Speaker 1: To this question of what we can actually do to
Speaker 1: get beyond this world of noise that you pose Deeric.
Speaker 1: The first thing we look to is notice noise. Pay
Speaker 1: attention to figure out how you can notice where things
Speaker 1: are noisy, including the signals that noise creates in your body.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guests on this episode are Justin Zorne and Lee Mars.
Speaker 1: Justin has served as both a policymaker and a meditation
Speaker 1: teacher in the US Congress. He's a Harvard and Oxford
Speaker 1: trained specialist in the economics and psychology of well being
Speaker 1: and has written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard
Speaker 1: Business Review, Foreign Policy, and others. He is co founder
Speaker 1: of Asterius Strategies, a consultancy that bridges contemplation and action,
Speaker 1: helping leaders and teams envision and communicate solutions to complex challenges.
Speaker 1: Lee Mars is a collaboration consultant and leadership coach for
Speaker 1: major universities, corps, operations, and federal agencies, as well as
Speaker 1: a longtime student of pioneering researchers and practitioners of the
Speaker 1: ritualized use of psychedelic medicines in the West. She has
Speaker 1: led diverse initiatives, including a training program to promote experimental
Speaker 1: mindset among teams at NASA and a decade long cross
Speaker 1: sector collaboration to reduce toxic chemicals and products. Lea's also
Speaker 1: co founder of Astria Strategies. Today, Lee, Justin, and Eric
Speaker 1: discuss their book Golden, The power of silence in a
Speaker 1: world of noise. Being consistent with your habits is the
Speaker 1: engine that drives your transformation and growth. Think about it.
Speaker 1: You can't feed your good wolf one big meal a
Speaker 1: year and expected to thrive consistent Steady bits of food
Speaker 1: fuel a good healthy wolf, but it's hard to create consistency.
Speaker 1: You might listen to this podcast on a Thursday feel
Speaker 1: really inspired, but then life takes over and by Saturday
Speaker 1: night you've forgotten all about it. That's why I'm hosting
Speaker 1: a free live Q and a town hall zoom meeting
Speaker 1: on Thursday, February, where I'll be answering your questions about
Speaker 1: how to take what you know and turn it into
Speaker 1: what you consistently do. Had to one you feed dot
Speaker 1: net slash town hall to register for this free live
Speaker 1: session with me. During this town hall, you'll ask me
Speaker 1: your specific question and I'll answer it. It's that simple.
Speaker 1: So if you would like my help creating some tools
Speaker 1: to deal with real life when it gets in the
Speaker 1: way of your best intentions, let me help you. If
Speaker 1: changing habits feels overwhelming, if you struggle to make time
Speaker 1: for things because life is so busy, if it's easy
Speaker 1: to get caught up with your to do list, you
Speaker 1: feel consistently behind and taking time for yourself feel selfish,
Speaker 1: then let's talk. The things we do consistently are more
Speaker 1: important than the things we do once in a while
Speaker 1: in this free town hall session, you'll ask me your
Speaker 1: questions and I'll help you find what works for you,
Speaker 1: how you might look at things differently and create the
Speaker 1: structure to help you do the thing you really want
Speaker 1: to do. And if you don't have a specific question,
Speaker 1: just come listen to the conversation. A little bit of
Speaker 1: something is better than a lot of nothing. Truth is,
Speaker 1: you can make a lot of progress by doing just
Speaker 1: a little bit. To register for this free zoom session
Speaker 1: on February, go to one you feed dot net slash
Speaker 1: town hall. That's when you feed dot net slash town hall.
Speaker 1: I hope I get the chance to meet you there.
Speaker 1: Hi Lee, Hi justin, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric,
Speaker 1: thanks for having us so good to er. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: going to be discussing your book Golden, The Power of
Speaker 1: Silence in a World of Noise. But before we do that,
Speaker 1: let's start like we always do with the parable. In
Speaker 1: the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild
Speaker 1: and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of
Speaker 1: us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and
Speaker 1: the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 1: greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops, thinks
Speaker 1: about it for a second, looks at their grandparents, says, well,
Speaker 1: which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Thank you, Eric, and I
Speaker 1: love so much that you start every episode with this parable.
Speaker 1: It's such a good lesson for all of us, such
Speaker 1: a good parable. And I'd like to start my answer
Speaker 1: to it by just describing what we learned from one
Speaker 1: of the neuroscientists we interviewed in writing this book, Judson Brewer,
Speaker 1: who explained that in decades of studying the human brain
Speaker 1: in situations of deep meditation as well as the brains
Speaker 1: of people facing addiction, he described to us that there
Speaker 1: is a term he would use to describe a noisy
Speaker 1: state of the brain, which is a state of contraction.
Speaker 1: It's when a person feels like they're in a place
Speaker 1: of contraction. And there's a state that describes, according to
Speaker 1: this expert neuroscientist, a place of what he called and
Speaker 1: what we call silence in the mind, clarity Christine attention,
Speaker 1: and he said that in his research that corresponds to
Speaker 1: a place of expansion. So when I think about the
Speaker 1: one that we tend to feed off and in our culture,
Speaker 1: it's this state of contraction, which is the dopamine hit,
Speaker 1: which is reaching for more news, reaching for more sound
Speaker 1: and stimulus, reaching for more data, reaching for the like
Speaker 1: on Facebook or Instagram. And then there is this state
Speaker 1: of expansion, which is another wolf we can feed in ourselves,
Speaker 1: the good wolf, which is a state of openness, the
Speaker 1: state of as I said, pristine attention and really the
Speaker 1: state of being open to mystery and wonder. And that's
Speaker 1: not the dopamine hit. That's a different, deeper kind of
Speaker 1: well being that many cultures historically recognize as a kind
Speaker 1: of well being that's grounded in patience and virtue. So
Speaker 1: this book is about cultivating that second wolf in our minds,
Speaker 1: that expansive state of consciousness, that openness to wonder, that
Speaker 1: openness to silence, and not needing that dopamine rush. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we can wrap right now. We've got we
Speaker 1: got all we need. That's done, perfect episode. Thanks guys,
Speaker 1: that's great. And that idea of expansion and contraction I've
Speaker 1: described before that that is almost a proxy for everything
Speaker 1: in life, like particularly I talk with a lot of
Speaker 1: people about their spiritual lives, and I think that's as
Speaker 1: good a definition of what spiritual growth is is moving
Speaker 1: into a place of more expansion versus contraction. And I
Speaker 1: love that idea and that image because you can feel
Speaker 1: it right. Spiritual teacher Audie Shanty said to me wants
Speaker 1: the listeners who are listening won't see this, But he
Speaker 1: said his teacher used to say to him, less of this,
Speaker 1: which is like a closed fist, and more of this.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I just do that gesture myself because it can
Speaker 1: aesthetically gives me that expansion versus contraction. And I also
Speaker 1: love the phrase pristine attention. That's a beauty full phrase.
Speaker 1: Lee anything you want to add on there. It was
Speaker 1: occurring to me that sometimes it's hard to know whether
Speaker 1: we're feeding the good wolf for the bad wolf, and
Speaker 1: that silence affords is the opportunity to discern when we're
Speaker 1: feeding the good wolf or the bad wolf. It's not
Speaker 1: always so clear, and sometimes we're really like scurrying to
Speaker 1: do something, we're just actually adding in our case, noise
Speaker 1: to the you know, our bad wolf is noise to
Speaker 1: the mix in this place of urgency and contraction like
Speaker 1: we're describing, but we're coming from a good place. So
Speaker 1: I think if we can pull back sometimes and bring
Speaker 1: in some silence, then we allow for some space for discernment,
Speaker 1: so we know which wolf were feeding. Thank you, you know,
Speaker 1: and looking at your guys biographies, right, it's clear that
Speaker 1: you both have been very focused on doing really good
Speaker 1: work out in the world, all sorts of different justice
Speaker 1: type projects and climate work, and you know your lives
Speaker 1: have been devoted to service. Yet early in the book
Speaker 1: you say that sometime around let's say I think it's
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, you were feeling like a lot of
Speaker 1: us were feeling, which is a little bit of despair,
Speaker 1: a little bit of like, God, we keep doing all
Speaker 1: this work and these problems don't seem like they're changing.
Speaker 1: And that led you to a place where silence was
Speaker 1: what you guys came up with as perhaps the answer
Speaker 1: to that. Talk to me a little bit about that process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is really a book. It's an exploration of the
Speaker 1: question where do good ideas come from? Where do really
Speaker 1: good ideas that generate real progress, not just you know,
Speaker 1: one step forward, perhaps two steps back kinds of movement,
Speaker 1: But how do we really make the kind of change
Speaker 1: that's durable in our world that really improves our lives,
Speaker 1: really improves the lives of people around us? And, as
Speaker 1: you mentioned, Eric, in that period around we were just like,
Speaker 1: what can we possibly do to make positive impact? We
Speaker 1: had spent so much time in social movements and environment
Speaker 1: of economic movements and policy work where we felt like
Speaker 1: we were doing good work, but looking at it five years,
Speaker 1: ten years after some of the policy interventions or media
Speaker 1: stands we had taken, it's like we just weren't really sure.
Speaker 1: So when we thought about this question, what does it
Speaker 1: take to really generate progress? The answer that came to
Speaker 1: us was first, go deep into silence. Yes, turned down
Speaker 1: the noise, Yes, figure out how to be less distracted,
Speaker 1: but go deeper than that, tune into the most pristine
Speaker 1: silence you could find. So it was really kind of
Speaker 1: experimenting with this idea that we first started to come
Speaker 1: onto this possibility of writing about silence. We wrote this
Speaker 1: article for Harvard Business Review, and that got us started
Speaker 1: really in this formal exploration, Lee, you want to say
Speaker 1: somewhere about that. So we set out to have all
Speaker 1: these conversations with neuroscientists and poets and activists and a
Speaker 1: Whirling Dervish and a man incarcerated on death row who
Speaker 1: has become a close friend Grammy winning opera singer heavy
Speaker 1: metal front man a Whirling Dervish, if I didn't already mentioned,
Speaker 1: so we just had all these exploratory conversations asking this question,
Speaker 1: what's the deepest silence you've ever known? And it's their
Speaker 1: answers that really led us on this path to this book.
Speaker 1: So we started with the article we were really looking
Speaker 1: at auditory noise, and we were looking at strategy and
Speaker 1: problem solving, like Justin was mentioning. But as we embarked
Speaker 1: upon these conversations, like it got so much deeper, asking
Speaker 1: this question, hearing their responses, and the responses surprised us.
Speaker 1: There were moments like births, deaths, moments of awe, moments
Speaker 1: running the perfect line through roaring rapids, or the four
Speaker 1: a m Market at all my dance party, so not
Speaker 1: auditorially quiet, which begged the question like, what is the
Speaker 1: silence they're talking about? And so we started thinking about
Speaker 1: that framework, that external silence. Of course, at decibel levels
Speaker 1: that's interest to us. But internal quiet that's where things
Speaker 1: get really interesting, and so that's what shaped the book. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love what you talk about with silence, which is
Speaker 1: silence isn't just the absence of noise, you know, it's
Speaker 1: also a presence undo itself. And I remember the first time,
Speaker 1: and I'm referencing the spiritual teacher Audio Shanty twice in
Speaker 1: five minutes, so I guess he's on my mind. But
Speaker 1: I remember sitting retreat with him, he said something and
Speaker 1: he just said, just notice, before you have to do anything,
Speaker 1: that silence is already here. And it was a revelation
Speaker 1: to me, it really was. I went, oh my God,
Speaker 1: Like it's right there. All the sound is coming out
Speaker 1: of it, but it's still there. And it just was
Speaker 1: a very foundational moment for me in learning to settle
Speaker 1: more deeply, um say a little bit more about silence
Speaker 1: as a presence or also silence not just being the
Speaker 1: absence of noise. I love that what you just shared
Speaker 1: from Ataschanti Eric about the silence already being here, because
Speaker 1: one of the reasons we wanted to write this book
Speaker 1: is to give people a sense that there is already
Speaker 1: clarity in abundance that's always reachable. You don't have to
Speaker 1: run off to a meditation retreat, you don't have to
Speaker 1: have some fancy teachings or some fancy initiation. It's accessible,
Speaker 1: it's always here. So we look at silence at one level,
Speaker 1: is the absence of noise as this kind of space
Speaker 1: where no one is making claims on the consciousness. And
Speaker 1: we think of noises that which interferes with your perception
Speaker 1: or your intention. So the noise isn't just any at
Speaker 1: all sounded stimulus. The noise is that which is interfering
Speaker 1: with our ability to perceive the world clearly and perceive
Speaker 1: our own intention, perceive what we really want, perceive what's true,
Speaker 1: perceive what's good. And then there's a deeper level though,
Speaker 1: you know, in line with what you were just saying
Speaker 1: about your experience, Eric, you know, silence not just as
Speaker 1: the absence of noise, but silence also as a presence
Speaker 1: unto itself. And this presence isn't something that we can
Speaker 1: readily put into words. It's something subjective. It's something each
Speaker 1: one of us can grasp in our own way. You know,
Speaker 1: this can be a place of not knowing, of letting
Speaker 1: go of accepting that it's okay to not fill the space.
Speaker 1: A friend told us that silence can reset the nervous system.
Speaker 1: One teacher of ours described this presence of silence as
Speaker 1: the essence of everything. But we say in the book
Speaker 1: that this silence is this space where there's nothing signaling
Speaker 1: what needs to be done. The world is so noisy
Speaker 1: because there's all these signals pushing us to movement, pushing
Speaker 1: us to change things, pushing us to to fix things.
Speaker 1: And that can be good. It can be good that
Speaker 1: we have these signals that can be important. But when
Speaker 1: we can encounter silence, we're in this space of pristine
Speaker 1: awareness where there's nothing signaling what needs to be done.
Speaker 1: It's where nothing needs to be done. It's wholeness. I
Speaker 1: think there's just one thing I want to say or
Speaker 1: add to that what justin just said, which was so
Speaker 1: beautifully put, but just speaking to your experience and your
Speaker 1: encounter with silence. When I have had those experiences and
Speaker 1: the deepest silence I've ever known, and we share a
Speaker 1: little bit about our own experiences there. We don't just
Speaker 1: ask people that we actually do answer it ourselves. It
Speaker 1: was one of those encounters when I also noticed that
Speaker 1: silence was there holding me all along and I really
Speaker 1: could cough and this painful psychotic episode I was having postpartum.
Speaker 1: When I met the silence in that moment and felt
Speaker 1: the holding of that presence, it changed me and it
Speaker 1: made it something I can find my way to from
Speaker 1: here on out. So I just wanted to put a
Speaker 1: little rod to that. It's not just like this grade
Speaker 1: encounter this it actually changes us, changed me cellularly when
Speaker 1: I came in contact with silence in that way, And
Speaker 1: that's the silence that we're really speaking to. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we've talked a little bit about what silence is. There's
Speaker 1: actually about fifty different quotes in the book about different
Speaker 1: people talking about silence that I could just go through,
Speaker 1: one after the other after the other because they're so beautiful.
Speaker 1: But I want to keep us moving and I want
Speaker 1: to now talk about noise. And in the book you
Speaker 1: call noise say we can sum it up in two words,
Speaker 1: unwanted distraction, but then you go further to break noise
Speaker 1: down really into three types of noise. Right, there's the
Speaker 1: noise that we all think of. When I think of noise,
Speaker 1: I think of gas powered leafblowers, which I have heard
Speaker 1: have been outlawed in Berkeley. Is that true? It's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'm in Kensington, so I don't benefit from that. Okay,
Speaker 1: Well I've learned to try and treat them as a
Speaker 1: spiritual teacher, um, but they drive me crazy. So there's
Speaker 1: that kind of noise, right. Then you also talk about
Speaker 1: informational noise, which is just this constant more and more
Speaker 1: information that we're all deluded with, and then finally internal noise.
Speaker 1: And so I wonder if maybe we could just talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about those three types of noise for
Speaker 1: a moment, and anything about each of them that you
Speaker 1: feel like would be salient to say, Sure, I can
Speaker 1: get us started on that. You know, we think of
Speaker 1: auditory noise, you know, as you mentioned the noise in
Speaker 1: our ears, informational noise essentially the noise in our screens,
Speaker 1: and internal noise is the noise in our heads. And
Speaker 1: when we set out to write this book, when we
Speaker 1: first had this intuition about the power of silence as
Speaker 1: a resource for being able to solve problems and find inspiration,
Speaker 1: we weren't actually sure that the noise of the world
Speaker 1: was increasing. We had a haunch. I mean it seemed
Speaker 1: fairly obvious to us, but we didn't know empirically if
Speaker 1: that was true, and we set out to answer this question.
Speaker 1: The answer was a resounding yes at all three levels.
Speaker 1: In terms of the auditory noise, the National Park Service
Speaker 1: estimates that noise pollution increases two to threefold every thirty years,
Speaker 1: and there's evidence for urban landscapes of how the noise
Speaker 1: of sirens of emergency vehicle sirens has increased astronomically, the
Speaker 1: decibel levels have increased in order to deal with the
Speaker 1: increasing noise of the surrounding din Across Europe and estimated
Speaker 1: four hundred fifty million people, we found roughly sixty five
Speaker 1: per cent of the population lived with noise levels at
Speaker 1: the World Health Organization says are hazardous to the health.
Speaker 1: And then there's the informational noise. We looked how in
Speaker 1: two thousand ten, Eric Schmidt, when he was the CEO
Speaker 1: of Google, made an estimate that every two days we
Speaker 1: now create as much information as we did from the
Speaker 1: dawn of civilization up until two thousand three, just as
Speaker 1: exponential rise in the amount of content bombarding each and
Speaker 1: every human being we've been responsible for. Like of that
Speaker 1: with the number of podcasts we've released, at least it's
Speaker 1: good content, or at least that's good noise, good noise,
Speaker 1: beautiful noise. So I mean, so that level of the
Speaker 1: content on our screens. I think that one is often
Speaker 1: the most obvious to folks, but one that's often a
Speaker 1: surprise is the third level. And that's this that researchers
Speaker 1: at the University of Michigan found that we now have
Speaker 1: to listen to an estimated three hundred and twenty State
Speaker 1: of the Union addresses worth of inner monologue on any
Speaker 1: given day. There's that much internal noise in our heads. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and as often other guests of the show have pointed out,
Speaker 1: how much of it is habitually repetitive and inane, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's just if it's not outright detrimental, you know,
Speaker 1: if it's not act of that sort of internal critic,
Speaker 1: then a lot of it is just like if I
Speaker 1: had a friend who talked that much, we would have
Speaker 1: not been friends more than like three hours. I would
Speaker 1: have been like, Okay, you're done, buddy, Like this isn't
Speaker 1: gonna work. So how then can we be friends with ourselves?
Speaker 1: That good question. That's what this whole book is about
Speaker 1: is how to be friends with ourselves. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: guess when we really, when we compile all this together,
Speaker 1: this auditory, informational and internal noise that we're taking on
Speaker 1: and in and creating, it's not just that it's irritating.
Speaker 1: It's not just that it's annoying. It's that it's actually
Speaker 1: taking us off track on what we're here to do,
Speaker 1: what we intend, you know, our purpose for being here. Cumulatively,
Speaker 1: the cost is too dear. And we were really just
Speaker 1: and I were in the midst of that, really saturated
Speaker 1: in that noise, and much of it of our own
Speaker 1: making and our own generating as we were trying to
Speaker 1: take on our work being responsible family members, community members
Speaker 1: in all this, and it really just became too much.
Speaker 1: And that seems to be a pretty shared experience. So,
Speaker 1: given we have this much noise, with the exception perhaps
Speaker 1: of the well even the internal, you can't turn it off, right,
Speaker 1: It's just not the way that our physiology is wired up,
Speaker 1: given that there's this much noise, right, And you know,
Speaker 1: if you live in Europe then you're exposed to it.
Speaker 1: If you live in the modern world and you engage
Speaker 1: with it, you've got more information by noon than you
Speaker 1: could process all week. What are some ways that we
Speaker 1: start to work with this skillfully in our lives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we turned to a teacher in the book, really the
Speaker 1: soul of the book, Jarvis j Masters, to ask this
Speaker 1: question because he is in San Quentin on death row.
Speaker 1: I mentioned, he's our friend there who is um on
Speaker 1: death row for the last thirty two years now for
Speaker 1: a crime. The preponderance of evidence shows he didn't commit,
Speaker 1: and we certainly believe that to be true. He's in
Speaker 1: one of the loudest environments imaginable. When we speak with
Speaker 1: him on the phone, it is so echoes. All this
Speaker 1: cement and metal and keys and boots on some all
Speaker 1: it just in hollering day and day out. It is
Speaker 1: impossible to concentrate. And yet in that environment he is
Speaker 1: not just kept his sanity in a pretty insane situation,
Speaker 1: but he's written two books, one of which was just
Speaker 1: picked by Oprah's Book Club, That Bird Has My Wings
Speaker 1: just recently. It's a huge So he's a New York
Speaker 1: Times bestselling author at this point. He's brought equilibrium to
Speaker 1: those around him, including us as friends, you know. So
Speaker 1: he's brought this calm, this quiet and he's kept his
Speaker 1: balance in an impossible situation. So how we asked him,
Speaker 1: how do you do that? Even in that environment? It's
Speaker 1: not just the auditory, of course, it's also the information
Speaker 1: around their cases and appeals and things like that that's
Speaker 1: just always changing and stressful, but also the reverberation of
Speaker 1: fear and of trauma and the internal noise that gets
Speaker 1: kicked up even even for him, as things change, shift
Speaker 1: and change, And how does he calm back down? How
Speaker 1: does he find his balance? Where? How does he find it?
Speaker 1: And it's in the silence. So while he does have
Speaker 1: a deep meditation practice and is an accomplished Tibet and
Speaker 1: Buddhist teacher, he also finds it through his workouts in
Speaker 1: his cell is for by nine cell, through his studies
Speaker 1: of astronomy, through his correspondence, letter writing and writing as well.
Speaker 1: So what he told us is that when he first
Speaker 1: got into prison and realized this is where he was
Speaker 1: going to be for some time, the thought jumped into
Speaker 1: his mind It's like I'm being buried alive. It's like
Speaker 1: I'm being buried alive. And he immediately knew, even as
Speaker 1: a young man, I have to stop that thought. I
Speaker 1: have to interrupt that I can't feed that, and I
Speaker 1: can't respond to it, I will go crazy. So he
Speaker 1: has been practicing on his responses to the noise to
Speaker 1: quiet the noise by quietening his response to the noise,
Speaker 1: because his spear of control was very limited. We do
Speaker 1: point the readers to their sphere of control, what do
Speaker 1: they have power over? And that response is one of
Speaker 1: those places he found even in that environment where do
Speaker 1: we have influence? And he's even got a little bit
Speaker 1: influence with the guys around him in the tier at
Speaker 1: this point, with his reputation as it is like they'll
Speaker 1: protect his writing time. You know, hey, man, Jarvis is
Speaker 1: writing leave him alone and that kind of thing. And
Speaker 1: then that which is out of your sphere of control,
Speaker 1: you let it go. So we start off by talking
Speaker 1: to Jarvis jan Masters and having him point the way,
Speaker 1: who would you add justin you know, this question, what
Speaker 1: can we actually do? We turned to Jarvis because we
Speaker 1: didn't want to write a book about going off to
Speaker 1: a monastery to find silence. We didn't want to write
Speaker 1: a book about going off and running away from society.
Speaker 1: You know, I have two year old twins and a
Speaker 1: six year old and a full plate with work and
Speaker 1: community responsibilities and leaves a teenager and a very full
Speaker 1: work life. And we really wanted to look at what
Speaker 1: it's like to be immersed and sound and stimulus, including
Speaker 1: what could be really debilitating noise. And Jarvis is just
Speaker 1: this like this sherpuff for us in this regard. He
Speaker 1: knows exactly the terrain. He knows the toughest terrain. So
Speaker 1: as a society as a whole, we write in the
Speaker 1: book you know about how we often mistake the feeling
Speaker 1: of stress for aliveness. And it comes back to what
Speaker 1: he was saying before about the wolf we tend to
Speaker 1: feed is that kind of stressed out, contracted state. So
Speaker 1: to this question of what we can actually do to
Speaker 1: get beyond this world of noise that you pose, Deeric,
Speaker 1: the first thing we look to is notice noise, pay
Speaker 1: attention to it. Figure out how you can notice where
Speaker 1: things are noisy, including the signals that noise creates in
Speaker 1: your body, like getting tense and a cleansed jaw, and
Speaker 1: then tune into silence, even if the pockets of silence
Speaker 1: are only a second, five seconds a minute. You know,
Speaker 1: don't focus so much on the quantity of silence. You
Speaker 1: can get in your life, but the quality how deeply
Speaker 1: can you go into each of these pockets of silence?
Speaker 1: And that's a starting point for us. We get a
Speaker 1: lot more specific in the book, but that's the essence
Speaker 1: of it. Hey, everyone, this is Jenny. One of my
Speaker 1: absolute favorite things is when we hear from listeners of
Speaker 1: the show, and something we hear quite often is that
Speaker 1: one of the biggest obstacles to feeding the Good Wolf
Speaker 1: is remembering, because life is busy and we get caught
Speaker 1: up in routines and we're all on autopilots so much
Speaker 1: of the time. So to help with that, we've started
Speaker 1: sending a couple of text messages after each episode is
Speaker 1: released to listeners who sign up for them, and it's
Speaker 1: something we're offering for free. A listener wrote us and said,
Speaker 1: the message has caused me to pause, even if just
Speaker 1: for a moment, and help me to remember important bits
Speaker 1: of wisdom, bringing them to the forefront of my mind.
Speaker 1: Remembering is the hardest part, and the text messages are
Speaker 1: super helpful. So if you'd like to hear from us
Speaker 1: a few times a week via text, go to one
Speaker 1: you feed dot net slash text and sign up for
Speaker 1: free Yeah, there's a lot of similarities in your books
Speaker 1: approach and the approach I've taken in my Spiritual Habits program,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, people who want to deepen
Speaker 1: their spiritual life for I mean, I would just call
Speaker 1: it their inner life, right if you don't like that word.
Speaker 1: And I kind of came to the same place you
Speaker 1: guys did, which is, yeah, you could go to a monastery,
Speaker 1: but that's not what the people who encounter my work
Speaker 1: are going to do. So if you're not going to
Speaker 1: do that, then how do you do this in all
Speaker 1: the moments of your life? How do you bring it
Speaker 1: into moment by moment? How do you weave it into
Speaker 1: your busy day, because that's the type of practice we need,
Speaker 1: right because noise isn't going away. I'm a big believer
Speaker 1: in ear plugs, and I buy industrial great earplugs by
Speaker 1: the giant box full. So there are practical ways to
Speaker 1: deal with it. But broadly speaking, our lives are busy,
Speaker 1: and so I did really appreciate that about your work,
Speaker 1: that it was really about finding these moments, you know,
Speaker 1: I call them still points in the day, right, you
Speaker 1: call them I think pockets of silence, But it's essentially
Speaker 1: the same thing, which is, Okay, I don't have an
Speaker 1: hour to do some practice, but for a minute, can
Speaker 1: I reorient towards what matters, what's important to this presence
Speaker 1: of silence? You know? Is that a way that I
Speaker 1: can re engage. And so I really appreciate that about
Speaker 1: the work, and I do think it's really interesting. I
Speaker 1: think it's why so many of us are drawn to
Speaker 1: people like Jarvis J. Masters or Victor Frankel's work. It's
Speaker 1: because when we see these people who are living the
Speaker 1: extremes and they show us what's possible, it really then,
Speaker 1: at least for me, has a tendency to go, Okay, Eric,
Speaker 1: your excuses for why you can't do this, you need
Speaker 1: to work on that, not that your challenges aren't real.
Speaker 1: It's not to do like comparative suffering and oh I
Speaker 1: don't have any problems, but it does say like, look,
Speaker 1: people have found ways to do this sort of thing
Speaker 1: in really difficult situations. Means that you can find ways
Speaker 1: to do it in your situation. And I think those
Speaker 1: people are always a guiding light for that very reason. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: he is such a guiding light for us. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're so appreciative and we also wanted to avoid this
Speaker 1: being thought of silence being categorized as a luxury, as
Speaker 1: something only some people get. He identifies it as a
Speaker 1: survival mechanism and as his human right to be able
Speaker 1: to find it even in that situation, under his own power,
Speaker 1: And so we can all do that as well too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he said, if I have it right here,
Speaker 1: he talked about I started quieting the noise by quieting
Speaker 1: my responses to the noise. And holy mackerel, is that
Speaker 1: right on point. It's me and the leaf blower, right, Like,
Speaker 1: part of the noise is the leafblower, but a huge
Speaker 1: part of the noise is my reaction to that leaf blower.
Speaker 1: This shouldn't be happening. What's the matter? I mean, all
Speaker 1: that that is a whole another level of noise. And
Speaker 1: I can't make the leaf blower go away, but I
Speaker 1: can work skillfully with all that other noise. And I
Speaker 1: just thought that was such a great summer. I started
Speaker 1: quieting the noise by quieting my responses to the noise.
Speaker 1: You know one thing that's so beautiful about that? Eric?
Speaker 1: Is it for us revealed this interplay between external noise
Speaker 1: and internal noise it's often the internal noise are responses
Speaker 1: to what's going on around us that produced the most suffering.
Speaker 1: And one thing about Jarvis, you know, being on death
Speaker 1: row for a crime he didn't commit. This guy shows
Speaker 1: us what it means to be able to receive a
Speaker 1: teaching out of a difficult situation. It's not to make
Speaker 1: light of any the difficulty he goes through, but to
Speaker 1: give you an example. When COVID first hit, one of
Speaker 1: his blockmates was the first person in San Quentin to die.
Speaker 1: Many people died, many people suffered a lot, and he
Speaker 1: was one of the first people to get COVID, and
Speaker 1: in that moment he was given an experimental treatment. He
Speaker 1: described to us, they handed him a bottle of pills
Speaker 1: and he was reading all of these side effects on
Speaker 1: the bottle of pills, and he was freaking out, bad headaches,
Speaker 1: difficulty breathing, really going through it. And then in that
Speaker 1: moment of suffering, he just heard an intuition. There was
Speaker 1: a voice in his head that said, this isn't about
Speaker 1: you right now, This isn't about you right now, and
Speaker 1: it just stopped him cold. And he said that that
Speaker 1: moment was the quietest he's ever been and for us,
Speaker 1: it was like he brought this teaching about how if
Speaker 1: we really want to get to profound quiet, there's this
Speaker 1: moral dimension to it. It's getting beyond fixation on the self.
Speaker 1: Like when we talk about that internal noise, the internal
Speaker 1: noise that the noisiest are the thoughts within the self
Speaker 1: about the self. You know, we're caught grasping for our
Speaker 1: own position or performing to how we look to the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's beautiful, Lee, Well just that made me wonder. I
Speaker 1: would love to know. And you don't have to do
Speaker 1: it right on the spot here, but Eric is such
Speaker 1: a thoughtful person. I am very curious about the deepest
Speaker 1: silence you've ever known. I think it was listing audio
Speaker 1: Shanti is getting tiresome for this episode. I hate to
Speaker 1: be a one trick pony. But it was on a
Speaker 1: retreat and I had sort of the classicalistical experience where
Speaker 1: everything fell away and I felt completely connected to everything.
Speaker 1: It was the real deal we talked about, and the
Speaker 1: word I would use is the deepest piece I have
Speaker 1: ever felt. But I think there was a deep silence too.
Speaker 1: There was a deep, deep silence. It wasn't that everything
Speaker 1: went quiet, although everything kind of was quiet because we
Speaker 1: were on a silent retreat, but it was pretty quiet.
Speaker 1: But all that internal noise that we're talking about, that
Speaker 1: was just gone, you know, in the most profound way
Speaker 1: I've ever heard it. It's not that my brain was silent,
Speaker 1: It's just that the internal talking to myself out of
Speaker 1: quality to me. And they're somewhere in the book that
Speaker 1: you talk about that the goal of a quiet mind
Speaker 1: is not that we will get rid of all thoughts,
Speaker 1: because that would be to be dead. But the quiet
Speaker 1: mind is when the mind stops talking to itself about itself, right,
Speaker 1: And that was profoundly what happened. That faculty just went offline,
Speaker 1: and so the result was a truly deep, deep silence.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and I love silent retreats for that reason.
Speaker 1: I love the quiet. Some people like I would be
Speaker 1: so hard. I'm like, sitting in meditating twelve hours a day,
Speaker 1: that can be hard. But for me, the silence is
Speaker 1: not hard. It's just glorious. Yeah. I think it's important
Speaker 1: to say when we can get away and have those big, profound,
Speaker 1: rapturistic silence experiences, whether that's on a meditation retreat or
Speaker 1: out deep nature or the use of mind expanding plant
Speaker 1: medicines or anthogens, however, are route or flow states things
Speaker 1: like that. However, our route just to have those deeper
Speaker 1: moments is important as well as finding those tiny micro moments,
Speaker 1: or that what we call in the book the healthy
Speaker 1: successor to the smoke break, because that's what helps teach us, Ah,
Speaker 1: this is the space. Now, let's bring it home, let's
Speaker 1: bring it back. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I remember the
Speaker 1: first time I went on silent retreat and when it ended,
Speaker 1: I was like, what is happening? All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: everybody started talking, and I just was like, I just
Speaker 1: wanted to run and hide. So my point with that is,
Speaker 1: even if you get these very special moments where you
Speaker 1: go away and it does douce, I mean, it's done
Speaker 1: some very profound things to me, there's still the moment
Speaker 1: to moment managing of it. We don't get out of that, right,
Speaker 1: we don't get out of still having to, moment by
Speaker 1: moment manage noise and seek silence in our day to
Speaker 1: day lives. I love how you describe that. Erica's peace
Speaker 1: his piece is a really beautiful word for what we mean.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes people just glancing at this book quickly,
Speaker 1: they might misunderstand what we mean by silence, because the
Speaker 1: word silence can be a little bit loaded sometimes. I
Speaker 1: mean sometimes it could mean censorship. Sometimes it could mean
Speaker 1: self censorship, mean a kind of oppression, and it could
Speaker 1: mean a kind of forced stillness, forced in the sense
Speaker 1: of artificial. The physicists and neuroscientists and psychologists and doctors
Speaker 1: today are describing how really nothing in the body, nothing
Speaker 1: in our whole universe is really completely still. As you
Speaker 1: were describing before, a mind that is totally without thought,
Speaker 1: without sound and stimulus is in a word, dead. But
Speaker 1: peace is a good word for what we mean by silence,
Speaker 1: because we're talking about this pristine attention, this pristine presence
Speaker 1: which is inherently alive, and the word piece and the
Speaker 1: experience you're describing, I think captures that really. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe let's take a minute and have one of you
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about that idea of silence, the
Speaker 1: bad kind of silence. There have been various movements that
Speaker 1: talk about breaking the silence, right, because silence around, say,
Speaker 1: domestic abuse, is not good silence, right, So silence can
Speaker 1: be a tool of the oppressure, right, So you know,
Speaker 1: just make that distinct for us a little bit clearer.
Speaker 1: You know, we look at a kind of silence that
Speaker 1: is the refusal to speak and act in the face
Speaker 1: of injustice, and we not only acknowledge but honor that
Speaker 1: that is truly wrong. This idea of silence as complicity,
Speaker 1: silence as complacency, even silence as violence, like we honor
Speaker 1: that idea. But we look in the book and we
Speaker 1: this is a result of our own contemplation that silence
Speaker 1: of close lipped complacency like that isn't silence in the
Speaker 1: truest sense, because the refusal to see what's happening in
Speaker 1: the world, to perceive, to address what's wrong, that is
Speaker 1: the polar opposite of what we mean by this kind
Speaker 1: of state of pristine attention. That's the polar opposite of
Speaker 1: clear perception and intention. And when we're really open our
Speaker 1: eyes and our hearts were really open to it's going on,
Speaker 1: we're not going to be just satisfied to look elsewhere.
Speaker 1: We're going to take skillful action. So we look in
Speaker 1: the book about how you know, there's this idea of
Speaker 1: silence as violence, but there's also the fact that it's
Speaker 1: a noisy world that's enabling injustice, Like if everyone's just
Speaker 1: obsessed with the noise of what's happening with Instagram likes
Speaker 1: and reality TV stars and you know, socially unproductive profit
Speaker 1: seeking in which way the noise of the market might
Speaker 1: be in any one short term measure. It's like, how
Speaker 1: are we going to have the attentional space that's necessary
Speaker 1: to perceive what's really helpful for the world, but even
Speaker 1: more importantly to feel another person suffering or to feel
Speaker 1: what's happening in nature. So we need silence in this
Speaker 1: sense of pristine attention in order to do good in
Speaker 1: the world. Yeah, we need that silence for that place
Speaker 1: a discernment of the best path forward and to really
Speaker 1: a two with what is true and what is needing
Speaker 1: our attention. And it was really the work of Gandhi
Speaker 1: that taught us that when we started digging around this
Speaker 1: whole area. In fact, we just thought we would maybe
Speaker 1: briefly mentioned, oh, and then there's this other type of silence,
Speaker 1: but we're not talking about that silence, and we're talking
Speaker 1: about this silence. And we kept trying to put it,
Speaker 1: maybe wrap it up in a few paragraphs, and it
Speaker 1: just wasn't happening. It wasn't. It was just kind of
Speaker 1: roaring back, And we're so glad it did, because then
Speaker 1: it brought us into this relationship with silence as the
Speaker 1: work of justice. And really that's what's going to help
Speaker 1: our path forward from here is just working with that
Speaker 1: silence as that place to discern what is the right
Speaker 1: path forward, what is true here. So Gandhi took every
Speaker 1: Monday in silence, even in the midst of the most
Speaker 1: intense work he was doing for Indian independence. He would say,
Speaker 1: I am not speaking on Mondays. And he would take
Speaker 1: meetings still, he would go to conferences still, but he
Speaker 1: wouldn't say a word. And his colleagues would say that
Speaker 1: on Tuesday, when he'd come out, be ready to speak,
Speaker 1: he would speak just words would pour forth in this
Speaker 1: rapturous flow without notes, with such eloquence that it was remarkable.
Speaker 1: Right this Monday was obviously doing wonderful things for him
Speaker 1: to attune to silence, And he said, a seeker of
Speaker 1: truth has to be silent. So we take that in
Speaker 1: other lessons. The Quakers, for example, will practice silence together,
Speaker 1: which by that we haven't touched on shared silence. But
Speaker 1: silence is magnified when it's shared, and so together they're
Speaker 1: tuning into what is true, what is the word that
Speaker 1: needs to be spoken, what is worthy of breaking the silence?
Speaker 1: You know, and even in conflict, when things get difficult
Speaker 1: in a meeting, the clerk would call for silence. That's
Speaker 1: the person running the meeting, just kind of paying attention
Speaker 1: to the situation, the dynamics and the meeting. If it
Speaker 1: starts to feel a little polarized or rigid, the clerical
Speaker 1: call for a moment of silence and income silence and
Speaker 1: there's a soft finding of this positionality right, an ability
Speaker 1: to attuned why is it important that we resolve this
Speaker 1: without blame perhaps or without being rigid, and incomes an
Speaker 1: answer that is better than where they started for sure.
Speaker 1: And the gentleman we spoke with, Rob Livinkop, he's a
Speaker 1: birthright Quaker, he said, inevitably someone will say the thing
Speaker 1: I was thinking, but even better, and then they can
Speaker 1: continue on to their problem solving to be in that place.
Speaker 1: As the Quakers the speaking truth to power, they're the
Speaker 1: ones who coined that term, and you know, they're the
Speaker 1: ones using silence and they are also speaking truth to power.
Speaker 1: So that got really interesting for us as a whole
Speaker 1: place to consider and think about silence. Yeah, you've got
Speaker 1: some great stories in the book about Tick not Han, Martin,
Speaker 1: Luther King, and Thomas Merton, and so we're not gonna
Speaker 1: have time to go into all those but all those people,
Speaker 1: you know, I've just often reflected on when we look
Speaker 1: at some of the people we most admire from an
Speaker 1: activist perspective, they were people that sought some degree of silence,
Speaker 1: of time away, of reflection. You know, they really balanced
Speaker 1: contemplation and action really really well, like they knew how
Speaker 1: to do that. You know, as you were talking about
Speaker 1: the silence of somebody who's oppressed, it made me think
Speaker 1: of something from my own life, which is very minor
Speaker 1: in comparison. I want to be careful that I'm not
Speaker 1: saying this is I'm not comparing my oppression. But there
Speaker 1: have been times in my life where I silently don't
Speaker 1: say what I need to say in a relationship or
Speaker 1: a situation, because what I would say is I want
Speaker 1: to keep the peace. There are two deep insights I
Speaker 1: had about that. One was it doesn't work. It simply
Speaker 1: doesn't work. But secondly was in the moment where there's
Speaker 1: no active conflict, what has happened is all the conflict
Speaker 1: has gone inside. My internal noise is now at eleven. Right,
Speaker 1: So I've stopped the external noise of you and I
Speaker 1: having a loud conversation, but my internal noise is way
Speaker 1: way up. And so you know, I just sort of
Speaker 1: noticed that. That was a real insight for me. Oh
Speaker 1: that's so good. I was transferring the conflict all internally.
Speaker 1: You can't resolve conflict between two people inside one of them, like,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work that way. Now again, I think it's
Speaker 1: always a good idea to pause, cool down, take a moment,
Speaker 1: collect yourself. But this perpetual I just won't say anything
Speaker 1: to keep the peace. That was my insight. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: such a good one. And just to notice where the
Speaker 1: noise goes. Okay, if the noise was in the relationship,
Speaker 1: but then you shift, you know, and don't say anything.
Speaker 1: Now where's the noise. Just to notice that and go
Speaker 1: from there. That's that's helpful to me. Eric, Thank you.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you said something about me too, Me too, her.
Speaker 1: And then that gets to like a big reason for
Speaker 1: this understanding of the external noise and the internal noise,
Speaker 1: because if a person is quiet when they to speak up,
Speaker 1: and there's that internal noise that that elevates, that's going
Speaker 1: to be felt in the field. I mean even people
Speaker 1: who aren't super intuitive necessarily people, whether they consciously recognize
Speaker 1: it or not, they can feel that. Maybe we could
Speaker 1: take a minute and talk a little bit about informational noise,
Speaker 1: and we could talk about some strategies for dealing with
Speaker 1: informational noise, because as you mentioned, I mean, the numbers
Speaker 1: on how much new content is created every minute. It
Speaker 1: just every time I read it, it's more than it
Speaker 1: was time and it was mind blowing ten years ago,
Speaker 1: and now it's just preposterous. What do we do with
Speaker 1: all this information on noise? How do we turn that
Speaker 1: down in a way for ourselves. There's one little piece
Speaker 1: I want to share before we look at the strategies,
Speaker 1: and that is just to know this, not only is
Speaker 1: that information on the rise, but our ability to process
Speaker 1: that information has not increased. So our attentional capacities are
Speaker 1: maxed and we need them, right, We need them to
Speaker 1: take note of what's grabbing for our attention and bottom up,
Speaker 1: those are the things, just like someone says Lee, So
Speaker 1: you know, Eric, you know that's the bottom up attention
Speaker 1: grabbing or a top down what we're focusing on. So
Speaker 1: we have two types of attentional things going on at once.
Speaker 1: The things grabbing for our attention pinging, Hey you've got
Speaker 1: a new blah blah blah whatever. This little notifications are
Speaker 1: way way way up. There's nothing more precious than our attention.
Speaker 1: Where we put our attention. We only have so much
Speaker 1: to go around. There are eleven million bits of information
Speaker 1: coming for our attention at any moment. Our attentional networks
Speaker 1: sift through that to that gathered bits get sifted through,
Speaker 1: and now even more things of less quality, we would argue,
Speaker 1: are coming for our attention. So where is our attention
Speaker 1: not happening what we found? It's like not happening on ourselves,
Speaker 1: maybe on our health, with our family, the relationships that need,
Speaker 1: you know, the tasks were doing the deep work we're
Speaker 1: trying to get done. So I just want to put
Speaker 1: that perspective on there in terms of why it's really important.
Speaker 1: It's not just the information and our attention grabbing things
Speaker 1: are going up. It's just that our attention isn't getting
Speaker 1: any bigger, better, vaster. It's a scarce resource. So where
Speaker 1: we put it matters what Lee just said. They're about
Speaker 1: our capacity to discern from the signal from the noise,
Speaker 1: and to be able to really incorporate all this information
Speaker 1: is such an important part of this at the individual level,
Speaker 1: and then there's also the macro level, all the societal level.
Speaker 1: And at the societal level, we look in the book
Speaker 1: that that noises our most celebrated addiction. So it's your question, Eric,
Speaker 1: about how we get beyond the informational noise. A big
Speaker 1: part of it is whether we perceive noise to be
Speaker 1: part of the problem, or that if the noises progress,
Speaker 1: And again going back to this idea of the one
Speaker 1: we feed, you know as contraction, the one in our
Speaker 1: society we tend to feed the maximum possible proliferation of
Speaker 1: sound and stimulus. And we explore in the book how
Speaker 1: we measure progress as a society, often not just by
Speaker 1: how much industrial stuff we're creating, but also how much
Speaker 1: mental stuff we're creating. The way we measure GDP. For example,
Speaker 1: if you take a forest and you chop down all
Speaker 1: the wood sell it for lumber at home depot, that
Speaker 1: counts as a plus according to GDP. But if you
Speaker 1: keep the forest intact as a pristine natural environment that
Speaker 1: doesn't count as progress and into GDP, which is our
Speaker 1: foremost indicator of progress as a society. And you can
Speaker 1: say the same thing about human attention. If we keep
Speaker 1: our human attention intact, admire and great arts, spending time
Speaker 1: in nature, rolling around on the floor, being silly with
Speaker 1: our kids, that generally doesn't count as any positive for GDP.
Speaker 1: But if we take our attention, we chop it up
Speaker 1: and turn it into eyeballs on a Facebook page that
Speaker 1: generates advertising revenue, then that's a plus for GDP. So
Speaker 1: I think at the macro level, one answer to your
Speaker 1: question is how do we measure progress? What do we
Speaker 1: deem to be positive and productive in our culture, in
Speaker 1: our economy, in our society. So it starts with changing
Speaker 1: some of those norms, just as it starts with, you know, recognizing,
Speaker 1: as Lee was saying, our attentional capacities aren't going to
Speaker 1: grow all that much. Yeah, I mean, it's a real problem.
Speaker 1: And I joked earlier about us contributing to the always
Speaker 1: out there. Obviously it's it's a very small percentage, but
Speaker 1: I do at times go, well, you know, I put
Speaker 1: out two of these a week, like that's a lot, right,
Speaker 1: And so in my own life, I've had to really
Speaker 1: work with how to balance consuming information and content and
Speaker 1: then application and deepening. And the best example I found
Speaker 1: in my life recently is there was a period of
Speaker 1: time I was studying very deeply with a Zen teacher,
Speaker 1: and you know, I read at least one book a
Speaker 1: week for this podcast sometimes too. So I am just
Speaker 1: moving right, and I've been doing it for eight years.
Speaker 1: It's just coming in right. But then I started working
Speaker 1: with this Zen teacher and I specifically went, you know what,
Speaker 1: I need to pick a path that I stay on
Speaker 1: because the nature of my work fragments me if I don't.
Speaker 1: And so all of a sudden I started reading. You know,
Speaker 1: he'd give me a book, you know, like as part
Speaker 1: of our work together, why don't you read this book?
Speaker 1: And I started reading it in a completely different way.
Speaker 1: I might read the same hundred sixty page book for
Speaker 1: six months, because that's how it actually changed me, you know,
Speaker 1: that's how it happened. If I read seven books in
Speaker 1: six months or seventy books in six months, I think
Speaker 1: the change that would happen to me is often less
Speaker 1: than one book for that long, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: sort of the foundation of so much of what you
Speaker 1: guys talk about feeds into what goes on in the
Speaker 1: Spiritual Habits program. Is the idea was pick some core
Speaker 1: principles and keep coming back to them again and again
Speaker 1: and again. It's not about more information, it's not about
Speaker 1: learning something else. You know everything you need to know
Speaker 1: in that realm. I'm not saying we don't need to
Speaker 1: learn other things, but I have found for me in
Speaker 1: my own personal development, I have to slow the flow
Speaker 1: of information way down. And I've learned to recognize that
Speaker 1: I like to consume things like listening to podcasts like
Speaker 1: this and doing that because they call me, they soothed me,
Speaker 1: they entertain me, right, they're they're really helpful. But I
Speaker 1: have to have another lane too that is much more
Speaker 1: slow and deliberative. This is so perfect because so much
Speaker 1: of this is really about getting onto ourselves, like I'm
Speaker 1: onto me, I'm onto me in my habits like I
Speaker 1: get it. So so in this book, we don't make
Speaker 1: a really prescriptive case here. You know, don't do podcast.
Speaker 1: You know that would be sad if we don't do podcast,
Speaker 1: don't read too much. You know, it's not about that
Speaker 1: it's really tuning in with when are you in that
Speaker 1: kind of maybe it feels in my in my mind,
Speaker 1: did my body? It feels kind of grasping. I just
Speaker 1: I didn't. I don't feel like there's enough. I need
Speaker 1: more information or I've got some downtime and I'm going
Speaker 1: to stuff something more in. I start to feel agitated.
Speaker 1: I start to feel a tightness in my diaphragm. There
Speaker 1: is like a graspy, greedy kind of monster that gets
Speaker 1: unleashed in there. And that's when I know, Okay, we've
Speaker 1: gone too far. That's on the spectrum in this way. Now.
Speaker 1: It's not that podcasts are not my thing. Is sometimes
Speaker 1: they do really such deep quiet. I remember one just
Speaker 1: like gardening and listening and just falling into a story
Speaker 1: of someone's story. It's beautiful. So what truly brings us
Speaker 1: quiet and what really is our noise? And it might
Speaker 1: surprise us those things that are really quietening to us.
Speaker 1: So we talked to a professor by behavioral health and medicine,
Speaker 1: Joshua Smythe, who told us about a guy in one
Speaker 1: of his studies who carves with the chain. Saw these
Speaker 1: big hunks of wood and that's his quiet place, right,
Speaker 1: and for others in this podcasts and things and sometimes
Speaker 1: it's things in nature. I teach dance in a really
Speaker 1: loud studio, so auditorially loud, but Christine quiet on the inside.
Speaker 1: So really for us to be really feeling into what
Speaker 1: truly brings us quiet and what at a certain point
Speaker 1: tells us, what signals at a certain point tell us
Speaker 1: we're actually veering into noise and you know, not giving
Speaker 1: us us the space to actually digest these things that
Speaker 1: we're taking in. Yeah, that's the practice. That's the practice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've learned. This is a new thing for me, but
Speaker 1: we all know that feeling of just sort of like
Speaker 1: checking the phone again and again and again right for
Speaker 1: nothing right, and it does it as this rush contracted
Speaker 1: quality to it, and nobody's perfect at this. I've gotten
Speaker 1: better at recognizing, oh, it's happening, and then saying to myself,
Speaker 1: what you're looking for is not on this device, instead
Speaker 1: of continuing to look in the place that it's just
Speaker 1: simply not going to come from. It hasn't. Just to
Speaker 1: recognize whatever you need is not here. It is a
Speaker 1: really profound way for me to then go, Okay, where
Speaker 1: might it be right. Our friend Joshry, who's a podcast,
Speaker 1: really cool podcast called The Emerald that applying mythology to
Speaker 1: the modern world, says that all human beings want light,
Speaker 1: need light, need the light of the sun, needs spiritual light,
Speaker 1: and we're attracted to this blue light of our phones
Speaker 1: as we're seeking illumination in our consciousness, you know. And
Speaker 1: we were talking Eric with the neuroscientist psychologist duo Adam
Speaker 1: Gazzali and Larry Rosen, and they were explaining they found
Speaker 1: in their research. One thing they really focus on is
Speaker 1: how human beings are driven for what they call information rewards,
Speaker 1: more content, more news, in very much the same way
Speaker 1: that many other animals seek food and juice rewards in
Speaker 1: a forest, even though for us it's not critical for
Speaker 1: our survival. So sometimes when that you know, news alert
Speaker 1: comes up on our phone or Twitter notification, we react
Speaker 1: in the same way that one of our ancestors might
Speaker 1: have been, you know, picking a ripe and BlackBerry forging
Speaker 1: in the forest. It's really not the same level of
Speaker 1: of necessity. Yeah. Well, you talked in the very beginning
Speaker 1: about dopamine, right, And there's a book that I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's out yet. I think it comes out
Speaker 1: at the end of the year. I think you guys
Speaker 1: would really like it. It's a guy named Chris Bailey,
Speaker 1: and it's called how to Calm Your Mind, Finding Presence
Speaker 1: and Productivity and Anxious Times. And I didn't think, even
Speaker 1: though I've had him on he's a great writer, I
Speaker 1: didn't think like I just the title didn't really grab me.
Speaker 1: I thought I was going to be talking about meditation,
Speaker 1: and but he didn't. And he helped me see, really explained, well,
Speaker 1: this dopamine aspect that is driving us, you know, in
Speaker 1: the same way that it's dopamine that seeks a chimp
Speaker 1: in the forest to go get the berry. Right, I'm
Speaker 1: vastly oversimplifying, but that's what it's doing. And you know,
Speaker 1: dopamine's role is not to satisfy, it's to drive behavior.
Speaker 1: And we live in a completely dopamine infused culture. We
Speaker 1: are way over saturated in and I love justin that
Speaker 1: that's kind of where you started us. Yeah. Absolutely, I
Speaker 1: was just thinking, we know we're up against these big
Speaker 1: systems like the GDP, the way we measure success. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not just that we're failing at something here. You know,
Speaker 1: those of your struggling with noise and silence. It's it's
Speaker 1: a huge system that's pushing towards the commodification of our attention.
Speaker 1: For example, these systems are also tapping and exploiting our
Speaker 1: evolutionary ways, you know, our dopamine ways. That's about evolution
Speaker 1: and how it's been working. So it's not just that
Speaker 1: we're personally failing or falling short here. And yet there's
Speaker 1: still are strategies and ways that we can find our
Speaker 1: way through this and find our way to quiet through
Speaker 1: little practices and bigger still, and we can get into
Speaker 1: those that we have a little time left. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna start to pivot us towards wrapping up, but we'll
Speaker 1: do a little of that. Maybe we could just have
Speaker 1: you guys each share maybe your favorite practice at the
Speaker 1: end of the book you have I think it's thirty
Speaker 1: three ways to find silence, to have the number right,
Speaker 1: Maybe share one or two of your favorites. From there,
Speaker 1: we can use that as a way to kind of
Speaker 1: wrap up here, just to kick yourself. You're I would
Speaker 1: say that the core kind of common thread that runs
Speaker 1: through many of these is a Japanese aesthetic principle called
Speaker 1: ma and MA is appreciation for the empty space, appreciation
Speaker 1: for silence, for the space in between words exchanged among
Speaker 1: conversation among friends, for the in between intervals and music notes,
Speaker 1: and even for the space in between the flowers in
Speaker 1: ikibana flower arranging and the Kanji Japanese character mob means
Speaker 1: golden light pouring forth through the slats in a temple gate.
Speaker 1: So so one one definition of MA is pure potentiality.
Speaker 1: We have many practices in this book that are built
Speaker 1: around MA. How to find momentary math through your day
Speaker 1: when you finish a task taking a moment, yeah, perhaps
Speaker 1: for a deep breath, but really to just be in
Speaker 1: silence and listen to the silence for a moment, Or
Speaker 1: when you go between rooms and turn a doorknob, taking
Speaker 1: just a moment to appreciate MA. Or where you get
Speaker 1: a glass of water and turn on the tap, appreciating
Speaker 1: just a moment of MA. And we talk about how
Speaker 1: we can bring MA on the job in brainstorming sessions,
Speaker 1: for example, into dispersing periods with deep silence, and we
Speaker 1: look ultimately in the in these practices. You mentioned the
Speaker 1: thirty three practices. What would mean like for mod to
Speaker 1: go to Washington if we actually appreciated the value of
Speaker 1: this purited potentiality of empty space and honoring people's quiet
Speaker 1: attention as a priority for public policy, particularly as we
Speaker 1: think about the attention economy. So that's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a teaser and an overview of what we get into.
Speaker 1: What would you add, Lee, Well, you know, one of
Speaker 1: my favorite things is really the silence I find in dance,
Speaker 1: So to point people towards the flow states and movement things,
Speaker 1: and just to not just think about those merely as exercise,
Speaker 1: right or merely as a little hobby, but to really
Speaker 1: honor them for the silence they bring in our lives.
Speaker 1: So what cheeks set me hi and hi cheeks set
Speaker 1: me hi. The Hungarian American psychologists points us towards us
Speaker 1: that in those states, all of our attentional capacity is
Speaker 1: needed to focus on this place of skill and mastery. Right,
Speaker 1: is so sweets lot where all of our attentional networks
Speaker 1: are needed, and what falls away is that self reflective thought,
Speaker 1: and that ends up being a very delightful experience for us.
Speaker 1: It's a quiet new experience for us in addition to
Speaker 1: being probably something we love, you know, maybe with others
Speaker 1: or in nature or any of those things. So I
Speaker 1: just want to give a shout out to that silence
Speaker 1: and motion, those flow states things you may already do,
Speaker 1: just to honor it all the more for the silence
Speaker 1: it brings to your life. Yeah, guitar playe is a
Speaker 1: strangely silent activity, right, I mean when I'm really doing it, Yes,
Speaker 1: of course your sound coming into the environment, but that
Speaker 1: internal chatter gone, you know, so it speaks to that.
Speaker 1: And I have to give you guys a special call
Speaker 1: out because Cheek set Me High has been mentioned on
Speaker 1: our show. He may be the most mentioned human, but
Speaker 1: nobody has ever had the decency to put how to
Speaker 1: pronounce it in the book so up till now, I've
Speaker 1: just never tried. I have never tried until this very
Speaker 1: moment just there, and I may not have had it right,
Speaker 1: but Cheeks sent me High is in the neighborhood. And
Speaker 1: that is thanks to you guys and your kindness of pronunciation.
Speaker 1: I'm so grateful. That was all me. Okay, I spelt
Speaker 1: strongly about that. I've heard his name said so many ways,
Speaker 1: and he's, you know, a genius. He's a genius, So
Speaker 1: let's say his name right. Yeah, you look at how
Speaker 1: it's written, and I literally have been like, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to attempt that. I hear people say it and
Speaker 1: I read it and I'm like, that doesn't make any
Speaker 1: sense to me. So well, justin Lee, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for coming on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I
Speaker 1: really did enjoy the book again. It's called Golden The
Speaker 1: Power of Silence in a World of Noise. While of
Speaker 1: links in the show notes to where people can find
Speaker 1: the book, where they can find you. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: It's so nice to hear. How will our work works together?
Speaker 1: Thank you, Eric. I love the conversation and thanks for
Speaker 1: all you do. If what you just heard was helpful
Speaker 1: to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support
Speaker 1: the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community.
Speaker 1: With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members
Speaker 1: only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for
Speaker 1: your support. Now. We are so grateful for the members
Speaker 1: of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what
Speaker 1: we do without their support, and we don't take a
Speaker 1: single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation
Speaker 1: at any level and become a member of the one
Speaker 1: You Feed community. Go to when You Feed dot net
Speaker 1: slash Join The One You Feed podcast would like to
Speaker 1: sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.