Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 264: The Brain Science of Enlightenment | Rick Hanson

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

Today we’re going to nerd out about what enlightenment (or, if that word is triggering, let’s just call it “high doses of meditation”) can do to your brain — and, more practically, how we can derive these benefits even if we don’t plan to spend decades living in a cave. My guest is Rick Hanson, Ph.D., psychologist and author of the new book Neurodharma. We go into the deep end, yes, but we also get very down-to-earth, talking about how anyone, including you, can “reverse engineer enlightenment,” and have “Nirvana operationalized in your nervous system.” Quick note that this was recorded right before the pandemic, but enlightenment is evergreen. Where to find Rick Hanson online:  Website: https://www.rickhanson.net/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/drrhanson Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rickhansonphd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rickhansonphd/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RickHanson Book Mentioned: Neurodharma by Rick Hanson: https://www.rickhanson.net/books/neurodharma You can find meditations from our world-class teachers and more wisdom from Rick Hanson on our app. Visit tenpercent.com to download the Ten Percent Happier app and kickstart your meditation practice. Visit tenpercent.com to sign up today. Other Resources Mentioned: Hippocampus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus U Pandita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Pandita Enlightenment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_in_Buddhism Nirvana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_(Buddhism) Robert Thurman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Thurman Mark Epstein: http://markepsteinmd.com/ Joseph Goldstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goldstein_(writer) Jhanas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhy%C4%81na_in_Buddhism Stephen Batchelor: https://www.stephenbatchelor.org/index.php/en/ Neurodharma Online Program: https://www.rickhanson.net/teaching/neurodharma-online-program/ More Books: https://www.rickhanson.net/books/ Being Well Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936 Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/rick-hanson-264 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. 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, today we're going to nerd out about what enlightenment or if that word is triggering to you, just think of it as high doses of meditation, can do to your brain, and more practically how we can derive these benefits,

even if we don't plan to spend decades living in a cave. My guest is Rick Hansen PhD, he's a psychologist, and he's the author of a new book called NeuroDharma. We go way into the deep end here, for sure. But we are also very down to earth in this discussion, talking about how anyone, including you, can reverse engineer enlightenment. That's his term. Another term that he uses that I like is that we can have Nirvana operationalized in our

nervous system. Quick note that this was recorded before the pandemic, but I'm of the view that enlightenment is evergreen. So here we go with Rick Hansen. The kind of dirty little secret in the growth world is that most positive, most beneficial experiences people have, useful, enjoyable, wholesome, leave no lasting value behind while due to the negativity bias in the brain, the negative experiences tend to get lodged right into us. So I've had a long standing interest in what could be called taking in the good, I think if it is really the fundamental process of social emotional learning and getting more skillful ourselves in helping the experiences we're having really

land inside based on some understanding of how the nervous system is most effectively changed for the better and how that boils down in concrete terms a lot is just stay with the experience for a breath or longer rather than channel surfing onto the next shiny object. First point, so if you're having a moment where you feel strong or determined or relieved or close to another person or you realize how to be more effective with your teenager, whatever it might be, maybe there's a sense of inner peace, maybe there's a sense of self-worth, maybe you just enjoy petting your cat in your lap. Stay with it for a breath or longer, so that in the famous saying, neurons that fire together,

wire together. So the longer you keep them firing, the more they're going to tend to be firing. Feel it in your whole body, second. The more the richer the experience is, the more embodied it is, the more it's going to tend to leave a trace behind. And then also another easy, good, simple, private, autonomous thing to do is to focus on what's rewarding about it. What's enjoyable? What's meaningful about this experience? There are different things that happen in the hardware that occur when you do these practices that increase the conversion of the experience to a lasting change of neural structure or function.

And for example, when you focus on what's rewarding about it, that increases the activity of dopamine and norepinephrine in your hippocampus, or two of them, technically, but people speak of them in the singular. So you have a hippocampus, and the pattern of activation and the moment that underlies the experience you're having, let's say self-worth or determination or commitment or inter-peace, the experience that you're having at the time, if there's increased dopamine and neuropinephrine activity in the hippocampus at the time, based on focusing on what's rewarding or enjoyable about it. Well, the pattern of activation at the time is flagged for prioritization and

protection and during consolidation into long-term storage. That's kind of a long way of putting that if you stay with the sense of enjoying and experience, it's going to more efficiently turn into a lasting change in your body. It's going to be more hardwired into your nervous system. So I'm just reaching for something in my own life and thinking about how I could operationalize Elasting change in your body. It's going to be more hardwired into your nervous system. So I'm just reaching for something in my own life and thinking about how I could operationalize this. I love my four-year-old probably, by the time this goes up, you'll be five, and I more than probably will still love him. And snuggling with him feels really good for him too. Yeah, well, I hope sometimes I feel like I'm co-worsing him, but that feeling, if I can

be with it and really take it in, all of it in my body, in my mind, then that is, it's registering in a more lasting way in my nervous system, which then may make me a more warm and affectionate person generally going forward. Exactly right. And the whole point of this is not to cling to the experience or crave it as a word or turn it into a thing, but rather to help yourself heal and grow through your experiences. And intuitively, people who are good growers, so are people who intuitively get the most out of a mindfulness

training or who get the most out of a therapy or anything, conversation with a friend. They tend to do this implicitly and teachers or therapists tend to have good results tend to do this implicitly and teachers are therapists who tend to have good results, tend to do this implicitly, but people usually don't systematically, a handful of times a day, really less than 10 minutes a day, probably closer to max, five minutes a day, slow it down to let the good learning land to help it sink in. And it's really striking to me as someone who's been involved in the growth business for a long time in both the Wild West forms of it and human potential and the buttoned up, you know

Juliard School of Music forms of it in terms of formal psychotherapy It's really striking that we tend to not focus on the actual how of growth and in particular We tend to not teach the skills of it to the people we work with. It's interesting. Fourth grade school teacher, a love school teacher, I had an awesome fourth grade teacher. Mrs. Hall. Thank you, Mrs. Hall. Shout out to Mrs. Hall. Anyway, they have a theory. They have a theory of what they're trying to do in terms of the kids nervous system. And they also are trying to help kids learn how to learn. You know, they're teaching them to be active learners.

They treat kids as active learners in memorizing the state capitals in America or something, but when we're working with other people, typically as teachers with therapists or coaches, we tend to not teach them how to be active learners in their own social, emotional, motivational, somatic, or spiritual learning. For me, that's a big missed opportunity. And so I've written a fair amount about that. And I think that that's a really important thing. What is the book about?

What does neurodermy even mean? Yeah. For me, it's an odd word, but what it really means basically is we can know ourselves in two ways, right? We can know ourselves subjectively in what is called the first person perspective, our own experience from the inside out. We can also know ourselves objectively through the third person perspective of science from the outside end. What's actually happening in the nervous system, what's actually happening in the body

when we feel all right, or strong and determined, but not frustrated and addicted and driven. What's actually happening? Or what's happening when we start moving into more and more stable qualities of well-being and inner peace that we can see demonstrated by our inner teachers or other people known throughout history. What's actually happening inside? So for me, neurodharma is where those two ways of knowing ourselves intersect.

There's the neuro, and then there's the Dharma. So Dharma, the way I use that word, is not restricted to Buddhism. Yeah, I use the Buddhist roadmap of the mind in a basically secular way to kind of orient us as we climb the mountain of awakening as it were. But Dharma basically just means truth, the truth of things, which for me is a very deeply scientific way of looking at things. What's the truth of things?

And then neurodharma is what's the truth of things, particularly what's the truth of various kinds of well-being, very well developed in the living body. So that's what it's about. truth of various kinds of well-being, very well developed in the living body. So that's what it's about. And I got really interested in taking a fresh look at the peaks of human potential. What is awakening? What is it to be awakened? What are the qualities that we see in people throughout history and in the present day?

Our models for us of stable mindfulness and kindness and inner peace and inner strength and authenticity and really being in the present moment and feeling connected to everything, like what's going on there. So what the book's about basically is seven qualities that I see in people who are really far along. I see them in myself. I see them in you, and it's about developing them, so we grow them by practicing them. So it's a book of practice. It's not a very magic carpet ride to the peak of enlightenment. I don't consider myself enlightened. I think enlightenment is when you're stably fulfilled and perfected in these seven qualities and irreversibly so, man. So the seven qualities are steadying the mind. These are practices too.

Study your mind. Let's think about that. These qualities are described in the book and then follow it up with practice. How do you develop this? How do you steady your mind these days? And including and very deep ways, how do you do that? Okay? Second, warming the heart, cultivation of compassion, kindness, sense of belonging, healing of old wounds that happen in relationships, feelings of inadequacy, insecure attachment, how do you actually practice with all that? Third, I call it resting and fullness. That's material related to equanimity. It's also related to what we were talking about earlier. About How do you stay in the green zone when you're challenged?

And how do you develop? There's a teaching from Upandita. It's a really pithy line. He says, the purpose of practice is to expand the range of experiences in which we're free. Really interesting. It's easy to feel great when, let's say, you're cuddling your four or five-year-old, that's really good. But how do you deal with rejection? How do you deal with physical pain, illness, challenge over time? Those are the range of experiences in which we want to be increasingly free. So, resting in

fullness, and then those three cluster together, steadiness of mind, warmth of heart, kind of a happy equanimity. And then the next three three cluster together, steadiness of mind, warmth of heart, kind of a happy equanimity. And then the next three also cluster together. I call it being wholeness. What I mean by that is accepting yourself fully and being less divided internally and increasingly having a kind of non-dual sense of awareness and the contents flowing flowing through awareness, it's just one single field of consciousness. Just unpack that for a second, because Nondual may be a bit of a jargon-y term for people. Nondual meaning there isn't me and here,

and everything else out there, there is not a duality between observer objects and subject. Yeah, let me unpack that. I just went right past that. So there are two kinds of non-duality, really three kinds, if you think about it. The first kind is internal in terms of our subjectivity. Very often we have a sense that there is an eye inside who is witnessing thoughts, reactions, plans, sensations, and so forth.

And that's somehow that's all happening in a kind of implicit field of awareness. It's possible, and you see people do it and I've developed this myself, it's possible for those distinctions to soften internally. So there's more and more of a sense of consciousness occurring without a sharply divided eye who's watching things. And there's more of a sense of consciousness occurring without a sharply divided eye who's watching things. And there's more of a sense of just being your mind as a whole, being the stream of consciousness in this moment and this moment as a whole. And what is good about that, and there's, by the way, a lot of neuroscience about each one of these things, when you move more into that sense, that holistic way of experiencing yourself, things taken as a whole.

The structure of suffering starts changing because the structure of suffering is part struggling with parts. Inner conflict starts to obey. And the other thing that's really neat about it is that when you move more into that sense of things as a whole, you begin to activate neural circuits on the sides of your brain, especially the right side, and you deactivate circuitry as it were, reduce activity and circuitry in the midline of the cortex, the front part of which is about stressful task oriented doing, but the back part of which is that default mode network where people go when they're doing a lot of ruminating,

including anxious ruminating, with a lot of self preoccupation, me, myself, and I. So when you move into more of a sense of things as a whole, you can just watch it. If you be aware of the sense of your body as a whole, breathing as a whole body, or the sense of breathing in a large part of your body all at once, like the whole torso,

left, right, left and right together, or as you get a sense of the whole space you're in, the whole environment, just watch your mind. Very quickly, you'll calm down. It'll be calmer. You'll have less sense of self-preoccupation, less sense of inner division. Really great, and that's just being wholeness.

The one after that, the fifth practice I call receiving nouness, everybody says, be here now, right? Power of now. Well, how? How do you actually do that? How do you come really close to the front edge of now? And there's neurology about how to do that, having to do with different circuits of attention that we have, and more fundamental circuits are involved with being alerted by the next new thing.

It's sort of like the front edge of the windshield of consciousness. So as you move closer and closer to the subject of now, you move closer and closer to the object of now, and as you do that, again, suffering starts falling away. It's what the great teachers have said. You're more in the moment. And technically, in the brain, you move closer and closer to the immediacy of perceiving what's happening now. And you become less engaged with neural processing that's full of worries and anger and preoccupations. Sometimes you need to do that. But most of us are not in the moment.

You know, you probably have heard about these studies where people are pinged routinely. Yeah. And they have a wandering mind on average 50% of the time. So let's say you're, or I, let's say you're more present than average. Well, that means a lot of people are gone 80% of the time, right?

And as mind wandering increases, so does negative rumination statistically. So we're more inclined to go negative than we're mind is wondering. So being able to stabilize in the present moment, particularly to be here at will, is a really useful strength to develop. So that's the practice of receiving nounness. And then I'll just finish on the last two, practice those. And these are things, again, we see in people who are really far along, we also know what they're like

in ourselves. We've all had flashes of these. Question is, how to stabilize it, right? So I call it opening into all of us. I'm reverse engineering enlightenment, in a way. I'm that's what I'm trying to do here. Like what goes on with people who are having these extraordinary, quite frequent, actually, about a third of the people in the world

report having had these kind of very non-ordinary, sometimes called self-transcendent, or non-dual experiences in the second sense of non-duality in that the boundary or line between me and everything else, soft ends, fade, sometimes just, boom, totally drops out. What's going on? And more generally, how can we cultivate a sense this peaceful in which we feel less of a beleaguered self struggling with the universe around us, divided from it, and more carried along and supported by a vast network of causes, so factors that is reality. So there's really interesting neurology about how to shift

from the kind of classic egocentric perspective. It's called that. It doesn't mean negatively. It's just self-referential where we're regarding what's happening around us from my perspective, then there's this other perspective that's much more impersonal and holistic, fancy term ford is hallow centric perspective, where we have a sense of things as a whole. And to kind of pull some threads together, when we are feeling internally divided and caught up in the default mode, let's say, and when we are doing mental time traveling down in the present, and when we have that kind of egocentric orientation to life that we're divided from it and separated from it, the

neurology was actually happening in our bodies for those three ways of relating to life, kind of come together. There are interrelated circuits that promote the sense of inter division, lost in the past or the future, and a sense of me, myself, and I, strong sense of self, on the other hand. When people have a sense of things as a whole in the present, peacefully connected with everything else, those experiences tend to come together and the underlying neural circuitry that promotes that way of being, those three qualities of being, is also interrelated. And with practice, we can train so that more and more stably we acquire the trait.

We develop that's lasting learning, lasting growth is trait. Instead of just a passing state. Yeah, exactly right. So, let me want to talk more about how to do that. You have in terms of just putting some meat on the bone, you have a nice phrase here, you shift from seeing yourself as an isolated, some reading from your book. You can shift from seeing yourself as an isolated actor, sometimes flailing against everything to feeling that everything is manifesting locally as you. Yeah, that sounds cool. It is cool.

But how do you do it? Practice. Practice really helps. And there are practices in the book. Oh, yeah, definitely. For example, I'll just kind of highlight some things here. So one really powerful practice is if you are do any kind of meditation and you can do it in an informal way, be aware of the sense of your whole body as you breathe. You can start out with your chest,

then torso, then whole body. So you have a sense of whole body awareness. And when you do that, it naturally tends to quiet activity in those midline cortices and increase activity in the lateral on the side of the brain networks that are involved in Gishtalt or holistic processing and as you do that you can again just watch your mind internal chatter will get quieter The lateral networks on the sides and the midline networks are connected like a seesaw. When one goes up, it pushes the other down. So as you increase that lateral activity, that those negative self-preoccupations or stressful

doing in the midline cortex decrease. So just doing that, that's a really useful thing to do. Another thing that's useful to do. But how does that get me toward feeling like the world is manifesting locally? Oh yeah, I'm moving there. Yeah. So now you have more of a sense of things as a whole. So right, but to go to the point, when you're contracted inside yourself, how can you feel like the world's manifesting locally as you, you know? So another thing you could do, just try it, is to lift your gaze out from your body toward the horizon. Naturally, as we bring the gaze closer, the egocentric perspective increases, right?

Is it going to eat me? Can I eat it? Right? Friend or foe? On the other hand, when your gaze moves out, 10 feet away toward the horizon, maybe up above, again, watch your mind. You'll naturally become more peaceful.

You'll have more of a sense of things as a whole. There'll be not such an intense sense of me, myself, and I. And in that process, you will be activating the Neural Circuitry of the aloecentric mode, and through repeatedly stimulating that way of being, you will strengthen those circuits over time because neurons are fired together, wired together, for example. There are other ways also to develop that more sense of alnus. A key part of that is to practice with a sense of

self. So in that sixth of seventh practice says the allness practice, that's where I drop in a lot of deep teachings about, is there a self, what is the self, what does it mean to be a person without presuming an internal entity inside that is a self in the way that I'm meaning that word. And there are things we can do to be more comfortable with regarding others and ourselves as persons who exist, who have rights, who have dignity, who have needs, who have responsibilities, as persons without being identified with, some unified, independent entity inside that we think is me. You know, this non-self or selflessness idea

that is central to Buddhism is confusing to a lot of people. There's a quote I've heard a third hand. It was from some allegedly from a Tibetan monk who said it to the scholar Robert Thurman who then said it to Mark Epstein, the psychiatrist who's written a bunch of books about Buddhism and psychology who said it to me or wrote it in one of his books that the monks is said to have said to Thurman, of course you're real. You're just not really real. And I like that. Because of course you are you, you've got it just as you said before, you're a person with rights, you get to get your pants on and make a dense employment, et cetera, et cetera. But if you look

closely enough on some fundamental level, you can't find some core essence. And that is very important thing to know. And the constantly budding your head up against that, the constant looking, really over time, I think is what pounds into your neurons, a deeper, felt sense of, oh yeah, I don't have to take this me so seriously and build up and defend it all the time. Yeah, it's really interesting that when,

as people relax the sense of self, and I mean that we're self not as the person as a whole, and that's a useful distinction, but as this presumption that there's some kind of entity inside, right, that's enduring and unified and independent. So when people relax that, when they relax ego, relax conceit, when they are less caught up in possessiveness, you know, my precious or superiority, I matter more than you or identification, you know, I am that, right? As they do that, they become more functional as persons.

They become more successful as persons. Why, that seems like a paradox. Why is that? There's a lot of defensiveness and stressfulness when we're caught up in trying to impress others or compare ourselves to others or judge ourselves routinely. And people can have compassion for persons, including a person that they are without thinking that there's some sort of entity inside over there. Now, there's another line, I wondered if you were going to quote this one that you have

to be somebody before you can be nobody. The Jack Angler, the famous therapist, said that. And so there's definitely a place for being on your own side and recognizing that the body is continually constructing a sense of the person process, that's how I think of it, that's ongoing, that's completely natural. But what's wild is that at this point, there's a lot of neuroimaging on what's happening in the brain when people feel like me or I in different ways, recognizing your own picture among other pictures, pulling up a personal memory, what's your stand on some big moral issue?

Can they have people do this while their brains are being scanned? Yeah. What's wild is that the patterns of activation are scattered all over the brain. It's like polka dots. There's everywhere in their brain. There are certain parts of the brain, like I said in the midline cortex, especially more toward the default mode end of it, that tend to be particularly involved, but self-thing, as it were, as a process is scattered all over the brain.

You know, we all want to feel special, but there's no place in the brain that's special for itself, right? Even though there's a lot of localization of function for all kinds of other things. And you watch it, these patterns of activation, light up, then they fade, it's like a Christmas tree. And you really get that this idea we have that our self is unified. You don't see that in the brain. It's spread all over the place.

The sense that we have that we are independent, no, the sense of self increases, decreases due to all kinds of causes, rises and passes away. And we have a sense that we're sort of enduring, you know. No, it's very transient. Just like you said, so as you said, when you look closely from that third person perspective on the brain, or when you look closely from the inside out, that first person perspective, you see that the defining characteristics of the conventionally assumed self don't exist.

I say this self is like a unicorn. It's a mythical beast. We can have... We can think about it. We can have experiences of what we think it's there. It's always implicit. It's never found. The whole package is never found. What starts to happen is that you lighten up about it, which makes you a lot happier. Yeah. I mean, my teacher Joseph Guilton said that one way to think about enlightenment is lightning up. Yeah. Much more of my conversation with Rick Hansen coming up right after this.

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Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Just continue to talk about how we mortals were not going to spend decades in robes practicing you get a taste of this Allness you have practices in the book where we can work meditatively toward this insight We also talk about we have some Cognitive exercises to get us to think about how small we are within the universe Etc. Etc. Etc. But then there are also some recommendations for a kind of like how to live your life that might bring us toward seeing this on a more regular basis.

And you have some bullet points here. Like one is a simpler life with less self referential task doing makes more room for an undefended, uncontracted receptivity to everything. And I saw that and I found it pretty provocative because my life is not that simple. Yeah, mine's not that simple either. I put that sentence in there a little bit to tell the truth about people who have simpler lives

who are more connected to nature. There's more room for the sense of this. Yeah, nature was the other thing you listened to. But I guess I guess so. So long sir, there's a reason why they have this experience like every Tuesday. Yeah. What it says though, for all of us, like I'm going to get on a plane pretty soon today. And I'll do little things multiple times a day. And the larger point is the bigger the challenge, the bigger the resources need to be. So if you want to cultivate a greater sense of taking care of business, you know, you have your ticket with you, I have my passport with me because my driver's license has expired and I haven't renewed it yet.

So you take care of business, but if you're interested in developing the sense of just interconnectedness and gratitude, really, for everything that is and the more of a sense of being carried along rather than oppressed, even though you recognize ways that you actually are oppressed, but by having more of a sense of interconnectedness, it draws you into a sense of resources and things that you can use. Well, if you want to cultivate that in a life like I have or you have, you really have to practice. So multiple times a day, I'll just sort of look like I'll step out on a busy city street pretty soon. And I'll look around and I'll just have a sense

of, wow, all this is here. So many things cause these skyscrapers to be here, cause the sidewalk, cause the taxis to be here. I'm part of a vast whole that's enabling what's happening right now and is kind of carrying me along to the next thing. Looking at an airport, as you land or take off, they're extraordinary places, so much human effort, so much technology, and that rests on previous generations of effort that have led to the capabilities we have today. Woof!

That draws me out. We're crazy. You know, I have a bottle of water here. I look at it, I go oxygen. Where did that come from? I came from exploding stars. We're breathing startups. And yeah, it totally goes to my geeky science fiction background, but it's also completely

true. And just little reflections like that in the flow of a day where you just kind of drop in. It's like, you know it conceptually. Can you feel it? Like you said earlier, you move from knowing it to feeling it. And if you give yourself that multiple little times a day, there's a proverb, you know, drop by drop as a water pot filled. Likewise, the wise one gathering it little by little,

fills oneself with good. And in these little drops, as well as, you know, if you could do a mega practice, like a weekend retreat or a day of meditation or 20 minutes straight, Great, but a lot of the other opportunities are to kind of weave these ways of being through practicing them again and again throughout your day, which to me is incredibly hopeful because it means that we grow through lots of little steps that we are responsible to take in your mind knowing can defeat you

but knowing can do it for you. That makes it real. You talked about big projects, or some, I don't remember the exact words, require a lot of resources. What are your challenges? Big challenges, yes. So I think, you know, this is a big challenge,

and some people think, well, I need to rip my life up to go experience this, and I think that is, if you can do it without hurting anybody, or yourself, then go for it. I have a lot of respect for people who become monks or become meditation teachers. It's been a lot of time on sound retreat. But you don't have to rip your life up. You just have to, and this is going to sound daunting, but make it the organizing principle

of your life, which you can do within the current context of your life. You can live your life by all intents and purposes, for all intents and purposes, or at least by every objective measure the same way, and that you're still going to the same job, and interacting with the same people. But if your orientation is, hey, I'm going to squeeze in meditation every day, and I'm going to do all these little practices, and they become just a part of your life at every day part. And then you're going off on retreat once a year, once every other year, that is a way in which it just, over time, I think it takes on a big momentum. That's huge, and that's personally what I've done.

Honestly, myself, and I think it's doable, that whole approach, I don't know if you accept this way of talking about it, but I've thought about your book. And I think that if people are 10% more practice oriented, what I really mean is more like 1%. If people were to increase by 1%, the number of breaths in a day, or minutes or seconds in a day, in which they were purposefully helping themselves grow in some way, helping something land, really trying to understand something, recognize what would be better to do next time when you're talking with your partner.

One percent, if people were a little, one percent were effortful, one percent were deliberate every day, they would definitely become 10% happier and maybe even more. Yeah. I agree. I often joke that the 10% compounds annually. Yeah. And so I do think this is the room for infinite expansion here. Final question for me, which is just, is there more to say about feeling part of the all in your life? And what does that mean? Because you do, you are writing a ton of books, you are treating patients and you're quite active in the world. And yet it sounds like you do, for some percentage of the time, feel like the world is manifesting locally through you. Yeah. That's accessible. There are people who've had these huge fireworks experiences.

I've had mid-range fireworks experiences, the problem is the fireworks usually fade. And then what do you do? How do you go forward in your life? But the kind of open-hearted, receptive, present moment, founded on, grounded on those three first practices, steadiness of mind, lovingness of heart, Aquanimous while being, those are foundational, then yeah, a lot.

You really can feel like a much softer sense of who you are and where you are, in a way that's really great, it's really accessible. I still work it on it, and I think that those fireworks experiences can often really help people, because their breakthroughs, they show you that's really great, it's really accessible. I'm still working on it. And I think that those fireworks experiences can often really help people, because their breakthroughs, they show you what's actually really true.

But through cultivation over time, people can definitely experience that while still being functional. Anything I missed? Oh, timelessness. That's seventh of this. Yeah, timelessness is really interesting. That takes us into the potentially third kind of non-duality as it were and a big area of controversy

and Buddhism and also elsewhere. In other words, when people are following the classic progression in the Buddhist training that basically says, okay, you're quiet, you're mind, you're steady, training that basically says, okay, you're quiet, you're mind, you're steady, you bring it to singleness, you move into the genres. That's the right concentration or wise concentration. Johnas are deep states of concentration. Non-ordinary is very, very non-ordinary. You're non-cansist anymore. And I write about them in the book, what are they actually characterized by? So you move through these already, not typical states. Usually experienced after days of not weeks on retreat, I've experienced them. And then you move into what are called the formless chanas where it gets really exotic. And then you drop into the unconditioned

dun-duh-duh. What is that? Right? So people have been arguing about that ever since. And do we understand the ultimate, the ultimate sense of unconditioned, the unconditioned or unfabricated, unconstructed? How do we understand that? And the Buddhist training is to encounter it in some way and be changed by it, and then be increasingly able in small ways, drop by drop over the course of a day to be in touch with it. So I wanted to honor that. And for me, there's a place of practice, there's a place for be more aware and be nicer.

That's kind of great, consider the alternative, right? That's great. And if that's all you want, that's cool. On the other hand, the path goes all the way to the summit. And I'm inspired by that. I think that on all, throughout the world, across multiple paths of practice, I think of them as different routes

up to the fulfillment of the heights of human potential, whatever that is, like different routes up the mountain to the peak. But on each of those different routes and different traditions, including secular traditions, you find the same steps, the same trainings in steadiness of mind, warmth of heart, wholeness, nouness, almos, and more and more deeply, what is unconditioned, actually? So one way to understand it is that we are unconditioning ourselves and we are getting more in touch with we are unconditioning from what is reactive, habitual, contracted, and pressured and we are opening

into what is unconditioned in our ordinary mind, the unconditioned field of awareness, which can represent anything. All right, that's great. Second way to understand it is that people are having extraordinary states of mind within ordinary reality. When they go through these cessation experiences, they drop into Nirvana, what is Nirvana operationalized? As you said earlier, what is Nirvana operationalized in the nervous system?

So I write about that. What might that actually be? So that's the second way to understand. We've seen Nirvana and the MRI. That's a great question. You've seen people in deep-johnis, and what's interesting is the brain doesn't look that different. But there are some key distinctions that seem like plausible neural correlates for what

the johnis are described as. So the third way, though, to understand it, and it's whether when someone is really, really developed in this way, or accessing pinpricks of this over the course of their ordinary day, are they accessing something that's genuinely transcendental, genuinely transcending ordinary reality. And in the book I talk about those different ways of relating to unconditioned, the unconditioned, unconditioning, with respect for both of them. If someone is purely secular, they want to stop at the first two, fine. There's a very strong tradition in Buddhist on this as, no, there really is something genuinely

transcendental that is transcendental and unconditioned and thus timeless. It's not impermanent, it's not subject to arising and passing away, and the ultimate aim of practice to have some access to it. That is a huge area of debate. I vastly respect people like Stephen Bachelors and others who very firmly trying to keep practice in a secular frame. On the other hand, most people in the world right now, right now, in the last 24 hours or right now, the majority of people in the world who are doing something contemplative are doing it with reference to something, Transcendental, for them it's in the frame of

something theistic, if you will. So I think it's important to honor that and try to think how might unconditionality intersect with conditioned or in our reality. And I go after that without trying to preach it to anybody. So anyway, those are the seven. I just take it so cool.

And what an opportunity, you know, to keep playing with it ourselves. And every day have a, you know, little opportunity to grow a little further and get a little deeper in those seven. Each one of them can be developed just as a taste or all the way, really, really fulfilled. And that keeps us busy a whole good life. Hey, man. Or saddo as they say in the Buddhist tradition, well said, let's do the plug zone. Can you just remind us in the name of the book,

your other books where you are digitally centered on a plug zone? Yeah, well that's cool. And of every show. That's good. So the book's called NeuroDharma, and I could add that I also have an online program that people can do that's experiential.

So it takes the book and has a whole bunch of guided meditation. What's the URL for that? Just go to my website, rikanson son.net, and then you can find it there rickanson son.net. And in that program, it was based on a 10-day meditation retreat I taught. So it has all the talks, has the guided meditations, Q&A, a lot of supportive materials. So that's the online program. That's a good companion, experientially, to the book.

Neurodharma. And you've written Buddha's Brain. Well, it's my sixth book. What else, what are the other book? Right. My first book was Mother Nurture, which is a... Which is a...

Yeah, in an obstetrician gynecologist, named Ricky Polykov. Basically, it's about promoting the long-term well-being of mothers past the postpartum period. And if we wanted to change the world, make our number one public policy priority taking good care of mothers. Hello, in a generation that would change everything.

I have very well-indegates to talk about that. You just tick off the names of the other books. Yeah, so Mother Nurture, followed by Buddhist brain, followed by just one thing, 52 practices, followed by hard-wearing happiness, followed by resilient, which I wrote with our son, Forest Hansen, Big Shoutout to you, Forest, who helps me do a podcast. I actually help him do his podcast, really, the being well podcast.

We try to learn from the master, Dan Harris then the most recent six book neurodrama. Excellent Thank you for doing it. Congratulations on the book. Oh, it's a real pleasure to do this and I appreciate your graciousness honestly and having me here You're free Big thanks to Rick. I also want to thank the team Everybody who works so hard on this show, Samuel Johns, is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman, our new producer, our sound engineers, Matt Boynton, and Agniesz Eshecik, of ultraviolet audio, Maria Wartel, is our production coordinator. We've got a ton of useful input from TPH colleagues, such as Ben Rubin, Jen Poient, and At Atobie Lives Levin. Also, big thank you, as always, to the ABC News, Comrades, Ryan Kessler, and Josh Cohan.

We'll see you on Wednesday for a fresh episode. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ 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.

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