October 5, 2020 • 28 mins
The Buddha was born to a royal family... and it shocked him when he found out that no amount of money or power could keep suffering and loss at bay forever. The quest to accept that life brings us pain was key to the development of Buddhism as a major religion.
Dr Laurie Santos is joined by Liz Angowski and Robert Wright (author of 'Why Buddhism is True') to explore The Buddha's teachings about unhappiness and how mindfulness meditation can help us come to terms with the negative feelings we all experience from time to time.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. One of the biggest lies our minds tell us
is that happiness will be ours if we can just
get the next thing we really want. That if we
only got that new promotion, or that new love interest,
or that new outfit, then we'd finally be eternally happy.
(00:37):
I mean, it's true that all of those things will
give us some joy, but the effects are more fleeting
than we think. Many things we yearn and strive for
are fragile. Dresses, rip companies, fold, lovers leave, or die.
That means we end up grieving for the happiness we've
lost and thirsting for something new. Yet again, there are
(00:57):
good reasons rooted in evolution for all this constant striving,
but it comes at an emotional cost, and it's the
root of lots of heartache and suffering. So in this
final episode of our historical minis, we're reaching way way
back in time to a thinker who recognized the sadness
that hunger, yearning, and loss can bring, and one who
also offered us a way to deal with the pain. Today,
(01:20):
we're turning to the Buddha. Welcome back to happiness Lessons
of the Ancients with me, Doctor Laurie santos oh Man.
I don't know if I can do a quick Buddha
one oh one. I love telling and retelling the story
of the Buddha. This is Liz Angowski. She's a fellow
in my residential college here at Yale and also one
of my really close friends. But more pertinently, she's also
(01:42):
an assistant professor of Religion at Earlham College. Liz teaches
an introductory course on Buddhism. For her. Particular areas of
expertise are the men and women who really mastered the
Buddhist teachings. I'm interested in why particular figures can both
inspire and kind of profoundly unnerve people by being too good.
A friend of mine described me as somebody who studies
(02:04):
Buddhist overachievers and the trouble they cause. Buddhism is a
vast subject, but I really wanted to laser in on
one aspect, in particular, how the Buddha came to understand
that life is full of unavoidable disappointment and suffering. We
don't have information about the Buddha that is contemporaneous with him.
We think he lived between the sixth century BC and
(02:26):
the fourth century BC and he was born in Limbidi,
which is now modern day Nepal. The tradition holds that
he was born the son of a king, or at
least we think, a wealthy clan leader, and his upbringing
was one of total opulence. He was born and raised
in a palace, and he never had to leave that palace.
(02:47):
He never had to see the outside world at all.
And when he is born, a seer or susayer was
brought in to predict his future, and the seer reports
to the Buddhist father Suddodana the Buddha will either be
a chako artin so an emperor of the whole world,
or a dropout who was referred to as Ashramana. So understandably,
(03:08):
Suda wants to keep the Buddha in the palace. He
wants to ensure that his son will grow up to
become a king, maybe even one that's more successful than
he is. And so he surrounds him with everything anyone
could possibly want. He has all of the archery equipment
he could possibly need, the finest horses, etc. And then
you know, one day he kind of overhears a song
(03:30):
about how beautiful the parks in this city are you know,
I haven't seen these parks. I should probably go out
to these parks, these pleasure groves and see what's happening
out there. His father's apprehensive about this, and he decides
that I'm going to let him go out. However, I'm
going to I'm going to clean up the streets. I'm
going to remove all undesirable things, older people, sick people, etc.
(03:53):
But what happens is the Bodhisatta he goes out and
the gods manifest first an old man. They decide that
the Bodhisatta should see what Samsara the cycle of existence
does to people, people age, and the Buddhistafta he's totally
shocked by this, you know, and he asks his chariot tear,
(04:14):
what is going on here? Like? What is wrong with
that man? Is it a trick of the eye? Is
that going to happen to me? He cannot really process
what this being is. So the charioteer explains to him,
you know, that's that's an old man. This charioteer is.
He's hipped everything he knows. And then they return to
the palace and the Buddhisfta can't stop thinking about the
(04:36):
old man, so He's like, I need to go back
out there. I need to kind of figure this out
and see. So he goes back out and he sees
a sick man, and then again we repeat this process.
He sees a corpse and the cherio tear. You know,
just this is a part of life. We age, we
get sick, we die. Eventually he goes out, he sees
one of these kind of stramaa guys. He's a set
x who's dropped out and he looks peaceful. The Buddhisatta
(05:00):
is like, you know, I want to be like this guy.
So the dad didn't do such an awesome job by
like the God's intervened to sort it out for Buddha
to see that all this stuff, But it sounds like
this suffering really had a huge effect on him. Yeah.
The idea that the Buddhisatta would have made it into
his thirties without ever having gotten sick himself or realize
that people are aging is kind of a, you know,
(05:20):
surprising idea to most people who read these accounts. You
have to take this with something of a grain of salt.
But eventually he asks to be allowed to leave the palace.
His father says no. His father doesn't want to part
with him. It's actually a very moving part of the
Buddha Charta, the life of the Buddha. There's an emotional
scene between them in which the Buddhisatta says, you know,
(05:42):
if you can guarantee me that we won't part in
this life because of death, then I'll stay. And because
his father can't really guarantee him that, you know, there's
this moment of realization that the father cannot provide really
everything that he wants, which is an answer to this
huge problem of not only death, but death and rebirth.
(06:03):
Something I have to frequently emphasize for folks are unfamiliar
is that, you know, karma keeps bringing you back. It's
not just death, it's redeath. It's not just birth, it's
rebirth right. And so eventually he's able to leave the palace.
He escapes the palace, and then he's well on his
way to becoming the Buddha. Just a detail that I
think about a lot is that the horse that was
(06:25):
leading the chariot that brought him out several times to
see the sites, the old man, the sick man, the corpse,
the horse Kantika. He brings the Budhisada out for the
eventual escape, and then he dies of a broken heart
because he's so sad to leave his owner. People just
love the Buddha. I mean, everyone loves the Buddha. The
sadness around him leaving is really profound. And so the
(06:49):
Buddisafa now goes out and he says, you know, I'm
going to find a teacher, someone to help me figure
this stuff out. One of these traumaas. After having tried
out different paths, He's like, I can neither go the
way of hedonism nor the way of total self mortification.
These are not the ways for me. Some accounts will say,
you know, he has this memory of being at a
fest of all that his father was throwing, and he
(07:10):
sat under a shady tree and felt some calm, and
so he decides to sit under a tree and just
contemplate what it is to be alive, what it means
to exist. And so then, so how did he go
from that kind of under the tree moment of contemplation
to like because he somehow gets to like full enlightenment. Right,
Oh sure, So he you know, takes a seat under
(07:31):
the tree and he starts to contemplate everything and he's
learned up to that point and what he's seen, and
then he goes through what are called the watches of
the night. In the first watch, he can see everything
that has happened to him in the past, as if
he's reliving these past lives. Not just I know who
I was in the past, but I now feel again
(07:51):
whatever the suffering and pain was that I went through
in that time. From there he sees all of the
past lives of all other beings, and this moves him
deeply to have compassion for all of their sentient beings. Finally,
he comes to the realization that the element at the
heart of all of this is suffering. Life is duca,
(08:12):
so this idea that life is stressful at its most
basic core. At first, when you mentioned duka, you translated
it as suffering. But what I've heard is that it's
not really suffering in the way we think of it
as like kind of pain, right, you know, like kind
of pain and suffering. It's kind of just like a
deeper not being really satisfied, right right, that's right. Frequently
(08:34):
with students all translate it as discomfort or unease. Suffering
really evokes I think now for individuals the idea of
physical pain and mental anguish, which which it also includes
for sure. But the idea is that we're sufferings as
a part of our fundamental being, you know, because largely
because we can't accept that things change. Is there end?
(08:55):
Once he figures out duca, he achieves nirvana, and then
he became the Voddha. Yeah. I think that as he
realizes that all things are pervaded by suffering, he also
realizes there must be a cause for this, and that
he concludes is tanha. This idea of craving. Sometimes we
think about it as thirst My students now they love
to translate it as thirsty, right, But the idea is
(09:16):
that we continually crave things. And it's not just that
we are craving central pleasures. We're craving, you know, experiences,
We're craving even just the sense of stability. We feel
some desire for things to stay the same, and fundamentally
everything is impermanent. And so from there the Buddha comes
(09:38):
to the conclusion that there has to be a way
for this to stop, and that cessation is the total
extinguishing of suffering. And how do you get there? What
is the process by which you come to the total
cessation or nirvana. Yeah. The reason I love the Buddha
is that he's really nicely connected to a central topic
that we talk about a lot on the Happiness lab,
which is this concept of hedonic adaptation, right, or the
(10:01):
hedonic treadmill. You can be really happy for a while,
you can be satisfied in the short term, but then
basically you just go back to kind of craving new
stuff and you're kind of on this treadmill where you
want more and more and more. And that kind of
seems like this, at least the scientific version of this
idea of duka, we're kind of never satisfied, in part
because we have this craving thirstiness, as your students would
(10:23):
call it, this tanha. Is that that's the word ta, Yeah,
in part because we have this sort of thirstiness, this
tanha that is constantly telling us to go for more,
and so is that kind of what the Buddhist thought
like is does that kind of fit with what the
science is suggesting? Yeah, I think that. I mean the
Buddha's father, Sododnas, you know, his answer to the problem
(10:43):
of his son potentially leaving home and leaving him is
you know, I'll just throw more wonderful, delightful things at him.
He wants to keep him distracted from what might be
underlying the bigger problem. He wants to put all the
band aids on the wound rather than addressing the wound itself.
The Buddha in general is analogized to a doctor. A
(11:05):
doctor's only really a good doctor if you can give
a full account of what's on with someone. If you
don't want to look at the symptoms and then treat
the superficial symptoms, you want to treat the underlying disease.
And so really, what is at the heart of it
is the fact that we can't accept that even the
most beautiful, wonderful things, the coin will flip and the
other side of them will be dissatisfaction, suffering, impermanence. It's
(11:28):
not that beautiful things don't make us happy or material
things don't make us happy. It's that they don't stay
and we don't stay happy with them. They change and
we change our perception of them. I think one of
the awesome things about the Buddha is that he in
some ways was like a real early practitioner of self help.
And you know, his path was like really one of
the first I think for kind of enlightenment or kind
(11:50):
of achieving flourishing. I mean, is he sort of thought
of as a father of self help to a certain extent. Yeah,
I frequently describe it to my students as a program
designed to affect self transformation. We want to think about
it as something that is designed to change your perceptions.
You are in charge of this program. You take it up,
(12:11):
and you execute it. Buddhism is an important global faith,
with a culture and traditions built up over thousands of years.
We can only scratch the surface of this in a
single show, But after the break, I'll introduce you to
someone who created his own program of self transformation using
parts of the Buddhist teaching, and that transformation worked so
well he even stopped hating the weeds in his yarn.
(12:34):
The Happiness Lab will be right back. I don't actually
call myself a Buddhist, partly out of respect for all
of those in Asia, especially who means something very different
by the term. But it's true that I practice certain
(12:56):
important parts of Buddhism. This is Robert Wright. He's one
of my favorite science writers and a respected expert on
evolutionary psychology. Robert is someone you'd probably assume is pretty
skeptical of the things you read in a religious text,
but following a brush with Buddhist teachings, he saw that
this philosophy totally meshes with everything evolution teaches us about
(13:18):
how humans operate. An obvious example, as we overestimate the
speed of large things approaching us, you know, better safe
than sorry, So that's an inaccurate perception. But it's good
at keeping organisms alive. So we have it. And you know,
one of Buddhism's main claims is that, well, ay, we
don't see the world clearly by nature and be that
(13:39):
that is the source of our suffering and is also
the reason we make other people suffered. It's an amazing
claim when you think about it. If we could see
things more clearly in certain important respects, we would become
happier and we would become better people. That's like amazing
if true, and I think it's basically true. Why Buddhism
(14:00):
Is True is Robert's book on the subject, and while
Liz Angowski looks at the cultural and religious significance of
the Buddha, Robert explores the parts of the practice that
are really supported by scientific research. There are other parts
of Buddhism that are more in I would say, the
supernatural or traditionally religious realm having to do with rebirth
(14:20):
after death. But my book focuses on the naturalistic claims
made by Buddhism, that is to say, the Buddhist conception
of human psychology, the validity of human perceptions, this thing
that we think of as the self. You know what
is that Buddhism developed an incredibly rich literature which isn't
(14:41):
all on point by any means. I mean, they have
these dense psychological texts that divide the mind into a
billion parts, and a lot of it I can't make
heads or tails of. But central to a lot of
these texts is I think, a fundamentally on target view
of the mind, of the way it works, and maybe
(15:03):
most important, of what to do about the fact that
in a lot of ways it doesn't work very well
if what you're trying to do is be a happy
person and a good person. I mean, one thing I emphasized,
the human mind is not designed necessarily to see the
world clearly, those traits that are conducive to getting the
genes underlying them into the next generation is the traits
(15:26):
that we will have, and that includes mental traits. So
if having a slightly deluded conception of yourself or an
inaccurate perception of other people or things will help get
genes into the next generation, then you know our species
will be inclined towards certain kinds of thoughts and perceptions
(15:46):
that aren't strictly speaking accurate. One of the things I
like about Buddhism as a psychologist, and as a psychologist
who's kind of interested in evolutionary theory, is that he
kind of got a lot of human psychology right with
these first few noble truths, right, And so I wanted
you to dig into us a little bit, these first
noble truths about this idea of duca or suffering or tanha,
which is like this idea of criving. So the first
(16:09):
sermon that he is said to have given after his enlightenment,
he lays down the foreign noble truths. He asked, what
is the source of suffering? His answer is just the
fact that we always want something more right, and gratification
doesn't last. And when you think about it from a
Darwinian point of view, this makes total sense. I mean,
(16:30):
if you imagine two animals, one of them have genes
that keep the animal perennially restless. In other words, they
have sex or they eat, they feel better for a
little while, and that rewards the behavior they got them,
the section, the food, but then they want more, you know,
the happiness, the pleasure evaporates. You compare that to an
animal whose genes provide just enduring contentment after a single meal.
(16:54):
You're then talking about an animal whose genes are not
going to get anywhere because the animal is not going
to live very long or is not going to reproduce
very successfully. So that's just an example of how one
of the very first and most fundamental things the Buddha
lays down makes total sense in light of a theory
that did not exist when the Buddha laid the truth down,
(17:16):
nobody knew about natural selection, but it makes sense. And
also I think nobody knew about all these lovely data
on hedonic adaptation. Psychologically, right with this idea that you know,
we're always on this treadmill chasing more and more stuff,
and even if you get these fantastic things in life,
you know, you just go back to baseline. Even though
we don't predict it, right. We have these incorrect theories
about the fact that, you know, we could be happily
(17:37):
ever after, we could get this wonderful thing, you know,
we get a marriage, or get a wonderful circumstance, and
we're good forever. The data simply suggests psychologically that that's
just not the case, right, And that is an example
of delusion in a certain sense. I mean, that's another
example of how we're designed not to see the world clearly.
We are designed to keep convincing ourselves that the next
(17:57):
elevation of status, the next promotion, the next big material
good is going to make us happier for longer than
it winds up making us happy. The mind is designed
to bring us happiness that's not high on natural selections,
agenda understanding that is the beginning of seeking, you know,
(18:18):
a more enduring kind of happiness. Even though the hedonic
treadmill is a tough thing to get around, it really is,
But a lot of Buddhist practice is designed to get
around it. And I think that was one of the
most fantastic things about Buddhist teaching, right, is that he
didn't just leave us with suffering and craving and say
that's it. The minds of design this way, we're stuck.
The teachings actually go beyond that to give us a
(18:39):
path past this. Right, How did you go from being,
you know, Robert Write, the Evolutionary Psychologist to Robert Write,
The Buddhist Sympathizer. Well, in two thousand and three, somebody
convinced me to go to a meditation retreat, like a
seven day silent meditation retreat. You meditate intensively, like four
and a half hours a day is sitting meditation, four
(19:00):
and a half of walking meditation, maybe a little more.
Why on earth did you say yes? I feel like
you know, like like did you known about meditation like cures? Well,
I guess I should admit to being something of a seeker.
I was brought up religiously, lost my religion. Maybe that's it,
But I had certainly flirted with meditation, tried to do it,
(19:21):
you know, you hear about in college. Every once in
a while I would try it. It It would never really work.
I figured, what the hell, I'll try this crazy thing.
The first couple of days were total hell. I just
could not focus on my breath. I hated everyone there
because I was sure they were doing it better. Then
suddenly something clicked. I had had too much coffee and
(19:44):
I had this jittery feeling in my jaw. And I'm
sitting there thinking, God, you can't meditate with jittery feeling
in jaw. And then suddenly I just had this feeling
that wait, the feeling is down in my jaw. I'm
up here, and I suddenly was observing in a way
that completely neutralized it. And by the end of the
week my consciousness was completely transformed. It was like magical.
(20:08):
I mean, like I remember just to here. Beauty of
things was amazing. I remember walking through the woods and
seeing this weed called a plantain weed that I had
spent a lot of time trying to kill because it
had always infested yards I had had, And I just thought, wait,
why have I been trying to kill this thing? It's actually,
objectively speaking, it's as pretty as the other green stuff.
(20:30):
That I would say is an apprehension of the Buddhist
idea of emptiness. I had been seeing essence of weed
in this thing, and that had given me an antagonistic
feeling toward it. At one level, something trivial was going on.
I mean, obviously weed is an arbitrary label that certain
cultures assigned to certain plants. Fine, we know that, But
(20:51):
what was interesting was that I wasn't just being consciously
aware of the arbitrariness. It was that I realized that
my perception of the weed had been infused with this
sense of essence of weed. And when that drops out,
it's a totally different world. It's hard to describe, and
(21:12):
the Buddhist concept of emptiness is a very subtle one,
but I do think it has to do with the
way that feelings suddenly inform not just our thoughts, but
are very perceptions of things. And when some of that changes,
it's amazing how radical your perceptions can change. It's one
(21:37):
thing to talk about that for weeds, but it feels
like that could be even more powerful when you're thinking
about other negative sensations that evolution wants us to avoid,
like pain or like judgments of people. I mean, you're right,
it can transform your relationship to pain. It absolutely can,
believe it or not. You can even look at pain
and go that's kind of beautiful in a way. You
(21:58):
can look at sadness and go that's kind of beautiful
in a way. Again, these are things that are easier
for me to do on retreat than they are at
nine thirty am on a regular day, But they're possible,
and you're right about that. But it's also true that
you know the way you categorize people without thinking about
it so much. First of all, I'm too friends and enemies,
but also along more subtle gradations, sometimes in ways that's unhealthy,
(22:23):
not good for you, not good for them. And so
just as I was less judgmental of that weed, I
found myself being much less judgmental of people by the
end of the retreat. You know how humans are. They
size people up on the base of very little evidence.
I remember at the beginning of the retreat seeing this
guy with a Juilliard T shirt on it, thinking, oh, Juilliard, Well,
(22:43):
aren't we special like you know? And by the end
of the retreat I was much less judgmental, and in fact,
that guy at the end, when the silence is broken,
he raised his hand and asked a question, and he
was this shy, insecure guy, exactly the opposite of the
way I had stereotyped him. Needless to say, by the
end of the retreat, I was sold. So give me
a sense of how meditation actually does that. Because it
(23:05):
sounds awesome to kind of get control over your feelings
and deal with your thoughts. But how is sitting there
and focusing on your breath for ten minutes a day
actually help you do that? Well, if you can make
a lot of progress in ten minutes a day, then
God bless you, and some people can. People's mileage varies.
You know. I meditate longer than that, and my practice
still has its ups and downs. But there's an irony
(23:27):
about meditation, which is that if you quit running away
from bad feelings and just accept them and kind of
be with them, get closer to them, you can get
a more objective perspective on them. Like I recommend it.
If you're feeling sad, just sit down, close your eyes
in a quiet room, observe the sadness. I mean, normally
(23:50):
we try to get away from sadness. We try to
think something that will make it go away. We try
to talk to somebody who will pull us out of
or we just eat something that will help, or take
a drug. But just sit down and go, Okay, I'm sad.
What is this thing? Like? Where in my head is
the feeling or elsewhere in my body, Where are the feelings,
what are their contours, what are their shapes? You know,
(24:13):
I predict it before long, you'll find that, oddly, although
you're closer to the feeling, you have a more objective
perspective on it. You're in a certain sense more detached
and closer at the same time. And that is the
beginning of liberation from a feeling and getting that kind
of objective purchase on it is the beginning of deciding
(24:34):
whether you're going to let it govern your thoughts and
life and the rest of your day. When I've had
a chance to kind of watch my feelings in the
way you're talking about, kind of sit with my sadness,
it seems like it also teaches me this other Buddhist
ideal of sort of impermanence, right. You know, sometimes when
you're sad, it can feel like I'm just going to
feel this way forever. But if you kind of sit
with it and hang out with it, you know, those
(24:56):
things go away in this weird sense. So, Yeah, my
daughters went to teen meditation retreats. One thing the teachers
emphasize with them is like, think of feelings as like
the weather. Yeah, it's a storm or whatever, it's high humidity,
but it'll be gone tomorrow. And yeah, that can be
a helpful thing, just to think, regardless of whether you're meditating,
(25:18):
just remind yourself this too shall pass. I know you
talked about this lot in the book, But have these
practices helped you? Oh? I think so. People say they
noticed the difference. I mean, my wife says she notices
the difference, and she's probably the most reliable witness. When
I came back from my first meditation retreat, all I
had to do was call her and start talking. Before
(25:39):
she was glad I had gone. Literally, it was just
a tone of my voice, she said, just the way
I was talking was like, oh, yeah, this guy would
be much easier to live with than the guy who
left for this retreat. And you know, meditation retreats give
you a taste for how radically different your everyday consciousness
could be. They condenced me that that state of consciousness
(26:05):
would be much more conducive to happiness, would make me
a much better person, and would bring me a clearer
view of the world, a literally clearer view of the world.
I really believe that those three things can align, and
that is the Buddhist promise, and it's not easy to
keep them aligning as thoroughly and as magically as they might.
(26:29):
At the end of a nine day retreat, you know
once you're back in the real world, but once you've
seen that, it's an incentive to keep practicing on a
daily basis and to hang on to at least part
of that consciousness. The story of the Buddha is one
that I just had to include in this mini season
(26:50):
on Happiness Lessons of the Ancients. It encapsulates so much
a privilege. Young man realized that life is impermanent, and
that even the richest king couldn't build palace walls high
enough to fight off the sadness that this impermanence brings.
The Buddha tap that the best way to deal with
all this suffering is to sit with it, to it
and experience it. I know very few of us can
(27:12):
go on long meditation retreats, but all of us can
bring a bit more mindfulness into our daily lives. It
can be as simple as noticing the sensation of being
in your bed, or how the soap and water feel
as you wash your hands. I personally try to fit
in ten minutes of meditation a day. I do it
right after I exercise, when I'm already feeling a little
bit more in tune with my body. I just PLoP
(27:34):
on the floor, close my eyes and try to focus
on my breath. And while that sounds really simple, it's
surprisingly hard. A previous guest on The Happiness Lab said
that sitting with his thoughts during his first meditation was
like trying to wrestle alive fish. But trust me, it
gets a lot easier. I'm no Jedi master, and I
have lots of days when I don't even get in
(27:54):
that ten minutes, but even my patchy meditation practice makes
me feel a lot better. I'm even starting to come
to terms with the sad fact that nothing is permanent
and that all good things come to an end, including
this mini season. So with that, I'd like to share
some gratitude. Thank you so much for listening to these shows,
which we've really enjoyed making, and never fear. The Happiness
(28:16):
Lab will be back with some special episodes as well
as a new season in January, where we explore how
other old school happiness lessons are also backed by modern science.
Until then, stay safe and stay happy. The Happiness Lab
is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show
was mastered by Evan Viola and our original music was
(28:38):
composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the entire Pushkin crew,
including Mia La Belle, Karli Migliori, Heather Fine, Sophie Crane, mckibbon,
Eric Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent Ben Davis. The
Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and
meet doctor Laurie Santos.
Pushkin. One of the biggest lies our minds tell us
is that happiness will be ours if we can just
get the next thing we really want. That if we
only got that new promotion, or that new love interest,
or that new outfit, then we'd finally be eternally happy.
(00:37):
I mean, it's true that all of those things will
give us some joy, but the effects are more fleeting
than we think. Many things we yearn and strive for
are fragile. Dresses, rip companies, fold, lovers leave, or die.
That means we end up grieving for the happiness we've
lost and thirsting for something new. Yet again, there are
(00:57):
good reasons rooted in evolution for all this constant striving,
but it comes at an emotional cost, and it's the
root of lots of heartache and suffering. So in this
final episode of our historical minis, we're reaching way way
back in time to a thinker who recognized the sadness
that hunger, yearning, and loss can bring, and one who
also offered us a way to deal with the pain. Today,
(01:20):
we're turning to the Buddha. Welcome back to happiness Lessons
of the Ancients with me, Doctor Laurie santos oh Man.
I don't know if I can do a quick Buddha
one oh one. I love telling and retelling the story
of the Buddha. This is Liz Angowski. She's a fellow
in my residential college here at Yale and also one
of my really close friends. But more pertinently, she's also
(01:42):
an assistant professor of Religion at Earlham College. Liz teaches
an introductory course on Buddhism. For her. Particular areas of
expertise are the men and women who really mastered the
Buddhist teachings. I'm interested in why particular figures can both
inspire and kind of profoundly unnerve people by being too good.
A friend of mine described me as somebody who studies
(02:04):
Buddhist overachievers and the trouble they cause. Buddhism is a
vast subject, but I really wanted to laser in on
one aspect, in particular, how the Buddha came to understand
that life is full of unavoidable disappointment and suffering. We
don't have information about the Buddha that is contemporaneous with him.
We think he lived between the sixth century BC and
(02:26):
the fourth century BC and he was born in Limbidi,
which is now modern day Nepal. The tradition holds that
he was born the son of a king, or at
least we think, a wealthy clan leader, and his upbringing
was one of total opulence. He was born and raised
in a palace, and he never had to leave that palace.
(02:47):
He never had to see the outside world at all.
And when he is born, a seer or susayer was
brought in to predict his future, and the seer reports
to the Buddhist father Suddodana the Buddha will either be
a chako artin so an emperor of the whole world,
or a dropout who was referred to as Ashramana. So understandably,
(03:08):
Suda wants to keep the Buddha in the palace. He
wants to ensure that his son will grow up to
become a king, maybe even one that's more successful than
he is. And so he surrounds him with everything anyone
could possibly want. He has all of the archery equipment
he could possibly need, the finest horses, etc. And then
you know, one day he kind of overhears a song
(03:30):
about how beautiful the parks in this city are you know,
I haven't seen these parks. I should probably go out
to these parks, these pleasure groves and see what's happening
out there. His father's apprehensive about this, and he decides
that I'm going to let him go out. However, I'm
going to I'm going to clean up the streets. I'm
going to remove all undesirable things, older people, sick people, etc.
(03:53):
But what happens is the Bodhisatta he goes out and
the gods manifest first an old man. They decide that
the Bodhisatta should see what Samsara the cycle of existence
does to people, people age, and the Buddhistafta he's totally
shocked by this, you know, and he asks his chariot tear,
(04:14):
what is going on here? Like? What is wrong with
that man? Is it a trick of the eye? Is
that going to happen to me? He cannot really process
what this being is. So the charioteer explains to him,
you know, that's that's an old man. This charioteer is.
He's hipped everything he knows. And then they return to
the palace and the Buddhisfta can't stop thinking about the
(04:36):
old man, so He's like, I need to go back
out there. I need to kind of figure this out
and see. So he goes back out and he sees
a sick man, and then again we repeat this process.
He sees a corpse and the cherio tear. You know,
just this is a part of life. We age, we
get sick, we die. Eventually he goes out, he sees
one of these kind of stramaa guys. He's a set
x who's dropped out and he looks peaceful. The Buddhisatta
(05:00):
is like, you know, I want to be like this guy.
So the dad didn't do such an awesome job by
like the God's intervened to sort it out for Buddha
to see that all this stuff, But it sounds like
this suffering really had a huge effect on him. Yeah.
The idea that the Buddhisatta would have made it into
his thirties without ever having gotten sick himself or realize
that people are aging is kind of a, you know,
(05:20):
surprising idea to most people who read these accounts. You
have to take this with something of a grain of salt.
But eventually he asks to be allowed to leave the palace.
His father says no. His father doesn't want to part
with him. It's actually a very moving part of the
Buddha Charta, the life of the Buddha. There's an emotional
scene between them in which the Buddhisatta says, you know,
(05:42):
if you can guarantee me that we won't part in
this life because of death, then I'll stay. And because
his father can't really guarantee him that, you know, there's
this moment of realization that the father cannot provide really
everything that he wants, which is an answer to this
huge problem of not only death, but death and rebirth.
(06:03):
Something I have to frequently emphasize for folks are unfamiliar
is that, you know, karma keeps bringing you back. It's
not just death, it's redeath. It's not just birth, it's
rebirth right. And so eventually he's able to leave the palace.
He escapes the palace, and then he's well on his
way to becoming the Buddha. Just a detail that I
think about a lot is that the horse that was
(06:25):
leading the chariot that brought him out several times to
see the sites, the old man, the sick man, the corpse,
the horse Kantika. He brings the Budhisada out for the
eventual escape, and then he dies of a broken heart
because he's so sad to leave his owner. People just
love the Buddha. I mean, everyone loves the Buddha. The
sadness around him leaving is really profound. And so the
(06:49):
Buddisafa now goes out and he says, you know, I'm
going to find a teacher, someone to help me figure
this stuff out. One of these traumaas. After having tried
out different paths, He's like, I can neither go the
way of hedonism nor the way of total self mortification.
These are not the ways for me. Some accounts will say,
you know, he has this memory of being at a
fest of all that his father was throwing, and he
(07:10):
sat under a shady tree and felt some calm, and
so he decides to sit under a tree and just
contemplate what it is to be alive, what it means
to exist. And so then, so how did he go
from that kind of under the tree moment of contemplation
to like because he somehow gets to like full enlightenment. Right,
Oh sure, So he you know, takes a seat under
(07:31):
the tree and he starts to contemplate everything and he's
learned up to that point and what he's seen, and
then he goes through what are called the watches of
the night. In the first watch, he can see everything
that has happened to him in the past, as if
he's reliving these past lives. Not just I know who
I was in the past, but I now feel again
(07:51):
whatever the suffering and pain was that I went through
in that time. From there he sees all of the
past lives of all other beings, and this moves him
deeply to have compassion for all of their sentient beings. Finally,
he comes to the realization that the element at the
heart of all of this is suffering. Life is duca,
(08:12):
so this idea that life is stressful at its most
basic core. At first, when you mentioned duka, you translated
it as suffering. But what I've heard is that it's
not really suffering in the way we think of it
as like kind of pain, right, you know, like kind
of pain and suffering. It's kind of just like a
deeper not being really satisfied, right right, that's right. Frequently
(08:34):
with students all translate it as discomfort or unease. Suffering
really evokes I think now for individuals the idea of
physical pain and mental anguish, which which it also includes
for sure. But the idea is that we're sufferings as
a part of our fundamental being, you know, because largely
because we can't accept that things change. Is there end?
(08:55):
Once he figures out duca, he achieves nirvana, and then
he became the Voddha. Yeah. I think that as he
realizes that all things are pervaded by suffering, he also
realizes there must be a cause for this, and that
he concludes is tanha. This idea of craving. Sometimes we
think about it as thirst My students now they love
to translate it as thirsty, right, But the idea is
(09:16):
that we continually crave things. And it's not just that
we are craving central pleasures. We're craving, you know, experiences,
We're craving even just the sense of stability. We feel
some desire for things to stay the same, and fundamentally
everything is impermanent. And so from there the Buddha comes
(09:38):
to the conclusion that there has to be a way
for this to stop, and that cessation is the total
extinguishing of suffering. And how do you get there? What
is the process by which you come to the total
cessation or nirvana. Yeah. The reason I love the Buddha
is that he's really nicely connected to a central topic
that we talk about a lot on the Happiness lab,
which is this concept of hedonic adaptation, right, or the
(10:01):
hedonic treadmill. You can be really happy for a while,
you can be satisfied in the short term, but then
basically you just go back to kind of craving new
stuff and you're kind of on this treadmill where you
want more and more and more. And that kind of
seems like this, at least the scientific version of this
idea of duka, we're kind of never satisfied, in part
because we have this craving thirstiness, as your students would
(10:23):
call it, this tanha. Is that that's the word ta, Yeah,
in part because we have this sort of thirstiness, this
tanha that is constantly telling us to go for more,
and so is that kind of what the Buddhist thought
like is does that kind of fit with what the
science is suggesting? Yeah, I think that. I mean the
Buddha's father, Sododnas, you know, his answer to the problem
(10:43):
of his son potentially leaving home and leaving him is
you know, I'll just throw more wonderful, delightful things at him.
He wants to keep him distracted from what might be
underlying the bigger problem. He wants to put all the
band aids on the wound rather than addressing the wound itself.
The Buddha in general is analogized to a doctor. A
(11:05):
doctor's only really a good doctor if you can give
a full account of what's on with someone. If you
don't want to look at the symptoms and then treat
the superficial symptoms, you want to treat the underlying disease.
And so really, what is at the heart of it
is the fact that we can't accept that even the
most beautiful, wonderful things, the coin will flip and the
other side of them will be dissatisfaction, suffering, impermanence. It's
(11:28):
not that beautiful things don't make us happy or material
things don't make us happy. It's that they don't stay
and we don't stay happy with them. They change and
we change our perception of them. I think one of
the awesome things about the Buddha is that he in
some ways was like a real early practitioner of self help.
And you know, his path was like really one of
the first I think for kind of enlightenment or kind
(11:50):
of achieving flourishing. I mean, is he sort of thought
of as a father of self help to a certain extent. Yeah,
I frequently describe it to my students as a program
designed to affect self transformation. We want to think about
it as something that is designed to change your perceptions.
You are in charge of this program. You take it up,
(12:11):
and you execute it. Buddhism is an important global faith,
with a culture and traditions built up over thousands of years.
We can only scratch the surface of this in a
single show, But after the break, I'll introduce you to
someone who created his own program of self transformation using
parts of the Buddhist teaching, and that transformation worked so
well he even stopped hating the weeds in his yarn.
(12:34):
The Happiness Lab will be right back. I don't actually
call myself a Buddhist, partly out of respect for all
of those in Asia, especially who means something very different
by the term. But it's true that I practice certain
(12:56):
important parts of Buddhism. This is Robert Wright. He's one
of my favorite science writers and a respected expert on
evolutionary psychology. Robert is someone you'd probably assume is pretty
skeptical of the things you read in a religious text,
but following a brush with Buddhist teachings, he saw that
this philosophy totally meshes with everything evolution teaches us about
(13:18):
how humans operate. An obvious example, as we overestimate the
speed of large things approaching us, you know, better safe
than sorry, So that's an inaccurate perception. But it's good
at keeping organisms alive. So we have it. And you know,
one of Buddhism's main claims is that, well, ay, we
don't see the world clearly by nature and be that
(13:39):
that is the source of our suffering and is also
the reason we make other people suffered. It's an amazing
claim when you think about it. If we could see
things more clearly in certain important respects, we would become
happier and we would become better people. That's like amazing
if true, and I think it's basically true. Why Buddhism
(14:00):
Is True is Robert's book on the subject, and while
Liz Angowski looks at the cultural and religious significance of
the Buddha, Robert explores the parts of the practice that
are really supported by scientific research. There are other parts
of Buddhism that are more in I would say, the
supernatural or traditionally religious realm having to do with rebirth
(14:20):
after death. But my book focuses on the naturalistic claims
made by Buddhism, that is to say, the Buddhist conception
of human psychology, the validity of human perceptions, this thing
that we think of as the self. You know what
is that Buddhism developed an incredibly rich literature which isn't
(14:41):
all on point by any means. I mean, they have
these dense psychological texts that divide the mind into a
billion parts, and a lot of it I can't make
heads or tails of. But central to a lot of
these texts is I think, a fundamentally on target view
of the mind, of the way it works, and maybe
(15:03):
most important, of what to do about the fact that
in a lot of ways it doesn't work very well
if what you're trying to do is be a happy
person and a good person. I mean, one thing I emphasized,
the human mind is not designed necessarily to see the
world clearly, those traits that are conducive to getting the
genes underlying them into the next generation is the traits
(15:26):
that we will have, and that includes mental traits. So
if having a slightly deluded conception of yourself or an
inaccurate perception of other people or things will help get
genes into the next generation, then you know our species
will be inclined towards certain kinds of thoughts and perceptions
(15:46):
that aren't strictly speaking accurate. One of the things I
like about Buddhism as a psychologist, and as a psychologist
who's kind of interested in evolutionary theory, is that he
kind of got a lot of human psychology right with
these first few noble truths, right, And so I wanted
you to dig into us a little bit, these first
noble truths about this idea of duca or suffering or tanha,
which is like this idea of criving. So the first
(16:09):
sermon that he is said to have given after his enlightenment,
he lays down the foreign noble truths. He asked, what
is the source of suffering? His answer is just the
fact that we always want something more right, and gratification
doesn't last. And when you think about it from a
Darwinian point of view, this makes total sense. I mean,
(16:30):
if you imagine two animals, one of them have genes
that keep the animal perennially restless. In other words, they
have sex or they eat, they feel better for a
little while, and that rewards the behavior they got them,
the section, the food, but then they want more, you know,
the happiness, the pleasure evaporates. You compare that to an
animal whose genes provide just enduring contentment after a single meal.
(16:54):
You're then talking about an animal whose genes are not
going to get anywhere because the animal is not going
to live very long or is not going to reproduce
very successfully. So that's just an example of how one
of the very first and most fundamental things the Buddha
lays down makes total sense in light of a theory
that did not exist when the Buddha laid the truth down,
(17:16):
nobody knew about natural selection, but it makes sense. And
also I think nobody knew about all these lovely data
on hedonic adaptation. Psychologically, right with this idea that you know,
we're always on this treadmill chasing more and more stuff,
and even if you get these fantastic things in life,
you know, you just go back to baseline. Even though
we don't predict it, right. We have these incorrect theories
about the fact that, you know, we could be happily
(17:37):
ever after, we could get this wonderful thing, you know,
we get a marriage, or get a wonderful circumstance, and
we're good forever. The data simply suggests psychologically that that's
just not the case, right, And that is an example
of delusion in a certain sense. I mean, that's another
example of how we're designed not to see the world clearly.
We are designed to keep convincing ourselves that the next
(17:57):
elevation of status, the next promotion, the next big material
good is going to make us happier for longer than
it winds up making us happy. The mind is designed
to bring us happiness that's not high on natural selections,
agenda understanding that is the beginning of seeking, you know,
(18:18):
a more enduring kind of happiness. Even though the hedonic
treadmill is a tough thing to get around, it really is,
But a lot of Buddhist practice is designed to get
around it. And I think that was one of the
most fantastic things about Buddhist teaching, right, is that he
didn't just leave us with suffering and craving and say
that's it. The minds of design this way, we're stuck.
The teachings actually go beyond that to give us a
(18:39):
path past this. Right, How did you go from being,
you know, Robert Write, the Evolutionary Psychologist to Robert Write,
The Buddhist Sympathizer. Well, in two thousand and three, somebody
convinced me to go to a meditation retreat, like a
seven day silent meditation retreat. You meditate intensively, like four
and a half hours a day is sitting meditation, four
(19:00):
and a half of walking meditation, maybe a little more.
Why on earth did you say yes? I feel like
you know, like like did you known about meditation like cures? Well,
I guess I should admit to being something of a seeker.
I was brought up religiously, lost my religion. Maybe that's it,
But I had certainly flirted with meditation, tried to do it,
(19:21):
you know, you hear about in college. Every once in
a while I would try it. It It would never really work.
I figured, what the hell, I'll try this crazy thing.
The first couple of days were total hell. I just
could not focus on my breath. I hated everyone there
because I was sure they were doing it better. Then
suddenly something clicked. I had had too much coffee and
(19:44):
I had this jittery feeling in my jaw. And I'm
sitting there thinking, God, you can't meditate with jittery feeling
in jaw. And then suddenly I just had this feeling
that wait, the feeling is down in my jaw. I'm
up here, and I suddenly was observing in a way
that completely neutralized it. And by the end of the
week my consciousness was completely transformed. It was like magical.
(20:08):
I mean, like I remember just to here. Beauty of
things was amazing. I remember walking through the woods and
seeing this weed called a plantain weed that I had
spent a lot of time trying to kill because it
had always infested yards I had had, And I just thought, wait,
why have I been trying to kill this thing? It's actually,
objectively speaking, it's as pretty as the other green stuff.
(20:30):
That I would say is an apprehension of the Buddhist
idea of emptiness. I had been seeing essence of weed
in this thing, and that had given me an antagonistic
feeling toward it. At one level, something trivial was going on.
I mean, obviously weed is an arbitrary label that certain
cultures assigned to certain plants. Fine, we know that, But
(20:51):
what was interesting was that I wasn't just being consciously
aware of the arbitrariness. It was that I realized that
my perception of the weed had been infused with this
sense of essence of weed. And when that drops out,
it's a totally different world. It's hard to describe, and
(21:12):
the Buddhist concept of emptiness is a very subtle one,
but I do think it has to do with the
way that feelings suddenly inform not just our thoughts, but
are very perceptions of things. And when some of that changes,
it's amazing how radical your perceptions can change. It's one
(21:37):
thing to talk about that for weeds, but it feels
like that could be even more powerful when you're thinking
about other negative sensations that evolution wants us to avoid,
like pain or like judgments of people. I mean, you're right,
it can transform your relationship to pain. It absolutely can,
believe it or not. You can even look at pain
and go that's kind of beautiful in a way. You
(21:58):
can look at sadness and go that's kind of beautiful
in a way. Again, these are things that are easier
for me to do on retreat than they are at
nine thirty am on a regular day, But they're possible,
and you're right about that. But it's also true that
you know the way you categorize people without thinking about
it so much. First of all, I'm too friends and enemies,
but also along more subtle gradations, sometimes in ways that's unhealthy,
(22:23):
not good for you, not good for them. And so
just as I was less judgmental of that weed, I
found myself being much less judgmental of people by the
end of the retreat. You know how humans are. They
size people up on the base of very little evidence.
I remember at the beginning of the retreat seeing this
guy with a Juilliard T shirt on it, thinking, oh, Juilliard, Well,
(22:43):
aren't we special like you know? And by the end
of the retreat I was much less judgmental, and in fact,
that guy at the end, when the silence is broken,
he raised his hand and asked a question, and he
was this shy, insecure guy, exactly the opposite of the
way I had stereotyped him. Needless to say, by the
end of the retreat, I was sold. So give me
a sense of how meditation actually does that. Because it
(23:05):
sounds awesome to kind of get control over your feelings
and deal with your thoughts. But how is sitting there
and focusing on your breath for ten minutes a day
actually help you do that? Well, if you can make
a lot of progress in ten minutes a day, then
God bless you, and some people can. People's mileage varies.
You know. I meditate longer than that, and my practice
still has its ups and downs. But there's an irony
(23:27):
about meditation, which is that if you quit running away
from bad feelings and just accept them and kind of
be with them, get closer to them, you can get
a more objective perspective on them. Like I recommend it.
If you're feeling sad, just sit down, close your eyes
in a quiet room, observe the sadness. I mean, normally
(23:50):
we try to get away from sadness. We try to
think something that will make it go away. We try
to talk to somebody who will pull us out of
or we just eat something that will help, or take
a drug. But just sit down and go, Okay, I'm sad.
What is this thing? Like? Where in my head is
the feeling or elsewhere in my body, Where are the feelings,
what are their contours, what are their shapes? You know,
(24:13):
I predict it before long, you'll find that, oddly, although
you're closer to the feeling, you have a more objective
perspective on it. You're in a certain sense more detached
and closer at the same time. And that is the
beginning of liberation from a feeling and getting that kind
of objective purchase on it is the beginning of deciding
(24:34):
whether you're going to let it govern your thoughts and
life and the rest of your day. When I've had
a chance to kind of watch my feelings in the
way you're talking about, kind of sit with my sadness,
it seems like it also teaches me this other Buddhist
ideal of sort of impermanence, right. You know, sometimes when
you're sad, it can feel like I'm just going to
feel this way forever. But if you kind of sit
with it and hang out with it, you know, those
(24:56):
things go away in this weird sense. So, Yeah, my
daughters went to teen meditation retreats. One thing the teachers
emphasize with them is like, think of feelings as like
the weather. Yeah, it's a storm or whatever, it's high humidity,
but it'll be gone tomorrow. And yeah, that can be
a helpful thing, just to think, regardless of whether you're meditating,
(25:18):
just remind yourself this too shall pass. I know you
talked about this lot in the book, But have these
practices helped you? Oh? I think so. People say they
noticed the difference. I mean, my wife says she notices
the difference, and she's probably the most reliable witness. When
I came back from my first meditation retreat, all I
had to do was call her and start talking. Before
(25:39):
she was glad I had gone. Literally, it was just
a tone of my voice, she said, just the way
I was talking was like, oh, yeah, this guy would
be much easier to live with than the guy who
left for this retreat. And you know, meditation retreats give
you a taste for how radically different your everyday consciousness
could be. They condenced me that that state of consciousness
(26:05):
would be much more conducive to happiness, would make me
a much better person, and would bring me a clearer
view of the world, a literally clearer view of the world.
I really believe that those three things can align, and
that is the Buddhist promise, and it's not easy to
keep them aligning as thoroughly and as magically as they might.
(26:29):
At the end of a nine day retreat, you know
once you're back in the real world, but once you've
seen that, it's an incentive to keep practicing on a
daily basis and to hang on to at least part
of that consciousness. The story of the Buddha is one
that I just had to include in this mini season
(26:50):
on Happiness Lessons of the Ancients. It encapsulates so much
a privilege. Young man realized that life is impermanent, and
that even the richest king couldn't build palace walls high
enough to fight off the sadness that this impermanence brings.
The Buddha tap that the best way to deal with
all this suffering is to sit with it, to it
and experience it. I know very few of us can
(27:12):
go on long meditation retreats, but all of us can
bring a bit more mindfulness into our daily lives. It
can be as simple as noticing the sensation of being
in your bed, or how the soap and water feel
as you wash your hands. I personally try to fit
in ten minutes of meditation a day. I do it
right after I exercise, when I'm already feeling a little
bit more in tune with my body. I just PLoP
(27:34):
on the floor, close my eyes and try to focus
on my breath. And while that sounds really simple, it's
surprisingly hard. A previous guest on The Happiness Lab said
that sitting with his thoughts during his first meditation was
like trying to wrestle alive fish. But trust me, it
gets a lot easier. I'm no Jedi master, and I
have lots of days when I don't even get in
(27:54):
that ten minutes, but even my patchy meditation practice makes
me feel a lot better. I'm even starting to come
to terms with the sad fact that nothing is permanent
and that all good things come to an end, including
this mini season. So with that, I'd like to share
some gratitude. Thank you so much for listening to these shows,
which we've really enjoyed making, and never fear. The Happiness
(28:16):
Lab will be back with some special episodes as well
as a new season in January, where we explore how
other old school happiness lessons are also backed by modern science.
Until then, stay safe and stay happy. The Happiness Lab
is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show
was mastered by Evan Viola and our original music was
(28:38):
composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the entire Pushkin crew,
including Mia La Belle, Karli Migliori, Heather Fine, Sophie Crane, mckibbon,
Eric Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent Ben Davis. The
Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and
meet doctor Laurie Santos.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.