Dialogue with Zen Master Doshin, Sept 20th 2016

well Andrew it's so wonderful to see you again thank you it's wonderful to be with you and I'm so I'm delighting in our emerging new friendship yes I am as well and I really admire what you've been doing for the last number of years but I most admire what you've been doing for the last two years well let's see what happened is the three and a half years ago I fell from grace and my community was decimated as a result really of my own pride and then I more or less disappeared for about three years and there a lot of work on myself did a lot of suffered enormously and I think really throughout the last 12 months I've begun to emerge and come out the other side so I I'm feeling very much in a renewed state but it's been the most harrowing journey of my life [Music] but I feel that I need them I need it there's a message I needed to receive and I don't think I was gonna hear that message any other way unless I fell as far and as hard as I actually did and what is that message that you needed to hear that you ain't that that I'd been in that an arrogant a very a very arrogant man and an important in in in shocking ways quite deluded and being driven by unwholesome forms of ambition sounds like you were human well that's what I've come to realize you come to understand that I was that and and and and the the pain and the shame and the humiliation of it all and the I think more than that I think the suffering itself for long for months on end grueling nature over the unforgiving nature of the suffering is what compelled me a forced me to let go of a lot of deluded ideas I had an emotionally driven unexamined emotion NEADS so in the end or on the other side of most of that I actually feel a level of gratitude that I've never felt in my life and I'm feel I feel I have a chance to do something in a very different way than ever did coming for a much more wholesome place than myself that was available to me in the past so I do feel very grateful much more integrated I think that'll be the result it's not really how I think about it I what I feel is something something there was a kind of a dark form of ambition and pride and a need to see myself as being superior and using and using other people too as mirrors in which to see my own not and to fulfill the needs of my own narcissistic cravings to be brutally honest about it so now that much of that has fallen away from falling away I feel so much more at ease and more uncomfortable to being simply myself so it feels much more it feels so much yet it really feels so much easier to simply to be Who I am without needing to needing to needing or wanting or hoping that other people will see me in a way that I so desperately wanted them to so it's an enormous relief enormous relief but it's amazing how much I held on in spite of so much and what it really took for me to let go was quite something and but but now that I'm very much on the other side of it the primary feeling I have is gratitude and joy and much more freedom do you see the perfection of how things unfolded now I do I remember Jerry and then at the early stages of the collapsing of my community I felt like the the earthquake of the century was happening in through and around me and it was the worst thing that ever could have happened and a friend asked a powerfully awakens spiritual teacher that he knew to call me to console me to advise me to enlighten me and this teacher was the minute we'd never met each other but when we started speaking on the phone he he didn't get to anything personal with me he understood what the situation was what all he started saying was isn't there most isn't the most incredible thing that's ever happened aren't you so grateful look at the opportunity God's giving you for purification isn't this fantastic isn't it wonderful isn't this great and I could immediately recognize the deep and profoundly liberated place in his heart that he was speaking to me from and I knew the place he was calling me to because I had called many of my own students over the years in the same place and I spoke from the same place and I could fully recognize simultaneously that I was absolutely unable to meet him and I heard myself in a very pathetic and embarrassing way considering who I had been for so long saying no no this is the worst thing that ever happened just never should have happened oh no and I was full of self-pity and in so much grief yes so much grief and self-pity and wishing it wishing that it wasn't happening which on one level of course was understandable but something much deeper more profound was happening and I needed to really wake up that something needed to give in my own in my own being and I was I was the cause of all this and from from the highest perspective to use Mehta fit mythical language God was giving me giving me an opportunity to purify myself to cleanse myself to face my sins and my arrogance and I wasn't during that phone call I wasn't able to I wasn't getting able to realize that that was simply so from a very small part of me way back deep inside and I knew that he was right but I was so spiritual and I and I say with shock what I shouldn't be I was so spiritually unprepared to meet that moment and so it took me really about three years after their phone call to get to the point of my in my own development where where I don't know where it's all true and everything he was saying was true and it is the truth there's took me a long time to get there you know jump oh my teacher was so instrumental in me not having to go through something similar for me because my personality is very similar to years in which way well it's damn the torpedoes yeah well that's how I was that's how I was it's burned the boats on the beach there's no escape and I was trying to eliminate the deficiencies in my own personality by projecting them on to my students mm-hmm and eliminating them and my students thinking I was ridding the world I I'm guilty of exactly the same crime yeah I did that way too well that's the way shadows work what we can't see in ourselves we project into others or or and tell me if you agree or I think that there were there were parts of myself that I was avoiding or that I was frightened over that I was in denial of and so when some of my students would act out in certain ways that would display weaknesses that reminded me at an unconscious level of weaknesses myself that I didn't want to face I found it unbearable I found it unbearable and then I would shame them and blame them for it but I was but it was it really had nothing to do with them it had to do with might with me and isn't that the same thing just a little different view yes yes and I can really relate to that for example when I was afraid and about ready to display a weakness rather than doing that rather than being open honest and vulnerable I would project something onto the students in order to avoid displaying my weakness yeah and it's just the same it's slightly more visible but so I saw them so the meta question and when we're talking about is you know we both done a lot of spiritual work we both been teachers for a long time and relatively speaking we should be more awake than a lot of other people because of that and in many ways we obviously aren't have been and yet in spite of it we're both speaking about unexamined shadow and this is something that that Ken Wilber is spoken about with a with a great deal of clarity and urgency for many years and I've also had many talks with myself about it but but in spite of how much I thought I knew and understood about the territory there was so much about it that I was literally radically oblivious to in my own conduct and behavior in consciousness and so part of the paradox of awakening at this time in history is how can people who have a measure of profound spiritual awakening and enlightenment still be so unconscious to