Making Sense with Sam Harris - #4 — The Path and the Goal

Episode Date: October 28, 2014

Sam Harris speaks with Joseph Goldstein about the practice of meditation. 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. of the Making Sense podcast, 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. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming I'm here with Joseph Goldstein, who's a very old friend and quite respected meditation teacher, and we're going to talk about all things related to meditation and mindfulness. And Joseph and I have known each other for about 25 years, and he was one of my first meditation teachers and became a friend a long time ago. We spent a lot of time studying with other teachers in Asia. He's here recording

this interview with me under less than ideal audio conditions, so we apologize for that. Joseph, for those of you who don't know, started the Insight Meditation Society in western Massachusetts, and has probably done more than anyone, certainly as much as anyone, to establish the practice of mindfulness in the West. And this explosion of interest you see in mindfulness in the scientific community and in clinical practice is largely the result of how clearly he and his colleagues have taught it to thousands of Westerners. So Joseph and I are going to talk about mindfulness and the mind in general, and probably push into some areas of interest only to us and alienate 99% of our listeners, but that's what we are free to do. So Joseph,

thank you for being here and thank you for agreeing to talk about all this with me. I'm delighted to have a chance to get back into the meat of our discussions, which we've had over all these years. Joseph and I have had arguments on... Just about everything. About everything and on transcontinental flights where he has been captive and desperate to avoid me, however unsuccessfully. So before we get into esoterica, tell us a little bit about how you got into meditation and how this became your life's work. Well, I was studying philosophy at Columbia University in New York as an undergraduate. And by the time my senior

year came around, I was really anxious just to get out and see the world. And this was in 1965, and it was just soon after the Peace Corps was established. So that seemed to me a really good vehicle for getting out and seeing new parts of the world. So I applied to the Peace Corps, and I actually applied to go to East Africa, but as fate or karma or accident or whatever,

whatever the conditions may be, happened, they sent me to Thailand, which turned out to be a very fortunate happening. Because while I was in Thailand, I had my first contact really with Buddhism and Buddhist teachings and meditation. Soon after I started teaching in Bangkok, I was teaching English. I started going to discussion group at the Marble Temple, which is quite a famous temple in Bangkok. There were some Western monks who were leading the discussion, kind of introducing Westerners to some of the Buddhist ideas and concepts. Of course, having just graduated college in philosophy, I went there full of my own ideas about

things and I would be asking so many questions in the group that people would stop coming you know it's like and we've all been in groups like that right and we've probably both been that person you were the insufferable blowhard exactly so finally this one monk says Joseph I think you ought to meditate. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know anybody who meditated. I was 21, 22 years old in the Far East. It was all extremely exotic to me. And it just seemed like a really interesting thing to do.

So he gave me some initial instruction, and I also began a little reading. There's one classic book called The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, which laid out the basic methodology. And so I gathered kind of all the sitting paraphernalia, cushions and this and that, you know, to sit. And the very first time I set my alarm clock for five minutes because I didn't want to over sit. But something quite amazing happened in that first five minutes. And it really changed the whole course of my life. So the first time you sat, you actually connected with the practice and realized it was something worth looking into. Well, what I realized, it wasn't that I had any great enlightenment experience, but what I realized was that there was a way to look into the mind as well as looking out through it and my whole life

I had just been looking out right out of my mind yeah rather than looking into it so it was like a turning in place yeah and that just that was so extraordinary to me you know i got so excited i started inviting my friends over to watch me meditate right arguably the most narcissistic thing you could possibly do it was well more charitably it was naive uh it really came out of this tremendous enthusiasm for you know what i felt i was discovering right obviously they didn't come back very very often it made for a poor viewing experience very poor uh but that was the beginning you know and then you know over the course of my time in the peace corps i just i extended this time past five minutes a little bit, but still.

So how long did it take for you to actually go on intensive retreat? Oh, at the end of my Peace Corps stay, I had an experience. Somebody was reading from a Tibetan text, a friend was reading. So at this point you had been meditating for what, a year? Yeah, maybe a year, but very intermittently. Just an hour a day or something probably not even right you know but i was dabbling yeah i was just dabbling in it but and reading and going to some classes trying to find out more about it but just at the end of my peace course day before i left for home i had a really transformative experience listening to somebody read from a Tibetan text and it just was an

experience of opening to an understanding of the mind and kind of in classical Buddhist terms they talk about the unborn or the unformed, or using words like that to describe the freest aspect of the mind. So something happened. What the hell happened? Somebody was reading this text, a Tibetan text, and that was a very early translation of it, a translation which has now been... So a faulty translation.

A faulty translation by Evans Wentz called the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. There have since been much more careful translations of it right and very powerful ones but even in that faulty translations have the new translations revised the very line you found so no okay no all right so let's so so back up you've got you've got this this uh faulty victorian translation of the vietnam book of the great liberation and you have a friend who's reading it out loud to you right and then at one point in the reading just on the word unborn the mind open to that experience right say more say more about that you hear this word unborn you're looking into your mind all the while, what changes? the mind going from being aware of different things arising moment after moment,

you know, what sights and sounds and breath and the mind itself. And then upon hearing the word unborn, and it's very hard to describe, but it was, if you think literally of what that word means unborn it's it's the experience of non-occurrence so right being born is something occurring it's so moment after moment experience is being born and dying being born and dying moment after moment unborn is a moment of non occurrence which broke that stream of continual birth of continual occurrence and the metaphor or simile one of those right after right after that moment i described it to myself as zero it was the experience of zero right so so the experience is was however difficult it is to characterize it entailed the loss of ordinary sensory experience you're no longer seeing hearing smelling tasting touching thinking right so the lights went out in some

sense the lights went out in some sense but there was a knowing of that right right and this this gets into another you know a deeper discussion of that experience, which we might have later. So it is the knowing of a reality. That doesn't entail ordinary sensory perception. It's zero. Right. It's like a rebooting of the hard drive. Yeah.

Yeah. But one of the things that became so apparent is that zero is not nothing right zero is a powerful number yeah and perhaps the most powerful number and the fruit of the fruit of that experience was the immediate understanding and realization of the selflessness of this whole process we call life that there's no there's no one to whom it's happening right it's a process of what one teacher described as just empty phenomena rolling on meaning empty of self empty of core substance yeah that that experience doesn't refer back to anyone and that just that all was just understood completely in that moment that that view of self was just completely gone so so then what take me back to the the immediate aftermath of that experience so your friend is

reading this this book to you on the word unborn, you have this cessation experience. You come out of it. Completely. Your mind is blown. And I tell him to stop reading. And so how long do you think you had been gone for? Just a second. Yeah, momentary.

Right. And so you have this transformation, and now you're articulating it to your friend? And what's that next half hour like? The next half hour was like I was in a completely altered sense of everything because it was free of any notion of self. The self-center had just dropped away. because it was free of any notion of self,

the self center had just dropped away. But I, this wasn't the fruit of many years of practice. So I really didn't have any, I had very little context for understanding this. Although I knew enough that something familiar within the buddhist tradition that just happened but i didn't understand the mechanism or what led up to it or anything i didn't have any context was it was there anything negative about it or scary about it were you at all destabilized in a way that where you where you were searching to get back to who you were?

I wasn't searching to get back to who I was, but there was a period of, I think, some days where it was destabilizing of my previous way of being and the conventional way of being. So I was kind of starting to find my sea legs and all this right but it was there part of you at all that worried about it that thought about it in psychopathological terms or no even as our even as there was kind of uncertainty or about how to manifest right you know how to relate no i i always felt that something tremendously powerful and revealing had happened right to stick with the immediate aftermath was that the character of your experience in that moment was changed but if i recall correctly you were experiencing things which now you don't

necessarily tend to experience now selflessness is still obvious to you but there were features of your experience in the immediate aftermath of cessation that are not true right now it says what was what was what was especially salient or psychedelic or otherwise odd about those next hours or it was like it was days too it was like didn't you have like a week where you felt like you were as much the other person in the room as you were so yeah or something like that yeah uh but also just this happened 50 years ago yeah so even though it's very the experience is very vivid you know in terms of impact and understanding some of some of the details you know yeah have faded but you but you have had what you consider the same experience again to the practice of meditation i I have, but not actually as dramatic. The aftermath

was not as dramatic, or you actually think that you can detect a different character to the cessation experience? No, I would say the aftermath was not as dramatic. So talk about the aftermath for a minute. At first I told my friend to stop reading because I knew he didn't understand what had just happened. It just destroyed your mind.

So, I mean, there's no point to going on because it's like a from my perspective i had experienced what that teaching was trying to do so why why keep reading yeah you know it was redundant at that point and so i just wandered off and i remember this was in a school. It was right next to the Bangkok Zoo. So I was just wandering around. I was wandering around in the zoo and just in this place of, as you said, I mean, the way you expressed it, there was no separating out of myself separate from everything that was being seen or heard. It was all one thing.

But presumably, you can do that now in the context of this conversation with me, but it's not quite the same thing. No, because... what is it but talk about the positive characteristics of this aftermath experience that is positive not in in necessarily as being good or versus bad but positive in terms of something added to the flavor of experience that's not happening mostly again i'm not sure of this but my sense is that it was just the newness of that experience. And so, because it came so out of the blue and so unexpected and not as the result of a systematic meditative progression. So the change was so dramatic, so sudden, so unexpected, so without mental preparation. It's a bit like through the looking glass yeah

all of a sudden you turned inside out yeah you know now it's just that that experience is just and the understanding is much more familiar to me so i think it does it just doesn't have the same dramatic interest. Right, right. Do you think there's a difference in just your stability in that experience so that in the immediate aftermath of cessation, you were stabilized in that selfless awareness to a degree that is not normal in your life? It's a little hard to say because... And something kind of...

It had a half-life, right? So it wore off, this transfigured consciousness wore off after, over days? Yeah, over days. And then what? Then you really wanted to find out what the hell had happened? Yeah, exactly. But this was just at the end of my Peace Corps stay so I was going home and I had

no I mean I had no idea of what to do or how to integrate this but I I'm I mean I tried talking to people about the fact that there's really no self, and the self is a construct. People, meaning your rabbi in the Berkshires? Well, to my family when I got home, even to friends before, the friends in the Peace Corps, before I left. This was just like a week or two before.

So there was this huge transition happening yeah you know finishing my time in thailand going back to the states obviously people had no way of relating to what i was talking about so when i went home and it it didn't take me long to realize that i wanted to pursue misunderstanding and actually just a little anecdote when i was home i thought i went up to a place called chapel house at colgate university it was just to go on a little retreat myself but this is before i had done any intensive practice right but so i went up to this place beautiful place upstate new york and they had a copy of that text there and so i got somebody to read me the text thinking oh maybe i can recreate this whole thing yeah uh and nothing read it again right

so i realized that louder that wasn't the way right uh And so then I just became motivated to go back to Asia. This is still 1965? No, this is 67. I went into the Peace Corps in 65. And this happened just in the beginning months of 67. So you were a part of that wave of Westerners going to India, the slightly early part going to India to meet Eastern teachers of esoterica. So I was going to go back to Thailand since this is where all this happened.

But I stopped in India on the way. People had given me the names of different Indian teachers and gurus. So I went in India and I was just wandering around to some different ashrams. So Hindu ashrams and Buddhist? Both, yeah. So at this point you were not committed to Buddhism as the context for your study? I think I was, not so much consciously,

but I went to this one Sikh ashram that teaches this, what do you call the inner sound nod yoga something like that yeah so i went there and here's a very powerful big ashram in the punjab right i've got tinnitus now i could be a master of well i could take well the sound that is unignorable it he was very, very impressive, very powerful. And everybody who went there was on the trajectory of wanting to get initiated into it. So that all the pressure, the peer pressure was to go for initiation. But there was just something in me based on this experience that said, this is not my path.

So I went for a personal interview with the master and he wasn't trying to convince me or anything. I said to him, just doesn't feel the right path for me. I think I'll go back to Thailand. And he said, I think you should stay in India. But not necessarily with him. No, not with him he was so as it turned out that proved to be a very prescient remark yeah whether from my perspective it's a pity you've been wearing a turban all these years right it would have been a very different

very different path anyway i'm going back to the train station to go back to Delhi to go to Thailand again. In the rickshaw on the way to the train station, the thought pops into my mind, maybe I should go to Bodh Gaya, which is the place the Buddha was enlightened. I go to Bodh Gaya, and at this time there are not that many Westerners. In Bodh Gaya there were very few. I go to this place called the Burmese Vihara where the Westerners were staying. It was like the Burmese,

rest house for Burmese pilgrims. But Burma was closed at that time. So the Burmese were coming. So the few Westerners, there were maybe five or six Westerners, they were staying there. I met some of them. They were a group of Danish people.

They were studying meditation with this person named anakarika munindra who had just come back from nine years in burma and was teaching vipassana or insight meditation so he had just come back he had started teaching in bodhgaya so these danish people said, would you like to meet Manindraji? So I went to see him. He explained the Vipassana practice. And it was an immediate connection. It's exactly what I was looking for. But wasn't Vipassana what you had been given in Thailand? Not really. What I had been given in Thailand was much more just the preliminary being with the breath. Right.

So it was more like a concentration practice in a way. Yeah. And it was very unintensive. You know, when I went to Munindra and he explained the practice and then I started doing it intensively, that's when I realized this is a good expression of what my experience was had been right well for our listeners who are unaware of maybe unaware of the details of a pasta practice can you do just like a two-minute guided meditation yeah just to get us there after you drink that water crackling water bottle ruin our audio okay so i go to menindraji he explains the basics of vipassana practice which is really simple it's the sitting meditation part

is sitting down starting with attention on the breath and just feeling feeling the sensations the experience of the breath and being aware of moment to moment whatever arises sensations in the body thoughts emotions so should we do a little guided meditation? Do like a minute or two. Okay. So if as you're listening to this, you just take some comfortable posture, sitting in a relaxed way. In Vipassana, generally we close our eyes, but can also be done with the eyes open. So sit and you might begin by taking a few deep breaths, simply as a way of settling into the awareness of the body.

And let the breath come to its own natural rhythm. And simply be aware or feel the sensations of each breath as it comes into the body, as it leaves the body. It's not a breathing exercise, it's an exercise in awareness. And so we simply use the breath as a vehicle for being aware. for being aware. As you feel the breath going in and out, you may become aware of sounds, background sounds or loud sounds.

Then simply notice hearing. Be aware of the experience of hearing, how the sound comes and goes. Then returning to the breath. You might begin to feel other sensations in the body. Pressure, of tightness, of tingling of vibration If any sensation becomes predominant become aware of the sensation Notice how it changes when it's no longer predominant again return to the breath and be aware of any thoughts or images that appear in the mind as you're feeling the in-breath and out-breath

thought may come and at first may carry you away, lost in the thought, but at a certain point you become aware that you're thinking. You might make a soft mental note, thinking, thinking, to highlight and emphasize the awareness of thought rather than being lost in it. And notice what happens to the thought in the moment of awareness. Does it continue? Does it disappear?

When the thought is no longer there, again return to the breath or bodily sensations. So in this way we are just being mindful moment after moment of whatever is the predominant experience in the body, in the mind. And through that awareness we begin to see the changing nature of all these phenomena. Things are arising and passing away. And in the awareness of this process of change, the mind no longer clings. And the mind of non-clinging, of non-grasping,

is really the essence of the Vipassana practice. Well, that's great. So a few things to point out there. One is that is the whole practice. In a very short span, you can give more or less the entire practice. There's tweaking of the dials that you may want to emphasize for someone in the middle of a three-month retreat or given whatever they happen to be experiencing. But in seed form, the whole logic of the practice was just given. What's unique about Vipassana, and I think the reason why it has been adopted by so many clinicians and now scientists who are studying meditation, is that, one, it doesn't require

that you add anything strategically to your experience. You're not repeating a mantra. You're not visualizing something. You don't have to develop an interest in or sympathy for historical figures or imaginary, potentially imaginary figures, you know, deities in Hinduism or the Tibetan Buddhist canon. And so it really is just paying closer attention to whatever happens to be happening in that moment in the mind and body.

And the other very important feature of it is that it, in principle, doesn't exclude anything. So you don't need a quiet room. You don't need a comfortable body. In principle, anything you notice is as good as any other object of meditation. And virtually every other practice can't, can't, can't meet those two tests. So I think it's perfectly designed for export to a secular scientific audience because it stands to reason. It's just life.

It's just life. And if you, if you want to know something more about what it's like to be you and what could possibly be discovered through introspection, it makes sense to pay attention. Exactly. All this is is paying attention. When I first met Manindraji in Bagaya when I went to meet him, he said something that was so, the common sense of it was so striking to me. It's really what was the big hook for me.

He said, if you want to understand your mind sit down and observe it that was well there was nothing to believe there was nothing to join it was just that how else can we understand our minds except by observing so the yeah the the accessibility of it yeah and the common sense of it was so striking to me. Of course, as we do the practice, there are many, many dimensions of our experience that reveal themselves that previously we had not been aware of. So it goes very deep into with tremendous nuance but the basic instruction is is this simple yeah it's all it's it's always a matter of not being lost in thought about the experience noticing thought as thought and noticing the character of experience with interest and without grasping at pleasant and pushing away

the unblessing. Simply always being aware of what's arising and I think one thing that people get confused about is obviously there's a vast amount that the brain is doing and that therefore the mind is doing that we're not aware of and that is not best discovered through introspection. Hence the necessity of having whole branches of science named psychology and neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science and linguistics and everything else. I'm following the rules of English grammar more or less effortlessly to get to the end of the sentence. I have no idea how I'm doing that. And when I fail to do that, I have no idea why I fail. And the best way to discover those details is not by me

paying attention because it's simply not visible. The data are not there. But what mindfulness is, is a tool to be as aware as possible of the actual character of your subjective experience. It's not to say this is the best way to do neuroscience. It's the best way to be aware of what it's like to be you in every moment. And it's in that context that you can discover whether or not this thing you call yourself exists the way you have always thought it does. And it's also very pragmatic in another, because one of the things we discover through this simple introspection and observation is to see what patterns of thought and emotion create suffering for ourselves and others, and how to be free of that suffering.

And that's really the bottom line of why to do it. It's a way of coming out of suffering. And we become much more expert in terms of understanding our own minds and our own conditioning. Because we all have established habit patterns that are not helpful. They're not conducive to peace, not conducive to freedom. We need to learn about that. We need to see how all of that's happening.

So take me back to, so now you're with Manindra in Bodh Gaya, and he's making a lot of sense and has given you a practice that seems very promising in light of this experience you had had in Thailand. What is your motivation at that point is your motivation a interest in the nature of the mind is it getting rid of suffering that you're finding intolerable what it was for me for me interest was the key i didn't have any obvious suffering right you know i was i was just still very young i was 23 years old and i was just incredibly interested at this point in the mind and exploring the implications and ramifications of what this experience was and upon this further investigation, I realized that Buddhism really explained it all.

This was the most appropriate context for the exploration. So at that point, had you gone and met other gurus apart from that one Sikh? Had you met Muktananda or Nandamayi Ma? No, I had gone up to the Himalayas to try to find some Tibetan teachers, since it had been in Tibetan text. But it was in the middle of winter, and it was freezing cold, and the Tibetans had all gone south, so nobody was there. No, and so Munindra was really, aside from one ashram i had gone to he was the first

teacher i met and i feel very fortunate because it was just exactly what i was looking for right but you did do some practice in another tradition of the pasan because you sat goenka that was after after okay you get the boat guy you meet manindra. How long did you stay in India? That very first time I was in India, I stayed for about six weeks or two months. And then I was going back to the States. And when I started, I had no concentration. So it's almost like I was practicing to catch up to the experience I had had right because I hadn't done any of the mental development that in the normal course of things would have culminated in that right and so when I started to actually so you you were not a prodigy not a meditational

prodigy from the side of actually doing the practice not at all in fact i think quite the opposite so what's interesting but this breakthrough cessation experience as a starting point why wouldn't that have made you a prodigy the the only the only prodigy aspect that i could discern there was. Doubt about the path had been eliminated because I had this very clear understanding and realization of the selflessness of it all. But I saw also that there was still a lot more work to do. There was still a lot of conditioned habit patterns of mind

that were still there so even though I knew they were selfless you know I had that basic understanding still and when you sat down to meditate with menindra you're spending virtually all your time lost and oh yeah you don't have concentration yeah no exactly and enjoying it I thought it's a nice way to spend an hour. Cross your legs and think. Yeah, exactly, which is basically what I did. But I knew I had found the path made sense to me, even though that it was not easy. But I didn't have any doubt. I knew, yeah, this is what I

want to do. So I went back to the States, worked for a little while, made a little more money, to do so i went back to the states worked for a little while made a little more money and just you know was anxious to get back to india and to pursue it when i went back i got inspired to do the meditation on loving kindness meta meta and that's the poly word i had just come to a realization that I felt that this was a quality that I could well develop in myself. You know, I feel a little lacking in myself and I started lacking in the world. So I was very inspired. Can you just describe what that practice is? You don't need to do a guided method practice. yeah so the the way meth is done or one way it's done traditionally is just to think of somebody you start with a benefactor somebody for whom you have good feeling loving feeling and you

visualize them and repeat certain phrases of loving kindness of well-wishing you know may you be happy may be peaceful you be free of suffering. And it really becomes a mantra of loving kindness, you know, where you're repeating the phrases, directing it to the image. And then there's a progression going from a benefactor to a friend, to somebody who's neutral, to somebody who's difficult for you,

and then to all beings. So it's a gradually expanding field of loving kindness and unlike mindfulness in this practice there's a target mental state you're trying to kindle and to hold in the mind and to grow and deepen and there's a very explicit goal in terms of the mental state you're trying to produce yes and actually there are two aspects to it one is the development of the feeling of loving kindness but it is also a concentration technique and so what develops it can also be used to develop concentration as well as the feeling of loving kindness and for me i so i did I was doing this loving-kindness meditation intensively

also for about six weeks or two months so this is all day every day yeah I'm just you're on retreat I'm on retreat yeah and it was in doing that practice that for the first time my mind developed some concentration. And it was quite remarkable. I mean, it's a whole new inner space. And before, even though I had no doubt about the practice and I was committed to doing it, it was really difficult. You know, it was work. So your first time you had had periods that were

periods of intensive practice on retreat doing Vipassana where you hadn't broken through? No. So your first period of retreat was doing metta? No the first six weeks when I first went to Bodh Gaya I was doing Vipassana. Vipassana but for like ten hours a day or yeah and still just feeling the effects of not having concentration. Right right no I was continually trying to bring my mind back and be present. It was hard work but I had no doubt about it. I wanted to do it. Right but so you but you were a hard case because many many people do a 10 day or three week retreat Vipassana for the first time and at some point in that retreat,

you really do experience kind of effortless concentration. No, I didn't. And that's why for me now as a teacher, I have tremendous confidence in people being able to do it. Because if I could do it, anybody could do it. Because my mind was so unconcentrated. But the metta really, that established my mind in a degree of concentration. Not fantastic, but sufficient.

And it changed everything because once the mind develops a certain level of concentration, then the practice becomes much more effortless. There's a momentum to the practice and it becomes much more effortless. Right. You know, there's a momentum to the practice and it becomes much more enjoyable. And so doing that period of the loving kindness was really important for me in the whole trajectory. And then at a certain point, I went back to Vipassana and then just proceeded to continue with Vipassana going through.

So how long did you stay in India this time? I was in India over a seven year period and I was back and forth to the states maybe two times two or three times in that period for a few months at a time so I was mostly in India. Mostly in India for about seven years would yeah mostly in Bodh Gaya? Bodh Gaya during the winter months up in we would go to the mountains in the summer months. Dalhousie? Yeah Dalhousie is very very hot in the plains in the summer. So and during this period so you're basically in India for seven years and now this is the period where a real influx of westerners is now noticeable you've got Ram Dass and the whole party coming through Bogaya and doing Goenka retreats.

So you studied with Goenka as well during that period? I did. Starting in 1970, I started doing Goenka retreats, which was also very powerful. It was a very powerful technique. But I had a major obstacle. So when I first started doing Go Anka, which is a body scanning. So the difference being you don't focus on the breath

as a primary point of contact. You actually very strategically move through the body noticing sensation from your toes to your head and back again. Right. He does emphasize using the breath for the first few days of a 10-day retreat. For concentration.

For concentration. And then it opens up to the body scan. Right. So when I first started doing that, I'd already been with Manindra for a few years. My body, it totally opened up. It just became a body of light. You know, and it's wonderful it was just

free flow of energy and it was unpack that that phrase can sound a little spooky body of light what do you mean by body of light it's it's you weren't literally glowing from the inside the it felt like it uh but usually we experience the body somewhat dense and solid but through this intensive body scanning up and down we begin to experience the body as

an energy field meaning just a field of flowing sensations with no solidity any place and so it's just this free flow of energy that's very it's very enjoyable and so i got into that and but just spent hours and hours and hours in that very effortless then i had to go back to the States maybe I'd run out of money or hmm went back for a couple months when I came back to India my I had lost my body of

light and it had become like a body of twisted steel right and I could not recreate that experience and for two years I was struggling to get that back. Struggling in the context of... Meditation. With Goenka or with Manindra? No, with Goenka. So you spent two years doing the Goenka style? Oh, more.

I spent close to four years. Three and a half years doing that style. So it had started off gloriously right and then it had crashed but of course mindful that the point of the practice is not to recreate any specific body correct but but it was too seductive it was too seductive and yeah i was just doing it wrong right but and it i didn't give you instruction no not really i was just doing it wrong right but and it did i didn't give you instructions no not really i was because there was a lot of emphasis in that tradition to get that free flow so that was in a way the goal right and so it was exceedingly frustrating yeah it was the worst two years of my practice. Right. And it took me two years to realize that it's not about getting something back,

but to be with how things are. So finally, it took a long, long time. Finally, my mind let go of that fixation and just relaxed into how things were. And then there started to be movement again. It never got back to how it was, but it didn't matter. There's a different kind of flow. So that was its own learning in terms of understanding what the practice really is about and what

it's not about. That's a point of interest to me which we've argued about in other contexts, but it's interesting the way in which the logic of a practice, explicit or implicit, can lead you to practice in a way that is just not profitable there's a there's a very classic progression in what are called the stages of insight so there's a very classic unfolding of different experiences where people at a certain stage have experiences of tremendous rapture and clarity and concentration and all the things that we're practicing to develop, at this particular stage, they're called corruptions of insight because the tendency is for almost everybody in one way or another

to get attached to them. It's such a remarkable shift from anything that's happened before that when you're experiencing that it just feels you've arrived yeah this is the flavor of enlightenment it seems like yeah this is this is why i was practicing in the first place i want to feel this way exactly and it's called pseudo nirvana yeah yeah and so it takes some real guidance at that point to simply be mindful of those states as other changing conditions and not to be attached to it. And the very next stage of insight is called seeing what is the path and what is not the path. And that's an important juncture because until that point we think that having those experiences is the path yeah yeah and so we have to really go through that and see that it's not the path that's

just experiences along the way and that the whole path is always about letting go it's not about holding on yeah and whatever is fundamental to the nature of mind has to be discoverable in the context of whatever experience happens to be present if the thing you're taking to be significant is there by virtue of having the conditions some contingent contingent conditions in place then obviously it's vulnerable to yes exactly to change exactly yeah i i like to say in the teaching in guiding people through situations like this if freedom is dependent on conditions it's not freedom you know yeah just take me back to that period so that now you're you're in boat guy you've been there for years now you're an in-boat guy, you've been there for years, now you're just practicing in a Buddhist context. You're not going to be, you know,

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