Brad Warner on Hardcore Zen

But the fact that you want something from it doesn't have to be all that relevant. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort. To make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Brad Warner, and ordained Zen teacher and also the author of many books, most of which have hilarious titles like There Is No God and He's Always with You, Zen, Wrapped in Karma, Dipped in Chocolate, and his two thousand and four book Hardcore Is In. He also maintains his blog and YouTube channel, Hardcore Zen and as if that's

not enough. Brad is also a punk rock bass player in the band Zero Defects, and has published work in the Buddhist magazines Shambala, Son, Buddha Dharma, and Tricycle, as well as rock magazines such as Alternative Press, Maximum Rock and Roll, and Razor Cake. Hi, Brad, welcome to the show. Hell, it's good to have you back. You and I talked,

it's been probably four years ago. The main difference between well, there's lots of differences between now and then, but one of them is that in the intervening years, um, I've become a much more serious practitioner of Zen. So we've got a little bit more in common there. You know, I'd always sort of considered myself an all purpose Buddhist maybe, but I've gotten very specific and very focused in the last couple of years on Zen. So we'll have more

to talk about there. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he

looks up at his grandfathers as well. Grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well. I think it's an important thing, and I think it's a good parable, and it's true, it is the one that you you feed that wins. And you always have a choice of whether to feed your greed and anger and hatred or or feed the

other parts. You know, the better the kindness and love and all of that, and I think that's real crucial. The book that we're going to be talking about is not the one that I'm writing now. I've decided that I wanted to write a book about Buddhist ethics, and that plays into it too. There's a really strong ethical component to Buddhism, and I've been looking at some there's sort of non dual philosophies like advice to Vedanta and that and their ethical components there, but they aren't as

strong as in Buddhism. Buddhism really lays the ethics on heavy, you know. Sometimes I think even when I first came across it, I was I thought that was a bit heavy. But now I realized, I know, this is a really good thing to to follow, an ethical system to live your life, because it's good. It's good for me, and it's good for everybody else that I encounter. So I think feeding that good wolf is it's the best thing

for everybody involved. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I think we could explore that for a while, because when I started initially being really into Buddhism, I was really drawn towards language that talked about behavior was skillful or

it was unskillful. You know, there was this sort of framing that that I felt moved things away from an ethical or moral area, and that appealed to me for for quite some time, and than at times as I looked at this parable, there's moments where I'm like, well, you know, maybe we've got a skillful and an unskillful wolf and and you know, well, that's kind of a boring parable to have a skillful or unskillful. But more

and more, maybe this is what happens. I don't know, it's a part of natural, part of getting older or what. But as I've gotten as I've gotten older, I've gotten more interested in the ethical or moral ideas and a belief that there is some right and wrong that exists, or at least that that I can orient around. Yeah. Yeah, Zen Zen is really weird about that, because they'll on one hand, tell you there is no right or wrong, and on the other hand, Dogan is great for this.

He'll tell you there is no right or wrong, and then he'll tell you do the right thing. You know that The Shoakumakasa is one of my favorite passages in all of Dogan's and it just that's just Japanese for don't enact wrong, don't And I made that title of my book before a few books ago, called don't be a York and I just tried to sort of americanize

that into don't be a jerk. But there are different ways of looking at the world, and there are ways of looking at the world in which you can't say that there's any right or wrong, and then you know, words like skillful or unskillful kind of help get you

into that. But you can also say that in a given situation, when you're face to face with somebody and something has to be done, there is the right thing to do, and there's probably a thousand not right things to do, and trying to find the right thing to do is tricky sometimes because we tend to get very dominated by our own desires and fears and things, and you'll you'll respond based on desire and fear rather than on what's actually the proper thing to do in the moment,

which is why we have the Buddhist precepts. The Buddhist precepts are just kind of rules that you can defer to if in trouble and you don't know what to do you know, you just try to follow the sort of the ethical behavior of the ancient Buddhists, you know, don't kill, don't lie, don't steal, don't you know there's a bunch of them. Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that sort of two ways of seeing the world.

There's a view in Buddhism or Zen in particular, but I think it applies across the board of seeing that the world is whole and perfect and kind of as it is, all is well, And there's another way of seeing the world that is more the way we tend to see the world. You could refer to it is more dualistic, or I sometimes hear it referred to. Is there's the absolute and the relative, you know, And maybe the answer is just when it gets down to practical things,

there is a right or wrong. But how do you balance or keep those two views in mind in a way that's useful. It's tricky because if you go if you go just by language or an intellectual understanding, you get one sort of answer and you get another answer if you're if you're actually just in the moment doing things. And I think the point is to go for the

answer that works in the moment doing things. Everybody likes to talk about that, you know, absolute truth and relative truth, and I've never it's just maybe me, but I've never been comfortable about dividing things that way. I feel like the absolute truth and the relative truth are ultimately the same.

So it's not that there's one sort of behavior that works in the absolute realm and one sort of behavior that works in the In the relative realm, what you want to do for the sake of the absolute is the same sort of behavior that you want to do in the relative context. You want to do right by

whatever you encounter whoever. I was going to say people, but it doesn't necessarily always have to be people, but by whoever you encounter, and in whatever situation you find yourself in, you want to do the proper thing, and that is how the absolute kind of makes its way into the world. I think the the absolute is is always on the side of doing the proper thing. The problem is, the proper thing is often difficult. You know, you can't make a blanket set of rules that are

going to apply to every situation. This is one of the things that's acknowledged in the Buddhist precept My teacher had this God, I wish I could come up with ab off the top of my head. Be it this great way of phrasing it where he does this Q and A in this book that he wrote about the precepts, and he's kind of going on and on about you know, it's sort of absolute. You know, there's no absolute right or wrong and blah blah blah, and he goes on

for that the paragraph. And then the student says, well, then does that mean we should follow the precepts? And he said, we should definitely follow the precepts. You know, so even though there is no absolute right and wrong, and then things are as they should be, always and forever, you follow the precepts and that's how you get through this, you know, as Prince said, this thing we call life, you know, you're trying to do the right thing by

everyone you encounter. Yeah. I was reading something today earlier that was talking about that idea of saying of saying everything is perfect. It was a Zen book and it said not that everything is perfect in like the way we normally think of that. It just meant that everything was perfect, as in it was complete and it was as it is when we hear perfect, we sort of read into ideal ideal of paradise. It's not necessarily what's

meant there. Yeah, yeah, it's just complete. That's sort of the thing that I'm struggling with to try to explain in this book that I'm writing now, which I probably shouldn't overpromote because it'll be a while before it comes out. It's that idea. I was sort of putting some of this stuff on my YouTube page and somebody objected to the idea of what's the idea I put it forth?

You should always try to avoid harm or avoid doing harm to any living creature or sentient being, as they say in Buddhism, And somebody kind of came back with, well, if this means that a parent whose child is being attacked by a wolf can't can't fight back against the wolf because that would be harming them. You know, if people get into these weird when when they hear this, they go into this like absolute area where you can't

do anything. And the thing is, if you look at Buddhist ethics the way they sort of described on paper, you would imagine that Buddhists couldn't do anything, you know, like like they would be just stuck not doing anything at all for fear they would do harm to to something. I mean, the Buddhists get even really weird. There's a line that one of my teachers teachers said in a lecture that I was looking at, and he said, he's holding this stick that the Zen teachers often hold when

they give a lecture. He said, when they touched my stick to the ground, both the stick and the ground feel pain, but they don't say So that was what he said. And from the Zen point of view, you

can go, Okay, I get what he's saying. If you tried to take that out into sort of um mindset that we have, where everything is in a separate individual object with its own agency and its own feelings and so forth, then you get this idea that, oh my god, a Buddhist can't even touch a stick on the ground because he's he's going to cause harm to the stick in the ground. But that's not that's not the way

it is. It's actually a much more practical philosophy. But it acknowledges this other side in which we say that the whole universe is a living entity and everything that we do does kind of hurt it, you know, but we're at the same time, we're trying to minimize that amount of harm that we do because we know that that's good for everybody, and we know that that's how we eventually make this world a better place. Totally, totally,

all right, let's change gears a little bit. Your book that I've took most of my notes from is called Letters to a Dead Friend about zen Uh. There are a series of letters you wrote. Most of them happened while you were on tour in Europe, and they were written to a friend of yours who died at the age of forty eight from cancer. Yeah, that's that's basically

that's a good slummation. It was this interesting book to write because I had had this idea for a aisle that I had been writing some books and I still think are really good. But I was writing these books that were sort of deep dives into the philosophy of Dogan and trying to explain its relevance to the contemporary

world and kind of make it accessible to people. And I was going and doing these tours in Europe and elsewhere and getting questions back from the audiences that indicated that a lot of the people I was talking to not only I mean they were interested in what I had to say, but not only didn't they know who

Dogan was. They barely knew who Buddha was or what Zen was, you know, And I thought, oh, I better take a few steps back and put a book out that explains a very basic outline of what this philosophy is. In the meantime, a friend of mine had cancer and died um and it was really devastating because this is a guy I knew since we were both in high school, and we actually lived in the same house to get there for a while, so I knew him pretty well.

By the time he got the cancer diagnosis. I hadn't seen him regularly for a few years, but we've been, you know, communicating online like people do, and so we were pretty close. And I visited him a couple of times during his last illnesses and kind of saw what was going on. And after he died, you know, I had this idea of I wish I had talked to him about this Zen stuff. I mean, he knew he was around the entire time from the start of my

entry into the practice. You know, it would have been a couple of years after we met each other in high school, and then when we were living together in that punk rock house, I was sitting zazen, you know, every morning and every night in my in my little room, which was you know, down the hall from his room.

I didn't talk much about Zen to him. I'm not one of these people who kind of fancies himself as into Zen, you know, and and wants to kind of tell the world and where the broken stocks and whatever you do to kind of try to indicate that you're into some sort of Eastern spirituality. So we never really had a conversation about it. But he was a guy who was interested in those kind of things. And when I visited him, when he knew, you know, his prognosis, he got it very late in the disease, so he

never had a good prognosis. We were always hoping that that something would, you know, something would happen and pull through. But it didn't happen, and so everybody was aware that that that this is what was going to happen to

him and he wasn't going to last very long. But I decided when I was with him, and the two times I went up to visit him during his illness that I didn't want to be one of those people who tries to sell a dying person on their religion, because I think that's obnoxious, you know, that's I don't I don't like that, you know when people do that. So I thought, oh, I'm just gonna let him move

the conversation wherever it wants to go. And in retrospect, I had some regrets of thinking that, well, maybe I could have pushed things a little bit, you know, maybe he was a little bit too shy to go into some of these areas, and maybe I should have, you know, kind of moved the conversation in that way, because we never did get into the depths that we could have gotten into because we were spent like a week together two different times. So this book was sort of a

way to kind of rectify it. It's sort of a way to say all the things that I felt like I should have said to him, explaining this practice, explaining what it has to do with everything. And I had this funny question when I gave a lecture about this in in London right after the book had come out, when somebody said, of course, you're not a person who believes that your dead friend can actually read these letters,

And I said, wow, not exactly. I mean, I don't I don't put it absolutely outside of the realm of possibilities that he might be able to read the letters in some sort of way, although not as you know, a guy sitting up in heaven with a harp and and looking at the book, but there might be a way that that what he was receives what I'm trying to give him. So in that sense, I took it really seriously, like I'm actually trying to say this to

my dead friend. But I'm also right. I also know I'm writing a book, you know, and I know that most of the people who are reading it are not him, and and so I tried to make sure I wasn't saying anything in the book that I wouldn't actually say to him. You know. I tried to put my mind

in the mindset that, Okay, he can read this. You know, whether I absolutely believe that or not is kind of not relevant to me really, But I thought, for the sake of the book, I have to write it as if he can read it, and so it makes it very sort of intimate. So I'm telling him, uh, this, this friend of mine what what I would have said to him, And then the audience gets to look in on it if they're interested, and see what I have to say to to my friend who die. It about Zen.

It's a long explanation of the book. Yeah, well, I want to dive in and talk about a couple of things in the book there that you said, and and the first I'm just going to read just a short little section here because I really love what you say here. You say, we're like icebergs. What we know is only the little bit that shows above the water. The rest of us goes on forever below, unseen, unknowable. We can't understand it. We can only try to accord with it.

And I'd like you to just elaborate a little bit more on what does accord with these deep, unseen, unknowable parts of ourselves? What does that mean? It's interesting you should bring that up, because you know, certain parts of that book are really real. And that part actually I copied from a diary that I was writing right after this front, right right after I got the news that

he died. You know, the day described in the early part of the book, what I I went to this pizza shop in Hamburg in Germany, and uh and was sitting there writing in this diary, and that was one of the things I wrote, was about the icebergs. And then I just basically copied it into the book and didn't change it very much. But I think that's my feeling about life. Our conscious mind is able to access

a certain certain aspects about our self. And you know, if you're if you practice Buddhism like I know you do, the word self is a loaded word in Buddhism, but there is a there is a sense of personal self. And the personal self is something we I was gonna say, we know very well, but we don't actually know it very well. But it's among the things that we know.

It's the thing that we know best, you know. It's it's sort of a limited trajectory of a life history and likes and dislikes and things like that that all come together and we form a picture of ourselves which is about as accurate as the pictures that we form of anybody else. You know. Is one thing that struck me during practice one day, like you know, a wallop on the head, was that I know myself about as

well as I know. You know, a close friend, which is, you know, I don't know that much about you know, even my closest friends, you know, and but we do know that, and we know that aspect. But then there's this other business that just goes on. Like I use the metaphor of the iceberg, that's that's huge underneath and that that probably is much more meaningful than any of that personal stuff. That personal stuff is just sort of

weird little reflections of what's going on underneath. And to accord with that is difficult because the you know, the personal self has its own agenda, you know, as things it wants to do and you know, places it wants to go, and you know, stuff it wants to accomplish and all that, but it might not be in accord with that bigger sort of push that's going on. And that push that's going on is what brought your personal self into existence in the first place. This is me

being all weird. And Zenny, I suppose you know the reason you're here, of the reason you manifest on this earth is this thing that you are is for a bunch of reasons that are not accessible to the conscious mind. But you can sort of accord with them. You can sort of try to feel where this is going and and try to do what's best to make that happen. And it's something I've been working on all my life. And I feel like I've gone wrong in a lot of ways. But one of the Buddhist precepts is don't

speak or don't dwell on past mistakes. Try not to dwell on my past mistakes. But you know, I've made a lot of mistakes. And as I make those mistakes, I learned from those mistakes and I try to move things back on track. And and that's, you know, what I've always been trying to do, at least consciously, even if I screw up a lot of the times. And that's how I accord with it. But it's always a little bit. It's going on at a level that the

conscious mind doesn't have access to. So it's not like you can go, Okay, I need to, you know, buy prius. I don't know why people that's how they want to do, but maybe it involves buying a prius, but I think it's much more nebulous and harder to understand than that. It's more like a push towards and and end. And somehow I got pushed towards this Buddhist end. And I often wonder why, you know, why me? Why why Buddhism,

you know, of all things. Even after thirty seven years, because I figured it out today is at least thirty seven years of Buddhist practice, I still don't feel like much of a Buddhist. And I still don't know why this is the thing that I chose to kind of go for. But I think it's something that that needed to be done in the world. And whatever forces are out there that understand these things saw that need and popped me into existence and said, here you go, that's

your job. And I went, what, yeah, something like that. You mentioned old teacher of yours. I don't know if i'll get his name right, Nisha Jimam Nishijima roshi Um your teacher. And while you were in Japan and people would ask him what Buddha was, and he would say, I think Buddha was a kind of genius. And you go on to say, I think that's the best way to understand Buddha. That means he was sort of like

a spiritual Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. I think that's a great, great explanation, say a little bit more about what that means to us. Yeah, I just I really liked it when he said that. I if I remember right, the conversation was with a guy who was I think he was a devout Catholic or he raised a devout Catholic, and he really wanted to understand what Buddha was cosmically. So I think what he wanted was an answer like, you know, the savior of mankind or something that would

be more religious answer. I think it is what this I don't know for sure, but it seemed like in the conversation that's what he was reaching for. And Nishimuroshi came out with I think he was a sort of genius. You know. I love that because it sort of puts him back on the level because you can kind of say, well, there's a lot of ways you can take that. You know, Stephen Hawking or or Albert Einstein. We understand that they don't possess magical power wers or or they aren't celestial beings.

Uh in that sense, maybe we're all celestial beings, but you know, we could really need to go there. But they're people like us. But you also understand that if you wanted to argue about the rules of general and special relativity with Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, you probably you're probably not going to get You're probably not going to get very far. You know, you have to defer to a person like that when it comes to their area of expertise, you know, and same with with the Buddha.

The same with the great masters in Buddhism as well, is you understand that they're human beings and you don't try to kind of idealize them too much. But you have to understand that that if the Buddhists said something about ethics, for example, it's probably not going to make much sense to argue your point about ethics against Buddha's point about ethics. So so that's why I get funny reactions from the sort of audience that I have for

my books. I think because it's a sort of you know, it's a snarky, punk rock audience, and they're going, well, why are you always quoting these old ancient masters, because you know, aren't you going to say something for yourself or you know. I'll get that kind of response sometimes and I think, well, now, these these ancient masters are revered for a reason. You know, they're not. They're not just arbitrarily set up there on a on a pedestal.

It's because they said and did things that were recognized by their contemporaries as important and worth preserving even after they died. Sorry, that's Ziggy, my dog. He's he's barking at my girlfriend's mom in the backyard. But that's what I mean when I say that he was a genius. I'm you know, I don't know if n stem Roshi meant exactly that, but I think he did. He wasn't.

He wasn't really he didn't like all the sort of supernatural stuff that sent tends to surround Buddhism sometimes, especially being a Japanese person, where that stuff, you know, kind and can get overwhelming depending on which sort of Buddhist temple you go to. So so talking about him in terms of being a human genius was I think his way of kind of bringing that down to a more realistic sort of view. And so in your mind, given that when we talk about the three treasures of the

three Jewels, right, there's different words we could use. I I pay homage to I venerate I, you know, will say the Buddha, the Dharma and the sanga. Right, And so you know when we say Buddha in that sense, what do you think we're saying there? You know, is that not a phrase you even like? And if it's one that you don't like, or if it's one that you do use, what's that translation in your mind mean?

Because where I get hung up is I'll go, well, okay, the Buddha, historical figure who is really wise, gave us all these teachings. But isn't that sort of the dharma? No? Well, okay, you know those two get confused in my mind. They should I think probably, you know, the Buddha and the Dharma and the Songa even are kind of a single thing, you know, the song of being the group of practitioners, and the Dharma being the teachings, and the Buddha being

the person. But of course, if you if you get into Mahayana Buddhism, if you want to get into the sort of philosophical intellectual history of the thing, they transformed the meaning of Buddha from being the historical person to a sort of ideal that is believed to be a real thing, you know, not just an idea that pervades the whole universe kind of a living spirit, if you will, of rightness. We revere that, and we honor that in the sense that it manifests in everybody, you know, not

just the historical figure you studies end. So you know that Zen tends to almost downplay to the annoyance of a lot of other sects of Buddhism, the historical figure of Buddha. The Zen teachers often quote the Buddha, but if you actually look at what their quotes are from there, from Mahayana sutras, which were written long after the Buddha died, and you don't get a whole lot of quotations from the actual historical Buddha when you listen to his end

teacher talk about Buddha. So it's not it's not exactly the sense of revering that guy. Although although he was a special person, you know, you have to kind of acknowledge that he said something into motion that was very, very important and it shouldn't be kind of looked down upon. And the dharma is is that thing. But then of course you get into Mayana Buddhism again and the word

dharma becomes a kind of catch all term. I was just trying to explain it in a piece of writing I was doing yesterday, and I realized, well, the way that the word dharma is being used in this particular sentence means anything and everything. You know, this cup that I'm holding, well, your audience can't see this cup I'm holding is dharma, you know. Literally, that would be included in in all dharmas. In some versions, even aspects of

the physical world are are dharmas. The one I always had trouble with if we want to go there is sana because I, like I said, I never really fancied myself a Buddhist, and I would be with these Buddhist groups, and I know that this is an important part of the practice, but I'd be kind of like, I don't want to know these these jokers, you know, and a lot of them weren't really friends of mine or anything.

Even among the groups I practiced with, I'd be kind of like, I don't hang around with that guy, you know, except when we're doing something Buddhist e together. But then that should be honored too, because these are the people, you know, like it or not. These are the people who are taking this stuff seriously. And whether you agree with them or whether you kind of mix with them otherwise, this is who's working on this stuff. It's always a

little hard for me. You know. There's this trendy phrase, the Mahasanga, and moha means great, and they're talking about the greater group of Buddhists throughout the world, and usually they're referring in America to American Buddhists, and I look at American Buddhism and I go, oh, yeah, you know, there's some stuff in there that I kind of go, well, yeah, that's fine if you want to do that, but I

don't think that's what I'm working on. They get very political and stuff sometimes, and usually it's all for a good cause. You know, I haven't seen many Buddhists supporting causes that I think are bad. But I also think, you know, there's there's something deeper we're working on here, and if you if you kind of channel it into a political cause, you get lost in the politics of it.

And I'd rather bring it back down to what it is, that it's core the reason we're trying to do the right thing, rather than the you know, the specific laws you're trying to get enacted or movements you're trying to support and stuff. There's always a core to that that's more basic and important than the specifics, and you can get lost. I'm sorry, I shouldn't go there though. That opens the whole care that we're not gonna have time for.

But good because because I actually made a decision, you know, after the pandemic and everything started going wonky with everybody, that I'm just really going to stay away from that, like I haven't been getting it. I've been trying to stay away from it before, but dipping my toes in here and there, and then I thought, no, I'm gonna stay absolutely out of that, you know, just work on something much more, I think, much more basic than that. Let's talk about something that I think is pretty basic

and yet universal and pretty important. And it's one of the most challenging I think aspects of a serious Buddhist practice. Um and it's not self, although it can't avoid the self, but it's really the discussion around desire and goals. There's a lot of saying, you know, particularly in Zen, that you know, we don't practice meditation or zazen. We don't do it for any reason. We don't do it for

any goal. There's no goal. What we want to do is abandon our goals, right, and and then of course you get yourself into an infinite loop that goes well, isn't wanting to be free of desires? Another type of desire? And but I want to talk a little bit about why are we even trying to not have a goal in our spiritual practice. Well, it's a good question, because you're you're right, you can get into this endless loop of the goal of having no goal is also a goal.

That the way my first teacher, Tim McCarthy saw that for me is he said, well, yes, semantically, the goal of having no goal is is also a goal. But when you're actually working on having no goal, it's very different from working on having a goal. You know, the actual practice of it is a whole different way of working and things. And probably the main reason for not having a goal is because everything in our society tends to be very goal oriented. I just started looking at

Alan Watson. I usually used to avoid even mentioning him because you know, he's very pop culture and stuff, but he said some great things. And there's this little video you can find on on YouTube that's done by Trey

Parker and Matt Stone, the South Park Guys. They animated to a speech that Alan Watts gave in the sixties or something about having goals, you know, and it's it's about in the first grade, your goal is to get into second grade and you're you know, and then your your goal is to get into junior high school, and then your goal is to get in high school, and then your goal is to to you know, maybe get into a university or college, and then your goal is to get a job, and then you know, you you

live your whole life with all always something out there that's the thing you're going for, and each time you get it, you know, you might have a moment of elation, like yeah, I did that, but but pretty soon that just becomes another part of the ordinary life, and then you have to go for the next goal. So everything is is goal oriented, and the idea of zaza and

meditation is to do this without any goal. But of course nobody's gonna do zazen, especially you know, like me for thirty seven freaking years without wanting something from it.

But the fact that you want something from it doesn't have to be all that relevant, you know, you sit on your cushion, you know, wanting whatever that thing is you want, and as that want comes up in your mind, if you're working on this seriously, you put it aside and going, okay, that's here's where I am now, you know, And and I want to be better, but here's where I am now, and just keep facing this as it

is and not worrying about the goal. The other problem with goals is, especially when they're spiritual goals, is they tend to just move you in the wrong way. There's this one passage of Dogan's that I was working on a couple of weeks ago, where Dogan says something like, no one ever had realization and thought, oh, this is realization. It's just exactly as expected it to be, you know. Uh So, any sort of expectations you have about this, you know, realization, which is a normal, the standard goal

of a lot of meditators and zen practitioners. Any sort of idea you have about it is a false idea anyway. So there's no real sense in setting your sights on that thing that you just made up out of out of the same sort of confused problematic consciousness that that you're sort of working to overcome anyway, So you just set aside all goals and just try to see things as they are. The irony of it is is that things as they are is quite different from what you

imagine them to be. And once you start to catch glimpses of that and notice how wrong you've been. In my own case, I can tell you that that when that first started happening years ago in my practice, it was sort of scary because I realized that every idea I had about who I was and the life I was living and what the world was it was completely wrong, you know, And and at first there's nothing. You don't

have anything to put in its place. You know. It's not as if you get a download of the right idea and go, oh yeah, it's like this, you know. That's what sort of religions are good at. You know. They come up with a different sort of framework for you to to to follow and say, oh, yeah, this is the will of col Ob or I don't know,

I just made that up, or it's Mormonism or something. Anyway, it doesn't matter, you know, whatever whatever it is, you know, you you have that idea, but but in this end form you're just putting aside any ideas that you have, and you kind of you can kind of feel like you're just a drift, like there's nothing it's not. You know, if I can't believe in my own body and mind, then what the hell can I believe in? And this is one of the reasons the practice is also all

about relaxation. You know, it's fun to pooh pooh people who talk about meditation as a relaxation thing, but it really is. And part of the reason that that relaxation is part of it is you have to be very relaxed when it comes up to your mind that you don't even know who and what you are. You know, you have to be like, Okay, I don't know who and what I am. Now what am I going to do about that? And and what it turns out is, you know, spoiler alert, that who and what you are

is actually a good thing. You know, there's nothing scary about it. In fact, it's like a foundation. It's like a solid, solid foundation that you find at the bottom of all this when you thought that you were in free fall and then you realize, no, I'm standing on the most solid ground possible, and it just seems like free fall because everything I thought about it before was wrong. I don't know if that makes any sense, totally, totally. Yeah. You said a couple of things in the book that

I thought really really summarized this well. You you said that practices for getting you into your true experience. It's for learning how not to be chasing after something other than where you are right now. And then the other thing that you said, and I love this whole sort of couple of sentences, is you said, what we're trying to do in Zazen practices to get into a real experience, unadorned as it is, and see it for what it is. What happens when you do that is surprising for me.

When I finally started to understand what my own life really was, I discovered that my ordinary, mundane life was much subtler and more beautiful and important than I ever could have imagined. And and I think that's that's such a great way of saying that the problem with goals, by their very nature is they are somewhere else, some other time. They always draw our eyes up and away

towards someplace else, something else, instead of right here. And the amazing thing about right here is that if we actually sort of touch it, it's very different than what we think of. We think of right here, right now is generally kind of boring. But when you when you actually touch it in a deeper way, it's, as you said, it's it's something much more than that. And you just say, you know, when we try to acquire things that are far away from this, we miss out on what is

very near. We miss out on our real lives here and now. And that's the saddest thing that can possibly happen. Yeah, I think so, And it's something that I personally always have to remind myself because I'm just like anybody else. I can get I can get seduced by, you know, the idea that there's something better, especially, you know, you look at a time like we're going through now, everything seems to be wonky and you just want it to be over and resolved and things to get back to

some sort of semblance of normalcy. And it's hard to see that as being this is exactly where I needed to be. You know, this is especially difficult in in these times, even for me. After all the practice I've done, I've gone there enough to know that that's true, you know, and and I've read enough teachers who themselves have gone through very difficult times and and they say that's true too.

You know, I think about Ishima Roshi, and you know he was practicing zaza and during the Second World War, you know in Japan. Um. You know, these are heavy times, and people have gone through them and gone Okay, this is absolute reality as it needs to be, and there's a kind of deep beauty to it that transcends any ideas you might have about how it ought to be or how you want it to be. Like I say, it's a tough sell, especially right now as they say to say that, because I think we all agree that

this is not where we want to be. But in the in another sense, this is this is part of a process that is is an endless process that's been going on for a very long time, and we're just trying to kind of accord with it, just to get back to the thing I said several minutes ago, trying to find our own place in it and our own right action within the situation that we are forced into. I have found Zen training to be very useful for me during quarantine, because every time my brain goes I

need to be somewhere else. Some zen voice pops up inside me and goes, no, it's right here, and I'm like, oh, okay, I gotta I gotta pay attention. Um. The thing that you go on to say, which I think I want to take this this point just a little bit further, is the thing that has always sort of been a challenge to me as I look at this basic Buddhist idea of hey, it's you always wanting things to be

different than they are. That's your problem. If you could stop doing that, you'd feel better, right, which it makes intuitive sense. At the same time, I see this desire just pouring out of us as human beings, you know, and the thought that I'm trying to eliminate that feels like, well,

I'm trying to squash something that's essential. And you really make a nice point that, you know, desire seeking is sort of build into our nature, and if we try and battle it out and eliminate that, we're just going to fail. So how do we work with the fact that desire is not going to go away just because we think it's not a useful tool. It's a difficult one.

One of the things that Jima Roshi used to like to tell in his lectures is in Japan you get the same sort of basic Buddhism as you get anywhere else now because they kind of follow a Western model. And the idea is that the first noble truth is is all life is suffering, and the second one is suffering is caused by desire, and the third one is that you cut off suffering by cutting off desire. And he said that that that never worked for him, because

you can't cut off desire. You're always going to be desiring something. You know, at the most basic level, you desire to breathe there, you know, and eat, you know, and and sleep and do things like that. You can't you can't just evade all desire. So you you kind of have to put desire into its its place. It comes up and you notice it and you go, well, you know that desire is a desire for something that makes sense, you know, like like I'm hungry and I

want to eat, and you do that. And the way desire goes wrong is when when it becomes greed, I think, and maybe that's you know, the real key to it. Maybe the problem isn't so much desire as as a kind of greed for wanting things to be different from how they actually are. Wanting things to be. You always want things to be better, but you kind of even put that aside and just allow things to be as they are. And I mean, it's a tricky one because desire can mean a whole lot of things. Not every

desire is bad. Desire for world peace is not a bad thing. The desire for a less polluted atmosphere is not a bad thing, you know. The desire for an end to the pandemic is not a bad thing, you know, And I'm glad there's a lot of people working on those projects at the same time. You know, you you want to eliminate a tendency to desire more than what is actually necessary. But that you know, you can fine

tune that in lots of ways. You know, the early Buddhists would have one robe and one begging bowl and trust the universe to provide for them. And ironically, you don't you don't hear a lot of stories where that fails. You know, they always seem to to get by. It's a very difficult thing, and I don't know too many. I might know a couple of contemporary Buddhists. You try that, but neither of my teachers ever went that far with it, but you do try to kind of limit it to uh,

what's manageable. And for myself, you know, especially in light of recent events, I've really cut down on a lot of things and realized there's so much, there's so much that I don't actually need. I think there's maybe an interesting consciousness developing during during all these shutdowns that if we can accord with it and and find our way into it, might actually end up really improving the world.

And of course there's all the negative things, which of course the news is doing a great job of covering, but they're not doing such a great job of covering the positive sort of things that are happening to people as they are forced to, you know, limit their movements and limit what they can get, you know, yep, yep, totally. Well that's the news for you, all right. Well, Brad, thank you so much for taking the time to come on.

You and I are going to talk for a couple of minutes in the post show conversation about a statement you make, which is that what most people call spirituality is bull You and I are going to talk about that in the post show conversation listeners. If you would like to get access to the post show conversation and other things and the joy of supporting the show, you can go to One you Feed dot net slash joint. Thanks so much Brad for coming on. It's been a

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