Episode 92 - Buddhist (Part 1)

=== [NOTE: already transcribed elsewhere - please work on editing a different transcript - keeping this automatically generated transcript here for reference until the fully edited one, which already exists, is published] ===

hi i'm science mike and i'm michael gunger welcome to season five of the liturgist podcast everybody so mike you weren't able to be on this episode with bouchie i don't you were off like signing autographs or what i do drinking champagne on your yacht yeah i have i sign autographs and have mental health crises the one two punch of science mike uh it's it's an amazing interview it picks up steam as it goes it's full of fire but uh you're you're a guy that's practiced buddhist practices to a degree yeah that's fair my first exposure to buddhist practice was was in the westernized sterilized variant known as mindfulness which was like my methadone that was yeah getting off the god addiction and it was really helpful but obviously mindfulness is completely practice based was that pre like pre-atheism or in the middle of all the atheism or middle of atheism like god's gone okay i need something gotcha mindfulness and it was uh it was post-mystical experience that i really started to examine buddhism i had examined it kind of on the way out of faith briefly and was like well that's as ridiculous as anything else because i took a real superficial view what was that like can you remember how you saw it at the time a neutered hinduism um the very notion of enlightenment seemed woo to me but it wasn't it wasn't a deep it was a a slightly deeper than wikipedia examination yeah yeah yeah you know what i mean i was on a mission to disregard all faith oh yeah in an open-minded way gotcha like it wasn't really open-minded i was i was on the the rails to atheism at that point so after the mystical experience and i start trying to re-encounter christian theology like my [ __ ] reflex was so strong from my skepticism that i couldn't engage even really open eastern traditions or modern traditions of christianity without just this reflexive rejection so it was reading karen armstrong's a history of god that exposed me to ideas in buddhist teachings ways that the divine was positioned if it could even be called the divine yeah that started getting me to study some writings and some practices from the buddhist tradition but even then my understanding wasn't nuanced to understand one school from another school so in a very entitled post-atheist way i just cafeteria grabbed whatever was helpful from whatever i read and um at first the only theology i had was a hodgepodge of a buddhist and some hindu notions of god and spiritual growth and that was true for a while really even when i started to contemplate you know who christ was or could be again any idea i had of non-dualism i picked up from studying buddhist thought and only later grafted that into my christian faith yeah there's a lot of misunderstandings misconceptions about buddhism as we see it through our movies and our western expressions of it becomes a very new age woo often like white people going okay find your inner bliss right i i'm actually afraid to talk about buddhism for that reason i feel like i know enough about buddhism to know how little i know about buddhism if that makes any sense yeah yeah um and i i don't want to i don't want to reinforce those superficial stereotypes of l.a buddhists basically okay so before we dive into today's interview with bushi who is a zen monk i thought we could just clear up a few of the really common misconceptions about buddhism before diving in so we have at least a little bit of common understanding buddhism is not a woo-woo self-help new age religion for people to feel superior to other less enlightened people in many ways it's actually quite opposite of that in fact to a lot of people calling buddhism a religion is not quite accurate part of the problem that happens when christians and post-christians start looking at buddhism is they interpret it through the same sort of lenses that they used to interpret christianity so christianity had a savior they came to save the world who was somehow god in a way that other people weren't and taught us how to live so we wouldn't sin and could be pleasing to god but that's not the fundamental story of buddhism in any way the buddha is not a god to be worshipped like christ or the idea of the father i remember i used to go to a chinese restaurant when i was a kid and saw the big golden laughing buddha statue that was budai i thought it was just the one buddha but but i figured that it was a statue and it was gold so it must be like the golden calf in the old testament and these people were just worshiping this false god this vice false idol that really is quite far from what buddhism is the tradition makes no claims about the divine although to say the tradition might be a little misleading because buddhism is not a single school of thought a lot of people mistakenly think that all buddhists have the same beliefs and practices but the buddhist world is quite diverse like christianity think about how many different expressions of christianity you can find within the religion so not all buddhists meditate or are pacifists or are vegetarians or believe in reincarnation there are different schools of buddhism different interpretations of the dharma the teaching of the buddha some buddhists believe in god or in gods of some kind while others do not some pray while others do not buddhism is remarkably compatible with many other religions and worldviews because it doesn't make a whole lot of fundamental claims other than the nature of suffering which is essentially clinging to desire and while it may be fair to say that the end of suffering would be the common goal between practitioners and studiers of the dharma of the buddhist teachings from siddhartha gautama it would also not be fair to impose christendom's lens of shoulds and should nots over the top of buddhism as though one should do these practices in order to not suffer or that suffering is bad or anything like that so i encourage you to listen to this series with an open mind and an open heart it's a powerful conversation and actually interestingly enough personally i had a shift after this conversation in how i would like to communicate my inner landscape of assumptions and beliefs and lack thereof to other people many of you probably heard the christian series towards the end where william matthews our beloved co-host tried to convince me to be a christian after having let go of that label but as we spoke with pushy funny enough i think he changed my mind there's a point of this interview where bhushi says i am a christian because i'm a friend of christ and in that moment i notice how free of subtext the sentence felt to me i didn't feel like he was making a claim of exclusivity i didn't feel like he was seeing himself as above anyone else i didn't assume his statement came with any political or social attachments with what that word or identity would mean in fact as bushi this zen buddhist monk said that he was a christian because he was a friend of christ it made me feel like he was affirming the journey of all humans regardless of their labels funny enough that's kind of the vibe i was shooting for when i was opting for nettie neddy which means not this not that but in hearing him speak i wondered if saying yes to all labels was sort of the same thing just perhaps a more generous and even in ways accurate way of accomplishing what i was trying to accomplish by saying no to all the labels so it's it's something i'm still thinking about but i will tell you that someone came up to me recently and asked if i was a christian and my natural response was yes and i'm a buddhist and a hindu and a taoist as well and honestly it felt good it felt like an affirmation of the truth that i see in all of the great traditions but we'll see where it goes who knows it's tuesday today you know and honestly labels don't mean much to me as i don't hold on to a sense of a permanent self to be a this or that anyway this is all just stories and marketing but those stories are useful for practical purposes so but i just wanted to let you know that because after this interview my practical purposes actually shifted a little but enough for me you get to hear from me all the time you need to meet bushi he's this wise and beautiful soul his full name is bushi yamato damashi a man who was born a preacher's kid became a pastor and eventually a zen buddhist monk and the lead teacher at the daishin zen buddhist temple in thomasville north carolina as a child i was urged to study abroad i mean before i knew where india was my grandmother had just about ordered every britannica over the years and made sure that uh she would give us reading lists and tasks to do my penmanship even today is is stellar you know we we learned those things right in cursive i do and i'm i'm exquisite at it but we we were always from the navel to the ability to stand on your own feet we were urged to read and not just necessarily uh read one perspective but many perspectives and so for me once an ex an experience or or perspective had exhausted itself then i realized it was time to learn more typically in buddhism you know we we often ask the questions until there are no more questions to ask and then when you've done that then you move on that area of your life is clear you can see it for what it is and uh all of the delusions and perceptions that you had that were false they are now revealed and so i guess for me it was just this constant you know search and in so living in the church you know i was a pastor and seeing the experience of the experiences of those that were parishioners in the church and clergy i desire church can tie you out and i think that's what happened i think i came to this place to realize we are repeating the same things but we are expecting a glorified end and this is lunacy by definition in and of itself and then uh in so researching even more you know one of the things i noticed that christianity as a institution as a as a major religion one of the things that christianity off top fails to provide for many christians are practices yeah there is liturgy there is protocol there is structure there is ecclesia there is episcopal say there's presbytery you know but uh there are no practices and in particular practices that search deep within uh our consciences usually in christianity we have the remedy of pray it out or pray it off or pass it on or say this many our fathers and hail mary's or we do this uh this rather unconsciously conscious thing of uh just providing some sort of you know adaptation of of a prayer uh to suffice for the deeper need you know i watched people over the course of years in the church you know just be become older and become more unhealthy and continue the same traditions that liberated neither they nor the people that were coming up behind them and i think that's a very obvious uh perspective of uh much of christianity here in america so i think for me being an individual who was urged to not only see it from the perspective of those that are great and small but to see it from your own eyes and this is something too that i found like many people very disheartening about christianity you know this this idea that we are to serve god and to give up everything that we have of our own and adopt or assimilate into some sort of uh holy being without actually having gone through the nasty work of becoming holy and i'm not saying that i'm holy what i'm saying is i've found practices that put me a little bit closer to being better in actuality than i was so these are the things that kind of urged me along the path and as it is you know known throughout the world and i made it very clear you know when i left the church i took jesus with me i think it's what we both wanted you know i was going to ask bush because i'm from north carolina too i grew up i wasn't born there but i grew up there you're from north carolina so i was going to ask you uh you know you can let go to church but did you let go of jesus too you can't you can't let god jesus bushy you know you can't let god jesus you know when i was preparing my exodus uh you know it was he and i who were confiding in each other he wanted to know when i was going to go and how much he needed to bring you know so well god bless yeah i've never felt like more of a yankee wisconsin it's okay we'll let you into the conversation no talk about that process right like you're this pastor your grandma was a a preacher and maybe she was an ordained but she was a preacher you you know you said you're a child of a bk pk right you grew up in the church the black church your whole life the black church which is has its own beauty and idiosyncrasies right right how do you transition as a pastor into did you instantly jump into a type of zen buddhist practice obviously you were leaning that way but i mean it seems like you've gone through uh you know a bit of a transformation in that like yeah explain the tent the beautiful tension of that process right as it was unfolding right i understand i was raised in a home where we had many people who visited from all cultures and walks of life um so this uh this was not a hard leaning for me however i do remember as i was exiting beginning to proclaim my allyship with uh eastern religion as a result of studying and and coming to find some sort of community in that in my own life there was this reluctance from within my own community uh african americans uh who found this very uh misunderstood or uh you know many people thought i was copping out you know or that i was doing the wrong thing or that my uh my soul uh was in jeopardy you know and i and i dealt with that i didn't know how to deal with that as i do now now i understand that you know once we define it we have to defend it and so most of the encouragement or disencouragement that i received largely came from christians who had these structured ideologies these kind of ironclad thoughts and perspectives about their god their jesus and the rule of the church the law of the church and how the church is particularly the black church how it should be run and i i realized that's what i was dealing with nevertheless when the pursuit of truth is honest within yourself you will find a way to deal with the the gnashing and uh of teeth and mean mugging that people will will encourage you and i think if you push your way through that that's that's when you find happiness you have to get beyond the emotion of the thing and study deeper you know i lost my grandfather when i was 13 years old and it crippled me it crippled me as a young man but i had to learn and i had some good people such as my grandmother and others who encourage now you know this is the only time that you'll experience this and the rest of this will happen over and over in your mind you have to learn not to live in this moment for the rest of your life uh all the time and so you know so that's a very valuable lesson to learn and i think christianity could learn from that it's amazing we memorialize everything yeah um and what this does is it reinforces especially for human beings who have not dealt with the trauma uh it reinforces this kind of vividness of a delusion that is not present at the very moment that does not mean that it is not sad that does not mean that it was not tragic but uh we have to learn to transition from failure to success and do that with your whole self uh the consciousness uh the truth of your being and your placement in that truth if you are not where you need to be spiritually then going through these things and dealing with them honestly are a great medicine for that so i think for me it was just i got tired of you know i was a marine and so uh when i woke up every morning putting on my uniform the the the gentlemen who were going to be fighting in the foxhole next to me weren't in army gear you see uh and i think for christianity that was uh that was pretty much the case for me we're gonna play hard let's play hard but uh let's be playing hard and not something else yeah yeah because you you talked a lot about trauma in light of the christian experience you know i i'll be kind of honest with you you know you didn't fully answer my question because i i you know right okay a lot of pain yeah right like i'm not asking you even to say more as much as i i kind of want to talk about how does this intersect as well we danced around it but with your blackness right like being black just carries a type of trauma you were walking around with a type of ptsd on some level depending on your experience of blackness and and also your how your trauma and your blackness is interacting with your faith it sounds to me that there came this crisis um that was being informed on several fronts that you found a type of rest paw maybe with eastern religion or a way to actually start helping you process that trauma because that's what it sounds like what you're talking about um what would you say to to people products children of the black church who are tired who are traumatized who have gone through various experience like we've had several decades of a prosperity gospel that has not been working for the black church but yet it's still being preached right um right you would have thought you would have thought if it was real my parents would be millionaires by now but it ain't so what do you say to people of color particularly who have often been susceptible to american religion american white christian religion and and tired of it all because i feel like that's sort of the corporate moment we're in right now is there's a lot of tiredness um and it seems like there's trauma around not just our blackness but also uh the christian faith so what would you say to people uh in that process i i fully understand your question and let me let me answer by saying you know i deal with a lot of people and i often deal with people from every walk of life every race black and white uh rich and poor and with regards to christianity in particular people come to me and they they voice their frustrations and i fully understand especially black people i've had you know so many discussions over the years with uh people who uh have been following this tradition this way this custom uh almost this birthright so to speak you know and and they have difficulty with it because you know they they deal with sometimes racism they deal with us you know religious misinterpretation those sorts of things and in most cases many are frustrated because it appears that they uh this is what people say they you know feel like they're like mice on a wheel um and you know they're never really going anywhere with this religion they're not going anywhere with at least the the perspectives that uh the church currently offers and so when you when you have black trauma identity issues self-identity issues uh self-motivation issues issues of attempting to heighten one's own intellectual perspective sometimes we don't heighten our level of uh education or our level of experience simply because we've been taught within our culture that no we don't do that you see but when the church breaks down and they come and they say these things you know they often ask what do you do and uh my answer is very clear i don't know what to tell you what to do about your situation about being a black person um dealing with traumas and then now you're frustrated with the church but i can tell you this and this is what i say to folk you are more than a black person dealing with the delusions or whatever uh troubles are going on in the church whatever you're dealing with spiritually you are more than that then they often say well what do you mean by that well you are identifying yourself with the perspective of of someone else and this is a common problem with us as black folks sometimes you know we live in the post-traumatic stress disorder of our parents and so their rituals become our rituals their ways of thinking about god even become our ways and so we don't have an issue of of god not being relevant or god not working in our lives we have an issue of how are we seeing god through our experiences and so i think the experiences you know of where god is to be found need to be taught within the black church within the black community and i think it needs to be taught in vividness and expressed very clearly that god is also found in nature god is mostly found in nature and you know it's interesting you know our minds are so focused on the church the temporal building the scripture the paper the liturgy of the cloth uh you know all of the things that we do in church we put great devotion to that yet we reluctantly and negligently commune with god on the very places that moses did and experienced the wonder of the parting of the waters you know coming to terms with the earth is to come to terms with god and i think that's uh that could be one of the reasons why the church doesn't work so well now we can modify it all day long we can open up churches and we can customize to these people and that people and i think that's great but if that is our greatest aspiration we're still no more than mice on the wheel recycling because we offer nobody else from any other generation to come any perspective that says it's all right to abandon this and seek greater of yourself and so to black folk i would say often you know you know some of the troubles that we're facing i deal with it every day i'm a black man in robes in a very conservative area of north carolina but i choose to be here why well because what people think of me and what people do to me on a day-to-day basis don't line up you see they may talk to they may talk all of this mean stuff but i don't die every day so therefore nature and god work and work work well for me in this regard and to have that reality to have the reality to know to to hold that reality that most of our fusses most of our confusion and delusion and hatreds towards one another lie within the thing that we will be willing to define the most and that is usually pinned to how we are seeing ourself through the thing that is largely outside of ourselves god is not outside of ourselves this is no reason to seek god outside of oneself history is to prove that we've had churches here in america since we landed and how is that working for the world today you know it's our practice so we i would say you know we need to start teaching children uh in the black community as well as in the white community as well in all communities all communities of human beings yeah we need to challenge the perspectives of god the perspectives of the bible and and let those biblical passages and those biblical truths be lived out in our day-to-day breathing our day-to-day involvement with each other um so yes that's what i would i would say hey everybody just want to really quick let you know about a few events that are happening because as fun as the podcast is it just of course is never as great as when we actually get to be in a room together so we've got a few tickets left in the kin men's retreat that's happening in may may 24th and 25th in ojai california to be more specific you can get your tickets at the liturgists.com um if you've been wanting to do one of those get your tickets quick they always sell out fast also don't forget to get your tickets to the farewell gunger tour the end of the world tour that we spoke about a couple podcasts ago if you go to gungermusic.com tour this is your last chance to sing some of these songs that we've used on this podcast and spoken about in this podcast and even though it's a gunger show there's usually a bunch of liturgists there so you can also meet each other we are also working on a handful of other events from the liturgists that we will be letting you know about soon so keep an eye out for that all right let's get back to our conversation with bushi i'm struck by several things i'm struck by the way you have allowed what you have learned and that seems to be a word that keeps cropping up in your speech is that you're a learner that you are a learned man that you have allowed other perspectives to reinform that which was given to you that you originally treasured which is the christian faith and you've allowed those things to re-inform them i'm struck by not a lot of people will do that not a lot of people allow different disciplines or even different religious thoughts to reinform their religious thoughts so that's just groundbreaking for a lot of people but also how does this then interact because a lot of what you're talking about what seems to me as the eye right which is the internal practice it seems very focused on the eye and it seems christianity has always uh very much been concerned about the we how do you then integrate those things right or at least for people that want to integrate those things and you said earlier you said you know people can modify the church and that's great and that's wonderful but it still doesn't replace right you know kind of the internal transformation that you're talking about which to me are things that i i see inside the text the the cries for holiness and sanctification you know especially that you you'd hear in the black church and and even the collective sense of holiness yeah is there a way i don't i don't know if there's a way but i'm so i'm asking you yeah this journey and obviously it's still a journey of of bringing the i and the we together in the way of the freedom and the liberation and potentially i'm just opening this up um and some of the the tradition and the and the the collective practices that at least a lot of us or some of us feel are valuable whether it's corporate singing right um finding god in nature i fully agree with you finding out in nature and finding god in the the omni presence of god as everything and everywhere um but also in the collective intentional reverence space of that can we do both is there a way to do both yeah i you know so this has been a this has been an ongoing question uh for me personally you know even though i've worked tirelessly on myself as is the nature of or should be the nature of all of us and i think buddhism largely brought me to that uh that realization as a zin monk uh one of the things that we're often encouraged to do and this is often said uh through story um as the young monk approached the master the roshi the roshi screamed to him uh sit down and shut up and that particular instruction rather harsh as it came across was absorbed as such the young monk took that that advice he took that perspective of what he should do with his life and he he sat down and he didn't say a thing while the whole time he's sitting down he's feeling bad as if he's done something the roshi said no more to him had no more conversation until he had built up the nerve within himself to ask what he had done wrong and it was only after he had found this power within himself to question himself did he get the power to go and ask this roshi and when he did ask the master the master said oh no you you took that wrong sit down merely means to meditate means to sit down and see what's going on in your world and shut up simply means don't open your mouth to give commentary about what you're seeing and so for me when i came across this uh this this lesson through my own experience uh having all the expressions and the emotions just as everybody else uh you know would would first perceive of hearing the story i lived that and then i later learned that taking time to not busy one's mind in either god nor hell is a happy medium to find out who you are one of the things that i learned is that when when we hold on to ideas perspectives viewpoints it clouds our judgment and it also blurs it makes rather opaque what we're actually seeing and so you have to let the thing go why because the universe and history and even the last several years here in the country have taught us everything changes and so this is a staple of buddhism buddhism teaches that everything changes and to be happy to be healthy to be ever growing and ever learning to understand what it means to be tolerant and loving to even go forward to uh go so far to say that you you will fully understand the christ consciousness or development of understanding of what christ meant when he said to love your enemies you see often when you sit and observe you get to really see who you are the problem with us is we offer commentary on what we think we're seeing we're like often children riding down a boulevard with a lot of lights and uh and if it's our first time well you know it's gonna be fascinating and we'll call out everything we as adults do that every moment of our lives in many cases and so we never get a perspective of where we really are or what we're doing or who's who and why do we not like them and why don't they like me we're so often attached to some sort of perspective uh that we're missing each other and this is what causes the confusion and so that's what happened to me i got tired of i saw you know the movie the matrix is fascinating to me there's this cycle of delusion that everybody lives in these kind of programs that people live in and underneath the surface we're being sucked dry of all of our essence because we believe the delusion it is a reinforcement of the protocol this is reinforcement of our lunacy of our attachment and so god has not failed people have failed to allow themselves to be god in your buddhist practice as you became a monk i i would love to hear more about that process and what you discovered because you know when i first began to study buddhism more and practice more myself i had kind of a a western book learned romantic idea of what buddhism was and how it was practiced and then in my travels when i would go to a certain kind of buddhist temple in hong kong or wherever several places and i was kind of shocked to be like how did the teachings of the buddha turn into this where you're like selling these trinkets for your ancestors you know bring this stuff and it sends it to the ancestors and it's kind of like prosperity gospel in a yeah in a bit in a different context different culture and then you know of course you can ask the same about how did the teachings of jesus turn into laser lights and fog machines right i'm just curious for the same reason that i don't really call myself a christian i don't really call myself a buddhist either because i'm not really fully in the culture right i'm curious at how your experience was moving from the thoughts and the practices yourself into an actual monastic community into a full-on buddhist lifestyle and in the tradition yeah so for me when i came across buddhism it was not for academic endeavor it was based on its history buddhism largely throughout the course of its history deals directly with personal standing one's personal standing in the universe and after having a number of uh critical experiences that kind of really rocked me you know i was a marine and deployed off to uh combat and we lost a uh a daughter uh in 2008 you know and at the same time uh of losing my daughter i was being installed as the new pastor of this uh this place here so here you are this young minister more so in a faith at this particular point or at that particular point who was committed to doing the work of uh saving all and relieving the suffering of all sentient beings who was experiencing you know ptsd the loss of a daughter how to lead from you know a perspective equal to that of george bush just the other day and i was that was the hand that i was dealt with now when my daughter died and you have to understand we often say i i know how they feel you know or i can imagine how they feel and i used to say that i am now one of those people uh and i can assure that's not the case at all it's a i didn't even know i was so far away from that reality it was that experience and i had already been meditating i had already been ordained and taken in and i had several teachers who were teaching me from afar and the church suggested these these things i call them to me they suggested to me that first of all god had a plan god needed a another angel it'll be all right in the grand scheme of things she's with god it's all right you know it'll be okay by and by you know those sorts of things that we still do today i remember when i was a young pk up under my grandmother's foot just about they were saying those same sorts of things with regards to dealing with people's trauma and suffering and hurt and i think seeing my own dna lay there before me in that casket did something for just about two years i uh i had suffered uh tremendous depression as a result of that couple that with being deployed and it was horrible so being such a die-hard learner my medicine is reading and studying my medicine is going to the places that i can match uh wisdom with actual experience and it drove me to this place where i needed to to really really go in uh and buddhism offered me that as a result of doing some critical work of gaining some perspective on life and death like death is not a bad thing death is a thing that's supposed to happen and you haven't lived until you've died you can't cut it in half 50 50 and think that the one side is all that there is all of these truths all of these things you know this cause and effect this big comic you know mass of everything that we live in um you know was was taught to me all of those things that were missing from this i often wondered why i couldn't connect jesus to walking on water and i'm not saying i can today but i never could understand what made water so theologically and significant that they would draw up some sort of amazing miracles such as that could it be that they were just trying to express the egotistic desire of how great their savior was to be you know could it still be reminiscent of the fact that they saw their master before all of these leaders riding in on a donkey instead of coming in chariots of gold and such or could it be we miss the basic fact that while most of us run from nature christ found liberation in his closest connections with his father in it maybe we just scratched the surface we see we see the big picture but we don't understand the particulars and so buddhism led me to understand the particulars i'm of the mind today jesus is probably one of the best things that ever happened to america uh even after its long slave history even after this uh this terrible condition that our country is in socially today i think jesus is still one of the best things but i do not mean that in the perspective of a jerry falwell type viewpoint i do not mean that from the perspective of thinking that just because we have churches we're doing good i do not mean that in the fact that you know for those that are on team jesus and those that are alumni of the church you know have one in their favor what i mean by that is that i mean that jesus the greatest example of compassion and having human dignity dignity enough that he would be willing to lower his own dignity to raise the dignity of others i think that example is still found in every book in every church and every synagogue all over the world and i think if we were to start looking deeper into the things that connect with us as human beings then our gospel would come to life then people would be brought to the church the church is a human roach hotel people come in and they die now this is sad this is sad this is happening all over this is happening all over the world it is a human roach hotel now there are those who are doing great work to create space for those that are still living to not enter in that kind of uh trauma-ridden environment some of those people are people like bishop yvette flunder you know doing great work uh and and i love any community that comes together and expresses the love of christ over the fact that everybody else says that you are different you are you're not special you're not worthy you see as we've heard for years anybody who champions and says you know what those are your words god speaks otherwise i'm i'm a i'm i'm on the same same page with you we just do it from different ends i don't i don't know brother bushy because i was taught all and all roads lead to hell okay there's only one room and it is the road of jesus h christ i don't know yeah i'm being funny yeah funny yeah i know but yeah i just i i realized that um if you don't attach yourself to the perspective that the church is the only the world you know if that were the case then we'd be functioning a whole lot better right yep that's so true if if if ford if ford made the best cause then there would probably be no need for chevy if if certain things were so great and so wonderful there would be no need for copycats but here's the thing with the church being as great as it is as far as its reputation and as far as uh what it has touched regarding people's lives over at history it still is not greed and it will not be great until the people in the church connect deeper with themselves most of the people in church most of them you know especially in rural areas of of the country have a fifth grade sunday school education now if that does not grow up then you become a master of liturgy and you never master what it means to overcome community crisis from a growing perspective everything changes this is why some of our old methodologies don't seem to work for us we've not assimilated it we've not become like water bruce lee said be like water christ walked on water you see he turned water into one now whether he did or not i'm i'm of no concern and i'm in no position to argue that point i'm an intellectual man so it does point to the because water keeps coming up and it doesn't seem to be cleansing our sins of our social life and our own personal lives we still hate each other on sunday morning blacks and whites i'm not saying the water and the stories of christ dealing with water and all of the other people who had anything to do with water in the scriptures is irrelevant what i'm saying is human beings do not seem to look deeper into the significances of those those elements the sky is bleeding down radiation and all sorts of other things that's hurting us and our temperature on the planet is up one and a half degrees and scientists are telling us that within the next 20 to 25 years we'll experience major catastrophic fallout as a result of our human negligence of handling such a holy place such as the water and the earth and those sorts of things the gospel is not the problem the gospel is a good gospel whether it's interpreted correctly or incorrectly its interpretation is of insignificance understanding is not a requisite for cooperation with other human beings when they are suffering yeah you understand yes so when you talk about the gospel when you talk about buddhism it seems to me that that you still you're still talking of we within both which i love right yeah and and what that is the difficulty the difficulty of seeing how that works is solely in your ability to detach like what is attachment people often ask me what is attachment you know from a buddhist perspective and they don't ask me that from a christian perspective in that interesting yet the scriptures often talk about if you want to be great you got to be the last and the last will be first the first to be last and one man tried to even do whatever he could to purchase his way into eternal life and jesus said what you got to give up everything you've gotten follow me you've got to deny your attachments you've got to see yourself as none of that and i think that is um that is what i understand now it is not so hard to translate that over into your actual life there are very basic practices that can bring you back to that reality one you can not hold your hand on fire and not expect to retract it you see it will burn you when you are hurt once in the church when you're hurt for 20 years in the church when you are destroyed by the church you see you cause damage to yourself when you are able to identify those places in your spiritual life even in your church community that are damaging one of the things that you must firstly do is weigh your responsibility to yourself in that i heard one comedian say you gotta become yours your own star player and you've got to decide whether or not this is what you're going to do this is what you're going to perceive this is what you're going to follow and uh the the issue with that is most of us from the cradle have been taught to assimilate to follow we want something cool to drink we go to a machine we want something to eat from another country we have to drive to a restaurant to do that we want to look like this and we want to look like that we're always seeking external these attachments and that's what they are these things that we seek we want to have more grace and more love and more tolerance and who do we reach for we reach for something outside of ourselves all of these things are homegrown they are homegrown the days of depending upon god to do any and everything for you outside of god's ability to do that should be over human society is at such a place that religion all religions and i even classify buddhism in that in that in that vein should reassess the tradition of following old papers old books and look at who we are as human beings and what we can accomplish outside of those books now that's going to require some digging in but that's what exactly what i did i realized i am not my mothers my grandmothers my grandfathers uh i'm not their mess i may have been affected by i may have been touched by i am not my pastor's mess i am not my church's mess i may be affected by it i may have touched it but you as an individual have the the capacity it only takes practice and that's exactly what it'll take it's a matter of saying that i'm not going to do this and just don't do it and you have to be very very committed to that you know and and the evidences of uh you know always keep the evidences as to why you don't want to go back or why you don't want to do this or why you don't want to do that keep those things around as as reminders you know uh keep those things close by we do a lot of praying i've said for years when i was a pastor in a church and i often said he has a buddhist you can come and you can pray and you can do all of those things but prayer is a supplement prayer is a supplement to divine things people would say what do you mean by that well according to human history at least on this planet as we know it prayer has never stopped a war prayers never stopped the child from being hungry prayers never kept a white man from hanging someone from a tree when they didn't like him because of the color of their skin prayer didn't keep someone from walking into the church in charleston south carolina and praying with the people that were there and then killing them prayer didn't do that prayer didn't put the catholic church with all of its hail marys and our fathers in the predicament that it's in right now prayer didn't do that and so i submit and i often submit that uh as one who is a friend of jesus he's uh is he's another room right now as a matter of fact um you know i often say you know prayer is you know prayer is prayer is not the problem it is a people problem it is us doing the thing it is doing the thing there's a passage of scripture that i still remember and i love to talk about it it's very small it says faith without works is dead being alone faith without works is dead you understand so we got a lot of faith a lot of preachers we got a lot of buddhist monks who come into monasteries to get away from trouble get away from their their woes and if you're coming to any place to assume that that place will alleviate your suffering then you'll be greatly disappointed in the end life that you live will be one of suffering in some sense because you have to grapple with those things you have to ask yourself the question so deeply that you realize wait a minute i'm believing in something i'm doing something i'm feeling a certain kind of way based on misinformation i'm basing my life and how i live it and who i love and who i don't love on someone else's perspective and there are many people who do that you have to find yourself and then when you find yourself you can find the great divine another interesting point to make is isn't the church a tremendous place uh we've been taught throughout history that we should never seek our own selves to seek yourself as foolish to have your own mind is foolish we need to have the mind of christ well what does that look like we don't know and not even by the examples of the of the red letters or or all of the other stuff we still don't know we're we're still under the cross and christ is still screaming father forgive them because they don't know what they're doing and the answer to our problem is to be true to ourselves and then be the christ be the god be the muhammad be whoever you're going to be be the avilakitesvara whoever you going to be for the the benefit of alleviating suffering for others but we've got to come out of this this mindset that the the church first no i know that's what we've been taught that hasn't worked well for us church has neglected the church's hurt people and is hurting in itself and i often say hurting people hurt other people the cycle of abuse in the church this cycle of abuse amongst religious leaders will continue because there has to be a practice to deal with the suffering that the infidels are dealing with once one deals with bear vividly the troubles of their own mind and come to realize wow i believe these things all my life only to come to find out that they're not as they are and that's a difficult place for people you know to come to realize that now we're free we're no longer slaves people are like this in their minds but where do we go the emancipation proclamation was signed we are no longer bound by certain things but yet we don't know where to go and so it's still a liability to our thinking if we don't know ourselves i i hope that that translates well i think uh you know that's a very that's a point that we try to make around here a lot you know when you come here we will teach you methods ways in which to touch your deeper self uh i am both and i'll say this for the first time i have not said this in just about 10 years or so i am a buddhist but i am also a friend of christ therefore i am too a christian neither progressive nor conservative evangelical or liberal i would classify my uh my christianity more akin to that of thomas merton where is contemplation of all things thinking seeing things as they are being willing to slow down we've moved so fast since we've been on this planet generations have come generations have gone we've we've we've been moving and doing and going on this planet for so long yet the planet is eroding as a result of our presence on it and i think it's because we're doing too much they they often say that in music these days you're doing too much and there's not enough sitting down the the earth the tapestry of how we deal with each other is just about like carpet if you walk on it uh a lot if it's brand new uh more than normal it'll lose its its buoyancy it'll lose its plushness and it'll become old and run down and needing of of replacing and i think we've done a whole lot of going on this planet uh we've done a whole lot of walking and seeing but uh we've not done a whole lot of sitting down there aren't enough butt marks yeah there's not a no there's lots of footprints yeah not enough butt prints that is amazing i've been a big fan of nettie nettie in my own walk not this not that and i think that's part of why i've resisted or not resisted just haven't felt the need to don any labels but hearing you embrace the labels with everything else that i'm hearing from you and feeling from you is a beautiful experience i just wanted to name that like you thank you embodying to me what is so beautiful about both of these traditions to me i i do love so much about both of the traditions and think that they can be as you're embodying uh beautifully paired and beautifully cooperative and they can find a synergy i am curious about the ways that they might not because if you think about star trek and star wars there's there's plenty of like similarities yeah they're different mythical universes right oh they are so so marvel in there too so there's plenty of ways that you can talk about the similarities but yeah there's ways that you that it's going to break down if you try to just say you know saying god in the context of buddhism is going to be a little different than most not a little different fundamentally different than most judeo-christianity the understanding of a fundamental separateness between me and my source versus a universe in which my source is my ultimate self i see right yes exactly and so that's just one example but you're probably i think you're the most naturally conversant in both east and west that i've ever heard come across actually so how do you how do you switch universes yeah you're talking and how how do they come i think there's plenty of obvious ways they can compliment and you've already touched on some of that if you want to add to any of that but also what are the ways that you have to kind of choose one universe or the other when you're speaking yeah so you know uh and thank you very much for that question i appreciate that um it's uh i've often been asked that how do you do that and i think for me it was understanding what each tradition was what each religion or philosophy was while buddhism has many religious aspects and in in many cases people consider it a religion many hold many scholars as well as those who practice deeply hold buddhism to be more of a philosophy or a way of life it's some people choose to wear certain types of shoes that mean certain things to them in buddhism it is a certain type of life of renunciation it is uh for me and for many buddhism is a way to go in the opposite direction of your religious experience what i mean by that to point on some some fundamental issues buddhism does not hold a deity it is very non-theistic that is to mean that buddhism does not hold a god buddhism however does recognize other gods of other religions and is very tolerant and accepting of other gods and gods of other religion the difference between my buddhadom and my christendom is that buddhism is the practice and when i engage my christian friends or when i engage christ i engage christ or the christian perspective from uh or as an expression so buddhism is the philosophy and christianity is the method so to speak and how does that look buddha the buddha was not one uh of in compassion he spent tremendous amounts of time with people loving on them and and caring for them and teaching compassion um but he was more of a solitary creature who did more teaching intertwining quite like jesus one would say however more explicitly jesus was committed to boots on the ground who sought these spaces sought to go across the margins and go as far as he could uh to find human beings and to not only find them but to engage their mentalities to engage their physicalities and to engage their emotions jesus went there to teach this message of liberation but also to demonstrate what that looked like through his own example and so for me buddhism is a way to clear myself in order to become christ if any man be in christ he is a new creature is also something that talks about having a new mind let the let the mind in christ also be the mind in you well what does that look like we don't know what he thought we don't know where he learned we don't know what school he attended we don't know what he was having in conversation with the father and so sometimes we opt out right there because we don't know we'll figure it out ourselves and there's the obvious answer that lies right there as to what to do it's not in a one peripheral of how we should see christ we should see christ through the the didactic perspective where he taught where he educated and then we should also experience jesus on the other side where he actually did at least according to scripture what he did and that's not too far removed from what we can capably do today someone is hurting stop along the side of the road and help them out someone is in needing of some encouragement someone is in need of not feeling as if some law is better than they you know as if in the the 60s when negroes were confined to water fountains and restaurants he went to that well and made that woman to feel as if she's a part of society too those are the practices so for me buddha helps me to see that i have the capacity helps me to work on the garbage that would uh obstruct my egoless efforts by removing my own ego you see buddhism the deep practice of sitting deep practice of seeing uh your garbage not lying to oneself helps one to become more like christ and could it be one of the reasons why the church today global institution of the church suffers because it has not attained enlightenment but it has nurtured the ground it has plowed the fields it has sold the seeds and now humanity all of society in many cases and certainly the church has attained ego hood the opposite of enlightenment and the delusion is we think we're doing something and the evidence or the walking on the water is the suffering that we see every day and so we're missing we're missing the point everything changes and such a capital power such as the church may find this quite difficult and yet i think the church is changing in many ways but it is experiencing some reluctance some resistance in its institution and we should not worry about that we should not worry about the institution we should not worry about the institution at all we should be worrying about ourselves as a as a participant in the institution find out from within ourselves whether we are actually aiding or hindering the help that we can offer as a as a church as a religious body to people you know until we know that i mean if you you know if i had stayed in west palm beach all of my life you know it's a good possibility i would have been so uh adjusted to the culture and uh adjusted to the to the rituals and standards you know some people are like that we know and i would have never known this and one of the things that was encouraged to me when i was a child is uh you know that you ought to stay here because it's a beautiful place you know there's lots of money here there's lots of wealth we lived about a mile and a half from the atlantic ocean so i often say that my front yard was the atlantic ocean and we have private lake behind the house that i lived if i had stayed there that would have been the only perspective of what opulence looks like and so i would have gone out into the world trying to measure my wisdom measure my knowledge an inch worth of it trying to stretch it out across a yardstick and this is where many of us fail in our religious lives we learn a little bit when somebody tells us enough that we feel comfortable in defending it and standing on it and reciting it and doing it and we never investigate the very thing that we're doing and sometimes all we do is travel and carry trauma from generation to generation and a misunderstanding of christ in god from a deeper human perspective generations and generation until we change until we stop and realize you know the idea that god comes first you know has to has to change has to change i pastored people who were 100 200 pounds overweight praying for god to do something for their lives i prayed for people who were doing things in in in their lives that without their knowledge their ignorance just kept them there and they thought it was somebody else's fault you know i've prayed for people who just got older before me still praying for the same thing and the whole time they'd come into the church there the answer sat right with them so i think the church needs to rethink where god is and where god isn't god certainly isn't up there at the end of that ladder trying to reach babel god certainly ended up there with hubble so far because we haven't been able to find him and so i think that it would be who of us to stop the lunacy and realize that this god that we're talking about is much bigger and much more personal than we've given credit to this brick and mortar wow i know you call yourself a preacher but sir i perceive you to be a prophet i just i i want to get as much as i can from you about this sort of interfaith thing because i don't think many people do that well it's hard right i mean it's hard right right when you have all the assumptions of your own story and your own mythic universe and i i think generally i would agree with you that buddhism or hinduism or taoism would would generally be more naturally spacious enough to include other religions or stories within them because at the end of the day it all goes back to the one and there's plenty of room for all sorts of incarnations within that world absolutely absolutely where as in most unless you're talking about the contemplative or mystic christian tradition it's a pretty strict metaphysic or cosmology of god being sort of somehow separate from the universe right and from from incarnation he was his incarnation was through jesus and that's the word of god and the rest of it's like kind of you know depending on how radical or contemplative you want to get um the mystics see through those lines but yes but i think what i'm really intrigued by in hearing you is is how how you've been able to marry some of the best of both and so when i think about like america and when you said that jesus has been so important for america i so agree and christianity has enough belief in separateness enough belief in the ego to say hey no this isn't correct this is not right you can't do this you can't own people as slaves you can't right exactly you know there's exactly and within buddhism or or a tradition that says well it's a slave in the master or one in the same godhead it's a little more difficulty to get some [ __ ] done that's right absolutely right so christianity coming with that sort of prophetic edge of like no here is the truth here's what needs to be done here's the kingdom of god but i think on the other hand in america we have gotten to this point where we have taken it all so seriously that we're just drowning in suffering that we're just miserable and we're we're in hatred of each other and because we believe our stories of separateness so much i think that question i love this book by ellen watts called beyond theology that he he tries to bring hinduism and christianity together and one of his big questions is is this compatible is is the question is this serious like ultimately is this serious are we in in a movie where we're really enjoying the drama and the the suffering for a moment the godhead being we we where we're like in this crazy play but it's it's maya it's illusion it's gonna it's gonna go away back into the oneness eventually or is it at the core actually serious and are we in peril of hell or have you know like christianity at its core is more serious in a way we wouldn't call it the cosmic joke of existence necessarily um so how do you navigate that with somebody who has obviously suffered a lot in your practices i would imagine you've had moments at least if not a constant presence at this point of seeing through the illusion of separateness seeing through the illusion of self and how does that inform your um both christianity and practice of buddhism yeah so you know my my theology is quite simple it may it may seem that it is uh polished and exquisite but it is quite simple uh and that is uh what is what is most important so i came to understand that what we say and what actually occurs are separate now what we say changes often what is happening you know it'll it'll change on its own but no matter how we define it uh it will change so for me i came to understand that there are some things in theological perspective in even buddhist perspective that we shouldn't hold on to rather dogmatically certain ideologies or certain um certain viewpoints uh if they're not born of your own experience because they change now my understanding of christ because we haven't seemed to to i guess pretty much uh ratified you know what kind of guard image we're going to lay out for ourselves there are multiple so i choose a rather rather streamlined approach to that you see i don't like waiting in line and so i've learned to bypass all of the stuff that causes this kind of critical thinking even though critical thinking is necessary i am a critical thinker but i don't think with regards to our social life the basic tenets of being human being don't require of us to have either understanding knowledge or or the necessary tools in order to understand uh humanity why do i say that simply because all of us as human beings are born with five senses that is you know hearing uh touch taste sound and sight and all of us experience the world differently yet we only use those senses to translate the information all of us also only are capable of thinking two ways every human being on this planet thinks only two ways to assume that we can think bigger is is lunacy like we either think and we base our worlds on past events or our pursuit in some way whether personally theologically industrially educationally whatever our pursuits might be may be engineered towards finding something of the past or of reaching for a future that has not materialized all of us live in that perspective and i think uh for me i came to realize we're not getting anything done because we're caught between those two polls now history told me that history taught me that history taught me that in my lifetime 49 years i've probably heard the same things when i was two and three and four and five and they're still alive in church today yet the communities around the faithful continue to suffer many within the church are dealing with issues of trauma as a result of old thinking you see so for me i kind of streamlined jesus i don't have to know where to find uh first thessalonians i don't have to know whether or not the wine was fermented i don't have to know that but i do know you know i don't have to know that i don't have to you know i don't have to do that that's uh that's you know that's what i call getting caught up in the paralysis of analysis and that's why you're just spinning your wheels going nowhere and for those that are suffering in the moment suffering in the right now the thing that the buddha taught and the thing that jesus taught right now heaven is now the kingdom of earth is now not to be found outside you don't have to go dig up a treasure map to find it it's right now it's happening right inside your own mind make it our father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name you know and then there's this part about uh you know me may you know make everything like it is in heaven here on earth with these external perspectives um we're still seeking it and we have the power to do it so for me i kind of cut through the garbage i don't care whether a person yeah i don't i don't care whether a person is uh gay or straight or a woman or a man tall or short it doesn't matter that's how we come as human beings we choose this other stuff to argue about and that never any none of those arguments ever stop jesus from wanting to stick up and stand up for people uh in their in their plights of of suffering and so i'm just i guess uh too much studying maybe you know come to realize wait a minute there's a lot of theory here but there haven't been uh there hasn't been much uh much evidences you know that comes out of theory you know there's not much that shakes out of theory there's only more theory but to practice the thing to lay down our attachments and really become one with ourselves we can see others then it's hard to suffer correctly when you're comfortable and it's hard to see people uncomfortable when you're suffering well i don't know if that make any sense to you but uh no you just literally stump us and we just like sit here and just like whoa yeah so i you know i deeply believe in these things this place uh where i live now many failed to to to understand the history of this place my whole life was given to this place i became a homeless person my wife and my family our three children and two small children at the time we left our home and moved into this this huge place is very very large what was that at one point a church we moved into this place and then in the mornings i would get up i would begin working on trying to make the place a better place for the community make it a place of healing for myself and my family so it was a short walk to work but this is a this has been a committed work and maybe that's sometimes to be considered when when one considers how i've reached to this place how i've come to these truths now i had i had some special circumstances i lived where i worked which meant if my work was to be true then my soul had to be poured out honestly into it and my suffering was poured out into this place my healing was birthed through this place my ability to see jesus for more than just a couple of pans going around the church uh and a collar around my neck you know was born out of living through this trauma right here in the place that i practiced my deepest spirituality walking with jesus and then allowing myself the grace and the gratitude to uh to see this big world and all of its other perspectives that god had offered and uh mine was through buddhism and through other faiths so the world of religions came to heal me and as a result of coming to love them back i am their brother um and i understand the essence of god not necessarily through our words or our translations of books we've got many of those the evidence is that we don't do good with the books but this place has taught me the deeper understanding the god in in the books and god in the liturgy and god of you know the program and the institution there are no more than road signs churches are no more than giant road signs with all of their laboracy they're no more than road signs and we can come to that conclusion because the church as christ once predicted and as many have often talked about it through scripture it uh it will suffer and it does suffer it hurts and it does seek to heal but it's missing one major thing and that is that the detachment of the hand of god and the ability to learn to stand on its own two human feet this is what the church fails at doing you know it's interesting jesus said how long do i have to suffer with my god when will you get it certain things you know you're not gonna get unless you're actually doing it and you know you can't pray it up the evidence is all that that we know that we see that no one today can tell me that you know we've been we've been praying and all of these wonderful things are happening well that may be good that may be actually happening i'm not impressed with that i don't seek to be impressed what i do seek is to know where the evidence of your love is where where the evidence of your abilities to help others to suffer less ah that's all i'm concerned about because that is the work of jesus and that's the work that i'm interested in doing that is the work of the buddha you know alleviating our own sufferings one of the things that we pray every sunday here is you know may all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness and that points back to us because we are the cause money is not the cause of happiness the suicide list of the rich as well as those who don't have a dime can prove that and history is replete with illustrations of sadness coupled around money that is not to say money or wealth is a bad thing but it's not the answer how do you help alleviate suffering if how do you go about that well you have to you know realize that uh it is what it is as they say you don't make it any bigger you know importance is in how how you treat it it's all in how you treat it attachment is this if you can live without it then you're not attached if you can't live without it then you are attached if you evaluate along that line if you take that statement and you evaluate where you are in your spiritual life then this will give you some sort of insight into yourself because if the thing changes right and you're attached you will crumble you are the thing itself if the thing crumbles and you are able to transition with it and i'm not saying that you won't cry i'm not saying that you won't hurt i'm not saying that you won't get mad and say some foolish things i'm not saying those things at all because those are human what i'm saying is this if you can live without it then you understand some small measure of what it means to be separate take that into your spiritual life practice with that see what it feels like to visualize in your own mind being on your own without a reliance on god you have to be daring you have to be daring to breathe the air as it is without understanding or without even knowing if god is present you have to be willing to experience this life without the prerequisite that you suggest to yourself every day that you can't survive without this image of god you have to convince yourself of that you have to walk yourself through that you must sit with that more than that you must open your eyes and realize you know what how many times have you prayed in the week and you're still here without a reliance on god moments in our lives when we are totally human the church isn't near our thoughts and uh in our minds yet we are faithful and we survive and so i think this hyper activity around some sort of support system or not some sort of bad thing happening or not we should rid ourselves of that these are tendencies that were taught to us when we were children and they just kept on growing up because nobody checked them you know it's like somebody's screaming screaming run run what's the first human reaction we would run in many cases well when you know how to do that with people's spirituality you got william roley there it is there it is and that's exactly what happened and this is why people get stuck in that not being able to see objectively not being able to see clear so reliant on uh on what's before them to interpret the world around them i have people here who dislike me uh merely because of the color of my skin we have people here who are very open about disliking me because of uh me being buddhist and there are those who dislike me because of being a martial artist and those who dislike me because i'm a martial artist black buddhist than a once was a christian church you see sounds like witchcraft yeah you know so i can't uh you know i can't make that that's not my stuff and when we say that we have to practice in such a way that that that is actually before us at all times we hear we become compassionate to the expressions of others we become very open to hear and tolerant without putting our own perspective uh first you see um and so you know yeah i guess i've i've uh i've worked on it and i work on it every day these are what i'm telling you now are practices that i perform every single day often in solitude often uh alone in a way so we have this dependency sometimes don't we feel holy when other people are around you see and so being in isolation helps one to deal with you know what there's no ego to nurture so now all you have to do is sit with yourself and so i do lots of this and as a result you know i don't i don't lie to myself very forthcoming with other people and my compassion is true because i've allowed myself to sit in observation to watch watch what makes the person scream the nasty things to you whenever they come in from work you see just sit and watch and observe watch you know the little girl of the little boy uh that goes away from everybody else you know they're not weird you know that may be someone's interpretation but they may be hurting they may have some sort of if you sit and watch and quit running our mouths we may learn something that was a lesson that uh my grandmother used to used to often emphasize sit down and shut up close your mouth yeah i was about to say that's like church too the whole sit down yeah so when i hear you correct me if i'm mischaracterizing what you're saying but when you're thinking about alleviating the suffering of others so often in christendom we so quickly move to being a separate ego that tries to make something happen for them tries to fix it in some way and it's still really connected to our own ego and so often we just end up making the problem worse when we get in with our egos and try to do that but what i'm hearing from you is learning to be so open and clear within your own experience of this moment that it creates a spaciousness for their suffering to play itself out to dissipate yes absolutely you know so there there are practices you know that we often practice in buddhism uh and one of them you know is is meditation meditation is a phenomenal practice uh but it is in the meditation process that you know i have found a unique way to deal with the ego of myself that was once steeped in church culture and steeped deeply in the mindset or the protocol thinking of religiosity particularly christianity in america sitting in such a posture whereas you know i'm sitting in lotus and i don't you know just sit and close my eyes and just allow the sounds to go around me and just accept those as a part of you know my being but i go beyond i imagine through visualization myself standing or sitting higher than myself just behind me so if you could imagine sitting on uh some bleachers in a stadium and then there's the people sitting in the step just behind you and what i do is i visualize myself looking down on myself and i often do this constantly whereas my meditation is not only a quiet solitary thing but when i emerge from my meditative state i emerge in a very lucid and vivid meditation and i'm still looking down on myself and this is a visualization practice and what does that do for me what it does is it allows us to be able to monitor and see very clearly if you keep the practice the behavior that other people are viewing that's coming from your presence so in other words instead of being so deeply involved in our minds where we're sitting we're going over everything we're looking and we're believing and we're angry and this thought comes around and that com thought comes around and we're constantly in this kind of up and down situation that keeps us in samsara what i do is i have envisioned myself above myself this keeps me very clear pretty much become your own papa gepetto um from a visualization standpoint you're a little more careful about what comes out of your mouth whether it be true or false what you say to others you see whether it be kind to good these sorts of practices we have to bring to ourselves we our religions uh have largely failed as a result of the protocol being taught things that were not primordial that were not indigenous to our human anatomy you see our human psyches all of these practices many or many perspectives of christianity keep us so high in the sky and thought and theory uh that our ground uh effort or boots on the ground as i often call uh call them you know are never are never enacted so we get this half true there's no reason whatsoever a seven-year-old in some far midwest place in america should hate black people and he's never had any direct experience that's a learned thing there's no reason that someone should have a hatred or a mislike of people who are lgbt if they've had no direct experience this is lunacy this is no more than believing in the monsters under your bed and that works both ways yeah for me that that practice keeps me stable whereas i'm always in service uh and never allowing my ego hood uh to take capital reign you see and these are practices these are practices when there's less of you there's more of christ and i think christ and so many others pointed to that they sounded all real good when we were younger and now we're all growing up and now we're in a shitstorm and everybody's trying to figure out you know well what do we do oh we missed it we missed it we got so caught up in the the protocol of what we thought and uh now we realize our absence of human involvement in our religion is costing us i remember reading um anthony demello when i was in my 20s and he would talk about attachment within love and i could tell there was something beautiful and true about the separation between love and attachment but it was really difficult to even know what what is love without attachment at that point in my life it was right right like it was so foreign and alien and i imagine there's people out there listening to your voice and hearing you describe all these things and when you come from an entirely different mythic universe uh some of it might feel so alien and so like foreign but but i think and i hope and i would encourage those who hear something in this something in your voice something in the way that you've lived out these ideas and lack of ideas i hope that it catches people and i think it will that there was something about reading those words about loving without attachment what is that how is that even possible that i didn't see it yet but eventually it kept digging its way into my life and experience and i could find it oh that's the attachment versus the love i had a friend i was i was talking about some problems of a friend recently with a different friend who is a buddhist and i was talking and really concerned about this other friend and he goes yes and he's like if you care what happens to him you're of no use to him right i could hear i could hear it and understand it but that's and i was like it's a great reminder um that is language that is really alien and foreign to a lot of us um but is that like how loving without having any stake in what happens in the outcome that's right losing that's right losing hope in a way like getting rid of him that's right that's right so that you can be present to this that's right so i'm i'm working on a piece now and many have been uh at me for years i'm a rather reclusive person my journey has taken me deeply deeply in and i've spent the last 10 years making public appearances in in various or selected spaces however i am working on a piece now um for the first time that will deal with uh an interpretation of love that i kind of devised you know of my own and i and it's a it's a buddhist christian type of interpretation so i interpret love as or or what love is is preemptive empathy um preemptive empathy and what i suggest with that preemptive empathy is this that whether or not we understand a person's plight directly with experience direct experience we as human beings have all felt the same physical anomalies mental anomalies emotional anomalies as a result of those five senses that we all have this is where our community really lies it's not in the differences those things that divide us uh you know they they they may be tantalizing to us to our physical uh human natures but the greatest of us is to be found in this uh this idea of a preemptive love whether we don't we don't have to know directly what each other has gone through but we know when people are hurting when people are suffering and when people are are happy we've at some point in our lives experience those very same things and so this should give us a sense of ease and comfort in knowing that we are not out of place when other people are experiencing what they're experiencing with human life and conversely when we were or in the church we're often you know offered this uh this kind of duality it's them in us there's the saved and the center there's the good and the bad right and wrong and uh we forget about the human stuff in between that we all experience that we can connect on yeah christ was human and i think more so in that that perspective uh a bodhisattva yeah yeah is there anywhere that you would like to point people to anything you're working on or anything that would yeah like so point people too i will always as uh a renunciant of funding or a nuncient of money i took a vow of poverty but i'm always in the in the work of letting people know if they want to support us financially uh they can go to our website to do so but i would like to point people to explore thomas merton alan martz people such as my teacher lamorad owens llama justin von bordage you know those personalities that are working directly in the seams of suffering um i i largely like to point to those that are doing good work of bringing humanity together people such as the the reverend william barber who's on the front lines fighting for for rights you know i think there are those of us who have christ consciousness who are so detached from the idea of ego that we are we're willing to enlarge numbers stand up for many people at one time some of us can only shepherd a small flock but there are those of us that are endowed with christ consciousness to such the power and who are actual living bodhisattvas who can handle such a larger capacity and i think reverend barbara's doing doing that work wonderful um also the wild goose festival i almost never miss pointing out the festival not because when i transitioned as a zen monk the good folk at the goose gave me home and a place to help to grow into this thing this person that i've become today so if anybody finds any value in that it is as a result of following these people who encouraged this kind of stepping away from ourselves our egos to really see who we are and what we're fighting for in in others and for others so i just want to point point people to those directions shout out to my wife she's everything and uh largely this theology this transition of my life that is affecting so many thousands of people across the globe largely influenced by this little country girl that i met on a blind date so i i thank her for lending me also to all of the people that we touch what's your website uh it is uh ripabushi.com r-e-p-a-b-u-s-h-i dot com and if and others can reach us at uh our center site it is thomasvillebuddhistc gmail.com bushi what an honor and a pleasure to speak to you thank you thank you it's been my pleasure we'd like to thank our patrons as always for doing what you do to make this show possible if you're interested in becoming a patron where you get an extra podcast every week and some meditations just go to the liturgists.com you can find a link there thanks to greg nordin for editing support thanks to tom kraut from liminal music for a couple of those tracks in there as well as on earth music which is my band with tyler chester thanks for listening everybody you