I think about Robert Thurman almost every day. But during this past week after his death, I've been thinking about him all day, every day. The very first book I ever read on Tibetan Buddhism more than three decades ago was Thurman's translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Liberation Through Understanding in the Between. I picked up this bestseller when my best friend's father suddenly died. Struggling to process the loss of someone I'd loved and admired, I devoured the introduction to this book, which seemed to reveal the mysteries of life and death. To be honest, I understood little of it. But Thurman's vivid creative prose gave me a sense that there were vast aspects of reality I'd never even imagined. So foreign was this world to us Westerners that he had to invent new English terms to translate it from Tibetan. He called the great yogis and meditators to explore the depths of their inner wisdom and potential psychonauts. He called the tools of meditation and mind training spiritual technology. It took me another six years to formally become a Buddhist. And one of the first things I did after taking refuge was to attend a Robert Thurman talk in California, where I heard more of these ideas that have stayed with me and changed my view of reality. For those who don't know his life story, Robert Thurman was one of the most important Western interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism. A former monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a scholar and translator, an inspiring professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University, a best-selling author and co-founder of Tibet House US. Through his books, teachings, activism, and vigorous, joyful personality, he helped bring Tibetan Buddhist wisdom into the English-speaking world. That first time I saw him, Thurman asked a huge auditorium full of laughing, astonished admirers what the root of our human misery might be. Then he revealed the answer as a punchline. Our anguish is rooted in the delusion that each of us thinks we are a little bit more important than everyone else in the universe. Each of us clings to the sad, isolating illusion that we're separate from other people and from nature itself. Thurman said that the universe is biased toward connection and against disconnection. It's our nature to feel whole and close with all of the universe. We exploit, dominate, consume, and neglect at our peril because such acts disconnect us more and more from humanity, nature, and ourselves. Facing nihilistic modern beliefs, Bob demolished the idea that we simply turn off when we die by asking the famous question, why is there something rather than nothing? All we have ever experienced, all we in the universe are is something. A magnificent, ever-changing, beautifully unpredictable something. Bob challenged anyone to debate him, and then summarily won by demanding that his opponent show him what nothing is and where it could be found. You can't find it. The definition of nothing, he said, is that it does not exist. The idea that we could go from something to nothing is as nonsensical as the whole universe disappearing in an instant without cause. Thurman taught that our nature is not only something, but something beyond our wildest dreams. Our nature is bliss, he said, an enduring happiness and joy that underlies even our most difficult experiences. You and I may not always feel this bliss, but it seemed that Bob did. He was a joy to be with, and it was my pleasure to get to know him as a friend and colleague over the past few years. Bob was my guest on this podcast four times. He enthusiastically read and endorsed my first book, How to Train a Happy Mind, and we had a lively conversation for its launch at Tibet House, New York. Bob also invited me to join the Tibet House board, where I got to know him and more of the people he profoundly impacted, all of them helping to further the cause of the Tibetan people and the extraordinary ideas he helped spread through millions of minds. From the Tibetan Buddhist view, we might imagine Bob now in what is called clear light meditation, an experience of total blissful interconnectedness with everyone and everything. Perhaps each of us can imagine such a state right now. A state already there inside us all, available if we spend even a little time contemplating the truths of reality that Tibetan Buddhism so profoundly reveals. Keep the religion of your grandparents, says the Dalai Lama. Embrace any Buddhist practices you find beneficial. Whether you're Christian, Muslim, Hindu, humanist, atheist, or scientist. And integrate them into your own unique stream of existence to become whole. One of the greatest compliments I ever received was when Bob told me that this conversation we had five years ago was one of the favorite interviews he ever gave. I hope you enjoy it as much as he and I did. I'm Scott Snibby, and this is How to Train a Happy Mind. Dr. Thurman, it's an honor to have a chance to speak to you today. I first learned about Tibetan Buddhism through the Tibetan Book of the Dead when I was grappling with the death of somebody close to me. So first of all, thank you for starting me on the Buddhist path back then. And second of all, thank you for your time today.
SPEAKER_02Most welcome, most welcome. My pleasure.
SPEAKER_00So we have ten questions for you today, and I really hope we have time for them all. I'm going to get started talking a little bit about our audience. Our audience for the podcast is primarily modern skeptics who are curious about the benefits of Buddhist meditation. So I'm wondering if you can share the role skepticism has played in your life as you explored Buddhism, first as a monk and later as an academic scholar and a teacher of Buddhism.
SPEAKER_02Well, I was always skeptical. I never believed in God, although I went to a Presbyterian church intermittently. My parents were not terribly church-going, but they weren't radical atheists either. And sort of atheists. My mother thought Shakespeare was God. And my father, he liked mystics like Francis of Sisi and things like that. So anyway, I liked Jesus, but I didn't like God. Thought he was too grumpy and uh gave Jesus a wrong deal. And actually, Buddhism taught me to really like Christianity, actually, which I felt I was rebelling against early on. So skepticism, I'm all 100% for it. And one reason I really liked Buddhism when I encountered it was the teachings of Nagarjuna. And Nagarjuna is a professional skeptic, in fact, a better skeptic than almost anyone you can think of. So I really, really liked his writings and his teachings. And he teaches you to train skepticism, in other words, what's called critical or analytic meditation, which is the original meaning of vipassana or vipassana. Vipassana is not just sitting quietly, vipassana is using your mind critically to penetrate appearances and discover their falsity and so forth. And so it is cultivating a meditation of skepticism, in fact, precisely. Also, you said the audience is primarily skeptic, so I would say philosopher-scientist types, Westerners, who are not skeptical enough nearly about their dogmatic materialism from our point of view. But anyway, we welcome them for skeptical meditation. Some kinds of meditation, like simply one-pointed types and things, which are useful and important, but they are not the primary one in Buddhism. And they are also like tranquilizing meditations. One-pointed meditations have side effects also. And you have to be cautious about them. And one of their main side effects is a kind of palliative thing where a kind of restless anxiety that makes you want to dig deeper and know reality can be palliated, but not cured by just suppressing your thinking through one-pointedness. One-pointedness you can learn to suppress your own thinking and worry and so on. And that in a way can be good. Blood pressure, you know, mindfulness-based stress reduction, all that sort of thing is really good. But for scientific or philosophical penetrating the surface, misconceived appearances of reality to discover deeper nature of reality, that tranquilizing will dull your edge in being able to do that and make it seem too tiresome to analyze something and too tiresome to even use language because of knowing that it's dualistic, why bother to use it? But actually, the Buddhist trick is you have to use the dualistic language to go beyond it. You can't just discard it because the underlying structure of dualistic perceptual habits remain in your mind, whether you suppress the manifestation or not. So that's a really important thing. And therefore, we welcome the skeptical thinkers. And the Dalai Lama himself, in fact, he considers skeptical humanistic uh secularism to be like a world religion with one and a half billion followers, about one-fifth of the world's population, pretty much the elite of the population. So one of the primary goals of the way he tries to wield Buddhist philosophical critical philosophy, Buddhist analytic meditation, the more important kind, is to engage with those people to try to get them to be a bit more skeptical on their materialism, which he considers too dogmatic. And they need to really be more questioning about things like, oh, yeah, we got the world. Oh, our standard model is so cool. Well, of course, 97% dark matter and energy, but we're on to it, but we haven't seen it yet. Whatever, you know, the whole resistance to the Copenhagen declaration that you can't turn it down at the super micro level because your observation interferes with it, and therefore there's no such thing as absolute objectivity. And so, therefore, you have to really cope subjectively with your subjectivity and critically with your subjectivity. That's what you wield as a scientist and as a human being. So denying that there's any such thing, or just putting an arbitrary label on it that it's an illusion made by as an epiphenomenon of the brain is really too simplistic for critical, high-tech, super smart scientific thinkers, and they really need to get over it and start using their analysis going both ways. To of course keep analyzing and using even materialistic reductionism to get a finer and a finer and a finer apprehension of material processes and energy processes. But then if you shift back through energy to awareness, then you go, you equally go do mentalistic reductionism in some contexts, and you'd be more flexible in your modeling rather than dogmatic. If you want to be truly empirical scientists, we feel. So therefore, we we couch this in terms in Buddhist uh science and philosophy, we couch it in terms of the meeting of what the Indians called, not just the Buddhists, but all of the Indian uh thinkers and scientists called inner science as connected with outer science, so that they're all work together rather than just canceling inner science and trying to consider even the inner as if it were material.
SPEAKER_00That's wonderful. So analytical meditation in this Nalanda tradition promotes this skeptical approach.
SPEAKER_02Not just the Lalinda tradition, in the Pali tradition as well, because that's what vi pasyana means. Pashana means to see, seeing, it's a gerund, and vi means analytically or dividingly, you know, the vi prefix. So it's vipassana, such as seeing one-pointedly, it's seeing critically, dividing the real from the unreal. That's the idea.
SPEAKER_00In that first book I read of yours, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the introduction introduced this term psychonaut that really blew my mind when I first read it. Could you explain what a psychonaut is?
SPEAKER_02Well, it's like an equivalent of an astronaut. And actually, I have to say, because I've always into honest attribution, that I thought I coined it actually. And I think I did because I hadn't read his work. But uh simultaneously or parallel, a man named Stan Groff also used the term, and I'm sure he didn't read my work. So, and I might have heard him say it or something because I met him once or twice, but I don't remember that. And then I thought I coined it. So I wouldn't argue with him over if he claimed it. But I thought I also claimed it. And so it means a sailor, navigator, as everyone knows, and an astronaut then is a navigator of the stars. And in a way, the astronaut in materialist science is the ultimate scientific adventurer who is trained in the disciplines, astrophysics and what have you, but then also undergoes a physical, like a yoga, being spun around in G-force machines and doing all kinds of things to be able to go into space, you know, and to do spacewalking and live in zero gravity and things like that. So, in a way, they're the far frontiers men and women of material science and so of mental science or inner science, as the Indians call it. The Voyager internally is a navigator of the psyche. That means psychonaut. And if you read the Book of the Dead, then you note that I make the claim there on behalf of the Buddhist scientists that the reason they have that Book of the Dead is not because of having religious faith whatsoever, but it's because they believe some of them actually developed the ability of lucid dreaming. You can learn to be aware of yourself in a dream as dreaming without leaving the dream and train yourself to do that. And some people naturally can do it, some people train themselves to do it. A little difficult, but not that difficult. Well, the psychonautic people, yogis, they believe that they train themselves to remain aware during the dying process and then the after-death mental continuum process, where although there is a phase in that process where you go completely unconscious, like falling asleep, and then the subsequent stages are like being in a dream, but the difference of that dream is that you're no longer associated with the old physical body, you're doing it outside of that physical body. Even in a dream, you have a subtle or virtual physical body in which your imagination controls the environment in the dream, which is what makes a dream so interesting to be lucid about, because you are you're building the Eiffel Tower that you go in in a dream out of your imagination and your knowledge previously of having seen an Eiffel Tower or a picture of it. And so, similarly, in the between state, you rebuild a different environment based on your past experiences in your previous life. But in a way, you build it. So they lucidly died, in other words, and they lucidly went through the between state, which is, you know, Tibetans call it bardo. They then know through the process of finding a womb if they're going to be human or whatever it is they're going to do, or actually, if they have really developed themselves as yogins, yogi means yoking your own body and experience to your theory. So it means like a scientist, actually, where you yoke yourself, like a yoking and ox, it's the same word, Indo-European word, you yoke your being to what you believe and you experiment and investigate it by it becoming it. That's what yogi really means. So you try to yoke yourself finally to reality itself. You try to yoke yourself to that experientially. So, in that sense, also, anybody who's a real yogi in this way, they are their own lab all the time. So that's a psychonaut, anyway. And therefore, they claim that these are the reports of those who have chronicled those dimensions. The huge difference between them and Freudian thing is that they believe the purpose of a psychonaut was to investigate their own unconscious and make it more conscious, and that the goal was to have no unconscious drives, actually, to be able to be aware of the mechanisms that drive you and create impulse and create instinct, even and habit, and then really learn to control yourself in your relative experience. And that's sort of the goal of their psychology because they felt you take your unconscious with you at death, and therefore you don't want to be steered into future existences by unconscious impulse that would lead you into a negative rebirth of some kind, where you would be massively unhappy and maybe massively lesser able to analyze and investigate your own wiring and your own structures than you can as a human. And that would be a massive disaster, actually, evolutionary disaster, because they believe they have discovered that we all are evolving as individuals, not just as a mindless gene-carrying member of a species. Those are all scientific claims, in other words. They don't have to be blindly and dogmatically accepted, they should be skeptically listened to and investigated and evidence looked at, and etc. And then people might be surprised if they took them seriously in that way. Like modern secular humanists, Buddha disagreed with the idea that there was an omnipotent, absolute creator controlling the whole thing. But that didn't mean there aren't some kind of powerful beings of other types, even demonic ones, angelic types, or even what you might call deities. This meeting of the inner and outer scientists is looking back into this area that secular humanists consider just the area of religious belief, dogmatic blind faith belief, and superstition. But looking back at it as if it were making some potentially verifiable and explorable claims, that's a key thing.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell This meditation on the death process, His Holiness says he practices this six times a day, as do many other practitioners. Could you talk about why that's important and also how you became convinced that this isn't just an exercise but a depiction of what actually happens to us when we die?
SPEAKER_02Right. Well, when his holiness says meditating on the death process, what he's talking about there is meditating on the dissolution process up to losing consciousness. And that's the eight stages that you saw if you read the Book of the Dead, dissolving out of the coarse body and the course senses, and even the coarse mentality that coordinates and unifies the inputs of the four senses, sort of dealing with the brain. That's what he's meditating on. The way you meditate, and he doesn't claim that he does that six times a day, but I think he may also do that, although I don't really know because I'm not that advanced. But meditating on the death process would also mean doing what they call between state yoga or dream yoga. And these are where you have to develop lucid dreaming and then use the lucid dreaming to learn more about your own mind and how it reacts to different things and your unconscious content of your mind. And then the between state is more advanced a little bit than that, where you visualize almost as if you were dying and leaving your body, and then how you relate to it, and then actually merging back into your body. That's a very advanced kind of thing. And they say that when such yogis can do that, that their normal respiration ceases for a period of time. They go into what I believe we call a cataleptic trance, where they have no coarse respiration, but somehow they are getting oxygen. And I guess the heart is still being, I don't know, because I said I didn't attain it and I wasn't sitting around with holding the pulse of anybody who did while they were doing it. There's very structured descriptions of the practices that enable one to learn this, although it's extremely advanced, and because also dangerous, because you could not be able to get back into your body. Actually, they say if you get to where you could actually consciously remove your consciousness from the body temporarily in a meditative way, and then practice between stage rehearsals, let's say, the only reason you wouldn't get back in the body is because you would be much happier out of it. So that can be taken as the most extravagant, blind trade, superstitious nonsense. Or if people are willing to try to think a little bit in a new way, it would be very provocative to think that people might be behaving like that. So he doesn't do that six times a day because he's too busy. He himself is the first to say he has so many bureaucratic duties and he's trying to help speak up for the Tibetan people, and he's like trying to like do his four four aims of life. And so he he hasn't had time to do those advanced things, or he might even say he would not be able to at this point in his life. He's very simple, humble, non-pretentious. He has tremendous identity resilience, which is a great goal, where you don't always have to act like you're the high psychopomp and just be normal, do you know what I mean? Like an ordinary person, and then sometimes you can be very special.
SPEAKER_00I think one of the fears I had, and some people have with Buddhism is that somehow you lose your personality the more you get into it. And I remember hearing you once say that the Dai Lama proves you can have no ego but still a big personality.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. But not only that, you don't lose your personality anyway. But what you do is you lose Who's been stuck in a fixated identity personality where you think you only have this and that kind of personality? And so you begin to take responsibility for shaping your personality and actually to improving it a little bit actually all the time. And then they're at the psychonaut level, they have extreme, extreme amazing modalities. That's what tantra is, you know, the modalities of reshaping your sort of self-structuring because a personality is a relational thing. You develop it because of relating to your parents and your education and your language and your culture and blah, blah, blah. And then when you move to different sectors of your own age or your own professions or your own circumstances, it changes. And as you become more conscious of that, you decide what input to take and what input not to take. And you don't watch too many horror movies and Rambo movies, so you won't go out and get in bar fights, which will shape your personality. I mean, so that's a shaping right then of people's behavior, you know. Powerful in doing so. And when we can see what Fox News has been doing in the last four years. I should say 40 years, actually.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, even at a very conventional level, whatever we put into our mind shapes its evolution.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So the Buddhist thing is very sophisticated psychology learning about as the more you loosen the rigidity of your sense of identity, and the more resilient you become in different contexts and circumstances, and then the more creative you can be about cultivating your behavior and awareness and sort of being conscious of your body language, of your subliminal prejudices and so forth. It's a mastery. You know, the whole anti-racist thing, the techniques of the Buddhist habit, identity, identity formation and reformation is unparalleledly useful. Eventually, I'm sure it will be integrated in modern psychology and used really well.
SPEAKER_00How do you see that specifically, those teachings as applied to our current challenges with Black Lives Matter and racial justice and so on?
SPEAKER_02Well, very important, you know, but not just necessarily meditating. I'm not a person who markets meditation as a panacea. But if you take it as being more self-aware, making it a part of education, not in any kind of religious context whatsoever, but in the context of a skill of being more introspective and being aware of how your reactions occur and the mechanisms underlying those reactions, uh, the human being has every capability of messing with their own wiring. You know, the whole thing, from the Buddhist biological point of view, the virtue of being a human is that we're not that hard-wired at all. And as you note, a perfectly nice guy who behaves when grandma scolds him can be trained at Paris Island to become a vicious killer. And if one of his buddies gets shot in a village in Afghanistan, he'll mow down a whole village full of grandmothers by being then unfeeling and unresponsive to what they're looking at, you know. And so we know that people can be rewired to be vicious, and we're very weak on the idea of rewiring oneself to be gentle and be friendly and being open-minded. But in fact, that's what we do. And the best of our modern liberating and humanistic education, which is being sadly neglected for STEM education, but anyway, because of this idea that everybody has to get a job and be productive all the time, meanwhile, we're totally overproductive all of us. But in other words, we're touching on that, but we haven't taken it to the point where we really teach people to, for example, develop better one-pointed concentration as part of their BA or high school degree, and develop better critical analytic way of looking at things and more introspective things about themselves emotionally and culturally. We abdicate that responsibility as educators because of our fear of religion, because of the fact that materialism has the natural science thing has become the religion of our education system. And they are like the high priests and they babble some mathematics and pretend they know everything, and they don't actually. And they're simplistic in some special ways, especially about denying that they have a consciousness is especially simplistic. And so we'll come back to it though, I'm sure. It just takes time, you know. And in a way, the materialism was a wonderful thing from the 17th century to get us away from the horrible thought conformity of the Inquisition and the church and the terror about hell and blah, blah, blah. But nevertheless, making nothingness the ultimate destination for everybody to not be scared is way too simplistic and irrational.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I want to ask you about nothingness because I've heard you frequently refute this modern view that we came from nothing, and then we die, we go back to nothing. Could you talk a little bit about your view on the modern world's relationship to nothing?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell It's simply irrational. It's ridiculous. It shows that someone who says something like that has no notion of what they're saying. Every physicist or psychologist or biologist should absolutely, as a pre-science, at least undergraduate, if not earlier, should be trained in logic and philosophy to learn about paradigms and how they establish their theories and hypotheses and then look for evidence and so forth and how they interpret what they experience. They really should. The idea that they're just going in to measure some stuff is ridiculous. Rather, it's interesting in that they do measure a lot of interesting stuff, but it limits them from really inventing and creating and seeing more deeply something new, like breakthrough types of discoveries, because they're just locked into the dogma that it's just a matter of objective measurement, and that's naive, actually. So it's a kind of naive realism from a critical philosophical point of view. So the idea that nothing is something is simply irrational. In order to be a source of something, it has to be something. And nothing is a word that has no referent in a sense, it's just a negation, and it doesn't reach any referent because it means something that isn't there. There's no there there. So there's no way to come from it, and there's no way to go into it, actually. And note that they will realize that easily with their thermodynamic law. There's a certain energy and it's never destroyed and it only transforms. It can just be diffused by entropy, but it never becomes nothing. And they can sort of see the rash, the reasoning behind once there's energy, it will always be energy in different forms. And as far as where it first begins, beginning lessoness becomes more and more mandatory once they get past the naivete of there was just one big bang where it big banged out of nothing. You know, the idea of a black hole as ultimate density is still not nothing, you know. And it can't ever be nothing, which is why some people theorize maybe cults are comes exploding out of it at some point, which would be logical, actually. And uh so to hold in your mind the very powerful image that materialists, you know, philosophical materialists have, that a dark space awaits them when the brain stops functioning and they lose consciousness, and then whatever continuity was in them before becomes nothing. And that fits very much with their daily experience of falling asleep and becoming unconscious in a dark room. And so they think that's the ultimate thing that that'll happen to them. But the point is, when you fall asleep, you don't become nothing, you're just unconscious, and you're still there. And actually, strangely, you feel rested in the morning, and you didn't get that new energy that renewed your cells in some way and made your your hyper mitochondria or whatever it does from nothing, because nothing has nothing to give you. So there must be an underlying plane of energy, a field of energy. So it's not nothing. And therefore, some idea of a final nothing is simply an irrational idea. But on the other hand, be a skeptic and try to prove the existence of nothing. Go for it. Why not? But you'll find it's a really hard sell if people are thinking rationally. Meanwhile, many people, it's like heaven. Then the other thing they do, dogmatic and true, is they will convince themselves that they're having so much fun running around in their Chevrolets or Teslas or whatever it is, and whatever with their girlfriends or spouses or boyfriends or whatever it might be, that they're really brave to think of never waking up. And yet that's a mature thing, and they're not being superstitious, and they're being like modern and go for broke, and like, okay, I'm I've agree to be nothing, and pretend that's a bravery. But meanwhile, the slightest dentist drill on one tooth makes them want to be unconscious, or 16 hours of hard work makes them pass out. So they really welcome being unconscious actually doesn't take courage. It's a joy to be unconscious when you're worn out or in pain. So they trick themselves into acting like it's a it's an act of bravery to be nothing. Meanwhile, we're nothing every night, as far as being unconscious goes. And every time we go under anesthesia in any kind of professional setting. So the point is the default is that there's continuity in everything in nature. So we can point to a zillion examples of continuity, and even entropy must end up being trapped by a black hole. One little tiny fragmentary piece of energy will be trapped somewhere and then it'll explode. So it'll be concentrated again, in other words. Also, by the way, the Bardo and Book of the Dead, Indian and Tibetan Buddhist science, it doesn't mean that that's the final description of the death and rebirth process. They say that once there's no ultimate description of relative realities, and once all relative realities are empty of any ultimate fixed essence in any one of the parts of the relativity, then all theories about or descriptions of relative realities are just that, only relative. And they may be valid and useful contextually in context, but in other contexts they won't be so useful. So they're always awaiting further revision, experiential revision in navigating through life. And therefore, there's no such thing as a fixed dogma except that, which is a negation that there's no such thing as a fixed dogma, which should be Karl Popper's scientific principle as well. You know, all theories are hypothetical, awaiting falsification by further experience, if you take experiment to mean the results of experience, which I do. So that's the thing, you know. It took me a long time to realize because what you do when you meet your natural science friend, and then you're a little bit Buddha scholar or something from some weird thing called a religion department on a campus, which really it shouldn't even be there, but they sort of are. And so then they say, Well, what evidence do you have about that former future life stuff? And then you say, Well, there's a lot of people who remember previous lives and this and then you know you start in a thing and then poof and the orchestra's missed. And then it took me 40 years to decide to say, excuse me, but that's before even we discussed that matter. What evidence do you have that something can become nothing? Give me some evidence on that. And then I like to tease them who got the Nobel Prize for discovering nothing, which guy? Right. And then they get irritated.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's such a convincing argument. You know, we only have evidence for something. We're surrounded by something. We have no nothing detector yet.
SPEAKER_02So imagine to make one of the most important predictions of an individual's life, which is, what should I prepare for and expect after death, based on something that has no evidence and never will in principle, you know? And in a way, you could say it's the most blind form of blind faith you can ask for. Because even if you know Moses sees a bush burning that tells him I'm some sort of a big shot, go to go talk to Pharaoh or something. Well, at least he's talking to a bush, you know, and then maybe he misinterprets it as thinking it's omnipotent and he has to do what it says and whatever, he can't talk back, whatever, which the rabbis don't do, actually. They talk back plenty. I noticed, so I studied that. But point is at least they have something to refer to. But once you say nothing, it's ultimate reality, really. You're saying the ultimate reality of everything is nothing. Well, and then they think it's it's modernity to say there's no purpose to life, it's meaningless, it's an accident, here we are, a random mutation, who knows? It's just completely irresponsible. It leads to great irresponsibility, actually, in my view.
SPEAKER_00So nihilism is one huge delusion. The other is egotism and self-centeredness.
SPEAKER_02And I think we like egotism.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Smart egotism is good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02In other words, in the sense, you know, one of the things that that Buddhists would say, they do say, although they tend, because the Western goes, oh, ego, ego, so they go ego, ego. But the point is, it takes a very strong ego to decide I'm going to get control of myself. I'm going to understand myself. I'm going to understand the world.
SPEAKER_00So you're talking about this healthy kind of ego. Does that relate to Buddha nature? Could you talk about Buddha nature in a way that makes sense?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, sure. It relates to Buddha nature and it relates to the view of nature. And this is my shtick nowadays, very much last decade, two decades, maybe, but getting stronger and stronger. Which is that the main thing Buddhism can try to help the West is. I want to just say one thing is that I followed Dalai Lama and I learned from him, and I 100% 30 years ago agreed with him that it is really wrong to act like somehow everybody's got to be a Buddhist. And he disagrees with religions that try to convert other people to their religion. And so he considered secular humanism a religion, Islam, Christianity, Taoism, any Baha'i, you know, like Sikhism, whatever you like, Hinduism. And he tried to make pacts with all of their leaders that he's met is to stop converting each other and competing for market share, you know. Ashoka, actually, 2300 years ago, he also said, don't convert each other. Try to convert yourself to living up to the best ideals of whatever you believe, and that way show the virtues of your religion. And don't try to convert other people because it leads to conflict. 2300 years ago, he wrote that in the Stone Edict, you know, the Emperor Ashoka of the Maurya dynasty in India. And uh Dalai Lama totally is into that, and he's told three popes to share that message and try to get them to conspire with him, which they didn't agree to, of course, because they have this thing to convert everybody, you know, they think that's necessary. And he loves the rabbis, especially because they don't try to convert you unless you marry one or something, and then maybe better for the children's sake, but otherwise they don't, which he admires that, he really does. So that's the first thing. So therefore, Buddhism is not going to make people Buddhist and it shouldn't even try. Because it really is kind of a the harbinger of the herald of Indic inner science, you know, the more mind science type of thing, the real one, not the fake Scientology crap, but the real one from India, highly developed over hundreds of years, thousands of years. And it can help seed that into secular humanism or any of the other religions to help people get rid of this being terrorized by nature. Because actually, if you look at cultural history of the last few thousand years, populations are usually mainly terrorized about nature. The high priest and the king tell them, be scared, be very scared. All the other tribes are enemies and they want to kill you, and all the animals are enemies, and the priest tells them, oh, the germs are enemies, everybody's an enemy, and only God can help you. And the king says, only I can help you, and join my army and do what I say and follow the law, you know, my law. So everybody's scared of it, and they think that it's really bad, and nothing is a blessing compared to nature red in tooth and claw, you know, and the idea of turning off the fossil fuel industry or whatever, no electricity, things would come and get us, you know. We're so scared. Whereas the Buddha view, Buddha's good news is nature loves you. Nature is fine. Any sensitive being, of course, is going to have pain and bang into things, it's going to be a problem. But the way that we have to get out of that is we die when we're tortured. We pass out or we die. The ultimate dissociation is to die, and then we get reborn. And if we do it with a good attitude, we can find a better rebirth than we had. And so the overview of it is it's a positive thing, and also it's beginningless. There's infinite numbers of other beings. There are many beings who become enlightened and who therefore love other people. You know, the occasional saint, the occasional Christ, the occasional great rabbi, Arabia Hillel, the occasional Krishna, the occasional Buddha. Those are just outstanding kind of sages and especially kind people. And almost all of the women are exceptionally kind people because they allow someone to live in their gut for a year, which most people don't know normally think it's a really nice thing to have a non-paying tenant squatter in your gut here. But they allow it. And so overall, it's fine. And actually, the more open to it you are, and the less scared you are about unnecessary things to be scared of, the more you can navigate and actually deal with the necessary things to be scared of in a more efficient way by being more connected to your fellow humans, more social, more open-minded, more friendly, more empathetic, listening to others and learning from them, and that actually you can navigate the relative world better the more open you are and the less scared you are. So we are the products and the European cultures in particular. Europe was relatively poor, and people were relatively more violent, etc. So we're particularly terrorized, I think, by nature. And therefore, nature is basically great, and we are the lucky residents, the humans, not because we're the only ones with a soul, every living being has a soul, in the sense of a subtle mind and body that goes on, subtle energy continuum that continues. But we are particularly more free because we're less hardwired and we can use our genius to understand it. And by understanding it, we can maneuver more effectively and then be more helpful to everyone. So that was his good news, you know. This is nirvana, in other words, if we learn to use it properly. The first noble truth is not his discovery. Everyone knows about the suffering, and everyone in every culture everywhere knows about suffering. It doesn't take a Buddha to discover that. But the fact that there's a way of understanding the world and relating to it where you can be free of it, and you can even help others become free of it, was his good news, you know. So, Buddhism, without saying you have to believe Buddha as like a religious prophet or something, without having to do that, all the different sciences and arts and things that come associated with it that can be shared without having to follow a particular person or a particular belief system by just being open-minded and more realistic about the world. In a way, you could say, well, the materialists have been more realistic about the way matter and energy works, and they have therefore developed a lot of good methods to use reality more effectively to exploit it for human benefit. But they didn't apply that to themselves, so therefore they misuse it with greed and hostility, and they carry over their whole fear of nature into f nuclear weapons against other people and all this sort of wasted stuff, and then consumer greed polluting the whole beautiful garden that we live in. And so they need that realism to the way their mind works and master that, which they will, I'm sure, be doing in the next decades. And we have to do. We will not meet the climate challenge unless we re-educate ourselves to restrain ourselves and learn how our greed and and uh fear and things drive us irrational.
SPEAKER_00That's great. So you're saying our Buddha nature is our openness, our fearlessness, a sense of our connection and being part of nature.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And and actually, I used to think of it like an impersonal thing, but what I discovered lately is what it is, is the fact that those beings who have become fully open and therefore fully empathetic, which is in theory what the evolutionary stage of a Buddha is, a being that has expanded to identify with everyone, their presence in us empathetically is our Buddha nature in a way. And all of them, not just this particular one of that one, but all the all the many enlightened beings. Like, you know, parinirvana, which people think of as Buddha's death, because Buddha leaving his Siddhartha, Prince, King, Shakyamuni body. Pari doesn't mean final, as it's wrongly translated. Pari means thorough or total. So it just means that he his sense of nirvana is here, expanded to be everything in his own experience, and he didn't feel the need any longer to connect it to that particular course body. He was consciously present everywhere in his own idea. And then supposedly there are innumerable beings like that. And therefore, all the Buddhas think they're me, poor things. They think so. Like when you're Empathize where you feel you are another person. They are feeling that. And so their presence in me is the Buddha nature in a way already. But that's blocked from my own awareness because I don't think that I'm some sort of wide open thing empathizing with everybody. To discover it, I have to expand my own sense of identity, identifying with more and more people, my being more and more altruistic. And I have my limits. I'm scared to do more than my limits.
SPEAKER_00Can you talk about that view of ignorance and narrowness and self-centeredness? We have some pretty funny ways of talking about this that I've really enjoyed over the years. And also the antidote. What is that antidote of wisdom or dependent arising?
SPEAKER_02One thing we could to start with, we could maybe ignorance is not such a good word in the sense that avidya in original language was a satvida. So it means a knowing of what is not the case, of what is not real, as if it were real, in other words. So it's a misknowing. And there is a word in the Oxford Dictionary, misknowledge. You know, we have still alive is misunderstanding, misapprehension, these were you know, mistake, but we don't use misnowledge, but there is such a word misknowing. And so it's misknowing that is, I think I know I'm just a limited so-and-so. And I know that I'm not the other person. And if what happens to them doesn't really bother me, and I can wall myself off from them and they can starve and whatever, they can get coronavirus, and I can stay get a shot and run around and uh don't need to wear a mask and all this kind of thing. I can do all that, but that's because I misknow my reality, which is completely interconnection with all these people. And so when someone gets a strong conviction, they think they're right. How rigid we get when we think we're right and we know, and especially when we know something that's not the case, we can get misled. All of these structures like racism, sexism, all kinds of things are forms of misknowledge. So the the antidote to misknowledge, of course, is trying to see things, looking at them more carefully, trying to understand them. Initially, maybe receiving the encouragement from someone who knows a bit more than we do that we can know and that we could be critical about what we think we know. It will not ruin us if we know something more deeply than what we do. And so then there will be lessening and lessening by degrees. It's a gradual process. It's actually a process of education. Like when you go to uh take a course in biology, you don't think, well, now I'll believe in biology and then you have mastered biology. It doesn't work like that. You have to systematically learn the steps and all the components and things and how to do the experiments, and that way you gradually understand it through a process of education. And same about yourself. We learn about ourselves, we learn that what we thought we knew was misknowing, and we begin to learn better, and we have this education, and heretofore people have always translated what Buddhism is in practice as the three trainings, because we that's our arrogance. Because we got educated, we went to eight years of grade school, four years of high school, four years of undergraduate, seven years of some sort of professional thing, usually most of us in professions. So, what is that? That's like 23 years and of education, and we're still miserable.
SPEAKER_01Still don't know what's going on, and we worry all the time, and we're running around freaking out.
SPEAKER_02Maybe we're being successful in something, but we're really upset about other things. So we think education doesn't help at that deeper level. It doesn't help our heart, but that's just because we didn't do heart education. Because somebody told us that, oh, that'll lead to religion, and that's just you have to believe in something. But that's not the case. Believing, I mean, you can still be a total bastard believing in the best savior person that you can think of, and you can be a monster anyway, and think, oh, he'll save me later, which I'm afraid is what we notice happening quite a bit with religion. And uh on the other hand, of course, they all have essential different kinds of education about educating the soul to be altruistic and loving and blah, blah, blah. And that's all really great. And all of them have that. All the ones that have lasted have that. There's not one of them that has lasted that has just taught hate. But lots of them have been mobilized into seeming to back hate by nasty high priests and theologians and buddhologians and Hindologians and every kind of logient. The thing is, these are three higher educations, or let's say, since higher education is professional school, three super educations in ethics, super education in mind, how to use the mind, like an instrument, fabulous instrument, the human mind, and how to learn what reality is, wisdom, meaning knowledge or science. So that's what Buddhism actually is. In practice, it's called the three higher of the three Adi Shikshas. And the word shiksha in Hindi still is the word for the department of education, not the department of training. But naturally, there is training in any process of education, like you memorize some things to learn a language, you memorize some formulas to learn mathematics and things. So there's a training aspect always in education. But education is a wonderful thing. It's bringing out the innate human openness and sensitivity and gentleness, sociality, let's call it, that the human being has by their evolution to having become a being that interconnects with other beings better than their animals. Like they the tigress can't really tell the tiger he has to wash the dishes. You know what I mean? They can't share in that way. You know, they can just growl and give him a swat if he tries to mess with the cubs. But they can't really train the male tiger. But uh, we can be trained a little bit or educated a little bit here and there. And therefore, we can use that badly and be more destructive, of course, than any tiger or lion. But on the other hand, we can be much more benevolent than we were going to be. We're going to restore the garden that we have been privileged to live in here on this beautiful planet for sure, very soon.
SPEAKER_00I want to ask you a question about enlightenment. I I heard you say a couple of different times this idea that once we're enlightened, we realize we were always enlightened. I wonder if you could explain what that means exactly. Do we have some fundamental misunderstanding about time?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Maybe, yes. I think we do. Of course, we miss no time like we miss no space and the solidity of objects and so forth, sure. And the speed of light, right? There's no more momentum and no more time, and it's an absolute in Einstein's brilliant relativity thing because l the mass of the light, supposed particle, becomes infinite. So it's everywhere. So therefore they can't have any more momentum. And that means it's everywhere also in a way. It's everywhere and everywhere as well. Momentum has to do with time as well as space. Speed does, right? So many miles per hour, you know, or per minute or per second. So, yes, the reason I say that is this is a complicated thing. Because Nirvana is said to be the absolute, emptiness is the absolute. Theologians say God is the absolute, but they can't really say that rationally because anything that's absolute cannot affect the relative or it loses its absoluteness. Okay? So that means that when you experience nirvana, you you have to be somehow accepting that it has always been the case. It's called the uncreated, meaning, and therefore undestroyed, meaning beginningless and endless. But it actually is the reality of which the relative reality is made of, and there, of course, when you make something of something else, there are two different things. But in this case, our expression made of is not accurate, because it is all this relativity, is the idea. So therefore, there's no relative person who, in a dualistic way, possesses the experience of nirvana. So people who say, Oh, I experienced empty, they are bullshitting. They lost consciousness, is what they did, which was a good thing to do. Let themselves go in a way, bravely lost consciousness. But in a way, they can't experience it in the way you experience the wall over there, which is a dualistic thing where you're still you and you possess, having experienced that. In a way, nirvana, you just sort of melt into nirvana. But the great thing is you don't become nothing because it's not nothing, it's everything. So melting into nirvana means you experience yourself as everything, which is completely inexpressible. What I just said wouldn't make sense either. And you have to therefore give a caveat that I'm just making an impression to open the imagination, but you can't open your imagination infinitely to infinity, thought of as quantifiable or quantity, because it negates the idea of quantity. And it's eternity at the same time which negates the idea of time, because you'll never reach infinity, right? On the other hand, you're permeated by infinity, because you, as a finite being, have to be completely infinite, because infinity cannot be excluded from every fiber, every atom, every subatomic energy in your being, or it wouldn't be infinite. It couldn't be delimited at the frontier of you finite, right? So it's very interesting. We say that concepts block us, because they're dualistic, block us from a non-dual experience of ultimate reality, and therefore freedom and blah, blah, blah. And it's partially true when we're stuck in dualistic concepts. So absolute and relative are the same. What emptiness means is the discovery that all these presumed absolutes are just projections based on a miswiring in the center of the being that there's something absolute about me, separate from my relative, but I can't find it, but then I'll imagine that it's there because I have a word absolute. When that word is taken and smashed flat onto the relative, then the relativity becomes absolute. Then that means your sort of wish for an absolute means that you have to live absolutely, relatively in the optimal way, which means lovingly, openly, compassionately, totally not conceding to the suffering of anybody. And if you feel you're everything, you can't tolerate anybody's suffering. The point is, Buddha's absolute skepticality about all the presumed absolutes that people use to try to armor their own way of trying to dominate their sphere in culture or in relations or in the way they feel about themselves, are all emptied out. And then you're just there interconnected with everything. And then you have to make the best of it. And then actually, people will go to death over because they're dying for absolute God or they're dying for absolute no-god or they're dying for the absolute nation or they're dying for absolute democracy or absolute communism or absolute fascism, whatever it is. They'll actually die over some concept. And so when you take the concept and flatten it right into relative reality, then you're dying to live. And in doing that, then you discover that's what you always do, anyway. You have always done it. And now suddenly this relative thing is wide open. In other words, any particular way it is that I have to just bang into that wall, or I can only eat this thing, or I can only do that other, or have to obey that, then all of those things are optional in a sense. And then things could be shifting levels of causation and shifting ways of relating and bringing in resources that you weren't open to before, then something that seems to the person who's stuck in a rigid description of reality that might seem miraculous to them. I mean, the most miraculous thing is that you could be so blissful having discovered your true nature that even you could give your body up and let somebody hack it up, and you would feel all those things and it wouldn't stop your bliss, and yet you wouldn't dissociate. It's like you have been so much in the flow yourself in some aspect of your life. I don't know when. Some people it's sex, some people it's when they're running, some people skydiving, I don't know when it is, but I'm sure you've personally done it. Everybody's had some flow moment where they banged a foot on something, they didn't bother with it. They felt it and then they had an ache or a bruise later, but they didn't bother with it. But they didn't not, they didn't ignore it, they knew it happened, but it didn't destroy the flow. So their idea of being in a flow like that, that always, and yet completely open to everybody's bumping into everything, and therefore really capable of trying to help those also discover their own flow. You know what I mean? That there is that evolutionary possibility to a rewirable creature like a human being, who's very flexible in their wiring and can be badly rewired easily by Fox News, but could be rewired by proper education really well, and they have been endlessly. It relates to the time. You know, we had 500 years of horrible colonialism. So when do you think it can happen by a process of re-education where it might become a general consensus that the people who got conquered were the superior ones? And the people who did the conquering were the sort of the protection racket, the mafia with the guns and the bombs and the things who went around and wrecked the environment and enslaved the people here hither and thither, and that the more gentle ones lost. And that's what we have to reach quickly, though. We have to now reach redefining civilization to be gentleness and true justice and tolerance, non-prejudice, and cooperativeness, and also elevation of women to having equal power in decision making and so on. And we have to quickly get there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02I think our own clever technologies of magnifying our greed and fear and anger have made life so unviable if we don't that we're doomed.
SPEAKER_00What can each of us do, you think, on a practical level to help cultivate those qualities in ourselves and around us?
SPEAKER_02Continue our education, continue to learn, read some great books, you know, from a different culture, read the flower ornament sutra, or read the writings of Nagarjuna, you know, the greatest of all skeptics, you know, twenty-seven critiques, critiqued causation, critiqued substance, critiqued intrinsic nature, and critiqued self, critiqued other, critiqued nirvana actually, when thought of as a sort of place apart, critiqued uh all these type of things. Therefore, somehow it's like the nihilist, actually. You know, the nihilists, once they're gonna go into nothing when they die, which gives them their psychotic recklessness, culturally psychotic recklessness about the way the they deal with the planet and with others and so on. Because the results will be nothing ultimately. The only way they can really logically kind of stick with that is that they're already nothing. So inside, they carry around like a nothingness of self subliminally without realizing it, which makes them very depressed, actually. But that's probably mostly subliminal to those who are distracting themselves with worldly success and activism and things like that. And they even misinterpret their flow state, and that's where they're close to their nothingness, you know, and then even if they misunderstand freedom as if it were nothingness, instead of freedom being a negational opening to voluntary and joyful and blissful interconnection, which is what freedom really is. And it's not a null state. So they have to do that. Similarly, at the time of the achievement of the education where one understands the uncreatedness, the clear light, the transparency of reality and the full commitment to relativity, it's like direct experience and inference, conceptual inference, that duality also just is dissolved. And reason and direct experience become the same thing. It's not like you leap of blind faith off of reason and reject it as useless. It brings you to the point of its own self-transcendence, rather, and immanence, if you will. And then your reasoning becomes truly experiential in your ongoing thing, and you get smarter even in regular relativity, supposedly. And I hope it's the same. I hope I discovered another life. I really do.
SPEAKER_00Once we can transcend this dualistic way of thinking.
SPEAKER_02One thing that's also very important about this is it helps skeptics evaluate gurus, which they should do, and cults. Because the kind of people who say, like, I'm enlightened, so uh you do what I say, give me a car, and I want this and that, the other, and do it, do this. That person doesn't have it, actually. Because when you realize that nirvana is samsara, and you can't leave suffering unless you bring everybody with you. So you have to see them in the timeless level as already free, too, and also be committed to knowing that for them they're in time, and therefore you're gonna help them over time because they think there is such a thing. You're actually beyond that time, so you see their future. But you see, it could take much longer, or they could suffer much more or much less if they weren't helped. So you're gonna try to help them. So the real one is the teacher is the servant of the student, not the master of the student. The master teacher is the servant of the student, the bullshit teacher is the master of the student and bosses them around. The real teacher is the servant, but sometimes they might have to give some some recommendations in an authoritative way, but not as a domineering way, as a way of eliciting the understanding of that option by the student, basically. Because it's education, bringing out of the student the freedom and the flow that they actually already have.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02And we can't take these people who are using even Buddhism to terrorize people more.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's not cool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and what you're saying is we use our skepticism and our critical insight even with our teachers. That's what's really important. That's one of the most important places to apply it.
SPEAKER_02Of course. Although there is a really double quadruple bind there, they say they say that you can't understand selflessness, which then gives you the strong relational ego when you understand selflessness, because it's your pronoun. You learn to use the language from which you create yourself all the time. So you can't understand that until you learn it from someone who already understands selflessness. And yet they can't understand it for you. You have to understand it. But you need to hear it from someone who did. So, in a way, when you read Nagarjuna in a deep way, like as the Zen in the wonderful Zen way, where they say you read with your body, not just your mind. When you read Nagarjuna's 27 critiques like that, then you are meeting a person, Nagarjuna, who does understand that. And he's offering to you these pathways of critique, of skeptical critique to liberate you from reifying your concepts into things and projecting them so that you can't have experience beyond what you expect to experience. And since you've grown up in cultures that terrorize you about experiences mostly bad, mostly something to be resigned about, you you therefore trap yourself in a world of suffering.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So that that's that's there's a double bind like that. So it doesn't mean that teachers, good teachers are not tr really important. They are. As we know, in any kind of education, you they it's massively better to have the help of a good teacher.
SPEAKER_00So to circle back with what you were saying about enlightenment, that even enlightenment and unenlightenment and nirvana and samsara are dualities that we need to transcend as we move toward that state.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, we need to transcend projecting them as intrinsically real or absolutely real as they seem to be. But in a way, then we can use them creatively. Something like that. There's a wrong idea about enlightenment at the end of enlightenment, of cry, of joy, and enlightenment is like a big duh. Not the case. Not the case. Not the case. See, I like skepticism.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you so much. You've been very generous with your time, and I think we can wrap up. They say enlightenment and emptiness are beyond words, but your extremely creative use of word uh gives us a taste of it.
SPEAKER_02So one thing I want to say is there are some people in my profession, my trade, my guild, who have had a big eureka lately that we're not going to say enlightenment anymore. We're only going to say awakening. It's going to be awakening. You can't say enlightenment. That's really wrong, my opinion. Of course, that's just we'll debate it. Um I haven't had a formal debate with any of them. But I think it's really wrong because the European Enlightenment was to break from religion to get to observing nature, which started religiously actually, and they were going to look at the book of God in his creation of nature. So it started actually religiously, breaking from the church. But the spirituality of science was to be materialistic, and therefore they call that the Western Enlightenment, which is good. But the point is that the Buddha's enlightenment includes that. And it includes an awakening dimension as well, sort of spiritual awakening. But you cannot proscribe the word enlightenment usefully. That's not good. The enlightenment word really is an enlightening word. It's really good. And my friend Tom Cleary, the great translator from Chinese and Japanese who lives out there on the West Coast, who is the greatest in his generation, whether the academics will admit it or not, he uses a wonderful word for bodhisattva that I think he uniquely uses, and I use it sometimes, which is enlightening being. I would call it enlightening hero or enlightening heroine of bodhisattva, because I like sattva to be a hero rather than just a being. But it's not a being. But he uses enlightening, which I love, because that means enlightening the self and enlightening others, you know. Bodhisattva. I like that. But he I think that's really great. He doesn't get enough credit, that guy.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much, Professor Thurman. We really appreciate you making the time to talk with us. This is really wonderful.
SPEAKER_02I do, I really like it.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for joining us for this memorial rebroadcast of my conversation with Professor Robert Thurman. Bob Thurman helped open the door of Tibetan Buddhism for so many people in the modern world, bringing together scholarship, skepticism, humor, and a lifelong devotion to the freedom of Tibet and the possibilities of a joyful, connected life that's open to any of us. If you'd like to go further with these types of meditation and mind training practices that transform our minds toward their greatest potential, come join our Train a Happy Mind community that meets weekly for live discussions and guided meditations. You can learn more at how to train a happy mind.org. Our podcast is a nonprofit organization, and we offer all our episodes, meditations, and classes free and ad-free, thanks to our generous donors. If you've benefited from this or other episodes, consider making a tax-deductible donation at how to train a happymind.org. Thanks to Steven Butler, the co-founder of this podcast, for producing this episode and helping to create our interview series six years ago. May Robert Thurman's life, work, and boundless enthusiasm for awakening continue to benefit beings for generations to come.