Joan Sutherland: On Awakening with Zen Koans

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Megan Rundel: What a complete pleasure and delight it is to be here with my teacher and dear companion, Joan Sutherland, and to celebrate the release of her new book, Through Forest of Every Color: Awakening with Zen Koans, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

Joan Sutherland: Hi Megan. It's great to see you. Thank you very much for doing this with me.

Megan: Yeah, this is gonna be fun. So, Joan, I thought maybe we could just start, for people who aren't familiar with Zen, maybe you could just say a little bit about the Zen tradition and how it's different from other Buddhist traditions?

Joan: Well, first, I have to do a little thing here which is, I don't so much think of myself as Zen anymore, because of the evolution of the way that we sort of hold the koans, but I think of myself as a koans teacher and that has threads from Zen and also threads from Chan, which is the Chinese origin of koans, actually. “Chan” And “Zen” are the same words pronounced differently in the two languages. And they are quite different- that’s a big question. And the thing I want to say about that for right now is that it's a practice that works with the dynamic quality of the heart and mind. It's a practice of inquiry, and so it has different forms of meditation than other schools of Buddhism.

If you want, I can read just a little bit from the beginning of the book that kind of introduces where it comes from and how it is its own thing. So, would it be a good time to just start with that?

Megan: Okay. Yeah. --Joan: Okay.**

Joan: And again, Chan is the Chinese pronunciation of the word pronounced Zen in Japanese.

--reading** “Koans study emerged in Chan about a thousand years ago. The scholar Jinhua Jia describes Chan’s shift in emphasis, as one from pacifying, cultivating and contemplating the mind to letting the mind be free.”

That's my deepest answer to your question about what the difference is.

--continues reading** “‘Koans introspection,’ as this new practice came to be called, was transmitted through East and Southeast Asia- particularly Korea, Japan and Vietnam- and from there it is spread to many parts of the world. It's been in North America for less than 100 years. This is a living tradition, evolving through eras, landscapes and cultures. The koans have always pulled for the genius of each new group of people who take them up.

“In the beginning, Chan teachers and students were having conversations during which one or more of the participants would have an opening. Then they discovered that if other people, who could be quite distant in time and space, brought the story of that conversation into their meditation, they could experience the same thing the participants in the original conversation had.

“Not a lesson or even an understanding about awakening- but awakening itself. Records of these conversations were the first koans. Pretty soon, teachers were trying out bits of poems and songs, quotes from scriptures, common sayings and folktales, borrowing from both classical literature and popular culture, and the same thing continued to happen. How it happens is the dark mystery of the Koan tradition.”

So that's the tradition walking toward us in a way, and very briefly here, this is us walking toward the tradition. 

--continues reading** “We set out with life shaped like wondering. In the beginning, we're looking perhaps for some kind of answer. An answer to the shared questions, about life, death and meaning. Or to the question uniquely formed within our own lives. The thing that aches on some days and causes a sudden pain on others. Or we’re propelled by intimations of another world inside this one, a softly glowing world in which the defining characteristics are not limitation and repetition, but something more spacious and at ease.

“How do we get closer to that? Perhaps, we have both kinds of questions at the same time, which barely leaves energy to pack for the journey. Eventually, perhaps, we lay those questions down in hope or desperation on a particular doorstep, and we're met not by an answer, but by another question. Perhaps we pick the new question up. It comes with a simple tag. Here's another way to ask your question- a way people have been asking your question for a long time. Keep company with it, and you'll soon notice it emits a soft glow in whose light your questions look different. The questions you carry with you look like a pilgrimage. The question you've been given starts to look like shelter.”

Megan: --pause** Thank you for that. That's really...just lovely and inspiring and offers hope for all of us in our practice.

Joan: --laughs** Thank you.

Megan: I'd love to just ask you a few questions about koans, especially for people who might not be too familiar with them, koans have a reputation for being puzzling or mysterious or impenetrable. There's an idea that koans are meant to short circuit our minds, can you speak to that?

Joan: Yeah, I think that there's something certainly true about their meaning to get underneath our normal cognition, our normal ways of thinking about things and feeling about things. So, they can begin by seeming puzzling or strange, or they don't make sense in the usual ways we think of making sense. But that's... that’s on the way to something else. The thing it's on the way to is getting, again, underneath the use of our usual habits of heart and mind, so that all of us can come to the question. Our histories, our bodies, our psyches, our intuitions, you know, all of that could come in, and we take up the question and we come into relationship with the question with our whole selves, rather than having the cognitive mind be in control or the only way we're relating to it.

So when that happens, when we engage the whole self in that way, they don't seem so puzzling anymore. There's something true about them from that perspective. They might still- Some of them are quite mysterious, and they might still be mysterious, but the mystery feels intriguing and inviting and interesting. Certainly, also sometimes perplexing and discouraging and all of that, but if we stay with it, we get to intriguing and mysterious, in a good way.

Megan: Yeah, thank you. I may want to maybe just dig a little deeper into some of what you're saying. Do koans help us with our emotional life? I mean, are they mostly sort of philosophical or spiritual, or are they actually relevant to my sorrow, my fear, my anger? The things that are happening, you know, for me and my own life that cause me, you know, distress?

Joan: Yeah, absolutely, they are. I mean, the way we work with koans is that we bring our whole selves to them, whatever is going on with us. And they operate at a lot of different levels, but one of them is certainly the level of the emotional life.

There's a piece in the new book, which is about a woman who was filled with grief, she lost her partner at a young age and came to a monastery looking for some kind of help with the grief she was feeling. And what she came to find was that grief was the Buddha of that time in her life. When she asked about, “What is this? What is this practice?” Her teacher said to her, “The heart of the one who asks is Zen.”

So, there's that sense of exactly where your heart is, even if it's full of grief, that's where you begin and that is Zen. So, she comes into relationship with the Buddha of grief in her life. It's not about it curing her, or her curing it, but keeping company with it and listening, and being willing to stay in silence, and be patient and find out what it's calling from her. There's a beautiful story that I tell in the book about what happens as she sits in the dark with the grief Buddha, and how in the end it opens something very large in her. 

Megan: --pause** Yeah, that's wonderful and definitely, you know, in accordance to my own experience of koan work as well. Maybe a little bit later, we can talk more about kind of how koans actually work in a person's life.

Joan: Great.

Megan: Yeah. But just another question about the tradition, you know, the koan tradition arose in the time of monasticism, patriarchy, and racial homogeneity. So, I'm wondering how is the tradition evolving in the west to speak to our lives, that includes issues of lay life, gender, sexuality, power, and inequality?

Joan: I just want to acknowledge that we're asking really, really big questions and so my answers are going to sort of have a broad-brush quality, that probably isn't really going to do them justice, you know, so broad-brush speaking: the koans did begin in a particular context, there's no question about that.

We mostly in the west tended to receive them at a time of- in a kind of conservative way. And by conservative, I mean with a sense of preserving things as, you know, as closely as possible. I think that that's led to some misconceptions about the koans because I think that, although they come to us from particular cultures and have much of those cultures embedded in them, we have our own relationship to them. We are developing that relationship and bringing our questions, which will be different questions because we're different people in a different time. We're bringing our questions to the koans and thereby enlarging the tradition, I think, as the tradition enlarges us- it's a sort of mutual enlargement going on.

It's beautiful for me to see that. I think that the koans lend themselves to that because on the big questions that you just kind of listed there, they don't have sort of bullet-lists about how to think about them. They don't have doctrines about how to think about those really important things. What they do have are suggestions about ways to inquire into things. Suggestions about ways to explore things that are different and sometimes problematic and painful, and sometimes wonderful. So, that's their power. You can take them to any question. You can bring any question to them and they will give you ways of engaging with those questions rather than telling you how you ought to feel about them, what you want to do about them.

Megan: Yeah, yeah, that's lovely. And I love that it's, you know, as you said, a kind of a living tradition, and one that we're shaping as it’s shaping us. --Joan: Yeah.** It feels really true. It's alive, you know?

Joan: Yeah, it's alive. There's a great Zhaozhou koan: “What is meditation?” “It's not meditation.” “Why isn't it meditation?” “It's alive, it's alive.”

Megan: Yeah, yeah. As you mentioned when we were speaking before, you know, one of the ways we can tell it is alive is that- you and I, two women, koan meditation teachers- are here talking. --Joan: Mhm.** And that's a western phenomenon mostly, and a really lovely one, and I think that among many other things, you know, women are adding our voices and our lives to the koan conversation.

Joan: Yeah, there are some traditions- I'm most familiar with in China and Japan and so I'll speak a little bit about Korea as well. There are certainly some traditions of women teachers, and women teaching women, and they're so precious, you know? And one of the reasons they're so precious is because they're rare. Our knowledge and understanding of them is based on scant, precious, rare information. So, one of the most exciting things for me and my teaching life has been way that the voices of women have come into the tradition and changed it in ways that I think are probably good for all of us. 

Megan: Yeah, I think so too. So, in your book, you know, you talk about how many people associate Zen practice with enlightenment. And yet you describe a process that happens in Koan work that you call endarkenment, can you describe endarkenment and how it might interplay with enlightenment? 

Joan: Yeah, okay. So again, broad-brush warning --laughs** but it is in the book, it's explained more in the book. Enlightenment, I think, is a real thing, and I feel like it's gotten kind of obscured behind clouds of our projections and our longings about it.

So, I started really just thinking about, “Well, what am I actually experiencing in my own practice? What are my students experiencing in their practices?” and it became really clear to me that, in general, if enlightenment has to do with experiences that show us what we know, they open us to a kind of bright insight and a kind of depth of experience of the world. It's about what we come to know, what we come to have confidence in.

There's a complementary process, which is endarkenment, which is coming to understand that at the center of the temple there's a deep well that we can't see to the bottom of. There is a mystery at the heart of things. That's a particularly Chan idea which came out of Daoism. Daoism talks about the origin of everything in the dark mysterious. That sense of a dark mysterious at the center of everything came into the koans and is very much there. It's really important to understand what you can't know. As important as it is to understand what you can know. There's something quite beautiful about exploring the dark and exploring what we can't know, and coming to rest in that and trust that.

So, that's one part of endarkenment, that sense of the, you know, the vast unseen ocean that we ride on the very top of. The other sense of it is that it's about opening our senses to the great broken heart of the world. That's a big part of this process, too. It's not just about becoming certain about things, knowing things, and understanding things. It's also about really pressing our own hearts up against the great broken heart of the world and saying, “Yes, this is it, too. This is the great matter. I am not separate from this and it is not separate from me. And how then do I live in this world that is both glorious and devastating at the same time?” and not turning away from any of that.

Megan: Lovely. Yeah. Thank you. --pause** So Joan, I thought we might go just a little off script here- --laughs**

Joan: --laughs** The koans are fundamentally off script, so that's great.

Megan: Yeah, yeah. You know what I'm thinking, people might be wondering: What does koan practice actually look like these days? Like, how do people do this? If somebody's interested in koan practice... How does that manifest and what does a person do? How does it work in a person's life? --Joan: Mhm.**

So, I thought, maybe we could just talk about our relationship as an example of that, and how it's unfolded, and how we've worked together over the decades. I can talk a little bit about how that has intersected also with my development as a psychologist. These are different ways of exploring the mind. Maybe we can also talk about similarities and differences in the approach to suffering, and the nature of the mind.

Joan: That sounds great. So why don't you start? You know... You were a very young woman when we first met! So, what was up with that? What were you doing?

Megan: Yeah, I was. I think it was the mid-90s when we first met. I had already been studying Zen with another teacher for a little bit. Then we met, and I think made a really great connection and I was so thrilled. Well, I just adored you, but I was also so thrilled to be able to work with a woman teacher. --Joan: Mhm.** Especially at that time, it was a very rare and precious thing. It felt to me like an amazing opportunity. I just had all of the big questions that I think bring many people to spiritual practice. My own suffering, but also just the kind of questions about, “What is this life? What is the nature of things? What happens when we die?” ...Just a real calling to the questions.

So, we took up koan practice and it felt like, in the beginning, a way of pouring my questions and my longing, and focusing them into the question of the koan. It was a great relief to have a place to put a lot of longing, and a lot of drive, and a lot of... a lot of energy. It felt like you were able to help me in the idiom of the koans. Not just to answer the questions, but to maybe ask more interesting questions. Or to explore the questions themselves, not just getting to answers- but to really... sort of enlarge the whole field.

Joan: So let's talk a little bit about what that looked like, you know, which was: we would be in retreat. I would be doing work in the room, which is basically where I would just sit in the little room, usually in some out-building on the edge of the retreat center- which I think is where you are now. --There’s** an altar with a candlelight and we would start before dawn and- when I say all of this, I have to say that it feels like one of the great privileges of my life. That I would sit in that room next to that altar and people would come in and talk to me, you know, people like you. How amazing that was. So, you'd been out sitting in the meditation hall, and you would come in for work in the room. What made you decide that you wanted to come in and do work in the room? Was there like an impetus? 

Megan: Sometimes I thought I had some insight and sometimes you would clear up that delusion for me -- Both laugh --. I think sometimes about the koan where the student says to the teacher, you know, “I'm pecking from the inside, you peck from the outside, please.” I was working hard, you know, on my retreat and my meditation cushion and you know, I felt like I needed a peck from you. --Joan: Mhm.** Sometimes I had something to share or to say. Sometimes I just needed to make contact. Sometimes you could help me sort of deepen, or shift directions. You know, as we worked on koans, it was also very much about a relationship that was forming between us, and that felt really like an essential part of it as well.

Joan: Yeah, for sure. So you begin with the first koan. Everybody begins with a first koan- if you're doing a kind of formal, individual koan study- and you stay with that first koan, for most people, for quite a good while until something opens up.

And one of the things I talk about in the book is that I think of enlightenment as a very particular thing, which is a kind of a experience that happens with that first koan. When something really opens up. And then from there, you go to other koans. In our curriculum, there's 750 of them, so there's a long way to go, and each one is different. Each one has its own quality and its own flavor in it and it illuminates a certain part of the whole field of awakening.

So, we should probably just stop for a second and say that enlightenment and endarkenment for me- this is a little weird idea- are part of this arc of awakening that each of us is on. It takes the shape of a human life, and it lasts as long as a human life. There are enlightening experiences, there are endarkening experiences within that, but the awakening is the long arc of things. That’s what we shared in our relationship. One of the things that is so beautiful about the work in the room relationship to me is that it's a conversation, whose one subject is your awakening. You know, the student's awakening. How wonderful that is.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we did many long retreats together and met often daily during those retreats, working on koans. We also sometimes met outside of retreat and had other meetings that were working on koans, and we met in other contexts. We had a meditation community that we are part of. Many other kinds of activities, and ways of being together, and learning and growing together in the context of community.

Joan: Yeah, indeed.

Megan: You know, during those first years that we were working together, I started my doctoral program in Clinical Psychology. So, part of my experience was just a very deep dive into the nature of suffering, the nature of healing, and the nature of the mind... from two very different perspectives... It took me a long time to, kind of, grok all of that, you know? Because they were coming... the sort of koan perspective, and then the western psychological perspective, are both incredibly valuable and they're different. So, I'm wondering if maybe we could talk about that difference.

Joan: Yeah, sure. Do you want to start?

Megan: Oh boy. Well, you know, I've come to see them sort of, like, two wings of a bird. For me, I'll just speak for myself, they've both been essential. They offer just sort of different takes, sort of like two sides of a coin.

The western psychology perspective- and I went on to study psychoanalysis and depth perspectives- really involves getting to know your individual human mind, your habits, your history, your unconscious, and to do personal healing work. That was something that was, you know, really essential for me, and I think is really valuable to many, many people.

The Zen tradition, I would say, focuses on enlarging the self. It's not that we never focus or we don't focus on our individual suffering or our individual story, we certainly can. But it's in service of kind of coming to see it from a bigger perspective. One in which our mind is just one little shard of a vast awareness that we partake of. That awareness is not actually personal. It's something that we share with the whole world around us. So, maybe you could expand upon that in your language.

Joan: Well, I like your thing, with the two wings of the bird. One of the ways I think about the two wings is, psychology has a lot to do- in my amateur experience- with finding what story you're in and sometimes finding the right story is really, really important.

When you can go, “Oh, I'm Psyche in the underworld,” then, suddenly there's a way to approach what's happening in your life. A way to hold it, a way to explore it. And you have the wisdom of all these... all these traditions: the psychological tradition, the mythic tradition, the poetic tradition, all of that that have addressed what it's like to be Psyche in the underworld and that can be incredibly helpful. It's another way of saying the same thing you said, which is that it's an exploration of a particular person and a particular life.

Then, the koans do this thing where it's like, “What's it like not to have a story at all? What's it like not to have a position?” and that's a really different way of looking at it. So, the koan question would be, “Who's in the underworld?” and it becomes an exploration of that “who”, which you were just talking about. That “who” which is the larger sense of things.

I don't think that one is true and the other isn't. I think they're both true simultaneously and that... as enlightenment and endarkenment do, they amplify, complete, ,and heal each other in some ways. So, I think that they're a really powerful thing.

I think the koans, in particular, acknowledge that in the sense that you've got that large view- that big view- then you also have, what is technically called Tathāgata, which is to really see the particularity of each being in each thing that you encounter. It's my favorite. They use words like ‘suchness’ and ‘thussness’: the suchness of someone, the thusness of something. But I like James Joyce's the ‘whatness’ of a thing.

So you look at the whatness of a thing- which is the thing that makes that thing, that person completely particular and themselves- and that calls from us, a certain obligation to really see and take place with the whatness of another person. And that large perspective- where we see that we're kin in a very big way with that other person- that calls something else from us.

A way we used to talk about it a long time ago was that the large perspective- the perspective of oneness and interpermeation and all of that- is kind of “We all have the same last name.” We come to understand that we have the same last name. And then the Tathāgata perspective, the whatness perspective, is “And each of us has our own given name that's different.” Both of those things are true, and both of those things have a claim on us, in terms of how we treat each person and each thing that we encounter.

Megan: Yeah. Yeah, it's so true. Maybe another thing to say about my experience in studying koans, is that I was always, and our tradition is a lay tradition. I've never been a priest or a monastic. And as we were doing koan study together, at the very same time, I was working, being a parent and managing a household. So, you know I was very involved in the particularities of life, the dilemmas and the strains of regular life.

I found that what the koans offered me, I think you've talked about it, the koans as a way of, sort of, tossing ourselves back and forth between the world of the vastness and the regular world that we live in, so that they just interpermeate each other. That’s really true to my experience. At first, it felt like these are kind of separate domains. There's my spiritual life, my Zen life, and then there's my regular life. But the koans really helped me to find the ways that the koans were speaking, not to some abstract principle, but actually to my lived experience.

Joan: You can bring the koans with you, you can carry them around with you and bring them throughout, not only your waking life, but your sleeping life, your dreaming of life as well. We talked about keeping company with the koans so that they're there all the time and part of our lives all the time. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah and it's something that people, I think, may not really understand about koans is that they're extremely relational. Most of the koans are records of conversations. --Joan: Right.** And that's not an accident. --Joan: Right.** No, these are exchanges between people. --Joan: Mhm.** When a person comes with their most important question... That's a record of a moment when something shifted and it happened in the context of a relationship.

Joan: Relationships between people and also relationships with other things in the natural world. I mean, there are stories of people suddenly seeing cherry blossoms. I know, from my own experience, it can be, hearing a cook cough from the kitchen or, you know, a car backfire on the road. There's always a call-and-response. There's always a relationship. And because it's larger than human- although that's the most common- it gives us this sense of being in relationship with the whole world and all the beings of the world.

I think particularly right now that's tremendously important, there's a kind of radical empathy in the koans. There's the relationship aspect that you're talking about and the way that awakening always happens in a relationship. There's also that we're thrown in and out of the bodies in the lives of all these other beings. Of animals, trees, buses and everything and so... That's the way the self is dealt with. You were talking about how it enlarges things. Because we realize we swap in and out with all these other lives and see... “Yeah, it's that big.” It's all of that. 

Megan: Yeah, yeah. It makes me think about how... I think in the beginning of my practice, awakening seemed like something that would be personal. Like I, Megan, perhaps could become awakened. 

Joan: Yeah.

Megan: I think something that shifts, and this is something you talk about in the book, is the feeling that awakening is not primarily a personal process, but it's something that the whole world is engaged in. There's a way that the world is awakening. And perhaps, maybe, we can hope that humans can be engaged in a process of awakening.

So, I guess the question for you- and you talked about this a bit in the book- but maybe you could talk about how we hold awakening... Either personal awakening, or the awakening in the world... When things seem to be devolving?

Joan: Yeah, yeah. I've been thinking a lot about that because I do think that each of our individual awakenings belongs to the world in some way. We've just been talking about how it happens in relationships... That's the world coming to get us. Whatever that ‘turning word’ was, as we say in the tradition, that's the world coming to get us. To bring us into that awakening of the world.

That's becoming complicated to hold given what's happening in the world. So, I've been thinking a lot about how when you go through your personal awakening, for most people, there are times of tremendous turmoil and difficulty, because when you go through that gate, you can't leave anything behind or your experience isn’t complete. So, all of you comes through the gate: all the messy parts, too, all the difficult parts, too. Sometimes, there's a lot of purification that has to happen before you can get there and it can be really, really tough.

I can't think of anybody who hasn't had times of tremendous struggle, where the fault lines in their character and their own difficulties and their own agonies come up and get raised by the process. The process is not an escape from those things. It's a way of including all of that. If we think about the agony, sometimes, of our own awakening, the sense that sometimes we go through periods where nothing's happening... It just seems like it's gone completely fallow... That has to happen because all of that has to come. It has to be part of the process. You can't pick and choose, and you can't leave anything out. Somehow, I feel like the world is at this incredible threshold where all the really hard, difficult, painful, devastating stuff is right here. Just like with a personal experience.

I don't know what's going to happen, I don't know. I don't know if we're going to be able to bring it all through the gate but boy, it's astonishing to me that it’s all here, including the very things that need the most care, the most attention.

Megan: Yeah. Maybe, if I can pick up on that and expand it a little bit, in the chapter in your book, called ‘The Natural World of Koans’, you talk about koans as a call from the earth that invites our response.

So how can koans help us in this time of climate catastrophe? Both, perhaps with how to manage our despair? But also, how to take skillful action? And any other kinds of help or solace that koans might offer us at this very particular time?

Joan: Yeah. I think that that's so multifaceted and I feel like I'm just at the beginning of my understanding about that, so I'll just mention a couple of things I can see here at the beginning.

Part of it has to do with this sense of radical empathy and the sense of koans kind of make it impossible to turn away... It's really hard to be in denial --laughs** when you're engaged in a koan practice because you're aware all the time. Both of how alive everything is, also how threatened it is right now. So there's a kind of holding us up against it that I think they do.

I would say, I think that they help us with our despair by saying, “What's it like to feel neither hope nor despair? What if you don't have a position at all about this? What's that like?” And that goes against everything in American culture- mainstream American culture. But it's really important to ask, “What is it like to be without a position? If you come not knowing, what happens? What becomes possible? What might you see that's really difficult to see if you have a position?”

That's another thing that koans give us: a way to ask questions all the time. A way to hold things, provisionally. A way to wonder. A way to not... not have the necessity to land on an outcome or a conclusion. To just hang out in not knowing and uncertainty, and be okay with that even though it might be really uncomfortable. The longer we can do that, the more things become possible. The more things become apparent because we haven't closed down the inquiry too soon.

Then another completely different thing that koans give us, is that solace you mentioned, that there's that sense of the really big view. One of the koans that’s dearest to me is a line from a poem that talks about a tree older than the forest it stands in. There's that sense of that tree older than the forest, that we can lean back against any time. You know, when things feel so painful, difficult and impossible, there is a kind of solace there that then enables us to... move forward again.So those are just some of the ways that I'm seeing that koans can help. And again, I'm just at the beginning of that, I think.

Megan: Yeah, wonderful, and very much in accord with my experience, as well. Thank you for saying that so beautifully. I don't know if I want to say hope exactly, but that kind of enlarged view keeps possibilities open.

Joan: Yeah, I mean, you know, the questions for me become very simple like, “Well, what else would you be doing?” --laughs** You know? Like, you don't need to feel either hope or despair to ask, “Well how else would I be spending my time, except trying to do what I can about this? Regardless of the outcome, without knowing what the outcomes are going to be, would I be doing something different if I knew what the outcome was going to be?” That's an interesting question.

Megan: Thanks. Yeah.

Megan: So just to shift gears for a moment here. You know, my connection to CIIS is that I am a graduate of the certificate program in psychedelic studies and therapy. You know, many people are interested in psychedelics for healing and you're probably aware that they're being used more and more therapeutically these days. But, there's also with us a spiritual sensibility that part of what psychedelics can do is to kind of open us up to that larger world than is easily available to many people... That a lot of our suffering comes from the sort of ‘tight knot of self’ that we construct; that psychedelics can be a way of opening that up. --Joan: Mhm.**

I'm curious if you have any thoughts about whether or not the kind of realms that psychedelics can open to people in service of healing: is that similar to the territory that is opened in meditation? 

Joan: Yeah, I think it absolutely can be... I'm speaking completely as an amateur here, but yeah, I do. I do think it can be. You and I have spoken about how sometimes psychedelics can break something open that is really stuck, that meditation sometimes can't for some people and that it can be really helpful. The one thing I would say out of my own experience with both is, there's a kind of fantasy that koan meditation is about getting enlightened and then you're done. So it's the big bang and then that's the point, you reach the point. But actually, it’s about what happens after that. It's about the interpermeating of that large vision with your particular life. How do those things go together, and then make something new in the world? Both parts of it: your life, and this sort of larger way that you now have of seeing things. Both are necessary and come together. So, usually 749 of those 750 koans are about that --laughs**. About that bringing of those things together and turning awakening into matter.

My wondering about psychedelics would be: What's the equivalent practice of that? Given how important it is, not just to have the breakthrough, but to make the breakthrough your life, to make it part of your life? And maybe they have a way of working together in that way?

Megan: I think it’s such a great point. We talk in the psychedelic therapy world about integration. As in meditation, you know, sometimes people have glimpses and breakthroughs, an ability to see something much bigger, but then it can get lost. It can fade, it can feel very separate from ordinary life. So, the task with psychedelic therapy is: how do we make that a living ongoing process, so that can stay alive and continue to inform everyday life? Relationships, the sense of meaning, and the sense of oneself? I’ve really come to see meditation practice as a really essential part of psychedelic integration.

Joan: That’s great. Thank you.

Megan: So I guess just following up on that, I’m just wondering if you think that there’s any role for psychedelics in Zen? It feels a little out there, I know, but...

Joan: Um... --pauses in thought** Yeah. I can see it working in the kinds of ways that you’re talking about. One of the things you and I have talked about is how, if we’re being really honest, a lot of the extreme physical and psychological stuff that happens in a retreat- you know, you don’t sleep, you don’t have time to do anything, you sit and sit and sit past human endurance, and then you have some idiot teacher challenging everything you have to say- there's a lot of psychological and physical press that’s put on you in a retreat. And that’s got to be some kind of equivalent to something that might happen with psychedelics.

I just would say that I think that you need to have people who are really skilled in both to do it. That would be my one concern. I mean, you’ve been in retreats; you know that people have operatic experiences- I mean really big things happen. They need containment, they need a safe container, so that experience can be lived out completely.

That’s a big deal. It really takes care and attention to do that right. As long as that’s happening, I think it’s really interesting.

The other thing I would say too is in meditation, you know, there are lots of kinds of visional experiences one has- one sees things, and hears things, and comes to experience things- and there's always a kind of balance between really honoring the images that come to you in meditation- “Oh wow. What is this?” welcoming them, and working with them- and then not getting derailed by them, stuck by them. So, they come, they have their life. You have a relationship with them, and then they go. What's the psychedelic equivalent of that? That you don't get attached to the phenomenon, but have the relationship with the phenomenon and then keep going.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. That expending, that experience of surrender and letting go is really crucial, as is the experience of containment to do that. --Joan: Yeah.** Thank you.

Megan: I would love to have you do another reading from your book.

Joan: So, we've been talking about koans --laughs**, how about we do a little bit of a koan? Interspersed in the book are koans, and then my commentaries on them. This is a koan that's called, ‘Falls Into A Well’. The commentary I have on it is the way that a koan can change over time in your life. That they're not static. That it's not a kind of one time big-bang, where you get an answer and that stays with you forever. Actually, your relationship with koans can evolve and change because it's not just about the koan. It's about the relationship between the koan and your life. Your life is going to change, and the koan will change with it. So, this is an example of that.

This is from Baling Haojian, and he has a series of these questions and answers. The question is, “What is the way?” The answer is, “A clear sighted person falls into a well.” This is my commentary on it.

--reading from her book** “The Chinese teacher Baling Haojian created a set of three questions and answers that were known as his ‘turning words’. This is the middle couplet. Here, it serves as an example of how your relationship with koan can change over time. When I first heard this koan, I burst out laughing because, of course, all the koan practice in the world won't save you from making mistakes. Really, everything we do is a mistake because we can't possibly know all the results of our choices. In an absolute sense, there's no way to get any decision right, so the question becomes more like deciding on the most beautiful, thoughtful, generous, mistake you can make under the circumstances, and then paying attention to what happens.

“Pretty soon what stepped into the foreground of this koan is the idea that, quite often in life, wells are what present themselves to us, wells are what happens. We are surprised, ambushed sometimes by events. The ground that seems solid under our feet suddenly gives way and we have to make a choice that yesterday we didn't know existed. Life, it turns out, is full of wells and potholes and interesting portals and sometimes being clear-sighted means falling into them.

“Sometimes falling into them is the most generous thing to do. People you care about are in trouble. A planet is in trouble. Do you cross the street or do you fall in? Some people spend a lot of time at the lip of the well. Peering over. Dropping stones in to see how deep it is. Trying to find a way around the opening. Or thinking that they're not ready- that they need to get their lives together, or learn to repel. This has its own pain. If a well presents itself, which mistake do you make?

“My attention shifted from the well to the falling. I thought of Pang Lingzhao whose father tripped and fell one day. Lingzhao threw herself down next to him and when he asked her what she was doing, she explained, “I saw you fall, so I'm helping.” May we all be blessed with one person whose idea of helping is to accompany us as we trip and fall, with a sympathy that is unafraid, unselfconscious, and funny.

“Then there's Musō Soseki, who went off into the mountains to concentrate completely on his meditation. One night, he finally decided to go to bed after sitting in his garden until late. He didn't bother to light his lantern because he knew the way back even in the dark. As he stood up, he put his hand out to steady himself on a wall that was supposed to be there, but it wasn't there and he fell over. He just kept falling all the way through, right into emptiness. He started to laugh, and the laughter didn't stop for a long time.

“Eventually, the idea of falling took on vaster proportions. Lifetime after a lifetime, we fall through the universe, through solar systems and interstellar gas clouds. Now we're falling together through a little planet in one of those solar systems. We find that it's made of carbon and hydrogen. Tenderness and regret. Light, dark and twilight. It may not be like this everywhere; life as a molecule in one of those interstellar gas clouds might be ecstatic, surfing the currents of space. Astronomers say that when the clouds bump into each other, they make a sound like chiming. It's not always ecstasy and chiming here; the invitation this particular world extends is a complicated one. But in the big picture, we're falling, not through solitary wells, but together, accepting the particular invitation of this world together.

One day, we will fall completely through this world, back into the darkness, and whatever comes next. In some Scottish churches, small models of ships are hung among the rafters to commemorate losses at sea. Gazing up at them, I thought of all the souls who sank through the waters, all the way to the bottom, and then farther to continue their voyage in the sky.

As the light dims in your human eyes for the last time, what will you say of the life that's passing? What has joined its molecules with yours, carved itself into your bones? As the last well presents itself, what will fall with you from this rocky little planet?”

Megan: --pause** Yeah, wow. Thank you. That's so lovely and really so helpful, you know. As you know, I'm speaking from Meditation Retreat and so many mistakes are happening --Joan chuckles** and it's so easy to get kind of tense about it, and to feel like something terrible has happened. It's such a relief, and such an expansion, to make the most beautiful mistake possible and to find all the possibilities there. So, it's just, you know, news you can use... Thank you for that.

Joan: Do you remember our retreat manual had as its epigraph something that Samuel Beckett used to say? “Just fail better.” --chuckles**

Megan: --laughs** Working on it, for sure. --Joan: Yeah.** Yeah, yeah yeah, great thanks. Well, I see that we're coming towards the end of our time. And well, first of all, I want to just thank you, Joan, for all of your teachings and all of the inspiration that you've offered to so many people and to the tradition. You've really made a tremendous offering to all of us with your teaching, your words, and your example. I'm really grateful for that and so grateful to have this book. It's such a tremendous offering and resource. So, thank you.

Maybe, just the last question is: what's been on your mind since you wrote this book? Is there anything that has been coming to you and is feeling important to you now? 

Joan: Thank you Megan. I really appreciate the depth of this conversation and the warmth of it. It's really great and the last chapter in the book is called, ‘Dream It On’, and it's a way of saying, “Okay, this is all yours now. Dream it on,” and I certainly see you doing that, and it makes my heart very glad to see the way that you're dreaming it on.

Writing the book had an interesting and unexpected effect on me, which is that I felt like I had requited my duty to the ancestors. I had I completed something about teaching. In doing that, it freed me to go deeply into- to use of wonderful word that someone brought in- into my idiosyncratic relationship with the koans. I'm really focused now on how the koans might accompany us in climate crisis and in, you know, all the social justice sues, and everything that we're dealing with. I think maybe primarily with the climate crisis, but all of it.

So, not having to kind of explain or take into account the whole tradition, but really looking at bringing the whole tradition to that one question: How might it accompany us and help us as we live through this unprecedented time that we've already begun to live through? I do believe the koans have something valuable and supportive and challenging to say about that.

Megan: Yeah, wow. Well, thank you for that and I think many of us look forward to your musings and wisdom and offerings in that respect, in whatever way they are manifest.

Joan: Thank you.

Megan: So thank you again, Joan. It's just such a pleasure and a delight to see you and to talk with you and to make this offering for all the people who are watching. You're an inspiration for my practice and for the practice of so many. Thank you for all that you do.

Joan: Thank you Megan, and have a great retreat. 

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.