Letter to a Buddhist Nation: Rebirth, Refuge, & the Limits of Skepticism | Sam Harris Q&A

Oh yeah, great to meet you both.

I don't know if your friend is, but well, that praise will bounce right off, but thank your monk brother.

Cool answer.

Good answer. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I don't think insight into emptiness or selflessness tends to be enough for most people most of the time. I mean, I remain agnostic as to whether or not it's ultimately enough. I mean, if you, you know, fully stabilize it and you're an arhat or, you know, a Buddha or however you want to conceive of the final condition, well then I suppose it's by definition enough, but we've just noticed so many seemingly mature practitioners of meditation. And I mean even people who were billed as enlightened masters misbehave so terribly in their conditions of power. This is especially true, I would say, in the Vajrayana, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, because I think some of the safeguards around sila are more relaxed there. I'm not aware of it being as true in the Theravada tradition, though I'm sure there are stories to tell, but it's less true there for, I think, a variety of reasons. One, I think the emphasis on sila tends to be greater, and also the role of the teacher is deemphasized. It really is kind of a technique-based teaching. It's not that, you know, it's not that a great charismatic teacher isn't a great thing and it's not that there can't be a lot of devotion for such a teacher, but devotion as a primary method or even as a necessary component, you know, kind of guru devotion, is significantly deemphasized in a way that it's not in, certainly in, Vajrayana Buddhism, and Vajrayana Buddhism is almost like Hinduism in that regard. And obviously Zen has its, you know, kind of lionizing role of the teacher and a kind of deemphasis on sila and compassion certainly by comparison with Theravada. So I think some of this, some of the guardrails have been removed, and so it's not really a surprise that there are probably more scandals that can come to mind among Zen teachers and Vajrayana teachers than among Theravada teachers. And obviously, you don't get me started on the Hindu gurus, there's endless scandal there. So this does reveal a kind of paradox or seeming paradox, which is you can be very, very advanced in kind of meditative accomplishment and still be a dangerous jerk of some description. When you're out there in the wild among other people, and there's just, this experiment has been run too many times for us to be in doubt about it, right? So, I think more is needed at least most of the time. And that more that's needed is, I mean, is very much present in Buddhism. I mean, it is the Eightfold Path after all, right? So what you're talking about, things like right livelihood, you know, and right speech as a necessary component to this. And so I think, you know, having a precept against lying is important, right? Just to know that you're not going to lie really ever unless you're in some kind of self-defense situation where, you know, you're choosing between lying and physical violence. You know, that's the exception I would, that's obvious to me. But so yeah, I do think, you know, there are other things to know that are worth knowing in this world that can give you a stronger set of ethics. And when you actually ask the question of just what is required for all of us to live together in, you know, a global civilization that is functional and improving, and, you know, wherein we can be confident that the future is going to be better than the past or not worse, and the kinds of contributions we can all make to that, well, then you're by definition talking about politics and how can we make our politics sane. And there I think the contributions of Buddhism are harder to detect. Right? I don't know of a Buddhist society that has produced a politics that we should all envy and want to emulate. Right? I think there's a kind of quietism and, you know, I mean, just there's a bunch of Eastern biases that I think, you know, that are cultural biases that are in some ways not helpful in producing a sane politics, right? It's, and it's, yeah, just kind of collectivist, herdlike, you know, ant colony aspiration that doesn't map very well onto the kind of the primacy of individual rights and, you know, the freedom that we would locate and enshrine there. Again, that has its own pathologies. I think, you know, free people can get into their heads to live profoundly unwise lives and, you know, have and want, you desperately want things that are not worth wanting in the end. But I do think that the West has, I mean, just wisdom in all its forms has not been spread evenly over the surface of the earth. Right? So I think, you know, the contributions of Western science and Western philosophy are important and in certain areas are making an asymmetrical contribution to human progress and human wisdom. I would say the comparison is equally invidious in the other direction when you're looking at the contemplative life and, you know, what you can do with your attention so as to recognize, you know, how to be happy in this world. There I think, you know, virtually all of the really actionable wisdom is Eastern because, you know, all of the Western contemplative traditions have been explicitly framed within the Abrahamic religions, right? So you're talking about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And those religions are so heavy-handed conceptually in their dualism and in their emphasis on, you know, kind of the primacy of revelation and the, you know, the revealed nature of these specific texts, the unalterability of them. I mean, there's just, the texts are so meager in their contemplative wisdom. It's not that you can't find anything worth contemplating there, but, you know, when you compare, you know, if you're just leaping through even the best parts of the Bible, to say nothing of the Quran, which is even more, even a scanter resource there, you compare that to just what you could pull at random off a Buddhist bookshelf, it just doesn't survive comparison, right? Right? It's just not, you know, it's not to say that the Buddhist canon isn't also full of miracles and magic and things that many secularists would want to doubt or, you know, disbelieve or at least bracket with uncertainty. I mean, it is, but vast stretches of it are, you know, perfectly serviceable in a secular context for, you know, the contemplative life, right? Right? I mean, there's just clear teachings about the nature of awareness and, you know, just how to recognize it by looking directly at the nature of your experience. And there's nothing that has to be believed to get that project started, right? You don't have, I mean, yes, you can believe in karma and rebirth and in the magical powers acquired by advanced yogis and all of that. But you really don't have to embrace the project fully enough so that you can recognize everything we've been talking about in this conversation, right? I mean, you really can untie the knot of self without believing anything and then just notice, then ask the question, what is there left to pay attention to?

No, that was, we were dubbed that by somebody.

Mhm.

I doubt it. I doubt so. I doubt.

Stalking Buddhist in the faith.

Stalking horse. Stalking horse. Yeah.

I mean, the way I say this is that, this is the way I said it in this recent lecture, is that I don't consider myself a Buddhist, but you would know far more about the way I view the world by mistaking me for one than by knowing most other true facts about me. Right? So, I don't think it's true to say that I'm a Buddhist because I don't think Buddhism really has a monopoly on the wisdom of the Buddha, right? I mean, on some level, the Buddha wasn't teaching Buddhism or wasn't a Buddhist. And anyone who has realized these things in any depth, I mean, just recognized emptiness, say, must recognize that this is deeper than, this is an insight about the human mind that's deeper than culture, right? It's deeper than any tradition, right? So it doesn't justify any kind of sectarian claims. Any, I mean, you don't even have to be as highfalutin as emptiness or any real insight, it's just the fact that thoughts or experience altogether is impermanent, right? You know, just that, just being able to observe impermanence in one's life, right? That no experience lasts. You know, this is just this ceaseless change in one's sensory engagement with the world and in one's inner life. It's just, you know, you were angry yesterday, but that anger is not here anymore, right? And if it appears again, it'll appear and then it'll disappear and you'll be on to something else, right? That insight into impermanence, that is not a Buddhist insight, that is just the way the mind is, right? It's deeper than culture, it's deeper than tradition. And ultimately, I do think we have to get out of the business of being sectarian, right? So that ultimately speaking about an insight into emptiness as a Buddhist insight, right? I think that's a little bit like talking about, you know, physics as a Christian insight because the Christians were the first people to really give us physics, right? And Isaac Newton was a Christian, a very devout and unpleasant one apparently. But so I just think, you know, just as physics is deeper than Christianity or any culture that would make progress in it, I think spirituality and a real, a sane approach to ethics is deeper than any religious tradition, including Buddhism. So that's why I would tend not to call myself a Buddhist. And also I recognize that other traditions, to one or another degree, are mapping the same territory, right? So I think, you know, unlike some Buddhists who would either be agnostic about this or actually deny this, I think it's just, it's pretty obvious that people like Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj and Punji were talking about this same insight. You know, the fact that they would tend to use the language of the kind of the Vedic language of self, you know, capital S Self, to positively identify what is left when you're no longer captivated by your own ego. That's just a semantic difference. I don't think anything really turns on that. And I think there's where everyone's talking about emptiness or non-duality at bottom. But some are talking about it more precisely than others, and I think that precision does matter in the end, right? I think it's possible to spend a lot of time confused by very subtle concepts that are kind of subtly, you know, misleading you or biasing your attention. And I do think Buddhism has a near monopoly on a lot of the precision here. And again, to some degree, to one degree or another, depending on the tradition. I mean, for instance, one of the reasons why I, you know, once I could practice non-dual mindfulness, well, then I could sort of see it everywhere, right? And I can read Zen teaching with great edification and feel like, well, okay, this Zen teaching is totally on point, but I know that if I had gone through the front door of the Zen tradition, I would still be confused, right? I mean, like, you can spend a lot of time, at least by my lights, not knowing how to meditate in the Zen tradition. Like, you just can spend years wondering whether you're doing it correctly. I think, and honestly, I think it's this, and I've said this before. I said this, I'm not sure I've said this over at Waking Up, but I've said this somewhere. I think I probably had I not met Tulku Urgyen and just found myself in the presence of another great Dzogchen master, I might not have recognized how to practice Dzogchen, and I just would have come away wondering whether I was doing it right. I mean, he was uniquely precise in how he taught, and I've been with many great Dzogchen masters. I mean, the greatest, you know, of the age really. I mean, some who, Tulku Urgyen would have, you know, if you had asked him, would have said he, you know, was a much greater Dzogchen master than he was. Someone like Khenpo Rinpoche, and I've been with them when they were teaching Dzogchen. I mean, when they were giving mind teachings in a, you know, very formal way, and, you know, I recognized in that context that I would not have gotten the point had I not had Tulku Urgyen's instruction prior to being there, right? And I even had the great good fortune to spend a lot of time with Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, who, you know, by everyone's estimation, was just this amazing Zen master. He was someone who the Dalai Lama considered a teacher and, you know, had been with all the great lamas of the time, and he was a contemporary of Tulku Urgyen again, and a little younger than Khenpo. But I had a lot of access to him, spent just a lot of, you know, informal time with him. Created several month-long and two-month-long retreats with him, two of which were in my house in New Mexico at that point. So I mean, I just could just hang out with him as a teacher. He didn't speak English, so there was a translation problem, but, you know, had a, you know, a translator there all the time. And he was, I mean, he was constantly teaching Dzogchen just with his vibe, right? And I spent, I had just immense devotion to him as a teacher and a fair amount of pure perception of him as a teacher. I mean, there's the times where he would just, he would just look like guru to me. I mean, just, I just was in the presence of an enlightened master, clearly. And yet I don't think I would have been able to practice Dzogchen by spending all that time with him and getting his Dzogchen teachings. I don't think he, he wasn't delivering the goods precisely enough for me at that, you know, that I just would have, I would have been getting the vibe, I would have had the non-striving vibe well in hand, but yeah, I mean, the crucial bit for me was the it's right on the surface component, right? The not, don't overlook, like, the gesture of overlooking it, of spending too much time, and too much time is, you know, a full second trying to get this thing, you know, to glimpse this thing. Again, this is, the instruction that's necessary to get started is different than how you wind up practicing ultimately. Like, the practice isn't ultimately, I'll give you just a, you know, I'll just describe what that is. I mean, the change is like, so this initial trying to turn attention upon itself to look for what's looking, that trying to turn is this initial way of recognizing that there's no center to experience. Once you've recognized that, I mean, once you've got the paper moving back and forth, back and forth, and now you know where to hold, now you can see that the dot isn't, it disappears. Right? Again, it's not a perfect analogy because this sounds like you're trying to maintain some kind of state, which you're not. But once you know how to see that there's no center, well, then in just a very straightforward and ordinary way, you're just mindful of that, right? It's not, then there's not this continuous sense of turning, turning and not finding. So that is kind of an initial exercise. But the crucial piece for me was the nearness, you know, and just how subtle the non-effort is, right? It is this shift of plane. It is like, you know, you're looking through, you're looking through the window. So again, just imagine what it's like to look through a window and not see your face at all, right? It's right there, just six inches away, but you, it's not, you don't see it at all because your starting point is you're looking at this beautiful tree outside on the front lawn, and it's, you know, its branches are waving in the wind, and there's a child at play underneath it, and there are birds, you know, that you can hear singing from the top of it, and you're studying all of that with mindful attention, very one-pointedly, and the teacher saying, 'No, no, no. Don't you understand? It's right, it's closer to you than that, right? Forget about the tree. You can keep looking in that direction. I'm not telling you to move your eyes, but this thing is closer, right? And it takes less time to see than the tree, right?' It's like, and there's this shift of plane that reveals your face, right? Without moving your head or your eyes. So again, that's the initial condition of just figuring out how to see this thing, that this moment of absence that leaves everything else intact, right? That again, you can see and hear and smell and sense, and even thoughts can arise, right? There's also this initial conditioning is one in which thoughts are apparently the enemy because thoughts are the thing that are distracting you, that are making it impossible to be mindful of anything, much less the ocean of emptiness that is before you, and that is in fact your condition. So again, yeah, so again, this is the paradox to come back to your question. You know, I'm always long-winded, but with you guys, I've achieved a level of long-windedness that I think will stand the test of time. So my relationship to some of the kind of spookier aspects of Buddhism, and to take the kind of larger footprint of Buddhism, including, you know, Vajrayana Buddhism, it's somewhat paradoxical because, I mean, I've had all these experiences. I mean, I have the experience of real devotion, and I, you know, have even the experience of seeing my teacher as a perfect Buddha, but all the while knowing that he wasn't, or very likely wasn't, or at least I could recognize other qualities in him as just an ordinary person, or certainly more ordinary than being perfect. Which is to say, you know, it's obvious to me that all these great teachers I studied with were people who were culturally bound to some degree, even in so far as, even if only in so far as they were, there are many things that they didn't understand about the world, right? Right? I mean, I would not have looked to any of these guys for insight into, you know, quantum physics or any other branch of science, right? I mean, I, you know, I was with some teachers who might well have thought the earth was flat, right? Right? I mean, I've seen some yogis who just had spent decades in caves, and, you know, I don't know what kind of education they had gotten prior to going into those caves, but I mean, this is just, you know, these are not guys you're going to stick a microphone in front of and ask, you know, tell us what our 21st century worldview should be around human health or, you know, asteroid impacts or anything else. And so there's just a lot to know, and it's pretty clear that meditation, you know, barring some, you know, magical change that I have not witnessed, you know, omniscience, meditation doesn't deliver those insights, right? And I think some of those insights matter. You know, if you don't want your kids to die unnecessarily from viruses, well, it's important to have insights into biology and have a society that can ramify those insights into, you know, medical technology and vaccines, etc. And, you know, there are a wide variety of traditional cultures that have had lots of insights into emptiness, but haven't had, you know, material insights into how to build a society that can survive or that can even encourage basic human health to the degree that we can now. And so, so yeah, I view the, you know, the precious jewel of the Dharma in this larger context where there's just more that we, there's more that is, that's worth having in hand, and there's more to know and explore to safeguard everything that we care about in this world.

That's good. It's great. Great start.

Yeah. Well, again, this is sort of the realm of paradox. I mean, because it's on some level, yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any way of avoiding paradox here. But so on the first pass here, it's obviously incredibly valuable to practice and to get access to people who have practiced more effectively than you have, you know, thus far, right? I.e., great teachers. And I mean, at every level, I mean, they're inspiring, you know, they can prove to you just by the way they are that this project is worth engaging in the first place, if you even can't feel it yourself from the beginning. But even once you become self-sufficient in your practice, which is to say you're confident that there is a there there, you know, whatever example a teacher provides, I mean, you know that all the pleasures you can seek in the world are by definition impermanent, right? And they can't be the basis of lasting satisfaction, right? And just repeating your pleasures as rapaciously as you can achieve, you know, just what sort of durable happiness is can that be? And, you know, you can give that a try for years at a stretch, but at a certain point you might realize, well, there's got to be something deeper here, and why not focus on that entirely, right? If only for a time, right? Why not give that your full attention? Well, then the logic of that, withdrawing your attention from every other concern and putting it entirely on that, that produces something like a monastic retreat almost by definition, right? Like, I'm just going to do, I'm going to do nothing but this. I'm not going to read any other books or any books at all, and I'm not going to talk to anyone about anything, and I'm not going to get married, and I'm not going to have kids, and I'm not going to, you know, find a career, and I'm not going to do any of that. I'm just going to bear down on this existential concern of, you know, what is happiness, you know, what is well-being at the deepest possible level within this realm of change, right? You know, again, it's not, it can't be just keeping the, you know, a dozen different plates spinning because, you know, they stop spinning the moment you let up, and there's a dissatisfaction even in those moments of satisfaction, right? You begin to notice that, you know, pleasure on some level isn't good enough, right? And so it's very easy to just, without being told that you should be a Buddhist or you should be a monk or you should adopt any tradition, just the logic of your inquiry into the implications of impermanence and the nature of experience and the question, the overriding question, is it possible to be free in this context of impermanence? Is it possible to really be happy even though everything changes and everyone ultimately dies? If there's a possibility of a yes there, well, why not find that, right? All of a sudden that begins to look like a monastic life on some level. But the paradox is that once you find its real basis, well, then why should you have to do anything out of the ordinary to just live as that, right? Why should you have to withdraw from the world? Why should you have to not have a family or not be married or not have a career or not watch television or not, I mean, well, you know, you can recognize emptiness while watching a movie and, you know, and eating fistfuls of popcorn too, right? So why not just do that, right? I mean, if that's what's happening, why not do that?

So, so, yeah, so it's, so on some level it doesn't matter, but on another level it matters quite a lot what you do with your attention, right? So, and maybe this is just a stage thing, you know, in one stage of life it really, really matters that you give all your attention to this project, and in another stage it matters less. And the truth is, I, you know, I can't personally say that I know I'm living correctly. I mean, it's totally possible that there's some, it would be possible for me to get to the end of my life, I imagine, and, you know, retrospectively look back on the last, you know, many decades and say, it would have been much better to have practiced much more, right? Like, I, you know, I wasted a lot of time on some level. Like, I could imagine that an epiphany like that awaits me. And that's the kind of epiphany that being a monk is a very deliberate strategy, very deliberate hedge against, right? Like, you just, like when you decide to be a monk, you're deciding, okay, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be the guy who gets to the end of his life and thinks, oh, I should have really been practicing rather than doing all these other things I got distracted by. And I totally understand that. And yet, and another way of thinking about this is when you look at why aren't you a monk, or why am I not a monk? And why don't I spend my days doing nothing but practice? Well, mostly that's a story of all the other things that captivate me, right? All the other things I want, all the other things that I haven't seen through the illusion of on some level. I mean, so it really is a story of samsara, right? To put it in Buddhist terms. I mean, it's like, whoa. Oh. Oh. So, you're telling me you wanted a wife and you wanted kids and you wanted a career and you want all those pleasures that require more money than you currently have. And so now you're working harder. Oh, is that the story you're telling me? Well, that sure sounds like samsara, right? That doesn't sound like emptiness. So yeah, that's true. And yet I find that I can punctuate all those moments with a recognition of emptiness. Right? So there's kind of an equalization, and this happens. I mean, this is a part of the power of being able to practice non-dual mindfulness, but it's also a liability of it because, I mean, if you can really just drop your problem, you can drop your predicament, you know, always on demand in an instant, right, as one can when one can really recognize emptiness, then it's true to say that you're never far away from your deepest insights, right? You're just, you can always just, you know, you can just be free in the next moment, but whatever you've been doing by tendency in previous moments, but it also can take the urgency out of the whole life plan of being a yogi, right? Because then you can never really wander too far. Your life can never really be that dysfunctional because the emptiness is always just right here. You know, how judgmental can you be of the way you just spent the last hour if you can let go of all of it in this instant, right? How much regret can you really feel if you can really just recognize emptiness? And yet there can be a lot of moments over the last hour where you were just captivated by just random that shouldn't have been, that wouldn't have, certainly wouldn't have captured the attention of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche or some great master presumably. And the fact that it did capture your attention explains why, now speaking personally, the fact that it did capture my attention, it explains why I'm not tending to show up like Khyentse Rinpoche in most moments, you know, of the day. You know, it's like, it's not, there's an ordinariness to my life that is pretty easy to explain given how, given the many ordinary uses of attention that, you know, that I'm still fairly dedicated to on a daily and an hourly basis. And if I think, if I believed more of what I consider the kind of the metaphysics and the mythology and the superstition of Buddhism or any other tradition, I might feel more urgency around all of that. Like for instance, if I thought, if I was sure that karma and rebirth were real, right? And, you know, everyone I love in this life is going to be lost to me in a few short years, and then I'm going to be plunged into some other circumstance that's going to be just as impermanent and just as unsatisfying, and I've been doing that from beginningless time, and, you know, this precious opportunity to practice as a, you know, in a human birth is, you know, analogous to, you know, a tortoise surfacing once a kalpa into a vast ocean with a, you know, a single life preserver floating randomly on the surface, and, you know, once in a, you know, 50 trillion years it manages to get it, put its head through that yoke, and that's, that's the preciousness of a human life, or, you know, you know, all the other analogies. If the circumstance really is that precious and that precarious, and I'm using it to, you know, sometimes practice and sometimes recognize this, you know, this condition, but in many other moments I'm just looking for something to watch on Netflix, or I'm, you know, shopping for groceries or whatever it is, or reacting to some awful thing that happened in our politics, you know, maybe, maybe simply having the traditional religious orientation toward, you know, you know, Buddhist principles could have spared me a lot of that. And I'd be, you know, I'd be, you know, you and I, the three of us would have the same haircut and wearing the same clothes.

Well, my hair is, my hair is also falling out, so I'm going to get there one way or the other. You know, you know, robe or not. But yeah, so I just, the truth is I just don't know, and I, but by tendency I am agnostic on many points about which, you know, you know, traditional Buddhists would want me to be gnostic, and I also, you know, and fundamentally doubt other things, and yeah, so I'm just, I'm muddling along on the shore of emptiness along with you guys and doing it differently.

Okay, you're playing the long game.

Well, it was probably master and slave, but I'm not sure in which direction, given our current karma. Yeah, you know, I, you know, honestly, I just don't, I'm just agnostic as to how weird this universe might be. I mean, you know, it's, however you think about it, it's deeply weird. I mean, I think the traditional picture of rebirth is obviously weird, but so is the notion of not existing prior to one's birth and not existing after one's death. You know, that consciousness just is created from nothing and vanishes into nothing. That is also weird. Yeah, there are obviously many theories in good standing in modern physics that are even weirder and in some ways strike a tangent to, if not a notion of rebirth, kind of a similar picture of multiplicity and strangeness. I mean, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that there at this moment are, you know, a functionally infinite number of copies of ourselves having increasingly dissimilar conversations to this one, you know, in adjacent slivers of slices of this universe based on things that are happening at the quantum level. You know, how anyone can believe that with a straight face is something that escapes me. And yet that is, you know, probably the most kosher interpretation of quantum mechanics, at least in the current generation of physicists. So I just, I don't, I mean, I think the universe may in fact not only be, as, you know, J.B.S. Haldane famously said, not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose, that we're just actually not capable of conceptually representing the circumstance we're in. And so how that relates to the mystery of birth and death, I don't know. But I mean, I've certainly had experiences in meditation and on psychedelics that intuitively gave me the sense that mind is much vaster than it tends to seem, right? That you can just, you can be, you can find yourself entangled with a kind of a vastness of mental landscape that is, that is just, that has, that makes no reference to your personhood even, right? And across which it's impossible to remember that you even are a person. And entry into that space certainly felt a lot like what I imagine dying would feel like. So, you know, if upon death we find ourselves in a circumstance of just much more mind without any reference to what was happening here with our bodies, intuitively that wouldn't surprise me given certain experiences I've had. And again, none of this is to discount the plausibility of, you know, mind being entirely a product of what the brain is doing. I mean, that is also, you know, there's a lot of, you're not going to embarrass yourself by thinking that, right? But again, it's still not clear how consciousness is integrated with matter on any level, even by reference to all that we know about, you know, the mind's dependence on the brain through 150 years of neuroscience. So I just really, the truth is, I just really don't know. And I wouldn't, you know, any answer seems surprising, right? There's nothing that, there's nothing that seems intuitively common-sensical about any of this. It's somewhat analogous to the question of, is there more advanced life out there in the universe or are we alone? Right? The so-called Fermi paradox or the Fermi problem, you know, I find that either answer is completely mind-blowing, right? The idea that we might be alone, that you look out there, you know, at trillions upon trillions of, you know, possibly habitable planets and solar systems that we have every reason to believe exist at this point, and the idea that there's nothing complex that's alive on any of them, right? That we're the only point of view on the universe on this lonely rock, right? That seems insane. But the idea that the universe is teeming with other conscious complex creatures and, you know, even civilizations, and it basically, it's all, you know, Star Trek or Star Wars out there on some level, that also seems completely insane, right? So, and anything in between seems also arbitrarily weird and insane. So it's just like there's no answer that you can get comfortable with. And I do feel the same about the mystery of birth and death.

I've never met Alan Wallace. I know that Joseph holds him in very high regard, and I've read some of his, um, his work on mindfulness, but I've never met him.