Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 558: Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Sharon Salzberg, NYT best-selling author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices, re-joins the DTFH! You can pre-order Sharon's new book, Real Life - The Journey from Isolation to Openness & Freedom, on SharonSalzberg.com. You can also learn more about Sharon there, as well as find links to her podcast, past books, and upcoming appearances! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order!

Greetings, friends. It is I, D. Trussell, reporting in from Kansas City. My apologies. I left the cord to my beautiful Apollo Twin X audio interface back in Austin. So we're doing this right into the MacBook, baby. Today we've got a wonderful guest who is one of my favorite teachers of Buddhism and meditation. She is a New York Times bestselling author and you know her. It's Sharon Salzburg. And what a great time to tune in to what Sharon Salzburg is teaching all of us. ChatGBT at the time of this recording has existed for what, 11 days? And already it's transforming the way lots of people do their work. And you know this is just the beginning. This is just the beginning. It reminds me of when I got a Commodore 64 and how impressed I was

by that thing that now is only worth money because it's an antique. But you certainly wouldn't use it for any kind of computing for anything that you wanted to do now. But to me, it seemed like a spaceship. I would take books of code and type it into the computer to make the shittiest games you ever saw. And then as time progressed, we all experienced this. The computers began to evolve. I would go to these computer stores in North Carolina and just marvel at machines that you couldn't sell at a good will now. But in those days, they were super expensive and seemed incredible. But the difference between this evolutionary technological trajectory that we've all sort of become attuned to and ChatGBT is that that trajectory, that evolutionary trajectory

is going to be accelerated. Meaning that over the next year, we're going to see some crazy stuff emerge from technology. You could probably expect potential cures for diseases. You could definitely expect some really interesting sex toys because once ChatGBT gets into your vibrator and can talk to you in any kind of voice you want with any kind of personality you want, wow, that's going to be real interesting. Not to mention the ability in video games to chat with NPCs that seem to have their own personality and potentially could even connect with you in the real world when you're not playing the game via text or email. Kids toys are going to be super creepy and all of our appliances are potentially going to be

very annoying. You might one day walk into your kitchen and hear your microwave talking to your refrigerator. This is on the horizon, which is why teachers like Sharon Salzburg are more important than ever. We're about to get a shotgun blast of technological novelty to our faces and we need something that we can ground ourselves in. I think the teachings of Sharon Salzburg are perfect for that because she has a way of simplifying Buddhism, which can sometimes be quite complex into something that an idiot like me can digest. Anytime I get to have these conversations with her, it's like somebody has poured water on my seething, bubbling, rashy, neurotic brain. Sharon is so good at teaching about the idea of cultivating compassion.

A lot of people, I don't think they, when you think about compassion, you just kind of imagine it's like baked in, built in. Yeah, I can be compassionate, but in Buddhism, it's something you actually kind of have to develop, train, cultivate. And you know, right now, people are already wobbled by the never ending historical events that seem to happen every couple of weeks. And so finding a way to cultivate compassion for them and for you and for all of us as we find ourselves getting suctioned into a technological cyclone is probably a good investment of all of our time. Otherwise, we're all going to end up like drooling, raving, maniac characters in some HP Lovecraft short story who have looked into the eyes of the eldritch gods

and lost their minds. Look, I'm not saying chat GBT is an eldritch God. I love it. I'm delighted by it. I'm excited for it. But I think once you remove the ability to get used to the wonders that we're about to see, once you remove that, that nice year or two in between each new technological advancement, it's going to spin some people for a loop. So folks like Sharon Salzburg are here for us. And you should definitely check out our new book. It's called Real Life, The Journey from Isolation to Openness. You can preorder it by going to SharonSolzburg.com. All right, everybody, here's Sharon Salzburg. Sharon, it is wonderful to see you. Welcome back to the show.

How are you? I'm well. It's great to see you. It's, you know, anytime I get a chance to talk with you, I essentially just scroll through whatever is going on with me, which is generally some form of, I don't want to call it mental illness, but some form of paranoia from doom scrolling. And this results in an incredibly grim appraisal of the world all together. And then from that grim appraisal of things, I like to think what would the Buddha do? Should the Buddha appear? Like if suddenly it happens, the matreya comes and scans this world where we see fever pitched levels of fear, indignation. I'm right, you're wrong. And the subsequent tribalism that has to emerge when large groups of people just stop

listening to each other. And then I scroll through all the stuff I've read in Buddhism, all the things that I hope that I gathered from you and Ram Dass, and I inevitably hit that rainbow wheel that spins on your computer when an app is about to crash. So in this case, what do you think should the Buddha, Jesus, whatever name you want to give to some brilliant savior or teacher, what do you think they would think scanning world events as they are right now? Would there be any difference in messaging as opposed to past iterations when these great enlightened beings have appeared? No, I don't think there personally, I don't think their message would be different. It might be a little harder for us to tolerate or trust, but and there are many things that have

come up in my mind hearing what you had to say. One is, I think there's a certain balance in mind, you know, speaking on behalf of the Buddha, for example. Thank you. You know, who talked about balance quite a lot because as he posits the world, suffering itself is not redemptive. Suffering is not grace. It doesn't equal grace. And we know that there are people who go through a hard time and they emerge bitter and isolated and blaming everybody in the world and very self-absorbed and there are people who go through sometimes even a harder time and something ignites in them as they metabolize it into compassion. And I would see that sometimes in my, say my teachers in India, you know, where especially this one woman named Deepa Mahu had gone through tremendous

personal suffering in her life, you know, losing two children and her husband dying very suddenly. And that was the point that she went to practice meditation because she was so grief-stricken. Her doctor actually said to her, they were living in Burma at the time. Her doctor said to her, you're actually going to die of her broken heart unless you do something about your mind. You should learn how to meditate. The thing that always was amazing to me with people like her was that they were all interested in other people, you know, like, how was your journey? Were you okay, you know? Do you want a cup of tea? And I kept thinking, boy, if I went through what she went through, I don't know if I'd care about anyone else's journey. Right. You know, and so what we're

doing in terms of approaching the genuine pain in the world and in ourselves is trying not to add so much stuff to it. Like, it's only me or this is the only thing that is true. And we need to see it, you know, honestly and directly, but it's not the only thing that is true. And so being able to face what's happening with some greater balance, have some compassion for ourselves and others. And then the other part of it is actually, is going to sound a little goofy, but it's kind of like looking for the good, you know, when you're talking about doom-scrolling, I thought of, actually, Mr. Rogers, like, I'm too old to have seen it and your kids are too young, but, you know, but his famous comment, he was about nine years old and very distressed about

the state of the world. And his mother said to him, look for the helpers. There are people of good-heartedness really everywhere and are trying and there's something uplifting about that and incredibly touching. And, you know, I've known people who have gone through such huge, terrible tragedies in their own personal lives. And they talk about that, you know, the love that came their way and the help that came their way. And they looked for the helpers and it doesn't deny the pain, but it surrounds the pain with another perspective. And I think that's important in a time that I didn't know that word doom-scrolling, someone had to describe it to me when I was being interviewed or something. You taught me the word. Yeah. I've used it ever since. It's good.

I use it every day. I think about it all the time. Bad habit is a bad habit. It is. You know, so a little bit of restraint is also good. It's like, okay, it's the fifth hour I've been going through this. Yeah. Well, you know, I agree with you, but I've noticed that sometimes even proposing what you just proposed is offensive to some people that they recoil from the idea of looking at other sides. I have been scolded myself if you even come close to proposing an idea that not that long ago was just sort of normal. Like, yeah, let's try to embrace all sides. Sometimes the response is you are trying to... What you're doing in your attempt, what do they call it? The thing in the middle, which is Buddhism. In your attempt, it's not centralization,

there's a better name for it. Centrist. Centrism. Your goal of trying to find some middle line between radical factions where one, depending on who you're talking to, one faction is completely, permanently, inalterably wrong. And so the attempt to find the center point is, even though you don't want to do that, is to embrace the worst possible reality. So I'm not trying to find the center point between views, because I actually agree that I don't think all views are equal and that we need to sort of compromise. I think the rigidity with which we might hold our own view and rival listen to anyone else is another problem. But the centrism or the balance is more about your approach to things, your own personal approach

to what you're feeling, your ability to hear, the balance between compassion and effort to make things different. Isn't it better when that effort is infused with wisdom rather than that need to be in control of everybody? But I agree. It's a huge problem to somehow hold that place where we can listen to someone, have a strong sense of our own principles, not feel like we're just giving in for the sake of some sloppy kind of piece, you know? Yeah, you're right. Sloppy kind of piece. I'll take it. You know what? I'll take it. I'll take a nice sloppy piece these days. But I know what you're saying. But I guess this, when I, so I'll I'll scan the way I feel when I've gotten particularly frothed up by some horrible

thing I've managed to dig out of the swamps of the Internet. And usually it's a... You should be more superficial. That's all I can say. Why don't you just go for distractions? Oh, I do that too. But this state that I experience is of some generally a combination of confusion, anger, fear, and I guess I don't know, sprinkle on top of that a general sense of hopelessness or a feeling like, oh, this is an irreparable situation. I don't know what to do, what anyone could do about this. So in that state, do you think that people who are in that state, whether they're in that state for good reasons or they're in that state for neurotic reasons, can you execute the sort of compassion you teach about even though you are completely pissed off?

I think you can. I mean, I wouldn't be the last person to say it was easy, you know, because I don't want to be glib about these things and hypocritical. But I think you actually can because there's something about, I think really picking up someone else's disconnection from reality, from caring what anybody else has to say, you know, and we don't have to echo that. It's like, you know, we can care about the person and be present and see if there's anything, you know, without giving in. But, you know, is there anything that actually unites us? I mean, I've heard in the kind of situations you're describing, sometimes it's love for one's children. It's the one thing people can actually agree on. Right. You know, what one feels about the,

you know, climate they're narrating is a different thing, you know, but, right. But fundamentally, you know, whether you find that common point or not, it's just a caring, you know, I go back to myself, I go back to what the Buddha said when he said everybody wants to be happy. People want a superficial sense of happiness, but a sense of finding a home somewhere in this body and this mind with one another on this planet. And we have so much ignorance and so much confusion about where happiness really lies. And, you know, is it endless accumulation? Is it really ventrleness over everyone else? Is it, you know, right, bizarre and endless competition that leaves us exhausted? You know, is it giving up everything that we actually really cherish

for the one thing we think isn't going to be permanent? Is there anything happy about that ultimately? But people believe that and they live by that. And you can just have a kind of compassion like, wow, you know, even if you don't subscribe to a cosmology of many lives, it's even worse. It's like, you've got this one life and this is what you're doing, you know. Yeah. So this and again, I'm sorry if I'm coming at you with some unanswerable or annoying questions. But again, it's this is just from my own dark reservoir of thinking. So to put it plainly, this is my new parent, like I have good obsessions, don't worry. I mean, but what am I going to do to tell you all the happy things I'm thinking,

Sharon? It was a waste of everyone's time. So let me present to you, here's my current dark obsession. I have become convinced that there is a new, I guess you could say, I don't know, cultural fashion trend and sociopathic narcissists, where they have identified a method of seeming. And I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I'm saying across the board, China, Russia, the United States, anywhere, there's a new discovery. Maybe it's not a new discovery. Maybe I just haven't been paying that much attention, where you cover up your self obsession or self absorption with this costume in which you're not self absorbed at all, but rather you are sort of representing the entirety of some population of people, whoever

you are, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Chinese communists, the environmentalists, the warmongers, the whoever it may be. And so in your self absorption, you are negating all of that like, what? I'm not self absorbed. How could I seem self absorbed? I'm completely invested in saving the world. But the world that you're wanting to save inevitably means the destruction of someone else's world, at least subjectively. So this is my dark thought, because I'm friends with a psychiatrist. He told me the most horrifying thing about sociopaths. He said that if a sociopath presents to you for help, I think maybe this is more clinical psychology actually than psychiatry, the instruction is stop treatment. Because the sociopath,

I'm talking the actual thing, is untreatable. If they're coming to you, they're coming to you because they want to manipulate or they're doing it for some ulterior motive that you'll maybe never know, or they want to hurt you, stop treatment. And so I was chilling when I heard him say that, because again, refer to compassion, never give up on anyone, help. So this is where my head is really slammed into a wall, Sharon, because what I'm worried that by sort of seeking some of these compassionate methods with people who really aren't truly invested in the movements that they claim to be, that all you end up wasting a lot of time, and most importantly, elevating someone who is completely self absorbed to higher and higher

levels of exposure to the world, which is really what a narcissist wants, you know, more and more attention, more and more, it's about me, me, me. I'm saving the world. I'm the one who's at war with the darkness here. Don't you see it's me doing the saving? And so to me, that, what do you do there? What do you do there? I mean, this is such a confusing predicament. Well, it's a very profound question. I think first of all, I would be interested if you did a poll or some kind of survey of your many listeners who do want to hear you talk about the bright side of things, you know, so just because there was that assumption in the very beginning of this part of the conversation, I would wonder,

you know, so fair enough. Yeah, that's personal. So I think what you're pointing to is this very deep question about the nature of compassion and action. And those are actually different things or they're distinct, they're distinct things. So compassion is like a freedom of the heart to not condemn, not hate, not be lost in fear of, but you know, kind of picking up someone's suffering, wish that they could be free of it for many reasons. What you do about that is not just about compassion. It's about wisdom. It's about discernment. It's about understanding your own limits. It's understanding that there's got to be a balance between compassion for yourself and compassion for others. It's like, you are not responsible for fixing this other person's view.

You know, you may be responsible for having a kind of wish for them that they be free, certain respectful presence, you know, but why would you be elevating them? Don't elevate them, you know, and that doesn't mean you're not compassionate. It means you're bringing another kind of clarity into the situation. And this figures in every so-called helping situation, you know, where you're a caregiver of some kind or another, either in your family or in your professional life or sometimes people just say, that's who I am in any friendship, you know, I'm the one who is like the giver. I'm taking care of, I'm trying to make sure the other person is okay. And understanding that there are limits, that's the reality. And so, you know, I'm thinking of

this friend of mine who way back in the old days when the Dalai Lama wasn't sort of surrounded by so much security and, you know, kind of pomp and circumstance, and he was visiting the states and he was just like staying people's houses, you know, and he'd need a ride, someone would like grab a car and give him a ride or something like that. So I have a friend who was very close to him from those times and was working with him and spending a lot of time with him. And she said she heard from her mother one day and her mother had a history of mental illness and some very dangerous behavior for her kids. And her mother wanted to see her and she was sort of stricken. It was like, you know, she felt terribly guilty. Like she didn't want to go see her mother. She was

really frightened and she said, here I am spending all this time with the Dalai Lama, you know, like the supreme master of compassion. Like I'm horrible and terrible. And so finally she went to the Dalai Lama and she told him, you know, her dilemma and her feelings and he looked at her and he said, you should do a tremendous amount of loving kindness for your mother from a distance. He said, it's not safe to be with her, you know, and that's like reality. That's wisdom. And so of course you think he, of all people, is going to say, go, you know, grovel, you know. Yeah, lie. Go lie to your mother. Everything's fine. Yeah, I love that. That conflation, you know, bringing together kind of the heart, space of

compassion and a certain kind of action is what holds a lot of people back. I find, you know, people say to me, I don't know about this kind of loving heart thing, because then I can only say yes. I can only give them more money. I can only let them move back in. I can only smile, you know, right. It's not like that. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by Squarespace. Squarespace has everything you need to create a beautiful website. I've been using them for years. I love them. If you are thinking about starting a podcast, if you're thinking about doing anything online that involves an audience, Squarespace should be your first stop. You're going to have to have some home for your content

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Again, that's squarespace.com forward slash Duncan. Use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. It's what holds a lot of people back. I find out people say to me, I don't know about this kind of loving heart thing because then I can only say yes. I can only give them more money. I can only let them move back in. I can only smile. It's not like that. This is the part of that that is very difficult for me, which is generally if I have some sense of like, look, I don't want to interact with that person or even, oh boy, here we go again with this looping sort of argument that's been going on forever. I have so much like, I don't want to

call it anger, frustration, so much frustration and so much of, especially now that I'm a dad, busy, that sense of like, my time, I have to be careful with my time. I got to get so much done a day. I don't have time to entertain this. Even if it's from a distance, even if I'm not talking to them, it's still time being burned. It's still, you know, time mentally being burned and considering whatever the particular conflict is. So I really don't understand, and maybe this is just because I don't understand compassion. I don't understand how to honestly invoke this open-hearted state while simultaneously being terribly frustrated with a person. I don't see the frustration seems to drown out that open-hearted, vulnerable feeling that I've achieved rarely in my life.

Well, you know, I would probably say, forget compassion for the moment and see if you could sit with the frustration and, you know, don't dwell on what you're frustrated about. Like they said this and they wrote that, you know, but look at frustration itself and see what it's made of, what it's to feel like in your body. What are the component parts? Because there's often something very interesting there. Like in Tibetan Buddhism, they say that anger is what we pick up when we feel weak because we think it's going to make us strong. And there's a strength, certainly, to the energy of anger. And it's very important that we utilize that. But you think about that feeling of helplessness underneath it. And what I find is that if I can sit with, say, the anger of the

frustration, which is a form of anger, be impatient and just sit and watch the movie of it, I will find that place of helplessness. And once I do that, once I find that, then I say, okay, what can I do? And it might be a very small action. Like with people like that, I don't really feel, you know, they're not coming to me for meditation instruction. I don't really feel like I can affect directly their state of mind. But I can really try to make sure they're not in power over me or other people that's voting, you know, in this system, or, you know, organizing it in some way, because it's one thing for them to have certain beliefs or ways of seeing the world. And it's another thing for that to be imposed on, you know, children, you know, or, or young adults or women or something

like that. You know, and so often there's some action, it might seem small, but that's okay. That kind of channels the frustration and the energy of the anger in some way. And that's useful. That's so brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. Because nobody, first, this is what I love about Buddhism. No one, or most people who haven't heard of that, it's the very opposite way of thinking, which is get as far away from that feeling of helplessness as you possibly can, usually via some form of like aggression to assert yourself and is the one in control. And going into that state of helplessness, I want to talk about that state of helplessness a little bit more. And, and, because I've been getting this ever since I was at one of these retreats, Joan Halifax was talking

about insecurity from the Zen Buddhist perspective. And this being sort of the, this is the natural state of things. So why would you feel secure, you're going to die, you're going to get old, we live on a plant, we have all the stuff. But sometimes I get so overwhelmed by that feeling like, forget all the, I'm pissed at somebody, just in general, you know, you're sitting, you're, especially getting older, which I enjoy getting older, but the older you get, the more you watch the world run away from you, you know, it just runs away, it grows on its own, it doesn't care what you think, boomer or whatever, Gen X or whatever, we don't care about that anymore. We're on to the next, so far onto the next thing that you couldn't even hope to harmonize with that

next thing. Do you know what I'm, you must know. I know, I'm quite a bit older than you, I'm sure, you know, and it leaves you with this sense of like, you know, the same feeling I get when like my poodle gets out, this sense of like, well, I'm not catching him a good luck, I hope I, he's gone, he's gone with the wind. And, and, and then that feeling that you're talking about, which is no different than the feeling of vulnerability underneath anger or any other thing, it's the identical feeling. So what is that Sharon? What is this? When, when I hear, sometimes I, and I feel like this is, must be an error when I am feeling that it's another way to like sort of put lipstick on it or, or, or comb its air. I think, okay,

this is a spiritual state sitting here in my car, morosely looking out at a parking lot, thinking, well, world's going to just keep going when I die. I'm just the old useless, old thing or whatever, just that fee, and forget this story. I'm talking about just the feeling, the feeling itself. Like, I don't, I, it's almost indescribable, maybe the way a fish feels when it gets pulled out onto a boat and it's just flopping around on the boat, just trying to swim. Tell me about this. What, what, what, what stories do you have about that specific feeling? Is there something to poly for that feeling? What are we talking about? Yeah, I mean, it is, it is considered a spiritual state. It's, it's not bad, you know, because

it's like, look at all the myths and the lies we're fed. Like, if you only had this income, you'd feel safe, you know, you wouldn't die in effect, you know? Yes. It's like, you won't even get sick, you know? And, you know, immortality isn't really here at hand, but only for rich people, you're not rich enough. Right. You know, that you can hold on to someone else. I mean, you're a dad, right? And so there's a combination, you know, what I've seen in my friends who are parents or grandparents of, you know, of course, nurturing and feeling responsible for and holding the family in that way. And there's also a good amount of letting go, you know? Like, yes, you can't insist the child be poetic when they're kind of scientific or athletic when

they're cluts or, you know, whatever. And you could, but that's not love either, you know? So you're continually letting go of being in control all the time. And so, you know how to do it, actually, you know, as a dad, that was just applying it to yourself in your life. But I think that's an amazing feeling. You don't want it to be like you're every day or every moment of every day, you know, because how grim is that? But, you know, to be right, I mean, one of my big bugaboos is how far down I have to scroll online whenever I have to enter my birth year, you know? And it's like, it's like hours, you know, I'm still going down that stupid list, you know, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Yeah, the 50s, right. Okay, you know.

I mean, it's so stupid, you know, and it brings up a lot of a genuine feeling, even though it's funny, you know? But it's the truth of things, right? So why live in denial? It's going to be worse somehow to live in denial and pretend like, yeah, I've got it down now, you know, it's going to be okay. Right. Right. Right. That's cruel. I do that with video games, Sharon. It's like, I'm embarrassed that I'm playing a video game, right? And then on top of that, it's like, okay, it's like, okay, let's just go all the way back decades before most people were playing this game we're born. So this, this is where to me, I recoil sometimes from Buddhism. And maybe a lot of people do is because somewhere here, you must face

this terrible reality that you were sort of dissipating that you are in a system, in a process that is dissipating you and will dissipate your children and will dissipate every single thing. This, I think this is where I hit the wall, because I like to, sometimes I think I'm not afraid of death. I'm not afraid of death at all. I've overcome that. I've done LSD hundreds of times. I know what it is to die. But you know, in those moments where you really face it, it is inexorable. You can't argue with it. It doesn't care how funny you may be or how, whatever, whatever you're doing, how many books you've written. Oh, people like your podcast, I'm still going to eat you. But I was number 48 in the house. Yeah. So somewhere here,

I, I hit something that I, it's almost worse than terror. That's almost worse than, it's like zero on the number line. It's, my mind cannot play any tricks on it at all. What, what is, what is that? Is that suffering? Is suffering that feeling that, I don't even want to call it a feeling. It's suffering like that electric pulse that just goes through your body when you manage to terrify all of your coping mechanisms and look at the thing in the eye. Yeah. I mean, that's why, you know, people have teachers, people have a community. It's not easy to go through alone. And yet, it's not useless. It's not a useless state. It's horrible feeling.

Yes. But it's not a useless state if we use it correctly. You know, because it is, it's a genuine response to a real problem. Somebody was once quoted as saying, the best thing you can say about the universe is that it's a bad design. You know, I mean, really, it's absurd. And it's, it's a bigger front. Personally, I feel that I have to die. You know, like, I spent all this time like learning something or, you know, cultivating something and I have to die. It's ridiculous. Yelp reviews of the universe. Yelp reviews of the universe. I'm going to give this universe one star. What? Yeah, really, immortal star. You know, and so utilize it. Everyone says that, right? It's like you've got these young kids, you know, you can pay some attention to them.

The world doesn't necessarily tell you to do that, you know, right. But you have that feeling, you know, and you want to just have the best life that you can. Like I have a friend who kind of retired, you know, he sort of had done his career and retired sort of early and he had enough means and he was doing things that were interesting to him in life, you know, in terms of philanthropy or, you know, other things. And then he got offered another job and it was like a super job, you know, and it was not in his intention, his intentional feel to take another job, you know, but yeah, but there it was. And he's trying to decide what to do. And then his partner said something to him, which I just found so funny. She said something like,

I'm really afraid that on your deathbed, you're going to look back and have regret that you didn't take the job. And I said to him, I've never heard of anyone dying and thinking, I wish I'd taken that job, you know, like ever, ever, ever, you know, and I'm not yelling. And so, you know, that doesn't be what we tend to regret at the end of a life. It's like, I didn't see my kids for 40 years. It was a shame. You know, or I was in this other place in life and I kind of fell for the old trap. That's what we regret, you know, but the lack of love we give and receive, you know, maybe there were people that are trying to love us, we couldn't let it in. That's what we regret.

Okay, so you're saying sort of alchemize that state as use it or use it as a compass almost, like what exactly this is true. And that is nothing, you know, it's like, as a parent, you want to take your, you take your kid, you want to your kid have fun. So, take the kids to Dave and Buster's. Now, at some point, you got to leave Dave and Buster's. There's no way around it. It's time for that. I don't know what Dave and Buster's is. I feel all of a sudden like, what is Dave and Buster's? I think Dave and Buster's is a good, Sharon, it's just a good thing. I would actually be shocked if you're like, I love Dave and Buster's. It's a video arcade, basically. It's a loud video arcade designed to drive children into a

froth. And maybe that's the thing we're into. Dave and Buster's for mortals or something. Maybe that's what all of society is, but taking the child out of Dave and Buster's, it's the apocalypse for the child. Like, why don't we live here? This is what reality is supposed to be. Flashing lights, tickets to get your toys, and like cool rides that you can go on, not whatever the heck you guys are doing back at that boring house you've been making me live in that isn't Dave and Buster's. And so, this is how I feel, I think, in contemplating my own mortality. And I I feel like what you're saying is, look, this is usable energy, but also I feel like kind of what you're saying is it's not going anywhere. Like, not only is your mortality an unchanging factor

in reality, but that underlying sense of existential dread associated with it. Does that go away? I mean, are you telling me that for you or for your teachers that they weren't they were still experiencing that even in their wisdom and realization? Yeah, I think it's a kind of complex question because these states are also conditioned, they're culturally conditioned, they're conditioned on our own life experience. Like my mother died when I was nine years old. And I went to live with my father's parents, whom I hardly knew, who were European immigrants, Eastern European immigrants, and had certain beliefs, including the fact that they should never mention my mother, because that would hurt me, you know. So that's sort of the ambiance I

grew up in. And so I went to anyone I was 18 years old, you know. And, you know, so I had a kind of terror about death that is, I think, beyond that existential dread. You know, I think some of it is probably just the human condition, but it's complicated. You know, it was really a compound by my personal life experience. And when that story changed for me, you know, because I do actually believe in rebirth, even though I talked about it earlier. And sometimes when I would feel a lot of fear of death, I'd say to myself, you've done this before, you've done this so many times. You can do it, you're going to be okay, you know. Not everyone has the kind of conditioning that I have. But there's also belief systems, you know, if you do believe in rebirth, you believe in

this life, being like a drop in the ocean. And it's a genuine belief. And so it guides people's kind of feeling states, you know, that's a possibility too. So I do think it is a kind of human feeling. But I don't think everyone dwells in it the same way, or that it's so overwhelming in the same way for everybody. And no, I don't think that my teachers felt that kind of thing. If they did, it was like a blip, you know, because, right, like the 16th car mopper who died in the States of cancer. There's a famous story about him, like he was, and I think Chicago in a hospital and his disciples were around the bed and freaking out. And he said to them, don't worry, nothing happens. You know, I'm gonna say it's like

changing apartments or changing suits or something like that. You know, your consciousness goes on the body is dropped and you pick up a new body. So I don't think it's the same for everybody. But I don't think one should judge oneself for feeling that kind of dread, you know, or feel that you're inferior or something like that. It's not so. This is what you feel. It's not an abnormal thing to feel, really. My loves, I travel all the time. I'm in Kansas City. Soon I'm going to be in Portland. And I've got so many shows coming up. And today's sponsor, Loomie Labs, is my savior. Loomie Labs has created the perfect microdose gummy. I know so many people who when they see an edible, they

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Again, the longer you got to scroll down on the age thing, the further away your child gets. And it becomes kind of shadowy. It's distant, obviously. But then I started thinking, oh, that's reincarnation. That's reincarnation. Probably when you die, you don't even know you died. Kids are born with amnesia. They don't know where they came from. Well, not all the way. Sometimes they say some pretty wild stuff. But so in other words, you don't even get the finish line of death. You probably probably don't even get that. It's just you just wake up and you have no idea what you are. You're in a little body and good luck. Hopefully you were born in the right family, and you don't even know what was in between. And I did feel, when I thought about that,

a sort of remission of the intensity of dread. But then I thought, you're just trying to invent a mythology. You're trying to concoct something to make you feel better in the face of your own mortality. That probably is not the case. So it worked, though, for about eight seconds, which is nice. The reason I'm going down this road with you, Sharon, is because being a general idiot, I try to find a root cause of, okay, well, if we can find the root of what's going on here, then theoretically, there's a fix to the root. And so in the earlier in the conversation, my hopeful, hopefully dark fantasy that we have, there's a epidemic of sociopathic narcissists being fueled by likes and hearts and social media. I think, okay,

well, what makes me a sociopathic narcissist? Like times when I'm acting like a sociopathic narcissist, what is it that would make me want to be the center of any attention at all? Why do I want that? Why would you want that? It's dangerous. It's a noise people. And I think if I'm doing that underneath it, is this very fear we're talking about? Underneath it is if I instantiate myself via some trickery, some charisma, some, you know, social backflips or whatever, conversationally, then I'm real. I'm alive. I exist. And I get to feel like I'm alive for a second, like I'm here. And so then I started thinking, well, theoretically, the more I sort of reframe my position as far as my own mortality goes, then

that kind of neurotic habit would dissipate. And as above so below. So is that what we're dealing with here? Is this a collective attempt at evading that feeling we were talking about earlier? Is that what we're all doing? Collectively running away from that vulnerability by trying to force ourselves into the world? Well, in general, I think that is true. But look at that, then seeing it for what it is gives you an option, you know, or several options that didn't exist before. It's like, really beautiful. And I want to go back to the idea that, you know, the rebirth or whatever is just a myth. It's just a story to help one feel better. I mean, they're all stories, because we don't know, right? You know, in the midst of that dread, there's another

story going on about complete annihilation and erasure and neilism, nothing mattered. So that's a story as well. And we're not quite sure unless you have that kind of vision, you know, we're looking back at your past lives, which some people do clearly. But if you don't have it, you don't know. And so it's like one story or another. So why not choose the story that allows you to, you know, be more free and more creative and have more choice in your life and not just be beholden to the society's myths? May I answer that respectfully, pushback? Because again, let me reiterate, I do believe in reincarnation and not just some faith based thing, because I've met people who remember their past lives. But the pushback is coming from the people listening who

maybe are like, no, no, no, no, no. So I think of Camus, I think of his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, and his definition of something I think he called an existential suicide, which is by sort of inventing something that might not be real by not going to the truth of truths. You actually negate your own existence because you've attached yourself to, you know, it reminds me of what Chogyam Trumpa said, who did believe in reincarnation. He was a Rinpoche. But still, he said, you know, this is like burrowing, like creating an illusion, now burrowing into it and creating a little house that you're living inside. I think that's, there's some resonance between those two ideas, Camus and Chogyam Trumpa. So, and even so, Sharon, you know, if we do reincarnate,

it doesn't matter, because we don't remember. We might as well be gone, like who cares? The identity, the ego, the thing that gets the likes and the retweets, bye-bye, it's gone. It's gone. You can't take those numbers with you. Like, I'm a baby, but in my last life, I got 4,000 followers on. Damn. How depressing. How depressing. You gotta lose that? Are you sure? Oh my god. Oh my god. Yeah, you gotta lose that. And so, and so, again, you're thwarted by this sort of, okay, if, you know, this is my, this is where I'm harvesting the dopamine, or this is where I'm sort of nesting, you're still thwarted yet again by this, no, the Ozymandias, that poem,

you're still, behold my works, ye mighty and despair, a head lay on the sand, or however it goes. You know what I'm saying? You're still thwarted. So now what? Let's take reincarnation off the table. Now what? Okay, well, I'm not proposing one rigidly holds a view and sort of beat other people over the head with it. You know, my favorite line about rebirth, because my teachers, you know, they weren't holding on to Buddhism or certain philosophy or a certain view. They were really encouraging one's own discovery, you know, of what is true. And so, I'd want teachers, my name is Ninja, and somebody was really arguing with him about rebirth and saying, I don't believe it, I don't see this cosmology in many lives. And

Ninja just said, you don't have to believe it. He said, it's true, but you don't have to believe it. Which is a kind of likeness, which is a good thing. I think you come to the same place, whether you believe in, if you know, future lives or not, which is like, this life is precious, and it matters what we do. It's not inconsequential, it matters, whether it matters because it forms your next life or it matters, because this is all you got, you know, it matters. And so, I think Camus, he did something with that feeling he wrote, right? Yeah, he did. Yeah, which is kind of useful for generations to come. Absolutely. And yes, I love that, you know, it's sort of like finding in the groundless, some kind of, here's the reason, not just to keep going,

though, but here's the reason to keep going compassionately, because I think the danger, if we remove a cosmology that has baked into it, consequence, repercussion, then, and many secularists really like hate it when people like me say this, because I'm like, look, I don't need God, I don't need reincarnation to be a good person. But if you wanted to create a condition, if you, I'm sorry, I write this, generally, the secularist atheists will say, I can just be a good person, okay? And it's like, well, that's incredible. I wish I were you, because I can't be a good person all the time. I habitually make radical errors in the way I treat people around me. And I believe in reincarnation, I will think, well, eff it, I'll be a bug next life,

if I get to win this argument, it'll be worth it to be a mosquito, to win here, you know? So, but I love, this is like something you're so good at teaching, which is like, ultimately, it doesn't matter, because here we are, and the people around you, don't forget them, they too have a precious human life, maybe they reincarnate, maybe they don't, but they're here, they're here. But look at this here-ness that we're dealing with right now. And I think this leads us into a chance to talk about your book that's coming out in August. I have to try April. What? It's coming out in April. Oh, I thought you said August, God forgive me. April. We did this delusion April 11. Folks, real quick, I get to talk to

Sharon Salzburg, it's not fair, could you do me the favor of pre-ordering her book? It makes a huge difference. It seems like it wouldn't, but if you love her, which we all do, go pre-order the book, that we're about to talk about, probably just after we talked about the book. But this, it appears to me that compared to the past, at least in my own life, your own life, technology has given us so many beautiful things. It has made, we are all magicians now, if you want to be, we can do just about anything you want to do. We've got artificial intelligence that we could have the conversations with, we can, anything in our minds, it's easier to get it out into the world. But the price of that seems to be that we don't need to go to the office anymore. We don't

need to go around people anymore. We are using dating apps to find people who don't have to go to the bars, the restaurants, the clubs. This is the, take Boo Radley from to kill a mockingbird. That's everybody. We're all Boo Radley right now. We're all living in the house. We don't go out that much. We don't need to. And so this has produced a incredibly lonely reality for so many people who maybe they think they're not lonely because they're having zoom chats or they're like talking with their friends in video games, but I can only speak for myself. The world is a distant place for me. And it's right outside my door. Sometimes I walk from, I walk from my house to my studio, back to my house. Sometimes I'm like, huh, listen to those birdies. And then right back in the studio,

off to work. So for me, it's an isolated situation. I've got a family. I can't imagine what it's like for people who have yet or don't want to. And so can you tell me a little bit about your new book in relation to this predicament that I think we all find ourselves in? We've collect, we're the most lonely, collectivized society in history, maybe, completely interconnected, completely dependent on each other's like affirmations via social media, completely like connected through work, and yet somehow massively fragmented, massively disconnected, massively isolated. Well, and thank you for bringing up the book. That's a great thing. So the book is called Real Life, The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom. It's the first time I've written a book

while not traveling incessantly, you know, because I was in basic isolation, as so many people were, although not everybody. And it was kind of inspired from the first Passover I was in lockdown, you know, in 2020. I watched this show on YouTube called Saturday Night Seder, which I loved. And it's, I believe it's still up. And it had brilliant, brilliant musicians. And it was very funny. And I learned a lot. Like, I didn't know that the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow was connected to Kristallnacht in the Nazi regime, you know, and I learned a lot, you know, and. Wait, can you talk about that a little bit more? I mean, I wish you'd never said that. Oh, God, what can you talk about? Well, it's just, you know, this

just was in the show. And, you know, I'm not a historian or a scholar, but they said that. And it was in that era, you know, some believe in response to what was happening. And then someone sang it so you can imagine the emotion of, you know, so I learned a lot watching it. And it reminded me that symbolically, not dealing with geopolitics, but symbolically, the word Egypt means a narrow place, narrow strength. So it's about confinement, constriction, feeling trapped. And the journey is from constriction to openness to freedom. And so I thought, oh, that's what I want to write about. I want the arc of the book to be just that. So then I looked at, like, when do we tend to feel the most trapped, the most shut down, the most constricted? And,

you know, certainly in Buddhist teaching is greed, hatred, and delusion. And, you know, I tried to make those relevant in people's lives. You know, I talked about addiction, I wrote about shame a lot as a kind of lacerating self-hatred. You know, we think it's so noble and it's so onward leading and it's not really, you know, it's confining, it's trapping, it's not a way to learn, it's not a way to grow. And then what do we do about that? You know, and so there are all these practices, including one from my Tibetan teacher, Sonny Rinpoche, who calls it, he calls all those states that go on fear and greed and so on. He calls them our beautiful monsters. And then he calls the practice handshake practice, which is like, you know, don't freak out. Your awareness

is actually stronger than this, even seemingly massive and intense feeling. It's just visiting. You live here. Your awareness, your compassion, they live here. So you can actually treat this visitor with awareness, with presence, with balance, with some kindness, like in other forms, as you know, of Tibetan Buddhist practice, they would say, invite that demon in for a meal. Keep an eye on them, like don't give them the run of the house, because, you know, they're dangerous if they're in control. But you don't have to be so upset. You don't have to be so freaked out. You don't have to be so ashamed that this visitor has come. It reminds me, I think, psychologically of, you know, when things happen to us, when we're two years old or three years old or four years old,

it is about survival. And so we incorporate that level of angst and anguish and terror with the incident. And so later on, that spark is triggered, as we say. And yet we're an adult. We have choices now. We have options we never had. As a child, it's actually not a matter of survival. We have enough space, spaciousness. We have enough awareness. We can deal with this as an adult rather than a child. So it's a lot of that kind of feeling. So, you know, let the beautiful monster be there without falling sway to it, you know, having an overwhelming, and also without being so ashamed, so upset. It's like, here you are. You know, so I was teaching once, I think it was New York, and I said, invite, you know, you're inner critic. Invite those

demons in for a meal. And someone in the room didn't like it. So we said, how about inviting them in for a cup of tea? And they said, how about a cup of tea to go? So I said, okay, if that's the extent of your hospitality, but that's the feeling we cultivate. So it's not the very appearance of the demon. It's how we are with it that moves us into that state of expansion. And then, you know, I wrote about what that's like, you know, to have more gratitude, more love, more generosity, not in a funny way, you know, which I think you've been pointing to as a possibility in this conversation. You know, people put it on as a mantle of defense. They're just spiritually up-leveling. They're not looking at, you know, genuinely what's happening within them or outside

of them. And that's always a possibility, but we don't want to go there. And we don't have to go there. Sharon, we've got a few minutes left. In the beginning of your description of the book, you were talking about awareness is stronger than these things. How would you define that awareness? And what's the distinction between the awareness and, I don't know, the apprehension of whatever these particular beautiful monsters are? Like, where does the awareness end and the monsters start? Well, you could say awareness is like consciousness of, you know, you can be conscious that you're hearing a sound. You can be conscious that you're seeing an image. You'd be conscious that you're feeling an emotion. You'd be conscious of a thought that's arising

and passing away. But this, you know, comes into British psychology. And I'll try not to be too technical, but it's almost like we know with certain elements. So the, you can know the sound with greed, you can know a sound with hatred, you know, a sound with delight, you can know a sound with, and there are lots of factors that feed into that. You know, you may be didn't get any sleep all night, and then you hear a conversation and you think you're so annoyed by it. Whereas yesterday would have been nothing. You know, there are a lot of factors that feed into our reaction, but the reaction is very real as a part of the whole dynamic. And so that's really what we're working on. Instead of being ashamed, for example, that, you know, I still get frightened. I've been

meditating for 50 years for God's sake. Yeah, it's like, okay, how am I with the fear? And that's, that's where our power actually lies. Whoa, I never, I didn't, I haven't heard that yet. You can change like, is that, is that in that? So the idea is like, it's the knowing or the listening or, that's right. You could change the way you're listening. That's right. You can control that. So, and so you're sort of habitually attuned, like when you hear this certain thing, if my phone beeps and I'm expecting like a bad text, whereas if my phone beeps and I'm waiting for someone I love to text me, it's, it's, so you're saying that there is some control so that you don't have to, that's really fascinating. I never, I mean, I've heard that maybe in different

ways, but I've never heard it from the Buddhist perspective. You can, you don't have to listen to everything with horror. Yeah. Whoa. Cool. Sharon, thank you so much. I am so excited for this book. I love all your books. Thank you. You are so prolific. And I'm very excited for this new one. And I really, really appreciate you letting me, as always, unload the darkness. You're so good at, you're so, you should become some kind of meditation teacher. Whoa. And, and, and book aside everyone again, please pre-order the book. Please, so that, so that Sharon will keep coming on the podcast. Not that you wouldn't, but you know, it adds a little sugar to the situation. Can, can also, can you tell people, you know, aside

from writing, you do have meditation classes, Zoom sessions. Can you tell people a little bit about your community and how they can connect with it? I think if you just look at my website, which is SharonSalsberg.com and Spellcheck is repeatedly trying to change Salisbury to be with a U, but it's not in my name. It's A-S-A-L-Z-B-E-R-G. And you'll see my schedule. I am, thus far, still teaching on Zoom, you know, and not in person. And they're, I feel very connected to people I'm with on Zoom. I don't feel distant and weird at this point at all. I don't know that I ever did. And so I have a whole variety of different things. I mean, for now, since the book is coming out in April 11th, there's a lot about

expansion and contraction and how to deal with these beautiful monsters and stay living with more loving kindness and so on. And then as time goes on, you know, it's a lot of introduction to meditational kinds of things that, that I'm interested in. I'm gonna have to teach a class on getting older and facing death, I can tell from this conversation. It's time. And I'm, I'll be your first sign up. Sharon, thank you so much. It's a joy chatting with you. I'm so lucky that you keep coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. And a big thank you to you for listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. With one of the best savings rates in America, banking with capital one is the easiest decision

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