Zen zingers
Durango Dharma Center presents Wes Nisker benefit

Wes Nisker performs “Crazy Wisdom Saves the World Again,”a benefit for the Durango Dharma Center, this Friday. Niskers is a noted performer and Buddhist teacher fromthe Bay Area./Courtesy photo

by Judith Reynolds

Let’s face it,” Wes Nisker states in his monologue “Crazy Wisdom Saves the World Again.” “The basic rules on this planet are a bitch.”

Author, performer, Baby Boom beatnik-turned-hippie, student of Western philosophy and Asian wisdom, Nisker has become one of the country’s leading teachers of Buddhist meditation. He’s also a gifted comedian with what the New York Times has called his “Borscht-Belt timing.”

Nisker will be in Durango to deliver one of his jaw-dropping monologues Fri., Sept. 19, in the Smiley Auditorium. He’s the guest of the Durango Dharma Center, and his comic stories and original songs serve as the center’s annual fund-raiser. Beginning at 6:30 p.m., ticketholders may enjoy a light, comfort-food reception that also includes a display of Nisker’s many books and Tom Cheatham’s Burmese photographs. The performance, “Crazy Wisdom,” Nisker’s full-court shtick on what it means to be alive today, begins at 8 p.m.

So what are the givens that Nisker will skewer? Well, for starters: you’re born, you live, you die. Furthermore, he would add, you didn’t ask to be born, you didn’t choose your parents, you didn’t choose who you wanted to be. You were given a body and a personality that remains with you throughout life. And then it all ends.

“But you can change the way you look at the world and the way you behave in it,” Nisker said in a telephone interview last week. “In all my monologues, my main interest is investigating the messages we receive – lots of stories, the stories of creation, the new story of evolution, not that they converge – but the new science supports what the Buddha taught.”

“The Buddhist blessing, ‘May all beings be happy’ has a deeper ring to it when I regard myself as in the same world as those who dress in feathers, fur, scales, leaves and bark,” Nisker writes in “Crazy Wisdom.”

At 66, Nisker stands just outside the fading gates of the Baby Boom Generation. A look at his biography, however, puts him in the middle of Post-World War II children who went to college, searched for truth and meaning, experimented with everything, and have never seemed satisfied with ground rules.

Born in Norfolk, Neb., Nisker said he knew early what it was like to be on the outside. He was the only Jewish kid in town. In one of his monologues he reveals that Alfred E. Newman was his spiritual mentor in adolescence.

“I learned how to be funny,” Nisker said of the dreaded high school years, “the class clown. Norfolk was Johnny Carson’s home town, too. Being funny was a way to make it out of Norfolk.”

One summer at Zion Youth Camp, Nisker met Bob (then Zimmerman) Dylan. “He was a rebel. We used to say ‘juvenile delinquent,’ didn’t we? He never went to arts and crafts class. He ran off into the woods and chased the girls. Me? I went to arts and crafts class. I won a Best Camper Award.”

At the University of Minnesota, Nisker studied philosophy, and his college-age search for wisdom has become part of one of his comic monologues. In “Cynics in Recovery,” Nisker recounts taking a senior course in Existentialism. What did it teach him? That all previous philosophies were bunk and nonsense. He wonders out loud why he didn’t take it as a freshman and save himself a lot of time.

“The Existentialists said that life and the universe were absurd. It was a great relief to hear.”

In 1967, Nisker headed for San Francisco “to be a beatnik … too late,” he says in the “Cynics” monologue. “So I got assigned to the hippies. I was a flower child. We started holding Be-ins.”

It was in San Francisco that Nisker began his radio career. Odd as it sounds, he “covered” the first moon walk July 20, 1969.

“And in the late ’60s, I experienced my first Buddhist meditation group,” he said. It, too, made a profound impression on him. Soon thereafter, Nisker traveled to India, joining a wave of Westerners traveling to Asia. “At age 28, I went to my first retreat and learned to step outside my own psyche, my own drama.”

At this point, Nisker dips into the wisdom of the ages: “Self knowledge is often bad news.”

Nisker returned to California where he resumed his radio career with a regular program. In the late ’80s he founded and co-edited the International Buddhist Journal, Inquiring Mind, which celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year.

In an interview for Beliefnet with Lisa Schneider, Nisker summarized the cultural shift that took place in America during the last century: “I was part of this great wave of young Westerners in the late ’60s, early ’70s, who went to Asia. Many of us had been reading in college about Buddhism and Taoism and had been reading the beatniks, who were also exploring. In Asia we found teachers and we studied meditation and various martial art practices, and philosophy and music – and we brought it all back. We smuggled these foreign gods into the country and you can see the result today.”

Nisker also embarked on a prolific career as an author. His books have spawned innumerable reprints and a maze of performance pieces: “The Big Bang, The Buddha and the Baby Boom,” “Cynics in Recovery,” “Your Mind” and “Crazy Wisdom Saves the World Again!”

In each monologue, Nisker asks the big questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? How did we get into the mess we’re in? Why are we here anyway? Where are we going?

In the Beliefnet interview he clarified his specialty: bringing spirituality and science together: “It’s my understanding that the Baby Boom generation developed a kind of spiritual hunger, and that many of the religious institutions that we were born into didn’t explain life to us in an adequate way, didn’t give us the stories that conformed to what we were learning in school about the scientific revolution, really didn’t give us the spiritual tools to deal with the modern world.”

One way Nisker deals with the modern world is to remind himself and others: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” •