The two really life changing meetings for me are as follows....The background is that I was a vegetarian for a number of years and very rigid (and quite obnoxious ) when it came to issues surrounding eating meat.So... during a sesshin Loring Palmer who was the head cook, put fish stock in the soup. I got into it with him, quotes I can remember are ( him ) saying : "I'll throw your ass out of here" ( the kitchen that is ), and, ( me ) "yeah, you and what Army?.Reb happened to be around, so somehow I was lassoed and taken up for an interview with Roshi right away, as it was a sesshin and all.I went in , and bowed, sat down in zazen with Roshi, and blurted out : "Roshi, Loring put fish stock in the soup, and we don't usually do that here, and I haven't eaten meat or fish for six years, blah, blah, blah". and Roshi sat there just listening with no sense of judgment or reaction, and at a certain point my batteries just ran down, as there didn't seem to be any sense of resistance or support for my rant, and I shut up and we just sat, for what seemed like a long time (but it probably wasn't .)Then all of a sudden Roshi spoke, and it felt like thunder rolling through my head, (although I'm almost sure he didn't raise his voice at all ) and he said, "Let me tell you something. Your ideals are the death of reality." Then he said, "You can be 99% perfect in this world if you like, or even 90%, but don't ever try to be 100% perfect, because you just push the world away from you, and have no relation to it "From there he talked a bit more, the one thing I remember is him saying something about that he didn't really prefer to eat meat, but when he visited friends who served it, it was just easier to go along with it.