The One You Feed - Bob Thurman on How to Find Bliss

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Bob Thurman is a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He’s also the President of the Tibet House US, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization. He’s also the President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies.  In this episode, Bob and Eric discuss his book, Wisdom is Bliss: Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your 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, Bob Thurman and I Discuss How to Find Bliss and …His book:  Wisdom is Bliss: Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your LifeHow our civilization is based on fearThe wisdom in the bliss view is that reality is good and that you get back what you put into it.The Four Friendly Fun Facts he renamed from the four noble truthsHow altruism strengthens our sense of self-worthTo be noble means you become more “we” oriented than “me” orientedThe deepest level of reality is love, abundance, energyFirst Friendly Fact is to take responsibility to understand our ultimate reality or we will sufferSecond Friendly Fact is the diagnosis- to understand that we are not the center of everythingThird Friendly Fact is the prognosis or needing to unlearn and opening ourselves to what we really areFourth Friendly Fact is the “therapy” or the eightfold path of how we can open our own minds to find freedom and blissOur tendency to see things as absolute rather than relativeInvestigation is the real practice of Buddhism and meditation is a toolRealistic mindfulness is noticing what’s going on in the real worldThe three types of wisdom are born of learning, unlearning, and freedomBob Thurman Links:Bob’s WebsiteInstagramFacebookTwitterBest Fiends: Engage your brain and play a game of puzzles with Best Fiends. Download for free on the Apple App Store or Google Play.   If you enjoyed this conversation with Bob Thurman, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Robert Thurman on Buddhism and The Dalai LamaPaul Hannam on The Wisdom of Groundhog DaySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

But the Catholics were saying they could pave your way to hell if you gave them money. So our scientists tell us that, except they have freedom from hell, but they don't have heaven, they just have nothingness. 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 empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions 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's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really no really podcast. Follow

us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and promotion of Tibetan civilization. And he is also the president of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. Bob is the author of many books, including the one him and Eric discuss here, Wisdom is Bliss, Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your Life. Hi, Bob. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. I'm very happy to be here with you again. Yes, it is a pleasure to have you back on. I greatly appreciate it. We're going to be here with you again. Yes, it is a pleasure to have you back on. I greatly appreciate it. We're going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Wisdom is Bliss, four friendly, fun facts that can change your life. But before we do that, we'll start like

we always do with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, He says, and the grandfather 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 well i think that's a lovely parable in the sense that it implies that you have the choice to choose which one to feed and also of course even more basically that everyone has both sides in their being and yet they're not doomed to follow the fierce one or the angry one or follow the good one in a way they are presented as kind of equal and that the one who you feed in your freedom as a free being which we basically are you can choose to strengthen the good one.

And it doesn't sort of address the issue of do you want to kill off the bad one? Or do you want to change the bad one into being an ally of the good one, etc. I mean, you could take it further, which he leaves the grandpa. Grandpa leaves that open. But I like it in that sense that at least you know your own shadow side and you choose to be the good one if you're smart. In a way, I think it would be nice if they continued the conversation. And if grandpa had wisdom, I think maybe he would say how the good one would relate to the bad one. Because, of course, it always is the danger, even you feed the good one, the bad one will

attack it and destroy it. And he's sort of not addressing that because he's talking to a grandchild, apparently a young one. Yeah. So he says he's helping him cultivate the awareness of his freedom and of the fact that he has a shadow side but he's not resolving the issue i'm a happy ending person i always was actually as a child which to me is a proof of former life because i didn't do anything great in this life particularly and i'm pretty much like I've been hiding in my ivory tower of the educational world.

And I didn't do much, but I always didn't like tragedies. I mean, I can understand that, but I didn't like ending with the tragedies. I wanted somewhere beyond the suffering of the tragic hero. And I didn't like movies that ended in misery. I really didn't. And our books or anything, I wanted a happy movies that ended in misery. I really didn't. Or books or anything. I wanted a happy ending, and I still do. Well, that's interesting. Nobody has ever suggested that I can remember that somebody ought to write the rest of the wolf story. That's a brilliant idea.

I pulled this from near the end of your book because I thought it spoke so well to the parable. I'm just going to read it to you and the listeners here. Okay. Because I think it's basically the parable you wrote. That means you read all the way to the end. I'm deeply honored. That's right. The Buddhist view is that the human being is completely malleable in their wiring. Any human being can become a saint and very easygoing, and any human being can become quite evil and very, very difficult if they go and what influences you, and you do not choose what you allow to influence you by using your intelligent discrimination, then you will probably be changed for the worse. Right. That's wonderful. Well, you know, my wisdom is bliss book

about how it is to bliss energy, joy energy, that we're going to meet these challenges. And we're going to deal with the bad wolves. And we're going to meet these challenges. And we're going to deal with the bad wolves, and we're going to reinforce the good ones. And the issue of how if you just kind of let yourself go in this dream, you will probably be conditioned toward the dark side. Our civilization, or would-be civilization on the planet, is based on fear to a great degree for the last 5,000 years, I would say. It seems that there was a time when the women, the female side of the human team, was stronger, if not dominant, perhaps even dominant, what they call the civilization of the goddess, as some archaeologists do anyway. And there, there was much less violence, and things were more peaceful, and there were

less fortified cities, etc., etc. And then these male people came off the great steppes of Eurasia. This is, I'm talking sort of Eurasia- because that's what we have the writing about. We don't really know about the Mayans and the Aztecs except through European propaganda. So we don't know about the Americas in the ancient times. So I'm not talking about that. But we know about Eurasia. So we've been conditioned to feel we need to depend on leaders. We've been terrified that reality is nature red in tooth and claw, that other beings are potentially dangerous. So we need to depend on the warrior king or the high priest.

And we're sort of taught that ignorance is bliss because reality is very dangerous. And nowadays, the version of it by the scientists is that we're this lonely bunch of creatures on this one only planet in this sort of vast universe of these stars. And although they look nice twinkling at night, they're hot and boiling. And in between is a gulf of total death where you'd explode, you know, if you didn't have a Michelin man suit on. And it's our own thing is very fragile. But luckily, if we get all killed, if we wreck the whole place, as we were obviously doing at the moment, there will just be nothing. So at least there's no hell.

And so, you know, the equivalent of the indulgence that barton luther was disturbed about in the time of the reformation but the catholics were saying they could pave your way to hell if you gave them money so our scientists tell us that except they have freedom from hell but they don't have heaven they just have nothingness but at least it's anesthetic we don't have you know they promise us that we won't feel pain after death, which is what we're really scared of. We pretend to ourselves that we're scared of being annihilated, and the scientists reinforce that idea to make themselves feel macho. But actually, nobody is afraid of annihilation when they're in serious pain. They seek it, actually. They crave it because

it's anesthesia. And so this is a false dispensation that the science priesthood, the scientific priesthood, not scientific, but scientific priesthood, offers to the planet why we should follow their prescriptions about lack of spirituality and lack of seeking a higher sort of level in ourselves. So therefore, they lead us into a kind of apathy about just following the currents of culture. But you know what, if at this moment we follow either the current of some religious fanatic culture where you're based on fear, fear of hell, so you follow a certain god, either Hindu or Buddhist or Jewish or Muslim, and that god will save you when everybody else goes down the drain. And people who don't believe in that god, they will go down the drain. So you're

in your isolated little clique. So that's one side you can sort of put your blind faith in. Well, the other side is you put your blind faith in annihilation, in anesthesia, in nothingness, and you can just flow with the secular culture or one of the religious cultures and not take care of the situation and be responsible with the idea that you're going to be involved in it, whatever. Just like you will not abuse your body in youth usually because you want to live older so you won't do things that will damage the body and make you suffer when you're older right and we do that as a practicality usually some people and

sometimes we don't know what's harming us when we're young so we'll get into bad habits of course but the point is basically we try not to because we look forward to a consequence. So similarly, if all the humans on this planet look forward to a consequence based on how they're living, they would not do anything harmful to other creatures. They would not be harmful to future generations by wrecking the planet. They would be much more responsible and less psychotic. So that is what I'm sort of saying there, that

the wisdom is bliss view. And the main thing that I feel the Buddha was trying to convey, but I also think it's what Jesus was trying to convey, actually all of them, they did convey it. Muhammad was trying to convey it, the great

Jewish prophets and the many great saintly rabbis conveyed it, the Hindus, great yogis and enlightened beings, the Taoists, etc. Every great spiritual founder conveyed to people that reality is good. And even the scientists at first, who thought that nature was God's gift to us, and if we studied nature without dogma and just by whatever we observed, we would be able to manage well in this beautiful planet, which God gave us. They were quite religious, the early scientists, in the Western Enlightenment, 17th century. They were not anti-religion like the current ones.

But I don't blame the current ones for being anti-religion in the sense that the religions have become very dogmatic. Unfortunately, they've also become dogmatic that there's no spirituality. And that has doomed people to just follow the herd unfortunately you know counting on no consequence of how they behave right but what the great founders and teachers have told us east west spiritual scientific is reality is good and you get back what you put into it you know know, what goes around comes around, those kind of statements. And so you've got to put good stuff out there.

And the good stuff for us to put out there would be to listen to Greta Thunberg and to take care of our grandchildren's future and immediately turn off fossil fuel machinery, methane producing feedlots, bad agriculture, chemical agriculture, etc. All of this we would immediately stop, not just by 2040, 2050, the fake stuff politicians tell you, but just turn it off right away. And then use all our technological genius to create alternative energy sources, which we know how to do already. Let's start sort of at the beginning of your book and talk about what you're referring to as four friendly, fun facts.

All right. Thank you. That's good. Which are normally referred to as the four noble truths of Buddhism. I love the fact that you've rephrased it as four friendly, fun facts. First, let's start with why are you calling them that versus the Four Noble Truths? Let's start with kind of why you titled it that. Well, you know, the Noble Truth is not wrong. So it's not that I'm saying it's wrong, but I'm saying it has connotations about the early encounter with Buddha's teaching, Buddha's mission and movement by Western people. Noble is a class term

which Buddha changed from being a social class term to being a psychological class term. Meaning an ignoble to him, or what he would call a commoner, is someone who is very self-preoccupied and self-centered, and who just is sort of hardly aware of the existence of other people. We might say narcissistic, as some psychologists might say. And therefore, it's quite miserable because they're only in their own world and nobody else matters much to them. And other people end up being not that fond of them, actually, because they're just always out to feed themselves.

Talk about feed the one you feed. They just feed themselves. So then that's commoner. And then noble is someone who develops an awareness which can be done methodically through education. Some people have a natural, are born with a stronger affinity for that. But everyone has both possibilities. In a way, they're the good and the bad wolf.

And the good one is the altruistic one. And that's very strengthened by an education where they really learn that actually other people are just as important as themselves. And in a way, if they don't realize the importance of the other, they're not really recognizing their own importance. And they even realize they're more important when they realize they can do something for the many others that makes them more important. So altruism strengthens the sense of self-worth, actually, naturally, automatically. So it's really, as the Dalai Lama likes to say, if you want to be successfully selfish, meaning get to have a good outcome, be more altruistic.

Because when you care about others, the first person who gets happier is you. Because once you're looking only at how happy you are, you're never satisfied. You always want more. Whereas when you look at others' happiness a lot, there's a lot of things you can do for them all, and then you forget about how unhappy you are and get better. So that's what noble means. Noble in his use of it, Buddha, is he's saying just by

birth, that doesn't give you altruism, although a noble should have noblesse oblige and take care of the people who depend on the noble person. In a good society, they do, but actually often they don't, unfortunately. So noble is when you really feel the pulse of others as equal to your own in importance, and you become more we-oriented than I-oriented, and that makes you happier and healthier. Okay? So that's what noble meant. But then I'm saying, since we have a double connotation of noble as some sort of highfalutin, snotty person, that friendly is a good definition for friendly, because your true friend is one who cares about you. And you can rely on them because to them, you are important. And that's a true friend. The word of truth is again, not wrong. The word

satya can mean truth. But truth has two meanings in English. One is reality itself. And one is propositions about reality. You know, as I sort of said in different words before, the third noble truth, or the third friendly fact that the Buddha taught, and it was the root of his whole popularity and usefulness, is that the deepest level of reality, when you discover what it really is, you find that it is itself is good. It's nice. It's love. It's abundance. It's energy that can help you, not destructive. And so you should not have ultimate fear. You should be afraid of some temporarily damaging or ruinous thing when something you feel is separate from you, like a scorpion is about to sting you in its tail.

You shouldn't be afraid of that. So fear can be useful. But the ultimate level of everything beyond sort of life and death, or maybe in the heart of life and death, both, is goodness. And it's a stronger force. And it's actually quite similar to what theists believe. But Buddha didn't necessarily think it was one person monopolizing that goodness. They think that same goodness is in the reality of every person,

and every even stone and object and planet and whatever, and it's the nature of the final reality. In a way, it's like the dark matter and the dark energy, and the bright one three percent bright it's 97 dark as we are told by the physicists nowadays but it's not really that it's dark it's that it's transparent so it's invisible but that invisible reality is goodness it's total goodness and that's what that's what nice monotheists believe because they think god is good. But the fanatic ones, they don't care good or bad. They just think God is their God. And they think they can be bad in the name of God. And the gods actually don't really like it, according to Buddha.

The gods are unhappy with that. So that's the reason I came to friendly facts. Because reality is friendly. It likes us. Whenever we let go to reality, it's better for us than when we try to impose something on reality. I love that. And four friendly, fun facts is great alliteration, Bob. It's great alliteration. It's fun to say. It is. Four friendly, fun facts. That's right. I could have added free, freedom. That is the friendly freedom of reality, too, you know. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's walk through what these four friendly, fun facts are. I don't think we've done an episode where we really took apart and examined the four noble truths, or in this case, the four friendly, fun facts. So this might be sort of a Buddhism 101 here on what they are. So what is the first friendly fun fact? I just I can't get enough of saying it. Understand your reality and the ultimate reality, which is your ultimate reality as well as the world. If you do, you will be stressed out. You will be frustrated. But that's still okay because you're going to find it eventually anyway. Because the knocks will get you to take it more seriously, you know, the stressful life. And it's not as extreme as Socrates once said. The unexamined life is not worth living.

It is definitely worth living, especially as a human. Humans are the luckiest of all the life forms, including more lucky than the gods. Buddha certainly believed there were gods. He was not against theism, but he just didn't say there was one that completely in charge of it all. That's all. He didn't blame one for everything or give one credit for everything they're all helping or and there are a few who are a little bit clumsy and harmful now but they're there so the point is human is the best because we're vulnerable and yet we have a kind of divine intelligence and we have a close

to an enlightened intelligence and so we can have a meaningful life but even if we don't use it well and we just sort of follow the herd we don't take the road less travel let's say uh it's definitely worth living because life itself is a teacher it will teach us so one of my motives in the book was to counteract the atmosphere emerging from a lot of buddhist teachings and teachers and misunderstandings of buddhism that buddha is very much emphasizing suffering and you're supposed to suffer and if you don't suffer all the time you're somehow being unrealistic and that's very wrong but a way, that reflects what other world scientific traditions kind of tell us, that wisdom is being resigned to the basically inadequate level of life. It's a bad planet. Nature wants to eat us up. And, you know, we're never going to be that happy. So being miserable is realistic or something like that. And Buddha is against that. He's just saying, if you don't find reality, which you're capable of finding

and is right there in front of your face, in fact, it is in your face, but if you keep neglecting and living in denial of it, it'll be stressful. That's the first friendly fact. Don't expect if you get to be president, if you even get to be God, if you get to be whatever you think is the ultimate state of a separate being from every other being,

that you'll be fine. That'll be the limit, the end. No. It'll never work. No. Unless you see reality, you will continue to be, as you say, stressed or to suffer if we don't see reality. So number two, second friendly fun fact. Now, this is where friendliness gets stronger because you know what? We can diagnose the cause of the stress. And it's very simple. You think that you are the main center of everything. And even you're told by some psychologies and some traditions,

you should think that, that that's what you're supposed to think. And that's very, very erroneous. And it's obviously a futile situation. If I'm the most important thing, I'm immediately paranoid because I realize nobody else agrees with me. paranoid because i realize nobody else agrees with me they all on top of that they have the temerity to think they're the most important things and they know i don't agree with them so it's a war of all against all as hobbes said you know in the western philosophy guy and you lose and you because there's so many of them you know if you're the more greatest

you're going to lose. They're going to bring you down. So it's not even rocket science, but it is a good diagnosis. Because it's not merely moralistic telling you, you shouldn't be self-centered. What it's saying is, well, you have a self-centered element because you're human and because your culture has made you like that. And when you were in previous lives as an animal and as a god, you were like that. And when you were in previous lives as an animal and as a god, you were like that, whatever you were. But luckily, as a human, you can become self-reflective

and you can investigate yourself and quite easily discover that you're just one of the ones. You're not the one. As my old Mongolian, in a very simple way, teacher used to say, it's correct that you're a reality one as my old mongolian in a very simple way teacher used to say it's correct that you're a reality you're real but the problem is each of us tends to think we're the really realist one and that's a mistake others are equally real because again some people will misunderstand the buddha's teaching as and all spiritual teaching is you have to be somehow self-destructive.

You have to say, I don't even exist, and I'll be a martyr, and come destroy me, and then I'm saintly. And that's quite wrong. Your ego is very useful. It should make you want to use your human life in the best way possible, to be the best kind of being possible. And that's very easy to see, what would be the best kind of being? Totally happy,'s very easy to see what would be the best kind of being. Totally happy and totally loving, maximally capable of making others happy. Although ultimately, one of the things is you can't make any other person happy. They have to find that you can only help them find their happiness in themselves. So that's the second noble truth, is the diagnosis. Yes. And so it struck me when I was reading, you know, you summarize these things at one point and you said, what's the cause of our confusion? We talked about not seeing reality in the first one.

What's the cause? The cause is self-centeredness. And it took me back because when I got sober in AA way back when, there's a line in the AA big book that says, the root of our problem is selfishness, self-centeredness. And I was blown away by that. And again, I think what you say there is so important because if, when we hear that, oftentimes we're told that in a moralizing way, you know, you're so selfish, you're so self-centered. What I understood when I read that, I mean, didn't fully understand. I've been trying to live my way into it for 30 years. But what hit me so

clearly and what you're saying is that that strategy is doomed to cause suffering. Because like you said, I think I'm the most important thing in the world. You think you're the most important thing in the world. Everybody else thinks the exact same thing. And boom, we are always in misalignment. And when we can just loosen up on that a little bit, at whatever level we're capable of, of slowly shedding that belief that we are the center of everything, boy, does life get better. Right, right. That's wonderful. I think you put that so beautifully. And, you know, the issue of addiction is so important. And the diagnosis involves analyzing this system of habitual what they call kleshas, Sanskrit word kleshas, which people I also used to translate as affliction, mental affliction, because it's not only an emotion, it can also be some sort of

rigid idea. You know, it can be a rigid concept as well as an emotion it can also be some sort of rigid idea you know it can be a rigid concept as well as an emotion but they're usually hatred delusion delusion is where the concepts come in and then greed and jealousy and exaggerated pride you know arrogance and uh but those are mental addictions and they're're addictions because, you know, when you feel weak in a situation, somebody's making problems for you, then anger comes in your mind and it's in your own voice. And it tells you, well, they're pushing me around because I'm not strong enough. But if I get angry, that'll make me stronger. And at first it feels like you're stronger when you're in a rage.

But actually, any martial arts guy would just toss you out the window, turning your old imbalanced fury against itself, and you're staying cool and just getting out of your way, and then you will run into a wall. And so those are addictions. We have mental addictions. The root of substance addictions, which are so spectacular in our society, though, is that we are not given in our education a way of understanding mental addictions, which are so spectacular in our society, though, is that we are not given in

our education, a way of understanding mental addictions, that we could easily understand. And they are the root by when you get free of the mental addictions, and you realize, hey, anger, don't you're free to choose not to follow the dictator, the anger, not to follow the dictator, the greed, not to follow the jealousy, not to follow the arrogance, but to follow the delusion. I'm free. I don't have to have this rigid idea. I don't have to hit that guy. I don't have to do this. When we find that freedom in our mind, then we become a little bit immune to that. And then we will also not be trapped. You know, the four friendly facts are actually like you have a friendly doctor,

but it's not like a prophet or religion or a moralizer or a preacher. He couldn't preach. He said, I can't make you happy. I can't give you a formula that if you adopt it and keep repeating it yourself, you'll be fine. It won't help. You have to do it yourself. But I give you a good prognosis. And I'm giving you a good set of therapies. But you have to apply them yourself. Yeah, I love that about them. It's like a doctor's thing. So that's the second noble truth is the diagnosis. And the third is the prognosis, which I'm trying to deliver ahead of time to everybody. And that prognosis has not become a buddhist or it's not become any particular new identity don't strap on to your ego yet another identity oh i'm a buddhist i'm an american i'm a male i'm a white i'm a black i'm a female i'm a i'm a red i'm help. What it is, is you have to try to relax and start unlearning stuff and opening.

And the one place where Buddha said, well, give him a little credibility. He asked for a little credibility, but the way he got it was by being so incredibly joyful himself he was a special effect he was like an et you know the guy met a little et in the closet he made a light with his fingertip and he looked totally harmless but he could do like magical things and so then that he had a little credibility with a little kid. He thought, this guy is really cool. I'm not going to expose him to the CIA or the surgeons or somebody who wants to dissect him to find out how he does these supernormal things. So Buddha showed a form, they say he made himself, created himself. He himself was a work of art. And he showed sort of

He himself was a work of art. And he showed sort of just like, you know, we fall in love with some wonderful singer or people identified with movie stars or in ancient time, some handsome prince or a beautiful queen or something, or your fairy godmothers, you know, but would have these kind of ideal beings. And then that would give you like hope. Well, if someone can be like that, I can be like that type of idea you know by depending on them but in this case the being who is like that just said well yes you could be like that but i can't make you like that and only depending on me and thinking i'm cool won't help you have to find the coolness in yourself and the credibility is just there that

he showed us by example he just like a good parent you know a good parent can tell a lot of stuff to the kids but ultimately the kids will believe how the parent behaves yeah if the parent talks all the moralistic stuff and then they have a foul temper they're very greedy and only think about their money. They're stingy about dishing out allowance. They're like nasty, punishing people. Because we don't believe that. We look at

how they act. By their deeds, Jesus himself said, just like Buddha, by their deeds ye shall know them. And so Buddha was a high prince, could have been a king, had an army. Kings are always commanders-in-chief in old societies. And he left it all. He gave it back. He said, I want to really discover what is real, and I want to really help people, not boss them around.

So then the third noble truth is the prognosis. We are on the brink of freedom, The fourth noble truth is the prognosis. We are on the brink of freedom, the brink of superintelligence, the brink of awareness of what we really are. And the minute we know it, we will be it and we'll feel totally great. And then we'll be so helpful to everyone we love and we'll find out we love more people than we thought. So it's a really good prognosis. Okay. Then the fourth noble truth.

I used to say even, and people used to say, well, just like the second is the cause of the first, the fourth is the cause of the third. Just like you go to the doctor, you have a symptom, they recognize the symptom, diagnose the cause, and then you have a prognosis, and that gives you hope you can cure it and then he gives you the therapy those analogies only go so far because in this case the fruit the good result already there actually it has always been there nirvana it's the ultimate it's the actual reality of life in the deepest teaching when you first reach it maybe you think it's something different from life but then that could be a trap and then you get separated in another way. So it's uncaused, nothing causes it, and that's why Buddha can't just put you on a train and you arrive there.

So what the fourth is, is the therapy of how you can open your own mind, not how you can believe something, but how you can open your own mind to find in your own self and in the world around you this reality, which is the freedom and the bliss. Bliss, freedom, indivisible, they will say. They call freedom voidness or emptiness, meaning emptiness of any stuck thing or absolute thing. And that's the Eightfold Path, and that's what the real main substance of the book is. Just to do a quick summary, first noble truth, the diagnosis, which is if you're confused about reality, you will suffer. Second truth being that the main thing that causes us to be confused about reality

is our self-centeredness, our thinking we're separate. The third noble truth is, hey, this can get better. You can fix this. There's a path. And the fourth noble truth lays out what that path is, which is often called the eightfold path. And we're not going to be able to go through the whole eightfold path because we are near out of time. But there's a couple of parts of it that I wanted to hit that the way to number eight on the Eightfold Path. Right. And use the term instead of using, oftentimes we say that these things on the Eightfold Path are like right speech, right livelihood. You use the word realistic. So realistic speech, realistic livelihood. But the last one is realistic samadhi, which is often translated as sort of realistic meditation. But what's interesting is

you write that you may have heard that Buddhism is basically or even only meditation, and that meditation is the most important thing you can do, and that learning is okay, but not really important. Practice, we are told, is meditation. Right. Say more about that, because, yeah, I think that is one of the messages that came through for me in 20 years of reading Buddhist books was... Right, right. 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...

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Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Practice, practice, practice, meditate, meditate, meditate. And if you're not doing that, then you're not really engaged in the path and you're saying something different. So talk to me, Bob. So a couple of things there. But first, let me just say, I know you didn't want to start at the beginning and I won't completely, except simply to say that we have this tendency to what I call absolutize things. And we project sort of essential and unvarying realities into things. So we think that the table is really a table. And we think that I am really me, most importantly. And so you could take worldview as belief. You could translate that as belief. And you could say, Bob, you're wrong. Buddhism

is dogmatic and you have to believe something. But in a way, what is the realistic belief for few? It is fundamentally nothing but a belief in causation, that things are a process of causation or relativity. It's a belief in relativity. And why that is so powerful is that the subliminal belief that we have that is the cause of, you know, when you mentioned the cause, you said self-centeredness was the cause because of confusion. But the confusion is the root of the self-centeredness. In other words, it's an exaggerated sense of fixed self. It's the absolute, you see.

The relative self is a great thing, and we need that. And that's often the Buddhist, there is a statement of selflessness, which is very important in Buddhist teaching. And he means by that, not that you don't exist, which is the wrong in buddhist teaching and he means by that not that you don't exist which is the wrong way of understanding it he means by that that you exist with an only with a relative self yourself is interrelated with everything it's not the absolute thing so you could be forgiven for being self-centered when you feel that yourself is the absolute do you follow me because that's the realest thing so therefore i'm going to be focused on it. When you realize that you are relative, then you still have to be focused on it to be responsible for yourself and compassionate for your relative self, which feels and experiences and has happiness and has suffering when it's not fully aware of the deeper reality of things.

So that's very, very key. not fully aware of the deeper reality of things so that's very very key and now the other end the last one samadhi is not really meditation but samadhi means is total concentration sort of the most absolute a relative being can get by being very able to use their mind in one pointed focus on whatever it is so it's sort of almost like willpower it's like it's realistic realization it isn't really like okay i realize that all of reality is this relativity and i've realized that by analyzing and investigating it which is the most important thing that's how buddha i'm unlearning all sorts of dogmas and cultural conditionings and even neural wrong wirings from culture and so that its investigation is the real practice of Buddhism in fact and the meditation

part is a tool in that that's a really really important they're not wrong in saying that it is really important but within the two types of meditation one of them called you could say critical analytic or investigative meditation and the other one one point of deep focus meditation But within the two types of meditation, one of them called, you could say, critical, analytic, or investigative meditation, and the other one, one pointed deep focus meditation, which is the Samadhi one. The more important one is the investigation one. So the seventh realistic path is realistic mindfulness, which means opening the mind to what's going on in the mind and in the world and noticing that i don't have to be

angry and i don't have to be depressed that's one choice i could make but i could also choose not to be because i become aware of the mechanisms of the mind and how the what i'm addicted to what are my habits and i can then gradually undo those habits, replace them with more positive habits, more free habits. This mental freedom is the real thing. Because reality, when we're fully free and fully open, we are our reality, actually. And then we realize our reality is this wonderful, loving interconnectedness with everyone. Empty of that one being absolute or this one being absolute or anything rigidly fit this way or that way.

And that's what's so great about it. We then can draw from wherever it's needed, whatever it is, to make any relative situation ultimately better. So the absoluteness spreads and smears itself over the whole of the relativity, including all of the beings. And so it's all one big, huge happiness, you could say, you know, and then the only thing that would stand out in it would be anybody persisting in unhappiness. And all everybody else would be all wanting to help them find it. And that would be their more fun, that would be their realistic thing to do and become almost automatic so when you sort of rework through that inferentially you sort of realize that given

beginningless past there's no first beginning big bang genesis those are all cultural pretenses that we know where it all started so therefore we are in charge of you. There are sort of false certainties stuck on us which attract our absoluteness and make us then subjected to the people who pretend to know this. Because who would ever know the first beginning? How could there be a beginning? A beginning means an ending of something before it.

A limit means there's something on both sides of the limit. A limited thing here and then other things. So it's just completely a misuse of language to say a beginning out of nothing. It's just thought of an assertion, meaningless, actually, incoherent. But then if you get attached to it, you get really fanatical about it. It attracts our tendency to find security in being stuck somewhere. Because once we think we're separate, as we're given reality, then we want to be really separated so nothing else can bother us. Bodo was a scientist, as you know, and I make a big fuss about it. And therefore,

he opened the door for us to discover the reality that we ourselves are, and we're related to, and what's precious about us is our ability to understand what we are by critical investigation and education and so on and developing our powerful mind and then once we have it focused toward freedom then meditation comes and totally makes that a kind of power of freedom if we meditate right away when we are stuck in all kinds of wrong views or unrealistic views, then it will heighten our entrapment in the unrealism. And that's why we've seen in the teachings of the Asian traditions or even in Western spiritualities, actually,

where they want to actually achieve something like Jonestown, you know, these cults, you know, where they think they're going to really meet Jesus or something, you know, they're not just going to think Jesus later is going to take care of them. They're going to really do something. Then you get these absolutistic behaviors by people, which is worse, and people meditate on them, and then they practically will kill themselves, and they'll do all terrible, and they'll hurt other people, and they'll do terrible things.

They'll have jihads or crusades, or they'll be nasty to the Muslims like fanatic Buddhists got to be in Burma and in Sri Lanka, which shows you that even Buddhism as a religion can be falsely absolutistic. So the point there is that it's a progression. When you are walking down the street and someone asks you i'm a broke i'm a veteran you know i i have no food i can't eat you know and then you could give them a quarter your mind will say all sorts of things why are they doing this must be their own fault i should turn them into the aspca or whatever it is you know they should go to the shelter they should go on welfare or something you know and i don't i'm not doing that well okay but that could be practical maybe in some

if there was a thousand of them and you only had two quarters but if you could give a quarter when it's not the end of your own livelihood and you don't then you are closing yourself and that little gift is you by doing that little gift, that's practicing Buddhism. Talking yourself out of following the cultural thing of there must be something wrong with them because they're poor, and I don't have to, they'll contaminate me even if I touch them. And instead, what a nice thing, giving me the opportunity to give them something. But the point is, it's an advantageous moment for you to be nice and be happy by doing that. And that's the practice of Buddhism.

And then critically learning about reality and trying to critically eliminate the absolutes that are stuck everywhere by everyone who wants you to absolutely follow them in some way. And you will be more and more free gradually and then you learn you know i love eckhart tolle the power of now guy i love him because his story was that he was talking himself into suicide and he was hearing his own voice telling him the worthlessness of life worthlessness of living worthlessness of the, and he should just threw himself in somehow, taking him right down that drain. And somewhere he found in his mind another voice saying, why should I listen to you? You know, which still was also his own voice.

In other words, he wasn't just hypnotized to follow the inner narrative that he was bound to because he identified it as his thinking. And he found another voice in his mind that said, wait minute why am i listening only to this narrative and he did it without a shrink he did it without anybody else interrupting him sort of he found that that was mindfulness that was hearing a deeper level of his own intuition and so he got into his power of now to get away from negative thinking pattern but but that's okay that is in the same ballpark as the realistic mindfulness what we call or real it's actually called realistic memory yeah or realistic awareness is the real literal translation of what we call mindfulness and it means counting your blessings actually observing what's really going on and anybody who

really observes like right now when you draw breath and that's like the big meditative practice that people will sell as the main thing of Buddhism and it is a very important thing I'm not against it at all but when it's the only thing then it's not making use of the whole prescription

it's just picking one pill in the prescription but the point is when you breathe they just have you. But the point is, when you breathe, they just have you counting. But on the other hand, when you breathe, who should you be thankful for? All the plants. They are giving you this oxygen. And they are taking your carbon. If you didn't cut them all down and like put smoke, smoke them out with fires,

they are giving you the oxygen and they love you. They have what you need and you have what they need. Carbon to make their leaves and plants and flowers and new seeds for the next generation. And they're giving you the oxygen to live your human life. Take a deep breath. So all of those things going down, and then the realistic samadhi is the concentrative side of meditation. The mindfulness is the analytic investigative side of meditation. Both are crucially important. But the key is the wisdom.

And it is said three types of wisdom. Wisdom born of learning. We are so arrogant as Westerners, we think we're the smartest people in the world that ever lived because we can blow it up and we are wrecking it that means we're smart wait a minute i think that thing means we're a little backward actually we're irresponsible actually because we keep having all these ways of disconnecting and disconnecting from nature disconnecting from life and then we think disconnecting from death by making it into nothing.

But it isn't that. Death is just like falling asleep, having a bad nightmare, and waking up on a bad day if you had a previous bad day. You know, when you went to sleep in a horrible temper, anger, and frustration, and paranoia, and depression, then you were going to wake up in a bad way, usually. So wisdom born of learning, which is critical unlearning of all sorts of dogmas, and then wisdom born of meditation as investigation, like Descartes' type of meditation, like mindfulness, analyzing different things, and finally wisdom born of concentrated and investigative combined on a single point to

focus on the freedom, freedom embedded in relationality. So wisdom and compassion, indivisible, wisdom and bliss, indivisible. That's the thing. Wonderful. I think that's a great place for us to wrap up. Bob, thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope I have your spirit and energy when I am your age. I really do. Don't wait for my age. You have it already. I love you're the one you're feeding and you're already doing it. And, uh, and you know, helping people find the dark side, helping them feed the good wolf, but not to pretend there's no dark wolf and deal with the dark wolf. And that's really wonderful.

All right. Thank you, Bob. Lots of love. Lots of love to you. Take care. Thank you. Bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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