Ah, Henry, good to see you.
Kevin, it's great to be back. Really nice to be in the room with you again.
Yeah, it's changed a bit. Last time we were here we had like two chairs floating because I was just kind of building out the studio, but now it's pretty much complete. So, lots has happened since we last chatted. You launched a new book, The Way app has been building momentum, which has been great. So I'd love to talk about all those things. And then also this morning I was up early because of my jet lag; I did some user-submitted questions as well. So I went on Instagram and we've got a few questions there. So are you game for all of that? Let's see where we go. Dive in and whatever happens, happens.
So The Way app — one of the things that we know to be true in the app industry, when you look across the board on meditation apps, and I would say meditation in general, is that there is a lot of user churn. Like people have these intentions; they're like, okay, meditation sounds great, you know, they want to sit down and really figure out if this is for them. Oftentimes — and a lot of people listening to this, I'm sure, will say, hey, I tried it, it just didn't work for me. It's funny, a good colleague of mine — I was just in Hawaii at this conference and he was there too, and we sat down for meditation, and he had never experienced it before, and I played one of the meditations, and he's like, that was wonderful, but my mind is just like, I don't think this is for me. Like he seemed to be having a hard time with it. So I'm curious, when you were developing the courseware and the curriculum for this app, how did you think about that? I mean, you have so much experience training people. How do you think about ways in which you can engage them, meet them where they are, and keep them around for the long term, so this really is a durable habit?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great — it's the perennial question actually of meditation, because all the traditions that have been doing it for 2,500 or 3,000 years, they all know what the great benefits of it are, but they come from cumulative, steady, regular habit of practicing a little bit every day. You know, that's really the key thing. So our whole project actually with The Way —
Five of you, right? Sort of four plus a few.
Yeah, but really the core team is really just four — was to build something that could take a user on the journey of being trained in meditation. So in my mind that meant we've got to frame what the project is, so people know it's actually not just about a targeted stress reduction intervention when you need it. You actually, if you learn how to meditate, and if you know what the greater possibilities of it are, and you're instructed gently, sort of guided, trained really in how to do it, then you will get the stress reduction benefits and the calm — but that's not the only thing you'll get. And it won't be like, hey, my dog just died, I need a meditation, or I'm having a stressful time at work, I need a meditation. It'll be actually your whole system has changed, your whole brain operating system, as it were, has changed; you've got new software. So the way you handle whatever comes up will be different. In other words, we didn't want to do — I'm not going to knock them; there are some fantastic, spectacular meditation apps already out there, a lot of them, but they nearly all followed this model of having a lot of choices: do you need it for this, do you need it for that, you know, short-term courses. What we wanted it to be is this longer-term thing, that you're really being drawn into a long path of practice that has clear and various benefits that are going to actually function in a way that changes how you operate in the world, under whatever circumstances, you know.
You know, when I think about a couple hundred years ago, there was way less distraction. We didn't have Netflix, we didn't have all these devices that are fragmenting our brains in all these weird ways. How do you think about approaching this when someone says, you know, I don't have time for 10 minutes? And then also, do they have to just believe in this bigger end goal? Is that like the main hook for it?
Right, right, right. Okay, great. So a couple of points I would say. First of all, the fact that this practice has been around as long as it has suggests to me that it's been needed that long. So I'd say there's sort of two kinds of distraction. One is just grabbing at things that will make us feel more comfortable in the moment. And of course nowadays it's often apps on the phone, social media, news, a glass of wine, the fridge for some, you know. And usually it's because there's some undercurrent that we may be aware of or not, of some kind of distress or unease that we want to just not feel. So distraction is a powerful tool. It's not all bad, by the way, because sometimes distraction really does help us feel better. The problem is when it becomes the main thing, you know. We're hungry for the little dopamine hit, and we're just sort of led by that.
But there's also another level of almost deeper distraction in a certain sense, which is where we're so caught up not just in those immediate distractions, but in the sort of hunger and sense of need and sense of stress we might have around the larger projects in our life. And the issue there is that we don't give ourselves time to recognize the bare fact of existing at all. The very fact that we're here being conscious in this very moment is a miracle, actually. And it's a gift; if we start thinking about it, it's just an incomparable gift to be experiencing this existence. And of course often it has a lot of hard things in it, and it has challenges, it has grievous losses, it has lots of difficulties. So you can see the reasons why we might not want to come back to just experiencing being here.
But if we can navigate the challenges to that, we can actually start to recognize that in my very being I'm being given an infinite gift, you know, just because I'm aware right now. I have a human body, I have a human mind, I have a human heart, you know, and I'm able to experience them. So here's the bigger picture of meditation: it's ways to come back to really receiving the gift of being alive. And the wisdom of meditation is that it's counterintuitive, and it's against our typical conditioning. In Buddhism they say you have to go against the stream, you know, because actually you are going against a tide of conventional ways of being. But if you do, and you can do it just enough to get over the little resistance hump, and you can do it every day, you're starting to open up the possibility of being at peace without outward circumstance being the way you want them — that there's an actual intrinsic peace we can find.
And there's lots of dimensions to that that we could go into, but fundamentally I think it's about a shift from all my well-being being contingent on outward things, to giving myself the opportunity to find a kind of underlying well-being. And I may get it in only little hits, I may get it in very small amounts, but just to start recognizing that there actually is something right here, now, that is already okay. And it can be called, I think, a fundamental well-being. And to get even the smallest hints of that is kind of radical, because so much of our orientation has been about, I've got to make the world and the outward circumstances of my life be the way I need them if I'm going to be okay. And to start discovering that's not the whole story — we're not saying that's totally wrong, abandon that. I mean, maybe a few want to do that; serious, dedicated souls want to be an adept on the mountaintop. But for most of us that's not necessary. All that's necessary is to open up the chance of getting a taste of a radically different kind of well-being that's not predicated on the way our lives are going.
That's intrinsic, and it's such a beautiful thing to find that. And it's not that hard. That's the thing that I'm really committed to, that's why I'm so keen to share this with anybody interested — it's actually not that hard. It does require one difficult thing, which is establishing a habit. So hence again, you're asking, do the big goals of meditation help make the habit? I'm sure they do. If you've got the frame that meditation is just going to help me with a particular stress, it may do that, and that's great, and there's nothing wrong with that, but in a way, why should I keep going? But if you've got the frame that meditation on a regular basis can take me to a new way of experiencing my life — one where I'm less beholden to how things are going in order to be okay, and one where in fact I find that I'm already okay, at least I get a taste of that.
Yeah, that's a bigger picture. And it's a hard one for people to wrap their heads around that are so in their head all day long. Like even, you know, I've had a decent practice now for a few years, and last night Dar had a great suggestion where she said, hey, let's teach the kids that phones aren't okay at the dinner table by being role models and putting them in a box 10 feet away. And I'm like, yeah, sounds great, of course I'm in on that, right? So I put it in the box 10 feet away, and I finished dinner — but one of the things that your app has taught me is this recognition of feelings. Like just to identify and see the discomfort, and just feel it, and taste that discomfort, and just to see, oh, there's that thing, right? And I felt that anxiety: I've got to get back to this thing, I've got to move, I've got to do something else. But just to recognize it was — normally I would just get up and go right into it, right? And so I feel like recognition, to me, feels like a very early stage and step in this process. Would you agree with that? Just seeing what your own brain is doing.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. But it's not only early stage, because it doesn't matter how long you've been meditating, you'll get times when something comes up and I want that, you know. And the question is how much you put the finger on it precisely. It's like, how much can I actually recognize the experience that is going on, rather than immediately react to it? So typically it's, ah, there's this discomfort, I don't want discomfort, I'll have another swig of wine, or I'll go and get the phone, or I'll just do something that will stop this feeling. But the meditation path is, again, it's counterintuitive: no, let me give a home to this feeling. Let me actually recognize how I'm doing what's going on. And in doing that, what I'm doing actually is expanding, even just a tiny bit, my capacity for holding my own experience, including the feelings that are difficult. And what's so beautiful about that is that we're developing — it might sound a bit grand, but we're sort of developing compassion, and that includes self-compassion. And that is a really significant shift.
Yeah, because rather than being tugged around by our impulses, it's like we either push it away or we shove it down, right? And so you're saying this is kind of like a warm hug for it.
And it's like, you don't have to go anywhere. Yeah, I'm going to recognize what this feeling is and embrace it.
Exactly. And then what it's as if, what we feel we are shifts from being wrapped up in that difficult feeling — that's just me wanting something, you know, that's me, I'm there wanting something. Instead we start to identify with the part of us that is able to hold the distress, however mild it is. So then we become kind of a more expansive person, and we can feel our heart really growing. I think that's how it may feel. I always think actually we're only uncovering capacity we already had. It's always what I think in meditation — it can feel like we're doing something to make something develop; that's one framing of it. But another framing of it is, no, we're actually just expanding our recognition of capacities we didn't know we had but we've had all along.
I see. And I think that's really what it's about, all the way from handling difficult emotions to, you know, mind-blowing openings. Well, it couldn't have been any other way though, right? Because if we didn't have the capacity to have that capacity, it never would. Do you know what I mean? Like it has to —
That's true, yeah. But it's not like, say, we've got the capacity to grow to get fitter but we do need to go to the gym. But this is slightly different. It's like it seems like we're developing the equivalent of better musculature and all the rest of it, but actually maybe we're just parting what obscures that we actually already have.
And correct me if I'm getting this quote wrong, but there is a Zen saying where it's like the lifting of the veil, or something like that. Maybe it's not Zen related, but it's the idea that you have a veil over your face, and it's just the clearing and lifting, so that there's more clarity of what already was there, versus obtaining something new.
Exactly. I think it is. And there's another phrase in Zen which is like the clouds of delusion opening. And so that's a metaphor that's quite easy to get: like if it's a cloudy sky, the sun is still there, right?
Yeah, I always love that when you take a plane and it's super cloudy and muggy out, and then you pop through those clouds and it's a beautiful day out here. I always get the window seat. I love the window seat. But okay, I think this actually transitions great into another question from our friend Tim Ferriss. I was texting with him this morning and I'm like, hey, I'm going to be interviewing Henry, is there anything you want to ask him? And he's like, yes, I have some things I want to ask him. So Tim asks: if someone has 20 minutes per day, is it better to do one session or two 10-minute sessions, or another configuration? And are there certain times of day that are better than others?
Okay, I can answer that. The ideal is fairly early upon waking, soon after waking. And I would say do the 20 in one go, because every sit is actually a journey, and if you give yourself 20 minutes for that journey to unfold, you don't know quite where it might take you. And if you have two 10 minutes, you haven't got quite as long for the whole settling process to happen.
So let me do a follow-up question to that though, because it was interesting — you were so gracious in introducing me to your teacher who's based in Tokyo, and I was able to go out and meet with him. And one of the things that he asked me was, how many days a week do you miss sitting? Like how many days a week do you not sit? And I was like, I got to be honest with the senior Zen master here: probably two, you know. And he goes, I would rather have you sit five minutes a day every day than to miss a day. And so I guess a follow-up question to this would be: okay, 20 minutes sounds great, but if someone finds themselves missing days but they're aiming for 20 minutes, would you agree — shorter duration?
Unquestionably. You cut back to a level that you can maintain every day for, say, two weeks, and if you've done that, then you take a small step towards your target number. We may have a dream dose, whatever that might be, but if we're missing days, it probably means somehow it's too high for the way our life is at the moment. So you cut back to what you can maintain daily, and once you're up and running — and by that I mean going from complete beginner to sort of novice who might have been meditating regularly for, let's say, three to six months.
Okay, so interesting. That was a good question I had in mind because everyone's going to be a little bit different. And so if someone says, I've tried this before, it didn't work for me, what would you say the commitment is? To say, okay, I can almost — I can't perfectly guarantee, but I can almost guarantee you'll start to feel this will get easier for you. So it's at the three-to-six-month mark, is that kind of where it's at?
Yes, I think it probably is. And once you set a cruising reasonably, there will always be times when you don't want to do it, and we just learn to ride that, just do it anyway. I was thinking it's like if a ship in the olden days was sailing from, you know, Britain to India or something, and it's going to go through weather, but it doesn't mean it stops the journey — 'I'm just going to give up' — no, they just keep going. And it's the same; weather will come through our lives and through our bodies and our minds and our hearts. We just keep going.
It's so nice to have something that just keeps going regardless. There's a great value in that itself; like no matter what's going on in my life, I just do this thing. Even when people have had a sort of massive awakening experience, some great opening, what do they do the next day? Sit. What will the teacher tell them to do the next day? Sit. When someone's going through a really difficult time and there are real serious upheavals in life, the teacher might be compassionate, of course, around it, but still they'd say, sit. Just try to make a bit of time to sit every day, regardless.
So I would say what is really great to get to at some point — maybe three to six months actually is not long enough to be aiming for this — but twice a day of about half an hour, or 20 to 30 minutes twice a day, is fantastic when you're ready for it. And you have to wait till you're ready for it. And then maybe sometimes the evening sit is only 10 minutes, right? But if you can do it morning and evening — this is the big picture, we don't want to rush to this — but that is actually kind of the dream dose, because then you sort of don't drop away. It's like whatever you've developed in your sit in the morning is kind of very easily topped up in the evening sit, and same thing in the morning. And you start to get this contiguous sense of it that can run right through your life, and that's really getting beautiful. But again, everybody should find their own. I sometimes say it's like this: imagine your life is a mug of hot water, and you're putting a tea bag in it, and the tea bag is meditation. And ideally the water is flavored — all the water is flavored by the tea. And whether the tea bag needs to be in for 15 minutes in the morning and then it can keep you going around the clock, or maybe it needs a bit more — you see for yourself. Am I tasting it in my day-to-day life? And if the answer is, nah, not really, it probably means, ah, up the dosage a little bit.
I see. And I like that in the app where you have this selection where you can say, okay, I want to do 10 minutes, and I think you have a 20 and 30 now. So as you get further along, if 10 minutes is feeling a little short for me, you can jump up to the 20, and then always go back if you need to as well.
That's right. Now, back actually, Kevin, I want to circle back to that question about the guy saying, my mind is just so busy, how do I do this? My advice would be just stick with it. Do the first sit, listen to the next talk, do the next sit, do the next sit. Just keep going, just keep going. And the hope here is that, because all the sits have some amount of guidance, at some point you will just find you start to listen more consistently to the guidance. You'll find it just starts to happen that you're able to stay with what you're being asked to do, and you'll be able to do it, and you'll just kind of lock in more. It's not going to be a perfect thing; there'll be times when you've just got a lot going on and you can't seem to rein in the mind — it'll do what it does. But having guidance does make it a lot easier. You know, when I started meditating it was just like, do this thing, you're on your own, go and do it, and my mind was all over the place. And then I discovered, wow, there's this world of guided meditation, which actually wasn't part of the Zen world. Maybe a little bit here and there, some teachers would do a bit, but it was much more part of modern mindfulness; the Vipassana world did more of it. And I started to get exposed to that. I thought actually, especially for beginners and novices, this is great. You can save a lot of time.
When you say save a lot of time, what do you mean by that?
Well, I mean like you could be getting to discovering places of stillness and of meditative flow, which are very beautiful experiences, and just being more attentive to your immediate present-moment experience and the different dimensions of it, much quicker. Because guidance can show us how the tools can work before we know how to operate the muscles.
Right, it's a good point. Because, you know, when we first met and it was COVID time and we were chatting, you were doing these check-ins with me, and I'd tell you what was going on in the practice, and I felt like it was just you being like, let's tweak this little knob a little bit this way and a little bit this way. And it's like these little kind of guardrails for me to operate on that could be potential roadblocks and probably slow down my progression.
That's right, and discourage you.
Yeah, that's a huge one. You know, you mentioned a couple times these depths of awakening that can happen. Can you give me an example of a student and how does that vary versus a minor type of awakening moment versus a major moment?
Yeah, that's it's a — thank you, it's a great question. I'd say there's all kinds of shifts that we can find in meditation, and they're all valuable. They come in, I think, four main categories. There's mindfulness. A shift in mindfulness is when we've been finding it hard to sit, we don't really know why, we just are, and then suddenly we recognize, oh my gosh, I've been thinking — there's been thought running through my mind that I hadn't actually noticed, because it can be slightly subliminal, or we just don't notice it. We're just restless, and ah, why can't I sit still? And then suddenly, oh my gosh, there's been this movie playing in my mind, or there's been a sort of radio talking to me in my mind. And the first time we actually notice thinking as a process going on in our minds that we can observe, and instead of being caught up in it — that's a pretty big shift, because suddenly it's like, wait a minute, I'm so used to being wrapped up in my thinking, right? And now I'm realizing maybe I don't have to be, right? Maybe I can recognize it's a thing that arises in my experience, but it's not me.
See, that's a radical thing, because like you're saying, who's doing the recognizing then? If you're recognizing and you're watching the thinker, who is that person that's watching the thinker?
Yeah, well, that's the beautiful thing. That's because you've just taken a step back closer to who you really are. Really, there's some sort of slightly deeper level of each of us that can observe, that can be a kind of witness. And usually, very often actually, when we find that and taste that, there is a little shiver of a good feeling, of a kind of peace, of a kind of aliveness perhaps, of a kind of wakefulness, attentiveness, and appreciation. It's funny, they all sort of can be in there when we just get that little shift that detaches us from what we've been caught up in, and we start to recognize basically a deeper level of ourselves. So that's beautiful.
And we have that capacity, and it happens in lots of ways. In mindfulness, another key one is like you were describing: when you recognize there's this little knot or claw pulling me towards something I need now — oh gosh, I'm distressed — when we can just find there's a way we can hold that. The poet Rumi has this great poem about being a guest house. You want to become a guest house, you know, dear listener — be a guest house to the difficult things that come in life, rather than closing the door: I don't want to know about you. Be a guest house, be the host that welcomes in all the difficult things that arise. And then we recognize, man, I'm not just this person blindly being tugged around and pulled around in their life; I am actually a capacious being with a larger heart, you know, and that's beautiful.
Yeah, and that's a shift.
Yes, and it's not yet what we call awakening, right? But it is a little awakening. It's a little shift, it's an important shift, and it can actually be huge in a life.
Yeah, little moments of space too I think are quite nice to have. Like if you get into a confrontation with someone, and rather than just immediately coming from this gut instinct of snapping back or whatever it may be, and just like — if there's this micro — if you can catch the thought before it comes to a full-bloomed kind of backlash, you know, it's just like that little space, it almost feels like it's almost infinite. Do you know what I'm talking about?
What is that I'm feeling sometimes? And trust me, most times if my wife gives me a little shiv or I give her a little, we react. But what is that little thing that I'm talking about? Is that a thing or am I just making that up?
It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. You know, there's a great Jewish philosopher, Viktor Frankl, who said, between stimulus and response there is a gap. Everything is in that gap. Which just puts it beautifully, because I believe that space is a moment when we've kind of suspended our attachment to who we ordinarily feel we are. It's a gap, and it's a beautiful thing because we're just floating, and it is exactly as you say: space. And we can take that on different levels. On one level it's just an interruption of my ordinary reactive process — being the pause button somehow. And I would say meditation helps with this a lot. The pause button has been tapped, and everything that I'm normally—
Just a micro tap, not a long one. Just a little dup, just enough to get you to notice it. You're like, what was that? Like, I didn't immediately engage, you know.
Exactly, exactly. And if we just look at it for one second, what is this gap? It's very open, it's very, very open. So we may just experience this just a little quiet, a little pause. And this can happen in meditation: we're sitting and we think we're trying to do a certain practice, and all of a sudden there's just a space with kind of nothing in it. So it can go all the way — that gap, that space can go all the way to an actual awakening. A real awakening is when we drop our sense of being who we are, who we normally think we are. It's not just dropped; we see that there's a way of being without it that has always been here, and so we understand our sense of self then from a very different perspective, from one of a boundless openness, and our sense of self is just a thing that arises in this boundless openness. That's very liberating.
I have no doubt. Sounds amazing. So it's impossible to describe though, right? Like for someone that's never experienced that, it can't be put into words.
Well, I think that's true. It is — they always say it can't be expressed in words. But I think lots of us, many of us, most of us have had foreshadowings of it, little glimpses that kind of echo what that's like. And again, it's these moments when we just are interrupting the normal way we exist, and we find, huh, that thing that I normally do — I don't have to do it. That's a foreshadowing of what awakening is like. I mean Zen, for example, puts a central emphasis on awakening experiences, because it knows that humans can go through them, and they can be very decisive in a life. So it values them. And it also says you can't really talk about them: the way that can be spoken of is not the true way, as it says in the Tao Te Ching. This reality that is revealed in awakening, we can't speak of it, but we can say some things about it. You often get a sense of incredible and inexplicable okayness. It can be in the midst of some real difficult situation, both personally and in the world. Suddenly there's this shift, and in a way that you could not explain to anybody, you know everything is okay in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. You know it in your bones that it's actually all okay, but you couldn't explain why.
Is it — I'm just going to throw some stuff out there and you tell me how far off I am. So I'm watching a crazy movie, there's a conflict and battle scene on the screen, I'm not in any fear, I'm enjoying the movie, I'm caught up in the action. Does my life at that awakening moment shift to more of that type of view?
Yeah, that's not bad actually. It can be like that. You can be in the midst of something you're wrestling with in your life, and suddenly you just drop back into a vast space, and you see yourself in your life wrestling with whatever problem you're wrestling with from this infinite perspective.
When you say see, not visually?
Kind of, it's not exactly visual. But you're aware that, oh, there's Henry trying to get that internet problem sorted out, or something that was frustrating him. But it is a little bit like you're looking at your life as if it were a movie on a screen, and you're back in the dark of the auditorium in this great space, and you're seeing the little life that Henry is trying to navigate and negotiate from that great perspective.
Yeah, wow. You're at the operating system level at that point, like you're—
It's fantastic, because what happens then is whatever the problem is, you love it. You love the fact that this being — because you're not really you anymore, you're observing from a vastly different perspective — and loving this being with their little problem, you feel very compassionate, and you do that for the whole world.
I mean, some would say that sounds like — I hate to use the G word — but it sounds like a godlike state where it's like... do you see what I'm saying? Like this overarching watching, because I know it could sound a bit like that, but—
Yeah. Well, first of all, that's not the only way awakening shows up. But it's not for me to say, though I suspect that a lot of the experiences that people have had that were attributed to God and gods may have been moments of shifting, where awareness shifts so decisively into another perspective that traditions like Buddhism and Zen call awakening, rather than attributing them to any divine or supernatural beings. I don't want to diss on anybody's faith tradition, but it might be that some faith traditions have evolved out of experiences like that, that you don't really need the superstructure of a great theological belief system, possibly. I don't want to say for sure, but it's possible. Certainly I do think that our human experience has many dimensions to it, many more than we ordinarily allow ourselves to experience, but they're here waiting to be experienced. It's not like you have to be some marvelous adept who trains this stuff up and creates it. No, each one of us already has all these multiple perspectives; we're just not used to opening them up, and we're not used to having access to them. And again, bring it back to The Way: that's one thing that I really want to be helping people with — maybe not experience it, but at least know that these are real possibilities, and perhaps get glimpses.
When you think about the things that we're very well familiar with today in terms of like sight, hearing, touch, smell — all our traditional senses — is there any... and then I promise, last one, I'll try and figure it out, because I know I can't figure it out in this podcast, but is there any hint of this being like another undiscovered sense that gets opened up in some way that we've always had the capacity for, but we just haven't stepped into it or really opened it up yet?
I love that. I love that. The way I would put it probably is something like: this is in all sense channels, so it's not another one, it's in all of them. And that's why actually in the Zen tradition there are lots and lots of stories of people having awakening experiences in very different ways. There's one famous story of a guy who just saw a beautiful plum blossom, and he just saw it, and boom, he just realized that plum blossom was opening up the whole universe to whatever — again the language falls down.
And then another story of somebody just heard a pebble hit a stalk of bamboo — the little knock — and the whole universe opened up, or that sense of self and world fell away, and they're in vast experience, and it was overwhelming and beautiful. And so that was the sense of sight, the sense of hearing. There's a story of somebody where he went to a master and asked, like, what's my real nature? And the master reached out for the corner of his shirt and just pulled on it, a little tug like that, and he had a great awakening. So it's a sense of touch as well. And in all cases that kind of awakening is up to the same multi-dimensional experience that is in all senses. And it goes on. I mean, what have we got? We just did sight, sound, touch. Oh, there's a guy who ate a piece of melon and it was so sweet, and he was asking himself, is the sweetness in the melon or is the sweetness in my tongue tasting the melon? And as he was pondering that question, bam, he awakened. It's both, and it's more. It's jumping to another level that includes both me and everything else in one further dimension, or something that wraps it all together into one.
Sounds so beautiful. This is why I'm so interested in always having you on the show, and always wanted to explore this, because I need to keep going further down this path, because it sounds like a relief and a release to feel that.
Well, I was going to say that's another thing — when we're talking about the little shifts, and 'release' is a great word actually, that you can get in just mindfulness. You get this sense of joy or peace, a sort of quiet joy. I think it's a little bit like a kind of love actually, which is why I call my new book Love, because it is a kind of love, I think, because you feel such relief.
It's funny, there's so many stories that I've read — you've certainly read an order of magnitude more than I have — about these awakening moments, and it seems to be followed oftentimes by a lot of tears.
Yeah, I know. Because it's like, wow, I belong in a way I never knew I could, and the whole system sort of melts, and there's a great relaxing and everything. We can just let go, and it's all through the body, all through the heart, all through the mind, and tears just well up. And they're tears of sorrowful joy, they're tears of joyful sorrow, they're tears of relief, they're tears of just a great upwelling of happiness.
It's from the tyranny of the little self that's been dominating my life, that I've believed in all along, and demanding this and criticizing that and judging this and heaping shame on me and blaming others, and all the sort of dramas, and the kind of strutting, you know, impostor really, in a certain way, that we all have. That's been running my life, and suddenly it's just gone, and the relief is incomparable.
I don't know — I haven't had a life with astounding economic successes or something. I don't know what they're like, but I can't imagine that there could be anything greater, honestly, in a human life than this discovery. I mean, of course, falling in love, having a child, and the love of a long relationship that goes through challenges and is still going strong and has come back to love in new ways again and again — those are all absolutely marvelous. But there's something about the moments where we shift our whole understanding of what it is to be alive; they're so precious. And they're available, and if only there were a surefire delivery method — there isn't.
Maybe there will be, but even now I don't think the neuroscience has fully caught up with the actual moment of awakening. There's a friend of mine, James Austin, who's written a series of books studying this — his first one was called Zen Brain — and he's been doing it since the '80s, maybe even the '70s. He's a serious Zen practitioner himself as well as a neuroscientist, and he thinks he's narrowed down what's going on for some kinds of awakening experience, but not for all. There are ones where just everything seems to disappear.
And when you say that everything disappears, you mean visually?
Yeah, basically everything.
So if you were sitting and this state happened to you, would you lose consciousness? Like what happens?
Yeah, you know, I've only had what I've had in terms of this kind of experience, and I'm sure it's a very shallow one, but it was a moment when simply the totality of my life fell away. And I know it sounds weird, and it's impossible to describe — I tried in my book actually, One Blade of Grass, but nobody can really convey it. But it is like everything's just gone and somehow sort of reforms afterwards. And in the moment of that sort of annihilation or whatever it is, you can't be there knowing it. But somehow you know when it's happened.
And that was a decisive moment for me, because thereafter what shifted in that moment has never fully stopped since then. And it's now 2024; it's now 16 years ago, nearly 17 years ago. And it's not like I'm living in the fullness of the power of that experience when it happened, but it's still present, and I feel this incredible gratitude. You know, if I just remember it's here, it immediately switches on a powerful gratitude and a kind of love — a love for this moment arising. Because it's very nice to be with you, and so it's a very nice circumstance anyway. But even if I was just walking down a rainy street and I was late for something, I could find love for this moment arising, just as it is.
Something like that in some text that talks about this idea of there's this no birth and no death. Yeah, what's your take on that?
Yeah, you know, I hesitate to say anything about it, but I do know that there have been, there's certainly been times when I'm not so sure that this life is exactly what we think it is, and therefore death isn't what we think it is either. And that is a, it's actually a very reassuring do you hesitate to talk about it because it sounds wild if you were to say it out loud, or because you don't have the words, or is it like, this idea of no birth and no death is just wild to everyone that's listening to this except for maybe you. So um, but I'm very curious because it is mentioned so many times throughout these different traditions that when they have these deep awakening moments, that is one aspect that is seen.
Right. I know it is true. It is true. I mean, here's one way we could think about it. Okay, it's like we know that all the experience we have, to be aware of it, there has to be awareness. So like right now, you know, I can see the table, I can see your eyes, and we're chatting. You got me so far, I'm with you. Yeah, so there is awareness. Yes. Now, what if that awareness somehow exists independently of content? In other words, right now we're looking at each other, but actually awareness is present right now around wrapping around the experience. So this experience of conversing with one another, I know I'm talking a lot actually, it's a bit one-sided. I'm sorry. No, it's interesting. It's interesting. But you know, this experience is actually arising within a context of awareness. So then the question, we can get some sense of that as a possibility. You know, so then the question is, well, what characteristics does this awareness itself have? So one way say well, it can show visuals, it can show auditory stuff, because we can hear, we can see, we can feel, you know, sense pants and seat and so on. We can sense all of this stuff. But do you believe that you are part of that global awareness and not just the awareness here?
That's right. That's right. That's right. You can migrate your sense of who you are. Wow. Cuz you actually are, you actually are really that great awareness. So let me just coming back to the birth and death thing. Therefore, in that awareness, um, well, we have to get to know it a bit, but if we investigate it, we find that it really doesn't have, it has the capacity to do lots of things, but in itself it has no characteristics. And when we really sort of release our hold on here and transfer to being absorbed into the awareness, if we then ask a question like, well, what's time? It's very clear time belongs to that thing out there. This sort of play we're having of being people, right? It doesn't belong to that awareness. It just doesn't do time. It can do time in the play on stage, like a stage play, but it doesn't do time. And when we really are in there, clearly there is no time.
So well, let me ask a question though real quick. There, uh, how do you know you're in that thing if there is no time? Because time is just a string together set of awareness.
Yeah, but time is actually an idea. Time is an idea that we have. We create the idea of time. If we're really right here now, now just being here now, time's not here. Time is an idea we pick up.
It's a good point, you know, and because there's no time for this glass right now.
That's right. It's just being the glass. It's just being the glass.
