November 12, 2021 • 47 mins
Beth Jacobs is a clinical psychologist in private practice and a former faculty member of the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University. She is also a teacher in the Soto Zen tradition and incorporates Buddhist studies and meditation into her work as both a psychologist and a writer.
In this episode, Eric and Beth discuss her book, The Original Buddhist Psychology: What the Abhidharma Tells Us about How We Think, Feel, and Experience Life
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In This Interview, Beth Jacobs and I Discuss Original Buddhist Psychology and …
- Her book, The Original Buddhist Psychology: What the Abhidharma Tells Us about How We Think, Feel, and Experience Life
- Abhidharma is the structural layout of the Buddha’s original vision of the universe
- Understanding the complex laws of how forces move together in the universe
- The entity of “me” exists from the arbitrary framework we create for ourselves
- The 5 skandhas are what is used to construct our reality: form, feelings, perceptions, habit formations, consciousnesses
- Neuropsychology and the 17 steps of perception
- Interdependent origination is the idea that everything is in motion and connected
- How consciousness is just an interaction
- The various lists of lists in the Abhidharma
- Energy, mindfulness, and investigation
- The idea of gently removing our obstructions
- Writing and meditation as powerful tools for awakening
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If you enjoyed this conversation with Beth Jacobs, you might also enjoy these other episodes:
How to Find Bliss with Bob Thurman
Inner Freedom Through Mindfulness with Jack Kornfield
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, before we get started, I want to give a
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(00:22):
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you Feed dot net slash join. I think that even
though we will always fail in the task to express
the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we work
with it, every time we play with it, we bring
out something new for ourselves. Welcome to the one you feed.
(00:51):
Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
you are what you think ring true. And yet for
many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
(01:13):
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
(01:48):
episode is Beth Jacobs, a clinical psychologist in private practice
and a former faculty member of the Fineberg School of
Medicine of Northwestern University. She's also a teacher in the
Soto's Entry addition, and incorporates Buddhist studies and meditation into
her work as both a psychologist and a writer. Today,
Eric and Beth discuss a couple of her books, including
(02:09):
The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the Abi Dharma tells Us
about how we think, feel, and experience life. Hi, Beth,
welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so glad to
be here. Yeah. We're going to be discussing, among other things,
a practice journal you have for writing and meditation, as
well as your book, The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the
(02:30):
Abby Dharma tells Us about how we think, feel, and
experience life. But before we do that, we'll start, like
we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there
is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
(02:51):
other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops, she thinks
about this for a second, looks up at her grandmother, said, well, grandmother,
which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. Thank you. I love the parable.
(03:13):
I love your radial approach to this parable. How you
just talk about it from so many angles, with so
many people. So in the terms of original Buddhism, you
might name these wolves kusla and akusla, which is usually
translated as wholesome and unwholesome. But I think the real
(03:35):
key to this is the venue of the fight. It's
not medicine square garden, it's not out in the woods,
it's inside. So these wolves, it's very very important that
that's how it's put. And what I think that's saying
is that the battleground is the mind, and that what
we feed these wolves is attention and we feed these
(03:57):
wolves energy. But it's an internal process, and no matter
what we do externally, I think solutions are not complete
unless we deal with our minds and our internal process,
and if we can move those towards more generosity, more flow,
more openness. That's what it says to me. I have
(04:20):
an original If you would tolerate a little verse from
original Buddhism, sure of course. Okay. This is the opening
verse of the Dama Pata, which is one of the
very popular, early believed to be utterances of the Buddha.
Maybe three something stands as a verse, A very practical
(04:40):
down to earth and poetic advice stands a number one
I think says the same thing as a parable mind
precedes all phenomena. Mind is their chief. They are all
mind wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks
or acts, suffering follows them like the wheel that follows
(05:01):
the foot of the ox. Mind proceeds all phenomena. Mind
is their chief. They are all mind wrought. If with
a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows
them like they're never departing shadow. I've always loved that verse,
and I've always loved that metaphor. Is it a metaphor?
(05:23):
You know? The wheel follows the foot of the ox.
I just have such a great visual to that same
with your never departing shadow, and I can see why
you love it because it is very much like the
parable to me, very much, very much. So yep, okay,
So let's talk about what is the Abadharma, which I'm
certain to mispronounce at least four or five times in
(05:45):
this conversation, so you're welcome to say not quite, but enough.
Let's start with what it is, because I think there's
probably a lot of people who have studied Buddhism to
a fair degree who have never heard of it. That's right,
And it is an essential part of the original Buddhist cannon,
so it's very interesting. The original Buddhist cannon is called
(06:05):
the Tippitaka three Baskets, and it's believed that even though
it wasn't written down for a few hundred years um,
that this is pretty close to what the Buddha actually taught.
So one piece of this Tippitaka is called the Venaya,
and that's the monastic code that describes the processes and
(06:27):
rules for the monks and nuns. The second is the
early Sutras, which many people are familiar within the Dama
Poto would be in there. The early Sutras are the
parables and stories and narrative and discourses of the Buddha.
The third part of the early cannon is the Abi Dharma,
and this is a structural layout of the Buddhist vision
(06:50):
of the universe, the multiple worlds, how consciousness interacts with
all of it. It's in the form of lists and
matrix is. It is a lot of cross referencing. It's
ridiculously complicated. There are seven books of the terravann Abi Dharma,
and then there are some spinoffs of other schools. But
(07:14):
if you think of the sutras as conveying to us
the Buddha's original teachings, I think of the Abu Dharma
as conveying to us the Buddha's original vision. And it's
kind of like a right hemisphere left hemisphere thing a
little bit. The sutures are very verbal and narrative, but
many of the sutras when you read them, are lists,
(07:34):
and they get repetitive and didactic and teaching. But if
you want to just look at the raw information, the
pure lists, the way it all lays out the way
it all fits together. It's laid out in this kind
of very structural way in the Abi Dharma. That's what
it is. Yeah, I've often thought of it as sort
of like the list of all the lists, which I
(07:56):
know is a is an oversimplification, but you know, you
don't spend much time around Buddhism before you're like, well,
we've got the eight Full Path, we've got the four
Noble Truths, we've got the seven Factors of Awakening, we've
got the four Foundations of my I mean, it is
list after list and then to me, the Abi Dharma
has always seemed like a collection and cross referencing, like
you said, of all those lists, and extraordinarily complex. And
(08:20):
this is not a show about deep Buddhist scholarship, which
I'm sure you could more than hold your own in. Uh.
This is a show about how people, you know, feed
the good wolf in their own life. So I want
to make sure we stay there. But what sort of
key ideas from the Abi Dharma do you think we
could pull out that help us in our day to
(08:40):
day life. And I've got a couple of my own
that I made directest towards, but I'd love to hear
kind of where you would start, because the other thing is,
in addition to being an author, you have done a
lot of work with clients, right, or a psychotherapist. Yes,
And it all has a meaning to me, you know,
as the Noble truths evolved in terms of how much
suffering I see increasing around me and within me. Yeah,
(09:02):
So it's not just an exercise in the technicalities and
the obsessions. What I think it tells us is that
there are these extraordinarily complex but unchanging laws of how
things come together and move in the universe, how our
consciousness interacts with what we experience, with what we encounter.
(09:27):
And the more we understand these laws, and the more
we understand that they're so outrageously complex that we're not
going to understand all of them, the more fluidly I
think we can move with them and not fighting against them. Basically,
the Abi dharma is completely about meetings. Everything is in motion.
(09:48):
There's no stuff in there. It's all just about how things,
how forces, how events move together. And um, I think
that kind of understanding really helps us move with more
generosity and fluidity. There's a section you right, which speaks
I think to very much what you're saying. You're talking
about something known as the condas. I'm used to hearing
(10:11):
it as the scandas, but you say they are a
roiling caldron of activity and momentum. As aspects of the
different condas arise and fall away, combine and recombine, permutate,
and develop, And I think that speaks to what you
were just saying. Absolutely, I'm used to saying scandas to
we're kind of flipping between sanscrit and Polly. But the
(10:32):
scandas are materials that we use to construct reality, and
there are so many realities, and these materials are based
on the fact that we're human bodies and we have
human senses and they're set up a certain way, and
because of that, we kind of combine these experiences into frameworks.
(10:55):
But they are in constant motion, and what we choose
to draw upon is constantly changing the selectivity and the
ways that we put things together. So it is really
an amazing thing that you can study all these very
detailed lists and feel like it's making you more fluid.
But another way I think of it is that this
(11:17):
is kind of aerating your mind or your consciousness. It's
not that you need to memorize all this information. But
by getting down there on that level where it's so
detailed and atomic, you kind of aerate how you think
about things and how you feel. I've always heard of
the five scandas they're also called the five aggregates, as
being the things that put together, that combine together to
(11:40):
create me and this sense of me. Mm hmmm, I
think that's really good, and how you experience moment to moment.
It's the framework you're using to experience and filter what's
happening moment to moment. And so in Buddhism, when we
talk about no self or non self, we're not saying
(12:01):
that there's nothing here. What we're saying is that what
is here is actually a collection of these five things
combining and countless permutations, roiling and broiling and rotiss ing
and whatever cooking verbs that all comes together, and that
(12:21):
is what makes up what I think of is this
entity of me. Yes, I think that's a beautiful description.
And this entity of you I think does exist. We're
all bodies in a particular lifetime that exists. That's real,
but it's kind of encouraging the flexibility to think of it.
The way, you just describe the flexibility to keep it moving,
(12:43):
to not lock it up, and to realize that the
framework that we're making moments a moment is fairly arbitrary.
Maybe it's useful, maybe it's a little less useful, but
just to remember there are infinite other ways it could
be at any of a moment. And so let's maybe
talk about what these five are, just to go through
(13:04):
them quickly and maybe give a sense of them. Again,
you could study these five things for the rest of
your life if you wanted to write. So obviously we're
going to give it the three minute version, but let's
walk through what the five are, because I do think
it does frame up a basic idea of what this
construction of me looks like. You'll read different translations of
(13:27):
these depending on what era and what school of Buddhism
you're working with, But this is what I work with. Form, feelings, perceptions, habit, formations,
and consciousness is I pluralize it. That's something that comes
from my original teacher, because it helps you remember that
there's no one thing that's a hunk of consciousness that
(13:49):
we're in. So starting with form, that's the bodily material
realities they are there. Um, we're not all mind making
up a universe. So it's the actual truth of physical
reality and how we experience that in sensation continuously, and
how we ignore so many aspects of it continuously. Feelings
(14:11):
in this list is not emotion, but it's a kind
of binary approach avoid plus or minus response to things
that we create as we move through our life. On
a very small scale, every moment of consciousness has an
attached feeling, but the feeling it's just like it's just
(14:33):
yes or no. It's just bimodal. In this arena. It
could be bodily or mental, but it's bimodal. And there's
also a category for neither. But that's just like the
typical abidermic complication. You can never say something without the exception. Okay.
Then moving on to perceptions, the sensory perceptions the five
senses that we're used to in Abidarma, there are six senses.
(14:57):
The mind is considered as sense, but this perception is
about how we put together experiences of our five senses
habit formation. So you can kind of see this is
ascending in complexity as we go. The habit formations are
sometimes called mental formations. Or karmic formations. Another term for
that in modern psychologies cognitive schema. It's just mind wise,
(15:21):
the way we filter what's happening in these terms of ourselves.
And then the last category is consciousness. Is the word
is cheetah, and cheetah is the essential unit of a
consciousness experience. In the Abi dharma, that word you could
spend your whole life on two yes, because you're at
(15:44):
about it. So cheetah is a moment of mind, object
and field meeting. And it's no more than that. It's
a bear coming together of these three elements. So let's
take an experience that we have and see if we
can deconstruct it. This may be a fool's errand, but
I'm going to give it a shot, and you guide
(16:05):
us through it with you. I stub my toe right,
so all of a sudden, there is a physical reality
the form rupa that we talked about. There's a physical reality.
My toe hit something else. There is a basic use
the word feelings pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. So there's an
immediate no, don't like it, you know, unpleasant. Then there
(16:31):
is the sensory element, which scanda would we call that perception.
I call that perception yep, so there would be a
perception of pain also, um, I might include like that
kind of frozen visual thing that you say, like when
something happens, it's kind of shocking, how you suddenly like
see things real intensely. I would include that, or you know,
(16:54):
if you're more of an auditory person like, I would
include the other senses in your perception one there. In
this case, though, the primary one would be the kinesthetic
pain sense, because that's kind of what's radiating dominant. Then
from there I would start to say something like, who
is the idiot who left this block sitting here in
front of me? So now I've moved into mental formation
(17:17):
exactly exactly. That all makes sense to me. It's the
last one, the consciousness or action of consciousness or cheetah,
that I don't really understand. And again I may not
get it in this conversation, but in that example I'm
giving where does that fit? Yet I'm right with you,
And the difficult thing here is that the cheetah is
(17:39):
a too small unit for the event that you're talking about.
So maybe it would help to say the flow of cheetah,
So your consciousness, maybe before you stubbed your toe was
flowing in a really positive, fluid way. You stubb your
toe and suddenly there's like this, Jack, I get movement
(18:01):
in the flow of your consciousness. I think a good
analogy for this is like electrons in a wire, which
I don't really know anything about, but you know, if
you think of the cheetah like the electrons, you know
it's a flow of things and short circuited. Maybe, So
that's how I would think of it. Cheated, the very
raw consciousness experience got diverted or spiked up or something.
(18:53):
This idea that reality is constructed of these forms, this
basic one of feeling of like, don't like neutral? Is
that conditioned or is some of that in built? And
what I mean by that is there a situation in
which with different conditioning, different DNA different if you want
(19:15):
to believe in karma from previous existences, that stubbing my
toe might be pleasant or is that happening at such
a fast, such a base perceptual level that it has
nothing to do with any sort of conscious or even
unconscious conditioning. I'm going to go with the latter part.
That you know, in in the Abiderarma they say like,
(19:37):
if you want to look at objects of consciousness as
positive or negative. It's just sort of there in the object. Now,
this is a kind of debatable point, but what happens
is that we are so reactive and so quickly constructive.
It's like fire and kindling the way we start thinking
(20:00):
about things. This is where you're conditioning is coming in,
I think in the kindling comes in as you move
into the mental formation. Yeah. Yes, I've asked a couple
of neuroscientists about this, because there's something in the way
in neuroscience called teroception, and inter reception is the body's
very basic sense. It's believed that it is very much.
(20:24):
I like it, I don't like it, I have no
feeling about it. All creatures have it. All creatures have
inter reception to some degree. And so when I've heard
feeling in the Buddhist sense of it, you know, it's
often seen to me that that's what Buddhism was describing
what a modern neuroscientist would call interoception. I think. So,
I think that sounds very useful and accurate to me.
(20:47):
There's another point of neuropsychould like to bring in with
those seventeen steps of perception. So if I could just
briefly say that in the Abi Dharma they lay out
seventeen moments of consciousness that are a full perception, and
they're very neuropsychologically accurate, and there's a point in the
(21:07):
middle there where if you compare it to neuropsychological view,
where the limbic system is mixing in and the prefrontal
cortex is mixing in, which is to say, and the
hippocampus memory, association, emotion, planning, motivation, there's a point in
the seventeen steps where all that mixes in. This is
(21:30):
where we're getting our conditioning. Every one of those steps
has feeling with it. But in the middle where that
happens is where we start having emotion, conditioning and reactivity.
As I was reading in that book, it almost sounds
like that's also the hinge on which our ability to
change any of that starts. By change, I don't mean like, oh,
(21:53):
well I just changed my mind and fifty years of
conditioning goes out the window. I don't mean that, but
I mean the possibility exists for it to be different.
That's right. Every moment is an opening for that. We're
talking about a very small scale of time, so it's
not like we can sit there every second and do
(22:14):
three switches, which is basically how it would go. But
this is another one. We're carrying the concept helps even
though we might not work on that scale. So carrying
the concept that first you're taking in things, and then
there's a moment where you bring in all of your
material and your past essentially, and your associations and all
(22:35):
of these ingrained things. And if you're just aware of that,
you watch for it a little bit more and you
get it quicker and quicker, and the quicker you get it,
the more little moments you have that you can change.
There's a great quote from reb Anderson. I'm going to paraphrase,
but he says something like everybody who's studying mindfulness is
looking to extend presence for longer and longer. Bodhisata's in
(23:00):
dead work on bringing mindfulness to smaller and smaller moments. Yeah,
I was telling you before we got started. We just
closed enrollment for a program called Spiritual Habits and one
of the things in that program, and the idea is
little by little, a little becomes a lot, and it
just means that we need to keep noticing these little moments.
Now I know what he's saying, is your your perception
(23:21):
is getting finer and finer. But again, it's not that
we need to be present for fifteen straight minutes for
us to get value out of mindfulness. That's right. I
think it's the same point. The smaller the moment is
that you can reclaim, the more you're going to be
doing it. It astounds me how looking at this original
Buddhist psychology, this Abi dharma, how some of the stuff
(23:44):
that they were able to figure out by sitting in
meditation we are now monitoring and seeing in modern neuroscience.
It is staggering to me. That was kind of this
huge moment when I saw the seventeen ups of perception,
you know, a timeline, and then I thought, well, let
me get out some biological something book and I opened
(24:06):
it and there was a picture of a brain opened up.
It was called something like from Stimulus to Response. And
I looked at him and I'm like, these are the
same thing. In detail, they are the same thing. And
I ran around talking about this to everybody. I was
so excited. But I do think it says something about
the acuity of those minds, and and they also functioned
(24:28):
on very big scales too. This is the small scale,
but you know, it's just a different language. Is pretty
random too, that that's the language that I kind of
grew up in my professional training. But but the fact
that these people could sit and perceive steps of awareness
that are you know, about a sixty of a second
(24:50):
with such finesse, it does blow me away, and it
makes me just love the Abu Dharma a lot, and
it makes me have a certain kind of faith in
the aspects of it that I can't directly verify in
my empirical experience. Yeah, what I'm hearing from Buddhism comes
back and is verified by science. I love having two
(25:13):
verifications like it just gives me more confidence in it. Yes,
it does. You know, I think that probably throughout history
people have had some way to verify. But the main
way I think we verifies that, you know, we continue
feeling better and watching other people blossoming around us. That's
the real verification, right and in our own lives is
(25:34):
that happening. I want to move on to another line
from the book that I thought was really interesting. I'm
going to read it to you and then ask you
to say more about it. You said, I am convinced
that plain emotion directly expressed rarely causes much harm, while
second guessing, sugarcoating and avoidance of feelings can be disastrous.
(25:55):
A feeling wasn't a state people were in, but a
mental factor modulating contact with reality. But the dynamic abbidharma
view opens potential for intervening with emotion. Those sentences weren't
right after each other. I pulled a couple that were
very close together. But this idea of plain emotion can
be directly expressed, And you know, how does the abi
(26:18):
dharma open potential for us intervening with emotion in a
skillful way. It's really a mindfulness type of point here.
But even emotion can be observed dispassionately. And the first
statement comes from my work as a therapist. You know,
for many, many years, it is always this avoidance and
(26:40):
this you know, tripping over it, and this walking backwards
into what you fear that causes the problems when people
are clear with other people. It's just empirical to me.
I just see it over and over when people are
clear and just say calmly how they feel. Sometimes maybe
not even entirely calmly, but when it's clear, people do Okay,
(27:00):
they know what they're working with, and so it's kind
of the same point. When you have the capacity to
understand the process, you have a bit of remove from it,
and you're not so in the cloud of it, but
you're looking at it and dealing with it, whether it's
your own self or interpersonally. So I really do feel
(27:21):
that strongly that one of the best descriptors for what
we want to be is plain plane. Yeah, say more
about that. I guess another thing they say about the
Scandas is it's the upadana scandas. That's a problem, the
clinging to the Scandas. So maybe when I'm saying plane,
I'm meaning a little more like not clinging to things,
(27:43):
not clinging to what we make up, not proliferating, not complicating,
not adorning our experience when experience is just taken in openly,
and you know, I know a lot of Buddhist writers
have written about this much more beautifu fully and I
can say it, but when we just take things in plainly,
(28:04):
it's gorgeous and it's beautiful, and the plane truth of
it has a kind of exquisiteness that all the adornment
doesn't do. Thank you for that. There's another term that's
used a lot in Buddhism and in the Abi Dharma
that I thought we could talk about for a minute,
and it's interdependent origination. What does that mean, Well, you've
(28:26):
hit on the two big things, the non self idea
and this that are core core Buddhism, but also core
Abi Dharma. Interdependent origination gets back to the idea that
nothing happens other than things meeting. There really aren't things
separate from meetings of forces. So it's just that everything
(28:48):
is in motion and everything is incredibly complexly and multiply determined.
The seventh book of the Abi Dharma, the terravan and Abidama,
is called the Patana. That book is a list of
twenty four ways that different phenomena interact, and then it
filters all the phenomena of the rest of the Abidama through.
(29:11):
But apparently when the Buddha thought of this whole thing,
as the story goes, he started emanating six color lights
from every pore of his body, just to give an
idea of how complicated it is. But interdependent origination is
just saying that all we can really look at are
the ways that things interact and that's all that's happening.
(29:34):
Consciousness is an interaction. Yeah, everything is an interaction. I
think would another way of saying it be that this
might be an oversimplification, but I think often about you know,
sort of the infinite causes and conditions. You know, we
tend to say like this happened, because that happened, and yes,
there are some things that we could sort of loosely
say Okay, but I mean you start following that train
(29:56):
of thought back, it is literally infinite, Yes it is, Yes,
it is. You just described one of the twenty four modes,
which is a predominant condition. Sometimes there's a condition that's
really big, but it's never the whole thing. You start
like a child asking why, but then why that? But
then why that? You know how kids do that? And
you keep going. You end up in independent origination, which
(30:19):
is another way of saying you end up in emptiness.
That's what I think the term emptiness is meant used
in Buddhism. There's so much if you keep expanding your
view and the Abu Dharama does not have any real
limits on the view point. Emptiness is a subject I
love to think about and talk about. Like you I
(30:40):
am a practicing zen person. I'm sort of in that
school that's Soto and rinse I from the White Plum lineage.
But the best definition of emptiness I've ever heard, the
one that I really like, it's everything all at once
that is great. And it also comes back to that
quote to everything at all one in this teeny teeny
(31:01):
teeny view. Later on in your book about the Abadarma,
(31:28):
you talk about a couple of lists of lists. There's
a wholesome list and an unwholesome list. Basically, the wholesome
list is called the thirty seven Aids to Enlightenment, and
you say that this is seven different lists from the
Abi Dharma that are all sort of put together into
one big list. But you kind of go through all
those lists and you pull out a lot of things
(31:51):
are mentioned multiple times, and you sort of sum those
down a little bit or try and find some of
the most common pieces. So, in the list of the
thirty seven Aids to Enlightenment, what are some of the
most common factors that show up? Actually, energy is the
most commonly referenced one, which is interesting because you know,
(32:11):
there's a lot of talk about energy and the idea
of not a balanced energy, not over using, not under using.
But energy shows up a lot, and I think actually
mindfulness as a word shows up a lot too, And
you're going to stump me. There's a third one. I
actually just looked at a chart about that this weekend,
(32:33):
and I can't remember the third one. But mindfulness is
kind of a balancing within a lot of the other lists.
I'll just throw an investigation, which is not so frequently
referred to, but I like it, so I'll throw it
in there. And by energy, you don't mean some strange,
mysterious force that may or may not exist in different
(32:53):
in different ways that people interpret it. You mean energy,
as in energy to do things, to pursue things, is
to engage, to be alive. To commits not the right word.
The word that's coming to mind is from you know
Zen great determination. Yes, yes, all of that. Yeah, it's
a kind of a practice energy. I do think commitment
(33:15):
actually is in there. There's a great suiture about Buddha
saying that Dave's ask him how did he cross the flood?
He said, I pushed forward. I would have whirled about.
If I stayed still, I would have drowned. I didn't
push forward. I didn't stay still. That's his cryptic answer.
But that's energy. There's a co on for you. Summing
up that seven lists. You see the result of this
factor analysis determines the balancing act between the stimulating effect
(33:39):
and the calming effective self improvement at the heart of
positive change, momentum and focus have to be partners. I
love that. I think it's a very important point that
is made in how the lists are arranged. You know,
we're all different, and in the Abidama there even some
meditation techniques that are arranged by temperament, so we all
(34:00):
have to adjust our own like soundboard, you know, as
we move, but essentially like keeping it moving, keeping it lively,
but also keeping that kind of calmness and training in
the capacity to be mindful and step away from the
experience internally. That's a balance. I'd love to see that.
(34:23):
That sounds like a very useful tool. I mean, maybe
the way it's presented is not useful, but is to
be able to say, hey, based on these type of temperaments,
here's type of meditation that works for you. I've always
been so drawn to the idea in Hinduism of the
different types of yoga, you know, that people have different
ways of making their way to God. You know. Some
(34:44):
people do it via service to the world, some people
do it via their intellect, some people do it through
love and devotion, and you know, it says, okay, people
are different. It seems to me that with Buddhism, very
much in the Western presentation of it has been largely
sit down and follow your breath. It's diversified a little
bit now in the last few years, we're getting a
(35:06):
little bit more embodiment practices, some different things. And I
feel like I spent fifteen years trying to do breath
meditation and not being very good at it, you know,
and it really struggling with it, and all of a sudden,
at one point somebody was like, why don't you listen
to sounds, And all of a sudden, I was like,
I can concentrate, my goodness. I would be really interested
(35:29):
in that part of the Abi Dharma, which says, hey,
what are the different types of meditation for the different temperaments?
I have a chart on this. I'd love to see that. Yeah.
It uses the forty meditation subjects that are in the
Sati Pitana Sutra, and it breaks them into six temperaments
and recommends it for ones. But I do think, you know,
both are useful those long periods where you struggle with
(35:52):
something that doesn't fit, and then that click period where
you're like, I could just adjust this and it's easier
for me. But you're so right, And it's like the
a fault path too. There are just different ways to enter,
you know. I guess there are as many paths as
there are Buddhists. So we talked about the main factors
for good, the main factors for wholesomeness. You title the
(36:15):
chapter the Way Things Go Wrong. I don't know if
the list has a name, but you say, basically, there's
an equally complex system that lays out the unwholesome qualities.
And you did the same thing. You kind of went
through and tried to service area. Let me boil this down.
Where do we end up there? I think where we
end up there is the idea of the obstruction that
basically we have what we need and we are removing obstructions,
(36:39):
and that approach is gentler and easier to kind of
really sink into and use in a practical way. You know,
I think the basic hindrances are good. I think the
other thing that I would emphasize about the list of
unwholesome obstructions. You know, there are hindrances, defilements, fetters, funds. Yea,
(37:01):
it's just like all these different ways that that it's
it's described, but it's again there is this kind of
balance that's very personal about what kinds of things get
in your way. And everything operates on many levels, and
that's important too. So in one list something will be
described one way, and another list that same word will
(37:23):
be described differently. And I know I give examples of
this in the book, but you know there's like you know,
a slight distraction and there's an intense rumination. Those are
the same process, but they're on different scales. So part
of what happens why these lists get so complicated, they're
talking about the different scales of obstruction that can happen.
(37:45):
You sort of boil all those down to some degree
to the things that show up in the four body
soft vows that I say every morning after I meditate, right, Greed,
hatred and delusion or craving, you know, aversion and ignorance.
I mean there you wanting not wanting. I always sort
of rephrase them like wanting, not wanting, and being confused
(38:05):
about all of that. That's a nice summary of the
hub of the wheel of life. Yes, yeah, yeah, you know,
I want that, I want that, I want that, I
don't want that. I don't want that, I don't want that.
And the realization or the confusion around the fact that, like, well,
that's why you're not that's why you're struggling. It's really nice.
I love in the body stuff of us. Again, there's
(38:27):
lots of different translations, but one of them I like
is agreed, hatred, and delusion rise endlessly. I vowed abandoned them,
and I like that rise endlessly, not from a pessimistic perspective,
but from a perspective of like, well, of course you're
still having them. That's what happens. They keep coming and
you work with them as skillfully as you can. There's
not a time, you know, at least that seems in
(38:49):
my imminent future where those are disappearing. No, not at
all mine either. But I think that, you know, that
kind of brings me to the good fortune of the
human birth is that we won't solve these things. Were
on the edge of a mystery, we sort of sort
of sense it but we don't really get it. We
keep trying to say it, but we can't really And
(39:09):
these things are part of our human existence that they
do just continuously arise, and you know, our our mission
is to curate this flow of consciousness throughout this existence.
Another plain thing I think of sometimes is like the
purpose of life is to clean consciousness. You know, it's
(39:31):
kind of boring, but I think it's sort of true
that that has to do with obstructions again also as
removing obstructions. But it'll just keep going. And and that
is our good fortune that we do have enough awareness
and enough of the suffering to keep developing if we
find a way to develop it. Yep, you said something
(39:52):
there a moment ago about the mystery. We keep trying
to sort of say things but we can't. Which is
a great transition into the next area I wanted to
go to, which is another book of yours that I
unfortunately left sitting in the other room. But it's a
book about writing and meditation. And you know, you sort
(40:12):
of start the book off by saying, in your tradition, Zen,
which is also mine, we sort of pooh pooh words
like you know, you know, burn your words. You can't
say it every you know, every word is false. I mean,
there's a there's a real like, hey, get rid of words.
But you say that writing is a really powerful tool
for us on the journey to awakening, along with meditation.
(40:34):
So tell me a little bit about why those two
go so well together and why you wanted to create
a book that really explicitly marries them. Again, this is
something that's a little bit temperament bound, because I don't
I don't think this is for everyone, but it's probably
for more people than people might think. I think that
even though we will always fail in the task to
express the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we
(40:59):
work with it, every time we play with it, we
bring out something new for ourselves. We articulate something that
was half formed in our mind or our bodies, and
then that is a useful process. Writing takes that process
a little bit further. Because I've experimented with us how
(41:19):
much I might sit and carefully think something through, something
new will come out every single time I sit and
write about it. It's different. It's a little bit of
a bodily remove And also you're making an object. You're
making a literal object, even if it's you know, a
file on a screen, you are still making something. And
(41:39):
by seeing your internal process turn into an object, you remember, oh,
my internal process is just a bunch of objects. And
by bringing it out and articulating it, you carry it further,
and you carry awareness further. Your pen carries your awareness.
You don't even have to worry about it. I write pen,
(42:00):
but same with a keyboard. Yeah, it makes me think
back to an earlier sentence of years I read there
are a royal in Culdron of activity and momentum. And
writing is one way, at least for me, of slowing
that process down. I mean not literally slowing it down,
but does but slowing down what's going on in my mind.
(42:23):
It's you know, thoughts and emotions are so slippery, you know,
they feel so real and yet they're so slippery. And
writing is a way I can deconstruct, you know, what
are the elements that are going on here? What are
the things? And you quote a bunch of studies that
are that are pretty clear. We've talked about some of
them with different people in the show. That expressive writing
can be a really good tool in our growth and healing.
(42:47):
Absolutely um And you know, they're all these very objective
measures as well as subjective that you know, even at
very small amounts, surprisingly small amounts of expressive writing have
some healing power. So I absolutely believe it. I've worked
with kids, teenagers, grandparents, Expressive Writing group that I work
(43:07):
with people that you just wouldn't even think might get
anything out of it do, But I think you're right.
Literally it does slow down thought processes. They move at
different rates, and like those monks that could break down,
you know, the split second into all these steps. Writing
kind of does that is kind of deconstructing, mulching through
(43:28):
things that that you're talking about. It's very powerful. Um.
Neona Panica Terror writes a lot about like what a
mess the average mind is. He describes it as like
I can't remember exactly. It's kind of poetic, like you know,
cobwebs and and half baked thoughts and emotions flying around
and this and that, and he just says, one thing
(43:51):
we need to do is clean it up again. So
writing forces it to this level of articulation that will
always surprises you. That's my favorite thing about writing is
you can surprise yourself with what you write. Um, but
it always kind of moves it out of your body.
There's also that element of it being a physical act,
and moving emotion out of your body is is critical
(44:14):
for people. I don't think people do that enough to
kind of help the process move through you. Yeah, you
have a line I love slightly different than emotion. But
you say meditation and writing rely on structure and repetition
while they court surprise and revelation. I think it's a
beautifully written line and so true. You know, structure and repetition,
(44:34):
but what we're after, right is surprise and revelation. It's
it's a really nice way of thinking about it. So
we're near the end of our time here. You and
I are going to continue to talk a little bit
in the post show conversation about um a couple of
the exercises from the book, because there's some really great
exercises that are very different than anything I have ever
(44:55):
seen before. A lot of journal writing prompts, I've just
seen a lot of them at this point in my life,
but your book, I was like, I've never seen anything
quite like it about you know, a contemplative way. It's
almost as if writing and meditation combined together to make
something better and stronger. So we'll do a couple of
those exercises in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd
(45:17):
like access to the post show conversation as well as
a special episode I do called Teaching Song and a
poem and the Joys of being a member of the
one you Feed, you can go to when you feed
dot net slash join. Is there any last things about
the Abi Dharma that you feel like we haven't covered
that are really important? The thing that I would say
(45:39):
is there's a ton of information and it's never going
to be a super popular study in this in this
current world. But if you can do anything where you
just kind of dip into the complexity, the multiplicity and
the interactivity of how we are experiencing. Whenever you do that,
(46:04):
I think you open yourself and I think you dim
the intensity of how hard you're holding onto yourself, and
you'll feel it. There's this kind of weird, refreshing quality
in it. I think that makes people more generous. It's
a beautiful way to end. And your book is called
the original Buddhist Psychology. What the Abi Dharma tells us
about how we think, feel, and experience life, and it
(46:27):
is of anything I have read so far, one of
the best introductions that I have read that made it
very clear. So listeners, if you're interested in this topic,
this is a great place to start. Thank you so
much for that and for our conversation. Yeah, thank you
so much for coming on, Beth. I really appreciate it.
(47:00):
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(00:22):
all the benefits that come with it, go to One
you Feed dot net slash join. I think that even
though we will always fail in the task to express
the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we work
with it, every time we play with it, we bring
out something new for ourselves. Welcome to the one you feed.
(00:51):
Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
you are what you think ring true. And yet for
many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
(01:13):
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
(01:48):
episode is Beth Jacobs, a clinical psychologist in private practice
and a former faculty member of the Fineberg School of
Medicine of Northwestern University. She's also a teacher in the
Soto's Entry addition, and incorporates Buddhist studies and meditation into
her work as both a psychologist and a writer. Today,
Eric and Beth discuss a couple of her books, including
(02:09):
The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the Abi Dharma tells Us
about how we think, feel, and experience life. Hi, Beth,
welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so glad to
be here. Yeah. We're going to be discussing, among other things,
a practice journal you have for writing and meditation, as
well as your book, The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the
(02:30):
Abby Dharma tells Us about how we think, feel, and
experience life. But before we do that, we'll start, like
we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there
is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
(02:51):
other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops, she thinks
about this for a second, looks up at her grandmother, said, well, grandmother,
which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. Thank you. I love the parable.
(03:13):
I love your radial approach to this parable. How you
just talk about it from so many angles, with so
many people. So in the terms of original Buddhism, you
might name these wolves kusla and akusla, which is usually
translated as wholesome and unwholesome. But I think the real
(03:35):
key to this is the venue of the fight. It's
not medicine square garden, it's not out in the woods,
it's inside. So these wolves, it's very very important that
that's how it's put. And what I think that's saying
is that the battleground is the mind, and that what
we feed these wolves is attention and we feed these
(03:57):
wolves energy. But it's an internal process, and no matter
what we do externally, I think solutions are not complete
unless we deal with our minds and our internal process,
and if we can move those towards more generosity, more flow,
more openness. That's what it says to me. I have
(04:20):
an original If you would tolerate a little verse from
original Buddhism, sure of course. Okay. This is the opening
verse of the Dama Pata, which is one of the
very popular, early believed to be utterances of the Buddha.
Maybe three something stands as a verse, A very practical
(04:40):
down to earth and poetic advice stands a number one
I think says the same thing as a parable mind
precedes all phenomena. Mind is their chief. They are all
mind wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks
or acts, suffering follows them like the wheel that follows
(05:01):
the foot of the ox. Mind proceeds all phenomena. Mind
is their chief. They are all mind wrought. If with
a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows
them like they're never departing shadow. I've always loved that verse,
and I've always loved that metaphor. Is it a metaphor?
(05:23):
You know? The wheel follows the foot of the ox.
I just have such a great visual to that same
with your never departing shadow, and I can see why
you love it because it is very much like the
parable to me, very much, very much. So yep, okay,
So let's talk about what is the Abadharma, which I'm
certain to mispronounce at least four or five times in
(05:45):
this conversation, so you're welcome to say not quite, but enough.
Let's start with what it is, because I think there's
probably a lot of people who have studied Buddhism to
a fair degree who have never heard of it. That's right,
And it is an essential part of the original Buddhist cannon,
so it's very interesting. The original Buddhist cannon is called
(06:05):
the Tippitaka three Baskets, and it's believed that even though
it wasn't written down for a few hundred years um,
that this is pretty close to what the Buddha actually taught.
So one piece of this Tippitaka is called the Venaya,
and that's the monastic code that describes the processes and
(06:27):
rules for the monks and nuns. The second is the
early Sutras, which many people are familiar within the Dama
Poto would be in there. The early Sutras are the
parables and stories and narrative and discourses of the Buddha.
The third part of the early cannon is the Abi Dharma,
and this is a structural layout of the Buddhist vision
(06:50):
of the universe, the multiple worlds, how consciousness interacts with
all of it. It's in the form of lists and
matrix is. It is a lot of cross referencing. It's
ridiculously complicated. There are seven books of the terravann Abi Dharma,
and then there are some spinoffs of other schools. But
(07:14):
if you think of the sutras as conveying to us
the Buddha's original teachings, I think of the Abu Dharma
as conveying to us the Buddha's original vision. And it's
kind of like a right hemisphere left hemisphere thing a
little bit. The sutures are very verbal and narrative, but
many of the sutras when you read them, are lists,
(07:34):
and they get repetitive and didactic and teaching. But if
you want to just look at the raw information, the
pure lists, the way it all lays out the way
it all fits together. It's laid out in this kind
of very structural way in the Abi Dharma. That's what
it is. Yeah, I've often thought of it as sort
of like the list of all the lists, which I
(07:56):
know is a is an oversimplification, but you know, you
don't spend much time around Buddhism before you're like, well,
we've got the eight Full Path, we've got the four
Noble Truths, we've got the seven Factors of Awakening, we've
got the four Foundations of my I mean, it is
list after list and then to me, the Abi Dharma
has always seemed like a collection and cross referencing, like
you said, of all those lists, and extraordinarily complex. And
(08:20):
this is not a show about deep Buddhist scholarship, which
I'm sure you could more than hold your own in. Uh.
This is a show about how people, you know, feed
the good wolf in their own life. So I want
to make sure we stay there. But what sort of
key ideas from the Abi Dharma do you think we
could pull out that help us in our day to
(08:40):
day life. And I've got a couple of my own
that I made directest towards, but I'd love to hear
kind of where you would start, because the other thing is,
in addition to being an author, you have done a
lot of work with clients, right, or a psychotherapist. Yes,
And it all has a meaning to me, you know,
as the Noble truths evolved in terms of how much
suffering I see increasing around me and within me. Yeah,
(09:02):
So it's not just an exercise in the technicalities and
the obsessions. What I think it tells us is that
there are these extraordinarily complex but unchanging laws of how
things come together and move in the universe, how our
consciousness interacts with what we experience, with what we encounter.
(09:27):
And the more we understand these laws, and the more
we understand that they're so outrageously complex that we're not
going to understand all of them, the more fluidly I
think we can move with them and not fighting against them. Basically,
the Abi dharma is completely about meetings. Everything is in motion.
(09:48):
There's no stuff in there. It's all just about how things,
how forces, how events move together. And um, I think
that kind of understanding really helps us move with more
generosity and fluidity. There's a section you right, which speaks
I think to very much what you're saying. You're talking
about something known as the condas. I'm used to hearing
(10:11):
it as the scandas, but you say they are a
roiling caldron of activity and momentum. As aspects of the
different condas arise and fall away, combine and recombine, permutate,
and develop, And I think that speaks to what you
were just saying. Absolutely, I'm used to saying scandas to
we're kind of flipping between sanscrit and Polly. But the
(10:32):
scandas are materials that we use to construct reality, and
there are so many realities, and these materials are based
on the fact that we're human bodies and we have
human senses and they're set up a certain way, and
because of that, we kind of combine these experiences into frameworks.
(10:55):
But they are in constant motion, and what we choose
to draw upon is constantly changing the selectivity and the
ways that we put things together. So it is really
an amazing thing that you can study all these very
detailed lists and feel like it's making you more fluid.
But another way I think of it is that this
(11:17):
is kind of aerating your mind or your consciousness. It's
not that you need to memorize all this information. But
by getting down there on that level where it's so
detailed and atomic, you kind of aerate how you think
about things and how you feel. I've always heard of
the five scandas they're also called the five aggregates, as
being the things that put together, that combine together to
(11:40):
create me and this sense of me. Mm hmmm, I
think that's really good, and how you experience moment to moment.
It's the framework you're using to experience and filter what's
happening moment to moment. And so in Buddhism, when we
talk about no self or non self, we're not saying
(12:01):
that there's nothing here. What we're saying is that what
is here is actually a collection of these five things
combining and countless permutations, roiling and broiling and rotiss ing
and whatever cooking verbs that all comes together, and that
(12:21):
is what makes up what I think of is this
entity of me. Yes, I think that's a beautiful description.
And this entity of you I think does exist. We're
all bodies in a particular lifetime that exists. That's real,
but it's kind of encouraging the flexibility to think of it.
The way, you just describe the flexibility to keep it moving,
(12:43):
to not lock it up, and to realize that the
framework that we're making moments a moment is fairly arbitrary.
Maybe it's useful, maybe it's a little less useful, but
just to remember there are infinite other ways it could
be at any of a moment. And so let's maybe
talk about what these five are, just to go through
(13:04):
them quickly and maybe give a sense of them. Again,
you could study these five things for the rest of
your life if you wanted to write. So obviously we're
going to give it the three minute version, but let's
walk through what the five are, because I do think
it does frame up a basic idea of what this
construction of me looks like. You'll read different translations of
(13:27):
these depending on what era and what school of Buddhism
you're working with, But this is what I work with. Form, feelings, perceptions, habit, formations,
and consciousness is I pluralize it. That's something that comes
from my original teacher, because it helps you remember that
there's no one thing that's a hunk of consciousness that
(13:49):
we're in. So starting with form, that's the bodily material
realities they are there. Um, we're not all mind making
up a universe. So it's the actual truth of physical
reality and how we experience that in sensation continuously, and
how we ignore so many aspects of it continuously. Feelings
(14:11):
in this list is not emotion, but it's a kind
of binary approach avoid plus or minus response to things
that we create as we move through our life. On
a very small scale, every moment of consciousness has an
attached feeling, but the feeling it's just like it's just
(14:33):
yes or no. It's just bimodal. In this arena. It
could be bodily or mental, but it's bimodal. And there's
also a category for neither. But that's just like the
typical abidermic complication. You can never say something without the exception. Okay.
Then moving on to perceptions, the sensory perceptions the five
senses that we're used to in Abidarma, there are six senses.
(14:57):
The mind is considered as sense, but this perception is
about how we put together experiences of our five senses
habit formation. So you can kind of see this is
ascending in complexity as we go. The habit formations are
sometimes called mental formations. Or karmic formations. Another term for
that in modern psychologies cognitive schema. It's just mind wise,
(15:21):
the way we filter what's happening in these terms of ourselves.
And then the last category is consciousness. Is the word
is cheetah, and cheetah is the essential unit of a
consciousness experience. In the Abi dharma, that word you could
spend your whole life on two yes, because you're at
(15:44):
about it. So cheetah is a moment of mind, object
and field meeting. And it's no more than that. It's
a bear coming together of these three elements. So let's
take an experience that we have and see if we
can deconstruct it. This may be a fool's errand, but
I'm going to give it a shot, and you guide
(16:05):
us through it with you. I stub my toe right,
so all of a sudden, there is a physical reality
the form rupa that we talked about. There's a physical reality.
My toe hit something else. There is a basic use
the word feelings pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. So there's an
immediate no, don't like it, you know, unpleasant. Then there
(16:31):
is the sensory element, which scanda would we call that perception.
I call that perception yep, so there would be a
perception of pain also, um, I might include like that
kind of frozen visual thing that you say, like when
something happens, it's kind of shocking, how you suddenly like
see things real intensely. I would include that, or you know,
(16:54):
if you're more of an auditory person like, I would
include the other senses in your perception one there. In
this case, though, the primary one would be the kinesthetic
pain sense, because that's kind of what's radiating dominant. Then
from there I would start to say something like, who
is the idiot who left this block sitting here in
front of me? So now I've moved into mental formation
(17:17):
exactly exactly. That all makes sense to me. It's the
last one, the consciousness or action of consciousness or cheetah,
that I don't really understand. And again I may not
get it in this conversation, but in that example I'm
giving where does that fit? Yet I'm right with you,
And the difficult thing here is that the cheetah is
(17:39):
a too small unit for the event that you're talking about.
So maybe it would help to say the flow of cheetah,
So your consciousness, maybe before you stubbed your toe was
flowing in a really positive, fluid way. You stubb your
toe and suddenly there's like this, Jack, I get movement
(18:01):
in the flow of your consciousness. I think a good
analogy for this is like electrons in a wire, which
I don't really know anything about, but you know, if
you think of the cheetah like the electrons, you know
it's a flow of things and short circuited. Maybe, So
that's how I would think of it. Cheated, the very
raw consciousness experience got diverted or spiked up or something.
(18:53):
This idea that reality is constructed of these forms, this
basic one of feeling of like, don't like neutral? Is
that conditioned or is some of that in built? And
what I mean by that is there a situation in
which with different conditioning, different DNA different if you want
(19:15):
to believe in karma from previous existences, that stubbing my
toe might be pleasant or is that happening at such
a fast, such a base perceptual level that it has
nothing to do with any sort of conscious or even
unconscious conditioning. I'm going to go with the latter part.
That you know, in in the Abiderarma they say like,
(19:37):
if you want to look at objects of consciousness as
positive or negative. It's just sort of there in the object. Now,
this is a kind of debatable point, but what happens
is that we are so reactive and so quickly constructive.
It's like fire and kindling the way we start thinking
(20:00):
about things. This is where you're conditioning is coming in,
I think in the kindling comes in as you move
into the mental formation. Yeah. Yes, I've asked a couple
of neuroscientists about this, because there's something in the way
in neuroscience called teroception, and inter reception is the body's
very basic sense. It's believed that it is very much.
(20:24):
I like it, I don't like it, I have no
feeling about it. All creatures have it. All creatures have
inter reception to some degree. And so when I've heard
feeling in the Buddhist sense of it, you know, it's
often seen to me that that's what Buddhism was describing
what a modern neuroscientist would call interoception. I think. So,
I think that sounds very useful and accurate to me.
(20:47):
There's another point of neuropsychould like to bring in with
those seventeen steps of perception. So if I could just
briefly say that in the Abi Dharma they lay out
seventeen moments of consciousness that are a full perception, and
they're very neuropsychologically accurate, and there's a point in the
(21:07):
middle there where if you compare it to neuropsychological view,
where the limbic system is mixing in and the prefrontal
cortex is mixing in, which is to say, and the
hippocampus memory, association, emotion, planning, motivation, there's a point in
the seventeen steps where all that mixes in. This is
(21:30):
where we're getting our conditioning. Every one of those steps
has feeling with it. But in the middle where that
happens is where we start having emotion, conditioning and reactivity.
As I was reading in that book, it almost sounds
like that's also the hinge on which our ability to
change any of that starts. By change, I don't mean like, oh,
(21:53):
well I just changed my mind and fifty years of
conditioning goes out the window. I don't mean that, but
I mean the possibility exists for it to be different.
That's right. Every moment is an opening for that. We're
talking about a very small scale of time, so it's
not like we can sit there every second and do
(22:14):
three switches, which is basically how it would go. But
this is another one. We're carrying the concept helps even
though we might not work on that scale. So carrying
the concept that first you're taking in things, and then
there's a moment where you bring in all of your
material and your past essentially, and your associations and all
(22:35):
of these ingrained things. And if you're just aware of that,
you watch for it a little bit more and you
get it quicker and quicker, and the quicker you get it,
the more little moments you have that you can change.
There's a great quote from reb Anderson. I'm going to paraphrase,
but he says something like everybody who's studying mindfulness is
looking to extend presence for longer and longer. Bodhisata's in
(23:00):
dead work on bringing mindfulness to smaller and smaller moments. Yeah,
I was telling you before we got started. We just
closed enrollment for a program called Spiritual Habits and one
of the things in that program, and the idea is
little by little, a little becomes a lot, and it
just means that we need to keep noticing these little moments.
Now I know what he's saying, is your your perception
(23:21):
is getting finer and finer. But again, it's not that
we need to be present for fifteen straight minutes for
us to get value out of mindfulness. That's right. I
think it's the same point. The smaller the moment is
that you can reclaim, the more you're going to be
doing it. It astounds me how looking at this original
Buddhist psychology, this Abi dharma, how some of the stuff
(23:44):
that they were able to figure out by sitting in
meditation we are now monitoring and seeing in modern neuroscience.
It is staggering to me. That was kind of this
huge moment when I saw the seventeen ups of perception,
you know, a timeline, and then I thought, well, let
me get out some biological something book and I opened
(24:06):
it and there was a picture of a brain opened up.
It was called something like from Stimulus to Response. And
I looked at him and I'm like, these are the
same thing. In detail, they are the same thing. And
I ran around talking about this to everybody. I was
so excited. But I do think it says something about
the acuity of those minds, and and they also functioned
(24:28):
on very big scales too. This is the small scale,
but you know, it's just a different language. Is pretty
random too, that that's the language that I kind of
grew up in my professional training. But but the fact
that these people could sit and perceive steps of awareness
that are you know, about a sixty of a second
(24:50):
with such finesse, it does blow me away, and it
makes me just love the Abu Dharma a lot, and
it makes me have a certain kind of faith in
the aspects of it that I can't directly verify in
my empirical experience. Yeah, what I'm hearing from Buddhism comes
back and is verified by science. I love having two
(25:13):
verifications like it just gives me more confidence in it. Yes,
it does. You know, I think that probably throughout history
people have had some way to verify. But the main
way I think we verifies that, you know, we continue
feeling better and watching other people blossoming around us. That's
the real verification, right and in our own lives is
(25:34):
that happening. I want to move on to another line
from the book that I thought was really interesting. I'm
going to read it to you and then ask you
to say more about it. You said, I am convinced
that plain emotion directly expressed rarely causes much harm, while
second guessing, sugarcoating and avoidance of feelings can be disastrous.
(25:55):
A feeling wasn't a state people were in, but a
mental factor modulating contact with reality. But the dynamic abbidharma
view opens potential for intervening with emotion. Those sentences weren't
right after each other. I pulled a couple that were
very close together. But this idea of plain emotion can
be directly expressed, And you know, how does the abi
(26:18):
dharma open potential for us intervening with emotion in a
skillful way. It's really a mindfulness type of point here.
But even emotion can be observed dispassionately. And the first
statement comes from my work as a therapist. You know,
for many, many years, it is always this avoidance and
(26:40):
this you know, tripping over it, and this walking backwards
into what you fear that causes the problems when people
are clear with other people. It's just empirical to me.
I just see it over and over when people are
clear and just say calmly how they feel. Sometimes maybe
not even entirely calmly, but when it's clear, people do Okay,
(27:00):
they know what they're working with, and so it's kind
of the same point. When you have the capacity to
understand the process, you have a bit of remove from it,
and you're not so in the cloud of it, but
you're looking at it and dealing with it, whether it's
your own self or interpersonally. So I really do feel
(27:21):
that strongly that one of the best descriptors for what
we want to be is plain plane. Yeah, say more
about that. I guess another thing they say about the
Scandas is it's the upadana scandas. That's a problem, the
clinging to the Scandas. So maybe when I'm saying plane,
I'm meaning a little more like not clinging to things,
(27:43):
not clinging to what we make up, not proliferating, not complicating,
not adorning our experience when experience is just taken in openly,
and you know, I know a lot of Buddhist writers
have written about this much more beautifu fully and I
can say it, but when we just take things in plainly,
(28:04):
it's gorgeous and it's beautiful, and the plane truth of
it has a kind of exquisiteness that all the adornment
doesn't do. Thank you for that. There's another term that's
used a lot in Buddhism and in the Abi Dharma
that I thought we could talk about for a minute,
and it's interdependent origination. What does that mean, Well, you've
(28:26):
hit on the two big things, the non self idea
and this that are core core Buddhism, but also core
Abi Dharma. Interdependent origination gets back to the idea that
nothing happens other than things meeting. There really aren't things
separate from meetings of forces. So it's just that everything
(28:48):
is in motion and everything is incredibly complexly and multiply determined.
The seventh book of the Abi Dharma, the terravan and Abidama,
is called the Patana. That book is a list of
twenty four ways that different phenomena interact, and then it
filters all the phenomena of the rest of the Abidama through.
(29:11):
But apparently when the Buddha thought of this whole thing,
as the story goes, he started emanating six color lights
from every pore of his body, just to give an
idea of how complicated it is. But interdependent origination is
just saying that all we can really look at are
the ways that things interact and that's all that's happening.
(29:34):
Consciousness is an interaction. Yeah, everything is an interaction. I
think would another way of saying it be that this
might be an oversimplification, but I think often about you know,
sort of the infinite causes and conditions. You know, we
tend to say like this happened, because that happened, and yes,
there are some things that we could sort of loosely
say Okay, but I mean you start following that train
(29:56):
of thought back, it is literally infinite, Yes it is, Yes,
it is. You just described one of the twenty four modes,
which is a predominant condition. Sometimes there's a condition that's
really big, but it's never the whole thing. You start
like a child asking why, but then why that? But
then why that? You know how kids do that? And
you keep going. You end up in independent origination, which
(30:19):
is another way of saying you end up in emptiness.
That's what I think the term emptiness is meant used
in Buddhism. There's so much if you keep expanding your
view and the Abu Dharama does not have any real
limits on the view point. Emptiness is a subject I
love to think about and talk about. Like you I
(30:40):
am a practicing zen person. I'm sort of in that
school that's Soto and rinse I from the White Plum lineage.
But the best definition of emptiness I've ever heard, the
one that I really like, it's everything all at once
that is great. And it also comes back to that
quote to everything at all one in this teeny teeny
(31:01):
teeny view. Later on in your book about the Abadarma,
(31:28):
you talk about a couple of lists of lists. There's
a wholesome list and an unwholesome list. Basically, the wholesome
list is called the thirty seven Aids to Enlightenment, and
you say that this is seven different lists from the
Abi Dharma that are all sort of put together into
one big list. But you kind of go through all
those lists and you pull out a lot of things
(31:51):
are mentioned multiple times, and you sort of sum those
down a little bit or try and find some of
the most common pieces. So, in the list of the
thirty seven Aids to Enlightenment, what are some of the
most common factors that show up? Actually, energy is the
most commonly referenced one, which is interesting because you know,
(32:11):
there's a lot of talk about energy and the idea
of not a balanced energy, not over using, not under using.
But energy shows up a lot, and I think actually
mindfulness as a word shows up a lot too, And
you're going to stump me. There's a third one. I
actually just looked at a chart about that this weekend,
(32:33):
and I can't remember the third one. But mindfulness is
kind of a balancing within a lot of the other lists.
I'll just throw an investigation, which is not so frequently
referred to, but I like it, so I'll throw it
in there. And by energy, you don't mean some strange,
mysterious force that may or may not exist in different
(32:53):
in different ways that people interpret it. You mean energy,
as in energy to do things, to pursue things, is
to engage, to be alive. To commits not the right word.
The word that's coming to mind is from you know
Zen great determination. Yes, yes, all of that. Yeah, it's
a kind of a practice energy. I do think commitment
(33:15):
actually is in there. There's a great suiture about Buddha
saying that Dave's ask him how did he cross the flood?
He said, I pushed forward. I would have whirled about.
If I stayed still, I would have drowned. I didn't
push forward. I didn't stay still. That's his cryptic answer.
But that's energy. There's a co on for you. Summing
up that seven lists. You see the result of this
factor analysis determines the balancing act between the stimulating effect
(33:39):
and the calming effective self improvement at the heart of
positive change, momentum and focus have to be partners. I
love that. I think it's a very important point that
is made in how the lists are arranged. You know,
we're all different, and in the Abidama there even some
meditation techniques that are arranged by temperament, so we all
(34:00):
have to adjust our own like soundboard, you know, as
we move, but essentially like keeping it moving, keeping it lively,
but also keeping that kind of calmness and training in
the capacity to be mindful and step away from the
experience internally. That's a balance. I'd love to see that.
(34:23):
That sounds like a very useful tool. I mean, maybe
the way it's presented is not useful, but is to
be able to say, hey, based on these type of temperaments,
here's type of meditation that works for you. I've always
been so drawn to the idea in Hinduism of the
different types of yoga, you know, that people have different
ways of making their way to God. You know. Some
(34:44):
people do it via service to the world, some people
do it via their intellect, some people do it through
love and devotion, and you know, it says, okay, people
are different. It seems to me that with Buddhism, very
much in the Western presentation of it has been largely
sit down and follow your breath. It's diversified a little
bit now in the last few years, we're getting a
(35:06):
little bit more embodiment practices, some different things. And I
feel like I spent fifteen years trying to do breath
meditation and not being very good at it, you know,
and it really struggling with it, and all of a sudden,
at one point somebody was like, why don't you listen
to sounds, And all of a sudden, I was like,
I can concentrate, my goodness. I would be really interested
(35:29):
in that part of the Abi Dharma, which says, hey,
what are the different types of meditation for the different temperaments?
I have a chart on this. I'd love to see that. Yeah.
It uses the forty meditation subjects that are in the
Sati Pitana Sutra, and it breaks them into six temperaments
and recommends it for ones. But I do think, you know,
both are useful those long periods where you struggle with
(35:52):
something that doesn't fit, and then that click period where
you're like, I could just adjust this and it's easier
for me. But you're so right, And it's like the
a fault path too. There are just different ways to enter,
you know. I guess there are as many paths as
there are Buddhists. So we talked about the main factors
for good, the main factors for wholesomeness. You title the
(36:15):
chapter the Way Things Go Wrong. I don't know if
the list has a name, but you say, basically, there's
an equally complex system that lays out the unwholesome qualities.
And you did the same thing. You kind of went
through and tried to service area. Let me boil this down.
Where do we end up there? I think where we
end up there is the idea of the obstruction that
basically we have what we need and we are removing obstructions,
(36:39):
and that approach is gentler and easier to kind of
really sink into and use in a practical way. You know,
I think the basic hindrances are good. I think the
other thing that I would emphasize about the list of
unwholesome obstructions. You know, there are hindrances, defilements, fetters, funds. Yea,
(37:01):
it's just like all these different ways that that it's
it's described, but it's again there is this kind of
balance that's very personal about what kinds of things get
in your way. And everything operates on many levels, and
that's important too. So in one list something will be
described one way, and another list that same word will
(37:23):
be described differently. And I know I give examples of
this in the book, but you know there's like you know,
a slight distraction and there's an intense rumination. Those are
the same process, but they're on different scales. So part
of what happens why these lists get so complicated, they're
talking about the different scales of obstruction that can happen.
(37:45):
You sort of boil all those down to some degree
to the things that show up in the four body
soft vows that I say every morning after I meditate, right, Greed,
hatred and delusion or craving, you know, aversion and ignorance.
I mean there you wanting not wanting. I always sort
of rephrase them like wanting, not wanting, and being confused
(38:05):
about all of that. That's a nice summary of the
hub of the wheel of life. Yes, yeah, yeah, you know,
I want that, I want that, I want that, I
don't want that. I don't want that, I don't want that.
And the realization or the confusion around the fact that, like, well,
that's why you're not that's why you're struggling. It's really nice.
I love in the body stuff of us. Again, there's
(38:27):
lots of different translations, but one of them I like
is agreed, hatred, and delusion rise endlessly. I vowed abandoned them,
and I like that rise endlessly, not from a pessimistic perspective,
but from a perspective of like, well, of course you're
still having them. That's what happens. They keep coming and
you work with them as skillfully as you can. There's
not a time, you know, at least that seems in
(38:49):
my imminent future where those are disappearing. No, not at
all mine either. But I think that, you know, that
kind of brings me to the good fortune of the
human birth is that we won't solve these things. Were
on the edge of a mystery, we sort of sort
of sense it but we don't really get it. We
keep trying to say it, but we can't really And
(39:09):
these things are part of our human existence that they
do just continuously arise, and you know, our our mission
is to curate this flow of consciousness throughout this existence.
Another plain thing I think of sometimes is like the
purpose of life is to clean consciousness. You know, it's
(39:31):
kind of boring, but I think it's sort of true
that that has to do with obstructions again also as
removing obstructions. But it'll just keep going. And and that
is our good fortune that we do have enough awareness
and enough of the suffering to keep developing if we
find a way to develop it. Yep, you said something
(39:52):
there a moment ago about the mystery. We keep trying
to sort of say things but we can't. Which is
a great transition into the next area I wanted to
go to, which is another book of yours that I
unfortunately left sitting in the other room. But it's a
book about writing and meditation. And you know, you sort
(40:12):
of start the book off by saying, in your tradition, Zen,
which is also mine, we sort of pooh pooh words
like you know, you know, burn your words. You can't
say it every you know, every word is false. I mean,
there's a there's a real like, hey, get rid of words.
But you say that writing is a really powerful tool
for us on the journey to awakening, along with meditation.
(40:34):
So tell me a little bit about why those two
go so well together and why you wanted to create
a book that really explicitly marries them. Again, this is
something that's a little bit temperament bound, because I don't
I don't think this is for everyone, but it's probably
for more people than people might think. I think that
even though we will always fail in the task to
express the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we
(40:59):
work with it, every time we play with it, we
bring out something new for ourselves. We articulate something that
was half formed in our mind or our bodies, and
then that is a useful process. Writing takes that process
a little bit further. Because I've experimented with us how
(41:19):
much I might sit and carefully think something through, something
new will come out every single time I sit and
write about it. It's different. It's a little bit of
a bodily remove And also you're making an object. You're
making a literal object, even if it's you know, a
file on a screen, you are still making something. And
(41:39):
by seeing your internal process turn into an object, you remember, oh,
my internal process is just a bunch of objects. And
by bringing it out and articulating it, you carry it further,
and you carry awareness further. Your pen carries your awareness.
You don't even have to worry about it. I write pen,
(42:00):
but same with a keyboard. Yeah, it makes me think
back to an earlier sentence of years I read there
are a royal in Culdron of activity and momentum. And
writing is one way, at least for me, of slowing
that process down. I mean not literally slowing it down,
but does but slowing down what's going on in my mind.
(42:23):
It's you know, thoughts and emotions are so slippery, you know,
they feel so real and yet they're so slippery. And
writing is a way I can deconstruct, you know, what
are the elements that are going on here? What are
the things? And you quote a bunch of studies that
are that are pretty clear. We've talked about some of
them with different people in the show. That expressive writing
can be a really good tool in our growth and healing.
(42:47):
Absolutely um And you know, they're all these very objective
measures as well as subjective that you know, even at
very small amounts, surprisingly small amounts of expressive writing have
some healing power. So I absolutely believe it. I've worked
with kids, teenagers, grandparents, Expressive Writing group that I work
(43:07):
with people that you just wouldn't even think might get
anything out of it do, But I think you're right.
Literally it does slow down thought processes. They move at
different rates, and like those monks that could break down,
you know, the split second into all these steps. Writing
kind of does that is kind of deconstructing, mulching through
(43:28):
things that that you're talking about. It's very powerful. Um.
Neona Panica Terror writes a lot about like what a
mess the average mind is. He describes it as like
I can't remember exactly. It's kind of poetic, like you know,
cobwebs and and half baked thoughts and emotions flying around
and this and that, and he just says, one thing
(43:51):
we need to do is clean it up again. So
writing forces it to this level of articulation that will
always surprises you. That's my favorite thing about writing is
you can surprise yourself with what you write. Um, but
it always kind of moves it out of your body.
There's also that element of it being a physical act,
and moving emotion out of your body is is critical
(44:14):
for people. I don't think people do that enough to
kind of help the process move through you. Yeah, you
have a line I love slightly different than emotion. But
you say meditation and writing rely on structure and repetition
while they court surprise and revelation. I think it's a
beautifully written line and so true. You know, structure and repetition,
(44:34):
but what we're after, right is surprise and revelation. It's
it's a really nice way of thinking about it. So
we're near the end of our time here. You and
I are going to continue to talk a little bit
in the post show conversation about um a couple of
the exercises from the book, because there's some really great
exercises that are very different than anything I have ever
(44:55):
seen before. A lot of journal writing prompts, I've just
seen a lot of them at this point in my life,
but your book, I was like, I've never seen anything
quite like it about you know, a contemplative way. It's
almost as if writing and meditation combined together to make
something better and stronger. So we'll do a couple of
those exercises in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd
(45:17):
like access to the post show conversation as well as
a special episode I do called Teaching Song and a
poem and the Joys of being a member of the
one you Feed, you can go to when you feed
dot net slash join. Is there any last things about
the Abi Dharma that you feel like we haven't covered
that are really important? The thing that I would say
(45:39):
is there's a ton of information and it's never going
to be a super popular study in this in this
current world. But if you can do anything where you
just kind of dip into the complexity, the multiplicity and
the interactivity of how we are experiencing. Whenever you do that,
(46:04):
I think you open yourself and I think you dim
the intensity of how hard you're holding onto yourself, and
you'll feel it. There's this kind of weird, refreshing quality
in it. I think that makes people more generous. It's
a beautiful way to end. And your book is called
the original Buddhist Psychology. What the Abi Dharma tells us
about how we think, feel, and experience life, and it
(46:27):
is of anything I have read so far, one of
the best introductions that I have read that made it
very clear. So listeners, if you're interested in this topic,
this is a great place to start. Thank you so
much for that and for our conversation. Yeah, thank you
so much for coming on, Beth. I really appreciate it.
(47:00):
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(47:21):
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