Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 54: Vince Horn, Buddhist Geek on Struggling with Nirvana

Episode Date: January 4, 2017

Vince Horn, the co-founder of Buddhist Geeks, says when he reached nirvana, he found it "disappointing" and "anti-climactic," which set him on a new journey to map his experience. A practicing meditation teacher from Asheville, N.C., Horn's latest project is called Meditate.io, a free course on aiming to make in-depth meditation training more approachable. 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 y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. So way before 10% happier the book or the podcast even existed, there was a great podcast that I used to listen to and still listen to occasionally called Buddhist Geeks. And it doesn't actually exist anymore though you can find it in your podcast feeds. They're not doing it anymore. But is this great show where they brought on all of these deep end of the pool Buddhist

teachers and asked them all these crazy questions and it was really where I started to learn a lot about going past my interest in straight-up secular meditation and getting a lot more interested in, I guess, issues around enlightenment to use a loaded term. And the host of that show was a guy named Vince Horn, young guy, and he's moved on to some really interesting things but learned a lot of interesting stuff along the way while hosting Buddhist Geek. So and also his his experience on the cushion is super, super compelling which you'll hear all about in this interview right now with Vince.

From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you, man. Yeah, that's really fun to have. I've spent countless hours with your voice in my head listening to Buddhist geeks. And you must hear people tell you that all the time.

Well, my podcast is pretty new, so... It's more of your face than there is. Yeah, we must see on the TV. Yeah, we have to see on the TV. Yeah, but sometimes people do recognize my voice. Anyway, we're here to talk about you. I always start with the same question, which is how did you come to meditation? The first exposure I had to formal meditation was from a meditation class I took with my aunt who was teaching it and I was 13 at the time.

Wow, it's pretty young. Yeah, I came by honestly because my family was kind of weird and into some strange stuff. Where did you grow up? I grew up in North Carolina and Western North Carolina. You're Asheville. And so what kind of meditation was she teaching? It was, for lack of a better term, it was kind of an eclectic mix of sort of new age-inspired stuff like imagining going on journeys.

A lot of things that had to do with grounding attention downward into the earth, which I've learned later was our pretty common practices among different traditions. So were you like, this is crap or were you into it? I was pretty into it. I was curious what my aunt was doing and I found it fascinating. And so I went with it.

And for a while. For what? Okay, at some point you rebelled or dropped it? At some point I dropped it. And strangely looking back now, I have a better understanding of why, but I had some interesting experiences and kind of a certain kind of awakening to

something that was different than I'd ever experienced before. I didn't quite know how to make sense of it, especially with like a 13-year-old conception of the world. And at some point I dropped it, but I always felt as I was going through high school that I should go back to that at some point. Like, there's something important there. And then did when I was 19 in college, I kind of hooked up with some people that were exploring similar stuff and I ended up dropping out of college to meditate full time at that point. Whoa. Yeah.

I mean, I've heard about people driving out to like follow the grateful dead or join a cult, but you just were really in the meditation? Yeah, I was really on a trip. You know, I had these experiences that blew me away and made me think there was a whole other aspect to reality that the conventional reality wasn't talking about. And as a result, conventional reality, like going to school, getting my degree, being able to earn a good living,

like all of this thing suddenly felt very flat and very meaningless to me. What kind of meditation were you doing there having all these crazy experiences? I mean, I feel like my work a day meditation does not. I mean, I think it's incredibly useful but it hasn't blown my mind in that way. Yeah, so I mean, I think it's incredibly useful, but isn't below my mind in that way. Yeah. So I was, I actually, the, some of the experiences I was having, there were some

of them were connected to meditation and some weren't. I mean, I was doing at 19 in school, I got connected with this group. That was doing a kind of large group awareness training, and it comes out of the 70s human potential movement where you go in these big groups, and you do all these these crazy experiential exercises. Some of them are very meditative and it's very intense. You're not sleeping a lot. It's over like a weekend. It's like these encounter groups, sure you've heard of these things. Not really. Okay. Well, it's a whole weird kind of subculture and it's kind of a mix of personal development, multi-level marketing

and spiritual training, like all kind of mix into this very strange environment. And I would never recommend anyone do this stuff actually in retrospect, but it kicked off or like recatalized that sort of investigation process for me. And as a result, I started having a lot of, again, a lot of kind of quote unquote spiritual experiences, like my sense of self would dissolve for periods of time, like the sense of who I am as a localized thing would sort of break open. I'd feel a sense of being able to kind of fathom

like the suffering of human experience that a really universal level like suddenly I feel like I could identify you know how all humans throughout time have suffered in wars and you know I'd be reflecting on these things and suddenly my heart would just be cracking open I'd be corpballing and all of a sudden you know deep sense of compassion would arise that had nothing to do with me like Vince in my life experience it was kind of balling and all of a sudden, you know, deep sense of compassion would arise. That had nothing to do with me, like Vince in my life experience. It was kind of touching into the collective experience of being human.

Do you think you're just a natural meditator? Because these things you're describing are basically the way the Buddhists and many mystical traditions describe the point of practice, which is to to to see that the self that you're carrying around with you is an illusion yes and also that to to to love thy neighbor as thyself as another person not the Buddha said it and here you are 19 year old kid in these strange quote unquote encounter sessions you're having these realizations and not everyone else wants. No, what I'm saying is I'm not having those realizations.

I mean, sometimes intellectually and maybe taste of them in my daily meditation practice or on retreaters and then like that. And I suspect many of the listeners aren't just kind of cracking open in the way you're describing. So you think you're a natural or what's going on? I don't tend to think that I'm natural. No

um, I Don't know. I don't know what was going on That was just my experience and it it seemed like the most important thing So I I felt like I needed to to really dedicate as much energy time as I could do it fair enough So you're 19 you start meditating full- time. What does what formed is that take? Well, it took a Buddhist form pretty early on, although it hadn't taken that form up to that point. But I met a bunch of friends at NC State where I was going to school that were going off to do these Vapasana retreats. Some of them are going to do these 10 day retreats in what's called the Goenka tradition

that are pretty hardcore, and that had other friends going up to Barry Massachusetts to do retreats at the center called the Insight Meditation Society. So just for the people who are listening to this, for the first time Vipassana is the ancient Indian word for insight, meditation, and it's the kind of Buddhist meditation you often start with just noticing the sensations of

your breath coming in and going out, and then when you get lost, you start again. And over time, it's supposed to direct you toward a clear seeing of the impermanence of everything that arises and passes in your stream of consciousness, and that should lead you to ultimately to the point of it, which is to see that there's nobody there directing, governing all of this experience, and that is supposed to free you from all of the negative emotions like greed, hatred, and delusion in their many variants. Am I stating that correctly? I think that's a pretty common model. I had a slightly different one. I wasn't trying to get rid of greed, hatred, or delusion. I was trying to get enlightened. Wasn't that the same thing?

Well, I learned as I got more into this world, like any world, there's different perspectives on what we're doing. Well, I like to say that as soon as you start talking about an enlightenment, you're in an argument. That's right, because everyone's got their ideas about what it is. And then ironic, they usually conflict. At one point, I thought so. I spent too much time hearing the arguments and having them to think it's ironic anymore.

So, okay, so one conception, the traditional conception in the Vaposs... And if you go to a Vapossin retreat at the Insight Meditation Society that you referenced, or I don't know what they tell you about a Goenka retreat. S.N. Goenka, just again for those who aren't steeped in this stuff. S.N. Goenka was an Indian businessman who studied meditation in Burma and then taught a very secular form of what is really basically Buddhist meditation. I don't know if he talked about enlightenment or how he did, but traditionally in the, if you go to IMS,

they talk about meditation the way it was described in the sort of first, in the early Buddhist scriptures, as the uprooting of greed, hatred and delusion, which basically means you no longer, you know, just striving for things that you want and running from things you don't want and are no longer suffering confusion about the basic nature of reality. Yes. Yes. And what I found unhelpful about that way of looking at what I was doing is that I couldn't find anyone who had done that or who claimed that they that it could be done from their personal experience. And so it seemed like a myth to me just on the surface of it. But I did find a young teacher named Daniel Ingram. I found an ebook that was floating around and I actually met one of his ex-room mates,

college roommates while I was at NC State. And he had a different conception, which is enlightenment isn't necessarily about eruding all these things. It is about totally shifting your sense of identity and the experience of a reference point, like of who you think you are, and that it was possible to have a full experience of that changing and even dissolving totally. Why would you want that? Well, at the time I knew there was something that was, I had these experiences that pointed me in the direction of it not being about me, but the most profound experiences were the ones where I disappeared, you know, the sense of vints

as a local agent. So, but again, a lot of why I think I was that important. Yeah, why is that important? Why is that desirable and is it super destabilizing? It can be, it's also really beautiful, at least it was in this experience because it's like the times where I'm worrying about me and where I was always referencing the Vince's problems. And I still do this, it's not like it's gone, but you know, it's just a lot of anxiety

about what's going to happen to me. There's a lot of, it's like the world really shrinks down this little tiny sphere of concerns and preferences. And I think sometimes it's like we don't realize how small our world gets when we're all, when we're totally focused on ourselves. And these experiences kind of brought me out of that world and revealed another world. That's not separate from my experience, but it was

very different way of experiencing. And that, you know, it felt so much more vast. It didn't feel like free totally in the sense that there wasn't suffering, like the suffering that I experienced when I got out of the way was actually like bigger than my own suffering. And so it was actually really painful. But there was something else that was bigger that could hold that or respond to. Maybe more painful but less personal. Yeah, less personal, yeah.

You know, I mean, the idea of transcending the self to the uninitiated sounds sort of, I don't know, weird or it's hard for me sometimes for people including myself to grasp why it'd be important. But if you think about it, all of the peak experiences in the human repertoire are often described as like, you know, in Game of Thrones when the guy kills the white walker and they, and he describes it as like he wasn't there. It was just the sword doing

the killing or when people talk about you know being in the zone making you know some incredible play in sports. It's you know it's as if they're being played. Same thing with music. Same thing with art where or what's that expression you know I can't remember who's said it but great artist when you walk into the studio all of your critics come with you then they leave and then you leave you know and I can probably be mangling that quote but anyway I think on some level we understand that we get out of our own way when you put it that way as opposed to transcending the self and all the traditional mystical formulations of it, then I think people can get understand.

And the way you said it, that we're sort of trapped in our own little prison of self-concern and when we can break out of that, it feels marvelous or profound and painful. But in a way that again, it's like it's painful, but I'm not speaking from experience, I'm speaking from intellectual understanding sadly, but the pain that one can feel as I understand it from breaking out of the aforementioned prison, it doesn't sting in the same sort of way because it's not referencing back to some tiny little vints behind your eyes. Yeah, there's something bigger for a lack of better terms.

So you mentioned Daniel Ingram. Yeah. Daniel Ingram, full disclosure, a friend of mine, I love the guy. Probably the single most controversial human being in all of Buddhism, or at least modern Buddhism. He's an ER doctor from Alabama who created a sensation in the Buddhist world by writing a book in which he claimed to be an Arhant. He actually signed it by the Arhant Daniel Ingram. Arhant in the traditional Buddhist lingo is considered somebody who's a fully

enlightened being. Now in Daniel's defense, he actually kind of redefines Arhant a little bit, so he doesn't consider himself fully enlightened but nonetheless basically a dude who's saying he's gone a long way toward enlightenment and he wrote a book about how to do it kind of a cookbook as he describes it and this thing was like an e-book yes from a Alabama based ER doctor that which is went crazy in boot a circles and a lot of my

friends were senior teachers did not like this at all because declaring your meditative attainments is considered to be arrogant at the least yes anyway so why did you like daniel what's your view on them now i and i guess the caveat should be that both of us are friends with the guy. So I don't know that anybody's going to expect some sort of super objective analysis of him.

But I'll say that that's exactly the approach I wanted and needed at that time. You know, I'm 19 young, ambitious, dude, who's having these weird experiences and then goes, how do I like take this further? And it is mostly dudes in Daniel's orbit. Yeah, I mean, he's a very masculine human being. I mean, he's very directed and very goal focused and he's got a lot of qualities that are often associated with masculinity in some form.

And I connected with that, I appreciated that. I liked that he was talking directly and clearly and plainly about something that wasn't so esoteric or unachievable. And that made it feel like this energy, like all this energy and time that I'm gonna put into this thing, which I'm already doing, is gonna be worthwhile. It's not gonna be, I'm just to put into this thing, which I'm already doing, is going to be worthwhile.

It's not going to be, I'm just going to be wasting it chasing some delusional myth. Yeah, he is argument that's really provocative, and he had a big impact on me, too. He really shook me up when I first read his book, because what he's saying is, look, Enlightenment's on offer, but you're not going to hear that from the teachers, or they'll mention it in passing almost in a joky way, but they won't really tell you how to do it, but there's a map out there. There's a set of things you can practice as you can do and goalposts for you to keep your mile markers for you to keep your eye out for, things that you will experience in your practice that will tell you that you will experience in your practice

that will tell you if you're heading in the right direction. And here's what it is, it's super explicit, go for it. I was like, really? Plus also, I'm a journalist, so I was just fascinated by the fact that there was a controversy in Buddhism. I just didn't, before I realized that there are a million controversies in Buddhism, but that there's a real controversy

in modern Buddhism, just struck me as super interesting. so I made it my business to become friends with him. Anyway, so you really dove into the Daniel Ingram model. Yeah, around 2002, I found his cookbook and the IMS retreats that I heard about for my friends seemed like a little friendlier than the goingka ones. I decided to go that route and I went on retreat and then just started going on retreat after retreat after retreat and practicing all of the time while I waited tables. So I just save up money, go on retreats, come back, meditate, surf beer, and really tried to work my way through those maps, like, tried to kind of hit the myelposts. And my real goal at that time was I wanted to experience

the first quote, quote, unquote, stage of enlightenment. And that's sort of a culminating point in the on these maps where you have your first experience of, we want the Buddhist traditions called Nirvana, the first experience of something which is unconditioned, some experience that's not an experience at all. And it's supposed to change you in some fundamental way. And that's what I thought I was after.

So I kind of went for that. All right, step back for a second. What are these maps? Why did you believe that they were true? And what, where do they lead you? So I believe they were true because the first part of the map seemed to line up with my experience. I said I'd been having these crazy experiences.

And when I looked at the map and I looked at the descriptions that Daniel wrote out, I was like, oh, I recognize some of these things. What is the, it's not actually like a map that shows you how to find a treasure, hidden treasure. It's not a geographic map. It's a description of states that lead toward Nirvana. It's a phenomenological map. It's a map of interior experience that happens as you practice these particular forms of meditation. And in Daniel's case, they were very detailed maps, you know.

But he was taking them from another source. He was, he was really inspired by and they originally come out of this is getting a little Buddhist geeky. Go for it. But this is the right place to do that. You're gonna save. Okay, I feel safe. You know, they go all the way back to the original texts that talk about the Buddhist time and he would talk about these stages of enlightenment and he would talk about stages of concentration. Like, there were already maps even in the earliest written histories, but then several hundred years later

in Sri Lanka, this other monk comes along, his name is Escapimian Buddha Gosu. Buddha Gosu, thank you. And he writes basically like a commentary on all these original texts. He basically wants to flesh it out and give people essentially a cookbook for how to walk the Buddhist path and particular at that time how to be a Buddhist monk. And in that cookbook, which is basically divided into three sections, three training sections. You have the training on morality, the training on concentration, and training on insight. He basically lays out in the training on insight this map called the Progressive Insight, and he gives a very interesting

description of what happens as you practice this insight meditation technique, what you know is supposed to happen and so Daniel is inspired by that but also in Burma in the 1900s some other monks came along took this stuff and had their own commentary on it they created their own practices I fell in a Mahasi Sayada, Sayada Upandita, these guys in Burma basically took the cookbook and made their own, you know, approach around the cookbook like this is how you move through these stages. They had their own kind of reinterpretation of it and Daniel was had practiced in that tradition. And so it was basically taking what was pretty much

a traditional Burmese approach to meditation in that world. Wasn't anything new actually and it wasn't anything that the folks that were practicing at IMS, the people that we've mentioned, that they weren't aware of and hadn't been exposed to. So it's strange to me in one way that it was a controversy because he was studying with the same teachers. Yeah, so he called himself an Arhunt. Yeah, and that was, controversy because he was just, he was studying with the same teachers. Yes, he's ever, he called himself an arhunt. Yeah, and that was, that's, that's the part that, yeah, that's the part that, that's the violation of the omerta that you find in, in Buddha's circles, that it's talking about your attainment.

Yes, and, and you know, what I find interesting about how he justifies that is that if you go back to the Buddha himself and you look at the name Buddha Buddha means the awakened one and so the Buddha basically by saying he was a Buddha after he had his his own and like an experience was saying I'm awake. Yeah, but he's the Buddha. Right, but he's the Buddha. Right, so it's okay if the dude who we can't talk to anymore, you know, he did it, but like it's not okay if anyone around us has done it. So there's something about that that just, it just struck me as being weird and it sets up these weird power dynamics and I appreciated that Daniel had the gumption to say that he had done something important that was related to the Buddha. And did you believe that he had done it?

I always you know, I always tried to maintain a kind of skeptical attitude toward anyone's claims Knowing that everyone you know Can dilute themselves into thinking they're special But I the more conversations I had with him and with Kenneth, and the more Kenneth that was his roommate that you mentioned before. Kenneth helped turn him on to meditation. Another he's also, Kenneth's also a meditation teacher now of some prominent. And so the more I hung out with these guys and talked to them and the more of my practice

developed, the more retreats I went on, the more I got to understand my own experience better. The more I thought it was, at least that first stage of enlightenment seemed totally feasible and possible and that they had experienced it. So just to talk a little bit about the map, and we've been, I didn't expect to talk about these things. You didn't? No.

Oh well, all right, good. I'm glad I'm surprising you. We can talk about whatever you want. You can shut me up in any time. The map, if I understand it, you can correct me if I'm wrong, because I know it just enough to be dangerous. But as I understand this map, and there are, here's where things get controversial, even more controversial.

There are many maps. So the Tibetans and the Zen folks don't necessarily agree with this map that we are discussing now, which is awesome. I love all of this. I just think it's incredible. And I don't agree with it anymore. You don't have my own maps. Okay, all right, well, let's get to that.

I'm excited. I'm not gonna hear about that. Okay, so this map has like four stages. The first is that leads up to this first big Nirvana experience is called stream entry, which you just said you were gunning for. Then there's one more. There's another one, which is what's called once returner. And then there's a third. Each time you hit Nirvana, they you you you you graduate to the next level. The second one is once return to

the third is non-returner, second one is once returned to the third is non-returner, whatever that means, and then the fourth is Arhont, which is a fully enlightened being, although Daniel redefines Arhont in ways that I actually don't, I can't claim to understand. It's all very Dungeons and Dragons to me, but you know, totally fascinating. And I just am totally curious about the intrigued by the notion that for millennia people have been saying, if you do certain practices in certain ways at certain dosages, certain effects will happen reliably and predictably. And they describe it in minute detail. Hey, you will have a stage of the practice where you start to notice X, maybe the difference between mind and body. Right? You'll notice that some things are

happening in your mind and some things you're happening in your body and two are related and that's just an early insight that one can get. And then it gets more complex from there and then there's a stage of the path that involves fear and misery and it's where you start to see the self dissolving which is a whole destabilizing period of the practice and sometimes referred to as the dark night and then you get into a phase of equanimity and then you have a bolt of lightning and nirvana hits whatever that means and so anyway you just to get back to you for a second you were going for that first experience of Nirvana. Yes Did it happen and what was that like if it did happen? I think it did

and It was disappointing actually Nirvana is disappointing. I was disappointed after Recognizing that I probably had the same they experienced that was described and I think I was disappointed in part because I was so obsessed with this goal and I'd put invested so much into it. And then when it happened I was, you know, I was grateful and happy and it did feel like something very important for a while. But then I was like, that was it.

Like it was kind of anti-climactic. What were you hoping for all your problems to be solved? At some level I was. At some level I was. You were a kid in your defense. Yeah, I was and still in some ways, and definitely. How old are you? I'm 33.

Okay. So, you know, being a young person, I had all these ideals many of them unexamined and I Attached them to this notion of enlightenment even though What I was reading from Daniel is you know, you know, it isn't going to actually give you all this I was hearing the message that you wanted that I wasn't gonna be perfect Yeah, yeah raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

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I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Um, did you have some sort of primordial childhood pain you're kind of overcome or something like that? I mean, I'm sure that's part of it, you know, the history of pain compels one to try to find relief and release. But I think there was something going way back to at least 13 where I knew there was something important about this reality that most everyone wasn't seeing. It felt like a foundational assumption was happening at a totally collective level that

all of this and the stories we're telling about it are are totally true and real. You know that we are these individuals going around doing this important stuff and that you know that that story and that that kind of world is you have to operate within it as if that all those assumptions are fundamentally true. And I knew at some level that it wasn't true from my own experience. And so I really wanted to figure out what was true. That's how I framed it. And so this experience that I ended up having, it was important and it was interesting, but it didn't deliver on all of the high hopes that I had. But just again, let's just get back to the experience itself because people, again, the word

and rvana, obviously there was a grunge band and whatever, named after the experience. But I won pictures, the angels singing birds you know coming down and delivering you Candies and whatever what what is it actually like? Well, you know, I think what people when they think about Enlightenment they usually think about actually a phase of practice leading up to it Instead of the experience itself. So there's a phase of practice leading up to enlightenment, this is described in various maps where one has a breakthrough, some sort. There's a peak experience, the sense of self can be dissolved or can be witnessed from a very different vantage point.

There tends to in that experience of the breakthrough, be a sense of vast, spacious openness or stillness or primordial kind of space. And everything is seen to be arising and passing inside of that, inside of this primordial awareness that can't be implicated in any of it. And so that experience is very profound and kind of mind-blowing, but the problem with it is that it's still, there's a separation between the sense of the someone, some awareness of what's arising and passing, and the experience and the objects of awareness. Right, so you might think you're what is knowing that everything...

Yes, what is knowing. You might think you are the knower of everything as arising and passing. In fact, it's even more complicated than that. There is no knower. That's right. And there's a Zen Mastering of Category Rochy that said it really well.

He said, the witness is the last stand of the ego. It's like, we learn how to witness our experience and meditation and mindfulness practices. That's what it's aiming at. It's like, first you to witness our experience in meditation and mindfulness practices. That's what it's aiming at. It's like first you develop this sort of observer standpoint, this witness standpoint. And at some point you get really good at witnessing. Like if all you do is practice witnessing, at some point you start to just be able to rest in that position.

And then at some point you see everything is coming and going. You know, it's like nothing is standing still at all. But the problem is that witnessing perspective where you can have that vantage point isn't itself stable. It isn't somewhere that one can hang out forever. Like if the witness starts to turn back on itself, you know, and see like, wait, what is this feeling of being in a witness or observer? What is that actually made of? Then the witness or the the knower itself begins to dissolve and shake. And then that's where it can get scary for people because, and it was for me, because we tend to think if we're anything, at least we're aware, at least we're like, at least we Were the ones that are knowing this this this experience and when that shakes it's like who am I like who am I really if I

Nothing is stable here including the sense of knowing this and so When people have a break through it tends to be followed pretty reliably I've seen over the years by a breakdown. After Nirvana or after this is leading up to Nirvana. This is the fear and misery stage that I was recording. Yeah, the dark night. I think of it as the disillusionment phase, where you thought you had this great thing

and then it starts to slip out of your fingers and you go, like, I lost that. Well, isn't the pattern that I was often described in these maps is that you have a peak experience sometimes known as the arising and passing away or Daniel calls it the A and P, which is there was a supermarket in Boston when I was growing up called A and P. And that is where you're really seeing how rapidly things arise and pass in the mind. And that's very thrilling. Very interesting.

And then the fear comes when you see that there's nobody, you think you are noticing all of this stuff, but then you realize that there's no you noticing all this stuff which is incredibly scary for some people, it's often been referred to as the rolling up the Matt's period of practice. And then according to the map, you enter into this period of equanimity where you're

okay. Actually, this disillusionment becomes disillusionment in a positive way, like the illusion, the enchantment of the world is dissolved and you're actually cool with all of it. Or it's, again, that my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, uses the analogy of it's like jumping out of a plane and it's thrilling for a minute, that would be the A and P. And then it's scary because you realize you don't have a parachute and then, and so that's terrifying and then you realize

there's no ground to hit. And that's the equanimity and somewhere in equanimity, Nirvana can strike. Yeah, so, you know, I was going on a lot of retreats and going through these phases and getting to know them and checking in with teachers who knew themselves. And they were sort of helping me kind of, they were helping me map my experience in a way. And the disillusionment phases, the hardest phase for most people people because it feels like you're going backwards or that you've lost your ability to meditate even

It's like I can't even stay focused anymore because the moment I try to pay attention to my breath or you know Even the changing experiences that were previously really easy to notice It's like the moment I try to do that. It's already gone You know and in the sense of who's watching it is also gone. And so there's just constantly, it's kind of very murky and it's kind of disorienting. And you feel like shit. And you know, really wishing it was some other way than that.

And so for me, it took a few years of really kind of being in that territory and not knowing how to move forward because the way forward is not by pushing anymore and I had pushed so hard to get to this point. Well, a classic hindrance. Yeah, it becomes a problem. Yes, it becomes wanting too much. Yeah, it becomes a problem when all of the sensations

that make up the wanting it to be different aren't themselves noticed and can't be allowed to occur by themselves. And this is the criticism. What are the other criticisms of Daniel? And we'll let Daniel come on whenever he wants and defend himself, but one of the criticisms and he does have good defenses here, is that by being so explicit about the map, he sets up a lot of striving. That's right. This is why senior teachers in the Western tradition have avoided being overly explicit

about the map, because there were that type A, Americans will just become obsessive about hitting all of these goals, which of course that obsession that's striving prevents you from getting anywhere at all. It's really, it's a big, big, perhaps the biggest of mall catch 22. Yeah, and there's catch 22s on all sides. So if you don't have a map and you don't know what's possible, if you don't know that you could have these breakthrough moments, these big experiences and then everything could

kind of crumble around you after. It's hard to also move forward because you just don't know what the hell is going on and you're left with your own interpretation, which is usually not that helpful. Yeah. So you were disappointed after Nirvana. You didn't actually get around to describe what that was like. Yeah, so I was going to say like over the years of kind of working with this phase where it was hard to meditate and really I was learning I had to just let go and just trust my experience however it was, even if it was totally like there's a lack of concentration, I couldn't focus, I wasn't having any interesting experiences, I was cranky, my body hurt, you know, all of those things, just letting those be, learning how to let go of trying to get something other than what was arising in my experience. I got to tell you just by a brief interruption, just hearing that for me where I am in my practice is incredibly useful. Yeah, and it's the key to unlocking that phase of practice.

And eventually I got wise enough to do that, or I eventually wore myself down enough to let go and just to really allow things to happen on their own. Again, getting myself out of the way, That was the kind of the common out thread there. And at a certain point, and this happened while I was on a meditation retreat, so I was meditating for about a month. And about three weeks in, I got to this point where everything would get really just open, relaxed, easy. Nothing special about it, nothing mind-blowing. It was just kind of like, but it felt good compared to feeling crappy. And so in that sense, it felt like a relief.

And it would open up into this way and I'd be like meditating for several hours like this. And then all of a sudden, I'd like, I lose it and I'd go back to being crappy again. And I'd be like, oh, I gotta get out of here. And there's something wrong. And I'd be like, okay, just notice that. Notice the sensations. Be with them, label them, you know, anger, aversion, wanting, craving. You know, I'd just be there.

And it would open back up. And this happened several times where it opened up and then it closed. The reality is teaching you a lesson. Yeah, it was like getting kind of like, you know, kind of getting pushed through the grinder and each time through, it's like I had to let go a little bit more. And a certain point it felt like, yeah, in that way I kind of gave up trying to make it

to force it to be a certain way, to a pretty large degree, like that I'd certainly a larger degree than I'd ever done before. And in that, something shifted. And I didn't even actually, I didn't explicitly notice it the first time that it happened. It was only actually later, because once this experience happens, as this is part of the maps too,

you start to actually go through and have the experience again and again. You start to actually cycle through these phases faster and faster, and each time through, you have this moment of what's called fruition in the maps, which basically just means everything kind of bottoms out. Everything disappears for a moment. So it's like they call it a cessation. A cessation, yeah. The lights go out. The lights go out. And it's like, you know, the way I think about it, it's like if you're blinking your eyes, right? For just for a moment, the whole visual field actually just vanishes and then reappears.

And we don't really think about that because it's just normal part of our experience. But imagine if your whole life, your eyes were open all the time. And then for the first time, your eyes blinked, and everything just disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared. It'd probably be pretty frickin' weird. This experience was like that, except that everything disappeared.

Multisensorial. All the physical senses, and any sense of an internal awareness of what was happening. It's like the whole, like all of the physical senses and any sense of an internal awareness of what was happening. It's like the whole, like all of reality just kind of blinked. And in the strange thing is like, in the wake of that, there is this incredible sense of relief or bliss or clarity and a sense of having seen something important, but not being able to describe it because there wasn't anyone there to witness it. So you can see why I might have been disappointed

because I thought I was going to like, you know, for some reason I thought I was going to get something. I thought I was going to be able to point to it and be like, I achieved that. Like some sort of trophy? Yeah, like a trophy or, you know, like, not explicitly thinking this way, but at some level, I thought, you know, I was gonna have something. Like as an attainment, I thought you, when you attain something, you get it. And it was like, I attained,

I can't even describe what it was. It was. Did it change your life in any way? It didn't, well, it changed my meditation practice because it became much easier to meditate after that. It felt like it felt much more like I was seeing in the impermanent way that it all I had to do was reflect on how things changed and it's like everything's changing. And in that sense, it felt like I suddenly got better at meditation, but it didn't change anything else. And that was, I think, also what was kind of weird about it.

Right. Because your life can be still messed up and all the sorts of ways in which lives are messed up. Yeah, especially, you know, going on constant retreats, coming back and being like, sorry, honey, I, you know, sorry I was gone for six weeks, are you okay? Yeah, but your partner, you're now wife, she was doing is a deep meditation teacher. That's right. But still, I mean, it doesn't not great for the career.

It's, you know, I don't know that maybe experiencing Nirvana can make you less cranky around the house, but maybe it doesn't, I don't know. I mean, to me, it made me afterwards. I felt like I was just constantly moving through these different phases, you know, of consciousness, you know, or sometimes I'd be happy and uplifted and joyful. And then sometimes everything felt like it was dissolving. And that that became like really, you mean you were going through A and P,

fear, and like, when I made it again and again? Like all the territory that I'd gone through to get to get to this point, now it was like, it just kept repeating itself over and over again, like kind of recursively cycling through these same. I don't know why it happens that way. They talk about that in the month.

They do, yeah, that's considered part of what happens is that once you become familiar with that it becomes like the baseline of your reality. You're making me not want Nirvana. Good. Really? No, I don't know. So you don't agree with this map anymore.

You said that earlier, what do you mean? You invented your own map? Because it sounds like you experienced the stuff that's on the map, so would you not agree with it? Well, you know, here's the tricky part So I yes, I experienced it But I also what I experienced was highly conditioned by my by the model and the map that I had you think you can have Experiences because you're expecting said experiences Or can you dilute yourself into thinking you had the experiences because you think they're going to come? I think both of those are true in some cases, but this is a little more like, it's impossible

for me to separate my experience from the models and the mental models that I have of it. Those two come together like as a package. So I have these experiences and their valid experiences, but the way they get interpreted as them having them are through the lens of these maps. Right. So if you've been practicing in the Zen tradition where they talk about Satori and Kencho, yes. Those are their names for the various big moments in practice. You might have just described what you had as Satori and Kent Show. You would have put all of the intellectual concepts from Zen onto

the raw data of the experience that you had. Yeah, and in that sense, it probably would have been a different experience. Like certainly my memory of it would have been different or what I chose to focus on would have been different or, you know, I can think there's some overlap and some connection there. It's not to say it's all dependent on the map or the model or the kind of practice you're doing. Yeah, and the practice is important too. So expand on what you were saying before about you don't, you have a different map

and now, what does that mean? Well, it just means, I think the map that I was using was very precise and very specific and very helpful, but it didn't it seemed to apply mostly to a particular kind of meditation and in a particular environment in this case retreat practice and what I noticed outside of that environment as I got more interested in other forms of meditation and other traditions is one yet like you said the maps are different. Like they're actually describing slightly different types of experiences. And so that immediately broke my fascination with one map and I started getting interested in all these different maps.

And interested more in the commonalities, you know, the convergence points between them as opposed to the descriptions of one. And then when I started working with students later on, as I'd got further into my own practice, sometimes I found that particular map, the 16 stages of insight, helpful stages and enlightenment, all that. And sometimes I found it was a hindrance for people.

Like some people just, they were so obsessed with trying to find themselves on the map that it prevented them from actually being able to deepen their practice, their concentration, their investigation. And then for some people, I found that their experience actually didn't map onto the map. And yet they were still having important insights and they were still deepening in their wisdom,

like their fundamental wisdom. And so I started to really see, you know, that the wisdom and the insight that people are going for when they do a contemplative practice, it isn't dependent on the maps or the models of the practices that they're used to get there. There's some point at which it does converge across different contemplative traditions, and there's lots of divergences too. But I just started to find, like, I need to simplify that model and make it a little bit more kind of a little bit more soft and a little less hard and precise so that it could kind of

include more of people's experience. And still have a map, but one that's a little bit more kind of relaxed and easy. So what are you doing these days? Because Buddhist geeks, which was your podcast, really one of the early podcasts in the world of podcasts. And just I recommend everybody go check it out because I don't think you're doing it anymore,

but there's a huge body of recordings there with basically every important Buddhist practitioner, teacher, and thinker, and writer out there, and non-Buddhist, and I'm just contemplative in the whole field of contemplative endeavor, tech folks, and that's how I got turned on you is just listening to that podcast. I mean, I've listened to dozens and dozens and dozens of them. But you, as far as I know, you kind of wound that down and have a new adventure. Can you tell me about both developments? Yeah, so I did Buddha's Geeks for about 10 years and starting in 2007, 2006 actually. It's funny because the experience that I described of this Nirvana experience happened several months before I started Buddhist geeks. So I started it from both the place of feeling like I started to understand what I was doing

a little bit, but also certainly not mature. You know, certainly needed more time and practice time to really start to like, for it to start to affect my life in a real way. Yeah, because they often say that, you know, Nirvana is a big moment, but actually it's integrating the understanding of your actual life as a big part of the process. Yes, and not just having some experience that happens, but starting to see that that experience actually, that non-experience actually permeates everything, you know, seeing it in real time, as Daniel

said, as Daniel put it to me. It was, you know, that was, I had to go through that process as well. And so while I was doing Buddhist geeks and talking to these people, I was going through my own journey, of course. And part of that journey was deepening in my Buddhist practice, and then part of it was starting to explore outside of Buddhism, and really like where are the touch points between Buddhism and technology and for younger millennials. What is Buddhism?

Why is it useful? What does Buddhism have to offer the modern world and what does the modern world, what kind of light does it shine back on Buddhism? And so at first I came at it from the perspective of what does Buddhism have to offer, you know, because I'm like, I'm so on fire with Buddhism, it's gotten me to this place, I think I'm enlightened. And so I obviously want to bring that into the world, right? But then sort of after years of talking to people, I started to see, and as my practice kind of started to mill about and become more holistic and integrated, I started to also see

that there was a lot of problems with Buddhism and there's a lot of ways in which it hadn't incorporated critiques and insights from outside of itself. And so that became more my interest and I started talking to more people outside of the Buddhist world. And eventually, and this was in the last few years, I started to just kind of lose some amount of interest in Buddhism at all, you know, recognizing, oh, like this isn't as big of a part of my life as it used to be. What I'm really more interested in is meditation. And that's what I got into Buddhism for anyway, to begin with was the meditation stuff. So it's kind of a full circle experience in a way, and so now that project has kind of gone into dormancy.

Although you said the archive is there, and people can listen to it. I'm picking up where you left off on this podcast. Yeah, thank you. And in many ways, actually, that's the way I think of this. That's cool. And you're talking to a huge diversity of different people and doing different things and incorporating

mindfulness and meditation into the brain. But I still, we're a little bit more poppy than you were, but we still talk to a lot of the same people. Yeah, great to try to mix it up. So you're coming back, as you said, you're coming, you came full circle back to your interest in meditation. Yeah, so what does that mean and what is your current endeavor around that? Well, you know, after starting to teach meditation, my wife and I started to teach several years ago, and try to help people through some of the same kinds of territory that we went through.

So we used the maps we'd learned, and you know know we're talking to people a lot of times on Skype you know having one-on-one relationships really helping try to guide them through the stages in the same way that you know our teachers did. As we did that that's when our our conceptions change our models started changing we started to see there were a lot of people that you know set outside of these they had experiences that didn't conform to these things and so we started to broaden our perspective and how we taught. We also started to see that among our generation, among millennials, not everyone was interested in learning this big Buddhist system. You know, they just wanted to actually learn something that they could apply immediately

to their lives in the case of meditation. And so we started to let go of our, also our ideas that it had to look this way. You know, people had to become Buddhist or go on meditation, even go on meditation retreats in order to make progress. Like all of those things we started to kind of question. And the result of that is that we've moved more and more

toward teaching just straight meditation, recognizing that there are different styles of practice that each of these different traditions teaches different ways of training the mind and heart and body, but that they're also convergences, they're places where they converge. And so there are these kind of, for us, there are at least these five styles of practice

that we teach. And how can we, if listeners want to learn from you, how can they find you? We're teaching these different styles of practice through a project called Meditate.io. Meditate.io. And it's really aimed at, how do we do a legit training in the digital age? How do we train ourselves in a legit way given the 21st century reality that we live in? So that's the other inquiry for us is,

what is enlightenment in the 21st century? What does it mean to have these experiences or to train our minds today in the internet age? It's because it's such a different world than the world in which these maps, these original maps were created. And so it seems like we need to think about it differently. I think.

So if people want to learn from you, they should go to meditate.io and also check out the backlog of Buddhist geeks. Yeah. We should say your wife's name, Emily Horn, who's your partner in the most holistic sense of that term, and a very experienced teacher and meditation practitioner herself, and if you go listen to some of the Buddhist geeks, podcast you'll hear her quite a bit.

She's definitely the more enlightened of the two, and I don't actually mean that. You don't actually mean that? I do mean that. You't actually mean that. You don't actually mean that? I do mean that. You do actually mean that. Yeah, she was figuring things out well before I was. And it took me a while to realize that. It sounds like my marriage.

Look at everyone. Yeah, that's probably true. Yeah, and I can even see, you and I both have two year olds. You can just see the little girls are so much smarter than the little boys. My kid, I don't know about yours, is he eating and destroying and not doing anything constructive, like knocking things over.

And the girls will actually like make stuff and build stuff. Really, something to be learned there. All right, this has been great. A huge pleasure. Thank you. Great to see you. You too. So big thanks to Vince for that. And you. Great to see you. You too. So big thanks to Vince for that, and I just want to let everybody know.

Vince talked about this a little bit, but he's got this new project called Meditate.io. That's the website Meditate.io. It's a free course on, as they say, mapping the mindful path. And it's a way, you know, we talked a lot about the progress of insight during the course of this podcast and it's really Vince and his team's way of making this progress of insight more approachable and doable and this new course really talks a lot about something called social noting which is a really interesting technique so I encourage you to go check it out and again thanks to Vince and thanks for everybody for listening.

Okay, 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 guess we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter, at Dan B. Harris. I also want to thank heartily to people who produced this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calp, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News Digital Dan Silver.

I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. at Wondery.com slash survey.