Speaker 1: You sit down there to meditate, and it becomes really
Speaker 1: clear that there are different parts to your mind that
Speaker 1: have different ideas about what you should be doing while
Speaker 1: you're sitting here, and some of them don't even think
Speaker 1: you should be sitting here. Welcome to the one you
Speaker 1: feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of
Speaker 1: the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think, ring true. And yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Chula Dasa, a meditation master with over four
Speaker 1: decades of experience in the Tibetan and Theravad and Buddhist traditions.
Speaker 1: He taught psychology and neuroscience at the Universities of Calgary
Speaker 1: and British Columbia. Chiladasa lives in Arizona's wilderness and leads
Speaker 1: the Dharma Treasure Buddhist songa. On this episode, Eric and
Speaker 1: Chuladasa talk about many things, including the book The Mind Illuminated. Hi, Chuladasa,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Thank you
Speaker 1: for having me. I am so excited to have you on.
Speaker 1: As as I told you before, your book, The Mind
Speaker 1: Illuminated is one of the best books on meditation and
Speaker 1: how the mind works I have ever read. I've told
Speaker 1: so many people about it, and so I think a
Speaker 1: bunch of listeners are waiting to hear this one. So
Speaker 1: I'm really looking forward to getting into this. But before
Speaker 1: we do, let's start like we always do with the parable.
Speaker 1: There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. What is a bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the
Speaker 1: other is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love. And the grandson stops and he
Speaker 1: thinks about it for a second and looks up at
Speaker 1: his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?
Speaker 1: And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 1: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do. Well, you know, it's very interesting, Eric
Speaker 1: I would say that that that parable is an extremely
Speaker 1: good description of what the dharma practices all about. We
Speaker 1: have these two sides to our nature. Which parable describes,
Speaker 1: and uh, yeah, it's which one we feed. If we
Speaker 1: go around succumbing to greed and hatred and basically acting
Speaker 1: out of self centeredness and selfishness, then that grows stronger
Speaker 1: and that comes to characterize the kind of person we are,
Speaker 1: and as a matter of fact, when it spreads culture wide,
Speaker 1: we end up with the kind of world we have.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, if we can learn to feed
Speaker 1: the other wolf, if we can practice loving kindness and
Speaker 1: understanding and compassion, we can learn to maximize the h
Speaker 1: cooperativity aspect of ourselves rather than a competitive aspect, then
Speaker 1: then that's the wolf that that wins. And quite frankly,
Speaker 1: up until now, in the history of Buddhism, it's been
Speaker 1: all about feeding the right wolf largely for your own say,
Speaker 1: although the Mahayana School has recognized that you need to
Speaker 1: go beyond that. But we're at a place where the
Speaker 1: survival of humanity, or at the very least the survival
Speaker 1: of the incredible cultural heritage that we have developed, is
Speaker 1: at very very serious risk. And the only solution that
Speaker 1: I can see is to feed the right wolf. I agree.
Speaker 1: I'm actually one of those people that believes the world
Speaker 1: is getting better in a lot of ways, but I
Speaker 1: also think at the same time that it's getting better,
Speaker 1: our challenges are growing in magnitude. The the impact that
Speaker 1: our screw ups can have are so much worse. The
Speaker 1: impact greed and hatred and fear can have in the
Speaker 1: world is magnified by just the nature of our our
Speaker 1: technology and our tools. I totally agree. It's a race
Speaker 1: between these two sides of our nature and uh, and
Speaker 1: which one wins on a collective basis is going to
Speaker 1: determine the future. Yeah, that's why this dharma has to
Speaker 1: spread beyond the individuals. Ye. So I mentioned to you before,
Speaker 1: and you know, for the listeners, we're gonna do this
Speaker 1: is a two part interview, and we're gonna do it
Speaker 1: in two sections. The first section we're gonna do is
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about your understanding of how the mind
Speaker 1: and the brain works based on different Buddhist teachings and
Speaker 1: and your own experience in neuroscience. And then in the
Speaker 1: second part we'll talk about applying that stuff and get
Speaker 1: very specific about meditation guidance, which is really one of
Speaker 1: the strengths of the book. Um. But the other strength
Speaker 1: is this whole section about understanding how the mind works.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to make sure we got that. And
Speaker 1: it's a little bit dense at points, and I've been
Speaker 1: fretting a little bit about like, am I gonna be
Speaker 1: able to get this, you know, into a podcast and
Speaker 1: and you know, make it digestible. So we'll see how
Speaker 1: we go, but I think it's worth trying. I thought
Speaker 1: we'd start with the basic distinction between attention and awareness,
Speaker 1: because that is fundamental to basically everything that you teach,
Speaker 1: particularly the meditation stuff, is understanding the difference between those
Speaker 1: two things and being able to recognize them. I agree
Speaker 1: with you, it is totally fundamental. And when I realized
Speaker 1: the distinction between those two, it made all of the
Speaker 1: difference in the world, not just to my own practice,
Speaker 1: but to my ability to understand what people have been
Speaker 1: trying to say in all of these classic meditation texts
Speaker 1: over the centuries, and also helped him make sense of
Speaker 1: what was going on in the world with people the
Speaker 1: key to it. Initially, maybe this isn't the key, this
Speaker 1: was the discovery of the keyhole. Like so many people,
Speaker 1: my initial meditation training led me to believe that what
Speaker 1: I was trying to do was to make my meditation object,
Speaker 1: the breath, the only thing that was present in my consciousness,
Speaker 1: and to eliminate everything else. And this was such a
Speaker 1: struggle and frustration, you know, dullness and drowsiness and falling
Speaker 1: asleep and all the usual kinds of things, extensive mind
Speaker 1: wandering and everything. I find myself lost in mind wondering.
Speaker 1: And then I go back to this really narrow focused perspective.
Speaker 1: And I don't know why exactly, but one day it
Speaker 1: occurred to me to just, well, why don't you just
Speaker 1: let all that other stuff be there, and as long
Speaker 1: as I'm focused on my meditation object, let's see what happens.
Speaker 1: And everything not only became easier, but I could recognize
Speaker 1: the problems in my practice before they became problems. And
Speaker 1: then so that was the discovery of, like I said,
Speaker 1: the keyhole. Then I found the key which was when
Speaker 1: I read the descriptions that there were two different networks
Speaker 1: by which we became conscious of things in our day
Speaker 1: to day, moment to moment knowing of the world. One
Speaker 1: was this aspect of our mind which focused on things,
Speaker 1: analyze those things, allowed us to manipulate our experience, solve problems,
Speaker 1: do all these great things. But there was this other aspect,
Speaker 1: so other brain network that functioned in a different way,
Speaker 1: and it took in information in a much more global
Speaker 1: or holistic way and was actually providing the completely different
Speaker 1: kind of information a different perspective, and that the two
Speaker 1: were intended to work together. And so these were being
Speaker 1: described by neuro scientists as the dorsal attentional network and
Speaker 1: the ventral attentional network. They were most often being described
Speaker 1: as two kinds of attention. But it was so obvious
Speaker 1: that these were inappropriate terms. And then, of course, and
Speaker 1: cognitive science being at van to see people using terms
Speaker 1: like focused attention and open attention or broad attention or
Speaker 1: distributed attention. And I thought about this, and I thought
Speaker 1: about the way we use language, and I said this,
Speaker 1: this is an extremely important discovery and concept. How to
Speaker 1: talk about this in a way that is meaningful? And
Speaker 1: it occurred to me that people use the terms attention
Speaker 1: and awareness interchangeably very often. There was a lot of
Speaker 1: conflation of these two as just being two different ways
Speaker 1: of referring to the same thing, but had a little
Speaker 1: peper level. There was a distinction there that was part
Speaker 1: of our common language, part of our common understanding. People
Speaker 1: would selectively use the word attention or paying attention in
Speaker 1: association with words like concentration and focus and things like that.
Speaker 1: But people would also often use the word awareness, not
Speaker 1: just in a broad sense to include everything, which was
Speaker 1: actually quite appropriate, but also that kind of knowing that
Speaker 1: didn't involve as highly focused, uh analytical approach to things.
Speaker 1: And so there was all what I realized is within
Speaker 1: the language itself, there was already an intuitive understanding of
Speaker 1: these two ways of knowing, these two ways of perceiving experience,
Speaker 1: and that all it was really necessary was teased them
Speaker 1: apart so that we could use these words the kind
Speaker 1: of understanding people already had in order to be able
Speaker 1: to talk about these two ways of knowing. And it
Speaker 1: is an interesting thing about the way our minds work,
Speaker 1: that when we can give labels to something and we
Speaker 1: can understand them and we can use them better. So
Speaker 1: it's a very interesting thing. I think it goes back
Speaker 1: to some biblical references that to give a name to
Speaker 1: something is to know it and are to understand it.
Speaker 1: And if you think about it, you know, I could say, um,
Speaker 1: of course, you know a dog can pay attention to things,
Speaker 1: but if you take a worm, it's kind of hard
Speaker 1: to imagine an earthworm paying attention to something. But you'd
Speaker 1: certainly say an earthworm was aware. And uh, where I
Speaker 1: lived and surrounded by wildlife, and I watched the deer,
Speaker 1: and I see that dearer dwell in a state of awareness,
Speaker 1: and attention is something that they invoke periodically. So as
Speaker 1: a result of all of us that this particularly distinction,
Speaker 1: both the on a neurological neuro physiological basis and the
Speaker 1: experiential basis just became really clear. And at that point
Speaker 1: I could look at what had previously been confusing discussions
Speaker 1: by modern meditation teachers trying to describe what mindfulness was
Speaker 1: by the writers of traditional texts, going going back to
Speaker 1: early commentaries and on the Buddhist teaching, and this particular
Speaker 1: key unlocked the meaning of what they had had since intuitively,
Speaker 1: and we're trying to put into words, but without the
Speaker 1: specific language to distinguish between these two different things. And
Speaker 1: so in your specific definition, and that's one of the
Speaker 1: things I love about the book is you define things
Speaker 1: very very clearly, so that we all know what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. And attention in your definition is the process
Speaker 1: of giving attention to one thing to sort of analyze
Speaker 1: it and you know, learn more about it and and
Speaker 1: just be focused on whereas awareness is the broader sense
Speaker 1: of what's happening around us. You know. So I'm sitting
Speaker 1: here talking to you, I'm my attention is on you
Speaker 1: and your conversation and your face here. My awareness knows
Speaker 1: though that, you know, there's a room behind me, and
Speaker 1: there's light coming in, and that somebody knocked on the door,
Speaker 1: you know, next door. You know, my awareness is sort
Speaker 1: of is picking all that up. But it's my attention
Speaker 1: that is what I focused. And one of the things
Speaker 1: I thought was so interesting about this approach, and we'll
Speaker 1: cover it more as we get into meditation in the
Speaker 1: next section. But this leads us into the idea of
Speaker 1: moments of consciousness. I don't know if you called it
Speaker 1: the moments of consciousness model, but but that is a
Speaker 1: you know, there's a whole chapter on that idea. Do
Speaker 1: you think you could walk us through you know what
Speaker 1: you mean by moments of conscious and what that model is. Yes,
Speaker 1: to begin with the origins of this, we're very early meditators. Now,
Speaker 1: this is something that many meditators will experience at some
Speaker 1: point that they will begin to perceive their experience in
Speaker 1: the form of the rapid arising and passing away of
Speaker 1: moments of consciousness. And interestingly enough, this seems to happen
Speaker 1: at several different frequencies that seem to be fairly characteristic. Well,
Speaker 1: this had been noticed by early meditators who constructed the
Speaker 1: part of the polycanon that's called the Abidama, and they
Speaker 1: used it as a basis for taking all of the
Speaker 1: various things that the Buddha had taught about consciousness and
Speaker 1: putting it into a framework that there were individual that
Speaker 1: that consciousness consisted of individual moments of consciousness that arose
Speaker 1: and passed away, and each moment of consciousness had specific
Speaker 1: characteristic to it. Of course, it had the object of consciousness,
Speaker 1: which is the one that we most easily become aware of.
Speaker 1: But these these wonderful meditators who created the Abidama recognized
Speaker 1: and enumerated a very very long list of characteristics which
Speaker 1: could be present or absence in each moment of consciousness,
Speaker 1: and which basically determined the qualities of that moment of consciousness.
Speaker 1: I can say this is something that many meditators experience,
Speaker 1: this arising and passing away of experience in these discreete moments. Uh,
Speaker 1: and this is something that had been anal lies in
Speaker 1: great detail. One of the interesting things about this from
Speaker 1: the point of view of neurophysiology is what is going
Speaker 1: on in the brain. Are all of these different complex
Speaker 1: waves of electrochemical activity that are going through the brain.
Speaker 1: I think most people have enough knowledge of brain function
Speaker 1: to realize that they're all these neurons. They're connected to
Speaker 1: each other at junctions called signapses, and an electrical current
Speaker 1: runs along the fiber that's part of one neuron, and
Speaker 1: at the end it releases a chemical neurotransmitter that stimulates
Speaker 1: the next neuron and a chain and initiates a wave
Speaker 1: of electric change that passes to the end of that
Speaker 1: neuron and to the next. Well, it actually turns out
Speaker 1: that individual neurons can have anywhere from dozens to literally
Speaker 1: thousand of these connections to other neurons. And when you
Speaker 1: do a classic electro and cephalogram, you know, e e g.
Speaker 1: Put the electrodes on the scale, what you're really doing
Speaker 1: is you're tapping into the electrical part of those electrochemical
Speaker 1: waves passing through the brain. So this is this is
Speaker 1: a form that information is taking in the brain. And
Speaker 1: if you have information in the form of a wave,
Speaker 1: what you have to do to extract the information is
Speaker 1: you have to take a chunk of that wave and
Speaker 1: you have to break it down and then you can
Speaker 1: extract its information content. This this gets down to you know,
Speaker 1: basic physics and mathematics and something that people have been
Speaker 1: doing for going on a hundred and fifty two hundred years,
Speaker 1: learning to analyze the information content of waves. And we
Speaker 1: do this. I mean, the information that's being passed between
Speaker 1: you and I, in all of its different forms, is
Speaker 1: really in a form of a wave, and it becomes digitized.
Speaker 1: But what do we mean by digitization. We mean you
Speaker 1: take chunks of that wave and you extract the information content.
Speaker 1: Do you see how that the understanding of that physical
Speaker 1: process of how you extract information from uh from waves
Speaker 1: translates into the subjective experience of information impulses or chunks
Speaker 1: or moments of consciousness. Yeah, so this all comes comes
Speaker 1: together to offer a model, and it's a model that
Speaker 1: has a lot of utility. And now every model is
Speaker 1: just an approximation. Some models are closer representation of what
Speaker 1: they attempt to model than others. But the whole purpose
Speaker 1: of a model is to help us to understand something.
Speaker 1: So what I've done is I've taken this moments of
Speaker 1: consciousness model that historically goes back to shortly after the
Speaker 1: time of the Buddha, that is common to my own
Speaker 1: meditation experience and that of many others, and that has
Speaker 1: its counterpart in understanding how the brain works to extract information.
Speaker 1: And I've applied it to the experience of every meditator,
Speaker 1: because every meditator who sits down to meditate, to learn
Speaker 1: to meditate, there's two things that they experience, and there
Speaker 1: are a variety of different kinds of information, and we
Speaker 1: can distinguish some of those as the information that we
Speaker 1: are interested in. If you're meditating, it's your meditation object.
Speaker 1: If your student focusing on your homework, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: your homework. And then there's all that other information that
Speaker 1: keeps appearing in the mind that is not related to that. Right,
Speaker 1: So we have the phenomenon of distractions that can lead
Speaker 1: to forgetting what your primary focus is. And the other
Speaker 1: thing we have is dulness. And both of these things
Speaker 1: are actually inherent in the Abidama description of uh moments
Speaker 1: of consciousness. I just developed them for the purpose of
Speaker 1: helping the meditator have a model that's relatively easy to
Speaker 1: understand that they can apply to what it is they're
Speaker 1: trying to do in their practice. Well, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: increase the number of moments of consciousness that are on
Speaker 1: my meditation object in order to stabilize my attention. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to increase the proportion of moments of consciousness that
Speaker 1: take the form of awareness in order to develop this
Speaker 1: other aspect of how how I know so that I
Speaker 1: can use it in my meditation. And where are these
Speaker 1: additional moments of consciousness coming from? Well, there's a whole
Speaker 1: supply of non perceiving potential moments of consciousness, and of
Speaker 1: course this can explain dullness, and this can explain that
Speaker 1: really high level of consciousness, that powerful conscious perception that
Speaker 1: we all experience under certain circumstances. So there's a continuous
Speaker 1: stream of moments of consciousness. Ordinarily many of them are
Speaker 1: non perceiving, and those that contain information content can take
Speaker 1: a variety of forms. So now we have a model
Speaker 1: by which we can talk about how we go from
Speaker 1: a mind that's full of distractions that can lead us
Speaker 1: to forget what we're doing and end up in the
Speaker 1: chain of mind wandering. How it is that we can
Speaker 1: descend from the level of consciousness that we first sat
Speaker 1: down with into a state of sleepiness or even actual sleep,
Speaker 1: And likewise, how we can sit down to meditate and
Speaker 1: ascend to a very high level of conscious clarity. And so,
Speaker 1: in essence, what you're saying is that what appears to
Speaker 1: us to be a continuous stream of consciousness are really
Speaker 1: individual moments of consciousness, kind of the way if you
Speaker 1: think about a movie, right, it's a bunch of still
Speaker 1: frames that you just process really fast, and that those
Speaker 1: come from in a variety of sources. Start from our senses.
Speaker 1: So there's the five senses, So those are a certain
Speaker 1: moment of consciousness. And then the other one is that
Speaker 1: And I've heard this from Buddhism before about the idea
Speaker 1: of the mind or the thinking itself being a sort
Speaker 1: of a sixth sense that you watch. And then the
Speaker 1: piece that you put in that I thought was so
Speaker 1: interesting I'd never really thought about or understood or read
Speaker 1: is the idea of binding moments of consciousness. How these
Speaker 1: individual moments are happening in there, these these things that
Speaker 1: are are coming up. And then there's another type of
Speaker 1: consciousness that is the piece that makes it look seamless.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's a piece that helps make it look
Speaker 1: seeing less. Yes, yes, And your point is in meditation,
Speaker 1: if people get to a deep enough level, they begin
Speaker 1: to see the frames in a sense, to use the
Speaker 1: movie analogy, Yes, they begin to be able to see
Speaker 1: the frames. And the other thing is that they developed
Speaker 1: the ability to see frames of different levels of complexity.
Speaker 1: Your mind is taking in information uh in a very
Speaker 1: basic fundamental form, and then combining it so that by
Speaker 1: the time it comes to consciousness, it's been highly processed,
Speaker 1: highly conceptualized. So the other thing you can do is
Speaker 1: you can train your mind to be able to actually
Speaker 1: see how the process takes place of building up a
Speaker 1: meaningful perception from many disc eat bits of information that
Speaker 1: are arriving through different senses and coming from stored information
Speaker 1: from past experience, and so on and so forth, even
Speaker 1: combining emotion with intellectual information. The pictures in the book
Speaker 1: are really great for this because they sort of show
Speaker 1: moment by moment consciousness and it really lays out what
Speaker 1: meditation can be like, where you know, it's bird bird meditation,
Speaker 1: object meditation, object headache, bird bird meditation. But the idea
Speaker 1: of the non perceiving moments of consciousness was a real
Speaker 1: eye opener for me, because what you're basically saying is
Speaker 1: that there are moments where we're not really perceiving anything.
Speaker 1: It's the dullness. It's you know, you're not asleep, but
Speaker 1: your brain is not doing anything. And when I heard that,
Speaker 1: it a helped me understand why I got so sleepy
Speaker 1: when I meditated and some of the challenges, but it
Speaker 1: also just made me realize, moment to moment, day to day,
Speaker 1: that that is there at at a level that I
Speaker 1: had not seen or understood, and it was a really
Speaker 1: helpful way for me to think about it and you
Speaker 1: talk in the book a couple of points about the
Speaker 1: goal of concentration and you know, mindfulness or of aposta
Speaker 1: together is to increase the total power of our cognitive
Speaker 1: abilities or of our of our consciousness, right. And so
Speaker 1: one of the ways that that happens is we fill
Speaker 1: in more of those non perceiving moments. And you made
Speaker 1: the example of the really heightened states of consciousness where,
Speaker 1: for example, of somebody's in great danger, they say that
Speaker 1: everything slowed down, and they saw every little thing, and
Speaker 1: they were aware of every moment everything that happened. And
Speaker 1: and that's what this is. In that moment, you have
Speaker 1: essentially no non perceiving moments of consciousness or or very few,
Speaker 1: that's right. And another example of that, of course, is
Speaker 1: the zone that athletes, you know, professional athletes that the
Speaker 1: top people talk about, you know, uh entering into the zone.
Speaker 1: The same thing happens with them, yep, sort allows them
Speaker 1: to perform at the level that they do. So the
Speaker 1: next level of detail that you go to, and these
Speaker 1: are kind of different chapters. The next one is sort
Speaker 1: of we've gone from the moments of consciousness model to
Speaker 1: more of the mind system model and how the mind
Speaker 1: works and this ends in a really fascinating place. So
Speaker 1: that's why we're going to take the time to go
Speaker 1: through it, because I think where it ends is a
Speaker 1: real eye opener um. I'm going to lay out the
Speaker 1: basic pieces of it, allow you to then add a
Speaker 1: little commentary, and then we'll kind of move through it.
Speaker 1: But basically, we all know we've got a conscious and
Speaker 1: an unconscious mind, right, So there's there's that piece, and
Speaker 1: then you break up the unconscious mind into a couple
Speaker 1: of major parts. One is the sensor mind, the other
Speaker 1: is the discriminating mind. The sensory mind is as you
Speaker 1: would say, it's the it's the part of our mind
Speaker 1: that perceives what's coming in through our senses, and it
Speaker 1: actually does a variety of things to the raw signal.
Speaker 1: And I don't think we've got enough time to go
Speaker 1: into all that, but it's basically going through and processing
Speaker 1: what comes in through our senses. And then there's the
Speaker 1: discriminating submind, which is the one that's doing the more
Speaker 1: cognitive thinking, feeling type of analysis. Am I on target
Speaker 1: so far? Right? One? And then ultimately, what what you
Speaker 1: get to, and this is the part that gets so
Speaker 1: fascinating is that we've got all these sub minds that
Speaker 1: are all doing these different things. And again, this is
Speaker 1: a model. This isn't like you've got, you know, a
Speaker 1: hundred little teeny minds in your brain. Right. It's the
Speaker 1: model of how the processing works. But the fascinating part
Speaker 1: to me is where you describe how these subminds are
Speaker 1: in essence, competing for conscious attention. And the one that
Speaker 1: is deemed most relevant is what actually pops up into consciousness.
Speaker 1: And this is fascinating because if you've meditated, which a
Speaker 1: lot you know, I'm sure a lot a lot of
Speaker 1: people on the show are one of the real initial
Speaker 1: things that we get from meditation if we follow it
Speaker 1: the right way, is that I'm not controlling these thoughts.
Speaker 1: There is no conscious me. Whatever I think of is
Speaker 1: the conscious me is not deciding to think about this
Speaker 1: or to think about that. All of a sudden, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about this, and then next thing I know, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about that. And and so your model of these
Speaker 1: various subminds projecting these things into consciousness is really fascinating. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is, and it helps so much to understand what's
Speaker 1: going on. You sit down there to meditate, and it
Speaker 1: becomes really clear that there are different parts to your
Speaker 1: mind that have different ideas about what you should be
Speaker 1: doing while you're sitting there, and some of them don't
Speaker 1: even think you should be sitting here. Right. That's a
Speaker 1: extends the every dimension of our lives, and we can
Speaker 1: say reflections of it and so much of our our behavior.
Speaker 1: What we absolutely love is when we are able to
Speaker 1: enter into that wonderful state of clarity where we no
Speaker 1: longer have these different parts of our mind competing with
Speaker 1: each other. And whether it takes the form of just
Speaker 1: being totally present standing on the beach watching a sunset
Speaker 1: and just the fullness, the wonderfulness of the of the experience,
Speaker 1: or if we're engaged in a specific task and we
Speaker 1: enter into that flow state where we're just everything is
Speaker 1: going perfectly and there's not these other parts of our
Speaker 1: mind interrupting the process, making us lose that flow and
Speaker 1: have to recapture it and so forth. What this leads
Speaker 1: to is the idea that the conscious mind is not
Speaker 1: the course of its content. It's actually a space or
Speaker 1: a place that the various unconscious sub minds project into.
Speaker 1: And you go one step beyond that, and this is
Speaker 1: an area that I'd love to talk a little bit more,
Speaker 1: because you say that the conscious mind isn't really doing anything.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's projecting it into consciousness, and then
Speaker 1: there is one particular mind that is there that says, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is what I'm going to do with that. You're
Speaker 1: saying that these things all project into consciousness, the most
Speaker 1: important ones, and they're vying for that, and that they
Speaker 1: almost use an analogy of a boardroom, right, and and
Speaker 1: the consciousness being sort of the boardroom or the power
Speaker 1: point presentation that people are looking at in the boardroom,
Speaker 1: and the various people in there that are going to vote.
Speaker 1: Are these subminds. There isn't one master. And that's a
Speaker 1: fascinating idea because we're so used to thinking of I
Speaker 1: do X, I do Y, and so that statement that
Speaker 1: the conscious mind doesn't do anything is really a challenging one.
Speaker 1: And what I wanted to ask you was if it's
Speaker 1: the various subminds that are doing this process. You talk
Speaker 1: a lot about intention, you know how setting intentions is
Speaker 1: the way that we sort of train our sub minds,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna talk about that more in the meditation section.
Speaker 1: But if setting intention is the way that you train
Speaker 1: the subminds. What is setting the intention? Who? Where? What? Where?
Speaker 1: Where is that something is making a priority judgment that
Speaker 1: I want to intend to do X. Yes. Well, here,
Speaker 1: if we go back to the moments of consciousness model,
Speaker 1: every moment of consciousness has an intention. Every one of
Speaker 1: these subminds which is producing, uh, some aspect of our
Speaker 1: experience that it wants to project into consciousness, has an intention. Now,
Speaker 1: when we tell the story of what happens over a
Speaker 1: given period of time, what we're really doing is describing
Speaker 1: what has happened as a result of the interaction of
Speaker 1: these different subminds, each with its own intention and UH.
Speaker 1: When we when we have that feeling, that clear feeling
Speaker 1: of well, I intend to do such and such or
Speaker 1: past tense, I intended to do such and such, what
Speaker 1: we're really doing is saying enough of these subminds came
Speaker 1: into agreement and shared an intention. It was the one
Speaker 1: that was ultimately expressed as a part of our conscious experience.
Speaker 1: So this is what your intention is or my intention
Speaker 1: when I have the subjective experience of forming an intention
Speaker 1: to do such and such. It began with different subminds
Speaker 1: with different intentions and What became my intention was when
Speaker 1: enough of those shared the same in interest him that
Speaker 1: it determined what took place, and the others kind of
Speaker 1: got pushed to the background. This at first glance sounds
Speaker 1: crazy or it's revolutionary to think that they're that the
Speaker 1: conscious mind isn't the decider. Right. We talked about executive function.
Speaker 1: That's the great human endowment, right, is that we've got
Speaker 1: this prefrontal cortex that can make good decisions and recognizing
Speaker 1: that that's more of a committee than it is a person.
Speaker 1: But the truth is this, everything you're saying, a besides
Speaker 1: being backed up by a bunch of meditators for thousands
Speaker 1: of years, aligns completely with what a lot of the
Speaker 1: newer neuroscience is saying. Also, you know, we are a
Speaker 1: collection of mind processes. So I think that's a really
Speaker 1: amazing idea, and I think what that leads to then
Speaker 1: is we all would say, but wait a minute, there's
Speaker 1: a very clear me here that's doing this stuff. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a that's me. And what you're saying, and you're
Speaker 1: not alone in saying this, is that there's a narrating mind.
Speaker 1: We've talked about these other sub minds, ones that process
Speaker 1: the sound that's coming in ones that are discriminating. Again,
Speaker 1: we can't go into everything that's in your in the model,
Speaker 1: but one of the sub minds is a narrating mind,
Speaker 1: and that narrating mind is the one that ties all
Speaker 1: this stuff together and makes it seem as if there
Speaker 1: is one thing that is making these decisions. Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: In order to make sense of our experience as it
Speaker 1: unfolds over time, we need to link all these individual
Speaker 1: experiences UH together in a meaningful way. We need to
Speaker 1: create the story of who we are UH. And we
Speaker 1: do that at many different levels over the period of
Speaker 1: a few minutes while we're performing a particular task. UH.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of different things that arise in
Speaker 1: consciousness during that and then needs to be put together
Speaker 1: into a continuous story so that quote, we know what
Speaker 1: we are doing and we can stay on track and
Speaker 1: complete the task. But there's also the all of the
Speaker 1: different you know, the all of the different experiences that
Speaker 1: I've had in the in the course of a day
Speaker 1: or a week or a month. In order two give
Speaker 1: those meaning and power and utility in the future, they
Speaker 1: need to be linked together to create to create a
Speaker 1: meaningful story of me. And as a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: this is what your whole life is. Uh, And it's
Speaker 1: the narrating mind that does that. It kind of does
Speaker 1: that on a continuous basis, creating the story of you,
Speaker 1: you know, step by step as it occurs. What happens though,
Speaker 1: depending on how deep we want to go into this um,
Speaker 1: but at at the level that everybody can can relate to,
Speaker 1: how do you take a sequence of events and make
Speaker 1: make sense of it? Every story, to make any sense
Speaker 1: at all, needs to have a narrative center of gravity
Speaker 1: the links everything together. And that's what the sense of
Speaker 1: I name mine does. That's that's the purpose it serves.
Speaker 1: And then the rest of it consists of taking those
Speaker 1: experiences and collecting them into a variety of objects. You
Speaker 1: take my teacup for example, I look at one side
Speaker 1: of it, it's got another side that I can't see,
Speaker 1: and I have no direct experience. So what needs to
Speaker 1: happen is that, Uh, all kinds of information has to
Speaker 1: be gathered together about these things that we're experiencing. We
Speaker 1: experienced them in different ways moment to moment, so that
Speaker 1: what the narrating mind does is object so we have
Speaker 1: the experience. Now I the narrative center of gravity and
Speaker 1: this number of objects or people or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: each of which has its own discrete identity that I'm
Speaker 1: interacting with, and now it can create the story of
Speaker 1: that interaction. And I was going to say, what is
Speaker 1: so amazing about this, although disorienting, right, it is a
Speaker 1: disorienting concept, is that you know what we've talked on
Speaker 1: the show multiple times, we've had guests on We've we've
Speaker 1: covered the Buddhist idea of not self or we aren't
Speaker 1: the self we think we are. And this is the
Speaker 1: clearest description of that that I've ever found, because that
Speaker 1: self that seems so real is the narrating mind. And
Speaker 1: the idea that there's not a self again doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that there's nothing here, right, It's this idea that there
Speaker 1: isn't this one overriding governing thing that is me. I
Speaker 1: am a collection of all of these different processes, and
Speaker 1: and that's what I find to be the The end
Speaker 1: result of understanding that mind system model is it gives
Speaker 1: me a way to think about and discuss the the
Speaker 1: not self. And that's not all there is to it.
Speaker 1: I know there are deeper levels of insight that come
Speaker 1: but it's a place to start to because I think
Speaker 1: the experience of of not self is a completely different thing, right,
Speaker 1: and you can't have it, so you have it, But
Speaker 1: understanding what people mean when they say that to some
Speaker 1: extent is so helpful. And that's what I love about
Speaker 1: this model, that that is one of its greatest virtues
Speaker 1: is it makes intellectual sense of something that otherwise is
Speaker 1: a very rarefied experience that that up to this point
Speaker 1: in time, not too many people have had. I do
Speaker 1: want to point out something, though, and that is that
Speaker 1: the narrating mind, in doing, in performing its function, is
Speaker 1: what generates the the the eye, and the world of
Speaker 1: objects that we perceive. And it does that out of necessity.
Speaker 1: But it's a relatively simple functional component of our minds.
Speaker 1: It's just assembling information and it's the eye other construct
Speaker 1: that allows it to do this. Really, where the the
Speaker 1: notion of self comes um is the rest of the
Speaker 1: discriminating mind here's this story and takes it as an
Speaker 1: accurate description of reality. So the funny thing is now
Speaker 1: all these different subminds, none of which is the self,
Speaker 1: but in different combinations at different times, constitute what gets
Speaker 1: labeled the self have come to believe that there is
Speaker 1: a self. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, that's that's fascinating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's what what changes with the realization of not
Speaker 1: self or no self is that all of those different
Speaker 1: parts of the discriminating mind that are the origins of
Speaker 1: the totality of your perception and behavior as you navigate
Speaker 1: through the world, they're all operating on this assumption that
Speaker 1: there is a self and there's a world consisting of separate,
Speaker 1: discrete objects. And then they further take the narrative and
Speaker 1: add to it this third component that well, when I'm
Speaker 1: happy or when I suffer, it's because of the interaction
Speaker 1: between the self and this other. And so there's this
Speaker 1: fiction that we lived in and the notion of self.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't have a self without another right,
Speaker 1: and so there's a boundary says that here's where self
Speaker 1: ends and here's where other begins. That boundary becomes the
Speaker 1: war zone, and this is where all of our suffering arises.
Speaker 1: So here you have a mind mechanism that's serving extremely
Speaker 1: valuable important the narrator, the narrating mind that is allowing
Speaker 1: us to function and navigate through the world and the
Speaker 1: rest of the mind, each individual part of it developing
Speaker 1: an assumption that that view of the world it's being
Speaker 1: described is an accurate view of the world, and then
Speaker 1: out of that arises all of our problems. It's fascinating. Well,
Speaker 1: I think this is a great place to wrap up
Speaker 1: part one of the podcast, so listeners, you'll have to
Speaker 1: wait till next week, but uh chu, lad Us and
Speaker 1: I will keep talking here in a moment. If what
Speaker 1: you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
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