Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 487: How (And Why) To Lose Yourself | Jay Garfield

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Today’s episode looks at one of the hardest Buddhist principles to grasp— the notion that the self is an illusion. Many people get stuck on the misunderstanding that they don’t exist. They look in the mirror and say, “Of course I exist. I’m right there.” And that’s true, you do exist, but just not in the way you think you do. Today’s guest, Jay Garfield explores this notion by arguing that you are indeed a person just not a self— a principle that can simultaneously feel both imponderable and liberating. Jay Garfield is the Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Buddhist Studies at Smith College and a visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School. He is the Author of multiple books, including his latest, which is called, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self.In this episode we talk about: The difference between a person and a selfThe problems with being taken by the illusion of selfhoodWhy he believes the illusion of self is not an evolutionary design flawThe many benefits of “losing ourselves”How to actually lose ourselvesThe concept of InterconnectionHis definition of real happinessThe difference between pain and suffering and how to have the former without the latterFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jay-garfield-487See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Today we're going to take another whack, actually, at that classic Buddhist imponderable, the notion that the self is an illusion. This is simultaneously one of the hardest Buddhist principles to grasp and also one of the most liberating. Many people get stuck on the misunderstanding that they don't exist. They look in the mirror and say, of course I exist. I'm right here.

And that is true. You do exist. But just not in the way you think you do. As my guests today will argue, you are a person, meaning you do appear in the mirror, you do have a name and a social security number, if you live in the States, and you do have responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera. So you are a person, you're just not a self.

J. Garfield is the Doris Silbert professor in the humanities and professor of philosophy, logic and Buddhist studies at Smith College. He's also a visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Dominity School. And he's the author of multiple books, including his latest, which is called Losing Our Selves, Learning to Live Without a Self. In this conversation, we talk about the difference between a person and a self, the problems that arise when we're taken in by the illusion of selfhood and Slash but we talk about why he believes the illusion of self is not an evolutionary design flaw.

We also talk about the many benefits of losing ourselves, how to actually lose ourselves, interconnection, his definition of real happiness, and the difference between pain and suffering, and how to have the former without the latter. 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 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 experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer

on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Jake Garfield, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. It's a true pleasure. Likewise, let's start at kind of an obvious spot, which is the title of your new book, losing ourselves. What do you mean by that? Well, here's what I've gotten mind. As I try to explain in the book, I think that human beings are kind of wired for the illusion that what we really are deep down

ourselves, a kind of substantial entity that stands behind our mind and our body, that acts on the world, that observes the world, but isn't really part of the world, that's permanent, continuing, and that we have immediate access to it. And I think that's a very, very powerful cognitive illusion to which we're all subject. And I think, like many illusions, it's an illusion that we are well advised to shed, to get rid of. And so, part of the point of the book is to explain the nature of the illusion, why it's an illusion, why it's a dangerous illusion, and how to think about our own existence differently so that we actually can help ourselves lose the identity of the

self. You're very clear in the book that you're not saying we don't exist. Absolutely. That would be absolute madness. It would be self-defeating for me to sit here and say, I don't actually exist. You could simply ask the question, who's saying that? So if the self is an illusion, but we exist, where does that leave us? Well, that leaves us where we are as persons. And so a fair amount of

the burden of the early part of the book is to distinguish what it is to be a self from what it is to be a person. And I think that we do exist, we exist as persons. If we turn ourselves back to the classical Indian tradition where some of my thinking begins, we find that the definition of an illusion is something that exists in one way, but appears at another. So if we think about a mirage, for instance, a mirage exists, so it's a

real thing. It exists as a refraction pattern of light, but it appears to be water. A rope that we see on a dark night in mistake for a snake exists as a rope, but appears as a snake. So an illusion isn't something that's non-existent. It's something that exists as an illusion, but whose mode of existence is different from its mode of appearance. And so I want to explain that our own mode of existence is existence as persons, as roles, as constantly changing, causally open, continue of psychophysical processes in constant interaction with other persons, and that our identity and our properties and our experience are co-constituted by things inside of that continuum, by the world with which we

interact, and by the others with whom we share that world. That's very different from being a self, a permanent independent entity standing behind the world. And so the way that I'd like people to think about this is that what we really are, are dependently arisen, constantly transforming sequences of psychophysical processes that are instantiated by physical and psychological things that are themselves constantly changing. And that when we think of our identity, my identity is J, your identity. We're thinking of a role that's played by that sequence at various moments, rather than a some substantial thing.

I use various analogies in the book, and one that I think is particularly easy to grasp is money. Like suppose that I need to get a cup of coffee and I don't have enough money for it and I borrow five bucks from you and you give me five ones. You've given me five dollars. Tomorrow I pay you back and I do it by handing you a five dollar note. Have I given you back the five dollars that you gave me? The answer is yes, I've repaid my debt. But if I'd done that by giving you back exactly the objects that you handed me, no, you handed me five ones, I handed you back a five. That doesn't mean that dollars are weird and that they don't exist,

but it does mean that the five dollars you lent me wasn't identical to those five ones. Because if it was, the only way I could pay it back would by handing you, maybe, a handing you back, those bank notes. And it's not identical to the $5 note that I handed you, because you didn't hand me that. It's something that has a different kind of existence, a conventional, dependently-arisen existence that is instantiated at one moment by five ones at a different moment by a five-dollar bill. So what I want to suggest is that we are more like dollars than we are like banknotes. What I'm about to say probably confirms me as a weirdo. I love listening to your high-falutin philosophical language. I was raised by overeducated academic physicians,

but I'm gonna put it back to you in very simple terms, because that's the only way I can ever understand something at the dumbest possible level. The illusion is that there's some unchanging, immutable nugget of Dan behind my eyes peering fretfully out through the sockets at the world from which I am separate. Yeah, and you got that illusion, right? You can feel that. Oh, yes, yes, I can, even after many years of meditation. Good, okay. Even after reading my book.

The truth, though, is that I am a constantly changing filler of roles. In one moment, I'm a dad. In another moment, I'm negotiating against somebody in a contract. In another moment, I am being cut off on the road. And that is not some core, unchangeable thing. It's a constantly changing thing, which adds up to an illusion. Exactly. And the trick is that the illusions almost didn't escapeable, as lots of illusions are. I mean, here's a fun thing to do that I like to do with my students when I'm teaching

them about illusions. Draw the Mueller-Lyer illusion yourself on a piece of paper. It's really easy. Draw the two parallel lines exactly the same length and you see the other same length. Then draw the little arrowheads, and as you draw them, the illusion appears, and one line looks shorter than the other. And you know that that's not true. But you see it anyway. And just as you know that there's no hidden little pearl of

Dan that is distinct from your body, distinct from your mind that stands behind them and uses your body and mind as instruments with which to experience and act on the world, you know how crazy that is. Still, you feel that way. And it's that being wired for the self-illusion that is a kind of fundamental part of what it is to be human. That doesn't make it a good thing. That makes it a natural thing, just like the Mueller-Lyre illusion is natural. But just because we're subject to illusions and that evolution has found it convenient to construct this in those ways doesn't mean that those illusions are good for us. And the self-illusion, I think, is a particularly pernicious one and one which, just in order to understand who we are,

we might want to shed. But also one that we might want to shed if we just want to be a little bit more effective as human beings, a little bit happier and a little bit more successful in the roles that we, in fact, inhabit. So we'll get to the benefits in a big way. But you referenced this illusion, the mule illusion, many listeners' eyes affect, won't

know what that illusion is, so can you describe it? Sure. It's really easy, and you've got a picture of it in the book. All you do is draw two parallel lines reasonably close to each other of the same length. On one of those lines, at the ends of it, draw arrowheads that face outwards, so it looks like an arrow pointing both ways. On the other line, draw the arrowheads pointing inwards at the line, so it looks like a line with little wigs on each side. Suddenly, one of those lines looks longer than the other. The one with the arrows pointing in shrinks and looks smaller than the ones with the arrows pointing

out. And the cool thing is, the illusion appears even if you draw it all by yourself. And then if you erase the arrowheads, the lines go back to looking equal. And that's just an artifact of our visual system that we evolved to be very good at using lines as information for detecting edges and estimating the sizes of things in our environment. And our eyes use that. But it also means that as a consequence of having evolved that kind of visual system, when we have this kind of stimulus in front of us, we see it wrong. And I think that's very typical of a lot of illusions to which were susceptible, auditory illusions, illusions of color and so forth. They're spandrels on really adaptive features of our cognitive and perceptual systems, things

that came along for the ride because they were ineliminable features of systems that are otherwise pretty good. I think that the illusion that we're selves is a cognitive illusion like that. It comes along for the ride as a consequence of our abilities to figure out where we are in space and to distinguish us from other objects in our environment and so forth. But what comes along with those very adaptive abilities that enable us to survive is the illusion that we're more than just one more psychophysical process in the world that we inhabit.

I was going to ask, why and how do we end up with this illusion? Would it be accurate to say it's a kind of design flaw? Maybe. I mean, flaw makes it sound like, hey, we could have done it better. And I don't know whether evolution could have done it better. But I prefer to use Stephen Gold's metaphor of a spandrel, something that just comes along because it's the easiest way to design something that does something better.

So if you think about important features of our own ability to monitor who we are, we have to be able to have a certain amount of proprioception to know where our body is and what position our limbs are in. We need to be able to locate ourselves with respect to the objects that we experience and see. We need to be inter-receptively aware of the sensations in our bodies. We have to be able to monitor our thoughts and our desires and our intentions. All of that awareness of who we are makes us much more effective beings and gives us a lot of survival advantage.

Now, if the easiest way for evolution to get us to do that was to give us the illusion that those are all properties of that little self nugget as you put it, then that's the way evolution is going to go. And that might be a kind of illusion that isn't such a bad thing if the alternative is not being able to monitor our own inner states, not being able to monitor our position. But once we recognize that even if it's a necessary or a best design approach to solving other problems, it poses its own problems. And becoming aware of it allows us to be better at being aware of ourselves. So again, let's come back to the Mueller-Lyre illusion.

Suppose we conclude that that was just the best way to design a human visual system. It was going to be a way that would give us the Mueller-Lyre illusion. That wouldn't make that illusion itself an accurate representation of the world or a good thing. It would mean that we've got to be careful that when that illusion crops up, we've got to say, wait a minute, those lines look to be different lengths, but let me look closer, they might well be the same. And that would be a more effective way to deal with our world than just being sucked in by the illusion. Maybe the self-illusion was the best possible outcome,

nonetheless, recognizing that that illusion is part of the design allows us to say, wait a minute. A lot of what we're monitoring might be correct, but that little piece of it is wrong, and it might be getting me in trouble. And so that's why it might make sense to attend to that and to try to dispel it. How does it get us in trouble? Well, it gets us in trouble in a whole lot of ways, I think. One is just a kind of boring way. If part of what it is to be a human being is to come to know ourselves, Let's us in trouble in a whole lot of ways, I think. One is just a kind of boring way.

If part of what it is to be a human being is to come to know ourselves, it kind of occludes from us who we are. So there's a kind of self alienation. And if you're a philosopher, self alienation feels like a bad thing. But I think it's worse than that. I think that it has ethical implications and interpersonal implications. Because when I take myself to be a self, to be the subject of my world, then I start as a kind of reflex and by contrast, taking all of the people around me to be my objects. And that gives me a

very special place in my world. I'm the one with respect to whom I have immediate knowledge, immediate access. I'm the one who can act freely. I'm the one who respect to whom I have immediate knowledge, immediate access. I'm the one who can act freely. I'm the one who's on the subject side, and everybody else is on the object side. And that kind of puts me at the center of my own universe. I call it the middle pole, and everybody else exists in relation to me. And when I do that, then that seems to license not only egoism, not only taking my own interests more seriously than those of others, but also partiality, taking people who are closer to me more seriously and as more valuable than people who are further from me. And that leads to all kinds of clannishness, violence, injustice. It also leads to a really distorted sense of rationality.

So, anybody who, for instance, has taken a course in micro-economics will have seen that the definition of rationality for economists is disinterestedly pursuing my own welfare. And so, when economists talk about the rational agent, they talk about somebody who doesn't care about anybody else's welfare, unless it gives them particular pleasure, and resolutely pursues their own welfare and tries to maximize their own benefits. And that's how economists model society. And that idea that that's rational feeds back. And we start, for instance, accepting the idea that because I want to, or because

I like it, is at least a prima facie reason for doing something, or for wanting something. And notice that when we do that, we immediately ignore the desires, the wants and needs of others. And just think about what I want, what I need. And that kind of casual, non-hostile, reflexive selfishness and egoism that masquerades as and is even valorized as rationality is a consequence of the self-illusion. And so if you think that an institution like consumer capitalism, for instance,

that encourages us to satisfy all of our desires and to be disinterested in or competitive with the wants and desires of others is a really good thing than maybe you like selves. But if you think that it's a fundamentally irrational way to think about the world, to think that there's something so special about me, that when I act, I should only care about myself, then you begin to see just how pernicious it is. It can also be bad, because it gives us the illusion that we have and other selves have a very special kind of freedom

that allows for a kind of refusal to give credit and excessive pride and excessive blame that causes a lot of conflict. So, for instance, if I think of J as a self, then I don't think of J as this kind of causally determined and open process in the world. I think of J as standing behind the world, observing it and acting on it. And we really do feel that way when we have that illusion. And that means I think of myself as exempt from the causal order. And that means I think that when I do things, when I

accomplish things, I can simply take credit for them and feel really proud of things that I've done. And I forget that in order to do those things, somebody had to teach me how to read, teach me a whole lot of other things, provide the physical, economic, social resources for me to lead the life that I live. And so what I should be feeling is gratitude and a recognition of how much others contribute to my life, what I instead feel is a kind of arrogant pride. Or when somebody else does something that may be offends me or hurts me, I think, well, they just acted as a self completely freely on the world. And I forget to think that whatever they did was caused, caused by emotions,

caused by desires, caused by events that impinged upon them. And so that perhaps a better response to their behavior than anger would be a response of care or sympathy or trying to remove and remediate those causes so that they would be happier and so that they wouldn't act that way towards me. So I think that we get a significant moral distortion as a result of the self-illusion that is really better dropped. Finally, one more kind of case. The self-illusion encourages us to focus our attention on ourselves and on who we are and what we're doing, what we're feeling, what's going to happen. And when we do that, we kind of exit a natural flow state in which that self isn't thematized. And we then kind of focus in a self-conscious way.

We have that word in English on who we are, what we're doing, what we're thinking. And as we know from lots of psychological studies of self-performance and self-monitoring, or anybody can verify for themselves when they think about when they're involved expertly in something, playing music, dancing, painting, even talking to a friend. If we're not paying attention to ourselves and we're just in flow, we do so much better. When we start self-monitoring, we start doing the stupid stuff and the

herky jerky stuff and behave like amateurs. And so the self-illusion takes us out of a state of being a virtual so person and returns us to a state of being a kind of clunky amateur person. And that just makes us less than who we could be. There are so many questions I could ask you, but the first one that's coming to mind is about self-interest. You leveled a critique of capitalism, which, even though I'm a capitalist, I happen to share, but are you saying that self-interest is never appropriate? I think that self-interest, when it is interest-focused on a a self is never appropriate. Because what that does is to distinguish me from all other persons as the one deserving my interest.

On the other hand, taking an interest in the welfare of the person who I am can often be extremely appropriate, but that's an interest that recognizes me as being somebody in interaction with Dan, an interaction with countless other folks, and encourages me to recognize that my interest in their interest are completely bound up with one another. And that my interest, well, it's an interest in me, takes me to be important. It doesn't take me to be more important than anybody else.

I might be the person who's benefit I can best pursue. There might be not much I can do on your behalf and more I can do on my behalf. But if that's the only kind of reason for doing something on my behalf versus somebody else that I can imagine being any good, to say, well, I'm me, and therefore, my interest has to be more important. That's to fall into the self-illusion. And that just doesn't get us any place good. So say you're haggling over the price of a product

or you're negotiating a contract, any number of situations in which self-interest might come into play, I think what you're saying is it is appropriate to argue for your benefit as a person in relationship to other people who have just the same claim on being people that you do rather than being so in your head that you, in some way dehumanize the people you're dealing with. PINKO, let me give you a great example. And the example that you gave of bargaining or haggling really brings me to an example

that I wouldn't have thought of, but I really like now that I've thought of it. I spend a lot of time in India. And a lot of the Indian economy is a bargaining economy, not a fixed price economy. So if I'm going down to my neighborhood market and just buying some oranges from somebody selling them on the street, she'll probably quote, a high price to me. And then I'll quote a ridiculously low price. And then we'll both laugh.

And then we'll talk. And we'll come back and forth. And while buying the oranges at a grocery store here might take a couple of minutes and involve no social interaction, buying the oranges there might take quite a while, not because it's necessarily a long, difficult negotiation and we're deeply apart and each trying to maximize our own benefit, but because it's a real social interaction

between two human beings. And we laugh and we discuss and she tells me how much she paid for them and I tell her I think she's joking and she tells me how much I can afford to pay for them and I say, actually, I'm not that rich. And, you know, we have a conversation and eventually we come to a price and it's a price that is going to make her a decent profit and just going to make me happy about the oranges and it's going to have us each have an enjoyable day.

And when we do that, we've treated each other as persons. I mean, you could come into it in a totally cut-throat way and say, damn it, I'm going to get the absolute cheapest price I possibly can and if she loses money on it or if she's humiliated by it, the hell with it, I'm in this game to win. And it's a two-person zero-sum game and if I win, she loses. That's what the self-illusion does to people. And I've seen people bark in that way. And you end up with-illusion does to people. And I've seen people bargain that way. And you end up with two unhappy people at the end. One really unhappy because somebody tried to cheat me.

And somebody unhappy because I had to deal with this really unpleasant person trying to buy oranges from me today. And it basically wasn't worth my time doing it. And I just can't see how that's a good outcome. There's nothing wrong with bargaining. But when you do that, bargaining between persons feels really different from bargaining between persons who take themselves to be selves. Coming up, J. Garfield on the benefits of losing ourselves, plus how to actually do it.

And we take a stroll through four mental states that can, when cultivated, support both selflessness and happiness after this. Hey, I'm Arisha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course.

In our series RuPaul Bornnaked, we'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon stuck in the illusion of selfhood. You listed some and you also talked about the benefits of transcending that illusion. But did I give you enough space to talk about the benefits? I don't know, but let me talk about them a little bit.

I think one benefit is this. And this is something I do talk about in the book. Each of us, if we're at all fortunate, has experienced moments or maybe lots of moments or hours. When we realize we've been in a flow state, it might be playing a sport, it might be playing a musical instrument, it might be listening to music in a concert,

it might be thinking about a hard philosophical problem, it might be just having a wonderful intimate conversation with a friend, a state in which we don't thematize me and the world, where I simply experience the world around me in interaction, and I don't have that superimposed artificial subject object duality. Those are the most enjoyable rewarding states that we ever experience. We really value them. And they're also the states in which, as I said, we're at our best where we're doing our best work,

playing our best game, appreciating the world around us in the best way. And to my mind, the advantage of shutting the self, the biggest advantage is living life in that flow state. So I like to say, you know, sometimes people think of the goal of philosophical practice or religious practice as to lead a virtuous life. I think it's better to say it's to lead a virtuous life, a life that one leads in flow, a life lived in expertise rather than as an amateur imitation of who I would like to be. And so I think that getting out of that self mode and into the more realistic person mode is just of extraordinary benefit to us.

I haven't spent a lot of time in the world of Zen, but to the extent that I have, I've noticed that the Zen folks talk a lot about spontaneity. Yes, that's a wonderful way to put it. I think that when we think about spontaneity, what we're referencing is the absence of deliberation. Now, I think we have to be careful about that. This is just a long footnote. Sometimes we can deliberate in a flow state too, because even the thinking can be done in a virtuoso way.

But the kind of deliberation against which people in Zen tradition are counter-posing is the kind where I'm really thematizing the subject object duality and thematizing my existence as a self. And it's really hard to be spontaneous then. Then what you're doing is you're creating a circumstance of self-consciousness where you're thinking through every move and it's always one thought too many and you always end up screwing it up, right? And one of the goals of some Zen meditation practice,

but I think not just of Zen practice. I think a lot of Buddhist practice, but also a lot of Western practices, is to try to get us to a point where we stop doing that. And we just are better versions of ourselves when we do and happier versions of ourselves. Yes, and the better version of oneself in playing a musical instrument and performing on the field in interacting with other human beings, the better version is one who has lost one self who is over one self is out of one's head and more available to whatever is happening right now because you're missing data if your bandwidth is chewed up with this kind of internal focus. missing data of your bandwidth is chewed up with this kind of internal focus. Absolutely. And as I say, anybody who's experienced a state like that will know it and know that that was just extraordinarily precious. And to the extent that we can live more of our

lives that way, that's just a really good thing. And I think it's possible. Okay, you've brought me right to where I want to go. When you say you think it's possible, how? Okay, you've brought me right to where I want to go when you say you think it's possible how? Oh, that's the hard question, right? That's the hard question and I'm good at punt on it a little bit but it's I think it's a fair punt. I don't think there's a single answer for everybody. Some people find meditational or religious or spiritual practices to be the best way to do that. Other people find developing a discipline, maybe a martial arts discipline, maybe a musical discipline, maybe an athletic discipline, to be the best way to do that. Other people might find it in philosophical reflection.

I don't have a particular view about what the best way is for you, Dan, or for any of the listeners. But what I would say is there are so many routes on offer in the world's traditions that it's worth asking oneself the question, what would work best for me, and trying it out, and figuring out whether that's something that's enabling you to get this more realistic experience of your own being. But I don't want to be the one to say to people I've never met before, here's how you should best

lead your life. I think that's a mess. What are the practices that have helped you to lose yourself? To the extent that I've been successful, and I would say that's a very limited extent, I find myself succumbing to the self-illusion most of every day, so I want to confess that I think that it's difficult. For me, it's been some contemplative practice, but also practice in sport, poetry, and a lot of it, quite frankly, is walking in the forest with my dogs and enjoying bird song. Places where I really do just disappear, and I recognize that those are the moments when I'm happiest. I think we've all or most of us or many of us have had these experiences.

It shows up in our language to be blown away, for example. Absolutely. Where I went in my head very quickly as I imagined you walking through the forest with your dogs is that a big benefit I would imagine for you is that you know to tune into it. Yeah. Whereas others of us might have the fleeting pleasure, but we can't articulate it or replicate it. Yeah. And I think practice is really important. That is even if it's something you want to do, like take a walk or become a better putter in golf or, you know, really kill that particular sonata that you've been working on for a while. It's one thing to focus on the task, and it's another thing to recollect that your goal

is to attain that kind of experience and to tune into when you've got it, right? And of course, you have to be careful. There's this wonderful line in a Yogi Chara Buddhist text that I like that says, the moment you say, there it is. I'm now experiencing mind only, or I'm now experiencing the state. You've blown it, right? Because now what you've said is, there's me and the state, and I got it, and you've reinstated that self-illusion. And so there's also something deeply paradoxical and tricky about this, because you want a certain kind of focus on attaining that state, but it can't be, ah, now there it is, I perfected

it, because then you've just gone right out of it completely. And part of this is a way to say that I think that a lot of practice is deeply paradoxical in that sense, and that learning to live with that paradox is part of the trick, and that the pitfalls are always there. Can you talk a little bit about some of the meditation practices you've done that have helped you to lose yourself? Only a little bit. For me, it's mostly analytical meditation. That is meditation on emptiness, and I find that as I go deeper into trying to understand the nature of phenomena and the nature of who I am, that that very analytical process of immersing

myself very deeply in that thought takes me to really lovely places. I'm just going to push you to say a little bit more about that. How does one do this practice? Because it's I think new to me. Yeah, what I'm not going to do is to give meditation instructions in a podcast, but to say that this is a family of meditation practices that are important, especially in Indian and Tibetan traditions, where what you're doing is trying to take a particular phenomenon. It might be a physical object, like an apple or a statue, where it might be your own mind or your own current conscious state, and to focus on it and to be asking yourself constantly the question, what's its nature, from what did it arise, to what does it give rise, what are its components, and to immerse yourself in coming to see that even though it appears to be a substantial independent entity, what you've done is, you're focusing on one impermanent moment of a web of dependent origination as opposed to a substantial thing and to immerse yourself

in that appreciation of interdependence and essencelessness. Now, for some people, that's a terrible, terrible thing to do because it's hard, it's intellectual, it's philosophical, it's time-consuming, and for some people, that might just engender much more self-consciousness and be maladaptive. So some people prefer to have a kind of meditation that's focusing on moral attributes and meditation on care or a meditation on love or a meditation on open awareness that doesn't objectify. There are many different ways to meditate, many different approaches to meditation. And so I said, for each person, there's something that's going to work and something that won.

I'm an egghead philosopher, right? What I do is I analyze things and develop arguments. So for me, a contemplative practice that focuses on doing that is something in which I can lose myself, whereas it might be harder for me to lose myself in something that asks me not to be analytic, because then I'm constantly saying, am I analyzing? Am I analyzing? If I stop analyzing, and every time I do that, I'm sanitizing myself. And so finding the practice that works for you is what's most important. And that's something that's probably best done in consultation with a qualified meditation teacher who knows you well,

not some guy on the podcast. In the book, you talk about the Brahma Viharas, and I'm wondering whether you could describe what those are. They will be familiar to some listeners, but for the benefit of those who have never heard of it, if you could describe what they are and how one could use those practices related to the Brahma Viharas to get out of one's head. Absolutely. The Brahmin Viharas and what that really means is divine states. There's lots of different ways that it's translated, but the way I like to it is divine states, the

states that you really want to achieve. And these are moral attitudes, and they run through the entire Buddhist tradition, starting very early in the Polycanon and just valorized every place. And typically we talk about four brum of hiharras, and I'll say them first in Sanskrit, and then explain how to translate into think about each one. So the first one is my tree, and it's often translated as loving kindness or love. I think a much better translation, much closer, both to the Sanskrit

and what it really means is friendliness. And it means wishing well for others spontaneously. So if you've got a friend, sounds like a Carol King song, right? But if you've got a friend, you wish well for them. You want them to be happy and you're willing to do things for their benefit.

You don't say to yourself, gee, what's in it for me if I take her out for dinner? Or do I really want to benefit her or maybe I should harm her today, right? If you've got a friend, you wish well for them and friendliness is like that. The second one is Karuna, often translated as compassion. I prefer to translate it as care, because it's really a commitment to alleviate somebody else's suffering or pain. As you could say, for instance, if you really cared, you would do something. Karuna isn't just feeling bad. It's actually committing yourself to do something to alleviate others' suffering. So, you know, like if you cry at movies, that's not Karuna, right?

Because it's not like you're going to jump into the screen and say, Vanna Karuna from the train. Karuna is a real commitment to relieve suffering. And again, that's, you know, a really divine state. It's different from my tree. Because friendliness means promoting somebody's happiness. Karuna means alleviating their suffering. The third one is a one that's hard to translate directly into English,

Mudita. The best translation, I think, is sympathetic joy. And that means the ability to take genuine pleasure in the achievement of others and in the virtue of others, to not be consumed with envy when they do well, to not say, oh, gee, they just got lucky, or it should have been me, but to be genuinely happy when somebody else succeeds and does well. And the fourth one, Uzupekshah, sometimes translated as equanimity. I prefer impartiality, but both of those ideas are in there. It's an attitude in which we do not take particular people, including ourselves, as the most important,

in which we take the same moral attitude towards everybody. And so we're not excessively elated when something good happens to me, excessively upset when something bad happens to me, but have the same kind of attitude towards all. Now, each of these Brahmaviharas, each of these states, has both what Buddha-Gosa, great Indian ethicist, called a near-enemy and a far-enemy, and paying attention to those enemies helps us to get a fix on them. The far-enemy is the easier one to see, the near-enemies, the really dangerous one. So when we think about my tree or friendliness,

well, the far enemy is hostility, and it's easy to see the difference between hostility and friendliness and why hostility is a bad thing, and friendliness is a good thing. But the near enemy of my tree is a kind of partiality, or a kind of being willing to be friends if it makes me feel good, but not for the other person's sick. So if I say, gee, I really want to help Dan out because it makes me so happy to see Dan do well, and for my own happiness, I want to help him. That's not my tree. My tree is when I say, I just want to help Dan for his sake. And so when we do that, now notice that the difference between

the near enemy and the Brahma-Vihara is whether I thematize myself and my own good there, cultivating the Brahma-Vihara means taking myself out of the equation and thinking only of my friend. When I think of Karuna, the far enemy is being cold and uncarrying. But the near enemy is sloppy sympathy, saying, oh, I've got to do something for her because I just can't, it just makes me feel so bad when she's unhappy. And I just can't stand the crying anymore. So I'm going to do something about it. I'm doing it for me, not for her. And once again, the near enemy, thematizes the self instead of the proper object. When we think about modita of

far enemy it might be envy, but the near enemy is clannishness or partiality. And we see that like what our favorite sports team does really well, we're really happy. But when another sports team that we hate does really well, we're really unhappy, right? And it's because what we've done is thematized the relationship to me. I've put myself at the center of the universe. The Brahma-Vihara takes me out of it, similarly for Upekshah, for this impartiality. The far enemy might be just not caring about people at all, callousness. But the near enemy to Upekshah is this idea of thinking that only the people near me are the people to whom I should have that regard, and again, thematizing myself. And so in each of these cases, when we put all of the Brahmavi

horrors together and cultivate those, we cultivate a vision of our moral landscape in which we are no longer at the center pole, in which ourself is no longer thematized. And when we cultivate that kind of moral attitude, then we are of much greater benefit to everyone around us. And by the way, we're much happier, because here's one way to put that. If our only source of happiness

is our own preferences and what we want and what feels good to us, then out of the six billion people in the world, only one can make me really happy. But if our source of happiness is the welfare of all other persons, then the sources of my happiness are boundless. And so in the end, we become much happier when we take ourselves out of the equation. And the brum of yhara's is a kind of ethical outlook. Show us how that's the case. And there are a whole bunch of practices you can do to cultivate these mental skills. Many of them feel to skeptics quite forced because frankly they are your envisioning people and sending phrases like may be happy or may be free from suffering

or may your happiness increase. And yet there's this robust body of data from the research world that show that it works and that that yeah, it has physiological, psychological and even behavioral benefits. It turns out that if you're learning how to ride a bicycle, the training wheels actually help you for a little while. And it doesn't mean that your goal is to ride a bicycle with training wheels. Turns out that if you're playing a musical instrument, learning your scales and practicing helps you become a better musician.

Your goal isn't to learn the scales. And so the goal of any of these ethical meditation practices, like exchange of self for others, like visualizing all sentient beings as one's mother, things like that, those might feel forced and awkward, but the goal isn't the visualizations. The goal is what the visualizations do to our minds. And you're right, there's an enormous amount of evidence, both traditional and experimental, that what they do to our minds. And you're right, there's an enormous amount of evidence, both traditional and experimental, that what they do to our mind is not only to make us better ethical agents, but they make us happier.

A year or so ago, we had on the show a journalist named Jessica Nordell who's written a book about ending bias. I was asking her, what are the practices we can do that have been shown to reduce our bias? And one of she said was loving kindness meditation i'm gonna probably mangled this but she said that there's some research that showed that you put people in the brain scan and then show them pictures of themselves and others and that the selfing regions of the brain the zones of the brain associated with self-concern self-f fire, kind of an equal measure, no matter who you were looking at.

In other words, it's gone down overall. The amount of self focus goes down, and it's funny, I didn't put it together at the time, but I've added a lot more Brahma Vihara practice into my meditation repertoire over the last couple of years, and I can really see when, especially see it, and I'm watching or reading the news and seeing people doing something abominable,

it's easier for me to understand that in the right conditions, I might do the same thing. Yeah. It's a little horrifying at first, but I really see this happen. Yeah, the other thing that I find, because I really find these meditations valuable myself, is that when I see things in my initial reaction is to become angry or outraged or hostile.

That's me, right? I know that I have those reactions. That the Brahmavihara meditation allows me to notice that and then to step back and say, why am I doing that? Is that appropriate? What would be a more effective way? How can I reconceptualize this? And one of the things about anger or hostility or aversion in general that one notices, and the same, of course, is true of attraction.

That's why those are the two real proximal causes of suffering, is that when we're in the thrall of those things, we are never at our best. Nobody ever says, I was so damned angry and out of control, I was fabulous, right? It's always, I was so angry and out of control, I am so embarrassed. So, to the extent that we can take those

powerful, aversive emotions, or those powerful, attractive emotions, and recognize them, and then step behind them and deconstruct them and calm down, then we become much more effective agents. Let me just build on that again from my own experience, which, and I hope, as I say, this isn't me investing too much in myself here, but I've noticed that I've got a few principal demons that have dog me from most of my life.

One is rage, the other is a kind of self centered greed, not just for money, but attention or whatever it is. And these are sort of firmly established aspects of the human repertoire. Before I started doing high dose Brahms of the horror meditation, these demons were the source of an enormous amount of shame, which of course drives you further into yourself. Yep, it's a self-directed emotion, right? Yes.

And so you're just telling yourself a whole bunch of stories about what kind of person you are because you notice some fleeting homicidal thought or whatever it is. And with the loving kindness meditation, I actually can watch these patterns in my mind with more warmth. I can see that this is just an ancient aspect of my lizard brain that's trying to protect me. And I don't have to see it as uniquely mine. I don't have to take it that personally. I can just see that it's a part of what humans do.

And I can blow it a kiss and do something smarter sometimes. That's right. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's good. And just because it's innate doesn't mean it's immutable. And I think those are really important lessons for anybody to learn about who they are. And that's the lesson of impermanence of dependent origination, the fact that we can do things to transform ourselves. And that I find deeply empowering.

After the break, Jay explains what he means by interconnection. He also distinguishes between pain and suffering and talks about how to have one without the other. And he offers up his definition of real happiness. Keep it here. You've used this word throughout interconnection. There is a, you hear in spiritual circles, the sentiment of no one can be free until we're all free.

And I, some part of me agrees with that, but I don't fully understand it. So I know this question a little bit out of left field, but it just popped into my head as we've been talking. Yeah, I think we can talk about that in terms of the Buddhist analysis of suffering. So now I'm going to just return to Buddhist territory for a minute, which I think is very useful territory for thinking about this. When we think about the nature of suffering, the standard account in Mahayana traditions is that suffering is threefold, there are three kinds of suffering. The first most obvious kind of suffering is what I think tubed in jimp is given as a beautiful translation for evident suffering.

The obvious suffering, headaches, sore throats, floods, things like that. And that's bad stuff, right? The second level is the suffering of change. And that is twofold itself. One is it's the fact that good things kind of turn bad after a while. You think of that pop song that you really loved and you thought you could never get enough of. And so you played it again and again and again

and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and you discovered you could get enough of it. But the other aspect of course is the fact that we're all getting older and it's kind of always downhill from there as one of my teachers said we should each look at ourselves as a corpse in the making and every day we get more perfected as a corpse. And that's a source of suffering, the fact that we know that things are going downhill in a way. and that's a source of suffering, the fact that we know that things are going downhill in a way. But the third is the suffering of pervasive conditioning. And that's sometimes the hardest one to get a grip on, but I think it's the deepest and the most important one. And it's the fact that

we are completely connected to everything around us. And as a result, everything that happens to us or that happens in the world can affect our own well-being and we can't control it. And we have a powerful drive to be in control of our lives. And we even have a mythology about that. He stands on his own two feet. I mean, what am I supposed to do when I stand on my own two feet? I'm not only supposed to grow my own food, but I'm supposed to make the dirt in which it grew and cause the rain that makes it rain. And if I'm supposed to generate all my own electricity, right? And I've got to create the sun to shine on me.

We're completely interdependent. But what that means is that because of our relations to others, what happens to other people inevitably affects our own state of happiness or suffering. And let me make that really plain and boring. Like suppose you're on vacation on the beach and you're sitting sipping a margarita and watching an absolutely gorgeous sunset and you say to yourself, gosh, life is good. I am really happy right now. Then I want you to imagine somebody whispering in your ear saying, that's really cool.

That means you don't really care about all the refugees out of Ukraine. And it doesn't bother you that people are starving in Yemen. And the fact that there's a food global shortage doesn't make you unhappy at all. And now you suddenly recognize that you're suffering from being a person you don't want to be, namely somebody who can simply shut out the welfare of others, focus on my own current situation and be happy. And notice you would never say, I want to raise my kids so that they're never going to care about anybody else and they can be completely happy on their own. You would never want to do that. And you don't want to be that kind of person. And so when we take that phrase, like nobody's free, till everybody's free, I want to understand that as nobody could really be free from suffering, nobody could be happy unless everyone else is because if somebody else is unhappy, then your only choice is either, hey, I don't care. Or, gee, that makes me unhappy too.

And if you say, I don't care, that makes you unhappy because it creates an emotional cognitive dissonance. Because then you have to look at yourself and say, oh damn, I'm that kind of person. That's how I would understand that. How do we ever feel happiness given that at any given moment there's incalculable suffering? Well, the first noble truth that we've been exploring is that all of existence is permeated by suffering. And that's a fact. And what that means is that our moments of happiness, while we don't want to deny them, are themselves sources of suffering.

That's the really awful thing. There's a wonderful Tibetan metaphor for this. It says that samsara, the world that we live in, is like looking honey from the blade of a sword, or as I do it for modern people, looking honey from a razor blade. You can't deny that that honey is there. But what's under it is what's really scary. And so I never would deny the fact that there are moments of real pleasure, but to call those lasting happiness or real happiness, I think is actually also one more very deep illusion. It's the denial of the first noble truth. And that's the bad news,

right? I mean, the good news is the third noble truth in the path. But the first two truths are a downer. And they're a downer because they're reflecting the actual nature of our reality, which is not entirely satisfactory. And the self-illusion is right at the base of all of that. So what is real happiness? Real happiness would be the extinction of that suffering and that would mean the extinction of attraction and aversion. And that would mean the extinction of the kind of primal confusion that lies at the base of that. Now we're talking second-nobal truth.

And that primal confusion is the confusion that takes things that are a source of suffering to be a source of happiness, that takes things that are a source of suffering to be a source of happiness, that takes things that are insubstantial like persons and reifies them as substantial selves, to take things that are dependent and to see them as independent, right? So those are the sources of suffering and we can get past those. Pain is not suffering and pleasure isn't happiness and it's really important to remember that. If you've ever engaged in a sport, you know

that pain doesn't have to be suffering. And if you pay careful attention to pleasure, you know that pleasure is often not happiness. It's simply something that masks further suffering. And I think that what we've been talking about are the routes out of suffering and into happiness, not the routes out of pain and into pleasure. So if we can start to conceive of ourselves, if only episodically as people enmeshed in a vast fluxing gumbo of reality as opposed to separate selves fretfully navigating a hostile world, then we might...

That's a step towards real happiness. Right. And would that mean that I might experience a broken arm, but it wouldn't... It would cause pain, but no suffering. I might experience the honey and see it for what it is. Yeah, that's quite possible. I mean, I don't know how many people listening to this have been engaged ever in vigorous sport. But if you play soccer or football or if you're a marathon runner or if you're a mountain climber, you're going to have experienced a lot of pain, both in practice and training and in high performance,

athletic activity. It hurts. And if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it hard enough for it to be worthwhile. But athletes are often smiling in that pain. And often you say, wow, that hurt, that was fabulous. And that's because pain only becomes suffering when you add aversion to it. And in parts of our lives, we don't. And we can learn to subtract the aversion. That's doable. And when we look at a lot of, say, mindfulness-based

stress reduction and mindfulness-based pain reduction, a lot of those are attempts to use techniques derived from Buddhist meditational techniques to try to remove the aversion from pain. Pain does go away. The aversion does. As you consider the possibility of achieving real happiness, of a kind of self-improvement that helps us overcome the self as you consider this possibility as being on the menu for human beings and consider the massive problems facing the species right now including inequality, violence, climate. What level of optimism can you muster about our planetary future? Not much because I honestly don't see the vast majority of people as committed to the

project of human happiness, and I don't see the vast majority of people as willing to give up the self-illusion. Honestly, when I look at the current state of the world, I'm deeply saddened by it. Sorry. No, no, no, Palsy. Honesty should never be accompanied by it. And apology, at least in my view. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, happy or more helpful lives that will mean whatever is happening will be experienced in a less gruesome fashion, I think. Absolutely, and that's our responsibility. And that's the only thing that we can

do, right? The only thing we can do is our very best. And so each of us is an obligation, right? I mean, I always come back to Indigo Girls Lyrics, but you know, it's that let it be me Lyrics, it's just so important. We need to shine our lives like lights and we need to strive, but there's a difference between what's necessary and what's sufficient and Even if we each do what's necessary, I don't want to be artificially optimistic and say, oh yeah, and I think that will be sufficient. I hope it will be. I hope we can pull ourselves out of this mess.

And I think we each have to try as hard as we can to help in that project. But if you're asking me how optimistic I am about it, that's a different question. Committed yes, optimistic now. Jay, before I let you go, I would like to push you to please promote this book, any other books you've written, any other resources you're putting out into the world. I sometimes call this part of the show the Plug Zone. So please indulge me. Well, of course, the book is losing ourselves, how to be a person without a self, and you can find that wherever good books are sold. And so I do hope that people enjoy it. And

I hope to hear from people who disagree with it or who agree with it. Another recent book of mine that might be of interest is my book on Buddhist ethics called Buddhist ethics, a philosophical exploration, and my book engaging Buddhism, why it matters to philosophy. But that's very much not a general audience book. It's a book for philosophers. So those are the things that I've been up to lately. Do you have a website, people, check out? I do. It's jgarfield.org. All right. We'll put a link to that and to your books in the show notes. Thanks so much. But again, Jay, thank you so much for coming on. It's really, really fun to talk to you. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks again to J Garfield. Thank you as well to everybody

who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davie and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimmy Reggler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poyant, scoring and mixing by Peter Badaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. And we will see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation from La Sarmiento. Hey, hey prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon music.

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