Why Should I Explore My Own Consciousness? | Jeff Warren

Jeff Warren is a Meditation Teacher and Writer, he is the co-author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and author of The Head Trip. Today we learn why introspective work should be taken as seriously as personal hygiene, how you can double the span of your life experience, what benefits occur when consistently practising meditation, and just why exploring our own consciousness is so difficult, yet rewarding. There are more connections in a single square centimetre of human brain tissue than there are stars in our galaxy; our inner universe is infinitely more vast than we will ever notice, and yet our unexamined daily experience of life offers very little to suggest that this is the case. Join me and Jeff as we discover why, and how to work around it... Further Reading: Jeff's Book with Dan Harris - Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics: http://amzn.eu/d/5zmmsEz Jeff's Website: http://www.jeffwarren.org/ Consciousness Explorer's Club: http://www.cecmeditate.com Cory Allen's Basics of Meditation Practise on Modern Wisdom: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549?mt=2&i=1000410359630 Sam Harris on The Meaning Of Life: https://youtu.be/srxDtefn740 Shinzen Young's - The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works: http://amzn.eu/d/hbZ9Nbj Sam Harris - Waking Up - Searching for Spirituality Without Religion: http://amzn.eu/d/gUdGubV What 10,000 Hours of Meditation Does to Your Brain: https://www.projectmonkeymind.com/2016/11/ph-d-happiness-10000-hours-meditation/ - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  Hello, hello, hello. It's time that we revisit the inside of our own minds. There are more connections in a single square centimeter of human brain tissue than there are stars in our galaxy. Our inner universe is infinitely more vast than we will ever notice, and yet our unexamined daily experience of life offers very little to suggest that this is the case. Today, I'm joined by someone who can hopefully help us map out exactly where we're going, why it is the case that we don't notice the nature of our own minds day to day, and how to work around it. Jeff Warren is a meditation teacher and a writer.

• 0:48Chris Williamson?

  He's the co-author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics with Dan Harris, who is an American news anchor that very famously broke down and had a panic attack live on air. Dan then went on a journey of meditation, and Jeff was a big part of that journey. Now, I've wanted to get Jeff on for as long as I can remember, and his schedule is absolutely manic. I first discovered him on Joe Rogan's podcast, and then read his and Dan's book subsequently after that. I'm also now rereading Waking Up by Sam Harris, which is an absolutely fantastic exploration into the sense of self, the nature of our own consciousness, and meditation and spirituality

• 1:32Chris Williamson?

  without religion. So it was very timely for me to sit down with Jeff. He gives us a lovely breakdown of why we should be concerned about exploring our own consciousness, as he calls it interpersonal hygiene, the meditation practice which everyone should be doing as often as they're washing themselves. And yeah, it was really eye-opening. Jeff's obviously an incredibly experienced guy in this field, and I felt like I learned a lot as someone who's read into it quite a bit already, so hopefully you do as well. Enjoy.

• 2:26Chris Williamson?

  Mr. Jeff Warren, welcome to Modern Wisdom. How are you, sir?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Good. Nice to be on, Chris.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic to hear from you. So for the listeners at home who don't know who you are, could you give us a little bit of a background to yourself, please?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Well, I started out as a journalist. I was working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, writing scripts for a kind of big current affairs show over in Canada. And I was, you know, interested in ideas. I kind of became the ideas person for that show where I was doing a lot of kind of big picture interviews. I was really interested in science in particular, in neuroscience. I mean, I had a literature background, but got really into the brain stuff. My brothers are neuroscientists, so we have lots of talks. And I ended up getting into consciousness, the whole mystery of the mind and how the mind works. And I wrote a book called The Head Trip, which is sort of about the neuroscience,

• 3:24Speaker 01

  where the neuroscience meets our experience, like how and what these shifting states of consciousness mean for us. You know, waking, sleeping and dreaming and the different variations and iterations. And through that, I got into meditation. And then that kind of ended up changing my life. And I ended up really going kind of deep on the meditation path and just spending all my time

• 3:48Speaker 01

  practicing and going to as many retreats as I could and eventually found a really great teacher in this guy Shin Zen Young. And he encouraged me to start teaching myself. I started a community of practitioners in Toronto called the Consciousness Explorers Club in 2011. And that grew really quickly. And it had sort of a unique way in which we approached the whole subject of exploring the mind. And started teaching and eventually just came out with a book with Dan Harris called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, which is sort of a kind of a no bullshit guide to what really goes on in a practice, why it's helpful, where it's maybe not helpful, what are the stumbling blocks that prevent people from getting into it, the common challenges that you hear and where

• 4:31Speaker 01

  some of the best practices for addressing that. And it's sort of a road trip as well. And since that happened, it kind of just opened me up now to a larger demographic. So I'm doing lots of podcasts like these and I have various programs I'm starting to roll out around, around practice. That would be a bit of an overview.

• 4:46Chris Williamson?

  That's fascinating. So it sounds like a real trajectory from where you started. I absolutely love the name Consciousness Explorers Club. That is, that's a fucking club that I want to be a part of.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Just have to be conscious to be a member.

• 5:01Chris Williamson?

  Nice. So very, very low requirements for the members.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  And not even, you can maybe expand it out to the non-human world too, throw a few cetaceans in there, some ravens. Ravens are very skillful at certain mind moves, they say.

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  So I would absolutely go to a Consciousness Explorers Club for dogs. That sounds, in fact, that sounds not far off my Valhalla. So yeah, that would be a, that would be a good way to spend an afternoon. So you've, you've touched upon one of the words that I really want to focus in on today. It's a big question, but can you try and explain why people should explore their own consciousness? Why should they be bothered?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I mean, there are so many responses to that. Uh, I guess the, maybe the most obvious one is you're already doing it anyway. You know, being human means that you are living in a particular way, you're creating certain habits of mind. Um, most of us just do this unconsciously and whatever habits emerge are the habits we're living with. And often some of those habits can be very, you know, unhelpful to us and cause a lot of challenges. Exploring your consciousness means basically just beginning to be deliberate about how you're living your days, about the way you're existing, about the habits of mind and body

• 6:22Speaker 01

  and heart that you're reinforcing. So I would say it's the beginning of living a more awake and intentional and deliberate life. And that it's a path that leads unquestionably to more of a centered life, more less suffering, more meaning and fulfillment. I mean, it doesn't mean it's an easy road, but that certainly therein lies sanity, connection, all these things. And even to say even in a bigger picture than that, what I'm really talking about is practice. And practice is about, at a very fundamental level, choosing how you in particular want to live this life. What are the qualities that are important

• 7:06Speaker 01

  to you? What are the things that you want out of your life? You can choose practices and explorations, if you will, that help you make these things happen. And I mean, I think that's, I can't imagine what else you would want to do.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  It's such a good point. There's a couple of Sam Harris quotes that I'm going to smatter throughout this and try and get some of your feedback on. But in something that he's very recently released, he actually says that most of us spend our lives learning to live. And I think that it would appear that this introspective work is discovering your own path of how to live. Would you say that's fair?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  I would say that's absolutely fair. I mean, we say at the Consciousness Explorers Club, or one of the taglines I like is, being human takes practice. So it's like, it absolutely takes practice. And, you know, you can just go on autopilot and go totally unconscious, but where do you end up? You know, maybe some of us with the absolute, where our decks are stacked, we had phenomenal genes, we had an incredibly healthy, secure upbringing, we have all the circumstances in the world have unfolded for us in an external way perfectly. Maybe then you can go on autopilot and you can just, everything will just sort of work out.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  Perfect storm sort of thing.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Perfect storm. I don't doubt that happens for some people, you know, and I, those people, wow, they're lucky as hell. For a lot of us, for me, I had to do some major course correction. And it wasn't, it wasn't optional, you know, it was sort of like do or die.

• 8:34Chris Williamson?

  Mandatory.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  It was mandatory, exactly.

• 8:38Chris Williamson?

  So moving on from that, I wanted to give you a quote and I wanted to hear what your interpretation of it would be because it's one that's very meaningful to me. "The quality of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, but you are not your thoughts." What would you say that means to you?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Well, I completely agree with it. And what it means for me is, well, it points basically to, I mean, you're going right here, I guess. It points to the heart of the contemplative mystery. So the mystery that's at the heart of the world's contemplative and mystical traditions, and these traditions are as old as humankind. And what they pretty much all say, if you're going to subscribe to what they call the perennialist perspective, which believes that there is a kind of convergence, and that is only one perspective, there are other...

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  The perennialist perspective?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Perennialism basically believes that there is a kind of unifying principle or set of principles that are there underneath all the world's practices and traditions, and that they're all trying to sort of point us there. And what they're all trying to point us to in different ways is that the limited way in which we experience ourselves as a kind of mind-body, separate from the rest of the world, isolated in this little container, is actually unnecessary. It's real, it's real as an experience, but there are practices that can begin to open up the bandwidth a little bit to allow you to feel yourself in relationship with a larger whole.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And they, so they talk, I'm not saying that all these prac, that the experience of that is the same and all these traditions are indeed in all people, it's not. I think how it's experienced within a more Abrahamic context is that you feel that reality itself, you're in relationship with reality, you're in tune with that, it's a god to you, or whatever you want to, whatever language you want to use.

• 10:33Chris Williamson?

  Personal god.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  That's not, a personal god, that's not the language that, say a Buddhist or is used in Indian philosophy, they would say that's your true self, that you are not your thoughts. In fact, what you are, from an Indian perspective, from an Indian philosophy... Is the kind of empty knower of those thoughts of sounds of all sensations. That the there's a process of personality that is you, a mind body process that's unfolding. It has a history, it has preferences and that's fine. Part of a path of practice is owning that and creating the best possible mind body process you can. If you if you want to think of it that way. But that it's the awareness of that whole process that is you.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  The thing that feels like the center of you, the place you're knowing from is actually empty. It's the same in every single human being.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  You know, so it's sort of like an octopus with six billion arms. You know, and each at the end of each arm is an eyeball that's looking out of the world. And then we're each one of us is one of those arms.

• 11:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  But there's only one awareness in that octopus. And that's that I'm giving you kind of like a boilerplate summary of how contemplative. You know, how how I kind of think about it and how a mystic might describe it. And I actually think it's true insofar as my own experience has begun to point me in that direction. And if it is true, it's fucking mind blowing. That's true. And it should be out there and talked about by everyone, not just by unhinged mystics. Because I I think it's as true a description of human experience and consciousness as any you'll find in the psychology or neuroscience literature. So.

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  I'd agree, yeah. I mean, the fact that the vast majority of humans on the planet believe that they are they are their thoughts. As opposed to the watcher of their thoughts, that there is no distinction between them and their thoughts is. For neuroscientists, contemplatives and anyone who's done a modicum of introspective work. It it's so far off the mark.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, I I sorry, I just should say, um, you know, I think that as something we could. As a claim of something that's objectively true about how humans are, I think you can argue with that.

• 12:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  In so in so far as you could say, okay, what you can't argue with is the experience of.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Suddenly coming out of a thought stream and being able to notice it. So there's, you can't argue with that. There's a real human experience of being able to pan back the camera and disembedding from a particular trance of thinking. What you could say is, okay, but are you disembedding from that trance into just a broader trance? Uh, into a broader view. And so in other words, it's thoughts all the way down.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Which is perfectly legitimate. Actually, that has partly been my experience in insight practices. You, you think you're free and then you realize after a while that actually you're trapped in another kind of layer. And then you pop out again and pop out again.

• 13:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  But what, what's important to me is not to make any kind of claim about, uh, any kind of objectively quote true to claim of how this works. My only interest in saying it's true as an experience and as an experience, it has great value. It, it can really help us with our suffering. It can really help us, uh, get out of habits of mind that are very, you know, destructive. And so I, I'm interested in what's going to help people. I'm much more interested in that than I'm interested in what's true about reality. So I kind of have to make that, you know, you kind of had to say that in the world of consciousness studies because it's, you're, you're operating in a very weird and interesting medium.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  You know, it's not quite like other mediums. It's a medium where, you know, the, the subjectivity itself is kind of changing what it's learning and what it's understanding. So you have to be kind of humble about how you talk about that space because it's all very mysterious.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  The paradigm and the, the framework that your, um, understanding is within is constantly shifting. And the meta fact that the only way, the only way that you can appreciate my subjective experience is by me telling you which that you then subjectively interpret. It's like, it's like inception.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  It is like inception. I mean, which is actually a fine film.

• 14:46Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic motion picture.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say the probably this, I mean, there's so many paradoxes in this work. But one of the central paradoxes, if not the central, is that exploring consciousness is both a discovery and a training. So you're both discovering things that are true in your mind, like true dynamics that you're discovering and saying, hey, this is the thing I'm seeing. But in the act of seeing it, you are changing what you find. So you can never entirely say, are you discovering something or are you creating it? You know, you can, there's no place that you can stand in that has with absolute confidence that could say it's one or the other, and it's probably both in some way.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  So, which I think is good news for this whole, for us in terms of how, in terms of our health, in terms of our happiness, because it means that we can change what we find.

• 15:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, it allows you, it allows you, it allows you to build a road towards a destination which you want to get to. And as you're building the road, you learn how to build the road better. And as the road continues along, you can then move forward and back down it. You've seen where you've been, you've laid it, and you get a better image of where you're going in the future. You're totally right that as you do your training, the capacity that you have to move on and your direction becomes more zeroed in, hopefully towards whatever it is that you're aiming for, enlightenment or self-actualization, or a better understanding of the self, or wherever it's heading.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely, that, that's true. And then, and it's also true that there's, the whole thing is still really shot through with mystery and surprises and that you can have an intention, you can have an idea of what you hope will happen, you can be going in a particular direction. But life isn't gonna confirm itself according to your biases.

• 16:40Chris Williamson?

  No, no.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  You may have, you may have an idea or an agenda of what's gonna happen, but there, it can still go in a different way. So there's a continual dialectic between you have an intention. And that you're clear about and you and you move forward and it helps build up a particular kind of road, but you're also open to the unexpected. And, you know, that's what creates, actually, that's what creates a lot of wisdom is in that capacity to kind of hold that, that those two things at once, where you're, you're moving forward, you're, you're deliberate, you know, you're building your own reality in a certain way, but you're also humble enough to know that the thing you're building is only a small sliver and that reality itself will have much to say about it.

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  That's a lovely way to put it. So you've touched on the external world there and I wanted to move on to that as well. So, bad things will happen to you and good things also will inevitably happen to you. How does meditation change how you're going to feel about them?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, again, I would say it depends a little bit on the kind of meditation that you're doing, but the technique that I'm really sort of most passionate about, I guess, or at least I had the most experience in is a mindfulness technique. And the essence of mindfulness, as I see it, is it's really about disembedding from trance. It's about coming back to your own awareness and using that awareness to notice how you were operating according to a more limited set of principles. And suddenly you can see a particular thought pattern, a particular way of relating to the world that you were previously in unconsciously, as you get more experience with mindfulness, you start to see that that's happening.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  And in the act of seeing, you're no longer in that pattern. So there's a freedom to potentially then begin to change it. So that is unquestionably enormously valuable piece of information to know.

• 18:41Chris Williamson?

  It's super liberating, right? It's liberating you from the inputs of the external world to one degree or another. This is not a saying that you're no longer going to be subject to the forces of gravity or a car hitting you, but that, that your ability to be able to, Cory Allen, who I did a podcast with a few months ago, referred to it as the mindfulness gap, which I think is a lovely way to put it. It is, it is that gap, it's that breadth between something occurs.

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  And your reaction to it, or your thoughts about it, or a thought occurs and your capacity to not allow the next thought that comes careering into view to be what you think about, that you can simply observe it and watch it go by like cars on a road or birds in the sky.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely, that's super well said. I mean, let's just unpack that for a second because it is really, really deep and really interesting. What we're talking about here is you start to learn to live in that gap. So you start to learn to spend, get more and more space around what's going on in your experience. And then at a certain point, you start to realize or feel that that more spacious place is more a truer description of who you are. And, and the trajectory in a mindfulness practice, I mean, we can be really clear about this, the trajectory in a classic Buddhist mindfulness practice is happiness independent of conditions. So independent of whatever is going on in your

• 20:11Speaker 01

  life, whatever horrible external circumstance is happening, if you can get enough space around it, then you can experience that circumstance not as a hardship, but as what they would describe as a purification, as another opening to go deeper into your life. And that's boggling to try to consider what that would look like. But that is what the, you know, I've done a lot of interviews with lots of very, very, very senior teachers, and that more or less is a version of what they describe. And so that's really interesting. And that for me brings up a lot of questions around, first of all, do I want that for myself? Isn't part of being in the human experience to be identified, to be, will that affect

• 20:50Speaker 01

  that at all? And what they tend to say is no, that you, as you get more and more space around your experience, you develop the option to kind of ride with the energies of your life in a new way. So there's a kind of bouncy spontaneity and playfulness that can emerge. And it doesn't say take away from, it's not like you're dissociated when you're dealing with a tragedy in your life. It's more like the tragedy, instead of being something that's purely causing suffering, is experienced with a much deeper and rawer sort of poignancy.

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  I think.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Very deep and meaningful.

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 21:27Chris Williamson?

  Totally. I think the, a nice analogy there would be the equivalent of you being in the swell of a wave and it carrying you into shore as you're sucked underneath, or you surfing the wave and allowing the bounce playfulness, as you say, the control. You are using the waves of your life, but you are in control of them and you're riding them as opposed to being carried along at their will.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  I think it's like a perfect metaphor. And as someone who serves a lot, I love it, you know, because it's true. And, and actually it's interesting because it sort of says, you know, in initial early Buddhism, it was, I mean, some people describe early Buddhism was more about, okay, transcending suffering, you know, getting into this place of true freedom and enlightenment, uh, so that you're, you're happy independent of conditions, but then you're also just kind of chilling out and not really doing much with those conditions. So within Buddhism, they started saying, hey, you know, what's the point of that? We should really be all about coming back and to try to help other people. And so that became sort of second wave Buddhism. But then you have sort of third wave Buddhism within Tibetan Buddhism that was, that was saying, yeah, that's true too. And let's make it about energy and play and riding that life,

• 22:37Speaker 01

  you know, and much more of a joyful kind of take on it. That's more of a tantric take on it.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  And so I think that's a really, I think that's a really wonderful, when we get to that stuff, then it kind of meets the kind of self-actualization movements that came out of the West and these kinds of ideas that there is something about just, you know, playing with our lives and creating the most beautiful life that we can, in addition to finding that freedom, that it's both of those things.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  You're totally right. The, um, I, I use this analogy with Cory Allen. I'm going to use it again with yourself. So do you watch Game of Thrones?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. I watched the first few seasons and loved it. And I keep meaning to try to download it and get the rest. But I haven't seen the last few seasons.

• 23:13Chris Williamson?

  That's fine. So Bran, who's the young Stark, um, he becomes the three eyed raven at partway through one of the seasons. I haven't spoiled it for you, I promise. And When that happens, he essentially becomes almost completely detached from all emotion. And he's just like this, this zen master that's sat in a corner. But I think that a lot of people presume if they were to take mindfulness practice and meditation to its end point, that that's what they would become, this kind of turnip that's just so.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  A root vegetable.

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Do you know what I mean? That's completely, completely detached from what's going on around them. And I think what's interesting, I can't remember who it was, and I'm going to butcher the quote. So I'll try and get, get as close to it as I can. That they, they said that they understood that mindfulness practice, combined with a retention of the ego was important because the ego is what gives you the get up and go. But it's not being at the mercy of it that was important. And I think that it's interesting, the dynamic between the ego still being there and still allowing you to go and do the things that you want, but you being the, the person who chooses as opposed to being at the whim, being sucked under the swell again.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that's a useful way to think of it. I mean, I certainly try to find that balance in my own life. Um, I, I do want to say something though about, you know, I actually do think that, you know, no practice can go unmonitored. Um, and there's no such thing as a practice that you can just implement the technique and then just be unconscious in the technique and kind of hope for the best. You continually need to be checking in with ways in which a technique might need to be corrected. And I think in a mindfulness practice, there's definitely a trajectory within a practice that can happen, where people do get kind of dissociated. They do kind of just get, they kind of, they become the kind of witness and everything else is just passing through them.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  And there's sort of, there is an indifference that can potentially arise there. It's one of the traps within a practice that a good teacher should be looking out for and to help them work through that, you know? So it doesn't, it is possible to do a, a practice and to be, uh, for it to kind of imbalance you in a, in a new way. So you have to, you don't ever get to kind of, uh, lose the response, the sense of responsibility. You have to continually be responsible for where it's taking you.

• 25:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  So I think that's important to say, you know, because I think people have idealizations around practices and that you definitely hear that a lot with mindfulness. But mindfulness can lead into some very troubling and challenging areas. Uh, so you need to be kind of watching, is this, you know, you need to always have a kind of litmus test. Is this practice leading me, you know, am I, is my life better? Is it leading me, is my life better in the ways that are meaningful for me to be better? You know, am I more connected to my family and friends? Am I more creative? Do I feel like I have more vitality? If it's not doing that, then you may need to make, uh, uh, you may need to change the way you do the practice.

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

  So. Yeah, I get that totally. Are you, are you saying, are you saying that you need to be mindful about your mindfulness practice?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You do, yeah. It just keeps going on and on, bro.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  You just keep popping out and have to be mindful at the next level and then you're mindful the next level.

• 26:25Chris Williamson?

  Like, like a game of whack a mole, right?

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:29Chris Williamson?

  Right, so you touched on something earlier on about happiness not being contingent on external factors. And there's a lovely quote from Sam Harris again that I'm going to use now, which is that he talks about solitary confinement being considered as the worst form of punishment. That given the choice between spending their time with murderers and rapists or their time on their own, most people would choose the former, but yet solitary confinement and silent meditation retreats have been used by contemplatives for thousands of years to give themselves an insight into the mind that most normal people can't get. I think that it's, that is a perfect identifier of the fact that it is so contrary to most people

• 27:11Chris Williamson?

  to think that sitting alone with your thoughts would be beneficial. It sounds like a punishment, right?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I, I mean, I think a lot of people, it sounds like a punishment because for a lot of people, it's experienced that way. You know, when I first started meditating, it was like, are you kidding me? I gotta spend all this time with this guy? And there was a lot of really neurotic patterns and suffering and it was just like being in a health spiral. So I had you very quickly run in and, but so we're pointing, we're talking about something really deep here, which is that, you know, a practice points us to basically freedom. Because if, if, if, what, if you learn that you can't actually just sit and be with yourself. That is a huge thing to learn about yourself.

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  You can't actually just sit and be okay with yourself. You need to always be changing the external conditions to be okay. That's a deep unsettled pain or hole in the middle of your life.

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  Very unnatural as well, from an evolutionary perspective.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  It absolutely is very unnatural. So the practice is about you learn to sit alone so you can actually be okay with just being with yourself. And as that happens, you increase exponentially the range of possible conditions in which you can be free in.

• 28:24Chris Williamson?

  I totally get it.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  If you're not free in that situation, you're constantly gonna be grasping at the next thing. You're just racing from one thing or another because you don't want to spend one second alone with yourself because it's a horror show. But that is a nightmare to be living inside. And at some point, your capacity to outrace your own aversion to yourself is gonna fall apart. You know, you won't physically be able to do it. You won't find a new novel. And that's what happens when you're always trying to up the novelty. At a certain point, there's no greater novelty. You can't find, you know, once you've done all the stuff, once you've done your Richard Branson and done all the extreme experiences of reality and had all the privileges, you know, you're gonna be left with yourself.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  So you better come to peace with it at some point.

• 29:04Chris Williamson?

  Well, we come into this world alone and we leave this world alone, right? There's a lovely, a lovely little quote as well that talks about there's more connections in a single square centimeter of human brain tissue than there are stars in a galaxy. And you think that that is a physical manifestation of the depth of our experience or the capacity for depth of our experience. And yet, you're totally right that so many people lead a hedonic life where they're looking for the next thing that is going to make them happy. They're, even when they think that they're experiencing the present moment, in very subtle ways, they're looking over its shoulder. They're eyeing up what's coming next, even if they think that they're being present. Now, you mentioned Shinzen Young, who I know, I really want to get on to,

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  who is one of your meditation teachers. And he talks in The Science of Enlightenment, his book. He likens meditation to a magic trick that can double your life by increasing the depth of experience. I wondered if you would be able to explain to people what that actually means and how that kind of manifests itself, especially moving on from what we've just talked about there to do with the novelty and the chasing the next thing.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, I'm happy to talk about it. I've found that to also be true. Not as, I don't experience it in the way Shinzen does because he's such a more advanced practitioner than me.

• 30:24Chris Williamson?

  Because he's an absolute monster, that's why.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. He's next level. I mean, first of all, he's in his mid 70s and he's been hardcore practitioner for 50-plus years. And, you know, so the way he experiences reality is, it's fascinating, actually. I've had hundreds of hours of talks with him about how it is. So maybe I'll say something-

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  Sorry to interject. Have you got an idea of, in any idea of how many hours of practice it's likely that Shinzen Young's done during his life?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Um, that's a great question. I'd have to ask him. I would guess, I would guess probably upwards of 60,000 hours.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my god.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, I remember hearing once about this particular Tibetan, this Tibetan, actually, I would guess probably more like 80,000. Because I remember hearing about this Tibetan teacher who figured out, he figured he was maybe doing, done 65,000 hours of practice. And this guy was my age, so he was in his 40s.

• 31:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my god.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Shinzen's in his 70s. So if people say 100,000 hours of practice is what makes you, you know, gives you a certain amount of mastery, you can then compare that. So it definitely is a numbers game. The more time you spend doing it, the more time you spend in awareness, the more awareness erodes everything in your experience. Everything just turns into basically pixelated dust.

• 31:39Chris Williamson?

  I totally get that.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  It all just gets emptied out and turned into energy. So he lives, so to go to your question, to why it's deeper, I can talk about it in a general way that is accessible to everyone, about, that speaks to my experience. And then I can talk about it in a weird, cool, fucked-up mystical way that is true of Shinzen experience.

• 31:57Chris Williamson?

  Throw it both at us. Throw it both at us. It's a mindfulness spit-roasting. It's fine.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so since we're in the spit roast, so we'll start with the, we'll start with the dark meat that everyone can get.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  That everybody likes. So with that, I would say, yeah, what happens is, it's like I said, you begin to feel like you have more space. So you start to see how previously you were always inside this sense of urgency, sense of urgency, sense of urgency, and you were, and the sense of urgency just begets more urgency, and it begets in turn more work and more complexity. And it seems like you're constantly running out of time, because you're constantly running around this hamster wheel. And it's not even that it stays the same. The more you repeat a loop, the deeper it gets, therefore, the more it grows exponentially. So you're in, we're in these doomed sort of feedback loops of urgency and limit, sense of often of a limitation. So as we get into practice, we learn we don't need to feed

• 32:55Speaker 01

  those loops, and that our, the space just starts to open up. We realize that actually lots of things we thought were priorities that were important, that we had to do, can just drop away. And the things that remain, we start to be able to do them with more intelligence and care. And there's just a sense of overall of like, that you just have more time and space available in your life. And there's a depth of appreciation that comes with this, too. So I often think it's like, we move out of the, of a paradigm where we're trying to, you know, we're kind of in this up and down paradigm, where we're trying to keep the ups and get rid of the downs. But as you get deeper into practice, like I think I talked about this in the Fijian Skeptics book, there's a depth dimension

• 33:38Speaker 01

  that comes in. So you, you don't, you can't get rid of the ups and downs in life entirely, although they may start to round off a little bit with the practice. But what happens is, both the ups and the downs start to be experienced with more poignancy, more fullness. And this is where language runs out. This is where the contemplatives have always said that they can't explain it. You can't explain what this means. But just that there is a way, there are certain moments that are more poignant and full and spacious and meaningful. And most of your listeners will know what I'm talking about. But at some time spontaneously in their life, on a nature hike with a lover, who knows what, they entered into a space

• 34:19Speaker 01

  like that. And that's the space that a, a deep practice, that meditation practice, but many other kinds of practices can begin to bring us to.

• 34:27Chris Williamson?

  I totally, totally get that. Totally, totally, totally.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's what he means in a general way.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  I figured you get it. I mean, it seems like you, first of all, just from talking, it seems like you do. And if you're talking about modern wisdom, I mean, it seems that that has some kind of understanding.

• 34:43Chris Williamson?

  It fits the name, right? Fits the name. I think a really good way. So one of the typical co-hosts on the show is a guy called Youssef. And he gave me this fantastic insight and I'd be interested to share it with you and then we'll move on to the weird quirky insight that you've got coming up for us. What he said was that the more novel and experiences, the more mindful that we are of it. So I think everyone who's listening will be able to, will be familiar with their days appearing to go very quickly. When you look back at the last year and you think, well, what did I do with my year? As every subsequent year occurs, that speed, it appears like you're accelerating, right?

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  Like you can remember less. And one of the few times where there appears to be a little bit of a mindfulness gap is when you do something that's out of the norm. So if the listeners at home can think about the last time that they went somewhere new or the last time that they were driving somewhere and hit a roadworks and had to be diverted. So the more novel and experiences, the more mindful that we are of it. So what that means is that the mindfulness and the understanding of that, people can, for instance, looking back over my last year, I couldn't really tell you an awful lot of what occurred during my days when I went to the office. But I went to LA for 10 days, then Hawaii for five, Austin for one and Virginia for six this year.

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  And I can tell you without looking at notes or a diary, every single thing I did on every single day because the level of novelty was so high, which meant that my level of mindfulness was so high. So we've shown that in particular situations, we can be significantly more mindful than we already are. But the beginner's mind or the learned mind means that when we see things that we are already familiar with, we tend to allow them to rush past us and we allow ourselves to be carried off in thought and not experience the present moment anymore. I thought that that That example of what happens when you do something new and novel was a really

• 36:49Chris Williamson?

  good, like it's like taking a quick holiday to mindfulness land and you go, oh, that's what it, that's what it feels like, that, that level of remembered self and that depth of understanding and depth of experience and, you know, that's, that's what it feels like. And I think going to the doubling your life as Shinzen cites it, if I look back at how, how fast my holiday went, I think, well, yeah, like I was away for 30 days, but it feels like I was away for 60 days because look at all of the things that my remembered self can actually bring into view. Whereas when I look at a couple of months stretch where I'm in the office all the time, I think, oh, well, my, my God, that feels like it's gone by in a week.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I could not agree more. Yeah, that's, that's, and people describe that interestingly, almost, that's almost a universal description that comes from practitioners over time of exactly that kind of an insight. Yeah. And it's, and it's very liberating, you know, to, to begin to realize that you can spend more time in that space and that mindfulness gap, as you call it. I mean, I would say that it's also partly it happens because, you know, when we're just stuck in our thoughts, we're in a much narrower place as opposed to when we're actually popped out of that and really paying attention to the richness of what's going on all around us. And that's kind of the, the orientation.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  And from that place, there's so much more details to soak in. It's just like when you're having a, if someone's in front of you and they're kind of, you're, you're half paying attention, but you're mostly listening to your own thoughts of what they're saying. You're not taking in what they're saying, you're not taking in the character in their faces, you're not, there's so much information that's not there. So that's why it makes more space because it brings attention out into the world where, and it's not to say that it's not important to be able to, to sometimes be in your thinking process. Of course, it's like they say, you know, thinking is a wonderful tool. It's just a terrible master, you know, it's great to be able to go in there.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  Such a lovely way to put it. It's a wonderful tool, but a terrible master. Yeah, fantastic.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:50Chris Williamson?

  So you were saying that there's a slightly more spooky version, a slightly more out there version?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Well, so, so, so this is where, this is something I'm very interested in, which is that the kind of practice you do shapes your consciousness in very particular ways. So Shinzen is a classic Vipassana nerd. I mean, he's deep, he's deeply shaped by hardcore Vipassana practice from within both a Goenka and a Mahasi tradition and hardcore Zen practice within, from his teacher. And more of a Rinzi practice. So, and his main training that he has done for himself, it's in concentration, clarity and equanimity. But I would say in particular, in the equanimity and in the clarity. So, and in all of them together, but the clarity means that he spends every moment, he's trying to notice the beginning of each moment. He's trying to hear the very beginning of each sound.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  He's trying to hear, feel the very beginning of the sensation of breathing. So he has zoomed up the resolution of his consciousness now, so that he's able to notice the moment sensory experience begins to emerge into consciousness. Most of us, there's a kind of delay. But for, and, and there's, there's this unconscious processing that happens where underneath the threshold of consciousness, where something, a stimuli comes into awareness and then it gets sort of moved up into the higher levels of processing and it pops out into, into actual conscious awareness. But it entered the brain earlier. And so what, what some meditation research is showing and what Shinzen believes and what his experience describes, is that he's slowly lowered the threshold of his conscious awareness

• 40:22Speaker 01

  down into the, the area where the old turbines are, the kind of under the basement of mind, the stuff that's normally unconscious.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  He's in the belly of the beast, is he?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  He's in the belly of the beast. So he experiences each moment as that, more and more as that moment begins. So his experience of reality is everything is a kind of gushing fountain of, of, of, of energy that emerges before it crystallizes into anything, where it gets tagged as tree, as person, as emotion, as thought. It's just this blooming openness of experience. And, and he's oriented himself to the empty space out of which that bloom arises. Cause if you think about it, Like what is the ground of consciousness? You know, what is, if we're looking at, we're looking at trees and everything, but really we're looking at a TV screen. You know, all this is built by our consciousness. It's a model of the world. And you can, and what you can realize is that you can, in a sense, turn off the model, but there's still a screen.

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  And that's kind of like the ground or the emptiness or whatever you want to call it. And some people call the, the full version of that is awareness. When there's something in it, it's aware. When there's nothing in it, it's emptiness and there's no awareness, there's nothing. So he experiences reality as blooming out of emptiness at every moment. And he knows himself as that emptiness. And so therefore he lives a deathless life.

• 41:36Chris Williamson?

  Can you, can you, can you even begin to imagine what it's like to experience Shinzen's life? What, what it would be like to be him for five minutes?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Uh, I've had, uh, not really. But I would, I would say yes and no. Like I have had a taste of some of that because I've done a lot of practice. So I've had experiences like that, maybe not as. So this is the other thing you realize. Practice, there's a depth dimension to insight. It's like an iceberg, you know, and it's always the same insight. It can just ever be deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.

• 42:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  So I have many, I have thousands, tens of thousands of times I've had deep insights into impermanence. I've had insights into the liberating power of equanimity, of, of purification. I've experienced myself to be part of this larger process. I've felt myself emerging under the zero. But the way in which I have experienced that is, is superficial compared to the way, say, someone like Shinzen does. Because it only gets deeper with time. And, and I mean, it, wisdom is learning from experience. So you're learning, you insight is learning from experience. So the longer you are in experience, the more you create that direction, that trajectory of more openness, of more, of being in relationship to the space, the more exponentially quick that grows, just like a bad habit grows.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  And eventually you're inside something that's so foreign to where, what you were when you began. And yet you can see that it's the same principle operating all the way through. Does that, does that make sense?

• 43:02Chris Williamson?

  Totally, totally get it. I think one thing that I'd love to get your thoughts on is the difference between state and trait changes that occur within meditation. I discussed this with Cory Allen and I've discussed it at length with a number of my friends who are significantly more experienced meditation practitioners than I am. But I think a lot of people expect the. Trait changes to manifest themselves. I'm going to do my 30 day course and then I'm not going to feel anger anymore, or I'm going to be completely immune to negative emotions, or I'm just going to have this blissful happiness all the time. And it's, I think, reminding people to focus on the state changes, how it feels when they meditate, as opposed to the Brandon Stark

• 43:47Chris Williamson?

  turnip in the corner analogy again. I think it's good to focus on that. And I wondered if you had any thoughts about the state versus trait changes that occurred during that.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think a lot about it. I think, I mean, ultimately, so I think of it as three levels. I think of it as state, it starts a state, then it goes into trade, then it goes to state and trade. So and so I basically, I think of meditation as it's sort of, it's something that happens at three different times in the same moment, you could say. So there's the, there's the in the moment experience of meditation, where you sit down and you pay attention to your breath, and it can almost, many techniques can start to create a temporary state change right there. You can start to feel more calm, your anger can start to be metabolized, you can go into states of bliss or whatever, you can take, create a state change. That's how, that's, that's practice

• 44:42Speaker 01

  as it unfolds in the moment. But then you have practice as it unfolds over months and years. And that's what's, that's what generates the trait change. So you do, you practice being more friendly, for example, and you can start to feel more friendly as a state change in the moment. And over time, doing that more and more, the default baseline of friendliness starts to increase. So the trait of friendliness starts to become easier and easier to get. And that's the second, so that's the, and that's really what we're looking at in a meditation practice, is looking at the scale of months and years. There's a scale of the moment that makes you feel better in the moment, sure, that can do that, or it can actually be, make you feel worse in the moment sometimes, because meditation doesn't always go easily. But over the long run, it begins to create those

• 45:24Speaker 01

  state changes. Now, there's also a third scale, and that's the scale of a lifetime. And that's really what. Uh, the deep end of practice is about the deep end of practice is pointing you towards the whole of your life to beginning to experience yourself as a larger whole, beginning to feel yourself in relationship to the whole of your life. That's kind of the deep, meaningful stuff. And when that, as that starts to come really online, you have a combination of those state and the trait where this, the trait becomes so well entrenched that you get, you're, you're more likely to be in that state all the time.

• 46:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Maybe not, not 24/7, as Shinzen would say, the small self always comes back. You know, you still, there are always going to be times when you're going to fall out of that, when you're going to get into, you know, you're going to forget yourself and get into a more limited pattern of reactivity or whatever. But then you pop out of it again and the, the time you spend in that more spacious place just gets bigger and longer over time. So is, is that, is that, is that helpful, that way of describing it?

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  Totally get it. Yeah. Um, so going back to the individual practices, what are your thoughts on guided versus unguided meditation practices?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's really user's choice. So, um, some people, I think especially for a beginner, it can be really helpful to have that orientation. I mean, mindfulness means remembering, it's sati. It's remembering to be aware of what's going on and it's very easy. You start a meditation with the best of intentions. You start paying attention to your breath and then, you know, five minutes later, you're thinking about, you know, who knows what? So having a guided, a structure where the, the guide is kind of bringing you back online is super helpful for a lot of people. But for other people, they find it distracting. They're able to generate enough of that mindfulness on their own or enough of whatever they need. So I would say, you know, I think there's a, there's definitely a place for both. For me, I still listen to guided practice sometimes because I find it helpful,

• 47:19Speaker 01

  but I also really enjoy not listening to guided practices. So I would do both. So.

• 47:25Chris Williamson?

  Is it, does it feel a little bit like?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Training wheels?

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then removing, removing the, the training, removing one, removing two, sometimes putting them back on, et cetera, et cetera.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it is a little bit like that. It's a structure, it's a support structure that's there for the, for you at the beginning. But it's no, there, there's nothing wrong with needing a support structure, you know? And some people may need that for a very long time. Others may feel like, okay, at a certain point, I wanna lose that support structure and see what happens. I would encourage people to try to do that. Cause we are talking about trying to be, you know, good in all conditions. So if the condition of having a support structure is the only way you meditate, at some point, you might want to experiment with losing it. But if doing that leads you into a storm of thinking, then put the, put the wheels back on. It's no shame. You know, it's just about what works.

• 48:13Chris Williamson?

  I totally get that. There's a, an app that I know Yusuf will be shouting at his earphones at the moment, saying, I need to mention it, called Insight Timer. And it's just, it's literally that. It's a, it's a timer that you use on your phone. However, one of the things that it can do is you can set it to have a little, a very quiet knock on wood at specific intervals throughout.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that.

• 48:36Chris Williamson?

  Every minute, every two minutes, every five minutes. And that is what he uses to bring himself back to the breath. And to just, it's just a little tap in the back of the head going, make sure that you're thinking about the right thing.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Excellent. That's funny. I do, I use Insight Timer the exact same way. I know exactly that wouldn't block that. Yusuf uses it. It's the best little, a little talk sound. It kind of like brings you back.

• 48:59Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yeah, I was thinking about my dinner again, or I was thinking about work again, or I was lost in thought. So

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  would you advise people to get a meditation teacher? You know, it's evident from hearing you speak today and also from reading your other bits online, that Shinzen Young's had an incredibly profound effect on yourself.

• 49:24Chris Williamson?

  Is there a, after a particular number of years of practice, should someone look to get a teacher? Is it something that everybody could do with from the beginning? Can you talk us through what a meditation teacher does and how it can benefit people?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Well, I think, what I would say is the most important thing is that occasionally having and being able to check in with somebody about your practice. So being able to get another perspective on what's happening. Even if you're the most relatively independent person, we, in a practice, a meditation practice is still another habit. And sometimes we can develop habits that are actually not serving us, or we can get stuck in a kind of cul-de-sac. So we might be in a state of kind of low-level, checked-out, drily bliss, and we think that that's what it's all about. But we're actually still a complete dick in our life, or we're still hung up on all these other ways. So the great benefit of a teacher, it's really the benefit of having another perspective.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Hopefully a knowledgeable perspective that can hear about your practice and give you some feedback so you can kind of reorient. That's, I think, I think that is important for everybody. Whether it's a formal teacher relationship, I don't think it needs to be. Like, I'm a big thing with, I mean, it was very valuable for me, and I think it's very good to start out at least with a teacher who can kind of get you going and answer some of the main questions. But I'm a big champion of the community as the teacher. You know, that's what, that's one of the mantras of what we say at the Consciousness Supporters Club. We deliberately created a kind of non-hierarchic culture where we respect the fact that there is a genuine, such a thing as deepening inexperience.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  So there's more expertise and less expertise around a particular technique, and people who've been at it longer have a lot to share. But that, no matter who you are, it's valuable. If you can be honest about what's going on in a particular way in which you're addressing some situation or challenge, then you're creating insights for other people. And that we, and so you can, you can, you can sit with a group of friends and you can meditate and then you can share about your experience and you can learn a lot about how to work with what's going on. And that can be that other perspective I'm talking about to be able to do that once in a while. But at the same time, I think it's, you know, if you're gonna take it seriously, I think it's very valuable to be able to check in with somebody who genuinely has a lot of deep experience.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Uh, even if it's just their experience, cause here's another thing, here's another one of those cool paradoxes or again, we talk about the nature of wisdom. Wisdom is learning from experience. We can, we're all learning our unique things about experience that may be different than what other people are learning and we can pull our wisdom that way. Absolutely. So there's a pluralistic sense in which that's how wisdom unfolds. But there's also this other dimension to experience, I would call or two wisdom and experience, capital W wisdom. And that is that the longer you practice, certainly for me as a teacher, the longer I practice, the more people I speak to, the more people I work with. The more I start to get clear and clear intimations of what seems to be true for all people. And that's what Dharma means. Dharma means truth. So it's, it's talking about the wisdom, the prajna.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  That is the dynamics that are, that seems to be true for everyone.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  Unity, right? Unity across everything.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  And that, right. So that's moving towards a unifying or an absolute direction. So, so you need to have that perspective. I think it's really helpful to have that perspective in, in this world as well, where you have teachers that have, that have been practicing for twenty, thirty years. That have, that are able to articulate what they, what they see as, is universal in experience. And that's what, when you go to a good teacher, by the non-dual teacher, Buddhist teacher, whatever it is, and you have that, they say something, there's that quickening, you're like, fuck, man. It just hits you right in the belly. That's what you're getting. You're getting that, that deep truth. And that's a real thing. That's what the, that's the, that thing is the thing that people come for. People say, oh yeah, I'm here. I come for the stress. I come for, cause I wanna be less angry. Yeah, maybe they come for that. They stay for this stuff.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Cause this stuff is the, the, the stuff that you really feel. It's the magical mystery tour, what the fuckness of reality. Where you're, you're dropping into this like, into these deep truths that you, the hairs will rise up in the back of your neck. That's what I'm talking about.

• 53:37Chris Williamson?

  I totally, totally get that.

• 53:41Chris Williamson?

  It's um, there's a, there's a cool quote from Johann Wolfgang von Guth that says, "All truly wise thoughts have already been thought a thousand times, but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly until they take root in our personal experience." And I think that's one of the reasons, that's one of the reasons.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  You gotta send me that quote.

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  You like that one, yeah?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  That was amazing.

• 54:04Chris Williamson?

  Um, so I think that's one of the reasons why people's lives don't change when you see an inspirational quote on Instagram. If, without, without context or buy-in, even the most enlightening concepts don't resonate with us. And what we need is, we need, we need that, that experience, we need to, to have that resonation between us and the concept. And that's, that's where it, like you say, is, it's such a good analogy for it, that punching you in the stomach and it, it, it sort of swells inside of you and it's that, "Fuck", like, "Shit, like, how didn't I see this before?" And I think that's, that the analogy

• 54:47Chris Williamson?

  that the guys from Headspace use, Andy Pudikum talks about this a lot, about the mind being like the sky, and I love this one, and he, he says that your mind is, you are the sky and everything else is the weather, that the weather can come and go and that it can be cloudy, it can be rainy, but that above the clouds, the sun is always there. And all that needs to happen is that the clouds need to disperse and the sun comes back again. But the sun doesn't leave when the clouds are there, it's just the fact that you can't see it. And that was, that was a punch in the stomach moment for me, for sure, when I heard that. And

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what, that's what Tibetans call natural mind, or that the, the, and the belief within Buddhism is that the natural state of the mind actually is a state of openness, of creativity, of peace. It's just this broad, spacious, vibrant place that gets covered over with what they call the kleshas, or various pains and obsessions and the ways in which we get caught up in the small trance of our life and not see that bigger perspective. But just, can I just come back, comment on one, a thing you said a moment ago?

• 55:53Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  About, you know, people hear something that, it's like they hear a bit of wisdom, they hear an insight, and it's a great quote, and it's like, boom, there's this moment where it resonates, and like, "Yeah, I feel that." And then, of course, you go back to your life. And they say, so that's why I say a quote, most of the time, a super insightful quote, may not stay. And the, but the reason it doesn't stay is because you haven't made it your life yet.

• 56:20Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  You know, and that's what, and there are times when we hear a phrase or a word, in Zen, they call it turning words, where somebody, or it's also described sometimes as pointing out instructions. Somebody describes something in a particular way, and it is so, it just shoots through all your guards. It is so totally vividly true that it lands in your belly, and sometimes so deeply that it does create a, a, a permanent change right there.

• 56:49Chris Williamson?

  To the, to the listeners at home, I promise that we haven't actually rehearsed this, but Jeff, I'm looking at a quote in front of me from Jay Kristof, which says, "An avalanche starts with one pebble. All you need is the right one."

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Totally, man. Totally. It's so cool. I mean, this stuff, I just think it's fascinating. I love it. Like, I don't know, I, I feel like it's the biggest privilege in the world to be able to talk to you about it, to be able to see, I mean, you share a practice and you start to see people's lives change. But behind that is this fact that you're exploring this mystery of being a human being. And the mystery is way bigger than anything that we know in any one little domain or silo of knowledge. And that we can be participants in this mystery, you know, and we can, we can, it's not, because that's what happens in a practice. You, it starts as a bunch of ideas, but you start to live these truths. You start to live this stuff, and then you just can't even believe that this is happening. So.

• 57:44Chris Williamson?

  We're all explorers, right? We're all mapping the terrain together.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Man, that's how I feel.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  I agree. Um, so I wanted to do a couple, get a couple of more insights from you. Um, you talk a lot about the pooling of wisdom and the democratizing, the sharing of practice. Can you explain what you mean by that?

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's partly what I was saying about the community is the teacher. Um, uh, it's understanding that when you're honest, when you're actually honest and real about your experience, you are embodying that direction, that spacious, more absolute, more wisdom direction. You can, and you have an enormous amount that you be, so every one of us can do this. Every one of us can be honest about our experience and when we do that, we're teachers to each other. So it's sort of, in a way, it's, it's trying to, um, decentralize and/or democratize the idea of, of teaching so it doesn't have to only be the lofty teacher on the pedestal. We can recognize that we all have something to provide on what it is to be human. So it's partly that.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Uh, but it's that, and it, I, I'm interested in that in the service of really opening up the guiding and sharing of meditation practices. Cause I basically see a major mental health crisis happening, as a lot of people do right now, where levels of stress and mental illness, I mean, it's all off the charts. And we don't have enough meditation teachers like, who've spent like Shenzhen 50 years in a monastery to a, able to kind of meet each one of those, those people. So we need to start empowering many more practice groups to be out there and they need to be able to be, it's okay to have an amateur practice group. It's more important to have an amateur practice group with amateur teachers than to be not practicing and teaching at all. Uh, so I'm really interested in what is the minimum people and groups need to know to

• 59:30Speaker 01

  be able to safely share meditation practice?

• 59:33Chris Williamson?

  Minimum effective dose, so to speak.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  The minimum effective dose, but also the minimum way to how to do it safely and effectively. Cause there is a lot of, cause even as I'm saying this, there's a lot of stuff coming out now about what people would call the dark side of mindfulness or, and what, you know, which is, there's a few things there, but-

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, what's that?

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Well, there's a, uh, two main things there. One of the things is, um, one of the things is very rare and it has to do with when you go really into hardcore, deep practice and you're deconstructing reality, you can end up in these sort of dissociated states and you can, you can cause really, you can do that in a reckless way. So if you're gonna do that kind of a practice, you absolutely need senior level teachers to guide you.

• 1:00:12Chris Williamson?

  Is that when you turn into a turnip?

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Ah, it could be a turnip, or it could be that you turn into like a vibrating bolt of electricity, and that's what happened to me, and the energy doesn't go off for four months, you know?

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, got you.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  So there's that kind of stuff, but then there's, I would say, a much broader, more relatable set of potential challenges has to do with what we're learning about trauma, which is that, you know, trauma is kind of a big word. You could think of it as there are shocks that the nervous system experiences that are not so much, that are very different for each person, and that sometimes when we, and they leave these kind of undischarged energies of fight and flight, and who knows what neurotic stuff in our bodies. And sometimes when we go into stillness with a meditation practice, all that stuff can rear its head. And sometimes the instructions, with the simple mindless instructions, aren't enough to deal with that. We may actually need to seek some kind of professional support in a different modality.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  So, so all that is to say, my interest is in, like, I want to empower everyone to begin to think about how to share practices in a safe way, so parents can share them with their kids, so friends can share them with each other, you know, it can become something that the whole world is doing in their own way, in a way that's responsive to their local needs, but I want to do it in a safe way, too. So what is the minimum that needs to be imparted for that to happen? And that's, that's a book I'm working on right now, that's a course, I'm gonna, an online course I'm gonna roll out, there's an in-person course in Ottawa I'm doing in October.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  And I'll start to offer them in a lot more places, but that's, so that's what I, that's kind of my interest. My interest isn't, okay, I want to help the planet, you know, have better, more centered self-regulation, more mental health habits. Right now, we see meditation as this sort of specialist thing, but actually, I think that a basic understanding of the mind and self-regulation is as fundamental as a basic understanding of diet and of exercise. And that we need to be teaching this to our kids, we need to be, it needs to be in schools, it needs to be, and I don't mean that's only mindfulness, I mean, that understanding of mind-body, I mean, an understanding of all practices, ways of exploring practices, talking about what practice is. So that's what I'm pointing to with all of that.

• 1:02:24Chris Williamson?

  I totally get that. I think... There's baggage that comes along with mindfulness, unfortunately, or comes along with the term of meditation. And increasingly now, meditation is a, it's an incredibly secular act, right? You know, it's, it's, there's not, you don't have to subscribe to any sort of theology that comes attached with it, although some people choose to, but it's, based on my, my friends and my exposure to it, the vast majority of people don't, they, they treat it the same way as you'd treat a gym. You wouldn't say, oh, well, I'm a, I'm a weightlifting church person. And you go, no, no, no, I just, I just do weightlifting. It's a tool which allows me to achieve the goals of weightlifting. And

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  I think you, you touched on something that's really, really interesting there, talking about people unearthing bad experiences. There's an analogy or an experiment that was done that was trying to work out why people in their mid 50s, in the sort of mid 80s and 90s, were experiencing what appeared to be spontaneous LSD trips. And what had happened was the summer of love in the 60s, when everyone had been taking LSD, LSD can actually be deposited in fat cells in the body. Then, as people got into their 30s, maybe got, got married with kids, they started to gain weight. And this LSD was deposited into the fat cells. Then, if these people lost weight later in their

• 1:03:52Chris Williamson?

  50s, it would then get redeposited back into the bloodstream. So some poor, poor mum of three might be walking down the street to go to the shops and get hit with a couple of micrograms of LSD that she took 30 years ago. And that resurgence of a traumatic experience kind of feels a little bit similar to what you were talking about there. And a podcast I did with Susanna Hallinan, who's a positive psychologist, I asked her a really interesting question. And I said, is making someone happy the same as making someone not sad? And she said, no, they're two very distinct approaches. And the reason is, it would appear what you're talking about here, that dealing with trauma and improving normality are two different approaches. And the introspective work for someone who

• 1:04:37Chris Williamson?

  has got a lot of trauma to deal with can actually be a very dangerous thing that, that they should be, there should be some trepidation about doing.

• 1:04:46Chris Williamson?

  And moving on, honestly, I'm bouncing around ideas here on the notes as I go through it. You touched on the fact that you think that there's a global or a widespread mental health epidemic, so to speak, that's coming. Do you think that there's an analogy that could be drawn to kind of like global warming here? That we need to have the tools to be able to fix the problems that are a byproduct of modern society and that those need to be rolled out, essentially rolled out more quickly than they are?

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I absolutely think that. I mean, I think that the precondition to solving the world's external problems is to have a more optimal internal set of conditions. And that, I mean, the classic quote is you can't change the world's problems with the consciousness that created them. And that people have been saying that for years. And that a big part of, so it's like, yeah, there's all these external challenges and now they're in the ecosystem and it's very, very serious. But if we come at those challenges with the same obsessions and biases and fixations and propensity for conflict and reactivity, then we're just going to create more noise in the system and more,

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  we're going to potentially just make it worse. And that much more, much, much improvement on that model would be to come at those questions from a place of relative sanity and clarity and openness and genuine openness to collaboration, where you have a capacity to listen, where you're not just in your obsessive trance. And so I think that that's, I mean, from my mind, a kind of training in how to be in the mind and how to have a mind and how to be in relationship is essential for everyone, because it's what's going to allow us to have the best chance to address all the external stuff. I mean, it's, there is a direct correlation.

• 1:06:42Chris Williamson?

  You refer to it, I think, on your website as personal hygiene.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Interpersonal hygiene.

• 1:06:47Chris Williamson?

  Interpersonal hygiene, personal hygiene. Interpersonal hygiene, which I think is a lovely way to put it. And it touches obviously on something that everybody does, or thankfully, the vast majority of people do. And treating it as a must do, not a should do, is probably what feels to me like the best way to go about this. So what's your, what's your sentiment at the moment about the trajectory of the mindfulness movement right now? Are you, are you hopeful? Do you, is it, are we at crisis period? So where's your head at with it?

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, I, I mean, I may have a slightly different perspective on it than other people. Like, I kind of take the big picture view, you know? I think it's, I think it's great to me that there's a big explosion of interest in mindfulness. Just like, I think it's great that there's been a big explosion of interest in yoga.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  I think I, what I see across the board is there's just more interest in practice and people beginning to take responsibility for themselves. And people realizing the value and importance of these self-care practices, whether it has to do with body practices, diet practices, mind practices. There's a, I mean, compared to the kind of, there's so much more consciousness around this now than there was 50 years ago. You know, every, it's on, everyone's thinking and talking about these kinds of things. So that's the trajectory I look at. And I think it's a great thing that that's happening. Whether within mindfulness itself, of course, within that, there are going to be

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  people who are able to, I mean, there's going to be a very, let's just say that there's different levels of, of the ways in which those mindfulness is being taught and being disseminated. And that some people can be emphasizing parts of mindfulness that may not be, that can be a little bit reckless or, or, you know, and there's things you could criticize about in the small picture of whether this is, this is really the best thing for here. I mean, for example, There's a kind of, as soon as mindfulness gets big, all of a sudden it becomes the big panacea. Now it's gonna be the answer to everyone's problems. And now everyone's talking about mindfulness, it's you can get mindful mayonnaise, mindful friggin' butterscotch, you can have, you know, mindful, whatever, like classes on mindful, like lawn trimming.

• 1:09:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  It's just like, and, and so, and what happens then? Well, first of all, people are making way too many claims for it because it's not magic, you know, and in the way, and what you just said there, say you come across major traumatic symptoms, mindfulness can really help with a lot of that, it can also exacerbate them. So it, it's not, i- i- it needs to be done in tandem with other modalities, you know, in certain situations. And, and so there's, and so, you know, that's, and that's just true. And then, and then, and then there's some of the ways in which it could actually be genuinely reckless, like you get into doing a, a, a serious mindfulness practice, if you have a lot of those destabilizations already, you can make, make things worse. So there has to be some thinking around that as well.

• 1:09:50Chris Williamson?

  It needs to be done responsibly then, I suppose.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Needs to be done responsibly, it needs to be seen as just like there are, it's another tool in the tool belt, it's great. Uh, there are other things that are great too. But at the same time, you also don't wanna be like, it's also very easy for there to be a backlash, and we're already seeing that too, because everyone hears mindfulness everywhere, people think, oh, fuck, I know what this is, mindfulness is stupid, I'm just annoyed by it, or just because you're a, you know, because you get, or you're just a reactive dude, you're like, screw that, I'm definitely, I'm not gonna look at this at all. Now all, so while the people aren't even looking at mindfulness, or they think they know what mindfulness is.

• 1:10:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Because it's so simple, oh, just bringing stuff into awareness, which is part of it. But they're not, that doesn't get it, the whole crazy shit that I just spent the entire, you know.

• 1:10:31Chris Williamson?

  Podcast explaining about, yeah.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  There's a ton of amazingly deep stuff in mindfulness, but, but, you know, people hear the word so much, after a while, they go unconscious on the word mindfulness, they get unmindful of mindfulness and start to think they know what it is.

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  So there's all kinds of ways in which, you know, but that's, in, in terms of the big picture, I guess I see it as God and the devil neck and neck. You know, it's like, one starts to get ahead, then the next one pulls ahead, and the next one pulls ahead. So I see the interest in taking responsibility for ourselves, the interest in self-regulation and practice as being a deeply positive force in society and culture, maybe the most positive thing that's happening. But at the same time, uh, things are fucking up exponentially all around us, you know, the the environment's going to hell in a handbasket, you know, mental illness is just shooting off the Richter scale, you know, there's wars breaking out, we got Donald motherfucking Trump in the US who's just a complete dickhead, I don't give a shit if you don't agree with

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  me, and it's just like, what the fuck? You know, what the hell's going on? So it's like, which is gonna, which of those things is gonna win? I don't know. I mean, I think it's just like, as we get more awareness, the stakes are always increasing. My sense is it may always just keep going on that trajectory, and there's just always gonna be more intensity, but there'll always be more capacity for spaciousness around that intensity. And there's no Disneyland ending, there's just ongoing, continuous complexity until we either destroy ourselves, or who knows what happens.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a lovely way to round it up there. Um, for anyone who is a little bit more interested in having an alternative view of global warming, there's a podcast that I did a few weeks ago with Professor Adam Frank, where he talks about global warming essentially being a natural byproduct of any world girdling civilization. And I think that this, this race towards, a lot of the things that we've gone through, on the individual level, it seems like we can get good control, but on the societal level and on a, on a broader scale, that's when, that's when things can start to become bastardized. So for instance, you've got, there's a move towards mindfulness, but what that means is there's now a market for mindfulness, and inevitably wherever there's a market,

• 1:12:38Chris Williamson?

  there's money to be made, which means that charlatans will appear, which means that people will promote practices which are irresponsible. And the same thing goes for global warming. It's like, well, agricultural revolution was fantastic, industrial revolution was fantastic, but very quickly we overshoot. And in the same way that a light bulb is supposed to give off light, which we want, but it also gives off heat, which we don't want, there's all of these weird byproducts and, and extra things, ancillary bits that get tagged on the side, and that's where the shit occurs, right? Like, that's where the actual bad things happen.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  I totally agree. I mean, there's a great, um, uh, maybe one of the last things to share with your, uh, with your posse there, there, my, Shinzen has this great expression, he talks about the waxy buildup. Um, and, and so, and it's basically how he describes how reactivity builds, so.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Apple say of a relationship. So you're new to a relationship, you're completely in love and everything they do is perfect, you know, it's like they do no wrong. And then, you know, a year into a relationship, you kind of notice that they chew with their mouth open a little bit and it's kind of annoying. They get a little bit annoyed, but then you're like, yeah, but that's okay. They're still cute. I love them, whatever. And then it's like three years down the road and now it's like, you know, every time they eat, they're just like they're grating on you the same like chewing, oh my God, whatever. And then before long, it's 10 years down the road and there's just been this buildup and buildup and buildup of a little bit of reactivity building on itself. And at some point, they just open their mouth to eat a hamburger and then you're just like, fuck it, we're getting a divorce. I'm done. And for in your, in your view, they're just the antichrist. The whole relationship is transformed. It, it's because it was lots

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  of, it was like a death by a thousand cuts. It increases and aggregates over time and that's, all of us are in that dynamic where we're getting a little bit reactive about the things happening around us. And then we get a little bit more reactive, a little bit more reactive and it just builds.

• 1:14:24Chris Williamson?

  It compounds, right?

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  It compounds and that's the same dynamic that happens globally. It happens socially, that happens culturally. We have, you know, a, a, a conservative can't even hear a liberal begin to speak or vice versa, before they're already in a massive emotional storm, you know, they don't even, they can't, have no capacity even to listen to what each other is saying. And in the same way within the climate debates and everything else, there's just, and even though I'm, I consider myself politically very progressive, I do, I see this as a problem that happens across all political divides, all social divides.

• 1:14:55Chris Williamson?

  We're naturally so tribal, right? Like it, it's the, it's an unintended consequence of something that kept us alive for a long time, that there's still this desire to be tribal.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  But the tribe we can't see around is the tribe of our own individual biases. You are in your own tribe, the tribe of one, you know, and you are, you create this whole carapace of biases that are basically warping how you interact with the world around you. And you think you're just being this neutral actor. We're all like that. And so that's what I mean, the practice is about beginning to dismantle that carapace. So we can actually have true intimacy and connection with each other, you know, we can, we're not just bumping up against each other like, you know, you know, cars in one of those, you know, those amusement parks, those little bumper cars?

• 1:15:44Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  That's kind of what it's like. And it's instead, let's just have a giant group hug, man, because it's all about love.

• 1:15:51Chris Williamson?

  A giant car orgy.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Giant car orgy.

• 1:15:53Chris Williamson?

  That would be fantastic.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  If you melt our cars, chill in a big puddle of happiness.

• 1:15:59Chris Williamson?

  That sounds good. Jeff, would you be able to tell the listeners at home where they can find you online, please, if they want to check out your guided meditations or read some more of your stuff?

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  My website is jeffwarren.org, or R G. So that's J E F F W A R R E N dot org. And I got tons of stuff there, like I actually just put out a new online course, like literally like two days ago, the first one I've ever done. So it's called the elements of practice or elements of meditation.

• 1:16:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  And I have lots of writing up there. And then the other one is, I would say, C E C meditate.com. So that's the Consciousness Explorers Club. And there's a ton of free meditations there. There's resources. Oh, and by the way, I wouldn't mind saying this, I'm just putting the finishing touches on version one of the my community kind of practice startup kit. So it's like 15 pages about anyone, anywhere can start up their own little practice group. It's sort of along the lines of what I was talking about, some best practices, how to do it safely, what some of the, how to work with different challenges. And that should be free. That'll be in the next C E C newsletter and it'll be in one of my next newsletters. So if you sign up for those, you can get that and it's no strings attached. There's no money. The C E C is a nonprofit. So we were actually a registered nonprofit. So.

• 1:17:12Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Well, I'll make sure that the link to everything is in the show notes below. Meditation for fidgety skeptics will be in there. The head trip will be in there as well. All of the stuff that we've gone through, there's a really cool study, which I'll actually send to you as soon as we get off the air, which explains a, from an analytical perspective, the experience, the differences in experience of life at 50 hours, 100 hours, 500 hours, 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 hours of practice. It's a really, really interesting read for anyone who wants to start to understand the trajectory of mindfulness practice a little bit more and maybe begin to get a sense of what Shinzen Young understands on a daily basis. But Jeff, it's been an absolute blast, man. Thank you so much for

• 1:17:55Chris Williamson?

  coming on. I'm excited to see what you do as you move forward. Consciousness Explorers Club. I'm definitely going to check that out. And yeah, it's been awesome, man. Thank you.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Awesome Chris, it was my pleasure and there's all kinds of awesome insights emerge from you, so I'm glad you're doing this podcast for folks.

• 1:18:12Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate that, thank you very much, have a good day man.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Okay, bye.

• 1:18:15Chris Williamson?

  Bye bye.