I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME the sound of someone’s voice brought me such a sense of well-being.
Henry Shukman is a Zen teacher, poet, and travel writer. If you have the chance, you’ll probably want to read what he has written and maybe take a class to experience him in person.
That voice – resonant with rhythm and an internal sense of pacing. You hear knowledge and heartfelt wisdom all accomplished through hard work, suffering, and determination. At the same time, there’s this ongoing riff on his own flaws and failed efforts, as if he always wants you to be in on the joke. And that joke is his ongoing source of mirth, humility, and amusement. So you know you can trust him.
How has meditation changed you?
Suddenly, the feeling of our relationship with the world dramatically changes, and we don’t feel separate from it. We don’t feel like a separate observer going through life. We feel more like we’re part of one greater whole, and the sense of separateness disappears.
You had this amazing experience on the beach when you were nineteen.
Exactly. I suddenly found that my whole normal way of constructing experience and reality had been really missing something. I could see that I was part of a great whole. It was an incredibly, overwhelmingly beautiful thing.
So I’d had this weird experience when I was nineteen that I couldn’t understand, couldn’t integrate into my life, and I just knew that on some level it was true. It actually took me a number of years to begin to find the paths to actually addressing it, and it was very painful to not know what to do about it.
Eventually, I found my way to meditation. It was transcendental meditation at first, but it didn’t really address what the hell that strange experience had been. But as soon as I discovered Zen, it was clear that somehow that tradition knew all about that experience and knew there was a way of revisiting it and integrating it into life.
I see the main project for most of us in meditation is to become a little more at ease in life and to acquire capacities like patience. It’s a sense of acceptance and letting things be the way they are.
And there is another whole project that it can address, which is an existential exploration: What is this existence we’re having? Who am I? What is life? What is death? Well, we may never know the answer to those questions, but we can get new perspectives on our experience that are shocking and marvelous.
You distinguish between knowledge and wisdom. Is your knowledge growing? Is your wisdom growing? Do you feel like you’re maybe getting a little smarter?
I’m getting less smart.
But I don’t mind that much. I don’t really mind at all. I could say I’m probably wiser than I used to be, which isn’t saying a hell of a lot; but I’m a little bit more at home in the present moment.
I’ve been lucky to find some great teachers along the way. One in particular was a humble, modest, under-the-radar guy quietly leading quite an interesting group of people in New Mexico. These were random folks who would gather every couple of weeks to sit together. They were very unobtrusive, just quietly doing their thing.
That’s important because there are people in a lineage who can feel superior because they’re in a lineage, and there can be an arrogance in that. But if it’s done right, there can be a humility where you don’t think you’re greater than the lineage you’re part of. I was lucky to fall in with this great group of people, one of whom was the Zen writer Natalie Goldberg.
It was through her that I got interested in Zen. She was part of a little temple on Cerro Gordo, which is now part of Upaya. It was just a small, simple, bare room. There was no fanfare, no grandiosity, no gods, no garlanded guru. Just simple.
So you came here for this community?
Actually, I was working on a book about D.H. Lawrence’s time in New Mexico. It was an ill-informed attempt to follow in his footsteps. But the publisher bought it, and I was given quite a lot of money as a young man to come out here and write it. But it turned out that there really weren’t a whole lot of footsteps. It was basically his ranch above Taos and San Cristobal, and there were his paintings on the Taos Plaza.
Which are horrible.
Right, and then there was a little bit of stuff in Santa Fe – mostly mythology about where he’d drunk a martini or this or that.
But what really hit me was that I felt Lawrence was best as a writer in his poetry and his writing about places. His accounts of excursions in New Mexico, Arizona, and other parts of the Southwest were phenomenal and really pivotal for me. He showed me something that I wanted to try to do. These travel reports were so much better than his sermonizing novels.
Why did you think the travel writing was so good?
There are a lot of ways we can learn from him. First of all, he was very revolutionary. He just tore down the established literary patterns of English. You could look for precedents in Wordsworth, but his whole thing was how the landscape teaches us.
But, like you, he is an Englishman who came here and saw something that appealed to his sensibility.
I could recognize in him some sense of alienation from English life. I hated the class-ridden society, the social norms. And coming out here in the late ’80s, I suppose I was post-hippie, but there was a sense of, God it’s just so free compared to what I grew up in.
The cultural norms of the artistic and writing community that I fell into here were so much more open. I remember sort of noticing that I was feeling so good and feeling a warmth in my heart and loving the hills around town. And I just, and I was like, My God, it’s okay to feel this way. It was almost like a shock to me that you didn’t have to apply brutal, rational, logical thought to everything. You could be a little looser.
And D.H. Lawrence, having spent a lifetime traveling, chose this place.
But he ended up leaving.
There’s this question about practice and belief because they’re different. Aldous Huxley’s whole thing was that he couldn’t practice – he didn’t live the life that he basically advocated. And D.H. Lawrence had a lot of trouble with that as well. Huxley concluded a decade-long obsession with Lawrence with a devastating satire of him as “the Savage” in Brave New World.
Unfortunately, Lawrence came before the arrival of contemplative practices in the West. Huxley was actually one of the harbingers of it, bringing perennial philosophy.
Lawrence was suspicious of any kind of lofty spirituality. But I think he might have liked Zen because Zen is very down to earth. It’s about being more grounded, not less. That’s how I understand it, anyway. But, God, I don’t know. I think from my point of view, it just seemed so necessary to have some kind of practice. And I couldn’t really conceive of life without it.
Your writing has a wry, self-deprecating humor that…
Please put that in the article. [laughs]
I will! There’s a sense in you of being amused by your own behavior, which gives people a kind of permission.
Oh God, I mean it’s such a relief after decades of deep self-absorption. As a writer and a poet, you can be horribly self-absorbed. Zen gave me a little bit of an opportunity for a gap to develop between me, myself, and I.
In Zen, you’re learning different ways of experiencing, different ways of being alive, different ways of being aware. You learn new ways of experiencing so you can meet each moment, whatever moment: meeting a person, meeting a dog, meeting a beautiful cloudy day or a sunny one.
You know, Zen training is really paradoxical because to call it a training suggests there’s some kind of trajectory you’re going to be led through. But actually, it really is mostly about losing the sense of knowing what the training is supposed to be. And it’s a means dropping into a deeper way of experiencing life, a clearer sense of our place in this world right now. I still practice every day to try to have less mind clutter.
We like to believe in the idea of progress within ourselves.
There’s the idea that one condition is advance and the other is retreat. One is progress and one is regress. But that’s really a mental construct. And if we drop that construct, we can find an openness to what is actually arising. And that openness would be what the practice would consider progress. But you can’t have it if you’re trying to have progress. You see what I mean?
Besides Zen, you write about the Greeks – how they had an understanding of the commonalities of the East and West.
There was this entrenched European imperial view that Greek culture from classical times was this marvel that was unique on Earth. And the inheritance of this in Western Europe was one of the justifications for European supremacy and the colonial powers: We’re the best.
But it turns out that there was actually a tremendous amount of exchange between ancient Greece and ancient India, and even the whole Persian Empire, which connected the two. The Persian government organized something like study centers where they’d bring in philosophers, poets, and physicians from all parts of the empire.
They would mingle and ideas were transferred east and west. All of a sudden, there were Greek philosophers who sounded remarkably like the wisdom of the East. And there was also the great trade route, the Silk Road, going right across Eurasia. Really, the ancient world could be seen much more as a coherent whole world.
So are you happy now?
Yeah. Zen has been transformative.
Is it disturbing to you that there are such dire problems in the world and that you have this happy life, relatively speaking?
A well-regulated nervous system on the planet is a good thing. It should help us address the planetary problems we’re facing in more effective ways.