Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 186: The Importance of Dying Before You Die, Helen Tworkov

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

Helen Tworkov first encountered Buddhism in Nepal during the 1960's and has studied in both the Zen and Tibetan traditions. She has also studied with Mingyur Rinpoche, a well-known Tibetan Buddhist meditation master. Together they have written the book "In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying." The book details Rinpoche’s intimate account of his three year journey away from his monastery and the near-death experience that allowed him to gain life-changing wisdom. The Plug Zone Tricycle: https://tricycle.org/ Book: https://www.amazon.com/Love-World-Journey-Through-Bardos/dp/0525512535 ***VOICEMAILS*** Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. We have a remarkable story on the show this week. It's remarkable at a lot of levels. The details of the story are riveting, but the takeaway is something that's been, But the takeaway is something that's really stuck with me. And it's about the concept of dying before you die, which is not morbid. It's about letting go of attachments, letting go of status, money, possessions, achievements, whatever. We will, when we die, be forced to let go of all of that.

But can you do that before you die, at least in some way? Will when we die be forced to let go of all of that? But can you do that before you die, at least in some way? And you're going to hear about somebody who endeavored to do just that. He's a famous, super famous monk and meditation teacher in the Tibetan school of Buddhism. He's what's been called a prince of the Dharma. In other words, he was born into a famous school of a famous family of meditation teachers. He's believed to be the reincarnation of one, maybe two famous meditation masters of your. And so has spent his life studying meditation teaching meditation, but also all of the Practical stuff has been taken care of he's never made a cup of tea firm style. He's never ordered a train ticket and one day

He up and disappeared from His monastery where he lived in Nepal from his monastery where he lived in Nepal. Disappeared, ghosted, and he went off on what's called a wandering retreat. This is something that meditation masters have been doing for centuries, where instead of just going to a monastery and sitting in retreat, you actually go off and wander through the streets and the forests and do your retreat in that fashion. And so this so-called Prince of the Dharma went and lived on the streets where he had the

beg for food. He lived in caves. And at one point he almost died. And I mean, I'm not using that according to his telling of the story. This is not just kind of he got super sick. I mean, he really almost died and he has an amazing account of a near death experience where he is after having done decades of really intensive meditation, awake and aware as his body is falling apart. So that's fascinating too.

This is also though the story of the Western writer who collaborated with this monk to tell the story. The writer's name is Helen Torkov and she's our guest this week. And she and the aforementioned monk whose name is Ming-Yer Rinpoche have written a book about this. It's called In Love With The World. It's just out. So we're going to talk about what does that mean in love with the world, it's just out. So we're gonna talk about what does that mean in love with the world? And what did she Helen learn in the process of this, because she is a longstanding relationship with Mingyu Rinpoche, she's a student of his

and she's a writer herself. So what did she learn in all this, and what can we learn from it? That's all coming up first, a couple of items of business. One is we have two new meditations up in the 10% happier app the newly redesigned revamped 10% happier app which has a whole new look to it So going if you're an app subscriber going and updated you'll see we've got a whole snazzy new look

Also very interested to hear what you think of that. So hit me on Twitter or go to go tell your coach on the app What you think is where we really want to know. The two new meditations, one is from Joseph Goldstein, it's called Am to Is, and then another one called Understanding Stress by Anushka Fernandipoli. The other item of business is that my colleague, Dr. Jan Ashton, who was on the show a couple of weeks ago,

she's just written a book called Life After Suicide about what she and her family went through after her husband or actually they'd been divorced for two weeks. So her recently ex-husband died by suicide. And she started a podcast, which you should go check out. It's called Life After Suicide. You can go and subscribe right now.

And the second episode has just gone up. And it is an interview with her daughter, Chloe. And it is really quite a wrenching discussion about how Chloe was a college student reacted to the loss of her father and how she's been dealing with grief. Okay. Helen Torkov, our guest this week, she is the founding editor of a magazine called Tricycle, the Buddhist Review, which is the first and only independent Buddhist magazine. She also, before her most recent book, she wrote a book called Zen in America Profiles of Five Teachers.

So now she's got this new book called In Love with the World. Helen has been a long time meditation practitioner and writer. She has also been a long time student of this particular teacher Ming-Yer Rinpoche. After he got back from his four and a half year wandering retreat, he reached out to Helen and asked her to work with him on writing this book. He initially, as she tells the story, he initially wanted to write pretty much all about his near death experience and talk about what he saw there to break it all down. She said, sure, we can write about that, but I think what's equally, if not more interesting, is why anyone would walk away from basically having it all, being such a highly esteemed meditation teacher in a world where he has all these

attendants taken care of him, all these students who adore him, and he went out and lived on the streets. adore him and he went out and lived on the streets. And of course, this move that he made of giving everything up is what she means by dying before you die. Letting go of everything and sort of living from that spot. And we talk about how in this episode, Helena, I talk about how we, the rest of us, can incorporate this wisdom, this perspective without living on the streets or living in a cave.

We talk about the difference between letting go and giving up. That's a really fundamental thing to understand. We talk about, this is going to sound a little gooey, but we talk about how when you strip away all of your attachments, all that is left is love. Okay. I know that sounds a little sappy, but I have to say that when I have this incipient sense based on my own beginning or beginner experiences on long retreats, that that may be true. So we talk about that and of course that sentiment that all that's left after you strip

way your attachments is love. That of course is what's behind the title of the book in love with the world. We also talk about Helen's career, both from a meditative standpoint and from a writing standpoint, what she's learned from having meditated for all of these years and what she's learned from working one-on-one with many amazing teachers. And, you know, what does that say about the rest of us? Do we need a teacher? What she's learned from covering America's Dharma scene? We talk about a specific kind of meditation that's known as nature of mind meditation, which I do a little bit and find fascinating.

She also holds forth about all of the scandals, the Me Too scandals that have rolled through the meditation and Buddhist world in the last 18 months or so. And she has a very interesting perspective. She talks a lot about the difference between having enlightenment experiences and being full stop enlightened. And that's a really key distinction. We also talk about how

she got into the meditation game in the first place and how she has learned a hard way that Buddhism is not going to solve all of your problems. And yet she says it still offers something immeasurably valuable. So here we go. Here's Helen Torkov. Nice to see you. Thank you. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. How did you get into meditation in the first place? I don't know why I asked that question as if I was making it up on the spot. I always ask that question first, but anyway. It's not a, it's not in one line answer. And it took a long time. I spent a lot of time in Asia when I was very young. And I was exposed. Why, why were you in Asia? Because I was a very rebellious kid of the 60s and rather than go to sit at the icons

of European heritage, I took off for the East and I was a hippie and I traveled. I was in Japan for six months and read DT Suzuki and understood absolutely nothing. He wrote his end-mind, beginner's mind. No, that's the other Suzuki. That's Frenriosis. This is DT Suzuki who was very, very influential. He influenced the beat poets with a very influential with Alan Ginsburg and Jack Harrowack and Gary Snyder and people like that. What did he write that you read?

He wrote dozens of books that I can't remember the titles. I honestly couldn't understand a thing. There were much too intellectual and abstract for me and his part of what he was doing at that time was to try to create a kind of philosophy devoid of practice. He thought practice might frighten Westerners away, which it might have. So there was nothing about actually how to sit. It was very philosophical, but I couldn't get into it. How old were you at this time? 22. So you graduated from college? Yeah. And where did you grow up? On East 23rd Street. Right here. Okay. So were your folks annoyed that you decided to go to Asians that have, I don't know, studying the great... They were a little bit perplexed, I think. I mean, they were... Yeah, I think they were a little perplexed, but they were supportive of my traveling.

Maybe not. I stayed away a little longer than I intended. Stayed away for almost two years. I told them I'd be back in six months, but I kept in touch with them. So that was my first experience of Buddhism, of the East. Then I went to Nepal and I worked in Tibetan refugee camps in 1966, and that was very transformative for me. But I was afraid to practice. I was afraid of gurus.

There were aspects of Buddhism as far as I knew it. There was very little to read in those days. So it took me another 10 years of slowly making my way towards practice. And I didn't start practicing till around 75, 76. Why were you afraid of gurus? I think I was just afraid of the whole concept of an authority in a so-called religion. I didn't know what it meant. I'm not sure I do today, but I still have, you know, I think I had so many misunderstandings about it, which I think people do today as well

um I really misread it a lot, but do you have a guru now? I do winter impache is my teacher sure Okay, well you pronounce it minjure rinpoche yeah, okay, so I've been mispronouncing it this whole time What do you say I thought it was minjure rinpoche Minjure minjure m-i-n-g-y Minjure rinpoche yeah, isn't he he's he's even younger than me right? He's he's he's super young right? Shea. Minger. Minger, M-I-N-G-Y. Minger, but she has. He's even younger than me, right? He's super young, right?

I met him. Well, he's, let's see, he must be about 42 or 43 by now. I'm 47, so he's definitely younger than me. He's a lot younger than I am. Is that strange, too, to have a, because what we think of the guru as being some, Eminence Grease. At some point I started off into betting Buddhism, and then I started studying Zen.

And at some point my Zen teacher died. And I had several years without any teacher. And when I began looking around, that was an issue for me. Age. I thought, well, this is going to be strange. I mean, maybe I don't need it. I actually had the idea that maybe I didn't need a teacher at that point in my life. That turned out to be a miss big mistake on my part.

It took me a couple of years to realize that my practice was not where I wanted it to be. And I needed help, I needed guidance. And so I started looking for a teacher and I did a retreat with Mindra Bache that was very important to me and it was basically everything that I was looking for. He during, it was a five day retreat at Gimpo Abbey in Cape Breton and it was teaching something what we call the nature of mind. It was sort of asking to get in again, where is your mind, where is your mind.

And I had been gotten very lost in my Zen sitting practice. So this was a specificity and a precision to his questions. That was very important to me. We're way off the rails now in terms of your personal chronology, but we're here, so let's just stay here. I'm assuming that the question for you, I'm assuming that all of this gets edited. Oh no, we don't have anything at all. Beautifully messy.

Not this messy, Dan. Why not? Our listeners love it. I hope I may be speaking for our listeners in a way, But they have no choice because this is the way we do it. But stay on the nature of mind for a second because we glossed over that. What does that mean? Where is your mind? What's that all about?

Now I can, you know, I wish I had stayed way off the rails. Well, when we practice and when we just sit in meditation, we're basically learning something about our minds, trying to familiarize ourselves with our minds. We don't know a lot about it. The first teacher I ever had, the first Tibetan teacher I ever had, I went in to have one on one interview with him and he asked me, what color is your mind? And I was completely done found that I just sat there completely astonished.

I had no idea what to say to say anything. Nobody, I'd never even imagine being asked that question. Never occurred to me that that question existed in the world as a question. And what color is your mind? And how big is your mind? And how big is your mind? And where does it come from? And where does it go?

And so those are kinds of questions. And then Minter and Bache basically was something, an echo of that quite a few years later. But it was the same idea of asking you to look into your mind and see what you know about it, which is pretty much nothing. Right. I mean, my understanding of these practices and it's been filtered to me through Joseph Goldstein who The great meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein who went off and studied with Tibetan masters

But he he actually comes from a different lineage Meaning he's it he's in a different school of practice, Teravada, which is kind of old school, which predates the Tibetan practice. And he will sometimes ask you to ask a question, which is, you say, you're hearing noises, you ask yourself, what is hearing? What is hearing these noises? Who is hearing these noises? And in the looking, you don't find, but the not finding is in some way healing. Is that, is that? That's the same idea. It's the same very limited, very constricted version of what there is to know and becoming more and more familiar with that, how to unearth what's

underneath that muttering that goes on all the time. Did you get an answer? I'm still looking. 1975, you actually start practicing. What brings you to the cushion at this point, after all these years of kind of flirting with it? A lot of emotional pain. Personal pain. What was going on?

You don't have to answer that question. Good. Okay, fair enough. It's a lot of my my marriage was breaking up and other emotional difficulties and I couldn't my my my mind was driving me crazy. It's very simple. I was thinking very obsessively about things that were very unpleasant and very difficult and not working with them in any kind of construction, constructive way and not dissolving them in any way and just experience myself as like banging into a wall again and again and again I have to do something.

I have to do something. Why not just see a shrink like all good New Yorkers? I think I already had seen a shrink. That was, I don't even done that, with varying degrees of success or not. And it was 1975, I had been living in Canada and I moved back to New York and everybody seemed to be searching for some spiritual way and the Vietnam War has was barely over and the culture was still in a lot of turmoil. And so there was certainly an interest in exploring things that were outside the mainstream at that point,

still a mistrust of what was going on in the mainstream whether it was therapy or other more conventional religious forms. And I had been in Asia for a couple of years before that and I had gone back to Asia. So I had some affinity for Buddhism without being able to really study it. What, when you finally started actually practicing, it was it gathering from the shards of narrative that we've been able to collect thus far that it was in the Zen tradition? No, first it was the Tibetan tradition. First it was the Tibetan and then Zen and then back to Tibet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So tell me what was that like?

Well, my teacher at that time was a very elderly gentleman named Dujar Rinpoche. And it was quite traditional from one point of view. Any Westerner walking into a Tibetan shrine room in 75 or in many cases today might think that this looks just like it does an old Tibet, you know, it's just but of course if any Tibetan walking in would think it's radically different. So it depends on your view there, but in many ways it was quite traditional. The practices were traditional, the ritual, there was a lot of chanting, a lot of recitation of liturgy.

He was very extraordinary, but unlike a teacher like Trumper Rinpoche, it was not his karma, if you will, to put a bridge down for Westerners like myself. So he remained very inspiring but unreachable for me personally. That's not true for many people, but that was for me that was true. You referenced Trump, a Rampuche controversial Tibetan teacher who came to the West, wore a suit and tie, took off his robes and became quite accessible, depending on who you ask for better or worse, to Westerners. I just wanted to get that out there for folks. So it was his books that first actually was reading his books in 1973. I was still living in Canada, but those were the first books because I had started reading anything I could about Buddhism.

But in those days, late 60s, there were about five books. It was just incredibly. I mean, you go to a bookstore now, it just blows my mind. How many books there are about Buddhism in the last 50 years we're talking about. But his books in the early 70s were, with my introduction to the possibility that Buddhism was for Westerners. I hadn't quite believed that prior to that. Buddhism, I had experienced it in Asia and it was still something that seemed to me so integral

to Asia, but I couldn't actually imagine bringing it out of Asia and his books which were so much written Four Westerners and two Westerners and addressing our concerns in such a fourth right way Was my first experience of thinking that maybe this was a possible path for a Westerner. Why didn't you go study with him? I think by that time he already had like a big kind of scene around him that felt quite impenetrable to me. I would like, I would always be an outsider. And it was all, it already felt like it had formed and it had some sort of solidity. And he was in Colorado mostly and I was in New York and it just didn't.

I didn't have, actually I did go to see him a couple of times in the 70s and I wasn't particularly attracted to changing my life and studying with him. What, you say you got into practice finally because of emotional pain? Did it help? Yeah, in a long run, I think it did. But in the short run, I can't remember. I honestly can't remember. I think that having some alternative knowing that there were alternatives to what I was doing with my mind was critical. And was very encouraging.

It gave me a lot of hope and optimism. That doesn't mean that I could get up every day and work with that mind. But just to have something as an alternative to what I had known about, I think was very critical. It was that all of a sudden instead of just drowning in and indulging your emotions all the time, you could see them at arm's length? I'm projecting here because that's what's been useful for me.

I think taking responsibility for the kind of emotional anxiety that I was experiencing was critical. That I couldn't continue to blame others. although I did a good job at that anyway. I mean, that took quite a few years. It's still happening. I'm still working on it. But there's some level on which knowing that I am creating my own suffering and that I have the capacity to liberate myself from that same suffering. That's a very critical piece of information. And even if you can't import it into your marrow every day and live with it and

keep using it from the inside out, I still think it's an important piece of information. Yes, I mean you're making me think about something that I've been thinking about quite a bit recently that it's often said, and I have found this underwhelming when I first heard it that one of the original if not the original translation of the ancient Indian Polly word for mindfulness is remembering or recollecting that the other day. And and I remember thinking okay okay but now now we are so wired for denial, for forgetting. We don't want to look at, you know, hard, small, T-truths like impermanence. And so much of the practice for me now

is just like remembering to wake up. Yeah. I completely agree with. I have the exact same, exactly the same idea that often I have thought that the key to Buddhist practice is remembering, just remembering, just remembering. Yeah. So it helped in some way, but it wasn't, I would imagine, it didn't solve all your problems. No, no, and it took me a long time to understand the Buddhism wasn't going to solve all of my problems ever. That was some fantasy I had, some wishful feeling, ideal I had. Problems are going to keep coming. Circumstances were going to keep

arising. You went on to do a thing to make a move that's had quite a legacy, which is you started Tricycle Magazine, when and why? I started Tricycle in 1991. The years before that, from around the mid-80s, to around for several years, there was a series of scandals in the Buddhist community, not like what's going on right now, but there were individual scandals in all the different communities in Zan and Tibetan Buddhism and Vipassana communities. And at that time there were several of us that were working on community newspapers, Shrumpur-Bitches paper, it was then called the Vajra-Dat-To-Sun,

Winnbell and San Francisco, Ten Directions and Los Angeles. These were all community newspapers. And there was a group of us who would write for those papers, but of course we were not allowed to talk about these scandals. And all these guys that were being under the gun, were all friends of each other, and nobody could write about anybody else's teacher, and it was a very censored situation. Meanwhile, we were told we talked about. We were all talking about these various situations

in these different communities. And so the need for some kind of independent magazine became somewhat pressing. We had been talking about it, but it was sort of like, wouldn't it be fun? Wouldn't it be fun to have a non-sectarian Buddhist magazine? And suddenly it became not fun. It became like, we really need this.

And the mainstream press started to pick up on some of these stories. And so the mainstream press could cover it, but we couldn't cover it. And we wanted to put it into a larger and sympathetic context. Yeah, things happen. And they're not great.

And we wanted to own it and make it part of our own lives and our own community. And so, at that time, there was no other Buddhist. In fact, I don't think historically, there had ever been an independent Buddhist magazine. They were all coming out of communities, or they were supported by various sects, or lineages, and so forth.

So this was a very radical departure from anything that had happened previously and it really freed us up. We could do anything. And we had people working from all different traditions and it was one of the things that happened during that period of these different problems in the communities. It was acted like a great leveler. Because prior to that, all these communities had a kind of sense of being better than, you know,

Zen was always, you know, the most anti-comatic, the most mysterious, and the coolest. And Tibetan Buddhism was, you know, and they took it as a literal that they were the supreme teachings. And the Viposanic community has always thought, you know, they were the closest to the bones of the Buddha, so they were the supreme teachings. And the Viposanic community is always thought, they were the closest to the bones of the Buddha, so they were the real Buddhists.

And there's all this kind of sense of one-up manship between the different communities. And these scandals was a great leveler. Like all of a sudden, we kind of accepted that we didn't know what the heck was going on. We didn't know how to bring these teachings into the West. We didn't know what it meant to have a teacher and that we were all in the same boat.

And that allowed us to create a common language and a common ethos for one magazine. What did you think? Where were the scandals you referring to sex scandals? Uh, sexual scandals. Well there was a scandal with, um, at the Zen Center of San Francisco. That was a sex scandal. There was a scandal with my own teacher, my Zlumi Roshi, that was sex and alcohol. There was a scandal with a Vipassana teacher that was sex.

And in Trimper and Vichase community, there was a scandal with his Vajra region who had been diagnosed with AIDS and had been having unprotected sex. How do you compute these purportedly great masters training their minds for greater self-awareness and compassion, doing things that are less than wholesome. I can't. It doesn't compute. I don't know how to answer that question.

I just don't. I think one of, I'm still working on it. I'm thinking about it a lot these days because we have a whole new set of scandals as you know. What are you referencing when you talk about this scandals today today? Yeah, we've had three major problems with intermittent communities recently The Sakhya and the Shambhala community former guest on this podcast who is

Trunk the aforementioned Trunk Bo Rinpoche's who was controversial in and of himself Trunkpa, the aforementioned Trunkpa Rinpoche's, who was controversial in and of himself, dragging himself to death, had relationships with his students and spouses of students, and so there's that. And then his son, who was actually, you know, he sat in the chair, sitting right now, and presented as quite straight-laced, kind of maybe I thought a bit of a reaction to his dad, and then it came out that there were allegations that he had done You know there was some untoward behavior with women I don't know if there's drinking involved. I didn't look at it closely

I The rumor is that there is I that's I only know it from some quite a bit of remove. I'm not a member of that community Then there's a sogul Rinpoche that was mostly sex, a barriana teacher, and then Lamanorla in Upstate New York. That was also sex. So, you know, right now there's a kind of another, but I don't think it's gotten, it hasn's gotten easier for me to explain it, except that I do feel that we have made adjustments, at least I have, and I think many people, and what our ideas of enlightenment are, we used to see it as something static, something like a, like some kind of a alchemical transformation in the mind or the brain or some part of, some part of your being that therefore could not be moved,

became immutable. And even though the teachings themselves keep reminding us that everything is changeable, everything is transitory, everything is in transition. We continue to have this idea that enlightenment was some kind of a rock. That I think we can put aside. How it manifests and what it means that can we hold these two things together? Is it legitimate to hold them together? I don't know. I really don't know. So maybe they have enlightenment experiences, but that doesn't preclude them from doing something. Well, we know that enlightenment experiences are not enlightenment. And I think that's one thing we can, many of us can agree on at this point, that glimpses of emptiness, glimpses of enlightenment, experiences of non-duality of no self, that is not an enlightened mind.

There's a kind of a steadiness that has to be acquired. And I think at the end of the day, very few people get there, or at least among people that we know or have known or know of. Maybe a few, but not so many. Yeah, it's 80. I continue to find it mystifying. I've had folks, we've had podcasts guests who've really looked at this and if I don't know if I can remember it accurately, but I think one of the explanations I've heard is that look delusion runs deep. Desire runs deep. These patterns run very, very deep. And so you can be, you can have done a lot of work and really change the structures of your brain and your mind. And in the right conditions, you may act in ways that are harmful.

That explanation seems, I mean, if not fully satisfying in the neighborhood. Well, it gets complicated because, of course, a lot of what looks like unenlightened behavior to one person will then look like enlightened behavior to somebody else. So if you keep the focus on behavior, then you run into a lot of issues around conventional judgments and assessments, and that gets complicated also. So it doesn't help. So, a tricycle started in in 1991 and the mission was to look. No, the mission was so simple in those days. Now it seems so complicated.

I say, what does the magazine do today? But in those days, it was to disseminate Dharma. And it still is. It's the same mission, even though it has many different platforms right now. Because James Sheehan, whose running tricyicle, has developed big digital platform and learning platform and movie festivals, all kinds of things at TriSicle. The mission is the same, but of course,

the whole landscape has gotten a lot more complicated. So you are, you are writer by training, and is that what? No, my background was an anthropology. Okay. But I had some editing experience before, and I wrote a book about Zan before I started Tricycle. What was that book? Zan in America. It's a profile of teachers of American teachers. So a lot of it that had to do. It wasn't dissimilar to things that I did with the magazine, but it had to do with a with a cultural meeting point between

with the magazine, but it had to do with a cultural meeting point between Japanese-trained American teachers and Western-Col-American, specifically American culture. Let's talk about your new book. Good. We got to hear of Minusure Rampichets version, but you actually, and we talked about this a little bit before we started rolling here, we're able to kind of draw out of him probably more than he told us. So, and it's possible, by the way, that many people listening to this, haven't yet heard the Minusure interview. So let's just start from the beginning. How did you get hooked up with him to write this book. Okay. I started studying with him in around 2005 and then a couple of years later he asked me to work on a chap book for his own students. A book?

A kind of a chap book, a kind of study book on the foundational practices of Tibetan Buddhism. And that turned into a 350 page book on the foundational practices of Tibetan Buddhism that was published by Shambhala. So that was the first book we did. What was that called? Turning confusion into clarity. And then he, well, when that book actually came out, he was on retreat. And he came out of retreat. He announced in 2010 that he'd be going on a three-year retreat or a long retreat. And he'd say, how long?

That wasn't so surprising because in his comma, cocky tradition, that's quite common. You go for long retreats, three years, three months, three days is a kind of classic number, but basically that's just a stand-in for long-thillow retreat. And he began making extensive preparations to be away for a long time, making curriculums for the little monks, for the big monks, tapes for the western students. There was one thing about this retreat that we didn't know about, which is where was he going to do this retreat. And there were a lot of rumors about what monastery he might go into, where he'd go into one of his own monasteries, his teacher's monastery, what kind of hermitage might he go to.

And then one night in June 11th, 2011, he disappears from his own monastery. He sneaks out of his own monastery in Borgaya. And he leaves behind a note saying that he's always wanted to do this. He's going to live on the streets, and in the forest, and sleep in caves, and live like a sadhu, like a Hindu wandering mendicant, and beg for his food. And this was completely shocking. And part of it is that he was 35, 36 years old at the time, but he was a hot house, Darmer Prince. He wasn't like a street kid.

He is not that he grew up with any kind of middle class the comforts in terms of materialism. But he was very well taken care of. He was a Tuku, a reincarnated Lama. He was the youngest son of an esteemed meditation master, Tuku Organ. He was the abbot of three monasteries. He was a major lineage holder. He had been very well protected.

And he had never been outside by himself. He had never ordered a cup of tea by himself. He had never ordered a cup of tea for himself. He had never carried money. He had never bought a train ticket. So the idea that he had just walked out of his own monastery was just astonishing. And when he came out of retreat four and a half years later, as it turned out, he then talked about this near death experience that he had had, which was very transformative and was meant a lot to him, and he wanted to share that experience with other people.

So I went, I went to visit him in Nepal shortly after he came out of his retreat. He asked me if I would help him with a new book on the Bardo's, on the, like I said, I have to explain that. So Bardo's referred to a set of teachings in Tibetan Buddhism about death and dying, basically, that's what it means. When we use the word kind of colloquially, it kind of means in between, in between, in between one stage of life and another stage of life. And as in the... Because, of course, in the because of course in the Tibetan

tradition and as in many Buddhist traditions, there's more life after life. So this so this is a kind of stages of one's physical life. You're born and you enter the the bardo you're in the bardo of this life and you have an irreversible illness and you enter the barto of dying and then the longest barto that according to the text that you're in is the barto in between this form of this life and taking a new form. So it can be used as in between in that way. So I said, well, it's, you know, sure.

I love to do this. So I went back to Nepal a couple of months later. But I didn't know where to start. You know, we were to start working on a book on Bardo. So I started asking him more about the beginning of his retreat. And I have to say that the beginning of the retreat and his whole reason for leaving was a much bigger hook for me than anything that came after us.

Does he thought it was going to be about the near death experience? Well, it is about them. The whole second part of the book is about the near death experience, but a lot of people almost die. What this book offers is an extraordinarily articulate, precise understanding of what's happening because he had been trained to know this. He had been trained in Bardo. He knew what was happening to him as the dissolution of his body is taking place. If you read other near-death experiences, there is an experiential parallel to what

he describes, but without any of the articulation of what is happening in the body. So that's what makes this near-death experience quite remarkable in the near-death experience literature. Because his mind, he's not only trained in the Bardo's, which, by the way, for those of us who are secular folks, I don't know what to think of that, but he's definitely got a sharp focused mind and can see more as what happens to the mind in the body as it's coming close to death than your average untrained mind does, who then comes back and reports to us stuff about a white light. Well, there is, there is in Tibetan studies, there is a particular emphasis put on the dying process because the separation

of the mind and the body, which is what the descriptions of the, in the near death experience literature refer to, there is what Tibetans would call this separation, I don't know what other people call it, they just talk about floating above their bodies, but it's the same experience. But the Tibetans have known about this as have many traditions. And there's a great deal of emphasis put on that experience, which will happen to everyone. It's part of the dying experience. None, all of us will go through that. But only those who can recognize what's happening can benefit from it.

So Rinpoche is very clear about wanting to know what is happening, and he knows what that possibility is about. But as I said earlier, a lot of people almost die. Nobody we know walks out of their middle class comfort zone and decides to live on the street. That we don't know about. Even though it's very much part of his tradition, especially in the early founders of his tradition, people like Tilopa, Naropa, Milarepa, these are all the early heroes of the Kagu tradition that he grew up knowing about. They did this. They were they were they were wild street yogis or not street but but living a very unconventional lives but very few of the more recent masters do this. Rippetay had one teacher, Nertel Kenbimpichet, who spent

some time on the street but unlike Mindrenurimichet, he had grown up in tremendous poverty. And if he had to go hungry for a couple of days on the street, that was not his first experience of hunger. For Minjurimichet, it would have been. So, what about the story, aside from the broad strokes of it, what caught your imagination? How did it go for him? Well, this is what happened when he first leaves. It doesn't go so well. He ends up, his first plan is to get a tag.

He takes some money from the monastery with him because people leave offerings of money every day in his room when they come to visit him. And so he had been cyphering off a little bit before his attendant came to take it. So he had a little bit of cash with him. It comes to a week calculated about $150 American dollars. And so he had bought him, so figured out how to buy himself a train ticket from the Gaya station, which is about eight miles from his monastery. So his first plan was to get to that station, take the midnight train to Varanasi.

And he had no plan from there, which is another, for me, that's amazing, one would set off and have no plan last past the first night. But he gets on onto this station platform. He had always been there with attendance. So he would sit in the nice air conditioned room. And as attendant, we'd go by the tickets and figure out how to get the porter

and carry the luggage and get him into the AC, car, and so forth. And he has to sort of figure out. And he doesn't even know how to read the currency, the denomination on the notes. What? He doesn't handle money. All right, I guess that's right.

So he's been a monk since he was a little boy. Since he was a little boy. So he's standing there and he's figuring all this stuff out. You know what, you know, what cue to get on for the train to Varanasi and buying the cheapest ticket, which meant that he's got to get a squished into this car with gazillion other people. And it's not comfortable for him at all. It doesn't freak out like many of us might have.

And just to say, I think this is a really bad idea. I'm going to take a taxi back to the monastery. I sneak back in right now. He doesn't do that, but he's not comfortable on this platform station waiting for the train. And he's trying to deal with that and to figure out what's going on here and talk himself down.

That this is impermanent, this will change. I have to let this go, this agitation will go. If I let it pass, it will go. And then he gets on to the train and he spends a fairly miserable night on and off. I mean, there are times when he reveals to us what his practice is, how he's trying to practice, but he's also disgusted by the smell of the overflowing toilets. And he's, babies are crying and people are falling over him because after a few, first

he doesn't have a seat. And then after a few stops, he gets his seat on the floor. And so people are tripping over him. Well, he's a tuckel. He's never sat on the floor. He's never allowed to sit on the floor. Tuckels do not sit on the floor, it was never allowed to sit on the floor, tukus do not sit on the floor. So all of this is completely new, there's just a completely radical upside down moment that happens so fast.

And the biggest change that he talks about in the book is being alone, not having an attendant, not having any protection whatsoever. So I think that in love with the world is really very radical in terms of exposing, that's the title of it. It's very radical in terms of exposing a mind that's stressed out of an enlightened teacher who then is trying to work with it. And the enlightenment comes in

in how he tries to work with it, how he's working with it. And he talks about losing his awareness for moments at a time, but not too long. So it's a combination of constantly relying and being tremendously confident of the awareness that he knows he has. He's very, he has a lot of confidence in his practice and in the teachings. But his awareness gets broken a couple of times and he has some really difficult moments. But what, can you talk about what the most difficult moments were? I think the first difficult moment would have been on the platform in the Gaya station.

He had only been out of his monastery for less than an hour at that point, but I think the crowds were difficult for him getting pushed around, was difficult. And I think being on the train, there was one description of a very loud noise that kind of agitates him a lot. And again, he walks you through what's happening in a way that's very, very unusual and it's kind of amazing, where he is very articulate about being frightened. He imagines that he wakes up to this noise, this huge noise. And before he even knows what the noise is, you know, he's in the middle of a terrorist attack or something horrible that is happening. And he can hear his mind, he can hear what his mind is doing to him faster than he can hear the sound of the train. It turns out it's the sound of the train, the train whistle. But he walks you through all of that in a way that really illuminates how the mind works

and then how he's working with his mind and how, even though it's not the perfected enshrined enlightenment that we might think of, it's very much a mind that is extremely advanced and knows what it's doing in a way that's incredibly inspiring and encouraging for the rest of us. So it sounds like he equated himself well and that he put himself in a test, a real test for his practice. Extraordinary test, extraordinary. Yeah, he had some ref moments and he, as you put it, acquitted himself well, that's a, yeah, I would say that's kind of an understatement.

I mean, most of us would have been under the covers. We're back home work. Yeah. And he kept going and he kept telling himself that, you know, everything will change, everything will be okay. Change, that's very much a part of the theme of the book because it goes change in permanence, transience, and finally death and dying. It becomes a meditation on all aspects of change, and physical body, mental body, and so

forth. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown all are, we will be your resident not so expert experts.

Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to,

I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. What did you learn and what we, as readers by extension, learn about how to work with your own mind in working with Minjaro Rinpoche to tell the story? One of the things he does in this book, and it's not unique to him, But he describes the Bardo's not as a linear process that takes place in this lifetime and then dying and then your next life. He describes the Bardo's as states of mind that we go through continuously. So all day long we're dying, we're changing, we're being reborn all day. And I think there's something about how he talks about it.

Again, it's not radical, it's not brand new for a Tibetan teacher to talk this way. It's a little different than some of the more conventional versions. But this sense of continuity of being born and dying and being born and becoming and becoming and becoming. He has a way of talking about it that you can bring into your daily life continuously. So you constantly, you know, I got on a subway to come here.

What was the beginning of my journey? Was it when I got on the train, when I left my house, when I went down the steps, when I bought my ticket, when I got off, what was the beginning? What was the ending? To take the most daily life situations and to ask, where does it start? Where does it end? To kind of slowly absorb it as continuity, change in continuity, transformation. And I think Rupert Chase's point in this book is how much this can reduce our fear of what we call dying. So that dying doesn't remain

this monolithic thing that happens at the end of our lives, that we can work with it continuously. Right now, in our, in every aspect of our daily lives, he talks about breathing in and breathing out as beginning and ending and being born and dying. Every, every, every breath is a death, every breath is a rebirth. So you can do it, you can keep working with it continuously, and I found that to be very powerful. I'm not sure. I'm, I'm, I'm still struggling a little bit to understand that. So every breath is of being born and dying because it begins and ends and ends and everything's beginning and ending and becoming and changing. And we tend to I think part of part of what he talks about in the book is that we we often feel that we're stuck in our lives. I mean, this is, you know, he's seen thousands of students, and this is a constant theme is that they somehow feel discontent, but they don't know quite

what to do with it, and they don't quite know how to handle it, and they have a sense of this is who I am. And it's not really, there's nothing in their actual lives that is chaining them to one perspective of themselves, or one view of themselves, or one activity of themselves, that they have a fixed idea of who they are. And that fixity is what keeps them going and what we call some sorrow, keeps them going in circles. And so the working with the sense of continuity and change in all situations is something that really allows the fixed mind to loosen up a little bit,

loosen it up so that you're not starting here and ending there as we do all day long. Of course, some of this is just simply pragmatic. You know, if I say I'm gonna meet you at four o'clock, you, I'm going to look at why I should meet you at four o'clock. But a lot of it has to do with the way we fix ourselves and hold ourselves in very constricted, in very limited ways. And so having a sense of continuity and change in every part of our lives, whether it's in how we breathe or breathing or going anywhere, can be extremely inspiring to what the possibilities are.

Did you talk about, you know, when the rubber hits the road, how would we practice this in our daily lives? What's the practice? Is it just noticing all the time how things change? I think, what are the things that Mindre Rinepicce is I think quite good at both in this book and in general in his teachings is bringing the practice down to some very pragmatic daily life situations so that something like change and impermanence is not held out in some iconic form. Like, let's say, I'm going to go on vacation and that's going to be a change. Or I'm going to graduate from this program and that will be a change. We have all these new jobs. We have all these very big markers. Somebody in our life dies. These huge markers. And instead to take these markers

and bring them down into the nitty gritty of our lives. I'll give you a silly example, one of the first times I ever kind of realized this for myself. I was in the middle of working on the book and I read a novel. It was a novel that I liked a lot. And like a lot of the times when I read novels, I didn't want it to end. I just spent a week with this character and this character became my best friend and I had returned to this character and the novel ended and I wanted to hold on to this character. And very often I go back and I start reading the book again from the beginning, at least for a while. Maybe the first

couple of chapters before I'm ready to say goodbye. And I had never before thought about it as a kind of a grieving. I never used that word. I had never applied that word to that process. And it suddenly occurred to me that this is a kind of a grieving, it's a kind of letting go, it's a kind of allowing myself to be open to the next experience, the next book, the next character, whatever it was. And so it was a shift in perspective.

I had never seen it. It was the same feeling. The feeling didn't change. How I thought about it changed. And so to add that to a sense of letting go, of moving on, of after letting, you know, the letting go of one breath allows for a new breath. It allows for a new possibility allows for a new experience. It allows for greater curiosity, greater acceptance of what's in front of you. So you're not taking that fixed mind and working your normal

or your habitual program. Do you think that actually working with these practices has made you more comfortable with the idea of death for yourself? You know, I'm very aware of the fact that if I was given a life threatening diagnosis tomorrow, I would not know how I would respond. I cannot tell you that I would respond with greater or lesser equanimity than I might have two years ago. I really don't know. But what I do know is that I don't think so much about how will I die physically. I'm much more interested in this process of continuous dying, grieving, reborn, letting go.

It's much more interesting to me. And will it help me at some point? I don't know. I hope so, but I don't know. In terms of dying before you die, there appear, and you just correct me if I'm wrong on this, I hope, there appear to be a couple ways to look at this. There's this moment-by-moment thing where you can watch the beginnings and endings of everything. And then there's also, you know, Minja Ribbache had to die, had to let go of his status in the world and let go of many other things in order to go out and do this, this, this retreat. You talk a little bit about that? in order to go out and do this retreat. You talk a little bit about that? Let's try to understand your question.

Before we started rolling, you were talking about dying before you die. That part of it is to let go of our status in the world. Let go of our middle class life. Let go of our whatever titles we may have accrued. It's let go of our attachments. Whatever your attachment is. If your attachment is to being poor, you've got to let go of that.

So it's not just middle class versus some other class. It's whatever you're attached to. The attachment is, the attachment expresses the ego. That's where the ego gets caught. And that's the small self, the self that's identifying with these outside tiles, outside descriptions, outside associations. That's what has to let go in order for another kind of birth to take place. We see this in all kinds of cultures. We see this in tribal cultures where young men, not women for the most part, but young men go through a kind of transformation

from a secular to a spiritual maturity. You see this worldwide, this sense of letting go of the small, and in the terms that we use, it would be ego-driven, a small self, in order to reveal and allow to flourish a different level of being. And that's just, that theme is very strong at Christianity as well as Buddhism, but it maybe not as articulated these days as it once was.

With this kind of letting go make us less effective in the professional sphere, if I'm just constantly letting go of my title as anchor man of this and that, you know, am I gonna, you know, give... I remember I was talking to our mutual friend Dr. Mark Epstein who's been on the show a bunch of times and I was talking about maybe letting go of something in my professional sphere and he said and not in the majority that he was concerned that I was, quote unquote, giving away my power. Not meaning like, not meaning it in the sense of, I'm power hungry

and I should actually look at a healthy way of getting, of letting go of that. He meant more like, you know, you have this influence in the world, do you want to just let that go in a way that might be unwise? And actually that very concern he had is, I guess, what I'm trying to voice here. Could we let go in a way that may be irresponsible? In the second part of Mindrewerp Chase's book, in love with the world, he has an encounter. He's sitting, by this time he's in Krishnagar. He's sitting in a park. He's still transitioning from his, he's still wearing his

robes. He still has enough money to stay in a guest house, but he's more and more spending more time outside and sitting in a, in a park area. And he has an encounter with an Asian man. And the man notices that he's meditating and he comes and he asks for his advice. I see that you're meditating. Can I ask for your advice? I'm visiting. I came here to look for a piece of mind and learn how to meditate and I'm having a terrible time.

I don't know what to do. And they begin to have this conversation and they talk several times. And one of his concerns is that he is a businessman. And he's been learning Buddhist practice, but he admits that at some point of his concerns is that he is a businessman. And he's been learning Buddhist practice, but he admits that at some point of his Buddhist practice has been used, he hopes that it will make him an even better businessman. And he does not want to, he fears letting go

will be bad for his business. He's never known a life without ambition, without goals. And Rinpoche says to him, letting go will be bad for his business. He's never known a life without ambition, without goals. And Rinpoche says to him, letting go does not mean giving up. So I think in that there's something about what you're asking, that letting go has to do with letting go of the attachment and of the attachment, the seeing the attachment itself, as what causes the problems, not what your activity is. It's not like letting, you mean, you could let go of being whatever you were meant to really clear yourself.

You could let go of being, you know, Mr. 10% happier, and you could get very attached to being Mr. 2% happier, Mr. 100% happier, whatever it is. It's the attachment that creates fixity around who we think we are. It's the attachment that reduces and constricts and limits our capacity for exploring new possibilities. But I've always had trouble with this. I wouldn't know how to be effective in the world if I didn't have some level of attachment to it. So I gramped up this idea of 10% happier and then pursued it even though everybody told me

it was stupid and now people make fun of me for being Mr. 10% happier because it worked on some level. Right, so I do have some attachment to it and in that attachment I think helped me persevere in the face of headwinds, let's say. So how could I have done what I kind of stumbled into doing without having some level of attachment? Well, when you were stumbling into it, you weren't yet attached, right? The attachment somehow came later on.

You're stumbling in, that's not an attachment. That doesn't sound very attached. Generally, when we're stumbling, you know, we're making our way and we're being motivated by whatever it is, curiosity, maybe ambition, maybe possibility, maybe wanting new horizons and wanting new challenges. Stumbling doesn't sound like attachment. Attachment is that sticky stuff that gets in our way. It's not about the activity. It's not about what's at the other end of the attachment.

It's the attachment itself, it's the quality of reaching out and yearning and manipulating and trying to angle to meet your needs based on that fixed idea of what you think you want or are. It's where it gets restrictive and constrained. So your view is that this attachment is an overlay on top of motivations that actually are could lead you to be more effective, and if you can get rid of the attachment, actually you could do more good in the world or have more success. She's shrugging. I don't know. I mean, I think for a lot of us, we talk about attachment because we recognize it as

the entrapment. Now, if you don't recognize it that way, there's no problem. Yeah. No, I mean, I think this is one of these things that I've kind of puzzled over for a long time because I think the theme of one of the big themes of the first book I wrote was, how can you be ambitious not in the majority of, you know, how can you be a person who thinks big and tries to go for it without making yourself miserable. And so attachment seems to be a big part of

the how you make yourself miserable. But I've never quite sussed out how to turn down the volume on that attachment without... Well, the experience yourself has been very attached to your role or to your profile... At my worst. At your worst. Yes. And maybe that's not so bad. at my worst at your worst. Yes. Maybe that's not so bad at my worst. Yes.

And my best it's not on my mind. Right. And so there's probably the answer. Yes. And my best I'm just focused on what I'm doing and I'm not so wrapped up in how's this going to make me look as Mr. 10% happier or whatever. I'm just like talking to you or play with my kid or playing with ideas for how to create great content or mentoring my employees or whatever. So I'm not thinking about that. Okay, so you just answered my question. Took me a long time to get there.

Sorry, but you were very patient with me and I appreciate that. What is meant by the title in love with the world? Following Mindy Rupaache's near death experience, this is at the very end of in love with the world, the book. He recognizes there's something in that experience that happens in the near death experience, in which he experienced the entire world as love. And he's very articulate about it. And this is the complete absence of the ego self,

of the conceptual self. And he charts the dissolution of the elements, of the up until he can. And then at some point the conceptual mind dissolves. So he's giving us a play by play description up to a certain point. And then he, but he still has the capacity to have some memory of what happened. He spends about five, six hours in this very, very, very deep meditation state.

And even when he, I'm not going to tell you the very end of the book, because there's a very wonderful surprise engine. So I'm not going to tell you if the virus book, but he does experience the world as an enormously loving space, a space that he loves, the space that loves him, the space of total complete acceptance, and in a way that's very radical for him, that he had never known such a degree of comfort in the world, complete absence of self-consciousness embarrassment.

These are the things that be devil to him on the train station in Gaia at the beginning and the station in Verenasi. He was intensely embarrassed and self-conscious and that just disappears. He feels completely accepted by this loving, loving world. Have you ever had a glimpse of that for yourself? Glimps. Little glimpses. What do you think that is that when you strip away all of our attachments

and striving and yearning and fear and confusion that what remains is somehow love? I think in our own lives and in our own world that most of us inhabit, we give so much dominance to the thinking mind, the intellectual mind. And it often leaves us perhaps not as much in touch with our hearts as we could be, might be. And I think when a lot of that intellectual, conceptual mind drains out, we're left with something that we always have, but it's so covered and so obscured and so often remains so hidden. So when you say you ever had a glimpse of that, in some ways, you know, if you remember when those first moments when you fall in love, those moments,

you know, with just the whole world is wide open. Everything, everybody looks beautiful. Everybody looks wonderful. Everybody is so happy to see you. You're so happy to see everybody. But that's a very open heart. That heart didn't go anywhere. It doesn't leave us. It doesn't fly away.

It doesn't have its own little paradise that it goes home to. It's there all the time. But are you saying our fundamental nature is loving? Because you could also argue that our fundamental nature is pretty awful and violent if one takes a passing glance at human history, for example. I think I have a lot of faith in the Buddhist view of an essentially loving space, loving being.

Why am I saying that? We know through our own meditation practice that the intellectual mind that we are so used to and so dependent upon and so familiar with. We know how fragile that is. We know that that's not our true mind. And when I look at the world today, what I see more than anything else is not violence. I could look at it that way easily. But what I see is just tremendous ignorance. And I see an ignorance that is being perpetuated through

mental constructs, not the heart, through ideas, through very ignorant ideas. So I have a lot of faith in that possibility that we can learn to be allowed for a more loving consciousness. I mean, one could marshal evidence to support this thesis. For example, you have to train people very hard to become killers in the military. We used to drug them in or give them booze in order to do this. And now we have to kind of, you know, you really have to train people for quite a while in order to get them to do something which is essentially against our nature. It doesn't feel good to hurt other people. So that would be one data point. Another data point from my own experience, and I may have talked about this in previous podcasts so I apologize everybody for being repetitive but I remember the first time I had a real sort of a meditative

experience on a meditation retreat where the volume of my inner chatter went way down. I made a big deal out of it, probably like nothing, but I remember feeling extraordinarily happy, but not in an excited way, but happy in a sort of profound way, a well-being contentment. And I remember if I had to sum it up in words, which is a very difficult thing to do, that it was a feeling of, like, of everything's okay. Not everything's okay right now, but, like, everything's okay. Not everything's okay right now, but like everything's okay. Period. Full stop. And yeah, that's so, and every time I've gone back on meditation retreat and I,

you know, I'm back in that terrain for a fleeting second and then, then I get attached to it and ruin everything. It is the same sort of feeling that you all you're left with is a much warmer state of mind than I'm normally in when I'm, you know, trying to catch a cat. She's nodding and agreeing with me. I just before we close here, I just want to, we've talked a lot about his near death experience but we didn't actually fill in the details of what happened to him that he was having in near death experience. Oh, he went out to beg for food. By this time he's out of money and he's begging for food.

And he eats something that's very poisonous. And he begins vomiting, he has extreme diarrhea. He's getting very dehydrated, probably more so than he realizes. So he's continuing to drink water, but not enough. So after about, I think after the second night, he can no longer stand up to go back to the restaurant, even beg for food. So then he stops eating completely. And I think it's the dehydration, probably. Yeah, and I can't tell you the exact ending. I have to remain a mystery.

He obviously doesn't die. So that's not so mysterious. I don't have to go back and listen, but I think you might have given away the ending on the first piece. Yes, I think you might have. But I won't give it away here. Okay, good. Such a pleasure to sit and talk to you. Really appreciate that.

Yes, fun. So before we go, I always ask people to enter what we call the plug zone. Can you so can you just plug away plug the book? Love to. I'd love to. Tell us where we can find all of this, all of anything related to you. Well, tricycle, you can go online and you can buy a subscription to the print version or you can buy a digital version or you can find up for both and you get a lot of extra things. You get daily Dharma, wonderful reminders every morning about how to practice and how to work with your mind and encourage it inspiring daily reminders. And for the book it's in love with the world. My journey through the Bardo's of Living and Dying by Mindra Rinpoche and me. And it's coming out from Speagle and Gral on May 7th and you can pre-order

from Amazon or from Random House. And buy this book. Which one was your editor, Speagle or Grow? Speagle, Cindy Speagle. Okay, so Julie Grow, her partner, is my editor. What's your editor, right? Yeah, is still my editor. I've got two more books. I owe her.

Okay. Yeah. She's a wonderful person. So thank you. So are you. So thank you very much for coming and really appreciate that. Thank you. Thanks, Dan.

Thanks again to Helen Torkov. I should say that if you're interested in hearing more about me, your Rinpoche's story, he was actually on this podcast, episode 27. And this was actually, this was a while ago, because we're in episode 180, something now. So this was one, he was one of my first guest, three, almost three years ago, and he was fresh off of his wandering retreat at this point. So he talks about his experiences from his perspective. And unfortunately, it's only in the last 15 minutes of that podcast that we get to it, because I didn't know that much about what had happened at the time, so we talk about many, many fascinating things,

including the fact that he's suffered from panic attacks much of his life, and so what's that like? But in the last 15 minutes, he really talks about why he went off on this retreat, what it was like to have a near death experience. So go check that out. I think it'll be a great compliment to what you've just heard from Helen. Time for the voicemails. Here's number one.

Hey Dan, this is Eileen from Boone, North Carolina. Thank you for all you do. Your podcast is one of my absolute favorites. And I wanted to ask you about loving kindness meditation. So one of the forms that I practice, I know there are a few different things people say or think when they do it, the one that I do, sends wishes out for, may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you be happy, may you live

with ease. And my question for you is, some of the people that I choose to focus on in this meditation besides myself are people who are struggling with health and happiness. And so my mind starts to argue with me as I'm sending these wishes out, saying yeah, that's a nice idea, but that's not what their life is like. So what I have chosen to do is, when my mind starts to disagree with me,

I just note that and let it go, and return to the wishes that I am sending out to those people. But my question for you is, have you ever experienced this? And do you have any advice to do something different than what I'm already doing? So again, thank you very much. Have a great day. I have experience that.

My first response is what you're doing sounds pretty good to my semi-educated ears. The second thing I'd say is I don't know how much arguing is really needed if you just approach this from a purely logical perspective. For example, so I practice meta-METTA or loving-kindness meditation a lot and METTA or Loving Heinthus meditation a lot. And one of the people, one of my targets is my dad who has some health problems. And I picture him when I say when I'm sending the phrase of may, you'll be happy. I actually picture him playing with his grandson, my son, and recently, and he was really happy. So that's not that hard.

But when I send him wishes for his health, I just kind of picture him as he is now and hope that he can be as healthy as he possibly can be given the current circumstances. So he used to run marathons. I'm not imagining in my mind that he's that he be that healthy again, but I'm I'm hoping that he can be as healthy and happy and safe as is possible given his current circumstances. So I hope that makes sense. I don't think it's about having unrealistic fantasies. It's just hey, can you be fantastic fantasies, it's just, hey, can you be the best you can be right now given what's happening? So, that's my approach. I hope that helps.

Here's voice mail number two. Hey, Dan. Love the podcast. I have a question. So, there are several individuals who claim sort of enlightenment, namely Eckart Talley, Adishante, Gary Weber, and others who claim to not have thoughts. sort of their default mode network is like permanently offline. And I submitted this, the question to the Sam Harris AMA page to which he has not responded in his AMA podcasts. And I'm just curious as to whether this is something that is true,

or if there is some other more rational explanation, I can understand that they're not lost in thought, but to simply claim that you have no sort of thoughts concerning a year historical past or your future seems to me unlikely and would make life impossible for that person. So I don't know if that question made any sense or if I phrased it right, but that was the best I could do. Thank you, and keep up the great work. So I agreed to answer this question, not because I have the perfect answer, just because I think it's incredibly interesting. Before I say whatever I'm going to say, let me just for the uninitiated explain who some of those people are that you named. So you talked about Gary Weber, who I've never met,

but I've heard some podcasts with him is, if memory serves a former businessman who was practicing, doing contemplative practices for a long time and claims to have had a pretty significant enlightenment experience. Adyashanti, I don't know much about it all. I believe is a pretty prominent teacher. And Eckhart Toley, who I have met and have interviewed

and have written about extensively, is a huge, best-selling spiritual teacher and author who says he had a spiritual awakening after which he lived on park benches in a state of bliss in the city of London foron for two years and yeah. And you say you submitted this, your question about this to Sam Harris, to his AMA, ask me anything podcasts that he does. I know he's got one coming up, so maybe he'll take it during that.

Sam is also a long time meditator and has a podcast called Making Sense. He used to be called Waking Up, which was named after a great book he wrote called Waking Up, but now the podcast is called Making Sense. He also has a meditation app called Waking Up. And Sam is a friend of mine and has been a real sort of like mentor as I've gotten deeper into meditation. And in fact, he, knowing him, I met him about 10 years ago, maybe actually met him a little bit longer than, uh, longer than that. But anyway, meeting somebody as skeptical as him, he's one of the sort of first

authors to come out and write these forceful books about atheism. Meeting somebody as skeptical as him was a neuroscientist and an atheist and a philosopher and a writer, but also was deeply into meditation. That really helped me get interested in meditation in the first place. And I remember as I was writing 10% happier, at one point I called Sam Harris and asked him because Eckhart Tolly was in some ways the sine qua non of my whole quote unquote spiritual journey because I read Eckhart

told his book and he was the first person I ever heard, describe the fact that we all have a voice in our heads, the sort of inner narrator that is yammering away at us all the time and has us sort of casting into the future or ruminating about the past all the time and never quite where we are, never in the quote unquote, the present moment. And I remember asking Sam once about Eckhart's claim that he had this spiritual experience and that he was enlightened. And I think there's some quote I read from Eckhart Toli

that he said that if he ever met the Buddha and the Buddha told him he wasn't enlightened, he would think, oh wow, even the Buddha can be wrong. So I remember thinking, that's a pretty big claim to be making about yourself. And I asked Sam about it once and Sam's answer, if memory serves, was that, you know, maybe that's, it could be. Having enlightenment experiences of this level to Sam's mind, again, this is a guy who's who had spent years and years and years in India and other places on retreat and also has

a scientific background. To him, it seemed possible that you could have these profound levels of, you could reach one, could reach these profound levels of enlightenment. And look, there's actually some scientific evidence to back up that the people who've done decades and decades and decades of practice that their brains are different. You know, there's all this research spearheaded by Dr. Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, where you take these highly, these advanced, these sort of Olympic meditators and look at their brains, and their brains are really different.

And by the way, one of the people whose brains has been scanned is Mingur Rinpoche, and he's close with Richie Davidson. In fact, that's how I got to know Mingur Rinpoche. And so obviously there's a causation correlation question here about these folks with these really interesting brains. Like, maybe they're advanced meditators because their brains were like that, or maybe they their brains are like that because they did all that work on the cushion. So it's not dispositive, this evidence, but it's certainly compelling.

And it's been really interesting for me over time as somebody who thought the idea of enlightenment was ridiculous to meet all of these really smart Western secular science-based folks who talk about how, yeah, no, I think it's possible, they say, that you can affect profound changes on the level of the brain and the mind. So that life is very different. That you're not so afflicted by difficult emotions like greed and hatred and confusion. So does that mean you no longer think? Well, you know, I'm not sure that's my understanding of what Gary Weber and Eckhart Tolly are claiming that they don't have thoughts.

My understanding, and this is where I'm getting on thin ice, so I don't want to claim that I know too much, but my understanding about a Gary Weber, people like Gary Weber and Eckhart Tolly are claiming is that they do have thoughts, but they have no illusions about whether there is a thinker. In other words, they've seen through the illusion of the self. I have no illusions about whether there is a thinker. In other words, they've seen through the illusion of the self. That, of course, thoughts arise. Yes, I need to, I should eat right now. My belly is rumbling or I, it's time to brush my teeth.

Or you can think, I'm Gary Weber. I need to make a dentist appointment using that name, but you have no illusion that there is some core Gary in there or some core Eckhart in there who's thinking these thoughts that there is, they really in touch with the mystery of consciousness, that at some level, if you look in a sustained enough way at the mind, you will see that it is empty, that there is no, not empty in the conventional Western sense, but that is empty of self, that there's no one home, really. And that is the mystery.

So if there's no one home, how can we be having these thoughts? And this is one of the things that many of us in the meditation scene really wrestle with. I don't have firm answers about this. This is one of these questions that I think we should, in fact, I will now resolve to do. So I think this would be a great question for when we get teachers on the show to run some of questions from you all by them. In fact, we've recently taped an episode that we're going to post soon, where I had a very senior teacher on the show, and we let her listen to some of the voice melons, and she

takes a crack at some of the answers. So this would be a good one to reuse. So I hope I've shed a little bit of light from my un-in-lightened mind on this question, and I hope Sam weighs in too on his excellent podcast, which I am a regular, of which I am a regular listener. Thanks for that question. Thanks to, to everybody who works on this now Webby Award-winning podcast. It gives me so much pride to say that. Samuel Johns, Grace Livingston, Ryan Kessler, Susie Luz, working the boards today today as I record this intro on

the Saturday morning. Thank you also to all of the folks who agreed to give us feedback on a regular basis that's enormously helpful and thanks to everybody who just listened to the show really appreciated. I know I say this every week, every podcast host says this but there's a reason why we say it. If you have the time or energy to give us a review or rate us or talk about a social media that really helps with our rankings and helps more people find us and make sure that we can continue to do this work.

All right, I'll see you next Wednesday, thanks. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself

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