The One You Feed - Dr. Miles Neale on Gradual Path to Awakening

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Dr. Miles Neale is among the leading voices of the current generation of Buddhist teachers and is a forerunner in the emerging field of Contemplative Psychotherapy. He is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, an international speaker, and a faculty member of the Tibet House (US) and Weill Cornell Medical College.  In this episode, Miles and Eric discuss his book, Gradual Awakening:  The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully HumanBut 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, Dr. Miles Neale and I Discuss Gradual Awakening and…His book, Gradual Awakening:  The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully HumanHow a person’s mythology is held in the unconscious with the framework that was formed in childhoodShadow work is diving deep into the unconscious or the inner childThe process of going from understanding our behavior to changing it How processing emotions need to be included in behavior changeThe importance of establishing a new framework in the complex inner workBecoming fully human is complex and requires commitmentThe gradual and direct paths to awakening experiencesHow awakening requires a new framework within the psycheThe importance of understanding the complexities of psychedelicsThe paradigm of the current wellness movement and materialismHow we can miss the power of many transformative techniques Aligning ourselves with the greater goodDr. Miles Neale Links:Miles’s WebsiteInstagramYouTubeIf you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Miles Neale, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Awakening in Life with Ryan OelkeSpiritual Awakening with AdyashantiSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The very thing that we are afraid of is the very thing we're liable of replicating. That's what a mythology does. That's what a prophecy does. I call it a self-fulfilling prophecy or a self-fulfilling mythology. 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 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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Myles Neal. He's among the leading voices of the current generation of Buddhist teachers and a forerunner in the emerging field of contemplative psychotherapy. Myles is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, an international speaker, and faculty member of the Tibet House U.S. and Weill Cornell Medical College. Today, Eric and Miles discuss his book, Gradual Awakening, The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human.

Hi, Miles. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric, and thanks for having me. Pleasure to be with you. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to have you on. We're going to be talking some about your book, Gradual Awakening, the Tibetan Buddhist path of becoming fully human. But before we jump into that, let's start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he 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 it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather. She said, well, grandfather, which one wins? 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. Thanks so much for that. This is a very powerful story and I think

very fitting way to start any of your conversations, which I've been enjoying tremendously on my morning runs going through some of the really great, great speakers that you invited on. One thing I'd like to draw our attention to the fact is that the question is being posed to a young granddaughter. And I just think that, you know, one thing that's important to me is that in the young mind of underdeveloped or perhaps naive mind of child, everything appears in very clear black and white categories. There isn't much sophistication. It's the child's mind that is idealized. And so one thing I want to just position at the outset is that the very question is coming from and being answered in a way that is, it's a motif that is idealized. And to me, it's far from the reality of the complexities of human nature. And so one of the things that I do in my work and one of the things

I try to draw attention to, though, it doesn't end up having much success and certainly falls deaf on the ears of contemporary culture. So I like to I like to emphasize the underdog, the wolf that nobody gives a shit about. And so, I mean, one of the things that I just, in our culture, if you just look at our culture right now with the binary thinking between there's black and white, there's good and bad, there's red and blue, it's problematic from the outset to have these binary categories because it means one is privileged and therefore the other one is sacrificed. And at least in terms of psychology, depth analysis, and shadow work, if you move through life in these very binary and superficial of us that are trying to navigate our lives in the world, the greater levels of complexity that we can bring to our thinking, the better that we're going to

deal with reality. And I think we don't have to look much further than the general election last year and the way that our, at least the United States, has absolutely split among itself into two camps. This represents, in my estimation, some very, very superficial thinking. And we have lost nuance and we have lost middle ground and everything is categorically us versus them, black versus white. And I just find that we're in a very rigid dilemma and we could trace the origin of that to just very primitive thinking. There isn't much room for complexity. There's no longer much room for nuance. We cannot sit together in the same conversation and hold and respect different points of view because we are buttressed and divided and marshalling

tremendous forces to hold our ground around really just, I mean, mask, no mask, vax, no vax, you know, Trump, Biden, whatever it might be, the world can't exist in that framework. And that's why things are falling apart. And that's why there's tremendous forces arising right now that are kind of eroding the very fabric that we live in. right now that are kind of eroding the very fabric that we live in. So that's one little spinoff that came to my mind is just how the framework of that. Most people will tend to look at the good wolf and the positives, the virtues. I think they're incredibly powerful in my own work, and especially coming from a Buddhist tradition, we want to celebrate virtue as much as we want to cultivate virtue as much as we can.

tradition. We want to celebrate virtue as much as we want to cultivate virtue as much as we can. But I've also just recognized that people that try to just focus on the good and don't respect the latent forces in their unconscious that would propel them towards lack of virtue, they shortchange themselves and they put themselves at odds with their own psyches. And when they do that, we get blindsided. And that can be blindsided by trauma, or that can be blindsided by so many other elements. I really like to use the relationship with the wolf that most people don't want to deal with. That ends up being really important. In order to strive for the virtue, you have to deal with vice. You have to include that wolf somehow. You have to get closer to the things that you don't like in order to free up energies.

Listen, I know that it's everybody's intention right now. For example, in the wellness space, I'm sure you're very well familiar with people that are just absolutely killing it with their books and programs about optimal health and optimal healing. How do you become more productive and how do you absolutely take your business to a massive, massive gain? But what's not spoken about is that if it were so easy as just following a program, everybody would do it. What gets in the way is the question that comes up in my conversations with people who are trying to succeed, trying to win relationships, trying to improve themselves, trying to get healthier. If it were as simple as just embracing the good and feeding the good, everybody could do it and we'd all be well. So it ends up being that at least in psychotherapy and shadow work, it's not sexy.

Okay, I'll grant you that. It doesn't fill the airspace, the Instagram space that well. But I don't give a damn because it's true to life that most people need to actually spend a lot more time with the unsavory elements of their psyche in order to actually get closer to achieving their goals. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, I often say that a lot of my personal philosophy and what I work with and what I teach people is just about how not to make things worse. And that doesn't sell very well. It's just not that exciting. But if you think of how constantly we are capable of making things worse in our lives. Just to simply stop that process can really be so helpful to simply not add suffering on top of suffering.

Yeah. But again, it assumes that you have the choice to do that. And sometimes we don't necessarily have the choice to do that, which begs the difference. Why? What's at play in the unconscious that would prevent us even from doing something like do no harm? Yeah. So let me ask you about that. What you just said is sometimes we don't even have that choice.

So I think what you're speaking to then are forces that are operating below consciousness that are reducing the range of conscious choice that we actually have. Is that what you mean by that? Yeah. I mean, that's one way of putting it. And then we can nuance it further by saying that we live according to mythologies, and mythologies dictate or mandate that we're, you know, bad people, or that we have certain negative results. And as long as that mythology lays intact and under the surface, we are going to live by those mandates despite our best intention, the best conscious intention. As long as the mythology lays intact, then we're bound to replicate it. So say a little more about that in whatever way you want. I know I'm opening

a door to a vast and complex topic, but say a little bit more about depth psychology, shadow work. What is the landscape of venturing into that world look like? Well, I'll just give you an amalgam of a patient, you know, just so that there's some point of reference, even though this doesn't one to one describe someone singular that I'm working with. But let's say that the gentleman in his 40s comes to work with me. He presents his stated intention, which is, you know, he wants to have a decent relationship and he wants meaningful work. Now, who doesn't? Okay. Like these Freud recognized this a very long time ago that the modus operandi of the human being played itself out in terms of successful work and loving relationships, but he can't fulfill them.

You know, so back to the two wolves scenario, if it were just about feeding the wolf of success and love, he's tried and it hasn't worked out for him. And so we look a little bit about his life and we look for symptoms. We're starting, we're starting the Buddha's first noble truth and looking at the presenting problems and going into the ideology and looking at the symptoms. And what we see is like, you know, he's a broker, he makes millions of dollars, but he spends it really poorly. And he, you know, doesn't show up for work, and he gets reprimanded, puts on probation with his team. And he's a bit of a maverick. And, you know, and it creates friction at work. And in a way, it erodes trust. And so he's created a kind of environment in which

he's basically just having a hanging on for dear life in his work environment because he doesn't have any accountability, doesn't have any follow through. He lives sort of impulsively and it's a little bit of addictive to his money and gambling. And that's why despite his stated and conscious aspiration to have meaningful work, he fails at it miserably and puts himself in a position where he may not have any work and may actually run through his money, which is an enormous amount of money, which most of us in our lifetime can't imagine, but in very short order, he could decimate it. And the same is true in his relationship life. He's at the stage in his life where he wants marriage and family and children. That's his stated conscious intention and goal. And yet he finds himself unable to be

disciplined sexually. He acts out, goes and has extramarital affairs. He's basically acting, in my estimation, like a fucking child. Okay. He's really just in this very primitive and immature base impulse, low disciplined, low capacity to tolerate ambiguity, frustration, delay his death to gratification. He's like a child. Okay. And, and it would be quick to judge him. So what's the shadow work? Well, there comes an interesting point in our relationship where we're somewhere between, you know, three months and six months where it starts to get a little dicey between him and I, you know, there's something in psychotherapy called a frame, which is like there, these are the agreed upon contracts that we can keep accountability towards. Like I will show up at

a certain time and I will serve and you will pay me on a particular kind of timeframe and you will show up or give me a cancellation notice. These are very basic things to help operational processes. But in psychotherapy, they end up being some of the very subtle domain in which we can analyze the unconscious players that are playing out their motifs. And for example, he doesn't pay me one week. He doesn't actually pay me for a month. And I repeatedly ask him to pay me and he's unable to do it. And he, in a way, kind of acts out childishly. He won't tell me why. He won't follow up on emails. The money hasn't arrived. And what happens to me? You get angry. I get angry. And so I become another player in the metaphor or the mythology that is

haunting him everywhere he goes. And so in that moment, I'm at a crossroads with him where I can do to him and relate to him and fulfill the prophecy of cutting him off and sending him and casting him out. And that's my crossroads. And if I don't know his mythology, I'm liable to step into it. And if he doesn't know his mythology, he's liable of replicating it. It doesn't matter what his conscious and stated intention is. The mythology is alive. And so what's his mythology? Ask me what the mythology is. The mythology is the motif inside the unconscious that had its framework formation in early childhood development and maybe even earlier in ancestry. So this is someone who was abandoned emotionally by his mother who had a severe mental health

crisis and was just not available to him. And this is also a person whose father paid attention and needed to pay attention to the mother, rescue the mother. And so he's abandoned by both parents. And so he's like a feral child. This is how I start to understand his process. He's like a feral child. His instincts of gratification are very premature. He's just trying to get love in all the wrong places. He doesn't know how to be in relationship. He doesn't know how to delay his gratification.

He doesn't know how to restrain his impulses. He doesn't know how to restrain his impulses. He doesn't know how to think about tomorrow. He's thinking only about today because he's so starved and he hasn't had the infrastructure. He has no infrastructure. He has no tribe. And so he's deathly afraid of being rendered abandoned again. However, he sets up the abandonment himself or his program sets up the abandonment. So the very thing that we are afraid of is the very thing we're liable of replicating. That's what a mythology does. That's what a prophecy does.

I call it a self-fulfilling prophecy or self-fulfilling mythology. So the shadow work involves, I appreciate all kinds of tactics to sort of get him to follow through kind of coaching, like let's set up the goals. So you want to have a successful relationship. You want to win the graces back of your employer so that your team actually feels that you're a team member. What do you have to do? And sort of think about all these things that you have to do. It would be me like saying, well, we have to pay me at the end of the session. So you state that thing, but the minute you state it, it presents for him or his unconscious an opportunity to disrupt the relationship. So then what do you do? If you try to remain at that level,

it's only a matter of time before the fait accompli destroys itself. So you're left with one other option, which is the option that we spent the top of the session with, which is go towards the wolf that we don't like. Go closer. What's happening? So just at that moment where I'm about to fire him. And also, guess what? There's two unconsciouses.

So let me just disclose in my life, I was manhandled by a narcissistic father. And so I have a lot of fear of authority, inadequacy, overcompensatory behaviors where I usually tiptoe around people. because I don't want to create conflict. And I've learned over time that that doesn't serve me and it doesn't serve anybody else. But maybe in him not paying me once or twice or three times after asking, I'm also activated in my mythology. And so now we have dual activation of two mythologies. And so like, okay, I'm the professional here. So i have to like spend a little time between sessions working with my own sense that here's another person in my life disrespecting me because i'm i'm not worth it right so that's my shadow work i have to go closer to the vulnerability of the inner child that whose father basically treated me like a puppet on strings. And anytime I didn't appease him, he would pull the string on the dependency string,

the fact that I needed house, shelter, pocket money or whatever, love or whatever. He would yank that and I would come becking like a wounded dog. And there's a long legacy of anger and resentment about that. And underneath that, there's a fundamental sense of anger and resentment about that. And underneath that, there's a fundamental sense of deficiency in my mind. Because I've done a lot of work, it doesn't take me very long to get out of the heated moment between session and see how he stepped on all my buttons or tread on all my triggers. And I have to get some perspective. But I don't also just think it's my problem here. I think that two unconsciousnesses

collided and I'm now using it instead of using it as a point of contention that we shouldn't work together. I'm now using it, trying to use it therapeutically in order to really deeply empathize with this person. That here is a person who is just on the verge of destroying every single relationship and unable to be accountable and commit in any way despite his greatest aspirations. So then his unconscious, we look at his archaeology, we look at his abandonment, and we look at his juvenile structures. He hasn't had the kind of mentoring that would be required over the long.

He hasn't had enough consistency and enough container and enough of a caring authority that has that both the measure of kindness and grace, but also the discipline to help him grow into maturity. He hasn't had a rites of passage and no one's held him to the fire and no one's held him to the test because what happens is he comes right up to the rupture and then the rupture happens and he's never been provided the opportunity to see it through and repair. So in this session, with some of the few sessions that happen after this, we're going into the shadow, into the unpleasantries and helping him really process what it's like to have been abandoned and what the consequences of that have been. And you get a lot of rage.

He's fucking angry at everybody, you know, including me. When I ask him to pay me what he hears, what do you imagine he hears when every time I send him a reminder to pay me, what do you think he hears? That you don't care. That I don't care. I mean, it's uncanny what's happening on the surface and what the reverberations of echoes of our past is really interpreting, isn't it? So let me ask you a question about this unraveling process of the mythologies, because I do a lot of coaching work with people. And a lot of the work that I do is sort of what you would describe as that step-by-step, like I got to do this, then I'm going

to do this. And there's some emotional regulation work in there. And what I get is a lot of people who come and say, you know, I've gone to therapy a lot. And I've now understand why I'm doing everything that I'm doing. But understanding it hasn't changed my doing of it. And so where is the breakdown in your mind between somebody who's gone, okay, I've done the work to understand it. I may have even done the work to go back and feel some of it, maybe, but it's not translating into current life. very thorough analysis and have got some very good sound conceptual understanding. I wouldn't actually call that insight. I think it cheapens insight. We throw around this word insight. I've gotten a lot of insight. I've gotten a lot of insight from my therapy, but it hasn't translated into behavioral change. I actually would challenge that, that the insight, if it's not a deep gnosis and deep and intuitive, direct understanding that it's not going to translate or parlay into any

effective change in one's life. So I would hope that we can sanctify the word insight instead of loosely throw it around. But I take your point, and it's a good point, and it's a very common experience. And there's a couple of different vectors. You mentioned one of them, which is conceptual understanding or seeing something clearly. Seeing the mythology is only one part of it. I mean, you also have to process and actually embody and feel the disenfranchised aspects of the self that have never been given the light of day. So, for example, you know, if you look at this guy's story, his rage that he was abandoned is not a very savory thing to feel. It's not condoned by culture. And this is one of

my bones I have with spirituality is it's a big no-no in spirituality. Big no-no. You can't get angry. You can't get angry. Now, one of the things that we noticed very powerfully from the social justice movement is that we are seeing that underneath the surface there are very, very deeply traumatized segments of our population. Once the curtain has been undone and we see how deeply in pain people are and have been for a very long time, we also see that what comes with the pain is a tremendous amount of rage. And then, you know, the establishment then goes, oh, well, your pain is acceptable here, but your rage, we can't have that. And that becomes a second wound because A, who the fuck are you to control or dictate how the process goes? And number two, you fail to recognize that

processing trauma also includes some unsavory bits that it's going to unsettle everybody. So to deny somebody by saying, oh, well, culture won't accept this, and we don't accept civil unrest, and we don't accept it in spirituality, anger is a big no-no, this is no way through. You're just creating more limitations around the process. So he really needs a safe place to be angry, and he needs a safe person to be angry with.

And if I look at my own story, I had a lot of rage to my father who pulled strings on me and dictated all the terms. And the I look at my own story, I had a lot of rage to my father who pulled strings on me and dictated all the terms. And the minute I got angry, what would happen? The anger was appropriate, but there was no place for it. Where did it go? You think probably internal, internal. Exactly. So I survived years of cutting. I survived years of burning. I am still a person who is very prone to depression. So that's the legacy of anger that has no channel, no appropriate channel. So it's not enough for this guy to see and to have it head up. This is one of the great innovations of trauma therapy, the revolution of trauma therapy with

polyvagal theory, Dan Siegel's interpersonal neurobiology, Schwartz's parts work, Gabor Mate. I mean, we have transitioned recently in therapy into a rubric of very subtle understanding about the origins and the appropriate measures for processing trauma. And Basil Van Der Poel was a pioneer saying neck-up therapy will not do. It will not do. He exposed the limitations and the lie of a conversation. He survived almost a near career-ending backlash, but he was right. He was right. The idea that you're going to just see hope behind the veil and see the mythology is insufficient. What's also going to happen is that there has to be a safe place to really connect with all that grief, shame, rage, abandonment, fear, aloneness. I call them ice cubes. They have been frozen in time and put into deep freeze and the shelf has been closed.

And they may be feelings that you had when you were six. They may be feelings that you had when you were eight. They may be feelings that you had before you were six. They may be feelings that you had when you were eight. They may be feelings that you had before you were prelingual. In those cases, they're called implicit memory, the first three years of your life. Like in my case, I was born premature. I almost died. I was put into an incubator for the first three months of my life. I lived in a bubble.

Now, because I have no cognitive recall, do you think that had no impact on me? The original three months of my brain development in this world were in a test tube environment in which I was not touched and not received by the world. And I still deal with the legacy of that. I still deal with which is like, even if my wife brushes my shoulder, I will flinch. And even though I crave love, my neurobiology has said it's homeostasis to being alone. And so knowing that is a huge, remarkable illumination. But feeling it is an entirely different thing. Going into the deep freeze, pulling out the shelf of ice cubes, and letting them thaw out on the kitchen table means that I will have a tremendous amount of fear and loneliness and

sadness and grief to process in order for me to finally make sense and free up some of that energy so that I can capitalize on that energy exchange and mobilize it towards my altruistic or my original conscious motivation. So that's one vector which is conceptual insight isn't enough or conceptual understanding is not enough. Emotions need to be included. 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.

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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. A long time ago, like, I don't know, God, has it been 20 years? 20 years ago, amazingly, I did a bunch of sort of inner child work, John Bradshaw type work. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. And a big focus of it was on going back and experiencing the emotion and these men's groups where we raged and we cried and we did all of that stuff. Is that a through line to the sort of trauma therapy we're seeing now? We're something different going on then. I'm just kind of curious how different a more modern,

you know, last 10 year method would be from what was sort of going on, you know, 20 years ago. I'm not specifically familiar with that technique, but let's do it together. What I would say intuitively, and then I'll let you come back. I really like Dan Siegel. I think his work is really about integration. Okay. And I think back to maybe the sixties, where they had this sort of primal screen, go into the basement, grab a pillow, pretend it's somebody who you want to suffocate or beat up and abreact and get all your energy out. And I think that very quickly we learned that didn't work. It's not simply just a matter of releasing energy in the nervous system. There needs to be a right-left hemisphere, brain-hemisphere integration, which is that the left is responsible for the mythology or the narration, the story, and the critical thinking, and the conversation.

And the conversation, which conversation is really useful in co-creating and analyzing the blind spot so that you can get down to the mythology level, but then also on the back end and the reintegration of recreating a mythology. That's really nice to do that in tandem. But the right brain is responsible for the shadow material. That's where you access these frozen states. And that's where you can really engage in letting yourself process some of them and they have to happen together they have to i mean you have to create a structural process in which the left brain leads into the right brain and allows it to circulate back and reintegrate with the left brain and if you go too deep which is one of the things that i think is happening with the psychedelic renaissance and one of the dangers that i think is happening with the psychedelic renaissance

and one of the dangers that I find when people come, I'm sure they may come to you too, they've just come back from Peru and they've had a massive ayahuasca experience and yet they're struggling with reintegration. Well, they have been thrown into the depths of their right brain, into the depths of their psyche, and they've seen something very profound, but the infrastructure on the beginning end and the tail end isn't there for that whole process to come full circle. So what you're seeing there is like, here's something really beneficial, but it's not held within a bigger, more complex. And here's the word complex again, if it was just simple and binary, why

doesn't it work? Well, the problem is, is that it's not complicated. And the human mind must be one of the most complicated things on the planet. So all the theories that people put forward, it's not until you get people like Dan Siegel and Porges, for example, these are very complicated theories. These are very multidimensional, multi-cross-cultural, interdisciplinary theories. That is the movement towards success because it really understands that a human being has complicated aspects that need quite a very sophisticated infrastructure to really bring about change. So I don't know where that lands for you in terms of the primal screen wing work or the inner child work that you may have done.

Did it have these other components? You know, was it truly was it truly integrated? It did. And was it was it successful for you? I think so. You know, it certainly was successful to the extent that I was a couple years removed from a heroin addiction, and I stayed sober, my relationships improved. Was it successful? As in, like, have I been happy, joyous, and free every minute since? Of course not. So, you know, I always find that an interesting question because, you know, over the course of 25 years, I've done a lot of different therapy work. I've done a lot of meditation work, a lot of different things. And people will say, well, did that work? And I'll be like, well, I don't know how to answer that question because to your point, it's all so complex. It's really hard to say like, oh, well, this did this and then this did this. And then, you know, it's like they all integrate over time. Yeah. Ideally in a

overall upward spiral, but, but one that certainly has a lot of variability if you zoom into it very closely. Yeah. And it really begs the question, like what's our explicit or state. And as a, as a coach, you know, how important it is. You probably spend several sessions determining what the goals, the explicit goals are. And the reason that you do that is so that you need a very specific target to work towards, you know, and like health wellness or enlightenment is too amorphous, you know, to work towards. You need milestones along the way and they need to be clear and tangible. And, you know, for example, you know, your recovery was essential to you without which none of the other therapies would have worked. So did 12-step

work? Yes. You wanted recovery and you got it. You maintained it. But was it sufficient in and of itself to bring you towards the next stage of your life? Well, that also begs the question that human beings are less linear and more cyclical. I mean, there's always work that you can do. And maybe you mature and you gravitate towards different disciplines. You dust off or expose different parts of your psyche that remained unaccessible during different parts of work or prior work or different techniques. So this is truly the paradigm that we're living in that is much more complex, much more integrative, but I hope much more humble, like what are we really

asking for? And how do we really get there? And seeing that that health really, you know, real wellness, true wellness, it may be lifelong commitment, it may not be something that you do in 10 sessions, right? But this is some of the backlash that I'm having towards our culture and what I see on Instagram, which is like these big cells, marketing pushes for the three-step program that are going to deliver some sensational outcome. I find these so obnoxious and so predatorial because I think people are hurting. People want genuine wellness. We now live in a culture where we're bombarded by memes and technologies that are extremely powerful. The algorithm is extremely powerful and a very cunning use of technology to co-opt our brainstem and our amygdala and get us very lustful and very

desirous and very afraid. And there's a sort of predatorial element to what I see in the wellness space, where there's the lures and the temptations and the marketing ploys that are used to get people to buy programs and start things. I think it's disturbing. I mean, it is really disturbing. And I think what you're talking about, what I'm talking about, a human being is so complex. It's not pretty. It's not sensational. It requires a long commitment. And for some reason, that just doesn't sell. And, you know, that's why my book, Gradual Awakening, it's not, you know, who wants to

take their time? Who wants to take their time to do anything anymore? Yep. You know what I mean? Absolutely. I mean, and even that, I think that's a really interesting transition into that book, because the book is called Gradual Awakening, the Tibetan Buddhist path of becoming fully human. And, you know, you're talking about awakening or enlightenment. And you say early on,

enlightenment is possible for everyone. And then you describe Eckhart Tolle's experience, right? Eckhart Tolle sitting on a park bench, apparently, boom, wakes up once and for all, right? Which may or may not be true. None of us are in his head. We don't know, right? So I'm going to suspend any judgment on that. But that you say that-

I won't suspend any judgment on it. All right. All right. All right. But what's more likely is gradual awakening. You know, it's interesting. I'm in Zen. Even within Zen, we have two schools.

We have, you know, Soto and Rinzai. One was the sudden awakening and the other is the gradual awakening. And I think that's what's made the modern non-dual movement take off so much is that it basically says to people, hey, it's really easy. I can just give you the direct path to waking up. I'll just point at it. You'll see it. And you described this in your book. And I really loved how you talked about this, that you can have some of those experiences relatively early on. The direct path can point at some experiences that for some people are profound awakenings. I've had a couple of them. They were deeply life-changingly profound.

And I absolutely have spent years trying to then bring the insight, and I would use the word in this case, insight in the way you mean it in true, true insight, how to integrate that insight back into all the moments of my life. That is, I think, an absolutely gradual path regardless. Yeah, I agree. And I think that this setup again, here, the binary, here's the benign, either it's a sudden path or it's a gradual path. there it is again there's the same motif you got two choices which one do you want you know most people in our culture the way that we have been indoctrinated and institutionalized have no patience anymore and want the quick fix whether it's come in the pill form or the ayahuasca

form or the quick enlightenment form or the 12-day course or whatever it is, they will be there are primed. And I, again, say by marketing and capitalistic endeavors, I think there's a secret hand behind the screen that is pulling the strings here. They're primed for that choice and just an observer of tradition. And those two choices have always been possible since the beginning of Buddhism. There's always been those two routes, the direct path and the gradual path. As I was mentioning in the book, Gradual Awakening for Tibet in the early inception of the transmission of Dharma, they did many debates between these two schools and the gradual one was seen as probably more appropriate to the masses.

You do have the one-off exceptional case of someone who has come in, according to their cosmology, that soul has come in with a predilection or there's been a prior development of consciousness that would facilitate or make possible a very deep and profound seeing into the nature of reality and create the conditions for a sudden breakthrough. But then to your point, even once that sudden breakthrough has occurred, you still need to return and reshift the matrix, the organizing principles of the psyche, so that that wisdom can then imbue the rest of your associative processes. And I think therein lies one of the greatest metaphors found throughout mythology is this idea that you leave the garden, you separate, you die, and you go into a very liminal space, the unknown, the shadow.

You disintegrate in order to get there. You have to disintegrate. The ego has to disintegrate. You have to lose your security blanket. You have to leave home. disintegrate. You have to lose your security blanket. You have to leave home. You have to leave the familiar because that's the very structure, though it's comfortable, that's the very structure that keeps you in a very rigid and confined bandwidth of reality. You pass a threshold and you go into the unconscious or you go into the amorphous or you go into the liminal space.

It is dark in there. This is the dark cavern metaphor of Joseph Campbell. And there you find the demon. And the demon is the shadow. And the demon is also all the other elements of your psyche that have been kept at bay by society, the unwanted bits. And you have to reclaim them as part of you. Or one of the other metaphors, like in Padmasambhava, who didn't just kill the demons of Tibet, he recruited them, which is an alchemical metaphor of using anger wisely. In other words, meet the demon and recruit the demon, make the demon your ally. And then you can come out of the cave as a new person. This is the rebirth process now.

So that rebirth process requires a new person. This is the rebirth process now. So that rebirth process requires a new infrastructure, you know, and that new infrastructure takes time. And I'm now just, as I'm talking with you, recalling one of my favorite quotes by Jung, and I'm going to paraphrase it because I don't know exactly the citation, but he said, be wary of wisdom unearned. Be wary of wisdom unearned. And wow, what a powerful message to people right now amidst the psychedelic renaissance. Because I think the psychedelic revolution is going to create very powerful inroads for people to shed egoic structures, rigid egoic structures, comfort. Their shire will be shattered so that they will contact very deep recesses in their mind. But if the infrastructure isn't there,

then the reemergence or the return, the reintegration process is going to be very, very bumpy. And whatever insider wisdom they have called won't land. It won't graft. It's almost like you will have a seed that doesn't have a pot to be planted for firm rooting in. So this is one of my big concerns for people because I don't know about you and your coaching practice, but I get more and more people coming after very deep psychedelic work that are having trouble with the integration. I say this in response to your question about the sudden versus gradual path, because I think it's the same thing.

Very deep breakthroughs, even if they're authentic moments of insight, like you see no self for the first time. It's not conceptual in a book when you're sitting there and your sensory experience has no fundamental ground to orient yourself. You finally see that this arbitrary thing that you've been holding onto for dear life is just a construct. And you don't just know that conceptually, you actually viscerally feel that. You viscerally feel that. And that's a very powerful meditative experience that a lot of people have in a 10-day Vipassana course or after years of meditating. And now what they're going to do is they're going to have that in three days in a ceremony

in Peru. And I'm just concerned that that kind of thing doesn't have the preliminary, because the preliminaries, at least in Tibetan Buddhism, before you take a tantric practice, which replicates the whole process of the shadow work, the dismantling of the ego, the entering into the shadow, the recruiting of the alchemical energy and the reconstitution for it, for rebirth. That whole fabric of that architecture and that psychodrama is enacted in a Tibetan sadhana, is also at play in a psychedelic experience. But for the Tibetans, they spend years and years and years in preparation, and they have all the container in place, the mentor

and the virtues and the practices and the preliminaries in order to contain so that someone's breakthrough moment can really graft and be integrated into the very fabric of their being. 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, Not 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. The psychedelic renaissance is a topic that we've had some people on who have mentioned it in passing, but it's not been a focus of what we do, partially for the reasons that you're stating. I don't know that I'm ready to

start devoting lots of our airtime to what is being promoted by a lot of people as a fast path. And again, I think that this reminds me a lot of your conversations around a phrase that you quoted called McMindfulness. And what your basic critique was that we have pulled one part, the mindfulness, the mindfulness meditation part, out of the rest of its container, and we've just given it to people and it's being used in all sorts of ways. We can talk about it being corporatized. We can talk about it being used for capitalist purpose. But your point is that this was one tool in a whole cadre of other tools, and that if you pull the one tool out, it's not necessarily real effective. And I think with the psychedelic piece,

I think a similar thing is sort of occurring. And I think what we're saying is we're taking a tool, but we don't have the container around it. This is exactly what you're saying that supports it. I think, though, that the difference is, if you just go spend 15 minutes a day watching your mind, that we hear stories of people who have problems with meditation, but by and large, relatively safe. problems with meditation, but by and large, relatively safe. Psychedelics are a different animal. Very, very powerful, but their power comes with danger. You know, I mean, I used to take psychedelics back in my addiction days. I didn't use them addictively. And even just taking them recreationally, I realized just how holy mackerel are these getting in deep here. And so I share your feeling that I think they're really powerful tools. And I think they are going to be a revolution in mental health. But I'm worried that the very nature of our culture of our medical system of everything are going to strip them down to the, you know, like the most basic thing, like you get your trip,

and you get one hour of psychedelic integration afterwards. That's all you got. I share your concerns about that either A, not being enough to events lasting change or actually being harmful. So well put. Thank you, Eric. And I'm glad that we share that concern. And we're not falling into the binaries of for psychedelics or against psychedelics, but we're just raising and having an intellectual conversation with some rigor and some sophistication and not falling on any clear answer, but pointing out some of the disturbing features in our culture. There have been many waves in history, including yoga, where yoga was abstracted from its basic substrate and commercialized and commodified. And it's not that I argue that there's no benefit of all. I

mean, I think if you do calisthenics and you call it yoga, but you're, and you get more flexible and you decrease your blood pressure and you're, you know, you reduce cholesterol. Great. But it's not enlightenment. Then you have to be careful that you don't cheapen these things. Then the came, came the mindfulness movement. And of course I don't't mind stress reduction. A lot of people need stress reduction, but let's also not put ourselves in a position where we overlook the fact that the Buddha's entire matrix and his assertion was that a human being could be liberated from the vast cycles of endless samsara. I guess where this leads us is towards coming full circle to where we started with, which is what is missing if you abstract these things is the mythology that they come out of. And to me, the mythology is as important as the technology, the technology of yoga as a physical practice, the technology of mindfulness as a meditative training, the technology of plants, even though they're organic, there's still a technology, there's still a tool. They can all be abstracted and they can all have some relative benefit. I think we're willing to agree on that. Where I

think the pushback comes from is if you abstract them from their mythology, what you do is that you leave the current mythology alive. The very bedrock that people are doing mindfulness in, the very bedrock that people are doing yoga within, and the very bedrock that people are dosing and microdosing or doing psychedelics in, remains intact. And that mythology is part of the sickness. That's what I argue in Gradual Awakening, that the very paradigm that we are trying to have a wellness movement within, if left unchallenged, will keep people sick. Because the very paradigm of materialism that treats us like skin bags with chemistry brains that die at the end of this life, and that's it. The lights go out and out she goes. That paradigm is only three to four hundred years old. And it is the first time in human evolution

where we have so reduced ourselves into brain jelly and thrown out the soul. And by throwing out the soul, thrown out our meaning and thrown out our greater purpose. And what we have done is we have constructed a mythology that we are basically useless. We're basically useless brain jelly. And that's out there, but it's so concealed. And my problem is, is if that lays intact, just like the patient case that I presented at the beginning of the conversation, intact, just like the patient case that I presented at the beginning of the conversation, if the mythology of secular materialism remains intact, it doesn't matter how much you dose, micro dose, do yogas, do push-ups, do mindfulness, something very deep in our psyche will remain corrosive and lead to more than just apathy, but dire meaninglessness. Now that's my contention.

Yeah, it makes me think of something you wrote in your book, which is, you say, in my estimation, combining Tibet's deep psychology, meditative techniques, and virtuous rituals offers far more transformational potential than merely sitting quietly following the breath. And I think what you're talking about there is this thing where we've got the techniques, the technology that you were just talking about, but it's also framed around deep psychology, which we could simplify. I'll simplify for now. You may not agree with this simplification to call it view. It's basically the way we see everything, you know, and then also the ritual. And the last component I would add, and maybe ritual assumes that it's baked in, is community, right? But if we just pull one of those out without all those different things, we really miss the power of these transformative techniques.

Yeah, and I would just add, it's not only we miss the power, but something inside of us. And this goes back to the two wolves. Okay. It's a great place to end. It's not just that we missed the opportunity. We continue the problem. Yeah. Okay. The problem isn't that we're stressed out. And if it were just that we're stressed out, mindfulness would be fine. The problem is that we don't see reality clearly. We don't see ourselves clearly within that reality. Right. So in order to do that, you will need to have a different view. And whether you call that view in Buddhism or you call it mythology, as I do, you will need mythology. You will also need the technology. You also need a sophisticated psychology, but you also need virtue and you will need community. The final point here, we're very in agreement that, you know, one trick ponies will not do in the modern world.

Yeah, and I love what you're saying about taking this one level deeper, which is, it's not just enough, you know, that the modern world is robbing us of meaning and purpose. It's that we are also effectively destroying ourselves and we're destroying the planet. And all these things are connected, you know, and I'm generally a very optimistic person. If I were to look towards the future, I tend to feel optimistic. I think as a species, we're getting better, we're improving overall, but boy, climate change looks like we're speeding off the edge of a cliff. It's like we're getting better as we drive off a cliff. And it worries me a lot when I really think about

things to be deeply worried about. That's the one that rises for me. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I say as much as in the book that the troubling things that we see are symptoms, ecological demise, ecological devastation, economic divide, political unrest. They're not discrete problems. They can be traced to a fundamental, inaccurate appraisal or view of reality and ourselves within it. And I trace that to the fact that the pendulum of our paradigm has swung too far to materialism. I end that point in Gradual Awakening, but I re-begin it in the new book that I'm writing right now, because I think this is where I really want to reintroduce some of the more mystical traditions. Definitely mythology and astrology have something to tell us about the current situation where we find ourselves.

Like the pandemic is not an anomaly. The pandemic was predicted. People knew years in advance. And I'm not talking conspiracy theorists. I'm talking about the astrologers knew it was coming to a T. But because most of modern people, they don't look up at the stars anymore. They're just looking at their iPhone and they're looking at how cute their waistline is and how many fans they're building. This is symptomatic.

My waistline is just wonderful. Yeah. So we're particularly disturbed and sick. And we have every right to be anxious and afraid because history shows, if we're good students of history, we are capable of going into very dark and prolonged periods of darkness culturally. And we call them dark ages. So we could tip ourselves into one easily. And we should be very afraid, but we shouldn't get paralyzed about it. I guess the point in all your conversations and all the good work that you

do, Eric, is to bring voices and channels and messages to help people align themselves towards a greater good. And based on today's conversation, part of that also includes bringing into the fold or bringing into the fray the less desirable wolf that's filled with fear and that's filled with rage and that's filled with uncertainty because he or she or it has a role to play in the overall schema. So let's not banish them to the netherworlds. Let's bring them closer to our consciousness. Yeah, I had somebody say the other day to me, you should listen to the bad wolf, but just don't feed him. And I thought, I was like, okay, that kind of makes sense. Like, I'm going to listen, I'm going to give it attention.

That's who you're talking to. Some of those Tibetans, they have the practice called feeding the demons, you know. So, like, they, you know, I was at a very big gathering with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and he did something very historic because he's the 14th in a long legacy, so many centuries, right? So we're talking about an opening ritual of Tibetan Buddhism for the Bodhisattva vow into a tantric initiation of Yamantaka, the death destroyer, the foe destroyer tantric initiation that is preceded by a number of different rituals. And for the first time in history, one of the rituals is to banish the demons. You know, one of them is like to cast them out, get out of here. We're doing something holy here on this big space. The tree of enlightenment is just a few hundred yards away. And there are, I don't know, 50,000 people or 30,000 people ready to take the Bodhisattva vow under the Bodhi tree there. And His Holiness does this something very powerful for the first time

in his legacy of 14 generations, which is to say, it no longer makes sense to me that we speak of compassion but banish the evil spirits. So I welcome them here too. Wow. Maybe they could enjoy a little Dharma. So I'll end my podcast with feeding the beast in us, but doing it with compassion and cognizance and care and love. Yeah. Thank you so much, Eric. It was and cognizance and care and love. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, Eric. It was a real fun ride to be with you.

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