Making Sense with Sam Harris - #184 — The Conversational Nature of Reality

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with poet David Whyte about the importance of work and relationships, the balance between training and expressing of one's talents, the lessons of mortality, and other topics. 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed

to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today. Today I'm presenting a conversation originally recorded for the Waking Up app.

And while podcast subscribers already get access to those conversations through my website, it seems to me that this episode might be of more general interest. So I'm releasing it now on the main podcasting feed. Today I'm speaking with David White. David is a poet and the author of 10 books of poetry, along with four books of prose. and the author of ten books of poetry, along with four books of prose. And he holds a degree in marine zoology, and has traveled very widely, and has, as you'll hear, a sensibility that is quite relevant to questions of awareness, the nature of the self, what it means to live an examined life, and other topics that are central

to my concerns here. It really was a great pleasure to speak with him, and he has a wonderful voice. So, now I bring you David White. I am here with David White. David, thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure. So I recently discovered you. I think I was actually at the TED conference where you spoke a couple of years ago, but I think I was not in your session and just heard echoes of the effect you had on the rest of the crowd, which was quite positive. And then I subsequently saw that talk when it came online and, I don't know, saw another place where you were speaking and reading and now have read one of your recent nonfiction books, your prose books, The Three Marriages, which I want to talk about. But you're primarily a poet. And so I just,

marriages, which I want to talk about. But you're primarily a poet. And so I just, to begin, can you describe how you view your career as a writer and some of the other things you're doing? Because I know you're not just working as a writer, you also work with organizations and you have an interesting way of interfacing with the world. So tell me what you're up to. Yes, I suppose there's two ways of looking at my way as a writer. One is looking back on it and looking at the astonishing journey. One is the frontier that I'm on now. And I've always seen poetry intimately connected to good thinking. There's a tendency to think that poetry is on the arts side and therefore you leave your strategic mind at the door. But it's actually good poetry is very, very practical in looking at the phenomenology of the conversation of life. In other words, what happens along the way when you

try to deepen that exchange. And Coleridge said, no poet begins in philosophy or they write very bad poetry. And it's very true. But he also then said, but every poet becomes a philosopher. Interesting. poet is to invite, create language that invites everyone else into that understanding at the same time, in a beautiful way, actually, not just a quotidian mechanical way, but in a way that actually enriches you as you enter the experience. You have a background in, is it marine zoology? in, is it marine zoology? I do indeed. Yeah, I had a 10-year excursion into sciences from when I was 17 to 27 or so. And I worked as a guide in a naturalist, Guia Nathalista, in the Ecuadorian National Park System in Galapagos. And I felt like I actually experienced all of my ambitions being fulfilled and left Galapagos wondering what I would do for the rest of my life, really.

And that's when the return to, you could say that the states of attention that I experienced in Galapagos also began my, restarted my poetic career because I've written poetry since I was six or seven years old, probably under the influence of my Irish mother. And then I wrote seriously through my teens until I was 17 or 18 when my sciences overwhelmed my time for writing. And it was good to have that hiatus. But when I was in Galapagos, I started to understand that there were five different levels of attention that I could

identify. Of course, there are many, many more. The Tibetans have gradations of hundreds of them. But there were five that I could identify. And I noticed that the deeper my level of attention for the world, the more that my identity as a person actually changed and also deepened and widened. And you could say that I started to understand that a person's identity didn't depend on their inherited beliefs. And I've always felt, actually, that a person's beliefs are the least interesting thing about them, actually. Would that most people realize that. Exactly, yes. And that your identity actually depends more on how much attention you're paying to things and people that are other than you.

And of course, you are in a discipline here of interviewing, which is a real discipline of listening to those that are other than you. Yeah, I've begun to say that really our true wealth is not even in the coin of time. It really is, its cash value is in what we do with our attention, because we all know what it's like to guard our time and then to squander it by misusing our attention. So really your life becomes the substance of it moment to moment. It becomes what you do with your attention and yes and with regard with regard to your uh your metaphors with time the great thing about the deeper and deeper states of attention lead you into the timeless yeah and the untrammeled because we have all this surface language around time you know that you can you can, as if you, that we will kill time as if that would be possible. We, as if we could make time as if that would

be possible. And, um, we have all kinds of language, which actually don't, doesn't bear examination when you apply it to time. And so, um so I think one of the reasons poetry is so coming to the fore in the world of Instagram and the falling away of our previous structures is its invitation into the timeless and the untrammeled. We have so many children in the developed world who are bullied into their adulthood just by the way that we educate them and the amount of coercion around learning. And there's something about poetry

that allows you to have your own language and that sets you free. Do you have a background in meditation or any contemplative tradition like in Buddhism? You just mentioned Tibetan Buddhism. So what's your background there in Eastern or Western spiritual traditions? Well, my first background was spending an enormous amount of time by myself out in the woods and fields and hills of Yorkshire, where I grew up, the north of England. I had a kind of Wordsworthian childhood.

I had a very fierce education, too, in kind of the last gasp of the old classical world, classical teaching. But we had marvelous countryside around where I grew, and I spent a lot of time alone there, and listening and watching. And I was always entranced by landscapes. So that was my first introduction. And then I started, when I was at university, to get really interested in the more esoteric forms of meditation. And I tried all kinds of things myself. more esoteric forms of meditation and i tried all kinds of things myself and when i think back it was it was uh quite droll what i was turning my mind to but then i discovered uh zen sitting and

zen teachers and i i sat zen quite seriously for many years with uh with very serious teachers and so i i feel like that has stood me in good stead actually over the years, even though I don't have a Zen teacher now, I feel like it's in my body somehow. And what about psychedelics? Did you have a phase or are you in a phase now where you have used the pharmacological advantages of the modern world? I did have a phase. Yes, I did. And I found them very, very helpful. Which did you take? Well, I was in South America. And so I had experiences with the various forms of mushrooms and then with ecstasy. And my first experience was one that was really, really rejuvenating. And that was with LSD when I was at university.

And I hadn't realized until I took it and had that experience that, and it was just one experience actually towards the end of my time at university, but I hadn't realized how much I'd been mourning my childhood and my childhood visions or vision, I should say, of the world. And that experience on LSD really restored the bridge between the young man I was becoming and the child that I had been. And so that was really remarkable. I'm very thankful to it. So I've never, I've never been a drug taker, but every now and again, I've had these threshold moments which have, which have deepened my experience. Whenever I have taken anything, I've always just wanted to be alone, actually. So I often find company quite distracting, no matter how much fun you might be having.

Yeah. I always feel this incredible invitation to the underground, to grounding it in my body and grounding it in understandings and insights. And so I'll most often just take off by myself walking. Nice. Nice. Well, was that before you got into zen practice yes yeah and a couple of experiences after in parallel yes yeah well um yes it's i i know i know wherever

you speak i did not have a wordsworthian childhood to be called back to but um still uh the vividness of the natural world is is available on the other side of many of those compounds. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so actually let's start off with a poem. I'd like you to read The Bell and the Blackbird, because this is one of these poems where the connection between your work and paying careful attention to the world and you know the the subsequent changes in one's consciousness when one does that is so obvious so maybe you could

give us i will i'll recite it i have it in my memory actually and and uh just a little context for this uh the poem is called as you said it's called the Bell and the Blackbird. And it's really the inherited understanding in the Irish tradition, or you could say the Celtic tradition, but particularly in the Irish tradition, that human beings are constantly choosing too early in the conversation, that the strategic mind throws up these black and whites and binary questions because that's the only way it can approach things. But almost always the way forward is actually holding them both together or the way between things. And the image here is of a meme in the Irish tradition, which occurs again and again, of a monk in the old Irish church, which had a tremendous relationship with the natural world, a monk standing on the edge of

a monastic precinct and hearing in the morning and hearing the bell of the chapel calling him to prayer. And he says to himself, that is the most beautiful sound in the whole wide world, which is the call to silence, to depth, to another context beneath the context that you've established in the world. And he's just about to turn towards the chapel when, doesn't he hear, from over the wall, he hears the call of the blackbird from the fields and the woods and then he says to himself and that is also the most beautiful sound in the world and the lovely thing about the story in a very Irish way is you're not told which way he goes because actually we don't get to choose if you think about it the first call is to a deeper understanding of ourselves. Should I rehearse

more before I play my instrument in public if I'm a musician? Should I deepen my understanding? Should I educate myself more? Should I get a degree before I hurl myself at the job world? And the other one is the call of the world just as you find it, just as you hear it, just as you see it, and perhaps even more importantly, just as it sees and hears you. So this is the piece, The Bell and the Blackbird. The sound of a bell still reverberating. The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. The sound of a bell still reverberating, still reverberating, or a blackbird,

a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage. Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all. Wants you to walk to the place where you, you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach, that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk, both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world crying hallelujah.

Nice. I love your style of recitation. Perhaps other poets do this and I haven't noticed, or is this really your own innovation? But you repeat lines in a way that it's kind of obvious when you hear it, it's especially obvious when you see it on the page, that these lines are not repeated in the written form of the poem itself, but you kind of re-traverse your steps again and again, and it has a kind of incantatory quality to it. It really just demands that your poems really be recited by you. I mean, that's the form in which to consume them.

Well, if you think about it, it's actually, I mean, it's seen as an innovation, but it's actually a re-innovation because it's how poetry would have been recited in the old traditions. And the chorus in the Greek theater, for instance, was something that the gods had said, and therefore it had to be repeated because it couldn't be understood fully the first time. And I often say poetry is language against which you have no defenses. So you have to actually say it in ways against which there are no defenses. If you hear a good marital argument, you'll hear both sides repeating things, usually three times. The poetry of anguish. Exactly, in three different ways, because the other person must hear it.

because the other person must hear it. Or more poignant, more poignantly, if you are bringing very bad news to another person of the loss of a loved one, you will always be very careful about how you say it. And you will say it three times in three different ways. And you leave silence between the lines. And you will have this tremendous physical connection to the listening ear. So that's the way poetry should be read, actually. And it's a great pity that it isn't in so many poetry readings, because people turn up at a poetry reading, perhaps for the first time, and they hear something remarkable from the poet, man or woman, and before they know it, the poet's on to the next line when they haven't even actually caught up with what they just heard. Yeah.

So many poetry readings can be actually quite violent to the listener. So we need to treat the listener with a deep kind of respect. Give them some space, yeah. Give them some space. Give them some silence. You don't even know what you've written yourself. So you need to hear it too. You don't understand fully the implications of what you've said. And if you do, it's not good poetry.

It always leads to broader and wider emancipations of your understandings. There are many lines I've recited for 20 years, you know, and then suddenly you're standing somewhere in a hall or a room and you say, my God, I never understood that in 20 years of reciting it, but there it is. So you are literally trying to overhear yourself say things you didn't know you knew. That's the discipline of writing poetry. So you speak about what you call the conversational nature of reality in various places. What do you mean by that? Well, it just seems very obvious to me. Whatever a human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it

or first laid it out in their minds. Equally, whatever the world desires of you will not happen no matter how coercive that world is what always happens is the meeting between what you desire from your world and what the world desires of you it's this frontier where you overhear yourself and you overhear the world and that frontier is the only place where things are real. That to me is the conversational nature of reality. And the discipline is to stay on that frontier as fully as you can. Does that relate in your mind to this opposition you sketched in the poem, the distinction between hearing the summons of the bell and going in to work on yourself and improve your craft and prepare, rehearse, and not yet enter the world. But as opposed to actually trying your gifts such as they are in public and for better or worse.

Yeah, it's lovely relief actually to realize you don't get to choose. You always have to rehearse. You always have to deepen. You always have to practice. You always have to find the next level of generosity in your being or your soul. And you must meet the world just as it finds you now too with whatever you've got right and i think once you actually follow that frontier conversation the conversation itself actually starts to deepen you and after a while you realize well i actually i don't need to do the

work i just need to be in that exchange, in that meeting place. In many ways, that's the way my career has gone. It's only a career in looking back. It's a kind of frontier, otherwise, in which you just try to keep a kind of integrity and groundedness while keeping your eyes and your voice dedicated towards the horizon that you're going to or the horizon in another person that you're meeting. Yeah, that actually describes how I view my career as well. I mean, it really is a...

Yes. Because I'm now spending most of my time doing things that I never envisioned doing. And if you had told me, yeah, you know, five or 10 years ago that I would be spending my time in precisely this way, I would not have believed you. Yes. Had you shown me the path into the future, it would have not only been unfamiliar to me, I would have had reasons why that could not be the past. Yes. Yeah, that's very well said. I always think a good work always leads you into worlds you could not have imagined for yourself. You know, I grew up from my Irish and Scottish and Yorkshire sides with this kind of blood allergy to all hierarchical powers.

I come from long lines of Irish, Scottish, and rebels and Yorkshire Luddites. And so you can imagine when I first went full-time as a poet and I had my first invitations into the corporate world, my first reaction was to say no, because my only understanding was that I would have to compromise myself and compromise my work and create some kind of propaganda that worked in parallel with whatever the organization wanted. So it was a powerful, upsetting, and subversive surprise to find that I didn't have to.

It would have been much more comforting to have found that I did need to compromise, and therefore I could say no. But I was actually led into a world that I never imagined I would belong to. Yes. Well, this seems like a nice point of segue to your book, The Three Marriages. And there's one, you should say what those three marriages are, but I'd like to start with what you have observed to be the illusion of work-life balance. Because this strikes me as an unusual and very useful observation.

Yeah, it's another binary that just has us more stressed. So I'm not only supposed to be this incredible, inspirational center of charismatic understanding in the workplace. But when I come home, I'm supposed to be this paragon of perfection as a partner in a love relationship or as a parent in a family. So it just has us working harder all the time. So it's really interesting to think that we live and breathe actually between our different marriages. And we have times where work is naturally the center of our life and other times where family has to come first and knowing when those rhythms appear and disappear is is really part of being able to go through the doorway of happiness and satisfaction and understanding. So the first marriage to my

mind is the one we normally talk about, you know, the Jane Austen horse and carriage marriage. But in today's world, that's also a love relationship with another person, whatever gender or mid-gender you are. So that's the first marriage is a love relationship with one other person and someone who you make yourself physically vulnerable with. And that's what, of course, what sexual relations does is undermine our sense of physical frontier. That's why you have arguments with your intimate loved one that you don't have with anyone else in the world. with your intimate loved one that you don't have with anyone else in the world. So that's the first marriage.

And the second marriage is the marriage with your métier, with your vocation, with your work. And I often think work must be a marriage because why would you have stayed so long in your work if it wasn't a marriage? You must have committed, you must have made a promise to something that was greater than the nit and the grit and the difficulty of the everyday insanity of work. Just like a marriage at home or a committed relationship, if you were to take any one day in your work life as the reason why you were in that work, you'd lock yourself up in a padded room quite often and never come out, you know?

But what keeps a marriage sane or a relationship sane or a work sane is the horizon to which we've dedicated ourselves. That's what keeps the difficulty of keeping the conversation alive with another man or woman. That's what keeps us alive in keeping the conversation, the heartbreaking conversation with our work alive. And then the third marriage is the marriage, the relationship with that tricky mov movable frontier called yourself. Who, like another person, is constantly surprising you as to who it's becoming and what it wants from life. I always say you always meet the new you in the mirror in the form of a stranger. And you always turn away from that stranger to begin with. Just like you always turn away from the surprise that your partner seems to inflict on you when they suddenly want something completely different.

Well, we have that same surprise with ourselves as we go through the different thresholds of our life, you know, through our mid-30s, through our mid-40s, through our mid-50s. And you have to get to know the person you're becoming, like you have to get to know again and again the person you're committed to. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content,

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