Introduction

Available 9/30/22

My teacher, Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi, was a Rinzai Zen master. As such, he often said things intended to irritate listeners in a way that would cause them to reflect more deeply on their beliefs.

It is our beliefs, more than anything, that obscure us from the deeper clarity sought through a spiritual practice.

One of his favorite sayings was, “The only trouble with Zen, and with psychotherapy, is they don’t work.” That is a very interesting thing for a Zen master and lineage holder to say — especially one who was the head abbot of his own school of Zen.

Not to mention the fact that Junpo spent many years in ongoing forms of psychotherapy, even well into his later 60’s, to better understand his own childhood trauma and how it continued to impact his day-to-day life.

As was so often the case with his provocative sayings, there was an implied wink in the ridiculousness of the statement itself. Nevertheless, it had the dual benefit of pissing off all the spiritual practitioners in the room as well as all of the therapists, no small feat.

In a place like Boulder, Colorado, where I live, that often meant just about everyone in the room! And yet his message had a serious point behind it: there is no awakening without bringing your ego — and all of its shadows, blind spots, conditioning, and neurotic tics — along for the ride. And there is no therapy in the world that can awaken you from your suffering. These two things, therapy and spiritual practice, don’t really work — unless you use them together.

Therapy, in part, tries to strengthen our egoic identity to one that is healthy and strong, can integrate its traumas, and is able to reflect on the ways it’s prone to deceiving itself. Spirituality, in part, tries to soften our egoic identity to one that is transparent and open to seeing beyond its beliefs and opinions about reality, a reality that is utterly unconcerned with our view — our opinion — of it.

As such, this book will begin with the challenge of our egoic identities, and how those identities — especially if they’re spiritual — can be the thing most in the way of awakening. We’ll then move into how childhood conditioning and trauma can greatly complicate our spiritual practice, and how that spiritual practice is unable to help us see and face our psychological shadows.

If this book were to be reduced to a single sentence, it would be this: we awaken through our egos, not from them.

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We live in interesting times. Identity has burst upon our collective consciousness. Identity politics. Racial and gender identities. Polarized electorates waging war against identities not like their own. Pro-mask and anti-mask identities. Spiritual identities, woke identities, conservative identities, progressive identities, national identities, scientific identities, religious identities, postmodern identities. Identities that create ideologies and then attach to those ideologies creating the endless war we find in our world, and inside of ourselves.

Yet there is a fundamental truth of our universe that stopped me in my tracks the moment I realized it. It seems that some billions of years ago there was nothing. Or rather, there was nothing except, somehow, the potential for all of this, but there was no time, no space, no laws of the universe, nothing except ...some kind of suchness, some kind of potentiality.

“Before the Big Bang” doesn’t even make sense because there was no time before then, so how could there be anything before? We don’t know and we can’t know, at least not with our thinking brains. Our rational minds and our intellects are like computers fed bad data. We look at the birth of the universe, or inside of black holes, and it generates an error code in our brains. How do we conceive of things that don’t exist in time, in space, in the reality that seems so ... real to us?

The most cutting-edge science tells us that a paradox lives at the core of this universe and that paradox seems to be beyond mathematics, reason, or even imagination. Science, in short, is unable to even approach, much less explain, the foundational truth of the universe: first there was Nothing and then, somehow, there was Something.

There is another way to know this paradox, however, one that is outside of our thinking minds and the computational parts of our brains. There is a way to know the grand, ultimate truth of the universe, and to know it deeply inside of ourselves, as ourselves.

There is a way to live inside of the paradox of what is and to live as this paradox, and in so doing free ourselves from the endless wars inside and out. For many thousands of years, a small number of very wise humans have crackled this riddle of our existence, but they’ve done so not with their thinking minds at all, but their their direct apprehension of what is, now:

Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe returns to this common source. Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don't realize this source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kindhearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king.

Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and when death comes, you are ready.

— Master Lao Tzu, 600 B.C.E.

This book is not a work of philosophy. It is certainly not a self-help book, or a book on spirituality. Or therapy. It resides in the cannon of Zen, which is to say it’s merely offering you a view.

It is possible to be liberated from the suffering of this world, but the path to doing it is a paradoxical one, like the universe itself. In the end, it comes down to choice. If you seek liberation and freedom from the endless strife and suffering of your mind and of our world, continue.

But be warned: there is no waking up outside of this world. Liberation comes only through the door of you and into the places you are most trying to avoid, right now. Your deepest contraction and your biggest fears are the places where liberation lies, not in heaven or nirvana or some far-away perfect and enlightened place, but here, now. You can’t be freed from this world, but you can be freed within it and, paradoxically, then be freed from it.

This book will explain how.

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