The One You Feed - Michael Taft on Deconstructing Yourself

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Michael Taft is a meditation teacher and best-selling author of many books such as The Mindful Geek and Nondualism. He is also the host of the podcast, Deconstructing Yourself.In this episode, Eric and Michael discuss spiritual practices and learning to deconstruct and reconstruct ourselves.But 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, Eric and Michael Taft Discuss Deconstructing Yourself and …His podcast and blog titled “Deconstructing Yourself”Learning to “untangle” the concepts and emotions that can overwhelm usThe importance of “reconstructing” ourselves after the “deconstructing”Taking our meditation practice from the cushion into everyday lifeFinding what is sacred to you and bringing more of it into your lifeDefining and distinguishing between psychology and spirituality Thoughts and feelings and seeing their constructivenessVipassana practices and his work with Shinzen YoungDifferences between early and later Buddhist practices and traditionsHow real spirituality contends with the intense human conditionMichael Taft Links:Michael’s WebsiteDeconstructing Yourself PodcastTwitterTalkspace is the online therapy company that lets you connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. It’s therapy on demand. Visit www.talkspace.com or download the app and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get $100 off your first month.Calm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Michael Taft, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Michael Taft Interview (2015)Paths of Spiritual Awakening with Henry ShukmanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So we don't separate and say there's these good feelings and good emotions and bad things and bad emotions. Our job is to just wash out the dirt and only focus on the good stuff. It actually includes every part of life, even the most difficult stuff. 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 Know Really podcast

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Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael Taft, a meditation teacher, bestselling author of books such as The Mindful Geek and Non-Dualism, as well as the host of the great podcast, Deconstructing Yourself. Hi, Michael. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. I'm really glad to be here. I am happy to have you on. We're not talking about a particular book or anything. We talked about your book, The Mindful Geek, years ago.

I'm just a big fan of your Deconstructing Yourself podcast, your guided meditations, just a lot of different things you do. So I'm really excited to dive into all that. But before we do, we'll start like we always do with the 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 other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. And she looks up at her grandfather and she says, 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 and your life and in the work that you do. This is the second time I'm answering this question. I can't remember what I said the first time. And I feel like what instantly comes up is I want to make the joke about it's all wolves all the way down, which I'm sure you've heard at this point. I think I've seen a cartoon to that effect, but yeah. What's really actually arising here is this joke I heard based on that parable, which is, and inside each wolf are two wolves, and inside each of those wolves are two more wolves. It's just wolves all the way down. And as a big wolf lover, I really like that joke. So that's my flip it response. But in the spirit that you're actually asking the question

and in the spirit of the wolves all the way down, I'll just say, of course, what we point our mind at is what we experience. Where we put our energy is what our life becomes. And whether, you know, it's split into a good wolf or a bad wolf, or maybe some kind of mixture of both or something much more complex than that, wherever we point our attention is what our life becomes. And so you really do have to be very careful about, you know, what seemed to be your default settings and examining your default settings and really deciding whether you want that to be your default setting. your default settings and really deciding whether you want that to be your default setting. And if you don't, figuring out how to, you know, change that to make the outcome of your life a little bit more along the lines that you'd like it to be. I mean, in a way that's kind of obvious, right? But that's what comes up. Right. You kind of have to contort it a little bit to take it to the non-obvious places, right? Because it is kind of like, that's why it's a parable. You hear it and you're like, oh, I know what that means.

Obvious. I wanted to start off by talking about the title of your podcast and blog, which is called Deconstructing Yourself. Why is that the title that you've chosen for your main body of work at this point? Yeah. I mean, it makes it sound so intentional. It really wasn't. I mean, back in 2011, so 10 years ago at this point, I just felt like writing a blog that I imagined hardly anyone would ever see at that point about like Shenzhen style mindfulness meditation. And I just was very intrigued by the way that we can use that sort of mindfulness meditation to deconstruct the ego as if it were a car engine, like taking it apart bit by bit by bit in that methodology. And the phrase deconstructing yourself just arose. You know, I just thought of that.

And I was reminded of the movie called Deconstructing Harry. And I thought, that's a fun name for a blog, Deconstructing Yourself. And so I just threw it on there in the most flippant manner. And now it's become, it's an LLC and it's a podcast and it's a blog and it's all this stuff. Well, I do like that name. And it does represent a core of what I'm talking about even now. Although now I think I would call it something more like deconstructing and reconstructing or maybe deconstructing yourself and the world or something. I don't know. But none of those are as catchy. Yes. Deconstructing yourself works. I've listened to you on a few different things over the years and recently, and you were actually just very recently on a podcast with Rick and Forrest Hansen. We just actually interviewed those guys last week ourselves. Fun. you said, if we want to engage with others, the world, et cetera, et cetera, we begin to notice the main thing in our way is a tangle of concepts. And then you say, and that tangle of concepts is

attached to another tangle of reactive emotion. And I feel like that is such a great way of describing what the minds of most of us when they're left to their own devices tend to do. A tangle of concepts that's tangled up with a tangle of emotional reactions. I just thought that was a great analogy. In a way, I don't think we can get out of that. Or to put it another way, you know, you always are going to have concepts and emotions arising. So the idea isn't somehow, oh, I want to erase all concepts and erase all emotions. I mean, maybe that can happen for one minute in meditation on the cushion with your eyes closed or something. But if you're out in the world doing anything, you're going to have concepts and emotions arising. And so the point

is not that that is somehow bad or wrong that those are there, but rather to be very aware of them, number one, and number two, be able to cope with them. And also to get back to kind of the wolves, to craft your, you know, sort of baseline reactivity into something that's more responsive and intentional and not just coming from blind concepts and blind emotions and a sort of like deeply unexamined sense of self, right? That's part of why we do the self-deconstruction is that I am from Michigan. And back when I lived there, especially, you know, this is like when I was a little kid, every single person was a car mechanic, right?

Or worked at Ford or worked at GM. Sorry, GM. And, you know, so everything is a car metaphor at the bottom of my mind. And so as you, you know, deconstruct the engine of ego, you're kind of taking out the calipers and looking at the size of the pistons and checking out the piston rings and check like each little part of it. And then very intentionally, you know, crafting the replacements that are more skillful, more helpful, more useful. It's not that the idea is, oh, I'm just going to not have an ego. You must have that to interact with other people. It's just number one, not being bought into it. But even that's not enough. Like that teaching, like, oh, don't be identified with your ego. Even that's not enough because the structure still runs.

You know, you're using it to interact. And so you can be all kinds of awake. But if you've got this sort of rote, undeveloped ego structure still running as your interaction module with other people, it's still going to have poor outcome. That's what I mean by the reconstruct. interaction module with other people, it's still going to have poor outcome. That's what I mean by the reconstruct. We want to like work really diligently at making a skillful ego and not inhabiting it, right? Not identifying with it. Now I know you're a psychologist, right? And this is obvious to a psychologist and yet it's not often taught in meditation world. Yeah. I'm actually not a psychologist. I'm not really anything. I'm a self-taught, as I've heard you say, sad, scared monkey.

And I want to get to that quote in a minute. But yeah, I love that idea of the tangle and being able to untangle it a little bit, because very often I find that's what overwhelms us is when thought and emotion and body sensation and urges and all of it lands on us, boom, all at once. And the process of being able to separate those things out, even in a rudimentary way can can bring a certain degree of freedom, for sure. Absolutely. And probably is more worth doing than trying to see them as not there. Right. As someone who's teaching people to meditate all the time, you know, that's what I'm doing all day

long is talking one-on-one with people who are trying to deepen their meditation practice. Often what they want is that kind of relief that comes from untangling that rather than seeing through it. Yeah. And I have been reading a book, just found it recently, but you have known about it longer because when I looked at your archives, you interviewed the author who has now passed. It's a book called Seeing That Frees by Rob Berbia. And I have not been in love with a book in a while, as much as I am in love with this book. And what I love about it is he approaches this idea of emptiness from

progressively the most simple ways into deeper and deeper reflection. So eventually it's seen through, but along the way, there's a lot of untangling and just pulling apart. And I really love that approach that he's taking there. And I know you liked the book and I thought you had a great conversation with him. And I just love that because sometimes I felt like people are want to go right to seeing through. And if they can't see through, they get stuck. But I think unraveling at different levels, like I think the idea of a knot of cutting through the Gordian knot,

right? You're supposed to untie the Gordian knot and that makes you king. And Alexander the Great took his sword, this is supposedly a true story, and just cut through it and said, now I'm king. And, you know, that would be beautiful, right? We just cut through the whole tangle. And if you can do that, that's interesting, you know, go ahead and do it. But it turns out that most people can't just cut through it in a single, you know, sweep of their sort of wisdom, right? It takes a very diligent process of untangling and then kind of putting it all on the floor in front of you and then untangling some more and then putting it all on the floor in front of you, and then untangling some more, and then putting it all on the floor in front of you. And I feel like the sort of

mindfulness that Shinzen Young teaches, where we're, you know, we actually divide up the ego into various sensory components, and then we untangle each of those components individually, and then we examine how they fit together. You know, that's really, really helpful. Like you're saying, Eric, even if you can't do it at a high level, even kind of doing it at a rudimentary level in kind of a not-so-scuff-away, you still get benefit. You still start to get insight. And it's delivering insight all the way along instead of waiting for this one big swoop of this sword of insight. Right. So I like that method, too.

I guess it's that debate that has raged in the spiritual world for a long time between sudden and gradual awakening. And if you look at most sudden awakenings, they happen suddenly after 15 or 20 years of meditation. Right. Yeah. meditation. Right. Yep. Yep. Yeah. The idea of sudden awakening. Sure.

You know, you talk to someone like Henry Shookman. He was just sitting on the beach as a 19 year old who never meditated and didn't believe in spirituality and had a sudden awakening. Boom. And then, you know, spent years trying to integrate that. But so it does happen sometimes, but it's extremely rare. And for the rest of us who don't have those kind of awakenings, the progressive style of slowly deconstructing actually does work and does deliver.

I want to change directions a little bit. And I don't quite know how to phrase the question of what I'm asking. So I'll probably wander around it for a second. But, you know, you've done a lot of work in a secular mindfulness way where you sort of take mindfulness and it's in a secular context. I heard a very interesting conversation you had with Ken McLeod recently where he was talking about Varyana as a way of life. Varyana. Varyana. Yes, thank you. You guys were kind of talking about how in that tradition, which is a Tibetan tradition, there's a whole way of life that's wrapped around

mindfulness practice or around all the practices. And you guys are kind of talking about that. And you used to have that for years when you were involved in a Hindu tantric group. And so I'm kind of curious where you sit today now as being part of a modern secular type of practice, how important it is to orient all parts of our lives towards spiritual practice and awakening. What might that look like for a modern person who's committed to further growth and development? It's simply seeing that the divide we always make between spiritual practice and life is not a real divide. And the more that we compartmentalize like that, the less effective the whole project is. You know, the most compartmentalized is if we think,

oh, my work on the cushion when I'm meditating is just utterly, utterly separate from everything else I do all day. And I just want to get good at meditating. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. That's doable. But I think for most of us, the idea is we're meditating because that's going to have some kind of positive impact on the rest of our lives. And if that's the case, then eventually you realize, oh, the meditation is like playing scales when I practice my musical instrument, but then we got to go play music. And the playing the music is when you're off the cushion, out of retreat, back in life, in, you know, arms up to the elbows in the muck of life, just arguing with people and having disappointments and dealing with

some kind of government website and, you know, all the stuff that we just don't like. And that's where the real spirituality happens. That's where it matters. That's what we're doing this for. And so, first of all, you know, just realizing that even separating life and spiritual practice, we just have to drop that idea. But then much more deeply, as we detangle the tangle of concepts and thoughts that we're seeing everything through, and that gets clearer and clearer, something actually quite a bit deeper starts to shine through, which is that every one of those moments of arguing with people and dealing with government websites and, you know, just all the stuff that we think of as the cruft and resistance and problems of life, itself

is actually sacred. Itself is actually, you know, has a shining brilliance of awakening and clarity and liberation shining through it at every moment. And not in some kind of theoretical pie-in-the-sky way, but rather as a stark and vivid reality to be experienced moment by moment. And so that's what I think that looks like. And in these traditions that Ken and I were talking about, such as Vajrayana or Hindu Tantra, these non-dual traditions, they've kind of formalized that in a sense where,

you know, there's actual practices you're doing every minute. I mean, there's practices for eating, you know, which might be something akin to just praying before you eat, something that we would recognize from Midwestern American culture. But then other weird stuff like praying when you go to the bathroom and, you know, praying when you're beginning a trip. And it's not praying always. Sometimes it's doing some kind of big complex ritual. It's much more built-in methods of attempting to contact that sacredness of every moment, even the very mundane moments. For us in the modern West, it's probably not going to look like that, because unless we create each one of those for ourselves, you know, we

don't have ready-made rituals for all those things. But on the other hand, that doesn't impede the direct seeing of that, digging into or bathing in or saturation with this sacredness that's available in every moment. Yeah, I think one of the questions I've become increasingly really focused on and really working on in my mind and in the programs that we offer is how do we take that insight and awakening that we're having while we meditate and how do we infuse it through more of the moments of our lives? And I agree with what you're saying about in certain cultures or traditions, it's sort of done for you. The danger is you just start going through the motions, but there is a plan and a well-thought

out structure to life that makes it more likely that's going to happen. I feel like that's missing to a large degree in so many people's practice in our current world. And so I'm kind of curious, long way around of asking, what ways do you work with people to bring this to more of the moments of life? Yeah, you know, I work in a very bespoke manner. So I start with each person looking at what is already in place for them. Everyone has had some kind of sense of the sacred or experience of the numinous, no matter how small, because that's a spot in the human brain, right? That's a thing everyone can experience. not the case that you have to believe in a religion or you have to be raised in a religious context for that sort of like awe and wonder and sense of the numinous to be aroused. So, for example, many people notice that happening if they go out in nature.

They have a kind of a nature mysticism opening or perhaps at the birth of a child or something. There's just sort of built-in moments that for each person radiate this sense of the sacred. And so we start there and, you know, point to that feeling and see what about their regular daily life brings the whiff of that up or the scent of that up or the remembrance of that up. And we start building from there. Now, of course, we're also doing hardcore meditation and a lot of emptiness practice and untangling, untangling, untangling. So, of course, all that is also happening. But then it's like, hey, you know, what is it that reminds you of the numinous? What is it that reminds you of the sacred?

And can you start to bring more of that into your physical environment, more of it into your daily activity? Even a little bit, even 5%, so that you start to resonate with that, right? And so let's say if you're very, very secular and the only thing that does that for you is a walk in the woods, well then of course we want more walks in the woods, but also can you have some objects from your walks in the woods in your house and can you bring up a visualization or a memory of those walks and start to re-experience that flavor when you're not outside. And so little by little, little by little, we work our way into feeling that more and more often. Now, this is like for each person, we've got to build

their own culture, right? It's really hard in a way. but in another way, since it's so personally crafted, it does tend to land. And so that's one of the ways we can work. And another completely different way is if there's any of these traditional methods coming from other cultures that resonate for them or traditional methods coming from our culture. So I've got some students who are, you know, hardcore scientists and stuff, but as kids, they had a little bit of Christian upbringing, and some of that really landed for them as kids. And so we bring some of that in, you know,

like maybe they have a relationship with Jesus or something, not in a religious way, but just directly, like that's an inspiring vision for them, no matter how much they kind of don't like all the stuff that goes around it in our everyday culture. But we can take these pieces of things that are available, kind of ready-made, and also work with some of those. 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. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? 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. You said once, I don't recall where it was, but you were talking about how we need to learn to integrate our psychological knowledge with all these spiritual practices and start making them work together better. I'm kind of curious, are they even two separate things? Is there even a difference in psychology versus spirituality? And if so, what is it? This is, I think is a really interesting question because a lot of times people will use whichever of those terms they're a little bit more comfortable with or interested in, but I see an awful lot of overlap. I'm just kind of curious how you think about that. Well, I mean, you're asking me a

definitional question. And so the easy answer is, well, it just depends on how you define it, but I'll go the harder route and say, you know, when Freud was initially writing about psychology, he never talked about the self, right? Not in German. He wasn't calling it the self. He was writing about Geist. And that means soul, because psyche in Greek is the word for soul. That's why it's called psychology. The idea was soul. And so if we take that original impulse, we could say, psychology. The idea was soul. And so if we take that original impulse, we could say, perhaps there is no difference. And really they're going at the same goal. But I will say that meaning of psychology, you know, I have to dig into German and etymology to dredge it up. And that tells us that that's not really how it's seen today. Usually, if I were to just off the

cuff, say what's different about them in the long run, the psychology is about untangling that knot of consciousness or the awake awareness within which the thoughts and feelings themselves are arising. And you don't get too much psychology that's concerned with that. Some transpersonal psych, there's, you know, a hint of that in IFS, the way internal family systems is talked about, you know, they have that sense of the kind of like witness consciousness or whatever. But that would be the thing that's sort of missing from Western psychology is that deeper connection with kind of outside of thought and feeling with just awareness itself, just the ground of being. That's kind of marginal part of psychology. Yeah, I see it, you know, certainly acceptance of commitment therapy has angles of doing that. I just often think that as we're saying, I think it is definitional. And they're a lot closer than a lot

of people make them out to be or set them up to be at least in my experience. And that may be because so much of the spiritual lens I look through is a Buddhist spiritual lens, which is a more psychological of the world religions, I guess, because it's more focused on the working of the mind. Yeah. And I agree that probably in the long run, they'll be seen to be the same project. In the same way, we talk about thought and emotion as if they're very separate things. And I'm kind of curious in your experience of doing a lot of untangling, are they truly separate things? Can you completely pull them apart or in some fundamental way, are they connected and tied to each other?

I'm just kind of curious what you think. Well, I want to back up a bit and talk about what we mean by pulling them apart. So when we're pulling them apart in some kind of Vipassana or, you know, deconstructive manner, we're not pulling them apart in the sense of saying they don't arise together. We're pulling them apart in the sense of let's just look at this one thing and then we can look at the other thing so again to go back to my very tired car engine metaphor you know you still need everything to be in the car engine at once for the thing to run but that doesn't mean we can't look at spark plugs as different from you know pistons and and so on they're different components and we can focus on those components so even if thought and different components and we can focus on those components. So even if thought

and emotion arise together, we can focus on listening to the verbal thinking or focus on seeing the visual thinking or focus on feeling the body sensations of emotion individually. So another metaphor that probably will be more obvious to people is you can listen to a song as a song, or you can start to listen to just the bass part or just the drum part. And yet they still all have to be there for it to be the song. You know, it's not that they're separate in some kind of functional way, but you can tune into the separate parts and that makes it easier to see their constructiveness. That's helpful. And so you have studied a lot of different traditions and you landed in Shinzen Young's school of learning from him. And what is it about

his method that has spoke to you so much? And I've heard you describe his method as a blend of Vipassana and Zen. And I'm kind of curious why you say that. So that's two different questions that are both kind of gigantic. So I'll do my best. And my apologies to Shinzen if I misrepresent anything. The reason I like working with it so much is that, A, I like Shinzen's mind because I was working at a place where we were producing Shinzen's recordings. I got to meet him personally before I knew about his teachings. Almost. I mean, actually, there's an interesting story there where I was the acquisitions editor and I just got this little box of cassette tapes one day and I broke it open. And this is about 1993 or something. And it was just like, I'd get a lot of these in a day, like really weird stuff from people all over who wanted their strange stuff, you know, like hilarious recordings. I remember one was a guy who told stories about the ghosts of past American presidents. And so I got all

these cassettes of his stories and, you know, I mean, just completely not what we would ever use. It's probably a little bit like logging onto insight timer and seeing who's going live these days. It's just, you're a little bit like, wow, there's a lot out there. There's a lot out there. Right. And so in the midst of a lot of those, I took out this one and the label said thanatos and eros or eros and thanatos. And I'm like, oh, love and death. This is at least, you know, this is interesting. So I put it in there and it was the first time I ever heard Shenzhen. And he's going into this very deep and really fascinating talk about mainly death. And I was instantly captivated. I'm like, we got to get this guy in here. And so I had heard him

at least a little bit. But then once I met him and I understood like that we got to get this guy in here. And so I had heard him at least a little bit. But then once I met him and I understood that he's so ecumenical, he knows the original Asian languages of these traditions. He's hyper fluent in Japanese, but also functional in Sanskrit and Chinese and so on. He understands world religion in an academic way that is actually really helpful when you're trying to understand what's going on with these traditions. There was a whole bunch about how he was coming at it that was very attractive to me. And so I just started working with him. And then I saw it's not just his mind, it's his methodology is really fascinating.

And, you know, we've been describing this deconstructive methodology. He didn't invent that, of course, but the way he teaches it is very, very unique, quite unusual. And, you know, he will say, these days he's calling it mindfulness, but then he would call it Vipassana. But, you know, his personal practice, what he was doing for the past, even at that point, 30 years or whatever, was Zen. And his teacher, Sasaki Roshi, was teaching him Zen. And so a huge amount of what he would talk about in a Dharma talk or how he would present the material, even though we are doing these very non-Zen techniques, the view that we're taking of liberation and how we're working and all that was coming directly from a Zen teacher out of the tradition of Zen. So it brought a really different

vibe to the Vipassana that I really appreciate and a real understanding of, you know, coming from the non-dual perspective, which is not there in Vipassana, which led me in a long, circuitous route from, you know, Hindu Tantra into Vipassana, and then all the way back into Vajrayana, which is like very related to Hindu Tantra. So it's the Buddhist version or Buddhist angle on that. And so what Shinzon's doing is really, really interesting. I, you know, can't recommend him highly enough. He's a wonderful teacher. of looking very closely at phenomenon in an attempt to sort of, as we've talked about, deconstruct them a little bit so that we get a deeper insight. But you also have very much the non-dual aspect of it. That's what I like about Rob Berbia's book too, is that it's very systematic,

but the main goal of seeing through the whole enchilada is never lost. It's always sort of front and center in a, there is deep emptiness here. That's what we're aiming at. This is the method. And I don't know that it's not in other insight traditions, but it doesn't seem to be as emphasized as much as I see it, like in your work or in what I was reading in the Rob Berbia book. your work or in what I was reading in the Rob Berbia book? Yeah, it's not emphasized very often, that's for sure. And the whole view is of, you know, let's say Vipassana comes from early Buddhism, like we would call it Theravada or Hinayana or whatever. And, you know, that is not a non-dual tradition. The philosophy behind it is not the same, actually. Buddhism went through very big changes. And so later,

Buddhism has some real differences to the early way of working. Now, of course, those changes happened like 1500 years ago. So a lot of them fed back into early Buddhist practice. But still, you know, the way you conceptualize what you're doing is actually pretty different. 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. Brian 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 I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts. What would you say is the difference between what you're saying? Sort of the early Buddhist Theravadan approach versus a non-dual approach. Yeah, almost anything I say here, someone's going to violently disagree with. Of course, of course. A little inside baseball here, but I'm curious. I'll just wade in anyway and say, in early Buddhist practice, the idea is that you are kind of reworking the mind very deeply to cultivate a state of awakening, cultivate a state of transcendental awakening. And so it's like, very often they're using metaphors like your mind is dirty. Imagine a dirty cloth and you have to wring it out and wash it again and wring it out again and wash it again.

That's kind of the metaphor. And the final goal is to transcend everything, to overcome all desire, to overcome all attachment to samsara and transcend. Whereas the later Buddhist non-dual traditions, the idea is everyone is already a completely awakened Buddha. We're not cultivating that. We're simply revealing it. That's why immediate awakening is possible, because it's always there, potentially, to be revealed at any moment. And furthermore, it's not just transcendental. It's not just, oh, we're going to give up all connection with the earth and, you know, become monks and sort of like give up on the project of life in an engaged manner, like most of us would think about. But rather, we're going to see that, like I was saying earlier, every moment is sacred, even moments of being totally involved in work and money and sexuality and relationships and difficult emotions

and all that, even that it's not just sacred in a transcendental way. It's sacred in an imminent way. It's sacred on its own terms. So we don't separate and say there's these good feelings and good emotions and bad things and bad emotions. Our job is to just wash out the dirt and only focus on the good stuff. It actually includes every part of life. Even the most difficult stuff is already, in a sense, deeply liberated. And so it's a very different viewpoint, actually, and leads to, I think, pretty different outcomes. Now, again, these are sort of like archetypal cartoon descriptions of this. Many, many traditions might not say this stuff, but this is sort of the easiest way to understand it.

Thank you for being willing to wade into it. I'm sure I'll regret it. I want to go back to a book that you co-wrote years ago, and I will say I've not read it, so I may be getting in trouble here, but I'm taking the premise of it. And I want to know if you still sort of agree with it. And the book was called Ego. Tell me more about the book, because what I read was it's contending we're not in the grip of a new dark age. First of all, I want to talk about my co-author, Peter Bauman, who, Because what I read was it's contending we're not in the member of Tangerine Dream. His music from a recent album called Machines of Desire is the music that plays at the beginning of Deconstructing Yourself. People always ask me about the music and I'm like, that's my friend Peter.

He's actually quite a wonderful musician and I love that music. Peter had most of the ideas for this book and we developed them together over several years. And by the way, the ideas have nothing to do with 9-11. Okay. So this is what's funny about the book is that we brought that in as a storytelling device. Okay. But it accidentally got sort of confused together with the main idea. And so it didn't work that well as a device. But the main idea is simply that human beings are evolving towards being more awakened. It's the basic premise, you know. And we saw a lot of data that seemed to point to that. And in a way, a similar book, there's two books that have similar ideas that came out, I believe, after we wrote this. I'm not sure, but do it like much better than

our book. And one of them is Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels, where he's talking about how if you took the average human being on an average day, their life is just improving. So that's part of it. And another one, again, where the person, the idea is a little different, but he's touching a lot of the same ideas, again, doing a much better job of it. The book Sapiens, if you get into that, he's kind of looking at some of the same stuff in a similar way. So I would just say that's where we were coming from, is this idea that, hey, it's not teleological. We're not saying that some magical being is guiding the progression of humans, but just saying, if you connect the dots, you know, it is moving in a direction. And again, that direction is not divinely guided,

but it's just happens to be what's unfolding right now. And we found that interesting. And is anything in the intervening years, since you wrote that caused you to think differently about that overarching conclusion, which is, I agree, Steven Pinker did it. This book, Sapiens, there's a great book called Factfulness that argues something similar. Humankind by Rutger Berman, again, similar. I'm kind of curious, though, do you still hold that view? Because it's not teleological, because it's not necessarily guided by some kind of influence, but just happens to be unfolding, you know, it can change directions. Things can go wherever they go. some of our basic ideas like the continuous improvement in intelligence over time as measured worldwide and stuff seem to be falling apart. And lifespan in the West, particularly in America, lifespan is going down.

And so, you know, oh, it's like, just like we were saying, these things are not somehow preordained. They can get better and worse. And I would say that in the intervening years, a lot of signs of things getting worse have become quite a bit clearer than they were, at least clearer to me. But I also think there's more data. It's not so obvious that we're just going to keep progressing into more and more ease of life for more and more people taken on average over time. It's like, we might be just falling off the cliff of existential non-existence, right? Here pretty quick. So I would say, yeah, my view is pretty different these days. And it's not totally negative, but it's not that kind of, hey, we're headed towards a golden future here.

but it's not that kind of, hey, we're headed towards a golden future here. Yeah, I tend to have a view that as a species, we are growing more awakened. We are growing to be more broadly kinder, more decent creatures with some definite ups and downs in there. And it seems that so many indicators look really positive. And then we are burning the planet alive. That seems to be a big problem. Like, it's kind of hard to keep the optimism up against that. That's where mine runs into its challenge. Yeah. And I think it would for any thinking person, honestly. It was apparent then, but I feel like now it's just much, much clearer and starker. And we have to hurry up and figure this out because there really isn't much time to turn this around. Yeah, it's 11 years later.

You know, I started a solar energy company in 2008 because I thought like, all right. It's time. It's time. And nope, it at least wasn't in Ohio. It sure wasn't time. Well, I mean, in some ways it was definitely time, but that doesn't mean it happened. People weren't ready. They weren't thinking about it.

Yeah. Yeah. This is what the spiritual, sorry, I'm interrupting you here, but this is what real spirituality is meant to contend with. Real spirituality is contending with the human condition and the human condition, or let's just say the sentient being condition, the animal condition is that, you know, we're all going to die. Everyone we love is going to die. Everyone's going to get old and sick if they're lucky, or they just die young. And, you know, that hasn't changed. That's always been that way. And so that's what spirituality, deep spirituality,

wants us to be able to contend with. And in a way, that hasn't changed. Rather, it's become just more obvious, more in our face that, hey, this is what we have to work with here. And so if I'm being optimistic, my hope is that as more and more people get more and more tools to untangle the knots and get clearer and clearer, they can work more effectively with the very intense conditions of the world right now. And hopefully, instead of being driven by terror and despair, they can bring a helpful and useful hand to bear on the situation. Yes, I would agree that that is the hope. You on a podcast referred to us once as sad, scared monkeys. Yes. And it just makes me laugh. And I completely get it. And I'm also curious to what extent, would you say that that's what we're trying to do with the spiritual life is be a little bit less sad and a little bit less scared as a monkey? I mean, in a way, yes.

But in another way, what I'm saying is certainly certainly, if you can be less sad and less scared, that's good. However, it's more about, can we help our fellow monkeys? We're in this together. Can we really connect and do what it takes to lift each other up? And that will probably help us be less sad and scared individually. But it's not so individual and not so kind of about me. You know, it's about us. And I would include not just monkeys, but all the other animals. You know, this is part of why the situation, even if we look at a book about the improvement in human life,

if we wrote the same book and amortized it across what's happened to all the other life on earth, it's actually very negative, right? So, um, yeah, this is one of the ways my thinking has shifted. Someone should write that book from the perspective of the animals. It would be a dark, dark book. Yeah. And yet, you know, you see that we've kind of traded one for the other. We've been able to increase the standard of living for average people a little bit around the world over all these years, but we've done it by basically burning the world down. Yeah. And so it's come at the cost of trillions of, you know, animal lives, or let's say at least millions of larger animal lives.

Well, I'm trying to think of a way to end this on a semi hopeful note, but Hey, you took us here. Give me some inspirational word of wisdom to take us out here, Michael. Give me something. Well, it comes back to the, the tangle, you know, it's like, what's the real problem with the world? The real problem with the world is that people are sad, scared, greedy, angry monkeys. And that's part of that tangle of thought and feeling. And that, you know, if we can untangle that and get from what we think we want, which is, you know, this kind of like, oh, I want to pile up my heap of gold and stand on top of it as the Lord or Lady of creation,

you know, and get to what we really actually want, which is connectedness, kindness, sharing, caring, feeling like we're part of something that's meaningful and all that. That is very available to us. There couldn't be anything more meaningful than turning this around and reshaping the earth as a paradise for us and all beings, right? And all it takes is a re-engineering of our way of seeing, or again, a detangling of our thoughts and feelings. So there is a method. We know how to do this. The information's out there. And so the more that all of us push in that direction, I think one body, I vow to free them. Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly. I vow to abandon them. That feels like what this is about to me. Me too.

Thank you so much for coming on. I always enjoy talking with you. Thanks for having me, Eric. I really appreciate it. It's a great time. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a

member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

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