Making Sense with Sam Harris - #15 — Questions Along the Path

Episode Date: August 11, 2015

Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein discuss the practice of meditation and answer questions that came from listeners in response to their first conversation, "The Path and the Goal." If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. Today I'll be speaking with Joseph Goldstein, who is an old friend and quite a distinguished and wonderful teacher of meditation, in particular Vipassana meditation, mindfulness meditation. Joseph and I spoke before on my podcast about a year ago, and that episode was entitled The Path and the Goal. And if you haven't listened to that, I recommend you do before listening to this one, because this one is, in fact, a response to listener questions that arose from that first podcast. The conversation this time around, because it's in Q&A format, really does not take any kind of linear path from beginner to expert in terms of its content areas. And one thing I'd also point out is that I make no effort to discuss the liabilities of Buddhism

as a religion. As most of you know, I don't consider myself a Buddhist. I just find the practice of meditation incredibly useful. Joseph certainly considers himself a Buddhist, and he is a quite well-known Buddhist teacher and largely responsible for bringing the techniques of Buddhist meditation into more prominence in the West over the last 40 years or so. But we use Buddhist terminology, and while we define these terms from time to time, I'm not making any effort in these conversations to divorce this topic from its traditional Buddhist context.

I do that more in my book, Waking Up. This is just to say that those of you who may be uncomfortable with seeing meditation and the nature of mind discussed in an explicitly Buddhist framework will continue to be uncomfortable throughout this conversation. But given Joseph's background and his expertise, it would have simply been a waste of time to try to translate our terminology for export out of Buddhism into some other non-sectarian context. In any case, Joseph is a gem. He's, as I said, the first time around one of the wisest people I've ever met. And as you'll hear at the end of our conversation, he and our friend Dan Harris,

the ABC News anchor and author of the New York Times bestseller 10% Happier, have designed a short meditation course in the form of an app. And where this podcast is embedded on my blog, I have a link to the relevant page in the iTunes store. And while you can start that course for free, I think you get the first three days free, if you choose to buy the whole course, you get a 20% discount using the product code WAKINGUP, all in caps. So if you want more information about that, please check my blog. And without further preamble, I give you Joseph Goldstein. Without further preamble, I give you Joseph Goldstein. I'm now with Joseph Goldstein.

I have him back for round two of more meditation punishment. Thanks for coming back, Joseph. Thanks for doing this. That's great. I think something like 180,000, is that right, people have listened to the first one? It could be the same four people who are just diehards hitting refresh over and over again. But we certainly were more esoteric than many conversations on this topic become, but I think that was probably a strength. I think a lot of people appreciated us getting into the weeds about mindfulness and the difference between different types of mindfulness and Dzogchen versus Vipassana. Or Dzogchen and Vipassana.

Yeah, as the case may be. So let's get into it again. And we have a bunch of questions that have come in. But first, is there anything that you recall from our last conversation that you wanted to revisit and explore, or you want to retract something that I said? Anything come to mind? Nothing really is coming to mind. The older I get, the less I recall. The less that comes to mind? Okay. Well, we have many questions, and maybe that'll just start us off. So Jamie Lunsford asks, what amount of practice is required before the average practitioner can expect to obtain, quote, sufficient concentration, as Joseph puts it,

to change the quality of her experience? I'm sure it varies, but more generally, what if I never go on a 10-day retreat or meet a Dzogchen master? Can everyday practice still serve me? I think it's correct to say that there is no average meditator. You know, the people bring a wide variety of backgrounds to the meditation. And so for some people, concentration comes quite easily.

And for others, it takes quite a systematic training. What I would say is it's really important to watch the commitment to being mindful throughout the day because concentration actually comes about through the continuity of mindfulness. So it's not so much an effortful focusing, but rather more quality of being relaxed back into the moment to get right back into the Dzogchen Vipassana framework. A Dzogchen phrase that is used very often, and which we might've mentioned in our last talk, the phrase that's used is undistracted non-meditation. So the non-meditation part suggests that effortless quality of settling back into a natural awareness. But often people forget the undistracted part.

Yeah, yeah. That's where it's about this continuity of relaxed awareness and so really the the question is whether we're really considering our meditation to be the time that we're sitting on a cushion you know for however long each day or we're seeing it as practicing that quality of undistracted non-meditation throughout the whole day. And it's that continuity which will lead to some stability. What does the phrase, the word non-meditation mean to you? Because undoubtedly that's gonna be confusing

to some people. I think it has many levels of meaning, but just in the simplest way of understanding it, it can refer to a relaxed awareness, settling back into the simplicity of things being known moment after moment without an efforting, without a striving. I think that's just the simplest way of understanding it. I think in a Dzogchen context, it means abandoning subject-object focus, too. That has the implication that you're not trying to fix attention on anything strategically. It's just wide open to whatever, in fact, you notice. Yeah, I think that could be a further way of understanding it.

But as you point out, the crucial distinction is between being distracted and undistracted. If you're distracted, then you're just lost in thought like anyone else. And one of the things almost everybody notices is that it's not very easy to remain undistracted. I mean, the idea is very nice. You know, the idea of non-meditation, that open, effortless awareness. But there's something else which is needed in order to sustain the undistracted quality.

And you could call it recognition, you could call it remembering, you could call it settling back. I make the difference. You could call it recognition. You could call it remembering. You could call it settling back. I make the difference. You could call it mindfulness. Wouldn't you call mindfulness the gatekeeper of that? Definitely. The quality of mindfulness is to know when we're distracted and when we're not.

You know, that's, Tulkha Orgen, the great Zotan Mester, called mindfulness the watchman of the mind. Another phrase that I like to use, especially when I'm teaching retreats, but it could be useful for anyone practicing in the course of their daily lives, is understanding the difference between being casual and being relaxed in our attention. Because often those two are confused. because often those two are confused. We hear the suggestion to be relaxed,

and then before we know it, our attention has simply become casual. And in that quality, we find our minds getting distracted again and again. So there's a certain impeccability that's needed. This brings up a few questions. Actually, one question of mine, or one thing to explore further, I have recently said in another podcast, and it's directly to Jamie's question, that I felt like I didn't learn how to meditate until I sat my first 10-day retreat. cause for despair because my experience was I got very into meditation. I was sitting really

reliably an hour a day for a full year before I went off on the first, I think it was Yucca Valley retreat with you. And it wasn't until maybe the fifth day of that retreat, somewhere around the midpoint where I really connected to the practice in a way that I hadn't before. And I remember the epiphany, presumably reasonably accurate, that I had just been thinking with my legs crossed in my daily practice for the previous year. An hour a day was insufficient for me to really drop down a level within a mindfulness context with continuity and sustained attention to see what I wasn't seeing and to really clearly see the difference between being lost in thought and not. And now I'm sure I was a hard case, but can you comment on that?

Is that a common experience to feel like it's not until you sit in intensive retreat that you really know what it is you're supposed to be doing? I think you probably did have a strong propensity for thinking. So it depends on what people bring to the practice. I guess a question I would ask you, and I don't know whether you remember back to then, but in that time before your first 10-day retreat, you mentioned that you were sitting pretty reliable an hour a day.

The question would be, what were you doing the other 23 hours? You know, whether you had enough understanding of what was needed to actually be committed to the practice of mindfulness, you know, just in the course of your daily activities. And many people don't appreciate the importance or the power of that. I think the jury is still out because I think there are not that many people who give that level of attention, you know, and of mindfulness to walking down the street or to eating or to really making the daily activities part of the practice. So whether the level of concentration and settledness you experience on the retreat would

come in the course of daily practice if you did that would be an interesting experiment. in the course of daily practice, if you did that, would be an interesting experiment. Now, clearly, if people come to a retreat, they're practicing intensively all day long in silence, just sitting and walking. So there is a momentum that more easily builds up. Right. So it's understandable that you had that experience. Actually, a related experience was to discover sometime later that the walking meditation practice is every bit as deep as the sitting practice. I would imagine people also make that

discovery rather often later for whatever reason. And I don't know if that was in the same retreat or my next one, but at a certain point, it just became very clear that the walking that I had been treating as kind of a break from the sitting as a way of just rejuvenating the body was truly profound. And so that's something, there are kind of layers of discovery, very simple ones at the beginning where you notice that mindfulness is as available in every context as every other context. In principle, it's just not, it doesn't actually have to be framed by a sitting practice. Though, again, the crucial difference between distraction and non-distraction is the thing that always one has to note it. Yeah, I think that is a very

important insight. And many people, it does take time for them to realize how profound the walking practice can be. But anybody who's listening to this podcast might take this understanding and in the course of their daily practice, actually give more attention to the walking. And so one very helpful thing that I often suggest to people is if you're doing a daily practice of an hour or however long it may be to perhaps do the first 10 minutes of walking meditation and then sit. And that does two things. One, it settles the mind so that we drop into the sitting in a deeper place from having done the walking and it begins to reveal the fact that the awareness can be as refined in the walking as in the sitting once we have that understanding then in walking any place we're walking down the street we're walking from one room to another once we really have the sense of what it means to feel the sensations of the movement and walking

we realize it takes very little effort because we're walking anyway there's not right there's nothing special to do except to be feeling it then every step we take through the day can be a walking meditation and that gives that gives a chance for us to build the momentum that person who sent in the question was asking about there's more chance you know of building up that level of stability even outside of a retreat right although you know always a retreat is helpful is helpful. There's no doubt about that. But at a certain point, don't you feel that it's divorced from the principle of momentum? You seem to be suggesting that it's by dint of momentum that the experienced meditator has better daily meditation practice than the unexperienced one.

Okay. So I think here this may harken back to our previous conversation. It's not that I have a bone to pick with you. I've just fallen back into these same ruts. I think given your predilection for the Zou Chen perspective, which, you know, as you know, I have tremendous appreciation for also, I think would be more useful in this conversation if you simply replace the word momentum with stability, because for me, they're the same thing. Right. But I guess I'm trying to dig under that. It's not so much... Because I see momentum, stability, they both get decisively interrupted, and they can be interrupted for so long that any notion of a carryover from some previous period in the day seems a little far-fetched, right? So you could have an hour

that's just wall-to-wall distraction, right? You're watching a movie or you're arguing with someone on the telephone or you're shopping. I mean, it's something where you've linked up as many moments of dualistic confusion and distraction as you're capable of. I would imagine that hour has cleared out the bank of potential energy you have stored up from all your previous moments of continuity or momentum or stability. So that you're really starting fresh. Get me to a moment where you're starting, you've had a period of total distraction and now you just have to start fresh and you're starting fresh with a period of sitting for

the first time in 24 hours or even longer than that. I think that someone who knows what they're doing, knows what to look for, knows how to pay attention, has become sensitized to the difference between being lost in thought and being clearly aware, that person can very quickly move through to an experience of clarity and sustained mindfulness that it is like a's like a it is like a skill that you've learned which you you know once you know how to play the piano once you know how to ride a bike you can actually start doing it it's not like every time you get on the bike you fall off because you don't have enough momentum from your previous writings no i think that's right yeah so i guess it's a

skill-based conception of what it means to be mindful rather than a storehouse of energy notion. I'm not denying that the momentum phenomenon is there. The stability phenomenon. Yeah, or the stability. But there is a sense of storing up energy when you link enough moments together. That's something you get, I think, especially on retreat, where the day at a certain point is really humming along, and it's not something one tends to feel unless one is practicing in a sustained way. in addition to having learned the skill and, you know, being able to access what that skill can bring more easily, you know, the more practiced one is in the skill.

As you say, you don't have to struggle to know how to balance on a bike each time. Right. Like the mind drops right into it. Something I've noticed, you know, for many years of practice now, over 50 years, that there is a gradual buildup of what I would call the base of concentration or the base of stability.

And I kind of liken it to the ski reports where they give the snow report and how deep the base is. And what I've noticed is that, of course, it will go up and down. It'll be deeper or shallower at different times. But the slope of that curve over time, I have noticed, has really gone up. I have noticed has really gone up. And so the mind drops more easily into a deeper base of stability, of concentration. And I think that's not a question of, you know, we're more or less concentrated for any particular sitting.

I don't know, you could probably address this more accurately, but the neural pathways in the mind get, I don't know the right terminology, get more deeply patterned. Yeah. You know, over time it is just easy, even if one has been distracted. For example, you go to the movies and you're totally lost in the movie. You come out and you decide to sit for an hour. If one is well-practiced, the mind will drop into that deeper place of stability. And that has grown over the years. The more we practice, the more stable that becomes. Well, I think that fits with the skill-based model. It is a skill of attentional regulation, which you get better and better at. Yes, yes, yes.

So you just have a facility for coming back to the present moment more decisively, and you notice when you're gone earlier. I also find that intense experience is a kind of mindfulness alarm now and increasingly in a way that isn't in the beginning of one's practice. When you're suffering, you can't suffer for very long without realizing that this is a problem for which you have a solution. And at that point, you're either willfully not using the solution and indulging in some negative mind state, or you're cutting through the suffering and undermining it just as a matter of habit every

moment going forward. Yeah. And I think one element of that habit, which for me has been a huge source of energy in the practice to cut through, you know, in those moments of being caught up or, you know, lost in some kind of suffering is the quality of interest. For me, interest has played such a key role in my meditation practice because when my mind is suffering in whatever way, you know, just caught up, caught up in some reactivity for the most part, I get really interested in what's going on in my mind. Now, how is my mind getting caught? How am I, how am I feeding this? And that interest then provokes the attention, right? Provokes the investigation. And interest is, I love that word and I love the

quality because interest is very nonjudgmental. There's a tendency in the mind, I would say, especially for people in the beginning of their practice, although this could go on for many years, is when we're involved in some kind of negativity or some kind of suffering, of negativity or some kind of suffering, there can be a tendency to be self-judgmental or judgmental about what's arising. And that, of course, just ties the knot even tighter. If there's a quality of interest, it's like we're removing that judgmental aspect and it almost becomes, you know, the mind becomes like, it's this puzzle that we're trying to understand, that we're trying to untie the knots. And it gets very interesting. There are two expectations that cover what we've just been talking about that I think can be

unhelpful. One would be the expectation that you need to be on retreat, having linked many, many moments of mindfulness together to get down to bedrock in this moment, right? So if you've been lost for long enough, there's really nothing good that's going to come of the next moment of mindfulness, kind of a radical gradualism expectation, which I think is false, but also to some degree self-perpetuating. So to drop that is helpful because you really can have as deep and as meaningful an experience of mindfulness in this moment as at any point in a retreat if you

really pay attention. The other is relevant to what you just brought up, the expectation that certain negative mind states shouldn't or won't come up any longer for you if you have any kind of mature meditation practice. So to feel, as you said, to feel that you really shouldn't be experiencing something and have a self-judgment added to the negative experience blocks the door to just becoming interested and cutting through it on the basis of just merely paying attention to the arising of this anger or fear or greed or whatever it is. Once you know to expect that many negative things will keep coming up, victory is in, at least in my view or at my stage of practice, victory is in the half-life of these things.

Like how long are you an asshole for, right? The difference between being angry for an hour and for five seconds, I mean, that is a huge difference. That is huge. is a truly life-disorienting state of mind, whereas five seconds is just, again, you could just be the one who's interested to see this anger arise and pass away. Well, there are a couple of things. One is I'd just like to emphasize the fact that it's not necessarily that we'll go from an hour of anger to five seconds.

We could get five more seconds, five seconds after that, yes. No, it's the punctuation of it that is to become sensitive. Yeah, yeah. And keep it rising. There's one attitude of mind, an attitude shift,

which was tremendously important for me in seeing the negative feelings or emotions or things that cause suffering arising in my mind. When I went from either feeling bad about myself for having them or judging them, you know, being in an adverse relationship to them, when things shifted and I became delighted to see them because I would rather see them than not see them. And so there's a certain moment of delight that can happen when we have that frame. So anger arises or judgment arises or fear arises or conceit or pride or envy or

jealousy, you know, any one of the afflictive emotions, when these arise now and in the moment of seeing them, it's almost like a smile comes to my mind because, you in the in the language of the buddhist discourses where the buddha would often say oh mara i see you that's the quality in the mind in that moment oh mara i see you and there's there's a certain joy in the fact of the seeing when that shift happens it changes everything in terms of our relationship to it. Then that becomes the foundation for an investigation. Okay, you know, what gave rise to it? How am I getting caught? How can I be free in this moment?

Well, I must say, I love to see you get angry too, Joseph. That's always fun. Well, keep trying. So there's a few questions related here. I think we've covered some of this, but Julio Gutierrez asks, could you speak more about the path outside of the meditation cushion, how to be mindful in daily interaction with people, how to be mindful while having an intellectual discussion? We've covered some of that, but what is your thought on how to be mindful, if at all, while engaged in intellectual work? There's

the difference between thinking and not thinking, or being lost in thought, seeing thought as thought or just being busy thinking. This is a question I get from people a fair amount, the idea that you can't really be mindful while doing most of what creative, intelligent, productive people need to do? How do you view that? I think there are two domains to understand this. In one, it's something my first teacher, Manindraji, would say often in addressing that question. Because when we are engaged intellectually, even something as simple as reading a book, you know, or doing any kind of creative work that involves the intellect and

involves thinking, you know, or concepts, we can't really apply the same kind of mindfulness as we would, for example, in meditation, because otherwise the words would become disconnected. We wouldn't be tuning into the level of meaning particularly. And so Munindra used to talk about what he called a general mindfulness, where we're totally engaged in what we're doing. We're engaged in the concepts and we're using that level of the mind, but there's enough mindfulness present to pick up if some unwholesome states arise in the process of being engaged in that work. You know, we're talking or we're reading or we're doing some kind of conceptual work. And if the mind is in an even place in doing it

or a wholesome place, you know, there's interest in creativity and energy, but then if something unwholesome should arise, there's enough mindfulness that will pick that up. And in that moment, we could kind of settle back and say, okay, what just happened? So that's a kind of, mindfulness is a protection for the mind.

There is one exception which I found to mindfulness within kind of that conceptual, intellectual realm. And the Buddha had an interesting comment about this, and that is in giving Dharma talks, the in giving dharma talks or even in speaking the dharma in a dharma conversation that actually falls more into the meditative level than the level of just conceptual conceptual work so even though we're using concepts to express the content there's a certain power in terms of speaking the dharma so that it's actually possible

the buddha mentioned this to get enlightened both in speaking or in listening right because in that kind of conversation, if we're doing it with wisdom, we're not so much lost in our usual evaluation of what's being said, oh, I like this, I don't like it, I agree with it, I don't agree with it, but rather in a Dharma conversation or either speaking or listening, it's more that we're actually doing the words rather than analyzing them.

And so that's why it can be such a powerful experience to hear a Dharma talk or to be in a really engaged Dharma conversation. As I say, where we're actually experiencing what the words are saying. It seems to me that the difference may be even more categorical than that, because I just think listening to someone speak or having a conversation is potentially more amenable to that kind of expansive clarity than doing other things like reading. For instance, like I'm talking to you, I can very clearly be mindful both while talking and while listening. And I can cut through what I'm calling or have called the illusion of the self in the midst of that. that to lose a sense of self while looking at your face, it's got a clear mirror to that experience than just looking at a wall or some other or having your eyes closed.

But if I go to read these questions from listeners here, there's a kind of trimming down of my awareness to just decode the sentence I'm reading that seems to some degree synonymous with delusion for me. It's not that you can't read, and certainly if I was reading about meditation or emptiness or any of these topics, I could bring a special kind of attention to the task of reading. But generally speaking, looking at words on a page and trying to figure out what they mean, at least for me, is a much duller frame of mind. And it's analogous to walking into a supermarket, just doing shopping and looking for different brands and trying to figure out which one you want. I mean, there's something so dull about that use of attention. Dull,

not as in boring, but dull as in just there's a kind of a bovine lack of clarity by comparison with other moments. The ultimate example that no longer pertains happily to the world is free of this experience now. But I recall what it was like to come off retreat decades ago and go into a blockbuster video store looking for what video to rent yes and there was something excruciating about that experience to just travel the shelves reading with your head cocked to the side to read the the vertical spine of these cassette boxes trying to figure out what you wanted and just going through hundreds of crappy movies, many of which you've seen. And at that point, I was just very sensitive to the difference

between paying attention one way or the other. And that has always figured in my mind even more than experiences of interpersonal conflict as a kind of awareness that is just the antithesis of wisdom and clarity and mindfulness. I think that points to, how to say this, it points to both the diluted and unsatisfying quality of wanting. Just that that mind state of wanting itself right is a kind of buddhist it's a buddhist terminology dukkha it's just unsatisfying the the amazing thing is that we are seduced generally into thinking that wanting is enjoyable. And we live, you know, very often wanting to want, like your experience in the store.

You were just waiting to want something. You're wanting to want, not seeing that the very quality of the wanting mind is inherently unsatisfying. Yeah. And it gets amplified in that case because you're kind of wanting on a deadline because you can't get out of the store until you figure out what you want, right? It's just an exercise of focused wanting and dissatisfaction. And the hopelessness of the whole exercise becomes obvious. Yeah, but here this becomes a very interesting exercise, I think,

for people to explore in the course of their daily lives because wanting comes up a lot in a lot of different situations. Wanting comes up a lot in a lot of different situations. It would be very interesting for people to begin to really pick up or become aware of when there is wanting in the mind for whatever it may be, and to get a visceral sense of what it's like to want. What does it feel like to want, what does it feel like, you know, to want, to have that quality in the mind. And then if possible, either to contrast that with other times of not wanting, you know, and just to begin to see the difference in one's experience between wanting and not wanting.

Just to begin to see the difference in one's experience between wanting and not wanting. And one could do that if we're aware of the wanting and then are mindful enough to just wait until it's gone. Because wanting, like everything else, is impermanent. And in that moment of transition, of going from wanting to not wanting, That's a really powerful moment, you know, because we get a very clear understanding of the difference in our experience of those two mind states. And for myself, it always feels like

I've been let out of the grip of something. As soon as the mind is released from wanting, there's a kind of relaxation into openness into ease but this is this is not something that most people are paying attention to you know the the kind of wanting mode is just so it's so much part of our everyday lives we hardly pay attention to it. And yet it offers, if we are mindful of it, it can offer a very profound understanding of the nature of mind of the cause of a lot of suffering. At this point, because I've played with this a lot, and I watch for this in my mind, very often, not always, there's still quite a bit more to do in this regard but quite often often enough to be noticeable i'll notice a wanting for something and then i'll i'll consciously say or consciously remind myself i don't need to want this you know

the wanting is a choice. The wanting is a choice I'm making. And if in those moments I really see that clearly and say, no, I don't, I don't need to want this. And the mind actually lets go. It's an amazing moment of ease, you know, and it's, it's always available to us. It's just being mindful enough of what our minds are doing and the potential for making wiser choices.

Yeah, yeah. It actually connects to this next question I have here from Matthew Laurel Trinidad. I would appreciate some comment on what Joseph and you think of the role of sila, i.e. moral conduct, in the development of mindfulness and how to define or arrive upon the essential principles of sila, i.e. moral conduct, in the development of mindfulness and how to define or arrive upon the essential principles of sila or to avoid religious dogma in defining or arriving at

the same. It's hugely important. Right. So say more about that, but I guess one question to get you started that just occurred to me is, it seems to me, certainly reading the literature on meditation and understanding some of the mishaps in the careers of various gurus and yogis, it's possible to be quite an accomplished meditator and still be a total schmuck. Be someone who is not only not impeccable, but reliably unethical by our standards. You have Swami Muktananda building a tunnel between his living quarters and the girls' dorm at his ashram where he's essentially raping, one presumes, 14-year-old girls. And I mean, they're just horrendous stories about specific people about whom there are also stories that really seem to attest to their spiritual athleticism in terms of their meditative attainments and the kinds of positive effects they've managed to have on people. So talk about that.

Well, I think this points to a critical distinction between power and wisdom. a critical distinction between power and wisdom. You know, and through meditative skill, the mind can become very powerful in many ways and do all kinds of, you know, what might even seem miraculous things, and certainly with strong energetic impact on other people. And so lots of experiences can happen when somebody has developed,

through whatever particular techniques, the strength or power of mind. That's very different than wisdom. And it's very possible for people to have developed these without wisdom. Isn't sustained mindfulness synonymous with a certain component of wisdom? I mean, are you talking about someone, you imagine that some of these teachers have just become concentrated in ways that may be pleasant and given them certain powers of mind or amped up their charisma as teachers

so they have certain influence over their students, but they have just consistently missed the bullseye of what you're calling right practice. That's one possibility. Because that seems a little far-fetched to me. I would imagine that if you grabbed someone like Muktananda in his best hour of meditation and could run that on your brain, you might find all of the components of what you're calling wisdom, and yet it still hasn't inoculated him against being a sociopath in other circumstances in his life. No, I disagree.

I think that just classically speaking, the power of concentration is that it suppresses the defilements at a particular time. And so while you're in that concentrated state, it may be that these unskillful mind states are not arising. But as soon as you're out of the concentration, then these unwholesome states just reemerge because the concentration by itself,

it's not a purifying force in and of itself. We're not necessarily seeing into the impermanent empty nature of phenomena people could be very concentrated and while they're in that state you hook them up to some brain monitoring and their their brains might seem very peaceful or calm or stable or whatever it shows, but that's not saying anything about what defilements have been uprooted from the mind. And that's really the function of wisdom, which is a very different kind of practice. It's also the function, though, of an explicit conceptual understanding about the importance of ethics in one's life.

So that if you're teaching people to meditate without any kind of deep or sophisticated ethical consideration of just what life is for and what constitutes a good life, then the edges of the path are not discernible. There's no metric by which you can then say, oh, my life has wandered off into some totally unskillful and suffering-producing direction. This relates to another point I've made in other contexts, that it's often pointed out that Buddhism can give rise to the same kinds of pathologies as Islam, which I've frequently criticized.

And what is often thrown at me is the phenomenon of the kamikaze pilots in World War II, that you can have Buddhist suicide bombers because they were clearly influenced by Zen. Now, it wasn't just Zen. It was Shinto and it was Japanese martial nationalism and other constellations of ideas, but Zen was definitely involved and you had Zen masters who were advocating for this behavior. And if anyone wants to read about that, there are two books, Zen at War and Zen War Stories, that detail that evidence. And yet you have now the modern spectacle of Tibetan Buddhists, rather than becoming suicide bombers, they're practicing self-immolation in response to the actions of China.

And it seems to me, you know, there's not really deep scholarship at the bottom of this. I have more experience of Tibetan Buddhism, but insofar as I know Zen as well, you can read for a very long time in the Zen literature and not find any emphasis on compassion and sila ethics. To the contrary, you can find many analogies that seem to give a kind of martial ethic, the sword of wisdom, kind of a samurai ethic comes to the fore often in Zen parables. So it's actually not a surprise to me that Zen, under a certain construal, could have helped animate the kamikaze phenomenon. And it's also not a surprise to me

that Vajrayana Buddhists are self-immolating as opposed to becoming suicide bombers, given the emphasis on compassion in that context. I think I have to disagree. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,

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