cohen interview

I recently heard a quote about Bernie Glassman. Someone who knows him well went to hear him speak. During the talk he said that he was going to confess his greatest addiction. The narrator thought, "cigars? Pepproni?" But instead, Glassman said his greatest addiction was himself. We take this to olympic levels in our culture. I found this clip of an interview in my 'documents' and, sadly, don't know its origins but it speaks to this addiction we all share:

"You never went to a therapist?" "For one reason or another, I didn't have any confidence in the therapeutic model. Therapy seems to affirm the idea unconditionally of a self that has to be worked on and repaired. And my inclination was that it was holding that notion to begin with that was the problem -- that there was this self that needed some kind of radical adjustment. It didn't appeal to me for some oddreason."

Up on Mount Baldy, Cohen found a notion of the self -- or non-self -- more conducive to his way of thinking than the one handed down by Freud et al."Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof," he told me, quoting Buddha. Not curing the self, but releasing one's grip on it --that was the solution. Also of help was the monastery's rigorous daily schedule, so filled with menial chores that he had no time to think about his problems. And then there was his friendship with Roshi, and the companionship of the other monks.

For Cohen, one of the beauties of Zen is that, because there is no discussion of a deity, it has never threatened his own Judaism, which has strengthened over time. "It just deepens," he said almost dreamily. "You just enter into that 4,000-year-old conversation with God and the sages."