I went and got hugged by Amma, India’s world-famous hugging saint, when she was in Los Angeles last month. She shoved my head into her fluffy right boob and whispered something that sounded like “Magilla, Magilla, Magilla, Magilla,” into my ear. Or maybe it was “Medula, Medula, Medula, Medula.” It was hard to tell.

Her hot breath was kind of a turn-on. I didn’t expect that. But I have kind of a weakness for women whispering in my ear. Then she mashed a Hershey’s Kiss into my hand, after which two of her people grabbed me from behind, kind of spun me around and sent me off into the crowd.

It took me a while to get the whole “hug and kiss” pun.

I felt a little dizzy as they shoved me out of the way to make room for the next customer. Was that the shaktipat everybody was getting so excited about? Shaktipat is supposed to be a direct transference of spiritual energy from an enlightened being. It felt to me more like that druggy, disorientated sensation you have when you get off a rollercoaster or when you take a hardy toke of some very good weed.

In case you don’t know, Amma is a cute, short, chubby Indian lady who a lot of people believe is an Enlightened Being. She was born in 1953 in a tiny fishing village in South India. During her childhood, they say, she spent much of her time absorbed in a deep meditative state of Samadhi. By the time she was 21 she’d begun to attract followers. In the early '80s she consolidated this following into an ashram and began traveling the world offering darshan, a Sanskrit word meaning “encounter with a saintly person,” to spiritual seekers around the world.

There’s a lot to like about Amma. So I’m going to start by saying some of that, because I know that no matter what I do people are gonna say this article trashes poor sweet Amma. But she seems like a genuinely decent person and I’m sure her charitable work does a lot of people a lot of good. She’s not a hate monger. She doesn’t put down anyone regardless of race, creed or religion. She seems to be a very nice lady who wants to do some good in the world. Her charities run educational programs, distribute free food, run hospitals and hospices, build free homes for the poor and provide lifetime stipends for mentally and physically challenged adults. It is all wonderful stuff.

What worried me was what surrounded all of this niceness and how some of it wasn't really all that nice.

The set up has been psychologically and theatrically designed for the maximum build-up just before you get the big pay off. When you arrive at the Radisson Hotel near LAX you take a number. Or in my case, you arrive really late after taking your friend to the airport and you get a little pink card. After Amma gets through hugging all the people with numbers, if she’s still up to hugging some more, they allow the folks with the pink cards to get a number.

The second floor of the hotel has been re-imagined as a spiritual wonderland, sort of a Hindu themed fairground complete with uniformed Mousekateers to guide you through. After you get your number you stand in a long line, drawing slowly ever nearer to the saint herself. “Have your ticket visible,” I was told several times. Can’t have any line jumpers! And you’d be amazed how many of these “spiritual seekers” will elbow the next guy out of the way to get their shaktipat first.

As you get closer you see that Amma is surrounded by concentric circles of ever more devoted disciples. There are three or four guys right next to her watching her the way a dog watches its master as she speaks what I assume are beautiful spiritual messages to them, to which they dare not reply or in any way engage in conversation with someone so divine. After that are rings of worshippers swooning just to be in the Amma’s presence. When they remove Amma’s chair many of these will run up to lay prostrate and kiss the ground upon which it had sat.

As you move closer to Amma you gradually surrender more and more of your own will. First your shoes come off. Then you’re directed in a line by authoritative people who instruct you to move from chair to chair. Then you are pushed into a kneeling position such that you are crawling for the last ten feet or so. Then they remove your jewelry and glasses and wipe off your face like you’re a three year old child. Finally you are pushed powerlessly into Amma’s -- they call her “Mother” -- waiting embrace.

The stage is set up with Hollywood style lighting full of vibrant orange, pink and gold. On the wall is a ten-foot high photo of Amma with a half dozen spotlights trained upon her face to make it glow even more ethereally, just in case you forgot what she looks like. Backlit streamers and flags hang all around the Radisson Hotel’s conference room to create the image of a blissful Hindu heaven. The color scheme seems intended to generate a feeling of womblike security. The scent of incense and perfume hangs heavy in the air.

Beyond the inner circle is the marketplace. Here you can buy Amma jewelry, Amma T-shirts, Amma bumper stickers, Amma dolls, Amma coffee mugs, Amma iPods pre-filled with MP3’s of Amma singing and a whole range of other such goodies and trinkets. On the walls are advertisements for other spiritual healers personally endorsed by Amma, such as Dr. Weng’s acupuncture, Effective Vedic Astrology, Banyan Botanicals and much, much more. If that’s not enough for you, you can buy all sorts of items personally used by Amma including discarded clothing, chairs, rugs, and even Amma’s Lexus. The poster for this last item helpfully includes the car’s current Blue Book value ($8000) and its starting bid ($12,000). And don’t forget the food! Delicious vegetarian cuisine at reasonable prices. This last, I did not pass up.

Amma is a registered trademark. None of the licensed items on offer fail to put that little circled “R” next to her name, lest she lose her claim. I know how this works. I used to be in charge of this kind of stuff for a Japanese company that made a superhero show and we did exactly the same thing. She’s got a cute little logo too, just like we did. Branding is everything! I’ll bet you dollars to donuts she goes after bootleg Amma merch just like we went after bootleg Ultraman merch.

Later on, after my hug, I got to witness some of Amma’s teaching. She’s not bad. In fact she and her opening act, a bearded swami whose name I’ve forgotten, are fairly accomplished stand-up comics. That was something I didn’t expect. The jokes were pretty corny, but not too worn out. There was one about a guy who walks into a bar and throws his drink at the bartender. Before the bartender can get mad, the guy starts weeping. He tells the bartender he can’t help himself, it’s a compulsion. The bartender recommends a shrink. The guy goes and then returns six months later whereupon he again throws his drink at the bartender. The bartender says that the shrink doesn’t seem to have helped. The guy says, “No. He helped a lot. I still have the compulsion but now I don’t feel guilty about it!” The crowd laughs, the spiritual significance of the joke is explained and everybody sighs deeply in unison at the beauty of the great teacher’s great teaching.

And just what is Amma’s message to the world? Here are a few quotes from the free pamphlet (chock full of advertisements) given out to all comers; “God-realization is nothing but the ability and expansiveness of the heart to love everything equally,” and “Love is what fills life constantly with newness,” “Try to cultivate a heart that never harms any being in thought, word or deed.” That sort of thing.

We are also told in the pamphlet, “To love is Mother’s (Amma’s) nature, to serve is her nature,” and assured that, “As far as Mother is concerned, everyone is her child.” “There is nothing preplanned about Amma’s mission,” the pamphlet tells us, “All her projects have been spontaneously compassionate responses to the sorrow and suffering she sees around her.”

And yet, and yet, and yet… for all the charitable work and messages of kindness and generosity there is something deeply disturbing about the whole circus that surrounds all of this admittedly admirable work.

Maybe it’s because it is such a circus. Why do we need to driven nearly to a frenzy with spiritual madness before we can be coerced into contributing to a good cause?

What’s wrong with worshipping Amma, after all? She seems nice enough. So what’s the problem?

The scariest part of the whole thing to me was the men standing around her transfixed just like dogs ready to obey their master. The expressions on their faces were just like the expressions you see on a Doberman waiting for its master to say “fetch” or “kill.” A dog is only as good as its master. If the master tells the dog to fetch the paper, it fetches the paper. If the master tells the dog to maul the black man who just moved in next door, it mauls the black man. The dog’s only criteria is pleasing its master. It has no will or moral center of its own. Blind obedience is never a good thing, even when it’s directed at a supposedly “good” person.

What happens when these folks who’ve learned only obedience get tired of Amma? They have learned only obedience. Who will they obey next?

We need personal responsibility. This is truer now than it ever has been in history. We now have access as individuals to unprecedented power. This was brought home clearly by the events of September 11, 2001. A handful of people were able to cause a level of destruction and havoc that had previously taken the efforts of an entire nation. And things have only become more dangerous since then.

It’s never a good thing to give up your personal power. You need your personal power in order to take personal responsibility.

Maybe Amma delivers pure love. That’s what her press agent says, anyway. Still, I’m not sure pure love is what we need either. I think what’s truly needed is a balance of love and hate. By “hate” I’m not talking about the kind of hate that manifests as crimes against people of other races and that kind of thing. Hate is something much deeper and more profound.

There are two sides to the Universe. Spiritual people always talk about oneness, about dissolving into the embrace of Universal love. But that’s only one side of reality. The other side is hate, separation, aloneness. Both are real. When love and hate are balanced there is compassion and wisdom. Love alone is beautiful but powerless. Hate alone is powerful, but too dangerous.

It’s as bad to deny hate is as it is to deny love. When we acknowledge our separation we can act in unity with each other. When we lose our sense of separation we lose our effectiveness as individuals.

The two sides of our being are not mutually exclusive. It’s not that we have to give up our existence as individuals to merge into the warm embrace of all-encompassing Oneness. Our essential Oneness and our essential separation are manifestations of the same thing, which is neither oneness nor separation.

There are no words for this because the function of words is to divide and categorize. But reality as it is defies all categories. Even something as obvious as saying love is better than hate is an attempt to pin down and define that which is beyond definition.

We must act with compassion if we want to create a peaceful world. That’s true. But compassion is also beyond love and hate. Compassion is a spontaneous response to what needs to be done right here and right now.

I don’t detest Amma any more than I detest Phish or The Grateful Dead or anyone else who offers an evening of escapist entertainment based upon that heady feeling of warmth and community that can be created in an environment specifically designed to amplify those feelings while pushing all the other stuff to one side. I had fun and I would go again. The food was delicious too. I am overwhelmed by my own good fortune to have friends as wonderful as Aspen, Sawa and Tenaya who accompanied me and tolerated my annoyance at much of what went on at the event. I am overjoyed to live in a world enough at-peace that something like the Amma experience is allowed to happen.

What I question is when such experiences are offered up as if they provide some kind of Ultimate Answer to the world’s woes. If we don’t acknowledge and understand our own hate we can’t effectively deal with the problems that hate creates in our world. Warm smiles and hugs don’t fix everything and, sadly, they never will.

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 Warner's endless tour continues soon and he may even be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

The Dalai Lama recently said, "Sexual pressure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication.” He says that celibacy, ultimately, brings a better life with “more freedom” and less ups and downs.

I found this interesting and wanted to ponder it further and engage in discussion with my friend, Brad Warner. Brad is sometimes referred to as a Buddhist teacher and people often ask me if I ask Brad about Buddhist shit. Mostly I don’t. We normally eat burritos and talk about how much sex we are or are not having, but since I’m a curious kitten and this topic was fresh in my mind I decided to ask him what his thoughts were.

Who am I to disagree with the Dalai Lama? Hence, I looked within myself to figure out where my feelings lay on the subject. And then asked Brad for his.

I definitely see what the Dalai Lama’s saying. I have several journals full of romantic anguish that would depress a holocaust survivor. I can understand how a life without the distractions of all that might be could ultimately more desirable, and for a while I sat with that.

I realized that when I reach for my journal it’s often to get the feelings out that might bore my friends, since its pages contain more angst than can be hammered out with a night’s drinking.

While at times life is taxing, I’m usually living in the land of the blissfully content. I’ve had my heart broken but I’ve also experienced true intimacy and found out what love is. I’ve bonded myself to several individuals for life through our relational and lustful encounters -- and I wouldn’t miss that for the world.

Maybe I’m just an intensity junky, but what goes up, must come down and isn’t it better to engage in a rich life experience, when it comes to this stuff anyway, than to abstain from romantic relationships entirely? That’s what I think I think, but I wanted to clarify my position and see what Brad’s thoughts are.

Aspen: Do you agree that sex and dating ultimately cause suffering and attachment?

Brad: Sure. But just about anything you do causes suffering and attachment. Any kind of personal interaction leads to suffering and attachment. When monks leave family life behind they just form new attachments in the monastery. It’s impossible to really live free of human attachment, except for maybe a few people who live in the mountains, but in general, yes.

Aspen: Isn’t it more important to have a well-rounded human existence with interpersonal relationships than it is to try to avoid suffering?

Brad: People think that because I’m a Buddhist teacher I’m an advocate of not having these human attachments, but it’s next to impossible to actually do so.

Aspen: So then maybe a better goal would be to learn to deal with your suffering...

Brad: Yeah. I come across as sounding kind of boring in that way, because really the best way to be free from suffering, as much as possible, would be a marriage or a monogamous relationship, or these kinds of boring things. When I go on SuicideGirls and I start reading that people are into polyamory. It’s a nice fantasy but it normally doesn’t really work.

[Brad is surprised I don’t know what that is and explains its an extended polyamorous family, and alternative lifestyle. According to Wiki, it’s having more than one intimate relationship with the consent of everyone involved. Brad picks up a guitar and starts to strum it. He and I discuss the fact that we’re both suffering right now as I write this.]

Aspen: Even the dog is suffering.

Brad: Really? Even the dog?

Aspen: Yes. She wants you to give her as much attention as you are giving that guitar right now. What are you suffering about?

Brad: Cookies.

Aspen: Do you think there is suffering even when we’re in love and the sex is mutually agreeable and both participants are laying around afterwards all dreamy?

Brad: If you really looked closely you could see some.

Aspen: How would searching for suffering serve me?

Brad: Suffering is always a matter of comparing what you have now with what you think it ought to be. I’m not saying you should look for it, I’m just saying it’s there.

Aspen: Do you think that all of us in this urban experience have pressure from society to have an enhanced sexual desire?

Brad: Yes. There is a great push in the advertising community and incentive to promote the idea of sex, because sex sells. In our media saturated culture, you are constantly being told various things about sex. Most of the people who are telling you don’t have a clue. They are presenting fantasies or something that isn’t real…like the Playboy mansion. This is the life the Buddha lived before he left the palace to embark on his own spiritual journey.

Aspen: So you are saying the Buddha is like Hugh Heffner?

Brad: Yes. He was like Hugh until his early 30s. There are all kinds of stories about him having hotties at his disposal and he saw that that was not an end to suffering…to keep coming back to that word.

[Brad then plays with the dog and tells me since she’s fixed she’s not suffering.]

Aspen: How do you feel about love?

Brad: Oh….um…..love….love stinks. Remember that song? Love is a funny thing. In Christianity, it’s all about love and Buddhism tends to value the word compassion a lot more so…Then there’s the agape love. There is something called love that you could say holds the whole universe together, an interconnectedness. Love in the emotional sense tends to be problematic.

Aspen: Does it always involve attachment? There is often a fine line between intimacy and co-dependency. It causes an extraordinary amount of pain in the world. If you don’t love someone, they can’t hurt you.

Brad: Yeah, I’m sort of thinking about my own life and this marriage that’s ending. Its also culturally bound. I tend to be kind of cold.

Aspen: Yeah, I can see that.

Brad: I’m not really Mr. Cuddly. I’m not a “Mr. I-love-you-all-the-time” kind of person, so when you say love it means different things to different people.

Aspen: Yes, but I asked you.

Brad: I don’t think too much about love.

Aspen: Don’t you think too much about everything?

Brad: Yeah. Um…..I don’t have any great deep thoughts related to the word love.

Aspen: What about the word burrito?

Brad: I have a lot more associations with the word burrito because I had a good one in San Fran with Soyrizo. What do you think about love?

Aspen: I think its something people chase like food and when people don’t, its just so they don’t get hurt.

Brad: I think men and women think different things about love. Men say “I love you” in the heat of the moment without really understanding what that means to the woman. I’ve never gone out searching for lots of sex. It’s mostly not worth the trouble. That’s what the internet is for.

Aspen: Why? Because it’s often less fulfilling than you would like?

Brad: Yes and it often has to do with your upbringing. My parents stayed together until my mom died, so it’s just not something you go and do. I have the same sort of urges of any man….I sound very confused and weird….

Aspen: I see how the roller-coaster inherently caused by dating would go against the typical Buddhist path of staying even-keeled. How can one keep a steady mind if they want to experience a healthy dating life while keeping steady on their spiritual path?

Brad: You’re probably not going to and it’s a tradeoff.

Aspen: Well when the endorphins kick in, you’re too high to stare at the wall and when you do you just think about sex.

Brad: When you are in that state you cant really think clearly.

Aspen: Why would you ever want to avoid that experience entirely?

Brad: Well its standard in Buddhist practice to avoid states of bliss because bliss is the other side of terror. So that’s why you’d want to avoid that terrific state because it always has a backside to it. This is why the long term relationship is better….if you get through that bliss state you can get through the flip side and then settle in a place that is neither one of those.

Aspen: Awesome. I dig. Do you think people turn to spiritual journey when they are looking for love, or after they have it?

Brad: Both. I think often people get into these spiritual groups because they are looking for a love experience but that’s also why people join cults…because they feel they are loved by the cult and that can create a kind of drive toward looking for that.

Aspen: Does urban living affect one’s spirituality?

Brad: Yes it does but then so does rural living. These days it might be equal because of the internet and everything. I’ve spent time in Tassajara [an SF Buddhist mountain retreat] where no technology is allowed and its very isolated. I was talking to a guy I know who spends a lot of time there and also a lot in San Francisco and he was saying he thinks that we get acclimated to the sounds of the city and you are actually primed to react to that and it’s in your nature to be alert to sounds that might hurt you so he was thinking that based on his two experiences that we are expending energy to shut out all of these sounds. So like a billboard that flashes something to you, it is causing a response and all of that is taking a toll.

Aspen: So you think that people seek refuge from the stimuli?

Brad: Oh yeah. More often what I see people doing is searching for stimulus. I find myself doing this, like when you surf the internet, people are spending hours on the internet looking for stimulation. The worst thing I do I go on YouTube looking for old bands. It causes a reaction so sometimes people want to be away from that. And what’s really important is to find a way for people to live in that environment. This will gradually change the environment itself but it will take time. The economy is a reaction to over stimulation and we’ve put ourselves in an economic recession to avoid stimulus. When you go around you see blank billboards and you didn’t see that in Los Angeles two years ago. When things go too far it’s over consumption and we sort of recognize that we are over consuming, but we don’t know how to do it in a comfortable way, so you have all these very deep unconscious reactions…

[I’m yawning and he says doing zazen makes him fall asleep too easily.]

Aspen: Do you think those in urban society are more promiscuous than in rural areas?

Brad: Not necessarily. I think were more open about it. Christians are more promiscuous but they hide it well. Like Sarah Palin and her pregnant daughter. Maybe were a little bit more in this kind of a society but…..it’s a common idea to idealize rural life. That it’s free of temptation….but sometimes in a rural society sometimes all there is to do is fuck.

Promiscuity always seems to lead to misery but people seem to mask it because they’re going to have more orgasms. Well the orgasm lasts a minute but you’ve invested a week into getting a minute long orgasm. You’ve invested a week of miserable hunting and pursuit and you cant help but get tangled into peoples lives.

Aspen: Does zazen affect your sex life?

Brad: There are two ways it affects your sex life. The sort of net result of doing zazen is that your life is more balanced so you start to pay attention to everything. When you start noticing everything, sex is just one of the things that happens. It doesn’t become less exciting, and it can become more stimulating because you’re more present. When everything becomes extraordinary, sex becomes less of a contrast to the rest of your life.

Aspen: Do you have anything specific to say about LA and sex and spirituality?

Brad: Los Angeles is a funny city when you talk about sex and spirituality because the entertainment industry is based here. A large portion of the population is involved in the entertainment Industry. In the ‘60s there was a huge spiritual movement here and it’s always struck me as being flaky. The actors have too much time on their hands -- that’s sort of a caricature but I think its very true. The entertainment industry is based on sex. Everyone needs to look sexy and everyone is better looking in LA.

Aspen: Everyone is very focused on grooming here.

Brad: When I go back to Knoxville everyone is a lot fatter. They seem healthier here. In LA the emphasis is always on getting something from it, like being in the spiritual community is good networking. Like scientology and this weird thing where they get together and yell at you but when spirituality is done for a gaining ideal then you’re just back into the same trap of anything where you’re trying to gain something like enlightenment or peace of mind.

Aspen: Meaning you aren’t content.

Brad: Well that’s part of it but the Zen focus tends to be on seeing what you really are now without trying to alter it deliberately. And it changes as you see it whereas other spiritual practices focus on….well I want to be this and how am I going to get to be this person I want to be.

Aspen: Well right now I’m a mess, Brad.

Brad: Well then that is very helpful because what you want to be is an idea created by that mess so it’s not a sound starting point. If this messiness creates an idea of what it wants to be then the idea is fundamentally flawed so its better to look at the mess and if you keep looking at it, it sort of gradually sort of fixes itself. But I don’t think there is any other way to do it.

Aspen: Well if you are looking at yourself where you are now, then why do zazen?

Brad: Because it’s the best way.

Aspen: According to whom? You?

Brad: Well yeah. Because you’re sitting still and a blank wall doesn’t lie to you it just kind of presents. It’s kind of an amazing thing how that wall will present to you everything that you are.

Aspen: Usually it just presents my grocery list and the calls I need to return.

Brad: Yeah that too. At least you remember.


Brad Warner is currently on a book tour to spread the gospel about his latest spiritual guide, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate.

My new book, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate is out now. The nice folks at Borders put an excerpt from the book on-line and you can read it by clicking HERE. I’ll be touring extensively to promote it this year, see below for a link to a list of dates.

I want to talk a little about the book. Not just to promote it (though I won’t deny I’m doing that), but because I wrote it to address a topic I think is really important. And that is, why we can’t seem to accept good spiritual advice unless it comes from Superman. I already ranted in my last column about how Buddhism isn’t spirituality. But here I’m using the word “spiritual” just to refer to that area of life that addresses the deep questions about the nature of things. It’s convenient shorthand. But everything I said last time still stands.

ANYWAY, there’s a long-standing notion that runs through a wide variety of religious traditions that people won’t listen to good spiritual advice unless the source of that advice possesses powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men (and women, of course, but I’m quoting the intro to the old Superman TV show, which was very sexist). Thus it is not enough that Jesus said to love your enemies and advised that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. In order for anyone to accept that good stuff, the folks who spread his message thought we also needed to believe that Jesus had magic powers. I mean, why should we bother treating others the way we want to be treated ourselves unless the guy who said we should could change water into wine? D’uh.

This line of thinking runs through all the world’s great and not-so-great spiritual traditions. Buddhists are not any more immune to it than anybody else. There are hordes of stories of Buddha’s miracles and even of his virgin birth. The only real difference with Buddhists is that, by and large, they don’t tend to give a whole lot of importance to whether or not you believe those stories. In fact several major Buddhist lineages discount them entirely. But that doesn’t mean a lot of other Buddhists don’t believe them or even that for plenty of Buddhists those stories aren’t crucial.

The notion that for a spiritual teacher to be believed he or she must appear to be superhuman still carries a lot of weight even today. Of course, nowadays we’re less likely to believe our contemporary spiritual teachers can really do magic tricks -- though lots of people still fall for the sleight of hand of Eastern fakirs and Western faith healers. Sophisticated, worldly urban types tend to expect their miracles to be a bit more subtle than walking on water or turning into fire-spitting whirly-gigs as the Buddha is reported to have done. But we still expect miracles.

Sometimes we like our guys to be Great Ancient Masters reincarnated right in Beverly Hills or possess psychic abilities and beatific vision. And even when we’re not after those sorts of blatant conjuring acts we still look for people who conform to our image of spiritual purity. Those who are spiritually pure shouldn’t be like ordinary people. They need to be perpetually serene and unaffected, liberated from bodily desires and distress. When we find out that they’re people just like the rest of us we’re liable to rebel and turn upon them viciously. The mechanism by which this happens in Zen is well documented in books like Shoes Outside the Door and The Great Failure. Neither Richard Baker, subject of Shoes Outside the Door nor Dainin Katagiri, the subject of The Great Failure, ever claimed to be spiritual Supermen, but that didn’t stop certain of their followers from reacting with anger, distress and even grief when it was revealed they were not.

Of course someone who advocates a meditative practice ought to show signs of that meditative practice having had some good effects on their own lives. That’s perfectly reasonable to expect. What’s not perfectly reasonable to expect is that those good effects should manifest in precisely the manner we imagine they ought to. We can never know what these people would have been like if they hadn’t done their practice. Furthermore it’s not how meditative practice has affected your teacher that’s important. It’s only how meditative practice affects you that matters. And you are the only one who will ever see the full extent of that.

ANYWAY, the reason I wrote Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate was, in part, to try and kill the notion of the spiritual Superman for good and all. The only way I felt I could do that effectively was to character assassinate a specific Eastern spiritual teacher. Since I come from a tradition that believes you don’t find the really important truths by looking outward but by looking inward, it wasn’t good enough for me to do what the authors of the books I mentioned above did and pick out someone else as my target. The teacher whose reputation I was to trash had to be me. Admittedly, I’m not a really good example because so few people actually believe that I am any kind of Great Enlightened Being. Those that do are mostly a couple fries short of a Happy Meal.

Still, since I’ve started becoming more popular I’ve seen people react to me in ways that are a little scary. I’ve only been recognized on the street by random strangers a couple of times. But these days when I walk into a meditation center where they know my work, people’s eyes light up in a freaky way and some even seem to cower when I try to speak to them. To these folks I am no ordinary person. I find that kind of reaction difficult to deal with. Some people are starting to react to me in ways that only make sense if they have begun to project something ethereal upon the image they carry of me in their minds. They expect things of me that they would never expect of each other. And that’s unfair.

I didn’t really want to write this book. It’s hard work exposing your worst side to public scorn and ridicule. This book was physically painful to write. I had at least half dozen other ideas for a third book that would have been a breeze to write and would have been more commercially bankable. But this book screamed at me to get it done until I had no choice but to obey.

There was something very deep that could only be got to by digging around in my own guts. In doing so I discovered that even the tawdriest portions of my life are not all ugliness and horror. In fact, much to my surprise I found very little of that. There’s a kind of beauty to the truth that transcends whether or not you find that truth to be pleasant or objectionable. Plus there’s some jokes in the book too.

I wanted to write a book that told the truth about teachers in Eastern spiritual traditions. Because there are still a lot of illusions out there about those of us in this game. The public has been conditioned by the media to believe that teachers in Eastern traditions aren’t like our garden-variety preachers, priests, imams and rabbis. Yogis, Gurus and Zen Masters, we’re told, have this special something called “Enlightenment” that makes them transcend the world of ordinary humans. You can make very good money exploiting that twaddle. There’s even one so-called “Roshi” (i.e. Zen Master) who sells gullible rich people five days in his godlike presence for $50,000 on the grounds that by being in proximity to him they just might get some of this Enlightenment thing for themselves. It won’t happen, so you might as well give the money to me instead!

But just because no spiritual teacher is Superman doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot through the practice of meditation. I happen to believe zazen is the only way humanity has to get out of the mess it’s in. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t bother shouting about it.

In this media saturated age where every person’s sleeziest action is captured on digital video and put up on YouTube for all to see two hours later, there is nowhere left for spiritual Supermen to hide the pulleys and wires that enable them to do their magic tricks. It has become urgent that we kill the idea of the spiritual Superman and start looking at how we can accept good spiritual advice even from people who burp and fart and -- oh my god! -- fuck just like we do. If we can’t do that there won’t be any way we can accept good spiritual advice from anybody.


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

To see where Brad will be speaking next take a look here!

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

Looking over some of the comments to my last piece for Suicide Girls, I think I figured out the root of a lot of the confusion I’ve created here. When I write about religion and the religious point of view, it seems like a lot of readers assume I’m including Buddhism in that category. I don’t. Even though books on Buddhism, including my own, are usually shoved into the back corner in the religion section, Buddhism is something very distinct from religion.

When you say that, people usually respond with, “OK, then Buddhism is a form of spirituality.” Spirituality is seen as something better than religion. It exists outside the constraints of the organized formality of religious institutions. It’s a personal relationship with your spiritual nature.

Which is fine. But Buddhism is not a form of spirituality.

The history of philosophy throughout the world has been a struggle between two basic fundamental systems -- idealism and materialism. Spirituality is a kind of idealism. It takes the view that the spiritual world, the world of ideas, imagination, and mental formations is the true reality. Matter is secondary at best or sometimes even regarded as non-existent. We are spirits trapped inside bodies made of gross matter -- some bodies are a lot more gross than others -- and the way to happiness is to get free of this material world and its miseries. In many Eastern philosophies we are told, “I am not this body. I am the spiritual soul within.” This is not the Buddhist viewpoint. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

Materialism on the other hand sees matter as primary and spirit as either non-existent or, at least, negligible. What we perceive as our soul, we are told, is just the workings of a highly complex biological machine. We’re all just animals. The more radical materialists go on to assert that the only way to be happy is to get as much money, sex, and power as possible. There is no soul. There is no afterlife. There is no God.

Buddha explored both of these ideas and found both of them lacking. He was born a prince and spent the first part of his life dedicated to the practical study of materialism. He had everything he could possibly want -- money, hot babes, power. But they didn’t satisfy him. So he set off to see if happiness could be found in the opposite direction. He dedicated himself to various spiritual practices and achieved their highest goals. He got a massive spiritual high, but in the process he nearly destroyed his body. That wasn’t what he wanted. It wasn’t until he rejected both extremes and found the Middle Way that he began to teach the philosophy that now bears his name.

Buddhism starts from the basic premise that neither materialism nor idealism is correct. The Heart Sutra says, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.” In other words, matter is the immaterial, the immaterial is matter. With apologies to Sting, we are not spirits in the material world. Rather, the experiential, internal, subjective, spiritual side of our day-to-day existence and the hard, external, objective, material world we inhabit are one and the same. This is a very radical idea. Even today, 2500 years after Gotama first put forth this notion, few people can accept it. Even those who call themselves Buddhists all too often believe that it’s a form of spirituality.

While it’s not spirituality, Buddhism is not materialism either. Buddhism is realism. There's a tendency for contemporary people to assume that realism is the same as materialism. When they use the word “reality” it most often refers to the material world as explained to us by science. But that's not what Buddhists mean by "reality." The materialistic point of view is also just a concept.

Now, matter is obviously real. But the trouble is that our understanding of what matter is may not be correct. Most of us believe that matter exists first and because of its existence sense stimulation occurs. Both idealists and materialists tend to conceive it this way. The computer in front of you is made of matter and it’s real. So is your forehead. When you bang your forehead on the computer it hurts. The subjective experience of pain is the result of the objective collision of material forehead with material computer. Buddhist philosophers like Dogen, Nagarjuna and Buddha himself turn this around and place sense stimulation first. Because our senses are stimulated in certain ways, we assume matter exists. It is a completely different way of conceptualizing the world from what we’re used to.

Science happens to be a very good way to look at the material side of reality, so we need to accept science (legit science, anyway). But Dogen, the guy who founded the school of Buddhism in which I study and practice, said that the universe in all directions is just a tiny fragment of reality.

That doesn’t mean that the material world is here and somewhere out in the vastness of space is another even bigger universe made of something else. Dogen was talking about our real day-to-day experience. The material component of our experience forms just one small part of our existence.

Furthermore we never experience mind separate from body or vice-versa. The idea that one side is true while the other is false doesn’t fit our real experience.

We constantly swing back and forth between materialism and idealism. When materialism doesn’t satisfy, we try idealism, when idealism lets us down, we swing back to materialism. As a culture we can see this happening right now. A century ago it seemed like materialism might one day solve all the problems of mankind. But, in spite of the fact that most of the poorest among us enjoy wealth and comfort our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of, materialism has failed to fulfill many of our most basic needs. So we, as a culture have started to drift back towards spirituality in the hopes that it might solve our troubles and bring us the fulfillment we seek. What we’ve forgotten as a culture is that spirituality already let us down. That’s why we became so materialistic in the fist place.

A lot of people look to Buddhism as a spiritual answer to our materialistic woes. But if Buddhism is just another form of spirituality, it’s as worthless as any other religion. We need something different.

Every other religion, philosophy, addiction or any other method for dealing with what life throws at us that I’ve encountered says, “You feel unfulfilled? OK. Try this. It will fulfill you.” Materialism works for a time. But once you buy something the thrill of buying it is gone and you want to buy something else. Spirituality can give you a great big high. But there’s always a comedown.

Buddhism doesn’t promise to fulfill our desires. Instead it says, “You feel unfulfilled? That’s OK. That’s normal. Everybody feels unfulfilled. You will always feel unfulfilled. There is no problem with feeling unfulfilled. In fact, if you learn to see it the right way, that very lack of fulfillment is the greatest thing you can ever experience.” This is the realistic outlook.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up! and the forthcoming Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too.

Plus he also has a spiffy newly revamped YouTube Channel.

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!