Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 217: The World's a Mess, But Don't Freak Out | Norman Fischer

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

Norman Fischer is a poet, writer, and Zen priest who has dedicated his life to studying, practicing and teaching Zen Buddhism. After graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he moved to San Francisco to learn how to practice meditation in the Soto Zen tradition. He spent decades studying the practice and serving the temple at the San Francisco Zen Center, where he went on to serve as the co-abbot from 1995-2000. After retiring as co-abbot, he founded the Everyday Zen Foundation where he continues to offer teachings and lead retreats. In this episode, Norman discusses with Dan the importance of expanding the way we think about ourselves and the world we live in because, he says, we are drowning in the limitations we've collectively set for ourselves and the ways we live in the world. The theme of the reflections in this episode come from Norman's new book titled "The World Could Be Otherwise." Plugzone: Website: https://www.normanfischer.org/ Everyday Zen Foundation: http://www.everydayzen.org/ The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path: https://www.amazon.com/World-Could-Otherwise-Imagination-Bodhisattva/dp/161180504X Other books mentioned in this conversation: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli: https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/073521610X Ten Percent Happier Podcast Insiders Feedback Group: https://10percenthappier.typeform.com/to/vHz4q4 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. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, before we dive in, I just want to talk about the 10% happier app for a second. A lot of people who listen to this podcast may not know that we also have an app where we have many of the world's greatest meditation teachers, many of whom have been on this show, teaching guided meditations and also appearing in lots of these incredible videos that we use to bring to life various aspects

of the practice. The app was named as one of the best of 2018 by Apple. So this is a project that takes up an enormous amount of my time and energy, and I'm super proud of it. And I want to point out that for the holidays, we're offering the gift of sanity. You can give the gift of sanity to people. If you want to give the app as a gift, a subscription to the app as a gift, you can do so at a 40% discount and you can find information and whatnot at 10%.com slash gift. That's T-E-N-P-E-R-C-E-N-T.com slash gift. Go check it out.

All right, our guest this week, I'm going to keep this introduction super short because I want you to just hear them. I know because I read, I see the download numbers every week, I'm going to keep this introduction super short because I want you to just hear him I know because I read I see the Download numbers every week and I read the comments from our podcast insider. I know You guys are reasonably well now and I know that one thing that does extremely well with you is these deep end of the pool Using wisdom from their pores Incredibly experienced meditation teachers and that's who's on tap this their pores, incredibly experienced meditation teachers, and that's who's on tap this week.

His name is Norman Fisher. He's been practicing in the Zen tradition for decades, upon decades he's extremely well respected in the meditation world. I'd heard about this guy four years, so it was a pleasure to finally meet him. He's also a poet and a father and a grandfather and has taught all over the place mostly on the West Coast and has written a new book called The World Could Be Otherwise. I

Could describe it to you, but it's gonna be better to hear about it from him. So as I said, I'm gonna keep this one short because I think you're gonna really like this guy. Here we go. Norman Fisher. Well, it's great to meet you. I've heard about you for a long time So, oh, please you're gonna really like this guy. Here we go, Norman Fisher. Well, it's great to meet you. I've heard about you for a long time. So I'm pleased to finally meet you. So let's just start where I always do, which is how did you get interested in meditation in the first place? Well, my interest was metaphysical and religious. And I got interested before anybody

was doing meditation in the West. So I, to make a long story short. Gating yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To make a long story short, I grew up with my grandparents, and my grandfather was ill. So I grew up in a household in which illness and death was pervasive.

Where was this? In Northeastern Pennsylvania. Near the Scranton and Wooksbury area, in that Wyoming valley, in a little town. And where were your parents? My parents lived there too. We lived with my parents and my grandparents. And so for some reason, as a young child, I was already obsessed with death and the idea of death. And as a kid, my idea was, this is so unfair when they told me that everybody dies. Even if you were really, really good,

you died anyway, I thought that was really unfair. And if that was God's plan, I disagreed. So I just had this in me, you know, this sort of weird, my parents were quite worried about me as a kid, you know, like, what's wrong with him that he has this dark idea? Anyway, eventually, you know, like, what's wrong with him that he has this dark idea? Anyway, eventually, when I went to, this was a town where there was no intellectual life,

my parents were not educated. So I couldn't wait to go to college and learn and explore these questions. And through those explorations, I've discovered the first books about Zen Buddhism published in the West by D.T. Suzuki, I remember specifically it was called Zen Buddhism, D.T. Suzuki essays. And then there was also Zen mind beginners mind? That came later. I discovered D.T. Suzuki in probably the early to mid-60s. I was in my beginner's mind was published in 1971 or so.

Okay, okay, yeah. So, I guess the beat poets were writing a little bit about. Yeah, yeah, the beat poets were writing about Zen, but what was not clear was that there was a Zen practice, that there was meditation. It sounded like I thought Zen was like an ideology and idea, like a philosophy that you believed in and you've tried to live it out. So I was totally, an ideology, an idea, like a philosophy that you believed in and you tried to live it out.

So I was totally, you know, one thing led to another in my reading and in my reflections, and then it led to Zen, and I thought this makes the most sense of anything. So I was living, and then I found out later I went to the University of Iowa writer's workshop where I met somebody who had been in San Francisco and said, oh yeah, there's actually a meditation practice where you can realize these things that are spoken about in the books. And there's a Japanese guy in San Francisco that has a meditation center. And so when I finished up at the University of Iowa, I moved to California to learn how to do Zen.

What in those initial books you were reading about Zen lit you on fire? What was so interesting? Well, here's the way I think of it, maybe I completely misperceived it, but the way that it struck me, I had been reading the existentialist philosophers, which were current in those days in the early middle 60s. And they were saying, the world is out of control. God is not making this a reasonable world.

Human beings die. And this is a terrible dark catastrophe. And I said, that's totally right. Completely right. How do we live in the middle of this situation? Then I read D.T. Suzuki, who seemed to be saying, all that is true. But why would that be a reason to be miserable?

Why don't you live that truth? Enjoy. And I thought, that's absolutely right. Just because this is the situation, why would you take that and then conclude that it's miserable? The only reason you would do that is if you expected it to be otherwise, you thought it was supposed to work out and it wasn't working out. And so you were miserable.

But what if this was the way it was always and the way it was supposed to be and you could take joy in it? Why not? That made sense to me. Embrace the catastrophe. Embrace the catastrophe and somehow in the embracing of it,

transformative so that you didn't have to mulear it and pretend that God was good and somehow rather all the bad things were explained somehow, you didn't have to do that. You could admit that life was as it was, and then you could take joy in it and find a way through taking joy in it and through seeing it as it truly was to make it otherwise in your own heart. So before you moved to San Francisco, was this all kind of philosophical and academic for

you? Exactly. It was all philosophical and academic. And I was also writing and reading and thinking. So that was my life. But then when I moved to San Francisco, I learned how to do Zazans and meditation. And in those days, I mean, now meditation, this podcast,

is evidence of the fact that meditation is completely mainstream. But in those days, only weird people, you know, marginal people like me would do meditation. Regular people wouldn't dream of the crazy wacky stuff, you know, the wisdom of the East and all that, who was interested in that. So we were, there were, but there were a lot of young people who were as marginal as I was at that time. And so we all shared this passion for meditation. And that's how does N Center get going? A lot, I think I'm guessing, because I don't really have the data, but I'm guessing that a lot of people who listen to this podcast do straight up mindfulness meditation or they

do a teravata-inflected secularized version of my toes meditation. What is Zazen, what are you doing in your mind with Zazen? Yeah, well, technically speaking, it's not that different. You're sitting, you're breathing, you're paying attention to the body, trying to bring the mind back to the body and the breathing,

allowing what arises to come and go without being hooked into it. So, it's two all-intensive purposes. It is the same meditation as of a posse or mindfulness meditation. But, you know, nowadays meditation is presented as if it were like a drug that you took. Like take this and call me in the morning. It has an impact on the body, and so it's just totally neutral. But of course, that's not really true.

It's not neutral. There's a whole culture around meditation. And if you do a Pasin of meditation, there's a Pasin of meditation culture. If you do mindfulness meditation for health, there's a mindfulness meditation culture, a whole worldview embedded in it that we don't think of as neutral

because that's our worldview as a society. So the thing that's different about Zazen, Zen meditation is the way it's understood and the context in which it's presented. So Zen meditation is really sort of classically anyway, and of course, a million people doing Zen, they do it, everybody does it their own way with their own understanding, but classically Zen is a religious practice. You're, you, it's understood that when you're sitting in meditation, it's not just me and my stuff sitting here. I'm sitting here out of faith that my human life is more than it seems to be. That a human being is more than a machine that you can put, measure the brainwaves.

We have brainwaves, and we are machines, but also we're more than that. We sit in Zazen, the idea is in Buddhism, in Zen Buddhism, we're sitting in the middle of Buddha's mind. We're actually sitting in the moment in which the Buddha was awakened. We are that moment of the Buddha's awakening when we're sitting in Zahzana. Even though half the time we're distracted and all that, we don't know it.

But that's the idea and the feeling of sitting in Zahzana. So there's a sense of devotion to it. There's a sense of commitment. There's a sense of the beauty and purpose of the practice and of being human. And all of that comes from, if you study Zen and you go to retreats and hear talks and if you have a teacher who presents that context, then same practice technically, but it takes on a different aura because of that context.

I guess just speaking personally, the hesitation I would have is that I have a trouble with faith, depending on how you define it. If you define faith as, if I was gonna use the term, I would use it in the sense of sort of trust or confidence that doing the practice can work, depending on how you define work. But having faith that my meditation is happening

in the same moment as the Buddha's awakening, I don't even know if the Buddha is a real person, I mean, we have some evidence, but it's not this positive. So that required, for me, from my mind, I would struggle with that. Yeah, it does require a kind of faith, but always in Buddhism, the faith, and I think confidence is a good word to use because faith has so many overtones in Western religious philosophy.

So the confidence that one's meditation is occurring in a bigger space. It comes over time in practicing. Just like now, I'm assuming that you meditate and you have a lot of confidence that it's a good thing to do because of your own experience in doing it. Similarly, if you meditate in his end context and you are listening to teachings and studying teachings and thinking about them as an intelligent person. There's also an emotional dimension to it. You're going to retreats and you're hearing these things, and you're taking them into your heart, and you're reflecting on them

with your whole body of mind and your feelings. Eventually, you come to have some confidence in it, just the same way that you would have confidence. I mean, in a certain way, you're in the same position. You're meditating. There's a context for your meditation. That context is a context that you understand and affirm, and so you have confidence in the practice

in the context in which you're doing it. Similarly, Zen context is different, but as you do the practice, you have confidence in the practice and in the context. But can you do the, so, for example, and I practice it personally in a teravata context, there are a lot of metaphysical claims that that get made by the teachers like enlightenment as a possibility for you. And you know, just some reincarnation

is a real thing. And even talk about the superpowers that, yeah, right. That people who, you know, that Olympic meditators can achieve, I just completely ignore that. Based on what I've heard, what the Buddha has purported to have said, which is don't take anything I say on face value. Right.

Practice and see what's true in your own experience. Would I be a failed Zen meditator if I did the practice technically, paid attention to my breath when I got distracted, started again, but did not come to any confidence ever that I'm meditating as you said before in the same moment as the Buddha's awakening? No, you wouldn't be a failed. Probably most Zen students, you know, hold that thought in a variety of ways or ignore it just the same way you might ignore something you hear in the Pasana, right? It's the same thing. There is no, you know, the way we at least,

who knows, I don't know, I've never been a Christian myself, but the way we could imagine anyway that if you go to a Christian evangelical church, you must believe, or at least pretend to believe, there'd be a pressure for that. I think, look, maybe it's not true, but I think that's true. There isn't that thing in any form of Buddhism that I'm aware of, including Zen. Whatever you've thought about it or whatever your attitude was, it would be fine. You just do the practice and follow the rules and that's all that matters. So what impact did moving this average disco and beginning meditation have on your life on your mind, on your level of well-being?

Well, it completely transformed it because I've spent my whole life doing Zen full time. So I never had a job, you know, I never did anything. All I ever did, I went, because I went to the Zen Center, I just never got out of it. It was the San Francisco Zen Center. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, more or less, I went there. I was a writer, a young writer, trying to be a poet. And so I was always writing, and still do. But I had no career aspirations or no skills or anything. So I went to this

Incenter, and my attitude was, I'm going to do this practice full-time, if I can, until I've satisfied that I don't need to do it anymore. You still do it, it's just that. That's right. It means I'm a total flop. Right, so I went in there and I just never came out. I mean, I spent my life there. You know, I was living at the Zen Center until I was elected Abbott of the Zen Center, a co-abit of the Zen

Center in 1995, and I served as co-abit from 1995 to 2000. So I lived there from the late 70s to 2000, and I was ordained as a Zen priest and a full-time Zen student, you know, working at the temple and maintaining the temple and so on. And then I retired as Abbot at 2000, and went forth into the world to try to figure out what to do next. And then people said, well, we'll help you. We'll start an unprofit and we'll help you. You can still teach then, and I think you can,

we'll support you. So that's when I've been doing it ever since. I started the Everyday Zen Foundation in 2000. And now I have various Zen groups and other projects here and there that I've started. And that's how I, that's my support. You have a Zen center of you. Well, it's, it's sort of, yeah, it's called Everyday Zen Foundation. But Everyday Zen Foundation is a website and an umbrella for a number of different Zen

groups that meet in the Bay Area, but also in other places in Canada, in Washington State, in Mexico. But I thought you had a physical center in Marin. No, no. I practiced in Marin in places that we rent. I. Because I had enough of raising funds for buying buildings in the Zen Center. So I didn't want to do that anymore. I wanted to write more. I wanted to study more and be more quiet.

So I didn't want any buildings. So we rent spaces. And that's really nice. We have a weekly seminar in the Bay Area, and a monthly all day sit in the Bay Area and an annual seven day silent retreat. And that's our Bay Area activities. And we rent spaces for all those things. On this show, we've talked a lot about

what the teravodin, what sort of old school Buddhist scheme of foreign lightenment. You know, you got these four paths, these four stages, you know, stream enter in the first one, then once returner, non-returner, then our contour, you're allegedly enlightened. Yeah. What's the zen version of that?

What does enlightenment look like in Zen Buddhism? Well, there's two classical approaches in Zen. One is sudden enlightenment. No stages, you just work really hard on your meditation and then poof, you pop open all of a sudden. Is that what's that called? Is that called? Usually that's kind of practice. Ken show, yeah, or satory. That kind of practice is usually associated with Rinsize End.

That's a different, that's not the school you practice. That's not the school I practice. Rinsize End is a school of Zen, but you practice in Soto Zen. Soto Zen, that's right. So in Soto Zen, the idea of enlightenment is what I was saying earlier. The idea of enlightenment is that enlightenment, it's a beautiful thought.

Enlightenment is the fundamental nature of time itself. So on every moment awakening occurs. So when you sit down in meditation, every moment of meditation is a moment of awakening. And every moment of your life is a moment of awakening. The only problem is you don't know that. You know, it's what you're sort of crashing around in the dark, trying to find yourself. You've been there all along. You've been there all along, but you can't find yourself. When you sit in meditation, you have a feeling of

being in the place where you should be. And you hope that as you continue your practice a little by little in your life, you realize that you're always there. So meditation is not something you need to do. You do it because it's a pleasure, you do it because you support others in doing it, you do it because it's your devotional practice. But awakening is really the shape of every moment. And it's really interesting because the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, that's the school that we follow, Actually had a very sophisticated and beautiful short essay about time

where he talks about the nature of time and about how, in effect he says that in the the Zen and Mahayat and Buddhism flips upside down the whole Buddhist teaching because it says that flips upside down the whole Buddhist teaching because it says that impermanence actually is eternity because Logically a moment arises and it passes away. That's what's we call impermanence How long does a moment last before it passes away like one second one 50th of a second one one hundredth of a second one one one millionth of a second, one 100th of a second, one 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2nd. Well, there's no end to that.

So a moment must arise and pass away at the same time. So things are not as they seem to be. I'm not, you lost me. Yeah, okay. I'm not the smartest person. So let's just go back. No, no, no, you are the smartest person. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,'s go back. No, no, no, you are the smartest person. Think about it. If a moment arises and passes away,

we certainly are clear that a moment arises and passes away. There's no question that impermanence is undeniable, right? Yes, we had a period when I walked in the studio, you were already here, we did our little greetings and got to know each other a little bit. That is now over. It's gone. Where is it?

We don't know where it is. Also, you were not the same person you were 35 years ago. Oh, man. No. I can't begin to tell you. Exactly. So, how did that happen? How did you get from that person to the place you are now, you were disappearing and appearing

over and over and over again. And when you think about that logically, how long does a moment last to carry you over to the next moment, there is no amount of time that a moment lasts, because however small an amount of time you can conceive of that a moment would last, there could be a smaller amount of time, right? So really and truly, it does mean that time is not what it appears to be.

Because it's really infinitely divisible, it is therefore infinite. Yes. And actually, what's really wonderful is that the insights of contemporary quantum physics show exactly that same thing. How so? Well, their analysis of time is pretty much the same as doggins in an analysis of time. They say that they're being the founder of the of the same. The founder of Soto Zen. Yeah, they say that we have all these conventional ideas of time, and they serve us.

We need them. We couldn't operate in a material world without them. So these are concepts that our minds create in order for us to function as human beings. But in physical reality, time is not what our concepts of time would lead us to believe. So even though we can't but live according to our concepts of time, we can't get through a day without saying, what time is it I've got to meet Dan at a certain time, I've got to be there.

But when we kind of realize that we're living on a set of conventional assumptions that may actually not be true, could we feel our lives on some larger scope beyond the conventional concepts of our lives, then we're in the territory of Soto Zen meditation, feeling our lives differently. And this is really partly what I'm saying in the book that your new book, which is called, the world could be otherwise. Yeah, what I'm partly what I'm saying in there is that

we have reified our conventional conceptions of the world and of who we are to the point where we are all convinced that this is it, period. But all religious teachings, as well as all imaginative realms, you know, the arts and all realms of imagination, conceive of the world differently, conceive of a world that is not the world we conventionally live in, and that my argument is that we need to actually expand our imaginations, and we need to have a different felt sense of what this world is and what it means to live in it, because we're drowning in this limitations right now of

our concepts of the world. Let me dive into that is rich and I wanna get into that, but let me just go on a stepwise progression here. In Doge and Thesis, if I've got it right, is time is infinite because every, you can divide it in... You can't get a hold of it. Yes, you can't get a hold of it. How does it just talking to me about your life, your mind?

How does that rather kind of, Ken sound, to me at least a somewhat abstruse, theoretical idea? What are the practical benefits for you in Norman's life? It's actually quite practical. And I know it's, when you talk about it, it's not worth talking about in some way because it always ends up abstruse. Although it can be an interesting abstruse idea.

But the way it relates to my life on an everyday basis is I know that as I'm going through the day, I'm living a bigger life than the one I am aware of. So it gives me a sense of perspective, I mean, literally. Right? I sit in the morning, I live by the ocean, I sit in the morning, I walk outside and I feel after sitting like I'm living in an endless space. And it's a feeling that I have outside and I feel after sitting like I'm living in endless space. And it's a feeling that I have, that I experience.

And then I'm upset, let's say. I'm upset something happens and it's got me going. I take a breath and I realize, like, what am I really upset about here? This setup that I've just created, where I've said, I think this is supposed to happen now, and I was thwarted in that happening. And now I'm upset about that. Like, why would I be buying into that point of view? Why didn't I just recognize that the world has just changed? It changed not according to what I wanted. And so now I'm upset because the world changed according to a way that I didn't want it to change.

But why would the world change according to what I want? Why wouldn't the world change according to the vast set of circumstances that make the world in every moment? And why don't I just release myself to that space? And then let go of my crazy stupid idea that things are supposed to go the way I thought they should go, especially when I'm so limited, that the way I think they should go probably is not as good as the way they actually go. But is that a larger life than you think you're living or a smaller life? In other words, I think of perspective as my screen say, the wallpaper on my computer now is a picture that I heard my meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein talk about.

The picture is called pale blue dot. Have you heard of this picture? No. Picture of earth from some saddle, from some rover we sent out into space. And it's just space that looks like a giant picture of space. And in the middle of the picture there's a pale blue dot. And that's us. And Carl Sagan has a beautiful paragraph about this. All of the world's wars and all of your personal dramas have all played out on this pale blue dot. And it's a pale blue tiny blue dot in this infinite soup of interstellar mystery. And so that makes me think, well, it's very, it feels good actually if you the awe that it provokes. And it makes me think, well, it feels good actually if you the awe that it provokes.

It makes me feel smaller than the largeness of my dramas that exactly. So I'm just caught up on the line you uttered a couple of paragraphs ago about how you're the Soto Zen feeling you get in your molecules is, my life is larger than the one I think it is, but I feel like the perspective sends the opposite message.

Well, right, smaller, larger. Doesn't make a difference. It's the same thing. That's a smaller and the larger question has to do with our conceptual way of looking at things. But to say something is infinitely large and infinitely small is to say that's the same thing. A little dampening.

Yeah. And again, I read a different, there's a great book, I think it's called The Order of Time. I was talking about the physics of time. Carlo Rovelli wrote this great book, The Order of Time, about Time, but there's another book I read about space and cosmology, and I long time ago, I can't remember the author, but he says in there, where did the big bang happen? You think about the big bang, like it must have happened someplace,

like somewhere in space. Right, right? Just in suburban Boston. Yeah, exactly. Where did it happen in suburban Boston or Antarctica or somewhere so far from the Earth? We can't even think about it. Where did it happen?

And so they worked this out. The mathematics of this were worked out. And the answer is that the point in space where the big bang happened is every point in space. That is the mathematics of that question. So isn't that wonderful? When you sit down in meditation, you are sitting in the exact center of the universe. And by the way, we are both sitting in the exact center of the universe right now as we're talking. So it's that kind of uncanny weird thinking that becomes the felt sense of what your life is. And it puts everything in a different context so that it's much harder to be petty. It's much more difficult to be unkind. I mean, how can you be self-defensive

in a case when you're living that life? How is it possible? And you get self-defensive, and you look at your self-defensiveness, and you say, come on, like, what's wrong with you? It's ridiculous. And yeah, it is, so that's why you look at the world, and you think, look what's going on here. People are doing like ridiculous things, ridiculous things with huge consequences because they're not seeing who they are and who the other people in the world are. It doesn't make any sense, like you said a moment ago in this little blue dot with just a few people on it, nine billion, but that's not very many in the cosmos, compared to the number of bacteria on the planet, nine million is billion is nothing.

So here's this little blue dot with a few people on it, who should be like whenever they see each other, falling into each other's arms, to relieve that there's another creature on the planet, like themselves. And what are they doing? They're killing each other, and they're so unwisely using

the resources of the planet that they're going to wreck the whole species and destroy many other species. It seems ridiculous when you feel your life in this other scope, whether you call it larger or smaller, it's immaterial. It's just different. So I think of... I keep putting this, putting off the thesis of your book for a second, because I So I think of, I keep putting this, putting off the thesis of your book for a second, because I kinda think of it as two levels, and maybe this doesn't put off the thesis of your book, but as like a micro level meaning

how it plays out in my own mind, and a macro level meaning how do I act it out in the world, by the way, they're inextricably, which are woven. Of course. But it just in my own life perspective, By the way, they're inextricably woven. But just in my own life perspective, I sometimes think of it as getting the cosmic joke. I get caught up in some drama. Somebody told me this morning that I'm working on a book. Somebody told me this morning that some famous author is actually going to write on the same topic. And I had a moment of just feeling awful.

And then I realized, okay, well, I'm on a pale blue dot here. I've got about 15 minutes left of my life. Is this the way I want to spend it? Exactly. That's just what I'm talking about. Exactly. So dogen would approve of what I just said. Yeah, dogen would be very pleased with you.

Stay tuned. More of our conversation is on the way after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long.

If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people

about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering app. Okay, so let's talk about the macro part of it, which is what you just said. The consequences

of us being stuck in our own selfish impulses or self-centered dramas or whatever for the rest of the 9 billion can be quite severe at hence the problems we're seeing on the world today, on the world stage today, including climate change, racism or bigotry in all of its forms, income inequality or I could go on. So from your perspective, what you've written this book at about the role of imagination in the face of all of this. What is the role of imagination?

How does imagination connect to everything we've been talking about up until now? And how can it change the way we are in the face of the problems that I've just enumerated? Is that even a fair question? Yeah, yeah. No, that's what the book is about. Although, I, so first I have to say, these words, all these words, I don't know what, imagination, spirituality, cosmos, truth, God, whatever words we use,

their meanings are very fluid. There isn't like a thing called the imagination, like there is a thing called this microphone that I'm talking into, we could take it apart and say what it is. So take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt. I'm using the idea of, I'm using the word imagination in some of the associations we have with that word to try to say something I'm trying to say. That's hard to say.

So, what I'm saying is that we all, whatever side of this question we're on, whatever side of a political question or an environmental question we're on, I think we're all sharing this very small scale and inaccurate point of view. We need to release ourselves from the smallness of our viewpoint. So we need to do a lot of objectives things in this world. We need to canvas for elections and elect the best candidates.

We need to do various kinds of things, many, many things in relation to climate change. So I'm not saying that things like that don't need to happen. But in order for those things to happen and to happen in the best way, we really need collectively to have a different way of thinking about who we are and what the world is. We really need, because we're really stuck all of us. You know, a lot of people have written about this politically, where both sides of a political issue end up activating each other and destroying any kind of sense of hopefulness, because we need a different way of looking at things, a really different way of understanding who we are and what the world

is and who the other person is. And so my concept here that I'm working with is that it's the imagination, the human imagination, that is the function in us, that gives us the sense of what we are in the world. And that the imagination is the province of all of our most profound thinking. It's the province of the arts. It's the province of philosophy, religion, and all of that space within us and those disciplines that we've always had as human beings, that create a bigger perspective for us and how we think about the world. And so I'm saying to people that in these hard times, no matter what our fate is, one

way or the other, no matter who we elect or what the environmental fixes or unfixes turn out to be, we really need to have a bigger sense of our purpose and our connection to each other on the planet Earth. Otherwise, we're really going to be in deep trouble. It's going to be very unpleasant, unless any one of us individually and all of us collectively learn how to reduce our sense of self-defense ofness and self-protectiveness and increase our sense of literal identity as being together identity rather than my separate identity. I'm going to just have a happier life and a more meaningful life. When I don't think of myself as this atomized guy over here in battle by the rest of the world who doesn't agree

with me and isn't on my side. If that's who I am, it's going to be a rough life. If I think of myself as being, you know, like it's literally the case, right? Literally the case, like right now, my life is you, right? Because what I'm saying, what I'm thinking is in relation to your talking to me and I'm looking at you, I'm not looking at myself. I'm crowding yourself. I'm crowding out your field of vision. No, I see. So I mean, and I'm happy about that,

because it's so, I mean, I've been me all the time. It's not that interesting. But if I can take you in, right, and identify, see that this is my life right now, and if I can embrace that, not as like, oh, I have to like be brilliant in front of you or I have to somehow convince you of something. No, I'm just going to take you in as myself. If we could see the world in that way, we would have a much better time with

it. And I think that in actual fact, the world is that way much more than it is, the small way that we think of it. And that's what I'm trying to talk about in the book, and I'm setting forth in the book just one of many possible spiritual programs, because this takes discipline. We can't just like, I want to think this way, and now we think this way. It takes just like, you know, from your own meditation practice, you don't do it for a weekend, and then it's done. It's something you continue with for a weekend and then it's done, it's something you continue with for a lifetime. So in the book I said for the spiritual program, which is a traditional Buddhist program that I expand for our time to say, this is a way of working on this larger vision for

who you are and what the world is. There are lots of other ways. I think every single religion, when you think about it, is a way of doing this, but religions have become little Balkanized states fighting with each other, and that's no good, but that's what they're supposed to be. I think ways of expanding the heart. So we need this. I mean, we really need spirituality now more than we ever have.

That's why I think it's great that meditation has become, has had a secular context placed upon it because it doesn't require people to believe in anything in order to do it. And that's great. We need spiritualities that do not require you to be a member of a clan or a group or a whole to a belief system. We need broad-based spiritualities that we can share and appreciate together to get through this. We really need it. Given the speed at which some of our problems seem to be moving, in particular, I'm thinking about climate change, and I'm not, and I don't have an encyclopedic understanding of all

the science, but what I read doesn't seem good. How optimistic are you that the kind of imagination of our imagination that you're proposing is actually going to happen quickly enough so that we can fend off some of the problems that seem to be coming down the pike? Well, you know, I don't think like that. In other words, I'm not thinking because you don't you don't care about time. Well, not thinking... Because you don't care about time. Well, it's not that I don't care about time. It's that I don't really believe in the small bore concepts of time. So, for instance, I'm not an erase against time here. I'm not an erase against time. In fact, I'm not living that much longer in this lifetime, so I don't know what happens

after that, and I won't know. But I do know that doing this work of expanding the heart is good now. It's a good thing to do now. I know it's right, and I know it's good, and I know that to work on this myself is a good thing for my life. And when I share it with other people who work on it for themselves, it's good for their life, too. I know, and I know it helps. So if it helps fast enough or, you know, if it helps thoroughly enough,

I don't really know. But I know it's good and I know it will help. So I think that, again, when you think about what life is, being alive is a great thing. It's fabulous. It doesn't last long. We don't really understand it. Like, where did it come from? How come human beings evolved on the planet Earth?

I mean, are we the only ones in the comments? Amazing. This reality being human. So where it's going and how it plays out is a question that I don't really know. But right now, it's obvious to me that not burning fossil fuels is a moral imperative. So I say that and I try to share that thought with as many people as I can. Whether human beings will stop burning fossil fuels in enough time to prevent the worst of these disasters, I have no idea.

I am pretty certain that bad things are going to happen in the future. What bad things I don't know and how often, how extensive I don't know, but we'll have to be ready for that. We'll have to be able to have a good spirit and take care of what needs to be taken care of. But life is so amazing that it strikes me that to be alive is to automatically have a sense of hopefulness. Because the thing about life when you're still alive is that there's always a future.

Even if the future is one year or a month, or even like five more minutes because I'm on my deathbed, this moment of time has embedded in it a future moment. Otherwise, I'm dead. At the moment, when my arising moment doesn't have a future moment embedded in it, then I've deceased. As long as I'm alive and there's a future, that future is unknown. I don't know what will happen.

Something bad could happen, something good could happen, something completely unexpected could happen. No computer model will ever 100% tell me what happens in this next moment of my life. Even if I'm going to die in the next moment, I don't know what the moment will bring and how I'll die. So what I'm saying is that if you really appreciate your life and you really understand your life, you know that being alive is an inherently hopeful thing. And that despair is a kind of cognitive error, actually. It's an emotional and cognitive error. One can be sympathetic to

it. People feel it. But in fact, if you were alive and you know you're alive, you're a hopeful person. Bad things will happen. But you can still be a hopeful person. Like, you know, did you ever think about this? I'm like 73. So like, how come I'm not like freaking out that I only have, people 73 years old, like they get up in the morning and they have breakfast and they do stuff? Like why isn't everybody like 73 and older?

Like totally freaked out that they're gonna die in a minute. Well, partly they forget about that. But partly, it's because life itself keeps them hopeful, even though they're in a desperate situation. Well, we're lacked that collectively. We're collectively like we're 73 years old collectively. We face, you know, tough things and probably one way or another are eventual demise. But why can't this be the happiest part of our lives like I'm pretty happy right now It could be the happiest part of my life even though I'm in this catastrophic situation So why don't we all collectively recognize that this is a beautiful time on earth

This is maybe the time when we realize how much we love each other Because we have these problems. Maybe that's great. For me as a parent of a four year old, almost five year old, the despair seems more readily accessible to me now than it did before having a kid. Because I sort of, okay, I can live through some bad stuff. But the thought of my son suffering. I know, isn't it awful?

Yeah, you have kids. I have kids and grandkids, right? And my grandkids, especially, they're little, and they're so sweet and pure and wonderful, and the thought of them suffering is really horrifying. So how do you avoid despair? Well, I don't know whether they'll suffer or not. I don't know. I have no idea what their lives will be like. I can't even imagine. I don't know what their lives will be like

when they're when they're adults. And anyway, when they're adults, they won't be those children. They'll be somebody else, right? So I think that those of us with children and grandchildren, we have a special obligation to raise those kids with maximum love, because they will have to have strong hearts, you know,, but I'll be going. Popping on. And they'll be in charge. So there better be people on earth who are maximally loving and unselfish so that they can appreciate the poignancy of what we're living through and they can do good things to benefit others. And perhaps their lives will be quite beautiful because of the challenges they will have. Also, yeah, it could be a horrifying world. I don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. So when I feel that kind of sadness, I don't feel despair. I wouldn't call it

that. I would call it sorrow, grief and sorrow for what they may perhaps live through. When I feel that I think it's good that I feel that because it means I really love my children and grandchildren. I really love them. That's why I feel that. And I think that, so let me be clear, I'm not saying that we should all be chipper every day and thrilled and happy to be alive and period because I think that it makes no sense in the world moment we're living in for us not also to have a lot of grief and sorrow. But grief and sorrow is not a bad thing. When somebody your love passes away, you want to feel grief and sorrow. And that sorrowful feeling is sort of like the flip side of your love. So it's not a bad thing.

When there are conditions for sorrow, a person ought to be sorrowful, ought to be sad. So yeah, there's a lot of reasons to be sad. And I'm sad at the possibility of what will happen when my grandchildren and my age. But I don't know what will happen. That's different than despair. That's different from despair. And just to make you say a little bit more about that, because before we started rolling, I said,

one way to phrase the thesis of the book is the world's amest, but don't freak out. Yeah, that's right. The spare, to me, how I understand the spare, I mean, the spare is a perfectly traditional and beautiful human feeling, so I'm not against the spare. I think the feel the spare from time to time is very important. It's part of being human, so I'm not against the spare. But habitual the spare, a constant perspective that is despairing, I think, is just a cognitive error, because you

think you know what will happen. I know what's going to happen, and it's terrible, and so I feel despair about that. Actually, you don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Yes, you could be fearful and sad for those you love, but to be in despair is to think you know what's going to happen. And it's also to misunderstand the fact that even though you are in a dark state, you are alive.

And as I said a minute ago, living is already a hopeful state if you understand what living is. So you're misunderstanding two things. You think you know what the future will bring, and you think you know who you are and what your life is, and you're wrong on both those counts. It's also a misappropriation of energy. Yeah. Because you could be spending that energy.

Yeah, absolutely. Toward solutions on any number of levels. Completely. On anything you could do, I mean, you could just be like cleaning up your house so you could be, you know, sending flowers to a friend who's ill, which you're not going to do if you're in despair. Jonathan friends and the brilliant writer had a piece, a brilliant piece in the New Yorker recently about, you know, sort of climate change is real, probably worse than the telling

us what should we do. And his answer was pretty small, but in a way that I thought he was like, you know, just get involved in your community and be useful. Yeah, because that's what we're going to need in a new world. Exactly. And I'm not saying anything quite any very much different from that. That's right. I completely, we know what's good to do. Do what's good and commit yourself to it. But it does require this tapping into this, to the imagination in which you are writing about in your book. I think of another phrase from another brilliant writer, David Foster Wallace.

And I think this will resonate with the way in which you're using the term imagination. He talked about how we have, we all live in these skull-sized kingdoms. Yes. And you're trying to get us to imagine our way toward an escape from the skull-sized kingdom. Yes, exactly. And I'm saying that living in that skull-sized kingdom is really really an error because we're not really, that's not really who we are. We've never been that.

So it's not a matter of escaping from ourselves, it's becoming ourselves who we really have always been. But I can imagine the becoming ourselves who we've always been could be a little bit confusing on some level for people who have been listening to this show because, wait a minute, haven't you Buddhist been telling me there's no self anyway? Yeah. Well, that is what no self means.

You know, in Mahayana Buddhism, as I said before, it turns Buddhism upside down. It says, what does no self mean actually? It means true self. What does impermanence mean actually? It means eternity. What does suffering mean actually? It means love. So the three marks that Buddhism initially talks about, Mahayana Buddhism claims, and I believe it as someone who is practiced and reflected on my own Buddhism for my whole life. It claims that the insights of my own Buddhism were embedded in the beginning in early Buddhism, but we're not stated directly. And then later, we're stated in my own Buddhism. There's actually a very funny and beautiful parable in the

Lotus Sutra where basically it's a parable about a caravan driver who is getting up a bunch of people to go on a journey. And he's telling him about this wonderful oasis that they're going to go to this fabulous city and all this great stuff that they're going to see. And they'll really love this destination. So they all go with him and they go there and they reach the place and they really enjoy it. And he says, we have to move on because this is not really the place we were going. But I had to tell you that this was the place, because I knew that if I told you the actual place we were going,

you never would have agreed to come on the journey. So, sorry, a little bit of friendly deception. So, that parable is used by the Mahayana practitioners to say, this is the early teachings. The Buddha didn't want to say that the goal here is universal love and compassion for saving all sentient beings because he thought you would never go for that. So he said, the goal is relief from your suffering and more happiness.

And that way, he got you to go. But now that you're here, let's go on. Let me just, let me focus on our closing moment here, let me just try to impact that just a little bit because you referenced the three marks. So just for the uninitiated and the Buddha was said to have talked about the three marks of existence, which are impermanence, suffering, and not self. Impermanence is obvious, nothing lasts. Suffering is often mistranslated to make it seem like life is non-stop, you know, crows picking out your innards, but it really just means that if you're clinging to things that will not last, you're gonna suffer. And not self means that if you look closely enough, all of the things you think are you are so impermanent that you really can't claim it. And that widens the aperture in such a way that you're not,

that gets you out of the skull-sized kingdom. I think I'm stating that reasonably close enough to correct. That's great. You should be a Buddhist teacher. Why are you wasting your time as a journalist? My next life. My next life. So, I say that as somebody who doesn't believe in reincarnation. But, and so you said that the Mahayana, which is the later school of Buddhism, came in and kind of tweaked that. So, impermanence actually became sort of infinity. I get that. As we discussed earlier, we've covered that.

Suffering became compassion. I get that because once you see other people suffering love, if you're handling the suffering in a healthy way, both for you and others, love is the inexorable result. Exactly. What I didn't understand, which is what I want to just close the loop on before we go, is how not self becomes true self. So can you just hold forth on that? Well, it's like I was saying a minute ago

when I was saying that in this moment, I am you in the sense that I'm seeing you, your words are in my mind, my relationship to you is really my whole life right now. That is, so myself, my true self, is not me as an atomized separate person over here, sort of fending myself off in relation to you, but it's me completely merging with all the circumstances of my life moment after moment after moment. So who I am, what I am

is changing as everything in me is changing in relation to everything that's around me. So literally I am everything other than myself in every given moment. Right. So it's all the same thing at all. That insight you just articulated so well is what you're trying to get people to provoke their imagination. Exactly. Exactly. I'm saying that the process by which we realize these things, not as just an idea, but as a felt sense in our daily living, is an imaginative process. It's something that gets us out of our small materialistic scientific viewpoint exclusively, that viewpoint that's so small and expands our hearts. It only took me 60 minutes to get it. It's not bad. That's excellent. It took me 60 minutes to get it. It's not bad. That's excellent.

Before we go, just can you remind us again of the name of the book, where can we find you on the internet and all that stuff? Just plug everything if you don't mind. Okay. The name of the book is the world could be otherwise. Imagination and the body soft of path. And it's published by Shambhala, that's a Buddhist publisher, but it's generally available in bookstores everywhere. You can look, you can find it anywhere. And my website is Everyday's in. www.EveryDaysIn.org. And that website has lots and lots of my Dharma talks that I've given in retreats. So they're all available for streaming No charge anybody can listen. They're they're not professional

Polish talks. They're literally talks that I gave in retreat situations to specific people But anybody who wants to can listen in and it also has my schedule on there of retreats and whatnot Plug on top of your plug. Jay Michelson, my colleague, oh, Jay Michelson has been on the show a couple of times. He's written a number of really great books about good books. Yeah. Jay sent me an email last night, specifically referencing your talks and how great they are. So in fact, I'm going to record with Jay tomorrow for the pot for the app. Oh, for the 10% happier.

I know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Recording tomorrow. He did a great job of exerting little scripts from my various essays and books. And I'm going to read them tomorrow for the podcast. Oh, nobody tells me. Nobody tells me anything.

This is awesome. I know I love it. Well, you're going to have fun with Jay because he's the best. Yeah. Thank you. Pleasure to meet you. Yes, a pleasure to meet you too. Thank you. Really fun to meet you. Yes.

Pleasure to meet you too. Thank you. Really fun. I love that conversation. Big thanks to Norman Fisher for coming on. By the way, Norman's got a talk that just went up in the 10% happier app. One of the sections we have, we've got all these sections. We've got a sleep section.

We've got courses, which are a combination of video and audio. And we also have a talks section these like bite-sized wisdom bombs that sort of like mini podcast five to ten minutes long and Norman has one up on generosity that just went up. Let's do some voice bells here's number one. Hey Dan this is Lisa from Oregon and I have a question related to your show on civility. Where does profanity fit in that? I struggle every day with it.

I did not grow up with it. I had just learned it through maturing and at age 65, I struggle with it constantly with potty mouth. And I'll pose to you too. This component to the question is it we're inundated with it so help me with how to give me my motivations and support to start minimizing that. It's to me it's rudeness it's not simple to drop F bomb so help please Dan love you

so I thank you bye bye. Okay so when I'm going gonna say is just my opinion, informed a little bit by Buddhism, but it's just my opinion. I love profanity. I can't do it on this show because we're owned by Disney and they don't like swear words that much. But, you know, if you've read any of the books I've written,

I use a lot of it. That said, I also agree with you that it can be rude and it's sometimes I will swear either in a conversation or when I'm giving a talk and it just doesn't feel right. And so how can these things both be true at the same time? In my view, they can be. Because there are if you buy into the Buddhist concept of right speech. What is right speech? If I can produce this accurately from memory, the Buddha said something about say that which is true

and which is useful and at the right time. So in a timely fashion. And sometimes you can say things that are true and useful at the right time, they have an F-bomb in them. And I love language. I love playing with language when I'm writing. And I think there are ways to creatively and colorfully add profanity into the things you're saying in a way that can make them,

they can make what you're saying really funny and relatable and signal to people that you're a, you know, for me, as somebody who's out there talking about meditation, the fact that I swear sometimes, I think, I think, and I've been told this from people, you know, signals to them, okay, he's a regular person, he's a flawed person like the rest of us, and he didn't, you know, he's not immaculate in his language, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the defense of profanity, but also it's true that, you know, if you use profanity around people who are uncomfortable with it, well, that doesn't seem like wise or right speech. And if you're paying attention, there might be some negative feedback in your system. You

might notice, oh, I've just made this person uncomfortable. This doesn't feel right. Or I'm using it in a hostile way or a harsh way., you know, accusing somebody of something and adding in a swear word. So you know, to me, it just seems like something to use with some care and attention, but I don't know that for me, I don't know that I'm ever going to just completely excise it from my vocabulary because of what I was saying before, that at times it can be a help you relate to other people if used in the right way and also just could be funny.

So, yeah, I don't know if that's the answer you were looking for, but that's just my opinion. But I really appreciate the question. It's a great question. And for you, if you're finding that just, you don't like the way it feels when you do it, then I think the way to cut it out is just to attune't like the way it feels when you do it, then I think the way to cut it out is just to attune to the pain of it. You notice that you're using colorful language and you notice that if you can really tune into the fact and you're already doing

this, tune into the fact that it feels bad. Inextrable the mind, which is a pleasure seeking machine, will want to move away. Once you're become clear about the fact that which is a pleasure seeking machine, will want to move away once you're become clear about the fact that this is painful. You're going to realize you're holding a hot coal and you'll naturally drop it. So I think you're already on route to reducing what appears to be a source of pain for you. All right, voice mail number two. Hey Dan, my name is Chris. I've got to say I love the work. A couple of months into meditating and I can already see a big benefit. But in any case, it's my question. Okay.

First one is, what is your take on seeking out a person for meditation or a type of practice and in-person practice versus let's say using your app or any other app. And by the way, I love your app. What does your take on actually being with someone one-on-one is there a benefit to that versus the app? I'm sure other listeners may have that thought as well. Secondly, how many of these guys that things weigh too much and welcome to the problem, sure. And before I start meditating, sometimes about two or three minutes in those thoughts, you know, prior thoughts before sitting and meditating kind of creep its way into the meditation, what are your thoughts on like taking two, three minutes just to write down and just

do a mental dump on a piece of paper just to get it out? Or is wrestling through that process beneficial to the meditation exercise, if you will? And I guess that's pretty much it. I'm curious to your thoughts. Appreciate it. Keep up the good work. Thank you. Thanks for the question. I've answered the first one before on the show, so I'll go through that quickly and then get to the second one. The answer on the first one, which is,

is there power to sort of in-person learning with a teacher as opposed to an app? Yes, there is. Obviously, I'm pro-app, but really the value I see in the app is that you can, among other things, that you can really, there aren't that many, really deep teachers out there, and the app is a way to scale the impact of these incredible teachers. By the way, it's also, you know, often, until recently, and still to this day, being a meditation teacher has been a kind of financially insecure situation, and I love that we can provide financial security to, or at least get people on

the road to that through the app and through the remuneration we give the teachers. So I think there's a lot of value to an app both for the folks who are involved in making it, but also more importantly for the folks who consume it, because it's not easy to get in the room with a great teacher. And some of us, you know, we live in a remote area or we're busy and so really having an app can be incredibly valuable. That being said, being in the room with the teacher is enormous. And you know, I'm really excited over time with our company to move toward in-person experiences,

getting these teachers out into the world and getting larger and larger audiences in contact with these teachers because what they've done, the teachers, spending years, decades, training their minds is incredible. And just to be around them is for lack of a less cheesy word, inspiring. So yeah, if you have the opportunity to go out and learn from a teacher in your community, I think it's a great idea. So, okay, so that's, that's answer number one. I'm sorry if that's repetitive for close listeners, but I didn't want to ignore it entirely. But the second one, I think I can handle this one pretty quickly too, but I think it's, this is where it is just my opinion. So I'm not sure what some of the aforementioned

great teachers would say about this, but just my opinion, as somebody who's been at this for just a little while, is that doing that kind of dump that you just mentioned sounds like a pretty good idea, because we do wrestle with all of these thoughts during meditation. By the way, I want to be clear,

wrestling with thoughts during meditation is natural. And even if you do a dump beforehand you do an information download on your computer and just type out all the stuff you're thinking about or on your to do list etc. You're still going to be thinking during meditation but it can be a little less entertaining because I know anybody who ever meditated knows what it's like to remember something seemingly important and have this desire to get up and write it down, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's possible that it could work for you to, as somebody describes himself as an overthinker, which I think most of us are, to write it all down and then go meditate. But just to know that when you meditate, you're, of course, it's not going to solve the quote unquote problem. Part of the point of meditating is to help us to learn more skillfully to our thoughts,

so that we're not owned by every random thought that comes through our consciousness in the middle of a conversation with somebody else, or when we're trying to focus on something else, that we can be, we can let these thoughts come and go without grabbing onto them so firmly. So, yeah, give it a try. Really, the mantra that Joseph Goldstein uses is whatever works, obviously, within limits, but whatever works to sort of get you toward the fruits of meditation, which are, you know, calming relaxation concentration and then insight, insight into the fact that we have all of these powerful habitual patterns and that they're really not sub,

they don't represent a core U that you can let them arise and pass away. That is to be grandiose about it liberating. So if that works for you, give it a shot. And if it doesn't, let it go. Thanks again for listening, everybody. And I want to thank everybody who works on this show. Samuel Johns, Ryan Kessler, Tiffany O'Homahundro, Grace Livingston, Lauren Hartzog. I think that's the whole list. Josh Cohan is also helping out for a couple of weeks. So big thanks to all those folks, big thanks to our podcast Insiders who give us all that

useful feedback all the time, and I will see you in a week with another episode. 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 Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com

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