Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

The Novice
There’s one novice brother that I have a hit-or-miss time with. Sometimes we get along great and we’re really on, other times we just get on each other’s nerves. We’re on each other’s nerves currently. He keeps trying to lecture me about Cosmology and Astrophysics because he’s reading Brian Greene’s “Fabric of the Cosmos”, and admittedly I have an interest in those areas, but he gets unmindfully obsessive. He does have a background in sciences and he also loves to teach, but when I’m not interested in listening to someone at a certain time, subject matter notwithstanding, I don’t hide it well. I like to learn, but I’m particular about how I’m taught. If I don’t get something, it’s their fault. So when I don’t get something, he gets frustrated and disappointed. I make it look like I’m smart enough, but he failed to transmit the lesson. Not very compassionate of me, especially since I do hide it well that I'm not all that smarts. He did recently explain an aspect of Special Relativity I had missed before, and I tried to be encouraging and tell him he was successful, but then when he started going off on entropy for five minutes, I practically walked away from him. I did walk away from him, practically mid-sentence.

I’m being hands-off these days in order to not bug him anymore than I already have. So when I saw him alone in a room with a 13 year old girl I had seen him hanging around with a little too noticeably, I didn’t hound him about having a second body in the presence of a member of the opposite sex. Although I did try to hint at it before wordlessly walking off. For Buddha’s sake, she’s 13 years old!! I don’t care how well you’re connecting with another human being, show a little discretion, monk.

I wanted to lecture him earlier about teaching and keeping relevant and being aware of your audience. The problem with his physics lecturing was that he was just explaining these concepts in a vacuum, pure theoretics. I’ve been trying to implore him to connect it to real life, with the practice. Explain to me why I should be as fascinated as him. Like when I go off on the Rotation of the Earth Sutra, I’m trying to make a point of connecting the world turning to our practice. It is something we can notice and appreciate every day in our practice. I also wanted to stress gauging whether your audience is interested in what you’re saying. I ended up not giving him this lecture, because I gauged that my audience, him, would not be interested in what I was saying – i.e., telling him why his teachings weren’t working on me.