Joseph Goldstein Transcript

Joseph Goldstein Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Joseph Goldstein. Joseph is co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society where he is one of the resident guiding teachers and, is it pronounced Barry? Barry Center for Buddhist Studies, both in Barre, Massachusetts. He is the author of Mindfulness, A Practical Guide to Awakening, A Heart Full of Peace, One Dharma, The Emerging Western Buddhism, Insight Meditation, and The Experience of Insight. Those are all separate books, not one book with a long title. He has also co-authored books with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. Joseph has studied and practiced meditation since 1967 under the guidance of eminent teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet, and he leads Insight Meditation retreats around the world. So, thanks Joseph for coming on the show.

Joseph: It’s a pleasure.

Rick: So, I have a lot of questions for you, some that I’ve thought of and some that a friend of mine submitted, so I’ll be asking those a little bit later. But I thought maybe I would start since, as I understand it, Buddhism is all about enlightenment ultimately, asking you for your definition of enlightenment.

Joseph: I think the very simplest and most pragmatic description of the enlightened mind from the Buddhist perspective is the mind that has been freed of greed and hatred and delusion. So rather than try to describe it as some esoteric metaphysical state, I like this definition which comes right from the discourses, from the suttas, because it’s so pragmatic and we can check our own minds against it. Has greed and desire been weakened and uprooted or not? Has ill will been uprooted or not? I like the pragmatism of that way of understanding it.

Rick: I like that too, because sometimes you hear people claiming to be awakened or enlightened or something and they’re still acting like schmucks, so you wonder. Now, you said the enlightened mind, is that perhaps an oxymoron? Is it the mind that gets enlightened or what exactly happens when enlightenment occurs?

Joseph: Well, it’s that reality that appears when the mind is freed of those defilements. So, what obscures the enlightened state, one might say, are precisely those forces of confusion, of aversion, of greed. And so I think we can speak of the enlightened mind or the enlightened heart. In many Asian languages, the word for mind and heart are the same, and I think that gives a fuller picture of what we’re talking about. Here in the West, we tend to divide mind and heart, and so it can get a little confusing.

Rick: Yeah, so I like that. I guess you would say then that if the mind is full of impurities, or defilements as you put it, then it tends to be very opaque, and that obscures, what does it obscure exactly?

Joseph: Well, one could say it obscures the true nature of mind, or the purified nature of mind.

Rick: So it obscures itself, you’re saying?

Joseph: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. Now, as you know, in some spiritual traditions it’s understood or taught that there’s a kind of a pure essence or pure consciousness, sometimes referred to as the Self, with a capital S, as some kind of ground state or foundation or bedrock of our existence, which is not even personal, it’s universal, and that the impurities you’re referring to obscure that. So it wouldn’t be that the mind is obscuring itself, but that it’s kind of obscuring one’s true nature with its defilements. Would you resonate with that or no?

Joseph: You’re getting right to the depth of things here! You know, even within the Buddhist traditions, there’s a wide range of description of what we’re calling the mindful or the awakened state. And so depending on which tradition you’re speaking of or with, you’re going to get different metaphysical descriptions. I went through a bit of a crisis with understanding these differences some years ago, which was actually the prompting for exploring and then writing my book One-Dharma, because I had been studying the Burmese teachings of vipassana, insight meditation, for many years, thirty, thirty-five years. And then I started practicing with some very renowned Tibetan masters, and their description of enlightenment, it was like a different metaphysical system, and some of what they were saying was contradictory. So, this became a real spiritual burning for me, it was almost like this koan that I needed to resolve in myself, and I was proceeding with the question in my mind, “Who’s right?” If one was right, then the other must be wrong. After struggling with this for quite a while, and specifically on one particular retreat, this burning question, I realized I was asking the wrong question. That it’s not so much a question of who’s right, I framed it more in terms of metaphysics and metaphysical descriptions as skilful means. That is, do these teachings, are they skilful means for freeing the heart? Rather than having the metaphysics be some statements of absolute truth. If we take the teachings as statements of truth, then differences of view really create conflict. If we take them as skilful means, then we ask ourselves, “Do these teachings help to free us?” Then we can actually use opposing teachings, if they each serve to free us in certain ways, then there’s no conflict at all. Then I further asked the question, “Well, skilful means for what?” And really trying to apply it in my life and practice. I came to see that the underlying teaching of all the traditions was to free the mind from clinging, to free the mind from grasping. There’s no, certainly within Buddhism, there’s no teaching that says “cling.” So that became the bottom-line reference point for my practice. So, then it’s a question of really examining one’s experience when the mind is free of clinging. What is that experience like? And I think that’s a more helpful approach than trying to pin down the metaphysical reality. It’s always going to be done just through concepts, and concepts are always limiting.

Rick: Would you say that maybe the different metaphysical flavors that you run into in different areas and different cultures and so on, and we can broaden this beyond Buddhism and begin to speak of other spiritual traditions around the world, are just sort of a, I don’t mean to say “blind men and the elephant,” because these people aren’t exactly blind, we would say, but just there’s a, we’re all kind of approaching the same reality from within different cultural contexts and with different nervous systems we each have, and therefore our expressions are naturally going to vary from one to the other according to our orientation, our culture, the whole language in which we’ve been trained in our spiritual tradition.

Joseph: I think that’s definitely true. There are many cultural expressions of the spiritual path. It’s not to say though that I think necessarily that all spiritual traditions aim to accomplish the same thing or lead to the same place. There may be many that do, but there may well be different spiritual paths that actually have different aims. So, it takes a fair amount of discernment to see where a path is leading.

Rick: Yeah. I think that might segue into one of the questions posed by a friend of mine. You may know this guy, his name is Dana Sawyer, he’s a teacher of comparative religions at Maine College of Art in Portland, an old friend of mine. He asked several questions here. “Several religions that originated in India have the goal of enlightenment, though they each tend to define it differently. What do you think of the Hindu view that enlightenment is a state of consciousness in which one is continuously having the experience of Brahman or the divine ground of being? How is that criteria of enlightenment different from and either superior or inferior to the Buddhist definition?” Maybe this kind of harkens back to your answer to the previous question.

Joseph: Well it does, and I also have no experience with the Hindu tradition or practices, So, anything I might say is just basically based on hearsay. I think the key point from a Buddhist perspective with respect to awakening is whether there is still any sense of identification with anything at all, even with consciousness. So, to go from a small sense of self to a big sense of self, if that big sense of self involves being identified with it, then from a Buddhist perspective that would not yet be awakening, because we’re still imprisoned by a sense of “I,” a sense of the knower of it all. So, freedom from identification with anything, and that’s why I like the reference point of liberation through non-clinging. And it’s not clinging to anything, not clinging to consciousness, not clinging to big self. So, the operative experience is the non-clinging, not the state.

Rick: So then for instance, the Upanishadic statements such as “I am that, that thou art,” that kind of statement denotes a sort of clinging to you still, or a personal identification with the ultimate reality?

Joseph: Well it could, and again, people use language and descriptions in so many different ways, and to rush to a superficial judgment about what’s meant by that phrase I think would not be wise. We’d have to really explore what’s meant by that.

Rick: Yeah, fair enough. One could actually utter such a statement and still not be saying that my personal individual self is that, in any sense of the word, but that universal reality I have come to know as my true nature, so to speak, or it has come to know itself through the instrumentality of this.

Joseph: Yeah, one of the things I’ve learned from, I’ve been practicing now for quite a while, for about 40 years or so, and have practiced mostly within the Buddhist tradition, but I’ve done some readings in other traditions, and one of the things that I’ve seen, even from within the Buddhist context, is that it’s very hard to know what a text means without having practiced it. Because we can read it and get some conceptual or intellectual understanding of it, but that may be quite different than what the actual experience is, so I’m a little reluctant to pass judgment based simply on reading.

Rick: Yeah, that’s very good.

Joseph: It’s should come out of experience.

Rick: Right, yeah, and I would agree. So, let’s get to another question here. We talked about enlightenment a little bit, and you defined it as the freedom from mental defilements which cause the mind to obscure one’s true nature, if I’m stating that correctly. Do you regard there, in your tradition or in your experience, do you regard there to be stages or levels of enlightenment or awakening, for instance, preliminary stages, intermediate stages, and have you seen, if so, do you see a tendency for people to sometimes jump the gun and mistake a preliminary or intermediate stage of awakening for the final thing?

Joseph: Oh yeah, I think that’s very possible. Within classical Theravada teachings, the kind of Buddhism that you find in Thailand and Burma and Sri Lanka, the path is very well mapped in terms of the stages of awakening, and there are what are called the four stages of enlightenment, they’re called stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, arhant, the fully liberated. At each one of them, different defilements are uprooted and the further ones weakened. So that’s the process, it’s a gradual process of uprooting those forces in the mind which create suffering. Now it is very possible that people have a certain experience of awakening at one of the earlier stages, which can be so powerfully transforming that without proper guidance they might think that “Well, I’m done, I’ve finished the path,” whereas there might well be further obstructions to work with. So that’s very possible, and I think that happens a lot when we see teachers in the broader spiritual scene getting into trouble in one way or another. I think it’s often because they may have had a genuine realization and think perhaps that the job is all done, but still there are other work to do.

Rick: Do you think the job is ever done?

Joseph: I hope so. One of the phrases one finds in the text, which has always inspired me from the very beginning, it’s like the song of the enlightenment, the enlightenment of beings in the text, and they say, “Done is what had to be done,” which really does imply, yes, there is an end to the path, and I find that very reassuring.

Joseph: I mean, as I don’t know much about Buddhism, and you know it’s ironic because this is called Buddha at the Gas Pump, and I’ve only had a handful of Buddhists on the show and I sometimes get called on that, so it’s good to add to the tally here talking to you. But as I understand it, the Buddha himself still engaged in spiritual practice for the rest of his life after his awakening, he still meditated a certain number of hours a day or whatever. If that’s true, was that just to set an example or do you feel like even in his case there could still have been some refinement or something taking place?

Joseph: As it’s described, and of course I don’t know personally, but the way I understand it, he was really done, ‘done is what had to be done’. However, what that means is that one is abiding in a place of awareness, and one abides in it in various postures – sitting, standing, walking, lying, in communicating and not communicating. In one sense, there’s nothing else to do except to be practicing meditation in that sense, which means simply being aware. So, one of the ways he would be abiding in his awakened state would be sitting in meditation.

Rick: I seem to remember some quote where he said it was good for the body or something, restful.

Joseph: Yeah, certainly.

Rick: Getting back to where we were just a minute ago, do you feel that some, I think maybe this is an obvious question, but some latent defilements, to use your term, in the mind would be responsible for a person assuming that they’re finished when they’re not. In other words, some kind of like, I don’t know, there’s the term “spiritual ego,”, one has some kind of awakening and the ego gets spiritualized, but it’s still very much intact, and yet one is blind to that because of some defilements.

Joseph: Yeah. No, I think that’s very much the case. It’s interesting, in the classical list of the unwholesome states that are eliminated at the various stages of awakening, in one of the lists there are 10 of these states mentioned, ignorance, the final ignorance in the mind is not uprooted until the last stage of awakening. So even after one has seen through the illusion of self, when one comes to an understanding of the basic selflessness of the process, still there’s levels of ignorance in the mind which kind of catch us up in terms of desire, in terms of aversion, in terms of restlessness, in terms of conceit. The sense of “I am” is also not uprooted until the very end. So even as one has had a deep understanding of emptiness and emptiness of self, the habit pattern of these other obstructive forces are still there, which is why more work needs to be done.

Rick: You know the story of the Buddha where he finally sat down under the Bodhi tree and he said, “This is it, I’m not going to get up until I’m done,” but then he was assailed by all these forces of temptation and horrible things and all that. Do you think that there’s sort of a conspiracy in the way the universe is structured to try to thwart our final enlightenment by throwing us off the track?

Joseph: I don’t know if there’s a conspiracy, but it definitely seems to be the nature of the unenlightened mind. There are these deeply, deeply conditioned habit patterns of all those forces you mentioned, the forces of Mara, which were assailing the Buddha under the tree. They’re really personifications of forces in our own minds. I love that image because sitting on retreat and teaching retreats as people are sitting in the meditation hall, in one way they’re sitting under the Bodhi tree, just like the Bodhisattva, facing the same forces. Desire arises and ill-will arises and restlessness, because this is the nature of the unawakened mind. These forces are there, deeply conditioned, and from the Buddha’s perspective, this did not have a beginning. Since beginningless time, these forces have been at work. So, I don’t see it so much as a conspiracy, it’s just the nature of things.

Rick: Yeah, I just sort of threw that word out, it came to mind.

Joseph: It feels like a conspiracy. But one of the things I so appreciate about the Buddhist teachings, given how deeply habituated these patterns are, is that quite amazingly, he saw the way through. He saw the path that actually led to freedom. That’s quite an amazing discovery, and many people have walked on that path.

Rick: It would almost seem that if enlightenment were a piece of cake, if it were just something that we all naturally grew into as we aged, we wouldn’t have much of a universe, because it would be just this sort of retreat into oneness and dissolution of the whole thing. So, it almost seems like these forces which tempt us outwardly are a necessary part of the whole package for there to be manifestation and creation.

Joseph: I think that’s more probably a Hindu way of looking at things, and I think it’s unlikely, and I don’t think it quite works that way, is the older we get, the wiser we necessarily become.

Rick: Well, I wasn’t saying that, no.

Joseph: From the Buddhist, in my understanding anyway, it’s not that we’re all destined to awaken and we’ll just get there one way or another. Rather, it takes the effort and it takes understanding and it takes the application.

Rick: Oh yeah, well I mean, are we all destined ultimately, in the Buddhist perspective, after X number of lifetimes? Are all beings flowing in that stream toward that goal, or not necessarily so?

Joseph: In my understanding, not necessarily. It really depends on the effort or the interest in the effort in the investigation that a person makes, because if we were all heading in that direction, given the infinite time that has already passed, we should have already been awakened.

Rick: True, although that gets into this whole esoteric conception that maybe new souls come along and rise up through the process, and universe after universe, this whole cycle continues, who knows?

Joseph: Who knows? Who knows has become one of my favorite mantras.

Rick: Yeah, it gets very speculative. Just letting a dog in here, I believe.

Joseph: Does a dog have Buddha nature?

Rick: Moo. I would say yes, but hearkening back to something you said a few minutes ago about Theravada Buddhism having this nicely delineated roadmap of different stages of awakening, I just want to comment and maybe get your comments. Seems to me that’s something that contemporary spirituality in the West could really use more of. Unless I guess one is really established in a tradition which has laid something like that out, there’s a lot of vagueness and fuzziness, I think, in contemporary spiritual thinking about what actually the possibilities are. That’s why I asked that question earlier about is it possible to have an awakening and think you’re done. That’s probably more likely if there hasn’t been a clear intellectual understanding of the full range of possibilities.

Joseph: Yeah, no, I think that’s very true and it points to two very helpful approaches with regard to that. One is that it’s very helpful for people who are committed to a spiritual path, first to, at least for periods of time, have a relationship with a teacher that they really trust, who’s very familiar with the path, the stages of the path and the unfolding, so there can be some guidance and feedback. And the second aspect is I found it very helpful to engage in some study within the tradition because there is a tremendous wealth of teachings within each of these traditions and a lot of the map has been explained in exquisite detail. But the combination of having, doing some study and having the personal guidance from a teacher really is a safeguard and keeps us going straight rather than wandering off.

Rick: Yeah, my former teacher used to emphasize that, that intellectual understanding and experience are like two legs, you really can’t walk without both.

Joseph: Yeah, most of my teachers had really mastered both aspects and I found it so valuable.

Rick: In fact, he used to say that intellectual understanding safeguards the path because you then have a sense, like if we compare it to a road map, you don’t end up in Ohio and think you’re in California, you understand, “Okay, the map says I’m just in Ohio.”

Joseph: Exactly, that’s exactly right.

Rick: Yeah, well that kind of relates to the next question I had written down, and you kind of answered it but maybe you can touch on it just a bit more. Can a person reliably judge their own attainment or is a master necessary to do this?

Joseph: Well, that’s an interesting question. I think it’s possible to reliably judge one’s attainment if one has the right metric of assessment and that’s why, going back to my initial description of enlightenment, why I find that particular description so helpful because it’s not about, “Did I reach this state or that state?” But rather really looking to the mind to see, “Is there still desire in the mind?” Is there still grasping in the mind? Is there still clinging? Is there still a sense of self or has that been seen through? So that becomes a very pragmatic mirror to assess one’s experience, much more so than having some experience which perhaps is momentary and perhaps transformative, but then not having context of anything and not having a way to check back, “Okay, what actually happened with this?” That’s different than putting a concept on that experience and calling it enlightenment. I like that mirror-like quality of really examining what’s going on in the mind.

Rick: So to do that then your introspective muscles have to be pretty well developed and you have to have a sort of a ruthless self-honesty to really recognize it and not delude yourself.

Joseph: Well, exactly, and I talk a lot about that in my last book, Mindfulness. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to Awakening, because it really goes through in a lot of detail the Satipatthana Sutta, which is the Buddha’s discourse on ways of establishing mindfulness, which he called in the discourse in the first opening lines, saying this is the direct path to awakening. And even though the Sutta, the discourse itself, is quite short, there’s a wealth of teachings and descriptions which provide a possibility for assessing our practice. So yeah, it is possible, but I think it’s also helpful to have feedback from people we respect.

Rick: Yeah. I heard one time, I don’t know if this is true, you can correct me, I heard that it was said that in Buddha’s lifetime, maybe 500 of his students or contemporaries became enlightened. I don’t know, but if that is true, how do you think it’s going these days in terms of the number of practitioners who become enlightened? And the follow-up to that, which I might as well ask right now, is if the numbers are not quite so good, do you feel like perhaps there’s been a dilution or a distortion or a misinterpretation of what the Buddha was originally teaching? Or are you confident that what is being taught today in the name of Buddhism pretty well mirrors exactly what he would have taught and was teaching?

Joseph: First, my impression, and it is only an impression since I don’t remember being there at the time of the Buddha, although I might have been off, not practicing when I should have been, but my impression from reading is that there were many, many more enlightened beings than 500. So, it was much, much more extensive than that, and certainly many, many more at different stages of enlightenment. In terms of what’s happening today, there are definitely people who are reaching different of these stages of awakening. Probably not as many as in the time of the Buddha, for a couple of reasons. One is the Buddha himself was the consummate teacher. He was able to see precisely what a person needed in order to awaken, and so the blessing of actually receiving teachings from him would have been enormous. Also traditionally, from the Buddha’s time and up till now, most people deeply committed to the practice and on the path to awakening, many of them would choose to be monastics. And that structure very much supported people’s going to great depths of practice. It’s very interesting now as the Dharma has come to the West, at least to date, it’s mostly been carried by laypeople. In the lay life it’s much more challenging, because we’re living with so many responsibilities of family and work and living in the world.

Rick: Are you married?

Joseph: No, I’m not.

Rick: Okay, so you’ve been a monastic?

Joseph: No, not monastic either. I’m just an ordinary lay person. And even with the simplicity of not being married, but still just being an ordinary lay person, it’s very different than being a monk or a nun. The whole living structure supports the kind of intensive practice that furthers one’s understanding. So, it’s not surprising that there may be less people, fewer people, going to that same depth. But even with that, there are many people who have really attained significant levels of understanding and awakening.

Rick: Now it’s my understanding that in Buddhism it’s sort of a tradition that you don’t speak much about your own level of awakening. If somebody asks the Dalai Lama if he’s enlightened, he’ll just sort of give some simple self-effacing answer. So, if I were to ask you that question, what am I going to get?

Joseph: I would try to find some simple self-effacing answer. And this comes right out of the text, where the Buddha, in the discourses, he describes how one should speak of these experiences. And he’s saying that one shouldn’t speak of them with reference to oneself, for a couple of reasons. One is the very nature of the awakening is to see that there is no self. Self is a concept. And so, to lay attainment, or to reference attainment to a being, to a self, already misses the point. And the suggestion that the Buddha made was to speak of it in terms of, at different stages of awakening, what qualities of mind have been purified. So, in the text you read, as people would declare their attainment, they would say, “In one who is in arhant, conceit has been uprooted.” That’s all.

Rick: So they put it in the third person or something.

Joseph: Yeah, and not making any claims. And I appreciate that a lot, because we can make all kinds of claims, and they may be accurate or not accurate, but no one else has the ability to know whether they’re accurate or not. So, I don’t see what purpose it serves.

Rick: Of course, we refer to the Buddha, we say, “Well, the Buddha was enlightened.” And obviously even that, that’s almost as absurd as saying, “I am enlightened,” because it’s not like the individual here got something, right? But the language itself is kind of structured in a way that it’s hard not to talk like that.

Joseph: Well, it is. I just think the Dalai Lama’s approach I find very appealing.

Rick: Yeah. But on the other hand, doing this show, I’ve spoken to a couple hundred people now, and my sense is that they’re at all different levels of attainment, but almost universally they’ll say, “Well, I was crossing the street one day and all of a sudden, boom, the whole world fell away,” and very many different stories. But they can actually refer to various awakenings or stages of awakening that they had, many of which are not just flashes in the pan, just something that happened on a Thursday the 22nd and they’re gone again, but abiding states or stages resulted from those shifts or those shifts were harbingers of abiding states, however you want to put it. So, there do seem to be a lot of people waking up around the world.

Joseph: No, I think that’s true.

Rick: Yeah, from all kinds of traditions. Some people who had done intensive practice, others who had never practiced, and all of a sudden, boom, something happened.

Joseph: Right, of course, no, I think that’s very true and we hear stories like that all the time and it’s wonderful because often they’re very transformative. It’s just that we can never really know from the outside what the boom is.

Rick: Exactly, yeah.

Joseph: You know, we just know there was a boom.

Rick: Yeah, something happened.

Joseph: Something happened, and then that’s why I like to go back to the measure, “Well, how is this manifesting in behavior? How is this manifesting in qualities of heart and mind that still remain?” That to me is more important than just the boom.

Rick: Yeah, no, I really like that. In fact, one of my questions here from my friend was, “Houston Smith has said many times that traits matter more than states, by which he means that compassionate and moral traits of behavior matter more than elevated states of consciousness. Although the two may be interrelated, which is better or more valuable to the world, a person experiencing mindfulness or a Red Cross worker?”

Joseph: Well, I don’t see those two as being contradictory.

Rick: No, I don’t either.

Joseph: But I really like what he said about traits versus states. First because there are many powerful, refined states of consciousness, which can bring enormous power and are tremendously subtle, which from at least the Buddhist perspective are not necessarily enlightenment, not necessarily awakening. And so, it becomes very challenging to discern the difference between what might be powerful states, powerful experiences, and the freedom that comes from liberation. It’s very tricky to assess these, especially from the outside.

Rick: Yeah, in the Ramayana, the demon, the evil, the bad guy Ravana was said to have had tremendous attainment. He was the master of the Vedas and he had all these siddhis and he was incredibly charismatic and just all this stuff, but he was definitely a bad guy, causing trouble.

Joseph: Yeah, exactly. That’s why I think the traits are important. I’d just like to qualify that a little bit. To be looking to see the traits or the behavior or how people are in the world doesn’t imply that awakening or enlightenment is going to always look the same way. We have very different personalities and our understanding will be expressed through those personalities. So, it’s not a cookie cutter mould of awakening. And having studied with quite a few different teachers, I came to appreciate that because they were all so different. And it was very freeing to realize that I didn’t have to become a certain way. I could express my understanding through my own personality. It was very liberating to see that.

Rick: Do you feel that although the external appearance and behavior of various people is naturally going to be different, since variety is the spice of life and we’re all different, but do you feel that if you had a hundred enlightened people in a room, despite all their surface differences, if you could somehow step inside their eyes, so to speak, step inside their body and experience the world as they experience it, that there would be a fundamental similarity among them all in terms of certain kind of quality of the enlightened state?

Joseph: I think there’s a good possibility that there would be, of course, different traditions may be calling different states enlightenment. And so again, one would really have to know if people had similar experiences, then I think their internal reality would reflect that.

Rick: Their internal reality, yeah.

Joseph: We don’t really know whether the experiences that they’re calling awakening were the same.

Rick: Yeah, I guess the reason I keep dwelling on this from different angles is that I do consider it an important thing for some reason. I feel like if we had litmus tests of enlightenment or awakening and its various stages, if there were kind of a more of a universally understood road map, like you say that Theravada Buddhism has, it would be useful. For instance, one characteristic that I often come across is that people who’ve had an abiding awakening main pure awareness or self, I know you don’t like the word self as a Buddhist, but awareness is maintained 24/7 throughout sleep, it’s never lost. And then there are other things, refined perception eventually comes along and one begins to apprehend the subtle levels of creation which were previously, previously one’s attention was just on the gross. I don’t know, things like this and perhaps a thousand years from now our culture, if things go well and we survive, this kind of road map or understanding will be more or less matter of fact, it will be taught in the schools and there will be a kind of a more universally agreed upon understanding of what this whole thing is all about.

Joseph: It’s possible and again different traditions might emphasize different aspects of the map rather than contemplate the end result. I think it’s more helpful to look at the beginning stages of awakening where more people are likely to have had these experiences and to see it in terms, and this also comes right out of the text of the Taravada, the Pali Canon, one of the qualities that said, or a couple of the qualities that said to manifest at the first level of enlightenment, stream entry, that people become more generous, they’re freed from the taint of stinginess, that their ethical behavior is unbroken. So, these are very pragmatic, down to earth expressions of what awakening means. If you have some fantastic meditative experience and are still stingy and hoarding and breaking ethical behaviors, so it might call into question, “What was that experience really about? What was the transformation?” I like bringing it down to earth.

Rick: Yeah, I like that too. So, you’d probably say that those who want to cut Social Security and Medicare and eliminate tax breaks, taxes for the rich are probably not at the stream entry stage.

Joseph: Maybe not.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I have another line of questioning to get into, but just to dwell on this a little bit more. The correlation between ethical behavior and enlightenment, or degrees of enlightenment, do you feel it’s fairly tight? Could a person advance quite far in their enlightenment, their inner development, and yet the ethical behavior has not really caught up with that? Or could a person be ethically quite saintly and yet not have too much going on in terms of inner awakening? Or do the two pretty much go hand in hand?

Joseph: There’s a little more complexity, I think, in the question. It’s definitely possible that people have a very refined ethical norm and may not be awakened. So, I think that’s possible.

Rick: Mother Teresa, for instance, lamented that she felt like she had not really realized the inner experience.

Joseph: In terms of whether somebody who genuinely is awakened, whether the ethical commitment and the living of it follows along, I think to a certain extent it has to. If somebody is claiming to be awakened and is going around being dishonest and cheating and killing and stealing, it would definitely raise some questions in my mind about, “Well, what was that enlightenment about?” That being said, the key to determining the ethical behavior is really the motive behind the action. And so, I can see the possibility of some actions looking a certain way from the outside, but the motive being quite different. So, motive might be wholesome, but to the outside it might look a little questionable. This is very tricky because it’s easy to rationalize unskilful behavior by claiming pure motive. I just don’t want to exclude that possibility. One of the expressions in Tibetan Buddhism is very powerful. They talk about wrathful compassion. So, it might manifest as a lot of wrath, that strong vajra energy that might look from the outside as being unskilful, but actually the motivation might be compassion to help awaken somebody.

Rick: Yeah, there are some well-known teachers who have behaved that way a lot.

Joseph: Exactly. But a lot of care is needed because, as I say, it’s easy to rationalize unskilful behavior by laying claim to pure motive. So, we really need to be very clear and honest with ourselves of what our motivation actually is.

Rick: Yeah, and there have been some egregious examples of teachers who did all kinds of crazy stuff and just sort of wrote it off, rationalized it as, “The devil made me do it.” More like, “I’m beyond all this,” and “I’m not really doing this.” That whole thing. People are familiar with it. And then, of course, ethics is also a very cultural thing. In some cultures, polygamy is totally normal and acceptable and various other things that other different cultures might consider totally wrong. So, it gets kind of grey area.

Joseph: It does get in some respects, but the basic five precepts in Buddhism are pretty basic. It’s not killing and it’s not stealing and it’s not causing harm through sexuality. It’s not getting diluted through intoxicants. It’s not lying.

Rick: Yeah, I think those should be pretty universal. Yeah, you’re right. I read an interesting article by David Loy the other night. You know David Loy? It was an article entitled, “Why Buddhism and the West Need Each Other.” The essential point of the article was that neither individual freedom nor political freedom alone are sufficient to eliminate dukkha. Both are needed. And he kind of gave examples of how a person could be individually free, but in a very repressive society in which there was a lot of suffering because of the social policies. And then on the other hand, one could be in a very kind of progressive, liberated society and yet be full of greed and personal traits that weren’t really very commendable. So, do you have any comments on his premise?

Joseph: I think that the way people’s practice and how they manifest their understanding and their awakening, I think there’s a broad, broad spectrum that’s possible. And a lot depends on individual interests and talents and motivations. So, for example, for many people, compassion will be manifest as social engagement and really addressing the suffering in society. Other people might well be sitting in a cave, you know, but sitting there with the motivation of what’s called bodhichitta, practicing in order to awaken all. So, I think, for example, of the Buddha in his many previous lifetimes, as the stories go, he would be living off by himself as a hermit and you just see, kind of imagine his family thinking, “What’s this guy doing? He’s not helping anybody. He’s just off by himself in a cave.” And yet the fruit of his practice, because it was motivated, “Let me awaken for the benefit of all,” so his enlightenment, the culmination of his practice, we’re talking here today, is 2600 years later because of what he did. So, I’m reluctant to take too narrow a sliver of life and say, “Oh, this is more compassionate or less compassionate.” We have to look at the big picture and really examine the motivation. And then it will manifest in many different ways, and I think there’s a beauty in that.

Rick: Yeah, I like that.

Joseph: There is not just one way to be.

Rick: Right, so according to one’s dharma – one might be reclusive, one might be very engaged, but yeah.

Joseph: Exactly, and especially given not perhaps many people listening to this may or may not believe in rebirth and past lives and all that, but within the Buddhist context and teachings, it’s certainly taught. If one takes that very expansive view, then whole lifetimes could be spent either engaged with society or as a recluse, and it’s just part of a much bigger picture.

Rick: Yeah, you’re kind of learning the lessons you need to learn as you go along. And some would also say that even while sitting in the cave and not interacting with anyone, on a subtle level, one could be radiating an influence. Not just like you’re preparing for some future lifetime where you’re going to be a great teacher, but even then and there you’re radiating an influence which is helping a lot of people.

Joseph: Exactly, I think that’s exactly right.

Rick: It’s true. In fact, there have been studies of large groups of meditators, thousands at a time, sitting in one place and they’ve correlated it with changes in crime rate and so on in the vicinity. So, let’s talk about mindfulness a little bit. Well, first of all, what is the mind?

Joseph: The mind, again this goes back to particular Buddhist teachings and particularly as it’s talked about in the Abhidharma, which is the Buddhist psychology. This is a very elaborate, sophisticated analysis of consciousness and all the different mental qualities. So, the mind within this framework is taken to be basically that which knows, it’s the cognizing faculty. So, it’s just bare knowing. Now this knowing doesn’t arise by itself, it arises in combination with a lot of different mental qualities. In Buddhist jargon they’re called mental factors. So, it’s consciousness or knowing arising flavored or colored by a whole assortment of different mental qualities and some are wholesome, some are unwholesome. Greed is a mental factor, love is a mental factor, mindfulness is a mental factor. So, each one is just functioning in their own way.

Rick: So, then mindfulness is an attentiveness to what is at hand? I’m going to ask you to define it because I’m totally a neophyte in that tradition, but how do you define mindfulness?

Joseph: It’s an important question, especially these days because mindfulness is getting such wide play now. It’s amazing, the way mindfulness is popping up.

Rick: I saw, I got to interject, I saw this funny cartoon a while back. A Buddhist guy was standing up on a soapbox and there were a bunch of monks in the audience and he had a megaphone and he was saying, “What do we want?” And they said, “Mindfulness!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”

Joseph: That’s great.

Rick: Sorry about that outburst. So, we were talking about mindfulness and you were about to define it more before my little cartoon joke.

Joseph: It’s interesting, someone, I was sitting at our center in the staff dining room and just over the lunch table somebody asked me, “Well, can you define mindfulness in just a few words?” And words like, phrases like, “living in the present” or “being attentive to the present moment” are what come to mind. But asking what is mindfulness, it is a little bit like asking what is art, what is love. The word, although very simple and even prosaic in English, has a wealth of meanings. And so, I’ll just give a few examples, both of what it is and what it isn’t. You can say mindfulness is living in the present moment, but that is really not enough because one of my favorite examples is, you’re familiar with like black labs or golden retrievers?

Rick: Sure.

Joseph: These amazingly playful, friendly dogs running around, they are living in the present moment, but they don’t look like they’re being too mindful. They’re literally being led around by the nose.

Rick: They’re in a state of excitation for one thing. I mean, there’s this “ha ha ha”

Joseph: Exactly, and very much in the present. It’s not mindfulness. So, I call lab quality of mind “black lab consciousness” to distinguish it. So, then we might say, “well, mindfulness means the observing power of the mind.” So, we’re really observing what’s happening as it’s happening.

Rick: Well, a black lab is doing that.

Joseph: Well, I don’t think there’s much observation, you know, like a stepping back and knowing what’s happening. In it, they’re completely, I mean, not remembering my black lab life, I’m just saying what it looks like from the outside, but they seem pretty identified with what’s going on. There’s not a lot of, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of self-reflection. So, when I say that observing power of the mind, it’s like that stepping back and knowing that we’re knowing, rather than simply knowing. But even that is not complete. That’s not enough for mindfulness, because we can be observing something through a filter of various mental factors. For example, if we’re observing something through the filter of desire, or through the filter of anger, and we’re not aware of that, so we’re observing what’s happening, but we’re not being mindful. So, mindfulness is yet something else again. It’s not just being in the present. It’s not just observing what’s in the present. It’s observing it in a particular way. It’s being aware of what’s arising, but without greed or attachment, without aversion or condemning. And without delusion, without being identified with it. So that’s a very particular kind of awareness. And right there, it kind of leads the understanding of mindfulness into an ethical dimension, because mindfulness is always a wholesome state of mind, because it’s free of greed and free of aversion. So, then we open up this whole ethical dimension to the practice of mindfulness. So, it’s very rich. It’s not a superficial quality of mind.

Rick: So it sounds like, from what you’re saying, that mindfulness is something that not only would be practiced in meditation, but would be practiced during all one’s waking hours.

Joseph: Absolutely. And that’s really the goal. People come on retreat or do a daily practice as a way of strengthening that factor, so it is operative throughout our lives. And it’s a tremendous blessing. The more mindful we are, the less we suffer.

Rick: And I’m sure it wouldn’t be a good place for practice, but could a well-established practitioner be doing mindfulness just fine on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange?

Joseph: I think they could if they were quite well-established. It might be difficult. I don’t think I’d start there.

Rick: Right. That’s kind of why it might be good to do some retreats. Why, as you said earlier, the monks had an advantage with their lifestyle.

Joseph: It’s a part of the environment.

Rick: Less impact of the senses all the time.

Joseph: But the idea very much is to integrate this ability, this power that we develop into our lives.

Rick: I know in Hindu tradition, the analogy of a movie screen is used a lot, where you have the flat white screen and then all the images of the movie are playing on it, and they overshadow the screen so that as you’re watching the movie you forget the screen is there and you’re just engaged in all the changing images. But if somehow, let’s say, the light from behind the screen could be increased or something, you might begin to see the screen as a continuum which the changing images couldn’t overshadow. Does that analogy kind of fit in with the mindfulness thing or not at all?

Joseph: Yes, it does. I’d like to use that image and bring it back to your first questions about enlightenment and awakening. What happens to the light if there’s no screen on it to land? Because screen already has reified consciousness into something a bit too solid, as if there’s a thing there. And so, it’s a useful image because one of the things we see in meditation a lot, you know, we’re sitting, maybe feeling our breath, feeling our body, and then we get caught up in the movies of our minds. We get caught up in all the thoughts and feelings and images, not realizing that they’re just thoughts. We’re caught in the story of the movie.

Rick: Get absorbed.

Joseph: Yeah, a lot of the time. And so, sitting back and realizing that it’s just a movie is a powerful awakening. We’re coming out from being lost. But in terms of the realization of what goes even beyond the mind, I’ll just give you an example. For us to be aware of light, the light has to land on something. And it can be even something as subtle as air or particles of dust in the air. But there has to be something on which it lands for us to become aware both of the object and of the light. So, if we were staring out into outer space, and a light beam going into outer space and it didn’t land on anything, we wouldn’t be aware of the light, even though the light was being radiated. So, in that case you could say the light is unmanifest. From the Buddhist perspective, and especially in Theravada, nirvana or the enlightened state is unmanifest, unborn, unformed. And so it’s that image of light being projected. Is it landing on something? In which case we see it. Or not landing on anything? In which case we experience the unmanifest quality. So that’s just a little footnote to our opening discussion.

Rick: Yeah, that makes sense. And would it be true to say that the, I just got distracted because my earphones were feeding back. Would it be true to say that with sufficient integration and development, whether one is entertaining sensory experience or not, then this light, to use the metaphorical term, is continuous. That nothing overshadows it or can overshadow it at a certain stage. And that there could be states in meditation or even sleep for that matter where there’s no sensory experience whatsoever, no mental activity, no thoughts, and yet that light of, I don’t know if you like to say consciousness, but that inner light is sustained continuously and then engaged in dynamic activity, very same state, it’s just that there happens to be activity also.

Joseph: Yeah, I think that the freedom of mind of an enlightened being, a fully enlightened being, is not constrained by whether there’s activity or not activity. I’m a little hesitant to give too much weight to the particular metaphors that we use to describe it, but in terms of understanding that the freedom of mind is not limited to sitting still. The freedom of mind is the same whatever one’s doing.

Rick: I’m also a little thrown by the use of the word mind, because to me mind, as you say, it’s a faculty and so it denotes a kind of an activity of some sort. And as an activity it sounds individuated, and I think of freedom as something which is non-individuated in its nature, like the ocean, whereas mind is more like a wave on the ocean, to throw another metaphor into the mix.

Joseph: You know, these discussions are interesting just because both between us and also in the various traditions, we use words, we may be using the same words to mean different things, and so, it really takes a lot of care to define how we’re using a particular word.

Rick: Or different words to mean the same thing.

Joseph: Exactly.

Rick: I just listened to a discussion that took place at the Science and Non-Duality Conference between Rupert Spira and A.H. Almas, and they had this heated debate for 45 minutes, and I thought, “My God, they’re saying the same thing. Come on guys, you’re actually saying the same thing, you’re just trying to say it in different words.” You know, one of the first verses in the Yoga Sutras is something like, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” “Yogas citta-vritti-naroda.” So far, when I’ve heard mindfulness described, it’s sort of like an attendance to various sensations, you know, the breath or whatever, one is attentive to something, which to me implies that the mind is still active and engaged and fluctuating. I mean, ultimately or ideally, is the purpose of mindfulness to have even that activity settle down into a more kind of an unmanifest state?

Joseph: Yes. I mean, mindfulness, the Buddha taught mindfulness as being the path to that. So it’s a very pragmatic, skilful means to that opening of what we could call the unformed or the unconditioned or the unborn. That’s the culmination of the path of mindfulness.

Rick: And is that something that one would only hope to experience after many years of practice, or is it the kind of thing that even from the beginning one would have to dip into momentarily, but perhaps it gets more sustained and clear over time?

Joseph: For most people, I think it comes as the result of some increasing depth of meditation practice and skills, but there are some people who have, for whatever reason, some back, maybe it’s from past lives, or who knows, but who just have an ability to open to that unconditioned state more quickly. That’s rare, although it can and does happen. Mostly it happens through training. I mean, it’s somebody, most people have to really practice if they want to learn to play a musical instrument. Every once in a while there’s a Mozart.

Rick: Right. Yeah, very rarely.

Joseph: But it can happen.

Rick: So, you mentioned that mindfulness is something that one might engage in 24/7, or at least during one’s waking hours. I can see how the state in which people are ordinarily engaged is really not very desirable. I mean, you’re walking down the street looking at your cell phone, and the mind is sort of scattered in every direction. In fact, there’s a verse in the Gita which says, “Many … ” I forget. I’ll forget that. In any case, it would seem that mindfulness is very desirable. One is focused on the experience at hand, rather than being fragmented in every direction. But does that take effort, and if so, does it sort of, in a way, paradoxically divide the mind? Where let’s say you’re trying to do something, and yet at the same time there’s this effort to be mindful. So, it’s like you’re doing two things at the same time.

Joseph: Yeah. Both, two different questions there. Generally, in the beginning, it does take some effort to be mindful, because the habit of our mind is to be distracted. And so just the effort to see that the mind is distracted and to come back again and again and again until that factor, the quality of mindfulness is strengthened, so that it starts working more by itself. It doesn’t take …

Rick: It becomes second nature.

Joseph: Exactly.

Rick: It’s kind of like riding a bicycle. You have to really pay attention when you’re first learning, and after a while it’s

Joseph: That’s exactly right. Your second point is a very interesting point in a deepening understanding of mindfulness. Because very often, and this is a result of a lot of the language we use in talking about meditation and mindfulness. We use a lot of watching language. You know, say, “Watch the breath, notice the breath.” And so, the language is a kind of dualistic language. It’s as if we’re outside the experience tracking it. It’s not the best language that describes the actual experience, and I’ve been encouraging people to think of it more as feeling what’s happening rather than watching it. Because watching is from the outside, feeling it is from the inside. And so, then mindfulness just becomes, if you’ll indulge me, if we just do one little experiment now.

Rick: Sure, yeah.

Joseph: If you just move your arm from side to side but move it and just feel the movement.

Rick: Okay.

Joseph: Can you feel it moving? It’s that simple.

Rick: Yeah.

Joseph: That’s mindfulness. So, it’s not complicated when we’re in that feeling mode. If we’re in the watching mode, then it would be more effortful. It would be like this. We’re trying to hold on to it. Yeah. But when we’re in the feeling mode, it’s effortless. But it takes some training to have the mind remember that.

Rick: I remembered that Gita verse. It was, “For many brash and endlessly diverse are the intellects of the irresolute, but the resolute intellect is one-pointed.” That’s great. Yeah. I read something, I think it was in your book, where you were quoting someone else as advocating a very gentle, effortless approach to this whole thing. There’s not a lot of brow furrowing and teeth clenching. It’s a very gentle, effortless process. Is that correct?

Joseph: Well, it is. The Buddha talked a lot about right effort and what it means. In the example he used, which is kind of a classic image, he talked about tuning the strings of a lute. To get good music, the strings have to neither be too tight nor too loose. That’s really what we have to learn in meditation. It’s an art. It’s really learning with the mind and awareness, are we too tight? Are we struggling? Are we striving? Are we getting tense? So, then we have to relax. Are we so relaxed that we become very casual? We’re really not connected to what’s happening. So, then we have to bring it in a little closer. This is a continual dance. It’s not that we find just the right balance and then we’re there. This is something that we pay attention to through the course of the day. Is it right effort or not? Are we off balance one way or another?

Rick: It’s like the bicycle. If you’re a good bicycle rider, you don’t get to stop balancing. You keep doing it, but it becomes sort of this effortless thing. Yeah.

Joseph: And it’s interesting, it’s part of learning about oneself. Are we the kind of person who is over-striving, grasping, self-judgmental? So, if we’re conditioned in that way, then relaxation is really important. If on the other hand, we’re the kind of person who’s really lazy and slothful and doesn’t want to make effort for anything, in-rousing a kind of heroic energy, “Okay, let me do this,” so then that’s appropriate. So, there’s a lot of self-knowledge involved.

Rick: That’s a good point, yeah, that different strokes for different folks. I read somewhere in your book, you said, we kind of talked about this, but it might be helpful to throw it in again. Morality is the foundation. Without it, it’s like trying to row a boat without untying it from the dock.

Joseph: Yeah, exactly. Because when we’re committed, from the time we’re committed to ethical behavior, then that frees the mind from remorse. If we’re living a life continually doing unethical things, when we start meditating then, all of this stuff comes to mind and it’s very disturbing, very difficult to concentrate. So as soon as, not that we’ve all done plenty of unskilful things in the past, but from the time we’re committed to a basic foundation of morality, that brings a certain ease and peace of mind that can then be built on. From that as a foundation, then it’s easier to concentrate, easier to develop insight. So, it’s pretty essential.

Rick: There’s somebody, sorry, go ahead.

Joseph: There’s a kind of inner beauty to it. The Buddha talked of this quality of non-harming as being the inner beauty of a person. Our culture was so focused on the outer beauty, but these other qualities of the foreign mind And are much more important.

Rick: Somebody used the analogy of engaging in spiritual practice without ethical standard is kind of like trying to fill a bathtub without plugging the drain. Water’s coming in, but water’s going out.

Joseph: So, I think especially as these practices come to the West, I think it’s really important that this foundation is understood.

Rick: Yeah. Somebody came to my town recently and gave a presentation about the Buddha boy. That kid in Nepal or wherever it was, it sat under a tree for six years and didn’t eat or sleep or drink or anything. Do you think that’s for real? Do you know anything about that?

Joseph: I don’t. I remember vaguely reading about it, but I have no idea.

Rick: They’re kind of hailing him as the new Messiah of the East or something.

Joseph: I don’t think those manifestations are necessarily the signs of awakening, as unusual as they are. I think one of the things I’ve learned, and I think has stood me in good stead over these many years is the realization that I don’t have to have an opinion about things I know nothing about.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. I respect that and appreciate it. I just thought I’d throw it out to see if you knew anything about it.

Joseph: It’s an interesting story. Who knows?

Rick: Right. A couple more questions from my friend here. They’re a little bit long, but it might be worthwhile reading them and then maybe we’ll be wrapping it up a little bit after that. But here’s one. He says, and if this is something you know nothing about, then we’ll just move on, but is the gulf between Hindus and Buddhists on the issue of Atman versus Anatman really all that significant? Hindus define the absolute quality and the substrate of all existence as Brahman, and since that is what underlies each of us, they also term it the Atman, the essence of our existence, and therefore our “true self”, although it is not our personal property or exclusive to us and has no characteristics of our individual identity, which members of both religions see as impermanent. It is simply the root of all being, including ours. Mahayana Buddhists describe the absolute quality of the substrate of all existence as dharmadhatu or dharmakaya of the Buddha, his unmanifest, formless, essential “body” that is synonymous with tathata or suchness. To the educated outsider, when the historical figure of the Buddha is called tathagata, the one who has gone to that, the “that” to which he has gone sounds very much synonymous with the “that” of Hinduism’s expression, tattvamasi, “you are that.” What is the non-negotiable difference? Sort of an academic question, but this is an academic guy.

Joseph: And I’m not, and so I’m going to plead not knowing.

Rick: Okay, take the fifth.

Joseph: Exactly, because I really haven’t done a study of Hinduism either scholastically or in practice, and so it would be very hard to kind of

Rick: Okay.

Joseph: … what’s really meant by all that.

Rick: Here’s one that sticks more to Buddhism. This is his final question. In your book, One Dharma, you try to create a sense of common ground between the various Buddhist traditions of Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana by claiming that if we dig down to the essence of each of them, we find a common core. However, when you describe this common core, there was no element of it that would, oh, now here he gets into Hinduism again, there was no element of it that would exempt, Advaita Hinduism from this one dharma. So, answer this if you can, but otherwise maybe just comment on the first part of the question. Do you see some kind of firewall between Buddhists and neo-Advaita Hinduism in the US today, as practiced by various famous examples. And if there isn’t an impenetrable barrier between the two traditions from sharing one dharma, aren’t we talking about the perennial philosophy? Do you believe in the perennial philosophy?

Joseph: I mean, I can really only speak with any degree of confidence at all within the Buddhist tradition, and even that’s very broad.

Rick: So the first part of the question, within the Buddhist tradition, do you see a kind of a common core among the various branches?

Joseph: I do, I do. And there’s one phrase that is found in a lot in Theravada Buddhism, but is found also in Mahayana and Vajrayana, and I think it just gets to the very bottom line of what all these practices are about, where it says liberation through non-clinging. And it’s just so simple and so direct, that all the different methods, and all the different teachings and methodologies and practices are all in the service of non-clinging. And part of that non-clinging is non-clinging to the idea of self, some individual self. And part of the manifestation of that non-clinging is that it manifests as compassion. There’s a famous teaching by Dilgo Khense Rinpoche, who was a great, great Dzogchen master of the last century. He said, “When we realize the empty nature of phenomena, when we realize the selfless nature, the energy to bring about the good of others dawns uncontrived and effortless.” And so, I love that, it’s like, it’s understanding from that place of not clinging to anything, not to the body, not to the mind, not to awareness, not to consciousness, the mind free of any clinging at all, that there’s that real emptiness of self manifests as compassion, as responsiveness. And so, I love the frame of compassion being the activity of emptiness. And that to me brings the essential elements of all the traditions together.

Rick: Do you feel that that is so because if there’s clinging, then there’s sort of a selfishness inherent in that, there’s an individuation, there’s a sort of a myopia, a narrowness. And if that can be relinquished, then one’s more universal nature is able to flow forth, to shine forth.

Joseph: Yes.

Rick: And I mean, we’re all kind of wired to cling, I mean, from our infancy, we want our bottle, and we want our toy and we want this and that.

Joseph: Well, just this is why mindfulness is the key, because mindfulness is the method of practice that frees the mind from, it deconditions that very deep habit of clinging. And that’s how it works, and that’s why it’s the vehicle leading us to the goal.

Rick: And as I think you said before, that conditioning is multi-layered, it goes deep, you know, very deep, right? And so, it has to be kind of peeled like an onion, layer after layer.

Joseph: Yeah, layer after layer and moment after moment.

Rick: Yeah. Great. Well, that was a pretty comprehensive discussion. Is there anything you feel like is dear to your heart that we haven’t, you know, through my negligence, we haven’t really touched upon, that really kind of excites you or interests you that you want to just throw in?

Joseph: I think we covered a lot, and I’m glad we ended where we did, because I feel that that union, understanding the union of compassion and emptiness, is just such a beautiful, simple expression of the path and of freedom and of awakening. It brings together just the essential elements, and I think this is what’s found in certainly the different Buddhist traditions, and perhaps many others as well. So, I think that’s a good place to close.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s nice because sometimes the striving for enlightenment seems to have a self-indulgent quality to it, people who are sometimes looked upon as just being narcissistic or self-obsessed because they’re so keen on their inner state, culturing their experience, but what you’re saying is that the outcome of it, if it’s successful, is kind of a turning around and an ‘over my cup runneth over’.

Joseph: Yeah, and also what you’re saying points to one teaching which is emphasized a lot in the Tibetan tradition, Mahayana, and is there implicitly in Theravada, although it’s not expressed so explicitly, and that is the whole teaching of bodhicitta, which is the aspiration that we practice, and we awaken for the benefit of all. And I found that a very powerful addition to my Theravada practice. Before that I knew, and I understood that our practice will inevitably help others. If we’re less greedy and less angry and more generous and more loving, obviously everyone is going to be benefited. But to put that motivation up front, not to see it simply as the by-product of the practice, but to make it the motivation up front, “May my practice be for the welfare of all,” that added a tremendous richness to how I and others undertake the practice. And that’s bringing the compassion aspect right into the heart of what we’re doing.

Rick: Imagine what our society would be like if everyone’s orientation, all the millions of us were for the welfare of others.

Joseph: Yeah, exactly. It would be very different.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, one way of putting it is if people come together just to take, then no one receives because both are just taking, but if people come together to give, then everyone receives.

Joseph: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: There was a story in some Vedic scripture where, for some reason, the gods and the demons all had their arms tied. You know that story? Their arms were tied with a splint so they couldn’t bend at the elbow, and the demons starved to death because they couldn’t feed themselves, but the gods realized they could feed each other.

Joseph: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah, nice. Okay, well, that is a sweet note to end on, and I think you’re a nice example of the principle. You’ve dedicated your life to giving to others, and that’s really commendable.

Joseph: Thank you. That was great talking.

Rick: Yeah, thank you, Joseph. Let me just make a couple concluding remarks that I always make. The interview you’ve been listening to is part of an ongoing series. I’ve done over 200 of them now, and there’s a new one each week. You can find them all at batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. There you’ll find an alphabetical listing of them, a chronological listing of them, and you’ll also find there’s a discussion group that crops up around each interview. There’ll be one for this interview. There’s a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking. There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. There’s a link to an audio podcast. And incidentally, regarding the audio podcast, I just discovered that Apple gives much greater prominence to podcasts that have more stars and reviews, and I’ve only got two reviews, one positive, one negative, and about seven people have clicked on stars. So, if you sign up for this, or if you click on that podcast link, you’ll be taken to a page where you can say subscribe, and it’ll take it into iTunes, and there you’ll see a ‘reviews’ button. If you click on that, you can click on the stars, hopefully five, and leave a review if you like, and it’ll help this be more recommended within the iTunes podcast thing. So, thanks for doing that. Thanks for listening or watching, and we will see you next week.