Speaker 1: Hey, before we get started, I want to give a
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Speaker 1: though we will always fail in the task to express
Speaker 1: the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we work
Speaker 1: with it, every time we play with it, we bring
Speaker 1: out something new for ourselves. Welcome to the one you feed.
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think ring true. And yet for
Speaker 1: 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 Beth Jacobs, a clinical psychologist in private practice
Speaker 1: and a former faculty member of the Fineberg School of
Speaker 1: Medicine of Northwestern University. She's also a teacher in the
Speaker 1: Soto's Entry addition, and incorporates Buddhist studies and meditation into
Speaker 1: her work as both a psychologist and a writer. Today,
Speaker 1: Eric and Beth discuss a couple of her books, including
Speaker 1: The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the Abi Dharma tells Us
Speaker 1: about how we think, feel, and experience life. Hi, Beth,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so glad to
Speaker 1: be here. Yeah. We're going to be discussing, among other things,
Speaker 1: a practice journal you have for writing and meditation, as
Speaker 1: well as your book, The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the
Speaker 1: Abby Dharma tells Us about how we think, feel, and
Speaker 1: experience life. But before we do that, we'll start, like
Speaker 1: we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there
Speaker 1: is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops, she thinks
Speaker 1: about this for a second, looks up at her grandmother, said, well, grandmother,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Thank you. I love the parable.
Speaker 1: I love your radial approach to this parable. How you
Speaker 1: just talk about it from so many angles, with so
Speaker 1: many people. So in the terms of original Buddhism, you
Speaker 1: might name these wolves kusla and akusla, which is usually
Speaker 1: translated as wholesome and unwholesome. But I think the real
Speaker 1: key to this is the venue of the fight. It's
Speaker 1: not medicine square garden, it's not out in the woods,
Speaker 1: it's inside. So these wolves, it's very very important that
Speaker 1: that's how it's put. And what I think that's saying
Speaker 1: is that the battleground is the mind, and that what
Speaker 1: we feed these wolves is attention and we feed these
Speaker 1: wolves energy. But it's an internal process, and no matter
Speaker 1: what we do externally, I think solutions are not complete
Speaker 1: unless we deal with our minds and our internal process,
Speaker 1: and if we can move those towards more generosity, more flow,
Speaker 1: more openness. That's what it says to me. I have
Speaker 1: an original If you would tolerate a little verse from
Speaker 1: original Buddhism, sure of course. Okay. This is the opening
Speaker 1: verse of the Dama Pata, which is one of the
Speaker 1: very popular, early believed to be utterances of the Buddha.
Speaker 1: Maybe three something stands as a verse, A very practical
Speaker 1: down to earth and poetic advice stands a number one
Speaker 1: I think says the same thing as a parable mind
Speaker 1: precedes all phenomena. Mind is their chief. They are all
Speaker 1: mind wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks
Speaker 1: or acts, suffering follows them like the wheel that follows
Speaker 1: the foot of the ox. Mind proceeds all phenomena. Mind
Speaker 1: is their chief. They are all mind wrought. If with
Speaker 1: a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows
Speaker 1: them like they're never departing shadow. I've always loved that verse,
Speaker 1: and I've always loved that metaphor. Is it a metaphor?
Speaker 1: You know? The wheel follows the foot of the ox.
Speaker 1: I just have such a great visual to that same
Speaker 1: with your never departing shadow, and I can see why
Speaker 1: you love it because it is very much like the
Speaker 1: parable to me, very much, very much. So yep, okay,
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what is the Abadharma, which I'm
Speaker 1: certain to mispronounce at least four or five times in
Speaker 1: this conversation, so you're welcome to say not quite, but enough.
Speaker 1: Let's start with what it is, because I think there's
Speaker 1: probably a lot of people who have studied Buddhism to
Speaker 1: a fair degree who have never heard of it. That's right,
Speaker 1: And it is an essential part of the original Buddhist cannon,
Speaker 1: so it's very interesting. The original Buddhist cannon is called
Speaker 1: the Tippitaka three Baskets, and it's believed that even though
Speaker 1: it wasn't written down for a few hundred years um,
Speaker 1: that this is pretty close to what the Buddha actually taught.
Speaker 1: So one piece of this Tippitaka is called the Venaya,
Speaker 1: and that's the monastic code that describes the processes and
Speaker 1: rules for the monks and nuns. The second is the
Speaker 1: early Sutras, which many people are familiar within the Dama
Speaker 1: Poto would be in there. The early Sutras are the
Speaker 1: parables and stories and narrative and discourses of the Buddha.
Speaker 1: The third part of the early cannon is the Abi Dharma,
Speaker 1: and this is a structural layout of the Buddhist vision
Speaker 1: of the universe, the multiple worlds, how consciousness interacts with
Speaker 1: all of it. It's in the form of lists and
Speaker 1: matrix is. It is a lot of cross referencing. It's
Speaker 1: ridiculously complicated. There are seven books of the terravann Abi Dharma,
Speaker 1: and then there are some spinoffs of other schools. But
Speaker 1: if you think of the sutras as conveying to us
Speaker 1: the Buddha's original teachings, I think of the Abu Dharma
Speaker 1: as conveying to us the Buddha's original vision. And it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a right hemisphere left hemisphere thing a
Speaker 1: little bit. The sutures are very verbal and narrative, but
Speaker 1: many of the sutras when you read them, are lists,
Speaker 1: and they get repetitive and didactic and teaching. But if
Speaker 1: you want to just look at the raw information, the
Speaker 1: pure lists, the way it all lays out the way
Speaker 1: it all fits together. It's laid out in this kind
Speaker 1: of very structural way in the Abi Dharma. That's what
Speaker 1: it is. Yeah, I've often thought of it as sort
Speaker 1: of like the list of all the lists, which I
Speaker 1: know is a is an oversimplification, but you know, you
Speaker 1: don't spend much time around Buddhism before you're like, well,
Speaker 1: we've got the eight Full Path, we've got the four
Speaker 1: Noble Truths, we've got the seven Factors of Awakening, we've
Speaker 1: got the four Foundations of my I mean, it is
Speaker 1: list after list and then to me, the Abi Dharma
Speaker 1: has always seemed like a collection and cross referencing, like
Speaker 1: you said, of all those lists, and extraordinarily complex. And
Speaker 1: this is not a show about deep Buddhist scholarship, which
Speaker 1: I'm sure you could more than hold your own in. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is a show about how people, you know, feed
Speaker 1: the good wolf in their own life. So I want
Speaker 1: to make sure we stay there. But what sort of
Speaker 1: key ideas from the Abi Dharma do you think we
Speaker 1: could pull out that help us in our day to
Speaker 1: day life. And I've got a couple of my own
Speaker 1: that I made directest towards, but I'd love to hear
Speaker 1: kind of where you would start, because the other thing is,
Speaker 1: in addition to being an author, you have done a
Speaker 1: lot of work with clients, right, or a psychotherapist. Yes,
Speaker 1: And it all has a meaning to me, you know,
Speaker 1: as the Noble truths evolved in terms of how much
Speaker 1: suffering I see increasing around me and within me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's not just an exercise in the technicalities and
Speaker 1: the obsessions. What I think it tells us is that
Speaker 1: there are these extraordinarily complex but unchanging laws of how
Speaker 1: things come together and move in the universe, how our
Speaker 1: consciousness interacts with what we experience, with what we encounter.
Speaker 1: And the more we understand these laws, and the more
Speaker 1: we understand that they're so outrageously complex that we're not
Speaker 1: going to understand all of them, the more fluidly I
Speaker 1: think we can move with them and not fighting against them. Basically,
Speaker 1: the Abi dharma is completely about meetings. Everything is in motion.
Speaker 1: There's no stuff in there. It's all just about how things,
Speaker 1: how forces, how events move together. And um, I think
Speaker 1: that kind of understanding really helps us move with more
Speaker 1: generosity and fluidity. There's a section you right, which speaks
Speaker 1: I think to very much what you're saying. You're talking
Speaker 1: about something known as the condas. I'm used to hearing
Speaker 1: it as the scandas, but you say they are a
Speaker 1: roiling caldron of activity and momentum. As aspects of the
Speaker 1: different condas arise and fall away, combine and recombine, permutate,
Speaker 1: and develop, And I think that speaks to what you
Speaker 1: were just saying. Absolutely, I'm used to saying scandas to
Speaker 1: we're kind of flipping between sanscrit and Polly. But the
Speaker 1: scandas are materials that we use to construct reality, and
Speaker 1: there are so many realities, and these materials are based
Speaker 1: on the fact that we're human bodies and we have
Speaker 1: human senses and they're set up a certain way, and
Speaker 1: because of that, we kind of combine these experiences into frameworks.
Speaker 1: But they are in constant motion, and what we choose
Speaker 1: to draw upon is constantly changing the selectivity and the
Speaker 1: ways that we put things together. So it is really
Speaker 1: an amazing thing that you can study all these very
Speaker 1: detailed lists and feel like it's making you more fluid.
Speaker 1: But another way I think of it is that this
Speaker 1: is kind of aerating your mind or your consciousness. It's
Speaker 1: not that you need to memorize all this information. But
Speaker 1: by getting down there on that level where it's so
Speaker 1: detailed and atomic, you kind of aerate how you think
Speaker 1: about things and how you feel. I've always heard of
Speaker 1: the five scandas they're also called the five aggregates, as
Speaker 1: being the things that put together, that combine together to
Speaker 1: create me and this sense of me. Mm hmmm, I
Speaker 1: think that's really good, and how you experience moment to moment.
Speaker 1: It's the framework you're using to experience and filter what's
Speaker 1: happening moment to moment. And so in Buddhism, when we
Speaker 1: talk about no self or non self, we're not saying
Speaker 1: that there's nothing here. What we're saying is that what
Speaker 1: is here is actually a collection of these five things
Speaker 1: combining and countless permutations, roiling and broiling and rotiss ing
Speaker 1: and whatever cooking verbs that all comes together, and that
Speaker 1: is what makes up what I think of is this
Speaker 1: entity of me. Yes, I think that's a beautiful description.
Speaker 1: And this entity of you I think does exist. We're
Speaker 1: all bodies in a particular lifetime that exists. That's real,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of encouraging the flexibility to think of it.
Speaker 1: The way, you just describe the flexibility to keep it moving,
Speaker 1: to not lock it up, and to realize that the
Speaker 1: framework that we're making moments a moment is fairly arbitrary.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's useful, maybe it's a little less useful, but
Speaker 1: just to remember there are infinite other ways it could
Speaker 1: be at any of a moment. And so let's maybe
Speaker 1: talk about what these five are, just to go through
Speaker 1: them quickly and maybe give a sense of them. Again,
Speaker 1: you could study these five things for the rest of
Speaker 1: your life if you wanted to write. So obviously we're
Speaker 1: going to give it the three minute version, but let's
Speaker 1: walk through what the five are, because I do think
Speaker 1: it does frame up a basic idea of what this
Speaker 1: construction of me looks like. You'll read different translations of
Speaker 1: these depending on what era and what school of Buddhism
Speaker 1: you're working with, But this is what I work with. Form, feelings, perceptions, habit, formations,
Speaker 1: and consciousness is I pluralize it. That's something that comes
Speaker 1: from my original teacher, because it helps you remember that
Speaker 1: there's no one thing that's a hunk of consciousness that
Speaker 1: we're in. So starting with form, that's the bodily material
Speaker 1: realities they are there. Um, we're not all mind making
Speaker 1: up a universe. So it's the actual truth of physical
Speaker 1: reality and how we experience that in sensation continuously, and
Speaker 1: how we ignore so many aspects of it continuously. Feelings
Speaker 1: in this list is not emotion, but it's a kind
Speaker 1: of binary approach avoid plus or minus response to things
Speaker 1: that we create as we move through our life. On
Speaker 1: a very small scale, every moment of consciousness has an
Speaker 1: attached feeling, but the feeling it's just like it's just
Speaker 1: yes or no. It's just bimodal. In this arena. It
Speaker 1: could be bodily or mental, but it's bimodal. And there's
Speaker 1: also a category for neither. But that's just like the
Speaker 1: typical abidermic complication. You can never say something without the exception. Okay.
Speaker 1: Then moving on to perceptions, the sensory perceptions the five
Speaker 1: senses that we're used to in Abidarma, there are six senses.
Speaker 1: The mind is considered as sense, but this perception is
Speaker 1: about how we put together experiences of our five senses
Speaker 1: habit formation. So you can kind of see this is
Speaker 1: ascending in complexity as we go. The habit formations are
Speaker 1: sometimes called mental formations. Or karmic formations. Another term for
Speaker 1: that in modern psychologies cognitive schema. It's just mind wise,
Speaker 1: the way we filter what's happening in these terms of ourselves.
Speaker 1: And then the last category is consciousness. Is the word
Speaker 1: is cheetah, and cheetah is the essential unit of a
Speaker 1: consciousness experience. In the Abi dharma, that word you could
Speaker 1: spend your whole life on two yes, because you're at
Speaker 1: about it. So cheetah is a moment of mind, object
Speaker 1: and field meeting. And it's no more than that. It's
Speaker 1: a bear coming together of these three elements. So let's
Speaker 1: take an experience that we have and see if we
Speaker 1: can deconstruct it. This may be a fool's errand, but
Speaker 1: I'm going to give it a shot, and you guide
Speaker 1: us through it with you. I stub my toe right,
Speaker 1: so all of a sudden, there is a physical reality
Speaker 1: the form rupa that we talked about. There's a physical reality.
Speaker 1: My toe hit something else. There is a basic use
Speaker 1: the word feelings pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. So there's an
Speaker 1: immediate no, don't like it, you know, unpleasant. Then there
Speaker 1: is the sensory element, which scanda would we call that perception.
Speaker 1: I call that perception yep, so there would be a
Speaker 1: perception of pain also, um, I might include like that
Speaker 1: kind of frozen visual thing that you say, like when
Speaker 1: something happens, it's kind of shocking, how you suddenly like
Speaker 1: see things real intensely. I would include that, or you know,
Speaker 1: if you're more of an auditory person like, I would
Speaker 1: include the other senses in your perception one there. In
Speaker 1: this case, though, the primary one would be the kinesthetic
Speaker 1: pain sense, because that's kind of what's radiating dominant. Then
Speaker 1: from there I would start to say something like, who
Speaker 1: is the idiot who left this block sitting here in
Speaker 1: front of me? So now I've moved into mental formation
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. That all makes sense to me. It's the
Speaker 1: last one, the consciousness or action of consciousness or cheetah,
Speaker 1: that I don't really understand. And again I may not
Speaker 1: get it in this conversation, but in that example I'm
Speaker 1: giving where does that fit? Yet I'm right with you,
Speaker 1: And the difficult thing here is that the cheetah is
Speaker 1: a too small unit for the event that you're talking about.
Speaker 1: So maybe it would help to say the flow of cheetah,
Speaker 1: So your consciousness, maybe before you stubbed your toe was
Speaker 1: flowing in a really positive, fluid way. You stubb your
Speaker 1: toe and suddenly there's like this, Jack, I get movement
Speaker 1: in the flow of your consciousness. I think a good
Speaker 1: analogy for this is like electrons in a wire, which
Speaker 1: I don't really know anything about, but you know, if
Speaker 1: you think of the cheetah like the electrons, you know
Speaker 1: it's a flow of things and short circuited. Maybe, So
Speaker 1: that's how I would think of it. Cheated, the very
Speaker 1: raw consciousness experience got diverted or spiked up or something.
Speaker 1: This idea that reality is constructed of these forms, this
Speaker 1: basic one of feeling of like, don't like neutral? Is
Speaker 1: that conditioned or is some of that in built? And
Speaker 1: what I mean by that is there a situation in
Speaker 1: which with different conditioning, different DNA different if you want
Speaker 1: to believe in karma from previous existences, that stubbing my
Speaker 1: toe might be pleasant or is that happening at such
Speaker 1: a fast, such a base perceptual level that it has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with any sort of conscious or even
Speaker 1: unconscious conditioning. I'm going to go with the latter part.
Speaker 1: That you know, in in the Abiderarma they say like,
Speaker 1: if you want to look at objects of consciousness as
Speaker 1: positive or negative. It's just sort of there in the object. Now,
Speaker 1: this is a kind of debatable point, but what happens
Speaker 1: is that we are so reactive and so quickly constructive.
Speaker 1: It's like fire and kindling the way we start thinking
Speaker 1: about things. This is where you're conditioning is coming in,
Speaker 1: I think in the kindling comes in as you move
Speaker 1: into the mental formation. Yeah. Yes, I've asked a couple
Speaker 1: of neuroscientists about this, because there's something in the way
Speaker 1: in neuroscience called teroception, and inter reception is the body's
Speaker 1: very basic sense. It's believed that it is very much.
Speaker 1: I like it, I don't like it, I have no
Speaker 1: feeling about it. All creatures have it. All creatures have
Speaker 1: inter reception to some degree. And so when I've heard
Speaker 1: feeling in the Buddhist sense of it, you know, it's
Speaker 1: often seen to me that that's what Buddhism was describing
Speaker 1: what a modern neuroscientist would call interoception. I think. So,
Speaker 1: I think that sounds very useful and accurate to me.
Speaker 1: There's another point of neuropsychould like to bring in with
Speaker 1: those seventeen steps of perception. So if I could just
Speaker 1: briefly say that in the Abi Dharma they lay out
Speaker 1: seventeen moments of consciousness that are a full perception, and
Speaker 1: they're very neuropsychologically accurate, and there's a point in the
Speaker 1: middle there where if you compare it to neuropsychological view,
Speaker 1: where the limbic system is mixing in and the prefrontal
Speaker 1: cortex is mixing in, which is to say, and the
Speaker 1: hippocampus memory, association, emotion, planning, motivation, there's a point in
Speaker 1: the seventeen steps where all that mixes in. This is
Speaker 1: where we're getting our conditioning. Every one of those steps
Speaker 1: has feeling with it. But in the middle where that
Speaker 1: happens is where we start having emotion, conditioning and reactivity.
Speaker 1: As I was reading in that book, it almost sounds
Speaker 1: like that's also the hinge on which our ability to
Speaker 1: change any of that starts. By change, I don't mean like, oh,
Speaker 1: well I just changed my mind and fifty years of
Speaker 1: conditioning goes out the window. I don't mean that, but
Speaker 1: I mean the possibility exists for it to be different.
Speaker 1: That's right. Every moment is an opening for that. We're
Speaker 1: talking about a very small scale of time, so it's
Speaker 1: not like we can sit there every second and do
Speaker 1: three switches, which is basically how it would go. But
Speaker 1: this is another one. We're carrying the concept helps even
Speaker 1: though we might not work on that scale. So carrying
Speaker 1: the concept that first you're taking in things, and then
Speaker 1: there's a moment where you bring in all of your
Speaker 1: material and your past essentially, and your associations and all
Speaker 1: of these ingrained things. And if you're just aware of that,
Speaker 1: you watch for it a little bit more and you
Speaker 1: get it quicker and quicker, and the quicker you get it,
Speaker 1: the more little moments you have that you can change.
Speaker 1: There's a great quote from reb Anderson. I'm going to paraphrase,
Speaker 1: but he says something like everybody who's studying mindfulness is
Speaker 1: looking to extend presence for longer and longer. Bodhisata's in
Speaker 1: dead work on bringing mindfulness to smaller and smaller moments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was telling you before we got started. We just
Speaker 1: closed enrollment for a program called Spiritual Habits and one
Speaker 1: of the things in that program, and the idea is
Speaker 1: little by little, a little becomes a lot, and it
Speaker 1: just means that we need to keep noticing these little moments.
Speaker 1: Now I know what he's saying, is your your perception
Speaker 1: is getting finer and finer. But again, it's not that
Speaker 1: we need to be present for fifteen straight minutes for
Speaker 1: us to get value out of mindfulness. That's right. I
Speaker 1: think it's the same point. The smaller the moment is
Speaker 1: that you can reclaim, the more you're going to be
Speaker 1: doing it. It astounds me how looking at this original
Speaker 1: Buddhist psychology, this Abi dharma, how some of the stuff
Speaker 1: that they were able to figure out by sitting in
Speaker 1: meditation we are now monitoring and seeing in modern neuroscience.
Speaker 1: It is staggering to me. That was kind of this
Speaker 1: huge moment when I saw the seventeen ups of perception,
Speaker 1: you know, a timeline, and then I thought, well, let
Speaker 1: me get out some biological something book and I opened
Speaker 1: it and there was a picture of a brain opened up.
Speaker 1: It was called something like from Stimulus to Response. And
Speaker 1: I looked at him and I'm like, these are the
Speaker 1: same thing. In detail, they are the same thing. And
Speaker 1: I ran around talking about this to everybody. I was
Speaker 1: so excited. But I do think it says something about
Speaker 1: the acuity of those minds, and and they also functioned
Speaker 1: on very big scales too. This is the small scale,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's just a different language. Is pretty
Speaker 1: random too, that that's the language that I kind of
Speaker 1: grew up in my professional training. But but the fact
Speaker 1: that these people could sit and perceive steps of awareness
Speaker 1: that are you know, about a sixty of a second
Speaker 1: with such finesse, it does blow me away, and it
Speaker 1: makes me just love the Abu Dharma a lot, and
Speaker 1: it makes me have a certain kind of faith in
Speaker 1: the aspects of it that I can't directly verify in
Speaker 1: my empirical experience. Yeah, what I'm hearing from Buddhism comes
Speaker 1: back and is verified by science. I love having two
Speaker 1: verifications like it just gives me more confidence in it. Yes,
Speaker 1: it does. You know, I think that probably throughout history
Speaker 1: people have had some way to verify. But the main
Speaker 1: way I think we verifies that, you know, we continue
Speaker 1: feeling better and watching other people blossoming around us. That's
Speaker 1: the real verification, right and in our own lives is
Speaker 1: that happening. I want to move on to another line
Speaker 1: from the book that I thought was really interesting. I'm
Speaker 1: going to read it to you and then ask you
Speaker 1: to say more about it. You said, I am convinced
Speaker 1: that plain emotion directly expressed rarely causes much harm, while
Speaker 1: second guessing, sugarcoating and avoidance of feelings can be disastrous.
Speaker 1: A feeling wasn't a state people were in, but a
Speaker 1: mental factor modulating contact with reality. But the dynamic abbidharma
Speaker 1: view opens potential for intervening with emotion. Those sentences weren't
Speaker 1: right after each other. I pulled a couple that were
Speaker 1: very close together. But this idea of plain emotion can
Speaker 1: be directly expressed, And you know, how does the abi
Speaker 1: dharma open potential for us intervening with emotion in a
Speaker 1: skillful way. It's really a mindfulness type of point here.
Speaker 1: But even emotion can be observed dispassionately. And the first
Speaker 1: statement comes from my work as a therapist. You know,
Speaker 1: for many, many years, it is always this avoidance and
Speaker 1: this you know, tripping over it, and this walking backwards
Speaker 1: into what you fear that causes the problems when people
Speaker 1: are clear with other people. It's just empirical to me.
Speaker 1: I just see it over and over when people are
Speaker 1: clear and just say calmly how they feel. Sometimes maybe
Speaker 1: not even entirely calmly, but when it's clear, people do Okay,
Speaker 1: they know what they're working with, and so it's kind
Speaker 1: of the same point. When you have the capacity to
Speaker 1: understand the process, you have a bit of remove from it,
Speaker 1: and you're not so in the cloud of it, but
Speaker 1: you're looking at it and dealing with it, whether it's
Speaker 1: your own self or interpersonally. So I really do feel
Speaker 1: that strongly that one of the best descriptors for what
Speaker 1: we want to be is plain plane. Yeah, say more
Speaker 1: about that. I guess another thing they say about the
Speaker 1: Scandas is it's the upadana scandas. That's a problem, the
Speaker 1: clinging to the Scandas. So maybe when I'm saying plane,
Speaker 1: I'm meaning a little more like not clinging to things,
Speaker 1: not clinging to what we make up, not proliferating, not complicating,
Speaker 1: not adorning our experience when experience is just taken in openly,
Speaker 1: and you know, I know a lot of Buddhist writers
Speaker 1: have written about this much more beautifu fully and I
Speaker 1: can say it, but when we just take things in plainly,
Speaker 1: it's gorgeous and it's beautiful, and the plane truth of
Speaker 1: it has a kind of exquisiteness that all the adornment
Speaker 1: doesn't do. Thank you for that. There's another term that's
Speaker 1: used a lot in Buddhism and in the Abi Dharma
Speaker 1: that I thought we could talk about for a minute,
Speaker 1: and it's interdependent origination. What does that mean, Well, you've
Speaker 1: hit on the two big things, the non self idea
Speaker 1: and this that are core core Buddhism, but also core
Speaker 1: Abi Dharma. Interdependent origination gets back to the idea that
Speaker 1: nothing happens other than things meeting. There really aren't things
Speaker 1: separate from meetings of forces. So it's just that everything
Speaker 1: is in motion and everything is incredibly complexly and multiply determined.
Speaker 1: The seventh book of the Abi Dharma, the terravan and Abidama,
Speaker 1: is called the Patana. That book is a list of
Speaker 1: twenty four ways that different phenomena interact, and then it
Speaker 1: filters all the phenomena of the rest of the Abidama through.
Speaker 1: But apparently when the Buddha thought of this whole thing,
Speaker 1: as the story goes, he started emanating six color lights
Speaker 1: from every pore of his body, just to give an
Speaker 1: idea of how complicated it is. But interdependent origination is
Speaker 1: just saying that all we can really look at are
Speaker 1: the ways that things interact and that's all that's happening.
Speaker 1: Consciousness is an interaction. Yeah, everything is an interaction. I
Speaker 1: think would another way of saying it be that this
Speaker 1: might be an oversimplification, but I think often about you know,
Speaker 1: sort of the infinite causes and conditions. You know, we
Speaker 1: tend to say like this happened, because that happened, and yes,
Speaker 1: there are some things that we could sort of loosely
Speaker 1: say Okay, but I mean you start following that train
Speaker 1: of thought back, it is literally infinite, Yes it is, Yes,
Speaker 1: it is. You just described one of the twenty four modes,
Speaker 1: which is a predominant condition. Sometimes there's a condition that's
Speaker 1: really big, but it's never the whole thing. You start
Speaker 1: like a child asking why, but then why that? But
Speaker 1: then why that? You know how kids do that? And
Speaker 1: you keep going. You end up in independent origination, which
Speaker 1: is another way of saying you end up in emptiness.
Speaker 1: That's what I think the term emptiness is meant used
Speaker 1: in Buddhism. There's so much if you keep expanding your
Speaker 1: view and the Abu Dharama does not have any real
Speaker 1: limits on the view point. Emptiness is a subject I
Speaker 1: love to think about and talk about. Like you I
Speaker 1: am a practicing zen person. I'm sort of in that
Speaker 1: school that's Soto and rinse I from the White Plum lineage.
Speaker 1: But the best definition of emptiness I've ever heard, the
Speaker 1: one that I really like, it's everything all at once
Speaker 1: that is great. And it also comes back to that
Speaker 1: quote to everything at all one in this teeny teeny
Speaker 1: teeny view. Later on in your book about the Abadarma,
Speaker 1: you talk about a couple of lists of lists. There's
Speaker 1: a wholesome list and an unwholesome list. Basically, the wholesome
Speaker 1: list is called the thirty seven Aids to Enlightenment, and
Speaker 1: you say that this is seven different lists from the
Speaker 1: Abi Dharma that are all sort of put together into
Speaker 1: one big list. But you kind of go through all
Speaker 1: those lists and you pull out a lot of things
Speaker 1: are mentioned multiple times, and you sort of sum those
Speaker 1: down a little bit or try and find some of
Speaker 1: the most common pieces. So, in the list of the
Speaker 1: thirty seven Aids to Enlightenment, what are some of the
Speaker 1: most common factors that show up? Actually, energy is the
Speaker 1: most commonly referenced one, which is interesting because you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of talk about energy and the idea
Speaker 1: of not a balanced energy, not over using, not under using.
Speaker 1: But energy shows up a lot, and I think actually
Speaker 1: mindfulness as a word shows up a lot too, And
Speaker 1: you're going to stump me. There's a third one. I
Speaker 1: actually just looked at a chart about that this weekend,
Speaker 1: and I can't remember the third one. But mindfulness is
Speaker 1: kind of a balancing within a lot of the other lists.
Speaker 1: I'll just throw an investigation, which is not so frequently
Speaker 1: referred to, but I like it, so I'll throw it
Speaker 1: in there. And by energy, you don't mean some strange,
Speaker 1: mysterious force that may or may not exist in different
Speaker 1: in different ways that people interpret it. You mean energy,
Speaker 1: as in energy to do things, to pursue things, is
Speaker 1: to engage, to be alive. To commits not the right word.
Speaker 1: The word that's coming to mind is from you know
Speaker 1: Zen great determination. Yes, yes, all of that. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a kind of a practice energy. I do think commitment
Speaker 1: actually is in there. There's a great suiture about Buddha
Speaker 1: saying that Dave's ask him how did he cross the flood?
Speaker 1: He said, I pushed forward. I would have whirled about.
Speaker 1: If I stayed still, I would have drowned. I didn't
Speaker 1: push forward. I didn't stay still. That's his cryptic answer.
Speaker 1: But that's energy. There's a co on for you. Summing
Speaker 1: up that seven lists. You see the result of this
Speaker 1: factor analysis determines the balancing act between the stimulating effect
Speaker 1: and the calming effective self improvement at the heart of
Speaker 1: positive change, momentum and focus have to be partners. I
Speaker 1: love that. I think it's a very important point that
Speaker 1: is made in how the lists are arranged. You know,
Speaker 1: we're all different, and in the Abidama there even some
Speaker 1: meditation techniques that are arranged by temperament, so we all
Speaker 1: have to adjust our own like soundboard, you know, as
Speaker 1: we move, but essentially like keeping it moving, keeping it lively,
Speaker 1: but also keeping that kind of calmness and training in
Speaker 1: the capacity to be mindful and step away from the
Speaker 1: experience internally. That's a balance. I'd love to see that.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a very useful tool. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: the way it's presented is not useful, but is to
Speaker 1: be able to say, hey, based on these type of temperaments,
Speaker 1: here's type of meditation that works for you. I've always
Speaker 1: been so drawn to the idea in Hinduism of the
Speaker 1: different types of yoga, you know, that people have different
Speaker 1: ways of making their way to God. You know. Some
Speaker 1: people do it via service to the world, some people
Speaker 1: do it via their intellect, some people do it through
Speaker 1: love and devotion, and you know, it says, okay, people
Speaker 1: are different. It seems to me that with Buddhism, very
Speaker 1: much in the Western presentation of it has been largely
Speaker 1: sit down and follow your breath. It's diversified a little
Speaker 1: bit now in the last few years, we're getting a
Speaker 1: little bit more embodiment practices, some different things. And I
Speaker 1: feel like I spent fifteen years trying to do breath
Speaker 1: meditation and not being very good at it, you know,
Speaker 1: and it really struggling with it, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: at one point somebody was like, why don't you listen
Speaker 1: to sounds, And all of a sudden, I was like,
Speaker 1: I can concentrate, my goodness. I would be really interested
Speaker 1: in that part of the Abi Dharma, which says, hey,
Speaker 1: what are the different types of meditation for the different temperaments?
Speaker 1: I have a chart on this. I'd love to see that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It uses the forty meditation subjects that are in the
Speaker 1: Sati Pitana Sutra, and it breaks them into six temperaments
Speaker 1: and recommends it for ones. But I do think, you know,
Speaker 1: both are useful those long periods where you struggle with
Speaker 1: something that doesn't fit, and then that click period where
Speaker 1: you're like, I could just adjust this and it's easier
Speaker 1: for me. But you're so right, And it's like the
Speaker 1: a fault path too. There are just different ways to enter,
Speaker 1: you know. I guess there are as many paths as
Speaker 1: there are Buddhists. So we talked about the main factors
Speaker 1: for good, the main factors for wholesomeness. You title the
Speaker 1: chapter the Way Things Go Wrong. I don't know if
Speaker 1: the list has a name, but you say, basically, there's
Speaker 1: an equally complex system that lays out the unwholesome qualities.
Speaker 1: And you did the same thing. You kind of went
Speaker 1: through and tried to service area. Let me boil this down.
Speaker 1: Where do we end up there? I think where we
Speaker 1: end up there is the idea of the obstruction that
Speaker 1: basically we have what we need and we are removing obstructions,
Speaker 1: and that approach is gentler and easier to kind of
Speaker 1: really sink into and use in a practical way. You know,
Speaker 1: I think the basic hindrances are good. I think the
Speaker 1: other thing that I would emphasize about the list of
Speaker 1: unwholesome obstructions. You know, there are hindrances, defilements, fetters, funds. Yea,
Speaker 1: it's just like all these different ways that that it's
Speaker 1: it's described, but it's again there is this kind of
Speaker 1: balance that's very personal about what kinds of things get
Speaker 1: in your way. And everything operates on many levels, and
Speaker 1: that's important too. So in one list something will be
Speaker 1: described one way, and another list that same word will
Speaker 1: be described differently. And I know I give examples of
Speaker 1: this in the book, but you know there's like you know,
Speaker 1: a slight distraction and there's an intense rumination. Those are
Speaker 1: the same process, but they're on different scales. So part
Speaker 1: of what happens why these lists get so complicated, they're
Speaker 1: talking about the different scales of obstruction that can happen.
Speaker 1: You sort of boil all those down to some degree
Speaker 1: to the things that show up in the four body
Speaker 1: soft vows that I say every morning after I meditate, right, Greed,
Speaker 1: hatred and delusion or craving, you know, aversion and ignorance.
Speaker 1: I mean there you wanting not wanting. I always sort
Speaker 1: of rephrase them like wanting, not wanting, and being confused
Speaker 1: about all of that. That's a nice summary of the
Speaker 1: hub of the wheel of life. Yes, yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I want that, I want that, I want that, I
Speaker 1: don't want that. I don't want that, I don't want that.
Speaker 1: And the realization or the confusion around the fact that, like, well,
Speaker 1: that's why you're not that's why you're struggling. It's really nice.
Speaker 1: I love in the body stuff of us. Again, there's
Speaker 1: lots of different translations, but one of them I like
Speaker 1: is agreed, hatred, and delusion rise endlessly. I vowed abandoned them,
Speaker 1: and I like that rise endlessly, not from a pessimistic perspective,
Speaker 1: but from a perspective of like, well, of course you're
Speaker 1: still having them. That's what happens. They keep coming and
Speaker 1: you work with them as skillfully as you can. There's
Speaker 1: not a time, you know, at least that seems in
Speaker 1: my imminent future where those are disappearing. No, not at
Speaker 1: all mine either. But I think that, you know, that
Speaker 1: kind of brings me to the good fortune of the
Speaker 1: human birth is that we won't solve these things. Were
Speaker 1: on the edge of a mystery, we sort of sort
Speaker 1: of sense it but we don't really get it. We
Speaker 1: keep trying to say it, but we can't really And
Speaker 1: these things are part of our human existence that they
Speaker 1: do just continuously arise, and you know, our our mission
Speaker 1: is to curate this flow of consciousness throughout this existence.
Speaker 1: Another plain thing I think of sometimes is like the
Speaker 1: purpose of life is to clean consciousness. You know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of boring, but I think it's sort of true
Speaker 1: that that has to do with obstructions again also as
Speaker 1: removing obstructions. But it'll just keep going. And and that
Speaker 1: is our good fortune that we do have enough awareness
Speaker 1: and enough of the suffering to keep developing if we
Speaker 1: find a way to develop it. Yep, you said something
Speaker 1: there a moment ago about the mystery. We keep trying
Speaker 1: to sort of say things but we can't. Which is
Speaker 1: a great transition into the next area I wanted to
Speaker 1: go to, which is another book of yours that I
Speaker 1: unfortunately left sitting in the other room. But it's a
Speaker 1: book about writing and meditation. And you know, you sort
Speaker 1: of start the book off by saying, in your tradition, Zen,
Speaker 1: which is also mine, we sort of pooh pooh words
Speaker 1: like you know, you know, burn your words. You can't
Speaker 1: say it every you know, every word is false. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a real like, hey, get rid of words.
Speaker 1: But you say that writing is a really powerful tool
Speaker 1: for us on the journey to awakening, along with meditation.
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit about why those two
Speaker 1: go so well together and why you wanted to create
Speaker 1: a book that really explicitly marries them. Again, this is
Speaker 1: something that's a little bit temperament bound, because I don't
Speaker 1: I don't think this is for everyone, but it's probably
Speaker 1: for more people than people might think. I think that
Speaker 1: even though we will always fail in the task to
Speaker 1: express the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we
Speaker 1: work with it, every time we play with it, we
Speaker 1: bring out something new for ourselves. We articulate something that
Speaker 1: was half formed in our mind or our bodies, and
Speaker 1: then that is a useful process. Writing takes that process
Speaker 1: a little bit further. Because I've experimented with us how
Speaker 1: much I might sit and carefully think something through, something
Speaker 1: new will come out every single time I sit and
Speaker 1: write about it. It's different. It's a little bit of
Speaker 1: a bodily remove And also you're making an object. You're
Speaker 1: making a literal object, even if it's you know, a
Speaker 1: file on a screen, you are still making something. And
Speaker 1: by seeing your internal process turn into an object, you remember, oh,
Speaker 1: my internal process is just a bunch of objects. And
Speaker 1: by bringing it out and articulating it, you carry it further,
Speaker 1: and you carry awareness further. Your pen carries your awareness.
Speaker 1: You don't even have to worry about it. I write pen,
Speaker 1: but same with a keyboard. Yeah, it makes me think
Speaker 1: back to an earlier sentence of years I read there
Speaker 1: are a royal in Culdron of activity and momentum. And
Speaker 1: writing is one way, at least for me, of slowing
Speaker 1: that process down. I mean not literally slowing it down,
Speaker 1: but does but slowing down what's going on in my mind.
Speaker 1: It's you know, thoughts and emotions are so slippery, you know,
Speaker 1: they feel so real and yet they're so slippery. And
Speaker 1: writing is a way I can deconstruct, you know, what
Speaker 1: are the elements that are going on here? What are
Speaker 1: the things? And you quote a bunch of studies that
Speaker 1: are that are pretty clear. We've talked about some of
Speaker 1: them with different people in the show. That expressive writing
Speaker 1: can be a really good tool in our growth and healing.
Speaker 1: Absolutely um And you know, they're all these very objective
Speaker 1: measures as well as subjective that you know, even at
Speaker 1: very small amounts, surprisingly small amounts of expressive writing have
Speaker 1: some healing power. So I absolutely believe it. I've worked
Speaker 1: with kids, teenagers, grandparents, Expressive Writing group that I work
Speaker 1: with people that you just wouldn't even think might get
Speaker 1: anything out of it do, But I think you're right.
Speaker 1: Literally it does slow down thought processes. They move at
Speaker 1: different rates, and like those monks that could break down,
Speaker 1: you know, the split second into all these steps. Writing
Speaker 1: kind of does that is kind of deconstructing, mulching through
Speaker 1: things that that you're talking about. It's very powerful. Um.
Speaker 1: Neona Panica Terror writes a lot about like what a
Speaker 1: mess the average mind is. He describes it as like
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly. It's kind of poetic, like you know,
Speaker 1: cobwebs and and half baked thoughts and emotions flying around
Speaker 1: and this and that, and he just says, one thing
Speaker 1: we need to do is clean it up again. So
Speaker 1: writing forces it to this level of articulation that will
Speaker 1: always surprises you. That's my favorite thing about writing is
Speaker 1: you can surprise yourself with what you write. Um, but
Speaker 1: it always kind of moves it out of your body.
Speaker 1: There's also that element of it being a physical act,
Speaker 1: and moving emotion out of your body is is critical
Speaker 1: for people. I don't think people do that enough to
Speaker 1: kind of help the process move through you. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have a line I love slightly different than emotion. But
Speaker 1: you say meditation and writing rely on structure and repetition
Speaker 1: while they court surprise and revelation. I think it's a
Speaker 1: beautifully written line and so true. You know, structure and repetition,
Speaker 1: but what we're after, right is surprise and revelation. It's
Speaker 1: it's a really nice way of thinking about it. So
Speaker 1: we're near the end of our time here. You and
Speaker 1: I are going to continue to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: in the post show conversation about um a couple of
Speaker 1: the exercises from the book, because there's some really great
Speaker 1: exercises that are very different than anything I have ever
Speaker 1: seen before. A lot of journal writing prompts, I've just
Speaker 1: seen a lot of them at this point in my life,
Speaker 1: but your book, I was like, I've never seen anything
Speaker 1: quite like it about you know, a contemplative way. It's
Speaker 1: almost as if writing and meditation combined together to make
Speaker 1: something better and stronger. So we'll do a couple of
Speaker 1: those exercises in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd
Speaker 1: like access to the post show conversation as well as
Speaker 1: a special episode I do called Teaching Song and a
Speaker 1: poem and the Joys of being a member of the
Speaker 1: one you Feed, you can go to when you feed
Speaker 1: dot net slash join. Is there any last things about
Speaker 1: the Abi Dharma that you feel like we haven't covered
Speaker 1: that are really important? The thing that I would say
Speaker 1: is there's a ton of information and it's never going
Speaker 1: to be a super popular study in this in this
Speaker 1: current world. But if you can do anything where you
Speaker 1: just kind of dip into the complexity, the multiplicity and
Speaker 1: the interactivity of how we are experiencing. Whenever you do that,
Speaker 1: I think you open yourself and I think you dim
Speaker 1: the intensity of how hard you're holding onto yourself, and
Speaker 1: you'll feel it. There's this kind of weird, refreshing quality
Speaker 1: in it. I think that makes people more generous. It's
Speaker 1: a beautiful way to end. And your book is called
Speaker 1: the original Buddhist Psychology. What the Abi Dharma tells us
Speaker 1: about how we think, feel, and experience life, and it
Speaker 1: is of anything I have read so far, one of
Speaker 1: the best introductions that I have read that made it
Speaker 1: very clear. So listeners, if you're interested in this topic,
Speaker 1: this is a great place to start. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for that and for our conversation. Yeah, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for coming on, Beth. I really appreciate it.
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