An Interview with Jun Po Roshi
My mother carried nine children to term, but she also lost six to late-term miscarriage. One of my brothers, the one born just before me, lived a single day and then died. I bring this up because I think something about surviving inside that womb, in a kind of constant survival mode, left its mark on me. For years I did psychological work trying to reach my shadow states, to understand my psyche and my ego, and I kept trying to trace all of it back to childhood. I couldn't locate the source. I kept looking, kept coming up empty, until I went down a layer, into something more structural, and there I recognized where the intensity came from. Call it the basic drive in my character.
I was raised Roman Catholic and I did my honest best to be a good Catholic boy. But even when I was young I started asking questions, because a lot of it confused me. Mortal sin, for one. The notion of eternal damnation handed out for a finite act never sat right with me. The virgin birth, the whole mythopoetic architecture of belief, I wanted to actually understand these things rather than swallow them. So the search started early, and it started with simple questions: where do I come from, what is this life about, who am I?
That carried on for about twenty years before I landed in California and found psychedelics. I spent roughly a decade experimenting with them, though never as party drugs. I approached them spiritually. I'd arrange meditation around them, do yoga practices, keep knocking at the door with them to see what would open. They turned out to be good at producing state experiences, powerful openings, but I had no framework to hold any of it. No perspective, no ground to stand on, no way to integrate or truly realize what I was glimpsing. That gap is what sent me back toward the discipline of yoga, and the more I studied it the more it drew me in.
Inside the yoga tradition I came across what I'd call the great yoga school, which is Zen. The word Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese Chan, and Chan comes from the Sanskrit dhyana, the second stage in the yogic and Buddhist tradition of meditative discipline. First you have concentration practice, which leads into deep awareness and realization, and then into what I sometimes call unreasonable enjoyment, or Samadhi. The whole arc of it. So I got serious and disciplined, and I went looking for teachers and for the teaching itself.
At that point I wasn't inclined toward reincarnation or those kinds of metaphysical commitments. Zen and Buddhism pulled me in partly for that reason. I loved the story of the Buddha being asked whether he believed in life after death, whether there was another world, and his reply was that they had more important things to discuss. The first time I heard that line something clicked. I thought, okay, here's something I don't even need to go chasing.