You Can't Awaken What You Can't See
Kogen Keith Martin-Smith is the author of several books devoted to the life and dharma teaching of Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi. He was ordained by Jun Po Roshi in 2012, and he continues to teach and write. He also offers an innovative podcast at The Integral Edge. I caught up with Kogen recently in anticipation of his joining the Fall Practice Period at Shining Bright Lotus.
Ekai: I am with Kogen Keith Martin-Smith today. Kogen, welcome.
Kogen: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
Ekai: I've read lots of your materials, and we've known each other for a while, so I'm really excited to have a chance to hear about how this all happened and your decision making. How did you get involved with meditation in the first place?
Kogen: I started having spontaneous and overpowering spiritual experiences when I was a teenager, and this ran into my 20s. I had never learned anything about meditation or awakening or even mysticism. I was raised in a conservative Catholic household. I went to a conservative Catholic school, and I hadn't even read the Christian mystics. I just thought I was going crazy with experiences of witnessing and nondual consciousness. They were incredible when they were happening to me, and terrifying when they would fade away. I was left to sort it out myself.
In my early 20s, I came across Ken Wilber’s, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, and reading that book changed my life. I realized that I wasn't mentally ill. What was happening to me was something that is actually deeply sought. Looking at Ken's developmental map, I realized that, not only was I not at the end of things, I was like in the middle of the road, and it gave me so much hope. Ken talked about Buddhism as a science. Even though I've been having these state experiences, I was hardcore agnostic and a scientific rationalist with an engineering background. I decided to go into Buddhism as an exploration of awakening and cause and effect. I ended up in Vajrayana and in the Nyingma School under then Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. I spent 10 years doing all their preliminary practices with Lama Tsering Everest.
When she was sent to Brazil to open a retreat, I lost my main teacher. I moved to Boulder, Colorado from Philadelphia; I was going through a divorce, and I went to an event at the Boulder Integral Center with my friend Jeff Saltzman. At this event, he put us in groups of four, and I ended up with this bald white guy. He said, “They call me Jun Po these days, and I’m supposed to be some kind of Roshi.” I went, “What? There's a Roshi sitting here with me. That's interesting.” Then he said something like, “You know, a couple of years ago, I started fucking somebody I shouldn't have been fucking, a priest of my Sangha, and I fucked her life up, and I fucked my life up, and I pretty much destroyed everything I'd spent a lifetime building. So I'm here to see if Integral can explain what the fuck happened to me.” That is exactly how he said it, with that kind of salty language. I couldn't believe a number of things, mostly that a high ranking spiritual person was talking that candidly and with that much ownership about something they'd done. It just blew me away. So I was hooked from that moment forward. I had to get to know who he was, what he was doing, and our relationship started that night.
Ekai: Interesting, this was a personal relationship. You had a foundation of practice, but your personal relationship is where you grew, and you just started practicing with him.
Kogen: I had no interest in Zen. Zen reminded me of Roman Catholicism - hierarchical, punitive, no fun, all black clothes. It was like the Jesuits, walking around with their long faces. And they get up early, which I really hate. Vajrayana is about fullness, sex, food, it's all tantra. It's all these wonderful things. I started doing trainings with Jun Po, and I fell in love with him. Jun Po was far more heart-centered than almost all the Zen teachers I had met. He really did have a radiant heart. Although it was sort of hidden under his theater of himself, it was the radiance of his heart that really drew me in and really took my practice to the next level. I began to see the brilliance and the genius that Zen held.
Ekai: So you practiced with him, and you eventually were ordained by Jun Po.
Kogen: In 2009, he flew me out to Di En Roshi’s compound in Massachusetts. We spent two weeks while he told me his life story. That was the basis for me writing his biography, A Heart Blown Open, which came out in 2012. This completely changed the course of my life. He offered ordination as part of my path. I was ordained in April of 2012.
Ekai: It's a wonderful book. I read it as soon as it came out. It's Jun Po’s biography. It's a multi-narrative voice. How did that change your life?
Kogen: For one thing, it won a number of awards, so it put me on the map as a professional writer. But it was the intimacy of the relationship. We met for those two weeks, but then I flew out multiple times to Wisconsin to sit with him. We'd be sitting on his couch drinking beer, him telling me stories of such depth and pain, loss and personal failure. His thing was that there would be no lies between us. The original book I wrote was 160,000 words. I ended up cutting out about 60,000 of those words. The book called to me to write in a way that I'd never been called before. The material demanded that I grow up as a writer. I did something I'd never done before in my life, which is, I poured everything I could into it. I couldn't do any better job than I did, which was incredibly vulnerable because part of me always held back a little bit.
Ekai: The book actually reflects your relationship with Jun Po. He was really like that. That's the way I knew him. To put that in a Zen context, traditional Rinzai form has that relationship between the student and the teacher. Mondo is that dialog, and can you really show up for each other.
“It doesn’t matter how deep your spiritual insight is. You can transform shadows when they arise. I think that is absolutely true, but you’re not going to be able to understand what’s actually driving the shadows themselves, unless you do relative ego shadow work.”
Kogen: Rinzai has a couple of things that are unique and a little different from Vajrayana. One of them is certainly transmission. The spiritual master transmits, something that Jun Po was able to do for me. I had all these state experiences. When I was with him I rested in turiyatita, the nondual, awakened mind, the whole time I would be with him. It would last for weeks or months afterwards. Our capacity together, whatever the karma was between the two of us, was enough that it made practice irrelevant for me. Since his passing, I don't have that anymore. It was much easier just to go spend time with him, you know, and just be awake.
Ekai: I can appreciate that. You wrote two books with him. And a third book includes your time with him, but it's your book. So you were ordained, and then at some point, you were teaching. I know you teach martial arts, but in terms of the Zen practice and the Mondo form, that's not so much what you do now.
Kogen: I have a handful of students. Part of the calling over the next year is to begin teaching again, offering courses and opening my home to people to come and practice. Part of this is trying to really settle into the uniqueness of Rinzai. Not of Zen, but of Rinzai. What is it that makes it unique? If I'm going to call myself a priest, and I'm going to continue my training in this Sangha, I don't want to teach mindfulness or vipassana. I don't want to teach versions of Dzogchen. I've spent the last few years, since June Po died, coming back into relationship with what is the jewel of Rinzai. That's what I intend to teach.
Ekai: For a while, you were teaching the Mondo form.
Kogen: I was teaching Mondo when The Heart of Zen came out in 2014. I was doing a lot of emotional shadow work. By necessity, I was more focused on Jun Po’s insights around the nature of emotion and emotional integration, shadow integration, and trauma work. I had to get my stuff cleaned up. A lot of what I taught people back then in those days was really traditional Mondo, with a lot of emphasis on the emotional koans. I would say my focus was more on the cleanup and less on the wake-up in those days.
Ekai: That's what's unique to Jun Po, you just said there is Rinzai, and then there's Jun Po. He marries them both together, and, and so do you. How do you see that now?
Kogen: It's 2025. In any spiritual discipline, awareness of shadow states, trauma, attachment disorders, attachment wounds, is vital. You can't have a sangha, in my opinion, and not be trauma informed and shadow informed, because you're going to end up being ineffective. Traditional Buddhism never had any sense of psychology. Nothing like how we understand psychology today, with unconscious drives, attachment proclivities, split off selves, introjects and projections. All these things are vital to have a healthy community, because if the teacher isn't aware of those things, they're actually putting it onto the community. So we have to have some of this included in our practice. But for me, it's enough to be deeply informed by it. I don't have to teach it anymore. It's something that I just insist, that anyone that trains with me be doing some kind of shadow work, not with me, but with someone else. And I will call out shadows when I see them.
Ekai: You're making a distinction of the value of that teaching and phase you went through. But now, moving on to wanting to really polish that Rinzai perspective.
Kogen: Yes, keeping some of the of June Po’s awareness. Where he was coming from, Dai Bosatsu Monastery and coming out of the 70s and 80s, there was really a cultural belief that Awakening was absolute. We could never get square in this. He believed to his dying day that you could fully awaken, and that that would awaken all your shadows. I don't agree. I've met many spiritual teachers, with deep spiritual insight, and I've never met someone that's fully awakened. My angle is that you can't awaken what you can't see, and so you can't awaken your shadows. It doesn't matter how deep your spiritual insight is. You can transform shadows when they arise. I think that is absolutely true, but you're not going to be able to understand what's actually driving the shadows themselves, unless you do relative ego shadow work.
Ekai: I think that's brilliant. The key is in recognizing that there's stuff you can't see.
Kogen: It just keeps arising all the time. Transform it every time. It's still going to rise.
Ekai: I appreciate that goes a bit to the other side of your training, which is developmental psychology, Ken Wilbur, Terri O’Fallon's work. Where do you see the developmental perspective fitting into this evolution of Rinzai Zen and Buddhism.
Kogen: That’s a big question. Understanding development helped me understand something important. When you look back at the teachings of the great masters with a developmental eye, you have a little bit of a better capacity to discern what it is they're waking up to. Most of the great Zen teachers throughout history were waking up to and seeing through the concrete world, the world of rules, the mountain, so to speak. The mountain is impermanent, and the self that looks at it is impermanent. But they're not actually waking up to subtle objects. They're not seeing through personas. They're not seeing through cultural norms. They're not seeing through enculturation, because they can't see those things. And they're certainly not waking up to a meta-aware awareness itself. They're not waking up and seeing through the construct of mind, in the sense of being able to see the full self as an as an evolving, impermanent, temporal object. So seeing that kind of discernment is helpful, because you can take the instructions from the great masters and understand what it is they see through, and then apply that with more precision.
Ekai: Nice.
Kogen: We're not going to veer off into conversation that no one can understand. If you're reading this, you have the world of your senses, the five senses. That's the concrete world. And most Zen masters awakened to the impermanence and the transparency and the nondual nature of the five senses. But as you're hearing this, you also have the entire world of your mind. You have shadows and you're encultured to by being wherever you're born and by your family. So you can awaken and see through those constructs as well. The Japanese were not as good at that second part.
Ekai: That's very articulate. Thank you for explaining it so well. You're a martial arts master, you're a writer. I think you like motorcycles. You’ve done a lot of work with Integral Life, and also Stages, Terri O'Fallon’s work. How does that stuff come into your view as a Zen practitioner, teacher, mentor?
Kogen: I think I would give two answers. The first is my public-facing teacher self. Over the next couple years, I'm really going to work on teaching and focusing on the awakening process and what that looks like. I'm going to leave the ego development stuff out of it for now. But I do see eventually that my calling is going to be to sit fully in these two worlds and really own these two worlds. The second part of the question, what developmental psychology and Terri O' Fallon's model has allowed me to see, is that in my own development, the unfolding process of awakening begins to happen, not outside of the ego structure of Keith, but through the ego structure of Keith. So rather than having these experiences, and suddenly I'm gone, and there is just a witness, or the witness falls away, and there's just pure suchness, radically present, radically subjective, radically part and parcel to everything, rather than those things happening, and then Keith coming back online and then integrating that stuff, those experiences are beginning to happen more and more stably while I'm here. And so I'm seeing the emptiness underneath all of reality. I'm seeing the construct of language. I'm seeing the projection of a human reality onto this beautiful, unfolding, groundless ground that is actually what's here. But those are happening through ego structures and stages. It’s the only model that I know of that has the capacity and experience to speak about these stages of ego development that begin to include some of the most profound spiritual states that we know of.
Ekai: That makes sense to me. You're at the leading edge of that development. How does that model embody? How can we make sense of that model in who we are, individually, you and I and the people around us?
Kogen: And the koans, if you will. The injunctions that we are working with are different if I'm waking up through the self or to the self, and there's a really profound difference. And I've done a lot of waking up to the self, but waking up through the self is more of where my personal edge is.
Ekai: I love that. Thank you. I do want to give you an opportunity to share what's next for you. What are you doing with yourself, and what are you looking forward to?
Kogen: I'm helping Terry O'Fallon write her first book. That will be a tremendous gift to humanity. That is the thing I'm most excited about, because her genius and her wisdom and her nuance in understanding the human mind and condition are really next level nuance, and it's going to help a lot of us get a lot clearer on the path of awakening and the path of humanity. Another thing that's really alive for me is becoming a servant of consciousness and using all of these developmental psychology states, but really meeting people where they are, and especially meeting leadership where they are. So I'm working with a mentor now, and my life is going to begin to move into working with leaders and executives, because I want to spread the infection of consciousness. I want to serve consciousness and help people gain basic emotional intelligence, basic state experiences, and if we can help awaken the people that are running the world, we can help shift some of these existential problems that we're facing as a species. That's my view.
Ekai: I'm looking forward to continuing our relationship, and indeed, I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today.
Kogen: It was truly my pleasure, and I'm very, very excited to see where you take your sangha, and where you take the teachings. I told Fugen Roshi the insight I had on my last retreat, it's continued to bring tears to my eyes. I've been homeless since Jun Po died, and I realized that this is my home, and it's a home that I'm going to help build.
Ekai: I look forward to building a home with you, my friend.