#531: Henry Shukman — Zen, Tools for Awakening, Ayahuasca vs. Meditation, Intro to Koans, and Using Wounds as the Doorway

Henry Shukman — Zen, Tools for Awakening, Ayahuasca vs. Meditation, Intro to Koans, and Using Wounds as the Doorway | Brought to you by Allform http://allform.com/tim premium, modular furniture; Pique Tea http://piquetea.com/Tim premium tea crystals (pu’er, etc.); and You Need A Budget https://www.youneedabudget.com/landing/tim-ferriss/?utm_medium=referral_sponsored&utm_source=timferriss&utm_content=tim-ferriss-fall21 cult favorite budgeting app. 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 Allform http://allform.com/tim! If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep mattresses, which I’ve been using since 2017. They just launched a new company called Allform http://allform.com/tim, and they’re making premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door—at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. You can pick your fabric (and they’re all spill, stain, and scratch resistant), the sofa color, the color of the legs, and the sofa size and shape to make sure it’s perfect for you and your home. Allform http://allform.com/tim arrives in just 3–7 days, and you can assemble it yourself in a few minutes—no tools needed. To find your perfect sofa, check out Allform.com/Tim http://allform.com/TIM. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at Allform.com/Tim http://allform.com/TIM. * This episode is also brought to you by You Need A Budget https://www.youneedabudget.com/landing/tim-ferriss/?utm_medium=referral_sponsored&utm_source=timferriss&utm_content=tim-ferriss-fall21! You Need A Budget https://www.youneedabudget.com/landing/tim-ferriss/?utm_medium=referral_sponsored&utm_source=timferriss&utm_content=tim-ferriss-fall21 is a cult favorite budgeting app for a reason—it works. The app and its simple 4-rule method will change the way you think about your money and help you gain total control so you can plan for the things you need and get the things you want without guilt or stress. You Need A Budget has helped millions of people transform their finances, save their marriages, and live life on their own terms. The You Need A Budget https://www.youneedabudget.com/landing/tim-ferriss/?utm_medium=referral_sponsored&utm_source=timferriss&utm_content=tim-ferriss-fall21 team offers free, live classes every day of the week—including video courses, bootcamps, and challenges—and active fan groups in every corner of the internet. On average, new budgeters save more than $600 by month two and $6,000 in their first year. Try the app free for 34 days (no credit card required) at YouNeedABudget.com/Tim https://www.youneedabudget.com/landing/tim-ferriss/?utm_medium=referral_sponsored&utm_source=timferriss&utm_content=tim-ferriss-fall21. * This episode is also brought to you by Pique Tea http://piquetea.com/Tim! I first learned about Pique through my friends Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose, and now Pique http://piquetea.com/Tim’s fermented pu’er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu’er Green Tea and Pu’er Black Tea, and I alternate between the two. Their crystals are cold-extracted, using only wild-harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. Plus, they triple toxin screen for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold—contaminants commonly found in tea. I also use the crystals for iced tea, which saves a ton of time and hassle. Pique http://piquetea.com/Tim is offering 15% off of their pu’er teas http://piquetea.com/Tim, exclusively to my listeners. Simply visit PiqueTea.com/Tim http://piquetea.com/Tim, and the discount will be automatically applied. They also offer a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is completely risk free. Just go to PiqueTea.com/Tim http://piquetea.com/Tim to learn more. * If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! 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. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peak Tea. That's P-I-Q-U-E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China. I've lived in China, in Japan. I've done tea tours. I drink a lot of tea. And 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things. Chief among them, that gut health is critical to just about everything. And you'll see where tea is going to tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented Pu'er tea specifically, pretty much every day for years now. Pu'er tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem with good Pu'er is that it's hard to source.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's hard to find real Pu'er that hasn't been exposed to pesticides and other nasties, which is super common. That's why Peak's fermented Pu'er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. It's so simple. They have so many benefits that I'm going to get into. And I first learned about them through my friends, Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose. Peak Crystals are cold extracted using only wild harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu'er green tea, their Pu'er black tea, and I alternate between the two. The rich, earthy flavor of the black specifically is amazing. It's very, very, it's like a delicious barnyard. Very peaty, if you like whiskey and stuff like that.

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  They triple toxin screen all of their products for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold contaminants commonly found in tea. There's also zero prep or brewing required, as the crystals dissolve in seconds. So you can just drop it into your hot tea, or I also make iced tea, and that saves a ton of time and hassle. So Peak is offering 15% off their Pu'er teas for the very first time, exclusive to you, my listeners. This is a sweet offer. Simply visit peaktea.com/tim. That's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A.com/tim. This promotion is only available to listeners of this podcast. That's peaktea.com/tim. The discount is automatically applied when you use that URL. You also have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is risk-free.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  One more time, check it out. Peak Tea, that's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A.com/tim.

• 2:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by You Need a Budget. What is You Need a Budget? You Need a Budget is a cult favorite budgeting app for a reason. The app and its simple four-rule method will change the way you think about your money and help you gain total control so you can plan for the things you need and get the things you want without guilt or stress. To give you an idea, on the cult favorite side, to date, they know of at least seven customers who have customized their license plates to mark the occasion of purchasing a new car in cash. And these fans do this by including Y-N-A-B, You Need a Budget, on their license plates. So, people love this app. You Need a Budget has helped millions of people transform their finances, save their marriages, and live life on their own terms.

• 3:05Tim Ferriss?

  I even asked Pete Adney, who's been on the podcast, best known as Mr. Money Mustache, super popular episode, what he thought, and he's a big fan of the founder, and what they're doing. You Need a Budget's simple four-rule method will actually teach you how to manage your money. You will learn a new way of thinking, new habits, and new behaviors that will help you get out of debt, break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, and build wealth faster. The You Need a Budget team is committed to your success. They offer free live classes every day of the week, video courses, bootcamps, challenges, and active fan groups in every corner of the internet. If you want to learn, they can teach you. On average, new budgeters save more than $600 by month two and $6,000 in their first year.

• 3:43Tim Ferriss?

  So, try the app free for 34 days, no credit card required, at youneedabudget.com/tim, spelled as you would expect in proper English. Try You Need a Budget free for 34 days, no credit card required, at youneedabudget.com/tim. And just to explain, 34 days, that's because most people reconcile at the end of the month or 30 a period, so having a couple of days of cushion helps folks out. So, 34 days with no credit card required at youneedabudget.com/tim.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would be an appropriate time.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:39Tim 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 @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 fiction. 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

• 5:23Tim 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.

• 6:01Tim Ferriss?

  Facebook, facebook.com/MTNCLOUDZen. And you can find Henry on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/Henry-Schukman. Henry, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Really truly honored and humbled to be with you. I'm excited to dig in. And as I mentioned before we started recording, I think we will run out of time before we run out of material. But we must start somewhere. So I wanted to start in perhaps an odd place.

• 6:34Tim Ferriss?

  And that is to go into mythology for a moment. And specifically to talk about, if I'm getting the pronunciation right, Typhon, the mythological beast who lived under the volcano Etna. And I've read that at one point you felt like this mythological beast. And I would love for you to explain why that is the case.

• 6:58Henry Shukman?

  Okay, well, that's going right back to early years. Great place to start, actually. Basically, I had raging, severe eczema. That's a skin affliction. Many people might know of it and think of it as just a rash or something now and then. But it can be quite severe. And I had it chronically for, I guess, like more or less the first, it's hard to say, two to three decades of my life, starting from the age of six months. And when I was a kid, I was often in hospital for stretches and stuff. It was, it was at that sort of level. And Typhon, I remember hearing about him in class at school, you know, and it's Greek mythology, lived under Mount Etna, the volcano.

• 7:42Henry Shukman?

  And he kind of could survive the sulfurous raging heat down there. And I lived quite a lot of my early life in a kind of sulfurous raging heat that came out through my skin. And I don't want to over dramatize it, but from living it from the inside, it was very difficult. It was like being slowly on fire or something. eczema is, when it's bad, it itches to an unimaginable degree. It's really quite debilitating. And the doctors in the UK in the 1970s, when I was growing up, they didn't really have a lot of great sort of tools. They had one tool that was really effective, which was heavy steroids.

• 8:27Henry Shukman?

  But they didn't like to use them. The thing that really made the big difference for me was actually meditation. You know, I took it up in my early, mid twenties. And it made a dramatic difference quite quickly. It wasn't that I was over it forever, but things really shifted. Once I started meditating, and I'm not suggesting that all eczema sufferers will find the same thing, because there's a complicated, multifaceted affliction, and there aren't clear-cut factors. Actually, it really is rather tricky, I think, for a lot of people to handle it. But for me, that piece of essentially getting a

• 9:10Henry Shukman?

  method for calming the nervous system, which I had not realized needed calming, by the way. The thing is, again, if you grow up with this kind of thing, I think anybody with a chronic ailment of some kind knows what this is like. That, I mean, I suppose it depends when you first get it, but especially for kids, you just think this is normal. You don't know that there's something dysfunctional going on. It's just this is how the world is. In my case, when I started to actually taste a different kind of way of being alive, it was a really big deal. It was wondrous to me.

• 9:51Tim Ferriss?

  I was just gonna hop in to also paint a picture for folks, because you had this itching, weeping, bleeding, and so forth, and the severity of it is remarkable, and what I've read it, at least, that is, having a district nurse coming to you daily, laying you on a towel, bathing you in antiseptic solution, wrapping you in coal tar bandages, and so on. I mean, this was a non-trivial condition. And when you say that you weren't even aware that the nervous system needed calming, do you think the eczema was in response to something?

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  That was a psychosomatic, and not in a, not in a way that diminishes it, but literally psycho-hyphen-somatic, response to something that you can identify? Do you have any thoughts on what generated that experience?

• 10:48Henry Shukman?

  Well, yes, I do, actually. I think, I mean, of course, in a certain sense, this is kind of private, personal mythology of another kind. But what I know happened was that when I was six months old, my parents were living for a semester in Helsinki. And actually, both my parents were professors, both in Russian studies. And they had a, my dad, actually, I think, had a fellowship in Helsinki University for a semester. And we all went over there. That was my older brother and myself, just six months old, mum and dad. And this may sound a little fanciful, but it's actually real and true. But because, this was actually

• 11:29Henry Shukman?

  back in the 1960s, when the Cold War was really, you know, hot, it was really happening. At that time, basically, anybody who could speak Russian in Britain was likely to be in some way or other approached and used by the intelligence community. And that was true of my mum and my dad. They were both recruited early on, actually, while they were studying Russian still, to MI5 or MI6. And they didn't do anything, you know, massively sort of, it wasn't kind of James Bond stuff, you know, it was just like, could you tell us about this scientist who's just been sent to the Gulag? Or can you read this report?

• 12:13Henry Shukman?

  And occasionally, they'd get involved in little minor operations or whatever. This all came to light much later, by the way, after the 50 years of the Official Secrets Act had expired, when a lot came to light about things that have been going on in the world of espionage in the UK with the Soviet Union. But while they were in Helsinki, my dad was requested that he would go to Leningrad, which is just not so far away across the Gulf of Finland. And my mum, I don't know the exact circumstances, but for whatever reason, she went to. And that was how she weaned me.

• 12:56Henry Shukman?

  So she left this baby that had been seemingly well, went to Russia for whatever they were doing there, came back a week later, or 10 days later, or five days later, I've heard different versions of the story. And when they got back, I was covered in eczema. And so I imagine that I went through something pretty difficult. Well, my mother was suddenly gone. And at the same time, was weaned of the breast and put on formula and by probably somebody I didn't know. And it must have been very, very difficult for me. I think in some way that, if I can call it trauma, which I guess I can, that trauma has been

• 13:38Henry Shukman?

  very, very important for my whole life, actually, and even for the path to and beyond awakening. I'm very interested these days in how trauma and awakening relate to each other. I think I'm not the only one. People are starting to look into that. There's something about deep wounding that can be a pathway to deep, deep love. It's a very beautiful thing when the wound becomes the doorway. I think there's always that potential with a wound, but so much of the time we tend to accrete protection over a wound and sort of stay away from a wound and, you know, avoid it and live as if it weren't there.

• 14:21Henry Shukman?

  So unpicking the defenses and actually finding some kind of way, usually it needs support, actually, some sort of supported way to go into our wounds. And what we find there in the place that we're most terrified of can be just, of course, pain, but also great, great love. Honestly, in certain ways, I'm jumping crazily ahead, Tim, in terms of a trigonometry. But to me, there's something just amazing at how deep, deep wound and deep, deep awakening, they've got things in common that I find mind blowing and really, really beautiful. And I think there's a blessing in going into our wounds and

• 15:04Henry Shukman?

  Maybe to a lot of people this sounds crazy, but I really think often the thing that we fear most, the thing that seems most what we don't want can turn out to be the great opening for us.

• 15:19Tim Ferriss?

  What type of meditation did you start with? What was your first entree to meditation, which helped you to calm your nervous system and begin to resolve the eczema?

• 15:32Henry Shukman?

  That was TM, Transcendental Meditation, in the sort of late eighties, but then in London. That was the most sort of conspicuous game in town, if you wanted to meditate.

• 15:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:44Henry Shukman?

  They still had this kind of cachet in England because the Beatles had done it.

• 15:49Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 15:50Henry Shukman?

  They went out to Rishikesh or whatever it was and hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. And so there was this sort of endorsement that somehow TM wasn't sort of too weird. It was kind of weird, but not so weird. And actually, the tagline was "life tool for the busy."

• 16:14Tim Ferriss?

  That's great. I've never heard that.

• 16:20Henry Shukman?

  So they kind of undercut any worry that you might be sort of checking out from life and going into some weird cult. This was going to help your career.

• 16:28Tim Ferriss?

  That's how all the best cults get you.

• 16:33Tim Ferriss?

  I also, I still practice TM at points, so I'm not casting aspersions, I'm mostly just poking fun. Let me come back to a term you used, because I want to keep track of definitions for people who are new to all of what we're talking about, and I'm going to be new to a lot of what we're talking about. You mentioned the term awakening. What does that mean here? How should we define it for people listening?

• 16:58Henry Shukman?

  I could give a really dry definition, or I could give an account, or I could do both.

• 17:03Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do both. In whichever order you like.

• 17:09Henry Shukman?

  Okay, let's do dry first. I think this will be quite short. The sort of working definition for me, and I think many others in this field, would be to awaken is to see that the sense of self, that the me that I have taken myself to be for as long as I can remember, has been a kind of genie. It's been a kind of mirage that constructed itself and then believed in itself. Now, this is not in any way to sort of diminish, I want to get to this later, that, you know, really, the whole world of sort of healing the self is dear to my heart and very, very important.

• 17:49Henry Shukman?

  I don't go along with people who just say, who trash the self, say, "Forget it, self is just a delusion." You hear that in spiritual circles, "Self is just a delusion." And it may sound like I'm saying that right now. In one level it is, and in another level, we must take it seriously. That's how I take it. So to awaken is actually to see that the sense of self, the sense of me, has not been what I've taken it to be all along. Instead, it can actually be seen through so that we realise it's never been here the way we've thought from the start. It's never really been here quite the way we took it to be.

• 18:31Henry Shukman?

  That's one side of awakening. The other crucial component here is that when that happens, when we see through the sense of me as a separate being, all the rest of the world is out there, I'm in here, when that is gone, we discover that we belong in an utterly wonderful way to and with everything. We find that there is actually another level of our experience, and it's right here now. It's not some weird other state we go to. It's actually right intrinsic to our ordinary experience. It's just that we don't see it. We rarely see it. Most of us seldom see it, but it's actually never hidden. It's just that we're totally conditioned away from seeing it.

• 19:13Henry Shukman?

  Now, it sounds very weird, and it is very unusual in the sense we don't normally experience things like this, but it's actually present right now and always. There's another dimension, another aspect, another face of our experience of this very moment in which we are totally... Part of everything. And so that's the flip side. So an awakening is sort of one thing vanishes, that sense of self. And another thing appears, which is what that sense of self was occluding in some sense, which is that there's this unbelievable, wondrous participation that we have. We are part of everything. Even to say we're part of everything is not quite getting it.

• 19:55Henry Shukman?

  We discover in a moment of awakening, we are all. Is that enough for now? Do you want to respond to that, Nena?

• 20:01Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'd like to encourage you to perhaps illustrate it with a story. And the question perhaps that I could ask in the meanwhile is, is it fair to say that the experience of awakening or waking up? Of course, you've done quite a lot with Sam Harris on the Waking Up app. And with Sam, who is also a close friend. And is this experience of awakening a repeatable or repeated phenomena? In other words, you hear the term, which I have never really gravitated towards, enlightenment gets used in different spiritual traditions or different practices.

• 20:45Tim Ferriss?

  And it seems kind of like a zero to one, one time event and lickety split. There you are, even though you still have to carry water and file the taxes and so on.

• 20:55Henry Shukman?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Tim Ferriss?

  Typically, but is this experience of awakening something that in practice recurs with some regularity?

• 21:04Henry Shukman?

  Here's a metaphor that a great 20th century Zen master called Yamada Kotun used. He said, it's like this, imagine that we've been living in a room made of opaque glass. In a moment of awakening, a hole is suddenly poked or drilled or smashed through part of one of those, the walls of the room. And we see kind of a bright world outside the box of glass, of opaque glass that we've been, dark glass that we've been living in. Suddenly we see, oh my God, there's a world out there that's really so different. So that's one instant of awakening.

• 21:44Henry Shukman?

  That would be, one way that awakening can be defined is a sudden moment of revelation. Can I tell a little story now that would this be appropriate to say just what that's like?

• 21:57Tim Ferriss?

  You're very, you're very British, my friend. Yes, it would be entirely appropriate. Please continue. I love it. I love it. I wish I had your accent. My God, people would think, give me a bonus 20 IQ points. I would love that, but please, please continue. Yes, this would be a great time, perfect time for a story.

• 22:14Henry Shukman?

  We got two hours here, so the IQ level will tank, I'm sure, as we go. Here's a story. When I was 19, I'd actually gone away from the UK to work abroad during my gap year after school. I went to Argentina and then I backpacked through Bolivia with a friend. And while I was doing that, I wrote my first book, actually, and then in Peru. And toward the end of the journey, having written this book, and 19, I'd always wanted to be a writer, a poet, and I was so happy. I'd actually finished this whole book and I'd worked and earned some money and seen the world. And I'd been in a totally different universe from the rainy, academic, library, riddled world I'd grown up in, books, books

• 22:58Henry Shukman?

  and rain, basically. That was Oxford, you know. I mean, very beautiful, you know. Books and rain and old stone walls. I mean, it was marvelous and poetic and lovely and all the rest of it. To go to Bolivia, 13,000 foot plateau with people living just utterly different kinds of lives, you know, just so different. And to be able to travel, this was again back in the 80s, traveling in the backs of trucks everywhere, just trundling through this immense landscape and this ultra clear air and sky and with my best friend who was a photographer and I'm writing and he's taking photographs and we're going to make a book together. And actually, we did. A few years later, it came out. It was the

• 23:41Henry Shukman?

  opposite of the life I'd known, so constricted. And on that journey, actually, before going, I'd managed to persuade my doctor to actually give me a tube of steroid cream because I didn't want to be 5,000 miles away with a raging eczema flare up. He gave me that and I hardly ever used it. Somehow, in the new climate, in a totally different dietary system, whatever, I don't know what. And this feeling of being free and out from under a heavy cloud and... Not having realised I'd been living under such a heavy cloud all those years. Somehow, that was the first taste, actually, for me, that eczema might clear up. So I'm just painting the picture a little bit. Eczema gone, my skin was normal.

• 24:25Henry Shukman?

  It was, it was, can you imagine, after all those years, to see that I had this beautiful, brownish, I'm sort of part Jewish, Sephardic a bit, brown, beautiful skin, smooth and, and not a blemish on it, not an itch and not a, not a hurt. It was amazing to be healed like that. And I was writing this book and there was a certain point towards the end of the trip where I holed up in a little hostel in a room, fifty cents a night or something, and just drank Coca-Cola, pints of coffee, smoked Winston cigarettes and wrote about eighty pages of this book. What was the book about? It was about this journey, this very journey, you know, it was called Suns of the Moon and it was very exciting, you know, got published in London and New York and

• 25:10Henry Shukman?

  I was still pretty young and it was very thrilling. Having done the book, having healed the skin, towards the end of the trip, I was alone on a beach on the Pacific Ocean, late one afternoon. And the beach was deserted and I was just watching this desert coast up there. I was going to say featureless, that's not quite right, but just kind of bare, barren, stark coastline. And there's this sun getting close to the horizon, nobody around, a little boat anchored offshore. And I'm just gazing at the path of light that the sun was laying on the water.

• 25:54Henry Shukman?

  It was probably only like a hand's width above the horizon or something like that. That beautiful scintillating path of light that leads out to the horizon that, that you get on the ocean. And I noticed that this boat. Had disappeared. I knew it was there, but it disappeared. And then suddenly I saw it. It was just a silhouette inside the path of light. And it was there as a sort of black silhouette, and then it disappeared again in the sparkling light. And it just struck me as extraordinarily beautiful. I don't know why, but that image of a boat being there and then not being there and being there again, kind of like a stain on the retina when you've looked at such a bright light. That was what it was like to me, sort of in reverse.

• 26:39Henry Shukman?

  It came, it went, it came, it went. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. I don't know what more to say than that. But as this sense of its great beauty welled up in me and filled my heart, actually, with a great sense of love, suddenly something utterly unprecedented for me, unexpected, unknown, weird, happened to me. Which was that the scene I was looking at wasn't outside me, and I wasn't outside it. We became one. It's a glib way to put it, actually. When I say it now, "we became one", it doesn't convey what it was really like.

• 27:23Henry Shukman?

  It was utter beauty. It was like being swallowed up by beauty and becoming home, coming home in a way that I didn't know I hadn't been home, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'll just finish the experience. It was like becoming part of the world. Instead of being an isolated entity stalking the earth, upright on the earth, separate from it, moving through it as a sort of bubble, almost like it's got this membrane around it called skin. And that skin separates the entity from the world. Instead...

• 28:06Henry Shukman?

  It's like the skin was gone, the separation was gone, there was just one reality, one kind of dream, one kind of movie, and that's what I was. And it was like finding I belonged to a degree that was inconceivable. Because I didn't just belong, I was actually part of the very sort of fabric of everything. That's what happened. And in the midst of that,

• 28:39Henry Shukman?

  I don't know if I'm going too fast, too deep, too weird, but I'll just carry on. That should be the tagline of my podcast.

• 28:48Henry Shukman?

  Please continue.

• 28:50Henry Shukman?

  Okay. Basically, in the midst of it, there was a sort of moment also where it was mind blown because all space had disappeared. There was no distance anywhere. It was like, I felt like my nose was pressing against the end of time. My nose was touching the furthest reaches of the universe. Because it was all just here. It was one reality without space, without time. It was just utterly mind blowing. I'm describing a moment of awakening. So how long did it last? I don't really know, but not very long. Somewhere between five seconds and five minutes, I'm guessing. Then there was kind of like, knowing I was a human being on a beach again,

• 29:35Henry Shukman?

  taking a step and how extraordinary it was just to take a step. How marvelous to be able to do such a thing as sort of be a body and take a step. Everything seemed sort of new. It was just, it was like a new world. And it was so, so beautiful. My heart was just, it felt like a flame was burning in my heart. I know it sounds a little bit like the old exom of trouble, but actually it was a beautiful, beautiful thing. It was just a flame of love burning in my heart. I knew that I had found the answer, but I hadn't even been asking a question. I had had no interest at all in spirituality, definitely not religion.

• 30:17Henry Shukman?

  I was very atheist or just totally atheist. I was kind of still am actually, but that's another matter. I had no interest in whatever that experience might have been.

• 30:29Henry Shukman?

  It wasn't in my worldview at all. And I think because I had no preconceptions at all about whatever that kind of experience might have been, none at all. I was able to just go with it like a complete ingenue. I just totally naive. I just was, what's this? Whoa, and what's this? As it sort of got deeper and weirder, I just went with it. And it was so beautiful that I sort of trusted it. And then, kind of in a sense, I was back in a known world. It was also so different because it was just so, so, so beautiful.

• 31:11Henry Shukman?

  And it was like everything was feather light and paper thin, as one of my teachers likes to say. I weighed nothing. I was sort of see-through and the world was see-through. I mean, it existed, it would look like it normally did, but it had become weightless and so beautiful. So that was a moment of awakening. But the real moment itself was only short, but there's long, long afterglow that lasted weeks. And my heart was so alive and I, you know, as I sort of walking through streets of town, seeing kids on the street, I just wanted to help wherever I could. And I felt human suffering in a new way, a different way.

• 31:55Henry Shukman?

  And yeah, like I said, I felt that I had found the answer to life, which I hadn't been looking for and wasn't interested in. But now it was like I knew I could die and my life had been fulfilled. It wouldn't matter what else happened to me.

• 32:13Tim Ferriss?

  So if I could pause for a moment, I have a number of questions and I'm going to act as a stand-in for some of the audience here with one.

• 32:21Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, please.

• 32:22Tim Ferriss?

  Were you entirely sober for that experience or was it enhanced in any way?

• 32:28Henry Shukman?

  Stone cold sober.

• 32:30Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 32:30Henry Shukman?

  I've never had anything stronger than sort of a beer, virtually.

• 32:35Tim Ferriss?

  You have not?

• 32:37Henry Shukman?

  Then I hadn't.

• 32:38Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. I have some follow up questions.

• 32:41Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, I mean, a few years later, I said, I dropped acid and it was meaningless. It was so shallow compared to.

• 32:50Tim Ferriss?

  To what you'd experienced.

• 32:50Henry Shukman?

  It didn't come close to what I experienced, yeah.

• 32:52Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting. All right, we'll have more follow ups on that theme. But the next question is, in retrospect, now as someone who studies, I suppose, the phenomenon of this experience of awakening, this type of awakening, what do you think were the ingredients in that encapsulated period of time that led to that spontaneous actualization or realization of feeling as you did?

• 33:27Henry Shukman?

  I've wondered that myself at times. I could say the most immediate probably was the fact that I was really closely studying what I was looking at and asking questions.

• 33:40Tim Ferriss?

  As a writer, you mean?

• 33:41Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, but I mean, I had been doing that as a writer, exactly. But actually, in the very moment, I was staring at this phenomenon of the very bright light on the water, this boat sort of appearing and disappearing in the light. I was asking myself, I know the physics of this, basically. There's water, which is transparent. There's air, which is transparent. There's the surface where these two things are meeting. And there's light landing on that surface. That's what's going on. Why does it look the way it looks was kind of my question? Because the surface, I noticed that it was so dazzlingly bright,

• 34:22Henry Shukman?

  but it was really composed of these bright scales that were shifting over the surface. And where a scale was, it was super bright. But when the scales slid off, it was actually super dark. So it was this mix of black and white, and I was just looking at it very closely. And I think one ingredient was scrutiny. I was really studying what I was looking at. And this was, as you mentioned, it was on the back of several months of considering, to the best of my ability, deeply, what I was seeing as I'd been travelling. And, you know, also when working, because it was also novel. So that was another factor.

• 35:04Henry Shukman?

  I suspect also, this is maybe a little bit weirder, but the eczema, years of eczema, of having to somehow sit with, or lie with, or be with, quite intense discomfort that wasn't going to go away. I suspected it had done something to my consciousness as a kind of training of some kind. I mean, it wasn't one I'd wish on anybody, and I certainly didn't appreciate it for this. But I think it probably had somehow taught me, very, very unwillingly, some kind of tolerance.

• 35:45Henry Shukman?

  And I suspect that I could only find that tolerance when I sort of shifted gear in my mind in some way. There were certain times when that was quite vivid. There were times where the eczema, especially sort of lying in bed itching at night, when I would really go into a different state of mind that was very alert, very present, very attentive, and blissful, and peaceful. And I'd feel like I was in a kind of cocoon, and I could have stayed there forever.

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

  Was there something you did consciously? Was there a method to achieving that state? Or did it just manifest itself unexpectedly?

• 36:27Henry Shukman?

  Unfortunately, it was the latter. I wished I could. I remember wanting to learn how to make it happen, and I didn't know how to make it happen. It would just randomly happen. I kind of learned how to let it prolong itself, which was, I found there was a way of being with it. Without holding on to it, if I could put it like that, I noticed that if I wanted it to stay, it would go away. But I could just be with it and not wish it would stay, and it would stay. That was the only level of proficiency, so to speak, I got with it, but I couldn't make it happen.

• 37:09Tim 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 Allform, from the creators of Helix Sleep. Allform makes premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now, and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. Allform sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping, and you get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it. That's more than three months, and if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also

• 37:51Tim Ferriss?

  has a forever warranty. That's literally forever. To find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com/tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com/tim. That's allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, dot com slash tim.

• 38:11Henry Shukman?

  I started getting interested in this form of practice called Jhana practice. This is really getting into the weeds, so I won't take long on it. Some people might have heard of this, many probably won't. It's a particular form of practice from early Buddhism known as Dhyanah or Jhana.

• 38:24Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that?

• 38:25Henry Shukman?

  And actually funny, J-H-A-N-A, that's the Pali, and Dhyanah in Sanskrit is D-H-Y-A-N-A. And actually, that is the word that became Chana in Chinese, or Chan, which then became Zen in Japanese. So Zen is connected in some way to this kind of practice. But the Jhana practice is this, regarded as quite esoteric and sort of tricky, difficult sort of advanced practice. The first time I got trained to do it, there's eight different states, by the way, I just went into the first one fairly easily. I couldn't believe it. It was exactly that state I'd been in as a kid. I don't know what the...

• 39:06Henry Shukman?

  I don't know how this actually all fits together, but I had been doing something in the midst of eczema that had some kind of correlation, very vaguely or in a sort of abstruse connection with meditation. I had somehow, and I don't know whether, could it be that that in some way precipitated that experience, I don't know, I don't really know. Could it be that years of living with great discomfort and somehow having to find ways to just endure it or not and just sort of be tormented by it, could that have been some kind of preparation? Or was it simply the having lived like that a long time and

• 39:46Henry Shukman?

  suddenly being well, it was sort of mind blowing to be well. And in this moment of solitude, in the midst of the sort of mighty forces of the ocean, the sun, the sky, the sand and alone. I remember actually before it happened, I thought, I could be any man in any century. Cause all there was was the sea, this boat, there was a kind of timeless type of boat shape. It wasn't some modern speedboat or cruiser. I think it was just a simple boat. Could have been the year 1200 and I had pair of shorts on. I could have been any century, any person. And perhaps in that moment, there was a bit of a loss of identity that paved the way, maybe.

• 40:33Tim Ferriss?

  What happened after that? In the, let's say the subsequent 12 months, what was your, was there anything notable that happened after that?

• 40:41Henry Shukman?

  Oh my God, yeah, totally. Cause about, I had a sort of blessed few weeks, transfigured world after it. And then I went home. My parents had split up when I was young and I'd had a very sort of difficult relationship with my dad, feeling very sort of abandoned and just heartbroken at his leaving. Then there was a difficult remarriage. It was very complicated.

• 41:08Henry Shukman?

  Emotional domestic arrangement that we all had to live in from when I was about seven onwards. And it had never been resolved, it had never really been spoken about. It was this awful English middle class sort of reticence to talk about feelings and that we were all seized by, possessed by. Us kids, my brother and sister and I, you know, we were caught in this very difficult parental tangle. But somehow, the absence of speaking about it led to any sort of understanding that this was a difficult situation. Again, it's the sort of kid thing where I don't know that this isn't normal. This is the way the world is, I've got to learn to live with it.

• 41:52Henry Shukman?

  It's me that's at fault if I don't like it, kind of thing, that I think many children, I assume, would feel that way. So I have had this awakening. I'm wide open. My heart is just so full of love and of wonder. I come home and I walk through the door of my dad's house. Within half an hour, I had a kind of breakdown. I felt overwhelmed by the unhappiness of my childhood in a way that I'd never actually felt it during my childhood. I'd had defenses against it. And when I came home, I had no defenses. I was wide open.

• 42:35Henry Shukman?

  All the unhappiness that I'd actually experienced during it just kind of tumbled on top of me. And I kind of collapsed. I went into a very sort of closed down and miserable state of mind, actually for several years. I kind of got through it. I somehow sort of limped along, very unhappily, with the help of alcohol and not very good hash. Not even good hash. Junior varsity hash on top of it all.

• 43:14Tim Ferriss?

  Books and rain and bad hash.

• 43:19Henry Shukman?

  Exactly. And some good friends. I mean, although even my friendships have been sort of, I mean, they're very good friends, but somehow I was so broken that I couldn't even really connect with my old friends. It was a miserable time. It was transcendental meditation that helped me out of all of it. I'm not sure whether that's enough on that misery.

• 43:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's, I mean, I'm a connoisseur of depressive episodes and anxiety and so forth. But let me ask you on that topic, how often would you say, do what you would consider awakenings overlap with what others might call a psychotic episode? Or are they easily distinguished? Or would a psychiatrist with a DSM, desk reference, categorize it as a psychotic episode? And part of the reason I ask is that I've seen

• 44:17Tim Ferriss?

  people in multiple practices, sometimes breathwork, could be Kundalini, could be any number of things, extended silent retreats, extended fasts. I've seen people have what some or what they might consider breakthroughs. I've observed people, certainly you see this with psychedelics as well, who have had what many would consider breakdowns and to become untethered for some period of time. How do you think about distinguishing those, if you do?

• 44:53Henry Shukman?

  First of all, I'm not well versed in Kundalini. And I know that there are powerful experiences that happen in that. I've seen somebody go through something like that during a retreat I was part of, and it was much more about energy and not so much about discovery. I would want to be quite careful in our taxonomy and not just put them all under one heading, awakening experiences. There are different kinds of breakthrough experiences. Actually, there are different kinds of awakening experiences, even within Zen. But fundamentally, I don't think they overlap.

• 45:31Henry Shukman?

  The way that it could be highly problematic and even in a sense could get muddled up with psychosis is really more if the context isn't a very supportive one. But you know, the fundamental thing discovered in real awakening is that we're part of everything. And that's a blessed, most blessed thing to discover. And yeah, it can be very destabilizing. For me, it wasn't destabilizing. What happened was I went home and had to face the trauma I'd never faced.

• 46:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 46:07Henry Shukman?

  Because I was now open enough to. In the hands, if I'd had a great therapist at the time, it would have been a golden opportunity. Because I was open at last. My defenses were gone. I don't actually think that the misery that followed was because of the awakening. I think it was because I had all this unprocessed misery that I had never known how to let myself feel. And suddenly, in that context, I had no choice but to feel it. And actually, in a way, it took years, but I've come to see that that experience of the breakdown, so to speak, was as important in its way as the awakening.

• 46:49Henry Shukman?

  Because my whole thing now is a path of awakening and healing, both. And I think one of the hazards of modern, Western embrace of Eastern spirituality, which has been fantastic, I mean, how amazing that we're even sitting here having a conversation about something called awakening, and we kind of have enough common ground to have a sense of what that might be, that it's in the zeitgeist now.

• 47:13Tim Ferriss?

  You're giving me a lot of credit. But please continue.

• 47:19Henry Shukman?

  One of the hazards have been this sort of over enthusiasm about enlightenment and awakening that can leave behind the healing side that has to go on as well. And on the other hand, there's, we had all this deep Freudian therapy and all kinds of therapy now, it's fantastic that we do, but it doesn't really know about awakening and often is very suspicious of it. Things you know Freud thought it was sort of oceanic and infantile regression. Many therapists, when they write about enlightenment and awakening, they try to bring it into their worldview and it doesn't fit in their worldview because it's a totally different register of experience. So, you know, my whole thing now is like, let's get clear, there are these different dimensions of experience that human beings can go through and they're not all on the

• 48:04Henry Shukman?

  same sort of level. They're all in our heart, they're all sort of what we're capable of, what we can experience. They sort of shouldn't tread on each other's toes, is kind of how I feel about it now. For example, deep profound non-dual awakening is a fantastic thing. Somatic release of trauma through deep somatic therapy, that's a fantastic thing. Working with, I don't know too much about it, but I've done, actually, we can get on to it, I've done ayahuasca, which was, you know, so I've got a little bit of a sense of plant medicine for healing, that's fantastic. And there's different levels of experience, there's different levels of healing. I would say awakening is a kind of most profound healing, but it's not on the same level as

• 48:48Henry Shukman?

  the trauma that I needed to heal from my childhood. It was a more universal kind of discovery of what a human being is, any human being, what human consciousness, what human awareness is, it was a discovery about that, about what this life is, that it's not really on the same level as the psychological healing I also needed. It happened to open that up and it took me a few years to find ways to do the healing or begin the long healing that was needed on that level. But on the level of awakening, I was still somehow fully healed in the awakening experience. This is one of the weird things about it, is that...

• 49:33Henry Shukman?

  God, I'm still worried that I'm going off the deep end.

• 49:35Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let me, let me. Well, deep end, or just getting warmed up. We're still in the kiddie pool. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna go to some very strange places. So before we do, I want to mention a few things and to maybe provide a bit of a teaser for folks also. So there, there's certain terms that I still have an aversion to, rightly or wrongly, like enlightenment. Awakening, I can get on board with for a number of reasons. So we won't dwell on that right now, but I do find it could be helpful to add a bit of color in a few areas for folks who are listening. So, and, and hopefully I'm not stealing thunder here. I just want to

• 50:16Tim Ferriss?

  mention a few things. And then if I could ask one very crass question, which is a total non sequitur, but I have to ask because I'm too curious and I have to scratch that itch. So the first thing I want to mention to folks is that, and we can certainly talk more about this, but part of the reason that your teaching and lineage appeals to me, and I've spoken to Kevin about this, is because awakening does not equal checking out, right? You're not, you're not requiring that people join a monastic order of ascetics and give up all engagement with the world. And we'll probably come back to this, but one of your, if not your primary teacher, we can talk about this, but Yamada Roshi is CEO of a

• 51:01Tim Ferriss?

  company of 2,000 employees who wrote the biggest check in its history, or maybe we can get more context there, while leading Mitsubishi Securities. And so for people who don't know, Mitsubishi is like one of the kaitetsu, like one of the gigantic monster conglomerates in Japan. It's, it's hard to overstate how big a deal that is. He also continues his own Zen training and trains around 75 Zen teachers worldwide, right? So you can be. Of this world while still developing these tools or utilizing these tools in the toolkit. So that's, I just wanted to underscore that, just so it doesn't seem as though we're kind of frolicking in a bath of esoteric sciences that don't apply

• 51:45Tim Ferriss?

  to people who still want to engage with the world. I also want to paint a picture because there's no way we're going to get to it all, but I want to paint a picture of your bizarre and incredible life story. I just want to give a couple of samples. So as a young man, you worked as a professional trombonist, playing in calypso and salsa bands all over the place, hitchhiked across the Sahara as a young man. And I don't think we're going to get to the Egyptian doctor. I wanted to ask you about that, but might not have time. This is the part where I have a crass question. It might be because I don't speak the Queen's English, but you roamed the countryside as a young teen, sleeping out and were mentored by an old school tramp. That is the term I'm very interested in.

• 52:26Tim Ferriss?

  Trying to live like an ancient Chinese Chan poet. There are a lot of loose ends here, but I found old school tramp to be very intriguing. Could you just explain that portion of everything I just threw out there, please?

• 52:40Henry Shukman?

  Oh my God. Well, the term tramp in the UK, it used to refer to these guys who just wandered the highways and byways.

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, okay, got it. It was some out of work geisha. Okay, got it.

• 52:56Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, exactly. These days they talk about the tramp stamp. I don't know if you know, it's a tattoo, you know? Do you know that term?

• 53:03Tim Ferriss?

  I'm familiar with tramp stamp. I don't know much about enlightenment, but I do know the term tramp stamp. Shows you where, where we're going to have to meet in the middle.

• 53:12Henry Shukman?

  So yeah, I had this friend. I mean, he was, he would come to our valley every summer and put up in this ruined mill. And he kind of mentored me and a couple of friends of mine how to live on the land. When we were fourteen, fifteen, we got into that. We were would be young poets. And we knew these, those Chinese poets, we were into them. They were seventh, eighth century, Wu Wei, Du Fu, Li Po, great, great poets who did a lot of wandering. At least we got that impression. They would wander around the gorges and write poems and drink rice wine. And they were actually a great inspiration for the Beat as well.

• 53:55Henry Shukman?

  You know, Kerouac and Ginsberg and so on, Gary Snyder, they got into these poets, they got into Zen, because those poets used to do Zen as well. They would meditate, they would go to monasteries, go to hermitages.

• 54:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Salinger, Allen Ginsberg.

• 54:10Henry Shukman?

  Right, right. Salinger used a koan in one of his books as an epigraph.

• 54:15Tim Ferriss?

  Let me zoom out for a minute. And I want to hear the story of how you got to Zen. And you noted, for instance, that at one point TM was all the rage, the sort of hippest game in town, was it Life Tool for Busy People? And they had, they had a great sort of celebrity outreach program, right? They had the Beatles.

• 54:38Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 54:39Tim Ferriss?

  Even today, of course, they've got, you know, Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, they have many, many celebrities engaged who practiced TM. And there was a period of time where that was all the rage. And then you have sort of this Yogananda period, right? Steve Jobs, et cetera. Was Zen just sort of the zeitgeist for a period of time? And you became engaged while it was sort of in the slipstream of the zeitgeist? So I'd like to hear that story. And in the process of telling that story, I would love for you to, best you can, define what characterizes the practice of Zen Buddhism, because I have found it very confusing. And part of me thinks that's kind of the point. And I'll give you

• 55:21Tim Ferriss?

  an example. I was at a retreat at Spirit Rock in Northern California, this is many years ago, and I heard a story from one of the teachers. And she described how she was having a lot of trouble figuring out certain aspects of Zen Buddhism. And at one point, she was having breakfast with her teacher and they were eating in silence. And then suddenly he shouted, "You know, it's not logical, okay?" And so there was this, and that was, it was a teaching moment for her and she took a lot from that. And when I sort of think of koans and these various things, it seems like almost the point is to bludgeon your rational mind into submission so that you can experience reality past the constructs of concepts and labels and so on. But that's

• 56:06Tim Ferriss?

  my best guess. Honestly, I don't know what Zen Buddhism or Zen practice is. So that is a huge mouthful. I just kind of foie gras a lot of word salad into the microphone. But the story of how you found Zen and then what in fact Zen is would be very helpful.

• 56:24Henry Shukman?

  The story of how I found Zen is I was doing another book that my publisher had commissioned me to write. It was about New Mexico. It was about the English writer, D H Lawrence, in New Mexico. And I was 28 at the time. And while I was out here, I made friends with a dear friend of mine, Natalie Goldberg, who's a writer who writes, a Zen-based writer.

• 56:46Tim Ferriss?

  Writing Down the Bones?

• 56:47Henry Shukman?

  Right, exactly.

• 56:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great book. Yeah, great book.

• 56:50Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, yeah. And Natalie and I, we hit it off. Actually, she rented me a room in her house in Santa Fe. And it was great entree to living out here that she offered me. But along the way, one evening, she was reading me a bit of this great, famous Zen writer, teacher, poet, Dogen, from 13th century Japan. She was reading a bit of Dogen. I didn't understand a word of it. It was just kind of weird nonsense about mountains walking. I just sort of didn't even want to think about it. I just, I couldn't understand it, wasn't interested. Conversation moved on, and I found myself thinking about it. And the next day, I was still thinking about it. And the day after, I was still thinking

• 57:32Henry Shukman?

  about it. And then I remember vividly, I was washing a mug up at the sink in her kitchen, and I suddenly got this thought. Maybe Dogen was speaking from what I had experienced on that beach years ago, nine years earlier. I've got to say, ever since that beach moment had happened, one of the things that made me so miserable, one of the ways I made myself very miserable, was by thinking, but oh my God, I discovered this freedom, this beauty, this wonder, this love, this total fulfillment, and look at me now, depressed and miserable and anxious, and eczema has come back, actually, by the way, and why haven't I managed to keep hold of that incredible discovery?

• 58:16Henry Shukman?

  Why haven't I managed to live from it? Why haven't I taken a step to sort of somehow revisiting it, whatever the hell it had been? And so, by this point, I'd been doing my TM for four or five years, absolutely religiously, every day, twice a day, you know, it was my lifeline, and it had really been helping. It hadn't really occurred to me that the meditation thing I was doing with them could have anything to do with that moment on the beach. It just hadn't occurred to me. But suddenly, I hear this bit of Dogen that makes no sense. Somehow, it came to me, from the perspective of that moment, it would make sense. I can't exactly explain how I knew it, I just knew it. And I said to Natalie, "What's this Zen all about?

• 59:01Henry Shukman?

  You know, I want to know more." And she said, "Well, you don't really know about Zen, you just do it." And I said, "Well, I want to do it." There and then, she phoned up a friend of hers who was a Zen practitioner in town, and the next day, I went and met with him, and he taught me how to do Zar Zen, or Zen meditation, which was beautifully simple. We sat in this beautiful little zendo, that's still here in Santa Fe, actually, beautiful little zendo, sitting on a black cushion, on a black mat, facing the wall, and all you do is breathe. Maybe in a way, that's part of the challenge. There's not a lot to it.

• 59:44Henry Shukman?

  With TM, you had this mantra that you use. And it's a lifeline through the practice. And you kind of know, you've got some sense of this mantra is doing you some good, kind of thing. But with Zen, you just sit there in a posture that is a little bit more prescribed and sort of set up. But actually, it's very, the posture's got a beautiful, intrinsic, peaceful liveliness in it. That I felt the first time this guy set me up in it, I felt, huh. This feels weirdly good. Somehow, an aliveness, a different quality of awareness, just switched on.

• 1:00:29Henry Shukman?

  And I felt like I was right in that room, in a more vivid way than normal. And then all I had to do was watch the breath and count it in sets of 10. So simple. And it's not like I had some marvelous enlightenment experience right then. But I did have a sense in that first sit, that this was a way of contacting life. This was a way of being alive, that brought you in intimate contact with being alive. And that wasn't something I'd ever felt in TM.

• 1:01:12Henry Shukman?

  I'd felt many other marvelous things, but not, this is a sort of, if you want to know what life is, this can help you. That was the feeling I got from Zen.

• 1:01:25Tim Ferriss?

  Can you remind me of how long that first session was?

• 1:01:29Henry Shukman?

  It wasn't long. It might have been 15 or 20 minutes. I can't remember. But it was enough.

• 1:01:35Tim Ferriss?

  What characterized it that led you to feel the way you did about it? Why did you feel that way?

• 1:01:43Henry Shukman?

  I think there may be something in the posture. I think there may have been something in the way this guy taught it to me. He was a very experienced practitioner. It could be honestly, the fact that I'd done four years or five years of meditation by then. So I was more open and ripe for another practice than I might otherwise have been. I think there was probably something of a setup from what had happened with this piece of dogan that I'd been fascinated by because that had reawakened my curiosity about the beach, that beach experience. What the hell happened then? Might this be a way to revisit that?

• 1:02:27Henry Shukman?

  Might there even be a way, not just to revisit it, but to go through it and beyond it? Might there be a land, a world, a life beyond that experience? So it wasn't just a flash in the pan and it sort of closes and you're done with it and you have to limp along in your ordinary life. May I just pivot to the koan question? Because actually it was a little bit later that I found my first Zen teacher that I really connected with.

• 1:02:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please. I have a lot of questions about koans. So please segue as you like.

• 1:02:59Henry Shukman?

  I'll start out and we'll see where I get to. And now I'm dying to hear your questions because basically you're not, you're on track a bit with the way you describe them, but I can elaborate maybe a little bit more. So I got lucky. I did my first Zen retreat sometime a couple of years, I think, after that. I'd been sitting diligently daily in my Zen and I'd done some weekend retreats and introduction to Zen and stuff by then. And then I did a week-long retreat led by a Korean Zen master. He himself was Westerner, but it was a Korean lineage and he'd been trained in. He was a deep guy and he was sort of throwing out koans through the retreat. And actually, I was sitting with one of them, it was just the basic question, "Who am I? Who am I?", which is a fundamental koan.

• 1:03:45Henry Shukman?

  I had a glimpse of what it was pointing at. I was very lucky. I got a glimpse of how a koan can work then. It's like this, so if you take, let's say you take the most famous koan that probably, I would guess, even him, probably most people have heard. By the way, here's the correct wording. "You know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand?" That's the formulation. You could say it like this. "You know the sound of two hands clapping, but do you know the sound of one hand?" That's more or less what the koan is trying to push us to, is like, "What the hell does this mean? You know the sound of one hand." It's a preposterous question.

• 1:04:29Henry Shukman?

  I get people, they try to snap their fingers, they say, "Well, this is one hand." You know, "No, no, no, no, no." So the first thing to say about koans is they are not riddles to be solved. And our mind wants to make them that, it wants to problem solve them. "This damn thing makes no sense, I'm gonna make it make sense. There must be a way in which it makes sense." Good luck. I might say something like this. "There is a way in which they make sense, but your mind will never know it. But part of you will. There's part of us that the koan is speaking from and speaking to. And it's basically a non-dual level of experience.

• 1:05:14Henry Shukman?

  Non-dual is where the sense of being separate from the world has gone. Self and world are one. There are flavors and varieties, but fundamentally, it means that the duality of me being in here and the world being out there has gone.

• 1:05:36Henry Shukman?

  So Koans are actually emissaries of whatever that was that I discovered on that beach when I was 19 years old, and thousands and millions of people have discovered. What's beautiful about Koans is that they know that that experience is here all the time. They know it's precious beyond belief. They know that it is somehow, in some way, what we humans are built to discover. It's a thing that can transform our life in an utterly wonderful way because they show us something about who we are that we couldn't imagine.

• 1:06:17Henry Shukman?

  And it's so crazy, we're going around living our lives the way we do, all predicated on this basic assumption, which is that I am me in here, and we don't really question it. We're too busy living out the dictates that flow from the assumption that I am what I think I am in here. It's to study this radical thought, like, well, hold on, if I'm going to build my life on this assumption that there is this me in here, and it wants these things, and it doesn't want those things, and my happiness depends on having X and not having Y, if I'm going to build my life on that presupposition, shouldn't I at least take a look at the initial assumption?

• 1:07:00Henry Shukman?

  It's really, I think, it's equivalent to Galileo and Copernicus going from a geocentric worldview where we're totally convinced the world's flat, the sun, moon go round us, to, well, actually, wait a minute, maybe not. Lo and behold, we go around the sun. I think we're in the midst of a transformation. Actually, I'm going to be careful what I say. This is going off the deep end. But perhaps, perhaps, in this globalized Western culture where there's so much more interest in awakening these days than 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 60 years ago, it was a pretty niche 50 years ago. Now it's people are hearing about it.

• 1:07:43Henry Shukman?

  There is a reality that we can find about who we really are. And there's a lot of neuroscience now backing it up. What we think we are is a construction. And actually, the way we think the world is, is also a construction that follows from that.

• 1:07:59Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned ayahuasca earlier. We're not going to go there yet. I would like to hear more about that at some point. But when I think of your experience at 19 on the beach, that distinguishes you from a lot of people in the sense that you had this spontaneous experience of non-duality. So you knew it was a possibility going into your Zen training, going into these various practices. And I'm wondering if or how common it is for people to get an appetizer or a taste of these non-ordinary states. Although one, I know that label is not perfect,

• 1:08:43Tim Ferriss?

  but let's just for the, for the time being, call it a non-ordinary state. Is it common that people have that experience relatively quickly in their practice? Because I could see it being very difficult for someone who has not had the firsthand experience that you had on the beach or something like it, to dedicate years with the hope that there is some payoff that they have never tasted or had a glimpse of. And conversely, and I'm not saying that I recommend psychedelics for all people. I don't. I think they are very powerful tools that have some applications for some people. But where they do perhaps represent an unusual tool in the toolkit

• 1:09:25Tim Ferriss?

  is that with rare exception, you are guaranteed to see an effect. If that makes any sense, right? That's sufficient dose with proper plant or compound. If you want to induce the realization that you are not exactly what you believe yourself to be, or at the very least, that there are invisible scripts and stories and filters that assemble your current reality. That's a very reliable way to induce that type of realization. So to summarize, is it common that people get some taste of what you are describing relatively early in their practice? Or is it something they have to kind of cross their fingers and hope for?

• 1:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  Long down the road.

• 1:10:14Henry Shukman?

  Honestly, it's a bit of both. And here's a couple of ways to think about it. One is that, yeah, if you add a koan into the mix, once somebody's really committed and settled in their daily sitting, it can be a powerful stimulant, powerful fertilizer. Koans are weird. They can actually trigger profound experiences, who knows when, they really can. So that's on the one side. On the other hand, it's unreliable.

• 1:10:49Henry Shukman?

  And it's certainly not reliable, the way that I think safely administered plant medicine may be. But here's the thing, two things, actually. One is that what Zen is teaching us about is ordinary consciousness.

• 1:11:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Yeah, this is why I knew the, I knew my term, non-ordinary consciousness is a tricky, it's a tricky one. So please, yeah, it's not imperfect phrasing, but please continue.

• 1:11:18Henry Shukman?

  I mean, the wonder of this is that the most profound things we can discover through awakening are here right now. And the process of training with koans is to go, like what I experienced on the beach, that was a beginning experience. A far deeper things happened to me, working with koans. That was a gateway that got me onto a path. It took me a long time to find the path and a long time to go down the path. But man, it was a beginning. The things you can discover through these koans that these masters have discovered and they're sharing with us through the koans, hoping that we'll join them in what they've discovered. It's even more radical and crazy.

• 1:11:59Henry Shukman?

  But the point is, is here right now, we're making discoveries about our ordinary experience. And this is the wondrous thing about it, that you don't have to have some totally different life. Again, my master, Yamada Roshi, it's not like he has to rein in his Zen mind when he's in a board meeting. There's no need. Boundless reality is right there at the board table, able to do everything the board chair needs to do. That is the wonder. So when whoever this, I think it was Lehman Pang, the old master, said, "My miracle is that I chop wood and draw water," whatever it was, I "draw water and carry wood," I can't remember. "That's my miracle."

• 1:12:41Henry Shukman?

  He means that pouring out the kettle for a cup of tea, if we're awake to the boundless wonder, that's a miracle. It's not like it's a miracle in a way that we'll have to sort of swoon and put the cup down in case we drop it. No, we just behave normally. We can have a normal conversation. I don't know if everybody would consider this a normal conversation because I'm saying such weird shit, but, you know, but kind of a normal conversation. We're having it. I'm, you know, I'm sitting here and I know this boundless, infinite, nothing and everything, whatever, that's so full of love is right here, right now.

• 1:13:23Henry Shukman?

  It's clear and it doesn't mean like now I've got to do something. So I've got to switch off the wonder, the boundless love. It's not like that. That's where koans can take us. I'm sure way further as well. I'm, you know, I'm a beginner. But on the other hand, what about the people who they want this? They believe in it and they sit with it and nothing happens. They're sitting with their koan. Well, see, I think personally, what I'm now trying to teach people is deep in the Zen tradition, there's a, there's a metaphor, goes way back to fifth or sixth century China of a cart track having two ruts. And the idea is that one rut is awakened nature itself. That's always here.

• 1:14:07Henry Shukman?

  And awakened nature, by the way, is everything's one, everything's infinite and everything's empty. Those are the three main things we can discover about it through personal experience. That's awakened reality. But the other rut is they call it the four foundations of mindfulness, which comes from early Buddhism in India. And the four foundations of mindfulness are a gradual path of learning to be more present, learning to sit with difficulty. Learning to sit with our wounds and pains and gradually release them. And we may need help with that. And you might bring in therapy. You might bring in pharmaceuticals. You might bring in plant medicine or whatever. You might bring in all kinds of stuff to help with that.

• 1:14:52Henry Shukman?

  That's the beginnings of, this is the beginnings of psychological health and wellbeing, really. Gradually, how practice can help with that. So there's two ruts for one track. One rut is awakening, and we could put the koans on that side. The other rut is a gradual path of sort of healing. And that takes us to deeper and deeper states of absorption. We start to get more wellbeing with less. It's generally a path of growth whereby we can be happier with less and less and less

• 1:15:32Henry Shukman?

  until in deep states of absorption, which is growing out of the mindfulness. We're basically happy with basically nothing extra. We're completely fulfilled, just sitting and breathing.

• 1:15:48Tim Ferriss?

  I've read you describe awakening as, quote, "more of a loss than a gain, a marvelous kind of loss," end quote. And then there's also a set of expressions here that maybe you could explain. Muichimotsu mujuzo. I don't know if they're long vowels or not in Japanese for the mujuzo. I think I can guess what the first three characters are, but I can't guess what the last two are. So by "more of a loss than a gain, a marvelous kind of loss," what does that mean?

• 1:16:16Henry Shukman?

  Okay, so in my book, actually, I go into this sort of various experiences that befell me on the koan path. One of which was, it was basically, it's hard to talk about it. It's so amazing, but it's sort of the loss of everything. That somehow seeing that everything has been a dream.

• 1:16:38Henry Shukman?

  And when we see that everything can actually fall away, self and world fall away is the way Dogen described it. He said, "Body and mind fall away." And various Zen masters have spoken about this, this experience where everything's just gone. And instead of it being a horrific, ghastly void, it's the opposite. Because everything is coming from that emptiness, that goneness. It's generating everything.

• 1:17:18Henry Shukman?

  If we fall away sufficiently, I don't think I've had the great profound experiences or anything. I've just had experiences that were profound enough for me, that changed my life. And this was the pivotal one. It happened at a certain point, a certain time, during a retreat. Everything disappeared. And I then discovered, and henceforth, it hasn't gone away, really. I can see everything's being born right now. It's coming out of nothing. And that is the ultimate wonder.

• 1:17:52Tim Ferriss?

  So that's very interesting. There was durability to that. There was kind of a before and after.

• 1:17:56Henry Shukman?

  Yes.

• 1:17:57Tim Ferriss?

  With respect to that experience. That's very interesting.

• 1:17:59Henry Shukman?

  And I never believed that could happen to me. I was such a troubled soul that I'd done all this practice. I'd even had several kind of, you know, mind blowing awakenings. And still I was a troubled soul. I didn't think, I mean, I suppose I still am a bit of a troubled soul, but I'm a happy one. It's weird. I, I never thought that I would be, I could see my teachers, these amazing, patient teachers who are guiding me. I could see these, these people, they've sort of done it. Whatever it is that can be done, they're the kind of person that could do it. Not me, no way. And then it just happened. This thing just happened. And it was a fulcrum in a lifetime. And I believe that all of us can go through this.

• 1:18:44Henry Shukman?

  That's why I'm a teacher, because I want to share this. So, but here's the thing. I don't think we should sit around in misery, waiting for this kind of thing to happen. So this two-rut track idea is really important to me, actually. And I've got this new program called Original Love. The Zen Awakening is often called Seeing Original Nature. And Original Nature is what I'm saying. It's one, and it's boundless, and it's empty. That's the original nature. What it's like when we find it is it's like love. It's like love to find that we're part of everything. It's like love to find that this nothing, no thing, is producing everything,

• 1:19:27Henry Shukman?

  generating everything, infinite generosity. That's like love. So in this Original Love program I've got, we've got, there's awakening is in it, but so is mindfulness, so is support, deep kinds of support that we can open to, that are so crucial. I've done a lot of dream work, archetypal kind of work where figures come and help us and challenge us. And I think that's really vital for our growth. And, and then the third zone in it is sort of, it's got four zones, actually, like mindfulness, support, deep support. Third zone is absorption, becoming one with this moment through flow states, absorption states, samadhi, as they call it. And then the fourth zone is awakening.

• 1:20:10Henry Shukman?

  So it's not like it's awakening or bust. You know, that's a, that's a wrong mindset.

• 1:20:16Tim Ferriss?

  That shouldn't be the title of this podcast episode.

• 1:20:20Henry Shukman?

  Please. Well, you can see, you've got it, awakening or bust, not, you know?

• 1:20:26Tim Ferriss?

  Not like Borat could have some sound bites spliced in. There was a term that I mentioned that if you can translate it, I would love to hear what it is, just with my fascination with Japan and having lived there for some time. So mu ichimotsu, mu juzo. In what context is that used and what does it mean?

• 1:20:48Henry Shukman?

  By the way, you've got a very nice accent.

• 1:20:50Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:20:51Henry Shukman?

  Yeah. I don't actually speak Japanese to my shame.

• 1:20:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's not the easiest. It's time consuming.

• 1:20:58Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, I've been, you know, quite a number of times and spent most of the times staring at the wall in my master's zendo, you know?

• 1:21:07Tim Ferriss?

  Not the most effective way to learn Japanese, just like my friend who spent a lot of time in Peru, he spent tons of time in Peru doing dietas and working with ayahuasca and so on. And I asked him, I said, you spent nine months in Peru. Why is your Spanish so terrible? And he said, well, I was in the forest trying to talk to plants the whole time. And I was like, yeah, all right, that'll, that'll explain it. So yeah, you were staring at a wall.

• 1:21:29Henry Shukman?

  Vomiting into a bucket.

• 1:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. Makes it hard to pronounce things correctly.

• 1:21:35Henry Shukman?

  Yeah. So, so mu ichimotsu, mu juzo. One of my teachers, Ruben Abito Roshi, is a guy from the Philippines who's also in the same lineage, who teaches in Dallas and he's also a professor at SMU in Dallas. He actually used this phrase with me once when I was in dokusan with, going through koans with him, you know, it means.

• 1:21:59Tim Ferriss?

  What is dokusan?

• 1:22:01Henry Shukman?

  Dokusan, yeah, thanks for asking. It's a one-on-one meeting between a Zen student and a Zen teacher. And actually, that's a, when you're working seriously with the koans, if you're getting into koan training, you can work with them in different ways because they can provide a really helpful frame when you're sitting, just to have a koan in the background, it'll change your sitting. But if you're going seriously through a koan training, at least in our lineage, there's a way to do that with a teacher. So you meet with a teacher and you, you know, you work on a koan and I won't go into too much detail, but anyway, we were meeting, Ruben and I, that style. And at some point he said, yeah, yeah, mu ichimotsu, mu juzo, which means not a single thing.

• 1:22:45Henry Shukman?

  An inexhaustible treasury.

• 1:22:50Henry Shukman?

  In other words, what I was trying to describe, this experience of everything disappearing isn't a horror, quite the reverse, it's an inexhaustible treasury.

• 1:23:07Henry Shukman?

  Everything is being given by nothing. I don't want to get too abstract because the point of it, it sounds so abstract until you experience it. When you experience it, it's just, it changes your life irrevocably. It can't not.

• 1:23:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there are certain things that require experience and words do a very poor job of encapsulating or conveying, right? It's like if someone's never orgasmed and you're trying to explain it to a male and you're like, yeah, it's kind of like a sneeze in your balls. And he's like, what? Yeah, I guess just you kind of have to be there first and then the descriptions make sense. So mu ichi motzu, mu is, just for people who are curious, I'd actually love help from any native Japanese speakers on the mujuzo. The mu ichi motzu, I'm pretty sure is, yeah, mu like mushin, like no heart, no mind.

• 1:23:59Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:00Tim Ferriss?

  Mu is a very common character in discussing Zen Buddhism. Ich is like ich ni san, one, and then motzu is thing, right? Or carry. It's also, it can be used as a transitive verb, but then mu the same mu and then juzo, I'm, I'm, somebody who's a native speaker, let me know, I couldn't find this when I Googled it. Maybe muju, ju is like maybe the ju boon enough, like, but mu is the same muju. Zou is like treasury, treasure, I'm pretty sure, although sambo zen also has the bo, like the three treasures.

• 1:24:34Henry Shukman?

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm taking us down a rabbit hole.

• 1:24:37Henry Shukman?

  Yeah. I'm afraid it might be a typo, actually. I'm thinking now.

• 1:24:42Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, there we go.

• 1:24:43Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, maybe it should be mujo zo.

• 1:24:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, mujo zo.

• 1:24:48Henry Shukman?

  Inexhaustible.

• 1:24:49Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, okay. Yeah, yeah, that'll make, that'll make it a lot easier.

• 1:24:52Henry Shukman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:24:53Henry Shukman?

  Sorry, my bad.

• 1:24:55Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, you're good.

• 1:24:56Henry Shukman?

  Not only my bad Japanese and my bad typing, you know.

• 1:25:01Tim Ferriss?

  No problem. Yeah, okay, that would make that would make more sense. I was like, God, I wonder how to actually translate that. I was trying to figure that out. Yeah.

• 1:25:10Henry Shukman?

  Damn, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

• 1:25:12Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, you're good. You're good.

• 1:25:13Henry Shukman?

  Mujo.

• 1:25:14Tim Ferriss?

  Mujo. Mujo. Yeah, like impermanence. Mujo. Jo is like everyday conversation would be like nichi jo, like ordinary, nichi day, nichi jo kaiwa would be like everyday conversation. Pretty sure it's the same jo. Yeah, mujo. Okay, got it. So, yes.

• 1:25:34Henry Shukman?

  Okay. Does that work? Yeah?

• 1:25:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Roger that. I think I think I got it.

• 1:25:38Henry Shukman?

  Okay.

• 1:25:40Henry Shukman?

  Cool.

• 1:25:41Tim Ferriss?

  I was interrupting to sort of white knuckle this Kanji translation.

• 1:25:46Henry Shukman?

  I think you were rescuing me from going over yet another precipice of nonsense.

• 1:25:53Tim Ferriss?

  That would also be a good, good title for the podcast. Over the precipice of nonsense. I could kind of, I mean, I don't know, it sounds like maybe a great description of koans, actually.

• 1:26:03Henry Shukman?

  Well, yeah, because you, but, but, but as long as we know that you're going in this vast liberation, you know, boundless one, that's the thing is that they're pointing at us. That's the thing that's so hard to get. When you think of one hand, sound of one hand, what the hell's that talking about? The only answer is found in us. Sometimes I've explained it like this, that I don't know whether you've heard this, but there's a sort of notion in fiction writing and storytelling that if you want to know who the main character of a story is, it's the one who changes, or it's the one who has an opportunity to change and either takes it or doesn't take it. That's the main character. So I've sometimes tried to explain koans this

• 1:26:45Henry Shukman?

  way. A koan is a story. It doesn't look like it, doesn't sound like it, but it is in fact a story, and the main character in the story is you.

• 1:26:57Henry Shukman?

  So Koan is inviting you to change in a radical way. You don't even know it's asking you to do, and even if you did, you wouldn't know how to do that change. Because it's asking us... You see, the sound of one hand only becomes clear when our self, our sense of self, drops away. And then suddenly, we find it. And I can't explain how or why, but I know that it works. And I can sort of tell you that when it does its magic, it's marvelous. You understand why this phrase is put that way. You see it. And you see that it's been telling you something

• 1:27:41Henry Shukman?

  about your very life that you hadn't been able to see before. And that's why, you know, I was so thrilled when I found Koans, because at last, it was actually a system that knew about what I'd been through on that beach and could lead me through beyond it.

• 1:27:58Tim Ferriss?

  So I think our round two will include a condensed... I think masterclass might be too ambitious, but a detailed discussion of the system, the systematization of using Koans, getting into checking questions, whether partial realization is possible or not, and so on and so forth. So I think we'll do a very deep double-click on that when we speak again. I'd like to ask you, when you reflect on your experience or remember your experiences of, let's call it awakening, using Koans, and this is going to be another one of my notoriously convoluted, compound questions,

• 1:28:41Tim Ferriss?

  but how similar or dissimilar are those experiences from, say, your experience on ayahuasca? Because it is possible, with a tool like ayahuasca, to arrive at places where you feel liberated from the constraints, the tight shoes of the rational mind. You absolutely can arrive in those places, including feeling at times the sort of beauty and infinite potential of the emptiness that you can access. The two questions are... How similar or dissimilar, or how would you describe the similarities or differences?

• 1:29:22Tim Ferriss?

  And then, why did you decide to consume ayahuasca? And you can tackle those in either direction.

• 1:29:32Henry Shukman?

  Maybe I'll take the second first. Consistent with this sort of philosophy of the two routes, there's that even though we may have had awakening, even we've become, even perhaps somewhat consistently access that awakening world, we can do it. Nevertheless, we're still a fallible, vulnerable, ailing, aging, mortal, suffering human being. What awakening shows us is that the suffering human being is themselves part of the infinite wonder. But nevertheless, you've still got the suffering being that needs tending. So I was, this was long ago, actually, I was, I guess I was in my mid 30s, I was in my Zen training.

• 1:30:16Henry Shukman?

  I was very unhappy, I'd been working on a book, a novel, actually, funnily enough, set in Peru, that was sort of revisiting, you know, that my early trip when I was 19. And I'd written, I thought, a really promising start to it. And then I got totally stuck and I just couldn't figure out how to keep going. It was a real, you know, severe writer's block and I was quite depressed. I was teaching down at a college in the south of New Mexico. And there's really not, not happy for various reasons. And I was going out to breakfast with a couple of friends one morning. And I'd just ordered huevos rancheros. And this friend of mine called me who lived in Santa Fe and basically said, Henry, you gotta come and do this thing this evening.

• 1:31:01Henry Shukman?

  I did this trip with this Peruvian shaman like a couple of days ago. Ayahuasca, I became a panther, it's the most amazing thing. You gotta come and do it, but you gotta fast. And he's doing another one tonight. And I was literally sort of, my huevos arrived and I was cutting the first bite out, hearing his voice on the phone. And this feeling came on, I don't know if you're familiar with, like, oh, fuck, I gotta do this. I know I gotta do this. I wanna eat these eggs, but actually I wanna do this thing more. It's more important, even though I don't really wanna do it.

• 1:31:34Tim Ferriss?

  That night, that evening?

• 1:31:37Henry Shukman?

  That night.

• 1:31:39Henry Shukman?

  So I did not eat my eggs.

• 1:31:41Tim Ferriss?

  Walking around.

• 1:31:45Henry Shukman?

  And I went up in a state of, you know, the depressive sort of dragging himself up. And I went to the studio where it was held and it was a Peruvian shaman and drink the vile tea, the weirdness comes on. And I had a hellish time, basically hell punctuated by moments of extraordinary peace. I shot up into this upper atmosphere and realized I was an asteroid. I, you know, I had, weird shit happened, you know, and I vomited a ton and it was scary and it was overwhelming. And when it was kind of over, I thought,

• 1:32:25Henry Shukman?

  well, thank God that's over. I'm never doing that again. But actually, the next day, I felt like I was sort of a teenager again. It felt like a whole layer of swaddling of something, some kind of been taken away from me. And I was alive in a, in a younger, fresher way. It was, it was marvelous. And the book I'd been working on just kind of in my mind, it was like looking at a map that opened out in front of me, that sort of unfolded in front of me. The whole map of the book was right there. And I carried on working on it. And it actually ended up happening and doing rather well, that book. And that

• 1:33:04Henry Shukman?

  was my first taste of ayahuasca. Later, after years of Zen training and really being in a very different place, I just had this friend who was a trained in the Peruvian style. And I was just curious to try it again. And I did three ayahuasca ceremonies like on once a month for three months. And it was totally different. I didn't have a very powerful time. And, but it was kind of nice, but I, I really just basically, I didn't need it to the same extent I had done before. I didn't have a lot to purge. I was quite mellow. I actually helped because I was in a totally different state.

• 1:33:44Tim Ferriss?

  How did you help? You rinsing, rinsing out buckets, holding people's ponytails? What was, in what fashion?

• 1:33:52Henry Shukman?

  A little bit of that. But actually, also, I sort of at a certain point in that tradition, they talked about.

• 1:33:59Henry Shukman?

  Grandmother, you know, the plant is grandmother and you've got to let grandmother come in and do the work she needs to do. So I was doing that in all those three times. I was just totally surrendered and grandmother didn't seem to have a whole lot to do. This wish came up. I said to grandmother, if anybody else needs to purge, let them purge through me. And I don't know, it's just some crazy idea that came up in the midst of the trip. But I had a feeling that there was one person there who did sort of, I don't know why I'm even bringing this up. It was just, I'm just trying to say, I was in a totally different space when I did it. And so, okay, so now, but going to the more important matter you're bringing up.

• 1:34:39Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, no, no, I'm not gonna let that go so easily. So, so you did end up purging them in this case?

• 1:34:46Henry Shukman?

  Actually, I think I did once for what I felt was somebody else.

• 1:34:51Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. For what it's worth, that experience, and to be clear, I'm not claiming that this can be proven. I'm not claiming that mechanism is understood, if it is real. I'm not saying it isn't just a fabrication of the mind, but the subjective experience of purging for someone else or having someone else purge for you is quite common.

• 1:35:16Henry Shukman?

  Is that right?

• 1:35:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. So it's not, it's not surprising to me to hear that.

• 1:35:21Henry Shukman?

  Oh, wow. That's, that's nice to have that affirmed, actually.

• 1:35:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for what that's worth.

• 1:35:27Henry Shukman?

  But look, now to the matter of deep kinds of experience.

• 1:35:31Tim Ferriss?

  Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

• 1:35:35Henry Shukman?

  Like, like awakening on ayahuasca. Normal programming. Right. Yeah. So here's my take on it, which of course is based on my experience. I have known, I mean, a number of Zen students I've known who have used plant medicine and found it profoundly helpful. Here and there, they've reported to me an experience within a plant ceremony that sounds like a Zen awakening, what I was saying, seeing the original nature. I don't think that that's commonly what people experience in the way Zen defines it.

• 1:36:16Henry Shukman?

  All the way through a psychedelic experience. I really don't believe that. But I think there are moments within a psychedelic experience for some people that sometimes that are like that. Now, but here's the thing, though, is how? I'm just now thinking, one student had a really strong experience of, you know, it's called, the Japanese is Kensho, for seeing original nature, had a really quite a strong one, actually using another form of DMT. But there's something about having it with a completely clear, ordinary mind versus having it when you know

• 1:37:00Henry Shukman?

  there's a powerful psychotropic compound in your bloodstream that will wear off. There's something about it that is just... I've seen that the impact is different. I'm not saying I know that it always would be, but that when somebody is stone cold sober and this happens, it's so undeniable that you've really seen something real. And it's not induced by anything. I'm convinced that, you know, this moment right now has sort of different levels to it. Different levels of experience, right here and now.

• 1:37:44Henry Shukman?

  And in these moments of awakening, that's what we're dropping into. And it can go all the way down to nothing. And the love that's there, it's right here now. But if you're... I mean, I would, I'd like to hear your take on this. I think you've probably had a lot more psychedelic experience than I have, I'm sure. And I'm really so thrilled that psychedelic research is in full swing again. I think it's absolutely... I mean, I see it, from my perspective, I see it mostly as just an incredible mental health tool. And I'm sure that's an insufficient way to look at it. But at least from that side, I can see, my God, this is gonna be fantastic in coming years and decades, helping people with depression, anxiety, fear of death.

• 1:38:29Henry Shukman?

  Love of death, you know, how amazing to be able to have love of death. That's what awakening can do. Deep love of life, deep love of death. I mean, that doesn't mean longing for death, you know, it means just this, you know, somehow really happy that it's part of the whole picture. I can't explain why, but we can be.

• 1:38:46Tim Ferriss?

  There's so much we could explore here. I think that psychedelics, properly administered, properly and respectfully used with certain guide rails and guidelines, can be really helpful for certain conditions and certain people. And I think they're useful for exploring facets of the mind itself and, and reality. Yeah, we could put that in quotation marks since I think that reality as we experience it is largely a constructed hallucination to begin with, which there are many ways to kind of explore. This is a book called Biocentrism that does a decent job of introducing thought exercises, although I disagree with some of the things in the book.

• 1:39:31Tim Ferriss?

  It's an interesting read. What I would love to see, and maybe it already exists, but would be to see, for instance, and this is, it would be very hard to do this non-invasively, but if it were possible to compare the neurochemical activity of someone, again, like who's going to pay for this research? And how on earth would you even structure a study is kind of a fool's errand probably. But let's just say hypothetically that you could compare someone having the experience of Kensho or an awakening with someone 90 minutes after drinking ayahuasca, who would subjectively report, right?

• 1:40:16Tim Ferriss?

  The phenomenology of the experience would include something akin to Kensho or awakening. It'd be so fascinating to compare those two because whether, let's just say catalyzed by.

• 1:40:32Tim Ferriss?

  A cup of tea, or catalyzed by diligent training, as Dennis McKenna would say, who's an ethnopharmacologist, our experience of reality is mediated through neurotransmitters, by and large, right? So you can change your experience of consciousness, let's just say using holotropic breathwork is one example. Ultimately, that would catalyze and induce certain electrochemical changes that would then help confer a certain experience. And I'd love to see, it would be fascinating. I'd love to see, I think it's too optimistic, but it'd be so endlessly fascinating to see

• 1:41:16Tim Ferriss?

  how the sort of presentation of these experiences differ along those parameters. I also think that the container and the cultural context and the assistance with constructing meaning out of unusual experiences is so important that it is difficult to, I would imagine, get to a point where you experience in your practice khensho without a lot of deliberate practice, at least as something that is repeatable. But you could find a rent a shaman on Craigslist and show up as like number 17 in someone's basement and have, you know, some lady who's watched too many Lord of the Rings movies

• 1:42:01Tim Ferriss?

  like smack you on the head with a feather and give you a super big gulp of ayahuasca. And like, you're going to have a very intense unusual experience, but then what to do with it? And I think it can be very, I know it can be extremely destabilizing for people. And to that extent, I think the downside risk seems to be much lower when you are practicing within the tradition of, in this case, Zen Buddhism. And there's a lot to be said for that capping of downside on some level.

• 1:42:39Henry Shukman?

  Well, yeah, you've got a whole lot of support. You've got a profound level of support. But I'm wary of equating.

• 1:42:49Henry Shukman?

  The whole of psychedelic experience with Kensho, I really am.

• 1:42:53Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, I think they're very different. I'm not trying to equate the two. I think that if, I'm just saying, if someone were to, I've never experienced Kensho in the Zen Buddhist sense. There's no way for me to know. There's no way for me to confirm that. And a lot of very strange things happen in psychedelic experiences that probably have nothing to do with what you would conceptualize or think of as Kensho. I certainly think they're very different things, but they may be kind of edging at aspects of similar spaces, I think.

• 1:43:27Henry Shukman?

  Yeah. Yes, I agree with that. I agree with that. And man, what a healing space it is, right?

• 1:43:34Tim Ferriss?

  It can be. Yeah, I mean, it can be. I think it can be with insufficient support and with the wrong preparation, at least in the case of psychedelics, it can be incredibly destabilizing. And people do end up in very bad circumstances if they have. Ayahuasca in particular, I think, is a dicey proposition for a lot of people. I mean, you just don't know when you're going to pull a joker card and it's always in the deck. Whereas with the practices that you're describing, perhaps it's a little, it's less likely. Although I would have to imagine, I mean, certainly it happens at Vipassana retreats and other places where there are people who have really difficult kind of breakdown experiences.

• 1:44:19Tim Ferriss?

  Have you seen that happen in the Zen Buddhist practices also?

• 1:44:25Henry Shukman?

  I've only seen it once. And actually, it wasn't a big deal. We just helped the guy.

• 1:44:29Tim Ferriss?

  Put him in a cage, kept him fed. He was fine a few weeks later.

• 1:44:35Henry Shukman?

  He was fine 48 hours later. He was, you know, and took him off the cushion, you know, actually. But I want to say one other thing, which is that. It's to do with this ordinariness that somehow in Zen, it's not quite right to sort of sit because I want to have a Kensho experience. There's something about sitting itself and just being more and more embedded in this moment, so that it becomes more and more fulfilling and okay, just as it is, that is perhaps the greatest reward, that we are learning to come home to ourselves,

• 1:45:20Henry Shukman?

  to come to terms with ourselves, to just be ourselves, not needing anything, not even Kensho. That's part of the training as well, that this practice isn't just for me to get something I want, namely a marvelous experience. There's something else going on as well, also likewise that a master like Yamato Roshi, and you know, we're all aspiring to that, all of us who are in training, to be able to live, what can we call it, a fully awakened life. The heart is fully open, there's great freedom, there's great flexibility of sort of register.

• 1:46:03Henry Shukman?

  I can see through this moment, I can see it's transparent, I can see that it's concrete as well. I can see that I'm getting a little tired, I can see that there's infinite joy, I can see that there's infinite love. All this, it can be present in an ordinary moment and of utter sobriety. There's something about its impact on our ordinary life that somehow is just such a treasure. And so it's not just about special experience, it's... Am I making any sense here?

• 1:46:35Tim Ferriss?

  You are making sense. So Kensho or bust is not the title of your forthcoming...

• 1:46:43Tim Ferriss?

  How to book.

• 1:46:44Henry Shukman?

  No, in fact, my new book is called Original Love. I mean, for real, I am writing one.

• 1:46:49Tim Ferriss?

  Nice, nice. That was good. That was a good. So now, is it a book? Is it a program? Is it both? It seems to be both. Why do either or when you can do both ends?

• 1:46:59Henry Shukman?

  Well, right. It's a manuscript at this point, which I think, I hope, is getting nearly finished. It's been a marvelous journey writing it, but it's a program and a course as well. And I'm actually just so excited about it. It's thrilling to be able to teach this full spectrum of what meditation can be. Because I think there's confusion. What's awakening? What's mindfulness? How do they? And if I'm awakened, or if I've had an awakening experience, am I awakened? Why am I still so miserable? Why do I get anxious still? Actually, we're multi-dimensional and to have got this way of addressing these different zones and being clear about it. So it's kind of a map. It's a, all parts are suffused with love.

• 1:47:41Henry Shukman?

  That's my main point, that in any level of any zone of practice, love is usually the thing somehow or other that triggers the transformation, that opens up things.

• 1:47:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Where can people learn more about Original Love or find the program?

• 1:48:00Henry Shukman?

  Yeah, well, at mountaincloud.org, at henryschukman.com, both of those. Anybody who read my existing book would learn a lot, actually, about many of the things we've been discussing.

• 1:48:15Tim Ferriss?

  One Blade of Grass. One Blade of Grass, subtitle, Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen memoir, which I have on my bookshelf in Austin, courtesy of our mutual friend Kevin Rose. And I recommend, I definitely recommend people check it out. Your stories are insane. I mean, you have, and I mean that in a sort of Yankee compliment kind of way, keeping in mind it's the same person who thought old fashioned tramp was something much more sensual.

• 1:48:47Tim Ferriss?

  But One Blade of Grass, I definitely recommend people check out One Blade of Grass and also the program and your website. Just to go to the website, go to mountaincloud.org, go to henryschukman.com and you will see an assortment of different resources. And that's, I suppose, a good repository, kind of a home base for a lot of the things that we're discussing. Henry, I think we Should do around two at some point, if you're still open to it, you can sleep on it and decide if you're willing to put up with this type of stochastic memento, nonlinear conversation a second time, but-

• 1:49:23Henry Shukman?

  If you can put up with me again, I'd be thrilled to.

• 1:49:29Tim Ferriss?

  Wonderful. Well, I mean, we've covered a good amount of ground. The great news is I don't have to do really any prep for the second conversation because I have 70% of my notes still remaining in front of me untouched. And is there anything else you'd like to share, like to add as closing comments, requests you'd like to make of people listening, suggestion, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wrap up for round one?

• 1:49:57Henry Shukman?

  I'd like to just acknowledge my deep gratitude to my teachers and to say, it can be tricky having a spiritual teacher, a spiritual guide is fraught with difficulty. I was very distrustful for a long time myself, found it very hard to accept a teacher until I finally found somebody I could accept. But it is wonderful if you find people who are really committed to helping others in their practice, but have no power trip of their own. They just want to share the teaching they've received. For those who want to partake of it, you know,

• 1:50:38Henry Shukman?

  there are people like that. It's shark-infested waters for sure, spirituality. So be careful, but you can find safe, deep teachers. I'm not putting myself forward, by the way. I'm a shallow, you know, I think I'm reasonably, I think I'm safe, but I'm not deep enough. I'm working on it. But you can find people who are, and it's a great gift if you do. So that's one thing I just want to say. And actually, I want to say huge thanks to you, Tim. You took a chance on having this crazy British Zen, whatever fool, and it's very nice of you.

• 1:51:17Tim Ferriss?

  My pleasure. I mean, Kevin was putting his nuts on the table, so I took it very seriously. I was like, well, look, it's very, it's on record as Kevin's recommendation in our last recording of the Random Show. And I have great faith in Kevin, and he's a huge fan of yours, and has learned an incredible amount from you and has taken a lot from the practice over the last year. And I've had front row seats to seeing it. So for people who wonder what the experience might transmit to one's sort of waking reality outside of your personal experience that you've shared, I've seen it in Kevin, and

• 1:51:57Tim Ferriss?

  it's been very noticeable from the outside looking in. And he's certainly been very excited for us to have a conversation. And vis a vis his excitement, I have been eager to have this conversation. And I've really enjoyed getting to know you a bit. And this will be part one of at least two. So we'll figure out the scheduling at some point soon. I also need to get to New Mexico. I've been meaning to spend more time in New Mexico to visit. There are a number of different places I'd love to explore.

• 1:52:28Henry Shukman?

  Oh, God, I'd love to show you around to whatever extent you want to be.

• 1:52:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it's got Zen Buddhism, you got Meow Wolf, you've got

• 1:52:36Henry Shukman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Tim Ferriss?

  skiing, you've all sorts of things.

• 1:52:41Henry Shukman?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:52:42Tim Ferriss?

  In New Mexico.

• 1:52:43Henry Shukman?

  Can I just tell you, just while we're on the subject of Kevin, I just want to say what a marvelous man he is. Incredibly generous, incredibly curious, and so supportive in so many ways. Just a treasure of a guy. And I'm very, very, very happy that I've got to know him. And he's very serious. And he's so serious about his Zen, he really gets it. It's got great possibilities and you've got to do it.

• 1:53:08Tim Ferriss?

  You know, actually, it's a, you know, it's a great point, because some native Japanese speaker can correct this, but there's an expression, I think it's "hiyasei samiasei", which means it or he heats up quickly and cools off quickly. And what that means is that Kevin's life is a vast collection of two weak passions.

• 1:53:31Tim Ferriss?

  And he is expert in a number of areas, but he gets very, very, very excited about something. And then two weeks later, I'm like, oh, how's X going? He's like, ah, I'm over that. I'm not doing that anymore. So it is all the more remarkable that he is stuck with Zen practice under your guidance for as long as he has with the diligence with which he's treated it. It's a very clear, Kevin, don't kill me, but it's, it seems to me to be a very potent anomaly. And that really speaks volumes. So I'm really happy that he's engaged in the practice also. So Henry, thank you for taking the time. Once

• 1:54:12Tim Ferriss?

  again, this has been great. And I'm actually really happy that we covered what we covered and that there's so much left to cover because why do I do these conversations other than to explore? I get a lot out of them myself. People can find you at Henry Shukman, that's S H U K M A N, henrysukman.com, mountaincloud.org. I'm sure they can find the social and so on, on those websites. Your memoir is One Blade of Grass. I highly recommend people check it out. They can also find the original Love Program and more info on the websites that I mentioned. We'll link to everything in the show notes at tunedupblog/podcast.

• 1:54:51Tim Ferriss?

  So if you just search Zen on that page, this episode will pop right up. And what fun. Thank you again for, for taking the time.

• 1:55:01Henry Shukman?

  Oh, man. Much gratitude to you. And yeah, I feel the connection. I was hoping I sort of feel it. It's very, very nice.

• 1:55:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're, uh, you're serious without taking yourself too seriously, which is nice. And I really enjoy this new terrain. I've been interested in Zen for a very long time. I've known, I've had very close mentors and friends in Japan who were dedicated Zen practitioners. But it's, it's really something I have very, very little familiarity with. So I'm looking forward to digging deeper, really getting into the nitty gritty details of koan use and also the sort of hierarchy and progression within

• 1:55:49Tim Ferriss?

  The Zen practice and Zen communities and many, many more questions. But we'll get to that in round two. So thank you, Henry, and many thanks to everybody listening. So until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered.

• 1:56:33Tim Ferriss?

  It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:57:09Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by You Need a Budget. What is You Need a Budget? You Need a Budget is a cult favorite budgeting app for a reason. The app and its simple four rule method will change the way you think about your money and help you gain total control so you can plan for the things you need and get the things you want without guilt or stress. To give you an idea on the cult favorite side, to date, they know of at least seven customers who have customized their license plates to mark the occasion of purchasing a new car in cash. And these fans do this by including Y-N-A-B, You Need a Budget, on their license plates. So people love this app. You Need a Budget has helped millions of people transform their finances, save their marriages, and live life on their own terms.

• 1:57:52Tim Ferriss?

  I even asked Pete Adney, who's been on the podcast, best known as Mr. Money Mustache, super popular episode, what he thought. And he's a big fan of the founder and what they're doing. You Need a Budget's simple four-rule method will actually teach you how to manage your money. You will learn a new way of thinking, new habits, and new behaviors that will help you get out of debt, break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, and build wealth faster. The You Need a Budget team is committed to your success. They offer free live classes every day of the week, video courses, bootcamps, challenges, and active fan groups in every corner of the internet. If you want to learn, they can teach you. On average, new budgeters save more than $600 by month two and $6,000 in their first year.

• 1:58:31Tim Ferriss?

  So try the app free for 34 days, no credit card required, at youneedabudget.com/tim, spelled as you would expect in proper English. Try You Need a Budget free for 34 days, no credit card required, at youneedabudget.com/tim. And just to explain, 34 days, that's because most people reconcile at the end of the month or 38 periods, so having a couple of days of cushion helps folks out. So 34 days with no credit card required at youneedabudget.com/tim.

• 1:59:04Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peak Tea. That's P-I-Q-U-E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China, I've lived in China, in Japan, I've done tea tours. I drink a lot of tea. And 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things. Chief among them, gut health is critical to just about everything, and you'll see where tea is going to tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented Pu'er tea specifically pretty much every day for years now. Pu'er tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem with good Pu'er is that it's hard to source.

• 1:59:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's hard to find real Pu'er that hasn't been exposed to pesticides and other nasties, which is super common. That's why Peak's fermented Pu'er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. It's so simple. They have so many benefits that I'm going to get into. And I first learned about them through my friends Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose. Peak Crystals. Are cold extracted using only wild harvested leaves from 250 year old tea trees. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu'er green tea, their Pu'er black tea, and I alternate between the two. The rich earthy flavor of the black specifically is amazing. It's very, very, it's like a delicious barnyard. Very peaty, if you like whiskey and stuff like that.

• 2:00:29Tim Ferriss?

  They triple toxin screen all of their products for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold contaminants commonly found in tea. There's also zero prep or brewing required as the crystals dissolve in seconds. So you can just drop it into your hot tea, or I also make iced tea, and that saves a ton of time and hassle. So, Peak is offering 15% off their Pu'er teas for the very first time, exclusive to you, my listeners. This is a sweet offer. Simply visit peaktea.com/tim. That's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A dot com forward slash tim. This promotion is only available to listeners of this podcast. That's peaktea.com/tim. The discount is automatically applied when you use that URL.

• 2:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  You also have a 30 day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is risk free. One more time, check it out. Peak tea, that's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A dot com slash tim.