Welcome to Living Dharma, a podcast from the Turga Institute. I'm Summa Kunzangpamo, here with my co-host Justin Kelly, as we explore what it means to bring Buddhist wisdom into everyday life. Each episode features conversations with practitioners, teachers, and change makers who are living the path in real, grounded, and inspiring ways. We're so glad you're here.
SPEAKER_00Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Living Dharma. Today we're joined by someone who spent his life with a foot in two worlds that don't always speak to one another: the rigorous world of science and the quiet world of contemplative practice. Rob Roser is a developmental psychologist who came to meditation the way many of us do by hitting a wall. Burned out in graduate school, he went looking for something, found his way to a cushion, and never quite left. What's distinctive about Rob's work is that word developmental. He's one of the leading figures in what has come to be called developmental contemplative science. The study of how practices like mindfulness and compassion actually shape the heart and mind across the whole arc of a human life, from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. The question isn't simply whether contemplative practice works, but how it lands differently in a 10-year-old, a teenager, a teacher, a parent, and what that means for how we raise and educate one another. For years he helped guide this inquiry as part of the Mind and Life Institute, building bridges between scientists and contemplatives. And today he carries that work forward at Emory University as the director of research at Emory's Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics. In our conversation, we trace the whole journey, his origin story and the burnout that cracked him open, what developmental science and Buddhism each have to say about the goodness we're born with, why he believes a teacher's inner life is, in a very real sense, the curriculum, and what it means to take gratitude seriously, not only as a subject of study, but as a practice. And we turn together towards the harder questions. How do we prepare young people for an unstable world? And what does a contemplative life offer in such a time? Not as an escape, but as a genuine resource. It's a warm and wide-ranging conversation. So settle in and enjoy. Here's our conversation with Rob Roser.
SPEAKER_03So, Robert, it's absolutely wonderful to have you with us here today. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Really looking forward to diving in and really exploring exploring
our Living Dharma podcast with you. And uh as you just said before before we started recording, Justin did share with you our first question. Uh so I know you're gonna have a good answer for this.
SPEAKER_01It's I hope so.
SPEAKER_03So uh Rob, but what does applying the Dharma in our lives mean to you?
SPEAKER_04Uh first of all, thank you both so much for being on the podcast. It's a great joy and an honor to be with you, and of course, sending lots of love and respect to whoever's ears may hear what we're going to talk about. So I was thinking about the question of Dharma and how I've experienced it over the course of uh this particular life, where, you know, to be honest, I didn't encounter the Sanskritic traditions of India until age 25. And I I can honestly say I didn't even know I was looking for such an encounter. Um, but my first encounter with the idea of a dharmic life was was probably this uh classic Hindu notion of a kind of a way of life, as it were. And um the little homework that I did on the word dharma before the podcast was looking at the Sanskritic root as um as kind of um to hold or to support, I understand, with an ancillary meaning of sort of firm and stable. And so I I think the first encounter I had with uh Dharmic living, um, I was enchanted, not in the actual specific way of the Hindu thinking about a way of life that may be based on our occupation or location, but but as a kind of um uh yeah, um something that holds up and supports a way of life leading to fulfillment, meaning, purpose, and altruism. So in in that loosely Hindu sense, it was a a kind of my thought about it was there's a kind of hidden order to things that if one could um discover that would be a helpful way um to live a life. So so I think that was the idea. Um not not exactly the same way that the Vedas thought that the there's a natural order and ritual practices can uphold that, although I'm not against that idea. But it was just that there was a way to live that if we lived a virtuous life, we would under uncover, discover this underlying sense of possibility, joy, and transformation. And that if we lived other kinds of lives, we would, on this Hindu view that I was being taught, cover up uh the reality in some sense. And then, of course, I think in the Buddhist sense of not something that's upholding the reality as we experience it, but as something to hold on to with firmness and stability in this life to take refuge in, uh I then, you know, was introduced, and I'm not a I'm just a very junior student of Buddhism, to the idea of the Dharma, meaning the teachings of Buddha with regard to the nature of relative and absolute reality. And, you know, I guess in my mind, I'm a lumper, not a splitter, as it were, when it comes to um uh uh my habitual mode of thought. That that also um the idea that there's a set of teachings to hold on to that reveals the nature of reality and a path beyond suffering has also obviously made a huge impression in my mind this life. And so, among the other jewels, I take refuge in that possibility of these teachings being salvational in a sense and transformative. So I think I've sort of been a onesie Hinduism thinking about everything is one and there's a dharmic order, and we need to align it. And then I became a nunzy. Well, you know, there's just emptiness and form, and we have to find the uh we have to realize this uh unification right here, now, and nowhere else. And it's all been a wild journey, and I can say it's way still in progress. Just baby steps, you know. Sorry to go on, but I had prepared for that question. Maybe my answers for the next ones will be very short, you know.
SPEAKER_00No, it's beautiful, Rob. Uh,
it's really beautiful. I know one of your loves you've disclosed is spiritual origin stories, which I I I too share a lot of interest in. And and I'm curious, even to go before, right? So you said you were 25 when you engaged with the Sanskrit traditions. Even to go before that, were there inclinations in your own kind of early years that drew you towards this idea of discovery or um some part of your upbringing that made you, I don't know, charitable to this idea and these ideas that you found?
SPEAKER_04Such a beautiful question. And you know, for a developmental scientist, you just want to kiss someone who asks a question about the origins, because you, you know, we really believe you can't understand a system or a person without understanding its history and its origin story, because all of that is contributory towards what the manifestation is in this moment. So, you know, I've thought about this deeply, and uh I think I'll just say two quick things. I think growing up in my family, there was a time where I was um going to a Presbyterian church and learning about the life of Jesus. And I was fascinated even then with the idea of a life, like, you know, that you wanna, or at least I had a sense of wanting to have an exemplar that I might mold my experience uh towards uh to be happy. And so I I, you know, I have a great love for the figure of Jesus. And then it was the 1970s when many middle class white families experienced a significantly huge rise in divorce following the women's liberation movement of the 60s. And so my parents were having trouble, and they stopped. Um, my mother stopped taking us to church, maybe around seven or eight years old. And in psychology, there's something called the zygarnik effect. Um uh there was a study of waitresses who tended to remember tabs of clients they had that had not been paid out yet. It's almost like they stayed in their working memory as an open gestalt until the person paid. And then it was like, okay, we can let go of that memory. I don't have to keep it in the buffer. That task has been resolved. I think, in some sense, by leaving church early, I had a great curiosity about Jesus and spiritual figures, a kind of a zygarnic of a lack of closure uh intellectually because of the interruption of my spiritual training. And I think um, to use your word, uh that led to a kind of charitable curiosity about such things. Um, and I would say my cathedral after that for many years was nature, also with um a Christian overlay. And then um, yeah, at age 25, I quit graduate school and went to study with a Catholic theologian and got introduced to all manner of traditions and slowly found my way into the Sanskritic traditions of India, all the while telling my mother that as I practiced Hindu yoga and then Buddhism, that I still, of course, love Jesus. Gotta keep the family happy. And it turns out it's also true, which is a virtue. So so I think, you know, uh Justin, my sense is that um, as Desmond Tutu says, nothing good comes without a bit of suffering. And I think that was the genesis of my spiritual journey this life, that there was a both a a suffering and a pain that was happening around not going to church,
but also there was a curiosity and an openness that came from that, which sort of made me an ecumenical kind of thinker around spirituality, I think.
SPEAKER_00I love that that that theme of ecumenicism. And Rob, getting to know you over, you know, the past couple of years, I think you have a real beautiful uh ability to find synthesis in places. So I love that term onesie. You are onesie and an unseen, maybe back to onesie, I don't know.
SPEAKER_04Maybe zero and one, or that's right. You know, not two.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And even the way you identified, or I think the word that you used was um to mold yourself to an exemplar. Even that evokes a sense of discovery and uncovering versus kind of comporting. So I'm seeing even a theme in the way that you were understanding Christianity, it sounds like, um, in your early years. Would you say that's true? And has that been a common theme throughout? I just love that idea of molding.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you know, there's this really beautiful in developmental science. If you forget everything um Western individualism has taught you, and you just see development as totally social from the very outset, that it has nothing to do with an unfolding mind by itself, you know, the great thinker at the gates of hell. All of that is uh it's not true. And so I think in if you think about development as you know envelopment in a social system, then the idea of a model imperative becomes very important. That is, that we need to, the brain itself, and of course the mind, um, needs to not imprint exactly in the way that we understand imprinting, but it needs a guide to know how to come to full fruition. And that guide is often understood in a very general sense to be a more expert other, someone who's already gone down that developmental path, usually your parents, your older siblings, um, peers, they're all providing models in some sense. And I do think there's a continuity between that idea and how we might approach our own spiritual teachers, that they they are an example of something, um, not that we imitate blindly, but that that helps to mold our thought and our body and our mind in a certain kind of way that's um beneficial, as you know. So so I I think um this this whole idea of you know that we have these more expert others who point out what we need to know and where we need to look and the word we need to use for that experience is there with the the children, all of children in a cultural setting. And it's also there in our spiritual communities where we talk about our, you know, that we're students of the of the masters and that they provide us pointing out instructions so we can understand who we are in the fullest and deepest sense. So so I I I don't think I knew all that as a seven-year-old. I just wanted to be like this person who seemed very generous, very loving, didn't leave anyone out, you know, fearless. I thought, well, wow, those would be qualities to emulate and to mold myself after. And and you know, the last thing I'll say is sometimes we think about education and educare that word as a kind of formation. That's that's a one way to think about what education is. It's kind of forming a certain kind of human being. And I think that's always happening in a social and cultural way. It's not it's rarely happening
alone, and almost it's not happening alone ever. Yeah. It's interdependence all the way, as you know.
SPEAKER_03Robert, you you speak with um in a way that it sounds almost as if your journey was was very fluid and uh almost harmonious. You know, you're you're talking about the threads. Um but I would imagine that also there would have been many contradictions and a lot of uh a lot of inner inner struggles, time times that you were resonating with with what you were exploring and form the formations that were happening, and times where it was really uh not not fitting. Could you could you describe what that that journey was like for you?
SPEAKER_04Yes, uh it's such a beautiful question, and of course, Kun Sung La, you're seeing below the the veil of appearances and narrative coherence, which our mind loves to to smooth things over, but that that hides an another reality that we all experience, I think. Uh I mean thank God for narrative, and it's not completely true, usually, as the way I see it. You know, I I remember one of my first teachers was from the Ramakrishna Order of Monks, uh, Vedanta Society of Northern California, Swami Prabhudananda. And one night he he would teach on Friday nights in San Francisco in the Union uh Union Street district. And he would he asked us, What is spiritual life? And he was such a gentle person, so calm and so quiet. And so we're all sitting in this beautiful old temple and smells nice from incense from you know a century, and his seats are comfortable, very silent, and then he just roared at us, struggle. And I remember being quite taken aback and thinking, uh oh, yeah, that's true. So uh yeah, lots of struggle, uh, lots of not knowing, lots of I can't believe this, uh lots of pushing back against discipline and uh authority structures and receive knowing versus trying to find things out for myself and uh lots of unhappiness. There's no doubt about it. And and you know, I of course I wished all that hadn't been there at the time. But I think as you get older, and I I did this for myself once, I actually charted out the things that were the most difficult moments in my life. Not getting tenure at Stanford, losing a relationship, having a physical injury that ended an athletic career, you know, going to graduate school and being miserable and thinking this can't be the path. And all of those things were the um womb, the seedbed for um the movement down the path, however small. And so uh I'm trying to bring that retrospective understanding of how suffering is co-constitutive of transformation. It's not an antithesis, it's not something other than that, but in some sense, that is the path. Even conflict in my social relationships with people I love, seeing that as a possibility for some growth that's been, you know, um impeded, not as something to be avoided because it's uncomfortable. I'm trying to bring that retrospective
understanding, which is getting clearer and clearer by the year, into my everyday moment-to-moment experience. And it's so vexingly hard. Uh and your question is so wonderful because it reveals again the truth of that and the forgetfulness that I experience with regard to that truth in this very moment in things that I'm working on and dealing with in my life. And so I wish I, you know, one of my aspirations is to be able to hold on to that um sword of wisdom with regard to all that a little bit more here, but it's it's really like everything else you asked about, it quite a challenge in in I think many of our experiences, but certainly in mine.
SPEAKER_03You articulated that so beautifully, really so beautifully. Thank thank you. Um yeah, so just your just yeah, your your personal encounter with with these teachings and your understanding of Duca now compared to when you first heard the word. Yeah, maybe maybe you've already spoken to that, but just wondering how how your understanding of Duca.
SPEAKER_04It was um so fun. I I love your questions, and I do think we um wouldn't it be great if we had an education system that honored the questions people asked as much as the answers that they had come to. I love saying now, I don't know, it feels so wonderful. Um and it's often so true. I I was just in a compassion training course that we offer at Emory this morning, and we were speaking about this, and you know, to be on honest, uh Kun Sung La I don't accept it. I don't accept Duke, and it's uh it causes me even more trouble than it could, you know. This first noble truth. I've discovered is particularly challenging for me. Um, and I think also in the students and in the courses we, you know, of course, we're not in the courses I teach, I'm not teaching Buddhist philosophy, but but just the idea that suffering isn't a personal failing, it's not our fault, it's not something unique and personal that doesn't befall other people. And it's just part of the deal. And it's of course interconnected as we're talking about with joy and sorrow and growth and stagnation, and it's all sort of mixed up together down here. I just don't accept it at uh many days. I find it very painful. I want to have a discussion with someone, quote unquote, upstairs about why that would be the case, you know, really let people know about I just don't agree, and I think it should have been different, and I'm angry, and if I could get below that, I'd you'd see a deep sadness about sometimes the state of the world in me. And so I uh I recognize the problem, I recognize the resistance. I would not say that that has opened on to a kind of uh unconditional acceptance of the way things are, yeah. Uh, but it's so good to know the problem. Uh, because you know, not the not knowing the not knowing is even worse than the not accepting and not knowing, I think. At least as a scientist, I feel that way. So I'm trying to cuddle up to dukkha, you know, to understand it, to penetrate it. I just talked on and on and on about how it served me in my life, but somehow still I do not find gratitude for it yet. Uh and I would welcome the day. I would call it the long journey to now, with if that day could dawn, but uh not
not quite there.
SPEAKER_00Rob, this has been embedded in many of your responses, and I know it's the core element of your work is this uh infusing a developmental approach into our looking at human experience and human thriving, spirituality education. And I think it'd be beneficial to kind of like just for a moment to pause and to throw a definition out there for our listeners. And maybe there's an example that you could give about kind of what this shift in perspective does and how it kind of aids in many of our investigations.
SPEAKER_04My definition of contemplative education in in some sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And why I think maybe it's a way to reimagine education in our times.
SPEAKER_00Is that the kind of the Yeah, the benefit of that reframing?
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Well, I these definitions are so tricky, and let us call let us assume they're like fuzzy math. They don't have uh clearest of clear delineations. These are, and you know, as my my friend Gashe Lobesangnagi reminds me of, whatever contemplative science and contemplative education is, it's been around a lot longer than my lifetime here. So these are just provisional uh whisperings from the early the 21st century. But I think my friend and I, for secular purposes, Steve Peck, decided that we would define contemplative education as a set of relationships and pedagogical practices aimed at cultivating attention, awareness, and let's say love and compassion in a context of growth, mutuality, and ethics. Um, and so I think it's a kind of education that's educating us about how there's something between the world and what we think about ourselves, and it's called the mind, and that we should know that because it's one of the supreme causes and conditions for the how our life unfolds. And so um it was meant to be very broad, it could be yoga, it could be tai chi, but these are discipl uh practices that try to discipline our normal way of our normal psychology, which for instance could be mind wandering. What we're trying to cultivate in contemplative education is focused attention, the ability to place our attention where we want it when we want it there, or maybe a little bit of a sense of judgment or distrust of others. Can we cultivate a sense of trust and common humanity? So, so you know, really working with the default states of the mind that help keep us alive to a kind of cultivated set of states of the mind that can conduce towards a flourishing for self and others at the same moment. I think um our colleague Justin, we were just together at a meeting in Portland where Adam Engel, the founder of Mind and Life, said it for me in the clearest and most concise terms that, you know, we're living in a time where the world is on fire with the three poisons, and they're not just in minds, greed, ill will, and ignorance, but they're seemingly taking up residence in social structures. Whether that's kind of late-stage capitalism and the accumulation of wealth or the perpetuation of weapons of mass destruction or a system of advertising that tries to convince us that we're less than and unworthy. And if only we had whatever fill in the object, we would be fulfilled. So I think in a world like that, as Adam Engel said, if we we come to some agreement that the old world order is falling apart and we're in a bit of a Bardo state, and it's not clear what's being born out of that state right now. We don't want an education system that obfuscates people's understanding of the world for 20 years, as Adam said. And then, like many of us, you develop a prefrontal cortex and hopefully you have a facilitating environment, and you wake up and you say, Why is everything so effed up in the world? And then it's going to take another 20 years for you to unlearn what you've just learned to solve that question of that you've just woken up to, that maybe that's an inefficient way of educating future generations given the state of the world. So, so what if we could front-load the kinds of insights, understandings, um skills, and dispositions that young people need to both understand the world and transform it? Wouldn't that be um an education system for the postmodern age that drew on pre-modern wisdom? I think that's the the big
idea as I understand this project, both in its sacred and secular dimensions.
SPEAKER_00I love that, Rob. And you know, as we say, we're unabashedly and unapologetically Buddhist as an organization, right? A lot of the work that's being done is we're kind of transferring it into secular spaces, which is wonderful work. But with the Turgh Institute, we're really embracing our Buddhist identity. And you've spoken kind of in generalities about how spiritual practice has influenced you as a person. You see how these practices can benefit the educational process. Talk a little bit, if you will, about when you found Buddhism as a tradition and what you is unique about Buddhism that can really serve in that space.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, wonderful question. Uh it just will reveal the impoverishment of my inner development. But wonderful. Thank you. That's exactly what this ego needs, you know. Um, I just want to say two other things because every morning, um, when I do find myself meditating, I thank two root teachers. One is my uh Hindu teacher, and one is my Buddhist teacher. And um, I could summarize my Hindu teacher's teaching as it's all about welcoming. Um, and uh she would often, as I did today, because I want her to dwell in my heart, mind, and on my tongue as I speak, she would say with great love and great respect, I welcome you all with all my heart. And um, that's a pretty awesome talk about something to mold up against as an aspiration. I was like, what would that mean? What is the fullness of my heart? What is great love? What is great respect? What does it really mean to welcome? And um, I would say uh, so that helped me to just calm my body down and to have a sense of worthiness and then to have a social practice, which was welcoming as a spiritual path. I think my encounter with Buddhism and the Mind and Life Institute, in particular, in this regard, and people like Mingir Rampochela and Sotni Rampuchai, and his holiness, the Dalai Lama, so many great beings, was to um give a very refined psychological perspective on what welcoming might mean, even in my own mind. Like what is what is equanimity? What is what does it mean, and like as Rumi said in the guest house to welcome whatever arises, you know, to go back to this beautiful question of this deviating path full of detours, dead ends, and wrong turnings, you know. What what does it mean to see all of that as part of a whole life, a whole path? And and then as a scientist, of course, what was so exciting, Justin, was the idea that that inquiry that psychology and neuroscience was going on had such a long and and um rich and clear and specific history in Buddhism. This was something that I think even my experience of Hinduism, it was a bit frustrating. The terms were a little, at least when I was reading, I couldn't quite figure out the mind. I'm kara manas, jitta, you know, yeah. Um, but I found a a bit more precision, uh, which had a lot of has had a lot of practical value in the kinds of paths I've been exposed to, and mostly in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, from my experience. Um, so um so it's been very satisfying intellectually, but I also feel like it has deepened experientially my my meditation life. And again, the most important part of that, though, I want to say, because when the students ask me at the end of a class, what is the most important thing you would suggest to us for our spiritual life, which I think is a beautiful question, A plus to anyone who asked me that question at the end of the course, you know, your question is so good. I always say, and this again comes from my first teacher, keeping the company of the truth, that being with great beings is the thing that if you ask me, I've benefited most from my quote-unquote encounter with Buddhism. It's been being with the Rinpoches and the Lamas and the Gashes and the Nuns, and that's just been and that's beyond words the way that that teaching comes.
SPEAKER_02What a blessing, really. So fortunate.
SPEAKER_04Such a blessing, and yeah, it could have been otherwise, I always say Kun Sung La You know, could
have no one could have come.
SPEAKER_03And as you were saying earlier, like the um what was it that you repeated back just into moulding, moulding to that exemplar? We're just so fortunate to have that. So fortunate. Um Robert, you you spent your career building a scientific case for something that many of our contemplatives already know. Um, that training the mind has profound effects on how we learn, how we teach, how we relate. Um, can you talk about what development dot what developmental psychology reveals about the nature of mind that you feel Buddhist practitioners would find resonant?
SPEAKER_04Wonderful. Definitely should have gotten these in advance. No, it's okay. First thought, best thought is fine. I just uh um well I'll say too I want to say one thing first, because this sometimes comes up here with younger generations. Um my experience of his holiness, the Dalai Lama, in the context of the mind and life science and contemplative dialogues was that this conversation from the outset, and let us say forevermore, if we could have it our way, is um mutually beneficial, um, is mutually respectful. It's really trying to, in our time, bring together uh two great traditions for one common humanity, as his holiness puts it, spiritual tradition and science. Now, people may come to this with a sense of uh is it proving what Buddhism says, or is it just uh uh are we just proving what already is known, or da da da da da? And I I I don't know. I can't adjudicate all that. Um, I can only I can say two other things. I think what the scientists got most out of the mind in life meetings was Buddhism. It was a compliment and a view that that that in some ways had such deep touchstones to what contemporary science was talking about with regard to interdependence and maybe even emptiness in the form of vacuums and quantity, you know, there was just so and and and also the idea that training the body and training the mind are in some sense it's one thing, it's an embodied mind. And um the one thing I do uh I guess I could say, even in my encounters, uh I don't know if this is true, but sometimes I think developmental science suggests things happen way before we may think they happen, to be honest. So if you look at um when we think a kind of self is developed enough to start drawing a pretty strong line between us and them, that happens like in the two and a half, three years of age. And and the kinds of isms that characterize our world that take up residence as social conditioning in in minds, it's really peaking in the three to five, six year period, right? So so if we think, well, let's not talk about discrimination or whatever it is until adolescence, when it's it's actually it's kind of late in development. Um so where things emerge maybe sometimes uh may be uh a question that maybe developmental science has a unique view upon, I'm not sure, or at least has something to add in terms of enrichment. Um I think the way that material reality of the genes can be affected by mental thought is a great mystery, epigenetics. Um, so what and of course, I I'm not saying Buddhism doesn't have very rich traditions to handle this line between mind and matter, which in certain conceptualizations is a matter of subtle and growth and could be seen in a different light. Um I'll be honest, I think the most exciting thing and Mingyo Rinpoche really helped me to see this is that the science of the 21st century is trying to um is uh shall I say this, the materialist and dualistic science is being seen as inadequate to solve certain problems of our time. And so the exciting thing, and this is this was a big battle in developmental science in the 20th century, is to see a kind of new metaphysics, uh a kind of new set of operating assumptions in science that are much closer to those in Buddhism around dialectics, the interpenetration of apparent opposites, um, a wearing down of all splits that we've made for 500 years between bodies and minds, environments and persons, emotions and cognitions. You know, pick your favorite. As we look closer and closer scientifically, we see something that's really been there in many wisdom traditions is that I'm not sure there's two. Uh, that the veil of appearances may trick us in some ways as to what the reality is. And so just like a good meditator, a good scientist wants to use certain tools to try to cut through that appearance. So so I don't really, I can't weigh the relative. I I think your question is so provocative and good, and I don't have a really great answer to it. Um, but I'm much more excited, and this is, you know, again, who I am as a scientist, that the at the commonalities that could lead to a new way of thinking and a new way of organizing societies. I think this is what the world is dying for today. Um and I think it's what both traditions in their best senses can offer the world is a new way of conceiving our relationships to each other and the earth and and all that is.
SPEAKER_00You don't give yourself the credit. I uh and I want to take that same thread and kind of extend it into education. Um, something that you uh have written a lot about, research a lot about, and I've gained great inspiration from your presentation
and um what you're offering about education. And the question is like, right, you don't have to look very hard to see how how much struggle young people are having in the world. Whether you go you look at kind of scientific data or you go down to your local school, like kids are struggling. And I think part of it is just the the magnitude of the questions and the problems that they're facing, what they're exposed to, kind of are just rendering it really difficult. So from this intersection of Buddhism and science, as you said, right? Within the educational space, what do you think is the most kind of impactful element of that, or what have you seen evoke and support evoke the greatest transformation or support young people to the greatest extent in your in your career?
SPEAKER_04It's a wonderful question. Thank you so much, Justin. Um I'm gonna just tell a quick story, and then I promise.
SPEAKER_00We love stories.
SPEAKER_04I um I walk at night sometimes from my apartment, and I think there's a center for elderly people. And I'm on one side of the street, and they're sitting, uh, gentlemen are often sitting there in their wheelchairs or whatever, and every night this one dignified older gentleman always kind of gives me a wave and says, See you tomorrow. And without thinking about it, my hand goes up and I says, See you tomorrow. And I think um, in some fundamental way, we call ourselves into the shared space of the living for another day, at least aspirationally, by doing that with each other. And of course, I think about my father who's in a you know a memory care center, and that could be my, you know, all sorts of things are going on there. But fundamentally, I think as you know, the Ubuntu philosophy, the Pan-African philosophy suggests, that that a person is a person through other people. I think we call each other into being each night when we do that. And so for me, um, the challenge in education in a mechanistic age was um we sometimes forget about the the very human instrument and vehicle of the teacher, herself or himself, and the quality of their seeing and listening. You know, I'm taking a page, of course, out of beloved uh Sukhmi Rempuchela's book, but you know, he talks about the grandmother principle or that that sense of unconditional positive regard and security, a sense of uh Lung being calm in the body. All of that is the pre condition for curiosity, expansion, learning, exploration. And so um Um that's why I love the contemplative work because it's not working on a technique, it's not working on a content to be um poured into children, it's working on um our being. As Parker Palmer says, it's a secret hidden in plain sight. We teach who we are, and yet in even in our schools of education, we don't teach people like how to be. We teach them content, we teach them sometimes about the developmental needs of the kids they'll teach. And yeah, we certainly teach them pedagogical practices, which is wonderful. But there's this other element that I think we were talking about, Justin, in the work that you all do, and in many beautiful places of really working on the awareness and the kind-heartedness and the calmness of the educator. Again, we're back to uh how does learning occur? Well, without saying a lot, we're teaching a lot. And so um, for me, it's the the teacher, and but that doesn't mean it's just the teacher. I think the view of what's being taught together with the quality of the teacher. So I think if we said, never gonna see you again, you know, that gentleman and I every night, it wouldn't be quite the same as see you tomorrow. Uh so I do think the content is important, but whatever the content is being manifest through, which I think was a sense of warm-heartedness and shared humanity with this gentleman, I think that's the most important, precious thing. And I think you know, Justin, when you ask people to think about their favorite teacher, it's the person of the teacher. And it's not always soft and and you know, it can sometimes be sharp and someone who sees what you don't see in yourself and calls you into that, but it's still them. That's making the that's being the critical vehicle of upliftment there. Yeah, I want to explain. That's not always a popular view either. I'm so sorry to say, because people want it to be teacher-proof so that we can spread it quickly and get it in the world and put it on an app. And I can't train all those humans. We're too, you know, so it's not a very popular view, but it's the one that I really believe in.
SPEAKER_00Gosh, so I appreciate it, Robin. I'll hand it over to you, Kunzang, in just a moment. But just the fact that you didn't talk about techniques, you didn't talk about like prescribed protocols, you talked about like presence. And in the in the in the case of the Turgar Schools project, Sokani Rempochet, again, to evoke him, when he visited our school for the first time, he said we talked a lot about our curriculum and a lot about what we did with the kids. And he laughed at me and us and said, All they need is essence love. And he called it the silent dharma. And it's very resonant with what you're saying right now, Rob. And I think more people need to hear it. So thank you for offering that.
SPEAKER_04Thank you for the question. And thank you for Sokni Rempoche for offering an extremely wonderful example of the silent dharma.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so important, especially as we are just becoming so much more digital or seem to be so much more online and and just that that human experience that's so that's authentic and real and not uh yeah, not two-dimensional, three-dimensional.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_03Uh it's hard to create safety when it's when it's two-dimensional, it's hard to it's hard to really create that. I mean, for us to have a a a real debate now, you know, it would be very different if we were in the kitchen over a cup of tea or something. But when it's all when it's all online, it's just yeah,
it's a very different dimension of experience. Um Robert, you've spoken about gratitude as both a a research interest and a personal practice. What's your own study of gratitude revealed to you about human flourishing? And what does it feel like to practice it rather than just to study it?
SPEAKER_04Wonderful. And thank God I went to the CBCT course today where we were talking about gratitude as a function of our insight into the fundamental interdependence of our lives. And, you know, we put a pick an object and we pick shoes and imagine all of the people that were involved in creating that pair of shoes that you love. And and how could there be any other emotional response to that analytic exercise than thank you? My goodness, I had no idea. So many people, and you know, ultimately we got back to the sun, you know, where which produced the plans and the conditions on earth where the petroleum products to then be. So it was just a I uh I think it's so bound up in wonder, gratitude, and awe that when and this is why I love 21st century system science and uh uh 5th century BCE Buddhism, because the vision that's offered by this intrinsic interdependence is breathtaking. It's awesome, and and I don't think people know that without interdependence, not only all of the sciences fall down and all of these great world traditions, but our existence is not. You know that somehow the stars are are yeah, it's very close uh or in the molecules of our hands. How amazing is that? So so in my in our better moments, when we step behind the the veil of this ego, we and we touch that awareness of how fundamentally interconnected we are with others. I'd love to ask my students how many of you picked your names, you know, maybe a few, but I said, geez, you didn't even pick your own name. You know, that's how socially embedded you are. I thought you were such an independent person, you know. We all do, or not all of us, but especially on this side of the pond, uh we do. Um, so so I think it's a natural response to the wonder of the way things are, gratitude. And um, I think one of the great tragedies of our time is that we're so disconnected from the cosmos and natural systems, and we're so conditioned to be consumptive and self-cherishing in some ways that we can look right over that understanding of interdependence and gratitude and and not uh yeah, participate in that emotion more. So I think it's wonderful, and it's one of those topics with with me and with young people where it's like a campfire that's suited over you, just blow on it a little, and they see interdependence. And I think pretty close behind that is a a sense of maybe wonder and gratitude. And the last thing I want to say is there's a wonderful practice that my friend Brendan uh actually Chikako Azawa da Silva and Brendan Azawa da Silva have studied in Japan, Japanese Buddhism, called Nikon, where you spend days reflecting on the different people in your development and life, and you ask, um, you know, what have they offered me? What have I uh uh offered them, and what trouble has I caused? But you don't ask what trouble have they caused me? Because that's what we think about all the time. How could they, you know? And and I think this exercise is designed to um to uproot that tendency to not see our fundamental interdependence and the gratitude that you know can accrue from that insight. And so it's trying to, as you know better than I, reverse the usual cognitive framework to capture this. So and as you said, uh it turns out you keep gratitude diary, uh list five things every day for a week or two, and lo and behold, your mind starts to see it more, and you start to create a new seed and a new perceptual habit that can grow and grow and grow. And and so, how wonderful that the cognitive theorists of Buddhism centuries a millennia ago got there, and there's a few nice studies of it now in the 21st century that that's so could have been otherwise.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, why isn't that part of uh uh curriculum growing up at school? I mean, why is it why is it not there?
SPEAKER_04I I don't know if we've lost this fundamental sense of place and people because we're so I I don't know. It's a wonderful question, but so many things in postmodernity have been desacralized and disconnected and disembodied. And I think we're trying to heal from some very deep metaphorical and theoretical and assumptive ideas we have that are instantiated in the world today. And I think education, yeah, it's such a prime time to reimagine education because it's so unclear what it should be going forward. So let's keep a hope that we have a pedagogy of gratitude, awareness, interconnection, love, and compassion coming. And you guys are at the vanguard of it, you know.
SPEAKER_00Well, what's so cool is when you ask a child to do that, they're they they love to do it. It's not like I asked my kids and students that I work with to do all kinds of things. Oftentimes when you ask them to talk about who loves them and who's impacted them, like they they adore it. But yet somewhere between, and I don't know where it is, I was talking to a fellow educator, somewhere between the age of like 10 and 14, it evaporates and you get resistant to that. And there's like a calcification. So I wonder, I don't know, Rob, if there's a if there's a moment that you've observed developmentally where it's like, man, if we could, if we could kind of insert because a lot of the work we're doing,
like you said earlier, with with Adam Engel's work and and observations, if we could kind of get it built in, and not if we go through the healing process later in life, are there interjection points where you feel like, yeah, if we could focus there, or is that just wishful thinking and it's more idiosyncratic?
SPEAKER_04I love it. I would call it developmental, contemplative, scientific thinking. Are there windows of opportunity where the right kind of enrichment, wisdom, experiential practice, reflection may um, you know, it could really quicken growth so we don't have to unlearn things later. It could increase the quality of growth at that moment so things go deeper. It could forestall other things that we don't want to have happen, like depression from coming online. So, so I think this notion of windows of opportunity for when we want to intervene in in specific ways is so important. And I think you and I talked about, for instance, what like if you were in a Buddhist education context, what and how would and when would the concept of emptiness be useful to teach? And maybe when not. I think that's a a developmental frame. So I think the ones that we think about, you know, it I was thinking about if someone asked me how to improve education, the first three things I would say is maternal health care and health, um, you know, food for all and uh uh uh universal health care. All right. Uh none of it would have to do with education. So let's just say in utero would be the most impactful time to take care of families, you know, and before. But once the child has arrived, we tend to think that early childhood, and and that's not even true. The whole thing in the first two decades is a window of opportunity. But let's say giving parents time to bond with their infant. Then when kids move into preschool, three to five, so many capacities coming online, 10 to 14 early adolescence, 18 to 21 early adulthood, these early periods as people move, we think are windows of opportunity. The one that you've cited in early adolescence is a bit tricky, as you know. We haven't quite cracked the nut there with regard to, at least in the secular schools, how to introduce these practices in a way that makes sense in early adolescence. And as you know, one of the things that's happening in early adolescence is this predominantly bottom-up, let's call it implicit, intuitive, more sensory, emotional way of encountering and making sense of the world, is now um trying to be coordinated with a more top-down language-based um conceptual way of understanding the world. And I think for a time, neither mode is very efficient. Um, and and it really does take time for that to kind of solidify towards the end of adolescence, where you can you can kind of go back and forth from a bottom-up and a top-down way of encountering the world, or it's more seamless. And so I do think there's something about early adolescence. There's something lost on the way to something being gained there. And um, what the implications of that transitional moment are for how we should think about the contemplative educational experience, I think is a really interesting and open question in my mind. But I think it has something to do with not being too inward, but really helping people become apprentices in adulthood, because that's the journey that, you know, when the body becomes more adult-like through puberty, that's the developmental task. How do I become adult? And so, how do we meet young people in that moment in a way that positions themselves for mattering to others and exploring life's big questions and I don't know, creating beautiful things for the world? Maybe we can think about contemplative education not as introvert at that moment where there's a lot of confusion and inner work going on, but extrovert meditation form service. And anyways, this is sorry to go on, but I think it's a brilliant question. And I don't think we have a good answer to it, but I would love to learn from even what you're not even, I would love to learn what you're doing and learning. And I think we need to share more to figure this out in some sense.
SPEAKER_03I love what you're sharing there, Robert. I yeah, that outward and particularly that that age, it is, I imagine, just personally speaking, it was a time that was very confusing inwardly, and just to have the the opportunity to really express, to to to work through all of that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, beautiful. I mean, we get compliance and little ones, which is wonderful. That goes away, which is you know, wonderful, and and and and they're somewhere between compliance and wanting response. It's very confusing for everyone, you know. But it's a bardo, it's a transitional stage that gives way to something else. And I I think if we can hold it in that way, a lot of good things can come out of it. But unfortunately, I think many of us see that confusion and we want to control it and we want to direct it and tell kids what to do, and it sometimes backfires uh a little bit. I'm not a parent, so I I probably shouldn't speak about this at all. Uh I can't imagine it's an easy job in any way.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think there's also like a real skill. Some f some colleagues who spend their lives in kind of early adolescent classrooms. There is a skill that they can they can deduce that a kid is getting what they're what they're offering in a way that I am completely oblivious to. And I'll oftentimes walk out of classrooms and just be like, they were not engaged at all. And the and colleagues will say, No, like here's the minor indicator. They shifted in their seat, they they unfolded their arms. There's really profound ways that those teachers can help us strategize about it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I've always thought middle school teachers, those of early adolescents, are a breed, you know, because they can deal with the confusing gestalt of a child adult.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I used to teach that age group, middle, middle school and upper, upper sex, upper secondary as well. And I have to say, to be honest, hands down, I find adults way more challenging.
SPEAKER_01Oh, see, wonderful.
There you go.
SPEAKER_03I mean uh adolescents, they're sponges, you know, and they've got so much energy and so much to express, and they can be so honest. And uh I think if you if I I loved what you were sharing, like they they want to be adults, they want to be treated as adults, and I think if you speak to them in that way, that's what you call forth. And it's it's quite beautiful. The they they they used to give me a lot of energy, certainly. Uh as an art art teacher, I really enjoyed working with that age grade.
SPEAKER_00I want to I want to ask you another question about wonder, Rob. You've used this word a couple times, which I think is great. Um and it's a slightly different perspective. I've been everywhere I travel, all I'm hearing about is psychedelics. Whether it's at you know, I was at Harvard University recently, they're investing millions of dollars, and so many institutions are. Um, you know, psychotherapeutic or psychiatric practices in the region of the country that I live are investing in ketamine research and psilocybin research across the board. Is because I share in your observation that like the wonder that children bring into the world is so transformative and so profound. And a lot of the work that we do in spiritual traditions with adults is having them reaccess that. So slightly leading question. But it seems like there's a growing number of people that believe that psychedelics can help aid in that process. Is this something that you've thought about? If so, what are your thoughts about? How do you relate to it? Is it a fleeting trend, or do you think this is really kind of substantial what's happening?
SPEAKER_04Um Yeah, I um I think it's a wonderful question. Of course, it doesn't um, you know, I'm speaking about this now as a scientist outside of the primary and secondary school situation. This is just, we're now talking about an adult topic on why psychedelics may be achieving such a um uh uh a resurgence, uh we could say. And I think we have to acknowledge that among the indigenous peoples of the world, plant medicines have had an had a long history and and likely will continue to have a long history. And of course, we co-evolved with the plants and the so I think there's some great mystery there. I think um for me, uh what it comes down to, and the link to awe and wonder that I think you were alluding to, Justin, is as you know, you know, starting in utero, but but from age two onward, we're replacing a kind of open sensory, affective experience with the of the world, um, more and more with linguistic concepts. And those concepts start to condition the mind such that it sees through them in the next mind moment once they start to take up residence in us. And the habitual or the experience of awe or wonder, the way I would teach it to my students is hashtag mindblown. You know, you go to the Grand Canyon and you see it as a young boy or Monument Valley, and and um literally your mind stops at the spacious vastness and powerfulness of it. And the reason we think the mind stops is there's nothing to assimilate or accommodate the experience. There's no um there's no mental structure to make sense of it. That's why we say hashtag mind blown, it's beyond the constructs of the mind. And in that moment, I don't know, you guys could tell me maybe there's some other feature of mind that can come through. Uh, when the mind stops. Its habitual grasping and noting and labeling and conceptualizing. So I think that return to a bodily immediate experiment experience where I think the science shows the way that the brain has habitually created short and long distance connections between regions loosens under the hallucinogenic, let's say, um psilocybin. I think it it has that quality of of seeing the world freshly again beyond the reducing valve that that uh you know what I'm talking about, that beautiful book. When the doors of perception are cleansed, all things will be seen as they uh were originally. I think it's very exciting. It's very it's the yeah, something shines through there. So I think it's here to stay. I I I think in our times I worry that it becomes a consumptive, commercialized, medicalized, capitalized, um, addictive thing. Uh uh uh in an age where we're disconnected from traditional sources of wonder, the universe, the person next to us, uh, the ocean, the sky, the stars, you know, all those things where we used to really experience wonder and awe and many people don't experience at all. Or not as much as they did. I think it's here to stay. I think it's super helpful, has therapeutic value. But I agree if we could have an education in awe and wonder early on, um, and somehow maintain the the discussion I had with Mingu Rinpoche was we have if we had a developmental understanding of how self evolves, is there a way to soften or slow this consolidation of wondrous water
to slightly um uninterested ice? Ice knows what ice can see. Water is wondrous, you know. But is there a way that we could build families and schools and community settings to keep that ice watery for longer? I think is a wonderful question. Um and again, I can't wait to come up there and learn from you and to explore it together because I think that would be the education part, even more than paying attention, allowing yourself to be wondrous. Gosh. And then you put those two together, attention and wonder. Wow, you've really got an education.
SPEAKER_03So Robert's question. Yeah, it's wonderful. Maybe this would be a wonderful way to to finish the conversation. Could you could you share with us some your thoughts on how to access that wonder?
SPEAKER_04Oh I love the uh the the short poet shard by Rumi. Um well, maybe can I remember all of it? At night I asked the moon to come in my window. At night I open my window and ask the moon to press her cool face against mine to breathe into me. To close the language door and open the love window. The moon will not use the door, only the window. And so I think we need to close the language door a bit more and um explore the moon and other celestial bodies and trees, and uh I think we I think we have the language illness going on in some ways, you know. I think language is wonderful, and of course we have to use it to uproot language once we acquire it, so there's no going back. But I do think um experiential sensory forms of education, being in nature, um, feeling clay in the art studio, painting, um, singing, uh, which uses like all of these kind of non-conceptual modes of being and knowing. I think we need to ramp up. I think what we need more than anything now is not engineers, we need artists, we need ecologists, we need new vision. And so I would love to see an education system that we're churning out artists like there was no tomorrow, you know. I think that would be wonderful for the world. We have such great technology, and we need to leaven the truth part with some beauty and some love, you know. So that's where I would love to end. More love, more beauty, beautiful, more color, more color, beautiful, more ardiness, more hummus, uh humus, humus, earthiness, humility, being closer to the very thing that makes up our body. Wonderful.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, what a great way to end it. Yeah, thank you so so much for your your pearls of wisdom and your your eloquence. And it's been incredible to listen to you. And uh yeah, your humbleness is very, very touching and very everything that you've said is very inspiring. Thank you, Robert.
SPEAKER_04Lovely to see you. Thank you both. Your presence and your questions were wonderful. Thanks for playing around. Yeah, it was really funny.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I can't wait to play games soon, brother. Yeah, Rob's coming, he's gonna join at O Saling for the Grand Opening, or just before the Grand Opening, and we're gonna spend a few days kind of adventuring around Kathmandu, which I'm so thrilled about.
SPEAKER_03Right now I'm in in Portugal. Oh, in Portugal retreat center here in in Padence.
SPEAKER_04How beautiful it must be. Yeah, it is.
SPEAKER_00That should be 2027. We should bring Rob to Padence and visit Tergar Retreats.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04I would love that. I found Portugal to be deeply mysterious and wondrous.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04Okay. It certainly is.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thank you so much, Rob.
SPEAKER_04Thank you both so much. Lots of love, and uh I look forward to meeting again, Kun Sang La and Justin. Can't wait to see you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_00People take good care.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Bye.
unknownBye-bye.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to this edition of Living Dharma. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd be grateful if you left a review, subscribed to the channel, or shared it with somebody that you love. As a 501c3, the Turga Institute relies on your generosity to continue offering transformational programs rooted in Vajrayana Buddhism. To support our work and explore our course offerings, visit us at turgainstitute.org. Until next time, may your awareness be steady, may your heart be open, and may your wisdom be ever present.