The One You Feed - Shinzen Young: Meditation, Mindfulness and Enlightenment

Episode Date: November 2, 2016

This week we talk to Shinzen Young about the science of enlightenment Shinzen Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant. His systematic approach to categorizing, adapting and teaching meditation has resulted in collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Vermont in the burgeoning field of contemplative neuroscience. He is the author of The Science of Enlightenment, Natural Pain Relief  and numerous audio offerings.    Please Support The Show With a Donation  In This Interview, Shinzen Young and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable His new book, The Science of Enlightenment The five fundamental good wolves The skill set of mindful awareness How meditation helps you concentrate How the ability to concentrate is at the base of the pyramid of anything you want to do That mindful awareness is the ability to focus on anything you want, whenever you want for as long as you want Untangle and be free How to break down our inner space How to track your sense of self Breaking the self down into these three things: Mental images, mental talk and body emotions That when you have a strong emotion you almost always will have a change in body sensation How to parcel body sensation into emotional and non-emotional The experiment you can do when you move into a situation that is emotionally intense but that is not currently intense How to suffer less in life and be 10x happier The difference between pain and suffering The habit of equanimity That one of the goals of meditations is to achieve happiness regardless of conditions The periodic table of meditation techniques The unified mindfulness system A "name and claim" meditation     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How do we know that a condition exists in the world? We know it through our senses. 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 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 No 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 Shinzen Young, an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant.

Shinzen leads residential retreats throughout North America, and in 2006, he created the Home Practice Program. His new book is called The Science of Enlightenment, How Meditation Worked. And here's the interview with Shinzen Young. Hi, Shinzen. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. I'm excited to get you on the show. As I was mentioning to you before the call, I know one of your students pretty well, and I've always been intrigued by some of the things he said about your teaching. is kind of understanding our mind space, kind of what's happening in our mind. You know, I'm always sort of interested in the idea of thoughts and emotions and kind of what's the difference.

And I think you've got a really interesting take on that. So we'll get into that in a minute. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. He 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. I would say feed the wolf that feeds all the other good wolves. Leverage your feeding of the wolf. There is a wolf that of the wolf. There is a wolf that optimally nurtures all the other good wolves, all the fundamental dimensions of human happiness, reducing suffering, elevating fulfillment,

understanding oneself at all levels, including the spiritual or deepest level, positive behavior change, and learning how to derive fulfillment from serving others. I would say those are the five fundamental good wolves. And there's one wolf that nurtures, feeds all those other wolves. So my suggestion would be feed the wolf that feeds those wolves. And the wolf that I am referring to is what I call mindful awareness. It's a skill set. It involves elevating your concentration power, your sensory clarity, your equanimity through systematic exercise. So the cost of the wolf food is a little bit of investment in time and energy to continue the metaphor. And if you're willing to buy that wolf food, you'll feed the wolf that

will optimize your happiness in all the fundamental dimensions of human happiness. I love that. And you referred to as mindful awareness. You know, another term that people use is meditation. And one of the points that you make in the book is that one of the benefits of meditation is the ability to concentrate better. And how the ability to concentrate better, you say, is at the base of the pyramid of pretty much anything as a human you want to do. of the pyramid of pretty much anything as a human you want to do.

When you look around the world, you'll find that everything that has ever called itself a meditation system, in one way or another, will elevate your base level of concentration power. And we're going to think of concentration power as the ability to attend to what you deem relevant. So, it's not necessarily that you're limiting your attention. If you're driving the car, what's relevant is the sights, sounds, and physicality of driving the car. Memory plan fantasy may not be so relevant to that situation. So, we're going to think of concentration as the ability to focus on what you want to anytime you want for as long as you want. All forms of meditation worldwide will develop that skill for you, whether it's DM or counting your breath, what have you. In addition to that, though, there is a sensory clarity skill,

which you can think of as the ability to untangle the strands of experience and also to detect subtle experience. And then there's an equanimity skill, which is the ability to allow sensory experience to flow without interference. So when you bring those three skills together, you have what is classically called mindfulness meditation. Other forms of meditation may also involve those skills, the clarity and equanimity. And if they do, they are also mindfulness,

whether they would use that name or not. Yeah. And so we'll get deeper into the meditation and we'll specifically try and talk about those three components. And I really like the way you break that up, that from mindfulness, we're getting concentration, clarity, and equanimity, and how those three sort of feed each other. Back to talking about food again. So we'll get into that in a minute. The thing that fascinated me most about your book and from some of your work that I've glanced at over time is the way that you lay out sort of what's going on inside of us. So a lot of us hear things like, pay attention to your thoughts, or distance yourself from your thoughts, or feel the emotion. And while that is all great advice, my experience is that

what's going on inside of me is a fairly tangled and confusing thing. It can be difficult without guidance to kind of tweeze apart the things that are happening. And you've got an idea, I think you call it mind space. I think that might be a limited part of it, but you've got a way of sort of describing what our experience is like. Could you walk us through that? If you are able to keep track of those things, of those things, you won't freak out, meaning you won't suffer or won't suffer very much, and or you won't certainly. As you know, I call the book The Science of Enlightenment. And what it's basically about is bringing the spirit of science into the teaching of meditation. Now, the nuts and bolts of science around the world could be described with the phrase, divide and conquer. Now, I know that

sounds not very politically correct, but it actually, it's not imperialistic. It means something very powerful and very beautiful, which is when faced with a complex, inscrutable, and perhaps problematic phenomenon in nature, what the scientists will do, knee-jerk-wise, is to ask, what are the basic atoms out of which this system is composed? What are the fundamental dimensions? What are the primes? What are the basis vectors? These all mean exactly the same thing. The natural parts. If we can figure out what the natural parts are, then we can understand how they work together to create complex phenomena that seem inscrutable. And also, we may be able to get a handle on any problems associated with that. So, this is the tried and true method of science. It's worked in mathematics with things like the prime number theory and more broadly what they call canonical representations of formal systems. It's worked in chemistry with

the periodic table of elements. It's just worked over and over and over again. It works in linguistics. You can break things down into features that belong to independent dimensions. So, the great thing about the Buddha was that get a handle on how limited identity arises, get a handle on how you can become free from limited identity and experience an identity that's not limited, a broader identity, and also how you could use that same approach to experience physical, mental, or emotional pain without suffering. So, some people, as I say, don't like my phrase divide and conquer, so you can also, in a more gentle metaphor, call it untangle and be free. Now, in traditional Buddhism, they have some fairly complex ways of cutting up the pie of selfhood. For example, there's something called the five aggregates. But once again, in the spirit of bringing the spirit of science to the teaching of

enlightenment and liberation, I apply Occam's razor. I think that there's a relatively simple way to break down that sense of self. I actually call it inner space, and mind space is a proper subset of that. So, if you look carefully, you'll see that at any given instant, you either have a visual thought or you don't. At that very same instant, you either have mental talk or you don't. At that very same instant, you either have body emotion or you don't. So, that's two times two times two, or two to the third, which is the number eight. That gives you exactly eight possible internal states. So, I teach people to track their sense of self, which includes will, desire, emotion, mental clarity, mental confusion, any sense of self, you could be broken

down into exactly one of seven possibilities. You either have just a mental image, just mental talk, just body emotion, or you have image and talk, image and body, talk and body, or you have all three. That's seven possibilities. The eighth possibility is that that system goes offline. And that happens to everyone constantly, but they don't notice because they don't have the categories to observe with. When the system spontaneously goes offline, you have an experience of no self. There's no limited identity. Your identity becomes unlimited. And so let's walk through each of those in a little bit more detail.

I think that two of them are relatively straightforward. So, you know, there's something mentally going on in my brain, like I'm forming a picture of some sort, regardless of how hazy it might be. I've got inner dialogue going on, right? The voice in my head is talking in some fashion or other. And then the last one you describe is body emotions. And that's what I'd like to talk a little bit more and maybe ask a couple questions. So can you explain it in a little bit more detail what you mean by that? Yes. So as you know, I consult on neuroscience, and that's one of the things I talk a little bit

about in the book. It's well known to neuroscience that there is an emotional brain. There are certain regions within the brain that tend to activate when we have emotional experiences. And I designed a category that people could observe that would, with time, sensitize them to know when their emotional brain is activated. So if you have a strong emotion, take a look. Almost certainly there will be changes in your body sensation. So it could be a pleasant emotion or an unpleasant emotion. But when emotion is strong, almost inevitably, it's not just a matter of what's in your head or on your mental screen.

There's things that are going bang, bang, of what's in your head or on your mental screen. There's things that are going bang, bang, bang, bang in your body. So, those sensations are obviously emotional in nature. So, I ask for people to be aware if they have sensations that are obviously emotional in nature. Now, a lot of times, there's nothing like that. The emotional body system, the emotional brain is resting, and that's a completely legitimate state. on the unpleasant side, anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment, impatience, disgust, or on the pleasant side, interest, joy, love, gratitude, humor, smile. When something big happens emotionally, it's very easy to detect the somatic component of that. Now, let's say that you have a mild emotion. Let's say that you have a mild emotion. Well, your body may be activated, but the sensations may be too subtle to detect. But if you train yourself to be aware whenever the body emotionally activates, then with time, you'll be able to detect when the body is subtly emotionally activated.

You'll recall I talked about concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. And when I mentioned clarity, I said that there was an aspect of untangling experience. But I also mentioned that there was an aspect of detecting subtle experience. So, if you break your moment-by-moment subjective experience into image, talk, body emotion, well, obviously, you're developing the clarity to track those body sensation that seems to you at this moment to be obviously emotional. It took me 20 years to hone that definition to something like scientific precision. So, if a person is aware of that category, then with time, their ability to detect when the emotional brain is subliminally activated will increase. And subtle body emotion is a big part of what happens when we do something that we later regret. It's like, why did I do that? Emotional hijack, sometimes called limbic or amygdala hijack. The emotional

brain hijacked the rational response. Well, there's many aspects to that, but an important one is subtle body emotion, body sensations that go unnoticed. So, I created that category, and I have people observe the presence or absence of that category, not with the idea that they're going to be able to parse each body sensation into emotional or non-emotional, but rather with the idea that with time, their ability to detect subtle body emotion will dramatically increase. Thank you. And here's the rest of the interview with Shinzen Young. What we're talking about here is when we're having an experience, whether that be an emotion, like you said, of anger or of feeling good or any state,

we should be able to detect which of those three systems, either individually or collectively. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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

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

That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ... collectively is happening.

A question I would have about that is, is there any cause and effect between those? So, for example, do thoughts cause emotions? Do emotions cause thought? I guess I'm always kind of curious about that exact question. Like, is there one of those that drives the whole process? Are they really independent and affect each other equally? I can see why you and Darren would be friends. You ask great questions. You are a great interviewer. Thank you. So, you can think of a triangle having three vertices. Maybe the upper left is mental image, the upper right is mental talk, and then the lower one, it's an inverted triangle, the lower one would be body emotion.

And then you can imagine arrows going back and forth. Sometimes image will trigger talk. Sometimes talk will trigger image. Sometimes emotion will build in the body until you just have to think about it. But sometimes a mental sentence will cause a body reaction or a particular image. will cause a body reaction or a particular image. So the answer to your question is that each element potentially can trigger any of the other elements. So there's a dance that goes back and forth. The nitty-gritty of science is how much of what, when, and where interacting in what ways and changing at what rates. Anyone that's listening to this that has a background in science will appreciate that.

How much of what, when, and where, interacting in what ways and changing at what rates. When you start to monitor your subjective world, you can monitor all these qualities. And one of them is interaction. Does A trigger B, okay? How intense they are, that's the how much. Are they solidified or are they a wave?

That's rates of change. Now, some of your listeners may have a background in science. You'll recognize that what this represents is an abstract vector space. But anyway, I won't go into any more detail about that. But it is three abstract dimensions, the degree of activation of each of these systems. But what's really interesting is, it's not just that the inner system interacts with itself, it reacts to the outer world, to physical sight, physical sound, and physical touch. So, if that system activates and coagulates and is surrounded by unconsciousness, it creates a separation of inside and outside

due to that reactivity. But if that reactivity is experienced in a state of concentration, clarity, and equanimity, it doesn't create that fundamental barrier between inside and outside. So, it reacts to the outer world. It interacts with itself. Then it goes proactive to spin memory plan fantasy, disengages from the outer world. And then every once in a while, it goes inactive, creating a sense of no self. If you know how to spot that, no self, no problem. And so memory, plan, and fantasy, those are states that have some combination of the three, mental talk, mental image, and body emotion, that also make up those states. That is correct. And your listeners can do an experiment. I'm claiming that this is science-like.

You can do an experiment next time you move into a situation that you think might be emotionally intense in some way, but it is not currently intense. Okay, so you're fairly neutral, but you know predictably something's going to trigger me, perhaps in a negative, perhaps in a positive way. You can start to just pay attention to what's going on inside of you. If you have a mental image, you say to yourself, see. If you talk here if you have body emotion you say feel maybe if you have image and talk at the same time see here or you got yadda yadda and then bang bang bang in the body here feel if the system goes to rest you just say none so you can actually use just the verbs for you. See means an inner seeing, an inner hearing, and a metaphorically inner feeling. And you start to track, and maybe there's not much activity.

And then as you move closer and closer to that challenge, you'll notice more of the system activates. At some point. You got all three going and they're getting more intense and more intense. Your label is all, all, all. You see the scene, you hear the dialogue and your body's going bang, bang, bang, all, all, all. And then at some instant, you lose it. You freak out. Now, for me, freak out is a technical term. It means one of two things happen or both. Freak out means you really start to suffer and or you do something you later regret. So at the point of freak out, you will discover that your ability to parse your experience in terms of see, hear, feel on the inside will evaporate. It will evaporate.

You won't know what part is what. Flooded is, I think. The flooding is the term. That's right. But what's interesting is, clearly, those things are active because you watch them escalate, right? You were fairly placid, and then it got more, and it got more, and it got more. Pretty soon, it's all, all, all. And you could tell which space was which, right? Because they have spatial. And then suddenly, you can't tell anymore. It's at that moment that you've reached your limit of baseline sensory clarity. Now, the bad news is that happens pretty quickly for most human beings. Quicker than we'd like to think. Yes. And that gives us the wretched parade of human history from the interpersonal level to the international level,

the galactic scale of unnecessary suffering on this planet. That's the bad news. Here's the good news. It works the other way. If you are able to keep track of those things, If you are able to keep track of those things, you won't freak out, meaning you won't suffer or won't suffer very much and or you won't do things you later regret. So this gets back to our metaphor of the wolf. With consistent practice, you can develop those skills. You can elevate your base level of those skills. And therefore, that freak out point, you get stronger and stronger. It's like lifting weights, right? So when you first go to the gym, you can't lift very much. You lose it. There's a limit. But whereas you can only maybe double your strength, you can easily increase your concentration, clarity, and equanimity skills by a factor of 10, which means basically you can be 10 times happier. So as the result of investing a fairly small amount of time, as you would with working out with your body to develop physical attributes such as

strength, endurance, flexibility, you can develop consciousness attributes, concentration, clarity, and equanimity, so that when you face a challenge, you can use your concentration to hold your attention in inner space. You can use your sensory clarity to not be flooded even by the most intense arisings. And then you use your equanimity to allow those arisings to flow as part of the effortless perfection of nature. We're going to head into more of how we do some of that in just a minute. I just want to touch on a couple other things here. So we've sort of described how these things, how we can monitor them individually.

One of the things that you point out, and I thought there were a couple of things that I'd like to touch on. I thought there were a couple of things that I'd like to touch on. One is that, you know, we suffer to the extent that we are unable to tease those things apart and we get that point of overwhelm. And you say a salient feature of suffering is that it distorts behavior. So let's talk about the distinction between suffering and pain. Yes, that is a little bit tricky. If you're a lawyer, you equate those two, right? You want your client to be compensated for their pain and suffering. But many mindfulness teachers would distinguish between pain and suffering. They might not use those words. They might use some other words. I think the easiest way to approach this is for your listeners to think back on their own lives. Has there ever been a time in your life where you were in some sort of discomfort? Maybe it was physical,

maybe it was emotional, maybe it was mental, combination thereof. And for whatever reason, you just stopped fighting with it. You dropped into a state where you didn't push and pull on it. You may not have surrendered to a circumstance, but you surrendered to the sensory experience of that circumstance. And the discomfort level, if someone would have asked you, was the discomfort the same? Did it change? The answer would have to be, no, the discomfort didn't change. It was at the same level. Well, did something change? Yeah, something dramatically changed. Well, what? Well, my relationship to the discomfort changed. Well, can you describe what that change was? changed? Well, can you describe what that change was? Well, somewhere the depths of my being decided not to fight with those sensory arisings. And when I stopped fighting with them, it hurt, but the bother was no longer there. So, perhaps in your life, you had an experience

like that. If you did, then you experienced spontaneously dropping into equanimity. And you actually did experience the difference between pain and suffering. Now, I would say technically, suffering is what happens when we have an incomplete experience of pain, using here pain to be physical, emotional, and or mental. Now, complete experience is just another way of saying mindful experience. When you bring concentration, clarity, and equanimity to an uncomfortable experience, it doesn't stop hurting, but it does stop bothering. essentially that pain is one thing, fighting with the pain and going unconscious around it, and not being able to continuously focus on it, that's quite another thing. So another way to put it is that suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance, and that the resistance can be trained away, and the training away of the resistance is called equanimity. And once you realize this, it fundamentally changes your

relationship to all forms of discomfort, and it's a very empowering change in relationship. Yeah, I've called that, you know, notice, don't resist. It's really profound how it can work. I mean, my favorite example of it is just like when I go out in the cold, you know, all of a sudden I'm think it takes training to be able to stay in that space, but I think it's easy to at least get at least a basic taste of it. One of the reasons that people sit and meditate for relatively long periods of time is it's a numbers game. If you go to a retreat or you sit on a regular basis, every now and again, you'll fall into equanimity spontaneously. But because there's nothing diverting you, you'll notice it. And when you notice it, your deep mind notices it. And that begins an operant conditioning, a retraining of the deep mind into the habit of equanimity. we've sort of described the different things that are happening inside us we've talked about

you know what causes us to suffer. Let's now talk about that training. You say that, you know, one of the goals of meditation is to achieve happiness that's independent of conditions. And along those lines, you talk about, you touched on it just a second ago, which is this idea of having a complete experience of things. How do we know that a condition exists in the world? We know it through our senses. So I think it's useful to distinguish objective situations from sensory experience. The objective situations and sensory experience have an important relationship. The only way we can know about an objective situation is through the sensory experience. Now, there might be objective situations

that I will never accept because you shouldn't accept them. There are things that we need to change personally or in the world. But I think it is very useful to have the ability to experience fully the sensory event of being aware of any situation. And it turns out that if you can have a complete experience... all the way to the floor? We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God 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. Of the sensory event, that is the means through which you know about a situation, then if that happens to be a negative situation, it will reduce your suffering. But it will reduce your suffering in a way that frees up energy to take an active role to change the situation. So this is very deep, very, very deep, and an area of huge confusion on the part of human beings.

There's a fear that if I totally open to the way a situation makes me feel, quote, which really means the impact on my mind and emotional body. If I don't fight with that, then that means I'm going to be passive and I won't fight to change the situation. However, that is not only untrue, it is profoundly untrue. It goes back to what we were trying to clarify before, the difference between pain and suffering. If you have an uncomfortable situation and you have a complete experience of the pain it causes, that pain is still pain. It's true it doesn't cause you suffering, which is good, but it's also true that it still motivates and directs you to take action in the world. take action in the world. So, once you know that no matter what comes up in the objective world, if it's uncomfortable, you can have an experience of it without suffering that doesn't also lead to indifference, then your happiness is no longer dependent on avoiding uncomfortable conditions or uncomfortable

sensory events. However, there's a flip side. This life is not just about uncomfortable situations and events. It's also about nice situations and events. Well, it turns out that the same skill set that allows you to experience big pain with very little suffering will also allow you to experience tiny pleasure with enormous fulfillment. So that even if you don't have sources of big pleasure in your life, you can still have enormous sensory satisfaction in your life. And the incredible thing is, it's the same skill set. Concentration, power, sensory clarity, and equanimity. It's the wolf that feeds all the other wolves. Let's talk a little bit about your system of mindfulness and meditation? Because I think that unlike certain people, you have multiple methods of mindfulness that people can practice. Is that an accurate way to say that? Well, yes. I like to give people something analogous to a periodic table of

meditation techniques. So, it's not so much that I have a lot of techniques, it's that I have a system for classifying all the meditation techniques in the world in a very systematic way that's basically similar to the periodic table of chemical elements. I lay it out into families and I do the same thing with meditation techniques that I do with sensory experience. What are the basic categories? What are the basic components, dimensions? Because that's science. You just apply it to everything. So I wouldn't exactly say I have a lot of techniques. I think I have a way to think about all the world's techniques that is unified. And that's why I call my system unified mindfulness. But it's not so much a system as a way to think about all of the world's meditation strategies. And then I encourage people to find the one or several approaches that works for them at a given time. Excellent. That makes sense. So, and I want to talk about one of those. So, this is very much a question for me. So, you talk about, in meditation, we've talked about

concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity working together. You've also talked about meditation having a calming side to it and a clarity side to it. And one of the things you talk about in the book is you say people who may not settle down into meditation very easily, they don't get the calming piece very well. Can use, you call it dry vipassana, or more of the clarity techniques as a way to deepen their meditation. And I think that's a pretty good description of my experience is that I don't think I settle into calmness incredibly easy. Things like following the breath are a challenge for me. I do better with noticing, you know, I can notice sound or, so what would be a, what would be a practice or

a type of meditation that I could be doing that would help to deepen that? And you say, and then as you do that, you remove the barriers that stand in the way of the ability to settle down a little bit. Probably the easiest would be a sort of broader version of what I described before. Before I described in a lot of detail how to deconstruct the inner world. Probably the simplest is to work with both the inner and outer world. And so, if you're pulled to anything visual, inner or outer, you say to yourself, see, and you briefly focus on that visual experience unless it immediately vanishes. If you're pulled to something auditory, it could be mental talk or a physical sound, you say to yourself, here, and you briefly focus

on that unless it immediately vanishes. Same for any body experience. And then if you're pulled to two or three of those modalities, you just choose one to name and claim. By name, I mean label it. And claim means if it doesn't instantly vanish, you momentarily focus on it and try to merge with it and become it. Now, the fourth possibility is that the tug of the senses might go away. fourth possibility is that the tug of the senses might go away. And if that happens, you could say none to indicate that you're experiencing a moment of freedom from inner and outer sensory experience. And every time you say none, you're actually for just a brief moment, experiencing what the poet T.S. Eliot called the still point of the turning world. And so doing that, you're sitting there and you notice, all right, thought, you know, or hearing.

I'm hearing something in my head. I'm hearing something external. I focus on it for a second. And then do I just sort of go back to the sort of the broad view, I would say, that sits there and says, well, what's the next thing that captures my attention? Yeah, I would say, don't go back to anything, just wait for the next thing. For the next thing, okay. And there's a very famous story in Zen about, the Zen master said, inside every one of you is an authentic human being that has no fixed position. If you have not seen this yet, look, look. So, there's no place to go back to.

You abide in each thing as each thing. That's that kanika samadhi, we call it, that momentary high concentration. So, your center is unfixated, and your boundaries are de-coagulated, and you simply become the effortless efflux and reflux of space itself. Eventually. Eventually, yes. Well, Shinzen, thanks so much for taking the time. I could talk about your book for hours, but I really enjoyed reading it. I'm looking forward to diving into more of your things as I go out to the website.

You're right, you've got lots of material out there, lots of classification. And there's a real intellectual rigor to it that I think will really appeal to certain people. And so we'll have links to where people can buy your book. We will have links to your website and different things on the show notes. But thanks so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed getting to have this. Sure. Thanks so much. for taking the time. I really enjoyed getting to have this. Sure.

Thanks so much. Bye. Take care. Bye. You can learn more about Shinzen Young and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash young.