Shozan Jack Haubner- No Self, an Opium High and a Death Sentence

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 Y, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is shows On Jack Hofner.

Shows On. Jack's writing has won a push Card Prize and been published in The New York Times, Tricycle the Sun, the Best Buddhist Writing Series, Lions Roar, and other publications. His first book, Zen Confidential Confessions of a Wayward Monk, was chosen as one of NPR's Best Books of two thousand thirteen and won an Independent Publisher Book Award. His new book is Single White Monk Tales of Death, Failure,

and Bad Sex, although not necessarily in that order. So normally at this point in the show, Eric asks the listeners to go to one you feed dot net slash support and donate to the show or something thereof. So instead of asking you to donate, what I wanted to do today was just ask everybody to take an episode of the show that you like and share it with somebody you care about, because that would be a great gift to us and to them and to you because

sharing feels good. Okay, don't get me started. Here's the interview with shows on Jack Hobner. Hi, Jack, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's fantastic to be here again. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on again. You were one of our early guests, so thank you for coming on a show that almost nobody knew anything

about at that point. And your book then was called Zen Confidential Confessions of a Wayward Monk, which I absolutely loved and and I love the new one just as much, and it is called single White Monk Tales of Death, Failure,

and bad Sex, although not necessarily in that order. I heard somebody refer to you as like a Buddhist David Sedaris the other day, which is a remarkable compliment, but I understand exactly they're getting at, because you have that unique ability to be funny and extremely poignant and heart wrenching within a sentence or two of each other. And that is just such a such a gift in in art. So I really enjoyed the book. Oh thank you very much. I'm waiting for the day that someone says David Sedaris

is like a secular shows on Jack Hawker. He's washed up. I think. I think his best days are behind him. Um, your best days are ahead of you, so we should be we should be set here. Although I am going to see him this Saturday, so hopefully his best days are at least a few months away from being, you know, happening, because I hope to catch him in a good night anyway. Let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's

a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, what's up, Doc, No, he does not what he says at all. He says, he says, grandfather,

which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. Yeah, that's a wonderful parable. Thanks for having me on again so I can misinterpret it once more. Um, you know, it's funny. I was thinking, I've been thinking about this because I just listened to the Robert Thurman interview. You guys did. I loved his answer. He said that

you feed the bad wolf to the good wolf. Um, there's a there's an inherent arguably, and not to be too pedantic, but there's an inherent dualism, or a dualism suggested in the parable. And I never quite know what to make of that. I find myself thinking, I'm trying not to throw red meat to either of the wolves these days. UM. You know, I remember when I first did my very first zen retreat. Um, I wasn't even remotely prepared for it. Um. It was, you know, nineteen

hour days of just sitting on a cushion, UM, breathing. Interestingly, I just did a zen retreat last weekend. Yeah, because you know, you know, you know, the right, That's what I was getting exactly. I mean, all wonderful um, a deep, um, purgative, profound experience. And part of it was sitting there and listening to the wolves howl within um and starting to come to the realization that what I had thought was

a bad wolf maybe wasn't so bad. Maybe I needed to listen a little bit more deeply to what was behind it's it's pleased for food um, and a good wolf was maybe just uh the ego in in wolf's clothing. The practice that I did and I'm so grateful for and still doing on a regular basis. Um, I was taught that you have then. I mean this is an oversimplification, UM, but you know you sit down on your meditation cushion. Um, You're doing the most simple activity possible when you meditate

and it's just breathing. And I was taught that you have an inside world in an outside world, and um, you know, when you inhale, you're taking in the outside world completely. My teacher would say, you have to give yourself completely inhale the whole universe. And then that activity comes to an end amazingly, profoundly, and then there's a zero moment when there's no inhale and no exhale, and then the situation reverses itself and you exhale and you

completely give your interior universe to the outside world. And in a very and it sounds a bit um heady until you think about the fact that in a very simple, basic way, when you breathe, your your becoming your surroundings, and your surround you're gonna becoming you. I mean, you take an oxygen and it becomes part of your blood stream, and it goes into your toes and into your heart, and it becomes part of your blood stream and your thoughts um. And then when you exhale, your breath becomes

part of the world around you. It becomes part of the trees um, you know. And it's in a similar way things are happening through all of our senses. We're taking in the sounds from the street and in Los Angeles right now, staying at my old apartment that my my sister is now living in, and I can hear the traffic outside, and you know, the rubber hits the road, and there's a sound wave that travels somehow through the air or maybe my ear reaches out, because I don't

know what happens, but there's a connection. There's there's no separation, there's a continuum of experience. The sound wave hits my ear drum and interacts with my nervous system, and and

a feeling arises me. A thought eventually appears. It says car, and then I have a memory about a car, and then I think about how I'm thinking about that memory, and they're at the top of experience is what we call the I am self right, um, So, bringing this full circle to your question, um about about the wolves, I if the world's if the wolves are a metaphor for the inner life, then then what I've tried to do in my practice get out of the way and

let the inner world in the outer world meet completely, and from that meeting, a new moment arises. So so rather than looking at it as a good wolf or a bad wolf in that dualistic way, more than trying to maybe relinquish my notions of good and bad and right and wrong and behavior. Um uh, it's completely connected and selfless as a way as possible, and then good and bad spontaneously arise, right, And I'd like to get

into the concept of no self a little bit. And then I think the tension between good and bad we will also explore as we talk about your experiences at your form monastery. But I want to go right now into because what you said about the wolves ties very much to something that was not in this book but I read, which was an essay you did on the

abortion question, which is just brilliant. But I'm just going to read part of it because I think it speaks to a lot of what you were saying right now, and um you say, I have come to see that the stumbling block nature of life's deepest questions is not necessarily an obstacle to understanding the human condition. Rather, it speaks to the very heart of it. Ever, wonder why so many of the conflicts at the heart of life seem to be logically and ethically unsolvable one way or another.

Could it be because they are the very conflicts that generate life. You wrote that essay a while ago, But that does sound very similar to what we were just saying. It really does. These are really really deep questions, and I struggle with them. So I need to I need to be um honest about that. I I don't consider myself a moral rel to this, and I and or

a much less a nihilist um. And oftentimes I get instincts that something is right or something is wrong, and there's no part of me that's genuine that says, UM, ignore that completely because you're a non duels and practitioner.

So that's not the answer either. The longer I've practiced and lived, the more I've come to realize that my knee jerk notions of good and bad and right and wrong, more often than I'm conscious of, have to do with affirming myself and my people and my ideas, and almost have more of a Darwinian flavor than a than an ethical or moral flavor. And that's something that I have

to really consider and to sit with. My mentor who introduced me to this practice, used to tell me all the time dude, It's not about good and evil, right and wrong, naughty and nice. It's about where these things come from. And that's an interesting question. To good and evil have the same source? Is good and all the right term for these two halves of what experience? Then if they do come from the same source, let's talk about this idea of no self for a moment. I'm

very interested in that. I have studied Buddhism for a long time and you know, and practiced, you know, to varying degrees, and that is the one sort of topic that I largely just sort of went well, that's interesting and kind of got back to the other teachings that felt practical and useful to me. And without going into a ton of detail, I've had some experiences that have

caused me to revisit that. So let's let's talk about this idea of when Buddhism says there is no self, because, as I was for many years, it's like that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. Clearly, here I am, and I feel myself very strongly. So what is it that that Buddhism is getting at when it says that, you know, there's no self or that there's a small self and a big self, or there's lots of different words for it. Wait, this is a this is a

fifteen minute interview. I can go now, right, yeah, I really do not really going to make me go there. Not only do you have to go there, you have to make it succinct in two minutes. So go. Oh jeez, Louise, I am so this is so far above my pay grade. Um, I will I will say that the question is humbling, and I'm not as un master. I was a monk and then a priest, and um, they're far more qualified teachers to answer this. But in any event, um, it was really helpful to me to get introduced to the

teaching of of not self. Um. And there's different ways to look at it, in different different ways to practice with it. So again, I guess I don't want to repeat myself, but maybe I'll return to the earlier analogy. One thing we can contemplate is and then I was asked to contemplate over and over and over at the monastery was how does the self arise? So it's interesting my teacher never asked me who are you? I mean? I got a collection of essays from a bookstore in

Pasadena Ones called who am I? You know, existentialists debate the question, and I had asked that question for many, many years. I was attracted to the writings of Nietzsche. I'm not gonna do this in five two minutes. By the way, um my noseelf is revolting against that requirement. So you know, that was a big question for me for a long time. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? First question my teacher asked me was where are you? So that's something you can sit with.

Where am I? Take who off the table? Where am I? Am I? In my body? Maybe? But if I lost some fingers, would that mean myself is gone? Um? Am I within a certain memory, a certain feeling, a certain thought kind of? But then there's new feelings and thoughts that arise. Um A Buddhism asks you to question what my teacher would say. You're standing unconditionally on the I am self. Just consider how the self arises and how it passes away. So the teaching is not that there

is no self. That the teaching is the self is not fixed, it's not solid. That's the mistake we make, and that's the illusion we make. We think that it's fixed and that it's solid at its porous and the world is coming in and it's giving rise to ourselves. And then we are doing a manifest and activity and we're interacting with the world. So there's something called angy or practiq some some party which is codependent arising. You. If this, then that so things do not exist unconditionally

on their own. The self as an activity, it is constantly dying and it's constantly being reborn. So if I can just once again try and time make this disantinct as possible, and I want to talk about this just to make the point that was taught to me that I found to be so valuable and the kind of the pogative styles them that my teacher taught me, which is a technical word, but it refers to a really basic principle, which is basically that the self and all

things arise through relationship. They don't exist unconditionally and independent. They are interdependent and arise through relationships. So again, I'm sitting here in my old living room on a nice comfortable blue chair, and I and here the air conditioner across the room because it's now over a hundred degrees

in October and Los Angeles. Um. So again, there's a there's a sound wave and it touches my ear and it travels across the hairs in my ear drone, and it's just an intricate system within the ear canal, and the sound wave is being transformed. What happened to that sound wave? What happened to that sound And now it's inside of me, traveling up my vital cordy through my nervous system. It's interacting with my brain, and my brain is producing this this thought, Uh, you know hot right now.

We tend to think of our Yeah, we tend to think of ourselves only as like that person that says hot, right, and we don't even think about the process that's given rise to that thought that we label as I am. But we're inextricably woven together with our surroundings, and our surroundings give rise to us, and we give rise to

our surroundings simultaneously. So ultimately, the teaching of mose self for me is the teaching of of relationship and um complete relationship as a as a metaphysical principle that that says at the heart of of how we live. And so it's not that there's no self. It's that the self is not unconditional. I mean, certainly you are there and you are feeling some you know, like like you said, you sometimes you feel pain, sometimes you feel pleasure, and

it's undeniable that you're there. And that's true. There is that experience, but but there's something so much deeper that's giving rise to that experience. And um, at some point you might ask yourself, where does my connection to the outside world end? Or where do I end and and the outside world begin and vice versa. And I think that the question of who is it or what is it that these things are occurring to? Who is feeling

the pain? You know? Or just you know that that that sense of and I mean I think for me it just it's again it's something I've been been more interested in recently, but sort of the self inquiry piece, like well, okay, what you know? What am I? It's starting by what am I? Not like you kind of did, well am I really the body? You know? Am I?

My my thoughts? Am I? And do that for a little bit at least, My experience was to end up pretty perplexed as to yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, perplexed is perplexed, is okay, So let's move on from that to now back to something a little bit easier for us to talk about, because ultimately we're describing an experience that we don't have words for really. But you say somewhere in the book that the worship of success thwarts true fulfillment.

That's an interesting phrase from a zen monk. So, um, it's interesting in that it's a personal experience, right, because we would tend to think, well, as en monk, isn't really out after success. But but talk to me about that quote. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm a zen monk,

but I'm an American too, which means I'm um. I grew up within the context of the American dream, and a lot of times I've had to look at my own spiritual ambition and say, Um, on the one hand, that ambition can really drive you to do make remarkable, brave choices. On the other hand, it can't keep you from letting go of this smarmier, more fame seeking, selfish

aspects of your character. Um. In that particular essay, I was I was really trying to look at how over the years I've had these different ambitions and in that essay. It was basketball. When I was really young, I had this overwhelming drive, despite being um unathletic and small statured, I had this drive to be a great basketball player. And you know, that drive transformed and more into a desire to be a comedian and a filmmaker and a screenwriter and an artist. And and that need, that desire,

that thirst, and what is that a thirst for? I mean is it? It's a thirst for approval. It's a thirst for recognition, it's a thirst for affirmation. It's a thirst for success. And I'm not immune to that. And I like to talk about the things that I'm not immune to as a monk and a priest, because I think that monks and priests don't always talk about those things, and that regular not late people feel alone in swimming in the you know, undertow of their own um desires.

And so I like to talk about those things. And I mean, if this is more of a life lesson in some sense and a monastery lesson, but you know, success and fulfillment are are not the same thing. Success it's about outward appearances on some level and having the outside world affirm you. So moment is aligning with your deeper purpose, a purpose that that transcends your UM status. It's always amazing to me that we all know that on some level, and yet we mostly don't live our

lives that way. The lure of success is or even the lure of success or just the lure of it's the next thing that I get. It's, you know, somewhere in the book you call it, you know, like around the corner, you know what's around the core. Um is the thing that is going to bring fulfillment, and how we just we know it on some level. But boy, is it hard to live that way. Yeah. I mean, I very much believe in throwing yourself into life and

engaging with it and not withdrawing from life. On the other hand, you've got to be able to let go of your need for an outcome. I'm remember I did stand up comedy many years ago, and I went to this bar and there was this bartender there and we had a good um uh working relationship, and he was the m C from this open mic night. Remember him looking at me one night and um and saying, no attachment to an outcome, that's all he said, No attachment

to an outcome, which I think is one way that. Yeah, I mean it's a question in this country, we're so status driving, we're so driven by our role in society and the amount of money and fame and leverage we have, and you know, and my own experience of that, it's you're never satisfied. I mean I always thought, more than anything,

I wanted to be a writer and published books. And now I have two books and I can look at it and kind of laugh and say, now I want free, you know, I mean, it never ends, and they should sell better and more people should like him and more Amazon reviews, And mean, I go through the same thing, you know, with with this show is and I talked about it a lot, mainly just you know, because I just think, as you said, it's important to talk about, is that there's no satiation of some of these things.

You know, if one time you told me we had would have gotten as many downloads as we have gotten, I would have said, oh, my f and you know, like what more I might be? Maybe I am, Maybe I am, but I'm not given the number. So so I'm gonna I'm just gonna keep it relative there. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say how many, but it's

beyond what I could have imagined in the beginning. And yet I'm perfectly capable of being a dissatisfied with that if I'm in a certain place, and I'm also perfectly capable of being deeply and profoundly grateful and and humbled by that. I can, depending on where I'm at, I can look at that same number completely differently. And I think that's I tell a story sometimes I don't think I've told in the while. But I was in a halfway house when I first got sober, and there was

a water fountain. I used to call it the serenity fountain, because the way the building was wired up was that whatever Einstein did it, if somebody on the first floor in the basement turned on the water, nobody else got water on any of the other floors. And so I would turn that fountain on, I would get no water. Or conversely, I would, you know, get no water, and I'd look at it and suddenly I would get like

a super powerful stream of water. And it was always that way, And there were plenty of days where I just laughed about it, and then there were other days where I got so bent out of shape about the damn thing. And it was the same fountain day after day after day, and it was just such a clear lesson to me early on for me that like, oh, I'm really the one that's deciding. Deciding is maybe a wrong word, but my perception is at the root of of how I experienced this, and I think that's also

a pretty key Buddhist lesson. Yeah, that's a beautiful story. Actually, it's about sums it all up. Um, you know, it's interesting. I mean, it's very tricky, and it's easy to say the thirst for successes is bad. Let me give you an example, like if someone emails me and says I needed company when I was going through a dark night of the soul and reading a chapter of your book made me realize that everybody goes through this and it helped put my heart at rest. I can feel fulfillment

in that. That's one thing. Checking my Amazon ranking obsessively it's like another that's the first. But yeah, the same

activity of writing a book. You know, writing a book isn't necessarily the problem or having a podcast or doing public things where it's really easy to get caught up an ego and numbers and attention and money and all that the activity of writing the book the podcast isn't necessarily the problem in a lot of ways, holding true to your integrity and and your original purpose and not getting too caught up in the winds and the storms of what society throws at you in terms of praise

of blame, yep, and and motivation behind it. And you know, I feel like I could say some of these things on the show often, but like I've gotten to a point where I'm not sure that I'm okay with the fact that most everything I do has some degree of mixed motivation. I don't know how to not have that happen. I just I'm just like, how can I How can I spend my time and my energy and focus on

the good motivation and minimize the bad motivation. So if I look at it and I'm feeling discouraged, like well, we're just not growing as fast as that show or that show, right, I go back to like, well, what was I Why am I doing this? Why did I

start doing this? And that wasn't why I started doing this, And so if I can reconnect with that sometimes sometimes that that helps on a similar level of looking forward to everything, I just want to read this, and you're one of those folks that I just like to read a lot of it because it's it's just written so well. But you say, my whole life, I've been looking forward to something, and now it hit me like the wake up slap on the newborns behind It was almost comical,

What the hell have I been looking forward to? Except the end? That's what comes next. The few uture is the finish line. That's what's finally waiting for us around the next corner. And I just love that because it is the logical extension of this fallacy that we have, that it's the next You know, if I could just get to this then right. I wrote that in the context of an opium high and uh a delivery of a death sentence. So I should probably unpack that a

little bit. Um. I had experienced some horrifying pains in my um lower left abdomen. It felt like I swallowed a fish hook and someone was tugging the line and tearing me open inside. It was quite painful. Is that the monastery, and I was on the premises alone. So finally I called nine eleven nine month and they can't pick me up. Brought me to the emergency room, took a bunch of tests and gave me dilatted to kill the pain, which is a morphine drivative. In the opening,

I'm familiar. So yeah, as an ex heroin addict, I'm very familiar. There you go. Yeah, So, I mean, in a much smaller way, I felt that on the believable feeling that's apparently opium gives you, which kind of floating in the clouds kind of ecstasy. Just as that was kicking in, a nurse came into the room and she told me that they looked at the blood tests and

they had my enzyme levels UM were really elevated. And she went on to tell me that in her this is life pace anamalies, which are enzymes having to do with the pink pancreas. And she said, in my experience, this means cancer. And she said, I don't see what else it could mean UM, And she said, also in my experience is that it's um. You don't outlive this cancer. She said, you know, Paparatti, the opera singer, just just died from it. And then she kind of smiled surely

and left the room. So I had been experiencing this it was funny. It was really trying trying to figure out what's wrong with me. The whole morning, I was like, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? I think it's really bad food poisoning. And as the as the pain got worse and worse at a while, I just heard a radio show on NPR where they said, you can die from food poisoning, so it must be food poisoning. And then when you told me this was like, Okay,

I have an answer to the problem. It's it's cancer. Um. Yeah. And then in that moment um when I got this death sentence and I looked out and I had the morphine kicking in. I kind of looked through the plastic curtain that was separating my little um deathbed from the other death and suffering the cubicles in the e R. I saw this real flurry of activity, and I had this moment of of kind of being at peace with the fact that my story was coming to an end. Now I'm the cancer guy. You know, my life was

not supposed to be any other way. I was supposed to be the guy who did a little bit of this, did a little bit of that, brought some pleasure brought some pain. Um lived his life and is now going to die of cancer. And I felt at peace with that. And the idea that I was supposed to have done something more. I was supposed to have been something more, supposed to have found my bliss in some more concrete and tangible way was bolder dash. My life was perfect

as it was. It was perfectly me sized, perfectly me shaped, and there's no other standard that it could be judged by. It was mine completely. It had its own integrity, and that felt good. And it wasn't an ego inflating thought. It was a It was a humbling, grounding thought that really gave rise to a sense of gratitude. And then you found out it wasn't true. I found out I wasn't there. Then I got really depressed. Wasn't gonna die? And I got really depressed? Did you I was? I

was ready for it. I was ready to go. And then and then the new thing was I got to get back on my feet again. And it took me months and months and months to pull out of this funk of why did I get sick? Am I still sick? Is the pancreat It is gonna come back? What's wrong with me? And I take different homeopathic or western medicine stuff and they would have a side effect that would

plunge me deeper into this body and mental darkness. And then finally I at zazen in my parents garage, sitting on a chair with the door open and the pounding rain outside, and something shifted and I I wanted to sort of get my life in here again, and I went back to the monastery and here we are. Here, we are well we This is gonna be a two part episode, so we're gonna wrap this up, but a little teaser for next section. We're gonna cover Zen sex scandals.

We're gonna talk about Leonard Cohen and ayahuasca. So that's enough to that's enough to bring bring folks back for the next episode. So we will end here and pick up again the next episode. Great, Thank you, see you soon. Okay, if what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the one you Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support