CEOInterviews.AIThe Dharma of Bob 5: Mindful Defiance | Robert Wright & Josh Summers

B

Bob Wright0:05

Hi, Josh.

J

Josh Summers0:06

Hey Bob, how you doing?

B

Bob Wright0:06

I'm pretty tired. How are you doing?

J

Josh Summers0:11

I can't complain.

B

Bob Wright0:11

I'm actually not so tired as I usually am. So but let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, this is The Wright Show, available on both streaming video and via audio podcast. You're Josh Summers, well known to our regular viewers and listeners. We've spoken before. You're like a yoga guy, yoga guru guy. You're seated like—we should tell our podcast listeners—you're seated as a guru would be seated.

J

Josh Summers0:38

Yeah, given the back and forth we had, the setup for this installment of the Dharma of Bob, I thought I might need to occupy a little bit more guru territory today.

B

Bob Wright0:51

Somebody's got to do it. And then maybe you're going to explain to me how to do it, as I understand it, if we have time for that. So today, we've had a series of conversations loosely grouped under the rubric The Dharma of Bob—a term you came up with, I always point out. Today, maybe the Dharma of Bob part won't pop up immediately. I would like to do a couple of things. I want you to be—life in a couple of sentences. First of all, help me with some meditation problems I'm having right now. My practice isn't in great shape. And then if we have time at the end, you can be life coach in this deeper sense that you alluded to in our pre-taping patter, where you said you had big plans for me, which is good. I want to hear about the big plans for me.

J

Josh Summers1:51

And that's why I'm tired, because the big plans kept me up all night.

B

Bob Wright1:54

You've been thinking about—well, good. That's funny. One thing we have in common is we stay up at night worrying about my future, and you're the only other person I know who does that besides me.

J

Josh Summers2:05

It's not just your future—it's the future you're trying to avoid. The apocalypse.

B

Bob Wright2:09

Yes. So there's a version—right. And so the listeners need to realize that the Dharma of Bob is situated in context with that initiative. You're all about avoiding the apocalypse. And this is a thing I focus on in my newsletter, the Non-Zero Newsletter. But speaking of which, in between these two life coach segments, I want to talk about the connection between mindfulness and courage. I wrote about the courage part in the newsletter recently. And if I had time I was going to say—you know, it may sound surprising for me to jump from mindfulness, which sounds kind of soft and mushy, to recommending courage, which I was saying more of us need to show on social media, including me. But if I had more time, I would have said there's actually a connection. In theory, at least, you should be able to cultivate courage via mindfulness. So I want to talk about that in the middle if we have time. And that would be the point that we flip the life coaching role.

J

Josh Summers3:18

Okay, so that's the hinge. That's the pivotal point, from pedestrian life coaching to profound and visionary life coaching.

B

Bob Wright3:30

Before we go into the meditation, just so the audience doesn't take what I say too seriously here in terms of the guru thing, it's the way I'm going to talk to you about this is what I do with a lot of my peers and friends. We just share and talk about our practice and we sort of try to triage what we think is going on for each other. And it's a sort of peer mentorship. I mean, you have done, I guess, a little meditation teaching kind of in an ancillary way. You're mainly a yoga teacher, actually. I've let you slide with that one.

J

Josh Summers4:06

And I haven't interjected. I do teach meditation regularly. I have actually a lot of meditation teaching background. I've talked at Boston University in a sports psychology department program for a while. And I was also an acupuncturist before the middle of COVID, which shut that down. So I have three different hats. Two of them actually, three of them are all quite related.

B

Bob Wright4:28

Okay, so I have that in the mix. Maybe at some point we get to the sports psychology part. I'm fascinated by—

J

Josh Summers4:38

Well, that's going to come up when we triage your process. Right now you're going to help my golf game? Well, no, I'm going to help your game with the way—see, the sports psychology piece was at a—Professor of Sports Psychology invited me into her positive psychology class to talk about mindfulness one time. And then she hatched this idea of me giving an intervention training to the Boston University women's soccer team. So it was one of these things that she did a pre-post analysis on their psychological experience of stress among other things, and I was the quote-unquote teacher. And I learned some things in that that I might be able to—

B

Bob Wright5:19

And you transformed them into a world-class team?

J

Josh Summers5:22

Just say yes. Trust me, I'm not good at marketing myself, but I have basic marketing instincts.

B

Bob Wright5:28

Just say yes.

J

Josh Summers5:32

Well, it was mostly my colleague's work. But she did find that there was much better capacity that the players had to navigate their stress, get back into the zone. And it was really the first Division One study on—

B

Bob Wright5:56

There's a lot of things I don't know—probably some of them you don't want me to know. And then you can keep those.

J

Josh Summers6:02

No, yeah, the door came open.

B

Bob Wright6:04

So well, that's good. I mean, we should do a whole conversation on sports psychology because I am a head case in any athletic endeavor. I am a head case. You can name the sport, I will be a head case. But we'll get back to that. Let's talk about meditation problems. I blame it on the pandemic. So here's the pattern of my meditation practice: it had been, I'd go to a meditation retreat, it would kind of recharge my practice, and that'll last for more than a year. And then I'll feel I need another retreat. So I was kind of going to retreats about every two years—like one-week silent meditation retreat, sometimes ten days, the longest ever was two weeks. And then I was due for one this summer but then the pandemic—as you know, you've heard about this pandemic thing, probably. And by the way, I looked at IMS's site today and they're still not—I still don't see any signs of live physical retreats on the calendar. So I don't know how long it'll be. But so as a result, I feel like my practice—I still do it, and I think I deserve some credit for that. I get up in the morning, I do my—for reasons I probably shouldn't get into, I've been setting the timer for thirty-four minutes. Odd number, I know, and you don't want to explain that, you don't remember. Well, I'll tell you honestly—when your practice isn't going that great, so it's not like you're exactly looking forward to it, you know what I mean?

J

Josh Summers7:48

[Laughter] Sounds like lumpy oatmeal.

B

Bob Wright7:51

Yeah, it's kind of like—oh, can I do forty minutes of this? Well, I should do more than thirty. Well, thirty-four seems like closer to thirty than it is to forty. It seems like I can do that. So that's how I got into thirty-four. Am I starting to sound like a problematic case?

J

Josh Summers8:08

It's starting to come into focus, yeah.

B

Bob Wright8:14

And I don't know how to describe it. It's like at one end of the spectrum, when you're right after you've done a retreat or in day five of retreat or something, you just sit down, you focus on the breath. Certainly within like a minute or so, you can easily focus and immerse yourself in kind of ten consecutive breaths, no sweat. You keep going. And then six months after the retreat, it may take you five minutes what was taking you a minute. And now more than two years after my last retreat—I don't want to make it sound like just a linear decline, okay? You have your ups and downs. But at the moment, it just seems like I'm lucky to be able to focus on ten consecutive breaths by the end of the session. And I think part of it is I've kind of given up. I just sit down and it's like—in a way, maybe what I've done is get into a version of Zen. You know, you hear that some Zen instructions are like, just sit down and do nothing. Don't worry, they don't say focus on your breath, blah blah blah, just be, just sit. My mind wanders, you know, and then it's like, fine, this is okay, I'll do that. And then it does—you know, it's like slowly you get a little of that out of your system and you get a little calmer and better able to focus. But it may be as simple as just telling myself, no, sit down and focus on your damn breath right away. But I don't think it's going to be that simple.

J

Josh Summers9:56

No, well, that wouldn't be my recommendation.

B

Bob Wright9:59

Of course not, because you're one of these meditation people who's like, be gentle with yourself.

J

Josh Summers10:05

Gentle—well, okay, that will feed into the courage piece later, because that tiptoes into the dynamic of compassion versus the dependence—compared to idiot compassion. Idiot compassion is just indulging the whinging, desiring, whatever, being too easy on yourself.

B

Bob Wright10:31

Right. Just, you know, if you're sleepy in meditation, go back to sleep. If you're not feeling good, you know, just move, and maybe get up and have a coffee or something. It's not the right time to do it, come back when it feels right for you.

J

Josh Summers10:42

That's very indulgent, yeah.

B

Bob Wright10:45

That—yes, I'm against that.

J

Josh Summers10:47

So yeah, real compassion is investigating and opening to the pain of experience and wishing that to be mitigated, to relieve the suffering.

B

Bob Wright10:58

Well, but you shouldn't really quite be sitting there wishing for it to be mitigated and go away, right?

J

Josh Summers11:05

Sure, that can be part of the intention.

B

Bob Wright11:09

Well, this isn't going in—but when you're sitting there you shouldn't be trying to push it away.

J

Josh Summers11:13

Don't push it away. Right. Not push it away, but to open to it. And then that is what awakens the compassion. It's that in the encounter with the difficulty that you brush up against or encounter the pain, which then animates the aspiration of the heart to have it be relieved. But in a deep level, which is the letting go—I mean, I know you know this—but the letting go of the desire that it goes away is the pivot within that process.

B

Bob Wright11:46

So let's back up, because it started out—you're talking about you go on these retreats once every couple of years, and they recharge your practice. And you come off and then you're able to sit down and lock in on the breath, and you get in that groove pretty quickly and you're able to focus. So I think that's an incredibly common experience. I know that experience myself. Well, what I hear—and I'm checking with you if you recognize this—but there's a subtle clinging to the focus that you develop on retreat, probably. And that's—and then I mean, I know many of my friends are like this, that they feel like they just sort of need to get back on retreat to re-amp and keep that level of samadhi or concentration going. And then if they lose that—if that gets degraded, then somehow the practice is in the ditch, which is essentially I think what you're describing.

J

Josh Summers12:43

Probably. So I would—you know, one thing you could do is just step back and let's discuss what the frame of the practice is about. So in your words, how would you describe what you're trying to quote-unquote—what kind of process or development are you engaged with in the meditation?

B

Bob Wright13:13

Do you mean what are the overarching goals?

J

Josh Summers13:14

Yes, that's one way of putting it.

B

Bob Wright13:20

Well, what's the outcome? I mean, meditation in Buddhism is referred to as bhavana—it's a development, it's a cultivation. So what is getting cultivated? I mean, broadly speaking, you could say mindfulness. That's the tradition of meditation. It's not the only Buddhist tradition of meditation, but it's the kind that I'm in. And also—it's funny, I mean, people have asked me—there's some very practical things, like what's the virtue of mindfulness practice? And sometimes I just say, you do fewer regrettable things. Right? I mean, you're—you're—and that's because you're in a more balanced, equanimous state, less likely to fly off the handle, less likely to send the ill-advised email, the ill-advised retweet. So there's wisdom. I think in a previous conversation you succinctly defined wisdom as, at one level, just avoiding bad outcomes.

J

Josh Summers14:34

Right. Yeah.

B

Bob Wright14:36

Don't—as Obama described his foreign policy aspiration: don't do stupid shit. It's better than doing it and it's a start. It's not, you know, it's not all the way to enlightenment or nirvana, which, you know, are kind of the same or arrive at the same time. But yeah, wisdom—it's being in the kind of emotional and mental state that facilitates wise action. And I would say that's, you know, why—and to stay on a pragmatic note—efficient action. I mean, wasting time is also not the wisest thing you can do in the world. You hear the phrase skillful action, skillful means—it's a common one in Buddhism and it refers to, you know, the sense is kind of sizing the situation up and doing the wise thing given what you want to achieve. And yeah, it allows you to live a skillful life. There's a lot of ways you could describe mindfulness, but I think at a practical level it facilitates effective and wise intervention in the world. And as a byproduct, you know, it would expect it to increase your well-being, and it tends to, I think, increase your appreciation of—

J

Josh Summers16:22

Okay, let's come back to your experience in the practice around your breath. Because it sounds like there's a dichotomy or a binary between good practice and bad practice in your mind. And good practice, based on what you're saying, would be predicated on being able to sustain your attention on your breath for more than ten cycles.

B

Bob Wright16:50

It has tended to involve that in my experience. When my practice is what I would call going well, I would have that capacity, yes.

J

Josh Summers17:04

Right. So that happens when the condition is supported on retreat. And this—and I think retreat experience gives everyone that does it a really good felt experience of that development. But in daily life, to kind of hang on, try to cling to the momentum that we have on retreat is a recipe for dissatisfaction. Well, let me ask you—so we just come back to breath though. If you're—if the practice is about developing the capacity for skillful action, skillful perception, wisdom, compassion, those things—then what I would want to talk with you about is how does the dynamic of the meditation facilitate that development. And to quote the Thai teacher of the last century, Ajahn Chah, who said a hen can stay on her nest immobile for hours and hours and hours watching over her eggs—that doesn't make her wise. So, in the analogy, just keeping your attention stuck on the breath is not necessarily going to produce a deeper level of understanding. As I know I've heard you talk about—understand the structure of experience, the structure of the self, and the structure of emotion and feeling and all that. So I would want to look into the dynamic between when you're on the breath, when you get off the breath, what you're aware of, and how you treat waking up to not being present on the breath. Because it's in that territory, I think, that the real important insights and broader perspectives start to come.

B

Bob Wright18:46

Vis-à-vis the reference point of breath—not keeping the attention. But there's two different issues here. One is, okay, let's say you're in the groove and you're focusing on your breath. Well, you realize that's not the end goal, that's not the point. I mean, unless you're really pursuing samadhi and doing kind of concentration meditation, and that's a different thing. But if you're doing mindfulness meditation, the point of the focus is—some would say—stabilize the mind, whatever. But that's as a way station to something else. Okay, that's one point, fine. And if Ajahn Chah said that in context, fine. But that's different from saying I'm not even getting to the point where I'm focusing on the breath. These are two, you know—can something useful happen without going through that way station? And let me add—something does. I mean, one thing that keeps me going is that it's not a complete waste of time. I sometimes say that—look, at minimum, it's better than average mind wandering. By which I mean, if you sit there long enough with your eyes closed, there's mind wandering without outside intervention. In other words, it's not like your mind wanders and then you see a tweet, your mind wanders and you see CNN—no, it's sealed-off mind wandering. And in my experience, as the time passes, five, ten minutes or so, you are calming down a little, something is changing. And like, for example, good ideas are more likely to pop into my mind. I may not be thinking about them, but it'll just be an idea that's relevant to my work. And then the time will often arrive where, oh, you can focus on your breath if you want now. And that's not necessarily critical as something to do at that stage, but it's a sign that your mind is calming down a little, stabilizing.

J

Josh Summers21:10

And so in my own practice life—and this is where I think not so much in the year—we started practice more or less at the same time, around the same time, give or take a few years—but I think I probably worked with more teachers offering different approaches. And so my approach in general is more analogous to the way I think a jazz musician develops themselves, which is you survey a whole bunch of influences, you really steep yourself in the ones you resonate with, and then you integrate them, and then you ultimately figure out how to make them come alive in your own experience. So I've done a practice where for a long time was just to be receptive to whatever happened—mind wandering or not—and let that go on. And I found that, and this is actually what I recommend for beginners, because there's too much—it's too easy for a person in meditation to really create a divided mind, that there's some experience to have, some experience not to have. And I think with if you have the frame around the practice the way that I read the Buddhist instructions, the practice is to be aware and interested and explorative of all experiences, and that includes the mind wandering. And the question then is, how do you get to know what's going on in the mind wandering? That's through reflection. And I don't have any problem—I think there's been a contemporary emphasis of mindfulness to get into the present moment, like locked into the present moment, that's the only sort of lane of experience that will produce any kind of wisdom or value. And that, to me, is just too reductive.

B

Bob Wright23:02

Right. But when you're doing the mind wandering, you're not observing it.

J

Josh Summers23:08

You're not observing it, but that doesn't mean that something interesting isn't occurring within it, or that there's something—like I said, it's better than average mind wandering. But—and I accept that, and that's fine. But hang on—hang on. Hey, so you're familiar with the list of the hindrances, right? The difficulty—there are various lists, but some shorter than others. But the five big ones—the nirvanas, the varanas: desiring mind, the ill-will mind, the restless worry mind, the low-energy mind, and the doubting mind. And there's a kind of presumption that in mindfulness practice you're meant to sort of catch and release these whenever they arise. You know, if you catch your mind desiring, you recognize it, you kind of become aware of it, and then let it go and come back to your breath. But the wandering mind itself is going to be some permutation and combination of the spectrum of those energies. And to understand them, you have to let them go on a bit, and then reflect back either during the meditation or even after the meditation, get a sense of what the mind is preoccupied with. And that's pretty accurately described in the Satipatthana Sutta, the sutta on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, when the Buddha refers to looking at the hindrances when they're present, when they're absent, getting a sense of how are they released when they arise, what kinds of fuel, how do they come to be in your mind. That requires a comprehensive understanding that if you were limited to strictly present-moment attention would not be possible.

B

Bob Wright24:55

No, but I mean—another way of putting the problem is that observing the things you're saying should be observed, that you just listed, is easier in some states of mind than others. And I'm saying that when my practice isn't going well, it's taking me a long time to get into the kind of state of mind where you can observe these kinds of things. So by your own definition, things aren't going great.

J

Josh Summers25:23

Well, no. So let's come back to something more fundamental. Just basically we're describing being present and drifting off, right? There's moments when you're awake and you're aware that you're doing what you're doing, and then there's moments where you've drifted off. So the question is, when you wake up—when you wake up to having drifted—really, at that moment, I think we've talked about this a little bit before, but to me, in my view, that is the pivot point and the most important point of the whole process. Not being on the breath, not being focused on the body, but what do you do—how do you navigate that moment of wake when you go—

B

Bob Wright26:05

You mean when you go, oh, my mind is wandering?

J

Josh Summers26:07

Right. What do you do at that point?

B

Bob Wright26:08

Okay. What do you recommend?

J

Josh Summers26:10

Well, there's a variety of things you could recommend, but one is like—appreciate it, in the sense of being grateful, in the sense of—celebrate it, in a sense of reward yourself. In the way that the mind is awake again, and I'm borrowing this from a few other teachers that I've explored, been exposed to, who really encourage you to smile gently. And this is just one—I'm not recommending you do this necessarily—but you could smile, and that has a cascade of biochemical effects through the body and it is conducive to tranquility. When you're receptive to that experience, you're basically praising your mind for doing what you're encouraging it to do, which is to be present. So if every time you wake up and you kind of reflexively slap your wrists, do the Homer Simpson 'D'oh,' and then hustle back to the breath—it's like training the dog. If you negatively reinforce the dog when they do the behavior you want, right, they're not as likely to—

B

Bob Wright27:18

Now that's—I mean, I remember at my very first retreat, the teacher—I think I wrote about this in my book—but the teacher is like, you know, it's the first time during the retreat where you meet in a group with a teacher. So for this, forty-five minutes, the silence is going to be broken after like three days. And it was my first retreat—it was probably the second day or first day since I was a beginner, they would have seen me early. And I was like, 'So how's it going?' I'm like, 'Well, you know, I just keep realizing that I'm not focusing on my breath.' She's like, 'That's great! You're realizing that you're not focusing on your breath.' I'm like, 'Yeah, but it happens like all the time.' She's like, 'That's even better!' Like, that's what you're saying.

J

Josh Summers28:14

I mean, exactly. That in itself is an insight into anatta, into not-self.

B

Bob Wright28:21

Yeah. Elaborate on that. Elaborate on how that's an insight into not-self.

J

Josh Summers28:28

Your conscious attention—your conscious sense of self tries to do its simple task, and you get disabused of your ability to do that task again and again and again. You're not in charge of your mind the way you think you are.

B

Bob Wright28:46

Right. Yes. So ironically, you know, becoming more aware of that kind of, in a certain sense, puts you in charge. But we'll leave that aside. Okay, so I had a session with my online group on Monday, and we were talking about the theme of doubt. And there was a kind of connection that was made to an article in the New York Times by Adam Grant, I believe, on this kind of malaise that is sort of pervading the collective right now. That he referred to with the word 'languishing.' Oh yeah, you know, I saw that piece.

J

Josh Summers29:24

Thrive in between thriving and full-scale depression, there's this middling state, kind of energy of just not thriving, kind of the mind—things just aren't spicy or attractive. You don't feel engaged and enthusiastic as much as you would. But his antidote was flow. And this gets back to the sports psychology thing. This is an idea most famously associated with Csikszentmihalyi—pronunciation of that formidable last name.

B

Bob Wright29:58

Csikszentmihalyi, yeah.

J

Josh Summers30:02

So yes. And what I brought into the group on Monday was, how can you practice in a way that supports the experience of flow? And then—I mean, you're feeling like there is no flow, that you're kind of grinding things out and it's a little bit routinized and dull and not very exciting. So what I offered to them, and the feedback from many was pretty good, if you had difficulties with it—again, one-size-fits-all practice, I don't believe in, every instruction is going to work for everybody—but was, at the moment of waking up, to pause and just reflect on what you have been drifting into, if you can. And to see that within the drifting there's some manifestation of one of the hindrances. Like there's a desire for something, you're planning, you're remembering, you're hashing out something you're going to write about. And then the follow-up question I had was, once you are able to sort of recognize what's going on, to inquire into what—I can already sense your audience members might roll their eyes when I hear me say this—but since the energies, what the energies are trying to achieve within that state—like, what is that energy seeking? What is the state of mind that you were in that departed you from the perch of the breath, or the feeling of your hands, your body, when your mind departs from that experience? There's an unconscious kind of train of thought that's seeking something.

B

Bob Wright31:48

Yeah, there always—that's the whole problem.

J

Josh Summers31:50

No, but this is the problem to understand.

B

Bob Wright31:54

Mm-hmm.

J

Josh Summers31:57

So as soon as—I mean, you're always—the problem of life, at some level, according to Buddhism, is that you're always grasping for something, right? So in a sense, you're seeing the graspy mind just after it's left the gate.

B

Bob Wright32:12

Yeah.

J

Josh Summers32:14

Okay, so that's an important piece. And then what I was trying to encourage was, once you can—if you're able to sense what it's grasping or seeking, in a sense to see the limitations of that strategy, of the thing that you've—of the grasping. Or even just to feel into it and let it be heard. Because, and this is what I was trying to get at with the idea of compassion—is that when you see over and over again how the conditioned habit patterns—what in Buddhism is referred to as sankharas, or in the yogic terminology, samskaras—when you see those habit patterns and they break into consciousness from the unconscious when your mind wanders, and then something wakes you up, and then you are able to get some bearing on it. And at that point, you can—what I was recommending is to listen to it, get a sense of what it's seeking, and then just let it be heard. So there's no fighting with it, you're listening to the experience.

B

Bob Wright33:21

Okay.

J

Josh Summers33:24

And then you can return to your—so then it resets. And the reason I'm saying this is because—and this will—I'm going to try to build this metaphor into other territory in our conversation—is I've been, during the pandemic, one of the things I've been doing just as a hobby is trying to get my music hobby back in gear. And I used to try to be a musician at one point. But the main problem I had in the world of music was that I had a terrible musical ear. I had lots of other skills, I could read music—

B

Bob Wright33:56

It's like a hindrance of another kind.

J

Josh Summers33:58

Yes, right. But there are software and apps now that train the ear. And what's kind of confidence-inspiring about working with these apps is that you can see yourself progress. The app I'm using will play a chord progression, a harmonic progression, at the end of it they'll play a note, and you have to guess—that's the question—you have to guess what note it is in relationship to the context of the other sounds.

B

Bob Wright34:27

Right.

J

Josh Summers34:29

And I think there's an analogy here. In meditation, you're tuning your mind. That's what—like in the Eightfold Path, the word samma—some of right speech, wise speech, wise action, all those things. The word samma, from one teacher I've had, describes it as being in tune. It's a quality—being in tune with your speech, being in tune with your mind. Usually translated as 'right,' conventionally, but some people have issues with that translation.

B

Bob Wright35:06

I think you have an implicit bias based on your own name around that.

J

Josh Summers35:08

But that is the predominant right—I mean, that is 'right speech,' right. And then there's been a backlash against it, but over the decades, that has been the main translation.

B

Bob Wright35:18

Right. I've seen 'wise' and 'right' used interchangeably.

J

Josh Summers35:22

But either one—then that becomes this sort of rigid form of dogma that you just have to comply to what's right and not. And I think 'being in tune' is much more flexible, less rigid way of looking at it. But the point is, you're learning to become in tune with your experience so that you then have that skillfulness to play within the dynamics of your life. The more you're able to recognize the patterns clearly for what they are—whether it's not being with a breath, or planning, or remembering—you're better able to recognize them off the cushion.

B

Bob Wright36:08

Right. So basically, I'm trying to figure out—try to help you consider using all the phases of the meditation as valuable to the meditation.

J

Josh Summers36:21

There's no experience that—as you know, one of the teachers we shared, Rodney Smith, would say: 'The only experience to have in the meditation is the one you're having.' Any other—

B

Bob Wright36:32

And Rodney would say that, and then he would follow that by chastising you for having the wrong experience. But I digress. I mean, I love Rodney, I've had him on the show. But yeah, go ahead.

J

Josh Summers36:43

And by the way, we should say—all of this—one reason if I sound a little skeptical—

B

Bob Wright36:46

Is like—Buddhism has evolved and assumed many forms, and there are many traditions and so on, and it's been taught in a billion ways. And I think your version is being refracted through a particular modern sensibility that doesn't like admonition. But you know—well, there are Buddhist traditions where the teacher hits you on the head for falling asleep. And so it is, you know, it's—

J

Josh Summers37:16

Well, but I have to push back on that charge of me being just a woo-woo—

B

Bob Wright37:24

I didn't say you're wrong. You're a particular person in a particular cultural milieu doing a particular interpretation.

J

Josh Summers37:34

Right. But I've also practiced in systems that arguably are just as hard as the one you just described. And I've gone the hard route. And it is not—I don't think it's necessary. I just do not think it's necessary. But I don't want anybody to hit me on the head. I'm not asking for that, definitely. But the aim—I mean, I'm interested in people waking up to their true nature. And that requires a certain fire. I'm not diluting the fire of it so much so it's like, as one author said, 'the gurgling babble of a California hot tub.' But the point is, if you are interested in samadhi and developing the calm states and the ability to see—like concentration, focus, kind of stillness—that's another word that I think gets mistranslated. Because that's—I mean, this is sort of the heart of it—you keep talking of focused attention. That's a very narrow form of—

B

Bob Wright38:42

Well, but it is part of— I mean, as often translated, it is one of two primary—as commonly translated, it's, you know, one of two primary kinds of meditation. It's prominent. So you're taking issue with one common translation of it, but it's not like—

J

Josh Summers39:10

Right. I mean, if you put the term in context with other images of what the Buddha referred to as samadhi, the narrow focus point I don't think is supported. He defined it as a collected, gathered, unified state. Similar to—like when a warm spring comes up through a body of cold water, it diffuses through the whole body. So it is a pervasive sense of warmth.

B

Bob Wright39:41

Well, now here I'm going to be more contemporary and less traditional than you, I think, in the sense that—all of this business about what the Buddha actually meant—you know, it's like the tradition—there's an array of texts that say an array of things in different traditions, and the idea that we can reconstruct exactly what the Buddha would have translated each word and exactly what he meant—I think we don't have to get into the philosophy of this. But I think, you know, Stephen Batchelor does this, and I've had conversations with him and kind of accuse him of trying to convince us that the Buddha would give the Stephen Batchelor interpretation the Buddha seal of approval. And I—it's like, also, just different things work for different people.

J

Josh Summers40:38

Sure. I mean, you're not here to say that, like, Tibetans who emphasize a lot of visualization have it wrong, right? The tradition went in that direction in a particular place at a particular time. Some people find it useful. It's very different from what we're talking about.

B

Bob Wright40:55

Right. So I don't know. I mean, I guess I would say, look—if stillness—we all agree stillness is a great thing, and it's certainly part of the aspiration in this tradition. Whether all the people who have translated samadhi in other terms are wrong—I don't see the point of arguing.

J

Josh Summers41:25

Well, what you mean by stillness conditions how you relate to what goes on in your practice.

B

Bob Wright41:31

Well, right, but it doesn't matter whether I say that that's the translation of samadhi. I'm totally on board for stillness.

J

Josh Summers41:38

Okay. So the means by which we become still is different depending on if you're trying to focus on your breath and do it versus if you rest into what's going on and start to intuit—which you're going to cut me off if I say this—but I think this is what the Buddha means by wise stillness. It's not a stillness absent of experience. It's a stillness within the field of experience, because that's what will give you insight into the nature of things. You can't tune everything out. So the stillness is radically inclusive of all conditions—all sensations, feelings, thoughts, all of it arise and pass away within the experience of stillness. I mean, the experience of stillness allows you to observe all these things and be aware of them.

B

Bob Wright42:32

Yes, right. No, I've been there. We're not arguing about that, right?

J

Josh Summers42:38

No, but we're debating on how to proceed when the momentum of a particular kind of concentration degrades off retreat.

B

Bob Wright42:48

Well, I'm not even debating that. The only thing I'm debating is whether we should keep pausing to talk about what the Buddha actually meant. I just don't think we should. And what words, how words should be translated and so on. But I'm happy to believe that. I can leave that aside.

J

Josh Summers43:03

Yeah.

B

Bob Wright43:07

But I mean, I take it—so yeah, you've given me a couple of things to think about. One is to try to, when I do notice that my mind is wandering—which at the moment is happening all too infrequently in my view—but when I do notice, kind of celebrate it, which I think makes sense. I'll even try the smile thing. As you know, it doesn't come naturally to me, but I'm willing to give the occasional smile a try. And then the other thing, which maybe I'm a little fuzzy on, but it has to do with trying to—as long as you're noticing that your mind was wandering—observe certain things about the nature of the wandering, what was driving the wandering. And you want me to think of that in terms of the five hindrances, is that right?

J

Josh Summers44:02

I would say use the five hindrances as a placeholder for the spectrum of things that propel you into thought. And it's not all negative. There might be things that you can think about that actually, whether it's related to your work or something, that I think are fine to consider.

B

Bob Wright44:20

Yeah. And even—I misspoke there—all of it is fine.

J

Josh Summers44:23

All of it's fine.

B

Bob Wright44:27

Okay, good. Then we've succeeded. It's all fine, it's all good. I mean, you know, it's funny—a different tendency I would have had is to think that you can always, if you observe the mind wandering closely enough, you can always see it as being driven by either—the greed, hatred, and delusion thing. You can translate the greed as more like clinging, attraction, grasping, and you can translate the hatred more as a version—I would say you can always view what's driving your mind wandering as one of those two things, in a certain sense. You know, there's something you're wanting, there's something driving the thought pattern. And it's either desiring something—desiring to believe something, desiring to convince yourself of something—or it's being averse to some thought or to some way of thinking about things. And even those can be boiled down to tanha. I mean, you can subsume both of those under tanha. You're always either craving the thing or craving to be away from the thing.

J

Josh Summers46:00

Right. Yes.

B

Bob Wright46:01

So that would have been my natural tendency. I'll have to wrap my mind around this five-hindrance scheme of observing the mind wandering.

J

Josh Summers46:18

That was just a starting point. You could do exactly what we just described. So you could wake up and just sort of, as you wake up to the wandering—and to be clear, I don't think you're going to be aware of the wandering while it's occurring, most of the time.

B

Bob Wright46:32

Very hard.

J

Josh Summers46:35

I would say almost by definition. But maybe when I'm closer to enlightenment I won't say that.

B

Bob Wright46:38

Right. No. And I'm not there either. But I think that does get held up as an ideal. Many teachers say there's no problem with thoughts—just be aware of thoughts while you're having your thoughts. And I think we've talked about this maybe a year or two back—but that, in my experience, I tried—I really got into watching, is that possible? Is it possible to be aware of thoughts while they're occurring in real time? And every time I was sufficiently aware of thoughts occurring, that had an operational influence of interrupting the thoughts, and they just vanished.

J

Josh Summers47:07

Right. And certain teachers will say that's great. But if you're interested in getting to understand how thoughts function, how thoughts condition your view, I think it behooves us to let it go on for a while. And as long as it does, really. And then when you realize that you've woken up to it, then you can look back through it a little bit. But the part of what I'm—sure you picked up on the smiling bit or the celebrating bit—this is a style of meditation by an American monk, Bhante Vimalaramsi, who has a system that he attributes to having extracted from the suttas, the early teachings. And he calls it the five Rs. So when you wake up, you recognize that you've wandered and you recognize what you're aware of. You re-smile—so you re-establish a soft smile. You relax your body. And then you let it be—it's a form of releasing, just let it be. And then only then, after you've gone through that step, you return. And his argument is if you don't do those steps, you inevitably build an extra, unnecessary tension. There's a struggle or fight with the wandering. And his point is you have to go around the cycle over and over and over.

B

Bob Wright48:27

Right.

J

Josh Summers48:28

You recognize, you re-smile, you relax—relax physically, because there's often in thinking a subtle tension that can creep into the physical experience. And then you return to whatever your primary object was. So if that was the breath—and he actually recommends metta practice, not as an ongoing repetition of a phrase, but just using one phrase and then relaxing within the feeling of the chest or the heart until your mind wanders again and you repeat it. So there's a way—I mean, you know, I know John Kavatkin would say something like this—it's going around that cycle that is the equivalent of doing a repetition with a weight in your arm. Like, for when you—coming back to the outgoing shot thing—if you stay just on your breath, that is not going to give you the training conditions to really develop both the mindfulness of what it's like when your mind is not with the breath, to see how your mind moves. That's one way of describing mindfulness—you're seeing how your mind moves from one thing to another and the relationships within that process.

B

Bob Wright49:48

Okay. So well, the five Rs thing is interesting too. I'm afraid I can't oblige him on the metta front. But that's interesting too. So you've given me plenty to think about, and I already have in mind questions for next time we talk about this. Things I'd like to actually bring up now, but I think we should move on to this courage and mindfulness thing.

J

Josh Summers50:21

Yes.

B

Bob Wright50:22

Because it's a genuine interest to me. And let me—I think you read the piece I'm going to reference in my newsletter, the Non-Zero Newsletter. The point was, it was an argument that we should be willing to do things on social media, if that's where we are, that are unpopular in our tribe. We don't have to go over what's that. And risk the blowback, if you think your tribe is kind of thinking tribally—for any reason—not acknowledging something that's just not consistent. You know, there's something that happened that really doesn't fit into the talking points of the tribe, and so nobody's kind of acknowledging the reality of it. Or this could have been like, back in olden days when Trump was president, everybody's seizing on something as evidence of his collusion with Russia when really it's not, and you're going overboard and it's just not the smoking gun and people are going crazy. And it allows people in the other tribe to rightly ridicule you. It could be any number of things. It could be you think the wokeness is going too far in distorting your tribe's vision, or if you're in another tribe, it can be something else. It doesn't matter. But the point was, on social media it can take real courage to take a stand like that, because it's very painful for a bunch of people to jump in and condemn you, as will pretty reliably happen in situations like this. I mean, you can phrase things in a way that reduces the chances of that, maybe, but still—we can all probably think of things we're tempted to say that aren't going to be popular within our tribe. And it happens to me all the time. But I was singing the praises of courage. And I was thinking, there has to be a way to use mindfulness to cultivate courage, because what keeps you from courage is fear. Fear of the blowback, and maybe fear of various feelings you'll have after the blowback. And then I was hoping you'd say more about this, but from the evolutionary psychological front, this must be rooted in social ostracization. Right? That has to be a deeply rooted kind of atomistic fear.

J

Josh Summers53:20

Sure. And a desire to be thought highly of, you know, within your peer group.

B

Bob Wright53:25

But the ultimate opposite of that being actual ostracization. You don't want to be close to that end of the spectrum—you want to be close to the accepted and admired end of the spectrum. And so yeah, and then you combine livelihood to that ostracization in the form of canceling. Yeah, it can have real career stakes. And again, the extreme case can be cancellation, losing your job, but even the increments along the way are things you're naturally averse to. Just a few people thinking you're cancellation-worthy, or a few people thinking less of you than they thought before. Because in this environment you can say reasonable things and be accused of almost anything.

J

Josh Summers54:29

Yeah, there's a pile-up. And I don't know—I looked at the article you wrote. I mean, I've read it a few times now, and I was on your Substack page and read through some of the comments. And I was just impressed by the number of people that were chiming in saying, well, I'm off social media now. I pulled the plug on that completely. And I've done more or less a similar thing, because with the pile-up, it's impossible to process that. There's no conversation, there's no discourse—it's just this shooting range. And I respect that. Like right now, I don't have Twitter on my smartphone. That's a kind of a cop—I just don't want to get too obsessed with it, so I just do it on the computer. And I respect the decision to just unplug. That said—it would be a shame if kind of all right-minded people unplugged.

B

Bob Wright55:28

Right. You would like to think there's somebody in there trying to set your tribe aright, unless—

J

Josh Summers55:34

And well, this will feed into the apocalypse version a little bit. I don't know if we'll get to it today. But unless there's enough people that actually, en masse, leave and actually start having better conversations and restore their own sanity.

B

Bob Wright55:47

Sure. And then maybe venture back for a while, and then they need a break. Or—but I mean, the problem is, and this is especially true during the pandemic—if you aren't going to influence people on social media, where are you going to do it? Now, as we emerge from this pandemic—it seems to be happening at least in America—there will be more actual in-person conversations and so on. But I still think, given the importance of social media, I think it would be good if there were people who were really trying to be mindful and do the right thing on social media, and not gratuitously antagonize people, and are willing to wade in. But in any event, the thought was just that in principle, if fear is the main thing standing in the way, in principle, mindfulness can help you with that. I mean, any given kind of aversive feeling is something that in principle mindfulness can help you with. And yet this seems like not that easy an application of mindfulness, you know what I mean? It's not as easy even as anxiety, which is no—not easy. But I would rather overcome my fear of public speaking than I would to try to—I would be harder to overcome my fear of being lambasted on social media for speaking out against my tribe, as you're describing.

J

Josh Summers57:24

Now, before we get to the courage piece, I think part of what stands in the way, what obstructs it, is that I think there's an implicit problem in mindfulness culture around the issue of non-judging. Because if you come out with any kind of statement that is a judgment against something in your tribe, then you're being a judgmental person. And just convincing how badly or what a poor meditator or mindfulness person you are, if that's part of your brand—like mine—so I'm doubly hamstrung. There's an expectation that I won't have judgments because I'm a mindfulness practitioner. At the same time, we referred to skillful speech and skillful intervention—it entails implicit judgments. It doesn't entail you saying to people, 'you're right, you're wrong,' but it could entail something like just saying, 'it seems to me that if we all put it this way, then Trump supporters are going to take it that way. That's probably not constructive.' And now, implicit in that is a judgment. The judgment is like, doing it the way we were doing it is suboptimal, not good, given our goals.

B

Bob Wright58:47

Right.

J

Josh Summers58:49

But I think you'd agree that—you know—without violating any fundamental tenets of Buddhism, you can wade in and say the equivalent of, 'I think this is not a good idea.' Right?

B

Bob Wright59:08

Right. That's what your reaction is, right. And I think you do that better than most because you go out of the way to have cognitive empathy for the opposing view. You're able to be a kind of diplomat between the two sides. That's not so easy. And I think even if you're a mindfulness practitioner, it's—you could still be quite under the sway of your own internal bias system.

J

Josh Summers59:35

Sure, we all are. It's very hard. Enlightenment would be to be completely free of the biases, I think, among other things. I don't know anybody who's enlightened. It's definitely not me.

B

Bob Wright59:48

So, and let's not get into that argument either. I know you have a more liberal threshold for enlightenment, I think.

J

Josh Summers59:56

But I see awakening as a process. And to frame it as a thing that's out of reach, I don't see that as being helpful.

B

Bob Wright1:00:05

But okay, so then—the mindfulness to courage connection. One way of describing that is—and I want to see if you agree with it—is that mindfulness, in the course of doing it, you learn to tolerate things you don't normally sit with. And this gets back to your practice. Can you sit with not being focused? Can you bring tolerance—which I see as the seed of compassion. The more you can tolerate something that's uncomfortable, you can start to see into the mechanism of it more. So it's the seedling. And I can think of a few cases where I have confronted fears. I mean, even talking to you is me confronting a fear. Coming onto a platform like this with you takes me way outside my own comfort zone. But I think it's a result of actually just being okay with not sounding so clear, or feeling so good, or feeling like it wasn't the greatest.

J

Josh Summers1:01:13

Are you the guru, I'm the student? You should—how nervous should I be?

B

Bob Wright1:01:16

Don't be terrified!

J

Josh Summers1:01:21

No. The only reason—don't be terrified because I'm not a guru, and you know that. The phrase I like is kalyanamitra, the spiritual friend. You and I, and I have with others, a spiritual friendship in the sense that we have engaged with practice together, we share about some interest in the practice, and we enjoy talking about it. But the ability to tolerate things outside of your thermostatic comfort zone does breed a kind of courage, if you're willing to go there.

B

Bob Wright1:02:00

Okay, but wait, let's make sure we have the application right here. I shouldn't have distracted us by calling you a guru. Are you saying that tolerance—you're talking about tolerance of what kinds of things? You're talking about tolerance of the things you see online that you want to in effect criticize? There's that kind of tolerance—by which we mean, not that you're not going to point out what might be suboptimal about them. Not tolerance in that sense. But in the sense that you just don't freak out when you see them. It's like, okay, that's happening. I'm talking about the tolerance of the consequence of speaking out.

J

Josh Summers1:02:40

Okay.

B

Bob Wright1:02:43

That's hard. I mean, that's—but that's what the fear is confronting, sure. Right? That's harder. And one thing about it is—it seems to me, let's suppose that you're going to say this thing on Twitter, and you sit down, you meditate, maybe you imagine the kind of blowback—to the extent that you can—people saying mean things about you on Twitter. And you reach a kind of peace with your imagined version of it. It's not triggering you as much, it's not feeling so aversive. You're just kind of observing it. And then you go on Twitter and you say the thing, and then the people call you a neo-fascist. And you're like, shit, that hurt. And then—doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose? A lot—in other words, you know what I mean? I mean, to the extent that it hurts, it is going to be that much harder the next time. You tell me. I mean, I'm off the platform mostly, so—

J

Josh Summers1:03:59

No, this is where the tables—you're the guru to me. How do I become more courageous? Because—the thought I had the other day—I'm going to go on a tangent for a second if you'll indulge me—is that my partner, my life partner, and I had one of our perennial problems. It's a miscommunication problem. And these happen like once a month or so. And they can get really escalated really quickly. I don't need to go into specifics. After really spending some time talking to her about it in a calmer space, what I realized was that under normal circumstances we're in harmony. We're coming back to this musical level. We're in harmony. And then something happens and one of us goes out of key. And invariably—and you may have different ideas about who that person was, exactly—you're right, but it doesn't matter who it is out of key because the resultant discord is so bad that whatever statement gets made in the out-of-key disharmony, whatever statement is there, it gets interpreted as a hand grenade getting launched. And it really will escalate into this existential threat. Which I think is more or less what we see on the national scale right now. Two warring tribes hurling grenades, both sides feeling that it's an existential threat.

B

Bob Wright1:05:26

Now, in couples therapy, what they talk about is this practice of mirror listening. One person speaks and speaks for maybe five minutes. And after they speak, the other partner needs to mirror back and sort of steel-man what the person said—what she said or he said. And you don't progress until the first speaker feels like they've been heard and have been more or less understood.

J

Josh Summers1:05:55

Now, and that's what I'm getting at. This is the kind of process that I think you might want to be thinking about on a broader scale, because it's not just about an individual. It's the conversation that needs to shift. And by both parties figuring and offering from the conflict to get into being in tune again. Do you see what I'm saying?

B

Bob Wright1:06:24

Yeah, but are you talking about in the interaction between America's two big tribes, red and blue? I don't see an easy way for me to orchestrate that. I mean, part of the problem—it's hard to influence the other tribe. If you're going to have any impact, it's probably going to be preaching to your own tribe. And even that's hard, because things are so polarized. So if you start saying anything that sounds like, 'Oh, you're trying to excuse what they do, you're trying to understand them, what they're doing is intolerable, we shouldn't try to understand them'—if you try to say things in a way that won't offend them, you're surrendering to them—it's hard. It's hard enough to preach to your own tribe in times like this, but it's super hard to preach to the other tribe.

J

Josh Summers1:07:25

Right. But the intuition you've expressed in that courage piece—which is that you suspect there are more people like you—I think you're right.

B

Bob Wright1:07:34

Oh yeah. Well, I think there are more people like me in my tribe. I mean, this was a specific issue. In general, like, there are lots of things politically—in my tribe, there are things that if you say them, I tend to get a lot of receptivity. Like, 'Don't you think maybe in this particular case the identity politics went too far?' And a lot of people say yes, but they're not saying it online. Or, 'Don't you think police aren't always evil?' And they go, 'Yeah, they're not always bad.' And you're like, 'But would you say that online?' Even something as modest as that. So that's what I meant—there are some ideas that I think are pretty widespread within my tribe that people are very reluctant to express.

J

Josh Summers1:08:35

Absolutely. Yeah, right.

B

Bob Wright1:08:37

So I don't know how we set that up to improve conversation.

J

Josh Summers1:08:40

Well, it's like a critical mass thing, though. Of that particular thing, when there's a lot of people who aren't—who are afraid to say something—it's like eventually there's a snowflake that causes the avalanche. Eventually, if enough people step forward, you can reach a tipping point where people feel comfortable.

B

Bob Wright1:09:00

And by the way, this is what happened with Trump, I think. There were a lot of people in what is now his tribe who wanted to say these things—and we might not approve of all of them, or any of them—but they believed them. They wanted to say these things about political correctness, they wanted you to quit lecturing them about how you could and couldn't describe some minority group. There were all these things and they really weren't seeing them on TV. So they could tell, like, this is not acceptable, you don't see this on TV. Suddenly this guy shows up, he's on TV, he's saying them. And that was for them the snowflake that caused the avalanche, I think. And suddenly that's why people rallied around such an imperfect figure. A lot of them recognize his imperfections. It's—but it's like, he's all we got. That's kind of a digression, but that's within your own tribe. Part of the case for courage is that if a few more people can show it, you might reach that tipping point where something that needs to be said within your tribe is now widely said.

J

Josh Summers1:10:16

Right. The thought that occurred to me is—you've used this phrase in the past, that what's good for the individual is good for the collective. So mindfulness on one level can be thought of as self-help. But if more people do it, even with that intention of just getting a little more relaxed, a little more peaceful, whatever, then that could have a positive outcome distributed through the collective. I'm trying to imagine—my recent experience with this configuration at home made me realize that I did not get good training growing up on how to be a good communicator. And I don't think I'm the only one. And it's actually a specific skill line—like ear training, like mindfulness—and they could all reinforce each other, but it needs its own kind of practice and development in an ongoing way. If you're really serious about becoming a more cognitively empathic interlocutor—cognitive empathy means kind of just understanding the point of view of the other person. That almost needs to be a practice.

B

Bob Wright1:11:40

Which I put in your Eightfold Dharma path that you're developing in the apocalypse aversion project.

J

Josh Summers1:11:44

I was glad to hear that. I'm developing this—until we spoke shortly before I clicked record today, I didn't realize I was—

B

Bob Wright1:11:52

Well, think about it. What's the first noble truth in Buddhism?

J

Josh Summers1:11:58

Well, I don't mean to put you on the spot about suffering.

B

Bob Wright1:12:01

Yeah, but—it's translated misleadingly, I think, as 'life is suffering.' But—well, I'm the one who's supposed to not care about translation, so never mind.

J

Josh Summers1:12:13

Right, let me just—okay. So there is a source of suffering. Ultimately it's craving. And there's a way to get rid of the craving. So it follows an Ayurvedic, ancient Indian medical prescription or formulation. There's symptoms—there's dukkha, what's often translated as suffering. Just chronic frustration, as I think Alan Watts put it. Then there's the cause, the diagnosis—what's at the root of it—grasping. And there are various forms of grasping. But then the third truth—or the third enabling truth, I like that translation—is the realization of liberation from the cause. Whether that's a once-and-for-all thing, I don't think that's the case, it's more of a momentary thing where you learn a new dimension, a new way of being independent of the conditioning that had you grasping. And that leads to the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path is a prescription. It's the medicine that you have to develop to facilitate a deepening understanding of those other three truths.

B

Bob Wright1:13:23

So in your apocalypse aversion project, do you want to map what you're doing into that schema?

J

Josh Summers1:13:32

I did it last night. It kept me until two o'clock.

B

Bob Wright1:13:38

You start with a societal-level diagnosis along those lines, you mean?

J

Josh Summers1:13:46

Yeah.

B

Bob Wright1:13:49

I mean, zero-sum Trump, zero-sum tribalism, will more or less guarantee an inability to handle the apocalypse.

J

Josh Summers1:13:56

It's an existential-level issue, yeah.

B

Bob Wright1:14:01

I mean, did you read my most recent one where I had a seven—seven of the seven tenet breakdown?

J

Josh Summers1:14:10

Yep. That brought into clarity—

B

Bob Wright1:14:12

That's your analysis of the symptom and part of the end, part of the cause, the diagnosis.

J

Josh Summers1:14:19

So the diagnosis is what?

B

Bob Wright1:14:23

Well, the psychology of tribalism, I'm saying, is at the root of it.

J

Josh Summers1:14:28

Well, that's the symptom, I think. The root of it—you could say the biases. I mean, you can—the way I put it is that the psychology of tribalism consists of cognitive biases, you can say, for the most part. But it seems—the symptom is not so much the psychology of tribalism as the strife, the conflict. That's what gives signals that there's a problem and it is almost synonymous with suffering. It's not fun for most people, it causes pain.

B

Bob Wright1:15:17

It's bad, it's a symptom. I'd say the source of it—I'd say what's analogous to the tanha part of the noble truths—is—it could either be put as the psychology of tribalism or in terms of its constituent parts, which includes these cognitive biases. That's the way I would think of it.

J

Josh Summers1:15:42

And then the prescription is the third part—

B

Bob Wright1:15:44

But that's not the prescription, that's the prognosis.

J

Josh Summers1:15:50

Right, the prognosis. I was going to say the prescription is harder, but I hinted at that. It includes mindfulness.

B

Bob Wright1:16:04

Right. Mindfulness would be one piece, I think.

J

Josh Summers1:16:08

But the—go back to the prognosis. How would you define the prognosis?

B

Bob Wright1:16:15

Well, if you take prognosis to mean, if you follow the prescription, if you're able to follow the prescription—what is the good outcome? The good outcome is a true global community. At a nuts-and-bolts level, characterized by some degree of international governance, but not massive strife along national, ethnic, religious, or ideological lines. Are you comfortable with the phrase 'non-zero consciousness'?

J

Josh Summers1:16:51

Um, what do you think of that?

B

Bob Wright1:16:54

That's—because that's what the prescription needs to do, if you've been talking about the need for an evolution or development and transformation in human psychology. It would mean—it would imply, I think, moving from the kinds of things that get one into a zero-sum frame of consciousness to the ability to operate at non-zero sum.

J

Josh Summers1:17:17

Yeah.

B

Bob Wright1:17:20

I mean, the only reason I'd hesitate—there is an insufficient awareness of non-zero-sum dynamics, which makes it hard to respond wisely to them. I think all that's really required for the salvation of the world is for everyone to recognize non-zero-sum dynamics when they exist and respond wisely to them. Even from the point of view of self-interest. I mean, that's not all you need if you want justice to prevail and everything. But if job one is to keep the planet intact and get us all on the same page so we can talk about all of these things, including justice, then it really would be enough for people to recognize non-zero-sum dynamics, react to them wisely, even from the point of view of self-interest or national self-interest. Because—I could explain why I think that is strictly speaking enough if you just want to keep the planet intact. But if I hesitate over a phrase like 'non-zero consciousness,' it's because zero-sum dynamics do exist in the world. They're real in all kinds of realms—in athletic realms, in—and you might as well recognize them when they exist. I sometimes get people reacting to my writing by saying, 'Oh, they don't realize that this is a non-zero-sum situation.' Sometimes they think—no, actually, that's not an answer. You guys have a natural conflict of interest. That happens in life. You want different things that are incompatible. But yeah, non-zero consciousness does capture a lot of, with that kind of qualification.

J

Josh Summers1:19:10

So I'm going to try to thread this back to the very beginning. You and I—we haven't mentioned this in this conversation—but you and I, one of the things that kicked off the series of conversations was the tragic and untimely death of our mutual friend Michael Brooks. Years before Michael Brooks became the celebrated progressive pundit that he was, he and I were interested in launching a mindfulness consultancy that would help individuals within organizations overcome cognitive biases through mindfulness training. So it's a combination of cognitive bias training and mindfulness training, synthesized with that explicit intention. And we never got it off the ground. But we did offer a few series of workshops to a small number of people that I had through my own network of students. And one of the things we were exploring was approaching meditation practice as a way of developing non-zero-sum relationship to your own mind.

B

Bob Wright1:20:24

And that's—and this is what I think is—if we can frame the practice—and this is how I'm trying to frame mindfulness practice—rather than having this divided mind between good experiences and bad experiences, these two binary oppositions, to actually get the parts—anything that happens—to be held and received and tolerated enough to see the larger process under play. That it's not—it doesn't need to be a war, which is often what happens in people's psychology. You get divided between competing virtues.

J

Josh Summers1:20:55

Non-zero-sum relationship to your own mind. I'm tempted to ask whether you mean a non-zero-sum relationship between two different parts of your mind, or between you and a given part of your mind, or something. Because you become more aware through meditation that there are in essence these competing actors, competing impulses in your mind. And that's consistent with a certain scientific paradigm about the structure of the mind.

B

Bob Wright1:21:29

But that's not what you mean. There's a reason you're saying non-zero-sum relationship with your own mind.

J

Josh Summers1:21:34

Just, you know, a collaborative approach that doesn't try to—like, a zero-sum relationship would be like, you have to get rid of things. You have to cut things out. You can't have one thing without the other. And from the perspective of non-duality, we're waking up to a capacity to hold the totality of our being from a different perspective or from a different dimension of ourselves—namely, awareness. Awareness wakes up to be able to hold the totality of good and evil within the heart.

B

Bob Wright1:22:09

So if you had a non-zero-sum relationship with your mind, you would at a minimum spend less time saying, 'Bob, you fucked up again.' At minimum. But the question arises: is that just because you would fuck up less? Or is it because saying that—even when it's arguably true—is being zero-sum in your view, or something?

J

Josh Summers1:22:40

I think it's resisting it, trying to squash into zero-sum whatever energy comes up, whatever manifestation of the hindrance, whatever manifestation of tanha. If you can collaborate with it and actually enlist it in the project of developing more wisdom and compassion, that seems like a win-win. Because you're collaborating with the energy rather than resisting and fighting it.

B

Bob Wright1:23:07

Okay, well, so that would be part of—what you mean by non-zero consciousness?

J

Josh Summers1:23:12

Yeah, I may not be using your term correctly, I realize that. Well—it's more like conceptualizing my mind in a way that allows me to even apply that kind of terminology to it. So that's what I'll have to think about. I just think of—when you—there's a shared outcome that's dependent on two parties collaborating and working together. Whether it's a hunt—you know, two hunters have to work in a non-zero dynamic to take down the beast. So if the aim is to become more tolerant, compassionate, and wise about your experience, you will see in the course of your meditation that you have parts of you that are in competition around that process. They will struggle with it. And so it's learning to essentially get all parts of yourself to function like a harmonized team.

B

Bob Wright1:24:15

But see, that's exactly my point. The way you put it there—if you get the parts of yourself to function harmoniously, then you could say they are in non-zero-sum relationship with each other. I mean, first you have to characterize them as these discrete things that are capable of having outcomes that are good or bad from their point of view. But that's kind of what I had in mind—the way you put it is bringing all the parts of you into harmony in pursuit of a goal is in a certain sense—well, it's to bring them to the kind of win-win outcome of what was intrinsically a non-zero-sum relationship.

J

Josh Summers1:25:11

That's why I was drawn to that way of thinking about it—almost dividing your mind into parts that you want to be working harmoniously. And I think that's the phenomenological experience when you look into yourself. You start to see that you have different—and we speak about it colloquially: 'A part of me wanted to do that.' And there's a whole psychodynamic system called Internal Family Systems that sort of has a conscious way of engaging in and communicating and conversing with these parts to, in a sense, get them to work together as a team. Or, you, the core self or the conductor, with the whole orchestra—getting the arms of the orchestra to—

B

Bob Wright1:26:01

And there's just the modular view of the mind.

J

Josh Summers1:26:04

Certain versions of which are kind of that—these actors.

B

Bob Wright1:26:10

So—well, anyway, we've—I have a lot to think about. We've been approaching the ninety-minute mark. One thing I want you to think about—here's your home prescription.

J

Josh Summers1:26:29

The fourth—oh yeah, we haven't gotten to—I mean, we should save this because it sounds like a big subject, but we haven't gotten to my whole Eightfold thing, which you say I have or should have—

B

Bob Wright1:26:46

I think you're in the process of developing it. Last newsletter had seven.

J

Josh Summers1:26:52

I just need one more.

B

Bob Wright1:26:53

No, I know—those don't map onto an Eightfold Path. I realized those were—

J

Josh Summers1:26:57

No, they do. Listen, they do. What you're mostly describing are wise view—how to comprehend the dynamics of the world in terms of non-zero—to see the non-zero-sum dynamics that are at play. That requires—that's like the philosophical, cognitive aspect of the Eightfold Path as it's being updated right now.

B

Bob Wright1:27:21

And then the intention, and then the intentions that flow from that. And then there's action, speech, livelihood, energy, mindfulness, and samadhi—which we'll talk about another time.

J

Josh Summers1:27:32

Okay.

B

Bob Wright1:27:36

This has a lot of potential. I'm glad you reacted to the little seven-tenet thing I laid out by thinking it could be further developed, somewhat along the same lines. In other words, I had more than one reaction. Like, 'Okay, this is what you've been saying is a little clearer to me now.' And also, I know you mentioned you wrote about Frankenstein. We don't get into that now, but I hear you looking for stories that are kind of on the mythic level that convey the deep structure of the worldview you're trying to share.

J

Josh Summers1:28:31

Yeah. And this allows us to actually close with a reference to your work. So in your Everyday Sublime podcast, you did this podcast—I wasn't aware of this story from the Buddhist text. I assume—is this in the Mahayana—

B

Bob Wright1:28:48

No, this is, really, in the Theravada canon.

J

Josh Summers1:28:50

Okay. So it's this—this guy's name is translated as—what, 'guy who cuts off fingers' or something? What was it? It was—this guy, anyway.

B

Bob Wright1:29:02

What it has in common with the Frankenstein story is that it's a guy who kind of becomes this horrible person for a while. I mean, Frankenstein becomes this horrible, beastly monster, and yet started out, you know, as this guy you'd like—innocent as the driven snow. And then was steered through kind of hostile social forces into a dark place. And in this case, unlike in Frankenstein, there's redemption at the end, because this guy has the good fortune to run into the Buddha himself.

J

Josh Summers1:29:46

That was a lucky break.

B

Bob Wright1:29:49

And he gets straightened out. But anyway, people should—if they want to hear the rest—what's the name of that episode on your podcast?

J

Josh Summers1:29:58

The podcast is the Everyday Sublime. The name of that episode was Angulimala's Karma.

B

Bob Wright1:30:06

So you'll see how, like, if your problem is you're going around killing people and cutting off one of their fingers as a—and then wearing it as a garland around your neck—then this is the podcast for you, because there is a way out. You don't have to do this for the rest of your life.

J

Josh Summers1:30:28

Well, you know, and this gets back to our first retreat. I remember—you were driving off after your first retreat, and you asked me, 'Is this feeling I have now gonna last?' And my answer was, 'No, I'm still an asshole, Bob.'

B

Bob Wright1:30:42

Is that what you said? I said, 'I'm still'—yeah, I think you're being too hard on yourself. I think you should apply more loving kindness to yourself.

J

Josh Summers1:30:48

That's idiot compassion.

B

Bob Wright1:30:51

Okay, then don't—whatever you do, don't—

J

Josh Summers1:30:57

No, no. Real compassion is not going to tolerate the shit. I will tolerate it, but I will have commitment to transform it to good energy.

B

Bob Wright1:31:20

Kind of look at it with bemused attachment and forgiveness, and yet aspire to change it.

J

Josh Summers1:31:29

Right. That's what I think—you should look at yourself the way a loving god would look at you. Shakes its head, kind of doesn't approve, knows when you did something you shouldn't—but by virtue of omniscience, by virtue of understanding everything about how you came to be what you are, kind of understands and so isn't too harsh.

B

Bob Wright1:32:01

That's what I really recommend.

J

Josh Summers1:32:03

Okay. That's—I'll take that. I'm going to imagine a loving, benevolent god shining down upon me next transgression. I want to talk about this—we should talk about this in the future, because that's a particular little stick of mind that—even if you don't believe in god, you can—there's a sense in which you can say God loves you and forgives you, and it can help.

B

Bob Wright1:32:29

That's the cryptic thing I leave you with. There's so much to do. Yeah.

J

Josh Summers1:32:36

Well, this is what I think a lot of your work does—it zooms out to this ten-thousand-foot view to see the various causes and conditions that cause people to be the way they are, through natural selection and evolutionary pressures and technological pressures. It really does change the sense I have around my personal authorship on these things. I mean, when I act like that—it's causes and conditions that have been baked into me, they're just getting expressed.

B

Bob Wright1:33:10

Yeah, causes and conditions being a Buddhist kind of phrase. That's the great thing about Buddhism—I mean, it understands the pervasiveness of causality. And that's the irony: people think of it as this fuzzy eastern thing. In a certain sense, it's very infused by the scientific spirit. It takes causality seriously as a pervasive thing. And it wants you to understand that your own behavior and psychological stuff is a result of causal forces. And it wants you to become aware of those—and that's the path to liberation.

J

Josh Summers1:33:51

And you have to be aware of them, because the access to them is what comes up from the unconscious when your mind wanders.

B

Bob Wright1:33:57

We have come full circle. I told you we would. Okay, so I'm going to try—following your sage guru advice—when I meditate tomorrow—oh, oh, oh, this occurred to me while we were talking. Here's what—on the courage thing, this just occurred to me: sit down and meditate before you tweet the thing that's going to get blowback. But then, when you get the blowback, maybe you should sit down then, on the cushion, and observe the feeling you're having right then.

J

Josh Summers1:34:30

That's what I think you should try.

B

Bob Wright1:34:34

You know, the very uncomfortable feeling. And—and sure, and you can definitely do that.

J

Josh Summers1:34:43

You sound a lot more optimistic about it working.

B

Bob Wright1:34:46

I think it could be the ticket. The trouble, the heart—it's so often the hard part is getting yourself to sit down.

J

Josh Summers1:34:55

Well, I think the skepticism I have is I think you're trying to apply it in the moment. And this is what I'm trying to say—I think the habits of practice build up certain character traits that over time—

B

Bob Wright1:35:11

Absolutely true. Right, yeah. So that if you've got a really robust practice, then anything you feel out there in the world, you'll be better at stepping back and observing before it grabs a hold of you and compels you to do something that's not wise.

J

Josh Summers1:35:27

That's all true. At the same time, this feeling—you'd agree, probably, it's good to practice with all kinds of feelings, right? And this is a specific kind of pain that's not that easy to imagine, and it's not going to afflict you while you're doing your morning sitting. So you might want to take that opportunity. And it's probably the best way to defuse it—like, what I recommend is: okay, so you tweet the thing, three people call you a neo-fascist—we don't really consider them assholes, we're very tolerant—but okay, so you see it, and then you mute them. You mute them so you're not going to hear anymore. You got it. And then you sit down and observe the feeling that you're having, which is an uncomfortable feeling.

B

Bob Wright1:36:25

So are you going to do that between now and next time we meet?

J

Josh Summers1:36:27

If I—well, assuming I work up the courage to tweet something unpopular, which probably won't happen. We'll see. But I will try to do the four Rs. That I guarantee you, if I can remember them.

B

Bob Wright1:36:44

I wish you luck with that. So thank you. We will return to this whole thing in all its dimensions. And I'll try to summon non-zero consciousness. And non-zero—I've also been into the phrase 'non-zero communication.' You could go all out. Somebody wants—anyway, I can see you moderating debates, similar, with people from other sides. And shaping it around a goodwill effort to heal this problem. Like you're a marital therapist for the country.

J

Josh Summers1:37:31

Okay, there it is. I'm going to go change my LinkedIn profile. Thank you for that phrase.

B

Bob Wright1:37:38

You know what I mean, though.

J

Josh Summers1:37:42

That's my calling.

B

Bob Wright1:37:44

I think your calling is—you're trying to do it for the world.

J

Josh Summers1:37:48

You're right, country wasn't big enough. I'm the marital therapist for the world. Hold on, it's a big burden. But somebody's got to do this job. And why not me?

B

Bob Wright1:38:04

Because I can't even meditate, that's why.

J

Josh Summers1:38:07

But now you got the four Rs, so you're going to get better.

B

Bob Wright1:38:13

I know, I shouldn't think of it that way. I know, but I will. And on the last thing—the retreat with Michael and Orion. I was on a retreat with Michael once where someone complained that their meditation was no good, they weren't making any progress, they couldn't—as you kind of complained about not being able to stay on the breath. And then Michael's answer—question, the answer to that share—was, 'Well, tell me about your life. How are your relationships?' And the guy said, 'Oh, you know, my children are doing well, very fulfilled in my career, my marriage, and life's pretty good. I just can't focus on my breath.' Michael's answer was, 'Sounds like you have a good practice.' I would have said, 'Why are you even trying to focus on your breath? Enjoy your life, man.' Okay, so anyway, we should go. We'll be back at some point. And thank you for the sage guidance, Josh.

J

Josh Summers1:39:10

Thank you, Bob. I look forward to hearing the report.

B

Bob Wright1:39:16

It'll—I promise to deliver it. We'll see.

The Dharma of Bob 5: Mindful Defiance | Robert Wright & Josh Summers | The Wright Show

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