Speaker 1: So we don't separate and say there's these good feelings
Speaker 1: and good emotions and bad things and bad emotions. Our
Speaker 1: job is to just wash out the dirt and only
Speaker 1: focus on the good stuff. It actually includes every part
Speaker 1: of life, even the most difficult stuff. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the
Speaker 1: importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
Speaker 1: And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: 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 pot cast is
Speaker 1: about 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 guest on this episode is Michael Taft, a meditation teacher,
Speaker 1: best selling author of books such as The Mindful Geek
Speaker 1: and Non Dualism, as well as the host of the
Speaker 1: Great Podcast Deconstructing Yourself. Hi Michael, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks Eric, I'm really glad to be here. I am
Speaker 1: happy to have you on. We're not talking about a
Speaker 1: particular book or anything. We talked about your book The
Speaker 1: Mindful Geek years ago. I'm just a big fan of
Speaker 1: your Deconstructing Yourself podcast, your guided meditations, just a lot
Speaker 1: of different things you do. So I'm really excited to
Speaker 1: dive into all that. But before we do, we'll start
Speaker 1: like we always do, with the parable. In the parable,
Speaker 1: there's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she
Speaker 1: thinks about it for a second, and she looks up
Speaker 1: at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins?
Speaker 1: And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 1: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do. This is the second time i'm answering
Speaker 1: this question, I can't remember what I said the first time,
Speaker 1: and I feel like what instantly comes up is I
Speaker 1: want to make the joke about it's all wolves all
Speaker 1: the way down, which I'm sure you've heard at this point.
Speaker 1: I think I've seen a cartoon to that effect. But yeah,
Speaker 1: what's really actually arising here because this joke I heard
Speaker 1: based on that parable, which is and inside each wolf
Speaker 1: are two wolf. Inside each of those wolves are two
Speaker 1: more wolves. It's just wolves all the way down. And
Speaker 1: as a big wolf lover, I really like that joke.
Speaker 1: So that's that's my flip it response. But in the
Speaker 1: spirit that you're actually asking the question, and in the
Speaker 1: spirit of the wolves all the way down, I'll just say,
Speaker 1: of course, what we point our mind at is what
Speaker 1: we experience. Where we put our energy is what our
Speaker 1: life becomes, and whether you know it's split into a
Speaker 1: good wolf or a bad wolf, or maybe some kind
Speaker 1: of mixture of both or something much more complex than that.
Speaker 1: Wherever we point our attention is what our life becomes.
Speaker 1: And so you really do have to be very careful about,
Speaker 1: you know, what seemed to be your default settings and
Speaker 1: examining your default settings and really deciding whether you want
Speaker 1: that to be your default setting, and if you don't,
Speaker 1: figuring out how to you know, change that to make
Speaker 1: the outcome real life a little bit more along the
Speaker 1: lines that you'd like it to be. I mean, in
Speaker 1: a way that's kind of obvious, right, but that's what
Speaker 1: comes up, right. You kind of have to contort it
Speaker 1: a little bit to take it to the non obvious places, right,
Speaker 1: because it is kind of like that's why it's a parable.
Speaker 1: You hear it, You're like, oh, I know what that
Speaker 1: means obvious. I wanted to start off by talking about
Speaker 1: the title of your podcast in blog, which is called
Speaker 1: Deconstructing Yourself. Why is that the title that you've chosen
Speaker 1: for your main body of work at this point? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes it sound so intentional. It really wasn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, back in so ten years ago, at this point,
Speaker 1: I just felt like writing a blog that I imagined
Speaker 1: hardly anyone would ever see at that point about like
Speaker 1: Shenzhen style mindfulness meditation and I had I just was
Speaker 1: very intrigued by the way that we can use that
Speaker 1: sort of mindfulness meditation to deconstruct the ego as if
Speaker 1: it were a car engine, like taking it apart bit
Speaker 1: by bit by bit in that methodology. And the phrase
Speaker 1: deconstructing yourself just a rose, you know. I just thought
Speaker 1: of that, and I was reminded of the movie called
Speaker 1: Deconstructing Harry, and I thought that's a fun name for
Speaker 1: a blog, deconstructing yourself, and so I just threw it
Speaker 1: on there in the most flippant manner. And now it's
Speaker 1: become you know, it's an LLC and it's a podcast,
Speaker 1: and it's a blog and it's all this stuff, and well,
Speaker 1: I do like that day, you know, and it does
Speaker 1: represent a core of what I'm talking about even now,
Speaker 1: although now I think I would call it something more
Speaker 1: like deconstructing and reconstructing or maybe deconstructing yourself and the
Speaker 1: world or so. I don't know, but but none of
Speaker 1: those are his catchy. Yes, deconstructing yourself worked. I've listened
Speaker 1: to you on a few different things over the years
Speaker 1: and recently, and you were actually just very recently on
Speaker 1: a podcast with Rick and Forest Hanson. We just actually
Speaker 1: interviewed those guys last week, ourselves, really enjoyable guys. But
Speaker 1: you said something on there that I really wanted to
Speaker 1: hop into because you said, if we want to engage
Speaker 1: with others the world, etcetera, etcetera, we begin to notice
Speaker 1: the main thing in our way is a tangle of concepts.
Speaker 1: And then you say, and that tangle of concepts is
Speaker 1: attached to another tangle of reactive emotion. And I feel
Speaker 1: like that is such a great way of describing what
Speaker 1: the minds of most of us, when they're left to
Speaker 1: their own devices, tend to do. A tangle of concepts
Speaker 1: that's tangled up with the tangle of emotional reactions. I
Speaker 1: just thought that was a great analogy in a way.
Speaker 1: I don't think we can get out of that, or
Speaker 1: to put another way, you know, you always are going
Speaker 1: to have concepts and emotions arising. So the idea isn't somehow, oh,
Speaker 1: I want to erase all concepts and erase all emotions.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe that can happen for one minute in
Speaker 1: meditation on the cushion with your eyes closed or something.
Speaker 1: But if you're out in the world doing anything, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have concepts and emotions arising. And so the point
Speaker 1: is not that that is somehow bad or wrong that
Speaker 1: those are there, but rather to be very aware of
Speaker 1: them number one and number two, be able to cope
Speaker 1: with them, and also to get back to kind of
Speaker 1: the wolves to craft your you know, sort of baseline
Speaker 1: reactivity into something that's more responsive and intentional and and
Speaker 1: not just coming from blind concepts and blind emotions and
Speaker 1: and a sort of like deeply unexamined sense of self. Right.
Speaker 1: That's part of why we do the self deconstruction is
Speaker 1: that I am from Michigan, and back when I lived
Speaker 1: there especially, you know, this is like when I was
Speaker 1: a little kid, every single person was a car mechanic, right,
Speaker 1: or or worked at Ford or worked at GM sorry
Speaker 1: g I, And you know, so everything is a car
Speaker 1: metaphor at the bottom of my mind. And so as
Speaker 1: you you know, deconstruct the engine of ego, you you're
Speaker 1: kind of taken out the calibers and looking at the
Speaker 1: size of the pistons and checking out the piston rings
Speaker 1: and check like each little part of it, and then
Speaker 1: very intentionally, you know, crafting the replacements that are more skillful,
Speaker 1: more helpful, more useful. It's not that the idea is, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna not have an ego. You must have
Speaker 1: that to interact with other people. It's just number one
Speaker 1: being bought into it. But even that's not enough, Like
Speaker 1: that teaching like oh, don't be identified with your ego,
Speaker 1: Even that's not enough, because the structure still runs. You know,
Speaker 1: you're using it to interact and so you can be
Speaker 1: all kinds of awake. But if you've got this sort
Speaker 1: of rote undeveloped ego structure still running as your interaction
Speaker 1: module with other people, it's still gonna have poor outcome.
Speaker 1: That's what I mean by the reconstruct. We want to
Speaker 1: like work really diligently at making a skillful ego and
Speaker 1: not inhabiting it, right, not identifying with it. Now, I
Speaker 1: know you're a psychologist, right, and this is obvious to
Speaker 1: a psychologist, and yet it's not often taught in meditation world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm actually not a psychologist. I'm not really anything. I'm
Speaker 1: a self taught as i've heard you say, sad scared monkey, um.
Speaker 1: And I want to get to that quote in a minute.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I love that idea of the tangle and
Speaker 1: being able to untangle lit a little bit, because very
Speaker 1: often I find that's what overwhelms us, is when thought
Speaker 1: and emotion and body sensation and urges and all of
Speaker 1: it lands, honest boom, all at once, and the process
Speaker 1: of being able to separate those things out, even in
Speaker 1: a rudimentary way, can bring a certain degree of freedom,
Speaker 1: for sure, absolutely, and probably is more worth doing than
Speaker 1: to see them as not there. Right As someone who's
Speaker 1: teaching people to meditate all the time, you know, That's
Speaker 1: what I'm doing all day long, is talking one on
Speaker 1: one with people who are trying to deep in their
Speaker 1: meditation practice. Often what they want is that kind of
Speaker 1: relief that comes from untangling that rather than seeing through it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I have been reading a book, just found it recently,
Speaker 1: but you have known about it longer because when I
Speaker 1: looked at your archives, you interviewed the author who has
Speaker 1: now passed. Uh. It's a book called Scene that Frees
Speaker 1: by Rob Erbia, and I have not been in love
Speaker 1: with a book in a while as much as I
Speaker 1: am in love with this book, and what I love
Speaker 1: about it is he approaches this idea of emptiness from
Speaker 1: progressively the most simple ways into deeper and deeper reflections,
Speaker 1: so eventually it's seen through, but along the way there's
Speaker 1: a lot of untangling and just pulling apart. And I
Speaker 1: really love that approach that he's taking there. And I
Speaker 1: know you liked the book and I thought you had
Speaker 1: a great conversation with him, and I just love that
Speaker 1: because sometimes I felt like people are want to go
Speaker 1: right to seeing through, and if they can't see through,
Speaker 1: they get stuck. But I think unraveling at different levels,
Speaker 1: Like I think the idea of a knot of a
Speaker 1: yarn is a simple way to think of it, because
Speaker 1: as we start to unravel it, it's still kind of tangled,
Speaker 1: but it's getting a little bit better, until eventually you
Speaker 1: unravel it and you're like, well, there's no knot here
Speaker 1: at all. There's a certain beauty and elegance to the
Speaker 1: Alexander the Great story of cutting through the Gordian Nut.
Speaker 1: Right that you're supposed to untie the Gordian nut and
Speaker 1: that makes you king. And Alexander the Great took his
Speaker 1: sword this is supposedly a true story and just cut
Speaker 1: through it and said, now I'm king, And you know
Speaker 1: that would be beautiful, right, we just cut through the
Speaker 1: whole tangle. And if you can do that, that's that's interesting.
Speaker 1: You know, go ahead and do it. But it turns
Speaker 1: out that most people can just cut through it. In
Speaker 1: a single you know, sweep of their sort of wisdom. Right.
Speaker 1: It takes a very diligent process of untangling and then
Speaker 1: kind of putting it all on the floor in front
Speaker 1: of you, and then untangling some more and then putting
Speaker 1: it all on the floor in front of you. And
Speaker 1: I feel like the sort of mindfulness that Shinzhen Young
Speaker 1: teaches where we're you know, we actually divide up the
Speaker 1: ego into various sensory components, and then we untangle each
Speaker 1: of those components individually, and then we examine how they
Speaker 1: fit together. You know, that's really really helpful, Like you're saying, Eric,
Speaker 1: even if you can't do it at a high level,
Speaker 1: even kind of doing it at a rudimentary level and
Speaker 1: kind of a not so scipeful way, you still get benefit.
Speaker 1: You still start to get insight, and it's delivering insight
Speaker 1: all the way along instead of waiting for this one
Speaker 1: big swoop of this sword of insight. Right, So I
Speaker 1: like that. Two. I guess it's that debate that is
Speaker 1: raged in you know, the spiritual world for a long
Speaker 1: time between sudden and gradual awakening. And if you look
Speaker 1: at most sudden awakenings, they happened suddenly after a fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty years about a teacher, right, yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: idea of sudden awakening. Sure, you know you talked to
Speaker 1: someone like Henry Shookman. He was just sitting on the
Speaker 1: beach as a nineteen year old who never meditated and
Speaker 1: didn't believe in spirituality and had a sudden awakening boom,
Speaker 1: and then you know, spent years trying to integrate that.
Speaker 1: But so it does happen sometimes, but it's extremely rare,
Speaker 1: and for the rest of us who don't have those
Speaker 1: kind of awakening, the progressive style of slowly deconstructing actually
Speaker 1: does work and does deliver. I want to change directions
Speaker 1: a little bit, and I don't quite know how to
Speaker 1: phrase the question of what I'm asking, so I'll probably
Speaker 1: wander around it for a second. But you know, you've
Speaker 1: done a lot of work in a set pecular mindfulness
Speaker 1: way where you're sort of take mindfulness and it's in
Speaker 1: a secular context. I heard a very interesting conversation you
Speaker 1: had with Ken McLeod recently where he was talking about
Speaker 1: Marianna as a way of life. Adrianna. Adriana, Yes, thank you.
Speaker 1: You guys were kind of talking about how in that tradition,
Speaker 1: which is a Tibetan tradition. There's a whole way of
Speaker 1: life that's wrapped around mindfulness practice or around all the practices.
Speaker 1: And you guys are kind of talking about that, and
Speaker 1: you used to have that for years when you were
Speaker 1: involved in a Hindu tantric group, And so I'm kind
Speaker 1: of curious where you sit today now as being part
Speaker 1: of a modern, secular type of practice. How important it
Speaker 1: is to orient all parts of our lives towards spiritual
Speaker 1: practice and awakening. What might that look like for a
Speaker 1: modern person who's committed to further growth and development. It's
Speaker 1: simply seeing that the divide we always make between spiritual
Speaker 1: practice and life is not a real divide. And the
Speaker 1: more that we compartmentalize like that, the less effective the
Speaker 1: whole project is. You know, the most compartmentalized is if
Speaker 1: we think, oh, my work on the cushion when I'm
Speaker 1: meditating is just utterly, utterly separate from everything else I
Speaker 1: do all day, and I just want to get good
Speaker 1: at meditating. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. That's doable.
Speaker 1: But I think for most of us, the idea is
Speaker 1: we're meditating because that's going to have some kind of
Speaker 1: positive impact on the rest of our lives. And if
Speaker 1: that's the case, then eventually you realize, oh, the meditation
Speaker 1: is like playing scales when I practice my musical instrument.
Speaker 1: But then we got to go play music. And then
Speaker 1: playing the music is when you're off the cushion, out
Speaker 1: of retreat, back in life, in you know, arms up
Speaker 1: to the elbows in the muck of life, just arguing
Speaker 1: with people and having disappointments and dealing with some kind
Speaker 1: of government website and you know, all the stuff that
Speaker 1: we just don't like, and that's where the real spirituality happens.
Speaker 1: That's where it matters. That's what we're doing this for.
Speaker 1: And so, first of all, you know, just realizing that
Speaker 1: even separating life and spiritual practice, we just have to
Speaker 1: drop that idea. But then much more deeply, as we
Speaker 1: detangle the tangle of concepts and thoughts that we're seeing
Speaker 1: everything through, and that gets clear and clear, something actually
Speaker 1: quite a bit deeper starts to shine through, which is
Speaker 1: that every one of those moments of arguing with people
Speaker 1: and dealing with government websites and you know, just all
Speaker 1: the stuff that we think of as the craft and
Speaker 1: resistance and problems of life itself is actually sacred itself
Speaker 1: is actually you know, has a shining brilliance of awakening
Speaker 1: and clarity and liberation shining through it at every moment,
Speaker 1: and not in some kind of theoretical pie in the
Speaker 1: sky way, but rather as a stark and vivid reality
Speaker 1: to be experienced moment by moment. And so that's what
Speaker 1: I think that looks like. And in these traditions that
Speaker 1: Ken and I were talking about, such as of Adriano
Speaker 1: or Hindu Contra, these non dual traditions, they've kind of
Speaker 1: formalized that in a sense where you know, there's actual
Speaker 1: practice as you're doing every minute. I mean, there's practices
Speaker 1: for eating, you know, which might be something akin to
Speaker 1: just praying before you eat, something that we would recognize
Speaker 1: from Midwestern American culture. Done other weird stuff like praying
Speaker 1: when you go to the bathroom, and you know, praying
Speaker 1: when you're beginning a trip. And it's not praying always
Speaker 1: sometimes it's doing some kind of big, complex ritual. It's
Speaker 1: much more built in methods of attempting to contact that
Speaker 1: sacredness of every moment, even the very mundane moments. For
Speaker 1: us in the modern West, it's probably not going to
Speaker 1: look like that, because unless we create each one of
Speaker 1: those for ourselves, you know, we don't have ready made
Speaker 1: rituals for all those things. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: that doesn't impede the direct seeing of that digging into
Speaker 1: or beathing in, or saturation with this sacredness that's available
Speaker 1: in every moment. Yeah, I think one of the questions
Speaker 1: I've become increasingly really focused on and really working on
Speaker 1: in my mind and in the programs that we offer,
Speaker 1: is how do we take that insight and awakening that
Speaker 1: we're having while we meditate, and how do we infuse
Speaker 1: it through more of the moments of our lives. And
Speaker 1: I agree with what you're saying about in certain cultures
Speaker 1: or traditions, it's sort of done for you. The danger
Speaker 1: is you just start going through the motions. But but
Speaker 1: there is a plan and a well thought out, structured
Speaker 1: a life that makes it more likely that's going to happen.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's missing to a large degree in
Speaker 1: so many people's practice in our current world, And so
Speaker 1: I'm kind of curious long way around of asking what
Speaker 1: ways do you work with people to bring this to
Speaker 1: more of the moments of life. Yeah, you know, I
Speaker 1: work in a very bespoke manner. So I start with
Speaker 1: each person looking at what is already in place for them.
Speaker 1: Everyone has had some kind of sense of the same
Speaker 1: acrid or experience of the Numenists, no matter how small,
Speaker 1: because that's a spot in the human brain, right, That's
Speaker 1: a thing we everyone can experience. It's not the case
Speaker 1: that you have to believe in a religion or you
Speaker 1: have to be raised in a religious context for that
Speaker 1: sort of like awe and wonder and sense of the
Speaker 1: Numanists to be aroused. So, for example, many people notice
Speaker 1: that happening if they go out in nature, they have
Speaker 1: a kind of a nature mysticism opening, or perhaps at
Speaker 1: the birth of a child or something. There's just sort
Speaker 1: of built in moments that for each person radiate this
Speaker 1: sense of the sacred. And so we start there and
Speaker 1: you know, point to that feeling and see what about
Speaker 1: their regular daily life brings the whiff of that up
Speaker 1: or the scent of that up, or the remembrance of
Speaker 1: that up, and we start building from there. Now, of
Speaker 1: course we're also do wing hardcore meditation and and a
Speaker 1: lot of emptiness practice and untangling, untangling, untangling so of
Speaker 1: course all that is also happening. But then it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, what is it that reminds you of the numenous?
Speaker 1: What is it that reminds you of the sacred? And
Speaker 1: can you start to bring more of that into your
Speaker 1: physical environment, more of it into your daily activity, even
Speaker 1: a little bit, even five percent, so that you start
Speaker 1: to resonate with that. Right, And so let's say if
Speaker 1: you're very, very secular and the only thing that does
Speaker 1: that for you is a walk in the woods, well,
Speaker 1: then of course we want more walks in the woods,
Speaker 1: but also can you have some objects from your walks
Speaker 1: in the wood in the house, and can you walks
Speaker 1: in the woods in your house, and can you bring
Speaker 1: up a visualization or a memory of those walks and
Speaker 1: start to re experience that flavor when you're not outside.
Speaker 1: And so, by little, little by little, we work our
Speaker 1: way into feeling that more and more often. Now this
Speaker 1: is like for each person we've got to building their
Speaker 1: own culture. Right. It's really hard in a way, but
Speaker 1: in another way, since it's so personally crafted, it does
Speaker 1: tend to land. And so that's one of the ways
Speaker 1: we can work. And another completely different way is if
Speaker 1: there's any of these traditional methods coming from other cultures
Speaker 1: that resonate for them, or traditional methods coming from our culture.
Speaker 1: So I've got some students who are, you know, hardcore
Speaker 1: scientists and stuff, but as kids, they had a little
Speaker 1: bit of Christian upbringing and some of that really landed
Speaker 1: for them as kids, and so we bring some of
Speaker 1: that in, you know, like maybe they have a relationship
Speaker 1: with Jesus or something, not in a religious way, but
Speaker 1: just directly like that's an inspiring vision for them, no
Speaker 1: matter how much they kind of don't like all the
Speaker 1: stuff that goes around it in our everyday culture. We
Speaker 1: can take these pieces of things that are available kind
Speaker 1: of ready made, and also work with some of those
Speaker 1: You said at once, I don't recall where it was,
Speaker 1: but you were talking about how we need to learn
Speaker 1: to integrate our psychological knowledge with all these spiritual practices
Speaker 1: and start making them work together better. I'm kind of curious,
Speaker 1: are they even two separate things? Is there even a
Speaker 1: difference in psychology versus spirituality? And if so, what is
Speaker 1: it This is? I think is a really interesting question
Speaker 1: because a lot of times people will use whichever of
Speaker 1: those terms they're a little bit more comfortable with or
Speaker 1: interested in. But I see an awful lot of overlap.
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of curious how you think about that. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you're asking me a definitional question, and so
Speaker 1: the easy answer as well, it just depends on how
Speaker 1: you define it. But I'll go the harder route and say,
Speaker 1: you know, when Freud was initially writing about psychology, he
Speaker 1: never talked about the self, right, not in German. He
Speaker 1: wasn't calling it the self. He was writing about gey
Speaker 1: east and that that means soul because Psyche and Greek
Speaker 1: is the word for soul. That's why it's called psychology.
Speaker 1: The idea was soul. And so if we take that
Speaker 1: original impulse, we could say perhaps there is no difference
Speaker 1: and really they're going at the same goal. But I
Speaker 1: will say that meaning of psychology, you know, I have
Speaker 1: to dig into German and etymology to dredge it up,
Speaker 1: and that tells us that that's not really how it's
Speaker 1: seen today. Usually if I were to just off the cuffs,
Speaker 1: say what's different about them? In the long run, the
Speaker 1: psychology is about untangling that not of thought and feeling
Speaker 1: and getting that really, really really untangled and also upgraded
Speaker 1: and improved. And the spiritual goal is also to see
Speaker 1: beyond that to the consciousness or the awake awareness within
Speaker 1: which the thoughts and feelings themselves are arising. And you
Speaker 1: don't get too much psychology that's concerned with that. Some
Speaker 1: transpersonal psych there's you know, a hint of that in
Speaker 1: i f S the way internal family systems is talked
Speaker 1: about that you know, they have that sense of the
Speaker 1: kind of like witness consciousness or whatever. But that would
Speaker 1: be the thing that sort of missing from Western psychologies,
Speaker 1: that deeper connection with kind of outside of thought and feeling,
Speaker 1: with just awareness itself, just the ground of being. That's
Speaker 1: kind of marginal part of psychology. Yeah, I see it.
Speaker 1: You know, certainly acceptance of commitment therapy has angles of
Speaker 1: doing that. I just often think that, as we're saying,
Speaker 1: I think it is definitional, and they're a lot closer
Speaker 1: than a lot of people make them out to be
Speaker 1: or set them up to be, at least in my experience,
Speaker 1: And that maybe because so much of the spiritual lens
Speaker 1: I look through as a Buddhist spiritual lens, which is
Speaker 1: a is a more psychological of the world religions. I
Speaker 1: guess because it's more focused on the working of the mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I agree that probably in the long run they
Speaker 1: will be seen to be the same project in the
Speaker 1: same way we talk about thought and emotion as if
Speaker 1: they're very separate things. And I'm kind of curious, in
Speaker 1: your experience of doing a lot of untangling, are they
Speaker 1: truly separate things? Can you completely pull them apart, or
Speaker 1: in some fundamental way are they connected and tied to
Speaker 1: each other. I'm just kind of curious what you think. Well,
Speaker 1: I want to back up a bit and talk about
Speaker 1: what we mean by pulling them apart. So when we're
Speaker 1: pulling them apart in in some kind of vipashana or
Speaker 1: you know, deconstructive manner, we're not pulling them in the
Speaker 1: part in the sense of saying they don't arise together.
Speaker 1: We're pulling them apart in the sense of let's just
Speaker 1: look at this one thing and then we can look
Speaker 1: at the other thing. So again, to go back to
Speaker 1: my very tired car engine metaphor, you know, you still
Speaker 1: need everything to be in the car enginet once for
Speaker 1: the thing to run. But that doesn't mean we can't
Speaker 1: look at spark plugs as different from you know, pistons
Speaker 1: and so on. They're different components, and we can focus
Speaker 1: on those components. So even I thought and emotion of
Speaker 1: rise together, we can focus on listening to the verbal thinking,
Speaker 1: or focus on seeing the visual thinking, or focused on
Speaker 1: feeling the body sensations of emotion individually. So another metaphor
Speaker 1: that probably will be more obvious to people is you
Speaker 1: can listen to a song as a song, or you
Speaker 1: can start to listen to just the base part or
Speaker 1: just the drum part, and yet they still all have
Speaker 1: to be there for it to be the song. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not that they're separate in some kind of functional way,
Speaker 1: but you can tune into the separate parts and that
Speaker 1: makes it easier to see their constructiveness. That's helpful. And
Speaker 1: so you have studied a lot of different traditions and
Speaker 1: you landed in Shin Zen Young school of you know,
Speaker 1: learning from him, and what is it about his method
Speaker 1: that has spoke to you so much? And I've heard
Speaker 1: you describe his method as a blend of a Pastna
Speaker 1: and Zen, and I'm kind of curious why you say that.
Speaker 1: So that's two different questions that are both kind of gigantic.
Speaker 1: So I'll do my best, and my apologies to Sians
Speaker 1: and if I misrepresent anything. The reason I like working
Speaker 1: with it so much is that AI like shin Zen's mind.
Speaker 1: Because I was working at a place, you know, where
Speaker 1: we were producing Sinzen's recordings, I got to meet him
Speaker 1: personally before I knew about his teachings. Almost. I mean, actually,
Speaker 1: there's an interesting story there where I was the acquisitions
Speaker 1: editor and I just got this little box of cassette
Speaker 1: tapes one day and I broke it open, and this
Speaker 1: is about or something, and it's just like, yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: get a lot of these in a day, like really
Speaker 1: weird stuff from people all over who wanted their strange stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, like high recordings. I remember one was a
Speaker 1: guy who told stories about the ghosts of past American presidents,
Speaker 1: and so I got all these cassettes of his stories,
Speaker 1: and you know, I mean just completely not what we
Speaker 1: would ever use. It's probably a little bit like logging
Speaker 1: onto insight timer and seeing who's going live these days.
Speaker 1: It's just you're a little bit like, Wow, there's a
Speaker 1: lot out there. There's a lot out there, right, And
Speaker 1: so in the midst of a lot of those, I
Speaker 1: took out this one and the label said Thanatos and
Speaker 1: arrows or arrows and Thanatos, and I'm like, oh, love
Speaker 1: and death. This is at least you know, this is interesting.
Speaker 1: So I put it in there, and it was the
Speaker 1: first time I ever heard Jensen, and he's going into
Speaker 1: this very deep and really fascinating talk about mainly death.
Speaker 1: And I was instantly captivated, like, we got to get
Speaker 1: this guy in here, and so um I had heard
Speaker 1: him at least a little bit, but then once I
Speaker 1: met him and I understood like that he's so ecumenical.
Speaker 1: He knows the original Asian languages of these traditions. You know,
Speaker 1: he's hyperfluent in Japanese but also functional in Sanskrit and
Speaker 1: Chinese and so on. He understands world religion in an
Speaker 1: academic way that is actually really helpful when you're trying
Speaker 1: to understand what's going on with these traditions. There was
Speaker 1: a whole bunch about how he was coming at it
Speaker 1: that was very attractive to me, and so I just
Speaker 1: started working with him, and then I saw it's not
Speaker 1: just his mind, it's his methodology is really fascinating, and
Speaker 1: you know, we've been describing this deconstructive methodology. He didn't
Speaker 1: invent that, of course, but the way he teaches it
Speaker 1: is very very unique, quite unusual, and you know he
Speaker 1: will say these days he's calling it mindfulness, but that
Speaker 1: then he would call it vipassana. But you know, his
Speaker 1: personal practice, what he was doing for the past even
Speaker 1: at that point thirty years or whatever, was Zen and
Speaker 1: his teacher Sasaki Ria, she was teaching him Zen, and
Speaker 1: so a huge amount of what he would talk about
Speaker 1: in a dharma talk or how he would present the
Speaker 1: material even though we're doing these very nuns and techniques,
Speaker 1: the view that we're taking of liberation and how we're
Speaker 1: working and all that was coming directly directly from a
Speaker 1: Zen teacher out of the tradition of Zense. So it
Speaker 1: brought a really for ant vibe to the vipasana that
Speaker 1: I really appreciate and a real understanding of, you know,
Speaker 1: coming from the non dual perspective which is not there
Speaker 1: in vipasta, which led me in a long circurtreous route
Speaker 1: from you know, Hindu contra into the Pasta and then
Speaker 1: all the way back into Adriana, which is like very
Speaker 1: related to Hindu contras. It's the Buddhist version or Buddhist
Speaker 1: angle on that and so um, what Shinzon is doing
Speaker 1: is really really interesting. You know, I can't recommend him
Speaker 1: highly enough. He's a wonderful teacher. One of the things
Speaker 1: I appreciate about your work a lot is that there's
Speaker 1: the technical aspects of vipasana, and and for listeners who
Speaker 1: aren't familiar, vipasana is a method of looking very closely
Speaker 1: at phenomenon in an attempt to sort of, as we
Speaker 1: talked about, deconstruct them a little bit so that we
Speaker 1: get a deeper insight. But you also have very much
Speaker 1: the non dual aspect of it. That's what I like
Speaker 1: about Robert is Book two is that it's very systematic,
Speaker 1: but the main goal of seeing through the whole enchilada
Speaker 1: is never lost. It's always sort of front and center
Speaker 1: in a there is deep emptiness here. That's what we're
Speaker 1: aiming at. And this is the method. And I don't
Speaker 1: know that it's not in other insight traditions, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be as emphasized as much as I
Speaker 1: see it, like in your work or in what I
Speaker 1: was reading in the Robber be A book. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not emphasized very often, that's for sure. And the whole
Speaker 1: view is of you know, let's say Papasna comes from
Speaker 1: early Buddhism, like we would call it Terravada or Indiana
Speaker 1: or whatever, and you know that is not a non
Speaker 1: dual tradition. The philosophy behind it is not the same. Actually,
Speaker 1: Buddhism went through very big changes, and so later Buddhism
Speaker 1: has some real differences to the early way of working. Now,
Speaker 1: of course those changes happened like years ago, so a
Speaker 1: lot of them fed back into early Buddhist practice. But
Speaker 1: there's still you know, the way you conceptualize what you're
Speaker 1: doing is is actually pretty different. Oh m m. What
Speaker 1: would you say, is the difference between what you're saying
Speaker 1: sort of the early Buddhist Terravanin approach versus a non
Speaker 1: dual approach. Yeah, almost anything I say, here's someone's going
Speaker 1: to violently disagree with. Of course, of course here, but
Speaker 1: I'm curious. I'll just wait in anyway and say, in
Speaker 1: early Buddhist practice, the idea is that you are kind
Speaker 1: of reworking the mind very deeply to cultivate a state
Speaker 1: of awakening, cultivate a state of transcendental awakening. And so
Speaker 1: it's like very often they're using metaphors like your mind
Speaker 1: is dirty. Imagine a dirty cloth and you have to
Speaker 1: ring it out and wash it again, and ring it
Speaker 1: out again and wash it again. That's kind of the metaphor.
Speaker 1: And the final goal is to transcend everything, to overcome
Speaker 1: all desire, to overcome all attachment to some sorta and transcend.
Speaker 1: Whereas the later Buddhist non dual traditions, the idea is
Speaker 1: everyone is already a completely awakened Buddha. We're not cultivating that,
Speaker 1: we're simply revealing it. That's why immediate awakening is possible,
Speaker 1: because it's always there, potentially to be revealed at any moment.
Speaker 1: And furthermore, it's not just transcendental. It's not just oh,
Speaker 1: we're going to give up all connection with the earth
Speaker 1: and you know, become monks and sort of like give
Speaker 1: up on the project of life in an engagement or
Speaker 1: like most of us would think about. But rather we're
Speaker 1: going to see that, like I was saying earlier, every
Speaker 1: moment is sacred, even moments of being totally involved in
Speaker 1: work and money and sexuality and relationships and difficult emotions
Speaker 1: and all that. Even that, it's not just sacred in
Speaker 1: a transcendental way. It's sacred in an imminent way. It's
Speaker 1: sacred on its own terms. So we don't separate and
Speaker 1: say there's these good feelings and good emotions and bad
Speaker 1: things and bad emotions, and our job is to just
Speaker 1: wash out the dirt and only focus on the good stuff.
Speaker 1: It actually includes every part of life, even the most
Speaker 1: difficult stuff is already in a sense deeply liberated. And
Speaker 1: so it's a very different viewpoint actually, and leads to
Speaker 1: I think, pretty different outcomes. Now again, these are sort
Speaker 1: of like archetypal cartoon descriptions of this. Many many traditions
Speaker 1: might not say this stuff, but this is sort of
Speaker 1: the easiest way to understand it. Thank you for being
Speaker 1: willing to wade into it. I'm sure I'll regret it.
Speaker 1: I want to go back to a book that you
Speaker 1: co wrote years ago, and I will say I've not
Speaker 1: read it, so I may be getting in trouble here,
Speaker 1: but I'm taking the premise of it. I want to
Speaker 1: know if you still sort of agree with it. And
Speaker 1: the book was called Ego. Tell me more about the book,
Speaker 1: because what I read was it's contending we're not in
Speaker 1: the grip of a new dark age. First of all,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about my co author, Peter Bauman,
Speaker 1: who Peter is an interesting guy. He's a musician. So
Speaker 1: if you're into crowd rock from the seventies, you may
Speaker 1: have heard of this band called Tangerine Dream. They were
Speaker 1: extremely famous, of course, and so Peter was original member
Speaker 1: of Tangerine Dream. His music from a recent album called
Speaker 1: Machines of Desire is the music that plays at the
Speaker 1: beginning of Deconstructing Yourself. People always ask me about the music,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, that's my friend Peter. He's actually quite
Speaker 1: a wonderful musician, and I love that music. Peter had
Speaker 1: most of the ideas for this book, and we developed
Speaker 1: them together over several years. And by the way, the
Speaker 1: ideas have nothing to do with nine eleven. Okay, So
Speaker 1: this is what's funny about the book is that we
Speaker 1: brought that in as a storytelling device, but it accidentally
Speaker 1: got sort of confused together with the main idea and
Speaker 1: and so it didn't work that well as a device.
Speaker 1: But the main idea is simply that human beings are
Speaker 1: evolving towards being more awakened. It's the basic premise, you know,
Speaker 1: And we saw a lot of data that seemed to
Speaker 1: point to that in a way a similar book. There's
Speaker 1: two books that have similar idea. Is that came out
Speaker 1: I believe after we wrote this. I'm not sure, but
Speaker 1: do it like much better than our book. And one
Speaker 1: of them is Stephen Pinker's book The Better Angels, where
Speaker 1: he's talking about how if you took the average human
Speaker 1: being on an average day, their their life is just improving.
Speaker 1: So that's part of it. And another one again that
Speaker 1: where the person the idea is a little different, but
Speaker 1: he's touching a lot of the same ideas again doing
Speaker 1: a much better job of it. The book Sapiens. If
Speaker 1: you get into that, he's kind of looking at some
Speaker 1: of the same stuff in a similar way. So I
Speaker 1: would just say that's where we were coming from. Is
Speaker 1: this idea that, hey, it's not teleological. We're not saying
Speaker 1: that some magical being is guiding the progression of humans,
Speaker 1: but just saying if you connect the dots, you know
Speaker 1: it is moving in a direction. And again that direction
Speaker 1: is not divinely guided, but it's just happens to be
Speaker 1: what's unfolding right now. And we found that interesting. And
Speaker 1: is anything in the intervening years you wrote that caused
Speaker 1: you to think differently about that overarching conclusion, which is
Speaker 1: I agree Stephen Pinker did it. Uh this book Sapiens.
Speaker 1: There's a great book called fact Fulness that argues something
Speaker 1: similar Humankind by Rutger Berman, again similar. I'm kind of curious, though,
Speaker 1: do you still hold that view because it's not teleological,
Speaker 1: because it's not necessarily guided by some kind of influence,
Speaker 1: but just happens to be unfolding. You know, it can
Speaker 1: change directions, things can go wherever they go. So what
Speaker 1: seemed really kind of clear in in certain ways now
Speaker 1: all these years later, I think some of our basic ideas,
Speaker 1: like the continuous improvement and intelligence over time as measured worldwide,
Speaker 1: and stuff seemed to be falling apart, and lifespan in
Speaker 1: the West, particularly in America, lifespan is going down, and
Speaker 1: and so you know, oh, it's like just like we're saying,
Speaker 1: these things are not somehow preordained. They can get better
Speaker 1: and worse. And I would say that in the intervening years,
Speaker 1: a lot of signs of things getting worse have become
Speaker 1: quite a bit clearer than they were, at least clearer
Speaker 1: to me. But I also think there's more data, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not so obvious that we're just going to keep
Speaker 1: progressing into more and more ease of life for more
Speaker 1: and more people taken on average over time. It's like
Speaker 1: we might be just falling off the cliff of existential
Speaker 1: non existence right here pretty quick. So I would say, yeah,
Speaker 1: my view is is pretty different these days, and it's
Speaker 1: not totally negative, but it's not that kind of Hey,
Speaker 1: we're headed towards a golden future here. Yeah. I tend
Speaker 1: to have a view that as a species, we are
Speaker 1: growing more awakened, we are growing to be more broadly kinder,
Speaker 1: more decent creatures, with some definite up and downs in there,
Speaker 1: And it seems that so many indicators look really positive,
Speaker 1: and then we are burning the planet alive. That seems
Speaker 1: to be a big problem. Like it's kind of hard
Speaker 1: to keep the optimism up against that. That's where mine
Speaker 1: runs into its challenge. Yeah, and I think it would
Speaker 1: for any thinking person. Honestly, it was apparent then, but
Speaker 1: I feel like now it's just much much clearer and starker,
Speaker 1: and we have to hurry up and figure this out
Speaker 1: because there really isn't much time to turn this around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's eleven years later. You know, I started to Solar
Speaker 1: Energy Company in two thousand and eight because I thought, like,
Speaker 1: all right, it's time, it's time. And Nope, at least
Speaker 1: wasn't in Ohio. It sure wasn't time. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: in some ways it was definitely time, but but that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it happened. People weren't ready, they weren't thinking
Speaker 1: about it. This is what the spiritual Sorry I'm interrupting
Speaker 1: you here, but this is what real spirituality is meant
Speaker 1: to contend with. Real spirituality is contending with the human
Speaker 1: condition and the human condition, or let's just say the
Speaker 1: sentient being conditioned. The animal condition is that you know,
Speaker 1: we're all going to die. Everyone we love is going
Speaker 1: to die. Everyone's going to get old and sick if
Speaker 1: they're lucky, or they just die young. And you know,
Speaker 1: that hasn't changed. That's always been that way. And so
Speaker 1: that's what spirituality, deep spirituality wants us to be able
Speaker 1: to contend with. And in a way that hasn't changed. Rather,
Speaker 1: it's become just more obvious, more in our face that hey,
Speaker 1: this is what we have to work with here. And so,
Speaker 1: if I'm being optimistic, my hope is that there is
Speaker 1: more and more people get more and more tools to
Speaker 1: get untangle the nuts and get clearer and clearer. They
Speaker 1: can work more effectively with the very intense conditions of
Speaker 1: the world right now, and hopefully, instead of being driven
Speaker 1: by terror and despair, they can bring a helpful and
Speaker 1: useful hand to bear on the situation. Yes, I would
Speaker 1: agree that that is the hope. You on a podcast
Speaker 1: referred to as once as sad scared monkeys. Yes, and
Speaker 1: it just makes me laugh and I completely get it.
Speaker 1: And I'm also curious to what extent would you say
Speaker 1: that that's what we're trying to do with the spiritual
Speaker 1: life is be a little bit less sad and a
Speaker 1: little bit less scared as a monkey. I mean in
Speaker 1: a way, yes, but in another way, what I'm saying is, certainly,
Speaker 1: if you can be less sad and less scared, that's good. However,
Speaker 1: it's more about can we help our fellow monkeys. We're
Speaker 1: in this together. Can we really connect and do what
Speaker 1: it takes to lift each other up? And that will
Speaker 1: probably help us be less said and scared individually, But
Speaker 1: it's not so individual, and that's so kind of about me,
Speaker 1: you know, It's about us and I would include not
Speaker 1: just monkeys, but all the other animals. You know this, this
Speaker 1: this is part of why the situation. Even if we
Speaker 1: look at a book about the improvement in human life,
Speaker 1: if we wrote the same book and amoritized it across
Speaker 1: what's happened to all the other life on earth, it's
Speaker 1: actually very negative. Right. So um, yeah, this is one
Speaker 1: of the ways my thinking I've shifted. Someone should write
Speaker 1: that book from the perspective of the animals. It would
Speaker 1: be a dark, dark book. Yeah, and yet you know,
Speaker 1: you see that we've kind of traded one for the other.
Speaker 1: We've been able to increase the standard of living for
Speaker 1: average people a little bit around the world over all
Speaker 1: these years, but we've done it by basically burning the
Speaker 1: world down, and so it's come at the cost of
Speaker 1: trillions of you know, animal lives, or let's say, at
Speaker 1: least millions of larger animal lives. Well, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think of a way to end this on a semi
Speaker 1: helpful note. But give you took us here, Give me
Speaker 1: some inspirational word of wisdom to take us out here, Michael,
Speaker 1: give me something comes back to the tangle. You know,
Speaker 1: It's like, what's the real problem with the world. The
Speaker 1: real problem with the world is that people are sad, scared, greedy,
Speaker 1: angry monkeys, and that's part of that tangle of thought
Speaker 1: and feeling and that, you know, if we can untangle
Speaker 1: that and get from what we think we want, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, this kind of like, oh, I want to
Speaker 1: pile up my heap of gold and stand on top
Speaker 1: of it as the lord or lady of creation, you know,
Speaker 1: and get to what we really actually want, which is connectedness, kindness, sharing, caring,
Speaker 1: feeling like we're part of something that's meaningful and all
Speaker 1: that that is very available to us. It couldn't be
Speaker 1: anything more meaningful than turning this around and reshaping the
Speaker 1: earth as a paradise for us and all beings right.
Speaker 1: And all it takes is a re engineering of our
Speaker 1: way of seeing, where again a detangling of our thoughts
Speaker 1: and feelings. So there is a method we know how
Speaker 1: to do this. The information is out there, and so
Speaker 1: the more that all of us push in that direction,
Speaker 1: I think it's actually possible to turn this around. Makes
Speaker 1: me think of the first two of the Bodhi side,
Speaker 1: the vows or the Great Vows for all ends in
Speaker 1: you know, there's lots of translations of it, but all
Speaker 1: beings one body by vow to freedom, Greed, hatred, and
Speaker 1: ignorance rise endlessly. I vow to abandon them. That feels
Speaker 1: like what this is about to me to thank you
Speaker 1: so much for coming on. I always enjoy talking with you.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me Eric, I really appreciate it. It's
Speaker 1: a great time. If what you just heard was helpful
Speaker 1: to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support
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