Peter, let's start this differently. What would you like to
talk about?
Well, the truth is I always have more questions than I have answers. One of the things
I think about a lot is this proliferation of magazines and interest in what we call the
New Age phenomenon. It seems pretty obvious to me that the Judeo-Christian paradigm isn't
working for a lot of people. There are intellectual flaws in it, and also some character
flaws in the people practicing it. I see a lot of New Age stuff as an attempt to come to
terms with something that's real. Unfortunately, I also see that the same character flaws
that are making the Judeo-Christian world view not work, are turning a lot of New Age
practice into bullshit.
I couldn't agree more.
Everything to me boils down to practice.
Well you're a great example. You have been practicing for a
long time, as far as meditation, and in your life. I always discover a real impeccability
each time 1 rediscover you.
I tend to think of myself as a sorry example, stumbling along with good intentions and
sincerity. The thing about practice is you can be pretty sure that if you're not working
on your character, the world is eroding it. I mean the level of temptation, indulgences
and distractions that are available to us are extraordinary. If you don't have a rudder,
or some kind of an outrigger to keep you straight, you're hardly to be blamed for being
confused.
I just came back from spending the last two days watching some Pueblo Dances out in the
Southwest. The scope of what these people do is so broad, it encompasses the most profound
intention of establishing some kind of meditative relationship with the energies of the
universe, and also the most bawdy, hysterical play acting, social instruction, and the
discipline of children. Compared to that, anything I have seen in Western European
Culture, except for little off-shoots like the Quakers, and some of the religious
communities, is just a thin soup.
How did you get interested in Buddhism?
I was spending time with Indian people, and finally realized that they were never going
to really make me one of them because I had no tribe. I chose Buddhism because it was a
world religion, and they had to take me.
"When you go home they have to take you in." Do you remember that
statement?
They take you, as long as you follow the rules of the community. One of the first
things I noticed about the Buddhist community, that's also true of primitive communities,
in fact, it's true of anything that works, is that it's made up of a series of practices.
Even early Orthodox Judaism used a series of practices. They had something like 600 single
minded devotional prayers that you had to say daily.
What's changed?
The single biggest difference between these communities and us, "us" meaning
the whole Western ragtag, is the notion of reciprocal obligation. That's the thing that,
for me, is totally missing from all the New Age bullshit. The structural problem with the
golden rule is that it allows you, if you are a misogynist who doesn't want to be around
people, to behave independently and ignore everyone. In any old and stable community you
have obligations; to the old, to the sick, to the children, to the rest of the community,
to the universe to which you are connected on every level. To me, the New Age is basically
the transference of capitalist greed into a spiritual dimension.
In a lot of ways that's true.
You go into this or that for personal power, for personal aggrandizement, for personal
something. I hear very few teachers, institutions, whatever, talking about obligations,
how you manifest your obligations, how you turn it from being brain candy into a living
act. The thing I look for when I meet teachers and people, and look at institutions, is
the daily practice that keeps them centered. When picking the vegetables in the garden,
what do they owe the vegetables? What do they owe the garden? What do they owe the water,
the sun light, the clouds, the moisture, the force of germination in the seed? Because
they wouldn't exist without them. The self is built of all non-self elements, so the idea
of independent existence is just a fiction. Yet we've grafted new and jazzy spiritual
practices on top of an absolutely adolescent notion of unlimited freedom. What freedom
means in the American context is, "without limits."
So that something like "You can have it all," really should be, "You
already have it all, now how are you going to take care of it?"
Yeah, how are you going to pay it back. How are you going to express it. You can know
everything, but if you can't express it in your life, it's just brain candy.. ideas that
you feed and nourish in the realm of the intellect...
But you don't do a damn thing about them in your life.
I'm not talking about joining the Sierra Club. I'm talking about the way you empty the
water out of a pot. Do you throw it away like it's nothing, or do you say good-bye to it,
in effect? You know what I mean? Thank it for it's use and pour it in such a way that
you're expressing your respect to it.
Peter, how long have you been sitting in meditation everyday?
I wish it was everyday. It's not everyday.. .But over the course of twenty years, it's
been my constant practice. Because you know, sometimes I'm on the road and when I can't
sit, rather than make myself crazy, I make other things my meditation.
Life becomes your meditation.
Well I don't want to attribute qualities to myself that sound great, that I'm not
actually doing. The notion of practice doesn't mean that you are perfect. It means that
when you lose track of your breath, you bring yourself back to it. When you stumble, and
lose your temper, you know how to correct yourself quickly. There are little practices,
like when a phone rings, before I answer it, I try to take one breath and let it out,
consciously, so when I pick up the phone, I'm really there.
And when you're working?
There's a lot of concord between Zen practice and acting. Zen practice takes you down
to ground zero. It's like having a clean piece of paper with which you assemble a
character. The truth is, once you've gotten the character, the way he walks, his posture,
his dialect, his accent, the process still comes down to being in the moment. You take
impulses from the environment, your nervous system, and the other actors. When I was
younger, I spent a lot of time and effort trying to create a counter culture parallel
world that was going to be purer, better.. perfect. I realized at a certain point that you
can never pour a quart of water into a pint pitcher.
The world is the world, and everything is in it. On a Hollywood film set, in a
recording studio, wherever I am, that's the world. The same passions, greed, hatred, and
delusions are blowing through that universe as any other, and the most I can do is to
consistently reach for the most enlightened possibility. I think that is doing the work. A
caveat is, that if enlightened possibilities is your goal, there is certain work that is
probably inherently inappropriate. I probably wouldn't be a bartender, or in the business
of deliberately creating a need that's not healthy, or disguising the defects of something
not healthy, but those are personal spiritual decisions that people have to make for
themselves.
I know about your green tea habit. Do you believe diet is important, or is it more
the respect that we bring to the food?
I believe that the fact that we have to eat to live creates reciprocal obligations. I
don't make a lot of distinction between the life of a broccoli, and the life of a rabbit.
It's all energy.
I just try not to take more than I need. I don't eat a lot of meat, because not having
a tough, hard labor existence, I don't need a lot of meat. It just doesn't work to take
vegetarianism as a world wide goal, however, or one would exclude the Eskimos. The task is
to be completely grateful for what you do receive, and try to come up with some
reciprocity. How do you express it? In my case, I try to say grace before I eat, and I
feed a lot of animals at my house... Two foxes, six coons, a skunk, and innumerable birds.
I'm living where they lived, and I've taken up a bunch of their space and habitat. I've
tried to cut certain kinds of fences on my property so that deer can get through to have
water.
You do what you can with the knowing that without the whole world, there would be no
self . We wouldn't be here without the oyster. We wouldn't be here without pollinating
insects. We wouldn't be here without sunshine, and we wouldn't be here without other
people laboring to serve us. How do you express that gratitude? So when we're sitting,
having our new age haute cuisine vegetarian meal...
(laughter)
I wonder what we've done for the farm workers lately. Those people who are working with
short handled hoes, noxious chemicals, and don't even have bathrooms out in the fields.
How are we expressing our relationship? Paul Hawken, once said he would rather spend fifty
cents a pound more for organic brown rice in the super market, than give a hundred dollars
to the Sierra Club, because when you support organic food, you're already supporting the
insects, the birds, and the water, and what have you.
Good point.
I try to recycle. I try to do all those things, but you know, the other thing is, keep
your car an extra ten years, turn off the lights, and don't run the water when you're
shaving or brushing your teeth. Don't waste! Live in a smaller house. (he laughs) People
don't want to hear that, you know. I mean, Americans buy storage units to store extra snow
mobiles, while most people in the world spend half the day gathering enough twigs for one
fire, for one hot meal. It's a zero sum game, if people here are really serious about
compassion and the environment. Americans have to lower their net use of energy and
calories. It doesn't have anything to do with being poor, it doesn't have anything to do
with being inelegant.
It definitely means cutting down indulgence in our lifestyles, and if we are not doing
that, it's brain candy. I can't tell you how many benefits for the environment I've
attended where the catering table would feed an Ethiopian village for a month; in
somebody's 6000 sq. ft. house, with all the lights and air conditioning on. It's the
nineties equivalent of socialite charity balls. That's not going to cut it.
How do you feel about the role of books and magazines or electronic publications
such as Spirit Matters?
I have to give them benefit of the doubt. A lot of my early pursuits began by reading.
But finally, without a practice, "ideas" will desert you in a pinch.
Sure, reading is only helpful if it inspires people to change their lives.
It might be interesting to have a reference list of communities with legitimate
teachers, where people can go to get a sense of old practices and disciplines.
Let's start one now. Who would you put on it?
I'm thinking of people like Jack Kornfeld, at Spirit Rock.
We can invite readers to E-Mail their suggestions, and have a growing list of real
communities published each month. That might really be helpful.
Yes. Real communities, because for me, these people who are channeling dead people, and
astro-beings, and a lot of these New Age practices are thinner than gruel.
Who has been your most inspiring teacher?
Well, I guess in one way, it would be Suzuki Roshi who I never actually studied with,
but whose community I lived in for a long time. That community has been a big teacher. The
schedule of a monastery is wisdom, over and above whoever is in charge of it. It's the way
the day flows.
What kind of schedule are they on?
You're up about five in the morning, and you meditate for about 45 minutes, and then
you go to service and then cleaning. There is a work day, and at the end of the day,
there's meditating. There is service, and it's early to bed. The day is arranged to allow
for the maximum of meditation you can do, and still take care of your affairs. So
community has been my teacher.
And others?
Gary Snyder has been a big example to me. He is a friend that I have watched and
admired over the years, who has managed to integrate all the levels of personal
practitioner, householder, community member, and artist into himself Also there's my
teacher Robert Aitkens and his disciple Nelson Foster. Then strangely enough, out of left
field, Carlos Castaneda's books have been something that I have been reading, and thinking
about, and integrating with Buddhist practice for more than 20 years. Certain experiences
that were in the books synched with my meditation experiences. Ways in which I understood
parts of the books were an indigenous expression of truths I had encountered in Buddhist
practice.
Well, I have a couple of the commercial audio tapes of your reading Castaneda's
books, and they're a treasure. Are you doing Castaneda's Tensegrity movements?
Yeah, oh yeah.
And what about sound? Does music influence you a lot?
I have always loved music. I've been a songwriter and guitar player for a long time.
I didn't know that. Have you also recorded music?
I have, but not commercially. A few years ago I made some tapes of songs I had written
during the communal days, and I mailed them as Christmas presents to a bunch of old
friends who had asked me about my songs over the years. The tape got popular. I went
through over a thousand of them, (laughter) and got into a second printing. It's sort of a
"Digger" tape, you know, free and only for friends. I guess I would rather be a
talented amateur then a second rate professional.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
The thing I've worked on changing the most is rage. Explosive, learned as a child, you
know, and hard to get rid of The positive side is anger at injustice and ignorance, the
negative side of it is just indulgence.
Rage at brain candy?
Yeah, and you know, I'm just cranky. I get angry. (laughter) It's just my way of
obliterating things I don't like. It's a very egocentric perspective.
And the best thing about yourself?
I think it's a willingness to pull the rug out from under my own feet. To look and
consider the possibility that something I think, or feel, could be wrong, and then to look
at the ramifications of that.
Three wishes?
I guess the first wish would cover everything, which would be universal enlightenment..
but failing that, (laughter) my biggest wish would be that people would realize that the
Earth is alive, down to it's deepest recesses. It's alive in invisible realms. I wish
people would wake up and begin observing and respecting that.
That alone would change everything.
I guess my third wish would be that my country softened some of its muscular
aggressiveness, and replace it with something a little more receptive and sensitive.
Do you think that would bring us into more of a male/female balance?
I think that men and women are really each other's dark side. I don't mean dark in the
negative sense, I mean shadowed. When I love a man, I'm actually loving characteristics
about him that I can understand: courage, honor, discipline . A woman is different
territory. I think that the only way that you can work it out with women, is to be willing
to relinquish control, to not be in charge. Women have a genius about relationships, that
I certainly can't match, so I have two choices: I can either talk about sports scores,
cars, and computers. Things that can be quantified and numbered to reaffirm my sense of
control. Or, I can accept being out of control, and hopefully learn to be more graceful
with it. That's the path I've chosen in my life because it works for me.
I think that we can't have harmonious relations between men and women when we are
living in a culture with an exploiting, and ravaging world view. I think the way we treat
the environment is the way we treat each other. The way we treat third world people is the
way we treat each other. The way we treat the weak and the helpless, is the way we treat
each other and that's why I wish for a softening. We are exploiting the shit out of the
rest of the planet for our own indulgence. We're putting ourselves first. So why shouldn't
that be the case in any of our human affairs? If I'm dealing with you, and you're making
me uncomfortable, and yet in every other aspect of my life, my personal comfort is the
highest priority, why should I defer to you, why should I lose my sense of power? So I
don't think men and women can make it in an exploitative, rapacious environment.
(Laughs) Does that mean your relationship is going well?
Going very well.
with Coyote