Compassion
An interview with Michael O'Keefe
by Raz Ingrasci, President (Edited
by Shawn McAndrew)
Actor Michael
O'Keefe (MO) is currently starring in the Pulitzer Prize winning
play "That Championship Season" at the Second Stage Theatre at 43rd
Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. Known for his memorable
roles in "Ghost of Mississippi," "Ironweed," "Caddy Shack" and "The
Great Santini" (for which he received an Academy Award nomination),
Michael was also a television regular on "Life's Work" and "Roseanne."
He has starred in several TV movies of the week, as well as on Broadway
in "Mass Appeal." A practitioner of Zen Buddhism for 13 years, Michael
was ordained a Zen Priest in 1996. He took the Hoffman Process in
1997.
Raz Ingrasci: What difference has the Process
made in your life?
Michael O'Keefe: Mainly, I have a lot more quiet
about myself. I don't have the hang-ups about the difficulties I
had growing up, and I don't have the tendency to slip back into
old patterns of relating to my family. In fact, I noticed a change
in all of my relationships. I have more clarity and presence of
this moment, right now.
RI: Both Buddhism and the Hoffman Process are
concerned with the release and transformation of suffering. What
is the relationship between your Buddhist practice and your Process
experience?
MO: I've been telling my teacher and other meditation
teachers that the Hoffman Quadrinity Process is a great way to jump-start
one's realization practice. There is clarity and energy from doing
the Process that is invaluable when one returns to a daily meditation
practice. Much of what occurs on the meditation cushion is accepting
yourself as you are, including your emotional baggage: "This is
who I am, I'm sitting on this cushion. I'm nice in certain situations,
I'm not nice in other situations." The Hoffman Process and Buddhism
can benefit each other in seeing how you created your negative boundaries
and bonds with people, and then letting them go. The object of Zen
is to find out who you really are and the Process is excellent for
that. I find a common denominator in what is true about the Process
and what's in Zen. You can see one in the other and each can benefit.
RI: Finding out who we are includes finding out
who we are not.
MO: Right. When you peek beneath the surface of
"everything is fine," you find that it's not as fine as you'd like,
or as you try to convince everybody. When you're ready for that
kind of honesty and insight, the Process is definitely the place
to go.
RI: There may be a misunderstanding for some who
see a meditation practice as escaping from life or disconnecting.
MO: Sometimes people get this notion that to go
off to a monastery and meditate would be much nicer and easier than
this life that we're living now; there would be nothing required
of us, just to sit and meditate and enjoy the day. In reality the
hardest thing you could do is to have a real monastic process. The
men and women who actually do that are heroic and have incredible
endurance, dedication and perseverance. They stare into the "dark
night of the soul" and find a way of resolving it. It's not a vacation
to go into a Zen practice or into a monastic setting. The best definition
of Zen was given to me by one of my Japanese teachers who said,
"The real thing about Zazen (the Japanese word for meditation) is
that it is the end of separation." The aim of meditation is the
end of separation between you, the source of life, and every bit
of life around you - especially the things you don't know.
RI: The end of separation is experienced as connection.
Through the Hoffman Process people find a much deeper connection
to life, in an everyday kind of way.
MO: Yes. One of the other big messages about Zen
is that everyday life is the enlightened way. There's not a lot
of magical thinking in Zen.
There's not a promise of the supernatural in which you wake up
in the morning and begin by levitating and then your coffee is magically
presented by special powers you've accrued. There's just none of
that.
It's like having tea and eating rice are all the special powers
you need. When you wake up to that fact, it's what blows your mind.
RI: I recently came across something from a Buddhist
sutra: "Deeds exist but no doer can be found." I was struck by how
similar that is to Bob Hoffman's statement, "Everyone is guilty
but no one is to blame."
MO: That's a great statement, "Everyone is guilty
but no one is to blame." When we talk about the "doer" and the "deed,"
it could sound like two things are there, but the Zen saying means
that no one is there. Both doer and deed disappear. Yet, there they
are. There is a saying in Zen, "When you have an enlightenment experience
body and mind drop off." A teacher once said to me, "When body and
mind drop off, what's left?" I said, "Body and mind." So, it's the
way we experience what's happening around us that changes.
RI: Yes, one's perceptions change. Tell us, please,
about the movie you made.
MO: "Raising the Ashes" is a documentary
of a retreat conducted by the Zen Peacemaker Order at Auschwitz
every year. About 150 people come from Europe, Israel, North and
South America for five days of prayer and meditation. We have three
tenets. One is to come from a place of "not knowing,"
which is what we consider to be the source of all life. Then to
bear witness. At Auschwitz, we bear witness to the Holocaust. Finally,
we hope for healing. Something was left in that place by the people
who perpetrated the crimes, and by those who passed through there.
There is a palpable feeling, an undeniable power in the place itself.
It's one of the inspirations for going.
We go there for a week, gathering in prayer and meditation eight
to fourteen hours a day. A realization of shared healing arises
among the people with whom you're praying and meditating.
We have Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, and Sufi services. Everybody
may go to any or all of the services and find a way of communing
that is right for them. Then we gather in silent prayer and meditation
and read the names of people who were killed during the Holocaust.
We do this at the same site where Dr. Mengele and his staff selected
who would live and who would die. After a while there is a quickening
of the meditation and prayer experience and you go into a very deep
state in which a lot can happen. In the same way, the Process is
an intensified environment where you're continually working for
a week until you start to really punch through. Well, you might
imagine what can happen at Auschwitz. It's intense.
RI: You've done the retreat three times. What
happened for you?
MO: So many things. This year while we were chanting
the Kaddish inside one of the barracks, a tour group of teenage
boys from Israel came in. I looked up and my eyes happened to meet
the eyes of one of these boys. I was so totally overwhelmed - by
the poignancy of loss in the Holocaust, the grief that must have
been suffered, the innocence that was crushed under the weight of
the Nazi machinery — that I just passed out. I was carried
outside where I later woke up. I will never forget that experience
for the rest of my life. That is partly what the retreat is about,
deepening your appreciation of what happened in the Holocaust.
RI: Though you conduct this retreat for yourselves,
it seems you are also doing it for humanity. Somehow by witnessing
these primitive aggressions, which exist in all our hearts, perhaps
our hearts can break open.
MO: A Rabbi in Poland about 200 years ago said:
"The only whole heart is a broken heart." Until your heart is broken,
you can't heal yourself and you can't heal the world around you.
But once it has broken then you have every opportunity to begin
a healing process, which can have an indefinite effect on you, the
people around you, and the environment. As you change the way you
view the world around you, and if enough people share that, the
world begins to change its view.
RI: What does "Raising the Ashes," mean?
MO: It has two images: the "ashes of the dead"
and from Zen practice "to raise the Bodhi mind," the mind of compassion.
To raise it means to raise the desire to enlighten yourself and
those around you.
RI: Is there anything else you'd like to say?
MO: I'm a firm believer in the Hoffman Process.
If there is an aspect of yourself that you feel is unrealized, somehow
hidden or not within your grasp, in the Process you'll have a chance
to get a good look at it, understand it, and then let go of it and
move on. At the end of the day, it's not any theory or philosophy
that's going to cut it, it's the spirit of compassion in you for
other people, for yourself and for the world around you. By compassion
I mean doing something. I mean dedicating yourself to putting some
element of social consciousness in your world. I think that kind
of compassion is what the Hoffman Process is truly about. They say
in Zen, "Don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon."
So when I say "Look..."
RI: ...Look at the moon.
MO: Right. It's the moon. It's the moon that's
important, not what's getting you there.
RI: Good. I agree. So now you're off to perform
"That Championship Season" at the Second Stage Theatre in New York
City. We'll let the Hoffman graduates know.
MO: I'll be there and I'd love to see them. ø
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am
here and you are out there.
-Yasutani Roshi
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