Becoming a Sane Saint with Tucker Peck

00:00 — Meeting inside the computer

Pranab · 00:00

Hey Tucker.

Tucker · 00:01

Hi, Pranab! Nice to see you here inside the computer.

Pranab · 00:05

It's good to be inside your computer and it's good for you to be inside mine.

Tucker · 00:08

I always thought you’d be taller.

Pranab · 00:10

I thought so too. Just waiting for that growth spurt.

Pranab · 00:15

Nice. We're here today to talk about your book, and also to talk about someone else’s content. I had a few questions around some of the concepts from Sanity and Sainthood, which came out a few months ago, and how it lands on the deep end of the path. I thought you’d be the person to talk about that with.

Tucker · 00:37

I did write it, so let's go.

00:41 — Content and process

Pranab · 00:41

To start, I’d be curious if you could give your riff, just to set the context: what is the distinction between content and process, and how is that roughly divided between meditation and psychotherapy, since you are both a meditation teacher and psychotherapist?

Tucker · 00:56

Yeah, sure. This is maybe the central point of the book: most of what you're doing in psychotherapy is looking at the content of your experience. Content is the thing that at least Westerners normally relate to, right? So everybody who's listening to this is focusing on what you and I are saying and trying to extract meaning from that. Very few people are noticing how their mind is processing what we're saying, changes in volume and so forth, unless they’re dramatic. Content is what's happening. And so in therapy, generally, you're addressing content. Often the first question is like, how are you? How was your week? Or something like that.

The idea of addressing the content is that you can make it better. Your mind has a lot of insanity in it, meaning the content is a mess. And if you work on the content, you can improve it. And of course, that's true. The Buddhist angle is largely, I mean, you can improve it, but like, it's not gonna stay that way. A lot of the factors of whether it feels good or bad to be you are things that you can't ultimately control for all that long.

And so what you should be doing is changing the way that you relate to the content, right? So if your listeners are listening to a conversation right now and they find this conversation thrilling, they're going to be really happy. And if they think everything we're saying is really stupid, they're going to be angry. And if your listeners are like treating this simply as sound arising and passing away, now it doesn't actually matter what we say, right?

So the process is like, how is all of this stuff happening? Where is it happening? How are you relating to it? And if all you can do is see the content, and this is your content, we have a lot of power over you. As soon as you change your relationship to the content, you can actually remove all of our power over you. And most of Dharma is changing your relationship. Of course, there's some overlap. There's a lot of Buddhist influence in late 20th, early 21st century psychotherapy.

Tucker · 03:15

There are things in Buddhism like jhana practice, for instance. It’s talked about as supposed to suppress the hindrances. The point of jhana practice in Buddhism is to get better at process. But jhana is changing the content and making it a lot better. Similarly, metta has an angle in terms of working with process, but it's trying to make you feel more positive sensation. So it's not a straightforward cut, but it’s a…

A simple heuristic is: therapy works on content, Dharma works on…

Pranab · 03:47

Thank you. And I think a lot of what I want this conversation to go into is where does that break down and what's in that weird messy middle and how to navigate that. But maybe before we get there, there's some stuff we can do before that.

Cool. So I'm wondering, so given all that, where do you feel are common misconceptions or common traps kind of in the early stages of separating out content and process between some of the people you see or things you've noticed?

04:18 — Going too far in either direction

Tucker · 04:18

Yeah, so one of the big traps is going too hard in either direction. When I first started teaching Dharma, everybody was going too hard in the process direction. And that's what a lot of the authoritative sources were saying to do, right? So the ancient Pali texts, I mean, they don't say that for most people it will be an easy, pleasant, linear path. They certainly allude to difficulties.

But what happens to most Westerners at least, or maybe better to say globalized people, what happens to most globalized people when you do a bunch of meditation is you start crying a lot, right? You notice how much trauma you hold, you notice how crazy you are. And the error was this belief, which a lot of teachers were preaching, are preaching, that if you just focus on your breath or do your jhana practice or do your insight practice or something, all of this content will just go away. And in fact, if you don't do anything about loud content, it just gets worse and worse and worse. And you feel like you are failing at meditation or the Dharma doesn't work or it doesn't work for you or something like that. This is one common mistake: “If all you do is process, the content will go away.” In fact, if all you do is process, the content gets worse and worse. The other one, which is less common, but here in the Bay Area, if you do see it, is people who basically think if you talk to your internal parts all day, you will become sane. In fact, if the model you take of yourself is that you're schizophrenic, and then double and triple and quadruple down that model, it makes you progressively more insane, reactive, narcissistic. “Hey, do you want to hang out on Sunday?” And it's like, okay, I have a 45-minute essay on what all my parts want to do and no answer to your question.

06:23 — Parts work, reactivity, and balance

Pranab · 06:23

Yeah, I'd love to learn more about that and see what you've seen as the failure modes there because things like IFS, parts work, focusing, all the somatic stuff is super in vogue and I think it's pretty important and I know you feel that way too. I’m curious: where do you feel like those failure modes happen and what can people do to remedy those 45-minute diatribes on the nature of all their parts?

Tucker · 06:36

Yeah, in vogue for good reason.

Tucker · 06:47

Yeah, so what you're trying to do is both process and content, right? The rhyme that I use in my book is that if all you do is process, you feel hazy, meaning you don't really know what's happening in your mind. There's not a lot of... It's not that you become suicidal at all, but your motivation to live gets pretty low. Most of the reasons it’s good to be alive are love, meaning, connection, passion, direction, purpose. Which are all the names of feelings, right? So hazy means feeling kind of flat. Crazy means feeling reactive every time a part starts talking. Everybody in the room needs to stop what they're doing and address the feeling you've just had, right? So the thing you're trying to do is not fall too far into being hazy, meaning spiritually bypassed, dissociated, and not too far into being crazy, meaning reactive.

Self-obsessed. [One word unclear] is probably a good word that would go along with crazy. Like, okay, you have an unpleasant feeling, like move on. You can handle that. Whereas if all you're doing is looking at the content, there's no tolerance. There's just like, improve, improve, improve. So what you're trying to do is both. The way I always talk about it is if zero is totally dissociated and 10 is freaking out every time you have an emotion, you don't need to be awesome at math to figure out the optimal number here is five. You're not going to be able to stay at five. That's a really fine balance. You should be like in the three to seven range. And if you find you're getting really reactive, stop doing parts work. Like, okay, there are a lot of voices you hear in your head. They just arise and pass away. You don't have to listen to them. You don't have to be them. And if you find you’re going flat, or if you find you’re misbehaving, like people who say, “I’ve done all this meditation. I don’t experience any anger.” It’s like, “I saw you screaming at somebody.” “That was just non-self spiritual energy passing through me and manifesting on its way to God-consciousness.” If you start like misbehaving, that's another sign of being too dissociated. So that's how I think about it. Avoid the extremes. Middle way.

09:03 — Warmth and self-hatred

Pranab · 09:03

Sweet. A thing that comes to my mind is the role of compassion, metta, groundedness, maybe secure attachment, which I know is a lot of concepts in one, and maybe it's too many that I'm kind of equivocating in some ways. But could you talk about your experience with that sense of warmth or groundedness as it relates to this stuff?

Tucker · 09:25

Yeah, attachment is a big topic, so maybe I'll put that to the side. In terms of like warmth, groundedness, the Buddhist term which I know you're familiar with is the brahmaviharas. So equanimity for some reason is thrown in there. The other three which fit together better are like an open loving presence towards everybody, compassion and appreciation of other people's joy and success.

Pranab · 09:31

Yeah, let’s put that aside.

Tucker · 09:55

The common cold of mental health, particularly among Americans, to a lesser degree among all globalized people, is self-hatred. If a globalized person is in a therapy session with me for long enough, or somebody who grew up globalized—people who grew up in more local or tribal areas and then moved into global society don’t actually have this problem so badly. But for those of you who grew up in globalized society, if therapy sessions go on long enough, we will start talking about a voice about how you hate yourself and basically like an internal version of an abusive dad. Even people who had really nice dads, oddly, sadly, it doesn't seem to help in globalized world. We all tend to have this internal abusive dad.

And one feature of the abusive dad is like no pain, no gain. The harder I beat you, the better a human being you will be. If I ever stopped beating you, like you're already trash. Like imagine how much more trash you would be. This is not truly ubiquitous, but close to ubiquitous among people who grew up in globalized society. One thing that comes from this which can be really hard to notice is that Dharma becomes one more whip you use to beat yourself with, right? That you're not good enough and you can have like really compassionate flowery language around self-help and improvement and enlightenment, but it's masking the idea that Dharma for you means you're not good enough, you're not doing it right, and if you just like beat yourself a little harder, by one more retreat and one more sit and whatever, you will attain enlightenment and then you'll finally be good, right? And the karma of this is atrocious. In Buddhism, karma means, I like to use a simple definition, that what you do determines who you are, and who you are determines what you do in a cycle, right? The Buddhists say what particularly matters is the intention, not what you do, but why you're doing it. So like, is meditating good for you?

Tucker · 12:15

Well, it actually depends on why you're meditating. If you're meditating because you hate yourself or you hate your experience and you think sitting quietly will kill it, that's kind of more bad for you than good for you. So the place where I see metta as being the most helpful is here. Why is somebody doing five IFS sessions a week? They hate their experience and they want a totally different experience. I think of Scrabble, where you can just trade in all your tiles, get all new tiles. The idea of metta is: if you’re in love with somebody—and hopefully a lot of our listeners out here are in love with somebody—you can list their flaws and those flaws don't stop you from being in love. So the idea of metta is like, okay, like I can think about my husband and hopefully he’s not listening to this—I can think of some things if I designed a husband that would be different and like I'm totally in love with him and I don't really mind those things. And then can I do that to myself? That's what I see is like the strongest value of the brahmaviharas. It seems like in the, at least in the ancient South Asia where these teachings come from, the problem was that people were arrogant and selfish. Most of the people I work with, it's the opposite. They're very like kind to others and want to help and, very cruel to themselves. So I think metta and compassion and the mudita as well, the ability to be proud of yourself. I think these are things that most globalized people need to direct more inwards than they do outwards.

13:57 — View and intention

Pranab · 14:04

That's awesome. Yeah, this is great. This brings up lot for me in terms of, the concept of no bad parts. Like a lot of doing IFS seems like it helps instill the idea of no bad parts. I guess when done right, it can kind of move towards that intention and move towards that view. And then the role of view in general, like right view and the Rob Burbea ways of looking almost in Dzogchen mode, like view in terms of view, practice, fruit. But anyways, just view in general seems like a really important. Aspect to all this.

Tucker · 14:38

Yeah, so like, view is where intention comes from. In terms of like in the outside world, intention doesn't really like, it may not play that big a role often, right? In the inside world, it's the main thing. And so, yeah, if the view is, if the view is imbued with self-hatred, then the intention becomes imbued with self-hatred.

And then no matter how much from the outside you may have gone on 40 meditation retreats, you're probably not getting much benefit from them.

15:17 — The Mind Illuminated and individual needs

Pranab · 15:17

Yeah. Yeah. One, I'd be curious about, the role of the hindrances in view, or I guess how view matters when relating to the hindrances. So this is something that I thought about with, and I've talked about with people, it seems like a common misconception with The Mind Illuminated, which I know you're quite trained in. There seems to be a pervasive view, not necessarily from the book, but in general around the hindrances being bad and things that should go away versus kind of a more no bad parts style relating to the hindrances.

And when actually looking at The Mind Illuminated again a couple months ago, I realized, actually, there actually kind of is this softness to it. But curious if you could riff on that a bit.

Tucker · 15:56

Yeah, I helped Culadasa with writing The Mind Illuminated. And some of my feedback didn't get incorporated. That line about not everybody can achieve stage 10 in a year. There’s an occasional loser who needs a little bit more. Every draft, I was like, “Take that out.” That is not true. And it survived all the edits. So.

Yeah, The Mind Illuminated became for a while basically a Bible. I still will hear people refer to it as the book, as though like if you're talking about meditation, there's only one. And so we don't need to use the title. There's pros and cons. There's pros and cons to the approach. One of the cons to the approach is it's a totally top-down, control-focused, be-elsewhere-later type of approach, right?

And my first teacher was Sharon Salzberg. She would constantly say this thing, which her teacher had constantly said, which is the Buddha's enlightenment solved the Buddha's problem, now solve yours. Meaning to me, solve yours means you have become a sane saint, right? And well, why aren't you a sane saint? No offense, but there's probably a lot of reasons. The things between you and the goals are probably diverse and vast.

If a big thing between you and the goal, or for many of the people that I work with, the biggest things between you and the goal is like wrong effort, trying too hard, and acting out of self-hatred and abusive dad mode, then you can't treat the hindrances as bad. Then you're going to beat yourself when you have the hindrances and beat the hindrances. And the hindrances, of course, are you, right? Your mind. So.

Certainly this top-down controlled approach for people who have those proclivities, it’s going to make it worse. The reason Culadasa started writing a book, we kept meeting these people who were like, yeah, I've been meditating for 25 years. It's like, cool. Well, like, what did it do for you? It’s not about doing or getting. And they're like, well, that's like the healthy attitude to adopt. It's instrumentally true, but it's not epistemically.

Tucker · 18:17

Like you may be wasting your time, like there are some like skills to develop and just sitting there really could go either way. So for people who trend lazy, for people who trend too non-judgmental, the like control and the maps, it's really good. I would imagine that my students and your listeners have some overlap, both of humans and of psychological qualities. The lazy, spaced-out, dopey people—I don’t get a lot of those. I get super-driven people who need to chill the fuck out for a couple years. Before they should try overcoming sleepiness, they should try accepting sleepiness. I guess the central answer here would be…

Pranab · 18:47

Individual people.

Tucker · 19:12

What you're trying to do in meditation is generally achieve balance along quite a large number of dimensions, right? And so the dimension here is like, if all you do is sit back and accept everything, that actually can, for some people, be a path to awakening. For others, it's a path to like falling asleep, watching porn behind your closed eyes, doing math problems. And of course, if you just strive and strive and strive, you get nowhere.

So depending where you are on the balance, you'd want the counterbalancing instructions and the like one size fits all, The Mind Illuminated is the book and everybody should do this. That's a really harmful and really common philosophy.

Pranab · 19:58

Yeah. I know that for me, starting off a few years ago, I was really stuck to The Mind Illuminated as a thing that I had to do. And I felt like I wasn't making a ton of progress, but then the thing that was giving me a lot of juice was working with Michael Taft's practice and the more spacious awareness type stuff. But it was almost like my brain didn't let me do that because I was like, wait, no, where will that get me on The Mind Illuminated stages? And then I, once I kind of dropped that and I actually could fall into the thing that I really liked and then made a bunch of progress in the ways that I wanted to make progress.

20:27 — Cultivating more dullness

Tucker · 20:27

Michael coached me on a few solo retreats and one of them he was like...

Basically, I think what you should do next is cultivate more dullness. There's a way in which like if the ego is really weak, you can get it even weaker by like getting under the covers. And I was just like, that's not allowed. How could you say that? My first response was like, “Heretic! Burn him!” Because, yeah, the teacher I studied with the longest was Culadasa, and dullness is original sin.

Pranab · 20:57

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, and I really liked the idea of, I used to work at Jhourney and you had Stephen Zerfas on your teaching meditation podcast. Think the, yeah, teaching meditation, subscribe now. It's really good, I like it a lot. But one thing that I think that he and the organization does really well is emphasize two of those points you made of, yeah, the goal is do nothing, nowhere to go, nowhere to be, there's no goal in practice. And seeing that,

Tucker · 21:04

Yeah. Thanks for pitching my podcast.

Pranab · 21:26

I'm not sure the right way to phrase it, but that as a pointer to a way of being more than like literally there is no goal. Like yes, there are things are moving the mind towards, there is mind training, there is kind of progression. And then within that there's skill development. And I think both of those kind of feel very helpful as views.

Tucker · 21:47

Yeah, so the non-doing is certainly not a truth, right? The Buddha becomes awakened in his late 20s and just like wanders around for 60 years teaching. The Mahaparinibbana Sutta, he's like an old man. He says, my body is like an old cart. Like you can't just keep replacing the parts. You have to throw it out some point. And he's like dragging this like almost corpse of his, on multi-day long hikes. So he can do a little bit more teaching. So certainly the model isn't like the world is stupid, you can't control anything, just give up. It’s that you’re controlling things from the ego. You're controlling things from this part of you that's really functional in the outside world and disastrous inside world. And you need to stop doing that. And I can't tell you how to stop doing that. That's going to require some insight for you to know what I mean by acting from the ego and not acting from the ego. And so because I can't tell you how to not act from the ego, why don't you just not act at all? And then like you will also be not acting from the ego.

It's a way of having an insight into what the ego is. The eventual goal is to be able to recognize the ego and see that it is, well, I mean, it's not a thing. One model that works is like the captain's chair connected to a steering wheel that's not connected to anything. And there's like a rotating cast of characters in the captain's chair. Without training for almost everybody, it feels like you are that captain, right? And so you're trying to see that like that captain is not on your team. Like he's generally pretty dumb, pretty angry and like she's grabbing a busted steering wheel. And so you're trying to get like a smarter way of relating to the ego, a smarter way of moving the mind. And that is the goal is like to be able to do stuff in to operate the mind in the right way.

21:50 — What non-doing points toward

Tucker · 23:54

Is the goal not to abstain from operating.

Pranab · 23:57

And reflecting that back, almost a summary is the progression of do nothing practice is going from do nothing in a coarse physical way where you're literally not doing action to seeing kind of do nothing as the seeing the ego as not doing things in a more subtle mind mental move way. Is that a way to kind of summarize reflect back the thing you're saying?

Tucker · 24:17

As a map, yes. As an instruction, no. The people who are like, my god, Dharma is amazing. It solved all my problems. I'm enlightened now. You have to try it. They've been meditating for eight months, right? The same way that 14-year-olds believe that no one has ever been as in love as they are, when you're new at it's easy to mistake really immature, exciting stuff. For insight into non-self. So yeah, it's really easy to get tricked and be deluded about this stuff. So if you’re on a path of non-doing, just keep non-doing until your teacher says you should stop. When you think you're enlightened, it's probably a bad sign. It's a sign that you should really keep letting go.

Pranab · 25:11

Yeah, nice. I have a, there's a whole direction here on liberation stuff and avoidance that I think would be great. But before we get there, I'd be curious on integrating some of the content process stuff into the last few minutes of what we just talked about. So I'm curious kind of given, insight, right effort, right view, what part of that is content? What part of that is process? So when an insight comes up, like what does that mean? And when it integrates, what does... Curious if you could talk about that a bit, because think that's where it starts to blend for me or feel a little fractal.

25:44 — Where content and process meet

Tucker · 25:44

Yeah, sure. Where I think it blends is in really advanced states. Unless you are semi-monastic, or on retreat, or a very weird person—unless you’re in a real minority category—where they blend together is a state that is too advanced to access in daily life. These are states you access on retreat.

And when you access these states is when you see why lots of spiritual people use physics metaphors. And in fact, I just read a great book by Kieran Fox about Einstein’s spiritual life. It's called I Am a Part of Infinity. The book's over there, so I had to read the title. It's basically saying all the physicists started talking about Buddhism and Hinduism and spiritual stuff because it starts like metaphorically running together, right?

Tucker · 26:45

They’re different. One sort of advanced state would be like the last of the formless jhanas. A similar one would be dissolving phenomena, getting tanha so low that you've like almost blinked out. And what happens there is like when you get into quite deep states, you notice that actually process is what creates content. And so you can switch process such that either there's literally no content, which is phala or Cessation or Nirvana, or you can switch it so that the English translation of the name for the fourth formless jhana is a jhana of neither perception nor yet non-perception. And it feels like a real bulky name until you get there and you're like, I have nothing shorter to call this, right? It's like, because of the way I'm relating to the phenomena, they have all come unglued. And so I can't say I'm not perceiving. There are like sort of atoms or subatomic particles that would normally glue together to form content. So I can't say I'm not perceiving because I'm seeing these, you things. If you're like, okay, then what are you perceiving? Like, thing stuff. Like it's not gluing together. So, the same way that like if you cut something in half, you have two things that are each half the size of the original thing, and you can keep doing that and keep doing that until eventually you can't. You cut something in half and you have two things of the same size the original thing, and actually like whether you're observing it like suddenly determines whether and how it exists. This is one of the metaphors that [wording unclear] start talking about. So I think like at the really deep end of the pool, things run together because process undoes content.

I don't know whether monks can abide in that state. My one monastic teacher said, maybe like a couple of monks in the entire world can abide in that state, but for the most part, no, that content re-arises and so it's important to work with content because it's not permanently going anywhere.

Pranab · 28:58

Yeah, and would permanent abiding in that state be something like nirodha samapatti or some other way of actually being awake and walking around? Yeah, yeah.

Tucker · 29:07

I would feel dopey just speculating about what that would look like. I can't imagine it.

Pranab · 29:14

Yeah, and maybe in the steps before it becomes like super crazy kind of fused, let's say like fifth jhana infinite space or sixth jhana infinite consciousness, where does content process delineate there?

29:30 — Looking at content or process

Tucker · 29:30

Generally, I have two thoughts. Generally is, if you're looking at one, you miss the other, So the analogy that I always use is, it took me a couple years to come up with, and then I was really proud of it, so I keep repeating it. If you watch two people arguing, you are almost certain to listen to their arguments and try to figure out who's right. That's just the way we listen to speech, right? Now, imagine two people are arguing in Dutch. We don't speak Dutch. And so suddenly we can't figure out who's right.

What we're going to look at is like, how are they arguing? Like maybe she gets more and more aggressive. He gets more and more submissive until she snaps and then he gets submissive and I think I mixed the genders up and they're somewhere, but you see what I mean. You can look at how people are communicating or you can listen to what they're saying, but you can't really do both very well. If somebody's watching this video, and dissolving our image into pixels, my hand no longer appears to be moving, you can actually see it's just pixels changing color, and my voice is just like sound waves coming out of your speaker system, you really aren't gonna be able to know what I'm saying, right? So one thing is like, content and process run together when process undoes content, but otherwise they basically don't run together, like... The more, that's another physics metaphor, it’s like the uncertainty principle. The more you're observing process, the less you're capable of knowing about content. I have yet to see anybody come out of the first formless jhana and start talking about their childhood trauma or who they want to hook up with. Like you're looking at how space exists and you just don't care about content. You don't really see content when that's happening. The other thing I could say is,

31:33 — Going big and going small

Tucker · 31:33

Content exists at a medium lens of analysis. So one route to awakening, it's the primary one in the Theravada tradition, is: get things really small. So some definitions of vipassana are things like deconstruct or pull apart. That the way that you see through the content is look at really little things.

And the same way you cut something in half and half and half and eventually like, whoa, that is not what I was expecting was gonna happen. There are other moves like in open awareness, shikantaza, where what you're trying to do is go really big. And similarly going big or going small, there's actually not a lot of similarities between those paths, there's very little overlap in the map, but they both do lead to transcendence, Transcendence meaning like Tucker is kind of over there, he's not me, like. He's like my puppy or something. If he's hungry, should probably feed him. But like, I'm not him. He's over there. Content is at the medium level. And so if you stick to the medium level and you don't get too fine grained in analysis in time, meaning content requires a medium region of space and enough time. Yeah, if you stay at a medium level space with enough time, it's pretty easy to see the

Pranab · 32:58

Yeah, I think this is, that's really, I'm glad you said that, because I found myself disagreeing a little bit, or maybe not disagreeing, but finding some internal sense of objection. It's like, no, I mean, maybe like someone deep into like a true formless jhana wouldn't normally think about, their childhood trauma or things like that, but there's kind of, maybe, but it does seem like, let's say earlier on in the progression, there's a way of kind of like softening into maybe a formless, spacious self-energy and then intentionally bringing up a childhood trauma. It does seem like that's a lot of how therapy works or some forms of experiential somatic therapy. But I could see how maybe on the deeper end, it's like kind of just two separate things. What do you think about that? Just, yeah.

33:40 — Jhana and the return to ordinary experience

Tucker · 33:40

Yeah, so, the point of the jhanas is suppressing the hindrances, right? The point of the jhanas is to come back and be able to observe things more clearly. One of the things I talked to Stephen about on my show was there's always this question around jhana junkies, people who don't use jhana the correct way and get addicted. And it like seems quite logical that would happen. I've literally never, literally never seen it before. I think that like, you can't stay in the jhanas, right? You get into these awesome states, they make you temporarily smarter and they decay. So do you work for Jhourney?

Pranab · 34:22

Not anymore, but I'll probably be a facilitator in the next few months.

Tucker · 34:26

Cool. So I keep seeing on Twitter people posting like, “I used to think there were problems in life. And then I met Jhourney.” And it’s like, okay, but those are people on their first retreat, right? Like the thing where you're like, happiness is simply, unhappiness is simply jhana deficit disorder. And Jhourney has invented jhanas and found the cure. That's a really naive, immature, brand new to this stuff sort of take, which

Pranab · 34:54

Totally.

Tucker · 34:55

I mean, a lot of people have it and it's awesome for marketing, marketing Dharma practice. The jhanas decay, all these awesome states decay and it seems, I mean, as far as anyone I've ever observed, it seems impossible not to eventually notice that, to stay in this dopey, “I found the cure for all suffering, and it’s creating awesome mind states”. And so like the jhanas, what you're supposed to do, is come out of them and use the wisdom that comes after them in order to review what's going on. And in Dharma, you're generally supposed to review things from an insight lens, but you can equally review things from a content lens. It seems like in globalized society, we are not processing emotions properly. And I think that's why culturally Asian teachers if you try to talk to them about your trauma, they're gonna say shut up, right? They're gonna say like this is delusion and you shouldn't be addressing this. And Western teachers are like, yeah, we're gonna have to go through 10 years of this. We might as well start talking about this now, right? We're not processing the emotions properly. And so it was just like a lot of content that we are gonna have to deal with when we come out of all of the awesome states.

Pranab · 36:13

Cool. Yeah, and it's funny because I think my lens in a lot of this is from a shikantaza, shiné first approach with a bunch of somatic IFS type stuff, which is not usually the dominant path compared to more typical Theravada or maybe this more twin jhana style focus. So it's been fun translating some of this into my own practice from that lens. Curious, what do you see the role is of?

Rob Berbea calls the unfabricated or the deathless or within the more Tibetan traditions, rigpa or best approximation of awake awareness in Michael Taft's speak. That's all, again, not the same tradition as the one you're most trained in, but do you see that there's a way in which one could play with both or a role for that or maybe that's more to the deeper end of practice?

37:03 — The deathless and anxiety

Tucker · 37:03

Yeah, of course. So it’s not that we don’t have that in Theravada. My theory in Theravada is that of all the prophets in history, the Buddha tried harder than anyone else not to found a religion. And so it's why he's not telling you any of the good stuff, right? It's like, well, you have no self. And then there's no, instead of a self, you have blank, right? Any blank is just attachment to view.

There's one sutta where he's like, here's all the selves you don't have. And it's like a cosmic self where like you merge with the cosmos. You super don't have that one. That's the dumbest one. Don't think that. Right. So we do use the term nirvana in the Pali Canon. We use the term phala. If there's some scholar listening, I'm not sure whether phala appears in the earliest parts of the canon, but it certainly appears in Theravada Buddhism.

We're just trying not to talk about what's going to happen because we don't want you to just get a touch that and think Nirvana is heaven and if you give money to the monks you go to Nirvana when you die and look at Nirvana Buddhist world that's exactly what happened, immediately after the Buddha died. So I think that in later lineages where they're talking about this stuff it makes a lot of sense. The benefit of not talking about it turned out not to really be there.

In terms of what awake awareness and rigpa mean, I think it's the same thing as what jhana means, right? Where jhana means almost nothing because it means different things to all different speakers. Some people are using rigpa or awake awareness to mean like a large sense of self or a like spatial loss of center. And some people are probably using it to describe states that lay people like you and me. Have no access to and don't understand, right?

Tucker · 38:59

If what you're talking, I think what you're talking about is what we might call like the deathless Nibbana. It's the like, it's the transcending of all content, right? It's the transcending of all reality and the cessation of all content. If the question is something like what's useful about Nibbana, I would be really glad to answer this question. I think it's probably quite heretical sort of question. To ask, but I would say what's useful, what's been most useful for me about it is decrease in anxiety, particularly death anxiety.

In very increasingly large swaths of globalized world, we aren't faithful to religion anymore. I recently learned Buddhism is the world's fastest shrinking religion as Buddhist countries in Asia rapidly globalized and people become secular. If you don't have any religion, death is pretty terrifying. And erode the meaning out of everything and this experience of the Deathless is like, huh, I get the sense now that the things that I really want not to lose when I die, I think I actually don't lose those things. I mean, I lose this body, but like, by the time I'm likely to die, I'll probably be about ready to lose this body.

Nibbana is like immortal and immutable and it's... There's just a bunch of cliches here but it's like the void from which everything springs, it's your true nature, it's underneath everything. Thich Nhat Hanh’s cliché around it is like when the wave breaks and returns to the ocean,? People have been trying to explain this

Tucker · 41:06

Since there have been language, since there has been language, and we keep using the same kind of analogies. Yeah, it's helped me not be so worried about death, and then also, not that I'm by any stretch like devoid of anxiety, but it does help everything feel a little bit lighter. It's like one level of the, one level of what I'm engaged in might go. Really badly and other levels are untouched by that.

Pranab · 41:40

Beautiful. Yeah, that's a nice segue into, I think, the difference between awakening and liberation and maybe even the role of nirvana within both processes.

So maybe a more pointed thing there, because I know that's a big topic that I just brought up.

41:41 — Defining awakening and liberation

Tucker · 41:57

Well, particularly, you when I say jhana doesn't mean anything, that's an overstatement, right? Like basically what people disagree about is, is jhana something you can do on your lunch break or is jhana something you do after a three year retreat? It's like similar with rigpa or awake awareness, there's disagreement on the depth. If you're talking about awakening and liberation, these are truly meaningless terms and that it's hard to find two people who have any overlap. Or two systems, maybe even two people who have any overlap in what they mean by this. So we have to be, we have to use a more precise term than either of those to be clear what we're working towards.

Pranab · 42:40

Awesome. So some of the context we had before this call is that we both talked about Shamil Chandaria's video about non-dual awareness and awakening, where he has this chart that I like a lot.

Tucker · 42:51

Hi, Shamil!

Pranab · 42:54

Hello, Shamil and my computer and your computer. Yeah, one of these days we'll get Shamil on too. So maybe let's anchor just to this model for now, where there's awakening in his model of this, awakenings on the Y axis, liberations on the X axis, with awakening having properties of deepening and broadening in further depth, with liberation having the label of extinction therapy on the X axis. Again, this is both of us riffing on Shamil's thing that you have watched.

Tucker · 42:54

I realize that's YouTube and he can't see me.

Pranab · 43:24

Maybe a couple years ago, like a year ago when it came out, I watched a few months ago caveats that were not experts in this and Shamil could probably explain this far better than both of us. But maybe having this as an anchor to our discussion, how do you think, yeah, could you riff on kind of this model or how maybe what we've talked about so far plays into this?

Tucker · 43:42

I play music and like if you ask me to play an easy song I can just sight read it. There's some songs I can't sight read. I think this is more depth than I can like rapidly wrap my head around and riff. Shamil's one of the smartest people I've ever met and I've met a lot of smart people.

Pranab · 44:06

Cool. Cool, cool, Yeah, no, that makes sense. Maybe what is kind of the role of liberation or how does it, within your traditions that you've trained in, liberation or awakening tend to play with each other?

Tucker · 44:17

In my tradition, actually, we’d use awakening and liberation as synonyms. What I think I got from Shamil's model is one, I think it was a liberation axis is equanimity, is like non-reactivity leading to the cessation of phenomena. And then awakening is related to like basically making the size of consciousness larger.

In the Theravada we don't talk quite so much about increasing the size of the sense of self. There is open awareness practice, but I was earlier saying that for awakening you can go big or go small.

Pranab · 44:44

Almost like the role of the sense of self.

Tucker · 45:07

Almost everything in the Theravada is going small. Maybe actually, I was saying I couldn't wrap my head around that chart, but I think maybe I can wrap my head around it. That the Y axis is going big and the X axis is going small, right?

Pranab · 45:22

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Pranab · 45:26

Or I think going small but in a different way is my take on it. Like I think the Y, the X axis of liberation going small is going small into the kind of the knots or the samskaric patterns or something where, the awakening is less like permeating or something. But that's my, that's my understanding versus I think in the Theravada going small is typically investigating the nature of Tanha. More in the sense of self, necessarily in samskara patterns.

45:59 — Different minds and different paths

Tucker · 45:59

Yeah, so like your question is specifically like in my lineage, how do we talk about this? And I'm mostly trained in Theravada lineage and we don't really talk about this. We don't do a lot of the... Get the mind really big sort of practices. We do much more like investigation and investigation equanimity concentration those sorts of things. I guess the way I would personally think about it the Buddha frequently says there's 64,000 Dharma doors which is just a way of saying different strokes for different folks. The least ancient book of the Pali Canon is the Abhidhamma.

And one of the books, Abhidhamma, is called the Puggalapannatti, which is fun to say and not terrifically fun to read. It's real dry and boring. But the whole book is just like, well, there's this type of person. They should probably do that type of thing. And this type of person should do this type of thing. I think the idea is like the Buddha's enlightenment solve the Buddha's problem. Human minds vary enormously.

For people whose egos are too tight, which is most of the people I work with, there's a really important role for getting the ego bigger and that like anything you do is going to be from the ego. Like, see if you can just relax the ego into more spaciousness.

I don't have a sense of like, if all you do is the big path, what happens? Like, do you eventually converge on the small path like in Shamil's diagram there? Or my experience with the big path was like, at some point feeling like I hit the end. So it turns out I'm really talented at the big path stuff and really untalented at the small path stuff.

47:53 — Spaciousness and mental pliancy

Tucker · 47:53

It's why I teach the small path stuff. It’s a funny inversion: you can’t teach something you’re talented at because if people are struggling, like, I don't get it. You just do it. And so the things that you’re really bad at naturally are the things where you've made all the mistakes and you really understand all the struggles and you can teach it. So for me, the big path comes really easy. And I've gotten to this place where I feel like the big path is done. Like if you want to know whether my sense of self resides in like my head, my foot, my neighbor's house. The, Orion galaxies, my answer's gonna be like, it resides equally in all of those and none of those, right? And so I got there and I was like, fucking now what? Like, I could sort of slap an I'm enlightened bumper sticker on my car and go home. And so what I wound up doing from that point was, you get mental pliancy from there, meaning, your mind simply follows instructions in the way that normally you say, hey, mind, focus on the breath. And it's like, fuck you.

Here's 500 things we're going to think about. Mental pliancy is: it complies. So I did small body vipassana, sometimes looking at content and sometimes looking at process, with the mental pliancy that came from what to me at least seemed like maxing out the big path.

Pranab · 49:13

That's awesome. That's actually really helpful for me because I find that the big path is what has come naturally and I'm by no means near the end of that but I could see how I could at some point and I'm like cool and even even now as I've progressed I'm like yeah all the stuff that used to be really hard I can actually just do focused jhana practice or I can do vipassana body scanning in ways that were too difficult before and I just had all this stuff come up and a good friend of mine she always always like yeah I feel like eventually you're gonna want to do the stuff that I'm doing, is more of the small stuff, like cutting in and everything. And I think that after hearing you say that, it does seem more likely that's the case for my own path, which is

Tucker · 49:53

Yeah, yeah, I guess another way you could split it is looking forwards versus looking backwards. So the Theravada stuff is almost entirely looking forwards, like how are you relating to the things that are happening right now? And the backwards path is like who is relating to the stuff that is happening right now? And at least in the model of awakening that I would use, the extinction of the person that it's happening to is like, I mean, it's a really significant, awesome thing to happen, but it's not like a terribly advanced thing to happen. It's, once you get the hang of this stuff, it can be a fairly early sort of transition to not having a sense of self anymore. Or I'm not sure that I know people who never have a sense of self, but sometimes not having a sense of self.

Pranab · 50:48

Yeah, yeah, this kind of gets into kind of the deep end that I think a lot of Vajrayana traditions or Hindu Shiva Tantra gets into. What does it look like to have the world of, or the world, the idea of skillful refabrication, which I know in this video Shamil gets into quite a bit, or almost creating a more beautiful story or soul making or all that stuff. How do you think about all that stuff as it comes to?

post-awakening or post-relaxed sense of self.

51:16 — Skillful refabrication and a shared world

Tucker · 51:16

Yeah. So my first thought, I talk about early in my book, is when Buddhism came to the West, it merged into a hippie New Age culture. It was, it was New Age hippies who brought Buddhism here, right? And New Ageism and Buddhism are in most respects the opposite. New Ageism is like you can win, right? There are ways of looking at things, there are supernatural powers that you might not have otherwise known about, you can manifest and actualize and be who you want to be. And Buddhism is like, samsara is fucked, get out of here. And there is some overlap between those, but not a lot. And so I don't at all take the view that reality is mind-generated and you should generate something better, I think this view will make you really crazy. I had a student leave retreat one time and he was like, you've totally changed my life. Thank you for helping me see that global warming is not something I am doing. And if you believe that reality is like simply how you look at it, then I regret to inform you that famine and war and climate change are things you should probably stop doing. They're like... Pointing to you being insufficiently enlightened. So I think that there is a real world. Of course, we're not directly perceiving that real world, but it is consistent enough that I think it's there. And so in terms of like, what does skillful refabrication look like? Well, there is, there are a lot of fixed points in skillful refabrication. I'm not there, but I could imagine getting to a place where I could abstain from fabricating. For some like the period of time. But when at some point you have to like return to default world, a lot of what presents is like just what's there, not what you want. Where I think you can make big changes is like.

53:29 — What happens to the concept of the breath

Tucker · 53:29

The world, when you realize the only reason there is a world is because of a particular way of looking, and you can, maybe you don't have access to the other ways of looking right now, but you've had them before and you will have them again. That's this huge decrease in anxiety that I was talking about. You also may be able to draw much smarter stories from the data. So the normal way of living is existing almost entirely in a world of concepts.

The easiest way to see this in meditation, I mean, it's not easy. Like the average person can't just do it right now, but it's probably the easiest one. You just focus on your breath for a while. And like every day for a while or on retreat several days in a row. And it goes in and out and in and out and in and out. Like, what am I doing this for? And then suddenly you get what in Pali is called the Uggaha Nimitta, which I use the Pali because it's really fun to say Uggaha. And the Uggaha Nimitta is when...

Pranab · 54:23

That's a fun word to say, yeah.

Tucker · 54:26

You suddenly don't have the concept. You're like, okay, I definitely used to have a nose and there used to be air passing through it and that created rhythmic sensations that I called the breath. And now in the region of space formerly inhabited by my nose is like a non-rhythmic series of sensations. And you can be like I wasn't seeing the raw data. I was living in theory and the raw data don’t support theory nearly as tightly as I thought they did. So you may get a lot more flexibility in how you see reality and how you interpret reality, but like that flexibility is quite limited by the fact that at least as long as you have a human brain, like to say is reality real or do we all see reality because we have a human brain, that one I can't answer, but at least as long as you have a human brain, there's going to be an awful lot of constraints. On how much world building you can do.

Pranab · 55:28

I think that sense of being grounded in physicalism and social consensus seems like a good way to become a sane saint.

Pranab · 55:39

And that seems like a good way to end it.

Tucker · 55:42

Yeah, that was awesome, [brief phrase unclear]. Thank you.

Pranab · 55:45

Thanks, for sure.