The One You Feed - Steve Hagen on What We Know But Don't Believe

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Steve Hagen was ordained a Zen priest in 1979 and in 1989 he received Dharma Transmission (formal endorsement to teach) from Jikai Dainin Katagiri Roshi. He is the author of several books on Buddhism, science, and philosophy. These include Buddhism Plain and Simple, his most popular book. In his most recent book, The Grand Delusion, he applies breakthrough Eastern insights to seemingly indelible problems in Western science and philosophy. In 1997, he founded Dharma Field Meditation and Learning Center in Minneapolis, where he continues to serve as senior teacher.In this episode, Eric and Steve Hagen discuss his book, The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don’t BelieveBut 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!Steve Hagen and I Discuss What We Know but Don’t Believe…His book, The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don’t BelieveDefining grand delusion: our belief in non-emptiness or substantialityThe dichotomy of understanding that if there is something, there must not be nothingHow there are two truths that coexistUnderstanding that it’s in the mind where reality occursRealizing that we can’t actually hold anything is the beginning of awakeningWhy understanding this concept is important in our day to day lifePeace and present mind comes by seeing that the questions are misunderstanding the experience of lifeHow we can’t resolve or answer the question of what’s the meaning of lifeWe don’t need to answer the questions to bring freedomTrying to find a logical answer to meaning of life isn’t possibleHow we are acting and seeing things in terms of wholenessPerception is what we process through our sensesConception is the meaning we give to what we perceiveOur suffering is tied up in the way we conceptualize the worldThe freedom of knowing that what we are grasping for isn’t possibleConceptualizing things isn’t bad, but it can also bring sufferingSudden and gradual awakeningHis work and practice with koansGreat doubt comes with the question of why is there something rather than nothingSteve Hagen Links:Steve’s WebsiteJohann’s WebsiteWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Steve Hagen you might also enjoy these other episodes:Steve Hagen on Perception and Conception (2018)Original Buddhist Psychology with Beth JacobsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Do you ever feel like life is just one problem after another? You finally feel like maybe there's a break and then BAM! Another problem. This is how it is for many of us, but there is a better way to respond. A way of responding that brings greater ease into your life and returns some of the energy that the problems drain from you. We are hosting a free live masterclass on Sunday, February 27th called, Learn the Spiritual Habit to Unlock Energy and Ease in Your Life,

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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 really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to decisions decisions the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid.

Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Steve Hagen. Steve was ordained a Zen priest

in 1979, and in 1989 he received Dharma Transmission, or the formal endorsement to teach, from Jikai Denon Katagiri Roshi. He's the author of several books on Buddhism, science, and philosophy. These include his most popular book, Buddhism Plain and Simple. In his most recent book, The Grand Delusion, he applies breakthrough Eastern insights to seemingly indelible problems in Western science and philosophy. In 1997, he founded Dharma Field Meditation and Learning Center in Minneapolis, where he continues to serve as senior teacher. Hi, Steve. Welcome to the show. Hello, Eric. Yeah, it's good to be here.

It's nice to have you back on again. Today we're going to be talking about your book called The Grand Delusion, What We Know But Don't Believe. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they said, 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 grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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. Yeah, it is an interesting story, and it does make you think a bit. But I would say many things come to mind, but one really kind of stuck out for me this time. In terms of what you feed and which one you feed, I would say, you know, you should feed them both. But it depends on what you feed them. And you mentioned kindness, that the good wolf shows kindness.

We can show kindness to the bad wolf if we can identify the bad wolf, but sometimes it's difficult to know which is which. But I would say we can feed them both kindness and caring and love and whichever one might be getting out of hand there a bit. If they know that someone cares and is giving them some kindness and feeding them some good nourishing food, I think that might be the best way to go. I love that. I don't recall anybody saying, you know, it's more about what you feed them. That's an interesting perspective.

And although we've had, you know, plenty of people that we've talked about, you know, showing kindness towards your bad wolf, which I think is important, but really thinking specifically about what the content of the food is, is a really interesting idea. All right, let's go into your latest book called The Grand Delusion, What We Know But Don't Believe. Could I stop you there just a second? Yeah. The actual title that I wrote, the subtitle, was What We Know But Can't Believe. But that seemed a little harsh for the reader just coming, approaching the book right off.

I'm hoping that when the reader gets through the book, they might have that understanding to some degree. But we don't believe it, what we know, because we can't. And I explain all of that in the book. So really, the title would be What We Know But Can't Believe, which probably seems like an odd thing when you first approach it. But it was pretty strange, I think, for the publisher probably would have had a hard time with that word, so we changed it. Yeah. Well, I think we can talk about why we can't believe the truth. Having read the book, I understand what you're saying. We may have to go step by step to get there.

But let's start with the title, The Grand Delusion. What is The grand delusion? Well, the grand delusion basically is that we devoutly believe in non-emptiness, as Nagarjuna would say. We believe in substantiality. We believe that things are whole and complete entities unto themselves, separate and apart from everything else. And of course, I myself, for each of us, I myself am one of these things. And that puts us in a pretty difficult situation much of the time, where now we have to look out for ourselves and try to get what we can, and greed and anger, these things begin to appear in the mind. And that's a pretty common experience for us human beings.

It's a delusion. The delusion is in thinking that there's actually something to this, that there's some actual substantiality here. And what I try to show in the book is that things aren't quite as substantial as they appear to be. But I also stress the point, and some people have missed this, even though I repeatedly say it in the book, that I'm not advocating nothingness. This clearly isn't nothing, but it has a lack of substantiality about it. But when we open up to this and realize this now, other things that are very puzzling for us, such as what is mind, what is consciousness, this all begins to clear up. We begin to see it in a radically different way. And the hard problem that was identified by David Chalmers, yeah, and back in the early 90s, is how do we get subjective experience from just electrochemical processes in the brain and this sort of thing.

And that's the hard problem. That's the one that hasn't been resolved. And people, they can deal with the easy problems, so to speak, which aren't so easy themselves. But that's because these problems can be dealt with. The hard problem is something that we're imagining. And we're imagining it along with the idea that we have substantiality in the first place, or that, say, mind comes from matter. That's a belief. There's no evidence for that whatsoever. There's a lot of coincidental kind of things, but there's no actual proof of such a thing. And I try to supply in the book all sorts of things that might help us to doubt that a bit. Yeah, let's start there. So the grand illusion being substantiality. And you talk early on about a question that Bertrand Russell famously posed that has been out there a lot, which is,

why is there something rather than nothing? It is perhaps the most basic existential question you could have. Why is there anything here at all versus nothing, right? And so you talk about your hard questions, right? This is about as hard a question as you get. What's your answer to that? How do you respond to that question? Well, again, it's based on the assumption that we actually have something. And that's kind of where I start with the book. In chapter two, we get to that point, and I spend the rest of the book then just showing why this might be the case. I realize right off, of course, that's an absurd thing to say, that we don't have something. But what I mean is we don't have substantiality. And that's really what I'm saying. Of course, right away, it seems

like I'm, and people will take it this way, that I'm saying that, well, if we don't have something, then we must have nothing. But that's kind of a false dichotomy there. Clearly, this isn't nothingness. It's just plain obvious. There's sight and sound and feeling and color and taste and flavor and thought and feeling. So this isn't nothing. But to think that there's an actual distinct separateness and ego or self, but belonging to things, including ourselves, this is actually an illusion. And to believe it, that's probably the grand illusion. It's these things in terms of substance. And delusion, the grand delusion is to believe that and to carry on as if this were the case. And I try to give some indication as to how this entangles us in

all sorts of suffering. In fact, virtually all existential suffering can be done away with in a flash if we could see through the illusion of substantiality. we could see through the illusion of substantiality. Yeah, and I want to pivot to an idea that is late in the book for a second, because I think it helps listeners to hear what we're saying and maybe settle down a little bit and lean in a little bit more. And it's really the idea of two truths. Yeah. So share a little bit about what we mean by the two truths. Yeah. So share a little bit about what we mean by the two truths. As soon as we

start talking about like, well, the self is not here in the way we think it is. And it all of a sudden people start going, but hang on. No, I mean, I still got a mortgage to pay. I still got it. And you're like, yes, of course you do. Right. So I think recognizing that there's two truths that are co-existent at the exact same time helps us to go, oh, okay, we're not denying one of them. Right. This is very important. It's a subtle thing. It's not easy to see. And I spent years approaching it before suddenly I realized it. Well, I was mainly studying Nagarjuna, and I suddenly was able to see what he was getting at, because using my rational mind, which is very logical,

and I happen to be kind of a logic sort of guy, but so I delve into something here that doesn't require the normal logic that we follow, Aristotelian logic or Boolean logic or any kind of other kind of logic you might want to find. And in doing that, then it's very difficult to see what is taking place here. And then we fall into this grand illusion. Yeah, the thing is, we're not talking about, like, well, right here in front of me, I have a cup. Hold it, there it is. We might speak of it in Zen.

We might talk about that the cup is empty. Well, it's got water in it. We can say, well, cup is empty. Well, it's got water in it. We can say, well, yeah, yeah, of course it's got water in it. But the cup itself, there's no particular thing there about it at all. And that just seems like a very strange thing to say. And yet there's all sorts of ways we can go in and take a close look at what we're attributing substance to. And that to say there's a particular cup. attributing substance to. And that to say there's a particular cup, it's made of atoms, which are made of quarks and electrons and things like this, and you keep moving in. And eventually,

we don't seem to have any particle, any substance there at all. And yet here's the cup. And so there's like two truths right there. Yes, we have a cup in a conventional way. I put it down here before we started so I could get some water if I needed. So that's one truth, conventional truth, relative truth. But then if we really get down to it exactly, then what exactly is the cup? And as we go in and look for it, physically, we go in and look for it, it seems to turn into no particular thing at all. And there's other ways we can look at it as well. It can have all kinds of uses that might take us beyond what we might commonly think that a cup has. But even when we get down for a close look here, we actually don't seem to have anything at all in particular that it is that we're calling

a cup. Same thing is certainly true of more complex things, such as, you know, like for each of us, myself, what exactly are you referring to there? And it isn't like some people understand Buddha's teaching as that the Buddha pointed out that there's no self, which is an extreme. There's nowhere where the Buddha actually said that, at least, well, of course, we don't know exactly what he said. But from the earliest recordings, we don't really find that. What he's pointing out,

what Nagarjuna clarified about 500 years after the time of the Buddha, is that a self can't be found. And what would a self have to be? Well, it would have to be something that endures, you know, that remains itself from moment to moment. If it became something else, well then, what sense is it of self? You know, so, and there's all kinds of ways,

just one of many ways we can begin to look at this, and the whole thing begins to kind of fall apart. But still, we are in this world of this and that, you and me, cups and water and soil and sky and all of this. And yet, at the same time, as we go in and investigate these things, as I do in the book in various ways, they begin to lose their substantial nature. And I also then try to help the reader see that this has a great deal to do with mind and consciousness, that the reality is of a mental nature.

It's sound and color and feeling and thought, but these don't really have any particular substance behind them. So when you say that something doesn't have any substance behind it, it's sort of what you were just describing. There are multiple ways to arrive at that, right? One, as you said, is if we start zooming in closer and closer and closer and closer we eventually find nothing like you said i mean that's what quantum physics is sort of saying like there's nothing there you know even if you stay as simple as that you know energy equals

mass uh you know squared right you're like well okay it's so at the end of the day it's just what's energy yeah yeah yeah so yeah I think that's one way in. But I don't go so far as to say nothing. We never get to nothing. It's just that what you get to is something that you can't get hold of. Yes. That's what we have. That's the fabric of reality is of that nature.

It isn't nothingness, but you'll never get hold of it. And one of the core ideas in your work, as I was saying to you before the call, I've noticed in all your books and shows up again here, is the idea that the reason we'll never get a hold of it is the minute we start trying to get a hold of it, we start applying concepts to it, which a concept cannot define or describe reality. which a concept cannot define or describe reality. That's right, yeah. But we believe it does.

And until we begin to wake up to the fact that, no, we're never, and that's the two truths again. We have it in concept, that's a truth, up to a point, but if you pursue that far enough, you realize that you actually haven't gripped reality itself. Reality remains kind of a mystery for us, which I talk about right at the very beginning of the book. Why is this the case? Well, it's because we think we can get hold of it. And that's what I'm trying to show in the book. And this is why we can't believe it in the end, the nature of reality, because we can't get hold of it. And so it isn't that we don't believe it. We have all kinds of beliefs of

things that we think we've gotten hold of. But if you stay with anything at all for a while, you start to realize how well do you understand this? And you're granting realness or existence to this or that, or persistence. And if you look carefully enough, you realize that's never there, the persistence. And that kind of absolute realness, it just isn't there. But it isn't nothing. But it has this very liquid and fluid nature

which bespeaks of mind and consciousness. This is what they are. And this is the nature of reality. This is the fabric of reality, is mind and consciousness. So that's one of the things that rather than substance, and we keep looking for how do we get mind and consciousness from substance? How do we get the electrochemical processes in the brain to yield subjective experience? And in the book, though, I identify that as the impossible problem.

It's not just hard. It's simple. You're never going to show that. Yep. I'm going to read a line from the book that I really like, sort of talking about this mind thing. You said, you hear a bell, smell a rose, see a bird. Where does seeing, hearing, and smelling happen? In the bell or the rose of the bird? In the sense organ that picks it up? In the space in between?

In the neurons of your brain? Remove any bit of this and there's no experience. So where is it happening? And I think that's such a great description of, you know, when we talk about mind, what are we talking about? Because where does it end? Or begin, for that matter. Yeah, well, that's one way in which to it. it shows itself as not being something that you can grasp. Because if it had a beginning or an end or had boundaries or surfaces or something like this, you'd be able to get hold of it.

But as we investigate any of these things, we begin to realize that the smell of the rose could be very distinct. If this is what you're smelling now in this moment and you see well there's a rose there across the room or something and you know and so we're giving it location and this sort of thing but as you start to think about well where where is this experience of the smell taking place we might say well it's in my nose or yeah but but it's up that rose over there and uh you know and there's various ways we just keep asking questions and investigating what it is we're assuming. You'll start to realize, and this is true of virtually everything that we experience in terms of substance, this and that. If we continue to observe these things,

you begin to realize you cannot get hold of anything. This is the beginning of awakening. This is the beginning of actually seeing the true nature of what is taking place here. And with that, there's a great deal of freedom of mind and ease that otherwise might be quite elusive for us to find. So So Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running.

All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love.

So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know 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 tonight. 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. Oh, 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. maybe go the direction you just sort of went there a little bit, which is to bring this back to a personal sense. Because one way of hearing the last 20 minutes of you and I talking is, who cares? Like, so what? If I don't care about why there's something rather than nothing, you know, it seems like an interesting question to ponder. But for my day-to-day life, why does this stuff matter? Yeah. And in the sense of trying to bring you to some point where you can grasp this or that, that would make you feel better or fulfilled or, you know,

this is meaningful for me or whatever. That's fine. But see that none of that ever lasts. We constantly have to go get some more or defend ourselves better against whatever might be seemingly attacking us now. What we're doing with this is I'm not supplying any answers in the book. I'm not telling you what it is you need to think or believe. In fact, I'm asking you to constantly question whatever it is you do settle down with. But what you'll find in time when you really truly can let go of the various things that we otherwise are constantly reaching for and grasping, you'll find a kind of freedom and an ease of mind and a relaxation.

I don't know. We're at ease in the world rather than fighting with it. And this is, well, is that valuable to you or not? I don't know. But if you turn that into something, then it's kind of like, well, now you're grasping again. So we don't have to do that. But I would say to have a mind that is peaceful and present and isn't locked in all kinds of confusion and wondering, where did we come from? Where are we going? What happens to me after I die? All these big existential things, that can all be eradicated, not by finding answers to these

questions, but by seeing that the questions themselves are kind of derived from a misunderstanding of what the experience is in the first place, the experience of just this life. You wrote once the deep, hollow ache of the heart arises from a life in search of meaning. Yeah. So say a little bit more about that. So you're describing a very specific experience, the deep hollow ache of the heart, because I'm out there trying to go, what is the meaning of life? And once we get to that, the meaning of life, then we're starting to get to

these bigger questions, right? We're all of a sudden going, well, why? What's the point? Yeah. So talk about, can we resolve that? If so, how do we resolve that? Yeah, we can resolve it, but we can't resolve it by pursuing our normal way. We're actually trying to get to an answer. It's like that question, why is there something rather than nothing? Well, we can start to see that this isn't, in a sense, this isn't even a legitimate question. Because as I was pointing out, if we look carefully, we don't really seem to have something and yet this is not nothing. But what we do is when we're trying to get to answer that question about the meaning of life and this sort of thing, we're constantly looking for something we can put there. Every now and then we might come upon something where you think, aha, now I have it,

this is it. But now you have to defend it against other people who might have a different view of it or thought of it in a different way than you had, or else we can just isolate ourselves in some way and live in some kind of blissful ignorance. But still, we're holding to something which doesn't supply us with any kind of support. But if we wake up to the fact that you don't need that kind of support at all, right from the very get-go, you don't need that, there's a great freedom that comes with this, an unspeakable freedom. But we can feel it, we can know it, we can realize it.

That's why our normal pursuit of trying to answer the deep existential questions, looking for answers is not where to go, existential questions, looking for answers is not where to go. But starting to realize the kind of the emptiness, the lack of substantiality within the questions themselves. And seeing that rather than being, oh my God, no, everything's going to fall apart. That's not true. You'll realize that you've been free all along. Yeah, I often think about finding meaning. And I make this analogy, which I'm not sure whether you would think is a good one or not. But trying to figure out meaning through the mind doesn't work. It's like the example I give is imagine I walked outside my door and I live right by a road and I saw a dog that had been hit by a car and it was laying there suffering.

Right. suffering, right? If I try to argue why me taking care of that dog matters, I can't really make a good ultimate argument because eventually you get to, well, you're just one person and it's one dog and there's billions of dogs and suffering is endless and you're just a planet floating in the middle of nowhere and on and on and on. There is no resolution. But in that moment, you could not argue me out of believing that taking care of that dog was important. Because that emerges from someplace beyond a rational meaning. It's a response of the heart that just happens. I couldn't convince you why it's meaningful, but you could not convince me it was not meaningful, right? Because it would just appear to me. And that's how I've often thought about this idea of trying to find meaning by asking rational questions, is that that's not where you can find it. That's right. Yeah. The fact that stopping to help the dog, and you'll do it. And it isn't because, I don't know, well, it could be because you think, well, this is right. This would be what a good person does. And you can have all kinds of rational

thoughts like that. Your heart is also going out for the suffering of the dog and all of this. What is important here, and this is really the true form, basis of morality, really, which very few of us ever find, It's not in rules and regulations and Dalschultz and Dalschultz-Nass, and this is a definition of a good person or a bad person. It is in acting and seeing things in terms of wholeness, in terms of totality. And it's like with the two wolves at the beginning. And that's why I said, feed them both. We don't throw one out or something, but watch what you're feeding them. Kindness is something of the whole. The opposite of that is something of the part or the self or this

faction against that faction. So in helping someone who's suffering or a dog, an animal, it doesn't matter, a plant even, that's suffering in some way. This is action. And if your heart is there, your heart is with the whole and with taking things as a whole it isn't because it's right or wrong or because we can start to argue about these things right and try to justify it now there's nothing to justify you're acting out of wholeness and the kindness extends to everything yeah even the air around us you know and the earth you live in a radically different way and your heart and mind are at peace. And I wouldn't say that, well, this justifies then being kind to animals. There's no

argument for that. Also, sometimes you're in a situation where it's not really clear what to do, or for whatever reason, you might not act here where you did there. And if you ask yourself, might not act here where you did there and if then if you ask yourself even why why did i do that i wouldn't spend too much time with that it's it's just you know because you're not going to come up with an ad you're not going to get something you can grasp there um you're just going to make your head spin uh but it's just in your heart we can learn to keep our heart open to to everything to the whole that's the treat with kindness. That's why I said at the beginning, too, to treat the so-called bad wolf, well, you know, treat them both, because it's hard to distinguish. How do you know for sure you got the bad wolf

there? But if you treat everything with kindness, and the word kind, it comes from, you know, we're referring to our own kind. That's how you would treat those who are of your own kind. But if you can let that sense of what's of your own kind extend to everything, then you're there and there's no need to justify anything. And the understanding of why you feel peaceful and calm and more at ease in the world than you would have otherwise becomes readily apparent. One thing that you say very often is you make the distinction between perception and conception. Yeah. And that distinction is a big one, is a really important

one. Describe what each of those are and what is so important about being clear about what's going on there. Yeah. Well, perception is, it's more subtle than this, but the easiest way to talk about it at first, but it doesn't quite capture the whole thing here. But perception is basically what we take in through our senses. There's all kinds of problems with me saying it that way, because there's I and me and my senses. But just to kind of get us into the general ballpark, that's what we're talking about here. But the thing is, we'll take whatever sense object is appearing in the mind now, and we'll start to conceptualize about it. First of all, we'll turn it into a thing, into something that seems to have substance, and it is a particular thing, and that sort of thing. I use the example in the book where, say,

I don't know if it's a common experience, it has happened to me, where I'm off in some distant place or something, and then I hear some kind of a rumbling sound, and I wonder, was that thunder or was that a plane I heard in the distance or something like that? And the perceptual experience is that, well, there's that sensation. I don't even know if I want to call it sound. But immediately we try to conceptualize it. Well, was that a plane or was it thunder? And then we start to go with that.

And what cannot be doubted is the actual perceptual experience. But when we conceptualize it, now it was a plane. Well, that can be doubted and you might be mistaken, but we cannot be mistaken about the perceptual experience. And so there's a subtle difference there. Well, it might be subtle, but it's also huge in terms of how we might react to things. It's important to make that distinction. There's a great deal that comes from that. And all of our suffering, our human suffering is tied up in the way we conceptualize the world. And if we realize that this is just our take on the world, it doesn't necessarily have to be wrong or right or anything like that.

It's hard to justify that and you go in any direction. But we do need to conceptualize our experience in order to function in the world. So it isn't like conception is bad. And here's where belief comes in too, where all of a sudden my take on the world is correct and right and I believe it and I'd lose everything if this weren't true and you know all the kind of worries and threats that come about and it's a kind of insanity but it captures most of us unless we just wake up to the actual fluid nature of what is being experienced here there is the sensation of say a sound do we have to name what it is well maybe we do if depending on what situation if it's a, you're in some jungle somewhere, and it could be a big cat that made some sound.

It might be good to distinguish that. So I'm not saying conceptualizing is out of the question, but we have to realize that whatever we conceptualize isn't necessarily the way things are. If we don't look at this carefully, we'll be lost to that, and we freeze ourselves into a particular viewpoint or a belief system or something like this. And virtually, I won't say all human suffering comes with it, but that's a great deal of it right there. And there's no basis for any of it. Thank you. Hey, y'all.

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All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You said earlier that seeing things more clearly, or if we were to see things clearly, would relieve all the existential human suffering like that. But that doesn't relieve all suffering. It relieves the suffering of a type.

Is that sort of your feel or your belief on it? Or I guess it depends how you define suffering. Yeah. that sort of your feel or your belief on it? Or I guess it depends how you define suffering. Yeah. If there's some deep disturbance in the heart and the mind, this is coming from, you know, holding on to some delusional, you know, thought of some sort. To the extent that we can be freed from this and relieved of this, we'll be relieved of a great deal of suffering. And what's important about this is that with that, now our mind can settle down. And with a quiet and settled, tranquil mind, we can more easily see the nature of what is actually taking place here. This is sanity now, to the extent that we can truly see what's going on. We'll be

perfectly sane. But to the extent that we're caught up in what I believe about this, what I think about that, what must happen. Now we're kind of heading down the road of insanity. It's important to wake up to this. Well, wake up to the fact that whatever it is you're gripping isn't ultimately true. Here's the two truths again. It might be relatively true. It might be functional and useful in particular circumstance. But ultimately, there's a freedom beyond that you say somewhere that the difference between a Buddha and an ordinary person, the difference is not in perception, it's in conception. To a Buddha, to a person with right wisdom, there's no, and I think this word is key, there's no habitual overlaying of perceptual experience with concepts, with ideas, beliefs, and notions,

preformed habits of thought that are used to explain experience. And I think that the really important word there is habitual overlaying, because as we've said, putting things into concepts and forming things is a useful thing in certain cases. But in most of us, we don't even know we're doing it. It just happens like that. And so the difference is in being able to choose or maybe to move more freely between conception and perception. Yeah, well, perception is always there if we turn our attention to it, but we have to learn to recognize it and see just what that is. And it is always present. The conceptual take isn't. They come and go. And the conceptualizing mind can actually go quiet.

But the perceptual aspect, it is very quiet, but it doesn't go away. To the extent that we can start to wake up to what's going on there, we can calm ourselves when we're in a situation of great stress. This is a very healthy-minded way to go. But I want to say all of this without implying that our conceptualized versions of things are bad or wrong. I wouldn't say that. They can often be mostly, probably, very useful and functional. They can also be pernicious and bring a lot of suffering into the world, too. But it isn't a matter of trying to get rid of these things, or like getting rid of the bad wolf,

you know. No, just take care of these things. But the sanity with which we can take care of these things is coming from that mind which is open to the whole. And this would be more resembles the mind of perception. There's a debate in spirituality between a sudden awakening and a gradual awakening. Yeah. And as we think about this idea of what causes us to be not awake is this layering of conception, right? Continuing to layer on conceptions. Are there degrees in your realm of conceptualizing, yeah, there's here and there's there and there's you and me and all of this sort of thing. And this is relative reality. Everything's moving around a bit. But what we're talking about is waking up, getting a full-blown understanding or realization of the perceptual experience.

Since we're already there and we've been there all along, there's no way of approaching it or getting close to it or anything of this sort. Those kinds of terms, approaching, moving, getting closer, that all belongs to the conceptual. And you can't really apply that then to, well, can I get closer to the perceptual? No, not really, because you're already in it. You can't get any closer than that. That's why we talk about waking up. We don't talk about figuring it out. It's just a matter of seeing it. But if we use the analogy of, let's say, a diamond, right? The diamond's there.

I'm already awake, right? But it's covered in things. But it would be covered in this analogy. I think what it would be covered with would be our concepts, our ideas. Right. And as a result, we don't notice the diamond for what it is. Yeah. I wonder to the degree in which there is, instead of four inches of dirt, there's an inch of dirt, right?

We're scraping away. Yeah. But I do agree. Ultimately, Zen practice describes it often. I've had some experiences of it. There are moments where the whole veil sort of falls away. Yeah. To the extent that we keep playing with the conceptual, we kind of deprive ourselves of that.

And it isn't, again, like we have to get rid of the conceptual. There's literature that speaks that way. But I wouldn't. That's going too far. Yeah. But it's just at some point, you realize there's something very quiet that's going too far yeah but it's just at some point you realize there's something very quiet that's going on all the time that we're not paying attention to and to the extent that we can suddenly open up to that that's when these moments of insight might strike

not necessarily in every case but that's what we're opening up to it's available to all of us at any time and if you can get the mind to settle down, be quiet, get a little tranquility there, it could finally open up widely for us. If once we actually see this true whole nature of reality, then things won't be the same after that. We'll go back into the conceptual, but with a different understanding than we had before. Yep, for sure. So I wanted to talk with you a little bit about koans because koans are a way, it seems, of moving away from the conceptual. And I wanted to read something you wrote about koans and then maybe we can discuss them. But you said people think of koans as riddles or problems that need to be solved. But that's not the case at all. With every koan, the point is not to arrive

at an answer through our ordinary conceptualizing minds. Rather, the point is to see for ourselves that our concepts can never provide us with a satisfying answer. And I think that's such a great definition of how koans work. Yeah, they throw us back into that space where you really can't grasp it, which we find frustrating at first. You approach a koan and it just seems inscrutable, you know. You can't identify anything there or read anything into it. But that's because we'll approach it with our conceptualizing mind. But we actually have the mind that sees it all along.

And really what it sees is that there's not a problem here. But when we grasp, we'll see it as a problem, that there are problems here and things that need to be figured out. But we don't really get to the end of what the problem is until we can see that we're gripping something that doesn't hold up, doesn't make sense. It isn't really a part of the world. It's something we've imagined.

So in your work with koans, do you still, you know, as a senior teacher, still work on koans yourself as part of your practice? Yeah, well, my tradition is Soto Zen, which is different than, say, Rinzai, where they would use koans, and you'd assign koans to students to help bring them along, and you go from koan to koan, and this sort of thing. In the Soto tradition, we spend more time just looking at the different koans, and the teacher would work with them by just discussing the koan, looking at the koan, and rather than turning it over and saying, okay, you, what, figure this out? I don't know. I'm not Rinzai, so I don't know what goes on there. In Dogen Zenji,

who was a great teacher from the 13th century, but Soto Zen to Japan from China, his approach to the koan, his approach to everything, he doesn't see things in terms of that we're going along some kind of graduated course. We move from one step to another and to another. It's more a matter of we study this, we look at this, we steep in this. At some point, the shackles may drop away and we finally realize where we are and what's going on. And so it has more of a flavor like that. But we'll use the koans the way I use koans most of the time. On occasion, I have assigned a koan or two to somebody because there might be a particular thing there that would help them. If they could see it themselves, I don't want to tell them what to see.

They have to see it for themselves. But otherwise, most of the time when I'm teaching with koans, I'm just lecturing on the koan and pointing out there's all sorts of things that are going on here and different ways of looking at our experience that we might uh you know habitually uh you know fall into and um you know so that we use it in a different way of that sort i gave a description of kind of the soto uh approach to this and i wrote a an introduction to a book it was the iron flute it's a collection of um soto uh koans a Soto collection, which is unusual. And that came out with Tuttle back, I don't know, around the year 2000 or so. Oh, actually, at our center where I teach, on our website, you can find it.

If you go there, you can look at texts that are there. I forget the title of it now. But it's on koans, and so it'll give you kind of a Soto take on koans that's a bit different from the Rinzai, which is more commonly known the Rinzai style. The tradition I've been studying in is white plum, so it's a little of both, right? I'm not sure what am I getting exactly. You know, I'm getting some Soto and some Rinzai. Yeah, well, that was from Mizumi Roshi, I believe.

Yeah. And he was trained in both, yeah. Yeah, well, that was from Mizumi Roshi, I believe. Yeah. And he was trained in both, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Definitely koans were a big piece. Yeah. I want to talk about, there's a phrase in Zen that I've always loved. I don't know what order these are commonly said in. The way I always hear it is great faith, great doubt, great determination.

You write a little bit about great doubt, and you say great doubt is not like ordinary doubt yeah share a little bit more about you know when we're talking about great doubt what do we mean normally doubt is well it is it's it's it's a counter to belief and uh so we believe this yeah but if you believe this well now there's room for doubt doubt will be there it might be very minute and you don't notice it you know but it's kind of opposite end of the balance scale with belief. And the doubt could increase and actually take over. So there might still be a little thread of belief left in there. But this is when we're doubting of ordinary things or not just ideas and thoughts, but also, you know, people and even objects of various kinds that we might begin to doubt.

Again, I have this cup in front of me here. I can begin to doubt the realness of this cup in any number of ways. But great doubt does come with that question of why is there anything at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? Which I believe was originally voiced by Leibniz. But I first learned about it through reading Bertrand Russell, as I pointed out in the book there. But for someone who actually tastes this, say you're out on a starry night, it doesn't have to be anything quite like that, perhaps.

But you look up at the vastness of the sky and and the stars and all of this at some point it could overwhelm you like what is you know why why this at all how can anything be you know and uh when you get to the point where you you even doubt the hand in front of your face i mean truly doubt it you truly realize you see that there's no reality, no substance to it. That's great doubt. But then what you need to see, hopefully it won't take too long, you realize, yes, but there's a hand here.

And, you know, so with great doubt, it doesn't destroy everything. Momentarily, maybe. And then everything is kind of recharged, but in an erratically different way. That's what was kind of depicted in that phrase of, you know, before I studied Zen, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. And then I studied this stuff. Mountains are no longer mountains, rivers no longer. If you can move from that one quickly to the third one when you realize it,

but there's a hand here. Yeah. Even though you realize there's no hand, there's no particular thing that's the hand and yet here's a hand now there's a full awakening and we've broken through the great doubt and uh we also uh now can understand the nature of mind and consciousness and that what is being experienced here is just that. As Wang Po, a great Chinese Zen master, said, there's only the one mind besides which nothing exists. And from the way that's written, I can tell he saw this. He realized this himself.

And we can experience that great doubt and break through. This is what we'll realize. This is what we'll see. And there won't be any question about it. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up with that idea that, you know, we can see for ourselves. We can see for ourselves. Yeah. Well, thank you, Eric. Yeah. Thank you so much, Steve. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

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