Little known outside his small coterie of students and a handful of dharma teachers, the U.S. insight meditation teacher, Eric Kolvig, died on 2 July 2024 at the age of 78. Eric was raised in rural working class Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, by a Danish-American father and a Cook Islands mother (although, interestingly, at one of his memorials, a contributor insisted his birth mother was, in fact, New York Jewish).

After being awarded a Ph.D. at Yale in English, Eric taught college English until he succumbed to a thoroughly disabling depression, around the same time that he discovered the dharma. His childhood was traumatic, one where violence and alcoholism were present, and he found that the dharma  provided him with solutions to issues that weren’t being addressed by the medical community.

In 1985, Eric started teaching the dharma and insight meditation –  yet, despite being exceedingly well read, he never wrote a book. Nevertheless, he was able to sustain himself as a teacher.

As a teacher, Eric was very gentle, with a wise, and wonderfully friendly manner. He had a particular interest in building dharma communities in democratic, non-authoritarian ways and was, for a long time, the resident teacher for insight meditation communities in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In a piece titled ‘Crazy and free’, a contribution to the Jan/Feb 2010 Hidden Valley Zen Center newsletter, Eric wrote:

I cannot remember ever in my life living through a whole year without experiencing both PTSD and depression for part, or in some cases all, of that year.

Each of these two illnesses brings with it a load of mental anguish. Each can be a killer. Together they constitute a lethal mix. How, then, have I survived them to the age of 64? Barely, and with a lot of help. It has taken a village, and more than a village, to keep Eric going: a large network of loving, supportive friends; many psychiatrists and psychotherapists; many medications; psychiatric hospitalisations; electric shock treatments; and a great range of both mainstream and alternative modalities for healing. Without all of these supports, I would not be alive.

And surely without the dharma I would not be alive. When I was young, with so much mental torment I was obsessed with two questions: Why is there suffering? What can I do about it? I read widely many of the best minds of western civilisation, but I could not find from them adequate answers. Then, in college, I discovered in the Buddha’s teachings – clear, comprehensive, and accurate answers for both questions. That discovery was the first big turning point of my life.

In 2011, Eric Kolvig travelled to Aotearoa New Zealand. He came here to teach a residential retreat at a centre outside Wellington. The topic of the retreat was Practice for hard times: a meditation retreat with a focus on socially engaged Buddhism.

Around 20 people took part, and it was the most interesting, the most rewarding, and the most useful retreat that I’ve been on.

But what brought Eric to this country? In the early 2000s, thirsty for knowledge of the dharma, and finding not a lot of inspiration in Aotearoa New Zealand, I was scouring this new thing called ‘the Internet’ for recorded dharma talks, when I stumbled across three by Eric.

In 2001, on the evening before 9/11, Eric had given a talk on Wisdom at the Insight Meditation Centre in Palo Alto, which is in California’s Silicon Valley. It was a lovely talk: wonderfully warm, very clear, and strong. The following day, with all passenger planes grounded, Eric was unable to get home. A year later, he was back in Palo Alto to give a talk titled Applying dharma to world tragedy.

Listening to this talk online, it was clear that Eric had pitched this talk at a group of strongly individualist, self-focussed tech workers. What he said to the people in that room in 2002 was, for me, a wake-up call. This was the first dharma talk I’d heard which touched on the importance of maintaining a principled political practice as well as a focussed meditation practice.

You can find those three talks by Eric on Audiodharma. More than twenty years on, they’re still well worth listening to.

  

Teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand

Wouldn’t it be great if he were to run a retreat for us here, in Aotearoa New Zealand, I thought. Well, it took time and a lot of effort to get his email address. He was, as one might imagine, a very private man, hiding his light under a bushel as the saying goes. I wrote, asking if he might consider teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand. ‘No’ was his response; the idea of travelling overseas didn’t appeal to him.

But, if he was to go anywhere, he told me, it would be to the Cook Islands, since his mother was from the Cooks. I pointed out that it was just a hop, a skip and a jump from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands to Auckland, and several airlines flew that route. He wasn’t convinced.

Fast forward to 2009. To celebrate moving from part-time to full-time work, with its welcome, unplanned increase in income, I signed up for a retreat that Eric would be offering with Arinna Weisman through Tucson Community Meditation Center. From New Zealand to Tucson is a long way to go to be with, listen to, and speak with a dharma teacher. I would not be disappointed.

Imagine the scene. Thirty people are in a circle at the C.O.D. Ranch outside Tucson. We introduce ourselves. After my very brief statement, Eric remarked with surprise in his voice how delightful it was for someone to travel all the way from New Zealand. I smiled.

Later on, at the start of my one-on-one meeting with Eric, he set the tone by letting me know that he did not want to teach in New Zealand. I understood his reasons, and had no intention of pressuring him to change his mind. The following morning, much to my surprise, I was asked to go see Eric for a second one-on-one conversation. His first words were, ‘Okay, Ramsey, I’ll come to New Zealand.’ Such was his generosity of spirit.

I was overjoyed, and yet full of trepidation. How many Kiwis might be willing to go on a residential retreat with a teacher they’d never heard of? And would we be able to attract sufficient donations through Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust to cover the cost of Eric’s air travel, making the retreat more affordable to all participants?

It was touch and go. Eric came, there were in the end about 20 of us, and it went really well. Eric set out the essence of what he would be offering:

❛The earth’s environment degrades faster. Species go extinct. Enmities and wars, both inner and outer, seethe on.

If you have eyes for it, you may see that injustice occurs more often than justice in many places.

We feel the urge to respond, and we want to do so in ways that will make a real difference.

So, how can we be, and what can we do, in such circumstances?

We can work deeply with our minds and hearts by learning to balance awareness, compassion, and equanimity.

These three powers, along with wisdom, can help us to live more at peace in unpeaceful times.

They can also help us to act in ways that heal both ourselves and our world.❜

  

Eric Kolvig’s four tasks

What did Eric suggest we do to cope with these global tragedies? If we look back to his 2002 Palo Alto talk, he set us four tasks; we needed to:

• decide how much information we want to expose ourselves to;
• stay balanced around that kind of exposure;
• see the ways in which loving kindness practice can stabilise the mind; and
• see how the practice of awareness can help us work with the feelings that come up, and with the public stories that were running through the air.

He then went deeper, asking whether we can use the dharma to understand a little of what are some of the causes of global tragedies, and how we might respond. Gotama, the man we know as the Buddha, makes it very clear – and Eric let the people in Palo Alto know this in no uncertain terms – that one of the fundamental causes of crime is poverty. He told them:

Most governments try to control crime through punishment, and that will never work. If people have enough on the material level, they will be contented, the country will be peaceful and free from crime. Then, the Buddha says, people will be happy, and dancing their children on their laps. They will live with open doors.

What a lovely phrase: ‘they will live with open doors’. It sounds just like here, in Aotearoa. He then quoted the poet Gary Snyder (interestingly, when you listen to Eric’s talk you’ll note that Eric subtly misquotes Snyder):

The mercy of the west has been social revolution; the mercy of the east has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.

Eric then asked:

If social justice leads to greater happiness and less suffering in the world, does it make sense for us to commit, as individuals and as communities, to social justice?

An integral part of his spiritual practice, Eric said, was to be involved in some kind of issue beyond personal practice. And then he read a very, very long and moving extract from an article by an Israeli Jewish woman setting out her heartfelt experience of being on the streets in support of Palestinian people. This was 2002 remember, not 2023 or 2024.

Eric’s final words from that evening in Palo Alto in 2002 are uplifting.

So ultimately I feel optimistic, because it isn’t as if evil is something out there in an objective way. It’s simply the projection of our mind states into speech and action in the world. We can change those mind states. I’ve been practicing for about a quarter of a century, a little more, and I’ve seen enormous change in this heart. You know, there’s a long way to go, still, but I’m doing a whole lot less harm in the world than I did a quarter century ago, it’s clear. And if it can happen to me, it can happen to any of us – if we’re willing to put in the effort.

I will miss Eric, his wisdom and his humour. Had he lived another year or more, I do believe he would have enjoyed Tuwhiri’s new book, Mindful Solidarity by Mike Slott, in which he sets out to create a dialogue between secular Buddhism and democratic socialism.