I think the idea of teachers as exemplars actually tends to get both teachers and students
in trouble.
Because the students come in with the attitude that this person should be an exemplar and
maybe project a lot of idealized virtues onto this teacher.
And unfortunately from what I saw, I think a lot of teachers come to believe their own
PR.
People are acting kind of worshipful towards them so they start to think that they really
are those exemplars.
Rick Archer - The Safety of the Mind
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.
My name is Rick Archer.
My guest today is Julie Nelson.
And I read Julie's book called "Practicing Safe Zen"
and as I read the book, I was thinking,
"This would be one of those interviews where I wish we could just talk for 24 hours
and read the book aloud and then keep stopping every other sentence to discuss the point
being made, because there were so many good points made in the book. But that would be
an awfully long interview. I think we'd have a lot of drop-offs. So what I'm going to do,
for starters, is just have Julie introduce herself, and then we'll get into it. So tell
us a bit about yourself, Julie.
Yeah. So I am in my 60s with a couple of grandkids. I just had brunch with today, since today is
Mother's Day. I've practiced Zen for about 20 years. I did some Vipassana meditation before that.
I started in the Robert Aikens lineage, later changed to Mizumi Roshi, for those who are
interested. It's Soto Zen, but also uses koans, so it's kind of a mix of what people think of as Soto
and Rinzai Zen. My sangha's had lots of problems over the last 10 years, and that's what inspired
me to write that book. I'm also a retired economics professor. I did my research in feminist and
ecological economics, which made me kind of swimming against the stream in that profession,
but it was worthwhile. Good. That's a good little intro. Oh, and I could also say I am a
transmitted teacher in the in the white plum lineage at this point. So you still practice and
teach Zen, obviously. Yeah, good. Well, so your book is about, you know, first-hand experience with
problematic teachers in the various Zen sanghas you belong to. And it's unfortunately a universal
story. It's not limited to your experience. And it's not limited to Zen or Buddhism or
Christianity or anything. I mean, it goes around the world and has perhaps for a long time.
And, you know, one thing I kept thinking about as I was reading your book is that
that saying by Jesus, "You shall know them by their fruits." And I've always naively, perhaps,
or idealistically thought that spiritual teachers should be poster boys for, you know,
what this can do for you, you know? There should be examples that you look at them and think,
"Hey, I'd like to have what he or she has." You know, it seems like, you know, it's really
turned this person into, you know, kind of an exemplar of what a human being could and should be.
But unfortunately, there are so many examples to the contrary, and I'm afraid it's confusing and
and disillusioning for a lot of students.
I know people that have sort of given up on spirituality
or taken one look at it and thought,
eh, that seems kind of screwy.
I don't want to get involved in it.
So I'm sure you've pondered that same thought.
In fact, I'm sure you brought it up in your book.
But let's start the conversation with that.
What do you think about what I just said?
I think this idea of wanting to look up
to teachers as exemplars is natural. We want to think that somebody in the world really
has things figured out, and if we just, you know, stay close to them, we can get everything
figured out and do that as well. I think it's reasonable to hope that teachers are well-behaved,
and well-behaved not in the sense of always doing everything perfectly, but be willing
to atone and make restitution when they screw up. I think the idea of teachers as exemplars
actually tends to get both teachers and students in trouble, because the students come in with
the attitude that this person should be an exemplar and maybe project a lot of idealized
virtues onto this teacher. And unfortunately, from what I saw, I think a lot of teachers come to
believe their own PR. People are acting kind of worshipful for towards them. So they start to
think that they really are those exemplars. And then of course, from a more objective point of
view, they're actually doing some really nasty things sometimes. Yeah. I mean, in ordinary
education, if you go to college, let's say, and you want to study physics, you expect that your
professors are going to be, they're going to know a lot about physics, you know. And, you know,
It gets a little bit more abstract with some of the more softer sciences.
If you were to study ethics, you would hope that your teacher at Harvard Divinity School
or wherever you were was an ethical person who was teaching ethics.
It's a little bit less hard to measure than physics.
If we're interested in enlightenment or spiritual development or awakening or whatever we want to call it,
it seems to be it's not unreasonable to expect that the teacher has attained some degree of it.
Otherwise, why is he or she a teacher?
And yet then, you know, you have to wonder, well, what's the measure of that?
What are the characteristics of that attainment?
You know, what should I expect and what would be too much to expect in someone who is supposedly
more advanced on the spiritual path?
I think the idea of some kind of spiritual attainment, spiritual achievement, that some
people are functioning on a higher plane, that somebody is coming in, unfortunately
cuts two ways.
One is that it, you know, all being, I mean, one of the constant themes of my book is that we're
all Buddha nature and we're all human, you know, frail humans at the same time, right? So it's
really easy to take anything that feels like an attainment, you know, even in a spiritual realm,
and turn it into a merit badge, you know, turn it into something that feeds our ego.
I do think teachers should be, and usually are, people who have had some kind of,
what I like to call opening experience, you know, it's some sort of visceral sense of the unity of
the universe and of our own continuity with that. So that they have it, but that is
in most cases a momentary experience or, you know, maybe for some people it right here might go on
for days or weeks, but then the question is how is that integrated into someone's life? And if you
If you take that experience and think, "Oh, now I'm enlightened, now I'm a perfect human
being, now I can go teach," it's going to end badly.
If you take that as an experience that, yeah, really memorable, really shook up the way
I see the world, now what am I doing next?
And now where do I need to open next?
And what do I need to look at next, even if it's unpleasant?
to keep on growing, to keep on having that beginner's mind.
- Yeah, I was just having an email conversation this morning
with Dana Sawyer, Phil Goldberg,
and a fellow named Frederick Smith,
who was a Sanskrit professor at the University of Iowa.
And the other two have been on BatGap.
And one of them was mentioning that very often
somebody will have some profound experience
a few seconds in the 1970s, let's say, and they're still hanging their hat on that experience,
you know, still kind of clinging to it as building a little shrine around it, you know.
Yeah. And even some great, you know, poets like William Blake, I believe, had had some
kind of profound experience like that. And it didn't last, but he spent his whole life
writing beautiful poetry inspired by that experience. So that's great. But I think, correct me if
if I'm wrong from the perspective of your tradition,
that awakening-- there's different kinds of satori,
right, or samadhi.
Some are temporary, momentary, and others
are said to be abiding.
And the idea, as I understand it,
is to maybe have the temporary ones, but then over time,
they might give way to an abiding realization.
I'm not sure about that sense of...
I mean, in some subtle way, maybe there's some...
you live more and more of your life
with that realization, but you still live your life as
a human being in the relative world with clay feet.
So, I don't...
I don't think anybody is going to...
I would have a very hard time believing that anybody even
Buddha himself was in a state where every action was always... I mean, the Buddha had some
very retrograde ideas about women, for example, right? So, we're always, like I said, we're
always human and we're always Buddha. And hopefully over time with integration and with
work and with practice and with... I think the Sangha is very important, the community,
people setting us straight and sometimes showing us stuff we don't want to see, that we can
have a long maturation where we can spend more of our time, you know, not acting from our
small self. But my guess is the people that do that most effectively probably don't even
know that they're doing it. That is, they're not checking up on themselves and measuring
themselves all the time.
Yeah, in other words, it comes naturally if it's a natural state of development.
Like, I don't know, riding a bicycle. It's really hard at first and you fall off and everything,
but after a while it's kind of second nature and you're not thinking, "Oh, I got a balance, I got a balance."
[Laughter]
Yeah, there was one writer, it was talking about A. H. Dogen, founder of Soto Zen,
just went about to know oneself is to forget oneself and likened it to riding a bicycle,
that you really need to figure out who you are. But once you do that, you're not thinking through
every step in the same sort of way you did in the process of kind of figuring out who you are.
Rick Yeah. On the other hand, there's a quote that I often quote from Padmasambhava, which was that,
"Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of
barley flour. You know, so basically he's saying, "Hey, I'm pretty cosmic, but that doesn't grant
me a pass to just sort of do whatever. I have to really kind of mind my P's and Q's and be precise."
Yeah. Impeccable. We're not escaping our causes and conditions and our karma. Just
momentary experiences. Okay. You've probably heard Ken Wilber's
lines of development model. He talks about waking up, cleaning up and growing up.
That sounds good. I read some of his work quite a while back.
So yeah, and he, he makes the point that these different lines, not only those three, but also,
you know, the intellectual, the emotional, the sensory, and so on, are not necessarily
tightly correlated. And they can get really out of sync with one another.
Yeah, the spiritual bypassing chapter in my book, I talk about that because it's,
I think there's often a misconception that Zen practices is some kind of cure-all. And if you
just, if you're having, you know, psychological problems, just do more Zazen, you know, if you're
sexually immature, just do more Zazen or something like that. And no, you stunt yourself and you
you probably become a danger to others when you get too off balanced in these ways.
Yeah, and a danger to yourself. I mean, if you're psychologically unbalanced, doing more
meditation of any kind can put you in a mental hospital, you know?
Yeah, yeah, there's people who go way into dissociation or into more deeply into depression.
I'm sure we've both seen it happen probably. And in the sexual realm, I mean, you know,
are famous, supposedly enlightened gurus who've come from the east to the west and some who
started out in the west who are sexually or emotionally less mature than your average high
school boy.
I mean,
Yeah, well if it went into a monastery at age nine, you know, what do you expect?
Yeah.
Anyway, it might be worth mentioning at this point for the audience that, you know, this is
an issue that has concerned me for quite some time and some others. And together with Jack O'Keefe
and Craig Holliday and others have joined in now, we started an organization called the Association
for Spiritual Integrity. And it now has nearly 800 members, I think, and about 60 member
organizations and we're doing all kinds of interesting things. It's spiritual-integrity.org.
But we considered it important because of the kinds of issues that Julie and I are discussing
here and we don't present it as some sort of authoritative, moralistic body that's going
to censure people or revoke their licenses or grant licenses or anything else. We're
just trying to kind of infuse into the collective awareness of the spiritual community an appreciation
of the importance of ethics on the spiritual path. And we've kind of outlined some guidelines
or tenets, code of ethics, that we, after hours and hours and days and weeks of discussion
continual revision feel are baselines for what a spiritual teacher should or should not do.
And I feel that this is more almost for the sake of students than it is for teachers,
because if a teacher is inclined to misbehave, he's not going to think, "Oh, I should check with
the guidelines and see if this is out of line." You know, usually they're kind of off on some
tangent when they start misbehaving and have lost their discrimination.
but students should be able to hold teachers' feet to the fire and not assume that, "Well,
this guy is supposed to be enlightened, and so as crazy as his behavior seems to be,
who am I to judge? You know, I should just continue sitting here."
- No, it's really important that there are some bodies and some ethical codes and statements
out there that says, you know, this isn't allowed. And there really has to be
trust within a spiritual teacher-student relationship, and there are--when that trust is violated,
when the teacher ends up using that relationship for their own purposes in some way, it can
be devastating to students and to communities, as I have found out.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few different ways to go at this.
One is greater education for both teachers and students about power in teacher-student
relationships because there really is power.
The student is looking for something.
The teacher has some kind of knowledge that the student wants to get, and that creates
a power differential.
And I think a lot of people are ignorant about that.
Sometimes people think teacher abuses of power is just a bad apple problem.
a few narcissistic psychopaths and they do the abuse and everybody else is okay. And there's
a few of those out there, but what I have seen the most is just more garden variety
ignorance, even that a teacher has power. You don't necessarily feel powerful because
people are coming to you and asking you questions, but if they're trusting you, they're giving
you power. And so teachers need to know kind of what behavior helps build that trust and
what sort of behavior destroys it. Students need to know the same kind of thing so they
can, you know, if they're feeling really queasy about something a teacher's doing, they can
look at something like the Code of Ethics for the Spiritual Integrity group and say, "Oh,
you know, this really is out of bounds.
- Yeah.
- And I know that that group doesn't, you know,
do any kind of certification or that kind of thing,
but in some ways I think, well, I mean, I think that our,
I think it's not necessarily sufficient,
but it's certainly necessary
for battling teacher abuses of power.
I think a lot of teachers don't really tend to be
very well educated about what kind of power they hold over students when students are coming to them and trusting them with very personal things and trusting their advice.
And a lot of students aren't really sure where the boundaries are between acceptable and unacceptable behavior by a teacher.
So having some of that laid out is helpful.
I don't think it's sufficient because, I mean, what I think a lot of teachers are giving other
teachers too much of a pass when they see misconduct going on. I would like to see more
sort of mutual accountability. Yeah. We're sort of touching on these points, but I'll
crystallize it into a question.
Well, two part, a statement and a question.
Swami Sarvapriyananda, who I admire a lot,
often says that you can have ethics without enlightenment,
but you can't have enlightenment without ethics.
And yet another spiritual teacher, whom I won't name,
said at a conference that if you think that ethics
have anything to do with awakening,
you don't understand awakening.
I agree with the first, with Swami's statement,
and strongly disagree with that one. But what's your take on why ethics are important on the
spiritual path in any tradition? We've touched upon it, but let's flesh it out some.
Diana: Yeah, in the early moments of this, we talked about the fact that these sorts of
cosmic opening experiences may last only seconds. They may be life-changing, but they last only
seconds. And it may be true that in those few seconds, how I'm going to behave is not the
main issue. The main issue is who I am, right? And if we don't build a little temple to that
experience and hang on to it and try to, you know, think of that as the be-all and end-all,
but we actually use what that experience is trying to teach us, I think we will have a
bent to act more ethically because we realize kind of both how insignificant we are and
how interconnected we are. But it doesn't come easy. Our karma and our habits and our conditioning
is very strong. So to actually live out in the way that we're maybe very briefly pointed
to in a Satori or Kensho kind of experience, to actually live that out takes hard work
and it takes, you know, constantly being reminded, you know, reminding ourselves, reminding each
other about what's ethical behavior.
Rick Yeah, in the Zen tradition, is there a whole
emphasis and explanation on deconditioning oneself, on working out all the sort of samskaras,
as this is sometimes called, that condition us to types of behavior?
Diana The way that we do it, at least in the tradition
that I'm in is through study of the 16 Bodhisattva precepts, the ethical teachings. And the way
we study them is not as a list of "thou shalt not" or "thou shalt," but as opportunities
for waking up. So in the middle of a 12-week series that we run, and the way we run this
class is every week we take one of them, and we just let it point out where in our life
are we not speaking truthfully? Where in our life is sexuality coming up? And not trying to
necessarily change our behavior right away, but just use that as a spotlight to what we're doing.
Use that to reflect on what's going on in our body, what our beliefs are that are causing us to
do this. And then after we focused on this for a while without trying to change it, trying to kind
of stop, you know, when an occasion comes up where we feel like we're about to say something untrue.
And that, that, using a book by Diane Rossetto called "Waking Up to What You Do," she talks
about it being the dead spot that is creating, having enough consciousness of the precepts and
of our own behavior to be able to sometimes stop in that point where we can actually make a decision.
And in that point we can make a decision. We can choose to go with a habit, just grab on the usual
way we do, or we can choose to do something different. And that to me is this unwinding
of the habit. It's loosening it up.
That's really good. Some people argue philosophically and even with some kind of neurophysiological
explanation that we don't have free will, and that we just feel like we do, we appear
to, but that we really don't. And to the best of my knowledge, I disagree with that. I may
be wrong, but my feeling is that we are conditioned certainly, but not absolutely. We have some wiggle
room, and the wiggle room, like you just said, could enable you to say to stop if you have the
impulse to do something. There's some kind of discernment or discrimination or faculty that
enables us to make choices, and if we use that faculty wisely, then we kind of move ourselves
up the spectrum in terms of being less bound and conditioned, we attain greater freedom and
we're less tormented, let's say, by habits or impulses that would be deleterious.
And it's not easy work.
No, it's a lifetime of...
It's a lifetime, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Self-scrutiny.
I mean, one thing I like to, that occurred to me very strongly on this issue of self-scrutiny,
is that there's a huge difference between wanting to be awake and wanting to be good. I spent a lot
of my life trying to be good. The problem is if you make a project about trying to be a good person,
all the psychological research says we have confirmation bias. You know, we like to see
what we like to see, and we tend to not see the things we don't want to see. So if you want to
to be good, you really don't want to see it, you know, notice when you're doing bad, right?
This way I just described working with the precepts is really trying to focus in on, you
know, when am I about to do something that, you know, I really should think about. And
it's really uncovering a lot of those places that we, you know, shadow areas, places that
we don't want to see bad behaviors. If we really want to wake up, we should be saying,
"Yes, thank you for showing me where I'm screwing up." You know, our human side doesn't want
do that. Human size only wants praise. But if we really want to wake up, we should be,
you know, glad in some way to find another spot where our habit energy and our knots
are keeping us constrained.
Yeah, you know, there's been a kind of a debate in the contemporary spirituality between
And those who are engaged in, let's say, self-betterment practices, you know, Tony Robbins or various
Be a Better, you know, various things you do to try to make yourself a better person, but
there's not a whole lot of talk of self-realization in there, you know.
And then the other wing is people who are focused on knowing your true nature, self-realization,
And they often critique the self-betterment people.
But I think that the two are not diametrically opposed, and in fact, are complementary and
could go hand in hand.
And of course, in their extremes, both of these things can be rather absurd.
The self-betterment stuff can get kind of silly, and the know-your-true-nature to the exclusion
of everything else can become very cold and devoid of ethics again.
Well, I actually love the book by a woman named Joan Tollison. The title is great. "Death,
the end of self-improvement."
I've interviewed Joan. I know Joan.
Isn't that a lovely title? I don't think it's not that we don't improve. Do I behave better
after many years of Zen practice? I don't know. Ask my family. Ask people around me.
I could have all sorts of illusions about it. I think that's probably the case. I think some
people think I'm, you know, even more obnoxious because, you know, I won't tolerate their nonsense,
you know, so I don't know. Yeah.
Pete: Kind of reminds me of Ram Dass saying, if you think you're enlightened,
go spend a weekend with your parents.
[Laughter]
Dianne: I was thinking, this is, you know, our final words before people like, you know,
go to Thanksgiving or, you know, Christmas or holiday gatherings, yes. Now is the test of your
practice. You thought it was, you know, Sashin retreat, long sitting. No, it's Thanksgiving
dinner with your relatives.
Yeah. Okay, it's an interesting, I mean, I've been meditating since the 60s. And, and, you
know, I was a teacher of meditation for many years. And it's like, I continually ponder
these questions, because I don't see them. I don't feel like I've totally resolved my
understanding of the paradoxes and discrepancies that I often see in spiritual communities.
And you know, I come up with explanations, my best explanation being that we're all works
in progress, and that, you know, you can never sort of rest on your laurels and assume you're
done. And that, and Ken Wilber's thing of lines of development, where there can be quite
a significant development of awakening in consciousness, and yet you can be quite immature and stunted
in other of those lines.
Yes.
Okay. Now, feel free to chime in on anything, any time. Don't just wait for me to ask you
questions. This is just a conversation, so anything you want to say. But I'm going to
start looking at my notes here.
So here's a synopsis of your book, the overall theme.
The book explores both the beauty and transformative potential of Zen practice alongside its inherent
dangers and pitfalls.
It emphasizes the need for awareness, healthy boundaries, and accountability within Zen
communities to practice safely and address issues like teacher misconduct and spiritual
bypassing.
Then you draw upon your personal experiences, including several different portrayals within
and communities to illustrate these points.
And you actually name names.
I'm surprised you haven't been sued, but I guess it's permissible to do that.
Well, I name names only in for documented things.
I have unfortunately heard of a lot more cases of abuse than I could write down,
but I didn't want to repeat rumors and undocumented things.
I use people's own words or statements by bodies that have done investigations.
Yeah, good.
Or my first-hand experience.
Right.
As a sangha, we have had legal threats by people who didn't like what we said.
Empty threats, because you can give somebody a bad online review and it's not illegal.
But yeah, people who kind of pride themselves on being virtuous and being, you know, more
gentle than the law can be quite litigious when you give them a bad review.
Yeah.
So, let's say the average student just kind of starting out on the path, or considering
starting out on the path and being interested in Zen as a possible path for them, as I was
actually before I took the path I took. But it was Zen books that inspired me to learn
to meditate and get going with this spirituality stuff. But what should they know? As someone
who's been in it for decades, what cautions and advice would you give them to proceed in
a safe way to choose a trustworthy teacher, and to not let themselves get burned, you
know.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I had a, I came at this a few different ways. One is a lot of people
just start meditating on their own, right? They don't even try a teacher, a sangha, they
just read a book and start. And that has some, some dangers and also some day, I would say
actual dangers for some people and a number of pitfalls, a number of sort of detours that
people can hit. The real dangers for people with certain pre-existing psychological conditions,
they may find when they sit that their depression just gets worse, they have psychotic episodes,
all of these kinds of things. And there's documented cases of this going on, or psychological
dissociation, they confuse that with them.
Yeah, I think you mentioned Willoughby Britton in your book.
Willoughby Britton has a whole thing.
Brown University, she has this whole thing devoted to helping people who get in trouble
with meditation. Right, right. So it's something that, you know, essentially if you try meditation
and you know, whatever's been overwhelming you is getting even more overwhelming. Stop
and get some advice, you know, maybe see a therapist, do something else. Zen is not a
panacea, it's not necessarily for everybody. So that's just kind of a first hurdle to get
Most people can practice meditation with no ill effects.
In terms of the Zen path of realization,
we talk about the great matter dealing with the big issues of life and death,
there's a number of things that could just be seen as detours.
Getting hung up on trying to get to certain mind states.
"I'm going to meditate so I can be calm."
That can be helpful, but it can also be a trap.
Sometimes I'm just not a calm person.
Does that mean I'm not practicing Zen? Maybe not.
I'm being at this moment fully, I'm not a calm person.
Or bliss states, or despair, or a lot, there's just a lot
of stuff that can start coming up in individual practice that
that needs to be handled carefully and just mostly treated as something that comes up rather than as
a be-all or an end-all of the practice or some kind of personal failure at the practice.
So I kind of go through a list of those things. It is very helpful to have a community and a teacher.
Some people in Zen say it's absolutely necessary to work with a teacher. I'm a little bit more
iffy about that. I think teachers can be very helpful. I can't see in, certainly in the Zen
tradition, you see that. I can't see in a lot of the earlier Buddhist writings, the emphasis is
really on community, not about, you know, working with one particular person. When looking for a
community or a teacher, I suggest just some basic things like doing a web search on the community's
name or the teacher's name and words like, you know, abuse, cult, misconduct. It can be hard because a lot of
teachers and communities can look very warm and welcoming
as long as you kind of stay around the edges. As you get more involved, you may find, you know,
some really nasty power dynamics going on behind the scenes. And so trying to avoid cultish groups
is important. Cultish groups are groups where basically the leader or leaders believe that
they know what's best. And not just what's best maybe for your personal spiritual development,
but increasingly the more you get involved, they know best about finances, about real estate,
about your personal life, you know, about what you should be saying and who you should be talking to
and who your friends should be and everything else. Very important to watch out for those things.
One of the things that those kinds of groups do is suppress dissent to a big degree.
One way to test if you're in such a group is to try disagreeing with something.
You know, are you treated as an adult that might have some kind of contribution to make? Are you
treated like an unruly kid, labeled as unspiritual, you know, kicked out. Those are some things to
watch out for. And I saw some of those behaviors in some of the groups that I was in, in terms of
ostracizing people who made any criticism, or treating them very badly.
Yeah, it can almost get comically extreme. A friend of mine went to an
ashram in Mexico for a while for a retreat. And it was so controlling that no one was supposed to have
any opinion or make any decision. Like she had some idea of what salad dressing to serve with
lunch. And oh, no, no, no, the leader decides everything. You know, I had a similar experience
where yeah, that the leader decided that there should not be any salt in the oatmeal. You know,
the cooks, the participants had no choice in it. It was just no, no, we don't do that.
Yeah.
Which makes you wonder, I mean, about the subjective state of that leader, if he thinks
that he has that kind of omniscience.
Yeah, yeah.
God.
I think one phenomenon is that being a spiritual teacher can go to your head if you don't have
enough whatever, emotional maturity or something.
the authority, the adulation, if that comes your way, even subtle adulation, like, you
know, just respect and so on, can inflate an immature ego.
DG Yeah, exactly. I point to that a lot in the
book because, well, a lot of people recognize that there are teacher abuses of power, and
it's usually the sexual abuses of power that make the headlines, but there's also financial
and emotional kinds of things that go on. A lot of people think it's just, you know, a
few predators out there, a few narcissistic psychopaths or something. But it's really
much more garden variety ego and subtle ego inflation, I think, behind most of these cases.
The teachers that I experienced creating very serious abuses of power also sometimes taught
very well, taught very effectively, said useful things, right? I suspect that most of them,
one I'm maybe not so sure about, but most of them had had valid opening experiences.
A lot of them I had sat next to as students, and as students they were quite humble and committed
to the practice. And in the book I mentioned what I call the Gold Raksu effect. That is, in my
tradition, you wear a black kind of bib-like garment when you're a student, but you've committed to
living the Buddha way. You've taken the bodhisattva precepts. But then when you become
a transmitted teacher, you wear a brown or a golden brown one. And I saw people that I'd sat
with for years as humble co-students become arrogant as hell as soon as they put on a gold
raksu. Suddenly they were not to be questioned, they were to be honored, and when I became
transmitted I got a little taste of how this works. Two things, one is I noticed people started to
take what I said more seriously, you know, people sometimes stood back when I passed by, you know,
these very subtle things, and some of them I think were unconscious, some of them I think had been
taught as part of the tradition. And I also was allowed into teacher meetings, groups of teachers
together, which I think can just become an echo chamber for pride. Yeah, you know, we do know
better than the students about, you know, the oatmeal or the, you know, kind of jam to put on
the toast, or you know, yeah, I think there can be this echo chamber effects and it's just very subtle
yeah, ego stroking that I actually, I keep what I, as a teacher now, I keep what I call a gold
raksu, I'm calling a gold raksu journal, got a little notebook down here, and when some of
these feelings come up of like, you know, aren't I special, or wouldn't it be better if this room
was a little bit more full, you know, like my teaching is so good, I really should have more
students. I write those kinds of thoughts down in this journal, you know, that it's better to have
your enemy close, right? You know, so I write these thoughts down so I can just laugh at them and know
that I'm human. And remember not to, I hope, you know, and I hope the song will help me not take
them seriously. Yeah, it's almost like dangerous to become a teacher. It is. I think it's, it's a
huge entrustment. It's very serious. Yeah. It has pitfalls that you're not going to
encounter if you're just a student. And so, you know, there shouldn't be a kind of ambition
to become a teacher as soon as possible. I think. Yeah. And so a few of the other teachers
I've talked to have said that, I mean, people often congratulate someone when they when they
become a teacher. And they said, Well, you know, maybe we should offer condolences.
Right.
I've heard and maybe you can correct me on this that in the in the Zen tradition, maybe
some particular branch of it, if you have a spiritual awakening, presumably, you know,
an abiding one, you're supposed to wait 10 years before you teach.
There's very, there's there's certainly old Zen stories about this. But yeah, this kind
this impulse that once you've had a big opening experience, you're now ready to show the rest of the world is
definitely, you know, frowned on. If you go to a Zen teacher and describe a great opening experience,
you'll probably get an underwhelming response from them. You know, "That's nice. Now, what about your, you know,
koan, your precept study, or, you know, something else?"
Just to kind of bring you down that notch, you know, keep you from building that temple over that
experience. Ten years, I don't know. Some of the different teacher groups have different
criteria for how long to wait. There's some old Zen stories about people who went off
to the mountains for 20 or 30 or 40 years, you know, to practice more before they came back to teach.
The stories that I like best, really, there's a wonderful story about
Daishan... no, oh shoot, I have a hard time with the Chinese names. Anyway, a teacher who was very
highly respected, very old, when he was about 80, he decided to go on a pilgrimage to learn
more and he said, "If I meet, you know, an 80-year-old, I'll learn from them. If I meet
an 8-year-old, I'll learn from them." And Ehei Dogen in Japan commenting on that said,
"Maybe that 8-year-old is an 8-year-old girl." You know, this is in medieval Japan, that would
have been a, you know, kind of a shocking thing to think that a distinguished senior Zen teacher
could learn from an eight-year-old girl. So, more than the time spent practicing before teaching,
I think that keeping that open mind of "I'm never just a teacher, I'm always still a learner"
is even more important. Yeah, or isn't there that phrase in Zen, "beginner's mind"?
that's how I interpret it. You know, like you should always have the attitude of a beginner.
DG Yeah, and I actually don't think of teaching as an identity. I think of it as a role,
and a role that comes with a lot of responsibility. I think as soon as we glom onto anything as a firm
identity, we're getting in trouble. I mean, this is, you know, Zen is in, one of the hazards,
actually, of Zen is it's kind of destabilizing of ideas about who we are, which is a good thing,
if it leads in the direction of spiritual awakening and understanding who we are in the universe.
But if we destabilize the idea of who we are in a bad way, we can just become, say, overly loyal
to a teacher, just kind of put the responsibility for our life in their hands. And so, you know,
being a teacher, to say, you know, I had a colleague of mine at one point, ex-colleague now,
say, "I am a teacher. I am always a teacher." And I don't feel that way. I feel like, you know,
when I go to the grocery store, I'm a shopper, you know, when I'm playing with my grandkids,
I'm a grandma. And I want to be the, you know, I hope I'm living out the wisdom and compassion I've
learned from Zen study in any of these roles. But I don't need to be a Zen teacher when I'm
picking out bananas, you know, that's not my... I mean, you know, change the word teacher to,
you know, heart surgeon. Are you a heart surgeon when you're like on the toilet or, you know,
surfing or whatever you do. Yeah, yeah, and I, so being a Zen teacher, you know, when I take up that
role, when, you know, I'm asked to give a Dharma talk or when someone wants to meet with me one-on-one,
it's a very serious role to take up, and there are, you know, boundary issues involved, there are power
issues involved, I have no illusions that I can always, you know, answer someone's question.
all I can do is meet people and perhaps the additional experience or study that I've had can be helpful.
Yeah, that point about answering someone's question is interesting. Do you, as a teacher,
sometimes find yourself saying, "I don't know"? And have you seen teachers that are
too proud to say that?
Yeah, I mean, I think that if a teacher is too proud to say, "I don't know, there's something wrong."
What I saw was not so much teachers that were reluctant to say, "I don't know," when faced with
some sort of personal or spiritual question, but who really didn't realize that they didn't know
things like legal standards for dealing with clergy misconduct. They believe that they somehow
naturally knew how to handle this without ever studying, so that kind of, you know, without
reading up and certainly without listening to anybody who wasn't a teacher, even if they might
have a legal background. So kind of the assumption of knowledge in areas where one doesn't have it,
even if one may, you know, modestly say, I don't know when asked, you know, some particular
question within a kind of a dharma context.
Yeah, I can think of examples of this where teachers, well-known teachers, are often asked
all kinds of questions. And rather than saying, "Oh, that's not my field. I don't know anything
about that." They feel like they have to give an answer.
Yeah, yeah. If you want to start questioning me about, you know, what modern physics has
to do with spirituality, I'll say, you know, I probably know less than you do, you know,
I've read a few books, but I'm not an expert, not my area. And yet, we see teachers doing
all sorts of decisions about finances and real estate and people's personal lives. I know,
I heard of a teacher who told students, you know, who they should marry, you know, just crazy.
- That was in the back of my mind. And some people want that, they have a guru and they,
should I marry so and so? Or should I get this job? Or should I buy a house and things? And
most teachers, go ahead, you're going to say.
I mean, that to me is this destabilizing of the feeling of who I am in the wrong direction.
Instead of kind of trusting the Dharma, you just you trust this other human being
in a way that that erases boundaries rather than then overcomes separation.
Yeah, which is not to say, I mean, ancient, all the ancient traditions of the world have the
archetype of the wise elder, you know, who does have some life experience and who's
it was worth getting advice from on things. But hopefully, if they if they are genuine,
they're also humble, and won't advise you on things they don't have any expertise in.
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
What as a teacher, um, have you you kind of alluded to this but have you had experiences where you felt like
students were
making too much of a fuss about you or you know, just to um,
Agulating you in in some way and what what do you do to?
Tone that down. Yeah. Yeah. I have had this just in in a few subtle ways. I remember somebody
apologizing to me for something that was actually my fault. I thought, I don't know.
Okay, they probably have this idealized image of me. And
I have, it's one of those contradictory things, I think, that it's really the teacher's
responsibility to not let that go to their head more than it is their responsibility to just
stomp that out in the student, right? I think sometimes for students it's a phase that you
have to go through. You really don't have any confidence in your own Buddha nature,
so you kind of have to believe that it's somewhere near you, okay? Somewhere near you where you can
get access to it, so you put all of that on your teacher. And that might be a necessary stage.
So, you know, a student idolizing a teacher doesn't necessarily mean that the student
needs correction. What it does mean is the teacher needs to be really careful,
and the teacher needs to take the task of growing the student out of that.
That's great. Very well put. Yeah, I like that.
Putting on my glasses so I can look at some more of my notes here.
Well, there's a section on pitfalls in spiritual practice. Let's talk about some of these.
So, spiritual bypassing. I believe you quoted Robert Augustus Masters in your book.
Yeah.
I've interviewed him years ago. But explain what spiritual bypassing is,
and we'll talk about it a little bit.
Well, the original way that John Welwood defined it had to do with bypassing psychological
maturity issues. So, you're having, you know, unhappiness, pain, psychological immaturity,
just go and practice and we don't need to worry about the fact that I hate my parents or that I'm not getting along with my spouse or whatever.
We just kind of sideline all of that stuff by becoming more holy.
What I've seen a lot, actually more in person, is kind of a confusion of Zen practice with emotional flatlining.
That equanimity just means that nothing's going to bother me.
Okay, so it's really just a separation from my life, you know, it's separation from my
body, separation from my life, to try to bypass those uncomfortable things that come up in
the real world. And that's not the Zen way. The Zen way brings us more into our life,
doesn't take us out of it. But it's very appealing, you know, it's a, you know, it kind of turns
religion into a feel-good drug.
Yeah, a lot of these points are nuanced. There is something, I'd say, to equanimity, at least
in the Hindu tradition, in the Bhagavad Gita, it talks about equanimity being one of the
characteristics of self-realization, you know, you're not just blown away by every little
thing.
No, but I think of equanimity as having the ballast to ride the waves.
Yeah.
Okay, so it's not that you're flatlining. The storms are still coming, the conditions
of your life haven't changed, there will still be grief and loss and, you know, other things
that you really need to face and deal with. But you're not going to be, you know, thrown
entirely off balance when these things come along.
Yeah, maybe one way of putting it is if you're in tune with your Buddha nature, that it's
a deeper dimension, which is like the silent level of the ocean that's not perturbed by
the hurricane that's blowing on the surface.
Yeah, I mean, you don't ignore the fact that it's choppy on top, but the fact that it's
choppy on top doesn't shake you to your core.
The way it's just one level of a deep ocean.
Yeah.
Yeah, good.
No, but it's, I mean, spiritual bypassing is a common syndrome.
People thinking that they can just meditate away, whatever bothers them.
Even sometimes, like a serious medical issue, they'll think that I can meditate that away
or take some herbs, I don't need to go see the doctor. I've had friends die with that
attitude at least in the initial stages. Anything more we want to say about spiritual bypassing?
I added on, in the book, I added a few more things. I think besides bypassing the pain
of life and, you know, the pains of growing up psychologically and in other ways, we can
also try to bypass life events. I remember overhearing one person, a man one time talking
about how he decided to really commit to doing Zen once a week, and somehow in the conversation
it came up that he was leaving his wife at home with like three young kids who get really
rowdy in the evening. Yeah, maybe he was committing to the spiritual life, but maybe it was just
avoiding being home with the rowdy kids, you know, you can use it that way too. Or, you
You know, you've got a... I gave another example of you, suppose you're running a business
and your co-manager is, you know, abusing your employees. So you recommend that they
go on a Zen retreat, you know. Okay, maybe you actually need to deal with their behavior,
not just spiritualize it and, you know, try to kind of override it that way. So anyway,
that's...
Yeah, that's good. And the Zen retreat isn't necessarily going to make the fundamental change
that that...
No, what this person probably needs is to be confronted and saying, "You're a jerk with
the way you're treating these employees and, you know, we really got to deal with that.
Yeah.
Um, you also, also you talk about, you know, engaging with one's shadow.
I've done whole interviews about, about the shadow.
Yeah.
Most.
And, you know, you earlier you're saying like, you know, maybe you grew up in an ashram and
then you come to the, to the West and you misbehave sexually with students or something because
you don't have, you've never sort of dealt with the issues that an ordinary adolescence
would have enabled you to deal with because you were in this protected environment. So,
do you feel, would you care to define shadow and do you feel that everyone has one? And
does Zen provide specific procedures for engaging with it or would one need to seek outside help?
Yeah, I like the, again, Robert Augustus Masters has written very well on the issues of shadow.
And shadow are those things we don't want to face.
So when I was mentioning the difference between wanting to be awake and wanting to be good,
I think as a main goal, wanting to be good, it tends to encourage us to hide our shadow,
because it's getting in the way of our projects.
to be awake, I hope allows us to go into those dark spaces when they present themselves.
Joan Sutherland talks about both enlightenment and endarkenment.
And Robert Augustus Masters talks about the spiritual life being a fire.
We like the light, but we don't like the heat.
So there's, you know, I think a lot of people come to spiritual, you know, make, initially
come to spirituality out of a desire to be a good person and, you know, and feel good
at the same time.
And yet there are times when we need to really face, in Zen we talk about the three poisons,
hatred and delusion. And I think I mentioned when, you know, as we work with the precepts,
we're really opening up and and noticing, you know, our own greed, hatred, and and delusion,
no matter how long we've been on the path. There's always still some, you know, at least some bits of
this, and for most of us, you know, big chunks of this stuff left to work out. Whether Zen,
I think things like precepts practice in our group, I think it sometimes has opened up to people
some of their darker behaviors and beliefs. And it can be scary, but if you're actually
carrying around with you for a week, you know, I'm just going to notice when I have an inclination to
speak untruthfully. That could dig out some shadow stuff, or I'm going to really notice if my
my sexuality is kind of turning dark.
That could actually help you notice.
Probably, it also helps to do some more
direct psychological work.
I've done a couple of years of therapy myself,
and I think for a lot of people that more direct approach
is a very good complement to these more spiritually oriented
practices.
That precepts practice sounds really good.
You know, the spiritual group that I grew up in,
the teaching was that, you know,
all you have to do is water the root of the tree
and the whole tree will flourish.
In other words, just, you know,
dive into pure consciousness and stay there for a while
and come out and live your life
and everything else will be taken care of automatically.
And there were so many egregious examples of that
not working all the way to the top of the organization.
But the fact that in your practice,
you put very specific attention as a group,
as a community, on specific precepts
and really ponder them.
I think that must really have a healthy effect
on people's development.
Some people have taken the cycle more than once.
They found it helpful.
And at a different part of their life,
back and take it again and all new insights. And I think at least one of the cases, the
case of sexual abuse in the history of the Sangha that I've been in, I mean, retrospectively,
I could see things where this person was, I think, quite separated from their body in
some ways. As I suspect, they're carrying around a lot of shadow having to do with their
body and its desires. You know, that's me as a third person, kind of from the outside.
But yeah, and I think, you know, again, some people, they can teach very effectively for
a long time, and it's like, you're just shocked when they get hijacked by they've got something
they haven't dealt with, and it comes out, and it's, you know, terribly destructive.
Yeah, and I think it's worth saying or reiterating if we've already said it that this kind of
focus on precepts and on ethics is not just a kind of a sideline or a luxury or an entertainment
or something.
It's because violating these things can really scuttle your progress.
can really undermine and you know, you can really crash and burn to mix several metaphors
in there.
Well, crash and burn and take a lot of people with you.
And take a lot of people with you, yeah.
And so, you know, it behooves someone on the spiritual path to actually pay attention to
this as a critical component of your spiritual toolbox.
Actually, in Zen, I mean, there can sometimes be some confusion.
talk about three levels of practice of ways regarding the Zen. The first one is the literal,
which is just kind of the basic stop sign, you know, don't do this kind of thing. Second
is compassionate or relative, where you take into account more of the context, because in
real life, you know, it's not always clear which of the sixteen precepts should take precedence.
Sometimes you can't do them all at once, so you have to weigh and think about what's going
to, you know, have the best result. But then there's something called the absolute level,
which is, we say that at the absolute level there's no right or wrong. And one Zen book
quotes, I think, St. Augustine as "Love God and do what that wilt." That is, if you were
really loving God all the time, you would be doing the right thing, right? But that's
very dangerous because people delude themselves into thinking, "Oh, I'm a Zen master, so therefore
or whatever I must do is right.
And I've heard people say almost in that work,
you know, I questioned a Zen teacher about what they did
in a group with some other Zen teachers around
and this teacher's first response was,
"Well, it's what I do."
(laughing)
And then we kind of eventually talked around
that maybe it wasn't quite right,
but it was like, you know, my first go-to
about whether this is correct or not
was judging by my own behavior.
Pete: Yeah, there was this fairly well-known spiritual teacher who it turned out was sleeping
with a lot of his students and when it came to light, he said, "Well, I'm not doing
it. God's doing it."
[Laughter]
Danielle: Exactly. So, this absolute level of the precept, even though it's taught,
you know, it's so easily twisted that, you know, in our group where we go through the
precepts, we talk about taking that, you know, very carefully and watching out for that delusion
that we're, you know, we're actually in that state when we're, may very much not be.
Rick Yeah. Your statement about on the level of
the absolute, there's no right and wrong, well, there's also no universe on that level.
Debra Yeah.
Rick But once you get into the relative, there's
a universe and then all the rights and wrongs and everything else come into play.
Debra Yeah. You know, in the relative world, we
be bumping into each other all the time, and we'd better, you know, pay attention to how
we do that.
Yeah.
That kind of segues us into perhaps the next point, which is misunderstanding no self.
You hear a lot of talk of no self in not only Buddhist lineages, but Vedanta and so on.
And some people make it the kind of like main...
a guy named Richard Sylvester, who I interviewed, who wrote a book called "I Hope You Die Soon,"
meaning the self is going to die. And there are teachers who, you know, insist that they
don't have a self. There is no such thing. And the fact that you might perceive yourself
to have one is delusional. So what is your understanding of the concept of self, everything
else, if we look at it from the perspective of differentiation, your you looks at it as
that in Zen we say we live both in the world of emptiness and the world of form. And so
this world right now, you, the screen, you know, the bookshelf, the screen behind, this
is all one universe. If we look at it from the point of view of the absolute, I'm you,
you're me, I'm your bookshelf, everything else, if we look at it from the perspective
differentiation. You're you, I'm me, and it's all the same universe, but it has these two sides to
it. We often tend to think that we're in the world of distinct objects. Me versus you, this versus
that. I give an example of the book about where we're encouraged to sit both alert and relaxed,
and to a lot of people that's a contradiction. You're either tense or you're sleepy, right?
So we keep on distinguishing these things.
And the realization that we can describe metaphorically all sorts of ways,
but only comes through with this kind of cellular level through an opening experience,
which a person can only understand for themselves.
That is the experience of I'm both nothing,
in the sense that I'm not a distinct entity that you can pull off and separate from everything else.
And yet I'm also contradictorily everything, because I'm not separate from everything else.
And so there's no self in terms of no enduring entity, which actually is just
embarrassingly empirical. You know, what did you have for breakfast this morning? That's part of
what you are now, you know, and it's not going to be part of what you are a couple days from now,
except for, you know, a couple molecules somewhere. So it's, it isn't like it's a,
you know, it shouldn't be that hard to understand, but we don't, we don't usually understand it. We
usually feel like there's some kind of me that's looking out through my eyes and feeling what's
coming in through my skin, and this is, this is separate. So no self is understanding, and then,
then death is much less scary when we understand no self in that way because
and the metaphor I like is that we're waves on the ocean and just because our wave peters out
doesn't mean we've were anything other than ocean. We're still ocean. We've always been ocean.
We will still be ocean. Unfortunately, the misunderstanding of no self is I'm supposed
to just obliterate my personality and merge with my teacher and that I think is where we get into.
a great deal of trouble. Yeah, that's good. I like to think of it in terms of
multidimensionality. The universe itself is multidimensional and at different
levels it has different characteristics. I mean, you know, everything
seems solid at this level, but you know, a physicist would tell you this is almost
entirely empty space. There's really nothing material there. Yeah, it just kind of seems
seems solid, but if you could sort of see on the quantum mechanical level or subatomic
level you wouldn't see anything solid. And both are true, it doesn't have to be either
or. It's just knowledge or reality is different at different levels of perspective.
Yeah.
Yeah. And the same with the self/no self thing. You've probably heard of the spiritual teacher
Nisargadatta Maharaj, he was an Indian spiritual teacher, but he, one of his comments was that
the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity.
Yeah.
Because the universe is kind of paradoxical, or maybe it isn't to itself, because it, you
know, it makes sense from its perspective, but from any kind of limited perspective, even
on the level, you know, quantum mechanics, a photon is both a wave or a particle, depending
upon whether or how it's observed.
Yeah, so that's, I mean, in the book, I use two different diagrams that I mean, I have
this analytical, you know, brain, this is the way I work and for people who, you know,
for whom it's useful. I offer a couple of diagrams, where you know, this versus that
world is like a white circle and a black circle. And they're just they're just different.
Oh, the yin yang thing.
And then, you know, the yin-yang is an ancient symbol of that, where it isn't that the white
and black come together and make gray, just kind of some meh, mediocre thing, but they're
dynamically, they're two sides of the same coin.
We wouldn't know what dark is if we didn't know what light was, right?
You know, they mutually define each other.
And I have something called like a compass where you can put words in.
So like, I mean, going back to that, that I mentioned, you know, we tend to think of
being alert and being relaxed as being opposites. But if you've sat, you know, sat meditation for
a long time and you've really settled in with your body and quieted your mind, you find that this is
true. You can, you're not worried, you're not anxious, you're not tense, you don't have to
work to try to be awake sometimes, and yet you're more alert than you've ever been. You can hear
every sound and you know, feel every air particle. So this, you know, that what looks like two
opposites in our normal way of thinking actually can, you know, interact in this yin yang sort
of way.
David Russell Restful alertness, you could call it. I think
if there's a lot of residual fatigue in the in the nervous system, it can be hard for people
to settle into a state of restful alertness like that because when they get restful, then they
fall asleep. But the fatigue can be neutralized, it can be resolved, and so your system is fresh
and can get very settled without getting sleepy. Yeah, and you know, we call it practice for a
reason. It takes practice. It doesn't usually happen the first time, and it doesn't necessarily
happen every time, even when you've been doing it for years. But sometimes it does happen,
and sometimes you can really notice that this is a real thing.
Yeah, and there's a neurophysiological component to it, as I was just kind of indicating that,
you know, I mean, they've done all kinds of studies on all kinds of long-term meditators
of various practice traditions, and, you know, the brain changes observably and profoundly.
Okay, so second part of your book, "Why Zen Forms and Institutions Matter," and we might
be repeating ourselves a little bit, but let's see how we can do here. So, you know, this section of
the book, you could say, examines structural issues within Zen communities. And we keep saying Zen,
because that's your, that's your tradition, but almost everything we're talking about here, you
you could apply to almost any other spiritual group.
- Yeah, I think a lot of it--
- From the Mormons to the Hare Krishnas or whatever.
I didn't mean to lump you in
with the Mormons and the Hare Krishnas.
(laughing)
But, okay, so there's an inherent power imbalance
once one becomes a teacher.
We've already talked about that.
And some people try to ameliorate that
by not even arranging the seating on a dais,
but just like having everybody sit in a circle or something.
So it illustrates, we're all kind of on the same level.
- I mean, I think there is a false duality
in either hierarchy or no hierarchy,
you know, that those are only choices.
Because the fact is that people tend to differ in power
tend to differ in power, even sometimes for trivial reasons. Someone with a louder voice or taller or
something like that may have more power in a group. And when you're talking about Zen teaching, and
whether it's a transmitted teacher or just somebody who's been around longer,
you know, people will tend to look up to them and ask them questions, right? And may even trust them
with, you know, some personal details in a request of wanting to get advice. So it isn't that the
the power differential goes away when you sit in a circle. You can lessen it. But if you
have the impression that you've now erased it, I think you just fall into another danger.
And the way I got thinking about this actually came from my work in economics. I said I was
doing feminist economics, and one of the kinds of standard economics viewpoint of work is
that you do it for the money. You exchange your labor power, you get a paycheck, and
then you go and consume, and the consumption is where you get the joy from it, whatever.
If you look at the kind of work that women have traditionally done, it's been mostly
taking care of people, taking care of kids, taking care of the sick, educating the young,
these traditional jobs. And in those jobs, the women were expected to have some emotional
involvement, some actual feelings of care. Okay, now usually in these situations they also have
more power than the person they're caring for, the patient in the hospital bed or the child.
If we think that power differentials are always bad,
what do we do? Tell the mom just let her kid run on the street because, you know, they're just buddies?
No, I mean you want some hierarchy of power in that case. You want the mom to be able to,
you know, keep the kid from running in the street. But you don't want the mom to beat on the kid,
you know, so you don't want a domination kind of model. So you want it to make the power
be a power that is enabling and empowering for the person with less power. And so this is,
I called it asymmetric mutuality and kind of an academic term.
But can we use power for the sake of the people that want something from us?
And this is, there's a good old-fashioned word called fiduciary.
People think of it as just pertaining to money, but a fiduciary relationship is a
relationship of faithfulness. It's a relationship where someone trusts you for something.
You know, when I take my car to the mechanic, they're the expert and I'm the dumby who could
be taken advantage of, right? And when I'm a Zen teacher, people are looking at me, to me as the
expert, and do I cheat, you know, do I cheat the student, or do I try to make all of my act, or do
I take advantage of the student in some way, or do I try to make all of my interactions for the benefit
of that student? And I, you know, I think hierarchy doesn't have to, I mean, Zen has this hugely
hierarchical lineage construct, which I think accentuates the hierarchy beyond where it
needs to be. But at the same time, I don't think trying to pretend that we're all equal
works either.
Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you were an economics professor and you didn't show
up at the classroom and say, "Who wants to teach the class today?" or "Who would
like to grade all the papers?" Something like that.
Yeah, yeah. I tried to teach for the benefit of the students, but yeah, I was the teacher
And that's, you know, that's how I actually feel that most Zen spiritual teachers would
be better off considering themselves to be something like math teachers.
You know, people with more expertise in some kind of area, but wouldn't expect the math
teacher to also be the principal in the school board, right?
And a lot of spiritual teachers set themselves up as the pinnacle of a hierarchy in which
they're in charge, and that's unhealthy.
unhealthy.
Yeah, so maybe one way of putting it is, you know, having some kind of authority as a teacher
or, you know, in academia or in Zen or whatever, it does endow you with certain, I don't want
to say power, but...
It is power.
I guess it is.
I think you can name it as power, but then notice that power doesn't necessarily have
to be...
power as oppressive, okay? But there's also, I mean, you can use power against people,
but we can also use power for people. We can have the power to heal. We can have the power
to do things.
Right. But then with that comes certain obligations and limitations and responsibilities. You're
not empowered to do whatever the heck you want with your students.
No. No.
And that's where, you know, many teachers have gone wrong.
You know, they somehow feel like, well, I'm entitled to,
or, you know, this is, this will be for the students benefit
if I sleep with them or whatever.
They get it all twisted around.
Yeah.
So just, there aren't the proper boundaries there.
Right.
And again, I think there's a syndrome of authority going to
one's head.
Yeah, exactly.
know, it's, I mean, back when I was in my 20s, I was briefly for a short time, one of three directors
of a large facility in upstate New York, the TM movement had, and as soon as I was made a director,
and the other two guys, all of a sudden, we felt like we deserved ice cream with every meal,
or, you know, special treatment in some way, a nicer room, you know, all kinds of things. It just,
you know, go see your head. Yeah, I mean just little things like yeah, sashin who gets the
who gets the nicer room. Irene is laughing over here. Who gets the nicer room at a retreat and yeah, no I
notice all of those those things, yeah. She's saying ice cream is pretty innocent
compared to some of the obese. That's true. If only it were ice cream. If only it were ice cream, we could
give all the teachers ice cream and then not have any other problems. Except for obese teachers.
Yeah.
Now, there's a whole--
one more point maybe before we--
transference.
Let's talk about transference.
It's a psychological term, but you
use it in your book, projecting feelings onto the teacher.
This is an important aspect of that power.
I mean, the student is coming to you for something.
And I mean Robert Aiken, who is a Zen teacher, talked about teachers playing an archetypal role,
you know, in their students' minds. And so this teacher-student relationship can get
pulled into all sorts of sort of unfinished psychological projects.
And very frequently, you know, a student's love for the Dharma will get mistaken for as a love for
the teacher as a person, you know, or a romantic love, and then the teachers can let that go to
their head and think the teacher, you know, the student actually loves them rather than
notice that it's the dharma that they love and they're just deflecting it,
and teachers should know better, right? And there's also, I mean, one of the cases I saw
was a case of the teacher reversing roles, a very caring, loving, empathetic student,
and starts saying, "My marriage isn't going very well, and you're such a great
listener. Can I confide in you about this?" Absolutely not, from a boundary point of
view, should they have been doing that. But you get, "Will you care for me? Can I care for you?"
all sorts of... I mean, so if you as... somebody came to you as a teacher and said that,
would you just say, "Well, that's not my role. I'm not qualified to do that."
No, this was the teacher asking the student to listen to their...
Oh, I see. I thought you were saying a student was saying... Well, either way,
it seems like they shouldn't have that conversation.
Yeah, I mean, the students can ask too much of the teachers, but with the teachers turn the tables,
you know, like that on the student, it was, you know, it was grooming, you know,
trying to get the student to take care of them. So, and I think this is one of the things that
teachers need to understand to avoid some of that ego inflation is, you know, when this admiration
comes, you know, it is coming from, you know, the student looking for something. It is a projection
on you of something going on with them. They're not in love with you, you know. It's not that you
you have suddenly turned into this attractive person, right?
And not understanding that there's projection going,
transference going on and counter transference,
as the teacher's own emotional needs
get reflected onto the student.
I think there needs to be a lot more
consciousness about that.
And you don't need a PhD in psychology.
And in fact, I've known some people with PhDs
in psychologies that in the real world
don't seem to get this.
Just want to make a quick comment.
I forgot to mention this at the beginning, but if those listening to the live version
of this interview, if you'd like to ask a question, look in the description field underneath
the video, and there's a link to a page through which you can submit your question.
I do want to throw in, before we run out of time, that one of the things that has been
most distressing for me to observe is the level of institutional betrayal.
That is, we know that individual teachers can misbehave, okay, and then what?
Then institutions try to cover up for them. And then institutions try to cover up for them.
And teachers... The Catholic Church being a huge example. The Catholic Church being a huge example,
and I've seen some of that same dynamic going on in Zen. I read a lot of the research, it turns out
that like therapists very rarely turn in other therapists that they know are engaging misconduct.
There's a whole kind of in-group. Happens in the military. Yeah. I mean, sexual abuse and then the
higher-ups, you know, they don't really prosecute the people who should be prosecuted and so on.
And, you know, supposedly, yeah, and the police forces, you know, the panels that are supposed
to look at misconduct are made up of other police. So this kind of self-policing thing that these
groups who supposedly have high ideals, you know, the Roman Catholic Church is supposed to have
spirituality, Zen teachers groups, you know, police supposed to be about safety and the rest,
and people don't self-police very well. This is why we have lawsuits and why we have, you know,
criminal charges going on. And, you know, it's just really disturbing in a religious group,
because you kind of hope that they would do better. And the institutional behavior, there's a good book
out on trauma, which I cite in the book, and again, Judith Herman, I think, the author on trauma,
that with victims of things like sexual misconduct want is not like a restored relationship with the
teacher. That's kind of the goal of a mediation sort of interpersonal approach. That's not it at all.
They want to be supported by the community. They don't necessarily even want the perpetrator
punished so much as they just want to know that this was really not okay and that the community
backs them up and holds them in this. And when the communities, the sanghas, the boards, the other
teachers just kind of turn their back and try to ignore it and brush it under the rug.
It's hugely, hugely painful.
I can think of two reasons, and maybe you can think of more.
One is one you just mentioned, which is that, you know, there's kind of a good boy, buddies
kind of thing going on in the military or the police department or a spiritual community
where you just don't rat on your buddies.
And another is maybe, and this is very short-sighted, you don't want the institution to look bad.
Exactly.
So you cover it up.
I mean, look, you know, look at all the cover-ups in the Catholic Church and priests, you know,
pedophile priests being transferred to other parishes and things like that, thinking that
the problem was going to go away.
But it's made the Catholic Church look terrible.
I mean, people have left in Ireland, for instance, is such a Catholic country, it's diminished
dramatically in its participation.
So it backfires if you think you're saving your organization by hiding this stuff rather
than dealing with it.
Yeah.
But yet, it's easy if the people being harmed are weak and have little voice, and the people
doing the harm are powerful.
It's easy to, you know, the easy way, the shortcut way is to ignore it and brush it
And I have personally witnessed that and I personally witnessed a whole lot of shooting the messenger.
Like you said, I named some names in the book.
Yeah, I mean, everybody whose name I named in the book, in a negative way, who I knew,
I sent a copy of the manuscript. I said, you know, "Here's what I'm going to say."
So I was not at all trying to be sneaky about it.
ones are just kind of matters of public record. I don't really know the people. I just know that
this is, you know, what a group did an investigation and made this decision. Or there's, there's,
you know, public records out there of, you know, incredible abuses.
And sometimes it's not just a matter of shooting the messenger. It's a matter of shooting the
victim. You know, like, you know, saying, Oh, this person is crazy. They're a liar.
All the time.
This didn't happen. You know, how dare they say they're just trying to drag me down because I'm
I'm a prominent person, blah, blah, blah.
- Well, the same person who coined the term
about institutional, the term is institutional behavior
has this great acronym, DARVO, D-A-R-V-O.
- Yeah, I was talking about that.
- Deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender.
And for anybody who's ever thinking about standing up
to a spiritual authority about misconduct,
this is really helpful to know, 'cause it'll happen
and you'll be totally confused by it.
And it happens all the time.
They deny or minimize.
In some cases that I've experienced,
it was outright denial.
In other cases, it was, yeah, I made a mistake.
I'm sorry, life should go on.
Let's just pick up where we left off,
minimizing the whole thing.
So deny, attack, that is, this person is crazy.
They're insufficiently spiritual.
I've met with them in Dokusan.
I know they're a little, you know, that's one-on-one interviews, I know they're a little unstable.
Yeah, that they're liars, you know, you can just attack all sorts of ways.
And then reverse victim and offender.
You know, "Oh, poor me, having to put up with this kind of, you know, stuff."
Right? Or, you know, "They're being so harsh on me, you know, in trying to, you know, get me to be accountable."
You're trying to question me, you must, you know, that's really an insult to me.
That you're thinking of doing some kind of investigation of my conduct. You're insulting me.
Even in case, you want to have a private conversation about abuses.
Oh, that is just such a terrible insult that you would want to talk to me about that.
All this stuff sounds so familiar to me. I've just witnessed and heard about this kind of thing for so many years now.
That's why we started that organization, just to have some contribution.
Actually, I started, and a few other people started an organization, not for the teachers.
And this one is kind of Zen-specific, but I hope it works, and I hope it's a model that could be picked up.
But there's a real power imbalance between teachers and students, just for the reasons we've talked about.
about. There's also a power imbalance in terms of knowing and dealing with abuses, because
the teachers have formed networks among each other, you know, with each other. And the
teachers and kind of the senior student grapevine knows a lot more about abuses than ever gets,
than I can put in the book, because, you know, a lot of it is not documented, but it's out
there. Students, meanwhile, naively wander into these very dangerous sanghas with no warning,
So I started something called the Zen Learners Association, which anyone who considers themselves to be an ongoing Zen learner is welcome to join.
That includes teachers as well as students.
But with the primary goal of making a cross-Sangha network for students to also share their ideas about Zen practice, future of Zen practice,
warning about what teachers or sanghas to avoid,
as well as practical stuff.
Where do I get this kind of gear?
What's a good book to study for that?
But that's--
I think that's great.
--trying to even this power imbalance a bit.
Yeah, as I said earlier, I think that it's really important
that students be more empowered and not
be intimidated or timid and feel like they're so new.
What do they know?
Yeah, it's kind of a dicey point here because on the one hand, it's absolutely the teacher's
responsibility to hold the boundaries and make the relationship work.
On the other, and so it's not, when a student becomes abused, it's not in any sense their
fault for having become vulnerable.
But if you want to protect yourself, you know, keep your eyes open and, you know, watch for
some of these things and try not to be overly vulnerable.
Yeah, yeah, good point. I mean, there's even today, I mean, there are so many strange cults
in this world, where, you know, the stuff we're talking about here is quite mild by
comparison to what happens in some of these things.
Yeah, no, but no Zen teachers ask people to drink the Kool-Aid or, you know.
Yeah, right, which everybody, in case you, you know, Jim Jones, Jonestown, where people
literally drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, that's where that expression came from, for
those of you who aren't old enough to remember it.
But, um...
Oh, I mean, the other thing I
didn't quite get, we were talking about cultishness earlier.
Research on cults is that it's most often very idealistic people
who want to change the world.
They get drawn to cults.
Jim Jones attracted a lot of people
originally to the church in San Francisco
because of preaching about racial justice
and this sort of thing.
including some prominent politicians who thought he was a great guy
Yeah, yeah, got all sorts of honors and he was, you know, he taught a lot of good things, he inspired people to do
good things and, you know, overstepped his knowledge and authority in all sorts of ways and ended up
leading these people to mad... and they gave their children
finite life to it, just unimaginable stuff.
And if you didn't take the Kool-Aid, there were guys encircling the compound with machine guns who would
Yeah, take care of it for you.
So, I mean, the idea that it's only, you know, people who are kind of, you know, loners that
might be susceptible to cults.
That's often very intelligent people and people with the best intentions.
So you really have to take a look at, you know, how they treat dissent in particular.
Yeah.
And Jim Jones reminds me of a point, which is that you don't flip overnight from being
a pretty, you know, positive influence and saying and doing good things to being a total
lunatic. It happens incrementally. And I don't think this is a true thing that but there's
that alleg that metaphor of the frog in slowly heating water, who won't jump out because
he doesn't notice that it's getting hot versus a frog who would jump out of boiling water,
I would never throw a frog in boiling water. But
I use a metaphor in the book that somebody else put together about a cart very slowly going
up a hill, so you think looking out the window that the ground is level.
You don't realize you've climbed until it starts to go down, you know, just a gradual
thing.
Yeah, so the danger in that is that if you're in a group like that, you don't see the changes
because they're so incremental, they're so gradual.
And you know, if somebody comes from the outside, comes in, they might say, "Holy mackerel,
is a really weird cult you're in here, but it seems normal to you because it changed
so gradually and you were in the middle of it.
Yeah, yeah, there's this very subtle... actually, I mean, the interesting thing when I was reading
about authoritarian... people don't use the word cult so much anymore, but authoritarian
or charismatic groups, you know, they attract, you know, intelligent, well-intentioned people.
And then this thought control is very gradual, and it unfortunately, you know, or parallels
a lot of the things that we actually do in Zen in terms of sort of uniformity of movement,
chanting together, using words in unusual ways.
Some of these things are also done in cults.
You use words in unusual ways because you're twisting them to, you know, do bizarre things.
if you've ever read any like Dogon in Zen, you know, or looked at Koans, you know, what
have you got? You've got words being used in unusual ways. So you can't tell just from
sort of the forms or the outside. You really have to look at, you know, how is, you know,
is the authority at a level that's appropriate, and are people being treated with respect as,
know, people with their own minds, or are they being asked to submit to some top authority?
Yeah. So, as with a lot of the things we're discussing, there could be a perfectly benign
form of many different things that are healthy and normal and a little unusual, perhaps, but
not a problem. And then there could be kind of the dark side of that same principle. You
know, like, for instance, I don't know, just, you know, you
don't just completely do whatever the heck you want. If
you're in a group, there's a certain authority structure, and
you're expected to dress a certain way or behave a certain
way, and go along with the group to a certain extent. But then
the dark side of that would be some kind of mind control blind,
you know, the Reverend sung young moon, you know, marrying
700 people want to have never met each other, things like
that. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, we say we have a bunch of forms in Soto Zen to make kind of a feeling of harmony
in the Sangha.
But yeah, I mean, walking in step and this kind of thing is also can be a form of thought
control.
So, yeah, interesting.
I suppose one overarching point to make is that it's always good to exercise discernment
and discrimination.
You don't want to be a blind follower.
You don't want to be a total rebel who doesn't agree with anything or cooperate with anything.
So you can go along with stuff, but you just want to keep your discernment sharp and continue
to hone it.
Yeah.
I mean, I know you talked with Mariana Kaplan.
Eyes wide open.
Right.
Yeah.
I think coming into any spiritual practice, open hearts are required and open eyes are
required.
It's never, I mean, I went into Zen practice initially thinking, you know, I can just kind
of get on this thing and at some point it'll just be on rails and it'll carry itself, right?
You know, and I don't have to think too hard or, it doesn't work that way.
This discernment and this waking up is every moment or it's not at all, right?
Yeah.
Some traditions, particularly Vedanta, say that ultimately the finest level of discernment
is that which kind of gets you over the barrier from ignorance
to enlightenment.
There's just the subtlest, subtlest intellect
has been developed through practice and purification
and focusing on knowledge.
And that's kind of the thing that kind of pushes you
over the edge.
Well, I mean, I think in sort of practical terms,
if you're checking out a sangha, some things
like--
more practical directives like follow the money.
Yeah, very good.
Can be helpful in discerning.
If they're raising money for a project in the inner city,
but you notice the teacher's driving a Rolls Royce--
Or 97 Rolls Royces.
You might want to exercise your discernment.
Good point.
Yeah, there's Marianne's book, Eyes Wide Open.
That's a good one.
She also wrote one called--
Halfway Up the Mountain.
error, yeah, halfway up the mountain, the error of premature claims to awakening.
Debra Yeah. And I'm not sure that the
phrasing of that sometimes a little bit, that the, to me, it's, I would phrase it as the delusion of
thinking that enlightenment is like one and done. That it's permanent, that you can, you know, it's
not something that can, you know, that you backslide on and happens, you know, have to do.
Do you think there is such a thing as enlightenment in the sense of some kind of terminus point,
some final realization beyond which you cannot grow any further in the spiritual sense?
I mean, I don't do a lot of conjecturing about, like, you know, other realms or something like
that. That's just where I say, "Heck if I know," you know. But I think among human beings,
my sense is no. That every human being has so many, carries so much karma in a spiritual
sense or just habits and conditioning. And not only even just our own conditioning from
childhood or psychology or whatever, but all of our cultural conditioning, all of the racial
and ecological and everything else that influences us, that we're never... I don't think, I don't
if it's humanly possible to have our eyes open in all directions at once.
It just might be too much for human wetware and bodies to handle.
But that doesn't mean that we can't go in the direction of this kind of lure for spiritual
growth and for, yeah, doing the best we can.
Yeah, there's always room for refinement. One of my favorite quotes is from Saint Teresa of Avila,
she said, "It appears that God himself is on the journey."
Yeah, right. Yeah, we're at the end. Well, there's a, I think it was,
Surya Suzuki that said, "You are all perfect, and you can use-"
But you can do some improvement, right? Yeah, I love that one.
consideration of transmission. You know, what in the heck is that and can...
Always, you know, present.
Is what we were saying before about paradox or different dimensions. On some level,
you're perfect. On another level, you never will be.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. It's good. It's good to ponder this stuff.
Then there's the whole consideration of transmission. You know, what in the heck
is that and can what can be transmitted from teacher to student and, you know, go ahead.
- Generally, it's not really about like physical teachings or teaching styles being--
- Some of the key main points.
- But the main point, I don't think it's enlightenment. There are people who are
enlightened and not transmitted. And there's a lot of stories in Zen of enlightenment by
seeing peach blossoms or hearing a sound. It's not, you know, the teacher giving the student something
like that. There's some real dangers in thinking of it as being kind of leadership of the sangha.
It's generally, it's not really about like physical teachings or teaching styles being
passed along. Once you kind of get rid of all of the things, I think it's not.
Actually, there's, I may say there's, I'm talking about teaching, I'm talking about what
goes from teacher to student here, teaching transmission. The teaching transmission is
entrustment. Okay, it is this, I said, you know, people should really be terrified to be named as
teachers because you're being trusted with carrying this dharma wisdom that has come down from
centuries and helping new people who are trusting in you to take their steps on the way.
And to me the idea of lineage, a whole bunch of teachers behind you, is not that
now you get a merit badge and you get to step up on the stage with all these other honored teachers,
but they're all looking at you and they're going to watch and see if you screw, you know,
screw up. You have responsibility to keep this dharma wheel turning. So it's a real big trust
thing. In terms of, I mean, the word "transmission," what I think is a better description,
And so the teaching transmission ceremony should be, I think, on the part of the teacher, a judgment
that this person is not only spiritually mature, but also emotionally and sexually and all the
rest mature enough to be able to do this safely. That is what a teaching transmission should be.
There's another way in which, in Zen we talk about mind, you know, that there's some kind of
mind-to-mind transmission between teacher and student. But Khezan Jokin, who's one of the
co-founder of Sodo Zen, wrote about mutual recognition in the room, the room being the
room where the teacher and student meet. And so I like to think, I think a more modern
metaphor for transmission is the teacher and the student are both wearing earbuds,
and they're listening to radio stations and they're dancing and they can't
communicate verbally to each other what station they're listening to or what song they're listening
to. But if they can tell by the way they're each dancing that they're they're tuned into the same
station, that's this mutual recognition in the in the room. Okay, I see my eyes are open, my my
candle is lit, to use another metaphor, and I see that your candle is lit. Yeah, that's good. I like
like that metaphor.
And so that, I think, is what goes--
the more spiritual dimension of what
can go on between teacher and student.
The teaching transmission is about trust.
Maybe there's a bunch of aspects to it.
Maybe one way of looking at it is the transmission is not
like the teacher is zapping the student--
Right, it's not like--
Kind of like lighting them up like a lit torch
lighting another piece of wood on fire or something,
although that metaphor might be apt in some cases.
Yeah.
Some people have experienced this opening experience
in an interchange with the teacher,
and a lot of other people haven't.
So in any case, there's one candle on,
and then another candle comes on.
Yeah.
But one thing I've experienced, and probably you too,
is that there can be a kind of entrainment
when the field gets really coherent, you know what I mean?
And you just, it's elevating because your consciousness
somehow aligns with the ambient coherence of the field
and becomes more coherent itself.
There are examples in nature actually,
where like 1% of the cells in the heart
are called pacemaker cells.
And if they beat coherently,
they get the whole rest of the cells to beat coherently.
so your heart beats properly, or in a laser, even the square root of 1% of the photons,
if they line up coherently, the other photons entrain with them, and the whole thing becomes
as if one coherent beam of light, a laser.
That's what I kind of mean by this dancing, you know, dancing to the same music.
Yeah, yeah, that's it, it reminded me of that when you said that.
Which again, highlights the importance and value of a sangha, as long as it's a healthy
Because I suppose it would work both ways.
If a group is really toxic, you could get sucked into that toxicity.
And the value of a teacher in this kind of situation, the value of having an authentic
and trustworthy teacher, if you can find it, is... some of it is in the cultivation and
encouragement of these openings, and a recognition of a valid opening.
building a shrine to it, helping people move past that so it's not just a memory that they
enshrine, but also distinguishing between some things that people sometimes falsely think
are, you know, something cosmic and it's really just their mind playing tricks or something
like that. I mean, so spiritual guidance is, can be helpful in sorting out.
Do you think a qualified teacher could recognize when a student had a genuine awakening? I
I mean, how did you, what would you look for?
I hope that that's usually the case.
And I have, you know, yeah, there's something,
I think there's some pretty distinguishing signs of,
you know, a real opening experience.
Some people say that if you have the eyes to see it, you'll see it.
You could run into them in an airport concourse and you'd see,
that person is awake. I actually heard a story from somebody who noticed some guy over by the
luggage carousel from 40 feet away, and he recognized the guy was awake.
Yeah, I mean, it could be. I have not had that experience, so I'm not going to
pass a judgment on it. But in a teacher-student relationship,
sometimes these relationships, or often these relationships, go on for years.
and you get to really get to know the person.
And you get to see, you know, as a teacher
and, you know, as a student, when I was working with teachers,
there are certain places you tend to get stuck at.
And when you become unstuck, it's visible.
You know, it's palpable to the people who have ethical teachings.
How is this going for, you know, what is the next step?
So you don't just kind of build...
And then, of course, time will tell, you know.
Yeah, like I said, that experience of opening,
and it may be helpful to have it, you know, kind of confirmed saying, "Okay, yeah, you
know, you're right, that is what we've been talking about," you know.
And equally important to say, you know, "And what about your precept study?
What about your ethical teachings?
How is this going for it?"
You know, "What is the next step?"
So you don't just kind of build that shrine and spend the next 30 years thinking back
to that one opening as if that defines your life rather than what you're doing right now.
Yeah. One point I was discussing with my friends this morning was,
you know, spiritual growth is incremental, and so we don't generally experience big contrasts,
although there might be occasional. There can be occasional big ones, but mostly it's slow.
Yes. Yeah. But you know what I was saying, one thing I was saying to them is that, you know,
I can regard myself as being in a very different state of mind than I would have been if I
hadn't been doing spiritual practice all these years.
And if I suddenly were to snap out of this state to the state I would be in, had I not
done all that spiritual practice, well, first of all, I'd probably be dead.
But secondly, it would be an agonizing contrast.
But it's incremental, so it's normal.
But there is a cumulative influence, I think, of regular spiritual practice, which just
is with you, whether or not you notice it.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of the...
I mean, a powerful opening experience is not forgotten, but it's also, you know, it's
work to integrate that in your life.
And as you integrate it, you know, certain things that were, you know, just seemed insurmountable,
know, maybe before this experience and this work at integration, now are not, you know,
they're molehills, they're not even that. You do gain some liberation, some freedoms.
Yeah, you gain greater capacity to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Yes, yeah.
Yeah.
I do think we need to, you know, we were talking about equanimity earlier. You can't rely on
outside things, you know, even a spiritual teacher in a sangha to give you the kind of
security you really want, until you find some security in your heart and innermost being.
Oh yeah, can't come from the outside.
you have to, you know, and that's what, you know, we, our sangha has really learned over these,
you know, deep betray, I would wish these kind of deep betrayals on no one,
but they also make you, you know, really go to the heart of your practice.
Yeah. Another thing, just to run by quickly, is, you know, being, we mentioned sexual
misbehaviors, but also a lot of times students are overworked, you know,
to the point of sleep deprivation with no compensation.
And meanwhile, the teachers live high on the hog.
Or perhaps they are literally divested of their life savings
or large amounts of money.
I can think of several examples, people
who I actually interviewed, whose interviews I took down
when I discovered that had been happening.
And so that's just another thing to be cautious of if you're
getting involved with a spiritual teacher, you shouldn't be.
I have a friend who has had chronic fatigue syndrome for decades because he was pulling
like three all-nighters in a row and stuff working on projects in the TM movement, and
it really damaged his nervous system.
So there needs to be... it's just a danger sign when that kind of thing is happening.
And unfortunately, we've had it, you know, I mean, sometimes the teachers in our troubled
sangha history were asking too much, but then when there is teacher misconduct, the amount
of work that that board had to put in to do the right thing was just exhausting.
And so we've had to deal with, repetitively, with issues of board burnout in dealing with
the misconduct and continuing on as a sangha.
And it's a real thing because you can't
Yeah again, you know, it's much easier. It would have been much easier and we'd have you know
More people willing to be board members if we'd swept it under the rug like every other sangha, right?
Um, so how do you balance?
It's tough
It's tough and so yeah, it is so bad and we have in if yes, some people have
gone through that and um
I would say everybody still has has come through who got burned out by dealing with the misconduct have come through with a spiritual life
Uh, but people have gone different directions
Yeah
Of course as as I as we're talking about this I think of you know
legitimate professions such as teaching or police or
Met the medical profession where burnout is a problem because there's so much demand is placed upon a person
but um
you know
where it becomes unethical is where people are being used as slaves to do all kinds of labor for the benefit of the teacher.
I think our board was actually kind of burned out for ethical reasons.
Yeah, you kind of burned yourselves out.
Which was not a waste, you know, I mean, their efforts.
Voluntarily, right.
I think their efforts were much for the good, but it still, you know, it was, they paid a high cost.
high cost. But yeah, the burnout for not, you know, yeah, if you're sacrificing yourself
and the leader's driving a Rolls, you know, there's something wrong.
Every time I mention one of these points, specific instances come to mind of this actually
happening and with this or that teacher, you know, so we're not just speaking abstractly
here.
My experiences were not with, you know, the Rolls-Royce driving teachers, but I was financially
taken advantage of in the first of the betrayals I describe in the book, where money was raised
to create a retreat center for a larger group, and then later on some people decided to have
it just for them.
I no longer had access to the place I'd put in work, and what was for me a chunk of change,
not my life savings, but something I could easily spare.
That happened in the TM movement too. People would donate to buy a center, you know, and then the organization would decide to sell the center and the money would go overseas to who knows what.
And, hey, you want another center? Donate more money.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so let's see. You mentioned, what did you mean by this? What's wrong with the bad apple understanding of teacher abuses? I think this is a huge obstacle to effectively tackling the problem.
I've seen this a lot among both students and teachers in Zen, is that somebody behaves in some certifiably misconduct kind of way.
And everybody around makes it a personal thing about that person's failing or mistake.
as if it really doesn't have to do with me, it's not my responsibility,
you know, this was just kind of a fluke, you know,
we seem to have an awful lot of flukes in spiritual communities, right?
You know, because this stuff comes up so often.
And I think the much better understanding of this is that we,
actually I heard one person describe it as,
you know, it's not that there's just a few narcissistic psychopaths out there
waiting to take advantage of you,
is that we cultivate narcissistic psychopaths.
That is, that this slow creep of ego inflation
and pride and arrogance
makes us a much more homegrown problem.
And it's not a problem just out there for a few people,
you know, an isolated individual,
isolated bad apple here and there.
Great anger and great hatred and delusion are in all of us.
And if we don't recognize that, and one of the things I write about in terms of sort of boundary violations in teachers,
and you know, teachers not taking adequate account of their trust, the trust the students put in them,
and inadvertently doing things that harm the students, was a very trivial thing about an academic arranging lunch for a visiting speaker.
and asked, this was in the case of a therapist, who asked one of their clients to go to the lunch,
and the client read all sorts of things into that invitation for lunch when the therapist was just
trying to fill up the table, right? So it's not that this therapist was a bad person in any kind
of way, but they did a thing that harmed their relationship with the student. In other words,
the student thought they were special because they had been invited to this lunch.
and then didn't realize that the teacher hadn't intended all of that stuff.
So the teacher really had to backtrack and apologize to the student for all of this.
And the student had to realize they'd been idealizing the therapist.
So it created this whole sense of misunderstanding and betrayal over this very simple thing.
So these kinds of ways in which teachers can misuse power and harm their students
You know, the cases that make the newspaper, you know, are just the tip of the iceberg.
The rest of it runs through all of us as human beings.
Yeah.
And, you know, this therapist was, you know, conscious enough to be able to apologize and,
you know, recreate the relationship on a new basis of trust, but it took work for her, even
in that trivial case.
You know, how much more for the rest of us that can screw up here and there.
That's what I mean.
We shouldn't expect the teacher to be a paragon of absolute virtue,
but we should expect them to have basically good behavior
and the humility to atone and do restitution
when they realize they've made a mistake.
Yep.
Well, it's a work in progress, as are we all.
And I'd say by way of a concluding point,
point is that, you know, you and I agree that there's something very valuable in all this.
It's precious. It's really the most precious thing in life, you know, what spiritual development has
to offer. And so people shouldn't be disillusioned or discouraged by all this talk of corrupt
teachers and everything that we've been having. But you just have to kind of realize it is a bit
bit of a razor's edge, this path, and you have to be on your toes and be wise. What did Jesus
say to his disciples? Be wise as serpents, but gentle as doves.
Innocent as doves.
Yeah, so open heart, you know, definitely, and it's well worth bringing your heart to
and keep your eyes open.
Yeah.
Any other concluding remarks you want to make?
I think that's a question just came in. Let's just see what this question is. Yeah, one just came in.
This is from Parchi Dixit in Torrance, California. Okay, we were talking about this a little bit,
but maybe you can elaborate. What are the signs you look for in a student to recognize awakening?
Actually, one of the things that seems to spontaneously arise in any set of opening, I would say, is gratitude.
A real feeling of gratitude. And a lack of self-consciousness, a lack of intellectualization, a lack of distancing, lack of arrogance and pride.
a being able to go past some kind of stuck spot, you know, exactly what that is will depend on what has come out in previous parts of that relationship.
And a real shift.
you know, often describe, sometimes describe through metaphors, sometimes just described,
particularly in Soto Zen, they say you can sometimes just tell from someone's demeanor.
And you can see someone almost visibly lightening up, often when they've had some kind of experience.
They are just a lighter, more erect, more present person, you know, they might just kind of come in,
kind of dance all the time before. Yeah, that's good. Irene and I have been going through the
YouTube thumbnail images for all the 700 plus interviews because we have a whole new website
with a new design, so the thumbnails have been redesigned. And Irene commented the other day
that just looking at all these pictures as she puts together these thumbnails, impressed upon
her how much presence is common among so many of the people. There's just something in the faces
that you can see. It was a similar thing, but I told you I was an economist and did feminist
economics and that was not a friendly environment. Economics tends to be pretty hard on women in
general, much less feminists. But one time I was, for some reason, I was cruising a lot of departmental
websites. And a lot of the women had the same strange expression.
I mean, it was just physically there. I'm in a hostile environment and I've got to play like
the guys. Yeah. Interesting.
Although I have to say, I find the, I was a place that where they had a wall of pictures
of their spiritual luminaries. Yes. Please don't use that kind of picture with the soft focus.
We won't, we're not.
So,
aside from having written a book, which I recommend people read, is it out yet or is it coming out?
It's coming out June 10th. It's available for pre-order at IndiePubs.
Name it, it's "Practicing Safe Zen,
Navigating the Pitfalls on the Road to Liberation."
Okay, I think it's available for pre-order on Amazon, too. Yeah, I think it's cheaper actually on IndiePubs.
Okay, indie pubs.
And you're also supporting independent bookstores.
Yeah.
If you want to send me a link to that, I'll put it on your Bath Cap page so people can
go to that, your particular book on indie pubs. I'd never heard of indie pubs.
And so aside from that, and you live in New Hampshire now, you still are a Zen teacher,
so you're meeting with, you have a sangha of some sort.
Yes and no. It's kind of a complicated situation.
I became a transmitted teacher in the middle of the second of the three big waves of
uh of betrayal by teachers
At the
third wave
And I was teaching meeting with some people individually and i'm still i've all
All along i've been meeting with a handful of people individually
Uh mostly on zoom but as part of the third wave of teacher abuse
we'd been so beat up by teachers that I resigned as an official teacher at Greater Boston Zen Center.
It's still my home sangha. I've been acting there as a practice leader and member of some working
group type things, but I have not, the sangha has had no teacher because we've just been so beat up.
We just recently had a membership vote because there are some people who feel so bit up,
bit up at teachers, they wanted to try this kind of radically egalitarian, we'll all just sit in a
circle mode. And then I and some other people wanted to say, no, can we use power, you know,
can we recognize it and use it for good rather than trying to pretend it's not there? And there
was just a membership vote and it's taken a long time to get to this clarity. It's a long story,
because mainly these threats of litigation and everything else are just a nightmare.
Anyway, the vote went towards the Sangha. Having teachers there is a service role.
We call it a Sangha-led Sangha. I am not the leader of the Greater Boston Zen Center Sangha,
even after... I'll probably be reinstated as a teacher in July. I mean, we have to... we want
to put together the new bylaws and go through all the hoops, but I will not be leading the Sangha.
I will be offering teacher services to the Sangha, and the Sangha is run by the membership via the
board. So most of the people watching this don't live anywhere near Boston. Is there anything you
do that people who live far away can participate in, like you mentioned, Zoom sessions? Yeah, we do.
We do sits, generally hybrid, and we just lost our lease on our permanent place and haven't found a
new one yet. So the next few weeks probably be only on Zoom until a new physical location is found.
We also do book groups and the precept study groups that I mentioned have been exclusively online ever
since we discovered during COVID how much better that works for that kind of thing.
Great.
Exclusively online you're seeing everybody's faces, you can talk.
Our zendo practice includes chanting and that's really hard to do over Zoom and you know still
get the same effect. I'm also hoping that we will restart having Sashin's residential retreats,
But those are only in person.
So anyway, there's this mix.
And all this will be on your website, right?
Yeah, the Greater Boston Zen Center website
has links to the series.
Well, make sure I have that, because I think I just have a
Julia Nelson website.
Yeah, julianelson.com has, I think, on the About page,
it links to the Greater Boston website,
and also has ways of contacting me directly.
That's my blog site.
OK, great.
Well, if people know how to get in touch with you,
then I'll have that on your Backgap page.
It's been great fun talking with you.
Yeah, thanks, Julie.
I've really enjoyed it.
And there are a couple of technical screw-ups
in the beginning, but we worked it out.
OK, great.
All right, so thanks to those who've been listening
or watching.
And my next guest--
I hope I can pronounce his name.
It's something like Diyamud Omuchu.
And he's an Irish, rather mystical priest,
kind of in the vein of Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeaud,
Elia Deleu, people like that. And I'm reading several of his books right now,
well one at a time, and I think you guys are going to enjoy that one. So
stay tuned. Thanks.
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