Joseph Goldstein On How To Train Your Runaway Brain

32:26So that's just a phrase that he uses a lot, which I have begun to use. So I was just sitting, feeling the breath. And then that thought came to mind, oh, what's the attitude? And the point of the question is not even really to find an answer. Simply by asking the question, as soon as I did that, oh, what's the attitude? I could feel my mind settling back from the leaning forward that you were just mentioning. And it was a leaning forward I was not even aware was there until I asked the question. So it can be very subtle. It's just we're with the in-breath in order to feel the out-breath. We're always leaning into the next moment.

33:16So this is a very common experience that people have in practice. It can be quite subtle. So it's just something to be increasingly aware of and to use prompts like what's the attitude or relaxed and alert. There could be many, many prompts that remind us of settle back. I just want to say again that the notion of rushing as a sort of feedback as a mindfulness bell plus what's the attitude in the mind which I personally find very powerful can be used again in formal meditation but throughout your life yes I find that asking and I've made this joke before so I'm just going to make it again but I'm going to own that I'm repeating myself, that when you ask the question, what's the attitude in the mind?

34:12Did you ever see there were some very famous segments on ABC News where my former colleague, Chris Cuomo, went into a hotel room with a black light and shined this black light on the sheets and all the surfaces? It was disgusting. That's what happens for me when I ask, what's the attitude in the mind. I see, oh yeah, there's been this background static of wanting or aversion or just tuning out that I don't have to get tangled up in, but once I see it, I can let it go. Exactly. This is something you may already be doing in that example. But when you see through the black light, all the stuff that's there, what the attitude of the mind is in seeing it.

35:06Yes. And so is there, oh, that's really disgusting, or, oh, this just proves I can't do it, or is the attitude, oh, I'm so glad to be seeing this. So how we frame our response to what we see is really important. And especially, and this took me some years of practice to let go of the self-judgment that would arise whenever I saw something that was unhelpful or unskillful or unwholesome. There would be an immediate self-judgment in that. Until a certain point where it all switched. Oh, no. I'm glad to see you. because I'd rather see you than not see you. And so it's really honoring the wisdom of the seeing.

36:05That kind of, I think, brings us to another phrase, which is Mara, I see you. So Mara, of course, within the Buddhist framework is the embodiment of ignorance and delusion and often represented as a figure that would come to try to snare the Buddha or the other practitioners. But it's really the representation of some form of delusion in the mind. And that phrase, which is often found in the Buddhist discourses, where Mara is attempting to ensnare the Buddha or some monk or even layperson. And when they see what's going on, the phrase will be, Mara, I see you. And then Mara just vanishes. I found the same thing in many different situations where some unwholesome pattern of mind in Buddhist terminology, they're called the defilements.

37:17When we see one of those arise in the mind, and for a while we may get caught in them because they're generally very seductive, but then in the moment of recognizing what's going on, to say, Mara, I see you,

37:39really affects the letting go of being identified with whatever it is. And then we just say, this is just another passing thought. So it's very freeing to do that. So I've sometimes altered that phrase a little bit of variation on it. So there's Mara, I see you. And then sometimes I call it wagging the finger at Mara. Like the wagging the finger is the mudra or the hand gesture of Mara, I see you. We're wagging the finger. Oh, Mara, you're not going to fool me. So the sense of humor is key. Yes, absolutely. It's really key.

38:28Our minds will do just so many crazy things. I'll just, a little sense of humor story.

38:39I was on this retreat with Saida Upandita, Burmese meditation master, very classical, very orthodox, very demanding teacher, and very skilled. So I was on retreat with him. It was actually in Australia. And because he was the kind of teacher he was, everybody I was just trying to be as impeccably mindful as possible and moving really slowly. And so there's a lot of stillness. We were online for lunch. I was second online. And people are walking very slowly into the dining room. So the person ahead of me, the first person online, took the lid off the first pot of food, that was on the table, and as they lifted the lid off, it slipped and fell to the floor, making this huge clattering noise in the midst of the silence.

39:42And the first thought in my mind, it just popped into my mind. It wasn't me.

39:52So how can you not have a sense of humor about that? You know, where you see just all the things the mind will do unbidden And, you know, and so not taking it too seriously is really helpful because it creates space. So then we can see and not be caught on whatever it is, but with a certain lightness, a lightness of heart about it all. So I just find a sense of humor really helpful. I don't know if what I'm about to say next could be fairly classified as one of your teaching phrases, but it is a word that comes up time and again, both in my interviews with you for this podcast and in the hours and hours of audio I've recorded of me complaining to you while on meditation retreat.

40:44The word is ridiculous. You use that word to describe the human mind all the time. I was not even aware that I used it that often, but it does resonate. So somebody, there was a meditator who once came into a meditation interview, and his great insight was, the mind has no pride. It'll do anything. It does do anything. But what's helpful about this realization is that it's actually liberating, because when we can approach our minds with that openness and just seeing all the things it does, and there's a lot, of course, we're talking about the ridiculous aspects. There are also sublime aspects.

41:38I don't want to leave that side out. But particularly with the more ridiculous things the mind does, this spaciousness and the sense of humor is actually an effective way for not being caught by it so it has a liberating function to not take oneself so seriously with regard to what the mind is doing it's really helpful and just makes it a lot more easeful and of course Yes, very often we forget this, when the mind will be carrying on with something ridiculous, and perhaps even painful, and we'll be caught in it for a while until we see. But with practice, we get to see the humor of things more quickly.

42:37Yes. The mind has no pride is another key phrase in my view. I've even thought that maybe, and we'll discuss this over the years before we publish this book, that it might even be a good title for the book. Do you have a thought, do you have any theory? Why are our minds so ridiculous? Why, how do we end up in this situation? So that question, the response to that question could be a whole book.

43:09So I'll just frame it in a couple of different ways. I'm not quite sure how it all fits together yet.

43:16One thing which I've come to appreciate more and more over the years and has really helped recalibrate, in a way, how I frame the practice, and it has to do with the idea that we have all established in ourselves certain habits of attention, habits of the quality of our attention. And it could be on, for different people, very different levels. Some people may have cultivated a habit of really being very attentive. And that's just their habit. That's their default. In some way or other, they have trained themselves to be really carefully mindful. For most people, without some formal training, our habits of attention are not at that level.

44:27our habit of attention is more like more or less mindful or casual where we're attentive but not closely attentive so if the habit of attention is casual where we're just being more or less mindful there's a lot of space in the mind then for the habituated patterns of desire and greed or restlessness or version or the things that create some kind of unease in our lives. There's a lot of space when our habit of attention is not really close and careful. There's just a lot of space in the mind for those deeply conditioned tendencies to manifest. So all the different kinds of thoughts that we have, and everybody knows who's really watched their minds at all, we've all just have different habituated patterns.

45:45Maybe there's a lot of self-judgment or a lot of fantasizing or a lot of planning. There are certain thought patterns that each of us really unknowingly have just habituated in our lives. So those are the patterns that are going to manifest in that space when we're not fully present. And that's why as the meditation gets steadier, when the power of our mindfulness gets stronger, where we really are one with the moment's experience, there's much less of that because our mind is fully engaged in the moment's experience. But it's not to say that even for very experienced practitioners, the mind becomes completely silent.

46:48Because there's another phenomenon, which is very common, and it's called the undercurrent of thoughts. where just through the day, these very light thoughts keep going through the mind. And sometimes they're problematic in some way and sometimes not. Sometimes they're just ordinary thoughts. But the problem is that because they're light and quickly passing, we for the most part are unaware of them. And so for those minutes or moments that we're lost in them, the mind is really lost. We're not aware of what's going on. And it's reconditioning those particular habit patterns of thought. So this is just another level of paying attention to when we're being more or less mindful.

47:57And then another gradation is we're coming even closer to the experience, but there's still this very subtle undercurrent. And then we start practicing really trying to be aware of the undercurrent. And so then we drop to an even deeper level of presence of mind with what's happening. So there's a whole spectrum here. It's not just either or. This kind of practice I find incredibly useful and helpful, particularly as I'm going about my daily life, even more so than in the formal sitting where we're really giving attention to all this in a very intentional way. But when we're just going through our day doing all the things we do, that's when it becomes really interesting to watch how often the mind has dropped in to the undercurrent of thought.

49:02I find it fascinating. Coming up, Joseph and I endeavor to answer the question, why are we like this? And he finally gives me the gold star I've been chasing for as long as I've known him.

49:22You just had a bunch of things that I want to follow up on. Very interesting. The undercurrent of thought is really important. We've spent a lot of time talking about it privately. But I just want to go back to this question of, like, why are we like this? You know, why do we have these minds? You dropped a few breadcrumbs. I'm going to see if I can articulate them and maybe expand on them a little, and then you can tell me where I run afoul. Or have gotten it exactly right. See, that's a little pattern. Okay, you can tell me how great a job I did once I'm done. And this pattern actually is completely apropos to what I'm about to say, which is that a fundamental view in Buddhism or the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, is causes and conditions, perpetual change.

50:07Everything that's happening right now is the wave cresting on an ocean of an unfathomable gumbo of prior conditions. And so, of course, your mind is the product of all of your prior experiences, but also whatever causes and conditions happened in the minds of your forebears, perhaps. Whatever conditioning your parents are carrying into this realm. And if you are not mindful, you're just carried along by your habit patterns. What mindfulness allows you to do, and you use this word decondition. So am I in the right zone? And what more needs to be said? I'm going to retire then. It's all yours. Take it away.

50:58The student has become the master. I love it. so i would just add one please one thing to it so the buddha did talk about okay what's the root condition for all of this and he said the root condition is ignorance that's at the bottom of it all as long as there's ignorance in the mind and that ignorance has many manifestations right

51:30So this is going to be like a crib sheet of Buddhist teachings. Because of ignorance, we're not necessarily attuned on an experiential level just to the process of momentary change. That impermanence of course happens on every time scale. It can be macro, it can be micro. And in the meditation we just begin to refine our perception of change, the changing nature of sensations of thoughts, that everything is just arising and passing very quickly. And as we focus the microscope of our minds through meditation and mindfulness, we begin to get a more and more refined perception of this flow of change.

52:35If we haven't done that, then one aspect of the ignorance is not understanding that. And it's through understanding that, the very impermanent nature of things arising and passing, it's that wisdom as opposed to ignorance which starts to decondition clinging and craving because we're seeing things are changing so quickly there's not even time to cling to it so this is an example just one little example of how ignorance of that particular aspect will then condition all kinds of other thought patterns and clinging and desire and aversion because we're not seeing the impermanent nature of it all.

53:33So the ignorance is conditioning all of those patterns. And that's just one little example of how ignorance is at the root of everything. If we see everything with greater clarity,

53:52in seeing the very nature of how things are happening, that's what begins to decondition a lot of the unwholesome patterns, the unskillful patterns that arise in the mind. And you're reconditioning things like present moment awareness. Exactly. And then compassion. Yeah, and steadiness of mind. What in Buddhism are called the factors of enlightenment, the factors of awakening. And the Buddha was so incredibly, I'll use the word brilliant, but it's not about an intellectual brilliance, although I think that was there too, but just a brilliance of understanding of what conditions what. how ignorance conditions a whole run of unhelpful qualities of mind, how wisdom conditions a whole run of really helpful qualities of mind.

54:59He understood the mind so well and so deeply that a lot of the teachings are about unpacking the nature of our own minds to us. we tried to figure this out by ourselves. It's hard enough just following the breath three or four times in a row. And here's the Buddha who just had this profound understanding of how it's all working. That enables us to see it with a greater degree of clarity. Oh, that's what's going on. So why are we like this? Because we're programmed for a kind of delusion, ignorance, blindness to what's happening right now. But in meditation, we can tune up our ability to see the machinations of the mind and that we don't have to be, quote unquote, like this, i.e.

55:58ridiculous as much as we used to be. Yes, exactly. I'm really racking these up. You are. Okay, so let's close one loop here before we end this session and go take a break. So there are a couple of phrases that are coming to mind on this very subject, and I'm not sure which one we should use in the book. I'll just provide a fuselade of them for our discussion now. Quickly passing thoughts, the undercurrent of thoughts, the thieves of meditation, and dreaming yourself into existence all come to mind as phrases I've heard you use in this zone. So can you unpack all of that? Yeah, so the phrase is the undercurrent of thoughts and the thieves of meditation actually comes from a Tibetan teaching that I came across.

56:52And it just so completely resonated with my experience. I thought this is a perfect description. I read this after an experience I had previous to reading it. I was on a self-retreat and I was just going for a mindful walk outside. So I wasn't doing the really slow walking meditation. at a more natural pace, but I was on retreat and really trying to be as mindful as I could. And for whatever reason, at that particular time, I just started noticing these very quickly passing thoughts. And they would come so frequently. I was surprised at how frequently they came. They were not dramatic. They were not particularly disturbing.

57:53They were just these quickly passing thoughts. But they reminded me of another experience, which I think many people have, of waking up in the morning. So you wake up and then maybe, you know, at times you just drop back off to sleep for, I don't know, five minutes or however long, a short period of time. But in that short period of time, we often drop back into a quick little dream state. So we wake up and then we drop back into sleep a few minutes of a dream, and then maybe wake up and we're fully awake. I realized that when I would be lost in this undercurrent of thought or these quickly passing thoughts, it was just like going from the waking state where I was really alert and I knew what my experience was.

58:55In the moment of being lost in a thought, we are not aware that we're thinking because we're lost in it. And it just reminded me of that dream state. And then I had this further reflection. I realized that a lot of these thoughts, even if they weren't dramatic or even necessarily obviously problematic, many of them contain some kind of self-reference. it could be something like a memory i had of being at a certain place or maybe a plan or just ordinary thoughts but which constantly lay around the self so when i realized that this other phrase came to mind i'm just dreaming myself into existence in all of these moments when i'm lost in the undercurrent of God.

59:58And the fact that it happens so frequently, much more than we're aware of, it's almost like this underground stream that's flowing along. We're hardly aware of it. So another analogy I use to describe this whole process is like the experience of going to the movies and being totally engrossed in the story. of what we're seeing in the drama, whatever it is, and unaware of the background soundtrack of music. Because we're so engaged in the content of the story, and yet it's that background, unnoticed soundtrack that is totally manipulating our emotions as we're watching the story. The music speeds up and gets tense, and all of a sudden we feel tense.

1:00:57The music mellows out and we feel mellow. And we can become aware of this, of the impact of this, just by muting for a while. It's a completely different experience. Completely different. This undercurrent of thoughts is like the soundtrack of our lives. And every time we're being lost in it, it's like having the soundtrack there and not being aware of it.

1:01:33Every time we're lost in this undercurrent of thoughts, the thieves of meditation, because they've stolen, they've entered unknowingly and have stolen our mindfulness, each of these moments are reconditioning our mind in one way or another, even to the point of unknowingly reinforcing this felt sense of I and self. So it's really powerful to begin to notice these thoughts when you're taking a shower, you're washing the dishes, or you're just going about your daily business. It's there. And I was just, I was completely fascinated when I became really aware of this process. It was another whole dimension of mindfulness and meditation that I had not really been aware of, even in deep practice.

1:02:40So it was kind of a new and exciting discovery. the phrase i've i mean i've because i've heard you give this rap before both publicly and to me when wagging your finger at me about my meditation the the the phrase that i'll sometimes use is especially when i'm doing walking meditation or just walking around and i feel like i'm i'm more or less mindful but i know there are these little kind of not supercharged somewhat subterranean thoughts happening soundtrack and then I'm here that's why I like that analogy because it's so immediately recognizable and it contains just within that word our understanding of the impact of it so instead of oh yeah these are just light thoughts that don't really matter by highlighting them we can see that that they do matter in the sense that they are reconditioning our minds one way or another in ways that we have not been aware of.

1:03:50One of the things that I find so interesting about it, as I'm noticing this, just as I'm going through my day, as I notice them, I can feel how they contribute just to different kind of moods I'm in. Yes. so there might be this undercurrent of thoughts of just some project that needs to be done you know and if i'm unaware of if i'm unaware of these thoughts going through my mind or when i do become aware of them maybe there's a slight anxiety oh do i have enough time to finish it and it's all really subterranean and yet it's having a really strong impact so i find that incredibly interesting and it's motivated me to really take interest and keep an eye out for them and i love it when i see them yeah it's really it has juiced up the practice a lot i just want to highlight that because a striver i don't want to name any names but his initials are dan harris might hear that instruction and think i've just got to work harder to see all these i've got to grit my teeth but shot through your comments as a playfulness a curiosity and interest that is the real tool here, not a bearing down.

1:05:21Absolutely. You hit upon a word that, for me, has characterized my practice over all these years, and that is interest. The mind is fascinating. The first line of the Dhammapada, which is this collection of Buddhist verses, the first line of the first verse is, mind is the forerunner of all things. That's a profound statement. It's like everything we do and we feel and everything, our whole life, is experienced. It's the manifestation of our minds. And mind here, just in the Buddhist sense, does not just mean thought or intellect. In the Buddhist sense, mind, you could say consciousness or awareness, which really includes the whole heart mind.

1:06:16So it includes all the emotions and different mind states. So mind is in a very expansive sense when it says mind is the forerunner of all things. So given that our whole lives are the manifestation of our minds, what could be more interesting than really exploring everything it's doing? you know both from the point of view the mind has no pride in the ridiculous things it does to the sublime things it does to the ways we get taught to the ways we can become free it's incredibly interesting and it's this quality of interest that for me has sustained my practice for 60 years now it's as interesting now as it was in the beginning Yeah, so there's a lot of joy in doing it if one...

1:07:14And one has to learn how not to get caught by over-efforting or over-striving, and that's part of the process as well, taking interest in that. Oh, this is not so helpful. Maybe that's a good place to leave it. Thank you, Joseph. You're welcome, Steve.

1:07:40Thanks again to Joseph. We will have another episode with Joseph's. And don't forget, we've got another episode with tons of Joseph's phrases coming up this Sunday, January 4th. And then on January 5th, we begin our free seven-day New Year's meditation challenge led by Joseph. If you want to sign up, just go to danharris.com, download my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. the app comes with a free 30-day trial. So that free trial will cover the New Year's Meditation Challenge. And then after that, if you want to stay with us, that would be awesome. Finally, thank you very, very much to everybody who works so hard on this show.

1:08:21Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.