Now however, we have contraception and it's mostly reliable so you can have sex without that happening. So then you start vilifying the act of sex itself. I don't think Buddhism has ever done that necessarily, or at least I'm not aware of Buddhism taking the stance that Christianity often has which says that sex itself is a kind of evil act, which is a really weird idea.

The thing with the question of oneness or non-oneness is that you can literally discuss it forever. You can go into the philosophy section of any library and you'll see people have been discussing it forever and will continue to do so.

As you're implying, there's a new technology that can look even deeper into that brick and we can start getting into a level where it breaks down so that the brick isn't even there, but obviously it is because Moe can hit Curly on the head with it. It's quite bizarre and all relative.

The state of ambiguity - that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you're living through right now - is enlightenment itself.

At times, Zen does get into some Buddhist Cosmology. Nishijima Roshi, my main teacher would talk about that and almost every time immediately say that it was only one way of looking at it. Whenever addressing realms of Heaven or Hell, he'd also address that it was just a psychological state.

What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn't even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.

It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.