Is It Possible to Uproot All Anxiety and Anger? Steve Armstrong Says Yes.

Meditation can be gorgeous… and it can be absolutely bewildering. If you've ever wondered, "Am I doing this right?" or "Why does this feel so intense?", this conversation is for you. In this vintage conversation from 2016, Dan sits down with legendary dharma teacher Steve Armstrong for a clear, compassionate walkthrough of the progress of insight—including why meditation sometimes gets harder before it gets easier, how to navigate the so-called "dark night" phases, and how to keep going without getting lost in the weeds of self-doubt. Steve Armstrong, our dear friend, teacher, and the founder of Vipassana Metta Dhamma Sanctuary, passed away peacefully at home on December 23, 2025. His wife and teaching partner, Kamala, was by his side. We are deeply grateful to everyone who contributed to the fundraiser we shared https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-steve-armstrong-kamala-masters, and held Steve and Kamala in their hearts. Your generosity made it possible for Steve to receive the 24-hour care he needed in his final months, allowing him to remain at home with comfort and dignity. Your support also helped ease the many practical and emotional burdens Kamala carried during this time. Steve devoted more than 40 years to teaching the Dhamma and to building Vipassana Metta Dhamma Sanctuary as a place for deep and sustained practice. His wisdom, kindness, and unwavering commitment to the path touched countless lives and will continue to live on through this work. Any future donations to this fundraiser will go toward supporting Kamala as she moves through this period of grief and transition, and as she continues the work at Vipassana Metta Dhamma Sanctuary that she and Steve began together. If you feel moved, you can find the GoFundMe at this link https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-steve-armstrong-kamala-masters. Our company has also made a significant contribution to support Steve and Kamala. In this episode, you'll learn: Why meditation can sometimes trigger emotional turbulence How to understand the "stages" of insight (without clinging to them) Practical ways to stay steady when your practice feels chaotic or confusing How to distinguish between a genuine opening and plain old overwhelm Why equanimity isn't passive—it's powerful Steve has spent decades helping people wake up. This episode is a chance to receive that wisdom—and, if you're able, to reflect it back with your support. Related Episodes: Get Happier Without Losing Your Edge | Kamala Masters https://open.substack.com/pub/danharris/p/get-happier-without-losing-your-edge-1f4?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Thanks to our sponsors: Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host http://airbnb.com/host. HomeServe:   Help protect your home systems and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs. Go to homeserve.com http://homeserve.com/ to find a plan that's right for you. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. If you listen to this show with any regularity, the odds are incredibly high that you are interested in finding ways to get happier. Today, we're going to talk about an ancient technology, not only for getting happier, but for becoming 100% happy, imperturbable, no matter what's happening. In other words, we're going to talk about how to get enlightened. Let me step back here. When I first got interested in meditation, I just wanted to be a little bit less stressed, to not be so owned by the voice in my head. But the deeper I got into the practice, the more I started to hear about enlightenment, which, of course, given who I am, I initially wrote off as religious bullshit. Over time,

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  however, I have become way more open to the possibility of enlightenment, while, of course, maintaining skepticism, given that I can't pound the table for the existence of something that I have not personally experienced. Anyway, my guest today knows what he's talking about on this score. He has helped translate an influential text called "The Manual of Insight," which is basically the operator's manual for how the mind works when you do high doses of meditation. What I find incredibly fascinating is that according to this tradition, the Burmese strain of Theravada Buddhism, if you meditate enough and in the right ways, your mind will pass through a predictable

• 1:43Dan Harris?

  series of stages, including bliss, rapture, existential freakouts, and then allegedly nirvana. Yeah.

• 1:51Dan Harris?

  My guest is Steve Armstrong, who's a longtime meditation teacher, who in his earlier years spent five years as a Buddhist monk in Burma. This conversation was recorded nearly 10 years ago, back in 2016. In fact, it was the 13th episode of this podcast. Just for context, we're now over 1,000 episodes. So actually, at the beginning of this conversation, you'll hear a much younger, much less patient version of your host peppering Steve with sometimes impertinent questions. So why are we running this episode again right now? First of all, because it's great, as you'll hear. Second, because Steve needs our help. Steve has been living with a brain tumor for several years, and his condition has progressed to the point where he

• 2:36Dan Harris?

  and his wife Kamala Masters, who by the way is a fantastic Dharma teacher in her own right, and has also been a guest on this show. Steve and Kamala need some in-home care support and other resources. Anybody who's ever been a caregiver for a loved one knows how all-encompassing this job can be. So we have helped to put together a GoFundMe for Steve and Kamala. There's a link to it in the show notes. I do hope you'll consider making a contribution, especially after you hear this conversation and you hear how amazing Steve is. My company has made a significant contribution, and if you go to the page, you'll see that many others have jumped in. We'll get started with Steve Armstrong right after this.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Your joints help you keep doing what you love. Give them daily support with Ancient Nutrition Multi-Collagen Protein. Two scoops deliver 20 grams of collagen from 10 types, including clinically studied eggshell membrane, plus vitamin C and probiotics to support skin, hair, nails, and joint health. Visit ancientnutrition.com/protein and use code PROTEIN for $15 off. That's ancientnutrition.com code PROTEIN.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 4:14Dan Harris?

  So Steve, thanks for being here.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Thanks for the invitation.

• 4:16Dan Harris?

  It's an absolute pleasure. We're gonna get into the book in a big way in a minute, but I wanna start by just giving people a sense of who you are, how you got here. So how did you start meditating?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  The story I tell is after dropping out of law school, resorting to a commune.

• 4:33Dan Harris?

  This is in the 60s?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Recover, yeah, mid 60s, late 60s, to recover from education. The focus of the commune was, we were all fans of the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, partaking of the sacrament as often as we could, and this was our idea of spiritual practice.

• 4:50Dan Harris?

  Sacrament, meaning LSD?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Among other things.

• 4:54Dan Harris?

  I gotcha.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  So that was our lifestyle.

• 4:57Dan Harris?

  Where was this commune?

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Central Maine.

• 4:59Dan Harris?

  And you grew up in Maine?

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Called Summit Plantation.

• 5:01Dan Harris?

  Summit Plantation was the name of it?

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:03Dan Harris?

  Does it still exist?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  It's an uninhabited territory in central Maine. Yeah, now it's uninhabited.

• 5:09Dan Harris?

  But just by way of background, you grew up in Maine, you grew up in Lincoln, Maine, which is north of Bangor, which is where I started my TV career.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:15Dan Harris?

  And you went to law school in Portland, Maine?

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I went to the university in Orano and then law school in Portland, Maine.

• 5:21Dan Harris?

  Undergrad at the university in Orano and then law school in Portland, University of Southern Maine?

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, University of Southern Maine, first year only.

• 5:29Dan Harris?

  First year only. So you hated it so much that you ran off to a commune?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:32Dan Harris?

  And that's where you discovered meditation?

• 5:34Speaker 03

  No, I met someone who found a book called Beginning to See by Suchata, had little one-liners about mindfulness, and wrote to the address in the back for more information and found out that there was a retreat being taught in Bucksport, Maine, just an hour and a half from where we lived at that very time. In 1975, Jack, Joseph, Sharon, and another teacher since deceased, were offering the first three-month retreat in an old Catholic monastery in Bucksport, Maine, and we went to the last two weeks of it.

• 6:09Dan Harris?

  Can I just interrupt for one second? Because I wanna explain who Jack, Joseph, and Sharon are. Again, close listeners will know, that's Jack Cornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein, the three sort of prototypical Jew boos who brought, really pioneered, the practice of inside meditation, which has turned into secular mindfulness, to these shores after having practiced over in Burma.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  India, Burma, India.

• 6:32Dan Harris?

  Burma, India, and Sharon has been on the show, and Jack and Joseph will certainly, I hope, be on the show in the future. So anyway, carry on.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. On the appointed day, we drove to this monastery. And now there'd been 50 people or so had been practicing meditation there in silence for two and a half months. So we walked in, and on one side is the dining room with a notice saying, "New arrivals, we'll meet at 5 o'clock" or something. And on the right-hand side was the meditation hall, chapel turned into a meditation hall. We looked at the schedule on the door of the chapel, and it says, "Wake up 4 o'clock, do your yoga, sit, walk, have your breakfast, sit, walk, sit, walk, have your lunch, sit, walk, sit, walk, have some tea, sit, walk, 7:30, talk till 8:30." And we looked at each other and said, "Well, at least we get an hour a day to talk."

• 7:22Speaker 03

  But what that meant was we really get an hour a day to listen. So there we were. And prior to that time, I had never met anybody that meditated. I didn't know anything about meditation. I didn't know anything about Buddhism. I wasn't interested in spirituality. I didn't know anything about it. And it was excruciating to sit in that hall and to just kind of watch the body scream in agony and the mind just all over the place was torturous. But one thing that happened that was noticeable and significant was when I heard the Dharma talks, the talks in the evening that was explaining the teachings of the Buddha and

• 8:00Speaker 03

  how it applied to our life and how to practice, I felt like I'd always known what was being said, and I always had lived that way or agreed with that, but I'd never heard it before.

• 8:14Dan Harris?

  That's exactly kind of the way I felt.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  This is so natural.

• 8:17Dan Harris?

  It's been called advanced common sense for a reason, right?

• 8:21Speaker 03

  I guess so, yeah. And that's how I started. Did the two weeks, and the immersion into the mind through mindfulness practice over the course of two weeks is so gradual that you don't really notice. You're dealing with the day-to-day stuff, but you don't really notice that you're really getting quite deeply into the mind and out of your ordinary chatter. So that when we went back to the, at the end of the retreat, went back to the commune.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Everybody was the same. Everybody was doing the same thing and everybody was there and it was all familiar, but because our perspective on our inner life was so different, it's like, wow, we saw the commune from a different place, from a different perspective.

• 9:07Dan Harris?

  Who's the we? You and some friends?

• 9:09Speaker 03

  We and the woman who went to the retreat.

• 9:11Dan Harris?

  Okay, so you and your girlfriend at the time or something?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:13Dan Harris?

  Okay. And so, did that cause you to drop out of the commune?

• 9:17Speaker 03

  We gradually did more meditation practice and drifted away from the behaviors and the people and left the commune. Yeah. Took a few years, but gradually we did.

• 9:28Dan Harris?

  And then what happened?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  We ended up at the Insight Meditation Center as soon as it opened, or soon after it opened, the meditation center in Massachusetts.

• 9:38Dan Harris?

  Yeah, opened by Jack Joseph and Sharon.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Opened by Jack Joseph and Sharon. They bought it shortly after that retreat. They bought it in February of 76. And I showed up in 77 and stayed for eight years.

• 9:51Dan Harris?

  Eight years?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  I was on staff and I was doing retreats. And when I wasn't on staff, I did a long retreat and I was involved with the Board of Directors and as a board member was overseeing and participating in the creation of the Dharma Seed Tape Library, where all of the recordings of mindfulness retreats have been kept and made available online. So, that was my home. That was my focus in life.

• 10:17Dan Harris?

  And then you went off and became a monk?

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Then I finally got the, got my act together enough, or got enough understanding or enough commitment to, yeah, to want to really understand what mindfulness practice was about. I think the first eight years was repair work, emotional repair work, family of origin, healing and stuff like that. And by 85, or 84 is when I made the decision to actually go to Burma. And then I went in 85.

• 10:47Dan Harris?

  And spent five years as a monk?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, five years as a monk.

• 10:51Dan Harris?

  All right, that's a good background on you, Mr. Armstrong. Let's, let's talk about this book, The Manual of Insight. It was actually written by a guy named Mahasi Sayadah, and you were the managing editor of translating this. Who is Mahasi Sayadah?

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Mahasi Sayadah was a very well-known, both scholar and practitioner in Burma in the last century. When there was a convocation of the Buddhist of the world in Burma in 1956, 56, I think, he was like the second in the hierarchy of monks to attend. He was like number two. He was very knowledgeable and he was responsible for codifying and correcting the whole Pali Canon, which is the basic foundation of Theravada Buddhism.

• 11:39Dan Harris?

  And Theravada Buddhism is like the old school Buddhism, right?

• 11:42Speaker 03

  The old school of Buddhism. And so he's very well studied. And when he went to do his own meditation practice, he got what instructions was available to him, practiced, but made some adaptations for himself in practice, which ended up proving quite successful for him. And when he tried it out on his relatives, who wanted to know what he was doing and how he was doing it, he found that laypeople, householders, like ourselves, could actually hear these meditation instructions and practice quite well in the course of a month or two. Whereas prior to that time, if you'd wanted to get that kind of instruction, you'd probably have to ordain as a monk or nun for life.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  And it would take years to get that level of instruction and that degree of instruction. So he made a very lengthy study and practice, very succinct and available, accessible to laypeople.

• 12:41Dan Harris?

  He wrote it all down, all the things that he experienced. And so I use this term cookbook. You gave me a little bit of a look.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  What about an operator's manual?

• 12:51Dan Harris?

  Okay, fine. Fair enough. Fair enough. I'll take that.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  It is. It's the how to book.

• 12:57Dan Harris?

  How to get enlightened?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  How to get enlightened, if you want to use that loaded term. But it is, how to get enlightened. Traditional Buddhist enlightenment.

• 13:04Dan Harris?

  Right. So, traditional, modern skeptic, me, I hear that and I'm thinking, okay, that's gotta be a load of crap.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can understand why. Because, wow, we have this pretty outrageous uninformed view of what being enlightened is. What do you think enlightenment is? We have all kinds of ideas that we don't know because we're not enlightened. Right? So we have all these ideas and he kind of reduces it right down to moment to moment life unfolding can be free of suffering.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Free of entanglement. Moment to moment can be known as it really is. The nature of being a human being. And when one wakes up to that very grounded, ordinary, this is the way it is for a human being, or other beings too. Then we come out of delusion. We come out of illusion. We come out of the fantasies that we live in. We put aside our assumptions and beliefs that we've acquired through a family of origin, cultural conditioning, educational system and all that, that are, excuse me, they're fantasies. They're ways of seeing that are not in alignment

• 14:18Speaker 03

  with our deepest experience of the way it is, the way reality is.

• 14:23Dan Harris?

  So enlightenment, nirvana, liberation, purification of mind, all of these terms that get thrown around that are pretty grandiose and kind of interesting and mysterious at the same time. All of that, you're saying is just a, these are fancy ways of talking about something very normal, which is meditation practice at an advanced level shows you, allows you to see your actual life as it's unfolding right now, what you're experiencing without the, to use your term, entanglements, without the suffering, without clinging to things that you want and pushing away things you don't want and being numbed out to the rest.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  That, among other things, yes. But I think that what gets in our way is that we have these beliefs and assumptions about ourself or the way things should be or what we expect or hope it to be. And when they aren't that way, we think somebody's to blame or it's wrong. Not my thoughts are wrong or my assumptions are wrong. But we don't know, we often don't know what our assumptions and beliefs are. Uploaded into our tender little brains and minds when we're defenseless, when our family of origin and schooling and things like that. And so we've got them. But they are, you know, some, you know, kind of not, not very skillful ways of dealing with.

• 15:41Dan Harris?

  Are you talking now about our resistance to enlightenment because we're taught to think that's fancy and foreign and weird, or are you talking now about the obstacles to achieving enlightenment because of the latter?

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Both.

• 15:52Dan Harris?

  Both?

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I think we have this, we have a grandiose idea. When you hear the word enlightenment, or whatever, we think that's for people way back then, or beings that are some kind of special, somehow different than me, and that keeps it at an arm's distance.

• 16:09Dan Harris?

  I don't think either of those things. I think it's just a sort of unproven religious claim.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Okay, it's something out there.

• 16:15Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  But when you have an idea of it, it gets in the way of actually experiencing it.

• 16:20Dan Harris?

  Yeah, when you describe it the way you describe it, which, and with the way it's described in this book, it actually becomes less highfalutin'. It's just about actually waking up to what's happening right now.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, waking up to having the feeling, knowing this body and knowing this mind in infinite and intimate detail. Yeah, as it occurs.

• 16:37Dan Harris?

  All right, so let's dive into the owner's manual, operator's manual.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Operator's.

• 16:42Dan Harris?

  Never henceforth to be referred to as a cookbook. So how does it work? This involves a high volume of meditation, right? So do you have to be in retreat to experience these experiences that lead up to nirvana?

• 16:56Speaker 03

  No, you don't have to be. But for most people, we need some guidance. And I always say that it's easier to learn to drive a car in an empty parking lot than on a freeway. So if you get meditation instructions just on the way to work in your hustle and bustle and hurry, you're not going to have much time to settle in, get familiar with it, figure out the terrain of your own heart and mind and how it works. So you go on retreat. You go on a retreat and you've got nothing to do, except hear the instructions and try it.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Hour after hour with some encouragement, some inspiration, some you get your questions answered and keep trying. And even over the course of a day, you can see, oh yeah, something's happening. Over the course of a week, or a longer retreat, as you know yourself, things happen. You get removed from the chatter of your own mind, and you get to experience things the way they are a little more intimately.

• 17:49Dan Harris?

  What I find fascinating, definitely things happen when you go on retreat, no question. A lot of them are terrible.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  So did I.

• 17:58Dan Harris?

  But what I find fascinating about the progress of insight, other than the fact that it's controversial, and we'll talk about why in a second, is that basically, the proposition is that if you do enough meditation, certain things will happen to you reliably and predictably.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:14Dan Harris?

  And what does it say about the way the mind works? You will have a bunch of these experiences that again, allegedly culminate in nirvana, which we will talk about. That I just, and that people have been doing this for millennia. So there appears to be something here, and I find that very interesting. But I've been, and again, I want to dive deeply into what these experiences and stages and insights are. But I've been meditating for, I don't know, almost seven years now. I've done several retreats. I meditate a couple hours a day right now. I haven't had any of these experiences. So what does that tell you? That I'm a complete idiot? Or that one needs to do a high volume of meditation in order to experience these things?

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it took me eight years. So you've got another year to go, Dan.

• 18:56Dan Harris?

  Took you eight years before you taped any of this stuff?

• 18:59Speaker 03

  Before I really, the little samadhi, the little concentration effects that you've had, I've had. But before I really got to the practice where the mind could do its thing, that was in my eighth or ninth year. And that was when I was more continuously in retreat as a monk.

• 19:15Dan Harris?

  Right. But so I'm not going on retreat as a monk. I have a baby. That's not going to happen. So do I have any shot at experiencing any of this stuff?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, sure. You're building up your, you're building up your potential all the time. Your daily meditation, an hour a day, two hours a day, really is important. That's what keeps the thread of it going. And as you see, as you become familiar with how the mind works, and you see how the mind works, it's not what you think about your life, it's what your life actually is that's important. And once you start looking at that, and you start seeing how the mind works, then you can put aside some of the reactivity and some of the recreational distractions that you indulge in.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  And actually see the mind. Now, there's many different spiritual traditions that have existed on the face of the earth and still do. And they've discovered some elements of this, whether it's ecstasy, or bliss, or oneness of mind, unification with the whole, great loving kindness, whatever. There's just lots of different experiences that some people, some religions, claim as this is it, it is the big it, this is the end, this is the goal, this is the purpose of life, of religious practice. And Buddha practiced those practices and discovered those conditions, those experiences.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  And he realized, this is not the end, this is not the goal, this is a scenic turnout on the route. So as you practice and the mind is allowed to just do what it does best, which is to know things as they are, ecstasy will come, bliss, joy, ecstasy, rapture, just pass out indulgent pleasure.

• 20:58Dan Harris?

  These are all things that happen during the progress of insight.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  They happen at a certain stage in this progression of insight. And we call them the spiritual goodies. It's a spiritual goodie phase of practice where effortless energy and soaring faith and unshakable equanimity, things like that, very attractive.

• 21:20Dan Harris?

  Yeah, no question.

• 21:23Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Steve takes us through the numbered steps to enlightenment, including an intriguing stage called pseudo nirvana.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 22:06Dan Harris?

  Before we get too deep, let's just go step by step. So what's the first, so if I've done enough meditation and I start to enter this progressive insight, right?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:14Dan Harris?

  What's the first thing I will experience?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  The first thing that you're going to know clearly is, in every moment, I'm experiencing something. Something's being known. I'm feeling the body, I'm feeling, I'm watching, I'm hearing sounds, I'm seeing sights. And so there's this knowledge called knowing of the nature of the mind and the body.

• 22:33Dan Harris?

  Each of these stages has a pretty elaborate.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:35Dan Harris?

  I love it. I've said this before, but it's really something out of Dungeons and Dragons. I love it. So, okay, the first, the first knowledge is called the knowledge of...

• 22:43Speaker 03

  It's Namarupa, but it means the knowledge of mind and body.

• 22:46Dan Harris?

  Okay, the first knowledge is you know that you have a mind and a body?

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know that in every moment, something is being known. This is basic awareness.

• 22:55Dan Harris?

  Okay, so maybe I've hit this.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, yeah. For moments. But there's a lot of time we're just living life and we don't, we don't really pay attention to what we're doing. We're on automatic pilot.

• 23:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah, most of our lives.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's when you come out of automatic pilot and you realize, oh, this is what I'm doing. This is what's happening to me. Oh, breathing in, breathing out, walking down the street. Oh, hearing sounds, getting excited, getting angry, feeling it, feeling bliss, whatever.

• 23:17Dan Harris?

  So you're, basically the first knowledge in this progressive insight is just basically just waking up to the raw fact of existence?

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:26Dan Harris?

  That you're experiencing things, that things are happening and you are experiencing them.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 23:30Dan Harris?

  Experiencing them. Okay, so what's stage number two?

• 23:33Speaker 03

  That seems to appear because of your actions. I'm meditating, this is what's making it happen. But later, if you keep paying attention, you're going to realize that, hey, things happen because of causes and conditions. They're not just happening randomly. And the way we train people to see this in retreats is we say, when you sit down, just have the intention to sit still. And inevitably, you'll find yourself moving, scratching an itch, adjusting your posture, opening your eyes, swallowing and doing all sorts of things without having noticed that you had the intention to do it. Right? So, the body doesn't move unless there's an intention. So what we do is we start paying attention to intentions and then we see that, hey,

• 24:15Speaker 03

  the body is dependent on the mind, the mind is dependent on the body. So this is the knowledge of conditionality. Things aren't happening randomly, they're not accidental. Whatever happens to you mentally, physically is not accidental.

• 24:31Dan Harris?

  Okay, so I might have experienced two of these.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Okay, good. Now, this is how you evaluate your own practice. Someone talks about the progress of insight and you can say, oh yeah, I've had that experience. Or I might get to some place and you say, no, I haven't had that experience. And you realize, oh, okay, I'm just far.

• 24:47Dan Harris?

  That's what I'm shooting for next. So what's the third knowledge?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  The third knowledge is you begin to.

• 24:52Dan Harris?

  What's it called first? I love the names.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  This one is called comprehension, the knowledge of comprehension. It's where you start to recognize the qualities of your experience. Primarily that things are changing all the time. Things are coming and going that no matter what it is that you experience, it doesn't last very long. So you begin to understand the characteristic of phenomena is that they're impermanent. Everything is impermanent.

• 25:22Dan Harris?

  Okay, I've had this experience.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. But along with it comes this, the second characteristic or the second knowledge, which is the knowledge of dukkha. Now.

• 25:30Dan Harris?

  Suffering.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Suffering, it's both dukkha dukkha is suffering, obvious, physical and mental suffering. But there's this other thing called vipari nama dukkha, which is the dukkha of change. You might have a good sitting for a while and then it changes and it becomes painful. So the pleasure of the good sitting really isn't stable. So when you begin to see that things aren't stable, they, even if they're pleasant, they don't stay pleasant. So when they change, then you're left with this dukkha.

• 26:06Dan Harris?

  Let me just jump in there for a second, just for the uninitiated. Dukkha, D U K K H A.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:12Dan Harris?

  Is the Pali, Pali being the language that the Buddha spoke, ancient Indian language. It's the Pali word, often translated, often mistranslated as suffering.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:23Dan Harris?

  The Buddha's principal pronouncement or most famous pronouncement was life is suffering, life is dukkha. But that really is a. A simplistic way of understanding it, it really is that life is going to be unsatisfying if you cling to things that will not last.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:38Dan Harris?

  Would be one way of saying it.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:40Dan Harris?

  And so you said before dukkha dukkha is like that double dukkha is straight up raw suffering when things suck.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:47Dan Harris?

  But then there's the other kinds of suffering, which is you see that something that is right now good. Eating a bowl of ice cream could make you sick later. And that is, that is this suffering that is inherent in everything in life.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Things don't stay the same. We live with this insecurity. We live with this instability. You know, no matter how much you put into your relationship, your job, your finances, your house, your kids, your whatever, no guarantee. Things are unstable, right? Things are insecure.

• 27:16Dan Harris?

  So.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  We live with the level of insecurity all the time, but we mostly try to keep it out of sight. But in mindfulness practice, we turn and see it. We look at it like, wow, this is going on. This is going on all the time.

• 27:30Dan Harris?

  One of my favorite Buddhist writers, Stephen Bachelor, talks about how Buddhism commonly misunderstood in my view and in his view as a religion. Actually is a rejection of all these death-defying dogmas and in fact is a turning toward all of the stuff that's going to destroy you. And that's a really interesting, to me, that is really the heart of what's interesting about Buddhism or one of, one of the areas that makes it so. So this is the, all the stuff that we're talking about with dukkha and suffering, this is what you understand in the third knowledge.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Yep, start to understand. There's one more thing.

• 28:01Dan Harris?

  So there's several part, components to this third knowledge? Is that what you're getting at?

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, there's three characteristics that we're going to begin to see impermanence, unsatisfactoriness. And the third one, I'm going to call conditionality.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Conditionality means that things arise due to causes and conditions. And when you see that, you realize everything is made up of other things. And there's nothing that has an inherent existence within itself. Heavy-headed, but what this means is.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Our mind is out of control. We can train it, but we can't prevent certain thoughts or feelings from arising in the mind. They just come, don't they? Due to causes and conditions. We don't control all the conditions of our life, externally or internally. And so that coming to see this and to recognize this in our experience can be rather unsettling.

• 28:57Dan Harris?

  First knowledge is knowledge of mind and body.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:00Dan Harris?

  Second knowledge is?

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Knowledge of conditionality.

• 29:03Dan Harris?

  And third knowledge is?

• 29:04Speaker 03

  A knowledge of the three characteristics. Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and I'm going to call it conditionality, but...

• 29:11Dan Harris?

  Sometimes referred to as selflessness.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, selflessness, but that's a scary word. It's like selflessness, who am I if I'm selfless and?

• 29:17Dan Harris?

  Right, but in selfless in this context doesn't mean generous. It means that the you that you think exists doesn't exist. The little inner you, the little Dan, doesn't actually exist.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Every moment is just a conjunction of conditions giving rise to an experience which we identify with as me.

• 29:33Dan Harris?

  Yes, but if you break down life from the solid movie of experience to the 24 frames per second, that the little Dan is just a story you're making up every frame as opposed to actually what is happening in every frame is something is happening and somebody is knowing and it is being known. But there is nobody doing the knowing.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 29:54Dan Harris?

  This is heady stuff, so we'll maybe not, we'll get into it a little bit deeper as we progress through the progressive insight. So what is the fourth knowledge?

• 30:02Speaker 03

  The fourth is a significant stage in practice. It's called arising and passing away.

• 30:07Dan Harris?

  Okay, so I think I've had the first three. And I've heard of the arising and passing away, sometimes referred to as the A and P. And this is the fireworks.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  This is where the fireworks come. But what happens is at arising and passing away is the speed with which you can notice the moment's experience start going by very rapidly. You just see.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Stuff is just going by and you're not stopping the flow of experience to have a emotional reaction to it, or have a relationship, or have a cognitive story about it. It's just like, the mind is just seeing things as they go by, moment to moment, very rapidly. And this is when the mind can do its work. The mind's work is to know what is. And when all of our stories about ourself and reactions to, I like it, I don't like it, are put aside, and that's what happens in the first three noughtages, we slowly begin to put aside all our reactions, all our beliefs and assumptions, and we just see, this is the way it is. Then the mind is able to do what it does, and it gets just really lit up. And then, there

• 31:13Speaker 03

  are these phenomena called pseudo nirvana.

• 31:16Dan Harris?

  Pseudo nirvana, or nirvana would be the poly pronunciation.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Spiritual goodies. We can call them spiritual goodies.

• 31:22Dan Harris?

  Pseudo nirvana, meaning that people mistake the experiences they're getting in the A and P for nirvana.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:29Dan Harris?

  Or nirvana. Nirvana being Sanskrit, nirvana being poly.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:32Dan Harris?

  Like what?

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Ecstasy. Yeah. For example. There are times when the mind just gets lit up, and it is just, it's not like the ecstasy of, oh boy, this is so much fun. It's just like, the whole mind and body is just in orgasmic bliss. Just like full body orgasm for hours.

• 31:53Dan Harris?

  What's the bad part of this?

• 31:58Speaker 03

  It's exhausting. It's exhausting. No. But while you're experiencing that, and when it first arises, you say, wow, finally, I'm out of knee pain, and I'm out of restless wandering mind. It's just blissful, it's just joyful. It's, wow, this is ecstasy, this is great. You know, we say, this has gotta be it, this is so good.

• 32:13Dan Harris?

  You think you're enlightened at this point?

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's right.

• 32:16Dan Harris?

  So you read the chapter in my book about being on retreat.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:19Dan Harris?

  You were one of the teachers on the retreat. Yes.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Hey, you didn't name me on that retreat.

• 32:23Dan Harris?

  I didn't name you, because we didn't actually meet until today.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  That's all right.

• 32:26Dan Harris?

  But the retreat was in 2010, and there's a moment in that chapter where I describe having a pretty, a very heightened experience for about 36 hours. Is that A and P territory? Or is that just like a terrible beginning meditator has his first bout of clarity and feels pretty good?

• 32:43Speaker 03

  You had a lot of samadhi.

• 32:44Dan Harris?

  Samadhi being concentration.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Continuity of mindfulness and purity of mind. Purity of mind brings, opens the door to all these spiritual goodies. So you'd get some taste of tranquility and joy and ease and clarity and a lot of confidence. You had a lot of confidence during that bout. And these are all manifestations of some of the pseudo nibanas or the spiritual goodies.

• 33:06Dan Harris?

  But you don't think technically I was in the fourth knowledge there?

• 33:10Speaker 03

  You can't say you go through a door and then you're there. It's more like as a cutting edge, we could say you step through the door. You fall back into the third knowledge and you don't stay in there all the time. So you're gradually learning how to access the fourth knowledge. Yeah, right, passing away. Don't take that as a confirmation of anything, but just as we're talking.

• 33:29Dan Harris?

  Why is it so touchy to confirm?

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Because we're really, the whole, the whole process and the whole progress of insight is self-knowledge. It's about self-knowledge. And if I can say to you, poof, Dan, you're enlightened. If you believe me because of your faith in me or your wish to be enlightened or whatever, you can walk around full of BS for a long time before you realize that's a delusion.

• 33:55Dan Harris?

  So is this why, we're taking a bit of a detour here from the progress of insight, but that's fine. Is this why Western meditation teachers have been so reluctant to talk about this stuff explicitly?

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Partly, but I think it's more that most of us who started practice in the early years, very driven in some ways, either spiritually called or comically called and just really

• 34:19Speaker 03

  on the fast track to get to our spiritual life. And when we were told, here's the map, check it out. You know, some people just get really overbearing or obsessive and strive too hard or with too much effort, which actually impedes their evolution, and I should say, of the knowledges.

• 34:42Dan Harris?

  Right. So the weird thing about this map is trying too hard, you can't make any progress.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  No, that's right.

• 34:48Dan Harris?

  So you have to put yourself in this weird kind of neutral position of trying without trying?

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Well, it's like, you know, if you went, if you said, hey, I've heard of this town called Paris. I'm going to go find it. You could wander a long time before you'd ever hit Paris. So it's good to have a map. Here's the map of where Paris is. Boom, okay, so you can wander around till you find what looks like Paris. And then you say, I need a map of the streets of Paris. So you get a map from someone who's into famous authors that lived in Paris. And you follow those, that map to all these locations that famous authors lived. You might be obsessed with getting your checklist done, but in the meantime, you're seeing the rest of Paris.

• 35:31Dan Harris?

  And missing it.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Lot of it. Because you've got to focus on that and you're missing what goes by elsewhere. So same thing with having the map of a spiritual journey. You know, if you've got a map and you're obsessively just trying to get it, well, that's just the wrong attitude to begin with in the first place.

• 35:48Dan Harris?

  Did you go through some of that?

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. When I first started meditation practice, I thought it was to have drug-like experiences. I thought you get high. That's good. That seemed like the goal. When I first shared that mistaken belief with Saito Upandita, the first time I was practicing with him.

• 36:07Dan Harris?

  Saito Upandita was Mahasi Saito's successor in Vermont and with whom you practiced. He recently died.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. And when I, you know, he said something about, what do you think happens? And I said, well, you know, you have these kinds of experiences. You just be mindful and you have some drug-like experiences and then puff, you can lighten. He just burst out laughing. He just burst out laughing. I mean, I wasn't offended. It was just, I was naive. And so he spends a lot of time instructing, offering the teachings of what the path is, at least the beginning path, how to get onto the path, so that you're not wasting your time looking for pseudo-nibbana. It'll come. Anybody that practices is going to definitely experience pseudo-nibbana.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  It's pseudo.

• 36:48Dan Harris?

  But just to get back to why... You and your ilk, you and the other meditation teachers have been hush about this. There's a lot of weirdness around this progressive insight. You're one of the first teachers who I've been able to sit here and just talk about this. Talk about the names and then, but even you got a little, you were like, don't take me as confirming anything. So there's a guy named Daniel Ingram, who you and I were discussing before, who wrote a, he's a Western guy. He's an ER doctor down in Alabama and he wrote a book about how he sort of went all the way on the progressive insight. That book was very much a cookbook, a term that he's okay with. And that caused an enormous amount of controversy within the tiny world of American Buddhism. And the reason why that's controversial, there's, there are about 7,000 reasons why it's controversial.

• 37:33Dan Harris?

  But one of them is that if people know too much, American teachers, yourself included, have had a lot of hard experience personally and with their students of seeing people get obsessed with making progress, which of course impedes progress.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Sure. And that, that was the danger. You'll know too much and we're very heady. We're great thinkers. We Westerners are great thinkers and we don't have a lot of faith for practice. Well, if you can think yourself into a blissful state or into believing that you're enlightened, great. Good. Don't have to do the work. Excuse me. That's the cynical view, but.

• 38:04Dan Harris?

  Cynicism is fine here, just so you know.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. I know. We're in the same club.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  But, uh, you know, I think that, you know, the introduction of a lot of what came in with the teaching of mindfulness and insight in the West, primarily the Western psychological understandings that help a lot of us get through the first years of practice and kind of become normal. And then suitable for really intensive practice of insight, I think has been a great blessing. And to have gotten the fast track to enlightenment early on could have derailed me and others. I heard about it a little bit, but didn't pay much attention to it because I wasn't. Didn't seem real to me, frankly. It wasn't until I got to Burma that, oh, it became apparent that this is what's happening.

• 38:54Dan Harris?

  Gotcha.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:55Dan Harris?

  Okay, so we're at the fourth knowledge here, the arising and passing away, which is where you see very clearly that everything is arising and passing away. And that can feel really good, and you can have these pseudo nibbana or pseudo nirvana experiences.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Now, let me just say about pseudo nibbana.

• 39:10Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Because we think this is it, we get attached to it. We take delight in it. We take delight in bliss. We take delight in joy. We take delight in clarity. We take delight in strong faith. We take delight in effortless energy. We take delight in non-reactive equanimity. And we just feed a sense of self until we can see those experiences as just ecstasy, being known, bliss, being known, great faith, being known, clarity, piercing clarity, just being known, so what? Until we can have that level of equanimity towards those spiritual goodies, we don't progress beyond arising and passing away. So it's a big, it's a big step.

• 39:51Dan Harris?

  I could see worse things than being stuck in a state of ecstasy. That feels like a pretty good cul-de-sac to me.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Well, it's a turnout on, it's a scenic turnout on the route, Dan. You know, as Upa and Dita would say, there's better things ahead.

• 40:04Dan Harris?

  But before you get to those better things, you gotta go through some tough things. So let's go, let's progress through the other knowledge.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  The next, the next mature arising and passing away where the spiritual goodies are arising, but you're not indulging in them, that's great. You know that the path is just noticed, is like the best practice you've ever could imagine. It's just, it's so effortless and it's so clear and it's so continuous and so, at times blissful and you're not indulging in it and you don't care if it comes or goes. And it's just very easy, a lot of equanimity. It's really great. And so the next phase of practice is where,

• 40:38Speaker 03

  I guess we'd have to say we purify our understanding of dukkha.

• 40:42Dan Harris?

  What's the name of this?

• 40:44Speaker 03

  It's called bhanganyana. It's the opening to the dukkhananas, what are called the knowledge of dukkha.

• 40:50Dan Harris?

  Suffering.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, suffering. And this is one of those, I didn't mention it before, but this is the second, what we call the rolling up the mat. Stage of practice. This is where practice is so hard.

• 41:00Dan Harris?

  People freak out and roll up their mat and leave.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, we just want to roll up our mat and go home.

• 41:04Dan Harris?

  So this is, this comes immediately after the awesome.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, the awesome.

• 41:08Dan Harris?

  Stuff of A and P.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:09Dan Harris?

  And again, the name of this knowledge is?

• 41:11Speaker 03

  It's Banganyana, the knowledge of dissolution, dissolution.

• 41:15Dan Harris?

  Sometimes this knowledge is called the dark night.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:19Dan Harris?

  People don't like this. Some people don't like this.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  People don't like it. Some of it say it's the dark night is similar to the dark night soul. I don't know what the dark night soul is, but some of the, there's some of the similar characteristics. But I'll also make a distinction if you want me to. When you begin to open to the fact that everything is arising, passing away, and everything is unsatisfactory, changing, and it's out of control. Suddenly or gradually, you begin to recognize.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Up until this point,

• 41:48Speaker 03

  I have to use three dimensional, objects are arising and they're being known. Another object arises and is being known. Object arises, being known, and it's very fast. But all along up to this point, the knowing has seemed to be steady, stable. Like it doesn't arise and pass away. But at mature rising passing away, you start to notice that the knowing itself is not steady.

• 42:11Dan Harris?

  So the Dan that's knowing is actually not there.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like the object and the knowing arise at the same time and they both pass away at the same time. And they arise again. An object and another knowing and it passes away.

• 42:25Dan Harris?

  So that's dissolution.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Another, yeah, because the sense of a permanent enduring knower of changing objects dissolves.

• 42:35Dan Harris?

  And this is scary as hell for a lot of people.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  This is very scary. Yeah, it's unsettling because you can't keep track of one moment to the next. The you that was mindful a moment ago isn't here to be mindful this time.

• 42:46Dan Harris?

  So let me.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  And you really feel it's visceral. It's like you feel that it's like, you know, where am I?

• 42:50Dan Harris?

  Let me tell you about an experience I had when I was young, a younger guy, much younger guy.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Were you ever not younger?

• 42:56Dan Harris?

  I'm, uh, will be 45 this summer, so I'm super young. So when I was very young, I had a recurring panic attack when I would smoke weed. And the contents of this panic attack were, it was like my brain was turning over in my head. Everything that was happening was happening right now. Oh no, this is happening right now. No, no, now it's now. No, now it's now. And it was terrifying. It felt like dying and waking up in every moment. And I. I know a little bit about the progress of insight in this stage, which is sometimes called the dark night or the knowledge of fear or whatever. I sometimes think that maybe I was having an experience like this as an immature weed smoker.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  It does sound like you access that understanding, that knowledge. But the difference between doing drugs or having a mental illness where one would access that kind of stuff is that you can't integrate it. You can't integrate that knowledge into an understanding that you can live with.

• 43:50Dan Harris?

  No, I didn't integrate it at all. It was like a vampire being confronted with garlic. I was just repulsed by it and freaked out instead of just leaning into it and seeing it with some equanimity.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's what happens. We get afraid and we have to work through the fear of

• 44:04Speaker 03

  objects and dissolution. And then there's another phase of this dark night. There's both the fear and then there's what we would call disillusionment, where you start to see that all that has appeared and that we've been fascinated by in our life is just really not very, doesn't really

• 44:24Speaker 03

  offer the goods. We get disillusioned with more experience.

• 44:28Dan Harris?

  Nothing does it for you.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Nothing does it for you.

• 44:31Dan Harris?

  So this is another knowledge, another state?

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's scary because to think nothing does it for you and there's no you that it's going to be done for anyway, it's kind of, what's it all about? You can really fall into a deep confusion and nihilism and just like you disappear and you don't, it's scary.

• 44:45Dan Harris?

  So this progress of insight is a real adventure. That's another thing I like about it. It's, there are great things that happen and then these, all these obstacles you have to navigate. It's back to my sort of Dungeons and Dragons comparison.

• 45:00Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Steve talks about the last few steps on the path and then stubbornly refuses to answer a few of my annoying questions.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 45:41Dan Harris?

  I don't know which knowledge we're in anymore, but we've gone from fear into disillusionment. And then what happens after that?

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Let me just say, when people get into that stage, we recognize that this is the disillusion. This is the bhanganyanas, this is the knowledge of dukkha, the dukkhananas, and people want to go home. And so we have to just say, okay, just settle back, just notice what you can. Don't look for the kind of experience you had last week. That's going backwards. Just keep noticing what you can, just settle back, be comfortable, don't push, don't know expectations. And eventually people will get through it. Their pace of noticing gets even faster. But there's a knowledge, there's something that has to transpire in the mind. And that is, as bad as this is, I got here through the knowing that I just had to recognize something is being known in each moment. Something is being known in each moment.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  This now is being known in each moment. Disillusionment is being known in each moment. Fear is just being known in each moment. Terror is just being known in this moment. Okay. And when you really remember that and you you kind of recommit, this is the next level of insight, where it's called re-observation. You determine the way forward is to just keep noticing things are being known, one after another.

• 46:58Dan Harris?

  This is called re-observation?

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Re-observation.

• 47:00Dan Harris?

  That's the name of this?

• 47:01Speaker 03

  That's the name of this stage, yeah.

• 47:03Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Because you reaffirm, again, you're just observing, you're not judging this as, if we were judging our experience as good or bad and saying this is skillful or not, you would go home, you would not practice, you wouldn't know how to practice, you'd get, you'd need a teacher. You need a teacher, a skillful teacher at the dukkhananas to help you navigate it skillfully. If you don't have a skillful teacher, or you don't have a teacher that you can have faith in, to trust, to guide you, you'll end up really disturbed.

• 47:28Dan Harris?

  And again, the dukkhananas are the knowledges of suffering that happen after the fireworks of the arising and passing away. So that's like the valley one has to?

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, the valley of death.

• 47:38Dan Harris?

  Literally, because you're seeing everything dies. Okay, so we're in re-observation, we're starting to emerge out of the valley of death.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:45Dan Harris?

  And what's the next, what happens, what's the next?

• 47:47Speaker 03

  There may be, there may be, I haven't got it quite in my mind right now, but you're on your way towards more equanimity.

• 47:54Dan Harris?

  And that is the stage, equanimity.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  This is the stage that we're headed towards. And gradually, we haven't seen it because we've been so fascinated with the variety of objects that we've been noticing, we've been so fascinated with the spiritual goodies. And then we've been so obsessed with the, or preoccupied with the dukkha nyanas. We haven't noticed that the stability of the mind to be with these changing objects has gotten stronger and stronger to now where it's just so equanimous. Anything can arise and we don't react. Anything can arise and we don't react. The best possible spiritual goodies can arise? No indulgence in them. The worst terrifying fearful dukkha that you can imagine arises? No fear of that. Equanimity.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Unshakable, steady observation. This is the way it is, moment to moment.

• 48:45Dan Harris?

  Okay, so here we are, we're about to get to the sort of culminating experience in this adventure. Start out with some basic understanding of the way the mind works. And during the progress of insight, the mind is steadied and concentrated and seeing things clearly. And you hit these, the fireworks of the arising and passing away, sometimes called pseudo nirvana, or sometimes I love this term, corruptions of insight.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Let me just, let me just explain what that means.

• 49:11Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  The spiritual goodies arise because you have good practice. But as soon as they arise, they become an object of indulgence or feeling gratified. It's that gratification with those experiences that is the corruption. Joy is not a corruption. Tranquility is not a corruption. Faith is not a corruption.

• 49:30Dan Harris?

  Clinging to them is the corruption.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Indulging and clinging to them.

• 49:34Dan Harris?

  So we started with the basic understanding of the mind and the body and conditionality. And then we enter into this A and P where we have the pseudo nirvana. Then things get scary. We're in the dukkha nyanas, the dark knight, the valley of death, whatever. There's a bunch of stages of this. And then you start to emerge with re-observation where you fall back onto the real anchor, which is that mindfulness, which is just seeing things clearly. And then you get to this really cool area called, and again, I've had no experience with any of this. This is just my understanding from talking to you and reading. You have equanimity, which is everything's cool. You're just cool with everything.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:07Dan Harris?

  And out of equanimity, this is where we get to the big N word here.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Okay, now let me, let me just, let me just prep you a little bit.

• 50:13Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  When we have, when the mind is in this equanimist, it's not a state, it's like moment to moment, it's just not reacting, it's just there, there. Things are going by extremely rapidly. And even the sensations of the body are going by so fast, you don't stop the flow of experience at all. For myself, when there was strong equanimity, it just, the tangibility of the body feels like mist. Mist, that's as heavy and as thick as the body is, it's like mist. Okay? And so the mind is very light too, it just not, it just doesn't get entangled in anything. It doesn't miss anything either, it just doesn't get entangled, it doesn't pick up, it often doesn't even pick up the ideas of what's being presented to it.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  It sees, but it's not picking it up to massage it into, I like it, I don't, I should do this, I shouldn't do that. The mind doesn't do that. And so the equanimity tends towards long periods of time of just sitting quietly observing the flow of phenomena. Time gets distorted. You sit down, you seem to take two or three breaths and a couple of hours has gone by. Yeah, some real time distortions, it is phenomenal. Okay, now what's happening is the objects are being seen quickly and recognized quickly. And we have no reaction to them. But what's being seen about them is one of the three characteristics. We're seeing that they're impermanent, we're seeing that they have the characteristic of dukkha,

• 51:43Speaker 03

  which means they're either painful themselves, not at this point. They're unstable, or they're not controllable.

• 51:49Dan Harris?

  Unreliable.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Unreliable, yeah. And then that the third characteristic, they're conditioned and they're not self, they're not stable, you can't control them. Okay, so we're seeing objects, we're seeing these characteristics of all objects. And so, think of it this way, Dan, imagine that you were seeing, you understood, everything that you're experiencing is painful.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  You wouldn't pick it up. You wouldn't deal with it. You wouldn't. You're just, no, I don't want to, I don't want to deal with that. Or if you realize this that I'm looking for to make my life 10% happier is unstable. It doesn't last. It might be 10% happier today, but it's going to be 10% less happy tomorrow. Why do that? So you don't pick it up. The mind doesn't reach for what it sees, doesn't offer what it looks for. So the mind is not reaching for, to hold on to anything. Because it's impermanent, it doesn't last. It has the characteristic of a dukkha. It's not controllable. It's not yours. It has no essence even. And so the mind doesn't reach. Now, when the mind doesn't reach for anything,

• 52:58Speaker 03

  it might fall into the unconditioned.

• 53:01Dan Harris?

  Okay, so now, the unconditioned is another way of saying nirvana, or in the Pali word, nibbana. Unpack that for me, man. What is the unconditioned and how would one fall into it?

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Well, you know, as Trungpa Rinpoche so aptly put it, he says, enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes us accident prone. Okay, so it's like, it's unconditioned. It's not conditioned by anything. It's a reality.

• 53:29Dan Harris?

  So we live in this world as this vast soup of causes and conditions. But nirvana is the unconditioned. It is this...

• 53:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's its own reality.

• 53:40Dan Harris?

  And when you fall into it, you spend a lot of time there, or is it like a zap and, and you bolt out of your chair? What is, what happens?

• 53:48Speaker 03

  The texts say it's just a momentary visit by the mind to this reality. And some people recognize it instantly and some don't. But if you continue to practice and develop what's called the fruition, not just the initial path of nibbana, but the fruition of it, then it can last for a longer period of time.

• 54:10Dan Harris?

  What's the difference between the path and the fruition?

• 54:12Speaker 03

  This first visit to the unconditioned is a profound experience. And it permanently transforms the mind. Okay? And some people experience it and it's just like, wow.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  They're just done. They're just done. They don't need to practice. They don't want to practice anymore. They just have done all they want to do. Some people just ride a ride the wave of bliss and Dharma joy for hours, if not days. Just wow, relief. It's a kind of relief that's just like unbelievable. Okay. So what happens is that all along in our practice up to this first taste of the unconditioned is we've been purifying the mind, purifying our understanding, and we're becoming more confident that this is the path to the end of suffering, clinging, the end of clinging, to these suffering. And

• 55:09Speaker 03

  that at some point, we have looked at all of our doubts, looked at all of our, is it possible, really? Is it me? Does it work for them? Does it work for me? Can I do it? All that stuff had been seen. It's just another moment's experience arising and passing away. And it is said that at the point of first accessing the unconditioned, that doubt about the teachings of the path, the Dharma, and the ability to practice in this way is uprooted, meaning it's not just suppressed through concentration, it's uprooted from the mind, never to appear again. But also, it is said that this belief in this, the

• 55:54Speaker 03

  little Dan or the little Steve that's in here, that this is all happening to, that belief is also uprooted from the mind at the first access to the unconditioned.

• 56:05Dan Harris?

  But what is it? But what is, you've had this experience, clearly. So what does it feel like? What is it like?

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Not supposed to say.

• 56:15Dan Harris?

  Why are you supposed to say? This is where things get weird. Why are you not supposed to say?

• 56:19Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not that we're not supposed to say. It's in the book. It's a non-experience, if you will. We're going to have to say it's a non-experience.

• 56:28Dan Harris?

  What's so great about it if it's a non-experience?

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Because it has this powerful effect on the mind.

• 56:33Dan Harris?

  But what's so great about it in the moment you're having the experience if there's nothing to experience?

• 56:38Speaker 03

  That's the greatness of it. Because at this point, you have seen that every moment's experience has this characteristic of dukkha.

• 56:45Dan Harris?

  Suffering.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 56:46Dan Harris?

  Nothing's gonna do it for you.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  And so now there is this experience of no dukkha.

• 56:51Dan Harris?

  Ah, I see, I see.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  No dukkha.

• 56:53Dan Harris?

  So it's like a weight has been lifted or something like that. So it's like, nothing's gonna do it for you until everything does it for you?

• 57:00Speaker 03

  No, I wouldn't say everything does it for you. You still realize that nothing is gonna do it for you like you had thought before. But now your sense of, your understanding of what happiness is, is forever changed.

• 57:13Dan Harris?

  So switch seats with me mentally here. If you were in my chair and you just listened to somebody describe this adventure that culminates in a non-experience that permanently changes the mind, would you believe any of this?

• 57:25Speaker 03

  No.

• 57:28Speaker 03

  Probably not. I would be skeptical. I would say, yeah, but so why would I wanna do that? And can you prove it? And tell me about it and show it to me. Can't do that. But the experience of it is real.

• 57:41Dan Harris?

  And you're just saying that based on your own experience?

• 57:42Speaker 03

  Once you taste the experience of the unconditioned, you know what it is.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Okay?

• 57:48Dan Harris?

  But this, there's a lot of controversy around this because we're talking about the understanding of enlightenment from one school of Buddhism.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 57:54Dan Harris?

  And there are many schools of Buddhism.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 57:55Dan Harris?

  And so if you sit with a Tibetan monk and talk to them about the unconditioned, they're gonna look at you like you're crazy.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. Yeah. Oh, in fact, one of my colleagues, who does practice with Tibetan teacher, described this kind of experience to his Tibetan teacher. And his Tibetan teacher, there's nothing in Tibetan Buddhism that would value that. Okay. It's just different. Probably a great Zen master from Japan and a Chan master from China and a Tibetan master from Tibet and a Ajahn from Thailand and a Saito from Burma, if they all got together and talked about their most liberating experiences, wouldn't be able to understand each other. But that doesn't mean it doesn't actually work. There's some cultural stuff there and there's some, how you frame the experience. But when you take the Buddhist teachings on the Four Noble Truths, that there is this experience of suffering.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  And once you come to know suffering, really what the suffering is that he's pointing to, then you begin to understand or begin to get an idea of what the end of suffering is gonna look like. And when you taste that end of suffering, then you confirm for yourself, oh, that's it. That's it.

• 59:03Dan Harris?

  So you have all of these different schools and they have differing maps of enlightenment, right? We just talked about one map, but there are other maps.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:15Dan Harris?

  Do you ever have a student who starts studying under you and starts showing landmarks on other people's maps, other traditions' maps?

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know, I don't know the too many details of other maps, but I do know that when students from other traditions come to me and they talk about their experiences, I can locate them on my map.

• 59:35Dan Harris?

  I see.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  So I can say, oh, that sounds like, you know, this is what we would, this is how I would understand it from my perspective, from my map. And having talked with a lot of students who practice Tibetan teachings, there's a lot of overlap. But there are places where if it goes dissonant and fuzzy and you can't overlap, they can't lay them over as a direct fit.

• 59:55Dan Harris?

  There was an effort here in the West to form something called the Contemplative Development Mapping Project, where they would lay the maps over each other and see if they could figure what the common goalposts are. But we, so we finished the progress of insight, or one part of the progress of insight with the Nirvana experience, but the fact is that actually this is just the beginning. It's called stream entry.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Dan Harris?

  You enter the stream.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Dan Harris?

  And then you actually go through this progress.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  Again.

• 1:00:23Dan Harris?

  Yes, and then the second time you have a Nirvana experience, it's.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Let me just correct, let me just correct. It's not the second time you've experienced Nirvana.

• 1:00:30Dan Harris?

  I see.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Because remember I mentioned the path.

• 1:00:32Dan Harris?

  Path, yes.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  The path is the first moment of experiencing or realizing Nirvana. But then with training, you can develop the capacity to enter this state, or enter, we'll call it a state, the state or this reality of Nirvana or Nirvana for extended periods of time. But this is a special training of the mind. So you might stay in this experience, realization of Nirvana for a minute, or two, or five, an hour, more.

• 1:01:02Dan Harris?

  Okay, so that's, those are fruition moments.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, those are fruition. That's not second path. No, that's not the second.

• 1:01:07Dan Harris?

  That's not the second experience. Alright, okay.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  So we can experience or kind of realize nirvana many times before one moves on to second path.

• 1:01:15Dan Harris?

  And then the second path, and I don't want to get too deeply into this because we have a lot of, we don't have that much time left, but second path, you are at this point a once-returner. And then the third path moment is a non-returner, and the fourth is an arhant, which is a fully enlightened being.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's that all mean? Yeah.

• 1:01:30Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I want to ask you, so can you even say, or are you allowed to say where you are in this progress? And why can't you if you can't?

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  This whole lineage comes from the monastic tradition. And the rules of the monks were not to, they weren't prohibited from sharing their personal realizations and attainments. But if in the process, they deceptively led others to believe their attainments, it could damage others' faith. And so monks were very cautious and just don't talk about their attainments.

• 1:02:07Dan Harris?

  So you're not allowed to say?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Nobody's preventing me from saying anything.

• 1:02:10Dan Harris?

  But you don't feel comfortable saying, "I'm a once-returner, I'm a non-returner," or whatever?

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:02:16Dan Harris?

  But don't you see how that's a little, like, there's like this code of silence, like mafia thing? Like, you can't tell me where you are on this map. Why not?

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  I'm still on the map. I'm still trudging along.

• 1:02:28Dan Harris?

  I asked you, we have, Joseph Goldstein, who was referenced before, was my teacher, and has been the teacher for you for many years. I once asked him, "Where are you?" And he said something like, "I'm somewhere between the first and the third," or something along those lines. But basically, people feel there is this omerta, you just really are not supposed to say where exactly you are on the map.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. I respect Joseph's hedging, if you will, and clarity without specificity. I think that's probably as skillful as we can get.

• 1:03:00Dan Harris?

  Do you guys, are you comfortable talking about this with your teacher, or among other teachers? Or are there like backroom conversations where you guys sort of figure out where you are?

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  Something like that. You know, when I first started teaching the three-month course with Joseph, Sharon, and a couple of other senior teachers, we did take one year of teacher meetings during the three-month course where we all spoke about our, what we considered our best, clearest, most liberating, whatever experiences, both practicing concentration or jhana, as well as practicing insight or liberation. And it was really, what was really instructive to me, Dan, was that we were all practicing in the same tradition, the Mahasim Sada tradition, and we all had very distinctively different experiences, but we all had a similar understanding.

• 1:03:47Dan Harris?

  But was that like a kind of like of a measuring, public measuring of where we are on the, on the path?

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  Well, we were just, it was, it was just very, we were sharing with each other what our, what our-

• 1:03:59Dan Harris?

  But don't you get into comparing mind? Oh, look, Joseph's so much farther ahead of me.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  That's for people who haven't got to the first stage.

• 1:04:06Dan Harris?

  You can't understand this conversation in like-

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Comparing mind is one of those grabbing things, conceit.

• 1:04:12Dan Harris?

  I see.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Comparing mind. So by the time you get to the first stage, you've done a lot of, you've uprooted a lot of that comparing mind. It still hangs in there till the end, but-

• 1:04:20Dan Harris?

  Gotcha.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Dan Harris?

  But that actually leads to my next question. I have two final questions I want to ask you. One is, you've gone, you won't say how far, but you've gone pretty far on the progress of insight, I would imagine. Are you, do you retain the capacity to be a jerk, ever?

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  Oh, I practiced that daily.

• 1:04:36Dan Harris?

  How, if you've gone through this adventure many times and you've experienced nirvana, how can you still be a jerk sometimes?

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  Jerk is an evaluation usually from other people's eyes.

• 1:04:47Dan Harris?

  No, I know when I'm being a jerk.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 1:04:49Dan Harris?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  I think it's being human. I think of it as being human. And in some ways, we become more human. Maybe not careless in being a jerk, but there are times we just, we still have our conditioning. We still have a lot of personal, family, cultural conditioning, which just comes out in carelessly saying things, doing things, that, coming from a place of delusion. We're not free of delusion.

• 1:05:13Dan Harris?

  So you're not fully enlightened yet?

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  No, we still have a lot of aversion, still have desire, still have conceit and pride. And these things come out in ways that harm others, or hurt others, or shock others, or shock ourselves even. None of us like to think of ourselves as a jerk.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  All the time, but we do, we all have some relapses, I'd say, from our most mindful and ethical and wise place that we've visited.

• 1:05:40Dan Harris?

  So here's my final question. So I've been playing the skeptic, but the fact of the matter is, while I am actually genuinely a skeptic, I'm really curious and want to experience some of this stuff for myself. But is that really possible, given the reality of my life? I have a crazy full-time job. I've started a company. I write books. I have a baby. I will be able to do a retreat a year and a couple hours a day of sitting, which is pretty good.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:06Dan Harris?

  But it took you eight years. You had to become a monk before you started really getting down the path. So that makes me feel a little dispirited.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  No, don't. I'll tell you why. Because all that you're doing, the practice that you're doing, the retreats that you do, even if it's once a year, the daily practice, and the keeping yourself informed, talking about Dharma with other people, it's inspiring. It keeps your mind headed in that direction a lot of the time. And it's not only silent retreats that's going to mature the mind, mature the paramis.

• 1:06:37Dan Harris?

  What is the paramis?

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  The paramis are the forces of purity in the mind. Generosity, loving kindness, understanding, truthfulness, energy, resolve.

• 1:06:47Dan Harris?

  Yeah, but all that I understand is all to the good, and it does prepare the mind for this. But don't you need to build up some concentration, like really?

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that mistake, mistake. If you build up the paramis, and in your daily life, you always have, every day, you have ample opportunities to practice paramis. Patience, generosity, loving kindness, non-reactivity. You've got to practice that every day. If you make it a conscious practice, you are preparing the soil of your mind for liberating insight. And there are those among us who didn't get enlightened, didn't get their first stage on retreat.

• 1:07:22Dan Harris?

  They hit.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Household.

• 1:07:24Dan Harris?

  Yeah, they hit stream entry, their first path experience, whatever lingo you want to use, not on retreat.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Dan Harris?

  Okay, so this could happen in my bedroom.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Depending on what you're doing.

• 1:07:33Dan Harris?

  I didn't mean that in a boudoir type of way, but I meditate in my bedroom. So this could happen in my bedroom.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Sure. Yes. If you inform yourself, read the book, study the book, whatever, find out what's involved, practice the paramis daily, do your daily practice, do a retreat when you can. You're gradually, if you haven't gotten first stage yet, you will.

• 1:07:57Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Steve Armstrong, and don't forget that there's a link in the show notes for the GoFundMe for Steve and his wife Kamala at this difficult time in their lives. Finally, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.