The Path to Awakening: Meditation, Zen, and Becoming a Person of No Rank (#73)

0:00:02 (upbeat music)
0:00:08 – Ah, Henry, good to see you.
0:00:09 – Kevin, it’s great to be back.
0:00:11 Really nice to be in the room with you again.
0:00:13 – Yeah, it’s changed a bit.
0:00:16 Last time we were here, we had like two chairs floating
0:00:19 ’cause I was just kind of building up the studio,
0:00:21 but now it’s pretty much complete.
0:00:23 So lots happened since we last chatted.
0:00:25 You launched a new book.
0:00:27 The Way App has been building momentum,
0:00:28 which has been great.
0:00:30 So I’d love to talk about all those things.
0:00:33 And then also this morning, I was up early
0:00:34 ’cause of my jet lag,
0:00:37 I did some user submitted questions as well.
0:00:40 So I went on Instagram and we’ve got a few questions there.
0:00:42 So are you game for all of that?
0:00:43 – Let’s see where we go.
0:00:46 – Okay, so let’s dive in and whatever happens happens.
0:00:48 – Yeah, sounds great.
0:00:52 So the Way App, one of the things that, you know,
0:00:54 we know to be true in the app industry
0:00:57 when you look across the board on Meditations app.
0:00:59 And I would say Meditation in general
0:01:02 is that there is a lot of user churn.
0:01:04 Like people have these intentions.
0:01:06 They’re like, okay, Meditation sounds great.
0:01:08 You know, they want to sit down
0:01:11 and really figure out if this is for them.
0:01:14 Oftentimes, you know, and a lot of people listen to this,
0:01:16 I’m sure we’ll say, hey, I tried it,
0:01:17 it just didn’t work for me.
0:01:21 It’s funny, my good colleague of mine,
0:01:23 I was just in Hawaii at this conference
0:01:24 and he was there too.
0:01:26 And we sat down for Meditation
0:01:29 and he’d never experienced your app before.
0:01:31 And I played one of the Meditations
0:01:33 and he’s like, that was wonderful,
0:01:36 but my mind is just like, I don’t think this is for me.
0:01:38 Like he seems to be having a hard time with it.
0:01:43 So I’m curious, like when you were developing the courseware
0:01:45 and the curriculum for this app,
0:01:47 like how did you think about that?
0:01:50 Like, I mean, you have so much experience training people.
0:01:55 How do you think about ways in which you can engage them,
0:01:56 meet them where they are
0:01:58 and then keep them around for the long term?
0:02:00 So this really is a durable habit.
0:02:02 – Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a great,
0:02:05 it’s the perennial question, actually, of meditation.
0:02:08 ‘Cause all the traditions that have been doing it
0:02:11 for 2500 or 3000 years,
0:02:15 they all know what the great benefits of it are,
0:02:19 but they come from cumulative, steady,
0:02:24 regular habit of practicing a little bit every day.
0:02:26 You know, that’s really the key thing.
0:02:30 So our whole project, actually, with the way,
0:02:32 our meaning, the small team that we have,
0:02:34 led by- – Five of you, right?
0:02:38 – It’s sort of four plus, yeah, but really,
0:02:40 the core team is really just four.
0:02:45 Was to build something that could take a user
0:02:49 on the journey of being trained in meditation.
0:02:53 So in my mind, that meant we got to frame
0:02:54 what the project is.
0:02:57 So people know it’s actually not just about
0:03:01 a targeted stress reduction intervention when you need it.
0:03:04 Yeah, actually, if you learn how to meditate
0:03:08 and if you know what the greater possibilities of it are
0:03:12 and you’re instructed, gently sort of guided,
0:03:16 you know, trained really in how to do it,
0:03:20 then you will get the stress reduction benefits
0:03:24 and the calm, but that’s not the only thing you’ll get.
0:03:29 And it won’t be like, hey, my dog just died,
0:03:32 I need a meditation or I’m having a stressful time at work,
0:03:34 I need a meditation. – Right.
0:03:37 – It’ll be, actually, your whole system has changed.
0:03:40 Your whole brain operating system, as it were,
0:03:42 has changed, you got new software.
0:03:46 So the way you handle whatever comes up will be different.
0:03:49 In other words, we didn’t want to do,
0:03:52 I’m not gonna knock them,
0:03:55 there’s some fantastic spectacular meditation apps
0:03:57 already out there, a lot of them.
0:04:01 But they nearly all follow this model
0:04:04 of having a lot of choices that you do need it for this,
0:04:07 do you need it for that in short-term courses.
0:04:10 We wanted it to be this longer-term thing
0:04:15 that you’re really being drawn into a long path,
0:04:20 a practice that has clear and various benefits
0:04:24 that are gonna actually function
0:04:31 in a way that changes how you operate in the world
0:04:34 under whatever circumstances.
0:04:37 – You know, when I think about a couple hundred years ago,
0:04:38 there was way less distraction.
0:04:41 We didn’t have Netflix, we didn’t have all these devices
0:04:43 that are fragmenting our brains in all these weird ways.
0:04:47 You know, how do you think about approaching this
0:04:49 when someone says, you know,
0:04:51 I don’t have time for 10 minutes.
0:04:52 – Yes, yes.
0:04:54 – And then also, do they have to just believe
0:04:55 in this bigger end goal?
0:04:57 Is that like the main hook for it all?
0:04:58 – Right, right, right, okay, great.
0:05:01 So a couple of points I would say this.
0:05:05 First of all, the fact that this practice has been around
0:05:08 as long as it has suggests to me
0:05:11 that it’s been needed that long, you know.
0:05:15 So I’d say there’s sort of two kinds of distraction.
0:05:19 One is just grabbing at things
0:05:23 that will make us feel more comfortable, you know,
0:05:24 in the moment.
0:05:27 And yeah, of course, nowadays it’s often apps on the phone,
0:05:30 social media and news and, you know.
0:05:31 – Glass of wine.
0:05:34 – Glass of wine as well.
0:05:36 The fridge for some, you know.
0:05:40 And usually it’s ’cause there’s some undercurrent
0:05:44 that we may be aware of or not of some kind of distress
0:05:46 or unease that we wanna just not feel.
0:05:49 So distraction is a powerful tool.
0:05:51 It’s not all bad, by the way.
0:05:55 ‘Cause sometimes distraction really does help us feel better.
0:05:58 The problem is when it becomes the main thing, you know,
0:06:00 we’re hungry for the little dopamine hit.
0:06:01 – Yes.
0:06:04 – You know, we’re just sort of led by that.
0:06:05 But there’s also another level
0:06:09 of almost sort of deeper distraction in a certain sense,
0:06:13 which is where we’re so caught up,
0:06:15 not just in those immediate distractions,
0:06:20 but in the sort of hunger and sense of need and sense of stress
0:06:24 we might have around the larger projects in our life.
0:06:30 And the issue there is that we don’t give ourselves time
0:06:38 to recognize the bare fact of existing at all.
0:06:42 The very fact that we’re here being conscious
0:06:46 in this very moment is a miracle actually.
0:06:49 And it’s a gift, if we start thinking about it,
0:06:54 it’s just an incomparable gift to be experiencing
0:06:56 this existence.
0:06:58 And of course, often it has a lot of hard things in it
0:07:01 and has challenges, it has grievous losses,
0:07:03 it has lots of difficulties,
0:07:05 so that you can see the reasons
0:07:08 why we might not want to come back
0:07:10 to just experiencing being here.
0:07:15 But if we can, if we can navigate the challenges to that,
0:07:20 we can actually start to recognize
0:07:23 that in my very being,
0:07:26 I’m being given an infinite gift,
0:07:29 just because I’m aware right now.
0:07:33 I have human body, I have a human mind,
0:07:38 I have a human heart, and I’m able to experience them.
0:07:42 So here’s the bigger picture of meditation
0:07:47 is ways to come back to really receiving
0:07:50 the gift of being alive.
0:07:52 And it’s wisdom, the wisdom of meditation
0:07:56 is that it’s counterintuitive
0:08:01 and it’s against our typical conditioning.
0:08:05 In Buddhism, they say you have to go against the stream,
0:08:07 ’cause actually you are going against
0:08:12 a sort of tide of conventional ways of being.
0:08:15 But if you do and you can do it just enough
0:08:19 to get over the little resistance hump
0:08:21 and you can do it every day,
0:08:24 you’re starting to open up the possibility
0:08:29 of being at peace without outward circumstances,
0:08:31 being the way you want them.
0:08:35 That there’s an actual intrinsic piece we can find.
0:08:37 So, and there’s lots of dimensions to that
0:08:40 that we could go into, but fundamentally,
0:08:45 I think it’s about a shift from all my well-being
0:08:48 being contingent on outward things,
0:08:52 to giving myself the opportunity to find
0:08:55 a kind of underlying well-being.
0:08:57 And I may get it in only little hits,
0:09:00 I may get it in very small amounts,
0:09:02 but just to start recognizing
0:09:06 that there actually is something right here now
0:09:09 that is already okay.
0:09:13 And it can be called, I think, a fundamental well-being.
0:09:18 And to get even the smallest hints of that
0:09:25 is kind of radical, because so much of our orientation
0:09:27 has been about I gotta make the world
0:09:30 and the outward circumstances of my life
0:09:34 be the way I need them, if I’m gonna be okay.
0:09:38 And to start discovering that’s only,
0:09:41 we’re not saying that’s totally wrong about that.
0:09:43 I mean, maybe a few want to do that.
0:09:45 A serious sort of dedicated souls
0:09:47 want to be an adept on the mountaintop.
0:09:49 But for most of us, that’s not necessary.
0:09:52 All that’s necessary is to open up the chance
0:09:56 of getting a taste of a radically different kind of well-being
0:10:00 that’s not predicated on the way our lives are going.
0:10:02 That’s intrinsic.
0:10:05 And it’s such a beautiful thing to find that.
0:10:07 And it’s not that hard.
0:10:10 That’s the thing that I’m really committed to.
0:10:13 It’s why I’m so keen to sort of share this
0:10:14 with anybody interested.
0:10:16 That’s actually not that hard.
0:10:19 It does require one difficult thing,
0:10:21 which is establishing a habit.
0:10:24 So hence, again, yeah, you’re asking like,
0:10:26 you got sort of the big goals of meditation.
0:10:28 Do they help make the habit?
0:10:29 I’m sure they do.
0:10:31 If you’ve got the frame that meditation
0:10:34 is just gonna help me with a particular stress,
0:10:36 it may do that and that’s great.
0:10:38 And there’s nothing wrong with that.
0:10:40 But in a way, why should I keep going?
0:10:42 But if you’ve got the frame that meditation
0:10:45 on a regular basis can take me
0:10:47 to a new way of experiencing my life.
0:10:52 One where I’m less kind of beholden
0:10:55 to how things are going in order to be okay.
0:11:00 And one way, in fact, I find that I’m already okay.
0:11:02 At least I get taste of that.
0:11:04 That’s a bigger picture.
0:11:06 – Yeah, and it’s a hard one for people
0:11:09 to wrap their heads around that are so in their head
0:11:10 all day long.
0:11:14 Like even, I’ve had a decent practice now for a few years
0:11:16 and last night, Dari had a great suggestion
0:11:19 where she said, hey, let’s teach the kids
0:11:21 that phones aren’t okay at the dinner table
0:11:22 by being role models and putting them
0:11:25 in a box 10 feet away.
0:11:26 And I’m like, yeah, sounds great.
0:11:28 Like of course I’m in on that, right?
0:11:29 So I put in the box 10 feet away
0:11:32 and then I’m like, I finished dinner.
0:11:33 But one of the things that your app has taught me
0:11:36 is this recognition of feelings.
0:11:40 Like just to identify and see the discomfort
0:11:42 and just feel it and taste that discomfort
0:11:46 and just to see, oh, there’s that thing, right?
0:11:49 And I felt that anxiety, I gotta get back to this thing,
0:11:50 I gotta move, I gotta do something else.
0:11:53 And it’s like, but just to recognize it was,
0:11:56 it was, normally I would just get up
0:11:58 and go right into it, right?
0:12:01 And so like, I feel like recognition to me
0:12:05 feels like of a very early stage and step in this process.
0:12:06 Would you agree with that?
0:12:09 Just seeing what your own brain is doing?
0:12:10 – Yeah, absolutely right.
0:12:11 But it’s not only early stage
0:12:14 ’cause it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been meditating.
0:12:17 You’ll get times when, yeah, something comes up.
0:12:18 I want that, you know?
0:12:20 And the question is how much,
0:12:22 you even put the finger on it precisely.
0:12:26 It’s like, how much can I actually recognize
0:12:29 the experience that is going on
0:12:32 rather than immediately react to it?
0:12:35 So the typically, you know, eh, there’s this discomfort.
0:12:39 I don’t want discomfort, I’ll have another swig of wine
0:12:41 or I’ll go and get the phone
0:12:44 or I’ll just something that will stop this feeling.
0:12:46 But the meditation path is, again,
0:12:49 it’s counterintuitive, it’s no,
0:12:53 let me give a home to this feeling.
0:12:57 Let me actually recognize how I’m doing, what’s going on.
0:13:02 And in doing that, what I’m doing actually
0:13:07 is expanding even just tiny bit my capacity
0:13:10 for holding my own experience,
0:13:13 including the feelings that are difficult.
0:13:15 And what’s so beautiful about that
0:13:17 is that we’re developing,
0:13:19 we may not put it in this,
0:13:21 it might sound a bit grand,
0:13:23 but we’re sort of developing compassion.
0:13:26 And that includes self-compassion.
0:13:30 And that is a really, again, significant shift.
0:13:34 ‘Cause rather than being tugged around by our impulses.
0:13:37 – It’s like we either push it away or we shove it down.
0:13:38 – Yes. – Right?
0:13:41 And so you’re saying this is kind of like a warm hug for it.
0:13:42 – That’s correct.
0:13:45 – And it’s like, you don’t have to go anywhere.
0:13:49 I’m gonna recognize what this feeling is and embrace it.
0:13:50 – Exactly.
0:13:55 And then it’s as if what we feel we are shifts
0:13:58 from being wrapped up in that difficult feeling.
0:14:00 That’s just me wanting something.
0:14:02 That’s me, I’m there wanting something.
0:14:06 Instead, we start to identify with the part of us
0:14:11 that is able to hold the distress, however mild it is.
0:14:16 So then we become kind of a more expansive person.
0:14:22 And we can feel our heart really is kind of growing.
0:14:24 Or I think, I mean, that’s how it may feel.
0:14:27 I always think, actually it’s not.
0:14:31 We’re only uncovering capacity we already had.
0:14:33 It’s always what I think in meditation.
0:14:34 It can feel like we’re doing something
0:14:36 to make something develop.
0:14:38 That’s one framing of it.
0:14:40 But another framing of it is no,
0:14:43 we’re actually just expanding our recognition
0:14:46 of capacities we didn’t know we had,
0:14:48 but we’ve had all along.
0:14:51 And I think that’s really what it’s really about.
0:14:53 All the way from handing difficult emotions
0:14:56 to mind blowing openings.
0:14:58 – Well, it couldn’t have been any other way though, right?
0:14:59 ‘Cause if we didn’t have the capacity
0:15:01 to have that capacity, it never would.
0:15:02 (laughing)
0:15:03 Did you join him?
0:15:03 – Yes.
0:15:04 – It’s like it has to last too.
0:15:06 – Yeah, but it’s not like say,
0:15:09 we got the capacity to grow, to get fitter,
0:15:10 but we do need to go to the gym.
0:15:12 But this is slightly different.
0:15:16 It seems like we’re developing the equivalent
0:15:18 of better musculature and all the rest of it.
0:15:22 But actually, maybe we’re just parting
0:15:26 what obscures it that we actually already have.
0:15:28 – And correct me if I’m getting this quote wrong,
0:15:31 but there is a Zen saying where it’s like the lifting
0:15:32 of the veil or something like that.
0:15:35 Or the feeling, maybe it’s not Zen related,
0:15:39 but it’s this idea that you have a veil over your face
0:15:41 and it’s just like the clearing and lifting
0:15:44 so that there’s more clarity of what already was there
0:15:46 versus obtaining something new.
0:15:48 – Exactly, I think it is.
0:15:49 And there’s another phrase in Zen
0:15:53 which is like the clouds of delusion, it’s opening.
0:15:58 And so that’s a metaphor that’s quite easy to get.
0:16:02 Like, yeah, if it’s a cloudy sky, the sun is still there.
0:16:03 – Right.
0:16:06 I always love that when you take a plane
0:16:08 and it’s like super cloudy and muggy out
0:16:09 and then you pop through those clouds.
0:16:12 – That beautiful day out here, I always get the window seat.
0:16:13 I love the window seat.
0:16:16 But okay, I think this actually transitions great
0:16:18 into another question from our friend, Tim Ferriss.
0:16:20 I was texting with him this morning and I’m like,
0:16:22 “Hey, I’m interviewing Henry.
0:16:23 Like, is there anything you want to ask him?”
0:16:25 And he’s like, “Yes, I have some things I want to ask him.”
0:16:30 So Tim asks, “If someone has 20 minutes per day,
0:16:33 is it better to do one session
0:16:36 or two 10-minute sessions or another configuration?
0:16:38 And are there certain times of day
0:16:40 that are better than others?”
0:16:41 – Okay, I can ask that.
0:16:46 That the ideal is fairly early upon waking,
0:16:49 soon after waking.
0:16:53 And I would say do the 20 in one go
0:16:57 because every sit is actually a journey.
0:16:59 And if you give yourself 20 minutes
0:17:01 for that journey to unfold,
0:17:05 you don’t know quite where it might take you.
0:17:07 And if you have two 10 minutes,
0:17:08 you haven’t got quite as long
0:17:11 for the whole settling process to happen.
0:17:12 – So let me do a follow-up question to that.
0:17:14 ‘Cause it was interesting.
0:17:17 I was, you were so gracious in introducing me
0:17:20 to your teacher who’s based in Tokyo
0:17:22 and I was able to go out and meet with him.
0:17:25 And one of the things that he asked me was like,
0:17:27 how many days a week do you miss sitting?
0:17:29 Like how many days a week do you not sit?
0:17:31 And I was like, I gotta be honest with this.
0:17:33 The senior Zen master here, okay.
0:17:35 Like probably two, you know.
0:17:38 And he goes, “I would rather have you sit
0:17:42 “five minutes a day every day than to miss a day.”
0:17:44 And so I guess a follow-up question this would be,
0:17:46 okay, 20 minutes sounds great.
0:17:50 But if someone finds themselves like missing days,
0:17:51 but they’re aiming for 20 minutes,
0:17:54 would you agree shorter duration?
0:17:56 – Unquestionably, you cut back.
0:17:58 You cut back to a level
0:18:01 that you can maintain every day for say two weeks.
0:18:02 And if you’ve done that,
0:18:06 then you take a small step towards your target number.
0:18:09 You’ve got to find, we may have a dream dose,
0:18:11 you know, whatever that might be.
0:18:13 But if we’re missing days,
0:18:16 it probably means somehow it’s too high
0:18:18 for the way our life is at the moment.
0:18:22 So you cut back to what you can maintain daily.
0:18:24 And once you’re up and running,
0:18:28 and by that I mean going from complete beginner
0:18:31 to sort of novice who might have been meditating regularly
0:18:33 for let’s say three to six months.
0:18:34 – Okay, so interesting.
0:18:35 That was a good question I had in mind
0:18:38 ’cause like everyone’s gonna be a little bit different.
0:18:41 And so if someone said that I’ve tried this before,
0:18:42 it didn’t work for me,
0:18:44 what would you say the commitment is to say,
0:18:47 okay, I can almost, I can’t perfectly guarantee,
0:18:49 but I can almost guarantee you’ll start to feel
0:18:50 this will get easier for you.
0:18:52 So it’s that three to six month mark.
0:18:53 Is that kind of where it’s at?
0:18:55 – Yes, I think it probably is.
0:19:00 And once you’re sort of cruising reasonably,
0:19:03 and there will always be times when you don’t wanna do it.
0:19:06 And we just learn to ride that, just do it anyway.
0:19:09 I always think it’s like if a ship in the olden days
0:19:13 was sailing from Britain to India or something,
0:19:15 and it’s gonna go through weather,
0:19:17 but it doesn’t mean it stops the journey.
0:19:19 Just say, I’m gonna go, I’m just gonna give up.
0:19:20 No, they just keep going.
0:19:24 And it’s the same weather will come through our lives
0:19:27 and through our bodies and our minds and our hearts.
0:19:28 We just keep going.
0:19:31 It’s so nice to have something that just keeps going
0:19:33 regardless.
0:19:35 There’s a great value in that itself.
0:19:38 Like no matter what’s going on in my life,
0:19:39 I just do this thing.
0:19:40 I just do this thing.
0:19:41 I could have had, I mean,
0:19:43 even when people have had a sort of
0:19:46 massive awakening experience, some great opening,
0:19:47 what do they do the next day?
0:19:48 Sit.
0:19:49 What will the teacher tell them the next day?
0:19:50 Sit.
0:19:53 When someone’s going through a really, really difficult time
0:19:56 and real serious upheavals in life,
0:19:58 the teacher might be compassionate of course around it,
0:20:01 but still they’d say sit.
0:20:05 Just try to make a bit of time to sit every day regardless.
0:20:10 So I would say, what is really great to get to
0:20:12 at some point, maybe three or six months actually,
0:20:14 is not long enough to be aiming for this,
0:20:19 but twice a day of about half an hour
0:20:20 or 20 to 30 minutes.
0:20:24 Twice a day is fantastic when you’re ready for it
0:20:26 and you have to wait till you’re ready for it.
0:20:31 And then maybe sometimes the evening sits only 10 minutes,
0:20:33 but if you can do it morning and evening,
0:20:35 this is the big picture.
0:20:37 We don’t want to rush to this,
0:20:41 but if we, that is actually kind of the dream dose,
0:20:46 because then you sort of don’t drop away.
0:20:50 It’s like whatever you’ve developed in your sit
0:20:55 in the morning is kind of very easily topped up
0:20:58 in the evening sit and same thing in the morning sit.
0:21:02 And you start to get this contiguous sense of it
0:21:04 that can run right through your life.
0:21:07 And that’s really getting beautiful.
0:21:10 But again, everybody should find their own.
0:21:11 I sometimes say it’s like this.
0:21:16 It’s like imagine your life is a mug of hot water
0:21:19 and you’re putting a tea bag in it.
0:21:20 And the tea bag is meditation.
0:21:25 And ideally, the water is flavored,
0:21:28 all the water is flavored by the tea.
0:21:31 And whether the tea bag needs to be in for 15 minutes
0:21:34 in the morning that can keep you going around the clock
0:21:36 or maybe it needs a bit more,
0:21:41 you see for yourself, am I tasting it in my day to day life?
0:21:43 And if the answer is no, not really.
0:21:46 It probably means up the dosage a little bit.
0:21:47 – I see.
0:21:48 – Yeah, and I like that in the app
0:21:50 where you have this selection where you can say,
0:21:51 okay, I want to do 10 minutes.
0:21:52 And I think you had a 20 and 30 now.
0:21:53 – That’s right.
0:21:54 – So it’s like as you get further along,
0:21:56 if you’re like, hey, 10 minutes is feeling a little short
0:21:58 for me, you can jump up to the 20
0:22:00 and then always go back if you need to as well.
0:22:01 – That’s right.
0:22:02 Now back, actually, Kevin,
0:22:04 I want to circle back to that question about,
0:22:07 you know, the guy saying, my mind is just so busy.
0:22:08 How do I do this?
0:22:11 My advice would be just stick with it, you know,
0:22:16 do the first sit, listen to the next talk,
0:22:20 do the next sit, do the next sit, just keep going.
0:22:21 Just keep going.
0:22:26 And the hope here is that, you know,
0:22:29 ’cause all the sits have some amount of guidance.
0:22:32 And at some point you will just find
0:22:36 you start to listen more consistently to the guidance.
0:22:39 You’ll find it just starts to happen
0:22:44 that you’re able to stay with what you’re being asked to do
0:22:45 and you’ll be able to do it.
0:22:48 And you’ll just kind of lock in more.
0:22:50 It’s not going to be a perfect thing.
0:22:51 There’ll be times when, you know,
0:22:53 you just got a lot going on
0:22:55 and you can’t seem to rein in the mind.
0:22:57 It’ll do what it does.
0:23:01 But having guidance does make it a lot easier.
0:23:03 You know, when I started meditating,
0:23:05 it was just like, do this thing,
0:23:06 you’re on your own, go and do it.
0:23:09 And, you know, my mom was all over the place.
0:23:10 And then I discovered, wow,
0:23:13 there’s this world of guided meditation,
0:23:15 which actually wasn’t part of the Zen world.
0:23:18 You know, maybe a little bit here and there,
0:23:19 some teachers would do a bit,
0:23:21 but it was much more part of modern mindfulness
0:23:24 and the vipassana world did more of it.
0:23:27 And, you know, I started to get exposed to that.
0:23:30 I thought, actually, especially for beginners
0:23:33 and novices, you know, this is great.
0:23:36 You can save a lot of time.
0:23:38 When you save a lot of time, what do you mean by that?
0:23:41 Well, I mean, like, you could be getting to
0:23:48 discovering places of stillness and of meditative flow,
0:23:50 which are very beautiful experiences
0:23:52 and just being more attentive
0:23:55 to your immediate present moment experience
0:23:59 and then different dimensions of it much quicker.
0:24:03 ‘Cause guidance can show us how the tools can work
0:24:06 before we know how to operate the muscles.
0:24:07 Right, right.
0:24:08 It’s a good point because, you know,
0:24:10 when we first met and we were,
0:24:12 it was COVID time and we were chatting
0:24:15 and you were doing these check-ins with me.
0:24:18 And it was like, I tell you what was going on in the practice.
0:24:19 And I felt like it was like you just being like,
0:24:21 let’s tweak this little knob a little bit this way
0:24:22 and a little bit this way, you know?
0:24:25 And it’s like these little kind of guardrails
0:24:27 for me to operate on that,
0:24:28 that I would just, you know,
0:24:30 could be potential roadblocks
0:24:33 and probably like slow down my progression.
0:24:34 That’s right and discourage you.
0:24:35 Yeah, you know?
0:24:36 Right, that’s a huge one.
0:24:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:24:40 You know, you mentioned a couple of times these,
0:24:43 you know, depths of awakening that can happen.
0:24:47 Can you give me an example of a student
0:24:49 and, you know, how does that vary
0:24:52 versus like a minor type of awakening moment
0:24:53 versus a major moment?
0:24:56 Yeah, thank you, it’s a great question.
0:24:59 I’d say there’s all kinds of shifts
0:25:01 that we can find in meditation
0:25:03 and they’re all valuable, you know?
0:25:08 And they come in, I think, in their four main categories,
0:25:10 you know, and there’s mindfulness.
0:25:15 That’s a shift in mindfulness is when, you know,
0:25:17 we’ve been kind of having, finding it hard to sit.
0:25:19 We don’t really know why we just are.
0:25:21 And then suddenly we recognize,
0:25:24 oh my gosh, I’ve been thinking.
0:25:26 There’s been thought running through my mind
0:25:29 that I hadn’t actually noticed
0:25:31 ’cause it can be slightly subliminal
0:25:32 or we can just, we just don’t notice it.
0:25:35 We just, we rest this and oh, why can’t I sit still?
0:25:36 And then suddenly we recognize,
0:25:39 oh my gosh, there’s been this movie playing in my mind.
0:25:42 Well, there’s been a sort of radio
0:25:43 talking to me in my mind.
0:25:47 And the first time we actually noticed thinking
0:25:50 as a process going on in our minds
0:25:55 that we can observe instead of being caught up in it.
0:25:56 That’s a pretty big shift.
0:25:59 ‘Cause suddenly it’s like, wait a minute,
0:26:02 I’m so used to being wrapped up in my thinking.
0:26:06 And now I’m realizing, maybe I don’t have to be.
0:26:09 Maybe I can recognize it’s a thing
0:26:12 that arises in my experience, but it’s not me.
0:26:14 – See, that’s a radical thing
0:26:16 because like you’re saying that
0:26:18 who’s doing the recognizing then?
0:26:20 If you’re recognizing and you’re watching the thinker,
0:26:23 who is that person that’s watching the thinker?
0:26:24 – Yeah, well, that’s the beautiful thing.
0:26:27 That’s ’cause you’ve just taken a step back
0:26:29 closer to who you really are.
0:26:33 You’re really, there’s some sort of slightly deeper level
0:26:37 of each of us that can observe,
0:26:39 that can be a kind of witness.
0:26:44 And usually, very often, actually, when we find that
0:26:49 and taste that, there is a little shiver of a good feeling,
0:26:52 of a kind of peace, of a kind of aliveness,
0:26:56 perhaps of a kind of wakefulness, attentiveness.
0:26:59 And of appreciation.
0:27:02 It’s funny, they all sort of can be in there
0:27:05 when we just get that little shift that detaches us
0:27:07 from what we’ve been caught up in
0:27:09 and we start to recognize,
0:27:12 basically a deeper level of ourselves.
0:27:17 So that’s beautiful and we have that capacity.
0:27:20 And it happens in lots of ways in mindfulness.
0:27:23 And now the key one is, like you were describing,
0:27:26 when you recognize there’s this little knot
0:27:29 or claw inside pulling me towards something,
0:27:32 I need that now, or gosh, I’m distressed.
0:27:35 When we can just find there’s a way we can hold that.
0:27:39 The poet Rumi has this great poem about being a guesthouse.
0:27:41 You wanna become a guesthouse,
0:27:44 the dear listener, be a guesthouse
0:27:47 to the difficult things that come in life.
0:27:49 Rather than closing the door,
0:27:52 they wanna know about you, be a guesthouse,
0:27:54 be the host that welcomes in
0:27:57 all the difficult things that arise.
0:28:01 And then that sort of, then we recognize,
0:28:06 man, I’m not just this person blindly being tugged around
0:28:07 and pulled around in their life.
0:28:12 I’m actually a capacious being with a larger heart.
0:28:16 And that’s beautiful.
0:28:18 And that’s a shift.
0:28:21 And it’s not yet what we call awakening,
0:28:22 but it is a little awakening.
0:28:23 It’s a little shift.
0:28:25 It’s an important shift.
0:28:27 It can actually be huge in life.
0:28:29 – Little moments of space too,
0:28:30 I think are quite nice to have.
0:28:34 Like, if you get into a confrontation with someone,
0:28:37 and rather than just immediately coming from this,
0:28:39 this gut instinct of snapping back or whatever it may be,
0:28:42 and just like, if there’s this micro,
0:28:46 if you can catch the thought before it comes
0:28:50 to a full bloomed kind of back, you know?
0:28:52 And it’s just like, it’s not,
0:28:56 this little space, it almost feels like it’s almost infinite.
0:28:58 And do you know what I’m talking about?
0:29:00 – I do, I do, I do, I do.
0:29:01 – What is that I’m feeling sometimes?
0:29:02 And I don’t trust me.
0:29:05 Most times if my wife gives me a little shiv
0:29:08 or I give her a little shiv, we react a bunch.
0:29:10 But what is that little thing that I’m talking about?
0:29:12 Is that a thing or am I just making that up?
0:29:13 – It’s a beautiful thing.
0:29:14 It’s a beautiful thing.
0:29:17 Like, you know, there’s a great Jewish philosopher,
0:29:22 Victor Frankel, who said between stimulus and response,
0:29:24 there is a gap.
0:29:28 Everything is in that gap, you know,
0:29:29 which is put it beautifully.
0:29:34 ‘Cause that, I believe that space is a moment
0:29:37 when we’ve kind of suspended our attachment
0:29:41 to who we ordinarily feel we are.
0:29:43 It’s a gap.
0:29:45 And it’s a beautiful thing.
0:29:49 ‘Cause it’s, we’re just floating.
0:29:52 And it is exactly, as you say, a space.
0:29:55 And we can take that on different levels.
0:29:58 On one level, it’s just an interruption
0:30:00 of my ordinary reactive process.
0:30:01 – Right.
0:30:03 – Where it’s been the pause button somehow,
0:30:06 and I would say meditation helps with this a lot,
0:30:08 the pause button has been tapped.
0:30:11 And everything that I’m normally the whole–
0:30:12 – Just a micro tap, not a long one.
0:30:14 Just a little, just enough to get you to notice it.
0:30:15 Like, what was that?
0:30:19 Like, I didn’t immediately engage, you know?
0:30:20 – Exactly, exactly.
0:30:23 And if we just look at it for one second
0:30:27 of what is this gap, it’s very open.
0:30:28 It’s very, very open.
0:30:32 So we may just experience it as just a little quiet,
0:30:33 a little pause.
0:30:35 If we, and this can happen in meditation,
0:30:37 where we’re sitting and we think we’re trying
0:30:40 to do a certain practice and all of a sudden,
0:30:43 there’s just a space with kind of nothing in it, you know?
0:30:47 And so it can go all the way, that gap,
0:30:50 that space can go all the way to an actual awakening.
0:30:55 A real awakening is when we drop our sense
0:30:58 of being who we are, who we normally think we are.
0:31:00 It’s really, it’s not just dropped.
0:31:05 We see that there’s a way of being without it.
0:31:07 There’s always been here.
0:31:10 And so we understand our sense of self then
0:31:12 from a very different perspective.
0:31:15 From one of a boundless openness.
0:31:18 And our sense of self is just a thing that arises
0:31:20 in this boundless openness.
0:31:23 And that’s very liberating, I have no doubt.
0:31:25 Sounds amazing.
0:31:28 So it’s impossible to describe though, right?
0:31:30 Like for someone that’s never experienced that,
0:31:32 like they can’t be put into words.
0:31:34 Well, I think that that’s true.
0:31:37 It is, they always say, you know,
0:31:39 it can’t be expressed in words.
0:31:43 But I think we, lots of us, many of us,
0:31:47 most of us have had foreshadowings of it.
0:31:51 Little glimpses that kind of echo what that’s like.
0:31:56 And again, it’s these moments when we just are interrupting
0:32:03 the normal way we exist.
0:32:08 And we find, ha, that thing that I normally do
0:32:12 I don’t have to do it, you know?
0:32:16 That’s a foreshadowing of what awakening is like.
0:32:19 I mean, then, for example, which just puts a central
0:32:21 sort of emphasis on awakening experiences
0:32:23 ’cause it knows that humans can go through them.
0:32:27 So it’s, and they’re very decisive in a life,
0:32:29 there can be, so it values them.
0:32:33 And it also says you can’t really talk about them.
0:32:36 The way that can be spoken of is not the true way.
0:32:38 You know, as it says in the Tao De Jing.
0:32:43 And it’s like that, this reality that is revealed
0:32:45 in awakening, we can’t speak of it,
0:32:47 but we can say some things about it.
0:32:50 You often get a sense of incredible
0:32:55 and unexplicable okayness.
0:32:58 It can be in the midst of some real difficult situation,
0:33:01 both personally and in the world,
0:33:02 suddenly there’s this shift.
0:33:06 And in a way that you could not explain to anybody,
0:33:09 you know everything is okay.
0:33:12 In spite of all the evidence to the contrary,
0:33:17 you know it in your bones that it’s actually all okay.
0:33:19 But you couldn’t explain why.
0:33:22 – Is it, I’m just gonna throw some stuff out there
0:33:23 and you tell me how far off I am.
0:33:26 So I’m watching a crazy movie.
0:33:29 There’s a conflict and battle scene on the screen.
0:33:31 I’m not in any fear.
0:33:32 I’m enjoying the movie.
0:33:33 I’m caught up in the action.
0:33:34 – Yeah.
0:33:39 – Is it, does my life at that awakening moment
0:33:43 shift to more of that type of view?
0:33:45 – Yeah, that’s not bad actually, it can be like that.
0:33:48 It can be like you’re in the midst of something
0:33:50 you’re wrestling with in your life.
0:33:55 And suddenly you’ve just dropped back into a vast space
0:33:59 and you see yourself in your life wrestling
0:34:02 with whatever problem you’re wrestling with
0:34:04 from this infinite perspective.
0:34:07 – When you say see, not visually.
0:34:10 – Kind of, it’s not exactly visual.
0:34:14 But you’re aware that, oh, there’s Henry
0:34:17 trying to get that internet problem sorted out
0:34:19 or something that was frustrating him.
0:34:24 But it is a little bit like you’re looking at your life
0:34:26 as if it were a movie on a screen.
0:34:29 And you’re back in the dark of the auditorium
0:34:31 in this great space.
0:34:34 And you’re seeing the little life
0:34:37 that Henry’s trying to navigate and negotiate
0:34:39 from that great perspective.
0:34:39 – Wow.
0:34:42 – So you’re at the operating system level at that point.
0:34:44 Like, it’s fantastic because what happens then
0:34:47 is whatever the problem is, you love it.
0:34:49 You love the fact that this being,
0:34:51 ’cause you’re not really you anymore.
0:34:56 You’re observing from a vastly different perspective
0:35:00 and loving this being with their little problem.
0:35:01 – Wow.
0:35:02 – You feel very compassionate.
0:35:05 – And you do that for the whole world.
0:35:07 – I mean, some would say that that,
0:35:10 I mean, that sounds like, I hate to use the word,
0:35:12 the G word, but it’s like a God-like state
0:35:15 where it’s like, do you see what I’m saying?
0:35:18 Like this overarching watching, ’cause like–
0:35:20 – I know it could sound a bit like that.
0:35:20 – Yeah.
0:35:22 – Well, first of all, that’s not the only way
0:35:23 awakeness show up.
0:35:24 – Yeah.
0:35:26 – But I mean, it’s not for me to say,
0:35:30 but I suspect that a lot of the experiences
0:35:32 that people have had that were attributed
0:35:37 to God and God’s may have been moments of shifting
0:35:42 that where awareness shifts so decisively
0:35:45 into another perspective that traditions like Buddhism
0:35:49 and Zen call awakening rather than attributing them
0:35:52 to any divine or supernatural beings.
0:35:54 It’s, you know, I don’t wanna diss
0:35:56 on anybody’s faith tradition,
0:35:58 but it might be that some faith traditions
0:36:01 have evolved out of experiences like that,
0:36:04 that you don’t really need the superstructure
0:36:08 of a great, you know, theological belief system.
0:36:09 Possibly.
0:36:10 – Yeah.
0:36:12 – I don’t wanna say for sure, but it’s possible.
0:36:17 Certainly, I do think that our human experience
0:36:20 has many dimensions to it, many more
0:36:22 than we ordinarily allow ourselves to experience.
0:36:23 – Yes.
0:36:25 – But they’re here, waiting to be experienced.
0:36:27 It’s not like, you know, again,
0:36:29 it’s not like you have to be some marvellous adept
0:36:32 who trains this stuff up and creates it.
0:36:35 No, every, each one of us already has
0:36:37 all these multiple perspectives.
0:36:40 We’re just not used to opening them up
0:36:42 and we’re not used to having access to them.
0:36:45 And again, I mean, bringing it back to the way,
0:36:49 that’s one thing that I really wanna be helping people.
0:36:51 Maybe not everyone’s gonna experience it,
0:36:55 but at least know that these are real possibilities,
0:36:58 you know, and perhaps get glimpses.
0:37:00 – When you think about the things
0:37:03 that we’re very well familiar with today
0:37:06 in terms of like sight, hearing, touch, smell,
0:37:08 like all our traditional senses,
0:37:10 is there any, and then I promise this is the last time
0:37:11 I’ll try and figure it out,
0:37:13 ’cause I know I can’t figure it out in this podcast,
0:37:18 but is there any hint of this being like
0:37:21 another undiscovered sense that gets opened up
0:37:25 in some way that is, we’ve always had the capacity for,
0:37:28 but it’s like just, we haven’t like stepped into it
0:37:30 or really opened it up yet.
0:37:32 – I love that, I love that.
0:37:35 I mean, the way I would put it probably is something like,
0:37:40 this is in all sense channels.
0:37:45 So it’s not another one, it’s in all of them.
0:37:47 And that’s why actually in the Zen tradition,
0:37:50 there are lots and lots of stories of people
0:37:54 having awakening experiences in very different ways.
0:37:56 There’s one famous story of a guy
0:38:00 who just saw a beautiful plum blossom,
0:38:02 and he just saw it and boom,
0:38:05 he just realized that plum blossom
0:38:09 was opening up the whole universe to him, whatever.
0:38:11 Again, the language falls down,
0:38:16 and then another story is somebody just heard a pebble hit
0:38:19 a stalk of bamboo, the little knock,
0:38:22 and the whole universe opened up,
0:38:25 or their sense of self and world fell away,
0:38:28 and they’re in this vast experience,
0:38:30 and it was overwhelming and beautiful,
0:38:33 and really, so that was the sense of sight,
0:38:35 the sense of hearing.
0:38:39 There’s a story of somebody where he went to a master
0:38:43 and asked like, what’s my real nature?
0:38:46 And the master reached out for the corner of his shirt
0:38:49 and just pulled on it, little tug like that.
0:38:51 – Yeah, he had a great awakening.
0:38:54 So it’s a sense of touch as well.
0:38:56 And in all cases, they’re kind of awakening up
0:39:00 to the same multi-dimensional experience
0:39:04 that is in all senses.
0:39:05 And yeah, and it goes on.
0:39:07 I mean, what have we got?
0:39:10 We just did sight, sound, touch.
0:39:14 There’s a guy who ate a piece of melon,
0:39:17 and it was so sweet, and he was asking himself,
0:39:20 is the sweetness in the melon,
0:39:25 or is the sweetness in my tongue tasting the melon?
0:39:29 And as he was pondering that question, bam, he awakened.
0:39:31 It’s both, and it’s more.
0:39:33 It’s jumping to another level
0:39:38 that includes both me and everything else,
0:39:41 in one further dimension or something
0:39:44 that wraps it all together into one.
0:39:46 – That sounds so beautiful.
0:39:52 This is why I’m so interested in always having you
0:39:53 on the show and always wanted to explore this
0:39:56 because I need to keep going further down this path
0:40:01 because it sounds like a relief and a release
0:40:03 to feel that.
0:40:04 – I was gonna say, that’s another thing.
0:40:07 You know, when we’re talking about like the little shifts
0:40:08 and releases is a great word actually,
0:40:11 that you can get in just mindfulness,
0:40:15 you get this sense of joy or peace,
0:40:17 a sort of quiet joy.
0:40:20 I think it’s a little bit like a kind of love, actually,
0:40:23 which is why I call my new bundle love
0:40:26 because it is a kind of love, I think,
0:40:29 ’cause you feel such relief.
0:40:32 – It’s funny that there’s so many stories that I’ve read.
0:40:34 You’ve certainly read an order of magnitude more than I have
0:40:36 about these awakening moments,
0:40:39 and it seems to be followed oftentimes by a lot of tears.
0:40:43 – Yeah, I know, ’cause yeah, it’s like, wow, I belong
0:40:45 in a way I never knew I could.
0:40:48 And the whole system sort of melts.
0:40:53 And we, yeah, there’s a great, oh, relaxing.
0:40:59 Everything, we can just, we just let go.
0:41:00 And it’s all through the body.
0:41:03 It’s all through the heart, all through the mind.
0:41:05 And tears just well up.
0:41:08 And they’re tears of sorrowful joy.
0:41:11 They’re tears of joyful sorrow.
0:41:13 They’re tears of relief.
0:41:17 They’re tears of just a great upwelling of happiness.
0:41:19 – What’s the relief from?
0:41:22 – It’s from the tyranny of the little self
0:41:24 that’s been dominating my life
0:41:26 that I’ve believed in all along.
0:41:30 And demanding this, and criticizing that,
0:41:34 and judging this, and heaping shame on me,
0:41:38 and blaming others, and all the sort of dramas,
0:41:43 and the kind of strutting, you know, imposter, really,
0:41:45 in a certain way.
0:41:49 We all have, there’s been running my life,
0:41:52 and suddenly it’s just gone.
0:41:55 And the relief is incomparable.
0:41:58 I don’t think, I don’t know, I mean,
0:42:02 I haven’t had, you know, a life with astoundings,
0:42:05 you know, sort of economic successes,
0:42:06 or something like that, I don’t know what they’re like.
0:42:11 But I can’t imagine that there could be anything greater,
0:42:14 honestly, in a human life, than this discovery.
0:42:17 I mean, of course, falling in love, having a child,
0:42:20 and the love of a long relationship,
0:42:23 and that goes through its challenges,
0:42:24 and is still going strong,
0:42:27 and sort of come back to loving in new ways again and again.
0:42:29 Those are all absolutely marvelous.
0:42:32 But there’s something about the moments
0:42:35 where we shift our whole understanding
0:42:38 of what it is to be alive.
0:42:43 They’re so precious, and, you know, they’re available.
0:42:46 And if only there were a surefire system,
0:42:49 delivery method, there isn’t, you know,
0:42:50 maybe there will be.
0:42:53 But even now, I don’t think the neuroscience
0:42:58 has fully caught up with an actual moment of awakening.
0:43:00 There’s a friend of mine, James Austin,
0:43:03 who’s written a series of books studying this.
0:43:05 His first one was called Zen Brain,
0:43:08 and he’s been doing it since the ’80s, you know,
0:43:10 maybe even the ’70s.
0:43:12 He’s a serious Zen practitioner himself,
0:43:14 as well as a neuroscientist,
0:43:17 and he thinks he’s narrowed down what’s going on
0:43:21 for some kinds of awakening experience, but not for all.
0:43:26 There’s ones where just everything seems to disappear.
0:43:28 And when you say that, everything disappears,
0:43:29 you mean visually?
0:43:33 – Yeah, basically everything.
0:43:35 – So if you were sitting in this state happened to you,
0:43:36 would you lose consciousness?
0:43:37 Like, what happens?
0:43:40 – Yeah, you know, I’ve only had what I’ve had
0:43:42 in terms of this kind of experience.
0:43:45 And, you know, I’m sure it’s a very shallow one,
0:43:49 but it was a moment when simply the totality
0:43:52 of my life fell away.
0:43:57 And I know it sounds weird and it’s impossible to describe.
0:43:59 I tried in my book, actually.
0:44:00 – Yeah.
0:44:02 – One blade of grass, but I can’t,
0:44:03 nobody can really convey it,
0:44:08 but it is like everything’s just gone.
0:44:11 And somehow sort of reforms afterwards.
0:44:15 And in the moment of that sort of annihilation
0:44:19 or whatever it is, you can’t be there knowing it.
0:44:21 You can’t be.
0:44:23 But somehow you know when it’s happened.
0:44:26 And that was the decisive moment for me,
0:44:30 because thereafter, what was sort of,
0:44:32 what shifted in that moment,
0:44:36 it’s never fully stopped since then.
0:44:41 And it’s now 2024, it’s now 16 years ago,
0:44:42 nearly 17 years ago.
0:44:46 And it’s not like I’m living in the fullness
0:44:48 of the power of that experience when it happened,
0:44:51 but it’s still present.
0:44:55 And I feel this incredible gratitude.
0:44:57 If I just remember, it’s here.
0:45:02 And I just immediately switches on a powerful gratitude
0:45:06 and a kind of love, a love for this moment,
0:45:07 that this moment is arising.
0:45:10 ‘Cause it’s very nice to be with you.
0:45:12 And so it’s a very nice circumstance anyway.
0:45:16 But even if I was just walking down a rainy street
0:45:19 and I was late for something.
0:45:23 I could find it, love for this moment,
0:45:25 arising just as it is.
0:45:27 – When you experience something like that
0:45:30 in some texts that talks about this idea
0:45:35 of there’s this no birth and no death.
0:45:36 – Yeah.
0:45:37 What’s your take on that?
0:45:42 – Yeah, I hesitate to say anything about it.
0:45:47 But I do know that there’s certainly been times
0:45:51 when I’m not so sure that this life
0:45:53 is exactly what we think it is.
0:45:57 And therefore, death isn’t what we think it is either.
0:46:01 And that is actually a very reassuring thing.
0:46:02 – Do you hesitate to talk about it
0:46:06 because it sounds wild if you were to say it out loud
0:46:08 or because you don’t have the words?
0:46:12 Or is it like, ’cause this idea of no birth and no death
0:46:16 is just wild to everyone that’s listening to this?
0:46:18 – Yes, I know. – Except for maybe you.
0:46:22 So, but I’m very curious
0:46:24 because it is mentioned so many times
0:46:25 throughout these different traditions
0:46:28 that when they have these deep awakening moments
0:46:30 that is one aspect that is seen, right?
0:46:32 – I know it is true, it is true.
0:46:35 I mean, here’s one way we could think about it.
0:46:40 Okay, it’s like, we know that all the experience we have
0:46:44 to be aware of it, there has to be awareness.
0:46:46 So like right now, I can see the table,
0:46:48 I can see your eyes and we’re chatting.
0:46:49 – You got me so far, I’m with you.
0:46:50 (both laughing)
0:46:52 – So there is awareness. – Yes.
0:46:57 – Now, what if that awareness actually somehow exists
0:47:00 independently of content?
0:47:03 In other words, right now, we’re looking at each other,
0:47:08 but actually awareness is present right now around,
0:47:11 wrapping around the experience.
0:47:13 So this experience of conversing with one another,
0:47:15 I know I’m talking a lot actually,
0:47:16 it’s a bit one-sided, I’m sorry.
0:47:18 – No, it’s interesting, it’s interesting.
0:47:22 – But this experience is actually arising
0:47:26 within a context of awareness.
0:47:28 So then the question, if we can get some sense of that
0:47:30 as a possibility. – Okay.
0:47:33 – So then the question is, well, what characteristics
0:47:38 does this awareness itself have?
0:47:41 So one way to say, well, it can show visuals,
0:47:44 it can show auditory stuff because we can hear,
0:47:47 we can see, we can feel in a sense,
0:47:50 pants and seat and so on, we can sense all of this stuff.
0:47:52 – But do you believe that you are part of that
0:47:56 global awareness and not just the awareness here?
0:47:59 – That’s right, that’s right, you can migrate
0:48:01 your sense of who you are. – Wow.
0:48:03 – ‘Cause you actually are, you actually are
0:48:06 really that great awareness.
0:48:09 So let me just, just come back to the birth and death thing.
0:48:12 Therefore, in that awareness,
0:48:16 well, we have to get to know it a bit,
0:48:20 but if we investigate it, we find that it really doesn’t have,
0:48:22 it has the capacity to do lots of things,
0:48:26 but in itself, it has no characteristics.
0:48:31 And when we really sort of release our hold on here
0:48:37 and transfer to being absorbed into the awareness,
0:48:38 if we then ask a question like,
0:48:40 well, what’s time?
0:48:44 It’s very clear, time belongs to that thing out there,
0:48:48 this sort of play we’re having of being people, right?
0:48:51 It doesn’t belong to that awareness,
0:48:53 it just doesn’t do time.
0:48:59 It can do time in the play on stage, like a stage play,
0:49:01 but it doesn’t do time.
0:49:05 And when we really are in there, clearly, there is no time.
0:49:08 – So let me ask you a question now real quick there.
0:49:11 How do you know you’re in that thing if there is no time
0:49:15 because time is just a string together set of awareness?
0:49:19 – Yeah, but time is actually an idea.
0:49:22 Time is an idea that we have.
0:49:24 We create the idea of time.
0:49:28 If we’re really right here now, just being here now,
0:49:32 time’s not here.
0:49:34 Time is an idea we pick up.
0:49:36 – That’s a good point.
0:49:38 – Because there’s no time for this glass right now.
0:49:40 – That’s right, it’s just being the glass.
0:49:41 – It’s just being the glass.
0:49:43 – And actually, there’s really,
0:49:47 there’s no time for this body, even though it’s aging.
0:49:50 – But this glass doesn’t have awareness though.
0:49:53 – But, you know, awareness is not the same.
0:49:55 It’s a concept, exactly.
0:49:57 – So it’s watching, it can construct the glass
0:49:59 and watch the glass, but it is not the glass.
0:50:00 – Exactly, exactly.
0:50:05 And so the time is a construction that is conceptual.
0:50:10 It has to be thought, right?
0:50:15 So the thought arises within a greater context of awareness.
0:50:18 In terms of actual experience,
0:50:22 I mean, there’s some traditions that say
0:50:26 it’s all about finding that awareness.
0:50:27 Great, good for them.
0:50:29 But Zen is a little bit, it includes that,
0:50:32 but Zen doesn’t restrict it to only awareness.
0:50:35 It thinks that we can have experiences
0:50:39 where actually we’re just absorbed into the fabric
0:50:42 of everything and there isn’t really awareness.
0:50:44 – That’s one step further than awareness.
0:50:45 – I don’t know, it’s different.
0:50:46 I think it’s different dimensions.
0:50:49 I wouldn’t like to say further or not.
0:50:51 I wouldn’t like to say, but I’m sure
0:50:55 that there are experiences where there isn’t awareness.
0:50:57 And, ’cause I think that was,
0:51:01 Zen talks about that, various masters
0:51:04 have been through that and it’s a thing that’s acknowledged.
0:51:07 It’s not where you want to end up,
0:51:08 but you can go through it.
0:51:11 – What do you say it’s not where you want to end up?
0:51:15 – Well, ’cause in Zen, the idea isn’t to end up
0:51:18 in some totally empty barren place.
0:51:21 The idea is to go through these experiences
0:51:24 and then be living your ordinary life
0:51:29 with a richer awareness and a more full awareness
0:51:33 and more compassion and more gratitude,
0:51:35 more positive pro-social emotions.
0:51:40 So it’s actually, it’s not about checking out
0:51:44 and being in a place of vast empty bliss or something.
0:51:47 We kind of hope you might get a glimpse of that,
0:51:52 but in order to come back and live differently.
0:51:55 – Yeah, it’s bringing it back into every ordinary life.
0:51:56 – Everyday life, yeah.
0:51:58 – One kind of follow-up question here
0:52:00 is pertaining to practice,
0:52:05 which is there’s also this kind of elusiveness of awakening
0:52:10 where it’s like the more you try to obtain it,
0:52:12 the more you point it in the wrong direction.
0:52:14 – Yes, that’s right.
0:52:15 – How would you frame that?
0:52:17 And it’s such a weird thing to think about
0:52:21 because like everything that we do in the physical world
0:52:23 is done through effort to obtain something, right?
0:52:27 And so it’s like, you almost have to think about
0:52:31 this state in a sense of just releasing
0:52:33 that desire of obtainment.
0:52:34 – I know.
0:52:36 – And that’s when the magic happens?
0:52:39 – It can be, there’s no guarantees, but it can be.
0:52:40 – Can you explain that though?
0:52:41 Like, what happened?
0:52:42 – Yeah, because here’s how it works.
0:52:45 It’s like awakening is not another view.
0:52:49 It’s not like there’s mountains, there’s the river,
0:52:51 there’s the hills, there’s the forest,
0:52:53 and there’s awakening.
0:52:57 No, in looking at the mountains, awakening is already here.
0:52:59 In looking at the river, awakening is already here.
0:53:03 Right now, you are the awakened one.
0:53:05 You already are.
0:53:09 So you can’t find it ’cause it’s you already.
0:53:10 Does that make sense?
0:53:10 – It does, yeah.
0:53:14 – It’s actually not, it’s not about a,
0:53:17 this is why talking about it as an experience
0:53:21 in a way is okay and as a way is misleading
0:53:23 because it suggests that it’s having
0:53:25 another kind of experience.
0:53:27 It’s not, it applies to all experience.
0:53:31 So ’cause it’s you, it’s just like I was saying earlier
0:53:35 about sort of coming back to a deeper self.
0:53:38 Once we’ve initiated that process,
0:53:41 we can be on track to do it more and more and more,
0:53:44 coming back deeper and deeper, clearer and clearer
0:53:49 until we really find this self we’ve always been
0:53:52 that is not the same as the self we think we are.
0:53:53 – If I was going down that path of saying
0:53:56 I want to be awakened, I’m creating an object
0:53:57 out of something.
0:53:58 – That’s exactly right.
0:54:02 – Versus just it’s already here.
0:54:03 – Yes.
0:54:04 – And if I’m creating an object out of something,
0:54:05 it’s not that it’s running,
0:54:07 Wigging’s running away from me,
0:54:08 it’s just that I’m looking at something
0:54:10 that isn’t even what it is.
0:54:11 Like it’s like–
0:54:12 – Exactly, exactly.
0:54:13 – I’m like creating a structure out of it
0:54:15 when it’s not structured at all.
0:54:16 – That’s right.
0:54:18 And I mean, imagine, you know, if you think of it,
0:54:20 I wanna get that glass.
0:54:21 – Right.
0:54:22 – But actually that glass isn’t what you wanna get
0:54:23 with awakening.
0:54:24 – Right.
0:54:27 – What you wanna get with awakening is you yourself.
0:54:30 So however you’re reaching for it,
0:54:32 you can’t be reaching for it
0:54:34 because it’s already what you are.
0:54:37 So Henry, that’s no help at all
0:54:39 because I’m not experiencing it, what do I–
0:54:43 So the path in practice
0:54:46 is really a path of coming back,
0:54:50 coming back more and more to just being,
0:54:53 to being more and more okay, just being,
0:54:55 meaning including the things we find difficult,
0:54:57 we can just be with them.
0:54:59 And we’re developing this capacity.
0:55:01 This is why it all builds up and helps,
0:55:05 is to be developing the capacity to be with
0:55:09 what we find hard, to know these impulses
0:55:10 that we have that, you know,
0:55:13 are impulses for distraction and suppression
0:55:16 and reaching for stuff and avoiding stuff,
0:55:17 pushing stuff away.
0:55:21 All of that to get, to be getting to know that
0:55:26 in a space that’s ours are just being aware.
0:55:32 We’re coming home more and more to just being.
0:55:37 And the more we’re able to just be sooner or later
0:55:40 in that condition of just being,
0:55:45 we might suddenly get a hit that, oh my gosh,
0:55:49 I’ve just never been what I thought I was.
0:55:51 – Right, so it’s not even actually like you’re coming back
0:55:56 to who you are, ’cause you is just a construct as well.
0:55:58 – Well that’s true, but in a certain way you are,
0:56:02 because you’re not a global you.
0:56:04 – Not a Kevin you.
0:56:08 – Exactly, well even maybe what Kevin really is,
0:56:11 is this global you, you know?
0:56:14 It’s not what he’d thought.
0:56:19 And Henry, likewise, thinks often he’s this guy
0:56:23 is trying to do this and trying to not do that and so on.
0:56:25 And actually all along, oh my gosh,
0:56:28 what that version of Henry has been,
0:56:33 it’s been made of the real Henry and the real Kevin,
0:56:37 which is just very different.
0:56:39 – And do you see that as like a,
0:56:42 I mean, when you say the real Henry and the real Kevin,
0:56:45 do you see that as two separate individuals?
0:56:48 Or is there, is there such a thing as Henry and Kevin?
0:56:51 – Yeah, well, again, it’s the answer that depends.
0:56:52 – Do you wanna go?
0:56:55 – Yeah, and there are different sort of levels, you know?
0:56:58 Honestly, there is a level on which
0:57:01 there’s no Kevin and no Henry, there really is.
0:57:02 – What would Zen call that?
0:57:06 – Oh, a true person of no rank, true self, you know?
0:57:09 – I love that true person of no rank.
0:57:10 – Yeah, you’re just,
0:57:13 oh, it’s such a beautiful saying, a person of no rank.
0:57:17 – That’s Rinzai, Rinzai, Lin Chi, great Chinese master.
0:57:21 You know, it’s, Zen sometimes does use a word, the true self.
0:57:22 – True self.
0:57:24 – Person of the rank feels so good though.
0:57:26 Why does that feel so good?
0:57:28 – ‘Cause it’s so habituated to-
0:57:30 – We wanna climb, we wanna rank everything-
0:57:31 – Status.
0:57:32 – Yes.
0:57:33 – Hierarchy.
0:57:33 – But just better, worse.
0:57:37 – Actually, I actually think I own personofnorank.com
0:57:38 or something like that.
0:57:39 I own something like that.
0:57:40 ‘Cause I read it somewhere.
0:57:40 – Oh my gosh.
0:57:43 – By these domains because I’m trying to rank things
0:57:47 and like, by the unrankable thing as a holdable object.
0:57:49 (laughing)
0:57:50 – Okay.
0:57:51 – That’s so cool.
0:57:53 – No, I have no rank, personal rank.
0:57:55 – I’ll tell you later, it’s ridiculous.
0:57:57 – Hector, funny that you bring up the true person of no rank
0:58:01 ’cause we got a course starting on November 3rd on it.
0:58:04 And the true person of no rank has come down
0:58:06 actually as a co-an in Zen.
0:58:08 And the full story,
0:58:11 I don’t know if you know it is Rinzai,
0:58:14 this great Zen master ninth century or Lin Chi.
0:58:15 – Who started the Rinzai sect.
0:58:17 – Which is one of the two major big sects.
0:58:21 – One of the two great schools of Zen, Soto and Rinzai.
0:58:24 He said, don’t you know that there is a true person,
0:58:28 a true you, a person of no rank,
0:58:31 constantly going in and out
0:58:34 of the portals of your head.
0:58:38 Where, what is this true person of no rank?
0:58:40 – Okay, when was that said?
0:58:45 – He died in 866, so maybe 840, 850.
0:58:48 – This is just what we know now with like quantum mechanics
0:58:49 and everything that’s going on
0:58:50 with like string theory and everything.
0:58:52 It’s like, do you kind of like,
0:58:54 does that blow your mind when you read some of these articles
0:58:56 like the scientists are publishing and you’re like,
0:58:58 oh, this maps to like.
0:58:59 – It totally does.
0:59:02 I think, I can’t explain why,
0:59:06 but I think in Zen and other practices,
0:59:10 you do taste these things that quantum physics is finding.
0:59:11 – Yes.
0:59:12 – And I, you know, I mean,
0:59:15 I can’t defend this ’cause I’ve got no evidence at all,
0:59:19 but I suspect that our whole idea of distance,
0:59:23 you know, into planetary travel, into solar travel,
0:59:25 whatever, it’s just so daunting
0:59:27 ’cause we think distances are so huge.
0:59:32 But what if, I mean, really in awakening experiences,
0:59:34 we were talking about time disappearing.
0:59:36 Sometimes it depends on the experience.
0:59:38 So does space.
0:59:39 You can–
0:59:40 – Have you experienced that in space?
0:59:40 – I have.
0:59:44 I just, I mean, you know, God, I’m going to sound so weird,
0:59:48 but the very first experience I had actually was like,
0:59:51 I knew that I was made of the universe.
0:59:53 I wasn’t this separate being.
0:59:58 I was, I was just, what I really was was the universe.
1:00:02 And the whole, I mean, I don’t mean that in some grandiose way.
1:00:03 It’s actually the opposite.
1:00:05 There’s not me.
1:00:09 There’s just the universe which is choosing to be me
1:00:11 as it’s choosing to be each of us.
1:00:14 And when we drop into it on that level,
1:00:17 whatever that level is, there is no space.
1:00:21 So I kind of, it was, I suddenly felt as if my nose
1:00:23 was touching the beginning of time
1:00:27 and my fingertips were touching the end of the universe.
1:00:30 – So when you say there’s, that sounds amazing.
1:00:31 So it sounds like you’re on a crazy trip
1:00:33 on some psychedelic–
1:00:34 – No psychedelics at all.
1:00:36 – Yeah, if there’s no space,
1:00:38 is there no emptiness in that state?
1:00:42 – See, emptiness is a misleading term
1:00:44 ’cause sometimes we can have an experience
1:00:47 where it’s a great empty space, right?
1:00:51 But sometimes emptiness actually, it’s just nothing.
1:00:53 It’s more like nothing.
1:00:56 – Like nil, like a lack of like–
1:00:59 – A zero, an absolute zero.
1:01:00 And I mean–
1:01:01 – Is that mool?
1:01:04 – It is, it is, it is.
1:01:07 – That’s a coin, people can look up at that.
1:01:09 – But remember, it’s right here now.
1:01:10 – Right.
1:01:12 – So even right now, when, actually,
1:01:14 if we just go to Rinzai again,
1:01:17 your sense gates, your seeing, your hearing,
1:01:20 smelling, tasting, and words, you know,
1:01:23 this is what it means by the portals of your head,
1:01:25 you know, is sense gates, basically.
1:01:29 There’s this true person without status
1:01:31 coming and going through your senses,
1:01:34 actually being your senses.
1:01:37 So your very sense of sight
1:01:41 and you’re receiving the very sights that you’re seeing,
1:01:44 your hearing of sounds,
1:01:49 they are the true person without rank.
1:01:53 They’re the true you, where there’s no ranking,
1:01:56 there’s no status, there’s no better and worse,
1:02:00 there’s no good and bad, there’s no truer and less true.
1:02:05 In the true person, it’s all real and true, you know?
1:02:10 And it’s actually your own experience is that discovery
1:02:14 of sort of the real you.
1:02:19 It’s not elsewhere, it’s in your very experience now.
1:02:24 And it’s actually, it is also, you just brought up Mu,
1:02:28 it’s also this cardinal Koan Mu,
1:02:30 where it’s just a little word that means not,
1:02:34 it’s right here, it’s this, it’s this.
1:02:38 There’s a way that all this is manifesting just as it is,
1:02:40 and at the same time,
1:02:44 it’s all kind of an expression of something else
1:02:49 that’s here, not, not that it’s all happening,
1:02:55 it’s all happening, but in a certain way,
1:03:00 it also kind of isn’t, both is and isn’t, kind of.
1:03:02 – I need to jump on the cushion after this,
1:03:04 this is like, I need to get back at it.
1:03:05 (laughing)
1:03:08 Man, I love that, thank you for sharing that, Harry,
1:03:11 that’s certainly aspirational for me
1:03:12 to get back on the cushion.
1:03:13 – I’m sorry, it’s so weird.
1:03:16 – No, it’s not weird, what the weird thing is,
1:03:20 I’m starting to like, not get it, but like, it’s so funny,
1:03:22 it’s like if you pick up Zen, mind, beginner’s mind,
1:03:23 and you read it the first time,
1:03:25 and you’re like, what the hell are they talking about?
1:03:27 You know, what is this Zuki talking about?
1:03:29 And then a decade later, you keep reading it,
1:03:31 and all of a sudden you’re like, well, I didn’t,
1:03:33 wait, I’m seeing that slightly differently now.
1:03:35 – Yes, yes, yes, yes.
1:03:37 – And I feel like, is that a common thing
1:03:40 with practitioners, where like, all of a sudden you’re like,
1:03:41 that sentence doesn’t mean the same to me
1:03:43 than it did two years ago.
1:03:45 – That’s right, ’cause you’re on the train.
1:03:46 – Right.
1:03:47 – You’re on the train, and the landscape,
1:03:50 and the perspective on the landscape is changing.
1:03:51 – Right.
1:03:52 – Therefore, you read a line,
1:03:54 you might not even have noticed.
1:03:59 – Right, so what I can tell people is that,
1:04:02 and this is from someone that has zero awakening,
1:04:04 but I will say in just in my practice,
1:04:06 like the things that you’re saying now
1:04:07 make a lot more sense to me than
1:04:09 if I had just heard it for the first time,
1:04:11 I had never had a practice.
1:04:12 – Right, right.
1:04:13 – Which is quite nice to know,
1:04:15 this isn’t always gonna sound like gibberish to everyone
1:04:18 if they pick up and get a practice.
1:04:22 – Exactly, I mean, my whole feeling today is that
1:04:26 we don’t wanna only be pursuing awakening,
1:04:28 ’cause there are so many great benefits
1:04:30 that come from meditating,
1:04:35 and so the way is a map and a path that takes you through,
1:04:38 yes, possibilities of awakening,
1:04:41 little prompts and questions that might help get a glimpse,
1:04:43 but also all these other things,
1:04:45 really helping us get grounded in our mindfulness
1:04:47 so that we can get more self-compassion
1:04:49 and compassion for others,
1:04:51 helping us feel more connected,
1:04:54 which is a huge terrain as meditation
1:04:56 is actually not a solitary pursuit.
1:04:58 It’s very much about connecting with others,
1:05:00 connecting with the world,
1:05:02 connecting with our experience here and now,
1:05:04 so that’s critical as well,
1:05:05 and there’s getting into flow states,
1:05:08 absorption states, Samadhi, as it’s called,
1:05:11 where you kinda cast loose a little bit
1:05:14 and you feel a great ease and a great peace
1:05:18 and effortlessness and a richness and a fulfillment.
1:05:20 That’s all tremendously valuable,
1:05:24 even though it’s not yet this kind of shift into it,
1:05:26 or it’s weird shit that we’ve been talking about.
1:05:28 – Yeah, well, it’s funny ’cause I’ve had this practice
1:05:30 with you where it’s I’m working on a call and I’m sitting,
1:05:33 I’m not using headphones, I’m not using guided,
1:05:35 I’m just sitting and I’m working on it,
1:05:38 and I have a very structured practice on that front,
1:05:39 and then you came out with the app
1:05:43 and I started using it and in conjunction with my sitting,
1:05:46 and I found out that one of the things I loved about it
1:05:48 was that you have these different mountains,
1:05:50 the different retreats that you go through,
1:05:52 and it was rounding out my knowledge
1:05:53 in so many other ways,
1:05:57 which I think for me personally, just speaking from myself,
1:06:01 is like it created a stronger foundation of knowledge,
1:06:03 and I think with that stronger foundation,
1:06:05 no matter which way you decide to take it,
1:06:07 you’ll be better off because of that.
1:06:09 – That is exactly my hope,
1:06:12 that I think it’s much more wholesome to have
1:06:17 a well-rounded practice because it helps more of us.
1:06:19 We’re multi-dimensional creatures,
1:06:22 and if we put all our eggs in one basket,
1:06:24 other things are gonna suffer,
1:06:27 and there is a phenomenon they call spiritual bypassing,
1:06:30 where, and I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it,
1:06:35 where we’re so focused on spiritual attainment of some kind,
1:06:37 which we already know is a bad idea anyway,
1:06:39 ’cause they won’t help you get it,
1:06:41 but anyway, we’re focused on our practice,
1:06:45 and we’re looking to get all our well-being
1:06:46 out of our practice,
1:06:50 and lo and behold, my wife’s not so happy with me,
1:06:52 but darling, I’m doing all this great practice,
1:06:54 I’m becoming a more compassionate,
1:06:56 and it doesn’t matter that I’m ignoring you,
1:06:58 and going off to do these machines,
1:07:00 ’cause I’m actually working on being,
1:07:03 it does matter, and actually, man,
1:07:05 I could do a bit of connecting,
1:07:10 and so having the whole person
1:07:12 be on board with the practice,
1:07:13 it’s just much, much healthier.
1:07:16 – That’s one thing that I like about the Way App,
1:07:18 is it is not just marching towards enlightenment,
1:07:20 and enlightenment or bust,
1:07:23 as we’ve said a couple times, laughing.
1:07:27 It is this kind of, it feels more multimodal,
1:07:30 kind of different types of experiences
1:07:31 on each one of these kind of mountaintops
1:07:33 that you go through and traverse through,
1:07:34 which is really cool,
1:07:37 and I like that you’ve always been an advocate
1:07:38 for traditional therapy,
1:07:41 for you talk about internal family systems one time,
1:07:42 which I tried out, which was fantastic.
1:07:43 – Isn’t great, yeah.
1:07:44 – Yeah, and so it’s like,
1:07:47 yeah, we’ll get into a question about that in a second,
1:07:49 actually, there’s a question just about that, but.
1:07:51 – So I just wanna say one last thing, please.
1:07:53 – At the same time, as all we’ve just been saying,
1:07:56 I think it’s really valuable to talk about awakening
1:07:59 so people know it’s a real possibility,
1:08:01 and it is part of the picture,
1:08:03 ’cause people sometimes have experiences of it,
1:08:06 and but without any context,
1:08:08 they’d no idea what just happened.
1:08:10 I wanna be part of the,
1:08:13 could you call it educational,
1:08:17 part of the movement that is letting more people know
1:08:20 that it is a human capacity awakening,
1:08:24 and that it does have a name and it’s a real thing,
1:08:25 ’cause it can be so disorienting.
1:08:27 So I just wanted to state that.
1:08:29 It’s important, I think,
1:08:32 that it be recognized and acknowledged as well.
1:08:34 – It is very important because there is,
1:08:36 like for example, I mean, you said this very,
1:08:38 you were very young when you had this experience,
1:08:40 and you were like, “What the hell was that?”
1:08:43 And Eckhart Tolle is another one
1:08:45 where he was near suicidal,
1:08:47 had this amazing awakening opening moment,
1:08:50 and he’s famous for saying that he just sat on park benches
1:08:52 in the kind of the state of awe
1:08:54 for weeks and months at a time,
1:08:56 not knowing what had happened to him.
1:08:59 And so it’s like, it can pop like that randomly,
1:09:01 which is crazy.
1:09:03 – Yes, yes, exactly.
1:09:05 – Okay, cool, so a couple of questions.
1:09:06 Last one, Tim wanted me to ask you,
1:09:10 is caffeine helpful or hurtful prior to sitting?
1:09:13 – Look, there’s a deep relationship
1:09:16 between tea and meditation.
1:09:19 I think both in India and in China and in Japan,
1:09:21 and tea is caffeinated.
1:09:22 There’s a reason for it.
1:09:25 I think if you can have,
1:09:28 if you just have straight coffee,
1:09:30 I think have what you want.
1:09:33 There’s one Zen master, I never sat with him,
1:09:37 but I know that his students at one point
1:09:40 were kind of, they were all sort of purists who said,
1:09:43 we shouldn’t have coffee on retreats,
1:09:45 on deep Zen sessions.
1:09:47 They call session intensive meditation.
1:09:48 – I have broken that rule at your Zendo.
1:09:49 I apologize.
1:09:51 – No, you’re glad you did.
1:09:53 ‘Cause this guy was called Pat Hawke Roshi, actually.
1:09:55 He died a few years ago.
1:09:58 And he said, when they were asking him,
1:10:01 can we, we want to abolish coffee,
1:10:04 he said, no coffee, no Pat.
1:10:07 And I was, he wouldn’t show up for the retreat
1:10:08 if they didn’t have coffee.
1:10:09 – Wow.
1:10:10 – They’re gonna have coffee.
1:10:11 – That’s crazy.
1:10:13 – I think it’s, I think whatever, experiment.
1:10:14 – Yeah.
1:10:18 – I, yeah, I think there’s a reason
1:10:20 that tea has been part of it.
1:10:23 – Do you know the Japanese story or origins of tea?
1:10:25 – Did you ever, did you ever, did you ever see one?
1:10:27 – I know the Chinese with Bodhidharma.
1:10:30 – Oh, so there’s two, there’s probably multiple,
1:10:33 but the founding stories of tea, just for,
1:10:34 it’s a fun little anthem.
1:10:35 So Shanang, who I have tattooed here,
1:10:40 which is the Chinese herbalist that was,
1:10:42 they think it was the real one that discovered it.
1:10:44 The first one to actually write it down.
1:10:45 And that was like pretty straightforward.
1:10:47 He found some leaves, he put it in some boiling water
1:10:49 and like felt something was like,
1:10:50 this is kind of awesome, right?
1:10:52 And then the Japanese are so cool
1:10:55 where they have this story where like their founding,
1:10:57 you know, father of tea was this man
1:11:00 who was having trouble meditating
1:11:01 and so do you know what I’m about to say?
1:11:05 And so he cut off his eyelids to keep his eyes open
1:11:06 so he wouldn’t fall asleep.
1:11:08 And he threw his eyelids on the ground
1:11:09 and it grew tea plants.
1:11:11 – Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
1:11:13 But that’s the story of Bodhidharma.
1:11:14 – Oh, yeah.
1:11:15 – It’s not the eyelids, is it?
1:11:16 – It is.
1:11:17 – It is?
1:11:17 – Yeah.
1:11:20 He’s in his cave sitting for nine years in China.
1:11:22 – Why did they say that was a Japanese thing as well?
1:11:23 Maybe that was–
1:11:24 – Well, that was because it’s part of the Zen.
1:11:26 – Is it come through Zen?
1:11:27 – Interesting, I did not know that.
1:11:29 Okay, so now you’re, that’s fascinating.
1:11:30 So that is–
1:11:35 – You know, he came from India to China, bringing Zen
1:11:38 with him, apparently, met an emperor
1:11:40 of the southern kingdom of China
1:11:44 and who kind of had a sort of Zen interview with him,
1:11:47 didn’t understand what Bodhidharma was saying at all.
1:11:50 And Bodhidharma left, crossed the Yangtze River
1:11:52 on a single blade of grass
1:11:53 and then went off to Shaolin
1:11:55 and sat in a cave for nine years.
1:11:57 And while he was sitting there, he was getting sleepy
1:11:59 so cut off his eyelids.
1:12:01 Exactly, three to one grand tea.
1:12:02 – I love those stories
1:12:03 ’cause they’re just so entertaining
1:12:06 when you hear those fables around this stuff.
1:12:08 – Well, he said, hey, do you know the story of when he died?
1:12:09 – No.
1:12:10 – That’s pretty amazing.
1:12:13 When Bodhidharma died, they put him in a cave
1:12:16 and rolled a big stone into the mouth of the cave,
1:12:17 which might sound familiar.
1:12:18 – Yeah, yeah.
1:12:21 – So three days later, there’s an official
1:12:23 who’s been away somewhere in the far west.
1:12:27 He’s walking back to the town where Bodhidharma
1:12:28 was living and just died.
1:12:31 And he meets Bodhidharma on the road carrying a sandal.
1:12:34 And he says, hey, Bodhidharma, where are you going?
1:12:35 What’s happening?
1:12:37 And Bodhidharma said, I’m going home.
1:12:38 As though it’s had little exchange
1:12:41 and the guy carries on, gets to the town.
1:12:43 Says, I heard Bodhidharma left.
1:12:45 Said, no, no, Bodhidharma’s here.
1:12:47 He just died three or four days ago.
1:12:48 He said, no, he didn’t.
1:12:50 I just met him on the road.
1:12:53 So they go to the cave and roll the stone out of the mouth.
1:12:55 Sure enough, Bodhidharma’s not there.
1:12:58 But he left one sandal behind.
1:13:00 – That’s an amazing little zen detail.
1:13:03 – So many resurrections with the stone going away, you know?
1:13:04 – Isn’t it incredible?
1:13:05 – Yeah.
1:13:07 – All right, so a couple quick questions.
1:13:09 These came in from folks that were emailing in.
1:13:13 When being asked, what is the nature of the clock
1:13:16 or some other type of traditional koan?
1:13:21 Do you think there is value in that kind of approach
1:13:23 to zen in modern society?
1:13:25 Are there any similar practices
1:13:29 that are equivalent to koans based on modern approaches?
1:13:32 – Yeah, look, I think, I mean, what I would say
1:13:36 is that koans actually are about our modern life.
1:13:40 It’s true that they’ll use old fashioned terminology
1:13:41 and things that we don’t have.
1:13:45 Like there’s one koan where a master hits someone
1:13:48 with a thing called a chin rest.
1:13:50 So nobody knows what a chin rest is.
1:13:53 It’s actually when monks were meditating a lot
1:13:57 and they’re gonna even do multiple days on end meditating,
1:14:00 they would have a board with a kind of support on the end
1:14:02 and rest it under their chin while sitting
1:14:05 so that they can actually sleep while sitting.
1:14:07 So who knows what, nobody would,
1:14:09 you never see that in modern life.
1:14:14 So yeah, you could change that to a cushion
1:14:17 or something instead of a chin rest.
1:14:20 And it would make no difference
1:14:22 because the koans aren’t,
1:14:25 I hope I’m not saying this question correctly,
1:14:27 but it’s right that there are things
1:14:29 that come from another time and place
1:14:32 and they could actually,
1:14:34 really they could just as well be contemporary things.
1:14:37 ‘Cause the point is, again,
1:14:42 that they’re attempting to draw us back into
1:14:48 the reality out of which all objects arise.
1:14:53 So, and the reality that all our experience is made of.
1:14:57 So whether it’s a weird Chinese implement
1:15:01 called a chin rest or whether it’s a glass today,
1:15:05 it’s actually the koan’s job is exactly the same.
1:15:10 It’s inviting us to realize that there is a reality,
1:15:14 there’s a level of experience in which,
1:15:15 and it’s here right now,
1:15:19 this glass and the mind that’s seeing the glass
1:15:22 and the arm and hand that are holding the glass,
1:15:27 they’re all made of that same awareness,
1:15:30 reality, experience.
1:15:33 They’re all expressions of it,
1:15:36 of one level of reality.
1:15:39 They’re all coming out of it, they’re all made of it.
1:15:42 So, and from that point of view,
1:15:47 they’re just as relevant today as 2,000 years ago.
1:15:49 They must be, you know,
1:15:51 ’cause they’re actually about something
1:15:55 that sort of I always feel is like just behind
1:15:57 our ordinary experience.
1:15:59 And actually, there is a Zen phrase,
1:16:02 take the backward step that shines the light inward,
1:16:06 like withdraw this little bit and then you get illuminated
1:16:09 and then you see what all this is in a different way.
1:16:10 – Excellent.
1:16:11 – A couple more questions for you.
1:16:12 – Sure.
1:16:14 – All right, next one here from Cody.
1:16:17 “Hi, Henry, big fan of your Mountain Cloud Zendo
1:16:19 “and your meditation at the Way.
1:16:23 “I’m having a great time going through all the trails.
1:16:24 “Questions on the differences
1:16:27 “between the various meditation-based religions,
1:16:32 “Thiruvada, Buddhism, Mahayana.”
1:16:34 I always get that one hard to pronounce.
1:16:38 “Hindu and Zen all can claim meditation masters
1:16:41 “that have taken the practice almost as far as it can go,
1:16:44 “but come to different conclusions on past lives
1:16:46 “and death, conclusions, I would imagine,
1:16:51 “that come from learnings directly from meditation.
1:16:53 “Why do you think that is?”
1:16:56 So these different teachers having slightly different takes
1:16:58 but yet are going very deep
1:16:59 and are having these awakening moments.
1:17:02 Why are they having different conclusions?
1:17:04 – Yeah, so yeah, let me just sort of throw that
1:17:06 in a little intersense perspective,
1:17:11 particularly in the Hindu world and the Thiruvada world,
1:17:14 there’s a lot of emphasis on reincarnation,
1:17:16 or at least it’s there.
1:17:20 Whereas in, you can find it in Mahayana as well,
1:17:22 but you can also find Mahayana Buddhism
1:17:23 that doesn’t speak about it
1:17:25 and Zen also does not speak about it.
1:17:27 It just doesn’t go there.
1:17:30 And my friend Stephen Batchelor,
1:17:34 who’s a fantastic Buddhist practitioner and author,
1:17:39 he’s written quite a lot about Thiruvada Buddhism mostly,
1:17:40 somewhat about Zen as well.
1:17:42 He’s a really interesting guy.
1:17:44 He wrote a great book called Buddhism Without Beliefs.
1:17:47 And his argument, take this or leave this,
1:17:50 but he believes that the cultural context
1:17:55 in which Buddhism emerged already had reincarnationism
1:17:58 as a sort of standard part of their worldview.
1:18:01 Therefore, early Buddhism just adopted that
1:18:05 and slightly repurposed it for Buddhism, but not much.
1:18:07 I mean, it’s basically the same system.
1:18:09 By the way, just a footnote,
1:18:13 there are different kinds of reincarnationist belief.
1:18:15 And this one, the one that we’re familiar with,
1:18:18 it’s called tripartite ’cause it has three threads to it.
1:18:22 One is that the reincarnations are a kind of,
1:18:24 they have a potential sort of moral hierarchy.
1:18:27 You can get sort of better and better births
1:18:30 and there’s a kind of final outcome you hope for,
1:18:33 which is release from being born again.
1:18:35 And in some traditions, that’s what Nirvana means.
1:18:37 You’re not gonna get born again.
1:18:39 And I think another element in that system
1:18:42 is that you can sort of go up and down the hierarchy,
1:18:44 depending on how you behave and live.
1:18:49 But Zen just, I think Zen’s just not interested.
1:18:53 Let’s just understand what this moment is, shall we?
1:18:54 Or let’s understand this life.
1:18:58 There’s enough to be getting on with right here in this life.
1:19:00 And actually there’s enough to be getting on with right here
1:19:03 in this very moment.
1:19:08 All answers, in a sense, are only in one place, right here.
1:19:13 And so why would we be speculating about other worlds
1:19:15 that we’re born into and other?
1:19:20 And then again, I find this always a bit perplexing.
1:19:26 I mean, it is a path of untangling the tangled knot
1:19:31 of self and finding that it was just a tangle.
1:19:39 And when it’s untangled, there isn’t something there.
1:19:43 What is it that gets, that would go on to another life?
1:19:49 One of the core sort of insights of Buddhism is no self.
1:19:53 That it’s a bit like complex systems,
1:19:57 that systems have their own sort of dynamic they develop.
1:19:58 And that’s what’s happening here.
1:20:01 Multiple systems are being this life,
1:20:04 but there isn’t one hard core self
1:20:09 that can be pinpointed as this is me.
1:20:14 That’s actually, in a way, sort of core of the practice.
1:20:15 So what on earth would it be
1:20:19 that theoretically might go into another life?
1:20:24 I’ve never really quite understood that.
1:20:25 – What do you think is like,
1:20:27 if you have these different sects
1:20:30 that all have their own enlightened masters
1:20:34 and they have slightly different viewpoints,
1:20:37 is that just the thinking mind kind of engaging?
1:20:39 And ’cause like, in some sense,
1:20:42 like there’s no such thing as like a perfect being, right?
1:20:46 So it’s like, we’re never gonna have the perfect clear
1:20:49 like picture in this entity, right?
1:20:51 Do you believe that’s kind of what’s going on here?
1:20:53 And why we have slightly different takes
1:20:56 on different things is it’s a little bit of like,
1:20:57 to your point about kind of playing in some
1:20:59 of the culture aspects and rolling those
1:21:03 into what your beliefs are or, you know,
1:21:04 but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
1:21:06 – No, no, this is different.
1:21:06 – Yeah, exactly.
1:21:08 I don’t think it’s good or bad,
1:21:11 but I think it probably is cultural context.
1:21:14 If I’d been brought up, you know,
1:21:16 in a very theistic context,
1:21:19 and I’d had that experience that I had when I was 19,
1:21:22 when I had a first awakening
1:21:25 that we just referenced a little bit a while ago,
1:21:29 might I have thought I’d met God?
1:21:31 I suppose I might have,
1:21:33 and I might have been very convinced to that.
1:21:35 Wow, now I had real proof God exists.
1:21:39 But I was brought up without a belief of that kind.
1:21:40 – Yeah.
1:21:42 – So I just didn’t go there, you know?
1:21:43 – It’s kind of like the book,
1:21:45 ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, right?
1:21:47 – Yeah, well, that man, that’s a deep book.
1:21:48 Gosh, I love that.
1:21:50 – But it’s very much like,
1:21:51 so we don’t know who wrote it, is that correct?
1:21:52 – Correct, Anonymous Author.
1:21:54 – Anonymous Author, but it feels like
1:21:56 it was potentially a Catholic monk or–
1:22:00 – Yeah, it was a 14th century, I think, in English.
1:22:05 And Catholic Catholicism was the only available option
1:22:08 back in those days in Northern Europe and Western Europe.
1:22:09 So it would have been a Catholic monk.
1:22:11 – Did you want to explain that book real quick?
1:22:12 ‘Cause this is a great example of somebody
1:22:14 that had an awakening type–
1:22:17 – Oh, my gosh, yeah, I know, he was very, very deep.
1:22:20 I mean, actually, do we know that it was a guy?
1:22:21 I don’t know if we know that.
1:22:26 The author had clearly gone very deep
1:22:30 in this contemplative, meditative journey
1:22:31 and had come to the conclusion
1:22:36 that God was sort of absolutely unknowable.
1:22:40 So what they meant when they said the word God
1:22:43 was not like our notions of Yahweh,
1:22:48 the ruler in the sky and his sort of tribal God of Israel,
1:22:52 his smite-mind enemies and all that.
1:22:53 Nothing like that at all.
1:22:59 Rather, it was a place of thorough unknowing,
1:23:01 of just not knowing.
1:23:05 And you could get deeper and deeper into that not knowing
1:23:09 until there was kind of nothing there.
1:23:13 So it’s very like Buddhist awakening, Zen awakening,
1:23:17 where you can get to the state where there’s less
1:23:21 and less and less content until there’s no content.
1:23:23 And it’s just a vast,
1:23:25 but you can’t even say it’s vast, actually.
1:23:27 It’s a dimensionless,
1:23:31 sizeless, spaceless, timeless.
1:23:32 – Right.
1:23:35 – And somehow it’s part of our makeup.
1:23:40 So we humans can actually experience it.
1:23:44 And more than that, in a certain way, we can’t not.
1:23:46 I mean, we can not experience it,
1:23:49 but we are always made of it.
1:23:50 – Yeah.
1:23:52 And what’s fascinating about this particular book
1:23:53 is in correct me if I’m wrong,
1:23:57 but it felt as though you have Buddhism over here,
1:24:00 and this seemed to be more on the kind of like,
1:24:03 maybe potentially Catholic side of the house.
1:24:05 And we know there’s been these awakening type moments
1:24:09 and very deep prayer states, things of that nature.
1:24:11 So it’s like in some sense,
1:24:15 there’s multiple mountaintops here to be discovered.
1:24:17 And it doesn’t have to be like,
1:24:20 people can get to the same more or less arena
1:24:24 through different modalities and traditions.
1:24:25 – Absolutely.
1:24:27 In fact, in my new book, Original Love,
1:24:28 I talk about going to Mount Athos,
1:24:33 which is this holy mountain of the Greek Orthodox church
1:24:36 and meeting an abbot there who was describing
1:24:40 the time when in his language, he saw the face of God.
1:24:41 And it was a moment when he was looking,
1:24:45 he was riding the ferry back to the peninsula
1:24:48 of Mount Athos from the local town in the evening.
1:24:51 And he saw the holy mountain
1:24:56 and it just dissolved into nothing and him too.
1:24:59 I was a classic Zen awakening.
1:25:03 But in his language, it was seeing the face of God.
1:25:06 And then he went on beyond that in his training
1:25:09 to learn to see the face of God in everything.
1:25:13 And that’s kind of, of course, different language,
1:25:16 but very similar kind of training
1:25:20 to find the timeless in every moment,
1:25:25 to find the marvel of things arising in every moment.
1:25:29 And to taste this a certain way is sort of,
1:25:31 I want to say a vastness that’s present.
1:25:33 It’s also sizeless though.
1:25:35 So it’s not the right language
1:25:39 and it’s an emptiness and it’s a fullness at the same time.
1:25:40 And it’s right here.
1:25:41 It’s really right here.
1:25:43 But once again, I don’t want to give the impression
1:25:47 that this app is just solely laser focused on awakening.
1:25:51 No, that’s, it’s part of our human makeup.
1:25:53 And the whole journey of meditation
1:25:58 is kind of developing in all these different dimensions
1:26:01 that help us be human.
1:26:06 And help us be ourselves more fully and amply
1:26:10 and in turn, of course, be more helpful in the world
1:26:15 and serve our fellow creatures, our fellow beings.
1:26:17 – It’s a great point, right?
1:26:20 Because in some sense, like there’s this idea that,
1:26:25 oh, if you have these states of bliss
1:26:27 and everything falls away and everything is empty
1:26:32 and you might lose the sight of what matters here
1:26:35 and now with everyday world affairs, right?
1:26:36 – Yes, totally.
1:26:38 – And so there’s like some sense of like,
1:26:41 well, actually this will probably sharpen your compassion
1:26:44 and make you more effective in some ways in this life.
1:26:45 – Exactly.
1:26:47 And I always say, when people think,
1:26:48 aren’t you checking out?
1:26:51 ‘Cause sometimes a criticism that is sometimes made
1:26:54 of spiritual practitioners is they get attached to,
1:26:56 they’ve had some great awakening,
1:26:59 they sort of get attached to it, can happen.
1:27:04 But my view is like, if you really see through,
1:27:07 you know there’s nothing to get attached to.
1:27:10 And you also know that what you’ve realized
1:27:12 is present everywhere.
1:27:14 So there’s absolutely no need to be,
1:27:17 I wanna be in that checked out spiritual state.
1:27:20 Not at all, it should knock that away completely.
1:27:23 A really deep experience should just do away with that.
1:27:26 Or even a maybe not so deep experience, I don’t know,
1:27:28 but we can have experiences that knock that away
1:27:31 ’cause we know that it is everywhere
1:27:33 and it cannot but be everywhere.
1:27:37 So there’s no need to be trying to cling to it.
1:27:38 See what I mean?
1:27:40 It’s like, you don’t have to stay in some special state.
1:27:42 It’s just all this, you know,
1:27:45 and you’re in the thick of it all the time.
1:27:49 So no need to be trying to have a certain kind of experience.
1:27:51 We’re in the thick of it.
1:27:54 And but the difference is where we’ve been through it.
1:27:57 It’s like, yeah, we’re less attached to the little dictator,
1:28:01 you know, and we’re more able to,
1:28:04 I don’t, I’m always hesitant to,
1:28:07 I don’t like doing down the sense of self actually,
1:28:08 although it might sound like I have
1:28:11 because I think it just needs to be loved.
1:28:15 And it actually, by loving ourself,
1:28:18 we actually get closer to letting go of self.
1:28:23 Weirdly, but we do.
1:28:24 I’m sure that’s true.
1:28:28 It’s by, if we think we’re, we don’t want it,
1:28:29 we want to get rid of it, you know?
1:28:31 That’s what I’ve heard people talking about,
1:28:36 spiritual teachers, sort of release from yourself or something.
1:28:38 – Yeah, so it’s more of embracing of what–
1:28:41 – I think it’s more embracing right now, yeah, yeah.
1:28:44 ‘Cause actually if we’re trying to sort of get rid of it,
1:28:46 that’s the self doing that.
1:28:49 I mean, it’s actually the self thing,
1:28:50 I don’t want the self.
1:28:51 – Right, right, right.
1:28:52 – ‘Cause the self does a version.
1:28:54 – Like who’s saying that you want to get rid of it?
1:28:55 – Yeah, exactly, exactly.
1:28:58 – Amazing, Henry, real quick to wrap up,
1:29:02 obviously thewayapp.com, fantastic,
1:29:04 there’s a free trial, you got to try it out there,
1:29:07 so you have these great sits combined
1:29:11 with some great talks on video as well, which is fun.
1:29:13 iOS and Android, which is great.
1:29:16 And then also your new book,
1:29:17 we didn’t go deep on the new book,
1:29:20 but can you give me like the 30 second kind of version
1:29:23 of, it’s probably not long enough to talk to the book.
1:29:24 Why did you write this book?
1:29:26 Why now and what’s behind it?
1:29:29 – Oh man, I think it’s so needed,
1:29:32 a clear map of the possibilities of meditation.
1:29:35 That like we’ve been saying, mindfulness,
1:29:38 connection, flow, and awakening.
1:29:40 And they’re not all the same,
1:29:42 and they’re all immensely valuable,
1:29:45 and the healthiest practice has all of them.
1:29:47 When we find, when we get a hint of awakening,
1:29:49 a glimpse of awakening,
1:29:51 this current love surges up,
1:29:54 ’cause we just feel such love for everything,
1:29:55 it’s a common thing.
1:29:59 In Zen, they talk about original nature and original face,
1:30:00 seeing your original face
1:30:02 that you’ve had since before you were born.
1:30:05 That’s a terminology for having an awakening experience.
1:30:08 And I just said to myself,
1:30:10 love’s always there, it’s original love.
1:30:13 And it’s the same lovingness
1:30:15 that helps us soften in our emotional lives
1:30:17 through mindfulness,
1:30:18 that helps us connect with others more
1:30:20 and help others more.
1:30:23 And I say that when we have flow states
1:30:26 and absorption states in meditation,
1:30:29 it’s like falling in love with this moment.
1:30:32 So there’s sort of thread of love through it all,
1:30:35 but it’s not the usual meanings of love really.
1:30:38 It’s this unconditional well-being, basically.
1:30:40 – Fantastic.
1:30:41 – That’s it in a nutshell.
1:30:42 – And it’s on, I listened to it on Audible
1:30:44 and you read it yourself, which is awesome as well.
1:30:47 So, you can check that out, original love,
1:30:48 Audible or Amazon.
1:30:51 And yeah, in your website as well, right?
1:30:54 – Oh yeah, yeah, HenryShutman.com has some stuff on it.
1:30:55 – Yeah, ’cause you’re doing retreats
1:30:56 and all kinds of stuff.
1:31:00 And also you’re doing some more Zoom big group calls,
1:31:01 I know, with the app.
1:31:04 And there’s a lot of fun stuff to dig into here.
1:31:06 So, Henry, thanks for being on the show.
1:31:08 – Okay, but thanks so much for everything.
1:31:09 – That was awesome.