Practicing Safe Zen – Julie Nelson – Transcript

Julie Nelson Interview

Summary:

Full interview, edited for readability

The Problem with Perfect Teachers

Julie: I think the idea of teachers as exemplars actually tends to get both teachers and students  in trouble because the students come in with the attitude that this person should be an  exemplar and may project a lot of idealized virtues onto this teacher.  And unfortunately from what I saw, I think a lot of teachers come to believe their own  PR.  People are acting kind of worshipful towards them so they start to think that they really  are those exemplars.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. My guest today  is Julie Nelson. And I read Julie’s book called Practicing Safe Zen. And as I read the book,  I was thinking this could be one of those interviews where I wish we could just talk for 24 hours  and read the book aloud and then keep stopping every other sentence to discuss the point  being made, because there were so many good points made in the book. But that would be  an awfully long interview. I think we’d have a lot of drop-offs. So what I’m going to do,  for starters, is just have Julie introduce herself, and then we’ll get into it. So tell  us a bit about yourself, Julie.

Julie: Yeah. So I am in my 60s with a couple of grandkids. I just had brunch with today, since today is  Mother’s Day. I’ve practiced Zen for about 20 years. I did some Vipassana meditation before that.  I started in the Robert Baker Aitkens lineage, later changed to Maezumi Roshi, for those who are  interested. It’s Soto Zen, but also uses koans, so it’s kind of a mix of what people think of as Soto  and Rinzai Zen. My sanghas had lots of problems over the last 10 years, and that’s what inspired  me to write that book. I’m also a retired economics professor. I did my research in feminist and  ecological economics, which made me kind of swimming against the stream in that profession,  but it was worthwhile.

Rick: Good. That’s a good little intro.

Julie: Oh, and I could also say I am a  transmitted teacher in the in the white plum lineage at this point.

Rick: So you still practice and  teach Zen, obviously. Yeah, good. Well, so your book is about first-hand experience with  problematic teachers in the various Zen sanghas you belong to, and it’s unfortunately a universal  story. It’s not limited to your experience, and it’s not limited to Zen or Buddhism or  Christianity or anything. I mean, it goes around the world and has perhaps for a long time.  And one thing I kept thinking about as I was reading your book is that  that saying by Jesus, “You shall know them by their fruits.” And I’ve always naively, perhaps,  or idealistically thought that spiritual teachers should be poster boys for what this can  do for you, you know? They should be examples that you look at them and think, “Hey, I’d  like to have what he or she has.” It seems like it’s really turned  this person into a kind of an exemplar of what a human being could and should be.  But unfortunately, there are so many examples to the contrary, and I’m afraid it’s confusing  and disillusioning for a lot of students. I know people that have sort of given up on spirituality  or taken one look at it and thought, “Eh, that seems kind of screwy. I don’t want  to get involved in it.” So, I’m sure you’ve pondered that same thought. In fact, I’m sure  you brought it up in your book. But let’s start the conversation with that. What do you think  about what I just said?

Julie: I think this idea of wanting to look up to teachers as exemplars is natural.  We want to think that somebody in the world really has things figured out, and if we just  stay close to them, we can get everything figured out and do that as well.  I think it’s reasonable to hope that teachers are well-behaved.  well behaved not in the sense of always doing everything perfectly, but be  willing to atone and make restitution when they screw up. I think the idea of  teachers as exemplars actually tends to get both teachers and students in  trouble, because the students come in with the attitude that this person  should be an exemplar and maybe project a lot of idealized virtues onto  this teacher. And unfortunately from what I saw, I think a lot of teachers come to  believe their own PR. People are acting kind of worshipful for towards them so  they start to think that they really are those exemplars. And then of course from  a you know more objective point of view they’re actually doing some really nasty  things sometimes.

I think the idea of teachers as exemplars actually tends to get both teachers and students in trouble because the students come in with the attitude that this person should be an exemplar.

Rick: Yeah I mean in ordinary education if you go to college let’s say  and you want to study physics you expect that your professors are going to be  they’re going to know a lot about physics and it gets a little  bit more abstract with some of the more softer sciences, like if you were to study ethics,  you would hope that your teacher at Harvard Divinity School or wherever you were,  was an ethical person who was teaching ethics. It’s a little bit less hard to measure than physics.  So, if we’re interested in enlightenment or spiritual development or awakening or whatever  we want to call it, seems to be it’s not unreasonable to expect that the teacher has attained some  degree of it, otherwise why is he or she a teacher? And yet then you have to wonder,  well, what’s the measure of that? What are the characteristics of that attainment?   What should I expect? And what would be too much to expect in someone who is supposedly  more advanced on the spiritual path.

Opening Experiences vs. Integration

Julie: I think the idea of some kind of spiritual attainment, spiritual achievement that some  people are functioning on a higher plane that somebody just coming in,  unfortunately, cuts two ways. And one is that it, all being, I mean, one of the  constant themes of my book is that we’re all Buddha nature, and we’re all human,  frail humans at the same time, right? So it’s really easy to take anything that feels like an attainment,  even in the spiritual realm, and turn it into a merit badge, turn it into  something that feeds our ego. I do think teachers should be, and usually are, people who have had  some kind of what I like to call “opening experience,” some sort of visceral sense of the  unity of the universe and of our own continuity with that. So that they have it. But that is,  in most cases, a momentary experience, or maybe for some people, I hear it might go on for days  or weeks. But then the question is, how is that integrated into someone’s life? And if you take  that experience and think, “Oh, now I’m enlightened, now I’m a perfect human being, now I can go teach,”  it’s going to end badly. If you take that as an experience that, yeah, really memorable,  really shook up the way I see the world, now what am I doing next? And now where do I need  to open next? And what do I need to look at next even if it’s unpleasant just  to keep on growing to keep on having that Zen beginner’s mind.

But that is, in most cases, a momentary experience, or maybe for some people, I hear it might go on for days or weeks. But then the question is, how is that integrated into someone’s life?

Rick: Yeah, I was just having an email conversation this morning with  Dana Sawyer, Phil Goldberg, and a fellow named Frederick Smith, who was a  Sanskrit professor at the University of Iowa, and the other two have been on BatGap.  And one of them was mentioning that very often somebody will have some profound  experience for a few seconds in the 1970s, let’s say, and they’re still hanging their hat on that  experience, still kind of clinging to it as

Julie: Yeah, I think they’re building a little  shrine around it.

Rick: Yeah. And even some great poets like William Blake,  I believe, had had some kind of profound experience like that. And it didn’t last, but he spent  his whole life writing beautiful poetry inspired by that experience. So that’s great. But I  think, or correct me if I’m wrong, from the perspective of your tradition that awakening,  there’s different kinds of Satori, right, or Samadhi, some are temporary, momentary, and  others are said to be abiding. And the idea, as I understand it, is to maybe  have the temporary ones, but then over time that they might give way to an abiding realization.

Julie: I’m not sure about that sense of, I mean, in some subtle way, maybe there’s some, you  live more and more of your life with that realization, but you still live your life as a human being  in the relative world with clay feet. So I don’t think anybody is going to… I would  have a very hard time believing that anybody, even Buddha himself, was in a state where  every action was always, I mean, the Buddha had some very retrograde ideas about women,  for example, right? You know, so we’re always, like I said, we’re always human and we’re always  Buddha. And I hopefully over time with integration and with work and with practice and with,  I think the Sangha is very important, the community, other people setting us straight  and sometimes showing us stuff we don’t want to see, that we can have a long maturation  where we can spend more of our time not acting from our small self.  But my guess is the people that do that most effectively probably don’t even know that  they’re doing it. That is, they’re not checking up on themselves and measuring themselves all the time.

Rick: Yeah, in other words, it comes naturally if it’s a natural state of development. Like,  I don’t know, riding a bicycle. It’s really hard at first and you fall off and everything,  but after a while it’s kind of second nature and you’re not thinking, “Oh, I got a balance,  I got a balance.”

Julie: Yeah, there was one writer, it was talking about Eihei Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen,  to know oneself is to forget oneself and likened it to riding a bicycle,  that you really need to figure out who you are, but once you do that, you’re not thinking through  every step in the same sort of way you did in the process of kind of figuring out who you are.

Rick: Yeah. On the other hand, there’s a quote that I often quote from Padmasambhava, which was  that “Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as  a grain of barley flour.” so basically he’s saying, “Hey, I’m pretty cosmic, but  that doesn’t grant me a path to just sort of do whatever. I have to really kind of mind  my P’s and Q’s and be precise.” Yeah. Yeah. “Be impeccable.”

Julie: We’re not escaping our causes and conditions and our karma.  Just momentary experiences.

Rick: Okay. You’ve probably heard Ken Wilber’s Lines of Development model.  He talks about waking up, cleaning up, and growing up.

Julie: That sounds good.  I read some of his work quite a while back. So I don’t know.

Rick: Yeah. And he makes a point that these different lines, not   only those three, but also the intellectual, the emotional, the sensory, and so on, are  not necessarily tightly correlated  And

Julie: Right

Rick: they can get really out of sync with one another.

The Cure-All Myth

Julie: Yeah, I, the spiritual bypassing chapter in my book, I talk about that because  it’s, I think there’s often a misconception that Zen practices is some kind of cure-all.  And if you just, if you’re having, you know, psychological problems, just do more Zazen,  know, if you’re sexually immature, just do more zazen or something like that. And no,  you stunt yourself, and you probably become a danger to others when you get too  off balanced in these ways.

Rick: Yeah. And a danger to yourself. If you’re psychologically unbalanced, doing  more meditation of any kind can put you in a mental hospital.

Julie: Yeah, there’s people who go way into dissociation or more deeply into depression

Rick: I’m sure we’ve both seen it happen, probably.  And in the sexual realm, there  are famous, supposedly enlightened gurus  who’ve come from the east to the west,  and some who started out in the west, who  are sexually or emotionally less mature than your average high  school boy.  I mean–

Julie: Yeah.  [LAUGHTER]  Well if they went into a monastery at age nine  What do you expect?

Rick: Yeah.  Anyway, it might be worth mentioning at this point for the audience that this  is an issue that has concerned me for quite some time and some others.  And together with Jac O’Keefe and Craig Holliday and others have joined in now, we started  an organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity.  And it now has nearly 800 members, I think, and about 60 member organizations.  And we’re doing all kinds of interesting things.  It’s spiritual-integrity.org.  But we considered it important because of the kinds of issues that Julie and I are discussing  here.  We don’t present it as some sort of authoritative, moralistic body that’s going to censure people  or revoke their licenses or grant licenses or anything else. We’re just trying to kind  of infuse into the collective awareness of the spiritual community an appreciation of  the importance of ethics on the spiritual path. And we’ve kind of outlined some guidelines  or tenets, code of ethics, that we, after hours and hours and days and weeks of discussion  and continual revision feel are baselines for what a spiritual teacher should or should not do.  And I feel that this is more almost for to the sake of students than it is for teachers,  because if a teacher is inclined to misbehave, he’s not going to think, “Oh, I should check with  the guidelines and see if this is out of line.” Usually they’re kind of off on some  tangent when they start misbehaving and have lost their discrimination.  But students should be able to hold teachers’ feet to the fire and not assume that, well,  this guy is supposed to be enlightened, and so as crazy as his behavior seems to be,  who am I to judge? You know, I should just continue sitting here.

There really is power. The student is looking for something. The teacher has some kind of knowledge that the student wants to get and that creates a power differential.

Julie: No, it’s really important that there are some bodies and some ethical codes and  statements out there that says this isn’t allowed. And there really has to be  trust within a spiritual teacher-student relationship, and there are–when that trust is violated,  when the teacher ends up using that relationship for their own purposes in some way, it can  be devastating to students and to communities, as I have found out.  Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a few different ways to go at this.  One is greater education for both teachers and students about power in teacher-student  relationships because there really is power.  The student is looking for something.  The teacher has some kind of knowledge that the student wants to get and that creates  a power differential.  And I think a lot of people are ignorant about that.  Sometimes people think teacher abuses of power is just a bad apple problem.  There’s a few narcissistic psychopaths and they do the abuse and everybody else is okay.  And there’s a few of those out there, but what I have seen the most is just more garden variety  ignorance of even that a teacher has power. You don’t necessarily feel powerful because people  are coming to you and asking you questions, but if they’re trusting you, they’re giving you power.  And so teachers need to know kind of what behavior  helps build that trust and what sort of behavior destroys it. Students need to know the same kind  of thing so they can, if they’re feeling really queasy about something a teacher’s doing,  they can look at something like the code of ethics for the spiritual integrity group and say, “Oh,  you know, this really is out of bounds.

Rick: Yeah.

Julie: And I know that that group doesn’t,   do any kind of certification or that kind of thing, but in some ways I think, well, I mean,  I think that our, I think it’s not necessarily sufficient, but it’s certainly necessary  for battling teacher abuses of power. I think a lot of teachers don’t really tend to be  very well educated about what kind of power they hold over students when students are coming to  them and trusting them with very personal things and trusting their advice. And a lot of  students aren’t really sure where the boundaries are between acceptable and unacceptable  behavior by a teacher. So having some of that laid out is helpful. I don’t think it’s sufficient  because I mean one of the things, I think a lot of teachers are giving other teachers too much of a pass  when they see misconduct going on. I would like to see more sort of mutual  keeping

Rick: accountability. Yeah, we’re sort of touching on these points, but I’ll  crystallize it into a question.  Well, two part a statement and a question. Swami Sarvapriyananda, who I admire a lot,  often says that you can have ethics without enlightenment, but you can’t have enlightenment  without ethics. And yet another spiritual teacher whom I won’t name, said at a conference that if  you think that ethics have anything to do with awakening, you don’t understand awakening.  I agree with the first, Swami’s statement and strongly disagree with that one. But what’s your  take on why  ethics  are important on the spiritual path in any tradition?  We’ve we touched upon it, but let’s flesh it out.

Ethics and Awakening

Julie: So yeah, I know there are early moments of this  we talked about the fact that these sorts of  cosmic opening experiences may last only seconds. They may be life-changing, but they last only  seconds. And it may be true that in those few seconds, how I’m going to behave is not the main  issue. The main issue is who I am, right? And if we don’t build a little temple to that experience  and hang on to it and try to think of that as the be-all and end-all, but we actually  use what that experience is trying to teach us, I think we will have a bent to act more  ethically because we realize both how insignificant we are and how interconnected we are.  But it doesn’t come easy.  Our karma and our habits and our conditioning is very strong.  So to actually live out in the way that we’re maybe very briefly pointed to in a Satori or  Kensho kind of experience. To actually live that out takes hard work and it takes, you know,  constantly to be reminded reminding ourselves, reminding each other about what’s  ethical behavior.

Rick: Yeah. In the Zen tradition, is there a whole emphasis and explanation on  deconditioning oneself, on working out all the sort of samskaras, as this is sometimes called,  that condition us to types of behavior?

Julie: The way that we do it, at least in the tradition  that I’m in, is through study of the 16 Bodhisattva precepts, the ethical teachings.  And the way we study them is not as a list of thou shalt not, or thou shalt, but as opportunities  for waking up.  So in the, I’m in the middle of a 12-week series that we run, and the way we run this class  is every week we take one of them and we just let it point out where in our life are we not  speaking truthfully, where in our life is sexuality coming up. And not trying to necessarily  change our behavior right away, but just use that as a spotlight to what we’re doing. Use  that to reflect on what’s going on in our body, what our beliefs are that are causing  us to do this. And then after we focused on this for a while without trying to change it, trying to  kind of stop when an occasion comes up where we feel like we’re about to say something  untrue. And that, using a book by Diane Rossetto called Waking Up to What You Do, she talks about  it being the dead spot that is creating, having enough consciousness of the precepts and of our  own behavior to be able to sometimes stop in that point where we can actually make a decision.  And in that point, we can make a decision.  We can choose to go with the habit, just grab on the usual way we do, or we can choose to  do something different.  And that to me is this unwinding of the habit.  It’s loosening it up.

Rick: That’s really good.  Some people argue philosophically and even with some kind of neurophysiological explanation  that we don’t have free will and that we just feel like we do, we appear to, but that we really don’t.  And to the best of my knowledge, I disagree with that. I may be wrong, but my feeling is that we  are conditioned, certainly, but not absolutely. We have some wiggle room, and the wiggle room,  like you just said, could enable you to say, to stop if you have the impulse to do something.  there’s some kind of discernment or discrimination or faculty that enables us to make choices.  And if we use that faculty wisely, then we kind of move ourselves up the spectrum in terms of  being less bound and conditioned. We attain greater freedom and we’re less tormented,  let’s say, by habits or impulses that would be deleterious.

Julie: It’s not easy work.

Rick: No, it’s a lifetime of

Julie: it’s a lifetime.

Rick: Yeah.  Scrutiny self-scrutiny.

Julie: I mean, but one thing I like to, yeah that,  occurred to me very strongly on this issue of self-scrutiny that is there’s a huge difference between wanting to be awake  And wanting to be good. I spent my a lot of my life trying to be good.  The problem is if you make a project about trying to be a good person  All the psychological research says we have confirmation bias.  We like to see what we like to see and we tend to not see the things we don’t want to see.  So if you want to be good, you really don’t want to see, you know, notice  when you’re doing bad. Right? This way I just described working with the  precepts is really trying to focus in on when am I  about to do something that I really should think about. And it’s really  uncovering a lot of those places that we, you know, shadow areas, places that we don’t want to  see bad behaviors. If we really want to wake up, we should be saying, “Yes, thank you for  showing me where I’m screwing up.” Our human side doesn’t want to do that. Our human side  only wants praise. But if we really want to wake up, we should be glad in some way to  find another spot where our habit energy and our knots are keeping us constrained.

If you want to be good, you really don’t want to see, you know, notice when you’re doing bad. If we really want to wake up, we should be saying, “Yes, thank you for showing me where I’m screwing up.”

Rick: Yeah, you know, there’s been a kind of a debate in the contemporary spirituality between those  who are engaged in, let’s say, self betterment practices, you know, Tony Robbins, or various  be a better, you know, various things you do to try to make yourself a better person,  But there’s not a whole lot of talk of self-realization in there, you know.  And then the other wing is people who are focused on knowing your true nature, self-realization,  and they often critique the self-betterment people.  But I think that the two are not diametrically opposed and in fact are complementary and  could go hand in hand.  And of course, in their extremes, both of these things can get, can be rather absurd.  The self-betterment stuff can get kind of silly, and the know your true nature to the exclusion  of everything else can become very cold and devoid of ethics again.

Julie: Well, I actually love the book by a woman named Joan Tollison. The title is great. Death,  the End of Self-improvement.

Rick: I’ve interviewed Joan. I know Joan.

Julie: Isn’t that a lovely title? I mean, and I don’t think it’s not that we don’t improve and we,  Do I behave better after many years of Zen practice? I don’t know, ask my family,  ask people around me. I could have all sorts of illusions about it. I think that’s  probably the case. I think some people think I’m even more obnoxious because,  because, I won’t tolerate their nonsense, so I don’t know. Yeah.

Rick: Kind of reminds me of Ram Das saying, if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a  weekend with your parents.  [Laughter]

Julie: I was thinking, this is, our final words before people like  go to Thanksgiving or Christmas or holiday gatherings. Yes, now is the test  of your practice. You thought it was, you know, sesshin, retreat, long sitting. No, it’s  Thanksgiving dinner with your relatives.

Rick: Yeah.  It’s an interesting– I mean, I’ve been meditating since the ’60s, and I was a teacher of meditation  for many years.  And it’s like I continually ponder these questions, because I don’t see them– I don’t feel like  I’ve totally resolved my understanding of the paradoxes and discrepancies that I often  see in spiritual communities.  And I come up with explanations.  My best explanation being that we’re all works in progress and that you can never  sort of rest on your laurels and assume you’re done.  And Ken Wilber’s thing of lines of development where there can be quite a significant  development of awakening in consciousness, and yet you can be quite immature and stunted  in other of those lines.  Okay, so feel free to chime in on anything, anytime.  Don’t just wait for me to ask you questions.  This is just a conversation, so anything you want to say.  But I’m going to start looking at my notes here.  So here’s a synopsis of your book, the overall theme.  The book explores both the beauty and transformative potential  of Zen practice alongside its inherent dangers and pitfalls.  It emphasizes the need for awareness, healthy boundaries,  and accountability within Zen communities  to practice safely and address issues  like teacher misconduct and spiritual bypassing.  And you draw upon your personal experiences,  including several different portrayals within Zen  communities to illustrate these points.  And you actually name names.  I’m surprised you haven’t been sued,  but I guess it’s permissible to do that.

Julie: Well, I name names only in for documented things.  I have, unfortunately, heard of a lot more cases of abuse  and I could write down, but I didn’t want to repeat rumors and undocumented things.  And I use people’s own words or statements by bodies that have done investigations.

Rick: Yeah, good.

Julie: Or my first-hand experience.

Rick: Right.

Julie: As a sangha, we have had legal threats by people who didn’t like what we said.  Empty threats because you can give somebody a bad online review and it’s not illegal  But yeah people who who kind of pride themselves on being  virtuous and  Being more gentle than the law can be quite litigious  when you  Give them a bad review

Rick: Yeah  So, let’s say  the average student just kind of starting out on the path or considering starting out on the path and  Being interested in Zen as a possible path for them as I was actually before I took the path  I took but I was it was Zen books that inspired me to  Learn to meditate and get going with this spirituality stuff  But what should they know as someone who’s been in it for decades?  What cautions and advice would you give them to proceed in a safe way to choose a trustworthy  teacher and to not let themselves get burned, you know?

Julie: Yeah, yeah.  Well, I had to, I came at this a few different ways.  One is a lot of people just start meditating on their own, right?  They don’t even try a teacher or a sangha, they just read a book and start.  And that has some dangers and also, I would say, actual dangers for some people and a  number of pitfalls, a number of sort of detours that people can hit.  The real dangers for people with certain pre-existing psychological conditions, they may find when  they sit that their depression just gets worse, they have psychotic episodes, all of these  kinds of things.  And there’s documented cases of this going on, or psychological dissociation, they confuse that  with them.

Rick: Yeah, I think you mentioned Willoughby Britain in your book.

Julie: Willoughby Britain has a whole thing.

Rick: Brown University, she has this whole thing devoted to helping people who get in trouble  with meditation.

Choosing Safe Communities

Julie: Right, right. So it’s something that, essentially, if you try meditation  and whatever’s been overwhelming you is getting even more overwhelming  stop and get some advice maybe see a therapist, do something else. It’s,   Zen is not a panacea. It’s not necessarily for everybody. So that’s just kind of a first  hurdle to get by. Most people can practice meditation with no ill effects.  In terms of the Zen path of realization, we talked about, the great matter  dealing with the big issues of life and death. There’s a number of things that,  could just be seen as detours. Getting hung up on trying to get to certain mind states.  “I’m going to meditate so I can be calm.” That can be helpful,  but it can also be a trap. Sometimes I’m just not a calm person. Does that mean  I’m not practicing Zen? Maybe not. I’m being at this moment fully a not  calm person, or bliss states, or despair, or a lot, there’s just a lot of stuff that can  start coming up in an individual practice that needs to be handled carefully and just  mostly treated as something that comes up, rather than as a be-all or an end-all of the  practice, or some kind of personal failure at the practice. So I kind of go through a  list of those things. It is very helpful to have a community and a teacher. Some people  in Zen say it’s absolutely necessary to work with a teacher. I’m a little bit more iffy  about that. I think teachers can be very helpful. I can’t see in, certainly in the Zen tradition,  you see that. I can’t see in a lot of the earlier Buddhist writings, the emphasis is  really on community, not about working with one particular person. When  looking for a community or a teacher, I suggest just some basic things like  doing a web search on the community’s name or the teacher’s name and words  like abuse, cult, misconduct. It can be hard because a lot of teachers and  communities can look very warm and welcoming,  as long as you kind of stay around the edges.  As you get more involved, you may  find some really nasty power dynamics  going on behind the scenes.  And so trying to avoid cultish groups is important.  Cultish groups are groups where basically the leader or leaders  believe that they know what’s best. And not just what’s best maybe for your  personal spiritual development, but increasingly the more you get involved  they know best about finances, about real estate, about your personal life,  about what you should be saying and who you should be talking to and who your  friends should be and everything else. Very important to watch out for those  things. One of the things that those kinds of groups do is suppress dissent  to a big degree. One way to test if you’re in such a group is to try disagreeing with something.  Are you treated as an adult that might have some kind of contribution to make? Are you treated  like an unruly kid, labeled as unspiritual, kicked out? Those are some things to watch  out for. And I saw some of those behaviors in some of the groups that I was in, in terms of  ostracizing people who made any criticism or treating them very badly.

Rick: Yeah, it can almost get comically extreme.  A friend of mine went to an ashram in Mexico for a while for a retreat,  and it was so controlling that no one was supposed to have any opinion or make any decision.  Like she had some idea of what salad dressing to serve with lunch,  and oh no no no, the leader decides everything.

Julie: I had a similar experience where, yeah, the leader decided that there should not be any  salt in the oatmeal. The cooks, the participants had no choice in it. It was just,  no, no, we don’t do that.

Rick: Yeah.  Which makes you wonder, I mean, about the subjective state of that leader, if he thinks  that he has that kind of omniscience. I think one phenomenon is that being a spiritual teacher  can go to your head if you don’t have enough, whatever, emotional maturity or something.  Just the authority, the adulation, if that comes your way, even subtle adulation, like,  just respect and so on, can inflate an immature ego.

Julie: Yeah, exactly. I point to that a lot in the book because, well, a lot of people  recognize that there are teacher abuses of power, and it’s usually the sexual abuses of power that  make the headlines, but there’s also financial and emotional kinds of things that go on. A lot  of people think it’s just a few predators out there, a few narcissistic psychopaths or  something. But it’s really much more garden variety ego and subtle ego inflation, I think, behind most  of these cases. The teachers that I experienced creating very serious abuses of power also  sometimes taught very well, taught very effectively, said useful things, right? I suspect that  most of them, one I’m maybe not so sure about, but most of them had had valid  opening experiences. A lot of them I had sat next to as students, and as students they were quite  humble and committed to the practice. And in the book I mentioned what I call the,  I’ve come to call the “gold rakusu effect,” that is, in my tradition you wear a black  kind of bib-like garment when you’re a student, but you’ve committed to  living the Buddha way. You’ve taken the the bodhisattva precepts. But then when you become  a transmitted teacher, you wear a brown or a golden brown one. And I saw people that I’d sat  with for years as humble co-students become arrogant as hell as soon as they put on a gold  Rakusu. Suddenly they were not to be questioned, they were to be honored. And when I became  transmitted, I got a little taste of how this works. Two things. One is I noticed people started to take  what I said more seriously. People sometimes stood back when I passed by,  these very subtle things. And some of them I think were unconscious, some of them I think  had been taught as part of the tradition. And I also was allowed into teacher meetings,  groups of teachers together, which I think can just become an echo chamber for pride.  Yeah, we do know better than the students about the oatmeal or the  kind of jam to put on the toast, or yeah, I think there can be this echo chamber  effects and it’s just very subtle, yeah, ego stroking that I actually, I keep what I, as a  a teacher now, I keep what I call a Gold Rakusu, I’m calling a Gold Rakusu journal, got a little  notebook down here. And when some of these feelings come up of like aren’t  I special or wouldn’t it be better if this room was a little bit more full,  my teaching is so good, I really should have more students. I write those kinds of thoughts  down in this journal, that it’s better to have your enemy close, right?  So I write these thoughts down so I can just laugh at them and know that I’m human  remember not to, I hope, and I hope the sanga will help me not take them seriously.

I saw people that I’d sat with for years as humble co-students become arrogant as hell as soon as they put on a gold Rakusu. Suddenly they were not to be questioned, they were to be honored.

Rick: Yeah, it’s almost like dangerous to become a teacher.

Julie: It is. I think it’s, it’s a huge entrustment. It’s very serious.

Rick: Yeah. It has pitfalls that you’re not going to encounter if you’re just a student.  And so, you know, there shouldn’t be a kind of ambition to become a teacher as soon as  possible.

Julie: Right.

Rick: I think.

Julie: Yeah, and so a few of the other teachers I’ve talked to has said that, I mean,  people often congratulate someone when they when they become a teacher, and they said,  well, maybe we should offer condolences.

Rick: Right.  I’ve heard and maybe you can correct me on this that in the Zen tradition, maybe some  particular branch of it, if you have a spiritual awakening, presumably, an abiding one,  You’re supposed to wait 10 years before you teach.  There’s very, there’s certainly old Zen stories about this.  But yeah, this kind of, this impulse that once you’ve had a big opening experience, you’re  now ready to show the rest of the world is definitely frowned on.  If you go to a Zen teacher and describe a great opening experience, you’ll probably get an  underwhelming response from them.  You know, that’s nice.  Now what about your koan, your precept study, or you know, something else?  Just to kind of bring you down that notch, keep you from building that temple  over that experience.  Ten years, I don’t know.  Some of the different teacher groups have different criteria for how long to wait.  There’s some old Zen stories about people who went off to the mountains for 20 or 30 or 40  years to practice more before they came back to teach.  The stories that I like best really, there’s a wonderful story about Deshan, no, oh shoot,  I have a hard time with the Chinese names, anyway, a teacher who was very highly respected,  very old, when he was about 80, he decided to go on a pilgrimage to learn more.  And he said, “If I meet an 80-year-old, I’ll learn from them.  If I meet an 8-year-old, I’ll learn from them.”  And Eihei Dogen in Japan commenting on that said maybe that eight-year-old is an eight-year-old  girl.  You know, this is in medieval Japan that would have been a kind of a shocking thing  to think that a distinguished senior Zen teacher could learn from an eight-year-old girl.  So more than the time spent practicing before teaching, I think that keeping that open mind  of, I’m never just a teacher, I’m always still a learner, is even more important.

Rick: Yeah, or isn’t there that saying phrase in Zen,  “beginner’s mind”?

Julie: Beginner’s mind, yeah.

Rick: That’s how I interpret it, that  you should always have the attitude of a beginner.

Julie: Yeah, and I actually don’t think of teaching as  an identity. I think of it as a role, and a role that comes with a lot of responsibility.  I think as soon as we glom onto anything as a firm identity, we’re getting in trouble.  I mean, this is, Zen is in–one of the hazards actually of Zen is it’s kind of  destabilizing of ideas about who we are, which is a good thing if it leads in the direction  of spiritual awakening and understanding who we are in the universe, but if we destabilize  the idea of who we are in a bad way, we can just become, say, overly loyal to a teacher,  just kind of put the responsibility for our life in their hands.

Rick: Yeah. j;And so, you know, being  a teacher, to say, you know, I had a colleague of mine at one point, ex-colleague now, say,  I am a teacher, I am always a teacher. And I don’t feel that way. I feel like, you know,  when I go to the grocery store, I’m a shopper, you know, when I’m playing with my grandkids,  I’m a grandma. And I want to be the, I hope I’m living out the wisdom and compassion  I’ve learned from Zen study in any of these roles. But I don’t need to be a Zen teacher  when I’m picking out bananas, that’s not my…

Rick: No, I mean, you know, change the word teacher to, you know, heart surgeon. Are you a heart  surgeon when you’re like on the toilet or, you know, surfing or whatever you do?  j;Yeah, no. And I, so being a Zen teacher, when I take up that role, when  I’m asked to give a Dharma talk or when someone wants to meet with me one-on-one,  one. It’s a very serious role to take up and there are boundary issues involved, there are power  issues involved. I have no illusions that I can always answer someone’s question. All  I can do is meet people and perhaps the additional experience or study or, that  I’ve had can be helpful.

Rick: Yeah, that point about answering someone’s question is interesting.  Do you, as a teacher, sometimes find yourself saying, “I don’t know”?  And have you seen teachers that are too proud to say that?

Julie: Yeah.  I mean, I think that if a teacher is too proud to say, “I don’t know,” there’s something  wrong.  What I saw was not so much teachers that were reluctant to say, “I don’t know,” when faced  with some sort of personal or spiritual question, but who really didn’t realize that they didn’t  know things like legal standards for dealing with clergy misconduct.  They believed that they somehow naturally knew how to handle this without ever studying.  So that kind of, without reading up, and certainly without listening to anybody  who wasn’t a teacher, even if they might have a legal background.  So kind of the assumption of knowledge in areas where one doesn’t have it, even if one  may modestly say, “I don’t know,” when asked some particular question  within a kind of a dharma context.

Rick: Yeah, I can think of examples of this where teachers, well-known teachers, are often asked  all kinds of questions, and rather than saying, “Well, that’s not my field. I don’t know anything  about that,” they feel like they have to give an answer.

Julie: Yeah, yeah, if you want to start questioning me about, you know, what modern physics has  to do with spirituality, I’ll say, you know, “I know less than you do.” You know, I’ve  a few books, but I’m not an expert, not my area. And yet, we see teachers doing all sorts  of decisions about finances and real estate and people’s personal lives. I know I heard  of a teacher who told students who they should marry just crazy  stuff.

Rick: Oh, yeah, that was in the back of my mind. And some people want that. They have a guru  and they should I marry so and so? Or should I get this job? Or should I buy a  house and things. And most teachers, go ahead, you were going to say.

Julie: I was going to say, I mean, that to me is this destabilizing of the feeling of who I  am in the wrong direction. Instead of kind of trusting the Dharma, you just, you trust  this other human being in a way that erases boundaries rather than overcomes separation.

Rick: Yeah. Which is not to say, I mean, all the ancient traditions of the world have the archetype  of the wise elder who does have some life experience and who is worth getting  advice from on things. But hopefully, if they are genuine, they are also humble and won’t  advise you on things they don’t have any expertise in.

Julie: Right. Yeah.

Rick: As a teacher, have you, you kind of alluded to this, but have you had experiences where  you felt like students were making too much of a fuss about you or just too  adulating you in some way? And what do you do to tone that down?

Julie: Yeah, I have had this just in a few subtle ways.  I remember somebody apologizing to me for something that was actually my fault.  I thought, “I don’t know.”  Okay, they probably have this idealized image of me.  And I have… it’s one of those contradictory things, I think,  that it’s really the teacher’s responsibility  to not let that go to their head more than it is their responsibility to just stomp that out in  the student, right? I think sometimes for students it’s a phase that you have to go through. You  really don’t have any confidence in your own buddha nature, so you kind of have to believe that it’s  somewhere near you, okay? Somewhere near you where you can get access to it, so you put all of that  on your teacher. And that might be a necessary stage. So a student idolizing a  teacher doesn’t necessarily mean that the student needs correction. What it does mean is the teacher  needs to be really careful, and the teacher needs to take the task of growing the student out of that.

Rick: That’s great. Very well put. Yeah, I like that. Putting on my glasses so I can look at some of  my notes here. Well, there’s a section on pitfalls in spiritual practice. Let’s talk about some of  these. So, spiritual bypassing. I believe you quoted Robert Augustus Masters in your book.

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: I’ve interviewed him years ago. But explain  what spiritual bypassing is and we’ll talk about it a little bit.

Julie: Well, the original way that John Welwood defined it had to do with bypassing psychological  maturity  issues  um, so you’re having unhappiness pain  psychological immaturity,  Just go and practice and we don’t need to worry about the fact that I you know  Hate my parents or that i’m not getting along with my spouse or   Whatever we just kind of sideline all of that stuff by becoming  more holy.  What i’ve seen a lot actually more in person is is kind of a confusion of  Zen practice with emotional flatlining that equanimity just means that nothing’s going to bother me  Okay, so it’s really just a separation from my life  It’s separation from my body separation from my life to try to bypass those uncomfortable things that come up  in the in the real world  And that’s not the zen the zen way the zen way brings us more into our life doesn’t take us out of it  Oh, but it’s very appealing. It kind of turns religion into a feel-good drug.

It’s really just a separation from my life. It’s separation from my body separation from my life to try to bypass those uncomfortable things that come up in the real world.

Rick: Yeah  A lot of these points are nuanced that there is something I’d say to equanimity  in  At least in the hindu tradition in the bhagavad gita. It talks about equanimity being one of the characteristics of self-realization, you’re not just blown away by every little

Julie: no, but I said  I think of equanimity as having the ballast to ride the waves

Rick: Yeah.

Julie: Okay, so it’s not that you’re flatlining. The storms are still coming. The conditions of  your life haven’t changed. There will still be grief and loss and other things that  you really need to face and deal with. But you’re not going to be thrown entirely off  balance when these things come along.

Rick: Yeah, maybe one way of putting it is if  you’re in tune with your Buddha nature, that it’s a deeper dimension, which is like the silent level  of the ocean that’s not perturbed by the hurricane that’s blowing on the surface.  Yeah, you don’t ignore the fact that it’s choppy on top, but the fact that it’s choppy on  top doesn’t shake you to your core.

Rick: Right.

Julie: The way

Rick: it’s just one level of a deep ocean. j;Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, good. No, but it’s, I mean, spiritual bypassing is a common syndrome.  People thinking they can just meditate away whatever bothers them. Even sometimes like  a serious medical issue, they’ll think that I can meditate that away or take some herbs,  I don’t need to go see the doctor. I’ve had friends die with that attitude, at least in  the initial stages. Anything more we want to say about spiritual bypassing?

Julie: I added on the in the  In the book I added a few more things.  I think besides bypassing the pain of life and the pains of growing up psychologically  and in other ways, we can also try to bypass life events.  I remember overhearing one person, a man one time talking about how he decided to really commit to doing  Zen once a week, and somehow in the conversation it came up that he was leaving his wife at  home with like three young kids who get really rowdy in the evening. Yeah, maybe he was committing  to the spiritual life, but maybe he was just avoiding being home with the rowdy kids,  you could use it that way too. Or, you’ve got a, I gave another example  of you, suppose you’re running a business and your co-manager is abusing your  employees. So you recommend that they go on a Zen retreat. Okay, maybe you actually  need to deal with their behavior, not just spiritualize it and try to  override it that way. So anyway, that’s, that’s good.

Rick: Yeah, and the Zen retreat isn’t necessarily going to make the fundamental change that  that

Julie: No, what this person probably needs is to be confronted and saying, you’re a jerk with  the way you’re treating these employees. And we really got to deal with that.

Rick: Yeah. You also, you talk about engaging with one’s shadow. I’ve done  whole interviews about the shadow.  And earlier you were saying like maybe you grew up in an ashram and  then you come to the West and you misbehave sexually with students or something because  you don’t have, you’ve never dealt with the issues that an ordinary adolescence  would have enabled you to deal with because you were in this protected environment.  So do you feel, would you care to define shadow, and do you feel that everyone has one, and  does Zen provide specific procedures for engaging with it, or would one need to seek outside help?

Julie: Yeah, I like the, again, Robert Augustus Masters has written very well on the issues of shadow.  And shadow are those things we don’t want to face.  So when I was mentioning the difference between wanting to be awake and wanting to be good,  I think as a main goal, wanting to be good, it tends to encourage us to hide our shadow  because it’s getting in the way of our projects.  Wanting to be awake, I hope, allows us to go into those dark spaces when they present themselves.  There’s, Joan Sutherland talks about both enlightenment and endarkenment.  And Robert Augustus Masters talks about the spiritual life being a fire.  We like the light, but we don’t like the heat.  So these, I think a lot of people come to spiritual make, initially  come to spirituality out of a desire to be a good person and feel good at the same time.  And yet there are times when we need to really face–in Zen we talk about the three poisons,  greed, hatred, and delusion.  And I think I mentioned as we work with the precepts, we’re really opening up and noticing  our own greed, hatred, and delusion, no matter how long we’ve been on the path. There’s always  still some, at least some bits of this, and for most of us, big chunks of this stuff left  to work out. Whether Zen, I think things like precepts practice, in our group, I think it  sometimes has opened up to people some of their darker behaviors and beliefs. And it can be  scary, but if you’re actually carrying around with you for a week, I’m just going to notice  when I have an inclination to speak untruthfully. That could dig out some shadow stuff. Or I’m  going to really notice if my sexuality is kind of turning dark. That could actually help  you notice. Probably it also helps to do some more direct psychological work. I’ve done  a couple years of therapy myself, and I think for a lot of people that is, you know, that  more direct approach is a very good complement to these more spiritually oriented practices.

Rick:  precepts practice sounds really good. The spiritual group that I grew up  in, the teaching was that all you have to do is water the root of the tree and  the whole tree will flourish. In other words, just dive into pure consciousness and stay  there for a while and come out and live your life and everything else will be taken care  of automatically. And there were so many egregious examples of that not working all the way to  the top of the organization. But the fact that in your practice you put very specific attention  as a group, as a community, on specific precepts and really ponder them. I think that must really  have a healthy effect on people’s development.  Some people have taken the cycle more than once. They found it helpful. And  at a different part of their life, they come back and take it again, and all new insights.  And I think at least one of the cases, the case of sexual abuse in the history of the  Sangha that I’ve been in. Rretrospectively, I could see things where this person was, I  think, quite separated from their body in some ways. And so I suspect, they’re carrying around  a lot of shadow having to do with their body and its desires. That’s me as a  third person from the outside. But, yeah, and I think, again, some people,  can teach very effectively for a long time, and it’s like, you’re just shocked when they  get hijacked.

Rick: Yeah.

Julie: But they’ve got something they haven’t dealt with, and it comes out, and it’s  terribly destructive.

Rick: Yeah.  And I think it’s worth saying or reiterating, if we’ve already said it, that this kind of  focus on precepts and on ethics is not just a kind of a sideline or a luxury or an entertainment  or something, it’s because violating these things can really scuttle your progress. It  can really undermine and you can really crash and burn, to mix several metaphors  in there.

Julie: Well, crash and burn and take a lot of people with you often.

Rick: And take a lot of people with you, yeah. And so it behooves someone on the  spiritual path to actually pay attention to this as a critical component of your spiritual  toolbox.

Julie: Yeah.  Actually, in Zen there can sometimes be some confusion.  We talk about three levels of practice of, or ways regarding the Zen.  The first one is the literal, which is just kind of the basic stop sign, you know, “Don’t  do this,” kind of thing.  Second is compassionate or relative, where you take into account more of the context.  Because in real life it’s not always clear which of the sixteen precepts should  take precedence.  Sometimes you can’t do them all at once, so you have to weigh and think about what’s  gonna have the best result.  But then there’s something called the absolute level, which is, we say that at the absolute  level there’s no right or wrong.  And one book I, Zen book, quotes I think St. Augustine as “Love God and do what  that wilt. That is, if you were really loving God all the time, you would be doing the right  thing, right? But that’s very dangerous because people delude themselves into thinking, “Oh,  I’m a Zen master, so therefore whatever I must do is right.” And I’ve heard people say  almost in that work, you know, I questioned a Zen teacher about what they did in a group  with some other Zen teachers around, and this teacher’s first response was, “Well, it’s  what I do. And then we kind of eventually talked around that maybe it wasn’t quite right, but  it was like my first go to about whether this is correct or not is judging  by my own behavior.

Rick: Yeah, there was this fairly well-known spiritual teacher who it turned out was sleeping  with a lot of his students and when it came to light, he said, “Oh, I’m not doing  it. God’s doing it.”  [Laughter]

Julie: Exactly, so the absolute level of the precept, even though it’s taught, it’s so easily twisted that, in our group where we go through the precepts, we talk about taking that very carefully and watching out for that delusion that we’re actually in that state when we may very much not be.

Rick: Your statement about on the level of the absolute, there’s no right and wrong.  Well, there’s also no universe on that level.

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: But once you get into the relative, there’s a universe and then all the rights and wrongs  and everything else come into play.

Julie: Yeah, in the relative world, we will be bumping into each other all the time and we’d better  pay attention to how we do that.

Rick: Yeah, that kind of segues us into perhaps the next point, which is misunderstanding no self.  You hear a lot of talk of no self

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: in not only Buddhist lineages, but Vedanta and so on.  And some people make it the main, there’s a guy named Richard Sylvester,  who I interviewed, who wrote a book called “I Hope You Die Soon,” meaning the self is going to die.  And there are teachers who  insist that they don’t have a self, there is no such thing.  And the fact that you might perceive yourself to have one is delusional. So, what is your  understanding of the concept of no self?

Julie: My understanding of what it  looks at is that in Zen, we say we live both in the world of emptiness and the world of form.  And so, this world right now, you, the screen, the bookshelf, the screen behind,  This is all one universe. If we look at it from the point of view of the absolute,  I’m you, you’re me, I’m your bookshelf, everything else. If we look at it from the perspective of  differentiation, you’re you, I’m me, and it’s, it’s all the same universe, but it has these  these two sides to it. We often tend to think that we’re in the world of distinct objects,  me versus you, this versus that. I give an example of the book about  we’re encouraged to sit both alert and relaxed and to a lot of people that’s a contradiction.  You’re either tense or you’re sleepy, right? So we keep on distinguishing these things.  And the realization that we can describe metaphorically all sorts of ways, but only  comes through with this kind of cellular level through an opening experience which a person  can only understand for themselves. That is the experience of I’m both nothing in the  sense that I’m not a distinct entity that you can pull off and separate from everything  else and yet I’m also contradictory everything because I’m not separate from everything else.  And so there’s no self in terms of no enduring entity, which actually is just embarrassingly  empirical.  You know, “What did you have for breakfast this morning?”  That’s part of what you are now, you know?  And it’s not going to be part of what you are a couple days from now, except for, you  know, a couple molecules somewhere.  So it isn’t like it’s a…  It shouldn’t be that hard to understand, but we don’t usually understand it.  We usually feel like there’s some kind of me that’s looking out through my eyes and feeling  what’s coming in through my skin, and this is separate.  So no self is understanding, and then death is much less scary when we understand no self  in that way, because, and the metaphor I like is that we’re waves on the ocean, and just  because our wave peters out doesn’t mean we’re anything other than ocean.  We’re still ocean.  We’ve always been ocean.  We will still be ocean.  Unfortunately, the misunderstanding of no self is, I’m supposed to just obliterate my  personality and merge with my teacher.  And that, I think, is where we get into a great deal of trouble.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good.  I like to think of it in terms of multidimensionality.  The universe itself is multi-dimensional and at different levels it has different characteristics.  I mean, everything seems solid at this level, but, a physicist would  tell you that this is almost entirely empty space.  There’s really nothing material there.

Julie: Yeah, space and energy.

Rick: Yeah, it just kind of seems solid, but if you could sort of see on the quantum mechanical  level or subatomic level, you wouldn’t see anything solid.  And both are true.  It doesn’t have to be either/or.  Knowledge or reality is different at different levels of perspective.

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: And the same with the self/no-self thing.  You’ve probably heard of the spiritual teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj.  He was an Indian spiritual teacher, but he, one of his comments was that the ability to appreciate  paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity.

Julie: Yeah

Rick: Yeah, because the universe is kind of paradoxical, or maybe it isn’t to itself, because it makes  sense from its perspective, but from any kind of limited perspective, even on the level of  quantum mechanics, a photon is both a wave or a particle, depending upon whether or how  it’s observed.

Julie: Yeah, so that’s, I mean, in the book I use two different diagrams.  I mean, I have this analytical brain.  This is the way I work. And for people who for whom it’s useful, I offer a couple of diagrams  where this versus that world is like a white circle and a black circle, and they’re just,  they’re just different.

Rick: Oh, the yin-yang thing.

Julie: And then, you know, the yin-yang is an ancient  symbol of that, where it isn’t that the white and black come together and make gray, just kind of  some meh, mediocre thing, but they’re dynamically, they’re two sides of the same coin. We wouldn’t  know what dark is if we didn’t know what light was, right? You know, they mutually define each other.  and I have something called a compass where you can put words in. So like I’m  going back to that that I mentioned, we tend to think of being alert and  being relaxed as being opposites, but if you’ve sat, sat meditation for a  long time and you’ve really settled in with your body and quieted your mind, you  find that this is true. You can, you’re not worried, you’re not anxious, you’re  not tense, you don’t have to work to try to be awake sometimes. And yet you’re more alert  than you’ve ever been. You can hear every sound and you know, feel every air particle.  So this, you know, that what looks like two opposites in our normal way of thinking,  actually can interact in this yin yang sort of way.

Rick: Restful alertness, we could call it. I think if there’s a lot of residual fatigue in the  nervous system, it can be hard for people to settle into a state of restful alertness  like that because when they get restful, then they fall asleep. But the fatigue can be neutralized,  it can be resolved. And so your system is fresh and can get very settled without getting sleepy.

Julie: Yeah I would, we call it practice for a reason.

Rick: Yeah.

Julie: It takes practice.  It doesn’t usually happen the first time, and it doesn’t necessarily happen every time,  even when you’ve been doing it for years.  But sometimes it does happen, and sometimes you can really notice that this is a real  thing.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s a neurophysiological component to it, as I was just kind of indicating that,  I mean, they’ve done all kinds of studies on all kinds of long-term meditators  of various practice traditions.  And the brain changes observably and profoundly.  OK.  So second part of your book, Why Zen Forms and Institutions  Matter.  And we might be repeating ourselves a little bit,  but let’s see how we can do here.  So this section of the book, you could say,  examines structural issues within Zen communities.  And we keep saying Zen because that’s your…  That’s your tradition, but almost everything we’re talking about here you could apply to almost any other  spiritual group.

Julie: Yeah, I think a lot of it is…

Rick: From the Mormons to the Hare Krishnas or whatever.  I didn’t mean to lump you in with the Mormons and the Hare Krishnas.  But  Okay, so there’s an inherent power imbalance. Once we become…one becomes a teacher,  we’ve already talked about that. And some people try to ameliorate that by not even arranging the,  the seating on a dais, but just like having everybody sit in a circle or something.  So, it illustrates we’re all kind of on the same level.

Julie: I mean, I think there is, there’s a false duality in either hierarchy or no hierarchy,  that those are our only choices. Because the fact is that if–that people tend to differ  in power, even sometimes for trivial reasons. Someone with a louder voice or taller or something  like that may have more power in a group. And when you’re talking about Zen teaching, and whether  it’s a transmitted teacher or just somebody who’s been around longer, people will tend to  look up to them and ask them questions, right? And may even trust them with some  personal details in a request of wanting to get advice. So it isn’t that the power differential  goes away when you sit in a circle. You can lessen it. But if you have the impression that  you’ve now erased it, I think you just fall into another danger. And the way I got thinking  about this actually came from my work in economics. I said I was doing feminist economics, and  one of the kinds of the standard economics viewpoint of work is that you do it for the money. You  exchange your labor power, you get a paycheck, and then you go and consume, and the consumption  is where you get the joy from it, whatever. As you look at the kind of work that women  have traditionally done, it’s been mostly taking care of people, taking care of kids, taking care  of sick, you know, the sick, educating the young, these traditional jobs. And in those jobs, the  women were expected to have some emotional involvement, some actual feelings of care.  Okay, now usually in these situations, they also have more power than the person they’re caring for,  the patient in the hospital bed or the child. If we think that power differentials are always bad,  what do we do? Tell the mom just let her kid run on the street because they’re just buddies?  No, I mean you want some hierarchy of power in that case. You want the mom to be able to  keep the kid from running in the street. But you don’t want the mom to beat on the kid,  so you don’t want a domination kind of model.  So you want it to make the power be a power that is enabling and empowering for the person  with less power. And so this is, I called it asymmetric mutuality and kind of an academic term,  But can we use power for the sake of the people that want something from us?  And this is, there’s a good old-fashioned word called fiduciary. People think of it as  just pertaining to money, but a fiduciary relationship is a relationship of faithfulness.  It’s a relationship where someone trusts you for something. You know, when I take my car to the  mechanic, they’re the expert and I’m the dumby who could be taken advantage of, right? And when I’m a  Zen teacher people are looking me to me as the expert and do I cheat you know do I cheat the  student or do I try to make all of my act or do I take advantage of the student in some way  or do I try to make all of my interactions for the benefit of that student and I you know I think  hierarchy doesn’t have to I mean Zen has this hugely hierarchical lineage construct which I  I think accentuates the hierarchy beyond where it needs to be.  But at the same time, I don’t think trying to pretend that we’re all equal works either.

Rick: That’s a good point.  I mean, you were an economics professor and you didn’t show up at the classroom and say,  “Who wants to teach the class today?”  Or, “Who would like to grade all the papers?”  Something like that.

Julie: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: I tried to teach for the benefit of the students, but yeah, I was the teacher.  And that’s how I actually feel that most Zen and spiritual teachers would be better off  considering themselves to be something like math teachers, you know, people with more  expertise in some kind of area, but wouldn’t expect the math teacher to also be the principal  in the school board, right?  And a lot of spiritual teachers set themselves up as the pinnacle of a hierarchy in which  they’re in charge, and that’s unhealthy.

Rick: Yes, I mean, maybe one way of putting it is, you know, having some kind of authority as  a teacher or, you know, in academia or in Zen or whatever, it does endow you with certain  I don’t want to say power, but

Julie: It is power.

Rick: I guess it is.

Julie: I think you should name it as power, but then notice that power doesn’t necessarily have  to be — we often think of power as, you know, oppressive.  Okay,

Rick: Right, j But there’s also I mean that’s kind of you can use power against people. We can also use power for people

Rick: Sure

Julie: the power to heal we can have the power to do things

Rick: Right. Yeah, but there then come with that comes certain obligations and limitations and responsibilities  It doesn’t, you’re not empowered to do whatever the heck you want your students

Julie: No

Rick: and that’s that’s where many teachers have  gone wrong  You know, they somehow feel like well, I’m entitled to or you know, this is this will be for the students benefit  If I sleep with them or or whatever

Julie: Yeah they get all twisted around

Rick: So just there aren’t the proper boundaries there  and again, I think there’s a syndrome of  Authority going to one’s head.

Julie: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: it’s I mean back when I was in my 20s. I was  briefly for a  short time one of three directors of a  large  Facility in upstate New York the TM movement had and as soon as I was made a director and the other two guys  All of a sudden we felt like we deserved ice cream with every meal  special treatment in some way a nicer room all kinds of things. It just you know, goes to your head

Julie: Yeah, I’m just little things like yeah, Sesshin who gets the who gets

Rick: Irene is laughing over here

Julie: who gets the nicer room at a retreat and yeah, no I  Notice all of those those things. Yeah,

Rick: She’s saying ice cream is pretty innocent compared to some of the

Julie: Yeah, that’s true.

Rick: If only it were ice cream  Give em all they want

Julie: If only it were ice cream we could give all the teachers ice cream and then not have any other problems  Except for obese teachers.

Rick: Yeah, now there’s a whole  One more point maybe before we–  transference.  Let’s talk about transference.  It’s a psychological term, but you  use it in your book, projecting feelings onto the teacher.

Julie: Yeah, this is an important aspect of that power.  I mean, the student is coming to you for something.  And I mean, Robert Aiken, who is a Zen teacher,  talked about teachers playing an archetypal role  in their students’ minds.  And so this teacher-student relationship  can get pulled into all sorts of sort  of unfinished psychological projects.  And very frequently, a student’s love for the dharma  will get mistaken for as a love for the teacher  as a person, or a romantic love.  And then the teachers can let that go to their head  and think the teacher, the student actually loves them  rather than notice that it’s the dharma that they love  and they’re just deflecting it.  And teachers should know better, right?  And there’s also, I mean,  one of the cases I saw was a case of the teacher  reversing roles, a very caring, loving, empathetic student.  And starts saying  my marriage isn’t going very well  and you’re such a great listener, can I confide in you about this?  Absolutely not, from a boundary point of view,  should they have been doing that.  But you get, will you care for me?  Can I care for you?  All sorts of–

Rick: So if somebody came to you as a teacher and said that,  would you just say, well, that’s not my role.  I’m not qualified to do that.

Julie: No, this was the teacher asking the student to listen to their–

Rick: Oh, I see.  I thought you were saying a student was saying it.  Well, either way, it seems like they shouldn’t have that conversation.

Julie: Yeah, I mean, the students can ask too much of the teachers, but with the teachers turn  the tables like that on the student, it was, it was grooming,  trying to get the student to take care of them.  So and I think this is one of the things that teachers need to understand to avoid  some of that ego inflation is when this admiration comes it is coming from,  the student looking for something. It is a projection on you of something going on with  them. They’re not in love with you, it’s not that you are suddenly turned into this  attractive person, right, and not understanding that there’s projection going,  transference going on and counter transference as the the teacher’s own  emotional needs get reflected onto the student. I think there needs to be a lot more consciousness  about that. And you don’t need a PhD in psychology. And in fact, I’ve known some people  with PhDs in psychologies that in the real world don’t seem to get this.

Rick: Just want to make a quick comment. I forgot to mention this at the beginning. But if  those listening to the live version of this interview, if you’d like to ask a question,  look in the description field underneath the video, and there’s a link to a page through  which you can submit your question.

Julie: I do want to throw in before we run out of time,  that one of the things that has been most distressing for me to observe is the level  of institutional betrayal. That is, we know that individual teachers can misbehave, okay,  And then what?

Rick: Then institutions try to cover up for them.

Julie: And then institutions try to cover up for them.  And teachers…

Rick: The Catholic Church being a huge example.

Julie: The Catholic Church being a huge example.  And I’ve seen some of that same dynamic going on in Zen.  I read a lot of the research.  It turns out that like therapists very rarely turn in other therapists  that they know are engaging misconduct.  There’s a whole kind of in-group.

Rick: Happens in the military.

Julie: Yeah, I mean…

Rick: sexual abuse, and then the higher ups they don’t really prosecute the people who should  be prosecuted and so on.

Julie: Yeah, and supposedly,  and the police forces

Rick: Same thing

Julie: the panels that are supposed to look at misconduct are made  up of other police. So, this kind of self-policing thing that these groups who supposedly have high  ideals, the Roman Catholic Church is supposed to be about spirituality, Zen teachers  groups, police are supposed to be about safety and the rest, and people don’t self-police very  well. This is why we have lawsuits and why we have criminal charges going on.  And it’s just really disturbing in a religious group because you  you kind of hope that they would do better.

Rick: Yeah.

Julie: And so, and the institutional behavior,  there’s a good book out on trauma, which I cite in the book, and again, Judith Herman, I think,  the author on trauma, that with victims of things like sexual misconduct want  is not like a restored relationship with the teacher. That’s kind of the goal of a mediation  sort of interpersonal approach. That’s not it at all. They want to be supported by the community.  They don’t necessarily even want the the the perpetrator punished so much as they just want to know    that this was really not okay and that the community backs them up and holds them in this  and when the  communities, the sanghas, the boards, the other teachers just turn their back  And try to ignore it and brush it under the rug  It’s hugely hugely painful

Rick: I can think of two reasons, and maybe you can think of more. One is one you just mentioned,  which is that there’s kind of a good boy, buddies kind of thing going on in the military  or the police department or a spiritual community where you just don’t rat on your buddies.  And another is maybe, and this is very short-sighted, you don’t want the institution  to look bad.

Julie: Exactly.

Rick: So you cover it up. I mean, look, you know, look at all the cover-ups in the Catholic Church and  Priests, pedophile priests being transferred to other parishes and things like that thinking that the problem was gonna go away  but  It’s made the catholic church look terrible. I mean people have left in in Ireland for instance with such a Catholic country  It’s it’s diminished dramatically  In its participation so it backfires if you think you’re saving your organization by hiding this stuff rather than dealing with it

Julie: Yeah, but yet  it’s easy if if the the people being harmed are weak and have little voice  and the people doing the harm are powerful it’s easy, the easy way, the shortcut way  is to ignore it and brush it, and i I’ve i have personally witnessed that and I personally  witnessed a whole lot of shooting the messenger, like you said I named some names in the book  Everybody whose name I named in the book  in a negative way, who I knew, I sent a copy of the manuscript.  I said, here’s what I’m going to say.  And so I was not at all trying to be sneaky about it.  And the other ones are just kind of matters of public record.  I don’t really know the people.  I just know that this is what a group did an investigation  and made this decision.  Or there’s public records out there of incredible abuses.

Rick: And sometimes it’s not just a matter of shooting the messenger.  It’s a matter of shooting the victim.  Like saying, oh, this person is crazy.  They’re a liar.

Julie: All the time.

Rick: This didn’t happen.  How dare they say– they’re just trying to drag me down  because I’m a prominent person.  Blah, blah, blah.

Julie: The same person who coined the term about institutional–  the term institutional behavior has this great acronym DARVO.

Rick: Oh yeah.

Julie: D-A-R-V-O.

Rick: Yes, talk about that.

Julie: Deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender.  And for anybody who’s ever thinking about standing up to a spiritual authority  about misconduct, this is really helpful to know because it’ll happen and you’ll be totally  confused by it.  And it happens all the time.  Deny or minimize.  In  some cases that I’ve experienced it was outright denial. In other cases it was “yeah, I made a mistake. I’m sorry”  You know life should go on. You know, let’s just pick up where we left off, you know minimizing the whole thing  So deny, attack, the idea is this person is crazy. They’re insufficiently spiritual.  “I met with them in Dokusan. I know they’re a little, you know (that’s one-on-one interviews)  I know they’re a little unstable.”  That they’re liars, you can just attack all sorts of ways. And then reverse victim and offender  “Oh poor me having to put up with this kind of stuff”  Right, or “they’re being so harsh on me  In trying to get me to be accountable.  You’re trying to question me. You must, that’s really an insult to me –  That you’re that you’re thinking of doing some kind of investigation of my conduct. You’re insulting me.”

Rick: Yeah

Julie: Even I in case…”you want to have a private conversation  about abuses. Oh, that is just such a terrible insult that you would want to talk to me about that”

Rick: All this stuff sounds so familiar to me and I’m just   witnessed and heard about this kind of thing for so many years now and that’s why we started that organization just to have some

Julie: Actually I started, I and a few other people started an organization, not for the teachers, and  this one is kind of Zen specific, but I hope it works and I hope it’s a model that could  be picked up.  But there’s a real power imbalance between teachers and students just for  the reasons we’ve talked about.  There’s also a power imbalance in terms of knowing and dealing with abuses, because the  teachers have formed networks among each other, with each other.  And the teachers and kind of the senior student grapevine knows a lot more about abuses than  ever gets, than I can put in the book, because a lot of it is not documented, but it’s out  there.  Students, meanwhile, naively wander into these very dangerous sanghas with no warning, right?  So I started something called the Zen Learners Association, which anyone who considers themselves  to be an ongoing Zen learner is welcome to join.  That includes teachers as well as students. But what’s the primary goal of making a cross  sangha network for students to also share their ideas about Zen practice, future of Zen practice,  warning about what teachers or sanghas to avoid, as well as practical stuff.  Where do I get this kind of gear, what’s a good book to study for that?

Empowering Students

Rick: I think that’s great.

Julie: Trying to even this power imbalance a bit.

Rick: Yeah, as I said earlier, I think that it’s really important that students be more empowered.

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: And not be intimidated or timid and feel like they’re so new, what do they  know.

Julie: Yeah, it’s kind of a dicey point here because on the one hand, it’s absolutely the teacher’s  responsibility to hold the boundaries and make the relationship work. On the other..  And so it’s not, when a student becomes abused, it’s not in any sense their fault for having  become vulnerable.  But if you want to protect yourself, keep your eyes open and watch for  some of these things and try not to be overly vulnerable.

Rick: Yeah.  Yeah, good point.

Rick: There’s, even today, there are so many strange cults in this world where,  where, the stuff we’re talking about here is quite mild by comparison to what happens  in some of these things.

Julie: No, but no Zen teachers ask people to drink  the Kool-Aid or

Rick: Yeah, right, which everybody, in case you,  you know, Jim Jones, Jonestown, where people literally drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide,  that’s where that expression came from, for those of you who aren’t old enough to remember  it.  But, um…

Julie: Oh, I mean, the other thing…  We were talking about cultishness earlier.  Research on cults is that it’s most often very idealistic people who want to change the  world.  They get drawn to cults.  Jim Jones attracted a lot of people originally to the church in San Francisco because of  a preaching about racial justice and this sort of thing.

Rick: Yeah, including some prominent politicians who thought he was a great guy and did good  stuff.

Julie: Yeah, yeah, got all sorts of honors.  And he was, he taught a lot of good things.  inspired people to do good things, and overstepped his knowledge and authority in all sorts of  ways and ended up leading these people to madness. And they gave their children cyanide  laced kool-aid. Just unimaginable stuff.

Rick: And if you didn’t take the kool-aid, there were guys encircling the compound with machine  guns who would take care of it for you.

Julie: So the idea that it’s only people who are kind of loners that might be susceptible to cults-  No, it’s often very intelligent people and people with the best intentions.  So you really have to take a look at how they treat dissent in particular.

Rick: Yeah.  And Jim Jones reminds me of a point, which is that you don’t flip overnight from being  a pretty positive influence and saying and doing good things to being a total lunatic.  It happens incrementally.  I don’t think this is a true thing, but there’s that allegory, that metaphor of the frog in slowly  heating water who won’t jump out because he doesn’t notice that it’s getting hot versus  a frog who would jump out of boiling water. I would never throw a frog in boiling water.

Julie: I use a metaphor in the book that somebody else put together about a cart very slowly going  up a hill. So you think looking out the window that the ground is level, you don’t realize you’ve  climb until it starts to go down, just a gradual thing.

Rick: Yeah, so the danger in that is that if you’re in a group like that, you don’t  see the changes because they’re so incremental, they’re so gradual. And if somebody  comes from the outside comes in, they might say, “Holy mackerel, this is a really weird  cult you’re in here.” But it seems normal to you because it changed so gradually and  you were in the middle of it.

Julie: Yeah, yeah, there’s this very subtle,  actually, I mean, the interesting thing  when I was reading about authoritarian,  people don’t use the word cult so much anymore,  but authoritarian or charismatic groups,  they attract intelligent, well-intentioned people.  And then this thought control is very gradual  and it unfortunately,  or parallels a lot of the things that we actually do in Zen  in terms of sort of uniformity of movement,  chanting together, using words in unusual ways.  Some of these things are also done in cults.  You use words in unusual ways  ’cause you’re twisting them to do bizarre things.  But if you’ve ever read any like Dogen in Zen,  or looked at Koans, what have you got?  You’ve got words being used in unusual ways.  So you can’t tell just from sort of the forms  or the outside, you really have to look at,  How is- Is the authority at a level that’s appropriate?  And are people being treated with respect  as people with their own minds?  Or are they being asked to submit to some top authority?

Rick: Yeah.  So as with a lot of the things we’re discussing,  there could be a perfectly benign form  of many different things that are healthy and normal  and a little unusual, perhaps, but not a problem.  And then there could be kind of the dark side of that same principle.

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: Like, for instance, I don’t know, just, you don’t just completely do whatever the heck  you want if you’re in a group. There’s a certain authority structure and you’re expected to dress  a certain way or behave a certain way and go along with the group to a certain extent. But then the  dark side of that would be some kind of mind control, blind, the Reverend Sun  Myung Moon marrying 700 people at once who had never met each other, things like that.

Julie: Yeah, it’s just because  I mean, we sa,y we have a bunch of forms in Soto Zen to make kind of a feeling of harmony in the  Sangha. I mean, walking in step and this kind of thing can be a form of thought  control. So,

Rick: Yeah, interesting.   I suppose one overarching point to make is that it’s always good to exercise discernment  and discrimination. You don’t want to be a blind follower, you don’t want to be a total rebel who  doesn’t agree with anything or cooperate with anything. So you can go along with stuff, but  you just want to keep your discernment sharp and continue to hone it.

Julie: Yeah, yeah. I mean,  I know you talked with Mariana Kaplan,

Rick: Kaplan

Julie: eyes wide open.

Rick: Right.

Julie: Yeah,

Rick: Good point.

Julie: I think I think coming into any  spiritual practice, open hearts are required, and open eyes are required. It’s never, I  mean, I went into Zen practice initially thinking I can just kind of get on this thing  and at some point it’ll just be on rails, and it will carry itself, right?  And I don’t have to think too hard – it doesn’t work that way. This discernment and  this waking up is every moment, or it’s not at all, right?

Rick: Yeah.  Some traditions, particularly Vedanta, say that ultimately the finest level of discernment is that which kind of gets you over the barrier from ignorance to enlightenment.  There’s just the subtlest, subtlest intellect has been developed through practice and purification and focusing on knowledge and some, that’s kind of the thing that kind of pushes you over the edge.

Julie: In sort of practical terms, if you’re checking out a sangha, some  things like, more practical directives like “follow the money” can be helpful in discerning.  If they’re raising money for a project in the inner city, but you notice the teacher’s  driving a Rolls Royce…

Rick: Or 97 Rolls Royces.

Julie: You might want to exercise your discernment.

Rick: Right.  Good point.  Okay. Yeah, there’s Marianna’s book Eyes Wide Open, that’s a good one. She also wrote one  called…

Julie: Halfway Up the Mountain.

Rick: The Error, yeah.

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: Halfway Up the Mountain, The Error of Premature Claims to Awakening.

Julie: Yeah. And I’m not sure that the phrasing of that sometimes a little, but to me, I would  phrase it as the delusion of thinking that enlightenment is like one and done. That it’s  permanent that you can, it’s not something that can, that you backslide  on and happens, and, have to do.

Rick: Do you think there is such a thing as enlightenment in the sense of some kind of terminus point,  some final realization beyond which you cannot grow any further in the spiritual sense?

Julie: I don’t do a lot of conjecturing about, like, you know, other realms or something  like that.  That’s just where I say, heck if I know.  I think among human beings my sense is no. That every human being has so many,  carries so much karma in a spiritual sense or just habits and conditioning.  And not only even our just our own conditioning from childhood or psychology or  whatever, but all of our cultural conditioning, all of the racial and  ecological and everything else that influences us, that we’re never…  I don’t think, I don’t know if it’s humanly possible to have our  eyes open in all in all directions at once. It just might be  too much for human wetware and bodies to handle. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t go  in the direction of this kind of lure for spiritual growth.

Rick: Yeah.

Julie: And for, yeah, doing the best we can.

Rick: Yeah, there’s always room for refinement.  One of my favorite quotes is from St. Teresa of Avila.  She said, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.”

Julie: Yeah, right.  Yeah  Well, there’s a, I think was Shunryu Suzuki that said you are all perfect and you can use

Rick: but you could use some improvement

Julie: Yeah, I mean we are Buddha nature and we are human and I think those things are always  Present

Rick: It’s what we were saying before about paradox or different dimensions on some level you’re perfect; on some on another level  You never will be

Julie: Right. Yeah

Rick: It’s good, it’s good to ponder this stuff.  Then there’s the whole consideration of transmission.  You know, what the heck is that?  And what can be transmitted from teacher to student?  And, go ahead.

Julie: I’ve got a whole chapter on that, and I go through a lot of things.  I probably can’t go through one by one through all the things I think it is.

Rick: Some of the key main points.

Julie: But the main point, I don’t think it’s enlightenment.  There are people who are enlightened and not transmitted.  There’s a lot of stories in Zen of enlightenment by seeing peach blossoms or hearing a sound.  It’s not the teacher giving the student something like that.  There’s some real dangers in thinking of it as being kind of leadership of the Sangha.  It’s generally, it’s not really about physical teachings or teaching styles being passed along.  Once you get rid of all of the things I think it’s not.  Actually, I’m talking about what goes from teacher to student here, teaching transmission.  The teaching transmission is entrustment. Okay.  It is this, people should really be terrified to be named as teachers because you’re being  trusted with carrying this Dharma wisdom that has come down from centuries and helping new  people who are trusting in you to take their steps on the way. And to me the idea of lineage,  a whole bunch of teachers behind you, is not that now you get a merit badge and you get  to step up on the stage with all these other honored teachers, but they’re all looking  at you and they’re going to watch and see if you screw up. You have responsibility to  keep this dharma wheel turning. So it’s a real big trust thing. In terms of   the word “transmission,” what I think is a better description, and so the  teaching transmission ceremony should be, I think, on the part of the teacher, a  judgment that this person is not only spiritually mature, but also emotionally  and sexually and all the rest mature enough to be able to do this safely. That  is what a teaching transmission should be. There’s another way in which, in Zen we talk about mind,  that there’s some kind of mind-to-mind transmission between teacher and student.  But Keizan Jokin, who’s one of the co-founder of Soto Zen, wrote about mutual recognition in  the room, the room being the room where the teacher and student meet. And so I like to think,  I think a more modern metaphor for transmission is the teacher and the student are both wearing  earbuds and they’re listening to radio stations and they’re dancing and they can’t communicate  verbally to each other what station they’re listening to or what song they’re listening to.  But if they can tell by the way they’re each dancing that they’re tuned into the same station,  That’s this mutual recognition in the room. Okay, I see my eyes are open, my candle is  lit, to use another metaphor, and I see that your candle is lit.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. I like that metaphor.

Julie: And so that, I think, is what goes, you know, the more spiritual dimension of what can go on  between teacher and student. The teaching transmission is about trust.

Rick: Maybe, yeah, there’s a bunch of aspects to it. Maybe one way of looking at it is the transmission  is not like the teacher is zapping the student.

Julie: Right, it’s not like, “Urghhh.”

Rick: Kind of like, you know, lighting them up like a lit torch lighting another piece of wood on fire  or something. Although that metaphor might be apt in some cases.

Julie: Yeah, I mean, some people have  experienced this opening experience in an interchange with the teacher, and a lot of  other people haven’t. So in any case, there’s one candle on and then another candle  comes on.

Rick: Yeah. But one thing I’ve experienced, and probably you too, is that there can be a  kind of entrainment when the field gets really coherent. You know what I mean? And you just,  it’s elevating because your consciousness somehow aligns with the ambient coherence of the field,  and becomes more coherent itself. There are examples in nature actually where like 1% of the cells in  the heart are called pacemaker cells and if they beat coherently they get the whole rest of the  cells to beat coherently so your heart beats properly or in a laser even the square root of   becomes as if one coherent beam of light a laser.

Julie: That’s what I kind of mean by this dancing   dancing to the same music.

Rick: Yeah  That’s what reminded me of that when you said that.

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: Which, again, highlights the importance and value of a sangha,  as long as it’s a healthy one.  Because I suppose it would work both ways.  If a group is really toxic, you could get sucked into that toxicity.

Julie: Yeah.  Yeah.  And the value of a teacher in this kind of situation–  the value of having an authentic and trustworthy teacher,  if you can find it, is–some of it is in this–the cultivation and encouragement of these openings,  and a recognition of a valid opening. Not building a shrine to it, helping people move past that  so it’s not just a memory that they enshrine, but also distinguishing between some things  that people sometimes falsely think are something cosmic and it’s really just their mind playing  tricks or something like that. I mean, so spiritual guidance is, can be helpful in sorting out.

Rick: Do you think a qualified teacher could recognize when a student had a genuine awakening? What would you look for?

Julie: I hope that that’s usually the case, and I have, yeah, there’s something,  I think there’s some pretty distinguishing signs of a real opening experience.

Rick: Some people say that if you have the eyes to see it, you’ll see it.  You could run into him in an airport concourse and you’d see, “Oh, that person is awake.”  I actually heard a story from somebody who noticed some guy over by the luggage carousel  from 40 feet away and he recognized the guy was awake.

Julie: Yeah, I mean it could be. I have not had that experience so I’m not gonna    Pass a judgment on it, but there’s, in a teacher-student relationship  Sometimes these relationships or often these relationships go on for years

Rick: you really get to know a person

Julie: as a teacher  And as a student when I was working with teachers  There are certain places you tend to get stuck at.  And when you become unstuck, it’s visible.  It’s palpable to the people who have been working with that.

Rick: Yeah, and then, of course, time will tell.

Julie: Yeah, like I said, that experience of opening,  it may be helpful to have it confirmed, saying, OK, yeah,  you’re right.  that is what we’ve been talking about. And equally important to say,  and what about your precepts study? What about your ethical teachings? How is this going  for it? You know, what is the next step? So you don’t just kind of build that shrine and  spend the next 30 years thinking back to that one opening as if that defines your life rather  than what you’re doing right now.

Rick: One point I was discussing with my friends this morning was spiritual growth  is incremental, and so we don’t generally experience big contrasts, although there might  be occasional.

Julie: There can be occasional big ones, but mostly it’s slow.

Rick: But you know what I was saying, one thing I was saying to them is that  I can regard myself as being in a very different state of mind than I would have been if I  I hadn’t been doing spiritual practice all these years.  And if I suddenly were to snap out of this state  to the state I would be in had I not  done all that spiritual practice, well, first of all,  I’d probably be dead.  But secondly, it would be an agonizing contrast.  But it’s incremental, so it’s normal.  But there is a cumulative influence,  I think, of regular spiritual practice, which just is  with you whether or not you notice it.

Julie: And I think a lot of the, I mean, a powerful opening experience is not forgotten    But it’s also,    It’s work to to integrate that in your life and as you integrate it  Yeah, certain things that were, just seemed insurmountable, maybe before  this experience and this work at integration  now are not. They’re molehills, they’re not even that. You do gain some liberation,  some freedoms.

Rick: You gain greater capacity to  deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Julie: Yes, yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Julie: I do think we need to, we were talking about equanimity earlier. You can’t rely on  outside things, even a spiritual teacher in a sangha to give you the kind of security you  really want, until you find some security in your heart and innermost being.

Rick: Oh, yeah,  can’t come from the outside.

Julie: What you have to, and that’s what we, our sangha,has really learned over these,  deep betray.., I would wish these kind of deep betrayals on no one.  But they also make you really go to the heart of your practice.

Rick: Yeah. Another thing just to run by quickly is, you know, being, we mentioned sexual  misbehaviors, but also a lot of times students are overworked,

Julie: Oh, yeah.

Rick: and to the point of sleep deprivation, and with no compensation, or, and meanwhile,  the teachers living high on the hog, or perhaps they are literally divested of their life  savings or large amounts of money.  I can think of several examples, people who I actually interviewed, whose interviews I  took down when I discovered that had been happening.  And so, you know, that’s just another thing to be cautious of if you’re getting involved  with a spiritual teacher.  You shouldn’t be.  I have a friend who has had chronic fatigue syndrome for decades because he was pulling  like three all-nighters in a row and stuff working on projects in the TM movement, and  it really damaged his nervous system.  So there needs to be… it’s just a danger sign when that kind of thing is happening.

Julie: And unfortunately, we’ve had it, I mean, sometimes the teachers in our troubled  sangha history were asking too much, but then when there is teacher misconduct, the amount  of work that that board had to put in to do the right thing was just exhausting.  And so we’ve had to deal with, repetitively, with issues of board burnout in dealing with  the misconduct and continuing on as a sangha.  And it’s a real thing because you can’t,  Again, it’s much easier. It would have been much easier and we’d have   more people willing to be board members if we’d swept it under the rug like every other sangha, right?    So how do you balance?  It’s tough  It’s tough and so

Rick: yeah,

Julie: it is so bad and we have.. some people have  gone through that and  I would say everybody still has come through who got burned out by dealing with the misconduct have come through with a spiritual life  but people have gone different directions

Rick: Yeah  Of course as I as we’re talking about this I think of   legitimate professions such as teaching or police or  the medical profession where burnout is a problem because there’s so much demand placed upon a person  but    where it becomes unethical is where people are being used as slaves to do all kinds of labor for the benefit of the teacher.

Julie: I think our board was actually kind of burned out for ethical reasons.

Rick: Yeah, you kind of burned yourselves out.

Julie: Which was not a waste, I mean, their efforts.  Voluntarily, right.  I think their efforts were much for the good, but it still, it was, they paid a high cost.  high cost. But yeah, the burnout for not, yeah, if you’re sacrificing yourself  and the leader’s driving a Rolls, there’s something wrong.

Rick: Every time I mention one of these points, specific instances come to mind of this actually  happening with this or that teacher, so we’re not just speaking abstractly here.

Julie: My experiences were not with, the Rolls-Royce driving teachers, but I was financially  taken advantage of in the first of the betrayals I describe in the book, where money was raised  to create a retreat center for a larger group, and then later on some people decided to have  it just for them.  And I no longer had access to the place I’d put in work, and what was for me a chunk of  change, not my life savings, but something I couldn’t easily spare.

Rick: That happened in the TM movement too. People would donate to buy a center, and then the organization would decide to sell the center and the money would go overseas to who knows what.  And hey, you want another center? Donate more money.

Julie: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so let’s see. You mentioned… What did you mean by this? “What’s wrong with the bad apple understanding of teacher abuses? I think this is a huge obstacle to effectively tackling the problem.”

Julie: This is, I’ve seen this a lot among both students and teachers in Zen, is that somebody behaves in some certifiably misconduct kind of way  and everybody around makes it a personal thing about that person’s failing or mistake.  as if it really doesn’t have to do with me, it’s not my responsibility,  this is just kind of a fluke.  We seem to have an awful lot of flukes in spiritual communities, right?  Because this stuff comes up so often.  And I think the much better understanding of this  is that we… actually I heard one person describe it as  it’s not that there’s just a few narcissistic psychopaths out there  waiting to take advantage of you, it’s that we cultivate narcissistic psychopaths. That is,  that this slow creep of ego inflation and pride and arrogance makes us a much more homegrown problem.  And it’s not a problem just out there for a few people, an isolated individual,  isolated bad apple here and there. Great anger and greed, hatred and delusion are in all of us.  and if we don’t recognize that, and one of the things I write about in terms of sort of boundary  violations and teachers, and teachers not taking adequate account of their trust,  the trust the students put in them, and inadvertently doing things that harm the  students, was a very trivial thing about an academic arranging lunch for a visiting speaker  and asked, this was in the case of a therapist, who asked one of their clients to go to the lunch,  and the client read all sorts of things into that invitation for lunch when the therapist was just  trying to fill up the table, right? So it’s not that this therapist was a bad person in any kind  of way, but they did a thing that harmed their relationship with the student. The student–

Rick: In other words, the student thought they were special because they had been invited to this lunch.  and then didn’t realize that the teacher hadn’t intended all of that stuff.  So the teacher really had to backtrack and apologize to the student for all of this.  And the student had to realize they’ve been idealizing the therapist.  So it created this whole sense of misunderstanding and betrayal over this very simple thing.  So these kinds of ways in which teachers can misuse power and harm their students,  the cases that make the newspaper are just the tip of the iceberg.  The rest of it runs through all of us as human beings.

Rick: Yeah.

Julie: And this therapist was conscious enough to be able to apologize and  recreate the relationship on a new basis of trust, but it took work for her, even  in that trivial case.  How much more for the rest of us that can screw up here and there.  That’s what I mean.  Yeah, I mean, we shouldn’t expect the teacher to be a paragon of absolute virtue, but we  should expect them to have basically good behavior and the humility to atone and do restitution  when they realize they’ve made a mistake.

Rick: Yep.  Well, it’s a work in progress, as are we all.  And I’d say by way of a concluding point is that you and I agree that there’s  something very valuable in all this.  It’s precious.  It’s really the most precious thing in life, what these, what spiritual development  has to offer.  And so people shouldn’t be disillusioned or discouraged by all this talk of corrupt teachers  and everything that we’ve been having.  But you just have to kind of realize it is a bit of a razor’s edge, this path, and you  have to be on your toes and be wise.  What did Jesus say to his disciples?  Be wise as serpents, but gentle as doves.

Julie: Innocent as doves.  Yeah.

Rick: Innocent as doves.

Julie: Yeah, so open heart, definitely, and it’s well worth bringing your heart to,  and keep your eyes open.  Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.  Any other concluding remarks you want to make?

Julie: No, I think that’s..

Rick: A question just came in let’s just see what this question is.  Yeah, one just came in.  This is from  Prachi Dixit in Torrance, California  Okay, we were talking about this a little bit but maybe you can elaborate  What are the signs you look for in a student to recognize awakening?

Julie: Actually, one of the things that seems to spontaneously arise in any set of opening, I would say is gratitude.  A real feeling of gratitude and a lack of  self-consciousness, a lack of intellectualization,  a lack of distancing,  lack of  arrogance and pride,  a  being able to go past some kind of stuck spot, exactly what that is will depend on,  what has come out in the in previous parts of that relationship.  And a real shift, often described, sometimes described through metaphors,  sometimes just described, particularly in Soto Zen, they say you can sometimes just tell from  someone’s demeanor. And you can see someone almost visibly lightening up,  often when they’ve had some kind of experience. They are just a lighter, more erect, more present  person. They might have just kind of come in, kind of dance all the time before.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good.  Irene and I have been going through the  youtube  thumbnail images for all the 700 plus interviews because we have a whole new website with a new design  So we the thumbnails have been redesigned and Irene commented the other day that  looking at all these pictures as she puts together these thumbnails  Impressed upon her how much presence  is common among so many of the people there’s just something in the faces that you can see

Julie: It was a similar thing, I told you I was an economist and did feminist economics,  and that was not a friendly environment. Economics tends to be pretty hard on women in general,  much less feminists. But one time I was, for some reason, I was cruising a lot of departmental  websites and a lot of the women had the same strained expression.  It was just physically there. I’m in a hostile environment and I’ve got to play like  the guys. Yeah.

Rick: Interesting.

Julie: Although I have to say, I find the, I was in a place that where they had a wall of pictures  of their spiritual luminaries. Yes. Don’t use that kind of picture with the soft focus.

Julie: We won’t we’re not.

Rick: So, aside from having written a book, which I recommend people read, is it out yet? Or is it  Is it coming out pretty soon?

Julie: It’s coming out June 10th.  It’s available for pre-order at IndiePubs.  Name it is Practicing Safe Zen, Navigating the Pitfalls on the Road to Liberation.

Rick: Okay.  I think it’s available for pre-order on Amazon too.

Julie: Yeah, I think it’s cheaper actually on IndiePubs.

Rick: Okay, IndiePubs.

Julie: And you’re also supporting independent bookstores.

Rick: If you want to send me a link to that, I’ll put it on your BatGap page so people can  go to that, your particular book on IndiePubs.  I’d never heard of IndyPubs.  And so aside from that–  and you live in New Hampshire now.  You still are a Zen teacher, so you’re meeting with–  you have a sangha of some sort.

Julie: Yes and no.  It’s kind of a complicated situation.  I became a transmitted teacher in the middle  of the second of the three big waves of betrayal by teachers.  At the third wave, and I was teaching,  meeting with some people individually,  and I’m still, all along I’ve been meeting  with a handful of people individually, mostly on Zoom.  But as part of the third wave of teacher abuse,  we’d been so beat up by teachers that I resigned  as an official teacher at Greater Boston Zen Center.  It’s still my home sangha.  I’ve been acting there as a practice leader  and member of some working group type things.  but I have not, the sangha has had no teacher  because we’ve just been so beat up.  We just recently had a membership vote  because there are some people who feel so beat up  by teachers, they wanted to try this kind of  radically egalitarian, we’ll all just sit in a circle mode.  And then I and some other people wanted to say,  no, can we use power, can we recognize it  and use it for good rather than trying to pretend  it’s not there?  And there was just a membership vote,  and it’s taken a long time to get to this clarity.  It’s a long story, mainly because these threats  of litigation and everything else are just a nightmare.  Anyway, the vote went towards the Sangha.  Having teachers there is a service role.  We call it a Sangha-led Sangha.  I am not the leader of the Greater Boston Zen Center Sangha,  even after I’ll probably be reinstated as a teacher in July.  I mean, we have to, we want to put together the new bylaws  and go through all the hoops,  But I will not be leading the sangha.  I will be offering teacher services to the sangha.  And the sangha is run by the membership via the board.

Rick: So most of the people watching this  don’t live anywhere near Boston.  Is there anything you do that people who live far away  can participate in, like you mentioned, Zoom sessions?

Julie: Yeah, we do.  We do sits, generally hybrid.  And we just lost our lease on our permanent place  and haven’t found a new one yet.  So the next few weeks will probably  be only on Zoom until a new physical location is found. We also do book groups  and the precept study groups that I mentioned have been exclusively online  ever since we discovered during COVID how much better that works for that kind of  thing.

Rick: Great.

Julie: Exclusively online you’re seeing everybody’s faces, you can talk. Our  Zendo practice includes chanting and that’s really hard to do over Zoom and  and still get the same effect.  I’m also hoping that we will restart  having Sashin’s residential retreats,  but those are only in person.  So anyway, there’s this mix.

Rick: And all this will be on your website, right?

Julie: Yeah, the Greater Boston Zen Center website  has links to the series.

Rick: We’ll make sure I have that  ’cause I think I just have a Julia Nelson website.

Julie: Yeah, julianelson.com has, I think on the about page,  it links to the Greater Boston website  and also has ways of contacting me directly.  That’s my blog.

Rick: OK, great.  Well, people know how to get in touch with you,  then I’ll have that on your BatGap page.  Great.

Julie: It’s been great fun talking with you.

Rick: Yeah, thanks, Julie.  I’ve really enjoyed it.  And there are a couple of technical screw-ups  in the beginning, but we worked it out.

Julie: OK, great.

Rick: All right.  So thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching.  And my next guest–  I hope I can pronounce his name.  It’s something like Diarmuid Murchu.  And he’s an Irish, rather mystical priest,  kind of in the vein of Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeau,  Elia Deleu, people like that.  And I’m reading several of his books  right now, well, one at a time.  And I think you guys are going to enjoy that one.  So stay tuned.  Thanks