#560: Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans

Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans | Brought to you by GiveWell.org http://givewell.org/ charity research and effective giving, Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim clean, plant-based creamers, and LinkedIn Jobs http://linkedin.com/tim recruitment platform with 770M+ users. More on all three below. Henry Shukman (@mountaincloudzencenter https://www.instagram.com/mountaincloudzencenter/) teaches mindfulness and awakening practices to a wide range of students from all traditions and walks of life. Henry is an appointed teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage and is the Guiding Teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center https://www.mountaincloud.org/. He has an MA from Cambridge and an MLitt from St Andrews and has written several award-winning books of poetry and fiction. Henry’s essays have been published in The New York Times, Outside, and Tricycle, and his poems have been published in The New Republic, The Guardian, The Sunday Times (UK), and London Review of Books. He has taught meditation at Google, Harvard Business School, UBS, Esalen Institute, Colorado College, United World College, and many other venues. He has written of his own journey in his memoir One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir https://www.amazon.com/One-Blade-Grass-Finding-Memoir/dp/1640092625/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Henry has also recently created a new meditation program, Original Love http://originallove.org/, which aims to provide a broad, inclusive path of growth through meditation. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim. Founded by big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton and volleyball champion Gabby Reece, Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim promises to deliver high-impact fuel to help you get through your busiest days. Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim offers a line of plant-based products designed to optimize your daily rituals from sunrise to sunset. My two favorite products are their Turmeric Superfood Creamer and Unsweetened Superfood Creamer. I put one of them in practically everything. Both can really optimize your daily coffee or tea ritual, and a $10 bag will last you a long time. For a limited time, Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim is offering you guys 20% off your order when you use code TIM20 at checkout. Check out LairdSuperfood.com/Tim http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim to see my favorite products and learn more. * This episode is also brought to you by GiveWell.org https://www.givewell.org/! 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LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer. Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 770 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim https://linkedin.com/Tim. * For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  It can be really hard to parse. You could do weeks of research to find the charities that are out there, what programs they run, what their admin overhead is, how effective, blah, blah, blah, on and on. It can take forever, I know from experience. Doing the research is really hard. Or you could simply visit givewell.org for a short, vetted list of the charities they've found to be best per dollar in donations at saving or improving lives. GiveWell spends more than 20,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations and only recommends a few of the highest-impact, evidence-backed charities they've found. They do all of this without any signup fees and without taking a cut of your tax-deductible donation. GiveWell wants to empower as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about their Donations, so GiveWell is free. I've recommended

• 2:12Tim Ferriss?

  GiveWell.org for a while now and donations from listeners of this podcast, that's you guys, amount now to roughly $483,399.27, so close to $500,000, which is incredible. So first and foremost, thanks to everyone who has donated. In total, more than 50,000 people have used GiveWell to donate as effectively as possible. And rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save tens of thousands of lives and improve the lives of millions more. So, go right now to GiveWell.org and when you make your first donation, your gift will be matched up to $250. This matching offer is good for as long as the funds last, so it's time sensitive and is a great opportunity to multiply your impact, which is something I always

• 2:56Tim Ferriss?

  look for. How can I get the maximum multiplicative effect out of my dollars that I give? To participate, just go to GiveWell.org and when you get to checkout, pick Podcast and enter "Tim Ferriss Show." It's that simple. So one more time, get your first donation matched up to $250 at GiveWell.org. Be sure to select Podcast and "Tim Ferriss Show" at checkout.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 3:26Tim Ferriss?

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 3:28Henry Shukman?

  Now would be seen in a perfect time.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 3:44Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Henry Schukman, S-H-U-K-M-A-N. You can find him on Instagram at @mountaincloudzencenter. Henry teaches mindfulness and awakening practices to a wide range of students from all traditions and walks of life. Henry is an appointed teacher in the Sambhav Zen lineage and is the guiding teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center. He was introduced to me by my very close friend, Kevin Rose. That is how this came to be. He has an MA from Cambridge and an M. Lit from St. Andrews and has written several award-winning books of poetry and His essays have been published in The New York Times, Outside, and Tricycle, and his poems have been published in The New Republic, Guardian, Sunday Times,

• 4:27Tim Ferriss?

  that's in the UK, and The London Review of Books. Henry has taught meditation at Google, Harvard Business School, UBS, Esalen Institute, Colorado College, United World College, and many other venues. He has written of his own journey in his latest book, One Blade of Grass, subtitle Finding the Old Road of the Heart: A Zen Memoir. And that book was gifted to me by the aforementioned Kevin Rose, affectionately known as Kev Kev on this podcast very often. The website is mountaincloud.org. You can find both Henry and Mountain Cloud Zen Center on Instagram, @mountaincloudzencenter, Facebook, facebook.com/mtncloudzen,

• 5:10Tim Ferriss?

  and you can find Henry on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/henry-shukman. Henry, welcome back to the show. I promised everyone a round two. I promised myself a round two because I have all of these notes that we didn't even touch in the last conversation, which was wide-ranging. And I want to focus on koans and delve deeply into many remaining questions about Zen and practices and so on. And I thought we might start, as I mentioned before we started recording, with a live example, a real-world case study. And that is, I'm coming down with some kind

• 5:51Tim Ferriss?

  of cold. I've got a scratchy throat. I feel turbulent in my internal state right now because I was feeling a little sick, also got agitated earlier this morning, and that has continued to the present moment. So I'm wondering, when you have a lot going on, or life has thrown you a curveball, or who knows, just wake up on the wrong side of the bed, assuming that still happens occasionally, what do you do with your toolkit and training and so on? What happens?

• 6:25Henry Shukman?

  Okay, okay. Thank you so much for asking that. I like it a lot. And it's dear to my heart because alas, I do have to deal with that. You know, it's not gone as perhaps it ought to have in some marvelously awakened practitioner or something, but I'm evidently not there yet. So I can definitely, I think I can offer a few tools. But actually, I want to just say, I've got to say this, Tim, thank you very much for having me back. I'm kind of bowled over, actually amazed. And I know you said it last time, but I thought somehow it'll just get postponed and what happened. Because I mean, you know, you have the people you have on are just so sort of amazing. And I'm unknown and weird. So, you know, it's a real honor.

• 7:08Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of my sweet spot, actually. But it's, I kid in part. It's, it's great to have you back on. And thank you for saying that. And I had to have you back on. I promised it.

• 7:21Henry Shukman?

  Well, I really am sort of humbled and very grateful. So let's see. Yeah, so I can totally relate to your question about where you're at right now. I mean, actually, to be honest, I can relate because I've got, I'm in the situation I'm in right now. First of all, talking to Tim Ferriss, my God. But then secondly, actually, I've got to do a teaching tonight to something like 400 people as a guest teacher. And so that's a little bit sort of in my system. And tomorrow morning, my wife and I are flying back to the UK for just under two weeks, the first time in two years or more, to see our aging, aging parents who we haven't been able

• 8:02Henry Shukman?

  to be face to face with in person. My system is sort of, it knows all that's going on. Now, you've got a cold or something coming on, you had some kind of, should we call it sort of a triggering event or some kind of activating event.

• 8:17Tim Ferriss?

  A kerfuffle earlier today, yes.

• 8:19Henry Shukman?

  A kerfuffle, okay, kerfuffle. Yeah, right. So the system got sort of a little bit riled up and hasn't fully settled down again.

• 8:28Tim Ferriss?

  Has not settled down at all.

• 8:30Henry Shukman?

  At all, okay.

• 8:31Tim Ferriss?

  I appreciate the generous phrasing, but yes.

• 8:35Henry Shukman?

  Okay, well, look, I mean, first of all, let's acknowledge clearly that that's the situation. There's a system here with a little bit of upregulation. The sediment is churning. Yes. So that's the first thing is just to know it, to state it, to be clear about it. This is what I do. And then the second thing, I mean, really, the key to the whole thing is letting it be that way. It's like, okay, here's a highly sensitive creature, a human being. And among human beings, some by temperament have more sensitivity than others.

• 9:18Henry Shukman?

  All of us have fluctuations in our levels of sensitivity. And some of us do, I mean, in a sense, do the kind of inner work that leads to more sensitivity. Let's note that in a way to be sensitive to things is a good thing. It means that we're more aware of life, put very broadly. But with it comes the possibility of getting more easily riled up. Those of us who've had, for whatever reasons and whatever shape, traumatic elements in our childhoods, especially also if we are of a sensitive nature, that sort of, it comes into us.

• 10:01Henry Shukman?

  It's a wound that, you know, is in us. So when we're allowing ourselves to be in, let's say, an agitated or a somehow distressed state, when we're allowing that, it helps to also allow with compassion that, you know, somehow things have made us be sensitive like this. And we're still, we still know, we know that we still have wounds. And maybe in some sense, there's a core wound and we don't want to close that off.

• 10:43Henry Shukman?

  And one way to not close it off is to be ready to accept and allow our states of agitation and distress in the present moment. If we can do that and see how in a way it's a kind of, if it's allowed, it becomes a kind of opening to perhaps a sort of deeper wound. At least there's some recognition that that's there too. And both are allowed that we have, as well as having that stuff, we also have all of us come pre-installed with access

• 11:24Henry Shukman?

  to a sort of wider, more loving, in this case, really meaning more self-loving awareness. Our hearts have the capacity to love ourselves. And we need to tap into that.

• 11:43Tim Ferriss?

  Henry, may I jump in for one second?

• 11:45Henry Shukman?

  Please, please, please.

• 11:46Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to be a dork and ask some technical questions about this word allowing. So when you allow these feelings to exist, or you allow yourself to recognize and accept your current state. So allow and accept, these are the two words I have questions about. How would you describe how that manifests? For instance, like what is the self-talk? Or what do you do with the feelings? In other words, if you were to try to describe for someone what not accepting or not allowing looks like? And what allowing and accepting look like?

• 12:31Tim Ferriss?

  On the other hand, what are the characteristics of those two things? Like practically for people listening, if they're like, great, I want to allow and accept. How do I do that? What does it look like?

• 12:40Henry Shukman?

  Again, I'll tell you what I do. But remember, this is on the back of decades of being still a bit each day. Because really, I'd say like the ideal is like this, that we can be still. We might close our eyes and be still and first say, wow, I'm agitated. I'm distressed. Maybe I'm a bit overwhelmed, if that's appropriate. Acknowledge it, state it, to declare it, what did they say, to name it is to tame it?

• 13:18Tim Ferriss?

  I've never heard that. I like that.

• 13:20Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, it makes it a little bit easier if we can just identify what's going on in a clear, kind, matter of fact, internal voice. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed.

• 13:34Henry Shukman?

  I'm feeling a bit agitated. I'm feeling somewhat distressed. Okay, so the first thing is stating it. Now, there's forks in the road all the way along, so there are lots of ways of doing this. But let's say for somebody who's got a certain amount of sort of somatic awareness, that's to say, we can find feelings in the body. I've actually heard you on a podcast saying, I don't know how old the podcast was, though, that like you get the throat and not much else kind of thing. So has that, have you done work on the somatic stuff at all, like feeling things in the body?

• 14:11Tim Ferriss?

  I have, I feel like for all the sensitivities that I have in so many other places, I don't want to say that I'm physically insensitive, but when,

• 14:22Tim Ferriss?

  when I'm in, say, a Hakomi therapy session, which is really a, if I could simplify it, a somatic focused mindfulness practice, it's constantly answering the question, what are you feeling? But in great detail. And I don't think I have a great vocabulary for it. Maybe that's part of the handicap.

• 14:45Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:46Tim Ferriss?

  Because someone could say, I feel like my friend is being unreasonable. And it's like, well, it's not really a feeling. What are the actual kinesthetic sensations? And I would say I'm probably a step broader than just tightness in the throat. There's more to it than that. But I wouldn't say, I've seen group sessions where exercises are being done and someone can go on for five minutes in like a mini TED Talk of their bodily sensations. I do not do that.

• 15:20Henry Shukman?

  Okay, okay. Okay, well, look, let's just see like right now. And I don't know if you if you would be happy to close your eyes, but it's usually a bit easier if you do.

• 15:29Tim Ferriss?

  I will close my eyes. Yes, I can. I can comply with that.

• 15:34Henry Shukman?

  This is very kind. I hope everybody's sort of okay with this. And if, by the way, I suppose if anybody's driving, don't follow along, right?

• 15:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, if we have to tell you that also, like, seriously, be be be careful with natural selection. But yes, if you're driving, don't close your eyes. If you're operating heavy machinery, don't close your eyes. In other words, consult with your closest commonsense PhD, please. Yes, I will. I will close my eyes and share my experience with the audience. So we'll keep we'll keep it to that.

• 16:09Henry Shukman?

  So let's see. So we're sitting, you can feel the seat of the chair. Let yourself just feel that. Let yourself feel your feet on the floor. Whatever your hands are doing, just feel them as well. It doesn't matter whether they're free floating or holding each other or resting on the thighs or something. It doesn't matter resting on a desk. Just feel them and again, feel the feet and again, feel the seat. See if you can feel all three zones at once, hands, feet and seat. And you don't have to do anything special. It's just just kind of recognizing that they're there as sensations.

• 16:51Henry Shukman?

  And just let me check in. Is that is that sort of working for you? You feeling them?

• 16:57Tim Ferriss?

  I am. And I should probably clarify that one thing I feel very capable of, I have a lot of sensitivity for, is feeling different parts of my body. So if I wanted to take the kind of locus of my conscious awareness and put it in my like, right big toe or in my left Achilles tendon, this type of practice that we're doing right now, I am very, comes very easily to me.

• 17:24Henry Shukman?

  Okay.

• 17:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I don't want to interrupt the flow. So please keep track. But when people usually ask in a therapy session, what are you feeling in your body? They're wanting to sort of tie it to some emotional tenor. And that's where I have. A harder time, but yes, I can feel, I can easily pay attention to the sensation of my hands on the table, my feet on the ground and my ass on this very, very hard white chair that I'm sitting on.

• 17:50Henry Shukman?

  Okay. Well, that's, I mean, honestly, that's probably nine tenths of the battle, so to speak.

• 17:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sweet.

• 17:58Henry Shukman?

  That's the key thing. So let's just, we'll keep on with it. So we've got feet, we've got hands, we've got seat. If you've got any back to the chair, maybe your, your lower back or something is just touching that as well, just feel that. If it is, it's fine if it is or isn't. Now let's go to the shoulders, just feel them. Let them settle a bit. Let them kind of, as it were, sort of slump on their sockets kind of thing. Let's feel the jaw now. So here's a key thing. It's really great to slacken the jaw. It's a common thing in, in our sort of fast paced world, our sort of hasty world, to have tightness

• 18:38Henry Shukman?

  in the jaw. So see if you can let the jaw sink about an eighth of an inch, probably forward and down. And see if that at the same time brings some kind of softness into the throat. And you might also just bring your attention to your tongue. Cause the tongue is, you know, it's a massive muscle that's incredibly, it's full of micro muscles, it's incredibly busy. Let it rest right now. I know you're gonna have to be talking shortly, but it's okay

• 19:17Henry Shukman?

  to rest it. Let it settle on the floor of your mouth. And maybe you get a sense that it sort of lightly expands. Like if you're camping and you leave your down sleeping bag in a sunny tent all day, it kind of inflates. Let your tongue do that, just for a few seconds. Maybe you're getting a sort of little enveloping, kind of just little taste of softness, like almost a soft cloud around tongue, around throat, jaw, all of them easing, becoming easier. So I'm just gonna check in. Are you getting anything like this? Yeah, I'm following along, definitely.

• 20:00Henry Shukman?

  Great. Okay, so we're still with our softness in that area. Now we're gonna let it melt down. So it melts down into the shoulders, and the arms, by the way, become really limp. And it melts on down into the upper chest, middle chest, lower chest, and then right through and around the midriff, kind of the solar plexus area, right in the middle of the body, either side of it, and whatever, to some extent through it, down into the upper belly, middle belly, lower belly, seat, upper legs, lower legs, feet, all becoming

• 20:38Henry Shukman?

  quite, kind of, maybe a bit warm and soft. So now, already, we're getting a bit more balanced in ourselves, probably already a little bit calmer, likely, we hope. Yes. Yeah, yeah, and a bit more sort of easy. And in this state of mind where we've managed to sort of diffuse a certain ease all through the body, and we, you know, under other conditions, we might take longer with this, and go a little bit minutely, just to really tasting

• 21:18Henry Shukman?

  the quality of ease. And now, we can bring our attention to sort of the whole atmosphere around the heart. Don't go for the middle of the heart, just sort of the whole area around the heart. If the chest was a kind of snow globe, you know, and the heart was a little structure in the bottom, in the middle of a snow globe, we want to be aware of the whole snow globe. You know, those little things you shake and snow falls, you know what I mean? I do. I hope you do. Yeah, good. Okay, so that whole area. So just feeling. How is this whole area?

• 22:03Henry Shukman?

  And it might be that much of it is relatively sort of clear, maybe sort of spacious, and that parts of it are a bit contracted and tight, with some tension in them. Could be that there's also, if we go a little lower in the body, like the solar plexus, like right in the middle, above the belly and below the chest kind of thing, around there, there's often some tightness, some contraction. So we're going to be aware of any tension, contraction we're finding, and we're not going to try to change it. Instead, we're going to be soft around it. We're just going to let, get a sense of the body,

• 22:46Henry Shukman?

  the fabric, tissue of the body, actually softening to the sides of the chest, the sides of the flanks. And whatever there may be by way of tension, more in the middle of the body, in the middle of the trunk, the intention is to allow it to be there. This is the allowing, in a slightly more somatic sense, we're softening around it and welcoming it, and allowing it, meaning, yes, you're welcome, you're welcome to be here. That's the kind of vibe. I welcome you. I want to treat you tenderly.

• 23:30Henry Shukman?

  I want to be kind to you. I know that I'm a sensitive creature. I know that I'm a suffering being. And my intention isn't to try to eradicate that, or deny that, or banish that, exile that. No, or reject that, no. My intention is to welcome this. And I know I may be imperfect at it, but I'm trying. And I want you, little tension, little tightness, little contraction, to know that I'm welcoming you.

• 24:09Henry Shukman?

  And ah, maybe there's just a little more ease in finding that at least there's a kind of sense of vague possibility of doing this. In other words, you don't have to be rejecting your feelings. Now, we're looking at feelings right now in a very somatic way. We're not so interested in any of the storylines, any of the cognitive side of emotion. We're really just feeling it out in the body. Okay, now, Tim, I've been going on quite a while. How's this going? You can stay in it as you're reporting, or you can just pop out, whichever you prefer.

• 24:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's great. It's like a therapy session that I don't have to pay for. It's fantastic.

• 24:57Tim Ferriss?

  And without the cognitive overlay of the story. So this is, I imagine, we're about 20 minutes in. This is 20 minutes that I could listen to very regularly and I could use your, what's the right word? Malifluous? Malifluous? What a malifluous? This is a word I have to find. This is a word that my fancy GRE friend used once. Malifluous. Yeah, malifluous.

• 25:23Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, I think you nailed it.

• 25:24Tim Ferriss?

  That's the one. Sweet or musical, pleasant to hear. The voice was malifluous and smooth. So as I was saying, without any type of hesitancy in my vocabulary, listening to your malifluous voice for 20 minutes. But moreover, the kinesthetic focusing and relaxing without story is actually really effective for calming my system. And it's a contrast to what I struggle with, which often exacerbates the situation, which is, for instance, perhaps I'm asked, like, which of the five dominant emotions are you feeling? Joy, anger, sadness, et cetera? And there's a list.

• 26:09Tim Ferriss?

  Now, where are you feeling that emotion? Those are questions that are... The second in particular, very hard for me to answer. But the sequencing, this like sort of boot up or boot down or scanning sequence that we just did, really called my system without any labeling of emotion.

• 26:33Henry Shukman?

  Right. Well, I mean, you know, part of me wants to just say sort of, welcome to the male gender.

• 26:40Henry Shukman?

  I mean, we're sort of notoriously poorly socialized or poorly educated in our social organization in having any emotional literacy at all. I feel that by the time I was cognizant that there was such a thing as emotion, all I knew was kind of, I'm feeling okay and I'm feeling awful. I couldn't parse out whether I was, whether it was, I like like mad, glad, sad, afraid. I find that very easy to remember. Right. It's four primary emotions. I don't know. I know people have different lists. I think four is quite good because it's just so easy to remember. Mad, glad, sad, afraid. And I wouldn't have a clue what I mean. Of course, if I was feeling glad, I'd sort of, I'd know that I wasn't feeling awful.

• 27:25Henry Shukman?

  That was about the extent of my emotional literacy. So God, I think for many guys, I hope it's okay to talk like this, it's a journey.

• 27:35Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'll, I'll take this episode and I'll put it on my new podcast, which is actually called poorly socialized. So it'll be okay on that podcast. Please, please continue.

• 27:47Henry Shukman?

  So, you know, it's, it's not surprising for many of us that we, we really have to go on a journey that might take some time to start to understand, in any sense, really understand our emotional life. And it's, it's so critical because what can you do with emotions, negative emotions, difficult emotions, if you don't know what they are, other than try to banish them? And, you know, if we try to banish them, we're sort of, inevitably, we're banishing part of ourself or parts.

• 28:16Tim Ferriss?

  It just doesn't work. And it's the type of realization that I would have thought by now I would have translated to consistent, reliable, self relating. Do you know what I mean? Like, I, I know that. Divorcing a part of yourself and stuffing or refusing feelings doesn't work. I know it just leads to more problems and yet here we are again, you know, the dog chasing its tail once again.

• 28:48Henry Shukman?

  Right, but you know, we have to sort of compassionately bear in mind what happened to us in childhood, because for many of us, that lays down some kind of a template for how we're going to handle difficult emotions. And if we have things that are really basically too much for us to handle in childhood, and we're alone trying to handle these difficult feelings without support, without being met by anybody, without connection to anybody, it's overwhelming. And there's kind of no choice. It's like, either I die, and often for an infant especially, it seems like it is life or death,

• 29:30Henry Shukman?

  or I somehow have to make it so I don't feel this somehow. Then we may have caregivers who chastise us for showing emotion. We may have stressed parents who just can't handle it. They don't need another screaming toddler or infant. They've got so much on their plate already and who knows what. And so I think it's not surprising that that we would ongoingly have to be working on this stuff. But I mean, the good news, as far as I'm concerned, is that inside of these difficulties, I think there's ways to access.

• 30:11Henry Shukman?

  Well, I don't know, God, we're going off the deep end again, like last time, but.

• 30:16Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's why I'm having you back on. So

• 30:20Tim Ferriss?

  in for a penny, in for a pound. Let's go for it.

• 30:22Henry Shukman?

  Okay, I guess so. Okay, I'll go all in. The inside of many of us, I believe there's some kind of deep primordial wound. There's some deep ancient grief. I don't know. Partly it's probably part of the human race and all the things it's been through over thousands of generations and all the killing and famine and slavery and think the most painful things that have gone on, endless loss of children, so many difficult things human beings have been through. But somehow, I think most of us, probably, I mean, I don't know. I don't know whether you could ever scientifically prove this, but I suspect that anyway, a lot of us have got some deep grief inside us and actually. There are various methods, I think a lot of good therapists somehow tap into that

• 31:04Henry Shukman?

  or can find ways to kindly, gently give us opportunities to sort of open up to that. And it can be incredibly cathartic and incredibly healing, actually, to open in that kind of way and find that grief is not an enemy. Personally, I feel that some of the most significant, most important sort of pivot points in my, my growth so far as a fallible, ailing, fucked up human being has been, has been through things like that, when suddenly a gate of my heart opened and I could feel all this grief, but somehow in that grief, I could also feel just great love.

• 31:46Henry Shukman?

  And I don't know how this works exactly, but my hunch is that grief and love and hurt and love and pain and love, they're joined at the hip somehow. And so our acts, I mean, I've gone deeper than we, with like how to handle and know emotions, but yeah, it all relates really. If we allow our emotional challenges and tightness and, and reluctance and to feel, if we're given a supportive framework where we can open to that, then we might open to this sort of deeper well of grief. And it's so beautiful because then we find, wow, in the depths of this, somehow I don't

• 32:26Henry Shukman?

  feel so alone, there's a truth in this that somehow joins me to the human race or something like that. I don't know, maybe I'm getting off the rails here, not only off the deep end, but off the rails, but, but there's, there's something here, you know, for, for us. I really think this is a part of our healing. That's been, anyway, my experience. And so not being afraid of feelings is a really important starting point. And That is, I think, part of the allowing piece, you know, is that instead of feeling

• 33:08Henry Shukman?

  this way, being wrong and bad, and I gotta not feel this way, kind of flip it. I'm gonna allow this to teach me something. I don't really know what it is, and it's probably quite hard for me to believe it could teach me anything. It just seems like wrong, but actually, maybe it's not wrong. Maybe it's just that my map of myself has got a lot of terra incognita, unknown lands in my map of myself. And hey, why don't I allow myself to be on a journey of discovery, of not knowing all of who I am, and being willing to let parts of myself show themselves that I didn't think I wanted to know, or I didn't

• 33:50Henry Shukman?

  even think we're there to be known, but maybe they are.

• 33:57Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Today, many small business owners like me are busier than ever. Time spent searching for and interviewing candidates can take time away from managing and, most importantly, growing your business. That's why LinkedIn Jobs has made it easier to get to the candidates worth interviewing faster and for free. Create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach your network and beyond to the world's largest professional network of more than 770 million people. Focus on candidates with the skills and experience you need, and use screening questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified people. Then, use the simple tools on LinkedIn Jobs to

• 34:40Tim Ferriss?

  quickly filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires over leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates worth interviewing faster. Did you know every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? So try it out. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/Tim. That's LinkedIn.com/Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 35:15Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was listening to you, of course. One would hope just now. And what I heard you say was, given your more sophisticated accent, the Queen's English and such, I heard terror incognita. And I thought to myself, you know, that's actually, then I realized, of course, that you're saying terra incognita, as I would say it. And I was like, well, maybe to get to the terra incognita, the undiscovered territory or the unexplored territory, where one reaps the rewards, you have to go through the terror incognita, which is the fear in the middle. But I'm starting to really, I'm grasping at straws here. So let me try to land this plane, if that's okay, just. Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 35:59Tim Ferriss?

  Just so we can pile on as many mixed metaphors as possible. This has been extremely helpful. I want to sit with this. We may come back to it, but I want to make sure that I cover a topic that is of great interest to me. It is of great interest to our mutual friend, Kevin Rose. And there are a number of words that you brought up that led me to think about it. Framework, truth, especially framework, is not something that most people would associate with koan, the word koan, or the, what people might think of as koans. And I think we should start from scratch, because not everyone will have heard the first episode.

• 36:42Tim Ferriss?

  But before ever speaking to Kevin about some of what he's learned, I didn't know that koans, which we'll define in a minute, have checking questions, that there may be such a thing as passing or not passing a koan, which kind of blew my mind, because for me, and perhaps you could give an example, but what is the sound of one hand clapping? That may or may not be a real example, that there may be some nuance to that, or one that I had kind of bookmarked for myself, which is somewhat different, maybe, which is not knowing is most intimate, which, again, may or may not be a real koan. You could, you certainly clarify, but these are.

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Statements of paradox that are intended to be meditated upon as a way of perhaps stepping outside the confines of logical, rational, hyper-intellectualized existence. Maybe that's how I would look at these types of things. What is a koan? Proper definition?

• 37:47Henry Shukman?

  Well, I'll try my best. Okay, so a koan is a phrase. It may be a few words, or it can be a few lines long. It may even be the longest two that I know are about a page long each, but even in those ones, we just kind of pull out a phrase here and a phrase there. And that's really the heart of what the koan really is. And these phrases, generally, they sort of don't make sense to our normal, rational mind. And it varies a bit. I mean, like, not knowing is most intimate. It is a, but by the way, it's a totally bona fide koan. Yeah, absolutely.

• 38:27Henry Shukman?

  Koan is with this master called Hogan. It's supposed to be the moment he had a great awakening, actually, when he heard another master tell him that. And maybe I'll come back to the story in a moment. That's almost a bit more, you could kind of wrap your head around some idea of not knowing is most intimate. Well, actually, it's a little bit hard, but you could sort of think, well, actually, Tim and Henry were just a moment talking about not knowing, like going into unknown land, as a sort of reclaiming part of the self by recognizing that there's limits to what I know of myself. So maybe there's some aspect to not knowing that's

• 39:06Henry Shukman?

  connected with personal growth of some kind. And actually, I think, Tim, your comment about terror, terror, that was great. That was great. Because actually, we know that we're moving into not knowing if we get a little bit afraid. Fear is a hallmark of that, because it sort of is scary, nearly always. But so you could kind of maybe think about not knowing is most intimate as, well, not knowing will help me know something about myself that I don't yet know, or something like that. You could sort of rationally approach it a little bit. But what about this sound of one hand? Actually, the real, sort of real, I don't know, the old formulation

• 39:50Henry Shukman?

  of that hand, of that koan is like this. You know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand? In other words, you know what two hands clapping sounds like? What does one hand sound like? Do you know what the sound of one hand is? That's kind of meaningless, really, isn't it? I mean, some people tried, I've had people sort of snap their fingers or something, you know, because only one hand, you know, to make a noise. No, no, no, no, no, it's not. The basic thing with koans is, is the frame, I think I've got to give to understand

• 40:32Henry Shukman?

  what they're sort of for and why they're beautiful and why they're not just often in seemingly infuriating little riddles that can't be unpuzzled out. They're not just that, they're actually, okay, so the origin of them in almost, I think in every single case, is something that one of these deeply awakened masters said or in some cases did. Sometimes if somebody just does something weird. And most of the people doing or saying the things in them are these Zen practitioners.

• 41:16Henry Shukman?

  Perhaps we should say Chan practitioners because Zen was called Chan in China where it really comes from. And the Japanese kind of took it on about a thousand eight hundred years ago and did a great job of sort of conveying it and practicing with it and passing it on, so to speak. But the original practitioners who gave us a lot of the koans, most of them were Chinese and they were mostly in this period of Chinese history called the Tang Dynasty, which was six hundred to nine hundred approximately. And that's when Zen is sort of said to have had its first real flourishing. There were just a lot of people around, apparently, at that time, who were really

• 41:59Henry Shukman?

  Doing this practice and got kind of really helped by it and clarified in certain key ways. And the key way that Koans sort of pass on or allow us to maybe taste is a dry way of putting it is, we could say, non-dual experience. That's sort of a bit boring, really, to put it that way. It's to realise through personal experience that there are actually sort of other dimensions to our experience than we normally experience.

• 42:39Henry Shukman?

  And what they are like is a kind of incredible overwhelming sense that somehow everything is one thing. That's one common experience that Koans are trying to convey. That all these separate things in this world, just like they seem to be. There's a table, there's, there's a cup, there's a tree outside, there's Tim and are you still on the east coast, Tim, somewhere? Yes. So Tim on the east coast, Henry in New Mexico, Santa Fe. And, you know, they're obviously quite separate.

• 43:21Henry Shukman?

  But at the very same time, there is actually also a level of our experience, of our reality, where nothing is separate. And this isn't an idea. It's an actual experience that quite a number of people through the ages and today still attest to.

• 43:50Henry Shukman?

  Being something they've discovered and found to be real that does not in any way impair their functioning as a normal human being. So it's not psychotic and it's not delusional. It doesn't generally sort of take us off into dysfunction. Quite the reverse. It can actually lead to better mental health than we've had before. And it's kind of good for us, apparently, to find this. And koans are little invitations to that side of things.

• 44:34Henry Shukman?

  Now, how they work is, actually, shall I, shall I give you a chance to, to say something and not just rant away? Is there anything, is there anything so far, you know, that sort of doesn't make sense or anything, or, or am I going in a direction that's sort of of interest, do you think?

• 44:51Tim Ferriss?

  It is of interest. Let me, let me just share a few things that may be of interest to folks. And I want you to bookmark, you were just about to get into the way they work, which is a hell of a cliffhanger. So I want you to remember that that's, that that's where you are. I was, I had a bee in my bonnet about the actual term koan, and I had to look it up because it was really bothering me because the characters are super strange for the association that I have with the meaning of koan. And I pulled it up on Wikipedia and the etymology. If you look at it, the origin, as you mentioned, of this expression is Chinese, gong'an, gong'an.

• 45:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's the, the two, or gong'an, depending on whether it's first or fourth tone on the second syllable. And then koan are the same characters in the onyomi in Japanese. But it literally could be translated as public case.

• 45:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Like Gong, I guess this would be Gong'an, yeah, fourth tone. But if you had like Gong'an first tone, it would be like public safety, like public security. It's public, like you would see that on the People's Liberation Jackets in Beijing. These huge green jackets that in some cases you would see that. So I was looking at this and I was like, what the hell does this mean? Because it's public and then case or plan. And I was just like, where does that come from? And so it turns out that that is exactly, according to Wikipedia, what it is. It's referring to a public record. And the terminology came from the Tang Dynasty in China.

• 46:35Tim Ferriss?

  And thus, the koan serves as a metaphor, I'm reading directly from Wikipedia, for principles of reality beyond the private opinion of one person. And a teacher may test the student's ability to recognize and understand that principle. That is the thing I really want to dig into. But, but, but suffice to say, as stated here on Wikipedia, Zen koan collections are public records of the notable sayings and actions of Zen masters and disciples attempting to pass on their teachings. So whether or not we agree 100% with that, I just had to get a better understanding of why these characters are used for this, because it is not obvious at all why they're connected. So let's jump back to where you were in terms of how they work.

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  And I just want to tease this for people. And that is, and I am going into the abyss here because I don't know the answer. But the idea that a teacher may test the student's ability to recognize and understand that principle seems on its face just absurd, right? Because it just does. So I can't wait to hear you tie it together. I will also say that this experience of unity or nonduality, all as one, et cetera, sounds really abstract. And I suppose it is for those who have not experienced it. These are experiences that can be captured or reflected at least in, on some level,

• 48:01Tim Ferriss?

  functional MRI scans with the administration of something like psilocybin at a sufficiently high dose. So you see, and it's much more complex than this, but some down regulation of or decrease in activity in what people might consider the default mode network, this constellation of neural components.

• 48:21Tim Ferriss?

  Thought to be associated with, among other things, conception of ego and self referential thinking and so on. So even though it sounds very woo woo and how would anyone ever document this, this is a phenomenon that is routinely documented and assessed with questionnaires at places like Johns Hopkins when they're working with psychedelic compounds. Not to say that the experiences are identical, but it's just to point out that it's not completely outside the reach of experience and observation. Although Zen or Chan Buddhism had a head start of a few thousand years.

• 49:00Henry Shukman?

  No, look, all of that is fantastic. I'm so happy to hear you say that, both parts. Because, you know, my own little sort of hobby horse these days kind of thing is that I'm so happy about the psychedelic research because it's giving us new tools for once again resuming the study of meditation at deeper levels.

• 49:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 49:23Henry Shukman?

  Because a lot of the study of meditators' brains over the last 30 years, whatever it's been, has been about mindfulness. It's been about, yeah, quieting the default mode network and just getting into maybe more compassionate states of mind or just more equanimous states of mind. But it hasn't really tapped into the capacity, or it's minimally tapped into the capacity of meditation to yield, to bring us to these non-dual states, which are really what the heart of the matter. And so now the psychedelic research is opening that up again and it's creating new ways of measuring longevity of change in people who've been through experiences like this, you know, which was so hard to do before because you

• 50:06Henry Shukman?

  couldn't, you can't really get somebody in an MRI and say, have Kensho. You know, Kensho being the Zen name for, you know, awakening to the principle, which is non-dual. So psychedelic research is really helping with that. And it's actually, it's funny that Zen, you know, had a real popularity in the West back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s even still, in the kind of heyday and then aftermath of psychedelic culture. People recognized, wow, Zen seems to know about what I tasted on that last acid trip. It seems to have some congruence with that.

• 50:47Henry Shukman?

  And maybe meditation is a way to sort of get there in a more stable way, kind of thing, and without having to take a substance. And maybe that's the case, you know, really. So I think now Zen got a little bit sort of, I mean, it was almost kind of mainstream, really, for a while.

• 51:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you had like Judy Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, right? I mean, and, I mean, not, not to mention, you know, Alan Watts and so on, right? So it was in the, it was in the zeitgeist for sure.

• 51:21Henry Shukman?

  And I think maybe it's due for a reappraisal at the moment. And, and maybe coeds can be a part of this. I'm so convinced because, because now, okay, public case, that's exactly right. Now, one interpretation that I've heard of what the public, the term public case means is that actually it was taken from Tang Dynasty legal processes. So essentially, a public case was a public record of some point of legislation or some, what we would call a legal precedent today.

• 51:57Tim Ferriss?

  Case record of a public law court, at least according to Wikipedia.

• 52:01Henry Shukman?

  Right, okay, great. So I'm not off track there. So basically, meaning that you could point to, actually, it was a master called Etu, who was an amazing master in the late 7th, early 8th century, if I remember right, who said, "The single hand doesn't sound without reason." That was what he said, "The single hand sounds." You know, so that's a little obscure. Of course, it's very obscure. But actually, he was trying to express his experience of quote unquote awakening. In other words, he's trying to use language to convey what is basically a non-linguistic

• 52:46Henry Shukman?

  experience and even an experience that we don't really have language for.

• 52:52Henry Shukman?

  But it's a very vivid and real experience in which the sense of self has been swallowed up by everything, kind of thing. And so what we feel we are is everything. And Koans are records of that, in a sense. They like, it's a great practice in expressing through words what he or she has realised. Therefore, the idea is the ordinary way of constructing reality, where I am a self in this body and everything else is outside of me. That way of constructing reality won't understand the koan,

• 53:36Henry Shukman?

  can't get at what the koan is getting at. The koan is a little drill bit that's drilling into the wall of my house of self, so to speak. It's trying to actually puncture the membrane of my sense of self. I'm switching metaphors, you know, it's trying to, I sometimes have talked to them of like, they're like, they're like little explosives. We take them into the psyche by sitting with them. You kind of do best with them if you have a meditation practice. You let them sort of somehow simmer away inside you and they will possibly do something to deep assumptions that I have.

• 54:18Henry Shukman?

  And one of those deep assumptions is that I'm me in my body, in my mind, and I'm not what's outside of me. And that's, that's a deep assumption and the koan can kind of blow a hole in it, in the assumption. And suddenly I discover that's not true. Or it's part, it's true, but it's not the whole truth. There's another reality that is real. I mean, it is a dimension of our reality where there isn't separation between things. There isn't distance between things. Somehow there's one fabric, one sort of tissue.

• 54:57Henry Shukman?

  That's what they mean, by the way, in when you were quoting the word principle. That's what it means. It means a single tissue, a single fabric that is what everything's made of.

• 55:09Tim Ferriss?

  Henry, may I jump in here for one second?

• 55:11Henry Shukman?

  Please, please, please.

• 55:13Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, because I have a tendency of saying, no, no, no. And what I really mean is, yes, yes, yes. So some psychoanalyst or therapist can really do a deep dive on that, I'm sure. But returning to the point I wanted to make, there are no doubt going to be people listening who are like, what the fuck are these people talking about? So what I'd love to do, because they might assume you have to do a lot of drugs or like lock yourself in a room in a robe until you basically go crazy for any of this to make sense. Let me ask some super specific questions. And if you wouldn't mind, I think this will be a way, because this is the itch that I want to scratch for myself also. And it's related to,

• 55:57Tim Ferriss?

  to the extent that one exists, the system around or that includes koans. So one of the questions that Kevin wanted me to ask you is how many koans are there? And how many have you passed? So give me the short answer to that, and then we can, we can go from there. Because I think it, people will be like, what? Okay. And it might, it might pull people in. So how many koans are there that you're aware of? And how many have you passed?

• 56:27Henry Shukman?

  Okay, I'm aware that I've read that there are 1,700 that are kind of classically recognized koans, nearly all from that Tang Dynasty period and a few from way earlier. Actually, a few have come out of the Indian phase of Buddhism, you know, way back in the fourth century is BCE.

• 56:48Henry Shukman?

  So apparently seventeen hundred, but in practice, what happens is there are these different sort of schools of Zen that will use certain collections. So not to my knowledge, no school uses seventeen hundred koans. No training involves that many. In a school that I'm part of called Sambo Zen, we use something like, I believe it's around four hundred and twenty is what I've heard fairly recently, actually, from one of our, one of my colleagues had sort of counted it up. And they're in five collections of koans. So these koans got collected mostly in Sung Dynasty China, that's around eleven hundred, twelve hundred. And

• 57:32Henry Shukman?

  these sort of classic collections were compiled. And there are several of them. There are maybe three really major collections. The earliest was put together in ten twenty eight. It's called the Blue Cliff Record. And that has a hundred koans in it. And then there's another one called the Book of Equanimity. There's also got a hundred. And there's another one called the Gateless Gate that has forty eight. And actually, there's quite a bit of overlap among those volumes. And then there's another volume that we use. And there's a preliminary kind of volume of just a sort of hodgepodge of koans that one of our teachers in the lineage put together called the miscellaneous koans, because they are just miscellaneous. And so

• 58:13Henry Shukman?

  what we do, okay, so this is how it works, is that if somebody's really kind of got a steady meditation practice, and they have found ways to get to the point where they kind of like meditating.

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  Henry, hold your, hold your thought. But if I had to answer Kevin's question, is there, maybe it's a bad question. I don't know, because I don't know what I'm talking about. But how many of those seventeen hundred or four hundred and twenty have you passed? Because I think that's a concept that is going to be interesting to people.

• 58:41Henry Shukman?

  Okay, so I can modestly and humbly say that I have been passed on all of the ones that we do, the four hundred and twenty, at least. Two at the minimum times, in some cases, multiple times. The reason I say multiple times is because I first went through them all with one teacher, and then actually, my teacher John Gaynor Roshi in the UK. And then I moved to New Mexico and picked up with my teacher Joan Rick Roshi, and sort of carried on with her. And so between those two teachers, I did one go through them all. Then I did another go through all of them with my teacher Ruben Habito Roshi,

• 59:25Henry Shukman?

  who's a professor of comparative religion at SMU in Dallas. A fantastic guy. They're all fantastic, fantastic people, by the way. And also, I've done many with my current teacher Yamato Roshi. And I've also, I've also done, I mean, I've done a lot of them at least three times. And I probably, I'd say hazard that I've done just about all of them three times. But definitively, probably three and, I don't know, three quarters of them, two and three quarters of them, I don't know, three times.

• 1:00:02Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I thought that I would have a set, a finite list of questions, but now I just have more questions about questions of all things. So if I may, just dance with me here a little bit. So there are, there are these many koans, but there is, for practical purposes, subsets that are practiced by different schools. You are in the Sambo, I guess, Sambo Kyodan, right? Sambo school, the three treasures, is that right? Something like that?

• 1:00:29Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, that's right, yeah.

• 1:00:30Tim Ferriss?

  And you have been passed, and we haven't yet explained what that is, on these various koans, some of them two or three times. Now, in my head, I'm thinking like, once you have an answer, don't you just kind of have the answer? What does it mean to be passed two or three times? And then I'm going to give you another question from Kevin, and then I'm going to let you run wild.

• 1:00:52Henry Shukman?

  Okay.

• 1:00:52Tim Ferriss?

  And that is, what are the checking questions? What are the checking questions? Because when I first had these sent to me from Kevin, I thought to myself, well, this is interesting. Because in my head, I'm imagining this koan using your earlier description as this...

• 1:01:10Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of Trojan horse software that puts a little snippet of code in your head. And your computer can't run the program. So you basically just like beach ball your way into giving up on rationality. And then somehow, poof, you have this Kensho unity experience because you break your computer. And whether that happened or not is kind of your word against somebody else's word.

• 1:01:35Tim Ferriss?

  So the idea that there is, there are checking questions and passing. I'm like, okay, I want to know all about that. So with that, please go crazy.

• 1:01:45Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, well, it all ties into what you just said. It's your word against somebody else's as to whether you've had Kensho. That's the point, really. It's not, it's not, it's really not. And the reason it isn't is that if somebody's had Kensho, oh my God, the way they experienced the koan will have changed utterly. And the way they are, if they meet with a teacher, if they do, I mean, we've got to bear in mind that this is not the only way of working with koans. Actually, there's nothing wrong with somebody just deciding they want to sit with a koan. Fine. But I've got a friend who doesn't even sit with them. He likes reading them. Fine. There's no ban on that, you know? That's totally up to you.

• 1:02:29Henry Shukman?

  But this system of training, you can actually, I mean, like with on Sam Harris's app, for example, we got these koan meditations and you just sit with them. And it's a bit like, for example, in the zendo, when we're open or even when we're, I mean, in live, but when we're on Zoom, people come and they just, you know, they hear a talk on a koan. They get to sort of bask in the weird waters of a koan for a while, while the teacher's giving a disquisition on the koan. It may be opaque and yet there may be moments when suddenly they feel some weird movement inside, a stirring of something within and some weird little pool of limpid clarity opens. They don't, what the hell is this?

• 1:03:14Henry Shukman?

  But it's beautiful.

• 1:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  Limpid clarity, that's my third podcast.

• 1:03:21Tim Ferriss?

  Poorly socialized. And then to offset the damage from that podcast, I have limpid clarity. Please continue.

• 1:03:29Henry Shukman?

  So there are different ways of working with them. But this way whereby you have sort of decided to engage a teacher with them. If you have this kenshu experience, I mean, in a way, the very point of the koan is it's a, it's a meeting place where two people, two practitioners, one more experienced than the other, can actually meet through the koan in the very reality they've awakened to. I mean, to me, that's the most precious and amazing thing about it is that far from this sort of awakening thing, you know, this awakening to non-dual,

• 1:04:08Henry Shukman?

  being just a personal experience, of course, it is that, but actually through koans, you can meet in it. You meet in the boundless wonder of this other dimension of our experience. I think I said last time we were talking, and I talk about in my book, I had a couple of these, what I felt to be very powerful experiences of non-duality. And they were slightly different, each one, prior to connecting with a teacher. I'd been trying to find a teacher, actually, but sort of wasn't ready. But then eventually, when I did connect with the first teacher that I really engaged with, John, in the UK, John Gayner, I got my first

• 1:04:51Henry Shukman?

  koan from him, which was this, often it's the first koan, which is, it's so inscrutable. I mean, it's just sort of damnable. I mean, I'm embarrassed to even say it, but it's this koan that a lot of people start with, which is mu, M U, mu.

• 1:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's it. That's the whole thing.

• 1:05:08Henry Shukman?

  That's it, mu. I mean, it has, it has a little background story. A monk asked Joshu, this great master, Jiao Zhou, Joshu in Sino-Japanese, "Does a dog have Buddha nature?" Buddha nature meaning this awakened nature, or principle, as it, as it was referred to earlier. "Does a dog, even a dog have that?" he asks. And Joshu answers, mu.

• 1:05:32Henry Shukman?

  Which ostensibly means not, it does mean not, literally. But it's sort of a principle of Buddha nature that it's everything. So how could a dog not have it, sort of thing? And yet, Joshi says moo. So we don't worry about that. We just sit with moo. We just sit with moo. It's, we could almost take it like when Joshi says moo, he's sort of just dismissing the whole question. Moo, I'm not going to deal with that. Moo, something like that. But he's also presenting that very reality in that little word moo. Because actually, that very reality is showing up all the time, right here, right now. It's always present, this so-called principle.

• 1:06:17Henry Shukman?

  You know, it's always present. It's always here. It's just, we're not conditioned to know it clearly.

• 1:06:24Tim Ferriss?

  What you mean by that is the principle of not, or the principle of emptiness? Is that what you mean? Is that what you're referring to?

• 1:06:29Henry Shukman?

  Yes, it is, yes. Basically, the principle of what I was calling non-duality, which also happens to be empty. The principle of total oneness, which is also empty. That's always here. So when Joshi says moo, he's expressing that in his way. Moo, just then, he's expressing it. And so a student sits with this question, moo, if and when they have a, an opening, you know, with this, with sitting with moo.

• 1:07:00Tim Ferriss?

  And to be clear, that is not done by thinking about it.

• 1:07:05Henry Shukman?

  No, it's not.

• 1:07:05Tim Ferriss?

  You're not reflecting and ruminating. You're just kind of sitting there with this software, this code that's been installed.

• 1:07:13Henry Shukman?

  And yes.

• 1:07:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, all right.

• 1:07:16Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, you're just, you're usually just sort of repeating it softly. You sort of add it to your breath meditation usually. Just softly voicing this sound moo with each breath. And you just sort of patiently do it. The more patiently you do it. The better because you'll be more comfortable and it starts to just sort of, sort of in a way, take over your sitting in a very nice, gentle kind of way, kind of thing. It's a little bit like a mantra, you know, it's a little bit like that. But anyway, so it's a little unlike other coins in that regard because you use it that way. Let's say something happens. When you go to see the teacher, you both sort of light up in this other dimension kind of thing. It's, I know, I'm sorry, I'm not expressing it very well.

• 1:08:00Henry Shukman?

  You meet in a way that, I mean, I certainly, coming back to when I was working with my teacher, John, when I went in to see him after I'd had some experience with Mu, I don't know if there's any interest, but I could tell you what that was like.

• 1:08:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. Yeah, please. And then I'm not going to let go, I'm like a dog with a bone on this checking questions thing. I'm not going to let that go, but please, yes, I would love to hear about the experience.

• 1:08:29Henry Shukman?

  And I'm truly going to the checking questions, truly.

• 1:08:34Henry Shukman?

  It's a long journey together, a long and winding road to checking questions. So this is also just to exemplify how much this can happen in the midst of ordinary life. I was busy as a writer and as a poet, I was doing lots of readings, I was working on my next book. I just sold a book and working out the contract with my agent, all of that stuff going on, you know, busy and kind of productive. And I've got a fellowship in poetry at Oxford Brookes University at the time. And one day, and I've been sitting with Mu, and often when I'm riding my bike to the office and in the college, you know, I'm using Mu. And as I'm riding along, just comes to mind and I said,

• 1:09:15Henry Shukman?

  what is this thing, you know, just doing it. And then one day I'm home, I've just made dinner and our two boys are young and they're watching a movie and I'm bringing a plate of food upstairs for Claire, my wife, who's, the boys have already eaten, they're watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a great movie, you know, on the video with Bob Hoskins. And I bring in Claire's plate of food and I think I'm still holding mine. And I'm watching this scene on the movie where Roger Rabbit goes whirring round around a kitchen while his rear end is on fire. I don't know if you've seen it.

• 1:09:52Tim Ferriss?

  I've seen it more times than I should probably admit. It's been a while, but yes, I've seen it.

• 1:09:58Henry Shukman?

  It's a fantastic film, I thought, or at least that's the last time I saw it, twenty years ago, whatever that was. And I was watching that scene and it just suddenly seemed just so funny. And then all of a sudden, this crazy, sort of like a cyclone energy sort of whips up through my body and blam. It's really like I sort of blackout. I'm on my feet and everything's disappeared. Everything's just gone. It's just a empty, vast, empty space that's so beautiful. And nothing there. And then I sort of come back, I realise I'm sort of standing in this room, holding a plate,

• 1:10:40Henry Shukman?

  which somehow I haven't dropped. And it's like the house is still here, but it's sort of not really made of anything. It's totally discombobulating and marvelous. And I'm just trembling with some sort of overwhelming gratitude and love. And it's like somehow this empty space that everything's in is just so overwhelmingly beautiful. And it's just like a huge love. And I'm overwhelmed. I can't believe how fortunate it is to be a human being, you know, it's like, it's just indescribable. So, and this is all coming out of this little word moo. I've been sitting assiduously with moo.

• 1:11:23Henry Shukman?

  And at the time, I didn't even realise it had anything to do with moo. You know, it's just like this mind blowing experience. So I go downstairs, I sort of, you know, I think, well, I'd better sit and light a stick of incense and maybe I'll just kind of calm down. And I don't, I'm supremely happy. It's, I'm overwhelmed with happiness, tears are flowing down my cheeks. And it's just so beautiful. And so then, you know, two weeks later or something, I get to visit with John, a teacher, and I tell him this thing. And he says something like, ah, so moo has paid you a visit or something like that.

• 1:12:05Henry Shukman?

  And I thought, what's he talking about? How could moo have anything to do with that?

• 1:12:13Henry Shukman?

  But suddenly, the penny drops and I realize, oh my God, this is what a koan is for. It's for precipitating, it's for sharing this fucking reality, you know, excuse my Greek. It's, it's, it's, it's, a koan isn't an annoying, boring, little pointless thing. It's got an incredible purpose, which is sharing this sort of deepest reality of our existence. And how can it do it? I mean, I still don't really understand how it can do it.

• 1:12:52Henry Shukman?

  I can sort of piece it together a little bit that, so yeah, Josu knew this world incredibly well. He was, he was accustomed to it, it becomes second nature to him. He was at ease in it and he knew that, you know, this sort of normal way things are and this mind blowing way things also are, are not in the end separate. That's the point of the training ongoing in koans is to go beyond this. Either life is this mind blowing, boundless oneness emptiness thing, or it's my ordinary life. But the point of training, damn, am I getting, am I going ahead? Let me, can I just finish that thought?

• 1:13:36Henry Shukman?

  Finish the thought, yes, please. Wow, God, Kevin, I, I, I hope this isn't too much for everybody listening, man. No, it's not, and I also like being Kevin, so please continue. God, you can tell how my, how my mind is blown, I'm sorry. I think Moo's got a hold of you right now, you're gonna be careful.

• 1:13:56Henry Shukman?

  Oh my God, yeah. So that is why we sit with koans, is because they can open up, they can open us up to this boundless reality. But ongoing beyond a first experience, they train us more and more in realizing that our ordinary life and that mind blowing reality, they're not separate. And that, that's a very hard thing to understand, but that's why so many koans are about things. So, no, okay, I want to talk about koans are about things and koans love the world so much and they love us, they want us to share in it. And basically, of course, they don't really, but the masters, the practitioners who created the koans.

• 1:14:41Henry Shukman?

  They're deeply compassionate and they wanted to share somehow what they had realized. And it's pretty amazing. So checking questions. So when I, yeah, okay, okay.

• 1:14:56Tim Ferriss?

  He's on it. He's on the scent trail.

• 1:15:00Henry Shukman?

  Oh, my God. This is going to be a bit of a letdown, probably. Now, to find us, we finally get that.

• 1:15:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'll be the judge of that.

• 1:15:08Henry Shukman?

  Okay. Well, the checking questions were what John started to ask me about Mu. That enabled him and me to meet more thoroughly and to know more deeply. Basically, what experience had just happened in this student, me? Their questions like, actually, I don't know how much of this I could sort of reveal, but that, yeah, I think I can. You know, there are things like, well, show me Mu. What is Mu? How old is Mu? How tall is Mu? How would you show Mu to a baby? They're weird questions like that. But after that experience, they're easy. They're easy.

• 1:15:49Henry Shukman?

  And they're so they're kind of, yeah, this is a system for sharing

• 1:15:58Henry Shukman?

  what we mean by awakening, right? A sort of a being able to, as in the sort of legal precedent, sort of to, to kind of meet in the same place, so to speak.

• 1:16:11Tim Ferriss?

  All right, I have so many follow ups. So I want to preface all of the follow ups by saying, I am genuinely fascinated by all of this. Simultaneously, I have to act as a stand in for the audience listening. So you can understand, I have to both be enthusiastic, I don't have to, but I am enthusiastic. And I have to present, or I should ask questions on behalf of the audience who might be thinking to themselves, at least a handful of them. What the hell is going on?

• 1:16:39Henry Shukman?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:16:40Tim Ferriss?

  So, so, so, no, this is great. This is great. We're getting, I like it. We're rolling in the mud here. It's good. So the first question that popped to mind for me is related to, sure, an observation that many people had or a thought that occurred to them, which is if you were to go to a psychiatrist and describe your experience with your dinner plate. There's a very good chance they would consider that a psychotic break, or label it a delusion of grandeur and prescribe medication for you. That would be one very likely psychiatric treatment response, right? And, and what I'm curious to know is, or just to get your opinion on,

• 1:17:23Tim Ferriss?

  and this is by, by no means meant to imply that people who have destabilizing experiences shouldn't seek professional help, I think they should. But do you think that these types of experiences, kensho, in the benefit or detriment of an experience like that, is dependent on the container and framework that you have within which to try to metabolize that? And building on top of that, and I've wondered this quite a bit, because with psychedelic experiences, you come to have, over time, I think, tremendous empathy for people who appear to be suffering from mental illness, say homeless people, who seem disconnected from reality.

• 1:18:08Tim Ferriss?

  In your opinion, right, this is not medical advice, it's just curiosity, do you think that some subset of people we view as completely mentally detached are just people who had experiences of kensho, perhaps identical to what you experienced, but have no means for trying to make any sense of it and therefore become lost at sea?

• 1:18:28Henry Shukman?

  I think it's quite possible that that's the case. Tragically, I do. Quite a number of people that, you know, who've reached out to me, report having had something like this earlier in life, I can think of several people who did as teenagers, and had no idea. They somehow, in the depths of the experience, they felt this was a kind of vastly benevolent thing to perceive, to undergo, to experience.

• 1:18:59Henry Shukman?

  And then afterwards got terribly scared and didn't know what was going on, what had just happened to them, were they going crazy? And in some cases, got unhappy, got depressed, anxious for some years. And I think that it could be that in some cases, it could, it could be graver than that. And if somebody is already perhaps traumatised anyway, as so many are, it might initially be, yeah, a very benevolent thing. But then there's no container, there's no understanding, they're completely alone with it.

• 1:19:42Henry Shukman?

  And it could be really scary and it could become another traumatising factor. I think that happens and it's, it's very sad. And I feel part of what I want to do is get the word out widely that this is a feature of human nature. It is something we, we're built with the capacity to have these kinds of experiences. And that they are, you know, vastly benevolent in the end. And they may also be really pretty fucking weird at the beginning. And so I want people to know, you know, that this is a feature of human nature. And therefore there are places you can reach out, people you can reach out to. And you don't have to be doing Koans for this, by the way.

• 1:20:25Henry Shukman?

  The Koan method, I think is a beautiful thing because it makes it more accessible to more of us. It's not a freak thing if somebody has that kind of experience with a Koan. It's still by no means totally predictable or reliable or something, but it's not a freak thing. And it also, the Koan training subsequently is exactly a sort of way of grounding it, integrating it, getting more familiar with it, probably deepening it, clarifying further and learning how to just effortlessly live from it in your normal life.

• 1:21:04Henry Shukman?

  And not feel you gotta do, you know, you gotta quit everything and go and live on a mountain top or something. You don't have to, you know, the mountain top's right here anyway, kind of thing. So the more that people are aware of this, and the more it becomes part of the conversation, the public discourse, the better. And, you know, so far in the world of meditation, a lot of the public discourse around meditation, most of it, has been about the nervous system calming benefits of mindfulness. Absolutely right, right on. It's great that that's happening. And then you've got people like Sam, Sam Harris,

• 1:21:45Henry Shukman?

  who are bringing this experience of waking up, waking out of the dualistic, separate sense of self into a much more inclusive kind of awareness that is deeply beneficial to experience in principle, because it shows our infinite connectedness. And if trauma is about ultimate separation and isolation, you know, the poor child with the overwhelming emotions, totally alone, can show, if we call it that, using Japanese terminology, is exactly the opposite. It's about infinite connectedness. And that is a, is the most wonderful thing

• 1:22:29Henry Shukman?

  to discover. It's, it cannot but flood us with love, at least briefly. And if we're then really freaked out, I want people to know that it's okay. You haven't gone mad. You've in fact discovered something really beautiful and real about your human nature. And there is follow-up. There are ways of gradually integrating it. And hallelujah that you've seen this. It's amazing. And, okay, I'll pause there.

• 1:23:06Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for the pause. I would imagine, though, that this puts you in sometimes a very tricky position where you have an audience now. You're on a larger platform. You're on podcasts like this and people must reach out to you, some percentage of which describe an experience that they have interpreted as Kensho. And for people who are interested, Kensho is actually written in a really cool way. It's Kensho, which is like seeing nature or essence. And it's a cool combination of characters, which does make a lot of sense, unlike the, my original exposure

• 1:23:44Tim Ferriss?

  to Kuan. And I would suspect that you have some subset of people who come to you who really should have psychiatric treatment, just like out of the, out of the ether, right? Kind of over the transom from the public. And I would expect that puts you in a tricky situation because having spent time around people who are having breakdowns and maybe not breakthroughs, sometimes one in the same, but not always.

• 1:24:13Henry Shukman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Tim Ferriss?

  Is that something that has been challenging for you when someone who is perhaps going through a manic episode or having some type of potentially destructive experience that is quite isolating for them, right? It's kind of separating.

• 1:24:31Tim Ferriss?

  Perhaps reaches out to you to validate it as Kensho and therefore something that does not require intervention?

• 1:24:39Henry Shukman?

  So far, it's been comparatively rare. And I think the reason is that, um,

• 1:24:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's good.

• 1:24:46Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, I know. I mean, I can think of one clear time it did, actually, that somebody wanted to come on a retreat. And we were, we meaning myself and the little team at the Zendo, was a little bit wary because of some of the things she said. And we asked about her psychiatric background. And there were some things she told us. And then she came and it was clear that, you know, she really was in much worse shape than she'd let on. And one guy who was part of the Zendo team then, who was a therapist, he sort of spent some time with her. And then actually, he decided. That she really needed to be taken to the psych ward for an evaluation. So that was what we did there and she was compliant with that.

• 1:25:31Henry Shukman?

  But usually people know that there's kind of whatever exactly role I'm in is I teach meditation. And so you kind of gotta be into meditation, really. It's like, and not, you know, not everybody is and it's, you know, it's quite, I don't know if I'd say it's demanding, but it's the main method here. I don't teach just, hey, let's talk about koans. No, I teach meditating and, and one of the ways I teach meditation is meditation with koans. It's not the only way, but for those that are inclined, we can do that. But also, like I said, there's, there's a large number of people, I think, getting interested in koans. You don't really feel the need to engage with the teacher and that's okay.

• 1:26:15Henry Shukman?

  They find their meditation is deeper if they've got a koan, that they're touching, that repeating or thinking of a little bit while they meditate. It's just sort of enriches the meditation. Some people have reported to me just having really deep sits, peaceful, lovely, deep, joyful, peaceful sits. When they bring a koan in, they have no idea really what, what the koan is kind of saying, what it's about, or what either, no interesting, how it might lead to kensha. They're just, they just sort of find the phrases somehow absorbing and relaxing perhaps,

• 1:26:54Henry Shukman?

  and cast a kind of little bit of a spell over their meditation and they find this really deep. And that's lovely, no problem there. And I think this kensha business is, and the real deep koan training is, is not for everybody.

• 1:27:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, true of a lot of things.

• 1:27:13Tim Ferriss?

  So let me follow up with a couple of exploratory points. I'm gonna get into some of the weirder stuff in a minute, but let's start with the assumption that the experiences you described it is absolutely true. This is where I want to start, just as a basis for the question I'm going to ask you. In other words, that this experience of Ken's show is not an everyday by all people thing, but it is not a freak thing. Another way to put it would be it's reasonably common. It's been reasonably common for hundreds or thousands of years. There are shared characteristics and it kind of takes one

• 1:27:55Tim Ferriss?

  to know one, if that makes any sense, right? Like one Obi-Wan could kind of look at another Obi-Wan in training and the force is strong with this one. You have passed. You have passed this. So after asking the check questions, right? I mean, I'm obviously joking around a little bit, but let's just take it as true that that exists as an experience, as a phenomenon, as a training. How does someone who is brand new to Zen, separate someone who is legitimate as a teacher from a charlatan? Because I have been exposed and overexposed

• 1:28:34Tim Ferriss?

  to the, let's just call it the so-called self-development fields, the personal development fields, to the medical fields, to the medical and quotation marks fields for decades, and all of them are rife with charlatans, or people who claim to have a set of expertise and skills that they do not, or people who make promises they cannot deliver. And I have to imagine on some level, there are people running around claiming to be

• 1:29:11Tim Ferriss?

  Masters or experts in Zen who aren't. How can one who hasn't had these experiences assess who is real and who is not?

• 1:29:20Henry Shukman?

  If I just describe a little bit how it works in Sambhosan, that would be a starting point.

• 1:29:26Tim Ferriss?

  Great, let's do it.

• 1:29:27Henry Shukman?

  Okay, in Sambhosan, somebody called it a sort of equal hierarchy kind of thing. Everyone is equal, but there are grades of responsibility. So there's an assistant teacher, there's an assistant Zen. An assistant teacher can do, usually they work with a Zen teacher as an assistant to them, and they can do a certain amount of things as the teacher wants. A Zen teacher can do everything. They can, meaning they can give talks, they can use the koans, they can meet with students, and they can sort of run a Zen though completely, you know? Then there's so-called associate masters, and this is all within Sambhosan. I'm just giving you sort of a framework so you can get some sense of how it works.

• 1:30:09Henry Shukman?

  And these associate masters can appoint a personal teacher. They can't appoint a Sambhosan teacher. And then there are so-called, they're called authentic masters or just masters. And they can appoint Sambhosan teachers. So they can sort of appoint people in the name of the lineage. And there aren't many of them, and they tend to do it sort of collaboratively if they're going to appoint people. So in other words, there's quite a, I don't know if it's elaborate, but there's a certain sort of careful system for who gets what level of responsibility as a teacher.

• 1:30:47Henry Shukman?

  Now, I feel that I'm happy that it's like that because it means that at every step of the way, there's some accountability. It's not just, I tell everybody, I had this awakening experience, I'm an awakened master, I want to be a teacher now. In fact, in Sambhosan, there's almost a bit of a view that if somebody wants to be a teacher, they may not be ready yet. If they're going to get something out of being a teacher. I mean, it's hard to be perfect about this, to be honest, but if somebody is needing the affirmation of being a teacher, you know, and after all, it's kind of a, whoa,

• 1:31:30Henry Shukman?

  you're a spiritual teacher, that's pretty exalted, right? If somebody's needing that kind of affirmation, they're probably not ready to do it. And we just wait. And every year, all the teachers of all levels and all the senior students who their teachers have thought this person might be ready to start training to be a teacher, they all gather, we all gather for a week-long retreat and workshop, and we do a lot with the koans, and people have to give talks in front of the others. It's pretty terrifying, because, I mean, one of the most frightening things, more frightening than being on the Tim Ferriss podcast, actually, which, by the way, I'm finding very enjoyable. It's not as frightening as I thought.

• 1:32:10Tim Ferriss?

  Terror incognita.

• 1:32:11Henry Shukman?

  Exactly. Oh, my God. But, you know, one of the most frightening things I've done really was have to give, I've done it twice now, give a talk to, you know, 80, 90 Zen teachers. Oh, my God, all my seniors. And anyway, in other words, it's totally not down to me to say I'm a teacher. In fact, it's rather carefully titrated over the years. You get more and more responsibility as you're ready for it, if you see what I mean. So, okay, so that's how we do it. Now, those quote-unquote masters, they get this formal, old-style Zen authorization called Dharma transmission, which is, you know, it's very

• 1:32:54Henry Shukman?

  moving to get that, because it, you know, it really means you're, you're, you're, the whole body is really trusting you. And why would they do that? But they decided they do, and so you just accept it, and you hope you'll do your best. And it's, it's a very moving thing.

• 1:33:09Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by the whole body, if I heard you correctly?

• 1:33:12Henry Shukman?

  I guess I mean like the whole organization of Sambhos and

• 1:33:16Tim Ferriss?

  Now, is the Dharma transmission, so I've heard transmission used in yogic practices in very specific ways. Is that a promotion effectively, or is it a transmission? That that sounds really crass, I know, but

• 1:33:29Henry Shukman?

  No, no.

• 1:33:30Tim Ferriss?

  In other words, is it like a titular, if that's the right way to pronounce that, titular? I don't, you get the idea, involving titles, honor that is bestowed upon you? And it's it's sort of a formal recognition, or is there an actual transmission from one person to another? Does that make sense?

• 1:33:48Henry Shukman?

  It totally does. It's kind of got at least two meanings. One would be, yeah, somebody really gets it. They really get the Dharma. They really get what this is all about. And they do it in conjunction with their teacher. And that is a kind of Dharma transmission, in a sense. But it's not really that there's anything transmitted, because you're realizing that it's all one. So nothing can be transmitted. It's like you're truly discovering that we're all one, one thing.

• 1:34:30Henry Shukman?

  It's no distance, no space, no time, no separation. That all is clear, and it's clear here and now. It's clear in the company of a teacher of another. And maybe in some sense, the teachers help that become clear.

• 1:34:46Tim Ferriss?

  So is the moral of your description, or the lesson, the take home lesson from your description of how Sambhokhyodan handles? Structure of the organization, responsibilities? In essence, to say, beware of rogue Zen masters running around?

• 1:35:08Tim Ferriss?

  That is to say, like, that you should look for a recognized organization with some type of self-governance and so on as a starting point?

• 1:35:22Henry Shukman?

  I just think if you do find somebody who's in that kind of realm, it's probably safer because for one thing, they will have been fairly closely vetted over quite a number of years by somebody else. Now, who that other person was and how reliable they were, who knows, but at least they've then further been sort of vetted by a number of people, by a sort of body of people. And, you know, that means that you feel, and of course, we develop relationships with our peers, and I don't want to let them down by misbehaving, for example. You know, I feel that I have a real deep responsibility, obviously, to people who want to study with me. What an honor that anybody would. And also to

• 1:36:07Henry Shukman?

  my buddies, my friends, my colleagues, or other Zen teachers, and to my own teachers. I don't want to let people down. And so there's a sense of, the way it's organized at Sambhasan would bring quite a few breaks on, would exert quite a bit of resistance on anybody who wanted to go rogue, kind of thing. They've got some endorsement. I think it's a bit safer. They've got an organization that has a code of ethics. And I'm not saying at all that Sambhasan is the only one like that. There's many other Zen organizations and non-Zen organizations that have this kind of, some sort of levels of responsibility that are bestowed or whatever on their teachers. So it's not the teacher just setting themselves up, and that have

• 1:36:52Henry Shukman?

  accountability to one another and, of course, to students. And actually, I think there are many quite well-organized spiritual sort of institutions, organizations in the West today, which is just great. And, you know, Vipassana has a number of really big, really well-organized outfits, and that's fantastic. Tibetan Buddhism does, I think, as well. And Zen certainly does. And so the rogue teacher thing, I mean, it's always a hazard, isn't it? I don't think there's any total foolproof.

• 1:37:25Henry Shukman?

  Way, but I would think that things to watch out for would be, does somebody seem to have some kind of accountability to a wider organization? Do they have fellow teachers that they're in contact with? Sort of accountability, I think. So this is also a thing with the coeds. You see, they're trying to set up a system whereby there can be some shared sort of agreement about what this awakening experience is. And the coeds themselves, they are sort of checking points, not knowing as most intimate, how might a student and teacher handle that if they meet with that coed?

• 1:38:10Henry Shukman?

  And they are also a way of checking that we're sort of on the same page.

• 1:38:16Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about that page. And this is a good segue to Strangerville. So let's do that because I'm always eager to take my occasional jaunt into Strangerville. And I want to preface this exploration by saying that I pay a lot of attention to two ends of a spectrum. When it comes to, I know people will dispute this word, they're not going to like it because they'll say the plural of anecdote does not equal data. But when I'm considering the potential veracity of something, on one end, you have randomized controlled trials. Fantastic.

• 1:38:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'm highly supportive and engaged with a lot of studies and clinical trials and so on. This is really, really important, very, very powerful framework, that scientific method as implemented in RCTs for asking questions of nature, testing hypotheses and getting answers back. Fantastic.

• 1:39:22Tim Ferriss?

  But there are limited researchers, limited funding for studies. Not everything is going to be studied. So we have to make decisions or interpret reality by and large in the absence of RCTs. So on the other end of the spectrum, you have direct experience. So if I trust the fidelity of my own senses, what have I experienced? And what I've experienced multiple times over and over again, what patterns have I identified? I pay a lot of attention to those things and testing. And For Our Body, actually, my second book is a good example of this.

• 1:40:01Tim Ferriss?

  There are many things in that book that were highly controversial, seemingly highly speculative, but tested and measured multiple times across multiple people. And many of those particular items now have more and more widely accepted scientific support. So it can start off with an N of 1 is what I'm saying. But I want to dig into this check-in question business. And I will offer something on my side, just so it doesn't seem like an inquisition. So on my side, I will say something that I have observed and experienced and also compared

• 1:40:42Tim Ferriss?

  with the experiences of dozens at least of other people at this point is the apparent phenomenon of shared visions on certain types of psychedelics. And what that means is people are seeing, hearing, or feeling the same thing simultaneously. And by any kind of secular scientific stretch of the imagination or assessment, these are hallucinations. But

• 1:41:13Tim Ferriss?

  Even if they are hallucinations, it's interesting to me that consistently

• 1:41:20Tim Ferriss?

  shared visions, let's just use visions for the time being, seem to be a common reported characteristic of certain psychedelics like ayahuasca going back hundreds of years. These are in fact so consistent that they are relied upon in certain implementations and usages of ayahuasca in South America. Okay, putting aside whether that is true or not, it is widely reported and experientially, it appears to be a real phenomenon. That's what I would say. Can I prove it? No, I can't prove it. Just like you can't stick me in a, or anyone for that matter, you into an MRI machine and be like, "Okay, 3, 2, 1, and Kensho," right? It just doesn't, doesn't seem to work that way.

• 1:42:02Tim Ferriss?

  And I recognize all of the criticisms that could be kind of levied against what I'm describing, so I'm well aware of it and moving on. When you talk about this experience of Kensho and then having the checking questions, "How tall is Moo? How would you introduce a baby to Moo?" These types of questions, and I'm probably not phrasing them exactly correctly, that sounds super bizarre, right? I mean, to anyone listening who's never experienced something like this, it sounds super strange, even to me, where I like, I spend a lot of time in some pretty unusual spaces and it still sounds pretty strange. So what do you think is happening there?

• 1:42:43Tim Ferriss?

  Because to me, there have been surveys, I guess you could look at them as observational studies, but surveys performed by different universities looking at so-called entity encounters with compounds like NNDMT. So when I hear you talk about these questions, like "How tall is Moo?", it sounds like we're describing an entity or something that exists independently of the observer or the experiencer, in this case, you. How would you explain what the hell is going on? Or describe, describe this further?

• 1:43:17Henry Shukman?

  Okay, first of all, let me just, how do I put this? So, I mean, I love what you're saying about the shared visions. I get that, actually. I really, yeah, it's fantastic to hear. Now, with, say, this sort of Kensho thing is, it's actually, the questions are doing, there's got a dual function.

• 1:43:41Henry Shukman?

  One is, we will be able to answer these questions if we've had kentsha, and especially if we've had it fairly recently, so it's still kind of alive and vivid, say, within a few months, or even weeks, or days, or even hours, if it happens on a retreat. So, they are, number one, the way we respond to them will confirm that we've really experienced this thing. Secondly, they will somehow help us explore it even more deeply.

• 1:44:20Henry Shukman?

  Now, that actually doesn't mean that it's an entity other than us that we've experienced. No, it's more like, my experience has shifted in a certain way, which has really opened up a different way of experiencing altogether. And these probing questions allow me to inhabit this new way of experiencing more. And they allow me, or they help me, to realise that this new way of experiencing is actually not contradictory

• 1:45:04Henry Shukman?

  to my ordinary way of experiencing. In other words, I can start to see that this mind-blowing sort of other dimension, for want of better phrasing, is in fact present in my everyday experience. That's what it's really trying to do, is to help me to sort of less know it as this other weirdness, mind-blowing and lovely, though maybe it's other, and to sort of actually, wow, I'm living this all the time, and I didn't realise, and it's not actually foreign and other.

• 1:45:49Henry Shukman?

  And that gives hope, really, that there is a way of integrating it. There's a way of having it be present in a very positive way. In our ordinary life, that's non problematic, quite the reverse. And I mean, I'm going to point to my master Yamada Roshi, who is an extremely successful businessman. He was head of submissive issue securities with something like 30,000 employees, you know, under him and could do all that while practicing Zen very seriously and earnestly and deeply, while having mind blowing experiences or whatever, while doing a lot of koan training. None of it interfered with his work life.

• 1:46:34Henry Shukman?

  In fact, he thinks that he said he wasn't, he was, he's a reasonably good student, he felt, but not the best. And he thinks the reason he had a very good career is his Zen. It gave him more balance, more clarity, more empathy, more compassion and more openness to seeing things from other people's points of view. And yeah, a sort of, you know, wisdom perhaps in how to approach things.

• 1:47:05Tim Ferriss?

  May I hop in for a second, Henry?

• 1:47:07Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:47:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Okay. All right. So I absolutely agree that Zen practice, there are many practices that might be thought to be antithetical or somehow compromising to your normal waking reality, let's just say. And so I certainly don't think Zen practice is incompatible, right? It seems highly compatible. And if Kevin's experience, limited as it may be, is any indication, that's certainly true, right? It's been nothing but an enhancer for him. And I want to come back just for a second, again, not to beat a dead horse, but to these checking questions with respect to Mu and to also clarify for people listening that

• 1:47:53Tim Ferriss?

  when I asked about the entity, sort of the relating to these questions and to Mu and whether or not there was the perception of independent entity, it's not so much that I'm saying. There is an independent entity because that's not the part that I find interesting. If we're just looking at the perceptual experience of multiple people, what I find so bizarre and tantalizing at the same time is that whether or not these things are happening for the reasons we believe them to be happening, whether or not the explanations are accurate.

• 1:48:30Henry Shukman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:31Tim Ferriss?

  If we take it as true for now that you and many other people are having consistent enough experiences in this nondual state, in this experience that is labeled Kensho within Sambhukyodan, right? That you can consistently answer, similarly answer the questions, "How tall is Mu? How would you introduce Muru, baby?" and so on?

• 1:48:59Henry Shukman?

  Yes.

• 1:49:00Tim Ferriss?

  Is fucking weird, right?

• 1:49:04Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 1:49:05Tim Ferriss?

  And that's not to say it's untrue. I want to be super clear here. But I want to hear, like, if you had had three drinks and we were just at a steakhouse in London, and I was like, "Henry, what the fuck is going on here? What do you think is happening here? Like, how is it that multiple people could answer these questions with similar or the same answers with respect to this? Come on, what is happening here? Like, what would you say?

• 1:49:37Henry Shukman?

  Well, I'd say I think it's so beautiful. I mean, I think it's not that, the thing is, it's not that, you know, we're each having our own experience and there's consistency among what those experiences are. It sort of sounds like that, but I actually believe there are kind of different levels of our experience. And I think many traditions seem to attest to the same kinds of thing. I'm not sure it's all one mountain. People say that. I think it's a mountain range, personally, so to speak. So that different spiritual traditions have slight different emphases and stuff, but there's a lot of congruence, you know, that I just think this is real, that we've got this level on which we normally experience things

• 1:50:20Henry Shukman?

  and which we're socialized into and conditioned into where we feel that we are a separate self and... The world is out there and I just think that it actually is true that there's another level of our reality where the somehow the separate self is inactive and we feel we're more part of what seems to be outside us, that we sort of belong to it and it belongs to us and we're not so separate from it. And it's a decisive shift and I think it's sufficiently widely reported in the traditions and here and there in literature, people getting to this level by

• 1:51:00Henry Shukman?

  one means or another, suddenly dropping into it where they just feel not so separate from what would seem to be separate to them and external to them, number one. And number two, it goes even deeper. There's underneath that, there's this reality again of our experience that we can get to where we sort of somehow see that things don't have the solidity they seem to have and that actually they're empty. And what that means, it can be understood in a number of different ways. I just feel convinced by now that these are real human experiences

• 1:51:43Henry Shukman?

  and they're not separately induced in each case. It's more like in each case, what obscures them is somehow blown away or blown open or temporarily suspended or punctured. It's more like that, that that's reality. Oneness and emptiness are actual features of, I sort of think somehow the way things really are and it's just obscured by our ordinary way of construing reality. And these practices and be it something that pops in the middle of an ayahuasca experience or five M E O D M T or something, a couple of students might have done that and had something like this, you know. It's a big gun, that one.

• 1:52:29Henry Shukman?

  Right, right. Big and fast, I gather, right? Yeah. Yeah. Man, well, I've never done it. But, you know, I think in Kensho. It's not like the practice is inducing an experience. I don't see it that way. It's more like the practice is allowing us to release something. And when that is released, naturally, this other stuff becomes clear.

• 1:52:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's an observation. Well, the, not the last part, but I think what you're in some respects alluding to this idea that our realities are constructed in a way by everything around us. This reality being filtered through a reducing valve of sorts, right? To use Aldous Huxley's term. And this seems like some hand wavy, or it might seem like some really hand wavy spiritual stuff to a lot of people listening.

• 1:53:39Tim Ferriss?

  But there's actually a great TED Talk I wanted to recommend from a cognitive scientist named Donald Hoffman, H O F F M A N. He is faculty at UC Irvine and a recipient of the Troland Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. This is a legitimate scientist. He has a TED Talk called, "Do We See Reality As It Is?" And I highly recommend it to folks. I put it in my newsletter in Five Bullet Friday and gave some time code points for people. You can kind of hop ahead. I want to say 10 minutes or so to get to the, the meat and potatoes of it. But he makes a very similar point. And he's running computer science simulations and using a totally different toolkit for

• 1:54:22Tim Ferriss?

  inquiry, but arriving at perhaps what is a very, very similar conclusion. And that is like, we are operating within a construction. And these things that we think of as solid, these things that we think of as... Real are more like icons on a desktop computer. They're representations that allow us to interact with something far different. So it makes sense to me that one way, one explanation or description of these kinds of experiences would be, okay, this is kind of just what naturally happens if you temporarily

• 1:54:59Tim Ferriss?

  remove the gating mechanisms of your perception so that more of the raw data hits you. In a sense, right?

• 1:55:12Henry Shukman?

  I think that's very good. I just recently read his book, The Case Against Reality.

• 1:55:17Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, nice, nice.

• 1:55:19Henry Shukman?

  Which is a sort of detailed dive. It's not, it's not too long. It's very readable. He writes well, you know, it's a dive into that realm. And absolutely, I'll tell you though, the one thing that I feel, I mean, that's a really helpful, really helpful way to, to come at it. The only thing though, that it doesn't necessarily sort of account for or quite cover is why does it feel so amazing? Why does it feel so good? You know, it's not just we see it differently. You see, the thing about this non-dual experience, and it does have different flavors, by the way, different, comes in certain varieties.

• 1:56:02Henry Shukman?

  So the one that I described earlier, that's not the only way it can show up. It has this weird property, this kind of experience, that we are profoundly implicated in it. We don't just see it. In a way, we can only see it when we discover that we're part of it. It's unlike other things we see. You can look at a tree from six inches away. You can take three steps back, you still look at the tree. Of course, it looks a bit different. You could walk a hundred feet away and again, it looks different, but you're still seeing it. This isn't like that. You can only see it when we discover we're part of it. And so that I find really.

• 1:56:45Henry Shukman?

  Wonderful. In other words, in using Donald Hoffman's approach, we'd have to sort of say that if we're using that kind of a frame to look at what happens in Kensho, it's discovering that we're made of the same code as everything else, kind of thing. Whatever the raw data is, we're made of it too. If you see what I mean. Do you get what I mean?

• 1:57:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I totally do. No, no, you're one in the same. Yeah, I totally, totally understand what you're saying. Absolutely. Yeah, you're not looking at the ocean. You're one of the drops in the ocean, so to speak.

• 1:57:19Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, to really have that as a vivid personal experience, it's just profoundly benevolent and sort of, I feel it's the sort of ultimate healing, in a way. I don't mean that we'll be instantly healed by it of all our trauma and all our dynamics that are unhelpful, etc. But man, it'll move things along and give us all kinds of help in our healing journey.

• 1:57:48Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here. Well, I think that is a beautiful place to begin our initial descent.

• 1:57:59Tim Ferriss?

  Since you also have a big evening ahead of you and a big day tomorrow. This has been so much fun. I expected it would be. And I'm glad that you were so game to go into uncharted waters with me. So thank you for playing along. You know, I wanted to share something super random with you also, because you mentioned pardon my Greek. So you know how we say in English, it's all Greek to me?

• 1:58:28Henry Shukman?

  Yes.

• 1:58:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I was in Greece at one point, and I asked them, I said, what do you say when you want to use an expression like that? Because you can't say it's all Greek to me because you speak Greek. And they go, oh, yes. We say, which means it's all Chinese to me. So in Greece, they say it's all Chinese to me. And apologies to any Greek friends if I screwed up that pronunciation. But I feel like all of this is much less Greek to me after. Getting your help walking through a lot of it, certainly still quite a lot of mystery and many, many questions, but very grateful that you were willing to take the time to dance this dance with us again.

• 1:59:13Henry Shukman?

  Well, I'm truly humbled and honored and very, very happy to get this chance to talk with you again. And you're an exceptional conversationalist and interviewer, truly. I mean, I suppose that's no surprise to anybody. But really, you really are. It's wonderful.

• 1:59:29Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I only see the warts. That's my own work. That's my own work to do. So I appreciate you saying that. And it really means a lot. And I encourage people to go to mountaincloud.org. That is a good jumping off point, I suppose, for many, many resources and many things that you're up to. So mountaincloud.org, we'll link to all these in the show notes. And Henry's memoir, which describes his own journey in detail, is One Blade of Grass, subtitle, Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen memoir. Henry, is there anything else that you would like to mention? Instagram is at @mountaincloudzencenter

• 2:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  if people want to check that out. Anything else that you would like to suggest people check out, or anything at all that you'd like to say, or suggest, or ask before we close up?

• 2:00:20Henry Shukman?

  I might just mention, we've got another site, originallove.org, where we're running a program called Original Love, which is like a broad approach to meditation that includes approaches to awakening, but other stuff, too. I think it's more, has more attention to the sort of healing side of meditation, as well as the awakening side. So that's something that I would just mention. And thanks to Kevin again for encouraging this. And thanks to you, very, very sincere thanks to you, Tim. It's great to connect with you. I hope you feel a bit better. How do you feel, actually, now?

• 2:00:58Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. You know, I feel emotionally much better. My throat is super sore, but I'm welcoming the throat soreness.

• 2:01:10Tim Ferriss?

  More than I was, more than I was two hours ago. So that's a step in the right direction. And I think I'm just gonna take a hot bath and watch some Disney shorts or something. I really need one of those nights, I think.

• 2:01:23Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm looking forward to it. And originallove.org, people should check it out. We'll put it right at the top of the show notes. So tim.blog/podcast, if you just search Zen or Shukman, S-H-U-K-M-A-N, or Henry for that matter, I'm sure they will pop right up. And Henry, once again, thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it.

• 2:01:47Henry Shukman?

  Well, not at all. Huge thanks to you.

• 2:01:50Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening. Until next time. Thank you for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get

• 2:02:35Tim Ferriss?

  sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by GiveWell. I love these guys. Donating money to help other people is wonderful, but how can you be confident that your donations are actually doing things? Are they improving or saving lives effectively? It can be really hard to parse.

• 2:03:19Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:04:03Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:04:46Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:05:10Tim Ferriss?

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