Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 52: Andrew Olendzki, Teaching Old-School Buddhism

Episode Date: December 21, 2016

Andrew Olendzki is a Buddhist scholar of the Pali canon, the original, authentic teachings of the Buddha that have been passed down for centuries. He even speaks Pali, the ancient Indian language the Buddha spoke and taught in. Olendzki started the Integrated Dharma Institute as a way to bring these teachings to the masses. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey, hey, welcome to another edition of the podcast. The guest this time is somebody I've known for a low-over-year is a fascinating, fascinating dude. A true scholar, like literally

a scholar of Buddhism, the old school Buddhism, what's known as the Pali Canon. He actually speaks Pali, which is the ancient Indian language that the Buddha spoke and taught in. But if that makes you at all nervous, you shouldn't be because he's an incredibly down-to-earth guy, a big beer drinking mellow dude who just is incredibly smart and really interested in Buddhism and really very skeptical about some of the claims of his fellow Buddhists which is really interesting to hear. He's got a new book that is fantastic it's called Untangling Self. The subtitle is a Buddhist investigation of

who we really are. And what he does is he makes the least comprehensible part of Buddhism, which is this idea that the self is an illusion, which a lot of people get really hung up on. But actually, if you explain it correctly as this guest does, you can really make it a not only comprehensible, but useful in your daily life. So check this guy out, his name is Andrew Olensky or Andy Olensky, I think you're gonna like him. Here we go. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. So how did a nice skeptical guy like you end up falling into Buddhism? How did that come about? Well, you know, I just followed my interests. I had the privilege of being able to study what I wanted at college, and I started out in philosophy as the kind of queen of the sciences. I wanted to see the big picture, understand, and the broadest terms.

And I took a course in Chinese philosophy, which was really transformative, is it exposed me to Taoism, which is a very different way of thinking and being in the world. And yet I found it quite compelling. And I followed that strand through Eastern religions generally.

That's where all the really interesting stuff was going on, was in the Eastern Religions Department. And in the Eastern Religions, I kind of gravitated gradually towards the historical Buddha. And I found his teachings from that era and his voice and his approach really very powerful. It was some straightforward, conventional language. It was nothing, strike me as particularly mystical or esoteric. It was just a lot of common sense about how human beings work, how we get into trouble in various ways, and how we can work our way out of it. So that's really what attracted me.

I mean, you're much more of an expert in the Buddha than I am by far, but what I like about the guy, to the extent that I have any understanding of him, is he's really much more down to earth than you would think given his reputation in the popular culture. I mean, he was really a, first of all, just a guy, you know, he didn't claim to be a god or anything like that. And he also said, you know, I'll look, I'm going to talk about a few metaphysical things like rebirth and karma and enlightenment, but take it or leave it. Just test it out in the laboratory of your own experience.

Well, that is, as you know, and as you can see in the book, it's really my whole approach to the topic. For thousands of years, Buddhism has been a religion in various cultures. It's been elaborated in various religious ways, but I'm not really moved by any of that or attracted to any of that. I'm interested in the man historically underlying all of that, and so as a scholar I specialize in the earliest strata of the tradition, the historical Buddha, the world he lived in, the language he spoke and taught in, or very similar to that.

And I draw all my inspiration from trying to see what's underneath all the myth-making and legend-building and so forth before it turned into that. One of the confusions I've always had about the focus on what the Buddha actually said is that we don't really know if he actually said it. I mean, he existed 26, he lived 2600 years ago and then his teachings were passed down orally for like 300 years before anybody even wrote them down. So we don't, I mean, no one actually was there with a video camera. So there's some faith involved in this, no? Well, the word I prefer to faith is trust.

There's certain things we can trust. I think that, of course, we don't know exactly what was going on then in any culture, let alone this one. But I think that the oral tradition was far more faithful than we are accustomed to thinking. We used to thinking, well, if you pass something along orally like in the telephone game, it gets garbled and it comes back in a totally different form. But in ancient India, they relied upon oral tradition for all of their important work, all the teachings of religious teachers, philosophers, poets, and literary figures, all of that

was passed down orally. They knew how to write, but the infrastructure for writing the paper and the materials and everything was very underdeveloped, so it was considered a very unreliable way of doing it. So you know, if you have a hundred people in a room, all being told the same thing in a very simple and repetitive style, almost like singing it together, and then you check in two weeks later, collectively the group will preserve it very accurately. An individual hearing one thing might garble it, but there is a whole tradition of memorizing important words. And all pre-literate societies really

show us how capable humans are of memorizing huge amounts of material. We just can't do it today. Okay, so I buy that the oral tradition is more faithful than one might at first give a credit for, but through all of the texts that we now have from the Buddha, low these many years, a lot of which are really sort of extremely repetitive, which gives a sense of how things are handed down orally, but through this kind of repetition, does a sense of who the guy was shine through? Do you have a picture in your mind of what he looked like, how he acted? Because often he's referred to as the perfected one, the enlightened

one. But, you know, there are stories about him getting into kind of a bad mood when he had a rocket issue and he was upset when his friends died and sometimes he would get a little annoyed at his followers. Do you have a sense of what he was like? I have a subsense of what he's like. There are little passages here and there where sort of his personality comes out. He's certainly a master of language, and there's a lot of punning that goes on in the literature, play on words, and so forth.

He has a kind of rye humor that comes out sometimes. But that repetition, I think, was really embedded in the original teachings. I think he taught in a repetitive style, and that was part of the rhetoric of how they communicated. So to give a list of seven things, and they'll repeat a sort of core phrase of seven times. We see it in contemporary speech like sometimes ministers use rhetorical repetition and things like that. I think it was embedded in the way the language was originally spoken.

He was obsessed with lists. It reminds me of the way on the internet now everything is, all the stories are in listicles. Seven things you can do to reduce belly fat. He was really like, yeah, seven things you can do to get enlightened. Quite literally, seven things you can do to reduce belly fat i mean he was really like yes seven things you can do to get enlightened quite literally uh... seven things you can do well i prefer to think of him as uh... well organized i think he organized it's a very well it's particularly to make it

something that could be more easily remembered in past so you you you having upon this or not have to put you really Discover it in Honeon on it in college and then you just you dove really deeply into it studied in I believe in Sri Lanka and and then London and and And where did things go from there? Well much of my graduate school work was done in England the Lancaster University at the time. My first one over there is an exchange student in my junior year of college and then I stayed on to do a master's degree in Buddhism,

Hinduism, and Sanskrit. That's when I started with the languages. And then, you know, I spent about a year traveling and studying in India and Sri Lanka and then I came back to this country and spent several years at Harvard studying the languages, all while working on a PhD for Lancaster University. So I spent about seven years on the thesis itself, just fully immersed in the primary text of the Polly language. The Polly language was kind of like a, it's related to Sanskrit. It's very similar to Sanskrit. Yeah, Sanskrit, it's a little older than Sanskrit. It's probably, it's more of a vernacular spoken version. Sanskrit is like a literary version of the language, proper English and so forth.

And the poly is more street language. And as such, it's closer to what the Buddha actually spoke. The Polly that we have in the text is some sort of hybrid of different dialects but they're all very, very similar. Can you speak Polly? Yeah, I can recite it. It's not a conversational language. It's like speaking Latin. Yes.

I mean, you go out and have a beer with someone and shoot the breeze in in poly. Could you if you had to? No, I don't think so. You really have to go back to India and live in a world where they spoke that language in order to get that kind of knowledge. But you know, I Read it all the time and I read it out loud quite often now and some of the work that I'm doing and you know And I can interpret it fairly lucidly what I see on the page. So I know the language, but it's not a living language. So I don't know it in the conversational way.

Although a lot of your work really brings the language alive. So at which point along the path for you, did you start actually meditating? Was it an academic pursuit at first that turned into a meditative pursuit? Well, it was really right from the beginning. I mean, the very first class I took in college, as in Boulder, Colorado, that involved Buddhism. I read my first book on Buddhism, and I got to the chapter on meditation, and it described

what meditation was. And so I just assumed that well that's part of what I had to do. So I went up into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and I sat down and I meditated. And you know I didn't have a teacher, I didn't have do any particular tradition, I was really just following what the text said about how to meditate. And I immediately found it incredibly compelling. That it's a different way of using the mind. And I soon came to realize that almost everything the Buddha was teaching was all about how to explore your experience directly. And that's what meditation is.

You know, it's not putting you into an altered state of consciousness, although there are some forms that can do that. It's more just paying very close attention to what's actually happening in the mind and body when you're looking at it directly, not when you think about it conceptually, but when you're looking at it directly. To what end in your view? Well, in so far as I've used it as a tool for Buddhist studies, one of the ends that it's brought for me is really the ability to relate to what the Buddha is teaching about how the mind and body works by seeing it in action. It's almost like the lab component of a science course. You know, here's the theory, now go into the lab and verify if that's the case.

theory now go into the lab and verify if that's the case. So for me, meditation has been a tool to really understand what the Buddha is pointing to in all those texts as much as anything else. So has your life been completely seamless and utterly and incestantly joy-filled as a consequence of meditation. That might be overstating the case a little bit, but I've been quite fortunate. I've not encountered a lot of misfortune, a lot of sorrow. There are many things that come up and one learns to roll with it. I'd say after so many years of meditation and study and understanding of this tradition, I've come to a certain equanimity

about most of what I encounter. But you got teenagers at home if I recall. I do, yes. So does that ever get difficult? Do I ever get annoyed at my family? Yeah. Of course I do. But not that strongly, not that often, not that intensively.

They're good kids, that helps. Yeah, take mine. You know you've met mine. I challenge you to take him for a weekend. But you know, even in the face of dramatic world events, like we've seen recently, you know, it's all very... From a bettertatus point of view, it's all very, from a meditators point of view, it all becomes very interesting.

It's not like I really like this, I really don't like this, or I want that, or I don't want that. It's more like, look closely at what's arising and find what's interesting about it. You say in your book, it is time for us to evolve or die trying. So you definitely have some strong views about the utility of the Buddha's teaching in the face of everything we are facing as a species, but let me just start at the beginning here. The book is called Untangling Self. The Self, or the lack thereof, or the illusion of is really, for me at least, and I think for many people, the hardest thing to understand about Buddhism.

It's completely confusing for many people. So explain, most people have even thought about the idea that we have a self or what the self is or anything like that, so that it, so the fact that it's an illusion is just counter-int intuition on top of just a totally new concept to begin with so it's doubly confusing so start from the beginning how do we how are we to understand this well first I'll acknowledge that it is a very challenging idea the Buddhist notion of non-self and it was in as challenging in ancient India as it is today many people during his lifetime came up to him and said, what do you mean by this?

They didn't understand it. And many of us don't either. I think here's a simple way of coming at it. What we're used to thinking is that the self is the starting point of everything. There is a me, there is a person, whether it's, you know, trans-identally created or not. There's some essence of me, and then we build out, well, what do I possess? What is my body like? What kind of feelings do I have? What ideas have I learned? Well, but I think it's worse than I think we don't even think about the fact that we do assume there is a me, right? I mean, I don't

think any of us, I think we operate as if there is some little dand behind our eyes. Exactly. But we don't, we're not even aware that we're operating with that assumption. Right, it is so fundamental and such a, you'd be with a starting point that we're not aware of it. It's, we just take it for granted.

Of course I'm a self. That's the starting point. Now let's talk about everything else. What the Buddha's is simply doing is saying, that notion that we have of the self is actually more like the icing on the cake. When you look closely at how the mind and body works, there's a sort of natural interaction

between the environment and the body, the senses of the body and the data that comes in from the environment, that the mind and body automatically and naturally processes the incoming information and figures out a feeling tone that goes with it and a perception, a kind of interpretation of what's happening, and there's a whole range of emotional responses that we learn over time and develop through a cause and effect. And then all of that is really happening automatically, unconsciously, I might say. And then at the very last minute, at the very end of this process,

we kind of like put a cherry on top and say, oh, and all of that, that's mine, that's me, that's myself. So the Buddhists are saying that our notion of self is actually an afterthought to what's all that's happening, whereas we're used to thinking of it as the essential starting point of everything that's happening. All right, so I'm going to try to break that time because I think those who are coming to us, uninitiated, may struggle with it. So what you were describing there, you were without using Buddhist lingo, talking about the way the Buddhists break down our experience into kind of the elementary particles of experience. So just right now

as I sit here, I can feel my pant leg against my leg. And so that's the raw data of the experience. But then a bunch of things happen. I have a perception in the mind, which allows me to confirm, okay, that's what that is. I have what you refer to as a feeling tone, which is Buddhist lingo for you. You did use a little Buddhist lingo there. Buddhist lingo for, do I like this?

Do I not like it? Or do I not care? Is it positive? Is it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? In other words, and then based on that, I either want more of it, want less of it, or ignore it. And so this is kind of just the tip of the iceberg of how the Buddhist try to get you to see every,

this is the point of one of the points of meditation, to see your experience in a much finer, grain way. And then what you see after all of that, after seeing, oh yeah, my mind just perceived this reality, decided whether it liked it or didn't like it, and then I made some decisions based on that. You can see how in every moment of experience, you are adding this extra element of ownership, which leads up to this ongoing sense of having a self. Yes, exactly. I actually said that correctly.

You mentioned the sensation of your leg, for example. You can say, I can feel my pants against my legs. That's a lot of me. That is right. So starting right there. Or you could simply say, you know, a sensation, a physical sensation is arising in the body, which is being interpreted as pants and legs, and that is being interpreted or experienced as pleasant. And then at the end of all that you say, you know, oh, and by the way, that's me. Yeah, but you know, but you can't you see how like when we talk about this is like it throws you into this position of talking in a very contorted way.

A physical sensation is being known by the mind and body. It really does, it's like reading the IRS code. Well, yeah, it's not so much that it's more complicated, but it's certainly unfamiliar. Basically taking this self out, depersonalizing everything. Our experience doesn't change just the way we talk about it changes. Like a sensation is arising or this thought is occurring or this impulse is coming up versus I want this and I'm doing that. I want to dive more deeply into how this process works in a second, but we may have gotten ahead of ourselves,

because I should have asked this question first, which is, why? Aren't we doing just fine as, you know, walking around operating as selves? No, we're not doing very well at all, frankly. Here's a simple example that the Buddha gives in one of his stories. You know, if a person is walking through the woods and sees someone else pick up a stick and wander off with it or are handful of leaves or something, does that bother you? No, it doesn't bother you. Why? Because that sticks that mind.

Those leaves aren't mine. They don't belong to me. But the minute somebody touches something that you regard as belonging to you, as mine. You know, this is my stick and I found it and I carved it or was given to me by my grandfather or whatever. Immediately, all of these very primitive emotions of, you know, violent defense of your territory of violent opposition to anyone who threatens you immediately comes up. But what's wrong with that? Speaking of sticks, you gave me these really cool little wooden blocks that my son plays with. If my neighbor walked into my apartment and took them, I would

not be pleased. And would I be acting irrationally if I was displeased by that? It's not irrationally. That displeasure is the source of suffering. First of all, you're going to be agitated. You're mad at this guy now and your blood pressure is going to go up and you're going to get teeth are going to get clenched and so forth. And not to escalate unnecessarily, but you could do some act of violence against the person. So many of the troubles that come up in our world are triggered by this sense of self, because the self is the sort of focal point of our most primitive instincts, of I have

to survive at all costs. Yeah, but we do exist. I mean, you, Andy, are sitting right here. I, Dan, I'm sitting across from you at the table surrounded by all this audio equipment. This is where things get confusing for people because we can look in the mirror and see that there's a person there. Oh yeah, the Buddha doesn't deny there's a person there. It sees that saying that you think you're a self, but we know better that you really aren't. What he's saying is that the concept, the idea that we have of self, and self is a view, in the Buddhist view.

It's a concept, it's an idea, it's a name, a label. The view that we have of self is very clumsy, it's not very accurate, it's not actually referring to the things that we think it is. It's like many things, like just in physics, for example, this tabletop. It feels smooth, it feels hard, and so forth. And at a conventional level of language, it makes sense. You know, put that on the table and so forth. But as we know, from science, if you zoom in closely enough at the table, you will find

at another level of scale, it's not very smooth at all. And if you go in farther, deeper to the subatomic level, it's not very smooth at all, and if you go in farther deeper to the subatomic level, it's actually there's no solidity there. It's all just empty relationships between various forces. They're really saying a very similar thing about ourselves. It's conventional to talk about myself and yourself. It's a useful concept legally and in so many ways. It functions in our society to help us. But what the Buddhists are doing in meditation

is they're really trying to look much closer. They're bringing a microscope to the mind. And when you zoom in much closer, you see that actually, it's not how it appears at the normal level of scale. What's actually happening is the construction of multiple smaller relationships that kind of build up to our sense of self. And even some boys would often say if you go down close enough in investigation you will see that the mind is essentially as empty as is matter empty when you look closely in us.

So it's a bunch of impersonal forces like perception and feeling tone of things feeling pleasurable or not pleasurable or neutral. In personal forces that we then personalize as the cherry on top. Exactly. But okay, so let's go back to my absurd example of my neighbor taking the little blocks that you gave my son how would a person who has done a bunch of meditation and has untangled the self or partially untangled the self seen through this illusion seen that the cherry on top is unnecessary how would that person react to a neighbor coming in and taking their kids toy well it depends on depends on the concept, on the context. I mean, if the neighbor is a friend and they just want to borrow them, then a person might feel generosity and say, well, I'm happy to share them with you, you know, just make sure to bring them back. If it's someone, you

know, with a weapon that wants to take all your, you know, valuable possessions and find that the most valuable and take off with it. Well, maybe there's not much you can do about that. So having the ability to renounce your attachment to those things is helpful. It doesn't, it doesn't provoke violence. It doesn't provoke bad intention. It's not necessarily saying that you should give away anything that you value, but, you know, in that particular situation.

And Buddhism is very particular. They're not really talking about generalities. They're much more interested in specific situations. But if your attachment to those is so strong that you resist an armed intruder, for example, that could be the cause of suffering for yourself, for your family, and for others. If you have the non-attachment to be able to watch it get taken away, that might be healthier for many of you. Okay.

So, I may have picked a dumb analogy, but then can you explain in a more, in terms that we can all understand and care about why untangling the self again to go back to the title of your book, seeing that it is a cherry on top that we're adding is useful in our actual lives? Yes. Let's go back to what you're quoting me saying that we have to evolve or die. This is the bigger context of all this. What the Buddhist tradition is saying, as I understand it,

is that we have deeply embedded in us certain very toxic emotional drives. They call it greed, hatred, and delusion. Greed is a fundamental urge to get what you want or need. Hatred is a fundamental urge to kill or avoid or something that threatens you, and delusion is really not understanding what's going on very well in making up various illusions about what's happening.

Now, the Buddhists are saying that those emotional tones, or those drives in us, are are toxic and they cause suffering. They cause harm. So much of the harm being done in our world is rooted in the greed, hatred, and delusion of individual human beings. I mean the occasional thing like an earthquake or you know a meteor strike, okay, there's nothing, no human involvement there. But all of the war and the injustice and the exploitation and so forth is all because some people are feeling greedy and hateful, and others are the victim of that.

And all of the personal distress that people find themselves under the sort of anxieties and the panics and the fears and the addictions and so forth, those all come from the internal breaking out or manifestation of greed and hatred and various formations, the racism, bigotry, and so forth. And so the problem is that the sense of self is really what triggers these things.

They're in us as very primitive defense mechanisms. And so when we feel like my self or the extension of myself into my property or my relations is threatened, then it brings out this very primitive behavior. What non-self is allowing to do, it's not a metaphysical denial of the self. It's recognizing that taking the self as a view, it's like a strategy for organizing your experience. And if you change that strategy to non-self strategy,

you know, this is not mine, this is not me, this is not myself, then you are not evoking those toxic emotions. And you're able actually to evoke and develop more positive emotions, such as, you know, non-grade, which is generosity and non-attachment, or non-hatred, which is kindness and compassion and caring for someone else. See I think this really evolutionary, I think it goes back all the way to the dinosaurs, this very operating system that, you know, I need to survive at all costs and never mind everything else, kind of this primal ferocity. And I think as mammals evolved, and that we, this kind of gentler part of ourselves, more

cooperative part of ourselves came out, where I'll sometimes sacrifice my own best interest, and maybe even my life for the sake of the family, for the tribe, for the group, for the herd, whatever. And that we have these sort of two operating systems, one on top of the other. They're both still there. And one is more evolved than the other. Now the third piece of this in evolution, you know, what makes humans unique is this prefrontal cortex where we are able to bring heightened awareness to the present moment. And that's what meditation is developing and strengthening.

And this gives us the ability to sort of mediate more between these two levels of our primitive responses. Reptile brain and the front of our brain. Yeah, it's a little bit like that. And so the thing is simply that when we habitually take the view that this is me and I am at stake here, then it brings out the worst in us. And when we take the view that this is just interdependent phenomena arising and interacting with one another, then it's easier to do what is

appropriate for one's own well-being and for the well-being of others. So if I threw meditation, and we should talk about how meditation would help with this, but if I threw meditation developed the view of non-self, am I going to be completely lost? Am I going to know how to make a dentist appointment or put my pants on? Of course, you'll be able to do all that. All that, it will affect. It doesn't come just by meditation, but through insight and wisdom comes from meditation. What the non-self perspective will help you do is become less selfish and more selfless. That'll make you at least a 10% better person.

Right, so you're you're still going to be you in the world doing what you need to do. You're not going to be a moron as a consequence of this. It's just that you will start to see. Now here's how I understand it. So I'm going to talk about how I understand it and you can tell me as the expert where I've run Australia here is that you start to realize that all of this commotion that you're experiencing internally this voice in your head the emotions that arise You don't have to take them personally and therefore you don't have to be yanked around by them. Yes That's the key phrase don't take it personally when. When you take something personally, it really hurts. When it's in-personal, it doesn't. But where people get, I love this, but where people get confused about this is like, again, you know, if somebody does something that you perceive to be bad, that is actually aimed

at you, a mugger points a gun at you and takes your stuff, it's hard not to take that personally. I mean, it is personal on many key levels. Well, you notice in that example that the closer it comes to an existential threat, the more potent and even necessary these primal instincts of self-preservation are. So I would say be a good Buddhist all your life, but if your life's at stake by a mugger in the park, be a non-Buddhist for a little while. At least to survive the moment. Right, so these cases that I'm bringing up are really just, they're so extreme that

they're not really a better one would be, okay, you're in a, I'll use my own life. I'm hanging out with my wife and I haven't gotten enough sleep and she's annoying me through no fault of her own, but she's, because she's really not annoying, but I'm irritable, because I haven't gotten enough sleep and I'm just kind of an irritable guy at baseline. And I can feel it, I can feel that I'm starting to get annoyed. At that moment, I can, through the power of meditation, just turn my attention in word and see, okay, is this anger mine? You know, like, do I own this anger?

Should I feel responsible for it? Should I act on it? Do I need to believe that it's true? Can I see what its component parts are? Like, oh yeah, my chest is buzzing. My ears are turning red. I have this urge to say the thing that will make the next 48 hours of my life terrible.

That, I'm just a deconstructing this thing that feels like a juggernaut in this anger. And I'm not taking it personally and therefore not acting on it. Right, so you're bringing heightened wisdom to the situation. You know, you have the impulse, I feel angry and I want to say something to you. I, I, I feel all these things. But then you catch yourself because you're in the habit of doing some meditation. So you understand, you look, you turn your attention and you're going to say, okay, what's really going on here? And just the ability to say, well, if you want to use, you can. I'm feeling

irritable because I haven't gotten enough sleep. That's a simple relationship of cause and effect. If I had gotten more sleep, I wouldn't be this irritable. And this thing that my wife said, I'm taking it as an irritation because of a certain set of assumptions I'm making. But I need not make those. So you can sort of reconstruct the situation in a different way by not taking it personally. And again, the result is, as you say, to avoid a certain amount of suffering that would come. When we make hurtful remarks, when we speak, you know, from weakness, it often has difficult consequences. Yeah, it's never really going well for me. And I've tried it a lot.

So I just want to keep free associate for a second here, because my whole stick has been talking about mindfulness. You know, when I wrote 10% happier, when I teach, when I teach, I don't teach anything. When I talk, I travel around the country speaking to corporations, I have an app where I work with teachers to talk about mindfulness. Meditation, I talk about mindfulness and I talk about it in the following way,

which is that mindfulness is the skill generated most commonly through meditation of where you learn to see what's happening in your head right now clearly so that you don't get yanked around by it. Pretty simple, when explained in non-Uigui, mystical, shmistical language. And people get, most of the time, people get, oh yeah, I could use that because the voice in my head

is offering up terrible suggestions like, oh, I should eat a million cookies or I should pop off at my boss or I should engage, let road rage overtake me and chase people down the road, I should eat a million cookies or I should pop off at my boss or I should engage, you know, let road rage overtake me and chase people down the road, et cetera, et cetera. Everybody knows that, you know, that we are yanked around by our emotions and that if we can see them clearly, then we won't get yanked around by it. So that's how I talk about meditation and mindfulness.

But selflessness, I've had trouble integrating that into my message because it seems like such a big counterintuitive brain Herding, mind numbing, you know, it just makes my head hurt, makes my teeth hurt thinking about what the cell find What do we even talking about here? But if we just bring it down to the practical level, which is yeah, you You're feeling angry right now. Look for the you who is angry. Try to find it. Try to find it.

Try to figure out, just close your eyes and next time you're angry, or next time you're experiencing a strong desire, which will come along in the next five minutes of some sort. You'll have an urge for an Oreo or to rip your headphones out and whatever. Look for who's feeling that. And you won't find that person, and that is

a way to kind of untangle to use a word from the title of your book, this emotion that might otherwise overtake you and make you do something you will later regret. Am I saying that correctly? Does that make sense to you? Yes, and I would even step it back and make it a little bit easier. You don't necessarily have to see whether that's the cell for the non-self or where is the self. Simply re-languaging it, re-fraising what's happening, what will be helpful.

So instead of I'm feeling angry, it's more simply, I notice that anger is arising. You can add in me, but the fact that, what you say that anger is there rather than I am feeling angry, the anger has gone from the emotional response that's driving everything you do and has become now something in front of you that you're looking at, that you're observing and that you're learning from. So one of the ways to understand deselving is sort of desentering.

Instead of, I'm in the middle of all this and whatever I feel, that's what I have to act out. It's that there is a mind body here in which various things are happening and I have the ability to look at and watch what's happening. And then the non-self habit is more sort of learning some of the principles. When you see certain things arising

and passing away in regular fashion, you simply understand, oh, there's that pattern again. What I want to get enough sleep I get irritable. Or when someone cuts me off, I feel anger. But with this sort of distancing that happens by looking at it as something to observe rather than something that you identify within

it habits you allows you to make different choices. You know, okay, the anger is impaling me to act a certain way, but I don't have to act that way. There are other options in this system by which to act. But the reason why I like the idea of looking for the self in those moments is because I've been, I've I've crashed up against the rocky shores of these sort of philosophical argument of whether there's a self or not. I've just gotten stuck in that a lot and wondering what, whether maybe the Buddha's full of

crap or whatever. But in fact, if you just set that aside and look for you, it settles the, well, it doesn't settle the argument. I mean, that's not the wrong way to put it. But in a moment of extreme emotion, if you look for who's feeling it, and realize that there isn't that this emotion you're feeling isn't as solid as you think it is. Somebody's just accused you of something you haven't done. And look for who is feeling mistreated. That can actually take the teeth out of this thing

that could make you act in a way that you would later regret. So taking it out of the theoretical, putting it in the deeply practical, just makes it so much juicier for me. Yeah, well that makes sense. Now here's another way coming out the whole thing, Dan, that might be helpful. So

um If we understand the human being to be a natural part of the natural world How could there possibly be a self? So in the natural world for example when it rains outside or there's a storm Uh, we don't say, you know, who is raining? Who you know who is making it rain? I mean in the old days, they used to say the rain god makes it rain, but we know that rain storm is something that comes together when certain conditions. Making it rain has taken out a whole different

meaning in the popular vernacular, but anyway, carry it on. So when the temperature is a certain way, the pressure, the, you know, the moisture content of the air, all those things, when they, conditions come together in a certain way, rain occurs. And of course it's just one part of a cycle. This puddles on the ground, that's part of the raining, this clouds on the sky, that's part of the raining, and the invisible evaporation, so forth. So I'm simply saying that the Buddhists are looking at the human being the same way. When certain conditions come together

in certain configurations. Yeah, mommy meets daddy. Well, now that's again too physical, to an external way of looking at it. Just internally, every single moment, Dan is something that's happening. It's not that he exists, it's that he's occurring. See, the Buddhists use the word self.

That the self, it's not that the self doesn't occur. It's that the self doesn't exist. And maybe this is parsing words, but it's an important distinction. To say that something exists means that it's somehow metaphysically real. The Buddhists say nothing is metaphysically real because everything is changing all the time. Everything is non-self, but everything is really occurring.

It's really happening. And so you as Dan and me as Andy, we are events that are occurring, complex events, very idiosyncratic events, but there's no person inside making it what it is. Just like there's no person in a rainstorm or in nature. And so, the only way that a human being can be a self in a natural system is by some sort of religious assumption. And that's how it got there in most traditions.

Well, God created the world and God created the self, and so the self is in the world. And we've got the special dispensation. We are the ones who ourselves, nothing else in the world is the self. So, as we enter more of the scientific age, it's becoming very clear. There's no place in the brain where the self is found. There's no structure in the body that houses the self. The self is not a thing.

What we understand in modern terms, social sciences and psychology and neuroscience and so forth, is simply that what we come to regard as the self is a complex set of conditions that have come together. Some of it's physical, and modern father getting together. some of it is emotional, what you've learned behaviorally, over a lifetime of learning and so forth, some of it is cognitive and conceptual, what ideas or views you created in any given time, but

all those things really do occur. They really do happen. So each of us as individuals are really happening. But again, to assume that there's some entity or essence or sacred energy behind or underneath or within all of that, that's really what the Buddha is questioning. Well, let me ask you, my mother, who is very, in my view, very smart and definitely influential

on me, scientist, a very skeptical person. I got her interested in meditation, she's still into it. She really rebels against the whole non-self thing. Her argument is just because you can't find it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Yeah, well that's the same argument they make about God, you know, you can't find it. Interestingly, she's pretty strong in arguing there's no God. Well, I think, you know, after years of coming at this concept of non-self, I think the time has come to put the burden of proof on the opposition.

It's not for me to describe what I mean by non-self. I would invite anyone else to explain to me what they mean by self. What is this self after all? And when you ask people that question, you get a whole range of different answers. Now, maybe 200 years ago, the answer would have been, you know, it's the sacred soul created by God. And there are many people who would still answer it that way. But people like your mother, I would think, if asked that kind of question, you should

try to ask her. What does she mean by the cell? Yes, she would, I think, reject that the burden of proof is on her. Why? I think because you'd say, the Buddhists are walking around in the guise of some either religion or ancient set of practices, but definitely a tradition, let's just say walking around in this tradition and making these pretty vocal assertions

about the illusion of the self, so prove it. Well, let's keep Buddhism out of it for the moment. Simply, what do we mean by the word self in a English language in the contemporary context? And most people never even thought about the issue. Well, you know, psychologists, though, and they've defined it in all different ways I mean Freud brought an understanding to it that included all the unconscious and all these different schools of psychology over the last hundred years

Have come up with a different definition of different understanding So and if you ask most people what do you mean by it? They won't be able to answer that you know It's some kind of essence. Well, what do you mean by that? Well, is it material? Well, no, it's not material and so forth and so on. So you keep drilling down on making sense of that idea to ourselves. And I think that the concept will largely self-destruct. Is it possible to do enough meditation? Well, let me step back for a second.

Very quickly, how does meditation help you get in touch with non-self? Nuts and bolts. What am I doing in meditation? Because most of us think of meditation is feel the breath coming in, feel it going out. When you get lost, which you will a million times, just start over.

And over time, that will really help you see that your thoughts are just these passing impulses and you don't need to take them so seriously. So how does that simple practice that leads generally described to something that leads to mindfulness, again not being yanked around by your emotions, how does that also lead you to seeing through the illusion of the self? Well at a very simple level when you are mindful you're not Selfing say I consider self to be a verb rather than a noun

It's not a thing that exists but a thing that occurs an event that occurs and you know When you sit down and do meditation as you describe you're simply observing the sensations Let's say that a rise and fall in the body while you're breathing Now you have two options on how to do that. You can say, I am watching my breath, or you can simply be aware that breath is occurring. And in moments of true mindfulness, when you're not just attending to the breath, but you're attending to the breath with a disengagement of desire and seeing it with equanimity, you kind of lose that distinction. You're not constantly reminding yourself, I am here doing this.

How do you know when you're at true mindfulness as opposed to whatever it is you just described as not true? And how do you do it right? Well, let me explain what I mean by this simply, is that there's really two parts to the definition of mindfulness in popular culture. One is paying attention on purpose in the present moment. You hear all that. And then the other part of the definition is with an attitude of non-judgment, or sort of disengaging from the wanting or not wanting. And I think that that part of mindfulness, which is training ourselves to pay attention

rather than being inattentive, that is a form of meditation. But mindfulness doesn't actually kick into the meditation until there is this disengagement of wanting or not wanting things to be a certain way. So I can see the pain in my knee and not get so hung up in my aversion to it. It's just I'm watching the pain change and etc. Well, that's a good example. So the pain is arising in the knee and you can't help but be annoying. You really don't like it. You wish it wasn't there. You wish it would go away.

And so you can be meditating with the pain is the object of what you're meditating on. So to speak, you're aware of the pain. But you attitude, object of what you're meditating on, so to speak, you're aware of the pain. But you attitude, whether you're aware of it, can be very annoyed, very angry, very immersive. I wish that wasn't there, or longing for some solution to the pain and so forth. You're meditating because you're keeping the mind on the object, but you're not meditating with mindfulness.

Mindfulness is, it's almost like pushing in the clutch on a car, you know, so that the speed of the engine and the speed of the wheels are no longer locked into one another. So in the same way, there's the awareness of the pain, but when the mindfulness kicks in, the pain becomes no longer a problem, no longer something that you dislike and it simply becomes a sensation to regard interest. How do you do that? It becomes interesting. How do you do that? You just put it in the clutch.

I think the way you do that is just by noticing your aversion. Well, you notice your aversion, but you let go of it. That's what I'm saying. You notice it, and in the noticing, you're like, oh yeah, this is aversion. And I don't need to be so wrapped go of it. That's what I'm saying. You notice it in in the noticing you're like oh yeah this is a version and I don't need to be so wrapped up in it. Right but you notice there's two phases to that. Noticing the pain, then noticing the aversion and then letting go of the aversion. Same well I don't have to see. Yeah and then over and over and over again because you're gonna start feeling aversion again. I mean unless you're really really good really good. Well, no, eventually you feel all the emotions.

The point is that the Buddhists aren't trying to run away from those emotions or suppress them or pretend they're not happening or turn it into some perfect experience. They're simply saying, notice everything that's happening, including the things that are distressing, but notice them with an attitude of curiosity and interest and not an attitude of identification.

Right. But it's not, it's just to be clear, it's not some magical pressing of the clutch. It actually really just is taking an interest in it rather than getting stuck in your revulsion. So with a pain in the knee, it can be, okay, I'm feeling the pain in the knee. I hate this. I'm starting to worry, like am I actually maybe hurting my knee? Is this because I was playing little league when

I was eight, nine, and I get hit in the knee by a ball, etc. Your mind just goes off like that. And then you notice, oh, I'm just, you know, I'm experiencing a flood of thoughts in relationship to this pain in the knee. I really don't like the pain in the knee. Well, let's see what that's like. You know, how is the aversion, is the aversion showing up in my shoulder because I'm kind of like squirming a little bit and want to get up, is the aversion showing up in a desire to like actually leave the room to start thinking about other things, you know, and so I'm just bringing a bunch of curiosity to what I'm experiencing. And then you move into what I would consider true mindfulness.

Yeah, I think what brings you, most of what you described is not mindfulness and when you come into it like you say, I think it's really when you stop taking it a personal. Yeah, that's a... It's a small thing. But the way to get there is I think through the application of interest, is through the application of interest and investigation. Yeah, I think there's a lot of ways to get there that's certainly one of them what would the other ways to be because i'm trying to get you away from just

the magical pressing of the clutch uh... which because i don't know that people understand what you mean by that well you know the bonus talk about it as uh... having insight into the way things actually are you know when you when you uh you sort of recognize that there is the sensation arising and that you have the option of either getting very identified with it, which will bring the aversion with it, or whether you have the option of sort of stepping back from it, I'm not sure which metaphor works best, you know, putting in the clutch of stepping back. But for me, for example, if the pain is there

and I feel aversion to the pain, it's almost a tangible sense of disengagement when one kind of steps back and sees it as, this is not my knee hurting, this is an unpleasant physical sensation. That's all it is. And you need not automatically hate the pain and love the pleasure. It's okay to notice pleasure and pain with equanimity.

And that's simply equanimity is just evenly balanced. You're not leaning into it, you're not leaning away from it. So the difference between, I hate this pain, I wish it would go away. You're pulling back or simply observing it as a non-personal event that's happening, which allows you to disengage from being caught by it. Can one get so good at this kind of meditative engagement slash disengagement because you're engaging with it in that you're becoming interested in it rather than reflexively running away with it and that leads to a kind of dispassionate disengagement, it's a kind of interesting paradox, but can one get so good at this that one reaches a state

known as enlightenment? Because you refer to the Buddha throughout the book as having uprooted greed, hatred, and delusion, as if we know that to be true. So do you think enlightenment is possible and that this dude 2600 years ago did it? Actually, I do. Yes. Both. Well, first of all, is it possible? This is what he is describing and this is what he said he did. so he's describing it for his own experience. This experience of awakening that he had or enlightenment is called under the tree, that is described as basically the complete uprooting of these primitive toxic instincts of greed, hatred and delusion. Yeah, lots of things are described in books, but I don't necessarily know that Hogwarts is a real place.

So, why do we think that this guy reached Nirvana? Well, you know, there's no proof, there's no evidence. You know, the kind of, I'm not even sure what we count as evidence in this case, but I'm not saying necessarily that I know that this person had exactly this experience and this is the way it's described. It's more like, here's a person who describes having an experience. To the extent that I find it useful or interesting to the extent that it can be verified in various ways and one's own experience, the extent in which it makes sense as a cohesive explanation

of how the human psyche works and how it can be healed from its difficulties, that's all plausible to me. And so I would say it's a working hypothesis of mine that there really was such a person that really did have this experience and so forth. And that is accessible to us? I think it's accessible to us because it's really talking about how the mind and body works and sort of readjusting it. I don't think I can point to anybody that

is an awakened person in the contemporary world and say that person has attained Buddhahood, he's become enlightened. But I think that there are many people who you can point to who have, you know, much less greed, hatred, and delusion than others, or much less than they used to have. I've seen many examples of people improving their personalities, so to speak. Their level of happiness, going up, their well-being, through the gradual letting go. Many people say, you know, this thing used to annoy me all the time, and now I just look at it with interest, where I used to, you know, be filled with with rage about something and now I'm really feeling quite benevolent. When you see changes like that happen in people, or when you see people exemplify a really

selfless way of holding themselves in the world rather than a heavily selfish one, it sort of corroborates some of the basic ideas behind this. Well, what you're describing there is kind of in line of my whole 10% happier thing, which is you just get incrementally less of a jerk to yourself and others. But I'm curious about the word enlightenment, which just has connotations of some sort of magical mystical transformation. The Buddha sitting under a tree in the middle of the night and, you know, touching the earth and its shakes and guava. Well, yeah, well, as I said at the beginning, there's a lot of legendary and mythological

material tied up in the story and, you know, that made it more compelling to thousands of years of people. Right, good PR. I don't find that stuff compelling. I'm far more interested in thinking of the Buddha as a man, having a profound psychological transformation. That's what I think happened to him under the tree. I don't actually believe that the earth's shock

or that the flowers bloomed out of season and the devas were singing and so forth. But I do believe that this person had a very dramatic realization. People have dramatic realizations of various sorts. That's not supernatural. And that this one basically was so reaching so deeply into his unconscious mind that it basically rewired the brain or re-rooted the construction of experience around those primitive instincts.

So according to this model, and I don't know if it's true or not, but as I understand, awakening to be a transforming of the mind such that these primitive toxins no longer operate. According to that view, for the next 45 years of his life, when he walked around, he would have not experienced any hatred, any anger, any fear, any ill will, any addiction or greed. Now, one's still, and so as such, I think he's really demonstrating the next step in human evolution. I think that we all are capable of operating in the world without being hateful and cruel, without being greedy and selfish.

And yeah, there's a lot to work out, practically, how to do that, especially in a world that is so thoroughly organized around greed, hatred, and delusion as the one that we live in. I mean, we live in a society that really institutionalizes greed in its economic system, and institutionalizes hatred in its military complex, and institutionalizes delusion in its advertising and political deception and so forth. So collectively, we have a lot to work out. But one tone of the book is optimistic. I think that we are evolving as a species.

I think we are becoming better and better people on the whole, despite compelling evidence to the contrary in some cases, and that we're doing it by becoming gradually less self-oriented, you know, there's a lot of people out there that are really focused on helping others, that really do care about others, that are really putting their energy into serving others. There's a lot of that out there.

And I think, you know, the sort of spread of some of the ideals, at least, of equal rights and of empowerment of women and underprivileged people and afflicted people, you know, all that. There's a lot of cultivation of generosity and kindness and compassion and so forth. And a lot of wisdom, a lot of evolving understanding. And I think science is in step with Buddhism on that regard, you know, desacralizing the world, demystifying the world, understanding the cause and effect that influences how everything comes to be, and then using our understanding of how cause and effect works,

to intervene skillfully such that we can encourage those things that turn out better and we can learn to gradually let go and weed out those things that cause more and more difficulty. Well said, where can people learn more about you and access more of, obviously you can get the book on Tangling Self. And Drew Alinsky. And that's A-N-D-R-E-W-O-L-E-N-D-Z-K-I.org. And on the web, you have another book called Unlimiting Mine,

which is also great. But you also are doing this thing. I just want to let people know before we close, because it's a really great way to access your teaching, where you do these online courses through the Integrated Dharma Institute. That's right. You can get to all this stuff through www.entralenkey.org. So it's got its own separate website now.

Integrateddharma.org. Go to either one of these websites, and basically, I recommend, because I've done it myself, sign up for one of these websites and basically I recommend because I've done it myself sign up for one of these courses That then he does where you basically you get every week an email or he takes a part of the Buddhist text Translates it himself and explains how you can put this to work in your own life And it really just breaks apart the Buddhist teachings into the most sort of simple, applicable stuff.

I like the value of generosity. What the Buddha said about speech. Speech is, you know, we're always saying dumb things to each other into ourselves. And the Buddha had some really simple guidelines, not rules, not commandments, but guidelines for how you can think about speech in your own life and act in ways and then test it out in the laboratory of your own life and your own mind. And I've tried it, you know, mostly failed, but it's an interesting, they're interesting things to learn there that I think over time I will get better at.

Anyway, Andy's a master at teaching this stuff. You can sign up for his courses there. You can read his books and re-list into this podcast because he said a lot of things that probably will take you two times to really fully grasp because this stuff is tricky but really important. I'm also doing a course now that's about to come out with tricycle called going forth and it's all about reimagining the move in our lives of entering retirement or our major years. And trying to take it really is an opportunity for spiritual investigation and understanding as opposed to just the time of

diminishing expectations. That's great. It's not advertised yet but it will be soon. It starts in January so stay tuned for that as well. Awesome. Thank you sir. Thank you. You're the best. Appreciate it. Thanks very much, Dan. OK, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please make sure to subscribe, rate us. And if you want to suggest topics we should cover or guests

we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. I also want to thank Hardly, the people who produce this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Cohen, the people who produced this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Kohan, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calp, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News Digital Dance Silver. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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