The One You Feed - Beth Jacobs on Original Buddhist Psychology

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

Beth Jacobs is a clinical psychologist in private practice and a former faculty member of the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University. She is also a teacher in the Soto Zen tradition and incorporates Buddhist studies and meditation into her work as both a psychologist and a writer.  In this episode, Eric and Beth discuss her book,  The Original Buddhist Psychology: What the Abhidharma Tells Us about How We Think, Feel, and Experience LifeBut wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Beth Jacobs and I Discuss Original Buddhist Psychology and …Her book, The Original Buddhist Psychology: What the Abhidharma Tells Us about How We Think, Feel, and Experience LifeAbhidharma is the structural layout of the Buddha’s original vision of the universeUnderstanding the complex laws of how forces move together in the universeThe entity of “me” exists from the arbitrary framework we create for ourselvesThe 5 skandhas are what is used to construct our reality: form, feelings, perceptions, habit formations, consciousnessesNeuropsychology and the 17 steps of perceptionInterdependent origination is the idea that everything is in motion and connectedHow consciousness is just an interactionThe various lists of lists in the AbhidharmaEnergy, mindfulness, and investigation The idea of gently removing our obstructionsWriting and meditation as powerful tools for awakeningBeth Jacobs Links:Beth’s WebsiteNovo Nordisk – Explore the science behind weight loss and partner with your healthcare provider for a healthy approach to your weight management.If you enjoyed this conversation with Beth Jacobs, you might also enjoy these other episodes:How to Find Bliss with Bob ThurmanInner Freedom Through Mindfulness with Jack KornfieldSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, before we get started, I want to give a big shout out to our newest Patreon members. Becky C, Chester D, Rachel, Adam D, Lucia Z, Jess A, Kim B, and Sienna S. Thanks so much to all of you. Thank you so much to all the other Patreon members. If you'd like to experience being a Patreon member and all the benefits that come with it, go to oneufeed.net slash join. I think that even though we will always fail in the task to express the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we work with it, every time we play with it, we bring out something something new for ourselves. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or

you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or Thank you. matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Beth Jacobs, a clinical psychologist in private practice and a former faculty member of the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University. She's also a teacher in the Soto Zen tradition and incorporates Buddhist studies and meditation into her work as both a psychologist and a writer. Today, Eric and Beth discuss a couple of her books, including The Original Buddhist Psychology, what the Abhidharma tells us about About How We Think, Feel, and Experience

Life. Hi Beth, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Yeah, we're going to be discussing, among other things, a practice journal you have for writing and meditation, as well as your book, The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the Abhidharma Tells Us About How We Think, Feel, and experience life. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter. And she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops. She thinks about this for a second. She looks up at her grandmother. She says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Thank you. I love the parable. I love your radial approach to this parable, how you just talk about it from so many angles with so many people. So in the terms of original Buddhism, you might name these wolves Kusala and Akusala, which is usually translated as wholesome and unwholesome. But I think the real key to this is the venue of the fight. It's not Madison Square Garden. It's not out in the woods. It's inside. So these wolves,

it's very, very important that that's how it's put. And what I think that's saying is that the battleground is the mind. And that what we feed these wolves is attention and we feed these wolves energy, but it's an internal process. And no matter what we do externally, I think solutions are not complete unless we deal with our minds and our internal process. And if we can move those towards more generosity, more flow, more openness, that's what it says to me. I have an original, if you would tolerate a little verse from original Buddhism. Sure. Yeah, of course. which is one of the very popular early believed to be utterances of the Buddha, maybe 300 something stanzas of verse, a very practical down to earth and poetic advice. Stanza number one, I think says the same thing as a parable. Mind precedes all phenomena.

Mind is their chief. They are all mind wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows them like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox. Mind precedes all phenomena. Mind is their chief. They are all mind wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows them like their never departing shadow. I've always loved that verse and I've always loved that metaphor. Is it a metaphor?

You know, the wheel follows the foot of the ox. I just think it's such a great visual to that. Same with your never departing shadow. And I can see why you love it because it is very much like the parable to me. Yeah, very much. Very much so. Yep. Okay, so let's talk about what is the Abba Dharma, which I'm certain to mispronounce at least four or five times in this conversation. So you're welcome to say not quite, but let's start with what it is. Because I think there's probably a lot of people who have studied Buddhism to a

fair degree who have never heard of it. That's right. And it is an essential part of the original Buddhist canon. So it's very interesting. The original Buddhist canon is called the Tipitaka, three baskets. And it's believed that even though it wasn't written down for a few hundred years, that even though it wasn't written down for a few hundred years, that this is pretty close to what the Buddha actually taught. So one piece of this Tipi Taka is called the Vinaya, and that's the monastic code that describes the processes and rules for the monks and nuns. The second is the early sutras, which many people are familiar with, and the Dhammapada would be in there. The early sutras are the parables and stories and narrative and discourses of the Buddha. The third part of the early canon is the Abhidharma.

And this is a structural layout of the Buddha's vision of the universe, the multiple worlds, how consciousness interacts with all of it. It's in the form of lists and matrices. It is a lot of cross-referencing. It's ridiculously complicated. There are seven books of the Theravadan Abhidharma, and then there are some spinoffs of other schools. But if you think of the sutras as conveying to us the Buddha's original teachings, I think of the Abhidharma as conveying to us the Buddha's original vision. And it's kind of like a right hemisphere, left hemisphere thing a little bit. The sutras are very verbal and narrative. But many of the sutras, when you read them, are lists,

and they get repetitive and didactic and teachy. But if you want to just look at the raw information, the pure lists, the way it all lays out, the way it all fits together, it's laid out in this kind of very structural way in the Abhidharma. That's what it is. Yeah, I've often thought of it as sort of like the list of all the lists, which I know is an oversimplification. But, you know, you don't spend much time around Buddhism before you're like, well, we've got the Eightfold Path, we've got the Four Noble Truths, we've got the Seven Factors of Awakening, we've got the Four Foundations of Mind. I mean, it is list after list. And then

to me, the Abhidharma has always seemed like a collection and cross-referencing, like you said, of all those lists and extraordinarily complex. And this is not a show about deep Buddhist scholarship, which I'm sure you could more than hold your own in. feed the good wolf in their own life. So I want to make sure we stay there. But what sort of key ideas from the Abhidharma do you think we could pull out that help us in our day-to-day life? And I've got a couple of my own that I may direct us towards, but I'd love to hear kind of where you would start. Because the other thing is, in addition to being an author, you have done a lot of work with clients, right? You're a psychotherapist. Yes. And it all has meaning to me, you know, as the noble truths evolved in terms of how much suffering I see decreasing around me and within me. Yeah. So it's not just an exercise in the technicalities and the obsessions. What I think it tells us is that there are these extraordinarily complex but unchanging laws of how things come together

and move in the universe, how our consciousness interacts with what we experience, with what we encounter. And the more we understand these laws, and the more we understand that they're so outrageously complex that we're not going to understand all of them, the more fluidly I think we can move with them and not fighting against them. Basically, the Abhidharma is completely about meetings. Everything is in motion. There's no stuff in there. It's all just about how things, how forces, how events move together. And I think that kind of understanding really helps us move with more generosity and fluidity. There's a section you

write, which speaks, I think, to very much what you're saying. You're talking about something known as the Khandas. I'm used to hearing it as the Skandhas, but you say they are a roiling cauldron of activity and momentum as aspects of the different khandhas arise and fall away, combine and recombine, materials that we use to construct reality. And there are so many realities. And these materials are based on the fact that we're human bodies, and we have human senses, and they're set up a certain way. And because of that, we kind of combine these experiences into frameworks, but they are in constant motion. And what we choose to draw upon is constantly changing the selectivity and the ways that we put things together. So it's really an amazing thing that you can study all these very detailed lists and feel like it's making you more fluid. But another way I

think of it is that this is kind of aerating your mind or your consciousness. It's not that you need to memorize all this information, but by getting down there on that level where it's so detailed and atomic, you kind of aerate how you think about things and how you feel. I've always heard of the five skandhas. They're also called the five aggregates as being the things that put together, that combine together to create me and this sense of me. I think that's really good. And how you experience moment to moment. It's the framework you're using to experience and filter what's happening moment to moment. And so in Buddhism, when we talk about no self or non self, we're not saying that there's nothing here. What we're saying is that what is here is actually a collection of these five things combining in countless permutations, roiling and broiling and rotisserie and whatever cooking

verbs we're going to use. That all comes together. And that is what makes up what I think of is this entity of me. Yes, I think that's a beautiful description. And this entity of you, I think, does exist. We're all bodies in a particular lifetime. That exists. That's real. But it's kind of encouraging the flexibility to think of it the way you just described. The flexibility to keep it moving, to not lock it up, and to realize that the framework that we're making moment to moment is fairly arbitrary. Maybe it's useful. Maybe it's a little less useful. But just remember, there are infinite other ways it could be at any given moment. And so let's maybe talk about what these five are just to go through them quickly and maybe give a sense of them. Again, you could study these

five things for the rest of your life if you wanted to, right? So obviously, we're going to give it the three-minute version. But let's walk through what the five are, because I do think it does frame up a basic idea of what this construction of me looks like. You'll read different translations of these, depending on what era and what school of Buddhism you're working with. But this is what I work with form, feelings, perceptions, habit formations, and consciousnesses. I pluralize it. That's something that comes from my original teacher, because it helps you remember that there's no one thing that's a hunk of consciousness that we're in. So starting with form, that's the bodily material realities. They are there.

We're not all mind making up a universe. So it's the actual truth of physical reality and how we experience that in sensation continuously and how we ignore so many aspects of it continuously. Feelings in this list is not emotion, but it's a kind of binary approach avoid plus or minus response to things that we create as we move through our life. On a very small scale, every moment of consciousness has an attached feeling. But the feeling is just like, it's just yes or no. It's just bimodal in this arena. It could be bodily or mental, but it's bimodal. And there's also a category for neither, but that's just like the typical Abhidharma complication. You can never say something without the exception. Okay. Then moving on to perceptions, the sensory perceptions,

the five senses that we're used to. In Abhidharma, there are six senses. The mind is considered a sense, but this perception is about how we put together experiences of our five senses. Habit formations, you can kind of see this is ascending in complexity as we go. The habit formations are sometimes called mental formations or karmic formations. Another term for that in modern psychology is cognitive schema. Okay. It's just mind-wise, the way we filter what's happening in these terms of ourself. And then the last category is consciousnesses. The word is chitta.

And chitta is the essential unit of a consciousness experience in the Abhidharma. That word you could spend your whole life on too. Yes. I know because you read about it. So citta is a moment of mind, object, and field meeting. And it's no more than that. It's a bear coming together of these three elements. So let's take an experience that we have and see if we can deconstruct it. This may be a fool's errand, but I'm going to give it a shot and you guide us through it. I'm with you. So I stub my toe, right? So all of a sudden there is a physical reality, the form, Rupa, that we talked about. There's a

physical reality. My toe hit something else. There is a basic, you use the word feelings, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. So there's an immediate no, don't like it, you know, unpleasant. Then there is the sensory element, which Skanda would we call that? Perception. I call that. Perception. Yep. So there would be a perception of pain. Also, I might include like that kind of frozen visual thing that you say, like when something happens, it's kind of shocking how you suddenly like see things real intensely. I would include that. Or, you know, if you're more of a auditory

person, like I would include the other senses in your perception one there. Yeah. In this case though, the primary one would be the kinesthetic pain sense, because that's kind of what's radiating. Dominant. Then from there, I would start to say something like, who is the idiot who left this block sitting here in front of me? So now I've moved into mental formation. Exactly. Exactly. That all makes sense to me. It's the last one, the consciousness or action of consciousness or cheetah

that I don't really understand. And again, I may not get it in this conversation, but in that example I'm giving, where does that fit? Yeah, I'm right with you. And the difficult thing here is that the cheetah is a too small unit for the event that you're talking about. So maybe it would help to say the flow of cheetah. So your consciousness, maybe before you stubbed your toe was flowing in a really positive, Maybe before you stubbed your toe was flowing in a really positive, fluid way. You stub your toe and suddenly there's like this jagged movement in the flow of your consciousness. I think a good analogy for this is like electrons in a wire, which I don't really know anything about.

But, you know, if you think of the cheetah like the electrons, you know, it's a flow of things and you short circuited maybe. So that's how I would think of the cheetah. The very raw consciousness experience got diverted or spiked up or something. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. This idea called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This idea that reality is constructed of these forms, this basic one of feeling, of like, don't like, neutral, is that conditioned? Or is some of that inbuilt? And what I mean by that,

is there a situation in which, with different conditioning, different DNA, different, if you want to believe in karma from previous existences, that stubbing my toe might be pleasant. Or is that happening at such a fast, such a base perceptual level that it has nothing to do with any sort of conscious or even unconscious conditioning. I'm going to go with the latter part that, you know, in the Abhidharma, they say, if you want to look at objects of consciousness as positive or negative, it's just sort of there in the object. Now, this is a kind of debatable point. Yeah. But what happens is that we are so reactive and so quickly constructive. It's like fire and kindling, the way we start thinking about things. This is where your conditioning is coming in, I think, in the kindling. Comes in as you move into the mental formation.

Yeah. Yep. Yes. I've asked a couple of neuroscientists about this because there's something in the way in neuroscience called interoception. And interoception is the body's very basic sense. It's believed that it is very much,

I like it, I don't like it, I have no feeling about it. All creatures have it. All creatures have interoception to some degree. And so when I've heard feeling in the Buddhist sense of it, it's often seemed to me that that's what Buddhism was describing, what a modern neuroscientist would call interoception. I think so. I think that sounds very useful and accurate to me. There's another point of neuropsych I'd like to bring in with those 17 steps of perception. So if I could just briefly say that in the Abhidharma, they lay out 17 moments of consciousness that are a full perception, and they're very neuropsychologically

accurate. And there's a point in the middle there where if you compare it to a neuropsychologically accurate. And there's a point in the middle there where if you compare it to a neuropsychological view where the limbic system is mixing in and the prefrontal cortex is mixing in, which is to say, and the hippocampus memory, association, emotion, planning, motivation, there's a point in the 17 steps where all that mixes in. This is where we're getting our conditioning. Every one of those steps has feeling with it. But in the middle where that happens is where we start having emotion, conditioning, and reactivity. As I was reading in that book, it almost sounds like that's also the hinge on which our ability to change any of that starts. By change, I don't mean like, oh, well, I just changed my mind and 50 years of conditioning goes out the window. I don't mean that. But I mean, the possibility exists for it to be different. That's right. Every moment

is an opening for that. We're talking about a very small scale of time. So it's not like we can sit there every second and do three switches, which is basically how it would go. But this is another one where carrying the concept helps, even though we might not work on that scale. So carrying the concept that first you're taking in things, and then there's a moment where you bring in all of your material and your past, essentially. Yeah. And your associations and all of these ingrained things. And if you're just aware of that, you watch for it a little bit more and you get it quicker and quicker. And the quicker you get it, the more little moments you have that you can change.

There's a great quote from Reb Anderson. I'm going to paraphrase, but he says something like everybody who's studying mindfulness is looking to extend presence for longer and longer. Bodhisattvas instead work on bringing mindfulness to smaller and smaller moments. Yeah. I was telling you before we got started, we just closed enrollment for a program called Spiritual Habits. And one of the things in that program, and the idea is little by little, a little becomes a lot. And it just means that we need to keep noticing these little moments. Now, I know what he's saying is your perception is getting finer and finer. But again, it's not that we need to be present

for 15 straight minutes for us to get value out of mindfulness. That's right. I think it's the same point, the smaller the moment is that you can reclaim, the more you're going to be doing it. Yep. It astounds me how looking at this original Buddhist psychology, this Abhidharma, how some of the stuff that they were able to figure out by sitting in meditation, they were able to figure out by sitting in meditation, we are now monitoring and seeing in modern neuroscience. It is staggering to me. That was kind of this huge moment when I saw the 17 steps of perception, you know, a timeline. And then I thought, well, let me get out some biological something book. And I opened it and

there was a picture of a brain opened up. It was called something like from stimulus to response. And I looked at him and I'm like, these are the same thing in detail. They are the same thing. And I ran around talking about this to everybody. I was so excited, but I do think it says something about the acuity of those minds. And they also functioned on very big scales too. This is the small scale, but it's just a different language. It's pretty random too that that's the language that I kind of grew up in my professional training. But the fact that these people could sit and perceive steps of awareness that are about a 60th of a second with such finesse,

it does blow me away. And it makes me just love the Abhidharma a lot. And it makes me have a certain kind of faith in the aspects of it that I can't directly verify in my empirical experience. Yeah. What I'm hearing from Buddhism comes back and is verified by science. I love having two verifications. It just gives me more confidence in it. Yes, it does. I think that probably throughout history, people have had some way to verify. But the main way I think we verify is that we continue feeling better and watching other people blossoming around us. That's the real verification. Right. And in our own lives, is that happening? I want to move on to another line from the book that I thought was really interesting. I'm going to read it to you and then ask you to say more about it.

You said, I am convinced that plain emotion directly expressed rarely causes much harm, while second-guessing, sugarcoating, and avoidance of feelings can be disastrous. A feeling wasn't a state people were in, but a mental factor modulating contact with reality. But the dynamic Abhidharma view opens potential for intervening with emotion. Those sentences weren't right after each other. I pulled a couple that were very close together, but this idea of plain emotion can be directly expressed. And how does the Abhidharma open potential for us intervening with emotion in a skillful way? It's really a mindfulness type of point here, but even emotion can be observed dispassionately. And the first statement

comes from my work as a therapist. For many, many years, it's always this avoidance and this tripping over it and this walking backwards into what you fear that causes the problems. When people are clear with other people, it's just empirical to me. I just see it over and over when people are clear and just say calmly how they feel. Sometimes maybe not even entirely calmly, but when it's clear, people do okay. They know what they're working with. And so it's kind of the same point when you have the capacity to understand the process, you have a bit of remove from it. And you're not so in the cloud of it, but you're looking at it and dealing with it,

whether it's your own self or interpersonally. So I really do feel that strongly that one of the best descriptors for what we want to be is plain. Plain. Yeah. Say more about that. I guess another thing they say about the skandhas is it's the upadana skandhas that's a problem, the clinging to the skandhas. So maybe when I'm saying plain, I'm meaning a little more like not clinging to things, not clinging to what we make up, not proliferating, not complicating, not adorning our experience. When experience is just taken in openly, and I know a lot of Buddhist writers have written about this much more beautifully than I can say it, but when we just take things in plainly, it's gorgeous,

and it's beautiful. And the plain truth of it has a kind of exquisiteness that all the adornment doesn't do. Thank you for that. There's another term that's used a lot in Buddhism and in the Abhidharma that I thought we could talk about for a minute, and it's interdependent origination. What does that mean? Well, you've hit on the two big things, the non-self idea and this, that are core Buddhism, but also core Abhidharma. Interdependent origination gets back to the idea that nothing happens other than things meeting. There really aren't things separate from meetings of forces. So it's just that everything is in motion and everything is incredibly complexly and multiply determined.

The seventh book of the Abhidharma, the Theravadan Abhidharma is called the Patana. That book is a list of 24 ways that different phenomena interact. And then it filters all the phenomena of the rest of the Abhidharma through the 24. But apparently when the Buddha thought of this whole thing, as the story goes, he started emanating six color lights from every pore of his body, just to give an idea of how complicated it is. But interdependent origination is just saying that all we can really look at are the ways that things interact. And that's all that's happening. Consciousness is an interaction. Causes and conditions. You know, we tend to say like this happened because that happened.

And yes, there are some things that we could sort of loosely say, okay. But I mean, you start following that train of thought back. It is literally infinite. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. You just described one of the 24 modes, which is a predominant condition. Sometimes there's a condition that's really big, but it's never the whole thing. Yeah. You start like a child asking why, but then why that?

But then why that? You know how kids do that. And you keep going, you end up in interdependent origination, which is another way of saying you end up in emptiness. That's what I think the term emptiness is meant, used in Buddhism. There's so much if you keep expanding your view. And the Abhidharma does not have any real limits on the viewpoint. Emptiness is a subject I love to think about and talk about. Like you, I am a practicing Zen

person. I'm sort of in that school that's Soto and Rinzai from the white plum lineage. But the best definition of emptiness I've ever heard, the one that I really like, it's everything all at once. That is great. And it also comes back to that quote to everything at all once in this teeny, teeny, teeny view. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Later on in your book about the Abhidharma, you talk about a couple of lists of lists. There's a wholesome list and an unwholesome list, basically. The wholesome list is called the 37 aids to enlightenment. And you say that this is seven different lists from the Abhidharma that are all sort of put together into one big list. But you kind of go through all those lists and you pull out a lot of things are mentioned multiple times and you sort of sum those down a little bit or try and find some of the most common pieces. So in the list of the 37 aids to enlightenment, what are some of the most common factors that show up? Actually, energy is the most commonly referenced one, which is interesting because, you know,

there's a lot of talk about energy and the idea of not a balanced energy, not overusing, not underusing. But energy shows up a lot. And I think actually mindfulness as a word shows up a lot too. And you're going to stump me. There's a third one. I actually just looked at a chart about that this weekend and I can't remember the third one. But mindfulness is kind of a balancing within a lot of the other lists. I'll just throw in investigation, which is not so frequently referred to, but I like it. And by energy, you don't mean some strange, mysterious force that may or may not exist in different ways that people interpret it.

You mean energy as in energy to do things, to pursue things, to engage, to be alive, to commit is not the right word. The word that's coming to mind is from, you know, Zen, great determination. Yes, yes. All of that. Yeah. It's a kind of a practice energy. I do think commitment actually is in there. Yeah. There's a great sutra about Buddha saying the devas ask him, how did he cross the flood? He said, I pushed forward, I would have whirled about. If I stayed still, I would have drowned. I didn't push forward. I didn't stay still. That's his cryptic answer, but that's energy. There's a koan for you. Summing up that seven list, you say the result of this factor analysis determines the balancing act between the stimulating effect and the calming effect of self-improvement. At the heart of positive change, momentum and focus have to be

partners. I love that. I think it's a very important point that is made in how the lists are arranged. You know, we're all different. And in the Abhidharma, there are even some meditation techniques that are arranged by temperament. So we all have to adjust our own like soundboard, you know, as we move, but essentially like keeping it moving, keeping it lively, but also keeping that kind of calmness and training in the capacity to be mindful and step away from the experience internally. That's a balance. I'd love to see that. That sounds like a very useful tool. I mean, maybe the way it's presented is not useful, but is to be able to say, hey, based on these type of temperaments, here's type of meditation that works for you. I've always been so drawn to the

idea in Hinduism of the different types of yoga, you know, that people have different ways of making their way to God. You know, some people do it via service to the world. Some people do it via their intellect. Some people do it through love and devotion. And, you know, it says, okay, people are different. It seems to me that with Buddhism, very much in the Western presentation of it, has been largely sit down and follow your breath. It's diversified a little bit now in the last few years.

We're getting a little bit more embodiment practices, some different things. And I feel like I spent 15 years trying to do breath meditation and not being very good at it, you know, and it really struggling with it. And all of a sudden, at one point, somebody was like, why don't you listen to sounds? And all of a sudden, I was like, I can concentrate. My goodness. I would be really interested in that part of the Abhidharma, which says, hey, what are the different types of meditation for the different temperaments? I have a chart on this.

I'd love to see that. Yes. It uses the 40 meditation subjects that are in the Satipatthana Sutra, and it breaks them into six temperaments and recommends different ones. But I do think, you know, both are useful, those long periods where you struggle with something that doesn't fit. And then that click period where you're like, I could just adjust this and it's easier for me. But you're so right. And it's like the eightfold path too. There are just different ways to enter. I guess there are as

many paths as there are Buddhists or as there are people. Yeah. So we talked about the main factors for good, the main factors for wholesomeness. You title a chapter, The Way Things Go Wrong. I don't know if the list has a name, but you say basically there's an equally complex system that lays out the unwholesome qualities. And you did the same thing. You kind of went through and tried to sort of say, all right, let me boil this down. Where do we end up there? I think where we end up there is the idea of the obstruction. That basically we have what we need and we are removing obstructions.

And that approach is gentler and easier to kind of really sink into and use in a practical way. You know, I think the basic hindrances are good. I think the other thing that I would emphasize about the list of unwholesome obstructions, you know, there are hindrances, defilements, fetters, bonds, yokes, there's just like all these different ways that it's described. bonds, yolks. There's just like all these different ways that it's described. But it's again, there is this kind of balance that's very personal about what kinds of things get in your way. And everything operates on many levels. And that's important too. So in one list,

something will be described one way and another list, that same word will be described differently. And I know I give examples of this in the book, but there's a slight distraction and there's an intense rumination. Those are the same process, but they're on different scales. So part of what happens, why these lists get so complicated is they're talking about the different scales of obstruction that can happen. You sort of boil all those down to some degree to the things that show up in the four bodhisattva vows that I say every morning after I meditate, right? Greed, hatred, and delusion, or craving, you know, aversion and ignorance. I mean, they're, you know, wanting, not wanting. I always sort of rephrase them like wanting, not wanting and being confused about all of that. That's a nice summary of the hub of the wheel of life and death. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I want that. I want that. I want that. I don't want that. I don't want that. I don't want that. And the realization or the confusion around the fact that like, well, that's why you're not, that's why you're struggling. That's really nice. I love in the Bodhisattva vows, again, there's lots of different translations, but one of them I like is that greed, hatred, and delusion rise endlessly. I vow to abandon them. I like that rise endlessly, not from a pessimistic perspective, but from a perspective of like, well, of course you're still having them. That's what happens.

They keep coming, and you work with them as skillfully as you can. There's not a time, you know, at least that seems in my imminent future where those are disappearing. No, not at all in mine either. But I think that, you know, that kind of brings me to the good fortune of the human birth is that we won't solve these things. We're on the edge of a mystery. We sort of sense it, but we don't really get it. We keep trying to say it, but we can't really. And these things are part of our human existence that they do just continuously arise. And our mission is to curate this flow of consciousness throughout this existence. Another plain thing I think of sometimes is like the purpose of life is to clean consciousness. You know, it's kind of boring, but I think it's

sort of true that that has to do with obstructions again, also removing obstructions, but it'll just keep going. And, and that is our, our good fortune that we do have enough awareness and enough of this suffering to keep developing if we find to go to, which is another book of yours that I unfortunately left sitting in the other room, but it's a book about writing and meditation. And, you know, you sort of start the book off by saying in your tradition, Zen, which is also mine, we sort of poo-poo words, like, you know, burn your words. You can't say it. Every, you know, every word is false. I mean, there's a, there's a real like, Hey, get rid of words. But you say that writing is a really powerful tool for us on the journey to awakening along with meditation. So tell me a little bit about why those two go so well together and why you wanted to create a book that really explicitly

marries them. Again, this is something that's a little bit temperament bound. Cause I don't, I don't think this is for everyone, but it's probably for more people than people might think. I think that even though we will always fail in the task to express the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we work with it, every time we play with it, We bring out something new for ourselves. We articulate something that was half formed in our mind or our bodies. And that is a useful process. Writing takes that process a little bit further because I've experimented with this, how much I might sit and carefully think something through, something new will come out every single time I sit and write about it. It's different. It's a little bit of a bodily remove. And also you're making an object. You're making a literal object. Even if it's a file on a screen, you are still making something. And by seeing your internal process turn into an object, you remember, oh, my internal process is just a

bunch of objects. And by bringing it out and articulating it, you carry it further and you carry awareness further. Your pen carries your awareness. You don't even have to worry about it. I write in pen, but same with the keyboard. Yeah. it makes me think back to an earlier sentence of yours I read, they're a roiling cauldron of activity and momentum. And writing is one way, at least for me, of slowing that process down. I mean, not literally slowing it down, but slowing down what's going on in my mind. It's, you know, thoughts and emotions are so slippery, you know, they feel so real and yet they're so slippery. And writing is a way I can deconstruct, you know, what are the elements that are going on here? What are the things? And you quote a bunch of studies that are pretty clear. We've talked about some of them with different people on the show. Expressive writing can be a really good tool in our growth and healing. Absolutely. And, you know, there are all these very objective measures as well as subjective that, you know, even very small amounts, surprisingly small amounts of expressive

writing have some healing power. So I absolutely believe it. I've worked with kids, teenagers, healing power. So I absolutely believe it. I've worked with kids, teenagers, grandparents, expressive writing group that I work with, people that you just wouldn't even think might get anything out of it do. But I think you're right. Literally, it does slow down thought processes. They move at different rates. And like those monks that could break down the split second into all these steps. Writing kind of does that, this kind of deconstructing, mulching through things that you're talking about. It's very powerful. Neona Panicatero writes a lot about like what a mess the average mind is. He describes it as like, I can't remember exactly, it was kind of poetic, like, you know, cobwebs and, and half-baked thoughts and emotions flying around

and this and that. And he, he's just says, one thing we need to do is clean it up again. So writing forces it to this level of articulation that will always surprise you. That's my favorite thing about writing is you can surprise yourself with what you write, but it always kind of moves it out of your body. There's also that element of it being a physical act and moving emotion out of your body is critical for people. I don't think people do that enough to kind of help the process move through you. Yeah, you have a line I love, slightly different than emotion, but you say meditation and writing rely on structure and repetition while they court surprise and revelation. I think it's a beautifully written line and so true, you know, structure and repetition, but what we're after, right,

is surprise and revelation. It's a really nice way of thinking about it. So we're near the end of our time here. You and I are going to continue to talk a little bit in the post-show conversation about a couple of the exercises from the book, because there's some really great exercises that are very different than anything I have ever seen before. A lot of journal writing prompts, I've just seen a lot of them at this point in my life, but your book, I was like, I've never seen anything quite like it about, you know, a contemplative way. It's almost as if writing and meditation combined together to make something better and stronger. So we'll do a couple of those exercises in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversation, as well as a special episode I do called Teaching Song and a Poem and the Joys of Being a Member

of The One You Feed, you can go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. Is there any last things about the Abhidharma that you feel like we haven't covered that are really important? The thing that I would say is there's a ton of information and it's never going to be a super popular study in this current world. But if you can do anything where you just kind of dip into the complexity, the multiplicity, and the interactivity of how we are experiencing, whenever you do that, I think you open yourself. And I think you dim the intensity of how hard you're holding onto yourself. And you'll feel it. There's this kind of weird, refreshing quality in it. I think that makes people more generous. It's a beautiful way to end. And your book is called The Original Buddhist Psychology,

What the Abhidharma Tells Us About How We Think, Feel, and Experience Life. And it is, of anything I have read so far, one of the best introductions that I have read that made it very clear. So listeners, if you're interested in this topic, this is a great place to start. Thank you so much for that and for our conversation. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on, Beth. I really appreciate it. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.

able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.