Enlightenment does not mean that your ego is suppressed or denied. It does mean it is deconstructed, seen through, exposed, and then reeducated and reconstructed, including the realization and precisely articulated understanding of these deeper truths.
—Jun Po Roshi
There are many ways we define ourselves these days. We’ve already touched on ego, persona, and conditioning in the last few chapters, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface. There are dozens of theories on how the mind, the brain, and culture create our sense of “us.” Personality types, gender types, brain-body types, and many other factors fuel an ever more complicated map of what the territory of being you looks like.
“Ego” is Latin for “I.” This stands in opposition to “it” or “other,” anything that isn’t, quite simply, what you define as you. Ego, in other words, is the combination of all of your thoughts and feelings, stories and memories, reactive patterns and conditioned behaviors, hopes, dreams, and sense of self.
Ego is a loaded word, of course, one that often has negative connotations in our culture, as in, “You’re so egotistical.” Let’s step back for a moment and take a look at the idea of ego, so that we can see where and how our egos impact us on a spiritual path.
Here is a curiosity. As humans grow and develop, we tend to become less egocentric, less self-absorbed. Children, for instance, are very egocentric, as anyone who has spent time with a two- or three-year-old can tell you. However, this is not because they have strong egos, but because their egos are not fully formed: their “selfishness” is actually a reflection of a sense of self that has not differentiated fully from its environment. In other words, children are more “fused” with their surroundings, which makes it harder for them to take a more-objective view of something. A two- or three-year-old does not yet have the capacity for compassion for the suffering of others, to say the least. They snatch toys, poke their brothers and sisters, are comically dishonest, stick the dog with a fork now and again, and have public meltdowns without regard to anyone but themselves.
Yet as we mature and grow, our egos grow stronger. What used to be the subject of our minds becomes an object in it. In other words, a two-year-old is their needs. They do not have needs, but are fused with them, which is part of what makes the “terrible twos” so terrible. As the two-year-old gets older, their needs become more of an object that they can see, and control. So a seven-year-old might want her brother’s ice cream bar, but she’s less likely to simply take it like she might have when she was half that age.
There is an interesting irony here, which is that it is only as a child matures and their egos grow stronger that they can begin to act less “egocentrically” and with more compassion and awareness of their actions on others. In other words, more ego can translate into less egocentric behavior. In adults, egotism is many times merely covering up insecurity, doubt, or pain. Egotistical behavior can be a reflection of an ego that is in terrible pain and confusion. As such, it projects its pain and confusion out into the world, blaming other people, races, religions, political parties, parents, or spouses for what it’s feeling internally.
This paradox of more ego meaning less egocentric behavior is at the heart of spiritual practice, because it takes a very strong ego to push through into a genuine, spiritual view of the world. At that point, our strong ego may get very quiet, and can be more easily used as a tool of our larger, spiritual awareness.
This is the last day Jun Po and I will be able to meet face-to-face for at least a few weeks, so we make the most of our time. Today we’re meeting in a community center in North Boulder, where I’ve managed to secure a quiet, garden-level private room.
KA: We’ve talked about ego already, but I want to further define it so that we are clear about what an ego is, and how an ego relates to Enlightenment and a spiritual path. How do you define “ego”?
JP: Well, for me, “ego” simply means all activities of self-referencing mind.
KA: All activities of self-referencing mind? That’s a broad definition.
JP: [Nodding] Ego is all of our thoughts, emotions, and emotional reactions, both positive and negative. We can get into a lot of nuance on this, believe me, but let’s keep it simple and not overthink it. Essentially, an ego does three basic things. It wants more of something (attraction), less of something (repulsion), or it doesn’t care (indifference/ignorance). No matter how sophisticated the theory of ego development might be, it comes down to these three reactions: come here, go away, or I’m not interested. In Buddhist thought: passion, aggression, or ignorance.
KA: How does traditional Zen view the ego, sometimes called the relative mind?
JP: I would say in traditional Zen, the goal is to push through the ego. To identify with dhyana consciousness, and from pure awareness, simply witness the ego arising.
KA: But?
JP: [Pause] Well, this is tricky. For many Zen practitioners, this can be a powerful path. But for me, it was problematic.
KA: Can you explain that?
JP: Zen is classically Japanese, even though it evolved from Chan Buddhism in China. But like everything the Japanese do, they took it to an extreme, in aesthetics, insight, practice, discipline, and formality. Zen developed, over many hundreds of years, as the perfect vehicle for the Japanese. The practice of Zen was completely in alignment with their traditional culture. The problem was that the things that work in traditional cultures don’t work well in modern and postmodern societies. When we look at traditional cultures from our modern and postmodern perspectives, they can seem xenophobic, sexist, hierarchical, conformist, and racist, to name some of the shadow sides of any traditional culture. Look at our own culture back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many of those “problems” existed, from our perspective today. Look at the confusion and hand-wringing over someone like Thomas Jefferson, who was a great proponent of freedom and liberty. And owned slaves. The problem with this is glaring today; it wasn’t as glaring 225 years ago, to say the least.
Japan didn’t come out of this traditional phase until after the Second World War; this made Zen, as taught to a hippie and progressive liberal like me in the mid-twentieth century, problematic.
KA: Problematic how?
JP: Well, in traditional Japanese culture, you didn’t have the strong sense of individuality that we now do in much of the world, especially the West. In traditional Japan, egoic identities were often fused with ideas of honor, discipline, fealty to the emperor, death before dishonor, and all kinds of things that are hard to comprehend from the view of a twenty-first-century Westerner. So Zen didn’t have a very good grasp of ego as we understand it today; it didn’t develop insights and activities to bring awareness to the complexities of the modern mind.
Traditional Zen, for instance, was great at transmitting dhyana, or pure awareness, and the shunyata, emptiness—it’s second to none, then and now. Without question, Zen’s transmission of the essential nature of mind is without equal. But its view of the relative mind—the ego—was developed in a time when the ideal was for a man to serve to death his master; a woman’s place was always behind the man, silently; and the only ones who could really understand Zen had to be Japanese, and certainly not Western “barbarians.”
KA: Yet you were the first Westerner, and first person, that your teacher Eido Shimano Roshi elevated to a dharma heir, a roshi.
JP: [Nodding] I was trained classically. That meant using Zen koans, those enigmatic riddles, to accomplish insight. Eido Shimano Roshi told me more than once that there was no Zen outside of Japanese culture. What he meant was that in order for me to become an effective Zen roshi [Zen master], I would have to essentially become culturally Japanese. Zen and Japanese culture were, to him, synonymous. This was problematic for me. On the one hand, I understood what he meant. Japan had created a beautiful and stable culture that has allowed the full flowering of Zen to occur; only within those rigid confines could they accomplish what they had accomplished. At the same time, I was a Midwestern, ex–Roman Catholic guy, six-feet-two-inches tall, a yogi, who had been deeply involved in the counterculture, served time in federal prison, and had once run one of the larger LSD families on the West Coast. I was about as far from Japanese as a man can get.
KA: What did you struggle with?
JP: Some of the traditional elements of Japan found their way into Zen, institutionally, that I found sexist, rigidly hierarchical, and xenophobic.
KA: And it was these traditional Japanese concepts of ego that were problematic to an American as well?
JP: To this American, yes. But let’s remember this was now a generation ago—we’re talking the late 1970s through the early 1990s. I don’t maintain it is still this way—Eido Roshi, after all, elevated a woman to the position of roshi, not long after me, and she’s in fact the head abbot of Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji, the monastery where I trained in the New York Catskill mountains.
But in my experience, there were moments where there was so much psychological shadow in a monastery I was stunned. Some of the American students were desperately trying to get away from themselves. They had self-institutionalized, because they could no longer function in the world outside the temple gates. I’m not saying this was the rule, not by a long way, but there was enough of this kind of behavior to make me question if insight alone—if spiritual insight alone—was enough.
Traditional Zen, as I watched over the years, could really struggle to address pathology in the ego. In traditional Zen, students are often told to “go back to the zendo” to deepen their insight. But some people, I suspected, needed to go to a therapist to work out wounds from childhood, to do shadow work—
KA: Let me interrupt and ask what you mean by “shadow work.”
JP: Yeah, well, that’s just the psychological conditioning that you can’t see with your conscious mind, right? It’s what we’ve been talking about. We all have it—all humans—without exception. Some of us have lots of “shadow,” some of us not as much, okay?
KA: How about an easy-to-understand example?
JP: Sure. So, for instance, I might get really upset around women in power, and that’s “just the way I am.” But if I look harder, I might see that I had some experiences as a child that caused me to fear women in power, like Mom, and that “shadow” now informs and conditions how I react to things in life. By doing what’s called “shadow work,” or therapy, we can become less reactive to life, freer in how we see and experience things. Or take someone like my father, who had PTSD. That drove all kinds of destructive behavior in him, because the trauma he experienced was pretty much “in shadow,” meaning not in his conscious thoughts. But he drank to get away from a nervousness that would never leave him, right, and he would become violent and unpredictable because the “shadows,” the damage, were wreaking havoc in his unconscious mind.
We see it a lot with sexuality, too. So it’s not okay for a spiritual leader to have sexual thoughts, or be gay, or whatever, so that energy goes into “shadow.” A person won’t admit to the thoughts and desires consciously, so they come up in shadowy, unconscious ways. Leering at the secretary, sleeping with students and then hiding what you did out of shame, even seducing children. Got it?
KA: Clear.
JP: Okay. So as I was saying, in traditional Zen, students are often told to “go back to the zendo” to deepen their insight. But some people needed to go to a therapist to work out their trauma that was coming out sideways, through weird reactions to power or sexuality. Others needed to get to a personal trainer, to get back into their bodies. They needed a better relationship to the food they ate, and to their families and loved ones. Body, mind, spirit, and community all needed to be addressed, not just spirit.
KA: In your view, then, traditional Zen didn’t honor the complexity of a modern ego. And it was necessary for students to have a better understanding of their egos if they’re going to seriously undertake a spiritual practice?
JP: Absolutely. Psychological shadow work is strongly encouraged in my sangha—my community—now. Emotional maturity and integrity are a requirement, and we’ve added an emotional koan practice to our meditation practice to deal with these issues.
KA: You encourage shadow work and new psychological understanding but require emotional koans, then. Yet you’re critical of too much psychoanalyzing as well. Why the contradiction?
JP: Because it may be beneficial to do psychological shadow work so that we can gain a better understanding of ourselves. To be able to see what is in our shadows that can’t currently be seen. At the same time, we can never lose sight of the fact that the ego isn’t permanent, and that all our stories are, at their core, habitual patterns, our hysterical-historical story.
We can’t do therapy in the hope that we can break out of the box that holds us. We do it to get to the truth of the cause of the reaction that put us in the box to begin with. But you have to step out of the box to step out of the box.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever become fully liberated from egoic suffering by therapy. The reason is because most therapies treat the ego, the self, as largely permanent; this strengthens the fundamental misperception that is at the root of our suffering.
In other words, therapy is sometimes necessary if a student can’t see what is causing unconscious reactivity in their lives; you can’t fix what you can’t see; you can’t transform what lies outside of conscious awareness. But therapy alone will not deliver you from your suffering. Just ask Woody Allen. [Laughing.]
KA: Therapy is seeing the box that holds you, and Zen is stepping out of the box altogether?
JP: That’s right. Spiritual insight allows you to step out of the box. But you can spend ten years meditating and still be an emotionally reactive jerk. With incredibly deep spiritual insight. The second part is great, but what about the first? This is a problem.
KA: We’ve started to cover this already, but let me summarize it here: we need an ego on the spiritual path to give awareness a view, yet an ego can be a problem on the path as well. Can you clarify the relationship between ego and spiritual practice?
JP: The ego’s not a problem. An ego is absolutely and utterly necessary. It’s only your identification and failure to understand the true nature of your ego that’s the problem.
You’re not permanent. Neither am I. You are real, but you’re not permanent. And your “realness” changes and is highly malleable. This is something I realized experimenting with lysergic acid, and that I was then able to verify in my middle age with a stable and steady insight practice that helped to produce similar sensations of ego being stripped away and reconstructed, in naked awareness.
This idea and experience of self-permanence is the foundation on which we build our lives, and for good reason. Without it, we would lose our sanity, our sense of continuity, and we would likely end up dead or in an institution, bouncing off the walls in a straightjacket. Your sense of self is very real. It’s just this idea of self-permanence is, when we look more deeply, false. We are not a concrete entity.
KA: So the ego exists, and it’s real, but you’re saying it’s just not what we think it is?
JP: Yes. Look, anyone with just touch of introspection can see that their sense of self is not stable. You can be regressed to an infant, when all you did was spit up on yourself. And one day you may be an old person, senile, spitting up on yourself all over again. The ego is real, the ego seems solid, and the ego is necessary. It’s just not permanent or fixed, and to treat it as if it is can lead to much suffering.
KA: How?
JP: Psychotherapy looks into and identities the hidden aspects of our personas, our personalities. This is very useful, to show us the things we cannot see, the unconscious ways we are reacting to the world. But ultimately, the ego isn’t permanent, and too many people go into therapy looking for something solid, for a concrete sense of who they are. I have bad news: it ain’t there!
KA: Therapy strengthens an ego. It makes us more conscious, stronger, better able to maneuver in life. And we need a strong ego if we’re going to seriously undertake the pursuit of Enlightenment, yes? We need a strong ego to see, ironically, that our ego is flawed, impermanent, fallible, and ultimately time-bound.
JP: [Nodding] In order to transcend our egocentric view of the world to a Buddha-centric one, we must be willing to be philosophically reeducated from an ignorant egocentric overstanding to an egoless understanding. Our egos must be well-trained and able to recognize their own shadows and deeply conditioned nature. Perhaps most important, they must be able to discipline themselves. Reeducating and retraining our egos takes a strong ego indeed! Only a strong ego can withstand the intensive fire that transformation requires, and usually it is only the most stubborn and egoic of seekers who are able to transcend and then include their small selves fully, a seeming irony that is very important to understand.
It is only by turning into the ego, but also by being willing to change our understanding of ourselves, that liberation can finally become possible.
KA: Certainly most of the spiritual teachers I’ve met have had a strong sense of personality, to say the least. More than enough to fill the room, no matter if they’re Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu.…
JP: Yes. Strong egos trained and disciplined to live in a deeper truth that transcends and includes the relative self.
KA: Yet I’ve also met more than a few people who think they’re Awake, or at least very much advanced on the spiritual path, who come across as, well, arrogant and condescending.
JP: People don’t Awaken. Awakening Awakens. Look, everyday neurotics sing the song, “me me memememememememeyoume.” But many so-called spiritual people are singing the same song, just at a different tempo: “Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. You. Me.” When ego thinks that spiritual insights are the goal and attempts to make emptiness its own, problems arise.
KA: [Laughing] That sounds like the cult leader.
JP: Sometimes. But more often it’s much more benign. Someone will take some legitimate insights but plug them into a belief system that allows the ego to perpetuate itself forever—heaven, reincarnation, karma, spirit realms, ancestor spirits—whatever fantasy you want to call it.
KA: You don’t believe in those things?
JP: I neither believe nor disbelieve. I’m a Buddhist agnostic.
KA: Yet you think those beliefs are problematic—of heaven, say? Or reincarnation? Or of spirit guides? I read that four-fifths of people believe in something after death. Are you saying they’re all wrong?
JP: Got time for a story?
KA: Absolutely.
JP: The Buddha was sitting when his disciple Malunkyaputta approached him. Malunkyaputta was a new guy, right, concerned that the Buddha never talked about the important stuff. Like, is the world eternal or not eternal? Is the soul different from the body? Does the Enlightened mind exist after death? And so this new student thought that if the Buddha didn’t or wouldn’t answer him, Buddhist training was worthless and he’d just go back to his old life.
So he asks the Buddha all those questions. The Buddha replied, “Did I ever say if you led a religious life you would understand these things?”
Malunkyaputta admitted that no, the Buddha had not promised this.
The Buddha continued, “You are like a man wounded by an arrow smeared with poison. As your friends rush you to a healer, you say you want to know who shot you, what he looked like, what caste he was in, if he was short or tall, what motivated him, what the arrow was made of, if it was feathered with vulture or hawk’s wings, and if it had a bamboo stalk.”
The Buddha then looked at this student, and said, “The man would die before he knew all these answers, would he not?”
Malunkyaputta agreed.
The Buddha then said something like, “Whether you believe the world is eternal or not, or if you believe in a heaven or a hell, karma, an eternal afterlife, so what? There is still birth, old age, death, and suffering. These things, these poisons, can be destroyed in this life. I have not explained these other things because they are not useful; they are not conducive to Awakening. What I have explained is suffering, the cause of suffering, the destruction of suffering, and the path that leads to the destruction of suffering. This is useful.”
Malunkyaputta bowed and withdrew.
KA: It’s about this moment.
JP: [Nodding] That’s all there is. Why move away from what is? You’ll die before you find what you’re seeking. When people ask me about these things, heaven and hell and rebirth and karma, I simply say, “We have more important things to talk about.” The Buddha knew something we forget easily these days. The idea of heaven or reincarnation or karma or a spirit realm is wholly unnecessary. It can be a huge barrier to Awakening because ideas have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth of this moment. Too often, these are ideas the ego grasps hold of in order to attempt to avoid the truth of impermanence and the truth of selflessness. It wants to give itself meaning, an out where it can exist forever.
I call faith-based mysticism “magical thinking” and a high form of narcissism. I don’t mean to be rude, but I do mean to be honest. What happens much of the time in faith-based mysticism—“magical thinking”—is that someone projects a part of their ego into an imagined afterlife or spirit realm. They then have a special relationship with this subtle dream they have constructed with their own projected belief. [Pause.]
I should note I have no judgments about these beliefs—I support people wherever they are and in whatever they need to believe.
KA: Really? I’m tempted to call bullshit on that one, Jun Po!
JP: [Laughing] As a man, I have no judgment, absolutely. Now, if you’re asking me from a Zen perspective, then I have to give you the pointed end of the stick, understand? If you want to believe in those things and they serve you, then go for it. What does it matter to me? But if you come to me seeking deeper insight into the nature of yourself and the world, well, then I have to be honest with you, at least as far as I understand things.
Many in these postmodern times express a desire to fully Awaken. But they don’t realize that to do this they will have to surrender their ego contraction to see utterly through the construct of themselves. And that starts with setting down belief, and being with what is.
Knock knock—who’s there? No body. No body’s home.
When I underwent cancer treatment, I got to experience a taste of bodily death. Stage four throat cancer, and a sixty-four-year-old’s body, meant that they had to take me to death’s door to kill the cancer. They very near killed me. Physical death is painful, make no mistake about it. You fear it for good reason. But the empty, silent part of death—now that’s something I’m looking forward to.
KA: Seriously?
JP: I could use the rest. [Pause.] I just wish I was going to be around to enjoy it.
KA: [Laughing] Okay, so you believe that the ego does, in fact, die? Even with all the stories of spirits and spirit realms and even near-death experiences that seem to show some kind of experience happening after death?
JP: We have more important things to talk about, Kogen.
KA: Humor me.
JP: See? In the good old days I would just hit you with a stick and we’d move on.
KA: [Laughs.]
JP: That’s a joke, by the way. So look, the death of the physical brain is wholly beyond knowing by its very definition, so in a very real sense it doesn’t matter what happens after death. That’s why we have more important things to talk about.
Since all that is made must be unmade, in Zen we practice dying before we die. What we really need to do is stabilize the mind, to experience and then identify with the deeper consciousness out of which our egos arise, consciousness deeper than awareness. We’ve already discussed how you are not your thoughts, feelings, or sensations. You’re not your story. You’re the emptiness out of which that arises. When you realize this, when you see through the myth of your ego permanence—you will know once and for all that your ego, like all things, is impermanent. That’s the insight that’s missing—ghosts, heaven, hell, bardo realms, ancestor spirits, great-looking vampires [Smiling]—whatever—they are all just impermanent structures arising in this relative mind. Freedom, Baba, absolute freedom, is right here, right now. You don’t have to die to get it, you don’t have to journey on ayahuasca or peyote, don’t have to do DMT ritually; don’t even have to become a spiritual person at all. Understand?
KA: You’re saying that whether or not past lives are real, or whether or not there is reincarnation or spirits or Spirit misses the point: none of these concepts or beliefs will help us to Awaken in the here and now?
JP: In Zen, we say that ordinary mind is the way. That is exactly what we’re talking about here. Elaborate karmas, rebirths, magical powers, other realms of existence—they all exist in this mind. In your ordinary mind. Follow this to freedom. Belief isn’t part of the Buddhist view; we are agnostic. You can believe in a flying spaghetti monster for all I care—the solution to life’s questions are revealed to you in concentration/meditation, as you go deeper into your consciousness and firmly take your seat in your own understanding. Letting all of those concepts, beliefs, visions, and mental configurations go is the only way I’ve known this path to work.
KA: Giving up belief is easier said than done. It takes a strong ego to do what you’re suggesting—one strong enough to not rely on beliefs that can comfort it, and one that is willing to be pretty ruthless about what it’s experiencing.
An ego grows around the emptiness out of which the infant is born, out of which a self-identity arises. From emptiness, you are born; at death, you return to emptiness. Is that what you’re saying?
JP: Yes, except you don’t go anywhere [Laughing]. And in between birth and death there’s the most miraculous opportunity. Your ego can wake up to its own delusion. How profound! It—the ego—can choose to become less self-absorbed, and can become conscious of its own conditioning. And ultimately, it can take its seat in shunyata, emptiness, and be informed from this place. Not destroyed, but informed and reformed, reeducated. Awareness becomes aware, and the ego can come along for the ride, at least until that particular process—you, in other words—ceases to exist in death.
KA: I suppose at some point, this question must be asked. Now seems as good a time as any: Are you Awake?
JP: Who Awakens? Awakening Awakens. I’m Denis Kelly, an Irish-Catholic, Midwestern, scrappy kid stuck in an old man’s body, who enjoys ales, tango dancing with my beloved, and travel. But Denis Kelly is in touch with shunyata, and understands his absolute nature and his relative self. And because of this, emptiness is expressed through my personality. [Pauses, wiggling eyebrows.] For better or worse.
KA: It seems many people I know who enter a spiritual path begin to look at their egos with disdain, sometimes even contempt. They may go to battle with their ego, trying to subdue, get away from, or otherwise transcend the lowly, needy, petty, and often embarrassing small selves that they think are completely in their way.
Or maybe they’re just tired of the show; the endless voices, feelings, self-judgments, desires, and conditioned responses. What they want is to get away from it all.
JP: That’s understandable and a good thing. The ego finally is in enough pain to start the journey.
KA: And they usually start by trying to overpower themselves.
JP: Understandable. And futile. We’ve covered this, I believe. We’re Enlightening our ego perspective, not overpowering it. We’re making room for what is, not trying to create a better story of us, a more pleasant and reasonable person who is easier to live with.
Liberation does not come when you conquer your ego, silence it, or through repression and denial get it to behave “properly.” Liberation comes when we release our attachment to the habitual conditioned nature and structure of our temporary egos. Like a slightly demented relative who means well, we can nod and smile when our ego offers its endless array of opinions, judgments, and knee-jerk reactions, but know that our ego is merely doing what it does best: valuate. More of that. Less of this. I don’t give a shit. Good for the ego. And thank goodness we’re more than just our egos! Awakening can Awaken, and we can change. Compassion is part of that Awakening, and when insight is deep enough, compassion is suddenly louder than passion, aggression, or ignorance. And then our angst becomes our liberation. We’ll get more into that a little later.
For now, remember: we are only temporarily someone; seeing clearly through the myth of our being allows us to reincarnate at will. Do you get that? We don’t need to imagine reincarnation in some far-off bardo realm. You sit there, right now, with a poison arrow sticking out of your chest, and you want to know about heaven and hell. Tsk, tsk. We have more important things to talk about! The antidote to the poison is right here, Baba.
KA: Okay. So would it be more accurate to say, then, that you advise we face our egos?
JP: No. We nonjudgmentally witness it. This is not oppositional. You must not think facing your ego implies a kind of showdown—that is the ego facing the ego. Your sense of self is not permanent; it’s not really real, not solid, not unchanging. Your ego is full of personas, sub-personalities, formed in reaction to your physical, emotional, cultural, and mental conditioning. It is the 1,000-faced demon that you fear and run from in your life, projected onto the world. When we’re willing to sit in stillness, in concentration practice, and not turn away, we can watch these personas arise. We can see, for the first time, that all feeling is primarily information and that our reactions are conditioned.
Emotions like fear and caring trigger feelings, which trigger personas, which trigger stories, which trigger reactions, and all of that happens literally in less time than it takes to blink. Meditation slows this process down, so that we can watch as the ego comes into being, moment after moment, arising out of the pure emptiness.
We can then learn to see what information is in the feelings, and slowly Enlighten our ignorance. We can see the stories that gave us form and function, and then see through the stories. For the first time, we can respond with choice to life’s stimulations, instead of react.
So we don’t face the ego. We don’t confront it. We don’t silence it. We don’t deny it. We simply let it be, and watch it arise, without valuation—after all, valuation is just more ego! Eventually, with our new understanding and discernment, we retrain (not restrain!) the ego and transform it.
KA: Okay—so one last question. Someone is on the path. They’re meditating, going to retreats, getting real insight into the nature of things. And they become convinced they’re Awake; they may even start to rank other people’s level of “Awakeness.” This, I’m sad to say, is growing more common in some communities I’ve traveled in. Your thoughts?
JP: [Laughing] I personally do not rank students or others unless asked directly to do so. I notice how compassionate one is, that much is true. How do we measure Awakening? Behavior is the surest sign. Remember: Who Awakens?
KA: So what’s happening in the circumstances I’m describing?
JP: [Shrugging] Perhaps an egoic inflation founded in narcissism and a more manic, temporary understanding of emptiness. Sometimes our egos become identified with instead of informed by emptiness. [Pause] It’s important you get this: I can’t wake you up. I can’t help you. I can’t do much of anything, except share my insight. It’s up to you to do the hard work.
KA: That sounds like a lousy cult. You’re not going to give me what I need? [Laughing.]
JP: [Laughing] Zen is and has always been a lousy cult, it’s true. Cults operate under the idea that the leader possesses some special and unique insight that you too can get, if you do just do what they say and do it their way.
KA: You don’t possess a special insight?
JP: I have passed the insight tests of Rinzai Zen and am recognized as a dharma heir, for what that’s worth. I’ve seen through the constructs of my own ego and have rewritten my script, my angst has become my liberation. But what use is that to you?
I said it before: liberation comes when the ego is seen through, deconstructed, reinformed, and reconstructed to include the realization of its essential emptiness and deeper emotional nature. To do this, you must develop genuine insight, you must release your attachment to and change your understanding of the nature and structure of your temporary ego.
Only you can take your seat. It will not be given to you.
KA: Because you can’t give me anything?
JP: Even if I could wake you up right now, Kogen, I would not rob you of your journey. I can give you a clear teaching and something in Zen called transmission, the intersubjective sharing of consciousness. This can be felt, shunyata, when the sky of your mind reaches to touch the sky of mine, where we’re one.
This is the difference between a talk about dharma and the presentation of the state and understanding of dharma. But again, so what? What good is transmission of shunyata, emptiness, if it only sticks as long as you’re in the same room as a teacher? That’s like staying warm in the winter by having to go to someone else’s house. Not so good for you!
At the end of the day, whatever insight I may have is not relevant to you. You have to find and claim your own insight and path; have your own experience of shunyata and stabilize that to a steady samadhi. It’s only this that matters.
KA: That might be the worst sales pitch I’ve ever heard.
JP: I know, I know. Zen is inherently unmarketable; some wise-ass monk once said that Zen is selling water by the river. [Laughing] And I’ve got plenty of water for sale. In truth, all I can do is hold you accountable, if you’d like me to. But at the end of day, it comes down to ata dipa—you are this light, you are the Buddha!
Understand?