The Psychic Question

A journalist finds out that many of his vaunted mentors are seeing a psychic. The same psychic. He decides to pay her a visit. Check out the 10% Happier podcast https://www.danharris.com/s/10-happier See more of Dan's work at DanHarris.com danharris.com Support Search Engine! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

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

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

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

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• 2:45PJ Vogt?

  Hello?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 2:48PJ Vogt?

  Dan, how's it going?

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Good. How are you?

• 2:50PJ Vogt?

  I just ate an enormous bagel.

• 2:55PJ Vogt?

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

• 2:57Speaker 01

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

• 3:00PJ Vogt?

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

• 3:12Speaker 01

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

• 3:19Speaker 01

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

• 3:28PJ Vogt?

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

• 3:42PJ Vogt?

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

• 3:52PJ Vogt?

  Dan Harris to the rest of the world is not primarily known for all the food poisoning he's had. He's known these days as an author and host of a popular podcast called 10% Happier. That's about meditation and mindfulness and a lot of other things. Recently, Dan found himself investigating this question, and I asked him if we could ride along on his journey to answer it. Can you just tell me the story of how you arrived with this question?

• 4:16Speaker 01

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

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And I became really close with a lot of these folks. And they really were kind of my guides as I got increasingly interested in Buddhism.

• 5:16PJ Vogt?

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

• 5:31Speaker 01

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

• 6:06PJ Vogt?

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

• 6:50PJ Vogt?

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

• 6:57Speaker 01

  I felt comfortable in this world, largely, and a lot of these older Buddhist folks believed in stuff that, and still believe in stuff that I found very hard to swallow.

• 7:13PJ Vogt?

  Like what?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Well, I'll start with the easier stuff, and this isn't even going to sound easy for some people, but the notion of enlightenment, that there is an experience we can have of nirvana, they call it nibana, which is the way it's pronounced in the language of Pali. And so you can have these zaps of nirvana or nibana, and it can upgrade the software of your mind permanently, and that's enlightenment. But they also believe, and this stuff is in the Buddhist texts, they also believe in rebirth in different realms of existence. They believe that certain types of meditative adepts get superpowers, like

• 8:01Speaker 01

  the ability to read other people's minds, or duplicate their body, or walk through walls.

• 8:08PJ Vogt?

  In America, we usually try to respect other people's religious beliefs. And Dan could respect these ideas that his teachers had, even if he didn't believe all of them. After all, they were rooted in Buddhism. But then Dan began to learn that some of his most respected teachers also held these other beliefs, beliefs that didn't come from Buddhism, beliefs that to him felt significantly wackier, the kinds of ideas someone trying to sell you crystals at a head shop in a strip mall might try to pitch you on.

• 8:39Speaker 01

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

• 9:22Speaker 01

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

• 9:39PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 01

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

• 10:17PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 01

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

• 10:32PJ Vogt?

  Hmm.

• 10:33Speaker 01

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

• 10:56Speaker 02

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

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me here.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for being here.

• 11:15Speaker 01

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

• 11:28Speaker 02

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

• 11:34Speaker 03

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

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:57Speaker 03

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

• 12:00Speaker 01

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

• 12:18Speaker 03

  You know, "Hey, look what I can do out at a bar. I know all about you, and I know..."

• 12:21Speaker 04

  You know that your dad's on the other side and I know that you have a seven year old brother and this sort of thing. But it took me a while to honor it.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  But eventually, like, she kind of settled in, she says, into her role as a psychic. Oh, yeah. And decided to use it to help other people.

• 12:37Speaker 04

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

• 13:02Speaker 01

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

• 13:21PJ Vogt?

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

• 14:04Speaker 01

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

• 14:42PJ Vogt?

  So Dan approached Search Engine to help him understand what was going on here. His question, why were so many of his respected teachers seeing this psychic medium? I wanted to follow along because, one, I just thought the situation was very funny. But, two, for me personally, I've just spent more time in the past few years around new agey people, and sometimes they give me the same feeling I get around my very conservative family members, where there's things they say that give me almost an allergic reaction, trigger me. And I wondered, in this case, if I could soften that. I wondered if I even wanted to. This is not a story designed to change your mind about psychics.

• 15:26PJ Vogt?

  Proving or disproving the supernatural is a trap. Search Engine does not fall for traps. Instead, it's a story about what we do with other people's beliefs, how we decide how open to be to the ideas that make our minds want to snap closed. That is our big quest this week. And as part of it, after a short break, Dan Harris will visit a psychic medium. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Toyota. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal from your local Toyota dealer. Make a smart buy on an all-wheel-drive Camry,

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• 16:56PJ Vogt?

  Toyota, let's go places.

• 17:01PJ Vogt?

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• 18:14PJ Vogt?

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

• 18:33Speaker 01

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

• 18:36Speaker 03

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

• 18:49Speaker 01

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

• 18:54Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 18:56Speaker 01

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

• 19:01Speaker 03

  That's a great question. So a psychic is somebody who tunes into...

• 19:07Speaker 03

  You can call it someone's aura. And the concept there is that there's an energy field around every single person that emanates about two or three feet away from each person's body. And that within that field, we can energetically tap into it with our thoughts and connect with it and read a person's past, present, future. We can see who they're connected to in the here and now. We get all sorts of information from that. We can read information about their physical health, all sorts of things like that. So psychic is somebody who would do that. A medium takes it a step farther. And we have a saying among all of us where it's every medium is psychic, but not every psychic is a medium. And what I mean by that is I feel that mediums should be...

• 19:51Speaker 01

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

• 20:14Speaker 03

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

• 20:29Speaker 01

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

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Ooh, that's scary. Ooh.

• 21:01Speaker 01

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

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Oh, sure.

• 21:13Speaker 01

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

• 21:31Speaker 03

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

• 21:48Speaker 01

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

• 22:17PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 01

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

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for being in conversation with me.

• 22:24Speaker 01

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

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Can you hear me all right?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  I hear you loudly and clearly.

• 22:49Speaker 03

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

• 22:55Speaker 01

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

• 23:11Speaker 05

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

• 23:45Speaker 01

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

• 23:56Speaker 05

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

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:25Speaker 05

  Did you play like two instruments?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  One.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  Okay, and did you play an instrument and sing?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Not very well, but I did, I did play one instrument.

• 24:35Speaker 05

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

• 24:41Speaker 01

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

• 24:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 01

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

• 25:05Speaker 05

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

• 25:44Speaker 01

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

• 25:53Speaker 05

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

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:02Speaker 05

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

• 26:19Speaker 01

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

• 26:58PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Speaker 01

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

• 27:03PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. What, what happened next?

• 27:07Speaker 01

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

• 27:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 01

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

• 27:18PJ Vogt?

  Hmm.

• 27:19Speaker 05

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

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:24Speaker 05

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

• 27:27Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:28Speaker 05

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

• 27:34Speaker 01

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

• 27:49PJ Vogt?

  I find that impressive. I find that challenging.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  The fact that we have four fucking cats, is that what you're trying to tell me?

• 27:58Speaker 01

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

• 27:59PJ Vogt?

  It's a lot of cats.

• 28:02PJ Vogt?

  What else?

• 28:03Speaker 05

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

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Beyond, um, this show? You mean beyond this podcast, like a TV show?

• 28:14Speaker 05

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

• 28:20Speaker 01

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

• 28:32Speaker 05

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

• 28:47Speaker 01

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

• 28:55PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Obviously. Like, I don't know if that's true, but I, I really liked hearing it and it felt to me like a very useful pep talk. There was nothing in there that if I did believe it, would have been harmful, I don't think. And most importantly, the experience was positive, because I have gone through a hard couple of years. It's been really hard. The hardest years of my life. Both because of what happened professionally and also, as you know, my wife's had some health problems. So the idea that we could both as a couple be entering this period of thriving personally and professionally is really exciting. Maybe wrong, but it motivates me to effectuate it.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  And so to me, I don't see any harm in any of that.

• 29:42PJ Vogt?

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

• 30:11Speaker 01

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

• 30:23PJ Vogt?

  Why do you think that is?

• 30:25Speaker 01

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

• 30:48PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  It's a very comforting story.

• 30:52PJ Vogt?

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

• 31:32PJ Vogt?

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

• 32:19PJ Vogt?

  After the break, we watch live as a skilled practitioner tries to gently pry open the mind of Dan Harris.

• 32:41PJ Vogt?

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• 33:26PJ Vogt?

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• 33:44PJ Vogt?

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• 34:51PJ Vogt?

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• 36:04PJ Vogt?

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

• 36:32Speaker 01

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

• 37:04Speaker 04

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

• 37:12Speaker 01

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

• 37:15Speaker 04

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

• 37:43Speaker 01

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

• 38:28Speaker 04

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

• 38:42Speaker 01

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

• 38:45Speaker 04

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

• 38:51Speaker 04

  That was my job.

• 38:53Speaker 01

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

• 38:56Speaker 04

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

• 39:02Speaker 01

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

• 39:08Speaker 04

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

• 39:13Speaker 01

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

• 39:21Speaker 04

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

• 39:36PJ Vogt?

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

• 40:14PJ Vogt?

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

• 40:23Speaker 01

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

• 40:32Speaker 04

  I think the times that I grew up in were just the dawning of The Beatles and transcendental meditation and LSD and the naivete of that early 60s mindset hit me just in my adolescence.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  When he was young, it was bedlam. It was the 70s and he's in Cambridge, at Harvard, seeking out everybody on campus who has any interest in anything new agey.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  I found all the occultists at Harvard Medical School. I worked with Lester Grin spoon, who was the first person to advocate for the legalization of marijuana.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  He writes a paper on ketamine. He's hanging out with psychics and of course, there's the Dharma and all of the metaphysical claims that are in that. And so he's just in this environment. I mean, he's hanging out with a car mechanic named Carmouche, who's also a psychic. He's just in this world of drinking from this fire hose. And it's so interesting because he's doing that and getting his degree at Harvard Medical School at the same time.

• 41:38PJ Vogt?

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

• 41:47Speaker 01

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

• 41:52PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 41:52Speaker 01

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

• 42:09Speaker 04

  It was after my father had died, so it was like 16 years ago or so.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  So was it the death of your father that made you intrigued?

• 42:17Speaker 04

  No, no, as I say, I'm always on the lookout for a good psychic.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Because you had a history of encountering these types of...

• 42:24Speaker 04

  Good and bad, yeah, I have a real history, yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so good and bad, that means that you're not going in with zero skepticism?

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Oh, no, I'm going in with a lot of skepticism. Yeah, I'm both gullible and skeptical.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Which I find really interesting, gullible and skeptical. Okay, so when you first met her, what did you think?

• 42:45Speaker 04

  It blew me away.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Say more, please.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  After the preliminaries, where the first thing she does is she gets a sense of your aura, a mix of colors, basically. So she went through that, and then the first thing she said to me was, "Oh, your father's here, he says to tell you you were right." That's the first thing she said. And immediately, I thought I knew what she was talking about.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  My father, who was a well-known professor of medicine, had a glioblastoma, which is a malignant brain tumor. And he got it scanned, and it had already spread to both sides of his brain. And he knew that there was, you know, very little treatment that was available, and communicated that to me. And I was in my office in the city, realizing that despite all these years of being interested in spiritual stuff, I had never had a conversation with my father about anything spiritual, and certainly about what the Buddhists have taught about what dying is, or how to die, you know? So I called him up, with some trepidation,

• 44:00Speaker 04

  and said, you know, "We've never talked about any of this. I don't know if you're interested, but do you want to know, like, what the Buddhists say?" And he was very welcoming, he's like, you know, "Sure, go ahead."

• 44:12Speaker 04

  So I needed to try to explain something using non-Buddhist or spiritual or new age language. And so I said something like, you know, that sense of yourself that you've always had inside that doesn't really change, no matter what age you are, you're 20, 40, 60, 80, but inside you're just sort of, you know, how it feels to be you. It's sort of transparent, that space. You know it, but you can't really find it. But it's a feeling. I said, what they seem to say is that if you can relax your mind into that kind of transparent feeling of who you've always been, that you can kind of ride that feeling out as the body shuts down.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  And he said, okay, darling, I'll try. And so when Laura Lynn Jackson said, oh, your father's here, he says to tell you you were right. It resonated with that conversation. So that that made me very receptive to anything else that she was going to tell me.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting, even in that story, you acknowledge she might have known that. She might have had ways to know things that informed her utterances directed at you.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  You're open to that. And you're also open to the fact that she may be communicating with your dead father. And so that's such an interesting.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  I mean, she didn't know me at all at that time. She didn't know me at all. And we were on the phone.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  That Google existed.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  Uh, Google existed. She could have Googled. She could have seen that my father had died, etc. But.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  But what?

• 45:45Speaker 04

  I prefer to think not. I would much rather be, that's really my father talking through her.

• 45:52PJ Vogt?

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

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Here's one thing I'm open to. I'm open to the fact that this is all true. I'm also open to the fact that she sincerely believes what she's doing is is real, and that she's a smart, empathic, helpful person.

• 46:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  And that she is helping people, but that is actually not true.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Strictly speaking.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Is that possible?

• 46:33Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  I mean, that's the most likely explanation in terms of the world that we operate in. You know, that's a generous interpretation that doesn't require any kind of supernatural, anything. If I would have to explain it away, that's how I would explain it. Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  And yet, it's possible that it, in your view, that it's totally legit what's happening?

• 46:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I would much prefer to believe that.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  So I think one of the things you're saying is that you have a real openness, and maybe even more than openness, like a belief, that there's more going on than science can explain.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Well, I'm just easy to convince. So, you know, that has worked for me and against me over the years.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  But I don't want to let you off the hook that easily because you're easy to convince. That's funny. It's funny. And like, you're incredibly smart. And so I just want to nail you down on, on having thought about this a great deal and having been alive for a non-trivial period of time. You're open to the supernatural, to put it quite bluntly, or to the things that might be natural. We call them supernatural now because science hasn't yet caught up.

• 47:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, yes. I mean, if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that science doesn't know everything.

• 48:04PJ Vogt?

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

• 48:49PJ Vogt?

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

• 49:29Speaker 01

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

• 49:58PJ Vogt?

  It does.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  To me, that's part of a skillful approach to life. It's like, can you resist certainty? You know, can you be really open in that way? It's one of the many design flaws in the human operating system is that we live in this world where everything's changing all the time. Like we're just in a tsunami of uncertainty. And yet we are really allergic to uncertainty. So we are not well-designed for the world we inhabit. And so I think that is one of the biggest problems facing the species. We are shouting at each other over politics, over vaccines, over religion, over geopolitical divides, without any empathy,

• 50:43Speaker 01

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

• 51:15PJ Vogt?

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

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Please.

• 51:19PJ Vogt?

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

• 51:30PJ Vogt?

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

• 51:44Speaker 01

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

• 52:22PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 01

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

• 52:34Speaker 01

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

• 52:44PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 01

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

• 52:49PJ Vogt?

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

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:08PJ Vogt?

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

• 53:19Speaker 01

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

• 54:00PJ Vogt?

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

• 54:16Speaker 01

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

• 55:10PJ Vogt?

  Dan, thank you.

• 55:11Speaker 01

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

• 55:16PJ Vogt?

  Oh, I really enjoyed it.

• 55:20PJ Vogt?

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

• 55:56PJ Vogt?

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

• 56:41PJ Vogt?

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

• 57:22PJ Vogt?

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

• 58:07PJ Vogt?

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