An edited version of this interview was published in Sacred Fire magazine.

Ken Cohen is one of my heroes. His book, Honoring the Medicine: The Essential Guide to Native American Healing, is one of the best books on Native spirituality that I’ve come across, and I’m an avid reader. In addition to his knowledge of Native American wisdom and healing, Mr. Cohen is also an initiate of Filipino oracion, had studied with Zulu shaman Ingwe, and is trained as an Igbo priest/shaman. Did I mention he is widely renowned for his research, writing and work on Qigong? He has studied with numerous Qigong masters and apprenticed to Dr. K.S. Wong, from China’s sacred mountains. And he’s Jewish.

These are mere footnotes in Ken Cohen’s complete litany of experience, and so I was understandably nervous about picking him up at his hotel in my barely functional vehicle. I should have known from Mr. Cohen’s smoothness during the qi gong that it would be okay. He lit up the room with his funny jokes and thoughtful stories. We met one morning in early November and I had the pleasure of introducing Ken to Seven Cups, where he had never been. It is a beautiful traditional tea shop. An enthusiastic tea lover, Ken was in heaven! He recited poetry in Chinese to the beaming owners, who brought out choice cakes of tea to show us. We shared three small pots of tea and a huge variety of mooncakes and mochi treats, with me asking questions between beautiful conversation. I know that Ken is not fond of the internet, where most of you are reading this interview. Please keep reading. Here it is:

Q: Do you think that society is evolving spiritually?
A: No. I would say we are devolving. Our brain size is less than Neanderthals, and I’m a follower of Jerry Mander, he says in his book the Absence of the Sacred that evolution requires interaction between people and natural environments, and that since we are now interacting mostly with objects of our own creation, that humankind has an incestuous relationship with itself, that we have stopped the process of evolution. Because again we need the stimulation of natural environments in order to evolve. So I would say that we are devolving rather quickly, and internet is accelerating that process, because it’s the ultimate example of the disembodied intellect, and is reinforcing the delusion that mind and body are separate and that people can live separate from their natural environment. To make it clearer, people talk about “virtual communities.” Community, community consists of a group of people living in a specific geographic location, and I highlight the word “geographic”, so that they are accountable to their place. The internet destroys the accountability to place. It gives people the belief that they can pick up their computer and live anywhere. Basically it becomes the ultimate rationalization for colonialism, because I think the mindset behind internet is, “Let’s rape the land where we are and move on.”

Q: Wow. Do you think that everyone who uses the internet has that mindset?
A: No, but I think that human society is largely shaped by our tools. They’re not simply tools… Some people say, well, if people use them in the right way you’ll be fine, but the lesson of history is that if we invest too much time in our tools, the tools shape us. The same way that agriculture helped to create social hierarchy and greed, I would say that internet is creating a further split between mind and body and people and place.

Q: So what do you think that people should do to stop the de-evolution process?
A: Simplify. Do less. Consume less. Be willing to make sacrifices for what they feel is right. I think we’re in a culture that lacks courage, and that’s the main thing that’s missing in the world today. People have no courage; they’re just blindly following whatever anyone tells them is going to be easy and profitable. It takes some courage to say, “No. I don’t need to earn 50,000 dollars; I can live quite well on 20.” That takes a lot of courage, to say, “I’m going to deliberately do less.”

Q: You mentioned vitamins in your book, and I thought that a lot of qi
gong practitioners draw in energy from the sun and moon, so why would you need vitamins?
A: The reason you would need vitamins besides drawing in energy from the sun and moon and nature and clouds and stars and so forth is that we’re not living in a monastery. Most people, they’re not living in nature, so they’re not exposed to those energies all the time, and it’s one thing to supplement your qi if you have a life in nature, but if you’re living in modern society, then I think the only way to sufficiently counteract the damaging effects of air pollution, water pollution, food pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, overcrowding, long work hours, lack of aesthetics, lack of beauty in our environment, all these different things that stress us, the only way to sufficiently counteract it is with some vitamin supplements. I don’t think that we can actually get sufficient nutrition only from food in the world that we’re in today. There’s too much free radical stress on the body and in fact one of the reasons for the dramatic increase in chronic fatigue syndrome, which is becoming one of the epidemics of our time, CFIDS, chronic fatigue immune dysfunction, is the level of free radicals that are produced internally in reaction to as a result of stress, and free radicals which consist of highly reactive oxygen basically do to the body what oxygen does to an apple, that is, the excess oxygen produced, reactive oxygen produced because of stress, rots the inside of the body, and one could say it does what it does to metal, just as metal rusts, so we become rusty internally, we become metabolically less efficient because of free radicals, so we need things like vitamin C, Vitamin A, which are free radical scavengers, they’re anti-oxidants, and we need I think more B vitamins, also to counteract stress, and more trace minerals which we’re not getting from our food, and we need of course to make sure that we’re getting our nutrition as much possible from organic and free range sources.

Q: So you’re Jewish and you practice Native American and Chinese spirituality …do you think that, sometimes it can be harmful to mix traditions, or to take what you like from some traditions…
A: Well, first of all I don’t mix traditions, as an educator I try to keep them very distinct, so when I’m teaching a class in Chinese I wouldn’t want to start in French and then throw in Chinese or start Chinese and then throw in French, I want to keep the languages distinct, as an educator. Everything anybody studies is going to influence who you are, but I keep it pretty distinct. The only harm is if a person digs a hundred wells but none are deep enough to strike water, then they’re all useless. So I think that if you want to really understand something well you have to go quite deeply into that, and not avoid the time and patience that’s necessary to pursue where you feel you’re called. So what sometimes happens is people at first learn something, they’re learning something maybe just because of its entertainment value, they’re not really interested in that, and then once that ceases to be entertaining, and they come face to face with their issues, and this always happens with a healing art, then their strategy of avoiding their personal issues is to switch to something else. Then the person ends up having a sort of chop suey spirituality, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that, then that’s like not striking water, none of them really will do you much good. So I would say I don’t mix the traditions together even though in my own conscious, the way that I live, they’re all an influence on me, but when I teach I keep them quite distinct, and the traditions that I am teaching I’ve gotten into quite deeply. I could speak a little bit about other things I’ve not studied much, I could draw a few parallels with Islam, especially with Sufism, and draw some parallels in Early Christianity, especially pre-Council of Nicea, pre-4th Century Christianity is very close to Taoism, very close to Buddhism, so I could talk comparatively about all that, but I wouldn’t claim to be a scholar of early Christianity. Does that sort of answer your question? The other thing too to bear in mind is that we’re in a society that has a hard time with dual expertise in spiritual matters. If I were to tell a group of students that I have, say, a degree in psychology, and a degree in anthropology, and I’m a medical doctor—this is not true that I have those three degrees—if I were to say that to a group, they would say, “Oh, well that person’s really talented. That person studied psychology and anthropology and got a Master’s in each, or maybe even got a PhD in one of them, and then went back to school, or maybe was doing pre-med the whole time, and also became a medical doctor.” We do have some outstanding physicians who are also anthropologists, I’m sure there are some that are also psychologists, not just psychiatrists, so that would be considered a sign of talent. But, if I say, “I am a practitioner of Qi Gong and Taoism and I trained as a traditional healer in Native American spirituality among several tribes, and I’m working with an outstanding Jewish Kabbalist, a Sephardic Jew, from Morocco, then people look at me kind of odd, and then when they hear my favorite poet is Rumi, I become odder still. It’s because of this strange Western notion that different forms of spirituality are mutually exclusive. I tend to take more of the view that we’re all planted from the same earth, the same soil, so our roots go to the same place, but from the view point of the branches of leaves, that, is as the spiritual conditions have developed and been codified in modern times, they appear different. But you can trace them back to a common root, common plant, common earth, and say it’s the ground of the earth, I think it’s the same in all the traditions. I met one of the great Islamic sheiks, incredible man, supposed to be an old man, one of the great scholars of the Quran, and the teaching that he shared with me, I could have heard from a Native American, all these examples, and the same thing with, Moses, the words that Moses first heard, “Take off your shoes…” One of the teachings in Judaism is that Moses basically went on a Vision Quest, and when he saw that bush, he heard a voice, that basically said, “Take off your shoes, because the ground is holy.” So the rabbis asked, “What are the shoes?” The shoes are concepts and belief systems. So if you take off your shoes, the ground is holy everywhere. It’s only our belief systems, including belief in God, that prevents us from realizing the holiness of the ground, So that’s a very Buddhist teaching, and it’s a very Native American teaching, cause one of the reasons we Vision Quest is to rid ourselves of ego, cause that’s the barrier. Ego, you could say, means “edging god out” – that’s the way I define ego.

Q: I guess I do the same thing, because I try use five element diagnostic tools in my herbal practice, and I also participated in a life-changing initiation ritual in the Apache tradition, but I guess I think the biggest difference for me that I have trouble with is that in Chinese medicine, it seems like they don’t really believe in God, whereas in Native American traditions that I’m somewhat familiar with, everything is based on a belief in Creator.
A: Well, I don’t know that I agree, and by the way, this dialogue is good to include, it’s going to make things more interesting, your comments, too. Native Americans don’t “believe” in the Great Spirit, they have “experience” of a reality beyond the conventional, beyond the conventions of thought, language and culture. So it’s not something to “believe” in. Sometimes people ask me if I believe in the Great Mystery, and I say, “No! Not at all. I sure hope not.” If I have a belief in the Great Mystery then I need to explore that, and get rid of it, because those are the shoes. With Taoism, there’s also an acceptance of mysteries beyond knowledge. That’s why the Tao Te Ching starts, “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the everywhere Tao…”

Q: the eternal Tao…
A: Yeah, sometimes translated eternal, actually the original character that’s used in the text means omnipresent, spread out, and later there was another Chinese character that was put in substitution which means eternal. So the Tao that can be spoken about is not the everywhere Tao, we cannot speak about it; we cannot know it because it includes us and we have no outside perspective. The commentator on the Upanishads, Shankara, said that just as the sword can’t cut itself and the fire can’t burn itself so the subject can’t be the object of its own knowledge. We don’t have any outside perspective, there’s no way to really talk about, all we can do is accept that to our experience, there is a mystery, that’s realized through silence. So I don’t think there’s really a contradiction between these different viewpoints, even the Jewish viewpoint, like I mentioned about getting rid of the shoes, or, the when you say the Sh’ma, the Sh’ma is based not on belief, but on one’s ability to listen. That’s why it starts “Sh’ma” it means to listen, or hear. And then it’s also talking about Echad, about unity, so that unity is a state of being where there’s no difference between you or the divine. Whether you’re actually the same as that, that’s for the philosophical/metaphysical question, whether you’re exactly the same as that, maybe you’re the same in that we’re all waves in one ocean of being, so is the wave the same or different than that ocean, you can’t really answer that. So I think at the heart Judaism and the message of Taoism and Native American spirituality are the same, they’re certainly very distinct in the way they are expressed, but I don’t really think that you can say that the difference is in one believing in God and the other one not, because the mystic is going to find a way to get rid of beliefs no matter what tradition they’re based in.

Q: So, it seems like one of the things people try to do in Qigong is to sort of, transcend, to integrate and then transcend the five shen
A: What are the five shen?

Q: The five elements, or
A: Wu sing, wu sing is the five elements

Q: Well it’s, maybe it’s the five organs…it’s all the same thing…but they say once you integrate all five of them and they’re balanced they you can reach enlightenment, or something, or be immortal … I don’t understand it.
A: Well I think the essence of what they’re saying is summarized in a phrase called Xing Ming Shuang Xiu, which means mind and body becoming cultivated. So we have, it’s so engrained in Western culture that mind and body are separate, that we tend to think of enlightenment as a psychological or psychospiritual process, whereas in Chinese culture, it makes no difference whether you achieve that clarity at first through physiology, or whether you achieve it at first through your mind, because they’re one system. So the idea is that you could completely clarify the energy of the body, then the mind would always be clear and lucid. And if the mind is clear and lucid, then the energy of the body will be clear and lucid as well, because the two have to always go together. Does that answer your question?

Q: Yeah. So there’s a direct relationship between your emotions and your physical body.
A: Emotions, physical body, spirit… You could say that clearing the energy of the five major organs could lead to some spiritual enlightenment, that’s possible in a sense that if you were able to truly rid yourself of the five harmful emotions in such a way in that these harmful emotions are… It’s not that they’re not present at all, but they are in balance, and that’s kind of equivalent, that’s very close to what some people view as enlightenment. For example, the liver houses anger, the positive emotion for liver is kindness, but that doesn’t mean that if the person has a clear liver he’s never going to be angry, but their anger will be not fragmented, not separated from their sense of their bodies, their sense of themselves, they don’t lose control, it’s not a problem with impulse control. Lao Tzu, the founder of philosophical Taoism, actually said that anger of all the emotions is the most destructive. That’s why he says, “Blunt all sharpness.” There’s an early interpretation, now this is not a reading of Western psychology into Chinese text, it’s purely from within the Chinese tradition, an early interpretation that says that sharpness refers to anger, which could also be, I interpret as frustration, which is rampant in our society. The energy of the liver is clarified, you are ridding yourself of negative anger, harmful anger, and I’m not talking about being upset when we see injustice. There’s good anger and there’s bad anger, and bad anger is the kind that hurts the person’s health, hurts the person’s relationships, hurts the person’s relationship with family, with friends, with nature, and that’s the kind of anger you have to get rid of, and certainly with the other internal organs, for example, the heart. The heart likes peace, what the heart doesn’t like is any kind of shock or upset. The Chinese say winning the lottery is as bad for your heart as hearing that a loved one has died, that’s the philosophy, because the heart likes equanimity. That doesn’t mean, however, that we need to spend our lives removed from the world, just live in caves with no stimulation, it’s just not allowing extremes, that’s the problem. And then for the spleen, the spleen has to do with boundary issues, so if there’s a problem maintaining internal boundaries in given situation, for example if you get overdrawn into another person’s problems, or if you’re unable to separate yourself from a situation that you maintain awareness of what’s good for you, then that’s a boundary issue, so that harms the spirit. So if we can have appropriate boundaries, then that nurtures the spirit, and the spirit is also nurtured by trust. And then for the lungs, the lungs are harmed by grief, and also by anxiety, so then if you can heal those parts of ourselves that might be sad about past hurts, or anxious about our future, then we can stop being so involved in the past and future and be more in the present, then that benefits the lungs. And the lungs are also healed through courage, the courageous action, through having guts to live your own path, very good for lungs. And finally we have the kidneys, and the emotion that harms the kidneys is fear and phobia, and anything that we perhaps avoid because we’ve been hurt by a situation in the past, any kind of fear is said to harm the kidneys. That doesn’t mean that we behave irrationally, that if we don’t worry about the speeding car, we just walk out in front of it. It means that fear is no longer, we’re no longer pre-occupied by fear. The kidneys are healed by self-knowledge, wisdom. So if we could understand those qualities, yeah I think that is one way of looking at the enlightenment process of Taoism, but it’s never really spelled out, unlike in Buddhism. In Buddhism it’s a little better defined what one needs to do or not do, but in Taoism the only thing the Taoists say is that we need to realize unity with the Tao, and become a Xian, which is usually translated as immortal, but it actually means a person in harmony with nature, it’s a picture of a person in the mountains, so it means you’re in harmony with nature.

Q: So what’s the relationship between our inner body and the outer universe?
A: They’re reflections of each other, that the five phases that express themselves as the liver, heart, spleen, lungs and kidneys express themselves in the macrocosm as the planet Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus and Mercury. So that is to say that we are in a state of mutual interdependence and there’s one field of interrelations that we have to become aware of, and that state of connectivity is another way of defining enlightenment, that there’s no separation between what’s inside and what’s outside.

Q: How do you think that society can come, or maybe people in their own lives, can come into more of a state of balance between male and female energy?
A: Oh, that’s a great question. I don’t know, I can try to answer that but I’m not sure that there’s a general answer. I think it’s really individualized. Of course I’ve met people who, the way that expresses themselves is so different, for one person it might be maybe a man needs to read more poetry, or do psychotherapy, to get in touch with the female side of themselves, or maybe a woman needs to touch the male side of herself, or maybe it’s the opposite, maybe she needs to get in touch with the female side of herself, there’s some women that are too yin or are too yang, there’s some men that are too yin and too yang, so I don’t think there’s a general explanation. There are some practices that tend to balance one’s male and femaleness, taiji is one of them, because of the emphasis in balancing yin and yang, some styles of qi gong, I think meditation is very helpful because it develops awareness, of what is natural femininity to express itself, just through awareness, clarity at times, and uh, a man who’s excessively yin or excessively yang will tend to move to a balance point just through a meditative lifestyle. I don’t think there’s one thing that I can say to our society. Certainly yin and yang are out of balance and men and women are, the level of communication is getting worse, not better, it has to do with each person finding out what creates wholeness, so that every part of ourselves is integrated, not fragmented into bits and pieces because of physical stress, because of emotional trauma. For whatever reason, if we’re disconnected then of course male and female will be disconnected inside, if we’re not connected in ourselves then it’s not going to work to connect on the outside. Let me think about this another moment, I think there’s another side to it. I think maybe one of the secrets is to not allow any experiences to make the mind rigid… I’m making this up right now as I’m speaking, so maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. I think maybe one of the ways that men and women can live in harmony is that each person figures out what’s necessary to have a flexible and supple mind. When the mind becomes rigid, maybe you can damage the two, or create drama, that shows a bitterness that forms around the heart, prevents a person’s male and female sides to interact within each person. So I would say supple-heartedness might be one of the keys to maintaining harmony between the sexes.

Thanks so much to Ken Cohen for making this interview possible. Thanks also to Rena for sharing tea and mooncakes, to the staff at Seven Cups for making this visit (and every visit) so delightful, to Cameron Momeni for buying me a ticket for Ken Cohen’s qi gong workshop, and to Nate Summers for introducing me his writing in the first place.

Ken Cohen’s web page is www.kennethcohen.com.