The secret of entering the Way of the Wolf, the Way of the Wild, the Way of the Soul; a celebration of the Gospel of Mountains and Wolves; and a path to creating a vitalizing civilization, based on a nonduality of Nature and Culture.

The Way of the Wolf, Part 3—The Secret to Entering Wolf Wisdom and Wolf Magic

Part 7 in the Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow of gratitude and reverence to Sophia.

I want to say hello to some listeners out there, including friends I’ve heard from recently in the U.S., Ireland, Canada, and Australia. A special hello to James in Tasmania, good to hear from you.

It’s always nice to hear from listeners, even if you don’t have questions. Remember to put up a review on Apple, Spotify, or Podchaser, and feel free to share your thoughts and questions through dangerouswisdom.org

Well, here it is, friends, we finally get to the secret of entering the Way of the Wolf, the Way of the Wild, the Way of the Soul.

If you missed parts 1 and 2, you might want to go back and start there. But we are on the cusp of deep spiritual teachings, so it’s also okay if you want to hit the ground running with the pack.

Let’s return to Dōgen’s words, from our last contemplation:

Dōgen told us: “We should understand that the mountains are not within the limits of the human realm or the limits of the heavens above. They are not to be viewed with the calculations of human thought.”

Dōgen also said:

“Although we say that mountains belong to the country, actually they belong to those who love them. When the mountains love those they belong to, the wise and virtuous inevitably enter the mountains. And when sages and wise ones live in the mountains, because the mountains belong to them, trees and rocks flourish and abound, and the birds and beasts take on a supernatural excellence. this is because the sages and wise ones have covered them with their virtue. We should realize that the mountains actually take delight in wise ones, actually take delight in sages.”

When we think about those words, we must think that mountains and wolves both remain beyond human calculation, and we must think the mountains love wolves, and the wolves love mountains.

We got that same message from Aldo Leopold, who invited us to learn the hidden meaning of the wolf and the mountain, the hidden meaning of our own life. Leopold told us we might learn the hidden meaning of our own life by listening to the howl of a wolf and learning to think like a mountain, which means learning to think like a wolf.

We cannot live without the mountains, and so we cannot live without the wolves. But the mountains and wolves will not long endure if we do not learn to think as they think, and live as they live.

At least some wolves are sages and wise ones of the mountains. Some humans too, like Larry Gibson, the man whose wise words we considered last time.

Mountains delight in sages and wise ones, people like Wolf 21 and Larry Gibson. And the sages and wise ones—including wolves, but also including people like Dōgen, Rumi, the Peacemaker, Machig Labdron, and many others—they can teach us how to become the delight of mountains, and how to become the delight of all beings.

We could delight each other instead of terrorizing one another, and we could vitalize each other rather than degrading ourselves, each other, and the community of life.

We can think of this as the Gospel of Mountains and Wolves. Remember, “Gospel” means “Good News,” “Good Words,” and “Good Magic”. The Gospel of Mountains and Wolves is the Good Magic of Mountains and Wolves, the Good Magic of Wisdom and Wildness. That’s the magic we need to rejuvenate ourselves and our world.

There is a Gospel of Bee and Flower, and of course a Gospel of Horse and Prairie. And these too are Gospels of Wisdom and Wildness. But today we celebrate the Gospel of Mountain and Wolf.

I would have called this little series on wolves “The Gospel of Mountains and Wolves,” but I thought some Christian friends might consider it heretical, and non-Christians might have been put off. Then no one would listen and think about these essential matters.

In his book, Mark Rowlands has a chapter called, “The Religion of the Wolf”. He’s not a very religious guy, but that chapter offers a lot of good food for thought that can help us learn the Gospel of Mountains and Wolves.

To keep things feeling very spacious and inclusive, let’s speak of the LoveWisdom of Wolf instead of calling it a religion, and let that LoveWisdom of Wolf encompass not only religion, but all philosophy and spirituality.

In my interpretation of Rowlands’s book, there are basically three core teachings of the LoveWisdom of Wolf:

First, being is time, but it isn’t past, present, or future; rather, being is moment.

Secondly, our highest moments make us what we are, and no possession can replace their function in doing this.

Finally, the most important or highest moments of our lives are the ones that force us to give up hope and fear, and to somehow enter the inconceivable.

Now, I have adjusted these teachings to put them slightly more in accord with the wisdom traditions. Rowlands actually gets the wisdom traditions a little wrong here, but that doesn’t take away from his book or the spirit of his message.

Let’s listen to what Rowlands has to say, and then we’ll link some of it up with the teachings of the sages.

First, a shorter passage, regarding the first core teaching of the LoveWisdom of Wolf, that being is time. Rowlands writes,

“A wolf is a creature of time as well as of the moment. It is just that we are more creatures of time, and less creatures of the moment, than is [the wolf]. We are better at looking through moments than the wolf. And [the wolf] is better at looking at moments than are we.”

This is a crucial idea. We can recall Dōgen again. When he wrote that,

“We should understand that the mountains are not within the limits of the human realm or the limits of the heavens above. They are not to be viewed with the calculations of human thought.”

he pointed us at this same issue, but from a deep, deep place in the wisdom traditions, beyond the popular notion of “the power of now”.

In practical terms, human beings encumbered with domestication and conquest consciousness take up a calculating approach to life, and that leads us to lose the moment, and to instead entangle ourselves in hope and fear, extraction and exploitation, manipulation and control. It comes in a thousand varieties, so we often can’t even see ourselves doing it. We think we are free of it.

Following Gregory Bateson, we have referred to this as the problem of conscious human purpose—to highlight that this orientation goes altogether with our goals, our conscious intentions, our habitual sense of purpose, and our pervasive domestication—all of which makes it subtle and intimidating—and we have touched on it many times.

Think how challenging that is—to say that the problem is conscious human purpose. How do we face that? The dominant culture indoctrinates all of us with goal setting and intention setting. How do we face the fact that the wisdom traditions teach us we just don’t know how to intend very well?

We have a video on YouTube called, “The Most Important Thing for Spiritual and Ecological Sanity” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxBiDTJfgmo]. It’s all about this issue, and it raises the challenges we face if we want to transcend domestication and conquest consciousness, and find our way back to wisdom and wildness, compassion and creativity, beauty and grace.

This issue is also a running theme in these episodes on ecological thinking, and we’ll have an episode focusing on it again. And we’ll touch on this crucial idea a little bit further in this episode too.

But first let’s move on to what Rowlands says about the other two core teachings of the LoveWisdom of Wolf: That our highest moments make us what we are, and that those highest moments carry us beyond hope and fear and into the inconceivable.

This is a little longer of an excerpt, and I’ll let you know when we come to the end. Rowlands writes,

“The crucial point is that each of my highest moments is complete in itself and does not require justification in the supposed role it plays in defining who and what I am. It is the moments that are important and not the person that they are (erroneously) supposed to reveal. That is the hard lesson.”

“there are some moments, not all of them by any means, but there are some moments; and in the shadows of these moments we will find out what is most important in our lives. These are our highest moments.”

“I was at my best, I am convinced, when I was saying no to Brenin’s death during those early days in France. I was a sleep-deprived deep shade of crazy. I thought I was dead and in hell . . . But, nonetheless, these were among the highest moments of my life. This is what Sisyphus eventually understood. We are at our best when there is no point in going on; when there is no hope for which to go on. But hope is a form of desire, and so it is what makes us temporal creatures – the arrows of our hope arcing off into the undiscovered country of our future. And sometimes it is necessary to put hope in its place – to put it back in its sleazy little box.

“And so we go on anyway – and in doing so we make a point (although that, of course, is not why we do it – any reason would undermine the point). . . To be at our best we have to be pushed into a corner, where there is no hope and nothing to be gained from going on. And we go on anyway.”

“We are at our best when the ninety-five-pound pit bull of life has us by the throat and pinned to the ground. And we are just three-month-old cubs and can be easily torn apart. There is pain coming, and we know it, and there is no hope. But we don’t whine or yelp. We don’t even struggle. Instead, there emanates from deep inside of us a growl, a growl that is calm and sonorous, that belies our tender age and existential fragility. . .”

“Why am I here? After four billion years of blind and unthinking development, the universe produced me. Was it worth it? I seriously doubt it. . . It’s not my happy moments; it is these moments, I now know, that are my highest moments, because they are my most important moments. And they are important because of what they are in themselves, not because of any supposed role they play in defining who I am. If I am, in any shape or form, worth it – if I am a worthwhile thing for the universe to have done – then it is these moments that make me so.”

“And so it was, I suppose, a wolf that revealed all this to me; he was the light and I could see myself in the shadow he cast. What I learned was, in effect, the antithesis of religion. Religion always deals in hope. . .”

“Hope is the used-car salesman of human existence: so friendly, so plausible. But you cannot rely on him. What is most important in your life is the you that remains when your hope runs out. . . . Anything we can have, anything we can possess, time will take it from us. But what time can never take from us is who we were in our best moments.”

“[And when it comes to remembering these moments], I never remember myself. I remember myself only through my memories of others. Here we are decisively confronted with the fallacy of egoism; the fundamental error of the [human]. What is important is not what we have but who we were when we were at our best. And who we were when we were at our best is only revealed to us in moments – our highest moments. But our moments are never our own. Even when we are truly alone, when the pit bull has us pinned to the ground, and we are but cubs and easily broken, it is the dog we remember and not ourselves. Our moments – our most wonderful and our most terrifying moments – these become ours only through our memories of others, whether these others are good or evil. Our moments belong to the pack, and we remember ourselves through them.”

Okay, that’s the excerpt.

The first thing we need to clear up is that religion doesn’t necessarily deal in hope. Certainly not all philosophies do. Buddhist philosophy explicitly invites us to transcend both hope and fear. Rowlands actually accuses Buddhist philosophy of offering hope, but that’s mostly an error. When I teach meditation, for instance, I have to help people to walk the razor’s edge of letting go of hope while nevertheless applying all the passion they can muster. Letting go of hope in an explicit meditation instruction in a variety of traditions.

And I am reminded of the great writer Nikos Kazantzakis, who comes from the same place in Crete where my father was born, and where my ancestors lived. Kazantzakis asked his epitaph to have the following words, in Greek:

I hope for nothing

I fear nothing

I am free

His character Zorba the Greek lived a good bit of the LoveWisdom of Wolf. Hope and fear go together with domestication, while freedom goes together with wisdom and wildness.

The reflection on memory that Rowlands offers is beautiful. He managed to touch the inconceivably wondrous nature of reality, which is interwovenness.

Consider a first kiss. That seems like an intimate and personal memory. But it only exists in relation to the person we kissed. Our first kiss may not be one of our very highest moments, but it resembles all our highest moments because of the interwovenness.

In my case, that first kiss happened at an event, with a girl who went to another school. I couldn’t have had that first kiss except for everyone who organized that event. And I had to have gone to the school I did, which happened in part because my grandfather went into a series of bars, struck up conversations with people there, and asked them about the public schools. I didn’t go to the best school in the state, but he thought he had found as good a school as I was going to get in that part of the country.

And of course Tracy and I couldn’t have had that first kiss without all the trees, grasses, and plankton that gave us air to breathe. We could go on and on. Every kiss arises as part of an inconceivable interwovenness.

How we love each other belongs to the whole of Nature, and is the memory and magic of Nature. The world thrives on the basis of all our moments. That’s why Dōgen said that mountains belong to those who love them. We arise interwoven with mountains and wolves, with horses and prairies, with dolphins and oceans, birds and trees, bees and flowers.

That interwovenness produces magic of all kinds, and Rowlands got a taste of that magic.

It’s not really a spoiler alert to let you know Brenin dies in the book. Wolves don’t live that long, and the subtitle of the book mentions death. You have to read the book to find out how he died, and to find out more about how he lived. But here’s what Rowlands says happened after Brening died—I’ll let you know when we get to the end of this excerpt:

“I couldn’t bury him in the garden – the owners of the house would almost certainly have taken exception to that. So I buried him at a place where we stopped every day on our walks, a small clearing surrounded by beech trees and scrub oak. The ground was sandy and it didn’t take me long to dig a substantial hole. When I had put Brenin in the ground, I built over his grave a cairn, made from rocks I carried across from . . . the dyke that prevented the winter storm surges from sweeping up into the village. This was a long and arduous process, as the [dyke] was a couple of hundred yards away, and it took me well into the night to finish the job. Then I lit a driftwood bonfire and decided to sit with my brother through the rest of the night.

“This is the part of the story that I am reluctant to tell, since – once again – I come across as completely psychotic, which I no doubt was. Keeping me company were [the two dogs] Nina and Tess, and two litres of Jack Daniel’s, which I had stockpiled knowing that this night was coming soon. I had been dry for the past few weeks, since I needed to keep my mind clear to make the best decisions I could for Brenin. I couldn’t afford to have any alcohol-induced melancholy make me send him on his way a moment before his time; nor could I allow any alcohol-induced euphoria to force him to cling to this life when it was not worth living. . . By the time I was significantly into my second litre, what had started out as a quiet rumination about the possibility of an afterlife had transformed into a raging torrent of invective directed against God. It went something like this: You show me. If we live on, you f****r, show me now!

“The next bit sounds horrendously far-fetched, but I swear to God it’s true. At the very moment I said this, I looked across the fire and saw him: I saw Brenin’s ghost of stone.

“I want to emphasize just how inexplicable this is. When I made the cairn, I travelled up and down the [dyke], picking up rocks wherever I found them detached or loose. Then I carried them back a couple of hundred yards or so to the clearing. When I got there, I simply dropped them on Brenin’s grave. I repeated this many, many times, and the entire process took around five hours. The dropping of the rocks on the grave was an entirely random process. I am still convinced of this. I didn’t place the stones, I just dropped them. I had no overall vision of the completed cairn driving me on. On the contrary, I just wanted it finished, and I wanted to get astonishingly drunk.

“But now – there – staring back at me through the flames was Brenin’s ghost of stone. The front of the cairn was his head: a diamond-shaped slab of rock, snout resting, as was his fashion, on the ground; and with a stain of moss on the sharp end that looked, for the world, like his nose. The rest of the cairn was a wolf curled up as if in the snow – a habit inculcated in Brenin by his Arctic forebears, and which he found difficult to break, even in the heat of an Alabama or Languedoc summer. There, at the zenith of my rage and need, he stared back at me.”

That’s the excerpt. Some pretty intense wolf magic.

We’ll let that speak for itself.

For now, let’s return to time, because we’re going to get clear on something. What we will consider here in all seriousness is that the Way of the Wolf involves at least one central and essential practice.

Remember what Rowlands said about time. He said wolves for the most part experience time differently than humans do. He spoke about seeing the moment in the case of the wolf, and missing the moment to see through it in the case of the human.

Rowlands was trained as an academic philosopher in the dominant culture, so I don’t expect him to know that the wisdom traditions have long spoken of this very difference as what separates ignorant people from sages.

We have consistently raised this suggestion, and with each contemplation in this series on ecological thinking, and also in the series on magic, we get clearer and clearer about the nonduality of wisdom and wildness. And we get clearer and clearer about philosophy as a path of transcending our domestication, a path of rewilding ourselves and healing self and world, reunifying Nature and Culture.

Ironically, then, Rowlands joined a discipline that had changed in terribly unfortunate ways in the process of the development of the dominant culture and the development of conquest consciousness within that set of cultures we refer to collectively as the dominant culture.

Rowlands became a philosopher only to have a wolf appear as his most significant teacher of real philosophy. And philosophy itself offers us all the most accessible path to thinking like Wolf does, and thus learning the lessons Brenin tried to teach Mark Rowlands. All of us affected by the dominant culture—all of us infected by conquest consciousness—need to learn these lessons.

Let’s turn to the great philosopher Dōgen to reflect a little on time. Dōgen wrote a famously challenging essay called Being-Time, and it goes well beyond the reflections on time offered by Rowlands. Again, I don’t expect Rowlands to know about these sorts of teachings, but they can help us enter the Way of the Wolf, and they can help us realize the wisdom and wildness indigenous to our soul and indigenous to the world we share.

In this essay, Dōgen writes, “time itself is being, and all being is time.” In some ways, this is like saying the world is process, dynamism.

I’ll read you a little longer excerpt and let you know when we get to the end. Dōgen writes,

“The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time. Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another.”

“The way-seeking mind arises in this moment. A way-seeking moment arises in this mind. It is the same with practice and with attaining the way.”

“Thus, the self setting itself out in array sees itself. This is the understanding that the self is time.”

“Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.”

“Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason you do not clearly understand being-time is that you think of time only as passing. In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are being-time, they are your being-time.”

“Being-time is entirely actualized without being caught up in nets or cages. The being-time of all beings throughout the world in water and on land actualizes your complete effort right now. All beings of all kinds in the visible and invisible realms are the being-time actualized by your complete effort, flowing due to your complete effort. Closely examine this flowing; without your complete effort right now, nothing would be actualized, nothing would flow.”

That’s the excerpt. And what a lovely set of images Dōgen gives us at the end. They resonate with the lesson the wolves taught us about cages, and they resonate so profoundly with what Rowlands said about our moments. He said, “Our moments belong to the pack, and we remember ourselves through them.”

Dōgen teaches this very same interwovenness of all things, the interwovenness of mind and Nature that characterizes Yeats’ definition of magic as well—our series on magic overlaps completely with this series on ecological thinking. Dōgen unites our moments with the whole Cosmos. He tells us that the way we face each moment belongs to all beings, and our complete effort actualizes the whole world.

Dōgen teaches us the way to get out of our cages, the way to get out of the matrix, the way to get out of domestication and conquest, so we can actualize our magic and realize our highest moments, realize the greatest potential of the whole world, the whole community of life, the entire Cosmos.

That way of magic and actualization fundamentally involves meditation. Meditation is the practice and realization of the mind of the wolf.

If we want the most direct entrance into the Way of the Wolf, it is meditation, holistically practiced. The holism means we need some education and instruction.

But here are some general reflections on Dzogchen meditation that Chögyam Trungpa offered. I’ll let you know when we get to the end, but notice that this excerpt explicitly mentions time, and it presents us with the sensibility of the highest moments that Rowlands tried to describe—without needing those moments to be particularly harsh.

We can get beyond hope and fear right where we stand, and we don’t have to wait for some kind of catastrophe or extreme life situation to enter the wisdom and wildness of the Way of the Wolf.

He presents us with the very spirit of the Wolf, which sees the fundamental equality of each being, each moment, each situation—without covering over their utter uniqueness. He offers us a way into wisdom and wildness.

So, let’s savor what Trungpa has to teach us. He says,

“All aspects of every phenomenon are completely clear and lucid. The whole universe is open and unobstructed, everything mutually interpenetrating. . . The everyday practice [of meditation] is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes onto oneself.

“This produces a tremendous energy which is usually locked up in the processes of mental evasion and generally running away from life experiences. Clarity of awareness may in its initial stages be unpleasant or fear inspiring.

“ . . . . All phenomena naturally appear in their uniquely correct modes and situations, forming ever-changing patterns full of meaning and significance, like participants in a great dance. Everything is symbol, yet there is no difference between the symbol and the truth symbolized.

“. . . one should not sit down to meditate with various hopes and fears about the outcome—one just does it, with no self-conscious feeling of “I am meditating,”

“. . . . All phenomena are completely new and fresh, absolutely unique at the instant of their appearance and entirely free from all concepts of past, present, and future, as if experienced in another dimension of time.

“The continual stream of new discovery and fresh revelation and inspiration which arises at every moment is the manifestation of the eternal youth of the living dharma and its wonder, splendor, and spontaneity are the play or dance aspect of the universe as guru.

“Learn to see everyday life as a mandala in which one is at the center, and be free of the bias and prejudice of past conditioning, present desires, and future hopes and expectations. The figures of the mandala are the day-to-day objects of one’s life experience, moving in the great dance or play of the universe, the symbolism by which the [teacher] reveals profound and ultimate meaning and significance. Therefore be natural and spontaneous, accept and learn from everything. See the ironic, amusing side of irritating situations.

“In meditation see through the illusion of past, present, and future. The past is but a present memory or condition, the future a present projection, and the present itself vanishes before it can be grasped. Free oneself from past memories of, and conceptions about, meditation. Each moment of meditation is completely unique and full of the potentiality of new discovery, so one is incapable of judging meditation by past sessions or by theory. Just plunge straight into meditation at this very moment with one’s whole mind and be free from hesitation, boredom, or excitement.”

That’s Trungpa. And we find these ideas throughout Buddhist philosophy. In his “Heart Jewel of the Fortunate,” the great sage Dudjom Rinpoche said:

“ . . . if you do not meditate, you will not gain certainty: if you do [meditate], you will [gain certainty]. But what sort of certainty? If you meditate with a strong, joyful endeavor, signs will appear showing that you have become used to staying in your nature. The [aggressive], tight clinging that you have to dualistically experienced phenomena will gradually loosen up, and your obsession with happiness and suffering, hopes and fears, and so on, will slowly weaken. . . After a time, your tense, dualistic attitudes will evaporate . . . As the Great [Teacher] has said, “My view is higher than the sky, but my attention to actions and their results is finer than flour.”

So don’t go around claiming to be some great Dzogchen meditator when in fact you are nothing but a farting lout . . .”

That’s a funny line for a famous sage, isn’t it?

We see in these teachings that we can enter a different experience of time, that we can enter our highest moments, and that we can go beyond hope and fear.

We need to do this for both spiritual and ecological reasons.

Getting beyond hope and fear means getting beyond our credulity and distraction. We have returned several times to something Rowlands wrote—he wrote,

“If I wanted a one-sentence definition of human beings, this would do: humans are the animals that believe the stories they tell about themselves. Humans are credulous animals.

“In these dark times, it does not need emphasizing that the stories we tell about ourselves can be the biggest source of division between one human and another. From credulity, there is often but a short step to hostility. However, I am concerned with the stories we tell to distinguish ourselves not from each other but from other animals: the stories we tell about what makes us human.”

Only when we meditate do we find out the fuller truth to which Rowlands gestures here. And he doesn’t even give the full picture. Our stories cut us off from ourselves just as much as they cut us off from each other and from Nature. Our stories cut us off from our potential, and from the wondrous potentials latent and implicit in the world.

When we meditate, we discover that credulity and distraction are suffering. That is a simple definition of suffering: Suffering is credulity and distraction. These two go together, and we begin to truly realize their relationship to suffering when we meditate.

When we meditate—if we look with passion—we can notice how we believe all the stories, memories, thoughts, and notions that pop into our mind. We believe them, and we follow along with them, elaborating them endlessly.

That goes together with an inability to rest the mind, to have the mind simply abide in peace. We sit down to meditate, perhaps with the intention to stay with our breathing, and almost instantly a thought, memory, emotion, hope, or fear comes along, and we leave the breathing, and follow our hopes and fears. We do this because of distraction and credulity together.

When we meditate, we can thus find out how much credulity and distraction drive our experience. And this includes a deep, deep credulity. Not just a credulity that an election was stolen, or a credulity that we have democracy, but a deep credulity about what we are, what wolves are, what Nature is, what other humans are, what the world we share is, what the Cosmos itself is. That kind of credulity is not easy to shake.

It’s an active credulity. It applies to our very construction of reality. But it also applies to countless stories about ourselves, other beings, and the world we share. The credulity applies also to our sense of, “I can’t”. People tell me all the time that they can’t meditate, that they can’t change this or that habit, and so on.

We have many such impossibilities in our culture, about ourselves, each other, and the world we share—such as the impossibility of having real democracy, including real democracy in our work.

So we have big credulity and big distraction. The dominant culture functions fully on the basis of distraction and credulity, and all our suffering connects with this distraction and credulity. Wolves teach us to practice nondistraction and doubt.

That doubt has to have some passion in it. The Zen tradition calls this Great Doubt. The Buddha spoke about it as dhamma vicaya, which means Way-seeking mind, a mind of wonder, a mind of passionate inquiry.

But in Zen we find the phrase, “Small doubt, small awakening; Great Doubt, Great Awakening.” That kind of mind gets applied especially to meditation with cases of spiritual common law.

Zen has a wolf-like spirit, a spirit of passionate never-giving-up, a spirit of resilience and joyful perseverance. We find that spirit in many traditions. But Zen emphasizes it, and it appears in many cases of spiritual common law that we find in the Zen traditions.

Just as we have political common law, in which justice gets expressed by means of the wisdom of a good judge, without the need for a legal statute, we also have spiritual common law, in which wisdom itself gets expressed, in some vitalizing encounter (often between human beings, but not strictly so).

The Zen Master Joshu had a wolf-like spirit. In one case, a student asked him, “What is holy?”

The master said, “Not ordinary.”

The student said, “What is ordinary?”

The master said, “Not holy.”

The student said, “What about when there is neither ordinary nor holy?”

The master said, “That’s a good Zen monk.”

We could add: That makes for a good wolf too.

In another exchange, a student asked, “What is the teacher of the seven Buddhas?”

The master said, “Sleeping when it’s time to sleep, waking when it’s time to wake.”

That’s a very intimate wolf teaching too.

But the most famous exchange with Joshu went something like this:

The student asked, “Does a wolf have Buddha-Nature?”

Joshu said, “No!”

When Joshu said, NO!, we can imagine it like a bark, like a growl, or even like a howl.

Technically, the student asked if dogs have Buddha-Nature. But the spirit of both the question and the answer remain the same.

Cases of spiritual common law require not just understanding, but wonderstanding. That means going beyond intellectual notions.

However, it doesn’t hurt to get the intellectual notions out of the way, so we can acknowledge them while also acknowledging that they don’t give us the full answer to such a case.

Intellectually, this case has to do with a basic teaching of Buddhist philosophy: that all beings have Buddha-Nature. All beings. No exceptions.

So, why did Joshu say wolves don’t have Buddha-Nature? Because wolves don’t focus on having; they instead focus on being. We find this same idea in the Earth Charter, a marvelous civil society document that invites us to practice our human cultures in such a way that we can all focus on being more rather than having more.

We find this same idea in the movie Lucy too. In that movie, the character played by Morgan Freeman speaks of a shift from having more to being more, and he speaks of this in relation to going beyond our limitations, getting out of our cages. Morgan Freeman’s character muses on this as part of imagining the realization of our fullest capacities for intelligence.

The lead character Lucy, played by Scarlett Johansson, understands that our habitual experiences of hope and fear, pleasure and pain, and the whole process of identification keep us caged.

The film is not a perfect work of philosophy, but it does put forward some ideas that resonate with the wisdom traditions, including the suggestion that something primordial lies underneath our habitual patterns, something that can never actually be caged, something not separate from being-time. And it suggests that our highest calling in life is to learn, to learn the true nature of what we are and what the Cosmos is, and to share what we learn with others. To do that, we have to be willing to risk our teeth, as Lucy herself is.

In the Buddhist traditions, a Buddha is someone with fully activated intelligence, something akin to the character of Lucy. The Tibetan traditions teach that, when we die, even if we don’t become a Buddha, we are 9 times more intelligent when we leave our body, just because of all the limitations we carry around as part of our embodiment.

People take ketamine for the same reason: It momentarily releases them from the body, and they can sometimes achieve insight by dropping all that embodied ignorance away.

That doesn’t mean we have to hate our bodies. The point has to do with our fuller potential, and how we need to let go of having more in order to realize that potential, or at least to taste it. Our bodies sometimes collaborate with all the triggers to have more.

This idea of being more instead of having more isn’t original to the Earth Charter, but rather appears in the wisdom traditions of the world, going back centuries. Socrates evoked this sentiment at his trial. He was put to death for trying educating the youth about becoming more, about following the path of wisdom, love, and beauty so that we can be more rather than staying trapped in the cage of trying to have more.

His culture saw this as heresy. The dominant culture still sees it that way, so the main currents of our culture drive us in a million ways to seek having more—often with the rationalization that this will then allow us to be more. But it’s a lie, and we are all pretty credulous about it.

But all of this remains intellectual. A student also asked Joshu, “What about when I don’t have anything?”

The master said, “Throw it away.”

That’s very much in the spirit of the wolf too. We try to cling even to the antidotes, but clinging is part of credulity and distraction.

In order to work with spiritual common law, in order to enter into wonderstanding and escape from our cages, we need to practice meditation. The Korean Zen Master Kusan gives us a powerful set of instructions on doing this. His name means, Nine Mountains. So we can receive his instructions as part of the Gospel of Mountains and Wolves.

I’ll let you know when we get to the end. Nine Mountains said to a group of students,

“It is most important to continuously investigate [questions of spiritual common law] with unswerving determination. At the beginning, you might feel as though you are trying to lift a heavy bucket full of water with a weak arm. Even so, you should never relax your effort. Instead, no matter what you are doing, be solely concerned with nothing but the [question]. If, a clock were unreliable and kept stopping, any sensible person would either have it repaired or get rid of it. Similarly, when practicing meditation, you must exert continuous effort and not allow yourself to be lazy.

“In Zen meditation, the key factor is to maintain a constant sense of questioning. So, having taken hold of the [spiritual common law question], “What is this?”, try to always sustain the questioning: “What is seeing?” “What is hearing?” “What is moving these hands and feet?” and so on. Before the initial sense of questioning fades, it is important to give rise to the question again. In this way, the process of questioning can continue uninterrupted with each new question overlapping the previous one. In addition you should try to make this overlapping smooth and regular. But this does not mean that you should just mechanically repeat the question as though it were a mantra. It is useless to just say to yourself day and night, “What is this?” “What is this?” The key is to sustain the sense of questioning, not the repetition of the words. Once this inquiry gets underway there will be no room for boredom. If the mind remains quiet, the [spiritual inquiry] will not be forgotten, and the sense of questioning will continue unbroken. In this way, awakening will be easy.

“While meditating, both wisdom and concentration need to be cultivated in unison. If there is wisdom without concentration, then mistaken views will increase. And if there is concentration without wisdom, then ignorance will grow.”

Those were the instructions of Nine Mountains, Korean Zen Master Kusan. He also said,

“In practicing meditation you should be prepared to grab hold of the blade of a sword so sharp that it cuts through hairs merely blown against it. You would normally be apprehensive even to take hold of such a sword by its handle since at the slightest slip you would be in danger of cutting yourself. Now you have to be prepared to seize it by the blade! Could you possibly do that in your ordinary frame of mind? As long as you are afraid of the sharpness of the blade you are bound to cut yourself. But in firmly gripping the blade with an utterly intrepid mind, you will not even be scratched.”

That’s intense. And it speaks to the Indigenous saying Gary Snyder quotes in his wonderful work of LoveWisdom called, The Practice of the Wild. I often recommend it. Read it. Then write me an email. I know you’ll enjoy it.

There, Snyder quotes the saying, “world is as sharp as the edge of a knife.” We need a Zen mind, a Wolf mind to walk that razor’s edge, and to preserve what we call civilization.

Snyder writes about this predicament. He writes,

“Thoreau says “give me a wildness no civilization can endure.” That’s clearly not difficult to find. It is harder to imagine a civilization that wildness can endure, yet this is just what we must try to do. Wildness is not just the “preservation of the world,” it is the world. Civilizations east and west have long been on a collision course with wild nature, and now the developed nations in particular have the witless power to destroy not only individual creatures but whole species, whole processes, of the earth. We need a civilization that can

live fully and creatively together with wildness. We must start growing it right here, in the New World.”

He means right here, on Turtle Island, or what we usually call North America. But it’s a global issue. The Earth Charter has to do with this issue too.

Our practice of life is reflected in the land, and that includes our practice of mind—in other words, whether or not we practice meditation. Our virtues appear in the land, and so do our vices.

Our clarity, stability, peace, and clear knowing appear in the land and in all beings, as do our incoherence, our discoordination, our distractedness, our fear and craving, our self-doubt and self-loathing.

If we think about the world today, we can see our practice of life vividly reflected in all lands—all of them.

If we cannot find ourselves here, now, when do we think we will do so?

Dōgen gives us the basic instructions—we need personal direct teaching, but he still gives the basic idea. He says,

“Once you have regulated your posture, take a breath and exhale fully. . . Sitting fixedly, think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of [proper meditation]. [Proper meditation] is not the practice of meditation [as people typically think of it]: it is just the reality gate of ease and joy. It is the practice and verification of ultimate awakeness. The fundamental point of wisdom realized, baskets and cages cannot get to it.” (adapted from Bielefeldt, 181)

There we have it again: To enter into nonthinking is to enter the Way of the Wolf, the Way of the Horse, the Way of Mountains and Rivers. To enter nonthinking means getting free from our cages, getting free from the matrix, free from domestication and conquest. It means unleashing our fullest creative intelligence, the creative intelligence we need to rejuvenate ourselves, our civilization, and the whole community of life.

We can’t accomplish a graceful and vitalizing civilization if we can’t live together with wolves. We have gotten domesticated out of our connection with wolves, and domesticated out of our connection with the wildness that is indigenous to our own soul and the soul of the world. That domestication is our cage, it is our modern matrix. And it’s sucking the life out of all of us, including all our kin, human and more than human.

As we said before, For the world to evolve, we must cultivate those qualities of mind its evolution depends on—we must cultivate those qualities of heart, mind, body, and world that its evolution depends on. We have to cultivate the Superness of Nature, and verify our own Superness and our own Naturalness.

We do that by means of a holistic practice of life which includes meditation in the context of that holistic education—not by itself, not as another tool in our toolbox, not as a big challenge to the ego when we go on some kind of 10-day retreat, but as something truly holistic and revolutionary.

We need to go further into all of these matters to understand the way to shift our minds, to rewild our minds without falling into chaos or further insanity.

For now, we’ve earned a break on our journey. So contemplate all these things deeply, and if you have questions or stories to share, send them in through dangerouswisdom.org. We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.