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Back in LA

I arrived back in Los Angeles at noon on Saturday, October 29th. I’m still not home, though. I lent my nephew my apartment while I was away and he can’t move into his new place until Tuesday. So I’m still living out of a suitcase. Americans in Europe tend to be obnoxious. I lost count […]

Resist Xenophobia!

A couple weeks ago, I stayed in a giant hippy-anarchist house in Berlin. Biggest hippy house I ever saw! It was like six stories of hippies! Apparently it had once been a squat. It was in what used to be East Berlin. It’s still “East Berlin,” but not in the same way as before. Sometime […]

Form is Emptiness

During the discussion of the Heart Sutra yesterday at the retreat I’m leading in Benediktushof, I started talking about how the idea that form is emptiness is very much related to some of the stuff people have discovered recently in the world of science. A long time ago people figured out that all matter is […]

Zen and the Art of Rock Guitar

Zen and the Art of Rock Guitar

In high school I knew a guy named Dave. Dave was a great guitar player even when he was 15. I remember seeing him play Eddie Van Halen’s solo guitar piece “Eruption” when Van Halen’s first album was still fresh and nobody knew that he played the really fast part by using his right hand on […]

Dogen’s Cookbook

I don’t usually write out my talks. But the one I gave at Benediktushof retreat center in Holzkirchen, Germany this year needed to go through a translator so I wrote it out before giving it. It’s based on a chapter from the forthcoming follow-up to my current book Don’t Be a Jerk. Because it was […]