Bamboozled

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

In the middle of the night in 1968 in Oakland, California, Bob Hoffman was awakened from a deep sleep by the discontented ghost of his former shrink, Siegfried Fisher. Dr. Fisher, as Hoffman always called him, stood at the end of his bed and revealed to him a key piece of psychological insight that had eluded his mentor, Sigmund Freud, and the entire Viennese school: “Everyone is guilty and no one to blame.”

Thus was born the notorious concept of Negative Love and the "world famous" Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy; both have the dubious markings of revealed Truth, and Hoffman, the awakened Teacher—literally.

I listened to Hoffman’s psychic awakening tale many times, and although the basic outline never changed, I did manage to fill in some of the lacunae over my long association with him. For example, there is a lie embedded in the narrative—he confessed that he had been Fisher’s patient and not an old family friend or acquaintance from shul. That misinformation had been manufactured for marketing purposes, and Hoffman was a born salesman. But it never occurred to me to ask how his wife reacted to the whole affair. I think that they were still married at the time, but I don’t want to make any factual assertions without some evidence, so I can’t say if they shared a bed, and I don’t want to spoil the party with more misinformation. Did she even wake up? 

So how did a Jewish tailor with barely a high school education become a healer, a channel for this occult insight, coupled with powerful results of psychological investigation? Answer: the Spiritualist Church and, if you believe the proponents of the Hoffman Process enterprise, the gifts of a highly advanced, and compassionate, “intuitive,” the new moniker that has become the cover for knowledge that mysteriously surpasses the hard-earned therapeutic work of professional psychology. 

I chronicled as accurately as I could the creation of the “Process” as a psychological tool in “The Ontological Odd Couple—The Origins of the Hoffman Process,” and I tried to give everyone I interviewed a fair hearing. At the time, I imagined that I could resolve my long-standing qualms about Hoffman and his influence in my life by simply getting to the facts, but in fact, it only aggravated my personal pain. 

When my friend Stan Stefancic cautioned, “Remember that there's a lot of Claudio in the Process,” I thought long and hard to determine if Naranjo’s input was enough of a justification to accept Hoffman’s preposterous story. In a long rambling piece, Bob Hoffman, The First Encounter, I tried to understand why Naranjo took Hoffman to be some kind of modern-day shaman, and supported his work—I will not deny that Claudio did support Hoffman and tried to plant some professional practices in the Process. But it was a relationship fraught with jealousy on Hoffman’s part as well as a good deal of passive-aggressive behavior, all the while seeking Naranjo’s imprimatur. I asked myself the question, why do intelligent people believe nonsense, but again, I couldn't really find a good answer, nor in any way understand Claudio's infatuation with Hoffman.

 

To complicate the investigation, as if it were not already cloudy enough, Hoffman was a sexual predator. I had firsthand experience, and the effects of his abuse have lingered for decades. I tried to exorcise that demon by writing what became a long series of posts on my blog, beginning with Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo. If the criteria for resolution is that I can forgive and forget, it has not been satisfied. At 77 I am resigned that his selfish and unethical behavior will be a trauma that I will carry for the rest of my life. I have given up looking for some reason why it happened. It makes no difference to me that he was a closeted, homophobic queer man and that it was a severe impediment to his happiness. It was. Yes, everyone is guilty, but I will continue to blame him. I have also given up trying to see some “wounded healer” motivation as a factor in his psychic therapy.  What’s the word? Bunk, as in complete nonsense.

So how was I bamboozled? When I read Henry Miller’s account of his experience just looking at a photograph of Madame Blavatsky, I understood him completely. Miller writes: “Now I don’t know if that had anything to do with what happened next, but I had a flash, I came to the realization that I was responsible for my whole life, whatever had happened. I used to blame my family, society, my wife . . . and that day I saw so clearly that I had nobody to blame but myself. I put everything on my own shoulders, and I felt so relieved: Now I’m free, no one else is responsible. And that was a kind of awakening, in a way.”

In October of 1973, I had such an awakening over several weeks of psychological investigation in Claudio Naranjo’s SAT group. It changed my life, and I will be forever grateful to Claudio for providing the platform for the experience. But I had the bad luck to have had Bob Hoffman standing in the room, shouting nonsense. That was almost 50 years ago. I gave the charlatan power over me, but damn it, I’ve taken it back. 

To the ghost of Bob Hoffman, if you’re still lingering around, there’s an open invitation to state your side of the story at the foot of my bed in my flat in the Himalayan foothills. It’s 12 and a half hours ahead of Oakland time, but if you can’t figure that out, Google has a nifty world clock application. 

Other Posts regarding Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

The Truth about Bob Hoffman

The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult. 

It’s a cult, damn it. Nothing more

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman 

Jonestown and Our Deliverance from Cults

Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple 

An Unauthorized Death

Originally posted Tuesday, June 7, 2022

When Maylie Scott’s mother died at home in Berkeley, she called me. Apparently, after my stint at Maitri Hospice, I had the reputation as the go-to person for dealing with Buddhist death rites. Personally, I found the designation of hospice priest slightly uncomfortable. I had done my best to distance myself from any sacred ritual after spending several of my Jesuit years fussing over post-Vatican 2 updating. But as we say, that was my personal issue.

Actually, I made it up as I went along. I had to. I’d fallen into my role taking care of men dying from HIV without any formal hospice training. The crisis trained us all, often brutally. The same for taking care of the Last Things. If there was a handbook, it was untranslated or came with tons of cultural baggage. This is a story about some of what we did, why we did it, and where our hands were tied.

When Issan died, Steve Allen asked Kobun Chino Roshi to perform the exacting Soto ritual done at Eiheiji for their most revered priests. Kobun had served in an official capacity there, teaching ritual and chant. He himself had been well trained; his seemingly endless chanting was mesmerizing but certainly beyond our language ability, not to mention voice control. He could not train us. I drifted off and realized that it probably wouldn’t make any sense to translate it anyway. It was perfect for that moment, and that was enough. It had to be. Later, there were a few odd ceremonial gestures, like pouring salt on either side of the doorposts, that I understood even less. The salt heaps seemed to be a Japanese superstition, perhaps to ward off marauding Yōkai. I didn’t want to believe that they had crossed the great waters with the Dharma, but I might be wrong.

Issan had arranged for his own cremation with the Neptune Society. We followed their car to the crematorium. It was a bare, ugly industrial space; the workers were dressed for work around the hot furnace. Though not disrespectful, it was utilitarian, which came into sharp contrast when Kobun, Philip, Steve, Shunko Jamvold, Angelique Farrow, David Schneider, and David Bulloch put on their formal Okesa. The usual work of burning bodies was interrupted by our chanting. I could see that this was outside the usual practice, and it cost extra. 

Steve and Shunko returned several hours before Issan’s body was reduced to ashes. Usually, the crematorium would grind any remaining bone fragments into a powder in what looked like a giant food processor before returning them to the next of kin. Steven had requested that Issan be spared this process so that he and Shunko could sift through his ashes with ceremonial chopsticks, looking for small gem-like fragments to keep as relics.

Several weeks later, there was an elaborate funeral at Zen Center. Hundreds of people gathered; Richard Baker Roshi, Issan’s teacher, was the head priest, but Kobun, as well as Mel Weitzman, Blanche Hartman, Norman Fisher, and Reb Anderson were also present. Towards the end, Richard Schober, the chair of Maitri and not a Buddhist, turned to me and said it felt like high mass for a bishop.

Between 1989 and 94 I was part of so many services for men who died in the hospice as well as others for Issan’s friends, that I lost count. Almost 90 men and one woman died during Maitri’s first years. I tried to school myself, attempting to discover an appropriate level of formal ritual. Issan, Steve, and Phil performed the Soto memorial service, which included food offerings and chanting, particularly the Daihi Shin Darani, an invocation for Avalokitesvara's compassionate intervention. There was also a period of spontaneous sharing about the person’s life and loves, something that Richard Baker may have added at San Francisco Zen Center. Several times, I helped gather a minyan so that we could recite Kaddish, and there was one Roman Catholic Mass in the zendo. On at least four occasions, Issan, Steve, or Phil performed Tokudo for men who wanted to join the sangha and shave their heads before they died.

The Book of the Dead

In 1989, at Lone Mountain College, I attended a teaching on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö, coupled with the bardo initiation. Only six to eight of us attended all the teachings. The lama sat on a high throne in the neo-Gothic chapel for three-hour sessions twice a day for three days. Despite all this formality, he was very approachable, answering questions in an informal, personal way. I remember a long argument he had with an animated, forceful Jewish woman who said she could not forgive Hitler but felt she had to. Jamgön Kongtrül’s resolution, as I recall, was if the Talmudic-leaning woman could stop harming herself, no matter what she wanted to hold onto, opinions and positions would inevitably fall away.

When on the evening of the last day, the time came for the empowerment of passing through the bardo, the audience swelled to overflowing, mostly gaunt men with HIV. I knew in my heart that many of these men were engaged in some kind of magical thinking. The fear of death was palpable. Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö performed the ritual in the manner of someone steeped in tradition. Perhaps death’s sting had not dissipated by the last chant, but if the pain of the men who lined up for his blessing was even slightly mitigated, it was a success. In my own life, the sting would linger for years, a kind of survivor's guilt. Along the way, ritual became less important, though it did not entirely vanish.

Normally, an initiation ends with some practice instruction. On that last evening, Jamgön Kongtrül concluded with a plea for everyone to live their lives as fully as possible for however many minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years remained. He said that would be the best practice; that bardo practice was noticing what happened in the “in-between” gaps in our experience. Many of these men would be dead in a few months. His instruction was a kind gesture of compassion.

Joshi, Kennett Roshi, and bending the law to death’s favor

Paul Joshi Higley was the first Zen priest in the community to die after Issan. He was one of two men and one woman that Issan ordained. Paul had been a student of Chogyam Trungpa and had completed some level of Shambhala Training. He came to the hospice with a six-month life expectancy and lived for nearly two years. He became part of our community and a friend of mine. In his late 30’s, dying of AIDS, he had a strong will to live fully. Determined to take full advantage of anything that medicine could provide during that first terrible decade of the epidemic, he didn’t die in the hospice but at Garden Sullivan Hospital out on Geary Ave after an experimental treatment.

The hospital called early in the morning, perhaps 1 AM. I’d promised Paul that his body would not be embalmed and that it would remain undisturbed for at least three days before cremation, but I was not at all prepared to find a way to transport a dead body from a hospital back to what looked like an ordinary San Francisco house in the dead of night. In those days, the hospital afforded you 4-6 hours to have a funeral service to pick up “the remains.” I called Paul's father, who met me at the hospital and provided the signature required for the release of his son’s body. Then I had to convince a tiny African-American mortuary to transport his body to “a Temple.” This was not entirely a fiction, as Maitri was still part of Hartford Street Zen Center, but it was pushing the limits. It was against the law for a body, certainly an unembalmed body, to remain in an ordinary house, not a licensed funeral home, for three days.

We returned Paul’s body to his room at Maitri between 4 and 5 AM. I began to wash it carefully with sweet tea and a few drops of alcohol added, the astringent to help seal the pores; then I inserted some cotton balls into his anus. He’d been my friend, so this was both a labor of love and extremely difficult. Issan once told me that in the time of AIDS, we were at war, and the ravages of Paul's last struggle with the virus were visible on his body. I imagined that I was washing them away. It was sunrise when finally Paul’s body, properly dressed, lay undisturbed in his room, dominated by a huge Tibetan-style shrine. I turned and saw the last calligraphy that he’d done on large pieces of fine paper hanging on the wall. They read “Yes, Yes, Yes.”

Over the next three days, friends, family, and admirers came and went. It was a kind of Buddhist wake.

Phil sent me to Jiyu Kennett Roshi’s Selling water by the river: A manual of Zen training, to review what she wrote about a priest’s funeral. Together, he and I sketched out the full ceremony, where everyone would stand, the placement of the altar table, the food offerings, and the order of the chanting. Phil was a Soto priest performing the cremation ceremony of a Soto priest. He wanted to make sure that we omitted no part of the ritual performed in the crematorium in Emeryville.

Paul had kept $25 dollars in his pocket to pay for his cremation. After the ceremony, we used it to buy lunch in a Japanese restaurant. It didn’t quite cover the entire bill.

What did we keep?

A few appropriate words!

After all my experience and hard-won lessons, I might expect to be able to say something definitive about The Last Things. I cannot. As far as ritual, the first thing that comes to mind is Aitken Roshi’s counsel to Joel Katz, Ken MacDonald, and me when we carried Dan Dunning’s ashes to a long boat at Queen’s Surf to be spread out beyond the reef. The Old Man said, “A few words would be appropriate.” Dan had been a dear friend for years. As I took the lid off the urn, I mumbled, “I loved you immensely, and I’ll miss you immensely.” Joel and Ken saved the day. They chanted the Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo, banging rhythm on the gunwale as we rode the waves back to shore. I’m sure Dan loved that professional musicians did the honors, especially since he’d seen Phantom half a dozen times.

Washing the body

Frank Ostaseski taught me the practice of washing a body for the final time. It is an intimate gesture of love and respect. It is also a difficult practice. When not left to morticians or hospital nurses, it can be an act of friendship. It is also a physical act, reminding us that death is real. Thank you, Frank.

Don’t touch anything for a while

I had a Japanese friend whose partner died of AIDS. Yoshi wanted to keep the man’s body undisturbed for three days. He bought all the dry ice available in his small Marin town. Early on, we decided that Maitri should also allow a resident’s body to remain untouched for three days. Cultural conventions certainly did not influence me, nor do I have any particular beliefs about the soul traversing to a nether world, but I did sense that trying not to interfere with a natural process was probably a good thing, akin to not interfering with the natural process of thought in meditation. 

I certainly wanted to be respectful. Working in the hospice, I'd become keenly aware of a delicate balance between pushing to get something done and leaving things alone. Although it may feel like a good idea for personal relationships to be as loving, complete, and even as robust as possible as death approaches, there may have been damage that requires more healing time than what’s available. On the other hand, having a formal will in place as well as written instructions about funerals, etc., is something that has a definite time frame. Sometimes I had to push through denial and procrastination to get papers signed. Thankfully, I had the assistance of highly trained social workers from Visiting Nurses and Hospice.

But more of a problem was the legality of not removing a body immediately. The law required that we not keep a body more than 24 to 48 hours without refrigeration or embalming. Luckily, I found a funeral director who helped with the legal forms, the death notice so that we could keep a body in the hospice for as long as possible. After some experience, we realized that though we didn’t need dry ice, we did need a lot of ventilation. We always seemed to be pushing the limits.

One of the social workers called it “lying in state” when she would ask patients how they wanted their bodies treated after they died. Many, if not most, chose our Buddhist wake. Their friends did come by. It always took its own form. Sometimes there was chanting or some spiritual practice, but it didn’t have the religious formality of visiting hours with the obligatory rosary of my upbringing. Most of the men in the hospice would have rejected that anyway. In almost every case I can remember, it just seemed to fit.

As I sat with many bodies, I began to notice that dying is not instantaneous. Like any process of saying goodbye, life doesn’t just end when the breath stops. It’s not like walking out and closing a door. The legal definition of death may be that the heart no longer beats, but hair and fingernails continue to grow. The skin seems to continue to breathe. Bodies actually change. Over the course of several days, I could actually see life taper out. I was not imagining something. It is a reality that I can no longer escape.

Full Circle

After Maylie Scott’s mother, Mary, died, I'm sure Maylie washed her body with love. Then she called several of us who’d been close to her mother during the last years of her life. We came and sat up with Maylie through the night. Three days later, she called the Neptune Society. Within the hour, they arrived, accompanied by two cops because there had been an “unauthorized death.” Maylie thought that her mother would have been very amused by the ruckus she caused.

Mary’s ashes are kept in the ancient Malling Benedictine Abbey south of London, where her other daughter, Sister Mary John, was the abbess. From Eiheiji, through Kaddish and The Book of the Dead, to a small Buddhist Hospice in San Francisco during the time of AIDS, and onto a small abbey of cloistered Anglican nuns. Perhaps a bit wobbly, but full circle. Life and death continue to circle on and on.

=

The Death of the Public Intellectual

Ideas have the power to change minds or reinforce tightly held beliefs and prejudices. Ideas can capture the public’s imagination--I’m not talking about soundbites or the flagrant manipulation of sentiment by appealing to racism, fear, or hysteria of one brand or another. At the risk of sounding overblown or pretentious, I will put forward a few ideas that might have legs: democracy and fascism, climate responsibility, the ethical life, the role of imagination, and spirituality. These topics interest me, and I would hope that joining in an intellectual conversation, sharing and discussing our ideas in a civil way, might help us find a way forward.

But sadly, in today’s information environment, this kind of conversation is on life support. Instead of a real conversation, we are reduced to sloganeering and “bothsidesism” that includes vile insults as well as calls for execution. Will it be by firing squad, or maybe just shot with an AK-47 and unrecognizably mutilated?

Someone posted on my Twitter account a clip of an animated Marjorie Taylor Green ranting incoherently about fake meat Bill Gates grew in a "peach tree dish." Surely a delicacy that will add to the wonders of Georgia. The woman is totally unhinged, yet she gets lots of coverage, and this is exactly what she wants, what the Right wants, and what her donors demand. This is the script: monopolize our attention, clog the airtime, and then move ahead with the other agenda, and we're not talking QAnon or some other nonsense. It doesn't matter whether MTG is an idiot or an Oxonian. She's just a pawn. Their Queen is about to checkmate our democracy.

If you did a survey--now at this moment, not yesterday before the Peach Tree idiocy--you’d find more respondents believe that Bill Gates is experimenting with synthetic meat and that it's finding its way to your neighborhood butcher without proper labeling. I’ll put money on it.

In the process, MTG has also heaped more distrust on the FDA and the entire expert class of technocrats who are ruining America. She’s also created an atmosphere where people who have done good work, gone to college, and gained some standing in their communities for careful thought, attention to science, and language are pilloried. Of course, you don’t have to know a damn thing about scientific experiments to know that we’re being poisoned by fake meat. Actually, the less you know, the more credible you are. There's not much of an audience for a man or woman who actually knows something about the real poisons that can infect the food chain. They’re just boring.

Who qualifies as a public intellectual, and what is their role? Narrowly defined, they would be an academic, philosopher, economist, or scientist who devotes some of their time to commenting on public issues, and, I would venture, subjects that a large number of people find interesting. In science, both Neil deGrasse and Stephen Hawking fit the bill. The late Milton Friedman, for all his faults, would have to be included, at least as testimony that his or her opinions don’t have to be as solid as Euclidean geometry.

Who are the current crop of public intellectuals? In America, with less reverence for academia, Dan Rather comes to mind, but there are no philosophers such as Albert Camus or Bertrand Russell.. Rachel Maddow gets high marks; though she’s an Oxonian, Google calls her a television presenter. John Oliver and Steve Colbert are very bright and, in their own quirky way, provide sharp commentary. Charlie Rose was in the running until he demonstrated that he'd disconnected his head from his penis. Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal are no longer with us. Thomas Friedman tries. No one today commands the respect of an Edward R. Murrow, but there must be people who could assume that role, yet as I survey the Op Ed page across America, brilliant voices do not speak out clearly and strongly for fear of getting mowed down.

We've always had crazies, even in very powerful positions. Sometimes the powerful maniacs have kept a low profile, or maybe they just didn’t stop taking their meds. But now, after Trump in this era of Fox News, the Margorie Greens of the airwaves flaunt their stupidity because the media will lap it up, and that’s key.

When I lived in the Upper West Side, an older woman installed herself every day on one of the benches set on Broadway's median divide and spent her day screaming at the traffic. None of it made much sense, a 70s version of Fake Meat and Peach Tree Dishes. But, my point--no one paid her any attention. If MTG were shouting her nonsense from the same bench, they'd have to close Broadway to make room for the TV crews.

The woman whom I used to see at 102nd Street has now been replaced by a silent public monument. She didn’t make the cut. Dan Rather has 2.5 million followers on Twitter. MTG has almost 900,000. Still behind, but her brand of insanity is getting exposure. Lauren Boebert has 1.3 million! Watch out, Dan. They’re coming after you.

If you can't shut her up, stop paying attention, stop giving her undue attention. Just stop it.






*Daniel Drezne made these nominations:

1) Ta-Nehisi Coates: Any book or long-form essay of his becomes the topic of conversation among elites. That’s influence.

2) Masha Gessen: I have found her thoughts about the Age of Trump, and the Age of Hysteria surrounding Trump, to be invaluable. She might even be right about Trump acting more like a teenager than a toddler.

3) Francis Fukuyama: An awful lot of people would have a hard time repeating something like “The End of History,” which holds up better than you think. Fukuyama’s latest work on political decay, however, has proven to be both prescient and vital.

4) Ron Chernow: I suspect some might not think of Chernow as an intellectual, to which I would respond by noting that Chernow’s biographies lead to reinterpretations of American history. If nothing else, reading Grant will cause multiple generations to rethink what we were taught about Grant — and Robert E. Lee — when we were kids. Since the Civil War seems to still play a role in current political life, that is no mean achievement.

5) David Autor: The hardest-working labor economist in the profession, and probably the least well-known name on this list. His research into the effects of technological change and globalization on the American worker guides much of the conversation on these topics in the current moment.

Remembering Harvey on his birthday!

Originally posted on August 12, 2009; reposted on July 13, 2018

November 27, 2008, was the 30th anniversary of the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco’s City Hall. Today, August 12th, 2009, President Obama honored Harvey posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"He would become, after several attempts, one of the first openly gay Americans elected to public office. And his message of hope, hope unashamed, hope unafraid could never be silenced," said President Barack Obama. Thank you, Mr. President.

Robert Aitken once said to me, “We don’t realize that we’re making history while we’re living it.” Yesterday I had a long conversation with a young gay man from Pakistan. I was surprised that he knew so much about Harvey. He hadn’t even been born when Harvey was killed, but he had so many questions. He grew up with hope. Harvey you did good.

Here’s something I wrote 8 years ago.

Remembering Harvey!

If Harvey were alive today, he would only be 78. Though he didn’t live to see much real effect of the gay revolution, if he were still alive he’d be thrilled to see the massive demonstrations across the country protesting the passage of Proposition 8 here in California. He’d also be raising hell, tempering passions, and organizing a skillful, resolute opposition to the religious faction that opposes the rights of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people.

I met Harvey face to face many times, but I don’t know if I really registered in his world. That doesn't matter much. I liked him, and supported him in every election—among gay men he was not universally popular—yet I didn’t get as deeply involved in politics as I did after his assassination. In the early 70’s I wasn’t totally out. This middle class kid was not entirely comfortable in the Castro, but I knew that it was as close to gay heaven as I would ever get, and I was having a great time.

Rick Audet, San Francisco, USA

Harvey’s desk in the camera shop was in such perpetual disarray that you might have wondered how he could track his customers’ film, but he never lost any of mine. I would sit on the famous beat-up red couch while we did business and then was invited to stay for as long as I wanted. I always felt welcomed and, when I spoke, listened to.

During those times I mostly sat and listened. He did love to talk, and I sometimes had a hard time following his conversation. In the course of an hour, as customers, political friends, kids from the street, other Castro merchants came and went, he might talk about the flood of gay kids looking for work, experimenting sexually, VD, pumping up rents, leaving litter (and doggie poop!) in the gutter, upsetting the old line merchants, and scaring the widows who still lived in the neighborhood. 

I remember one afternoon very well. Three older, well dressed Irish ladies came in to complain, and ask Harvey to do something—his influence was already established—about what they considered the open sexuality of their new neighbors (I’d even say provocative judging the Castro of the ‘70’s by today’s standards). Worked out guys cruised shirtless on the corner of 18th and Castro in front of the old Hibernia Bank, known as Hibernia Beach, and the women thought it was, well, just too much. Harvey was masterful, listening carefully and answering every question honestly, but he didn't give an inch. The women might have left with some understanding of their new neighbors though not completely mollified.

He could laugh at any topic or take it with complete, serious concern depending on his audience. I always had a sense that he was probing for the deeply felt needs of the neighbors who ultimately became his constituents. When anyone asked him a question, that person became his total focus. It was clear that he had thought long and hard about the issues, and he always linked your concern to the general good. He was a real leader, crafting solutions while measuring the complexities and the barriers to full participation and acceptance in all levels of society.

But no matter how far ranging his conversations, he never lost sight of his primary focus: that gay men and women were entitled to equal rights without having to masquerade or make deals that would push us back in the closet. Though many talented gay men and women have followed him in San Francisco politics, I don’t think it was martyrdom that set the bar so high. He was just a born politician and became a true master in a very short time. 

On the marquee of the Castro Theater where the movie Milk opened last November 26th, there was the image of a political button: “Never Blend In.” I don’t remember if I ever heard Harvey say those words, but I do know that he embodied the openness about your gay lives they express. And it was the reason why many gay men didn’t much like him; they truly believed that “blending in” was the only strategy that would allow them to lead the kind of lives they wanted for themselves. [For a very thorough treatment of “blending in” and how it affects our rights as gay men and lesbians, I recommend, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino]

Today is a good day to remind ourselves of what Harvey taught with his life: Never give in. Never think that you have to be other than you are! Keep up the fight. The only thing you have to lose is your humanity.

Occam's razor and the debate about condoms in Africa

“Keep your eye on the ball.”
Originally posted 13th December 2009

Occam's razor and the debate about condoms in Africa. A case for the ethical use of condoms to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS

In 2009 Pope Benedict made some remarks on his first visit to Africa that outraged health agencies trying to halt the spread of HIV and Aids. “. . . [S]peaking to journalists on his flight, he said 'the condition was a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems.’" (The Guardian 17 Mar 2009)

The passage of time has allowed human feelings to subside, mine included, I suppose, if I discount those who died because of the pope’s pontifical pronouncements. However, something might still be learned from the exchange. Here is an analogy that I hope brings home some of the contending impulses that get in the way of thought and action.

Fire at Samuel Wesley's House

Imagine that you are just walking along, minding your own business, and suddenly you notice a crowd of gawkers around a huge building that is being engulfed by flames. All of us would agree that the most humane response would be to call the fire department and help get those in harm’s way to safety as quickly as possible with the least risk to yourself and anyone else close to the flames.

But when you begin to take any action – shout to people in the building so that they might be able to find a way out, ring the fire alarm, grab a bucket – various bystanders try to stop you.

One group shouts that one floor of the building has been taken over by crack heads and that it’s better to let them burn than possibly influence their kids, and turn them towards the path to addiction.

Some preachers declaim that prostitutes live in part of the building and they spread venereal disease and, besides, the injunction in their holy books says that they should be punished by death. The fire itself is their god’s wrath.

Another man says that his wife is on one of the upper floors, but that she has been unfaithful. It makes no difference to him whether she lives or dies. He is cheered on by a larger group of men who do not believe that men should put themselves in danger trying to rescue any women.

A group of women blockade any help because their husbands are in the building. Each and everyone of the men is HIV infected. They say that the fire is the hand of God saving them from certain infection.

Some priests claim certain knowledge that the fire was set by an arsonist doing either God’s or the devil’s work. They shout that the only possible solution is to avoid fires in the first place, that it’s immoral to intervene in a situation where the laws of nature have been violated, and that dousing the flames with water will not work in cases like this anyway.

A group of social workers stand to one side shaking their heads. They are not without compassion, but they say they are helpless. And besides, this situation could have been avoided entirely if the basic needs of the folks in the burning building had been addressed earlier, if they had been educated, fed, trained in fire prevention, and given classes in self esteem.

Meanwhile the fire engulfs the building floor after floor. More and more people die. The professional firefighters cannot do what they know how to do--suppress flames with water or chemicals. They can handle catastrophic fires and reduce the loss of human life. But they cannot do their job.

Each group has seemingly sound reasons (or justifications) for blocking any intervention by the firefighters. One points to tons of studies that allegedly prove that proximity to drug addicts increases the risk of addiction. The group that is content to let prostitutes die shouts age-old taboos about sex and virginity to justify themselves. The man whose unfaithful wife is going to be burned feels justified because his honor will be satisfied. The women whose husbands are HIV infected feel that finally nature has set about to reset the balance of power between the sexes. The priests use myth about being possessed by the devil to justify their claim that water will not put out these flames. The social workers feel that their profession might finally be recognized for the possible benefit for all mankind when finally the fire has taken its toll and they can sift through the ashes.

We cannot allow considerations from other disciplines, practices, myths, cultures, religions, or magic to cloud the thread of the argument. Promoting the use of condoms is an ethical and necessary step towards preventing the spread of HIV, and that the conversation about the use of condoms to stem the spread of HIV in Africa has to be kept simple and direct. Only unencumbered language will allow us to arrive at an effective strategy to stop AIDS. That has to be the goal – reduce the rate of HIV infection among poorer African populations.

Here is a modern gloss of Occam’s razor: any good baseball coach teaches young players to keep their eye on the ball. It is that simple – there is only the ball flying through space, only you with a bat, or your glove, can stop its trajectory. When you hear people screaming at you from the stands, “if you catch it, you’ll be no better than the devil, you’ll go to hell, there’s a spell on that ball, it carries drug addiction and disease,” what do you do? Eliminate the noise as best you can.

Occam’s Razor: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." It is also expressed this way: Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, "Plurality ought never be posited without necessity".

HIV/AIDS is a medical problem. Whatever else should be handled separately.

gobbledygook /ˈɡɒb(ə)ldɪˌɡuːk/

“The meaning of life is found in the experience of Being, and the answer of the meaning of life lies in the knowledge of Being.”

Claudio, what does that convoluted sentence even mean?

?Are you still looking for an answer to the question about the meaning of life? But we just found that in Being, didn’t we? ?Or is there a further question about knowing something about Being that arises once you get your answer? I’m confused. English was your second language, and you weren't a philosophe, but really. 

Maybe I’ll ask Monty Python--or just fire the team making your memes. Gobbledygook.

Did I miss Holy Week completely?

Easter was yesterday. Why didn’t it make a dent?

I noticed something that I found quite strange. 

I live in a non-Christian culture. There are Christians in India, of course, a sizable minority, but they are not visible. Their priests do not walk the streets of northern India, at least, dressed in distinctive clothing. Their churches are few. Their holidays are official, but they are often crowded with more than 30 others from Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam. I have only a few Indian Christian friends; I do not seek out Christian rituals and communities. I am no longer seduced by the cultural trappings of religious Christianity, although I do from time to time feel what I can only describe as nostalgia.

Saturday was a difficult day for my small community. One of the families lost their only son, a bright, handsome young man, just 19 years old. He died on the back of a motorcycle coming home from the local Mela gathering; the driver, another young man, is still in a coma at the public hospital. Together with my friend Kumar, we went to the village ritual that accompanies death. The family was in a state of total shock. The women were gathered on the floor of a dark room with his mother, who sat silent and motionless. When I bowed to the father, the uncle, and brother of several of the men who work and do work for me, tears came to my eyes. 

Later at home, I realized that it was Easter in the West. In Europe, a well-intentioned Pope was doing something and saying something, but it seemed that most people were focused on the senseless barbarism of Putin’s army in Ukraine, actions that cannot in any way be connected to the ethic of Christianity. In America, people were arguing, fighting about vegetables, murder, and sex, and somehow connecting that with the slogan ”he is risen.” There was a Twitter storm with a clip of some lanky guy proclaiming his faith with a guitar and some terrible hymns to a captive audience of passengers on a plane at 36,000 feet. I wouldn’t have requested a parachute unless it went on the length of the Orthodox mass, but really, his faith has no manners. It just seemed like self-serving arrogance coupled with a strong dose of narcissism.

At this point in my life, I can no longer properly call myself Christian. The stories about Jesus seem to me to be just that, stories that may or may not strike a chord about living a full life with the rest of humanity trying to live their lives as best they can. They spring the myths and rituals of the pagan world in which they were born; perhaps some of those myths provide deep access to the mystery of human life, but for the most part I find them a distraction, even misleading. If push comes to shove, I would have to classify them as the artifacts, the “bricolage” of the predominant mystery cult, the one that won.

In the past, perhaps just a few years ago, when I was living in a more Eurocentric culture, I might have found myself at least paying some attention to the actions of the Pope during Holy Week. There was even a time when I did go to Church on this occasion. But what I noticed this year was barely a blimp on my emotional register, neither positive nor negative (even the singing nun type on the plane merited just a chuckle, no outrage). But I did catch a glimpse of how it is culture, the artifacts of dress and ceremony, the words of religious people, the songs, the conversations of friends and family, that carry and perpetuate what we call religious faith. And I asked myself, without them, what is lost? I was still able to be with a grieving family and share their sorrow. I did not miss Easter or Holy Week.

Issan, “Are you going somewhere?”

Originally posted Friday, March 25, 2022

This story has already made the rounds, and it should. It is so short and concise that it doesn’t yield to a lot of confusion or elaboration. Good koan material.

\Issan knew how to deliver a one-liner. He was, in fact, a true master, but this was delivered with no drama, and when he was in such pain and personal distress, we had to stop laughing and realize that he was not just making a joke but effortlessly pointing towards freedom.

I also know for certain that he was smiling and filled with gratitude. I can almost hear his laugh.

Michael Shunko Jamvold was a Zen monk who practiced for many years. He was known for traveling between monasteries and practice centers. Sadly, he died alone in Japan from an untreated or misdiagnosed respiratory disease. He was also one of Issan’s close friends whom Issan called on to take care of him at the end of his life. Shunko responded with devotion and grace.

During the last few months of Issan’s life, as the disease took its physical toll, either Steve or Shunko, but sometimes someone else they asked to help, would sit with Issan and help him with basic needs, food, drink, turning over in bed, and going to the bathroom. But basically, the day-to-day attendant duties fell to either Steve or Shunko. 

The bathroom was just across the hall from Issan’s room, but he needed support just to navigate the 15 or 20 steps when he needed to use the toilet. Shunko held his arm firmly but gently. 

On one of the return trips back to Issan’s bed, Shunko was overcome with emotion and blurted out, “Oh Issan, I am going to miss you!”

Issan smiled and asked Shunko, “Oh, are you going somewhere?”

All of You Are Gobblers of Dregs!

Blue Cliff Record, Case 11 (the long version)

One day Huangbo went up in the hall and said, "What do you people want to look for?"
And he chased them with his staff.
The assembly didn't disperse, so he said, "The Great Master Nintou Farong [594-657, 5th gen] of Ox Head Mountain spoke horizontally and spoke vertically, but he still didn't know the key of transcendence. These days the followers after Shitou [700-790, 8th gen] and Mazu [709-88, 8th gen] speak of Zen and speak of the Way most voluminously.

All of you are gobblers of dregs. If you travel around like this, you'll get laughed at by people. As soon as you hear of a place with eight hundred or a thousand people, you immediately go there. It won't do just to seek out the hubbub.

When I was traveling, if I found there was someone at the roots of the grasses, I would stick him in the head and watch to see if he knew the feeling of pain. If he did, I could give him a cloth bag full of rice as an offering.

If you always take things this easy here, then where else would there be this matter of Today? Since you're called pilgrims, you should concentrate a bit.

Do you know there are no teachers of Zen in all of China?"


There is a lively, ongoing debate in an online Buddhist group about the nature of practice and enlightenment. Dosho Port published a piece on August 18th called “The Showa Dispute About True Faith.” He describes the efforts beginning in 1928 to make Soto Zen more compatible with “modernism,” including Christianity, by reframing its belief system. A dispute ensued. One side organized its material under the slogan, ‘Original Enlightenment, mysterious practice.’ The other side, the monk establishment, wanted actual practice verification.

I am vaguely familiar with this dispute about modernization in Japanese Soto Zen before the Second War, and the attempts to "translate" the doctrine, if I can use the word, to make it more understandable. There was an attempt to take a portion of Buddhist literature in Japanese, but also Chinese, and free it from its Medieval encapsulation. I went to Masao Abe's amazing classes when he was teaching in San Francisco at CIIS. He definitely comes from this school. I’m a former Jesuit, so I also delved into Kitarō Nishida and the Kyoto School’s adoption of Western philosophical discourse. 40 years ago, we all immersed ourselves in the extensive writings of D. T. Suzuki, who, I have to say, comes across more like an apologist or evangelist.

This may be a bare minimum to butt into this conversation, but I will. These efforts to strip the vehicle down to its essential parts leave just enough to work with. To begin, let me take the debate one step further and remove the parochial underpinnings.

My pared-down argument runs like this: an experience of liberation is possible for humans. We don’t quite know what it is because of the current condition of our minds: our mental acuity, the quality of our perceptive apparatus, a balanced or afflicted emotional state, plus I think we have to throw a good dose of fancy, magical thinking, cultural mythology, plus translation difficulties and the vagaries of language into the mix. My list is not complete--there’s a lot to sort out, but I think we can establish, or posit, three hypotheses:

1. Such a state or quality of freedom exists and can transform our experience as humans.
2. It is possible, even desirable, to achieve it.
3. We recognize that it will take effort, education, what we commonly call meditation, and possibly recalibration to achieve this experience.

We believe that certain people have had this experience, most notably the Buddha, but others too, for example, Eihei Dōgen, Linji Yixuan, Hakuin Ekaku, Je Tsongkhapa, and Shinran. Still, perhaps we could stretch our imaginations to include the current Dalai Lama. Maybe that auntie whom Red Pine encountered sitting in a cave in China, who never heard of Mao Tse Tung, but, forget about her, she never wrote anything down. We’re stuck with the guys, they’re all guys, who wrote, had secretaries, or disciples who took extensive lecture notes.

What did they write: of course we have the Sutras, plus other stories of the Buddha and his disciples; the enlightened guys also wrote descriptions of their experiences, some of which seem to be in coded language; thankfully there’s lots of poetry, balanced with carefully reasoned philosophy of mind and analysis of perception and experience; we have to include the myths, and what we call practice manuals, “how to” lists; there are some riddles that purport to point to the experience; then extensive records of the mental and yogic disciplines that practitioners used to achieve this state of liberation plus prescriptive injunctions and admonitions that have even been codified. There is also a large body of instruction material that has not been written down, which is generally reserved for advanced levels of practice.

But there are huge problems with all this literature. First is the language and translation. We're blessed to have an army of very well-trained and literate translators, but cultural and archaic understandings of the texts remain. Then there is the sheer volume and diversity of the materials. Even if we could determine their authenticity, ensure an accurate translation, and understand their precise meaning, we‘d still face the question of how to use them, along with many other questions.

Our Western Zen practice stems to some degree from these efforts to modernize. Harada Sogaku Roshi, and after him, Hakuun Yasutani, Kuon Yamada, and the Jesuit Roshis, Bob Aitken, and the rest of my crowd come from another strain of that same impulse to modernize, so that's what I was handed.

Schools of thought are schools of thought. What do we do with them? Again, for better or worse, they inform our practice.

First, I think that there's a logical fallacy in the way we understand these efforts at modernization. Following any time-honored system of training that we’ve been handed, we believe that if we accurately recreate the logic of the thinking, the order of the steps, the lineage of the teachers, then we can access the authentic experience of liberation. If we fail, then we did something wrong. Perhaps it is a road map, but we want it to be Google Maps, with the blue dot moving across the dashboard screen. Good luck with that. I will set up a dharma combat: can algorithms become enlightened?

Another knot appears when we identify the criteria for validating the credentials of a teacher from within this arcane body of knowledge, whether it’s inka or transmission or tulku. The checklist resides in experience outside ourselves and muddies the teaching as well as opens the door to abuse and exploitation. Call the dharma police to testify before the High Court.

Is this even good practice? I remember working on the koan “Mu” for years with Bob Aitken. I kept complaining in my very Jesuit way that it was all just a self-referential exercise in a closed system. He'd say, yes, it appears that way, and then he’d encourage me to continue. I did. In 1996, I was living with Maylie Scott on Ashby in Berkeley and still doing sesshin with Aitken and John Tarrant. One Sunday morning, I had to drive a rented truck back to Santa Rosa. As I was returning to where I’d parked it the night before, POW. All that self-referential mind swirling stopped, and I got it. It didn't matter if it came via some well-intentioned modernization efforts in a Soto Shu University in the 20s. It hit me. There was no turning back.

Of course, that experience faded soon enough, which presented its own dilemma, but it was enough to set me on my own path. I remember saying to Phil Whalen once what a shame it was that the library at Nalanda was destroyed--all that knowledge lost. He smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. Enough remains. Just enough.” I feel the same about any attempts to update our practice and make it modern or palatable or whatever. Enough remains, just enough. And, as thanks to Phil, I’ll add: “With any luck if we’re lucky.”

I don't want to take a path based on pious dreams and hopes, magical thinking, myth, or wild speculation. When coupled with a few token morsels of experience that we might be able to recognize in ourselves if we’ve spent any time on the cushion, we enter dangerous territory. I was lucky to be able to see something authentic in several teachers, among them Issan Dorsey, Phil Whalen, Maylie Scott, Bob Aitken, and John Tarrant. I trusted them and was able to just stick with it until I began to catch a glimpse for myself that something else is possible.

Lord Krishna comes to tea

Originally posted Sunday, March 6, 2022

I knew that Allen was in town when there was a knock at the front door at 3:30 exactly. A young man, 21 but not a month more, clean-shaven, holding a book, asked, “Is this the Philip Whalen Zendo?” I invited him into the living room, where he sat down and quietly continued his reading. I knew that Allen would be at the door shortly; I could hear Phil beginning to make his way up the stairs. He and Allen shared years of friendship. They were punctual. I began to prepare tea.

I loved when Phil’s friends came to visit. Phil was on his best behavior. Not that he was normally badly behaved, though in private moments he could be angry, even insulting. Despite being one of the foremost leaders of a movement that questioned the very roots of believing and behaving that my parents taught me, when he was proper, he was extremely proper. But there was another quality to the conversations with his poet friends. Their language was careful and measured. It was literate. I was always looking for any innuendos, and I loved their laughter. It was poking fun without the slightest hint of slighting someone.

Phil, of course, knew Allen’s long-time companion, Peter Orlovsky, and talked openly about Peter’s drug addiction. Phil joked to me about Allen being a follower of “the Cult of Boys,” and this was the first time that Allen had brought a young lover with him. Phil was not very interested in sex himself, reinforced or dictated by his isolated personal habits, but I knew I would be looking for Phil’s reaction. How would he treat a young lover?

The young man and I sat a short distance from Phil and Allen. There were barely any pauses in their conversation. It doesn’t matter what it was about. It could have been Buddhism, Trungpa, Diane de Prima, or other poets who passed through the Disembodied School at RMDC, or even where to get the best Chinese food in San Francisco. They were friends, and though we weren’t excluded, we were not included. What was clear was that his young companion admired Allen. He hung on every word, carefully listening to each line, laughing when it was appropriate. Allen, for his part, was attentive to the young man. Not condescending or at all lecherous, he was careful that his friend was treated like an invited guest, not a hired boy. 

Yes, I admit that I entertained the possibility that there was some kind of coercion behind the young man’s presence. The age gap was enormous, and there have always been rumors about Allen’s sexual exploits. I also had a distasteful experience of being manipulated by an older man. But at least that afternoon, I was not sitting with a boy-toy but a bright young man who genuinely liked older men. 

I’d been reading Christopher Isherwood’s tribute to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, My Guru and His Disciple. Isherwood asked the Swami a hesitant question about a new relationship with a young man. Isherwood confessed that, given his experience in the stiff Victorian world of English Catholicism, he was expecting a censorious pronouncement. Prabhavananda told him to treat his lover like Lord Krishna.

Then it hit me. I’d been to tea with Lord Krishna.

A year later, I was sitting with Phil when Allen called to tell him that he was dying. Phil cried. 

An Invitation

[This is a part of the Introduction to *The Record of Issan]

Please come and sit with me. I invite us both to sit quietly as we can. Issan will also join us. Oh, how he loved a good conversation, especially the jokes. Together, we can explore what holds us together. The story of his life and Zen teaching is the glue.

I started to say “binds us together'' but that is not the correct word. It makes me think of prison or captivity. The purpose of this exploration is to be freer and more spontaneous. Issan would prefer something far gentler and more affectionate, more like the caress of love or the hug of friendship.

Perhaps this conversation will help both of us see more clearly what we are about. This is not the ordinary course of a conversation. Sometimes we just want to go over old times and have a good laugh. That’s probably just fine for certain times and places, but most times it’s a waste of time. Issan loved to quote Suzuki Roshi, “Don’t invite your thoughts to tea.” Disappointment and regret are sure to follow. Regret has its place, but not in this conversation. There are thousands of things that all of us should not have done, but tears or dreams of what might have been cloud our eyes and obscure what is right in front of us.

And Issan would probably suggest that we be on our best behavior, at least try to pay attention to what is being said. This requires an alertness of body and mind. We can listen to glean information, satisfy our curiosity, or actually try to find answers to the questions that matter. How we listen determines what kind of answer we find.

Issan died on September 6th, 1990. He continues to speak to us when we hear the words as if he were speaking to us. I have heard many students tell stories about him; some of them are recorded in this book, and they all have the very clear signs of words that were said to an individual person at a particular time at a definite place. If they have one consistent thread, it is Issan’s encouragement: Do the best you can. Listen and respond with every bone in your body. Don’t think too much of yourself, but certainly be yourself. No apologies are necessary.

I didn’t shout but I’m still a big phoney.

Blue Cliff Record, Case 10

Let me begin with a snippet from the few introductory lines that Hsueh Tou calls the pointer: “If on the other hand, you neither face upwards or downwards, how will you deal with it? If there is a principle, go by the principle. If there is no principle, go by the example.”

The koan

After Mu Chou’s formula introductory question, “Where are you from,” in a reversal of roles, the shouting teacher gets shouted at.
Then Mu Chou said, "After three or four shouts, then what?"
The student had nothing to say.
Mu Chou hit him and said: You thieving phon[e]y.

It was sometime in the Fall of 1993. If Mu Chou asked me where I’d come from, I would have said “Hartford Street Zen Center,” but he would not have recognized our lives there. A small temple in the heart of San Francisco’s gay ghetto, it had never been your typical Zen Center even before AIDS. After I moved in in 1989, more than 80 men and one woman died in its 13 bedrooms. Our everyday life was centered around doctor’s appointments, dispensing medications, talking with friends and family about wills and funerals, performing funerals, cooking food, as well as two periods of zazen every day, plus a pretty standard Soto ritual. We attempted to establish a more formal Buddhist study program, typical of Western Zen centers, but the grief support groups drew more attendees. I have to add that my daily ritual usually ended with a bout of heavy drinking in a local bar a block away. It was more than a full-time job.

The concern of our zendo was the pain and fragility of life. It was inescapable. You could try to run away, and we all did from time to time in our own way. But now Issan was dead; Steve Allen had resigned as abbot and left for Crestone. And it was the end of Maitri Hospice being part of the Temple. Phil told me to get rid of it. It was Issan’s project, and he had other ideas about Zen masters’ dying. In retrospect, I think that he hated trying to live his life with everyone dropping dead around him. He might have accepted Issan’s invitation to move in because they were old friends; they had been in Santa Fe together, and they were Dick’s first real dharma heirs. But actually, I really think that one of his main motivations was that he was homeless and had nowhere else to go. He had set himself to master Zen, and though he had done his work deeply and thoroughly, he was still a human, and a frail old man.

We had been sitting all day, and I went into Phil’s room just before the closing bell. I remember quite clearly what transpired. It could be fairly labeled passive-aggressive. From time to time, I have been less than proud of my behavior, although I let myself off the hook with the recognition that I am also human.

I forget the exact reason I was so pissed off, but I was. Of course, I was burned out and disappointed, perhaps due to the changes at Hartford Street or Phil’s dismissal of me, but we were all a bit “reactive,” including Phil. That is the way with anger’s confusion--whatever remains, the angry mind latches onto like a life raft in a raging sea. With all that experience of dying, anger turned out to have been a clever student and strategized its survival with the cunning of a fox.

I remember that I’d determined beforehand that in this dokusan, I would not say anything. Just sit like a fat lump and keep my mouth shut. If I felt even the slightest inkling of the beginnings of a word, much less the formulation of a question, I would shut it down. I would kill an errant thought before it even showed its face. I would not recommend this strategy for inching towards happiness, but on occasion, it is interesting to test if it is even possible. Perhaps yelling the nonsensical “Katz” has some salvific result as it involves more of the spontaneous, emotive parts of the psyche, but my Mother had taught me that shouting was always bad manners. Despite learning that great Zen teachers favored this theatrical gesture as a pedagogy, I still believe my mother. Western teachers have tried to polish this skill, but when I hear them affecting a Katz shout, it feels contrived. Or embarrassing. It is still better than cutting off fingers and other outlandish external “shoves” designed to facilitate the dropping off of body and mind. Shouting is not a principle in Zen, nor is it really an example of anything but the coordination of breath and vocal cords.

So for whatever reason, I could never be a shouting student, and I sat. It would be an exaggeration to say that I was shouting inside, though I did feel a few interior bumps. And once in a while, Phil began to look up and begin to say something, but then he stopped too. And so on for a very uncomfortable span of time.

Then Phil faintly smiled and said, “Let’s go back down to the zendo and join the others.” I remember or imagined a feeling of disappointment in his voice. That was it. He didn’t call me a phony. Do you spell it with an “e”? Did he see through to my anger? It makes no difference. All things considered, he was very generous.

I said in the beginning that Mu Chou would not have recognized our lives at Hartford Street Zen Center. Perhaps I’m selling him short.