Speaker 1: Your favorite restaurant, they change chefs, your favorite shirt turns
Speaker 1: into a dust drag. You know the Buddhist teaching of impermanence.
Speaker 1: It's all going away, all the time. 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 podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Dean Slider, an award
Speaker 1: winning author who has taught meditation since nineteen seventy from
Speaker 1: maximum security prisons to the Guatemalan rainforest. Is a student
Speaker 1: of Eastern and Western sages in several traditions and has
Speaker 1: completed numerous pilgrimage and retreats in India, Tibet, Nepal, and
Speaker 1: the West. Dean's latest book is The Dharma Bum's Guide
Speaker 1: to Western Literature, Fighting Nirvana in the Classics. It reflects
Speaker 1: his lifelong exploration of the awakening process, as well as
Speaker 1: his years as a prep school English teacher. I love
Speaker 1: this quote from the Buddha. The mind hard to control
Speaker 1: flighty a lighting where it wishes one does well to
Speaker 1: tame the disciplined mind brings happiness. Happiness can often feel
Speaker 1: like an elusive goal everyone seems to strive for and
Speaker 1: never quite achieves, because we seek it outside of ourselves
Speaker 1: rather than going inward, which is something mindfulness teaches us
Speaker 1: to do. And Jenny, yes, Eric, this idea of taming
Speaker 1: the mind is why you named your program The Well
Speaker 1: Trained Mind, right yep. And I'm excited to announce that
Speaker 1: it's open for enrollment now through October eight. In my
Speaker 1: live virtual six week Introduction to Mindfulness program, whether you're
Speaker 1: new to mindfulness and meditation, or you're looking to strengthen
Speaker 1: your existing mindfulness practice, I'll teach you the foundations of
Speaker 1: mindfulness so that you can live with more ease, create
Speaker 1: a nourishing and fulfilling spiritual practice. Discover how to be
Speaker 1: a friend to yourself and strengthen your ability to live
Speaker 1: in a more grounded, connected, peaceful way. To learn more
Speaker 1: about the program, go to one you feed dot net
Speaker 1: slash mindfulness. That's one you feed dot net slash mindfulness
Speaker 1: before October eight. I hope to meet you there. Hi Dean,
Speaker 1: Welcome back. Hi Eric, it's great to be back. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much. Yeah, it is a pleasure to be talking
Speaker 1: with you again. I don't remember when we talked the
Speaker 1: first time, but it's been several years at least, so
Speaker 1: it's good to have you back. You have a new
Speaker 1: book out that The minute I saw the title, I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, I absolutely have to read this one.
Speaker 1: It's called The Dharma Bums Guide to Western Literature, Finding
Speaker 1: Nirvana in the Classics, which is right up my alley.
Speaker 1: We'll talk all about it here in a moment, but
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 a grandchild
Speaker 1: and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 1: of us that are always at battle. One is a
Speaker 1: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
Speaker 1: and thinks about it for a second and looks up
Speaker 1: at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the
Speaker 1: grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
Speaker 1: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 1: you in your life and in the work that you do. Well.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting question because in some ways that all
Speaker 1: seemed a lot clearer when I was younger. You know,
Speaker 1: I was held bent for leather on the spiritual path
Speaker 1: from very early on. The feeling was, Okay, the stuff
Speaker 1: I want to feed is the spiritual stuff, and the
Speaker 1: one I want to not feed is the worldly stuff.
Speaker 1: And to a large degree, what this whole path has
Speaker 1: been about for me is finding out that well, there
Speaker 1: really is no separation, that you have to find this
Speaker 1: spirit right here in the world, and fortunately the world.
Speaker 1: Just as all the colors of the spectrum are expressions
Speaker 1: of white light, everything in the world, everything in the
Speaker 1: manifest universe, is in fact the expression of being this spirit. Brahman,
Speaker 1: now God, whatever completely inadequate word works for you. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: It makes me think of a section in the book.
Speaker 1: I'll describe the book briefly. There's lots of different chapters
Speaker 1: about Western classics you read where we're told to read
Speaker 1: in high school, and we're going to go into that.
Speaker 1: But what you just said made me think of a
Speaker 1: line from the chapter about J. D. Salinger, where you said,
Speaker 1: immature seekers operate only on the principle that the Kingdom
Speaker 1: of Heaven is inside us, per the Gospel of Luke.
Speaker 1: But mature seekers know, per the Gospel of Thomas, that
Speaker 1: the kingdom is both inside and outside us, that the
Speaker 1: grace of Nirvana embraces everything we thought was the enemy
Speaker 1: of grace. Yep, yep, there it is there. It is
Speaker 1: so much for that dumb parable. I need to rename
Speaker 1: this ship. Yeah, it really is. In a way. It's
Speaker 1: you know, dual is m right there, and the true truth,
Speaker 1: the highest truth, turns out to be non dual. It does.
Speaker 1: But the thing is, you have to learn that in
Speaker 1: your bone. It's not enough to get that philosophically or intellectually.
Speaker 1: You have to get it experientially. And the most direct
Speaker 1: way to do that, I mean what I do seven
Speaker 1: days a week is teach meditation. I guide meditation, and
Speaker 1: let me say this early on while we're here, I
Speaker 1: lead actually usually three times a week free zoom sessions
Speaker 1: anyone can join, come to my website and love to
Speaker 1: have y'all aboard. The essential misconception that people have about
Speaker 1: meditation is it's about blocking out stuff that should not
Speaker 1: be there, thoughts, anxiety, boredom, restlessness, the sound of the
Speaker 1: dog barking across the street, and disfavoring all of that
Speaker 1: and favoring something. It's the spirituality, the God, the boundlessness,
Speaker 1: And the main thing that I have to show them
Speaker 1: that I was fortunate enough to learn from my teachers
Speaker 1: is no, you open up your pores to everything. You
Speaker 1: don't try to block a thing out. Turns out that
Speaker 1: any effort to create a non agitated state of mind
Speaker 1: is a form of agitation. Hello, as the catch twenty
Speaker 1: two of trying to meditate. You know you were just
Speaker 1: reading from my chapter on J. D. Sallenger. That's really
Speaker 1: what Holden Caulfield eventually has to learn in the Catcher
Speaker 1: and the Rye. He's trying to run away from the
Speaker 1: so called phony materialistic world. You know, he keeps making
Speaker 1: up all these these fantasies about what the alternative will be.
Speaker 1: Says I'll go out west and get a job in
Speaker 1: a gas station and pretend to be one of those
Speaker 1: deaf mutes so I don't have to have stupid conversations
Speaker 1: with people. It's a very adolescent approach, and for a
Speaker 1: lot of people, you know, the spiritual path becomes a
Speaker 1: way to just prolong adolescence and finding out how to
Speaker 1: make spirituality mature. You know. Finally, in my advanced stage,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm starting to get a handle on that. I'm
Speaker 1: curious though, I often this question about the idea of
Speaker 1: spiritual practice being about not trying, just sort of sitting
Speaker 1: back and not trying. And I hear this come from
Speaker 1: a lot of very wise spiritual teachers who I admire,
Speaker 1: and I recognize an absolute certain wisdom in it. The
Speaker 1: question I have, though, is that those teachers almost always
Speaker 1: did try for a period of time on working to
Speaker 1: you know, meditate in more of a way where they
Speaker 1: were working to perhaps focus the mind, to develop concentration.
Speaker 1: And I sometimes wonder if it's not a little bit
Speaker 1: like this is the analogy I've heard someone else use,
Speaker 1: Barry Bond saying, well, you never need batting practice, right, Well,
Speaker 1: when you're five, you probably do. And so I'm kind
Speaker 1: of curious from your perspective, do you think that all
Speaker 1: the effort you did put in for a long time
Speaker 1: was sort of not needed and you could have just
Speaker 1: gone right to not trying, or was there a period
Speaker 1: of time where there was some degree of effort that
Speaker 1: was valuable. I did not spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: putting in effort because I was way too lazy for that.
Speaker 1: I mean I did start off. I mean I started
Speaker 1: off as a Zen student, right, you know, and I
Speaker 1: was supposed to sit motionless, and I was so supposed
Speaker 1: to make my mind motionless. And you know, they patrol
Speaker 1: the joint with a stick, and if they detect that
Speaker 1: you're stirring in body or mind, they whack you across
Speaker 1: the back of the shoulders with a stick. And I
Speaker 1: got about three days into it when I knew, no,
Speaker 1: this is not going to work for me. My body
Speaker 1: is way too twitchy and and my mind is way
Speaker 1: too twitchy. Now, if I had stayed with Zen practice
Speaker 1: later on, I learned through my reading, I would have
Speaker 1: gotten to what they call in Zen sikn taza, which
Speaker 1: means just sitting, sitting, not doing anything. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: knew that I was not going to be able to
Speaker 1: get there that way. I was not going to be
Speaker 1: able to get to the soft through the herd, as
Speaker 1: it sometimes put. And it turns out that what that
Speaker 1: was saying about me was that I was like regular.
Speaker 1: I was a regular person. And even the Zen teachers
Speaker 1: will say Zen is not for most people, it's for
Speaker 1: like one percent of people. It turns out I was
Speaker 1: in And so I very quickly found teachers who said,
Speaker 1: you know this idea that you have to put in
Speaker 1: a lot of effort to get to effortlessness. It takes
Speaker 1: some skill, some delicacy, some precision of instruction to go
Speaker 1: straight to the effortlessness. If it's instructed with that precision,
Speaker 1: it can be done. I feel I can say that
Speaker 1: with some authority now fifty years later, because I've taught
Speaker 1: thousands of people in that way. You know, in my
Speaker 1: thirty three years of teaching high school, all my students
Speaker 1: got exposed to meditation. Fifteen year olds, twitchy, fifteen year olds,
Speaker 1: They could all do it. The ones who took up
Speaker 1: them a little longer to get it were the valedictorians,
Speaker 1: because they were used to overthinking things. The ones who
Speaker 1: got it away were the jocks, interesting right, because they
Speaker 1: were used to experiencing things directly, somatically physically, not running
Speaker 1: everything through the brain. How did the juvenile delinquents do?
Speaker 1: That would have been my category. I'm just curious how
Speaker 1: I would have done well. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: after some years, I started to feel kind of morally compromised.
Speaker 1: I was working at this very ritzy prep school. I
Speaker 1: had the Johnson and Johnson kids and the Si new
Speaker 1: House kids, and Governor Kane's kids and and all that
Speaker 1: and some more, you know, aspiring upper middle class, you know,
Speaker 1: immigrant families from Hong Kong and Pakistan with you know,
Speaker 1: to doctor parents and so forth. But essentially I was
Speaker 1: working for the rich folks. And that, plus some memories
Speaker 1: from my hippie days when I briefly got thrown into
Speaker 1: the slammer a couple of times, I felt very motivated
Speaker 1: to teach in prison. So I got myself a volunteer
Speaker 1: gig down the road at Northern State Prison in Newark,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, which is considered the roughest and the worst
Speaker 1: run prison in New Jersey. And I was going there
Speaker 1: every Thursday, night. So I was going from these kids
Speaker 1: who were on their way to you know, Harvard and
Speaker 1: Yale and Brown and Dartmouth, to a lot of guys
Speaker 1: who would never learned to read and write. And they
Speaker 1: were also able to get it right away. They are
Speaker 1: the best people to work with because they get the
Speaker 1: seriousness of the situation. They're not fooling around. The Buddhist said,
Speaker 1: practice like your hair is on fire. Actually all of
Speaker 1: our hair is on fire. But but you know, if
Speaker 1: we have the comforts of middle class life, were able
Speaker 1: to distract ourselves from that fact for for several years
Speaker 1: and until it becomes a cute. But I want to
Speaker 1: look back to something. The way you first pose this
Speaker 1: question about is just sitting back, and there was sort
Speaker 1: of an implication that a lot of people have that, Oh,
Speaker 1: not making effort means not having commitment and not practicing
Speaker 1: with regularity. That's a different thing. That's a different thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, eventually it gets the idea of practice, you know,
Speaker 1: that's provisional. That's as the Buddhist said, you take the
Speaker 1: raft across the raging river of the allusion to the
Speaker 1: far shore of enlightenment where you discover, actually it's the
Speaker 1: shore you were on all the time but didn't recognize.
Speaker 1: But at that point, then you you don't carry the
Speaker 1: raft around on your back. That's one thing. The penalty
Speaker 1: of carrying the raft too long is okay, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you get a little backache. The penalty of jettisoning
Speaker 1: the raft too early is you drown. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: hang on too practice And what I tell people is
Speaker 1: practice long and easy. Got it. So what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here when we say non effort, is we're actually
Speaker 1: talking about when you're practicing. Yes, I think Audya Shanti
Speaker 1: might have been one of your teachers because he said
Speaker 1: to me once because I was asking a little bit
Speaker 1: about this question and sort of talking about will you know,
Speaker 1: and he said, the purpose of will is to get
Speaker 1: you to sit down I practice and at that point
Speaker 1: it becomes completely counterproductive. At that point you have to
Speaker 1: let go of the trying. And I think that's what
Speaker 1: you're saying, absolutely that trying to meditate. Oh I'm going
Speaker 1: to try to calm my mind down all of that.
Speaker 1: It's like looking at the surface of the ocean and going, oh,
Speaker 1: the ocean is choppy. I need a paddle and I've
Speaker 1: got a bam bam bam, bam bam. Flatten out all
Speaker 1: these waves. That doesn't work. It's a game of whack
Speaker 1: a mole. There's always more waves, and actually you're just
Speaker 1: stirring up the water worse, you're creating more turbulence. So
Speaker 1: what you do is you let gravity take over. The
Speaker 1: mind is always trying to gravitate towards joy, peace, boundlessness, nirvana.
Speaker 1: If you just allow gravity to take over, you sink
Speaker 1: a couple of feet below the surface of the ocean,
Speaker 1: and do you discovered it doesn't matter what's going on
Speaker 1: on the surface. Underneath the water is silent and has
Speaker 1: been all at along. See, the mistake is trying to
Speaker 1: silence the mind. The mind is the faculty of thinking.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be generating thoughts. Just like the eye
Speaker 1: is supposed to be seeing colors that you're supposed to
Speaker 1: be hearing sounds. The mind is supposed to be thinking thoughts.
Speaker 1: It's a matter of mixing up mind and awareness. Awareness
Speaker 1: by nature is always silent, as mind by nature is
Speaker 1: always busy, So it does take some guidance. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's something more than just hearing me saying these words,
Speaker 1: At least for a couple of times, you know, someone
Speaker 1: taking you by the hand and oh yeah, and gravity
Speaker 1: really does take over and we we sink down into
Speaker 1: awareness itself, which is even if is going on, that's
Speaker 1: up there someplace that doesn't matter. I don't want to
Speaker 1: spend too much time on the minutia of meditation, but
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask one follow on question, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to share a little bit about how I practice.
Speaker 1: The place I want to be is what you're describing,
Speaker 1: which is just let it all be and just let
Speaker 1: it all happen and just open boundless awareness. What I
Speaker 1: often find, though, is that that open boundless awareness sometimes
Speaker 1: starts to look exactly like my day to day life,
Speaker 1: which is basically one thought after another that I am
Speaker 1: following around. And in those cases, what I will do
Speaker 1: is I will narrow my aperture briefly to something like
Speaker 1: bodily sensations or the breath or the sounds around me,
Speaker 1: and I'll allow that to stabilize a little bit, and
Speaker 1: then I'll kind of let the aperture kind of back
Speaker 1: out to the wide full thing from what you teach
Speaker 1: in the perspective you talk about, is that a useful
Speaker 1: way or not that's a workable strategy, and it's a
Speaker 1: strategy with a lot of historical precedent. Where I've gotten
Speaker 1: to in my own practice, and the way I teach
Speaker 1: is simpler and I think more direct than that, okay,
Speaker 1: because that still involves a certain amount of judgment. Oh
Speaker 1: now I've decided that what's going on here is not satisfactory. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the way that I practice, in the way that
Speaker 1: I teach, is when you realize you've glommed onto something,
Speaker 1: whether you're following this you know, this whole thought story,
Speaker 1: or whether you are resisting something, which is another form
Speaker 1: of hanging on, right, And that's important to understand because
Speaker 1: if I decide, okay, I don't want to be hanging
Speaker 1: onto this. I want to get rid of this, so
Speaker 1: let me push it away. You see, pushing away is
Speaker 1: just a sneaky, quote unquote spiritual way of hanging on.
Speaker 1: So what I teach people and what I do, is
Speaker 1: when you realize you've golombed onto something, you're engaged with it,
Speaker 1: you're wrestling with in any way, relax your grip. Period,
Speaker 1: relax your grip on it. Now, once you relax your
Speaker 1: grip on it, naturally gravity takes over and you're settling
Speaker 1: back down into the self, into boundless awareness. Whatever it
Speaker 1: was you were gripping may continue to be there in time,
Speaker 1: it's going to drop away, but that doesn't matter. That's
Speaker 1: none of your business. This phrase that's gotten very popular
Speaker 1: in meditation and in spirituality generally, which is let go.
Speaker 1: And I used to say that a lot. But what
Speaker 1: I realized is people here let go, and they think
Speaker 1: the thing, whether it's the thoughts and meditation or the
Speaker 1: trauma you're dealing without a meditation, they think let go
Speaker 1: means it's supposed to go away. And you'll hear people say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to let go, but I can't see that's
Speaker 1: a contradiction. That's not really letting go. It's hanging onto
Speaker 1: the expectation that it's supposed to go away. So I've
Speaker 1: stopped saying let go. I say relax your grip. Once
Speaker 1: you relax your grip, now either mind is open to
Speaker 1: three hundred sixty degree boundlessness and whatever continues to be
Speaker 1: there is fine. I think that phrase relax your grip
Speaker 1: is a great one. Let it be is another alternative. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna say let it go, you have to
Speaker 1: follow it up with let it be that takes the
Speaker 1: poison out of it. Now. I want to get to
Speaker 1: the book because it's fantastic. I'm just going to read
Speaker 1: a couple of things that you wrote. In time. I
Speaker 1: began to see the connection between this awakening and the
Speaker 1: books and poems I loved, between the islends and the words.
Speaker 1: There are, of course, many powerful awakening books from the East.
Speaker 1: I'm skipping them all instead. I want to look through
Speaker 1: the Dharma eye and find the one light in the
Speaker 1: most familiar Western literature. I love that talk to me
Speaker 1: about Well, the title of the book is is sort
Speaker 1: of intro into this space, oh Western writer. Also, my
Speaker 1: introduction to Buddhism came through this book. Came through the
Speaker 1: Dharma bumps. Dharma bumps, all right, Caro X, Dharma bumps,
Speaker 1: right right right. I guess I was just giving you
Speaker 1: an opportunity to talk a little bit about what caused
Speaker 1: you to kind of really want to dig into Western
Speaker 1: literature right as a way of illuminating the infinite versus
Speaker 1: just relying on the sort of literature that talks about
Speaker 1: that more directly. So, really, this came out of my
Speaker 1: experience of working at my one and my first and
Speaker 1: last grown up day job, which was teaching English at
Speaker 1: this New Jersey prep school for thirty three years. And meanwhile,
Speaker 1: you know, very seriously contin and youing and my meditation practice,
Speaker 1: my spiritual explorations and reading and hanging out with different
Speaker 1: teachers and and so forth, and running off to India
Speaker 1: and to bat every chance that I got, and then
Speaker 1: you know, coming back in the fall once again, I'm
Speaker 1: teaching Huckleberry Finn. Once again, I'm teaching the Great Catsby.
Speaker 1: Once again, I'm teaching Emily Dickinson. And you know, if
Speaker 1: you're halfway awake, you know, in the regular way, if
Speaker 1: you're not just mailing it in, you know, coming back
Speaker 1: year after year teaching largely the same works, there's a
Speaker 1: tendency to get deeper into them, see things that you missed.
Speaker 1: And especially stumbling back from hanging out in the temples
Speaker 1: and with the Llamas in Tibet and so forth, I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, wait a minute, these dots are starting
Speaker 1: to connect. Also, I should mention that one of my
Speaker 1: early teachers was Maharishi Mihashiogi. When I've talked about finding
Speaker 1: effortless meditation early, my my first version of effortless meditation
Speaker 1: was transcendental meditation, which I learned from from Maharishi, and
Speaker 1: I became a teacher of TM. And in nine seventy
Speaker 1: three he founded a university, Maharishi International University, the only
Speaker 1: college as far as I know, whose initials pose the
Speaker 1: school's essential question, am I you? And so I was
Speaker 1: there at the beginning. I was a teaching assistant. I
Speaker 1: was in the master's degree program in interdisciplinary studies. And
Speaker 1: Marishi's whole premise for this founding this school was, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to teach all the traditional disciplines physics, chemistry,
Speaker 1: literature and so forth in the light of enlightenment. And
Speaker 1: that was the brilliant thing. And and in fact I
Speaker 1: wrote for my final paper for my master's degree program,
Speaker 1: the paper on Enlightenment in the Movies, just maybe ten
Speaker 1: page paper, something which many years later I expanded became
Speaker 1: my book Cinema Nirvana Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies, where
Speaker 1: I take on you know, Casablanca and The God other
Speaker 1: and deliberately I took on films that you would never
Speaker 1: think of as being spiritual or having anything to do
Speaker 1: with enlightenment. So I was kind of put in that direction,
Speaker 1: largely by Marsh. You know, later I had to walk
Speaker 1: away from TM and the TM organization because I started
Speaker 1: getting weird in various ways. And you know, was delighted
Speaker 1: to discover that, Oh, Marsh, she does not have a
Speaker 1: monopoly on effortless meditation, and I can practice this in
Speaker 1: places without the weird politics and finances of the organization.
Speaker 1: You say that to this point, if the infinite is infinite,
Speaker 1: there can't be anywhere it isn't. So again, you used
Speaker 1: a bunch of different words, Tao or Brahman or God
Speaker 1: or you know, all these things. If that light is there,
Speaker 1: it's in everything, and so how do we find it?
Speaker 1: And I think that's one of your gifts is finding
Speaker 1: it in the very common things that a lot of
Speaker 1: people overlook, like the movies or the books. The commoner
Speaker 1: the better, the funkier the better. One of the high
Speaker 1: points of my life was one morning at breakfast, reading
Speaker 1: the side panel of a carton of Tropicana orange juice
Speaker 1: and discovering that it had the perfect, concise, complete meditation instruction.
Speaker 1: Do you remember what they were, Oh, of course, and
Speaker 1: it said quote nothing added, nothing taken away, not from
Speaker 1: concentrate indeed, indeed, that's great, that's funny. Yeah. Well you
Speaker 1: also quote a line from Parliament or Funkadelic, Free your
Speaker 1: ass in your mind will follow, and you said, although
Speaker 1: often it's the other way around. Yes, yes, up, and
Speaker 1: it's the other way around. I think that's in my
Speaker 1: chapter on the Transcendentalists, which I had a jolly time writing,
Speaker 1: going into Emerson and Henry David Thorough and that whole crew.
Speaker 1: I mean, if I had a time machine and I
Speaker 1: could go back and visit and be a fly on
Speaker 1: the wall, the first two places as I would go
Speaker 1: would be the Globe Theater in the time of Shakespeare
Speaker 1: and Conquered Massachusetts in the eighteen forties, and the times
Speaker 1: of the Transcendentalist. Everything that we think of as alternative lifestyles,
Speaker 1: and of of devoting one's life to some kind of
Speaker 1: awakening rather than just making money, and the importing of
Speaker 1: the so called Eastern ideas and finding how to apply
Speaker 1: them in Western life. All that really germinates with that
Speaker 1: crew of eccentrics in eighteen forties and conquered. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: share a birthday with Mr Emerson, obviously not the same year,
Speaker 1: otherwise I would be the miracle of this conversation correct,
Speaker 1: So I've always felt an affinity towards him. And Emerson
Speaker 1: talked about the over soul, and he said, that's his
Speaker 1: plain American name for Brahmin, the transcendent beingness of the
Speaker 1: universe he'd read about in the Hindu texts. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and he did a wonderful job of kind of translating
Speaker 1: this into plain American in a theoretical way. And then
Speaker 1: his protege, Henry David Thorow, was the one who really decided, well,
Speaker 1: I want to put this in practice. You know, everyone
Speaker 1: reads Walden or reads excerpts from Walden in high school
Speaker 1: or in you know, English, one on one in college
Speaker 1: or something, and I think a lot of people miss
Speaker 1: the gist of it, which is that this was his
Speaker 1: version of being assad who the wandering holy men that
Speaker 1: you see in in India who have checked out of
Speaker 1: the regular making a living marriage, all of that and
Speaker 1: just get up in the morning. And Yeah, there's the
Speaker 1: oneness with nature that's you know, very important in thorough
Speaker 1: but more than that, there's the oneness with our own nature,
Speaker 1: with the deepest nature, the nature of being. This as
Speaker 1: you know, I quote in the book. He gives this
Speaker 1: one descriptions about half a page or something of just
Speaker 1: sitting in his doorway and not realizing that he's gone
Speaker 1: from the morning until midday, until suddenly he hears some
Speaker 1: sound kind of startles him, and he talks about as
Speaker 1: he's sitting there, the birds flying through his cabin, flying
Speaker 1: in and out of the doors. And I realized that
Speaker 1: that's a metaphor for exactly the openness, the non selective
Speaker 1: openness and meditation we were talking about before, that you
Speaker 1: just let yourself be like a house with all its
Speaker 1: doors and windows wide open, just let everything blow through.
Speaker 1: I think that's a Suzuki quote something around like let
Speaker 1: thoughts come in the front door and go right out
Speaker 1: the back door. When you're just talking about the row
Speaker 1: there and going to Walden. That made me think of
Speaker 1: Karo Wak And I don't remember which book this was in,
Speaker 1: maybe it's in Dharma Bumbs, but it's always stuck with me.
Speaker 1: Where he went somewhere like his job was to be
Speaker 1: like the forest overlook, you know, and he was basically
Speaker 1: like out in the middle of nowhere. That's Dharma Bums.
Speaker 1: Gary Snyder, who's called Jaffie writer in the book introduces
Speaker 1: them to that you can get a gig as a
Speaker 1: fire lookout. Yeah. Yeah, I've always thought that would be amazing.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because my introduction to Buddhism, as I said,
Speaker 1: two things came together at the same time. One was
Speaker 1: I had a high school science teacher who introduced me
Speaker 1: to Zen Buddhism. I don't know why he thought I
Speaker 1: would want to know this, but he did. And then
Speaker 1: around the same time, I was getting into Karouac and
Speaker 1: stumbled into the Dharma bumps and it sort of all
Speaker 1: came together. Now, from there I pursued the downward excesses
Speaker 1: of karo Wac for the next number of years, not
Speaker 1: the meditative aspects of Karoak that certainly was my opening.
Speaker 1: Let's change directions to another Western classic that I don't
Speaker 1: think you taught in your prep school, but we'll be
Speaker 1: familiar to all our listeners, which is the cat in
Speaker 1: the hat? Right, where is the infinite and the dharma
Speaker 1: in the cat in the hat? You know he's a
Speaker 1: zen prankster, right. It's interesting. The premise of the book,
Speaker 1: the presenting problem, as a therapist would say, is that
Speaker 1: these two kids are bored. It's a rainy day, they
Speaker 1: can't go outside in place, so they're bored. They're just
Speaker 1: sitting looking out the window at the rain and being bored.
Speaker 1: Sally and I the narrators, the boy and his sister Sally.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting that it starts with sitting. And all
Speaker 1: we could do was sit, sit, sit, sit, And we
Speaker 1: did not like it, not one little bit. You know,
Speaker 1: this is what we're saying before about about showing up
Speaker 1: for your meditation practice. You know, I'm sure a lot
Speaker 1: of the monks who were there practicing with the Buddha.
Speaker 1: Just because they lived two thousand years ago and war
Speaker 1: robes doesn't mean that they were a different kind of people.
Speaker 1: They were Oh, man, are we really gonna sit? Sit?
Speaker 1: Sits it again? And in fact it was in the
Speaker 1: rainy season. And I talked about this in the chapter.
Speaker 1: The whole tradition of spiritual retreat, of meditation retreat, of
Speaker 1: people being together as opposed to just solitary you know,
Speaker 1: ascetics practicing out in the jungle that was started by
Speaker 1: the buddhup because he started to have so many disciples
Speaker 1: with him as they wandered from village to village that
Speaker 1: they couldn't go during the rainy season in northern India,
Speaker 1: that's monsoon and it's hard to travel. And also then
Speaker 1: if you walk across the rice fields while they're flooded
Speaker 1: with rain, you destroy the rice and you destroy the
Speaker 1: livelihood of the local people. So during the rainy season,
Speaker 1: they'd find some caves or abandoned you know, house or
Speaker 1: building or something, and they would they would have their retreat,
Speaker 1: they would do deep meditation. So there's that lovely parallel
Speaker 1: right there. And and what happens. You get bored now
Speaker 1: at the same time. This is the mid fifties. You know,
Speaker 1: I was in the first grade. I had to include
Speaker 1: the book because this is the book that made me
Speaker 1: fall in love with reading. Dr Seuss said his proudest
Speaker 1: achievement was getting the Dick and Jane books out of
Speaker 1: the schools. Dick and Jane books, see Dick Run, Dick
Speaker 1: Can Run, Run, Dick Run. It was like, just kill
Speaker 1: me now. So it's this suburban home. The kids have
Speaker 1: been left home alone. By the way, back in those
Speaker 1: days happened all the time. We were all left home alone.
Speaker 1: We would go out and play unsupervised. That was a
Speaker 1: different time. And the kids are sitting there and there's
Speaker 1: this really fascinating picture of them sitting. It's a double
Speaker 1: page spread, and at the far end, on the reader's left,
Speaker 1: there's Sally and I looking up in shock from their
Speaker 1: seats by the window as the door is flung open
Speaker 1: and uninvited. The cat, leaning back like keep on trucking right,
Speaker 1: leaning back with his eyes closed, just con strides uninvited
Speaker 1: with a big confidence smile, into the house. He's gonna
Speaker 1: mix things up. You know, you're having your house turned
Speaker 1: upside down? Right, your worldview. You think you've got it
Speaker 1: all figured out, you know, what's what, You've got your
Speaker 1: nice middle class life. Then along comes, you know, in
Speaker 1: your case, Eric, along came Karroac. Caroac was your cat
Speaker 1: in the right and for a while, it creates chaos, right,
Speaker 1: and you followed all the karo Ax words. Fortunately you
Speaker 1: had the good sense to know when to stop with that,
Speaker 1: which Karoac did not. You know, Caroac just died, a miserable,
Speaker 1: nasty alcoholic. So here comes this element of chaos, and
Speaker 1: it's gonna turn everything upside down. Now. In the book,
Speaker 1: I reproduced this painting that I fell in love with
Speaker 1: when I was in Rome, which is Carravaggio's calling of St. Matthew,
Speaker 1: and the layout is exactly like this picture from the
Speaker 1: Cat in the Hat. Over here on the viewers left
Speaker 1: here is these five tax collectors and tax collectors in
Speaker 1: the days of Jesus. They were like the local mafia thugs.
Speaker 1: They were there to, you know, shake you down for
Speaker 1: however much money they can get out of you. And
Speaker 1: they worked on commission, so they were not beloved people.
Speaker 1: Jesus was reviled for hanging out with the tax collectors
Speaker 1: and the prostitutes. So they're they're sitting there at this
Speaker 1: table counting their take. That's their apple cart. Everything's fine.
Speaker 1: Everything right over here on the right, they've just come
Speaker 1: through the door, just like the Cat in the Hat
Speaker 1: is Jesus, and he's got St. Peter along with him.
Speaker 1: And by the way, all the tax collectors are dressed
Speaker 1: in contemporary dress and Carravaggio's time, Jesus and and St.
Speaker 1: Peter they're in robes and sandals, so they're coming out
Speaker 1: of a different dimension. And there's this there's this just
Speaker 1: tractor beam of divine light pouring through the door with
Speaker 1: them and Levi, the guy who's about to become Saint.
Speaker 1: Matthew is looking up and Jesus is pointing to him,
Speaker 1: and you know, and it says in the story, he said,
Speaker 1: out of those guys, he somehow knew the same way
Speaker 1: that your science teacher knew he saw And I, as
Speaker 1: a former high school teacher, I know how he knew
Speaker 1: you had this spark in your eye. Every year I
Speaker 1: would see it in a couple of kids. Right. So
Speaker 1: so Jesus in the same way knows he out of
Speaker 1: those five guys, he points to Matthew and he says,
Speaker 1: follow me. And Matthew was going, who me? Are you
Speaker 1: talking to me? And so it's this archetypal situation when
Speaker 1: that thing comes into your life. And it's interesting because
Speaker 1: it's with one hand he's still hanging onto his money.
Speaker 1: The one hand is still on the table hanging on
Speaker 1: to his money. So that's the moment, the moment of decision.
Speaker 1: Am I going to plunge into this world of opening?
Speaker 1: I loved reading that chapter. You also talk about thing
Speaker 1: one and thing too. So most people I think who
Speaker 1: are listening cat in the hats pretty pervasive in in
Speaker 1: Western culture. So but Thing one and thing to the
Speaker 1: cat basically unleashes and they are an extra level of
Speaker 1: mayhem making. And you say, in our own lives, there's
Speaker 1: always a thing one and a thing to tearing things up,
Speaker 1: the pairs of opposites, playing bad tricks on us, loss
Speaker 1: and gain, pleasure and pain, fame and shame, ambition and sloth.
Speaker 1: The list goes on. I won't keep reading all of it,
Speaker 1: but I love that idea. It's always been one of
Speaker 1: my favorite teachings from Buddhism is that idea of like
Speaker 1: the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows, Like
Speaker 1: that's life, you know. We all have our thing one
Speaker 1: and thing too. Yeah, and again that's the duality. As
Speaker 1: long as we're viewing the world in dualistic terms, we're
Speaker 1: screwed one way or another, you know. And when you
Speaker 1: see whole religions or the way people have in my view,
Speaker 1: misinterpreted religions in dualistic terms, where okay, there's the this
Speaker 1: you know, fight going between the two wolves, or between
Speaker 1: right sin and virtue, and ultimately that always gets projected
Speaker 1: onto other people and it becomes the good people versus
Speaker 1: the bad people, and someone always winds up getting hurt
Speaker 1: or killed. We've used the term multiple times, dualism, nondualism.
Speaker 1: We should probably define some of these things for people
Speaker 1: who are less familiar with that terminology. Pick either one
Speaker 1: of them, dualism or non dualism, you know, come at
Speaker 1: it whichever direction you want. But right, well, dualism is
Speaker 1: the way the world appears to us when it's filtered
Speaker 1: through the thinking mind. Right, it appears that, oh, there's
Speaker 1: I and you, there's self and other. It seems very
Speaker 1: clear to me that I am the self and you Eric,
Speaker 1: You're you're another, You're just you're another person. If we
Speaker 1: start to break it down to look at it a
Speaker 1: little bit interesting, eight billion people on the planet, seven
Speaker 1: billion million are other. One of them is self. Somehow
Speaker 1: I got elected, I got a golden ticket. I got
Speaker 1: to be the one who is this center, right, the
Speaker 1: center of the universe, the one whose joy and sorrow matters, right,
Speaker 1: the one who's pain and pleasure matters. Right. You know,
Speaker 1: I could say it matters, and I feel like I
Speaker 1: should feel like it matters, But it really doesn't matter
Speaker 1: as much to me whether you have a toothache as
Speaker 1: it matters to me that I have a toothache. So
Speaker 1: what happens in our explorations, our practice, our spiritual inquiry,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it is we start examining
Speaker 1: this notion of self and other. And you know, in
Speaker 1: Tibetan practice, there's a lot of exercises where you give
Speaker 1: the golden ticket of selfhood to the other person and
Speaker 1: you take on the ticket of being just one of
Speaker 1: the eight billion others. And it turns out, oh, you
Speaker 1: can feel it this right. Oh, it's such a relief.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of work being the self being this
Speaker 1: this construct. And you can bring this, by the way,
Speaker 1: into daily life. Like you're sitting at the red light
Speaker 1: and you're running late. You're frustrated because the light is red.
Speaker 1: You're stuck in the pain, in the suffering of the
Speaker 1: red light. But if a momentarily, what if I give
Speaker 1: the golden ticket of selfhood to all the people who
Speaker 1: are going on the cross street, then I can just, oh,
Speaker 1: just share with them the joy of having the green light.
Speaker 1: And this is showing how the suffering really is a
Speaker 1: self created thing, and it comes from being stuck in
Speaker 1: this dualistic worldview where I am the self and everything
Speaker 1: else is not the self. That's the dualism of subject
Speaker 1: and object. Closely related to that is the dualism of
Speaker 1: the seeker and the goal. I the self am seeking
Speaker 1: and somewhere there's this goal, there's this nirvana, there's this
Speaker 1: having this boundlessness. In a way, this is the easiest
Speaker 1: place to get at first us in meditation, that distinction,
Speaker 1: that sense of an eye, which is a you know,
Speaker 1: this little ego neatly sewn into a bag of skin,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of melts away and there's just awareness,
Speaker 1: And am I resting in the awareness? Or am I
Speaker 1: resting as the awareness? You know? That all kind of
Speaker 1: melts that duality. There isn't one thing resting in the
Speaker 1: other thing. And more and more you start to live,
Speaker 1: you start to experience that there's only this one ocean
Speaker 1: of existence. You know. Over here it rises up as
Speaker 1: a Dean wave, and over there it rises up as
Speaker 1: an Eric wave. And we can wave to each other
Speaker 1: in all these fun ways and interact, but it's it's
Speaker 1: really the ocean waving to itself. Back to the cat
Speaker 1: in the hat for a minute, I just simply cannot
Speaker 1: let this go by without mentioning it, which is you
Speaker 1: invite us to take a long look at the cover
Speaker 1: of the cat in the hat, and I have to
Speaker 1: say this was a deeply pleasurable experience for me. The
Speaker 1: way you walk through it. We don't have time to
Speaker 1: do at all, but I am going to point out
Speaker 1: the beginning of it. You say, here we see the
Speaker 1: cat's formal, almost presidential portrait ready to go on a
Speaker 1: dollar bill or maybe a three dollar bill. He gazes
Speaker 1: out us in three quarters profile with what has been
Speaker 1: described as a smile you might find on the Mona
Speaker 1: Lisa after her first martini. That made my day. Everything
Speaker 1: you do from there on, still analyzing the cat, is
Speaker 1: absolutely brilliant. Nicole, who helps with the show, sent me over.
Speaker 1: She said, I want to make sure you've got this.
Speaker 1: You sent me an image, you know, high res image
Speaker 1: of the front of the book, so I could I
Speaker 1: could go through the activity right good, the Mona Lisa
Speaker 1: after having a martini. That's beautiful. Yeah, as I say,
Speaker 1: that's what someone else said, I wish I wish I'd
Speaker 1: thought of that. I wish I had to. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But what I was able to bring to the table
Speaker 1: there was the fact that you know, I've been with
Speaker 1: a wonderful teacher, Charles Janu, who actually the book is
Speaker 1: dedicated to who's this wonderful Buddhist teacher from Switzerland and
Speaker 1: a world recognized expert on iconography. You know, when you
Speaker 1: look at any image, like the image of Ganesh there
Speaker 1: on my altar, every detail, the fact that his trunk,
Speaker 1: whether it's turning to the right or to the left,
Speaker 1: that all is saying something. And it's not that I
Speaker 1: expect someone to waltz through my front door with an
Speaker 1: elephant head. But that's all telling the story of awakening,
Speaker 1: of enlightenment, various aspects of it. So Charles walked us
Speaker 1: through all these temples and showed, Okay, this Buddha, you know,
Speaker 1: is wearing a purple undershirt, and that signifies this was
Speaker 1: this one's wearing a red undershirt. That signifies that. So
Speaker 1: I took that same approach of iconography and applied it
Speaker 1: to the cat and the hat, looking at every detail,
Speaker 1: which also that made me alert to the fact that
Speaker 1: of the seven dwarfs, five of them have brown eyes, dopey,
Speaker 1: the holy, innocent, the child, because to enter into the
Speaker 1: Kingdom of Heaven you have to be like a little child,
Speaker 1: has baby blues, grumpy. Who is the aspect of us
Speaker 1: that is resisting resisting the light has little tiny dots.
Speaker 1: He doesn't have pupils. He literally can't let the light in. Fascinating. Well,
Speaker 1: I have blue eyes, so maybe maybe maybe there's hope.
Speaker 1: Certainly plenty of people are gonna be like, yeah, he's dopey.
Speaker 1: We got that right. All right, Let's jump around to
Speaker 1: a couple other books. JD. Salinger. We sort of touched
Speaker 1: on this one a little bit. There's another section that
Speaker 1: I wanted to hit on, which I thought was great.
Speaker 1: Was your talking about in some of his post Catcher
Speaker 1: in Their Eye work. He's speaking through Buddy Glass and
Speaker 1: the family resident writer says, please accept for me this
Speaker 1: unpretentious bouquet of very early blooming parentheses. And you say
Speaker 1: that that bouquet may well be Salinger's model of the
Speaker 1: human mind, which is pros aspires to reproduce thought within thought,
Speaker 1: within thought within thought, at the inmost core of which
Speaker 1: is a perfect fragrant emptiness. And I just love that
Speaker 1: because isn't that the mind thought within thought, within thought
Speaker 1: within thought. But the key thing is at the center
Speaker 1: of it is the fragrant emptiness. That's the awareness which
Speaker 1: is always silent, invisible, in substantial, intangible, boundless and it's fragrant.
Speaker 1: You know, this is in Hindu philosophy where they say,
Speaker 1: you know, sut is chit is a nanda being. This
Speaker 1: is awareness, is happiness, and that's why the mind is
Speaker 1: attracted to it. My old teacher Marushi used to say
Speaker 1: that we're like a guide as the sun is rising,
Speaker 1: a thirsty man trying to sip all the little dew
Speaker 1: drops off the blades of grass before the sun rises
Speaker 1: and makes them all evaporate. And then one day you
Speaker 1: turn around and you discover all along there's been this
Speaker 1: vast reservoir right behind you. All right, So we've been
Speaker 1: trying to get these little drops of joy and happiness,
Speaker 1: peace stability from all the different things in our environment.
Speaker 1: And the problem is they don't cooperate. They don't hold still.
Speaker 1: You know, your adorable little kittens become cats. You know,
Speaker 1: your favorite restaurant they change chefs, your favorite shirt turns
Speaker 1: into a dust drag. You know, the Buddhist teaching of impermanence,
Speaker 1: it's all going away all the time. And also it
Speaker 1: can give us great joy sometimes, but it's finite joy.
Speaker 1: Only the infinite can give us infinite joy. And you
Speaker 1: know that's the bad news. The good news is tag
Speaker 1: your ip. Yeah. In the section on the Great Gatsby,
Speaker 1: you say, the belief that someone else has a special
Speaker 1: essence that we lack perpetuates our sense of incompleteness, and
Speaker 1: then identifying the light with any external thing is dangerous,
Speaker 1: not only because we might not get the thing, but
Speaker 1: because we might then we'll find out that having can't
Speaker 1: match the grandness of our yearning. And I find that
Speaker 1: statement so true that, like, some people never get the
Speaker 1: thing that they think will make them happy, and that's
Speaker 1: a constant frustration. Other people get the thing that they
Speaker 1: think will make them happy and doesn't work. Or I
Speaker 1: think the part that's tricky as it works for just
Speaker 1: a little while. If it didn't work at all, it
Speaker 1: would be so easy to see through the illusion. You'd
Speaker 1: be like, ah, this stuff doesn't work at all. But
Speaker 1: it does. It's temporarily, temporarily like I feel really good,
Speaker 1: this is great, and then it's gone. It's every Christmas
Speaker 1: morning of your childhood. Mommy, Mommy, please buy me the
Speaker 1: g I Joe. I'll never ask for anything else again.
Speaker 1: If I can only have the g I Joe, that
Speaker 1: will be it it. And you know, and that it.
Speaker 1: The implicit assumption is it's the one thing that will
Speaker 1: make me so happy my head will explode like the
Speaker 1: ultimate orgasm, and then I'll never be capable of desiring
Speaker 1: another thing again. And it really seems like it for
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes, and then then onto the next thing, onto
Speaker 1: the next thing. And it's because awareness is infinite and
Speaker 1: we're trying to fill it up with finite things. The
Speaker 1: only thing that can fill up infinite awareness is itself.
Speaker 1: That's why meditation is important, because that's where awareness rests
Speaker 1: in itself and is able to plumb its own infinitude.
Speaker 1: So early on in the book, you say that the
Speaker 1: stage is taught, and I've gradually confirmed what happens. If
Speaker 1: we keep opening to the light of being, we can
Speaker 1: deal gracefully with all life's noise and business on the outside.
Speaker 1: Wall on the inside were silent and crystal clear is
Speaker 1: an empty mirror. So I want to ask a question
Speaker 1: a little bit about kind of what we've been talking about.
Speaker 1: We were just talking about the nature of desire. It
Speaker 1: replicates itself, right, and we know from the way biology
Speaker 1: sort of has us wired. We're wired that way. You know,
Speaker 1: we're wired to not eat once and be sufficiently full forever,
Speaker 1: because we wouldn't survive that way. Right. So you've got
Speaker 1: this biology going on that does seem to promote a
Speaker 1: certain dissatisfaction, a certain wanting and craving that that seems
Speaker 1: wired into us. And then there's this infinity that we
Speaker 1: are part of, that we are how do the two
Speaker 1: work together in reality? So, say you've grasped the infinite,
Speaker 1: you've got some sense of this? Is it simply in
Speaker 1: the same way in meditation, you watch thoughts come up,
Speaker 1: you watch them go The same thing is starting to
Speaker 1: happen with desire. You watch it come up. You still
Speaker 1: feel it because you're a human being, you've got that,
Speaker 1: but you're able to watch it come up and watch
Speaker 1: it go away. I'm just kind of curious, like in
Speaker 1: your own life, Like how does that show up in work? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You know a lot of people when they read the
Speaker 1: teachings and they read that, oh, this whole root of
Speaker 1: suffering has to do with desire, I think it's more
Speaker 1: misunderstood than understood, and they think that, oh, therefore, so
Speaker 1: the way to awakening is to try to suppress my desires, right,
Speaker 1: or if they think, oh, this means I can never
Speaker 1: have sex again, or I can never enjoy a good
Speaker 1: meal again. Then they get well and I'm sorry, it's
Speaker 1: not for me. That's not what it means. As I
Speaker 1: understand it. There's what is, and then there's what the
Speaker 1: thinking mind superimposes on top of what is. There's this
Speaker 1: spiritual cliche I'm sure you're familiar with. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of truth to it. Pain is mandatory, suffering as optional.
Speaker 1: You know, the fact that we've got these carbon based
Speaker 1: bodies means that we're you know, especially as we get older,
Speaker 1: somethings start to hurt, some things, you know. But then
Speaker 1: the mind, the way the mind hangs onto the stuff,
Speaker 1: spin stories around it, runs it through this echo chamber,
Speaker 1: and that's the suffering. Even in the law, you know,
Speaker 1: you sue for pain and suffering, that it recognizes their
Speaker 1: two different things. Now, in a similar way, there's the
Speaker 1: biologically rooted desires and then there's the way the mind
Speaker 1: runs them through the echo chamber and creates all this
Speaker 1: drama around your sexual stuff and your eatings. It's very
Speaker 1: interesting to be on a silent meditation retreat, which I
Speaker 1: recommend everyone get a chance to do at least once
Speaker 1: in your life, whether it's a weekend or you know,
Speaker 1: I've done that for sometimes, you know, a month or
Speaker 1: more at a time, and it's great. You sit there
Speaker 1: and it's like your one break from stuff is getting
Speaker 1: the meal, and you think, oh, this is my one
Speaker 1: great chance for distraction. And you're sitting there in the
Speaker 1: mess hall and looking around at all the other silent people,
Speaker 1: like like cows on the hill, chewing their cud. And
Speaker 1: what I often would find was that I would take
Speaker 1: the normal amount of food I would usually take, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't finish it because for once I was actually
Speaker 1: paying attention to the act of eating instead of being
Speaker 1: all caught up in conversation, which you know, in regular life,
Speaker 1: and I'm not on retreat, I do all the time.
Speaker 1: I do with you know, my wife, for friends. It's delightful,
Speaker 1: it's great, but it's also a very valuable experience to
Speaker 1: just be eating and realizing that if you pay attention,
Speaker 1: I should write a diet book. This is right. This
Speaker 1: is the thing I do all the time when not
Speaker 1: on retreat. After every forkful or spoonful of food, I
Speaker 1: put the utensil down because otherwise, you know, you see
Speaker 1: people they shovel it in, and they're not tasting what
Speaker 1: they're eating because they're like covering with the utensil, getting
Speaker 1: ready to take the next bite. So when we do
Speaker 1: this and we're able to start kind of taking the
Speaker 1: mind and its carelessness and all that out of the
Speaker 1: equation and really experience and really enjoy, paradoxically, we wind
Speaker 1: up much less haut up and having to have more
Speaker 1: and more and more. Let's pivot to another book, which
Speaker 1: is Huckleberry Finn. You really bring up kindness a lot
Speaker 1: in that chapter, So let's explore the idea of kindness
Speaker 1: through the lens of Huckleberry Finn maybe to start, and
Speaker 1: then more broadly, in that chapter, I do a lot
Speaker 1: of drawing the parallels between huck Finn's journey and the
Speaker 1: journey of Gotama on his way to becoming the Buddha.
Speaker 1: You know, in both cases they had kind of two
Speaker 1: false models that they had to escape from. Right in
Speaker 1: the case of the Buddha, first he was being raised
Speaker 1: as a prince or something having every luxury, and then
Speaker 1: he realized that that life of gratifying, the sense of
Speaker 1: self indulgence, that was not it. So he went to
Speaker 1: the other extreme being an ascetic in the forest and
Speaker 1: supposedly living on one grain of rice a day. Then
Speaker 1: realized that wasn't it. And the key moment for him
Speaker 1: is a moment of kindness where this village girl, Sujata
Speaker 1: supposedly met him on this spot on the river which
Speaker 1: I've been to. There's a little shrine there. It's very sweet,
Speaker 1: and she offered him a simple plate of kind of
Speaker 1: this rice pudding meal, simple nourishing, and he accepted it.
Speaker 1: And his buddies, his fellow ascetics, this guy's off the
Speaker 1: program and they abandoned him. And then that moment of
Speaker 1: accepting that act of kindness, it's accepting human nous, the humanists,
Speaker 1: that's not this extreme or that extreme. Then he's ready
Speaker 1: to sit down under the Bodhi tree and do his
Speaker 1: final meditation and awaken. So kindness is really the catalyst now.
Speaker 1: In the same way, huck Finn has the two extremes,
Speaker 1: which conveniently Mark Twain puts on the two banks of
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River. On the one bank, he's being raised
Speaker 1: by the widow Douglas, who's trying to adopt him and
Speaker 1: make him wear starchy clothes and go to school and
Speaker 1: say prayers and all that, and it's too restrictive, right,
Speaker 1: too tight. Then his pap, his horrible, drunkard, bigot father, violent,
Speaker 1: awful person, kidnaps him and takes him to a little
Speaker 1: shanty on the on the other bank of the river
Speaker 1: where it's just chaos and violence, and he almost kills
Speaker 1: Hawk while he's drunk. So Huck's got to escape again
Speaker 1: from the two extremes. What does he do? He goes
Speaker 1: down the middle, he gets into the river, and there's
Speaker 1: this one bit if I can read this, please because
Speaker 1: it's just just about my favorite thing, just about my
Speaker 1: favorite discovery that went into this whole book. So this
Speaker 1: is when he's just escaped from PAP's cabin and and
Speaker 1: he's got this canoe that he's salvaged. I didn't lose
Speaker 1: no time. The next minute I was a spinning down stream,
Speaker 1: soft but quick, in the shade of the bank. By
Speaker 1: the way, if you want to learn how to write,
Speaker 1: read Mark Twain out loud. His sense of the music
Speaker 1: of sentences is just unparalleled. I got out amongst the
Speaker 1: driftwood and then laid down in the bottom of the
Speaker 1: canoe and let her float. I laid there and had
Speaker 1: a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe,
Speaker 1: looking away into the sky, not a cloud in it.
Speaker 1: The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down
Speaker 1: on your back in the moonshine, I never knowed it before.
Speaker 1: That's so beautiful. And then I write, this is about
Speaker 1: as clear a baptism in the transcendent as anyone has
Speaker 1: ever written. After the hectic scramble to get clear of
Speaker 1: pap Huck, let's go lying on his back in a
Speaker 1: posture of utter passivity. He gives up rowing and steering,
Speaker 1: allows the boat to merge anonymously with the mass of
Speaker 1: drifting timbers and basques in the moonlight. This is how
Speaker 1: to meditate. Let her float, and the result is a
Speaker 1: vision of unobstructed boundlessness. The sky looks ever so deep. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's wonderful. I love it. Did Mark Twain have any
Speaker 1: sense of the parallels there with the Buddha and the
Speaker 1: and the two banks or do you just think it? No,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't make it any less real. I'm just
Speaker 1: curious whether he was exposed. Yeah. And I made a point,
Speaker 1: and I say this in the introduction to the book,
Speaker 1: that some of the authors that I treat did have
Speaker 1: a conscious overt explicit connection, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Thorough,
Speaker 1: the great lesser known Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great frustrated
Speaker 1: Catholic priest who was writing ecstatic love poems to God.
Speaker 1: So for them it was explicit, but most of them
Speaker 1: it's implicit. Dr Seuss was not thinking about Zan Prankster's
Speaker 1: I Can pretty was not thinking about Carravaggio and the
Speaker 1: calling of St. Matthew. To me, it's much more fun
Speaker 1: in a sense when it's not deliberate, because then that
Speaker 1: gives me more to do. There's more of a game
Speaker 1: to play. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're going to have a
Speaker 1: post show conversation where we're going to talk about a
Speaker 1: great chapter that brings together the Star Spangled Banner, Mr.
Speaker 1: Rogers and Respect by Aretha Franklin. But before we do
Speaker 1: that in the post show conversation, I do want to
Speaker 1: hit just the very end of it so that everybody
Speaker 1: can get it. And you say that as you're talking
Speaker 1: about Respect by Aretha Franklin, you talk about the idea
Speaker 1: of respectate book again, Relook, look again, look back. Respect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: share a little bit about that, because this is a
Speaker 1: beautiful way to wrap up the book. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: all the great teachers, all the stages tell us we're here,
Speaker 1: We're walking around in nirvana. Right at the end of
Speaker 1: the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, the Kingdom of Heaven
Speaker 1: is spread upon the earth, and people don't see it,
Speaker 1: you know, And I like to imagine Jesus follows up
Speaker 1: by going, go figure, all right, how do they not
Speaker 1: see it? And you know, you may have experienced this,
Speaker 1: Eric when you've come out of a really good meditation,
Speaker 1: and sometimes you know, famously people when they kind of
Speaker 1: take the shortcut to something at least somewhat resembling awakening,
Speaker 1: you know, through psychedelics, they're like, oh, how did I
Speaker 1: miss it? There's no additional experience I need. I somehow
Speaker 1: missed that the world as I've been experiencing it. This
Speaker 1: is it. The Buddha said, how wonderful, How wonderful all
Speaker 1: things are enlightenment, just as they are. Right. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's the Homer Simpson moment that how did we miss it?
Speaker 1: It's respectate re look look again, what did I miss?
Speaker 1: Because I was wrapped up in an idea of this.
Speaker 1: This is just a cup of tea. This is not
Speaker 1: the infinite, you know, and that takes us all the
Speaker 1: way back to the very beginning of the book, where
Speaker 1: William Blake says, you know, hold infinity in the palm
Speaker 1: of your hand, you know, like just you know, take
Speaker 1: a grain of sand or a flower, or your hand itself, anything,
Speaker 1: look at it long enough, and that your ideas about it,
Speaker 1: that oh, this is just this thing, this is not
Speaker 1: the infinite, starts to melt away. Yeah, I'm gonna read
Speaker 1: uh sentence or two that I think is so beautiful.
Speaker 1: You don't see God smiling at you through the eyes
Speaker 1: of your child, or your dog, your ex or your
Speaker 1: unfavorite politician. Look again, you don't see boundless, invisible love,
Speaker 1: silently laughing through each moment, even as you frantically try
Speaker 1: to change the flat tire on your way to the
Speaker 1: job interview. Look again, meanwhile, look at yourself and your
Speaker 1: fellow beans. And if you don't yet see us all
Speaker 1: as the same one, pure light, just assume it for
Speaker 1: now and treat everyone accordingly. That's so beautiful. That's pretty good.
Speaker 1: Did I write that? You did? You did? And then
Speaker 1: you quote to take it back to the title of
Speaker 1: the book, Koac, where so much of this thing for
Speaker 1: you and I has a meaning? Is Kroac said, all
Speaker 1: is well, practice kindness. Heaven is nigh simple. That's Jack
Speaker 1: is best. That is well. Dean, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming on. You and I will continue in the
Speaker 1: post show conversation for a few minutes. Listeners. If you'd
Speaker 1: like access to the post show conversation as well as
Speaker 1: all kinds of other great things, go to one you
Speaker 1: feed dot net slash join and we will have links
Speaker 1: in the show notes to Dean and all of his
Speaker 1: work as well and to your zoom sessions. So thank
Speaker 1: you Dean. It's been such a pleasure to have you
Speaker 1: on again. Thank you Eric has really been great. If
Speaker 1: what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider
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