Certified to Begin - Pt. 2

Spiritual Director Ekai Joel Kreisberg and board member Kishin Sarah Saleemi discuss the past, present, and future of Mondo Zen and Shining Bright Lotus. This is the second part of an earlier blog post. Read Certified to Begin - Part 1.

Kishin: So, was Hollow Bones the first spiritual organization outside your upbringing that you were involved with?

Ekai: I got involved with my synagogue with my kids. I ended up being on the board. Since I had started my nonprofit with the Safe Drug Disposal thing, I had a lot of experience. As a priest at Hollow Bones Zen, I told Jun Po that the organization needed a healthier structure. A healthy organization requires a healthy structure, which is to have a board and employees and pay your taxes. I wasn't trying to get him to hire me. He said, “Can you do it?” So, I did it.

Kishin: I've noticed with spiritual organizations that if you hang around for too long, eventually you're you get asked to help.

Ekai: Exactly.

Kishin: That wouldn't have happened if you didn't have the skills and traits that were recognized.

Ekai: It was partly that I had the skills and partly that Jun Po and I got along really well. I didn't treat him like a guru. He was just a person, a very awake person, but being awake doesn’t make you stop being just a guy. He wanted to have relationships with people. We would do all the things that regular people do. That was really important to him. And it was hard for him to have people put him up on a pedestal. So, we had a good relationship. He felt like I had the skills, and it helped that I was on the outside. That reversed itself after he passed away. The next leader of Hollow Bones Zen didn’t want someone from the outside to run the place.

Kishin: So, it's really interesting because it seems like part of the way your relationship with Jun Po developed is that you fed his need to be treated like a person. Now that you're a Roshi, could you fall victim to deification?

Ekai: I think it's a good question, and a good observation. I think it's a lot better to be my age because I have my own history with highs and lows around transference and counter-transference. I wasn’t necessarily skillful over the years. I’m thinking it’s a little easier to pay attention to that stuff as one gets older. It's much harder when you're in your 30s and 40s to be put in this role, particularly if you're charismatic. People get hypnotized and mesmerized and they want to follow you. I see my students as having a little bit more pragmatism. There's trust here, but it's not like they're all signing up to be in the Ekai club.

Kishin: You might be surprised. You have a little bit of a fan club. I've noticed interacting or seeing you in-person or live on Zoom is a different experience than seeing a recording of you.

Ekai: I think it's different. You will find that the more time you spend with me, as with a student or any relationship, the more people trust me and find that I'm an effective teacher. It's harder in short periods of time. Looking back at my career, I was least effective doing 45-minute conference presentations. I can't get it all squished into that particular style. That wasn't my thing.

Kishin: So, if there are people you've been working with for a long time, in some sense, they better learn how to receive any wisdom or information you have to share.

Ekai: Yes, that is true. I had a really great osteopathic teacher, Arthur Lincoln-Pauls. He didn't teach manipulation; he taught energetic relationships between the client and the healer.

Kishin: In order to maintain those long-term relationships, to develop that sort of power, you have to have a good moral compass. I feel like you're an ethical guy. So, how did that happen?

Ekai: My dad was very ethical, and he was imperfect too. He had his moments. I also think it's a very Jewish thing. We were raised with a Jewish ethical structure. The Mahayana vow is to stick around and help everybody wake up. In Judaism, it's called Tikkun Olam, to repair the world. My father was very active in civil rights. I grew up around different socio-economically informed folks from a very young age. I got to witness his commitment to that throughout his life. My mom was involved with cultural activity. She promoted the arts. That's the musical side of me. They were both loquacious. They were from a generation where they were trying to be good people. Because they were raised in the Depression, particularly my father was always grateful for his success. They weren't spoiled.

Kishin: If you could teach everyone one thing immediately, what would it be?

Ekai: I think the thing that we all need is to learn to listen and tolerate the part of our self that seems to need to comment about everything else that's out there. Can we just sit with it and listen and allow others to have their perspective. That's the number one, right now, on my list.

Kishin: I feel like the work that you're doing with Shining Bright Lotus is interesting because there's a delicate dance happening between Mondo Zen and traditional mental health. The Mondo literature very explicitly states that Mondo is not therapy, but it can teach people skills that many people are trying to learn in therapy.

Ekai: It is a lovely crossover because therapy comes out of the medical perspective. It still has that sort of wall where it doesn't want to cross into religion and spirituality. So, it's a secular perspective. Mondo doesn't have that boundary. It’s a spiritual or religious perspective. It's going into the psychological and giving people a new tool that they're not going to get in the secular setting. It’s for those people who have a natural sort of intuition, they're spiritually open minded. There's a relationship here. It's a very unique offering in that particular way.

Kishin: Okay, so you first heard of Jun Po in association with Ken Wilber, when you were into Integral Theory. What was the hook that made you keep coming back?

Ekai: I particularly was interested in the way that Jun Po saw the relationship between emotional reactivity and the awakening process. He had a technology, which is what Mondo Zen is, for addressing that particular relationship. What problem was he trying to solve? He was at the monastery, and he noticed that everybody seemed to be awake, but they were all assholes to each other, right? He quickly realized that meditation and waking up didn't necessarily make you a nice person. And so, the problem he was trying to solve was how to integrate the awakening process with a maturing process, one of learning to be compassionate and loving to one another. His technology was emotional koans, which is what Mondo Zen offers. Ken thought this was very skillfully done because more than one line of activity was being addressed by the technology.

Kishin: So, you recognized this really pretty early on in the Hollow Bones story arc.

Ekai: I came to the party eight or nine years in. Turns out that, for the first five years, it didn't look like what it looked like when I showed up. It had to evolve. But the early versions of Mondo were all a bunch of men with shaved heads being really hardcore. I came halfway through, and I was probably two or three years after it really came into its most mature style.

Kishin: Do you feel like the Mondo process as it's currently written is mature, or do you think that's something that needs to continue to evolve?

Ekai: Jun Po trained 155 people in Mondo Facilitation. When I started running the Mondo Facilitator program, I polled them, and less than 10 people were actually still doing it. So, it wasn't a well taught phenomenon, and it had a lot of issues in it. Jun Po did a good job at starting it with the tools that he had.

Kishin: There were a certain number of people that recognized his potential even although it was still in sort of its early pluripotent state.

Ekai: He's pre-internet in many ways, so he's still doing a monastery practice. We're not. We have access to all the traditions, all the texts, all the time. When he was doing it, you still had to go to a used bookstore to find that book. Now, you just search for it, and it comes to you. So, it's just a different, different world. Jun Po was working within the constraints of a monastery tradition. I don't have these constraints, and I have much more access to lineage teachings. I think a reasonable analogy is that he had a really good 10-speed bike; I have a car that has a computer in it.

Kishin: What is the plan for the future with Shining Bright Lotus? How are we going to save the world? How are we going to disseminate Mondo to the masses?

Ekai: It’s slow and steady. That’s done through concentric circles of training.  As an organizational leader, I am interested in empowering teams to go out and play the role that I play. We're going to train at least a dozen folks who will be good at listening and teaching people this particular gift of Mondo Zen.  But it definitely comes from being a good teacher and then trusting and empowering others.

We’re not going to grow enough people to make a fundamental shift within humanity. But I do believe the 100th monkey myth, which suggests that if enough people are conscious, a quantum shift will naturally occur. So, it's learning how to be very strategic about what and how we communicate and to whom and then using your energy wisely. We're in a really challenging time. The good news is that really challenging times offer great opportunity. People need to pay attention to what might come along, and this is a good one.

Kishin: The internet has certainly made things really interesting. We're living in an attention economy.

Ekai: Yes, it is an attention economy. Unfortunately, I think most people aren't aware of it. It's a challenge. We recognize that a modern sangha needs to use modern tools to communicate with contemporary people. We're not a retreat center that you come to, that you go sit in 10 times a year. That's not our Zen. Our Zen has to be upfront and communicate regularly so that anybody who's reading this sees that we do our best to make sure that there's a steady amount of communication from a lot of people. You can see that we are a diverse group of people who are not just the Ekai show.

Kishin: Modern problems require modern solutions. It certainly seems more efficient than 30 years in a monastery with someone hitting you with a stick periodically.

Ekai: There is Thich Nhat Hanh's famous quote, “the next Buddha is a sangha.”  You actually have to produce a sangha of people who are attending to this. It really is a way of paying attention. It's interesting to watch the evolution. We're only five years into online sanghas.

Kishin: When I'm on Facebook Reels or TikTok, sometimes I do see 20-second videos from various meditation societies or Buddhist communities. I think it's actually good because if you can get someone's attention during that time, you can reel them in.

Ekai: We’re learning all the time, but you see, I just pointed out one of the big weaknesses. Give me four years, and I'm a great teacher. Give me 45 minutes? It's more of a challenge. How do you get it into 90 seconds? It requires a certain way of thinking and a certain polishing. I think that's what you need to get people to show up at the top of your social funnel, so to speak. That space is really crowded. You have to be flexible about how you communicate. In the context of this conversation, rather than being critical of the “McD’s of Buddhism,” you have feelers out so that people can find you and want to take more time to learn from us.

Kishin: Traditionally, how do you bring people in? You have a beautiful temple to get people walking by to come in and see what's going on?

Ekai: There are several ways. Some people proselytize. They pass out their wares at the fair, so to speak. There's a bunch of different ways of doing it. At this stage, however, communications are mostly electronic. That's why the grass seed model worked pretty well for Jun Po. Just to go wherever the wind was going to blow you. Our goal is to really empower folks to be meaningful in their own bioregions.

Kishin: You just spread your DNA out in a lot of places and hope it sticks somewhere.

Ekai: It appears to be working. You just don't really know who's going to light up. I have a lot of gratitude toward the actual dharma as it goes through its evolution. Let’s end with something from the tradition. Eihei Dogen:

Do we, out of ignorance, resent the dew for being ephemeral?

The true form of all things is, from the outset, abundantly evident,

yet it is difficult to fathom while waters are rushing by

that this very body is itself bound to be ever changing.

Kishin: Thank you!

Ekai: A pleasure to chat.