In this episode, Nahelia Aguilar (MA’21) shares how she learned to listen to herself through her journey of growing up in Mexico, searching for spiritual guidance, and coming all the way to DRBU. She also shares about her passion for environment & waste management and what we can do to help build a better world. 

In this Q & A episode, Alex, Bishnu, Phoenix, and Blake join Sanju to ask the President of DRBU, Dr. Susan Rounds, various questions that highlight what it is that makes DRBU a unique educational institution. Dr. Rounds shares about her approach to leadership, her life experiences and hobbies. She also shares about her first encounter with Master Hsuan Hua and her life after that.

In this episode, Michael, Bishnu, Blake and Sehen join Sanju to ask Professor Doug Powers rapid-fire questions! Questions range from psychological and phenomenological to trivia, politics, sports and more! 

Transcript 

Doug: Can I sing a for you…Ah, I can get no satisfaction…though I’m driving here and I’m driving down, trying to make something go. Hey, baby, come back the same day. Hey, I can’t get no satisfaction. (Laughs)

[Bell]

Sanju: This is the fourth and a special episode of the DRBU Podcast. I’m Sanju and for this episode, we had rapid fire questions with Professor Doug powers. Mr. Powers is the professor we all love. He has unique ways of making wisdom fun and relevant. Find out more about Doug Powers and Drbu.edu. For this episode in the studio were Michael, Vishnu, Blake, Sehen and me. We hope you enjoyed the episode as much as we did!

Sanju: How would you introduce yourself in 30 seconds?

Doug: It’s really interesting that you guys want to hear anything from me because basically, I don’t do anything. There’s nothing I could really say of any use to you. But since you’ve invited me here, I can try to ruin your life in some kind of way… to wreck what you believe in a way that will make you really sad when you realize you’re full of it, you know, full of s***. So, ah, I’m a person that probably you should not listen to if you want to continue down the path of your current lifestyle and life experience and mythologies. 

[Bell]

Blake: How do I get free? 

Doug : Stop thinking, stop, emoting, don’t attach to anything. Don’t pay any attention to what’s arising and try to do nothing really well. Try to be totally unproductive and don’t worry about it and try to not do anything that anybody actually wants you to do. 

[Bell]

Sehen: What keeps you at DRBU? 

Doug: You guys! you guys are all these all these cool people here and it’s something to do you know otherwise you know you just slowly but surely drift away into some kind of empty space and disappear. So, hanging out with you guys. You’re not yet any empty space so I can hang out with your false thinking which is really fun.

[Bell]

Sanju : What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?

Doug: I usually take a quick shower, and then I sit and meditate for about an hour or so. And it kind of depends. Usually, I try to sit at least an hour. And then I empty out to start a new day and I try to start every day totally new and fresh as a completely new person. And then I just sort of like deal with it as it arises. And I try not to carry anything from one day to another in terms of like my identity or who I am or whatever… and that way I can stay always fresh and new young and kind of you know 17..

[Bell]

Blake: What makes you angry?

Doug:  I don’t think I get angry. I think I have a problem with injustice. And I have a problem with the total ridiculous absurd myths that everybody thinks is going on… like a free market … kind of like really hilarious myths that most people are ruining their lives by. I’m a little sad that they actually believe any of that s***. But you know, other than the sadness of that, I get a little upset when I see direct injustice, and then we’re not collectively moving towards something more just rather than continuing all these myths.

[Bell]

Sanju: Do you have a favorite movie, Doug? 

Doug: A favorite movie, ahh? I like old German movies like Herzog. I like Herzog and the old German movies in the 70s and some of the French movies in the 70s. Then his spectacular movies that are big screen type things that cinematography of them is really beautiful. And you know, I like great cinematography. So…

[Bell]

Michael: if you hadn’t met Master Hua, what would you be?

Doug: Dead…. about 30 years ago… drugs and sex.. [laughs] drugs and sex and rock and roll I’d be dead.

[Bell]

Michael: Who created God?

Doug:  You obviously did because you’re asking the question. Where else could it exist other than the person who asked the question? So, I don’t know why you did that just now but good luck on that.

[Bell]

Sehen: What do you think of Kanye West?

Doug:  A little bit ambiguous about that man. He seems to be trying to make a point in a kind of funny way… about trying to be counter everything. I don’t know if he’s being a joke. Or ironic or doubly ironic or what he’s trying to do, but it’s not going over very well. So, I think his day in the sun is limited.

[Bell]

Sanju: When was the last time you cried?

Doug: [Crying sound/laughs] Just now…you made me cry by thinking about it, I was just overcome with emotion. So, I’m very sensitive. I’m very romantic. My main music I listened to these days is Brazilian women, you know, singing very romantic Brazilian, you know, kind of samba I really like Samba right now. I mean I go to different things… I listened to Lana Del Ray…

Sehen: Alright, time out..

[Bell] 

Blake: Do you play any instruments? 

Doug: I’m completely useless in terms of music. I’m fairly good at listening to it. But as soon as I go to try to make it, nothing happens… you know, again I’m as unproductive at that as most things..

[Bell]

Sehen: If you could say one sentence and be silent for the rest of your life after that, what would you say?

Doug: [Silence]… I had a hell of a good time!! [Laughs] 

[Bell]

Sanju: How do you have so much energy?

Doug: Ah, a combination of things… I think the meditation is really important. I had you know quite a while ago I stopped drinking and taking so much drugs and doing some much sex and stuff… so you know when you lessen the outflows, and you have more energy. If you’re going to go out with all those outflows. I’m aware of things but at my own pace and I don’t do a lot of outflows. And yet I’m very aware and involved aesthetically in the society and culture and economics. The key is to not outflow so much in it, be aware of it don’t outflows. Then you have quite a bit of energy…I think you’d find you’d have a lot of energy.

[Bell]

Blake: Maybe on a related note, what is happiness? 

Doug: Happiness is not having to do anything that anybody wants you to do, and getting other people to do what you want to do.

[Bell]

Sehen: What is power?

Doug: Power and freedom are completely interrelated. You have as much power as your freedom. So, the first aspect of freedom and power is not neediness. The more needy you are the less power you have. The more expectations you have that connects you to the capital of the culture, the more powerless you’re at because then you have to play the game for that capital… so the more you can be completely contented within yourself, doing nothing, the more freedom and the more power you have.

[Bell]

Sanju: How would you describe Chan to someone knows nothing about Buddhism?

Doug: [It is] developing a sense of dis-interested observer of what’s going on and then being aware of that disinterested observer. So, it’s an awareness of an awareness. And it starts from a disinterested observer but then [it’s about] becoming an observant of the disinterested observer. 

[Bell]

Sehen:  What Bodhisattva do like the most? 

Doug: Well, I’ve been hanging out with Guan Yin quite a bit so I had to be pretty loyal to her and you know, we have a thing … Guan Yin and I… so I feel like you know to be true to your true Bodhisattva. You know, I mean, I’ve done 50 Guan Yin sessions and yeah, I think we have a pretty good thing, and I think Guan Yin actually looks after things pretty well has given me a pretty good run.

[Bell]

Sanju: What do you think is the most pressing issue in the world today? 

Doug: Well, I think that’s fairly obvious. Everybody has to just cut down about 50% on what they’re doing, consuming, and you know, so that everyone can breathe, and the earth can breathe…But the problem is it that would require the people with the most to give up the most. So, you’d have to have…the people who have the most give up 90% And then the lowest 50% have to basically give up nothing because they have nothing to give up. So, the most pressing problem is the top 30% of consumers have to give up 90% of their consumption.

[Bell]

Bishnu : If you had to destroy everything in the world, except one, what would it be?

Doug: You! [Laughs]… you’re asking the question and the only place that could come from is your actual experience as the only place…and that you’re probably a total narcissist. So, one thing that you wouldn’t want to destroy is you, right? Because then you wouldn’t know what’s going on anyway, right one way or another?

[Bell]

Bishnu: Can you sing the song for me?

Doug: Can I sing a for you?…Ah, I can get no satisfaction…though I’m driving here and I’m driving down, trying to make something go. Hey, baby, come back the same day. Hey, I can’t get no satisfaction. (Laughs)

Sanju: Very Buddhist!

[Bell]

Michael: What sports do you like and why? 

Doug: What I watch religiously is the Tour de France. I watch every day of it. But I love France and I would live in France if I wasn’t living here and so I need to see France in the back country and see guys riding bicycles at the same time. So, I’ve watched every day I mean, I tape, I don’t watch anything live, but I tape it and then watch it when I can. Soccer I like soccer. I was watching soccer you know 40 years ago, and I like the World Cup right now. It’s cool. 

[Bell]

Sehen: Tell us a joke!

Doug: Everything is a joke, so I can’t really you know… every, everything you say is a joke. So, it’s hard to come up with a joke that isn’t even doubly a joke. Because, actually every time basically we use language it’s a joke, right?

[Bell]

Michael:  Are you a cat person or dog person? 

Doug: Oh 100% cat. I’m a cat guy! I’ve had cats actually most of the time. Right now, I have two beautiful cats. The last cat died. I don’t quite know how it died but I found it and it was very sad.

Sanju: Why do you not like dogs? 

Doug: They’re needy…cats will take care of themselves, cats are perfect personality, they sleep all day. I mean, what can you do better than not be needy, and do your own thing and sleep all the time? I mean, I just watched the cat I try to follow them! If they’re sleeping 16 hours and I’m trying to do nothing and 16 hours. I’m just trying to find, you know, the life of a cat.

[Bell]

Sanju: Who’s your favorite philosopher?

Doug: Well, that’s really difficult. I mean, I think the person that was most affected by early was Heidegger’s ‘Being in Time’! Like at about 19 or 20 years, I mean, I read ‘Being in Time’ and I think I probably every time I re-read ‘Being a Time’ I realize I think exactly like that. So Western philosophy. I mean, there’s a lot of other philosophers that I like equally well, Foucault and many other philosophers I like as well. But as far as affecting my basic way of thinking I would have to probably say Heidegger’s ‘Being in Time’, yeah.

[Bell]

Blake: What is one useless talent that you have? 

Doug: I have so many, it will take us you know, hours. I mainly, as I say, I’ve mainly tried to do nothing. And then, I try to do nothing in a way that nobody can see I’m doing nothing. Because then the trick is to always look like you’re doing something when you’re not actually doing anything.

[Bell]

Bishnu: If you didn’t have to be here, where would you be?

Doug: I don’t have to be here. I think I have a pretty good right now balance of a different place pretty much every day. So, you know, like I’m in no place for longer than a couple of days. I don’t know what it would be like to be in one place for longer than a couple of days. I don’t know you guys I guess have experienced that. But I have to get all my stuff together every couple of days. Put it all together. Clean the bathrooms and the kitchens everywhere. And then go and then I have to do the whole thing again three more days that I clean all the bathrooms and kitchen and I take off and throw everything in the car.

[Bell]

Sehen: What’s your favorite word?

Doug: I can’t use the word here.

Sanju: What about the least favorite word?

Doug: The least favorite word? Work. [Laughs]

[Bell]

Michael: What would Buddhism in America look like in 100 years?

Doug: Everybody will be sitting for four hours a day in the fourth dhyāna every single day. You know, all guns are gone. You know, you know, lust is gone. You know everything is fair and equal on and equanimity. There’s justice and everyone sees everyone as equally you know, incredible & compassionate.

[Bell]

Michael: What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?

Doug: For the story I like Lear, probably, but also, I spent a lot of time with Hamlet. And… to be and not to be that is the question whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die – to sleep, no more; and by sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to: Okay, enough. [Laughs]

[Bell]

Sanju: Do you know how to cook?

Doug: I actually just found out the difference between a pan and a pot. I saw they had different shapes and what I can do is if something’s frozen if there’s like a frozen veggie thing in the freezer, I can get it out and I can put it in a pan rather than a pot.

Bishnu: How do you personally relate to the idea of death?

Doug: Bring it on! You know, I mean it will happen, you know, so I’m okay with it. I just hope, that it would be nice to just keel over… but, so if today right now we can do it and keel over, that’d be cool. I actually have nothing more to do. I don’t have anything I need to do. So, I’m completely content with existence at this moment. So, if I was to kick off right now, I’d be okay, completely okay. And there’s nothing left to do. Okay, so… but there is also… that’s only the personality and there will be the continuum, and it would have been probably better if I cultivated little bit more to bring some elements of what I learned here into the future, which I’m not sure that I have the capacity to do. I have to see you won’t know that until you’re there. Right, so!

[Bell]

Sanju: Have you met anyone who changed your life forever?

Doug: Yeah, one person! So, that was that master Hua guy! So, you know, I had a lot of good great professors and a lot of great people and so forth that I’ve been hanging out with, but that that [Master Hua] was the most different person that had the most greatest effect, probably on changing the direction of my sense of looking at something that was completely different than in the flow of the habituation of what I was kind of already moving in.

[Bell]

Sanju: Following up to that, do you have a favorite memory with Master Hua?

Doug: Well, I was just sitting in the Buddha Hall just now before I came here. And so, I remember bringing Master Hua up to look at the city before we bought it. And I was playing basketball in the Buddha Hall. You know, I had a basketball in the back of my car, So I was playing basketball. So he said – “Oh, this is going to be a Buddha Hall!” And I said , ‘Oh cool!’ So I kept shooting free throws. So, I remember a lot of memories on a very personal kind of basic level of being with him. I was actually trying to experience what he was experiencing as he actually saw what this was and it was going to manifest something here, when I was just like playing basketball, in the gym, you know? So, the gap between where I was coming from and where he was seeing what was going on was fairly large. But I was interested in trying to get a sense of that what I’m still experiencing from that experience, and I’ve only gotten 10% of it, and I’m still missing 90% of it. 

[Bell]

Bishnu: If you could only preserve one Sūtra, what would it be?

Doug: Well, of course, that varies from moment to moment on what you’re working on. I mean, obviously Shurangama is extremely helpful and useful. The underlying meaning is extremely helpful and useful as a sūtra. I like the Avatamsaka and other sūtras, but I think if I had to choose one that gets deep enough and quick enough and goes to the heart of the matter, probably the Shurangama, yeah. 

[Bell]

Blake: What’s your favorite place in CTTB? 

Doug: I do like the Buddha Hall. I spent a lot of time in that Buddha Hall, doing a lot of sessions and meditations and stuff. But I’m pretty much okay anywhere. I used to live up here when there was only three or four of us living here. I used to live in different rooms hidden away different places. Like over TM there was the corner where there had little room in the place where the screamers were before. There’s a lot of little nooks and crannies around here that you can find it are nice. What I really like is I like to try and find places that are really still and really quiet. You know?

[Bell]

 Blake: What’s your favorite color? 

Doug: Probably I like black, but it’s not really a color. So, I mean color, probably blue. A non-color, black, you know?

[Bell]

Bishnu: If there is anything you would do differently in your life, what would you want to do?

Doug: No. There’s nothing I would do differently. 

[Bell]

Sehen: If you could say one thing to the whole world right now, what would it be?

Doug: If you have any, you know, compassion for the future and anybody other than yourself, just cut down 10 or 20% of what you’re using and get a little more at peace with yourself in doing less. And do that out of compassion for a future generation and yourself. And also for hanging out in a world that you might enjoy hanging out with.

[Bell]

Blake: Would you have specific things you would say to the different generations in America [like] Boomers, Gen Z, millennials?

Doug: Yeah, I mean, boomers are an interesting group. But you guys are, you know, kind of, to some degree wasting your blessings because you have pretty good conditions, but what are you using them for? I’m not sure that you really understand how to use those conditions in a way you could actually cultivate with them. I feel that the next generation is working their butt off, and they thought they can do everything… they could have kids, have a house, have a job, have a career and everything and, how’s that going? Well, you’re getting a little worn out, and I feel for you, but I really appreciate your hard work, you know. Millennials, I think your time of having a lack of expectations and being able to be young forever is running out a little bit.

[Bell]

Sanju: What’s the coolest thing that you’ve ever done?

Doug: Well, the trouble with cool is that it’s constantly changing. So, to actually be cool, you always had to be in the context of the next cool which is always changing. So, it’s a hard thing to answer, Cool. I think in general, probably, the coolest thing, I haven’t done as much, but I used to do, is just head out into the world and kind of trip in the world, from country to country to country to country, and just kind of hang out in India or Srilanka, or just sort of feel my present existence constantly changing and hang out in a new environment all the time for like months at a time.

[Bell]

Blake: What’s the scariest thing you’ve done?

Doug: Well, one of the scariest things I remember… I was climbing out in Sierra by myself for two months to see what the wilderness was, and I was climbing up a mountain and I was laying up and I was kind of tired. So I sat down and I laid up against a rock with a backpack on and my legs up, you know, and I was laying there and I kind of was dozing and I looked up and there was a massive eight foot timber rattler, that it come up between my legs and that was flickering their tail, their tongue about two inches from my crotch. So, I was looking down at it and it was looking at me and we just looked at each other for a very long time.

[Bell]

Bishnu: When was the last time you killed an insect?

Doug: I probably hit a mosquito up there at the Buddha Root farm in the summertime because we were like masked with mosquitoes. If you’ve seen pictures, we had like the whole regalia on!  Has anyone seen the pictures of it up there? We were masked, and I probably hit one of those mosquitoes, for sure. Maybe by accident and maybe not by accident, I don’t know. [laughs]

[Bell]

Sanju: Do you believe in astrology?

Doug: It’s is structure of a kind of causality and it actually has validity in his own sense. I’m not interested in it in any personal way because so what? You know, the question is, in the present moment, what are you doing with the information and the concept you’re operating in? And how existentially you were in the present. In astrology, you could feed information into that. But I don’t really care that much about the structures of whatever analysis of causation are going on there.

[Bell]

Bishnu: How can you make someone understand about cultivation in 30 seconds?

Doug: How are things going?

Blake: [tries to clarify question] How do you…

Doug: No, no, I’m answering [laughs]– how are things going? Is everything going really well? Are you completely contented in every way? And in every moment? You’re totally, joyfully, happily contented. And if they say yes, I am! I say, hang in there and keep doing what you’re doing. Please don’t do anything else. Primary issue about bringing Buddhism to somebody is having a common description of reality that we can agree through first. And if we can kind of come to a common description of reality, then we can have a conversation. If we don’t, there’s reason for having a conversation because I’m not trying to talk to anybody into anything, I don’t care.

[Bell]

Blake: When was the last time you broke a precept?

Doug: I think I’ve spent a lot of time right at the edge of precepts. Like the farthest edge that you can actually get. Now I haven’t been there for a while, like I would say 10/15 years I have not been… but, when I was being a millennial, I think I was probably mostly at close to the edge and you’d have to debate which side of the edge I was at. 

[Bell]

Michael: What’s one advice you’d like to give someone who’s trying to figure their life out?

Doug: The most important thing you could possibly have is have a sense of humor about yourself. And you need to take yourself seriously as far as your eating is concerned. And living in some apartment and those kinds of things. And everything else you shouldn’t take very seriously because you’re just making it up and probably messing it up. So, then you just need a sense of humor. 

Sehen: What does having sex mean?

Doug: Well, it means having sex, you know, you don’t know what it is? So it starts as you look across the table and you go oh, that looks interesting. And then you, touch the hand and then you get a little closer. And then it lights up something and then there’s an energy and then people want to rub against, you know, it’s something that kind of emerges over time and to something. I know you guys, millennials, they see it as almost any kind of thing that has kind of sexual energy to it. But I realized that the definition of sex has changed over time, to go from something that was very identifiable, fairly beyond the pale of you guys have mostly been thinking about, and now what sex would be, which was a lot less full blown something.

[Bell]

Sanju: Have you ever fallen in love?

Doug:  Ahhh….fallen In love!  I don’t know that I’ve fallen in love or not. I think I’ve been in something like love, but I’m not sure what I have been in and what I think is like love is exactly the same as what other people might have [when they have] fallen in love with. Because this thing when people do fall in love in a way that they like, it takes them like, you know, weeks years to recover from whatever, I’m not sure about that. But I have done, I think I’ve been in a lot of what love is from a different vantage point. I do think, to think from a cultivating view, whatever you’re doing about it that you stay intact in your awareness in it and I think you’ll do a better job of what actually is love by being intact and not lost. And I think if you’re lost in something, there’s nobody there to love anybody from.

[Bell]

Sanju: Nahelia asked this question. How does it feel to be the only hippie in DRBU?

Doug: I don’t claim to be the only hippie I just claimed to be a very happy hippie in my days, you know? And I’m probably still like, you know, 50% hippie.

[Bell]

Sehen: Is there one thing that being happy hippie “a self-proclaimed happy-hippie” taught you?

Doug: Yeah. To make the criteria of everything you’re doing absolute freedom, as the only marker that you ultimately use. So, if you’re looking at karma, you know, it has to actually be not something that you’re creating a theory about, but it actually has to cause suffering, and or happiness as the result. Now, you may not be able to see it in the long term because you may not have wisdom, but the goal has to still be an actual contented, happy, euphoric, sort of energetic like, erotic sort of like constant existence, right? And to do anything other than that seems like a waste of time.

[Bell]

Blake: If you could roast each of us in 10 seconds each, what would you say?

Doug: I don’t know if I can roast you guys. I take who you are way too seriously to mess with. You know, I know you all think you’re just sort of like kind of getting started in something on something. But actually, you guys are pretty far along. And so, I really appreciate each of you guys in a way that, what I know of you so far is worth a lot. And I wouldn’t really feel like roasting you, you know. I kind of take you guys too profoundly to roast. In all of my ironic elements, I don’t think I ever, ever make that irony personal. It’s always a larger scale of irony and is never directed at belittling or like, whatever the person or the individual, you know.

[Bell]

Blake: Would you ever write a story, and if you did, what would it be about?

Doug: Yeah, I mean, it would be worth writing some if I had time. I just never have time because I’m always too busy with what the next moment of existence is. But if I had, if I was, you know, like stuck somewhere and I couldn’t do anything, and I would and I might actually do write something. And I would write about an actual novel that displayed the activities of people in their internal processes of observation and, and symbolic reference and erotic exchange at a level that was a lot deeper level of what was going on in their process of mentality in the process of it.

[Bell]

Sanju: Do you have any plans for winter break? What are you doing?

Doug: Yeah, I try to walk every day; I tried to go to the gym every day; I tried to get my six pack back. I tried to get a little buff. I tried to sit about two or three hours every day. So, the day is about taking a walk on your city for a few hours,  reading something new and different. I’ve got a bunch of things stacked up there to read, go to the gym workout every day, kind of hang out on the beach every day and do nothing. And so basically, I have pretty much nothing planned. But it’s a nothing that’s an actual nothing. I will have to go get a Christmas. I mean, there’s some things I’m going to have to do because you know that. But I can actually do those things these days pretty, you know, nonchalantly so I’m looking forward to all of that. I completely have ignored my body for all these years, and I’m still getting away with it. And I’m not sure you can do that for ever. So, I think maybe I need to like kind of take a little care and maybe do something. Because just driving around, hanging around you know, blah blah blah is you know, eating… I’m not a big eater but I still like you know, 

Sanju: potato chips?

Doug: Anything around potato or Potato chips and potatoes and fries, oh my god you know!

[Bell]

Sanju: Anything that you want to say to our listeners from DRBU?

Doug: You know, I just really, really hope that everyone gets an opportunity during the three or four or five weeks that you can use it to be totally outside of this trip. So, hopefully you can take the stuff you’ve been doing here that you haven’t had time and reflection and just hang out and do nothing really well. And just sort of reflect on your own internal process and see what’s happening. Have I made it? Do I see something a little clearer? Am I a little more at peace in some kind of way? What kind of new questions am I asking? Now if you guys go through a real opportunity of reflection. 

[Bell]

In this episode, Sanju talks with Luke about Buddhist path, and on the nature of reality. The conversation is completely spontaneous – it’s like one of the conversation we have at DRBU courtyard during lunch. Luke shares about discovery at DRBU, which he summarizes in a sentence as : Objective is not Objective. To find out, listen:

Transcript

This is the DRBU podcast, I’m Sanju.

In this podcast, we talk to students and faculty of Dharma Realm Buddhist university about topics such as human experiences, meaning, lifestyle, and philosophy. For this third episode I had a conversation with Luke. Luke is a graduate from the Master’s program at DRBU. He also holds a PhD in mathematics from Rice University. He is a passionate explorer of both the intellectual and the spiritual domain, and I’ve enjoyed and learned from every conversation I’ve had with him. So, happily, I share with you our recent conversation

Sanju: Luke (laughs), you give this name to yourself, right?

Luke: Yes, after Star Wars. Skywalker. My dad was a Star Wars fan, so ever since I was in elementary school, I got that film. And I wanted to do math since fifth grade.

Sanju: Yeah. Was there a time in your life during any period when you felt like you experienced some form of suffering that led you to a realization that maybe there’s something else that’s needed in life, something that gives life meaning beyond the mundane day-to-day?

Luke: From what I heard a lot of people went into practice like that. And I would say, no. My dad has always been Buddhist. Since I was very little, when I walked with him, he would tell me things like, walk with mindfulness. So he would say things like that, like, huh, dad? This is too hard. But a lot of seeds are planted at that time. Or before I ate meat, I needed to recite this mantra seven times. So I actually did that.

Sanju: Was there any time that you felt like you questioned your faith?

Luke: Oh, that was much later.

Sanju: When you came to college, or –

Luke: No, no, no, when I went to college, that was when I started. It was like a honeymoon period. Honeymoon, in the sense that the relationship with religious authority was like, very receptive. It’s like, oh, yeah, this makes sense, and let me do it. It’s like, take all of that in, almost without question. It sounds reasonable, so I was like, okay, yeah, let’s do it. That’s how a lot of people got into practice.

Sanju: You’ve done a PhD in mathematics. So much of mathematics is about logical structures. Was your logical mind ever like an obstacle in that faith?

Luke: No, not – no. I would say it was never really an obstacle for me. I don’t think the logical mind can be applied. In a lot of ways, what most people are trying to do, like they try to prove or disprove the existence of God. I was like, huh, no, don’t do that. That’s not what the logic movement is meant to do. So in those areas, I almost never used that mind, so it was not an obstacle. And later, when I began to question it was mostly about whether the systems that I was taught really worked. It’s not that it’s not logical, but whether it works. Because how I was always taught is like in the sutras, right – oh, why do we want to practice? Because we want to end suffering, and birth and death. But then, later, I just realized, wow, like, this didn’t really connect with me. I didn’t go into practice because I was suffering. That statement has always been hard for me, because I didn’t go to practice because I’m suffering and actually, I just couldn’t relate very well. Like why everything is suffering. And I feel oh, yeah, everything is pretty good. Yeah. Not everything. Of course, there are afflictions. Not to the point that yeah, you know, I feel like there’s so much suffering that I won’t be liberated. No, never got to that point.

Sanju: Why do you think this system works for you? In what sense does it work?

Luke: At some point, like, as I mentioned, I start asking questions. So it means it probably did not at that time, because it was primarily, you know, around the problem of suffering, right? But that problem I just had a hard time with it because I couldn’t relate to it too well. So that aspect has somehow been difficult. And later, actually, a Dharma friend of mine pointed out, she said, ‘Oh, you don’t have enough afflictions yet.’ So I was like, that’s it, yeah, she’s right. So how can I really practice now? I need to find another hermeneutic, another story, that really makes sense to me. Otherwise, how can I be motivated to practice?

Sanju: That’s powerful. In my own practice, I found like, when I’m suffering that actually pushed me to practice more and more, you know,

Luke: Yeah, they were too. When at the moment, when I had afflictions, those come in handy. But then apply those methods, and those afflictions are gone, and I’m happy again –

Sanju: Yeah! What do you do now?

Luke: I’m like, what do I do now.

Sanju: Do you feel bored?

Luke: There was another kind of a motivation that keeps me going. So ever since I started practicing I never gave up the daily practice, not for a day. It was mysterious for me, too. I didn’t know. Later I found out a lot of people were struggling to maintain their practice, and how come I just did it?  And, you know, it wasn’t – it wasn’t very obvious at that time, but later, at various moments it gave me insights on what am I attracted to in this practice.

Sanju: Is it curiosity?

Luke: Yes. Wonder, curiosity, interest. Yeah, it kept me going for most of my life. I was motivated by that actually, not by suffering. So, very lucky, very fortunate to be able to live like that so far.

Sanju: How do you describe the wonder you’ve experienced – what’s the wonder like?

Luke: I would say it’s the magical aspect that attracted me the most. Like, an example, right: Master Hua in his commentary talks about the moon. It says oh, actually on the moon they’re like celestial palaces and devas and arhats speaking Dharma and all these. I was like, how, this looks really interesting. Well, what about modern sciences? It says that the moon is a lifeless rock and there’s no atmosphere, no this and no that. I’m like oh, that’s not very interesting. Hmm. Now, I have a respect for both. I came from the scientific background as like, educated. I know how it works. But I also have a lot of faith in you know, like the Dharma, in Master Hua’s wisdom. So I was wondering Hmm, how do they – how do they really live together? How does it work? So in other situations like oh, when Master Hua was talking about different kinds of worlds and planets, revolving around each other, and he said, oh, you know, it’s due to the Bodhisattva vows and living being’s karma and bodhisattvas’s spiritual powers that keep these in place. It talks about these disks of wind that keeps different worlds in place. And what does science say? Oh, law of gravitation, Newton, and then you write down the equation, and that’s it. It’s like, uhh, where is all the magic in all that? I feel like there is a lot to be to be investigated in mystical descriptions.

Sanju: Interestingly, though, Newton himself wasn’t definitive about it. He opened up that space for thinking about it. It wasn’t like, now I’ve solved it, go do other things. There’s more like, there’s still the magic, the you know, it’s holding things, we don’t know why – 

Luke: But his contemporaries didn’t like it.

Sanju: Right, right.

Luke: Yeah. So it’s that kind of question that really kept me going, and really interested in the science that the bodhisattvas and Buddhas investigated. How do they do science? It’s different from how we do it. How do they do this? So that they are able to, you know, open up all that wisdom or that like compassion and all the other spiritual powers – like, magic. Like, how does that work? So I’m really curious about that one. I would say, that’s pretty much the kind of question that kept me motivated and exploring. Yeah. And that’s the kind of mindset that I came with.

Sanju: I want to know more about what precisely was the question again, and then what answers did you find here at DW?

Luke: You can say the motivating question is what is the science that the Buddhas and bodhisattvas investigate? How do they investigate it? How do I understand this and how do I talk to, say, scientists from our age. How do I really communicate this? Especially in the subjective realms. What happens when we meditate? Because, just looking at, you know, if you’re coming from the materialist viewpoint, you look at these people observing their breath, observing their sensations on the body. Like, what? It’s totally incomprehensible, why would you do these things? It’s, you know, you’re doing some exercise in a totally subjective realm. There is no – almost like not doing any objective investigation.

Sanju: So, by science, we’re referring to like, maybe scientific method, where we try to find something objective and measurable. We’re trying to quantify. Would you say that – how would you describe this science, first?

Luke: Yeah, what  you just said, it’s probably what a lot of people think of as science, but for me, it’s – I actually don’t know. It’s that curiosity about how things work. It’s like, what is really going on –

Sanju: Does it also involve to be able to explain to someone else how things work?

Luke: Yeah, yeah, I have to get an idea of how things work and be able to use it to achieve certain effects. So I would say these two aspects are what defines this, not the particular methodology.

Sanju: There are some methods that have been laid out by the Buddha, right, as if like he investigated into the nature of mind and body, and then he kind of laid out a certain path. Would you consider that scientific?

Luke: Of course you can extract the science out of that. This is actually what I was trying to do. But the objective of Buddha is different from what we just said, right? It’s to investigate what’s going on and come up with some application of that knowledge. His main focus is the problem of suffering. So I would say he is having a different goal in mind. All the scientific elements are in there, but you just need to somehow take all these elements, string them together in a different way, and tell a different story. So that it now looks different, but all the essential elements are still there, but now it will look different so that it sounds scientific and maybe it sounds more interesting to a person who is not so sensitive to the problem of suffering, or maybe who has a hard time connecting to it.

Sanju: I see. You’re tapping into that sense of wonder in the Buddhist practice. Just to review a little bit. You started your journey not through suffering, but with a sense of wonder. And you came to DRBU you with some questions – 

Luke: With the identity of a cultivator – a cultivator scientist?

Sanju: Right, right. And you also said that you’ve found some answers in DRBU. And –  I’m curious about that.

Luke:

Yeah, a one sentence summary of what the answer is: objective is not objective. But to unpack, it took me almost like three years. What does that mean? And how do you practice using that. And you know, this word objective reflects on what the kind of mindset that scientists have – [which] is to investigate what is objectively true. When they say objective, they usually mean independent of the mind, no matter what you think. So that’s usually the sense that they use the word ‘objective.’ But then I feel like in this space, there’s so much that can be done to to clarify that – what is objective and why is it not objective. I think the biggest kind of flaw that I see is that in the scientific circle, very few people seem to understand the importance of the scientist – the subject who is doing the science. To them, there is this realm of objective truth. You only have to be trained to be able to intellectualize and carry out experiments that discover this objective truth. And the researcher, the scientist, is out of the picture. Because that part is subjective. It’s out of the picture. What’s important is objective. And this is huge. I mean, this has caused huge, huge impact. Of course, a lot of discoveries have been made from this mindset, but I feel like they’re missing a critical element, the subjective. The scientists themselves – what is their role in the universe, right? I think the assumption – the unsaid assumption – is that they don’t matter. It’s like, consciousness is an accident; It doesn’t matter in the world of objective. You know, we’re so small, the human race only comes in such a short span of the universe and outside of it, the universe is so big, you know, it has nothing to do with consciousness. So I think coming from that background, and you can see oh, yeah, then the scientist is out of the picture. But I would say, that’s the biggest drawback.

Sanju: I still have the very stronghold in my mind of the scientific viewpoint. Most of the measurement works with this assumption that there is something objective.

Luke: Ah, yes.

Sanju: Just the fact that you and I can both agree that a certain thing is a certain kilogram, let’s say two kilograms, right. We both agree, we measure it and we both say that this is two kilograms. And this in some sense is arbitrary. One kilogram is just, we decided it together, saying like this much is going to be one kilogram, and this is twice of that, so this is two kilograms 

Luke: So far, you kind of came up with a definition for objective: it’s agreement. So, Okay. Something is objective as far as it can be agreed upon. So yeah, you see, this sense is different from independent of the mind. You see, there’s quite a big gap in between what you just said, and independent of the mind. And that part should not be ignored. Actually, there is a really tremendous, tremendous space to be investigated on where does this mutual agreement come from? But if you jump to the conclusion that it’s independent of the mind, you kill that space.

Sanju: So would you say that what we think is objective is more like a collective subjective, if that’s even a word? It’s like, it’s subjective, but since we all agree on –

Luke: Mmhm. Another dimension is consistency. Let’s say I see this – this microphone right here. I close my eyes, I don’t see it, right. So at this moment, it doesn’t mean anything to me. The next moment, I open my eyes, it’s still there. So in this sense, it kind of makes the mind tend to go into space that it exists independent of us. It’s objectively existing. But in making this conclusion, we have used our mind’s innate tendency for continuity. It exists at this moment, and exists at the next moment, your mind will automatically fill in this gap with a continuing existence. And that’s going to be, that’s something to observe. It’s like, okay, yeah, now we know what our mind is doing. So we can actually distance a little bit from that objectivity for now. And it’s going to be important for later. 

That’s one of the things I got from this curriculum. I’m not the first one to ask this question. The first one was actually David Hume, a philosopher that we read that really questioned this kind of thing. He saw the billiard ball hitting and then he saw it moving, and he just questioned, all you physicists say there is momentum in this ball, right? But how do you really know there is this momentum, that it’s able to carry and make things move, until you actually see it hit and then move? So he really brings up this question of, how do you put a kind of momentum in this thing, when you actually don’t actually directly see that momentum – or you can try to stop the ball, I guess. You will feel that push, right. So I guess at that moment, you can say there’s a momentum because you feel that push. But when you’re not pushing it, you’re not trying to stop it, you just see it move. But in your mind, you’re already putting some kind of momentum, you think there’s momentum in it.

Sanju: Right, something extra is being added, right.

Luke: So actually, he says, you know, you’re, you’re doing some things that I don’t know if I can really take. And this spirit is actually very, very important. At that time, I didn’t know, but later I just thought, wow, this is very important, and it really ties in with what we talk about in cultivation, it’s like, it’s very important in cultivation.

Sanju: So Hume is big and cause and effect – that there’s cause and there’s effect, and that cause and effect if we don’t really correlate. We think that they correlate because they seem really continuous. But he’s saying that they’re not continuous. They’re discrete, right? But in my mind, I see one cause, and I see that same effect follows that cause over and over, consistently. So if cause and effect don’t really relate to one another, there can always be a different effect of that same cause. But in my mind, I’m thinking that that causes that particular effect, because I see it consistently, right? That’s the point. What’s – what’s causing that consistency, even?

Luke: Yeah, it’s a good question. What is making it happen?

Sanju: You’re changing – moment to moment, you’re changing, and there’s this discreteness to your personhood. But why don’t you change and become completely different than another point. Why is there continuity, or seeming continuity?

Luke: There is a tendency in our mind to kind of fill in that gap by continuity. And it actually takes tremendous effort to suspend. It will take your whole cultivation to actually temporarily suspend that movement.

Sanju: Right. But again, the question of like, although you’re changing, and I’m also changing, but I’m changing within my own framework, and you’re changing within your own framework – and what makes my framework separate from your framework? That question is still unresolved for me. That’s when like, there seems to be certain laws that are keeping things in check, right?

Luke: I wouldn’t call them laws, you could just say there’s a pattern. It’s like, where does that consistency, kind of like, some kind of un-movingness to it, right? Even though, okay, yeah, the sutra says it’s changing. Okay, okay, but what about – something’s really consistent. Well what is causing that consistency? But a quick answer, yeah? But not that we have arrived yet. But you know, it’s a good one to keep asking. Because we’re very stubborn. It’s the language that’s going on, that we’re using every moment that makes it the way it is. 

One example of that is, let’s say, I put my glasses on the floor. And the next moment, I forgot, and I stepped on it. And I saw the whole process, just to see okay, my glasses are on the floor, and I’m stepping on my glasses. I need to have this to go around. So there’s a certain sense of importance already attributed to it, right? So when I’m looking at this glass, I’m no longer just looking at the glass. Because if I step on it, some reactions are going to happen. There’s some kind of anxiety for sure to be happening. Like, wow, I see this. Yeah. So it says, when you’re seeing something, you are never just seeing stuff. There’s so much interpretation in the background that’s going on moment to moment. And guess what, these interpretations are very stubborn. So this can go very deep, not only regarding things that are related to me or mine, but it’s a whole language that you’re always using, an infinite collection of languages that you’re repeating to yourself every moment about what you are, what the world is. And my quick answer to your question is it’s that language, the immutability and the stubbornness of that language is what makes it seem.

Sanju: So then we look at everything then through the lens of interpretation. Constants hold so much importance in terms of mathematics and physics. As long as you’re in this universe and you have a circle, then the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is always going to be this number.

Luke: I think of PI as something different, because that’s purely mathematical. It doesn’t need a world, a universe, for that. So that one, I will say, yeah, it’s a constant to me. But when you say Planck’s constant or the cosmological constant that Einstein came up with, I question the constancy of that one, because, you know, there’s a universe, there are a lot of phenomena. So I don’t know if that’s, that’s a real constant.

Sanju: I see. I see. So you’re separating the mathematical constant from the physical constant. If we are to accept this, consciousness comes first, and then the consciousness chooses the body and the material reality follows that. What kind of way of being follows from that?

Luke: Ah, freedom from the phenomenon. Freedom, Let’s say last week was above 110 degrees. What would that mean for people?

Sanju: Really hot. 

Luke: Right. Would that make it very unpleasant? Would that make them restless?

Sanju: Yeah.

Luke: So in that case, you can see there is a power to what’s called the objective, right? So in this case, the objective is the heat. It seems there’s not much we can do about this objective that it’s really hard. But then, like, does it have to have power over us or even is it – furthermore, is it even objective, and where does this objectivity come from? So I think Yogacara would be able to provide answers to these questions. So it was a perfect opportunity for that kind of cultivation. It’s actually: objective is not actually objective, as I always said.

Sanju: Interestingly, it was objective and subjective both, right? It was objective in the sense that we all looked at the temperature and said that it was this much, a certain degree. And we all agreed to that. And then subjectively though, some people were really affected by it. By that same temperature, and some people were not as much affected by it. So the experience of it was pretty subjective.

Luke: Yeah. But the thing is, it can change right? One time can get really restless. But then last week, a cultivation about at that point, is to look at where the subject is subjectively experiencing the objective intersect. They intersect at the point of contact, attention, feeling, and volition. These things, a conceptualization. So these are the things that we can make a lot of change right at. So then a practice is actually classical, you know, Goenka calls the observation of the sensations, so it was a lot of sensations to observe that point.

Sanju: This is S. N. Goenka from Vipassana, right?

Luke: Right, right. So you know, there is this material element called Fire. And then there’s this sensation, yeah? Fire, and then we observe the sensation instead of reacting. So then what happens? You know, if you’re used to it a little bit, then you can feel that the perception changes, right? It’s very unpleasant, you know, restless, and then it changes into uh, it’s okay, you know, I would still call it hot but it’s not that unpleasant anymore. If you can somehow pick up some kind of discipline, and not just react right away, but to observe. So in that sense, I will say your mind gets a little bit of freedom over the material and fire. So in that sense, you know, at that place, is where you change and obtain just that little bit of freedom over the material element, which seems to be overpowering you. But it’s only the beginning.

Sanju: Right, and in changing that response to this material realm, we’re not really seeing that the material realm doesn’t exist, we don’t go that extreme – 

Luke: We’re not there yet –

Sanju: And in fact, maybe it doesn’t matter whether the objective is the objective anymore.

Luke: For me, I would like to go further, so it would be an interesting question for me. So actually to see okay, is it possible that, you know, like by my mind, I think this thought, and then I change the weather of Ukiah. Like, okay, would this kind of power be possible? But I think it has to start from what we were just talking about, you know, observing that sensation  of heat, and just obtaining that little bit of freedom over the material element fire. So my hypothesis from the new science is that as you do more and more of that, you’re gonna gain more and more freedom from the influence first, but then you are going to gain mastery. Mastery over material elements is somehow you have some level of control, almost. So that’s my hypothesis.

Sanju: So again, the thing is, like, do you have control over your own experience of reality, or you have control over the reality of everything? – That if you think there’s a control over the reality of everything, then you’re also assuming that there’s a reality outside of your experience or reality right?

Luke: Oh my gosh, you’re asking all these perfect questions. How would I be able to talk about this with a person? I’m really glad I have you here. All these questions I have thought about before. So, let me try to summarize my thoughts on this. Let’s say, the gaining of wisdom, the gaining of that little bit of freedom – that changes the language structure of our mind a little bit concerning heat, concerning fire element. So originally there was a lot of language interpreting the fire element, as you know, very hot, very overwhelming, it’s very, you know, blah blah blah blah blah. And then just by observing that we’re clearing that out a little bit a little then first of all, our subjective experience seems to change. And then I would imagine, okay, but are we an island? The thing is, are we an island?

Sanju: Yeah, that’s a big question.

Luke: Yeah, it’s like our language structure, does it really connect to other people’s language structure? And I can’t see it directly. But the very fact that we’re agreeing a lot on the physical properties of the world would seem to say that there’s a lot in common at that level about what we think. The language structure – there’s a whole ocean of shared language. And we’re thrown into it. Actually, by being born on earth as a human, we are thrown into the collective unconscious ocean of languages. About what we are, what the world is, we’re thrown into it, and so we share it with everybody else. But it’s possible to kind of get out of it for a little bit? I believe by practice, yes. The Bible actually talks about this using a different kind of language. They say oh, you know, the Israelites were delivered by God out of their land of slavery. He parted the Red Sea so that they can pass through, right –  from the land of slavery. That means to me – what is the sea? The sea is the overpowering influence of language on the entire human race, let’s say. They are constantly interpreting, saying what the world is, you know, there’s a language there. They’re constantly saying what it is.

Sanju: And it’s not necessarily a language that’s always spoken, right?

Luke: Yeah, it’s like way before even lifestyle, it’s a universe-style –

Sanju: And I think that’s another conversation to have, what this interpretation really means.

Luke: Yeah, and that creates everything else. The moment you use those languages, boom, the world is created, your body is created, right. And everybody seems to share it to a certain extent, at least everybody on this earth, right? Because we share it so much, the experience we have about our natural environment seem to be agreed on, to a large extent. And so my hypothesis is, by gaining enough freedom of your mind, you are able to gain a little bit of that, you know, what God does to Moses, right, you’re parting the seas a little bit. So you’re able to kind of like, see what is outside of it. And if your mind gains even more and more skill in doing this, you can actually help others kind of temporarily gain this experience to see oh, what is outside of this sea. So you can actually do that. So that’s my hypothesis

Sanju: Does it mean that there’s something outside of the sea?

Luke: No, it’s something – it’s just that you stop using this language for a while. And then you see oh, what is possible. It’s like, freedom, from…

Sanju: It’s that wonder you were talking about, yeah…

Luke: It’s like freedom from material elements, in this case. Or it doesn’t have to be material. Or it doesn’t have to be material, it has cultural narrative, a lot of that too.

Sanju: Gender narrative, as well. A lot of these.

Luke: All that, all of that is going on. But since we’re talking about science, I’m using material phenomena. Because that one seems to be more stubborn than certain other narratives. The language is more strong. Objective to the extent that we are stubborn about our own language and the collective influence of everybody else, everybody else’s language that is speaking the same thing over and over again. And that seemed to permeate very quickly to everybody else’s mind so that our experience seemed to have a certain common aspect to it.

Sanju: To wrap this up, what we think is objective and we claim to be objective, as long as we’re within the human realm as human beings – what you call ‘objective reality’ is a human reality. 

Luke: You can part of the ocean a little bit for yourself.

Sanju: Right. But a lot of that parting happens with the practice, right?

Luke: Yeah, that’s why we’re focusing so much on practice, practice and stillness. You have no choice in standing against this ocean that is coming at you from all sides. I would say the overall objective right now of this new science is not to discover more objective laws, because in the sense that you call it objective, and you call it laws, then people put more belief in it. So that means it’s even solidifying this kind of reality. I would just say pattern. And our goal is to kind of gain more and more freedom from these patterns, both material phenomenon, and mental phenomenon.

Sanju: Right, the psychological.

Luke: Yeah, that the psychological mental phenomenon is what ending suffering is primarily about.

In this episode, Sanju talks with Catherine on relationship, gender questions, and life experiences. Catherine (now 79 years old) shares her experience of growing up through 1940s and onward.

Spotify Player

Soundcloud Player

Transcript

S: This is the DRBU podcast, and I’m Sanju. In this podcast we’ll be talking to students and faculties of Dharma Realm Buddhist University about topics concerning human experiences, meaning, lifestyle, and philosophical reflection. For the second episode, I talked with Catherine Shaw. Catherine is a graduate student currently doing Master’s in Buddhist studies here. She’s also one of the oldest students we have here. Catherine has had very interesting life experiences; she’s learned with her Tibetan master for several years, and her practice still informs her every-day. So here, I present my conversation with Catherine. 

It’s such an inspiration that you have come here to join us in this master’s program, because you have so much lived experience; what you bring to the table is not just like these ideas and knowledge, but also something deeper and richer. So, for someone who’s starting off – I’m 24, and you are 78 – the difference between our ages is 54. And that’s exactly as many years you were married – you know, wh at… what comes to mind when you think of all those years?

C: Well, we definitely supported each other over the years. Now I guess that goes back to the thing of what’s good about a long, stable relationship – and also back to, I’m remembering a friend who was the generation before me in her 70s speaking to me about it, and said that there’s a depth of passion that takes years to develop, and people who keep changing partners will never experience that. On the other hand, I’ve heard, you know, people who don’t keep changing partners don’t experience that variety, so—(laughs). But Larry and I definitely supported each other. I definitely felt that my life was enhanced by being with him and I think he would have felt the same way. Okay, so that’s it – and I think the next question is, you know, what do you do to stay together for that long, right? People often talk about how important it is to have a common interest. And that’s certainly true. And I think, probably he shared all my interests and I shared almost all of his. I think even more important than common interest, and this is for any relationship – not just spouses or lovers but also like good friends – is a similar approach to living. I think that’s the most important thing. If your approach to living is really different, it’s going to be hard to be together in any close, intimate, mental, physical whatever – emotional, spiritual relationships. I’ve met people who do manage, but I think it’s harder. So yeah, approach to living I think is the most important thing for people to be together.

S: You know, people talk a lot about how sometimes opposites attract, and then these ideas of like, what is really important: having the similar ground, or having these differences that are making them learn from each other – or is there some kind of balance that’s needed – and you said that it’s the approach to living. What does that consist of, from your actual experience? What were the approaches of living? Was it the values that you had? More precisely, like, what time did you guys wake up? Or how did you feel about the political events that were happening around, or… what was it?

C: Okay, well, definitely not what time to wake up; we woke up at very different times (laughs). But values yes, very much so. I remember some time when our older daughter was, oh, I don’t know, not quite a teenager. I was saying something about the 60s and we were both in our 20s at that time, and that was when our values were popular. And I was saying something about it and she said, (gasps) “Oh, you mean there was a time when there were a lot of people like you and dad?!” First I said “Yes.” And then I thought about it and I said, “No.” There never was such a time, but many people are like whatever it’s fashionable to be like. And for a brief period, it was fashionable to be like us. And I think the world did change a bit. I think that I think the sexes get along a lot better now than before, I really do. Yeah, I think that this goes again into how people can live together a long time. I think the past idea of the opposite sex as being some exotic, unknowable other greatly interferes with the ability for people to live together. And once that got over with, you know, many colleges now have coed dorms, and if you’ve brushed your teeth with somebody, they don’t seem all that exotic and unknowable! So I think that’s a big change, which has helped. 

S: You know, there’s this relationship of being human beings. And there is a gender thing that brings this sense of opposites and – that in the beginning, when you’re like really fascinated by this opposite gender, there’s a lot of, like you were saying, exoticness, and there’s a lot of fascination, and then I’m sure that slowly fades away. What I see is after that fades away, the relationship either breaks or it entersanother period. How do people have a smooth transition? Are you able to identify any sort of transition that happened in your relationship?

C: I don’t think there ever was such a change (laughs). I think we related to each other pretty much the same way for the whole time. Earlier, you said something that I didn’t address about the idea that opposites attract, which is often talked about, and those relationships are good for people who love drama, right? Because they lead to lots and lots of drama. And if you love drama, that’s the kind of relationship you want, for sure, because you’re going to have plenty! But if what you love is mutual fascination, doing things together, you know, mutual enjoyment together, that’s – that’s a very different type of fascination. And, of course, it really is important, if people are going to be lovers, that they be physically attractive to each other – and mentally attractive – and spiritually and emotionally attractive. You know, if you’re living with somebody, not even as a spouse or lover but in any kind of close situation – if you find some part of them unattractive, it’s gonna make for a very big difficulty. It really is – and that again has to do with approach to life.

S: One of the poets that I really admire, David Whyte, talks about how a long term relationship is built on mutual forgiveness. How much of that was part of your relationship? And what was the thing that held you guys together?

C: Well (laughs), some time in the early part of our marriage, we decided that we should get married again every seven years. Because there’s a thought that the body over time slowly renews itself in seven years, and by seven years it’s pretty much renewed. So we did. And it happened that some very close friends got married within a month of our first re-wedding. That was their first re-wedding. And – I’m not talking about renewing their vows; that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying a real wedding ceremony. And to me, a ceremony doesn’t just honor some change in life; it actually facilitates it. You know, when you get married, you’re not just honoring the fact you’re getting married; you are getting married. It’s causing you to be married. And so every seven years, we would be causing each other to get married again. And each time, we added another couple, and eventually there were seven couples. Actually the last one was after Larry was dead. It was 2019, and he died in 2017.

S: I think you said that you had a remarriage ceremony with yourself after your husband passed away. How was that like?

C: The other couples were still there. I mean, although we were the founders, we weren’t the only ones. And some of the other couples were very, very enthusiastic about it. And it has been commented that none of those marriages ended in divorce. They’ve all stuck to it the whole time (laughs).

S: So you guys founded this process of getting married every seven years, and it was done with seriousness. People were invited – everyone was invited, just like the first one. So – what was it like to get remarried for the first time when you had kids?

C: Yeah, that was interesting. Yeah, the first one, that was before kids and – a good ceremony. There’s a place near the water in San Francisco, a camp place that we were able to rent for the weekend and spend the night – spend a couple there and have a big ceremony in the time. And then we were still there again for the next re-wedding, when both of the original couples had kids in the meantime, and the mothers were nursing, and the kids were part of it. And then the third one, the kids were children, not babies. And so they were participants, which was really nice. We had something called the wheel of life (all this is our own invention, right) it was a decorated bicycle wheel with handles that you could spin, so part of the ceremony was spinning the wheel of life – and the two younger kids came out with the wheel of life and held it for us to spin it. 

S: That’s so wonderful. That’s so wonderful. 

C: And as they’ve grown older, the children have gotten more involved, you know, that they are doing more and more things in the ceremony.

S: So what was the ceremony like?

C: Okay, well, it’s true that we have self identified as Buddhists for most of our adult life; we’ve also dabbled in a whole bunch of other religions over the time, including Native Western religion. And that’s what the re-weddings have been modeled on. And I at one time was a pagan priestess for a few years, and I guess I came out of retirement to officiate at this last re-wedding, because that’s what the weddings have been modeled on, is the pagan circular magic. And that’s when I say that it’s not just to memorialize a change in life but actually to help cause it. That’s, you know, pagan religion, that’s what you do. When you’re in a circle, you’re, you’re doing magic, you’re causing something to happen. And in this case, it’s these people becoming married. So it’s a circle, and call down the four quarters, close the circle… a series of dances we do during the ceremony, and the first one is the meeting dance. We developed it a bit over the years, and so we developed a procession with music to come in and then everybody forms the circle, and they have little shrines at each of the four quarters and then a big shrine in the middle. So that’s the first dance, and then, I have a dear, dear friend who was a pagan scholar. And so he and I usually write the ceremony the night before. He and his wife finally decided, you know, we want to be participants! So they got somebody else to be the officiants after that. You know, all these different elements come from the native European religious tradition.

S: Reminds me of the Indian wedding ceremony where couples – they have to circle around the fire seven times. And the symbol is that they are gonna be together for seven lifetimes. Something about the circle seems to be very sacred and something that you see in different cultures. You said it’s not the circle to honor the marriage; it’s a circle to actually cause something new. That’s very fascinating.

C: Okay, I usually give a little talk at the beginning – even before I became the official – in which I say something to the effect that for the couples, this is a wedding, this is becoming married. But for everybody, this can be a time to let go of that part of your past that you don’t want to carry forward with you, and renew what you do, and also to enable whatever in your life you aren’t doing that you think you should. And so it’s a time of change. And it can be so for everybody in addition to these couples that are officially getting married today.

S: What comes to mind is the idea of rituals. And various cultures have different rituals to facilitate different transitions or to cause new things to happen. Whether it’s people getting married or you know, someone passes away in the family. I see that these rituals hold much more meaning than what I normally thought. But there’s also, you participate in that, and something happens to you when you participate in that.

C: Yeah, that’s the purpose of ritual, something happens to you. Many traditions – the Tantrists say, oh no, ritual is a way to change yourself; ritual is a way to enable the next step to awakening, and sometimes would say that during the course of the ritual, one in fact is awakened. That’s partly why you’re doing it; you are a Buddha. You know, once you’re done, you try to carry as much of the Buddha-ness as you can into the rest of your life.

S: Some rituals involve everyone in the community to be part of it, like the wedding ceremony. But then there could be some individual rituals, something that an individual can do, in order to bring more life and more harmony to the relationship. Even some rituals that couples can do together. Did you guys have something like that? 

C: Yes, of course! (laughs). Being in nature. I think that’s, you know, we both love, love nature. Yeah, being out in nature. Definitely. Definitely.

S: I know that, Larry, the first time I heard about him was that he invented the National Pi Day, March 14th. I know that he was a scientist, an artist, and he had a very passionate work life – and being together with him, how was it for you? Because there’s this idea that everyone actualizes themselves through their work. If we are to talk about from the gender perspective, right, and culturally we are told that men are supposed to be working towards that much more vigorously. But for women there’s always an alternative of being a mother, and transcending herself in that sense in the household. So how was it for you being with someone who was, like, doing all the great things out there and how – how does it feel being in a relationship like that?

C:That actually can be a bit problematic. Because, just physically, very often Larry wasn’t there when he would have been mighty handy at home. That, you know, that was a large thing, particularly when the kids were little. But he always supported whatever I was doing as well as me supporting whatever he was doing. I spent some years doing art, and he always loved my art. But yeah, his devotion to his work did occasionally interfere with our lives together. That’s, I think that’s – I’m probably not the only person in the world who’s ever said that (laughs). When I was working at the Exploratorium too, it was really nice. You know, we’d have lunch together every day. That was very nice. Yeah, there were times when that was a difficulty. Certainly, both of us took pride in what the other was doing. But, you know.

S: You guys were doing different things.

C: Yes, yes. And you know, there’s only so many hours in the day and only so much energy to put into stuff. And if one’s been away at work all day, one hopes to come home and relax. If one’s been working hard at home all day, one hopes when one’s partner gets there that partner will take over (laughs). Right? So those two things are, you can’t do both.

S: You grew up through a very interesting time period, which is from the 40s – 1943, you were born. And from 1943 passing all the way, half of the century. I know that you went to college, to Reed. And during those times I’m sure there weren’t many females going to college like that.  Do you feel that you were ever confined in what you wanted to do as an individual because of your gender?

C: I had the good fortune to be an only child, so the gender thing didn’t come up that much. You know, I was the child. And what there was to do, I did it. And I became very aware of that when we were moving from one place to another and spent a little time during the move at some sort of resort at a lake. And there was another family there that had a younger son and an older daughter. And watching that family, and seeing that the younger son could do stuff that the older daughter couldn’t, I thought, oh my word if I had a brother, that’s the position I would be in. And so I was very aware of that. I would have been… nine-ish at the time. Yeah. And I was certainly aware, all stories that I loved to read, the protagonist was always male. Always. If you had tried to get me to read stuff like Little Women, it was just boring! You know, why bother reading about those lives, they’re boring lives!

S: So much of what we want to read is also told to us by, you know, the culture, right – the culture dictates like this is interesting and sometimes this is boring. And we go with that sometimes. Now, Little Women has gained a whole different meaning for women now. Right, right, right. Maybe that’s why I got exposed to it. And I love it. 

C: You grew up in a time when women’s lives were not boring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In my time, just looking around, women’s lives seemed pretty darn boring to me. Now, my granddaughter, who is 12, loves reading fantasy novels. She will not read one with a male protagonist, period. She absolutely will not. And of course when I grew up there were none. I clearly remember, I was in my 20s at the time – the first book I read. It was science fiction, of course. And it was about this young lawyer who was trying to help some race of intelligent cats get their rights. And she was female. I devoured that book. Because it was the first book I’d come across with a female protagonist who was doing something that seemed to me worth doing. Yeah, yeah. I have a neighbor who’s a very brilliant lawyer. And she said when she was in law school, she was the only woman in her class. And sometimes, the professor wasn’t able to figure out who this person was with this strange name. That was so strange.

S: What about your college experience?

C: I think among the students I think it was roughly equal male and female. Among the teachers, I can only remember one woman. There probably were some others, but I can only remember one. What did she teach? – sociology. And she had beautiful blonde hair and wore lipstick, and we all thought she was really interesting (laughs). And then in the administration there was one woman; the Dean of Women – had to be female, right? And other than that, I do not remember – I know there were no other administrators that were women – and I don’t remember any other teachers. But classes were roughly equal, and we were treated pretty equally.

S: Especially in a culturally normative, like gender normative society, where gender roles are fixed and that’s so much still there – and I think in the US, it’s a little different.

C: In my lifetime, the change of the role of women is just amazing. But yeah, yeah, I mean you look at pictures of any gathering from the 1950s or I think even into the 60s, there’s no women – any important gathering – it’s all men.

S: How – how was it after Larry passed away? Normally, I just see you very energetic and very joyful – as if you’ve made peace with him not being here,  or with your past; you’ve lived a good life. How was the process of making that peace?

C: Well, I have to preface that question with the fact that the last four years of his life he had Alzheimer’s. It was a time, you know. And he literally was a bodhisattva, he really was. And those four years, he still had the innate urge to help people. And by the end, anything he did made the situation worse, not better. And that was really, really hard for him. That was really hard. I’m sure anybody who knows anything about dementia, you know, Alzheimer’s is the most common dementia, it’s not the only one. So when he died, everybody agreed it was a blessing. I think, including him. The last couple of weeks of his life, he got calmer. And I really think that was because in some deep level that was still functioning, he recognized the death was coming. And then it was time. Sometime later, I learned that one of the people from our temple went and chanted with him in those times, so that probably helped also. But over time, of course, I’ve come to be more and more remembering all the good times we had together, you know, 50 years of good times. And I would say that the grief gets greater rather than lesser over time.

S: You know, changing the topic a little bit. We recently had Valentine’s Day, and I’m curious what you think of having a lover, or have you ever considered that or what does it mean for you to have a lover?

C: Well, to me, a lover means someone that that will always be there for you, no matter what. No matter what, you know. It doesn’t mean somebody you can mistreat. No matter what does not include that. But someone that you want to treat as well as possible, and someone that wants to treat you as well as possible. And that of course is true of a good friend as well.

S: I know that in the upcoming months you’re planning on going to the National Pi Day, March 14. I want to hear – what is it really about? How did it start?

C: Larry started it just for the Exploratorium originally, because they needed something and that satisfied it very nicely. So they made a pu shrine, which was a little circle with as many digits of pi as easily went on it. And one of the things that was built in the old Exploratorium was a classroom which was a circular building. So in the middle of the circle, we installed the pi shrine. And on Pi Day, he would lead a procession with people – with sticks with the numerals of pi in order through a hundred or so – up to that circle and then circumambulate the pi shrine. And then at some point, our younger daughter was doing a report on Albert Einstein, and turns out he was born on Pi Day. 

S: Oh, really? 

C: Yes, March 14 is his birthday. Yes, yes. So once we learned that, then we’ve been singing happy birthday to Albert Einstein (laughs). And for the first few years, it was just the exploratorium staff that did it. And I think, actually it happened to come on a day when the museum was closed. If it came on a day it was open, and some visitors just happened – we’d invite them to join us. But then eventually marketing got hold of it (laughs). And it got publicized, and now, hundreds of people come. I remember one of the last shows – as each of the events got bigger, you know there’s a lecture before all about pi, and people do pi activities. One time, we walked out of the museum into where the people were lining up for the parade, a couple hundred people out in proper order. And Larry came out and he was greeted like a rock star. So a couple of years between when he died and when the museum had to close for COVID, I kind of took his place in the parade. He, I, at the head of the museum, and his partner there who had been very much in it, the three of us would lead the parade. And we found this wonderful band to put on costumes to lead the parade. It’s real – it’s so fun, because math is serious, and yet this is both serious and frivolous at the same time. So it’s really a fun thing. But next year, it comes on a Monday, and I’m seriously debating whether I should go down to be part of it or not.

S: What kind of advice would you give to your younger self – let’s say, your 24 years-old self, if you were to give advice to her now?

C: (laughs) Oh I’d just take myself less seriously. I think that would be my advice to just about anybody at any age. When I was 24, we were living just across the hill from the Hague. And this wonderful flat (I guess you’d call it, because there was another one upstairs) was huge – the whole front of the living room was a huge bowed window at the end of the street – we were number one Douglas, and the street ended at our garage and our Rose Garden (we were just renting of course, but it was still ours). And in the living room, there was a fireplace on each side with a little niche. And one of the things Larry loved to do was make light sculptures. So in each niche he installed concave mirrors and various other mirrors and they used to be these Christmas trees that shone different color lights shining into these mirrors. So the ceiling was covered with lights moving around in all different shapes and colors which were visible across the whole valley (laughs). One time somebody came and said “I saw light glowing on the top of your house, may I come in?” and we said “Oh sure.” So that was, you know, when I was 24 I was having a pretty good time. I think everybody – I think it’s part of human nature that we tend to think that we’re important, you know, and we are. But on the other hand, does that mean that every decision has to be made seriously, every action has to be considered seriously – I think fun is such an important… back to the term important, fun is important, right? (laughs) – important part of life. I think living life easily, enjoyably, I think also helps to make a person a better person. I really think people who are miserable all the time have a hard time being nice to others. You know, I don’t have any particular evidence other than just my personal observation, but it seems to me being happy makes it easier to be also good and nice and that sort of thing. I think it’s easier for happy people. So if you don’t take yourself too seriously, I think that, yeah. And maybe also that means that we give more credence, more importance to others if we aren’t, so much, you know – 

S: Stuck on ourselves?

C: Yeah.

Spotify Player

Soundcloud Player

Transcript

S: This is the DRBU podcast, and I’m Sanju. In this podcast, we’ll be talking to students and faculties from Dharma Realm Buddhist University about topics concerning human experiences, meaning, lifestyle, and philosophical reflection. For the first episode, I invited Justin Howe, who is a translation fellow for graduate certificate in Buddhist translation of DRBU’s International Institute for Translation of Buddhist Texts. Here’s the conversation I had with Justin Howe.

J: “the sky is in possession of
the cipher of life
on this earth (or
is itself &
in itself the
cipher of the earth.)
Where none may see me
solitary underneath the olive tree,
it sees. It sees. Though
you rise early in
the morning, ere the sun itself
is up, still
it sees. O, it sees. But
on the darkest moonless night, as
the weary songbird dreams,
then is it
listening: listening
in the soughing of the breeze.”

Well, Sanju, you wanted me to read this part. Actually, I gave you few of my poems and I told you to pick one and surprise me. And I’m glad I did that because this not the one I would have picked, which is why I asked you to pick one. So, that I wouldn’t have any thoughts prepared. So, you wanted me to read the middle part of the poem. Why?

S – Yeah, you also wanted me to read another poem by Holderlin. I was interested in getting into this idea of..uh.. some kind of mystery that surrounds us. And in this particular stanza, seems like you talk about ‘It’. It sees. Oh, it sees. And that really strikes me that there’s this kind of connection. connection with a mysterious force that you’re not willing to name but you are somehow in touch with that mysterious force. Umm, because in today’s podcast, I really wanted to discuss about what creative process meant for you. How do we understand what creativity is! And I feel like this is a starting point for that, which is to talk about this sense of mystery, and somehow being in touch with that sense of mystery through our creative works.

J – Sense of mystery, hmm… I can tell you kind of like how this poem came about. And then, you can decide if it’s mysterious or not, I guess.

S – Sure.

J – Lets see! I remember, I was with some friends…and I think we were outside a fast-food place or something. I don’t remember exactly what was going on. We went on a little shopping trip. And I think I was looking at the mountains and the sky cause Ukiah is in a valley, and it’s surrounded by mountains. I was looking at the mountain and the sky, and I just have this thought. A lot of poems come from some kind of thought that will usually be a line or a verse and I try to figure out what’s it doing. So, maybe that’s a sense of mystery. So, I thought that the sky is like some kind of reflection of the earth. Or maybe the earth is a reflection of sky. I’m not really sure.

But, I thought you could look up and understand everything that’s happening in the sky then you would understand everything that’s happening on the earth. Because the sky sees everything that’s happening, so it should hold all the information. So, when the poem says, “Where none may see me solitary underneath the olive tree, it sees. It sees.” The sky is there, the sky sees me. And okay, this is another thing that will help you understand how I make a poem, which is that this like, “Where none may see me solitary underneath the olive tree, it sees. It sees.” This is reference to a story about Jesus, which has always struck me very very deeply. It’s about a guy called Nikodemus. Nikodemus is told by a friend about Jesus. And Nikodemus is not doubtful but also not convinced. He just says Okay, He friend says, I really want you to meet this person Jesus, he’s really special. And Nikodemus says, Okay, I’ll see what that’s about. And the friend Jesus to meet Nikodemus. And the first thing the Jesus says is, ‘when you were standing under the olive tree this morning, I saw you.’ And Nikodemus falls down on his knees and says, ‘you’re the real deal. You’re it!’

S – That’s fascinating. Because I remember having several conversations with you before, and one of the conversations we had was about how a person comes to have faith in something. And we also discussed about the nature of this faith, and I thought about that a lot. That someone having this sense this person or this being understanding me more than I understand myself. And I’ve been thinking how can I relate to that idea, but I mean here, that sense of having some relationship with that unknown, I feel that there’s some relationship with the unknown because when you look at the sky, what do you see? Except the color blue and the clouds. It’s pretty.. there isn’t much to abstract from it.

J – I guess that would be the problem – to abstract from it. That’s the reason that we don’t really see it. If we really know how to look at it, instead of abstracting from it, we would just see what it contains. So, there’s a story in Chinese Chan at least that a bird leaves a track across the sky. It does. It lasts for something like 24 hours. And if have the eye to see it, you can see it. And if you don’t. then you can’t. But it’s not abstract. Now you can believe that or not. The point is that it’s not abstract. It’s exactly opposite. It’s as immediate as something can be. Everything that happens on the surface of the earth leaves an imprint in the sky. And if we knew how to look to see the imprint, then we would know everything that’s happening. And then this also true of looking inside. You don’t have to look outside. Actually, the only way really to look is to look inside. But the sky is just an image, I guess. At least for me, that’s what these things are. That doesn’t mean they are symbols, which I think is an important distinction.

S – How would you make that distinction?

J – The image is evocative. The symbol stands for something. The symbol represents something. The symbol is a substitute for something. But the image is not a substitute. It’s just itself. However, it sets up a chain reaction in the viewer. So, a well-chosen image will evoke a series of thought. But it’s not by substitution. It’s not because you have a thought that you’re trying to express and then you find the right substitute for the thought that will encapsulate it or something. That’s not how an image works!

S – There seems to be some closer interaction with an image right, then the symbol. You said that the symbol is pointing towards something else other than itself. But with an image, that’s all you have. There seems to be that nearness in that experience with an image than the symbol.

J – I think that’s right. First of all, the image has a very physical reality. And it’s the physical reality of the image that is meaningful. I mean that’s not the right way to put it. But, it’s by investigating the quality of the image in and of itself that one can create meaning or discover meaning, rather than trying to decode. Because the symbol is like decoding. Now I guess I was maybe a little bit cheeky in this poem because I actually used the word ‘Cipher.’

S – I was thinking about that, yes.

J – which is a cryptographic word. So, you could be tripped off by that. But I also think that the thought itself is a little bit. it’s not an entirely a sincere thought. It’s the kind of thought that somebody has who is trying to figure things out. You know like, I don’t necessarily subscribe to this view of things, but it’s a thought.

S – so, language always has this weird thing right, we use a certain word, and we never really know what that really means, truly. I remember you saying that you had a thought before you wrote this poem and you wanted to somehow delve into that thought. I’m sure the nature of that thought was different from the nature of this other thought that we’re talking about, which is more often abstracting ideas and meanings out of a symbol.

J – well, I guess for me, I am trying to talk about the way that I understand how something like a poem works. Because I view a poem as a kind of machine. This is an idea that I got from a couple of French thinkers called Deleuze and Guattari. And they talk about everything about being a machine. And I do think that a poem is a machine. And that if you put a certain stuff in, and turn the crank, then certain stuff comes out. Or if push the button then, it runs along its tract. Or whatever, you know, there’re lots of different kinds of machines. I’m just trying to talk about the way that I think these little machines called a poem work. At least for me, in the work that I make, it’s much more based on an image. So, the image that came to me…I mean these images…how do I say this? Generally, an image would come to me as both a picture and a set of words. Or sometimes the picture would come first. Or sometimes there will just be words. And that’s fine. The point is that by taking that seed, which in this case, was this idea or like line about sky being the cipher of life on the earth, or kind of containing all the information about life on this earth. Then what I do is I try to extend a line out from that starting out. You talked about delving into me. But for me, it’s not a matter of depth, so much it’s a matter of…I don’t wanna say that it’s a superficial process. But it simply involves interrogating a thing where it goes in a variety of directions. I published a piece in student machine about this where I talk about following the lines. So, this how I think about it. This is sort of another concept I got from Deleuze and Guattari, which is that to follow the lines means to… it’s kind of like thinking of the image as an animal. Like there’s some raccoons that come hang around outside DRBU at night.

S – Ha-ha, all the time.

J – Yeah, so we see that raccoon for couple of minutes at night whenever it’s poking around, it wants some food. That’s an understandable thing. But what if you were to follow that raccoon after it leaves. Or what if you could turn time around and follow it before it arrives. To me, this is what I’m trying to do. Once I have the seed, once I met the raccoon, then I wanna know where is it coming from and where is it going to. That’s not a process in depth. That’s a process of following a surface along its whatever curves it takes. So, it’s an investigative process. It’s the process of discovery. But I assume that the image has a life of its own, an integrity of its own and my job is simply to figure out what that is, not to dictate it.

S – How does one open up to the process of investigation?

J – Yeah, I think you have to, at least for me, I have to be active. But actually, I like to think of as listening. So, the key is listening. It’s kind of like what you’re doing right now, you know. You’re drawing me out, and you’re letting me tell my story, which is just what at least I’m trying to do. So, I have an image in my mind, sometimes series of images. And I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know what they’re about. And in order to understand them better, I have to engage in a process of listening or anamnesis basically, which is…that’s a technical term for what a doctor does when they’re doing history taking out of patient. But actually, what anamnesis means is unforgetting, which kind of goes back to Plato’s conception of truth. Plato says that we already know what is true and what is real, and we just forgot, and we have to un-forget. And for some reason our medical institution preserved this view of the world.

S – That’s beautiful.

J – I don’t know why. And so, that’s what I feel like I’m doing which is I’m doing history taking on the idea. I’m kind of asking it questions. And how do I do that? Well, the physical process of doing it is by just writing a lot, which is like if you saw my notebooks for this poem, you would probably see that I wrote the same like five or ten times in a row. And the reason that I have to do that is because for me, personally I have to physicalize the thing. I have to actually write it with my hand, with a pen and a piece of paper because if the words don’t move through my body, then I don’t know what they are. And so, I might write the same line five times in a row, because I’m trying, I’m trying really hard to listen to it and to figure out what will happen next. And then, maybe I’ll get couple more words or maybe I will have a sense of what the next phrase is. So, I write out a version and think oh, that’s not right. So, I have to start over. And so, the process is very laborious, for me at least, where I might write five or six lines in a row. And then I will go back and try the first one a couple times and I’ll feel like that’s good, so then I’ll try the next couple. But then, by figuring out what the next couple is, it actually disturbs the first two, so I have to go back and rework them. I don’t know, have you ever done any sewing with a sewing machine?

S – I have not.

J – Sewing with a sewing machine is a very delicate process because every time that you press the pedal, and the fabric moves a little it really wants to bunch up. Writing for me is a lot like this, where every time I put another word in, it causes all the other words to, like, move around. And it might turn that I thought that first two lines are perfect, but when I put in the third line they’re not anymore. So, I have to go back, and I have to figure out. So, everything has to work together in the end, and it just takes a while, but it’s pretty exciting.

intermission

J – I guess, I think of the image as working more like some kind of electrical signal where you put the two things alongside of each other – you put the lion as fighting the wild boar and Achilles fighting some young Trojan man who no doubt comes to tragedy. You put them alongside each other, and sparkle happens across the gap. Because of the qualities of both of those images and because of the space between them. If you put them too close or if you put them too far away, there won’t be a spark. And if the qualities of two images are not correct, then there won’t be a spark. Because you know, if you put two anode and a diode, but you don’t have the right condition, then there won’t be this kind of spark. But if you set it up right, if you select the right image, and you don’t always have to give the other half of the image. Okay, so…Homer is very explicit. He gives both halves of the images. But you don’t have to give both halves of the image. You actually, that’s the work of the reader in many cases, is to figure out, what is the other half of the image? What is the partner to this image that will make the spark happen? That’s the work of the reader to discover. What is the other half that will cause a spark? And the reader might actually have to try a lot to find what’s that perfect material that will cause the spark to happen. That’s a very exciting process!

S – That’s wonderful. That really brings me to talk about reading itself as a creative process. How does one engage with the creative work? What does that engagement look like that is more interactive and alive. We could talk about specific examples as well.

J – Sure, yeah. I guess it’s based on two things. It’s based on one, curiously. And two, a sense of trust. By which I mean that, when we approach a creative work, we have to trust that the artist in some sense knew what they were doing, and that they were doing it with purpose. By which I don’t mean that we’re trying to discover the author’s intent. Because that is that is a very mistaken idea. Although, you know, it has a place. Like, one of the things, that I think about when I’m reading is – what did the author think that they were doing?

S – Seems pretty natural to think like that, right?

J – Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you can’t not think that. But there are other things to think at the same time. Regardless, you have to trust that there’s a principle of organization within the work that can be discovered by asking it questions. And I really want to de-mystify… because I felt like some of the things you were saying earlier were sort of like mystifying the process of making art. And I have the sense in our culture generally that art is a very mysterious thing but it’s not mysterious. It’s actually a lot more like a magic trick. I always thought of theatre as being a magic trick, which is that there’s a lot of hard work that happens in advance. And then, not in all cases, but in most cases, it should be covered up when the audience sees it. So, it should look like magic, but of course everybody knows that a magic trick has come physical principle behind it. It’s actually not mystical at all. But part art is to disguise the elements of it, that are just a lot of hard work.

S – I wonder why that is so! That remind me of a movie I recently watched actually. So last night, we watched a movie by Kurosawa, a Japanese film maker. And it’s called dreams. It’s a series of dreams that he saw. And in one of them, he is in an art studio. He looks at the Van Gogh painting and he’s trying to understand it first. And he goes inside the painting. And he’s trying to find where Van Gogh actually is. He asks some people in the painting and they tell him that Van Gogh is across a bridge. And you have to cross the bridge to find him. He crosses the bridge, and he goes there. And Van Gogh is staring at a certain nature and he’s trying to paint. He goes and says, are you Van Gogh? Van Gogh says, yes. Then they have conversation about what painting means and everything, and he goes there will such curiosity and sense of mystery there’s there. But as Van Gogh is telling him about why he’s painting, he says that he’s painting because he cannot stop. It’s like a machine. And suddenly, the movie goes Van Gogh to showing us an actual machine. A huge machine that has different gears and that are working, and it’s unstoppable. Von Gogh thinks of himself as a machine that he cannot stop. So, that’s very fascinating to think about art as something that has working parts. Because I always had this, almost like a struggle every time I go an art museum and I’m trying to understand what art is. Always trying to feel that there’s some kind of mystery there…I don’t really get it. So, I wanna know more about..like.. why is there a disguise, which is there so much mystery behind that?

J – This is the part of the fun, I don’t know. Because at least until the twentieth century, most art was not really about the process. Now there’s a lot of stuff now that is about the process. So, that kind of changes the conversation a little bit. But even that is mysterious. None of it is mysterious. In the sense that, as you said, there are working parts. That’s definitely how I think of it. You know how I think of a poem as that it’s got a bunch of working parts. Those working parts can work in very different ways depending on who wrote it and what the poem is. Like, my friends Hasan reads a lot more poetry than I do. I don’t actually read poetry I just write it, which, you know, means that I write really bad poetry. For him, he doesn’t ever ever ever try to figure out what a poem means, neither do I. But we go about that different ways. For him, he just reads it and he kind of has like a sensory experience. To him, that’s a successful poetry reading. And that’s great. Like that’s, for him, that’s how the machine works. And that could well be that’s how the machine works for lot of writers. They’re just trying to make a machine for a kind of sensory experience and emotional experience. Or maybe not to put any words on that. But some kind of phenomenological experience. By reading the poem, something happens to me. And that’s it. That’s all I need. I don’t need anything more than that.

S – Right.

J – But, when I’m reading, I’m asking myself what is this thing doing? And how is it doing it? Those are the main two questions. Sometimes I might ask, why would someone want something that does that? Because that can be important information. For instance, a book I think about lot about is ‘Moby Dick’. To me, ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about I’m putting quotes around it, so – “it’s a book Herman Melville tries to process the world that is resulting from scientific investigation and from the destruction of universal Christian narrative. So, it’s a book about doubt. It’s a book about the Leviathan. The Leviathan in Job is an image of the fact that we can’t know what’s really going on. That God’s plan is mysterious. And that Melville is sensing that the scientific and technological advancements that were happening during his lifetime and before that have presented a new problem which is that you cannot even believe in God anymore. So, it’s a story about confronting this Leviathan, this Leviathan of uncertainty and doubt. Why did he want to write that? I guess because he was pretty disturbed and confused. That doesn’t mean that he was necessarily a Christian person who was upset by the loss of Christian values. I don’t know much about him. I doubt that that’s true, just based on the book. I think that he was trying to process something that was happening to the entire culture at the time. So, he was this kind of crucible in which this thought was taking place. This thought that in some sense, everyone must have been having at one level or another – unconsciously or not. And so, he himself in his own being was a sort of crucible for this thought to be happening. And the way this thought took place was through the writing of this book called Moby Dick.

S – I haven’t read the book. But that seems like the idea of demystifying art. It’s almost like I wanna describe art more like a skill, which can be learned. Would you agree with that?

J – Yeah, to some degree I would agree with that. I mean I think there’s something to be said happy what people call ‘inspiration’. I don’t know where it comes from and what it’s about and I’m not gonna speculate too much on it. I think there are people who are more open…you know, maybe you can..I don’t know..I have heard you talk about Jungian mass unconscious. So, maybe if you wanted to put it in Jungian terms, you could say there are people who are more open and sensitive to the mass unconscious. If you want to put it in Buddhist terms, you could say there are people who, because of their past causes and conditions, they have certain elements of their being that are open to receive that kind of information. Whatever, I don’t know what the story is. But it seems like, to me that, yes, there is kind of a difference in terms of people’s receptivity. So, if you wanted to be an artist and you are not very receptive, you probably not gonna do very well, which is fine. You know, that is fine. Then there’s an element which is more technical, basically anybody can learn if they commit time and energy to it. The problem is that the machine only works so well if it doesn’t have the fuel and the fuel is what I was just talking about. Like the fuel is that stuff. Because we’re talking about the inner organization of the work. The inner organization of a work comes from that very living process just like that organization of a living being comes from a living process. Your body was organized by this very very complex living process. And I think that happens within artwork too, through the artist. The artist is kind of giving birth to this thing. I mean that’s just really trite old image. But in my mind, that’s extremely accurate. The artist is actually giving birth. And of course, like when a person is pregnant with another person that’s a lot of that process that’s not conducted very consciously, you know. The responsibility of the pregnant person is just to take care pf themselves while that happens. To some degree, that’s true of the artist. Of course, there’s like little bit more of a physical activity in terms of like, okay. A painter has to stand in front of the canvas or stand above the canvas or whatever weird stuff they’re doing now, standing under the canvas and has to apply the paint one way or another. But they’re following the line of a kind of organization.

S – In my experience, at least the act of creation, like you said is like giving birth. Although giving birth seems to be very laborious. There’s a lot of…you have to push; you have to do a lot of work in that sense. In artwork there also seems to be some kind of spontaneity that’s in play there. There’s work – of course you have to put into it in a very structured way. But there’s that ability to relax and let it happen, seems to also be part of that. I’m thinking of a poem that I read by Rumi where he talks about birds. I can recite it if you like –
“Birds make great sky circles
Of their freedom,
How they learn it?
They fall, and falling-
They’re given wings.”
So that idea of falling, idea of letting it happen and not trying too hard. Cause in my experience, I’ve felt like sometimes I sit down with a piece of paper and I’m just trying too hard. That sense of holding on or trying to push that machine in a certain direction whether it actually wants to probably go in other direction. To have that sense of which two words will probably combine in a way that fits the essence of what I’m trying to get at – that original thought that came to me. So, there seems to me that there’s a delicate balance there between doing and not-doing.

J – I think that’s right, but the issue is that you have to apply a lot of effort. But you apply an effort in a different place than you relax. That’s the issue. You’re sitting down to write. You’re trying to apply an effort in a place you’re supposed to relax. You’re not applying the effort in a right place. That’s why I’m trying to de-mystify the issue, which is that you have to apply a lot of effort to the mechanical elements of the problem. But when it comes to the non-mechanical elements of the problems, you have to really be willing to just listen and let it tell you where to go. So, a lot of the way that I figure out where it’s trying to go is that I just try a whole bunch of things. I’ll just write over and over and over again. And then I look over them, and I say, this one has something about it that other ones don’t. And now I look at that and now I actually approach it as reader.

S – This is where the reading and writing go together.

J – And I read it as I ask myself – what is happening in this thing that makes it more alive? And how can I do more of that? So, I try to extract. Ah, okay it’s because of this and this and this about it, that’s what’s exciting. So, can I do more of that? Now I have little bit more information. I’m working very hard to..you could say ..it’s like composting thing. You have to compost a lot of bad attempts to get that one good one. And far as the birth metaphor goes, I don’t know, you know, my mom told me that my older brother took many many many hours to be born. And then with me, she showed up at the hospital and I just came flying out. She literally went to a party later that night. So, I don’t know, some births are easier than others, I guess. And I told you the story about Rilke writing the Duonologies the other day. He had this vision or something as a young man, I think he was maybe even a late teenager. And he wrote first two and half poems or something like this and then he completely couldn’t proceed. And then twenty years later after he was already a very well-established poet, quite famous. He was able to finish them, all in one go of few weeks or a month. So, what happened in that period of time? I don’t know. But he was completely unable to proceed, and something had to happen inside of him for a long time before those poems were able to be bodied forth. I don’t know that I would call a little bit mysterious. But in a sense, it’s not mysterious because even those processes have a kind of mechanical reality to them. It’s just that I don’t know what they about, that’s all.

S – That’s wonderful. Great, this has been so wonderful to talk to you. I definitely have some change in prospective about how to think about art. I guess we could wrap up by reciting your poetry that we started with. Perhaps, would you like to recite the whole thing for us please?

J – Sure, I would love to. So, this poem doesn’t have a title. Most of my poems don’t. And I’ll tell you the other context about it which I neglected earlier which was that I actually wrote this and included this in a paper on Heidegger. So, part of this was actually a way of processing Heidegger’s thought.

“And though we all suspect it,
don’t we?, how we shrink
from even the whisper!… &
dare not discuss it openly,
but only in seclusion — in
a rush, in that hush
of a drowsy afternoon,
stolen into nearness
in the close
of summer’s bower:
the sky is in possession of
the cipher of life
on this earth (or
is itself &
in itself the
cipher of the earth.)

Where none may see me
solitary underneath the olive tree,
it sees. It sees. Though
you rise early in
the morning, ere the sun itself
is up, still
it sees. O, it sees. But
on the darkest moonless night, as
the weary songbird dreams,
then is it
listening: listening
in the soughing of the breeze.
So we envy the alpine heights
their heights, and trample
on the clouds. All urgently
we strive to see
farther, unobstructed. We amble
off the mountainside to stroll
across the sky.
We laud the tender plants
their shoots, stretching
toward the sky; &
the arms they open
wide. And we
would be like
them, the plants,
who stand
naively tall.”