd place. And that is to go into mythology for a moment and specifically to talk

Starting point is 00:06:41 about, if I'm getting the pronunciation right, Typhon, the mythological beast who lived under the volcano Etna. And I've read that at one point you felt like this mythological beast. And I would love for you to explain why that is the case. Okay, well that's going right back to early years. Great place to start, actually. Basically, I had raging severe eczema. That's a skin affliction. Many people might know of it and think of it as just a rash or something now and then, but it can be quite severe. And I had it chronically for, I guess, like more or less the first, it's hard to say, two to three decades of my life, starting from the age of six months. And when I was a kid, I was often in hospital for stretches and stuff. It was at

Starting point is 00:07:31 that sort of level. And Typhon, I remember hearing about him in class at school, you know, Greek mythology, lived under Mount Etna, the volcano. And he kind of could survive the sulfurous raging heat down there. And I lived quite a lot of my early life in a kind of sulfurous raging heat that came out through my skin. And I don't want to over-dramatize it, but from living it from the inside, it was very difficult. It was like being slowly on fire or something. Eczema is, when it's bad, it itches to an unimaginable degree.

Starting point is 00:08:11 It's really quite debilitating. And the doctors in the UK in the 1970s when I was growing up, they didn't really have a lot of great sort of tools. They had one tool that was really effective, which was heavy steroids, but they didn't like to use them. The thing that really made the big difference for me was actually meditation. You know, I took it up in my early mid-twenties and it made a dramatic difference quite quickly. It wasn't that I was over it forever, but things really shifted once I started meditating. And I'm not suggesting that all eczema sufferers will find the same thing, because there's

Starting point is 00:08:51 a complicated, multifaceted affliction, and there aren't clear-cut factors. Actually, it really is rather tricky, I think, for a lot of people to handle it. But for me, that piece of essentially getting a method for calming the nervous system, which I had not realized needed calming, by the way. The thing is, again, if you grow up with this kind of thing I think anybody with a chronic ailment of some kind knows what this is like that I mean I suppose it depends when you first get it but especially for kids you just think this is normal you don't know that there's something dysfunctional going on it's just this is how the world is in my case when I started to actually taste a different kind of way of being alive, it was a really big deal.

Starting point is 00:09:49 It was wondrous to me. I was just going to hop in to also paint a picture for folks, because you had this itching, weeping, bleeding, and so forth. And the severity of it is remarkable, in what I've read it, at least. That is having a district nurse coming to you daily, laying you on a towel, bathing you in antiseptic solution, wrapping you in coal tar bandages, and so on. I mean, this was a non-trivial condition. And when you say that you weren't even aware that the nervous system needed calming, do you think the eczema was in response to something that was a psychosomatic and not in a

Starting point is 00:10:35 not in a way that diminishes it, but literally psycho-hyphen somatic response to something that you can identify? Do you have any thoughts on what generated that experience? Well, yes, I do, actually. I mean, of course, in a certain sense, this is kind of private personal mythology of another kind. But what I know happened was that when I was six months old, my parents were living for a semester in Helsinki. And actually, both my parents were living for a semester in Helsinki and actually both my parents were professors both in Russian studies and they had a my dad actually I think had a fellowship in Helsinki University for for a semester and we all went over there that was my older brother and myself just six months old mom and dad and this may sound a little fanciful, but it's actually real and true.

Starting point is 00:11:28 But because this was actually back in the 1960s, when the Cold War was really hot, it was really happening, at that time, basically anybody who could speak Russian in Britain was likely to be in some way or other approached and used by the intelligence community. And that was true of my mum and my dad. They were both recruited early on, actually, while they were studying Russian still, to MI5 or MI6.

Starting point is 00:12:01 And they didn't do anything massively. It wasn't kind of James Bond stuff, you know, it was just like, could you tell us about this scientist who's just been sent to the Gulag? Or can you read this report? And occasionally they'd get involved in little minor operations or whatever. This all came to light much later, by the way, after the 50 years of the Official Secrets Act had expired, when a lot came to light about things that have been going on in the world of espionage in the UK with the Soviet Union. But while they were in Helsinki, my dad was requested that he would go to Leningrad, which is just not so far away across the Gulf of Finland.

Starting point is 00:12:47 And my mom, I don't know the exact circumstances, but for whatever reason, she went too. And that was how she weaned me. So she left this baby that had been seemingly well, went to Russia for whatever they were doing there, came back a week later or 10 days later or five days later. I've heard different versions of the story. And when they got back, I was covered in eczema. And so I imagine that I went through something pretty difficult while my mother was suddenly gone. And at the same time, was weaned of the breast and put on formula and by probably somebody I didn't know. And it must have been very, very difficult for me. I think in some way that, if I can call it trauma,

Starting point is 00:13:33 which I guess I can, that trauma has been very, very important for my whole life, actually. And even for the path to and beyond awakening i'm very interested these days in how trauma and awakening relate to each other i think i'm not the only one people are starting to look into that there's something about deep wounding that can be a pathway to deep deep love it's a very beautiful thing when the wound becomes the doorway. I think there's always that potential with a wound, but so much of the time we tend to

Starting point is 00:14:13 accrete protection over a wound and sort of stay away from a wound and avoid it and live as if it weren't there. So unpicking the defenses and actually finding some kind of way, usually it needs support actually, some sort of supported way to go into our wounds. And what we find there in the place that we're most terrified of can be just, of course, pain, but also great, great love. Honestly, in certain ways, I'm jumping crazily ahead tim in terms of a trajectory but but to me there's something just amazing at how deep deep wound and deep deep

Starting point is 00:14:53 awakening they've got things in common that i find mind-blowing and really really beautiful and i think there's a blessing in going into our wounds And maybe to a lot of people this sounds crazy, but I really think often the thing that we fear most, the thing that seems most what we don't want, can turn out to be the great opening for us. What type of meditation did you start with? What was your first entree to meditation which helped you to calm your nervous system and begin to resolve the eczema? That was TM, Transcendental Meditation,

Starting point is 00:15:35 in the sort of late 80s by then in London. That was the most sort of conspicuous game in town if you wanted to meditate. Yeah, yeah. they still had this kind of cachet in england because the beatles had done it for sure they went out to rishi kesh or whatever it was and hung out with maharishi mahesh yogi and so there was this sort of endorsement that somehow tm wasn't sort of too weird. It was kind of weird, but not so weird. And actually their tagline was, life tool for the busy. That's great.

Starting point is 00:16:15 I've never heard that. So they kind of undercut any worry that you might be sort of checking out from life and going into some weird cult. This was going to help your career. So they kind of undercut any worry that you might be sort of checking out from life and going into some weird cult. This was going to help your career. That's how all the best cults get you. I also, I still practice TM at points, so I'm not casting aspersions.

Starting point is 00:16:39 I'm mostly just poking fun. Let me come back to a term you used, because i want to keep track of definitions for people who are new to all of what we're talking about and i'm going to be new to a lot of what we're talking about you mentioned the term awakening what does that mean here how should we define it for people listening i could give a really dry definition or i could give an account or I could do both let's do both in whichever order you like okay let's do dry first I think this will be quite short the sort of working definition for me and I think many others in this field would be to awaken is to see that the sense of self, that the me that I have taken myself to be for as long as I can remember, has been a kind of genie. It's been a kind of mirage that constructed itself and then believed

Starting point is 00:17:36 in itself. Now, this is not in any way to sort of diminish, I want to get to this later, that, you know, really the whole world of sort of healing the self is dear to get to this later, that really the whole world of healing the self is dear to my heart and very, very important. I don't go along with people who just say, who trash the self, say, forget it, self is just a delusion. You hear that in spiritual circles, self is just a delusion. And it may sound like I'm saying that right now. In one level it is, and in another level we must take it seriously. That's how I take it. So to awaken is actually to see that the sense of self, the sense of me, has not been what I've taken it to be all along. Instead, it can actually be seen through

Starting point is 00:18:20 so that we realize it's never been here the way we've thought from the start. It's never really been here quite the way we took it to be. That's one side of awakening. The other crucial component here is that when that happens, when we see through the sense of me as a separate being, all the rest of the world is out there, I in here when that is gone we discover that we belong in an utterly wonderful way to and with everything we find that there is actually another level of our experience and it's right here now it's not some weird other state we go to it's actually right intrinsic to our ordinary experience it's just that we don't see it. We rarely see it. Most of us seldom see it, but it's actually never hidden. It's just that we're totally conditioned away from seeing it. It sounds very weird, and it is very unusual in the sense

Starting point is 00:19:16 we don't normally experience things like this, but it's actually present right now and always. There's another dimension, another another aspect another face of our experience of this very moment in which we are totally part of everything and so that's the flip side so in awakening you sort of one thing vanishes that sense of self and another thing appears which is what that sense of self was occluding in some sense, which is that there's this unbelievable, wondrous participation that we have. We are part of everything. Even to say we're part of everything, it's not quite getting it. We discover in a moment of awakening, we are all. Is that enough for now? Do you want to respond to that?

Starting point is 00:20:01 Well, I'd like to encourage you to perhaps illustrate it with a story. And the question perhaps that I could ask in the meanwhile is, is it fair to say that the experience of awakening or waking up, of course, you've done quite a lot with Sam Harris on the Waking Up app and with Sam, who is also a close friend. And is this experience of awakening a repeatable or repeated phenomena? In other words, you hear the term, which I have never really gravitated towards, enlightenment gets used in different spiritual traditions or different practices and it seems kind of like a zero to one one-time event and lickety split there you are even though you still have to carry water and follow the taxes and so on yeah typically but is this experience

Starting point is 00:20:58 of awakening something that in practice recurs with some regularity. Here's a metaphor that a great 20th century Zen master called Yamada Koun used. He said, imagine that we've been living in a room made of opaque glass. In a moment of awakening, a hole is suddenly poked or drilled or smashed through part of one of those, the walls of the room. And we see kind of a bright world outside the box of glass, of opaque glass that we've been, dark glass that we've been living in. Suddenly we see, oh my God, there's a world out there that's really so different. So that's one instant of awakening. That would be one way that awakening can be defined is a sudden moment of revelation. Can I tell a little story now that would this be appropriate to say what that's like? You're very British, my friend. Yes,

Starting point is 00:22:00 it would be entirely appropriate. Please continue. I love it. I love it. I wish I had your accent. My God, people would think, give me a bonus 20 IQ points. I would love that. But please, please continue. Yes, this would be a great time. Perfect time for a story. We got two hours here. So the IQ level will tank, I'm sure, as we go. Here's a story.

Starting point is 00:22:19 When I was 19, I'd actually gone away from the UK to work abroad, you know, during my gap year after school. I went to Argentina and then I backpacked through Bolivia with a friend. And while I was doing that, I wrote my first book, actually, and then in Peru. And toward the end of the journey, having written this book, and you know, 19, I'd always wanted to be a writer, a poet, and I was so happy. I'd actually finished this whole book, and I'd worked and earned some money and seen the world. And I'd been in a totally different universe from the rainy, academic, library-riddled world I'd grown up in, books and rain, basically.

Starting point is 00:23:00 That was Oxford, you know. I mean, very beautiful, you know. Books and rain and old stone walls. I mean, it was, you know. Books and rain and old stone walls. I mean, it was marvelous and poetic and lovely and all the rest of it. To go to Bolivia, 13,000-foot plateau, with people living just utterly different kinds of lives, you know, just so different. And to be able to travel, this was, again, back in the 80s,

Starting point is 00:23:23 traveling in the backs of trucks everywhere, just trundling through this immense landscape and this ultra clear air and sky and with my best friend who is a photographer and I'm writing and he's taking photographs and we're going to make a book together. And actually we did. A few years later, it came out. It was the opposite of the life I'd known, so constricted. And on that journey, actually, before going, I'd managed to persuade my doctor to actually give me a tube of steroid cream because I didn't want to be 5,000 miles away with a raging eczema flare-up. He gave me that, and I hardly ever used it.

Starting point is 00:23:59 Somehow, in the new climate, in a totally different dietary system whatever I don't know what and this feeling of being free and out from under a heavy cloud and not having realized I've been living under such a heavy cloud all those years somehow that was the first taste actually for me that eczema might clear up so I'm just painting the picture a little bit. Eczema gone. My skin was normal. It was, can you imagine after all those years to see that I had this beautiful brownish, I'm sort of part Jewish, Sephardic a bit, brown, beautiful skin, smooth and not a blemish on it, not an itch and not a hurt. It was amazing to be healed like that. and i was writing this book and there was a certain point towards the end of the trip where i holed up in a little hostel in a room 50 cents a night

Starting point is 00:24:51 or something and just drank coca-cola pints of coffee smoked winston cigarettes and wrote about 80 pages of this book what was the book about it was about this journey this very journey you know it was called sons of the moon and it's very exciting you know got published in london and new york and i was still pretty young and it was very thrilling having done the book having healed the skin towards the end of the trip i was alone on a beach on the pacific ocean late one afternoon and the beach was deserted and I was just watching this desert coast up there almost I was going to say featureless that's not quite right but just kind of bare barren stark coastline and there's this sun getting close to the horizon nobody around, a little boat anchored offshore. And I'm just gazing at the path of light that the sun was laying on the water. It was probably only like a hand's width above the

Starting point is 00:25:56 horizon or something like that. That beautiful scintillating path of light that leads out to the horizon that you get on the ocean. And I noticed that this boat had disappeared. I knew it was there, but it disappeared. And then suddenly I saw it. It was just a silhouette inside the path of light. And it was there as a sort of black silhouette. And then it disappeared again in the sparkling light. And it just struck me as extraordinarily beautiful.

Starting point is 00:26:26 I don't know why, but that image of a boat being there and then not being there and being there again, kind of like a stain on the retina when you've looked at a bright light. That was what it was like to me, sort of in reverse. It came, it went, it came, it went. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. I don't know what more to say than that. But as this sense of its great beauty welled up in me and filled my heart, actually, with a great sense of love, suddenly something utterly unprecedented for me, unexpected, unknown, weird happened to me, which was that the scene I was looking at wasn't outside me and I wasn't outside it. We became one. It's a glib way to put it, actually. When I say it now, we became one, it doesn't convey what it

Starting point is 00:27:22 was really like. It was utter beauty. It was like being swallowed up by beauty and becoming home, coming home in a way that I didn't know I hadn't been home, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'll just finish the experience. It was like becoming part of the world. Instead of being an isolated entity, stalking the earth, upright on the earth, separate from it, moving through it as a sort of bubble almost, like it's got this membrane around it called skin, and that skin separates the entity from the world. Instead, it's like the skin was gone, the separation was gone,

Starting point is 00:28:10 there was just one reality, one kind of dream, one kind of movie, and that's what I was. And it was like finding I belonged to a degree that was inconceivable because i didn't just belong i was actually part of the very sort of fabric of everything that's what happened and in the midst of that i don't know if i'm going too fast too deep too weird but i'll just carry on that should be the tagline of my podcast. Please continue. Okay. Basically, in the midst of it, there was a sort of moment also where it was mind-blowing because all space had disappeared. There was no distance anywhere. It was like, I felt like my nose was pressing against the end of time

Starting point is 00:29:11 My nose was touching the furthest reaches of the universe because it was all just here was one reality without space without time it was just Utterly mind-blowing. I'm describing a moment of awakening. So How long did it last? I don't really know, but not very long, somewhere between five seconds and five minutes, I'm guessing. Then there was kind of like, knowing I was a human being on a beach again, taking a step and how extraordinary it was just to take a step, how marvelous to be able to do such a thing as sort of be a body and take a step. Everything seemed sort of new. It was just, it was like a new world. And it was so, so beautiful. My heart was

Starting point is 00:29:51 just, it felt like a flame was burning in my heart. I know it sounds a little bit like the old Exeter trouble, but actually it was a beautiful, beautiful thing. It was just a flame of love burning in my heart. I knew that I had found the answer. But I hadn't even been asking a question. I'd had no interest at all in spirituality, definitely not religion. I was very atheist or just totally atheist. I was kind of still am actually, but that's another matter. I had no interest in whatever that experience might've been. It wasn't in my worldview at all. And I think because I had

Starting point is 00:30:35 no preconceptions at all about whatever that kind of experience might've been, none at all. I was able to just go with it like a complete ingenue. I just, totally naive. I just was, what's this? Whoa, and what's this? As it sort of got deeper and weirder, I just went with it. And it was so beautiful that I sort of trusted it. And then kind of, in a sense, I was back in a known world. It was also so different because it was just so, so, so beautiful. And it was like everything was feather light and paper thin, as one of my teachers likes to say. I weighed nothing.

Starting point is 00:31:20 I was sort of see-through and the world was see-through. I mean, it existed, it would look like it normally did, but it had become weightless and so beautiful. So that was a moment of awakening. But the real moment itself was only short, but there's long, long afterglow that lasted weeks. And my heart was so alive. And I, you know, as I was sort of walking through streets of town seeing kids on the street I just wanted to help wherever I could and I felt human suffering in a new way a different way and yeah like I said I felt that I had found the answer to life which I hadn't been looking for and wasn't interested in.

Starting point is 00:32:06 But now it was like I knew I could die and my life had been fulfilled. It wouldn't matter what else happened to me. So if I could pause for a moment, I have a number of questions, and I'm going to act as a stand-in for some of the audience here with one. Yeah, please. Were you entirely sober for that experience or was it enhanced in any way stone cold sober okay i've never had anything stronger than sort of a beer virtually you have not then i hadn't okay all right i have some follow-up questions. I mean, a few years later, I dropped acid, and it was meaningless.

Starting point is 00:32:47 It was so shallow compared to what you'd experienced. It didn't come close to what I'd experienced, yeah. Interesting. All right, we'll have more follow-ups on that theme. But the next question is, in retrospect, now as someone who studies, I suppose, the phenomenon of this experience of awakening, this type of awakening, what do you think were the ingredients in that encapsulated period of time that led to that spontaneous actualization or realization of feeling as you did?

Starting point is 00:33:26 I've wondered that myself at times. I could say the most immediate probably was the fact that I was really closely studying what I was looking at and asking questions. As a writer, you mean? Yeah, but I mean, I had been doing that as a writer, exactly. But actually, in the very moment, I was staring at this phenomenon of the very bright light on the water, this boat sort of appearing and disappearing in the light. I was asking myself, I know the physics of this, basically. There's water, which is transparent. There's air, which is transparent. There's the surface where these two things are meeting.

Starting point is 00:34:09 And there's light landing on that surface. That's what's going on. Why does it look the way it looks was kind of my question. Because the surface, I noticed that it was so dazzlingly bright, but it was really composed of these bright scales that were shifting over the surface. And where a scale was, it was super bright. But when the scale slid off, it was actually super dark. So it was this mix of black and white. And I was just looking at it very closely. And I think one ingredient was scrutiny. I was really studying what I was looking at and this

Starting point is 00:34:47 was as you mentioned it was on the back of several months of considering to the best of my ability deeply what I was seeing as I've been traveling and you know also when working because it was also novel so that was another factor suspect also, this is maybe a little bit weirder, but the eczema, years of eczema, of having to somehow sit with or lie with or be with quite intense discomfort that wasn't going to go away. I suspected it had done something to my consciousness as a kind of training of some kind. I mean, it wasn't one I'd wish on anybody, and I certainly didn't appreciate it for this, but I think it probably had somehow taught me very, very unwillingly some kind of tolerance and I suspect that I could only find that tolerance when I sort of shifted gear in my mind in some way there were certain times when that was quite

Starting point is 00:35:56 vivid there were times with the eczema especially sort of lying in bed itching at night when I would really go into a different state of mind that was very alert, very present, very attentive, and blissful, and peaceful. And I'd feel like I was in a kind of cocoon, and I could have stayed there forever. Was there something you did consciously? Was there a method to achieving that state, or did it just manifest itself unexpectedly? Unfortunately, it was the latter. I wished I could. I remember wanting to learn how to make it happen and I didn't know how to make it happen. It would just randomly happen. I kind of learned how to let it prolong itself, which was, I found there was a way of being with it without holding onto it, if I could put it like that. I noticed that if I wanted it to stay, it would go away.

Starting point is 00:36:53 But I could just be with it and not wish it would stay, and it would stay. That was the only level of proficiency, so to speak, I got got with it but i couldn't make it happen just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by all form from the creators of helix sleep all form makes premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores so i'm sitting in my living room right now and it's entirely all form furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman and I have an L sectional couch. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in store sounds risky, you don't need to worry.

Starting point is 00:37:39 All form sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast free shipping and you get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it. That's more than three months, and if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also has a forever warranty that's literally forever. To find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com slash Tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com slash Tim. That's allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M dot com slash Tim. I started getting interested in this form of practice called Jhana practice. This is really getting into the weeds, so I won't take long on it.

Starting point is 00:38:16 Some people might have heard of this. Many probably won't. It's a particular form of practice from early Buddhism known as Jhana or Jhana. How do you spell that? And actually funny, J-H-A-N-A, that's the Pali, and dhyana in Sanskrit is D-H-Y-A-N-A. And actually that is the word that became chana in Chinese or chan, which then became zen in Japanese.

Starting point is 00:38:41 So zen is connected in some way to this kind of practice. But the Jhana practice is this regarded as quite esoteric and sort of tricky, difficult sort of advanced practice. The first time I got trained to do it, there's eight different states, by the way, I just went into the first one fairly easily. I couldn't believe it. It was exactly that state I'd been in as a kid. I don't know what the, I don't know how this actually all fits together, but I had been doing something in the midst of eczema that had some kind of correlation very vaguely or in a sort of abstruse connection with meditation.

Starting point is 00:39:21 I had somehow, and I don't know whether, could it be that that in some way precipitated that experience that i don't know i don't really know could it be that years of living with great discomfort and somehow having to find ways to just endure it or not and just sort of be tormented by it could that have been some kind of preparation? Or was it simply the having lived like that a long time and suddenly being well? It was sort of mind-blowing to be well. And in this moment of solitude, in the midst of the sort of mighty forces of the ocean, the sun, the sky, the sand, and alone. I remember actually before it happened, I thought I could be any man in any century because all there was, was the sea, this boat that was a kind of timeless type of boat

Starting point is 00:40:13 shape. It wasn't some modern speedboat or cruiser. I think it was just a simple boat. Could have been the year 1200 and I had a pair of shorts on. I could have been any century, any person. And perhaps in that moment, there was a bit of a loss of identity that paved the way, maybe. What happened after that in the, let's say the subsequent 12 months? What was your, was there anything notable

Starting point is 00:40:40 that happened after that? Oh my God, yeah, totally. Because about, I had a sort of blessed few weeks transfigured world after it and then i went home my parents had split up when i was young and i'd had a very sort of difficult relationship with my dad feeling very sort of abandoned and just heartbroken at his leaving then Then there was a difficult remarriage. It was a very complicated emotional domestic arrangement that we all had to live in from when I was about seven onwards.

Starting point is 00:41:16 And it had never been resolved. It had never really been spoken about. It was this awful English middle class sort of reticence to talk about feelings. And we were all seized by, possessed by. Us kids, my brother and sister and I, we were caught in this very difficult parental tangle. But somehow the absence of speaking about it

Starting point is 00:41:39 led to any sort of understanding that this was a difficult situation. Again, it's the sort of kid thing where I don't know that this isn't normal. This is the way the world is. I've got to learn to live with it. It's me that's at fault if I don't like it kind of thing that I think many children, I assume, would feel that way. So I have had this awakening. I'm wide open. My heart is just so full of love and of wonder.

Starting point is 00:42:10 And I come home and I walk through the door of my dad's house. Within half an hour, I had a kind of breakdown. I felt overwhelmed by the unhappiness of my childhood in a way that I'd never actually felt it during my childhood. I'd had defenses against it. And when I came home, I had no defenses. I was wide open. All the unhappiness that I'd actually experienced during it just kind of tumbled on top of me. And I kind of collapsed. I went into a very sort of closed down and miserable state of mind, actually for several years. I kind of got through it. I

Starting point is 00:42:52 somehow sort of limped along very unhappily with the help of alcohol and not very good hash. Not even good hash. Junior varsity hash on top of it all. Books and rain and bad hash. Yeah, exactly. And some good friends. I mean, although even my friendships have been sort of, I mean, they're very good friends, but somehow I was so broken that I couldn't even really connect with my old friends. It was a miserable time. It was transcendental meditation that helped me out of all of it. I'm not sure connoisseur of depressive episodes and anxiety and so forth. But let me ask you on that topic, how often would you say do what you would consider awakenings overlap with what others might call a psychotic episode? Or are they easily distinguished?

Starting point is 00:44:09 Or would a psychiatrist with a DSM desk reference categorize it as a psychotic episode? And part of the reason I ask is that I've seen people in multiple practices, sometimes breathwork, could be kundalini, could be any number of things, extended silent retreats, extended fasts. I've seen people have what some or what they might consider breakthroughs. I've observed people, certainly you see this with psychedelics as well, who have had what many would consider breakdowns and have become untethered for some period of time. How do you think about distinguishing those, if you do? First of all, I'm not well-versed in kundalini. And I know that there are powerful experiences that happen in that. I've seen somebody go through something like that during a retreat I was part of, and it was much more about energy and not so much about discovery.

Starting point is 00:45:12 I would want to be quite careful in our taxonomy and not just put them all under one heading, awakening experiences. There are different kinds of breakthrough experiences. Actually, there are different kinds of awakening experiences. Actually, there are different kinds of awakening experiences, even within Zen. But fundamentally, I don't think they overlap. The way that it could be highly problematic, and even, in a sense, could get muddled up with psychosis, is really more if the context isn't a very supportive one. But the fundamental thing discovered in real awakening is that we're part of everything.

Starting point is 00:45:51 And that's a blessed, most blessed thing to discover. And yeah, it can be very destabilizing. For me, it wasn't destabilizing. What happened was I went home and had to face the trauma I'd never faced. Right. Because I was now open enough to. In the hands, if I'd had a great therapist at the time,

Starting point is 00:46:12 it would have been a golden opportunity because I was open at last. My defenses were gone. I don't actually think that the misery that followed was because of the awakening. I think it was because I had all this unprocessed misery that I had never known how to let myself feel. And suddenly, in that context, I had no choice but to feel it. And actually, in a way, it took years, but I've come to see that that experience of the breakdown, so to speak, was as important in its way as the awakening. Because my whole thing now is a path of awakening and healing, both. And I think one

Starting point is 00:46:57 of the hazards of modern Western embrace of Eastern spirituality, which has been fantastic, I mean, how amazing that we're even sitting here having a conversation about something called awakening, and we kind of have enough common ground to have a sense of what that might be, that it's in the zeitgeist now. You're giving me a lot of credit. But please continue. One of the hazards have been this sort of over-enthusiasm about enlightenment and awakening that can leave behind the healing side that has to go on as well. And on the other hand, we've had all this deep Freudian therapy and all kinds of therapy now. It's fantastic that we do. But it doesn't really know about awakening and often is very suspicious of it.

Starting point is 00:47:41 Things that Freud thought it was sort of oceanic and infantile regression. Many therapists, when they write about enlightenment and awakening, they try to bring it into their worldview and it doesn't fit in their worldview because it's a totally different register of experience. So my whole thing now is like, let's get clear. There are these different dimensions of experience that human beings can go through. And they're not all on the same sort of level. They're all in our heart. They're all sort of what we're capable of, what we can experience. They sort of shouldn't tread on each other's toes.

Starting point is 00:48:14 It's kind of how I feel about it. Now, for example, deep, profound, non-dual awakening is a fantastic thing. Somatic release of trauma through deep somatic therapy that's a fantastic thing working with i don't know too much about it i've done actually we can get onto it i've done ayahuasca which was you know so i've got a little bit of a sense of plant medicine for healing that's fantastic and there's different levels of experience there's different levels of healing i would say awakening is a kind of most profound healing, but it's not on the same level as the trauma that I needed to heal

Starting point is 00:48:50 from my childhood. It was a more universal kind of discovery of what a human being is, any human being, what human consciousness, what human awareness is. It was a discovery about that, about what this life is, that it's not really on the same level as the psychological healing I also needed. It happened to open that up, and it took me a few years to find ways to do the healing or begin the long healing that was needed on that level. But on the level level of awakening i was still somehow fully healed in the awakening experience this is one of the weird things about it is that god i'm still worried that i'm going off the deep well let me let me yeah well deep end we're just

Starting point is 00:49:39 getting warmed up we're still in the kiddie pool we We're going to go to some very strange places. So before we do, I want to mention a few things and to maybe provide a bit of a teaser for folks also. So there are certain terms that I still have an aversion to, rightly or wrongly, like enlightenment. Awakening I can get on board with for a number of reasons. So we won't dwell on that right now, but I do find it could be helpful to add a bit of color in a few areas for folks who are listening. And hopefully I'm not stealing thunder here. I just want to mention a few things.

Starting point is 00:50:17 And then if I could ask one very crass question, which is a total non sequitur, but I have to ask because I'm too curious and I have to scratch that itch. So the first thing I want to mention to folks is that, and we can certainly talk more about this, but part of the reason that your teaching and lineage appeals to me, and I've spoken to Kevin about this, is because awakening does not equal checking out, right? You're not requiring that people join a monastic order of ascetics and give up all engagement with the world.

Starting point is 00:50:54 And we'll probably come back to this, but one of your, if not your primary teacher, we can talk about this, but Yamada Roshi is CEO of a company of 2000 employees, wrote the biggest check in its history, or maybe we can get more context there, while leading Mitsubishi Securities. And so for people who don't know, Mitsubishi is like one of the, like one of the gigantic monster conglomerates in Japan. It's hard to overstate how big a deal that is. He also continues his own Zen training

Starting point is 00:51:22 and trains around 75 Zen teachers worldwide, right? So you can be of this world while still developing these tools or utilizing these tools in the toolkit. So I just wanted to underscore that just so it doesn't seem as though we're kind of frolicking in a bath of esoteric sciences that don't apply to people who still want to engage with the world. I also want to paint a picture because there's no way we're going to get to it all, but I want to paint a picture of your bizarre and incredible life story. I just want to give a couple of samples. So as a young man, you worked as a professional trombonist playing in Calypso and salsa bands all over the place, hitchhiked across the sahara as a young man and i don't think we're going to get to the egyptian doctor i wanted to ask you about that

Starting point is 00:52:11 but might not have time this is the part where i have a crass question it might be because i don't speak the queen's english but you roam the countryside as young teens sleeping out and were mentored by an old school tramp that That is the term I'm very interested in, trying to live like an ancient Chinese chant poet. There are a lot of loose ends here, but I found old school tramp to be very intriguing. Could you just explain that portion of everything I just threw out there, please? Oh my God. Well, the term tramp in the uk it used to refer to these guys who just wandered the highways and byways ah okay got it it wasn't okay not out of work geisha okay got it yeah exactly these days they talk about the tramp stamp i don't know if you know it's a tattoo you

Starting point is 00:53:01 know do you know that term i i'm familiar with tramp step i i don't know if you know, it's a tattoo, you know? Do you know that term? I'm familiar with tramp step. I don't know much about enlightenment, but I do know the term tramp step. Shows you where we're going to have to meet in the middle. So yeah, I had this friend. I mean, he would come to our valley every summer and put up in this ruined mill. And he kind of mentored me and a couple of friends of mine how to live on the land when we were 14, 15. And we got into that. We were would-be young poets, and we knew these Chinese poets. We were into them.

Starting point is 00:53:37 They were 7th, 8th century Wu Wei, Du Fu, Li Po, great, great poets who did a lot of wandering. At least we got that impression. They would wander around the gorges and write poems and drink rice wine. And they were actually a great inspiration for the Beats as well. You know, Kerouac and Ginsberg and so on. Gary Snyder. They got into these poets.

Starting point is 00:54:00 They got into Zen. Because those poets used to do Zen as well. They would meditate. They would go to monasteries, go to hermitages salinger alan ginsburg right right salinger used a koan in one of his books as an epigraph let me zoom out for a minute and i want to hear the story of how you got to zen and you you noted, for instance, that at one point TM was all the rage, the sort of hippest game in town, life tool for busy people. And they had a great sort of celebrity outreach program, right? They had the Beatles. Even today, of course, they've got, Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, they have many, many celebrities engaged who practice TM.

Starting point is 00:54:46 And there was a period of time where that was all the rage. And then you have sort of this Yogananda period, right? Steve Jobs, et cetera. Was Zen just sort of the zeitgeist for a period of time? And you became engaged while it was sort of in the slipstream of the zeitgeist? So I'd like to hear that story. And in the process of telling that story, I would love for you to best you can define what characterizes the practice of Zen Buddhism, because I have found it very confusing. And part of me thinks that's kind of

Starting point is 00:55:20 the point. And I'll give you an example. I was at a retreat at Spirit Rock in Northern California. This is many years ago. And I heard a story from one of the teachers, and she described how she was having a lot of trouble figuring out certain aspects of Zen Buddhism. And at one point, she was having breakfast with her teacher, and they were eating in silence. And then suddenly he shouted, you know, it's not logical, okay? And that was, it was a teaching moment for her, and she took a lot from that. And when I sort of think of koans and these various things, it seems like almost the point is to bludgeon your rational mind into submissions so that you can experience reality past the constructs of concepts and labels and so on.

Starting point is 00:56:05 But that's my best guess. Honestly, I don't know what Zen Buddhism or Zen practice is. So that is a huge mouthful. I just kind of foie gras-ed a lot of word salad into the microphone. But the story of how you found Zen and then what, in fact, Zen is would be very helpful. The story of how I found Zen is I was doing another book that my publisher that commissioned me to write. It was about New Mexico.

Starting point is 00:56:31 It was about the English writer D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico. And I was 28 at the time. And while I was out here, I made friends with a dear friend of mine, Natalie Goldberg, who's a writer who writes as a zen-based writer writing down the bones is that right exactly it's a great book yeah great book yeah yeah and natalie and i we hit it off actually she rented me a room in her house in santa fe and it was great entree to living out here that she offered me but along along the way, one evening, she was reading me a bit of this great, famous Zen writer, teacher, poet, Dogen, from 13th century Japan. She was reading a bit of Dogen.

Starting point is 00:57:13 I didn't understand a word of it. It was just kind of weird nonsense about mountains walking. I just sort of didn't even want to think about it. I couldn't understand it, wasn't interested. Conversation moved on, and I found myself thinking about it. And the next day, I was still thinking about it. And the day after, I was still thinking about it. And then I remember vividly, I was washing a mug up at the sink in her kitchen, and I suddenly got this thought. Maybe Dogen was speaking from what I had experienced on that beach years ago, nine years earlier. I've got to say, ever since that beach moment had happened, one of the things that made me so miserable, one of the ways I made myself very miserable was by thinking, but oh my God, I discovered this freedom, this beauty, this wonder, this love,

Starting point is 00:58:03 this total fulfillment. And look at me now, depressed and miserable and anxious. And eczema has come back, actually, by the way. And why haven't I managed to keep hold of that incredible discovery? Why haven't I managed to live from it? Why haven't I taken a step to sort of somehow revisiting it, whatever the hell it had been? And so by this point, I'd been doing my TM for four or five years, absolutely religiously, every day, twice a day. You know, it was my lifeline and it had really been helping.

Starting point is 00:58:35 It hadn't really occurred to me that the meditation thing I was doing with them could have anything to do with that moment on the beach. It just hadn't occurred to me. But suddenly I hear this bit of Dogen that makes no sense. Somehow it came to me from the perspective of that moment. It would make sense. I can't exactly explain how I knew it.

Starting point is 00:58:56 I just knew it. And I said to Natalie, what's this Zen all about? You know, I want to know more. And she said, well, you don't really know about zen you just do it and i said well i want well i want to do it there and then she phoned up a friend of hers who was a zen practitioner in town and and the next day i went and met with him and he taught me how to do zazen or zen meditation which was beautifully simple. We sat in this beautiful little Zendo.

Starting point is 00:59:28 They're still here in Santa Fe, actually. Beautiful little Zendo, sitting on a black cushion, on a black mat, facing the wall, and all you do is breathe. Maybe in a way that's part of the challenge. There's not a lot to it. With TM, you had this mantra that you you use and it's sort of it's a lifeline through the practice and you kind of know you got some sense that this mantra is doing you some good kind of thing but with zen you just sit

Starting point is 00:59:56 there in a posture that is a little bit more prescribed and sort of set up, but actually it's very, the posture's got a beautiful, intrinsic, peaceful liveliness in it that I felt the first time this guy set me up in it. I feel, huh, this feels weirdly good. Somehow an aliveness, a different quality of awareness just switched on. And I felt like I was right in that room in a more vivid way than normal. And then all I had to do was watch the breath and count it in sets of 10. So simple. And it's not like I had some marvelous enlightenment experience right then, but I did have a sense in that first sit that this was a way of contacting life. This was a way of being alive that brought you in intimate contact with being alive.

Starting point is 01:01:09 And that wasn't something I'd ever felt in TM. I'd felt many other marvelous things. But not this is a sort of, if you want to know what life is, this can help you. That was the feeling I got from Zen. Can you remind me of how long that first session was? It wasn't long. It might have been 15 or 20 minutes. I can't remember. But it was enough. What characterized it that led you to feel the way you did about it? Why did you feel that way? I think there may be something in the posture. I think

Starting point is 01:01:46 there may have been something in the way this guy taught it to me. He was a very experienced practitioner. It could be, honestly, the fact that I'd done four years or five years of meditation by then, so I was more open and ripe for another practice than I might otherwise have been. I think there was probably something of a setup from what had happened with this piece of Dogen that I'd been fascinated by, because that had reawakened my curiosity about the beach, that beach experience. What the hell happened there? Might this be a way to revisit that? Might there even be a way not just to revisit it, but to go through it and beyond it? Might there be a land, a world, a life beyond that experience? So it wasn't just the flash in the pan and it sort of closes and you're done with it and you have to limp along in your ordinary life. May I just pivot to the Koan question? Because

Starting point is 01:02:48 actually it was a little bit later that I found my first Zen teacher that I really connected with. Yes, please. I have a lot of questions about Koans. So please segue as you like. I'll start out and we'll see where I get to. And I'm dying to hear your questions because basically you're on track a bit with the way you describe them, but I can elaborate maybe a little bit more. So I got lucky. I did my first Zen retreat sometime,

Starting point is 01:03:13 a couple of years, I think, after that. I'd been sitting diligently daily in my Zen and I'd done some weekend retreats and introduction to Zen and stuff by then. And then I did a week-long retreat led by a Korean Zen master. He himself was a Westerner, but it was a Korean lineage, and he'd been trained in.

Starting point is 01:03:31 He was a deep guy, and he was sort of throwing out koans through the retreat. And actually, I was sitting with one of them. It was just the basic question, who am I? Who am I? Which is a fundamental koan. I had a glimpse of what it was pointing at. I was very lucky. I got a glimpse of how a koan can work then. It's like this. So if you take,

Starting point is 01:03:54 let's say you take the most famous koan that probably, I would guess, even him, probably most people have heard. By the way, here's the correct wording. You know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand? That's the formulation. You could say it like this. You know the sound of two hands clapping, but do you know the sound of one hand? That's more or less what the koan is trying to push us to say what the hell does this mean you know the sound of one hand it's a preposterous question i get people they try to snap their fingers they want this is one hand you know no no no no no so so the first thing to say about coins is they are not riddles to be solved and our mind wants to make them that it wants to problem solve them this damn thing makes no sense i'm going to make them that. It wants to problem-solve them.

Starting point is 01:04:47 This damn thing makes no sense. I'm going to make it make sense. There must be a way in which it makes sense. Good luck. I might say something like this. There is a way in which they make sense, but your mind will never know it. But part of you will. There's part of us that the koan is speaking from and speaking to,

Starting point is 01:05:08 and it's basically a non-dual level of experience. Non-dual is where the sense of being separate from the world has gone. Self and world are one. There are flavors and varieties, but fundamentally, it means that the duality of me being in here and the world being out there has gone. So koans are actually emissaries of whatever that was that I discovered on that beach when I was 19 years old, and thousands of millions of people have discovered. What's beautiful about koans is that they know that that experience is here all the time. They know it's precious beyond belief. They know that it is somehow, in some way, what we humans are built to discover. It's a thing that can transform our life in an utterly wonderful way because they show us something about who we are

Starting point is 01:06:15 that we couldn't imagine. And it's so crazy. We're going around living our lives the way we do, all predicated on this basic assumption, which is that I am me in here. And we don't really question it. We're too busy living out the dictates that flow from the assumption that I am what I think I am in here. To study this radical thought, well, hold on. If I'm going to build my life on this assumption that there is this me in here and it wants these things and it doesn't want those things and my happiness depends on having X and not having Y, if I'm going to build my life on that presupposition, shouldn't I at least take a look at the initial assumption? It's really, I think it's equivalent to Galileo and Copernicus going from a geocentric

Starting point is 01:07:08 worldview where we're totally convinced the world's flat, the sun, moon go round us, to, well, actually, wait a minute, maybe not. Lo and behold, we go round the sun. I think we're in the midst of a transformation. Actually, I'm going to be careful what I say. This is really, this is going off the deep end. But perhaps, perhaps in this globalized Western culture where there's so much more interest in awakening these days than 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 60 years ago, it was really niche 50 years ago. Now it's people are hearing about it.

Starting point is 01:07:43 There is a reality that we can find about who we really are. And there's a lot of neuroscience now backing it up. What we think we are is a construction. And actually the way we think the world is, is also a construction that follows from that. You mentioned ayahuasca earlier. We're not going to go there yet. I would like to hear more about that at some point. But when I think of your experience at 19 on the beach, that distinguishes you from a lot of people in the sense that you had this spontaneous experience of non-duality. So you knew it was a possibility going into your Zen training, going into these various practices. And I'm wondering if or how common it is for people

Starting point is 01:08:36 to get an appetizer or a taste of these non-ordinary states, although I know that label is not perfect, but let's just for the time being call it a non-ordinary state. Is it common that people have that experience relatively quickly in their practice? Because I could see it being very difficult for someone who has not had the firsthand experience that you had on the beach or something like it to dedicate years with the hope that there is some payoff that they have never tasted or had a glimpse of. And conversely, and I'm not saying that I recommend psychedelics for all people. I don't. I think they are very powerful tools that have some applications for some people, but where they do perhaps represent an unusual tool in the toolkit is that with rare exception,

Starting point is 01:09:27 you are guaranteed to see an effect, if that makes any sense. At sufficient dose with the proper plant or compound, if you want to induce the realization that you are not exactly what you believe yourself to be, or at the very least that there are invisible scripts and stories and filters that assemble your current reality, that's a very reliable way to induce that type of realization. So to summarize, is it common that people get some taste of what you are describing relatively early in their practice?

Starting point is 01:10:07 Or is it something they have to kind of cross their fingers and hope for long down the road? Honestly, it's a bit of both. And here's a couple of ways to think about it. One is that, yeah, if you add a koan into the mix, once somebody's really committed and settled in their daily sitting, it can be a powerful stimulant, powerful fertilizer. Koans are weird. They can actually trigger profound experiences. Who knows when? They really can. So that's on the one side on the other hand it's unreliable

Starting point is 01:10:47 and it's certainly not reliable the way that i think safely administered plant medicine may be but here's the thing two things actually one is that what zen is teaching us about is ordinary consciousness. Right. Yeah. This is why I knew my term non-ordinary consciousness. It's a tricky one. So please, yeah, it's not imperfect phrasing, but please continue. I mean, the wonder of this is that the most profound things

Starting point is 01:11:22 we can discover through awakening are here right now. And the process of training with koans is to go, like what I experienced on the beach, that was a beginning experience. Far deeper things happened to me working with koans. That was a gateway that got me onto a path. It took me a long time to find the path and a long time to go down the path. But man, it was a beginning. The things you can discover through these koans that these masters have discovered, and they're sharing with us through the koans, hoping that we'll join them in what they've discovered. It's even more radical and crazy. But the point is, is here right now, we're making discoveries about our ordinary

Starting point is 01:12:03 experience. And this is the wondrous thing about it, that you don't have to have some totally different life. Again, my master, Yamada Roshi, it's not like he has to rein in his Zen mind when he's in a board meeting. There's no need. The boundless reality is right there at the board table, able to do everything the board chair needs to do. That is the wonder. So when, whoever this, I think it was Laman Pang, the old master said, my miracle is that I chop wood and draw water, or whatever it was, I draw water and carry wood, I can't remember. That's my miracle. He means that pouring out the kettle for a cup of tea, if we're awake to the boundless wonder, that's a miracle. It's not like it's a miracle in a way that

Starting point is 01:12:55 we'll have to sort of swoon and put the cup down in case we drop it. No, we just behave normally. We can have a normal conversation. i don't know if everybody would consider this a normal conversation because i'm saying such weird shit but but kind of a normal conversation we're having it i'm you know i'm sitting here and i know this boundless infinite nothing and everything whatever they're so full of love is right here, right now. It's clear. And it doesn't mean like, now I've got to do something, so I've got to switch off the wonder, the boundless love. It's not like that. That's where koans can take us. I'm sure way further as well. I'm a beginner. But on the other hand, what about the people who, they want this, they believe in it,

Starting point is 01:13:42 and they sit with it and nothing happens. They're with their coin well see i think personally what i'm now trying to teach people is deep in the zen tradition there's a there's a metaphor goes way back to fifth or sixth century china of a cart track having two ruts and the idea is that one rut is awakened nature itself that's always here and awakened nature by the way is everything's one everything's infinite and everything's empty those are the three main things we can discover about it through personal experience that's awakened reality but the other rut is they call it the four foundations of mindfulness, which comes from early Buddhism in India. And the four foundations of mindfulness are a gradual path of learning to be more present, learning to sit with difficulty, learning to sit with our wounds and pains, and gradually release them and we may need help with that and you might bring in therapy you might bring in pharmaceuticals you might bring in plant medicine or whatever you might bring in all kinds of stuff to help with that that's the beginnings of this is the beginnings of

Starting point is 01:14:54 psychological health and well-being really gradually how practice can help with that so there's two ruts for one track one rut awakening, and we could put the koans on that side. The other rut is the gradual path of sort of healing, and that takes us to deeper and deeper states of absorption. We start to get more well-being with less. It's generally a path of growth whereby we can be happier with less and less and less until in deep states of absorption, which is growing out of the mindfulness, we're basically happy with basically nothing extra. We're completely fulfilled just sitting and breathing. I've read you describe awakening as, quote, more of a loss than a gain,

Starting point is 01:15:55 a marvelous kind of loss, end quote. And then there's also a set of expressions here that maybe you could explain. Muichi motsu, mu juzo. I don't know if they're long vowels or not in Japanese for the mu juzo. I think I can guess what the first three characters are, but I can't guess what the last two are. So by more of a loss than again, a marvelous kind of loss, what does that mean? Okay, so in my book, actually, I go into this sort of various experiences that befell me on the Koan path one of which was it was basically it's hard to talk about it it's so amazing but it's sort of the loss of everything that somehow seeing that everything has been a dream and when we see that everything can actually fall away, self and world fall away, is the way Dogen described it.

Starting point is 01:16:47 He said, body and mind fall away. And various Zen masters have spoken about this, this experience where everything's just gone. And instead of it being a horrific, ghastly void. It's the opposite. Because everything is coming from that emptiness, that gone-ness. It's generating everything. If we fall away sufficiently,

Starting point is 01:17:20 I don't think I've had the great profound experiences or anything. I've just had experiences that were profound enough for me that changed my life. And this was the pivotal one. It happened at a certain point, a certain time, during a retreat, everything disappeared. And I then discovered, and henceforth, it hasn't gone away, really. I can see everything's being born right now it's coming out of nothing and that is the ultimate wonder so that's very interesting there was durability to that there's kind of a before and after yes with respect to that experience

Starting point is 01:17:58 that's very interesting and i never believed that could happen to me i was such a troubled soul that i'd done all this practice. I'd even had several kind of, you know, mind-blowing awakenings and still I was a troubled soul. I didn't think, I mean, I suppose I still am a bit of a troubled soul, but I'm a happy one. It's weird. I never thought that I would be, I could see my teachers,

Starting point is 01:18:21 these amazing patient teachers who are guiding me. I could see these people, they've sort of done it. Whatever it is that can be done, they're the kind of person that could do it. Not me, no way. And then it just happened. This thing just happened. And it was a fulcrum in a lifetime. And I believe that all of us can go through this.

Starting point is 01:18:44 That's why I'm a teacher, because I want to share this. But here's the thing. I don't think we should sit around in misery waiting for this kind of thing to happen. So this two-rut track idea is really important to me, actually. And I've got this new program called Original Love. The Zen awakening is often called seeing original nature. And original nature is what I was saying. It's one and it's boundless and it's empty. That's the original nature. What it's like when we find it is it's like love.

Starting point is 01:19:18 It's like love to find that we're part of everything. It's like love to find that there's nothing no thing is producing everything generating everything infinite generosity that's like love so in this original love program i've got we got there's awakening is in it but so is mindfulness so is support deep kinds of support that we can open to that are so crucial i've done a lot of dream work archetypal kind of work where figures come and help us and challenge us and i think that's really vital for our growth and and then the third zone in it is sort of it's got four zones actually like mindfulness support deep support third zone is absorption becoming one with this moment through

Starting point is 01:20:04 flow states absorption states samadhi as they call it and then the fourth zone is absorption becoming one with this moment through flow states absorption states samadhi as they call it and then the fourth zone is awakening so it's not like it's awakening or bust you know that's a that's a wrong mindset that shouldn't be the title of this podcast episode please well you can see you got got it. Awakening or bust, not. Not. Like Barat could have some soundbites spliced in. There was a term that I mentioned that if you can translate it, I would love to hear what it is,

Starting point is 01:20:39 just with my fascination with Japan and having lived there for some time. So, mu ichi motsu, mu juzo. In what context is that used? What does it mean? my fascination with japan and having lived there for some time so muichi mozu mu juzo in what context is that used and what does it mean by the way you got a very nice accent thank you thank you yeah i don't actually speak japanese to my shame it's not the easiest it's time consuming yeah i've been you know quite a number of times and spent most of the time staring at the wall in my master's zendo you know not the most uh effective way to learn japanese just like my friend who spent a lot of time in peru he spent tons of time in peru doing dietas and working with ayahuasca and so on

Starting point is 01:21:16 and i i asked him i said you spent nine months in peru why is your spanish so terrible and he said i was in the forest trying to talk to plants the whole time. And I was like, yeah, all right, that'll explain it. So yeah, you were staring at a wall. Vomiting into a bucket. Yeah, right. Makes it hard to pronounce things correctly. Yeah, so Mu Ichimatsu, Mu Jozo,

Starting point is 01:21:38 one of my teachers, Ruben Abito Roshi, is a guy from the Philippines who's also in the same lineage, who teaches in Dallas, and he's also a professor at SMU in Dallas. He actually used this phrase with me once when I was in Dokusan going through koans with him. It means… What is Dokusan?

Starting point is 01:22:01 Dokusan, yeah, thanks for asking. It's a one-on-one meeting between a Zen student and a Zen teacher. And actually, when you're working seriously with the koans, if you're getting into koan training, you can work with them in different ways because they can provide a really helpful frame when you're sitting, just to have a koan in the background. It'll change your sitting. But if you're going seriously through a koan training,

Starting point is 01:22:24 at least in our lineage there's a way to do that with a teacher so you meet with a teacher and you you know you work on a koan and i won't go into too much detail but anyway we were meeting ruben and i that style and at some point he said yeah yeah mu ichimatsu mujozo which means not a single thing, an inexhaustible treasury. In other words, what I was trying to describe, this experience of everything disappearing isn't a horror, quite the reverse. It's an inexhaustible treasury everything is being given

Starting point is 01:23:10 by nothing i don't want to get too abstract because the point of it sounds so abstract until you experience it when you experience it it's, it changes your life irrevocably. It can't not. Yeah. There are certain things that require experience, and words do a very poor job of encapsulating or conveying, right? I mean, it's like if someone's never orgasmed, and you're trying to explain it to a male, and you're like,

Starting point is 01:23:42 yeah, it's kind of like a sneeze in your balls, and he's like, what? You know, it's just, you kind of have to be there first and then the descriptions make sense so muichi motu mu is just for people who are curious i'd actually love help from any native japanese speakers on the mujuzo the muichi motu i'm pretty sure is yeah mu like mushin like no heart no mind yeah yeah mu is a very common character in discussing Zen Buddhism. Ichi is like ichi, ni, sang, one. And then motsu is thing, right? Or carry. It's also can be used as a transitive verb.

Starting point is 01:24:14 But then mu, the same mu. And then juzo, somebody who's a native speaker could let me know. I couldn't find this when I Googled it. Maybe muju. Ju is like maybe the jubung bung enough like but mu is the same mu ju zo is like treasury treasure i'm pretty sure although sam bo zen also has the bowl like the three treasures that's right that's right so i'm taking it down a rabbit hole yeah i'm afraid

Starting point is 01:24:39 it might be a typo actually oh i'm thinking now oh there we go yeah maybe it should be mu joe so oh inexhaustible uh okay yeah yeah that'll make that'll make it a lot easier okay sorry my bad no not only my bad japanese and my bad typing you know no problem uh yeah okay that that would make that would make more sense i was like god i wonder how to actually translate that i was trying to figure that out yeah damn i'm sorry i'm sorry no no no you're good you're good yeah like impermanence is like everyday conversation would be like 日周, like ordinary. 日で, 日周会話 would be like everyday conversation. Pretty sure it's the same 周.

Starting point is 01:25:32 Yeah, 無周. Okay, got it. So yes, 無周. Does that work? Yeah? Roger that. I think I got it. Okay.

Starting point is 01:25:39 Okay, cool. I was interrupting to sort of white-knuckle this kanji translation. I think you were rescuing me from going over yet another precipice of nonsense. That would also be a good title for the podcast, Over the Precipice of Nonsense. I don't know, it sounds like maybe a great description of koans, actually. Well, yeah but but as long as we know that you're going to this vast liberation you know yeah this one that that's

Starting point is 01:26:11 the thing is that they're pointing at us that's the thing that's so hard to get when you think of one hand sound of one hand what the hell is that talking about the only answer is found in us sometimes i've explained it like this that i don't know whether you've heard this, but there's a sort of notion in fiction writing and storytelling that if you want to know who the main character of a story is, it's the one who changes, or it's the one who has an opportunity to change and either takes it or doesn't take it. That's the main character. So I've sometimes tried to explain

Starting point is 01:26:45 koans this way. A koan is a story. It doesn't look like it, doesn't sound like it, but it is in fact a story. And the main character in the story is you. So a koan is inviting you to change in a radical way. You don't even know it's asking you to do, and even if you did, you wouldn't know how to do that change. Because it's asking us, you see, the sound of one hand only becomes clear when our self, our sense of self drops away. And then suddenly we find it. And I can't explain how or why, but I know that it works. And I can sort of tell you that when it does its magic, it's marvelous. You understand why this phrase is put that way. You see it and you see that it's been telling you something about your very life that you hadn't

Starting point is 01:27:44 been able to see before. And that's why, you know, I was so thrilled when I found Coen's because at last it was actually a system that knew about what I'd been through on that beach and could lead me through beyond it. So I think our round two will include a condensed, I think masterclass might be too ambitious, but a detailed discussion of the system, the systematization of using koans, getting into checking questions, whether partial realization is possible or not,

Starting point is 01:28:19 and so on and so forth. So I think we'll do a very deep double click on that when we speak again. I'd like to ask you very deep double click on that when we speak again. I'd like to ask you, when you reflect on your experience or remember your experiences of, let's call it awakening, using koans, and this is going to be another one of my notoriously convoluted compound questions, but how similar or dissimilar are those experiences from, say, your experience on ayahuasca? Because it is possible with a tool like ayahuasca to arrive

Starting point is 01:28:53 at places where you feel liberated from the constraints, the tight shoes of the rational mind. You absolutely can arrive in those places, including feeling at times the sort of beauty and infinite potential of the emptiness that you can access. The two questions are, how similar or dissimilar? How would you describe the similarities differences and then why did you decide to consume ayahuasca and you can tackle those in either direction maybe i'll take the second first consistent with this sort of philosophy of the two ruts there's that even though we may have had awakening may even we've become even perhaps somewhat consistently access that awakening world, we can do it. Nevertheless, we're still a fallible, vulnerable, ailing, aging, mortal, suffering human being. What awakening shows us is that the suffering human being is themselves

Starting point is 01:30:01 part of the infinite wonder. But nevertheless, you've still got the suffering being the needs tending. So I was, this was long ago actually, I was, I guess I was in my mid-30s, I was in my Zen training. I was very unhappy. I'd been working on a book, a novel actually, funnily enough set in Peru that was sort of revisiting you know that my early trip when i was 19 and i'd written i thought a really promising start to it and then i got totally stuck and i just couldn't figure out how to keep going it's real you know severe writer's block and i

Starting point is 01:30:38 was quite depressed i was teaching down at a college in the south of new mexico and there's really not not happy and for various reasons and i was going out to breakfast with a couple of friends one morning and i just ordered huevos rancheros and this friend of mine called me who lived in santa fe and basically said henry you gotta come and do this thing this evening i did this trip with this peruvian shaman like a couple of days ago ayahuasca i became a panther it's the most amazing thing you gotta come and do it but you gotta fast and he's doing another one tonight and i was literally sort of my huevos arrived and i was cutting the

Starting point is 01:31:16 first bite out hearing his voice on the phone and this feeling came on i don't know if you're familiar with like oh fuck i gotta do fuck, I got to do this. I know I got to do this. I want to eat these eggs, but actually I want to do this thing more. It's more important, even though I don't really want to do it. That night, that evening. That night. So I did not eat my eggs.

Starting point is 01:31:41 I left my eggs and i went up in a state of you know the depressive sort of dragging himself up and i went to the studio where it was held and it was a proven shaman and drink the vile tea the weirdness comes on and i had a hellish time basically hell punctuated by moments of extraordinary peace. I shot up into this upper atmosphere and realized I was an asteroid. I had weird shit happen. And I vomited a ton and it was scary and it was overwhelming.

Starting point is 01:32:22 And when it was kind of over, I thought, well, thank God that's over over I'm never doing that again but actually the next day I felt like I was sort of a teenager again it felt like a whole layer of swaddling of something some kind of being taken away from me and I was alive in a in a younger fresher way it was it was. And the book I'd been working on, just kind of in my mind, it was like looking at a map that opened out in front of me, that sort of unfolded in front of me. The whole map of the book was right there. And I carried on working on it. And it actually ended up happening and doing rather well, that book. And that was my first taste of ayahuasca. Later, after years of Zen training and really being in a very different place,

Starting point is 01:33:13 I just had this friend who was trained in the Peruvian style. And I was just curious to try it again. And I did three ayahuasca ceremonies like on once a month for three months and it was totally different I didn't have a very powerful time and but it was kind of nice but I I really just basically I didn't need it to the same extent I had done before I didn't have a lot to purge I was quite mellow I I actually helped because I was in a totally different state. How did you help? Were you rinsing out buckets, holding people's ponytails? What was, in what fashion?

Starting point is 01:33:52 A little bit of that, but actually also I sort of at a certain point, in that tradition they talked about grandmother. You know, the plant is grandmother, and you've got to let grandmother come in and do the work she needs to do. So I was doing that in all those three times. I was just totally surrendered and grandmother didn't seem it's just some crazy idea that came up in the midst of the trip but i had a feeling that there was one person there who did sort of i don't know why i'm even bringing this up it was just i'm just trying to say i was in a totally different space when i did it and so so okay so now but going to the the more important matter you're bringing no no no no no i'm not gonna let that go so easily. So you did end up purging then, in this case.

Starting point is 01:34:46 Actually, I think I did once for what I felt was somebody else. For what it's worth, that experience, and to be clear, I'm not claiming that this can be proven. I'm not claiming that mechanism is understood if it is real. I'm not saying it isn't just a fabrication of the mind, but the subjective experience of purging for someone else or having someone else purge for you is quite common. Is that right? Yes.

Starting point is 01:35:17 Really? So it's not surprising to me to hear that. Oh, wow. That's nice to have that affirmed, actually. Yeah, for what that's worth but look now to the matter of deep kinds of experience regularly scheduled programming like like awakening on ayahuasca normal programming right yeah so here's my take on it which of course is based on my experience. I have known, I mean, a number of Zen students I've known who have used plant medicine and

Starting point is 01:35:52 found it profoundly helpful. Here and there, they've reported to me an experience within a plant ceremony that sounds like a Zen awakening, what I was saying, seeing the original nature. I don't think that that's commonly what people experience in the way Zen defines it, all the way through a psychedelic experience. I really don't believe that. But I think there are moments within a psychedelic experience for some people that sometimes that are like that now but here's the thing though is how i'm just now thinking one student had a really strong experience of you know it's called the japanese is ken show

Starting point is 01:36:40 for seeing original nature had a really quite a strong one, actually using another form of DMT. But there's something about having it with a completely clear, ordinary mind versus having it when you know there's a powerful psychotropic compound in your bloodstream that will wear off. There's something about it that is just, I've seen that the impact is different. I'm not saying I know that it always would be, but that when somebody is stone cold sober and this happens, it's so undeniable that you've really seen something real. And it's not induced by anything. I'm convinced that, you know,

Starting point is 01:37:37 this moment right now has sort of different levels to it, different levels of experience right here and now. And in these moments of awakening that's what we're dropping into and it can go all the way down to nothing and the love that's there it's right here now but if you're i mean i would i'd like to hear your take on this i think you've probably had a lot more psychedelic experience than i have i I'm sure. And I'm really so thrilled that psychedelic research is in full swing again. I think it's absolutely, I mean, I see it, from my perspective, I see it mostly as just an incredible mental health tool. And I'm sure that's an insufficient way to look at it. But at least from that side, I can see, my God, this is going to be fantastic

Starting point is 01:38:24 in coming years and decades. Helping people with depression, anxiety, fear of death, love of death. You know, how amazing to be able to have love of death. That's what awakening can do. Deep love of life, deep love of death. I mean, that doesn't mean longing for death. You know, it means just this, you know, somehow really happy that it's part of the whole picture. I can't explain why, but we can be.

Starting point is 01:38:46 There's so much we could explore here. I think that psychedelics properly administered, properly and respectfully used with certain guide rails and guidelines can be really helpful for certain conditions and certain people. And I think they're useful for exploring facets of the mind itself and reality. We could put that in quotation marks, since I think that reality as we experience it is largely a constructed hallucination to begin with, which there are many ways to kind of explore this. There's a book called Biocentrism that does a decent job of introducing thought exercises, although I disagree with some of the things in the book. It's an interesting read.

Starting point is 01:39:32 What I would love to see, and maybe it already exists, but would be to see, for instance, it would be very hard to do this non-invasively, but if it were possible to compare the neurochemical activity of someone, again, like who's going to pay for this research and how on earth would you even structure a study is kind of a fool's errand probably. But let's just say hypothetically that you could compare someone having the experience of kensho or an awakening with someone 90 minutes after drinking ayahuasca

Starting point is 01:40:13 who would subjectively report right the phenomenology of the experience would include something akin to kensho or awakening it'd be so fascinating to compare those two because whether, let's just say, catalyzed by a cup of tea or catalyzed by diligent training, as Dennis McKenna would say, who's an ethnopharmacologist, our experience of reality is mediated

Starting point is 01:40:43 through neurotransmitters by and large, right? So you can change your experience of consciousness, let's just say using holotropic breathwork as one example. Ultimately, that would catalyze and induce certain electrochemical changes that would then help confer a certain experience. And I'd love to see, it would be fascinating. I'd love to see, I think it's too optimistic, but it'd be so endlessly fascinating to see how the sort of presentation of these experiences differ along those parameters.

Starting point is 01:41:21 I also think that the container and the cultural context and the assistance with constructing meaning out of unusual experiences is so important that it is difficult to, I would imagine, get to a point where you experience in your practice Kensho without a lot of deliberate practice, at least as something that is repeatable. But you could find a rent-a-shaman on Craigslist and show up as number 17 in someone's basement and have some lady who's watched too many Lord of the Rings movies smack you on the head with a feather and give you a super big gulp of ayahuasca. And like, you're going to have a very intense, unusual experience, but then what to do with it. And I think it can be very, I know it can be extremely destabilizing for people. And to that extent, I think the downside risk seems to be much lower when you are practicing within the

Starting point is 01:42:29 tradition of, in this case, Zen Buddhism. And there's a lot to be said for that capping of downside on some level. Well, yeah, you've got a whole lot of support. You've got a profound level of support. But I'm wary of equating the whole of psychedelic experience with Kensho. I really am. No, no, I think they're very different. I'm not trying to equate the two. I think that if, I'm just saying, if someone were to,

Starting point is 01:42:59 I've never experienced Kensho in the Zen Buddhist sense. There's no way for me to know. There's no way for me to know there's no way for me to confirm that and you know a lot of very strange things happen in psychedelic experiences that probably have nothing to do with what what you would conceptualize or think of as as kensho i certainly think they're very different things but they may be kind of edging at aspects of similar spaces, I think. Yeah. Yes, I agree with that. I agree with that. And man, what a healing space it is, right?

Starting point is 01:43:34 It can be. I mean, it can be. I think it can be with insufficient support and with the wrong preparation, at least in the case of psychedelics it can be incredibly destabilizing and i mean people do end up in uh very bad circumstances if they have ayahuasca in particular i think is a dicey proposition for a lot of people i mean you just don't know when you're going to pull a joker card and it's always in the deck whereas with the practices that you're going to pull a joker card and it's always in the deck. Whereas with the practices that you're describing, perhaps it's a little less likely. Although I would have to imagine, I mean,

Starting point is 01:44:11 certainly it happens at Vipassana retreats and other places where there are people who have really difficult kind of breakdown experiences. Have you seen that happen in the Zen Buddhist practices also? I've only seen it once. And and actually it wasn't a big deal we just helped the guy put him in a cage kept him fed he was fine a few weeks later he was fine 48 hours later he was and you know took him off the cushion you know actually yeah but but i want to say one other thing which is that it's to do with this ordinariness that somehow in zen it's not quite right to sort of sit because i want to have a kensho experience there's something about sitting itself and just being more and more embedded in this moment so that it becomes more and more embedded in this moment

Starting point is 01:45:06 so that it becomes more and more fulfilling and okay just as it is. That is perhaps the greatest reward, that we are learning to come home to ourselves, to come to terms with ourselves, to just be ourselves, not needing anything, not even Kensho. That's part of the training as well, that this practice isn't just for me to get something I want, namely a marvelous experience. There's something else going on as well. Also, likewise, that a master like Yamada Roshi, and, you know, we're all aspiring to that, all of us who are in training, to be able to live, what can we call it,

Starting point is 01:45:54 a fully awakened life. The heart is fully open. There's great freedom. There's great flexibility of sort of register. I can see through this moment. I can see it's transparent. I can see that it's concrete as well. I can see that I'm getting a little tired. I can see that there's infinite joy. I can see that there's infinite love. All this can be present in an ordinary moment and of utter sobriety.

Starting point is 01:46:21 There's something about its impact on our ordinary life that somehow is just such a treasure. And so it's not just about special experience. It's, am I making any sense here? You are making sense. So Ken Shell or Bust is not the title of your forthcoming how-to book. No. In fact, my new book is called Original Love.

Starting point is 01:46:47 I mean, for real, I am writing that. Nice. Nice. That was good. That was good. So now, is it a book? Is it a program? Is it both?

Starting point is 01:46:56 It seems to be both. Why do either or when you can do both end? Well, right. It's a manuscript at this point, which I think, I hope, is getting nearly finished. It's been a marvelous journey writing it. But it's a program and this point which i think i hope is getting nearly finished it's been a marvelous journey writing it but it's a program and a course as well and i'm actually just so excited about it it's thrilling to be able to teach this full spectrum of what meditation can

Starting point is 01:47:17 be because i think there's confusion what's awakening what's mindfulness how do they and if i'm awakened or if i've had an awakening experience, am I awakened? Why am I still so miserable? Why do I get anxious still? Actually, we're multi-dimensional, and to have got this way of addressing these different zones and being clear about it, so it's kind of a map, it's a, all parts are suffused with love, that's my main point, that in any level of any zone of practice, love is usually the thing, somehow or other, that triggers the transformation, that opens up things. Where can people learn more about Original Love or find the program? Yeah, well, at mountaincloud.org, at henryschuchman.com both of those anybody who read my

Starting point is 01:48:09 existing book would learn a lot actually about many of the things we've been discussing and my one blade of grass one blade of grass subtitle finding the old road of the heart a zen memoir which i have on my bookshelf in austin courtesy of of our mutual friend kevin rose in fact and i recommend i definitely recommend people check it out your stories are insane i mean you have and i mean that in a sort of yankee compliment kind of way keeping in mind it's the same person who thought old-fashioned tramp was something much more sensual. But One Blade of Grass, I definitely recommend people check out One Blade of Grass. And also the program and your website.

Starting point is 01:48:55 Just to go to the website, go to mountaincloud.org, go to henryschuckman.com, and you will see an assortment of different resources. And that's, I suppose, a good repository, kind of a home base for a lot of the things that we're discussing. Henry, I think we should do a round two at some point. If you're still open to it, you can sleep on it and decide if you're willing to put up with this type of stochastic, memento, non-linear conversation a second time. But if you can put up with me again i'd be thrilled to wonderful well i mean we've covered a good amount of ground the great news is i don't have to do

Starting point is 01:49:33 really any prep for the second conversation because i have 70 of my notes still remaining in front of me untouched and is there anything else you'd like to share, like to add as closing comments, requests you'd like to make of people listening, suggestion, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wrap up for round one? I'd like to just acknowledge my deep gratitude to my teachers and to say it can be tricky having a spiritual teacher, a spiritual guide. It's fraught with difficulty. I was very distrustful for a long time myself, found it very hard to accept a teacher until I finally found somebody I could accept. But it is wonderful if you find people who are really committed to

Starting point is 01:50:26 helping others in their practice, but have no power trip of their own. They just want to share the teaching they've received. For those who want to partake of it, you know, there are people like that. It's shark infested waters, for sure. Spirituality. So so be careful but you can find safe deep teachers i'm not putting myself forward by the way i'm a shallow you know i think i'm reasonably god i think i'm safe but i'm not deep enough i'm working on it but you can find people who are and it's a great gift if you do so So that's one thing I just want to say. And actually, I want to say huge thanks to you, Tim. You took a chance on having this crazy British Zen whatever fool,

Starting point is 01:51:14 and it's very nice of you. My pleasure. I mean, Kevin was putting his nuts on the table, so I took it very seriously. I was like, well, look, it's on record as Kevin's recommendation in our last recording of The Random Show. And I have great faith in Kevin, and he's a huge fan of yours and has learned an incredible amount from you and has taken a lot from the practice over the last year. And I've had front row seats to seeing it. So for people who wonder what the

Starting point is 01:51:46 experience might transmit to one's sort of waking reality outside of your personal experience that you've shared, I've seen it in Kevin. And it's been very noticeable from the outside looking in. And he's certainly been very excited for us to have a conversation. And vis-a-vis his excitement, I have been eager to have this conversation and I I've really enjoyed getting to know you a bit. And this will be part one of at least two. So we'll,

Starting point is 01:52:18 we'll figure out the scheduling at some point soon. I also need to get to New Mexico. I've been meaning to spend more time in New Mexico to, to visit other number of different places. I'd need to get to New Mexico. I've been meaning to spend more time in New Mexico to visit. There are a number of different places I'd love to explore. Oh, God. I'd love to show you around

Starting point is 01:52:31 to whatever extent you want to be. Yeah. Yeah. It's got Zen Buddhism. You've got Meow Wolf. You've got skiing. You have all sorts of things in New Mexico. Can I just tell you,

Starting point is 01:52:44 while we're on the subject of Kevin, I just want to say what a marvelous man he is. Incredibly generous, incredibly curious, and so supportive in so many ways. Just a treasure of a guy. I'm very, very, very happy that I've got to know him. And he's very serious. And he's so serious about his zen, he really gets it. It's got great possibilities and you've got to know him. And he's very serious. And he's so serious about his Zen, he really gets it.

Starting point is 01:53:05 It's got great possibilities and you've got to do it. You know, actually, it's a great point because some native Japanese speaker can correct this, but there's an expression, I think it's hiyasi samiyasi, which means it or he heats up quickly and cools off quickly. And what that means is that Kevin's life

Starting point is 01:53:24 is a vast collection of two-week passions. And he is expert in a number of areas, but he gets very, very, very excited about something. And then two weeks later, I'm like, oh, how's X going? He's like, ah, yeah, I'm over that. I'm not doing that anymore. So it is all the more remarkable that he is stuck with Zen practice under your guidance for as long as he has with the diligence with which he's treated it. It's a very clear, Kevin, don't kill me, but it seems to me to be a very potent anomaly. And that really speaks volumes. So I'm really happy that he's engaged in the practice also. So Henry, thank you for taking the time. Once again, this has been great. And

Starting point is 01:54:14 I'm actually really happy that we covered what we covered and that there's so much left to cover, because why do I do these conversations other than to explore? I get a lot out of them myself. People can find you at Henry Shookman. That's S-H-U-K-M-A-N, henryshookman.com, mountaincloud.org. I'm sure they can find the social and so on on those websites. Your memoir is One Blade of Grass. I highly recommend people check it out. They can also find the Original love program and more info on the

Starting point is 01:54:46 websites that i mentioned we'll link to everything in the show notes at tuned up blog slash podcast so if you just search zen on that page this episode will pop right up and what fun thank you again for for taking the time oh man much gratitude to gratitude to you. And yeah, I feel the connection. I was hoping I sort of feel it. It's very nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:11 You're, you're serious without taking yourself too seriously, which is nice. And I really enjoy this new terrain. I've been interested in Zen for a very long time. I've known, I've had very close mentors and friends in Japan who were dedicated Zen practitioners, but it's really something I

Starting point is 01:55:32 have very, very little familiarity with. So I'm looking forward to digging deeper, really getting into the nitty-gritty details of koan use and also the sort of hierarchy and progression within the zen practice and zen communities and many many more questions but we'll get to that in round two so thank you henry and many thanks to everybody listening so So until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

Starting point is 01:56:17 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up

Starting point is 01:56:38 in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by You Need a Budget. What is You Need a Budget? You Need a Budget is a cult favorite budgeting app for a reason. The app and its simple four rule method will change the way you think about your money and

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #531: Henry Shukman — Zen, Tools for Awakening, Ayahuasca vs. Meditation, Intro to Koans, and Using Wounds as the Doorway

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #531: Henry Shukman — Zen, Tools for Awakening, Ayahuasca vs. Meditation, Intro to Koans, and Using Wounds as the Doorway

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