In short
Podcast Summary: Search Engine - *The Psychic Question*
Episode Overview
- Title: The Psychic Question
- Host: PJ Vogt
- Guest: Dan Harris, author of *10% Happier*
- Description: The episode explores Dan Harris' journey into the world of psychics after discovering that many of his respected mentors consult the same psychic medium. He embarks on an investigation to understand their beliefs and the implications for his own skepticism.
Key Themes and Discussions
Dan Harris' Journey
- Background:
- Dan Harris is a journalist and author who has spent years exploring Buddhism and mindfulness, often in a skeptical manner.
- He has developed close relationships with prominent Buddhist teachers who also hold unconventional beliefs.
- Skepticism vs. Belief:
- Dan identifies as a skeptic even after extensive involvement in Buddhist practices, often putting aside aspects that lack empirical validation.
- He wrestles with the beliefs of his mentors, particularly surrounding psychics and metaphysical claims.
The Psychic Medium
Laura Lynn Jackson
- Introduction to Laura Lynn Jackson:
- A psychic medium who claims to communicate with the deceased and provide insights about the future.
- Dan's research into her reveals that she has gained popularity among his Buddhist mentors.
- Interview Insights:
- During a Zoom interview with Laura, Dan questions her about her practices and philosophies, expressing both curiosity and skepticism.
- Laura describes her work in terms of energy fields and spirit guides, which raises alarm bells for Dan, who is cautious about pseudoscience.
Exploration of Beliefs
- Contrast Between Skepticism and Open-Mindedness:
- Dan grapples with the tension between his skepticism and the comfort that belief in psychics provides to others.
- Conversations with his mentors, like Dr. Mark Epstein, reveal different attitudes towards belief, openness, and the value of experiences beyond empirical proof.
- Radical Open-Mindedness:
- The episode discusses the concept of being open to experiences that cannot be fully explained or proved, which Dan admires in his mentors.
- Mark Epstein encourages a fluid mindset that allows for exploration while maintaining critical thinking.
Personal Reflections
- Dan's Readings:
- After his initial interview with Laura, Dan decides to have a psychic reading, which leads to mixed feelings about the experience.
- He describes the reading as a pep talk that provided some reassurance during a difficult period in his life, despite his lingering skepticism.
- The Balance of Certainty and Openness:
- Both Dan and Mark emphasize the importance of maintaining a balance between skepticism and openness to new ideas.
- Dan reflects on how his mentors' practices have influenced his perspectives on judgment and belief.
Conclusion
- Final Reflections:
- The episode concludes with Dan acknowledging the complexity of navigating beliefs that defy scientific explanation while still allowing for personal growth.
- It highlights the intricate dance between doubt and faith, and how embracing uncertainty can lead to deeper understanding.
Key Takeaways
- Skepticism and Belief: Navigating the line between skepticism and belief can foster personal growth and understanding.
- Value of Open-Mindedness: Embracing radical open-mindedness allows for exploration of beliefs that may initially seem absurd.
- Psychic Experiences: Even skeptics can find value and comfort in experiences labeled as "woo-woo," leading to personal reflections and insights.
Additional Resources
- Dan Harris’ *10% Happier* Podcast for further exploration of mindfulness and skepticism.
- Books by Mark Epstein, such as *The Zen of Therapy* and *Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart*, for insights into integrating Buddhism with modern psychology.
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This summary encapsulates the essence of the podcast episode, highlighting Dan Harris's exploration into psychic beliefs, his skepticism, and the broader philosophical discussions surrounding certainty and open-mindedness.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. This week, Dan Harris, author of the best-selling memoir about meditation and Buddhism called 10 % Happier, has a question. A very intriguing one involving a psychic. That's after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rosetta Stone. I'm always threatening to learn a new language. This month, I would like to learn German. I spent some time learning Germans this summer, and I found them to be very friendly, and I wanted to be able to communicate in their language instead of mine. The easy way to learn German is Rosetta Stone.
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2:57Hello? Hey. Dan, how's it going? Good, how are you? I just ate an enormous bagel. You know, like the ones where you gotta take a nap? I'm glad you're eating. It sounds like you had a stomach bug over the weekend. I was very, God, I don't even want to fill in the picture for you. I've never been that ill. I've just never been that ill in my life. Nor a virus. Don't get it. I've had it. I've had food poisoning on pretty much every continent. My father has a great expression about this. When you have a stomach flu like that, he says you switch between thinking you're going to die and fearing you won't.
3:40That's exactly the reality. That was exactly it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It made me realize that when I'm old, I'm not going to be a fighter, like, at all.
3:54I'm going to, like, cough twice and be like, take me off life support. They'll be like, you're not on life support.
4:04Dan Harris, to the rest of the world, is not primarily known for all the food poisoning he's had. He's known these days as an author and host of a popular podcast called 10 % Happier. That's about meditation and mindfulness and a lot of other things. Recently, Dan found himself investigating this question, and I asked him if we could ride along on his journey to answer it. Can you just tell me the story of how you arrived at this question? Okay, so the backstory is, I have spent the last 15 years really taking a deep dive into the world of Buddhism or the Dharma, which was not, you know, in my life plan.
4:42I started my career in local news and then I became a network news anchor and I spent, you know, 20 years at ABC News. But in the late aughts, I started to get interested in Buddhism and made friends with all of these teachers who were my parents' age. So I'm a Gen Xer and these guys were all boomers. And I don't think coincidentally, they're mostly Jewish. So they have like chewy last names like Salzberg and Epstein and Goldstein and Kornfield. And I became really close with a lot of these folks. And they really were kind of my guides as I got increasingly interested in Buddhism.
5:28These names Dan mentioned, they're big American meditation teachers, often credited with popularizing Buddhism in this country. Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Mark Epstein. For Dan, they're people who showed him a way into Buddhism that didn't require him to surrender to a faith. What I liked about Buddhism, coming from a skeptical, secular background, my parents were both atheist scientists, what I liked about Buddhism is that it actually wasn't a religion. I mean, it could be practiced as a religion, for sure, and that's beautiful and fine, but you can practice it as a secular person. I mean, the Buddha himself said, don't take anything I say on face value.
6:04You come check it out for yourself. So that was really attractive to me. And the basics of Buddhist philosophy and practice, like meditation and ethical practices, all really made sense and have come to be validated by modern science. Buddhist practices validated by modern science. This is what makes Dan so unusual. Most of us, when we encounter a new belief system, we either reject it or we explore it. And if we keep exploring it, it usually changes us. Dan, though, is a skeptic. He's remained somewhat of a skeptic despite nearly two decades of studying Buddhism. So he's a skeptic who goes on silent meditation retreats, a skeptic who himself leads guided meditations, a skeptic who publishes podcasts about Buddhism three times a week.
6:51While Dan has certainly become more flexible over the years, become less zealous, he's still kept his mind, and people don't usually say this as a compliment, but I mean it as one, at least half closed. Anything he encounters in Buddhism that science can't prove or prove the benefits of, he just sets aside. I felt comfortable in this world, largely. And a lot of these older Buddhist folks believed in stuff that, and still believe in stuff that I found very hard to swallow. Like what?
7:30Well, I'll start with the easier stuff, and this isn't even going to sound easy for some people, but the notion of enlightenment, that there is an experience we can have of nirvana. They call it nibbana, which is the way it's pronounced in the language of Pali. And so you can have these zaps of nirvana or nibbana, and it can upgrade the software of your mind permanently, and that's enlightenment.
7:59But they also believe, and this stuff is in the Buddhist texts, they also believe in rebirth in different realms of existence. They believe that certain types of meditative adepts get superpowers, like the ability to read other people's minds or duplicate their body or walk through walls. In America, we usually try to respect other people's religious beliefs. And Dan could respect these ideas that his teachers had, even if he didn't believe all of them. After all, they were rooted in Buddhism. But then, Dan began to learn that some of his most respected teachers also held these other beliefs. Beliefs that didn't come from Buddhism.
8:43Beliefs that to him felt significantly wackier. The kinds of ideas someone trying to sell you crystals at a head shop in a strip mall might try to pitch you on. I have a memory, and hopefully he won't mind me retelling this story, but I have a memory of walking down the street with Dr. Mark Epstein, who just by the way is an eminent psychiatrist who practices in the New York area and has written a series of books about the overlap between modern psychology and Buddhism. and he was really my first introduction to Buddhism. I read one of his books, called him up and essentially asked if he would be my friend.
9:22And we started having lunch and dinner together on the regular and he would just teach me stuff. And I remember walking down the street with him one time and I was really pressing him on some of the esoteric claims of Buddhism. And then he said something like, he was talking about tarot or astrology or something like that. And I was like, you really believe in that? And he said, yeah, I believe in everything. I believe in everything. And this is a guy who went to Harvard Medical School. Yeah. And then I would start to think, is this an affinity scam? You know, like, you know, where people who seem normal to you start telling you, you know, like on a multi-level marketing thing, you know, like what is going on here?
10:06So I kind of lived with this. I kind of put this in a box off to the side while I continued my meditation practice. And it was in that context that he mentioned that he talked to a psychic medium whose name is Laura Lynn Jackson. Then over the years, I would hear other teachers in this cohort say that they too had had readings. And this woman could apparently talk to the dead, like talk to my teacher's dead relatives. So she was a psychic, which means she could talk to you about your future, and a medium. That means she can talk to the dead. To be clear, as far as I know, Laurel Lynn Jackson is not a Buddhist and has nothing to do with Buddhism.
10:51She's an ex-high school English teacher from Long Island who became a professional psychic medium. So I started researching her, and her story is pretty easy to find because she's done a lot of public interviews. She appears somewhat regularly on the podcast and daytime TV circuit. It's always tough when a loved one dies, and for some people, psychic mediums help provide closure. But you don't have to be psychic to see the signs, at least that's according to a new book. Let's welcome Laura Lynn Jackson. She is the author of Signs, the Secret Language of the Universe. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me here.
11:26Well, thank you for being here. I'll tell you her bio, as I understand it, from what she said publicly. Laurel Lynn Jackson grew up on Long Island, and she's told the story many times about how she first realized she had some unusual abilities. You've been doing this, talking to the other side for years now. How did this all start for you? You know, it started for me as a child. I would see people in colors. I would feel what they were feeling. And when I was 11, I knew my grandfather was going to die right before he died. And right after he crossed, I had this dream where he visited me and I had this beautiful communication.
12:02And ever since then, I've just, you know, understood that people who cross are really still with us. And they're very accessible to us to connect with. She says her mom told her that these powers run in the family. And she continued to struggle with it, to not know, you know, what exactly these powers were, whether they were real, you know, what to do about them. In her wayward youth, she used to do psychic readings as a trick at a bar. Hey, look what I can do out at a bar. I know all about you. And I know that your dad's on the other side. And I know that you have a seven-year-old brother and this sort of thing.
12:39But it took me a while to honor it. But eventually, she kind of settled in, she says, into her role as a psychic. Oh, yeah. And decided to use it to help other people. I'm a mom. I am a wife. And I happen to be a psychic medium. And it took me many, many decades to come to terms with that and accept that. I don't consider myself woo-woo. I was raised by two teachers, and I was raised to be a critical thinker in the world. And a critical thinker questions, always questions and explores.
13:15I found myself struggling a little bit with this story. I mean, at a minimum, I think of psychic powers as, you know, definitionally woo-woo. And so knowing all that, I was like, all right, this is the final straw. I have to find out why do my teachers believe this? And is there any evidence for it? And what, to make sure I understand what you're describing, it's like you like a very sort of like, I believe things that there are empirical evidence for. I'm a skeptic. But you found a practice that is tied but loosely to spiritual beliefs or sort of optionally to spiritual beliefs. And you found that practice so useful and such a way to gain more thoughtfulness and wisdom and ways of being in the world.
14:00And so for most of your path into this, you've just been like, okay, there's an optional sidecar of bonus beliefs here that I don't think are for me. I don't have to judge them. They can stay in the box. What is it about a psychic that you're like, okay, I kind of need to poke the box a little bit here? Well, I mean, it struck me as obvious bullshit. Like, there's no way to disprove that there are multiple realms of existence. You know, in the Buddhist cosmology, there's a hell realm, like a god realm, this human realm, the animal realm. I can't, that's an interesting metaphysical claim, but it doesn't seem like I have the resources in this realm to falsify it.
14:44Whereas the psychic thing, I hadn't thought deeply about it, but it just seemed obviously not true.
14:55So Dan approached Search Engine to help him understand what was going on here. His question, why were so many of his respected teachers seeing this psychic medium? I wanted to follow along because, one, I just thought the situation was very funny. But two, for me personally, I've just spent more time in the past few years around new agey people. And sometimes they give me the same feeling I get around my very conservative family members, where there's things they say that give me almost an allergic reaction, trigger me. And I wondered, in this case, if I could soften that. I wondered if I even wanted to.
15:34This is not a story designed to change your mind about psychics. Proving or disproving the supernatural is a trap. Search engine does not fall for traps. Instead, it's a story about what we do with other people's beliefs. How we decide how open to be to the ideas that make our minds want to snap closed. That is our big quest this week. And as part of it, after a short break, Dan Harris will visit a psychic medium.
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18:29Welcome back to the show. Last spring, Dan Harris found himself reaching out to a psychic medium. He was asking himself what it meant that the people he followed were, in some sense, following her. And he was curious how far he could push his own mind. So he sent her an interview request, and they got together on Zoom. Before we dive in, any questions or concerns for me? No, I'm just very excited to be in conversation with you. I just read your book, 10 % Happier. I just added an extra half. 10 % happier and I loved it. It's fantastic. We have a lot of people in common, Mark and Sharon. I love it.
19:05Yeah. Yeah. That's how I came up with the idea of inviting you on because I've heard about you from these other folks. Oh, thank you. I start with some basic questions. Like for example, what is the difference between a psychic and a medium? That's a great question. So a psychic is somebody who tunes into, you can call it someone's aura. And the concept there is that there's an energy field around every single person that emanates about two or three feet away from each person's body and that within that field we can energetically tap into it with our thoughts and connect with it and read a person's past, present, future.
19:42We can see who they're connected to in the here and now. We get all sorts of information from that. We can read information about their physical health, all sorts of things like that. So a psychic is somebody who would do that. A medium takes it a step farther. And we have a saying among all of us where it's every medium is psychic, but not every psychic is a medium. And what I mean by that is I feel that mediumship... And so I interviewed her for, I don't know, 90 minutes, maybe more. She doesn't have the same vibe that these super advanced meditation teachers do. She's much chattier, and like you can ask her a question and she'll maybe take a half hour to answer it.
20:23I'm not kidding. Like she just is so excited about what she's talking about that she'll go for a half hour. You know, there is something so much grander and more beautiful and magnificent going on behind the scenes in this sort of unseen energy realm of connection that we can't even begin to understand, but we can learn to trust in and we can learn to call upon. Okay, you said about 75 things that I need to follow up on. in those paragraphs that you just uttered there. But let me just stay at the level of representing the skeptics in the audience. I'm imagining there are a couple of alarm bells going off for people, not having to do with you specifically, but with this topic.
21:07One is terms like, you know, unseen energy. It just reminds me of like poltergeist or, you know. Oh, that's scary. Right. So there's that. But even beyond that, it's like the stuff of movies. We've all seen psychics in movies. We've all seen or heard stories about charlatans in this field. Oh, sure. Just the lexicon itself can be hard to swallow for somebody who, you know, is reasonably new to this or only has interacted with it through pop culture. So for anybody who's listening to this and, you know, considering whether to stop listening, what can you say to keep us in the game here? Keep us open mind.
21:47Well, I think this is so important that you're bringing this up because when I talk about unseen energy, I don't mean this idea of like this concept of woo-woo stuff that's out there. I mean that I've researched and dived into, you know, quantum theory, trying to understand this. I'm always on a search for answers myself. It's one of the reasons I— I asked her a bunch of skeptical questions, and she answered them. She didn't convince me per se. But I also didn't walk away thinking it's absolutely demonstrably untrue. But I didn't get the feeling that she was, you know, and I've interviewed a lot of con men and cult leaders and fraudsters in my many years of being a journalist.
22:27I didn't get that vibe from her. I got the sense that whatever she's doing, she sincerely believes she's doing it. Yeah. Laura Lynn Jackson, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you so much for being in conversation with me. And I was like, what do I do with this tape? You know, I felt incomplete, but I just didn't know what to think and I didn't know how my audience would feel about it. And so then I called her back and said, will you give me a reading? Apparently, she's able to do these readings remotely over the phone. And she said yes.
23:01Can you hear me all right? I hear you loudly and clearly. Fabulous. Well, I feel really honored to read for you. And I always feel that readings are divinely orchestrated, you know. I couldn't see her. We were audio only. We weren't in the same room. I've actually never been in the same room with her. And she warned me in advance that when we do this, you know, she goes into a state where she kind of loses track of time. And first she was reading my aura. New Age people call it an aura. Scientists call it a biofield. It's a very real thing. You know, we have this energy field around us. And what's in that when I read for people is all sorts of information.
23:36information about your past your present your future people you're tied to in the here and now and the very first thing i'm going to be shown is something that i have come to call a core aura for the person i'm reading first so for you and all it means is i'm basically shown the blueprint for your soul mission this lifetime and the way that will appear to me as in a circle or like a globe sometimes it's like a 3d shape that comes and which you know sounds like something that People say to you on the street corner in Sedona, Arizona, she was talking about the various colors that are there in my aura and what they mean.
24:12All right, let's talk a little bit about the orange, the green, and then the other color. Orange is interesting to me. Not that I didn't expect to see it in your core, but it was just like, oh, wow, this is here. Because here's what it means. When I see orange in somebody's core aura, it means the person that I am talking to is marked as an artist for me in some capacity. I feel like you've always been very connected to art. Like, were you very into music when you were younger, especially like teenage years? Yes. Did you play like two instruments? One. Okay. Then did you play an instrument and sing?
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24:48Not very well, but I did. I did play one instrument. Okay. It has to be two because I'm seeing two. It's like two different streams. But this one, I feel like I'm going crazy. So she's reading my aura and she says that I'm into music and she says that I play two instruments, which is 50 percent correct. I play the drums poorly, but she insisted that I play two, which is not true unless you count like the triangle. Yeah. And then so she goes from the aura to then she has this whole thing about how we all have a team of light. Each one and every one of us has a team of light on the other side. That's three parts.
25:24right? God energy, which I see as this force of love that is just inherent and part of all of us and guides us to become like more loving, kind, forgiving, you know, guides us into our highest path and connects us all, right? And then we also have, and this part might sound a little woo-woo, but I've come to understand it, what I'll refer to as spirit guides, right? Throughout time and history, some religions have referred to that kind of conscious beings as, you know, guardian angels. I just call them spirit guides. And the third part of the team of light, of course, is anybody who loved to cross for the other side, pets included, I like to point out as well.
25:59And then my team of light showed up. And apparently they were talking about how I'd gone through something very hard in the last couple of years. There had to be like maybe some relationships that fell away. I feel like there's great disappointment about one person in particular. Does this make any sense to you? Yes. Okay. I want to commend you. This is not from me. This is from your guides. Because the main task was to come away from that without bitterness, without negativity. And yeah, we're going to feel it at times, but that's not going to be the takeaway. And I really do feel you're getting a standing ovation for acing that.
26:34They were saying at first you were thrashing about and not handling it very well, but ultimately you handled it well and we applaud you for that. And to me, that seems pretty obvious, Lee, a reference to my separation from the meditation app that I co-founded and went through a very painful separation from and was a three year long thing. And there were many times where it brought up my absolute worst. But toward the end, I was able to kind of deal with it reasonably well. And so all of that was really reassuring. And it felt good that my grandparents might have approved of my comportment during this.
27:08And I'm aware that she could have. I mean, I've talked about all this stuff publicly. Yeah. So she could have just known this and was giving me a pep talk. Yeah. What what happened next? Okay, so there's the medium part where she's talking to your team of light. Yeah. And then there's the psychic part where she's telling you what might happen in the future. Now, do you have three cats now but are talking about a fourth? Yes. Okay. You don't have the fourth yet, do you? No. It's coming. Like, I already see it as if it's there even though it's not. But, like, this fourth one is meant to come. At the time that I was doing the reading, we had three cats and she predicted we would get a fourth.
27:56And I did not mention that to Bianca, who several weeks later came home with a fourth cat. So there's that. I find that impressive. I find that challenging. The fact that we have four fucking cats. Is that what you find challenging?
28:13Because you're right. It's a lot of kitty litter. It's a lot of cats. What else? I also feel like, are you going to get your own show or something? Is that on the table somewhere? Beyond this show? You mean beyond this podcast? Like a TV show? Yeah. Yeah. Or somebody picks it up in a new way. Like I see my sign for like media coming. I mean, that would be great. I'm actually in the works of pitching a TV show that would have me kind of traveling around the world investigating how to get happier. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. It's like it's a show, but it's you teaching this and helping people find their own light.
28:55And it's going to be a little frustrating because it's an 11 month journey to having it come about. I'm going to tell you, you have to believe in this and you have to trust in this because you're in the midst of it right now. She was like, that show is going to get made and it's going to be a huge deal. And now I want to believe that. Yeah. Obviously. Like, I don't know if that's true, but I really liked hearing it. And it felt to me like a very useful pep talk. There was nothing in there that if I did believe it would have been harmful, I don't think. And most importantly, the experience was positive because I have gone through a hard couple of years.
29:33It's been really hard. The hardest years of my life, both because of what's happened professionally. and also, as you know, my wife's had some health problems. So the idea that we could both as a couple be entering this period of thriving personally and professionally is really exciting. Maybe wrong, but it motivates me to effectuate it. And so to me, I don't see any harm in any of that. And so you're having the experience still of like, part of you is spending disbelief, but like the greater part of your skeptical intellect is still online. And so it's like, it's just sort of psychologically strange.
30:10As somebody who has like had psychic readings as a non-believer before, I just very much understand the feeling that that conversation gives you, which is like, I don't want to get in the pool, but I'm a little bit in the pool. And it is warm, but I don't even believe in pools. So I didn't know you'd actually done this. And so I'll say, I'll run this by you. And I think it builds on what you just said. what surprised me the most about myself was how much I wanted to believe it. Why do you think that is? It just sounds nice. Her whole philosophy is that being alive and on earth is like a school, a training ground.
30:48And then we ultimately cross back over to whatever it is on the other side. And that when we get there, you know, we'll be reunited with our ancestors. And that all just, I mean, there's a reason why so many people at 11 o 'clock on Sunday mornings go to church. It's a very comforting story. But Dan is somebody who tries not to believe in stories just because they're comfortable. He doesn't usually get his aura read. He's not religious. He does meditate, and he's Buddhist enough that I've heard him use words like dharma in casual conversation. The story Dan tells himself, though, is that he came to Buddhism because he followed the evidence for it.
31:28Which I'm sure is true, although I also think most of us decide what to believe, at least partly socially. It's much easier to surrender to an idea if we admire the people who already hold it. If they seem happy, smart, if they fit our arbitrary thumbnail sketch of a wise person. As Dan and I kept talking over the months, I'd noticed how many stories he had about his teachers, memories of the lessons he'd learned by observing them. It's such a funny thing that happens in the human heart, this decision that you're going to become somebody's student, a surrender to their ideas or habits. But now, listening to this tape of Laura Lynn instructing Dan on the finer points of her metaphysical views, I just heard no such surrender.
32:14And while Dan said the conversation gave him a little more insight into why other people enjoy psychic readings, he still didn't know why his mentors, faced with the same experience, were able to walk through that door. Or if it meant he had to think any differently about them. Or think any differently about all the other ways he was following their lead. After the break, we watch, live, as a skilled practitioner tries to gently pry open the mind of Dan Harris. Thank you.
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35:57Welcome back to the show. Last month, Dan went back to Dr. Mark Epstein. Just to remind you, Dr. Mark Epstein, a hugely influential author, Harvard medical-trained psychotherapist, as well as a prominent Buddhist. The person, in fact, who turned Dan on to Buddhism, but who also subscribes to all sorts of beliefs Dan considers very woo. The person who told Dan, quote, I believe in everything.
36:25Do you remember, Mark, after one of our many, many meals, you and I were taking a walk from the restaurant. I think I was walking you back to your apartment and something came up like tarot or astrology. You referenced it in the conversation. And then I turned to you. This was back when I was a little bit more hard-bitten in my skepticism. I was like, do you really believe in that? And you turned to me and said, I believe in everything. Do you recall that conversation? It sounds familiar, yeah. I think we had that conversation a couple of times, maybe. What do you mean by that? When you say, I believe in everything, what does that mean?
37:09I'm not sure what I meant when I said it then, but, you know, I've been around longer than you. The Buddhist thing didn't come wrapped all by itself. So I've been exposed along the way to practitioners and practices of various occult types. And I've always gotten something useful from most of them. So I think that's what I was saying when I say I believe in everything. Like, I'm open to them all. Maybe too open. So I've interviewed Mark scores of times. And it's a bit like sparring with a cloud. I mean, he is hard to pin down. And he's got this kind of Zen mischief about him. And so I knew that going in that I wasn't going to get some like clear answer.
37:51He doesn't talk that way. He, you know, I think for decades he's been a therapist and he wants the person he's talking to to come to their own conclusion. I see. He's like a person where you ask him a question, you get a question. Exactly. And he also like he likes to fuck with you a little bit. And in this case, in the case of I Believe in Everything, he was pushing me on some of my insistence on having scientific evidence for everything.
38:21I know I was encouraging you early on to open up your preconceptions to allow for the possibility of stuff that we don't really know about from science. Why was it important for you to push me on that score? I just always thought it was important for me to push you on any score. That was my job. But you're saying this like it's in the past tense. Well, it took you 16 years, but now you're doing a show about Laurel and Jackson. Okay, but I know that part of your job is to mess with me, but why is this? Not mess with help. I was trying to help you. So why would it be helping me to prod me toward more openness toward things I might otherwise reflexively reject?
39:14Open is better than closed, right? Fluid is better than rigid. People who are too sure of themselves tend to be alienating to others.
39:29listening to this conversation between dan and his longtime guide i thought i could recognize some truth in mark's statement i'm more like dan more of a non-believer but my non-belief has softened some in the last few years some of that's social while i think the tarot people are wrong they frankly throw much better parties than the fact checkers so there's that but then you spend enough time around the believers, and sometimes you feel your own killjoy-ness more acutely. Like you're on a diet or fasting for reasons nobody else quite understands. Wouldn't it be nicer to just give in? Dan told me the story of how Mark Epstein became, if not the most open-minded person he's ever met, then at least the most open-minded person he deeply respects.
40:16Young Mark Epstein was sort of anxious, insecure, really, really smart, really, really curious. I think the times that I grew up in were just the dawning of the Beatles and transcendental meditation and LSD and the naivete of that early 60s mindset hit me just in my adolescence. When he was young, it was bedlam. It was the 70s. And he's in Cambridge at Harvard seeking out everybody on campus who has any interest in anything new agey. I found all the occultists at Harvard Medical School. I worked with Lester Grinspoon, who was the first person to advocate for the legalization of marijuana. I wrote a paper, writes a paper on ketamine.
41:08He's hanging out with psychics. And of course, there's the Dharma and all of the metaphysical claims that are in that. And so he's just in this environment. I mean, he's hanging out with a car mechanic named Carmu, who's also a psychic. He's just in this world of drinking from this fire hose. And it's so interesting because he's doing that and getting his degree at Harvard Medical School at the same time. Okay. So then how does the psychic medium in question enter his life? Like what was the when and how of that? A friend of his tells him about Laura Lynn Jackson at a dinner in Woodstock. Okay.
41:45And I realize this is all sounds like, you know, a subplot from a Portlandia episode. But he hears about this person and is like, yes, I want to talk to this medium.
42:01It was after my father had died. So it was like 16 years ago or so. So was it the death of your father that made you intrigued? No, as I say, I'm always on the lookout for a good psychic. Or a good astrologer. Because you had a history of encounters. Both good and bad, yeah. I have a real history, yeah. Okay, so good and bad. That means that you're not going in with zero skepticism. Oh, no, I'm going in with a lot of skepticism. Yeah. I'm both gullible and skeptical. which I find really interesting, gullible and skeptical. Okay, so when you first met her, what did you think? It blew me away. Say more, please.
42:41After the preliminaries, the first thing she does is she gets a sense of your aura, a mix of colors, basically. So she went through that, and then the first thing she said to me was, oh, your father's here. He says to tell you you were right. That's the first thing she said. And immediately, I thought I knew what she was talking about. My father, who was a well-known professor of medicine, had a glioblastoma, which is a malignant brain tumor. And he got it scanned and it had already spread to both sides of his brain. And he knew that there was, you know, very little treatment that was available and communicated that to me.
43:29And I was in my office in the city realizing that despite all these years of being interested in spiritual stuff, I had never had a conversation with my father about anything spiritual and certainly about what the Buddhists have taught about what dying is or how to die, you know. So I called him up with some trepidation and said, you know, we've never talked about any of this. I don't know if you're interested, but do you want to know, like, what the Buddhists say? And he was very welcoming. He's like, you know, sure, go ahead. So I needed to try to explain something using non-Buddhist or spiritual or New Age language.
44:12And so I said something like, you know, that sense of yourself that you've always had inside that doesn't really change no matter what age you are. You're 20, 40, 60, 80, but inside you're just sort of, you know, how it feels to be you. It's sort of transparent, that space. You know it, but you can't really find it. But it's a feeling. I said what they seem to say is that if you can relax your mind into that kind of transparent feeling of who you've always been, that you can kind of ride that feeling out as the body shuts down. And he said, okay, darling, I'll try. And so when Laura Lynn Jackson said, oh, your father's here, he says to tell you you were right, it resonated with that conversation.
44:59So that made me very receptive to anything else that she was going to tell me. Well, it's interesting, even in that story, you acknowledge she might have known that. She might have had ways to know things that informed her utterances directed at you. You're open to that. And you're also open to the fact that she may be communicating with your dead father. And so that's such an interesting... I mean, she didn't know me at all at that time. She didn't know me at all. And we were on the phone. That Google existed. Google existed. She could have Googled. She could have seen that my father had died, et cetera.
45:36But... But what? I prefer to think not. I would much rather be, that's really my father talking for her.
45:48Mark's first reading with Laura Lynn Jackson was many years ago. He's returned to her periodically since. He says she's really helped him at various junctures in his life. And he's recommended her to friends, to other meditation teachers, and eventually even to his hard-headed skeptical pal, Dan Harris. Here's one thing I'm open to. I'm open to the fact that this is all true. I'm also open to the fact that she sincerely believes what she's doing is real, and that she's a smart, empathic, helpful person, and that she is helping people, but that is actually not true, strictly speaking. Is that possible?
46:26Of course. I mean, that's the most likely explanation in terms of the world that we operate in. You know, that's a generous interpretation that doesn't require any kind of supernatural anything. If I would have to explain it away, that's how I would explain it. Yeah. And yet it's possible that it, in your view, that it's totally legit what's happening. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I would much prefer to believe that. So I think one of the things you're saying is that you have a real openness and maybe even more than openness, like a belief that there's more going on than science can explain. Well, I'm just easy to convince.
47:13So, you know, that has worked for me and against me over the years. But I don't want to let you off the hook that easily because you're easy to convince that's funny. It's funny. And like you're incredibly smart. And so I just want to nail you down on having thought about this a great deal and having been alive for a non-trivial period of time. You're open to the supernatural, to put it quite bluntly, or to the things that might be natural. We call them supernatural now because science hasn't yet caught up. Yeah, oh yes. I mean, if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that science doesn't know everything.
47:56I said in the beginning of all this that a quality I admired about Dan is that he keeps his mind half closed. Dan, like me, is a journalist. It's not just his job. It's a big part of his identity. When journalism works, it's a system for learning about the world, skeptically, so that you're wrong less often. You fact check. You double source. You try to write only what you can prove. But Mark Epstein is not a journalist, and he models a different way to learn about the world. Radical open-mindedness. To be open-minded means you'll get bamboozled sometimes. Mark says people in his circle have certainly fallen for charlatans.
48:35But his mind also allows him to benefit from his conversations with psychic types in a way that Dan's can't. Mark's able to think about how his father may have passed peacefully, might even still be out there somewhere watching him, instead of, like, Dan or me, mainly getting stuck on stuff like how a triangle's not really much of a musical instrument at all, really. I mentioned before how new-agey beliefs have a way of internally setting me off a bit. Plenty that Dan had turned up had given me more of those feelings. But nothing about this conversation with Mark had. And it left me wondering about this balance Mark described, the notion that you'd cultivate in your own mind not just skepticism, but at the same time, credulity as another positive trait.
49:20I asked Dan about it. It's a really tricky balance. And, you know, I think it's more art than science. Just to have the habit of mind to check your own impulse towards certainty. Of course, you want to check other people's too, but not in a paralytic way. So this is where the art comes. like openness plus skepticism. That is a recipe for moving through the world, I think, in a little bit more supple fashion. Does that make sense what I'm saying? It does. To me, that's part of a skillful approach to life. It's like, can you resist certainty? You know, can you be really open in that way? One of the many design flaws in the human operating system is that we live in this world where everything's changing all the time.
50:12Like we're just in a tsunami of uncertainty. And yet we are really allergic to uncertainty. So we are not well designed for the world we inhabit. And so I think that is one of the biggest problems facing the species. We are shouting at each other over politics, over vaccines, over religion, over geopolitical divides without any empathy, without being willing to understand or even attempt to understand the way other people might view the world. And that was one thing when we were fighting with stones, but now we're fighting with nukes and AI. And so it's this addiction to certainty is an existential threat to the species.
50:55And so, you know, Buddhism and other practices or other schools of thought can help nudge you in the direction of the kind of openness that I think Mark is modeling here. Can I say part of what I think is like a little bit difficult about this? Please. Like you and I have talked at extended length about how we believe in the importance of uncertainty. Like we're very certain about how it's important to be uncertain. I can say that. But like, once you start thinking about opening the door to things you can't prove, what I don't understand is like how you decide which things to believe. Like, I don't know where you actually set your level.
51:37Did I ever tell you the story about Joseph Goldstein's first meditation teacher? Joseph Goldstein is my meditation teacher and a friend of mine and Mark's. And he has a story about his first meditation teacher who he came across in a market in India. This guy had been his teacher for a long time. And one day Joseph was out for a stroll in India where he was learning from this guy. And he came across his teacher haggling like fiercely with one of the vendors. So Joseph goes to his teacher, his name is Manindra, after seeing him haggling over a bag of peanuts or whatever it is. And he was like, hey, you are always telling us to keep it simple.
52:15Yeah. And what's that about? And the teacher said to him, yeah, I said, be simple, but not be a simpleton.
52:26And that speaks to me to the balance that Mark is striking here. Like, you should be open, but you should also have boundaries. Yeah. And can you do those two things at the same time? Yeah, and knowing, like, being able to think this might be true, this might not be true, but to notice that in Mark's case, he wants to believe in one belief because it's useful to him, it makes him feel good. Whereas another belief, like, would be really, not just not useful, but, like, damaging. Yes. His mind is open enough that he can talk to everyone, and his mind is supple enough that he can know when for him it's good to change it, and when for him it's good not to.
53:11Yeah. And just to bring it back to the Buddha, the name Buddha, it means awake. And this is a way to not fall into the sleep of certainty, which is comforting for lots of reasons we've discussed, and not to fall into the opposite kind of sleep, which would be unremitting credulity. And if you're going to make your mind a relentless reconsideration machine, well, you've got to be awake for that. And that's why I think the Buddha spent a lot of time talking about the dangers of being attached to your views. He, in fact, said of himself, I'm not a dogmatist. I'm an analyst. You've got to be awake to analyze.
53:53Yeah. But so then with your teachers who, like for you, this started with the question of why are all my teachers seeing a psychic medium? Like, where do you, Dan Harris, land on that specific thing? I land on not agreeing with them that the stuff they're open to is real. but being open to the fact that they might be right. And in that is a teaching, I think, around not being so closed-minded, not being so rigid, not being so addicted to my certainty. It's like in doing this stuff that seems so outlandish to me, they've taught me something. Maybe not what they were aiming to teach me. Like they didn't teach me that psych comedians are for sure a thing, But they did teach me that my reflexive judgmentalism is not super helpful.
55:02Dan, thank you. Pleasure. Thank you for letting me make you part of my dilemma. Oh, I really enjoyed it. Dan Harris. You can find him at his podcast, 10 % Happier. It's full of thoughtful, funny, meditative conversations. A great place to go if you are ever looking for any help at all with the clamorous voice in your head. I really recommend it. If you want to go even deeper on all things 10 % Happier, you can check out Dan's website, danharris.com, which features guided meditations. If you're curious about Mark's work, you can check out his books. The Zen of Therapy is one. The one that Dan found that made him want to seek Mark out is called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart.
55:48As for us, this is our last episode of the season. We're going to take a month to read and think and find more things worth wondering about. In July, we'll be airing some of our favorite classic episodes. In August, do not forget about us. We will be back with new ones. In the meantime, please keep sending us your questions. We had such a fun time answering them for you this season. We're so excited that we get to do some more.
56:34Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinnamineni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was fact-checked by Kate Gallagher. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Vazarian. Additional production support on this episode from Hazel May Bryan. Our intern is Oscar Noxon. This was our last week with Oscar. He has a brilliant, wonderful, relentlessly enthusiastic presence in our office. We are going to miss him, but we are so excited to see what he does next. From the 10 % Happier Podcast, thank you to Dan Harris and senior producer Marissa Schneiderman.
57:10At Odyssey, our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Miranda, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaub. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some bonus audio, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. Have a cool summer.
From the publisher
A journalist finds out that many of his vaunted mentors are seeing a psychic. The same psychic. He decides to pay her a visit.
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