Discovery 

Well, I grew up mainly unchurched, my parents were both fallen away Catholics, and by the time I was in high school, I really thought anything that had to do with any kind of religion was a bunch of bunk and that the only way to explore where we came from and why we were here or what the universe was about was science. And I thought I was going to end up as an astronomer because I wanted to understand the universe. So I had that in me. But then I had a wonderful freshman English teacher by the name of Jim Chambers in my first year of college. And he just really opened my mind to classical freshman English literature. But he taught something that he called the classical, humanistic tradition. And in that tradition, he posed the question. Where does the inspiration that for artists, scientists, sages come from? Well, now that was a fantastic question. Where does inspiration inside come from? And I wanted to be a scientist, so still I thought more important than maybe being a scientist was understand, where does inspiration and insight come from? That was very exciting. And was that same inspiration inside motivating and informing not only scientists, but but sages and and great artists of all ilk? Well, that was very exciting prospect. OK, I want some of that. And that’s what I began my essentially spiritual journey. What would cultivate new insight or inspiration or creative? Kind of. Enlightenment about music or science or philosophy, where does that come from and how do you get it? And so that’s what eventually brought me around to Buddhism because it had a practice that didn’t seem at all to conflict with science and yet offered a methodology or a skillful means for cultivating. A kind of groundedness, wisdom, compassion from sitting on a cushion. Well, that sounded interesting. I want to try that. So I did by the time I was a junior in college now at UCLA. I began to train with a Vinnie’s teacher and in what was then called the College of Oriental Studies, and I also had run into a sort of a Zen priest who had gone to. He was a Caucasian, but he had gone to Japan as a Christian missionary and came back a Zen priest. And he also had come back as a social activist and a Vietnam War protester. So I had this blend of social activism and spirituality, and there was a funny occasion where I met this guy I was taking a course at by this point in Buddhism. And here was someone walking around in zen robes on the campus. And it turned out that he was a graduate student in Asian studies, but he had already been kicked out of Japan and already spent a dozen years in a monastery in Japan in the sort of zen tradition. And we had on the UCLA campus, a fellow by the name you can even google him today by the name of Swami X, and he would stand up literally on a soap box in the middle of the Quad, one of the quads on campus and would espouse the wisdom of the East. He said he got it from the streets of New York and it went on from there. And he had a very foul mouth and just tore apart everybody. Anything that had to do with religion or administration or government and but was very, very funny and all of the students loved him. We made recordings of him and such. And you can still hear them on YouTube. Anyway, here was a guy who a student, fellow student, a graduate student. I was an undergrad student who was rolling around on the quad of the grass with the rest of us just finding this guy hilarious. I said, Well, maybe that’s the religion for me. And I recognized him as a Zen priest and zen from what I had been reading. Even though I was interested in learning meditation before I encountered Zen, I thought Zen is a little mysterious. You know, it seems kind of not anti-intellectual. But beyond like it, Zen seemed to tease one’s intellect. And with Cohen’s zen parables. And I thought, Well, that’s scary because I was very dependent. I was a student and thinking of going on to graduate school in medicine or public health or physics. And so something that toyed with the intellect and yet promised or teased about enlightenment or wisdom that was both scary and exciting. So I was attracted to Zen for that reason. Well, the graduate school student and Asian studies was his name was dizaine Victoria, and he was a sort of Zen priest, and he had been living as a resident at the College of Oriental Studies at the time, which is not far from UCLA. And when I told him about my interest and my curiosity and that I was, I thought, maybe I should learn meditation. He said, Well, there’s a teacher here at the at the school that I live at and he’ll teach. He has regular meditation classes, and that’s the Vietnamese teacher that I first began meditation with and. You know, they had me sit on the floor and try to cross my legs, and that didn’t go over so well, but I tried. And you know, I could get my little toe up when I tried to cross my legs and it seemed painful, but I did enjoy the teaching. And I remember one early meditation when I was in my dorm room back at UCLA and I was trying to meditate on my own because I could only go to the school once a week for some instruction. And I wanted to have a daily practice, and I thought that was important, and I still think that’s important. In fact, since 1975, I’ve been sitting every day since. But one of my early meditation experiences is that I was sitting on the floor and I was just trying to calm my mind and breathe gently and listened gently and attentively. And it felt almost all of a sudden as though even though my eyes were mostly closed, that I could see all around me and it wasn’t like with my eyesight, but it felt as though I was connected to the whole room in a much more intimate way than I had ever experienced before. And I thought, Wow, wow, it feels almost like the room is alive and I’m alive in the room with it. And that was a new experience, and I thought, Well, I’m going to keep doing this. Whatever this is feels pretty good.

Advice

Well, I think maturity comes from the school of hard knocks. There’s no really no way around that one. And that life throws up its own barriers and koans, if you will, mysterious opportunities to investigate what’s it all about and who am I anyway? And how do you negotiate this? And these kind of barriers or challenges that we all encounter are really the place where we cut our teeth on maturity. And it’s a zen practice or some sort of meditation practice will give you access to insight. That’s helpful, and it’ll give you access to open heartedness. That’s helpful, and it’ll give you a sense of being grounded. That’s helpful. But those ingredients itself? Are just a foundation for something. And the school of hard knocks is really where you’re going to put all those things to the test and and. The hard knocks in life will are real teachers, so for example, going back to having a child. one of my. Most important teachers was my infant daughter and her growing up. I learned a lot about my own childhood. And my own bumps and my own. Wounds, because I could see her developing and I was like looking at a recording of my own development and seeing all the bumps and gaps and wounds that were in my life and that kind of also ended up tearing me apart because I became aware at that time how much a pre-verbal early abuse history had. It had a very big impact on my life, and I needed to process and recover from that, and it wouldn’t have opened up without then and my daughter and a marriage that was breaking up. I tell you those three things together totally cracked me open, then in a very positive way. And but my daughter and a marriage that broke up in a very disastrous way, at least on the surface. And I’m very thankful for Zen practice because it helped me negotiate that. But wow, I was really knocked on my rear by by revelations that were coming up fast and furious. And I was glad I was in graduate school in psychology because I needed all the help I could possibly get to try and process what was coming up for me. And so with even with the tools of psychology which I held, I think of as helping us unscramble our knotted power, knotted up and then giving us a spaciousness in which to do that work. Still, even with that. It takes decades of hard knocks of life to grow up. That’s just all there is to it. There isn’t any creature on this planet that takes longer to mature and there isn’t any practice or combination of practices that are going to do it for you. I’m very grateful to them and I’m very grateful to psychology, and I’m also grateful to movement practices such as Quito and and Taichi and Qigong, because I think having a movement practice is also very important. So the combination of a movement practice, zen and psychotherapy gave me the tools to negotiate hard knocks, which are the real teacher.

Experiences

And I went to my first one in the summer of 1977. I thought I would die. I really thought this. I felt like I was sweating blood and that I was sure to turn into some sort of puddle and that, you know, I was going to either implode or explode because it was so difficult to sit on the floor for so many hours. And I really seriously thought about running away or leaving, and I didn’t. I thought to myself, Well, I have already kind of committed in some way to zen practice. And if this is zen practice and I leave now, then I’ll never know really know what Zen practice was. So I better just sit here and do this anyway. And so I won’t leave, but I’ll probably die. That’s what I thought. And on the third day of that retreat, I had a breakthrough, and after that breakthrough, now I was sold and I knew I would commit my life to a Zen practice and training. Anyway, I do remember thinking, when is it going to pop again and wanting it to pop again? It lasted for quite some time. The rest of the week was just sort of easy and glorious. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have pain or discomfort. It was just so distant and it was inconsequential because of that. In any case. Let’s see. Oh, so I I wanted it to pop again, and once it kind of faded and and things were more or less ordinary again, I kept thinking, what’s going to jump out of me now? I both wanted it and was a little frightened of it. How is the world going to shift again? And when will it shift again? And there is another tree going to sort of pop out and start speaking without words. So that was my initial feeling about that breakthrough. And I’ve since come to understand that these things can either happen gradually or suddenly and that it doesn’t matter whether it’s gradual or sudden. And if you do enough practice one way or another, you get soaked. You might be in one way. It’s like jumping into a pool. In another way, it’s like walking through a fog. Either way, you end up soaked and one’s gradual in one set, but you end up soaked. So I don’t care about whether people in practice come to it gradually or suddenly, but I have every confidence and faith that if you practice long enough, you’ll get soaked and and then you have to throw it away. In other words, if you’re attached to it, you’re going to be in error. And even if you aren’t attached to it, but you try to live there, you’re in error. So it needs to be not clung to and not even lived in. It’s like, you know. Yes. See this now now how are you going to live your life? This may allow you to live your life differently. Now, go live it differently. And. The experience itself is. Wonderful to be soaked from time to time, and indeed, I guess I continue to train. We leave the week long retreats so that not only I but others can get soaked because I think it’s refreshing and restorative and helps us slip out of our narrow legalistic perspective in such a way that we feel more wisdom and more carrying on an open heartedness. Towards ourselves and the world. I think that’s a good thing and needed. So I’m very much committed to continuing the practice myself and offering. It to others.

Immersion

So there are. Kind of multiple layers of people who attend this residential practice center. We have morning and evening meditation where anybody can come, including the residents we have for week long retreats. There’s a requirement, if you’re a resident, that you do at least one of those. You don’t have to do all of them, but you do at least one of them. If you did want to be ordained and a resident, then you would have to do all you would have to do four of them. And I do five of them a year, so I kind of walk the talk, you see? But the. So there’s the opportunity if you’re living here and there, there’s only eight apartments, so there’s not that many people who can live on campus, but if you are living on campus. Well, all you have to do is go downstairs to the meditation hall for morning and evening meditation. The retreat centers right here. We share a few meals together, and especially during retreats. But outside of retreats, we’ll share some meals and meetings and teas together as residents. But everybody has their own individual apartment and has their own family life and has their own location. So there there are. There’s there are some people who are residents who are also ordained, but. And we might give a little preference to if there’s someone who’s doing togut or are ordained and saying they want to make this one of their priorities in their life, well, then I’m happy for them to be residents. But it doesn’t. You don’t have to be ordained to be a resident. In fact, most people are not ordained. But then you’ve got the place to train morning and evening right here. You have a place to do the week long meditation retreat right here. You have access to a teacher right here. That’s pretty good. And you’re living in the middle of a big city where we’re doing some gardening together and some cooking together. But mainly everybody’s living their own life has their own vocation and their own family life. This just is the place to keep coming back to the tree. And so I like this blend. It’s an experiment. It’s not done this way in the East, and I think this is a relatively new experiment. There’s not that there are other places in the United States that are doing this, but this blend of sort of halfway between. Ordained and and and completely lay where you come once a week, no, this is more intense than that and less intense than a monastery. So less intense than a monastery and more intense than once or twice a week can meditate here every day. And so it’s this blend this halfway between that I think is potentially of the most service to the individual and to the wider community. And we also try to do things here as a community to be of service, for example, where a an emergency hub for the neighborhood in case of a disaster. We try to cook 100 meals every month for people who are homeless. We participate as a, as an organization, as individuals and something called the Faith Action Network, which works for better conditions in the state and with the Legislature and the City Council and such and the County Council to make this a better place to live. So we’re doing all of that as residents. Well, again, it’s not a curriculum. I’m not saying here are your courses in Buddhism that you need to take or here you have to pass so many coupons or something like that. It’s not a curriculum. It is a place to blend. Somewhere between purely practice and pure monastic practice, this is a place to blend and how long you want to do that, it’s up to you. We ask for at least a year commitment. Some people stay many years, some people stay on the air and that’s OK with me. So long as they’re getting something from it and we are compatible as a community, then it may go on for years because it’s a blend. I’m not too worried about it. It’s not isolated. We’re in the middle of a city. It’s a city practice. Everyone is expected to have their own vocation. Everyone’s essentially paying rent, although that isn’t exactly correct. And in a way, everybody’s rent here is subsidized, so it is easier to live here financially. But then the going rate in this town, so it’s subsidized rent, but you’re expected to contribute by, you know, working in the garden, working in the kitchen and sweeping floors, and you’ve got a place to train and practice and there’s a certain expectation around that, but not such a big commitment is required that you’re not very clearly not only expected but invited to live an ordinary life of family and vocation and just blending it sincerely with practice.

Integration

Well, going back before I was ordained as a community organizer. I mean, here I was. White male working in with black churches and walking the streets where I was definitely the minority and suspicious in the minority at that. Trying to develop local leadership to fight absentee landlords and and city hall and wow, that was an education. But what sustained me for long, long hours of doing that kind of service and community organizing was meditation. You know, sometimes we would get in very hot spots and like one time there was a bakery here in town that said, quote, it got quoted in the paper. Well, why don’t you have any black drivers for your bread trucks? And he said, Well, black drivers don’t want to get up that early in the morning. So we did it an action around that. But they had a lot of men, people of color, African-Americans who said, no, we’d be happy to get up that early if we could get a job like that. And so we went over to this guy’s house on Mercer Island, which is a fancy neighborhood and knocked on his door at the hour that he said nobody wanted to get up. And so doing things like that was a little nervous cause he called the police and we knew when we asked to leave, we just left, but we weren’t doing anything other than showing up at the time, he said. No one would show up. We showed up. And so and I just played the role of photographer and just took pictures and the face of the Seattleites who happened to be African-American history. They did all the talking. I just took pictures and it was a good thing. I was around them because here I was this white guy taking pictures. And when the police came, they were gentle and. But that was community organizing. And but it does make you a little nervous. So having a daily meditation practice I already knew was serving me very well. Long hours, sometimes scary situations, tense situations, and I could feel grounded in something bigger than my own ego. And that was a very, very helpful. And then when it came to being a software engineer and I thought, well, now this is a good way to make money because I need to make some money to support my practice and to support my family and for me. And my teacher ganked, Takahashi was a potter, and he loved to throw pots. And he would take a lump of clay that, you know, it’s just a lump of clay and put it on the wheel and it became a pot. To me, that was software engineering. You know, you just take a blank computer. With a little bit of memory, and you shape it with code into something that is useful, a useful utensil that takes something in and put put something in and it put something out. So whether it was in inventory control program or a bulk mail or program, and I was getting this little teeny itty bitty computer to do these fancy things that for me, it was like throwing a pot. And so it was a very creative endeavor, and I didn’t at all mind spending long hours again because I had this meditation practice, at least the way I thought that was supporting me and allowing me to restore and feel grounded so that when I spent long hours either programing or debugging code, that it went like a breeze. So again, very useful. So in the community organizing that helped Anand Software Engineering, it helped, and I wish it had helped a little bit more in my family life. It did. I ended up getting divorced from the Vista volunteer when my daughter was about three so that it did. There was some clash that meditation wasn’t enough, and we went to a psychotherapist trying to save the marriage. And I, frankly, the person didn’t do a very good job in marriage, wasn’t saved, and I thought to myself, My God, I can do a better job than that. So I wanted to get back to social responsibility, and I also needed to make money. So I thought, Well, I’ll sell my interest in the software company that I had started with another. Another friend of mine, who I wrote the invite to. I wrote him an inventory in our book mailing program, and he said, Well, now if I can, I recoup the money that I paid you to write this. If we if I win, I market it like, you know, I’ll get half and you’ll get half. And that’s how the software company started so well. It became a big software company and I sold my part in it, and then I put myself to graduate school in psychology. And so that was very helpful because I needed that psychology. Zen is not enough, but you know, it’s a great grounding tool, and it opened my eyes to a wider world. And I felt this communion with the universe and beyond. But that wasn’t enough to save my marriage. And I knew this psychotherapist that we went to see a couples counselor. I could do a better job than he did so. And my grandfather had been a psychiatrist. So that’s why I put myself into graduate school and I found graduate school pretty easy to even though. As an undergraduate, I mean, as a young man, I have dyslexia, so studying and reading and writing is difficult. It takes me a lot longer. I’m good at all of those things, but it just takes me a lot longer. And so but going to graduate school was a breeze again, and I think because of Zen practice. So software engineering was a breeze. Going to graduate school was a breeze. Community organizing was a breeze. How to be in a relationship was not such a breeze. So now I’m going to psychology and examining myself and learning about psychology and hoping that that will help. That addition will help. And indeed, I think it really did. I think that the psychology helps with immaturity and then helps with the insight in the opening. And if you put the two of those together, you’ve really got a great combination.

Lineage

It’s a big question. So I started it out in Soto Zen, and I ended up in Rensselaer, so I definitely had a foundation and start in Soto Zen. And it’s an interesting story how I went from sort of then to Renzi’s and so does and does not principally use koans as as can openers to one’s heart mind . That’s how we think of co-ops. And then so does in tradition. Generally, you don’t use coupons in the same structured way as you do in the riverside tradition. But in any case, the breakthrough that I mentioned in the middle day of that first week long session in the summer of 1977, definitely things popped, and it was as though I was seeing the whole world exactly the same world in a new way. And I remember. Telling the soldiers and teacher teacher Hirano Socialcam, who had come twice a year to do lead sesshin and being in an interview with him and saying What is it when? A tree limb in the midst of morning fog dripping with dew. Speaks, but there are no words. And. He said that sounds like the start of something. And I came to Renzi’s end because the Seattle Zen Center needed got to a point a size and a structure where they kind of needed a full time instructor and it couldn’t be Dr Glenn Webb because he was an art history professor. Although he was qualified. And so there was a RINs in priest who had kind of gotten in trouble with the hierarchy in Japan. And so it didn’t have a lot of opportunities in Japan and was invited to come and be the resident sort of priest or practice holder here. And he happened to be in the riverside tradition. So when he finally did move here in the I guess, he came in the end of 1978 and began teaching in 1979, we switched kind of from a sort of group to a written group, and he worked with koans all his life. So he introduced all of us to the Rienzi Cohen curriculum. And I apprenticed with him for more than 20 years. And now I think I’m one of only probably a dozen or so people in the United States who are first generation from the Japanese teachers who can use this go on tradition properly. Yeah, that’s that’s all from the server. I mean, I don’t know the numbers, but just so does tradition more popular in the West. It’s also more it’s also more popular in the East. So it’s it’s it’s a smaller sect in Japan than it was then. And it is here, too. And so given your experience, having experienced, you know, Soto and Renzi, how do you see the application of that in the U.S. where you know why certain industries might be drawn to design versus red side? Like just I mean, also besides the curriculum, is there other substantial differences that draw different types of students to that, you know, these lineages? I don’t think they’re also very, very different, they’re not. I mean, in rinses and we face each other generally and then so doing, then you face the wall generally and re-energize and you’re kind of looking at the floor in sorrows and you’re kind of looking at the wall. And as I say, rinses intense to emphasize koan curriculum much more than the sort of zen tradition. But they both look at cons. These are Mondo’s are exchanges between historical teachers and their students. And by examining them either in the sort of tradition of differences in tradition, you’re trying to stir yourself up a little bit to look at things in a different or new way or a more flexible way is the theory anyway. And I do think that looking at the old stories and trying to put yourself in the role of the teacher, put yourself in the role of the student and examining that for yourself. You learn something about the human condition and the lens that Zen offers to the world to kind of see the world differently. We called being able to see them the ordinary discriminating world and kind of the absolute spiritual world in which it’s all contained. And being able to play with those two polarities, they’re not separate at all. But being able to play and juggle those two polarities freely because you’ve done so much training and part of that training and the insight tradition is the koan curriculum. But otherwise, I don’t think they’re that different rinses intends to emphasize a bit more of the sudden jump in the pool kind of getting soaked. And so does it. And I would say emphasizes more of them. Just stay in, you know, just keep going on with the practice in the sitting and she can’t until you’re soaked. But I don’t see much importance in the difference just as long as you get soaked somewhere along the line. It is not necessarily academic at first, because they say it to give the consent of that curriculum matches it in that regard is say again or focus on the studies versus some of the energy as opposed to sort of being more of the daily experience and in grading, you know, the zen practice as part of daily practice . I mean, I mean, again, I know I you know, I think they I think they both adequately or strongly emphasize bringing the practice into daily life from, you know, chopping vegetables, sweeping the floor, cleaning the toilet, working in the garden, making your bed. And if you can’t folding the laundry, you can’t bring it into those things. You really that’s the stepping stone to ordinary life. The whole idea is that your practice is just skillful means to bring out into ordinary life and in more complex ways than those simple chores. You know, our interactions with family and vocation and society. Hopefully you can bring some of that peace of mind and creative energy and insight and open heartedness into a much more complex situations than, say, the meditation hall meditation hall is just a stepping stone to ordinary life. In fact, I think of it as the laboratory where you come to the meditation hall to experiment in a very contained environment with a lot of structure. But it’s, you know, I have a scientist heart, so it’s like, this is the lab you’re reducing the number of variables you’re able to experiment with your own heart mind and in a very contained way, maybe gain some insights and develop some hypotheses and then go out and test them in the world. I think it’s very different then from Japan, where this lineage comes from, where there’s a very distinct ordained priesthood and a very distinct lay practice, and they don’t blend very much here. They blend much more in the West. And I like that. And for example, in the east, you would have just temples where women which they train and where men would train and they would be primarily ordained. And that’s all who would train in a temple. People might come to the temple as a place for burials or marry very, you know, different kinds of ceremonies. Life transitions, but they wouldn’t really train in a temple. A few lay people train and potential in a temple, but it’s mainly priests or ordained or monks that train in temples in Japan and throughout the East. And that, again, that’s fine. And there are a lot of high arts in the east where you go to the temple for a year or maybe as much as three years, but then you come back and live in that quote unquote ordinary life. And I think that’s the point of spiritual training is how to bring one’s training or practice into ordinary life. If you can’t bring it into ordinary life, I think you’re missing something. A lot of something I think is as American as then needs to experiment with such things. Yeah, and we are. So we experiment with adding to that base of practice and training and mindfulness and open heartedness. We try to add a social component. We try to add, say, nonviolent communication component. We try to add. You know. Investigating things like white privilege or investigating racial issues in the, you know, the trouble that the world is in when we put solar panels up on the roof, you know, things like that, we try to be responsible neighbors to ourselves and to the wider neighborhood.

Teacher

I think it works in the East, and it doesn’t work very well in the West, and it elevates makes people think that the teacher is somehow special and superior in some way. The only thing that we may have over someone who’s just beginning is that we’re not just beginning. But as I say, the practice is the teacher and I’m just hold the container. So I get a reduced rent here and I consider that great. I like a reduced rent because I hold the container of the practice and the role of Abbot or Roshi. And so that’s nice. But I prefer and I prefer those who I ordain to make their living doing whatever they would do normally as a vocation. They may make Zen approach priority in their life in terms of their spiritual nurturing and their grounding. But I’m much more interested in people living a normal kind of normal vocational and family life than being a separate priesthood. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a monastery or that kind of practice. But in my opinion, if you spend more than about three years in that kind of setting, you end up doing more harm than good, in my opinion. Well, my two principal teachers can get Takahashi and Shimano were very flawed human beings. And I remember starting out with a kind of idealization. Well, there their Zen masters, so maybe their flaws are even enlightened and. No, they’re just flaws and quite flawed. And, you know, I learned that it was great to learn from game you talk about shy about ordinary minders, Dow. In other words, chopping vegetables, sweeping the floor, working in the garden. This is it. You know, bring your presence of mind and and your open heartedness to each and every activity. This is it. He was great for that. But I would never. I came to find you would never talk to him about personal issues or advice about being in relationships that you know. And he was not any good at it himself. And it was terrible with managing money. And there were many excesses. You know, a doctor once asked him, What do you drink alcohol? No, I drink Saki, you know, and anal Shimano who wore it to me in terms of koan training was like the difference between. He was so sharp on the ancestors of our tradition and their subtleties and profundity is that it was like I could read all I wanted and it would be like, I’m pretty blind without my glasses seeing everything fuzzy, but working with him around corners, it was like putting on glasses and seeing everything 2020 when it came to the ancestors of the tradition. But when it came to his behavior in life, it was like I would not want to use him as a model. And yet people looked up to him as a guru, and I really discouraged anybody looking at me as a guru for the same reason as I couldn’t look at them as gurus . This is not the no, I’m I’m not in the Guru school and I don’t want to be in the Guru school. However, did had did they learn certain skills skillful means and they learned them very well through decades of training that they could pass on to me or to others? The skillful means that could well be used in negotiating life and and meeting those hard knocks and coming to some maturity. They presented tools or skillful means that I have found very useful and I’m very grateful for. And I will always be grateful for them. So, I mean, the one gave me a pair of glasses and the other to really let me learn how to chop vegetables with mindfulness and open heartedness. So I feel great for those two teachings. But. Knowing how to do simple tasks mindfully and open heartedly and getting a pair of glasses are not the be all and end all of life, they’re very nice. I’m very appreciative. I will forever be passing on these same tools to others, but they’re just tools. They’re just skillful means and again, back to the hard knocks or the real teachers. And so. I’ll say to others in you who look at me as the Zen teacher, I’ll say, be careful. I’m playing the role. And I’m putting on robes and. You may have all this transference on me as being a teacher, and you’ll learn that I’m a human being and I’m not going to meet your idealization and. And maybe falling off the pedestal is exactly what you need to learn. I’m not going to do it deliberately, but I’m just going to be me. And that’s not going to be to your liking. So at some point I’m going to disappoint you and be prepared for that. And that may to be part of the teaching. It was for me the fact that they were not my idealization was a big part of my training. Oh, you can know, very powerful, skillful means means and not be very mature. These two things can go together. I can still learn the skills and means from you and also learn that’s not maturity. And I’m going to have to work on that myself, using whatever tools I gotten from anywhere and my own hard knocks to to really be my teacher. And so that’s how I tried to present myself to others. I have some skillful means decades of training that I can share that you may find useful. I certainly have. And my appreciation of that. My appreciation of those tools may help you find those tools or make use of those tools. And that will be a great thing because they were a great thing to me, but careful. Well, you know, I’ve only trained outside of the country in Japan and then for just a short while, but I can tell you that there was a lot of idealization of the teachers in Japan. Roshi was a very high status kind of position and but they it seemed to me that. In Asia, they understood, Oh, this is a guru in this slice. And in this slice, there are wonderful artist, but there are many other slices to life. So is this a very high class artist in this slice of life? Yes. Can I appreciate that and honor that? Yes, but that’s only one slice of life. And in the east, they seem to understand that in the West, they say, Oh Jesus, zen master, or he’s a guru in this slice of life. Therefore, he is in all slices of life. Watch out just because you’ve gained some mastery in some skillful means and pretty powerful, skillful means does not mean that, and your eyes may be open and you may be seeing the world clearly and your heart may from time to time, be very open and very clear. But without the hard knocks and working through those hard knocks to become mature. You can have somebody who’s very clear and very even may be very open hearted, but does not have the integration that would in anywhere close justify what people have idealized them about. Same true for me. You know, it’s the the I’m still working on maturity. I’ll always work on maturity. We never arrive wherever we are. We’re just beginning. Now that does come from in wherever we are, we’re just beginning. Mastery is a process you never actually arrive. Ultimately, there’s nothing to attain. In some ways, we’re already there and we never arrive. So I like that. But uh, I wish there was a lot less idealization in the United States and in Europe and even in Japan. I wish there was less idolization. But it does seem to me that in my short time in Japan and my understanding of the east of other countries, including Vietnam and Korea and China, that people saw the Zen Master as as a master in this place revered in this slice. But you wouldn’t necessarily think he was going to be mature in all other slices.