Episode 93 - Buddhist (Part 2)

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hey everybody i just wanted to tell you about a new podcast that i launched recently it's called this podcast and if that's hard to find you know with such a commonly used word as its title just search my name michael gunger g-u-n-g-o-r in the podcast app and it should pop right up basically this is a podcast that is leading up to the release of my new book which is also called this which by the way comes out april 16th and is available for pre-order now and in this podcast we will pull apart and look at the stories we find most important in our lives those stories that cause us suffering until we can see under all of it there is always and only this whether it's tackling ideas like do we have free will wondering if death is real or simply indulging in esoteric analogies there's always going to be interesting music esoteric analogy [Music] i hope that teaser has adequately convinced you to go subscribe to my new podcast this and give it five stars on itunes so that my dad can be proud of me [Music] about four or five hundred years before jesus was walking around telling people that they didn't have to worry about tomorrow there was a teacher wandering around southern asia talking about that very thing his name was siddhartha guatama [Music] unlike jesus who was born as a poor refugee to a teenaged unwed mother siddhartha was born into riches in power in his palace he was sheltered from the harsh outside world from his exceedingly protective father he was afraid of the prophecies he had received about his son becoming a great sage an ascetic but one day when he was older siddhartha finally wandered out of his cocoon of luxury into the outside world what he found out there disturbed him to say the least sickness aging death suffering everywhere he looked [Applause] [Music] suffering so what he did was said what's wrong with these people they need to get jobs and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps like i did no i'm just kidding what he did was dedicate his life to figuring out why everybody was living such miserable lives why was there so much suffering in the world so he left his life of opulence to become a devoted religious aesthetic as the stories go he often only ate a single piece of rice a day he wore his body down getting weaker and weaker through his earnestness and dedication to finding clarity about the source of the world's suffering to the point that he nearly starved to death fortunately his path crossed with a woman who gave him some milk and honey and nourished him back to health and it was at this point that siddhartha decided to go and sit under a bodhi tree and meditate until he could find the enlightenment that he sought [Applause] and that's what he did he took his mat went under the tree and sat completely still he sat there and meditated for an hour two hours four hours 12 hours he sat completely motionless under the tree 16 hours 24 hours silent breathing waiting 30 hours 40 hours 50 hours still as a mountain willing to die here under this tree if necessary [Music] there would be nothing that could keep him away from finding the answer to his question where did suffering come from how could the fundamental problem of life be solved [Music] 60 hours 70 hours 100 hours nothing he waited and waited some more and after six days sitting motionless under that tree something extraordinary siddhartha opened his eyes [Music] a look of the purest serenity and peace on his face he's reported to have said wonder of wonders this very enlightenment is the nature of all beings and yet they are unhappy for lack of it [Music] and so at the age of 35 siddhartha gautama the buddha saw how things truly are [Music] he realized that what he had been looking for had never been lost never been anywhere but right here right now there was nothing to attain and no separate self there to attain it for seven weeks siddhartha just enjoyed the perfection that is this that is every moment he had no need or inclination to talk about his realization for what was there to talk about what was there to strive for or worry about what was there to do it was all happening just so perfectly eventually though the buddha began to teach out of compassion for his fellow beings i told everybody that life is suffering suffering is the result of our clinging to desire and our suffering ends when we stop clinging when we let go of that illusory idea of a separate self from there the teachings of the buddha spread far and wide split into different schools the theravada tradition the mahayana you had all sorts of different forms and practices and interpretations that split off into the world and here we are today with white people saying find your bliss all right so buddhism yeah let's talk about it anybody got a story on buddhism yeah probably you you're the guru here i approach our buddhist series as an opportunity for me to learn more about buddhism like obviously when i relate to anything i'm going to use computer mic architecture as my analogy i am running some buddhist middleware in my spirituality stack so i can answer a limited number of buddhist api calls i know enough about buddhism to understand the richness of the traditions their diversity and the beauty of the practices but i feel like for me discussing buddhism is like trying to talk about art history when i've gone to a couple of art museums once each yeah well okay let me i'll just tell you a little bit of my story with buddhism in particular [Music] aside from the the buddha statues or buddha statues in the chinese restaurants that i ate at growing up which you know me i'm a big chinese food restaurant a tender so much so that the uh the one in michigan that we're about to go to sunday oh bless my heart that's my soul whatever to say what did christians say they used to i used to go there so much that they would play my worship record there and name the dish after me but there was like buddhist statues in there and the one i grew up in and i remember i used to mow the lawn of the chinese restaurant and then i would like go to the guy's house that owned it and he had this big shrine in there and i thought that was like devil worship or something you know i was like oh i don't know if i should spend much time in their house spirits yeah every time we went to ethnic food and we saw the buddha that's what my parents said false god you think like literally like a golden image crap like a golden calf or something yeah you think they worship that which that the fat one is buddha actually okay that's not even uh siddhartha gotama but i think the first time i started really studying buddhism was when we were at bloom and i was the pastor of bloom we started this church in denver and we were doing a series on what can i learn about jesus from and then we just filled in the blanks like from buddhism and that's when i started meditating that was probably in 2008 or nine and started seeing a lot of the parallels between what jesus said and what the buddha said and and that's what i was teaching on it at church like wow look at all these parallels that they taught on and then started the practice and look that buddha led you astray he did the christians were right then i was surprised because i had this it did come through these all these western lenses and buddhism is really easy to make palatable to just secular thought and woo thought and christian thought there's a lot of you know it can kind of adapt and fit wherever it's being translated into in its own unique way is that why it feels like you have a hard time getting a hold of it as much as i've seen read about buddhism and listen to even buddhist teachings i feel like i still don't grasp it yeah it's because there's not much when you think about what he what we actually have from the buddha there's like the four noble truths so the first one is life is suffering the second one is suffering is a result of our clinging to desire the third one is the suffering ceases when you stop clinging to desire and then the fourth one is like the way that you can live that out and that has lots of disagreements even within different like mahayana buddhists or theravada buddhists would disagree about that fourth truth in in different schools they treat it differently they see it differently and that's kind of what you imagine if that's what we had of christianity you have like these kind of really basic principles and then it gets somehow turned into when i first experienced buddhism in like a religious way when we went to hong kong and i went to a temple a buddhist temple there and they were selling it's like all these booths and trinkets that you could buy and you could even buy like money that you could send into the afterlife for your relatives for your deceased for your ancestors and you could go and you'd pray and light these things and you could burn the money and send this money to these ancestors so that in the afterlife they would have this wealth it's like where did that come from i don't even know where that came from i've never even seen anything about any of that [ \_\_ ] in any buddhist text that i've ever read so it's extra buddhist probably the same place that coffee bars and churches came yeah exactly you mean the money changers i don't even mean that cynically i mean like any great earth-shattering truth from a teacher is unlikely to survive with integrity its encounter with the rest of humanity exactly because it's it's too it's too plain it's like what we have directly from jesus which was written down whatever 50 years later seven years later it's not that much right the red letters is there's not that much there's it's more than we have for the buddha but still what we turn that into with seminaries and christian going to school and dancing being outlawed and and playing cards being outlawed and girls had curfews and boys didn't and this is what lengths their skirts should be all all of this like where did any of this come from does buddhism have a purity culture or something equivalent i don't know i mean there are people that abstain from sex i don't know if there's others buddhist youth conferences nothing i'm aware of okay i want to go back vishnu i want to hear what happens in the story so you you start preaching and you start seeing that there's a lot of similarities yeah and then you start meditating and then what happens i did a an interreligious meditation retreat in 2010 it was a week of silent meditation and but even that it was like the practice was buddhist tradition like the practices we were even doing on this retreat were probably considered probably came from buddhist lineage i would imagine but you can insert anything it's like not being attached to desire you can you can put in fill in the blanks right i mean you can fill in the blanks to such an extent that you can turn that into just about anything um so during that whole time even through the the deconstruction of my christian faith i never like identified as buddhists necessarily but just the practices and the ideas of non-attachment and oneness and things that came through the buddhist tradition in that way just through india and china and japan and a lot of those the language of taoism buddhism hinduism they all kind of there's a lot of similarities between all those schools of thought and yeah so since that since 2016 when i had a major spiritual awakening experience after my first mushroom ceremony buddhism has become incredibly more like holy [ \_\_ ] like i'm discovering that what i've been experiencing has been written about and talked about for thousands of years and they have some very clever spiritual technology to help prepare the organism for being aware of unity being aware of how our desires shrink the universe down into an ego and a suffering so hearing these the words and seeing how people have fleshed this out and seeing all these lines begin to be drawn and tied between the traditions and like oh there there were so many people in all of these traditions every tradition mystic christianity buddhism hinduism taoism that saw through the veil of the ego of believing the separateness that sense in the organism that evolved for a really healthy good practical reason to feel separate from everything they saw through that and had a union with the divine in a way that that mystics have talked about for thousands of years and we've talked about in this podcast for four years or five years however long we've been doing it but i just i think buddhism has some great language and like i said technology for getting right to a finger pointing at the moon really effectively it's an analogy they use a lot of times like it can never be the moon as soon as you start talking about it it's not it the dial that can be spoken is not the true dial but there's really effective pointing mechanism like that's the moon finger pointing at the moon so that's what it's been for me vishnu when you started talking about spiritual technologies i was thinking about meditation as as one of the ones that has become so so profoundly important in my therapeutic work with clients as well like as a strategy for strengthening certain neuroanatomical structures the way that the brain works for weakening certain connections in in cognition and how we have so much science now to back up why that is important and and it's something that people have been doing for for centuries upon centuries and and now the evidence is so undeniable that even even from outside the tradition we're borrowing from it because we have so much evidence that it's just good for our bodies good for our brains the beginning of the liturgist was mike telling me about some of this brain stuff that when i didn't know how to have spiritual practice i knew i had experienced benefit of it but i felt like i was lying i felt like i was being disingenuous to keep practicing a religion that i didn't have a clear understanding of any metaphysics behind it other than just this feels good um so some of the science stuff that mike told me right up front was like why the liturgist was born i was like could we marry some of this stuff like practice and brain [ \_\_ ] yeah and and talk about this in a way that isn't just mystical language all the time but the language of our current times and a lot of the ideas that are meaningful to the a lot of the ways that so many of us process the world now like scientific rigor and i mean obviously the research on meditation and brain health is is kind of as conclusive as brain imaging studies get [Laughter] uh but even if you go past brain imaging and into into research that's more concerned with outcomes when you look at people who have regular meditative practice you are looking at people whose physical mental and emotional well-being is is transformed over time people who engage in a regular meditative practice they literally have lower blood pressure over time their heart rate decreases they have less amygdala arousal to a given stimulus so they're less likely to get angry and they're more likely to be forgiving of themselves and we understand that when people are more able to forgive themselves that comes with a wonderful side effect of being able to forgive other people too you see that people generally have increased and improved focus and concentration and that even meditation rituals are therapeutic for people who are suffering from degenerative brain conditions like dementia or alzheimer's that the symptoms for those diseases can be improved with meditative practice i came to meditation through an atheistic lens but as i started to contemplate spirituality again that's what drew me to buddhist practice i guess more than buddhist beliefs i i think it'll be a stretch to say buddhist theology but buddhist beliefs weren't really what got me into buddhist thinking but rather the rich and varied practices associated with meditation like there's only so many mindfulness and secularized meditative rituals yeah um but there are many many many many many many more options and so for someone trying to figure out like how does meditation play a role in my life what do different styles of meditation do for me emotionally how do i feel during how do i feel after having that opportunity to have this you know pretty vast ancient tradition at my fingertips on the internet where like buddhist teachers and prac practitioners have youtube channels which may be kind of weird like that i only a couple of times actually went to a buddhist temple most of what i would do and like my very i didn't realize hyper individualized kind of western framework i was like well i can get all the benefit if i just go on youtube and try this stuff but the fact is i did get a profound benefit from trying some of these practices and it made me feel in a time where i wasn't sure what i believed about god that it was gonna be okay because i could still have these really deep rich and meaningful spiritual experiences that weren't predicated on such strict belief structures you know the study that comes to mind is one that was released in 2012 about how meditating for about 20 minutes a day over the course of eight weeks showed decreased gray matter in the amygdala and increased top-down functioning so the parts of our brain that are responsible for making conscious choice about how we react and how we're monitoring our system we're better able to take over instead of this kind of reactive fear-based response when something came up for us and in as little as eight weeks for doing even guided meditations that we saw changes in the structures of the brain that were observable even when people were not meditating and what was fascinating about that research is that if we if we follow it down the line and actually look more specifically at the kind of meditation that people do we see that people who do compassion-based meditation are five times more likely to respond to the suffering of other people and when they're shown distressing images while they're having their brain imaged they're more likely to respond with you know increased activation and the amygdala to other people's suffering so for me the evidence has been super compelling like as a christian as someone who cares about the pain of other people that's really important to me in terms of my spiritual practices to to be compassionate and tuned into the pain of other people it was so helpful for me to know that paying attention to myself including my own breath and how i spend my time when i'm by myself what i'm thinking about and intentionally practicing certain kinds of thinking actually helps me love and care for other people better because i think one of the lies that i subscribe to in my faith growing up was that tending to myself or caring for myself was selfish in a kind of negative way that it was a way of taking away from this beautiful spiritual discipline of care for others and practicing meditation has shown me that when i take care of myself that i can actually love and take care of other people better one of the principles that i use lots that i was introduced to as part of a trauma training that i did a little while ago was ahimsa so this principle of non-violence and the idea is that we need to be non-violent towards other people but also to ourselves because ultimately we're all connected and when i hurt you i hurt me and when i hurt me i hurt you and for me my my faith practices and traditions in the church didn't always set me up well to know how to pay attention to myself and care for myself and integrating practices from the buddhist tradition i feel like has made me actually a better christian and that was one of the things i really liked in the the bushy interview is that he was talking about christianity as this really socially oriented religion and set of practices then buddhism is having a focus on training the mind and the individual i mean there are varying degrees of adherence to the idea of self of course but training one's own mind as actually a really important part of being a part of a social religion that's preoccupied with the care and the suffering of other people that to me fits fits really well so the science for me was a gateway into understanding how i could be more loving to other people by actually learning to care for myself and now i can see that there is there is use for these practices in my faith as a christian you kept emphasizing practice practice practice which i feel like in the christian context right we're always being told to have good character and there's this focus on just trying to be a better person but there's no real practice which is sounds like like what you went through was a a realization that it's in the flow of practice of mindfulness of taking time for contemplation that you naturally become the things that we're taught we should be right having good character good morals or being compassionate that's as well is what struck me about the bushy interview was his ability to connect the individual to the we in terms of buddhism to christianity [Music] i see how a lot of buddhist traditions have majored more in practice than theology and character and some of these other way things that christianity it's often majored in i would be slow to say that all christian sex and denominations are all about character and those things and not about practice there are some very practice centric christian i don't know about denominations but at least groups ways of being you know i think that's a lot of the ignatian spiritual exercises franciscans there's there's a lot of people that are very practice centric christians but probably as a whole i think i would agree that buddhism usually would put practices first but a lot of buddhists don't meditate it's it's a derivation it's it's one of the technologies to get to the point where you could see what the buddha was seeing and i think that it almost would be like chris saying that praise and worship comes from christianity yes but but like from jesus did did jesus tell us to praise and worship i mean he said the father seeks worshipers in spirit and truth you don't have jesus saying like okay go to a room and sing three up songs and two slow songs you know praise and worship developed through a tradition through centuries and what i think that we in the west especially sometimes leave out of both christ's teaching and the buddhist teaching is salvation salvation enlightenment satori nirvana whoever put whatever words you want to it but being born again the buddha siddhartha walked out into the city and he saw all this suffering and he felt all this suffering in himself and he tried to figure out what is this what is happening and he was just like desperate to find out what is this suffering thing all about what's the root of it because can we undo it everybody's suffering this is life is horrible for so many people life is suffering for so many for everybody that he was seeing life is suffering then having a moment of being born again and the suffering dropping away and the world changing everything changing the kingdom of god was at hand jesus i think was pointing to it all the time because it's all like look can you see it it's like this it's like this can you see it and we made it about something that happens after death christianity made it about this like much of christianity made it about this weird system of hierarchy about what happens to certain souls when they leave their bodies when they die like where did all this come from and they were just both pointing to the freaking flowers and to the sun and to the moon and saying look can you see you can't so many of you you can't see you got to be born again you got to give it all up you have to stop holding on to this and die and then you'll see yeah so i think we lose that part of the message with buddha and the christ and instead turn it into a self-help system of what can i add to my life to make it a little better to ease the suffering a little bit because i'm just what can i distract myself with what can i find some social identity with what can i spend some time on feeling better about my ego with rather than an invitation to die and so i guess both then in their own ways are critiques to empire right yeah which is the the dominant system that we're all functioning in which is how we even parcel out religion in and through that system of let me get a little buddhism a little christianity in order to but truthfully they're both and i don't think i've ever realized that until kanye making this connection about even how subversive buddhism is to our modern capitalistic culture by seeking contemplation or even by acknowledging that life is suffering even the critique of desire is a critique of empire which says buy more eat more drink more sell more be more productive so both are ancient traditions asking us to step outside of the the daily rat race kind of like what you're saying yeah one thing i had a friend recently make this tie to me that i thought was really brilliant but how so much of our fight against empire and white supremacy and patriarchy and racism all the things that a lot of our society is waking up to and saying wow we need to make some changes sometimes we don't have the underlying framework to stand on for that for any of of the work to get any farther than just yelling emotions at each other i want to be heard rather than having a framework and experience of we are actually all connected we share a ground of being we share a oneness that gives intrinsic sacredness to every being and there's not a theological or philosophical framework for that in post-christian scientific materialism which is kind of the operating method of seeing the world in our society for the most part even for christians and so some of these ideas from if we look into the red letters and we look into the words of the buddha and these teachings of the mystics and we begin to experience it then then things like white supremacy are like this doesn't make sense in the same way that me biting my own fingers off doesn't make sense yeah it's not just a theoretical ideal some lofty like oh we should really try to up your compassion so that you can feel bad for people that are down the ladder of you when you feel connected to the same people that are being mistreated yeah when their kids become your kids yeah exactly so i think that there's a power in some of this finding some of these treasures from these traditions the practices the way of seeing the way of being the way of experiencing reality it's not just about individuals not suffering but as individuals become free what could those individuals bring to all of us and for the shalom of all of us and ways of embodying shalom and peace and nirvana with all with all beings [Music] sharon salzberg is a central figure in the field of meditation a world-renowned teacher and a new york times best-selling author you can learn more about her work at sharonsallsburg.com sharon thank you so much for being with us what an honor to talk to you today well thank you so much could we just start maybe by getting a little bit of your story for the listeners maybe your early spiritual upbringing and and what brought you into buddhism and and studying schools and philosophies and traditions from from places other than where you were born well i grew up in new york city mostly with my grandparents and they were pretty observant jews although it was kind of a custom in the house it wasn't something that really entered me in a particularly deep way uh i went to college at the state university of new york at buffalo and i was a sophomore there i took an asian philosophy course and it was kind of stunning to me i i took it as far as i can remember looking back almost as a kind of happenstance like it fit nicely in my schedule so i took the class but it completely changed my life in two ways one was um the buddha's very upfront unashamed unadorned acknowledgments that there was suffering in life and certainly they've been suffering in my life but like for many people mine was a family system where this was never really spoken about so i didn't know what to do with all those feelings within me and he was the buddhist saying in fact you're not weird you know this is something that happens to everybody this is a part of life and and it was that sort of sense of belonging and inclusion that was really startling to me and then i heard there was such a thing as meditation that there were techniques or methods you could use that could actually help you be a happier person so i looked around buffalo new york this was quite some years ago 1970 and it was long before there was a yoga center in every corner you know mindfulness was like a thing and i didn't see it anywhere so i used the university they had a independent study program where if you created a project that they liked you could go anywhere in the world theoretically for a year and fulfill it and then come back so i created a project i said i want to go to india and study buddhist meditation and i said okay so off i went wow i just read a book that they compiled the letters from alan watts through his life and i laughed at a point where he he was talk because he was he started teaching very young but he was also he was in new york and then he started kind of traveling around the states teaching about buddhism and at that time he kind of realized he taught pretty much everybody in the country that was interested it was just like nobody nobody cared back then yeah there was no mindfulness movement here right and so what about after that so when you got to india so i get to india i didn't really know where to go i started out in dharamsala because i'd heard the dalai lama live there and i figured he must know how to meditate i had very specific kinds of desires i wanted to learn the methods i wanted to learn the how to i wasn't very engrossed in philosophy or comparative religion or i certainly didn't want to identity or to reject anything i just i want to know how to do it you know so uh that took a little while to find i finally found what i was looking for in budgaya about three months later where essentialenko had just left burma and he was leading uh his very early meditation day meditation retreats that were described just as that and they were exactly that they were they're very much based on method and your unawareness and the first night of the first retreat a goenka said the buddha did not teach buddhism the buddha told a way of life you know this is in no way about becoming a buddhist or rejecting anything and it just seemed perfect and it was really perfect as a as a launching pad for my meditation that's funny because we would say the same thing a lot i came from a christian tradition and it's funny that both the christ and the buddha it's not it's not like jesus taught christianity like he said yeah yeah be a christian or the buddha be a buddhist but why do you think that happens what it seems like you have these beings that we we so clearly see their enlightenment their their presence their way of being and then we we want it and it like even as the buddha teaches us how to not cling to suffering sometimes we see that and make that its own clinging do you have any thoughts about that um i think it's also um intriguing that you know they say the buddha always describes as a human being was not depicted actually in statues or paintings or anything for about 400 years or so what he was shown by symbolized by was like a set of footprints because the whole point was to walk the path you know it was not to revere him but to in a way become him or as close as you could get and the fact that it's believed that everyone has that capacity as an ability is kind of mind-blowing in itself it's really breathtaking to think of a human mind like that and what goodness we might actually be capable of so you know it's very tied into that certainly within buddhism that unless it's you know significantly changed from the original teaching the message will be you know ask questions it's fine to doubt find out for yourself um the buddha said don't believe anything don't believe anything just because i said it you know put it into practice see for yourself if it's true that's really the the original spirit of it did you experiment with any other traditions how did you land in like the specific schools that you did of theravada and the swasana and and the specific kind of and for those of us who are less versed in buddhist teaching and thought what the heck are those traditions a good point i always had a an instinctive feel for buddhist i didn't even know what the word meant you know and i was laughing with someone the other day they said why did you go to india if you're interested in buddhism that hadn't been in buddhist country in thousands of years and i said i didn't know that no it's just like so naive there's something about i don't know the the flavor it just seemed right to me and it matched my not wanting to adopt a belief system and so on so within buddhism sometimes it's divided geographically so the schools that were originated and preserved in southeast asia say from india um you know burma thailand sri lanka some of vietnam or someone was called teravadan or schools of the elders so that was one of the words um as buddhism traveled up north to uh you know countries like uh china and tibet korea and so on it would be referred to as the mahayana in tibet kind of the tantric vehicle would be vajrayana within those schools certainly within the charavada there is a division of there are lots of ways of slicing and dicing different styles of meditation so one way of doing it is that those practices that are designed to help us know ourselves more clearly to see the difference between our actual experience and what we make of them are called insight meditation and the active ingredient in insight meditation is mindfulness so mindfulness really means a quality of awareness where our perception of what's happening in the moment is not so distorted by bias like one common tendency for example would be if you feel pain in your body or discomfort in your body or heartache or disappointment it's very common to immediately begin adding a future like what's going to feel like tomorrow what's going to feel like next week so we're not just experiencing the discomfort of now we have now added all that time and the anxiety and the anticipation and we're trying to bear it all at once and so that leads so readily to our feeling defeated and overcome so we try to do through mindfulness to see the difference between what's actually happening and what's getting added to it kind of slice right in there see if we can relinquish the story and just be with the experience and that's it to say all stories are bad or even incorrect but we kind of want to construct it from the beginning again by ourselves so every story that person's not worth talking to because i heard from someone else they were boring or you know whatever it might be we just want to know for ourselves so insight is the ultimate goal mindfulness is the vehicle for getting there um there are other whole categories of meditation which are not so much it's not that they have no mindfulness in them but they're not so designed to help us see ourselves that clearly over time they're more designed to help us stretch so what i mean by that is uh we may have very habitual tendencies in terms of what we pay attention to and who we pay attention to and how we pay attention and in a practice like loving kindness you kind of stretch so you look at yourself from another angle you look at the person you usually look through like the supermarket clerk you know so it's intentional it's more active what makes a lot of people squeamish is that they think it must be then phony you know that you're in a place that's true and you're moving to a place that's not true it's not really so it's like you're in a place perhaps it's true and you're moving to another place that's true but usually gets a little very little air time you know so one example would be you're the kind of person who tends to judge yourself like at the end of the day and so to evaluate yourself and let's say you're the kind of person who pretty well only thinks about the mistakes you made and what you could have done better and what you really screwed up let's just say the process of stretching is almost like saying anything else happened today like any good within me and it's not to be conflict avoidance or deny the difficulty at all but [Music] we are more than that stupid thing we said at lunch at the meeting and either we recall that good that happened or and or we just wish ourselves well that's the practice of loving kindness it's gift-giving or offering you use phrases silently it may be happy maybe peaceful may i be happy may i be peaceful as a kind of offering to oneself and to others and so it's kind of designed differently i come to some of the ideas um in buddhism and buddhist teaching somewhat through the back door i grew up in a christian context and then as an adult became an atheist and became encountered mindfulness first as a secular meditative practice and found it incredibly helpful and beneficial but over the years i have found myself increasingly drawn toward loving kindness as kind of my main meditative practice because of that that perspective and heart expanding nature it really is powerful yeah it is thank you i'm always happy to hear somebody really likes i had a really interesting experience with loving kindness meditation in japan this last year it was actually led by mike we do these weekly meditations for our patrons we have a patreon page and we'll just put out different kinds of meditation different people like different things so mike did a loving kindness one and i was sitting with that one and i was on a i try to do a retreat by myself every year and so i this time i went to japan and i mostly just sit sit and do nothing the whole time but they've got those nice hot springs in japan so i was like [Laughter] and i was sitting with this loving-kindness meditation and up to that point i've been experiencing this very strange building of energy in my body for the for several months leading up to that and it kind of culminated in my head almost up into the crown of my head it wasn't unpleasant necessarily but it was pretty intense it was like this um it was just kind of a buzzing after i did this loving kindness meditation it it felt almost like a rubber band snapped or something in my brain and it all just like went away not it went up the top of my head or whatever like it just kind of like broke and it's hard to put words to it but it was a very non-dual open space that opened up i don't know i don't know how to talk about it but uh it was through it was after a loving kindness meditation it just kind of stayed it was amazing wow wow did you have experience with other schools as well as and when you did when you did the class in college did they kind of give an overview and was there something that just spoke to you out or that just all happened in india do you remember i mean the class was sort of an overview um certainly a buddhist thought but uh it was really the original teachings just hearing the buddha quoted you know that um and hearing about the possibility of meditation but it really did happen in india except that india is not a buddhist country you know there would be a lot of hindu devotional practice everywhere on the streets you know like wherever you might go um to some extent islamic teachings were were kind of available but mostly it was just a general climate was um you know i i was in a more hindu part of india and it was everywhere and so and in my very first retreat which was january of 1971 ramdas was sitting there as a student and along with many people who um actually left with him you know maybe six weeks later to go find his guru nuclear baba and they found them in a matter of hours you know when next time i saw them they were all you know they weren't like jeffrey and linda anymore they were christian artists and nearby you know yeah they they do have different names so i have a tremendous respect for a whole wide range of practices within just buddhism between my first teacher's role burmese or it studied in burma my next teachers were all tibetan uh then i was really confused i had no idea what to do i would say to myself eventually i said to myself just do something you know it doesn't have to be a lifetime commitment but you've got to do something because i would just sit and think i do this should i do that you know like uh it was kind of useless and and there i was you know in india so i decided did you meet maharaji no it didn't mean no and but you know he his um presence has been in my spiritual life since the beginning of my spiritual life because of ramadas because of those friends something i i often remark on i was just talking to christian house the other day about it is that of all the people i know who did meet maharishi and spent time there um which of course is a good long time ago now and i don't know anybody who says oh that was the folly of youth or that was a really stupid period no i was i wasn't thinking or you know every single person points to it as having been the most important time in their lives and like the sweetest and you know which is fascinating did that ever cause you suffering that that decision that you made did you ever like sometimes yeah yeah yeah i mean we joke about it but i say you know i should have gotten on the bus [Laughter] i mean that was really stupid because she now says no you know like someone i just practiced somebody somebody had to keep their english name right what's been your experience with ram das i know you're obviously friends on some level how how did how how was your relationship yeah how did we we are friends and you know he was there and i was just with him in hawaii a couple of weeks ago and along with joseph goldstein who was also at my first retreat and jack cornfields you've been living a kind of parallel life and thailand well joseph and i you know met up in india and rhonda and it was really fabulous you know like realizing i mean joseph for example recounted the first copies ever seen of be here now arrived while we were together in india and it was a box and it had like the book in it but also like a chai recipe and uh you know maybe a record after you know i was like in a box and and you know i'm just like pulling these things out of the box and it's first time he's seen it and it's just what he thought about it and he said i think i said something very nice but really i thought it's kind of confused there's so many different elements in there and then they went on to sell like more books than anyone except the bible and you know so we're just we have a long history together as friends and we've done a lot of things together and it's it's quite beautiful and i have the most respect to romnes i mean i knew him well before the stroke and you know i've seen him quite a bit since the stroke and and uh i couldn't imagine a more kind of graceful um reconciliation with one's current circumstance and and the power of love i mean i think he just radiates love in a way that he and we all aspire to but he actually used the circumstance of great adversity yeah to to move along that path which is so beautiful was he a lot different i mean obviously his speaking and a lot of his uh physical abilities were i'm sure a lot different before the stroke but how he feels to be now is does it feel substantially different after the stroke than it would i think so um i mean not he was always um pioneer in a way you know in a lot of ways like um i said this isn't why you know like uh we would gather this retreat and then you know we all ended up back um from asia into america and he was the first person i ever heard talk about working with homeless people he was the first person i ever heard talking about working with people in prison he's the first person i ever heard talking about working with dying people and his the range of his interest and his caring seemed like boundless you know and yeah sometimes i think of him back to that first retreat because i was 18 but he was like the elder you know he'd already been tandy or he had a guru he had a name change he'd been fired from harvard you know it was like very exciting and then i realized he was like 38 or something you know he was really a baby himself but he was like the patriarch and i would say one of the things he points to which is a really fascinating difference plus stroke is that he'd say i heard anyone say this in hawaii too he said i i used to be the kind of person that could give much more readily than receive and it was very very hard for me to receive and i would stand up and swear to that you know it was hard to give a birthday present too wow and um i said i have a stroke and the most painful difficult thing well harder than not being able to speak so fluidly harder than you know not being able to walk and you know this is harder than anything harder than the pain was having to accept help and he said it was the hardest thing and also showed itself to be the most liberating thing it was the most transformational thing he said you know one of my famous books is called how can i help now i feel like writing a book called how can you help me you know and and he is he feels to me just like his lit up being in love you know he's like reading it and and it's so beautiful because it was not an easy path yeah that's something our friend mike here is learning too i've had a stroke though just a concussion yeah just a brain injury much less severe but i you know i i resonate with that a lot it's uh i don't know how much of that is like western spirituality i don't know or western culture but the idea of being prepared to give of yourself it's actually kind of baked into christian theology i mean our spiritual point of fixation are supposedly the ultimate example of spirituality in christ is one who selflessly gave and died for the healing and reconciliation of others and i think a lot of us really internalize that i mean i think for those of us who perhaps christianity is not just a political social uh way of of conforming to empire but who who really do fall in love with christ this self-denial becomes an intrinsic part of our spiritual expression and self-identity and there are some really beautiful things about that there are great things about humans can be naturally very selfish and self-focused but in other ways to refuse to i'm learning unfortunately i wish this was some kind of wisdom i was sharing that i lived i can say it i can't live it i i'm learning that refusing to accept help from other people is a tremendous form of self-fixation and one of the things that has drawn me to certainly a much less informed and more superficial understanding of buddhism but at least participating in some of the teachings and practice has been presence self-reflection self-knowledge in some way helps me to take my personal identity and experience even if that is self-sacrificial kind of off of a pedestal and i found a beautiful alignment between the the teachings and what i probably call the theology of buddhism and its practices uh that really make you feel equal and connected to and with other people it's quite fascinating and i'm actually curious uh for you as someone who's who's practiced buddhism for for many many years how have you found that it has changed you and how has that changed your practice over time in response to the changes the practice has brought in your own heart in a lot of ways it's a hard question for me to answer because it's been so long you know i started practicing when i was 18 which was a good long time ago so it's really been my entire adult life and in a way you know the question makes me think well what would have been like without it i think i have no idea i just can't even conjure you know life without it it doesn't make any sense to me in a way but i have learned so many things along the way and one of the things i learned was that the practice really if it's going to show benefit if it's going to show some kind of change for us it's going to be in one's life not necessarily in the form of a period of practice so if you have a daily practice with 15 minutes a day say you may not see much in that 15 minutes you know for a long time but you will see that you're different in your life you're different with the way you speak to yourself when you've made a mistake you're different with the way you meet a stranger you're different when you are facing adversity there's so many signs that we've shifted or we've opened in some way but that's where you'll see it do you have a practice still oh yeah i sit every day and my uh formal sitting practice looks like a mindfulness practice that's what it is and i also have a loving kindness practice which is at this point it's much less formal where i've i've decided that i'm going to try to do loving kindness meditation which is done by the silent repetition of certain phrases like maybe happy maybe peaceful i was trying to do living kindness practice remember i'm waiting and i can't every motive transportation is waiting so walking down streets in new york sitting on airplanes in the subway wherever it is i'm standing in line you know in actual waiting uh i just make that result uh you know may i be happy may you be happy maybe peaceful and it's silence as you're walking along you're not working slowly it's going to look weird and it's very beautiful were there any moments whether in practice or just in other parts of life that felt like milestones of awareness or of consciousness or of seeing through the dream or you know what i mean like was there any after you went as a student looking for a practice looking for realization whatever you were looking for when you went to india were there milestones or or moments along the way that it felt like you the insight that you were seeking came uh there were many many and hopefully there's still more to come and mostly i think about it as not so much experiences but uh developing a very different relationship to things that had been troubling me you know so that they might still arise but i don't necessarily take them so to heart or feel so overwhelmed by them things like that uh one example would be anger which i remember uh still going to my first teacher at one point and this was you know for me this was the first time i'd really done introspection i'd never been in therapy when i went to sit and you know so everything was kind of shocking and i was very judgmental anyway so i remember going up to going and like looking him in the eye and saying i never used to be an angry person before i started meditating thereby laying blame exactly where i felt it belonged which was on him clearly my mind was so useful and he laughed you know and because i've been hugely angry but i hadn't really been in touch with it now i was so you know and the arising of things like that would trouble me a lot i feel like i shouldn't be feeling this this is wrong and what kind of person am i and then maybe go away and over the years um in tibetan buddhism they talk about when slaughtering feelings being like clouds moving through the sky you don't have to do something to dismantle it you don't have to hate it you never be ashamed of it just let it come and let it go just do it on its own anyway and so now you know i might have some thought i think why bother you know i just let it go uh it's a very different world when you look at at the culture right now and all the culture wars and all the the us and them that are plaguing everything with all of our you're suffering so much have you adjusted how you're speaking have you adjusted and you i mean you've been around for a lot of crazy things in society um how is how is now different and what does the buddha have to offer us right now where we're at as a society well it's kind of an extraordinarily stressful time you know sometimes i reflect once everyone always thinks that about their own time you know but yeah uh it just feels like it's really rough and there's a way in which you know we need these skills more than ever we need to know how to come together we need to know how to listen we need to know how to take care of ourselves we need to know how to find some balance um we need to know how to focus so that if there are some things that we are really determined to try to make a difference we can focus on those things and you know everything these tools are more valuable than ever but it's hard it's hard to believe in the efficacy of something that isn't um kind of strident you know and martial and uh pushing and it's just like what like sit and be with that doesn't make any sense but when you try it it makes a lot of sense um or loving kindness for all beings you know it's the most ludicrous idea in the world for a lot of people and if you try it it suddenly starts again making sense like the buddha talked about loving kindness as the antidote to fear like if we cultivate this heart full of love or caring we will get over our kind of perpetual insistent automatic fear and so we don't practice to be mechanical or cold or removed from life we practice to have other options and how to respond and i think it's great do you think part of the the difficulty people face or maybe that feel that it might be silly to engage in loving kindness is the the disparity the gap between kind of daily american life of speed and efficiency and multitasking and anxiety and um dispassion or antipathy towards those who come from different places of identity or politics than we do and the actual practice of loving kindness which is so slow and so still and so open and do you think it's just too big of an experiential gap especially for a culture who identifies self-improvement with great effort and work we go on diet plans and we're hungry and we work out and we we take continuing education and have to study a lot and this idea that growth can come from such a different place do you think it's just too far from the everyday american experience uh no i would hate to think that you know at all if you find out about it in this time that's interesting it's only you know reflection or conjecture but maybe this is the time you know that that you really uh need to do it like putting into practice is the hardest hardest thing it's so much easier just to think about or to recommend to others to actually do it is very difficult even if we're just talking about 10 minutes a day is difficult so people kind of create their own support system in a way that will help them actually show up and do it either in their own home or wherever but show up in that more symbolic sense and it's very important that we know that difference because our friends certainly know the difference between someone who's living through certain values and someone who's just talking to them all the time about how they should live you know which could be very annoying and i just i don't think it's too fascinating maybe you know i mean i keep looking at the mindfulness movement and thinking this is astonishing like who used to care that you know there'd be a mindfulness class and parliament or something you know like i know we do care and they're very symbolic signs of hope in a lot of ways and he's very important living in los angeles it's pretty amazing to see my daughter's gone to three different schools here and each of them has had some sort of mindfulness involved in the curriculum which is not something that i grew up with in the midwest and wisconsin in the 80s and 90s i'm just thrilled that to see these kids sitting for a few minutes and just quiet and i don't know i i've that's not something i ever experienced as a child and i'm excited to see what how that blossoms into my daughter's life as she continues to get older that's great do you have a practice with other people at all other than when you're teaching workshops or whatever do you have any sort of song i do i i mean i just went and sat at a six day retreat so whoever was there there were about 80 people there i think okay but i do have i have little groups uh here in new york city usually in i have one um cyber group which is really fun like about oh it was like over five years ago i think a few of us were at a friend's house and he mentioned he said if i get up in the morning and i turn right then i'm at my my desk or my computer if i get up and i turn left i'm at my sitting cushion so we had a whole discussion and we decided to form a support group largely for this one person to help him get his sitting in so we made an agreement that every day with what was then fewer people every day when we sat we would then send an email to the other people in the group and the headline the subject line would always be turned left and if you wanted to you added something like turn left in manhattan turn left and it's raining or whatever we didn't have to because the important thing was the subject line was like checking in and so we did that for a while and the group was like close to five people but it's fine uh first of all i saw that as then as with any endeavor that involves human beings it's gonna be every your mind will reveal many things about your relationship to human beings so as long as you take all that in good humor then it's a really good thing so what i did was i noticed to myself that by that time you know i had i had had a daily practice for a very long time and so i always write very quickly and then i get really paranoid like oh no i'm always the first one to write i bet they think i'm a goody goody i think i'm just showing off stuff and i would sit about like seven hours before i wrote or something or you know somebody might say well it was like five of 12 and i realized i hadn't done it and i realized people were counting on me so i quickly went and did it so you will see a lot to amuse you but um it's also the case that uh it's a big help to people and so you find your own way of creating that well we are so appreciative of you being willing to do this but also just of you being a student and a practitioner and such an open beautiful soul for so long and helping so many people easing so much suffering in the world what a beautiful gift you are to the world and thank you thank you for being uh faithful to your journey into your practice into your heart we're all the better for it well thank you so much it's really beautiful things to say [Music] [Applause] [Music] the most exciting thing about this podcast to me is the community that has formed around it um i see that most when we do the liturgist gathering and we all get a room together and there's just something i don't know there's something beautiful uh about being with all of you and because all of you are like me i don't mean you're like me and your intersection of identity or your beliefs i mean that the people who are drawn to this work uh you're here because someone hurt you or rejected you in the past and there's something sacred about how we all get together and there's i don't know there's this there's this desire to not hurt each other to to be supportive of people wherever they're at and uh to not judge people like we've all been judged before but the problem with the liturgist gathering is we can't do very many there aren't that many churches large enough to host a liturgist gathering first of all second of all there's like all kinds of travel that people have to do stay overnight they have to get childcare if they have kids uh the liturgies gathering is a big commitment for us and for you and because of that we get a lot of emails from you all saying that you would love to be in the room with everyone else and you'd love to see a liturgist event but two or three gatherings a year don't come close enough to you and it's too expensive and the travel requirements are too hard to pull off so this year we're going to try something new we're going to do a series of appearances at a local theater and local venues non-church venues so for those of you in the audience who said you can't go to the literature's gathering because it's in a church congratulations these will not be in churches for those of you who said i wanted to go to allergies event but they sell out too quickly these events will be in bigger rooms so hopefully we'll have more capacity not only per room but go to more cities across the country so next week next week we will start pre-sales for our first ever liturgist tour uh with one small caveat those pre-sales will be available only to our patrons at first so we want to make sure that anyone who's a patron of the liturgies podcast has a chance to go to one of these events so if you're not a patron and you want first chance at our upcoming tour tickets just go to the liturgist.com and then click the join us button in the menu and that will let you sign up for our patreon page which by the way you get a lot more than just uh ticket access when you're a patron we have another podcast called the alien and the robot that is a ton of fun that is me science mike and michael gunger the two of us do that podcast although you never know who will show up on the alien robot especially this season um and also uh we make meditations every week for people those are very popular especially the ones that hillary does so if you're not a patron of the liturgist podcast i'd encourage you to think about that especially because next week tickets go on sale in a pre-sale only to our patrons thelitus.com just click join us i think one of the challenges for some people who who interact with buddhist ideas of non-attachment as they relate to the experience of suffering or how attachment relates to suffering would have questions around social justice and paying attention to the suffering of others i've certainly heard people just be jerks with the language of buddhism and say like you need to not be attached that's why you're hurting and and use it as a strategy to to blame or silence or kind of dismiss the lived realities of other people how do we sit in that tension well where we're talking about the relationship between attachment and suffering while also paying attention to how much it hurts to suffer and and that we can't make that choice for other people and that we can't tell other people to not be attached especially when we're in positions of privilege and it's easy for us to not be attached to anything my first reflexes which is isn't that strange because buddhism isn't as attached to colonialism as an empire as christianity has been except that's also not true yeah it's not true buddhism is just co-opted by great powers in the eastern world as christianity has by great powers in the west and governmental power and governmental powers is so strange to me how traditions which at their core are about rebirth are about seeing others serving others helping others becoming awake to the way things really are get taken over by [ \_\_ ] [Music] for me it's like it's a weird bit of game theory it's almost like the prisoner's dilemma like if you if you're a good christian or a good buddhist if that's even a thing in either of those cases is to set yourself in a situation where you just lose the game a prisoner's dilemma every time which means you lose control influence i'm not sure the word i want to use here of how the tradition unfolds and then you arrive at places where wealthy westerners use an ancient tradition to invalidate the experiences of other people just before you go too far down that line i love where you're going but can you unpack what prisoner's dilemma is for those of us that don't remember the prisoner's dilemma is a classic scenario in game theory sorry you're right i shouldn't have assumed that was common knowledge where two people are playing a game although it can be a real situation and effectively you can either you can confess or not confess to an interrogator and if both parties don't say anything well then the prosecutor doesn't have anything to go on and they'll have to look at a case and so if neither you say anything it's likely that you spend let's say a week in jail um if one person rats on the other person they walk free say person a rats on person b person a walks free person b now does a long time in jail and if they both turn on each other they both spend a long time in jail right so you would think the logical thing to do would be to never talk right but if people don't trust each other then one person goes right that's the prisoner's dilemma and my point using the prisoner's dilemma as an example is so often in society people who are kind or deferential lose out to people who are domineering or aggressive and and what i feel like my understanding of buddhism as as a calling to waking up is also to some degree to like release such notions of gammonship altogether yeah but then those who don't are better at moving through the systems of society which happen to decide how all the resources get allocated in society yeah and that that's what's weird to me it's like that's almost the architecture of a buddhism is to maximize its capacity to be taken over by [ \_\_ ] like paul took over like paul took over christianity damn right and then constantine yes even a bigger [ \_\_ ] yes the [ \_\_ ] of [ \_\_ ] constantine yeah so what we hear from the about these teachers these great sages has been passed down through 100 other [Laughter] [Music] [ \_\_ ] [Music] another thing that's that's an interesting paradox with that scenario that you posed hillary is to truly let go of attachment to desire and to see the perfection that is already and always present includes all of the suffering so it's a weird paradox it's like it's that you have to die to live paradox it's to not suffer you have to stop being averse to the suffering yeah you know so to see that in someone else if you have somebody saying oh you're suffering here's how you should fix it this is your problem this is and they put all these ideas on it that's a pretty good sign they don't know what the hell they're talking about yeah because they're not because they're not actually okay yeah with what's in front of them and the process and the journey of that other person and the pain of that other person not not okay in a way that you don't care not okay in a way that you don't have compassion or empathy but okay with it in the sense that you're not going to stand over and against that person to try to control their process their journey yeah you see yourself as the same essential oneness as them so this is this is yourself going through what yourself is going through in that body and why why would this other ego jump in and try to turn this into an idea that makes you higher up on some kind of ladder enlightenment ladder and tell them what's what they should do yeah that to to do that would be to miss it entirely but there's a paradox in that like from a different angle to kind of concretize it differently i think about people who've come into therapy and will say oh you've suffered and i'll say what do you mean and they're like oh you i can tell when i'm talking to you about my pain you don't need to make it go away for you to be okay hmm and and how sometimes being okay with your own suffering supports you to actually be more compassionate and loving to the suffering of others to be present with them and and to not have to run away from it but to actually look at it so it's the being okay with suffering in a way that allows you to see it as it is maybe even more clearly think about like if you were truly the most diverse person to suffering would just kill the other person like you wouldn't be able to share in it at all because you'd be so averse to it no i don't want you to suffer you'll definitely not be suffering if you don't have any brain activity [Laughter] you know so like being able to sit in someone's suffering without trying to fix them but just being present with them is paradoxically by being okay with their suffering is often the most effective exactly yeah or another example of that would be when we don't know how to tolerate our suffering or our experience and i i i would be careful to apply this primarily to a kind of interpersonal dynamic and not necessarily to speak about political issues but when someone hurts us or when someone does something that we don't like sometimes it's so painful for us that we get angry and create pain in the other person maybe even creating so much guilt in them that they have to change or they feel like they have to change what they're doing so that we can be okay and how's there that there is this kind of like ping-pong of suffering that goes back and forth like i think about someone i've been i was speaking with the other day just a friend who was saying you know i i told this person i didn't like what was happening and they got so upset that i felt a tremendous amount of guilt over overcome with guilt so i i felt i had to do something different because i felt so guilty and we when we pulled it apart it was that the other person didn't like what had happened and so their reaction to their inability to stay with their own discomfort their own distress actually created more distress in the other person trying to make their own pain go away ended up creating more pain in the other person and in themselves too yeah like so all of these ways of trying to get away from it actually don't work and being with it being with it is the thing that actually kind of snubs it out in a way or allows it to the embers to die softly and on their own time instead of becoming a blaze [Music] yes i just was going to ask uh is this why buddhists are terrible at evangelism yeah because they're just so uninterested in fixing your suffering they just want to sit with you and and help you get some perspective in it but you know you can't really sell that and package that really well at least interesting i'm sure there are some buddhists that are more evangelical than others but the same things with christians right yeah but i mean growing up christian right like there was always the sense of you know i grew up with a parent who was very evangelistic minded and so knocking door-to-door tracks uh but as well this like let's go and pray for those people right like you even some church groups send whole teams of people they do this thing now where they'll flood entire cities with like thousands of people from a conference to just flood the streets and go pray for people but i'm like if that shoe was reversed if there were like a thousand buddhists that were like they just wouldn't i don't feel like that just doesn't work in their context um i know christians that go on mission trips and go to monasteries and they ask to pray for the monks and the monks say yes absolutely yeah of course and if a monk was to go inside of an evangelical church yeah with with lots of other monks and sticks can we pray for y'all chant for you yeah can i home for you yeah exactly no yeah it would be like it'd be an attack on religious liberty but uh so it's just funny how it doesn't work the other way uh which tells a lot about buddhism as a philosophy it occurred to me that if fundamentalism is a spectrum from your your faith is from 0 to 100 on a fundamentalism scale that one criteria for assessing how fundamentalist you are is your discomfort with people of other sex or faith traditions praying for you because i've just noticed every person i know of great spiritual depth and maturity yeah would welcome and accept prayer from anyone even someone who others might identify as that person's enemy interesting people who are in this very like insecure kind of fundamentalism i mean there's some door-to-door style faith that i'm not going to name specifically uh but who in the past when i've tried to greet them warmly and pray with them have literally run down my driveway to escape and i think it's interesting how a deep and sincere faith tends to be antithetical to that kind of anxiety and insecurity be it in any of the great traditions i think our whole culture though has de-evolved to the point where we solidify ourselves especially in religious circles and i feel like fundamentalism is just popular it's and it's becoming more popular in a lot of ways and so we just see less and less mature conversation whether around issues of faith let alone actual practices or the way in which we treat each other which it's just all become team sport and when we experience the uncertainty of the unknown so often the antidote has been or the the way of coping has been to make something known instead of to actually embrace or come to love the unknown trying to again use this like to concretize to make something to raiify it in a way that that manages our discomfort instead of being with the discomfort until we learn to love the unknown and find beauty and possibility in it i know with christianity there was a story that i i believed for a long time that if i pray a certain prayer it means i'm a christian this this singular event has to take place and then i you know get this don't have to worry about that so if i make this conscious choice then i get access to this whole other realm of experience and of course i i now don't necessarily believe that and i think there are lots of problems with that what happens when people can't make conscious choice and you know what i mean i could go on and on and on about the challenges with that but when i think about buddhism i think about people who live like buddhists are buddhists and that there isn't necessarily in some cases it sounds like there is a singular vow someone might take to enter to into a different level of commitment and service to the to the practice but my understanding and please correct me if i'm wrong is that people who adhere to the principles and live in that way are buddhists that it's not necessarily that you make one decision and then you have this get out of jail free card and it makes me think a little bit about christianity and faith in that way like would this is the classic question like would people who look at my life say that i'm like jesus because i live like jesus and does my does the way that i live my life and how i think about the world does that say something about what i believe instead of relying on a singular decision at a specific point in time to to assure my ass wage my fear of death so i don't know if it's the same if that applies to buddhism like how does one how does one become a buddhist do they have to say a thing yeah i don't think so right it's more like are you living that way or not and i think that there's actually something so so important about that being able to say like what does my life say it reminds me of a of something i learned in university about the word belief coming from from the german word to mean by life that often we think of beliefs as being these these top-down processes like if i think it therefore on some level a certain percentage of that belief will filter out through my life but actually it's the other way around we can say what a person believes by looking at how they live their lives and for me for a long time christianity was the other way around like here are these ideals and what 30 20 15 of it trickles down into my life but i see buddhism as the other way around that that beliefs are about by life that are about extracting or deducing from the person's way of living and moving through the world that we can see something about what they believe i'd like for that to be the way that i live my life too you know i think one of the brilliant things about both christianity and buddhism as teachings the dharma of both is the sort of self-destructive possibility that you can find in each one both teachings were so brilliant in eventually like turning on itself because if you otherwise it becomes an idol otherwise it becomes an object to be believed in a path that is somehow other than the rest of reality other than the birds and the flowers and the bodhi tree you know so buddhism eventually what you have is this idea develop if you see a buddha on the road kill him [Laughter] like buddhism in itself is it turns on it's like if you think this is the way like if you think that you can quantify it and put it in a series of in a label and in a series of doctrines and practices you are not seeing it kill that thing that's an idol i think that's present in all the great traditions in some level but it's usually hidden underneath all the words of the [ \_\_ ] who followed [Music] we hope you've enjoyed the second episode in our series on buddhism your hosts for this episode have been michael gunger hillary mcbride william matthews and me science mike greg nordin and vishnu das provided editing for this episode and corey pig provided production support if you have comments or questions we'd love for you to submit them to us at theliturgist.com just look for this episode and leave a comment or you can reach us on facebook instagram and twitter at the liturgists of course we're also part of an open source social media project on social.thelitus.com and we'd love for you to join us in an ad-free non-corporate supportive social media environment our next episode will be the final part of our buddhist series and will feature your questions that came in via mastodon and patreon thanks for listening everyone [Music]