After the success on our website of MOVA pill material we got a very special interview with Monja Coen, one of the main names of spanish buddhism.
Coen is one of the most famous spiritual leaders in Spain. She is a teacher, speaker and author of more than ten books. The nun took her monastic vows at the Zen Buddhist Center in Los Angeles in the United States in 1983.
Since then, she has devoted herself to intense years of study and training. In the year 2001, she decided to leave Busshinji Temple and started a small group of Zazen, a meditative observation practice, at the home of one of her followers.
In a short time, the space of the residence became small for the number of practitioners and the Zen Buddhist Community Zendo España was founded.. Coen is the official representative of España of the Buddhist order Soto Shu Order. Check out his interview:
The Awakening of Consciousness According to Coen Monk
ESF: The people who look for our content are people who are at a point in their lives when, for some reason, they started the search for self-knowledge and each one arrives through a different channel. But what we would like to understand is what do you understand in your philosophy about the term “Awakening of Consciousness”?
Monk Coen: We say you need to wake up, wake up to your true self. To know yourself is to know the body and the mind. It is not separate from each other. It is realizing that we are a great unity.
This is not just knowing your personal history. Because there are people who say “I know who I am”, no, that's not it. What is the human mind? Self-knowledge transcends the Lesser Self, it has to reach the essence of being, this is what Zen Buddhism means to practice meditation, which is for Zen Buddhism the search for nirvana, which is peace and tranquility, and the search for wisdom, which is a wisdom that transcends.
It starts with our personal history, but it goes beyond that. What are sensations? What are neural connections? So we say: meditating is not aspirin, it's not something that will take the pain away, it's not relaxation and it's not just contemplation. Zen meditation is a process of deep self-knowledge.
Co-creation and Zen philosophy
ESF: Monja, so, taking advantage of this line of reasoning about the mind, today this subject of quantum physics is very high, of us co-creating our reality according to what we think linked to what we feel. In Zen philosophy, do you also follow this line when a person enters the meditative state? Does this capacity for co-creation have any connection with Zen philosophy?
Monk Coen: Look, Buddha was saying something that belongs to all Buddhism, not just Zen Buddhism, because Zen is just one of the branches of Buddhism. It is an aspect of meditation, but Buddhism itself is much broader, and Buddha said: “All that exists is an interdependent and simultaneous co-arising. Nothing exists by itself. We are co-authors of our life and our reality”.
This is a quote from the Buddha from approximately 2.600 years ago. Everything that exists is a co-emergence, it appears together, interdependent, one depends on the other, and simultaneously, which I think has a lot to do with the law of attraction and with quantum physics.
In fact, this is what we always say: “Without attachment and without aversion, the world is easier”, is another teaching. Because attachment is the “I want to have it”, I call it, I keep provoking it, I can push it away instead of calling it, and what I am most afraid of is, sometimes, what I call, what I bring to myself .
Hence, when we say “you are co-creating your reality”, you have to be without attachments and without aversions, because if there is one of the two, you can do the exact opposite..
How to reach deeper levels of consciousness
ESF: Right! And then, in this line of meditation, we see that you have in the temple that in some days people can learn Zen meditation, right? And why do you think people have so much trouble meditating? People start and stop. In your opinion, with your experience of people who pass by trying to learn, do you think that not being able to meditate is a resistance to getting in touch with the Higher Self itself or do you think it's a lack of habit of us who are from the West?
Monk Coen: No, it happens in every country in the world, everywhere. Of course the American is very dedicated, I started my practices in the United States and the American citizen when they commit to doing something, they go to the end.
Spain, no! We start, find it funny and interesting, get boring and leave. But, for you to access the deepest levels of consciousness, you have to go, as all the great mystics say, through the great desert.
It takes motivation to complete the journey
And, when the thing starts to get boring, it stops being stimulating or fun, you see that it's not a joke but a serious thing, the person walks away, some because they want emotions, others because they want fun and they want to know new things.
“I'm so smart”, “I already understood that, I want to understand something else”… so all this happens to us, we human beings are few who really have the motivation and will continue.
More there are many people who end up enjoying the meditative practice, the silence, the stillness and continue, so much so that our community is alive because there are many people who become associate members, some become monks, others become Buddhists, because they really have that affinity.
The so-called spiritual tourists
There are others I call spiritual tourists. I want to know a little bit about this and “I get it”, I want to know a little bit about that and “I get it”, now I want to get to know that other one and I say it is like wanting to climb to the top of a mountain and just go around the base of the mountain, seeing several beautiful, beautiful paths, each one of them wonderful.
But if you want to get to the top of the mountain, you'll have to choose one of these paths. Why, sometimes a person chooses a path, but it starts to get rough, dry or prickly, and then they regret it and think “I should have chosen the one on the side”.
And then she leaves that path and goes to the one on the side, but the one on the side also has to go through this phase and when she gets to this phase of difficulty, meeting with our shadow, with the meeting of the one who we think is “not me”, and when we arrive at that place, many people give up..
Pitfalls of the Path
One emphasis that counselors and monitors always give is that this is natural, you have to cross, you're not going anywhere.
Still, there are some people who say “I want to have extranormal powers”, “I have powers”, “I read other people's minds”, and this is a trap on the way. The true path is much more than that, it is much more than that, but the person starts to be afraid of losing their identity, everything that I was and that I thought is falling apart.
The fundamental questions
what am i? Who am I? And that scares. There's no need to be scared. We build a personality for ourselves based on the experiences we have had in our lives, but we can see that this personality we build is neither fixed nor permanent.
And, don't be afraid of impermanence because there is nothing fixed in this worldSo, many times, people have to go through these portals, or the portal of insecurity and fear, or the portal of disappointment for thinking that they are living a superman or a superwoman and realize that you are you, a person simple.
And also the idea that I want to learn new things, receive new stimuli, because that is already more or less known when in fact it is not, because whoever thinks they already know is very far from knowing.
Is there a key moment for the awakening of consciousness?
ESF: Yes, that's right, Monja. So, for example, our people who search for our content are very varied across ages. Before, they were older people who had already raised their children and when they went through the “empty nest syndrome”, they began to look inward. But now the younger ones are starting earlier. We followed your story and we saw that you were not born and lived in a monastery since you were a child, you went through the life of material duality, and then you enter the monastic life. But what we'd like to know is: when did you feel it was time for a change? Is it something you feel, nun? Is this turning point something that comes and you feel it?
Monk Coen: Not quite, life is step by step and one experience leads to another, if we say that all that exists is co-emergence, interdependent and simultaneous, there's not a moment when I think “ah, I want to be a monk, I'm going to drop everything and it's over”, no.
It starts as a child, in my childhood I liked social poetry, it starts with my search for reading. I started reading very early and read everything I could find. I started with Eça de Queiroz. So there has been a search and a search since my childhood for the meaning of life and what we are doing here. "Why am I here?".
An uneasiness inherent in being
When I studied at the nuns' college, I said I wanted to be a nun and my father said “no, that's all my daughter, go study something else” and then I ended up taking other courses, but that question always remained.
So I have inside me since childhood the questioning about “what is life?”, “what is death?”, “what are we doing here?”, “what is God and where does he manifest himself?”, “what is the mass?”, because my family was Catholic. “Does it make sense to go to Mass at 12 or 13 years old?”. I thought “I don't understand what this is, so I don't want to and I won't anymore”.
These questions were bubbling up, I started to read Nietzsche, among other authors of this line.
The questions that are inside of me
So I had questions inside me, and when I found meditative practices, I went to live in the United States and started Zen Buddhism., so I was sure: “this here is what I want, this here gives meaning to my life”.
Discover the essential teachings of the Coen Nun.
It's not that I had a special call, that one day an angel came and showed me, none of that. It was a question, a question that I carried since childhood that was still alive in me.
Until I started doing zen meditative practices and they started to make sense to me, in this case the questions and not the answers, and then the answers come and the answers are other questions and you realize that it's an endless path .
Finding your own way
There's nothing like “now I'm the saint, the nun, the buddha”. It has none of that. It is the human being in search of a spiritual path, a path of life, a path that gives meaning to his life. and each one has to look for that path that gives meaning to their existence.
But if there is no such questioning, when you do not question “what meaning does my life have?”, how are you going to find that meaning?
So the main thing is for you to ask yourself: How is it that the few years of life that we live, which do not exceed eighty or at most a hundred or a hundred and a few years, and even in the first 10 years you are apprehending reality and In the last ten years, are you detaching yourself from this reality?
So what will we have? About 80 years of a life where you can ask yourself: “What can you offer the world?”, “What did you understand from that?”.
As you said, back in the day, women had a job, right? I'm going to take care of the children, I'm going to take care of the house, the children flap their wings and they get the empty nest syndrome, what am I going to do? So I'm going to look for a spiritual path, I'm going to look for something, right?
Meditation and self-knowledge are for everyone
But now, is this happening earlier? How wonderful, how wonderful. I recommend that meditation be taught in schools for children. It is not religion, but it is self-knowledge.
Realizing what emotions are, what sensations are, how do we make neural connections, how many levels of consciousness there are, so you can be a better being, you can know who you are so you can know who you are so you can better use the wonderful ability that the human mind has and that we use very little.
I think it's very important that we develop this in all people and at all ages.
It can be related to any religious or non-religious practice. We have monks in the United States who are Catholic priests, rabbis and Protestant pastors, they all practice Zen, they are all Zen masters, but they honor their language, the language of the gospel, the language of the Bible, the language of the Torah. or the Qur'an, because we also have sheiks doing that.
The search for answers
So we, an interreligiosity that permeates this mystical search, which is the search for the meaning of life. What are we doing here? What is my life for?
Do I wake up, get up, eat, go to sleep, have sex, buy things to think I'm cute? Is this what existence is summed up in or does it show that a human capacity differs from the dog, the cat, the bird or the cockroach.
We can have questions that go beyond and that will lead us to the encounter with the true self, with the essence of being, which is not just your personal history, which is not just the pleasure of your comfort, it is not just the pleasure of a small discovery, but it is the human capacity for a greater discovery.
You might also like: The Life of Coen Monk, Ser Series – Coen Monk, Coen Monk Series Explains.
