I'm not sure that Eastern culture does either, but I've never lived in India etc so I couldn't tell you. I can say we definitely don't. So people will sometimes come in contact with something strange and think, "Oh, it must be like this" and have a lot of fantasies about it, and somebody who sort of looks like our fantasy version of what enlightenment is can be very convincing in seeming like they've got something and then play that role.

So that's Godzilla, he's ultimately going to get you regardless of what you do. Maybe the people who made the American Godzilla film were scared of that. They didn't want him to represent that, to represent something we couldn't deal with because, "We're American's, we can deal with anything".

So I was first exposed to this guy Tim McCarthy, and he's talking about Zen, but deeper than that he was a genuine person. I thought maybe he's someone I can trust and follow this thing he's talking about all the time.

It's interesting to see what's going on with physics these days because they're starting to come out with stuff that sounds remarkably like Buddhism and even more specifically like the ancient Hindu Vedas. Physics isn't necessarily saying the exact same thing but I think eventually it will merge.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Those who hope for purity and righteousness always try and destroy that which disturbs them. They think the disturbance comes from outside themselves. This is a serious problem. Wars, suicide bombings, and all sorts of other nasty things start from the premise that we can destroy 'evil' outside ourselves without dealing with the evil within.

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.