Endless Depths of Enlightenment – Kogen Czarnik – Transcript

Kogen Czarnik Interview

Summary:

• Kogen Czarnik, a Polish-born Zen practitioner and teacher, shares his journey from a troubled youth in post-communist Poland through decades of intensive monastic training in Japan under Tangen Harada Roshi.
• He outlines a multi-stage model of awakening: initial recognition of the nature of mind, a deeper non-dual collapse of awareness and its contents, and a final dropping away of any sense of an experiencer.
• Kogen emphasizes that awakening is not a finish line — it requires ongoing “polishing,” ethical maturation, and embodiment across all dimensions of life.
• He critiques Neo-Advaita’s “you’re already enlightened, nothing to do” messaging as potentially misleading, and stresses the importance of discernment around teachers, particularly regarding narcissism and abuse of power.
• The conversation closes with reflections on compassionate engagement with the world, drawing on his teacher’s example of selfless service.

Key Takeaways

• Awakening unfolds in stages — from recognizing pure awareness, to non-dual collapse, to the complete dropping away of a self-referential experiencer — and each stage can feel final while more remains.
• Realization alone does not purify character; ethical development and psychological maturation must be cultivated in parallel, not assumed to follow automatically.
• The “nothing to do, you’re already free” teaching is valid at the absolute level but can be harmful when applied prematurely or used to bypass genuine inner work.
• Students should trust their own discernment around teachers — spiritual authority does not exempt anyone from accountability, and healthy peer structures are essential safeguards.
• The deepest realization returns to ordinariness — not dramatic experiences, but a quiet, compassionate, fully engaged presence that serves the world without needing recognition.

Full transcript, edited for readability:

Kogen: As long as we are identifying with the content of our mind, we are constantly at the mercy of that movement of content of thought. So then, there can happen this recognition that actually the content itself is simply like a movie projected on the screen, right? And yet there is a light that makes that projection possible. (upbeat music)

Introduction and Welcome

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done about 750 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to BATGAP.com and look under the past interviews menu. Actually, it’s just the interviews menu. And underneath that, we have a bunch of different categories of ways that we’ve organized the interviews. Should be self-evident if you look there. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and you would like to help support it, please go to the website and you’ll see PayPal buttons on a page with alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Kogen Czarnik. Is that the right pronunciation, Czarnik?

Kogen: It’s good enough.

Rick: Oh, don’t ask me to do that.

Kogen: Yeah, it’s really great.

Rick: Good. Kogen is in Poland and from Poland, and he’s one of these brother-from-another-mother guests on BATGAP because he has some ways of seeing things that are very similar to my own, even though our backgrounds are very different. For instance, he says he considers himself and all human beings a work in progress. And if you’ve been watching this show for the past 17 years, you’ve probably heard me say that hundreds of times. And he’s also, as was his teacher, concerned about ethical considerations on the spiritual path, which some people dismiss as irrelevant or illusory or something, but I don’t believe Kogen does. But anyway, rather than my reading the bio he sent me, which would be boring because you’d have to hear me reading it for a couple minutes, I’m just going to have Kogen start in and tell us a little bit about himself, and then we will get rolling on all the points we want to discuss. So, where would you like to start? I know another thing we have in common is you were a bit of a wild teenager, I guess.

Kogen: Yeah. And then you got on the spiritual path.

Kogen: First of all, thanks a lot, Rick, for having me. I’m a huge appreciator of your show. I think you’re doing great stuff for the overall spiritual community.

Rick: Thanks.

Kogen: So, yeah.

Rick: Like yourself, it feels good to try to make a contribution to the world.

A Wild Start: Street Life in Post-Communist Poland

Kogen: Yeah, so, I certainly had a not necessarily promising, spiritually, childhood. I had a good family. I had really decent and loving parents, so there’s nothing there. But, sometimes, people are asked like, “Oh, were you kind of having those spiritual inclinations as a kid?” And I always say, “No, I was actually, as a kind of straight kid in Poland at the time when the communists fell and before we got into EU, there was this kind of dark period where the collective dream of Poland, which we were, I guess under occupation of different kinds for 150 years. There’s this collective dream that the political freedom will bring happiness. And once that wasn’t delivered, there was this sense of great disappointment. And, there was a lot of crime. It was pretty rough, living in the projects. And so for myself, I was taking every opportunity as a street kid, either shoplifting or, stealing wallets for drugs or mugging people or whatnot. So that was my, that’s my honest answer about my kind of spiritual inclinations as a young kid. But I guess maybe what was slightly standing out in all of that was also I had this real curiosity about mind-altering substances. There was this feeling of something is just not right the way things are, the way I’m experiencing reality. As a young child, of course, I wasn’t necessarily shoplifting, but it was more the teenage years when this sense of being something in particular started to really set in. There was this kind of reactivity against it and dissatisfaction. So I guess I tried weed first time when I was 12 or something and tried different things and I guess in the end that was somewhat, there was some saving grace in that because I encountered psychedelics and had some experiences that were really transformative and showing me the potential of human mind and how much there is to… how much potential there is in our consciousness. And that really helped me set off on a different trajectory there.

Rick: Yeah, similar to my story, except I wasn’t mugging people. The thing that really hit me when I first did LSD was the realization that everybody sees the world so differently. I thought it was the same world and everybody saw it that way. And all of a sudden I’m seeing it so differently. and I went into a shop to buy donuts, and I saw the ladies in the shop were obviously seeing the world so differently than I was. And it kind of dawned on my very confused teenage mind that the name of the game must be to change the way you see the world rather than just trying to change the world.

Kogen: Yeah. Yeah, those are portals and they can be profoundly useful. They have their own dangers. And in my case, I never felt like it was an ongoing affair. I felt like almost my second mushroom trip and my second LSD trip were the kind of most, powerful. And after that I was kind of trying to recreate it for a while and just never hitting the same mark. And after some time I just decided it’s probably not in those substances. It has to be possible to find it in, other ways.

Rick: Yeah, so how did you – you eventually got into Zen, but how did you.

Psychedelics, Zen Books, and the Turn Inward

Kogen: I was actually… it was Zen that inspired me to learn meditation, although I didn’t learn Zen, but I was reading Zen books, and I thought… in fact, it was on my last hallucinogenic trip, I was sitting there reading a Zen book, “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones,” and I thought, “Wow, these guys were really serious, and I’m just screwing around, and I think I’d better learn something more serious and stop doing this kind of thing. And then I got myself to learn meditation and it really had a profound effect.

Rick: But how did you go through that transition from your wild and crazy period to something more serious?

Kogen: I was lucky I had a lot of great friends around me and they were – we were all kind of spiritually curious right at a time when we were discovering psychedelics and, different people are just reading different books. I mean everything from like, really odd stuff like Aleister Crowley’s books to, Carlos Castaneda to, some Zen books. And in the process we would do some practice together and through that quick discernment time I quickly arrived at Zen. It just was really speaking to me. And I think it was also because Zen is this sort of, at least it used to be initially in Tang Dynasty China, this sort of rebel kind of maverick movement of breaking off from the sort of worship-based spirituality. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I think it was like really formalized and sort of doctrinal Buddhism in China at the time. And Zen came in and sort of was this disruptive force of pure awakening and sort of radical simplicity. So reading those books I really had that sense of like, there’s something real in that and wanted to explore that. Later I kind of learned that style kind of has disappeared mostly. The literature is there and all the stories are repeated, but maybe the sort of teaching style kind of got a little bit tamed, especially when it came to Japan. And Japan is also… everybody likes the structure and all that. So, but yeah, so, through those practices with friends, I quickly read a couple of books, like “Three Pillars of Zen” and “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts, and I just decided to pursue that in some more formal context.

Rick: Yeah, and then you went to, was it Japan or Korea?

Kogen: It was Japan, initially. first I actually practiced with Jacques Castermane of Sonoma Mountain Zen Center, who was actually the same teacher that Adyashanti used to do his retreats with. He’s from Sonoma Mountain Zen Center and he used to come to Poland for a month and a half of every year and we were doing like a month-long retreat with him. So he was my first teacher there and I wanted to kind of – because my background was like being a musician, so I was trained in elementary school and high school and conservatory. So I had that kind of –

Rick: What did you play?

Kogen: Singing was my kind of, classical singing was my primary thing, although I played piano and some other instruments. But through that, being in those institutions, it was just my natural inclination or, whoever, someone might say it’s kind of karmic, that I thought like, okay, just as I’m in a music conservatory right now, which is the best possible institution, if you want to become a musician, there has to be an equivalent of that to become a sort of realized person, right? And for that, in Poland, especially, it was just at the beginning of this century, so there was not many kind of residential places. Everything was, in my city we used to rent a little place on the attic or in the basement, and sometimes sitting meditation and hearing the rats running on the pipes. It’s very kind of low budget, low, just the very start of the whole thing. So I felt like if I want to really dive into it, it’s just I felt that calling to go deeper and went to Japan.

Rick: Yeah, and one thing that I did visit a Zen Roshi one time after I had already been doing TM for a few months just to because I thought this is too easy. This TM thing is relaxing. I like it. I’m getting great benefits, but it’s got to be more. It’s got to be harder than this. And so I went into the Zen Center in New York and had a little Q&A with the guy and participated in a group meeting. And then after that I went to another TM talk and decided to become a TM teacher. But Zen has a reputation of not being easy, of being really kind of intense and harsh, and they whack you with sticks, and you have to sit in lotus even though you’re in agony, and you can’t fall asleep, or you get hit with a stick. So, I don’t know if I would have done too well if I pursued that path, but you kind of rose to the occasion and muscled on through.

Kogen: I don’t know what’s, I’m not like a tough guy by makeup, in terms of like, there are people who are athletic or like sturdy. I’m kind of like a weakling, like my health is not great. And so I’m kind of surprised I took this path, but there was something in the unescapability. Like my first retreat I ever done was in Poland still when I was just at the end of high school. And I signed up for three weeks of this month-long retreat. And the rule at that retreat was that you have to sit for each week that you’ll be sitting, you’ll go through this kind of cleansing period, so to speak. Like you have to sit the full day for each of the weeks that you’ll sit. You’ll have to sit a full day and you’re kind of separate from the group. You don’t take part in any activities and the schedule basically is you sit for an hour and a half, then you have breakfast, then you sit for three hours, then you have lunch, then you sit for four hours straight, then you have dinner, and then you sit for an hour and a half, and then you can go to sleep. Which, if someone is a meditator and tries to sit in a cross-legs for that long, unless you’re really well-stretched and sort of, well-equipped to that, it will be really challenging. It’s really painful after some time.

Rick: God, yeah!

Training in Japan: Cold, Discipline, and Tangen Roshi

Kogen: So, that was my first retreat, and literally the day I came, they told me that from the next morning that will be the case. And even though it was really painful, it was a hot summer and just like drenched in sweat, sitting there in pain, and yet, through that process of of, you are not able to escape. There’s just you, your mind, and that’s it. And there was something in that confrontation that felt beneficial, even though it was really challenging. So I think that’s why I kind of, even though I knew, like even the place I was going to in Japan, even that teacher, Kwon Roshi, he was telling me like, “I don’t think you can handle that. Japan is a whole different ballgame. You should really stay here.” He kind of wasn’t necessarily encouraging. But I had that feeling of, that’s where the path leads me. And I certainly don’t think everybody should do that. It’s not for everyone. And there are easier paths. So if you’re not inclined, probably you’re better off just not taking it. But for some reason I had that affinity and the training in Japan was pretty strict. It’s kind of like almost Navy Seals of the spiritual world. Of course, each tradition has some challenging aspects and some, but somehow the Japanese, I think there’s also like slightly emerging of that samurai culture and the spiritual culture that kind of produces that sense of, you need to really be tested in some way and that testing is part of the process. So for example, in the monastery we didn’t have any heating, right? So if outside is 28 Fahrenheit, inside it’ll be 28 Fahrenheit, right? and it can start snowing in November and still I remember in… There’s no…

Rick: Can you wrap up in a big blanket?

Kogen: No, in the meditation hall you cannot wear hats, you cannot wear gloves, you cannot wear socks. You have… the robes are kind of… nothing can stick out from the robes.

Rick: And you can’t have a blanket in addition to your robe, you just have to be just like that.

Kogen: You can sleep at night, we had plenty of blankets. But it’s still, it’s a very different thing if you’re like walking around and you’ll come back to the warm place. But if you are really in that cold all the time, it’s… I sometimes use this kind of image of… it’s like being in a stomach of a demon of cold that kind of slowly digests you. Because you get frostbite, like the head monk who lived there for… he was there from before I was born. And he had some blood circulation problem, but he had literally all of his fingernails have fallen out.

It’s like being in a stomach of a demon of cold that kind of slowly digests you.

Rick: Because of the frostbite.

Kogen: So, arriving there and seeing all that, it definitely felt like people in Asia, their commitment is just so unwavering sometimes. and whether there is wisdom in exposing your body to harm, I’m… later on, I kind of rethought a lot of those things. But at the time, that simply the way the tradition was transmitted and it was either you want to be there or you can do training elsewhere, but this is the way we do it, and you just have to surrender to that.

Rick: Well I have a couple of quick comments and you probably will have comments on those. And one is that I know people who have had to have knee surgery because they forced their legs into some position they weren’t ready to do and they tore their meniscus and things like that. So people listening to this, be careful. And second thing is there have been many instances of newbies, relatively inexperienced people plunging into some long intense retreat where they’re meditating all day long who’ve flipped out, they’ve had a psychotic episode and all. So you have to be really careful of that sort of thing too. I mean there’s a place in Rhode Island called Cheetah House run by someone named Willoughby Britton that specializes in dealing with train wrecks that people have run into from trying to push too hard too fast. So that’s just a cautionary.

Kogen: Yeah, and definitely I agree fully with that. I had myself four knee surgeries and, the saying goes, it’s better to start on a chair and end up in full lotus, then starting full lotus and end up on chair. Not there’s anything better with sitting on chair, either way. And I mean, it’s perfectly valid posture, there’s a lot of, which I guess maybe we’ll get in a little bit later, but there’s a lot of beliefs and ideas in the kind of very traditional orthodox centers in the east that might not necessarily be that useful. And definitely our body is a vehicle for dharma for our life and we should not damage it without reason. And to be fair, also, people in Japan live kind of kneeling on the floor, right? Their houses often don’t have chairs, they have little tables at the floor level. So they are used to sitting on the ground much more than we are. So for them it’s not that much of a challenge. So it’s not like, Zen monasteries are this kind of torture institutions or anything. It’s just for them it’s so much easier. And I happen to be six foot one and I wasn’t stretched properly. It was just more challenging for me. And I was also not listening to my own body. So certainly it’s not anything to be proud of. It’s kind of stupidity, if anything, to kind of go against obvious signals from our body. But also to the other point, I would still say that about the breakdowns, I think that’s a little bit of a role of a teacher too. There are many retreats that, I think one of them, I don’t think it’s a big, I’m not saying it is a negative comment necessarily, but the Goenka retreats, like the Vipassana Goenka retreats, there’s simply, there’s like assistant teachers, but all the teachings are from the tapes and there’s this very intense structure and if there’s not enough guidance and support, things can go south sometimes for people who might have some instability. But if there’s a wise guide around who can really see if a student actually is sort of fragile or something and they can really help with that and not to apply any more pressure and just kind of help them go through it.

Rick: Right. And maybe not let them on the course in the first place if they don’t pass some kind of psychological screening to show that they haven’t been recently hospitalized for psychiatric issues or some such thing.

Kogen: Sure, I still feel like some larger conversation about that part probably is still clarifying itself among like, the larger spiritual world and there’s still sometimes the belief in the East that like dharma or like, the tradition is the best medicine for all the forms of suffering when it’s not, right? sometimes in the West, if you meet a really good trauma specialist, maybe they’ll be way better for you at that moment, if you have a lot of trauma, then let’s say the highest teaching that some great teacher could give you, right?

Rick: Yeah, there’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita which says, “Because one can perform it, one’s own dharma, though lesser in merit, is better than the dharma of another. Better is death in one’s own dharma, the dharma of another brings danger.”

Kogen: That’s beautiful. I love it.

Rick: Yeah.

Kogen: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and the same goes with the psychedelic world. People have emergencies and catastrophes because of inadequate preparation or supervision in that arena.

Kogen: Exactly, yeah. I fully agree. Yeah, so, over there, I guess, in my case, even though I did, through the process, some health damage was done, but yet I felt like in some other ways I was really suited to this life. I really loved this life. And I have to also mention my teacher, Tangen Harada Roshi, who was kind of, I think it’s fair to say it’s kind of like Ramana Maharishi of Japan. what I mean – Like really very famous teacher that any person who met him, like I traveled in Japan quite a bit in different monasteries. And when people heard that he was my ordination teacher, sometimes people would tear up and they would say, oh, I encountered your teacher 30 years ago and it changed my life. And so many stories like that, that wherever I went, I went to different monastery for this longer formal training, priest training. And the abbot there, just when I said, that my home temple is Bukkaku-ji and my teacher is Tangen Harada Roshi. He also like, teared up and he told me this story when he traveled as a young monk, probably 25 years old, on some pilgrimage and he heard of this great teacher and he wanted really to meet him and, he came and, listened to some Dharma talk and really was so impacted and then they meditated in the evening and the presence that was radiating from from Tangen Roshi was just, really touching him and moving him deeply. But he said what really stayed with him the longest, or like it’s still bringing him to tears, was that the next morning when he had to depart, he was traveling onwards to some other temple for ceremony. He woke up and in the morning, he was about to leave and he saw that Tangen Roshi took his shoes and cleaned them because they were all muddy from travel and just put them neatly in front of his room. And he said that it really just stayed with him and became like a treasure for him for all his life. So, he was this person who was just really kind of like, in Buddhism we use this term bodhisattva, someone who really just lives to serve and lives to be for others.

Rick: Yeah, you wrote a book about him, which I read, and there were so many beautiful stories. Because you have the impression that in Zen, everybody’s really strict and harsh and mean and stuff like that. And he was a sweetie. Maybe he had his strict side, but like, little girl, her pet rabbit died, and he got in his best robes and did a ceremony for the rabbit, because she asked him to. Or there was some kitten sleeping on his seat and so he wouldn’t sit on his seat because it meant disturbing the kitten. Or another one was, he was going on some trip and he had a bun that he was going to eat on the way and when he opened it up to eat it, he discovered a cockroach was in there eating the bun. And so he very carefully, he could have thrown it out the window or something, but he carefully put it aside and kept the cockroach safe and he took it all the way with him to the trip and brought it home because he didn’t want it to be separated from its little cockroach family. And then the cockroach came twice, he put it in a corner, the cockroach came twice and bowed to him, like, “Thank you.” And then went back with his little cockroach family. So I just thought it was, it kind of revised my impression that, there’s not a lot of heart in Zen.

Deconstructing the Myth of Enlightenment

Kogen: Yeah, and, I have also practiced with some teachers who are a little bit more harsh and but yet I think I really feel this sort of two wings of one bird of wisdom and compassion. I mean like you need both to really be able to help people. even if you have a great wisdom if you’re kind of cold and demanding and harsh it can just be not skillful, right, or it cannot reach people’s heart because they’re kind of bracing themselves for the criticism and also sometimes people have just tons of compassion and yet without the wisdom piece, right, like saying yes to, let’s say when you’re raising a child, right, saying yes to every single thing is not necessarily the wisest way to raise a child. So, yeah, so I think, that is something that I, seeing in my teacher is stayed with me and, obviously it’s one of those things like living around those kind of great teachers of that sort of magnitude. It’s kind of humbling in some way, right? Because you kind of know how was the spectrum, right? What’s possible? And I think this is a larger conversation too about… I think it’s extremely important to kind of deconstruct the myth of enlightenment, of awakening, that there is this mythological state somewhere that is reserved only for very few and the special people. It’s all sold as that for many centuries, sometimes in different traditions. And even your podcast and showing that actually it is available for everyone. other resources are really

Rick: That was one of my main motivations for starting it because I live in a town where people have been meditating for decades and people were having profound awakenings and they’d tell a friend and the friend wouldn’t believe them because they’re just an ordinary person and so I decided I’m going to start interviewing these people and show people that people like them could get awakened and the subtitle of this show is “Conversations with Ordinary Spiritually Awakening People”.

Kogen: Yeah, and I agree with that 100%. It’s like every person, right, is an ordinary person. Like there’s no more special or less special people. But yet at the same time, I still feel like, sometimes in the process of that, there’s this … there’s a danger the pendulum can swing a little bit too far to the other end. And, just like in every field, let’s say we have Michael Jordan in basketball and we have Tiger Woods in golf, and it’s not like everybody should aspire to be Michael Jordan. Right. people can play basketball beautifully and help impoverished kids not to get into trouble like I was getting into trouble, through basketball and other things. So there are so many good things that can happen and yet, I’m just only saying it because, in the Buddhist world it’s never part of conversation but sometimes I feel like in the online secular non-duality there’s a someone has one glimpse and they hear the teaching over there’s nothing to do, little bit of that it’s already here and therefore there’s no need for any further practice or further maturation or further clarification. And yet only when we see people who truly were kind of far along that spectrum, we can see like, “Oh wow, there is actually more to be clarified. There is more to embody, right? Like with Tangen Roshi, that was the thing, like he really, his whole physical incarnation felt somehow sacred, right? Even though he was a chubby Japanese man, but yet there was something radiant about his presence that was truly moving, and people were, there were people who, every time they saw there was this woman from the neighborhood who was having horrific insomnia to the point him, they cried, or that she was really struggling with the mental health and she started to come to once a month to talks by this kind of public talk that Roshi would give for villagers and Roshi was always like laughing, like, I can, my talks can make sleep even an insomniac. But she was helped, she was literally falling asleep as soon as she was in his presence. And then through that, she got better with sleep on her own too. So there were some mysterious ways in which his presence could work. And yeah, it was just inspiring and humbling.

Rick: That’s nice. Yeah, here’s a quote from my notes. Tangen insisted that even great awakening requires quote “ever still more polishing”. Buddhahood as an ongoing process not a finished product. And there’s so many stories about that and you’re right I mean Neo Advaita, as it’s called, says this thing of, “You’re already enlightened and you don’t need to do anything.” and on some level that’s true but practically speaking it’s not true because on some level the universe never manifested – fine but we’re involved in a universe and don’t go stepping in front of buses because you think it never manifested.

Kogen: Yeah, definitely. I feel like, there are many analogies that I think are good here. One is that, the old one about the man going back to his home and seeing a snake coiled in a corner and he’s freaking out and, having this fear response and only later kind of coming with a light and seeing it was actually a rope coiled there, right? So is this true that snake never need to be thrown from the house. Like it’s not that the man will ever get rid of the snake. The whole premise of the whole thing is false. But at the same time, fear was real. His fear response was real. So as long as we are suffering from sense of separation from illusion, what is there good to hear that, you don’t need to be afraid of the snake. You have to actually come with the light of your own seeing and see clearly the reality of the situation. There’s just a rope there. But as long as you don’t know that, sure, the insistence of snake is not true, it’s all good, but unless the seeing happens, the suffering is ongoing. So, that’s …

Rick: I’ve heard there’s a Tibetan Buddha saying that “Don’t mistake understanding for realization and don’t mistake realization for liberation.” And, it’s actually kind of cruel to go to a person who’s confused and suffering and, all kinds of traumas and whatnot and say, “Oh, you’re fine just as you are. You’re already enlightened. That’ll be $10 dollars, please.”

Kogen: Yeah. And I, I’m not like too deeply, I actually, until the pandemic, I didn’t have, I never owned my own computer. I never had a bank account. I never had any social media so I’m really kind of new to the game but it was interesting to have like entered this digital marketplace and sort of see even the comments that people leave on spiritual videos that are kind of like so harsh and so judging and opinionated or just some of this kind of insistence for certain teachings and it kind of has of just finding a new identity club and sort of defending it just as you defend your religious or that undertone of political position, which is just so far from the actual living experience of it, which contains paradox always, it contains multitude. It’s never one-sided.

Rick: So, after everything you’ve been through now so far, what is your best understanding of what enlightenment actually is? And feel free to take as much time as you want to answer and we’ll go back and forth on it for a little while.

What Is Awakening? Three Stages of Realization

Kogen: It’s one of those things that you almost have to define terms before even responding, right? But again, I don’t think I use… there’s terms of like awakening, realization, enlightenment, liberation, and some people might use them interchangeably entirely. I feel like just because in my own unfolding and seeing it in other people, it seems to me that for most people it would go in a certain – it doesn’t come in one single strike. would call awakening probably. There’s an initial recognition, which I would

Rick: Is that what they call Kensho?

Kogen: Kensho literally means seeing nature, right? So we kind of see the nature of your mind. But, I could say, I could divide it into, let’s say roughly three categories – or like three stages. One could say, first one would be recognizing the nature of mind. Right. So it’s simply, initially we are just so identified with the content and the body and mind, basically. The content of mind and this body is me. Everything else is not me. So one could say that the central piece here is kind of identity. Like, what do we take ourselves to be? So initially, my thoughts are defining, are kind of statements of truth, are defining my reality. And I see the world even if I can’t recognize it in a moment we can see it mostly is as usually with those shifts we kind of see things in the rearview mirror what kind of is gone rather than – it is more difficult to recognize it beforehand but – we see the world through an elaborate spider web of thoughts, right – of different beliefs. Let’s say if I …

Rick: Filters, conditioning, that kind of thing.

Kogen: so if I think of myself as a bad person, my interaction will be seen through, my own actions and actions of others towards me will be seen through that lens. I might have some other different lens, like usually it’s not even one coherent view. Like ego, the mind identification is a little bit fractured one could say. It’s many pieces that kind of, I guess maybe the internal family systems are kind of trying to, point to that, right? There are different parts of ourselves and they have different needs, sometimes different psychological age and there’s; But as long as we’re identifying with the content of our mind, you’re constantly at the mercy of that movement of content of thought. So then, there can happen this recognition that actually the content itself is simply like a movie projected on the screen, right? And yet there is a light that makes that projection possible. So the whole field of consciousness, it almost like wakes up, right? It sort of it’s recognition of its own nature, right? So it’s not necessarily that even the small I is recognizing something or becoming an awakened self. It’s more that the true nature of mind which is, at least experientially, it feels like it’s timeless, unlimited, indestructible and I can perfectly understand why someone would – use the language more of like a God word, right? Like …

Rick: Yeah, and when you say that, true nature of mind, timeless, unlimited, indestructable, are you really referring to mind, which usually means a more sort of agitated, active level, or you’re referring to that which underlies and illuminates the mind, consciousness itself?

Kogen: Yeah, so ultimately there is no difference. But initially we have to, of course, disidentify with the layer of content and then see the nature of it, the under, as you said, underlying thing.

Rick: Yeah, like see the movie screen that the movies are playing on.

Kogen: But yet later we also see that that, even the nature of even that movement of confusion is in itself the same, has the same nature as the whole field. But initially we need to kind of disidentify from that. So there’s like sometimes there can be this moment of stepping back seeing as content is just content and some people experience the sort of witness stage. But ultimately in my experience that is also a duality that gets sort of transcended or healed or seen through however you want to phrase it.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s that same model in Hindu thought too, that you go into a witnessing phase and then later on there’s more unification and a unity consciousness thing. So it’s more universal understanding. So the word enlightenment itself has a kind of a static, superlative connotation, like “Oh, you’ve reached the end. You’re enlightened. You can just sit back and relax.” But, as we were saying earlier, your teacher and others have said, “No, there’s no end to it. There’s always going to be some refinement, some polishing, some deepening, some clarification or something.” So would you agree with that – there’s no end? And we might explore, like, okay, if you’ve realized pure consciousness, can you really improve upon that? And if not, then what is there left to refine or clarify or purify?

Bliss, Non-Duality, and the Down-and-In Movement

Kogen: Yeah, so no, I definitely agree that just that recognition and this is an important point I feel that very often those shifts, let’s say that recognition of the nature of mind, right? They have very often a flavor of “This is it! This is the final thing!” and it kind of can feel as if, okay, “I got it.” Like, now that’s the full enchilada. And yet, in the rearview mirror, we see so many times like, “Oh, actually, there is something completely different revealed later.” So I think it’s important to note that, even if it feels final and it fills us with self-confidence, sometimes in Zen it’s called the Zen stink, like smell of that fresh awakening that you sort of preach to every single person you meet, how free you are and how deluded they are, whatever. So this is like a first thing, this sort of awakening. And I would say that later, depending, some people go through a honeymoon phase and there can be a lot of bliss and it feels wonderful and rather complete. And I certainly spent, after my second really big awakening, I spent a couple of years in bliss and sort of, it was just, it was awesome, but there was almost like this sense of like, intuition, there’s still something more to see. So after, after the sort of initial…

Rick: This would actually be a good opportunity. You mentioned you had three breakthroughs at 23, 30 and 37. Maybe you could tell us about each of those breakthroughs and use that to elaborate on this concept of what enlightenment actually is.

Kogen: Yeah, so the initial one was just that recognizing the nature of consciousness itself. It’s a pure being, it has nothing, it has no quality. I guess the Sat-Chit-Ananda, right, is the term in Hindu or in Sanskrit, which is used.

Rick: Existence, consciousness, bliss.

Kogen: I think it’s pretty spot on. There’s this feeling of pure being, right, that has almost no qualities but bliss and pure beingness, right. It’s just that most fundamental sense of being and it feels beyond time and it feels just … it was never touched, whatever was unfolding in our lives and whatever challenge we experienced, that thing was never harmed and that’s why it’s so liberating and it’s so freeing and some people would call it the up and out movement of awakening, right? because it can feel like that. So in my It’s sort of… own awakening there was this, in that moment, it was this sort of movement that started to almost go up and out. Literally that’s how it felt. I remember very clearly this sort of… It was during a retreat I was laying in bed and days and days and days. It was just this sort of golden field of presence enveloping me. I couldn’t sleep for really And there was this kind of… Ah,

Rick: Now let me just ask a question there. So, was your body actually sleeping, but your consciousness was awake? Or do you think your body was even awake?

Kogen: It’s hard to make a distinction there.

Rick: Because there is this phenomenon of witnessing sleep. You could be snoring like a drunken sailor, but your inner awareness is pure and clear and you haven’t lost consciousness.

Kogen: Yeah, I was definitely hearing the breath, but it felt, the wakefulness of the radiant golden field was just so prominent that, I think it was probably borderline. I don’t think I was deep asleep, but because the trigger was, I was somewhat aware of the body.

Rick: And how long did this go on?

Kogen: I was actually on this 90-day long retreat and for several weeks I was going to sleep and I mean I was trying to go to sleep and then it was just this sort of like, felt like timeless presence that was just primary and everything else was just very distant background.

Rick: And did you feel tired during the day?

Kogen: Maybe slightly, like the biologically, the energetic body was pretty radiant and bright, but the biological body was… but it was all right. It wasn’t, and then it was actually, it was a summer and I was laying kind of somewhere on my side and it was dark, and I had a very distorted sense of space also, and I touched with my hand something on my back, and it was the first time I learned that I grew some hair on my back. So it kind of felt like in an odd place, suddenly there’s this touch and I feel some hair there and there’s this sort of almost like a stroboscope of, because you can feel both on your skin on the back and you can feel in your, so there’s this subject-object was flipping back and forth like a stroboscope because like both were trying to figure out what did it encounter in some way and then there was this moment of cessation, which when everything disappeared, and from there it felt as if from the depths of my belly was this movement that initiated, and then it kind of came up and sort of started this explosion of subtle body that there was this sort of liberating movement of kind of up and out all the time. It was really interesting. I only later heard that Papaji used to say that he can really clearly see each time a person has awakening because the subtle body explodes in the fireworks and I felt like, oh wow, that’s really precisely how I would describe it. And sometimes those things, kind of, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas sort of in those cascades of fireworks of a subtle body, it was ongoing for a couple of weeks. Which was…

Rick: You were saying that?

Kogen: I mean, it was not like, because they were kind of around here, but yeah, there was this. I don’t know if it was an eye seeing, it was more like a mind’s eye seeing.

Rick: Mind’s eye, of course. Yeah, I wasn’t suggesting your physical eyes. And so it sounds like a kind of a classic Kundalini awakening.

Kogen: No, I had Kundalini awakening later and it was very different in nature, it felt to me. And actually it was pretty challenging, the Kundalini thing later. But in that moment, that whole space of consciousness, it almost awoke and felt liberated. Obviously, the experiential byproducts of awakening are not awakening itself. It’s not what’s important in awakening, but it’s almost like you have a bottle of champagne and you shake it. Because of the pressure, if you put it, it’s like boom, it starts to flow, right? But what’s important is the taste of champagne, obviously. It’s not the foam, so it will settle. But initially, because the mind identification, the sort of contraction inherent in the sort of view of separate self, when it explodes, it can be just so,

Rick: Exhausting.

Kogen: yeah, exactly. It’s just thrusting and therefore there’s this up and out movement.

Kogen: So this is like I would say the first awakening right.

Rick: That was the 23-year-old one.

Kogen: I kind of don’t want to mix it too much here. There was an earlier one that I had at 23. This one was when I was 30. But there is still one at 33 and 37. But yeah, I don’t want to bore with too many details here.

Rick: It’s not boring, this is interesting.

Rick: And, okay, so I don’t really have any questions on that one. It just sounds like a beautiful experience. Well, I guess one question is, was this on a retreat that this happened? And this is after, if this happened when you were 30, you had been doing intense practice for over a decade. Yeah. So it had built up.

The First Breakthrough: Defeat and Liberation

Kogen: So the first awakening I had was with my teacher and it was, and actually, most of them, I have to say, it wasn’t like a victory situation. It was mostly failure, right? So I think that, I think it’s really accurate to say that awakening is not winning. It’s losing, you really lose to the schedule, you lose to your teacher, you lose, there’s a complete defeat and then something can really show up. And again, maybe for other people it’s going differently. So I’m not necessarily having a strong opinion how it should feel. For me, I certainly felt like I was defeated. So the initial breakthrough was when it was very cold. It was a December retreat and I was really thin because the monastery food wasn’t that much and there was just this continuous pressure and people are hitting with the stick. If you move this way or that way, they immediately get hit. There’s people walking behind you all the time, right? Like it’s continuous patrolling. Do you take turns being the stick person? I will take turns in that. Yeah. And then, there was, and I was just like trying to concentrate my mind like into this sort of Samadhi state and I was just feeling.

Awakening is not winning. It’s losing, you really lose to the schedule, you lose to your teacher, you lose — there’s a complete defeat and then something can really show up.

Rick: Would you get headaches? I mean would it kind of like. it seems to me it would be such a strain.

Kogen: Eventually when I kind of had some breakthrough it certainly felt very easy in some ways but initially yeah I think there’s a little bit of that sense of intensity.

Rick: I know in Adya’s case, he was like a gung-ho. He was a competitive bicycle racer and he brought the same competitive spirit to his spiritual practice. And he reached a point at which he felt like, “I’m going to go crazy if I push any further.” And so he kind of went to his little backyard hut and had this attitude of, “I’m giving up.” And then boom, he had his big awakening.

Kogen: Yeah. No, exactly. For me, it was like, because the Buddha’s enlightenment week in Japanese monastery is the most intense. You sleep even less. Some monasteries you actually have to give away your bedding so you don’t lay down for the whole week, right? Like it’s this sort of intense, intense retreat. And I was trying and trying and trying and trying and yet feeling like I was failing. So it was a seven-day long retreat and every day everybody was going to dinner at like 5 p.m. But because I was hitting the big temple bell, I had to stay in the meditation hall and I ate after everybody finished eating. So I was just sitting there at night, when everybody left and I was, every day, first day, second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day, sixth day, and I was just constantly being defeated and felt like I was just trying to push away this karma and confusion and vasanas and all that and I was just like struggling and struggling and it was the seventh day, so the last day of retreat, and it was evening time. Everybody left the meditation hall and I was waiting for the meditation to ring the meditation bell. And at some point there’s exactly that realization of like, I just can’t do it. It’s just too much. And I said, I welcome all the confusion, everything may come. And then there was this kind of movement that started to happen like, initially it was just the thoughts that I had and later it was almost like memories from my childhood and at some point it was a very fast fast fast kind of movement and then at some point it was also like different almost like a momentary experiencing of scenes from life. So I mean one could interpret this as past lives but regardless it was just like a woman grieving its baby or from the first person perspective, right? Or like a, a knight being cut by a sword, or like, all those images flashing, flashing, flashing. And at some point, they start to be more and more transparent. And there’s just this pure stillness, like I have never experienced before in my whole life.

Rick: Wow. Didn’t something like that happen to the Buddha too, on his awakening? He remembered all his past lives and then broke through. I thought, well, better than me, but I think I remember that story.

Kogen: There are many different tellings of that story depending on which tradition. So I didn’t necessarily remember that bit.

Rick: But I’ve heard that in various yogis and what not. They have this whole purging and kind of like a slideshow of many many many past lives at the moment of their liberation.

Kogen: Yeah, so, that was the first breakthrough that I had and I want to say that in the context of the whole talking about realization and its unfoldment, I’m pretty sure that many teachers in the West or I mean in the Zen sort of tradition in the West would probably say like, “Okay, you had your awakening, now you should work on subsequent koans or now you should do more refining work.” And yet my teacher, he wasn’t this kind of guy who just like easily passed people. So he would, he definitely acknowledged, he said like, “Oh, your eyes are so shining, you’re a treasure.” And, but he was, now, you really have to continue and he just rang a bell to kind of dismiss me. And so even though, there was a lot of qualities that were feeling like, my experience felt located at the center of universe centerless, I didn’t feel anymore. There’s a spaciousness and openness and things and yet I felt, I just fell to his guidance that I kind of keep still doing the practice that had a little bit of a flavor of an effort and even though I think there’s something to be said for transition from effortful to effortless practice I think it’s a spiritual life, and I certainly natural transition in many people’s experienced that. But at that point, so here’s like a little sort of working model that maybe I’ll hear your thoughts about. So there’s this kind of horizontal axis that I would say stages of realization, right? And I’ll go still later in this discussion into the further ones, but the collapse of what seems to be like let’s say pure awareness and the objects right into this initial awakening and then maybe that more non-duality and then some further clarifications and yet I still feel that there is also another axis which is the axis of depth and that axis it’s I rarely hear it acknowledged, but there can be recognition of the same awakening, the same nature of mind, and yet there can be qualitative difference of how permeating one’s incarnation, one’s humanity, it is. So let’s say someone like Eckhart Tolle, for example, who got to just blast it horrific depression into this world of out of blue from really kind of open wakefulness. he spent several years just sitting on the bench, just being mesmerized by the beauty of life and, I feel like maybe he was just really on this axis of depth, for whatever karmic reasons it really plunged him pretty deeply. And I feel certain pockets of modern sort of spiritual landscape, especially online, sometimes there is like a sense of where kind of YouTube channels sometimes try to like promote this sort of instant awakening sessions and sort of it’s almost like this little pointing and like trying to talk people into like you see everything is awake, everything is right and yet it feels sort of that realization is not going into the depths to which, I mean there’s a spectrum there, right? So I feel like there’s this sort of 2D and then, one could, if we want to make it even more sort of comprehensive, there’s maybe like a 3D axis, another axis that would be how much of our vasanas and how much of our obscurations or like how much our humanity is transformed, which I would say that, it is a related axis to both others and probably the more you are kind of at the deep end of both, that axis by itself probably for most people has to go along, but it’s not necessarily synonymous, right? The sort of idea that enlightenment or awakening or realization bestows upon us some perfect moral behavior or all that. It’s we learned the hard way enough already that it’s not necessarily true and I was made aware just recently of your work with the Association for Spiritual Integrity which I think it’s really great because especially these days it’s we don’t have that much it’s almost like a wild west right now with the spiritual teachings in the west because therapists, they have very clear sort of guidelines. What’s the proper relationship with the client? What’s not okay? And what was proved to be a sketchy territory? Right? And in the past there’s a little bit more, I mean depending on the country, but still there’s this framework of morality and how monks, let’s say, are but yet I think there’s this kind of new, young thing being born, which is completely secular expected to behave and spirituality, and yet the rules are kind of not laid out too clearly, and there’s a lot of room for mess up.

Rick: Yeah, I have a lot to say on this topic, so I’ll say a little bit, but I don’t want to say too much, because I want you to be doing most of the talking here. But I think it’s possible to have an experiential breakthrough without it actually influencing, like you said, all your vasanas and your hang-ups and your traumas and your whole makeup. There can be a breakthrough. And there are several different useful models. One is Ken Wilber’s lines of development model where he talks about, we have all these different things, intellect and heart and senses and consciousness and a number of other ones. And the consciousness line can have a breakthrough and get quite developed, yet the other ones are really quite immature still. And he advocates the holistic maturation of all of them. And I used to think, and my former teacher used to say, that they’re all tightly correlated. If you attain samadhi, then all the other aspects of your personality are going to come along, kind of like dragging one leg of a table and the rest of the table, all the other legs are going to come. But in practice, I have not seen that pan out, either with him or with many, many other people who were highly developed or are in the consciousness line, but really problematic in many other lines. So I don’t think it’s automatic, and I think it requires diligence and attention to bring all the other ones into line. There’s a line from one of the Carlos Castaneda books, Don Juan says, “A warrior has time only for his impeccability.” And there’s a great line from Padma Sambhava who said, “Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.” So I heard one popular, I wasn’t there, but I heard that one popular spiritual teacher said, “If you think awakening has anything to do with ethics, then you don’t understand awakening.” And I disagree with that because, if you can be an alcoholic and a sexual abuser and all kinds of other things and yet be supposedly enlightened, I don’t want that kind of enlightenment. You can have it. I want the kind that actually involves holistic development and refinement of all aspects of life so that you become a compassionate, ethical, good person, not just someone who claims to have some profound inner experience and is acting like an asshole. So anyway, that’s probably enough for me. You could comment on that.

Ethics, Narcissism, and the Spiritual Teacher Problem

Kogen: I fully agree and I think, traditions, we’re kind of aware of that. And again, there are certainly people coming out of those traditions who are not also behaving in the best way. So maybe it’s definitely the case that everybody should be vigilant. But, I think the older traditions, like Buddhism and Hinduism, they had some understanding about those traps. And for example, in Zen, let’s say when you had the breakthrough and then you, let’s say, if you’re working with koans, after the initial breakthrough koan, which is supposed to bring you to awakening, the second koan in that collection, for example, is the famous koan about the fox, which means it’s a long story, but basically the teacher is giving dharma talk and the fox is coming and the teacher is asking the fox, “Why did you come here?” and the fox is saying, “I’m a man, I was a man, a monk 500 years ago and I was a teacher and someone asked me whether a person who is enlightened is free from cause and effect, which means karma.” and he said, “I responded that you are completely beyond cause and effect and therefore I was reborn 500 years as a fox.” So it’s like the second thing after.

Rick: Because in other words, he committed a boo-boo by misinforming the person.

Kogen: It’s just like, those are all pointers, but they say like, the first thing you should learn after awakening is like, it doesn’t take you off the hook of being responsible for your actions, right? And then even towards the end of the process of learning, you revisit precepts, which are the moral rules that one should abide by. And so I think traditionally there was more understanding and also like if you live, let’s say, in a monastery, right, then everybody’s seeing how you behave, which is like the safety net, because it’s like living in this big family of, let’s say 25-30 people and even if you feel like, “Oh, I’m the Mr. Enlightenment now,” and meanwhile you get the mirror is right in front of your face, right? Like everybody’s reflecting back to you how you behave. So it’s more, there’s some.

Rick: Marriage will do that for you too.

Kogen: Yeah, no, sure, exactly. So I think it’s good to have safety nets, peer groups, or, like some people that hold you accountable and they don’t look up to you and they don’t think that you’re the coming of Christ. And, to be perfectly honest, I do feel like the line of work of trying to explain or teach, let’s say call it teach spirituality, either you’re just like, life is sort of naturally forcing you to do it, but at the same time there’s a percentage of people who have narcissistic personality traits who are just drawn to be in those positions and, maybe they have some glimpse, some taste and maybe they have charismatic personality, but, it’s good to really be discerning and if something doesn’t feel right, most likely it’s not right. It’s sort of a bullshit detector should be on at all times, I feel.

If something doesn’t feel right, most likely it’s not right. The bullshit detector should be on at all times.

Rick: Good points. Yeah, there are many people who have suggested that narcissists are drawn to becoming spiritual teachers, maybe in the way that pedophiles are drawn to being priests, I don’t know. But that, because you get all this praise and adulation, everybody thinks you’re wonderful. And a lot of spiritual teachers don’t have a lot of peers. They’re busy teaching and it’s just them and their students. And the students tend to adulate them and to kind of allow them to get away with stuff because they think that they’re supposed to be enlightened and even though it seems crazy and weird well, who am I to say because he’s enlightened and I’m not. So yeah.

Kogen: Yeah and that’s the most challenging thing to overcome because there is some power in inhabiting this archetype of priest or guru or whatever. People project a lot and that movement of mind that says, “It doesn’t feel right and yet they are the enlightened one and I am the unenlightened one, therefore I’m sure they know better.” And of course the group dynamic around the teacher and everybody is reinforcing that and you don’t want to be out of line and say, “This doesn’t feel that good to me.” It is a tricky dynamic and then hopefully with time we kind of as a culture figure it out a little bit better. I think there were like major incidents in the seventies and eighties and I think slowly hopefully.

Rick: Oh, and now.

Kogen: Yeah, I mean I’m sure you probably know more about those things just because of your work and how many people you interact with. So, I think it’s very important part of this whole discussion.

Rick: Yeah, and one of our goals with ASI is not only to give teachers a code of ethics or tenets that they might want to aspire to – to live up to but also to empower students to be more confident in their own discernment and discrimination and if they… There’s a saying with regard to like in terrorist situations, if you see something, say something. It kind of applies in this arena also. Don’t assume that you’re just an unenlightened dummy. If you see something inappropriate happening, say something, or leave, or respond in some concrete way.

Kogen: So, maybe just going back to that whole, trajectory of awakening and the timeline. So, with my own unfolding, I spent with Tangen Harada Roshi for as long as he taught. He had pneumonia in 2012, so he couldn’t teach after that. And after that I was just, traveling to different monasteries and studying with different teachers.

Rick: Did you learn Japanese, by the way?

Kogen: Yeah, I speak Japanese.

Rick: Okay, good.

Kogen: So I think, having met a person of that caliber, and I feel it’s one of those things that it’s easy to sort of, at the time I had just this view that probably the enlightened people are just this dinosaur race that is dying out and there’s no one else left because, seeing, traveling to different temples and I yet didn’t encounter someone as impressive as him. And I think there’s a little bit of that, there can be that tendency and that danger, especially in like more traditional paths that there’s sort of mythologizing and putting on a pedestal the past teachers and thinking how, extraordinary they were and thinking this almost like the Age of Decay of Dharma. And I certainly had a little bit of that and actually, your podcast was one point of reference that was helpful because I guess I left that monastery probably around the time when you were starting your show. So and then, at some point someone was sending me some links. I was like, oh, that’s really interesting to kind of see those interviews with regular people who, didn’t necessarily have those super dramatic life stories like my teacher had and all that. So then I went to this other monastery and there was this teacher who I thought he will be kind of just like my teacher and I was just having these big hopes because he was very impressive in some way and I went to this monastery and that Zen master was just so harsh. He was this, also old Japanese man but he was just very demanding, very harsh, very cold. There was none of that connection that I had with my first teacher and I felt like almost, just in the corner without escape and not being able to connect with him too much and yet feeling like maybe he’s my last chance for doing some serious practice. And he would still kind of send me, even though I had already one knee surgery, he would send me to like, in Zen monastery sometimes you have to carry shit, you know what I mean? Like you scoop out shit because you, all your poop and pee is going to a tank underneath it. And then you basically scoop it to those big buckets, which are like, I don’t know, 20 gallon buckets that you kind of like carry out and just like either use it on the fields or something. So it’s not something you can do with meniscus problems. And he kept sending me to those. And then also, this was a temple where it was both men and women. And he paired me, he made me work, like made this young girl – I was a young boy, so it wasn’t, but she was like, my age, let’s say we were 30. And he made her my assistant to do some particular temple function and something started to happen between us. And I was, at the time I was celibate and had whole identity wrapped around being celibate monk. So things were just like breaking down and I felt like I just can’t stay there, even though, he was impressive. He could really, he was one of those people who really could perceive something about your mind without any interaction. He would ring the bell, you would go inside, you would bow in front of him and he would just do one exhale and he would start to speak and he could literally start commenting on the exact thoughts you had right in that moment when you’re entering the room. He was very perceptive in that way, but yet he was very cold. He was very like looking at the chink in your armor and just like shooting an arrow there that would be kind of hurtful in some way. So through that process I felt like I was getting crushed down and crushed down and I left the monastery. I went to work in a hospice that he created. So I was just taking care of dying people and just kind of reconciling that whole thing. And then from there I went for the retreat that I just mentioned, where I just had these experiences during the sleep and all that. So I felt it was almost like, again, I kind of came to the place where I kind of felt, okay, I failed and there’s no room forward. And yet through that, right, there was some flowering that happened that couldn’t have happened when my will was constantly, directing every single movement that I was doing. So, that was really interesting. And then, past that I was kind of traveling to different. After that I also got involved with Adyashanti. I started to go for his retreats and I really connected with him and felt like he was extraordinarily clear and his presence was really beautiful, too. So it felt actually very healing for me to meet him because he was a Westerner. At some point, I had all sorts of stupid ideas, but I had the idea that almost maybe only those Asians were just like so hardcore motivated, maybe they are the only ones who can get it and we wimps in the West can’t and whatnot, so meeting Adia and the California guy and just a regular person in some ways and yet a very clear teacher was really healing and through that, I felt like this second movement of first is up and out, right, and then the second one is almost like down and in. So, we can hang out for as long as we want in the sense of transcendence and pure glory of consciousness. It’s just, it’s blissful, it’s never hurt, it’s complete, it’s always complete. That was the most prominent quality that I felt through that awakening when the fireworks subsided. There was this sense before whenever I looked at my experience I could always improve it. I could always be more in samadhi, I could always do something, I always wanted to have something better than this right now. And after that, there’s just this sense of completeness, as if the original sin was taken away. Like, finally, just sitting in bliss, just sitting was bliss in itself. There was nothing to be done, there was nothing to accomplish. But yet, when that sort of initial intoxication with the transcendence kind of comes to an end, there is a sense that your life there and I feel there are certain maybe styles of teaching that really emphasize you could almost hide all that aspect and they feel like this is the end of the trajectory and you should just spread your camp there and never leave. And yet there is something, some people might not experience it in that way but there feels something dualistic there, which means there is a consciousness or awareness or however you want to call it. And then there’s all the objects in the world, right? And they feel somewhat separate. There feels like one is a container and then everything else is arising within it. But yet it is still a duality, right? So then there is some kind of moment of collapse which kind of requires certain, almost like willingness to be vulnerable, because it’s, the sort of eternal witness is untouched. And yet, when we see that actually the two are never separate, and I think that’s the three statements of Shankara, right? That, the world is illusion, Brahman alone is real, but then the world is Brahman, right? That realization needs to happen. And then you kind of revisit, conditioning and your humanity, which as just we discussed, it’s not immediately blown away with the awakening. And then we kind of revisit all of parts of ourselves that were repressed or some shallow material that maybe was lingering, that we were not willing to see, because we were just so fascinated and in love with the bliss of self, with the capital S, let’s say, that we’re unwilling to bring it down, right, kind of like the, archetype of Jesus, right, that God loved the world so much that it gave its only son, it kind of – the word became the flesh and the flesh is messy, right the flesh can experience suffering and and be hanged on the cross and all that comes with the – we’re connecting with the very human aspect of ourself but what’s also important, I feel in that what’s experiential is also the difference between the first sort of awakening in that realization is that it brings even deeper intimacy. Because the difference is that, at least that was my experience, that initially when there’s this sense of pure being and consciousness, there’s still a sense that there is subject here, even though there is a sense that it’s all consciousness. In terms of perception, there’s a sense of a seer here that looks at objects out there. And only when the sort of the second movement of down and in and collapse of the apparent difference between awareness and its content happens, then there’s like profound intimacy with everything because there is no – that division, that separation of subjects and objects is completely gone. And therefore there’s just this completely alive, completely intimate experience that is unfolding and it has experientially a very different quality to that previous awakening.

There’s just this sense of completeness, as if the original sin was taken away.

Rick: Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts on this. Firstly, what you were saying about awakening being so fulfilling, you could just sit there forever and just bask and marinate in that and why do anything else, reminds me of a story of Vivekananda when he had his awakening and he went to Sri Ramakrishna and he said, “Oh, this is just wonderful. Now, just let me go to the Himalayas and just sit in a cave and enjoy this for the rest of my life.” And Ramakrishna said, “I’m so disappointed in you. I expected you to do something with this.” And so then he did. He became very active. And in fact, Vivekananda said at one point, he said, “I don’t care about liberation in which I never come back. I’ll be happy to come back.” Like a Bodhisattva thing, “I’ll be happy to come back thousands of times to help the world.” And then the second thing that it reminded me of is that I think this separation phase that you’ve described is perhaps a prerequisite to further phases in that until you’ve separated self from non-self, you can’t really progress in terms of the full refinement of the non-self world. It enables you to experience degrees of refinement which wouldn’t be possible if the self weren’t realized, if pure consciousness weren’t realized. This could involve refinement of perception. And also I think pure consciousness can act like a solvent where if we have all these embedded vasanas and whatnot in our systems, once pure consciousness is realized, in spite of those vasanas, they don’t last long in the light of that, or at least they’re challenged, and exposed to something which is going to tend to dissolve them. And then there’s the whole question of God, which is not really much discussed in Buddhism, but I believe there’s a phase, or at least in the Vedic tradition, there’s a phase where God consciousness becomes a possibility where there is such a thing as God, and you actually can realize it experientially, but not unless you have first established the self. As my former teacher once said, “Without having established that foundation, God couldn’t even telephone you from a distance. You’d be crushed.”

Kogen: Yeah. Yeah, I would, I guess I would need to read more descriptions of that because I could see how that realization of, let’s call it self with capital S, true self, right? How that could be called God. All the qualities are there. It feels indestructible, eternal, limitless and all that. So I say, sometimes it’s a matter of semantics. But yeah, and I fully agree. I think the jump from the sort of small separate self immediately to the sort of no self territory probably will be pretty destabilizing and pretty, a lot. So there’s like the stepping stone that needs to happen. And for most people, I’m sure there are people for whom it happened. I think you have a first row seat to how many different ways that things can happen in this arena. But I think for most people there is actually some first step and then a further step.

Rick: Yeah, there are stages. Almost everybody goes through stages. My understanding of God, which is, it could be put in terms of what you said about the self, is that if we look at any little thing in creation, a cell in a blade of grass or in our own body or anything, there’s this miracle of incredible complexity and creativity happening. And the whole universe is packed solid with those countless trillions of those little miracles, that the whole thing is just one solid mass of intelligence. And so for me the idea of just the realization of plain vanilla pure consciousness is not ultimate. I have also the desire to more deeply appreciate that omnipresent intelligence that’s running the whole show. to be one with that and to know that intimately. That’s my sense of God. Obviously not some guy with a beard hanging out on a cloud, that kind of thing.

Kogen: Yeah, certainly, reality is limitless and this sort of realization has endless depths, right. It’s ongoing exploration and the sooner we stop thinking about finish lines in this whole project, the more we just are able to appreciate the crazy ride that it is. And yeah, there’s so many different things that can be, that, know, can come to our consciousness and can come to our realization, the whole spectrum. So, certainly it’s sometimes, I think there’s some value in sort of narrowing it down for the sake of one-pointedness when, let’s say, communicating to, let’s say, someone who is interested in realizing the first thing, then sometimes we can just sort of hammer it away and sort of focus on that. But one.

Rick: Definitely. You don’t study quantum mechanics when you’re in second grade or something, you get to that later.

The Dropping Away of the Experiencer

Kogen: Yeah. So then, I would say there is another kind of shift, at least, that’s how my own trajectory was, which is a little bit more difficult to verbalize because, as with every shift, some of the shifts are more, I would say, more kind of dramatic when they unfold and all that. But yet the important piece almost is often what is not there afterwards. And some of those things can be tricky because they can be only seen in a rearview mirror. Let’s say if you have yellow painted glasses on all the time, and we discuss colors, and you see the difference between green and red. And you say, “Oh yeah, I kind of see the difference, so how could I see the difference in color more? But I would say, like, if, let’s say, we take off the glasses, then suddenly the contrast, then there’s, let’s say, there’s something more striking about it that we can recognize. So in the same way, some of the things can be really obvious when they are revealed, and yet not that obvious when kind of pointed to or spoken. But I would say that the following shift of the sort of collapse down of the awareness and its content or however you want to call it, of that sort of non-duality proper, right? Not the non-duality as everything is one and there are objects arising within it. That’s still very clear duality, awareness versus objects, right? And yet when everything, when there’s this collapse and there’s non-duality, it can seem like okay that’s what else is there to kind of be seen and yet there is almost like the sort of movement of identity itself that kind of travels initially right? There’s first “I am body. I’m mind,” right “I’m the content of my thoughts. I am this body.” Then it can explode into “Oh I’m the whole consciousness. I’m this pure being that is just limitless,” and then sometimes people go through the phase of which could be called one mind which means everything is part of the same thing and everything is myself, right? Everything is that one mind. But yet I would say that there is this other dropping away which is dropping away of I am anything business of defining ourselves as anything in particular and it comes with even further dropping away of separation. And even if it might seem like no wait a minute there’s a when that collapse happened of consciousness kind of implodes and goes right into all the phenomena, what’s there left to be separate? And yet the separation, it’s almost like at this stage, it’s almost like an assumption that there is an entity to which life happens. And that entity, again, initially thought it was by the mind, then it thought it was consciousness, then maybe it thought it was everything. But that entity kind of defines the moment in the most subtle way after those shifts already have happened. And then there is a dropping away possible where defining reality through the lens of something that is in relation to it, whether it’s about “I’m all of it”, “I’m nothing”, “I’m emptiness”, “I’m any of it”, right? That movement, self-referential movement of self, can completely drop. And then it’s almost like reality alone is. And each experience becomes almost like a separate universe, separate reality in itself coming into being. Let’s say the greenness of the wall is arising. And then yet when there’s a movement, there’s a change and there’s something here, before that change there would be like sense of like, oh there’s a non-dual experience of the greenness and then something, the same thing that experienced that greenness, now is experiencing the brownness of the shelf, right? And that’s precisely this sort of sense of something on the timeline, traveling the moments and collecting experiences, that is what’s kind of what’s dropping away then. And there’s just green, reality in itself, total, intimate, arising to no one. And then there’s just brownness shining forth, replacing everything that ever existed and there’s no one to kind of compare the two to each other. So each experience almost becomes full revelation of reality and it’s not in relationship to anything else. And although I understand it might sound almost like non-functional and how would you plan to go? How would you buy an airplane ticket? There is a natural unfoldment that seems to be, everything seems to be unfolding in a way that there’s no issue with that, right? There’s conversations are scheduled, the retreats are organized and all that, and yet there’s something, again, it’s a subtle thing, then it’s not like in a Big Bang, right? That quiet and yet it has some consequential experiential results of further… it’s like there’s a dropping away is kind of, can be quite radical freedom in it that seems deeper than the previous stage of non-duality as I described before.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve often and long wrestled with the notion of a complete cessation of the sense of personal self. You may have seen that conversation I had with Adyashanti and Susanna Marie about that about ten years ago. And because I mean take Adya for example. Okay so he was in a lot of pain for a long time and he finally retired and for whatever reason he was having a lot of anxiety and took some medication for it and he admitted that publicly, which I really respected. So it seems when you hear that kind of stuff, that sounds like it’s happening to someone who has some kind of sense of self. It’s not happening to a tree outside. It’s happening to this guy, Adya. And if I come into the room where you are and say, “Hey, Kogen, you’ll turn your head.” So I’ve never quite grokked the idea of complete cessation of a sense of personal self. It seems more like you can say, “Yeah, I’m the ocean, but I’m also this wave, as I’ve always been, but now I realize I’m much more than this wave. I’m the whole ocean.” To shift out of that analogy, we are an instrument experiencing the totality and we are that totality and we know ourselves to be that, but we’re still this instrument. And Vedanta deals with it with a concept they call “leysa vidya,” which means “faint remains of ignorance,” where there’s got to be some remnant of a sense of ignorance or individuality if you’re going to function as a living human being. What do you think about all that?

Kogen: I would say that the difference is primarily experiential. It’s simply the sense of there being a separate existence can be very, very subtle. Let’s say, as you mentioned, there is a “I’m just a wave.” Then there’s “I’m the ocean.” And then I can see I’m both ocean and I’m both a wave at the same time. So I would say the experiential difference that happens there is that then it feels there is an ocean, there is a wave, but there is not that flavor that almost, let’s say like you have an ice cream that is strawberry flavor, right? It’s almost like experience can have a flavor of my experience, right, in some form, whether it’s whether I’m totality or I’m a individual. I’m both at the same time and can see all the spectrums. And all I’m saying is that flavor of me, it’s my experience, can also drop away from it. It doesn’t mean that, let’s say, someone comes to the room and says, “Kogen,” that there’s no differentiation between that. It’s simply that the sound that is arising that says “Kogen” has absolutely no one attached to it that could be in a relationship to that experience. And turning of the head also doesn’t have that flavor. It’s simply on an experiential level. And again, I think it’s a very important point about us having a nervous system and that even deep realization, it’s not giving us free out-of-jail card sort of pass from all sorts of difficulties and grief and pain and discomfort. It’s just that there’s just something experientially that happens when that drops away that there is no sense that refers back to anything. It’s And each of those experiences can arise, experience of being cold, experience of having preference simply arising. for this food over that food that is arising, and yet there is just that little experiential difference of either it’s arising to someone who is either aware of the different spectrums of being, and yet it has that subtle reference point back to some subject to whom the life happens, or that can be relinquished. And therefore, even though it doesn’t necessarily stand with disagreement with the point you made about some remaining functionality to be there, it’s perfectly fine. It’s just the flavor of personal experience, conditioning that needs to happen for the of like, this is my experience, whether I’m God, whether I’m ocean, whether I’m everything. If there is this movement of it’s referring back to that me, it still has simply that flavor of someone collecting the experience, traveling the timeline, going through life. And when that drops, there’s some sense of freedom from that project altogether, which is hard to put into words. That is the best what I can do here.

Rick: Yeah, so I mean if you and I are in the same place and we’re having ice cream and you like strawberry, I like chocolate, and there’s some individual preference and your knee hurts, because you just tore your meniscus again and my knee doesn’t hurt. And it’s like you’re saying that even though there’s individual experience, which I don’t have yours and you don’t have mine, ultimately there is actually no person having that experience, no jiva, to use the Sanskrit term. It’s just experience without any individuated experiencer whatsoever.

Kogen: Yeah, without any subjective sense of there being an experiencer. Again, obviously, like, the experiences differ, right? The sense gates differ, like your ears, my ears, right? Maybe you hear more, maybe I hear less. Maybe I see more, maybe you see less, right? We have apparatus, right? Like the fly that would be in the same room would see the whole room very differently, right? Because it has multiple eyes and it’s all kind of, to us it’s psychedelic. So it’s definitely, yeah, it’s not about any sort of absence or presence of preference or about point of view. It’s about the subjective experience that can be very, very subtle that it happens to someone and that can give way to the only statement, I guess that, comes close – reality alone is.

Reality alone is.

Rick: Yeah, okay. Incidentally, this is a completely abrupt segue, but, you’ve spent all those years as a monk. Are you still a monk or do you have a relationship?

Kogen: Yeah, so I mean, I guess maybe my status on Facebook would be, it’s complicated. In terms of my life situation, I’m still sort of in the form of a monk and I travel the world, getting involved in different retreats. Sometimes the retreats as a student myself also. I feel that’s an important part of my journey. But I don’t live in a monastery, right? I spent maybe 15 years living in a monastery and in the kind of cloistered communities. But now it seems to be not happening anymore. Zen tradition, especially Japanese Zen tradition, is a very Protestant tradition of Buddhism. It’s very reformed, like celibacy is not a requirement. And also their approach to different rules is more loose than any other tradition in Buddhism, in Mahayana even, and not to mention Theravada, which are very strict about precepts. So I have quite a bit of freedom. My teacher has passed away. I’m kind of a ronin, if the term, it’s kind of, masterless samurai. Kind of, so in some way I have a lot of freedom. So I don’t feel, it’s one of those things.

Rick: You’re not bound by vows, in other words, but I mean, I’m just wondering if you’re, this is, I don’t even know if this is a useful question, but I’m just curious. And so I’m asking, whether your monastic tendencies were due to your fervent spiritual desire, and now that you’re no longer living in the structure of monastic community, whether you discovered within yourself that, “Well, yeah, I’m not actually a monk, I’m kind of a householder and I want to be in a relationship.”

Kogen: Yeah, totally. That’s a yes. I have to say, I’m not a householder, but I don’t hold any house. I don’t have any base and I’m still kind of a hobo, technically speaking. But I have relationships and it’s definitely one of those things like we discussed. Just having some realization doesn’t make you a perfect partner, right? I never had a long relationship all my life because I was, first half of my my life I was obsessed with music and second half of my life I was just in a monastery. So it is a beautiful point of learning and sort of seeing how that humanity is. And also, many conditioning of ours, especially like early conditioning from childhood, it tends to show up more in a relationship rather than, like an intimate relationship, rather than in a colleague-like sort of setup. So yeah, definitely. That is something that I tried to, after that I mentioned that I had this, I was a celibate and then I had this short-lived affair with this woman in that temple and I left there and I kind of wanted to go back to being celibate. I think it was almost like hormones just woke up because, for the first 10 years I was just completely celibate and then suddenly, like being close physically with someone. So then I was seeing like, oh, I keep just falling in love and getting attracted to people. So I felt like probably there’s something that needs to be expressed and that monk sort of limited life. Although I think it’s a beautiful life. I feel a lot of gratitude for everybody who’s still the numbers are dropping across the board through all traditions. I think there’s less upholding those traditions and and less monks and nuns and those were the carriers of those spiritual teachings for so many centuries that, I always have a special place in my heart to monastic traditions and but yeah, it just seemed staying there. It’s a little bit like maybe with, I’m absolutely not comparing myself to Vivekananda, but I’m just saying it’s an analogy of that kind that it felt like staying in a monastery would be just for myself because I just love this life and it’s so great to be there in this simplicity and without the digital world of YouTube and Facebook, and whatnot. And there’s just this radical freedom in choicelessness of monastic life that I love, but it felt it would be kind of selfish to just keep only doing that for myself.

Rick: So, yeah, no, I totally understand. once you’ve reached a certain stage of development, it’s good to share. I mean the world needs more people who can get out there and offer something.

Kogen: Yeah, and, definitely remembering my teacher. It’s not that I, never wish that people would just encounter my teacher other than me. There’s always that sense of how vast those shoes were to fill. But with the time, I guess I also understood that it’s not to fill anybody else’s shoes, but it’s to walk with integrity in one’s own and trying to be a helpful presence. And that feels good and aligned. I guess I would say also, even though all those things can kind of sound so extraordinary or, God consciousness and then collapse and then disappearance of separation, actually, through this process there is a little bit more and more, the more, I think, the more some of our realization matures, there’s also like this paradox of really, this never-ending unfolding of this luminous vivid reality that feels in some way extraordinary but at the same time there’s actually this deep ordinariness of just regular dudes making scrambled eggs in the morning or whatever. I feel there’s also importance to say that chasing big experiences is certainly not what this path is about. It’s living out of the truth of our being that, initially because of the contrast, right, there’s this contraction and suffering and all that and suddenly there’s this big expanse of freedom. And yet, if we constantly keep getting intoxicated with the freedom aspect of it, it kind of means that we are still holding some reference point to some past experience that, “Oh, I was like that. Now I’m like that.” And there’s this sort of maturation that happens that no reference point remains and this is simply it. And therefore, it’s quite ordinary in some ways. And in Zen, there’s this famous teaching device of the ten oxherding pictures where, the it’s the stages of awakening are explained. And the eighth oxherding picture, when both the bull and the herder are gone, it has this beautiful poem that starts that picture and it says, “He has completely cast off ordinary feelings and let go of all holy thoughts. He doesn’t linger where there are Buddhas. He doesn’t stay for long where the Buddhas are not. With not falling into either side, ten thousand eyes cannot see him. Ten old birds bringing flowers, that would be a disgraceful scene.” And the last line is a reference to this famous story where there was this I think it was a fourth, maybe fourth patriarch of Zen in China who was practicing in a cave, in a mountain cave and entering extraordinary states of Samadhi and many birds would be flying by and dropping flowers to the front of the cave because there’s this incredible energy coming off it. And then he traveled by foot and met the third patriarch of Zen and they had some exchange and he had this profound realization. And when he came back to the cave, the birds stopped coming, right? Because there was just, an old fellow sitting in the cave, right? There was no need for the fanfare and for the big sort of special things. It was just returned to that, human ordinariness in some way. Even though, it’s like you could say that the point of 360 degrees is exactly point of zero degrees, right? But there is some journey that needs to happen and therefore there’s this maybe dangerous danger of giving too much teachings that are about the 360 point because they emphasize the sort of more really mature and absolute view that there is nothing to do and just chop your, water is the greatest miracle. And this is true of course, but it’s hopefully, chopping wood and carrying we have understanding that there is actually a full journey that we embark on and sometimes it takes commitment. I know that sometimes the word “seeking” seems to be, looked down upon in certain circles and I understand what is it pointing to, but yet, I still feel about the whole spirituality. Of course there are cases where people just wake up out of blue and it doesn’t have any precursor to that, but I still feel about the whole thing, more or less, how I would think about learning a language or learning to play an instrument. For most people for whom that comes to fruition, it happens through some dedication. look like putting on robes and flying over to Japan and staying there in some places. Obviously it doesn’t need to And that’s the beautiful part about your show that is really showing it to people that in all life walks we can embark on this journey. But also I think remembering that there is the axis of stages that go further and further and yet there’s also the infinite depths of realization that that journey never ends and even though we can arrive so many times at the place that feels like, “Oh finally I’m totally done here,” if we keep our mind open and keep just sincerely looking where do we fixate because that’s almost the key right? Like if we fixate, even if you fixate in the absolute, just as we before we fixated in the relative, fixation is limiting in some way and this sort of diamond of awakening that has so many facets, sometimes each of them is called forth in a different situation, right? Like if, let’s say, you’re walking and your daughter is attacked by a rabid dog, right? In this moment, the aspect of everything is perfect as it is, is maybe not necessarily what’s called forth in this moment, right? You have to act, you have to really do something about harm that is being done right now in a wise way, whatever way you can. And in some other time, there might be that very aspect of inherent perfection might be what’s needed to be emphasized for someone else’s benefit. So I think this sort of complex jewel of realized mind has so many facets and fixating in any one of them is in the end limiting. So, I think it’s just an endless beautiful journey into the depths and into the sort of, even though again, I of course I understand the words of “reality is as is”. There was never anyone to suffer or, like I can experientially tune into, those statements, but at the same time this world is full of suffering, right? And just like in the analogy of a man entering the room with the snake in the room. Like, for some people the snake is terrifying and doesn’t let them sleep at night because they’re all the time, thinking they might get bitten in any instance. So, therefore, skillful means, that’s what I like about Zen and, Buddhism at large, that it’s never about like trying to provide a statement of absolute truth. It’s only a pointer, like a finger for example, let’s say when we want to go to Iowa, if you’re in Minneapolis, I’ll tell you go south. If you’re in New York, I tell you go west. pointing to the moon or – If you’re in LA, I’ll tell you go east. And if you’re in New Orleans, I’ll tell you go north. It’s really depending where is the fixation or where is the particular obstacle or where do you find yourself at that there’s just like a nudging to look in a certain way. But each of the pointers are not truth in itself. It’s just an empty just like I guess Ramana Maharishi had this beautiful image of like a thorn removing a thorn, right, and and after you finish that you discard both and living the freedom from both thorns.

Rick: There’s a lot of good stuff in what you said. So many things we could talk about. Let’s make a couple of comments. One is that people tend to acclimate. I mean if you and I were feeling pretty normal right now, if we could snap suddenly to the way we felt 30 years ago or something, even though we might have felt pretty good 30 years ago, but if we were to go from this to that, we would probably be in agony because of the contrast, But now we’re used to this and by the same token if we could snap to where we might be 10 years from now, we’d be totally in bliss, even though then 10 years from now, we might think, this is normal, no big deal. So human beings tend to acclimate to whatever they’re experiencing. Maybe all beings do, I don’t know. But I think that’s a lot of times you’re talking about this profound experience you had, and I’ve had a few myself. It seems like they fade away after a while, but maybe they don’t fade away. Maybe we just become accustomed to them. We metabolize them, you know? They become part of our innate normal makeup. And so they seem ordinary. I started saying all this to embellish on the word “ordinary” that you used. Ordinary can be extraordinary, contrasting with something else, but for the person experiencing it, it’s ordinary.

Kogen: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. I fully agree. And I wouldn’t say that, yeah, that experience, experience, again, it’s maybe semantics, right? Experience is in constant change, right? But yet realization, which means the entire paradigm from which we feel like reality to be experienced, I feel like those, after those shifts, they never reverted back. There’s no, it’s obvious as starkly in every moment as it was in the moment of revelation. But as you say, the sort of contrast…

Rick: but you’re not wowed out by it anymore.

Kogen: Exactly. The contrast is not blowing your socks off all the time.

The contrast is not blowing your socks off all the time.

Rick: Yeah, it’d be hard to live that way. Yeah, your feet would get cold without socks. Okay, well that was great. I’m sure we could talk for another couple of hours and for some reason people didn’t send in questions. I don’t know why. Seems like this would have been one for lots of good questions, but no big deal. So tell us about, you mentioned you’re traveling the world doing retreats and stuff. Do you have a website? How do people get in touch with you? How do they find out what you’re doing?

Kogen: So I have a website which is called seeyournature.org. I have also a YouTube channel, however I’m not like very good at YouTube and all that. I mostly record stuff from retreats and post it there for some people who can’t join the retreats. But that’s also at seeyournature, that’s the channel.

Rick: That’s the YouTube channel, okay.

Rick: And so on your website, if you have a retreat scheduled, you can find it.

Kogen: Yes, and also I meet with people on Zoom, and that’s also on the website. Also, I’ll mention just because I feel like, so much gratitude and to my teacher that the book of his teachings, which is called “Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha” is the one that we kind of mentioned both during the course of this interview. And I feel like he was the most dharmically impressive person I ever met in my life. And hopefully that comes, even if a little bit, through the book. So I feel that’s also like a great resource for people.

Rick: It’s an interesting book. He was a young man during World War II. He was a kamikaze pilot. He was like one day away from going and dying as a kamikaze pilot. But the war ended and then he ended up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and no, excuse me, it was a Russian prisoner of war camp. One of the guards said, “Hey have some drinks with me.” So he got drunk and he was hungover the next day and so because he was kind of in a bad state they didn’t send him to a Siberian prison camp where he would have died. And so there’s like these close calls. And then he eventually became a Zen monk and master. So it was a really good biography of him.

Service, Compassion, and the Bodhisattva Spirit

Kogen: Yeah. And also, I felt even this part when he, as a young kid, he decided just that he wants to be like a chair, right? Which means he wants to be of service in even the most simple possible ways and without even caring for any recognition, just like a chair never sort of gets its praise for being kind of people sitting on it. He had this mind of like, “How can I serve? How beautiful would it be to have a heart of a chair that just serves and serves and serves?” And I feel that Bodhisattva spirit, as we discussed. This world has a lot of trouble. It’s really so much suffering going on and even though it might feel overwhelming at times, it might feel like some people feel hopeless in the face of genocides. And of course I understand that. Therefore the realization part of inherent perfectness and compassion, at the same time, are also like two wings of the same bird. And the story that my teacher often loved to tell was that from Jataka about the little parrot that saw this big, big fire consuming the jungle and the parrot would go and take in this big one single drop of water and just fly over the fire and just drop it and go back to the lake and keep doing it and even if it felt like a sort of this desperate hopeless thing at least in the story it’s kind of like a tale for kids, Jataka some of them right? But then the parrot finally was just so exhausted it dropped into the fire and Brahman the gods saw the sacrifice and felt so moved it dropped this one tear and this whole this big tear extinguish the whole fire of the jungle. And sometimes, it’s hard to connect to which degree we can make a difference, even if it’s a difference in this one particular moment and instance. I remember I was one time doing a retreat in Auschwitz, you know, where my family lives just a kilometer away from the camps, and when the Zen meditation retreats were inside the Peacemaker Project was doing a retreat, their concentration camps. I went there and we sit in gas chambers in a ramps where they sorted people for immediate death or work. And it’s pretty intense but I remember there’s this famous Polish saint, Maximilian Kolbe, who basically people were lined up to every third person who was going to be camp and shot in the head in the concentration someone next to him got chosen and this priest, he was a Catholic priest, he stepped forward and he said, “Please let him, let this man be saved and I’ll.” not knowing whether they all will be exterminated later or not, I mean it was obviously a hellish sort of situation and he got killed for that and the man actually long life and had a family. And someone quoted this person as like, survived and he lived a in some situations when you save one life, you save all of life. Right? There’s real. We can do something in this world, even if we can’t save every kid in Gaza or we can’t, fix all the problems. The way we interact with each other, the way we treat each other, the way we are for each other brings fruit and matters to someone profoundly. So this path is really, at the end of the day, it’s not about like getting all, about our having great nice experiences. It’s actually about being a benevolent presence in the world and, being able to meet with wisdom and compassion the great suffering that is unfolding here.

This path is about being a benevolent presence in the world and being able to meet with wisdom and compassion the great suffering that is unfolding here.

Rick: Yeah, tell a couple quick stories and then we’ll wrap it up. So it reminds me of the starfish story that I heard you tell and it’s not clams or mussels, it was starfish. So there was a big storm and the starfish all get washed up on the beach and they’re drying in the sun. They’re gonna die and let’s say a man and a young girl are walking along and the girl keeps picking up starfish every few steps and throwing them in the ocean. And after a while the guy says, “Look, there’s thousands of them. What difference can this possibly make, picking up one here and one there,” and she picks up another one, throws it in and says, “Well, it made a difference to that one.” So there’s that. And then there’s this Indian story where there was this seagull who had laid its eggs in the sand, and a big wave came and washed the eggs into the sea. And she said, “Give me back my eggs.” And the ocean didn’t respond. And she said, “All right, I’m going to make you dry. So if you don’t give me back my eggs, I’m going to make you dry.” So she takes one beak full of water out of the ocean, puts it out, and then gets another one and does it. And she continues to do that day and night. And, what difference is it possibly making? But it caught the attention of the king of the birds, who was Garuda or something, and he could actually make the ocean dry. So he came and said, “All right, give back the eggs or you’re toast.” So she got her eggs back. So, a lot of times just a determined effort, even though it seems futile and impossible, can yield fruit.

Kogen: Yeah, beautiful. I didn’t know the second story, but the first one, I think I actually heard it from you and I stole it and I tell it on retreat sometimes.

Rick: Oh, there you go. You distorted it into mussels and clams.

Kogen: I promise to abide by the starfish scenario.

Rick: Yeah. Alrighty. Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate spending time with you and keep up the good work. And for those listening or watching, my next interview is going to be with a fellow named Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and I’m really looking forward to it because his podcast is one of my favorites. He has a podcast called Closer to Truth, where he interviews all these Nobel Prize winners and all these really impressive people. He himself is brilliant and he does a really good job and the whole thing is really nicely produced. So he has written a paper in which he summarizes nearly 400 theories of what consciousness is. And believe it or not, new theories keep popping up. It’s like, here’s this thing that we all have as essential constituents of our lives and no one can agree on what it is. So we’re going to talk about that.

Kogen: And thank you very much, Rick. I kind of think of you almost like a Mr. Rogers in a spiritual scene. You have helped so many people in so many different ways, connecting people and kind of holding space and mature conversation about this whole spiritual thing. And many people appreciate it so much. I appreciate so much and all your team, your wife, and all the volunteers, it seems like it’s taking a village right now to do it all. So thank you everybody all, and it was great to be here.

Rick: Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks for being part of it. I don’t know if I’m Mr. Rogers or Kermit the Frog, but whatever. All right, so thanks everybody, and we’ll see you for the next one. (upbeat music) [Music]