Jun Po Roshi: An Interview
I ask them to get ready, and then I say: show me who you are. One question at a time. The next one goes like this. Using language now, give me an adjective for who we are at the deepest level. Not a passing mood, not something that arrives and leaves, but who we actually are underneath all of that. Who am I? Who are we, down at that depth? At that depth, I am what? You are what? Something below the relative, chattering mind. And eventually there is silence.
If the silence comes, I press on it. How silent? And then I offer a word for it: deathly silent. Because that is the mind at real depth. Death is already present. You do not have to wait around for it to show up. Go far enough into stillness and receptivity and you reach the point that sits at the root of any living being.
In Zen we have a phrase for this. Die on the cushion. What we mean is going into a stillness so complete that the lights shut off. The joke, and it is a good one, is that you come back. It reminds me of psychedelics. I would die on the journey, or feel like I had, and then there I was again, back with the same nonsense I left with. That return is exactly why I had to go back to training and work the whole thing through. I needed to sort it out until I could enter that state on my own and rest there without a chemical pushing me into it.
Once you can do that, you can name what you found: silent, timeless, empty. Fear can still rise up, but the mind no longer grabs at it. From this vantage point fear reads as excitement, as an opening. The reaction that used to follow it drops away once the realization is in place. So fear becomes opportunity rather than a trigger.
What you are left witnessing from is vast, silent, fearless, present, aware, outside of time. This is it. So now you claim it. I am vast. At this level I am silent. At this level I am fearless. You have the words, the frame, the construct. Good.
Then I tell them to flush the toilet. The philosophy is set, so now drop it and show me. No words. Use your body, your psyche, your eyes, your bearing. Show me this witnessing intelligence as something you move through, not something you describe. Do not leave it as an abstraction sitting out there somewhere.
And something comes. A gesture rises out of the body, through the eyes, something spontaneous. If it is genuine, I reflect it back. From there we keep moving down the line, step by step. Then I ask whether this state comes and goes. People say yes, it does, all the time. So I stop them. Wait. Who is it that comes and goes? The ego comes and goes. The ego's awareness comes and goes.