As you read this I will be winding up the first part of an extensive international tour to promote my latest book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. I have a small break now before a short hop to New Mexico and then the madness all starts again in August when I go to Finland and Germany.

Whenever I give a talk I’m always in a hurry to get to the Q&A section. That’s where the real action is as far as I’m concerned. At several of my stops on the current tour people have asked me whether I’ve had the experience of satori and, if so, what it was like.

The word satori means “awakening to one’s true nature.” According to most of the earliest English-language books on Zen, including the works of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, satori is the goal of Zen practice. I happen to come from a tradition that looks upon satori in a completely different way. But even in my tradition, there is the idea that if you do your Zen practice long enough and sincerely enough, there will come a time when the true nature of yourself and the universe becomes clear.

But asking someone else about their satori is a little bit like the guy in the Monty Python “Nudge Nudge” skit who keeps pestering a stranger about his sex life then finishes by asking, “Have you ever slept with a lady? What’s it like?”

Like sex, satori is something that can’t really be explained. Also, just like sex, it’s very easy to make others believe you’ve had an experience that you really haven’t. There’s enough literature out there these days that anyone who wants to could cobble together a pretty convincing satori experience story without even having done a single period of zazen. Plus, again like sex, there’s a huge market for stories of satori experiences among those who want to try and live vicariously through others, leading to the development of a very popular and lucrative field of literature we could call “sa+0ri pr0n.”

I’m not a big fan of this kind of literature, though I feel I may have inadvertently produced some of it myself. A lot of the readers and reviewers of my first book, Hardcore Zen seized on an incident that happens about 2/3 of the way through, in which I described the experience of understanding that occurred one day while I was walking along the banks of a river on my way to work. Sometimes people ask about this and their questions get so garbled I can barely make sense of them. One guy in Detroit a few years back asked about the incident in my book where I saw an apparition beside a lake. I can only assume he must have been talking about that part of the book. Unless he was talking about someone else’s book entirely!

Zen literature is full of expressions of the state I was trying to address with that passage in Hardcore Zen. Sometimes it’s described as “seeing your own face as it was before your parents were born.” My first teacher, Tim McCarthy, said, “It’s more you than you could ever be.” Gudo Nishijima Roshi, who ordained me, said, “My personality extends throughout the universe.” Just the other day in Saskatoon a guy told me about how depressed he’d been when he found out God didn’t exist. I told him God exists and that I can no longer doubt it at all.

These explanations really don’t help much, though. “Seeing your face before your parents were born” sounds like a description of reincarnation. “It’s more you than you” just sounds weird. “My personality extends throughout the universe” sounds like the ultimate ego trip. And how many other worthless assholes claim they know for certain God exists? They usually end up causing major catastrophes. There are a million other expressions of the same thing out there, all equally useless.

Yet one facet of my experience that day by the river was that all of these expressions were not useless at all. In fact they began on that day to make perfect sense. I don’t expect you to believe that. In fact I wouldn’t even want you to believe that. You really shouldn’t. Don’t. Please.

You’ve got to be very careful about people who tell you about their amazing spiritual experiences. They’re usually trying to sell you something. I know of one guy who asks $50,000 to give you a satori experience. And I’m trying to sell books. I won’t lie to you about that. Not necessarily by talking about that experience. But it’s part of it. But I do want to make it clear that I am not trying to get followers. Followers are a pain in the ass. They’re the ultimate stalkers. I have nothing but contempt for followers, especially if they’re mine.

When the folks who tell you about their amazing spiritual experiences aren’t trying to sell it to you they’re usually trying to get you to validate their experiences. They’re not sure if their enlightenment was real or not, but if someone else has believes in it they might be able to believe in it themselves.

But then on the other hand I know why a lot of people ask me about whether or not I’ve had satori. Here I am telling them it takes years of hard slog for zazen to start really working. They don’t want to waste their lives on boring Zen practice unless there’s gonna be some kind of pay off. They want to know what that pay off is supposed to be like so they can decide if it’s worth the trouble.

If that’s your view I can tell you right now it’s not worth the trouble. You might as well do something fun instead. The only way you’re ever going to have what it takes to pursue Zen practice is when you’ve exhausted every other option, when there’s nothing left for you but to dive right into the truth itself no matter what it costs you. Because it will cost you dearly. It will cost you your soul.

Still, when I started out with this stuff I found some sa+0ri pr0n inspirational. From time to time, the hope that I might one day have an experience like that myself kept me from giving up, just like my hope that I might one day have a 3-way myself kept me reading Penthouse Forum. That very same hope for satori someday also made me lose faith in Zen entirely a number of times when I realized it wasn’t happening, the same way I finally stopped reading Penthouse Forum. (Y’know, someone at SG should start and “SG Forum” group. I’d read that.)

So I don’t really know whether it benefits anyone to give them my own Penthouse Forum-style tale of satori or not. Plus there’s a sense in which mentioning these things at all is seen as bragging, like only people on a highly elevated spiritual plane or some such shit can have them. But the fact is that satori is available to anyone serious enough to work at it. It is your birthright. It is the underlying core of your real experience this very moment.

The best I can say about what happened to me on that day I wrote about in my first book is that I went in a moment from seeing myself as a guy walking to work to seeing myself as a concrete expression of the will of the universe. And it was not an intellectual experience. It was pure body knowledge, the same way reading about a 3-way in Penthouse Forum is totally different from actually having one on a Saturday afternoon in your own bedroom with two very close and beautiful friends.

Looking at the sky was exactly like looking into a mirror. Same with anything I turned my attention to. Yet, although I’d never felt that way before, it didn’t feel like anything new. It was like this had been the way things were all along and my other way of thinking had just been a temporary obstruction. It was like recognizing the mind that I’d been born with.

But most people who believe in satori or various other kinds of “enlightenment experiences” think that these experiences will be the ultimate fix-it-all. They want the experience because they imagine it will instantaneously wipe away every pain, fear and difficulty they have in life and they will exist forever in a state of permanent bliss and happiness. They think it will end suffering. It doesn’t.

In fact in my case it didn’t really fix much of anything. OK. A few nagging fears that had dogged me for ages were gone. I’m no longer afraid I’m going to die someday. That doesn’t mean I don’t fear death at all. It’s just that I don’t fear it as death. I don’t worry that one day I’m going to disappear. I can’t disappear. Neither can you or anyone else. Yet you’re not going to live forever either. You’re gonna be dead as a doornail someday and ain’t nothin’ gonna bring you back. You won’t get reincarnated either.

I still have all of the residual karma I had before that day. I am exactly the same person as I was. As Dogen put it, “Realization doesn’t break the individual any more that the reflection of the sky in a dewdrop breaks the dewdrop.” You still gotta deal. Yet you deal from a new standpoint. You deal with life knowing now what you’re dealing with and who is dealing with it.

I’ll say it again; none of the foregoing is intended to impress you or to make you believe what I say. I honestly couldn’t give two shits who it impressed or who believed it. In fact if you do believe it I’m likely to regard you as kind of a sap. But the fact of having been asked about it so many times on this tour lets me know there are people out there who are curious about these things and I’d like to try and give a realistic answer. This, I think, is very important because there are so many bullshit answers to that question and a whole lot of people believe them. I believed a lot of that bullshit myself and it did me a lot of harm.

So take from this article whatever you want. Argue about it in the comments section if you feel so inclined. Enjoy yourself. Be happy.



Brad Warner is ON TOUR RIGHT NOW and may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the newest Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

Brad is currently looking for women to help him “do research” for his upcoming book about sex and Zen. He can be contacted directly for an appointment through this website!

I got tons and tons of responses to that last post I put up here and the related ones on my blog. So I take it that I may have stumbled upon a subject that interests people. Either that or it's cold in the rest of the country and people have nothing better to do than type on their computers. Anyway it interests me, so I’d like to continue.

One source of the problem lies in the idea of Enlightenment and what constitutes an “Enlightened Being.” While India is chok-a-blok with Realized Sages, Japan is just swimming with Zen Masters and the rest of Far East has seemingly endless traditions of purportedly God-realized men and women both ancient and modern, historically we in the Wild, Wild West haven’t really had many encounters with supposedly “Enlightened Beings.” The few we have met with on this side of the world have had their reputations blown up to unimaginably gigantical proportions. I once heard a story, don’t know if it’s true or not, but it certainly could be. Some missionary goes to India to bring Christ’s message to the poor Godless heathens. An Indian guy asks him why he should believe in Jesus. “He walked on water, healed cripples and raised the dead!” says the missionary.

“Oh,” says the Indian guy, clearly unimpressed, “There’s a guy over in the next village who does that too!”

In the Sixties we had a huge influx of rishis, roshis and lamas into this country. For a few years there they were the era’s new rock stars. The idea that these guys were Gods descended to Earth spread quickly and, unfortunately, not a whole lot of them made any big effort to dispel the notion. The Beatles were horrified that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (allegedly) made a pass at Mia Farrow’s sister because they thought he was supposed to be some kind of ethereal creature with no such desires. But he wasn’t and Prudence Farrow was a smokin’ hottie in those days — though I still woulda gone after Pattie Boyd, myself. The problem wasn’t that the Maharishi was a man like most men, it was that he had allowed, even encouraged himself to be seen as something else.

My friend Gwen works for a very cool website called Buddhist Geeks. While I can't say I'm down with everything that appears on the site, the people who run Buddhist Geeks seem much more intent than most others in the biz to get at what really matters. Last week they posted a really great audio interview with a guy named Daniel Ingram on just this subject. You can listen to it here. Daniel is a teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. And for a guy from the Lesser Vehicle he’s pretty smart! (This is a joke, OK.) Though I think he lays it on just a tad too thick towards the end — like someone else I know has a tendency to do (me) — he’s spot on in his basic assessment and I really wish more Buddhist teachers would say stuff like this.

One of the problems is that it’s very easy to play the Enlightened Master role and it most definitely does pay very well. But, as Wil Wheaton wrote about in his column this week (can’t wait for part 2!), just cuz someone can act like Captain Kirk for a few hours a day doesn’t mean that person really is Captain Kirk. Wil had an excuse for believing in Captain Kirk, though — he was 16. But Captain Kirk was just a character from a TV show and William Shatner was not him. Unfortunately, far too many grown-ups are eager to believe that their favorite Enlightened Masters really, literally are the spiritual equivalent of Captain Kirk on a 24/7 basis and way too many so-called spiritual masters are happy to let them go on believing that.

It’s a vicious circle for which I hold both sides equally to blame. The masters allow themselves to be deified because it’s the key to making a damn good living. That’s been widely reported and talked about. But what about their supposedly “innocent” students, duped, they’d like you to believe, by clever manipulators who wanted only their money? What would happen if these Masters let down the disguise for a minute and allowed their flock see them as they really are? Those adoring devotees would drop them faster than a teenager drops Britney for Lindsey and run off to someone with a more convincing schtick and a brighter fake spiritual gleam in his eye, never admitting that maybe the whole Awakened Spiritual Master guise itself was the problem all along. Since I’ve been at this Zen Master game I’ve seen for myself the intense pressure “spiritual seekers” of all kinds put upon their teachers to live up to their own silly and unrealistic expectations of them. It’s tempting to try and play that role just because of how badly all kinds of people seem to want you to and how disappointed or even angry they get when you don’t. Lately though I’ve started taking great pleasure in disappointing and angering folks like this. Who knows where they run off to after? At least they’re not my problem anymore.

Inevitably troubles arise when an inner circle of intimate students develops around a teacher. Because, although any decent actor — or even William Shatner — can be Zen Master Kirk for a couple hours a day while on stage in front of adoring crowds garlanding him with flowers and singing his praises, it’s quite another to try and keep that up offstage. In fact it cannot be done.

If the teacher is a decent enough person and his (or her, but I stick to his for now) students are not too full of fantasies, the problems that arise when the students start seeing him acting like a human being are easily solved. In fact they add to the relationship and help deepen understanding. On the other hand, if the teacher is a total asshat and students’ heads are clotted with visions of the Perfected Master you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Usually the real situation is somewhere between these two extremes. But depending on where along the gauge the needle lands, that’s how much trouble there’s gonna be. In the worst cases, the students start trying to fool themselves into believing that their Master’s every perversion is a sign of deeper wisdom while the Master’s perversions just get more twisted as he tries to escape coming to terms with the vast gulf between his students’ desire for him to be Swami Superman and his own sure knowledge that he is nothing of the kind. As time goes on there is more pressure to keep up the appearance of the saintly master and the students at his lotus feet, just so both sides don’t end up looking like a bunch of dolts to the rest of the world. So-called “Enlightenment experiences” only make matters worse as both Master and students dive deeper into their own head trips, becoming more and more convinced by the shallow and tawdry game they’re all playing together.

A great book about just how dire this can get is Enlightenment Blues by Andre van der Braak, all about Andre’s years with American guru Andrew Cohen. It’s a harrowing account of just how sick and twisted the relationship between a supposed Enlightened Master and his dewy-eyed student becomes when reality takes a back seat to pretty fantasies.

Great Enlightened Beings free from all worries, cares and difficulties, with no desires and no defilements, possessing magic powers to bestow their spiritual prowess upon you only exist in bad movies and fairy tales. This isn’t to say that there’s no benefit to Zazen practice, or that you end up just as much of an asshole after ten or twenty years of hard work. Nor is it to say that Zazen practice can’t help you see into the deepest truths about life, the universe and everything. It all depends what you’re working towards. If you’re trying to escape real life by running away into the ever-deepening fantasies buried in the recesses of your subconscious, you’re going to end up being an even bigger buttwipe than you ever were. But if you make your efforts to see clearly exactly what you really are, and what you see is that you’re a buttwipe, you’re likely to want to make changes. That’s when we can start talking about real Enlightenment.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.