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The Ezra Klein Show

By Ezra Klein

transcript

I’ve had a meditation practice for about 15 years now, and I got into it thinking it would calm me down. I’ve got a little bit of a highly tuned nervous system and it has done that. But over time. And in the periods when the practice is a bit deeper, when I have a little bit more grit under its tires, the thing that really seems to do is alienate me from my own mind. I watch what is playing on the projector of my psyche and I think, why did I or something in here, some part of me load up that particular film. And at least in the way my mind works, load it up again and again and again and again. And there are people who have been thinking about and exploring this strange way. The mind actually works for a very long time. One of them, whose work I’ve long been interested in is his Mark Epstein. Have you ever heard of Mark Epstein. Is he an artist. Epstein is a psychotherapist. He’s had a private practice in New York for many decades, but he’s also an eminent Buddhist philosopher and author. His first big book years ago was called thoughts without a thinker. Remember, everybody was reading that when I first moved to New York. Now a lot of people go to therapy. The fact that it has all these dimensions of mindfulness and awareness in it, it seems normal and natural. But some people built that bridge and Epstein was one of them. His most recent book is called The Zen of Therapy, and I’ve just had this thought for a while. Just be interesting to ask him. After his decades of therapeutic practice, his decades of intense meditation, what he’s learned about the mind. How does he think about how the mind works. What is the relationship you have to your own thoughts when you realize you’re not the one controlling them. Mark Epstein, welcome to the show. What a pleasure. So tell me, after all these years, what do you think a thought is. My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein. I was on a retreat with him last year. He said a thought is just a little something more than nothing. So I really liked that. I thought oh, that’s coming out of 60 years of his meditation experience. So I’ve been repeating that to myself a little more than nothing. Your first book had one of my favorite titles for a book, thoughts without a thinker. Yeah and I think that’s the part of this that I want to get at that strange sense that they just happen. Happen Yeah. Why do they happen. The person is in a predicament in that they find themselves in a body with a mind having to make sense out of being in the world. And a conscious, internal, subjective thought seems to come along with that realization. So thoughts are in some way what we would call the ego trying to figure out Oh my God, what do I do in this predicament. The ego mediates between inner and outer and between lower and higher. That’s the function of the ego. And thoughts in this way of thinking would be like an extension of the ego a tool of the ego. See, I would prefer it, I think, if they felt like a tool. Well used the thing that I find very alienating when my meditation practice is a bit deeper and I’m a bit more aware, is recognition that I’m constantly thinking about things that if I really were trying to figure out how to live in this world in a productive way, I would not be thinking about all the time the tendency of thoughts to get stuck for them to attract to negative imaginings of the future. It’s very strange when you begin being attentive to not just that they’re arising, but that they have certain patterns that you would not choose and you’re not sure, then who chose them or how they’re being chosen. And it doesn’t feel like you have a lot of control over that process. It can be a mistake from the Buddhist point of view, to see thoughts always as the problem. A lot of people who get interested in meditation start to value the empty mind, the mind with no thought, as if that’s some kind of great achievement. One of the first Buddhist texts that I ever read that made a big impression on me when I was still in college, talked about the untrained mind as being the problem. That a disciplined mind, they said, was the road to Nirvana, the road to enlightenment. The point of spiritual practice, of meditation, of psychotherapy isn’t to make you more stupid. It’s to make you more aware or more conscious so that you actually have choices about the way you live your life. You started that answer by saying that it can be a common. I don’t think you use the word mistake, but I understood you as saying mistake. Yeah, to fetishize the empty mind. Why Well, there’s something very appealing about stumbling into an experience of Oh, the mind is something more than just the thinker of thoughts. It’s actually very peaceful to have that experience of the empty mind. And we’re all looking for something different than what our everyday experience is. So it’s easy to get attached to what feels like a transcendental, you a brief transcendental experience and/or a drug experience. And then to go chasing that. So it’s not about getting rid of thoughts or devaluing thoughts. It’s about cultivating thoughts, that are useful. I had one of my most profound experiences on a silent meditation retreat was about five days into the retreat. My mind was analyzing what the food was going to be for breakfast, and it was like, O.K, the food is fine. It’s like yogurt and oatmeal and peanuts and raisins. But where’s the bread. What we really need is a piece of toast. And that was like what was preoccupying me. And on about the fifth day, the bread appeared and I put it in the toaster and made a plate with butter and jam and sat down and took my first mindful bite very focused. No thinking, just the taste of the toast. So delicious. And then my mind wandered and the next thing I knew, I looked down and I was like, who ate my toast. It was. It had disappeared. And where my mind went immediately was, who did this to me. Searching for someone to blame. And I think that’s the kind of insight, actually, that precipitates out of a deep meditation experience where we see that so much of our mental activity is trying to protect ourselves, or trying to find someone to blame for whatever it is that happens that we’re uncomfortable with. So much of thinking is from a self-centered place like that, and with enough meditation practice, we start to Wade through a lot of that crap. So in a way, this podcast, Genesis, is I was in a used bookstore in the East Village, and I came across that original thoughts without a thinker book, and I’d always meant to read it. And then when I did read it, that came out. What, in the 80s. 95 95. It’s very Freudian. Yeah and so I want to start bringing in the other side of your work here. I think now a lot of us look at Freudian work, Freudian theory, and think, man, it is strange. People got excited about that. But Freud is a big influence on that first book. What do you still find valuable about the way Freud understood, or what he did for psychotherapy or understandings of the subconscious. And what do you look at with a bit of. Well, we all got carried away. Well, I don’t think we all got carried away, but a whole generation got carried away. Freud’s been a big influence on all of my books. The whole way we think about the mind, about the self, the unconscious, the instincts. That’s all. Freud Freud. The 20th century, 21st century conception of the mind. Whether we agree with everything that Freud said about sexuality and whatnot. But it’s all Freud. Freud, in a way, was a meditator. He was snorting cocaine and using that heightened awareness to observe his own dreams, his own mind. All this. I do not know all this. Yeah my Freudian knowledge is paper thin. Oh, Freud. There’s a rich. So what you’re proposing here is that the correct way to understand the mind is to take a bunch of cocaine. And then observe. I’m not proposing that at all. But many, many people are doing that, and it leads them into meditation. But no, Freud’s whole thing. At the beginning of his career, after he was studying fish, he got into cocaine. It’s a classic progression. It can come out of many different directions. And his book, which was written around 1900 or published around 1900, the interpretation of dreams. He engaged in one of the first self-analysis and began to really chart his dreams, examine his dreams, and interpret his dreams and his whole method of free association and evenly suspended attention, which was the purpose of which was to get the rational mind, the thinking mind, the judging mind out of the way so that you could go deeper into your own personal experience. That led him into the discovery of what he called the unconscious. And the unconscious is where all our secrets are stored, and where the aspects of ourselves that comes up in our dreams and in our fantasies where what is that and where is that coming from. Freud called it the unconscious. And then he proceeded to develop a method of probing the unconscious through psychotherapy, which was a revolution. He promised too much. The same way that psychedelics are currently promising too much, or Prozac promised too much, or meditation promises too much because people want something that will cure everything. And psychoanalysis couldn’t do that. When I read things that are heavily influenced by Freud now, I’ll read the stories he’s telling, the ideas he is spinning out. You talk in your book about him taking a walk with some friends and just ending up, as they seem a little bit dissatisfied, spinning out a very profound and intense theory about their relationship to the passage of time. Yes, absolutely. It’s a beautiful little paper called on transience. And Freud ends it by saying, is a flower that blooms for only a single night any less beautiful because of the short duration of its life. But when I read that story in your book and I’ve read other Freudian stories, what I think immediately is, well, how does he know. I feel like now there is a tendency to prize forms of knowing that can be validated in some external way. Oh, totally. Whereas Freud it always seems to me a very insightful storyteller. Yeah, but you either bought into the story or you didn’t. Yeah Yeah. Same with meditation. Tell me about that. Well, there’s a big effort now to document the scientific benefits, to prove in the lab that when you’re meditating, something is really happening in the brain. And, and I started out in my career working for a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, Herbert Benson, who did the physiological measurements of transcendental meditators, showing that their blood pressure could be lowered and their heartbeat slowed and their carbon dioxide output diminished. So I understand the value of Oh, this is a real thing. Science tells us it’s a real thing. But my experience of going on my first couple of silent meditation retreats, which a week or 10 days of not talking, not making eye contact and just looking at my own internal experience. That’s what showed me that meditation was a real thing, experientially. Oh my mind is capable more than just my usual thoughts. There’s a whole vast, both interior and external experience that I have never allowed myself that is opening up science. If it was going to try to document that might be able to measure my heartbeat but it couldn’t get close to the poetics of the experience. If science can’t find it, how would you describe what it is that science can’t find love. In meditation. Yeah and meditation. Like at the great revelation that can come out of meditation is oh, you start to experience yourself as a loving being. Why do you think that is. I don’t know. I think because we are fundamentally loving beings and that’s our true nature. I’ve always been a little bit, I don’t want to say turned off, but the idea that the good nature is underneath. Yeah we’re just trying to pull off all the crust and the crud and the stories and the. Is that what you’re getting at. And, I have little kids. Sometimes they’re really loving and great. Sometimes they’re know. Yeah slightly tyrannical. Totally tyrannical. By the time they’re little kids, it’s already happening. So it’s just when they’re a baby that our good nature is there. What is. What is that thing under. Underneath? and do you do you actually believe that it is underneath, or do you believe it is a thing we are shaping. And then it feels like it was always there in sufficiently advanced meditation or moments of awakening. I had a conversation once with Ram Dass, who Richard Alpert, blah, blah, who I was very, very. Yeah Ram Dass, a great eventually Hindu influenced mystic, also crucial figure in the psychedelic revolution alongside Timothy Leary, one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century, started out as a psychology professor at Harvard. I met him when he was already in his Indian Ram Dass incarnation, but I was just at Harvard. I was in my early 20s. And then I went to medical school, became a psychiatrist, didn’t see him for 20 years. He had a bad stroke, could hardly talk. I went to visit him. And he always joked with me. He was like oh, are you a Buddhist psychiatrist now. I was like, I guess so, he said. And he had trouble making the words because he’d had a stroke. Do you see them. Meaning my patients. Do you see them as already free. And it took me up short do I see them as already free. But I had to say Yes, that was like. That’s what I had gotten from the meditation side of things. But the mind is capable of something so beyond what we normally think of our minds as doing that. The shorthand for that would be love. Are you talking about something we would understand as a mind or something more like what we would understand as the shards of a soul. From the Buddhist side, they use the same word to talk about mind and heart. So put that together, and I think you get a soul. So what’s if there’s any purpose behind our incarnations as humans, the purpose would be to come in contact with that greater potential of the mind. And that’s what all this work is about is uncovering to let it shine through. Well, this gets to a symmetry that you point out between how Freud advised the therapist to show up. Yeah and how Buddhist meditation advises a meditator to show up, which is with this........

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