# How to Live a Happy Life: NPR's Laura Sydell Talks with Scott Snibbe #176

An episode of [How to Train a Happy Mind](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1496841325), 26 Nov 2024, 53 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/721908/episodes/16098782-how-to-live-a-happy-life-npr-s-laura-sydell-talks-with-scott-snibbe-176.mp3

NPR's Laura Sydell talks with Scott Snibbe about his book, How to Train a Happy Mind, at The Battery in San Francisco. They discuss interdependence (or emptiness) at length and also how great movies and comedians, like Jerry Seinfeld, can capture Buddhism's insights into how to live happy lives. Episode 176: NPR's Laura Sydell Talks with Scott Snibbe If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott. 🙏 Help us stay ad-free 📲 Follow us on socials

## Chapters

- 0:00 Introduction
- 2:26 Performing meditation
- 3:40 How did meditation help you through difficult times?
- 7:32 Why take the secular route?
- 9:49 Cause and effect
- 13:31 Emptiness
- 16:05 What is the lamrim?
- 21:01 Meditation isn’t always good
- 28:02 The Four Fun Facts
- 37:38 Science and Buddhism
- 42:35 Practical advice from the book
- 45:46 Everyone Walks the Hero’s Journey
- 49:26 Q&A

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker: How to Train a Happy Mind is a production of the nonprofit A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment.
[0:04] Speaker: Our podcast and programs are free and ad-free thanks to our generous donors.
[0:09] Speaker: To support us now, visit our website at howtotrainahappymind.org.
[0:14] Speaker: We accept cash, credit, bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, and your donations are tax deductible in the US.
[0:21] Speaker: On the website, you can also find links to purchase the book based on the podcast, How to Train a Happy Mind, that features a forward by the Dalai Lama.
[0:31] Speaker: There you can also join our train a happy mind community that meets weekly for lectures, meditations, and discussions.
[0:39] Speaker: I'm Scott Snibbe, and this is How to Train a Happy Mind.
[0:52] Speaker: For many people I know, one of our biggest dreams is to be interviewed on NPR by one of its star journalists.
[0:59] Speaker: This dream came true for me a dozen years ago when Laura Sydell, NPR's digital culture correspondent, interviewed me about a beautiful project called Biophilia that I collaborated on with the musician Bjork.
[1:11] Speaker: A couple months ago, I had the honor to again share the stage with Laura Sydell at San Francisco's The Battery to speak about my new book, How to Train a Happy Mind.
[1:22] Speaker: Laura and I talked at length about the most advanced topic in Buddhism, interdependence or emptiness, that teaches us how to let go of our inaccurate sense of separateness that we feel from the people and the world around us.
[1:36] Speaker: In doing so, we create the ultimate cause for a happy life.
[1:40] Speaker: We also talked about how great movies and comedians can capture Buddhism's insights into how to live happy lives, and we rift on a great Buddhist teaching Jerry Seinfeld gave in his most recent Netflix special.
[1:53] Speaker: This episode is airing during the big shopping week of Black Friday as we go into the holiday season in the US.
[1:59] Speaker: So if you're someone who enjoyed the How to Train a Happy Mind book, consider getting a copy as a gift for a loved one.
[2:14] Speaker: So this is so great to be here with you.
[2:16] Speaker: So if you were hoping for the blue pill, might be time to go.
[2:24] Speaker: We're gonna get to the truth here.
[2:26] Speaker: Before we start, though, I think I know you came here to listen and hear us talk, but given what we're about to talk about, I thought we'd just take one moment to just sit quietly.
[2:39] Speaker: Just take a few breaths.
[3:15] Speaker: Performing meditation.
[3:16] Speaker: Performing meditation.
[3:18] Speaker: It's a good reminder because I often some of my friends say, Oh, I used to have a meditation practice, or I never developed a meditation practice.
[3:26] Speaker: I don't have time.
[3:27] Speaker: I'd say you can meditate for one minute.
[3:30] Speaker: And I used to do that a lot, especially when I had a very busy life on a bench or anywhere.
[3:35] Speaker: And it's extraordinary.
[3:37] Speaker: We all could do that at any moment if we wanted to.
[3:40] Speaker: Yeah, it is, it is amazing.
[3:41] Speaker: So I wanted to talk about how you and I first met.
[3:44] Speaker: We met when I did a story about the artist Björk.
[3:49] Speaker: And as she said when I interviewed her, it's Björk, rhymes with Bjork.
[3:53] Speaker: People tend to say Björk for her album The Ophelia, which was about the environment and it was educational.
[3:59] Speaker: She hired you to do the interactive parts of it, which were really beautiful.
[4:04] Speaker: I highly recommend checking them out.
[4:06] Speaker: But you came to that after going through a very difficult time where, in fact, your practice and your meditation were key to getting through it.
[4:14] Speaker: So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
[4:16] Speaker: This is a great question because there's a standard way a lot of these talks go, and I usually don't get past the first chapter or two.
[4:23] Speaker: You've just fast-forwarded to the most advanced topic in the book, which proves you read the whole book, by the way, and I appreciate it.
[4:29] Speaker: They call emptiness in Buddhism, which is very poorly named because it really means the opposite total interdependence and, you know, full fullness.
[4:38] Speaker: Yeah.
[4:38] Speaker: Fullness, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, actually says fullness is a better translation.
[4:43] Speaker: I know some people here are entrepreneurs, and I had some long stretches of my life.
[4:47] Speaker: I was doing that.
[4:48] Speaker: And I had a company that was making science museum exhibitions.
[4:52] Speaker: We were thriving, we had millions of dollars of orders, then all of a sudden everything collapsed with the economy, and I had to lay off 15 people to four people.
[5:00] Speaker: I was personally in debt.
[5:02] Speaker: I was newly married, and we had a new child, and I thought my life was over.
[5:07] Speaker: How are you going to ever pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and this nightmare company that just keeps losing money month over month?
[5:14] Speaker: And I tried everything.
[5:15] Speaker: I tried every type of meditation as an antidote.
[5:19] Speaker: Mindfulness is the one a lot of people know that didn't work.
[5:22] Speaker: Compassion didn't work that well for me.
[5:25] Speaker: The only one that worked was the most advanced topic of emptiness, which is where you search for the thing that's bothering you.
[5:33] Speaker: As I was walking to work every day, I would think, where is this company that's causing me so much misery?
[5:41] Speaker: Is it in the bricks that make up its walls?
[5:43] Speaker: Is it in the empty bank accounts?
[5:45] Speaker: Is it in the broken contracts?
[5:47] Speaker: Is it in the employees?
[5:49] Speaker: And through that searching, you don't find anything.
[5:52] Speaker: It's this kind of magic trick, the ultimate topic of Buddhism is that you search for the thing that's really bothering you, and you can't get at its essence.
[6:01] Speaker: You don't find it among its parts.
[6:02] Speaker: And that's what really worked for me as I turn the door to the studio in that morning.
[6:07] Speaker: I'll be like, it's not really here.
[6:09] Speaker: It's here in some subtle way, but it's much more flexible and it's not as solidly annoying and terrifying as it seems to me.
[6:18] Speaker: There's some opportunity for change here.
[6:20] Speaker: And that helped me go to work every day rather than have a nervous breakdown and fall apart and ruin even more people's lives.
[6:26] Speaker: And that's what led eventually to working with Bjork because I kept trudging in there day after day, using emptiness as an antidote to get through the day.
[6:36] Speaker: And then eventually I got an email from Bjork, or actually her manager, who said, Oh, Bjork's a big fan of yours.
[6:43] Speaker: And I said, That's funny because I'm a big fan of hers.
[6:46] Speaker: And then that led to new opportunities, new companies.
[6:49] Speaker: But without that lesson of interdependence, flexibility, that the label of terrifying company was nothing but that label, nothing but words I was applying to a more flexible situation.
[7:01] Speaker: I couldn't have actually crawled out of it and emerged into a new and better life.
[7:06] Speaker: And it's no guarantee that meditating on emptiness will get you an email from Bjork.
[7:12] Speaker: Yes, I was thinking I we don't want to give them the wrong idea, you know.
[7:15] Speaker: But something will change.
[7:16] Speaker: Impermanence is the first topic in Buddhism, in some ways of looking at it.
[7:21] Speaker: And knowing that things have to change.
[7:23] Speaker: Change is the only constant.
[7:25] Speaker: And when things are the worst, often that's the inflection point where the only direction to go is up.
[7:31] Speaker: You have, in fact, been following a Tibetan Buddhist path, which is very far from secular.
[7:39] Speaker: What inspired you to write this book?
[7:42] Speaker: To go in a more secular.
[7:43] Speaker: Yeah.
[7:44] Speaker: It was a couple of things.
[7:45] Speaker: One was that I got invited to start leading meditations about 18 years ago, not because I would had superior knowledge, but because I was an equal.
[7:54] Speaker: My teacher said it'd be good for students to have someone that they're not too intimidated by.
[7:58] Speaker: Like it was just like them, a peer, like the teaching assistant.
[8:02] Speaker: That's how I always think of myself as a teaching assistant, not a teacher.
[8:05] Speaker: But I was invited to lead the sequence that's in this book.
[8:08] Speaker: The sequence in this book, it's based on a thousand-year-old sequence called the Lamrim, which means the graduated path.
[8:15] Speaker: And it's this very beautifully refined ordering of the Buddhist teaching.
[8:20] Speaker: The Buddha gave, they said, 84,000 teachings.
[8:22] Speaker: He lived into his 80s, so he taught a lot.
[8:24] Speaker: And then it was distilled a thousand years ago into these eight or nine topics.
[8:28] Speaker: And so I was teaching those topics, but I was teaching them authentically.
[8:32] Speaker: We were advertising these sessions as open to anybody, don't have to be Buddhist.
[8:36] Speaker: Then in the very first topic of the precious life, in the first sentence, it says, Well, you've had infinite past lives, now you're finally human, but you're accumulating so much negative karma, you might die, and then you'll be reborn, a ghost, a turtle in a hell realm.
[8:51] Speaker: So, in one sentence, like the first topic, it mentions these three seemingly supernatural things of karma, rebirth, and other realms, which are quite intrinsic to Tibetan Buddhism.
[9:00] Speaker: So His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote a book called Beyond Religion, encouraging people like me in the trenches to try to be as authentic as possible, but welcome people where they are in a culture that wasn't raised with those ideas.
[9:14] Speaker: And so that was the gem of the idea.
[9:16] Speaker: The other is actually some of the people here, because most of my friends aren't Buddhists.
[9:21] Speaker: Several of them are here.
[9:22] Speaker: I was allowed to invite a bunch of people as the guest list.
[9:25] Speaker: And so much of the motivation is actually for my friends because my friends kept asking me, oh, you're the only Buddhist I know, you're the only religious person I know.
[9:34] Speaker: How could I get started?
[9:36] Speaker: And I could never point them to a book that could meet them where they were, that didn't immediately talk about those seemingly supernatural elements.
[9:44] Speaker: So finally I decided to write this book and develop the sequence.
[9:49] Speaker: I should add, I actually am a practicing Zen Buddhist and have studied Tibetan Buddhism in the past.
[9:54] Speaker: And I really enjoyed the book because I think it did distill a lot of things in a way that would make all the strange things in Buddhism seem more understandable.
[10:05] Speaker: I was going to ask you about things like Zen and karma and passing through other lifetimes, which is, I think when people think about Buddhism, they do think about that.
[10:15] Speaker: One of the most prominent Buddhists is the Dalai Lama, who is supposedly the reincarnation of Dalai Lamas going back centuries.
[10:23] Speaker: He's the 14th Dalai Lama.
[10:24] Speaker: He's the 14th.
[10:26] Speaker: Words like karma have a lot of baggage in the West.
[10:29] Speaker: And you talked about karma a bit in the book because I think getting people to think about karma in a way that's more secular.
[10:36] Speaker: And I think actually in Zen Buddhism, there isn't all this reincarnation.
[10:42] Speaker: It is a bit more secular in a way.
[10:44] Speaker: But still, I think getting people to think of it that way is important.
[10:48] Speaker: You start by talking about a scene in the film, the Terence Malik film, The Tree of Life.
[10:53] Speaker: Yeah.
[10:53] Speaker: And I love the scene and where you took it when you were talking about karma.
[10:58] Speaker: One of the greatest movies I've ever seen.
[11:00] Speaker: So in this movie, there's a mother in Texas and one of her sons dies.
[11:06] Speaker: And she's praying.
[11:08] Speaker: Oh, there's very few words in this movie.
[11:10] Speaker: It's like a Kubrick film.
[11:11] Speaker: But she's praying to God, like, why did you take my son?
[11:16] Speaker: Why did my son die?
[11:17] Speaker: And then all of a sudden, in this movie, bam, it cuts to the Big Bang.
[11:23] Speaker: Like it goes all the way back to the beginning of time.
[11:26] Speaker: And it's like a 20-minute sequence where the gradually dust clouds form, galaxies coalesce, we see stars form, we see our sun form, earth forms.
[11:39] Speaker: Four billion years ago, the first life forms emerge on Earth.
[11:43] Speaker: Then it zooms in as we get to the dinosaur era, and you see this dinosaur, like a velociraptor, about to kill a little vegetarian, gentler dinosaur.
[11:52] Speaker: And then all of a sudden, that vicious dinosaur has this moment of compassion.
[11:58] Speaker: Oh, maybe I won't kill this guy.
[12:00] Speaker: So it seems like the first moment of mercy on Earth is quite beautiful.
[12:04] Speaker: Then that dinosaur looks up and there's an asteroid, and boom, and everything's wiped out on Earth, right?
[12:12] Speaker: And so then boom, boom, boom, it keeps going.
[12:15] Speaker: And then you're back to the woman all of a sudden.
[12:17] Speaker: And what happens is that's God saying, that's your answer.
[12:22] Speaker: That's your answer to why your son died.
[12:25] Speaker: It requires going back to the very beginning of the universe because cause and effect has operated for as long as the universe existed.
[12:31] Speaker: And your son's life and death is just one more moment in that infinite cause and effect.
[12:37] Speaker: Very beautiful.
[12:38] Speaker: It is beautiful.
[12:39] Speaker: And I guess it seems in some ways empirically true.
[12:43] Speaker: We can't always see what the various, you know, because our little minds can't take them in, but it seems something that it's hard to argue with that anything that happens has a cause.
[12:54] Speaker: And that's how you're boiling down karma.
[12:57] Speaker: So yeah.
[12:58] Speaker: And then of course, in the Buddhist perspective, there's a material causes, but then there's mental causes.
[13:03] Speaker: Like how do the things, all the things that we decide to do or not do?
[13:07] Speaker: And that's where we live in kind of a nice time because we recently discovered neuroplasticity, which says that every single thought you have makes you more likely to have that thought in the future.
[13:17] Speaker: Every action you do makes you more likely to do that action.
[13:21] Speaker: That is karma from a secular perspective, is just if you do something, you're more likely to do it again.
[13:26] Speaker: And if you refrain from doing something, that strengthens the muscle of refraining from it too.
[13:31] Speaker: I'm throwing this in here a little bit, but this goes back to you're talking about what happened with Björk and your company and also this idea of things being connected and cause and effect.
[13:42] Speaker: And there's a metaphor you use for this in your book that I liked, which is you talked about a cell phone and how if you look at a cell phone, I think it really gets to the core of cause and effect, what something is, what it isn't.
[13:58] Speaker: It's very nice.
[13:59] Speaker: You're sticking with this most advanced topic of Buddhism.
[14:01] Speaker: It's good.
[14:02] Speaker: Traditionally in Buddhism, when you're thinking about interdependence, emptiness, you think about a cup.
[14:09] Speaker: You talk about a cup or a table.
[14:10] Speaker: Here they are.
[14:11] Speaker: There's always a cup and a table around when you're giving a talk.
[14:14] Speaker: But I prefer to use this object because it turns out that a cell phone has includes 75 out of the 92 naturally occurring elements in the universe.
[14:24] Speaker: So it's a really extraordinary object, like a distillation of almost everything that there is in the universe.
[14:30] Speaker: And yet we see it so atomically.
[14:32] Speaker: We see it as a phone and we have so much attachment for it.
[14:34] Speaker: If we're separated from it for just like 30 seconds, we freak out, right?
[14:39] Speaker: When I lead the meditation on emptiness, I almost always use this object because I have you analyze it and you think in great detail, like the I had to learn elements' names I didn't even know or remember, like neodymium and prisodymium and all of these things in the screen, very rare elements.
[14:54] Speaker: Why do we see this as a phone instead of a collection of little piles of 75 elements?
[15:00] Speaker: Delusion, an evolutionary delusion, where we impose the idea of objects on collections of parts.
[15:06] Speaker: That's the that's this fundamental illusion.
[15:09] Speaker: And you can start with something like a phone or a table, but the ultimate object to analyze is yourself, right?
[15:15] Speaker: To look at yourself and see where is that person that's annoyed or craving?
[15:20] Speaker: And you say, Oh, is it in my body?
[15:22] Speaker: You you go through silly, uh almost humorous exercises.
[15:25] Speaker: We say, Is my foot angry?
[15:27] Speaker: Does my hand want to drink?
[15:29] Speaker: Sometimes it does.
[15:32] Speaker: So you go through that kind of exercise, and then you go through your mind, which part of what part of my mind is, and then you don't find it.
[15:38] Speaker: As you start, you as you look for that person that's annoying or annoyed, you don't find them, and it starts to break down that illusion.
[15:47] Speaker: Nagarjuna was a great exponent of emptiness in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage, and he said, even having the slightest doubt as that things don't exist as they seem, that they're not atomic, separate, dualistic is so powerful, so helpful to living a happy life.
[16:05] Speaker: Let's get a little more basic now.
[16:06] Speaker: Yeah.
[16:07] Speaker: Now that I've given you some, forced you to give the more advanced parts, but I don't I guess I find that all of that fascinating and worth thinking about.
[16:14] Speaker: So in Tibetan Buddhism, there's this path called Lamrim.
[16:19] Speaker: And the book essentially lays out this path.
[16:24] Speaker: Take us through a little bit what this path is about that you lay out in the book, this meditative path.
[16:30] Speaker: The path was created a thousand years ago by a teacher named Atisha Dipam Kara, who came to Tibet and he resolved some conflict.
[16:38] Speaker: There were, there were people who had these beliefs that you didn't have to be moral, for example.
[16:42] Speaker: Like if you really realized the ultimate nature of reality, then you could do any kind of like a you know existentialist Nietzsche kind of view.
[16:49] Speaker: So he came and corrected that view.
[16:51] Speaker: He's like, no, you need these basics too.
[16:52] Speaker: You always have to go back to these basics.
[16:55] Speaker: And so what this path does, it was revised 500 years ago by Lama Sung Kappa.
[17:00] Speaker: So it was during the Tibetan Renaissance.
[17:04] Speaker: There was a in the four like around 1492, the same kind of time.
[17:08] Speaker: There was Tibetan Renaissance of the mind.
[17:10] Speaker: But anyway, the sequence, it starts with how precious life is.
[17:15] Speaker: That's the first topic, is that life's extraordinarily precious.
[17:20] Speaker: And that was almost the most difficult topic to adapt because normally you say it's precious, as I mentioned, because of all these karma and rebirth and so on.
[17:28] Speaker: But I remembered this quote from Voltaire I heard when I was in college, where he said, it's no more miraculous to live two lives than one.
[17:37] Speaker: And that was, to me, that became the core of that topic for this book.
[17:43] Speaker: Wait a minute.
[17:45] Speaker: We're missing the point that it's way more miraculous that there's anything at all, and that we have one life.
[17:51] Speaker: And if you only believe you have one life, how much more precious is that than you have infinite ones?
[17:56] Speaker: A lot of my Buddhist friends are a little bit lazy, actually.
[17:58] Speaker: One of my friends, a reincarnated Lama, and he was really amazing in his last life.
[18:02] Speaker: He's like, This life, I'm gonna relax, have fun, get married, have a kid, skateboard.
[18:07] Speaker: I and I know a few people like this actually.
[18:10] Speaker: They're kind of like relaxing after their harder work in the past life.
[18:14] Speaker: So for those of us, probably most of us here who think we have only one life, that's even more a responsibility to make it meaningful and find the true causes of happiness, isn't it?
[18:23] Speaker: Right.
[18:23] Speaker: So anyway, it starts with that, then it goes to impermanence.
[18:27] Speaker: Everything changes.
[18:28] Speaker: We have this terrible illusion that things are permanent, then to cause and effect how things although they make sure that your iPhone is not permanent.
[18:36] Speaker: It has an expiration date, you gotta get another one.
[18:39] Speaker: But go ahead.
[18:39] Speaker: Renunciation is the turning point where you start to acknowledge the true causes of suffering, that you stop blaming your suffering on external things and realize that it is fundamentally these delusions of anger, craving, and ignorance, which is not caring.
[19:00] Speaker: Not caring.
[19:01] Speaker: And you fundamentally say, those are my problems.
[19:04] Speaker: The only thing I should be angry at is anger, right?
[19:07] Speaker: There's really nothing else to be angry at.
[19:10] Speaker: I think a lot of people are familiar with the idea of mindfulness.
[19:14] Speaker: I think that's probably one of the most common kinds of meditation people talk about in the West.
[19:22] Speaker: But what you're doing in this book, you're laying out what you call analytic meditations.
[19:28] Speaker: What is the difference between doing mindfulness and an analytic meditation?
[19:32] Speaker: Yeah.
[19:32] Speaker: So we call mindfulness meditation stabilizing meditation in Tibetan Buddhism.
[19:37] Speaker: In general, they say there's two kinds of meditation.
[19:39] Speaker: One is the one you're used to, and probably the only one you thought existed, which is where you try to focus your mind on one thing.
[19:47] Speaker: And that thing is usually your breath.
[19:49] Speaker: And what you do is you try to stabilize your mind, calm your mind, and then whatever other things go through your mind, you let them pass by.
[19:57] Speaker: You don't have to push them away, you don't have to pull them close.
[20:00] Speaker: They'll just naturally move by and you keep your mind stable.
[20:04] Speaker: So that's a stabilizing meditation.
[20:06] Speaker: This other form of meditation, it's almost the opposite of that, because you deliberately fill your mind with thoughts, feelings, emotions, and also critical thinking, actually, very critically looking into your mind and the stories you're being told and asking, is this true?
[20:20] Speaker: Is this beneficial?
[20:22] Speaker: And they're like story, they're like your story, you know, like a master storyteller journalist like yourself.
[20:29] Speaker: It has a beginning, a middle, an end.
[20:31] Speaker: It has dramatic tension.
[20:33] Speaker: Um, and I find it's much, much easier for people to meditate on.
[20:37] Speaker: I regularly do one-hour meditation sessions, and I like to say no one's ever walked out, you know.
[20:42] Speaker: But who can sit and meditate for an hour by yourself?
[20:44] Speaker: Almost impossible.
[20:46] Speaker: So that's the benefit of analytical meditation.
[20:48] Speaker: It's like a story that brings out your best qualities.
[20:52] Speaker: That's one of the definitions of meditation, at least in the Buddhist tradition.
[20:56] Speaker: Stories that bring out your best qualities, thoughts that bring out your virtues.
[21:00] Speaker: Another thing I wanted to bring up, because I think it's an important component of the path you lay out to being happier, which it really is at the core of this.
[21:08] Speaker: And I have to say, I've been meditating almost daily now for nine years.
[21:12] Speaker: And I would definitely say it's made me calmer and happier.
[21:16] Speaker: It's really had an effect.
[21:17] Speaker: But there's another side of it.
[21:19] Speaker: It isn't just, as you say, sitting and watching your breath or even doing these analytic meditations entirely.
[21:26] Speaker: It is the role of compassion in this.
[21:29] Speaker: If you can, like you mentioned this in the book, Darth Vader has a meditation tank that he lies in.
[21:36] Speaker: The Empire strikes back.
[21:37] Speaker: He's always whenever he's not killing people, he's meditating.
[21:42] Speaker: Exactly.
[21:43] Speaker: Talk a little bit about this because I think it's important for people to really understand that meditation alone is not really gonna be sufficient to happiness.
[21:55] Speaker: So this is one of the surprises about meditation that at least you learn in our tradition.
[21:59] Speaker: Is that meditation isn't inherently virtuous.
[22:02] Speaker: You can meditate with a neutral or even negative motivation.
[22:07] Speaker: And we know it.
[22:08] Speaker: Okay, here's the most extreme example is that the US military uses meditation in two ways, mindfulness, in fact.
[22:15] Speaker: One is for soldiers trying to overcome PTSD.
[22:19] Speaker: And they give them the mindfulness training, and it really helps to let those kind of feelings pass and realize, you know, they don't have to be as overwhelming as you think, and it really works.
[22:28] Speaker: The other one is really frightening because they use it to train soldiers to kill better.
[22:35] Speaker: And the instructions are extraordinary.
[22:37] Speaker: I went and looked it up a few months ago because I wanted to be really accurate when telling stories like this in front of an audience.
[22:43] Speaker: You actually read the instructions like breathe in as you put your finger over the trigger of your gun.
[22:50] Speaker: Breathe out as you pull the trigger.
[22:53] Speaker: And so it stabilizes the mind of the soldier so they can more effectively kill another human being.
[22:59] Speaker: So that's the that's the most extreme example.
[23:02] Speaker: You can use mindfulness, stabilizing meditation to kill better.
[23:05] Speaker: You can use it to do a harmful job better if you're a CEO of a company that's doing some things you don't feel are ethical.
[23:12] Speaker: In fact, I had this experience when I was working at a job, I didn't totally believe in everything they were doing.
[23:18] Speaker: I would go home, meditate, but it was what you call spiritual bypass, which is a new and very useful word, where you use spirituality meditation as a way, more like a spa treatment to kind of relax a little bit and then go back to whatever harmful thing you're doing during the rest of your time.
[23:36] Speaker: So that's one explanation of why meditation isn't inherently virtuous.
[23:40] Speaker: But to make it virtuous doesn't take much, which is just to think in the beginning your motivation, like from the Tibetan Buddhist path, Men Mahayana Buddhism, you know, motivation is the most important part.
[23:50] Speaker: At a Buddhist center, when we're at a Buddhist center, we actually say it out loud before a meeting.
[23:55] Speaker: We'll say, May our work benefit others.
[23:57] Speaker: Right.
[23:58] Speaker: If they had said that at that company I was working at before every meeting, I think they would have avoided so many problems.
[24:05] Speaker: And and so, and you know, it sounds so cheesy.
[24:09] Speaker: My wife and I were actually arguing about it the other day.
[24:11] Speaker: She's like, What would you do to make corporations more ethical?
[24:14] Speaker: I'd say, have everybody at the beginning of a meeting say, May our work benefit others.
[24:19] Speaker: And it sounds really cheesy, but I think it'd be a lot harder to do something really obviously harmful after you say that out loud.
[24:26] Speaker: I like that.
[24:26] Speaker: I'm gonna then throw the next component at this because, yeah, sounds cheesy.
[24:32] Speaker: And what does it have to do with me being happy?
[24:35] Speaker: You know, your book is about how to be happy, and there is a reason why I think if you just meditate so you can shoot a gun or do something horrible, it doesn't make you happier.
[24:46] Speaker: To quote the Dalai Lama, if you want to be happy, cherish others.
[24:50] Speaker: In fact, it was the first thing I ever read in a book by the Dalai Lama.
[24:54] Speaker: He said, by all means be selfish.
[24:56] Speaker: He said, but be intelligently selfish.
[24:59] Speaker: The stupid way to be selfish is just to think about yourself and your own needs and pursue them relentlessly.
[25:04] Speaker: The intelligent way to be selfish is to realize that all happiness comes from the times that you benefit others, whether you're thinking about it or actually doing it.
[25:13] Speaker: And I invite each of you to do it as an experiment if you don't believe this.
[25:17] Speaker: Spend one day being totally selfish, doing things only for yourself.
[25:21] Speaker: Spend the next day only doing things for others.
[25:24] Speaker: How do you feel at the end of each of those days?
[25:26] Speaker: Measure that and then do more of the one that um made you happier and less of the one that made you less happy.
[25:32] Speaker: It's like stoicism.
[25:34] Speaker: People talk a lot about stoicism effective altruism, they talk about sometimes that by thinking about the human condition logically, it leads you to be compassionate.
[25:44] Speaker: That's the true cause of happiness.
[25:46] Speaker: I mean, it even, you know, going back to the early capitalist ideas, it's sort of rational self-interest to some degree, except that I don't think that quite works.
[25:54] Speaker: I think the actual act of feeling something for others.
[25:59] Speaker: And then the people around you are happy to see you too, because you make them feel better and it's a kind of a virtuous circle.
[26:05] Speaker: I loved this quote.
[26:06] Speaker: You brought up Robert Thurman, who is um most famously probably Uma Thurman's dad, but he is also one of the greatest scholars of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.
[26:17] Speaker: Had this great quote, basically, that you talked about how self-absorbed we are.
[26:26] Speaker: And I liked the way he put it.
[26:29] Speaker: If you can remember.
[26:31] Speaker: Oh, I remember it.
[26:31] Speaker: I'm so lucky I've gotten to see him speak so many times.
[26:34] Speaker: He's really like one of my gurus, it's such an incredible teacher.
[26:37] Speaker: But um, the first time I heard this, and this again, you keep bringing up emptiness, which is just wonderful because it's the root delusion.
[26:44] Speaker: So he said we were in a huge audience in Berkeley, and he said, Here's what Buddhism says is that if you think about your situation, how you think about yourself, deep down, each of us thinks that of everybody alive, in fact, out of everyone that's ever lived, we're just a little bit more important.
[27:05] Speaker: We're a little bit more important than everyone else.
[27:08] Speaker: And as a side, I want to say that for some people it's a little bit less important, but it's the same thing.
[27:14] Speaker: It's actually the same thing, it's your ego.
[27:16] Speaker: And it's the ego that gets in the way of all of our happiness.
[27:20] Speaker: It's a sense of separateness, that I'm more important, I'm less important, or I'm simply separate, that there's any way to separate me from everyone else.
[27:28] Speaker: That's our root delusion.
[27:29] Speaker: And so many different thinkers, non-Buddhists, too.
[27:32] Speaker: I think I quote John Muir in the book where he says, if you examine anything in nature, that it's connected by a thousand invisible cords to everything else.
[27:41] Speaker: Einstein has said it too.
[27:43] Speaker: It's the Buddha didn't call what he taught Buddhism.
[27:46] Speaker: That would have been pretty egotistic.
[27:47] Speaker: Yeah, it sure would have been.
[27:48] Speaker: He just called it the truth.
[27:50] Speaker: It's like a scientific analysis of reality that shows the true nature of things, but with a particular slant of how to be happy, how to live a happy life, a meaningful life, a beneficial life.
[28:02] Speaker: One of the things I love about Buddhism is that, to my knowledge, it's really the only spiritual path that says, we're here to show you how you can be really happy.
[28:10] Speaker: And I like that about it, that particular aspect of it.
[28:13] Speaker: Okay, so the getting to this skepticism and the idea here that you're it's you're creating a skeptic's path to enlightenment.
[28:20] Speaker: Indeed, Buddha never said, believe me.
[28:25] Speaker: He always said, check it out, figure it out yourself.
[28:29] Speaker: You may discover, in fact, that I'm right.
[28:32] Speaker: And then he gives us what are known as the four noble truths.
[28:36] Speaker: You actually call them, you use facts.
[28:39] Speaker: That's quoting Robert Thurman, too.
[28:41] Speaker: Yeah, it's not.
[28:41] Speaker: In fact, he now he used to call them the four facts.
[28:44] Speaker: Now he calls them the four fun facts, which is the wonderful.
[28:48] Speaker: And his latest book, Wisdom is Bliss.
[28:50] Speaker: He talks about that.
[28:51] Speaker: So let's talk about them a little bit.
[28:53] Speaker: I think the first noble truth is that there is suffering.
[28:58] Speaker: Suffering exists, life is disappointing.
[29:00] Speaker: Although I really have a funny side story.
[29:02] Speaker: My parents were asking me about Buddhism.
[29:04] Speaker: We're having dinner, and they were like, it's a philosophy.
[29:06] Speaker: And I said, There's these four noble truths, and the first one is that life can be disappointing.
[29:12] Speaker: And they looked at each other and they go, Not if you're well adjusted.
[29:16] Speaker: The irony is if you fully accept the first truth, then life isn't disappointing.
[29:20] Speaker: Everything in Buddhism is a paradox like that.
[29:23] Speaker: It's so weird that if you totally absorb the first of the noble truth, first fun fact, is actually a little more precise, which is that conditioned phenomena are unsatisfactory, which is actually much better because life actually isn't suffering.
[29:38] Speaker: I was talking to um uh Rick Hansen, you know, the great Buddhist teacher, he wrote Buddha's Brain, and we are having a nice conversation.
[29:45] Speaker: Then he says to me, you know, is life really suffering?
[29:47] Speaker: He's this conversation we had just had, we just sat talked for two hours.
[29:50] Speaker: It was so much fun.
[29:51] Speaker: Was that really suffering?
[29:52] Speaker: Yeah, not exactly in the way we think about it, right?
[29:56] Speaker: So it's something more subtle, which is that all of the kind of material, transitory experiences we have, they don't have a lasting ability to make us happy and satisfied.
[30:07] Speaker: Everything's constantly dissolving.
[30:09] Speaker: They call it disintegratedness, is a beautiful term for it, they've started to use in Tibetan Buddhism, is that things are constantly falling apart, like Pema Chodron says.
[30:18] Speaker: And when you accept that, life actually becomes quite beautiful because you accept things as they are.
[30:24] Speaker: It's actually nicer to kiss your partner without expecting that you'll have another one, or that it's going to fulfill you forever and make you completely satisfied.
[30:35] Speaker: You accept things the way they really are.
[30:38] Speaker: And that's the red pill there, right?
[30:40] Speaker: Seeing the world as it is.
[30:41] Speaker: Oh, I just have to get you to bring this up because of course you had to go to a Seinfeld episode to get it.
[30:46] Speaker: This was really my that there's a particular Seinfeld episode where he really he gets to the heart of suffering.
[30:52] Speaker: This was actually a Netflix special.
[30:55] Speaker: I didn't really, I thought it was a speech.
[30:56] Speaker: I'm adding to your playlist here.
[30:58] Speaker: 24 Hours to Kill.
[30:59] Speaker: It's a uh special.
[31:01] Speaker: I had to fight with my publisher a little bit because I had quotes are like, oh, is this copyright infringement?
[31:06] Speaker: No, people, it's gonna make people want to go see this show.
[31:10] Speaker: Subscribe to Netflix.
[31:11] Speaker: So this riff that he does, 24 Hours to Kill, it's very meta, like all Seinfeld.
[31:17] Speaker: The entire routine is about people coming to see his show.
[31:21] Speaker: All the jokes are only about that.
[31:23] Speaker: In the in the kind of culmination of this routine, he says, When you're at home, all you want to do is get on your way to see me here at the show.
[31:31] Speaker: When you're in the car, you can't wait to get there.
[31:34] Speaker: Once you're here, now you're looking at your watch and wondering when you're gonna leave.
[31:39] Speaker: And he says something like, We're tired, we're cranky, and nobody wants to be anywhere.
[31:44] Speaker: You know, very typical at a Seidfeld quote.
[31:46] Speaker: And then in the book, you know, I say, um, you know, this is the perfect teaching on what's called the suffering of change.
[31:53] Speaker: There's three types of suffering in Buddhism, and the middle one is a suffering of change, is how what we call pleasurable experiences actually have an element of suffering to them because they run out, we want them to last.
[32:04] Speaker: And then our minds change.
[32:06] Speaker: Our minds keep changing.
[32:07] Speaker: We're not, we're never satisfied.
[32:09] Speaker: So in the book, I actually say that I thought Jerry Seinfeld did a better job than the Dalai Lama in teaching about the suffering of change.
[32:18] Speaker: And the funny thing is, if you look at this book, it has a forew by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
[32:22] Speaker: So his office read the whole book, and they gave me many corrections, and they did not correct that part.
[32:33] Speaker: Like it's kind of point.
[32:34] Speaker: Well, I the second noble truth is that suffering has a cause, that there is an actual cause, and this comes from we talk about impermanence, this sense of change.
[32:44] Speaker: And then the third noble truth is there is a way out.
[32:48] Speaker: Your book really is meant to offer the way out.
[32:52] Speaker: And the way out in Buddhism is something called the Eightfold Path.
[32:56] Speaker: But in this book, you actually take us through, and I know you started to talk about this, but many of these steps would normally have a much more spiritual component.
[33:05] Speaker: As you said, when you meditate in Buddhism, usually you begin a meditation with taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha.
[33:13] Speaker: But that's not what a lot of people are going to do when they begin a meditation.
[33:18] Speaker: You talk about these different ways to do all of this in a much more secular way that still brings about that same sense of being able to let go and accept change.
[33:31] Speaker: Yeah, so refuge was another one of the very it's funny because the most advanced topics of Buddhism, like emptiness and compassion, they don't need any change.
[33:39] Speaker: But it's these earlier topics that were very difficult to adapt.
[33:43] Speaker: With refuge, normally as a Buddhist, like you said, you take refuge in the Buddha, which needs no explanation, the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, and the Sangha, the other people who practice it.
[33:53] Speaker: So if you're not Buddhist, that doesn't make sense, those three.
[33:55] Speaker: But as a Mahayana Buddhist, this Buddhism concerned with the welfare of all beings, there's two more things.
[34:02] Speaker: And this fourth one's amazing because it's everybody.
[34:07] Speaker: You actually take refuge in every single other person.
[34:10] Speaker: And they say the refuge in other beings is more powerful than refuge in the Buddha because you utterly depend on everyone else for everything in your life.
[34:19] Speaker: Everything good comes from someone else.
[34:21] Speaker: The roads that we drove or walked on to get here, the food that we ate, the clothes that we wear, everything here.
[34:27] Speaker: It's like 10,000 people that created everything we're we're having our pockets and that we're wearing and that sustained us today.
[34:34] Speaker: So you take refuge in all beings, first of all, for bringing us absolutely everything.
[34:40] Speaker: No word we're speaking tonight, we made up.
[34:43] Speaker: We learned it from somewhere else.
[34:45] Speaker: Our parents, our teachers, and so on.
[34:46] Speaker: So then there's everything good in our lives.
[34:48] Speaker: We have only other people to thank.
[34:50] Speaker: It's sad when you see people speaking and saying as if, you know, oh, I did it myself, you can too.
[34:55] Speaker: Like there's no greater lie.
[34:57] Speaker: But then the second aspect is actually you also take refuge in the people who make your life difficult.
[35:05] Speaker: Because we all want to be patient, we want to be compassionate, we want to be kind.
[35:10] Speaker: And the only people that really teach us how to do that are the ones that try our patience, that are hard to find compassion for, that's very difficult to treat kindly.
[35:20] Speaker: That's the Buddhist, the Tibetan Buddhist view.
[35:22] Speaker: And so that's really extraordinary.
[35:24] Speaker: My teacher, Lama Zopo Yorinbushe, used to complain that everyone was too nice to him, that everyone was always giving him food, a beautiful place to sleep.
[35:33] Speaker: That's how a very highly realized person thinks, is like, oh, what a shame.
[35:37] Speaker: Everyone is so nice to me.
[35:39] Speaker: If only I had some people irritating me, then I could develop my patience.
[35:45] Speaker: I have a number of people who I'm I'm so thankful they are making me miserable.
[35:51] Speaker: We all do every day.
[35:52] Speaker: Yeah.
[35:52] Speaker: But the weird thing is it's the exact opposite person for some of us, right?
[35:57] Speaker: It's like no, it is, yeah, I know.
[35:58] Speaker: It's that that's the other thing, is that you also realize through this path, even somebody who's making you miserable, somebody loves them.
[36:05] Speaker: Somebody out there cares, even the person that is making you miserable, somebody loves that person.
[36:09] Speaker: This also gets to the idea of emptiness to some degree, too, which is this and this idea of perspective.
[36:16] Speaker: I loved actually, I forget who said this quote.
[36:19] Speaker: You know, Buddhism does not guarantee that you'll be free from problems, only that you will be happy and calm through whatever problems you face.
[36:29] Speaker: In our culture, I feel like everybody's always looking for what is the thing that's gonna solve my problems, and like this accepting that sorry.
[36:42] Speaker: It's natural, yeah.
[36:43] Speaker: Problems are natural, right?
[36:45] Speaker: That's it's so bizarre the way it works in Buddhism, because somehow by expecting problems, they don't bother you when they finally come up.
[36:54] Speaker: Because you're like, oh yeah, and you prepare yourself too, especially in meditation.
[36:57] Speaker: Like in our tradition, we actually rehearse all the different ways you could die every morning.
[37:02] Speaker: It's like a horror show starring you, where you think all the different ways I could fall over a cliff, I could get hit by a car.
[37:08] Speaker: But it makes you really present for the day because you remind yourself every morning, oh boy, I'd really better take advantage of this.
[37:15] Speaker: Might be my last day.
[37:16] Speaker: Make the most of.
[37:19] Speaker: That's why Buddhists meditate on death.
[37:21] Speaker: That's what's so odd, is people think Buddhists are so depressing and like, why are you thinking about suffering and death?
[37:28] Speaker: If you do it the right way, it makes you quite cheery, actually.
[37:31] Speaker: It makes you quite makes you quite happy.
[37:33] Speaker: Like, oh, I better make the most of this day.
[37:35] Speaker: This is nice.
[37:36] Speaker: This is fun.
[37:36] Speaker: This could be my last day.
[37:37] Speaker: This is worthwhile.
[37:38] Speaker: I wouldn't rather be doing anything else.
[37:40] Speaker: Whatever it is.
[37:41] Speaker: What's it?
[37:42] Speaker: There's a sort of famous Zen little story about the monk who's being chased by a lion, and the lion chases him to a cliff, and he grabs a branch of this cherry tree, and he's hanging about to go to his death, and he sees there's a nice fresh cherry, and he grabs it, picks it, and eats it, and then falls to his death.
[38:03] Speaker: But at least he had the momentary experience of this beautiful cherry.
[38:08] Speaker: And life is like that sometimes.
[38:10] Speaker: You do in this book, though, try to bring in, and I think this will matter to people, some scientific research about the practice and what the practice does for happiness, what it does for your body.
[38:22] Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that and how you try to incorporate those things?
[38:26] Speaker: Sure.
[38:26] Speaker: And other authors have done that better than I have.
[38:29] Speaker: I have a lot of references.
[38:30] Speaker: Dr.
[38:33] Speaker: Rick Hansen's particularly good at talking about the scientific evidence and how neuroplasticity validates meditation and so on.
[38:40] Speaker: Something deeper though that's worth mentioning is like what Thubten Jinpa, who is the dialamas translator, says about scientific method, is that we have a bit of a narrow approach to science in our current culture, which is the kind of controlled experiment with external measurement instruments.
[38:57] Speaker: And he said there's a broader type of science that's existed before the Western Enlightenment, which is any anything that can be replicated, any experience that can be replicated.
[39:10] Speaker: And that could be as simple as fishing equipment and so on, that has worked over millennia.
[39:14] Speaker: But from the Buddhist perspective, there's a science of the mind that can be validated through your inner experience.
[39:21] Speaker: And that's where, in these dialogues between Buddhism and science, it's turned out that it's been about 95% Buddhism influencing science and you know, maybe 5% the other way.
[39:31] Speaker: And because these dialogues the Dalai Lama has had with scientists through the Mind and Life Institute over 25, 30 years, they've all encouraged scientists to go, yes, study how meditation works, but also to think about expanding the definition of science to our subjective experience.
[39:49] Speaker: Because we all do have this instrument for measuring and understanding the mind.
[39:54] Speaker: And just looking at the flow of blood within your brain is actually quite crude.
[39:59] Speaker: We couldn't understand a computer actually by just looking at the flow of electricity through its circuits.
[40:04] Speaker: You have to actually also understand the software.
[40:06] Speaker: And that's actually, you know, something I write about in the book.
[40:09] Speaker: For anyone who doesn't believe the mind is immaterial.
[40:13] Speaker: Many scientists believe in immaterial consciousness today, but they don't believe in assault.
[40:18] Speaker: And it's this analogy to software that nobody would think to bring out the phone is always my go-to object.
[40:24] Speaker: No one, none of us would say this is Instagram.
[40:27] Speaker: None would say my phone is Instagram.
[40:29] Speaker: That's nonsense.
[40:30] Speaker: But where's Instagram?
[40:32] Speaker: Is it in any of the chips?
[40:33] Speaker: Is it in the cloud?
[40:34] Speaker: Like, where is it?
[40:35] Speaker: Instagram doesn't really exist materially.
[40:38] Speaker: No app, no software.
[40:39] Speaker: Yeah, we'd have no problem saying that it exists.
[40:42] Speaker: When it's the same thing.
[40:43] Speaker: I often use the example of mathematics too.
[40:45] Speaker: I think we all believe in math, but where's math?
[40:48] Speaker: We don't have a math detector.
[40:49] Speaker: But none of us would say, oh, it doesn't really exist.
[40:52] Speaker: Saying something is immaterial doesn't mean that it's supernatural and that there's a soul or a ghost or something like that.
[40:58] Speaker: It just means like a pattern of information.
[41:01] Speaker: The information is immaterial, yet it definitely exists and has an impact on our life.
[41:06] Speaker: And you can just think of your mind, your consciousness that way too.
[41:10] Speaker: And we do know, I mean, there is in fact research about how attitudes and a variety of things can impact your health.
[41:18] Speaker: Right now, unfortunately, we have a mental health crisis.
[41:23] Speaker: And I think some of it comes from the isolation so many of us feel.
[41:26] Speaker: And in some ways, this path is hopefully, despite the ideas of a monk sitting on a hill, it's really not about that.
[41:34] Speaker: It's about actually it can ease your sense of isolation, and I think therefore make you happier in and of itself to realize you're that you're actually not alone.
[41:44] Speaker: There's one other question I was gonna ask you, and now I just did it.
[41:47] Speaker: Oh my god, I just as you were talking, and I'm like, I'll tell you something funny about that.
[41:54] Speaker: My brother was the one who got me into Buddhism, and he once told me one of the earliest teachers from one of his Buddhist movement here.
[42:01] Speaker: One of his Buddhist teachers was when his teacher said, You know that feeling you had when you were about to say something and you forgot it.
[42:08] Speaker: I was like, Yeah.
[42:09] Speaker: Teacher said, That's the feeling you always want to have.
[42:12] Speaker: I was like, Real?
[42:16] Speaker: Really?
[42:17] Speaker: But that's like truly being in the that's what they say.
[42:19] Speaker: Also, the way to listen to a person, the best way to give someone all your attention is to not think at all about the next thing you're going to say.
[42:26] Speaker: What were you gonna say?
[42:35] Speaker: So, all right, here's the thing.
[42:37] Speaker: When I met you, you were, I think, much more working full-time, and now you're spending, you know, you you have a substantial career as an artist, but you said really these days you're spending more of your time doing Buddhism.
[42:50] Speaker: I'm sure the people in this room have jobs.
[42:52] Speaker: They're very busy people.
[42:54] Speaker: I know that when I was full-time at NPR, I rarely worked less than 50 hours a week.
[43:00] Speaker: How can this book maybe what gems can they get that might help people who are in in that state, as so many people are?
[43:09] Speaker: People ask this question a lot, and it goes back to what we said at the very beginning about the one minute, like, but I'll tell you that if there's one thing that will truly change your life, is this when you wake up in the morning, don't reach for your phone.
[43:24] Speaker: And do anything at all to connect with yourself.
[43:29] Speaker: Of course, I can recommend meditation.
[43:31] Speaker: I think that's it.
[43:31] Speaker: We're gonna get to that excellent, that's an excellent thing to do.
[43:34] Speaker: But your job in life in so many ways is to get to know yourself.
[43:38] Speaker: And we're deprived of that in the way our culture exists today.
[43:41] Speaker: You deprive yourself of it when you reach for your phone first thing in the morning.
[43:44] Speaker: So, first thing in the morning, don't reach you for your phone.
[43:46] Speaker: You can go to the bathroom, come back, and then do anything to connect with yourself some yoga, meditation, exercise, go for a run without headphones or something like that.
[43:57] Speaker: Automatic writing is quite good, actually.
[43:59] Speaker: Especially if you're a creative person, or if you're not a creative person, you don't think you're a creative person.
[44:03] Speaker: Just take a blank page and write by hand everything that comes to your mind without thinking about it at all.
[44:09] Speaker: Don't have to have any punctuation or anything.
[44:12] Speaker: Something to connect with your the deeper aspects of yourself.
[44:16] Speaker: That will transform your life, even if you do it for five minutes.
[44:19] Speaker: And my own teacher, my Tibetan teacher, instructed me to meditate for five minutes a day for the first three years.
[44:26] Speaker: So it's a very slow path.
[44:28] Speaker: It doesn't have to be a lot.
[44:29] Speaker: But if there's one like gem of advice, that's it.
[44:32] Speaker: Don't reach for your phone.
[44:33] Speaker: Ideally, don't sleep with your phone and spend five minutes connecting with yourself, first thing.
[44:39] Speaker: Yeah.
[44:39] Speaker: And of course, and read the book.
[44:41] Speaker: But on that front, I we wanted to go out, I think, because it really feels appropriate, is that if we go out by doing one of your um analytic meditations, I think to give people a sense of the book has many of these different meditations that you can go through in different phases, but I thought we could just we could do one.
[45:03] Speaker: Sure.
[45:03] Speaker: So this is one that seems to be universally useful to people.
[45:09] Speaker: All of these meditations are antidotes for specific problems.
[45:12] Speaker: This is the problem of not caring about people, like people you pass on the sidewalk as you're walking around or at your workplace or something, you might not care about, not think about their lives, not care too much about them.
[45:25] Speaker: If you're particularly angry at someone, like your boss is yelling at you, or a fight with somebody, but it's particularly useful for people you don't know as well or people that that annoy you quite a bit.
[45:35] Speaker: And this is called Everyone Walks the Hero's Journey.
[45:38] Speaker: So it's a way to open up your compassion to everybody.
[45:42] Speaker: It's only a one page, actually.
[45:45] Speaker: Okay.
[45:45] Speaker: Everyone walks the hero's journey.
[45:48] Speaker: From Jesus Christ to Luke Skywalker, the hero's journey is a universal structure for mythical tales of growth and adventure.
[45:59] Speaker: But each of us is also the hero of our own life.
[46:05] Speaker: We may rarely acknowledge it, but each of us was born, and every one of us will die.
[46:13] Speaker: In between, we all experience our own struggles, conflicts, triumphs, and loves.
[46:22] Speaker: As you encounter people in your daily life, a powerful meditation on impermanence is to picture the moment that each one of these people was born.
[46:35] Speaker: Imagine their mother's pain, her exhaustion and joy at creating a fragile new being whose life depends on her.
[46:47] Speaker: Then try to imagine how that person will eventually die, alone or surrounded by loved ones, agitated or at peace.
[47:04] Speaker: This technique is especially helpful when you're angry with someone, because it helps to put your dispute in perspective.
[47:15] Speaker: Picture the end of that person's life in a hospital bed or at home, after a life that was long or short, a life of virtue or misbehavior, a life ending among friends or silently alone.
[47:36] Speaker: Then try to imagine where that person is right now on their journey from cradle to grave, what dreams, goals, and disappointments they may have had, moments of loneliness and intimacy.
[47:56] Speaker: Without this kind of reflection, the people around you can seem like video game characters, mere obstacles or aids to your life's agenda.
[48:10] Speaker: Such a rigid, self-centered view of the people around you is disconnecting and inaccurate.
[48:19] Speaker: They are all constantly changing, and each of them treasures their precious lives just as much as you do yours.
[48:29] Speaker: Each of them lives an epic hero's journey.
[48:41] Speaker: Thank you.
[48:42] Speaker: Your radio voice competes with mine.
[48:45] Speaker: Yeah, thank you.
[48:50] Speaker: This has been a lovely talk, and I certainly enjoyed the book, and I found it actually pretty easy to read.
[48:57] Speaker: So you did a lot of stuff in there.
[48:59] Speaker: Anyway, yes, the book is How to Train a Happy Mind.
[49:02] Speaker: It's A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment.
[49:04] Speaker: Scott Snibbe, thank you so much.
[49:06] Speaker: Thank you.
[49:07] Speaker: Thank you very much.
[49:08] Speaker: And thanks for The Battery.
[49:11] Speaker: One of my friends is a really fantastic meditation teacher.
[49:14] Speaker: She read this and then she said, You've made a meditation page turner.
[49:19] Speaker: Which is one of my favorite compliments about the book because I tried to make it readable and fun.
[49:25] Speaker: We can do a QA.
[49:27] Speaker: All right.
[49:28] Speaker: So opening it up here.
[49:33] Speaker: Hi, Scott.
[49:33] Speaker: I'm not sure I remembered right.
[49:35] Speaker: You were talking about the refuges.
[49:37] Speaker: So there were three Buddha Dharma Sangha, and then you introduced the fourth, which was everybody.
[49:42] Speaker: Everybody, yeah.
[49:43] Speaker: You said there were the fifth.
[49:45] Speaker: There's a fifth one we didn't get to.
[49:47] Speaker: That's the one that's always accessible to you because it's your own mind.
[49:50] Speaker: And I actually really debated because it's the first chapter, even before the first topic.
[49:55] Speaker: That's how they teach the Lamrim.
[49:56] Speaker: And that refugees that if you go deeply within your own mind, there's I'm surprised, I'm glad you got to this because actually the most important.
[50:05] Speaker: See, we jumped to the most advanced topic, but the very beginning of Mahayana Buddhism is an extraordinary belief that everybody is fundamentally good, that our anger, our craving, jealousy, pride, they're shallow.
[50:21] Speaker: They're at the shallowest level of our consciousness.
[50:24] Speaker: And you go beneath that, you get a subtle consciousness.
[50:26] Speaker: Beneath that is extremely subtle consciousness.
[50:30] Speaker: And you can touch that in meditation.
[50:32] Speaker: If we had time, I could lead people through a 10-minute meditation.
[50:35] Speaker: And many of you here would have the experience.
[50:37] Speaker: It's not difficult to have that experience, to see the fundamental goodness that's inside everybody.
[50:44] Speaker: And that's the flip side of Buddhists always meditating on suffering and death.
[50:48] Speaker: It's actually fundamentally we believe that everybody is good, and that goodness is so much more intrinsic and powerful than the shallow delusions that seem to overpower us.
[50:59] Speaker: So thank you for asking that.
[51:00] Speaker: That was actually maybe one of the most important points that we didn't even touch.
[51:05] Speaker: That's the fifth refuge, is your own mind.
[51:07] Speaker: And that's the one that's always accessible to you anytime you want it.
[51:11] Speaker: Thanks for asking that.
[51:12] Speaker: Yeah.
[51:13] Speaker: Thank you.
[51:13] Speaker: Thank you, Laura.
[51:30] Speaker: Thanks for joining me for my interview with Laura Sydell at The Battery in San Francisco.
[51:34] Speaker: If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy the book based on our podcast's Modern Approach to Buddhist Wisdom, How to Train a Happy Mind, featuring a forward by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
[51:45] Speaker: You can find it in paper, ebook, and audiobook format anywhere you buy books, and it makes a great gift for this holiday season.
[51:53] Speaker: If you'd like to go deeper in your meditation practice and find like-minded people interested in talking about the ideas discussed in the podcast, go to how to train a happymind.org to sign up for our newsletter and join our Train a Happy Mind community that offers weekly lectures, meditations, classes, and discussions.
[52:13] Speaker: If it's possible for you, please also consider making a donation to our podcast.
[52:19] Speaker: How to Train a Happy Mind is a nonprofit project of A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment.
[52:24] Speaker: Our podcasts and programs are free and ad-free thanks to our generous donors.
[52:29] Speaker: To support us now, visit our website at howtotrainahappymind.org.
[52:34] Speaker: We accept cash, credit, bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, and your donations are tax deductible in the US.
[52:40] Speaker: Thanks to Christian Parry for mastering this episode and Isabela Acebal for marketing.
[52:46] Speaker: We wish you a wonderful day.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.