Tara Brach - Conversation with Tara Brach and Arthur Brooks: Becoming Happier

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Becoming Happier: Conversation with Tara Brach and Arthur Brooks - The Dalai Lama regularly says that everyone wants to be happy, nobody wants to suffer. Arthur Brooks, in his new book on getting happier (co-authored with Oprah Winfrey) digs into the practical and science-based approaches that increase deep well-being. In this conversation Tara and Arthur discuss the ingredients of happiness, the role of unhappiness in our lives, how to work with core ego-fears, the power of metacognition, the necessity of transcendence of small self and the love that is the grounds of true happiness.  Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste, welcome, my friends. I am excited to introduce you to today's guest. Arthur Brooks is joining me. He's a best-selling author who's currently teaching a happiness course at Harvard University. And his most recent book, and this is what we'll be talking about. He co-authored it with Oprah Winfrey. It's entitled, build the life you want. And it's full with teaching, science-based tools that are designed basically to build your experience of happiness. So in this conversation, we discuss ingredients of happiness, what makes it up, the role of unhappiness in our lives, how to work with core ego

fears, the power of metacognition, the necessity of transcending the small cell, and the love that is the grounds of true happiness. I trust you'll find much of value in this. Enjoy. So welcome, my friend. Thank you for joining us. Delighted to be with you. Thank you to you for doing this and all the people listening to us today who want to help us make the world a little better. Yeah, which is what we're talking about, which is getting happier, having a happier world. And as I mentioned to you, when we were just talking, I wanted to start by acknowledging what's going on in our world, that there is a very raw suffering right now. There's few degrees of separation for many in terms of what's going on in Israel and Gaza.

And so anger, fear, powerlessness, grief, that's up. And so I thought maybe you could begin, because I feel like you shine a lot of light on the relationship between happiness and unhappiness. So I thought maybe how do we talk about happiness when so much is going on that's so painful? Yeah, the world is a complicated place. And I can't think of any time in human history that I'm aware of where heaven was coming to Earth and there wasn't a lot of unhappiness. Happiness is not a destination that we can reach to begin with.

Happiness is a direction that we're trying to bring to ourselves into others all the time. And it's especially relevant when there are these sources of suffering that we see so salient in the news and around us. One of the pieces of advice that I give people and that Oprah and I have been talking about as we've been talking about this, book, I mean, it's worth pointing out that when the book came out in early September, it was in the wake of the Maui fires, the wildfires that had killed and displaced hundreds or thousands of people. And Oprah lived there. She saw it right in front of her. And one of the things that we pointed out, based on the research on happiness, is that when you feel hopeless and helpless because of the suffering in the world, and there's really nothing that you can directly do, that the solution is not to be

hopeless and helpless, the solution is not to be miserable. On the contrary, your misery is not helping the situation. And there is something that you can do. It is to look around you and to look for the unhappiness that's around you right now, the suffering that surrounds you that you might not have seen. Let the world's events attune you to the actual suffering in your environment and then go solve that. Look, every single one of us has people around us that have needs, that have emotional needs, that have psychological problems or they have physical needs and lacks.

There's homeless people around us in every city. There are people who are suffering. There are people who don't have emotional support. Suffering is real. It's not just in Gaza and Israel. It's all around us right now. And if you look at the news and that attunes you to the suffering of people, thousands, millions of people in some faraway place,

let that feeling of helplessness attune you to the suffering around you. And in so doing, you can be the solution to the problem to elevate other people. And that's an incredible blessing. But don't let it go to waste. So I'm right there with you that acting, responding, just acting, is part of what absorbs some of the pain. It actually helps to engage you in a really wholesome way.

And acting to relieve suffering is beautiful. And so if I'm feeling right now a huge amount of grief, because that's a big one for me right now about what's going on, reading your book, there was something really powerful that talked about happiness and unhappiness are not opposed, that there's room for the grief that I'm feeling, there's room for people feeling powerless, and that the first step really is to totally except the unhappiness that's coming up. So I was hoping you could speak more about that because I feel like so many people look at them as oppositional

that I can't be happier because there's unhappiness. Yeah, that's right. And that's a misconception about what unhappiness is. Modern neuroscience helps us to understand that happiness and unhappiness are based on negative and positive emotions that are produced in different parts in the human brain in response to outside stimuli. The truth of the matter is, if it weren't for negative emotions, we'd be dead.

Emotions are not good or bad. They're nothing more than information. Positive and negative emotions are critically important for us to meet our knees, to survive, to pass on our jeans, and to be fully alive. That's important for us to understand, because until we do, we're going to be fighting against nature, fighting against our own nature, which is an exercise in futility. Back in the 60s, the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it, as if looking for, positive emotion and feelings is the best way to live your life. That's a ruinous path to abject misery, to be sure. But so is its opposite. If there's kind of a dictum today, especially among young adults who are suffering from a lot of anxiety or even depression,

it's if it feels bad, make it stop. If there's suffering in my life eradicated, if I'm, if I'm having a lot of pain, it means I'm a broken person, which is a lot of what our mental health establishment teaches us today. That pain is evidence of the fact that you're defective. And that's that's completely wrong. It's completely misguided. I teach at Harvard University. I teach graduate students in the business school at Harvard University. And I tell them on the first day of class, I teach a happiness class. And I say, look, you're at Harvard. If you don't have anxiety and depression, then you need therapy. It's a tricky world out there. So we have to recognize that human life can't look at happiness as some sort of attainable destination.

That will ruin your life. It's even dangerous to do that. On the contrary, the goal is to learn and grow and manage your feelings such that you can live a fuller life. As Oprah likes to put it, the goal isn't happiness. It's happierness. Well, what you're saying really resonates that the difficult emotions aren't bad or negative or don't have implications about us. And I often think of it

in terms of evolution that, you know, the stress, the unpleasantness is a sign of a need to adapt and it actually makes us more resilient. So the difficult emotions, they have intelligence to them and they actually make us stronger when we feel them, listen to them, and respond to them. So I'm right there with you on that, a question about happier and that happiness isn't a destination or even possible. And this is something I read and I just was curious to bounce with you, Arthur, which is in Buddhism there are two kinds of happiness and one is the happiness that's attached to causes and that can never last. You cannot stay in a state of happiness when it's dependent on you approving.

of me or me having a good hair day or me accomplishing such and such. But there's another kind of happiness. It's called there's Suka, which is happy for no reason. And in the Buddhist teachings, if you're really living in that quality of presence that includes whatever's happening without a reactivity and that's something we can train, there is a quality of peace and freedom and happiness that is abiding. So I was just wondering if you could comment on that, since I did read you saying happiness itself is not, you know, something that we can reach.

Yeah, no, this is an important point in the Buddhist tradition. And, you know, I've worked with His Holiness to Dalai Lama for a long time talking about these actual issues, and we've written about this a little bit. The best way to understand that is sort of in the search for what we would call in the West satisfaction. And the opposite of which is dissatisfaction, the word in Sanskrit for which is dukkha, which, you know, is suffering, often translated as suffering. And the first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering.

But it's really better translated as dissatisfaction. And the reason for that is that Mother Nature installs our hardware with the program that's always running saying satisfaction comes from having more of the outside things, Suka. More of the outside things. More money, more power, more pleasure, more admiration, more Instagram followers, more everything, more of the world's rewards, more, more, more, and this is what puts us on what we in the social science world called the hedonic treadmill. Run, run, run, but never really get ahead. And then your satisfaction is momentary. It's evanescent. It's actually profoundly dissatisfying. And this is the essence of this first-level truth of Buddhism,

is that life is this dissatisfaction because of the attachment that we have to more. The way to understand this ultimately, and I'm not going to try to explain to you, the eightfold path of Buddhism because this is what you do, what humorous that would be. But one way to think about the inner piece that we can get, the inner satisfaction we can actually get, is to think of your satisfaction as kind of a fraction, where the numerator is all the things you have. And the denominator is all the things you want. So it's halves divided by wants.

This is not a perfect mathematical formula, but it's evocative of what a better model of lasting and stable satisfaction, where His Holiness teaches me, the secret to stable satisfaction is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. In other words,

don't work on a haves management strategy where you're accumulating and having more for the rest of your life, work even more on the denominator of the fraction on wanting less. How can I chip away my wants? What are the things that I can get rid of? How can I go from a bucket list to a reverse bucket list where I take a list of my cravings and desires? And by the way, Tara, this is what I do on my birthday now. I used to have a bunch list. And it was incredibly, it was just, I was inflaming the denominator of my satisfaction equation. And now I take a list of all like cravings and attachments, you know, the sticky craving for inadequate things, which is the nature of duca, and across them out, not because these things will never come to me, but because

I don't want to leave them as ghosts in the limbic system of my brain, hungry ghosts, as it were. I want these things to be governed by the prefrontal cortex such that I can be in charge of these things. And it's been completely life-changing, just that little equation. for me. So I want you to unpack that one because this is, I love this, this reverse bucket list. I think it's just brilliant, you know. So you become very conscious of where your life kind of has that grasping around, I want this. In order to be happy, I really need to have this. And you'll write it down. What's an example at a recent birthday of something you wrote down? Yeah. So I just, a couple, a few months ago, I had my 59th birthday. And getting pretty close to a big one here.

And I was thinking, because I always do, I'll write down, you know, what are the, in the categories, I mean, the big categories of attachment, according to Thomas and Kleinas, he says they fall in four categories, money, power, pleasure, and fame, or the admiration of other people. We crave these things. And yet they're idols, because they're representations of what we really want as people. And the idols are easier than the divine things for sure. It's a lot that goes into that. And so I'm always, you know, I want. I want. a lot of people to buy my book. And, you know, I want, you know, to have a really, you know, a really good class where I get good teaching evaluations, all that, all that stuff, of course. But I realized, because I was reading, you know, the beloved Ticknot Han died this year, as we all know. And I wrote his obituary in the Washington Post. And I followed him for, I didn't know him, but I'd followed his teaching for a long time, you know, starting, I read the miracle of mindfulness many years ago. And it had a big effect on me. And, and there's other work. And I started thinking, about a quote that he had after he died.

I mean, not after he died, but I was thinking about it after he died. And he said that one of the greatest sources of attachment is our attachment to our opinions. We have a very profound insight. This is really important for Americans and a lot of people around the world, but especially I'm thinking about Americans today

where their political opinions are, they're like they're jewels. And I don't get between me and my wealth. I'm gonna, man, I'm gonna kill you. If you get between me and my opinions. I'm going to cancel you. I'm going to hurt you. And it's just this crazy, sticky craving that people have to be right all the time. So, Terry, you know what? I started thinking about that. You know, a big source of attachment that I have that needs to go on my reverse bucket list is a lot of my political opinions. It doesn't mean I don't have political opinions. There's

nothing wrong with that. It's my attachment to my political opinions. It's the self-objectification of my rightness. So I wrote down about, 10 of my most sticky political opinions, and I crossed them out. I crossed out their importance in my life. You know, I have fewer political opinions because I need more friends, quite rightly. And it's just been liberating. I mean, I still, you know, there are things that I think about economics and national security, you know, the nature of American social life, et cetera.

But I might be wrong. I might be wrong. And it's okay. And if you disagree with me, come sit down. next to me and tell me what you think. And I'm just, I've got more love because I've got more space. And I have more space because the importance of my rightness is diminished. And I did that on purpose, metacognitively, by putting that on my reverse bucket list this year. Okay. This is a powerful, beautiful example. It's one that I think everybody listening to can

listen even more deeply because when we're fearful, we grasp on to certainty about our beliefs and it takes a lot of courage to not know. I mean, to truly not, to truly get it that we don't know. It opens us to a kind of vulnerability and it's an openness. So I love that one, Arthur. Now tell me this, because you use the word metacognition and I'm going to want you to speak more about that. You wrote it down on a list, you crossed it out, these different beliefs that you kind of held

tightly to. of who you are, did that do it? Because if I wrote down some of my beliefs and I'm aware of the ones that I hold tightly to, just writing them down and saying, okay, I'm not going to cling so much, wouldn't release the grip. So can you speak a little more about how metacognition has the power to loosen up something that's so limbic and so driven in our nervous system. Yeah, so we should probably define some terms here because not everybody is going to be as familiar

with the neuroscience that we're using here. So the human brain has an onboard computer, a bunch of components dedicated to creating feelings, creating emotions, which are information about the outside world that it delivers to your conscious brain such that you can react in an appropriate way that helps you survive and pass on your genes and all the other things that you want to do.

That set of components is called the limbic system. The limbic system was evolved over about a 40 million year period, and it really is an emotion machine. It's a drives and cravings. It's a feelings machine. The biggest misconception that people have about emotions is that they're good or bad. They're not.

There's simple information that is translating information about the outside world, you know, what's happening, what I saw in the news, the light, the dark, the temperature, the conversation that I'm having into my limbic system to send the emotions so that I can interpret it in any language. Everybody has the same emotions, basically, although in different intensities, and then I can react once it comes to my prefrontal cortex. But here's the problem. There's a bunch of relays in there that can be quite imperfect. The last of which is the feelings that come from my

limbic system take a few seconds to get to my prefrontal cortex where I can interpret them and react according to my conscious will. Many people that we call limbic people or reactive people or also known sometimes as little kids that have brains that are not fully wired yet, they only act according to their limbic senses, their limbic impulses. A kid feels something that's uncomfortable, they scream or cry. And what you say, when your kids were little or my kids were little, we'd say, use your words. What you're saying is move the experience of your emotion to your prefrontal cortex where you can actually turn it into words and in so doing, you can manage the emotion so it doesn't manage you. There's a lot in there. But the truth of the

matter is that all of us get to do this. This is the incredible privilege of being human as opposed to being a dog or a fish or something like this, where they have feelings, but they're entirely managed by their feelings. Metacognition is the process, is the techniques involved in moving the experience of emotions to the prefrontal cortex. One of the single best ways to do that is by writing down your beliefs, is by writing down your emotions. That's why journaling is such a powerful technique. You can't write down something and not be processing it in your prefrontal cortex. And then the conscious act of crossing it out, what it doesn't mean is you're going to forget about it. You don't want to forget about it, but you want to manage it using your executive brain and not the

kids in the back of the station wagon, the limbic system, you know, rowdy and running around back there. That's not what you want. You want them, you know, mom and dad in the front seat. You want them to be driving that car. You want them to be deciding what we do with these particular feelings and writing it down and deciding not to be attached is the beginning of a much better relationship with all your emotions. So, so I have a question that I'm going to ask you more personally, or maybe a comment and then get your input. When I find myself attached to a certain belief or a way of looking at things, my process is to feel what's underneath that attachment and I can feel that there's fear, that if I don't

have that I won't know how to navigate, I won't be able to control things, things will go wrong. So there's a fear underneath that holding on to the belief. It's almost like, this is what gives me coherence. This is what organizes me. This is what gives me control. And if I want to undo the belief some, I have to sit down in that fear and bring a more full awareness, bring that fear into the more integrated sense of my prefrontal cortex,

know, mindfulness, noticing it, feeling it. And it's only then that presence enlarges and the belief is like a current in that, but it no longer is so much an identification. But I have to go through the feelings. I cannot just mentally observe that there's a belief. And so I'm just wondering, do you look at them as just two, both processes would serve in different ways? different times? It's a very deep question, of course. Neuroscientists treat this in a different way, but one of the ways to look at this is the fact that we're very attached to our fear because it's a very, very effective governing emotion. It's really good for keeping us focused, keeping us out of danger. The reason that fear exists in the limbic system, which is governed largely by a part of the

limbic system called the amygdala, is that it keeps us alive and has kept us alive thousands and thousands and thousands of times by alerting us to threats. When a car is about to run you over in a crosswalk, it crosses your visual cortex and is processed as if it were a large predator. That's actually how your brain interprets. You know, the Mercedes that's about to run you over is a big predator. That actually lights up the processed in the occipital lobe of your brain and it signals to your amygdala that something's up,

which then sends a signal through the pituitary gland, your adrenal glands and it spits out stress hormones. This happens in 74 milliseconds. That fear is unbelievably effective for keeping you alive. That's so important to us that we have huge parts of brain tissue that are dedicated to just that. Now, here's the problem, Tara. We've maladapted that tendency. In the Pleistocene, we were supposed to have that fear reaction very occasionally.

A twig snaps behind you on the savannah. You take off running and try to get into a tree as quickly as possible. but because it might be a predator. The rest of the time, you're hanging out with your family. You're hanging out with your tribe and having a pretty good old time. But now we've adapted our culture to be so unbelievably complicated and multivaried that there's twigs snapping around us all the time. And we can't tell the difference between a tiger and Twitter.

I mean, Twitter, man, it's not a tiger. And yet we can't quite distinguish from that. And so we have this unfocused fear. There's another word for unfocused fear. It's anxiety. Generalized anxiety is unfocused fear. The way that you deal with unfocused fear is by focusing it. And the way that you focus it is by bringing the experience to your prefrontal cortex. And the best way to do that is to write things down. When you're incredibly anxious about things and you're holding on to your anxiety because this is the way that you're governing everything. It's like I got to make sure I don't get eaten by something. And so I need this anxiety to stay alive. Say, okay, okay. But let's focus this. And that's how you do it. They're going to, let's say, what are the five things that are freaking me out right now? Let's be specific about it. Number one, huh, I'm not sure. Let me think. This is why meditation is so critically important because meditation is a form of metacognitive

self-examination where you say, huh, Tara is feeling afraid right now. What is the source of that fear? And it's a very intimate and thorough examination of what we're feeling. Prayer is good for this. There's so many techniques for this. But then when you write it down, the ghost leaves the machine. Then it becomes actually real. Then you can figure out what it really is and what it isn't, and that governing emotion of fear no longer has the power that it used to have. It's no longer a source of security that it used to be. It can be put in its proper place. And by the way, you feel a lot less of it and you feel a lot happier as a result. You know, the shaman used to say, that if you can name a fear, it loses its power.

And it's a similar idea. And there's good research from University of California that says even just being able to note, to mentally a light note saying, oh, this is fear, or this is hurt, or this is shame. Immediately in the activity of noting, as you're saying it, and it's even more full when you're writing, you're activating the prefrontal cortex. you're coming back into more wholeness. So I see the power of it. And I want to just step back some because you've just given your whole, in these recent years,

your whole life to helping people become happier, manage emotions as we're talking about now, and reverse bucket list kind of release some of our, you know, being hitched to things being a certain way. So just if you share a little background, you know, what got you on this happier, you know, kind of bent or trajectory? What happened in your own life that got you to focus on this? You know, it's a fair question. And I guess a better question for me internally is, why did it take me so long? I've had a pretty non-traditional career and a pretty winding path. I started off in my teenage years as a classical musician. I didn't go to college until I finished college when I was about a month before my 30th birthday.

All the way through my 20s, I was a professional touring classical musician. A lot of that time, I was in the Barcelona Symphony, playing the French horn. I also spent a couple of years on tour with a jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird. And it was a great life until I realized this was not probably the best way for me to raise a family. And so I went to college, got really interested in social science, and I realized that I could use my intellect toward the behavior of human beings, which I was fascinated with. And I wound up getting my bachelor's and master's and PhD through until about my mid-30s, studying behavioral social science and different economics and public policy analysis, et cetera. Then I taught at a university, mostly at Syracuse for about 10 years. And then I left again and ran a think tank in Washington, D.C., which is dedicated to bringing prosperity to people in poverty and better public policy.

It was a trying, it was a difficult experience because when you're running a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., there's a lot of controversy. There's a lot of politics. It's Washington, D.C. I mean, holy cow. I mean, it's, it's a, you live there. It's a tough place for sure. But I learned a lot. I learned a lot about human behavior.

couldn't get out of my head that I really wanted to get back to this idea of using behavioral science to lift people up and bring them together. And so as I was thinking about leaving after about 10 years, I started praying every day. Show me my path. Show me my path. And I wrote a little mission statement for myself that said, I want to dedicate the rest of my life, the rest of my life, not my career, to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas. And I've meditated on that. Beautiful.

Yeah. Because it was my toolbox, you know, my plumbing kit is science and ideas, right? And I want to dedicate the rest of my life toward the why of my life is lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. The what part is just my toolbox. I mean, my toolbox, I could have been a neurosurgeon or a, or, a meditation instructor or a physical therapist, but it wasn't. I'm a social scientist. And I prayed about that every day. I prayed about that day every day for six months. And then the phone rang. And a few universities said, why don't you come and do that here?

So I did. I came to Harvard University, which is a nice place to do it. I have good students. but it's also a good platform to talk about that with the rest of the world. And I don't do politics now. I mean, I got nothing against politics. Some of my best friends are politics. You're confessing. But it's a beautiful thing because I'm actually able to talk about what really matters and what people really want. Instead of saying, I have whiz-bang ideas that are going to help you, I can say, I want to stimulate a hunger in you.

for what's better. Understanding that the world changes when people are in search of what's better. And getting happier is what's better. So if I can bring those ideas and do that for the rest of my life, I feel like I'm living up to God's purpose for my life. So for those that haven't seen yet, this is the book you just came out with with Oprah. And if you look at the, you can see probably my post it. That means I really did read it. Thank you. Thank you for my gosh. That's a privilege for me that you read my book. Thank you. Well, there is so much really practical, valuable. Oh, I'll try this out right now. And you've experimented on yourself. I mean, you've been experimenting on yourself and now growing numbers of other people. So let's do a little bit of a more kind of broad

thing of can you give us, what are the ingredients of happiness? Like how do you describe? getting happier. Yeah, my students on the first day of class I heard this big happiness seminar for MBAs. And it's funny, why would MBAs mind take a happiness class? Well, the answer is by about the second semester of the second year, they're starting to figure out that not by the school, but society has kind of sold them a bill of goods.

They're going to do important things and really good things. But the one thing they've been told that's not true is that if they set themselves up for worldly success, that's automatically going to give them the secret to happiness. It's not. And they're starting to figure that out. And some of them are a little afraid. And I'm kind of the last chance saloon intellectually.

And so I have 180 students and maybe 400 in the waiting list for the happiness class. And on the first day of class, I asked them, what is it? What do you think it is? Because everybody talks about it. It's weird. It's the thing that everybody talks about, but it's really hard to define. So they start talking about their feelings. the feeling they get when they're with the people that they love or doing the things that they enjoy.

And I said, that's incorrect. Happiness has feelings associated with it the same way that your Thanksgiving dinner has a smell of the turkey associated with it. Feelings are evidence of happiness. They're not happiness itself. And this is incredibly good news. To be governed by feelings, to be chasing feelings, my goodness. I mean, it's one of the reasons that people find so useful to become practitioners of Buddhism is that they can actually no longer be governed by,

the phantasms, governed by the feelings. They're tired of being managed by their own feelings. And meditation is an incredibly efficacious way to get away from that. So I say, okay, if feelings are evidence of happiness, what is happiness itself? What is the meal? And the meal is a combination of three macronutrients, kind of the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. The happiest people, they have in balance and abundance, an enjoyment of life, which is a very complicated thing, and it requires a whole set of practices and understanding. They have satisfaction and what they're doing, which is, we've already talked about that.

You know, real satisfaction is halves divided by wants, really tricky. And last but not least is the trickiest and most, you know, complicated of all, which is meaning, you know, finding a sense of who am I and why am I, which takes people people, you know, to the ends of the earth, actually figure that one out. I meet people in Darm Salah all the time. We're trying to find the meaning of life. And the science of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning is an incredible adventure, an incredible journey. And what I'm trying to do with my leadership and happiness students at Harvard Business School is to set them on this vision quest to figure out how to get abundance and balance of those three elements of their

lives. And that journey is going to take them for the rest of their life and be a really, really wonderful journey at that. So let's do them one at a time briefly just because I feel like those words can kind of, you can even glaze with those words and they all are so important. And so for enjoyment. What is it? Tell us more. What's enjoyment? So a lot of people think it's pleasure and that's the, you know, if it feels good, do it kind of idea. And that's completely wrong. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's a set of signals that say, you should approach this because it's a good way for you to survive and pass on your genes. That's how pleasure works.

There's a part of the brain. It's the primary pleasure center of the brain called a ventral striatum. And there's all sorts of ways to stimulate the ventral striatum from behaviors and activities and substances, et cetera, et cetera. And what it's doing is it's scratching that little primordial itch to do something that if you do it back in the old days, the place to see and your ancestors, you're more likely to get the calories that you need and find mates and all the kind of stuff that people want to do. The problem is is really maladjusted to what we've done in modern times. Incredible. I mean, you have synthetic substitutes that will ruin your life, that they illuminate your ventral striatum as if it were the Fourth of July. So, for example, you know, we have natural endorphins that give us, you know, a little bit of pleasure in response to different activities.

And of course, we've taken into the lab and created fentanyl, right? Which is, you know, hitting again and again and again and again using dopamine for the anticipation of reward and the payoff in the ventral stratum and you capture your brain and ruin your life. The same thing is true with pornography. It's just, you know, behavioral fentanyl because it's related to sexual activity, which is supposed to be a good and generative thing. And so this is the key thing to understand. The pursuit of pleasure is nothing more than to stimulate your limbic system to get a reward from something. It's not entirely conscious or even fully human as we understand it. The way to turn that into a source of happiness as opposed to a source of addiction and misery is not by taking away pleasure.

It's by adding two things, people and memory. For anything in your life that could be a drug or behavior of addiction, there's a lot of lot of things, from gambling to, you know, alcohol to methamphetamine to eating highly glycemic carbohydrates for a lot of people. The key thing is not to not do that ever. It's to add people and to add memory, thus implicating the prefrontal cortex of the brain. You know, Anheuser-Busch never has run a beer commercial of a guy alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack. But that's how a lot of people use the product. Yeah.

Because they're in pursuit of pleasure. They always show the guy with his family or friends clinking the bottles together in a spirit of love, making a memory. And that's because that's what turns it from pleasure into enjoyment. And that enjoyment is a source of happiness. And so here's the rule on how you can use the science. I may have done a whole bunch in neuroscience, but really the practice is simple. You know, there's a lot of things that are really great alone.

So people like to travel alone. Some people like to paint alone. these are not activities of abuse. Anything that could be an activity, a behavior, or a substance of abuse, if you're doing it over and over again alone, you're doing it wrong. And it won't become a source of enjoyment

and it won't be a source of happiness. So what about me? I often will go down to the river and watch the sunset. Yeah. Or else I'll go down and watch the sunrise. I get up very early. And I do it really regularly. I feel a huge sense of communion with the trees and the geese and with the liveliness.

Like everything to me is sentient. It's all sentient. So it's huge enjoyment, Arthur, and I do it all the time. So is there, am I addicted? No, no, because that's not a behavior of addiction. There's nothing from human brain that's you get addicted to the sunset. You can enjoy the sunset an awful lot, but it doesn't give you the same. It doesn't have, there's a wonderful.

little part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. It gets a little spritz of dopamine. And when it does that, it gives you a tremendous anticipation of reward towards something that will help you survive and pass on your genes. Yeah, I'm not getting that spritz. Sunsets are different. Sunsets are different. So what I'm hearing from you, though, is that the elements are a sense of, there's pleasure, but there's also a sense of communion, whether it's with other humans, but you're feeling a part of something and you're remembering it, it's got a, it's got some sort of a trace in your mind that lets you really enjoy it fully. That's right. That's right. So there's a lot of enjoyment that comes from many, many different things in life, but I always focus on the ones that

are involved in actual physical pleasure because those are the sources of danger that people have in their lives. And, you know, that mistake is actually the most life-gruiting thing ever. I mean, nobody's ever said, my source of happiness is methamphetamine. You know, those words and never been uttered. You know, it's all regret and, you know, pleasure seeking, et cetera, et cetera. So their enjoyment is critically important. You have to have a life that is full of enjoyment, the healthy enjoyments that you talk about, but making sure that we can resist the unhealthy, the unhealthy pleasures as well. Probably makes sense. So, okay, so enjoyment. We've talked some about satisfaction,

which was really, really valuable, you know, really loving what we have and reducing the wants. I mean, in a moment that we can really say enough, you know, just that word enough, that sense of there's nothing I'm wanting different or more. It's a moment of freedom. So, yeah. So let's talk about meaning or purpose because that's such a big one. And, you know, I think of the deaths of despair right now in society that, you know, really a sense of just cut off from any meaningful belonging to something larger, any aspiration, any purpose. So just speak on that a bit because it feels so important. It really is. And I see the crisis of meaning is the primary problem that a lot of young

adults have today. Meaning really has three parts to it. I mean, there's kind of a cliche. You know, you're going to go and sit at the mouth of the cave and consult the guru. What's the meaning of life? You know, number 42, I don't know. I mean, it's just, it's too big, right? And With any problem, you need to subdivide it into smaller problems. You need to divide and conquer the problem. And the meaning problem is really three sub-problems. And so you can even diagnose a meaning crisis that people have by looking into these little sub-areas. The first is called coherence.

Coherence is why do things happen the way they do? You need to have a theory of that. You need to have an understanding of that. And again, it doesn't have to be the same one as somebody next doors. I have a theory of the creation of the universe and my relationship with God and I'm made in his image. And that's my theory of coherence, right? Other people think about it in different ways. The second is purpose, which is the arc and direction of my life. So purpose and meaning are not equivalent. Purpose is a subcategory of meaning where my life is a reason for it that's directional.

You know, these are the reasons that I'm alive. For me, it's to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love. That's my purpose in life. And last but not least is significance, which is it would matter if I weren't alive to someone and for something, that significance question. Those are the three things. Now, I have a little test that I give my students to whether or not they have a meaning crisis, because sometimes you don't know. I just have on we. I have this sense of doom about me. So here's the test that I think is actually pretty useful. It's a kind of a two question test.

And the way to pass the test is to have real answers to the questions. There's no right answers, but they have to be real answers, not like, you know, PC, fake answers you'd tell your mom. Why don't you give me the test? Okay. Okay. That's like you're going to put me on the spot a little. So Tara, why are you alive?

to wake up, to wake up to the truth of who we are, to love, to truth. And related to that, how were you created? I wasn't, the eye that I perceive wasn't created. There is a awareness, a sentience, a formless awareness that gives rise to all forms. and this temporary form we call Tara arises like a wave out of that sea of formless infinite possibility. For what are you willing to die today? For love. I've experienced many rounds of ego death, letting go into, letting go of ego, a kind of dying, a willingness to feel the fear and the letting go. because of some deeper sense of belonging to love.

You've given an answer that I mean that the adroit listener and a longtime fan of yours will recognize that you've defined death in a very, very profound and broad way. The death is true death. Everybody's afraid of death because real death is the death of your sense who you are. Most people are not afraid of physical death. Many people are afraid of becoming

irrelevant or they're afraid of failing or they're afraid of losing their minds or whatever that is because that's how they associate the sense of self. And so the threat to self is the death fear and actually have an exercise that you know really well from Therabata called a Mara and Asati meditation. Yeah, talk about it a bit because it's relevant here. Yeah. So that if you go to a a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka or Myanmar or or someplace in the southern tier of Asia where they practice there about of Buddhism, you'll find pictures of cadavers and various states of decay on the wall.

Photos. It seems really morbid. The monks will meditate in front of each one of those photos every day and say, that is me, a dead body. That is me. A body that's starting to decompose. That is me. A pile of bones. And what are they doing? They're desensitizing. themselves to the inevitable truth about the next phase of their physical existence. Why? Because death in this way is really an illusion. Now, and you need to understand that it's an illusion so that the illusion doesn't haunt you like a ghost anymore. Now, okay, when I'm talking to my students at Harvard Business School, they're afraid of failure because their essence is success. You know,

I mean, my students haven't never gotten a B. You know, I mean, it's unbelievable. They're high achievers. And so the result is I will ask them to write a Marinasati meditation that contemplates the nine stages of failure. It's brutal, man. I mean, it's like brutal. It'll be like, I'm not doing very well in my classes. Two minutes on that.

Then two minutes on, I'm going to graduate, but the job market isn't looking good for me. two minutes on that. And then I didn't get the job that I wanted. And then I think I'm going to have to look about my parents for a while. And then I think mom and dad feel sorry for me. That's when they start to cry, by the way. And everybody has a thing like that to confront death, to take off its terror by confronting not the inevitability of that specific form of death,

but the illusion that you are that thing. You know, for me, I'll be, I'll be up front. My death terror, it's not irrelevance. It's not failure. I mean, I'm 59. I've failed plenty of times, right? I've been desensitized to that. And it's not afraid of physical death.

My death fear is losing my mind. You know, in my family, people get dementia early. You know, my mother was demented when she was profoundly demented when she was my age. And like what's going on between my ears? That's the whole show. I mean, that's not. how I make my living. It's how I understand myself is my ideas. Science and ideas. It's in my mission statement. And I don't know if this is God's plan for my life. I don't know. And so I have

to confront it. And the only way for me to desensitize myself to the illusion that I am my brain, which is insane, by the way, is I have to imagine the inevitable degradation of that set of abilities and talents. And it freaks me out to our own. freaks me out, but that's why I do it, right? Now, for what am I willing to die? You know, this is an interesting question, or why am I alive? These two questions, a lot of people,

you have these beautiful answers because you've been thinking about meaning for a really long time, but an unexamined life does not produce the answers to those questions. And I talk to people all day long, including people my age, who don't have answers to those questions.

But I've tried to beat that into my kids, my adult kids. And my son Carlos, it was a really interesting example. He's 23. He didn't have answers years ago when he was in school. It's like goofing off and not having fun and not even happy. And now he's 23. He's married. He's a sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps.

He's got it going on. These are his answers are amazing to me now, not because they're my answers. They're not my answers. And that's not the point. But when I ask him, why are you alive? He says, because God created me to serve. And when I ask him for what are you willing to die, he's very specific for my faith, for my family, from my fellow Marines, and for the United States of America, and our allies.

Mike dropped. Boom. I mean, these are not the answers for a lot of people who are watching us, right? now. But that isn't the point at all. The point is as he's become a man, he's found the answers to his questions. And that's the quest that everybody can be on. And in so doing, find the center that is the existence of our true lives and not the illusion that we're in careers to be living. Well, I think your test is a powerful one for us, for an ongoing test. I think it needs to be ongoing and actually kept fresh because it's very easy to just use words, you know, as a response.

And your, I think it's very courageous invitation for people to pick out what is the fear that's really a fear where my ego is so tied into this that it would feel like the end of the world, you know, if I lost my mind or if I lost my capacity to move and be, produce or be successful or whatever it is and then actually go into it. And I don't know if there's any other instructions that you have other than reflect on it. Anything more refined just because I know my listeners here are going to be saying, okay, so how do I get beyond these ego death fears? To begin with, it starts with a question, who do I think I am? What is the characteristic that is most me?

What is the thing that defines me most in my own mind? And it would be great if we all said love. Well, you know, we all had, but be really honest about on your worst days, not on your best days. You know, what is the thing that you're most proud of about yourself? What is your greatest sort of worldly aspiration? And that is the cardboard cut out of you. We're all kind of images that we create in our own minds. We objectify ourselves.

This is one of the great temptations of people. You know, the people who are, you know, your followers are not going to, this is not throwing a dart into the general population that want to have these kinds of heavy conversations every day. These are people who really want to live better lives. So these are classic strivers. I get it. And striving is wonderful and it has all kinds of advantages.

But, you know, it's not costless, right? I don't have to tell him you. I don't even go into details on how costly it is to be a striver in our lives today. And so the way to think about this is how am I objectifying myself? What is the version of myself that I just can't get away from that I most want? Look, I'm not necessarily proud of it, but it is my thing. If you took that away, that's your death. That's your death.

Because that's the thing that makes you, you. right? You know, for some people it would be my status, my title, my money, whatever it happens to be. And that's the thing that you need to do a Mara and a Sati death meditation. That's the thing you need to visualize actually losing that thing to lean in cognitively and emotionally into the experience of losing that. And so doing, you'll find your true self. So I think it's crucial. I mean, to be able to, the examined life, to be able to really go in, where we know the fear is stopping us from living fully. Because when we're hitched to a part of the narrative of ourselves,

and it has to be a certain way, there is fear. There's fear that it's going to be taken away because it does get taken away. What I found for myself is that if I reflect on that, let's say for me, I am very attached to feeling like I'm a helpful person, you know, to be helping. And, you know, it's got, it sounds very benevolent, but there's also an ego that it's part, it gives me a sense of like it feeds worthwhileness. So let's say I'm not able to be helpful, you know, my mind, whatever. What goes on with that?

And then what happens in my body, fear comes up. I have to then be able to be with that fear. And I have to be with it, Arthur, in an embodied way. And I'm naming that out loud because I don't think it's enough. to reflect on the loss if it's a mental reflection. Yeah. It can't be just metacognitive. It also has to be embodied because until we, it's like the issues are in our tissues, you know, until we actually feel the feelings, as I would say, feel the feel, it doesn't get transformed. There's not a release.

So I want to name that and part of what helps us, because you name the different elements, is knowing a larger belonging. In others, we have to feel something larger to help us hold a space for being with the fear. Right. And I just want to name, because you and your life, your purpose, meaning that that cluster was very impacted by an early experience of transcendence. And I think this is where we're kind of coming into having some taste or intuition of something larger that helps us actually with the ego deaths. Oh, yeah, for sure.

I mean, it's one of the chapters in the book with Oprah Winfrey, but really one of the salient things that it's most important in the search for happierness is the role of the transcendent in each of our lives in the vernacular faith or spirituality. But the point is something that makes us small and that gives us peace and perspective. It's very important that we have a sense of the transcendent. Now, there's a lot of very important and. new and interesting neuroscience around how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous

systems can actually be on high alert at the same time only when we're experiencing the metaphysical. It's extraordinary when we look at Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns and people who are experiencing the transcendent in a contemplative state, you can literally be in a state of calm alert. And it's the only time your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems can be working simultaneously with each other. It's an extraordinary. extraordinary thing. But there's other aspects to it, neurophysiologically of note. The bottom line, however, is this, you must have a transcendent practice. If you're going to put yourself in proper perspective, and you're going to have a prayer of making progress in the search for happiness. And by the

way, if you want to make other people happier as well, you need to work on your own path. You must work on your own path. There are very few miserable people who are good at making other people happier. And this gets back to a certain thing that you said before, which is a really important point. Everything you're saying is really important because you're imparting these. Your questions are actually more profound than my answer, Tara. So because they're so full of meaning, right? And you talked about that helping in this fear, my death is not being able to help. You know, the animating feature of a good life is one that's full of love.

love of the divine, love of your family, love of your friends, your romantic love, love expressed to strangers through the way that you earned your daily bread. Love. Happiness is love is what it comes down to. But here's the thing. We're very transactional in the way that we try to, you know, once we understand that, then we're like, okay, okay, fine. What's the currency? What's the currency of that? We try to make it into a little market. And the market is one in which I'm going to give you this so I can get that. And it's so easy for you or me or anybody listening to us right now to become transactional in the business of love and the way that we do that is becoming addicted to helping. I'm going to be a helper. And then what freaks you out? Then what freaks you out? Not being able to help because then your brain is telling you, look, if you can't help

anymore, they're not going to love you anymore. They're not going to love you anymore if you can't help because you're not paying for the service. So then you lean into that. And the way that that can collapse on itself and show you the truth of how love works is that the way that you love, you experience more love is actually by loving others. If you can't help anymore because you're not ambulatory or you've lost your mind, you will not lose your ability to love others. and that is the only gift and the greatest gift and the defining gift of who you are as a person

is your acts of love, your thoughts of love, the expression, the heart that you actually bring. You can still love others. And in so doing, you're experiencing, you know, God's warmth and light in your very being. You don't have to go, you know, make somebody a pie so you can buy their love. Never been able to do that, unfortunately. but I would say that it is about love and there's another piece which is it's not even about me loving another. It's about love flowing.

Anytime I'm owning it, owning helping, owning loving, owning anything, there is a distance and there's still something transactional. And so I think the depth of it goes for me to being so present with, let's say, the fear that I'm not going to be able to be helpful, that in that presence, there's in full presence, a very natural, universal sense of tenderness, a sacred tenderness that shows that it was never me helping. I mean, to the degree I think there's a me, helping, you know, there's some suffering. There's a beautiful phrase from Srinar Sargadata,

one of my favorite masters, which is that love tells us we're everything and wisdom tells us we're nothing. And between the two, our life flows. And I feel like you pointed to it so beautifully when you said that the transcendent, something makes us small. It's like we're no long it's no longer a self that's so central. We're really, wisdom tells us we're no thing, but then we're everything and loves that everything. So I just wanted to add that piece of not having a self in there that's loving and ask you to talk a bit because I'm right there with you that a path of transcendence, and I call transcendence, we might have different terms, but transcending that sense of an egoic self

and realizing a belonging with the universe, including it all, you had a very powerful early experience, and I think it would be really helpful for people to hear about your experience. Yeah. You know, I've had a number of mystical or semi-mystical or transcended experiences at different points in my life. But the first that I really remember

that was helpful for me, really transformative for me, spiritually, was, as a team, teenager. I was in Mexico on some school trip to Mexico. I was a sophomore in high school. And I was visiting the shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City, which contains the tilma of Juan Diego, who's a 17th century peasant, Mexican peasant, indigenous, who was he was outside the city of Mexico City and the Blessed Virgin Mary of Pier Dam in an apparition and imprinted herself on his tilma, his, you know, the garment that he was wearing made out of a material made from cactus of all things. And that Tilma is interesting.

At the time that it happened, the Spanish settlers were having a pretty rough time of bringing the indigenous people to the Catholic Church. It was going poorly. Let's just say that there are sales techniques were faulty. They weren't making a really good case for it as it happened. They were getting no converts. Anyway, after this happens, here's the thing. So on the Tilmo Juan Diego, the Blessed Virgin Mary appears to this indigenous guy as a mestitha, as a woman of mixed race, which is just not done in early 17th century, you know, colonial Spanish territory.

I mean, this is not what you, today, us, you know, academia in 2023, oh, it's great. Kumbaya, no, no, no. This is 1609 or something like this. And so this was displayed for all these people. and they start converting by the millions. Because it turns out, this apparition says the Blessed Virgin Mary and her son and God himself love all of us equally, that we are cosmically, radically one with each other and one with her and one with God. And it's this oneness that was converting people.

It converted seven million indigenous people in the next nine years. Okay. Okay, so I'm in Mexico City as a 15 year, all in a punk. I'm like, what a boring old church, man. And I look up and there's the telmo of Juan Diego displayed. And she was looking at me. She was looking at me. And I had no idea of, I didn't even know any Catholics at this point.

I was brought up in kind of an evangelical Christian background. And of course, I didn't also know that there's a technique in art where, I mean, I could Elvis on velvet, his eyes also follow you. So, you know, let's keep things in perspective here. But, but, and I couldn't get out of my head. I couldn't get out. I went home. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I just couldn't stop thinking about it.

And I discovered I was Catholic. I joined the Catholic Church right before my, well, about a year later, I went through the program and actually became a wrong Catholic. And that has become the greatest gift that has ever been given to me. And later I married a Catholic woman. And now, today, I mean, it's just like, I see the Blessed Virgin Mary every single morning because I go to Mass every morning. I start my day.

I exercise a little and I go to Mass. I finish every day by praying the rosary with my wife before we go to bed every night. And it's the central organizing rhythm of my life is my Christian faith, my Catholic faith. And it was revealed to me. I didn't discover it. You know, it's funny because when I'm in Durham Sala with His Holiness and Lélyna, every year I go to his monastery and visit him and we do these. things, these programs together. And I meet a lot of Westerners because, you know, Tibetan Buddhism

is a big draw for a lot of people because it's very beautiful and very helpful. And I have learned all of my best meditation practices from the Buddhist monks from the Tibetan monks. And I meet a lot of people like, yeah, I'm a seeker, man. I'm a seeker. I'm sought. You know, this turned out to be the central organizing truth of my spiritual life is that I thought I was, perhaps I would have thought I was a seeker and the fact that I found accidentally that I was sought was what helped me to to wire the transcendent into my life. And it's I've never been the same. And you just describe ways that you continue to wire the transcendent into your life. In other words, it was revealed. There was no doing. But then you've managed to more intentionally find ways to find ways to

to keep on deepening that experience? Of course, because, you know, faith is a funny thing. I meet a lot of people, and I know you do too. And they probably say, Tara, I wish I could have your level of faith. I wish I could have your level of commitment. You know, like, dude, it's not what you feel. It's what you do. Love is not a feeling.

Look, if love were a feeling, my wife would have left me decades ago, right? Love is a commitment. Your marriage is a commitment. The experiences that you have of happiness. or really a commitment to particular practices. You know, this is the privilege of life is that you don't have to be governed by your feelings. Neither my love or my happiness

and especially not my faith. My faith is the act of commitment, the act of love that I have for the divine, refracted in all of my relationships and in my work. And when I don't feel it, I lower my standards and keep moving. You know, if I don't feel it, I still put on my clothes and go to mass.

I take out my rosary beads and pray. And I know that there are probably many days when you don't feel like sitting in meditation. But that's not the point. The point is what you do, not what you feel. And that's what it means to be fully alive. The gift of God is to be able to do as opposed to simply be a process of feeling, I think. So, yes, I'm with you about practice. I mean, the word practice can be really dry sounding.

but creating the atmosphere environment internally, externally, that makes us available for revelation because I feel like reality, truth, and love are already here. It's more of an undoing than a doing. I would imagine doing rosary. In some way, whatever you feel like you're doing, you're actually undoing the blocks. You're undoing the armoring of the heart.

I find prayer makes me porous. You know, it just, it makes me smaller, it makes me nothing, it makes me everything, and then sacredness is more revealed again and again and again. And I'm wondering for you, when there's a sense of arriving, experiencing, what is it like? You know, just the way we ask about happiness, you know, what is the experience when you're sensing the sacred, when you're sensing communion, when you're sensing that transcendence. I'm no longer trying to find sound from one hand clapping. They quote our Zen sisters and brothers.

I actually realize that the illusion of the psycho drama starring Arthur Brooks, it is an incredible relief where I'm actually able to relax into the reality that the universe has something better. then me, me, me, me, my job, my money, my lunch, my commute. And I'm just so boring. And I'm actually able to release that finally because God gives me permission to, I believe. And by the way, my, you know, my rosary practice, I learned all my technique from the Tibetan Buddhists. You know, but I would sit in meditation with the Tibetans and they're chanting in the monastery in Tibetan for an hour at a time. And I'm praying.

Oh, money, pardon me, home. I know. I know. And I'm praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It's a beautiful thing. And what I'm able to do. I mean, the Buddhists have the same Blessed Virgin Mary. It's an arctepl. Yeah. And it's a wonderful thing because you need that piece. You need that piece. And if you left to your own devices, you will not release yourself. You will hold yourself. You're chained to a pipe in your own basement. And only in the practice. do you realize the keys in your pocket the whole time? Yeah, yeah. And what you say resonates because it's that self-centeredness, and I don't mean it

pejoratively. It's just the habit of selfing that takes so much space. And when that habit quiets, space and light and tenderness, it's all there. Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, people get a lot of stressed out about their technique, et cetera, et cetera. and there's not that much to be stressed out about. The question is, what's your commitment?

What's your motive? What's your objective? And then practice. Then do that thing. And you can and everybody can if you make a commitment to do it. And it doesn't become, you know, I feel like meditating. No, no, no. I'm going to sit right now.

It's important that I sit right now. It's important for me and it's important for the world. You said one thing a minute ago that was really, it's really important. I think it's to emphasize when you talked about the nature of love and the transactional nature of love. You said that it's actually, it's kind of like blood circulating in the body. And when you do something in particular, when you get stuck on one part of it, you're cutting this circulation. And that's really important for us to understand. And it's very difficult to understand the circulation, the circulatory system of love in the universe and in our lives when we don't

have a contemplative practice. It's just a really, really, really hard thing to do. And you can come to all sorts of kind of innovative ways to express it and practice it in your life. I remember when I was, you know, after prayer, I was thinking to myself, I was in New York. And there's a lot of homeless people on the street in New York and I was asking me for something. And, you know, I believe that, I mean, I'm practical. So, you know, I know the data that can be perilous when you're actually giving homeless people cash because there's so much pathology having to do with drug addiction. You don't want to make matters worse. But to say no is to, I mean, this is the face of Jesus.

You know, as you did for the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did for me. So what do you? You know, so you do something. But really to keep the circulatory system of love going under those circumstances, very practical, very hard-edged circumstances. I thought to myself, I need to ask him for something to dignify the fact that he can give me something to. What does he need? And so I said, and this is what I do now, would you please pray for me and my family? Because, you know, I'm a Christian.

I believe that God hears the cries of the poor disproportionately in a special way. And that's powerful stuff, man. That's powerful stuff. And that was a really transformative moment for me, but I think it gives voice to the very profound point that you were making a little bit earlier of give and take and then obliterate the difference

between give and take, such that it's a constant flow of love over the course of our lives. It also brings, in the word, you use the word compassion a lot and you do a very helpful and again I want to recommend what you're finding this because very helpful distinction between empathy and compassion and compassion by nature means if I'm feeling compassion for you let's say you're struggling with something it doesn't mean that I feel oh poor you there's no pity there's a sense that this is the shared suffering of humanity.

It's not personal. Compassion doesn't separate. And it's the same thing with love. So if you're giving to this person, not just as a transaction, please pray for me, but as an authentic sense of your shared humanity, it makes the love much more rich and mature.

Yeah. You know, one of the great teachings of that we get from the Buddhists is, the illusion, it was the whole doctrine of emptiness, the whole idea that I'm empty until I'm actually completed in the oneness of all people. And you can experience that in the way that you deal with other people in bonds of love. You can actually experience the illusion of your, of your solitariness when you're in communion with other people in very, very profound ways. It's the most applied example of the truth of the doctrine of emptiness that we can actually get on a day-to-day basis and it's super important for me to actually experience that every day.

Otherwise, I'll be living under the illusion. Yeah, it's me. And that's, again, the psychodrama is exhausting and terrible. It really is. It's like the worst television show ever and that you're forced to watch it constantly. Yeah, I know. I sometimes think of somebody else was talking into my head the same way I was talking to myself nonstop incessantly. I wouldn't put up with it for a moment. Here we are with this ongoing narrative about. about who we are and what we need and what's going to go. Yeah, I was watching, you know, that show, that four-season show on HBO called Succession,

and a lot of people are watching it. I was like, why is this bothering me? Why is this? I know, because that's what's going on in my head all day long anyway. Perfect, perfect. I'm aware that we're coming to the close, and there's something towards the end that you talk about that's so inspiring about, you know,

if we really want to learn something, teach it, share it, and that we can all be happiness teachers. And I just thought maybe you could close with anything you want to say, but including something on that. Yeah, no, thank you for that. And, you know, some people might be saying, you know, what's the, your friends might say, Tara, what's the secret to maintaining your faith? And the answer is, share it with those all the time. Certainly that's the case for me. You know, what's my secret to getting happier? It's writing my column.

It's talking to you today. Why? Because this is an opportunity to share ideas from other people, which is an example of teaching. There's this whole body of literature about how people learn. And the best way that people actually learn is by teaching. And one of the reasons for that is that ideas are kind of, they're embryonic.

I mean, ideas you can kind of understand something. something at a relatively intuitive level. It's pretty limbic, as a matter of fact. For you to understand and be able deeply something and be able to use it, you need to have the experience of that information, once again, in the neocortex of your brain, and the more evolved structures of the human brain, and the only way you can do that is by explaining it to somebody else. My father was a very brilliant mathematician. He was a mathematics professor for many years, for decades, nearly 50 years, as a matter of fact. And one time I watched him give an advanced calculus seminar.

And he wasn't using notes. He was writing proofs, you know, epsilon delta proofs up on the blackboard. This was years before I had actually studied math because I came to academia really late in my life. And I was watching my dad, and I was just blown away. It was like watching Isock-Purlman or something.

I mean, it was virtuoso stuff. And I'm after, I was like, I'm amazed at the dead. How'd you do that? I mean, how do you understand that? How do you get that? And it's such a visceral level. It says I taught it 150 times. I taught it 150 times. That's how I understand calculus. And you know, it's really true. There's these papers that are written about how the best way to get languages, new languages, which by the way, it's easier to learn a language after you're 50 for all kinds of weird neurophysiological reasons. Yeah, you can't get the accent. The accent is worse, but the grammar and the vocabulary turns out to be better because of crystallized intelligence. It's actually

really encouraging. I found that my own foreign language ability has gotten way better after 50. But what this language acquisition literature shows is that even if you don't know a language very well, if you start to try to teach it to somebody else, you supercharge your language ability. Because you're using your full brain in a really effective way. Okay, back to happiness. You want to get happier? Teach happiness. Share the ideas. Take ideas. You know, whenever I give a lecture, I'm doing 175 talks outside my university a year now. I use PowerPoint a lot. Why? Because people are always like, can I have a version of the PowerPoint? And I say, yes, but you got to take my name off and put your name on. You got to give them briefing.

You actually have to give the knowledge because only when you do that, you'll know it for sure. And this gets back to the central point that we're making again and again and again in this conversation, which is that happiness is love. And love is sharing. It is communing with another person. How do you get happier? by spreading ideas of happiness. And the way that you do that is by sharing the knowledge, sharing the practices. That's a profound teaching exercise. Teaching in its best is nothing more than communing and becoming one with somebody else in the spirit of love.

Thank you, dear. That's beautiful. Thank you. And I gather you are happier and happier, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of progress. It's really been a lot of progress. And that's why, you know, why didn't I get to the service?

earlier because God had other plans for me when I'm here now. Here you are. Here we are. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you for your work. Thank you for your spirit, your blessing, and for all the good you're bringing in the world. Very mutual.

Blessing. Thanks.