As Big Mind we are both the self and larger than the self, Roshi explains. As the self we are both separate and interconnected. It's like the ocean, says Roshi. The ocean is made up of separate waves but is something whole. Without insight, he says, "we only see the waves." To see the ocean simply requires a shift in thinking.

"It's like if you live in a house and you reside primarily in the living room, and you forget there are other rooms," says Salt Lake writer Melissa Bond, describing how we all tend to stay confined. What was shocking, she says about her experience with the Big Mind process, was how simple it was to enter the other, spacious part of her self.

"It really did feel, on a curiously profound level, that I had tapped into something," she says. Not nirvana, of course, but "small shifts that start to take place."

Enlightenment comes in degrees, says Roshi. "What I'm interested in now is having more people have an initial insight, to be more aware. With more time, they may have true enlightenment," may incorporate this expansiveness into their everyday life. It's like planting a garden, he says. When the soil is properly prepared, that's when something will grow.

On a summer evening 30 people sit straight-backed on cushions in the upstairs room at the Kanzeon Zen Center, an old house on South Temple. Cars rev their engines out on the street, but inside there is only the whir of the ceiling fans and the softness of approaching twilight. Finally, after a long 30 minutes, Roshi asks if there are any questions. Yes, says a woman near the front. "My sitting is not going well. I can't relax."

"Are you trying to relax?" asks Roshi. Laughter ripples through the room. This is a kind of Zen joke, because trying is so not Zen. "Trying means you have a goal, an objective, an aim," Roshi explains. "As soon as you do, you're defeated."

Many of the people on the cushions are serious, long-time students of Genpo Roshi, some of whom were introduced to Zen through Roshi's Big Mind process. Some have followed him to Utah from Europe, even though in Utah the Kanzeon Zen Center is largely unknown, overshadowed by the Mormon temple 13 blocks down the street.

The Kanzeon Zen Center is part of the White Plum Sangha, a Zen lineage founded in the 1960s by Japanese Zen Buddhist Maezumi Roshi, one of just a handful of Japanese Zen masters who brought Zen to the United States in the 1950s. Maezumi, who died 10 years ago, has 12 direct lineage holders, including Genpo Roshi.

Before he became a roshi, or Zen master, Genpo was Dennis Merzel, born in Brooklyn and later an All-American swimmer and high school teacher in California, with a master's degree in educational administration from the University of Southern California. Before studying under Maezumi Roshi, he spent a year in the California mountains in solitary retreat.