652 - The Rose of Paracelsus

Program Notes

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Guest speakers: Brother David Steindl-Rast, Leonard Pickard, and Mark Juhan

Brother David Steindl-RastCirca 2004Photo source: Wikipedia

Today’s podcast features a reading by Brother David Steindl-Rast of Chapter 2 from The Rose of Paracelsus, written by Leonard Pickard. Earlier podcasts in this series include:
Podcast 644 – “The Rose of Paracelsus” – Chapter 1
Podcast 609 – “The Rose Garden – Introduction”
Podcast 629 – “The Rose Garden” 002
TED Talk by Brother David Steindl-Rast

Download free copies of Lorenzo’s latest books

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, well, then you know that today’s

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podcast has been a long time coming.

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At last, we’re about to hear Brother David Stendhal Rast read the second chapter of The

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Rose of Paracelsus by Leonard Picard, followed by commentary from Mark Schoenemann, and comments

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by the producers of this program, Alexa and Kat Lakey,

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as well as some comments from Leonard Picard himself. This is a long program today, and so

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I’m going to keep my comments to a minimum. However, at the end of this podcast, I am adding

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a brief message about the current world situation as we struggle with a global pandemic, an economic catastrophe, environmental

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destruction, and widespread racism and police brutality here in the United States.

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If ever there was a time to listen to some calm voices, I think it’s probably now.

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So here are the Lakey Sisters who will introduce today’s podcast.

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Today’s podcast.

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Hello and welcome to the next installment of William Leonard Picard’s The Rose of Paracelsus on Secrets and Sacraments. My name is Alexa. And my name is Kat. This is the third episode

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of the series. So if you are unfamiliar with this podcast, we recommend going back to listen

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to our introductory episode, explaining Leonard Picard’s story, as well as chapter one of the book, titled Highlander, which is read from

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inside a maximum security prison by Leonard himself. This episode is unique in that this

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chapter will be read by the world-famous Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl Rost.

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Brother David is 93 years old and may seem like a bit of an outlier in the series,

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but you’ll hear a recording from Leonard in a bit explaining a strange coincidence which led

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him to be involved with this podcast. Brother David recorded chapter two from the Gut Eich

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Priory Monastery in Austria. He has, in the past, been a monk of Mount Xavier Benedictine Monastery

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in New York, dividing his time between hermetic contemplation, writing, and lecturing.

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He’s the co-founder of Gratefulness.org, supporting ANGL, a network for grateful living.

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He was one of the first Roman Catholics to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue.

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He’s the author of several books, including The Ground We Share,

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a text on Buddhist and Christian practice, Gratefulness, The Heart Prayer, and Deeper Than Words.

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He also has several viral TED Talks, which have been viewed millions of times.

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We’ll provide a link to these in the description of the episode.

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After the reading concludes, we’ll hear some commentary on the chapter by theologian Mark Yuhan, where he’ll discuss some

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of the underlying themes. But first, here’s a recording from Leonard himself, discussing how

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Brother David came to be part of this project. Dear friends, this is Leonard calling to say a few words about Brother David. As you can imagine, Brother David is 94, 6’6”.

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He often writes and speaks in a white cowl. He observes the Benedictine hermitage for

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about six months a year, that is, living in silence and peace with his studies and his

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prayers.

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I have an anecdote about Brother David that you might find of interest,

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of how this recording was made.

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Brother David was 19 when the Nazis invaded Austria. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, came to the United States,

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entered the Benedictines,

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and was instructed by the Vatican to investigate Buddhism in America,

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which he most successfully did.

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He was well-loved and well-received in the Christian and Buddhist communities throughout his life.

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Michael Pollan speaks of the 1994 conferences at Esalen and Big Sur as the origin of medicalization of psychedelics.

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But there was an earlier conference in 1993 in which the late criminologist Mark Kleinman was there,

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Mark Kleinman was there, a RAND researcher, Tom Schelling, studying thermonuclear warfare,

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Doblin of MAPS, David Presti from the University of California.

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Schelling, of course, was the future Nobel laureate in economics.

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A gathering of 14 to 15 people in a little cottage in Esalen in 93, was the beginning of the medicalization effort. And Brother David opened it with prayers. 27 years later, when we were looking for someone

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to read chapter 2, I thought of Brother David, who lived nearby in a hermitage outside of Carmel

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and was familiar with the Zen center described in chapter 2, and all the people that are

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spoken of in the chapter. But I had no way of reaching him. I thought of a friend in

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Switzerland who might know him and telephoned. Of course, Brother David does not have a telephone. He

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considers him the modern hair shirt. Amazingly, Brother David was in the car as my friend

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was driving from Salzburg to Lucerne to bring him to a Buddhist meditative sitting. And we had a very good talk and

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very affectionate talk. And even a laugh about prisons being like monasteries

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except the monks were much louder. Brother David then agreed to do the

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reading, most happily, and promptly left for Argentina, where he spent six months a year,

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and circled back through Italy, where he had an audience with the Pope,

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and then finally to Gut H. Priory in Salzburg, where he lives most of the time,

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and most lovingly did this recording.

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And now, here is Brother David reading Chapter 2, titled Beginner’s Mind.

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As always, we highly recommend listeners pick up a copy of The Rose of Paracelsus to follow along.

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Chapter 2, Beginner’s Mind Tanuguchi Buswan

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On the one-ton temple bell, a moon moth, folded in sleep, sits still.

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Bodhidharma

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A special transmission outside the scriptures, not depending on words or letters,

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directly pointing to the mind, seeing into one’s true nature. Yates, the winding stair.

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Yeats, The Winding Stair I’m looking for the face I had before the world was made.

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James, The Portrait of a Lady

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Le couvent n’est pas comme le monde, Monsieur.

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The convent is not the world, sir.

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Ginzburg, Howl Who vanished into nowhere then.

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Chapter 2 begins here.

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There is the scent of lilacs.

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I am facing a wall, seated on a cushion in a monk’s formal sitting robe, legs crossed and back straight.

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Across the darkened hall, an incense offering burns.

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I notice my breath as it flows in and out and focus upon it.

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Distractions appear in the form of thoughts and feelings, sounds and light,

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and physical sensations from the disciplined posture.

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These go away for a while, then reappear.

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These go away for a while, then reappear.

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I think of plants and people, feel anxiety and desire,

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hear the faint, muffled traffic, and see upon the wall a shaft of sunlight.

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Within this eternal circle of perceptions, I have fleeting moments of pure consciousness.

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The Dalai Lama has described this essence of mind as clear and all-knowing.

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We are practicing at Hoshinji Beginner’s Mind Temple in San Francisco,

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the oldest and largest training monastery in America in Soto Zen tradition.

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We practice arts from the lineage of Japanese Zen master Dogen from 1250 AD.

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from 1250 A.D.

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It is a place of ancient courtesies and unworldly kindnesses,

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each morning opening into the rose window of the East.

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As heirs of the final teachings of Hoshinji founderunryo Suzuki Roshi, we are the residents for months, years or a lifetime.

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We learn about simple but difficult mental practices, about graceful conduct, aesthetics and perfections of manner and, within all of those, the iron rail of discipline.

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After zazen, or meditation, we engage in calligraphy,

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hibana or flower arranging, chanoyu or tea ceremony,

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gardening, and service of the dying.

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As a path to enlightenment or big mind,

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some Soto monasteries also may practice the martial arts of Aikido,

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the non-injurious rendering of physical aggressions by their momentum to the floor,

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the soft, elegant litanies of Hoshin-ji are merciless as diamonds.

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Indistinguishable from one another,

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50 Zen priests, monks, nuns and students sit side by side facing the wall in the Zen door or meditation hall,

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a rectangular room in the 16th century style with a hand-polished wooden floor and elevated areas for sitting meditation.

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areas for sitting meditation. Sometimes our restless normal consciousness, affectionately labeled monkey mind, ce space between thoughts. It is completely silent and just

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before dawn. Outside, through the zendo walls of rebar and brick, we hear two young lesbian lovers frantically clutch and rip each other’s clothing,

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pressing against doorways, sobbing,

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their footsteps shuffling back and forth in attraction and repulsion,

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their coming down hot in jangles crashing from their long sleepless night.

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and jangles crashing from their long sleepless night.

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They yearn at loss and gain, the fear and surrender, the tantalizing promise of new couplings,

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their tender fruitless urgencies cry to unify the spirit through flesh.

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Their voices are without bodies.

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Don’t go. I hate you. I can’t be with you anymore. Please don’t go. I love you. I gave you all my coke.

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Convulsive tears, they run up and down the alley behind Hoshinji, passed among sittings in silence.

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Passion and calm are separated by an aged, implacable wall, embossed with wet lichen

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and lapped by the city’s mists. We hear the cycle of unsatiated cravings, the pleading and chasing and embraces and tearing away and of the world, becomes delirious imaginings,

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unchecked passion and the cruel severing of their hearts.

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Their anguish fades in the barely perceptible sounds of distant motors,

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opening doors, salsa music, the ignition of engines,

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children’s voices ready for school, drunks shouting execrations.

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Two junkies from nearby projects prowl trash cans

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and mutter like aimless lunatics already jonesing for the next fix.

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The background becomes subdued as we attend to the breath.

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It is quiet once again.

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There remain only the whistles of swifts as if from abbey walls

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and the smell of rain shining streets.

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No one moves, not a word is uttered.

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We sit in silence, awaiting the next manifestation of thought and feeling,

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sound and light, bodily sensations, before it is lost on the out-breath. A haiku by Zen poet Basho arises.

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Below the autumn tempest rages, while above the sky is motionless.

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A bell is struck softly. The sitting period is ended. We turn to our cushions, gather our flowing robes, and stand simultaneously, with eyes lowered, hands folded, one upon the other, as the bell rings again, we turn left together.

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From the sendo, a single file, we slowly walk away.

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I have entered this world by begging admission the same day as released from prison.

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Captive for a misunderstanding about laboratory equipment, one had been consigned to a hellhole of lethargic suffering.

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By this different confinement of monastic practice,

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of monastic practice, I seek healing and purification, a cloistering from endless brutality.

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For a thousand years, supplicants meditated by temple gates for weeks until their earnestness was recognized by passing monks.

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My years of isolated meditation in the midst of knives and blood may be apparent.

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Possessing only the second-hand clothes I wear, remnants from a cardboard box that day,

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I ask for refuge and am given shelter.

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The howling violence, the ferocity of oppression is gone now.

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My body is lean and tight from relentless exercise beneath rows of razor wires in nameless, lonely yards.

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Monasteries, some say, are places for desperate people.

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I begin to walk these halls, past perfectly placed lilies, minimalist art, sculptures and paintings where each of us bows in passing with hands pressed near the heart in prayer or gassho.

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Contemplative mindfulness reigns.

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Mindfulness reigns.

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Such frequent bowing, traditional among Japanese and highly cultured in Zen practice, is explained to Westerners as lowering the mast of the ego, so that others can be seen more clearly.

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seen more clearly. The slightest loudness, anger or vulgarity is seized upon and distinguished through examination and insight. With each step, I thank the good Lord that Buddhists do not recognize, or the spirit that is the mystery, or the essence of mind, for this

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blessing, this teaching.

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Late at night I sometimes wander alone in the empty silent halls, freedom’s shadow emptying and splashing,

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and see through the tall windows under a clear sky the high-riding moon.

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Yet the monastery is proving far more demanding than gun towers.

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I slowly am making progress in not being an unruly creature, unconscious of these graceful, steely arts.

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As we practice before first light, I am always returning to the pool of silence. A tall, gaunt priest one day announces in a dreamy, true voice a haiku to help us cultivate body, speech and mind. Rhinoceros, crashing through the underbrush, becomes white deer in the moonlight. that even for monks with 30 years of practice is a rigorous, even grueling, continuous meditation.

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It is broken only by highly formal meals, or yoki, and walking meditation, or king hin.

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or king-in.

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This stringent, scrupulously detailed practice involves such absolute attention

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that I become a prisoner again,

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not of the gross, but of the subtle.

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A few of the new students physically shake during meditation, as random or powerful images manifest.

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Others, relaxing deeply for the first time, re-depress old memories in silent tears.

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Some may flee rather than continue to look inside.

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The monks consider these first phenomena as distractions by an egoless, then eager to

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observe itself.

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Occurring not infrequently among beginners, they are called makyo. A single small window

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high upon the wall opens to the edge of a pale and bloodless late moon. Behind us, as we face the wall, is the long hours of Zazen.

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We hear the almost imperceptible passing bare feet,

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the rustle of a robe as a priest slowly circumambulates the zendo.

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A phantom, he carries a long wooden awakening stick, the kiyosaku.

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He stops to administer it upon the shoulders or backs of students who posture it flagging.

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My form is perfect, but not perfect enough. Curtuous monks unto death he bows,

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then he strikes me. At the startling impact, my spine elongates, the thrill of alertness heightening awareness,

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until the flames of bodily sensation are recognized.

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They pass away like the many worlds that come and go.

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After a moment, there is neither pain nor pleasure.

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moment, there is neither pain nor pleasure.

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At the end of morning satsang, before an identical afternoon and evening, a priest rings a bell for the ritual service of oryoki.

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We do not ramble to the dining room, but bow to the wall, turn together to our cushions, then produce our orioke set.

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Facing each other now, with eyes lowered, hands in prayer, we all bow again in a single hush of robes.

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Within a square white cloth, tied twice at the diagonals, are a white ceramic bowl, a wooden spoon, a pair of chopsticks,

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and three nested lacquered bowls.

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All are arranged within a certain perfection.

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Still in Zazen posture, legs crossed, we open the cloth and place each item upon it in the prescribed order.

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Chopsticks in the wrong direction or not parallel is a flaw in the Oriyoki practice,

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as is the small lacquered bowl passed to the left rather than to the right, or the cloth not tied properly.

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We are training not to be obsessive, but also to be mindful of small things.

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We each lay our orioke set as silently as possible,

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lay our orioke set as silently as possible,

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then wait until the last of the fifty persons is done.

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We all bow as one.

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The Ino, head of Zen do practice,

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crafts his two blocks of wood together to signal several servers in robes

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queued by the central doorway.

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Each server carries a single large bowl of rice,

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vegetables, tofu or sliced fruits,

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appears in a silent row.

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The food is the most pure and adequate.

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There is no feeling of renunciative philosophy or being lost in the desert,

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purging guilt or a diet of locusts and wild honey.

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The serving monks and nuns walk in single file, not to the nearest person,

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but circumambulate the entire zendo, passing everyone.

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Then arrive to stand before the first recipient who is holding her hands in prayer.

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Both bow to each other.

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She offers her large lacquered bowl, one of the three, by first raising it to the forehead as a bow with her hands full.

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The server with the rice then bows, steps forward, ladles out a portion of rice, steps back and bows. The second server then bows.

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The process continues until all of the first recipient’s bowls are filled.

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All bow again.

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The next person then is served.

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With this formal procedure continuing through all 50 people, the abbess is served last, even after beginner

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students. I realize that the unearthly din of confined men no longer is heard. It is replaced by the nuns’ murmurs of devotions, their soft countenances, in this antipode

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of Hades’ past.

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A formal orioke service may require a half hour or more.

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Not a word is spoken.

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No one moves other than to bow.

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The Eno, seeing everyone served, strikes a bell for the meal, prayer or gata.

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We chant in part in honor of those who grow and bring food.

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We should know how it comes to us.

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Desiring the natural order of mind,

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we should be free from greed, hate and delusion.

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The bell rings and we begin to eat our rice thoughtfully,

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drinking our miso soup and consume slowly the mixed fruits in the small lacquered bowl.

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We taste each flavor, feel each texture.

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feel each texture.

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I reflect on the almost 2,000 days in the madness of prison chow halls, the surely angry line shuffling to receive through a porthole in a cement wall

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plastic trays filled with industrial byproducts,

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the lowest quality processed food for penal institutions,

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and carelessly heated in vats.

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A Shigella outbreak hospitalizations, 80 inmates because a worker placed feces into the food. Meals

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are consumed hastily as guards shout threats. Kitchen workers steal as much as possible.

00:31:03 ►

Kitchen workers steal as much as possible.

00:31:09 ►

Tightly crowded tables are filled with murderers,

00:31:15 ►

addicts and dysfunctional and crazed, the clearly evil.

00:31:22 ►

Dark countenances strain the smile from any face.

00:31:31 ►

But all that is gone now, and I dare lift my eyes slightly for the briefest of moments to see these many people practicing this ancient art. I now am surrounded by children of light. Remembering to return to the breath

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and at this moment to a Ryoki service,

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I pick up the last grain of rice

00:31:56 ►

with chopsticks, for these portions

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are just enough to sustain practice.

00:32:05 ►

Each person wipes the bowls with a sliver of daikon,

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pickled radish, then eats the daikon.

00:32:18 ►

The eon, seeing everyone has finished, claps the blocks and then servers reappear with pitchers of hot water, repeating the bowing procedure one by one, with each person swirling the hot water in their bowls, drinking the water, then drying the bowl with the orioke cloth.

00:32:51 ►

Through the high small window,

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the buttery dawn of light is now a pastoral blue.

00:33:01 ►

A whipping rain has ceased. The thin rays of the sun touch the ceiling. The first of three daily orioke meals is finished.

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cloth tied in the formal manner, we as one place the orioke sets next to the wall and

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to the right of the zafus or sitting cushions. The times of cages, of beggared friendships and destroyed love are no more.

00:33:50 ►

A bell sounds to begin the all-day meditation in the first of seven silent days.

00:33:55 ►

We bow.

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This refined and gracious service,

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the simplest of meals,

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and all other ancient forms of Hoshinji are conducted with the same perfection and reverence.

00:34:14 ►

About this practice, performed as if each of us were a sacrament one can never forget.

00:34:23 ►

a sacrament one can never forget.

00:34:29 ►

Suddenly I see tattooed faces in prison yards, hear the screaming, feel the cruelty of feedlots,

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the black hole of a human abattoir.

00:34:40 ►

I awake to see only the nuns’ luminous faces.

00:34:46 ►

My internal voice comforts me.

00:34:49 ►

This is the right place.

00:34:54 ►

On the seventh and last day of Rohatsu session,

00:34:59 ►

in the pre-dawn quietude, the esteemed abbess of Hoshinji glides in her robe behind those meditating

00:35:10 ►

and, without a word, touches a monk or student on the shoulder.

00:35:18 ►

This is the summoning to Dohatsu, a private interview with the abbess, to discuss difficulties we may be having with

00:35:30 ►

the practice.

00:35:31 ►

At the touch of the abbess, I arise and follow her to the Dohatsu room, eyes lowered, I can

00:35:41 ►

see only the swaying hem of her robe.

00:35:46 ►

For thirty years she has taught the 13th century art of sewing traditional monks’ robes,

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the rakusu, or little robe, and the okesa, the fine priest’s robe. Each requires thousands of hand-sewn stitches

00:36:08 ►

in a manner defined for 700 years.

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With each stitch, the word Namukiebutsu,

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the name of Buddha, the first teacher of this way,

00:36:24 ►

are softly entombed. Walking three stories

00:36:30 ►

up the narrow hallway to the Doha’s room, she enters and closes the door. On either side of the door we settled for a while. I, with knees folded

00:36:51 ►

and sitting on my heels, in César, the Ortonyf pose to the leg-crossing posture of Zazen.

00:37:06 ►

After some moments, she strikes a bell lightly.

00:37:12 ►

I rise, enter, bow, and sit before her in Caesar.

00:37:16 ►

I bow to her three times.

00:37:19 ►

She returns the bows.

00:37:39 ►

She is in the gold, grey, and brown robes of a Roshi, a direct descendant in the lineage of the first teachers, shaved almost to the scalp.

00:37:46 ►

She sits erect, balanced, intelligent, compassionate.

00:37:52 ►

One feels as though one is being diagnosed by a master physician for the malady with no name.

00:38:12 ►

physician for the malady with no name. We sit in the silence of mutual regard. I try not to waver, for there is no place to hide. We talk for a while before the essential questions.

00:38:23 ►

before the essential questions.

00:38:28 ►

How long will you remain, she inquires.

00:38:35 ►

Until I am married or accepted to graduate work, I propose,

00:38:38 ►

balanced on the gate to a new world.

00:38:45 ►

Our practice is very rigorous, some say, very difficult.

00:38:49 ►

Will you be able to manage it?

00:38:54 ►

My cumbersome efforts in the Zen Do are clear to her. New students are obvious, restless, distracted.

00:39:00 ►

Confusion and irreverence are like a rock thrown into a pool of moonlight.

00:39:07 ►

I have come from a world of men where for five years every hour of the day was highly structured.

00:39:18 ►

Awakening, meals, working, sleeping, not unlike here, but less peaceful.

00:39:26 ►

I do not describe the white scar of memory,

00:39:31 ►

the iron parallelogram in which part of me remains forever.

00:39:38 ►

She does not inquire further.

00:39:41 ►

From her direction, I feel she knows. Your occupation, she asks. My research interests

00:39:53 ►

are in medicinal chemistry, I respond, avoiding memory’s spiritual precipice.

00:40:08 ►

spiritual precipice. I too was a chemist at the University of California at Berkeley before studying Zen. She explains that she is from Alabama as a girl and has four children.

00:40:18 ►

Her husband is with her in the practice. I also am from the deep south as a youth. She will encourage the tenzo,

00:40:29 ►

the head cook, to include biscuits now and then in the mornings. We smile.

00:40:39 ►

Why don’t we try it for a while, she says.

00:40:43 ►

Why don’t we try it for a while, she says.

00:40:48 ►

She gently rings the summoning bell.

00:40:50 ►

I bow.

00:40:53 ►

She returns the bow and I leave.

00:40:57 ►

Bowing a final time at the door,

00:41:02 ►

I close it in the way monks enter and leave rooms by turning the handle and seating the door soundlessly.

00:41:10 ►

Assigned to a lay monk’s bare cell, I must move from my comfortable visitor’s accommodations.

00:41:19 ►

From this moment, I truly enter the monastery for the first time, not as an observer, but as

00:41:28 ►

a member of the exquisitely rare community where every small action, sitting, standing,

00:41:38 ►

walking, sleeping, speaking, must be conducted with mindfulness.

00:41:43 ►

must be conducted with mindfulness.

00:41:48 ►

Before descending to my monk’s cell,

00:41:52 ►

I go to the roof of Hoshinji,

00:41:59 ►

where there is a small garden and an expansive view of San Francisco.

00:42:05 ►

The brilliant open western sky is blue and hard.

00:42:16 ►

The spire of the Carrion at the Berkeley campus pierces a low fog across the bay. bells are calling the academic faithful to their devotions, to another form of enlightenment.

00:42:31 ►

It is a tolling to which I too ultimately must yield, as is my heritage.

00:42:58 ►

But reborn in this cleansing practice of Hoshinji, I vow to remain until these precepts can be applied to scholarly effort to the promise of a new life.

00:43:09 ►

To the south lie Stanford and Silicon Valley, their bandwidth electrifying our planet.

00:43:17 ►

I bow to that direction in honor of the being we all are becoming.

00:43:28 ►

Yet, as a cloud passes before the sun, I notice to the northeast the Federal Building.

00:43:49 ►

There, technology is being turned inward upon us through fearsome surveillance methods and databases with millions of files instantly retrievable from monitoring subjects of interest.

00:44:08 ►

Against the shadow’s coldness, I pulled my sitting robe closely, anticipating that such careful scrutiny of the population is leading to Indra’s net,

00:44:16 ►

the Sufi concept of a universe of eyes looking at each other, but this time in judgment.

00:44:20 ►

Perhaps they still consider me as a target, one who inexplicably has gone to ground in a religious retreat.

00:44:47 ►

in the Cold War, Yale poet James Jesus Angleton,

00:44:53 ►

who was fond of the phrase, wildness of mirrors.

00:45:00 ►

Angleton used to describe the illusion of a straight line, the truth always twists and turns in any games involving mutual deceptions.

00:45:09 ►

Certainly my own file still exists among the many more worthy of attention.

00:45:19 ►

Established the same year the DEA was formed. It must be long inactive and paltry, its lack of weapons or violence.

00:45:35 ►

My robe is flowing in a light wind.

00:45:40 ►

The sophisticated machines nearby might fail against the skills of Hoshinji’s practice,

00:45:50 ►

far too subtle to be comprehended by different breeds.

00:45:57 ►

Turning into the monastery, I remember to let such distracting thoughts go now.

00:46:06 ►

With gratitude, I begin rigorous training,

00:46:12 ►

erasing the pain that came before.

00:46:15 ►

This clockwork of sustained meticulous effort

00:46:21 ►

measures every hour for the next 700 days. Perhaps forgetting now by the watches,

00:46:31 ►

I have become only a simple monk. At the end of the first year, I still have the same dream, running wildly, escaping from the suffocating to torturing

00:46:48 ►

cages, and pursued relentlessly across bleak and misty landscapes under a cold moon, saved

00:47:00 ►

by the kiss of a woman never seen. Within this nocturnal sea is heard the awakening bell,

00:47:09 ►

and the practice day of Hoshinji’s begins.

00:47:17 ►

The sound of the awakening bell is not the clear resonance

00:47:22 ►

of a small singing bowl on a silk pillow in the zendo.

00:47:29 ►

An alarming brisk clanging down the hallway seeming to hover near every door,

00:47:37 ►

it grows and recedes in magnitude from horizon to horizon like a slow steam locomotive.

00:47:49 ►

It is accompanied by the sound of running, for a rogue monk or nun is swinging a large bell on a wooden handle in broad vertical sweeps, moving through every hallway up and down the staircases

00:48:10 ►

before vanishing as abruptly as they appeared. I enter the physical realm, tensing hands and legs and stretching, then sit up slowly in the prescribed manner. I am again

00:48:29 ►

in my temporary suit of bone and hair and tissue. My body becomes an automaton, working

00:48:39 ►

through exercises learned in prison cells, so cramped one can hardly turn.

00:48:47 ►

The blood begins to rush.

00:48:50 ►

The confined use these routines to survive

00:48:55 ►

weeks or months of lockdown from gang violence,

00:49:00 ►

to sharpen one’s spirit against insurmountable odds.

00:49:08 ►

My heart is leaping, lungs gasping.

00:49:12 ►

With slow yoga, I recover becoming as a child again, then bow in gratitude.

00:49:22 ►

Then bow in gratitude.

00:49:33 ►

Out the window of this cloistered bare room is only the chill deadness of a winter’s night. No surveillance teams lurk on the pavement anymore.

00:49:40 ►

No unmarked vans with UHF antennae are down the street.

00:49:50 ►

There’s only a stark, cancelled sky.

00:49:55 ►

It is 4.30 a.m. precisely.

00:50:00 ►

Slipping on a grey kimono and wearing sandals of the tamimath,

00:50:06 ►

I enter a procession of monks, splash cold water on my face to elicit the alerting reflex,

00:50:18 ►

then return to don a long black sitting robe with full white sleeves.

00:50:27 ►

The tendrils of night visions become frail.

00:50:31 ►

We walk mindfully in single file, town flights of stairs,

00:50:39 ►

worn at the center through decades of practice towards the darkened Zendo.

00:50:50 ►

The awakening bell is replaced by a sharp, methodical, singular resounding rap.

00:50:59 ►

The repeated concussion of a wooden mallet,

00:51:04 ►

the repeated concussion of a wooden mallet,

00:51:11 ►

administered every two minutes by a robed monk with his back to us upon a suspended flat hardwood hand.

00:51:19 ►

Defeating any thought of sleep and acting as a timer

00:51:24 ►

before we all must be seated in the sandal,

00:51:28 ►

the startling sound of the horn echoes insistently throughout the building,

00:51:36 ►

quickly soothed by the silence of night.

00:51:41 ►

A black swan upon an obsidian lake, we flow in our swirling robes, hands folded,

00:51:52 ►

only sandal heels and edges of robes seen by our lowered eyes. We are silent apparitions.

00:52:20 ►

We are silent apparitions. There are no whispered salutations or any words of interaction, just the movement of robes, a silent peace train. The monks facing the Han stands immobile, awaiting the exact moment for the next strike.

00:52:35 ►

I lift my eyes to the inscription carved into the Han, a wide, thick hardwood flat, suspended from the ceiling by ropes.

00:52:52 ►

Its words are the first we see each day.

00:52:58 ►

Awake, awake, great is the matter of birth and death.

00:53:05 ►

All things are passing.

00:53:09 ►

Don’t waste this life.

00:53:13 ►

We each enter the darkened zendo on the left foot and bow.

00:53:21 ►

The Eno, head of practice, bows and instructs us where to sit.

00:53:31 ►

A single votive burns.

00:53:34 ►

Not gazing about, we stand by our tan, the elevated sitting area, all facing each other.

00:53:46 ►

Upon a bell sounding, we bow simultaneously, turn to the left,

00:53:54 ►

then sit in Sazen posture on our Saffu cushion to face the war.

00:54:01 ►

to face the war.

00:54:06 ►

The Han is struck faster once each minute

00:54:09 ►

for five minutes,

00:54:11 ►

then every 15 seconds,

00:54:13 ►

then every second,

00:54:15 ►

then as rapid as staccato

00:54:18 ►

as the monk can manage before stopping.

00:54:22 ►

Then, after a pause of five seconds, a final, very loud rap penetrates

00:54:30 ►

every crevice of Hoshinji. We all begin meditating. It is 5 a.m. The monk by the Han strikes a heavy wooden mallet on a massive 300-pound iron densho, bell,

00:54:49 ►

its surface covered with Japanese sutras.

00:54:56 ►

Each stroke produces inescapable, deep, sonorous vibrations felt at the cellular level. The monk strikes the bell three times, letting each ring completely subside, a pause before the next strike. The sound is of utter gravity.

00:55:23 ►

The sound is of utter gravity.

00:55:32 ►

It is rung once for the Buddha, the Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama, who first developed this mental practice.

00:55:38 ►

The second is for the Dharma, the teaching arising from the realization.

00:55:47 ►

The third is for the Sangha,

00:55:50 ►

the community of those who practice the way.

00:55:56 ►

The swirling swans have become black crows,

00:56:01 ►

side by side on a power line to the infinite, to big mind.

00:56:10 ►

With heightened wakefulness, they step back from the restless cortex

00:56:17 ►

and examine psychic contents with great attention.

00:56:24 ►

Past the wall, much of the city still slumbers.

00:56:30 ►

Our thoughts are like incense, rising, curling, and vanishing.

00:56:37 ►

Our limited human awareness awaits the miraculous impossibility of the day.

00:56:47 ►

Through the high and narrow window,

00:56:50 ►

and just below the edge of the world,

00:56:54 ►

dawn beginnings to illuminate the eastern sky.

00:57:14 ►

sky. Externally, meditation is quiescent, motionless. Within, transcendent rivers of mind merge and flow in the darkness. I am not so skilled, and on in-breath clusters of vivid images erupt.

00:57:29 ►

Memories of volunteering in emergency rooms,

00:57:35 ►

the trauma unit of San Francisco General Hospital,

00:57:41 ►

four dying 19-year-olds, double-dates, now screaming on gurneys.

00:57:50 ►

A vehicular mass casualty from the driver’s cocaine overdose and cardiac arrest.

00:58:07 ►

Only twenty minutes earlier they were speeding over the bay bridge,

00:58:14 ►

music blasting, laughing, drinking, snorting, lines rushing,

00:58:19 ►

horning, grouching the silky thighs,

00:58:24 ►

unconscious of the beast about to pluck them all.

00:58:33 ►

Two survive, shrieking to their voiceless friends, now quiet as death.

00:58:42 ►

Blood everywhere, the driver’s ribcage sliced open without anesthetic, pried apart with a steel rib spreader

00:58:48 ►

for hands-on direct massage.

00:58:52 ►

The most extreme remedy, life’s last chance.

00:58:59 ►

Every resident is there,

00:59:01 ►

crowded together with victims, nurse attendings, paramedics. A resident calls

00:59:11 ►

the death at 5.13 a.m., just as it is now. All walk stunned from the trauma room to their private confrontations with God

00:59:28 ►

before the next patient in a line that never ends.

00:59:35 ►

Left alone, I say a prayer for the young man

00:59:39 ►

holding his lukewarm hand while no one is looking.

00:59:45 ►

His eyes are open, grassy like a doll.

00:59:50 ►

I close them, remove the rib spreader,

00:59:55 ►

and glance at the exposed heart.

00:59:59 ►

Hanging and still, I slip a body bag over him.

01:00:04 ►

Hanging and still, I slip a body bag over him.

01:00:21 ►

The janitor, a very elderly black man, mops a floor, slick with carnage, squeezes out the mop, says nothing. A resident approaches.

01:00:26 ►

We seal the bag.

01:00:28 ►

The victim’s face disappearing.

01:00:32 ►

We push the gurney to the morgue.

01:00:35 ►

We talk a while to come down

01:00:39 ►

from seeing fresh spirits

01:00:44 ►

so suddenly devoured.

01:00:47 ►

We hover between the two worlds.

01:00:52 ►

Colors seem unreal.

01:00:55 ►

Faces look away.

01:00:58 ►

We change subjects,

01:01:01 ►

for Armageddon’s cold visage has passed us by this time.

01:01:08 ►

There is no greater privilege than the witnessing of life and death.

01:01:14 ►

I apply to medical school,

01:01:18 ►

work at the trauma unit,

01:01:21 ►

death main stage on Saturday nights.

01:01:26 ►

I see everything.

01:01:29 ►

Dying junkies with scars like ropes.

01:01:34 ►

Latinos deranged on PCP with lacerated skulls from baseball bats, their wrists broken from struggling with handcuffs to

01:01:50 ►

gurneys, countless young mothers in wheelchairs delivering in elevators as

01:01:57 ►

life gives and takes away, the wealthy and prominent rendered mute and helpless

01:02:05 ►

by stroke now quickly discarded.

01:02:11 ►

My own world dies

01:02:14 ►

for I am arrested over some disputed laboratory equipment

01:02:20 ►

from a recycler.

01:02:23 ►

My acceptance to medical school

01:02:26 ►

arrives in jail

01:02:27 ►

the same week.

01:02:30 ►

I kiss the letter

01:02:32 ►

and pray for guidance.

01:02:36 ►

Five years follow,

01:02:38 ►

smothered in steel enclosures,

01:02:41 ►

born again now,

01:02:43 ►

sadness,

01:02:48 ►

failing, falling useless.

01:03:12 ►

With only a beginner’s mind, not yet quick to notice long submerged feeling arises. I finally recognize the fluid cognitive display of this makyo de-repressed from the subconscious.

01:03:19 ►

I awaken to return to the breath.

01:03:26 ►

The makyo resolves itself in a vow to act compassionately.

01:03:29 ►

It seems so simple.

01:03:35 ►

I become as a tranquil, clear stream.

01:03:41 ►

A soft bell sounds and the spell is broken. Each morning, for several hundred days,

01:03:47 ►

I gather my robe, stand, turn,

01:03:53 ►

and walk in silent single file with all monks and nuns to the Buddha Hall.

01:04:02 ►

It is empty, except for elaborate figures of Buddha, Bodhisattva and Kannon, goddess of compassion,

01:04:12 ►

all above an altar with votive candles, incense and flowers.

01:04:19 ►

On a shelf, there are small wooden boxes containing the ashes of past residents at Hoshinji.

01:04:31 ►

Fifty tatami mats and black zafu cushions are in order on the floor to seat us into two groups,

01:04:42 ►

each with rows of monks and nuns facing each other.

01:04:48 ►

Priests, inokesas, walk between us to the altar,

01:04:54 ►

lay prayer cloth, then kneel and touch their brows to the floor.

01:05:03 ►

We all together kneel three times as well, then collect our robes and

01:05:10 ►

sit in Zazen. We bow as one, as a drum and a large wooden fish, the Mokyugo, are struck in time for chanting. In Japanese or English, a steady slow beat commences.

01:05:32 ►

With our deepest voices, we chant the Heart Sutra for 700 years recited each morning in Soto Zen monasteries throughout the world.

01:05:47 ►

The monks chant in Japanese.

01:05:50 ►

There are many voices in a basso profundo

01:05:54 ►

described as a deep abiding or being settled in the heart of being alive. Or like walking on the Makkahanya Haramita Shingyo,

01:06:10 ►

an English fragment being form is emptiness, emptiness form, not born, not destroyed, not defiled, not immaculate,

01:06:27 ►

not increasing, not decreasing,

01:06:30 ►

in emptiness no form, no feeling, no thought,

01:06:36 ►

no volition, no consciousness,

01:06:40 ►

no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no sound, no taste, no touch, no object of mind, no vision, no ignorance, and no extinction of ignorance.

01:07:02 ►

and no extinction of old age and death, no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path,

01:07:08 ►

no cognition, no attainment, and no no-attainment,

01:07:14 ►

no hindrance, no fear.

01:07:20 ►

At the ceremony’s end, still heady with chanting, we turn and file into the hallway to queue before the Ino.

01:07:33 ►

She is standing in her robe and kimono, her hands in prayer.

01:07:54 ►

Each person approaches and leans close to her, where the Ino dispenses the work order for Soji, the temple cleaning period.

01:07:57 ►

She bows and whispers.

01:07:59 ►

Third floor hallway.

01:08:01 ►

Garden.

01:08:02 ►

Street.

01:08:04 ►

Toilets. Garden, street, toilets.

01:08:10 ►

We lift the fine black sleeves of our sitting robes,

01:08:16 ►

tie them with two strands of cloth sewn into the robe,

01:08:19 ►

and roll up the kimono sleeves.

01:08:24 ►

The prize assignments are the toilets.

01:08:38 ►

The monks vie for this location in humility already known to me from the prison years of scrubinji in robe and sandals at 6 a.m., clearing away leaves, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, and, from the hedge, the crack vials, wine bottles, and prophylactics from the nearby projects.

01:09:04 ►

and prophylactics from the nearby projects.

01:09:10 ►

Busy commuters stalled in traffic hardly glanced at us,

01:09:20 ►

this being San Francisco perhaps mistaking us for Catholic novices in a seminary.

01:09:35 ►

Summer and winter, in light rain or mist, only the mindful sweeping and the commuter’s hurried frustration occupy the dawn streets.

01:09:48 ►

The paranoia from incarceration fades into a certain peace. I no longer sense or imagine government teams indented parked cars down the streets

01:09:54 ►

for their ghosts have been fled with the light.

01:10:01 ►

There remains for any observers only the dreary spectacle of a monk sweeping with head down day after day, reciting softly spoken prayers.

01:10:19 ►

I have become nothing special.

01:10:31 ►

have become nothing special. One morning, in the pearly dawn from a receding fog, a young beginning Zen student who has traded in chronic cannabis, alcohol, and caffeine for clarity of mind through the practice inches goes by as we sweep with our brooms.

01:10:52 ►

After weeks of wrestling with sense, difficult merger of delicate forms with absolute discipline,

01:11:02 ►

he divulges quietly a certain truth. Now I know why this place is

01:11:10 ►

considered the marines for seekers. I smile, but continue weeping.

01:11:36 ►

On the second floor of Ho-Chin-Ji, one encounters a small alcove with the tamimats, flower offerings or candles, all before a black lacquered statue of a figure in robes carved from Bolina’s pearl.

01:11:47 ►

It depicts Shunryu Suzuki Roshi,

01:11:51 ►

the founder of Hoshinji,

01:11:54 ►

and the sister monasteries of Green Gulch and Tassahara,

01:12:01 ►

and arguably Zen in America.

01:12:08 ►

Although Suzuki Roshi passed away many years ago,

01:12:12 ►

once each week since then, after morning ceremonies,

01:12:18 ►

our lines of monks congregate on the stair below the effigy to chant in honor of his teachings.

01:12:32 ►

Once in place and everyone silent, a diminutive elderly Japanese woman appears,

01:12:50 ►

woman appears, grey hair pinned back, walking with tiny steps from an adjacent hallway to cross before us.

01:12:52 ►

She and the priests bow to the effigy, light incense, recite Japanese prayers, and bow

01:13:04 ►

again.

01:13:06 ►

Our low honoring chant fills the hallways, passing into silence.

01:13:17 ►

At the end, this single small Japanese woman, affectionately known as Okusan, our temple mother, slowly and very reverently bows alone three times to Suzuki Roshi’s statue, hands in prayer.

01:13:52 ►

She turns and bows to the priests, then to us, the monks and nuns, cascading down the stairway.

01:14:07 ►

She folds her hands and with great dignity walks away into the recesses of Hoshinji, not to be seen again until the following week.

01:14:17 ►

The ceremony is conducted over the decades since Suzuki Roshi’s death, never failing,

01:14:19 ►

never changing.

01:14:27 ►

For a year, I assume that Okusan is simply an aged nun.

01:14:32 ►

Finally, I whisper on the stairway,

01:14:36 ►

Why does Okusan come each week?

01:14:43 ►

And then Changsan, hands in prayer, whispers back,

01:14:48 ►

Why, that is the widow of Suzuki Roshi.

01:14:53 ►

She appears each ceremony in devotion to her husband for thirty years.

01:14:58 ►

Whenever Oksan bows,

01:15:00 ►

now my secret self only can bow to her in veneration.

01:15:09 ►

Never forgetting her husband, Okusan evokes memories of some unnamed loss or presence presence of a future life. Sensitized to the irreplaceable heart by Oksan’s quiet honor,

01:15:31 ►

I feel emotions like islands in a sea of emptiness.

01:16:06 ►

A performance becomes stirring when accompanied by the atonal sounds of a samisen, a geisha in jet black perfect hair, silk kimono, obisage, and holding a parasol,

01:16:14 ►

performs a 500-year-old dance so slowly as to be motionless.

01:16:22 ►

With no change of expression on her oval, painted white face and small, heart-shaped red lips,

01:16:27 ►

but only with limited movements of her feet and hands and parasol,

01:16:35 ►

she expresses falling in love.

01:16:39 ►

She symbolically cuts her hair before a ritual suicide at her plight for a geisha love can never be.

01:17:10 ►

From an old image in the Honshinji library, a mother in ragged kimono, stunned and lost, is carrying her newborn child. Her eyes are unspeakable.

01:17:17 ►

She stumbles through a crematorium, the aftermath of the firebombing of Tokyo.

01:17:28 ►

Sitting in Zazen, there are memories of fathers forced from their families in prison,

01:17:37 ►

visiting rooms, of mothers denied the nursing of their crying babies,

01:17:46 ►

of a distraught child being carried out prison doors,

01:17:52 ►

of their small hands waving goodbye forever,

01:17:57 ►

of all their hopeless eyes,

01:18:02 ►

images manifest of Okusan’s reverent bows, the geisha’s desperate heart,

01:18:13 ►

the lost mother in Tokyo. I see a future where the sad eyes of my own wife and child turn away one day

01:18:27 ►

and all seems connected to that wailing darkness

01:18:33 ►

where love departs and we are left so very alone.

01:18:50 ►

I first notice Helen, a very elderly nun with snowy hair,

01:18:55 ►

when she bows so deeply in Auxanne’s presence.

01:19:03 ►

I often escort her about the monastery, but never ask of this homage.

01:19:09 ►

When she becomes infirm, then an invalid,

01:19:13 ►

I find a blue silk kimono for her,

01:19:19 ►

one with streams and lilacs and branches of laurel.

01:19:24 ►

On the night of Helen’s death, she shows me photographs of her youth, when she was a sophisticated, attractive, artistic woman in San Francisco’s Bohemian with green eyes and red hair in a high French cut.

01:19:47 ►

One photograph catches my eye,

01:19:52 ►

though of an ageist blind Japanese woman with one arm.

01:19:56 ►

Her name is Ichizaki, she taught me Zen meditation,

01:20:00 ►

Helen explains, as a very young girl.

01:20:05 ►

Perhaps we were six or seven.

01:20:09 ►

Tell me of those days.

01:20:12 ►

I was the daughter of missionaries in Japan.

01:20:18 ►

Those were the war years, the time of starving families,

01:20:28 ►

the devastated haunted cities.

01:20:34 ►

We were among the last residents of a foreign consulate.

01:20:42 ►

Ishizaki and I played by the river under the Sakai Bridge.

01:20:47 ►

How did she lose her arm?

01:20:51 ►

A sunrise that never ended,

01:20:53 ►

a star on earth,

01:20:59 ►

a multi-headed dragon that spread across the horizon.

01:21:02 ►

It ate the very sky, the image of the slaughtered were written on its face.

01:21:09 ►

Hiroshima.

01:21:11 ►

I can say nothing but only listen.

01:21:15 ►

The poison sunlight was shining with the dead faces of sleeping infants.

01:21:23 ►

with the dead faces of sleeping infants.

01:21:32 ►

They were carved into a fanatic rictus, like white leprosy.

01:21:36 ►

I’m hearing her final words.

01:21:39 ►

I think she must be dreaming.

01:21:44 ►

Evil spirits hung about like great bats, then roamed the earth like reptiles among the dying, like beasts in the apocalypse.

01:21:56 ►

Perhaps she is delirious. I open her Japanese fan and try cooling her face.

01:22:06 ►

We are behind a small soji screen for privacy in her simple spare room.

01:22:16 ►

Incense lifts and whirls in the air.

01:22:22 ►

I try to bring her back.

01:22:34 ►

Where were you both? I was in blue satin and patent leather pumps that day. We were pretending a tea party in the garden of the walled estate, singing children’s songs. She was laughing

01:22:49 ►

and pointing up at the kites when the light blinded her. She staggered outside. The silhouettes of schoolchildren were etched into the consulate walls.

01:23:06 ►

Mothers with prams, the pink kites, our little friends, the rose garden, all gone.

01:23:18 ►

I keep her windows open this last night, flaring at the moon.

01:23:30 ►

opened this last night, flaring at the moon. Somewhere, someone is playing a flute.

01:23:46 ►

The shock wave came next, the hollowing of a trillion banshees, the instant flattening of buildings, bridges.

01:23:52 ►

And the survivors, what were they like?

01:24:01 ►

We saw grisly humanoid figures as they collapsed into dust.

01:24:16 ►

Japanese families were naked in the river, their clothes burned off. They looked like great blisters. Some had no faces. with their arms out, flesh hanging in shreds,

01:24:30 ►

as though they were reaching for a lost world.

01:24:33 ►

It was so eerie.

01:24:38 ►

There were no sounds but for the weeping.

01:24:42 ►

Where was your friend?

01:25:04 ►

I found her beneath the rubber and threw her out. Her leg was broken, her face burned. Her left arm was in the river with the heads and bodies, the stumps cauterized by the blast. Yet my friend gave me a plum she had kept

01:25:11 ►

in her right hand. We shared it and stayed together until the consulate survivors found us. They said we were embracing each other

01:25:26 ►

and singing hymns.

01:25:31 ►

What were you singing?

01:25:35 ►

A song I taught her

01:25:38 ►

for her meditation lessons.

01:25:41 ►

We sang it over and over

01:25:43 ►

until they came. And she began to sing in her frail high voice.

01:25:53 ►

We shall gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river.

01:26:15 ►

river. Yes, we’ll gather at the river that flows by our home up above. Death watch beetles sometimes stick in the timber of Hoshinji

01:26:29 ►

until the cool silence engulfs us yet again.

01:26:40 ►

Some monks die in sasen posture,

01:26:49 ►

for meditation is like one’s death at morning.

01:26:59 ►

After Helen’s passing, I find an envelope addressed to me in her handwriting. It contains the photograph of her beloved Ishizaki, as though it were a message no one else could read.

01:27:30 ►

funeral ceremony with 50 monks chanting to bells and drums, a priest calls out her name to the skies as if she were listening.

01:27:51 ►

We file from the Buddha Hall. Her ashes are on the shelf in a cedar box inscribed in Japanese. now, with its flowering of roses, the new aspiring violets, the garden scent of limes.

01:28:11 ►

There’s a plum tree Helen always cared for.

01:28:17 ►

I meditate here sometimes, overlooking the city, the last rays of the sun playing like August lions,

01:28:31 ►

the sunset below fresh and keen,

01:28:38 ►

autumn’s cooling is moist,

01:28:43 ►

I remain for hours as ruffled feathers of moonlight embrace the city in cobwebs of light and mist.

01:29:13 ►

gathering below this hermit in extremis. Midnight ravens crow sleepily. I can see all the way up the fretted coast. The ocean and mountains are like a Chinese water paint. The world becomes enchanted with lights,

01:29:30 ►

and an enigmatic fan of planets stretches across the cosmos.

01:29:38 ►

Hours pass.

01:29:40 ►

There is a high moonlight full of monochrome beauty.

01:29:50 ►

The sea drains of its colors.

01:29:56 ►

I begin to sing for Helen.

01:30:00 ►

Fragments of the old rugged cross, chants in Japanese, lines from Mournath Kaddish.

01:30:13 ►

I sing Islamic asan, the call to prayer.

01:30:26 ►

Then remember the hymn at the earth’s end Until the light of dawn I sing softly for her

01:30:32 ►

We shall gather at the river

01:30:35 ►

The beautiful, beautiful river

01:30:42 ►

I hear the rustling of black robes behind me, smell incense of green laurel, but no one is ever there.

01:30:57 ►

I awaken now at 3.30 a.m. before Zazen, then run through the barren San Francisco street until speechless

01:31:08 ►

with fatigue. Sometimes the sky folds back like great wings hovering in the sky. There

01:31:17 ►

is a strange confusion of scents from nowhere, jasmine, rose, laurel, blood, sulphur, the head of a newborn.

01:31:31 ►

The pavement is cracked and faded, but I still dance a little now and then, for out of darkness

01:31:40 ►

one is moonsplashed with the audience of stars.

01:31:49 ►

With the passing of Helen, her memories, my conscientious scruples, are ignited.

01:31:58 ►

I think of the madness of the world, the suffering she described, in the evenings, beginning with only small

01:32:10 ►

scribblings on bits of paper, I decide to change reality.

01:32:40 ►

For the second time, I apply to med school and, as a gesture to some impossible contact with decision-makers, to the Kennett School of Government at Harvard. The application has less than stellar transcripts from seven schools spread over

01:32:50 ►

decades, an admission of the prison years and standardized test scores obtained between controlled movements from one locked area to another.

01:33:08 ►

There is a desperate mention of being among the 40 science talent search finalists,

01:33:18 ►

once Westinghouse and now Intel, as a second school remained pertinent.

01:33:28 ►

No explanation is given for the curious white space in the curriculum vitae.

01:33:37 ►

To med school, I propose expanding American medical curricula online for the third world. To Harvard, I propose

01:33:50 ►

policy research from the perspective of certain special experiences. The applications are truly anomalous, radioactive.

01:34:06 ►

I feel foolish, presumptuous,

01:34:09 ►

but as a monk I can act only in the service of others.

01:34:22 ►

The second round of med school requests for recommendations slowly trickling in, together with outright rejections.

01:34:38 ►

Hopelessness flourishes.

01:34:41 ►

flourishes.

01:34:45 ►

Resigned to continual defeat from years

01:34:47 ►

to trampled spirit,

01:34:51 ►

I sit in meditation,

01:34:54 ►

facing the wall

01:34:55 ►

in my barren room,

01:34:58 ►

praying

01:34:59 ►

a path will open.

01:35:03 ►

A letter appears under the door. The soft panting of a nun’s sandals

01:35:10 ►

returns down the hall. The Cambridge return address is unsurprising. No doubt it is my rejection by Harvard.

01:35:31 ►

Zen practice teaches not to be too reactive to sorrow or joy.

01:35:38 ►

So I bow out, sigh, place the letter on a shelf,

01:35:50 ►

and go to the dining room to arranged tableware mindfully for 50 people at the evening meal.

01:36:00 ►

I work in the kitchen three weeks under the tent, so I help cook, for each of us circulates through the duties at Hoshinji.

01:36:03 ►

through the duties at Hoshinji.

01:36:10 ►

I chop vegetables grown in ocean fields at Gengarj Monastery,

01:36:16 ►

slicing with methods taught at Asahara,

01:36:19 ►

preparing monks’ food for monks.

01:36:24 ►

The thin letter remains unopened. It merely confirms again one’s failure in life.

01:36:31 ►

I wash dishes for fifty people silently. of white light and how a policy analysis could have influenced decision-makers,

01:36:49 ►

achieving surrender by detonating the device ten miles out in Tokyo Bay.

01:37:00 ►

Neglecting the letter for weeks, I sit on the stairs before Hoshinji in the afternoon or sometimes watch children playing in a local park.

01:37:15 ►

They are laughing, singing. One day there is a little girl flying her pink kite before the setting sun.

01:37:30 ►

At this small omen I drag myself to the room and see again the dusty envelope.

01:37:40 ►

I open it with resignation, for it is like all the rest.

01:37:46 ►

It begins in an elegant script.

01:37:51 ►

We are pleased to inform you.

01:37:55 ►

As I stand in my monk’s cell, the universe turns in the pale dusk.

01:38:04 ►

The universe turns in the pale dusk.

01:38:14 ►

I hear the soft rustling of a robe nearby andization of thought, but of bathing in them,

01:38:31 ►

of entering for years hence an almost wholly foreign environment of unfamiliar books, lectures, deadlines, memorization and finals.

01:38:50 ►

All among the most skilled competitors are in the study of bureaucracies,

01:38:58 ►

federal agencies, the military, financial systems, warfare and non-governmental organizations.

01:39:09 ►

I have never thought in these terms before.

01:39:16 ►

Sitting on the steps of Hoshinji, I watched the ambulances, the rush of commuters, the derelict with weary eyes, the first stars.

01:39:31 ►

With the quiet rhythm of the blood, I think of pink kites and the harmony of all things.

01:39:49 ►

all things. I know many entering students are from Oxford or Princeton, the mid-career people from CIA or State of the Pentagon. The syllabi are on topics completely unread in my exclusively scientific undergraduate courses.

01:40:08 ►

A new language must be learned.

01:40:12 ►

It all seems too much.

01:40:16 ►

Yet, it is a path from which one must not wander,

01:40:21 ►

like being at gunpoint in prison,

01:40:27 ►

or wintering difficult forms of hoshinji,

01:40:33 ►

derided as a convict, inexplicable to many as a Zen student,

01:40:40 ►

but now, conferred with the incredibility of Harvard,

01:40:47 ►

remain under the changing perception of others.

01:40:52 ►

Only this simple monk.

01:40:58 ►

Down the hallway, already torn about,

01:41:02 ►

leaving this perfect community for the trappings of conventional success,

01:41:10 ►

I see a hanging scroll in charcoal brushstrokes.

01:41:16 ►

It is a poem from the Blue Cliff Record, a centuries-old Zen text where the monk Oshin describes two rivers in China,

01:41:32 ►

the Shou and the Tan, encompassing the area when Zen was practiced. It reads, south of Shou and north of Tan, the land is filled with gold.

01:41:49 ►

Under the shadowless tree, a ferry boat.

01:41:53 ►

No one notices in the emerald palace.

01:42:13 ►

Turning from the calligraphy, I see nearby a kind Chinese nun down on her knees scrubbing the floor.

01:42:19 ►

She smiles, places her hands in prayer and bows. Returning this simple gesture for the ten thousandth time, I pass through the silent simplicity of the hall with the flowers a sad yearning, a sense of revocable loss.

01:42:55 ►

As the final months pass, at every ceremony and with every practice, I drink in the sight that remains forever with me,

01:43:09 ►

the black hems of the robes trailing above the floor,

01:43:15 ►

the endless bows, the faint smiles beneath lowered eyes.

01:43:23 ►

beneath lowered eyes.

01:43:26 ►

I see the gold of autumn,

01:43:29 ►

the noiseless rain,

01:43:32 ►

the venues of falling leaves.

01:43:37 ►

The Shusso, the head monk,

01:43:40 ►

makes a pronouncement to us during satsang,

01:43:42 ►

but I feel it is meant for me.

01:43:48 ►

When you step outside the gate,

01:43:52 ►

the multicolored dragon will eat you up.

01:43:57 ►

But remember, this is your home.

01:44:01 ►

You can always return.

01:44:11 ►

In the last week there, there is a formal ceremony in the zendo for one leaving the community. The Ino speaks of my assiduous practice with a smile of tolerance, recollecting the ox only dreaming it was a deer.

01:44:31 ►

Around me flows a stream of realizations and refined, humble beauty.

01:44:40 ►

I am leaving the womb.

01:44:42 ►

I’m leaving the womb.

01:44:58 ►

The final separation is announced by the sharp, loud, reverberating stamp of a log, wooden staff on the floor.

01:45:04 ►

I fight from the sendal for the last time.

01:45:08 ►

The morning ceremony is now without my cushion,

01:45:14 ►

but I hear down the hall the monks and nuns

01:45:19 ►

in sonorous rhythms reciting the Sandokai, the song of the precious mirror,

01:45:30 ►

rechanted in Japanese and in English on frequent mornings.

01:45:41 ►

Now you have it. preserve it well, a silver bowl filled with snow, a heron hidden in the moon.

01:45:54 ►

Move and you are trapped, miss and you fall into doubt and vacillation,

01:46:12 ►

and vacillation, turning away and touching a both realm, for it is like a massive fire.

01:46:22 ►

To portray it in literal form is to stain it with defilement.

01:46:29 ►

In the darkest night it is perfectly clear. In the light of dawn it is perfectly hidden. Like

01:46:34 ►

facing a precious mirror, form and

01:46:38 ►

reflection behold each other. In one end

01:46:43 ►

it says nothing, for the words are not yet right.

01:46:55 ►

I stand and listen. Light is coming on overhead, as if there were clear story windows high up in the wards. The walled gardens are

01:47:10 ►

still rosy, but only with the last blossoms, like a precious mirror o’er our lives. The monks and nuns are chanting

01:47:25 ►

in warm waves.

01:47:32 ►

Penetrate

01:47:33 ►

the source

01:47:35 ►

and travel the pathways.

01:47:39 ►

You would do well to respect this.

01:47:43 ►

Do not

01:47:43 ►

neglect it.

01:47:46 ►

With cause and conditions, time and seasons,

01:47:50 ►

it is serene and illuminating.

01:47:55 ►

So minute it enters where there is no gap.

01:48:00 ►

So vast it transcends dimensions.

01:48:07 ►

A hair-breadth division and you are out of tune.

01:48:14 ►

Whether teachings and approaches are mastered or not,

01:48:20 ►

reality constantly flows.

01:48:24 ►

Reality constantly flows.

01:48:31 ►

An archer with skill can hit a mark at a hundred paces.

01:48:39 ►

But when arrows meet head on, how can it meet a matter of skill?

01:48:48 ►

With practice hidden, function secretly like a fool, like an idiot.

01:48:55 ►

To do this continuously is called the host within the host.

01:49:06 ►

I fold my robe and kimono in the ritual manner for the trip east.

01:49:17 ►

A few clothes, futon and computer, my only other possessions.

01:49:29 ►

This gracious community of devoted monks and nuns in which I have lived for years is to be replaced quite suddenly. I vow to carry the teachings with me always. I know that the next monastery Monastery is one of competitive students and learned faculty, all striving to

01:49:49 ►

solve social problems. World hunger, cyber warfare, overpopulation, bio warfare.

01:50:11 ►

bio-warfare. Rather than votives and incense and disciplined holy tranquility, the world soon is becoming strange briefings, books on CIA assessment of threats from rogue states and non-state actors,

01:50:26 ►

or optimal fleet sizes for nuclear carriers’ destroyer escorts.

01:50:39 ►

There are no reverent vows on this path, no aesthetic arrangement of flowers,

01:50:50 ►

no space between soon relentless thoughts.

01:50:57 ►

The next world is a whiplash of conflicting moralities,

01:51:11 ►

a whiplash of conflicting moralities, one as stringent as the transition from the violent chaos of fifty cells to the Way.

01:51:20 ►

Summoned by the abbess, I appear in the dokusan room for the last interview.

01:51:28 ►

After the respectful bowing, she speaks.

01:51:33 ►

And what have you learned here? my limited gasp of the teachings, but feelings of loss soon overcome theological discourse.

01:51:51 ►

I will miss you, I cry, coming undone before her for some moments.

01:52:01 ►

I will miss you also, she replies gently, bowing a last time.

01:52:10 ►

As I bow again at the door, the abbess leaves me with a final teaching.

01:52:19 ►

Remember not to let your head get too far from your heart.

01:52:25 ►

Remember not to let your head get too far from your heart.

01:52:33 ►

Gathering my things, I bow deeply in reverence to my monk’s room.

01:52:42 ►

The stairs and halls are ready are empty, lonely, without soft smiles. On the 700th day of formal practice,

01:52:47 ►

I opened the gate of Hoshinji.

01:52:51 ►

My old ghost is there,

01:52:54 ►

restless and focused, frightened,

01:52:57 ►

asking for refuge.

01:52:59 ►

The eastern sky is light,

01:53:02 ►

with only a hair’s breadth deviation,

01:53:10 ►

distracted by thoughts of the journey ahead,

01:53:15 ►

I step directly into the dragon’s mouth.

01:53:32 ►

Next up we have some commentary on the chapter by Mark Juhann.

01:53:36 ►

The child of a German priest and an Estonian witch,

01:53:40 ►

Mark Juhann received his B.A. from Pembroke College, Oxford,

01:53:42 ►

and his M.A. at St. John’s, Durham.

01:53:47 ►

Having been a lay chaplain, researcher, and toy demonstrator,

01:53:52 ►

Mark’s essays, poems, and talks have been published in the Psychedelic Press Journal,

01:53:59 ►

Interfaith Now, and Breaking Convention. He is interested in syncretism, heresy,

01:54:03 ►

comparative theology, and the relationship between God and drug.

01:54:14 ►

So, what we seem to have in this chapter in many ways, it seems to be the calm before the storm.

01:54:16 ►

The storm in two senses here.

01:54:20 ►

The storm of being an internationally based trainee academic, on the one hand,

01:54:33 ►

and the storm of the, well I guess you could say the revelation onslaught to come. But it comes clearly very much after a previous storm of sorts. And there are kind of like, I guess, four themes that jump out to me when listening to this. The main message I get

01:54:40 ►

from this chapter compounds the core message of the book, which is to say the gift

01:54:47 ►

of consciousness, of the sober mind itself, is the greatest source of wisdom that we have.

01:54:54 ►

Yes, the book deals evocatively and descriptively in ways where we’ve all been there, the treasures

01:55:01 ►

of altered states. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of altered states,

01:55:07 ►

long-reach thinking, envisioning through history and geography. The words do take us on journeys

01:55:13 ►

beyond and before the monastery. But these altered states are garnered purely meditatively,

01:55:20 ►

and that’s not to mistake the meditative state for something unaltered, but it is the sober mind that we must always begin and end with,

01:55:30 ►

even and especially in the exploration of the human mind.

01:55:36 ►

Secondly, another theme is that the protagonist sticks us into the depths between prison and monastery. An uneasy juxtaposition,

01:55:48 ►

and one with a delayed cadence, given both his next and ultimate destination, Harvard

01:55:56 ►

and prison once more, respectively. I think we must remember, as I’m sure every person in this series of podcasts will,

01:56:09 ►

that the book was written, all 650 pages, in prison.

01:56:14 ►

Leonard had the luxury of having his muse right in front of him, existing as he does, in a federal prison.

01:56:22 ►

Though perhaps luxury is the wrong word.

01:56:27 ►

As well as the natural mind and the ironic similarities and stark differences between a prison and a monastery,

01:56:35 ►

the other main themes which I detect in this chapter involve, third,

01:56:41 ►

the integration of past experience and the transformation into a new detraumatised being.

01:56:50 ►

Though it’s not explicit in this chapter, this theme of therapy and exorcism still comes out,

01:56:57 ►

the exorcism of past demons and the purification of them in the furnace of peace.

01:57:03 ►

and the purification of them in the furnace of peace.

01:57:08 ►

Whilst later chapters contain multiple explicit exorcisms,

01:57:12 ►

even what I like to call sexorcisms,

01:57:15 ►

this chapter in many ways gets the ball in motion.

01:57:22 ►

How can the exorcist excise without first being delivered from his own demons. And then the final theme to this chapter is not just

01:57:28 ►

a work of Victorian-style American Buddhist auto-ethnography. It is, and this is where my

01:57:36 ►

personal hermeneutical biases come in, it is very much a work of comparative religion.

01:57:42 ►

Leonard is clearly engaged in a project, as he is throughout

01:57:46 ►

the book, of comparative theology and comparative religion. His Christian heritage is betrayed in

01:57:53 ►

the corners of sentences, even often in the same breath with the intricacies of his Zen Buddhist

01:57:59 ►

life study. This flies in the face of what is a more fashionable standpoint in scholarship today,

01:58:06 ►

that is, considering different religions to be incommensurate, immeasurable next to each other.

01:58:12 ►

And this hints at the eventual elucidation of the theory of religions which most of the

01:58:18 ►

counterculture subscribe to, which is this perennial philosophy, or an alternative form of it called the mystical core thesis.

01:58:26 ►

Indeed, Brother David, who read this chapter so beautifully, is himself a Benedictine,

01:58:33 ►

and has done much work comparing, among other things, the Christian Apostles’ Creed with

01:58:38 ►

the Buddhist notion of patika-samuppada, which is conditioned arising or dependent co-origination.

01:58:47 ►

which is conditioned arising or dependent co-origination. It is thus most fitting,

01:58:53 ►

I would say, that we have this chapter based in a Zen monastery read to us by an Austrian Catholic monk. Let’s be even more specific, a Californian Zen monastery, and it’s read to us by an Austrian Catholic monk.

01:59:12 ►

So the first image is that of the protagonist sitting on a meditation cushion in Hoshinji,

01:59:19 ►

the beginner’s mind temple in San Francisco, which is the oldest Soto Zen temple following, we are told, the Zen master Dogen, from 1250 AD,

01:59:31 ►

it is described as a place of ancient curtsies and unworldly kindnesses.

01:59:37 ►

The use of the word unworldly really gets me here.

01:59:39 ►

It even makes me trip up on my words.

01:59:44 ►

I would have used the term otherworldly if I were writing this,

01:59:48 ►

but here is a writer aware of the cruelties of the world.

01:59:57 ►

It is actually unworldly, the kindness in this temple.

02:00:06 ►

Far from the temple being somehow removed above or beyond the world, activities are increasingly engaged with creation.

02:00:13 ►

After zazen or meditation, we engage in calligraphy, he writes, hibana or flower arranging,

02:00:21 ►

channel yu or tea ceremony, gardening, and service to the dying. I think of plans and people,

02:00:28 ►

feel anxiety and desire, hear faint muffled traffic, and see upon the wall a shaft of sunlight, he writes. But the kindness, given what has come before, is unworldly.

02:00:38 ►

The sober monastic rhythm is not without its revelations,

02:00:43 ►

the most prevailing of which is described

02:00:46 ►

on page 41. We occasionally gain glimpses of no-mind, the space between thoughts.

02:00:59 ►

Unworldly kindnesses. Hmm. It seems that when Leonard wrote those words, he wasn’t simply

02:01:08 ►

writing from the perspective of a recently released inmate, though this is certainly implied

02:01:13 ►

later on and throughout. The second section details viscerally with the harsh contrast

02:01:22 ►

between the violence of cocaine-fuelled relationships in San Francisco,

02:01:27 ►

which they can hear from the monastery, and the peace of the monastery. And I quote again,

02:01:34 ►

tender fruitless urgencies cry to unify the spirit through flesh, their voices are without bodies,

02:01:40 ►

I hate you, I can’t be with you anymore, please don’t go, I love you, I gave you all my coke,

02:01:44 ►

I hate you, I can’t be with you anymore, please don’t go, I love you, I gave you all my coke.

02:01:54 ►

The cycle of unsatiated cravings, the pleading, the chasing and embraces, the tearing away and returning, the long, low moaning.

02:02:02 ►

Not to ruin anything for our listeners, but it is precisely instances like this, aggressive, cocaine-fuelled and poisoned love, which the six

02:02:07 ►

take it upon themselves in instances later in the book to exorcise. Drugs in this context are

02:02:16 ►

interpreted demonically, and so now, reading this book for the third time, I feel that there is

02:02:22 ►

something proleptic, something predictive in this.

02:02:25 ►

But more to the point of this chapter, far from a retreat from the world, this monastery in the

02:02:33 ►

metropolis is a clear indication that where restlessness is at its height, calm is most noticed. Where peace is least, there peace is the greatest gift. Where peace is lost,

02:02:51 ►

there it is needed the most. To relate this now to something personal in my life, in my meditation

02:02:58 ►

practice as a Christian Buddhist, I’ve consistently found that those moments in my life where I’m the

02:03:04 ►

busiest or the most hectic

02:03:05 ►

where I’ve had the most stuff to do in the shortest time available

02:03:08 ►

those are precisely the times where meditation has its deepest benefit

02:03:13 ►

as well as the time where it is most difficult to initiate, to keep at, to cultivate. This is illustrated, if I could borrow a western monastic term, even

02:03:30 ►

illuminated and encapsulated by the poem which Leonard chooses to reflect on with these events.

02:03:38 ►

Below the autumn tempest rages, while above the sky is motionless.

02:03:50 ►

rages, while above, the sky is motionless. On a personal note, Basho’s haiku here uses an image very useful to any meditator, that of a sky with clouds or a tempest. While the mind may be chaotic

02:03:57 ►

and filled, underneath it is always still the same being, mind. I’d also like to draw our listeners’ attention to the exploration of how

02:04:07 ►

he got there on page 42. I have entered this world by begging admission the same day as released from

02:04:14 ►

prison. This perhaps might benefit from some contextual unpacking. The earliest Buddhist monks were referred to as bhikkhus,

02:04:25 ►

b-h-i-k-k-u-s, transliterated, a word literally meaning beggars. So the earliest Buddhist monks

02:04:35 ►

referred to themselves as beggars. This notion of begging admission therefore has resonances not

02:04:42 ►

just with later Zen tradition, but with the

02:04:45 ►

Theravada and the whole of Buddhist society from the origin point to Zending. The first followers

02:04:52 ►

of the Buddha were renouncers who chose to leave the continual give and take of economic life to

02:04:59 ►

focus purely on the nature of suffering and its cessation for the good of humanity.

02:05:06 ►

Beggars were holy. Beggars were monks, literally.

02:05:10 ►

And so the protagonist here is moving from the humiliation in jail to the humility of the monastery.

02:05:19 ►

In the back of the reader’s mind is the question of how this not-quite-seamless segue began, and why he is in prison.

02:05:31 ►

It is, to quote further, the reason he’s in prison is a misunderstanding about laboratory equipment,

02:05:38 ►

which led to a hellhole of lethargic suffering, years of isolate suffering in the midst of knives and blood.

02:05:48 ►

And so we come to the great juxtaposition of the chapter, the ironic connections between the

02:05:54 ►

rigorous life of prison and monastery, and the unutterable divergences in philosophy that lie therein. Our protagonist tells us, I ask for refuge

02:06:08 ►

and am given shelter. Again, a contextual point is beneficial here for those who may not have

02:06:15 ►

studied Buddhism. As a monk, one takes refuge in three things, a Buddhist monk, in the Buddha,

02:06:21 ►

in the Dharma, or the way or doctrine, which is impossible to translate, but in the Buddha, in the Dharma, or the way or doctrine, which is impossible to translate,

02:06:25 ►

but in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and finally in the Sangha, or the community of beggars,

02:06:30 ►

monks. This notion of asking for refuge is an initiatory step, the beginning of the beginner’s

02:06:37 ►

mind. How could prison, the reader is left asking, how could prison prepare one for this?

02:06:47 ►

The protagonist tells us, howling violence, the ferocity and oppression is gone now,

02:06:52 ►

yet still his body is lean and tight from relentless exercises beneath rows of razor wire in nameless, lonely yards.

02:07:02 ►

And monasteries are for desperate people. And yet the monastery is proving far more demanding

02:07:10 ►

than gun towers. And in this, we return to some of the biggest themes in the book,

02:07:17 ►

exorcism or deliverance, integration, and transformation. Once more, illuminated for us by the haiku,

02:07:27 ►

rhinoceros crashing through the underbrush becomes white deer in the moonlight.

02:07:35 ►

Rhinoceros crashing through the underbrush becomes white deer in the moonlight.

02:07:42 ►

We also see the beginning of a project here of comparative religion which

02:07:47 ►

undercurrents much of the book. Pages 42 and 43, he says, with each step I thank the good lord that

02:07:56 ►

Buddhists do not recognise, or the spirit that is the mystery, or the essence of mind for this In psychedelic circles, this is perfectly non-controversial.

02:08:12 ►

Religions offer different angles on ultimate truth,

02:08:17 ►

something which is, in the end, one.

02:08:20 ►

But according to many postmodern scholars and recent fashions in this field,

02:08:27 ►

what Leonard is doing here is comparing the incommensurable. He’s comparing the

02:08:33 ►

incomparable. If religions circumscribe what it is possible to experience, which is the assumption,

02:08:41 ►

then how is it possible to bring the good lord into a Buddhist temple? Indeed, he even

02:08:46 ►

admits that Buddhists do not recognize this good lord, and yet his Christian upbringing is seen as

02:08:53 ►

enhancing his understanding, in spite of, perhaps because of, the contrast. Buddhism, especially in

02:09:01 ►

its earliest forms, but also in Zen, and especially in its Western variants, is soteriologically, at least, atheistic.

02:09:10 ►

And what I mean by that is, you don’t need God to be saved.

02:09:14 ►

You save yourself by your adoption of the Noble Eightfold Path, and your seeking refuge, and in the three things that I’ve mentioned, and changing your perspective gradually.

02:09:26 ►

God has little to do with it. Of course, if I may bring two other scholars here, Ninian Smart and Houston Smith,

02:09:34 ►

among others, have noted that forms of Buddhism are theism by another name, the notion of the

02:09:40 ►

bodhisattva, for example. But here the protagonist is quite content

02:09:46 ►

not only to thank the good lord of Christianity

02:09:48 ►

for the teachings of Buddhism,

02:09:50 ►

and in the same breath translate it into a previously alien culture,

02:09:55 ►

equating it with the spirit that is the mystery,

02:09:59 ►

or the essence of mind.

02:10:02 ►

Once more, without giving too much away, this has proleptic association later on in the

02:10:11 ►

book when the actual synthesis of the sacrament and the rituals of the synthesis are described.

02:10:22 ►

But I won’t ruin it for you. I’ll just leave that bit there hanging you have a lot to look forward

02:10:29 ►

to listeners but how does this process of saving take place the radical report continues merging

02:10:36 ►

themes of of transformation along with the the constant traumatized memories of prison

02:10:41 ►

the rahatsu seshin and forgive me if I’ve pronounced that

02:10:46 ►

wrong, the seven-day silent period broken by orioki meals and walking meditation, known as

02:10:52 ►

kinbin, requires, the protagonist says, such absolute attention that I become as a prisoner

02:10:59 ►

again, not of the gross, but of the subtle.

02:11:08 ►

Some around him physically shake, quoting again.

02:11:12 ►

Others relax deeply through, and I quote,

02:11:17 ►

de-repressing old memories in silent tears.

02:11:20 ►

Yet more flee.

02:11:24 ►

Run away. All this considered distractions by an ego less than eager to observe itself. So

02:11:31 ►

a stick is described, a kiyosaku is used to administer and hit the shoulders of those

02:11:40 ►

whose posture flags. It is an example of the harshness of the discipline asked of the

02:11:47 ►

adherents in this temple. In page 44, we are training not to be obsessive but to be mindful

02:11:53 ►

of the small things. The food is the most pure, adequate. There is no feeling of renunciative

02:12:01 ►

philosophy, of being lost in the desert, of purging guilt on a diet of locusts and wild honey. Here again, we have a critical comparative religious statement.

02:12:13 ►

This is not about creating artificial guilt, but the gradual noticing, the being with.

02:12:30 ►

the being with on page 45 he describes the monastery as an antipode of hades past hades past presumably here means the prison given the constant parallelisms that he

02:12:37 ►

invokes for us he compares every detail of the past experience to the, you know, every detail of his prison experience to the horrors of prison.

02:12:51 ►

He compares to the monastery, but and there’s this unsettling kind of similarity yet simultaneous radical distinction.

02:13:00 ►

And I think it might be helpful now to just list a few of these.

02:13:03 ►

And I think it might be helpful now to just list a few of these.

02:13:15 ►

So, the madness of the prison chow halls, the place where they eat, surly angry lines shuffling to receive through a porthole in a cement wall,

02:13:23 ►

is contrasted to serving monks and nuns walk in single file, not to the nearest person.

02:13:28 ►

Arrive to stand before the first recipient who is holding hands in prayer. The plastic trays are contrasted to a white ceramic bowl, chopsticks, a cloth tied

02:13:39 ►

properly. The recipient offers her large lacquered bowl, first raising it to her forehead as a bow with her hands full.

02:13:47 ►

The server with the rice then stops, bows, steps forward, ladles out a portion of the rice, steps back, and bows.

02:13:57 ►

The second server then bows, the process continuing until all the first recipient’s bowls are filled.

02:14:04 ►

All bow again. This formal process continuing through all the first recipient’s bowls are filled. All bow again. This formal process

02:14:07 ►

continuing through all fifty people, and the abbess is served

02:14:11 ►

last.

02:14:16 ►

Then he contrasts the unearthly din

02:14:20 ►

of confined men no longer heard

02:14:23 ►

with the nuns’ murmurs of devotions,

02:14:28 ►

their soft countenances.

02:14:31 ►

In terms of the quality of the food,

02:14:34 ►

he contrasts industrial by-products,

02:14:37 ►

the lowest quality processed food

02:14:39 ►

for penal institutions

02:14:40 ►

with each person wipes their bowl

02:14:46 ►

with a daikon

02:14:47 ►

a pickled cabbage, then eats the daikon

02:14:50 ►

it’s both charming and

02:14:54 ►

unsettling at the same time

02:14:56 ►

carelessly heated in

02:14:58 ►

vats, he’s now

02:15:00 ►

describing the prison again

02:15:01 ►

so everything has this kind of

02:15:04 ►

anti-mirror so or some kind of

02:15:07 ►

like it’s like the the the the prison and the monastery are mirrored but they are at the same

02:15:13 ►

time so radically opposite at the same time as being uh as there being so many equivalences

02:15:21 ►

and resonances and this is the process this is the process of of of um

02:15:27 ►

de-traumaring yourself it’s a terrible word but um that’s that’s that’s that’s how i’m

02:15:35 ►

going to describe it carelessly heated in vats is the prison food a shigella outbreak hospitalizes

02:15:41 ►

80 inmates because a worker has placed feces to the food, which

02:15:46 ►

he contrasts with this ancient art of eating food in a Zen monastery.

02:15:53 ►

Food is consumed hastily as guards shout threats, is contrasted to the meal prayer or gatha

02:16:03 ►

is chanted in honour of those who grow and bring

02:16:06 ►

the food. I dare lift my eyes slightly for the briefest of moments. So there is this sense in

02:16:14 ►

which the monastery is rigorous, there are rules, there are rules that you can break, break but these rules are are intrinsically um desired they’re not they’re not imposed so

02:16:29 ►

the the oppression of the prison is contrasted to the the desire for regularity in the monastery

02:16:40 ►

kitchen workers steal as much as possible in the prison.

02:16:46 ►

Tightly crowded tables are filled with murderers, addicts, the dysfunctional and crazed, the clearly evil.

02:16:53 ►

Dark countenances drain the smiles from any face.

02:16:57 ►

Every hour of the day was highly structured.

02:17:00 ►

Awakening meals, working, sleeping.

02:17:02 ►

awakening meals, working, sleeping.

02:17:11 ►

In contrast, now the times of cages, of beggared friendships and destroyed love are no more.

02:17:13 ►

I am surrounded by children of light.

02:17:17 ►

New students are obvious, restless, distracted.

02:17:23 ►

Confusion and irreverence are like a rock thrown into a pool of moonlight.

02:17:32 ►

This practice is performed on page 46 as if each of us were a sacrament.

02:17:39 ►

Now, I could be clutching at straws with this one,

02:17:42 ►

which is why I referred to my hermeneutical lens,

02:17:44 ►

but it’s interesting that Leonard uses the word sacrament here, given that he’s using so many Japanese words and Japanese traditions in their original language.

02:17:54 ►

Perhaps there is no better word, but this is a word which is fermented in a Christian context to mean the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

02:18:09 ►

It is also one of the main words in the novel’s subtitle,

02:18:13 ►

on secrets and sacraments.

02:18:19 ►

I’m going to just intersect this theme of sacrament with a book i’ve been reading recently

02:18:28 ►

called the city is my monastery by richard carter and this is this quotation speaks to the rose of

02:18:37 ►

paracelsus um in the sense that sacraments it’s a misnomer um it’s a it’s a it’s a appealing and indeed attractive

02:18:47 ►

thought that a sacrament is is is just a chemical but of course sacrament is is so much more than a

02:18:54 ►

chemical a sacrament is a way of treating people um and a way of being with others. And in this chapter, when the protagonist describes

02:19:08 ►

treating other people as sacraments,

02:19:11 ►

I think this quote from this book,

02:19:13 ►

The City is My Monastery, will help elucidate

02:19:16 ►

what we might mean by this term sacrament,

02:19:19 ►

which is not just part of the title, but a big theme of the book.

02:19:22 ►

Outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual

02:19:25 ►

grace it’s very easy to see a psychedelic as a sacrament it’s a it’s a chemical that binds to

02:19:33 ►

certain receptors and often elucidates and provokes deeply spiritual numinous mystical

02:19:41 ►

phenomena or experiences or qualia in the human mind so there is this

02:19:46 ►

physical pole and then there’s this experiential pole but a sacrament isn’t just a chemical so

02:19:54 ►

and that’s i think a really really important theme in the book as a whole

02:19:59 ►

and also in in this chapter as well.

02:20:08 ►

So this is taken from Richard Carter’s book,

02:20:09 ►

The City is My Monastery.

02:20:11 ►

Daniel told me about Brian,

02:20:15 ►

who had for 30 years slept on the same bench outside St. Andrews by the wardrobe.

02:20:18 ►

Each week he visited him with the street rescue team.

02:20:21 ►

They tried to persuade him to visit the hostel,

02:20:24 ►

but he didn’t want to come in.

02:20:26 ►

Too claustrophobic. Too many other people. This was his home. This bench. His ceiling, the sky.

02:20:35 ►

But over the years, he learnt to trust Daniel. Then one day, completely, unexpectedly,

02:20:42 ►

he said he would come. He was frail. His clothes were soaking wet.

02:20:48 ►

Daniel helped him.

02:20:50 ►

Don’t leave me, sir, he said so politely.

02:20:53 ►

Don’t leave me, please.

02:20:55 ►

He was wearing several layers of socks.

02:20:59 ►

They had been on his feet for so long they had disintegrated,

02:21:03 ►

had to be gently peeled away from his skin. Daniel washed his feet for so long they had disintegrated, had to be gently peeled away from his skin.

02:21:07 ►

Daniel washed his feet. That must have been difficult, I said. No, Daniel said.

02:21:15 ►

I felt so privileged that he allowed me to do this for him. It felt the most holy thing I had ever done in my life. It was sacrament. It was not long after that Brian

02:21:29 ►

died. It was as though he wanted to prepare himself for burial. Do this in remembrance of me.

02:21:50 ►

So on page 50 and 51 he describes the gong as being gravity, gravity itself. The gong is this thing which keeps the monastery grounded, upright and in connection with itself.

02:22:01 ►

In spite of the chapter containing no LSD, it still contains altered states,

02:22:08 ►

as I mentioned at the beginning, and the constant to and fro between inner transformation

02:22:12 ►

and outward sacrifice. The traditional theological meaning, as we’ve said, being an outward sign of

02:22:19 ►

an inward grace, this sacrament idea. So just to illustrate one experience that he has, and it kind of

02:22:29 ►

anticipates a lot of the more espionage-themed elements of the trips to come later on in the book.

02:22:43 ►

On the roof, he has this experience the brilliant

02:22:45 ►

open western sky is blue and hard the spire of the carolyn at the berkeley campus pierces

02:22:50 ►

a low fog across the bay its own temple bells are calling the academic faithful to their devotions

02:22:56 ►

so here we have another parallelism which is the academic faithful to their devotions another form

02:23:01 ►

of enlightenment it is a tolling to which I too ultimately must yield, as is my heritage.

02:23:06 ►

But reborn in this cleansing practice at Hoshinji,

02:23:10 ►

I vow to remain until these precepts can be applied to scholarly effort,

02:23:14 ►

the promise of new life.

02:23:15 ►

To the south is Stanford and Silicon Valley,

02:23:19 ►

their bandwidth electrifying our planet.

02:23:21 ►

I bow in the direction, in honour of the beings we are all becoming.

02:23:26 ►

Yet, as a cloud passes before the sun, I notice to the northeast, the Federal Building. There,

02:23:33 ►

technology is being turned inward, upon us through fearsome surveillance methods,

02:23:38 ►

and databases with millions of files instantly retrievable for monitoring subjects of interest.

02:23:45 ►

millions of files instantly retrievable for monitoring subjects of interest. Against the shadow’s coldness, I pull my sitting robe closely, anticipating that such careful scrutiny of the

02:23:51 ►

population is leading to Indra’s net, the Sufi concept of a universe of eyes looking at each

02:23:58 ►

other, but this time in judgment. Perhaps they still consider me a target one who inexplicably has gone to ground in a

02:24:06 ►

religious retreat so there are loads of things here um in this in the quotation firstly there’s

02:24:13 ►

this notion of surveillance and control which is a huge theme in the book and uh although it’s not

02:24:19 ►

and it’s a theme in this chapter um the prison, the macro in terms of Silicon Valley and the espionage networks that look, plough through our data.

02:24:39 ►

Technology being turned inward upon us through fearsome surveillance methods and databases with millions of files so um although this isn’t an altered state per se um he is nevertheless aware of his

02:24:55 ►

psychogeography and his positioning in in in the world and it’s not like meditation makes all this go away on page 51 incredibly moving and

02:25:08 ►

also anticipates future chapters we it was revealed that the protagonist once worked in

02:25:15 ►

emergency rooms helping people fight for life for their for their survival and um

02:25:22 ►

memories of volunteering in emergency rooms page 51 the trauma of san

02:25:28 ►

francisco general hospital four dying 19 year old double dates now screaming on gurneys a vehicular

02:25:35 ►

mass casualty from the driver’s cocaine overdose and cardiac arrest only 20 minutes earlier they

02:25:41 ►

were speeding over the bay bridge music blasting laughing drinking snorting

02:25:45 ►

lines rushing horny clutching to the girl’s silky thighs unconscious of the beast about to pluck

02:25:51 ►

them all to survive shrieking to their voiceless friends now quiet as death blood everywhere the

02:25:58 ►

driver’s rib cage sliced open without anesthetic pried apart with a steel rib spreader for hands-on direct massage.

02:26:05 ►

The most extreme remedy, life’s last chance. All walk, stunned from the trauma room to their

02:26:13 ►

private confrontations with God, before the next patient in a line that never ends.

02:26:21 ►

So, I mean, it’s astonishing in its scope scope this chapter even though as i as i keep saying

02:26:27 ►

it doesn’t contain induced altered states through through lsd the meditative state in itself brings

02:26:34 ►

all these uh memories to the surface and so he’s not just exorcising himself from the demons of

02:26:39 ►

prison but he’s also um he’s also uh finally been given the chance to integrate his his experiences

02:26:47 ►

at um at a and e accident and emergency and it is telling as well um that that that his

02:26:56 ►

descriptions are basically to do with with drug overdoses because one of the one of the core

02:27:01 ►

theses of the book is that the the types of drugs that a society allows its

02:27:07 ►

individuals to bathe their neurons in has a huge impact on the types of morals and ethics

02:27:15 ►

that are allowed to instantiate and are allowed to develop in that society.

02:27:23 ►

and are allowed to develop in that society.

02:27:30 ►

To quote from the previous chapter, when he asks Crimson,

02:27:39 ►

do you believe that the mass availability of psychedelics to a society is in aggregate benign?

02:27:43 ►

And it seems when faced with experiences like this,

02:28:11 ►

with drugs that can actually help to alleviate addictive tendencies, in contrast to drugs that don’t just generate addictive tendencies, but are in themselves incredibly destructive. skulls from baseball bats their wrists broken from struggling while handcuffed to gurneys countless young mothers in wheelchairs delivering in elevators as life giveth and taketh away the wealthy and prominent rendered mute and helpless by stroke now quickly discarded

02:28:17 ►

so the reason he’s he’s describing these is because he’s having these re-envisionings of

02:28:26 ►

his memory through meditation he describes with only a beginner’s mind not yet quick

02:28:31 ►

to notice long submerged feelings arising i finally recognize the florid cognitive display

02:28:38 ►

i awake to return to the breath i vow to act act compassionately. It seems so simple. I become as a

02:28:45 ►

tranquil, clear stream. So I’m kind of seeing this as a pun on the notion of a beginner’s mind,

02:28:53 ►

which is a Buddhist term intended to encourage practitioners to see the world anew in each

02:28:58 ►

moment. So as much as your day may involve the same rituals, waking up, breakfast, the commute, or whatever it involves,

02:29:07 ►

the Buddhist idea of a beginner’s mind is to experience the world anew each moment,

02:29:14 ►

because even though there is that regularity, each moment contains within itself a novelty,

02:29:19 ►

a newness of life. Even regular tasks practiced for centuries can be all there is to do nothing else to do it

02:29:29 ►

can be contentment because each moment brims with novelty and the protagonist here is is using this

02:29:34 ►

beginner’s mind here self-effacingly i only have a beginner’s mind but yeah of course beginner’s

02:29:40 ►

mind is the goal as well so as well as his kind of experiences and his his you know

02:29:47 ►

decompression of his traumas um he is manifesting this change in himself to do good in the world

02:29:55 ►

sweeping the sidewalk around hoshinji um in robe and sandals um so this community service again parallels his time behind bars but but but he’s enjoying it

02:30:09 ►

and again on page 53 he sees you know candy wrappers cigarette butts from the hedges there

02:30:16 ►

are crack vials wine bottles prophylactics from the nearby project so he’s very much seeing the dark side of drugs.

02:30:27 ►

And in the later exorcisms that the six engage in,

02:30:32 ►

they are all to do with the exorcising of the demons of drug addiction.

02:30:42 ►

So this combination here of secrecy and sacrament

02:30:48 ►

is very much

02:30:50 ►

compellingly illustrated

02:30:53 ►

in the protagonist’s relationship

02:30:55 ►

with Okusan,

02:30:56 ►

who’s a survivor of the nuclear blast

02:30:57 ►

at the end of World War II.

02:31:00 ►

My secret self can only bow

02:31:03 ►

to her in veneration.

02:31:14 ►

This nuclear blast is described in a really in a way that somehow manages to capture the tragedy and be beautiful yet not be indulgent what of course is significant about the nuclear blast

02:31:22 ►

and is mentioned at other points in the book,

02:31:26 ►

is that the year in which the nuclear bomb was discovered was the same year in which

02:31:32 ►

Albert Hoffman discovered LSD. And so there is this constant parallel, this ironic parallel between the destructive explosion in the physical world

02:31:50 ►

and the psychic explosion of the discovery of LSD.

02:31:56 ►

Page 56.

02:31:57 ►

A sunrise that never ended, a star on earth,

02:31:59 ►

a multi-headed dragon that spread across the horizon.

02:32:02 ►

It ate the very sky.

02:32:04 ►

The images of the slaughtered were written on its face.

02:32:08 ►

Hiroshima.

02:32:14 ►

The shockwave came next.

02:32:16 ►

The howling of a trillion banshees, the instant flattening of buildings, bridges.

02:32:21 ►

And the reason he can describe this is because of his relationship with Okusan.

02:32:26 ►

The survivors saw grisly humanoid figures as they collapsed into dust. Japanese families were naked

02:32:32 ►

in the river, their clothes burnt off. They looked like great blisters. Some had no faces. Others

02:32:38 ►

moved with their arms out, flesh hanging in shreds as they were reaching for a lost world.

02:32:48 ►

flesh hanging in shreds as they were reaching for a lost world. It was so eerie there was no sound but for the weeping. This in some way is the first instance in the book of demonography,

02:32:58 ►

but it is an unafraid, compassionate, firm and evocatively descriptive without fetishizing the demonic

02:33:07 ►

influences on humankind. This book is not an airy-fairy book from Erowid. It’s a book which

02:33:14 ►

takes seriously the human capacity, capability, and culpability in real evil. It does not just, as we shall see in the last chapter, imagine future evils. It is

02:33:28 ►

unafraid to look long and hard at what as the human race we are capable of, both the good and

02:33:36 ►

the bad. And again, this comparative religious stream comes in when Okusan sings a Christian hymn to comfort herself

02:33:45 ►

the song of the precious mirror

02:33:48 ►

Sandokai on page 62 of 3

02:33:51 ►

is incredibly illustrative as well

02:33:55 ►

now you have it, preserve it well

02:33:58 ►

a silver bowl filled with snow

02:34:00 ►

a heron hidden in the moon

02:34:02 ►

move and you are trapped, miss and you fall into doubt

02:34:05 ►

and vacillation. Turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like a massive fire.

02:34:12 ►

To portray in literary form is to stain with defilement. In the darkest night it is perfectly

02:34:19 ►

clear. In the light of dawn it is perfectly hidden life facing a precious mirror form and reflection

02:34:27 ►

behold each other in the end it says nothing for the words are not yet bright penetrate the source

02:34:35 ►

and unravel the pathways you would do well to respect this do not neglect it with cause and

02:34:43 ►

conditions time and seasons it is serene and illuminating

02:34:46 ►

so minute when it enters where there is no gap so vast it transcends dimensions a hair’s breadth

02:34:55 ►

deviation and you are out of tune by the teachings and approaches are masters or not reality constantly

02:35:01 ►

flows an archer with skill can hit a mark at a hundred paces,

02:35:06 ►

but when the arrows meet head-on, how can it be a matter of skill?

02:35:12 ►

With practice hidden, function secretly, like a fool, like an idiot.

02:35:19 ►

To do this continuously is called the host within the host.

02:35:24 ►

To do this continuously is called the host within the host.

02:35:48 ►

When the protagonist gets this incredible news, I mean, he’s been rejected from all these medical schools and then really prestigious medical schools that he’s applied for and then gets accepted to be a drug policy analyst at Harvard, even with a history of prison because of what’s described as a misunderstanding of a lab equipment.

02:35:53 ►

But, you know, he has this record of prison

02:35:56 ►

associated with drug production.

02:36:02 ►

Misassociated, but um associated nevertheless and yet harvard the the one of

02:36:09 ►

the most prestigious universities not just in the united states but in the world has invited him to

02:36:14 ►

be a um to their graduate school to the harvard kennedy school of government as a drug policy

02:36:19 ►

fellow and and when he uh when he has to tell the chief nun,

02:36:26 ►

it’s revealed that he’s been there for three years.

02:36:30 ►

And feelings, it’s just in page 63,

02:36:34 ►

feelings soon overcome theological discourse.

02:36:38 ►

The final two pages of the chapter are very moving.

02:36:42 ►

It’s revealed that the protagonist, yeah,

02:36:44 ►

he’s been living

02:36:45 ►

there for three years, and it’s very easy to typecast Buddhist doctrine as encouraging this

02:36:51 ►

kind of cool detachment, even an apathy. Many people have kind of straw-manned Buddhism for

02:36:59 ►

that, that is apathetic, but Leonard nips this in the bud at the protagonist’s response to the abbess’s

02:37:07 ►

question. What have you learnt here? And in response, he cries. The protagonist cries and

02:37:16 ►

says, I will miss you. So this monastery was a treasured haven. We are reminded of the restless and unfocused

02:37:26 ►

ghost of his past,

02:37:28 ►

and we feel trepidation

02:37:29 ►

when the image of the dragon

02:37:31 ►

returns, having been

02:37:33 ►

used previously to describe a nuclear

02:37:35 ►

explosion.

02:37:38 ►

Now the mouth

02:37:40 ►

into which he steps,

02:37:42 ►

with only a hair’s breadth

02:37:44 ►

deviation,

02:37:47 ►

but still in tune?

02:37:57 ►

Thus concludes chapter two of the Rose of Parasolsus podcast. We hope you enjoyed listening.

02:38:02 ►

We’ll leave you here with another message from Leonard, reading a letter he received recently from Brother David, which offers some solace in these dark times and his thoughts on the pandemic. Once again, I just received an email from Brother David.

02:38:22 ►

This is, of course, in the height of the pandemic.

02:38:26 ►

And so I leave you with this message about handling this crisis from Brother David.

02:38:34 ►

And this is to all of us.

02:38:37 ►

Here it is.

02:38:40 ►

I know that you are doing everything in your power to bring healing to the suffering.

02:38:49 ►

This pandemic is causing great suffering to the world, but is also offering a great gift.

02:39:10 ►

If we also avail ourselves of the gift, we will be able to help a new world emerge from this crisis.

02:39:15 ►

The gift is silence.

02:39:24 ►

The whole week of Easter is a time of great silence in the Christian monastic tradition.

02:39:29 ►

Silence is the face of suffering.

02:39:36 ►

Silence, embracing suffering in one big healing embrace.

02:39:43 ►

As an aside, Brother David included a photograph he took of a statue called the Duomo of Taramina in Sicily, which

02:39:49 ►

shows both suffering and healing. And he all, the deep joy of silent communion.

02:40:11 ►

Your Brother David.

02:40:16 ►

And so friends, I close also with Brother David’s statements.

02:40:21 ►

Let us help a new world emerge.

02:40:27 ►

This is Leonard. Thank you. and Kat Lakey under some rather difficult circumstances, and as such, it really isn’t

02:41:05 ►

my place to intrude on their program. However, well, I just can’t keep my ideas to myself right

02:41:12 ►

now, so I apologize in advance to Kat, Leonard, and everyone else involved for stepping in here.

02:41:20 ►

Now, in tonight’s live salon, we’ll be discussing the sort of Niagara of crises that we are facing right now.

02:41:27 ►

You know, ten days ago, when I first heard the message from Brother David that Leonard just left us with,

02:41:33 ►

well, it made perfect sense to me.

02:41:35 ►

At the time, the bulk of the news was about the pandemic.

02:41:39 ►

But then, a rogue policeman in Minneapolis murdered Mr. George Floyd and murdered him in cold blood.

02:41:46 ►

You know the rest of the story and it’s currently unfolding. Well, there are many thoughts that I

02:41:52 ►

have about this that I would like to share with you, but I’m going to leave that until tonight’s

02:41:57 ►

live salon, which by the way you can find a link to on our discord server and you’ll find that link

02:42:02 ►

over on our home page at psychedelicsalon.com.

02:42:06 ►

The one thought that I would like to leave you with right now, however, has to do with

02:42:11 ►

Brother David’s message to us. While I do understand his advice about staying silent,

02:42:17 ►

and while I recognize the fact that compared with an enlightened person such as Brother David,

02:42:23 ►

my personal opinion isn’t really worth very much.

02:42:26 ►

But nonetheless, I have a gut feeling that,

02:42:29 ►

well, maybe after seeing what’s going on with racial hatred and injustice here in the States,

02:42:34 ►

well, he might revise his thinking about silence just a little bit.

02:42:38 ►

In my opinion, silence about racial inequality is what has brought us to this point in time.

02:42:44 ►

I, for one, refuse to remain

02:42:46 ►

silent anymore about police brutality against black people in the United States. This isn’t

02:42:51 ►

something new. For example, during the past two decades, almost 200 people have been killed by

02:42:58 ►

police just in Minnesota. And my guess is that the number is much higher in some of the other 49 states.

02:43:10 ►

And that’s why I agree with the protesters who are carrying signs that say, silence equals death.

02:43:15 ►

I believe that right now is a time for all of us to stand up and be counted.

02:43:24 ►

Speak up, peacefully demonstrate, and work with your local community to make this a better place to raise our children and grandchildren.

02:43:31 ►

In other words, act like the intelligent, caring human being you are. We all are, in fact, so let’s show it. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Namaste, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

652 - The Rose of Paracelsus – Chapter 2

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Program Notes

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