#684: Jack Kornfield — How to Reduce Anxiety and Polish the Lens of Consciousness

Brought to you by Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business; AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement; and LMNT https://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement. Jack Kornfield (@JackKornfield https://twitter.com/JackKornfield) trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to have introduced Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society http://www.dharma.org/ in Barre, Massachusetts, with Sharon Salzberg https://tim.blog/2017/11/03/sharon-salzberg/ and Joseph Goldstein http://www.dharma.org/ims/joseph_goldstein.html, and Spirit Rock http://www.spiritrock.org/ Center in Woodacre, California. Current projects include CloudSangha.co https://cloudsangha.co/, which offers practice groups for all; The Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program https://mmtcp.soundstrue.com/, which has trained 7,000 mindfulness teachers in 75 countries; and Wisdom Ventures https://www.wisdomventuresfund.com/, a fund investing in companies that promote compassion. His books have been translated into 22 languages and sold 2 million copies. They include The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology https://www.amazon.com/The-Wise-Heart-Jack-Kornfield-audiobook/dp/B00VS0V5Z0/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; A Path with Heart https://www.amazon.com/A-Path-with-Heart-Jack-Kornfield-audiobook/dp/B000BYR530/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry https://www.amazon.com/After-Ecstasy-Laundry-audiobook/dp/B0167DE84C/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; Buddha’s Little Instruction Book https://www.amazon.com/Buddhas-Little-Instruction-Book-Kornfield/dp/0553373854/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace https://www.amazon.com/Art-Forgiveness-Lovingkindness-Peace/dp/0553381199/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20; and his most recent book, No Time Like the Present: Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy Right Where You Are https://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Like-Present-Finding-ebook/dp/B01HMXV236/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Jack is also co-founder of Cloud Sangha https://cloudsangha.co/, and they offer a quick and free mindfulness test https://cloudsangha.co/test?utm_source=timferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=timferrissshow2023&utm_id=timferrissshow2023 to gauge your mindfulness levels. As a conscious online community, Cloud Sangha https://cloudsangha.co/ brings people together to create meaningful human connections and integrate mindfulness into everyday life. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by Shopify http://shopify.com/tim! Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required. Go to shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health. * This episode is also brought to you by LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix http://drinklmnt.com/tim. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/Tim came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can get a free LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/Tim Sample Pack with any purchase. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/Tim http://drinklmnt.com/Tim. * [07:47] Stan Grof. [14:53] Yogic swoons and anesthetic autopiloting. [18:28] What’s the point of consciousness? [25:47] A big story or no story at all? [31:44] The Cosmic Game. [34:56] How would the Buddha deal with anxiety? [43:50] The stories anxiety tells. [46:41] Mystics and the mystery. [52:04] Jhana practice and the dimensions of meditation. [57:23] Achieving altered states: a matter of confidence or capacity? [1:01:30] What is love? [1:09:54] Wise guys. [1:12:49] Reliably eliciting the non-self. [1:14:35] Sifting out the charlatans. [1:15:27] Atisha’s instructions. [1:19:56] Cultivating a more joyful mind. [1:24:27] Living “social, not solo” and Cloud Sangha. [1:31:51] Ram Dass flunking the course. [1:41:23] Connection, climate, and justice. [1:48:40] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick note before we get started. To experience and practice one of the most important themes from this episode, stick around after the interview for a guided loving kindness meditation from Jack. He is very famous for these and for a very good reason. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, etc., another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough. And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita, but for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the

• 1:22Tim Ferriss?

  names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked, and bam, company was born. So if you're on a low carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their

• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least Five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting and on and on. You can try it risk free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. For a limited time, you can get a free Element sample pack with any purchase. It's the perfect way to try all of their flavors. Or if you're feeling generous, sharing with a friend who might enjoy. This special offer is available here at this link. Drink LMNT.com/Tim. That's Drink Element, again, Drink LMNT.com/Tim.

• 2:48Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything, anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day to day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third-party apps, from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine.

• 3:32Tim Ferriss?

  They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008, when I became an advisor, and it's been spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding $400 billion. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience required.

• 4:17Tim Ferriss?

  Access powerful tools to help you find customers. Drive sales and manage your day to day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed. And I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the day, which was awesome. The build a business competition and other things. Plus with 24/7 support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support. You have resources. You don't need to feel alone in this case. More than a store, Shopify grows with you and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a $1 per month trial period.

• 4:59Tim Ferriss?

  It is a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today and learn more by visiting Shopify.com/Tim. One more time, Shopify.com/Tim, all lowercase. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:37Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is a rare in-person episode and my job always is to investigate, interrogate people I consider to be world-class performers. I have one in front of me. He's a friend. He is a repeat guest, a very popular guest, Jack Kornfield. You can find him on Twitter at Jack Kornfield. Jack trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. That's an understatement, but maybe we'll come back to that. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to have introduced Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, and Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California.

• 6:22Tim Ferriss?

  Current projects include Cloud Sangha.co, which we will talk about, which offers practice groups for all, the mindfulness meditation teacher certification program. Which has trained 7,000, 7,000, that's a lot. Mindfulness teachers in 75 countries and Wisdom Ventures, a fund investing in companies that promote compassion. His books, many books have been translated into 22 languages and have sold roughly 2 million copies. They include The Wise Heart, A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology, A Path with Heart, After the Ecstasy and the Laundry, one of the best book titles of all time, Buddha's Little Instruction Book, The Art of Forgiveness, Loving Kindness, and Peace, and his most recent book, No Time Like the Present, Finding Freedom, Love, Enjoy Right Where You Are.

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  You can find all things Jack at JackKornfield.com. That's K-O-R-N-F-I-E-L-D.com. And we'll link to, of course, all of his social and everything else in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. Jack, so nice to see you.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  I'm very glad to see you, Tim, and I'm glad that our lives have now intertwined over a number of years. So it's been a pleasure in all these different venues.

• 7:27Tim Ferriss?

  It has been a pleasure. You have been a safety net, a mentor, a guide, a field EMT, perhaps, with some of my situations over the years, and I really appreciate your

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Well, it's my pleasure, too. We do it for each other.

• 7:43Tim Ferriss?

  The triage, the wisdom, the teaching, and there are a million different directions we could go. But before we started recording, we were chatting a bit, I was making my tea, asking about good departure points, perhaps the initial liftoff where we should go. And we landed on a name, and that's Stan Grof. So perhaps you can take that and lead us wherever you may, providing context on who this is, why it matters, why it relates to your life, and so on.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you, Tim. And I wanted to do this in some way because Stan Grof and the scene that I want to set for you who are listening opens the doorway to a huge number of really interesting questions about who we are, about humanity, about healing, about interconnection, about all kinds of things. So here's the scene. Stan Grof, or Stanislav Grof, as he is sometimes called, is a

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Czech-born physician and psychiatrist, who was the last legitimate LSD researcher in the 1970s. He'd done LSD research in Europe, got samples from Sandoz and took some himself, and it completely changed his life from being a kind of academic physician to say, whoa, there's something a lot bigger going on here. And he ended up at Johns Hopkins, when he escaped from the communist regime, running the last LSD research for people who had cancer and were in hospice, were dying, for vets returning, for clergy, so that they might actually have a little experience

• 9:22Speaker 03

  of the divine that was off the pages of their texts and so forth. And then he moved after that to be at Esalen for a long time. We collaborated there together for about 20 years. Over the course of our time, to get to the story, and he's a polymath, speaks 12 or 15 languages and reads Sanskrit and is completely well-versed in the European education of the great music of the world and all kinds of things like that. So when it became less possible to work with psychedelics, except a bit underground, he developed with his wife Christina holotropic breathwork, which allows people to go to some of those very profound open states using breath.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  And it mirrored things that I'd learned in monastery in Burma, where we'd done incredibly intense deep breathing for some hours and open to all kinds of states. We worked together, retreats all around the world, and we'd be in a room with 200 or 300 people, huge speakers, think the Grateful Dead or something like that. Half of the people, 150 lying on their backs on a nice mat, and then a sitter next to them. And then the music would start with the instructions, very simple instructions, breathe as deep and fast and hard as you can and keep it going for the next hour or two until, for liftoff, till you go wherever you go. So people would be

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Breathing away, and there would be this incredible music. It might be drumming from the African musicians in the Congo drum jungle, or all kinds of world music. And as you looked out over the room, once the breathing had kicked in after half an hour or an hour, it was like walking into Dante's Divine Comedy. It has heavens and purgatory and hell and so forth. So there would be people in bliss, laughing, smiling, their arms spread like they were angels, having the most ecstatic experiences. There would be people in the middle who were working stuff out with their bodies, things that were tight that would want to open. And every kind of possible sound would come.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  There were a lot of people in a birth experience because, like psychedelics of different kinds, one of the doorways you go through is in your regression, is to relive your birth. And so there would be people pushing and being squeezed and going through a process that was both physical, but more than that, it mirrored what their birth was like. And then there would be people reliving incredible traumas of different kinds, birth traumas, childhood traumas, and so forth. And they were encouraged to go through it and let it all out. There would be laughter, there would be the sounds of ecstasy, and there'd be people crying and screaming, and you'd all at the same time with this pounding music.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  And you're like, what is this? The result of it, to kind of cut to the chase, once the music quieted down and people are invited to make some art and then talk about it, is that, and Stan's work is this, if you trust the body and psyche and heart and mind to open, and you give it the opportunity and the medicine, and someone's with you, so you're not alone, it wants to open. And whatever's unfinished wants to come out, or whatever needs to be expressed. And if there isn't something that's waiting there, then it becomes the doorway to the realms of profound, both awakening, freedom, understanding, beautiful things.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  And one of the great sayings that Stan offered as we all began this collective journey was from our friend Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, who said, "If you're to do this inner work..." You either need a very big story, like the vastness of the universe that has what we could see in front of us, heavens and hells and, you know, the hungry ghosts and the jealous gods and everybody all enacting it. Either you need a very big story, or even better, no story at all. And this scene was really the scene of the gateway to the human heart and the human psyche. This is who we are, what we carry.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  And then we shrink down a bit as we need to in our roles to be a parent or an artist or a business person and so forth. But they're really kind of a contraction of this enormous spirit that we were born with and that we carry. So how's that for an opening scene?

• 14:09Tim Ferriss?

  Divine comedy of expansive states. I think it's a great place to start. And I'll add just a few things to that. And then I will have numerous questions that come to mind. So the first is for people who may wonder about the scope of Stan's experience. He's probably in some way directly or indirectly supervised at least 1,500 sessions. I remember when I spoke with him quite a number of years ago.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  LSD sessions?

• 14:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Thousands of them.

• 14:39Tim Ferriss?

  Thousands.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:39Tim Ferriss?

  So the breadth of experience that he has in witnessing in a clinical setting, how these things affect consciousness and also outcomes is vast. It's really vast. The second is holotropic breathwork. For people who need just a bit more in the visual in terms of conjuring an image of what you just described, the pounding music really can be pounding music.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's really can be very, very loud. And I've had some really bizarre experiences going through holotropic breathwork, which I don't do that often. And I may be doing something incorrectly, but I tend to have, speaking of pounding, a pounding headache the day after from the breathwork. However, I've had some really unusual experiences that I didn't go in trying to confirm. So I didn't go in with the expectancy of these experiences. But later I was told that it was sometimes referred to as yogic sleep. Maybe you have some thoughts related to this. But the experience of breathing as hard as I can, I take these directions very literally.

• 15:47Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm really going for the gold medal of of heavy breathing, sweating profusely. And having the experience of, subjectively, a gap in time where I haven't fallen asleep in the physiological sense that most people would conjure, but I've gone blank. And then I come to and I'm still breathing as intensely as I was. But I had these gaps that would pop up repeatedly. Do you make anything of that?

• 16:22Speaker 03

  There's a beautiful old yogic text that details eight kinds of yogic swoons.

• 16:30Tim Ferriss?

  Swoons.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Not a word we use very often, but basically it's description of what it's like to leave our ordinary consciousness and either go to a place where it's the void, where there's nothing, or the sense of profound emptiness, but there's still some awareness, there's a variety of them. And some of them have a huge impact on us when we experience it. It's as if, oh, the whole world that we've constructed is a little bit like a dream. And we'd step out of that dream of our identity. And here we are, coming back into this dream. And it puts it in an incredible perspective.

• 17:06Tim Ferriss?

  Raises a lot of questions also, whether it's in my experience that I described. Certainly you can have some interesting responses with, say, tetany and the lobster claws from the breathing, when the hands get pulled in, you start puckering at the mouth, just physiologically due to various changes in the blood. But, and I should note for folks, I have Quite a few friends who have trained or done weekend courses in holotropic breathwork. It is not standard that people have headaches afterwards. I haven't experienced that. For whatever reason, I just drew the Joker card on that, but I have found it very helpful. I've also experienced with breath workers in Baltimore specifically, the approach of

• 17:50Tim Ferriss?

  holotropic minus 40% intensity. You can still seemingly reach some very, let's call them alternative experiences of consciousness. But if we put that type of practice aside, even my experiences in some cases with, say, surgeries and anesthesia, where I'm given a push of Versed before I go under, and the last thing I remember is them asking me to switch from, say, a gurney to a table, but they afterwards tell me that I was conversing freely, following directions, cracking jokes for 20 minutes afterwards, which I have no recollection of.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Who was that?

• 18:25Tim Ferriss?

  Who was that? Exactly. Who was that? If the primary observer that I have constructed as this identity of the self was not that, who was that? So if you look back at your life, you've had some very unusual experiences from the vantage point of, let's just say, most Westerners who are raised in the secular society without mindfulness practice. You've spent a lot of time in silence. You've had the experience of metabolizing your anger wrapped in all sorts of clothing. And we've explored these in previous conversations. We probably won't get into all the weeds. But how do you think

• 19:07Tim Ferriss?

  of, this is a big question, but consciousness as it stands right now? Or is that a bad question?

• 19:15Speaker 03

  It's a central, a really important question and kind of connecting it with, starting with that scene of seeing Dante's realms all laid out and the people, you know, in ecstasy and those in agony and everybody in between. One more thing to say about it, because some people say, well, that's too fast. If you've got a trauma, it's not right. Of course, nothing's right for everyone, but there are two ways to go with this. One, which was Stan's way, is just, as you said, go for the goal. Just keep going. And the people he trained. To sit with you, if something was opening up and it took a long time, they would take all night and sit there with you as you breathed, or screamed, or wept, or just lay there quietly, until you felt you had been able to experience it all

• 19:59Speaker 03

  and come back to a place of presence. Now, some other people say, "Oh, you have to resource the trauma away. You have to get more quiet and strengthen yourself before you even approach your trauma, and that's better for you." Neither of these are the right way, but I'm glad there is this spectrum. For me, entering that room or doing that work throws me into the place of being the conscious witness of it all. And my deepest experiences, whether it's through long meditation, I spent more than a year in silence doing, in this little hut, doing intensive meditation 18, 20 hours a day,

• 20:42Speaker 03

  or whether it's psychedelic experiences, which were equally profound, or other things. Who we are is consciousness. And there's a couple of levels, there's a lot of levels to it. One, I can say, "You're not your body." Clearly, your physical body changes all the time, so it's not who you are. You rent it, you get to use it. You're not your emotions. They're always changing, like the tide. You're definitely not your thoughts, at least I hope not, in most cases, certainly for me and people I know. Who you are, you could say, is the consciousness that was born into your body and that will leave it. And we could talk about death and how consciousness leaves. But there's a deeper level than that,

• 21:23Speaker 03

  to know that not only are you that as consciousness, but more profoundly, it's all consciousness. That at the deepest level, what I've experienced...

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Is that there is, whether you call it primordial consciousness, or a field of consciousness, that the creative principle that creates all things, and we're a piece of that, or a part of that. And there are all kinds of beautiful myths that talk about how consciousness wants to explore all the possibilities it can be, or it is the creative of the universe. There's the void, and then out of the void comes creativity and all these myriad forms. When you experience this, and it's not a philosophy, you understand that this is a play. The Hindus call it the leela, the play of the divine, or something like that. And it doesn't mean you don't have to take care of your part. The play is in theater.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  The play is in theater. The play of the divine, and it doesn't mean that you don't have to play your part. As Ram Dass would say, you know, remember your true nature and your social security number, right? You have to remember both. And that's part of the very interesting paradox of waking up, knowing that what you are is consciousness itself. You are awareness. You're not all those other things. You are the awareness that's experiencing these things. When you know that, it gives you a kind of freedom, a sense of well-being and freedom, within which you can go through all the things you do as a human being.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  But some part of it behind that is smiling and going, wow, I hope I say this when I die, like, wow, what a ride, you know? That it's been quite... And some of it is painful and tragic, but with that perspective, there's a place of wisdom. I'm gonna read you something. It's just a not very long... Please. Few lines from the Tao to Jing. All the time in the world. "If you don't realize the source consciousness, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused,

• 23:45Speaker 03

  kind-hearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and even when death comes, it's okay, you are ready."

• 24:00Speaker 03

  And so it's a kind of 3,000 year old or 2,000 year old description of the consciousness, where you're both disinterested and amused, and at the same, kind-hearted and attentive. And it's the wedding of that universal dimension with this mystery of actually being a human being, which is what you've done. Then you can enter, or you go to Japan, or you say, "All right, let's play this game. Let's do martial arts. Let's do business." But you do it with less fear and attachment, and much more with the delight of the game.

• 24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It makes me think that you're, to come back to the play term, sort of, you're aware of the movies that you are watching, or the games that you are choosing to play, but you have that outside witness perspective, so that you don't necessarily identify or grip too strongly onto those things.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that includes your own personality. And again, just because I'm thinking of him in this regard, refer to Ram Dass. He talked about his personalities being like his pet, you know, and he would see his neurosis. And he said, "You think that getting wiser and more enlightened, that all would go away?" He said, "It doesn't. He's just, I've adopted it. It's my pet. I feed it. I say, 'Thank you,' you know, but I know it's not who I am." And from that place, even the kind of great suffering that many of us have in our lives, of people that we love who've died, and we can hold it with great tenderness, but it's not a surprise. It's like, "Oh, this too. This is

• 25:40Speaker 03

  part of what it is to be human." And, you know, someone dies, and from that perspective, it was their time.

• 25:48Tim Ferriss?

  So, a quick question for you, related to the Joseph Campbell quote that you mentioned earlier. I'd love for you just to elaborate on that a little bit, maybe what it means to you, that you either need a really big story, right, one of maybe a cosmovision or a mythology, or better still, no story at all. What does that mean to you?

• 26:10Speaker 03

  So I have a friend, Roger Walsh, MD, PhD, is on the faculty of Stanford Medical School, written a lot of books, is both a mystic and a... Psychiatrist and other things. And being somewhat scholarly, he decided to read through the entire encyclopedia of world religions. From Ahura Mazda all the way to Zoroaster and everything in between.

• 26:32Tim Ferriss?

  Underachiever.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Exactly. So I said to him afterwards, I said, Roger, you read the whole damn thing. What did you get out of it? And he said, what I saw is that every religion has a story of the origin of the world. It is a story of some kind about how to navigate gain and loss, praise and blame, you know, good and bad, he said. Usually has a story about death and afterlife. They're all very different stories. They're quite compelling. They're all different stories. And when I was finished, I realized human beings need to tell a story and place it on top of the mystery. Because without the stories, then we would be in the

• 27:16Speaker 03

  present with the mystery of being alive with the universe. But for most of us, we want a story. And so these are the big stories that humanity has written.

• 27:26Tim Ferriss?

  What is the alternative of no story? Because when I think of no story, that actually strikes terror into my heart because I imagine this free-floating nihilism or meaninglessness. And I understand experientially in some of these alternate modes of experience through psychedelics and so on, that you can have the experience of no story. No time, no name, no self. I understand. Or I shouldn't say I understand that. I've experienced it. I definitely can't claim to understand it. But what does the alternative mean to you?

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Well, this is really important because it's as if you're talking to some Zen monk somewhere and they talk about emptiness and you go, oh shit. It's like, how do I deal with that? How do I, you know, buy a new car? Or how do I, you know, take care of my family or things like that? So it's a really important question. And there are a couple of, we've talked about a number of levels. One level is the more opinions you have about the way things are, the more trouble you have. And one of my favorite passages, the Buddhist texts aren't really full of a lot of jokes and humor, but there's one place where the Buddha says, "And those who cling to their opinions go around the world annoying one another."

• 28:44Speaker 03

  You know, and that's, that's an observation that holds true thousands of years later. Sounds like Twitter. So we know that. The more we're attached to our view, because whatever you're thinking, or whatever you view, there is an alternative. It's not the only view. So on this level, what my Korean Zen master, De Seng San, Sansanim, said, is to keep a "don't-know mind," or Suzuki Roshi calls it "beginner's mind," where you meet somebody fresh, where you go into circumstances. So that's part of not having this story, but it's a much more positive cast on it. Then the second is that without having that story,

• 29:22Speaker 03

  then it's replaced in somehow by a sense of, I don't know quite words, wonder, value, meaning, a sense both of the vastness of things, and also the delight in being incarnated as a human being. And so with that, like the Tao Te Ching says, you remember the source, which is you are consciousness. That's who you are. And you get to witness this. You are the awareness, the loving awareness. Then your story might be, all right, I am the loving awareness. As, you know, as you are, as everyone who's listening, you are a loving awareness. And you get to then embody and enact in this world.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  And then you get to choose how. And it turns out, in...

• 30:13Speaker 03

  Our direct experience, that there are ways we can act that bring understanding, connection, joy, happiness, well-being, and ways we can act that create suffering. In the Buddhist teachings, the Buddha said, "I do not answer philosophical questions." People would all these, "What's the first beginning? What is all the meaning of karma? How, all of this, what's the story?" And he would say, "I just teach how human beings can release themselves from suffering and fear and confusion, and live with the innate freedom that is their birthright. That's what I teach." That is a story. It's my favorite story, I think, in this life,

• 30:54Speaker 03

  because there is suffering and difficulty in incarnation. There are causes that human beings can understand, and there's freedom. When Nelson Mandela walked out of Robben Island prison after 27 years, that's a long time, you know? That's, was half his life in that prison, with such magnanimity and graciousness and compassion. He not only changed to South Africa, but he somehow changed the imagination of the world. They can put your body in prison, but no one can imprison your spirit or your consciousness. And when you know this deeply, then there comes a different innate kind of story,

• 31:39Speaker 03

  which is one more deeply of connectedness and care.

• 31:45Tim Ferriss?

  Stan Grof, to return to our dear friend Stanislav,

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:49Tim Ferriss?

  has written a lot of books. He mentioned he's a polymath, he truly is, and he's prolific also in his writing. There is one book, it may be two volumes, and I can't recall offhand, called The Cosmic Game.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  One volume, The Cosmic Game.

• 32:06Tim Ferriss?

  One volume, all right. Why does this book, of all of his books?

• 32:12Tim Ferriss?

  Grab your attention, or why is it meaningful?

• 32:15Speaker 03

  It does. I'm glad you named it because he explores the very questions you're asking. Not only who are you, but he also shows, suppose we were to have a world that didn't have loss, didn't have conflict, didn't have disease, didn't have the kind of troubles that we live. What would that world be like? And he explores, and you kind of follow along with his exploration, how it is that the world that we live in somehow has been manufactured in some way, what there is to learn from it. And what's beautiful about it is that he says, I think,

• 32:55Speaker 03

  in the beginning, that he took the records from 5,000 LSD sessions and from the deepest understandings in the height. And a lot of the people who did those sessions were also people who were already meditators or yogis or martial arts masters or in some way, and shaman people who had already a very deep spiritual perspective. And he collated them and he said, here's what we as human beings, when the gates between the worlds open, this is how it looks, which is really compelling. He's so clear that he doesn't want to say, this is how it is, or how I think it is. He said, this is what 5,000 people report from the height or the deepest of their experiences.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  And you go, oh, yeah, I've seen that. I know that that's true.

• 33:43Tim Ferriss?

  All right. I need to dig back in and get into the cosmic game. So I'll get that on my Kindle for my upcoming travels.

• 33:52Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.

• 34:38Tim Ferriss?

  So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 34:56Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about something perhaps that many people listening will identify with, or at least recognize in their daily experience, and that is anxiety. And maybe we could just define terms and look at anxiety as fear of the future. You could also define it differently, could be pre-experiencing the worst case scenario. I really don't know how you would like to define it, but if you wouldn't mind digging into that and share any approaches that you think are helpful, practices, thought exercises for people who are suffering from anxiety, that would be very helpful.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  I was gonna say that word before you said it. So we're somehow riding some current, we'll see where it takes us. And if we're still in the same boat as we go through the raft.

• 35:50Tim Ferriss?

  Learning how to paddle, we'll see.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Anxiety is a big, but also a really important question. And the first thing to note is that we're living in a time of tremendous cultural anxiety. Even in places where there was warfare or starvation or things when there were very small groups of people, there was still a kind of basic, I know who my family is, I know where the land is, you know, we'll have the food or we won't, but everything is up for up in certain ways. There's a kind of upheaval now of identity, where we live, who we are and so forth, that's accelerating. And it's been accelerated, of course, for all kinds of things. And now we'll get to it, certainly been accelerated by technology. And we're on the cusp on the roller coaster ride, you know, the click, click, click, click, as you go, as you're going up to the top.

• 36:37Tim Ferriss?

  You ratchet up.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Right. And, and the little sign that you got your ticket for said, AI, go, go on this ride. So we'll get to that. I, I want to, but anyway, so there, there's the anxiety, there's the economy anxiety, there's the collective anxiety about climate, there's racial and economic injustice that's really in our forefront. And then there's the human anxiety of our own family and people going through things of loneliness and economic insecurity. So first thing to say, there's a whole bunch of things that might be helpful. The image that I like to start with is an archetypal one of the Buddha seated under the tree of enlightenment. The night of his enlightenment, before he was enlightened,

• 37:22Speaker 03

  the Indian god named Mara, who is the god of greed, fear, hatred, aggression, all of the forces of suffering, appeared and said, what are you trying to do to the Buddha? And this is the way he appeared. He said, you have no idea what you're dealing with. And he said, let me show you this enlightenment stuff. And so he paraded before him all the most beautiful dancing bikinis and gilded chariots, the Lamborghinis of the time. And the Buddha said, you know, been there, done that. Thank you. Okay. And then he said, well, you, you know, you have no right to be there. And he started throwing flaming arrows and swords and the Buddha lifted his hand and touched them all with compassion and they

• 38:07Speaker 03

  turned to flower petals. Cool. Then Mara said, you don't even know who you are. You don't know what you're doing. And there's no reason for you to be sitting here. And then Mara came basically in the form of doubt. And at that point, the Buddha put his hand down and touched the earth and said, will you bear witness to my right as a human being here halfway between heaven and earth to awaken to the way things are?

• 38:33Tim Ferriss?

  Keep that one more time. Heaven and earth or heaven and hell?

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Between heaven and earth. We didn't get to hell yet. If you want to go there, we can go there later. But between halfway between heaven and earth in this human form, be my witness that we human beings have the right to see clearly, not with delusion, not with doubt. And then Mara appeared again, and the Buddha just looked at Mara and said,

• 38:56Speaker 03

  I see you Mara, I see who you are. And the minute he said that clearly Mara dissolved. Now, what people don't know in the Buddhist texts is that after his enlightenment, Mara came back to visit the Buddha quite a few times. You think there's enlightened retirement, but Mara's part of the game. And Thich Nhat Hanh has a really beautiful image about this, where he sets the scene of the Buddha sitting in a cave. And again, the Buddha really is a stand-in for your awakened self. Sitting in a cave, mouth of a cave, meditating, and his attendant is there and Mara appears. And his attendant tries to chase Mara away. And the Buddha says, "Ananda, is that my old friend Mara? Set out some tea, let us sit down."

• 39:41Speaker 03

  And he says, "Is that you Mara?" And usually, all that it takes is for the Buddha to say, "Is that you Mara, or I see you Mara?" And Mara looks and kind of sadly slinks away, if you will. So the first thing about anxiety is to acknowledge that it's entirely human, that there are cultural reasons for it, and that there are physiological reasons, that we have fear, and we have fear of loss, and all of those things. And to be able to name it and say, "Oh, this is anxiety. It feels this way in my body. Your hands sweat, your breath stops, your heart. And it's hard to feel, it's unpleasant in the body." And then it has its thoughts, we'll get to those in a minute.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  And what you can do in naming Mara, you can say, "Oh, anxiety, I see you, I feel you." So that's the first thing. And already, you start to step halfway back from it as the witness. So that already begins to liberate you a little bit. And then the next thing is you can also say, "Thank you for trying to protect me." Because if you fight against the anxiety, what that is, is more anxiety. Oh my God, I got it rid of it. I hate it. But instead, it's almost like you take a little bow. Okay Mara, I see you. Thank you for trying to protect me. Because that's what it's trying to do. And you remember that statement from Mark Twain? Where he said, "My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened."

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Right? So, these are the stories. You meant sort of the advanced stories. Say, "Thank you Mara, I see you. Thanks for trying to protect me." Then the next thing is to know that there's something called the wisdom of insecurity. That it's actually okay to be insecure. My monastic teachers would say, "It's uncertain, isn't it?" We could ask them all kinds of things. "Tell me about enlightenment." My teacher would laugh. He'd say, "It's uncertain, isn't it?" He wanted us just to get comfortable with uncertainty. And then, what happens is when you realize that you can't know, that you come back into the present moment. And then, the next thing to do with anxiety is ground your senses. Feel your feet on the floor, or maybe go out in nature.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Stand there with a tree. Feel the roots of the tree and imagine your own feet as roots into the earth. And notice the wind comes and the storms and all those things happen. But the tree is rooted and it can stay there and you can be the same. You can let the storms of thoughts and fears and so forth arise. So that's another practice you can do. Then, you can question your thoughts. And this is more the beautifully spelled out by Byron Katie, for example, who has these practices of questioning your thought. Says, "What if that thought isn't true? How can you know that thought is true?" And if you look deeply, you can't know it. And you get to a place of realizing that your thoughts are tentative.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  They're a creation. And you say, "Thank you. Thank you for trying to protect me." And again, you become the witness of those thoughts. Then a few more very simple things that you can do. You can find where you feel the anxiety most strongly in your body. And once you feel it, you can feel into its elements. Is it hot or cold? Is it hard or soft? Is it vibrating, the earth, air, fire? So you really get close into it. You can ask it what stories it tells, because it'll have a story. And then you say, again, not only thank you, thank you for trying to protect me, but you wrap it with kindness, with loving awareness, and say, thank you. I know you're worried.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  I can respect you and hold you with kindness and compassion. And you know that that's not who you are. This is a part, it's something, it's common for human beings. You say, I respect this. And who I am is honoring you, and so much bigger than who you are. And you feel yourself, literally, being both the witness, the grounded one, the I know you, I see you Mara. And you become more the Buddha, rather than the one who's caught by all these things.

• 43:49Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say a bit more about asking, for instance, in this case, the anxiety, what stories it tells? Maybe give an example, whether from your personal experience, someone else's, or just a hypothetical, what that might look like? Because it's the first time I've heard that, and that piques my curiosity.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  So it's a beautiful question, because one of the things that I've learned all over these years is that you can have, the sufis call it a sobat, a conversation with the heart. And if you let yourself get quiet, it might be after a little walk in the woods, or just sitting quietly, taking a cup of tea, or something that you like to drink, and letting yourself quiet down, or meditating if you want to. And when you get quiet, you can have an inner conversation, and there's information that's waiting there for you to ask. So, for example, since we're talking about anxiety, and you want to have a conversation with it,

• 44:52Speaker 03

  you can say to the anxiety, where do I feel you most strongly in my body? Okay, that's a pretty simple one.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  Then you can say, ask the anxiety, what is the thing you're most afraid of? Usually, it will be something like loss, death, something huge. Okay, he's like, hey, thank you. Get quiet and say, tell me the story you have about it. And then your anxiety will answer and it will say, well, if you lose your job, which we're afraid you will, you'll be out on the street, you'll be homeless, people will beat up on you, then you'll be in the hospital, or you'll become whatever, and there's a whole disaster scenario. And you can say, yes, thank you, I hear your story. Then there's another interesting question. So, all these are things you can ask, and if you're willing to ask and get quiet and listen, usually your body and your heart will answer.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Then there's another really important question, or two that you can ask. What is the most important thing I need to learn from you? And it will give you an answer. I want you to pay attention, or I want you to take care of your financial affairs, so I don't have to worry so much, you know? Or I want you to make sure you have friends who know where you are, whatever it happens to be, or some bigger story. And then you can step out of the anxiety, and this is a really beautiful one, and get quiet and ask, what is my best intention of how I want to live this next month, or this next year? If I only had a year to live, what style, how do I want to live this? Because anxiety also has time in it.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  And so, you're sort of stepping out of time and say, alright, so my time's limited. How do I want to live? What is my deepest intention? And if you pause and ask, your heart will answer.

• 46:40Tim Ferriss?

  So, this may tie into my next question, it might not, but you mentioned this MD/PhD earlier, and you said, as you told the story of his digesting this gigantic encyclopedia, you said, "End a mystic," and then you moved on to say what you said. And since you mentioned Sufism, that also brought the word mystic or mysticism to mind for me. What does that mean to you, someone being a mystic?

• 47:13Speaker 03

  I'm afraid that it's sort of gotten relegated to the realm of religion. Okay, the Sufis have their mystics and there were the Christian desert father mystics or the Zen mystics or something. And that's true. These are people who are really interested in some way in vast spiritual experiences and understanding. But it puts it outside of ourself. We all, in that sense, are open to mystery when we quiet. How the hell did you get into this body? You know, you take a look, look in the, look in the damn mirror. There are these weird round things that we call eyes and protuberances from your head that stick out. Mine stick out pretty far. My ears, God made fun of as a kid. You know, you open your mouth and the tongue

• 47:56Speaker 03

  comes out and there's this hole in your body into which you keep stuffing dead plants and animals and grinding them up with these bones that hang down, right? And glugging them down through the tube and you move it. It's weird watching how people, you fall one direction bipeds and then you catch yourself and you fall the next direction. How did you get in there? And if you don't think that's weird, pay attention when you're making love. It's a fabulous thing to do. I'm completely, you know, love it. It's bizarre. It is. Okay, you know, whatever way you do it, licking, putting this in that part of that body or that and so forth, or a little whatever. I mean, it's weird. So how did you get in here? So we don't have to go to the Sufi mystics or the, or the whatever. It's really more mystery.

• 48:42Tim Ferriss?

  Is the mystical, in this sense, and this is my placeholder way of thinking about it, the direct experience of the mystery or seeking the direct, unmediated experience of that mystery? Is that one way to think about it?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a nice way to say it. I might want to change the word seeking to opening to it. And just to be really direct with you who are listening, you know what I'm talking about. You have had experiences, whether it's walking in the high mountains, or taking psychedelics and meditating, if that's your want or your avenue. You've had it listening to an amazing piece of music, or going into an incredible cathedral or a forest of the sequoias and redwoods of wonder, or you know it from making love. You know it even more from being there at the birth of a child. You go, "Whoa, here's a whole new human being."

• 49:45Speaker 03

  And my beloved wife, Trudy Goodman, who's also a meditation teacher in LA, inside LA, is her center. She was 21 years old, she was giving birth to her daughter, and by circumstance, she was in a hospital room alone. It was like in the 60s and it was the old-style birth, basically, and they left her alone. And she had no idea, her body just started contracting and going through these things incredibly painful. And she didn't understand it in a deep way at all, no one had sort of explained how it happened. She said, "And then, all of a sudden, it was late afternoon, it was in what the French call "le bleu," the blue hour of kind of transition between day and night."

• 50:28Speaker 03

  She said, "And all of a sudden, it wasn't my body. My body was doing its thing, delivering this child, but I became all-mothers. I could feel that I was in a chain of being that went back to a million lives before, one mother after another birthing people out of their body and would continue. And there was this incredible sense of being part of this huge mystery of life recreating itself." She said, "Afterward, I was walking down the street, and I looked at all these people, I say, 'They all came out of a woman's vagina. You know, how could that be?'" I mean, so you want to look at mystery, it's staring us in the face. Got it. We are that. Don't have to be a whirling dervish.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  You don't have to be a whirling dervish. There are all kinds of ways. So we all know this from somewhere, and even more so, sitting with someone when they die. Because there you are, especially if it's a reasonably conscious or peaceful death, that person is there, and you might be able to talk to them, or there's some sense of them being conscious. And then as quietly as a falling star, consciousness leaves the body. And it's meat, it's just dead, you know, it's like at the butcher. I mean, I'm being really graphic, but that's all it is, is this cold, you know, flesh. It's so clear that it's not that person. And you go, whoa, the gates between the worlds have opened, like, who are we?

• 51:55Speaker 03

  So you want that, baby, it's around you, it's here.

• 52:04Tim Ferriss?

  I think we're at an intersection.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 52:07Tim Ferriss?

  Where I'm going to bring up something just opportunistically because it's on my mind. And this has somehow popped up on my radar. I want to say at least twice, I don't know what it is. I literally have a Wikipedia page open, but why go on Wikipedia when I have you right here?

• 52:26Speaker 03

  And you could use chatbot and it would answer.

• 52:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I could use a chatbot, I could use a chatbot.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  The human chatbot will speak, go ahead.

• 52:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's right. So, you know, why use AI when you can use organic intelligence?

• 52:38Speaker 03

  J K I.

• 52:39Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly, J K I. Jhana practice, am I pronouncing that correctly?

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:44Tim Ferriss?

  What is Jhana practice?

• 52:46Speaker 03

  Okay, so Jhana practice, now you're getting down into the technical weeds of certain kinds of Buddhist practices.

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  This got sent to me out of left field.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  I know, okay. So, one of the things that's true about the dimensions of deep meditation practice is that we, human beings, have a capacity to concentrate our attention. In meditation practices, there are two major dimensions. One is the dimension of awareness. It can be mindfulness or devotion or something, where you open to the mystery of things unfolding, thoughts appearing, emotions, or you create certain emotions of love, compassion, joy, all of those things. The other is the dimension of concentration, where you focus deeply on one thing generally.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  It can be a candle flame, or a mantra, or a particular emotion like love, or your breath. And there's a beautiful biblical phrase where it says, if thine I be single, then the gates of heavens open, or something like that. When you start to get very concentrated, several things happen.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Your thoughts start to disappear. To be concentrated means you're focused on an experience like the breath or a light, and the thoughts quiet down and gradually they go away. Not easy to do for most people, but it's possible. And then as you get more concentrated on the breath, or a mantra, or whatever you've chosen, and you do it over and over again, it becomes a doorway. The next thing that happens is that inner forms of light will appear. So there you're sensing your breath. We use that as an example, but it could be other things. And as you do, the thoughts start to get quiet, and then the sense, as you feel your breath, is not only is there breath, but around your nostrils, or your throat, or wherever you're

• 54:39Speaker 03

  paying attention, your body. And the field starts to fill with light, because consciousness is made of light. So light will appear. And then with it comes, quite spontaneously, qualities of deep joy and happiness, and incredible steadiness and inner peacefulness. And when these qualities start to arise, they are the gateway to a whole series of what are called jhanas or samadhi states. The deepest ones, you no longer see or hear what's happening around you. You're so absorbed in the light, or the bliss, or the sense of peacefulness and well-being,

• 55:21Speaker 03

  that everything else disappears, and you're in a realm that's just filled with light and stillness and peace. And you can move around from one realm to another, several different flavors of them. The closest thing I can describe to it is, if you're a diver, and you're out on the water, and there's waves, and the sun shining and things, and then you go under the surface of the water, and everything becomes silent. You know, there's waves on the surface, they have nothing to do with you. And instead, you're in this vast, timeless, silent realm.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  The purpose of training to go into these kind of states is twofold. One is, it gives you some skill in navigating in your consciousness and mind. So you don't have to live, if there's a lot of, whatever it is, anxiety, or conflict, or things around you, you can actually stabilize yourself, become quite stable. It gives a kind of faith, "Oh, the mind actually can be trained." But the other is that from that stillness, then you can see or listen more deeply. To concentrate is a little bit like polishing the lens of consciousness. So that whether it's a microscope or a telescope, when you're very concentrated, the beginning, you notice there are thoughts, then you notice the thoughts at the end.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Then you're more concentrated, you notice at the beginning of a thought, "Oh, it's about to arise." Then you notice the impulse for thoughts to come. It's like a little burp that's coming out of the brain, you know? And then you see the space around thoughts, where they're born before they're even there. And then you look into the body, and at first you see hot or cold. And then it pixelates with deeper concentration, and you see all the elements that make it up. So this is like the microscope. Or you point it outward, and consciousness becomes vast, like the sky. And there's no bounds to it, it's timeless. So these kind of states of consciousness give you access to the telescope and the microscope, and the information that comes through that doorway. How's that?

• 57:21Tim Ferriss?

  That's great. You had me at pixelate. So, another question about this, and I suspect we've talked about this-

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Nobody ever asked me this on the air before, so this is fun. Okay, keep going.

• 57:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so let's go. So, I hear your description, and it grabs my attention and interest. And I would love to experience these states. I consider myself good at being a diligent practitioner. So I've trained in sports, I've done many things consistently over extended periods of time. My felt experience of meditation is that it's done regularly on a daily basis in small doses. I experience an improved quality of life, decreased reactivity, but I doubt my own ability to reliably achieve the type of states that you're describing, which is part

• 58:14Tim Ferriss?

  of the reason, and now I'm not married to that belief, but I think part of the appeal for a lot of people with, say psychedelics, is in most cases with sufficient dosing, you're probably going to feel something.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:28Tim Ferriss?

  And that is not to say that should be the sole tool, or that people should be a hammer looking for nails with psychedelics, because there are risks and trade-offs and so on. That is just a very long-winded way of asking, to get to a point where you would feel reasonably confident that someone could achieve these types of states, are we talking about five years, 10 years, 15 years? In some instances, it's like 10 people pursue this, they do it for 10 years, and then only three of them experience these states. I fear the possibility that I would dedicate to a long-term practice and then, for whatever reason, just not have the capability.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  So now, this is a really important question, and it's more than about jhana.

• 59:12Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  Even though I'm happy to talk about it, because it's fun to talk about, I'm also a little bit reluctant, because it can mislead people or feed into a kind of spiritual, not spiritual materialism, but idealism of some kind. Okay, I've heard about these states, and then, or you go and you read these Zen stories, and okay, then they worked on their koan, and finally whack the master, hits them, and then they have this great revelation, or other things like that. Jhana is completely unnecessary for wisdom. It's the kind of thing that yogis and people who devote themselves to meditation, some of them can do, some can't. It depends, there's sort of light levels and then very deep levels of this. If you want to do a light level jhana...

• 59:57Speaker 03

  There are several ingredients. One is you probably have to have a certain temperament or inclination to be able to do it. And that's probably, you know, a third of people. Not everyone can do it. And then you need to go on retreat. If you want deep jhana, you need to go on long retreats. What is long? Just because I know your reference point may be different than most. Like a month, or two months, or three months, long practice. If you want to have some kind of initial experience, a good friend of mine, a colleague named Lee Brazington, leads 10-day retreats and you can have experience. And it's fun to play with. It's completely unnecessary. Now I want to talk about enlightenment, because the point of all this is, if you divide

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  it, there are experiences, and then there's understanding or being. And the experiences that we have, you mentioned psychedelic experiences, which I deeply respect, whether it's jhana experience, or deep insight and meditations of different kinds that we do, or other spiritual experiences. You can be the dervish, as you mentioned, whirling, and it's such a beautiful thing to see and to do, and the world starts to dissolve. Most of these practices dissolve the separate sense of self. And you're there, as Alice Walker wrote of one character, "One day I was sitting there like a motherless child," which I was, "and it come to me that feeling of being a part of everything, and I knew

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laugh, and I cry, I run all around the house. In fact, when it happens, you can't miss it." So, there are all these doorways that open us beyond the separate sense of self, which that sense of small self, it's sometimes called the body of fear, that limited self dissolves. Hallelujah, they're great. I've played with jhana, I've taken psychedelics, I've done shamanic things, all these, I've had a bunch of experiences. And part of it gives me a kind of confidence, okay, I know this territory. Part of it is deeper than that, in the most profound places, as we

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  talked about, I know that who I am is not this body. I know that who I am is consciousness. Then the game is not about the experiences, it's about who you are, who I am, as we manifest in the world. And the way that I most express enlightenment at this point is not somebody who's had a lot of these experiences in all these years. My understanding really is that it comes down to love. I've met swamis and llamas and gurus and mamas and everybody else in between in my industry, and some of them are fabulous. But there's a really interesting thing that

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  you can have these powerful experiences and still be a little bit of a jerk, just getting real about it, you know?

• 1:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  There's a lot of that going around.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Because our consciousness is like a mandala, and we can awaken some dimensions of it. So you have an Olympic level athlete who's an emotional idiot. You have a professor of nuclear physics, most brilliant, and she can't find her shoes or her body. We can develop ourselves in some areas, but it turns out unfortunately that doesn't always go over to another area. And so there's a kind of halo effect where people think, oh, this person is a spiritual teacher and they've had these spiritual experiences. I'll go ask them for marriage advice, or advice for sexuality. They don't know shit about marriage.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  So this is our human nature. If we're actually to become wise, we need to direct our attention to body, to emotions, to relationships, to thought. We actually need to become wise in those major dimensions of our life. And we can't expect that of people just because they have a certain title or robe or anything else. But having said that, my measure now for myself, are you loving? Am I loving? Are they? And that love isn't just like, oh, sweet Valentine love, but it's can you be in this world and can you love it with all its imperfections? And can you bring that spirit of care and love in the middle of what's tragic and what's beautiful? That's a liberated heart.

• 1:04:16Tim Ferriss?

  So, love, let's underscore this. For people who are listening, this might sound like a really strange question, who are thinking to themselves, well, I love my dog, I love cheesecake, love my kids, if they have kids, let's say, but maybe they're like, I'm not sure if I would recognize or even know the feeling of what it is to love the world.

• 1:04:46Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe they feel like they might be colorblind to the first-person experience of feeling that. Is it just something they can intuit, or could you expand on that?

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  You remember Einstein said that the task for humanity is to widen our circle of compassion, or you could call it love, to include all of humanity and all of nature in its beauty. And so, we start by loving that which is right around us. It's natural, your dog, you know, your children, the partner, the people you care about, and maybe your neighbors. And now we're talking about, well, what is wisdom? And what is liberation? And it's that widening of the circle, so that when you're moving through the world, it's not just that person over there as an object, but they become more and more a part of your family.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  There's a beautiful monument to a mystical experience, going back to your asking about that, in Louisville, Kentucky, on, I think it's on Fourth Street, Fourth and Walnut. And the great Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, left his monastery and was walking down the street in the middle of Louisville. And he said, "I come from the monastery, we're all trying to be holy and close to God and have all these spiritual experiences, the way one does, and pray and so forth. And I was walking down the street, and all of a sudden, it came to me. I looked in the eyes of everyone going by, and I saw their secret beauty that was born in them, that no one can take from them, that magnificence of spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  He said, "The only problem would be, I wanted to fall down at their feet and worship each one that went by." He said, "If we could see each other that way, there'd be no more need for war and cruelty. The world would be a different place." So, this monument, a public monument to a mystical experience, what it does is it says that this is possible, but more than that, there are beautiful trainings to do it. One of my favorite trainings is trainings in loving-kindness meditation. There's bunches of it on my website, and Sharon Salzberg and Tara Brock, and lots of other colleagues and teachers. And it turns out, if you practice it, like anything... It grows. You start with people close to you and then those in a little wider circle

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  and gradually extend it. And for me, for example, I'm out on the street or I'm driving or something, and I'm a bit of a speed freak. You know, I can sit quiet in meditation, but my, my general MO is to get stuff done and move through the world, you know. And so if somebody's driving slowly and meandering and not being a good driver in front of me and I get annoyed, or even on the sidewalk, people are blocking it, not aware that I have something important to get done, whatever. And I feel a little moment of irritation arise, which it will. I look and I see them, not as they are now, but as they were at three, as I imagine them at three or four years old, completely innocent child, you know,

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  they all were that, no matter what things happened to them. And I go, oh yeah, I see who's in there. That's like mertensing. I see that there's that person doing the best they can, and there's that child that's in there. And instantly, my heart changes and I go, oh yeah, I wish them well. May they be safe and whatever dance they're in, may they be protected. And this quality of loving kindness and compassion, it's grown because I practice it some. It's where I want to live, but it's more than that. I see it or sense it as the best expression of enlightenment. All those other things

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  or experiences, they lead us back to love. And if they don't, I'm not sure that they matter that much. And we can learn it and become it.

• 1:08:38Tim Ferriss?

  So would you suggest maybe people use this objective or beacon of love versus enlightenment as a term? Because the word enlightenment has always bothered me because I've never had someone define it clearly for me in any way.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  Let's call it enlovenment. I just made it up, but.

• 1:08:58Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. Okay, great. Problem solved.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  We're, we're into enlovenment.

• 1:09:02Tim Ferriss?

  Pre-op problem solved. I also wanted to just take a side note because Joseph Campbell came up earlier and he has so many tremendous books. And one of them is called, I believe it's The Power of the Animal Spirits, which is this anthropological and historic overview of animal mythology across cultures. It's a beautiful hardcover book. It's gigantic. It's absolutely spectacularly illustrated with drawings and photographs and so on. Just to come back to the why you wouldn't ask your fill in the blank, right, your psychedelic practitioner automatically for marriage advice, for instance. Across the board, shamans in almost every culture are pretty much considered pains in the ass.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:47Tim Ferriss?

  Trickster, troublemakers.

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  Yes. And here you are, aspiring to be a shaman, Tim. You're in trouble.

• 1:09:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not in the shaman MBA program at present. Rule number one of tracking down shamans, if they call themselves a shaman, be very, very, very cautious. Might want to run the other way. It's kind of like if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him kind of situation. But let's shift to a moment to wisdom. And I would love to ask you, and this is a question that you can feel free to dissect in any way that you like, but who would you consider some of the wisest people you have met? And why? And/or what have you learned from them?

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  I could certainly go down the list. And I'll answer you explicitly. And then there's some place I want to go from here. But I studied with a guru in Bombay named Nisargadhat Maharaj. And there's a wonderful book of his or dialogues with him called I Am That, N-I-S-A-R-G-A-D-H-T-T-A. He had a little like beady cigarette stand. He was a kind of modest business person, but he had a wonderful guru that he met and he had some profound realization happen to him. And so groups of us would gather around and

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  One day, when I was with him over a course of a few years, I would go and visit him. Somebody says, "You're 80 years old." He was sort of getting toward the end of his life. "What do you think about your approaching death?" The kind of thing you want to ask a guru. And he looked back, completely affronted. And he says, "You are telling me I will die?" And the person said, "Well, aren't you?" He said, "That's just this body. It's made of, you know, chapatis and wheat flour and vegetables and some... You think I am... It's like saying I'm made of McDonald's? Is that who you think I am? You think I'm these feelings? You think I am, you know, these thoughts? You have no idea. This has nothing to do with me. I was never born, and I will never die.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  Who I am is beyond birth and death. I am the consciousness from which everything is born." And then later, he said, "Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything. Between these two, my life flows." So he was a pretty wise cat.

• 1:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, solid response.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  And Thich Nhat Hanh said sort of the same thing as he was dying. People, "Oh, God, Thai," as they called him, "you're gonna die." And he said, "I was never born. Look at a rain cloud, and it comes down as raindrops or snowflakes, and goes into the rivers and flows into the ocean, and then gets evaporated and becomes a cloud again. You think I can disappear? I am you, and you are me. We are life itself unfolding." And it's one thing to have him say it, but it was another to be with him and have him look you in the eye and say, "This is who we are." So there, of course, there's all these beautiful examples.

• 1:12:48Tim Ferriss?

  What are the most reliable approaches for eliciting the experience, the direct experience of non-self? And I say that because I don't recommend everyone use psychedelics. There are a lot of footnotes to any conversation on these compounds.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 1:13:10Tim Ferriss?

  They're so powerful. But that is how I've had my most direct experience of what you're describing, which has removed much of my fear of physical death.

• 1:13:25Tim Ferriss?

  I fear the descent to death. That's still there, but in terms of the light switch being flipped and being turned off, I don't have that much anxiety, at least at present, related to that. And I haven't for quite a while. A whole tube of breath work might be another tool. Are there other modalities that you think apply or could be applied to more people than powerful psychedelics?

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Of course. I mean psychedelics, they open a lot of doorways and they also need to be used with some discretion and some caution or discernment. As you say, it's just not a, you know, and definitely not just like, okay, let me take a high dose psychedelic and see what happens. You want set and setting. It has to be appropriate for you. All of those sort of things. It's really what we've been talking about, that there's a worldwide treasury now. We live in the treasury of the great spiritual teachings and practices. And you can go online and find masters and, you know, sages and llamas and mamas and so forth, many of whom are really, really good.

• 1:14:35Tim Ferriss?

  How do you separate the charlatans from the real McCoy, though?

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  It's just like, I don't know, I'm just sort of like chopping for a car. You know, the minute you walk in, if it's a sleazy salesperson, show them and it feels like this doesn't feel like it's a, you go somewhere else.

• 1:14:53Tim Ferriss?

  But there are so many jokers with large followings out there.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  Ah, yes. Well.

• 1:14:57Tim Ferriss?

  There really are. Any, any suggestions for the intrepid

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  I'm basically, I would say start.

• 1:15:04Tim Ferriss?

  car purchaser who's looking for a llama?

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  I'd say probably start with the name brands, although there's plenty of very widely known llamas and swamis and mamas who's also misused their position. What a good teacher wants is your dedication and your common sense. And if the common sense is thrown out, it's the wrong place for you. You really have to trust yourself as well. Now, you were asking about wisdom. I want to read you a few lines from a great Indian master named Atisha, and they're really instructions, because you say, okay, how do we do this? Yes, you can find practices, meditations, reflections, walking in the wilderness, things that will open your mind and your heart.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  Here's Atisha's instruction in something like eight lines, and they're really each is a kind of practice. The first one, "Consider all experiences to be dreams," that there's a dreamlike nature, and it is true. I mean, here we are, you and I are talking in April 2023. What happened to March? What happened to January? What happened to, you know, your childhood? Where did it go? What happened to, do you remember Y2K? What happened to 2000? It's back with the pyramids and the dinosaurs. Everything disappears back into the void from which it came, and then something new is born. It's the reason why people keep writing love songs.

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  It's not like there haven't been a lot of good love poems, but the universe wants to keep recreating itself all the time. That's why your body creates 100 billion red cells every day, red blood cells. The universe is a process of creation, but it also is like a dream, because it appears today is here, and it will be gone, like your life of this kind will be gone at some point. So, "Consider all experience to be dreamlike." Next one, "Be grateful to everyone." So, that's an instruction, and it sort of fits with this other instruction. "Let suffering teach you compassion."

• 1:17:11Speaker 03

  Because in Tibet, in some of the Tibetan teachings, they actually pray for suffering. They say, "May I be granted enough suffering so that the great heart of compassion will open in me." So, "Consider all experience to be dreams, be grateful to everyone," because they all have a lesson to offer you, might be an unpleasant or painful lesson.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  Let suffering teach you compassion. Next line, don't be swayed by outer circumstances. This is a tough one. They want you to be this and that and all that conditioning. And you can see it and you can use it, but don't let it guide your life. Let your life be guided when you get a little quiet by your own values in your own heart. A few more lines. I love this one. Don't brood over the faults of others. I could use some work on that one. Yeah, this one can save a lot of agony because people don't act the way we want them to. And they all have their faults, not us, of course, but don't brood over the faults of others.

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  You can feel how there's liberation in every one of these lines and you can practice it. Explore the timeless nature of consciousness, which is what we've been talking about. Two more things. At all times, simply rely on a joyful mind. And we'll talk about joy in a minute. Joy and community too, there are things I want to talk about. And then the last line I really love, he says, don't expect a standing ovation. How do you spell A-T-I-S-H-A? A-T-I-S-H-A. Oh, man, that's great. And you know, don't expect, and it's like we're looking for the universe to affirm us. The universe has affirmed you, baby. You wouldn't be here otherwise.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  Don't expect a standing ovation. So those are all, you're asking how we do it. Those are all actually practices. They're instructions in some way and you can take one or another. This year, I'm going to practice being grateful for everyone, the ones that are difficult. I remember when my daughter first got her, one of her first jobs, you know? And she was complaining about, she liked the work and she liked, but the manager, sort of the middle level boss was not good. He was a tyrant. He didn't organize things. She said, God, it's so bad, we need to get rid of him. I said, Caroline, welcome to the world of work. You think there's a bad boss there? Try another job.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  There will be someone, he's a stand-in for the archetype of, you know, the bad boss. You will find them. So you got to figure out how to deal, live in a place where, and not brood over it, where people are just that way. Yeah.

• 1:19:56Tim Ferriss?

  Joyful mind, I could always use more joyful mind. So joy or joyful mind? How should we find our way into this vast subject, which I think all listeners could certainly use a bit more of?

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want to repeat something that I believe I might have said in a previous podcast with you, but it is one of the great poems of the last decades in my mind by Jack Gilbert. And it's particularly so because we at this time, those of you and I and those who are listening, not only is there the mystery and incredible beauty of life, with all its sorrow, it still has unbearable beauty in so many directions. But we also carry in our heart the suffering of the world. And we can talk about that and how one holds it. But this is a poem called "A Brief for the Defense." "The Defense of What?" you might ask. "By Jack Gilbert.

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  "Sorrow everywhere, slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they're starving somewhere else with flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's also what the gods want. Otherwise, the mornings before lavender summer dawn would not be made so fine, and the Bengal tiger, orange and black, would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they've known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  somebody in the village is very sick. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation." We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure-seeking, but not delight, not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our tension is to praise the devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  We must admit that there will be music despite everything. And so that's a line, "To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the devil." "We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world."

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  What is the name of that poem, more time?

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  It's called "A Brief for the Defense" by Jack Gilbert. And it really speaks to the tearing open of the heart in our time that we have the suffering of the world, and it's presented to us. If we don't have it in our family or in our neighborhood, it's there on our screens, and it's there given to us. How do we hold it? And is it okay? Is it okay to be happy? And the Buddha put it the same way. He said, "Live in joy and love even among those who hate." There's an instruction, yes, that's there. "Live in love even among those who hate. Live in joy and health even among the afflicted. Live in joy and peace even among the troubled."

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  And that was like my teacher's monastery during the wartime in Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam. It was a place of peace in the middle of all of that. "Live in peace even among the troubled. Look within, be still, free from fears and attachments. Know the sweet joy of living in the way." So these are really instructions. Permission? People think spiritual life is a grim duty. I'm going to meditate. I go to the gym. I work out. I have a diet. You know, I've got my trainer. I've got it. And now I got to go and meditate. And it's not meant to be a grim duty. If you don't have some joy and pleasure in it, you know, that's the wrong direction, baby.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  It's really an invitation to quiet and calm, to bring in care and compassion. If you go into a refugee camp, they don't want your depression and sadness. They have enough of that. They actually want somebody to come in and say, hey, you know, let's see what we can do with this, even though it's incredibly difficult.

• 1:24:27Tim Ferriss?

  So, building on that, and also off of the previous mention of holding suffering, I'd like to shift to community. And the timing is perfect for that. Looking at my personal experience, because I've been in Los Angeles for a few weeks, and I made a commitment to myself, which is very atypical for me, because I have this productivity fetish, and I should put productivity in quotation marks, whatever that means. But I decided that my mantra for this time here was going to be social, not solo.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:25:05Tim Ferriss?

  And that meant, rather than doing what I normally do, which is default no to any type of social invitation, I made it default yes. And my well-being, my sense of inner peace is so much improved since I started doing that. Now, granted, my output has lessened substantially, but at this point, who cares, I think, on some level. And it's highlighted for me how even in a city, for instance, it could be anywhere, any city, it's possible to be surrounded by people but feel entirely alone. And it takes some intentionality, perhaps, to build and be supported by community.

• 1:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  So maybe this is a place to talk about cloudsangha.co, cloudsangha. But we could lead into it in any way that makes sense to you.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I welcome this as part of our conversation. First of all, there is an epidemic of loneliness. As you point to it, the Brits have their Minister of Loneliness now, and I think it's even gotten more... Extreme since Brexit in some way, they actually got lonely from the continent sadly. But anyway, from the very earliest understandings, there is a teaching or a pointing to the fact that we need each other in community, whether it's the Jewish minion or whenever two or more gathered in his name, whether it's the satsang in Hindu or the sangha in Buddhism or within a community in a village around a teacher or a shaman or and so forth.

• 1:26:41Speaker 03

  We're communal beings. We're raised by one another, we're connected, and so we languish when we don't have connection. One of the great problems in the current time is that there had been a way that many, many people had a sense of community through religious affiliation for generations before their church, their mosque, their temple, whatever it happened to be. That's dropped away a lot for all kinds of reasons, and it's left people more isolated. And so, together with Tara Brock and a couple of friends, we founded a company called Cloud Sangha, S-A-N-G-H-A, sangha which means community, cloudcommunity.co.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  And you can join for a month or several months to start with and become part of a group of people who meet together every week around themes that you're working with. We have groups for anxiety and how people are managing and learning about it and transforming it. We have groups for people who are parents, you know, and in those groups you can talk about whether it's, you know, your toddler's tantrum or your teenager's acting out or whatever it happens to be. We have groups for people who are interested in promoting joy in their lives and groups for those who are dealing with grief or loss and those kinds of things. And people who join them love them.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  Because you can be living in Boise, Idaho, or Belfast, Ireland, or whatever, and it can be hard to practice on your own. It's hard to meditate. It's hard to feel a sense that you have a kind of community who are supporting you. And what happens is, as people come together and share, they learn as much or more from themselves together as from any teacher. You know, I've done this sage-on-the-stage thing a lot in my life, and yeah, I can put on a good act or show or something. And sometimes it helps people. I love telling stories, and I remind them and so forth. But when we're in groups, one of my favorite things to do is to say, what have you all learned about this?

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  Somebody will raise their hand and say, what about grief? Or what about climate? Or what about how do I? And if I respond, what have you all learned? There is a collective wisdom when invited that comes out, where people learn so much from each other. And this is really what Cloud Sangha offers. It also has, if you go onto cloudsangha.co, for the fun of it, there's a test you can take, a mindful awareness test, to see, just for your own fun, which areas are you really attentive in your life, and which ones you really, you wish you had support for. And it would make such a difference. And we've got great people running them, and people who are in them love them.

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  So it's one of the offerings in my life, now that I'm very, really happy to be a part of, and want to invite people to try.

• 1:29:44Tim Ferriss?

  Are there practices, tools, and so on, that help people to share in communal experience? What are people finding most gratifying?

• 1:29:56Speaker 03

  So there are a couple of things. There are some practices, and there's teachings, and you can go on that, and there will be guided meditations. And there's weekly teachings by several variety of good teachers. But it turns out, people will come together, and, for example, it will be a group on parenting. Some are doing a mindfulness practice. Maybe some are doing some other form of meditation. They learn tea. Or maybe they they've been doing a Jewish or Christian practice or shamanic practice or something. But there they are and their toddler is having fits screaming as toddlers sometimes do as they're supposed to. And the common element is much less the focus on what you're practicing is. How do you engage in the world from that place of practice?

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  And people will say, well, I meditate and it helps me be calmer with my kids. And surprisingly, when I'm calmer, my children get calmer. You know, or they say when my teen is pushing back, you know, if I get into the conflict mode with them, it just builds. But if I do my practice of loving kindness, or I do my practice of whatever it happens to be. And I look at them and I see their secret beauty, especially it's a beautiful thing to do when your kid is sleeping. There you've had a little conflict, you know, at that age. And then you go in there, they fell asleep and you go look in them, they and you see who they are, who they were as a child, you know, there's there's something that original beauty.

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  Is there when their personality drops away a little bit, but they share that. And it's less critical what the practice is and much more. How are you applying it and what are we all learning in doing this? And this is where the rubber meets the road in some way. And again, it goes back to that definition of enlovenment or enheartment or something that's not enlightenment. But how do we learn to love in the midst of all of this?

• 1:31:51Tim Ferriss?

  I've come to feel I'm excited about this because I have realized for myself if I have. And I realize it's not the same thing, but group dinners with. Let's just say three friends, two, three nights a week. That does just as much for me, maybe more in some cases than short meditations on a daily basis. Just having that support and I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive. I do both as of right now, but that social cohesion for us monkeys on the spinning rock in the middle of the cosmos. Is easy to perhaps forget in the frenzied, individualistic. Prism within which we live in, say, the United States, it's easy to forget.

• 1:32:36Tim Ferriss?

  The value of something that is so obviously in front of us, but so often lost in the wake of, in my case, this quest for productivity and so many other things. So I'm excited to take a look at this myself, cloud sangha.co. And the spelling again for folks, cloud S A N G H A dot C O. I have some notes in front of me, and this has been something on my list to ask about. And maybe you've already brought it up. It certainly includes a name that has already come up. So Ram Dass, formerly known as Richard Albert, flunking the course, Ram Dass and flunking the course. This is a cue that I have in front of me. What does flunking the course refer to?

• 1:33:18Speaker 03

  So Ram Dass was a very close friend for a lot of years. And I've known him in his different incarnations when he was Baba Ram Dass, just back from India, having written that bestseller, Be Here Now, that opened a lot of people's eyes about how he'd been the Harvard professor. And then he took LSD and said, oh, whoa, things are, it's a bigger game than this. And then he met his guru in India and all of that. And he came back in his robes and his beard and beads as sort of the guru Baba Ram Dass. And one of my favorite early Ram Dass stories is there he was teaching a whole crowd. And he was articulate and funny and very self deprecating, you know, which is part of why we loved him because he would confess his neurosis publicly and

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  everyone go, oh, me too, right? Because we need, there's a common humanity. And one woman was sitting in the front row, an older woman and waved her hand and said, hey, Ram Dass. So he called her and she said, hey, there you are in the white robes and doing this whole Hindu guru thing. Aren't you Jewish? And Ram Dass said, well, well, yes, I was born Jewish. I was bar mitzvahed. She said, so what about it? And he said, well, there's beautiful things in it. There's the Kabbalah and all the mystical teachings. And there's the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters. It's, there's a lot that's great in it. And then he looked at her and he said, but remember, I'm only Jewish on my parents' side. And he was very witty, but it was also profound

• 1:34:45Speaker 03

  because who we are is not limited by our parents or our history. Who we are is much bigger than that. So Ram Dass evolved over his life, starting Saba Foundation and, you know, working to Combat blindness in Nepal and India for now, six million people who've been blind can see and all kinds of other stuff. And then he had that major stroke and ended up living 20 years in a wheelchair with tremendous pain and, you know, different kind of infections. But he became more and more and more loving. So when you'd sit with him toward the end of his life, he'd look around, he said, I love it all. I love the windows and I love the floor and I love the people who come in and I love, you know, the dirt. He said, I just love it all, whatever it is.

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  And, and people would come to see him and he would love them. And there's a phrase in India called the glance of mercy. When you go to see your guru, if you go to see the right kind of guru, but it doesn't have to be in India, it can be here. They look at you and they, it's somehow they see through you. They see all your life, your, you, Tim, you know, your strengths and your neurosis and your productivity, you know, the, the rat and the wheel going around making it spin faster.

• 1:35:58Tim Ferriss?

  God save us.

• 1:35:59Speaker 03

  All that, all that stuff. And they look at you with so much love and they say, wow, you're just amazing being. And you get this glance that sees everything and says, yes, I love you. And it changes you somehow. And that's what Ram Dass became in the end. Krishnanadas, the great chanter and, you know, also a fellow student of their guru, Nirmal Karoli Baba, said Ram Dass became in the end, the person we thought he was when he first returned from India. He really became that place of love. Now I've gone on and on and I haven't answered your question because I've forgotten it as I've been waxing about.

• 1:36:37Tim Ferriss?

  Flunking, flunking the course.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. So I went to see Ram Dass after I'd had a, a couple of events where I fell over on stage and was unconscious for a while and opened my eyes eventually and, you know, I was surrounded by all the doctors who were a part of the audience and so forth. And I got all these workups and I had a lot of tremors and I got misdiagnosed as having something like ALS. I was going to die relatively quickly and I would have dementia with it.

• 1:37:12Speaker 03

  I thought I'd made my peace with dying. Okay, I'm gonna die. But then when they said, oh, yeah, and dementia too, that flipped me over the edge. I didn't, that's not how I had pictured it. And I got frightened, really. And I remember sitting with my daughter after I got that and crying a little bit and thinking, okay, you know, here we go into dementia land along with tremors and my body going out of control. And then, you know, a couple of weeks later, I got more tests and turned out that was the wrong diagnosis and I'm okay, I'm fine. You know, I'm just aging like everybody. But I went to see Ram Dass and I told him that story and I said, I thought I was cool with death. I'd done all these meditations in the monastery, sitting with dead bodies and my own practice.

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  And then when the dementia came in, I got frightened. And he looked at me, he laughed and he said, oh, yeah, I've flunked the course a number of times. And the minute he said it, it was like this huge relief because it was just being human. And our body doesn't want to die, even if you know, like you said it. And I think it's true that we've prepared ourselves in some ways, but the body doesn't want to die. It has its own story. So Ram Dass represents for me, and I think for us, that loving witness that can wink and say, wow, we really got into a predicament this time, didn't we? And it's okay. It's just the dance that we're in and it's fine.

• 1:38:38Tim Ferriss?

  He did have a real facility for combining humor with the profound and really pithy short statements. It's remarkable.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  Yes, he did.

• 1:38:49Tim Ferriss?

  I've been listening to some of his audio recordings. There's a podcast, I can't recall the name, which, which is effectively sharing archival audio.

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's probably the Be Here Now Network.

• 1:39:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's it. That's exactly it. And. What incredible communicator, I mean incredible human. I never met him, but uh

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  Incredible, incredible humor and twinkle and sparkle and yeah, all those good things. And yeah, he was human too. So he had his own foibles. And the thing that was so beautiful about it is that he would make them all public. He would say, all right, here's where I messed up this week. And everybody would smile and say, ah, you know, like, just like me.

• 1:39:31Tim Ferriss?

  I remember at some point, and I'm not going to be getting this totally right. So you can correct me. I don't speak Sanskrit or can't read Pali or whatever it might be. But my understanding is that Ram Das, Das is the equivalent of servant of Ram. And then you have Krishna Das.

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  Serve Krishna.

• 1:39:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So is Das simply, is it just a common suffix and therefore that's it? Or is there deeper meaning behind the choice? I don't know if they made it or their guru or someone else made it of Krishna and Ram respectively.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Their guru gave them their names, looked at you and say, you serve Ram, you serve Krishna. You know, there's this whole, the cool thing about the Hindus is that they have so many gods. You can sort of pick your favorite and the way it works. I mean, the, the problem is that we have God as a noun that's singular. God. Okay. And then we fight over it. My God is realer than your God or better than your God or bigger than your whatever. You know, my God can beat up your God, whatever it is in the, in all these different traditions. All that you need to do is add an S. There is Yahweh or Jehovah or whatever. And there's Jesus and Jesus and there's, you know, there's also other versions of God.

• 1:40:49Speaker 03

  There's Krishna and Brahman. And if you allow, as the Hindus do, that the divine has many names and many forms, instead of fighting over and say, let's celebrate. Okay. So Das means the servant of, I mean, I don't know who you served him, but you could be uh

• 1:41:08Tim Ferriss?

  Sure. I guess I need a guru to tell me what my name is.

• 1:41:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, no, one of my teachers was named Buddha Das. He was the servant of the Buddha or the Buddha's teachings or things like that. So it's very, very common.

• 1:41:23Tim Ferriss?

  And for those who end up digging into Stan Grof and some of his writing, he has some really fun stories around the servants or worshippers of Shiva and his interactions with them, which is a whole separate can of worms.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  Okay, and Stan also has a book, when the, I think it's something like When the Miraculous Happens. It's his stories of all the wild things that happened in his life that were completely unexpected and that you can't put into ordinary consciousness. Just like, we've talked about it before, I've had the experience a number of times of knowing that someone died at a distance and not necessarily that they were ready to die, or you know, they didn't have cancer, but I knew it, they had an accident. Who would know that? And then I reach out and I found out, yeah, they had an accident. And then I'll ask in a room of, you know, 100 or 500 people, how many people have had

• 1:42:20Speaker 03

  the experience of knowing when someone died, you know, unexpectedly? And a third of the hands go up. And it's because we're connected. It's just the reality of it. So I want to talk about climate and justice. And one of the teachers that I most admire, who's in her 90s now and still alive, is Joanna Macy. She wrote a wonderful book called World as Lover, World as Self. And she's been doing what she calls despair and empowerment work for decades now. And she did, I remember her going and meeting in the survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And at first, they didn't want to talk to her.

• 1:43:04Speaker 03

  They said, why are you rubbing our noses in it? You want to come, you American, and you know, we've already had such a hard time. Why should we talk about it all again with you? And she sat and listened, she repeated back what she'd heard and she said, the only reason I really want to talk to you beside my sympathy, because I too am a mother and grandmother, she said, is because I don't want this to happen to other people's children. And you have a story that the world needs to hear. And then they wept and they said, "All right, we'll tell you the whole story." So she's collaborated for years with others in doing this work that she calls despair and empowerment work. And she describes it this way, she said, "We're in a time of what she calls the great

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  turning, where humanity has the capacity and tools to make the world and how we live a beautiful place or not. Things have gotten bad and it's not just a disaster, it's also an opportunity. And we can all feel that in some fashion or other." So her game is first to get people to feel the grief and the anger and the guilt and the despair and to share it with one another so you don't feel alone. And that you can sense that you're part of the web of life that's responding, just as if you've cut your hand or your finger. You didn't say, "Oh, that poor hand," as if it's separate from you. It's part of this, your body.

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  That people could start to feel that they were together in the body of the earth, holding this and responding. And she said, "All right, now let's listen more deeply." And one of the things that she did with an environmental activist named John Seed, they created something called the Council of All Beings. And on those retreats, after expressing grief and despair and holding it with compassion and feeling the interconnection of the earth alive, saying, "We need to do something," people would be sent out into the woods for half a day, to wander the woods and the streams, with the instruction to sense whose voice you want to carry, who you wish to be a representative of.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  And it might be someone you meet out there, or it might be that it inspires you. People came together and sometimes they even in a shamanic way would make a drawing or put something on their body that represented what they wanted to do, come back in circle, and then they would speak, but not as themselves. They would say, "I speak for the redwoods."

• 1:45:39Speaker 03

  Or I speak for the salmon, and I want you to know that most of my people have died off because of this and that happening, and this is what I want you to hear. I speak for the, you know, and you can name the species or the part of the earth. And what would come out of people was tender, grievous at times, but also tremendously inspired, because those voices said, here's what we need to do. This is what we salmon ask of you, and you can do this. You know, this is what we, the Sakoras and Redwoods, want of the world

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  now. And so she shifts the despair to a sense of interconnectedness, and that we become the voices of the earth in its most benevolent and best form. And it seems important to say this, because, you know, we started talking about anxiety long ago in this conversation as we wended our way through all kinds of strange places. And this takes us back to touch on that. And the important thing is to know that suffering is not the end of the story. It's the first Buddhist first truth that there is suffering, and there are causes. We can see it, greed, hatred, fear, and so forth. And there's an end to

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  it. There's another possibility, which is the empowerment of love, of action. And part of what makes things liberating, and this has to do with compassion and empathy, is not only what you feel, but then what you're empowered to do when you speak for the salmon or whoever it is. So here's the difference between compassion and empathy. If you're walking by a schoolyard and you see a child being bullied, the first experience inside might be, oh, I feel for that child. That's wrong. I feel their suffering. So you have a kind of connection, an empathetic connection with that child. Oh, I'd hate to feel that.

• 1:47:41Speaker 03

  I don't want children feel. You feel with them. Come means with, with passion. That's not enough. Compassion, it turns out, is a verb. You have, the first step is empathy. The second step in compassion is you walk over and you talk to them, or you go to the teacher, or you go into the office and you say, you know, the kids on the playground are bullying people. You not only feel it, and you let yourself enter in a communion, if you will, with what you see, but then something in you feels empowered to say, let me reach out my hand. You don't have to fix the whole world, but you can reach and mend the places that you can touch. And it doesn't have to be a lot.

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

  And just like you've come to LA and decided to be social rather than solo, and it makes a difference. Reaching your hand out and touching or doing something empowers you and it changes the world.

• 1:48:40Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's a tremendous place to leave people with that as a closing comment for Food For Thought. Is there anything else, though, that you would like to add, Jack?

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  Oh, maybe 108 other things. But this feels like a wonderful conversation and also a kind of expression of our friendship for a long time. I'm glad to see you and see you seeming so well. I certainly know when you describe that you're in new phases in your life in different ways, and I can very much appreciate that. And I've had fun.

• 1:49:16Tim Ferriss?

  Me, too.

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  And, you know, as I said, it's not a grim duty. It's actually a celebration.

• 1:49:21Tim Ferriss?

  It is a celebration, and I think I'm going to also set a brief for the defense, the poem by Jack Gilbert, as a reminder so that I reread and reread and reread that. It's a really potent reminder. And I think it's catching me at a good point in my life. So hopefully that's true for other people as well. Jack, people can find you online, jackkornfield, that's the K, K-O-R-N-F-I-E-L-D dot com. Twitter, at Jack Kornfield. Instagram, jack underscore cornfield. They can find Cloud Sangha at cloudsangha.co. And we will link to everything that we've talked about

• 1:50:02Tim Ferriss?

  in this conversation in the show notes for people at tim.blog/podcast. And they just can search your name in the most recent episode, probably, unless we do more of these. If someone's listening to this a few years later, they'll be able to find with ease. Thank you, Jack.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tim. What a pleasure.

• 1:50:20Tim Ferriss?

  So nice to see you.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  What a pleasure.

• 1:50:22Tim Ferriss?

  And to those listening, until next time, be just a little kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And remember that compassion can begin with feeling, but can also incorporate, and often should incorporate, some form of reaching out, some form of connection, some form of action. And thanks for tuning in.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  I'd like to do a guided loving-kindness meditation practice.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  There are many, many versions of it.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  You can find them online from Sharon Salzberg, and Tara Brock, and Joseph Goldstein, and many, many other teachers. And this will be one version, and you can see what works for you. There isn't a right way to do Metta. Sometimes the practice of cultivating loving-kindness is just to radiate love without words. Sometimes it's to begin by holding yourself with kindness again and again. And tonight, we'll use one of the classic practices, which also involves

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  the inner recitation of phrases of well-wishing toward others and toward yourself. And it invites, in whatever way you can, the quality of kindness, the images and the words are an avenue to opening the heart. But the most important thing is not to use it to judge yourself. Sometimes it feels beautiful. Sometimes it's so-so, you know how meditation goes. Sometimes it's frustrating, you know, or it brings up its opposite, how can I feel love? I'm so angry at that person. And then what do you do when you feel that?

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  You hold that too with compassion and kindness. If it feels mechanical, you hold that with kindness. You just receive what arises and trust that the field of kindness itself is what matters.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  So sit comfortably. It's hard to do Bata loving kindness practice if your body's, your knees are killing and your back's aching. So you want to be a little bit at ease. And let your eyes close gently for the next 25 minutes or so.

• 1:53:02Speaker 01

  And first, as you settle yourself, let the body relax at ease. Let the eyes and face be soft. Loosen the jaw. Maybe roll your head in a circle a little to release your neck and let it find a simple upright.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  Let the shoulders relax and the arms and hands rest easily. Feel yourself seated on the earth, halfway between heaven and earth in this human form. And let go. Rest where you are. Let the earth completely hold you and support you.

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  Let the belly be soft and the breath natural.

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  And let the heart be soft as well, so that you invite a quieting of the mind and a tenderizing of the heart.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  La bendición de la bondad amada es recitada a menudo antes de comenzar la meditación, es que es un antídoto del miedo y la ansiedad cuando entramos en el corazón de amor y confianza.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  Cuando cultivamos la bondad amada, otros nos amarán más comúnmente, los animales se notarán en cuidado y los elefantes se bautizarán mientras nos pasamos. Dice: "Los niños estarán más felices alrededor de nosotros y estarán más felices. Nuestros sueños se vuelven dulces, nuestros pensamientos se vuelven más fáciles. Nos vemos más graciosos con las dificultades de la vida mientras abrimos el corazón.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  Ahora, toma dos respiraciones largas.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  Hacia y hacia, deliberadamente y con bastante suavidad. Dejando irse lo que quiera liberar.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  Para estar abiertos.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  En el presente.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Y ahora, en este

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  momento presente,

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  dejando a ti mismo en paz

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  y estableciendo la intención

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  de despertar el campo de la bondad amada.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  Deja que te pienses o te imagines o te recuerdes a alguien de quien te importa, donde es fácil. No una relación conflictiva, pero alguien donde es fácil sentir una atención natural y amor.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  Não precisa ser algo super. É apenas quem evoca um sentimento de bondade em você e de caridade. Pode até ser seu cachorro.

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  Quando você se lembra ou pensa nesse ser, provavelmente uma pessoa,

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  que você se importa,

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  sente o cuidado natural.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Você imagina-os, se lembra deles.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  E então comece, muito simples,

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  a ouvir frases de desejo de bem para dentro.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Que você seja cheio de bondade amorosa.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  Que você seja seguro e protegido.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  Sente seu cuidado enquanto você diz essas coisas.

• 1:58:17Speaker 01

  Que você seja bem-estar ou forte ou sanado.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  Se consciente dos desafios em sua vida, a medida de desafios, como todos os seres humanos. E sinta a compaixão fria que vem com o que eles lutam.

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  Que você tenha suas lutas em compaixão.

• 1:59:02Speaker 04

  And underneath it all, may you be happy.

• 1:59:19Speaker 04

  May you be filled with loving kindness.

• 1:59:33Speaker 04

  May you be safe and protected.

• 1:59:48Speaker 04

  May you be well and healed,

• 1:59:53Speaker 04

  strong.

• 2:00:04Speaker 04

  May you hold your struggles

• 2:00:08Speaker 04

  with compassion and tenderness.

• 2:00:26Speaker 04

  May you be happy,

• 2:00:32Speaker 04

  peaceful and happy.

• 2:00:39Speaker 04

  Feel the natural well-wishing

• 2:00:43Speaker 04

  as you see them.

• 2:00:57Speaker 04

  Now pick a second person, a second being, where there's a natural caring and love. Again, uncomplicated and easy.

• 2:01:12Speaker 04

  And as you remember and picture and sense them, think of them.

• 2:01:23Speaker 04

  Offering the same well wishes.

• 2:01:31Speaker 04

  May you be filled with loving kindness.

• 2:01:42Speaker 04

  May you be safe and protected.

• 2:01:56Speaker 04

  May you be well and healed.

• 2:02:05Speaker 04

  Strong.

• 2:02:15Speaker 04

  May you hold your struggles with tenderness and compassion.

• 2:02:27Speaker 04

  Courage.

• 2:02:38Speaker 04

  May you be happy.

• 2:02:44Speaker 04

  Truly happy.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Now let yourself imagine, picture, that these two beings that you care about are there in front of you, gazing back at you

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  with eyes of kindness.

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  For they want to wish for you the same loving kindness you extended to them.

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  And together they gaze at you and they whisper, "May you too be filled with loving kindness."

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  Receive it, imagine their blessing, their kindness toward you. They want you to have this.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  "May you two be safe and protected."

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Feel their care.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  They say, "May you two be well healed and strong."

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  "May you two hold your struggles with compassion and kindness."

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  And they gaze at you, "May you be happy."

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  Like blessing you, "May you be happy amidst it all."

• 2:04:53Speaker 04

  And you take in these phrases and words of loving-kindness

• 2:05:01Speaker 04

  and recite them through yourself, if you like, you can even put your hand on your heart.

• 2:05:07Speaker 04

  And just as they wish for you, these people who you care about,

• 2:05:13Speaker 04

  they care about you as well.

• 2:05:17Speaker 04

  May I be filled with loving-kindness

• 2:05:22Speaker 04

  as they wish.

• 2:05:29Speaker 04

  May I be safe and protected.

• 2:05:41Speaker 04

  May I be well,

• 2:05:44Speaker 04

  healed and strong.

• 2:05:53Speaker 04

  May I hold my struggles with compassion and courage.

• 2:06:07Speaker 04

  May I be happy, free and happy in heart and spirit.

• 2:06:21Speaker 04

  Filled with loving-kindness.

• 2:06:28Speaker 04

  Safe, protected. May I be happy.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  As you extend the loving kindness, you become the beacon of kindness, the beacon of loving kindness.

• 2:11:16Speaker 04

  Yourself Know all that it touches.

• 2:13:26Speaker 04

  The.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  Take one more minute. Whatever invites the spirit of loving-kindness for yourself and other beings, invite it now.

• 2:17:26Speaker 01

  Now, keeping the spirit of loving-kindness, allow your eyes to open gently

• 2:17:35Speaker 01

  and sense that you can inhabit the consciousness of loving-kindness. Eyes open wherever you go.

• 2:17:47Speaker 01

  One of my ways of practicing this is to see the child in each person around me, especially if I'm going about on errands and I see somebody who's having a hard time or making a hard time, getting pushy or aggressive or whatever. And I look and I see them and I try to picture them as a child, as a young child, with a certain innocence and their struggles as children have. And know that that child of the spirit is still in there somewhere. It brings the loving kindness alive for me.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  Whatever, the principle of Metta is to do it in whatever way most feels natural to you. In whatever way allows you to see with the eyes of tenderness and compassion and kindness. Find your own beautiful way.

• 2:18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 2:19:36Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 2:20:03Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything, anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life. And you can have the tools to manage your day to day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third party apps from on demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine.

• 2:20:47Tim Ferriss?

  They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008, when I became an advisor, and it's been spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding $400 billion. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience required.

• 2:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Access powerful tools to help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day to day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed. And I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the day, which was awesome, the Build a Business competition and other things. Plus, with 24/7 support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support, you have resources, you don't need to feel alone in this case. More than a store, Shopify grows with you, and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a $1 per month trial period.

• 2:22:14Tim Ferriss?

  It is a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today and learn more by visiting Shopify.com/Tim. One more time, Shopify.com/Tim, all lowercase.

• 2:22:29Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it. Or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 2:23:13Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita. But for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked, and bam, company was born.

• 2:23:57Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting, and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. For a limited time, you can get a free Element sample With any purchase. It's the perfect way to try all of their flavors.

• 2:24:42Tim Ferriss?

  Or if you're feeling generous, sharing with a friend who might enjoy. This special offer is available here at this link. Drink LMNT.com/Tim. That's drink element again. Drink LMNT.com/Tim.