Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 229: Buddhism Without Beliefs | Stephen Batchelor

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

Stephen Batchelor is a Buddhist teacher who takes an unconventional approach to the practice. He was more of a scholar, studying logic and philosophy rather than mantras and deities. In his early life, Stephen traveled to India and met the Dalai Lama, which led him to become a monk who practiced Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Throughout his practice, Stephen felt torn between reason and faith, which ultimately resulted in his secular approach to Buddhism. He follows it as an ever-changing awakening rather than as a religious belief. Stephen eventually transitioned from Tibetan to Zen practice, as he was drawn by the meditation and existential questions of the world. He says keeping an open and questioning mind is key to the practice, and Zen frees the mind from what holds it back, allowing creativity and the ability to embark on the arts. Stephen says that though it’s important to have a sense of where the Buddhist teachings come from, we shouldn’t get stuck trying to preserve or replicate something that has survived for hundreds of years already. Instead, we should take the risk of translating the insights of these traditions into new forms of language, expression and art form that engage with our modernity. Plug Zone Podcast Audience Survey: www.tenpercent.com/survey Dan’s Documentary: Guardians of the Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdTAbgPQuNI Stephen Batchelor Website: https://www.stephenbatchelor.org/index.php/en/ The Art of Solitude: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300250932/ Books: https://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Batchelor/e/B000ARBI4K Mara Opera: Santa Fe New Mexico, Thursday 5th of March with Stephen Batchelor https://santafevipassana.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Mara-flyer.pdf Full Show Notes: http://tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/stephen-batchelor-229 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. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, fantastic guests this week. First though, two items of business. Number one, somewhat unrelated to meditation.

I just have another project I'd like to just to wreck you guys toward. I spent the past six months working on a documentary here at ABC News that I'd love you to look at if you've got a chance or you have interest. I spent time sort of embedded with this remote indigenous tribe in the Amazon and the Brazilian Amazon who have done something radical and really dangerous in the face of a spike of illegal logging they have taken up arms formed a kind of paramilitary group to go out hunt down and apprehend illegal loggers on their land and we spent some time with them we went on a raid with them and some really interesting

and quite striking things happen while we're with them and some really even more disturbing things happen after the raid. So we put it all together into a documentary, it's called The Guardians of the Amazon and it is available on YouTube. It's just a search for Guardians of the Amazon or on Hulu, same thing, search for Guardians of the Amazon. I'd love to see what you think. Hit me up on Twitter and let me know what you think after having seen it. Second item of business, I announced this last week, but we're saying again, we're running another survey back in 2018. We ran a survey asking you guys what you think we're doing right, what you think we're where we could improve. And we'd love your thoughts again, hundreds and hundreds of you signed up last time to answer our questions. And so we're asking you to do a solid and give us a few minutes and send us your thoughts.

Go to 10% dot com slash survey 10% dot com slash survey. Really appreciate that are against this week uh... speaking of the survey in two thousand eighteen we asked in that survey who you wanted to hear from one of the most requested guests with steven bachelor a man who's had a really significant impact on my interest in meditation and Buddhism over the years

when i was first getting interested in both meditation and Buddhism, I read a slim book that he had written, which is now when people ask me, hey, what should I read if I wanna, you know, check out Buddhism, but I'm still sort of early on and skeptical, what should I read? And this is one of the books I recommend always. It's called Buddhism Without Beliefs.

And it really is a fascinating introduction to the subject of Buddhism. And I believe, Steven, as the first person I heard say that Buddhism is not something to believe in, it's something to do, which has really inspired me to dive deeper and deeper into this 2600 year old tradition. This is an amazing conversation with a guy who's spent a lot of time

both as a monk and as a lay practitioner and has written many books including the aforementioned Buddhism Without Beliefs and also a confession of a Buddhist atheist and he has a new book called The Art of Solitude. We talk a lot about the impact that meditation can have on an individual life, and it's fascinating to do so with somebody who's spent so much time in the deep end of the pool, both practicing and studying. Here we go, Steven Bachelor. Great to see you. Thank you, Dad.

Thanks for making time for this. I appreciate it. I've been wanting to have you on the show for a long time. I recommend Buddhism without belief. Whenever somebody on Twitter says, what books should I read to get into Buddhism? There are two books I recommend, yours, and why Buddhism is true by Robert Wright.

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I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've been, I've And as I understand it, you got into meditation primarily as a consequence of drugs and abject failure in an academic setting. That's not entirely true. The drugs part might be true. I came out of the 60s subculture really. And when I was 18 years old, I was certainly less interested in any academic work at high school. I'm really a high school dropper, if the truth be known. And I was inspired like many others, often through people like Rundas, Behe now was a book that had just come out. And I headed off for India as soon as I was legally able and have enough money in my pocket

to afford to do it. So that was in 1972. I traveled over land to India and within a few days I ended up in Durham's Sala and I met the Dalai Lama who was then 38 years old. It was a very small little scene out there in the Himalayas. And from that point on I immersed myself Buddhism, and that's been my life. I was a monk for ten years, both in the Tibetan and later in his end tradition, and I've dedicated my life to the study, the practice, the translation, and now more and more the teaching, the interpretation of what the Dharma, as I prefer to call it, is about.

And how it might have something still to say to us two and a half thousand years later. So you started as a monk in the Tibetan tradition under the Dalai Lama? Not one to one under the Dalai Lama, but under his people as well. My teachers were senior llamas in the Gelluk tradition to which he belongs. And I trained with them for about seven or eight years. There are four, if I recall, traditions within Tibetan Buddhism. Gelluk is the one he was part of.

Gelluk is the sort of the mainstream orthodox school, rather scholarly in orientation, in which the Dalai Lama himself is trained. Then you have the Ning Mepas and the Calguipas who are more, in a sense, perhaps, focus more towards a contemplative disciplines. The Sakyapas, somewhere between the two. But yeah, I was a galook per monk, a scholarly monk.

I studied logic and epistemology and philosophy, rather than mandalas and mantras and weird deities and so forth. And that's what always appealed to me in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition was the way it retained the critical intellectual disciplines of the Nalanda monastery and others in India that were formative in the creation of Mahayana Buddhism. What was driving you? Because you were doing this before Buddhism was cool. I mean, I know it was a little bit cool because it was the 60s and Ramdas, who was more

of a Hindu guy, but was out there talking, you know, writing his book, be here now, et cetera, et cetera. But to go off to India, which I know was a done thing at the time, but to stay and to put the rose on, why would you do that? I've often asked myself that question. There were very, very few books on Buddhism in those days. You could probably have read them all nowadays. You can't even read, keep up with what comes out every month.

So it was fascinating. And I think probably what really drew me was the embodiment of this tradition in the lives of, not just the Dalai Lama and the great Lama's, but just the ordinary Tibetan people. Here were people who had been exiled from their country forcibly 10, 15 years before. And we're living in India as refugees, and yet they radiated a kind of well-being, a sanity, a groundedness that I'd never come across in my culture. And I think that

was probably the real trigger. Of course, there was the 60s enthusiasm of everything non-western, the glorification of Eastern ideas. That was in the background too. But I think what made me stay rather than go back to England and get a university degree, was the actual physical embodiment of the Dharma in the lives of these refugees. Did it feel like something you were lacking? You said you hadn't seen it in your own culture, but did you feel like it was something

lacking in your own mind? Yeah. I think there are two sides of that. One is that I was brought up as a humanist. I was never, I never went to church. My family were totally secular. I appreciated that at one level, but at another level I felt there was some part of my experience that was not really being addressed. Through taking things like LSD, one opens the mind to other dimensions of experience, there's not, was not really being addressed. Through taking things like LSD, one opens the mind to other dimensions of experience, which certainly the secular humanist culture of middle-class England had nothing whatsoever to say. Anything except

don't do it. And the sort of rebelliousness of the 60s and the idea that, you know, change is really possible. We can live differently. We can don't have to be stuck in these habitual ways of behavior. All of that together, perhaps also a lot of idealism, a lot of romanticism. I'm sure that was certainly there, not only in myself, but in many of my peers who are in India at that time. And together I chose to take that jump. And it wasn't easy. I remember, you know, when I decided, okay, I really want to focus on what Buddhism is all about. And the way to do that really is to become a monk. Then that was a difficult choice. I mean, that was a real step. That's really a concrete expression of an engagement with something largely unknown.

And of course, from my family's perspective, but how's that going to give you a pension at the end of your life? How are you going to make a living out of that? And those days, you know, it was completely off the map. In fact, it's turned out rather well. I'm now talking to you in New York and selling books and so forth. I've done, and I'm really, really in a way, glad

that I took that risk. And so did many of those who, I would consider my peers, other teachers today, like, Joseph Goldstein and so forth. We all went through that, as it were. And now we can look back on it and see that that was the beginning of a movement that 20, 30, 40 years later is having an impact on our society that we could never possibly have imagined at that time.

The fact that mindfulness is now just a completely normal thing to do, is in a way the result of our early explorations and experiments and commitments and retreat time and so forth. And it's very gratifying, quite humbling, really, to feel that I've been part of that. Yeah. I think that's absolutely true. Without you guys, there is no me and my current incarnation in terms of essentially turning my career over to becoming an evangelist from meditation. And in fact, we're in terms of just to echo your point about how normal it is to practice mindfulness where at ABC News, pretty mainstream organization, 13th floor of this building, there is a meditation room that I had nothing to do with setting up.

So to get back to your time with the Tibetans, if I recall from your book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, there were moments where you having been raised as a humanist, a humanist, and I think sort of constitutionally, you are, as you see here today, I think at least inclined in that skeptical direction, you struggled with some of the things you encountered in Tibetan Buddhism, if I recall. No, that's absolutely right. One of the reasons I was attracted to the Galugpa, rather than the more meditative traditions, was precisely because they gave great emphasis to reason, logic,

not believing things just on trust, examining ideas, and really trying to get to grips with them. And only when you arrive at some kind of rational clarity as to what these teachings are saying, should you consider accepting them, not just out of faith? This was very strong. And that appealed, of course, to my humanist, secular, Western background. But what I found at the end of the day was that that was certainly a very good education, a good discipline

in training the mind to think clearly. It also exposed, at least from my perspective, that certain doctrines were central to, not only Tibetan Buddhism, but all Buddhism, like reincarnation and the law of karma, and things like that didn't actually stand up to the very critical tools that the Tibetan Lamas had given me to examine things. And so that was a crisis for me. Do I follow reason, or do I recognize that this is perhaps beyond the range of rational understanding and I accept on faith and trust and enlightenment of my teachers that these things must be true.

I couldn't do that. Did they kick you out for that? No, there's no such thing as heresy No, there's no such thing as heresy in Buddhism, it's a bad degree. No, they didn't kick me out at all. No, and I also probably didn't fully declare my own doubts and anxieties. I stayed within that tradition for quite a while longer after those initial doubts. But the other thing that really I think made a shift in my engagement with Tibetan Buddhism was my encounter with goingka and the Vipassana meditation practice. Just jump in for a second just for those who don't SN goenka is an Indian gentleman who was doing business in Burma where he encountered Vipassana or insight meditation and then started teaching it in a to regular

folks all over the world in fact no longer with us but you apparently did some of his retreats. That's right and in fact he was invited by the Dalai Lama for reasons I still don't really understand to lead a tende retreat in Darmsala for Tibetan monks and western Buddhists who were there at the time and so I did this tende retreat as a Tibetan Buddhist monk and it, well, in the language of the time, it blew my mind. And it opened up a level of experience, a moment to moment awareness of what's actually going on in the body-mind complex. And a training to just be still and clear and stable in paying attention to the breath, the sensations in the body, everything that we now are familiar with from the mindfulness community.

SNGO Enca opened that door for me and that really was again a departure for me from the practices I've been doing with the Tibetans, which often included visualization and meditation and reflections, all of which were useful, but none of them really brought me into another relationship with my core experience of being a human being. And Vipassana, mindfulness, I feel can do that. Just unpack that. Another relationship with my core experience of being a human being, I think I've...

That's right. Okay. What do you mean by that? Well, Vipassana meditation, mindfulness practice, doesn't require that you believe anything. It just requires that you put into practice certain exercises, very simple, stop, pay attention, notice what's rising, what's passing away, don't get caught up in your thoughts, and just allow yourself to become more and more intimate with your feelings, your sensations, your thoughts,

your emotions, but without judging them as good or bad, desirable, undesirable, just accepting that this is what is happening right now. This is my life, this is my human being in all of its nakedness. And I don't have to buy into all of its stories. I don't have to follow all of the thoughts and digressions that run through my mind. I can just be with what is going on. And that was a profound revelation. And it has remained. From that point on, this was 1974, right through to speaking to you now, I feel that that grounded a quality of attention, a coming to terms

with the core experience of being human, that I feel is fundamental to the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha. And I think probably most contemplative traditions. And so those two things, my doubts as an intellectual about some of the Tibetan Buddhist doctrines and then my introduction to a form of meditation practice that brought me right back to the primary experience of being human. And so you ultimately left and became a monk in another tradition in Korea, Zen tradition. So why didn't you just start practicing

Vipassana all the time? Why did you join another, I mean, seemingly religious group? Very good. It's a question I've often asked myself, and I'm not entirely sure of the answer to that. I think, despite all of all that I have just said, I did still feel a strong rootedness in Mahayana Buddhism. A former Buddhism that's very much committed to a life that's founded on compassion and awareness of the suffering of others. I'm just going to jump in for one second because you used the T.Y. Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism is a reform movement historically within the Buddhist tradition that occurred maybe 500 years or so after the Buddha. The sort to, in a sense, redress attendancy towards a set ofism, let's say, detachment from the world and tried to bring back the principles of compassion, loving

kindness, to make a practice of the Dharma that's very much about your concern for the suffering of others. So in the, just to add to that, my understanding, and please, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, in the sort of old school, teravada Buddhism that was dominant before the reform movement began. There was at least the critique goes in emphasis on achieving enlightenment to escape from this world, to escape from what's called samsara, this endless cycle of rebirth, and you can be born as, you know, in several different realms, the human realm, you can come back as a goat, you can come back as some sort of deity, which is anyway.

And the Mahianna folks said, no, no, instead of achieving Nirvana and then just getting off the bus, you, we've got a new avatar, a new thing you should be shooting for, which is a Bodhisattva, who basically says, I'm enlightened, but I'm not getting off the bus until everybody's enlightened, until all suffering is ended. So that's the mod... I think that's the sort of a primary idea. That's pretty much it, yes. And so the tradition I moved to, I certainly wanted to do more meditation. I wanted to... I'd rather got somewhat overloaded with Buddhist philosophical ideas. I wanted to really have time just exploring experience more directly and immediately through contemplative exercises.

And I'd always been drawn towards Zen. I like the Zen appreciation for the arts. I like the quirkiness of the Zen stories and I like the immediacy in their directness of Zen teaching which cuts through nonsense and just confronts you with the core questions of life. Yes, sometimes they hit you with a stick. In Japan, they do that. In Korea, they sometimes, no, very rarely do they hit you with a stick in Japan. In Korea. But so what drew me to Zen was both the meditation, which I was already doing, Vipassana meditation, but they brought to the idea of meditation the notion of questioning,

the notion of a kind of radical existential inquiry. So the meditations I did in Korea as a monk, which was three months in the summer, three months in the winter, effectively was just to sit, get grounded in your body mind, and then open yourself to the question, what is this? And just to stay with that questioning. And that I didn't find in for personal, to be honest. And I found that the two went very, very well together, the mindfulness of the breath, the body and the sensations, and then in that deeper sense of embodiment, dropping the question, but what is this? And allowing yourself really to go deeply into that quality of complexity, of wonder, of awe, of mystery, and yet within a very

immediate direct here and now experience, No need to believe in God or spirits or absolute truth or anything like that. Just what is on earth going on here? I've read your writings on this mantra, this koan. The koan. So there's koan that you're silently repeating in your mind as you're practicing. If I, if I, well you don't, you do silently repeat it, but not in a mantra like way. You actually might actually bring the question only once or twice in a session. And once you've got what they call the sensation of inquiry, which is an embodied sensory feeling, then you can drop the words altogether. They're not that important. The point is to bring a quality of curiosity and perplexity and astonishment into the very fabric of your consciousness of every moment.

And so I misspoke, I'd heard you talk about this co-on within the difference. A mantra is sort of a word or a phrase. You repeat kind of rhythmically, almost incilely in your own mind, and it can induce a state of deep concentration, whereas a co-on is a question you're pondering, and it's more contemplative. And you are, in some ways, from what I'm hearing from you, you're harnessing the raw bear awareness that we conjure in mindfulness meditation with the power of the discursive or contemplative or investigative mind.

That's correct. Yeah. Except I wouldn't call it discursive or reflective so much as a kind of embodied confusion. It's a sense, it's allowing you, when you question something deeply, you are tacitly acknowledging that you really don't know what's going on. A questioning implies not knowing. If I say, you know, where is the Statue of Liberty? That means I don't know where the Statue of Liberty is. When I ask, what is this, this total experience? I'm tacitly acknowledging, I don't know what this is. So it's more than just pondering and questioning.

It's at the same time opening up in a way a kind of deep humility. We're in this world and it is profoundly strange. And can we stay with that profoundly strange, rather than as the mind prefers, coming up with all sorts of clever answers to these questions, all sorts of beliefs and doctrines and theories and so on, and we like holding on to those things. And so in the early tradition, which we haven't really got to yet, the early Buddhist tradition, the Buddha puts a huge amount of emphasis and not getting entangled in views and opinions.

And I think the corollary of that is keeping an open questioning mind. It's not just about rejecting views and opinions, but it's clearing the deck as it were in order to recover the fundamental questions of what it means to be human. So there's this kind of like marination in mystery. Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

To what end? What, why did you find, why would you dedicate two, three month periods of your life for several years to... They're doing that. The investigating this. Well, this is maybe, I don't really have a clear answer to that.

All I can say is that by doing it, I began more and more to actually appreciate and enjoyed doing that thing. I found it liberating, frankly. I found it freed me from being entangled in in views and opinions. And it opens up, therefore, not just and not knowing, but also something comparable say to creativity, to imagination. I think it frees the mind from what holds it back from being able to think differently, from being able to imagine another way of being, through being able to embark on projects of art and poetry, of painting, of whatever it might be.

And Zen embodies all of those things. Zen is the one Buddhist tradition that really valorizes the arts, whether it be scroll painting, whether it be flower arranging. This is seen to be part and parcel of the practice. It's not just a decorative add-on. And so part of my, this goes back also maybe to my earlier life in England. I was very much drawn to the arts. That was something I probably would have pursued, had I not got lost in Buddhism. I was going to probably be a photographer or something.

And so that part also was addressed in the Zen tradition that I didn't find, really was found, let's say, in the more Indian-based traditions of the Terawada or the Tibetan, where art is really just seen as a sort of support for your devotional practices, perhaps, but not as something that you as a person would actually engage in as part of your practice. So all, I mean, in the course of what we've been saying so far, I can see these different threads are coming together in ways that have led me to my current view of these traditions, which is neither Tibetan or Terroir, or Zen.

I can't really identify with any particular Buddhist tradition anymore. They've all informed me and I feel that what we're moving to in our world is something that's probably going to have to leave those behind in order to find a form, a language, a voice that really is able to speak to our contemporary modernity that we find ourselves in. And I see the mindfulness movement really as a kind of a, as a first wave perhaps, of an emergent Dharma that is yet to be defined and embodied. And that I feel is again both exciting

and also kind of bewildering. I don't know where it's going. So, should we not spend time looking back at these traditions? Yes, I think we should. And if I were to advise a young person who wanted to dedicate their lives to these sorts of practices and philosophies, then yes, I think it's a very good idea to get a grounding in a particular traditional form of Buddhism. I, I think it's a very good idea to get a grounding in a particular traditional form of Buddhism. I think we're still in a very transitional phase, culturally. I don't think we're really in internalized what these classical traditions

have taught. With far, I think, from having a contemporary form of Buddhism, it'll probably take more than my lifetime for that to work itself out, or maybe it won't, we don't know. So yes, I do think it's important to have a good sense of where these teachings come from, but at the same time, I think we need to be careful not to get to get stuck in just trying to replicate something or preserve something that's been, you know, survived for hundreds of years into battle, China or Japan. Instead, I think we have to take the risk of translating the insights of these traditions into new forms of language, of expression, of art forms, perhaps, that engage with armadternity. But that I think is how Buddhism has always worked.

One of the things I've always admired about the Buddhist tradition is there is no central authority, there's no Pope, there's no Vatican, there's not even a common body of canonical texts. Each Buddhist tradition, wherever it has emerged, has reflected the needs and the interests and the cultures of Japan, or Tibet, or Sri Lanka. And it is very malleable, in that sense. It's very adaptable and flexible. And it constantly, Buddhism constantly reinvents itself, according to new circumstances. And that's what we're seeing now, I think the mindfulness movement is a good example of the reinvention of the Dharma to speak to the needs of people living today. As you make this argument, you ever bump up against the counter-argument of cultural appropriation or failing to value the 2600 years of work that preceded the mindfulness movement?

Yeah, people do. People feel that the mindfulness movement is a debasing or simplifying or even distorting the pure teachings of the Buddha. I think that's historically somewhat naive. I think if you look at the history of the different Buddhist traditions, you'll see that they all were, they're all in a sense inventions. They're all adaptations. Tibetan Buddhism likes to think that it's just doing exactly what was going on in India, but that's not true. If you look more critically, you see that Tibetan Buddhism has adapted the Indian doctrines and teachings to meet the specific situations in medieval Tibet.

Ditto Japan, Ditto Korea, Ditto China. So we're not doing anything different. It's always been this way. I think it's healthy to have a certain concern that we don't depart too unthinkingly from what's been established in these earlier historical traditions, but we don't want to get stuck in them either. I remember once years ago when I was a Tibetan Buddhist monk, I met a Christian Jesuit, I think, a priest, and he made the distinction between being rooted in a tradition and being stuck in a tradition.

In other words, for a tree, for a healthy tree to grow, it needs to sink its roots deep. But that's purely for the purpose of the tree being able to flourish in the environment. To be stuck in a tradition means just basically to insist that this is true, and only this is true, this is the final This is the final word on the Dharma and I'm not going to budge from that. Any opinion I have or any view I have that conflicts with orthodoxy, that must be wrong. I have to dispel that and stick to the truth that my teachers, my llamas, these texts are encouraging. And that I think won't really, that doesn't do it for me. Let's put it that way.

I just can't do that. For me, the Dharma, the practice of Buddhism, is an encouragement to find your own voice. It's an encouragement to not just to be compassionate or to be wise, but to respond compassionately and wisely to the questions of our time. And there, I think, it's where it really comes into its own. And it begins to then find other ideas, other influences from the West, from psychology, from science, wherever it might come, that begins to feed into the finding of another voice. You don't strike me as a utopian, but let me ask this question,

although maybe you are, but I doubt it. What role do you think this new form of Dharma could play in a world that has a lot of profound problems? Not to, you know, just off the top of my head, climate, inequality, racism, polarization, I'll stop there. I could keep going. Well, I think that the dam or Buddhism is not got ready-made answers to any of these issues. That would be silly, I think, to feel that if we look deeply enough in the Buddhist discourses

we'll find answers to the questions of inequality or climate catastrophe or whatever. What it can provide us with, I feel, is a greater stability and focus and clarity within ourselves that is also, I think, a kind of courage, a kind of willingness to not just keep repeating the same old ideas and patents, but to recognize their just stories with inherited, with taken on board. And we can start to see them as just stories, as just digressions. And to thereby come into a much more immediate engagement with the world in which we find ourselves.

For me, the Dharma boils down to engaging in a core set of tasks, and the first one is to embrace the world you're in. And to notice how you so easily react to that world, according to the habits of your culture, the habits of your psychology or whatever, you can let that go. And you can ground yourself more and more in a non-reactive awareness that is present to the world that we now live in, that is aware of the climate crisis, it's aware of social injustices and so forth and so on, in such a way that we can find within ourselves a resource to respond to these situations, from a place that's not determined by our likes or dislikes or preferences or reversions, but somewhere that taps more into the core wisdom

and sanity of being human. And that I think is essentially an ethical process. To me, the Dharma is essentially an ethical process. To me, the Dharma is ethics. Through and through. It doesn't need metaphysics. It doesn't need any theories about what's true, in an ultimate sense. It simply provides us with tools to embrace the situation we're in, to not get entangled in our reactive patterns, and to respond from a non-reactive stance. So in other words, it gives us a discipline of training that hopefully we'll give us

say maybe a better basis for engaging with these questions. The answer is things that no one has to these questions. But how can we best prepare ourselves to come up with responses that might actually make a difference in the world? I mean, this again comes back to Zen. You know, what is this? It's a question. And the other side of it is, we don't know what this is. Climate catastrophe is a question.

And we don't know what the appropriate this is. Climate catastrophe is a question and we don't know what the appropriate response is. It's a co-an, if you wish. And I think the contemplative disciplines prepare us to work with that co-an and to, with time and maybe we make a bunch of mistakes, maybe we get it wrong. But the important thing is to have the courage to risk a response. I'm reading Yuval Noah Hariri's recent book at the moment and he says something very similar. 21 lessons for the 21 lessons for the 21st century. I've read his other work, but again, he too is coming to something quite similar. He too is grounded in vit pass on the meditation, at which for him, he says very clearly,

I wouldn't have had the focus and the clarity to do my work if I hadn't got that grounding in this kind of mindful awareness. And so he's a good example of someone who's obviously very intelligent, very much more better informed than I am about these things. But you can see him as an example of someone who's taking this contemplative, meditative practice and using it as the basis for engaging with the, I think, the really the most pressing and difficult issues of our time. 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 is 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 Up. I want to go back to something you said during a bunch of things I want to go back to. But the first thing I'm going to go back to is, and I'm sure your answer will provide more things that I also need to go back to later. So that's the positive slippery slope of anything somebody with your kind of mind. The Dharma is ethics through and through.

I think of ethics, I suspect many others do as rules. And in Buddhism, there are precepts, rules. You're not supposed to unretreat, you're not supposed to drink, you're not supposed to sit in high seats or wear fancy clothing, and there's all sorts of rules. What do you mean when you say ethics? I distinguish ethics from morality. And morality is, I think, very often just following rules, presets. And that's helpful. Our societies wouldn't function if we didn't have some kind of law-based morality. But I feel that what the Dharma offers is an ethic. And an ethic, therefore, is not legalistic in the sense that it means you do this

and you don't do that. But ethics is about how can I become the sort of person I aspire to be? It's how can I become the best possible version of myself? In other words, ethics is about the whole of you. Ethics is about the sort of person you aspire to be. And the eightfold path, which is the traditional Buddhist way of laying out the basic sort of dimensions of the path, the way we see things and imagine and work and speak and so forth, all of those things together constitute an ethical life. And this idea, I think, is one that is not only found in Buddhism, but you find it very much in ancient Greek philosophy too, the idea of an ethical life being a life

that is lived with greater consciousness, with greater awareness, that incorporates every aspect of your humanity and seeks to cultivate a human life in which the values that you hold are embodied in actual forms of life in the world. And that I would consider to be an ethical life. Of course, it has to do it at the outset with making choices. But making ethical choices is not about following a rule book. I can't do that because I'm not allowed to do this. But an ethical choice here is far more about responding to the situation at hand and not asking myself, what is the right thing to do but asking myself, what is the wisest thing to do?

What is the most compassionate thing to do? For which there is no rule book that gives you the answer, because each situation is unprecedented. It's unique. Any significant moral dilemma is one for which there is no rule book answer, and you have therefore to risk a response. So ethics begins by learning to differentiate your habitual reactions, which are often moralized things about right wrong. And instead, seeking a capacity to respond wisely, caringly, compassionately, with the understanding that you're taking a risk. You do not know the consequences of what you would do. You cannot know the consequences, but you cannot not act.

So, an ethical life will stem from that, and it's one that is ongoing and constant and never can rest, complacent, then I've got it all sorted out. I'm an intrinsically good person. Everything I do will be right. No, you're always faced each moment with the co-on, the question, what do I do now? What do I do in this situation? What do I say?

What do I, how do I act? And that is the practice of the Dharma. And I don't think you need anything else. So I agree deeply with what you've just said in many ways. One ingredient that's been important for me as a selfish person is that there is a lot of self-interest in what you're describing. It's not ethics because you should be a good person by somebody else's definition, or it's not eating your vegetables in that way. What I have found in meditation is,

we have this problematic word, heart. I don't like it. I've made that clear many times on this podcast because I think it's been pulverized into meaninglessness through wrote repetition or bathos. But when through meditation you are more in touch with, let's just say, your feelings or they sort of sub below the skull intelligence that is that is part of our body, you recognize that doing the quote unquote right thing or wise thing or compassionate thing is very much in your interest because it feels better. It just feels better. It's a more easeful way to move through the world. And yes, so for me that just everything, I'm plus one, I'm on everything you just said, and I'm adding in the fact that that's just a more pleasurable

way to be alive. Yes, I agree. I think that's right. And I think that the, I mean, I like the idea of cultivating or refining one's moral compass, one's in a compass, which is difficult to define rationally, but it has a lot to do with the feeling tone of our acts, what it feels like to do A rather than B. That becomes a more reliable guide, I feel to what's appropriate, but always with the caveat that I might be making things worse. I don't know. Humility is important in greening. Yeah, humility is important. The willingness to change one's mind. But yes, I think that's right. And it is. I don't think one.

Again, we have this moralistic idea that we have to be completely, there must be no self-interest whatsoever. This is pure altruism. But that, I think, is a bit unrealistic, to be frank. I think we, even in Mahayana Buddhism, this very altruistic form of Buddhism, they recognize that all sentient beings, for whom you are dedicating your life, include you.

It's not that you are apart from everybody else. No, your well-being is an integral part of what you seek to optimize in life. And I do think that is a good measure, really, of an ethical life, is whether it feels right, not whether it is right, but does that action somehow align with the kind of person you aspire to be, your ethical ideal? And that, I think, is felt very much in a embodied way, in the heart, if you wish. I would even go so far as to say, in the soul, which is probably a term you have less time for than heart. I don't know. It's close to heretical and the Buddhist...

Well, unfortunately, it is. I think it's a beautiful word. And I wouldn't say there is a soul of some separate entity tucked away inside myself somehow. But, you know, I think the soul is a lovely expression, the sailor, the soulfulness, soul music, soul food. We all know what that means. We don't have to pin down and define the word soul. It resonates at a level that is, I think, very, very, very, very familiar, very intuitive for us. It's the Greek word psyche, is soul. And I think the Buddhist word cheetah, or usually chasators' mind would possibly be better rendered as solver. That's a bit of a digression. Well, I mean Mark Epstein, our mutual friend, Dr. Mark Epstein, who's been on this podcast

many times, talks about the fact that yes, in Buddhism, one of the primary tendencies, if you look closely, you won't find some core nugget of views. In fact, the ancient Buddhist term, if I understand it, Anata, which stands for this, which is used as, we currently translate it as either emptiness or selflessness, the fact that there is no core self in here. Anata means no soul, if I understand it. No, I think that i seriously disagree with

okay well i had dinner with margol but some and we didn't talk about it let me let me the point you're trying to make was not the linguistic point so for set set that aside his point is that on some important level well yes we don't have you can't find some among the list of steven in your behind, between, or behind your eyes. There is some, there, we, we do exist, you know, and there is a you in there,

even though you can't find it. And so both things can be true at one time. That is his arguments, forget my linguistic digression, which is probably uninformed. What do you think of that point? Well, I think it's almost a truism to say that if you look deeply into who you are, you won't find any nugget of me there tucked away somewhere. But I don't think that's actually what the Buddha meant by Anata. Anata is nowadays scholars, translated as not self. The Buddha never says in the early canonical literature that there is no self. He never says that, not once, which is surprising

because it's become a Buddhist dogma. And the idea is that if you look into your experience and you look deep, you won't find that there is any self. There's not, you're not find that there is any self. You're not really there. And yet relatively or conventionally, yes, we function and so forth and so on. I don't think that language is helpful. I'm not, it's probably true, perhaps at some level.

But I feel that the notion of, I would actually like to reframe Buddhist teaching more positively and think of it actually as the cultivation of the self. The recognition that you are a work in progress that who you are is a project. And there's a wonderful text in the Dhamma Pada, which is a very early Buddhist text where the Buddha says that just as a farmer irrigates a field, just as a arosmith, fashions, an arrow, just as a carpenter shapes a piece of wood, so the wise person trains the self, trains themselves, trains an atom, accusative, the self. In other words, the self is like an unirrigated field, or you, and I, a like unirrigated field,

like unfashioned bits of an arrow, like an uncarved block of wood, and the practice of the Dharma is about shaping, refining, irrigating you, me, myself, my soul, whatever you call it. The status of the self or the soul, whether it exists or doesn't exist or whether it exists ultimately or relatively beside the point. When you look at it from this more positive site, you immediately see why it's ethics. The refining, the irrigating of the cell, the shaping, the forming, this is an ethical practice. It's got nothing to do with whether the self exists or not. There's a famous dialogue

between the Buddha and a fellow called Vachagotra, who comes to the Buddha and says, is there a self? Would it remain silent? Okay, is there not a self? Would it remain silent? Vachagotra goes away. Arnandar, the Buddha's attendant, then says, why didn't you give this guy an answer? And the Buddha says, if I'd said there is a self, he would have fallen into eternalism. He would have risk absolutizing it. And if I'd said there's no self, he would have fallen into nihilism. So the idea that that text, I feel, shows quite clearly that the Buddha is not interested in whether a self exists or doesn't exist. He's not interested in that binary question. He's interested not in what a self is or isn't, but what a self can do.

That's the question. In other words, the training and the shaping of our minds, our feelings, our whole person, our whole being in the world, is the practice of the Dharma. It's to let go of what impedes our cultivation as a person, and to encourage those qualities of mind, those actions that help refine and develop ourselves into something approximating what we seek to be the best possible version of who we are. So I really have no time for those sorts of questions any longer. I don't think that approach is terribly helpful.

Instead I feel we need to, in a sense, re-own the notion of self, soul, and so on. As a part of a discourse that enables us to ask questions of how do I live better? How can I lead a good life? How can I find what the Greeks called udimonia, human flourishing? That for me is what the Dharma is about. How can I flourish? How can I participate with others in a world in which we can all flourish? How can we really break out of our limitations and our fears and our anxieties and our attachments in order to flourish? That is what I feel the Dahmer is about.

Let me ask you about another concept that is held there by many people in the Dahmer community, which I've heard you voice skepticism about. There are many people in the Buddhist community who argue that if we engage in this kind of cultivation, if we start, begin the process of letting go of our habitual storylines, et cetera, et cetera, what will become clear through this process is our Buddha nature that we have,

you're laughing already, that we have essentially just an innate goodness. What's your view of that? Well, Buddha nature, again, obviously, is a term that's widespread in Buddhism, although again, the historical Buddha never used such an expression. I think, again, the Buddhists themselves don't agree about what Buddha Nature is. I was trained in the Galupur tradition, as we mentioned, and for them there is no notion of innate goodness at all. Buddha Nature simply means the emptiness of self-existence of the person, that sounds a bit abstract. But basically, emptiness, in other words, the absence of anything fixed or static in who we are.

A bit like what Mark said about, if you look deeply enough, you won't find any nugget of me. That's butternator, because by realizing that there is no kind of essential me, that then frees you to become what you could aspire to be. The problem with self-clinging egoism is not that it doesn't correspond to reality. It's because it inhibits you and prevents you from changing. It inhibits you and prevents you from transforming yourself along a path. And so, Buddha nature, I should say, I don't particularly use, but nonetheless, if we understand it to simply mean

the capacity we have to wake up, and that I think is a perfectly good definition. The capacity we have to wake up is not because we have some inherent goodness within us, but because we are not essentially this particular nugget of me that I'm holding on to in the core of myself. So it's, if one thinks of a spectrum

between original sin on the one hand and the popular version of Buddha nature wishes innate goodness, you're basically saying we're somewhere in between and we have the potential to cultivate. Yes, and that cultivation is a choice we can make. It's not something that is premised on some kind of intrinsic goodness within ourselves. It's, you see Buddha nature, I don't want to get down that. Well, how does it square, though, with what we were saying before, which is that if you're

paying attention, it feels better to be compassionate than to be cruel. I think that only makes real sense if we already have some kind of vision as to what we aspire to become. And then if we perform certain acts, say certain things, that feels good because it seems to be in alignment with what we are aspiring to achieve. I would think of it more like that. I don't think you can separate it from the framework within which you embed your life in terms of of a thinking, ethical being?

What about, I'm not sure I agree with that because if you think about evolution, we evolved as cooperative species, the tribes that cooperated the best, thrived. Doesn't it feel good for those, if you pay attention, this is an example I use a lot, pay attention what it's like when I use a lot, pay attention what it's like when you're holding the door open for somebody, you can have done no meditation, just pay attention in that moment. It feels good.

I think that's just a primordial, that's just part of our design. I don't have a position on whether we're inherently fallen or inherently good, but it feels, I'm closer to inherently good because as I, in my own life, the more I've been able to let go of some of the noise

Clear to weigh something underbrush what emerges is a desire to be helpful and I think yes Of course it part is because I've been soaked in Buddhism for the last decade But I also it feels to me deeper. Yeah, I agree. I think there is a large part of our moral sense, our moral intuitions are, I would feel, the consequence of our evolution. It's selective as it were to cooperate, to care for others, particularly those within our kinship groups and so forth and so on.

And that feels good, that feels right. There is that primary level of, I suppose, a kind of almost a naturalistic morality or ethic that's built into us through the evolution of our species, particularly as social animals. So yes, I think you can account for the basic ethical intuitions on purely naturalistic grounds. But I don't know whether that will be particularly helpful in dealing with climate catastrophe, for example, or social injustice. These are issues that go beyond my intuitive sense of what's the right thing to do in a social situation. sense of what's the right thing to do in a social situation. And something like Buddhism or any sort of philosophy is not concerned purely with ethics as, you know, social lubricant to making us feel better, but it's also giving us the foundations, the ideas, the vision that can help us actually deal with

questions for which we are not biologically prepared. And I think climate change is a very good one. We're not very difficult to feel that we're in a crisis situation. Intellectually, yes, we look at the data, we look at the number of the amount of carbon dioxide there is in the environment and we think hell, we're in a mess. This is dangerous, this is awful. But it doesn't impact us at the level of feeling. It's not like holding the door open for your friend.

It doesn't translate easily into a felt sense of crisis. That's the problem. And this is where I feel traditions like Buddhism or any real religion or philosophy provides us with a framework to answer or to respond to questions that are that transcend the capacity of our biologically evolved organism. I wanted to turn before we run out of completely right out of time to your new book. Ah yes my new book. So just give the, how and why do you decide to write this book? Well, the book I've just published is called The Art of Solitude, published by Yale.

And it's a project I've been working on for the last five years or so. It's an experimental book. It's not a Buddhist book, actually. I'm not trying to present a Buddhist interpretation of solitude. I'm drawing upon a whole range of experiences, particularly the writings of Montagne. I'm including a lot of material on meditation, which

is going back clearly to my Buddhist past. I'm talking about art. I'm talking about travel to remote places. And I'm talking about art, I'm talking about travel to remote places, and I'm talking about the use of plant medicines or psychedelics, too, as a way of, you know, in a sense, learning to live with ourselves in a more sane way, I would argue. So this is a book that asks the question of how can we live with ourselves better? How can we accept the fact that we are both social beings, but also we are beings who are very much alone. And that aloneness or that solitude is the framework, I feel, not just for loneliness and alienation and isolation, but it's also the space that

is implicit whenever we talk about meditation practice, for example, or mindfulness, or any such things. We're really speaking about how we engage with life as a being who finds herself alone in the world. It goes back in many ways to the very first book I wrote back in the 1970s called Alone with Others, published in 1983, I think. And I've always been gripped by the question of, I've always been gripped by the paradox that we are creatures who are simultaneously embedded in a world with others, in language, through our parents, through society, at one hand. We are utterly participatory

creatures, and yet at the same time we're also utterly alone, particularly in an existential sense. We're born alone, we die alone, we get sick very often in solitude and isolation. There seem to be these two poles to our humanity, the participatory and the solitary. And this is a book that has brought me back once again to the question of how do I live as a solitary being. And it's also a book that is, it's a kind of a literary book. It's a collage of different, four different essays that are interwoven with each other. To try to sort of, instead of explain what solitude is, I seek to show how people who have practiced solitude have lived. It's very much about that. Difficult to pin down in words, and if I could, I wouldn't have had to write the book. So that's in a nutshell, I hope, what the book is trying to do.

I write books usually because there's something I want to figure out. Did you figure something, was that true for you? Did you figure something out in writing this book? I think I probably did. The book actually tells the story of the writing of the book. That's another feature of this project, is that I actually, you know, described my own struggles and questions as the project continues. I think if I can put the one thing I think I figured out is that solitude is really just a synonym for Nirvana. That sounds a bit strange, perhaps.

But if you think of Nirvana as we find in the early text, as just the absence of greed, the absence of dislike, the absence of confusion, that is a solitary space. And it is, I think, referred to in the text in that way, that Nirvana is this capacity to be on one's own, this capacity to be with oneself in a way that you're not constantly driven by these drives and forces. It's a space of freedom. So for me, solitude is a way of talking about an inner freedom that is not determined by our attachments and fears and desires

and so forth, in which we've somehow come to terms with who we are. It's a kind of radical self-acceptance at the one hand, but it's also a groundedness and a truthfulness in regard to ourselves that can be the basis once again for leading an ethical life. That's kind of what I always seem to come back to in my work these days. But from a Buddhist perspective, that is what I think I figured out. But I feel also that this book has enabled me to connect a lot of what I've learned from my Buddhist training and tie it into Western philosophy, particularly the philosophy of skepticism, of Piro in the Greek tradition, which was the philosophy adopted by Montagne. Michel de Montagne,

the French essayist of the 16th century, tried to put into practice the ancient Greek philosophies, particularly skepticism, epicurianism, stoicism, taking Socrates, this is example, not the Buddha, which he knew nothing. But what comes through in this book, the Art of Solitude, is how close some of the Hellenistic philosophies are, both in theory and in practice to what we find in early Buddhism, in the Pali Canon particularly. And the book is actually structured according to a very early text in Buddhism called the Ataka Vaga, the chapter of eights, and I've taken four of the key chapters of that book as the kind of template for designing and structuring both the form and the arguments within the book itself.

If that makes sense. It does, but at least to me, but I want to ask a separate question, which is about solitude, because it's not something most of us aspire to. I mean, solitary confinement is straight up torture. John McCain famously said that the worst thing that happened to him in Vietnam when he was a POW was not the beatings. It was the solitude. So talk to me about why solitude. I mean, you've said it a bunch about it already, but how would we understand why this is a positive thing and how would we go about practicing it? It's not just to argue that solitude, per se, is a positive thing. It's to acknowledge the fact that whether we like it or not, we are solitary beings. But solitude tends to be taken negatively as your example show.

But you can also find counter examples, William Wordsworth, for example, things of solitude as bliss. Maybe it's just anti-social. Maybe, but I could, we don't have time here, but I could give you mother, many other examples and they're included in the book, where solitude actually embraces a whole spectrum from the deepest agonizing loneliness and isolation that, you know, is a feature of our world, to mystical rapture and poetic ecstasy, which is likewise part of our world. And I like what I've tried to do in this book, is not to reduce solitude, either to loneliness or to mystical rapture, but to understand it as an

inescapable given of being human. And the question is, how do I, how do I live that? How do I The question is, how do I live that? How do I embrace that dimension of my life in a way that I could actually thrive in my solitude? Anyone who meditates and does mindfulness knows what it's like to be alone. When you close your eyes and you sit on your cushion, you're there with yourself. That is your solitude, as it were. But the, I think the goal is perhaps best summed up by Emerson, who also was a great advocate of solitude. And Emerson puts it this way, he says that it's easy enough to live in society

according to the rules of others. It's easy enough to live in solitude and just following your own intentions, but the goal is to be able to preserve the sweetness of your solitude in the midst of the crowd. And that, I think, is very close to what we would also find in spiritual traditions. It's about how do I retain that sanity and that clarity and that stillness that I might find in meditation in the midst of a busy, engaged life in the world with others. That's what it's all about. And I'm just trying to, in a sense, open up the solitude dimension in such a way that doesn't point us to going away from the world, but actually gives us a resource, a courage, a clarity to engage with the world.

You can't abandon the solitude to being someone who is completely given over to the desires and the interests and the suffering of others. We need somehow, once again, this integration of our participatory and our solitary lives. So how does plant medicine or psychedelics fit into this? Because I know it's a feature of the book. It's a feature of the book, and again, it's a very personal journey. I describe here and not something that I'm encouraging in any way. But it was through psychedelics back in the late 60s that my mind was open to the possibilities of living differently, particularly through LSD. And that's what led me to India.

And that's what led me into the Dharma. And when I got to be 60, I took a year's sabbatical. And I very much wanted to somehow revisit my, well, take stock of my life would be what I felt I needed to do. And I wanted to revisit some of my formative experiences in the past. I wasn't interested in taking LSD in my home listening to music. I wanted to explore what these medicine, what they call medicine circles. In other words, we work with a shaman, in a group, in a very conscious and very prepared environment, and you ingest these substances, in my case, peyote and ayahuasca, which I only did three

times over the course of these five years. But in each time I found that they allowed me to engage with my solitude, of be, in other words, engage with myself in a way that cleared through the presumably through the medicines themselves, a cleared away temporarily certain habits of mind, chatter of mind, and I don't know how it works, but it brought me into a very deep, reflective contemplation about the person, the being I am, in a way that was similar in some respects to meditation, but at another level it somehow had a potency that meditation for me at least doesn't really engage. The fact that you're doing it in a ceremonial setting, I think also contributes a great deal to this, and also it has to do with the questions that you bring to

a great deal to this. And also it has to do with the questions that you bring to the occasion. And in my case, it was the question of, you know, how can I, you know, how, what is my life being like? Can I really acknowledge that I've led a good life? I really wanted to sort of just ask myself those fundamental questions that often recur when you reach a certain age, when your life is running out. I've got a few 10, 15, 20 years to go perhaps. And I found it very helpful, actually, to have an occasion where I quite consciously

thought, sought to come to terms with what I've done in the course of my life at the Navy, other ways to do it. But for myself, I found this very helpful. And what I found as a result is that it enabled me to let go of certain negative habits that I hadn't been able to let go of through meditation and Buddhist practice. One was an attachment to alcohol. I stopped drinking after my first ayahuasca ceremony, and I hadn't intended at all to deal with drinking half a bottle of wine a day that I was doing. But once I finished with that ceremony, my body just said no.

It's finished. It's over, and I've not drunk a drop of beer or wine or anything since then. This is my last question. And it's could be completely off base. It's it was prompt. I didn't plan to ask this question. It was prompted by your last answer. And also just the moment I walked in the door today and saw you for the first time, your lovely wife, Martine, was with you. Is in the next room listening. I thought to myself, and it was, well, maybe it was just like the whisper of a thought that just crystallized as I was listening to your last answer, you seem lighter than in previous meetings. Not only that you've lost some weight that you didn't, you didn't appear to be overweight, but you seem to have lost some weight but there's something about your overall presence this time where I'm with you that you

seem a little lighter. Am I making that up or does that sound on base to you? It's very difficult for me as the subject to really have any sense of that but another thing that I let go of on a subsequent on the second ayahuasca experience I had was I let go of on a subsequent, on the second Iawasaka experience I had was I let go of my attachment to Buddhism. What does that mean? Well, for me, it means a lot. It means that somehow I didn't feel I had to justify everything I do in terms of whether it accorded with some text in the Pali Canon.

I see. Pali Canon being the ancient. The ancient text of Buddhism. And I realized that I'd become a little bit too preoccupied with making sure that everything in my life was in accord with at least my interpretation of the early Buddhist tradition. And I felt that somehow these ceremonies

had allowed me to let go of a kind of unhealthy identification and attachment to that tradition. And in doing so, perhaps a certain lightness, I've no way of judging that at all, and I trust what you say is perhaps a good perception, but I don't really know. Am I the first person to say that to you? No, others have said it too, actually. Others others have said it to the real person to ask is Martin she has on occasion commented on these things and she's no great advocate of plant medicines, but I think it did Effect a shift in my experience. I mean not one that makes me feel like a different person, but one that somehow perhaps has helped me lighten up a bit. Before we go, can you, can I force you to plug all of,

anything you want to plug, obviously the new book is art of solitude, but if you want to mention any old books or web presence or speeches you're going to give, anything you want to plug, well, we have you on the microphone. Okay. Well, one thing I'd like to plug is is that in on the 5th of March in Santa Fe, we're going to be presenting some scenes from an opera that I've written called Mara. I wrote this, I wrote the libretto a few years ago, Sherry Woods, who's a composer, composed the music. We've had a performance in the Rubin Museum a couple of years ago,

but we're still trying to get a full performance funded, hopefully, by an opera company. So in the fifth of March in Santa Fe, we're going to have three of the scenes with the singers and piano, which will be anyone who wants to come, or we welcome. And that's a project that I'd very much like to plug. Mara, a chamber opera, hopefully one day we'll find someone. And if you're out there, please contact me to get this onto the stage. That would be terrific. And we'll put links to your, and there's a list of your books in in the show notes, but again, Buddhism

without beliefs is for me the formative book in my Buddhist career. Thank you. So great to see you. Great to see you, Dan. Thanks for doing this. Thank you. It's a pleasure. All right, big thanks to Stephen.

And as he mentioned, his the event, the chamber opera that he wrote is tomorrow night, Thursday, March 5th in Santa Faye, New Mexico. If you want to attend, doors open at seven at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 107 West Barcelona, Rhodes, Santa Faye, New Mexico. If you're in the region or interested in traveling, not withstanding the coronavirus. All right, let's do some voicemails. Here's number one. Hi, Van. I just started listening to your podcast. I have listened to Good Money America, my entire adult life, it feels like, but my question is I'm almost 70 and is this too old start mediterine? Thanks.

Well, first of all, thanks for being a GMA consumer and now a podcast consumer. That's awesome. Appreciate your loyalty. Definitely not too late. I've seen data to suggest that meditation is particularly good for the aging brain. As long as you're you have the capacity to breathe and to be aware, I think you can meditate. And so give it a shot. I think it's a great thing to do. It may help you stay sharp and happy as you get older as a process that we're all going through.

So short answer, but it's not too late and good luck. Here's voicemail number two. Hi, and my name is Jen. I'm a GR doc in Colorado and I recently discovered your app after setting an intention of meditating more regularly in 2020. My question for you is, I have an hour long commute one way to the hospital I work at, and I frequently use that for podcasts, and I recently thought maybe there is a mindful way to start meditating during my drive, the significant amount of time over the course of a year.

So would you have any tips or suggestions for how to be more mindful or safely meditated during a rural commute. Thanks so much. I really appreciate all the information I'm learning so much from at your podcast. Have a great day, bye. Really glad to hear the podcast has been helpful. Thanks, keep listening and fell out the podcast survey. Until recently, I might have said,

there's not much you can do to meditate while you're driving because you can't close your eyes, obviously. But the truth is, you can be mindful doing anything. It's just paying attention to whatever is happening right now. And actually, that might make you a much safer driver. So I would direct you to, there is a meditation for driving in the 10% happier app. If you go to the, if you go to the singles section of the app, the single guided meditation section, and then go to the on the go section within there, there is

from Alexis Santos, the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, a meditation on that you can use while driving. And again, it just really has to do with just taking in the raw data of your physical and mental sensations as your driving. Yes, please do it and do it safely. Thanks again for both the voicemails this week and thank you to all of you for listening and thank you to everybody who worked so hard to put together this show, Lately Schneider is operating the boards right now we've got Ryan Kessler, Samuel Jones, Tiffany Homo-Hundro, and Lauren Hartzog. I will see

right back here next week. 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 by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey. survey at Wondery.com slash survey.