Hi everyone!  Just want to share something about the book I've just finished reading, because in so many ways, it parallels the journey some of us are taking away from all that we once thought was so absolutely true, perfect, life-transforming, etc etc, and shows the gamut of feelings that one must inevitably pass through to make it back to one's self and the need to stop looking outside ourselves for someone to save us! 

The book is Natalie Goldberg's The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk and My Unlikely Path to Truth.  Some of you may recognise Natalie's name because of her very popular books on writing that have opened bunches of people to the experience of writing as a process rather than a product--(her book, Writing Down the Bones, was especially successful) over here in the States.

  She is also a Zen Buddhist, and moved in circles that included people like Allen Ginsberg, amongst others, but her "guru" was Katagiri Roshi, to whom she felt she owed everything, including her writing interests and skills.  She purposefully turned writing into a form of Zen practice, at his behest, and it was a great success!  But what is so heart-wrenching about this book is her discovery, some years after Katagiri Roshi's death, is that he was having affairs with some of his female students.  He was much more available on the personal level as a teacher than anything we've seen with M, but the downside of that was all the temptation of private sessions between him and individual students that no-one ever questioned, and that were built into the "system".  He was married, too, but felt very lonely, it turns out.

Natalie Golberg was clearly very devoted to him, and personally, I thought she had written her best book when she wrote The Long Quiet Highway, mourning Katagiri's passing, some years ago.  But there was a whole other side to the story that her latest book attempts to tell.

Natalie is very open about the processes she's had to go through to digest and comprehend the information about Roshi's indiscretions--anger, jealousy, disbelief, confusion, recognition, etc-- and eventually has to admit, there were "signs", just as many of us have noted in our journey.  She comments a lot, too, on what was going on in America back in the sixties and seventies, and that there were hoards of young people so hungry for this promise of "enlightenment", and therefore very gullible and vulnerable to the flocks of teachers who came over from Japan, India and elsewhere.  Also, these teachers did not understand the western culture that much either, and misunderstood the seeming freedom of expression that many young people were into at that time.

It's a sad and a beautiful, honest book--but the reason I wanted to share about it on this forum is that it shows yet another path and another teacher that seemed to promise everything to the student, but in the end was unable to deliver because of the all-too-human elements involved.  We wanted SO much to believe there is such a thing as a divine or enlightened soul who could show us the way!  But in hindsight, it's fairly easy to see how that could never work!  The teacher is saying that there is no intermediary between you and God.  But all the time, THEY are being the intermediary!  Go figure.

It's quite an enlightening journey, NOT being a premie anymore.  If only because I feel I am actually moving forward now, instead of running in place!

" I do not go back through a door I've already come through."  (T.S.Eliot?)

Best to all,

Shelagh