Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 332: The Profound Upside of Self-Diminishment | George Saunders

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

There is a powerful scene in a novel called Lincoln In the Bardo, where President Abraham Lincoln has come to the cemetery where his young son, Willie, is soon to be buried. Willie had passed away at the White House where he had gotten sick. Lincoln is so distraught that he goes to the graveyard to get one last glimpse at his boy’s dead body. As the President is leaving, and in the grips of perhaps the worst psychic pain available to any human, he has an insight. His suffering, he realizes, comes from viewing his son as solid, when, in fact, they are both just “energy bursts” or “two passing temporarinesses.”  There is a reason this insight will be familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with Buddhism, and that is because the author, George Saunders, is a practicing Buddhist. Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English. Saunders has written ten other books, including the newly released A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is about how to become a better reader and that can tell us about how to live. This was an enormously valuable conversation for me, both as a meditator and as an author (because he has many, deeply useful thoughts about the craft). We talk about many things here, including: the “unified theory of brain,” how writing resembles meditation, his speculations about the afterlife, and a speech he gave on kindness that went viral.  Another order of business: In response to our ever-changing reality, we’ve done our best to use this podcast to help you figure out how to navigate our world. And as you know, the practice of meditation undergirds nearly all of the practical takeaways you hear us discuss on this podcast. Many of our podcast guests have also contributed to our companion meditation app, which is also called Ten Percent Happier. Our app helps you understand both how to practice meditation and how meditation can help you navigate our ever-changing world. We hope that you'll subscribe to our app to learn how to care for yourself and others during crises (which are, after all, inevitable).  To make it easier, we're offering 40% off the price of an annual subscription for our podcast listeners. We don’t do discounts of this size all the time, and of course nothing is permanent—so get this deal before it ends on April 1st by going to https://www.tenpercent.com/march. And here’s a link to Love & Resilience: The Contemplative Care Summit (March 25 - 29). And finally, be sure to check out The Science of Happiness podcast, available here and wherever you get your podcasts.  Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/george-saunders-332  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 podcasts. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, y'all, there is a really powerful scene in a novel you may have heard of called Lincoln in the Bardo, in which President Abraham Lincoln, a fictionalized version of him, has come to the cemetery where his young son Willie is soon to be buried. Willie had passed away at the White House.

That actually did happen. The boy had gotten sick and passed away. In the novel, Lincoln is so distraught that he goes to the graveyard to get one last glimpse at his boy's dead body. As the president is leaving the graveyard in the grips of perhaps the worst psychic pain available to any human being, he has an insight. His suffering, he realizes, comes from viewing his son as solid. When, in fact fact they are both, and I'm quoting here, just energy bursts, or two passing temporary misses.

A fascinating, but hard to pronounce, neologism. There's a reason this insight will ring a bell for anybody with a passing familiarity with Buddhism, and that's because the author, George Saunders, is a practicing Buddhist. His novel, Lincoln in the Bardot, won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Best Work of Fiction in English. Saunders has written 10 other books,

including the newly released, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is about how to become a better reader and writer, and what those skills can tell us about how to live a better life and writer and what those skills can tell us about how to live a better life. This really was an enormously valuable and by the way enjoyable conversation for me, both as a meditator and as an author, in part because as you'll hear, he has many, many deeply useful thoughts about writing. We talk about a whole bunch of things here, including his unified theory of brain, that's his term, how writing

resembles meditation, his speculations about the afterlife, a speech he gave on kindness that went viral, and the profound upside of self-diminishment. One timely bit of business before we dive in here. You can join me this weekend in an online summit called Love and Resilience, the Contemplative Care Summit. It's a free five-day online event from March 25th to 29th. It's being co-presented by Lions Roar and the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. That's the Zen Center where my wife and I train to be hospice volunteers. And actually, my wife and I appear together in this summit. We talk about our relationships.

So if you want to know more about what it's like to be married to me, you can go check it out. As I said, it's free and the registration is open right now. You can visit linesroar.com slash care linesroar.com slash care. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Alrighty. Here we go now with george sunders george sunders thanks so much for coming on the show really appreciate it thank you for having a lot of pleasure

i was telling you before we started rolling i'm almost finished with the brilliant link in the bar to some really excited and thrilled that we were able to get you to come on so i have a million questions to discuss. The first on my list is you used a term with my Compadre, my comrade DJ who is producing this episode of the show. You said you've been thinking a lot about what you called the unified theory of brain. What is that? Yeah, well, I was thinking about it because I read Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind. And so he talks, and there are a lot about the state of the mind on hallucinogens. And then I'm always thinking about the changes in the mind underwriting, you know, when I'm writing what's going on

in my head, because I've noticed that it makes me happier to write after the fact somehow I'm just in a better place, even if the day's been kind of crummy. Something neurologically is going on in my head because I've noticed that it makes me happier to write after the fact somehow I'm just in a better place even if the day's been kind of crummy. Something neurologically is going on that's pleasurable. And then also, you know, with that Lincoln book, I was thinking a lot about death and what happens in those moments, which even if you're a spiritual person, to some extent, it's a physiological thing that's happening at the end there. So I'm just kind of interested in the idea that at some future time,'ll be able to say this is what your brain is doing as it dies. This is what your brain is doing when you're creating art. This is what your brain is doing and you're meditating. And to me that seems like not merely the academic interest. It's everything really. But I don't have any answers yet. I just have the intention.

but I don't have any answers yet. I just have the intention. So the thinking is if we can get this unified 360 view of what the brain in the mind are doing, or actually specifically here referring to the brain, in these key activities of our life, that could lead us to a better understanding of how to live a better life all the time in every moment. I think we're doing it all the time.

I mean, I'm sort of even at 62, still stumbling towards some idea of how to start the day, how to get into it, what to do during it so that my experience stays within certain parameters. And we might call that being happy or being whatever. So yeah, I think that's the idea. I think actually people have been doing it for thousands of years, but they maybe haven't been able to use the scientific angle. What do you do to keep yourself within certain parameters that might be called happiness and outside the parameters on happiness? What are your modes? For me, writing is a real big one. I try to do that pretty much as long as I can every day, four or five hours, six hours.

And then also, I'm a Buddhist, my wife and I are a Buddhist. So we've been involved in meditation at sort of at different levels over the years. And those are the two things that I know how to do. And I think they're related somehow, but I'm not sure how. I kind of know that the more of those two things I do, and yet I'm in that kind of classic mode of going, yeah, I should do more of that.

I would be happier and yet somehow I don't. Um, I'm very familiar with that, with conundrum. Okay, so I have a ton of questions though based on the foregoing. So the, I want to get to the Buddhism in a second because obviously that's the primary obsession of the show. But when you talk about writing as something that is happiness producing. I start to feel very guilty because I experience writing as the worst thing in my whole life, except for like a few minutes, a few seconds, a few nanoseconds where I understand something or phrase something correctly or somebody

tells me they like something I've written, but the rest of it is halacious. And I know I'm not alone on this because just to give you some examples, there's that famous quote from who I can't remember. Nobody likes writing a book. Everybody likes having written a book. And the other is Philip Roth who after he finished his final novel, I believe put a sign up on his computer that said my long struggle with writing is over. So what are you doing that the rest of us

are failing to do? No, I mean, I don't think, well, first of all, it's only really been a pleasure for the last some number of years. I mean, when I was younger, it was just torment and all that. I think the only thing that's changed for me

is that I've written enough stories where I kind of understand that a period of frustration and self-loading is part of it. So when I get there, I don't really believe in it. I feel like I'm having a kind of an emotion, but I've also got a little bit of distance on it where I can say, oh yeah, this is the part where you're filled with self-loading or you're frustrated. You know, there's kind of two levels of torment in an emotion.

One is the emotion or the feeling, and then the second one is come from believing and the feeling as being something permanent or real. So for me, now I get to a place, I mean, I'm there now with the story I'm working on or I had to trash the last four pages and I'm kind of at a loss and I'm feeling a little bit inadequate

and a little bit frustrated, but there's another little voice going, yeah, that's how it always is. This is the part where it gets good. So I think it might just be the exhaustion of experience. And then too, there's something about my process, which is really, I think because of, I'm a little bit of an unclear thinker, I've had to develop this method of revising that's really rigorous.

It has a lot of rewriting and kind of ridiculous amounts. But knowing that that's the way it is, I'm a little patient with it. And that becomes part of the fun is ago, okay, I'm probably about a third of the way through this really, really long thing that will eventually produce something good. I guess it induces a kind of patient. So I actually at this point, I really do enjoy it and I kind of crave to do it. And this is maybe another topic. But the state of mind that I'm in when I'm doing it is I think what I'm talking about when I say it makes me happy.

It's something like meditation, and that afterwards I just feel better. What is it about the state of mind you're in while writing that resembles in some form or fashion meditation? Can you say more about that? Yeah, I think it just has to do with the lessening of rumination. So when I'm reading, it's so simple that it's kind of embarrassing but I'm just looking at my text reading my text as if I didn't do it and then really just watching some kind of internal meter in me that either likes it or doesn't like it. That's either pulled in or isn't pulled in and over over the years, I've learned to not narrate that process.

Just look at the text, feel it, maybe make a little intuitive change or a cut or something or keep reading. But in that mode, it's a high attention mode, maybe something like when you're playing sports or you're rock climber or something where you're not rationally deciding anything and you're not busy with concepts, you're just reacting. And so there, this monkey mind is quiet. And it's not quiet because I'm able to get a quiet,

but I just push it out of the way a little bit, it feels like with task focus. So I think that's the part that I've come to think is beneficial where the decisions that are making aren't being made analytically or conceptually, they're just kind of got instinct feelings. If that makes sense. Yes, it does.

And I wish I was able to do more of that because I do have, you know, in my own writing and whether it's writing introductions for the show or writing my next book, I can have other voices in my head that are not so helpful. I think that's the sort of really high level part that's interesting is that, okay, I say that the rumination goes quiet and I'm just concentrating. That's true, but second to second, there's all kinds of things going on.

Like, I'll get a part that's pretty good or pretty funny. And a little voice will go, oh, that's really good. The New Yorker's gonna love that, you know. And then there's gonna be an illustration. So then you say, all right, that's, sure, of course, that's all right. Then it's just a slight move to sort of go, okay, enough of that, let's go back to concentrating.

So I think these things, I guess that's where I make the connection to meditation is that these states are just second by second. And to some extent what I've learned in that whole process is to be a little bit loving towards all those voices, like the one that piped up about the New Yorker instead of castigating him or myself and saying, oh, you're sullying a sacred moment, you just kind of laugh it off and go, yeah, of course, you'd think that. Now let's get back to it, you know. So there's kind of a gentleness that's

involved that I somehow associate also with teaching. Let's not make any crises here. Let's just kind of have a sense of humor and trust a process and you know like that. It's so interesting what you just said because you just articulated probably better than I'll ever be able to do. What I think is probably the core thesis of this book that I'm writing right now, which is, can you have a warm, friendly, humorous relationship toward all of your ridiculousness and all of the darkness and ugliness, I often use the expression, you know, instead of slaying dragons, which is quite a hostile approach, can you give the dragons a hug? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that's right. And especially if you to me that whole question comes down a little bit to when you despise yourself or when you are crazy about yourself, what is it that you're despising or being crazy about so and a certain way a person who's never wrong. Is ontologically or whatever related to the person who's never right because they're both so self celebratory basically, you know that it's so think with writing, the fun thing is you've got all these different voices in your

head. And you start to realize that none of them are you, like capital Y, you. They're just, they're almost like just people who are walking by shouting at you. You're sort of destabilizing that sense that the self is at the middle of everything and it's permanent, which living, you know, I mean, we have the monkey mind that tells us that person is so real and so important and so cool, or so real and so important and so terrible. But in writing, it somehow it reminds me that there's a whole bunch of, I use a technical phrase or brain parts that are constantly going on, these little voices and our heads and little instincts and habits and feelings that

really, they don't exist. They're just kind of temporary and our heads and little instincts and habits and feelings that really they don't exist. They're just kind of temporary and they come and go. Is there something you invoke to the Buddhist concept of, you know, not self or selflessness that there isn't some core nugget of you that we can find between your ears somewhere? Is that concept more alive for you as somebody who has to inhabit other selves and bring them onto a page? I think it's it is in, well, in this sense that when I'm doing that, what I'm really doing is going deep within myself to find a corollary of that person. So in other words, if I have a bitter 97 year old man in my story, I'm trying to find him within myself. And the thrilling part is that I can, or I can find,

I'm trying to find him within myself and the thrilling part is that I can or I can find you know close enough and I had There's an Israeli writer at Cri Carrot. It's just a wonderful writer in mind in person And I heard him one time talking about his parents or Holocaust survivors and at one point he sort of said, you know dad I know I could never understand what you went through and his dad said nonsense. You've been cold you've been hungry You've been scared you've've been hungry, you've been scared, you've been tired, just more of that. You know, so I think part of when you're making a character in a story, you're really not, I mean, it's quite impossible, I think, to know somebody else's experience, but you can say to yourself, okay, that person, there must be a corollary of that person within me. So the writing task then is to believe that, to really believe it, and then have confidence

in your ability to sum it up that corollary to within the approximation needed by the form. Can you sum up that empathy in your relationships with other actual human beings? I would say it's not really, it's kind of empathy, but it's almost more mechanical. Like for example, in a story, if you say Bill was a blowhard, then in revision, you're going to want to put some meat on those bones and you're going to want to be specific about, why do we say that? So, you're going to have Bill say something.

What tends to happen is once you force yourself to do that, Bill is going to say something that yes, includes the concept of blowhard, but also takes it a little further or makes it more specific. So you find out that he's a blow hard with a particular issue of feeling inferior. Okay, then you revise it again. Slowly the blow hard fades out of the picture and he becomes a very specific person with a feeling of inferiority because of something. So as you go that direction, I don't know that I'm really feeling more empathy for him. I mean, he's not even a person. He's just some words on the page.

But I'm putting myself to an exercise of increased specificity, which I think you would say is increased attention, I.e. increased love. So then when you go out into the world, I think there is some residual habitual after effect. Somebody cuts you off in traffic and you go, ah, and the projection comes up. And then maybe in a moment there, you can at least say to yourself, you know, what I know from writing is that's a first draft. And if I actually was in the car with that person, I would have a different story.

So maybe you can sort of fake it so you make it kind of thing. The way you just talked about it, sort of, and I don't know if this was conscious or unconscious, but kind of diminishes what seems actually pretty powerful. I mean, being able to sort of on a cellular, molecular level, understand I could be anybody else. And maybe if you want to be really Buddhist about it, maybe I was those other people.

And that just boosts my ability to put myself and other people's shoes and reduces my capacity, which by the way is gigantic for being judgmental. Does any of that, what I just said, make sense? 100%. I mean, when you're reading a story, the person that walks by you on the sidewalk that you instantly categorize and reject or whatever, you know, you turn around and follow them and then the writer puts you into that person's head for seven or eight pages. So yes, it definitely reminds you that other people are just as real as you are. And I think it also, for me, it just strengthens my confidence that I can make that jump. I actually can mechanically make it for other people.

And I guess I'm just trying to say that when I'm writing, I wouldn't want to give the impression that, you know, I imagine a character and I just love her so much. And so then she's totally there for me. It's much more in the writing part of it for me. It's much more mechanical, more like, well, if you start out the first period of the story with the character below you for fun, you know, and then she stays there, well, you've got a technical problem, which is stasis, you know, that the relation between you and the character hasn't changed, and therefore the relation between the reader and the character hasn't changed, whereas if you keep looking closer at her and forcer to do things and forcer to say things and

kind of forcer into clarity, then that's kind of a scale model of what we're talking about, about the process of a human being starting out vague and maybe dismissible and then becoming clear and equal. So I think it is true what you're saying. I mean, empathy is definitely part of fiction writing, but I always feel a little funny saying it because I wouldn't want to convey the idea that when I'm writing it, I mean, some transported state.

Now, I think meditation is much more effective than writing. It's just many, many more times more effective in it. And I think that's a totally different kind of deal. I'd be curious to hear about your meditation practice. I understand you practice nyingma, Buddhism, am I pronouncing that correctly? Yes. Yeah, and it's kind of been, I guess like everyone's

meditation practice has been all over the place. There've been some periods of real high intensity. And now it's not so intense. But I think for me, the biggest thing that I've probably learned in this life is just that, you know, there is variability in the state of the mind. And so being a practitioner and meeting people who are real practitioners, not beginners like me, you just see that their practice has changed the way their minds work and that has changed the way they are and they're amazing. You know, so I think if nothing else, if I don't take anything else from this life, then

we would just be noticell. Your mind is not fixed. And there are these ways to change your mind. You know from experience that people who have gone to that trouble and submitted to a tradition are living lives that seem quite rich and amazing. So do that. Can you educate me a little bit on Nyingma Buddhism? Nyingma. It's Nyingma. Nyingma. Yeah. You know, Dan, I really, I kind of can't because I think I'm so much a beginner that I would feel really shaky doing that. I think sort of the best practice

at this moment would be to dimmer on that and not talk about it too much. What has practice done for you? Well, you know the biggest thing I I You know when we first started my wife and I were a Piscopalians and then She was trying to find a Christian meditation practicing couldn't quite put her hands on one so she went to a Buddhist retreat and Started practicing and then I immediately noticed that she was different. There was something More patient and kind of just fun and like like she was just, we would get to those places, you know, where you have, you've been married a while, you're going to have fight 60 or whatever it is and you know how it's going to go. Suddenly she just wasn't going to do that, you know, and it was like really freeing, you know, for both of us.

And so I thought, I don't want to, some of what she's having. So I started just sitting a little bit and kind of on my own like with no instruction. And the first thing I noticed was that there was just like a split second more of time between thought and action. And we had little kids, so that was helpful because if I start about grouchy or something, that split second would stop me from being grouchy out loud. And I really thought that was incredible.

And then as I got more into practice, I noticed that I became aware that my mind had a preset quality to it, which was sort of kind of defensive. And because defensive, it was a little bit negative. So if I went to a party, I would often just kind of start making fun of it in my mind a little bit. And I was pretty good at it. So it's just a sliding clinician to be uncomfortable with comfort, you know, to not, if I start feeling happy, I would kind of swore off it. If I started feeling genuine positive emotion, I would kind of bounce off it like a stone

on water. The big thing about that was that I, with practice, I realized that that actually wasn't me. That was just a tendency, you know, it was like a hitch in your golf swing or something. So there was just a period where I was like, oh, so this person that I thought was me all along and had all those kind of negative traits, it's just an overlay and it can be worked with. And so the way, so the immediate effect of it in my work

was that I noticed when this story was taking an auto swerve towards the negative, you know, when it was taken sort of the easy path or the kind of negative path. And that's actually where Lincoln and the Bartle came from, partly. The idea that I don't have to take that path. If the mind is saying, do this auto-dark thing, you can pause a second and consider some other options. That was a big deal.

I think that's still where I am, with the slightly snarky negative defensive mind, but with a dim awareness that that's not necessarily facing. So you don't have to be owned by your mental habits and conditioning, you can sometimes catch it and make a different decision. Right. And for me, the longer term thing is that plus if one really worked at it, you could go deeper in that direction. And I always think if the definition of a spiritual life is just the knowledge that your mind isn't always the same. If you think of the worst day you ever had, the grouches you ever wore, the most dismal

everything it ever seemed, okay, that was real. Then you think of the day on which everything was luminous and wonderful and you felt free and you felt generous, that was real. So therefore, there's a continuum there and the really lovely, hopeful thing is that people have showed us how to be more often in the second condition than the first. So that's good. My stick as a public evangelist for meditation basically is the good news is that the mind is trainable. I really believe that. That is incredibly good news. It's huge.

Especially when you get the sense that the world doesn't exist in the pen of the state of your mind at any moment. Then suddenly there's all these doors that could fly open. The other thing for me at 62 and with this preoccupation with writing that is so strong and I love it so much, it also has struck me how it's kind of like if the settlers got to America and said, oh, the good news is there's a whole country out there and then they sat down, you know, which is what I put what I'm doing.

So in other words, the ego I'm finding is so amazingly stubborn. And at 62, I can kind of say, oh boy, this is something that one should start young and do with great fervor. The progress that can be made is tremendous, but it really is, it's really like ruling that stone uphill, I think, no matter where I go, the ego is there. And it's always a little bit smarter than I am. So I can be in the middle of being on a stage. So we're talking about these ideas and be aware that I'm getting very conceited about it. And I'm so, I'm such an advocate for selflessness. I'm great, you know what I'm saying? But the seeing of it allows you not to be so owned by it. And then I feel proud about that.

on by it. And then I feel proud about that. So were you saying that you sort of part of your ego is that you're so invested in this writing thing that if you could turn down the volume on that, you'd practice way more so that you got better at more positive mind states? Yeah, I'm not sure, you know, that's where it gets tricky because I don't think the answer is for me is to forego writing and just be a full-time practitioner because I think that's all for me the desire for attention and the desire for accomplishment and the more legitimate desire to do something wonderful and pros. Those are such strong desires that I think that's kind of what I have to work with. So it seems to me that the trick would be to use writing as part of the overall practice. And I think I've done that with different degrees of success, but I don't know if you feel those,

but as I'm getting older and when you see people that you care about passing away and so on, it does make me think of changing the mix a little bit. That's put it that way in a favor of meditation, which I think it's a nice idea, and I like the idea that writing might be related to meditation, but for me, it's really important to keep in mind that they're not the same. And meditation is, if your goal is to realize these ideas that we're talking about in your body and not just in your head, meditation

is the much more powerful route. Let me try a few things out on you. One is in Buddhism, as you know, meditation was part of an eightfold path toward enlightenment or a fully lived life. And I could, it's probably easier for me to do than for you to do, but I can easily frame your writing as service. I mean, like having spent the past couple of weeks reading Lincoln and the barto every night before I go to bed, that has given me an enormous amount of pleasure.

It's all inspiring. So why couldn't you just frame the writing as just another aspect of the eightfold path. Well, thank you. I think I do. I think I do. But I also notice in myself, it's just interesting. When you have something that you love to do as much as I love to write, you see that even that is made up of all different kinds of vectors. So the purest part for me is when you're working on something, and a solution comes to you and you take it,

that kind of, you know, responding to the form in a really genuine, honest way. And then there are other things, you know, which have to do with ambition. They have to do maybe with surrendering to the fictional world and being less attentive to the real one. It might have to do with a move that I've done where you say, yeah, I've got some things to work on, but in this life, I'm just going to work on writing. So I think it's really, it's absolutely part of the whole, but like everything else in the world, it's a matter of the mix. One of the things I talk about in this Russian book is the idea of how much human beings love autopilot, meaning I'm going to

decide once and for all that I'm going to dedicate my life to X. There's such a relief to do that, because then you don't have to worry anymore. You just do X. But I think that's a sort of a weak position. You know, the truth is that life always requires us to juggle many things at once. And the virtue of the life depends a lot on the acuity with what we've done, the juggling. So I think that's where I am. I'm just thinking writing is one really intense thing Practices another intense thing and of course family just to get the mixed writers really the the trek and what I tend to do like with that Lincoln book I went into a zone of just I was writing 12 14 15 hours a day Which isn't really sustainable?

So I know I'm just kind of at this stage of life just trying to look down the road and see what's the mix that I want to do in the remaining years. Yeah, I mean, that seems like the question we should probably all be asking ourselves all the time. And what I heard in your answer there, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, is that, yes, sure, you can frame your art as a kind of service, a gift to the world, but also there are pitfalls within that, like getting sucked into the fictional world to the detriment of your actual life, et cetera, et cetera. Exactly, yeah.

And I have a feeling, you know, at the end of the day that there probably isn't, I know I get a little bit addicted to having a stance, you know, okay, here's how I'm gonna do it. But my life to date has been a sequence of having those stances totally messing them up, recovering, having a new stance, contradicting that one. So I'd almost like somebody who is crossing

or frozen pond and, you know, they'd like to skate very gracefully and beautifully, but they just are stumbling all the way across the pond and every five minutes are saying skate right, skate right, and then they stumble off and they're dead. You know, for me, skate right, and then they stumble off and they're dead. You know what I think that, for me, that's part of the thing is that perfection is not really the game, you know.

Yeah, so to be okay with all of it going on at once, I think. I think I said this to somebody, maybe on this show, that I've been an idiot my whole life up until six weeks ago. I always go, yeah. Right, right, right. I'm reading Don Cuyhoody, and that seems to be part of that book is the idea that there's a guy who believes really fiercely in something, and sometimes it serves him well,

and sometimes it doesn't, and that kind of long view of a life as a series of blunders coming from a central source. As opposed to my model of life, I got to a certain age, and then I figured it out, and it was all clear sailing from there But I don't see that in my future really Well, you're a few years it'll just a few ahead of me So I'm relieved to hear that I can drop that ideal I want to go back to something else. I heard you say that scan to me at least as self-critical

And I'm picking up on it because it's first of I'mical, and I'm picking up on it because, first of all, I'm not even sure I've picked up on it correctly. So again, you'll correct me if I'm wrong here, but I picked up on it because it's a type of self-criticism. I've, this is a rabbit hole I've gone down many times. And I had a conversation with somebody who helped me kind of unravel it, untangle it, and I wanna see if it lands for you.

You said something before about being kind of addicted. I believe to the praise of writing and the people liking what you do, and I think you framed it as maybe not so positive, and I don't write as well as you do, and I don't encounter the kind of accolades that you do. But to a certain extent, I've had people say, you know, thank you so much for whatever you wrote or your podcast or blah, blah, blah. And I really like that more than I care to admit.

And I've carried around a certain amount of shame around that. And a friend of mine, Jerry Kallona, said something to me like you could kind of maybe reframe that as an exchange of, and this is a big word, but love between you and the audience. You are getting that love from the audience, and that fuels your ability to do more work, which of course, that work is ideally in service to the audience, and that can create a virtuous cycle. Does any of that land for you?

Oh, sure. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I tell my students, you have to kind of Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. I think so. I mean, I and I tell my students, you know, you you have to kind of To do the hard work of art. You have to use what you have So if you are a person who has craved attention or fame or praise or whatever you've craved I don't think you can just suppress that you know and pretend that it doesn't happen It's kind of like hunger, you know, if you get up in the morning and you're hungry We'd look strangely as someone said, oh no, but I can't. That's low. I deny that urge.

I think you just have to use the energy in a functional way. Especially in art, I think that's maybe the whole thing is to skillfully use those motivations so that you're kind of extracting out the negative and keeping the positive. That's really what's happening in the best cases. I'm taking this need for attention and then running it through this, through the machine and purifying a little bit. So you're taking all the oomph of it, you know, and using it to take that artistic object to the highest level. And likewise, if you go to do an event, you get a lot of positive energy and the trick is to kind of extricate out the

part that's reifying your bad ideas about yourself, you know, your positive self and so on, and keep the stuff that helps you do good work. So the way I see it is, you know, we're born in this world and instantly we're the center of the universe, we're the star of the movie, and all these nice bit players, our parents and friends and family and the country of England and so on are there for our enjoyment. Then, you know, you get older and things start breaking down. You make mistakes, you lose love, you hurt people, you do unkind things, you go bald, your knees start going out. And all that is kind of a blessing because it's the world's way of saying, guess what? You really weren't the center of this and you really weren't

Ever meant to go on forever. So we're just giving you a message But then I think there's a can be a kind of a subsidiary challenge if anything goes right in your life then You know, there's a little voice inside you that says see you were right You really were the most important thing So I think that's where you know for, the kind of public life becomes a little fun because it wants to tell you that you're more important than you are. And all your life you've been learning through living and also through your art that you're not as important as you are. So it becomes a little bit of a clash, I guess. But it's, you know, it's all manageable.

And I think for me, a lot of the fun of this is that it gives you something to work with, some to play with, and play with, and some challenges. I love that. Speaking of challenges, I wanted to ask you about this viral commencement speech you gave on the subject of kindness, which is a challenge for many of us in certain circumstances. Before I dive into my questions about your speech, do you mind just describing the basic thesis? Oh, sure.

I had been asked by my university by Syracuse to do a little speech at this convocation and I thought, okay, I should do it. And I had a graduation speech that I'd given to our daughter's six straight class a couple of years ago before anyone over pretty well, so I thought, okay, I'll just use that one. And then two or three days before the talk

and I couldn't find that speech. I just, I never, I haven't found it since. I just lost it. So I kind of rewrote it from memory. And the basic idea was just that, you know, like, you've got this old guy up in front of the crowd. And what does he have to offer you really? And really what a normal person has to offer is just to kind of the experience of looking back over all those years and seeing what he did right and what he did wrong. And so what I said was that I didn't really regret anything. I'd made some really stupid mistakes in my life and really gone off into the weeds.

But I don't really didn't mind that so much. But I what really did kind of stick was the times when because I was a little anxious or a little self-fisher or a little distracted, I had failed to do even a small act of kindness for somebody who really could have needed it. And as an example, I just used this one girl, a bathroom grade school, who was kind of not a real popular kid and had some issues and took a little bit of heat from it. And I remembered several times trying to engage with her and it was just too risky, you know. So looking back, I thought, oh, geez, you know, that was somebody's daughter. And if I'd been a little braver, I would have gone ahead and engaged and I would have maybe

tried, you know, maybe found a way to ease her way a little bit. So that was the talk. And I think kind of the background was that I wanted to say to these graduating kids that kindness is something that we, we live by it. Every day you get up and you're doing a lot of things for the people around you to try to make their life better. But somehow it doesn't have an intellectual presence. In other words, when we talk about things in a lecture, we don't often cite kindness as a real concept. And I think that's a fly.

It makes a kind of dysfunction in our public life. If what we live by doesn't have a place in our intellectual discourse. So that was the talk. And it was also fairly light. I was aware that I was going to give it in this big sports stadium to a bunch of people who probably would rather have been elsewhere. So it was kind of light and I did. And it didn't really, you know, there wasn't much reaction.

And in fact, there was a little reception afterwards. And I was kind of trolling through there, you know, looking for some praise and none was forthcoming. And then a couple months later, it was posted and went viral. So then suddenly you become the kindness guy, which is kind of a mixed blessing. Kind of messes up your bank robbery career. But...

When you say you would like kindness to have more of a role in our intellectual life, what are you envisioning there? Well, I mean, a lot of that idea just came from reading Dharma texts and seeing that the great practitioners, they assume that there is a thing called kindness or compassion, and it's real and it's important, and it certainly isn't separate from human activity. I mean, it's kind of what we're all, I mean, in my view, we're all trying to get there really. That we, if you look back at your life, the moments when you're in that state of heightened generosity

or love or whatever, those are really powerful. The state you're in when somebody has just passed away or when you've, you know, someone has needed you and you've responded. So it seems to me like in the East, they understand this as a, I mean, I think they'd find it laughable to think about philosophy with that out of it. But in our culture, it seemed like that's sometimes seen as a little bit as a kind of frothy hallmark thing that yeah, sure, you can be kind.

And I think it's because we mistake it for niceness. Kindness and niceness aren't, well, we can talk about it, but they're not the same thing. And so I think for young people to be told that not only is kindness possible, it's really the core of who they're going to be. It's kind of a, you know, a useful thing to tell them.

You will be surprised that I'm going to ask this question, what is, in your mind, the difference between kindness and niceness? Well, yeah. To me, it seems this way, like, okay, if you think of kindness as being in a state to benefit to people around you, now for a minute we'll just leave blank what that means to benefit. So then your question becomes how do you do that? So if you woke up one morning and you would pledge yourself to kind this and you go to the coffee shop and you see that the barista has been crying. Okay, so then you're the kind this person, what do you do? And I would say that you know based on what I've told you, you can't know what to do. Because we don't really know why he or she is crying, and we don't really know who that

person is. So therefore, it's kind of hard to understand, hard to know what would benefit her or him. You know, so then suddenly kindness expands and becomes well awareness, you know. So in that instant, when you're stepping up there and you notice the tears, there's some quality of data gathering, I guess, that I would say is related to the quietness of your mind, maybe, how open are you to the actual data? Relatedly, you would watch your own mind to not be pushing too hard. If you have a savior complex, you might override the existing data. You

might not see what she actually needs. So it might be that kindness would just be to shut up, you know, shut up, take your coffee and go home or in another scenario, it might be that saying just the right thing would really ease her way. But suddenly you're in a whole different realm where you're talking about awareness and then how, well, okay, what is awareness? How do we cultivate it? And you then you're off to the races in all kinds of interesting ways. But, you know, the kindness thing is like, when I toured for that book that was made of that speech, and I remember doing this radio show

and we were talking about kindness and how nice it is. And I had two calls in a row. The one guy said, he said, like, yeah, I love what you're saying about kindness. It's the most important thing, but a lot of people are too stupid to get that. So that one example. And then, and then a lady called up and she said, I think you're so right about kindness. And I think Americans are such kind people really, not the European so much. So I think kindness is a virtue that people can kind of fold into whatever it is they already believe,

and not have to move too much if it, you know, if kindness is just niceness, that isn't it because if the baby is crawling towards a light socket, niceness might not be kindness. You got to get her away from there. So I think it's a kindness itself is a very complicated concept as I found out after I wrote this little speech about it. Kind of see if I can reflect that back to you. So niceness would perhaps be a surface level sort of bland agreeability, the baby's crawling toward the light socket and you're commenting on how nice the baby's outfit is

as opposed to kindness, which is alert, aware, ready to respond with what is needed. Maybe always, as my teacher Joseph Goldstein says, holding in your mind the question, how can I help? Yes. Was that the inaccurate description of the difference? That's a beautiful description. I think, too, sometimes I've understood kindness to be kind of that somebody drives a spike through your head and you say, oh, thank you for the coat rack. Sometimes a little bit of pushback and a little bit of genuine anger

might actually be the most helpful thing. But the trick for me is I don't really, I can tell I don't have the tools to make that kind of judgment at this point in my life. And I feel that every day something will happen and I'm like, I don't know if I should be forceful or so I think that's just where practice comes in because there have been times when I was doing more practice and I felt a little more confident about my ability to

inflect things to the positive, which makes sense. Because again, if you're practicing, you're kind of, you know, hopefully you're in a state of higher awareness and less neediness, so you're not always trying to inject yourself into things just because you're there and so on. Much more of my conversation with George Saunders coming up right after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will be your resident

not-so-expert-expert. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest

job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. Hey gang, Dan here again. I just wanna do one little bit of business before we get back to the interview with George Sonders. I wanna take a hot second here to recommend another podcast that I really think you guys would enjoy.

It's called The Science of Happiness. On each episode, the host was who's a friend of mine, a psychologist named Dacker Keltner, who has yet to come on the show. Dacker needs to come on the show. Anyway, Dacker has guests on every episode. Try some science-backed practices to help them feel more connected, come, and resilient, and then we hear from experts about why these strategies work. The Science of Happiness has just come out with a great new series about music. They explore what draws us to melodies and rhythms, why can it, for example, sue us to sleep.

On the first episode, David Byrne, the former frontman of the Talking Heads, shares how music can help us communicate and connect. The Science of Happiness is produced by PRX, and UC Berkeley is greater good science center. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts Okay back now to my conversation with George Saunders You take the speech to a pretty to my eyes pretty deep place. I just want to read a

It's okay with you. I like to read one little bit of it and see if you can comment on the backside with you, I'd like to read one little bit of it and see if you can comment on the backside. So here it is, the quote. And so a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you, as you get older, yourself will diminish and you will grow in love. You will gradually be replaced by love. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won't care what happens to you as long as they benefit.

Can you say more about this process of kind of turning down the volume of you and what it is that rushes in when that volume goes down? Yeah, you know, in the Catholic faith, they used to have a hymn that went, we must diminish and Christ increase. And I thought that was really beautiful. But you know, that part that you just read,

I got so much flack for that because people would say, oh yeah, so you're saying, as you get older, you get kinder. Let me introduce you to my husband. You know, so I think there's probably a crossroads moment as we get older, you know, where either you do get kinder or maybe if you haven't a dresser and thing, I suppose you just get

more bitter, it's possible. But I think that for me, self-diminishment is really related to monkey mind. Like if you, if I look at myself and say, what is it that keeps building George up every day? Why does that guy keep showing up? And it's these thoughts that I have as I'm walking around my house that always seem to have me at the center of them and always are reifying what I already am in some way. And I think those are the things that prohibit

self-diminishment. And those are the things that recede a little bit for me during meditation and during writing. And also I think during when I'm reading or listening to a piece of music. So self-diminishment is not, you know, running yourself down. It's not self-flagulation or self-deprecation. It's turning down the volume on self-centered thinking so that the aforementioned, how can I help attitude might emerge? And I guess that might be synonymous with love. Yeah, and also the self-deprecation

is a form of self-aggrandizement also. If somebody told me that the phrase, back-drow, eagle, where if you're saying, I'm the worst person at this party, you're kind of saying you're the best person at the party, or at least you're the dominant person at the party. So I think the self-diminishment that I'm talking about is maybe more like, I mean, I always go back to this example, but in some day that you care about has passed away, something happens internally where you just aren't somehow you understand the correct proportions of the universe for a couple of minutes or hours or days or something.

So I think that's more what I'm talking about. The intellectual idea that I get, which is that this self is a construction, you know, the, I guess the brain constructs this thing called a self, probably for Darwinian reasons. That thing is, it's a fiction, you know, and we know it's a fiction because for me, that thing didn't exist in 1957. And then suddenly there it is, you know. So I think to somehow get that to get the habitual every moment belief in the reality of that self, that that's the real job. And I think all those other things we're talking about, kind of some love. I think I've had the feeling sometimes that when that self-making monkey mind goes quiet,

that other stuff just kind of comes in naturally, you know, like water into a basket or something. Right. I'll say loyal listeners know exactly what I'm about to say, because I quote this all the time, but the Tibetan definition of enlightenment as far as I understand it the word Enlightenment translates into in Tibetan clearing away and of bringing forth Hmm, right, right. So that's the dream You know, and and I think to you know, we get those little glimpses of that is It's not like it's some disinsure that we never get to, but in

little moments, you get little looks at it, I think. Is there a difference in your mind between love and kindness? Probably not, really, ultimately, I can just remember moments where there was somebody in front of you who needed something and you saw it really clearly. And then it was obviously what you should do. That seems to me like, love causing kindness maybe. But you know, sometimes like, I often think, if you were in a park and there were some people playing Frootbean nearby and the throw went astray and it was coming right for you and you could catch it, you just would. There's no real rationale for doing that, you know. I've had that feeling sometimes when my mind was in the proper state and somebody was

in front of me of just going, oh, I know what would be good. And just boom, just doing or saying the thing. And I guess one thing I'd know about that state is unlike my usual state, it's pretty clear of agenda. It's not something like, oh, if I did this, that would be really kind. Or this would be awfully tol-stoyant of me. You know, it's literally just an impulse that comes out of that sort of feeling. But I mean, you know, again, I'm recreating this from memory. Like this is not nothing that's happening every day for me. But I think that feeling of catching the frisbee is also one that I recognize from writing.

You're editing something and you clear away a certain part. And suddenly there's an idea right there and it just pop You just catch it. It just comes in very naturally and again the same kind of thing free of agenda Not the product of intellectual or analytical thought, but just like Almost like if you're like, oh, that'll be cool So in a certain way this whole writing craft is really for me about getting into a state Where one of those moments will seem clear to me and then I can just do it. You know, very simple, very quiet. I read a quote. I can't remember who said it,

maybe Picasso, but something like the muse does visit, but she needs to find you working. Right. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, because I think so much of what we call the muse is actually reacting. I don't do any exalted first draft stuff. I mean, there's nothing exalted going on when I'm doing a first draft. But when you come back and start reacting to this stuff you've already done, that's I think where the real kind of enjoyment is. And that's where a person, I would say, distinguishes herself from other writers. It is in the quality of those reactions to whatever was already there.

Which I somehow don't think you're enough credit in the sort of myth of the writer. In the movies, you don't see somebody revising closely. You know, they're always walking through a field of daisies. And you have an idea. I mean, I'm so gratified to hear you say this just as a writer because I'm in the stage of the book I'm writing right now that my colleagues and I refer to as the SFD. I'll call it the crappy first draft, but we use S. It's just so, it's so not exalted this stage, but I got to get some clay on the wheel and

so that's what I do. And then yes, it's iteration after iteration later down the road where the thing can become less horrible and maybe get dragged over the line between terrible and decent. Exactly. That's it. Exactly. I always think, you know, I try to say to myself, if you're reading something a year and it really stinks, that's a cause for celebration because it means your taste is still active.

You know, the day that everything you write seems good, and then you're in trouble. So let's talk about your new book, A Swim in a pond in the rain. Can you describe sort of what it's about? Yeah, well, I've been teaching this class at Syracuse for 20 years now, and the class is called a Forms class, which is basically literature for writers. So we get about 600, 700 applications a year, and we pick six students to come study with us. So it's 20 of those people in a room. And basically we're reading a body of work and it's got a slightly different emphasis in a regular class, which is that we're kind of trying to take it apart technically and trying to basically steal something from it or learn something that will inform our own work. So it's kind of cool. It's less formal, a little more pragmatic. And so I started teaching the work of the 19th century

Russians in translation about 20 years ago. And just found them to be a really wonderful stories for teaching for some reason. They're kind of simple. They usually have a kind of a, I don't know, like a moral ethical charge to them. So, started teaching it in 97 and taught it every few years since then. So, I just thought it'd be fun to make a book that kind of tries to mimic that classroom setting. So, the book has seven of these Russian stories punctuated with my kind of musings on them or analysis of them. So, it's Turgen, you have to tell a story, Google and check off. Is the idea somehow that becoming a better reader and writer can tell us how to live? Kind of, although for me, when I get into a book project, I usually have some kind of

little idea of it, like, okay, I've just said to you, and then I really hope that it'll be something other than that, you know, that it'll kind of turn into something else along the way. So this one, it feels to me like it's just a little bit of a celebration of the act of reading and its relation to writing. And then maybe just takes a little gesture in the direction of saying, since reading and writing are so fundamental to who we are. And since really, if we're looking at reading, we're kind of looking at the idea of one human mind communicating with another, then there might be some takeaways for life.

In other words, habits, as we've been talking about, habits that we get into while reading, habits we get into while writing, they do have natural corollaries in other kinds of relationships. So, being somebody who practices within reading and writing might maybe have something to offer us in our regular lives, too. But I didn't want to hit that too heavily because I found reading and writing to be heavily dependent on a respect from mystery, which is let's not nail anything down too tightly,

let's not be too programmatic. So I wanted to go a little bit light on that aspect of it, I guess. Because if we tell people that reading is supposed to manifest certain benefits in their life, then it might feel mechanistic. Yeah, and also I think that it changes the quality of it. If somebody says, oh, this book is really good for you, a lot of books, I mean, they may

be good for you, but they're good for you in a really indirect way. So I think the whole thing, somehow for me, the practice of art has to do with freedom, the writer being exactly who she wants to be without having to defend it, without having to articulate it, without having to do anything, but just be herself in that moment. And I think to have that attitude, you have to sort of let a lot of stuff go, is writing good for the world. Probably, but I'm not going to worry about it right now. It's a short story going to be instructive for the reader, maybe, but let's not commit to that. So as a practitioner of writing,

I don't want to claim too much for it because if you said, this is a hammer, it's only good for nails. It's the best thing for nails. Well, then if a bear was coming for you and the hammer in your hand, you'd want to be free. I'm sad to say to clunk the bear on the head. So likewise with art, I think you want to be give it maximum freedom and having a setting conditions on what a shooter shouldn't do has a tendency to kind of truncate that freedom. I'm not advocating for hitting bears with hammers, by the way. I'm sensitive to the fact that we don't have finite chunk of time here, and I do want to talk a little bit about Lincoln and the Bardot, which we've referenced a couple of times, but not really explained to those who might not have read it.

What it is, can you take a shot that's sort of just describing that book? Oh, boy. Yeah. Well, I had about 20 years ago, I heard this story, which I, and I don't know if it's true or not, but the story was that Lincoln was president, his son Willie passed away nine-year-old, ten or eleven, and Lincoln was bereft and supposedly the newspapers of the time said that he had actually visited the graveyard and had gone into the crypt of his son and That just really hit me and such a beautiful sad thing. So I kind of carried that idea

around for 20 years and then finally wrote this novel in which it's all said in one night and Lincoln does just that. Yeah, I mean it's a strange book because also the narration is done by the ghosts and the graveyard and there's all kinds of crazy things. But basically it's just a story of a father who he just can't say goodbye so he does a slightly strange or inappropriate thing and then he recovers and goes back to his life. But it's all kind of focused around that one evening. For the uninitiated, what's the Bardot? Well, it's a Tibetan word that means transitional space. So that space between death and reincarnation would be one, but we're in the Bardot of life right now. So really, when you use that word, you but we're in the barter of life right now.

So really, when you use that word, you're usually referring to the Tibetan book of the dead and that sort of transition that happens after the person is dead and before you reincarnate. And in this book, I kind of started out with the idea that I would put it in that world, but then I didn't have the understanding of that that I needed to.

So it's kind of a general word, just to mean the transition between death and whatever comes next. But you did have to kind of create some metaphysics here. You did have to come up with some vision of what the Bardo might be like. We've got all these characters who are these ghosts, as you say, who are narrating the story. And there are some rules, some physics to their universe. Am I wrong about that? No, no, you're exactly right. And that was actually a lot of the writing of the book was discovering what those rules needed to be

and then kind of making them come alive and justifying them. But they're not, in other words, the rules of my universe are not exactly the ones that are put forth, well, anywhere else. They're kind of my own, I kind of made it up. But yeah, so in that world, one of the interesting things was that the people who are there aren't necessarily, they weren't in life necessarily the best adjusted people. So they got to the moment of death and in the world of the book, what you're supposed to do is kind of just be grateful to have been here and go on to whatever's next. And this group that's huddled in

the graveyard is couldn't do that for different reasons. You know, either they love life too much or they they didn't get what they wanted or they have some hurt that they're nursing. So they're kind of stuck there and they kind of have to work at being there. You have to kind of keep telling yourself the story of your pain basically and then you can stay there a little longer. It's not necessarily a happy world and the people really shouldn't be there, but they're kind of, I guess, clinging to life in a certain way.

Do you have a suspicion on some level that the way you've described it may actually be how it is, or were you just doing that for the story? I don't know. The one thing I have, I think I read this somewhere is the idea that, you know, if you want to know what your death is like, you just look at this moment right now, your habit of mind isn't gonna miraculously change just because you're getting really old and weak and sick. And I also read somewhere,

I think it's an Tibetan text that, when you're here on earth, it's a very fruitful time for development because you're trapped in this body. So your wild mind has kind of got a damper on it, just your physicality. So your mind is like a horse, a really wild horse that's tied to a post as long as you're alive. And then when you're dead, that rope gets cut. And the mind is just totally powerful, you know, and you're being dragged along with it.

And so that's scary, you know, in other words, whatever your habits of mind are now, presumably they could be supersized. And whatever your relation to this dream that we're living in is, it's gonna be solidified. So if you think this life is real and you're real and you go into this next zone, it could be difficult, you know, or it could be glorious, you know, but I don't really know. And I know that the book, really, yeah, I don't know. I have a feeling that the one thing it is true about it is

that we cultivate certain habits in life. And then I don't know, I don't know. I have a feeling that the one thing it is true about it is that you, we cultivate certain habits in life and then I don't know. I don't know what happens, but I'm sure that it would be better to have those habits be functional and intelligent and loving than otherwise. Yeah, when we see that one of the ghosts, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, I just was going to ask you what you think happens. You know, I don't know that I've ever said this publicly, but I started to develop six months ago, said I have no idea. I'm respectful, agnostic. I don't know that I've ever said this publicly, but I started to develop six months ago, said I have no idea. I'm respectful, agnostic. There are lots of metaphysical claims about the before and the after. I've seen no evidence for any of it, but I'm not going to tell you it's

not true. I don't know why I started to develop some sort of suspicion that I cannot defend, and I won't attempt to, that rebirth may actually be real. Is that where you're at? Yeah, only because my sense is, and again, this is my 62-year-old revelation, is that I really have been so lazy about spiritual practice. And there are people who have not been. And the people that I know who have not been are quite confident. And, you know, I can go this far with it.

I can say, okay, wouldn't be weird if the world was just exactly the way that George and Dan imagined it is. In other words, if our sensory apparatus and our thinking apparatus was just precisely tuned to just exactly what's true. It is. In other words, if our sensory apparatus and our thinking apparatus was just precisely tuned to just exactly what's true, we know that isn't it. So clearly, whatever is going on beyond us is really unknown territory. And we might get little glimpses of it in different ways. So I kind of feel like the rational position is to kind of look to the people who have actually

really maybe over many lifetimes done the work and say people who have actually, you know, really maybe over many lifetimes done the work and say, well, okay, you say rebirth. I don't quite get it, but I can see that my sort of anti-rebirth mind is just completely born out of sloth, really. I don't know. I guess we'll find out as totally certain. I mentioned this name before. Josephstein, my meditation teacher, he's a great, great person. And he had a teacher, his first meditation teacher was a guy named Munindraji. And Munindra used to say, these of the rather baroque metaphysical claims that you will find in Buddhism around not only the various realms of existence,

but also the various superpowers that you can develop here in this realm, if you practice well enough. Munindra used to say, you don't have to believe it, but it's true. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, I just become more and more convinced that I've, you know, my life has been spent in a pretty small little corner of a pretty small little room. And so, you know, again, that's to me one of the really encouraging things about becoming involved in a tradition is that you see that if I plunk around on the guitar for 20 minutes a day, which I do, that's great. When I go to Cicigovia, you're like, oh, okay. So my ability to imagine prowess on the guitar is incredibly limited and it's surpassed by reality.

So I think that's where I am. Let me ask you just in closing here about something more terrestrial. One of the many moving aspects of reading Lincoln in the Bardo for me is a vision as psychedelic as it may be, a vision of an America that was almost fully torn us under in the throes of a civil war as Lincoln is mourning the loss of Willie, his son, and I know you've kind of spent some time both in fiction and nonfiction thinking about and dwelling in this period of American history. I wonder from that vantage point what you think about what we're seeing today in a divided country. Yeah, it's deep, isn't it? I went on the campaign trail with the Trump campaign in 2016 or kind of

skipped around to different rallies and stuff. And I have to say, I haven't made sense of it quite yet. I think it's really complicated phenomenon. And I'm kind of in the mode, just now where I'm writing more fiction, and I'm just trying to fight back my urge to make a theory about it and just listen to people. I have a lot of people in my extended family and stuff where Trump is. So it's really hard for me to do, but I'm trying to just get as much data in my head as I can because I didn't like the mode I was in in 2017,

which was, I can't believe this. Because as a novelist, if it's real, you should believe it and you should have an understanding of it. So I'm kind of just, I can feel like I'm kind of on a bit of a mental field trip to try to understand this thing, not to enable it or to normalize it, but to really understand the cause and effect of where it's coming from. And I don't know.

I have to say, I'm not that optimistic. It seems very dark that these things have happened. And actually, I was pretty pessimistic in 2016 and the way it played out was much worse. So I'm not really sure what to think about it. I hope we can recover from it. I think you couldn't ask for a better guide than Joe Biden. I've met him and he's an amazing person.

So I'm just hoping for the best for all of us and kind of trying to transition back into artist mode, which is, I'm supposed to be interested in what's happening. And that's, I think that's a mode that makes you anxious. It's a mode that doesn't close things off or decide or pronounce or a suage or, we're sure, it's just a mode that's open. So if information is disturbing, you let it in and then let it percolate down. So it's a little bit of an uncomfortable space, but somehow it, for me, it feels more authentic than when I'm, you know, trying to be a plundit or trying to be a cheerleader one or the other. But as you go about trying to understand what you call the Trumpies, including in your own

family, do you experience that as a kind of empathy Olympics? It's funny. I have a pretty natural fondness for people, so I never really have trouble liking people. Anyone on those Trump rallies, I had a great time, and people were, you know, I can get along with anybody, and there was a lot of interesting changes. I mean, to me, it seems pretty simple that we're at a, maybe a very fruitful crisis point, where we say, okay, are we going to decide that America is the America that's discussed in the founding documents, you know, where everybody is equal. That seems to me like a beautiful path.

We've never done it yet, but we could, and it's fundamentally, as we've been discussing, it's a spiritual path, because it says that everybody, in essence, is wonderful. You know, everybody's equal. It says that, you know, I would say everybody has Buddha nature. That's a path that we laid out way back then, but we've never really inhabited it. So that could be very exciting. The second path is to ascribe the term American, to a set of behaviors that actually have more to do with a certain kind of racial nostalgia, a certain kind of rallying around some strangely empty symbols like flags, eagles, crucifixes, what not.

That second path is more about a kind of constructed idea of America that actually has very little to do with the founding documents. So I think we're at that crossroads. That's interesting to me. But empathy, I feel that pretty naturally for even people that are in the other camp, but sometimes I think maybe what I've done is be a little bit too inadequate in the kind of kindness we talked about earlier that has a little bit of an edge, you know, that actually might be a sort of protective kindness or kind of engaging even angry kindness. I tend to be someone who doesn't like to have a fight, you know, which can be a weakness. I tend to be someone who doesn't like to have a fight, you know, which can be a weakness. Well, whatever your weaknesses perceived or real, you're doing amazing work in the world

and where all the beneficiaries of it. Thank you, Dan. So I'm really grateful for the work you do and grateful for you to come on and spend time with me, slash us. So thank you. Well, I'm grateful for what you do. And it was such an interesting conversation. I'll have better answers about four in the morning probably if you want to call back. That's how that's how it works for me. Thanks again to George. I really love that conversation. I'm going to go back to it. I suspect many times.

One more piece of business before we go if you'll humor me. In response to our ever-changing reality, we have done our best, as I hope you know, to use this podcast to help you figure out how to navigate a turbulent world. And as you know, the practice of meditation undergirds nearly all of the practical takeaways you'll hear us discuss on this podcast. Many of our guests have also contributed to our companion meditation app, which is also called 10% Happier. Our app helps you understand both how to practice meditation and how meditation can help you navigate our ever changing world.

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