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.

So when we come across somebody who does understand this and makes an effort to try and explain it to us, some people freak out and turn that person into either an object of worship or, some people freak out and want to kill that person. I think it's because they know what's true but they don't want to know, they don't want to face up to what that actually means. So they're going to kill the messenger and hope that by doing so they'll destroy the message so they can go back to living their ordinary life again.

Sometimes people pick up pet worries that they'll entertain themselves with and that was my big one. So as far as thinking about what that means, one of the definitions of insanity is that you lose your ability to communicate to anybody because your frames of reference have become so different from the rest of the world that you can't communicate anymore.

A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.

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.

I really thought Reagan was going to push the button and blow us all up. It was scary. So when they did the 1998 American Godzilla film, Hollywood didn't understand what Godzilla was.

The obvious example would be Jesus. Jesus is an object of fascination for me. He's an interesting historical character because we don't know much about him. He seems to be a guy who was in touch with something deeper than most people around him were and someone who was very concerned with trying to communicate that.