Genpo Roshi Interview

Summary:

• Introduction to Zen Master Genpo Mersal: Discusses his background and journey in Zen practice.
• The Role of Zen and Buddhism: Explores how Zen and Buddhism have influenced his life.
• Big Mind Process: Describes the development of the Big Mind Process, which allows participants to have profound spiritual experiences without formal meditation training.
• Journey of Consciousness: Talks about the evolution of consciousness and spiritual awakening.
• Becoming a Zen Master: Shares his path to becoming a Zen Master and the responsibilities it entails.
• Enlightenment and Liberation: Discusses the concepts of enlightenment and liberation in Zen practice.
• Working with the Shadow: Emphasizes the importance of integrating and working with one’s shadow aspects.
• Profound Experiences in Zen Practice: Shares various profound experiences and their impact on his spiritual journey.
• Integration of Feminine Energy: Talks about the struggle and eventual integration of feminine energy in his practice.
• Vulnerability and Unexpected Experiences: Highlights the role of vulnerability and unexpected experiences in spiritual growth.

Full Transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Zen Master Genpo Merzel, also known as Genpo Roshi. And I thought I might just start by reading a few quotes from well-known people about Genpo’s work that are on the homepage of his website. And then we’ll let him speak for himself. Here we go. So, Ken Wilber says, and probably most of you listening to this know who Ken Wilber is, “Let me state this as strongly as I can. The Big Mind Process, founded by Zen Master Genpo Merzel, is arguably the most important and original discovery in the last two centuries of Buddhism. It is an astonishing, original, profound and effective path for waking up or seeing one’s true nature.” Here’s one by Zen Master Bernie Glassman, “By integrating Western psychological insights with Eastern transcendent practice, Big Mind, Big Heart helps bring light to all our voices, those of depression, anger and confusion, as well as those of unity and transcendence. The consciousness that emerges is integrated, free and world-embracing.” And one final quote from Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup series, “I want to really encourage you to get involved in the work of Zen Master Genpo Merzel. Every time I’ve worked with him, I’ve had major breakthroughs and major insights. His Big Mind Process is tremendously valuable because it’s so universal. It works whether someone has been working for 40 years or they’re just starting out.” So I’ve listened to you do your Big Mind thing, and we’ll be talking about that during this interview. I’ve also listened to four or five hours of audio of you over the last week. I do that before I interview each guest. I listen to a lot of stuff on my iPod, usually while I’m brushing my teeth or washing the dishes.

Genpo: How’s your head?

Rick: It’s fine, it’s fine. And I must say that I’ve really enjoyed your sense of humor, your unpretentiousness, your kind of down-to-earth approach and way of dealing with people. It’s very refreshing and what you see is what you get, not any sort of putting-on-airs kind of thing. So I feel like I’ve gotten to know you and it’s been very enjoyable.

Genpo: Well, thank you. It took a few years to climb the mountain. It’s taken almost 40 years to descend it, to be just ordinary and normal.

Rick: Interesting point. I’ve never practiced Zen, but Buddhism and Zen had an important role to play in a couple of critical junctures in my life. When I was 17 I was driving down the road through Westport, Connecticut with three friends in the car, and one of them in the back seat was reading from Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And it suddenly dawned on me that there was such a thing as enlightenment and that’s what it was all about. So that was one thing. And then a year later, after I’d been taking drugs for a year, I was sitting there one night reading Zen Flesh Zen Bones, that little book, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, “Wow, these guys are serious and I’m just screwing around. And if I continue on like this I’m going to be miserable all my life, so that’s it. I’m going to stop taking drugs, learn to meditate and see where it takes me.” And that’s what I did.

Genpo: What year was that?

Rick: That was 1968.

Genpo: Okay, because I thought it was probably around the same time as me. My first awakening experience was actually in February of 1971. So in a month it’ll actually be 40 years, like yourself, which is like 43 years. Also I had done some drugs at that time, but was actually sitting on a mountaintop alone, and my friends had gone off hiking, and I was sitting there contemplating my life when I had this opening experience where I dropped the self, or the self was dropped, and body-mind was dropped off, and I was one with the entire cosmos, the entire universe. It changed my life forever; I’ve never been quite the same. My mother said, “You went insane.” I argued, “No, I think I’ve gone sane.” But that was probably debatable, and at this point I think she was right.

Rick: It’s funny, I was thinking about that today, and I was thinking, over the course of my whole spiritual career, if I look back on it, there were many times when I was out of my blooming mind. Because you go through so much inner transformation, and you tend to disassociate from the so-called real world, and get caught up in your own subjective world. Sometimes you can really get quite eccentric. As you said earlier, it took 40 years to come down the mountain, and it takes a while to integrate all this.

Genpo: It certainly does. I think it’s an amazing journey that we’ve had, and I think we’re all very lucky to live in the age that we do. I think it’s an amazing period of time right now, where so much is accessible. I really believe that the whole evolution of consciousness, that we’re becoming more and more conscious as human beings, and tapping into that, whatever we want to call it. We call it one mind, or cosmic consciousness, or universal consciousness. There’s just so many people around the globe doing that, and I think if we can reach a critical mass of those of us who do want to help others awaken, and others do awaken, we can actually reach the next level of consciousness. Maybe in our lifetime, even.

Rick: Yeah, I agree with you. When you heat up water, it gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and nothing seems to be happening, but as soon as it reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it starts to boil. So we don’t know what temperature we’re at. We’re at 200 right now, for all we know.

Genpo: Or 211!

Rick: Yeah, exactly. So let’s just keep heating the water;

Genpo: That’s right. I kind of liken it to when there’s a truck, the battery won’t start, it’s a big heavy truck, and you’ve got a slight decline, but not much, and you get a bunch of people behind it, and you just push it. If you get enough backs into it, you can get that truck going. And I feel that it’s going to happen. I’m almost 100% positive that it will happen. But we’re going to all have to throw our backs into it, and do our share, whatever our share is, to help awaken the planet.

Rick: Yeah, well you’ve certainly been doing yours. After you had that experience 40 years ago, how long did it last? And what did you do right after that?

Genpo: Well, for one thing, I’m not down yet.

Rick: Good, so it’s still going on.

Genpo: It’s still going on, but I would say that I was high for a good year; I don’t think my feet touched the ground, until I got to the Zen Center in Los Angeles, which was a year and a month later; I got there in March of 1972. And that kind of brought me back to Earth, going to the Zen Center, and really studying with a traditional Zen master; In fact, his teacher was my first teacher that I did retreats with. So Maezumi Roshi’s teacher, whose name was Koryu Roshi, I did my retreats in March of ’72, and then again in September, I think August and September of ’72. And then at that point, Roshi became my teacher, Maezumi Roshi. And I studied with him until his death, which was 1995, which was a long time to be with a teacher, and to go very deep. We went through all the Koan studies by 1979, and he made me a Zen sensei in 1980.

Rick: That means a teacher?

Genpo: Yeah, that means a teacher, exactly. And then as a Zen master in 1996, September of ’96, I became a Zen master with Glassman Roshi, who was my older Dharma brother, and also a teacher and mentor of mine, about five, six years older than me. And also my best friend made me a Zen master in 1996.

Rick: So it sounds like there’s an official kind of system or hierarchy or something, and you get approved to take on certain titles by senior or more advanced people. Is that the way it works?

Genpo: That’s exactly right. That’s correct. However, it doesn’t stop people from taking on titles. It is a kind of standard way, or a more traditional way. It’s called, particularly for both, the final seal of approval, that’s called Inka, and that’s as a Zen master; And then there’s Shiho, that’s the Dharma transmission, translated as Dharma transmission. That’s what I had in 1980, and that’s what makes you a Zen teacher or sensei.

Rick: How do they determine whether you’re qualified? Is there some sort of test, or is there some sort of psychic cognition of what state you’ve attained, or how does it work exactly?

Genpo: Well, it’s more of a psychic cognition. It’s a realization that you’re there. I mean, I’ve made eight Zen masters and 15 sanseis. And it’s really subjective, but there is a level where you just know that the person is a master now. Although, when you first become a master, like for me it was 16 years ago, almost 17. Is that right? 96 to 2001, yeah, 15 years ago. I’ve got to say that for probably 12 of those years, or 10 of those years at least, I was a very immature Zen master, in that I still had to ripen. I’m not saying that I’m all that ripe now, except in some other ways. [laughter] But, you know, you have to grow into it also. In the people I’ve made, Zen masters or roshis, the earliest one is now probably eight years. And she’s starting to really ripen, and I can see it, becoming a true master; So it doesn’t mean just because you’re anointed with the title of Zen master that you’re really a mature one in the beginning. I think that goes for everything. When you first become a sensei, too, you’re going to be an immature one for quite some time. For me, it was 1980, and I don’t feel I matured as a sensei until about 1995, ’96.

Rick: Huh. This is a little picky, but what is the difference? A sensei is a teacher, a master is a master; It sounds like first class in Eagle Scout, in Boy Scouts or something. What distinguishes the two?

Genpo: I can try to explain that. It’s not always true. It’s a kind of generalization, I can say. But a teacher teaches and a master empowers. A master, and if I use a little analogy, when you climb to the top of a mountain, we call that the absolute or the transcendent. And really, to be a teacher, you should have at least done that much. reached that absolute state of “I am Buddha,” “I am awake,” “I am the awakened one.” Where you can actually really say that with some sincerity.

Rick: Confidence.

Genpo: Right, confidence. And at that point, at the top of the mountain, you can encourage people to climb up. You can coach them. You can inspire them. You can yell down at them and say, “You know, it’s really great, this enlightenment. It’s complete liberation. It’s total freedom. You’re free of fear; You’re free of suffering. Work hard, practice hard, sit a lot, and you too can reach this state.” That’s about what you can do as a teacher; As a master, you’ve fallen off the mountain, or you’ve come down off the mountain. It’s usually more of a fall than a conscious choice to come down. You come down off the mountain, and you’re back in what we call the muddy water, or back in the grime, or back in the manure. And from that place, you can actually lift somebody up. You can actually get under them, under their backsides, let’s say, and just elevate them up. You can push them up. That’s empowering a person. And as a teacher, you’re teaching in a way, and it’s sad to say, you’re kind of teaching down to, and there’s that element. And when you look back as a master, you think, “Oh my God, that was horrible. I’m teaching down to, trying to inspire people to come up to.” Whereas a master, you’re just in the same grime, the same grit, the same stuff as everybody else. And you don’t feel superior; You feel like one-with. I’m just an ordinary being, an ordinary sentient being, just like everybody else. And yet I’ve been through this climbing the mountain and then descending the mountain. So I kind of know the territory, so I can guide, but I can also still inspire, still encourage. But there’s more of an ability to actually empower;

Rick: And you don’t mean to imply that this coming down from the mountain involves a loss of the awakened state, or the Buddha nature. I mean, somehow it sounds to me more like an integration.

Genpo: Well, it feels a lot like loss. Yeah, it does. That’s why very few people actually do it, because it really feels like you’re giving something up. Like, my first enlightenment, as I mentioned, was 1971. And then I had many, many, many experiences from ’71 until now. And in ’86 I had what was at that point the most profound enlightenment we call “kensho” or “Great Enlightenment.” That was in March of 1986, where at that point there was just no more fear, no more suffering. So many of the human elements are just gone. I mean, it’s complete liberation, it’s nirvana, it’s complete freedom. To come down off the mountain really means to once again feel the suffering of all sentient beings, to feel the fear and the anxiety of suffering sentient beings, to feel like everybody else, to have all the emotions everybody else has, to get angry, to get enraged maybe, to get frightened, to be once again a mortal, not a Buddha, you know, a sentient being. We call it, in the vernacular, it’s called a bodhisattva. The Buddha is the one who ascends the mountain, and the bodhisattva gives up the enlightenment in order to liberate all sentient beings. That’s what a bodhisattva is, like Kanzeon or Kuan Yin, or Avalokitesvara, they’re really all the same, just different languages, different nationalities refer to the same being, that is here to really liberate all beings. But if you’re up there on top of the mountain, you can’t do much. There’s no power to empower, we say. You have to actually come down off the mountain. So you are giving up enlightenment in a way. You’re giving up the kudos of enlightenment. I call it falling from grace. You’re giving up that state of grace that maybe you were in for all those years. For me, it was from ’71 until ’94 I was in that state. Of course, it was more profound by ’86, it was deeper; But from ’71 to ’94, it was like, you know, you’re just kind of beyond the suffering that we all encounter; And that’s what inspires you to go on and go deeper and to help others, because you find that freedom and liberation and peace. But eventually, and it’s a hard one for people to, as I said, to voluntarily do, is to come back down off the mountain, to descend it, and be an ordinary sentient being. And then for me, from ’94 until ’99, which was again, almost exactly five years, I still resisted being back in the mud. I resisted being back in the samsaric world. And I was, in some ways, trying to recapture or reclaim the mountain, get back up. And at that point, the mountain was just made of sheer ice. You can’t get a foothold in it. Before, it was like, “Oh, this nice path that you’re climbing, and it’s a little difficult, a little rugged.” You know, maybe a little rocky. But it wasn’t sheer ice. After you fall down, you look back and you go, “Oh my God, that’s just sheer ice.” And there’s no way up that mountain again. Then what you have to do is consciously make a choice, consciously, I call it to consciously choose, to be a human being, with all the pain and suffering that we as human beings feel. With that comes a humanness. Instead of being above everybody or better than everybody or greater than, or you know what kind of Buddha I’m talking about, you’re actually really just a human being, an ordinary person. We say like a lotus in muddy water;

Rick: There’s an old Stephen Wright joke where he says he broke up with his girlfriend because he wasn’t really into meditation and she really wasn’t into being alive. And it sounds to me like what you’re saying, you’re saying, “Okay, you were a sensei and now you’re a master;” It sounds to me like you’ve come full circle in a way, like the 10th ox herding picture, and that you have brought something back from the mountain. It’s not like you’re back to where you were before you started climbing it, you’ve brought something back. And the mountain phase, it sounds to me, if I’m interpreting this correctly, was one in which there was a lot of dispassion, aloofness, detachment, equanimity perhaps, disinterestedness and so on. And now you’re back into the nitty-gritty of being a human being, as you say. And personally, I may be wrong, I don’t see it so much as a fall or a descent, as more of an integration or a kind of a maturation. It’s a state of progress, it’s not a loss. Would you agree?

Genpo: I would. I have a few things to say. In the tradition, we call that stage, which I call “fall from grace,” “advanced achievement.” So it is an advancement, but it feels like a fall. You fall off the mountain. You don’t just climb down, nobody does that. “Okay, I’ve enjoyed this great view from the top of the mountain now for umpteen years, and now I’m just going to start to walk back down the mountain.” No way. You actually fall or descend quickly. And you talked about the tenth ox-herding picture, which is exactly right. And nine of the pictures, of course, are before the tenth. So the tenth is returning to the marketplace. That’s the real fall. Everything else, all those nine pics before the tenth, are all forms of emptying yourself out, becoming more selfless, disciplined, taming the ox, and so forth, going deeper and deeper and deeper into enlightenment. And the tenth is you’re back in the marketplace, with gift-bestowing hands, carrying a jug of wine in one hand and a pack of goodies in the other; But you’re just an ordinary guy, in the marketplace world. And for me, that means you brought back all your shadows. In other words, when we become spiritual, what we seem to do is we disown everything that we consider not very spiritual. I’m sure you’ve been through that. And so you disown, in a way, you push away greed, you push away being self-centered, ego-centered, selfish, unloving, uncaring, angry, and all those become shadows.

Rick: I might interject and say that it’s not that you actually divest yourself of those things. You may still be very much indulging in them. Yeah, but you push away your sort of acknowledgement of them.

Genpo: Exactly, that’s what I was getting at. You disown them, they become shadows, and you don’t really divest yourself of them. You’re not really free of them. It’s just you only can’t see them.

Rick: Yeah, other people may see them all too well, but you’re kind of on your little mountain.

Genpo: Exactly. And other people do see them. They see you’re just as competitive. I was a highly competitive athlete in water polo and swimming in my day. As competitive as you get, we went undefeated. In college, we were a two-year college, junior college. We beat all the four-year schools that year, we beat all the two-year schools, we beat everybody. We just wouldn’t lose because we were highly competitive athletes. I don’t know if it’s ever been done before or since in water polo, you know, in 1963. And when I became spiritual in ’71, I just, “Oh no, I’m not competitive anymore.” But if you ask anybody that trained with me in the ’70s and ’80s, they’ll say, “Genpo, not competitive? He’s the most competitive guy I’ve ever met?”

Rick: I could sit here on my mat longer than any of you guys.

Genpo: Exactly. Or I could do longer retreats than anybody. We were called the Olympians of Zen in the late ’80s and early ’90s. We did three-month sesshin. Nobody’s done that since the 1200s and 1300s. Three months of sesshin. People do three months Ango, but that’s about half the amount of sitting as a sesshin. As a sesshin, you sit 10, 12 hours a day, you’re there for 90 days. We took the 30th and the 60th day, we took a little break to do our laundry and wash our robes. So, very competitive, but just didn’t see it. So back to what you were saying, the shadows then keep us from really, really integrating, as you were saying, integrating the aspects that we disown. A lot of my work now is all about helping, and myself too, reintegrate the parts of myself that I left behind, and others, assumingly, left behind or thought I left behind, and then integrate it. So for me, returning to the marketplace is really dealing with the shadows around the marketplace. Being competitive, prostituting ourselves, selling ourselves, taking responsibility for being greedy or being ambitious, or being any of these things, but owning them. So they’re no longer at work in an insidious way or in a covert way, undermining us. That we can really come from what I call the apex of the triangle. So we have the spiritual on the right-hand side, which is transcendent, and we have, let’s say, the conventional or marketplace mind on the left side of the triangle. And we’re really coming from the apex where we’ve integrated both the marketplace mind and the awakened mind, or the spiritual mind, to a point where I don’t even consider myself spiritual anymore. I wouldn’t use that label. Just ordinary. But you said something else I wanted to come back to, and you were talking about the circle, and going full circle. That’s why we don’t complete the circle in Zen. You’ll notice that in Zen, that circle is never completed. It’s always got that little bit of space.

Rick: Like on your shirt.

Genpo: Yeah, exactly. I forgot it’s there. But that circle is that it’s never completed. And when we return, we return and yet we’re not really back to the same place we were. It’s an advancement. It’s like a spring or a spiral that advances. And each time we feel we’ve come back to that, let’s say, primary point or primary place that we were, each time we’ve advanced that much. So it is an advancement. And the tradition is called, it’s called five ranks. The fourth rank is called the advanced achievement, and the fifth rank is called integration or unity. As you say, you’re right, it is an integration or unity. But the fourth one does feel more like a fall than it does an advancement. Later, when you learn to embody it, incorporate it, accept it, embrace it, then you can see it’s actually an advancement.

Rick: Right. Boy, there’s a lot of teachers, well-known teachers, who have come either from the East to the West, or perhaps even started out in the West, who could really have used something of the nature you’re talking about. It almost seems like it’s the exception to find a teacher who hasn’t gotten involved in some sort of scandal, or some sort of major blow-up over their behavior, even though they had apparently reached a very high state. But a lot of the teachings that these people come from don’t really have something in them to deal with the shadow, and work this stuff out.

Genpo: No, what you’re saying is very true, although I don’t know if you can avoid it. I think to get to the fifth level, you have to go through some kind of fall. I don’t think it’s avoidable. So I don’t see that so much as, in a way, a disgrace to the person. What I see is the importance of how do they work with that? Do they really begin to integrate that and own whatever it is, and it’s usually karma, that’s brought them to that fall? Or do they go into denial about it, right? And then in that state of denial, they don’t do any integration of that, and they can’t move on, really, to the fifth level. Because most of the Masters, with a few exceptions, came to the West, who were still fairly young. Suzuki Roshi was young, Katagiri Roshi was young, Maezumi Roshi was young, Kobun Chino Roshi was young, and then Sasaki Roshi was maybe a little older when he came, but he’s 103 now. And I don’t know if he’s ever gone through that particular fall since he’s been here. Maybe he did it before, who knows? He’s pretty old. There’s others, you know, that, Trungpa, they were all young. When you think Trungpa died at 47, Katagiri and Maezumi Roshi both died at 64. Chino Kobun died also in the early 60s. That’s pretty young. I mean, I’m 66 now. And I’ve been around a while, but if I had died at 62, 64, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing now. And I can imagine in 10, 20 years, if I’m still alive, I’m going to look back and say, “What a young whooper snapper I was at 66! How green and immature!”

Rick: Well, I’m not just talking about Zen teachers. I don’t even know that many about Zen teachers. But, you know, just a lot of spiritual teachers have run into this sort of situation. And it’s interesting. I never thought of it the way you’re saying that. It’s actually a state of progress for them in a way, that they’re stumbling like that, and being forced to sort of deal with issues that they perhaps thought they hadn’t possessed.

Genpo: Exactly. I’m most familiar with Zen, of course, but Bhagwan, for example, who I really studied. I never met him.

Rick: Which Bhagwan? Rajneesh?

Genpo: Oh, Rajneesh. And I actually had an experience in 1980 in our big sesshin, we called it Rohatsu, A year-end session in December, where I actually became one with him. But I predicted in 1978, my cousins were asking me, or actually my aunt and uncle, my aunt and uncle were asking me about him, because he was news. And I said, “You know, he’s going to have a great fall.” Which he did. It was predictable, because he was ignoring the law of causation. Well, that’s what we all do. At level 3, which is the Absolute again, we ignore cause and effect, or karma. And we ignore it because at level 3 it doesn’t exist. There is no karma.

Rick: And there are a lot of teachers out there now, the sort of Neo-Advaita crowd, who actually say that very thing. They say, you know, karma, reincarnation, all these things, they’re just sort of concepts, they don’t exist, you don’t exist, the world doesn’t exist, and they kind of beat that drum over and over again.

Genpo: That’s stuck at level 3.

Rick: Yeah.

Genpo: That’s what it is. I was stuck at level 3, like I said, from ’71 to ’94, but particularly ’86 to ’94, which is 8 years, you know, 8 years of being stuck where I said the same things, and you tend to ignore the karma that you’re creating, which is a very dangerous place to be.

Rick: Yeah, and some of them are moving out of that, I’m glad to see. Various people I’ve been interviewing, there was one guy who talked about taking a walk with his mother, and his mother said, “Oh, look at that beautiful tree,” and he went into this whole cold rap about, “Oh, there is no tree, there is no person, there is no this,” and it was like, you know. And then later on, now he’s looking back at that and saying, “Geez, what a jerk I was.”

Genpo: Exactly. I’ll tell you my own experience with my mother in that same period, from ’86 to ’94. It was ’87, and I brought her to Holland, where I was living at that point, or maybe it was ’86, later in that year; I brought her to Holland, and we were walking all day around Amsterdam, around the canals, and we had a wonderful time. And she was probably at that point in her late 70s. And we were coming back on the metro, and I was sitting across from her, and I said, “Mom, wasn’t that a wonderful day? It’s been just great, hasn’t it? You know, all this walking and everything.” And she said, “Oh, yeah, it was really good.” And I said, “You know, you live across the street from the beach.” You know, she lived in Long Beach, just one block from the beach. I said, “Why don’t you do that every day? Why don’t you take a walk every day? It would be so good for you, you know, in that fresh air; Take a walk.” And she said, “Dennis, when are you going to just accept me how I am?” (laughter) And it was great, because it hit me. I mean, it was a dagger right into my heart. What did I want from my mother, which I never got? Just accept me how I am. And I couldn’t even deliver; I couldn’t do it for her; Here I had been practicing 25 years, and I couldn’t do it for her;

Rick: Yeah, interesting. Let’s go back to the 70s again. So you were sitting on this mountaintop, and you had this profound experience. Did you have a clue what was going on at that point?

Genpo: No, not a clue.

Rick: I mean, did you realize this was a spiritual experience?

Genpo: No.

Rick: There was this one lady I interviewed, she was a housewife in Arizona, and her grandmother died, and she started thinking a little bit about what happens when we die. And the next morning she woke up with this sort of energy in her head, and she ended up having this profound kundalini awakening, just spontaneously, and didn’t know what was going on. She thought she was going crazy.

Genpo: Well, I told you, I thought I went insane. Yeah. No, I had no clue. I started really reading a lot. I had not been… I had a master’s degree and all that, but I was not an avid reader, I was not a seeker, I was nothing like that. And I started to read around Christian mysticism, Jewish mysticism. I started reading Jung, Carl Jung, and Freud, and Maslow, and Fritz Perls. I had read Fritz already. I had done some gestalt therapy from ’68, and this was ’71. But I hadn’t really studied anything about religion or spirituality or mysticism. And so, as I read, I could say, I think I had some kind of mystical experience, that’s about what I’d say. Or some kind of opening.

Rick: And you enjoyed it anyway. You thought, “Well, this is cool.”

Genpo: Well, it was more than that. It changed my life. It was like I had been a freight train going 180 miles… let’s say a bullet train in Japan, going 180 miles an hour in a particular direction. And the direction was Olympics, trying out for the Olympics, succeeding in athletics and sports, getting a master’s degree, going to go on for a PhD. I wanted to be superintendent of schools in California, Max Raffery’s job. Very ambitious, right? And to be well-known, to be successful, all that. And all of a sudden, it all just was meaningless. Just meaningless. It was empty, completely empty. And the only thing that gave my life meaning from that moment on was continuing to clarify the mind, myself, and to help others awaken. And I began that day, I started turning everybody I met on… So I became, you know, the stink of Zen, right? I was teaching E.H. children, emotionally disturbed or handicapped children, who had educational problems. And they were brilliant kids, some of them. They just couldn’t sit still in the classroom or do anything. I’m teaching them to meditate, you know. We’re spending, like, two hours a day meditating, you know. Principal’s getting really upset, you know. We go outside to go to the park, and we’re being a tree, we’re being a dog, we’re being a bird, you know. I didn’t even know anything about koans, but I had him be all these different animals and different plants and everything.

Rick: Did it work?

Genpo: It did! I mean, they loved school. And they could sit still, and they did incredibly well. But I didn’t teach them a whole lot of the three R’s. I just lost interest in that. I just wanted them to enjoy their life and wake up and be conscious human beings. And I taught my teacher’s aid. and I taught the other teachers. I even tried to teach the principal in the school how to meditate, but he wouldn’t go for it.

Rick: Did you ever have any of those kids get back in touch with you, years later, and say, “Hey, I’m so glad you did that, it really changed my life”?

Genpo: I did a couple of them, but, you know, I dropped out of the whole site by… What year was it? ’71, and this was around ’68, ’69. No, I dropped out… This was ’71, I dropped out… Yeah, I left in ’71. I left six months after that, so I wasn’t around too much.

Rick: I had a high school teacher that I really loved, and she really sort of got me, you know, and understood me, and I really connected with her; And I found out years later she had become a professional psychic.

Genpo: I had a college at USC, a graduate school, and she’s probably still alive. Her name is Grumet. Anyways, she was that for me. She really saw something in me. I was not a good college student. I was just an average C+ college student. You know, in graduate school I did really well, because she took me under her wing. She was the head of this… We were the first national teacher corps to go into Watts and into East L.A., Boyle Heights area, and teach right after the riots in ’65, we went into ’66, and teaching fifth and sixth grade kids. And she took me under her wings, and I really blossomed from having that kind of mentor, which changed my life.

Rick: So you had this profound experience, and you became an avid seeker, I guess, reading a lot of different books and checking into all kinds of things. How long did it take you to settle into Zen? Did you try a bunch of things?

Genpo: Yes, I did. I would say from March until really maybe June.

Rick: That’s not long. Three months or something.

Genpo: That’s all, but it seemed like a long time. I was playing around. I studied integral yoga, Swami Satchitananda. I studied that. I did a number of things, read a lot, but I was on a mountaintop. It was sometime in June, I think it was towards the end of June, up in Glacier National Park.

Rick: I love that place.

Genpo: Oh, my God, it’s so beautiful. My friends had just decided to go back to Long Beach. They’d come to visit me, and we had this van that I had actually sold my former girlfriend. I sold her the van, good price, and I took off with my backpack. I saw this sign that said, “50 miles to Waterton National Park.” I had no provisions. I was actually heading to the general store to get some food. I had a little bit of granola in a plastic bag, and I had a little brown rice in a plastic bag, and I had some dry milk in a plastic bag. I had my little kit, because I’d been on the road, hitchhiking all over for a few weeks by then. I had a little grill. I had tennis shoes, no socks. I see this sign, and instead of going like a sane person to the market first, I just said, “Screw it, I’m going.” I took off on this mountain. I had to cross a glacier, and it was really amazing.

Rick: You weren’t walking on the road. You were going on the trail to Waterton.

Genpo: It was a trail to Waterton in that country of over 50 mountain peaks.

Rick: With 500 grizzly bears in the vicinity.

Genpo: Actually, somebody was killed the night before. We got to one of the campgrounds. A grizzly killed a woman who was in her period. We were in that campground the very next day, and a grizzly the following day in another campground came through our camp. By that time, there were three of us. I wanted to get to that part. I had no food, so I decided that I’d cook up the brown rice that first night. I cooked up a big pot, and then there were some other guys camping. I offered them some brown rice. I said, “I’ve got a lot here, more than I can eat. Would you like some?” They said, “Oh, yeah, sit down. We’ve got a lot of food.” We teamed up, and I had food. It took us five days to make the hike. One night, the three of us were lying there in our sleeping bags, and a grizzly came through our camp and started ransacking it. We just covered our heads up with a sleeping bag and just laid there. He eventually walked away. That was pretty scary.

Rick: Oh, I know. Boy, your heart pounds. You think you’re fearless, and then something like, “Boy.” When I was in Glacier, somebody got attacked by a bear, too. I was sitting in my tent meditating. It was rainy, and I heard this helicopter coming. I didn’t know what was going on. It landed fairly nearby. It turns out it was a medical helicopter coming to pick this woman up who had been attacked. For days after that, everybody was really spooked. You were hiking up to Waterton. I think this story has a spiritual corollary to it, as well as the adventure.

Genpo: Yes, it does. The next day, we’re at this point called 50 Mountain Peak. I went up there alone, and I’m sitting there. You look down at 50 Mountain Peaks from this point. Talk about spectacular, amazing. I had an experience there where I realized that my life’s vocation is to be a Zen master; This was just June of ’71. That’s when I realized that my path was Zen, and not some other path.

Rick: Have you ever had an actual profession, other than being a Zen student and teacher? Have you somehow managed to work out your finances to do this full-time ever since then?

Genpo: No, I did. I was a school teacher from ’66 until ’74. I took a year off. I went back and I taught school for a couple of years, from ’72 to ’74, or maybe ’73 to ’74. I don’t remember; It was two years. That’s the only profession that I’ve had since then. I was also a lifeguard for many years before, as I was a teacher, and even before I was a teacher; Since I was 16, I was a lifeguard on the Huntington Beach and Long Beach. That’s it. I’ve managed to survive teaching Zen since 1974.

Rick: When you became a Zen student and you started to get into these really long things, like three months at a time of long meditations and all, what was that like? What was the experience like, meditating for so long each day? Was it arduous and difficult and unpleasant, or did you really get into it and have profound experiences?

Genpo: All of the above. If I am a little bit glib, it was sitting long and getting tired. That’s what it was. We sat very long, we got very tired, and I had to go on and do another seven weeks in Europe of sesshins after the three months, because that’s really where I earned my living, was touring Europe and teaching sesshins and retreats. But I had very profound experiences during that. We all did. Probably why I can do what I can do today is because of those very long sittings and retreats that we went very deep into what we call “samadhi,” and various openings, various enlightened experiences or kensho experiences. But I’ve got to say that even though I did all that sitting and had the various realizations, since I gave birth, this is what I call it, to the Big Mind process in ’99, which was integrating the Western psychotherapy of Hal and Sidra Stone, Fitz Perls, and of course Carl Jung, integrating the Western psychological with Zen tradition, I’ve got to say that it’s night and day difference. The clarity that I’ve been able to access using the Big Mind, even as I work with people, and also continue to work on myself with the process, it’s a night and day difference.

Rick: Cool. We’ll get into the Big Mind. I want to really dwell on that in just a bit. So you’re saying that just all that long traditional Zen practice, which I presume was traditional…

Genpo: Very traditional

Rick: The Big Mind is night and day from that, in terms of the effect it has on you.

Genpo: That is what I’m saying, yes.

Rick: Is it worth recounting any of the experiences that you had during that period, or are they just sites along the trail that are not really worth dwelling on?

Genpo: During that period, from ’86 to ’94, maybe one is worth citing, and that is in ’86 when I had what we would call the more or less Dai Kensho experience, where all doubt is gone. I really saw that I gave up being a Zen monk, a Zen teacher, and really was just an ordinary person. But the flip side was also there, the shadow that I think I stank from high heavens about Zen, in that feeling I was so completely ordinary, so extraordinary, it became a trip in itself. Literally, you kind of glow, almost like you’ve got a halo around you or something. And that lasted until ’94. But the real major experience was ’94, and I can tell you a little bit about that, because it’s the most interesting. What happened was I was on my way to Europe to teach, and my girlfriend at that time said to me, “You know, we’re not married, and if you want to date and see other women, it’s okay.” And I thought, “Oh, that sounds nice.” I get to Europe, and she’s back in Salt Lake. And I started to think, “Why is she giving me this gift?” And I realized, “Oh, maybe she wants to.” And I started to get a little jealous, and I hadn’t been jealous since way back in 1972, where I think I just disowned jealousy. I mean, I just put it under the basement. I was in a monastery in northern France, and one of my students, who’s now one of my senseis, gave me a book called The Flight of the Garuda, and it’s a Tibetan book. I opened up the book, and I read this passage, and in this passage it said, “If you want to annihilate your ego or kill your ego, this is a practice for you.” And I go, “Oh, that’s exactly what I want. I still have too much ego, and I want to get rid of my ego. I want to kill it. I want to annihilate it.” And the practice was to use jealousy as an emotion that has the capacity to destroy the ego. Because if you think about it, and it didn’t say this in the book, but I did think about it after, if you think about jealousy, it’s the only emotion of all emotions that contains what we call the three poisons, all three. It’s got greed, it’s got anger, and it’s got delusion. Most of the others have two, but not three. Delusion and anger, or delusion and greed, but this one has all three. You’re deluded into thinking there’s another, and you’re separate from that other; You’re greedy to have, to own, to possess, to covet. And you’re angry because that beloved one or other is maybe seeing somebody else, making love to somebody else, or whatever; So I went into that, and there was a Dzogchen practice, and the way you did this practice was you visualized the worst possible scenario that you could visualize, where your lover is making love with other men, or other women. And you actually make your lover, your partner, into your guru, into your teacher, and you make vows. So what I was doing was, I was leading these retreats, and there were seven weeks of them, and I was in Kala Rinpoche’s monastery, and I was sleeping in his bedroom, in his bed, leading this retreat. And I was handed this book, and I started this practice, and I was bowing to her all night long, and meditating all night long. So I would alternate an hour of bowing and an hour of meditation.

Rick: Did you ever sleep?

Genpo: No, I didn’t sleep for seven weeks. I didn’t lie down for seven weeks.

Rick: Wow! How could you physically do that? Not to interrupt the story, but that’s kind of interesting.

Genpo: Well, we talked about acid. I was on, I don’t know, five hits of acid all day and night. I hadn’t taken anything. I was on natural endorphins, or whatever you would call that chemical, equivalent to being on acid. I was so high, so clear, and in some kind of altered state, where I was eating very little, only drinking water and juice, and not sleeping. And it went on for weeks. Six or seven weeks. And during that time, there were two consecutive nights where I would lock my door at 9.30 p.m., when I was finished teaching all day, and then I would open it up at 4.30 a.m., when my jishi would come in with a cup of coffee, and then I would teach all day. So, during the night, that’s what I did. And there were two consecutive nights where I just evaporated onto the floor; It was like I became a puddle on the floor; There was no ego left, there was no substance. It was like the bones and the structure of my being were gone, and I was just completely dysfunctional. I would just be like a tomato that had just been stepped on, on the floor; I was just totally, with no self, no ego left.

Rick: Are you saying that if someone had come in the room, they would have literally seen you on the floor?

Genpo: Yes, literally on the floor; I would be making bows, and then two consecutive nights, I just couldn’t get up. I was just there, just laying there. And probably a lot of it was exhaustion, altered state of consciousness, all the meditation all day long, all night long. Whatever it was, the ego was destroyed. And then I had to go and teach all day. And I remember thinking, “Thank God for the form,” because the form was so much a part of me. I’d been doing it since ’72.

Rick: The form means the routine, structured way of teaching?

Genpo: Yeah, I’d come up, get up, I’d have full robes on, making my bows, doing the greeting bows to everybody, walking around the zendo, holding personal interviews, which you call dokusan. There was a lot of formality to it. And I could just put myself into the form, and I didn’t have to think, and I didn’t have to create anything. I just put myself into that form. And then I’d lock the door again, and then the next night it happened again, just completely destroyed. So a week later, I’m in Poland, leading the same kind of retreat in Poland, and still doing the same thing all night long, still sitting all night. And something very, very strange happened, and really weird. So in the middle of my sitting, it was probably around 2 a.m., I got a visitation from three beings, and I could make out who they were. They were all deceased. The 16th Karmapa, Kala Rinpoche, who it all started in his bedroom, and Shri Tripa Rinpoche, who I was quite close to back in the ’70s and the very early ’80s.

Rick: Is he the one who died when he was 47?

Genpo: Yes, yes, yes. And he had kind of taken me under his wing, and became like an uncle to me. And these three visited me, and it’s a little humorous. They said, “We’re going to offer you to ask us three questions, and any questions you want, on dharma questions, and we’ll answer them. Whatever you want to ask, we’ll answer them.” So I was thinking, “Well, what can I ask?” And I’m doubting this whole thing as it’s happening, these apparitions, these entities. I’ve never seen ghosts or anything like that before. But it was obviously them. And of course we could say it’s all in my mind, it’s all makyo, it’s all mine. Can I have some water?

Rick: Sure.

Genpo: So I said, “Well, I’m going to ask three questions I already know the answer to.” Because I’ve done these as koans, right? And so the first question is, “Where do I come from?” And as I was sitting there, I had this… You talked earlier about a kundalini, it was kind of like a kundalini. The energy started in the pit of my being, below my stomach, probably, in the first chakra. And it just raised up, like this huge energy bolting through the top of my skull, out the top of my head. And what came out was, “Om.” All right, so I come from Om. So then I thought, “Okay, next question. Where am I now?” And again, I thought I knew the answer; And I’m sitting there, and the same thing happened, another bolt of energy, and it was, “Home.” So I’m home. All right, I got it. I come from Om, I’m home. All right, where am I going? And then Trungpa said, “You dumb fuck, you’ll know when you get there.” (Laughter)

Rick: That’s great.

Genpo: But that wasn’t…

Rick: He cheated you out of your third answer; You were entitled to three.

Genpo: No, he didn’t cheat me. “You’ll know when I get there.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s true. I guess that’s an answer;

Genpo: It was a very good answer in a way. So the next night, I’m sitting… and this time I’m sitting opposite direction. That night I was actually facing a mandala that was on the wall. This time I’m sitting away, looking away from the mandala, and these three aberrations come in the room again. And I’m sitting there, and this time Trungpa reached down, and he tweaked my testicles, my genitals, and he flipped me, my energy, from yang to yin. And when he did… it’s all bizarre, I’m insane, right? We know that. By now we know it. I’m totally insane. He changed me from, at that point, I don’t remember how old I was, I think 50, from a 50-year-old man to a 17-year-old girl.

Rick: In other words, you totally, at that moment, felt like a 17-year-old girl.

Genpo: For years.

Rick: Really? For years you felt like one?

Genpo: Well, it actually…

Rick: Were you attracted to Donny Osmond and stuff like that?

Genpo: No, I still had my attraction for women. I just felt like I was in a woman’s body. Now, I wasn’t, obviously, and I felt the same confusion around everything that a 17-year-old girl must go through. I lost all that aggression and aggressiveness, the yang energy. All my energy was very passive, very inviting, bringing things in, but there was no bringing the energy out. There was no energy going out. There was no projecting energy. It was an amazing thing. It only integrated completely one year ago last June, so a year and a half ago, 15 years from the day it happened. So, it was really strong for about a year; And then there was a few years, actually, when I met Ken Wilber, which was seven and a half years ago, I also spent some time with David Deida, I spent some time with Al Stone’s daughter and Judith Stone, and I was working on how do I integrate this masculine back into my feminine? And that was 2003. So, you can see, ’94 to 2003, I was still struggling with this feminine energy that had overtaken me. And it had become really problematic for me. And for a while there, I just had to ground myself, so I got back into the gym and I started working out adversely. I put on 40 pounds of weight, muscles, I got down to 5-6% body fat, I bulked up to lifting 335 pounds on bench presses. I mean, I was just trying to get my masculinity back, you know? Because I’ve always been very masculine, and all of a sudden I find myself in a body very feminine. And it really put me through something.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, did other people also remark that you had… You had totally changed?

Genpo: Oh, yeah. A chiropractor who saw me before that trip and after that trip, I was in Portland, and he said, “What happened to you?” You know, you’ve changed completely. You’re not in your body, your body is very feminine, you move like a woman, you know, what’s going on? And I told him, “Get yourself to the gym, man!”

Rick: So in other words, you didn’t actually become attracted to men, like a 17-year-old girl, but you’re talking more about the feminine, gentle, receptive, soft…

Genpo: Soft…

Rick: all that stuff.

Genpo: All the qualities, I became much more empathic, much more intuitive, and all of that, and much less aggressive and pushy. It was really like there was no ego.

Rick: It’s interesting, because when I hear you say this, I don’t get the impression that this was something that came from outside into you. It’s more like a whole section of yourself which had been sort of bottled up in some way was suddenly let out of the bottle. And it became kind of predominant because it was released so suddenly that it eclipsed the more masculine side, put that back in the bottle for a while.

Genpo: Yeah, exactly. It took me 15 years to integrate that back in. Talk about the subtle, sudden and gradual, this was the gradual part of the path, which it took that long to integrate.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I think the whole world would probably be a more peaceful place if everyone were to undergo such a shift.

Genpo: I don’t recommend it.

Rick: I don’t think we have a choice, but when you consider how much cruelty and aggression and greed and all this stuff from ego-driven personalities that’s inflicted upon the world…

Genpo: Well, I’ll tell you another outcome from this, and that is, once you lose your ego, you lose the desire to lose your ego.

Rick: Yeah.

Genpo: You see what I mean?

Rick: Because the very desire to lose it is in itself an egotistical drive, right?

Genpo: Yeah, and why would you want to lose it if you didn’t have it in the first place? It’s because we’re so much identified with the ego, and we’re so into the ego, that we want to be less egoistic, or egotistical, and more ego-less, and that had been driving me until ’94. From ’71 to ’94, I think one of my biggest drives was to be more selfless, more ego-less. And then once it happened, I go, “This is… I’m dysfunctional. I need to have an ego, I need to integrate an ego, I need to have a healthy ego, if I’m going to function in the world and do anything.” And that’s part of what I call “the fall from grace.”

Rick: So you’re associating this shift to a teenage feminine nature, to be a loss of ego.

Genpo: It happened a week later…

Rick: Because teenage girls have egos, you know what I mean?

Genpo: Oh yeah, but it happened a week later, probably because of the loss of the ego, I was receptive to that shift.

Rick: Ah, okay.

Genpo: That’s probably how and why it happened one week later;

Rick: So your loss of ego happened a week later, the shift…

Genpo: No, no, the opposite.

Rick: Oh, I’m sorry, go ahead, explain, clarify.

Genpo: Okay, so the loss of ego happened when I was in Holland, in the Netherlands, and one week later I found myself in Poland, doing another retreat, and that’s when these two events happened, with the three entities.

Rick: With the three spooks, yeah. And was the loss of ego in Holland just as abrupt and dramatic and definitive as this shift to your feminine nature?

Genpo: Absolutely, absolutely. Like I said, it was two consecutive nights where the ego was just completely… I mean, it just died, you know?

Rick: I see, yeah.

Genpo: And I was very dysfunctional, I mean, I don’t know if you can imagine, but yeah, that’s what happened. And a week later, probably because I was so vulnerable and so raw, that this other experience could happen. And probably because I trusted, and I loved Trungpa Rinpoche, I consider him probably the greatest 20th century master of our time, I really had great admiration for him. It’s probably why I chose Trungpa, or he chose me.

Rick: Genpo and I had some technical difficulties towards the end of this interview, and also both of our wives were calling us to do other things. So we decided to do a second interview, a follow-up interview, in a few weeks. So if this one seemed to end somewhat abruptly, that’s why, and there will be another one in early February. If you’d like to be notified of that and of all the interviews that I do, you can email me, rick@batgap.com, and I’ll put you on an email notification list. So I look forward to seeing you then. Thank you. [music]