Can a Psychic Medium Improve Your Life? Wrestling With the Balance Between Open-Mindedness and Skepticism

Why are many of Dan's favorite meditation teachers consulting a clairvoyant? A special collaboration with Search Engine https://www.searchengine.show/. Related Episodes: The Science of Training Your Attention | Dr. Amishi Jha https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/amishi-jha-388 The Art and Science of Compassion: Thupten Jinpa https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/thupten-jinpa-repost Compassion Is the Ultimate Tool for the Truly Ambitious | Paul Gilbert https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/paul-gilbert-425 The Science Of Manifestation: Can This Stanford Neuroscientist Convince A Skeptical Dan To Give It A Shot? | Dr. James R. Doty https://www.danharris.com/p/the-science-of-manifestation-can-353?utm_source=publication-search The Zen of Therapy | Dr. Mark Epstein https://www.danharris.com/p/the-zen-of-therapy-mark-epstein-86c?utm_source=publication-search Additional Resources: Search Engine podcast https://www.searchengine.show/ Starter playlist of Search Engine favorite episodes https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5S9VpzSJa8HVGG9H0EmkmJ?si=-BZ0ejCyQ5GC1bKxdYsQWQ&nd=1&dlsi=6301b86eaaed4aa9 Psychic medium Laura Lynne Jackson https://lauralynnejackson.com/ Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. Today, we are diving into a question that I have puzzled over for many, many years. How do you balance openness and skepticism? In my book, I used a quote from one of my favorite punk bands, The Meat Puppets. Here's the quote, "Open your mind, impours the trash." That really sums up the dilemma. As soon as you get interested in something like meditation, or for lack of a better word, spirituality, you have to start wading through oceans of bullshit before you can find the good stuff. How do you know how to separate wheat from chaff? So, we're going to approach this question today, and the way we're going to approach it is a little bit different than how we usually do it. Actually, it's very different. In other words, this is an unusual, and dare I say, special episode. We're not going

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  to do a straight one-on-one interview, which is what we normally do. Instead, we're going to deliver a highly-produced narrative. Some context here. For years, I've been hearing many of my meditation teachers, people I respect immensely, discuss the fact that they regularly consult a psychic medium. Said psychic medium's name is Laura Lynn Jackson. As you can imagine, this news created a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. How can these brilliant people who've helped me so much in my life sign up for something that seemed so clearly, to me at least, to be questionable at best? So, last year, I decided to reach out to Laura Lynn Jackson for an interview, right here on the show. Now, you may be thinking, "I don't remember that episode." That's because

• 1:47Dan Harris?

  we never aired it. I walked away from that conversation even more curious than when I went in. So, I went back to Laura Lynn Jackson, and I asked her if she would give me a reading, which she did, and which I also recorded. And after that reading...

• 2:04Dan Harris?

  Honestly, I still didn't know what to think, or what to do with all the audio tape we had gathered. I just didn't know how to make it into like, an episode of this show. So I reached out to some friends. PJ Vote and Shruti Pindamanemi have an excellent podcast of their own. It's called Search Engine. Every week, they take on a single question and they chase it down, whatever rabbit hole is required to get an answer. It's hilarious and super interesting. Again, it's called Search Engine. And not only are PJ and Shruti great at their job, but they're also great friends of mine. I've known Shruti for 20 years. I've only known PJ for a couple of years, but I already adore the dude. So anyway, I asked them if they wanted to team up and tell the story together. And they said, yes. And that is what we are going to play you today.

• 2:49Dan Harris?

  I love how this story came out. I loved working on it with my friends. And if you like it, you should go check out the rest of Search Engine's stuff. I'll put a link to their show in the show notes. Real quick, before we dive in, I just want to mention some of the cool stuff happening over on DanHarris.com. We loved having Cara Lai as our Teacher of the Month during the Get Fit Sanely episodes in June. Cara created bespoke companion meditations for each of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. And it was such a success that we're going to do it again in July and August. So in July, our meditations will be brought to you by the great Dan Mauricio. Head on over to DanHarris.com to access all the past and future meditations. Okay, enough out of me. I'm going to turn this show over now to PJ Vote and Search Engine. Enjoy.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vote. No question too big, no question too small. This week, Dan Harris, author of the bestselling memoir about meditation and Buddhism called 10% Happier, has a question. A very intriguing one involving a psychic. That's after these ads.

• 3:56Dan Harris?

  If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show, wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission.

• 4:41Dan Harris?

  And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show, wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way

• 5:25Dan Harris?

  to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 6:15Dan Harris?

  Hey.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Dan, how's it going?

• 6:18Dan Harris?

  Good. How are you?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  I just ate an enormous bagel.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  You know, like the ones where you gotta take a nap?

• 6:25Dan Harris?

  I'm glad you're eating. It sounds like you had a stomach bug over the weekend.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I was very, I was, God, I don't even wanna fill in the picture for you. I've never been that ill. I've just never been that ill in my life, nor a virus. Don't get it.

• 6:41Dan Harris?

  I've had it. I, um, I've had food poisoning on pretty much every continent.

• 6:47Dan Harris?

  My father has a great expression about this. When you have a stomach flu like that, he says, "You switch between thinking you're gonna die and fearing you won't."

• 6:57Speaker 01

  That's exactly the reality. That was exactly it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It made me realize that when I'm old, I'm not gonna be a fighter, like, at all.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, like, cough twice and be like, "Take me off life support." They'll be like, "You're not on life support."

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Dan Harris, to the rest of the world, is not primarily known for all the food poisoning he's had. He's known these days as an author and host of a popular podcast called 10% Happier. That's about meditation and mindfulness and a lot of other things.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Recently, Dan found himself investigating this question, and I asked him if we could ride along on his journey to answer it.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Can you just tell me, like, the story of how you arrived with this question?

• 7:45Dan Harris?

  Okay, so the backstory is, I have spent the last 15 years really taking a deep dive into the world of Buddhism or the Dharma, which was not, you know, in my life plan. I started my career in local news, and then I became a network news anchor, and I spent, you know, 20 years at ABC News. But in the late aughts, I started to get interested in Buddhism and made friends with all of these teachers who were my parents' age. So I'm a Gen Xer, and these guys were all boomers. And I don't think coincidentally, they're mostly Jewish, so they have like

• 8:24Dan Harris?

  chewy last names, like Salzberg, and Epstein, and Goldstein, and Cornfield. And I became really close with a lot of these folks. And they really were kind of my guides as I got increasingly interested in Buddhism.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  These names Dan mentioned, they're big American meditation teachers, often credited with popularizing Buddhism in this country. Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Mark Epstein. For Dan, they're people who showed him a way into Buddhism that didn't require him to surrender to a faith.

• 9:00Dan Harris?

  What I liked about Buddhism, coming from a skeptical, secular background, my parents were both atheist scientists. What I liked about Buddhism is that it actually wasn't a religion. I mean, it could be practiced as a religion, for sure, and that's beautiful and fine. But you can practice it as a secular person. I mean, the Buddha himself said, "Don't take anything I say on face value. Come check it out for yourself." So that was really attractive to me. And the basics of Buddhist philosophy and practice, like meditation and ethical practices, all really made sense and have come to be validated by modern science.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Buddhist practices validated by modern science. This is what makes Dan so unusual. Most of us, when we encounter a new belief system, we either reject it, or we explore it. And if we keep exploring it, it usually changes us. Dan, though, is a skeptic. He's remained somewhat of a skeptic despite nearly two decades of studying Buddhism. So he's a skeptic who goes on silent meditation retreats, a skeptic who himself leads guided meditations, a skeptic who publishes podcasts about Buddhism three times a week. While Dan has certainly become more flexible over the years, become less zealous, he's still kept his mind, and people don't usually say this as a compliment, but I mean it as one, at least half-closed.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Anything he encounters in Buddhism that science can't prove, or prove the benefits of, he just sets aside.

• 10:26Dan Harris?

  I felt comfortable in this world, largely. And--

• 10:31Dan Harris?

  A lot of these older Buddhist folks believed in stuff that, and still believe in stuff, that I found very hard to swallow.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Like what?

• 10:45Dan Harris?

  Well, I'll start with the easier stuff, and this isn't even going to sound easy for some people, but the notion of enlightenment, that there is an experience we can have of nirvana. They call it nibana, which is the way it's pronounced in the language of Pali. And so you can have these zaps of nirvana or nibana, and it can upgrade the software of your mind permanently, and that's enlightenment.

• 11:16Dan Harris?

  But they also believe, and this stuff is in the Buddhist texts, they also believe in rebirth in different realms of existence. They believe that certain types of meditative adepts get superpowers, like the ability to read other people's minds or duplicate their body or walk through walls.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  In America, we usually try to respect other people's religious beliefs. And Dan could respect these ideas that his teachers had, even if he didn't believe all of them. After all, they were rooted in Buddhism.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  But then, Dan began to learn that some of his most respected teachers also held these "other" beliefs, beliefs that didn't come from Buddhism, beliefs that to him felt significantly wackier, the kinds of ideas someone trying to sell you crystals at a head shop in a strip mall might try to pitch you on.

• 12:07Dan Harris?

  I have a memory, and hopefully he won't mind me retelling this story, but I have a memory of walking down the street with Dr. Mark Epstein, who just, by the way, is an eminent psychiatrist who practices in the New York area and has written a series of books about the overlap between modern psychology and Buddhism. And he was really my first introduction to Buddhism. I read one of his books, called him up and essentially asked if he would be my friend. And we started having lunch and dinner together on the regular and he would just teach me stuff. And I remember walking down the street with him one time and I was really pressing him on some of the esoteric claims of Buddhism.

• 12:51Dan Harris?

  And then he said something like, he was talking about tarot or astrology or something like that. And I was like, you really believe in that? And he said, yeah, I believe in everything. I believe in everything. And this is a guy who went to Harvard Medical School.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:08Dan Harris?

  And then I would start to think, is this an affinity scam? You know, like, you know, where people who seem normal to you start telling you, you know, like on a multi-level marketing thing, you know, like, what is going on here? So I kind of lived with this. I kind of put this in a box off to the side while I continued my meditation practice. And it was in that context that he mentioned that he had talked to a psychic medium, whose name is Laura Lynn Jackson. Then, over the years, I would hear other teachers in this cohort say that they too had had readings.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:46Dan Harris?

  And this woman could apparently talk to the dead, like, talk to my teacher's dead relatives. So she was a psychic, which means she could talk to you about your future, and a medium, that means she can talk to the dead.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 14:02Dan Harris?

  To be clear, as far as I know, Laura Lynn Jackson is not a Buddhist and has nothing to do with Buddhism. She's an ex-high school English teacher from Long Island who became a professional psychic medium. So I started researching her, and her story is pretty easy to find because she's done a lot of public interviews. She appears somewhat regularly on the podcast and daytime TV circuit.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  It's always tough when a loved one dies, and for some people psychic mediums help provide closure. But you don't have to be psychic to see the signs, at least that's according to a new book. Let's welcome Laura Lynn Jackson. She is the author of Signs. The secret language of the universe. Welcome.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me here.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for being here.

• 14:44Dan Harris?

  I'll tell you her bio, as I understand it, from what she said publicly. Laurel Lynn Jackson grew up on Long Island, and she's told the story many times about how she first realized she had some unusual abilities.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  You've been doing this, talking to the other side, for years now. How did this all start for you?

• 15:02Speaker 03

  You know, it started for me as a child. I would see people in colors, I would feel what they were feeling, and when I was 11, I knew my grandfather was gonna die right before he died. And right after he crossed, I had this dream where he visited me, and I had this beautiful communication. And ever since then, I've just, you know, understood that people who cross are really still with us.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  And they're very accessible to us, to connect with.

• 15:29Dan Harris?

  She says her mom told her that these powers run in the family, and she continued to struggle with it, to not know, you know, what exactly these powers were, whether they were real, you know, what to do about them. In her wayward youth, she used to do psychic readings as a trick at a bar.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  You know, "Hey, look what I can do out at a bar. I know all about you, and I know, you know, that your dad's on the other side, and I know that you have a seven-year-old brother," and this sort of thing. But it took me a while to honor it.

• 15:57Dan Harris?

  But eventually, like, she kind of settled in, she says, into her role as a psychic.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:03Dan Harris?

  And decided to use it to help other people.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  I am a mom, I am a wife, and I happen to be a psychic medium. And it took me many, many decades to come to terms with that and accept that. I don't consider myself woo-woo. I was raised by two teachers, and I was raised to be a critical thinker in the world, and a critical thinker questions, always questions and explores.

• 16:31Dan Harris?

  I found myself struggling a little bit with this story. I mean, at a minimum, I think of psychic powers as definitionally woo-woo. And so knowing all that, I was like, all right, this is the final straw. I have to find out, why do my teachers believe this? And is there any evidence for it?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  And what, to make sure I understand what you're describing. It's like you, like a very sort of like, I believe things that there are empirical evidence for, I'm a skeptic. But you found a practice that is tied, but loosely, to spiritual beliefs, or sort of optionally to spiritual beliefs. And you found that practice so useful and such a way to gain more thoughtfulness and wisdom and ways of being in the world. And so for most of your path into this, you've just been like, OK, there's an optional sidecar of bonus beliefs here that I don't think are for me. I don't have to judge them. They can stay in the box. What is it about a psychic that you're like, OK, I kind of need to poke the box a little bit here?

• 17:33Dan Harris?

  Well, I mean, it struck me as obvious bullshit. Like, there's no way to disprove that there are multiple realms of existence. You know, in the Buddhist cosmology, there's a hell realm, like a god realm, this human realm, the animal realm. I can't, that's, that's an interesting metaphysical claim, but it doesn't seem like I have the resources in this realm to falsify it. Whereas the psychic thing, I hadn't thought deeply about it, but it just seemed obviously not true.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  So Dan approached Search Engine to help him understand what was going on here. His question, why were so many of his respected teachers seeing this psychic medium?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  I wanted to follow along because, one, I just thought the situation was very funny. But, two, for me personally, I've just spent more time in the past few years around new agey people. And sometimes they give me the same feeling I get around my very conservative family members, where there's things they say that give me almost an allergic reaction, trigger me. And I wondered, in this case, if I could soften that. I wondered if I even wanted to. This is not a story designed to change your mind about psychics. Proving or disproving the supernatural is a trap. Search engine does not fall for traps. Instead, it's a story about what we do with other people's beliefs, how we decide how open to be

• 19:06Speaker 01

  to the ideas that make our minds want to snap closed. That is our big quest this week. And as part of it, after a short break, Dan Harris will visit a psychic medium.

• 19:24Speaker 04

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• 21:07Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the show.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Last spring, Dan Harris found himself reaching out to a psychic medium. He was asking himself what it meant that the people he followed were, in some sense, following her. And he was curious how far he could push his own mind. So he sent her an interview request, and they got together on Zoom.

• 21:26Dan Harris?

  Before we dive in, any questions or concerns for me?

• 21:29Speaker 07

  No, I'm just very excited to be in conversation with you. I just read your book, 10 and 1/2%, 10% happier. I just added an extra half, 10% happier, and I loved it. It's fantastic. We have a lot of people in common, Mark and Sharon.

• 21:41Dan Harris?

  Yes, we do.

• 21:42Speaker 07

  I love it.

• 21:42Dan Harris?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's how I came up with the idea of inviting you on, because I've heard about you from these other folks.

• 21:47Speaker 07

  Oh, thank you.

• 21:49Dan Harris?

  I start with some basic questions, like, for example, what is the difference between a psychic and a medium?

• 21:55Speaker 07

  That's a great question. So a psychic is somebody who tunes into, you can call it someone's aura. And the concept there is that there's an energy field around every single person that emanates about two or three feet away from each person's body, and that within that field, we can energetically tap into it with our thoughts and connect with it and read a person's past, present, future. We can see who they're connected to in the here and now. We get all sorts of information from that. We can read information about their physical health, all sorts of things like that. So a psychic is somebody who would do that. A medium takes it a step farther. And we have a saying among all of us where it's every medium is psychic,

• 22:39Speaker 07

  but not every psychic is a medium. And what I mean by that is I feel that mediums should be.

• 22:44Dan Harris?

  And so I interviewed her for, I don't know, 90 minutes, maybe more. She doesn't have the same vibe that these super advanced meditation teachers do. She's much chattier and like you can ask her a question and she'll maybe take a half hour to answer it. I'm not kidding. I see. Like, she just is so excited about what she's talking about that she'll go for a half hour.

• 23:07Speaker 07

  You know, there is something so much grander and more beautiful and magnificent going on behind the scenes in this sort of unseen energy realm of connection that we can't even begin to understand, but we can learn to trust in and we can learn to call upon.

• 23:22Dan Harris?

  Okay, you said about 75 things that I need to follow up on in those paragraphs that you just uttered there. But let me, let me just stay at the level of representing the skeptics in the audience. I'm imagining there are a couple of alarm bells going off for people, not having to do with you specifically, but with this topic. One is terms like, you know, unseen energy. It just reminds me of like Poltergeist or, you know.

• 23:52Speaker 07

  Ooh, that's scary. Ooh.

• 23:54Dan Harris?

  Right, so there's that. But even beyond that, it's like the stuff of movies we've all seen, psychics in movies. We've all seen or heard stories about charlatans in this field.

• 24:05Speaker 07

  Oh, sure.

• 24:06Dan Harris?

  The lexicon itself can be hard to swallow for somebody who, you know, is reasonably new to this or only has interacted with it through pop culture. So for anybody who's listening to this and, you know, considering whether to stop listening, what can you say to like, keep us in the game here, keep us open mind?

• 24:25Speaker 07

  Well, I think this is so important that you're bringing this up because when I talk about unseen energy, I don't mean this idea of like this concept of woo woo stuff that's out there. I mean that I've researched and dived into, you know, quantum theory, trying to understand this. I'm always on a search for answers myself.

• 24:41Dan Harris?

  I asked her a bunch of skeptical questions and she answered them. She didn't convince me per se, but I also didn't walk away thinking it's absolutely demonstrably untrue. But I didn't get the feeling that she was, you know, and I've interviewed a lot of con men and cult leaders and fraudsters in my many years of being a journalist. I didn't get that vibe from her. I got the sense that whatever she's doing, she sincerely believes she's doing it.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:12Dan Harris?

  Laura Lynn Jackson, thank you very much for coming on.

• 25:15Speaker 07

  Thank you so much for being in conversation with me.

• 25:17Dan Harris?

  And I was like, what do I do with this tape? You know, I felt incomplete, but I just didn't know what to think and I didn't know how my audience would feel about it. So then I called her back and said, well, give me a reading. Apparently she's able to do these readings remotely or over the phone. And she said, yes.

• 25:39Speaker 07

  Can you hear me all right?

• 25:40Dan Harris?

  I hear you loudly and clearly.

• 25:42Speaker 07

  Fabulous. Well, I feel really honored to read for you and I always feel that readings are divinely orchestrated, you know, so I always.

• 25:49Dan Harris?

  I couldn't see her. We were audio only. We weren't in the same room. I've actually never been in the same room with her. And she warned me in advance that when we do this, you know, she goes into a state where she kind of loses track of time. And first she was reading by aura.

• 26:04Speaker 07

  New age people call it an aura. Scientists call it a biofield. It's a very real thing. You know, we have this energy field around us and what's in that, when I read for people is all sorts of information. Information about your past, your present, your future, people you're tied to in the here and now. And the very first thing I'm going to be shown is something that I have come to call a core aura for the person I'm reading for, so for you. And all it means is I'm basically shown the blueprint for your soul mission. Lifetime. And the way that will appear to me is in a circle or like a globe. Sometimes it's like this 3D shape that comes and within.

• 26:39Dan Harris?

  Which you know, sounds like something that people say to you on the street corner in Sedona, Arizona. She was talking about the various colors that are there in my aura and what they mean.

• 26:49Speaker 07

  All right, let's talk a little bit about the orange, the green, and then the other color. Orange is interesting to me and I, not that I didn't expect to see it in your aura, but I, it was just like, oh wow, this is here. Um, because here's what it means. When I see orange in somebody's core aura, it means the person that I am talking to is marked as an artist for me in some capacity. I feel like you've always been very connected to art. Like, were you very into music when you were younger, especially like teenage years?

• 27:17Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 27:18Speaker 07

  Did you play like two instruments?

• 27:21Dan Harris?

  One.

• 27:22Speaker 07

  Okay. Then did you play an instrument and sing?

• 27:25Dan Harris?

  Uh, not very well, but I did, I did play one instrument.

• 27:28Speaker 07

  Okay. It has to be two because I'm seeing two. It's like two different streams, but this one, I feel like I'm going crazy.

• 27:34Dan Harris?

  So she's reading my aura and she says that I'm into music and she says that I play two instruments, which is 50% correct. Uh, I play the drums poorly, but she kind of insisted that I play two, which is not true unless you count like the triangle.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:53Dan Harris?

  And then she, so she goes from the aura to then she has this whole thing about how we all have a team of light.

• 27:59Speaker 07

  Each one, every one of us has a team of light on the other side. That's three parts, right? God energy, which I see as this force of love that is just inherent and part of all of us and guides us to become like more loving, kind, forgiving, you know, guides us into our highest path and connects us all, right? And then we also have, and this part might sound a little woo woo, but I've come to understand it. What I'll refer to as spirit guides, right? Throughout time in history, some religions have referred to that kind of conscious beings as, uh, you know, guardian angels. I just call them spirit guides. And, um, the third part of the team of light, of course, with anybody who loves to cross for the other side, pets included, I like to point out as well. And they.

• 28:37Dan Harris?

  And then my team of light showed up and apparently they, uh, they were talking about how I'd gone through something very hard in the last couple of years.

• 28:46Speaker 07

  There had to be like maybe some relationships that fell away. I feel like there is great disappointment about one person in particular. Does this make any sense to you?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:55Speaker 07

  Okay, I want to commend you. This is not for me, this is from your guides. Because the main task was to come away from that without bitterness, without negativity. And yeah, we're gonna feel it at times, but that's not gonna be the takeaway. And I really do feel you're getting a standing ovation for acing that.

• 29:12Dan Harris?

  They were saying at first you were thrashing about and not handling it very well, but ultimately you handled it well, and we applaud you for that. And to me, that seems pretty obvious. Leah, reference to my separation from the meditation app that I co-founded and went through a very painful separation from, and it was a three-year-long thing. And there were many times where it brought out my absolute worst, but toward the end, I was able to kind of deal with it reasonably well. And so, all of that was really reassuring, and it felt good that like my grandparents might have approved of my comportment during this. And I'm aware that she could have, I mean, I've talked about all of this stuff publicly.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:51Dan Harris?

  So she could have just known this and was giving me a pep talk.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. What, uh, what happened next?

• 30:00Dan Harris?

  Okay, so there's the medium part where she's talking to your team of light.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:06Dan Harris?

  And then there's the psychic part where she's telling you what might happen in the future.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 30:12Speaker 07

  Now, do you have three cats now but are talking about a fourth?

• 30:17Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 30:18Speaker 07

  Okay. You don't have the fourth yet, do you?

• 30:20Dan Harris?

  No.

• 30:21Speaker 07

  It's coming. Like, I already see it as if it's there, even though it's not. But like, this fourth one is meant to come.

• 30:27Dan Harris?

  At the time that I was doing the reading, we had three cats, and she predicted we would get a fourth. And I did not mention that to Bianca, who several weeks later came home with a fourth cat. So, there's that.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  I find that impressive. I find that challenging.

• 30:45Dan Harris?

  The fact that we have four fucking cats, is that what you find challenging?

• 30:51Dan Harris?

  Because you're right, it's a lot of kitty litter.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  It's a lot of cats. What else?

• 30:56Speaker 07

  I also feel like, are you gonna get your own show or something? Is that on the table? Somewhere.

• 31:03Dan Harris?

  Beyond this show, you mean beyond this podcast, like a TV show?

• 31:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, or somebody picks it up in a new way. Like, I see my signs for, like, media coming.

• 31:14Dan Harris?

  I mean, that would be great. I'm actually in the works of pitching a TV show that would have me kind of traveling around the world investigating how to get happy.

• 31:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. It's like, it's a show, but it's you teaching this and helping people find their own life. And it's gonna be a little frustrating because it's an 11-month journey to having it come about. I'm gonna tell you, you have to believe in this and you have to trust in this because you're in the midst of it right now.

• 31:41Dan Harris?

  She was like, that show is gonna get made and it's gonna be a huge deal. And now I want to believe that.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:48Dan Harris?

  Obviously. Like, I don't know if that's true, but I, I really liked hearing it and it felt to me like a very useful pep talk. There was nothing in there that, if I did believe it, would have been harmful, I don't think. And most importantly, the experience was positive because I have gone through a hard couple of years.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Dan Harris?

  It's been really hard, the hardest years of my life, both because of what happened professionally and also, as you know, my wife's had some health problems. So the idea that we could both, as a couple, be entering this period of thriving personally and professionally is really exciting. Maybe wrong, but it motivates me to effectuate it. And so to me, I don't see any harm in any of that.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  And so you're having the experience still of like, part of you is spinning this belief, but like, the greater part of your skeptical intellect is still online. And so it's like, it's just sort of psychologically straight. As somebody who has like, had psychic readings as a non-believer before, I just very much understand the feeling that that conversation gives you, which is like, I don't want to get in the pool, but I'm a little bit in the pool and it is warm, but I don't even believe in pools.

• 33:05Dan Harris?

  So I didn't know you'd actually done this. And so I'll say, I'll run this by you, and I think it builds on what you just said. What surprised me the most about myself was how much I wanted to believe it.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Why do you think that is?

• 33:18Dan Harris?

  It just sounds nice. Her whole philosophy is that being alive and on earth is like a school, a training ground, and then we ultimately cross back over to whatever it is on the other side. And that when we get there, you know, we'll be reunited with our ancestors. And that all just, I mean, there's a reason why so many people at 11 o'clock on Sunday mornings go to church. Yeah. It's a very comforting story.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  But Dan is somebody who tries not to believe in stories just because they're comfortable. He doesn't usually get his aura read. He's not religious. He does meditate, and he's Buddhist enough that I've heard him use words like "Dharma" in casual conversation. The story Dan tells himself, though, is that he came to Buddhism because he followed the evidence for it, which I'm sure is true, although I also think most of us decide what to believe, at least partly socially. It's much easier to surrender to an idea if we admire the people who already hold it, if they seem happy, smart, if they fit our arbitrary thumbnail sketch of a wise person.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  As Dan and I kept talking over the months, I'd noticed how many stories he had about his teachers, memories of the lessons he'd learned by observing them. It's such a funny thing that happens in the human heart, this decision that you're going to become somebody's student, surrender to their ideas or habits. But now, listening to this tape of Laura Lynn instructing Dan on the finer points of her metaphysical views, I just heard no such surrender. And while Dan said the conversation gave him a little more insight into why other people enjoy psychic readings, he still didn't know why his mentors, faced with the same experience, were able to walk through that door, or if it meant he had to think any differently about

• 35:06Speaker 01

  them, or think any differently about all the other ways he was following their lead. After the break, we watch live as a skilled practitioner tries to gently pry open the mind of Dan Harris.

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• 37:13Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the show. Last month, Dan went back to Dr. Mark Epstein. Just to remind you, Dr. Mark Epstein, a hugely influential author, Harvard medical-trained psychotherapist, as well as a prominent Buddhist, the person, in fact, who turned Dan on to Buddhism, but who also subscribes to all sorts of beliefs Dan considers very woo. The person who told Dan, quote, "I believe in everything."

• 37:41Dan Harris?

  Do you remember, Mark, after one of our many, many meals, you and I were taking a walk from the restaurant, I think I was walking you back to your apartment. And something came up like tarot or astrology. You referenced it in the conversation. And then I turned to you. This was back when I was a little bit more hard bitten in my skepticism. I was like, do you really believe in that? And you turned to me and said, I believe in everything. Do you recall that conversation?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  It sounds familiar. Yeah. I think we had that conversation a couple of times, maybe.

• 38:20Dan Harris?

  What do you mean by that? When you say, I believe in everything, what does that mean?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  I'm not sure what I meant when I said it then. But, you know, I've been around longer than you. The Buddhist thing didn't come wrapped all by itself. So I've been exposed along the way to practitioners and practices of various occult types. And I've always gotten something useful from most of them. So I think that's what I was saying when I say I believe in everything. Like, I'm open to them all, maybe too open.

• 38:53Dan Harris?

  So I've interviewed Mark scores of times. And it's a bit like sparring with a cloud. I mean, he is hard to pin down. And he's got this kind of zen mischief about him. And so I knew that going in, that I wasn't going to get some like clear answer. He doesn't talk that way. He, you know, I think for decades, he's been a therapist. And he wants the person he's talking to to come to their own conclusion. I see. He's like a person where you ask him a question, you get a question. Exactly. And he also like, he likes to fuck with you a little bit. And in this case, in the case of I believe in everything, he was pushing me on some of my insistence on having scientific evidence for everything.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  Know I was encouraging you early on to open up your preconceptions to allow for the possibility of stuff that we don't really know about from science.

• 39:51Dan Harris?

  Why was it important for you to push me on that score?

• 39:54Speaker 05

  I just always thought it was important for me to push you on any score.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  That was my job.

• 40:02Dan Harris?

  But you're saying this like it's in the past tense.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  Well, it took you 16 years, but now you're doing a show about Laurel and Jackson, so.

• 40:11Dan Harris?

  OK, but I know that part of your job is to mess with me, but but.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  Not mess with, not mess with help. I was trying to help you.

• 40:22Dan Harris?

  So why would it be helping me to prod me toward more openness toward things I might otherwise reflexively reject?

• 40:30Speaker 05

  Open is better than closed, right? Fluid is better than rigid. People who are too sure of themselves tend to be alienating to others.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Listening to this conversation between Dan and his longtime guide, I thought I could recognize some truth in Mark's statement. I'm more like Dan, more of a nonbeliever. But my nonbelief has softened some in the last few years. Some of that's social. Well, I think the Tarot people are wrong. They frankly throw much better parties than the fact checkers. So there's that. But then you spend enough time around the believers and sometimes you feel your own killjoy-ness more acutely. Like you're on a diet or fasting for reasons nobody else quite understands. Wouldn't it be nicer to just give in?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Dan told me the story of how Mark Epstein became, if not the most open-minded person he's ever met, then at least the most open-minded person he deeply respects.

• 41:32Dan Harris?

  Young Mark Epstein was sort of anxious, insecure, really, really smart, really, really curious.

• 41:41Speaker 05

  I think the times that I grew up in were just the dawning of The Beatles and transcendental meditation.

• 41:49Dan Harris?

  LSD and the naivete of that early 60s mindset hit me just in my adolescence. When he was young, it was bedlam. It was the 70s and he's in Cambridge at Harvard, seeking out everybody on campus who has any interest in anything new agey. I found all the occultists at Harvard Medical School. I worked with Lester Grin spoon, who was the first person to advocate for the legalization of marijuana. He writes a paper on ketamine. He's hanging out with psychics and of course, there's the Dharma and all of the metaphysical claims that are in that. And so he's just in this environment.

• 42:32Dan Harris?

  I mean, he's hanging out with a car mechanic named Carmou, who's also a psychic. He's just in this world of drinking from this fire hose. And it's so interesting because he's doing that and getting his degree at Harvard Medical School at the same time.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Okay. So then, how does the psychic medium in question enter his life? Like, what was the when and how of that?

• 42:56Dan Harris?

  A friend of his tells him about Laurel Lynn Jackson at a dinner in Woodstock.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:01Dan Harris?

  And, and I realize this is all sounds like, you know, a subplot from a Portlandia episode, but he hears about this person and is like, yes, I want to talk to this medium.

• 43:18Dan Harris?

  It was after my father had died. So it was like 16 years ago or so. So was it the death of your father that made you intrigued? No, no, as I say, I'm always on the lookout for a good psychic. Or a good acrologer. You had a history of encountering these types. Both good and bad. Yeah, I have a real history. Yeah. Okay, so good and bad. That means that you're not going in with zero skepticism. Oh, no, I'm going in with a lot of skepticism. Yeah, I'm both gullible and skeptical. Which I find really interesting. Gullible and skeptical. Okay, so when you first met her, what did you think? It blew me away. Say more, please. After the preliminaries where the, the first thing she does is she gets a sense

• 44:02Dan Harris?

  of your aura, a mix of colors, basically. So she went through that and then the first.

• 44:09Speaker 06

  First thing she said to me was, "Oh, your father's here. He says to tell you you were right." That's the first thing she said. And immediately, I thought I knew what she was talking about. My father, who was a well-known professor of medicine, had a glioblastoma, which is a malignant brain tumor. And he got it scanned, and it had already spread to both sides of his brain. And he knew that there was, you know, very little treatment that was available, and communicated that to me. And I was in my office in the city, realizing that despite all these years

• 44:53Speaker 06

  of being interested in spiritual stuff, I had never had a conversation with my father about anything spiritual, and certainly about what the Buddhists have taught about what dying is, or how to die, you know? So I called him up with some trepidation and said, you know, "We've never talked about any of this. I don't know if you're interested, but do you want to know, like, what the Buddhists say?" And he was very welcoming. He's like, you know, "Sure, go ahead." So I needed to try to explain something using non-Buddhist or spiritual or New Age language. And so I said something like, "You know, that sense of yourself that you've always had inside that doesn't really change, no matter what age you are,

• 45:37Speaker 06

  you know, 20, 40, 60, 80, but inside you're just sort of, you know, how it feels to be you? It's sort of transparent, that space. You know it, but you can't really find it. But it's a feeling." I said, "What they seem to say is that if you can relax your mind into that kind of transparent feeling of who you've always been, that you can kind of ride that feeling out as the body shuts down." And he said, "Okay, darling, I'll try." And so when Laura Lynn Jackson said, "Oh, your father's here. He says to tell you you were right."

• 46:13Dan Harris?

  It resonated with that conversation. So that that made me very receptive to anything else that she was going to tell me. Well, it's interesting, even in that story, you acknowledged she might have known that. She might have had ways to know things that informed her utterances directed at you. Totally. You're open to that, and you're also open to the fact that she may be communicating with your dead father. And so that's such an interesting. I mean, she didn't know me at all at that time. She didn't know me at all, and we were on the phone. That Google existed. Google existed. She could have Googled. She could have seen that my father had died, et cetera. But.

• 46:53Dan Harris?

  But what? I prefer to think not.

• 46:57Dan Harris?

  I would much rather be, that's really my father, talking through her.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Mark's first reading with Laura Lynn Jackson was many years ago. He's returned to her periodically since. He says she's really helped him at various junctures in his life. And he's recommended her to friends, to other meditation teachers, and eventually even to his hard-headed skeptical pal, Dan Harris.

• 47:23Dan Harris?

  Here's one thing I'm open to. I'm open to the fact that this is all true. I'm also open to the fact that she sincerely believes what she's doing is is real and that she's a smart, empathic, helpful person. Yep. And that she is helping people, but that is actually not true. Yep. Strictly speaking. Yep. Is that possible? Of course.

• 47:44Dan Harris?

  I mean, that's the most likely explanation in terms of the world that we operate in. You know, that's a generous interpretation that doesn't require any kind of supernatural, anything. If I would have to explain it away, that's how I would explain it. Yeah. And yet, it's possible that it, in your view, that it's totally legit, what's happening? Yeah, oh, yeah. I would much prefer to believe that. So I think one of the things you're saying is that you have a real openness, and maybe even more than openness, like a belief, that there's more going on than science can explain. Well, I'm just easy to convince, so.

• 48:33Dan Harris?

  So, you know, that has worked for me and against me over the years. But I don't want to let you off the hook that easily because you're easy to convince. That's funny. It's funny. And like, you're incredibly smart. And so I just want to nail you down on, on having thought about this a great deal and having been alive for a non-trivial period of time. You're open to the supernatural, to put it quite bluntly, or to the things that might be natural. We call them supernatural now because science hasn't yet caught up. Yeah. Oh, yes. I mean, if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that science

• 49:07Speaker 01

  doesn't know everything.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  I said in the beginning of all this that a quality I admired about Dan is that he keeps his mind half closed. Dan, like me, is a journalist. It's not just his job. It's a big part of his identity. When journalism works, it's a system for learning about the world skeptically so that you're wrong less often. You fact check. You double source. You try to write only what you can prove. But Mark Epstein is not a journalist, and he models a different way to learn about the world. Radical open-mindedness. To be open-minded means you'll get bamboozled sometimes. Mark says people in his circle have certainly fallen for charlatans. But his mind also allows him to benefit from his conversations with psychic types in a way that Dan's can't. Mark's able to think

• 49:58Speaker 01

  about how his father may have passed peacefully, might even still be out there somewhere watching him, instead of like Dan or me mainly getting stuck on stuff like how a triangle's not really much of a musical instrument at all, really. I mentioned before how new agey beliefs have a way of internally setting me off a bit. Plenty that Dan had turned up had given me more of those feelings, but nothing about this conversation with Mark had. And it left me wondering about this balance Mark described. The notion that you'd cultivate in your own mind, not just skepticism, but at the same time, credulity as another positive trait?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  I asked Dan about it.

• 50:38Dan Harris?

  It's a really tricky balance and, you know, I think it's more art than science. Just to have the habit of mind to check your own impulse towards certainty. Of course, you want to check other people's too, but not in a paralytic way. So this is where the art comes. Like openness plus skepticism. That is a recipe for moving through the world, I think, in a little bit more supple fashion. Does that make sense what I'm saying?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  It does.

• 51:08Dan Harris?

  To me, that's part of a skillful approach to life. It's like, can you resist certainty? You know, can you be really open in that way? It's a, one of the many design flaws in the human operating system is that we live in this world where everything's changing all the time. Like we're just in a tsunami of uncertainty and yet we are really allergic to uncertainty. So we are not well-designed for the world we inhabit. And so I think that is one of the biggest problems facing the species. We are shouting at each other over politics, over vaccines, over religion, over geopolitical divides,

• 51:50Dan Harris?

  without any empathy, without being willing to understand or even attempt to understand the way other people might view the world. And that was one thing when we were fighting with stones, but now we're fighting with nukes and AI. And so it's this addiction to certainty is an existential threat to the species. And so, you know, Buddhism and other practices or other schools of thought can help nudge you in the direction of the kind of openness that I think Mark is modeling here.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Can I say part of what I think is like a little bit difficult about this?

• 52:27Dan Harris?

  Please.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Like you and I have talked at extended length about how we believe in the importance of uncertainty. Like, we're very certain about how it's important to be uncertain.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  I can say that, but like, once you start thinking about opening the door to things you can't prove, what I don't understand is like how you decide which things to believe. Like, I don't know where you actually set your level.

• 52:53Dan Harris?

  Did I ever tell you the story about Joseph Goldstein's first meditation teacher? Joseph Goldstein is my meditation teacher and a friend of mine and Mark's. And he has this story about his first meditation teacher, who he came across in a market in India. This guy had been his teacher for a long time. And one day, Joseph was out for a stroll in India, where he was learning from this guy. And he came across his teacher haggling fiercely with one of the vendors. So Joseph goes to his teacher, his name is Menindra, after seeing him haggling over a bag of peanuts or whatever it is. And he was like, hey, you are always telling us to keep it simple.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:32Dan Harris?

  And what's that about? And the teacher said to him, yeah, I said, be simple, but not be a simpleton.

• 53:43Dan Harris?

  And that speaks to me, to the balance that Mark is striking here. Like, you should be open, but you should also have boundaries.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:54Dan Harris?

  And can you do those two things at the same time?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and knowing like, being able to think, this might be true, this might not be true. But to notice that, in Mark's case, he wants to believe in one belief because it's useful to him, it makes him feel good. Whereas another belief like, would be really, not just not useful, but like, damaging.

• 54:16Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  His mind is open enough that he can talk to everyone. And his mind is supple enough that he can know when for him it's good to change it and when for him it's good not to.

• 54:28Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and just to bring it back to the Buddha, the name Buddha, it means awake. And this is a way to not fall into the sleep of certainty, which is comforting for lots of reasons we've discussed. And not to fall into the opposite kind of sleep, which would be unremitting credulity. And if you're going to make your mind a relentless reconsideration machine, well, you've got to be awake for that. And that's why I think the Buddha spent a lot of time talking about the dangers of being attached to your views. He in fact said of himself, I'm not a dogmatist, I'm an analyst. And you've got to be awake to analyze.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  But so then with your teachers, who, like, for you, this started with the question of why are all my teachers seeing a psychic medium? Like, where do you, Dan Harris, land on that specific thing?

• 55:25Dan Harris?

  I land on not agreeing with them that the stuff they're open to is real, but being open to the fact that they might be right. And in that is a teaching, I think, around not being so closed-minded, not being so rigid, not being so addicted to my certainty. It's like, in doing this stuff that seems so outlandish to me, they've taught me something. Maybe not what they were aiming to teach me. Like, they didn't teach me that psychomedians are for sure a thing, but they did teach me that my reflexive judgmentalism is not super helpful.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Dan, thank you.

• 56:20Dan Harris?

  Pleasure. Thank you for letting me make you part of my dilemma.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I really enjoyed it.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Dan Harris. You can find him at his podcast, 10% Happier. It's full of thoughtful, funny, meditative conversations. A great place to go if you are ever looking for any help at all with the clamorous voice in your head. I really recommend it. If you want to go even deeper on all things 10% Happier, you can check out Dan's website, danharris.com, which features guided meditations. If you're curious about Mark's work, you can check out his books. The Zen of Therapy is one. The one that Dan found that made him want to seek Mark out is called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  As for us, this is our last episode of the season. We're going to take a month to read and think and find more things worth wondering about. In July, we'll be airing some of our favorite classic episodes. In August, do not forget about us, we will be back with new ones. In the meantime, please keep sending us your questions. We had such a fun time answering them for you this season. We're so excited that we get to do some more.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinmineni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was fact-checked by Kate Gallagher. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bezarian. Additional production support on this episode from Hazel May-Bryan. Our intern is Oscar Knoxen. This was our last week with Oscar. He is a brilliant, wonderful, relentlessly enthusiastic presence in our office. We are going to miss him, but we are so excited to see what he does next. From the 10% Happier podcast, thank you to Dan Harris and senior producer Marissa Schneiderman. At Odyssey, our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis,

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schaaf. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some bonus audio, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. Have a cool summer.