Beyond the Robes
Coming Soon…
Michael Santi Keezing, a former Thai Forest monk, opens a window into his spiritual world and thinking. He describes himself as both a Buddhist and a “post-Buddhist,” and expands on this to explain that his life is shaped by an ongoing attempt to understand the mind, to understand culture, and to understand what practice can realistically do for a person shaped by a Western, industrialized, and intensely individualistic society. Michael’s reflections reveal a long arc of aspiration, confusion, discipline, disillusionment, and renewed thought, all culminating in a vision of spiritual life that refuses both cynicism and romanticism.
Before ever learning meditation, Michael was drawn to trying to understand the strange phenomena of consciousness. As a young man, he felt a vague but insistent urgency, a kind of existential pressure that made him search for answers. Looking back, he believes that this early longing was a “free-floating yearning,” a hope that understanding consciousness would somehow solve a broader set of emotional and philosophical uncertainties. For Michael, books were the beginning of this search. As a teenager and student, he read Be Here Now, Siddhartha, the works of Carlos Castaneda, and a range of literature that introduced Eastern religious themes to Western audiences. These books felt like invitations into a world where consciousness mattered, where experience could be investigated from the inside, and where philosophical questions might have answers. He studied literature, wrote fiction, and immersed himself in intellectual life.
One set of teachings that resonated strongly with him were those of the great Thai Forest master, Ajahn Chah. Learning that a branch of that tradition had opened not far from where he lived in the United States, he started visiting on weekends as a lay practitioner, and eventually decided to ordain. That decision was not simple; he now sees it with far more nuance. He believed at the time that he was pursuing philosophical clarity, following a disciplined form of introspection that he calls Buddhist phenomenology—the attempt to understand experience through direct observation. But years later, he realized that trauma and longing for safety also pushed him toward monastic life. “There was a kind of retreat to a place of safety,” he says, acknowledging motivations he could not see clearly at the time. The monastery offered structure, purpose, belonging, and moral certainty. It offered a kind of refuge, and that refuge appealed to him as much as the promise of insight.
When he became a monk, he set his intellectual inquisitiveness aside, and for years he “put down the books;” not out of disdain for reading, but out of a desire to meet reality without conceptual scaffolding. Inside the monastery, he encountered two main forms of training: meditation and the Vinaya, the monastic discipline that governs every aspect of monastic life. Meditation gave him tools for emotional regulation, introspection, and concentration. He learned to observe thoughts and feelings without being overtaken by them, and he found that long periods of practice helped him understand the patterns of his own suffering. The Vinaya trained him in humility, restraint, and careful attention to conduct.
But his monastic training also revealed a more difficult side. In Western monastic communities, Michael encountered a kind of absolutism, a rigid interpretation of hierarchy and rules that sometimes distort the meaning of the original teachings. He remembers moments when senior monks asserted authority in ways that felt jarring, moments when hierarchy overshadowed compassion. He recalls thinking, “This is not the life of the peaceful ones,” a quiet but decisive signal that, to him, something in the system was misaligned with its ideals.
A major turning point came when he lived for a time in Queens, New York, among Indonesian Buddhists and alongside Thai Forest monks from another branch of his tradition. While the rituals, chants, and liturgies were nearly identical to what he practiced in his own monastery, he found the atmosphere felt entirely different. The traditional communities had a relational warmth, cultural ease, and flexibility that Western monastic groups often lacked. This contrast showed him that Western monastics brought their own psychological frameworks to the tradition, reshaping it in ways they did not always recognize. He realized that the Western attempt to recreate ancient monasticism was less an act of preservation than an act of reinvention.
In this regard, he describes the WEIRD culture—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic—paradigm. WEIRD society, Michael says, produces “highly individualized, individualistic people” shaped by a culture that “valorizes our individuality and uniqueness even as we are deeply unhappy about it.” He explains that industrialized, materialist conditions leave psychic wounds and a deep need that often fuel the yearning behind spiritual practice, pushing people toward inward-focused forms of self-investigation. Because they are raised to believe that the self is the central locus of meaning, they become “intensely inward-looking, always trying to define ourselves from the inside,” assuming that the solutions to suffering must come from within. This conditioning creates a seeker’s mindset that wants liberation but often misreads the Buddhist path through a modern psychological lens, carrying Western assumptions into a tradition that originally emerged from a very different cultural world.
Near the end of his monastic life, Michael returned to reading, which changed him profoundly. Years of meditation had sharpened his attention, and he found himself reading with a depth he had never experienced before. Neuroscience, especially Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things, offered new ways to understand the mind. He discovered naturalistic explanations for states he once interpreted through Buddhist metaphysics. These scientific frameworks did not invalidate meditation, but they transformed his sense of what it meant and what it revealed. He saw that multiple interpretations could describe the same experience, and he stopped assuming that Buddhist categories were the final word. This intellectual shift became one of the forces that eventually moved him beyond monasticism.
For Michael, one of the most difficult and misunderstood aspects of Buddhism for Western practitioners is the teaching of not-self. Many people, he says, treat the doctrine as a metaphysical claim that the self does not exist. Pushed too far, this leads to nihilism, depersonalization, or the collapse of healthy boundaries. “Tossing out the word ‘self’ does more harm than good,” he notes, emphasizing that the original teaching was practical, not metaphysical. Not-self helps loosen rigid identity structures; it does not require erasing agency or emotional complexity. He maintains that the insight is most valuable when it expands a person’s capacity for connection, compassion, and perspective, not when it negates their experience.
This nuance becomes important when he discusses activism and moral responsibility. Buddhism, as practiced in some traditional cultures, promotes political quietism: the idea that suffering is karmically deserved, that the world is unchangeable, or that outer engagement is a distraction from inner spiritual work. He says that these interpretations distort the heart of the tradition. For Michael, spiritual practice deepens responsibility rather than diminishing it. He believes that wisdom expresses itself as love, and that love expresses itself through action. And then there is the truth that individuals have distinct capacities—some are drawn to direct political involvement, others to teaching, caregiving, creative work, or support roles—but he insists that “everyone has some responsibility to try.” Here, Michael flatly rejects the idea that spiritual insight justifies detachment from suffering, and instead argues that correct practice should serve to clarify the need—even urgency— for engagement.
Continuing in this thread, Michael explains that this kind of engagement requires humility in order to be effective. This is because one person cannot control political outcomes, and attempting to do so leads to despair or distortion. Michael stresses that ethical action depends on focusing on the process rather than the result. He compares this to meditation: one cannot force an outcome, but one can commit wholeheartedly to the practice. The same is true for activism. One contributes what one can, without demanding that the world conform to one’s intentions. This approach aligns with his broader belief that spiritual maturity requires balancing clarity with compassion, intention with uncertainty, and effort with acceptance.
Towards the end of the conversation, Michael describes himself as someone who remains shaped by Buddhism but who no longer treats tradition as an unquestionable authority; as someone who respects the teachings but refuses to freeze them in idealized forms. Instead, he takes what he finds useful—ethical clarity, meditative discipline, psychological insight—and leaves behind what no longer serves. He admires people who draw real strength from Buddhist practice while refusing the authoritarian or fatalistic twists that sometimes cling to it. For him, the tradition holds many strands: some invite engagement with the world, others pull toward retreat. Practitioners, he says, have to choose deliberately which threads they follow.
Reflecting with seriousness and empathy on the crisis in Burma, Michael references how closely he follows the situation and how much it shapes his own sense of moral responsibility as a practitioner. He recognizes the brutality of the military regime and the scale of suffering endured by ordinary people, yet he never loses sight of the collective power of those who continue to resist. For him, Burma stands as a reminder that individual effort becomes meaningful when it contributes to a larger movement for dignity and justice. As he puts it, “you see that it absolutely is possible that justice can be achieved for the Burmese people, and there’s so much hope in that!”
Michael ends the discussion with a sense of openness, gratitude, and a willingness to continue the inquiry without pretending to have final answers. “Maybe we can go down that rabbit hole next time,” he says, offering a final gesture of curiosity that reflects the same yearning that first drew him to the study of consciousness, now steadied by experience and shaped by a hard-won understanding of what helps and what harms on the path.