25 Questions

After 20 years of trying to write your book, how did you finally manage to deliver The Novice: Why I Became A Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit & What I Learned? Despite an overwhelming compulsion to write, the process only took shape when circumstances were right, just as meditation only happens under certain conditions: one has to be basically sane and balanced. For years my past was too unresolved and my present too turbulent for me to turn those events into a coherent story. I needed distance, but that didn’t simply emerge from the passage of time; the indispensible ingredient was the emotional contentment that came with my successful relationships as a husband, a father and a son. Those relationships were in turn made possible by years of therapy, once I admitted a lot of painful truths to myself and stopped running.

You were raised Catholic. What drove you to become a Buddhist monk? Catholicism never sat well with me, in part because my earliest teachers, being superstitious and poorly educated, expected me to quietly accept whatever I was told. Still, I tried very hard to make sense of what I was taught, and never doubted that it was worthwhile to look beyond the superficial, purely material life. Although my teachers succeeded in instilling those qualities in me, the tools they gave me – prayer, faith and fear of damnation – just didn’t work for me. Buddhism on the other hand had enormous appeal. It’s like a Home Depot of mental-emotional tools, practical, down to earth, explicable and open to the enquiring mind.

Your book speaks to us on many levels. One that sticks out is your theme of seeking out a truth or direction to follow. What did you conclude in this regard? That you have to seek it; it doesn’t just come to you out of the clouds. I’ve read several books published in the last few years by authors who claim to have been granted sudden enlightenment, or views of ultimate truth, or insight into real reality. There’s nothing new in these claims, and I think they’re made mostly to get people’s attention. The desire to believe such things is universal, and it takes effort to push past this lazy thinking. People in all places and all times want to believe that an answer exists outside of themselves, that they can escape their demons without facing them and don’t have to step out of their comfort zone. Nothing is more disabling. Nobody’s out there trying to delude us; that’s unnecessary. We delude ourselves with illusions of certainty and security.

Does any religion have a handle on “the way” we should live our lives? I don’t believe that any system of belief or explanation of how things work can replace a sense of inner balance and intuitive understanding. However, those inner qualities don’t come without inner work. We human beings have an extraordinary intellect that can’t explain everything; we also have deep sensitivities that can lead us down dark and foreboding paths. Until we use our wits to integrate the two, we remain blind in one eye, unbalanced, incomplete and ruled by our insecurities. That’s why all our material progress, for example, has had such little impact on the number of wars or the scope of poverty and starvation in the world.

When you recollect your childhood, you seem to matter-of-factly speak of feeling misunderstood, unhappy, and mistreated by your dad and out-of-place. Does this feel any less painful now, given the distance and perspective of time? Time doesn’t heal by itself. The more we try to ignore childhood trauma, the more we drive it underground. The instinctive defenses I developed as a child still tend to rear their collective head, but I’ve learned to deal with them and to develop alternative responses. My own experience as a father, which came late in life, has taught me about my childhood as of course nothing else can, and that in turn has been an empowering foundation for the inner work of psychoanalysis and mindful reflection, not to mention the exhausting, gut-wrenching, exhilarating, painful, revivifying ten-year writing of this book.

As a young man, you shoplifted, took drugs, and felt uncomfortable with the life you were living. How did you find the courage to leave it behind you and seek a change? Most of the things in my past that others describe as ‘courageous’ strike me as simply desperate. How could I not leave that downward spiral behind at the first opportunity? My father intimidated the hell out of me, and he hurt me, but he was also larger than life and terrifically inspiring. I saw him as fearless, and grew up simply expecting to inherit his fearlessness. In the opening pages of the book I thank Dad, ‘for the grit.’ That’s no mere formality.

You traveled to far-off places when travel abroad wasn’t as easy as it is today. What did you like most about being in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India? I liked being lost and out of touch – the old-time adventure of it all. I’m appalled at the thought of satellite phones and GPS. They’re great for getting things done, but I think it’s a shame to take a practical, goal-oriented approach to everything. I’d never have experienced the exquisite wonder or danger of wilderness, or of being a stranger in strange lands if the information highway, not to mention my entire family, had been just keystrokes away. Of course, the places I visited are far more dangerous today. I read the news from Afghanistan in particular with great sadness. However, no place stands more indelibly in my memory than India. It’s like heaven and hell all rolled up into one.

You developed hepatitis and were hospitalized in another country with no friends or family around you. How did you get through this? I don’t know. I had no choice. I carried the I-Ching everywhere and that helped me maintain some inner continuity. Later, I got my hands on the complete works of Shakespeare, and a copy of the King James Bible. I consumed them both, mostly while I was recuperating from something or another. I was also inspired by the people who lived off the land, their instinct to survive no matter what. Their poverty was beyond my experience, their powerlessness something I couldn’t conceive, but I saw how it toughened them. Without saying a word, without even paying attention to me, they shamed me out of my self-pity and my weakness of spirit. They inspired me to never ever give up.

What are some of the Buddhist tenets or teachings that you continue to appreciate even though you’re no longer a monk? Most importantly, that freedom begins with taking responsibility for our own actions. The Buddha taught that empowering truths must be self-evident, which means that we have to look for ourselves. No one can hand us the answers, because it’s the questions that count – whether we answer them or not. Ironically, his teachings convinced me to let go of everything I learned as a monk. Clearly, what stayed with me is what remains significant. The Buddha’s remarks about the way we think we should be have led me to appreciate the deep simplicity of his meaning, even when it seems most complicated. This concocted self-image lies at the root of all defensiveness, all evil, and suffering. When it seems most impossible to fathom, it’s most definitely our own illusion. Delving into that has brought me freedom I never imagined. The Buddha was an awesome teacher. Still, I no longer call myself a Buddhist and do not wish to represent any tradition.

You write in your book, “To this day, comfort makes me nervous.” Why? Because comfort and pleasure are routine substitutes for happiness. Apart from the fact that their pursuit puts true happiness on the back burner, the misapprehension itself causes real misery. The age-old spiritual malaise of humanity all comes from the illusory security of having stuff – and not just material stuff. Look at reputation, control and spiritual rectitude. The ultimate comfort is certainty. It’s an illusion of course – look where we all end up – but projecting that illusion is an industry that grows in direct proportion to our culture of comfort. There’s no greater source of imbalance and disharmony in the world, both between peoples and also between the human race and the environment.

Why did you stop believing in God? Do you believe now? I think because I tried so hard to believe. My disappointment at not being answered turned into bitterness, but in time I saw the diversity of people and beliefs, the impossibility of proving anything or anyone ultimately right or wrong, and all those emotions evaporated. I see God as a way of speaking. My parents used to say, ‘God bless you,’ and I still find that a tender wish. I find myself saying it to those I love. I sometimes need to express intelligence itself, the order we find in – or project upon – life. The word God seems appropriate. I don’t believe in a person in the clouds or an intelligence that willed us into existence, more because I so strongly disapprove of insistent believers than because I need to disbelieve.

Did you learn to speak another language as a Tibetan Buddhist? What was that like? I picked up a smattering of Sanskrit, but mainly I learned to speak and read Tibetan. It was a real pain because, unlike French, Italian or even the Indian languages, there were absolutely no common roots. Even the sounds were foreign. Once I got past that, however, it was fun. Tibetan is grammatically and syntactically much simpler than English, though like English it leans heavily on idiom for its subtleties, and has similar tones and rhythms. Written Tibetan hasn’t a fraction of the punctuation that we use in English – not even spaces between words – so as a writer I really appreciate the flexibility of our own written language and all that’s gone into it.

Why did you write, “I’m heartened by those who can face their weaknesses or do good, without having to resort to some proprietary belief system?” Beliefs can be helpful, but only if we take them with a grain of salt. Beliefs that must stand no matter what make people crazy. I don’t care if those people call themselves religious, scientific or atheistic – I deeply distrust them. They insist on certainty, believe that explanations can account for everything and are motivated unconsciously by fear of life’s ultimate uncertainty. Those who cannot embrace this obvious truth are incapable of true humility. They’re a danger to mankind and the planet.

Are we in a period of unprecedented self-examination? A lot of people want to think so. The times and places in which both the Buddha and the Christ lived were times of great change and questioning, and that may or may not be true of today; only time will tell. The thought that we can destroy our own planet is having a sobering effect on us as a race, but it’s certainly not unprecedented. I think every child that’s born sooner or later asks, ‘What’s the point? Why am I here? Why am I me?” However, things start to get interesting when we bring those questions into our adult life alongside the certainty that they’ll never be satisfactorily answered. Some people are doing that, but most people always have and always will invest in wishful thinking. They can’t imagine living without certainty.

How did your Italian Catholic family respond when you went off to become a monk? They were pretty confused, but my parents were also afraid I’d take off and never come back, so they took a soft stance and tried to understand. They didn’t know where to begin though, and kept asking me questions like, “But what do you do, all day long?” Some of the others took a cautious step back, but once they saw I wasn’t out to convert them, most were mildly interested.

What advice would you give to someone who is searching for answers, truths, or direction? You say you are a skeptical seeker of truth, but you discovered a number of truths, such as this: belief is precarious, especially when it demands certainty. Tell us what else you’ve found. Belief systems are a vanity. The thought that we can know why we’re here and what we should do is a desperate attempt to anchor ourselves in a sea of uncertainty, not a genuine claim to knowledge. Let’s begin with the admission that we don’t know. Of course, we can know things like how drive a car or to run a household, as well as stuff we should and shouldn’t do, such as (not) hurting others and working for the common good. The problems begin when we try to come up with universal explanations, or unambiguous systems of knowledge. Life is contradictory and unpredictable, and yet we build monuments to our ungrounded ideals and then expect life to conform. We’re setting ourselves up for disappointment and, when we abnegate responsibility for it, disharmony rules.

It seems you spent most of your life feeling inadequate, but at some point in your monkhood you discovered a newfound self-esteem. So why did you end up walking away from it? The teachings of the Buddha himself led me away from my cozy nook in the august tradition of Buddhism. By following his directions to pursue my own enquiry, I came to see that adopting the conclusions of others would never set me free. I learned that true belief is belief in oneself, and the only faith that counts is faith in one’s own instincts to figure things out and find one’s own way. That’s why I grew self-confident from it, and why I walked away from it. The two are inseparable. An article I wrote in 2005 for Tricycle magazine, entitled A Sense of Belonging, explored the paradox of institutionalizing the path to freedom.

Why do you say that meditation is not about seizing control of your life, but of letting go? Meditation works in part by frustrating your expectation of it. That’s how we let go of illusions, and that means identifying those illusions in the first place. They’re of our own making but they’re largely subconscious and we hide inside them, hoping for security. The thought that we can take control of our lives is an ego trip. Of course, to the extent that we have political and economic freedom, we also have a say in how we orient ourselves, but to call that ‘control’ is absurd. What befalls us on the path of life is never free of chance and circumstance. Insisting on our expectations just ratchets up the sense of entitlement that’s strangling our world today. It’s no way to ground and balance ourselves.

Did you envy or mistrust those who seem to exude a certainty or confidence about life through their level of beliefs or religious faith? There was a time when I profoundly envied them, and there are times even today when I hear of somebody’s claim to certainty and feel a flash of regret, but that response barely survives a moment. It flies in the face of everything life’s taught me. It’s hard to resist things we really want to believe, but believing because we want/need to is a vicious circle and a recipe for disaster. It’s immature – a teenager’s way of cutting corners and avoiding inconvenient truths. When we work under such false pretenses, the flaws break through and the house of cards collapses.

Why are people drawn to Buddhism? I think people are drawn to Buddhism for a number of reasons. It has a reputation in the West as a ‘scientific’ or ‘atheistic’ religion, even though its Asian forms can be intensely religious and even superstitious. Buddhism demands faith, but only as a means to an end. What counts ultimately is faith in one’s own ability to change, not in divine intervention, which is simply not an issue in Buddhism. If you don’t get it right away, you need to trust that the historical Buddha’s teachings will eventually make some sort of sense, but of course the same is true of physics and other fields of study. Most appealing of all to Westerners is Buddhism’s repertoire of transformative tools. That’s a sharp contrast to the Abrahamic religions which insist that you must be good, but never bother to explain how to stop being bad, let alone why something is bad.

Did Buddhist psychology address your biggest concerns of fear, guilt and disappointment? At the time that I was studying it most intensely, no. It was just a bunch of definitions. I saw no Tibetan or Sanskrit word remotely close to ‘guilt,’ or saw fear described as the root of denial and delusion. However, Chogyam Trungpa, the first Tibetan to bridge the East-West gap and certainly the most successful so far, had an extraordinarily clear-minded take on disappointment and the meditative process. Disappointment is key to identifying our illusions, for it arises from the expectation that life will serve our desires. Life does no such thing, and the acceptance of that fact, as unpleasant as it is, is accompanied by potent insight. Who knows what’s around the next corner? Who’s exempt from tragedy?

You almost died from black water fever. How did that experience change your perspective on life? It made me glad to be alive. I’ve never quite lost that. I don’t see how anyone who skirts death can forget it for long. There are times when I deliberately recall that experience, in order to shake my present preoccupations into perspective. There’s nothing like the reality of death to iron out the wrinkles and help you see straight.

How did your life as a Buddhist monk help you become a happy family man? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Only if you think of Buddhism as a set of rules. The reflective lifestyle of a monk helped put me back together and gave me the tools I needed to make it on my own. For years I scorned the simple rewards of life as trivial, but I no longer shy away from domestic joy. Loving relationships, as John Welwood points out, are an ideal crucible in which we can intimately acknowledge and work with our wounds, fears and illusions. The life I live with my wife Caroline goes beyond the narcissistic pleasure that characterized my first marriage, or the confusion of my second, when I attempted to fit into conventional life without accounting for my years as a monk. My situation today is a constantly challenging, ever-renewing ground of introspection and facing up to reality. It’s profoundly different from the family in which I grew up. I understand now why I was so angry and so cynical about marriage and family.

Do you think everything happens for a reason? I believe in cause and effect, but that phrase is often used to imply that some benevolent supernatural force is making things happen just the way they need to happen for one’s personal betterment. I don’t think the universe is for us or against us; we have to work for rewards like that and, precisely because I believe in cause and effect, that we have to work it the right way. Good intentions are not enough; wishful thinking and choosing to see the negative as positive are not consistent with clear-mindedness. A meaningful life demands skill, strategy and insight.

What’s Mindful Reflection? Is it a sort of meditation? Yes and no. I coined the term to distance what I teach from the banal view of meditation as a tranquil escape from reality. I’m interested in getting to the root of stress, not avoiding it. The Buddha taught mindfulness as a way to increase one’s attention, deconstruct subconscious judgments and grow kinder. He also advocated specific reflective practices in which we develop a more adaptive view of the world as well as a context in which to change mental habits and resist entropy.