Dan Harris Transcript

Dan Harris Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Dan Harris. Dan is a co-anchor of Nightline, which is an ABC news program, and the weekend edition of Good Morning America. Previously he was the anchor of the Sunday edition of World News. He regularly contributes stories for such shows as 20/20, World News with Diane Sawyer, and Weekday GMA, Good Morning America. Harris has reported from all over the planet, covering wars in Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, and Iraq, and producing investigative reports in Haiti, Cambodia, and the Congo. He’s also spent many years covering America’s faith scene with a focus on evangelicals, who have treated him kindly despite the fact that he is openly agnostic. He has been at ABC News for 14 years. He grew up outside Boston and currently lives with his wife, Bianca, in New York City. And the reason I’m interviewing him is that he has written a book called “10% Happier, how I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge, and found self-help that actually works, a true story”. It has a picture of a glass half full or half empty on the cover, depending on your perspective. So welcome Dan, thanks for doing this.

Dan: Thanks for having me. And there’s also one little drop falling into the glass, so it’s like …

Rick: Oh yeah, it’s getting fuller, of course. I didn’t notice that.

Dan: You know, they didn’t do a good job. This is my one beef. They didn’t do a good enough job to really highlight that one drop.

Rick: They should have made it red or something.

Dan: Yeah, and then in the follow-up, the drop will be more prominent.

Rick: Okay, there will be a follow-up?

Dan: I don’t know, I just said that.

Rick: Well, you know, when I first heard the title of your book, the first thought that popped into my head was, you know, you’ve got a series here, you could, you know, like Harry Potter or something, you could be writing 20% happier, 30% happier, and so on. Because I think, in my experience, once you get on this train, there’s no stopping it.

Dan: Yeah, the problem is I hate math, so I’ll probably get away from that kind of numerical titling. But maybe I’ll do a 10% happier in different areas, though.

Rick: Kind of like John Gray, you know.

Dan: Who?

Rick: You know, Johnny Gray, “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”.

Dan: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Rick: He ended up doing like Mars and Venus on a date, Mars and Venus doing this, and he kind of spun it into this whole thing.

Dan: Or, right, chicken soup for the soul, that type of thing.

Rick: Yeah, chicken soup for the soul.

Dan: There’s an inherent cheesiness to that kind of franchising, and yet, if I can convince myself that it will work, then maybe I’ll do it.

Rick: Yeah, as long as it doesn’t take you four years to write each book, you’ll be okay. So, you start this book with an account of a full-blown panic attack that you had in front of 5 million people on Good Morning America, which I may have seen but forgotten, but then I watched it recently, and it was painful to watch. It must have been even more painful to experience. And so, perhaps we could start with a nutshell version of what led up to that panic attack in your life.

Dan: So, well, let me talk you through the panic attack, just in case viewers haven’t seen it. I was anchoring the news updates on Good Morning America. This is in June of 2004, and I was … basically, the person who does that comes on at the top of each hour and reads a series of headlines. So, I was supposed to do six stories, and that was my spiel, and then I was done. And I had done the job before, so I didn’t have any reason to foresee what was about to happen, which was about 30 seconds into my newscast, I was just overtaken by this irresistible bolt of fear. I … my mind started racing, my palms were sweating, my mouth dried up, my lungs seized up. I just couldn’t talk, basically. And I tried to power through it, but I couldn’t, and so I had to do something I’d never done before on live television, which was I quit right in the middle, and I tossed it back to the hosts of the show, Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. And people have seen the video. I’ve had mixed reactions. Some people like you say it was tough to watch. Some people say, “Eh, you know, it wasn’t that bad.” And I think …

Rick: You look terrified.

Dan: Yeah, well, I was terrified.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Dan: There’s no question about it. But, you know, if I didn’t … if I hadn’t had the luxury of tossing it back to the co-anchors, then you would have seen a panic attack along the lines of Albert Brooks from broadcast news, where he breaks out into flop sweat and et cetera, et cetera. Or I would have had to Tourettic outbursts or rip the mic off and run away. It would have gotten truly, truly ugly.

Rick: Yeah, so if you’d been doing the evening news, you know, and you’d had a whole half hour to fill, you would have been screwed.

Dan: Yes. You know, I just heard a little beep and I think that was my email, so I’m just closing out of my email.

Rick: Okay.

Dan: So you asked me what led up to it.

Rick: Yeah.

Dan: And what led up to it was a series of truly moronic decisions. So it kind of … I’ll just take you back to four years earlier, I arrived at ABC News. I was 28 years old. I was very green. And I was working with these giants like Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. And I was self-conscious about my lack of experience. And my way of compensating for that was to become a workaholic. I just threw myself into the job. And after 9/11, I volunteered to go overseas without really thinking about the psychological consequences. And I spent a lot of time in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and the Middle East. And when I came home after a particularly long stretch in Iraq, I got depressed. And I actually didn’t know I was depressed, although I was exhibiting all the classic signs or some of the classic signs. Like I was having trouble getting out of bed. I felt like I had a low-grade fever all the time. And that’s when I did something very, very dumb, which is I started to self-medicate with cocaine and ecstasy. And even though I was doing this for a pretty short period of time, less than two years, and sporadically, never when I was working, definitely not when I was on the air. I like to say that I was stupid, but not that stupid. It was enough, according to my doctor, the doctor who I consulted after the panic attack, to raise the level of adrenaline in my brain and prompt me to have the freak-out that we’ve been talking about.

Rick: So it was kind of a fight-or-flight thing that was triggered without any impetus at that moment. Yes?

Dan: Yeah, I mean, fight-or-flight can be triggered for any of us at any time, the variables being our brain chemistry and the severity of the event, the exogenous event that’s triggering it. And for me, according to the doctor, I had artificially raised the level of adrenaline, so any external trigger was going to be more potent. And in this case, my latent stage fright, which as I say in the book, had made my career up until that point a triumph of narcissism over fear. My latent stage fright was triggered just because my baseline of adrenaline was higher.

Rick: Yeah, and you didn’t quite say it, but it wasn’t just the drugs. It was the fact that you’d been in Iraq and Afghanistan for four years, and you must have accumulated a lot of stress there. I mean, you must have had a fair amount of PTSD without even knowing it.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if it was PTSD. Well, first of all, I want to say a couple of things about that. One is I am very careful not to compare what I experienced overseas to what our men and women in uniform experienced overseas, because I’ve been on the front lines with those guys and gals, and I’m in awe of what they do, and the amount of the volume and intensity of the stress that they endure, you know, is so much more than what I experienced. I got just a taste of it. So I don’t know if I had PTSD, but what I do think that I … this is my analysis in hindsight with the help of a professional, by which I am referring to my shrink. I think that I got this dose of adrenaline overseas, and I really liked it. And when I came home, I would compensate with this synthetic sport of adrenaline, this fake thrill of cocaine and ecstasy, and that had these unintended consequences of making me more prone to freaking out on television. So I don’t think that it’s the case that I went overseas and was so traumatized by what I saw that I then had a panic attack on television. I think it’s a little bit more complex and frankly a little bit more embarrassing than that.

Rick: Yeah, you’re just sort of an adrenaline junkie.

Dan: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so at some point you became the religion editor, or what does it say in your book? That religion was your beat, and you were going around interviewing all these fundamentalists and so on. Was that post-panic attack, or had you already started doing that?

Dan: Yeah, so it’s kind of a … this is all leading up to me becoming a meditator. And sometimes, one of the funny things about writing a book and being public about my own life is now that other people are writing about me, as opposed to me writing about other people, which for my entire life has been the case. And often the story gets summed up as, “Newsman has panic attack and becomes a meditator.” That’s actually not what happened. What happened was, I had the panic attack, and then around that time I was assigned to cover religion for ABC News by Peter Jennings. I think actually, technically, the assignment was given to me before the panic attack, but then I ended up spending a lot of time overseas covering war zones and didn’t do much with it. And it was after the panic attack, after George Bush was elected president, the second time, with the help of a lot of social conservatives and evangelicals, that I really dove into the world of religion. So, it was this assignment that was the second variable that led me toward meditation. Because heretofore, I had almost zero exposure to spirituality of any variety. I was raised in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts by two very, very skeptical secular scientists. My mother, when I was a little kid, I have this memory of her explaining to me that not only was there no Santa Claus, but there’s also no God. So, this is the kind of environment in which I was raised. I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for the money and for the social acceptance in my largely Jewish hometown. So, I didn’t want this assignment when Peter told me, “You’re going to cover religion.” But he said, “I don’t care. You’re going to do it anyways.” And it turned out to be this great thing because I was totally ignorant. And I ended up making a lot of really good friends, faith, and learning a lot about how most of our fellow inhabitants on this planet see the world through the lens of their faith. And I was really just not in touch with that. That being said, none of what I encountered spoke to me personally. I didn’t become a practicing Jew or Catholic or Christian or Muslim.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s some interesting bits in your book about this too, like the whole Ted Haggard situation, which some viewers may remember. So, you really got exposed to an interesting subculture, didn’t you? And then, how did you end up shifting from fundamentalists on to Eckhart Tolle and that whole world?

Dan: So, I was covering evangelicals mostly as a religion reporter because if you recall during that time, it was the height of the culture wars. But several years into it, so this is about four years after the panic attack, in 2008, I was actually out covering a story about Sarah Palin, who at that time had just been chosen as the nominee for vice president by John McCain. And the producer I was working with said, “Have you ever read a book by Eckhart Tolle?” Actually, what she said was, “You should check it out. It’s all about controlling your ego.” Which I laughed at because I thought that was her saying I was a self-important anchorman, which was true. But that actually wasn’t her point. Her point was that Eckhart Tolle talks about the ego as the voice in the head. I had no prior exposure to Eckhart Tolle. I had never heard of him. And I’m sure people in your audience have, but off chance that anybody hasn’t, he’s basically this mega best-selling self-help guru beloved by Oprah and lots of other celebrities. And my producer’s argument was he was making a cultural impact at that time. We ought to check him out and maybe do a story about him. So I said, “Okay, I’ll think about it.” So I ordered his book. And when I started to read the book, bear in mind, no prior exposure to anything like Eckhart Tolle or Eastern spirituality at all. I thought it was … can I swear?

Rick: Yeah, yeah, no problem.

Dan: I thought it was total bullshit. I mean, I just … I was completely repulsed. He uses all this pseudoscientific language and he’s talking about vibrational fields and all this other crap and making these grandiose claims about how he had a spiritual awakening and then lived on park benches in London in a state of bliss for two years. And then he says that he’s going to provoke a spiritual awakening in you, the reader. It was a lot for me to take. And his style of writing is, again, for a skeptical guy like me, it’s intensely annoying. So I was, you know, reading it and not happy with my producer for having suggested it. But then, as I persevered, he started to unfurl this thesis about the human condition that I had never heard before, which had to do with the ego, the voice in the head. He argues that we all have this voice in our heads, by which he’s not referring to schizophrenia or hearing voices. He’s talking about the voice that chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long and has you constantly wanting stuff or not wanting stuff or not caring about things or judging other people or comparing yourself to other people or criticizing yourself. And when you’re unaware of this voice in the head, he argues, it yanks you around. It’s why you’re eating when you’re not hungry or losing your temper when it’s not in your best interest or checking your Blackberry when your children are trying to talk to you. And this was a huge aha moment for me, because for two reasons. One, it just struck me as intuitively true. And two, I realized that it was this voice in the head that was responsible for all the things I was most embarrassed about in my life, like going to war zones without thinking about the consequences, getting depressed upon returning home without even knowing I was depressed, and then blindly self-medicating with coke and ecstasy. And at this point, I was convinced that my producer was right. We should check him out.

Rick: Yeah. Just a comment on this voice in the head thing. We’ll probably get into more of this kind of discussion later, but I just interviewed a woman yesterday, and I’ve interviewed people before who say that the voice in their head has completely stopped now. They don’t think. And I tried to press her about it. I say, “Well, if I ask you a question and you just answer it in your mind instead of speaking it out loud, or if I ask you to count from one to ten in your mind, aren’t those thoughts?” And even that, it was hard to pin her down on, but I’ve spoken to a number of people who seem to have awakened so profoundly, if that’s awakening, that their mind is like a placid pond, and the only thoughts which arise are thoughts which are actually useful and germane to the situation, and otherwise, the mind stays silent. I don’t know if that’s the way Tolle functions, but there are people like that out there, apparently, at least by their own description.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, it may be the way Tolle functions. And there’s another guy named Gary Weber. I don’t know if you’ve interviewed him.

Rick: I’ve interviewed him, yeah.

Dan: Okay, so Gary Weber makes this claim.

Rick: Yeah, he does. I had a big argument with him about that. I said, “You’ve got to think. You’re talking to me and thoughts precede action, you know, so there must be some thought that gives rise to the speech,” but I could never kind of nail him on it.

Dan: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, these people are making claims about their internal reality that are hard to verify. I mean, one of the interesting things that’s happening now in neuroscience is that you have this sort of young, renegade group of neuroscientists. They call themselves the Shangri-Las, and they are at various institutions like Yale and Harvard and Brown, and these are, you know, practicing Buddhist neuroscientists who are interested in liberation. And I think, you know, I know that they’re interested in seeing whether you can find the brain signatures for certain forms of awakening. And I find that extremely, extremely compelling. But for now, we have to either believe or not believe these people making these claims. And the only way I’ve found to gauge it is just the smell test, you know. Does their personal comportment jibe with the claim they’re making? And sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

Rick: Did Tolle’s, when you met him?

Dan: Yeah, I have to say, you know, he’s one of these guys who… So, first of all, I can answer on two levels. One, the way I felt in the moment, and the way I feel in retrospect. The way I felt in the moment was I was totally confused because he… He doesn’t seem like he’s full of shit, but a lot of the things he says are crazy, or at least seemed crazy to me. And he’s capable of saying something really incisive, and within the same sentence, veering directly into cuckoo town. So, like, I’m having a pleasant chat with him on the elevator after the interview, and I mentioned that I asked him how old he is. He says he’s in his 60s, and I say, “Oh, you look younger.” And he says, “Oh, yeah, well, I basically haven’t aged since I had my spiritual awakening at age 29.” So, to me, that sounds a little crazy. And especially to the me at that time, who, again, was not really in this world yet, in the world in which you and I now sort of marinate most of our time. So, but in retrospect, there’s nothing about him that seems to me like he’s a shyster, or is full of crap, or really just cares about the money, or something like that. I don’t… Again, this is only worth… This isn’t worth much, because it’s just one man’s opinion. He just didn’t strike me as somebody who’s pulling the wool over other people’s eyes, or even his own eyes, necessarily.

Rick: Yeah. I just wanted to make a comment on the cuckoo town thing, which is that… and I thought about this a lot as I was reading your book, which is that one man’s mysticism is another man’s everyday reality. And throughout history, people have had mystical experiences, or lived perpetually in a state which was so far beyond the ordinary, in terms of what most people experience, that descriptions of it would have seemed really far-fetched. And they were persecuted sometimes for describing their experience, murdered, killed. And yet it’s all a matter of societal norms. I mean, if we lived in a society in which pretty much everybody experienced the world that way, it would be no big deal. We’d all take it for granted. But these people are outliers. And so, they sound strange from the perspective of conventional reality.

Dan: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely… I mean, my suspicion is that you’re absolutely right. And that’s why I was trying to differentiate between the me in 2009, who was meeting Eckhart Tolle, and the me who’s talking to you now in 2014. Because you have to give me a break, the old me, because I had no exposure to mysticism or Eastern spirituality at all. I just thought he was…

Rick: Yeah, you were just going…

Dan: What’s that?

Rick: I say you were just kind of confronting this, like, you know, cold turkey for the first time.

Dan: Yeah. He just struck me as a strange little German guy. So, I didn’t know what to make of him. But where I come to over the course of the book is that, yeah, maybe he is right. I don’t know. And I know a lot of very smart people who I do trust, who say, you know, he could be telling the truth. And that has really forced me to reconsider a lot of my early assumptions. And in fact, one of the… it’s the big theme in the book, which is that my… I’m like the anti-Blink. You know that Malcolm Gladwell book, Blink, about the wisdom of our subconscious. For me, my reflexive judgments are usually dead wrong. And over the course of the book, I’m just wrong and wrong and wrong again. And one of the things I have to admit toward the end is that, on some levels, I was probably wrong about Eckhart Tolle. I still think he’s a little odd, but he may be right. And one of the things that may make him seem odd to somebody like me is that he’s talking to us, potentially, from a different state of… a very different state of mind. And that there’s a barrier. It’s hard for him to communicate over this gulf, over this chasm of the, quote-unquote, “from an awakened perspective” to the rest of us who are, you know, who’s… you know, where our hair’s on fire.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s a perennial problem. I think my former teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, always used to say, “Knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance.” And, you know, that he said that anybody like Jesus or Buddha or any of these people, they speak from their level of consciousness, but the listeners can only listen from their level of consciousness, and inevitably there’s a gulf, and something is lost in the transmission. And then what makes it worse is that, you know, after they die, and it begins getting handed on from one generation to the next, it’s like that party game, you know, telephone, where you whisper something, and it goes around the room, and by the time it gets back to you, it’s completely different than the original message. So, there’s this sort of, you know, confusion and distortion that takes place over time. And so, you have modern religions, which are probably the remnants of somebody’s experience 2,000 years ago or whatever, but which in many cases bear little resemblance to what that guy was actually saying, or, you know, can’t possibly evoke what he was actually experiencing.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, that’s, yeah, you end up with calcified dogma and persecution of those who don’t buy into every part of it. I mean, that’s a big, that’s a big part of Tolle’s writing, actually. He sort of re-theologizes Jesus, which is, you know, makes him controversial in some circles.

Rick: Yeah, Adyashanti’s doing that too, these days. I read, sent you a video, audio of him.

Dan: Yeah, I was, actually, when you, we started Skyping, I was actually listening to the first part of that.

Rick: Cool.

Dan: I don’t know. We’ve got a cat on camera, sorry.

Rick: Oh, very nice. We, I used to do that too. Our cats both died, unfortunately, of old age, but they always used to, I used to hold them up during the interviews and they’d walk across my desk.

Dan: Yes, there will be one or another cat walking through this throughout.

Rick: I love cats. One thing he did say about Tolle, which I think is an important point, is that he articulates truth extremely well, but doesn’t give you anything to do about it. And I do think that a lot of teachers tend to do that. In some cases, they articulate it so well that it kind of evokes an experience in the listeners and gives them a flavor of what they’re talking about, and maybe in some, actually, triggers an awakening. But for the most part, it’s kind of like, you know, describing a meal you had eaten and how delicious it was. It doesn’t nourish the listener, and you have to have that experience for yourself.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, so again, I’ll differentiate between the old me and then the sort of newer 10% evolved me. The old me felt like he had pointed out that my hair was on fire and steadfastly refused to give me a fire extinguisher, because my first question to him was, “All right, I buy it. We have a voice in our head. What do we do about it?” And he sort of looked at me and said, “Well, take one conscious breath.” And I was like, “What does that mean? What does that mean? What do you –” And I gave him like a bunch of bites at the apple to explain, “What do you do about the voice in the head?” And he just didn’t give me any actionable advice, which was extremely frustrating. He then went on to claim that he never gets into a bad mood, no matter what, and all this stuff about he doesn’t age. So, I mean, I kind of walked out of there — no, I walked out of there really frustrated, but determined to try to get answers to this. And that’s what threw me deeper into the self-help universe, which is not a pretty place.

Rick: Why isn’t it a pretty place?

Dan: Because it’s filled with a lot of these —

Rick: A lot of nonsense.

Dan: Yeah, not only nonsense, I think dangerous nonsense.

Rick: Well, yeah, there’s that sweat lodge guy and all kinds of things like that, which have killed people.

Dan: Well, there’s that.

Rick: Extreme examples.

Dan: Yeah, those are extreme examples, but I think there’s a common danger, which is this power of positive thinking, which is demonstrably untrue. It is not true that you can solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking. And the flip side, the inverse of the logic blames the victim. So if you were born in a refugee camp in Africa, does that mean you were thinking negatively in utero? If you survived the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2010, does that mean you and all of your neighbors were thinking incorrectly and you brought about this horrible earthquake? No, it’s ridiculous. And it also can lead to people getting sick. When they get sick, they don’t do anything about it, like traditional, like go to a doctor, they don’t do anything traditional like that. They just try to rely on positive thinking, and I don’t think that’s a good way to go. And so, yes, you do have these extreme cases of people getting hurt because they followed self-help gurus, but I think you just have this huge societal, negative societal impact of people latching onto this idea that everything can be fixed through the power of your mind, and I think it’s just bullshit.

Rick: Yeah, I tend to agree with you. There may be some nuanced arguments that we could throw in there, and some would actually argue that the people in the earthquake, they didn’t do anything bad in this life, but it was past lives that they’re now reaping the fruits of, and that all gets very …

Rick: Yeah, I’m a little bit more open to karma, just like a little bit more, but I mean, I covered that earthquake, and there were a lot of little kids who I saw dead on the side of the street, and I’m not willing to chalk that up to their past life misdeeds, and I’m definitely not willing to chalk it up to negative thinking. And I’m not saying that optimism has no value. Optimism has a lot … there’s plenty of value, and I’m not saying that we should all be wallowing in negativity. I’m just saying that the magical thinking that we’re being sold, this idea that just think positive thoughts all the time, and you can get diamond necklaces, as is actually depicted in the DVD of The Secret. You’ve got somebody, and they manifest a diamond necklace, or they cure their cancer. I just don’t think that’s a useful thing to be telling people. At the very least, it’s harmless nonsense. At the worst, it’s dangerous.

Rick: Yeah, and I don’t think it has anything to do with true spirituality, because to my understanding and experience, spirituality actually has to do not with the content of your thoughts, like I’m going to think positively here and there, but actually shifting the whole context in which you think. In other words, shifting your whole framework, your whole state of consciousness to the point where you’re actually thinking thoughts from an entirely different level than you were when you were caught up on a more superficial, agitated level of mental activity all the time. If that can be accomplished, then thinking can be, I don’t want to use the word positive, but it can be more appropriate and fruitful in a spontaneous way, without having to make a big fuss about it all the time, and it can actually yield results much more effectively and readily.

Dan: Yes, but when you make that paradigm shift, sorry to interrupt you.

Rick: No problem.

Dan: When you make that internal paradigm shift, maybe paradigm isn’t the right word, just the internal shift that you’re describing, yeah, I think the type of thoughts that come can change. I also think, though, there are some more cognitive-based spiritual practices like loving kindness meditation or compassion meditation, where you are really using thoughts that can, that do use thought to nudge that shift a little bit, and I think those are very interesting as well.

Rick: Yeah, and mantra meditation does that too, in a way. I mean, you’re using a thought, it doesn’t have any meaning, but it’s actually evoking or creating or resulting in a shift in your whole level of consciousness, your whole state of experience. But I enjoyed the bits in your book about the compassion meditation and how profoundly that influenced you. It taught me some things about that that I hadn’t really known. And you mentioned the Shangri-La boys a little earlier, and the term neuroplasticity is very much in vogue. So, the kinds of things you were doing in the book, and we haven’t really talked about that too much yet, and actually changed your brain. And if there are ways of actually measuring that, physiological changes would be seen. You have a very different brain than you did five years ago.

Dan: Well, I mean, there are ways to see whether your brain has changed on some levels.

Rick: Yeah, EEG and stuff, but they’re very inaccurate. They’re kind of like … they only get maybe a fraction of what’s really changed, what’s really going on.

Dan: I think in hindsight, from the vantage point of a couple centuries out, they’ll be seen as extremely rudimentary, there’s no question. But MRI technology has allowed us to see that the brain does change as a result of …

Rick: … meditation.

Dan: … of meditation. But what it hasn’t … I was talking about before, was the idea that you could somehow find a brain signature for enlightenment or awakening. We haven’t done that, but we have gone far enough to show that short daily doses of meditation can literally make the gray matter in key areas of your brain grow or shrink. So, that’s very, very exciting. And for skeptics like me, it can be enough to make you drop, in my case, my very hardened resistance to something like meditation, which I had always considered to be the apex of New Age nonsense. But once you hear that science, it can really provoke you to set aside your misconceptions and preconceptions and give it a try.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a fellow here in my town named Fred Travis, who’s been doing research on TM meditators for decades, and he does claim to be actually defining the neurophysiology of higher states of consciousness, people who are sort of established in a permanent state of pure awareness and stuff, and he’s noting unique brainwave signatures and all, but that’s a whole other story. But there is some research that verifies that. So, you got on to … then there was a whole episode of Deepak, which I thought was kind of interesting. And I know Deepak pretty well. I co-taught the course in which he learned to meditate, and so I knew him back before he was famous and all. I just want to … in his defense, I just want to say that he’s a good businessman, and there’s a lot of hype surrounding him, but there’s really a sincere core to the guy in terms of the ardency of his interest in spirituality and the genuineness of his desire to actually make some kind of impact on the culture.

Dan: So, again, I’ll sort of divide … I’ll do the divide again between my … my impressions of him at the time, which is a while ago, and my conclusions now. My impressions of him at the time were, I liked him a lot. He’s very funny, very sharp. He’s got this … he’s a hustler, and he’s impressive. He’s built this big empire. But I had a hard time swallowing some of his claims about being imperturbable and immune from stress and … I don’t know if he calls himself enlightened, but something in that neighborhood, because I saw him with my own two eyes really, you know, like get worked up in not a very serene way. Now, his argument is that … I think he would say that I can be passionate but not stressed, and fine. That’s his argument, but I’m just saying for me, what I saw seemed pretty stressed.

Rick: I listened to that. That was the thing with Sam Harris, the debate, with Gene Houston. Yeah, I thought he was getting a little worked up myself. I said, you know, Deepak, chill, you know. You don’t have to … you’re getting a little excited here.

Dan: He gets really excited. He gets … also, if you spend time with him, you know, his son made a documentary about him.

Rick: I just saw that the other night, yeah.

Dan: You see in the documentary, you know, this is a spiritual guru who checks his BlackBerry all the time. Now, in his defense, after that movie was made, he saw that he was doing that, and he stopped. So, let me then transition to, you know, my more charitable view of him now after having really, you know, grown in this world a lot more, which is that I don’t know what’s going on in his head, and his claims may very well be true, and who am I to say that it’s, you know, that it’s not … that he’s not as serene as he says he is. And I certainly don’t doubt what you said, which is the sincerity, his sincerity to drive these concepts, the concepts that he cares about deeply, like the mind and body connection, etc., etc., into the public consciousness. And if he makes a few bucks along the way, I got no beef with that.

Rick: Yeah, he’s making a few.

Dan: Yeah, and that’s fine. I’m a capitalist. I have no problem with that.

Rick: Yeah. And I just finally have to say, he is … anybody who’s ever spent any time with him, the guy is just immensely likable. There’s just no way to get around it. I mean, he is a really charming character.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, he’s a sweet guy. There’s a couple of things I want to cover with you, and I don’t want to run out of time. I don’t know how strict we are on the time, but there’s your whole experience with, you know, getting into Buddhist meditation and all, which people can read about in the book, but it was interesting, and your ordeal on retreats and so on. There’s that. There’s the whole “hide the Zen” chapter in your book, which I’d like to talk about a bit. And then I’d also like to cover a little bit some of the points that Sam Harris brings out in his book. And since you’re friends with him and moderated that debate, you know, we can touch upon some of that. I don’t know how we want to apportion the time, but maybe, why don’t you kind of give us a quick synopsis of your dive into Buddhist meditation and, you know, the struggles you had with it and the successes you had with it and how you feel it’s changed you.

Dan: Okay, so, after wading around in the self-help world in a very frustrating, in what was a very frustrating experience, my wife one night, or I guess at that point she was my fiancé, and she may actually walk in the door at some point during this conversation, but she gave me a pair of books by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein, who is a shrink here in New York City where I live, and also a Buddhist. And she said, you know, “I read these books years ago, and what you’re talking about with the voice in the head and all this stuff kind of reminds me vaguely of what I recall from having read these books. So here, check them out, maybe that’ll help.” So I started to read one of his books that night and had another huge “aha” moment where I realized that all the stuff that I liked most from Eckhart Tolle really seemed to be lifted directly from the Buddha. And 2,500 years before Tolle was cashing his royalty checks, it was this guy who most of us know as like the fat guy who’s out in front of massage parlors, who appears to have very clearly articulated this whole thing of the voice in the head. He called it the monkey mind, and his argument was that our minds are like furry little gibbons constantly lurching through this forest of thoughts and impulses and urges and desires, latching to things that don’t last and hurling ourselves from one hit of pleasant experience to the next, never fully satisfied. And again, I was like, “Wow, this is very, very interesting.” And unlike Eckhart Tolle, the Buddha had a very explicit recommendation for dealing with the voice in the head, and it was to meditate. Now, I didn’t want to do that at all, because I thought it was … I associated meditation with freaks and hippies and people who live in yurts and are really into aromatherapy and wear little finger cymbals and collect Cat Stevens records, etc., etc. So, I bought every cultural stereotype.

Rick: I don’t do any of those things, but I like Cat Stevens. But continue.

Dan: Okay, well, you’re forgiven. No, I have no beef with Cat Stevens either. I just … I pick on him for … just because he’s easy to pick on. But anyway, I was very much opposed to the idea of doing meditation, but then I learned about the science, which shows that, as we discussed, it can … it’s been shown to literally change key parts of your brain and lower your blood pressure and boost your immune system, etc., etc. One small caveat, I just want to say that the science is in the embryonic stages right now. It’s by no means is it just positive, but it’s certainly strongly suggestive that there’s a wide range of benefits. And then I learned that, you know, in order to meditate, you don’t necessarily need to join a group or pay any fees or sit in a funny position or wear a special outfit or anything like that or believe in anything. And so, once I had those two key pieces of information on board, I decided to start meditating. And I started with 5, 10 minutes a day, and that was five years ago, and now, you know, I do 30 minutes a day. I go on retreats once in a while. And, you know, as you can tell from the title of my book, I won’t claim that it’s, you know, magically reoriented my entire universe. My life is not a nonstop parade of unicorns and rainbows, but I am, roughly speaking in an absurd estimate, about 10% happier. And I do also think that that 10% compounds annually. You know, if you think of the happiness set point, we all have a set point. This is a psychologically well-accepted term that when bad things happen, so we get a little sad, but then we tend to migrate back to the set point. Good things happen, we get happy, but then we tend to come back to our set point. What I found with meditation is that the good, the upturns, I’m enjoying more, and the bad stuff, I’m not wallowing in as much. I’m not making my suffering worse than it needs to be. And on top of that, the set point itself is going up. So, that’s what I think meditation has done for me.

Rick: I’ve used the same description over the years. It’s like this sort of wavy line, but the wavy line is generally trending upwards, you know?

Dan: Yeah.

Rick: Cool. And do you find that meditation has gotten easier for you to practice?

Dan: No, I mean, I just did my 35 minutes and it was terrible. So, it’s hard. It’s still really hard. It’s definitely easier, there’s no question about it. It gets easier over time, not in necessarily a straight line, a trajectory, but you know, you can’t help but get better at it if you do it with some ardor and persistence. And I think I can bring both of those to bear. I don’t know that my mind is naturally a congenial place for these practices, but I’m into it and I’m committed. But, you know, I have daily sittings like the one I just had where it was a battle. I kept almost falling asleep and wandering. But that, you know, I try to say to people all the time, I’m sure the people on this who tune into your website already know this, but the point isn’t necessarily, especially when you’re a beginner, to reach some sort of special state. The point is to get lost and start again, get lost and start again, over and over and over. And that’s the bicep curl for the brain and that’s what shows up on the brain scans. So, that’s what my practice is generally like.

Rick: And that happens to me after 46 years of meditation. The mind wanders off and you just come back, the mind wanders off and you just come back. But you mention in your book that some of your best meditations, at least on retreats, were kind of very effortless. You didn’t feel like you were battling or struggling. And I would suggest that as a general principle, that if you’re kind of fighting the mind, it’s going to create tension and conflict. And it’s like if you want to calm a pan of water that has little ripples on it, if you start pushing on the waves, you know, you’re just going to create more ripples. But if you just let it settle down and be kind of gentle about it, it’ll kind of settle down of its own accord as you proceed.

Dan: Well, I would say two things to that. One is, on retreat, you know, as you know, the mind has the opportunity in this very special container to get concentrated. And so yes, the practice can take on a more effortless feel. And then the trick over time, you know, for a rank and file meditator like me, who’s not in any way a master, is not to get lost, but then to come back in a way that isn’t so judgmental or harsh or yanking yourself back into it. And so really, I do notice a lot of judgment around getting lost, but then just the noting of it can take the teeth out of it, so you aren’t pressing down on the water and the pan so hard.

Rick: Yeah, it happens to everybody. I mean, Joseph Goldstein, when he meditates, he probably wanders off and comes back. So, you know, don’t beat up on yourself.

Dan: Yes, that’s a good … well, and if you do, just notice that the self-judgmental thoughts were unsummoned and mindfulness of them can declaw them in a way.

Rick: Yeah, somebody once said, “Treat all thoughts as if they’re in Japanese,” you know?

Dan: That’s not bad.

Rick: What was I going to say? I don’t know. I forgot. Okay, well, let’s switch on to something and maybe it’ll come back to me.

Dan: Oh, you wanted to talk about “Hide the Zen”?

Rick: Yeah, I did, actually. You went through a phase, maybe you’re out of it, where you felt like you’d kind of lost your edge, you know? You lost your aggression, your motivation, you were kind of laying back and letting the universe just flow along, and you were starting to actually lose professional opportunities at ABC. So, I thought that was interesting, because I think it’s something that a lot of spiritual people go through, and I think spiritual development is, in some respects, like Eckhart on the park bench for two years. He was in a state where he had not yet integrated the realization that had dawned for him, and it took him years to actually integrate it where he could be a more dynamic person, at least in terms of his own personality. So, I think it’s something everybody goes through, and that’s why I wanted to bring it up. It’s worth addressing. And there’s this kind of balancing act that takes place between the relinquishing of the sort of hard-edged, narrowly focused individual will, which has been driving you all your life, that does begin to soften and dissolve and broaden out, and the sort of replacement of that with something else, which can leave you just as motivated, but not from such a kind of a bound perspective.

Dan: Yeah, for me, the whole journey of the book is trying to square this circle between, I don’t know, I’m mixing my metaphors here, is trying to find a way to have ambition coexist with contentment, happiness, spiritual evolution, whatever you want to call it.

Rick: Maybe you should keep a picture of Deepak on your wall.

Dan: Yeah, well, right, exactly. He’s the guy, here’s the guy who claims to have figured it out, right? Because he is super successful, and he says, you know, “Always in the present moment and never upset,” if you believe him. And just, you know, for my own, again, my own smell test, I didn’t quite see that, I didn’t see that being true. Anyway, but I now think, you know, who knows? Anyway, I didn’t see a model in his world that could apply to mine, but ultimately in the Buddhist world I did find some good advice. I mean, I did kind of stumble, as you admitted, excuse me, as you alluded to, we got a new boss at ABC a couple of years ago, and he’s a really hard-charging guy, and I didn’t really handle his advent very well, and we got kind of into a negative cycle where I think he thought that I really wasn’t firing on all cylinders, in terms of my work motivation, and every time he passed me over for an assignment or something like that, the more resigned I got, and it just kind of went into a negative spiral. Over time, though, this very boss ended up working with me, you know, I went to see him and he helped me sort of diagnose the problem and helped me resuscitate my career a little bit, and what I came to as the thing that I think really can, and I don’t want to give away the whole book or just bore you with every single nuance of this exploration, but one of the things that I found that’s really helped me here is the idea of non-attachment to results. You know, it is quite natural for people in the world like me, you know, I have a robust career and I care a lot about it and I want to do well, by selfish measures I want to do well, I want to be successful and I want to get good stories and I want to make a good salary and blah blah blah, and also by not-so-selfish measures, like I think this job is very, very important, I think journalists play an important role in society, I think we can inform people, and I want to be good at that, I want to get the right stories, I want to tell them in a sensitive way, I want to wake the world up to certain problems that I see, etc., etc., so there are a bunch of levels on which I am ambitious, but at the same time, what a practice like Buddhism can help you do is to realize that we live in a world characterized by entropy and impermanence and we are not in control and all we can do is the best we can do and then the results are kind of up to the universe. And that has made me much more resilient and effective because I recognize that I can try really hard and do my best, that sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t. And so I start on lots of, for example, I do a lot of investigative reporting and I will get really excited about a piece and I’ll work on it for a long time, there’s a story that I worked on for years, and you know what? It’s just not going to happen. We just don’t have it and I have to live with that. And then I work really hard on things like the book, for example, and I assumed that the book was going to go nowhere and then it turned out to be reasonably successful to my immense delight. And so in both cases I think I handle the ups and downs better than the old me would have. Am I perfect? Absolutely not. If my wife comes in she’ll give you the 90% still a moron speech.

Rick: We’ll let our wives talk to each other.

Dan: Yeah, exactly. So in fact my brother, my younger brother proposed that I rename my book from Deeply Flawed to Merely Flawed. So I’m not claiming to be perfected, but I know these principles and this practice has definitely helped me get better at continuing to be hard-charging in the conventional world in which many of us exist, while also not making myself more miserable than I need to be.

Rick: Yeah. There was a comedy troupe out in the late 60s, early 70s called Firesign Theater and they had an album entitled “We’re All Bozos on This Bus.”

Dan: Yes, I like that.

Rick: Yeah. Now you know with regard to the “hide the Zen” point, there’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita which addresses this exactly. It says, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits. Live not for the fruits of action, nor attach yourself to inaction.” So which you were kind of doing a little bit, you were getting a little bit attached to the inaction phase. And so that implies that you could focus like a son of a gun and be very motivated and all, but you kind of end up functioning in a way that you’re not clinging to the fruits of the action. You’re just, you know, you really are as Eckhart Tolle advocates living in the now, in the present, you know, doing your best with each moment because that’s all you have really is what’s happening now. But you really don’t have any control over the outcome as you just articulated.

Dan: Yes, that’s all really, I agree with everything you just said and I think that it makes the doing much more enjoyable because you’re not so focused on the outcome that you can’t pay attention to what you’re doing right now. And by the way, you get better at whatever you’re doing because you’re actually more focused on whatever’s happening right now. You’re also deriving more pleasure from the interactions with other human beings. Sanding down the edges of your own ego can, you know, make you more pleasant to be around, it can make you enjoy the success of others more, all of which creates a really virtuous cycle, I think. And even from a selfish standpoint because then people want to see you succeed and they want to help you succeed and all that I think has made my life a lot better.

Rick: Yeah, you know I think there’s something advantageous about an experiential approach such as you have taken, you know, because I mean there are people who do a lot of what I would call “mood making.” They read these spiritual precepts and they kind of try to evoke a mood of, “Oh, I don’t really care about the outcome of things, I’m just sort of mellow and I’m taking it easy.” And they can actually get kind of hypnotized into a very, kind of a permanent psychological state of unreality I think. And in my opinion, higher states of consciousness, if they’re genuine, are natural, as natural as breathing, as natural as ordinary waking state is. You just live them without thinking about them all day long, but you’re actually functioning from a different state in which you kind of do justice to the principles that are taught in all these precepts of spiritual teachings, but it’s kind of in your blood, it’s in your bones, it’s genuine, it’s spontaneous, you’re not adopting some kind of mood all day long in order to retain a particular style of functioning.

Dan: Yeah, well some of these people, if I understand you correctly, the people you’re describing can also be really annoying. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw on the New Yorker recently where somebody says, “I’ve been gluten free for 15 minutes and I’m already annoying.” You know, what I’m trying to do is to knock “spirituality” off of its sort of patchouli-scented pedestal and put it in the world of regular people who are ambitious either when it comes to their career or parenting or volunteering or whatever, who want to do something concrete in the world and don’t want all this froofy language.

Rick: Which has nothing to do with the actual experience that spirituality points to. That’s just all dross that’s clung to it, barnacles over time.

Dan: Right, exactly. And we don’t need the accoutrements. Actually, a regular schmo like me who wears makeup and has people putting hairspray on him can do this stuff and if I can do it, anybody can, is my point.

Rick: Hence the name of my show, which you asked me about before we started recording, Buddha at the Gas Pump. The implication is that in this day and age there are ordinary people whom you wouldn’t pick out in a crowd who are actually living in a very Buddha-like state of consciousness but living ordinary lives and integrating it quite well.

Dan: Yeah. In the discussion we had before we started recording, you were saying that you’re seeing a lot of this and we kind of quibbled a little bit about whether it’s an epidemic of awakening or not and then you qualified to say that it’s kind of like the beginnings of an epidemic and I think there’s something there. I think that you can see it by the fact that meditation is now being adopted by corporate executives and elite athletes and scientists and lawyers and pop stars and news anchors and this is probably, in my view, going to be the next big public health revolution and unlike past public health revolutions like oral hygiene or going to the gym, this is one that has the potential to shape and change behavior on a large scale and so that makes me very, very enthusiastic, especially given all the negative news stories we cover all the time like climate change and war, etc., etc.

Rick: I think you’re right and when I said that it was an epidemic, your objection was that, “Well, you know, in my job I deal with a lot of nasty stuff all the time so I don’t see the evidence of it very strongly,” and I would suggest that everything that’s going on in the world, whether global warming or the Palestinian conflict in the Middle East or anything, I mean, what’s creating it? Large groups of people behaving in a certain way and so if you get right down to, it’s like if the world were a forest and the people were trees, the forest is pretty dry and gray and sickly looking, you know, but if you ask yourself why, get right down to, “Oh, well, each individual tree isn’t doing so well, you know, each of them needs some kind of deeper nourishment and then if we can nourish enough of them, the whole forest when viewed from above will begin to appear green.” So I really think that all the world’s problems ultimately boil down to individual minds multiplied seven billion fold and that the solution to those problems will be the actual transformation of those minds to a more, if you will, enlightened way of functioning.

Dan: I agree, I agree, or at least I hope you’re right, let’s just say that.

Rick: And there’s evidence that that’s starting to happen. Now, there’s one more thing I want to talk to you about before we run out of time. Are we out of time? Are you cool on the …

Dan: I need to jump pretty soon because I’m supposed to be doing a Twitter chat with a bunch of teachers. So maybe make this the last question, is that alright? I’m enjoying this, I hate to give it up.

Rick: Yeah, we can even do another one someday if you like.

Dan: Okay, yeah, sure.

Rick: It’s just the whole Sam Harris thing, he fascinates me. I’ve read several of his books, I intend to read them all, I hope to interview him one of these days. And ironically, I’m not an atheist, but I just think he’s brilliant and I love the way he thinks. And the fact that he’s a dedicated Buddhist meditator, or not a Buddhist, he’s not a Buddhist, but he’s a dedicated practitioner seeking deeper spiritual experience, I think is really interesting in light of his philosophical perspective on the world. But I think he’s much more, he’s onto something really valuable. Here’s a quote, “There’s clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life, but we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions for us to do this.” And I have a number of quotes from him, we can just go off of that one. I think he nails it right there. You’ve heard the term “spiritual but not religious,” and I think that implies that there are a lot of people these days who are really interested in testing hypotheses that are, let’s say, proposed by spirituality, and they don’t care about believing in anything per se, they want to have direct, concrete experience. So, riff on that for just a bit.

Dan: You know, I am friends with Sam, and I’m a big admirer of his. He goes a little bit further in his atheism, I’m more of an agnostic, a respectful agnostic. But I do think he makes a really interesting case, which is, and again, I’m not endorsing the case per se, but I think it’s fascinating, which is that the world deserves a spirituality divorced from religion. That we can have spiritual experiences, but we don’t need to extrapolate from our internal experiences to some book from the Bronze Age being literally true. That’s his argument. You know, this is an argument which I don’t necessarily take aside, but I do think it’s a really interesting one, especially given, as you said, where we are in a society right now where we’re seeing so many people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, or as the pollsters call them, “the nones,” N-O-N-E-S, people who are not affiliated with any particular church or religion. I think this is an argument that’s going to resonate with a lot of people, there’s no question about it.

Rick: Yeah. And I find myself agreeing with just about everything he says in his books, and yet at the same time I’m not an atheist. I firmly believe in God, but it’s not like I believe in God. I believe God is something that can be experienced. But that’s a whole other discussion and we don’t have time for it. But I believe that somebody like Sam has lit a fuse that’s coming along, like one of those old Roadrunner cartoons, and eventually it’s going to pop his bubble of, it’s going to shake his worldview, because he’s going to start tapping into levels of experience that actually begin to verify some of the things that the mystics were talking about, and he’s not going to be able to hang out with the hardcore skeptic crowd very comfortably, or at least he’s going to get booed more often than he already has.

Dan: Well, I would say two things. One is that this argument makes him … the fact that he’s a meditator who believes in “spiritual experiences,” he would argue that he doesn’t really like the word “spiritual,” but that given a poverty of language there isn’t any other term that is quite so accurate. I saw him give a speech many, many years ago, I think in 2006 or 2007 at the American Atheist Convention where he got a standing ovation at the beginning and at the end when he started talking about his meditation habit he got booed. So it already is making him less popular in these circles. But as to whether you think he’s … I think his pushback to you on this notion that he’s lit a fuse that somehow is going to challenge his worldview, I think he would argue that what happens in the subjective expanse of your own mind, you can’t then extrapolate that to making claims about concrete reality, about there being a God or a Creator. Any experience you have can’t be used to make larger claims about the universe, is his argument.

Rick: And my key rebuttal to that would be that the human nervous system is the most sophisticated instrument that we’re aware of, more so than the Large Hadron Collider for instance, and if we really understand how to use it, it can actually enable us to experientially verify things that might be beyond our current ability to imagine.

Dan: I’ll leave it there.

Rick: Okay, well thank you. Let me wrap it up and maybe we’ll have another session one of these days, I could kind of give it some thought and come up with a whole new batch of topics so we’re not redundant.

Dan: Sure.

Rick: Yeah, but I’ve been speaking with Sam, with Dan Harris, brother from another mother, with Dan Harris, who has written the very well-written and entertaining book, 10% Happier, enjoyed it a lot. And this interview is one in an ongoing series, I think Dan is going to be 243 or something. If you’d like to listen to more of them, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and there you’ll find about four different indices, alphabetical, chronological, topical, and in terms of favorites. You’ll also find a donate button, a place to sign up to be notified by email, future interviews, a discussion group that is formed around each interview, and a bunch of other stuff. So check it out, batgap.com. Oh, there’s also a link to an audio podcast. And thanks for listening or watching. Thank you again, Dan, and we’ll see you next week. Not you, but everybody else.

Dan: Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Rick: All right. Thank you. Talk to you later.

Dan: Bye-bye.