So I’m sitting cross-legged in the meditation hall at the San Francisco Zen Center a couple days ago. Incense wafts through the air, bells are rung, ancient chants are intoned, and then profound silence descends. The assembled monks embark on their meditative journeys to the centers of their minds. All at once a thought bubbles up to the surface of my consciousness, like an arrow piercing the cold emptiness of the pre-dawn air.

I am soooo over this shit.

God how I fucking hate it. After 25 years of doing this stupid crap, stick a fork in me, I am done. When I was a youngster the mere idea of sitting in a temple with a group of dedicated monks all pursuing the sacred Dharma gave me an iron-hard boner you could have sliced pound cake with. How I longed for that serenity, that peace. How I fantasized of ascending to the heights of Supreme, Unsurpassed, Perfect Enlightenment. How I dreamed of the day I might be in the very spot I’m in right now, living the life of a wandering monk, flitting here and there from temple to temple absorbing the words of the wise and dispensing my own wisdom to those new to the Way, spending my days deepening my practice.

But god-dammit I’d rather be at Amoeba Records right now. It’s just up Haight Street. I could be there in 20 minutes. I think that new Om record must be out by now, the one they recorded live in Jerusalem. Maybe even that new Robyn Hitchcock boxed set. But noooooo. I not only signed up for this shit, I signed up to do a five-day long zazen intensive at the Berkeley Zen Center right afterwards, followed immediately by two weeks cloistered at Tassajara monastery deep in the mountains of Carmel Valley — where there are no record stores at all. Fuck. What in God’s name was I thinking?

One of the greatest things about Zen practice is that it’s incredibly portable. You don’t need anything special. You don’t need a temple or monastery. You don’t need to memorize any chants or read any books. You don’t need a congregation. Zen goes anywhere you go. You can do your sitting on a rolled up towel in your dorm room, which is how I started.

But human beings like to do things together. We’re social creatures. And so a monastic tradition also developed within Buddhism. A lotta folks think that if you’re not hip to the monastery thang you ain’t no Buddhist. They’re wrong. Shakyamuni himself did not come to his understanding as a member of any religious order, and there is a laundry list as long as your arm of other great teachers who either shunned monastic life, or came to monastic life after establishing the Way on their own, or who did a bit of the monastic stuff when it was necessary but largely stayed away from it. The non-monastic tradition in Buddhism is just as vital as the monastic one.

But the pull towards making Buddhism a social thing, and only a social thing, is strong. In America, we seem dead set on turning Buddhism into a string of socially agreed upon clichés and buzzwords.

A couple weeks ago or so I put a post up on my blog in which I moaned about some of the buzzwords and neo-traditions that have become au currant among American Buddhists these days. One was that dependable puppy dog of a word, “mindfulness.” Christ I hate that word. The word seems to indicate some vague state of thinking hard about what you’re doing. And I know we’re all taught that we should think about what we’re doing. But that’s not the Buddhist approach. Do what you’re doing. When thinking becomes a distraction, stop thinking and get back to doing. I’m also sick to death of hearing hipster Buddha dudes use the word “skillful” to describe things they like and “unskillful” to describe things they don’t. It’s a total misuse of the old Buddhist idea of upaya, or “skillful means,” by which ancient Buddhist teachers are said to have taught in unorthodox ways. These days it just means whatever’s under discussion didn’t rub the guy who called it “skillful” the wrong way. I’m also fed up with the concept of the “dharma talk,” which has come to mean something like, “guys in funny robes using buzzwords like ‘mindfulness’ and ‘skillful’ to lull people who think of themselves as ‘spiritually minded’ to sleep.” I’m tired of watching entire audiences nod out like opium addicts while smiling knowingly whenever a favorite word or phrase floats through the haze.

Whatever. Anyway, after I said this stuff a whole buncha folks got really mad about it. Fine. Be as mad as you want. I, myself, am not the least bit angry about this. I was just fed up with it and continue to be fed up with it.

Back when I was first in punk rock, the thing that irked me the most, and finally drove me out of punk rock altogether, was the fact that the philosophy we espoused was all about questioning things. And yet you were not allowed to question punk rock itself. It was great to question Reagan and nuclear proliferation and the cops and school. But if you started asking things like, why do we all have to wear leather jackets, or why can't we have vocal harmonies in some of the songs, or why can't I grow my hair long if I want, that was taboo.

American Buddhism as it stands today is pretty much the same way. Buddhism isn't that way. But the stuff that lotsa people call "Buddhism" is. It's a subtle distinction, I know. But an important one.

So when I started calling bullshit on the idea of mindfulness, and skillfulness and "Dharma talks," the reaction was almost identical to what used to happen when I'd go on stage at hardcore shows in the early '80s with long hair and bell-bottoms. You can't do that! We can challenge everything in the world, but don't you dare challenge us!

If Buddhism can’t be challenged it isn’t Buddhism anymore.

We're all looking for a place to settle. We want stability. We want something dependable. Buddhism is all about addressing that very issue. It aims for the ultimate stable resting place. But Buddhism takes things in a very different direction from our habitual way of dealing with our longing for stability. Religions and subculture movements like punk rock want to reduce things to formulas. Believe that Jesus Christ is the one true Son of God and you're all right. But the words "Jesus Christ is the one true Son of God" mean something absolutely different to each individual who uses them. Words such as “mindfulness” and the like take on all kinds of different meanings when they reach the mass culture. And when they stop meaning anything useful it’s time to retire them.

This is hard for lots of folks to get a grip on. They want Buddhism to be like a bumper sticker, “Buddha said it, I believe it and that settles it.” But that’s not the Buddhist way.

At any rate I’m totally over all that stuff big time. And yet, by the time you read this I’ll be finishing up one retreat and heading off to another — being all “mindful” and listening to skillfully delivered Dharma talks.

Sometimes even when you’re over stuff you still gotta do it anyway. Sometimes you gotta do it especially when you’re over it.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. 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.

The new CD by Zero Defex, with Brad on bass, is available now from CD Baby. Get yours today!

I just spent two weeks in a meditation center up in the mountains. Everywhere you went there were wooden boards that said:

Listen up!
Great is the matter of birth and death
Lost time will not be found again
Do not waste your life!

In Zen temples they have a chant they do just before they clean the place up, part of which goes, “When this day is gone, your life thereby decreases.”

The day I got back from the retreat center I found myself sitting at a swanky-ass restaurant in Beverley Hills, talking to a couple high-powered movie business execs about a film project some folks I freelance for are trying to get off the ground. These guys had that manic, sun-drenched energy you find in Hollywood types. It was hard to tell if they were on coke or if they’re just super high-strung people. They’re young guys. They’re always young guys. You can’t sustain that kind of energy long before you burn out. They’ll char those bright young lights to a deep brown dead crisp making our movie. They’ve got big ambitions. Big, big, BIG.

Young movie-biz dudes have no hope of ever understanding how they’re wasting their lives. Society will provide them with all kinds of rewards for wasting their own time and ours. They’ll have money, power, sex, cars, everything a person can possibly desire. They’ll never even imagine that instead of owning some tawdry little piece of the world, the whole universe from beginning to end could be theirs — that the whole universe already is theirs. As they drive down Santa Monica Boulevard blasting bad hip-hop hits from their shiny, silver Beamer convertibles with their vanity plates they’ll never know that there are guys trudging through the gutters outside their mansions in tattered shoes who own them and everything they imagine they possess.

Right now I'm sitting where I can hear a spiritual master talking spiritual stuff to a lot of spiritual people. He’s bullshitting them. He hasn’t got a clue in the world. But he lulls them to half-sleep with a honey soaked voice and tells them that half-sleep is the Highest Enlightenment. So it goes.

“Boys be ambitious!” said William S. Clark when he left Japan after spending the last few years of the 19th century educating its children in Western ways. Everybody in Japan knows the phrase by heart. Ambition drives Japanese waste and Hollywood waste.

There’s ambition in Zen centers in the mountains too, and in Zen centers in the cities and suburbs. Not so much ambition for money, though that does exist in some; ambition for spiritual accomplishment, ambition for spiritual fame, ambition for the ubiquitous “spiritual merit” practitioners are primed to pile up. You can see it in the eyes of the young studs who’ve been devoting themselves to the rigors of practice intensives in the hopes of rising up the ladder to positions of power within the organization. You can hear it in the mellifluous tones of the wanna-be Zen Masters who pontificate on the finer points of the dharma to those they consider their spiritual inferiors, hoping that one day when they’re dead, gone and buried their names too will be etched in the list the Great Eternal Masters. It rides the wind in envy-drenched whispers when someone passes by in a coveted brown or orange or ochre robe indicating they’ve received the ultimate promotion the bosses of the sect have on offer. Anyone impressed by the color of a glorified bathrobe deserves whatever they get, if you ask me.

And yet retreat centers in the mountains are still better places to practice not wasting your life than swanky-ass restaurants in Beverly Hills. Most of us need some time away from society before we can see how truly fucked over we’ve been. Sure we know that society is shit. But we still cling to the notion that we ourselves are somehow above it, what with our rebel haircuts and tattoos, and all that metal stuck through our bodily extremities. We aren’t like those saps.

Sorry. But you’re not only like those saps, you’re exactly like them. Not a centimeter of separation. Too bad, huh?

You don’t think so? That’s only because you’ve never really taken a look.

When today is gone you’ll be one day closer to death. So what are you doing right now? Turn off your computer and go outside, for God’s sake. There’s nothing in that shiny little box of delights on your lap that’s going to do you any good at all. Not my bullshit, that’s for sure. (Hey, clever kids! Quote that line in your sarcastic comments!)

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. 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.

UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

April 23rd at Malaprop’s Book Store in Asheville, North Carolina. Probably 7 PM-ish. Call for details.

April 25 - 27 leading a retreat at Southern Dharma Retreat Center in North Carolina.

April 29th at 7 PM, talk at Warren Wilson College’s Buddhist Studies Group.

May 3rd my band 0DFx will play at Pat’s in the Flats in Cleveland with This Moment in Black History and on May 4th, 0DFx will play at the Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio in commemoration of the 38th anniversary of the infamous shootings by the National Guard

Saturday May 10th at 7 PM at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Ohio’s Tremont neighborhood.

On May 17th and 18th leading a 2-day retreat at the Milwaukee Zen Center.

I'll be one of the teachers at this year's Great Sky Zen Sesshin August 9-16. Check out their webpage for details.

The annual Dogen Sangha retreat in Shizuoka, Japan will be September 20-23.

I’d like to offer something to help you
But in the Zen school we don't have a single thing.
- Zen Master Ikkyu (1394 – 1481)

Ikkyu is one of my favorite Zen teachers, even though he was part of the Rinzai lineage, the bitter rivals of the Soto lineage in which I studied. After all, Ikkyu is one of the few Zen Masters to write erotic poetry. As the resident Zen columnist for a porn website, this is something I can relate to.

I love this little couplet because it expresses the Zen attitude very precisely. We really would like to help you. But we have nothing to offer. Zen is very much a D.I.Y. philosophy. It’s up to each individual to work out his or her own way. Even so, there are standards and there are training centers. As you’d probably expect, though, each of these centers teaches Zen in its own unique way. I get about 2 or 3 e-mails each week asking me where the writer can go to study Zen, in spite of my having a notice in my F.A.Q. saying I don’t really know. So I figured this month I’d write about the few of the places I do know about and my own subjective impressions of each. But before I go on, I should mention that, whenever someone asked him this question, my main teacher Gudo Nishijima always said, “Everybody should study Zen only with me!”

KENT ZENDO
Kent, Ohio
This is where I first trained in Zen a bazillion years ago. Tim McCarthy, the resident teacher, has been one of my best friends for over 25 years. These days Tim usually teaches at Kent State University rather than at the zendo itself, so it’s best to check the website for the location and schedule. Be sure to stay for the “green stuff” (Indian food) after the sittings.

SAN FRANCISCO ZEN CENTER
San Francisco, California
This is the largest and most well-established Zen Center in the United States, founded in the early Sixties by Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind. The upside of this is that it is a very stable organization. They have a large and thoroughly trained staff of Zen teachers, regular practice periods, retreat centers, big bells and statues, and you can even get a delicious monk-cooked meal for a small donation on Friday nights. The downside is that the bigness of the organization can make a person feel a bit lost. Even so, I would never hesitate to recommend SFZC or any of its affiliate temples or retreat centers to anyone seeking to experience authentic Zen practice and training in the USA. The Berkeley Zen Center is in the same lineage and is also very nice but a lot smaller and more intimate.

TASSAJARA
Carmel Valley, California
Though Tassajara is one of SFZC’s retreat centers I’m giving it its own paragraph because it’s such a unique place. Located deep in the mountains of Northern California, inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t really want to be there, Tassajara is truly a retreat center. You can go there as a full-blown Zen student and live life pretty much as Dogen’s monks did 800 years ago, or as a work practice student in which you work and follow a light Zen practice schedule in exchange for room and board, or even just hang out in the hot springs as a paying guest with the option of doing some Zazen or not. I’ll be spending two weeks up there in early April and another two weeks in July as a work practice student, not to teach or anything, but just cuz I like the place a whole lot.

MILWAUKEE ZEN CENTER
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
If I were just thirty years older I’d probably ask Rev. Tonen O’Connor, who runs this place, to marry me. As it is she is one of my best and most valued friends in the Zen business. Her Zen center is located in a gigantic old house near the shores of Lake Michigan and offers all any cheese-head could ask for in terms of Zen training. I’ve only been there once and it’s still one of my favorite places in the world.

CEDAR RAPIDS ZEN CENTER
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
I’ve never actually been here. But their resident teacher Rev. Zuiko Redding is one of the most truly awesome people in Zen. She gave me the belt I wear on my robes today, she made it herself in fact. I was so touched I almost cried. I helped her chase wasps out of her room at the Great Sky Sesshin (see below) last year.

GREAT SKY SESSHIN
Hokyoji Monastery, Southern Minnesota
This one isn’t a full-time Zen center, but an annual retreat open to anyone who wants to sign up, though the space is limited. Tonen from Milwaukee Zen Center runs this and Zuiko from Cedar Rapids is one of the regular teachers. It’s seven days of late Summer Zazen (Aug. 9-16) from 5 AM to 9 PM in the wilds of Minnesota. There are six, count ‘em 6, teachers so you get a wide range of practice styles. They were even nutty enough to invite me to teach there last year and I’ll be there again this year. Go to Great Sky this year instead of Burning Man if you’d rather experience some real practice instead of just pretending to be all spiritual until the ‘shrooms wear off. (You know I just said that to piss you off, so why are you in such a hurry to post that nasty comment?)

CLOUDS IN WATER ZEN CENTER
St. Paul, Minnesota
This is one of several Zen centers in the Twin Cities area founded by Dainin Katagiri Roshi, author of Returning To Silence and Each Moment Is The Universe, and one of Shunryu Suzuki’s assistants at SFZC back in the day. Although it’s located in a disused warehouse in St. Paul, once you step inside it feels like a real Zen temple. I got invited here a couple years back when they were looking for a new “guiding teacher” after having given their former leader the boot. It was a really nice place.

STILL POINT ZEN BUDDHIST ABBEY
Detroit, Michigan
This is the most punk rock Zen center I’ve ever visited. It’s located in an area of Detroit once so seedy they had to repair bullet holes in the walls when they moved in. The neighborhood has improved since then, but it’s still a little sketchy. Even so, I love this place. They’re part of the Korean Zen tradition, so in addition to zazen practice these guys do a massive 108 full prostrations every single morning. These are optional to newcomers. But if you choose to join in, you’ll get a cardio work-out along with your zazen. Ask Koho Vince Anila, who runs the joint, about Johnny Sokko’s Flying Robot and you’ll have a friend for life. They also have an affiliated center in Ann Arbor, home of Iggy and the MC5!

SITTING FROG ZEN SANGHA
Phoenix, Arizona
I’ve never been here either, but Rev. Dogo Barry Graham, its founder, has been a penpal (e-mail pal?) for several years and we hung out when I visited the Arizona Zen Buddhist Society a while back. Barry maintains a very cool blog too. He tells really good dirty jokes.

ATLANTA SOTO ZEN CENTER
Atlanta, Georgia
This place is soooo cute you could just die! They’re located in a down-on-its-luck industrial park on the edge of Atlanta where you’d never imagine a Zen center could possibly exist. But it’s there! They offer regular sittings as well as monk training in the tradition of Soyu Matsuoka Roshi, one of the lesser-known pioneers of Soto style Zen Buddhism in America. When I visited, Taiun Michael Elliston, who runs the place, also took me out to Soul Vegetarian, to eat the best vegetarian soul food in the world, so the center gets extra points for that!

NASHVILLE ZEN CENTER
Nashville, Tennessee
When I led a retreat at their retreat center way out in the backwoods of Tennessee I was sure somebody was gonna take a shot a the "feller in the dress" (me in robes) or at least try and make me squeal like a pig. But I made it through just fine. In reality they're lovely and sincere people and the countryside around Nashville only looks like the woods in Deliverance. I'm just full of big city Northern prejudice and so are you if you think real Zen practice can't be found pretty much everywhere if you just look for it.

Also last, but not least, if you’re in Southern California you can come sit with me just about every Saturday morning at the Hill Street Center. All the links are contained in the little italicized statement below.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. 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.

As you read this I will be just finishing up a seven day Zen retreat. That means I’ve just spent seven days straight doing pretty much nothing except sitting and staring at a wall. What a complete waste of time!

The retreat takes place somewhere in the wilds of Minnesota far from the nearest Internets and way out of cell phone range. So in order to meet my deadline I have to complete this article before I go. But this isn’t the first retreat I’ve been to and it won’t be my last. So I can still say something about it.

First off, why would anyone in their right mind even go to something like a Zen retreat? I mean there are a whole lot of way more interesting things to do with a week. But maybe that’s one of the biggest reasons. It’s really good to get away from all your stuff for a time. So why not go on vacation instead, then? That’s the same thing, right? Just chillin’ out on the beach and tossin’ back some brewskis has pretty much the same effect, doesn’t it?

Not really. A Zen retreat isn’t a vacation. When I lead retreats it seems like I always have to go to great lengths to emphasize that since a lot of folks do seem to approach them as vacations. They get lazy and take the whole Zazen deal as just a fancy way of chilling out. In between sittings they carry on like they’re in Puerto Vallarta the week the Girls Gone Wild crews showed up. But if you do that you’re totally missing the point. This is why Zen teachers sometimes act like real hard asses at retreats. Whenever I don’t act like a hard ass people seem to go goofy on me.

ANYWAY, retreats have been part of the Buddhist tradition ever since Buddha’s day. Though it’s usually not given as a requirement of practice, most Zen teachers I know would recommend their students go on at least one a year if they can. The most essential part of practice is your daily Zazen at home. But retreats can be really beneficial as well.

One of the most interesting things I noticed on the first few Zen retreats I attended was how prolonged Zazen can make even your most profound or scary or sexy or gross or otherwise in any way interesting thoughts seem about as intriguing as watching paint dry.

When what you are doing is essentially watching the paint dry on the walls in front of you for hours and hours on end, your brain gets to work digging out whatever it can find to try and keep itself occupied. You’d be amazed what’s stored up in your head. It’s like rummaging through an attic where you’ve been tossing all your unmentionables for decades. There’s old comic books, pictures of your ex-girlfriend, a record by Harry Belafonte you didn’t even remember you ever owned. There are movies they showed you in grade school, there are minor childhood traumas you suffered at the hands of cousins you haven’t seen in years, there’s the light switch in the house you used to live in back in 1973. Then there’s other stuff, deeper, darker stuff. Stuff that’s so alien to your conscious mind you can’t even identify it as “you” the way you can with most of your thoughts. It just keeps coming up like a toilet overflowing and tossing out the remnants of TV dinners you ate three weeks ago.

For a while that process might be interesting. But after a couple days there’s nothing else fun or even creepy in there. No matter what your brain tosses up at you, it’s just more stuff and you don’t really care. At this point, though, you’re also getting well and truly fed up with being on this stupid Zen retreat. You have no idea in the world what in God’s name ever made you even consider signing up for such a thing. But now you’re stuck here, way the fuck out in the middle of the woods with a bunch of nerds who think it’s really cool to be all “Zen” and shit for a week. Fucking assholes. Why don't they just all go die?

You start planning escapes. Maybe you can claim you’re feeling ill and get a ride back to civilization. No. They’d never buy that. They’d know you were wimping out. Can’t wimp out in front of a bunch of Zen nerds! Maybe you can deliberately injure yourself during the work period. “Accidentally” cut a tendon with a garden hoe or something. Yeah. That’d be better than doing more of this shit! It would hurt a lot. But maybe it’d be worth it. No. There’s gotta be a better way. Carve your soap into the shape of a gun and threaten the head teacher with it unless he shuts the fuck up and does exactly what you say. Slowly now. No false moves….

Fuck. No. Gotta stay the course, as W says. Gotta see the thing through. So you get back to it. How many more days now? And how many hours does that work out to? And how many minutes? Shit. Why did I do this to myself?

You think nobody else feels like this. But they all do. Except that one psycho at the back who keeps drooling while he sits and mumbles about "the Seven Levels" at every break time.

But after a while you start to reach this spot. I can’t really tell you what the spot is exactly, or how to reach it. But it feels real good just to stay right there. You’ve been looking into a mirror the whole time. Not literally, of course. But in a way that’s exactly what it is. You like what you see sometimes. But a lot of times you don’t. Still, you keep facing it down and facing it down. Finally you realize you can live with it. It isn’t as great as you wish it could be and it isn’t as awful as you feared it might be. It’s just what it is. It's the universe. And it's you. And it's cool. Very fucking cool.

Retreats can be a great way to learn real patience. If you can sit and wait for the bell to ring signaling the end of another interminable round, when you’re sure the guy who’s job it was to ring the bell has died because you know you’ve been sitting here for six and a half hours straight – no matter the clock says only 20 minutes have passed, if you can sit patiently through that you can sit patiently through anything.

It can also teach you fearlessness. There is no greater fear than your own fear of facing yourself. You might think that the things that scare you most come from outside yourself. But they never do. When you can face down your own fear of yourself, nothing anyone else can do will ever scare you again. It might startle or surprise you. Nothing can fix that. But it won’t scare you anymore.

In any case, by the time you’re reading this I’ll be done with my seven-day ordeal. Just in time to go through a four-day ordeal in late September in Japan – our annual Dogen Sangha retreat in Shizuoka. By the way, there’s still time to sign up for that one if you’re interested!

Here are other upcoming gigs:

New York City, New York:
• Sunday August 26, 2007- 7 PM at Bluestockings Radical Books on the Lower East Side 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington - 1 block south of Houston and 1st Avenue.
• August 27, 2007 at 7 PM at The Interdepedence Project at Lila Center 302 Bowery at Houston (this will be the most like a formal lecture among all the NYC appearances) RSVP soon, space is limited.
• August 28, 2007 at 7:30 PM Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village 396 Ave of the Americas at 8th Street, New York, NY 10011

Montreal, Quebec:
• August 30, 2007 at 7 PM at McGill University’s Education/Counselling Psychology Department 3700 Rue McTavish Room 233

Boulder & Ft. Collins, Colorado:
• Monday September 10, 2007 - 7:30 pm Boulder Bookstore 1107 Pearl Street - Author Event

• Tuesday September 11, 2007 Noon – Colorado State University Bookstore - The Lory Student Center at CSU Ft. Collins, CO

• Tuesday September 11, 2007 7 PM - CSU Anthropology Club The Lory Student Center at CSU, Ft. Collins - Author Event

• Wednesday, September 12, 2007 Interview for Elevision TV show. Be part of the live in-studio audience! Doors close at 7pm. The show will be at Trilogy, 2017 13th St. in downtown Boulder

Akron, Ohio:
November 7, 2007 at the Akron Public Library

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and 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. This is open to anyone who wants to show up.