This is a long interview, kept that way intentionally. I recommend reading with a receptive headspace, away from your phone. Save it for before bed. Send it to your Kindle (here's how). Print it out, and return to it as needed. Enjoy.
It took all of thirteen minutes to know I needed to ask Alan Rossi some questions. I'd just finished reading The End of the Story, a micro-memoir in which the 45-year-old American writer opens up about his struggle with wanting. Wanting, you think—hardly a crisis. Actually, it's a terror. By definition, a person in want is restless, needy, and unfulfilled, like a mosquito. Being in such a state for too long breeds dissatisfaction; insatiability manifests. Soon enough, you're in the throes of a full-blown condition. I sent Rossi's piece to a friend. “Almost as if some other part of me had written it about myself,” he said. I thought the same.
Rossi was born in 1980 in Columbus, Ohio, a city whose demographics so perfectly mirror the country’s that fast food chains have long used it to market-test the next generation of culinary monstrosities. Hence its reputation as the most normal city in America. Today, Rossi lives in South Carolina, where he teaches creative writing to high schoolers. His credentials are formidable. He’s published two novels, an award-winning novella, and dozens of short stories. He has bylines in all the right magazines: Granta, The Missouri Review. Two of his short stories, Unmoving Like a Mighty River Stilled and The Buddhist, have won the Pushcart and O. Henry prizes, respectively. Nevertheless, Rossi remains largely unknown. “Painful at first, but then nothing to worry about,” he says, about his books eluding readership. He once believed there was somewhere to go with all this – with writing, with life – but he's since let that go.
The End of the Story, the piece that introduced me to Rossi, charts his path to non-attachment. It picks up in 2008. Rossi's in his mid-20s, teaching literature at a university and beginning the writerly life. But what for? He couldn't see how his work functioned any differently from the fodder produced by the stimuli-industrial complex—a Big Mac, say, or the latest Marvel release. He writes:
I disliked my own desire to be constantly entertained, and I disliked the way our culture preyed on this desire, making me desire more. I disliked that literature was tied into this. But what was below it? The desire for more desire? My wanting seemed the source of everything I did, and within literature I saw only more vain wanting, vain striving to be entertained, as well as thoroughly approved of, albeit in some higher or more transcendent form.
Rossi’s struggle over the point of literature was compounded by a deeper rift with reality itself. All he saw was stuff: entertainment, distractions, superficiality. Looking inward, he observed merely “another thing in a world of things.” Arrogance and cowardice kept him on the sidelines of the burgeoning online literary scene, and he grew increasingly isolated outside of his relationship. Depression and ennui set in—“just repetitive days spent looking at my email wondering when something might occur.” His alcohol, weed, and porn use worsened. Thoughts, doubts, desires, repeat. Going into nature solved little. On a hike, he couldn't see the mountain for the dead stone, nor the idyllic town below as anything but Kinkadian (“overly, irritatingly quaint”). The bigger picture eluded him, while any attempt to find his voice only intensified the screaming in his skull. He longed for stillness.
Then it came. In early 2010, Rossi got into soccer again after 20 years. He trained obsessively. The more he played and worked out, the less he wrestled with his sense of self. The pull of the literary world vanished. So did the matter of being a so-called ‘writer’. Physicality: this was real. More real than identity, anyway, which he came to see as illusory. Around the same time, Rossi began to meditate, guided by a Canadian Buddhist monk on YouTube. He says he was able to get into it immediately—five minutes, then 10, 15, 25, 35…up to an hour. I'd never heard such a thing. Either the monk taught brilliantly or Rossi had a preternatural ability to still his mind.
By practicing meditation, Rossi made a breakthrough in his writing. Rigorously observing his thoughts led him to develop a style that mirrors the way consciousness constructs reality. Though he warns his prose can be demanding, I find it remarkably lucid. His sentences unfold just as thoughts do, full of the doubts, judgments and plays of ego that inform much of our everyday thinking. There's a lot of Siddhartha in there, drawing the reader into the ebb and flow of inner life.
In one story, the protagonist, Blake, falls into a mental spiral over the answering machine message on his office phone. He'd recorded it four years ago to inform clients that if he wasn't picking up, he was out scaling cliffs or running rapids. At the time it seemed like a benevolent heads up. But looking back, he sees it as a calculated move to one-up the caller by flaunting his adventurous life. Recognizing this, he finds himself diminished—“less real, less authentic.” Not that re-recording the message, which he'd thought about over the past year, would have solved anything. He goes on to fixate on how a new, more corporate message might itself become a statement, inviting clients, depending on what they already knew of him, to draw fresh conclusions about who he was. It's an outstanding stream of self-consciousness, 607 words in total, and striking to see laid out over two heavy blocks of text. It gives an impression of the weight of these intrusions on our brain. Almost makes you pity our species for having developed such a mighty talent for self-regard.
All of which brings me back to why I reached out to Rossi. Here was someone who wrestled with many of the same intrusive thoughts and impulses as I did. Here, too, was a path toward managing them, expressed, for the first time, in a way I could grasp. Through my own fits and starts, I know meditation can be a difficult practice to absorb. If that's familiar to you, Rossi's writing might serve as a more light-handed gateway to concepts like non-attachment and no-self. Better yet, start here…
You call your writing style ‘representational consciousness’. Can you explain it? Why do you think it works best for conveying experience and meaning?
The modernists were my very early influences. Early exposure to certain styles really impacts a young writer, and those writers impacted me. Eventually, I came to zen practice, and I began to see the discursive nature of thinking that was layered on top of reality. But equally, I began to see that everything in my “normal” experience was actually my mind.
So, on a simple level, representational consciousness points to two things. One is the idea that you can only “represent” consciousness on the page, and I’m trying to get a reader to enter into that representation of consciousness (rather than entering into a more typical story). The other is that representational consciousness means that the world, as both a person and a character experiences it, is a mere representation. There’s an immediate tension there: what is real? The world or my mind? Both? Neither? My mind, like all minds, constructs a version of the world for me to interact with. It constructs a story of self.
From a Buddhist point of view, the main confusion is that we fail to recognize this construction. We take what we see and experience for granted and believe it’s “real” rather than a construction, rather than a sort of “story.” That representation or story is both true and not true. And so the term “representational consciousness” has to do with both the process of creating a character (I can only represent a character’s consciousness through language) and also with the nature of reality itself, which is that all people have “representations” of reality in their minds, which they then mistake for reality itself. I’m trying to use a style of writing that mimics the way our consciousness works to create our world, and our self, in order to expose it, so to speak.
Representational consciousness, as a prose style, is meant to indicate to the reader that, in some way, a mind works in a particular way – it constantly forms a story of itself, for instance, in order to feel real, stable – and also that this mind is its own world, its own universe. At the same time, that universe, that world, that mind, can be punctured though, if the mind is willing to sort of exhaust itself in a struggle. That struggle can be the attempt to produce a viable story. More than anything, I’m after that puncturing of the story. Unfortunately, that puncturing is the very part that eludes language.
In Buddhism, there's this idea of non-attachment and transcending the self, which is very different from the Western push to self-actualize. But to someone not immersed in the practice, it can look like emotional withdrawal or even moral disengagement, similar to the "protect your energy" mindset common in modern individualist culture.
Is that a misreading? Or is that tension – between inner peace and outer responsibility – something that’s addressed within the tradition?
This is a complex and really good question. I’ll do my best, and for those reading, I’m very sorry, this answer is long. I promise the ones after will be more succinct.
Editorial note: I've divided Rossi's answer into three parts.
I. The Self
I hear you: Buddhism can look distant, cold, and possibly even nihilistic. In order to answer your question about non-attachment, it might be helpful for readers to have a grounding in what Buddhism is really saying about existence. What it views as the basic facts, and how sometimes those facts get confused. Sometimes this is just down to bad translation.
For instance, the first noble truth is often translated as “life is suffering,” but “dukkha,” the term translated as “suffering,” might be better translated as “dissatisfaction.” So, life is dissatisfying. And then the next noble truth is the cause of dissatisfaction. The cause is often translated as “desire,” but attachment, clinging, or craving are equally good translations. Most importantly, though, it’s where the desire comes from that is really the problem. The self. Identity. In a better or more contemporary translation, the first two noble truths, rather than being life is suffering, which is caused by desire turns into life is unsatisfying because the self is constantly craving stuff and never becomes fully satisfied.
What Zen Buddhism is really asking the practitioner to do at this point is look at this self. In the zen tradition, [Japanese Zen master] Dogen says, “To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.” So the study begins there. What is this self that is always wanting, always craving, always desiring, always wishing and hoping for things to be better or different? Always, essentially, calculating for a way to get itself in a better position? What is the deal with that self? What I began to see is that the hinge is the self. It's the whole crux of the problem. And what Buddhism goes on to say is that the self and identity are illusions. (forget the literary cliche “you can never truly know another person”; Buddhism says there’s no other person to know on a fundamental level, that there’s only another person to be experienced. Knowing the self is almost beside the point in Buddhism).
This is why Buddhists practice non-attachment—because attachment, which emanates from and in turn reifies a sense of self, causes pain. We attempt to reify or validate that self or ego (if you prefer that term) over and over and over by craving and wanting and trying to get and seeking approval, and it leads to confusion and dissatisfaction because the self can never be satisfied. The self is an engine, so to speak, of wanting. Wanting is how the self constructs itself.
II. Non-Attachment
Okay, I’ve brought us to a weird place: the self is an illusion. As language, it’s like, yeah, sure, identity is a social construction, we’re formed by our experiences, etc, etc. But Buddhism is saying something much, much deeper than that. It’s too much to get into for this, so I’ll just quietly move on to a more specific answer about non-attachment.
As you said in your question, the whole notion of non-attachment appears to be at odds with ideas like “self-actualization.” In the Buddhist context, non-attachment is really about not clinging to certain mind or emotional states. It could also be not clinging to certain things, objects, or people. Not clinging to ideas. Even Buddhist ideas. But what I have found is that Buddhism has nothing to do with not experiencing things. In fact, Buddhism might be said to be the practice of fully experiencing things for the first time. Many teachers have said that to practice Buddhism is to become fully human, or what zen calls “a true person of no rank.”
“The self is an engine, so to speak, of wanting. Wanting is how the self constructs itself.”
For instance, say a person experiences joy at the birth of their baby girl (like I did). In Buddhism, that’s wonderful. I mean, there are way more emotions mixed up in that experience in reality. Almost nothing is cleanly emotional like that, but okay, just for sake of argument, let’s say, baby girl born, person experiences joy. Buddhism has no problem with this. The problem comes not in the form of the emotion, but in the attachment to the emotion, which reifies a sense of self. So, Buddhism says don’t cling to the emotion. Don’t hold on to it.
That reminds me of this note I saw…
There are a couple reasons why: one, that joy is going to change anyway (impermanence is a fact of reality). The joy is going to go away, so trying to hold the joy is impossible from the beginning. And two, holding on creates a negative, the sense that you’ll lose the joy. When we try to hold the joy, we don’t actually experience the joy fully. We instead experience the joy mixed with the fear of loss. In this way, due to attachment, hidden within the positive or pleasurable emotion (joy) is its loss and therefore pain (sadness at joy going away), which reinforces the need to cling or be attached, to hold on to what we want or see as good.
So, the reason non-attachment is important is because nothing stays as it is. For me personally, this has meant coming to terms with impermanence, coming to terms with the fact that life is incredibly sad. Actually allowing that sadness to be there. The goal isn’t to be detached and not experience emotions. Non-attachment is actually to experience emotions and life fully but not holding on nor pushing away anything (pushing things away is another form of craving, of attaching to or seeking and trying to hold something that is not the negative emotion/experience).
What attachment is, in a very basic way, is a controlling mindset. Almost everyone lives like this. Attempting to control reality, make it as stable as possible, in order to not really experience impermanence, nor directly experience ourselves. That attempt at control is an aggressive position. It’s like manhandling reality, trying to make reality and oneself be a certain way. On the other hand, letting go, not being attached, is to experience all things just as they are: joy is joy; sadness is sadness; compassion is compassion; anger is anger; tea is tea; food is food, and so on. Not adding anything extra to feelings and experiences. But no one does that. We all add the extra stuff. We attach to everything, see it as ours, add the story of our self, and thus, our emotions go up and down. They spin, they’re confused, and we don’t experience them clearly because we’re always looking for the next thing or trying to hold on to the current thing. That is samsara. Buddhism asks the practitioner to investigate whether that spinning is necessary or not. Not whether it is good or bad. Just whether it is a necessary part of the whole process.
The strange thing here is that as a practitioner becomes more and more aligned with non-attachment, they actually suffer more, they feel more sadness, they feel more dissatisfaction. This was certainly true for me. The world started getting in. Whereas the self and all its selfish concern kept the door closed by trying to hold good emotions and get rid of bad emotions, hold good experiences and avoid bad, with a general dissatisfaction kind of humming behind lived life mixed with a general feeling of meaninglessness behind that. But, for me, through less attachment, that filter of self began to open. Sadness was there. It’s the sadness of a confused world. That sadness in Buddhism, when experienced deeply, causes compassion to arise. The practitioner sees that it’s not their life that is important, but all the other lives out there, who need help, who are attached to self, who are mistakenly perceiving themselves as centrally real. The practitioner doesn’t try to convert anyone, doesn’t preach Buddhism, but takes action—not unlike your story about the permaculture farm.
My action is writing stories about it that I hope are impactful enough to make people curious. As the self begins to fall away, and a real experience of the suffering of the world begins to occur, the practitioner begins to sense that there’s another way to be in the world altogether, and that other way has to do with, in some sense, becoming intimate with reality. Eventually, over time, once one becomes truly intimate with reality, there’s no more suffering, there’s no more self, though individual action takes place. It’s sometimes said that the Buddha woke up to personlessness.
III. Self-Actualization
All of which leads me to self-actualization. I don’t think Zen Buddhism has a problem with that, at least not in theory. Let’s say you want to become a great artist. You have to strive in some way to become that. You have to actualize that “self.” The trick here, at least from a zen point of view, is to do that without being attached to results or attached to self. In other words, you strive and make a disciplined effort, but if you’re attached to results, you suffer, you’re dissatisfied. If you’re attached to the idea “great artist,” that’s not going to go well because it’s a further reification of self. Or if you’re attached to your striving, that’s a problem. Zen Buddhism, like Taoism, says, “do your work, then step back.” Striving, making an effort, becoming good at something, Zen Buddhism has no problem with any of that, and there are plenty of wonderful zen poets and painters (or martial artists). But the idea is to do the work and step back, not make it about the self. I struggled with that for years, and wrote about it for Cluny Journal. In America, the idea of “stepping back” seems almost insane, but from the Buddhist point of view, fame and celebrity are insane. Fame is a shrine to an illusion.
As to the part of the question about inner and outer responsibility, Zen says there’s really no such thing as an inner world and an outer world. There only seems to be that distinction. So, in zen, we treat ourselves with a sense of discipline, effort, and also gentleness, and this gentleness extends out to all other people. The meditative realm creates a sense of openness and spaciousness, whereas a strong sense of self creates a small landscape, where all its wants and desires and hopes and fears is the world. This can be very imposing and even powerful (again, we celebrate this in American culture), but it remains incredibly small, limited. The meditative realm allows all that to fall away. The meditative realm reveals that we’ve layered a world of self on top of the actual world. When that self-world begins to fall away, a sense of openness appears, a sense that life is just happening, unlimitedly, that nothing could ever be wrong.
“Through less attachment, that filter of self began to open. Sadness was there. It’s the sadness of a confused world. That sadness in Buddhism, when experienced deeply, causes compassion to arise.”
I’ve experienced this. It’s almost as though a person, for the first time, experiences cosmic energy simply at play, transforming, changing forms. That energy is awake, alive, radiant, unconfused, without self. In Zen, this has to be experienced. Talking about it doesn’t do anything. Writing about it here is a map, but it’s an inaccurate map simply because everyone's lived experience is unique.
Anyway, when this opening occurs, we can really meet the world and others directly. It’s not that we’re not attached and therefore cold; it’s the opposite. It’s that we’re unattached to our own agendas, and therefore open and receptive and warm. Real non-attachment means being unattached to one’s own agendas, schemes, and desires, and welcoming in life. Or, as Dogen says in Genjokoan, “Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization. Those who greatly realize delusion are Buddhas. Those who are greatly deluded within realization are living beings.”
Realizing my own delusions means allowing all things to carry out enlightenment through me. I don’t do anything, I don’t become awake or enlightened or even try to. I only realize my delusions, over and over. Realizing delusion is un-attaching from the self. Un-attaching from the self is letting all things carry out enlightenment through me. Then, it’s as Dogen says: “To forget the self is to be verified by the myriad things. To be verified by the myriad things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off. There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped. We endlessly express this ungraspable trace of realization.”
This doesn’t mean that a Buddhist can’t want an ice cream cone or want to become a great composer or even desire sex or something. It just means that one is unattached to the desire, so that if the ice cream cone doesn’t happen, one isn’t bummed, or if one’s partner isn’t up for sex, then one isn’t annoyed. This is because you don’t see the desire as yourself. It’s just a cloud. And that cloud, like all our thoughts, actions, and speech, endlessly expresses the ungraspable trace of realization.
That’s a long, conceptual answer, and there are a million dangers and pitfalls that I haven’t discussed, but there it is. Where I am is: I try to have an attitude of being up for anything, being open to anything, accepting things as they come, but when I’m cut off in traffic on the freeway, some days it might not bother me, and some days I get annoyed, ya know. Then I meditate later on and am like, I can’t believe I made a weird face at the person in that car that cut me off in traffic. Generally speaking, though, I’m a much calmer, less anxious person than I was 10 or 15 years ago.
I should note: Zen isn’t interested in conceptual answers about reality, like the one I’ve just given. But we also have to talk about it, so it’s a paradox.
I’d love to ask a question directed to you. From some of your own writing, I can see you’re engaged, either directly through things you’ve written, or by way of translation, with some of the most pressing issues of the day. I noticed a few pieces regarding climate change, and one in particular, about sustainable tourism, and eventually about your time spent working on a permaculture farm. This was a kind of antidote to what you called “leisure ennui.” My question is: do you see non-attachment occurring here, in this experience?
Me: Doing the permaculture work in South Africa, the extreme heat and intense labor left little room for anything but the most immediate thoughts and feelings—there’s that stinging in my eyes again; remember, sucking the venom out will only kill us both; fucking ants, God damn these ants, etc. There was very little beyond the moment to attach myself to, no one around to perceive me. I was a person picking things up and putting them down again, directing water to where it was most needed, plucking and pulling and edibles from their respective stems and soils.
The constructed world, so to speak, disappeared. I liaised between various natural systems. That was my identity. I was a liaison, devoid of rank, in service to something so much bigger, so much more essential, than myself. I mean, who are we, really, in the kingdom of living things? Everything and nothing, you know? I really felt that. I felt it in a way I can't explain, which I think suggests some sort of non-attachment occurred.
It was only when I reflected on the experience after, telling people and writing about it, that the attachments re-surfaced. Should something so “real” be expressed through such aesthetic language and images? Will permaculture experts consider me a fraud? Who am I to think I'm being read by permaculture experts? Even telling you this now, I'm thinking, was non-attachment only possible because I knew this experience would be temporary? Does it matter? The self-world fell away in the present. Isn't that what it's about?
As I understand it, you’re only truly responsible for what you intend. How do you understand or work with intention in your own life? Do you consider the karmic impact of most of your choices?
I think it would be nice to be responsible only for what we intend, but I don’t think that’s actually the case. I think we can intend something very good, and often that doesn’t pan out how we imagined. We might intend to help someone, and instead of helping them, we might confuse them further or annoy them. There are consequences, or karma, for that, and we have to deal with it. That being said, having good intentions is important, necessary. It at least gets us going in a decent direction. But life is life: chaotic, messy, confusing, and sometimes even the best intentions don’t see us through, and even good intentions can be a confusing map. From a meditative point of view, right intention arises directly on the spot.
I do consider karmic impact, definitely, but not on a global scale or anything. Just right down in my life with the people I live and relate with. I try my best to eat responsibly, buy responsibly produced things, live sustainably, etc. But we live in a system of harm. I didn’t create that system. Neither did you. And yet I have to weirdly be an agent within it. I’m typing on a computer that is using materials mined from poorer countries, probably using exploitive labor practices. Yet here I am, typing away. Best to focus on the immediate situation, the other people around me, the other life around me. That's where my intentions can make the most difference.
In sum, I do the best I can with my own intentions, but I also try to cultivate a sense of openness toward all situations. Openness is an intention of a certain kind, and it really invites in the most possibilities. Sometimes my own intentions can begin to look a bit too much like an agenda, and then it’s my self getting in the way again. My feeling here is that too many rules, intentions, or forethought is restrictive – I mean, I do it all the time, but I try not to – because then all these expectations get set up, and often, expectations don’t get fulfilled. So, for me, intentions should arise immediately, right on the spot, within the situation itself. This is trusting what Trungpa called our own basic sanity, our basic goodness. I’m curious about you. How do you think about intention?
Me: More retroactively, unfortunately. Obviously, I try to make decent decisions in the moment. I try to consider how my actions affect others. I try to act in ways that minimize unnecessary harm. I try to stay aware of the ripple effects of my choices. But things are unpredictable, and when my actions go awry, I tend to soothe myself with the righteousness of my intent. This is bad because righteousness gets stronger over time, I feel, which introduces an element of delusion. Instead of my present self taking responsibility for the course of things, there's a past self saying, Aren't you proud I tried to do the right thing? I don't think that's helpful to anyone, though delusion sure can soothe.
Someone wrote this on the r/Buddhism subreddit: Your decisions shape the quality of your life. In many ways, your life reflects the choices you make. No one else is responsible for your life but you. This perspective appears to challenge many popular narratives today.
The implication is that we have far more control over our feelings and minds than we often admit, and that our past actions and identifications may come under scrutiny as a result. Is shame a useful emotion in Buddhism like it is in Catholicism?
Oh, interesting. Yes, I’d say we have total control over our minds and emotions, but you’re right, we don’t experience it that way. Especially with emotions. They almost seem to come from outside us and then we have to deal with them. Having control of one’s mind, though, is very tricky. Repressing isn’t control, but also following every impulse isn’t control either. Even ‘control’ is a tricky word. It’s more about flow, letting things flow through, accepting them, not trying to control. In not trying to control, one gains some control. In allowing the mind to just do what it does, it calms down, and there’s a way to experience thought and emotion with clarity, without being overwhelmed or confused by these things. That really is what meditation practice is: reining in the mind, taming it, by allowing it to be just as it is. Then all emotions and mind states become opportunities for insight.
I think when we have a thought we don’t like, we go, “Oh no, that thought’s bad, get rid of it,” but that just gives the thought more power, because we reify its existence as being bad. At the same time, indulging in it is just as foolish. Let’s say I’ve been getting frustrated too often and maybe my wife has pointed that out. When the next frustration comes up, I can easily go, “Oh no, frustrated again, that sucks, get rid of that, why I am doing that?” But all that does is concretize the frustration further. Now I’ve identified with the frustration, and now I’m frustrated about the frustration. Instead of just seeing it clearly, letting it be there, and letting it go away. Problem is, we’d often rather not do that. The frustration seems to be ours, seems to who we are in that moment, so if we don’t repress it, we follow it, indulge it, and we often say, ‘This is real because it’s what I’m feeling, and I need to speak my truth’, which only further entrenches us.
Shame is useful because it points at something else. Guilt is useful. Anger is useful. All mind states and emotional states are opportunities to see more clearly, to see something being pointed out. Shame might be indicating that a person feels unworthy. Unworthy of love or existence. Unworthy of outside validation. So messed up as to be unworthy of other people’s time and consideration. I’ve certainly experienced that. But beneath the shame is something else. Shame usually indicates that we understand we’ve made some mistake; it indicates that we understand that something in our thought or action is out of alignment with reality; it might indicate that we feel impure or broken. In this way, shame points us back toward reality itself.
In Buddhism, reality is the following: all conditioned/assembled things are impermanent, all conditioned/assembled things are unsatisfying, all conditioned/assembled things are without self (those are the three characteristics of reality that we don’t like to look at). Additionally, there is that which is unassembled and unconditioned, which is the nature of everything, that is fundamentally pure, luminous, and perfect. Shame is often pointing us back to this original, primordial perfection that we can never not be, that we always are. Shame is actually a reminder of the inherent purity of all life, beyond concepts. Anger, on the other hand, is pointing back toward compassion or generosity, usually.
In your short story The Buddhist, we meet Sean, a Canadian monk who’s let go of almost everything—his violent upbringing, his home country, Western materialism, even his relationship to physical pain. During a conversation with his student Elise, he finds himself noticing her beauty. He comments on how her face lights up when she talks, and he imagines what she might look like in bed. These thoughts seem to slip through no matter how committed he is to detachment.
Do you think sexual desire is the hardest thing to let go of, even for someone who’s given up so much? Which wants do you find most difficult to resist?
I think what’s happening with Sean there is that he is playing too much at being a Buddhist. He’s attempting to let those thoughts go, but he’s really judging himself a little bit for having them. So, he’s not really accepting that a human mind just does this, has sexual thoughts sometimes. Rather than being detached, or non-attached, though he’s working at it, he’s actually attempting to repress the thoughts. Of course, I based this on myself. I understood this about myself. You can see here how a rigid intention can become a trap: A spiritual person should be like this, should only have sexual thoughts for my direct partner and then only pure thoughts for everyone else in existence. Thinking like that is a total trap. It’s a trap because sexuality itself isn’t bad. But we create scenarios in which it can be, or we cling to it in order to reify the self. All that does is cause confusion. But just letting those thoughts exist, we begin to see that they’re no big deal, and they go on their own. Easier said than done, but that’s the idea.
But yes, sexuality itself can be extremely potent and difficult to work with. It’s hard to let go. Sex is so cosmically validating! The emotional component coupled with the physical component is powerful. But the question here is very tricky. Letting go can often disguise repression. It’s really about getting to know one’s mind and learning to be very accepting of whatever goes on in there. Making friends with those thoughts, emotions. Not being intimidated by them. Sean is very much intimidated by these thoughts, really thinking he needs to let them go, controlling too much. I’ve written a character here who maybe understands a good bit about Buddhist philosophy but doesn’t understand it deeply yet.
“Shame is useful because it points at something else. Guilt is useful. Anger is useful. All mind states and emotional states are opportunities to see more clearly.”
Robert Aitken, a great zen teacher, has a quote that goes something like this: “The things of this world are not drugs in and of themselves; we make them drugs by our use of them.” I think we can turn just about anything into a drug or addiction. Actual drugs, alcohol, sure, but also food, TV, material items, sex, power, social media, anything. Those I mentioned are all difficult ones. Online life will increasingly take over the traditional addictions of alcohol, drugs, and sex. But I don’t really resist any wants. The ones that come up for me are typical. For instance, even though I don’t really like drinking, I crave a beer about every night. I drank or smoked almost every day of college, so I think it’s just encoded now. But I pretty much never have a drink. Not because I’m sober, and not because I’m resisting it, but because I just don’t like how it makes me feel anymore. But then friends will come over or whatever and I’m very happy to have a few drinks, and inevitably I’ll drink too much, and it’ll be really nice, but I’ll feel like garbage the next day, and not drink for the next couple months. It’s like that now. I’m older.
As for sex, it’s the exact same. Just kidding. With sex I feel now I can watch the desire arise and watch it flame out. Zazen [meditation] has taught me that’s just what happens. But I’d also say I’m not a monk or something. If I want a beer, I have a beer. If we treat things like drugs, they will be drugs; if we act like we’re not in control of our minds, then we’re not. The opposite is also true, and if we kind of abide in impermanence, not act from a selfish position, etc., we can enjoy most things in a wholesome way. Most importantly, if we stop turning things into drugs, reality totally opens up. New possibilities, freshness, curiosity everywhere.
In 2009, during the down period of your life, you got sick for a week—fever, hallucinations, thermal chaos. Here’s what you wrote about the morning you started to recover:
I ate chicken noodle soup from a can. It tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten … I saw the sunrise for the first time in what felt like forever, cresting over Buffalo Mountain. I felt wiped clean, empty, personless. The sunrise was beautiful. I was grateful for it. The sun’s rays felt as though they were prying open long-closed parts of my heart. I wrote a story that began, ‘If I lived in a hut, a lot of my problems would be solved.” The feeling of personlessness, identitylessness, lasted the day. People seemed friendlier. I felt freed from something, but by the next day I was back, able again to see nothing but myself.
I went through something similar. A bowl of phở from a bus stop in Hanoi had me laid up near-dead for four days. I wrote:
I emerged from my tomb with a sort of post-dissociative clarity, the kind you get after meditating or running or horse drugs. It was like I had just come into existence, living each moment as if it were my first. The buttery evening light over the rice fields, the highly edible smell of the air, the caress of a breeze—every impression made on an organ of sense produced an agreeable shift in my mood. My awe was so complete it was indistinguishable from air. But no sooner had things awed than they’d become awful.
Did we feel light and free because illness had, perhaps for the first time, put us in an extended state of not being able to think or want?
Yes, it had something to do with not thinking or wanting, I agree. How I’d describe it is that your normal reference point was wiped away for a moment. Your self or ego had dissolved. I think most people believe (from ridiculous media they’ve consumed about it) that when they experience a moment of self falling away or egolessness, they’ll be transported to the middle of the universe or the earth will fall away and they’ll be floating in black space, but that’s not really what happens. I mean, it can happen on psychedelics, and it’s pretty interesting, and there are some extreme things I’ve experienced during sesshins (long zen meditation retreats). But ego can fall away in many ways. I think of Joshu, when he wakes up, what he says is, “Oh, that’s what it is—but it was there all along.”
So it’s not like your individuality goes up in smoke and you’re a pinprick of light in the center of the universe (such a rather selfish image, really). It’s that your reference point has changed. The normal reference point is the small, collapsed self. When that structure broke down – and illness can do it – we got a glimpse of what life could be like if not attached to the self. Zen calls this “ordinary mind.” And that phrase is trying to point us back to the idea that the big cosmic notion that you’ll wake up and enlightenment will be this gleaming thing where the supernova of your real being finally explodes into action is nonsense. Ordinary mind is another way of saying primordial mind. But it’s not the mind of the self either. It’s not the mind we experience in day-to-day life. It’s way beyond all that, but Zen also calls it ordinary because we’re never without it.
After your immersion in Zen Buddhism, you wrote that your wish to live in a mountain hut had been fulfilled, but that the hut was metaphorical—“for the first time, my problems were not really mine, they were constructions of the mind, of the self.” Is solitude a useful tool for transformation, or just another fantasy of control? I'm reminded of the idiom, Wherever you go, there you are.
For me, solitude is definitely helpful. To practice zazen, or writing, one needs a lot of alone time. You have to be willing to work with your mind. Only being alone can facilitate that. That being said, being alone has to be balanced with being with others. I spend a lot of time alone (even though I’m part of a family), but I also like being with other people, probably in a more small-scale way than other people. I don’t like crowds, for instance.
I can easily see how “solitude” could be turned into a fantasy, or that it could be used as a mechanism for control. But to practice zen, being alone – to some degree, anyway – is necessary. Most people have no idea how to handle being alone, nor how to handle the boredom of being alone. And boredom, especially in our culture, is seen as an enemy, the worst thing that can possibly happen during a normal day (we like leisure but hate boredom).
“If we stop turning things into drugs, reality totally opens up. New possibilities, freshness, curiosity everywhere.”
When someone says a meeting is boring (and they often are), what they usually mean is they want to be somewhere else, doing something else. But there’s actually a way to be bored and alone that is totally refreshing. Trungpa calls this “cool boredom.” He says it’s the boredom of the mountain stream, moving along lazily. My own thought is that if we just alter our attention and awareness, we can take something that is seemingly boring, like being alone, and see what’s really going on there.
What’s something you read that changed you immediately?
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura. The Blue Cliff Record. A Portrait of the Artist. The Waves. Crime and Punishment. So many others.
All art changes a person in some way, even if you don’t notice it. All media and experiences do, too. But those were all impactful when I was younger.
Recently, so many: Dag Solstad, Tao Lin, Yuko Tsuhima, August Lamm, Jo Hamya, Daisy Hildyard, ARX-Han, JL Carr, Caleb Klaces, Jordan Castro.
You said playing soccer leaves you “feeling as though my mind had dissolved in my skin, just a body moving through the world, thoughtless and happy.” The other day, during a break in play, I felt exactly that, just perfectly at peace and grateful, which I guess is a thought, but still: it's so great to just be a body, isn't it?
Oh yeah, I completely agree. I love being a body and getting out of my head. I love playing sports, and I love sitting still in meditation—both are very physical things. I’m up for just about any physical thing, and while I’m a writer and a teacher, physicality is hugely important to me. It’s sort of why I don’t have social media. It’s just a waste of opportunities to be physical and out in the world.
Cate Hall says “much of life, and increasingly so, is a battle against superstimuli encroaching on your mental autonomy.” Do more sophisticated mechanisms of distraction require constant re-fortification?
Probably yes. But the best thing to do has been and remains to just turn screens off and go outside and be a body.
Most of us want to break free from constant, restless thinking. Many have tried meditation but stumbled early on. What would you say to encourage them to keep going? What small signs of progress can beginners look for that prove their effort is paying off?
If you’re just starting out, I would say go for a long walk or a long run, and then, at the very end of the walk or run, lay down, and just breathe. Just let yourself stop after a long walk or run and pay attention. You’ll feel the energy of the walk or run calming down. That is meditation. You’ll get a sense of how the body and mind slow down. It might look really weird if you have a roommate or a partner, so maybe let them know what you’re doing. Don’t do this in public. You may confuse people. Or, go ahead and confuse people.
“The best thing to do has been and remains to just turn screens off and go outside and be a body.”
On the other hand, if you just “start meditating,” that can be very tough. It’s much, much harder to notice how the body settles, and how the mind settles in turn. Instead, you’re sitting there wondering, “Am I doing this right, am I really following my breath.” All that. But if you start with intense activity, and then really stop and pay attention to that stopping, you’ll get a clearer idea of what happens naturally in meditation simply because the change from action to rest is more pronounced. I’d do something like that, then try to begin a formal meditation practice afterward. Start with 5 or 10 minutes and just relax. In-breath, attention, out-breath, relax. Attention, relax, over and over.
A small sign you can look for is feeling like things don’t get to you as much. You might notice that you’re sort of okay if something doesn’t quite go your way. That’s a great sign. This isn’t apathy. It’s becoming okay with how things are.
Another small sign is that you feel like you can focus a little longer. Meditation naturally develops concentration.
Another small sign is that you get annoyed when you find yourself overthinking something. That annoyance is sort of reminding you that there’s another option for your being.
Another one is a sense of humor about the absurdity of things. You might notice social situations are really bizarre. Having a sense of humor about that is important.
But: don’t look for those signs.
If you’re meditating and enjoy meditating, but are a little stuck, don’t know where to go next, I recommend finding a good teacher. A good teacher is someone who acts as a guide. Who isn’t there to impress you or make you feel like you don’t get it. But just someone who can share their own experience and give you an idea of what to do next.
I can't help but feel that concepts like progress or failure simply dissolve in a state of isness, where there's only raw experience and no interpretation. Isn’t there something a little unsettling about that?
Yes, definitely! Why do you think that is? I’m curious about your point of view on this. My own take here is that it’s unsettling because it reveals that our sense of self is not really solid or permanent, and that there is something else, much, much bigger than the small self that is endlessly expressing itself. It’s like stepping into the living void, and when you do that, your little ego-point of reference is decimated, no longer in control, but you’re also interrelatedly still there.
Me: I can only answer this from the perspective of someone with a strong sense of self (derogatory). I guess what unsettles me is that progress, failure, achievement, etc. are key indicators around which we've built our world and our selves, and without them, I'd lose my sense of orientation. Of course, I know that life is much more than a tally of wins and losses. And I would love to just be there more often, there being a place where the ego's points of reference are decimated. I'm just afraid I'd become inert and one-dimensional, like a toilet brush. Short-lived periods of action, otherwise unceasing passivity.
You’ve said that the less we experience the world through our wanting, the more of it we actually see, and that this is essential for writing. How do you bring that into your teaching? Can your students actually internalize and apply this perspective?
I try to talk to them about why they want to write. They’re often very aware of the contradiction between creation for creation’s sake and the need for approval. I tell them to investigate that. To make it part of their writing. The way out of wanting so much is to explore it, not be controlled by it, and be honest about it. Most of them really understand that in an intuitive way, and I try to only point them in a certain direction without telling them too much. It has to be personally realized. On another note, I’m extremely hopeful about the younger generations. I see them as great beacons, very intelligent, and willing to go to difficult places. I’m excited for them.
During long stretches when I’m not writing, I tell myself I’m just collecting material for when things finally click and the work begins—letting things simmer, etc. At the same time, I’ve never had fewer obstacles. I don’t have kids. I have time. And still, I wait. I can’t shake the fear that I’ll spend my whole life deferring.
In some sense, you’re correct. You are collecting material. That is necessary for a writer. But you also have to do the work. Doing the work is frightening, you’re faced with nothingness, and you have to create something out of that. You know this, I’m sure, from the articles and essays you’ve written. But there is a point when you know you really have something. You have to be honest about that. You have to be willing to look directly and go, Okay, I’ve got something here, it’s time to try to put it down, even if I might fail at it. Even if I don’t think I’m ready to do it yet. You have to go for it, and you have to be brave in the face of failure, basically.
Again, not to belabor the point, but the self, the ego, it’s going to find all kinds of ways to either keep you comfortable and not writing, not putting yourself out there, or it’s going to find ways to make you aggrandize yourself. And part of the whole thing, for me anyway, is finding a way to thread the needle between those two extremes. How can I be brave and really put myself out there, while also not aggrandizing myself? It’s a bit like soccer; you know when you’re playing well, and it’s almost effortless. That same area can be found in writing. The problem is, it doesn’t last. But, if you can hit that same sort of zone, even if the writing needs to be revised later, you usually know you’ve captured something important and can trust it.
I spent a lot of time writing when I didn’t have kids, and much of that writing no one will ever see. I wrote several novels, for instance. They weren’t good, but each one got a little better, and then eventually, I became decent at it. Those failures were necessary, and it was painful to kind of realize those books weren’t good (and I’m sure my wife would tell you I really dramatized that pain), but I also learned so much, and most of what I learned was what sort of writer I was and what sort of writer I wasn’t.
“You might notice that you’re sort of okay if something doesn’t quite go your way. That’s a great sign. This isn’t apathy. It’s becoming okay with how things are.”
Now I have two children, and I write more and in a more disciplined manner than I ever have. And yet failure still exists, it’s just that the failure is different now (not that I can’t write a bad novel, I know that I can and probably have). For instance, my agent is currently sending my new novel on sub under a pseudonym because the sales figures for my previous two novels were so abysmal. Editors look at bottom lines. It’s an unfortunate part of the business, and there’s a good chance this new novel won’t be published. Since I believe the novel is fairly strong, that would be a failure of a different kind, but a failure nonetheless. And that’s okay. I know my prose is demanding in a certain way, but that book was important to me, and the ideas in it were important for me to articulate.
Do you have ambitions as a writer?
My ambitions as a writer are to become a better writer, to challenge myself without causing myself harm, to challenge others with my prose style to enter into more complexity than is present in most novels, but to try to find a way to do this that feels possible and rewarding. To challenge readers just the right amount. I’m less interested in being entertained than in being immersed and feeling another’s way of seeing reality and being moved by that in some way, and so I aim for that in my own writing. I know a lot of people will disagree with me, but we’re a culture so hooked on “entertainment,” I can’t even read novels that are so-called “entertaining.” They often feel so false to me. I’d much rather be challenged in some way. I don’t read novels for pleasure or enjoyment exactly. I read them to learn others and to forget the self.
If by ambition you mean market success or fame, my feeling is that I’m happy to make some money because I have a family, and it’s nice to be recognized (like now, doing this interview) to a certain degree, but I’m not interested in fame or money. I think even in my twenties, when other writer friends wanted to win big prizes like the Pulitzer or something, I didn’t have a sense of that. I didn’t care about it, and I actually thought it was strange to think that way. I just wanted to write well, and in writing well, I hoped to learn more about life. This also makes me think of Dogen, in Regulations for the Auxiliary Cloud Hall: “Those who have a way-seeking mind and have abandoned fame and profit should enter. Those who are half-hearted and lack sincerity should not.” This is my feeling about writing and about people reading my writing. If you want to enter, there’s a certain way. I’m not writing for fame and profit, not writing to entertain the reader. I’m writing for the same reason I sit zazen [meditating in the lotus position]: to drop the self, to meet and express reality, and I hope others want to meet there.
You quote John Muir, the American naturalist, in your Cluny Journal piece. Muir never studied Zen, but his immersion in nature seems to have led him to something uncannily similar. How does being in nature and reading about it bring you closer to reality?
Nature is a gateway. Everything is a gateway. But nature is a good gateway because it speaks immediately of interdependence, stillness, and impermanence, and also something beyond all of that: emptiness. It speaks directly to our inherent nature. Nature can bring about this stillness and emptiness. Nature is in a meditative state all the time. The rabbit being killed by the coyote is nature meditating, and so is the stream quietly rushing through a mountain valley. If we’re willing to really be in it, that meditative realm arises naturally in nature. In zen we call this “thusness.” Everything immediately as it is, without overlay of concept. There’s an intensely frightening aspect to this. And in the end, zen is just a concept, and has to be let go of too. Nature speaks directly to this in all of us, and also asks something of us.
This reminds me of Yunmen, talking to his assembly. “Everyone is in the midst of illumination, yet they don’t see it. Everything seems dark and dim. How is it being in the midst of illumination?”
Do you find the idea of being reincarnated as a single-celled organism appealing? Some sort of microalgae perhaps?
A revered zen teacher said, “When you are born, not one atom comes into existence; when you die, not one atom goes out of existence.”
Despite all the talk of non-attachment, I’m pretty attached to being a human, so I’d have hard time converting to a microalgae. A tree might be cool.
The Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. James Hollis says we go through two phases of life. In the first, we're preoccupied with what the world asks of us. In the second phase, it's more about what the soul asks of us, the soul being a metaphor for the purposeful expression of the living organism. In other words, the goal is to figure out what is wishing to be expressed in the world through you.
Do you relate to the idea that something deeper – soul, essence, whatever – is trying to find form through your writing?
I love Jung. Yes, I definitely resonate with this. Buddhism wouldn’t use terms like “soul” or “essence” because that makes it seem like there is some realer part of you within you that is yours. But that’s just semantics on some level. Buddhism says nothing is yours, but also that there is something, which is neither being nor non-being, which is the nature of everything, which is asking each of us if we’d like to express and embody this mysterious something.
“Nature is a good gateway because it speaks immediately of interdependence, stillness, and impermanence, and also something beyond all of that: emptiness."
You can always more and more deeply express it, more and more fully embody it. Dogen says that we already express it, we just don’t realize that we do. Another take, in Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness, goes, “Consciousness evolves in the sea of birth and death.”
I have to admit I’m questioning my own motives for publishing this interview. Yes, I’m genuinely interested in your insights, and I know others will be too. But there’s also a part of me that hopes the depth of your responses will reflect well on me by association. And when I start thinking like that, I worry I’ll overthink myself out of seeking conversations like this at all.
I’m smiling at this because I completely understand what you mean. And I hope my answers reflect well on you, too—I mean, I don’t want this to be a flop for your audience! But I get what you’re saying: there’s some small selfish motivation here, too. And I’d say we all have that selfish part of ourselves. But you’re seeing it, which means you’re working with it, and it’s balanced with this conversation, which I’m grateful for, because it’s nice to be seen. Plus, noticing that selfish tendency, that’s what Dogen means when he says “studying the buddha way is studying the self.” Studying how the self has these little selfish motivations, it’s pretty subtle, and often daunting or irritating, but that’s the study.
We’re all doing this interplay of selflessness and selfishness all the time, and paying attention to that is the meaning of “consciousness evolves in the sea of birth and death.” On an ultimate scale, there’s nothing to worry about.
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I really appreciated this! 🤍 I feel so understood by you two and am now eager to read Alan’s writing—the answering machine story sounded right up my alley!
Ahh Christian, this piece is so special. It also brought me to Rossi's original piece, which felt like a great gift. I'll be chewing on both for a while, I think. Such a meaningful, thoughtful, true exchange – very, very generous.