Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute talk given on the final evening of a two-week Vipassana retreat at Camp Cedar Glen in Julian, California in 1977, Jack Kornfield reflects on what draws people to Buddhist practice by sharing how different personal motivations—intellectual curiosity, the weight of childhood suffering, longing for deeper understanding—have shaped his own path and that of his fellow teachers Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Richard and Jackie. Kornfield recounts his formative experiences: encountering Tibetan mysticism as a teenager, ordaining as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, training intensively under the strict teacher Ajahn Chah and later under the eccentric Burmese master Ajahn Asabha, and the difficult process of integrating profound meditation experiences back into ordinary Western life. He traces the pattern of expecting permanent spiritual transformation only to discover old patterns resurface, illustrating this with a striking moment at Dartmouth where he found himself back in his former role as a hashish dealer—a humbling reminder that practice is an ongoing unfolding rather than a final destination. Throughout, he emphasises the importance of honouring diverse paths, learning from teachers without copying them, and letting go of even the deepest insights to stay present to life as it unfolds.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 C CG.mp3
UUID: 1486839d-4a54-4e59-a2da-a4b605cd215b
Teacher: Jack Cornfield
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Jack Cornfield)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~7,226
This recording by Jack Kornfield was made on April fourteenth nineteen seventy seven at a two week Vipassana meditation course in Julian, California. Before giving this talk on the last evening, if if I tell of my own practice, I usually get chided by Joseph because I’ve often been known to talk about myself for a long time. In this case, Joseph isn’t here. However, dead on it. However, I’m kind of tired, so I guess I won’t be able to really do it anyway.
But I’ll start. The purpose for me of telling it all beside that it’s fun and I can make it amusing is that there are certain kinds of things that have been, in my experience or the experience of Joseph or Richard or Jackie, Sharon, the other person we teach with, that are really common to people’s practice and the evolution of their Dharma, their their own lives. And it’s kind of reassuring to hear that other people had the same difficulties, I guess. First of all, just like to talk for a moment about what it is that brings people to the Dharma on a very personal level. Lots of different things.
We talked about motivations during the retreat and practice. But it’s interesting to look quite specifically at some of us. Joseph studied philosophy at Columbia University and was very much into studying existential philosophy and also Greek philosophy. He’s a clear and an intellectual kind of mind, and he had a great deal of curiosity about how things were and why things were the way they are. And that, combined with some psychedelic drugs at a time in the early sixties, kind of brought him to the Dharma.
He was in Peace Corps in Thailand and met some Buddhist monks and began to try and meditate and eventually met his teacher in India. His motivation was very much from one of trying to understand how things were, that question. Sharon, whom many of you know, who didn’t teach with us this retreat, a woman who teaches with us, very beautiful, very compassionate woman, her motivation was quite different. She had of people in this country, she had about the most painful, difficult childhood of anybody that I know. And there are stories that she told me one night of it were really horror stories.
She went to India when she was seventeen and a half after getting to university very young. She’d been at University of Buffalo for almost two years. And she heard her first teacher talk about the Buddhist teaching of suffering and coming to the end of it, she said, that’s for me. It was like there was no question but that there was so much pain in her life that that was her motivation. And she practiced in a very strong way for basically for five years with her teacher, Goenkaji, doing retreat after retreat after retreat, then getting a house in the mountains with Joseph and sitting for six months and going back and doing retreats.
Because her motivation was there was nothing else that she wanted more than to come to that understanding that brought the end of suffering. Joseph’s motivation was to understand more deeply, and he practiced. Well, now he’s been practicing for over ten years. Seven years in India with his teacher, most of that time with Anagarika Munindra, also with Goenkaji for several years. Never really asked carefully what Richard and Jackie’s motivations were, but to let you know a little of their background so that you can see that we’ve all been in our different things together.
Richard’s been married and divorced and been in law school and dropped out and went to India and as was turned on by Joseph, an old friend of Joseph from childhood, got inspired and went and really practiced in a very dedicated way for several years in India with Goenkaji and Munindra, particularly Manindra as his teacher, returned to this country, practiced for at least a couple of years with Seungsahn, the Zen master. Jackie was traveling in Asia after graduating from university and met teachers in India and again got inspired and very much like Sharon. After getting turned on, I think she left India for a while to go to Japan and returned and got, on her travel away from India, started to appreciate the importance of the Dharma in her life and went back and again practiced for a number of years straight, really quite intensively in retreats and in silent houses that were set up. For myself, my motivation was somewhat different. The first first contact with the dhamma in any formal sense that I had came when I was fourteen.
I grew up in a intellectual upper middle class family, Jewish family in the East. My father was teaching in medical schools and very scientific, rationally oriented world. I was into science and understanding things in that way. Somehow I got a copy of T. Lobsang Rampa’s book, The Third Eye, when I was fourteen, which if you don’t know T.
Lobsang Rampas, he’s a he was actually a plumber in London who fell out of a tree one day and hit his head really hard on the ground and supposedly, as he tells it, switched consciousness with a Tibetan Lama and began writing all these books that were tales of his lives in Tibet. And they’re really quite exciting and marvelous books, The Third Eye Was One, The Doctor from Lhasa, Mysterious Caves, The Initiations in the Opening of Your Third Eye. And I got very excited by the book. The thing in it, the quality that most excited me was the fact that if even one of his stories was true, one of the many stories of Tibet were true, Then it meant that that whole worldview with which my life had been encompassed by science and and material things and rationality was, in fact, only a little part of the world, and there was a whole lot else. And that was very intriguing to me.
My motivation, if you will, and it grew as I went I went to Dartmouth College and also studied some time at Harvard. And my motivation grew as I got to spend time with some of the brightest and supposedly most, some of the most respected people in our society in terms of education and what they were supposed to know. And I always had the feeling, with a few special exceptions, that they really didn’t know. You know? I knew that I didn’t know either.
That was okay. But these guys who were teaching or women or whoever it was who was teaching, mostly men, didn’t know. And I was always very skeptical about about the depth of their understanding. I felt a great discrepancy often between the people that I learned from and even what they would say and how their lives were. That was really my motivation.
At Dartmouth, I studied Chinese and Asian studies. First, I was going to go to medical school, but decided after enough psychedelics and various other experiences that I was more interested in in Asian philosophy. When I graduated, I got a fellowship to go on to do a doctoral program. And then it dawned on me one day that I could do this doctorate which was in Asian studies and never have seen Asia. And it seemed really absurd.
So I wrote to the Peace Corps and signed up as Joseph had and ended up in the same country as him as Thailand, although we didn’t meet till a number of years later. And on going to Thailand, I worked with medical teams in the villages. It was a very rewarding work. At the same time, began to undertake my study of Buddhism in different monasteries around. One of the most important points for me of that which I’ve told you so far, there are really a couple.
One is that each of us, of Joseph, of Sharon, of myself, of Richard and Jackie, had different life situations and different kinds of motivations that brought us to practice. So it’s really important to honor that which is in yourself that brings you, and equally much to honor that in other people. People have all different motivations and all different kinds of understandings that bring them, and they’re all fine. And in a more, another way to express that in relation to T. Lobsang Rampa again is, although you may at times see people doing pretty strange practices and often things that seem peculiar to you, it’s very, very hard to know about someone’s evolution and how what they’re doing now is affected by their past and where that will lead them in the future, you know.
And and although I could laugh at T. Loeb’s hump Rump, now in some ways, it was very important for me. And and so you should really be open to honor that practice and that path that you see of anybody around you who has some curiosity or some sincerity or some direction toward Dharma, toward truth. Well, I was in Thailand and taking teachings from several teachers, met Ajahn Chah, who was quite impressive to me, and decided that I wanted to ordain after I finished the Peace Corps. So ended up having ordination ceremony in the town where I had lived rather than going directly to Ajahn Chah’s.
I’ll describe it a little bit to you. It’s a very fancy special monastery. They had monastery of the province, an old Cambodian temple of a thousand years or more with this beautiful stupa. And the abbot of it, he’s a beautiful man actually, was quite old in his 70s. This was about ten years ago.
And he had learned, he’d been a monk all his life, he had learned what he learned in the old days before they had books, all orally. He used to sit and he would tell me about his how he had learned the sutras and learned the dhamma that he did. Teachers would recite in classes and then he’d go back and recite over and over again in a very traditional way. The way I ordained there, had a big fancy ceremony with all the people that I’d lived with in the town attending. And it’s a beautiful ceremony.
There are some elements of the Brahmin ceremony. The night before one gets all dressed in white and goes through certain purification rituals. And then the morning of the ordination, it’s traditional for you to get robed in white with gold and to look like a prince going to the monastery, in a sense to reenact the drama of the Prince Siddhartha, leaving even the most beautiful things of the worldly life for that which is even higher, for coming to the deepest understanding. It’s also traditional, because of that, for people to go to the monastery riding on an elephant as part of this. And they tried to get an elephant for me.
There’s a couple in the province. I was looking forward to it. I ended up actually going on a bicycle. Not quite an elephant, but I ordained and I was to stay at that monastery for four perhaps a month for my initial instruction. And the instruction was very basic instruction, like how to put my robes on and and keep them on.
I remember the second morning going out for alms round and they’re just one great big sheet of cloth and you wind them in a certain way and throw them over your shoulder and it sort of stays on, if you’ve had practice. And I’m walking through the streets barefoot. And early in the morning, the people are out with their food for the monks. And all the monks were in line in front of me. And then behind me were the young novices who walked behind the monks.
And I feel my robe slipping lower and lower, and then it’s dragging on the ground behind me. Finally, the novice behind me ran up next to me, and he kind of grabbed it and put it back over my shoulder so it would fall off, and I made it back to the monastery. The training was not just the training of coming to a retreat and sitting and and watching the breath and the mind, But it was really a change, a great change of lifestyle. I stayed in that monastery for a few days, and then this horrible thing happened, which was that that was also the site of the annual provincial fair, which is like the county or the state fair there. And all of a sudden I looked out of my cottage one morning and they were pounding in stakes and setting up tents.
And there were show there were places where you threw darts at balloons and got prizes. And there was music blaring, and there were dancing girls. And I got enraged, and I went to see my abbot. And I was saying, listen. Here I am ordained, I’ve taken all these precepts, and we’re supposed to be following the teachings of the Buddha, and you’re having this in the monastery, and how could you?
Of course, they’d been doing it for hundreds of years there. Immediately, he he took it with a pretty good humor, and then he told the man he’d assigned to be my teacher to take me off the next day to the forest to get rid of him. Say goodbye. I tell it actually because it it’s a it’s an interesting point and kind of an important one in terms of our understanding of religion and Asia and the world. Only of the several hundred thousand monks in Thailand and Burma and that time Cambodia and Laos, which no longer exist, monasteries, only five or ten percent, probably less than five percent of the monks even meditate at all.
Most of them are very much like the clergy in the West. They’re involved in sometimes service things of teaching, of helping other people, of running schools. A lot of times they’re involved in their own internal politics, and they are the equivalents of bishops and archbishops and all the rest of it. It can be a life of a great deal of ease and prestige. And the monasteries that are really excellent, where there’s very, where there’s good understanding of the dharma and where that’s the essence of their business, are quite few and far between.
In fact, religion in Asia, it turned out I had all these visions of these great monasteries and high beings of monks and nuns enlightened. It’s very much like religion in this country. There aren’t so many Christians that you meet. In fact, not even very many priests who are really living, who are doing what Christ talked about, not just not just mouthing the words or telling other people about it, but have really undertaken it to change their lives. And similarly there, people go to the temple to to pray or to be consoled at times of death or for ceremonies of merit and such.
But it’s very much the same. And that that which is really a deep understanding of what the Buddha taught, just as in this culture what’s a really deep understanding and practice of what was taught by Christ, is still special and is very rare and can be found and is transmitted each year and each generation. But it’s special. So I went to Ajahn Chah’s, which I described to you a bit one night. Two hundred acres of of forest in the northeast of Thailand.
One of the first things I learned is that Ajahn Chah didn’t think that meditation was just sitting on your zafu or doing walking meditation. Really what the monastery was, was a whole special training environment in which there were there was a strict discipline and a lot of rules to follow. Everybody had to do things the same way. You get up early in the morning. There was sewing of robes and there was working and drawing water from the wells.
And there was a lot of meditation and sitting practice. But there was also talking to people who came to visit, and once you had some experience in the practice, teaching other people. It was a very full lifestyle with a great deal of discipline. Quite simple the same time because we ate one meal a day, and we only had our robes and very few possessions. When I first arrived, after he talked to me about the two kinds of suffering that I mentioned to you, began my practice.
And as I said, I had a very hard time. Hard time was the only one who spoke English there, only Westerner, although I could speak the languages by then. And I felt somewhat isolated. Similarly, I would sit and do my practice and I would see all this stuff in my mind that I hadn’t yet learned how to begin to work with it. I did a lot of walking meditation.
He had me do a lot of walking because I was very speedy, and he thought that would be good for me. And I had this little path in the forest and I would just walk back and forth. It must have logged hundreds of miles going back and forth the first month at his monastery. And actually it became even more than sitting for me the way that I learned to work with my mind. I got very concentrated.
Eventually, I became a really powerful meditation to do the walking. Anyway, I had such a hard time. I had a hard time with the discipline because before before all of this, when I was still in America, I had been hippie, a costume hippie. I had bells and robes and all of that And going to Ajahn Chah’s, everybody had to shave their hair, and everybody wore robes that looked alike, and everybody had to act exactly alike. And it was so hard for me that I woke up some nights in the first few weeks there with these nightmares of taking my robes and dipping them into buckets of green and red paint and tie dyeing them and painting different flowers and designs on my bowl because it was so ingrained to express who I thought I was that way.
And I went to him and I and I told him about it. He thought it was pretty amusing, and which he actually thought about almost everything I said to him. And he directed me. He just asked the question. I don’t remember exactly how he put it, but he said, you know, in the West, you seem to take what costume you wear, what kind of robe, what kind of garb, what how you do your hair as being demonstrative of who you really are and of what your freedom is.
He said, look at that and see if that really really has anything to do with freedom and who you really are. He was always turning you back to yourself. And it was really hard. It was hard to give up my costumes, and it was hard to give up what I thought my space was. And as I said, I got quite upset at times.
And another time I went running to him saying I was going to leave and go to the Burmese temple again. And he said, what’s the matter this time? You know, the monks aren’t behaving right again. And I said, well, you know well, I told him about what I’d seen, and I said, I thought I really needed to do intensive practice just to sit and walk and not to have to learn to sew robes or have to be bothered going to collect almonds food in the mornings. I just wanted to do the practice, and all this stuff was getting in the way of my practice, which he thought was pretty funny again.
And I said, as I got into it, I got more into it. I said, you know, even you, I said, you know, you you your teaching’s okay, but sometimes you really don’t seem enlightened the way I expected. And he said, you know, it’s a good thing that I don’t appear enlightened to you. And I said, oh, how come? He said, because if I fit your image of enlightenment, then you would still be caught into thinking that the Buddha was to be found outside yourself.
It was a very great teaching. And I had that teaching by being hit over the head. Actually, I’ll describe it in detail later. A lot of times of looking again and again for somebody out there to be enlightenment for me so that I could copy it. And it’s not out there, and you can’t copy it.
So that’s not it. It has to be you and your own unique expression of that. Well, I intended to go for three months and ended up staying more than a year, and I got to really love the life in the forest. It was so simple and extremely joyful. A lot of monks there, a lot of nuns there as well.
And although we they were pretty much in separate parts of the monastery, both Burma and Thailand, India too, are quite chauvinistic cultures, and so the women have a much harder time than the monks do. Nevertheless, there were some most extraordinary nuns who I had an opportunity to meet, practice meditation as teachers. The thing that was most important to Ajahn Chah was transmitting the understanding that the Dharma is really how you live your life. And he taught it in a way that was very full, that every part of your life of how you ate, of how you walked, of the simplicity of being there, made a space for you to really see. And he was a master of discipline.
People don’t appreciate the extraordinary power and the incredible freedom that can come from discipline very much in our culture. It’s really a quick serve culture. It’s a McDonald’s and, you know, get lime and get your lunch immediately culture. To follow a discipline, be it the discipline of tai chi or of painting or of a science, but especially in the spiritual practice. And to follow a form and use it can be can teach you so much because you always every time you come up against it, you see yourself reflected again.
There you are. What do you want? Who do you think you are? And it can make your life so simple. It was most wonderful, most extraordinary.
To go out in the mornings, I described seeing the monks go by. But part of the time I was there, I went to his mountain monastery, which is a very, very poor area of Thailand. The villages were quite poor. And the time I was there was right before the rain season for a couple of months or so. Big.
And we would go out in the morning with our bowls to collect alms food. It’s not really like begging. It was quite one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. Go out just as the sun was coming up and from this mountain monastery, it was a long walk to one of the villages, three or four miles. The villages are very simple, bamboo houses, wooden houses, no electricity, water buffalo, some cows under the houses there on stilts.
And the people in that vicinity knew of him and his monks and were really respectful because they knew that they really practiced. And the people would get on their knees often and wait for the monks to come by with a tray of food. The food they offered in these villages was very simple. It was rice and tree leaves and, fish, a few, and, some kinds of insects that were fried up, and bats, everything, because it was very poor and they needed to use whatever protein sources they could. And it was quite a it put me through quite a change to be a rich American as we all are without exception by comparison.
To go into this village and to take rice and some of the leftover food from these people who are so poor. You know, what am I doing taking their food? And there’s no way that you can thank them because you do it silently and in a slow line through the village, a few monks together with bare feet, and they wait and they put food in your bowl and you go on. And you don’t say, gee, thank you for that wonderful mango, you know, or thanks for putting the fish in it. I’m really hungry.
And that’s not how it happens. You become a place for them to make this offering. You take it back and eat it. What I realized was that they were making a statement no matter how poor they were. They said in their in their giving that we so value what you represent, what the monks represent and what the practice represents.
We so value that, that we’re willing to give even of the little food that we have to support you. And the only possible way to take that and to use it and to feel feel in harmony with that was to really work hard, to really be sincere in the practice. It was the most most wonderful experience to be there. When I left Ajahn Chah’s after more than a year, because I still wanted to go to the Burmese temple, and I asked his permission. He said, okay.
Fine. You’re ready. You can go now if you like. I went to this temple of Burmese teacher, Ajahn Asabha. Very, very strict type of practice.
I stayed in a cottage in that monastery basically without leaving except to pick up my food in the morning and to see the teacher every couple of days for without leaving this room for more than a year. And in that time, all I did was sit and walk, sit and sleep. Sit and walk, and he said to start by sleeping four hours a night and go work down from there. I started at five anyway, but six, five. Nevertheless, that’s all.
Silence and sitting and walking. He’s a very famous teacher, and I wanted to do this practice to see what would happen and what I could learn from it. Nevertheless, I had a really hard time when I went there because Ajahn Asabha basically, he’s a slob. Okay, to describe him. I went there and met this this old monk who sat around smoking black Burmese stogies and stogies and having the Burmese nuns come and serve him elegant Burmese lunches and yelling at the dogs when they were getting in his flower garden and throwing rocks at them to get them out of there and sitting around belching and reading the newspaper.
And I looked at him and I said, I’m gonna learn from him? Well, I just come from Ajahn Chah’s, which is the most disciplined, impeccable monastery. It was so bad actually that when it came I’d been there just a little while, came for the monk’s recitation of rules of discipline which happens every two weeks. I said, I’m not going. I don’t want to go because it doesn’t look like most of the people including you here even keep them.
And he was quite insulted and he said, well if you don’t want to come and sit with us then you can just leave. So I thought about it and of course I ended up going. What happened was that I had a cottage and because I was a westerner he was kind enough to give me a cottage that was right near his, which was a very nice cottage. But it had the unfortunate aspect, had a little place, a porch to walk on. And I would sit and the meditation was very good and already I had left Ajahn Chah’s and my mind was pretty still.
It was getting much deeper, really intense. And the sittings were good. And then I would go out and I would walk on my porch and I’d see him out there smoking his cigar and reading the paper and yelling at people. And I would get so upset I would say, How can I learn from him? I’d get all upset and I’d go back in.
I’d be upset and I’d watch that and I’d sit and quiet down. The mind would get peaceful again and my hour or so would be up. And then I’d out and I’d walk and I’d see him again and I’d get upset. And I did that back and forth for like a month or two. It was so painful.
Finally, it dawned on me, being a slow learner, that that I didn’t have to take all of that and that I could take his teachings, which which in fact were most wonderful. He was a very helpful guide and and good teacher in meditation practice. And I didn’t have to smoke cigars just because he did. And I didn’t have to copy his lifestyle. And if he was doing it out of enlightenment or he wasn’t doing it out of enlightenment, that was his business.
And when you learn in your life that you can take teachings rather than teachers, it’s enormously freeing because then you don’t have to look all the time out there for the Buddha or whoever your enlightened model is and you can see not only from a retreat or from a formal setting can you take teachings, but you can take teachings from the milkman or from the person that lives across the hall from you or people that you meet. Everybody can be a place where you can learn from. And what’s good you take and what’s not you can leave. Well, it was the most wonderful time I ended up having at his monastery because of that second year of really intensive practice. The time I had gotten into it, had some very deep meditation experiences, the mind became quite silent, almost difficult to describe.
Joseph talked about the rapture of the vipassana happiness. It’s like being washed out inside as though I’d been dirty and all clogged up and being so washed out that this light breeze would come through my cottage and it was though it felt as though it would pass right through my body. There was nothing there to stop it. The mind was so still. I sit really silent.
And in that space, all the things that I thought that I’d ever wanted to do or be unnecessary. The most wonderful kinds of pleasures or or situations. They were no more wonderful than just sitting and appreciating the breeze or looking at this one tree that was outside my window. It was really, really extraordinary. It’s like having your mind put through a really good washing and scrubbed clean with bleach.
Intense mood swings the first couple of months, just up and down the deepest depressions and the highest elations. I couldn’t believe what my mind was doing. A little more. Left Asabha’s. At the end, I ended up helping him to teach a number of Westerners who would come there as translator and sort of guide toward the end of my stay.
I went visited and stayed in several other monasteries, quite different kinds of practice because I wanted to learn about them. Went to this monastery in Burma where they do a heavy heavy breathing like as hard as you can for an hour at the beginning of a two hour sitting. And then you sit after you’ve gotten concentrated like that on the breath and pay attention to your body which is out there somewhere. And I walked into the meditation hall, it was a holiday so it was full. There was this huge hall five times the size of this, covered the walls and ceilings with colored mirrors and this giant Buddha at the end and like five hundred thousand people breathing as hard and fast as they could.
It was like walking into the middle of a steam calliope. And I looked around and I said, this is meditation? You know? I stayed there and I did it and it was a very powerful practice because it wakes you right up, really keeps you awake, and if you have any thoughts in your mind at all, blast them out like it’s very concentrated. It’s very hard to do alone though.
It really needed that group support. But each place that I went to again served to break down whatever models that I had of how practice had to be done. It has to be in a simple forest monastery, or it has to be intensive, only sitting and walking, Or it has to be quiet, can’t be noisy. In each place, they would do it some other way. And I would do it and it would work.
It would work because it was done by people who understood that it was a tool to use to come back to yourself, to train your awareness and deepen your concentration. So many kinds of forms. Not to get attached and think that one that the form is it. Just a vehicle. Well, I came back to Ajahn Chah’s after being with several other teachers went and saw him prostrated, sat there, finally got around to asking me.
He said, so you’ve come back. He said, what did you learn? And I said, nothing really. Nothing that I couldn’t have learned if I’d have stayed here. And he said, I could have told you that before you left, but you couldn’t have heard it.
You had to go. And a lot of times, take voyages to learn that which is really inside ourselves, which we could learn in our house, with our families, where we are right now. And yet also we need to take the voyage, not because it’s out there, but because the voyage is part of the way we learn. And that too is okay. Then I went back to see Sumedho at that monastery who was the other westerner who was very early with Ajahn Chah, now an abbot of his own monastery there, an American from Berkeley.
And quite an extraordinary man and a wonderful teacher and good yogi, fantastic yogi. And I went to see him, and I recounted all the details of my trip and my different teachers I’d been with and all the experiences I had had. I’m quite excited about what had happened. And I finished and his only comment was, well, something else to let go of. That’s all that he said about it.
It was devastating. That was true. You mean my experience? People ask sometimes in interviews, I have these good insights. What should I do with them?
Let go. Anything you hold on to, even the most deep insight, the most wonderful experience, keeps you from being here, keeps you out of harmony with the dharma, with what’s here now, with the moment. Anyway, I decided to come home after having been in Asia for almost six years for various reasons, a lot of which I didn’t even understand at the time. But it felt like it was time parents were separating. I wanted to see them and tell friends what I’ve been doing.
I came back as a monk in robes to see how it would be to live that way, America. I came back under certain delusions, if you will. One of which was that I came back because I thought I was a pretty good meditator and I didn’t need the support of the monasteries anymore. I could go in Grand Central Station and meditate. It was all the same to me, just sounds and sights.
I thought to give you an idea of the state that my mind was in when I came back, I was really very high for a while. I came back and stayed with my mother in Washington DC. I went down to the Lao Embassy. I remember one morning with my begging bowl and they came out and they were so happy and put rice and fish in my bowl in Washington. Anyway, put me on a train.
I wasn’t using money. I was trying to keep the precepts very strictly to visit my twin brother who lived in New York and Long Island. I was supposed to meet his wife who was in New York City. Okay. So I got off the train in Midtown Manhattan, and it it happened that it was around the time of his wife’s birthday.
And for her birthday, he gave her a gift, which was a one day gift certificate to Elizabeth Arden in New York on Fifth Avenue. And actually, sounds quite wonderful, you know, sauna and massage and manicure and facial and hair and everything’s really getting get well taken care of. It sounds quite nice. So I was to meet her outside of Elizabeth Arden at four o’clock when she was done. So I’m in my room barefoot with my begging bowl and my stomach.
I get off Grand Central Station. Just Grand Central Station. I’m walking, lifting, placing, lifting, placing. I didn’t didn’t use the mental notes anymore. They dropped away.
But I was just paying attention to my feet walking. I’m walking down Fifth Avenue one step left, right, left. Doing it, you know. Finally I get to Elizabeth Arden’s which is some ways down Fifth Avenue. Elizabeth Arden’s is is unique.
It’s very special kind of energy. The world on Fifth Avenue is kind of the center of a certain culture. I look around. It’s four o’clock. Nobody’s there.
I wondered had I got the message wrong or whatever. So I opened the door and I go in to the secretary and I say, have you seen Mrs. Kornfield? I’m supposed to meet her. And she said, oh yes, Mrs.
Kornfield’s here today. She’s up on the fourth floor finishing up. There’s a waiting room there. Why don’t you go right up? Press the elevator button.
Walk in the elevator. Go upstairs. The elevator opens. Walk over. This receptionist says, I’m waiting for missus Kornfield.
Please sit down. Sit down. Nothing else to do. I close my eyes and go back to my breath. In, out.
Very peaceful. Just meditating. It’s all the same. Forest, Elizabeth Arden. Well, I’m sitting there.
All of sudden, I notice that there’s sort of this sound in the background, voices and things going on. And finally I catch this one sentence which kind of strikes me. It’s like, is he for real? No. And I open my eyes and I kind of peek around and there are these women dressed in Elizabeth Arden.
They look like nighties, I think they put on there, with their hair in different kind of things, some big ones and some little, and colored colored paste like green avocado and stuff on their faces. And I look around, and the only thing I can think is, is this for real? It’s quite strange, actually, as I think of it. Well, anyway, when I came back, was really high. And it lasted for it took about a year or a year and a half to come down, actually.
I was that high. Uh-huh. And I came down just about the opposite end, which was not at all what I’d expected. In fact, the kind of learning that took place after I left that, and as I’ve been observing my process of learning since that time, I’ve saw seen a kind of pattern that’s really important that I want to relate it to you. That is that with my my hope and also my expectation from the meditation practice in Asia that a lot of things that I’d been involved in had dropped away.
The mind became so still and so balanced. Many kind of things that I’d been involved in in a pretty neurotic way. I’ll never do that again or this or that. I’ll never get involved in that again. And I came back expecting to be quite dramatically changed by all of those thousands of hours of practicing years away.
You know, the best way to to give you an example of what happens to tell another instance, which I’ve told. Some of you have heard these stories before. I went up to Dartmouth about a year and some after I was back, right at the the low point where I’d come back and after disrobing because it didn’t work to be a monk, I didn’t know what I was doing. Nobody else did either, basically. It was I had no spiritual friends, and it just seemed quite out of harmony with what’s going on.
Disrobe. Not knowing what else to do, the only thing I’d ever been trained to do was be a student, so I went to graduate school. And in psychology, I figured at least I could learn some language to maybe explain what I some of the things that had happened to me. And after being back for a year, I went to visit my youngest brother who also was up at Dartmouth for summer school that session. I went to see him.
He’s a musician, among other things. He’s a plays both classical and rock music and had a couple of bands. I went to his apartment, his house where he was staying. He was there with his friends, and they were listening to the latest tunes on their stereo and sitting around smoking some very good hash hashish, hashish. They said, would I like it a little?
I said, sure. Why not take a toke and sit around with them? Sitting around listening to music and they’re saying, you know, it’s really a pity. There’s there’s not very much good stuff around here, and there’s so many people that want it. And I start thinking, gee, I know somebody in New York where you could get a kilo of hash for this much and bring it up and sell it.
All this, and I start to talk to them about it. And all of a sudden I have this flash that almost ten years before in a room not more than a hundred yards from there or two hundred yards from there, I had been a hippie, my senior year at Dartmouth, hippie, dope dealer. And I was exactly back in the same physical location doing exactly the same thing. And I couldn’t believe it. It’s like my mouth dropped open.
You mean I had to come all the way back here.