E185 - Henry Shukman: A Zen Master With 40 Years of Practice on Who You Really Are

Zen teacher and author Henry Shukman offers a clear and grounded introduction to the heart of Zen practice. We explore how awakening is not an escape from life, but a deeper participation in it — a realization that dissolves the illusion of separation and reveals a boundless field of awareness and love. Henry shares his own spontaneous awakening experience at 19, the profound insight that life is not divided between self and world, and the difficult healing journey that followed. From mindfulness and meditation to flow states, jhanas, koans, and the role of trauma in spiritual growth, this conversation maps out a path that integrates awakening with emotional healing. Download SAILY in your app store and use our code KNOWTHYSELF at checkout to get an exclusive 15% off your first purchase! For further details go to https://saily.com/knowthyself Go to https://thewayapp.com/knowthyself to begin your journey with 30 free meditation sessions André's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 00:00 Intro 01:26 An Introduction to Zen 13:10 The Premise of Original Love 17:14 Training the Mind Like the Body 20:54 Freedom From Identification With Thought 27:50 What Are the Jhanas? 32:50 Ad: Saily 33:54 Tasting Awakening for Yourself 45:17 Awakening vs Psychological Healing 50:17 Awakening as an Ongoing Path 54:54 The Distinct Path of Zen 59:13 Koans as a Path to Insight 1:13:53 The Enlightenment of the Mundane 1:20:07 The Freedom of Emptiness 1:26:16 The Necessity of Meditation Practice 1:34:32 Sweeping the Yard (A Zen Poem) 1:43:33 Beauty, Ethics, and Interconnection 1:47:33 The Journey to a Whole Heart (A Poem on Heartbreak) 2:02:58 Original Love in a Fragmented World ___________ Episode Resources: https://www.instagram.com/henryshukman/ https://www.instagram.com/theway_app/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This life is a movie, and the purpose of life is to turn around and see the projector. So much of the modern mindfulness movement is focusing on mindfulness as a thing that I do, and it doesn't really point us to the total connectivity of our lives. It's not a path out of the world. It's a path deeply into the world. And I think this is a really important flavor of Zen. Now, I wanna, I'm gonna just, let me, can I tell you a quick story? Personal? When I began the path of meditative training nearly 40 years ago, I had no idea you don't need to have practiced in order to have realization or awakening. It's so easy for us to think it's down the road, but it can't be.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  There is only now. But also, I think it's really true. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. In other words, the pain of heartbreak can open the heart. And when the heart is open, we're really alive.

• 1:06André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself podcast. Our guest today is an authorized teacher in the Sambho Zen lineage. He is a poet, a novelist, creator of the Way app, and an incredible voice in the space of Zen. Henry Shukman, thank you for being here.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  It's great to be with you, Andre.

• 1:25André Duqum?

  Your voice has an incredible sound, especially for guided meditations.

• 1:31André Duqum?

  I am looking forward to having this episode be a solid introduction into the world of Zen, which I think has become quite commercialized, that term. However catchy it is, has been put on many different packages as a branding for well-being. And I would love to dive deep with you today. So to start very simply, what is Zen?

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question that Zen itself has been trying to answer for thousands of years, because the heart of it is unnameable. But at the same time, it's this very moment exactly as it is right now. So Zen, in a slightly less obscure way of putting it, it's one of the forms of, one of the many forms of Buddhism. It's a form of Buddhism that has got Daoism in it as well. And what that means in practical terms is that among the various kinds of Buddhism that there are, Tibetan, you know, Theravada, Vipassana, and so on, many, many forms of

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Buddhism, actually, Zen, I think it's fair to say, is the simplest. Simplest in the sense that there's, there's very little kind of extraneous material. You don't have a lot of beliefs. There aren't, you know, pantheons of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas and sort of semi-divine and divine entities. It all comes down to the practice. That's really what Zen focuses on. And the practice is, number one, meditation as the growth point, as what allows us to grow as humans.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  And number two, life, ordinary, daily life, as a kind of extension of the meditation. And, and in a way, Zen almost doesn't really want to exist. And there is a, there's a view that if, when we really get Zen deeply, Zen kind of self-destructs. You know, like Mission Impossible tape, it vanishes. When you really, when we really get the message, what it's trying to communicate, it's kind of not there anymore. The Zen part is not there anymore. So I don't know, that's probably rather obscure, but that's.

• 3:54André Duqum?

  No, that's, that's direct. What would you, how would you articulate the goal of Zen and Zen practice? What is the promise that it brings?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, so I've got to acknowledge there are different kinds of Zen. Okay, so they're probably all answer that differently.

• 4:07André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  In the school that I've trained in mostly, Sambo Zen, they're fairly explicit about it. There's the hope, there's the possibility that we can go through a radical realization, where we discover that what we've been all along is not invalidated, but it's a, it's a small part of the overall picture. That, you know, the sense of I being basically inhabiting this skin bag, this particular body, you know?

• 4:39André Duqum?

  Me too.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. That this is not what I am fundamentally. Yeah, I totally, you know, this body, mind, heart, this is, this is what I think of as me. But at the same time,

• 4:55Speaker 00

  the sense of this body being separate from all else is an illusion. And it's actually possible for us humans, and many traditions recognize this, of course. It's, it's possible to recognize a much deeper self that is all-inclusive, that is timeless, that is spaceless, that is infinite, that has always been here and is unnamable, actually. You can't, there is no word for it, but you can experience it. And Zen, as, as I've known it, trusts that all of us can recognize that. And, you know, we call it awakening, some, or realization, some, or recognition.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Some might call it enlightenment, but I don't know, we're a little tentative with that word because it sounds quite grand. But we can recognize it and we can, and it's often a turning point in our life to do so. But that's really, in a way, stage one. Because the next part is how do we live it? How do we manifest what we've realized in our daily life? And that's, that's the. In a way, that's more important, you know. So that would be a very headline, top line level of stating what it's all about for Zen.

• 6:22André Duqum?

  Yeah, well, we'll dive deeper into the iceberg that's under the water, so to speak. But for a bit more context in terms of the origination of Zen, before it kind of bifurcated into many different disciplines. Could you give us the spark notes of how it came from India to China to Japan and the many different forms it took? What's just like the overview of how it came to be?

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. So there's history and there's a bit of mythology and they're really hard to tease apart. But basically between about the... So Buddhism develops, you know, in fourth or fifth century BCE in northern India with Shakyamuni Buddha and Sudatta Gautama and his rigors and his training and his realization of the middle way and his coming to a profound awakening, becoming the Buddha, the awakened one. And in Zen's view, the heart of what he realized got transmitted or transferred from

• 7:25Speaker 00

  India to China in about 500 or 527 officially. They reckon in CE, you know, the common era. And it was this figure called Bodhidharma, who is said to have sort of brought the practice of Zen Buddhism, which was called Dhyana Buddhism. This is their view. It's really about meditation, meditation Buddhism. Rather than lots of practices and liturgy and sutra studies, doctrinal study, just the core practice of sitting still as a human being. That was brought from India to China. This is the Zen official biography kind of thing in around, yeah, 527.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  CE by Bodhidharma. In China, Bodhidharma, there's various adventures and episodes in his life. But the fundamental one was that he sat for nine years on his own in a cave. And that was how he planted this Zen form of Buddhism in China. This is all legend slash history, something. And out of Bodhidharma's practice, you know, he had various disciples and they started to to spread this form of Buddhism. There had already been Buddhism coming into China. And probably actually really Zen was the culmination of that process over several

• 8:58Speaker 00

  centuries. But I think it emerged as a kind of distinctive expression of Buddhism probably around 600, which is founded on this real simplicity, that you don't need a lot of beliefs, you don't need doctrine. In the end, you don't even need scripture, sutras. You just need to examine your own experience and you can come to know it in a new way. You can come to understand the relationship between me and the world in a radically different way that relieves a lot of the pains of the human heart.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  And it allows our hearts actually to grow exponentially and be much more open. And yeah, we will be concerned and motivated by compassion for the sufferings in this world. So it's not a kind of withdrawal. It's very much about a deeper engagement with the world coming out of the realization that we can have. Sorry, is that a, you know, actually, I could carry on. I got it to China, but then it spreads. You know, it spreads to Japan, it spreads to Korea, it spreads to Vietnam.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  You know, there are other forms of Zen that, that, you know, exist to this day. That are not, this is not just the Japanese expression of it. You know, in China, they called it Chan, actually. So, you know, it's, yeah, it's, and like I said earlier, it's, it's got a, it's got a mix in it of Taoism, you know, which, which has, um, which has perhaps, um, more emphasis on, as a result of that mixture, there's more emphasis on, say, artistic expression. And one of the things that attracted me to Zen as a poet, as a writer,

• 11:03Speaker 00

  was that it has such a great, rich history of poetry, of landscape painting, of calligraphy, you know, and of tea ceremonies. It's got these artistic expressions kind of woven into its history. And as a, you know, 20th, 21st century writer and poet, for me, that was like a natural kind of meeting, meeting ground that I found in Zen that I wouldn't have found so strongly in other kinds of practice.

• 11:36André Duqum?

  Do you think that's by in part your sort of inherent resistance to authority and tradition? There's something beautiful about the directness of the path and how it doesn't require often parsing through a lot of dogmatic language or even tradition in times to just sit with the directness of the experience it's offering?

• 11:59Speaker 00

  That is exactly right, yeah. And, you know, I'd had a, I mean, I grew up in a fairly convention-bound culture already in the UK, you know, back in the 60s and 70s when I was a kid. England was still quite.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  I don't know, it was quite a kind of conformist, convention-based kind of society compared to, say, California or something at the same time. And I didn't, I didn't need to adopt another one. I didn't want to go into another set of cultural trappings. I actually really wanted something that could meet, you know, my own experience directly. And, um, and wasn't, exactly as you say, it wasn't going to require kind of a whole slew of, of, um, of doctrinal study, which is really kind of adopting yet another culture. I didn't really want that. It was, I thought it, and Zen didn't, didn't offer that.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  It was just about meeting human experience directly, this very moment, coming back to it again and again, you know?

• 13:10André Duqum?

  I would love to fast forward and jump straight into the heart of your work, your most recent book, Original Love, and the premise of what that is. Because I think that we have culturally programmed the opposite, that we are fundamentally sinful creatures in the Western Abrahamic faiths, at least the way they position it.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:31André Duqum?

  So what is the, uh, the proposition, not only of the Zen tradition in which you share, but, uh, of so much of your work, about who we are?

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I, what I've come to, to find, you know? And, um, is that, is that, you know, we've got our surface sense of self that's trying to manage its existence in the world. Underneath that, we've got a, kind of a deeper soul self that has a calling and that is, that is, that is kind of wired to grow and wants to grow and loves to grow and loves, loves enriching experiences and, and loves love, you know? And, and is, and is fearless, and, and that's beautiful. But deeper still, there's, um, the, what, what is sometimes called original nature

• 14:26Speaker 00

  or fundamental nature. And that's what I really mean by original love. It's a discovery that we're not separate. We're not separate from anything. That there's a different order of experience, always right here.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Where, you know, at the same time, we're exactly who we think we are, this body, this mind, this heart. But we're also, yeah, boundless, timeless, infinite. And without size, without dimension, without history, without future, although history and future are allowed, you know. But fundamentally, they're just happening now. And in this kind of primordial present moment.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  Because we're not separate in any way. Because we're part of a great reality that is all inclusive. It's like love. To find it is like discovering an ultimate belonging. And it just fills the human heart with relief and joy and love to know it. And it also can reorient us to lives of love and service and compassion.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Probably always imperfectly, but it can make that reorientation happen. So, man, it's not just an original nature. It's an original love. That's, that's what I feel. So, yeah, to, to bring that back to the notion of original sin. You know, I, I don't accept that, that fundamentally, you know, we're wrong, defective, bad. And that we've got to be redeemed from that. I, I actually just, I just don't believe that. I think maybe superficially, we could use some help, you know. And certainly I have done and continue to actually, and I think this is an important point.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  But deep down, what we are is already, you know, an infinite, boundless, nameless.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Reality, one of whose aspects is unconditional love. So that's a long answer, but that's really what I think it comes down to. An unconditional love that is in our deepest nature. And finding that is like, is the journey of a lifetime. It's such a, it's such an amazing thing to get to know that this isn't some thing I've achieved because of my arduous, you know, self mortification or my rigorous spiritual practice. It's always been here. It's not an accomplishment.

• 17:13André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 02

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• 17:44Speaker 03

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• 18:16André Duqum?

  I think an amazing doorway into starting to glimpse that nature or true nature for ourself, which is the most important instead of, you know, studying it in a book, reading it, hearing it in a podcast, is first off to examine how scattered our minds are. And I think a lot of us understand the notion of bodies that are in shape, that are fit. You know, we have full industries, multi-billion dollar industries.

• 18:45André Duqum?

  Focused on getting people in shape from the gyms to the wellness.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:51André Duqum?

  Institutions and we get that, but the mind, because it's more invisible in nature. We don't understand that it needs the same level of attention, especially this day and age, maybe even more so. They're fundamentally connected. But what is the connection there, you think, between working with the mind? Our identification with our thoughts and then deeper on the path, getting to glimpse our true original nature. But start us a bit earlier on the journey. Most of us feel really

• 19:27André Duqum?

  swayed and identified with this voice in our head.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so, it's so true. Yeah. No, well, I think, you know, in, in my book, Original Love, actually, I parse out these four main areas of development that we can go through in our spiritual lives. And of course, this could be sliced and diced many ways. I totally acknowledge that. But I think these four, I call them ins, like refuges. I think they are a reasonable way of looking at it. And the first is mindfulness, you know, and mindfulness means becoming aware of what's actually going on around me and within me. And, and most of us, and myself totally included, you know, when I began

• 20:13Speaker 00

  the path of, of meditative training, you know, for nearly 40 years ago.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  I had no idea that I was actually listening to a voice in my head so much of my waking hours, and it was not a very friendly, kind, supportive, helpful voice. It was doing, you know, a lot of like, you gotta do this, you failed at that, you're no good, you know? And this is awful. And all that kind of, you know, disturbing language was going on. And, and even when it wasn't disturbing, it was still chattering away, commenting and, you know, a running commentary.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  To become aware of that is a big shift because the moment we notice, oh, I'm aware, here I am aware, and there's this voice. That's already created a little bit of a gap between me and the voice. Whereas previously, just exactly as you said, Andrei, I'm being totally identified with it. That somehow this voice is me being me. Well, it's not. It's thought arising in a verbal form, you know, which happens a lot for a lot of the time for a lot of people. So becoming mindful allows us to be aware of that voice

• 21:37Speaker 00

  and to have a little break from it, gap from it, distance from it, and space around it. And we start to find that we can actually inhabit that space rather than the voice. It's a great relief.

• 21:54André Duqum?

  I think such a liberating aspect of that is when you start to have some distance between you and your thoughts and emotions, you feel more free in your life. And so much of what we thought we were going to externally gain, it would be the cause of our freedom externally, whatever sort of arrangements, career, relationships, whatnot. We can approach those things less under the illusion they're going to provide us the solace we once thought they would. And so let's keep going down these ends. So what would be the next end, so to speak?

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Can I just add something to that?

• 22:33André Duqum?

  No.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  It's like we get so locked into this world before us and we're so preoccupied with it. And then when we stop doing something, we get preoccupied with the cloud of thoughts that come up. So it's finding that actually we can let go a little bit. We can put down the tasks, we can put down the thoughts, and there's this gray space. So that's right on. Okay. Second end is, yeah, it's about.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Really, I needed to state this, it's about support and connection. And I needed to state it because so much of the modern mindfulness movement is focusing on mindfulness as a thing that I do. It's just for me and it's just my own sole responsibility. And it doesn't, it doesn't really point us to the, the, the total connectivity of our lives. That we're already in a great field of connections and of support. You know, that, that, you know, we, you know, we, you know, look, look at a human body, all the factors that have to come together for a human being to exist.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  All of that is a form of support and infinite connection, allowing us just to exist, you know? Then, you know, we've all got families. We may have varying relationships with them, but we are part of a family. We're also part of the whole human family. We're also, you know, nourished every minute by breath, by the food we take in, by the water we drink.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and yeah, the air we breathe and, you know, the earth we stand on. All of that and the warmth that we need constantly, every moment of our lives, we're actually bearing the fruit of so much support. We're expressing so much support that is making us exist. So to, to be acknowledging that seemed to me really important that it's. So mindfulness too is not an isolated solo pursuit. It's not like me just going to the gym and doing reps, you know? It's actually helping me recognize that I'm part of infinite networks and that I'm not alone.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  And, and that's why in the old traditional Buddhist view, yeah, there was practice, doing your practice is critical. But so was community, what they call sangha. You know, it's the third refuge and there's, there's places where the Buddha said, he was asked, is, is sangha?

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Like, I've heard you say, Buddha, somebody said to him, Ananda said to him, one of his disciples, "I've heard you say that Sangha is half of the holy life. Would you agree with that?" "No, Sangha is the whole of the holy life. It's all about community and connection." "So for us to just remember that, that's why the second in is in." "And that is in my scheme and my book, Rishikant Love." "And also, by the way, on the app, we work through these ins, we call them zones in the app, "in the same way." "But so, but let me just say that that is not only in the visible and kind of

• 25:54Speaker 00

  "material level of connections we have with friends and guides and coaches and whatever, "therapists, whatever we might have, you know, teachers, mentors." "It's also in a kind of less tangible form as well, I believe, "which we, some call the archetypal realm, you know, shamanism can take us to it, "dream work can take us to it, meditation actually can open us up to more receptivity "to a kind of archetypal, imaginal realm, as some call it, "which is a little bit like Jung's collective unconscious, "where there's levels of connectivity that we don't see, but we're truly part of."

• 26:38Speaker 00

  "And I think that's, you know, that's really important." "I feel it's like soul, soul work, recognizing a deeper part of ourselves "that has, as I said earlier, has its calling in this world, in this life, "and wants to grow and, you know, this art comes from it and self-expression of different kinds." "You know, I think that's a really important side of our spiritual lives." "And we don't want to get too sterile, like kind of slightly dry mindfulness, you know, "just, no, it's a rich thing, you know." "So that would be the second in, yeah.

• 27:18André Duqum?

  Amazing, we'll keep riding the train. What's the third stop?

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, the third stop is like, it's actually, it's what Buddhism calls samadhi, or sometimes translated concentration. I don't think that's a good translation myself. It's more like absorption. And it's when we get into flow states, basically. It could be flow states from activities. But it can also be if we're, if we have a practice of meditation. In meditation, you can drop into these really beautiful flow-like states where, you know, and even novice meditators will know this, where, you know, we've been, we're used to finding it a bit of a grind, kind of hard, and what am I supposed to do?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Follow my breath? I can't do that. Be aware of the present moment. Oh, no, I'm just lost in thought. But then we'll suddenly get this, these moments when we don't exactly know how or why, but suddenly we're clear. We're calm.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Experience is very rich and beautiful. And it's like we're effortlessly doing the practice. We're suddenly, oh, my gosh, this is what it's all about. I never knew I could find this clear, free, easy awareness that's, that's really attentive. That's samadhi, that's flow states in meditation, and it's beautiful.

• 28:51André Duqum?

  What are, what are jhanas? And so how does that go in here?

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, they fall into this category. Jhana states are these, it's a set of slightly different flavors of absorption that, that you can learn to bring on in meditation. There's a, there are some subtle, kind of slightly technical methods for getting into jhana states, which are progressively more refined and powerful states of absorption.

• 29:23André Duqum?

  Would you rank them? I suppose it's futile to, but like on levels of deepness or profoundness of experience. I'm, I'm curious to hear. Your, maybe it relates to your own personal experience in altered states. But what are sample platter of these different states one might find themselves in?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, I've got to say, right off the bat, that I believe these are real, natural, human states. They're not like.

• 29:51André Duqum?

  Altered, in the sense, yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, that in a way they're not, then they're built into us, I think, to be able to drop into them. I had them as a kid. I found out later, when I did some Jhana training. I said, oh, my gosh, I, this used to happen to me. I had very severe eczema as a kid, right through my childhood, chronic and severe. And I was sometimes hospitalized for it. And, you know, like, skin problem. And it was very, very difficult to live with, actually. It was, you know, the itch, the pain, the burning, the, it was very, very difficult. And, but at times, usually when I was in bed at night and couldn't go to sleep, because of the itching, I would suddenly find myself in this different state,

• 30:37Speaker 00

  where it felt like I was kind of held in this sort of glowing cloud or something like that. And that all the pain and all the itching would have stopped. And it was, it was, it was beautiful and very, very peaceful. And when I first did Jhana training, many, many years later, and suddenly the gear shifted and I was in this beautiful, glowing, peaceful state, with this sort of rippling field of energy all through me. And when I described it to the trainer I was working with, the meditation teacher I was working with,

• 31:19Speaker 00

  I said, oh, hey, this thing happened that used to happen to me as a kid. It's so beautiful. And he said, oh, yeah, that's first Jhana and second Jhana. And so. That's how I knew that these aren't artificial or something, you know, they're real deep in us, but they-

• 31:35André Duqum?

  Just a note on that, I think it's really, it's an important point that these actually aren't altered states. They are from the perspective of an identified conventional self, but from the perspective of our true self, these are natural states and actually the identification with our ego and thoughts is actually the altered state.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  That's beautifully put. Thank you. Exactly. Right on. And, you know, they can get more refined. So the third jannas, it's all about this joy and well-being, it's very peaceful. Fourth janna, you know, you're in equanimity and it's all pervasive. And then you get, those are the first four, and then there's another set of four that are considered the formless jannas, because they're, one is about boundless space, one is about boundless mind, and they get emptier and more refined as you go.

• 32:28André Duqum?

  Could we dive into one? So boundless mind, or boundless space-

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:33André Duqum?

  From the subjective intrinsic experience of that, what is that experience like? How would you describe that?

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very beautiful. Boundless space, there's a sense that, you know, you can feel that from your heart outward, there's just one space, and it has no limit. And it's a very, the heart is always engaged, actually, because it's so beautiful. And you feel it's all, everything's encompassed in one great space, you know? And, and then boundless mind, it's everything's encompassed in one consciousness. It's also very, it's sort of moving. I find I almost get a little tearful in them because they're so beautiful. And it's amazing to me that so much

• 33:22Speaker 00

  peace and joy and love could come with so little. Like, it's not because you're in a, you know, much as I love a fabulous home, it's not because you're in one. You could be sitting in a hut and find this. You could, you could be, you know, virtually penniless, and you could find such deep contentment in your very own being. I find that so beautiful.

• 33:51André Duqum?

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• 34:32André Duqum?

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• 34:55André Duqum?

  Yeah, we just had one of the like, one of the most prolific Vedanta Vedanta teachers on Swami Sarvapri Ananda, and he was sharing about, there's this great non-dual book called I Am That.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  That, that, that book is on, is actually in my loo. I read it every day.

• 35:12André Duqum?

  Oh, amazing. Yeah. Sri Nasargathara Maharaj. And he had this experience where he went off to the Himalayas and had this enlightening experience and realized he doesn't need to be up there. He go back into the slums, which is, you know, stricken with poverty, and actually, there is nothing wrong with it, and lived the rest of his life in that, in that place, in that state. And the deepening of these jhanas and having it more be embodied in your day-to-day experience, home isn't a place that you try to seek externally. It becomes more and more the place in the presence you are wherever you go. And I think...

• 35:51André Duqum?

  The most important thing on the spiritual path is to actually have like have taste, a taste of this. Not just reading the menu, but having the meal. It's like in the intrinsic experience of this, where it becomes self-evident. Maybe you're looking at a view, you're out looking at the horizon and suddenly this experience of someone perceiving something outside of yourself dissolves and it just becomes one thing, which I know you've had, obviously I'm sure many, but earlier on as well with the sunset experience.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes. Well, look, we're jumping, we're jumping ahead a tiny bit now, because in, in my view, these jhana states aren't quite the same as realization.

• 36:35André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  And which is the fourth in. So, but I need to get to the fourth in to explain why.

• 36:42André Duqum?

  Cool. We'll, we'll keep on going then.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  Should we do that?

• 36:45André Duqum?

  Yeah, so the formless jhanas.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  The formless jhanas are getting, that's as close as you can get to realization or awakening without awakening. Okay. That's Henry's view. And it's, it's pretty consistent with a lot of Buddhist views as well.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  It's a little complex because the word samadhi has got different meanings. In the Vedic world, there are at least three levels of samadhi and only the first one is the Buddhist view of samadhi where samadhi is, you haven't yet realized, you haven't yet had realization, but you're in a very deep, beautiful state. And, and, and whereas in, in the Vedic view, yeah, there's the two other forms of samadhi are, are the same as realization. So you've got to just, the terminology gets a little tricky. And it also gets tricky because these are all very refined states of mind anyway.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  But here's the thing, in the fourth in, there's a decisive thing that happens, which you don't need to have happened for the jhana states. You've seen through your sense of self. It's not just that the sense of self has gone quiet, which it definitely does in jhana, but you've seen through it. You've seen that it was actually never here the way you thought to begin with. And this can happen, um, this can happen in, in different ways. I mean,

• 38:15Speaker 00

  The first thing actually I've got to say about realisation is it's actually not contingent on practice, which is a pretty radical thing. You don't need to have practised in order to have realisation or awakening. You don't, even, you can practise a lot and not have realisation slash awakening. It's a different order. Now, I wanna, I'm gonna just, can I tell you a quick story, personal?

• 38:45André Duqum?

  Again, no. Yeah, let her rip.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  You know, when I was nineteen, before I'd done any practise at all, I had a moment of quite significant realisation, awakening, that landed on me and I had no idea what it was, except that it was the truth. It was the truth of my life. And I was, yeah, I was standing on a beach watching the sun go down and I was looking at the light on the water and I noticed that it wasn't just one brightness, it was like pieces of brightness, scales of brightness on the water, moving over this totally black surface of the water.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Bright and black and I couldn't, is it bright, is it dark? I couldn't, I was trying to figure it out. And all of a sudden, me and what I was looking at stopped being two things. There was only one world, one reality. And both the water and any sense of Henry were both that reality. So the distinction had gone. And actually, I dropped right in then to this.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Unbounded, empty substance. There was no substance. That was what the universe was made of. And I knew to the bottom of my being, all through my bones, that I was made of the universe. And I was not separate from it and never had been and never could been, never could be, because we were one thing that was not really a thing. But it was absolute, absolutely one. And I sort of emerged from that, you know, realized I was a person standing on a beach again.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  And, and, and then I was just enveloped by the sense of all of this, this whole life, this whole world, all of us. It's, it's a dream, a most beautiful, sublime dream. And it's all made of love, like an immemorial love, just enveloped everything. And, and, you know, it was, it was, I knew it was real. And, and I was so blown away by it that I felt I had fulfilled my life.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  That whatever, whatever the purpose of this life had been, which, to be honest, I'd never thought about, really, before. I'd never really thought, what's my purpose? I'd just been following what I was told, studying and sports, gymnastics, I did whatever, you know? But in this moment, suddenly, it just was like a wave of love just enveloped me after, right after that experience, you know? And, and it was like, I've had a purpose in this life. It was to realize exactly what I've just realized. And actually, years later, I heard Yogananda

• 42:13Speaker 00

  saying in an old documentary, you know, "This life is a movie. It's a motion picture. And the purpose of life is to turn around and see the projector." And when I heard that, I thought, "Oh, my gosh, that's so beautifully put." That's exactly how I felt when I was nineteen and this thing happened. But, you know, what I really want to say is really important here for me is that,

• 42:43Speaker 00

  actually, my life didn't end then. I could have died happily that night, knowing my life was fulfilled. But it didn't end. And a few weeks later, I went back home. I'd been far away from home when this happened. I went back home, and it was when I went home that actually I got overwhelmed by the unacknowledged trauma of my childhood, which I had put a lot of effort into suppressing. I'd evolved these adaptive personalities, subpersonalities, parts, so that I could deal with the very difficult aspects of my childhood, traumatic, complex childhood trauma that I grew up with.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  But I'd managed to kind of avoid feeling it because it was too much through my childhood with adaptations. When I went home at nineteen after this experience, all those adaptive strategies had been ripped away. I was wide open, which was very beautiful. I was so open and full of love and very aware of suffering in the streets around me. I was in South America at the time and so on. As soon as I got home, literally, almost walked through the door of my father's house. Actually, an hour later, I was just overwhelmed by these terrible

• 44:13Speaker 00

  memories and emotions in my body of my childhood that I had not been able to feel as a kid, had avoided, suppressed, buried.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  But the awakening opened me. So I could feel them. But at that time, I had no resources and I didn't want to feel them. I thought it was a catastrophe that I could be feeling these terrible things. And I thought I'd lost that marvelous awakening and I went into despair. And I think this is, I really feel this is a crucial part of this whole process that we humans can go through of awakening. It's also healing. It's always, I think, going to be both awakening and healing.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Because for me, I was a very reluctant sort of client, patient, needer of healing. I didn't want to know about it, even then at nineteen. And it took me, well, several years, three years, four years of being really unhappy, drinking, you know, at university and kind of dragging myself through life, gradually finding a little more joy with music. Actually, I was a musician and writing again and, you know. But then I found meditation and almost as soon as I started meditating, I realized, man, I'm unhappy, you know.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  And I started therapy and I started dealing with all the trauma in my childhood. And, you know, it's been a kind of twin journey of awakening and healing, how to live more consistently and get actually even more deeply into whatever that was that I opened up to. But also be dealing with this suffering, troubled, traumatized human being. And I, I think the mercy of this path is that it doesn't leave either behind.

• 46:17André Duqum?

  I think a lot of us are under presumption that these two things are fused.

• 46:24André Duqum?

  That like the spiritual or contemplative work will solve the parts work, the healing work, the growing up. And I think they are intrinsically linked, very complementary, but not the same. And, you know, it's something we talk about quite a bit because I think it's really important to have a holistic understanding of what awakening means, right? And Under just the meditative contemplative lens, we can wake up beyond the idea of being identified with our thoughts and emotions. We can have these more formless jhana state experiences. And it doesn't fix the...

• 47:05André Duqum?

  In some ways, it can make it even harder to take seriously these like characterological stuff.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:13André Duqum?

  I think it makes it easier to work with because we're less reactive to them. In your case, it made space for that to come to the surface, right?

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:21André Duqum?

  But any other thoughts you have there on the importance between the two and how they're both essential, but they don't necessarily solve one another?

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it's really important to state like you because I think, you know, in a therapeutic context, I've never been in a therapeutic context that really deeply understood awakening. But they didn't really know that they didn't really understand it. And I've also been in meditative contemplative contexts that didn't really understand trauma and thought that they were the fix for everything. So I love this. There's in early Chinese Buddhism from the sixth century, there's a document that talks

• 48:09Speaker 00

  about the path of practice as a cart track, not a path. You know, we talk about like, often talk about like spiritual path is the path out of the mountain or something. But this, this idea, the cart track says, no, it's not a path. It's a track, meaning there are two wheel tracks. And it says, the first wheel track is the foundations of mindfulness. And by that, it means this early Buddhist training, you gradually develop your mindfulness and it expands, it gets deeper and deeper. You get into jhanas, maybe you get realization, but it's a gradual cultivation of the human mind-body-heart system.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  The second wheel track, running parallel to it all along, just like a kart track, is awakening. So rather than it being a journey to the mountain, up the mountain, awakening is alongside all the way, which I think is accurate. It's also because it's always here. And it also, it's not affected by, in a certain way, it's not affected by the practice, the gradual cultivation and development that we, we probably all need to do to some degree. Which is a beautiful thing as well, but what happens is that the more we're working on the gradual developmental side,

• 49:35Speaker 00

  the more open we become to maybe having glimpses of the awakening side. The more we might glimpse the awakening side, the more space there is to work with the gradual, I call it healing, side. And, and somehow, I think this is a really helpful metaphor. It's not a single journey to the destination. In a certain way, all the old traditions are right. The destination's here all along. But to actually glimpse it and integrate it, we probably need to do all this gradual work, basically on ourselves and on our relationships

• 50:16Speaker 00

  and on our trauma, on our history, on our collective trauma, on our ancestral trauma, let alone, of course, our personal trauma. And so I feel that, um, coming back to purpose, you know, I, I feel in some way, purpose of my life anyway, has been to clarify, at the deepest level, who I really am. But also, to work through all the things that I would think of as obstacles to that. Cause they're part of the path, they're not obstacles. They're the meat of the path, they're the, they're the nourishment of the path. It's all a trauma, yes, my personal trauma, but also collective.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  But, and now also, in a certain point in my path, it became, I was called, I was asked, actually, by my teachers to start sharing and teaching myself. So it's also been part of my path to be sharing this, you know, to the best of my ability and in full humility, because I'm still a student as well.

• 51:17André Duqum?

  Yeah. No, it, it's great, it's easy to simplify. Awakening to a bumper sticker, you know, but in many ways, it's been said the matured intellect is the capacity to hold paradox conflicting ideas. And what I love the way that you phrase what you just shared is that it's like awakening is the path, it is the two tracks, it is the process. Instead of this one place you'll get to one day. It's always here. It's it's all inclusive. Your purpose isn't some day when or just in relation to the world, but it is your being, your presence. And I think that when you shared your sunset story, that moment of insight and awakening.

• 52:02André Duqum?

  Like that level of fulfillment, that ontological experience of completeness, of wholeness, of undividedness, you could say is integrity also.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:12André Duqum?

  The root of integrity being integritas, you know, the undivided whole sense within. And I think so much of our endeavors in life are in pursuit of that, whether or not we articulate it.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:28André Duqum?

  And so I just, I love that we acknowledge that because the the reality is it's so easy to hear this on a podcast, read it in a book, go back into our life under the presumption that things aren't the way they should be. I think this insight equips us to meet life fully and inevitable challenges and health issues and societal troubles and suffering and some sorrow with an open heart and actually more more capacity to to be an effective agent of change in the world.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I totally agree. And I found on my own journey that how I show up as hopefully an effective agent of change, that's changed, that itself has changed. I mean, for example, for 10 years, I was just, you know, hardcore, running a Zen Center in Santa Fe, Mountain Cloud Zen Center. That was, I thought I'd be doing that till I died, but COVID came, the center shuttered. Right around then, I had a head injury, which really affected my cognitive capacity, actually. I also had a very difficult, you know, situation with somebody who's very dear to me, going, getting into a very, very, very, very challenging, long-term, life-threatening, difficult situation, which was heartbreaking.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  And all of these, they all happened at the same time. And I, I had to change how I was teaching. And that's where I came up with this terminology, original love, and that map of practice, which, of course, it comes out of the traditions, but it was a slight, slight simplification and reform, reforming of the view. And I couldn't, I was much less, I, I just had to live from my heart. I couldn't live from my head anymore because it was, it had had a blow struck to it. And my heart had had a blow struck to it. I just had to get into my heartbreak and live from my open heart.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  And, and that's what I aspire to be doing, you know, really. I aspire to do it all the time. Yeah. You know, I, I have my moments, but I have moments both ways. Yeah. Doing it better and worse, you know. But, but, you know, that wasn't what I was doing for 10 years of teaching. Kind of some of it was there because I'd been through quite a deep other realization experience in the course of my Zen training, which was different from that beach moment. I had a number of, yeah, a number of significant milestone moments, but one of them blew everything away. It was just everything, everything just totally gone.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  And, and thereafter, every moment being a new world arising, arising, arising, you know. And that was very heartfelt as well. And that's what I, that's why I was asked to become a Zen teacher, actually, really. Because, because this, this was a real shift. I really knocked away a lot of my, you know, neurotic trouble, was actually really blown away by that. And I thought that was it till I die. But I was wrong because then this, you know, the COVID stuff and the head injury and the heart blow, it, it took me to another place again, which is living from my heart fully, or aspiring to, as I said.

• 55:56André Duqum?

  So there are innumerable paths to come to that realization. I'm curious, as somebody who is one of the few teachers authorized in your lineage out here in the West, and who understands through that lens more than most people, I'm curious, how do you articulate what distinguishes Zen as a path? What is like, what's truly its flavor comparatively? As there are so many different conversations and lineages and disciplines that we explore on the show, what would you say is really the heart of what distinguishes Zen as Zen? As Sambo Zen?

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, that's, I'll try to do that with the caveat that I don't know the other traditions as deeply. And so, because a lot of them, the deeper you go, you know, they're so complex and there's nuances and so I don't want to caricature any other tradition. But I'll say this about the Zen that I've been training, it has this view that all of us can have these moments of realization and that that's not the end, that you can get them more deeply. There's a sequence of pictures called the ox herding pictures in Zen, which mark out a path of practice and spiritual development.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  And you know, the first one, the ox herder recognizes that they've lost their ox. And so the second one, they go looking for it and they pick up the hoof prints of the ox and they follow the hoof prints. The third one, they catch a glimpse of part of the ox, like the hindquarters showing out of a bush or the horns over a fence or something. And suddenly they know there's a living being, there really is a living being. And that's a moment of realization, of awakening.

• 57:46André Duqum?

  There's a there there.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  There's a there there. There's Zen calls it kenshu, seeing your original nature. Kenshu, sudden staggering moment, oh my gosh, it's real.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  But it's only a glimpse and it's only part of the beast. There's a long process of training till you get to see the whole, the whole ox and you get hold of it.

• 58:07André Duqum?

  You just saw the ass.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  You just saw the ass, exactly. But now you're seeing the whole thing and it doesn't go away. And that for me was what happened with that deeper experience I was talking about. It became present and accessible always. Then you train it, that's the fifth picture, actually. We got to in the sixth one, you ride it home. And then the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth, no more ox. The ox disappears from the pictures. It's become second nature and you're no longer concerned with the journey of awakening. You're concerned with a journey of helping and of service in this world. Whatever, however that, however you may be called to express that.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  And I think there's such deep wisdom in that notion that actually, cause it seems all encompassing to, to get this deeper awakening and be able to live, live with it. That seems like a total path in itself. But Zen sort of says, no, that's a phase and you can go beyond that. One of my, one of my Zen teachers actually is a great guy from the Philippines, Ruben Abito Roshi. He always would say, it's like Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear, to infinity and beyond. And the beyond is right this, this here now, us having this conversation, you know, which is both ultimate reality right here.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  And exactly this, you know, I'm a little bit thirsty, I'm gonna have a sip of water. We're dialoguing, talking about there's 10 Ox-erding pictures right now. Who knows what we're talking about next? But you know, this is it. It's so, it's a real emphasis on not checking out. It's not a path out of the world. It's a path deeply into the world, you know? And I think this is a really important flavor of Zen. It's not, I'm gonna escape this world of suffering. No, I'm gonna realize its true nature and re-enter it ever more deeply.

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• 1:01:14André Duqum?

  How do koans as a technology come into the picture here?

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Thank you for asking that. I was hoping we might get to them.

• 1:01:22André Duqum?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  It's a really, it's a, it's a, yeah, koans, there are, there are distinctive features in, they're not unknown in other traditions, but let me say just a tiny, a koan is a little phrase, sometimes a question, sometimes it's a phrase describing something that somebody did from the history of Zen and early Buddhism. So you have koans from the time of the historical Buddha, and you have koans from the early great days of Zen, the sixth century, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries in China, mostly they're from those time periods.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  And what they do is they kind of encapsulate one practitioner's deep awakening. And, but they do it in very paradoxical ways that make no sense to the intellect, to the ordinary mind. So for example, there's a famous one, you know the sound of two hands clapping? What is the sound of one hand? What is the sound of one hand? Now, you know, people might, I've had people, you know, when I was teaching with koans, people might come in, "There, that's the sound of one hand." Uh, no, it's okay, that's fine, you know, whatever. You've presented something and but that's not what this comment is about.

• 1:02:48André Duqum?

  Some people can clap with one hand, too.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. But this is, it's actually like, it's a paradox. It's inviting us into awakening, basically. It's what it's doing is inviting us into this, actually, this undivided organism of this present moment, where nothing's separate. So one hand, two hands, 10,000 hands, you know, it's actually all one. But it's inviting us to realize that for ourselves. So that was, was, so that's just one example. There's, there's hundreds of them.

• 1:03:23André Duqum?

  What would you extract from that? What is the sound of one hand? And you're, cause as, as a teacher in this lineage, you've had to pass hundreds of koans

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32André Duqum?

  to sort of be like authorized to teach in the way you do.

• 1:03:38André Duqum?

  And the way that you're describing it is like these paradoxical, puzzle seeming, you know, phrases don't make sense to the intellect, but they point to, once you're in the state, sort of an obvious realization becomes self-evident as to the nature it's, it's referring to or pointing to.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56André Duqum?

  So in that example, how would you, how would you, if I was your, if I was your, your teacher and I proposed this koan, you know, a thousand years ago,

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06André Duqum?

  what would be an answer that you would give to that one?

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  I have to be a little careful.

• 1:04:10André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Cause, cause um, we don't, there's a sort of protocol.

• 1:04:16André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  Not being too public about, about it. And we can talk about them and around them a lot, but I can tell you this. I would need to show it to you, not talk about it.

• 1:04:28André Duqum?

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  I'd need to show you. And in the way I showed it, you as a teacher would be looking to feel that I'm really presenting my realization of all the world and me as being one thing. There's nobody here, there's exactly this body, mind, heart here. And it's all-inclusive. So I'd need to show you the sound of one hand in a way that you could feel as a teacher, my realization.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  That's sort of the.

• 1:05:04André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  So it's a little strange because kahins are words. But in almost every case, when you meet with a teacher with them, you have to embody it. And you don't, you don't, you occasionally you show it with words, but it's got to be an embodied experience. Usually you show it with something you actually do as a movement, as a gesture, as something. You usually show them with your body because they're about embodying realization. So this is actually another special feature of Zen.

• 1:05:37André Duqum?

  It's like awakened charades.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  It sort of, sort of is.

• 1:05:42André Duqum?

  Not to bastardize a thousand year old lineage, but I'm trying to picture what it means.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  It can seem that way, but when you do it, when you do this presentation, this embodied presentation of it, you feel it. You feel, oh, you're back in awakening instantly. And that's the value of this training is that it's like, yes, you've been graced and blessed with a moment of realization. But how is it going to become part of your life, integrated into your life? And that's what the kahin training is for, is to embody it. So you don't do it by thinking about them. And, you know, they'll thwart every avenue of thinking. You know, if somebody's trying to understand a kahin and it's very natural, sometimes you get given one and of course you start thinking about it.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  And you're meditating, thinking about it, you get nowhere, you know? And then all of a sudden, when you're not thinking about it, you suddenly have some insight into it. And you feel it in your body and you know what to do. And when you next see the teacher, you just do it, you know? And, and you feel, this is how it's been for me in my training, you know?

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  You feel that you and the teacher are somehow,

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  you know, it's a single field. The room you're in, you, the teacher, the koan, it's all becomes one. And you just know the rest of the world drops away and you got it, you know? And then, you know, you have a chat and you go on to the next one. So it brings you back to embodying awakening repeatedly.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  And that's, I think, precious. It's something about the body being involved is so critical.

• 1:07:37André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think a lot of people might think here or go on and think of it from the way we've been trained to think of education, especially in the West. It's like a multiple choice. There's a right answer to give, right? As opposed to

• 1:07:54André Duqum?

  a phrase written in English, shared verbally, that dissolves into a state of experience that is a level of embodiment.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  Beautifully put.

• 1:08:03André Duqum?

  Well, I want to pass the baton back over to you because I think you're sharing this wonderfully. So, yeah, I would love to hear more in your experience of like how this, the koan as like a technology brings you into these states and these experiences and awakenings. Maybe we could share a couple more and I'm just so fascinated.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, there's a, there's a view that, you know, there's a handful of early koans, which are called breakthrough koans. And, you know, once somebody's had a significant opening with one of them, then they can start working on the whole long, you know, there's four or five books of koans actually that we work through. So then somebody can start doing that because they've had the critical breakthrough of realization to some degree. They've got some glimpse of it. Some of those early ones are like across, across traditions, you know? Who am I? Who am I? That's, that's taken up as a koan. Sometimes it's refined a little bit to like, who's hearing?

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  Who's seeing? You know, like, you know, who we are, you know, we're gazing at each other as we have this conversation. But who is actually the seer? You know, like, very clear what is being seen. But who is it that's seeing? And we can ask ourselves that. Who is really here doing the seeing?

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  You know, and the more we look back into that, we might find it's not so easy to answer. Well, I found, well, there's this little sensation that I think of as me, but it's just a sensation. Or there's an idea, a narrative in my mind, a story of me, who I think I am, has been through the experiences that, you know, this, this being has been through. That's me, but it's just thoughts. Who really am I? And we can, we can ask that sort of, you know, deeper and deeper. The, the lens can get perfectly aligned on this sense of me. And suddenly, boom. I don't want to say, actually.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  But suddenly, we might just suddenly see. It's not what I thought. You know? And so that's great. Then we would come to the teacher and describe what we've experienced. Say, yes, yes, that's an important realization. Great opening you've had. Let me give you another koan. And then you'd work through all these different koans if you wanted to. And one is make Mount Fuji take three steps.

• 1:10:43André Duqum?

  Make Mount Fuji take three steps.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So there's one, how on earth do I do that? That's crazy. But actually, after a moment of realization, we might, we might think about it and still not really get it, but we might just know what to do. And, and, or it might come to us. I'm going to try that. You know, so you try that. Low and behold, yes, the teacher says, yes, yes, I see it. I'm seeing it as you do that. I'm experiencing the reality of this koan. And you get it as well. Oh, my gosh, this is, I'm embodying realization in what I'm doing.

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  So, okay, is this, is this kind of landing? Is this making some sense?

• 1:11:28André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  It's, I know it's weird. There's tons of them. There's one where, there's this master called Dong Shan and he was,

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  the story is that he was sitting in a kind of granary in the monastery,

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  maybe at a table, counting out, weighing out hemp. And, and, and the student,

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  it seems, the koan goes, what is Buddha? Or what is awakened nature? You know, what is Buddha? And Dong Shan answered, three pounds of flax. Three pounds of flax. So he, it's thought that he was probably in this granary weighing flax. And it just hit the three pound mark. So he just said, three pound of flax. Cause it's exactly the moment that he's in, right then and there. So, um, you know, cause it can't be, it can't be something other. It's always this. So, you know, what is Buddha? Lifting glass of water. Glass, two thirds full. This is Buddha.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  You know, beautiful, actually very beautiful glass. You know, or it's a warm sock.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  It's, in other words, it's bringing us back to this moment. So, so here's a little point I just made to summarize this is like, koans are not trying to get us to some other place where they are. They're an invitation pointing us back to our own experience now. Always here and now.

• 1:13:13André Duqum?

  How many koans have you passed as a part of your practice?

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  Well, I've been through, um, there's, they say there's 670 in our curriculum. I don't, I don't know exactly if that's right, but some 600. But, you know, I've done, I've done them multiple times with different teachers. And then I've done them with students. So, and I've talked about all of them. So I've been kind of working with them all a number of times, not just once.

• 1:13:40André Duqum?

  What does it feel like from the perspective of the teacher? When you give a koan to a student and they pass? What does it feel like for you?

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  Oh gosh, it's amazing. Cause you know, basically it's like,

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  You know, most people would would start like with a first, one of those early breakthrough cards and and you know, who knows how long they'll sit with it. But you know, usually what happens when somebody's had a breakthrough is that they'll they'll come and see the teacher, you know. And there's like, they don't know what just happened. If it's on a retreat, so it's fresh, or it may have happened a week ago or something, they come in and you can feel right away, very kind of open and light. When they walk in, you can just feel it in your own body and mind and heart. And they'll say, God, this totally weird thing happened. I mean, I can still feel it, actually. It was so, so strange.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  I don't know what it was. Well, well, tell me about it. What, what, what was it like? And they'll always have a specific time. Well, I was in the supermarket. I was, I was in the frozen aisle and I was just reaching for this bag of peas. And all of a sudden, it's like it wasn't me doing it. It was like the whole universe was reaching for the, I can't, I don't know what to say, Henry. I can't describe it. It was really like, everything was there and there was, there was nowhere else. And, and, and it was like, this is what it had always been, just without reaching for the peas. I don't get it. And okay, that's a breakthrough experience. Whereas suddenly the ordinary sense of self with this narrative is cut, is interrupted.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  And instead, there's this infinite, boundless reality. And but it, you know, people will be often just really kind of like, but I don't know what it was. But when they're describing it, you, you can see, oh, my gosh, you seem, it's all one, there's no self, there's, you know, it's actually maybe all empty, there's no time, there's no space, everything's here, these kinds of things. So it's thrilling. It's thrilling as a teacher because you, you're as they suddenly realize, recognized something fundamental about who we are.

• 1:15:55André Duqum?

  There's something very refreshing in the way that Zen phrases a lot of this path to awakening where you're sort of, I would say, literally dying into the ordinariness of experience. Like, a lot of, especially maybe on the more shamanic paths or psychedelic paths, even through the study of the Eight Lems or various different yogic traditions, there can be this early on presumption that like, there is a state, once I achieve, I will then be enlightened and it can almost further the perception of duality.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:16:33André Duqum?

  And whether it's the three-pound flax or the two-thirds cup full of water, there's something

• 1:16:41André Duqum?

  so profound in bringing this insight into the everyday mundane ordinariness of washing dishes, of folding your laundry.

• 1:16:52André Duqum?

  And where else could it be found?

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  That's beautifully put. That's exactly the point. Where else could it be? It's because it's so easy for us to think it's down the road. But it can't be. There's only now. There is only now. There really is only now. And I was just teaching a retreat with an old dear friend and mentor of mine, Roshi Joan Halifax. And she came up with this phrase that I just love, actually. The organism of the present moment. We join, when we join the organism of this, of now, it's undivided. It's undivided. It's all-inclusive.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  Nothing's, you know, in this very now, here. I mean, I'm talking about this one, not some theoretical one, I don't know. This very moment. Everything's here and it's undivided. It's one reality. And, you know, an opening, a breakthrough, a realization, an awakening, is recognizing that. This very now is all there is. And Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese, he used to say this. There is only the present moment and everything is here.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  It's so beautiful, you know, it's such a mercy. Because, you know, we think we've got to earn and get to this marvelous place called awakening or something, liberation, realization. We think we've got to get there and earn it. No, it's already here. It's much more about releasing, letting go, allowing, you know, not fighting, not reaching, grasping, not resisting. It's much more about dropping stuff. You know, the many things that we don't recognize we're carrying, ideas and body sensations,

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  emotions, just to let it all be is actually the, that's what opens us up. You know, and so I sometimes wonder with Zen and with other paths, like, like, do we have methodologies, try to do this, try to focus on a koan, try to focus on your breath, just to keep the mind busy so that reality can sneak in around the back and come in and show itself. Because we're not trying to find it, we're trying to do the practice.

• 1:19:28André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  Therefore, the reality of this moment could show up.

• 1:19:31André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it makes total sense, and I feel like many meditative practices are giving the mind, which is a dog or a monkey, a toy to chew on, you know?

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. And then the real dog owner can show up, you know, all of this moment.

• 1:19:51André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53André Duqum?

  And then practice becomes, and meditation becomes less of something we do, more of something we are. But the, the beauty of having a practice that you're devoted to and you're disciplined with allows more of these spontaneous moments to appear, like they become...

• 1:20:12André Duqum?

  Like you're providing more and more opportunities for these realizations to come in because you're less distracted with the doom scrolling and our perceived problems and all of these things.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  I totally agree, and I think it's also about the, when you've got a path of practice, you've got something to bring them to. It's like there's a, you've already got this medium into which you can start integrating. So that's like me when I was 19. I had no path of practice to which I could bring what I'd realized. It was just this thing that had happened, but I had nothing, no way of grounding it and integrating it, you know? And I sometimes think like, at times I felt, man, I'm so grateful to my path of practice for all it's given me.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  And I remember there's a point, I don't know, 20 years ago or something, when I suddenly thought, no, I'm so grateful to my path of practice for what it's let me give it. All the things I've been able to let go of and hand over to this path of practice, that's equally valuable. That is, it's this, it's, yeah, it's this, it receives all this stuff from me that actually I kind of need to let go of, or I can let go of and I didn't know I could. So it's a reduction, not an acquisition.

• 1:21:47Speaker 00

  I think that's pretty much true, actually, of this path, yeah.

• 1:21:52André Duqum?

  We're so programmed to view from the lens of acquisition, though.

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:21:56André Duqum?

  Like more means more things, more acquisition, more money, more followers, whatever it is, right?

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Yeah, who would have thought how much we gain by losing?

• 1:22:09André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:11André Duqum?

  Yeah, and it's one of those counterintuitive things where it's like from that from that state of realization, you I personally feel like there's actually nothing to gain and nothing to lose.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  Like I'm Yes.

• 1:22:21André Duqum?

  And I find more and more freedom in making space for emptiness, both internally and externally.

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:22:29André Duqum?

  Anything that doesn't serve a purpose, that isn't intentionally placed in my home, give it away, sell it, get rid of it. And that and I also think of like the value of any room is actually not the stuff that's it's filled with, but the actual emptiness in the space of the room, which makes is so we can sit down and have this conversation, you know, it's and so like having that like empty emptiness first as a kind of viewpoint from how we build our home to

• 1:23:00André Duqum?

  even our email subscription lists, like every every area of life, we can I like the the phrase reduce it to its maximum, you know?

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  That's beautiful. Actually, I've got to say, Andre, just, you know, having a little glimpse of your home, it expresses that beautifully. I can feel that intentionality with everything that's present that actually helps the space to show up. I agree with that. There's a, you know, there's that Janis Joplin song, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. I think it's really true. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. You know, I remember the first time I went to a retreat with my Japanese master, Yamada Ryo and Roshi, this was now nearly 20 years ago.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  I'd been training with other my other teachers by then anyway, and they were part of the same Sambho Zen world. And he the first talk he gave is saying, you know, the point of Zen is this, that we're we're all busy trying to get the things we want so we feel okay. And that's, of course, it's material things, but it's also relationship, it's sort of some status. You know, a nice watch, whatever, but we're trying to acquire things to be okay. The trouble with that is that we know we're liable to losing them. And at the end with death, we know we'll lose them.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  We're gonna lose the nice house, the lovely relationship when we die. Zen's solution is not to adjust that a little bit and try to assuage it a little bit. No, Zen's solution is to realize that we never really had them to begin with.

• 1:24:56André Duqum?

  I love, I love the way that's phrased. There is this, the old story of Socrates going through the market at Athens and just seeing so many vendors and so many things and saying, who knew there were so many things in this world in which I do not need? You know, like that's, that's real power in my perspective and what you're speaking to in that level of freedom. You know?

• 1:25:21André Duqum?

  It's, and it's cool to be able to look at things from the many different lenses. Like I love the path of Yana Yoga to be able to intellectually walk through this. You can, you can get there through the intellect. You can get there through your emotions and the devotional practice, through the non-dual practices, through, through many different avenues. I think it's cool to also look at it from like the biological lens, how the sense of individuality, which we so strongly held the presumption of before dissolves the more we realize we're inhaling what the trees are exhaling, they're inhaling what we're exhaling. The mycelial network that, you know, makes life possible.

• 1:26:01André Duqum?

  And it, it keeps on like anchoring in this insight there that there actually is no strict demarcation line between self and other.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:26:11André Duqum?

  And I know that, you know, part of why I love doing this podcast so much is because I get to talk with people that are steeped in various different disciplines that get to be an entry point to whoever it might resonate with. You know, Zen, I think has been something that clearly. And the way that it was brought to you just really resonated with your being. And there's so many amazing other traditions that resonate with people in different ways. And it's cool to be able to see the golden thread that weaves them all and how they're essentially speaking about the same source of virtue nature.

• 1:26:45Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes. I know in my own case, I actually have trained in different traditions as well that I found so rich and helpful. And my first meditation path was transcendental meditation for five years or so. And I would have stuck with it. I loved it, except that I happened to stumble into Zen through a friend. And I knew that Zen knew about that experience I'd had when I was 19. It was like front and center in Zen. That's what Zen is really deeply concerned with, is helping us all come to a realization like that. And I'm sure I could have found that in TM. I just didn't, you know, it was very therapeutic

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  and kind of almost medicinal for me. And man, I needed it. But in Zen, they talked about it explicitly. No, they talked about it in poetic language that made it explicit. I knew, oh, my gosh, they know about that. And somehow it's central to what they're trying to express. So that's what got me to.

• 1:27:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  To find. And then, but since then, yeah, like I've done the Jhana training, I've done, you know, some Vipassana, some mindfulness, skeptical philosophy, and, you know, and, I mean, I did, I was into the Greeks as a young man. I read Ancient Greek, actually, and I started a PhD in Ancient Greek. And so I had some grounding in the Greek philosophy. And, man, they're wild, beautiful.

• 1:28:19André Duqum?

  Just one more note here on. The importance of sadhana, of a practice of meditation, as somebody who has founded the Way app, which is really beautiful. The necessity in this day and age is that having a practice, like you said, allows reality to sneak in through the back door. There's something inherently pleasant about the concentrated mind. And the reality is, we live in an age more than ever where it's, we have so many ways to become distracted.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:53André Duqum?

  So much technology and ideas about the world and things that are pulling us from the political lens that can, if we allow it to, pull us away from awareness of who we are. And so, any other note there on how important it is for many of us to cultivate a practice of meditation, whether it's once a day, whether it's twice a day? And eventually it goes down deeper into these jhana states and where it dissolves into awakening and it becomes less of, again, something you feel like you need to do. I know for me, early on, it was much more like of a militant practice, like I need to stick with this thing.

• 1:29:33André Duqum?

  And then it dissolves into less of a me doing a thing and it's part of the way in which you are. But somebody who's obviously such a prolific meditation teacher through your app and through in-person retreats, any words on the importance of cultivating a practice for everyone who's listening right now?

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, one way I used to think about it, and I still do, and when I started out, I got this, was the sense of like, basically, I want to have a shower every day. And my mind needs a shower. It needs hygiene. And it's a kind of mental hygiene to check in with myself, to give myself some space, to... And I could feel it as soon as I started meditating regularly. I got it. There's this kind of cleansing process. That just a single sit, it may be a really distracted sit, but the fact that I sat still for twenty minutes,

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  or ten minutes, whatever it is, and was devoted to sort of not doing anything outwardly. Yeah, my mind might have been active. It doesn't actually matter. The fact that I sat still and was kind of dedicating that little period of my day to my life, not to my activities, to my existence as a being. That provides, even if it's a very distracted sit, just a tiny grain of perspective, which is a kind of mental hygiene. And of course, if we're doing it daily with consistency,

• 1:31:19Speaker 00

  it just tiny, tiny incrementally builds on itself. And that little grain of perspective, over days, weeks, months, it grows into just a bit more awareness. And you just start to feel it, and you miss it if you don't do it, eh? And I don't know. I mean, I know there's a lot of nice things, of course, people do that are kind of meditative, going for a walk in the woods. Probably great to do the sauna or cold plunge, you know, whatever. There are things we can do that are in the same territory. But the particular value of meditation

• 1:32:03Speaker 00

  is that it's, you're not doing anything. You're really just inviting being to recognize your own being, you know? And that's, that has a particular kind of wholesomeness, that you and yourself, you're sort of, you're giving yourself an opportunity, daily, to gradually, and then sometimes suddenly, you know, discover that you've got your very own being is already okay.

• 1:32:40Speaker 00

  You know, whatever turbulence and trouble may be in your own personal world, you know, in your professional world, in the collective that we're living in, there's still the raw fact of your own being that is, deep down, is okay. And meditation is helping us align with that and getting to know that. So it's a, I mean, I see this, you know, with so, so thousands and thousands of students, you know, that it does actually work, you know. But, but you kind of need to be consistent.

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  And it's far better to do 10 minutes a day than half an hour once a week. Far, far, far better, you know. That's, you know, in a way, if I just talk about the app for a moment. Yeah. That's why we built it, was we wanted to help people get into the daily habit. And we thought that, that our radical thing on our app was that there's no choice. You do not have a choice about what to do. You follow this pathway and it's going to train you in these different ins that we've been talking about, in mindfulness, in connection, in absorption, and hopefully in awakening. And we kind of circle around through them, these four aspects of practice,

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  going deeper and deeper as we go. And what, our kind of philosophy was that if you know about these different benefits, it's a motivator is to know that there are these different things that can happen and they really do happen over time. So it actually makes sense to be on a journey that's training you in these different aspects of practice. So number one, you know there's fruits down the road, even though we're talking about they're not down the road. Actually, these things do develop over time. Number two. We know that we know a journey that makes sense,

• 1:34:50Speaker 00

  that's logically develops and is consistent. And you incrementally develop your practice. And we can train you on it, you know? And it's not like you open up and there's a hundred different courses you can do. No, there's one pathway. And if you just consistently follow it, you're going to start seeing different benefits in each of these different dimensions of practice development, of spiritual development that a human being can go through. So it's it's super simple, but it's actually deep. And and we think we're still the first app that is doing this.

• 1:35:32Speaker 00

  It's not a library, it's a pathway. And people, you know, the feedback has been insane. And and our growth has been, I mean, really, really awesome. And it's very heartwarming to see that people are resonating with it in the kinds of numbers that they are. But anyway, I have I gone off track? No, I think I'm still on track. This is this is this is about the path, the sadhana, the cultivation, which is valuable in and of itself. And it might open us up to the realization that's always here.

• 1:36:10André Duqum?

  Hand in hand, there, I would love to get your perspective on as you awaken to these realizations, you increase your sensitivity, so too does your capacity for noticing beauty in life.

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  I'm so glad you bring that up. I think beauty is critical. And actually, that's another aspect of Zen that really drew me. It totally values beauty.

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• 1:37:37Speaker 00

  I don't know whether we want this, but I'm a poet. I could share a poem. I would love that, yeah. Yeah, why don't I just share, um, why don't I share a poem? Okay. Would love that. This one's called Sweeping the Yard.

• 1:37:54Speaker 00

  Which is kind of a zen thing. Daily chores. Elevated, as, you know, sublime. Sweeping the yard, sweeping the yard. When I sweep the yard in the morning, I don't do it for myself because I like it tidy. I don't even do it for the yard's sake because it enjoys being clean. I do it for the shy one. I do it for the shy one who lives inside me, who loves this world better than I ever

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  will, who has nothing to prove, whose innocence is beyond understanding, and who I only ever know in glimpses that leave me breathless with longing, with hope that goodness is still possible, is still somehow present in this world. His sweetness shines on the earth, so the earth loves itself again.

• 1:39:05Speaker 00

  He knocks away all my ideas about who and what I should be. So we pick up the broom again, he and I. And we send the old leaves skittering across the patio and the dust smoking over the tiles. And we make the little heaps that we gather in. This is how he wakes up. This is how his wakefulness turns our little yard into the bright place I call home.

• 1:39:46Speaker 00

  This is how he wakes up. This is how his wakefulness turns our little yard into the bright place I call home.

• 1:40:00André Duqum?

  Beautiful, indeed.

• 1:40:02Speaker 00

  Sweeping the yard.

• 1:40:06André Duqum?

  I found

• 1:40:09André Duqum?

  poetry obviously has this capacity to speak to reality in a way that prose can't quite make contact with, right? Such is the nature of metaphor, analogies, and story.

• 1:40:23André Duqum?

  And

• 1:40:26André Duqum?

  I want to continue to get your perspective on the heart of that poem as it relates to our ability to notice beauty in life.

• 1:40:38André Duqum?

  The capacity and sensitivity radically changes the more that we start to get beyond our own dramas in our head. And that, of course, has many different implications on what we think we need to do, should do, must do in order to Extract joy, beauty, love from the external world, right? You're inherently recognizing it in the very thing in front of you as you. So, any other words on beauty?

• 1:41:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, you know, it's, it's like if we can unplug from our surface life where we're desperately trying to manage things. You know, we've got some notion of a, this line that we're living, this linear timeline that we're on and we've got to get to that and we've got to avoid all these other things we don't want. If we can get, that's just a construction. And if somehow we just drop a tiny bit below the surface of that, we find beauty here and now, waiting to show itself. And you can find it in the strangest of places. You know, I've found it on a freeway, just driving along and,

• 1:41:53Speaker 00

  oh, I just want to get to the exit, you know, 50 miles away and get to my destination or something. No, just sitting in this vehicle, the hills, the other cars with other people in it, the shine on the surface of the road, the shine on the steering wheel. It's actually all pouring into existence, being, being, being this very moment here and now. And it's beautiful. It's not exclusively nature. You know, of course, nature is an obvious place where it's easier for us to find beauty. But I think the key is that it's, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that it's here to be seen.

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  And it's, it's just whether we can just get that little bit of release from our attachment to the surface life, just drop an inch or a foot or a meter deeper. And we find that there's this part of us that intrinsically recognizes beauty in the world. I find it amazing that we do have the experience of beauty. You know, because it's like, what's the evolutionary advantage of that? I mean, maybe, I guess there could be a reproductive one, for sure. But, but, but we don't just limit it to other potential reproductive mates. We see it in the world. Why? And there's a, there's a great nature film I once saw where

• 1:43:22Speaker 00

  There's this line of like four or five big gorillas sitting, staring at a bush. They're just sitting there, captivated. And what is it? It's a little beetle, bright green, travelling from leaf to leaf across this bush. And all of them are just staring at it. Like, is that, you know, primate experience of beauty? I don't know. But it sort of looks like it could be. I think there's stories of chimpanzees going to a waterfall and just gazing at it. It's a special place and they recognise it, you know? I think we've got an inherent capacity

• 1:44:06Speaker 00

  to recognise something about our relationship with this world and appreciate our participation in it. And it shows up as beauty. And I think it's kind of important. You know, they say the journey of Zen, actually, it began in India, where the fundamental question was, was what is all this? They moved to China, where the fundamental question in the Confucian society of the day was how to govern, how to organise society harmoniously. And you can see some of that reflected in like koans

• 1:44:49Speaker 00

  are somehow trying to recognise our participation in the wholeness of experience or something like that. Then it goes to Japan, among other places. But in Japan, the question was, what is beauty? And there's so many ways. Tea ceremony, you know, calligraphy, landscape painting. True, it came from China as well. But in Japan, it got refined even further. Beauty matters, you know? And it doesn't mean being able to buy expensive things. That's the beauty of this world. Standing in the sunset, looking at that reddish hue on the green hill that develops.

• 1:45:32Speaker 00

  Being out, I walk, almost every morning I go out early and watch dawn come. And it always blows my mind. How can something this beautiful? Be no matter what the disasters in the world going on. And the crazy politics and the machinations of war and trade war and all the things going on, you know. There's still this beauty and it's totally free. Nobody can buy it. Nobody can sell it. Nobody can own it. You know, and yeah, I live in a beautiful place, Santa Fe right now. But I see the beauty of dawn kind of wherever I am. Walk out before it comes and to see the early light arriving.

• 1:46:16Speaker 00

  The clouds, the way they look at the end of night with light coming. Shadows suddenly appearing. It's it's a display of just such extravagant beauty. And, you know, and you can't buy it. And it's it's kind of amazing to me. That the gift that's given of beauty every day.

• 1:46:39André Duqum?

  Yeah, it goes from this experience we have maybe with only the natural world of like a big waterfall or the northern lights or a extravagant sunset that lights up the clouds. To increasing our sensitivity to the, for me in the tea ceremonies, you know, it's like the this, the smoke that comes off the cup and the, and the tea leaves that are swirling around at the bottom and something so simple, so small can be filled with so much.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:47:17André Duqum?

  That's a, that's an incredibly, obviously beautiful place to live life from because it, it changes your orientation towards life when you move from that place of fulfillment and recognition of beauty. And it also, I think, rewires our notion of ethics. Because I think that historically, like ethics are something that needs to be taught from the outside and rather. As seen as an extension of yourself. Like when you experience the self as other, you don't need to be taught to not harm it. And in a similar way, you don't need to be taught to cut off your own hand, right?

• 1:47:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:48:00André Duqum?

  And so I think sometimes some of these teachings can be perceived where like, okay, then what about all the horrific things that are happening on the world? And the list of all the corrupt leaders that are coming out and the genocides and all these things?

• 1:48:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14André Duqum?

  And um.

• 1:48:17André Duqum?

  And at least in my experience, and I'm curious to hear yours, this insight does not remove you from involvement towards very needed humane rights and action in the world. But rather it can actually allow you to meet it more fully and be more equipped.

• 1:48:35Speaker 00

  That's beautifully put. I totally agree. I think it, they've, you know, they, they often say in Buddhism, like the two wings of practice are wisdom, which can mean insights in all kinds of ways, such as we've been talking about, and compassion. And, you know, we might say realization and love, you know, and wisdom and love, you know? And that love is the core that precisely as you've said, that comes from our recognition of our non separateness. The beautiful thing about these realization experiences when they happen is that you can't get one without realizing that you're part of it.

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  It's not like you see it the way you see other things. It's not like, you know, there's a beautiful painting, now I'm seeing it. Or, you know, there's that power station, actually, and in the sunset, it's looking so beautiful. It's not, it's not like that. It's you're part of it, you're implicated. So that, with that said, it is exactly natural that you've started to feel love for the world. And it, and actually, you feel the sufferings of the world more intimately.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  But you're more resourced. You've got a capacity for the, because the heart is open. And compassion is a motivating thing. They talk about the difference between, there's some research on this, between empathy and compassion. Empathy is feeling with, which is obviously a beautiful thing to do, but it's not motivating. Compassion is motivating, energizing. Compassion actually is a positive emotion. Yeah, we care about the suffering that we may see going on. But we're motivated to help. And that's a positive thing. If that makes sense.

• 1:50:34André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:34Speaker 00

  I think that's intrinsically what all of this is about.

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

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• 1:51:08Speaker 03

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• 1:51:37André Duqum?

  I've heard you talk about the distinction between breaking your heart, opening your heart and the whole heart. And I think that goes hand in hand here because there's no shortage of heartbreaking things when we look, turn on the news. And then our, in our own very like, you know, various moments of our life, we're going to have those moments where our heart breaks. Yeah. And. I would love to just hear your thoughts on the progression there.

• 1:52:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, I'm tempted to offer another shorter poem, if I may.

• 1:52:11André Duqum?

  I love it.

• 1:52:12Speaker 00

  Which is about heartbreak and how, well, you'll see that it's how, what a difference, how it can change us in actually be, you know, they talk about post-traumatic growth, and I think heartbreak can be taken that way. This poem is called Frozen Lake, and the image in it is of a frozen lake, you know, that we can walk across or maybe fall through. So that's the notion in the poem. And it's got a little epigraph, which, like a little quote at the top, which is from a Sufi poet and wise fellow called Sheikh Abu Said,

• 1:52:56Speaker 00

  who called himself nobody's son of nobody. And the quote is, Allah says, or God says, "The broken ones are my beloved." Frozen lake, "The broken ones are my beloved." "When I think of friends who've been through the worst, through the dread love lives with, through the terrible fear anxiety can only dream of, I feel sorry for the rest, for those who had it all as they had hoped, who crossed the frozen lake from one side to the other, never guessing the great dark beneath. But those for whom the lake cracked and opened,

• 1:53:38Speaker 00

  who fell into its unspeakable night while still walking upright in the light of this world, whose hearts burst and met its waters. For them, there is no consolation, nor is any needed, nor is any needed."

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  That's about being cracked open, about the heart breaking and therefore breaking open. It's really about, in a sense, trusting grief. You know, grief is a thing all of us naturally don't want to feel because it's so painful. When we have the cause of grief, in our personal lives, people we love very much going through very hard times, losing people, we may have grief. Some people have climate change grief. Some people have what they call polycrisis grief.

• 1:54:42Speaker 00

  The world is in all these different crises, crises folding upon one another. Why not, why wouldn't we have grief around it, you know? But if we trust grief rather than try to avoid it, it can be a doorway that opens us up even more. So the broken heart can become an open heart. In other words, the pain of heartbreak, if we don't resist it, if we surrender, it can open the heart. And then, yeah, the heart's more tender and it's going to feel more, but it's open.

• 1:55:24Speaker 00

  And when the heart is open, we're alive. We're really alive. We're really feeling this life. You know, a life without feeling, it's not a full life. And when our heart is open, we know. Sort of, this is my real life. You know, and that leads to a whole heart. We become wholehearted. And I don't know that we can get to wholehearted, I don't know, without heartbreak. Maybe we can, and I don't know. But for me, heartbreak has been...

• 1:56:10Speaker 00

  Maybe it's been the great teacher.

• 1:56:14Speaker 00

  You know, in different ways, at different points in my life.

• 1:56:19Speaker 00

  And I've been very resistant to it. I've been partially open to it. Or I've been wide open to it.

• 1:56:30André Duqum?

  It seems like there is this inherent

• 1:56:34André Duqum?

  feeling that breaking open our heart, it's a death of sorts. And so much of our fear in life is the fear of death of some form. Whether it's our physical body, whether it's an identity, who we thought we were, what we thought something would be, a relationship or family situation. And I'm curious how you think about death and heartbreak and how they go hand in hand.

• 1:57:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's a beautiful point, a beautiful observation. I guess I feel that we go through many deaths. You know, maybe some say we dying a death each moment, you know.

• 1:57:17Speaker 00

  I know that I've I've been, you know, looking back on my life, I see, yeah, there've been chapters. There've been chapters and in a certain sense, the time each chapter ended, it was a kind of death.

• 1:57:32Speaker 00

  There's also, you know, I think I referenced this a little bit before, but there was a moment in my Zen training when I definitely seemed to go through some kind of something that was more of a kind of annihilation than I'd ever been through before. And in that moment,

• 1:57:56Speaker 00

  the very one who'd been seeking enlightenment or seeking awakening just was totally gone. And along with that one, everything was just gone. It was a, there was just nothing, actually. It was really, and there was nobody seeing the nothing. There was no seeing of the nothing. There was just nothing. And in that nothing. I only recognized it after. It was like I went through this. It wasn't an experience, in a sense. It was a kind of ending of experience. And then after it, kind of very disoriented sort of pieces started coming back.

• 1:58:39Speaker 00

  And, and for days afterwards, the only thing I could say was, "Thank you." And obviously, I didn't physically die, clearly. But there was a more thorough kind of death of something than I'd ever experienced before or since. And it was a turning point in my practice. It was, it was after that that I, I was no longer sort of in it, out of it, in it, out of it. You know, I got it, I lost it. I go, that was over with that moment.

• 1:59:19Speaker 00

  Because the person who had been trying to have a good practice and be more awakened and recognize sometimes, "I'm more, I'm awake now again. Oh, I'm more deluded now." That person had gone. And, and there just was no need to try to be more this or more that or anything because that was all gone. So that was, to me, that was, I guess that was the real fruit of my Zen training for me, was that actually happened. And until that moment, I'd always thought, yeah, clearly, you know, I'm really lucky. I've been graced with some of these moments of awakening, you know. And, and I've had great teachers and...

• 2:00:04Speaker 00

  But I'm never going to be like my teachers because I still default to, or at least repeatedly come back to this traumatized mess. You know, maybe slightly less of a mess. But, you know, somewhat, somewhat prone anxiety, stressing about stuff, fretting about stuff. I keep coming back to that even though I can also recognize, you know, something boundless and beautiful and vast.

• 2:00:40Speaker 00

  But after that moment,

• 2:00:44Speaker 00

  it wasn't like that anymore. It was no longer back and forth. It was no longer wanting some state over another state. It just was sort of gone. And I know that there's, I don't really want to claim anything with this because I'm, you know, still a mess. You know, I'm still doing my work. But, but it was really decisively different. And I think there's a saying in Zen that the real way is beyond

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  being caught in the many things and being awakened. The real way is beyond both of them.

• 2:01:25Speaker 00

  It's not about one or the other. It's beyond and includes both. And there's a, this is, this is, um, this is important for that cart track metaphor as well. It's not one or the other. It's both, you know? And they say that first there's the 10 trillion things. And then we see that they're all empty and one.

• 2:01:52Speaker 00

  But that's not yet the end of the path. And maybe, sure, there's no end. But the two, the 10 trillion and the empty oneness, they're exactly the same thing.

• 2:02:07Speaker 00

  And until they're exactly the same thing, there's some kind of duality between them. You know, initially, there's the duality of everything being separate from me and everything separate from other things. With awakening, that duality is gone. We discover the non-duality. Somehow, all things are encompassed by one great awareness, non-dual. But we'll still usually, most of us, have a duality between recognizing that and being back in the old view. Back and forth, back and forth. I want to get that all the time. Keep practicing. And eventually, the second duality between awakened awareness and non-awakened awareness, that can be gone.

• 2:02:53Speaker 00

  That's, that's, that's very, very beautiful. It's very, very beautiful to find that there's this.

• 2:03:02Speaker 00

  You know, it's unnameable. It's indeterminate. Um, you could say it's totally empty. But on the other hand, it's all things. You could say it's all of this just as it is. But on the other hand, it's utterly empty. And you don't, you can't choose between them. It's, it's, it's, it's so beautiful. And, um, for me, you know, in so far as there's still the thread of biography that I can recognize, that was a total turning point to somehow drop into that.

• 2:03:46Speaker 00

  Again, it wasn't an experience I had. It was somehow an ending of experience. And, and it's all been a little different since then.

• 2:03:58André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think it goes hand in hand with the, sometimes often overused analogy of the chrysalis and the caterpillar and the butterfly. Right? Like there is the, there is the death, the transmutation, the ending of one form we're taking into this goo of unknown, of nobodiness.

• 2:04:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:04:21André Duqum?

  And so whatever is going to emerge next, trusting that life is way more intelligent than we could ever, you know, choreograph in our own minds.

• 2:04:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:04:31André Duqum?

  That it, that it knows what it's doing. I also think about the, sometimes the paradoxical contemplation on the progressive path of awakening versus the direct path. You can have direct insight and yet it seems like we have this meditation practice. Like we're, it seems like we're doing this to get somewhere. And I love the Zen phrasing of a water heats gradually and boils suddenly. You know, that, uh,

• 2:05:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:03André Duqum?

  Like we have these little moments and these mini awakenings and ahas and realizations and insights into reality until the point where the water boils and then it, it, it stops becoming a duality that we return to. Yeah, there's, there's, there's so much here. I feel like we could talk for days and days and I'm sure this is the first of many conversations that will, will to come. I'm curious though, as we start to wrap up. Take your time to think on it if you if you want. But if you had 60 seconds to share a core message, one truth to the heart of humanity, what would what comes to mind?

• 2:05:40Speaker 00

  You are love. You are love.

• 2:05:49Speaker 00

  You know that movie? I don't know how big it is in the US, but there's a UK movie called Love Actually. I don't know whether you know that one. It was.

• 2:05:57André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think I might have.

• 2:05:58Speaker 00

  It's it's got it's got some stars in it. You know, I think I can't remember their names. Hugh Grant's in it, I think, and Emma Thompson, and some of those British stars, and and a few American stars as well. Love Actually. And I've also thought, why is it called Love Actually? And it suddenly came to me, maybe it's the answer to a question. What really matters? Love Actually. Or what's it all about? Love Actually. What you know, what is our purpose? Love Actually.

• 2:06:40Speaker 00

  Like, it's almost like we're reluctant somehow to say it. So tiptoe around the word love, because, of course, it can mean so many things, and it's got so many associations. But fundamentally,

• 2:06:56Speaker 00

  what if,

• 2:06:59Speaker 00

  what in the end we really are is love?

• 2:07:06André Duqum?

  It's been a beautiful through line throughout this whole conversation. And I think conversations and messages like you share so often about our true nature being that original love is it's really something that we need to hear, I think, now more than ever, as there's this increasing moments of depression, anxiety, meaning crisis, loneliness, epidemics. We're constantly reminded of our fracturedness, our fragmentedness, our separateness. So.

• 2:07:40André Duqum?

  Yeah, I highly recommend anybody who's listening, if they want to stay connected with Henry's work, check out the Way app. Go on that, on that journey of those insights and meditations. Any other thoughts you want to share and where people can stay connected with you and your work?

• 2:07:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, if anyone is curious, I got this book that's a kind of storyline of my own path of practice called One Blade of Grass. And there's the book Original Love, which is speaking to a lot of this as well. And yeah, the way app.com has all you need on the app. And but above all, you know, try to, try to just give yourself 10 minutes a day of stillness and quiet. You know, and if, if, if our app helps you with that, fantastic. If another app does, fantastic. If no app does, fantastic.

• 2:08:36Speaker 00

  Just being still and quiet every day for that little bit of gradual lessening of stress, softening the body, letting go. It's, it's, it'll change a life for sure. And if more of us are doing it, it'll change the world.

• 2:08:55André Duqum?

  Henry, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to connect. I'm looking forward to hopefully joining you in meditation on some retreats one day, diving more into your work, maybe pouring tea for you. I'd love that.

• 2:09:09Speaker 00

  I would absolutely love that, Andre. It's been a great, great joy and, and honor, you know, privilege to get time with you like this. Thank you.

• 2:09:17André Duqum?

  Likewise. Everybody who's tuning into this episode, I'm curious. Let us know in what ways this episode has resonated with you. I think there are various conversations on this podcast that feel, they have like a different energetic kind of resonance to them. And they're speaking to aspects of self beneath the analytical and they're more heart shares. And I think that was self evident in the way that you shared and also through your poetry. So big fan, big fan of this episode. And until next time, be well. Take care.