Modern Wisdom - #032 - Jeff Warren - Why Should I Explore My Own Consciousness?

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

Jeff Warren is a Meditation Teacher and Writer, he is the co-author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and author of The Head Trip. Today we learn why introspective work should be taken as seriously as personal hygiene, how you can double the span of your life experience, what benefits occur when consistently practising meditation, and just why exploring our own consciousness is so difficult, yet rewarding. There are more connections in a single square centimetre of human brain tissue than there are stars in our galaxy; our inner universe is infinitely more vast than we will ever notice, and yet our unexamined daily experience of life offers very little to suggest that this is the case. Join me and Jeff as we discover why, and how to work around it... Further Reading: Jeff's Book with Dan Harris - Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics: http://amzn.eu/d/5zmmsEz Jeff's Website: http://www.jeffwarren.org/ Consciousness Explorer's Club: http://www.cecmeditate.com Cory Allen's Basics of Meditation Practise on Modern Wisdom: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549?mt=2&i=1000410359630 Sam Harris on The Meaning Of Life: https://youtu.be/srxDtefn740 Shinzen Young's - The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works: http://amzn.eu/d/hbZ9Nbj Sam Harris - Waking Up - Searching for Spirituality Without Religion: http://amzn.eu/d/gUdGubV What 10,000 Hours of Meditation Does to Your Brain: https://www.projectmonkeymind.com/2016/11/ph-d-happiness-10000-hours-meditation/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, hello, hello. It's time that we revisit the inside of our own minds. There are more connections in a single square centimetre of human brain tissue than there are stars in our galaxy. Our inner universe is infinitely more vast than we will ever notice, and yet our unexamined daily experience of life offers very little to suggest that this is the case. and yet our unexamined daily experience of life offers very little to suggest that this is the case. Today I'm joined by someone who can hopefully help us map out exactly where we're going. Why is the case that we don't notice

the nature of our own minds day to day and how to work around it? Jeff Warren is a meditation teacher and a writer, he's the co-author of meditation for fidgety skeptics with Dan Harris, who is an American news anchor that very famously broke down and had a panic attack live on air, Dan then went on a journey of meditation and Jeff was a big part of that journey.

Now, I've wanted to get Jeff on for, as long as I can remember, and his schedule is absolutely manic. I first discovered him on Jorugan's podcast and then read his and Dan's book, Subsequently after that. I'm also now rereading Waking Up by Sam Harris, which is an absolutely fantastic exploration into the sense of self, the nature of our unconsciousness and meditation and spirituality without religion. So it was very timely for me to sit down with Jeff. He gives us a lovely breakdown of why we should be concerned about exploring our unconsciousness. As he calls it interpersonal hygiene, the meditation practice,

which everyone should be doing as often as they're washing themselves. And yeah, it was really eye-opening. Jeff's obviously an incredibly experienced guy in this field, and I felt like I learned a lot as someone who's read into it quite a bit already. So hopefully you do as well. Enjoy. Mr. Jeff Warren, welcome to Modern Wisdom. How are you, sir? Mr. Jeff Warren, welcome to Modern Wisdom. How are you, sir? How good. Nice to have nice to be on, Chris. Fantastic to hear from you. So for the listeners at home who don't know who you are,

could you give us a little bit of a background to yourself, please? Yeah, sure. Well, I started out as a journalist. I was working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, writing scripts for a kind of big corner fair show over in Canada. And I was, you know, interested in ideas. I kind of became the ideas person for that show where I was doing a lot of kind of big picture interviews.

I was really interested in science and particular and neuroscience. I mean, I had a literature background, but got really into the brain stuff. My brothers and neuroscientists silly to lots of talks. And I ended up getting into consciousness, the whole mystery of the mind and how the mind works. And I wrote a book called The Head Trip, which is sort of about the neuroscience where the neuroscience meets our experience, like how and what these shifting states of consciousness mean for us, you know,

waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and the different variations and iterations. And through that, I got into meditation. And then that kind of ended up changing my life. And I ended up really going kind of deep on the meditation path and just spending all my time practicing and going as many retreats as I could and eventually found a really great teacher in the Skysons and Young. And he encouraged me to start teaching myself. I started a community of practitioners in Toronto called the Consciousness Explorers Club in 2011. And that grew really quickly. And it had sort of a unique way in which we approached the whole subject of exploring the mind and started teaching and eventually just came out of the book with Dan Harris called meditation for fidgety skeptics, which is sort of a kind of no bullshit guide to what really goes on in a practice, why it's helpful, where it's maybe not helpful, what are the stumbling

blocks that prevent people from getting into it, the common challenges that you hear and where some of the best practices we're addressing that, and it's sort of a road trip as well. And since that happened, it kind of just opened me up now to a larger demographic. So I'm doing lots of podcasts like these and I have various programs and starting to roll out around, around practice. That would be a bit of an overview. That's fascinating. So it sounds like a real trajectory from where you started. I absolutely love the name Consciousness Explorers Club. That is a fucking club that I want to be a part of.

Just have to be conscious to be a member. Nice. So very, very low requirements for the members. And not even you can maybe expand it out to the non-human world too. For a few cetaceans in there, somevens ravens are very skillful at certain mind moves they say so I would absolutely go to a consciousness explorer's club for dogs. That sounds in fact that sounds not far off my Valhalla so yeah that would be a that would be a good way to spend an afternoon and so you've you've touched upon one of the words that I really want to focus in on today. It's a big question, but can you try and explain why people should explore that own consciousness? Why should they be bothered?

Yeah, I mean, there are so many responses to that. I guess the maybe the most obvious one is you're already doing it anyway. You know, being human means that you are living in a particular way. You're creating certain habits of mind. Most of us just do this unconsciously and whatever habits emerge or the habits we're living with. And often some of those habits can be very, you know, unhelpful to us, because a lot of challenges. Exploring your consciousness means basically just beginning to be deliberate about how you're living your days, about the way you're existing, but the habits of mind and body and heart that

you're reinforcing. So I would say it's the beginning of living a more awake and intentional and deliberate life and that it's a path that leads unquestionably to more of a centered life, more less suffering, more meaning and fulfillment. I mean, it doesn't mean it's an easy road, but that certainly therein lies sanity, connection, all these things. And even to say even in a bigger picture than that, what I'm really talking about is practice. And practice is about at a very fundamental level

choosing how you in particular want to live this life. What are the qualities that are important to you? What are the things that you want out of your life? You can choose practices and explorations, if you will, that help you make these things happen. And I mean, I think that's I can't imagine what else you would want to do. It's such a good point. There's a couple of Sam Harris quotes that I'm going to smatly throughout this and try and get some of your feedback on, but in something that he's very recently released, he actually says that most of us spend our lives learning

to live. And I think that it would appear that this introspective work is discovering your own path of how to live. Would you say that's fair? I would say that's absolutely fair. I mean, we say at the Conscious This Explorers Club or one of the taglines I like is being human takes practice. So it's like it absolutely takes practice. And you know, you can just go on autopilot and go totally unconscious, but where do you end up? You know, maybe some of us with the absolute, we are dexter stacked, we had phenomenal genes, we had an incredibly healthy, secure upbringing, we

have all the circumstances in the world of unfolded for us in an external way, perfectly. Maybe then you can go on autopilot and you can just, everything will just sort of work out. Perfect. Perfect storm sort of thing. Perfect storm. I don't doubt that happens for some people, you know, and I, those people wow, they're lucky as hell. For me, I had to do some major course correction and it wasn't, it wasn't optional, you know, it was sort of like, do're lucky. So a lot of us, for me, I had to do some major course correction. And it wasn't optional. You know, it was sort of like, do or die. Mandatory. It was mandatory, exactly.

So moving on from that, I wanted to give you a quote. And I wanted to hear what your interpretation of it would be because it's one that's very meaningful to me. The quality of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. What would you say that means to you? Well, I completely agree with it. And what it means for me is, well, it points basically to, I mean, you're going right here, I guess.

It points to the heart of the contemplative mystery. So the mystery that's at the heart of the world's contemplative and mystical traditions, and these traditions are as old as humankind. And what they pretty much all say, if you're going to subscribe to what they call the perennialist perspective, which believes that there is a kind of convergence. And that is only one perspective.

There are other perennialists perspective. Perennialist, perennialism basically believes that there is a kind of unifying principle or set of principles that are there underneath all the world's practices and suspicions, and that they're all trying to sort of point us there. And what they're all trying to point us to in different ways is that the limited way in which we experience ourselves as a

kind of mind-body separate from the rest of the world, isolated in this little container is actually unnecessary. It's real. It's real as an experience, but there are practices that can begin to open up the bandwidth a little bit to allow you to feel yourself in relationship with a larger whole. They talk, I'm not saying that all these prect, that the experience of that is the same and all these traditions are indeed in all people. It's not. I think how it's experienced within a more Abrahamic context is that you feel that reality itself, you're in relationship with reality, you're in tune with that. It's a God to you or whatever you want to, whatever language you want to use.

Personal God. That's not a personal God. That's not the language that say a Buddhist or is used in Indian philosophy. They would say, that's your true self, that you are not your thoughts. In fact, what you are from an Indian perspective of Indian philosophy is the kind of empty knower of those thoughts of sounds of all sensations. That there's a process of personality that is you, a mind body process that's unfolding, it has a history, it has preferences, and that's fine. Part of path of practice is owning that and creating the best possible mind body process you can if you want to think

of it that way. But that it's the awareness of that whole process that is you, the thing that feels like the center of you, the place you're knowing from, is actually empty. It's the same thing in every single human being. So it's sort of like an octopus with six billion arms. And at the end of each arm is an eyeball that's looking out of the world. And then each of one of us is one of those arms. And at the end of each arm is an eyeball that's looking out of the world, and then each of one of us

is one of those arms. But there's only one awareness in that octopus. And that's, I'm giving you kind of like a boilerplate summary of how contemplative, you know, how I kind of think about it and how a mystic might describe it. And I actually think it's true. In so far as my own experience has begun to point me in that direction.

And if it is true, it's fucking mind-blowing. That's true. And it should be out there and talked about by everyone, not just by unhinged mystics, because I think it's as true a description of human experience and consciousness as any you'll find in the psychology or neuroscience literature. So I'd agree. Yeah. I mean, the fact that the vast majority of humans on the planet believe that they are their thoughts as opposed to the watcher of their thoughts, that there is no distinction between them and their thoughts is for neuroscientists, contemplatives, and anyone who's done a modicum of introspective

work, it's so far off the mark. Yeah. And you know, I just should say, you know, I think that as something we could, as a claim of something that's objectively true about how humans are, I think you can argue with that. Okay. that's objectively true about how humans are, I think you can argue with that. And so far as you could say, okay, what you can't argue with is the experience of suddenly coming out of a thawp stream

and being able to notice it. So you can't argue with that. There's a real human experience of being able to pan back the camera and disembodding from a particular trance of thinking. What you could say is, okay, but are you disembedding from that trans into just a broader trans?

And so a broader view. And so in other words, it's thoughts all the way down. Which is perfectly legitimate. Actually, that has partly been my experience in the insight practices. You think you're free and then you realize after a while that actually you're trapped in another kind of layer. And then you pop out again and pop out again.

But what's important to me is not to make any kind of claim about any kind of objectively quote true claim of all this works. My only interest in saying it's true as an experience and as an experience that has great value. It can really help us with our suffering. It can really help us get out of habits of mind that are very, you know, destructive. And so I'm interested in what's going to help people. I'm much more interested in that than I'm interested in what's true about reality.

So I kind of have to make that, you know, you kind of have to say that in the world of conscious and studies because it's, you're operating in a very weird and interesting medium. You know, it's not quite like other mediums. It's a medium where, you medium where the subjectivity itself is kind of changing what it's learning and what it's understanding. So you have to be kind of humble about how you talk about that space, because it's all very mysterious. The paradigm and the framework that your understanding is within is constantly shifting and the meta fact that the only way, the only way that you can appreciate my subjective experience

is by me telling you which you then subjectively interpret. It's like inception. It is like inception, I mean, which is actually a fine film. It's a fun set of motion picture. Yeah, I would say the, probably this, I mean, there's so many paradoxes in this work, but one of the central paradoxes,

is not the central, is that exploring consciousness is both a discovery and a training. So you're both discovering things that are true in your mind, like true dynamics that you're discovering and saying, hey, this is the thing i'm seeing but in the act of seeing it you are changing what you find so you can never highly say are you discovering something are you creating it you you can you there's no place you can stand in that has absolute confidence i can say it's one of the other and it's probably both in some way. So, which I think is good news for this whole, for, for, for us in terms of how, in terms of our health, in terms of our happiness, because it means that we can change what we find.

Well, it allows you, it allows you to build a road towards a destination which you want to get to. And as you're building the road, you learn how to build the road better. And as the road continues along, you can then move forward and back down it. You've seen where you've been, you've laid it, and you get a better image of where you're going in the future. You're totally right that as you do your training, the capacity that you have to move on and your direction becomes more zeroed in, hopefully towards whatever it is that you're aiming for,

enlightenment or self-actualization or a better understanding of the self or wherever it's heading. Absolutely, that's true. And then it's also true that the whole thing is still really shot through with mystery and surprises and that you can have an intention, you can have an idea of what you hope will happen, you can be going in a particular direction,

but life isn't gonna confirm itself according to your biases. You know, you may have an idea or an agenda what's gonna happen, but it can still go in a different way. So there's a continual dialectic between you have an intention and that you're clear about and you move forward and it helps build up a particular kind of road, but you're also open to the unexpected. And that's what creates, actually that's what

creates a lot of wisdom is in that capacity to kind of hold that those two things at once, where you're moving forward, you're deliberate, you know, you're building your own reality in a certain way, but you're also humble enough to know that the thing you're building is only a small sliver and that reality itself will have much to say about it. That's a lovely way to put it. So you've touched on the external world there,

and I wanted to move on to that as well. So bad things will happen to you, and good things also will inevitably happen to you. How does meditation change how you're going to feel about them? Yeah, well, again, I would say it depends a little bit on the kind of meditation that you're doing, but the technique that I'm really most passionate about, I guess, or at least I had the most experience in as a mindfulness technique. And the essence of mindfulness as I see it is it's really about disembodding from trance.

It's about coming back to your own awareness and using that awareness to notice how you were coming back to your own awareness, and using that awareness to notice how you were operating according to a more limited set of principles. And suddenly, you can see a particular thought pattern, a particular way of relating to the world that you are previously and unconsciously, as you get more experience with mindfulness,

you start to see that that's happening. And in the act of seeing, you're no longer in that pattern. So there's a freedom to potentially then begin to change it. So that is unquestionably, enormously valuable piece of information to know. If you want to liberate. Super liberating, right? It's liberating you from the inputs of the external world

to one degree or another. This is not as saying that you're no longer going to be subject to the forces of gravity or a car hitting you, but that that your ability to be able to cori Allen who I did a podcast with a few months ago referred to it as the mindfulness gap, which I think is a lovely way to put it. It is that gap. It's that breath between something occurs and your reaction to it or your thoughts about it or a thought occurs and your capacity to not allow the next thought that comes curing into view to be what you think about that you can simply observe it and watch it go by like cars on a road or birds in the sky. Absolutely. That's super well said. I mean, let's just unpack that for a second

because it is really, really deep and really interesting. What we're talking about here is you start to learn to live in that gap. So you start to learn to spend, get more and more space around what's going on in your experience. And then at a certain point, you start to realize or feel that that more spacious place is more a true description of who you are.

And the trajectory in a mindfulness practice, I mean, we can be really clear about this, the trajectory in a classic Buddhist mindfulness practice is happiness independent of conditions. So independent of whatever is going on in your life, whatever horrible external circumstance is happening, if you can get enough space around it, then you can experience that circumstance not as a hardship, but as would they describe as a purification, as another opening to go deeper into your life.

And that boggling to try to consider what that would look like. But that is what the, I've done a lot of interviews with lots of very, very, very senior teachers. And that, more or less, is a version of what they describe. And so that's really interesting. And that, for me, brings up a lot of questions around, first of all, do I want that for myself?

Isn't part of being in the human experience to be identified, to be, well, that affect that at all. And what they tend to say is no, that you, as you get more and more space around your experience, you develop the option to kind of ride with the energies of your life in a new way. So there's a kind of bouncy, spontaneity and playfulness that can emerge. And it doesn't say take away from, it's not like you're dissociated when you're dealing with a tragedy in your life, it's more like the

tragedy instead of being something that's purely causing suffering is experienced with a much deeper and raw sort of poignancy. I think it's very deep and meaningful. Totally. I think the, and a nice analogy there would be the equivalent of you being in the swell of a wave and it carrying you into sure as you're sucked underneath, or you surfing the wave and allowing the bounce playfulness, as you say, the control. You are using the waves of your life,

but you are in control of them and you're riding them, as opposed to being carried along at their will. I think it's like a perfect metaphor and as someone who serves a lot, I love it because it's true. And actually it's interesting because it sort of says, you know, in initial early Buddhism, it was, I mean, some people describe early Buddhism was more about, okay, transcending suffering, you know, getting into this place of true freedom and enlightenment so that you're happy independent of conditions, but then you're also just kind of chilling out and not really doing much with those conditions.

So, within Buddhism, they started saying, hey, what's the point of that? We should really be all about coming back and to try to help other people, and so that became sort of second wave Buddhism. But then you have sort of third wave Buddhism within, that was that was saying, yeah, that's true too. And let's make it about energy and play and writing that life. And much more of a joyful kind of take on it. That's more of a tantric take on it.

And so I think that's a really wonderful, when we get to that stuff, then it kind of meets the kind of self-actualization movements came out of the West. And these kinds of ideas that there is something about. Just you know playing with our lives and creating those beautiful life that we can in addition to finding that freedom that it's both of those things. You totally right the am i use this analogy with coriola i'm going to use it again with yourself so do you want to get my throes. Oh yeah watch the first few seasons in love that i keep me trying to download it and get the rest. Okay, I haven't seen the last few seasons. That's fine. So, Bran, who's the young Stark, he becomes the three-eyed Raven

at partway through one of the seasons. I haven't spoiled it for you, I promise. And when that happens, he essentially becomes almost completely detached from all emotion. And he's just like this, this Zen master that sat in a corner, but I think that a lot of people presume if they were to take mindfulness practice and meditation to its end point, that that's what they would become, this kind of turnip that's just so... I read vegetable. Yeah. Do you know what I mean?

Completely detached from what's going on around them. And I think what's interesting, I can't remember who it was and I'm going to butcher the quotes, so I'll try and get as close to it as I can. They said that they understood that mindfulness practice combined with a retention of the ego was important because the ego is what gives you the get up and go. But it's not being at the mercy of it ego was important because the ego is what gives you the get up and go, but it's not being at the mercy of it that was important. And I think that it's interesting the dynamic between the ego still being there and still allowing you to go and do the things

that you want, but you being the person who chooses as opposed to being at the whim, being sucked under the swell again. Yeah, I think that's a useful way to think of it. I mean, I certainly try to find that balance in my own life. I do want to say something though about, I actually do think that no practice can go on monitors. And there's no such thing as a practice that you can just implement the technique

and then just be unconscious in the technique and kind of hope for the best. You continually need to be checking in with ways in which a technique might need to be corrected. And I think in a mindfulness practice, there's definitely a trajectory within a practice that can happen where people do get kind of dissociated. They do kind of just get, they kind of, they become the kind of witness and everything else just passing through them and there's sort of, there isn't an difference that can potentially arise there. It's one of the traps we're going to practice that a good teacher should be looking out for and to help them work through that.

So it's, it is possible to do a practice and to be, to, for it to kind of imbalance you in a, in a new way. So you have to, you don't ever get to kind of lose the sense of responsibility. You have to continually be responsive for where it's taking you. So I think that's important to say, you know, because I think people have idealizations around practices and that you definitely hear that a lot with mindfulness, but mindfulness can lead into some very troubling and challenging areas. So you need to be kind of watching,

is this, you know, you need to always have a kind of litmus test? Is this practice leading me, you know, am I, is my life better? Is it leading me, is my life better in the ways that are meaningful for me to be better? You know, am I more connected to my family and friends and my more creative, do I feel like I have more vitality? If it's not doing that, then you may need to make,

you may need to change the way you do the practice. Yeah, I get that totally. Are you saying that you need to be mindful about your mindfulness practice? Absolutely. It just keeps going on and on, bro. You just keep popping out and having to be mindful at the next level. You're mindful at the next level. Like a game of whack-a-mole, right? Right. You touched on something earlier on about

happiness not being contingent on external factors and there's a lovely quote from Sam Harris again that I'm going to use now, which is that he talks about solitary confinement being considered as the worst form of punishment that given the choice between spending their time with murderers and rapists or their time on their own. Most people would choose the former, but yet solitary confinement and silent meditation retreats have been used by contemplatives for thousands of years to give themselves an insight into the mind that most normal people can't get. I think that is a perfect identifier of the fact that it is so contrary to most people to think that sitting alone with your thoughts would be beneficial it sounds like a punishment right.

Absolutely, I mean I think a lot of people it sounds like a punishment because for a lot of people it's experienced that way. When I first started meditating it was like are you kidding I got to spend all this time with this guy. There was a lot of really neurotic patterns and suffering and it was just like being in a hell spiral. So I had you very quickly run in. But so we're pointing, we're talking with something really deep here, which is that, you know, a practice points us to basically freedom. Because if it, if what, if you learn that you can't actually just sit and be with yourself That is a huge thing to learn about yourself. You can't actually just sit and be okay with yourself You need to always be changing the external conditions to be okay. That's a deep unsettled pain or whole in the middle of your life Very unnatural as well from a evolutionary perspective. It absolutely is very unnatural.

So the practice is about you learn to sit alone so you can actually be okay with just being with yourself. And as that happens, you increase exponentially the range of possible conditions in which you can be free in. I totally get it. I totally get it. If you're not free in that situation, your constant can be grasping at the next thing. You're just racing from one thing to another because you don't want to spend one second

alone with yourself because it's a horror show. But that is a nightmare to be living inside. And at some point, your capacity to out-race your own aversion to yourself is going to fall apart. You know, you won't physically be able to do it. You won't find a new knot. And that's what happens. You're always trying to up the novelty. At a certain point, there's no greater novelty. You can't find, you know, once you've done all the stuff, once you've done your Richard Branson and done all the extreme experiences of reality and had all the privileges, you know, you're going to be left with yourself. So you better come to peace with it at some point. Well, we come into this world alone and we leave this world alone, right? There's a lovely, a lovely little quote as well that talks about, there's more connections in a single, square centimeter of human brain

tissue than there are stars in the galaxy. And you think that that is a physical manifestation of the depth of our experience or the capacity for depth of our experience. And yet, you're totally right that so many people lead a hedonic life where they're looking for the next thing that is going to make them happy. They're even when they think that they're experiencing the present moment, they're in very subtle ways, they're looking over at shoulder, they're, they're eyeing up what's coming next, even if they think that they're being present. Now, you mentioned Shins and Young, who I know, I really want to get on to, who is one of your meditation teachers.

And he talks in the science of enlightenment, his book. He likens meditation to a magic trick that can double your life by increasing the depth of experience. I wondered if you would be able to explain to people what that actually means and how that kind of manifests itself, especially moving on from what we've just talked about there to do with the novelty and the chasing the next thing. Yeah, well, I'm happy to talk about it. I've found that to also be true, not as I don't experience it in the way Shenzhen does because

he's such a more advanced practitioner than me. Because he's an absolute monster, that's why. Oh, yeah. He's next level. I mean, he's, first of all, he's in his next level. I mean he's first of all he's in his mid 70s And he's been hardcore practitioner for 50 plus years and you know So he's the way he experiences reality is it's fascinating actually I've had hundreds of hours of talks with him about how it is So I maybe I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry. You interject if you got an idea of in any idea of how many hours of practice

it's likely that Shins and Young's done during his life? That's a great question. I have to ask him. I would guess, I would guess probably upwards of 60,000 hours. Oh my god. You know, I mean, I'm remembering hearing once about this particular Tibetan, this Tibetan, I actually, I would guess probably more like 80,000 because there's a, I remember hearing once about this particular Tibetan, this Tibetan, I would guess probably more like 80,000. Because I remember hearing about this Tibetan teacher who figured out he figured he was maybe doing it done 65,000 hours of practice. And this guy was my age, so he was in his 40s. Oh, wow.

Chinsins in his 70s. So if people say a hundred, a thousand hours of practice is what makes you, you know, gives you a certain amount of mastery, you can then compare that. So it definitely is a numbers game, the more time you spend doing it the more time you spend in awareness the more awareness erodes everything in your experience everything just turns into basically pixelated dust that's so good to get. Ampede out and turn into energy so he lives so to go to your question why it's deeper i can talk about in a general way that is accessible to everyone about that speaks to my experience. And then I can talk about it in a weird, cool, fucked up, mystical way that is true of Shin's inexperience.

Throw it both at us. Throw it both at us. Throw it both at us. It's a mindfulness spit roasting. It's fine. Okay. So, since we're in the spit roast, so we'll start with the dark meat that everyone could get. You know, that everybody likes. start with the dark meat that everyone forgets.

That everybody likes. So with that, I would say, yeah, what happens is, it's like I said, you begin to feel like you have more space. So you start to see how previously, you're always inside this sense of urgency. The sense of urgency, sense of urgency. And the sense of urgency just gets more urgency and it gets in turn more work and more complexity. And it seems like you're constantly running out of time, but you're constantly running

around this hamster wheel. And it's not even that it stays the same. The more you repeat a loop, the deeper it gets, therefore, the more it grows exponentially. So you're in these doomed sort of feedback loops of urgency and limit sense of often of limitation. So as we get into practice, we learn we don't need to feed those loops and that our space just starts to open up. We realized that actually lots of things we thought were priorities that were important

that we had to do can just drop away. And the things that remain, we start to be able to do them with more intelligence and care. And there's just a sense of overall, that you just have more time and space available in your life. And there's a depth of appreciation that comes with this too. So I often think it's like, we move out of the paradigm where we're trying to, you know, we're kind of in this up and down paradigm, where we're trying to keep the ups and get rid of the downs. But as you get deeper into practice, like I think I talk about this in the,

the Geeskeptics book, there's a depth dimension that comes in. So you don't, you can't get rid of the ups and downs in life entirely, although they may start to round off a little bit with a practice. But what happens is both the ups and the downs start to be experienced with more poignancy, more fullness, and this is where language runs out. This is where the contemplatives

have always said that they can't explain it. You can't explain what this means, but just that there is a way, there are certain moments that are more poignant and full and spacious and meaningful. And most of your listeners will know what I'm talking about. But at some time spontaneously in their life, on a nature hike with a lover, who knows what, they entered into a space like that. And that's the space that a deep practice, that meditation practice with many other kinds of practices

can begin to bring us to. Totally, totally get that. Totally, totally, totally. So that's what he means in a general, oh wait, what? I figured you get it. I mean, it seems like you, first of all, just from talking, it seems like you do.

And if you're talking about modern wisdom, I mean, it seems that and something on the game. It fits the name, right? It fits the name. I think it's a really good way. So one of the typical co-hostorts on the show is a guy called Yusuf. And he gave me this fantastic insight and I'll be interested to share it with you. And then we'll move on to the weird quirky insight that you've got coming up for us.

What he said was that the more novel and experiences, the more mindful that we are of it. So I think everyone who's listening will be able to, will be familiar with their days appearing to go very quickly. When you look back at the last year and you think, well, what did I do with my year? As every subsequent year occurs, that speed, it appears like you're accelerating, right? Like you can remember less. And one of the few times where there appears to be a little bit of a mindfulness gap is when you do something that's out of the norm. So if the listeners at home can think about the last time that they went somewhere new or the last time that they were driving somewhere and hit a roadworks and had to be diverted.

So the more novel and experiences, the more mindful that we are of it. So what that means is that the mindfulness and the understanding of that, people can, for instance, looking back over my last year, I couldn't really tell you an awful lot of what occurred during my days when I went to the office, but I went to LA for 10 days, then Hawaii for five, Austin for one, and Virginia for six this year. And I can tell you, without looking at notes or a diary, every single thing I did on every single day because the level of novelty was so high,

which meant that my level of mindfulness was so high. So we've shown that in particular situations, we can be significantly more mindful than we already are. But the beginner's mind or the learned mind means that when we see things that we are already familiar with, we tend to allow them to rush past us and we allow ourselves to be carried off in thought and not experience the present moment anymore. I thought that that example of what happens when you do something new and novel

was a really good like it's like taking a quick holiday to mindfulness land. And you go, oh, that's what it feels like. That level of remembered self and that depth of understanding and depth of experience. And, you know, that's what it feels like. And I think going to the doubling your life as Shinsen cites it, if I look back at how fast my holiday went, I think, well, yeah, like I was away for 30 days, but it feels like I was away for 60 days because look at all of the things that my remembered self can actually bring into view. Whereas when I look at a couple of months stretch where I'm in the office all the time, I think, oh,

well, my God, that feels like it's gone by in a week. Absolutely. I could not agree more. That's, and people describe that interestingly, almost, that's almost a universal description that comes from practitioners over time of exactly that kind of an insight. And it's, and it's very liberating, you know, to, to begin to realize that you can spend more time in that space and that mindfulness gap as you call it. I mean, I would say that it's also partly it happens because when we're just stuck in

our thoughts, we're in a much narrower place as opposed to when we're actually popped out of that and really paying attention to the richness of what's going on all around this. And that's kind of the orientation. And from that place, there's so much more details to soak in. It's just like when you're having someone's in front of you and they're kind of your half-paying attention, but you're mostly listening to your own thoughts of what they're saying. You're not taking in what they're saying. You're not taking in the character and their faces. You're not there's so much information that's not there. So that's why it makes more space because it brings attention out into the world where, and it's not to say that it's not important to be able to

sometimes be in your thinking process. Of course, it's like basically thinking is a wonderful tool. It's just a terrible master. It's crazy. It's such a lovely way to put it. It's a wonderful tool, but a terrible master. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. So you're saying that there's a slightly more spooky version, a slightly more out there version. Well, so, so, so this is where this is something I'm very interested in, which is that the kind of practice you do shapes your consciousness in very particular ways. So shinsen is a classic Vipassana nerd. I mean, he's deeply, he's deeply shaped by hardcore Vipassana practice from within both a Goenka and a Mahasi tradition and hardcore Zen practice from his teacher

and more of a Rinsai practice. And his main training that he has done for himself, it's in concentration clarity and equanimity, but I would say in particular in the equanimity and in the clarity. So and in all of them together, but the clarity means that he spends every moment he's trying to notice the beginning of each moment. He's trying to hear the very beginning of each sound. He's trying to hear the very beginning of the sensation of breathing. So he has zoomed up the resolution of his consciousness now so that he's able to notice the moment sensory experience begins to emerge into consciousness. Most of us, there's a kind of delay, but for, and there's, because this unconscious processing

that happens where underneath the threshold of consciousness where something, uh, stimuli comes into awareness and then it gets sort of moved up into the higher levels of processing and it pops out into, out into into actual conscious awareness. But it entered the brain earlier. And so what some meditation research is showing and what what Shinsen believes and what his experience describes is that he's slowly lowered the threshold of his conscious awareness down into the area where the old turbines are, the kind of under the basement of mine. It's not that normally on the island.

He's in the belly of the beast, is he? He's in the belly of the beast. So he experiences each moment as that more and more as that moment begins. So his experience of reality is everything is a kind of gushing fountain of energy that emerges before it crystallizes into anything. Where it gets tagged as tree, as person, as emotion, as thought,

it's just this blooming openness of experience. And he's oriented himself to the empty space out of which that bloom arises. Because if you think about it, what is the ground of consciousness? If we're looking at trees and everything, but really we're looking at a TV screen, all this is built by our consciousness. It's a model of the world. And what you can realize is that you can in a sense screen, you know, all this is built by our consciousness. It's a model of the world. And you can, and what you can realize is that you can, in a sense,

turn off the model, but there's still a screen. And that's kind of like the, the ground or the emptiness or whatever you want to call it. And some people call it the full version of that as awareness. When there's something in it, it's aware when there's nothing in it, it's emptiness and there's no awareness. There's nothing. So he experiences reality as blooming out of emptiness at every moment and he knows himself as that emptiness. And so therefore he lives a deathless life.

Can you even begin to imagine what it's like to experience Shin's End's life? What it would be like to be him for five minutes? I've had, not really. I would say yes and no. Like I have had a taste of some of that because I've done a lot of practice. So I've had experiences like that. Maybe not as, so this is the other thing you realize. Practice, there's a depth dimension to insight. It's like an iceberg, you know, and it's always the same insight. It can just ever be deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. So I have many, I have thousands, tens of thousands of times I've had deep insights into impermanence, I've had insights into the liberating power of equanimity, of purification. I've experienced myself to be part of this larger process, I've felt myself emerging out of the zero,

but the way in which I have experienced that is, is superficial compared to the way say someone like Shenzhen does, because it only gets deeper with time. I mean, wisdom is learning from experience. So you're learning, you insight is learning from experience. So the longer you are in experience, the more you create that direction, that trajectory of more openness, of more of being in relationship to the space, the more exponentially quick that grows, just like a bad habit grows. And eventually you're inside something that's so foreign

to where what you were when you began, and yet you can see that it's the same principle operating all the way through. Does that make sense? Totally, totally get it. I think one thing that I'd love to get your thoughts on is the difference between state and trait changes that occur within meditation.

I discussed this with Corialin and I've discussed it at length with a number of my friends who are significantly more experienced meditation practitioners than I am. But I think a lot of people expect the trait changes to manifest themselves. I'm going to do my 30-day course and then I'm going to do my 30 day course and then I'm not going to feel anger anymore or I'm going to be completely immune to negative emotions or I'm just going to have this blissful happiness all the time. And it's a I think reminding people to focus on the state changes, how it feels when they meditate as opposed to the brand and stark turnip in the corner and I'll check it again.

I think it's good to focus on that. And I wondered if you had any thoughts about the state versus trait changes that occur during the affliction of this? Yeah, no, I think a lot about it. I think, I mean, ultimately, so I think of it as three levels. I think of it as state.

It starts a state, then it goes into trait, then it goes to state and trait. So, and so I basically, I think of it as three levels. I think of it as state. It starts a state, then it goes into trade, then it goes to state entry. So I think of meditation as it's something that happens at three different times in the same moment, you could say. So there's the, there's the, in the moment experience of meditation where you sit down and you pay attention to your breath and it can almost, many techniques can start to create a temporary state change right there. You can start to feel more calm. Your anger can start to be metabolized.

You can go into states of bliss or whatever. You can create a state change. That's how that's that's practice as it unfolds in the moment. But then you have practice as it unfolds over months and years. And that's what that's what generates the trait change. So you do, you practice being more friendly, for example, and you can start to feel more friendly as a state change in the moment.

And over time, doing that more and more, the default baseline of friendliness starts to increase. So the trait of friendliness starts to become easier and easier to get. And that's the second, so that's the, and that's really what we're looking at in a meditation practice is looking at the scale of months and years. There's a scale of the moment that it makes you feel better in the moment.

Sure, that can do that or it can actually be make you feel worse in the moment sometimes because meditation doesn't always go easily. But over the long run, it begins to create those state changes. Now, there's also a third scale, and that's the scale of a lifetime. And that's really what the deep end of practice is about. The deep end of practice is pointing you towards the whole of your life. To beginning to experience yourself as a larger whole, beginning to feel yourself in relationship to the whole of your life, that's kind of the deep, meaningful stuff.

And as that starts to come really online, you have a combination of those state and the trade, where the trade becomes so well entrenched that you're more likely to be in that state all the time. Maybe not 24 or 7, as Shinson would say, the small self always comes back. They're always going to be times when you're going to fall out of that, when you're going to get into, you're going to forget yourself and get into a more limited pattern of reactivity or whatever, but then you pop out of it again. And the time you spend in that more spacious place just gets bigger and longer over time.

So does that, does that, is that helpful? That's totally, totally get it. Yeah. And so going back to the individual practices, what are your thoughts on guided versus unguided meditation practices? I think it's really user's choice. So some people, I think especially for a beginner, it can be really helpful to have that orientation. I mean mindfulness means remembering. It's sati. It's remembering to be aware of what's going on. And it's very easy. You start a meditation with the best of intentions. You start paying attention to breath and then, you know, five minutes later, you're thinking about, you know, who knows what? So having a guided

a structure where the the guide is kind of bringing you back online is super helpful for a lot of people, but for other people, they find it distracting. They're able to generate enough of that mindfulness on their own or enough of whatever they need. So I would say, I think there's definitely a place for both. For me, I still listen to guided practice sometimes because I find it helpful. But I also really enjoy not listening to guided practices. So I would do both.

So. Is it, does it feel a little bit like training wheels? Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then removing the training wheels? Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then removing, removing the training, removing one, removing two, sometimes putting them back on, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, it is a little bit like that. It's a structure, it's a support structure

that's there for you at the beginning. But there's nothing wrong with needing his support structure. And some people may need that for a very long time. Others may feel like, okay, at a certain point, I want to lose that support structure and see what happens. I would encourage people to try to do that, because we are talking about trying to be, you know, good in all conditions. So if the condition of having a support structure is the only way you meditate, at some point,

you might want to experiment with losing it. But if doing that leads you into a storm of thinking, then put the wheels back on, it's no shame. It's just about what works. I totally get that. There's an app that I know you see if we'll be shouting at his earphones at the moment saying, I need to mention it called Insight Timer. It's literally that. It's a timer that you use on your phone. However, one of the things that it can do is you can set it to have a little, a very quiet knock on wood at specific intervals throughout. So every minute, every two minutes, every five minutes. And that is what he uses to bring himself back to the breath. And to just, it's just a little tap in the back of the head going, make sure

that you're thinking about the right thing. Excellent. That's funny. I do, I use Inside Time for the exact same way. I know exactly that wouldn't block that use of uses. It's the best little hook, a little talk sound. You kind of like, yeah, brings you back. Yeah, I was thinking about my dinner again or I was thinking about work again or I was lost in thought. So would you advise people to get a meditation teacher?

You know, it's evident from hearing you speak today and also from reading your other bits online that Shins and Young's had an incredibly profound effect on yourself? Is there a, after a particular number of years of practice should someone look to get a teacher? Is it something that everybody could do with from the beginning?

Can you talk us through what a meditation teacher does and how it can benefit people? Yeah, sure. Well, I think what I would say is the most important thing is that occasionally having and being able to check in was somebody about your practice. So being able to get another perspective on what's happening. Even if you're the most resolutely independent person,

we in a practice, a meditation practice is still another habit. And sometimes we can develop habits that are actually not serving us or we can get stuck in a kind of cul-de-sac. So we might be in a state of kind of low-level checked out, drool-ly bliss. And we think that that's what it's all about. But we're actually still a complete dick in our life, or we're still hung up on all these other ways. So the great benefit of a teacher, it's really the benefit of having another perspective, hopefully a knowledgeable perspective that can hear about your practice and give you some feedback so you can kind of reorient.

perspective that can hear about your practice and give you some feedback so you can kind of reorient. That's, I think that is important for everybody. Whether it's a formal teacher relationship, I don't think it needs to be. I'm a big thing with, I mean, it was very valuable for me. I think it's very good to start out at least with a teacher who can kind of get you going and answer some of the main questions. But I'm a big champion of the community as the teacher. That's one of the mantras of what we say at the Consciousness of the Florida's Club. We deliberately created a kind of non-hierofal culture where we respect the fact that there is a genuine, such a thing as deepening an experience. So there's more expertise and less expertise around a particular technique and people who've been at it longer have a lot to share.

and less expertise around a particular technique and people who've been at it longer have a lot to share. But that, no matter who you are, it's valuable. If you can be honest about what's going on in a particular way in which you're addressing some situation or challenge, then you're creating insights for other people. And so you can sit with a group of friends and you can meditate and then you can share

about your experience and you can learn a lot about how friends and you can meditate and you can share about your experience and you can learn a lot about how to work with what's going on. And that can be that other perspective I'm talking about, to be able to do that once in a while. But at the same time, I think it's, you know, if you're going to take it seriously, I think it's very valuable to be able to check in with somebody who genuinely has a lot of deep experience, even if it's just their experience. Because here's another thing. Here's another one of those cool paradoxes. Or again, if we talk about the nature of wisdom, wisdom

is learning from experience. We're all learning our unique things about experience that may be different than what other people are learning. And we can pull our wisdom that way. Absolutely. So there's a pluralistic sense in which that's how wisdom unfolds. But there's also this other dimension to experience.

I would call it a two wisdom and experience. Capital W wisdom. And that is that the longer you practice, certainly for me as a teacher, the longer I practice, the more people I speak to, the more people I work with, the more I start to get clear and clear intimations of what seems to be true for all people.

And that's what Dharma means. Dharma means truth. So it's talking about the wisdom, the progeny, that is the dynamics that are, that seems to be true for everyone. Do you need to write unity across every thing? And that, right. So that's moving towards a unifying or an absolute direction. So, so you need to have that perspective. I think it's really helpful to have that perspective in in this world as well, where you have teachers that have been practicing for 20, 30 years that are able to articulate what they see as universal and experience.

And that's what, when you go to a good teacher, whether non-dual teacher, but as teacher whatever it is, and you have that, they say something, there's that quickening, you're like, fuck man, it just hits you right in the belly. That's what you're getting. You're getting that deep truth. And that's a real thing. That's like the, that's the thing is the thing that people come for.

People say, oh yeah, I'm here. I come for the stress. I come for it because I want to be less angry. Yeah, maybe they come for that. They stay for this stuff. Because this stuff is the stuff that you really feel. It's the magical mystery tour or what the fuckness of reality where you're dropping into this like into these deep

truths that you the hairs rise up in a back of your neck. That's what I'm talking about. I told you get that. It's there's a cool quote from Yo Hanh Wolfgang von Gooth that says, all truly wise thoughts have already been thought a thousand times, but to make them truly hours, we must think them over again honestly until they take root in our personal experience. And I think that's one of the reasons. That's one of the reasons. You have a semi-ack quote. You like that one, yeah? That was amazing. So I think that's one of the reasons why people's lives don't change when you see an inspirational quote on Instagram.

If without context or buy-in, even the most enlightening concepts don't resonate with us, and what we need is, we need that experience. We need to have that resonation between us and the concept. And that's where it, like you say, is it's such a good analogy for it that, punching you in the stomach. And it sort of swells inside of you and it's that fuck. Like, how didn't I see this before? And I think that's the analogy that the guys from headspace use, and the puttycom talks about this a lot about the mind being like the sky, and I love this one, and he says that your mind is you are the sky and everything else is the weather.

The weather can come and go and it can be cloudy, it can be rainy, but above the clouds, the sun is always there. And all that needs to happen is that the clouds need to disperse and the sun comes back again. But the sun doesn't leave when the clouds are there. It's just the fact that you can't see it. And that was a punch in the stomach moment for me, when I heard that. And yeah, that's what's a bend is called natural mind. That the, and the belief within Buddhism is that the natural state of the mind

actually is a state of openness, of creativity, of peace, it's just this broad, spacious, vibrant place that gets covered over with what they call the clashes, our various pains and sessions and the ways in which we get caught up in the small trance of our life and not see that bigger picture of perspective. But But can I just come back, comment on one thing you said a moment ago about people hear something that it's like they hear a bit of wisdom, they hear an insight and it's a great quote and it's like boom,

there's this moment where it resonates and I think, yeah, I feel that. And then of course, you go back to your life and they say, so that's why I say a quote, most of the time a super insightful quote may not stay. But the reason it doesn't stay is because you haven't made it your life yet. And that's what, and there are times when we hear a phrase or a word in Zen they call it turning words where somebody,

it's also described sometimes as pointing out instructions. Somebody described something in a particular way and it is so, it just shoot through all your guards. It is so totally vividly true that it lands in your belly and sometimes so deeply that it does create a permanent change right there. So to the listeners at home, I promise that we haven't actually rehearsed this, but Jeff, I'm looking at a quote in front of me from Jay Kristoff,

which says, an avalanche starts with one pebble, all you need is the right one. Totally, man. Totally. It's so cool. I mean, this stuff, I just think it's fascinating. I love it. Like, I don't know, I feel like it's the biggest privilege in the world to be able to talk to you about it, to be able to see. I mean, you share practice and you start to see people's life's change. But behind that is this fact that you're exploring this mystery of being a human being. And the mystery is way bigger than anything that we know in any one little domain or silo of knowledge. And then we can be participants in this mystery. You know, and we can, we can, it's not,

because that's what happens in a practice. It starts with a bunch of ideas, but you start to live these truths. You start to live this stuff, and then you just can't even believe that this is happening. So. We're all explorers, right? We're all mapping the terrain together.

Man, that's how I feel. I agree. So I wanted to do a couple of more insights from you. You talk a lot about the pooling of wisdom and the democratizing, the sharing of practice. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah. So it's partly what I was saying about the community is the teacher. It's understanding that when you're honest, when you're actually honest and real about

your experience, you are embodying that direction, that that space is more absolute, more wisdom direction. And you have an enormous amount that you, so every one of us can do this, every one of us can be honest about our experience. And when we do that, we're teachers to each other. So it's sort of in a way, it's trying to decentralize and or democratize the idea of teaching. So it doesn't have to only be the lofty teacher on the pedestal.

We can recognize that we all have something to provide on what it is to be human. So it's partly that. But it's that, and I'm interested in that in the service of really opening up the guiding and sharing of meditation practices, because I basically see a major mental health crisis happening as a lot of people do right now where levels of stress and mental illness, I mean, it's all off the charts.

And we don't have enough meditation teachers like Pooves spent like Shins and 50 years in a monastery to able to kind of meet each one of those people. So we need to start empowering many more practice groups to be out there and they need to be able to be, it's okay to have an amateur practice group. It's more important to have an amateur practice group with amateur teachers than to be not practicing and teaching at all.

So I'm really interested in what is the minimum people and groups need to know to be able to safely share meditation. The minimum effective dose so to speak. The minimum effective dose but also the minimum way to how to do it safely and effectively because there is a lot of, because even as I'm saying this there's a lot of stuff coming out now about what people would call the dark side of mindfulness or, and what you know which is there's a few things there but. I was gonna say what's that? Well, there's a two main things there. One of the things is, one of the things is very rare. And it has to do with when you go really into hardcore deep practice and your

deconstructing reality, you can end up in these sort of dissociated states and you can, you can cause really, you can do that in a reckless way. So if you're going to do that kind of practice, you absolutely need senior level teachers to guide you. Is that when you turn into a turnip? It could be a turnip or it could be that you turn into like a vibrating bolt of electricity and that's what happened to me. And the energies go off for four months, you know? Yeah, got you.

So there's that kind of stuff, but then there's, I would say, a much broader, more relatable set of potential challenges has to do with what we're learning about trauma, which is that, you know, trauma is kind of a big word. You could think of it as there are shocks that the nervous system experiences that are not so much that are very different for each person. And that sometimes when we, and they leave these kind of undischarged energies of fight and flight and who knows what neurotic stuff in our bodies.

And sometimes when we go into stillness with a meditation practice, all that stuff can rear its head. And sometimes the instructions with the simple mindfulness instructions aren't enough to deal with that. We may actually need to seek some kind of professional support in a different modality. So all that is to say, my interest is in, like, I wanna empower everyone to begin to think about how to share practices in the safe way,

so parents can share them with their kids, so friends can share them with each other, it can become something that the whole world is doing in their own way, in a way that's responsive to their local needs, but I wanna do it in a safe way too. So what is the minimum that needs to be imparted for that to happen? That's a book I'm working on right now. That's a course.

I'm an online course. I'm going to roll out as an in-person course in Ottawa. I'm doing an in October, and I'll start to offer them in a lot more places. That's my interest. My interest isn't, okay, I want to help the planet, you know, have better, more centered self-regulation, more mental health habits. Right now we see meditation is this sort of specialist thing, but actually I think a basic understanding of the mind

and self-regulation is as fundamental as a basic understanding of diet and of exercise and that we need to be teaching this to our kids, we need to be, it needs to be in schools, it needs to be, and I don't mean that's only mindfulness. I mean that understanding of mind body, I mean an understanding of all practices, ways of exploring practices, talking about what practice is. So that's what I'm pointing to with all that. I totally get that. I think there's baggage that comes along with mindfulness, unfortunately, or comes along with the term of meditation. And increasingly now, meditation is an incredibly secular act, right?

You know, it's there's not, you don't have to subscribe to any sort of theology that comes attached with it, although some people choose to, but it's based on my friends and my exposure to it, the vast majority of people don't. They treat it the same way as you treat a gym. You wouldn't say, oh well, I'm a weightlifting church person. And you go, no, no, no, I just do weightlifting. It's a tool which allows me to achieve the goals of weightlifting. And I think you touched on something that's really, really interesting there, talking about people unearthing bad experiences. There's an analogy or an experiment that was done that was trying to work out why people in the mid fifties in the sort of mid 80s and 90s were experiencing what appeared to be spontaneous LSD trips and what

had happened was the summer of love in the 60s when everyone had been taking LSD. LSD can actually be deposited in fat cells in the body. Then as people got into their 30s, maybe got got married with kids, they started to gain weight and this LSD was deposited into the fat cells. Then if these people lost weight later in their 50s, it would then get re-deposited back into the bloodstream. So some poor, poor mum of three might be walking down the street to go to the shops

and get hit with a couple of micrograms of LSD that she took 30 years ago. And that resurgence of a traumatic experience kind of feels a little bit similar to what you were talking about there. And a podcast I did with Susanna Hallanen, who's a positive psychologist, I asked her a really interesting question. And I said, is making someone happy the same as making someone not sad? And she said, no, they're two very distinct approaches. And the reason is it would appear what you're talking about here that dealing with trauma and

Improving normality a two different Approaches and the introspective work for someone who has got a lot of trauma to deal with can actually be a very dangerous thing that they should be There should be some trepidation about doing and moving on I Honestly, I'm bouncing around And moving on, I'm bouncing around ideas here on the notes as I go through it. You touched on the fact that you think that there's a global or a widespread mental health epidemic, so to speak, that's coming. Do you think that there's an analogy that could be drawn to global warming here?

We need to have the tools to be able to fix the problems that are a byproduct of modern society, and that those need to be rolled out, essentially rolled out more quickly than they are. Yeah, I mean, I absolutely think that. I mean, I think that the precondition to solving the world's external problems is to have a more optimal internal condition set of conditions. And that, I mean, the classic quote is, you can't change the world problems with the consciousness that created them. And that people have been saying that for years. And that a big part of, so it's like, yeah, there's all these external challenges.

And now they're in the ecosystem and it's very, very serious. But if we come at those challenges with the same obsessions and biases and fixations and propensities for conflict and reactivity, then we're just going to create more noise in the system and we're going to potentially just make it worse. And that much more, much, much improvement on that model would be to come at those questions from a place of relative sanity

and clarity and openness and genuine openness to collaboration, you have a capacity to listen, you're not just in your obsessive trance. So I think that's, from my mind, a kind of training in how to be in the mind and how to have a mind and how to be in relationship is essential for everyone because it's what's going to allow us to have the best chance to address all the external stuff. I mean, there is a direct correlation. You refer to it, I think, on your website as personal hygiene. Interpersonal hygiene, personal hygiene. Interpersonal hygiene, which I think is a lovely way to put it. And it touches, obviously, on something that everybody does. Thankfully, the vast majority of people do.

And treating it as a must-do, not a should-do, is probably what feels to me like the best way to go about this. So what's your me like the best way to go about this. So what's your sentiment at the moment about the trajectory of the mindfulness movement right now? Are you hopeful? Are we at crisis period? Where's your head out with it? I mean, I may have a slightly different perspective on other people. Like, I kind of take the big picture of you, you know, I think it's, I think it's great to me that there's a big explosion of interest in mindfulness. Just like I think it's great that there's been a big explosion of interest in yoga.

I think what I see across the board is there's just more interest in practice and people beginning to take responsibility for themselves and people realizing the value and importance of these self-care practices, whether it has to do with body practices, diet practices, mind practices, I mean, compared to the kind of, there's so much more consciousness around this now than there was 50 years ago. It's on everyone's thinking and talking about these kinds of things. So that's the trajectory I look at.

And I think it's a great thing that that's happening, whether within mindfulness itself, of course, within that, there are going to be people who are able to, I mean, there's going to be a very, let's just say that there's different levels of the ways in which those mindfulness is being taught and being disseminated, and that some people can be emphasizing parts of mindfulness that may not be, that can be a little bit reckless, or, you know, and there's things you could criticize about in a small picture of whether

this is really the best thing for here. I mean, for example, there's a kind of, as soon as mindfulness gets big, all of a sudden it becomes the big panacea. Now it's gonna be the answer to everyone's problems. And now everyone's talking about mindfulness. It's you can get mindful mayonnaise, mindful, forget the butter spots, you can have mindful, whatever, like classes on mindful, like long trimming. It's just like, and so, and what happens then?

Well, first of all, people are making way too many claims for it because it's not magic, you know, and what you just said there is say you come across major traumatic symptoms. Mindfulness can really help with a lot of that. It can also exasperate them. So it's not, it needs to be done in tandem with other modalities, you know, in certain situations. And so there's, and so, you know, that's, and that's just true. And then, and then there's some of the ways in which it could actually be genuinely reckless, like you get into doing a serious mindfulness practice

if you have a lot of those destabilizations already, you can make things worse. So there has to be some thinking around that as well. It needs to be done thinking around that as well. It needs to be done responsibly then I suppose. It needs to be done responsibly. It needs to be seen as just like there are it's another tool in the tool belt. It's great. There are other things that are great too. But at the same time, you also don't want to be like it's also very easy for there to be a backlash. I'm already seeing that too because everyone hears mindfulness everywhere. People think off, fuck I know what this is. My illness is stupid. I'm just annoyed by it,

or just because you're a, you know, because you get, or you're just a reactive dude, you're like screw that. I'm definitely, I'm not gonna look at this at all. Now, all people aren't even looking at mindfulness, or they think they know what mindfulness is, because it's so simple, oh, just bringing stuff into awareness,

which is part of it, but they're not, that doesn't get it the whole crazy shit that I just spent the entire talk explaining about. There's a ton of amazingly deep stuff in mindfulness, but people hear the word so much after a while, they go unconscious on the word mindfulness, they get unmindful about mindfulness and start to think they know what it is. So there's all kinds of ways in which, in terms of the big picture, I guess I see it as God in the devil, neck and neck, you know, it's like one start to get ahead, then the next one pulls ahead, and the next one pulls ahead. So I see the interest in taking responsibility

for ourselves, the interest in self-regulation and practice as being a deeply positive force in society and culture, maybe the most positive thing that's happening, but at the same time, things are fucking up exponentially all around us. The environment's going to hell in a hand basket. Mental illness is just shooting up the Richter scale. There's wars breaking out. We got Donald, Motherfuck and Trump in the US who's just a complete dickhead.

I don't give a shit if you don't agree with me. And it's just like, what the fuck? What the hell's going on? Yeah, so it's like, which of those things is going to win? I don't know. I mean, I think it's just like, as we get more awareness, the stakes are always increasing. My sense is it made always just keep going on that trajectory.

And there's just always going to be more intensity, but they'll always be more capacity for spaciousness around that intensity. And there's no Disneyland ending. There's just ongoing, continuous complexity until we either destroy ourselves or who knows what happened. Yeah, that's a lovely way to round it up there.

For anyone who is a little bit more interested in having an alternative view of global warming, there's a podcast that I did a few weeks ago with Professor Adam Frank, where he talks about global warming, essentially being a natural byproduct of any world-girdling civilization. And I think that this race toward a lot of the things that we've gone through on the individual level, it seems like we can get good control, but on the societal level and on a broader scale. That's when

things can start to be combastodized. So for instance, you've got, there's a move towards mindfulness, but what that means is there's now a market for mindfulness and inevitably wherever there's a market, there's money to be made, which means that charlatans will appear, which means that people will promote practices which are irresponsible. And the same thing goes for global warming. It's like, well, agricultural revolution was fantastic, industrial revolution was fantastic, but very quickly we overshoot. And in the same way that a light bulb is supposed

to give off light, which we want, but it also gives off heat, which we don't want, there's all of these weird byproducts and extra things, and silvery bits that get tagged on the side. And that's where the shit occurs, right? Like that's where the actual bad things happen. I totally agree. I mean, there's a great, maybe one of the last things to share with your, with your posse there, my shinsen has this great expression. He talks about the waxy buildup.

And so, and it's basically how he describes how reactivity builds. So, I will say of a relationship. So your new to a relationship, you're completely in love and everything they do is perfect. It's like they do no wrong. And then a year into a relationship,

you kind of notice that they chew with their mouth open a little bit and it's kind of annoying. They get a little bit annoyed, but you're like, yeah, that's okay. They're still cute. I love them whenever. And then it's like three years down the road. And now it's like, every time they eat,

they're just like, they're greeting on you the same like chewing. Oh my God, whatever. And then before I long, it's 10 years down the road. And it's just been this build-up and build-up and build-up of a little bit of reactivity building on itself. And at some point, they just open their mouth to eat a hamburger. And then you're just like, fuck it. And we're getting a divorce. I'm done. And for, in your, in your view, they're just the antichrist. The whole relationship is transformed. It's because it was lots of, it was like a death by a thousand cuts. It increases and aggregates over time. And that's all of us are in that dynamic where we're getting a little bit reactive about

the things happening around us. And then we get a little bit more reactive, a little bit more reactive, and it just builds. And that is right. It compounds, and that's the same dynamic that happens globally. It happens socially, that happens culturally. We have a concern of can't even hear a liberal begin to speak or vice versa before there are already in a massive emotional storm. They don't even, they can't look at past even to listen to what each other is saying.

And in the same way with the climate debates and everything else, there's just, and even though I consider myself politically very progressive, I progressive, I see this as a problem that happens across all political divides all social. But naturally so tribal, right? Like it's the it's an unintended consequence of something that kept us alive for a long time that there's still this desire to be tribal. But the tribe we can't see around is the tribe of our own individual biases. You are in your own tribe, the tribe of one. And you create this whole carapace of biases that are basically warping how you interact

with the world around you. And you think you're just being this neutral actor. We're all like that. And so that's what I mean, the practice is about beginning to dismantle that carapace. So we can actually have true intimacy and connection with each other. We're not just bumping up against each other

like cars and one of those, you know, those amusement parks, those little bumper cars. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of what it's like. And instead, let's just have a giant. Group hug, man, because it's all about love. Giant car orgy. Giant car orgy. That would be fantastic. Jeff, you have to

email our cars filling a big puddle with happiness. That sounds good. Jeff, would you be able to tell the listeners at home where they can find you online please if they want to check out your guided or guided meditations or read some more of your stuff? My website is jeffworen.org or rg. So it's j-e-f-f-w-a-r-r-e-n.org. And I got tons of stuff there. I actually just put out a new online course, literally, two days ago. The first one I've ever done. So it's called the Elements of Practice

or Elements of Meditation. OK. And I have lots of writing up there. And then the other one is, I would say c-e-c-meditate.com. So that's the Consciousness Explorers Club. And there's a ton of free meditations there. There's resources. Oh, and by the way, I wouldn't mind saying this.

I'm just putting the finishing touches on version one of my community practice startup kit. So it's like 15 pages about anyone anywhere can start up their own little practice group. It's sort of along the lines of what I was talking about some best practices, how to do it safely, what some of the how to work with different challenges. And that should be free. That'll be the next CEC newsletter and it'll be in one of my next newsletter. So if you sign up for those, you can get that and it's no strings attached. There's no money. The CEC is a non-profit. So we're actually a registered non-profit.

Fantastic. I'll make sure that the link to everything is in the show notes below. Meditation for Fidgetly Skeptics will be in there, the head trip will be in there as well. All of the stuff that we've gone through, there's a really cool study which I'll actually send to you as soon as we get off the air, which explains a, from an analytical perspective, the experience, the differences in experience of life at 50 hours, 100 hours, 500 hours, a thousand, 5,000 and 10,000 hours of practice to really, really interesting read for anyone who wants to start to understand the trajectory

of mindfulness practice a little bit more and maybe begin to get a sense of what shins and young understands on a daily basis. But Jeff, it's been an absolute blast, man. Thank you so much for coming on. I'm excited to see what you do as you move forward. Consciousness, explorers club. I'm definitely going to check that out. And yeah, it's been awesome, man. Thank you. Awesome, Chris. It was my pleasure. There's all kinds of awesome insights emerged from you. So I'm glad you're doing this podcast for folks. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Have a good day, man. Okay, bye. Bye.

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