Speaker 1: When you're trying to relax or you're trying to be
Speaker 1: happy and not think about things. The part of the
Speaker 1: brain you're trying to shut down is the part you're
Speaker 1: using to do the shutting down. Welcome to the one
Speaker 1: you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think ring true. And yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is
Speaker 1: Edward Slingerland, Research Chair and Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition
Speaker 1: at the University of British Columbia. Edward is also the
Speaker 1: Director of Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium a k
Speaker 1: A CIRQUE and the co director for the Center of
Speaker 1: Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture. His new book is Trying
Speaker 1: Not to Try, the Art of Science and Spontaneity. Here's
Speaker 1: the interview. Hi, Ted, Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks
Speaker 1: for having me. Yeah, I'm happy to have you on
Speaker 1: your book, Trying Not to Try Ancient China, Modern Science
Speaker 1: and the Power of Spontaneity. I was really excited to
Speaker 1: read it, and I was excited to see that the
Speaker 1: Dowd Ching is a part of it that you have
Speaker 1: in there often, which is a book that I have
Speaker 1: long been a fan of it. I really I thought
Speaker 1: your analysis of it was really interesting, and I also
Speaker 1: loved the line where you hazarded a guest that more
Speaker 1: joints have been rolled and since burned in the presence
Speaker 1: of that book than any other. Yeah. I don't have
Speaker 1: any I don't have any references for that. It's speculation.
Speaker 1: I think it's saying about a trade book you can
Speaker 1: you can go out on a limb. I think it's
Speaker 1: a decent guest. I think it's a decent guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we'll start with the parable like we always do. So.
Speaker 1: Our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's
Speaker 1: based on the parable of two wolves, where there's a
Speaker 1: grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about
Speaker 1: it for a second, and he looks up at his
Speaker 1: grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the
Speaker 1: grandfather 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. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: with regard to the work I do, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of ways you can see this parable connecting with the
Speaker 1: this paradox of how you try not to try. So
Speaker 1: you can think about at its most basic, this tension
Speaker 1: you have when you're trying to relax, when you're trying
Speaker 1: to be spontaneous, is the conscious mind fighting with the
Speaker 1: unconscious mind. So's whnt to think of them as the
Speaker 1: two wolves. You've got the trying part of you that's commenting,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's giving you guidance. It's trying to get
Speaker 1: you to do things. And then you've got your embodied mind.
Speaker 1: You've got your mind that actually knows how to do things.
Speaker 1: That's that's trying to take over, and that's the tension
Speaker 1: between them. And I think you see this at and
Speaker 1: I think the best way to understand that the paradox
Speaker 1: is this game called mind ball that I talked about
Speaker 1: in the beginning of the book, where you're, uh, you're
Speaker 1: hooked up to an e G monitor and you're trying
Speaker 1: to push a ball to the other end of the table.
Speaker 1: And the way you push it is by relaxing, because
Speaker 1: the e G monitors picking up alphin data ways, which
Speaker 1: is what we produce when we're relaxed. And when you're
Speaker 1: playing this game, you know that you can't try. You
Speaker 1: know that the way to win it is to let
Speaker 1: go of winning. And it really does feel as if
Speaker 1: there are two forces in you fighting for dominance, and
Speaker 1: one of them is the conscious mind saying, oh, look
Speaker 1: the balls rolling back towards you. What should you do?
Speaker 1: How do you relax? Oh you're losing. What are you
Speaker 1: gonna do? And there's a part of you that that
Speaker 1: kind of knows how to relax that that you need
Speaker 1: to focus on. So if you want to think of
Speaker 1: shifting your attention as a kind of feeding of the
Speaker 1: internal parts of yourself, I think that's one of the
Speaker 1: ways in which the way you resolve the tension and
Speaker 1: the paradox of of trying not to try is by
Speaker 1: feeding the embodied mind, the part of you that has
Speaker 1: the skills, has the ability, but needs to be released,
Speaker 1: if you want to think of it that way. From
Speaker 1: the from the Clutches of the conscious mind. In your book,
Speaker 1: you describe a couple of thoughts or philosophies from from
Speaker 1: ancient China. One is away and the other is duh.
Speaker 1: Could you maybe tell us briefly what those are in
Speaker 1: context your book? And then I want to kind of
Speaker 1: cycle back to that idea of the unconscious and conscious
Speaker 1: mind and and the way that that that ties to
Speaker 1: those two concepts. Right, So basically, way literally means not
Speaker 1: not doing or no doing or no trying. Is sometimes
Speaker 1: translated as in action, but I think that's too passive
Speaker 1: a translation, because it's it's about a state where you
Speaker 1: lose a sense of yourself as an agent. You are relaxed,
Speaker 1: you don't feel as if you're exerting any effort and
Speaker 1: yet everything works perfectly, so you're very skillful in the world.
Speaker 1: You move through it perfectly. So it's a little bit
Speaker 1: like being in when athletes talk about being in the zone.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like that sort of state. So I
Speaker 1: I translated, if I have to translate it as effortless
Speaker 1: action or spontaneity, So that's the spontaneity and the subtitle
Speaker 1: of the book, but it's not it's spontaneity is not
Speaker 1: a great translation because I think in English it has
Speaker 1: a sense of almost recklessness, right or or irresponsibility, so
Speaker 1: you kind of spontaneously decide to skip work and go
Speaker 1: to the beach or something. And this idea of uway
Speaker 1: is in some ways the opposite. It's being perfectly engaged
Speaker 1: with the world and and operating in a kind of
Speaker 1: peak efficiency, if you want to think of it in
Speaker 1: that sense. So then this idea of unfortunately is pronounced
Speaker 1: uh carrot. Maybe charismatic virtue is the best way to translated.
Speaker 1: Is a power you have when you're in a state
Speaker 1: of way. So when you're in a way, you kick
Speaker 1: off this radiance that if you're a Confucian, it's what
Speaker 1: attracts people to you, so they want to follow you,
Speaker 1: and you don't have to force them to follow you,
Speaker 1: they just want to follow you spontaneously. If you're a Taoist,
Speaker 1: it's what relaxes people and kind of bring him back
Speaker 1: to naturalness. So you know, your your favorite book, the
Speaker 1: Dowda Jing, that does the power that the loud Saon
Speaker 1: sage has. It allows him to kind of bring everyone
Speaker 1: in the world back to naturalness. So it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's a kind of charismatic traction force you kick
Speaker 1: off when you're you're in the state of way you
Speaker 1: talk in the book about and there's there's a number
Speaker 1: of other books recently that that talk about this idea
Speaker 1: of you know, maybe the fast mind and the slow
Speaker 1: mind or um, you know, the the you call it
Speaker 1: the tacit hot system, and you know more the explicit
Speaker 1: cold cognition, which is you know, also another way of
Speaker 1: sort of the conscious versus a little bit more of
Speaker 1: the the unconscious. Can you describe what those two systems are,
Speaker 1: how they work? And then um, you say that the
Speaker 1: goal of ouway is to get those two working together,
Speaker 1: two systems working together. Yeah, so the system. So every
Speaker 1: psychologist has her own terminology for the so people call
Speaker 1: it system one system too hot versus cold, explicit tacit.
Speaker 1: Everyone's got their own pet terminology. I like hot and
Speaker 1: cold because it gives you this sense of The hot
Speaker 1: system is fast. It's it's all the things we know
Speaker 1: how to do without having to think about it. So
Speaker 1: the hot system is things that are automatic there uh
Speaker 1: in our if you want to think about muscle memory
Speaker 1: or basal gangli of Embruary. Really it's stuff we know
Speaker 1: how to do without having to consciously think about it.
Speaker 1: And that's most of what we do. Of what we
Speaker 1: do in our daily lives is run by these hot systems.
Speaker 1: But we also have this other systems, the system to
Speaker 1: cold explicit cognition, which is this ability we have to
Speaker 1: stop think. It involves reflection, so our ability to think about,
Speaker 1: well is this a good thing to do? What are
Speaker 1: the consequences five days from now? How does this relate
Speaker 1: to other goals that I have. It also involves what
Speaker 1: psychologists called cognitive control, so the ability to suppres us
Speaker 1: one automatic reaction and replace it with another. So system
Speaker 1: too is important. It's a really it's it evolved for
Speaker 1: a very good reason human beings. It's what allows us
Speaker 1: to be so adaptable and flexible in our behavior. But
Speaker 1: part of the point of the book is that one
Speaker 1: way to understand way is it's it's the integration of insights.
Speaker 1: We need the insights of system to system too is
Speaker 1: what keeps us from just being kind of stupid doing
Speaker 1: the same thing every time. We We need system to
Speaker 1: to develop new school, new skills and new desires and abilities.
Speaker 1: But you need to basically download what you figure out
Speaker 1: through system to onto your hot systems. That's that's what
Speaker 1: all of these early Chinese thinkers you're trying to get
Speaker 1: you to do. And once you do that, the this
Speaker 1: transformed hot cognition, transformed system one is much more powerful
Speaker 1: and will lead you to much better places than the
Speaker 1: uncultivated form that would. Yeah, the best description of those
Speaker 1: two systems and you you reference in your book is
Speaker 1: the the elephant and the rider, the rider being the
Speaker 1: thinking brain um the system the system too, and the
Speaker 1: elephant being the unconscious And and the idea of you know,
Speaker 1: it's I've heard it mostly referenced in the ideas of
Speaker 1: trying to make changes to habitual patterns or different things,
Speaker 1: and that you know that that that unconscious system or
Speaker 1: the elephant is so powerful that and the writer has
Speaker 1: such a small amount of power in comparison that if
Speaker 1: you don't find and you talk about this the book,
Speaker 1: if you don't find a way to get that unconscious
Speaker 1: system or the elephant going in the same direction that
Speaker 1: the writer wants to go, that you're you. You meet
Speaker 1: with a lot of challenges. Yeah, I think John Height
Speaker 1: might be the one who have popularized that metaphor, and
Speaker 1: it is his goal in doing so was to emphasize
Speaker 1: the difference in size. You know, the riders really small.
Speaker 1: Our our conscious mind is has very limited capacity. It's
Speaker 1: overloaded very easily. And I also walk people through some
Speaker 1: of the literature and what's sometimes called ego depletion, so
Speaker 1: the fact that when you exert cognitive control it gets depleted.
Speaker 1: You then are less able to exert it in the
Speaker 1: next moment. So if you exert cognitive control and focus
Speaker 1: on a really hard math problem, uh, you're the next moment,
Speaker 1: you're you're less able to resist cookies, even though you're
Speaker 1: on a diet. You just your worldpower it gets depleted.
Speaker 1: And so any viable system where we're going to actually
Speaker 1: change our behavior has got to respect the elephant. It's
Speaker 1: got to take into account that we are this tiny rider,
Speaker 1: and you're not going to make the elephant do something
Speaker 1: radically different than what the elephant wants to do. But
Speaker 1: you can guide it, and you can nudge it in
Speaker 1: a certain direction. And and the nice thing about the
Speaker 1: rider is it's far sighted enough that it can kind
Speaker 1: of see down the line how nudging the elephant a
Speaker 1: little bit every day can actually get it to go
Speaker 1: to someplace that is in the long run, quite different
Speaker 1: from where it's going right now. One of the things
Speaker 1: that I found interest in reading through the book was
Speaker 1: several different places talking about that in order to get
Speaker 1: to the uway state to a certain degree, which I
Speaker 1: think you talk about in the book, is similar to
Speaker 1: the more modern psychological concept of flow, except that it's
Speaker 1: it's a it's a little bit broader than that. It's
Speaker 1: it's a little bit more social and values based than that.
Speaker 1: And we maybe we'll explore that a little bit later,
Speaker 1: but that one of the keys to getting into that
Speaker 1: state is being able to essentially downregulate the that that
Speaker 1: conscious mind. You talk a little bit about some of
Speaker 1: the science around how exercise has the ability to sort
Speaker 1: of downregulate that very conscious mind, and that's why people
Speaker 1: tend to experience maybe that runners high to a certain degree,
Speaker 1: that sense of oneness, that sense of ease and peace
Speaker 1: with the world. Um. You also talk about how there's
Speaker 1: science out there about the fact that if we think
Speaker 1: about and analyze things too much, that sort of rumination
Speaker 1: can actually impact our ability to experience and identify pleasure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is you know, there's a lot of work
Speaker 1: has been done on the paradoxical effect of conscious intentions.
Speaker 1: So there are a lot of goals that we cannot
Speaker 1: pursue directly. So relaxation, happiness, attractiveness. Uh, they're the kind
Speaker 1: of creativity I think is one of these as well.
Speaker 1: When you pursue them directly, they they flee from you.
Speaker 1: And one of the things I talked about is why
Speaker 1: this would be so, and it's because it is directly.
Speaker 1: If you think about the two system nature of the
Speaker 1: human mind. When you're trying to relax or you're trying
Speaker 1: to be happy and not think about things, you're you're
Speaker 1: trying to you part of the brain you're trying to
Speaker 1: shut down is the part you're using to do the
Speaker 1: shutting down. So it's like trying to dissemble a bicycle
Speaker 1: while you're riding on it. It's just it's it's it's
Speaker 1: directly paradoxical. And so all of these early Chinese thinkers
Speaker 1: that I look at trying to come up with ways
Speaker 1: to get around what is what is paradox? And so
Speaker 1: it's important that to realize that it's a real paradox.
Speaker 1: If there was some kind of solution to it, would
Speaker 1: it would just go away and there wouldn't be all
Speaker 1: this to years of religious debate about how to get
Speaker 1: into these spiritual states. So the trick is how do
Speaker 1: you get around the paradox? And and that's where the
Speaker 1: debates happened about, you know, do you use meditative type
Speaker 1: techniques to use a lot of training and hope the
Speaker 1: training falls away. Each of the thinkers has their own
Speaker 1: particular view on how you how you get around the
Speaker 1: central tension of using your conscious mind to shut itself down.
Speaker 1: M M. You talk mainly about three main teachers Confucius
Speaker 1: laud say, did I say that correctly? Get louds of loudza?
Speaker 1: And then Mensius Menus and then also DWAs at the end.
Speaker 1: So the second daois thinker. So if we could maybe
Speaker 1: spend you know, a brief time on on the first
Speaker 1: couple menus is I found a lot of what was
Speaker 1: going on there resonated with a lot of things we
Speaker 1: talked about on the show. So maybe we'll dig a
Speaker 1: little bit deeper there. But let's start with Confucius. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Confucius and also his later followers sins at the
Speaker 1: end of the Warring States, was an externalist, what I
Speaker 1: call an externalists. So basically the the and this is
Speaker 1: the classic Confucian strategy, which is how do you try
Speaker 1: not to try where you try really hard. So it's
Speaker 1: about training. It's about using ritual training, so you immerse
Speaker 1: yourself and these religious ritual wills. You mentally immerse yourself
Speaker 1: in the classics, so you memorize these ancient classics and
Speaker 1: you spend time with fellow students and teachers discussing them.
Speaker 1: You you play classical music, you do other cultural forms
Speaker 1: of dance and archery. And the idea is that these
Speaker 1: are all going to reshape you. You're inside in a
Speaker 1: certain way, and in the beginning it's going to be
Speaker 1: involved conscious striving. You're gonna have to try. You won't
Speaker 1: want to do it, it won't feel natural. But there's
Speaker 1: the claim is that if you do it for long enough,
Speaker 1: you'll you'll eventually internalize it. So you'll you'll download it
Speaker 1: into that that's that faster hot system or the the
Speaker 1: elephant will internalize it. Yeah, so you'll basically have a
Speaker 1: tame elephant. So if you if you work hard enough
Speaker 1: to get the elephant going in the right direction and
Speaker 1: eventually want to do it on its own. So the
Speaker 1: famous description of Confucius at age seventy, he says, you know,
Speaker 1: go through all these stages. You know, it's at my
Speaker 1: heart on learning, I did this and that. And then
Speaker 1: finally he says, at age seventy, I could follow my
Speaker 1: heart's desires and never transgress the bounds of propriety. So
Speaker 1: he could do whatever came into his heart mind, and
Speaker 1: yet it was all ritually perfect and morally perfect. So
Speaker 1: that's the confusion strategy. And then you have louds in
Speaker 1: the primitive is Dao is popping up and saying there's
Speaker 1: no way that's gonna work, and it's and the center
Speaker 1: of their critique is really it's not necessarily exactly explicitly
Speaker 1: the way they put it, but I think it could
Speaker 1: be put this way is that the confusion strategy makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense when you're talking about a physical skill.
Speaker 1: So it's really clear how if you want to learn
Speaker 1: how to play tennis, well just training and training and
Speaker 1: drilling over and over again. Or you want to learn
Speaker 1: to play the piano, so you do your scales and
Speaker 1: you practice that. Eventually it's going to be internalized, and
Speaker 1: the fact that it's not at first is not a problem.
Speaker 1: Everyone understands how skills are required over time. But when
Speaker 1: it comes to away that the way the Confucians and
Speaker 1: Dallas are pursuing, it's really about moral skills. It's not
Speaker 1: about really being good at playing the piano. It's about
Speaker 1: being a good person. It's about being compassionate, being empathetic,
Speaker 1: being fair, and so there is a tension there. Actually
Speaker 1: Aristotle identified this in the West as well as his
Speaker 1: tension that he called it the dis analogy between crafts
Speaker 1: and virtues. But it's basically the case that so if
Speaker 1: I'm playing the piano and I play a beautifully moving
Speaker 1: piece and you are moved to tears, and you assume
Speaker 1: I'm feeling the same thing you're feeling. If you find
Speaker 1: out later that I wasn't feeling what you were feeling.
Speaker 1: I was actually thinking about how much money I was
Speaker 1: going to make. I'm looking out into the audience that
Speaker 1: they know ticket sales are good. I'm going to make
Speaker 1: some money off this thing. It doesn't invalidate the performance.
Speaker 1: It was still a great performance. Virtues, though, are different.
Speaker 1: So if I see you doing something that seems compassionate,
Speaker 1: so you give money to a homeless person, you help
Speaker 1: someone in need, and then I find out later that
Speaker 1: you did it because you saw me watching, and you
Speaker 1: weren't motivated by compassion. You were motivated by wanting to
Speaker 1: impress me, it's no longer it's invalidated. Your action is invalidated.
Speaker 1: It's no longer a virtue. So we have a very
Speaker 1: strong feeling that virtuous action requires the right internal motivation.
Speaker 1: And this is really the heart of the what Louds
Speaker 1: is worried about with a confusion strategy is that you
Speaker 1: train people how to be So you have a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who aren't compassionate, so you get them to
Speaker 1: do these rituals that express compassion. You get them to
Speaker 1: read about compassionate people a great compassionate sage kings. You
Speaker 1: get them to play compassionate music that expresses kind of
Speaker 1: longing and sorrow about the suffering of the people. Um
Speaker 1: And but how how is all that training every going
Speaker 1: to take someone who doesn't feel compassionate and make them
Speaker 1: really feel it? And what louds of things is going
Speaker 1: to happen is you're gonna get a bunch of fakers.
Speaker 1: You're gonna get a bunch of people who can talk
Speaker 1: until the end of the day about compassion, but they
Speaker 1: don't actually have the real virtue. And so he his
Speaker 1: argument is you've got to stop trying, and actually trying
Speaker 1: is the problem. And if you could shut down your
Speaker 1: conscious mind and avoid entanglements with these confusions and all
Speaker 1: their cultural forms and all this this kind of hypocritical
Speaker 1: stuff they're trying to teach you, you can get back
Speaker 1: in touch with your really virtuous nature, which has always
Speaker 1: been there. It's just been waiting for you to uncover it.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the Daoist strategy, is kind of going
Speaker 1: back to nature and going back to some kind of
Speaker 1: original goodness. What I found really interested in reading your
Speaker 1: book about the Daoist strategy and it's sort of the
Speaker 1: thing that it's not my favorite book, but it's a
Speaker 1: book I certainly enjoyed him as aspired is a lot
Speaker 1: of it is like, well, how how do you how
Speaker 1: do you do that? What do you do? How do
Speaker 1: you become that? That sort of thing. And the other
Speaker 1: thing I was struck by was how it felt to
Speaker 1: me a little bit like the Daoist side was that
Speaker 1: we're all inherently good, and civilization and messes us up,
Speaker 1: which is also very much a Buddhist Buddha nature kind
Speaker 1: of thought. And then there's also you go to the
Speaker 1: Western side, which is much more, at least from a
Speaker 1: Christianity perspective, we are we are bad, original sin, and
Speaker 1: we are cultured into being better, which is more the
Speaker 1: Confucian type ideal. And what I really liked about the
Speaker 1: Menus part was that he seemed to have what seems
Speaker 1: to me at least the view I take, which is
Speaker 1: that we've got some of all that in us, and
Speaker 1: it's a it's a matter of it's back to that
Speaker 1: parable what are we cultivating? And so that's why I
Speaker 1: thought a lot of what Mentius was talking about struck
Speaker 1: like the right balance to me between those two things,
Speaker 1: maybe you could share a little bit more about his approach. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: actually Menshas is the other place where I think the
Speaker 1: parable really applies to this this early Chinese material, although
Speaker 1: not quite in the way Mensha's intends. So he's an
Speaker 1: interesting figure. So he's a Confucian, he's technically a confusion.
Speaker 1: He thinks he's a follower of Confucius. But if you
Speaker 1: I argue in the book, and I think it's the
Speaker 1: case that he's really trying to straddle both sides. So
Speaker 1: he's arguing, Okay, we have this nature. That's how do
Speaker 1: we become compassionate If we're not already compassionate, it's because
Speaker 1: we have the sprouts of compassion inside of us, and
Speaker 1: if we were careful and we pay attention to our feelings,
Speaker 1: we can identify these little sprouts of compassion. So there's
Speaker 1: famous story where he interrogates this king who's a famously
Speaker 1: evil king. He's oppressing his people. He's he's likes to
Speaker 1: drink and hang out with his concubines and basically kill people.
Speaker 1: That's why he enjoys host kind of like a co host. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he says to him, you know, you can actually
Speaker 1: be a true Confucian king, and the king says, well,
Speaker 1: you obviously don't know me. Look at me. This is
Speaker 1: what I like to do. And then Mensche tells him
Speaker 1: the story that he heard from one of his ministers
Speaker 1: about him sparing the ox, and he walks him through
Speaker 1: what he was feeling, and the king basically admits he's
Speaker 1: it's a great dialogue. It's psychologically very rich, because the
Speaker 1: king gets very embarrassed, and then he finally admits, yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw this ox being led to slaughter, and he said,
Speaker 1: had this expression on its face of a look of
Speaker 1: terror that I couldn't bear. I couldn't bear the sight
Speaker 1: of this, this look of terror. And Mena says that
Speaker 1: feeling you had then is the sprout of true benevolence,
Speaker 1: and if you could actually focus on that thing and
Speaker 1: strengthen it and bring it out and make it stronger,
Speaker 1: you will start moving down the road towards being a
Speaker 1: true king instead of being this terrible tyrant that you
Speaker 1: are now. So he thinks that we have this set
Speaker 1: of good sprouts and they don't grow naturally, so that
Speaker 1: it's like agriculture. You have to water, you have to weed,
Speaker 1: it requires efforts. So that's the kind of confusion side
Speaker 1: of it, right, You got to do self cultivation. You
Speaker 1: need the classics, you need ritual but it's all basically
Speaker 1: pulling out potentialities, moral potentialities that you have within you
Speaker 1: if you reflect enough. Now Menches where it doesn't quite
Speaker 1: fit the parable as Menshes doesn't think that there are
Speaker 1: other bad sprouts, But I think that actually, if we
Speaker 1: want to update Menches, a more plausible modern view of
Speaker 1: the mind is that we you know, we have different
Speaker 1: sets of dispositions and they serve Some of them are
Speaker 1: very ancient ones that'serve very good purposes back in our
Speaker 1: evolutionary history and maybe aren't so appropriate now the way
Speaker 1: we live now. Others are ones we've learned that may
Speaker 1: be because of a bad environment or bad experiences, are
Speaker 1: bad training. And so then I think modernizing Mensches and
Speaker 1: bringing him into harmony with his parable about the two wolves.
Speaker 1: What self cultivation is about and getting into the right
Speaker 1: kind of way is about is figuring out which of
Speaker 1: these sprouts inside you are the good ones, and identifying
Speaker 1: them and then focusing on them and trying to strengthen
Speaker 1: those at the expense of the ones you don't like
Speaker 1: as much, and that don't lead you in the right direction.
Speaker 1: So that's mentions. His position, in a way is the
Speaker 1: compromise position. We have these potentialities within us, but they're
Speaker 1: not going to grow by themselves anymore than corn is
Speaker 1: just going to grow if you throw a the ground.
Speaker 1: You gotta do some work. But you also are working
Speaker 1: together with with things that are inside potentialities that are
Speaker 1: within you, which also explains how you can get a
Speaker 1: virtue that you don't already have because you're actually you
Speaker 1: do have it, it's just their potential form. It's got
Speaker 1: to be strengthened. You talked about the mention U way
Speaker 1: cultivation is about feeling and imagination. That you make a
Speaker 1: reference between analog and digital processes, and that um that
Speaker 1: changing our behavior is more of an analog process in
Speaker 1: the mentioned way. Could you explain that this is a
Speaker 1: contrast with the dominant theories of ethics in the West,
Speaker 1: the modern Western philosophy, which are about all systems too,
Speaker 1: if you want to think of it that way. They're
Speaker 1: about cold cognition. So how do you learn you're not
Speaker 1: compassionate right now? How do you learn to be compassionate
Speaker 1: while you either learn a set of mac sims. So
Speaker 1: if you're you're deontologists, you learn the categorical imperative, and
Speaker 1: you learn how to use these rules essentially and figure
Speaker 1: out which rules apply in any given situation. Then you
Speaker 1: apply them. You force yourself to act in accordance with
Speaker 1: the rules. Who are your utilitarian and you say, well,
Speaker 1: how do you act compassionately? Well, we've got to figure
Speaker 1: out what's going to maximize whatever good you happen to
Speaker 1: value for people in this situation. You do the math,
Speaker 1: and then you act in accordance with what the math
Speaker 1: tells you to do. And there were people like this
Speaker 1: in early China too, so there were these most too.
Speaker 1: Menchu was arguing against who our utilitarians. They were consequentialists
Speaker 1: and very rationalistic. Mench just thinks that that's actually not
Speaker 1: gonna work because you want to put this way, because
Speaker 1: the elephants too strong the ride. The rider doesn't have
Speaker 1: the ability to just go, oh, we need to go
Speaker 1: over here and just make the elephant go that way.
Speaker 1: It just is not gonna work. And if you try
Speaker 1: to do it, it's gonna piss the elephant off and
Speaker 1: things are gonna get really ugly. So men just actually
Speaker 1: thinks it's actively dangerous to to rely upon cold cognition only.
Speaker 1: So in his model, you do have some help from culture,
Speaker 1: So you have teachers telling you, you know, these are
Speaker 1: the kind of impulses that you want to focus on. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I argue you can see Manches in this dialogue
Speaker 1: with the King is kind of a moral psychoanalyst. He's like, well,
Speaker 1: how did you feel when you saw the ox? And
Speaker 1: you know, how does that? And then how do you
Speaker 1: feel when you see your people suffering? And the King's like, well,
Speaker 1: it doesn't bother me, feel pretty fine, and he gets
Speaker 1: in to see, well, don't you see how that's there's
Speaker 1: a kind of attention there, and maybe you could try
Speaker 1: to take that feeling that you had with the ox
Speaker 1: and learn how to extend it, but crucially slowly. So
Speaker 1: he says to the king, you know, first try just
Speaker 1: being a little bit nicer to your family, and then
Speaker 1: once you get better at that, you can learn how
Speaker 1: to extend that to people who aren't part of your family.
Speaker 1: So the idea that the way moral training works is
Speaker 1: through imaginative extension. You're using your whole body when you're
Speaker 1: remembering an emotional experience. It's not an abstract thing. You're
Speaker 1: remembering how you felt. You remember how your stomach clenched
Speaker 1: when you saw that ox and you felt really bad,
Speaker 1: and you're then trying to use your imagination to figure
Speaker 1: out how you could have that same kind of feeling
Speaker 1: in a place you should be having it where you're
Speaker 1: not when you see your people suffering because you over
Speaker 1: tax them or you you make them labor on your palace.
Speaker 1: So so this is the sense in which I think
Speaker 1: this confusion model of cultivating using emotions and cultivating your
Speaker 1: senses is much more empirically plausible. It's much more plausible
Speaker 1: from a modern psychological perspective than these abstract, ammodal digital
Speaker 1: forms of ethics that we've had for the last couple
Speaker 1: hundred years in the West. I'm really drawn to that
Speaker 1: idea because it's that whole idea sort of of you know,
Speaker 1: you have these sprouts or these tendencies, and then you
Speaker 1: can start very small and build upon those in a
Speaker 1: in a very small way. So that idea of, well,
Speaker 1: if you don't feel really compassionate in general and you
Speaker 1: want to learn that, start with something that's really easy
Speaker 1: to be compassionate towards like your dog, right, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, it's you know, being compassionate to Chris over
Speaker 1: here might be a stretch for me. But but but
Speaker 1: but but his dog, Charlie. Um, but I it's that's
Speaker 1: that's a common theme that we we talk a lot
Speaker 1: about on the show, is is starting really small and
Speaker 1: if you do that, you can you can build. And
Speaker 1: I really like also that thought of imagination emotion, and
Speaker 1: I think you talk about in the book because it's
Speaker 1: something I've been talking about with people recently, and I
Speaker 1: think it's also in the book around the purpose of
Speaker 1: you know, one of the reasons that I think literature
Speaker 1: or movies can be so powerful is because there's a
Speaker 1: call it moral training if you want. But they're teaching
Speaker 1: us about the human condition in a very emotional way,
Speaker 1: which is a lot different than like, as you said,
Speaker 1: sort of being taught here's the right thing to do,
Speaker 1: thinking the right thing versus feeling what feels right. Ye,
Speaker 1: And they're kind of it's like exercise for your moral emotions,
Speaker 1: especially because you know, literature and now movies allow you
Speaker 1: to be in a situation that you would not normally
Speaker 1: be in. So it allows you to experience extreme moral situations,
Speaker 1: especially when some kid hopefully you will never experience in
Speaker 1: your real life. Um. But being put in that position
Speaker 1: and empathizing, having to think your way, feel your way
Speaker 1: into someone else's position strengthens your moral intuitions and extends
Speaker 1: them in various ways. And that's precisely the way Menschez
Speaker 1: is using the classics. For instance, he thinks that these,
Speaker 1: you know, the poems and the stories about the sage
Speaker 1: kings are like reading great literature where you actually learn
Speaker 1: to feel the right kind of things because you're you're
Speaker 1: being exposed to these emotional experiences vicariously through through literature.
Speaker 1: Near the end of the book, you kind of wrap
Speaker 1: things is up by talking about the reason that we
Speaker 1: tend to be interested in uway and UH is that
Speaker 1: you know uway is that that feeling of being completely
Speaker 1: engaged in what you're doing being very effective. And then
Speaker 1: the dog is more the charisma or the drawing people
Speaker 1: towards us. And you say that these different Chinese philosophers,
Speaker 1: what they recommend may work differently in different situations. Um,
Speaker 1: And could you maybe extrapolate a little bit on that, like,
Speaker 1: what what are some of the types of things. If
Speaker 1: I was trying to do this sort of thing, I
Speaker 1: might think about this approach, And again I like what
Speaker 1: you say, and that look, this is a genuine paradox.
Speaker 1: Trying not to try is is really hard to do,
Speaker 1: and achieving some of these states as hard, which is
Speaker 1: why people are still thinking about it and talking about it.
Speaker 1: But you've got a couple guidelines that people might think about. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: one of my arguments is the reason we have these
Speaker 1: different strategies and and none of them ever go away,
Speaker 1: and no one ever wins, so uh know, and when
Speaker 1: Zen Buddhism comes into China's and Buddhism takes a really
Speaker 1: hard kind of z in daois line. So we're not
Speaker 1: gonna do any practice. If you're going to be a
Speaker 1: Zen Buddhists, you know, we're gonna just do nothing and
Speaker 1: just you know, see your Buddha nature and that's it.
Speaker 1: But very quickly they started setting up practices and you
Speaker 1: get the split between these different schools of Zen john Buddhism, Um,
Speaker 1: that's one of them starts to look very gradual. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we want to see our Buddha nature. We are Buddhas,
Speaker 1: but we gotta sits Zen for thirty years and to
Speaker 1: all these rituals. Um. So why is it that none
Speaker 1: of them ever win? And it's because I think so.
Speaker 1: First of all, there's differences and people's inborn personalities. So
Speaker 1: I really think some of these strategies work better for
Speaker 1: some people than others. So people who tend to be
Speaker 1: overstructured and tend to not respond flexibly to the world
Speaker 1: probably need the Daoist techniques a bit more. And I
Speaker 1: think that's why I've always loved Dwongs of the of
Speaker 1: the Daoist text, and probably because I'm kind of a
Speaker 1: creature of habit, kind of uptight, like I like my
Speaker 1: things the way they are. I don't like new experiences.
Speaker 1: I kind of uh. And so I think people need
Speaker 1: different things to break them out of the types of
Speaker 1: bad habits that they're into. Um. Whereas if you tend
Speaker 1: to be unstructured and undisciplined, this Confucian training, giving yourself
Speaker 1: some structure in your life and and having rituals and
Speaker 1: having particular ways you structure your physical space, how you
Speaker 1: set up your room and how you set up your
Speaker 1: office and doing things at certain times every day could
Speaker 1: be incredible exactly what you need to kind of liberate
Speaker 1: yourself into spontaneity because you you you need that kind
Speaker 1: of structure. So there's in our personal differences and it really,
Speaker 1: I think depends on the individual. You're also going to
Speaker 1: expect life stage differences. So children are going to be
Speaker 1: doing more the Confucian stuff than the Daoist stuff. Kids
Speaker 1: are kind of natural Daoist, that's not they don't need more.
Speaker 1: They don't need more. Doubt is that what they need
Speaker 1: is a lot of confusionism, right, because you just don't
Speaker 1: have the right dispositions. Yet nobody's arguing that the kind
Speaker 1: of way you want is the way of a three
Speaker 1: year old. Anyone who's had a three year old realizes
Speaker 1: that that's not who we want to be. So they
Speaker 1: need Confucianism, they need structure, they need training, they need
Speaker 1: to acquire new skills and so but then do you
Speaker 1: know the converses as you get mature and as you've
Speaker 1: acquired the types of skills you need, that's when maybe
Speaker 1: you need to shift into more of the Daoist strategy
Speaker 1: of letting go or making your mind empty or not trying.
Speaker 1: Because you've now trained your dispositions, you have everything on
Speaker 1: board that you need. And the trick now it's actually
Speaker 1: stopping thinking, letting go. So it's life stage is gonna matter,
Speaker 1: and then the particular situation is gonna matter, so and
Speaker 1: and this is something you really have to kind of
Speaker 1: diagnose on the fly or have your own you know,
Speaker 1: the king King Shin of Chi is lucky because he
Speaker 1: had his own personal way advisor next to him in
Speaker 1: the form of mentions telling him what he needed to
Speaker 1: focus on. But in any given situation, there are times
Speaker 1: when if you reflect, you'll realize, Okay, my problem here
Speaker 1: is that I'm just flowling around. I don't have structure,
Speaker 1: and if I actually really want to get into the
Speaker 1: zone and whatever activity is I'm doing here, I need
Speaker 1: to be more organized about it. I need to have
Speaker 1: a schedule, I need to have forums. I have to
Speaker 1: have physical forms given to me um to act in
Speaker 1: the right way. Whereas there are other times where it's
Speaker 1: the problem is you're just thinking too much and you're
Speaker 1: second guessing yourself, or you're thinking about irrelevant things. So
Speaker 1: you're thinking about, uh, you know, the famous story and
Speaker 1: the dwongsa is that when people are shooting, having an
Speaker 1: archery contest and they're just shooting for you know, basically buckles,
Speaker 1: belt buckles. They their skill is perfect. They start betting
Speaker 1: for beer money and they their skill gets a little
Speaker 1: shaky and they start betting for serious money and suddenly, uh,
Speaker 1: they don't have the same skill they had at the beginning.
Speaker 1: It's because external considerations are invading your mind and interfering
Speaker 1: with your ability to focus on your your embodied skill,
Speaker 1: which which is something you already have. I think the
Speaker 1: you know, some of the more Confucian approaches, the idea
Speaker 1: of of putting structure in your life. Um, we we
Speaker 1: talk about you know, there's I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of different readily available information there. What are some of
Speaker 1: the ways to, as we said earlier, sort of downregulate
Speaker 1: that thinking mind. We talked a little bit about exercise
Speaker 1: reference to meditation throughout the book. Yeah, alcohol you talk
Speaker 1: about at a few points, which is remarkably effective. Um,
Speaker 1: are there other other other other thoughts there that that
Speaker 1: that emerged from from some of this learning? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: think so there's you know, there's chemical means. So one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I think we like alcohol and drugs
Speaker 1: is they downregulate our preferntal cortex. That's physiologically what they're doing,
Speaker 1: and that's the seat of our cold cognition. So it's
Speaker 1: a kind of fast and dirty way to get into
Speaker 1: a form of a way. And actually people like Dwongs
Speaker 1: that use drunkenness as an analogy for for what the
Speaker 1: spiritual state he wants you to get into. But it's
Speaker 1: the problem is alcohol wears off and it's it has
Speaker 1: other side effects that aren't that great. Um. So most
Speaker 1: of the strategies that the Daoist used, I think could
Speaker 1: be summed up as using your body to distract your mind.
Speaker 1: So you're using your body in a way that is
Speaker 1: either going to distract you from your thoughts so that
Speaker 1: your thoughts kind of peed aro out on their own,
Speaker 1: or you're using your body in such a way that
Speaker 1: your thoughts just naturally damp down, they naturally fade away.
Speaker 1: And so these people are probably the ones who invented
Speaker 1: these sitting practices. So, um, they don't talk a lot
Speaker 1: about them in the Worrying States text that I study,
Speaker 1: but there's hints that people are sitting meditation there. This
Speaker 1: one artists says before he goes off to car of
Speaker 1: wood stands, he sits and forgets it's all along. He
Speaker 1: forgets about his body and everything. So it seems involved
Speaker 1: some sort of seated meditation. And the idea is you
Speaker 1: can use breathing exercises or objectless meditations, so sitting in
Speaker 1: a certain position and letting your mind clear itself as
Speaker 1: a way to re empower your body if you want
Speaker 1: to think about it that way, and let it take
Speaker 1: over when it needs to take over. But this is
Speaker 1: of course, you know, people years longer than that coming
Speaker 1: up with all sorts of techniques for doing this excellent. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we are kind of at the end of
Speaker 1: our time. But what I found interesting, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of kind of coming back to there. There were two
Speaker 1: last things. One was I was struck by that sort
Speaker 1: of mention is sort of walking what we would think
Speaker 1: of is sort of the middle way, which I thought
Speaker 1: was was really interesting. But I really like the way
Speaker 1: you tied that up at the end that hey, there's
Speaker 1: no one size fits all all um depending on all
Speaker 1: those different circumstances, which I thought was really helpful because
Speaker 1: it's easy to get locked into thinking if we just
Speaker 1: do this thing. And the other thing I thought was
Speaker 1: interesting is that a lot of times, something that works
Speaker 1: for us today doesn't work for us tomorrow or the
Speaker 1: week after, and I think that's really really important. And then, um,
Speaker 1: I thought the best example of what U way is
Speaker 1: really like and duh was when you referenced Jonathan Richmond's
Speaker 1: Pablo Picasso as the perfect example of that. So I
Speaker 1: thought that was thought that was a great way to
Speaker 1: uh to describe that for the the modern uh punk
Speaker 1: rock lover, I suppose, um, for anybody who's familiar with that.
Speaker 1: But Ted, thanks so much for taking the time. I
Speaker 1: really enjoyed the book. Oh thanks, thanks for having me
Speaker 1: on the show. All right, take care bye. Yeah. You
Speaker 1: can learn more about Edward Slingerland and this podcast at
Speaker 1: one new feed dot net slash Edward