Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 542: The Enlightened Mind | Part 5 of The Dalai Lama's Guide to Happiness

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

What is the Dalai Lama’s own meditation practice like? In this final episode, the Dalai Lama goes into great detail about the whys and wherefores of meditation, taking us way into the deep end. We cover single-pointed versus analytical meditation, gross and subtle levels of the mind, “true cessation,” and how we can use sleep as practice for the moment of death. Dr. Davidson returns to explain key, esoteric terms and to help us understand how we can apply elements of the Dalai Lama’s practice to our everyday lives.Want more of The Dalai Lama’s Guide to Happiness? Download the Ten Percent Happier app wherever you get your apps.Full Show Notes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dalai-lama-guide-542Other Resources Mentioned:Healthy Minds InnovationsThukdamAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/JoinChallengePodSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Cow is their sacred, so there are cows all over the street just chilling and nobody bothers them. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. And even McDonald's doesn't serve hamburgers here because they don't believe you should eat beef. What are you doing Dan? Making a little video from my son who will be fascinated by the notion of sacred cows. I think this cow is tired of being filmed. Over the course of two weeks in Durham, Sala India,

a guy like me is bound to encounter a lot of ideas that fall outside of my conditioning as a skeptical, agnostic journalist who grew up in a science-reveering, capitalistic, Western country. As you've heard, it's not just sacred cows, it's also prayer wheels, thousand-armed deities, and rebirth, each of which I would have met with kind of knee-jerk rejection not very long ago. But over the last decade plus, as I've gone from reluctant meditator to a meditation evangelist, and as I've come to really identify as a Buddhist,

I've softened on some of these notions. It's not that I believe them per se. It's more like I'm less positive that my lack of belief is absolutely correct. Or as I've been counseled by my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, sometimes you have to engage in what the poet Samuel Collaridge has called the willing suspension of disbelief. In fact, now when I hear meditation teachers talk about esoteric stuff, my response is mostly curiosity and interest. For example, with the Dalai Lama, here's a guy who's such a huge believer in modern science, but at the same time, he has all of these metaphysical beliefs.

That's just incredibly fascinating to me. How can these two things coexist? What's going on here? Are there things that the contemplatives know that science hasn't caught up to? And here's the cool thing. There was a whole part of my interview with his

holiness that got so esoteric that I could barely keep up. It was when the Dalai Lama took me on an unexpectedly deep guided tour of his own meditation practice. He went on for about 12 minutes and rarely have I ever felt so utterly intrigued and confused. The good news is that on this, the final installment of our series, the Dalai Lama's Guide to Happiness, good old Uncle Richie is here to help us one more time. The Richie in question is of course, Richard Davidson,

avid meditator, eminent scientist and longtime trusted confidant of his holiness, the Dalai Lama. We're gonna dive into the deep end today, people. His holiness is going to talk about gross and subtle levels of mind, ways to meditate during sleep that can double as preparation for the moment of death, and much more. And Richie will help us understand it. This is where the edges of any reasonable attempt to bring modern scientific concepts to understanding these phenomena begin to separate. Just to say this stuff may

sound a little out there, but as you will learn during the course of this episode, much of it is surprisingly applicable to our lives. So keep it here. Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, pure honor, and what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our

experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff.

Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families

and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newer series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring

queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Okay, Richie, welcome back. Great to be back with you, Dan. Thank you for having me. That's a pleasure. So on this final episode, we want to dive into this extraordinary 12 minute set of comments,

this 12 minute piece of tape that we recorded with his holiness, where he gives us an insight into his own meditation practice, which I found fascinating. And this is where you come in incomprehensible. So I want to unpack this with you piece by piece. So I'm going to play one of many clips now, and then we'll talk on the backside of that. So just to say the out there stuff comes soon, but the first clip is really him just describing some basic meditation stuff. And the whole thing kicks off actually when I ask him why he never really talks about meditation that much in public.

Instead, he focuses on how we all need to have this shift of worldview toward oneness. And you'll see that what happens here is that the Dalai Lama does something that I was not expecting, which is he takes my question and uses it as an opportunity to launch into a discussion of his own meditation practice. Okay, so having said all of that here is clip number one. I'm curious why you don't specifically recommend meditation, because you've done so much work with Richie to study the impact of meditation on the mind.

But when I ask you these questions, you fall back into a shift of mindset. But for me, I think meditation can help you shift that mindset. Oh, you see five senses of organs. Five senses of organs, just as you see, receive forms, sounds like that. Then six to mind. Okay, so as I said, I wasn't expecting this, but he starts talking about how he meditates, or at least, I think that's what he's talking about, and he begins by laying the foundations. We have six senses, he says.

I know in the West, we think of humans as having five senses, but in Eastern philosophy, the sixth sense is the mind. And how do we train this sixth sense, the mind, with meditation, of course. So here, the Dalai Lama starts talking about two of the most important kinds of basic meditation. The first is often called single pointed or concentration practice. That's where you pick one thing like your breath and

focus on it as a way to stabilize your mind. And the other flavor which I had never heard of is something called analytical meditation. Now it is useful to strengthening the sixth mind. Useful to strengthening the sixth mind. Now here, meditation, single-boiled meditation and analytical meditation, analyze. Any sort of object you saw, what is causes, what is the effect, what is the result? I always use the sixth mind and then try to find reason why, why did happen. Always not to satisfy something appear.

So that is our practice. Okay, so Richie, let me bring you in here. This confused me a little bit. This idea of analytical meditation. In my experience, much of meditation is about transcending the thinking mind and dropping into the raw data of your senses. So you're not analyzing. You're just feeling.

But here, the Dalai Lama is talking about using the thinking mind to examine cause and effect. That seems more cognitive than experiential, so I'm wondering if you could explain that to me. Yes. So in the Dalai Lama's tradition, they frequently practice this form of meditation that he calls analytic meditation, which indeed is using our capacity for reason. Our logical mind to analyze the nature of the self. And so an example of this is that if we have an experience of an emotion, for example, we might have an experience of pain, which happens to all

of us when we meditate, and we might think to ourselves, I'm in pain, and we often talk that way to others, that I'm in pain, or I'm sad, or I'm anxious, or I'm happy. And we can then, in the analytic kind of practice, the kind that the Dalai Lama does, we can begin to investigate that. What does it mean to say, I am in pain? Is it really every piece of you that's in pain, is every cell in your body in pain? What does it mean to say that grip of this entity that we experience as me or I. And in the Dalai Lama's tradition, they use reason to go beyond reason by continuously asking again and again and again, what is the nature of this eye? What shape does it have? How extended is it? Does it have any particular flavor? And just asking questions about it again

and again, there is eventually this experiential insight that again, the eye is not all that it's cracked up to be. That's how they arrive at that kind of experiential realization. So it's a different path than the one you might be accustomed to, but I think that most would agree that it is a path that at least presumably leads to the same place. Fascinating. Okay, I love nerding out about the meditation and the mind, and I'm in good company because I know you like it too. I'm going to play another clip because it gets even more interesting and esoteric. And again, this is all in real time with the dollar line that happened continuously, but we're breaking

it up to do some color commentating. And this clip, the Dalai Lama continues and talks about different levels of the mind and their relationship to reincarnation. You're going to hear him talk about gross subtle and most subtle. Take a listen. What does mind, there's a gross level, more subtle level, more subtle level. Most subtle level, mind at the time of dying. They only very subtle level of mind. That at the time of death, and that subtle level of mind is the connection,

previous life in this life. Alright, so let's say he said so much there. Let's start with the levels of the mind. Gross, subtle, and most subtle. What's that all about? Well, let me just preface this by saying, I am a scientist and neuroscientists by training, this is where the edges of any reasonable attempt to bring modern scientific concepts to understanding these phenomena begin to separate. And what I mean by that is simply that I'm happy to talk about it, but I also want to underscore to listeners that there is no legitimate scientific research in my view that in any way has approached what I think his holiness that Al-Alamah is talking about when he talks about the subtlest level of the mind.

the subtlest level of the mind. So I would say that 99.9% of neuroscience has focused on those functions of the brain that are associated with the coarsest level that the Dalai Lama is describing. So most people, if you play a sound and ask them what just happened, they would say that they hear something. That's kind of the grossest level of the mind, the five senses. As the levels of the mind become more subtle, it's less common to recognize those different levels. And what would be said in the Buddhist tradition is that meditation practices are helping us to recognize the nature of our minds.

And so we're not creating something new by meditating. What we're doing is we're familiarizing ourselves with the basic nature of the mind. And at its most subtle level is this quality of awareness which in the Buddhist tradition is said to be present at the time of death and then also after the traditional Western definition of death. You know, the Western definition of death is when the heart stops beating, the breathing ceases, and the brain is no longer functioning. In the Buddhist tradition, there is the claim

that there is something that goes beyond that, and the vast majority of people don't recognize it. And so that's why it's never been an issue in scientific research, because most people don't recognize it. But what is said is that with proper training during one's life, What you said is that with proper training during one's life at the moment of death There is the capacity to recognize the most subtle level and it's that subtle level that in the Buddhist tradition Apparently has some continuity with past and future lives now. This is way beyond pay grade. I have absolutely no idea from a scientific perspective what this is about. Well, we'll get forget whether from a scientific perspective, but you're perhaps downplaying

the extent of your knowledge of Buddhist practice and you've been doing it for decades. So, do you have a sense setting aside science from a Buddhist perspective, what the connection is between seeing this most subtle level of mind and connecting to your next life? Honestly, not in any kind of well-formed way, I can say that I do have some intuition, and this comes both from my own personal practice and from scientific research, of what this subtle level, how it might appear phenomenologically and how it might be reflected in changes in the brain. And it's interesting because some of the neural correlates that we have published on in very, very long-term meditation practitioners are the same neural correlates that scientists have reported seem to occur

in the period of time just after the conventional Western definition of death. That is so interesting. Yeah. And that is a kind of amazing finding because some of these findings are findings from scientists who are not doing meditation research, but who have been interested in the process of dying for all kinds of different reasons. The notion that there's some part of our minds that can be activated or recognized, not activated because it's already active, but recognized, or maybe even some part of the brain

that can be activated through meditation, and maybe even some part of the brain that can be activated through meditation, and that that same part of the brain is activated in the moments right after death. That's super interesting, but does that have anything to do with our day-to-day lives? Well, I think it does for the following reason. The cultivation or the recognition, if you will, of this kind of subtle level of awareness is very beneficial, I think, and research shows. It's a kind of panoramic awareness. So one of the things that we know from neuroscience is that anxiety and fear

constrict the aperture of awareness. They literally do that, so that you're aware of much less in your environment, and you tend to be maximally aware of those cues or events in the environment that are particularly threat-related and you're ignoring everything else or not sensitive to everything else. In this kind of state of awareness, there's just a panoramic view so that you're just aware of much, much more. That itself is probably beneficial. You also are much more aware of what's happening in your own mind,

you're more aware of how your thoughts and expectations and beliefs are shaping your experience of the world. And all of that is liberating. It's really associated with well-being because you're less hijacked by all the stuff that's going on around you. It's really kind of a ticket to equanimity. So, what you're describing, that doesn't sound to me as somebody who's a rank and file meditator as super esoteric. I know what it's like to have a constricted view because I have plenty of anxiety. But I also know what it's like, particularly from being on meditation retreat, to have the chatter go way down, and to be aware and a raw naked way of the data of my senses,

what I'm hearing, seeing, smelling, and even seeing thoughts and emotions come and go. Who is it that seeing those thoughts and emotions? Exactly, and that's a thing to analyze, to look as Joseph Goldstein, our mutual friend, the great meditation teacher often recommends to people, you can say, oh yeah, all of these things are being known, these sites are being seen, sounds are being heard, by what? Who's there?

Who's even asking this question? And that's a great way in my and of one experience to knock on the door of this great mystery of consciousness. The recognition of this quality of awareness that I think we're talking about, the next step in that is where there is no longer thoughts and a thinker. There's no longer feelings and a feeler or perceptions and a perceiver. It is simply awareness. The metaphor that some meditation teachers use, which I love, is if you lit a candle in a dark room, you wouldn't need a flashlight to see the candle. The candle is illuminating itself, and it's the same way with the mind. And so when you have this quality of recognition, there no longer is a self and other. It's completely obliterated. And all

there is is awareness. And awareness reflexively is aware of itself. So to speak, just like a candle is illuminating itself. It's beautiful. And it hurts my brain. And I'm, where I guess I was going with all of this is even for me as somebody who's, you know, a relative newbie in meditation, I feel like I've had some, and I'm speaking on behalf, I think of many listeners here is I've had some access to subtler levels of mind, but almost certainly not the most subtle level of mind. So while this may sound esoteric, it's not. We can all kind of get on this slippery slope. And we've all gone a certain way down the spectrum, especially if we've had some meditation

experience and what he's pointing to here really is the depth of the path. Exactly. Exactly. And I think, you know, your experience, you know, I really love the way you describe it. And I think that you and many others are getting these glimpses. It underscores the fact that it's actually accessible. You don't have to be the Dalai Lama to have access to these kinds of insights into your mind. Okay. So speaking of the Dalai Lama to have access to these kinds of insights into your mind. Okay, so speaking of the Dalai Lama, let's go back into the deep end now. In this next

clip, his holiness is translator jumps in and talks about some stuff that the Dalai Lama had just finished telling me that was very new to me about 80 different conceptions of the mind and then various colors. Here it is. 80 different conceptions which are divided into three sets. First they're called the 33 conceptions within the world's analysis appearance. And then 40 conceptions at the time of at the time of a reddish increase. There are seven of those the blackish white and near attainment. So Richie, what do you think he's talking about with these colors? I'm wondering if it's maybe related to some of the work you've been doing.

I know you've been conducting a study into the states of mind that are achievable apparently for experienced meditators at the time of death, including something called Tukdom. Yeah. And that is a project that his holiness requested us to undertake with dying yogis in India to investigate whether there is anything that we can measure using our scientific measurement tools that might be going on after a conventional Western definition of death that may reflect these subtler and subtler levels of awareness. So one of the things that happens, at least in the Buddhist text descriptions, is when

this state of Tukdham ends, which is this clear-light state that supposedly happens in a certain limited number of practitioners after the conventional Western definition of death. And this state can range from a few hours to a few days and even beyond a few days to several weeks, at least by accounts that are out there. When took down ends, there is a release of fluids from orifices in the body and those fluids are different colors.

So some of what his holiness, I think, is referring to is that what those fluids are and what the significance of them is, we don't know. Some of them may be quite ordinary fluids like blood, but we don't know they've never been chemically analyzed. And this is something that is of great interest to us to see if there's anything in those fluids that would yield some insights. I love that you're doing this research. So I'm gonna move us now onto the next clip because somehow his holiness goes even further into the deep end and in particular, he touches on the notion that certain sleep states

can be a way to practice for death. Here it is. So the practitioner, we try to experience the deeper level of consciousness at the time of sleep. If you have experience or ability to meditate on the subtle level of mind at the time of sleep, And that possibly brings the experience when you are dying. Growser level of mind die. Now that subtle mind can achieve, or what's it say, gogte true cessation.

In case you missed it, he's saying true cessation. In case you missed it, he's saying true cessation. And accordingly, or practice that, near USA, so to us, the Parliament of the Earth. So, as someone who's already described, you try to bring up this clear light at the time of sleep. How that happens, on this explained the gross levels of mind should dissolve and you should be able to maintain that clear light. And if you're able to do that in sleep, you have more chance of being able to do that at the time of death. Yes.

I was laughing when I was listening to that because you can hear me sort of saying, uh-huh, uh-huh. And I have no idea what he's talking about. So like that's just completely full of shit. All right, so a lot to unpack here. Let's start with this notion that sleep can be a kind of preparation for death. What is that about? And is that something mortals could do?

Yes, it is something that anyone could do. It's quite accessible and we can ask listeners, how often do you remember your dreams? You know, people dream every night. We know that from putting a person in a sleep laboratory and waking them up after a REM period and asking them what's going through your mind. They'll report a dream then, but most people in the morning don't report their dreams. And they don't report them because they've forgotten them and they've forgotten them because they're not aware at the time that they're dreaming. So what his holiness is pointing to is that we can cultivate the awareness that persists during our sleep so that we actually would never lose this basic quality of awareness. And then we would be able to actually be aware of our dreams when we're dreaming and be aware that

we are dreaming. And this is something that research shows can be cultivated through training. And it's exactly this kind of recognition that is said to be useful at the time of death, where there is a similar diminution in our sensory apparatus and in some of our mental faculties. And so by strengthening the awareness muscle at the time of sleep, we can have it be stronger and more readily available at the time of death. Two questions come to mind at this point. One is that I really want to press you on this again, is this really something normal people can do? And if so, how so? And then I guess

the other question is, why would I want to be aware at the time of death? So on the first question, there is not a lot, but there is some really mainstream hard-nosed research that has demonstrated that with simple strategies that people can be more able to recognize that they're dreaming. And in the scientific literature, this has been called Lucid Dreaming, where you actually are aware at the time that you're dreaming. And how do you know that a person is aware when they're dreaming?

Because most people will remember a dream after you wake them right after a REM period, which is the most reliable physiological correlate of a dream. So the way you know is you can actually train a person to move a finger, for example, when they recognize that they're dreaming, and they can reliably do that with the right kind of training. You know, it's like learning any other kind of complex skill, learning to play a Mozart concerto on the violin may seem impossible to most people, but you know, you can learn it if you practice. The second question you asked is, why should someone care about being aware at the time of their death? The reason why is because most of the time for most of us, our worlds are captured by all the stuff that's

happening around us, by all this external stimuli to which we are exposed. And that constrains our capacity to recognize the nature of our own minds because we're so externally focused. At the time of death, we are being given on a silver platter. It's a golden opportunity. The senses stop working. So all that stuff goes away. But it's only a golden opportunity

if we have the sort of muscle strength, if you will, to actually recognize it, to be aware of it. And that's the invitation here. So when all this clutter goes down, we are much more likely to have a glimpse of this most subtle level of awareness because all of the distracting things they ceased operating. things they ceased operating. It does that connect to what the Dalai Lama is saying about this being a moment. Maybe this is the golden opportunity you were pointing at. He says this is a moment potentially for true cessation or realizing the true path.

Am I connecting the dots appropriately here? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So because all this stuff is falling away as a consequence of dying, we are being given an opportunity to recognize the true nature of our mind, uncontaminated by all this other stuff, to see our mind naked, by all this other stuff to see our mind naked as it is, rather than hijacked by all the stuff that it gets hijacked by. And so when he talks about a true cessation achieving the true path,

would another word for that be enlightenment? Yeah, I think so. Although, you know, who might I say? I'm, I sometimes joke that, you know, who am I to say? I'm... I sometimes joke that, you know, there are all these different Buddhist traditions, and then of course other religious traditions as well that talk about enlightenment. And so it is odd to say this given that the subject is enlightenment,

but as soon as you broach it, you're in an argument. Because people from these different traditions think about it in such different ways, and most of us have no idea what they're talking about because we haven't experienced it for ourselves. But I think what he means by enlightenment here or true cessation or the true path is that we see through in a final, definitive way, the illusion of Richie, of Dan, of the self. Am I right about that? Yes, and I would add one other thing to that. Not only do we have that authentic experience, but that authentic experience produces an irrevocable change

so that we never will go back to what we were before, so to speak. The kind of insight that the Dalai Lama is talking about, once that kind of insight occurs, there's no turning back. I would imagine some listeners are saying, well, if I have to wait until death to experience it, what's the point? But as we established yesterday in the Dalai Lama's conception, the point is that you're going to be reborn.

And in this case, you'll be reborn as a Buddha or a Bodhisattva or somebody who is enlightened. Yes, and I also would accompany that by saying that in the Buddhist tradition as well, enlightenment in this life is also possible. And many people would say that the Dalai Lama is a living example of an enlightened being. And, you know, probably a number of others on the planet. Coming up after the break, we're going to take stock as we wing toward the end of this special series. I ask Richie to help us make sense of this man, who seems both entirely human and somehow superhuman, and

I share my own takeaways after this experience. What do I make of the Dalai Lama after spending all of this time with him? And how do I feel about myself, especially given all of my oversharing about the doubts I have about my own character? The conclusion to the Dalai Lama's guide to happiness is coming up after this. It's Wednesday morning. It's our last day in Darmsala and Richie and I are at a special and apparently somewhat rare ceremony. We're seated about 15-20 feet from his holiness who's on a throne in a large ornate room filled with high llamas and a massive statue of the Buddha behind him.

And this is called a long life ceremony where everybody in attendance is wishing for the obvious a long life for his holiness, the Dalai Lama. a long life for his holiness, the Dalai Lama. The ceremony includes lots of instruments and ceremonial outfits, all these months enter the room and hand out sweet rice and bitter tea. It's kind of a party. It also marks the end of our trip because we're going home tomorrow. So as we close this thing out, it's time to take stock. How do we feel about this? In the light and being, I've just spent two weeks orbiting.

How do I feel about myself given the psychic baggage I carried into this encounter? I'll start these closing reflections by bringing back Richie once again. Where do you net out on this Richie that is he, he strikes me as very human, super human, two separate words in that he talks about going to the bathroom and he makes jokes. He's also super human, one word in that he has clearly capable of levels of compassion that are far into their horizon for me. So where do you net out on this guy?

I mean, I, and again, who am I to say, but I have been blessed with having the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time with him in the course of my lifetime, I think that his holiness is really the embodiment of the boot of compassion. You know, that's how he sees himself. That's how he talks about himself. And that's, you know, I certainly have experienced him in that way, that I've never been in a situation with him where someone is suffering, where he hasn't recognized that and acted in a way to relieve that suffering. And that can be accompanied by a real sort of real realness, a real authenticity. And I sometimes refer to this as the paradox of realness, that the sort of less you that's there, the less self-centered you are, the more you,

you are as you show up in relationships with other people. Absolutely. And he jokes about, you know, the position of the Dalai Lama, and he is the least formal and often dispenses with formalities. And, you know, I've been in many situations with him where he's insisted on being treated exactly the same way as everybody else. So in that sense, he's, you know, utterly human in a way which I think just underscores this kind of characteristic that we're talking about. Richie just in closing just to say that it's been a delight and a pleasure and fascinating and meaningful to go on this little trip with you in the physical trip to India and the

podcast trip as well. And I'm really grateful to you for coming along. So thank you. Well, I want to thank you, Dan, too. I'm really deeply grateful and so incredibly appreciative that we were able to do this together. So thank you. So where do I land? I have a few things to say here in closing.

First, my thoughts about the man. Sure, he has changed since the first time I met him in 2011. He doesn't hear as well and he can be repetitive. But if you're patient and persistent, you can get him off script and into fascinating areas. And even when he's playing the hits, if you actually listen to him, what he's pointing to,

oneness, warmheartedness, the future of the species, all that stuff bears repeating. We need to hear it many, many times to get it through our thick skulls. Sculls that have gotten thicker in an era of tech-induced isolation, polarization, and general self-envolvement.

We need to escape what the late writer David Foster Wallace once called the skull-sized kingdom. And the good news here, and I know I keep banging on about this, is that there are practices that can help you do this. Practices that have been given scientific validation through the explosion of research recently, which his holiness helped to catalyze and Richie helped to lead. So yes, the Dalai Lama has gotten older and more repetitive. That's, I guess, to be expected given the truth of impermanence.

But what has not changed is the power of being in his presence. True, I personally did not have an emotional breakdown in his presence. And yes, that did set off my imposter syndrome about being an emotionally stunted self-centered ex-anchorman. But I was more open to him this time than I've ever been before. In the past, my reflexive skepticism was triggered by the fact that he's a religious leader, and I'm a secular person. And sure, that stuff still does give me pause. But this time, I lowered my walls just a bit and took in what it was like to be around somebody who's been training his mind for compassion for so many decades. You don't have to believe in anything to know that that will have an effect on somebody.

I just want to play you one quick moment here from the end of our interview when I thanked the Dalai Lama. Your holiness, thank you for doing this interview and thank you for all the work you do in the world. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all the work you do in the world. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. We shook hands and then he put my hand to his forehead. Thank you. It felt pretty good in the moment, but I was in work mode.

So it kind of flew by. But now, every time I watch video of that moment, which I have many times actually, because we've been using that moment in our meditation challenge, which we're launching over on the app. Anyway, every time I see that moment, it gives me a bit of a zap. So did I come home transformed? Am I now an avatar of compassion myself?

Fuck no. But my imposter syndrome has diminished, especially in light of the Dalai Lama's notion of wise selfishness, which we talked about in episode three. He's not saying we all need to exturpate all of our self-interest. He's just saying that the best, smartest version of selfishness is to recognize that we are social animals who were designed to be at our happiest when we're helping and connecting. So I think it's okay that I went to India because interviewing the Dalai Lama was a great professional opportunity for me because I'm using that opportunity to help you given the truth of interconnection, the line between self-interest and other interest

interconnection, the line between self-interest and other interest is porous. My success and your success can exist in a kind of beneficial double helix. Now that's not to let myself off the hook here, I always need to be checking my motivations and to keep turning my inner dial towards compassion. And that's true not just for me, but for all of us. And we don't need to stress ourselves out about reaching Dalai Lama levels of compassion. He's the pole star that keeps us moving in the right direction. And to be clear, moving in that direction will improve your life. As I like to say, the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. The view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. Now that I've given myself permission to be blatantly self-promotional,

let me mention here that we have a blockbuster January coming up on this podcast. Next week, we're doing a two-part series on money, what psychology and Buddhism have to say about staying sane on this touchy and taboo topic. Then we've got a cavalcade of scientists coming on the show to talk about key areas of doing life better. We're talking about the science of happiness, persuasion, procrastination, and awe. And then in February, we're gonna do some counter programming

against the vast majority of Valentine's Day content, which is often saccharin and overly focused on one narrow band of human relationships, romantic relationships. So instead, we're going to be talking about family drama and platonic relationships, and I'm going to sit down with a woman who wrote a whole book about heartbreak. So we're going dark for Valentine's Day. One last note on the promotional tip here. Don't forget the meditation challenge that we're launching over on the 10% happier app.

It's also called the Dalai Lama's Guide to Happiness. It starts on January 9th, but you can join right now. It's free. You can check out the show notes for all the details on how to join. And just to say, if you're listening to this after January of 2023, greetings to you in the future. The Dalai Lama's Guide to Happiness will remain available as a free course over on the app forever, so you can check it out whenever you're listening.

10% happier is produced by DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, and Lauren Smith are supervising. Producer is Marissa Schneidermann, Kimmy Regler, who I have to say has been a driving force behind this series and is amazing. Thank you, Kimmy. Kimmy is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient. Audio services are provided by Ultraviolet Audio with scoring mixing and sound design by the great Matt Boynton and we had additional engineering by Peter Bonaventure. Nick Thorburn composed our theme, check out his excellent band, Islands. And there are a lot of other folks I want to thank from the wider TPH universe and beyond. They include Liz Levin, Jade Weston, Gemma Vardy, Connor Donahue. I also want to thank

Richie Davidson and the whole team at Healthy Mind's Innovations as collaborators on this course. You can find out more about them in our show notes.