Interesting, an old friend, whom I, and a couple of established Zen teachers (Rinzai and Soto) view as hugely awakened, sat a single weekend retreat, which he l

Interesting, an old friend, whom I, and a couple of established Zen teachers (Rinzai and Soto) view as hugely awakened, sat a single weekend retreat, which he left due to aforementioned pain in the knees. Apparently he tooks loads of LSD in his late teens, enough to drop out of college, literally grab a blanket and head into the woods for 6 months (verified by mutual friends). That's a pretty "old" school approach ;-) In the couple of years that I knew him he routinely blew my mind with in-the-moment koans. FWIW, a brilliant mathematician and programmer who gave up silicon valley money for a non-thinking form of employment so he could more fully contemplate the magnitude of death. OK, sure.