Pico Iyer:
So many people are meditating, but I think many are meditating to be more successful, to be more productive, even to be better meditators. And I think as you suggest, that’s going against the current that meditation or contemplation is trying to open up to you. And I think that’s why it took me a while to learn, but that all of beauty of writing for me has so little to do with the product and so much to do with the process, which is why I don’t mind if I spend six months at my desk and there’s nothing that comes out that I can send out into the world because I know it’s going to much more essentially help me and help anyone who meets me because they’re going to meet a clearer calmer person than they would otherwise. But I absolutely agree that it’s not about forcing so much as surrender essentially and the acknowledgments that well, we’re wiser than our thoughts.
Thomas Hübl:
Right.
Pico Iyer:
And I think that’s, again, the Dalai Lama is a perfect example because when he stands in front of 30,000 people and he talks about kindness and he talks about attention, people are moved and he delivers it in a very universal way that any human can understand. But it’s really by seeing him exemplify those that people transform. They see him as soon as he steps into a large arena, instantly make his way to the people in the wheelchairs and just hold them. And he sees them listening to a little child as if you were listening to the Buddha and that’s what really sparks them, not the ideas and not just the abstract theories that he’s imparting, but the living presence of them, the incarnation of those ideas. But yes, there’s a lot I could say about what you said just now, but I couldn’t agree more. Well, anyone working in any of the arts or in any field probably soon realizes that there’s not so much you can do by yourself. It’s a matter of putting yourself in a position where something better than you can.
Thomas Hübl:
Beautiful. And then I’ve read there is, and maybe you can illuminate that also for us and then we’ll move a bit back to the world that we are facing right now, there is your connection to Leonard Cohen, which his music I love very much and who had a very strong practice himself. And so what was that stream for you? Because there is something most probably how that spoke to you in a bit of a different quality. So how did his transmission speak to you?
Pico Iyer:
Yes, a really serious practice in his case. So although, like you, I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen since I was a teenager, once he started living in a Zen temple in the high cold, dark mountains behind Los Angeles for five and a half years, because I spent a lot of time around Zen monasteries in Japan, an editor asked me to go and spend four days with Leonard Cohen. And I will tell you that I took this long drive up into the mountains and when I drove into the parking lot, there was this stooped old figure in a tattered black robe with a woolen cap and very unflattering glasses. And as soon as I got out of my car, he gave me a deep bow and he insisted on carrying my bags into the little cabin where I was to stay. And then, he started cooking dinner for me. And it took me about 20 minutes before I realized this was Leonard Cohen. He had so disappeared into his role as an anonymous grunt, as an anonymous monk.
And what really moved me was at the age of 61, this man who could have been doing anything in the world with anyone he wanted was devoting himself to this backbreaking practice of shoveling snow and scrubbing floors and driving the aged Japanese head of the monastery to the doctor for five and a half years. And I will say that other than the Dalai Lama, of all the people I’ve met in my life, Leonard was unquestionably the kindest, the wisest, and the deepest. And whenever I would visit him in the little house that he shared with his daughter in a very broken part of Los Angeles, and this is true of everybody who visited him, he’d be standing outside the front door waiting to serve, literally waiting to cook for you as if you were the eminence and he was just the person trying to make your life a little easier.
And then many people, I think were so moved when they saw him on the final concert tour that he gave in his seventies for six years crisscrossing the world and playing 380 concerts. And when I went to see those concerts, I really felt that what he was doing was bringing the passion, the intimacy, and the depth of the meditation hall into the great concert halls of the world. And I think what so stirred people was he wasn’t trying to sell himself or his music, he was kneeling before his accompanying musicians and he was really turning it into a sacred space. And as in any cathedral, personalities disappear and you just become part of something much larger. And I think that’s exactly what he was transmitting, thanks to his practice.
It’s interesting. I love the way that you’ve mentioned what a serious practice his was because when I took my Japanese wife up to meet him in the monastery, she didn’t know who Leonard Cohen was, but she’d grown up around all the great temples of Kyoto, Japan, her hometown. And when we went into the meditation hall, and there’s mostly people in their twenties and thirties, and it’s one person sitting with absolutely perfect form, motionless. And she took that to be the abbot of the temple, the head of the monastery, and it was Leonard Cohen. She just assumed that he seemed to be the truest monk there.
And I would say he’s as true a monk as I could ever hope to meet. And of course, he’s also a beautiful illustration of bringing that monastic practice and discipline out into the world and just what you were saying earlier, sharing the fruits of it through his songs and poems and concerts with the rest of the world. But there’s so much I could say about him and he was such a moving presence.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, I can feel it when you speak. And also I agree very much, this was also my experience when I heard this tour he gave in his seventies. I felt it. It’s like, “Wow, the transmission is very strong.” All his practice is, like it’s a sacred space, it’s a temple. I very much experienced it like that and so beautiful. And also his last songs ,before he passed away, they were very, very deep and powerful and they had this deep transmission. It was beautiful, beautiful.
Pico Iyer:
Yes. And as you know, they were all about death and unflinchingly confronting impermanence, reality and the fact they were all about saying goodbye to everything he loved. That’s a hard thing for any of us.
Thomas Hübl:
Exactly. That’s what I love. It was so true. And I think also the transcendence, once we transcend this world and we gain the ability to hold it in a different way, I really loved that. I was very impressed by it. Wow, beautiful, beautiful. Such a great example for our society.
Pico Iyer:
Yes. And also a perfect example of what you were saying, which is that he was essentially surrendering. All his early songs are about control and he gave himself up to this practice of obedience, but he was surrendering to the muse as well. What you’re sensing in him is something going through him that’s probably not coming from Leonard Cohen, but from the universe.
