Guru Viking Podcast
Ep261: Original Love - Henry Shukman
In this episode I am once again joined by Henry Shukman, award-winning poet, Zen teacher, and author of ‘One Blade of Grass; a Zen memoir’ and the new book ‘Original Love’.
Henry discusses the surprising writing process of ‘Original Love’, the importance of love in spiritual practice, and how to release the heart.
Henry describes the 4 major areas of spiritual development, his own first and subsequent awakenings, and the purifying effects of deep jhana practice.
Henry also talks about his own journey from head to heart, his personal challenges of heartbreak and neurological illness, and his love for St Augustine’s ‘Confessions’.
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Video version: https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep261-original-love-henry-shukman
Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast’.
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Topics include:
00:00 - Intro 00:50 - Writing Original Love 06:01 - 4 major areas of spiritual development 07:47 - The importance of love 09:27 - The example of mindfulness 11:06 - Henry’s neurological illness 13:37 - Letting go 14:39 - An epiphany in Venezuela 18:35 - Migrating from head to heart 20:53 - Heartbreak of awakening 22:31 - What is awakening? 26:56 - Henry’s first awakening 28:35 - Subsequent awakenings and the place of love 29:50 - The two wings of practice 30:41 - Release of the heart 32:50 - Does awakening change the experience of suffering? 36:53 - Resistance and suffering 38:37 - Unwrapping the gift of life 39:38 - Training jhana with Stephen Snyder 48:31 - Purification and catharsis in jhana 49:42 - Jhana vs awakening 53:54 - Encouragement to those seeking awakening 01:03:55 - Henry’s love for Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ 01:06:44 - Henry’s mother 01:10:03 - A resurgence in interest in awakening 01:14:15 - The original face 01:15:50 - Henry’s meditation app
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Previous episodes with Henry Shukman:
- https://www.guruviking.com/search?q=shukman To find out more about Henry Shukman, visit:
- henryshukman.com
- thewayapp.com …
For more interviews, videos, and more visit:
- www.guruviking.com
Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James
- Duration:
- 1h 19m
- Broadcast on:
- 05 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
In this episode, I am once again joined by Henry Shukman, award-winning poet, Zen teacher, and author of One Blade of Grass, a Zen memoir, and the new book, Original Love. Henry discusses the surprising writing process of original love, the importance of love in spiritual practice, and how to release the heart. Henry describes the four major areas of spiritual development, his own first and subsequent awakenings, and the purifying effects of deep Jana practice. Henry also talks about his own journey from head to heart, his personal challenges of heartbreak and neurological illness, and his love for Saint Augustine's confessions. So without further ado, Henry Shukman. Henry Shukman, welcome back to the podcast. Steve, thanks so much for having me again. It's really fun to see you and to connect like this. I'm so pleased to be talking with you again, and it has a bit of a celebratory tone, I think, because we are writing this as the publication of your latest book, Original Love, looms ever closer. And I had the pleasure and privilege of reading a an advanced copy just in the last few days, and it's really a wonderful book indeed. And quite a different book to One Blade of Grass, your Zen memoir. We've had many interviews discussing One Blade of Grass in quite some detail. So I'm curious about Original Love. Two questions really. The first, why did you write this book? And the second, how did you write this book? How did it come to be? In terms of its conception, how you came to it, perhaps that's linked with the Y also, and also its execution. I'm quite curious about the working process also on the book, but so there's a sort of two different questions. One's a conceptual one, I suppose, why and how, and the other one is the nitty gritty of how? Yeah, thanks. Well, you know, I think many a writer likes talking on those topics, so thank you for opening the door. I hope I don't go on for too long. The how, actually, I might just talk about that first, because it was a little bit surprising. About four years ago, around the start, actually, of COVID lockdown, I'd been right before lockdown, I'd been teaching rather extensively in a sort of series of retreats in Europe, and in California, and in New Mexico, where my home base is. And I was quite tired, and I decided that I really needed a rest, and I've got some friends who have some cabins in the most glorious place up in the mountains, north of here, right at the foot of these enormous cliffs called the Brasos Cliffs, that's a 1.7 billion year old rock rising 2,000 feet up from a little river, the Brasos River, and they were kind enough to make one of their cabins available to me. And I thought I was gonna, you know, hike and plunge in the icy river occasionally, which are one of my masochist things I enjoy doing, and maybe meditate a bit, and mostly just kind of rest for a week or two, and the very first morning I was up there, I was making oatmeal and coffee, and just kind of reorienting, you know, to being there, and is this such a beautiful place in ponderosa woods, forests, and all of a sudden, you know, god damn it, this sentence bubbled up in my mind, and I just, I just knew I got to write this down. I didn't want to be, I mean, it's a very familiar feeling when something that I really know is going to be something I want to be participating in the writing of, you know, that feels like it needs to be said somehow, it's just a certain vibe, one of those sentences came up. So I grabbed a yellow pad that I had, and I wrote the first sentence, and basically, I didn't look up till 1 p.m. when I'd written 14 pages, and was kind of had been on one of those, you know, wild rides that, you know, many, many people will know when you just get thoroughly absorbed in a task. And, and I realized sort of, you know, I really might, my last book, One Blade of Grassi, and very kindly, you know, had invited me to talk about here, was in some ways, I was talking about why I'd stopped writing, having been a, a very dedicated writer since my teens, really. And I, I wrote that book in spite of having quote-unquote stop writing. And, but I still felt that I was no longer kind of beholden to writing, and it was, you know, very freeing thing for me, in general, to be open to meeting the moment without thinking I've got to grab a pen and say something about it, you know. But this I knew really was something that just wanted to be said, and I'd better let it happen. So over the next two weeks, I just filled four yellow pads, and, and that was how it started. And then, you know, basically, over the next couple of years, I, I wrote more, I cut, I wrote more, I cut, I edited, I fiddled with it, you know, did a lot of work on it, it got much longer, then it got shorter again, then it got medium length. And, and so there's a lot of sort of messing around with it. But the, the upshot was that it, it, it had, it had been, I realized it had been as clear a statement as I could make about the way I saw the different areas of spiritual development that we might want to pursue, how they where they, what they are, and how they sort of fall into place, and how meditation in particular can help with them. And, and I, I looking back on it, I was what I wanted to say all that because I had felt that in people I met, you know, interested in, in practice, whether with me or just chatting about practice, you know, generally, I felt there was some confusion about different possibilities of practice. And particularly, I felt that it, there was a need for a clarification generally in what the primary purposes of meditation are. And then not, they're not single, you know, there are, I feel that there's a four major purposes that meditation could help us with. And I think they roughly are probably four major sort of territories of spiritual development that we might want to pursue. So I've, I really, you know, as I was writing it, and, and after it was getting clear and clear, oh, yeah, that's, that that's why this needs to be said, because there's a certain lack of clarity in the air in the zeitgeist about these different aspects of practice. So I wanted to clarify that. I also felt I really wanted to speak to the importance of love in the whole venture of spirituality, which is maybe, I mean, some people say, you know, a practice like Zen, which I've been deeply involved in, you know, doesn't speak about it enough. But I think in general, some say that of Buddhism as a whole, you know, and some say that of, of many other religious and, you know, do they embody the love that sometimes they speak of? And, you know, I mean, we all, you know, the worst case scenarios like Jesuit sort of torturing people so that they find the love kind of thing, you know, that there are somehow, it seems to be that love is really important in the whole thing, the whole spiritual venture project of humanity. And, and it's worth clarifying different ways that we can tap into it, different ways of understanding what it is, non, not the romantic love between two people, you know, not, of course, there's many kinds of love that we humans experience. But it's just struck me that in all these areas of spirituality that I was laying out as, as a sort of map of the terrain, love was active in some way, or, or every time there was a shift in that area, let's say I mean, to get a bit more concrete, like in mindfulness, which I think is a foundational, I call out the first in, in this book, it's absolutely foundational is learning that our nervous systems are, are, are, are amenable to some levers of control, even learning that we have a nervous system, you know, when, but certainly when I was a younger man, I was caught up in anxiety and stress, very, very consistently, and just didn't realize that my nervous system was dialed up pretty, pretty furiously a lot of the time. And just to discover that, oh yeah, wow, this is about my nervous system. There are interventions I can become more present, you know, but every time there's some kind of shift in that terrain, just for example, I feel there's always some little touch of a kind of love that I find I can love my experience in a way I didn't realize I could, you know, even if it's a difficult thing I'm going through, that love is a solvent of my resistance, you know, or when my resistance to whatever is going on, loosens just a bit that allows in some kind of sense of love, which is critical, it changes everything really, it can turn very difficult situations, it can change our attitude to them in beautiful ways. Actually, since we last spoke, I've had, I think you knew that I can't remember when it happened, but I've had a neurological thing going on in the last few years where, after a bike accident, it's actually got a lot better. But even that was a great teaching for me, because my cognitive stamina was severely reduced, you know, my ability to sort of think really clearly, in fact, editing was really challenging, you know, editing the book. I worked, I could do it in small chunks and luckily enough I had some help. Actually, my wife was really, really helped, really great, helped she slashed through it on certain occasions and cut a lot of unwanted thickets out of it, you know. But, you know, in a way, the debilitating or the infebling of my brain power was just nothing but good, because I sort of migrated into my my heart area and lived from my heart much more. And that's part of what this book was expressing, is how we can think clearly about stuff to whatever extent we can, but actually accessing a tenderness, a warmth, a gratitude, a compassion, sense of love, you know, in the body, especially in the heart area, is actually the critical thing for our responsiveness, our well-being, our appreciation, and our capacity to sort of be awake in this life, you know, to be aware of being alive and be open to responding in helpful, positive ways in this life. Yeah, so that was quite of a little bit of a garbled response to that was maybe a bit about the how and a bit about the why. I'm just thinking of that. I mean, there was actually, I suppose, there's one other piece I'd want to just mention here, which is as much as it was a book about, it is a book about understanding the main territories of spiritual practice. And as much as it's a book about realizing or hopefully coming to feel through reading it, I hope, some sense of the centrality of one or more aspects of love in the whole project. Also, the methodology, as it were, that is trying to share sort of in all areas, really, is one of letting go and allowing, allowing, allowing, not striving to get anything we haven't already got, but gently dissolving, gently releasing, doing less and less, and that being a pathway. And that comes out of a moment of clarity that I had many years ago when I was on a writing assignment in Venezuela, and I'd done the work that was for a magazine. I also had a book I was in the middle of, and I decided to put up in this little fishing village for six weeks on the coast of Venezuela. Very quiet little place, and every evening I went out onto the sand, dug up a little mound to sit on, to do my meditation, and sort of quiet corner of the beach under some palm trees or near some palm trees. And on the second night I was doing it, these kids came up and basically wanted to know what I was doing sitting there like that. And could they do it too? And so I kind of gave them a three-minute instruction in how to meditate, and we sat there, and they wanted to do more, so we did a bit more. And then they started coming every night to join me and brought their friends occasionally, their parents, and it was a little thing that sort of developed. And one night I didn't do it, and they came and found me in my room the next morning. Where were you last night? So I did it regularly, and the atmosphere there, sitting on a beach by the sea, palm trees nearby, sounds of the village in the evening nearby, it was so different from the atmosphere I'd got used to in, to monasteries, I used to go to, to do meditation retreats in various different zen centers and meditation centers I'd been to. It was so natural, and so relaxed, and so much about ease, just humans finding ease, you know, and a kind of ease emerging from the very fabric of our belonging in this world that was really different from the sense of aspiration, and, you know, attaining, striving to attain in some ways, that adds, that's probably got its place too, but, you know, that I'd encountered in more formal practice contexts, and so this book was attempting also to convey the method of no methods, or the method of ease, or the practice of ease, of just being home, of coming home, in a very non-demo hunting, non-perfectionistic kind of way, where, you know, rather than, hey, wow, there's this, there's these horizon lines of incredible things that may happen in the course of your practice, you may get, you know, marvelous moments of non-duality, you may get just marvelous moments of equanimous witnessing, and maybe you'll stabilize those and live in them, but none of that just coming to the simplest possible recognition of existing just as you are, and finding that actually there can be a tremendous sense of a quiet belonging, an ease, a belovedness even, that just seeps out of the fabric of being, you know, if we just rest basically, so that's, that's, that's kind of part of the methodology, the practice methodology, the book, advocates, yeah. This migration from the head to the heart that you mentioned had occurred after your, your neurological injury from the bike accident, was that an active migration, and if so, how did you navigate it, or was it a passive migration, a kind of relinquishing of the head into the heart, or some other version of that, what was that process? Yeah, thank you for asking. The best I can, I can come at it was actually, you know, our family had a very difficult situation to, to navigate. Somebody, you know, very close to us was going through a very hard time, and, you know, it's their story, not mine to tell, but it was very, it was very heartbreaking, you know, and, and, and, and difficult, you know, and I, I found that to try to figure out what to do about it. I mean, of course, we did what we could, was, was a natural response, but, and we did, we did figure out the best we could, what we might do to be of help, but actually, it was one of those things that really one can only surrender to in the end, a kind of surrender is necessary. And what that surrender looked like, for me, was accepting a broken heart. And once I realized that I could fully allow heartbreak, I found that actually all that really happened was that my heart was open, my heart was open. And there was no reason not to live in it. There was no resistance to living in a, in an open heart. I mean, the heart, I have, there's a saying actually talks about heartbreak at times, you know, that there's a famous Zen book, well, famous in Zen circles called If You're Lucky, Your Heart Will Break by a guy called James Ford, Roshi. And so there's some recognition in, in the, in the Zen tradition. I mean, it's not really, it's not, it's not very publicly sort of proclaimed, you know, but that's actually, there's some close cross pollination really between heartbreak and awakening actually, because the awakening is this, the letting go of the attachment to a sense of self, you know, even if it's brief, or it may, may be more sustained, but it's, it is a kind of, it's a kind of relinquishing to use the word you use quite rightly. And it can't happen without the heart being ready to be open. And that radical openness is a kind of heartbreak. So, yeah, I think the answer really is heartbreak, you know, being ready to surrender to a much more open heart, a radically undefended heart. Richard Rawr wrote a very beautiful paragraph about original love. And in it, he says, of all the books on meditation I've read, none have so clearly laid out the finding of love as its central project. So you've said here that it's necessary for the heart to be ready for awakening. And if Richard Rawr is right, is he right? Is the finding of love? Is that the central project of your book? And if so, why love? Rather than say, awakening or satisfaction, ease, freedom, or beyond freedom, or these sorts of, you know, Buddhist and post Buddhist kind of terms. Why love? Why is it so essential that the heart's ready for awakening? Well, okay, well, let's just, let me have great questions. I suppose this is a, this is almost a metaphysical matter. I'm not quite sure, but it's, or it might just be a matter of opinion. But I think I feel that love is, well, first of all, let me just say this about awakening and love, actually, if we're just starting there. Because, first of all, what do we mean by awakening? Because there's a ton of different ways the word is used. And they're all valid. But in this context, in the moral of meditation and of Buddhism, which is named after awakening, you know, it's pretty clear that it means a discovery that our ordinary sense of being a separate self is not the whole picture. And sometimes it's framed as simply actually, you know, you feel like you're a self and you have this little nugget core nugget called me that's always been on board. It's actually nothing more than a thought. The thought doesn't represent a real thing. It's just a thought. And that thought can cease. And you can find that you never were the separate entity you thought you were. Okay, that's, that's one way that awakening can look or can be passed out. Another closely related is that the when that sense of being a separate unit among a trillion trillion trillion units in this in this world in this cosmos, when that ops or perforates or has a rend in it, we discover that we're inseparable from all that exists. You know, the classic analogy of the wave thinking is, it's the wave that it is. Well, it is the wave that it is. But it's also the entire ocean. You know, there's there's no separateness between there's no dividing line between the wave and the great body of all oceans, actually, all seven five oceans and seven seas are all one body of water. And it's exactly the same with us that we feel like we're independent skin bags stalking the earth. But actually, we don't see it. But but we can discover it that we are actually inseparable from all that is. And that's a moment of awakening. Also, that's a, you know, it's called non duality because the duality of me and everything else breaks down. And it's not just an idea. It even doesn't sound particularly interesting, perhaps, as an idea. But it is a most visceral experience we can we can go through. And when we do, whether it's momentary or in a more sustained way, it's known as awakening. So, so just that alone to find that we are part of a whole single fabric of existence is it's an overwhelming experience of love. I mean, it first happened to me out of the blue. I wrote about it in my last book when I was 19 standing on a beach, you know, would be poet and writer. And suddenly out of the blue found this inseparability of myself and the scene I was in. The two just became one thing. And it overturned everything I'd assumed about what it was to be alive. And and and one of the I don't know if it's it was actually in the core of the experience. But one of the defining sort of recognitions that came out of it was, oh, oh, oh my gosh, there's an enormous wall encompassing love somehow this. That's what all this is is somehow this world seemed like it was sort of a love in action in some way. I mean, weirdly, even though I'm talking like that, I was and actually remained basically an atheist. I don't I don't see it may sound like well, that sounds very sort of godlike or something. I don't actually see it that way. I think it's in the nature of things. And that this the fact that this universe is generating itself out of nothing is a one sort of great act of love. Wait, am I getting off track? Let me just check that I'm on track. Place of love and and and awakening. What are they some something about those two? What do they have to do with each other was where I was trying to go. So in all subsequent flashes that I had of awakening, then including a really real shift that happened at a certain point in my practice. It just always brought up a really powerful sense of love, of belovedness, of lovingness, of it seemed like it was integral to the whole thing, to the whole project that of human existential exploration, that you couldn't really get into it without finding without knocking up against larger inklings of love, of having the heart awakened, warmed, blazing even with love. Yeah, I don't want to be too insistent on this because they're sure there's lots of, there will be counter examples, there already are, but generally speaking, in the Buddhist world, it's often said that the two wings of practice are enlightenment and compassion, and they're not really separate things. There's a dog in that great Japanese 30th century master. He said something like in one of his works, like all there is, is compassion. Everything that is, is an expression of compassion, which is maybe touching on similar kind of thing I'm talking about. Okay, wait, again, have I stayed on track with your question? Yes, another aspect of the question was why it's necessary for the heart to be ready for awakening, and you've defined awakening as that insight, that transformative recontextualization of the self. So why is it necessary for the heart to be ready for that? Yeah, maybe I wouldn't exactly say that it needs to be ready for it, because it might have been ready or not, you know, but that it's involved in it, because I guess because we're, you know, we've attached strongly to our identifications, the sense of, you know, this is mine, this is me, you know, it's something that there's a strong attachment involved in that. And that's some kind of gripping or tension or tightening in the heart, that kind of attachment. And when we're somehow able to let go of that process of identifying that attachment to identification, that's, that's a thing that happens in the heart. It may also have a cognitive side to conceptual side to, but it also is like, I've released something that I was very invested in, and very invested in holding on to. It's like I've been gripping to something all this time, and I may not even recognize that I was gripping to it, but suddenly I'm ready to let it go. And that is a release in the heart. And then whatever wants to flood in, can flood in, and it may be the whole world, or it may be a huge tidal wave of love, or it may be a recognition that there's somehow no limit of any kind anywhere, or, you know, whatever face of awakening shows up then. You write in original love, somehow, however crazy it sounds, the universe loves you so much that it is making you, giving you life and awareness. To experience this love in our hearts is what it takes to unwrap the gift this life can be, even in the midst of its challenges and difficulties. Experiencing this love in one's heart, what does that do to the challenges and difficulties when they come? Is there still pain? Is there still suffering? Or does this contact with love somehow transform those, or anesthetize those, or place one beyond the reach of those things? I think that's the promise of certain presentations of awakening that it takes you beyond the reach of suffering, or at least transforms something in you, or somehow makes some change, that pain and suffering has no grip, or it can't get you, something like that. Sometimes awakening is presented in that way, although not always. I suspect maybe not in this case. So, what happens with challenges and difficulties in this context that you're describing? Yeah, thanks for the question. Well, I say no way do they just want to become anesthetize to them, nor place beyond their reach. It's more a matter of, well, we could parse out the meaning of pain and the meaning of suffering. There's a traditional Buddhist view that pain happens, suffering is optional. This is how it's been caused somewhat glibly, I think, in modern Western Buddhism. The suffering is the second dart in Buddha's metaphor. The first one, or similarly, the first one, is the actual pains of the world, whether they're physical or psychological or emotional, but will inevitably happen. Dear ones dying, and so on, and breaking a leg, and whatever, they'll happen. And then our resistance and misery around the fact that they've happened, and the round the fact that we're feeling bad about it, is the optional suffering that we can learn to lessen significantly, very significantly. But in this case, the way I feel it is that certainly all of that, I think, is valid. But at the same time, it seems to me it's more about becoming even more intimate with pain. And I'm not sure I'm going to articulate this very well, but there's a way of not seeing the suffering and pain of another as separate from us, that we are, and that doesn't become an overwhelming, overemphasizing, empathizing so much that we're overwhelmed by the suffering of others. There's research into the difference between empathy, compassion, and altruism. The three are actually distinct. And the research suggests this, what I've read anyway, in a big book by Machia Ricard on the subject, to feel compassionately towards somebody, is very different from empathizing, simply empathizing with them, because compassion is motivating, to wish that someone suffer less, rather than simply feeling what they're feeling. I guess, yeah, again, it comes back to resistance. Are we resisting pain and sorrows in the world, resisting the fact that they exist, and resisting it when they touch us? Or are we open to them? And if our hearts are open, we don't resist them. And we can feel, you know, a tenderness around it, and compassion around it, and sympathy, and so on, of course. But we're not actually overwhelmed by it, and we're not immobilized by it, because we're not resisting. We've got a fluidity in us. Our heart is basically not gripping. It's actually at ease, and it's open, and it's sensitive, and it's kind of functioning naturally, I would say, you know? And so, we're not putting ourselves, we're not emuring ourselves from the sufferings of the world. We're not anesthetizing ourselves. We're not floating above it all. We're right in the thick of it, and somehow we're okay. We're able to stay aware, kind of balanced, kind of centered, and able to respond. Let's hope more effectively. But I think also, I think there was a line in there about sort of unwrapping the gift of life. I think I kind of stand by that. I feel that there's a way that, you know, when we're able to really inhabit our experience and have no resistance to it, right here and now, just as it is, I don't know, I always feel a kind of a core of this sort of incredibly intense gratitude that, you know, this moment just like this is happening, that I'm getting to experience this right now, whatever I am, I don't even, I don't know, I don't make any claims about that. But awareness and experience are both present right now. It's a wondrous thing. We've started at the fourth of your roadside inns, which is awakening. Part of the book, the main body of it, is structured as a journey along a path with a two-tracked cart, stopping at four roadside inns, and the sequence in which you write about them mindfulness, support, absorption, and awakening, and we've started at awakening. So to continue our sort of backwards journey through these, something you said about absorption really was quite interesting indeed. And by absorption, perhaps you'll explain it also, you mean one of the ways you mean that is in terms of samadhi, states of high concentration, and one of the ways in which that's trained is through Jana practice. And you describe your training with Stephen Snyder, power or excidal successor, and frequent guest, actually, on the podcast, on this podcast. By the way, I don't know if you knew that. And you write about Jana's are as near as we can get to awakening without quite touching the live circuitry of the universe as we do in Kensho, or awakening itself. They wear us as thin as we ever could be worn into a threadbare veil through which the deeper reality of non-separateness starts to shine. One breath of wind, and any single thread may snap, and the whole veil fall open. That's marvelous. Few lines there, by the way. I really love those lines, they're fantastic. I wonder if you might talk a bit about your experience with Jana, you're training in that. And also, could you unpack a little bit some of that wonderful imagery there that I just quoted from your book? Yeah, thanks. I was very, very lucky to get to train during during COVID lockdown, actually, with Stephen Snyder in Jana practice. I highly recommend it to anybody who's been meditating a while, and is curious about it. Basically, I know some listeners will know this, and I imagine many others might not, that Jana's is a particular sequence of states of absorption. And I think it's fair enough to say that largely, absorption states are more or less cognate with what are known as flow states in Western psychology. Well, suddenly, we shift gear into an effortlessness, an ease, as the time goes quieter, and we get very absorbed in what we're doing. Actually, a little bit like when I was describing earlier about writing the first draft of my book, I think that was pretty much a classic sort of flow state I was in for those days, all those hours of writing each day. And that's great research on this since the 1970s. When that happens in meditation, it's a little bit different, I guess, because we're not so we're not involving quite such a clear outward task. And we may indeed be following the breath, or we may be just sitting in open presence, or whatever our practice is, we may be doing something that is a little bit like an intentional task of some kind. But there'll be a moment that most meditators, even fairly novice ones, will have experienced this. There's a moment when what had been effortful and difficult to maintain suddenly flips. And all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, is easy. And it's really truly effortless. And we're not, it's as if we're not having to make anything happen. The very kind of concentrated awareness that we've been hoping to get has just appeared by itself. It sort of feels like that. It feels like a real gear shift. So that's a flow state when suddenly it's like it's we're not making it happen. It's happening by itself. And it's beautiful in meditation because we feel very peaceful and very energized and very alert and aware. And often in a very can be very blissful, can also be maybe less blissful and more just peaceful. And they can have this just marvelous level of awareness in it. And so rather than haphazardly stumbling into those as and when they may happen to arise, the Jana system sets out to engineer them. And more than that to actually show that they can get more and more refined and powerful. And so it has a sequence of eight steps, the eight Janas that you can, you can bring, you can learn to cultivate. And usually, at least in the park or outside or system, you sort of, you always do sequentially first, first, and then, and you might, you might spend hours in the first Jana, you know, hours on multiple days. And then there are a whole sequence of visualization exercises you do with each Jana. So it's hundreds of, maybe it's thousands of hours. I don't know, it was a lot of hours of meditating to go through the entire sweep of it. But basically, there are these eight different Janas that are progressively more and more refined and powerful. And within each one, you can kind of be in a different level of depth in it. So there's a kind of anti-chamber way, instead of you're starting to be in it, it's coming, it's going, it's coming, and going, then you're in. And it's lovely, it comes on by itself. It says a little bit like I said, I always felt it was a little bit, a little bit like a neon bulb lighting up. This glow comes on. And then there's a point where it's just on. No, it's not coming and going, it's just on, and you just sort of drop in, and you just sit doing nothing, and it does it all. Then you can get even more deeply into it where it's like there's really nothing else at all, except this incredible buzz glow. That's so good. And that applies to all eight of them. This is not exactly, I mean, Stephen might disagree with him. I'm not trying to give precisely his rendering of it. I'm just trying to give a sense of what it was like for me. But I recognize there were these different levels of depth of absorption in an absorption state. And when you're really deep in, you're not really separate from that state. The sense of being a separate person who's undergoing this particular condition, that drops away. You can't really separate yourself from the Janna state. And that's true of all eight of them. And like I said, it's weird thing that as they get more subtle and more refined, they get more powerful. And they're actually also viewed as a purification practice or kind of cleansing cathartic practice. So actually, when I started out, I was amazed to find that I had done it without knowing it as a kid. You know, as a child I wrote about in One Blade of Gross, I had very severe eczema. And one thing that would sometimes happen to me, usually at night when I couldn't sleep because of the itching, is that I'd suddenly hop into this weird state where it was a warm buzz. My skin didn't hurt anymore. There was no more itching. And I was filled with this sort of glow, buzzing glow that was, again, came on by itself and was extremely pleasurable and peaceful. And actually, the first time I hopped into first Janna while training with Stephen, it's like, "I know this." And when I reported to him after, he said, "Yeah, that's first Janna." I said, "Well, this used to happen to me randomly. I'd always wished I knew how to bring it on, but it would only come on when I recognized it already had come on, came on by itself." Anyway, so that was just a curious little sideline on it. But actually, so when I started doing it with Stephen, I realized at a certain point, particularly with the first Janna and then subsequently, somewhat with the others, that, "Yeah, there'd be something in me that was getting burned off." It was like a cleansing fire. And I would just stay in that Janna for a second, third, fourth, particularly those ones, actually, until whatever it was that needed to burn off, I could just sense it, had gone. And so it was very powerful. I felt it was like holding some kind of chemical in a Bunsen burner flame. And you could see certain elements would produce a different color flame or something in a Bunsen burner in the science lab as a kid. And it was like watching that flame until it had all burnt off. And the Bunsen's own flame was clear again or blue again. And the Janna would be at peace again, gently roaring away. And so it had that side to it, a cleansing side. Now, why do I draw a line between that and awakening? Well, actually, I have to say, in some understandings of Janna, it is a ladder to awakening. They think, you know, by the time you get to the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, you're starting to taste awakening. That may be so, I don't know. Then they talk about a ninth Janna, which definitely is non-dual, absolute, nay plus ultra. You know, there is no more, you know, and possibly so. I did seem to have flashes of that as well. But nevertheless, there's something about the engineering of it, the fact that there is a bit of intentionality, which is different from how classic awakening happens, where it's always a force of its own. And we can't control it. We can only put ourselves ever more in the way of it. And I suppose Janna practice would be doing that, especially when we get to those "higher" Janners or "formless" Janners as fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth. We are, we are, we're definitely much less. Our hold on self is very tenuous and becomes simply very thin. And it's quite possible, yeah, to to just have that single molecule jump that changes everything, that one little molecule hops over. And instead of being Henry in his body, it's just boundless, empty of self, boundless, you know, and it just, it's much easier for that to happen. I'm sure, I'm sure that's true. And at the same time, again, there would be another view. Well, actually, you know, real, real awakening experiences and durable awakening, it's not about meditation. Meditation might, for sure, make us more liable to it. But it, any state that we devise for ourselves or we encounter for ourselves on the cushion, lightly isn't it? I think that's a hard and fast rule, by the way. But it is, there were these very refined states and expanded states of mind that we can find on the cushion that can be, you know, wonderful and really salutary. But, but awakening, it's tricky because they can sometimes, if, you know, if someone's describing them, it can sound rather than like awakening. But I think there's always a force and a shock that some other power, not my own game bursting in and, and has shown me something about the nature of this world and what it is to be alive, that I could not possibly have sort of got to myself. So that would be my tentative border zone between meditative samadhi in the Buddhist sense and awakening. Fascinating, fascinating and wonderfully, wonderfully put. I mentioned you have four ins, mindfulness support and support means lots of things, community, working with a teacher and so on. And we discussed that actually in previous episodes, your journey from lone wolf to, as you described yourself, to opening up to trusting, working with teachers, etc. You also have some, we can't cover everything in the book today, of course, you know. So perhaps I'll leave those dangling as people, you know, to read themselves. You also have this taxonomy of awakenings where you go through four facets of awakening, oneness, emptiness, no way but through and blazing forth. That's, I got those right, those last two. Yeah, yes, yes, you have, you have, yeah. And they, that's also a wonderful part, as well as to return to Janet briefly, or you described as a sort of backfilling, actually, that you had. So in the interest of time, perhaps I'll ask you this and then I have one small question at the end. You, you write here, I grew up traumatized by my skin, life had been a scary place. But I'd also had inklings of a place of freedom, peace and love. At the age of 19, I'd leapt over a whole lot of middle ground and found my intrinsic, awakened nature. You described that earlier. But I had a lot of backfilling to do. And the Janet states help with that. So, someone in your position, who can we say accidentally at 19, had that experience on the beach, wasn't, you weren't shooting for it, you weren't striving for it. People do, though, people meditate and do all sorts of practices to attempt to get what you accidentally stumbled into. And so, I hear you also emphasizing this kind of fortuitous, almost sometimes it's described as grace, isn't it? The grace aspect of awakening. I hate describing that. When you're working with people who are looking for that, they're searching for it, they're not accidentally stumbling into it and wishing for an explanation, but they're actually looking for it. You who stumbled into it, how is it to work with people who are seeking it deliberately? Yeah, well, fortunately, I can deeply empathize with them because I've done that too. You know, when I was 19, that weird, thunderbolt happened. But two months later, I had a kind of breakdown. I was very unhappy for several years. I gradually started discovering that there were healing arts. There were ways of trying to heal the psyche. I got into therapy. I got into meditation. And for me, initially, meditation was nothing but healing, soothing, calming my nervous system, all of that. I desperately needed all of that. And only after a certain point of getting a bit more stable as a self, really. Did I remember that extraordinary time when I'd been 19 and start to wonder what was that? How do you find it again? I know it was somehow the truth. I know it was real. But I didn't know how to get back there. And I wanted to. So I can sympathize a lot with people who may not have tasted it, but want to. And actually, if we're not there, we're not there, whether we've been there before or not. And there's actually, there's quite a large number of people who've had tastes and don't know how to get back there. Or sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not there. They're easily caught by the mechanism of self again. How on earth do you get more stably there? More stably open to it, let's say. And so honestly, I don't think it's not a problem that I don't know myself. And I never thought I would cross a watershed and be there more consistently there, as it were, really meaning here. As my teachers were, several teachers that I've been lucky enough to have clearly didn't have that problem. Am I there? Am I not there? And sometimes there, I'm often not there. They didn't have that problem. And I thought I'm not constituted in the kind of way that to be a person who will ever get there. And I'm not really okay with that, but so be it. I'm sort of sometimes grumblingly resigned and sometimes frustrated about it. But I was wrong, actually, because by doing practice consistently with good guidance, and I mean the guidance that was appropriate for me at that time, actually something did happen that was more of a threshold that didn't really go back. And it was more like something just was knocked out that hasn't come back even now. This is now 20, 24, it's like 16 years later, I can almost I can date it exactly when it happened. And so I can bring a certain amount of encouragement to people that I hope that really it can happen. But what I'm also trying to say in this book is, if we get a taste of love, it doesn't matter. Because if we're feeling like, thank you for bringing up that backfilling with Janna practice. But I had to do it with mindfulness practice. I had to do it with feeling connected and supported and being trusting enough to open to support. I had to do all of that. And I still do. And so what I'm trying to advocate for, I think, in this book, is that there's totally the sudden awakening world. There's the reality of it. They call it subatticed scholars call it subatticed sudden awakening. And it's sudden because it's already here. We just didn't recognize it. So the shift happens in an instant where we suddenly recognize, oh boy, it's all totally different from what I thought. This is all me or, you know, I'm not here at all. And it's all just one flux, a marvellous flow. That's real. So is gradual development, where I very much am a self. And I'm gradually healing, growing, tending, warming, opening up the heart of that self. That I think all of that side is needed as well. So I would guess the great majority of us, definitely myself. And I think it's actually the gradual practice, probably, that makes the sudden revelatory moments more able to diffuse, suffuse our experience in others to be integrated. And I think that's probably an ongoing practice. I know that, I mean, as I was saying a few years ago, you know, my brain got messed up, my something very difficult happening up in my close circle. And it, it was a, it was a new reckoning, you know, and luckily I had decades of practice, and some, maybe some sort of insight into how I operate and function and what my problem points are and stuff. That made it easier to figure out, oh yes, I've got to let this be the case, you know, and that was, like I said, a heart opening and a release basically of resistance. And then, you know, beauty comes back. I mean, beauty tinged with pain, pain as beauty, beauty as pain, it comes back. And I don't have to fight anything. You know, like a wish for the world to be much less brutal for humans to be much less brutal than they sometimes are, you know, and, and that starts from a place of recognition of how things are, not from a refusal to accept a, I don't know, that yeah, not sure that's very clearly put, but. I think it's very evocative indeed, actually, what you've said, you know, original love, your latest book is full of this sort of, these sorts of considerations, beautifully written, goes without saying that you're such a masterful writer, and it really is a beautiful book. And we've really only touched on a few of the themes that are described, that are explored in original love. It's marvelous. And I recommend everybody to go out and get a copy of it. Would you indulge two niggling questions that I had that ought to be probably quite short, and maybe are a little non-central, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, sure. The first one, I'll give them both to you so you know what you're dealing with. First one is, in your acknowledgments, you talk, you're thanking everybody for reading and helping you with the book and song. And one of those you thank is Anne Shukman, who I think is your mother by what follows, just thank you for the course correction, Mum. I'm curious what the course correction was, so that's the first niggling question. And the second niggling question is, I noticed in the bibliography you had listed Augustine's or Augustine's Confessions. And you don't refer to him as far as I remember in the book, so I'm really curious about what that's doing there. Well, I mean, it's wonderful, it's great. So why is that there? So those are my two questions, what was the course corrections and why Augustine's Confessions? Yeah, thank you. Okay, let me take Augustine first, that's easier. Where everyone makes of that book, I mean, I love it actually. I'm not sure I've read the best translation, but I think there's a really good new one out that I haven't read. But anyway, I think it's a marvelous work. I love the frankness of it above all. And I love the fact that all be it, he is usually credited as being a sort of reviver or reformulator of the doctrine of original sin, which is, I think, a very problematic doctrine, but easily probably misunderstood. But he talks about the kind of love that I resonate with, you know, and his, I kind of exactly remember the details, he's in a garden and I kind of, he has a real sort of meeting reckoning with a vast unconditional love. Of course, in the cultural climate of his day, there's only one way to interpret that, I guess, which was the G word. But, you know, I think we're in a time now when we absolutely don't need to make that interpretation. And there's enough neuroscience, I think, to show that we can be discovering an intrinsic, unconditional loving quality in awareness itself when it's free and unencumbered by narratives of self. So he was just kind of, I guess, a little spark in the background for this book on that theme of love, really. And my mum, too, she's interesting. I think by any account, she's quite an interesting woman. She was a Russian scholar much of her life, who at a certain point became an anglic and priest, one of the very first ordained in the Church of England, which she had a difficult time with, actually, in spite of allowing women to be ordained. It remained for the most part, quite passionately sexist, at least some parts of it, and she had a difficult ride. And then she left the Church of England, God involved in running a little Orthodox Institute, Russian/Greek Orthodox Institute, which was more congenial for her, I think, with her background in Russian studies. She'd actually been a spy, by the way, way back when she first left the university, she was recruited by MI5 or MI6, got trained in spycraft, because basically there were so few Russian speakers in the mid-50s, late-50s, that anybody who could speak Russian was liable to being tapped by the security services. But anyway, she had a complex childhood herself, and she's a complex human being, but she has her flavor of Christianity today is quite idiosyncratic, probably. She's outside any real church, but it's all about love. The course correction is in that territory, but I wanted to remain a little bit under wraps, actually, precisely what the dialogue was. It was just a little bit of dialogue, I had with her, about spiritual matters that, yes, that's right, and it helped in my reworking of this book. You think your mother has tasted or touched, or maybe even abides in, the sort of awakening you're talking about here, albeit from a more Christian route? Well, I think she would say no, not at all, and it might be true. She's been curious about meditation, has tried it at different times, and I think she has some practice of Christian contemplation, what do they call it, centering prayer. I think that's part of her life sometimes, but she's not really, I don't think she's someone who's particularly interested, actually, in awakening. It's interesting, I think it's maybe it's generational, but right now, I mean, over the last 10 years, I'd say, there seems to have been a great resurgence of interest in awakening, interesting interest in non-duality, interest in the possibilities of, the deeper possibilities of meditation. After, of course, a huge surge in interest in meditation as a mental health aid, with mindfulness practice, of course, that's been a very visible thing, but I actually feel now, and maybe it's not even the last 10 years, more than the last five years, I see a huge increase in, well, people realizing, hey, meditation isn't only about nervous system regulation. It is about that, and that's great, and that's fantastic, you can help with that, but actually, it's also about a highly significant existential investigation of what really am I, who really am I, what is it to be a human being, and it's not necessarily that you get answers to that, but you definitely can get the relinquishing of prior answers. You can open up the assumptions and preconceptions that we've had, vastly. That's a pretty exciting thing, and in a way, in a certain way, I can't help feeling is kind of more important than the therapeutic mindfulness. I don't know, maybe that's quite not exactly the right thing to say, because you've got to have the therapeutic help that mindfulness can offer as well, but the difference between helping my sense of self be more at peace and at ease and so on versus what actually is this sense of self, you know, it's a very, the fact that we can, any of us at any moment, can actually relax our grip on our sense of who we are and feel the heart warm up and kind of kindle and then feel the boundary that I had somehow imagined was there between me and the rest of the world feel, actually, that that's just transparent, it's never really there. There's really no separation, and that any of us can actually just recognize that in any moment, and if there's really no separation, then we might see, well, there's still a little knot somewhere in my chest area that's telling me I'm me, but that little knot is just a thing arising, it's like a coffee cup, there's a coffee cup in front of me, there's a little knot in my chest area, and there's a tree outside that all items arising in one great boundless field. And when I see that, I can actually find this knot untying itself, and that whatever I was, I wasn't, and actually there's this great boundlessness that that will serve as its alternative, as it's actually as reality, as a reality. So that's an amazing thing that we humans can make that shift and make that discovery and be aware of it, and over time, perhaps, have it become accessible to us whenever we choose to look for it. Yeah, so, actually, Steve, again, just one more thing I want to say, like, in the olden days, Zen talked about the original face that you've had since before, even your parents were born, and that original face is just a poetic cipher for something without time, without limit, without space, shared by all phenomena, in fact, and when we get a flash of it, a glimpse of it, or when somehow we're able to tap into it anytime. It also, it's an inadequate term, original face, you know, it's actually much more like an original, generative force, a love. It's not inert, it's utterly dynamic. So original love published by HarperCollins, Henry Schuchman, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Henry, as we were talking, after the recording, you mentioned, or we got to talking about, your new app, I asked, could we record a bit of a PS, a bit of an addendum about the app, and you graciously agreed. So could you say something about this new app, your co-founder, what's it all about? Yes, there were thousands of meditation apps out there, but we, meaning the little team that has made the app, felt there was something missing, which was an app, that rather than offering lots of choices in what you can do, like hundreds, dozens of little courses, and among them dozens of meditations within each one, so that you have to really choose what you want to do, kind of thing. We decided to make an app that had no choices at all, that every day is a new sit, and you can't do the following ones until you've done the preceding ones, so that each time you do one, the next one unlocks, and you're just on a path or a way of meditation training. So it really struck us that you can actually teach meditation, you can guide somebody in it in a long-term path, or medium-term path, and gradually exposing the practitioner to some of these primary aspects of practice that are in the book original love. It was really almost the app was a practical application of the book, so it takes the user through developing mindfulness skills, opening up to support Auckland Connectedness as the second in, first and second is, and then bringing on possible openings to flow states, and then encouraging perhaps little glimpses, little tiny, incremental little flashes of something non-dual, and cycling through those four zones or four ins, so that gradually, you know, we get more and more immersed in them, and that's what the app offers is a way of a path of developing in all those areas of practice in a sort of systematic, programmatic, choice-free way, because we were hearing from a lot of, in the research we did, we were hearing from a lot of people like, "I'm just overwhelmed by choice," and the last thing I wanted to open up a meditation app where I can sort of relax and de-stress and sort of, and then have to make choices, based on what, you know. So the response so far has been fantastic, actually, we've got, we only launched recently and already have something like 10,000 users, and the feedback is just, is really, really just a lot of gratitude that I don't have to choose, I don't have to choose what to do. Wow, to what do you owe that take up? That's incredible. Well, we were very lucky that we had a mention on a Tim Ferriss podcast, a brief mention, and that was when we were still in what they're called beta here in the US, just a test version, and suddenly our test, which had 300 people on it, suddenly had 3,000 people on it, and many of those people have converted it into regular users, and then there's just, it's word of mouth has just spread it, and yeah, so it's, it's ticking along. Oh, congratulations on that, thank you very much. Thank you for listening to another Guru Viking podcast. For more interviews like these, as well as articles, videos, and guided meditations, visit www.GuruViking.com.