lol, yeah, dinosaurs everywhere.
I have really liked Hokai's style when I've come across him in Those Times When Giants Walked the Earth. He's often got a different inflection, and sometimes even a different vocabulary. The classic Hurricane Ranch discussion ---
Hurricane Ranch Discussion, February 2009 (Transcript) - Discussion - www.dharmaoverground.org --- is so great partly because Hokai's Shingon is so distinct from what the others are doing. He actually starts out against the grain of "doing," in a way that seems gently polemical amid that classic DIY Buddhism crowd. He says "grace," lol.
God, I would love to have been there for that talk, with sufficient beer. Everybody was still basically having fun together at that point, as I read it; you can feel the tensions at times, you can sense the possible faultlines, but it is still basically that real dharma spirit being hashed out and elaborated between friends and colleagues who are all in on the mutual fascination of it all, like a archive jazz session with all masters in the band, whatever different record labels they went on to record for in their solo careers.
I love this particular sequence so much; it exemplified what makes that era so much fun: (DI = Daniel Ingram, HS = Hokai Sobol, KF = Kenneth Folk, TG = Tarin Greco, VH = Vince Horn)
HS: The idea remains, it’s doable.
KF: That’s really important. And really that’s what we’re trying to do here and normalize this, and say this isn’t some crazy—
HS: It’s not a myth.
KF: And it’s not a particularly big deal. It’s something doable for very ordinary people who are interested and willing to apply themselves. And maybe the reason it doesn’t happen more often is because practitioners don’t have access to someone who will look them in the eye and say, this is possible, and I know that in my own experience. Because to have someone who will look you in the eye and say that is so powerful and so empowering.
HS: Yeah. That’s the shattering thing. That’s the break in the shell of the egg. Someone has to come from the outside, right? You know the thing with the eggs, when the little chicks, the first one that gets out, the strongest one goes breaking the other eggs, because the other ones are not strong enough to break. But once the egg is broken from the outside, the weak chicks can come out.
DI: Yeah. Like I remember, I was on the road with Ken, he was this, you know, rocker dude, you know, who lived in my house with me, and was smart and a good guy and all these things, but not some unusual, immortal superstar, you know. And when he did it, I was like, oh. “Kenneth.” I apologize. My error. And when he had done this, it was like, god, like, he’s smart, but he’s not, like, an immortal being. It was profound.
VH: He wasn’t yet.
DI: He wasn’t yet! That’s funny. But what’s weird is, you know, like, what’s sort of strange, though, is like, because that’s better than when I think, like, when you meet someone who’s already done it, and you meet them in the context of having already done it, it makes it weird. You know what I mean? It’s hard to think of them as a normal person. Whereas I met you when you were just some hairsprayed rocker dude, you know, and it was a little, like, you know, who was living in my house at my same level essentially, so that was really normalized.
KF: It’s really hard to project a lot of nonsense or hero-worship on to somebody you—
DI: You’ve been on the road with.
KF: Just another guy.
DI: Yeah.
KF: And that works both ways. It’s really hard not to project your mythical nonsense on someone that was introduced as—
HS: Who has it already done.
KF: Yes.
DI: That’s a real problem.
KF: Whatever. Grand High Mucky Muck
DI: Right. You know what I mean? Yeah, it’s true.
VH: It makes sense. It wasn’t so true for me when I picked up Daniel’s work, because he was so clearly advertising that he was a Mucky Muck. You were like, “I am a Mucky Muck!”
DI: Yeah.
VH: “And I just happened to figure this stuff out.”
