Enlightenment truly is closer to you than your own face, and your heart is as big and boundless as the heavens and cannot ever, ever be broken. But only you can choose this view.
—Jun Po Roshi
I entered university as a mechanical engineering student, and struggled through my first year of classes. My moment of clarity came when, after my third or fourth differential and integral calculus class, I realized that I had absolutely no idea what I had been taught that day. It was as if they were speaking a language I didn’t comprehend.
I walked over to the administration building, and changed my major to English literature on the spot. As has been pointed out in this book, if one cannot clearly explain an experience they have had, it’s as if it never happened. While this is certainly the case for very complex things, like advanced calculus, medicine, or science, it is also the case when it comes to spiritual insight and integration.
Integrating and stabilizing an insight that one can’t put into words is an impossible task. This, perhaps more than anything, contributes to the frustration that can arise after someone has been practicing meditation or yoga or some other spiritual discipline for many years, but insight seems to fade right in the moments when it is most needed. We lack the language to precisely articulate what we have experienced, and so we cannot truly understand what has happened.
Anyone who has spent more than a few months on the spiritual path, especially in Buddhist circles, has heard that Awakening is right here, right now. We’ve heard that there’s nowhere to go, nothing to attain, nothing to be gained—or lost—by Awakening. It is, as Jun Po says, a non-experience experience, because Enlightenment is always already. How does one open to this reality and what does a student do when their connection with Clear Deep Heart/Mind fades, leaving only a confused ego in its wake? The memory of this other way of being lingers, but Awakening begins to seem like a distant island, fading slowly into the horizon. In a phrase, it seems over there, and we seem locked over here. So we strive, in vain, to move back toward something that never left us.
What a maddening paradox.
Koans seven through ten in Mondo Zen are designed to allow a student to go from insight to presentation of Clear Deep Heart/Mind. Jun Po created them based on the classic koans in Rinzai Zen, but also on our more modern and Western ideas of self and spirituality. What they are most designed to do is demystify Enlightenment, so that integrating and articulating our insights becomes much easier.
What, otherwise, is the point of all the practice and insight? Today Jun Po and I are sitting in a coffee shop in Boulder, a few days from the start of a retreat. It’s an unusually cloudy day outside, with a stiff wind blowing from the West. Jun Po wears jeans and a rather loud Hawaiian shirt, complete with a coffee-colored, short-brimmed beret.
KA: You have kind of a Hunter S. Thompson thing going on today, Jun Po.
JP: Well, we were of the same generation, although we had a pretty different approach to life. We had a similar start, I’d say.
KA: Insanity and drugs?
JP: [Laughing] Yeah. He used drugs and his amazing creative insanity to numb out and turn away, though, I would say.
KA: Thompson never struck me as a terribly compassionate guy, either.
JP: [Nodding] Yeah, he was a narcissist extraordinaire. So was I, but that damn compassion thing really turns your narcissism on its head. Especially when you see there’s only one mind, one God, one view, one consciousness. It makes narcissism a whole different beast with that insight. [Laughs.]
KA: I’m gonna let that one go. Are you ready to tackle the next four koans?
JP: Absolutely.
KA: Wonderful. The seventh koan in Mondo Zen. Care to give it to us?
JP: I’d be delighted. “Choose a name for Clear Deep Heart/Mind. Call to and respond to this Awareness using this name.”
KA: Now I’ve seen you do this, and it’s a little strange at first, I have to admit.
JP: It’s a little bit of theater, sure, but it gets to a serious underlying point.
KA: So what’s the idea here?
JP: Well, it’s simple. It’s not terribly difficult to sit on your meditation cushion and get real high, but then fall flat on your face when you try to bring your insight into a world that seems to be moving at light speed. Which leaves a lot of students with what seems like two choices: stay in the monastery forever, or give up on integrating insight into the flow of daily life.
KA: This koan changes that?
JP: Meditation never ends, Kogen, which means that an aware life is our meditation—
KA: An aware life? Not just life?
JP: [Shaking head] Not if it isn’t aware, no. It’s like when people tell me “life is my meditation.” Well, yeah, sometimes that can be the case, if you’re trained and know what you’re doing. And sometimes that can be just so much BS, self-delusion, and spiritual bypassing.
KA: Got it. So back to the koan: choose a name.
JP: Right. So I’ll ask a student to pick a name that, to them, signifies the depth of mind that was uncovered and expressed in koans one through six.
KA: What kind of name?
JP: I ask them to repeat one of the signifiers, the words, or a synonym for one of those words that they used in describing what we are like at this depth of mind, from koan five.
This acts as an injunction—
KA: By “injunction,” you mean as a place of active inquiry. A place where they can drop back into their insight.
JP: That’s right. A word that drops them into the vast, empty silence they just described to me; to drop into deep heart/mind, dhyana mind. A lot of people will pick one of the signifiers themselves, like “vast” or “empty” or “formless.” But sometimes they’ll give their experience a name, like “divine love,” a condition of compassion that arises when they experience the purity of their deeper mind.
KA: So you accept any name? How is this a koan?
JP: No, I don’t accept any name. The word or words must refer to their experience shunyata, or dhyana mind.
KA: Because sometimes they’ll use a word that can distort their insight?
JP: Sure.
KA: Can you give us an example?
JP: Well, a lot of time people will tell me how the insight makes them feel. So, if someone said, “happiness,” I would have to see if they were describing the joy of samadhi, which is divine bliss, or merely feeling good about things. If it’s the latter, I would ask them to drop deeper into their experience and pick a more accurate word.
KA: Then what?
JP: I simply call to them. “Hey, Divine Love! Are you here?”
JP: I’m realizing this is better done with someone than explained to them. But, okay, let me see. Over the thousands of times I’ve done this, I’ve gotten a whole ton of responses. A lot of times, I’ll see their egos will come back online. They’ll get that doe-in-the-headlights look. “Oh, shit, this bald Zen guy is asking me something!” [Laughs.]
So a little coaching will help and take them back through some of the earlier koans. I get them to reexperience and then claim the experience of Clear Deep Heart/Mind. Then I’ll call to them once more, “Hey, Divine Love! Hi there!”
KA: Got it. And as we discussed earlier, I once gave a finger snap as my answer, which you accepted. What is it that this koan is seeking to have answered, on a deeper level?
JP: A spontaneous expression of insight. You’ll see it in the eyes: a spark, a falling away, a depth of awareness, an utter lack of fear, a playful fire, and a leaning into the game. Or a statement, some speaking that comes from emptiness. The ego, which for most of us doesn’t want to play name-calling games with old geezers like me, relaxes. Spontaneous expression of their insight comes forth, and if they’re really in deep heart/mind, they’ll usually lean in, smile, maybe even crack a joke.
KA: Awakening has a sense of humor?
JP: [Laughing] Oh, my God, yes. If you’re not smiling, Baba, you’ve not only missing the joke, you’ve missed the point! Awakening always brings enjoyment, samadhi. The expression lighten up can really be seen to apply on multiple levels. [Pause.] But it can be fierce, too, powerful. Sometimes playful, sometimes wrathful, but always deep, always visceral, and always connected to the heart. It’s not big mind. It’s not clear heart. It’s big mind/heart, Clear Deep Heart/Mind.
KA: As someone who’s been on the receiving end of a blow from you, I can testify to the wrathful part of it.
JP: Well, I seldom hit people these days. Just the really stubborn ones. In the right circumstances touch can be a powerful tool for knocking, shocking the door open. But this must be very skillfully done, and in our soft and touchy-feely postmodern culture, the Rinzai game is a dangerous one.
KA: I hate to get off topic here, but it’s too good of a story. In Zen, there’s a sort of stick called a keisaku that is used to whack students if they’re dozing on their meditation cushions. The first thing you did when you became a roshi was to publicly break the keisaku in half. That’s quite a statement. What was that all about?
JP: Well, for one, I had a dad and a church that were both into corporal and wanton punishment. I’ve been on the receiving end of just how ineffective and traumatizing it can be to strike someone, especially when you’re striking someone supposedly in the name of love or God or truth or for “their own good.” So I have a sensitivity there to start off with. In my experience of Zen, I found that a lot of the time Zen priests were striking students with a keisaku, they were hitting out of their own psychological shadows.
KA: There was violence in the hit?
JP: That’s right. It wasn’t the wrathful but openhearted strike of what we might call the divine masculine, designed to serve someone through intensity. That has a particular feel to it; there’s no ego in it, only love and service, served up in an utterly uncompromising way.
With some of these classically trained priests, it was punishment for a student being “sloppy” and ruining the priest’s idea of what a “good” zendo looks like. It was messy, psychologically violent, part of an unhealthy power dynamic, and too often not what the situation called for, in my estimation. So yes, I broke the keisaku over my knee as a symbol: I would not tolerate violence of any kind in my sangha, in my community.
KA: But you brought it back. And you’ve struck people, including me.
JP: Yes. And yes. [Smiling] To your first point, it was a woman in my order—my beloved wife now—who asked me to bring the keisaku back, which surprised me because the keisaku seemed like such a masculine ploy. She saw correctly that something had been lost. But we do it differently now. The old way was a priest would basically walk up behind you and tap you in the back to prepare you. The force of the blows would shock the hell out of new student, and also serve as a warning to other sleepy meditators.
KA: And how is the keisaku used now?
JP: It’s in service only. Your back will sometimes just be killing you after five or six days of meditation—seventeen-hour days, sometimes ten or more hours of sitting meditation. A skillfully used keisaku can do wonders for the back. So a few days into retreat, either myself or someone else who is well-trained will walk slowly around the room. If your back is sore and knotted, you’ll put your hands together, and the person holding the keisaku will stop. You make eye contact. You both bow, and then the person sitting leans forward, and the keisaku is used to knock the muscle knots out of their back, not to punish them, or you. It feels divine, believe me. And then you look into their eyes, bow again when you’re done. I tell the students that if they see any psychological shadow or any hint of aggression in the person holding the keisaku, to simply wave them on. And then let me know.
KA: So it’s voluntary?
JP: Absolutely.
KA: Since you don’t use the keisaku in the classic way, what do you do with sleepy students?
JP: We work with them. See what’s really doing on. Is it bad posture, is it they’re checking out emotionally, are they just exhausted? I’m not even vaguely interested in being Big Daddy in front of a group, brandishing a stick of discipline. I do demand a tight container, because a person who is allowing himself or herself to be distracted may be distracting others. It’s selfish. I have ways of keeping them Awake, trust me. But not with violence. And not without all of my heart.
KA: And when you do, on occasion, strike a student, what happens?
JP: Let’s use you as an example. I didn’t strike you. If I had, you would have felt my ego doing it. I had the shit beat out of me as a kid. The last thing my ego wants to do is to strike someone physically, I can tell you. But you were struck at a pivotal moment in your insight training, and in a lot of ways I merely watched my hand do it.
KA: My version of this is detailed in A Heart Blown Open, so I don’t want to repeat the story. But just to give some context to the readers, you and I had been sitting for about an hour. I was deeply in samadhi, and you asked me if anyone could make me angry. I thought about it, and then my insight collapsed as I began rambling on about my then-girlfriend, who “made me” very angry.
JP: And in the middle of your story, the leather-wrapped wooden mallet used to ring the bell struck you in the temple.
KA: That’s right. And for an instant, I was going to kill you where you sat.
JP: [Laughing] Oh, don’t I know it! Part of me wondered if I’d lost my mind, hitting a highly trained young kung fu master. [Pauses and raises an eyebrow.] But you needed your bell rung.
KA: Not quite a master, but certainly well-trained. And most definitely in need of having his bell rung.
JP: [Laughs.]
KA: But when we made eye contact, all I saw was love and devotion in your eyes—you literally had tears in them. I’ll never forget it.
JP: [Nods.]
KA: “Get this,” you said. “This is life and death, brother. Can anyone make you angry?” I saw that you couldn’t make me violent; that I had a literal, visceral choice to hit you back, or to open to the truth. It was one of the most powerful moments of my life.
JP: So I’d love to take full credit for that. But most of me was simply out of the way, you understand. In hindsight, I see that you’re an embodied guy with a complicated history and a strong ego and intellect. It’s possible that strike saved us a few years of mind-numbing emotional processing, intellectual bickering, and philosophical posturing. [Laughs.]
KA: Without a doubt. It had a hugely positive impact on me, probably because one of the reasons I had avoided Zen until I met you was I too had been raised with corporal, institutional punishment. I imagined that if some Zennie ever had the audacity to strike me as an adult, I’d shove that stick where the sun don’t shine. It turned out there was a much deeper lesson for me.
You struck from Clear Deep Heart/Mind. Far, far more often, I’ve seen you open a grandmother’s heart to someone when they’re struggling with the teaching, the very opposite of what you did with me.
JP: For 95 percent of people, compassion and understanding expressed in a more gentle way are more effective.
KA: But you’re still showing them Clear Deep Heart/Mind, yes?
JP: Of course.
KA: So in koan seven, when you ask someone to show you Clear Deep Heart/Mind, you’re calling from the very state of mind you want to respond back to you. Is that right?
JP: Yes. Two mirrors, one mind.
KA: What is it you’re trying to demonstrate with this koan, trying to get the student to understand?
JP: That pure awareness, shunyata, can be called forward by themselves whenever they want or need. You can call to your own Clear Deep Heart/Mind, you see, anytime it’s necessary. Any one of us can, once we’ve had the experience and have been properly trained.
KA: Being able to call to our Clear Deep Heart/Mind is one of the novel things that Mondo offers. To be actually able to do that helps me to undercut a lot of emotional energy and conditioned thinking. To slow things down and see where there are choice points in my life, instead of reactions.
JP: Exactly. Emptiness is vast, fearless, timeless, silent, boundless, eternal. Galaxies form in here. This is the depth of awareness at the core of us in this moment. A student will have touched into this themselves, and so we practice calling forth this depth of awareness that can remind them, later, when an emotional trigger comes up where they might be reacting negatively and out of ignorance.
KA: So, this is a really fascinating aspect of Mondo to me. With this koan, you’re essentially training the ego to be able to call forth Clear Deep Heart/Mind right in the thick of life, where it matters most. The ego is being used as a tool in the process of Awakening.
JP: Yes. And to remind them.
KA: Remind them of what?
JP: That they are, at their core, fearless, boundless, timeless, and limitless. This is critical when we get into the emotional koans. Because it’s easy to forget our true nature, you see. The seventh koan attempts to create a neurolinguistic pathway for a student to remember—
KA: Using language and taking them through it.
JP: Right. They get walked through the deepest part of their own mind and experience. Then, when we’re working in a difficult emotional point in their lives, I can interrupt them and call to “Divine Love,” or “Emptiness,” or even “Kogen.”
KA: Less hitting that way. [Laughs.]
JP: [Raises an eyebrow.]
KA: And then what?
JP: Well, then we have to practice it. So I’ll ask them to call to and respond from Clear Deep Heart/Mind, as much as is needed to get it.
The idea is that once you understand that, you can choose to come from your deepest, clearest experience. The boundary between your ego and your deeper nature is made a little less solid, you see. Ego deconstruction and reintegration with emptiness, dhyana mind, at the core of its lived awareness. So the first identification is with Clear Deep Heart/Mind, and then with my ego, instead of the other way around. Understand?
KA: You’re trying to create new conditioning, in essence?
JP: Bingo. See, the idea is that when I’m in touch with my true nature, I automatically see through the stories I’ve created about myself, the emotional triggers, the reactive patterns. I’m free. If I can call to my true depth of consciousness, out of which ego arises, I begin to break the cycle of reactive emotional conditioning that causes me to want to fight, flee, or freeze when I am confronted with an emotionally intense situation. And that’s pretty much all the time, isn’t it?
Eventually, we ask that they use their given name and call to and respond. For instance, Keith/Kogen, wouldn’t it be great if your given name called forth Clear Deep Heart/Mind?
KA: Got it. Okay, so this sets us up perfectly for the next koan. Personally, it was one that really rocked my boat. I hope it translates into book and audio, because while I think it’s something that most of us know, it’s a hell of a thing to have this realization come from inside of you, instead of from a teacher or book.
The eighth koan?
JP: “Does Clear Deep Heart/Mind come and go?”
KA: Okay, so anyone who’s read a book or two on spirituality knows the answer to this. It’s shocking for new practitioners, but even though I had heard a version of this koan a hundred times, when you first asked it of me, I felt the burn of the question. I mean, I knew the answer was no. I knew that vast, empty, eternal, boundless, timeless, fearless emptiness didn’t come and go. That it couldn’t come and go.
JP: You had known it philosophically. But not experientially.
KA: That’s right. And presented with that koan, “Does this come and go?” I realized what a horrible trick you had played on me.
JP: Not a trick, Baba. The truth. It’s very simple really: unless there is a clear, deep, empty mind, unless there is turiyatita or dhyana mind, there is no place for sensing, for ego, to take place. It’s not philosophy. It’s experience. But you have to be willing to have the experience.
KA: “No,” I remember telling you. “This doesn’t come and go.” And you leaned in and growled at me, “That’s your experience?” When I nodded, you followed up with, “Who comes and goes?” It was such a hard thing to admit! I really struggled, because I knew the implications of what I had to admit. “I come and go.” My ego awareness of this depth of mind comes and goes, which is a hell of a thing. And it was the only truth that fit what was going on inside my experience.
JP: [Nodding] That’s the beginning of a fundamental shift in our understanding. This is what all the masters through all the ages have been trying to tell us, over and over and over again.
What I’m saying isn’t new. Enlightenment is closer to you than your own face. How? Because when you experience this depth of awareness, not as a philosophical construct but as a felt reality, it’s obvious that Awakening Awakens, and that the ego only provides a lens, a window, for Awakening to see and speak. Ego is then what I like to call a figment of divine imagination—it’s transparent and obvious.
KA: That’s the view from emptiness. The view from ego is far less certain. I can imagine many people reading this are feeling a little lost, a little confused.
JP: An ego insists upon its view. An ego cannot Awaken. Only Awakening Awakens, which is why Trungpa Rinpoche said, “Enlightenment is the ego’s ultimate disappointment.” An ego is informed by emptiness, even transformed by emptiness, but the ego’s view is still relative, partial, finite, and limited. So long as the ego is informed by emptiness, it will see and accept its limitations and become an ally of deeper awareness.
KA: Someone once said the ego makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master.
JP: Well, is that true for you?
KA: More than I care to admit. This plays in nicely to the ninth koan.
JP: “How can you be certain that this Clear Deep Heart/Mind is real?”
KA: This sounds like a trick question.
JP: Only if you trick yourself. As I’ve said at least a dozen times in these interviews, I cannot give your seat to you. You must take it. I offer a student nothing except a mirror for them to see themselves. It is up to them if they wish to open their eyes and look.
KA: How did you come up with this koan?
JP: Part of the realization I had when I underwent chemotherapy and radiation in the mid-2000s was the importance of choice in the process of Awakening, and in the process of integrating Awakening with emotional freedom. Too often, I saw, people thought that Enlightenment was something that just happened to them or to others. It was like the lottery. We all can buy tickets, but only a handful are lucky enough to hit the big numbers. At the end of the day, we have to make a choice to live in this truth. We have to make the choice to Awaken, in this lifetime.
KA: Baker Roshi said, famously, that Enlightenment is an accident and meditation makes us accident-prone.
JP: It’s true that no one understands why some people Awaken easily, and some struggle. We have to be very careful here, though. If we’re sitting around waiting for the accident of Enlightenment, where is our will? Where is our choice? Enlightenment is right here, Baba, right now. It’s no accident. There are no accidents.
KA: Perhaps Baker Roshi was speaking to the paradox of pursuing Enlightenment from an egoic place?
JP: We’ve covered this already, if you recall. There’s nothing wrong with seeking mind, remember—it’s only neurotic seeking that’s the problem. Seeking mind will resolve itself on the path, without any effort on your part. Until that happens, it’s important to follow the energy. It’s important to take ownership, you see.
KA: Why? And of what?
JP: Because otherwise you’re in a prison of your own making. We have to watch out for highly sophisticated victim mentalities, where we passively sit around and wait for the day Awakening comes, like it did to so and so. Or you wait for your teacher to bestow their blessings on you so you can Awaken. [Shakes his head.]
Here’s a news flash: I never had a single, complete “Awakening experience.” I had lots of Awakening experiences over many years, and slowly and steadily adapted them into a continuous depth of awareness. That’s been my experience.
Investigate your teachers who you are so busy projecting perfection onto, I would say. I don’t know any that simply “woke up.” That’s the lottery view, the victim view, the “maybe one day it will magically happen to me” view. And I have news for you: it will never happen for you that way. This is always a process, always work, always a choice, until we finally understand and continually choose awareness.
So the question I ask my students in the ninth koan is a simple one: “Does Clear Deep Heart/Mind come and go?” No! Know a deeper truth than your relative mind! No to dualistic thinking! No! Know!
KA: I believe you.
JP: It doesn’t matter what I believe, Kogen. It only matters what you experience, not what you believe! [Pause.] That’s why this koan has a follow-up: Koan nine, part two is: “What is the first thing you must do to manifest this realization in your life?”
KA: You’re getting people to paint themselves into a corner.
JP: [Smiling] Well, I’m getting them to be honest. I am, hopefully, saving them years and years of sitting in frustration, the way I did, before this becomes painfully, unbearably obvious.
KA: Which is?
JP: You had the experience, and if you claim the understanding the experience has imparted there is no more pushing it away. That puts the ego into a room with no doors, you see.
KA: Because turning away from Awakening is, in fact, a choice?
JP: Yes. What is the first thing you must do to manifest this realization in your life? You must choose it. [Pause.]
KA: I get what you’re saying. I understand the metaphor in Zen of the gateless gate, where once we are in the realization of Awakened mind, there is no path, no realization, no insight, nothing to do, nothing to attain. It’s all right here. But holding onto this is tricky. It seems, to be honest, like an oversimplification to just say that I can choose to be Awakened, and that’s it. If that was the case, why would any serious practitioner not choose that?
JP: [Sighing and nodding] For most of us it takes a lot of work to stabilize this insight, but it does mean you understand what’s really going on. You’re no longer a victim in some kind of cosmic, karmic game of hide-and-seek. This is why I can’t give you your seat. You must choose it. I can help you in that process, but at the end of the day only you can allow Awakening to see its own true face.
Every Awakened teacher of the dharma has said this, in their own ways, throughout the ages. It’s nothing new I’m offering here; I’m just giving it a twenty-first-century twist. Right view, which we covered earlier, has to be updated for our times, for post-postmodern sensibilities and sophistications.
KA: Ready to give us the last koan of the insight and presentation koans? Koan ten?
JP: “What feelings arise when you experience this understanding?”
KA: Another trick question?
JP: [Laughing] Nope. It’s utterly straightforward. Without exception, everyone I’ve asked, who is experiencing samadhi, says the same thing.
JP: Good! They feel good! This isn’t a humdrum affair of stern Zennies being oppressed and rigid. This is divine laughter, this is getting the joke, this is the joy and bliss of samadhi, not from the ego but through the ego.
KA: So the implication is if this feels good, why are you not doing it?
JP: That’s right.
KA: It’s a lot, you realize, for people to take in. You teach a tremendous amount of self-direction and self-insight. You downplay the guru model. You ask people to take full responsibility for their emotions, which we’ll get to next, and for their level of spiritual insight. I hear what you’re saying, and of course I accept it since it has worked for me. But how does one walk this path? Someone who doesn’t have access to you, or to some other Awakened teacher?
JP: It takes willingness, a combination of will and surrender. A surrender of ego and a willful presentation of insight. I can tell you that a sense of well-being and joy arise spontaneously from this practice, and can eventually become permanent, so that you are never, ever separate from the divine ground of your own being. God/Buddha, Awakened mind, truly is closer to you than your own face, and your heart is as big and boundless as the heavens and cannot ever, ever be broken. But only you can choose this.
KA: Reminds me of the classically stated three prerequisites for Zen training. Great faith. Great doubt. And great persistence.
JP: [Nodding] I like to add one more, because I think it’s what makes all the difference on the path.
JP: Great passion. Because Awakening is not a casual affair.