JOSH: Hello and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Daniel Ingram about the positive effects of meditation and appreciation of pain, alternative approaches to perceiving self and reality, navigating ontology, the elegance of tradition, and finding new meanings to existing terms.

SPENCER: Daniel, welcome. It's great to have you on.

DANIEL: Wonderful to be here. Thank you.

SPENCER: So the first question I wanted to ask you about is a very simple one, which is, why meditate? When someone's considering learning about meditation, what should they be taking into account?

DANIEL: It's such a huge question, it's almost impossible to even know where to begin, because there are so many reasons that people might do this. There are so many different styles, so many different dose levels, and so many different skill sets that people are coming into this with, as well as so many sensory proclivities or aesthetic vibes that people like or don't like, traditions, religious upbringings, and philosophies that people are coming from. It's nearly an impossible question to answer without knowing a ton more about an individual person.

SPENCER: It seems there's a split between thinking of meditation as just something that can improve your life, somewhat like it can make you a little bit happier, a little bit calmer, and so on. You tend to see these perspectives promoted by things like, let's say, Headspace or the app Calm. Then I would contrast that with people who view meditation as something much bigger, much deeper, that can be radically life-altering. I imagine that you take more of the latter perspective.

DANIEL: Well, yeah, I mean, obviously, to be able to calm down, or to be able to just be present, if you're not that good at being present, could be profoundly life-altering. But there is this tremendous range of ways and depths to which people can take this and develop across a wide number of axes. It is definitely true that a lot of people sort of get into it at the app level. A lot of them are often not really introduced to the wide range of what's possible out there, except sort of in the realm of myth, legend, hyperbole, and distortion in pop culture, like kung fu or whatever.

SPENCER: So what are some of these axes, besides the ones we've mentioned, maybe increasing your mood or feeling calmer? What are other axes of the mind that meditation can help train or change?

DANIEL: Again, a huge topic. It can have all kinds of profound and interesting psychological effects, not all of which are in the short to medium term pleasant. It can produce deep existential insights about who one appears to be and who one appears not to be. It can totally transform perception to radically reinterpret things about intention and mental impressions, and whether or not there is actually a true agent, doer, watcher, knower, continuous being in time, or even such a thing as actual time with a true past and a true future. It can radically change the relationship to both thoughts and feelings and emotions, and all things pleasant and unpleasant, issues of desire and aversion. It can cause radically altered perceptions in ways that are too vast to explain, even in a long podcast, energetically and perceptually, things related to perceptions blending, or things related to the perception of space or luminosity. It can lead to complicated, bizarre, interesting, and sometimes very profound magical effects, bending what appear to be the ordinary laws of physics. The degree to which those actually alter the laws of physics is an ontological question, but the experiences of having those laws apparently altered are relatively common. It can lead to a whole lot of things that may mimic mental illness, may, in fact, be functionally diagnosable as mental illness, as well as profound reductions in things related to anxiety and neurosis at very deep levels, beyond just changing whether or not they occur, the degree to which they occur, but even the interpretation of those and things fundamentally about the perception of them, the meaning of them, the sort of ontological implications of them, the sense of self or not self being bound up in these things. That's part of the range, as well as depths of concentration and profound experiences that rival or may occasionally exceed anything but the most powerful psychedelics, and profound increases in the ability to perceive things like the rapid oscillation of attention and perception, or the appearance of those things in real time to degrees that most people would not ordinarily have imagined. It's just like giving a person a microscope and suddenly seeing that there are actually bacteria. This can have that kind of effect as well.

SPENCER: That's really interesting. So one thing I'd like to dig into more is the kinds of effects it's had on you. Could you tell us a bit about that? How have you changed through meditation?

DANIEL: It is a gigantic topic that is hard to actually sort out cleanly from ordinary psychological development, or what professional training did for my ability to handle myself in various situations, versus just getting older and hopefully more mature, versus having various life experiences. But the things I seem to be relatively certain of are a radical transformation of the degree to which any of this seemed to actually be a stable, permanent Daniel that somehow had something like free will, or was a separate perceiver of things, or an observer. Those senses have dissolved and been seen through, and all of the sensations that seemed to be mimicking those or pretending to be those are now radically reinterpreted at the level of fundamental perception, the rawest sense data I have access to. Now, what used to interpret intentions as being a doer, now just intentions arise naturally as a part of immediate causality and transience. What used to be interpreted as a knower are just these little wispy mental impressions that generally occur somewhere in the area of the head. Instead, everything is just happening where and as it happens, knowing itself as it does, and that's an extremely different way of experiencing and perceiving reality that was profoundly transformative in terms of the relationship to thought, feeling, emotion, time, space, existential questions, questions of being and nothingness, deep questions related to interdependence, causality, and resolves a lot of the tensions that would appear to exist between physics and chemistry and biology and ordinary human experience, where all of those would point to a sort of mechanistic, causal universe, and most people's experiences point to some sort of agent or soul or something that stands outside of that. Whereas the experience brought to me by meditation seems to have resolved those paradoxes, and now everything just seems to be happening right now, very much the way physics or biochemistry or even ordinary rational thought would have expected. That was actually also a very nice effect that really suited my intellectual propensities in ways I didn't expect to happen at all, but was very rewarding.

SPENCER: So to unpack that last point a little bit. If I interpret that, if you look at physics, there's kind of no role for a choice to be made, because if you just follow the laws of physics, the things that are going to happen have to happen in some sense. Okay, it might be probabilistic, but essentially, one thing leads to another leads to another, and it sounds like, through very careful observation in meditation, you now see, let's say, your thoughts arising or your choices being made as sort of following from what came before, rather than as you being some kind of being that's making the choice. Is that accurate? How would you amend that?

DANIEL: Correct. Yes. And it turns out that's incredibly transformative, propping up the illusion of a stable, continuous self in a changing, naturally occurring universe. It turns out it's just a total pain in the ass mentally, and actually causes this sort of weird, headachy quality of suffering that is actually there in everything that one experiences, even the most pleasant of sensations. The ceasing of that needless kind of neurotic, almost mind virus of activity to try to figure out who one is in something that's constantly changing, and what's the reference point or relationship to experience when everything is just experiencing itself, where it is, that was all totally needless. The stopping of that, it turns out, is really nice.

SPENCER: So I refer to this quality as sort of losing your sense of self. Would that be a reasonably accurate way to describe it?

DANIEL: Yeah, but a lot of people would interpret that to mean maybe the thought "I am" doesn't arise. But the thought "I am" can arise just like it did before, but it's just perceived clearly as more stuff that's happening very straightforwardly.

SPENCER: So how would you describe this? What word or phrase would you use?

DANIEL: Sort of seen through or reinterpreted in the light of much better data. All the sensations that seem to be a self are still occurring. In fact, it's the degree to which there's much more clarity about them that actually reveals they never were what I previously thought they were. It's not that the sensations that make up a sense of self are gone. It's the fundamental misperception of them actually being the self that they, in relative terms, appear to be, that has stopped.

SPENCER: It reminds me of the technique of noting where you have this sense coming in, the feeling of warmth on your skin, or the feeling of an itch in your body, and you just note that it's there. It sounds like that, you're noting the sense of self. You're observing that you're having a sense of self, rather than identifying with the sense of self. Is that accurate?

DANIEL: Yeah, those sensations just arise as a very small, transient, natural part of the mix, just like they always were. So even the sense of self, oh, I am here talking to you in an ordinary way, can arise, but the fundamental perceptual interpretation of it is very, very different, even in the face of what's extremely similar data.

SPENCER: And so how persistent is this change for you?

DANIEL: Permanent.

SPENCER: So you never even for a second have this identification with self?

DANIEL: No, not in that sense.

SPENCER: I see. And was this a sudden phase transition that occurred where one minute you had this thing and then it went away forever?

DANIEL: Both are true. So it happened in layers and degrees and shades of gray and nuance. But the difference between 99% gone and 100% gone is a quantum leap. It's categorically different. And so there was a lot of general reduction and seeing through aspects of it and pieces and parts of the puzzle. But once the whole thing clicked, suddenly it was a different whole level of completeness of that. And now it seems essentially unassailable, unless I stroke out some part of my brain that's necessary for that or something. But as far as I can tell, 17 years getting on, 18 years later, it's still this way.

SPENCER: So what are some of the consequences of this? In other words, do you have less negative emotion? Are you less reactive, etc? Can you talk through that?

DANIEL: Reactive is funny. Reactive is the nature of the system. So the system is still reactive in that it still responds. Things still are causal, and the mammal is still a mammal, and it still has some mammalian biochemistry that's still there, even if there may be some kind of differences in what happens when chemicals are released, like adrenaline, in response to ordinary situations where the mammal releases adrenaline in the face of. There might be a lot less re-triggering or a lot less interpretation of the rapid heart rate or the sweating, or the sensations in the chest or stomach or whatever, or the thoughts as being something that needs to take up a lot of attention in the same kind of way. So there's a lot more, what I call proportionality. I still very much feel ordinary feelings in terms of people would recognize them as things like anger or irritation or sadness or grief or joy, all of that. But the proportional experience of them is very, very different. For example, right now, my sensate environment, in terms of the room, is about nine feet by nine feet by 12 feet, or whatever this room is, and has a whole lot of sensations of it, of which an extremely small portion are whatever feelings I might be having. That proportionality in experience makes it vastly easier to relate feelings to thoughts. My thoughts are these wispy, teeny little things in the room; they cause vastly less stress and complexity than before, when my thoughts could easily take up a vast portion of my experience and a lot of the room could kind of go away. That whole sort of default mode network problem of not really being in this sort of consensus space, whatever that means and used in the loosest of ontological terms, that problem is not really happening in any kind of way like it did. Is it still possible to tune out the room and think about what's on my calendar and image and all that? Yeah, but that's not the default anymore. The default is thought to be these wispy little things, sensations of pain or stress or joy or whatever, to just be these places in the body that are just exhibiting some sensation like the rest of the spaces. The proportionality makes the whole of feeling life vastly easier to deal with and makes things move through a lot more quickly and easily. There's this sense of transparency, non-graspiness, non-stickiness. Things just don't quite land or stick around in the same kind of way that they used to. But that didn't mean that no feelings arise at all or anything like that.

SPENCER: If thoughts, and let's say negative feelings, are these now little wispy things that are not taking up a lot of your bandwidth, where is your attention focused? Is it more just in the present moment? On sense experience, on something else?

DANIEL: Well, sense experience is the present moment. So those are essentially the same thing. To say where attention is focused is funny. When everything starts standing for itself, there is much more natural general diffusion of attention, where things are allowed to kind of speak for themselves. The microphone colors of black and foam and dust or whatever, and the lights and the chair and the headphones and the hair and the toes and the cushion and whatever, they're all just where they are, and the walls and the colors and space and sound are all just occurring where they do. The fact that that is the present moment, and that is what reality is attending to, and that there's no option other than the present moment. Before, it seemed like there really was, sometimes I was kind of in the present and sometimes I was not. The notion that I could not be in the present is now totally ridiculous. How did I ever imagine that was possible?

SPENCER: But you're still able to do things like plan for the future, right?

DANIEL: Those are all sensations that happen now. The clarity that those are sensations that happen now is the fundamentally important thing.

SPENCER: Even if you're thinking about the future and planning, you're aware that even the feeling that you're planning, the thoughts, etc, are just things you're observing now in the present.

DANIEL: Observing is even the wrong word. They're just things that are occurring because the sense of a separate observer that's observing them is now gone. They're just thoughts that occur wherever they occur in the room at the volume they occur in relationship to other experiences, which is quite small. They can still convey their message. Proportionally, the biggest thought I can think, or strongest thought I can think, isn't 1/10 of a percent of the sensations of this room in terms of sensate data.

SPENCER: It sounds like you're getting a lot more input from everything around you than you used to. In other words, the feeling of your toe right now, which maybe wouldn't have registered at all because you would have been wrapped up in a thought, is now a more substantial part of all the sense experience.

DANIEL: Yes, that's true.

SPENCER: That's super interesting.

DANIEL: Everything's just kind of aware of where it is and doing what it does. That doesn't mean things can't be ignored, and attention can't be relatively selective. It can be, but even still, within that, there's the spatial proportionality, which remains, so things are not bigger than they are or more important than they naturally would be, whatever that means.

SPENCER: So I'm going to try to get you to speculate here a little bit. Suppose that scientists with an unlimited budget wanted to do a definitive test to prove whether you are in this state or not, right? Let's say they're skeptical of your claims about your change in perception. Is there some kind of experiment that they could do?

DANIEL: Well, I kind of did something like that experiment.

SPENCER: Oh, yeah?

DANIEL: Not necessarily a definitive experiment. So it's like six years ago or something. I can't remember. I went up to Jud Brewer's lab back when he was at Yale, and with Willoughby Britton, they put me in an fMRI for three and a half hours that was imaging the degree to which the PCC, or posterior cingulate, which is part of the default mode network, was activated or deactivated in my experience, and we were playing around with all these meditation exercises designed to highly deactivate it, which is very easy for me. I can just deactivate my PCC and hold it at various degrees of deactivation quite steadily, in a way that at the time I was the strongest person they had yet scanned who was able to do that. Now they found some people after me that were even better than me, some of my talented friends who turned out to be super good at this, but that was not a surprise. There were some of my best meditator friends. So, you know, it's a pretty cool crew and bunch of people. But then they did this experiment where they were like, well, let's see if we could get the PCC to really activate. And when the PCC is really activated, that's the default mode network really activating. And this is what they say happens during really neurotic, ruminative thinking or something. And so they said, go ahead and think a bunch of really neurotic thoughts, and let's see if that'll make it go really red. I got about eight seconds of delayed feedback on the screen that I could see that was giving me close to real-time feedback about whether or not my PCC was activated or deactivated, and when it would deactivate, the graph would go into the blue, and when it activated, it would go into the red. And they said, we'll see if you can really make it go into the red. And so I started based on their instructions of what they thought would make it go really into red, thinking all these really neurotic thoughts. And this was my first time really playing around with the PCC. I got to play around with it a bunch more, using EEG to image it later, but this was my first time doing this, so I'm still kind of new to this and figuring out exactly how the thing works and what it does as a brain center because I had never had biofeedback showing me its function before. So I started thinking things like, you know, I've never had brain imaging, but they're looking at the screen and seeing a big old glioblastoma multiforme, which is this terrible form of cancer, but they're not telling me because they want to get the scans, and this is going really well. And when I walk out of here, though, they're going to say, by the way, Dr. Ingram, we have to tell you you're a walking dead man, and you need to start tying up your last affairs and effects and businesses and everything. And I was thinking thoughts like that, and the thing was totally going blue. The PCC was totally deactivating. I thought a bunch more neurotic thoughts about, you know, they only see this brain pattern and terrible people and all this, and it was still going into the blue. And they were like, what are you doing? It's going really blue. And I was like, I'm thinking all these neurotic thoughts. And they're like, well, it's not working. It's not going red like we would expect it to. Try again. And then I was like, oh, I'll bet I know what I need to do. And so I very intentionally tuned out the room. I started thinking all these neurotic thoughts, and then all of a sudden it starts going red. But I was having to go back to thinking like I thought before.

SPENCER: By stopping to pay attention to everything at once. Is that what you mean?

DANIEL: No, by actually intentionally tuning out everything, because the default is to pay attention to everything. I had to actively tune out the room, tune out the body, tune out the sounds of the scanner and all that, close my eyes and really go into inner world, inner space, and do what most people do when they're thinking neurotic thoughts, which is kind of tune out a lot of the world around them. But it turned out that the PCC, it's not just about neurotic thoughts, because you can actually think really beautiful, nice thoughts, or altruistic thoughts, or thoughts about the space you're in. If you think neurotic thoughts in the room, then the PCC doesn't activate, meaning if you're thinking them in the thing with all the other sense stores together, then the default mode network, at least that part of it, stays deactivated. We got to see that in real time in an fMRI. This is a cool finding because a lot of people with depression and schizophrenia rely highly on thoughts being able to become this huge portion of experience and thus have this sort of huge emotional weight. Just like in dreams, the body releases all the stress chemicals in proportion to something about the thoughts and how big and real and important they seem, and whether or not it really seems like there's a true past and a true future and all of that stuff, rather than this present with wispy little thoughts in it that's mostly just sights and sounds and body and all of that. From my point of view, I've already done kind of the first part of that experiment. Jud was impressed by this, and he kept having me come up to test out his EEG rig because of that.

SPENCER: That's a really cool story. So can you think of another experiment you'd want to do in yourself that you think would provide even stronger evidence that you kind of have the state?

DANIEL: I actually have a number of hypotheses, and we're going to try to test some of them out. We're doing one right now. I have a research group about an EEG rig for home use, and I went through a whole bunch of meditation runs on this. It's only a 19 lead. Well, it's really 20 leads, but I'm only using 19 of them, Cognionics Quick-20r, which is a pretty good research grade. It was a pricey little toy, but I went through a whole bunch of meditation runs to try to figure out what is synchronizing in my brain when I go through the stages of insight and end up having everything synchronized, disappear, reappear, and then that nice afterglow. I have a number of different research scientists who are looking at this, and we're actually going to have a study of this at Harvard with some people from Oxford and their neuroscience research team, and a guy who used to work with Jud Brewer named Remco, who's from the University of Utrecht, and my micro-phenomenologist friend Terry and a bunch of us. We've actually got a bunch of the preliminary funding for this study. We've managed to raise now a few hundred thousand dollars, but coronavirus isn't permitting the scanning at the moment, and we're still doing a little bit of micro-phenomenology protocol development, so we really make sure we have a sense of what it is we're scanning, because a lot of those kinds of studies are pretty weak on actually the experience part, even if they have a lot of strong imaging data, but they often don't know exactly what they were imaging in that moment. We're actually starting to do a bunch of those studies to try to determine what it is about more advanced meditators and their skill sets that are different. I'm actively working to fundraise for that, and if you as a listener are interested in participating in any of those studies or helping to fundraise, or if you're a neuroscience researcher or something like that, please get in touch with me at info@theprc.org. I would be very happy to talk with you about all those ongoing efforts and all of our plans for the future to be doing that.

SPENCER: You have a website that talks about the whole team, right?

DANIEL: A huge white paper. If you go into the white paper, it's gigantic.

[promo]

SPENCER: You mentioned the stages of insight briefly, kind of going through those with your machine and measuring your brain activity. Could you just talk briefly about those stages of insight?

DANIEL: Yeah, the super short story, and this could be a topic that could go on for hours. The first one in the maps I tend to use, so I'm familiar with a bunch of maps, is called Mind and Body.

SPENCER: Could you just mention what a map is for those that don't know what you mean by that?

DANIEL: There are all these different developmental maps of the stages of concentration or insight or meditative development, or various techniques from a bunch of different traditions. I tend to use maps that come out of the Theravada. Though I'm familiar with the maps that come out of Zen, which are pretty loose, and the maps that come out of Tibetan traditions, which are complicated, some of the Hindu maps, and the stuff out of yoga suttas and Christian maps. There's a whole lot of different maps, some of the shamanic maps and some modern New Age maps and chakra maps. So there are all these different maps that attempt to make some sense and put some pattern recognition of sequential development or of optionality, or of the effects of various techniques, or things that can go very right, or things that can go very wrong, or things that can just get very strange, or things that one can learn to cultivate, if one wants to, in the realm of meditative territory. And it's not just, oh, I sit down and I get more calm. These are very, very detailed in terms of perceptual thresholds and frequencies and shapes of attention and transformation of consciousness and expected sequential development with all its variants, which are large and complex and energetic effects and mood effects and emotional effects and all of that. And so these maps, I'm going to use, the Theravada Insight maps, which are sort of a somewhat modified version that combines a bunch of stuff from my own observations and peer group with some of the stuff that Jack Kornfield described in chapters eight and nine of his book, A Path with Heart, plus the stuff in the Visuddhimagga, which is an old Theravada text of the old school of Buddhism, plus just a bunch of other stuff and some Christian terminology thrown in. So I'm very much a hybrid mapper who takes my good map theory wherever I can find it, a little bit of Sufi stuff as well, and some stuff from magical traditions, also some Kabbalistic maps and tree of life stuff. So looking at all these and putting these together. But going back to something of a more traditional point of view for this next bit of the presentation, the first stage would be mind and body, where you see thoughts as thoughts. The second stage is called cause and effect. It usually feels like you're interfering with the breath, and you can see intentions leading to actions, perceptions leading to mental impressions, little mental echoes of things that you can then remember. Then there's the three characteristic stage, which usually involves weird bodily pains and some muscle spasms and tension irritation, can feel very tight and sort of off. This is when people tend to start getting into yoga to help their meditation practice, or feeling like they can't sit because the pain is too much. This usually happens two or three days into an intensive meditation retreat, and then somewhere in there, hopefully people will start noticing fine-grained resolution, lots of little sensations per second, many detailed chills and tingles and lots of resolving detail, and maybe some pleasure energetic stuff or spontaneous movements or elevated mood or not sleeping. Huge topic. We call that stage the arising and passing away. Some can be a peak experience or a big opening. Some people could think of it as awakening. The Theravada doesn't, but I can see why some people do. It's sort of a point of no return. It's followed by dissolution, which usually feels very open, spacious, out of phase, very calm, peaceful. Things falling away, hard to practice, hard to focus, followed by fear, misery, disgust, desire for deliverance. Those are pretty straightforward, as described, a stage called re-observation, which tends to be the great existential kick in the ass. It can be very irritating and challenging, followed by an opening to equanimity. And then, if you're lucky, you get to stages like formal stages of awakening, like stream entry and stuff. It's very common for people to cycle around these, to go up, to fall back, to have variants of them, to have them go around. It's a huge topic, but that's sort of very, very basic Theravada map theory that I'll be using.

SPENCER: How consistent do you find that this map is? In other words, do some people find them in a different order? Do some people skip some or do they have different feelings in different stages for different people?

DANIEL: The variability is huge, but pretty well described. I talked to hundreds of people about these stages and their experiences of them per year. I've been through them thousands of times myself, and while there is plenty of individual variation in terms of intensity and whether or not it's more energetic or perceptual or mood-related or magical or existential crisis or joy, everybody's a little different. Every cycle can be a little different. That said, I think the fundamentals are actually pretty impressively reproducible across traditions and techniques, but just with some variants. If you're doing a visualization technique, it can look very different than if you're doing a mantra or more body-based practices or whatever. Still, I see something in fundamental perceptual and attentional development that really holds up across all of them. It is both something kind of universal and oddly predictable, and yet, depending on specifics in person and time and phase, can have a tremendous amount of variability, which makes it a challenging topic for people who want to think of it in simplified terms. Unfortunately, to really get into it, you kind of have to get a pretty sophisticated, deep, nuanced, rich understanding of the standard presentations and the variants to really get it, kind of like medicine. Medicine is sort of simple in some ways and super complicated in others.

SPENCER: To what extent is it true that some of these stages only really occur when people are really deep into this stuff, and you don't really get them early on?

DANIEL: There are certainly people who have that view, such as Jack Kornfield and some traditionalists, but I've seen people who chanced into what I think of as this territory, and again, we would argue about that, in all kinds of circumstances: in early childhood, during just moments of wonder at a sunset, during yoga classes, during childbirth, during traumatic events, during weird, intense exercise, just doing ordinary things, reading texts, reflecting on various spiritual teachings, just being in the presence of certain super powerful people. The causality of this stuff is clearly very multifactorial in terms of predisposing factors, and I would guess something genetic and previous life experiences and other things you've done to train your mind. There are tons of things we do all the time that really can be mental training and development of attention, concentration, focus, precision of mind, and internal introspection. There are lots of endeavors that we do that develop some of the skills that appear to make these experiences vastly more likely, and psychedelics as well. I actually see a lot of people get into this territory through various psychedelic experiences, sometimes on MDMA, sometimes on marijuana. Again, there's a wide range of how these things can occur. Sometimes, for no obvious reason at all, they were just hanging out, and boom, they suddenly started getting into this.

SPENCER: When people achieve these kinds of experiences not through meditation, is there a sense in which it's not kind of repeatable, or do some people find ways to kind of repeat it and maybe leverage it to go deeper outside of meditation?

DANIEL: No. Plenty of people, I mean, Punjabi, the Buddha of Lucknow, apparently just sort of woke up at around seven years old. He wasn't really a meditator. He was just a kid, and it stuck. It wasn't a question of repetition; it was a question of kind of getting a lot of the way there. There are other people who describe stuff like that as well. It's also very common, once you start getting into this territory, for it to just keep showing up, so for it to then reoccur. Even before I was a formal meditator, I went through what I think of as rising and passing away events and into dark night territory at least six times over a period of about 10 years before I started really going on retreats. Similar things have happened to family members, friends, previous girlfriends, and other acquaintances, and I see reports of this as well on the Dharma Overground, which is a big forum where people talk about this stuff. This can happen in a lot of situations, but once it starts happening, it generally keeps happening. Then there's the other strange thing of people who go on super intense meditation retreats and never seem to get into much of this territory. They never seem to cross the horizon and pass away. They're basically working at the level of psychology and their issues and learning to handle feelings and their past history and thoughts better, which is also very important developmentally, but they never really get into the increased perceptual stuff, the depths of concentration, the powerful raptures, or the interesting, magical experiences. It's just nothing. Why? Some people on weirdly small doses or no obvious doses get deep into this stuff, and other people can go on very long, month-long retreats, intense practice, and never seem to get any insight stages. It is something of a mystery, and there are probably some genetic factors for it, I would guess, but I don't know. I would love to do those studies, talking with some geneticists about how to do those and what that would cost, and what are the other predisposing factors? We just don't know.

SPENCER: It's funny you mentioned how sometimes people stumble on these. I just wanted to mention a personal experience I had. I'm curious to hear your take or analysis on it.

DANIEL: Please. Diagnosing this stuff is often somewhat of an inaccurate science, particularly if you weren't there at the time. Just an important qualifier.

SPENCER: That makes sense. So basically, what happened to me is, in college, I realized, just randomly, I don't know how I realized it, that I could create sensations in my body, and in particular, I found it was very easy for me to create a sensation of pins and needles. I could make my arm feel like, if you've accidentally laid on your arm for too long, you get that pins and needles feeling. I realized I could reproduce that kind of mentally, and more generally, just exploring this, I realized something that's sort of obvious in retrospect, but I think a lot of people don't necessarily notice, which is that just the same way most people can imagine an apple in their mind, you can also imagine many different kinds of sensations, not just images, but things like heat and itching, etc. I realized I could create this pins and needles feeling, and I started experimenting with it. I had never done any meditation or anything like that. I just kept experimenting with it. It led to one day when I was doing this kind of meditation. Well, I now call it meditation, but at the time I literally knew nothing about meditation and had never read any books on it. I was focusing on sensations in my body and trying to build them up more and more intensely. I was doing this kind of very shallow breathing while doing this for quite a long time, and then I just had this crazy experience where everything in my perception went white, like I couldn't see. It was like I was blind, but everything was white. It just felt this kind of intense pleasurable feeling. I remember this thought, just like, oh my gosh, this might be the most pleasurable thing I've ever experienced in my life. Then it went away, and I tried to get it again, and I really struggled to get back into that experience. Again, I'm just curious to hear your reaction to that.

DANIEL: It is actually super easy to diagnose, and that is super straightforwardly a really classic description of the arising and passing away. It is also super common after one for people to want to try to figure out how to make it happen again and be unable to, and then be on something of a spiritual quest, open to philosophy, but also sometimes darker, more renunciate, more driven, defined answers. It's a life-changing experience and event, and people are generally not thought to be quite the same after that, as if some spiritual adolescence or puberty has hit. Then usually people are what we call on the ride from that point on. That's a classic arising and passing away description, basically textbook. Bright white lights, super pleasurable experiences, overwhelming things, peaks that blow people's doors off and involve vibrations and tingles. That's all just classic ANP territory. Very straightforward.

SPENCER: At the time, I basically ended up deciding that perhaps what I'd been doing was such shallow breathing that I was kind of giving myself oxygen deprivation of some form. Do you think that that's unrealistic?

DANIEL: Oh no. Actually, I think a little bit of oxygen deprivation is par for the course in meditation stuff. I actually have a pulse oximeter coming that will probably arrive in the mail today or tomorrow because this topic keeps coming up in conversation. I wanted to actually check and see what my pulse ox is doing when I'm meditating.

SPENCER: Oh, that's a great idea.

DANIEL: But I have a little bit of data on this. It was after I'd had a kidney stone in the emergency department, and I had passed one stone, but I thought there might be another one up there. So I was waiting for my ultrasound, but the pain was basically gone, and I was just meditating there, kind of exhausted after truly impressively horrible pain had been racking my body for a few hours. The nurses kept running in because my respiratory rate was going down so low, and my oxygen saturation was going down to like 80, 81, something like that, which is pretty low. Usually, even your COPD patients are not getting that low. They tend to hang out in the high 80s to low 90s, and I felt totally fine. I was just in very nice meditation. I didn't feel short of breath or anything. But that probably is some part of what's going on, but it's certainly not the whole story. The arising and passing away is a super complicated thing. We actually hope to design a center where we can get active scans of people when they're starting to get into that territory to actually try to capture the events on fMRI and EEG, but that's going to require having those in-house lab facilities in the meditation center. That's one of the bigger, more expensive projects that I hope to find funding for.

SPENCER: You mentioned the experience with kidney stones was just kind of a famously painful condition.

DANIEL: Yes.

SPENCER: What is your relationship with suffering like now? Now that you've had this kind of permanent change, how has suffering changed for you?

DANIEL: I very much think of suffering broken down by the three trainings. The three trainings in classical Buddhism are morality or sila, concentration or samadhi, and then wisdom or panya or prajna, depending on the language. I think of three forms of suffering. There's the ordinary suffering of life, the suffering of old age, sickness, death, pain, lamentation, grief and despair, miscommunication, disappointment, all the things that happen in life. In that ordinary suffering, we train in morality, good behavior, good ethics, and hopefully right livelihood and skillful speech and action, to try to reduce the degree to which that is happening to a mortal being, recognizing that the final common pathway is old age, sickness, and death. Some of us won't actually make it to old age; they'll just get sick or be injured and die. That form of suffering is intrinsic to having been born, but through good ethics, behavior, health, and good diet, hopefully, you can minimize it to a reasonable degree.

SPENCER: Could you unpack the relationship there between ethics and that form of suffering?

DANIEL: The theory is that ethical behavior, if you're doing fewer things you feel guilty about or that are causing less suffering in the world, then hopefully you're living in a world that has less anger, injustice, and cruelty, and fewer repercussions for you because you acted in a way that was unethical. If there is some correlation between ethical behavior and whether or not you lead a good life, which I'm willing to entertain as a very strong working hypothesis and reasonable enough premise to go on, then hopefully, if one is leading an ethical life, one will, in some very ordinary way, reap the benefits of that ethical life: increased friends, friendship, goodwill of your community, skillfully caring for the body, and hopefully lasting longer and having less pain and trouble, et cetera. All the ordinary ways that we think of good behavior leading to better outcomes in a straightforward, non-magical, non-religious, just ordinary way.

SPENCER: I agree that that happens to an extent, but clearly also, sometimes people who are very good just get sick and suffer. So you have limited control?

DANIEL: Right. So terrible things are still going to happen, and that is the nature of having been born. Then you've got depths of concentration. You can train in concentration, and this is a very specific training to attain the jhanas, or dhyanas, or these deep stages of meditation where our minds can get into very, very pleasant, tranquil, blissful, peaceful, rapturous, expansive, equanimous, formless, etc., very temporarily transcendent states where ordinary concerns, ordinary hindrances, ordinary thought patterns, ordinary emotions become highly suppressed, or they seem to vanish utterly, and the body may seem to even disappear, and space may even seem to disappear. We can get into states where, in those moments, whatever suffering there is is incredibly slight. That's another way one can mitigate suffering. But the problem is those states are temporary. They're not sustainable. You can't function in them very well, so one has to eat and do stuff. Those temporary periods are also a way that sometimes suffering can be reduced.

SPENCER: Is that what are you doing with the kidney stones? Were you trying to get into that state?

DANIEL: You know, when kidney stones hit? I've had quite a bunch of them now, I don't know, maybe 15 or something. I've kind of lost count. But the ones that were terrible, there's really no question of getting into jhanic states during that. I'm not that good. If somebody could do it, they've impressed me, but I'm not that good. I think of myself as a pretty trained meditator. But when that's really hitting full force, certainly there are some perceptual tricks that I've got on board that help a little bit, but to get into jhana in the face of kidney stone pain is stretching most people's definition pretty far to be realistic. The fact of this body being born is non-trivial. The wisdom aspect is the thing that I've been the most thankful for, which is the proportionality that even when the pain is, from an ordinary point of view, mind-crushingly bad, it might exist in an area the size of a bowling ball in a room that is much bigger than that. While it might be quite strong, the rest of space and sensations and sights and sounds are not painful like that. There's much more of an even balanced appreciation of both, and that came from the wisdom training. There's also an appreciation of its transience, appreciation of exactly where the pain is and where it isn't. There's not the mind kind of extrapolating a general pain in the area and continuing to react to that as if it's always there in full force in all places. A well-trained mind doesn't make the pain anything more than it is, whereas an untrained mind is much more likely to make the pain much more than it is and add whole additional layers of mental suffering and perceptual distortion and perceptual exaggeration on top of pain that is already pretty horrible. The ability to keep things in proportion and perspective is of tremendous value, and it's actually the wisdom training that I'm the most thankful for when it comes to the really bad stuff, like kidney stones.

SPENCER: So when you're experiencing this excruciating pain, if you were to think about how bad in total is that experience, given that you have this kind of proportionality, how much does it reduce the badness of your perception?

DANIEL: I could still rate the worst of kidney stone pain a 10 out of 10, right? Because at its worst, it's hard to imagine how it would get worse. I guess you could imagine being dunked in a vat of burning oil at the same time, and maybe that being worse, right? But the system already kind of gets saturated. It seems to top out with a max, and past a certain point, it just doesn't seem to matter when it's really kicking in full extreme. But the proportionality is huge. My 10 out of 10 now is not the same as the 10 out of 10 I would have had before, because there's also a very direct and clear awareness of all the places where the pain isn't, very equally. That proportionality does something useful. It's almost hard to remember or compare to a mind that could become overwhelmed by the pain, and the pain becoming everything, and the pain being reacted to, even when it's not really quite there, as bad, and a lot of the room being tuned out. I'm not sure, even at this point, I can quite tell you a number or something, but it's very different. It's substantially better, but it's still bad pain. It's still bad pain, right? Does that make sense?

SPENCER: Yeah.

DANIEL: The mammal still sweats, you know, my heart rate might still go fast, I might still get nauseous, the body might still twitch and react trying to get away from it and move and do weird stuff. You know, that's just kidney stone pain. People writhe around, and the body might writhe around thinking it'll somehow help, right? Okay, all right, whatever.

SPENCER: So if someone were to do a behavioral study, let's suppose that you were already in that pain, and another person who's not an experienced meditator were also in that pain, would you be able to carry out a conversation, whereas that person wouldn't be able to, because they couldn't think about anything else? Would there be a behavioral observable difference?

DANIEL: I think there is because, well, it's true that the range of the degree to which people can tolerate pain is quite wide. I've seen some people with weirdly high abilities to tolerate what I'm 100% certain was terrible pain, like this woman who allowed me to reset her open, fractured, dislocated ankle, in fact, asked me to do it without anesthesia, because she was like, "It'll be fine." Tough woman in her 50s who was a career army, and she had tripped on a curb, and she had me set her ankle with no anesthesia or pain medication on board, and just put it back in, which I know ---

SPENCER: Had to clarify, you are a medical doctor.

DANIEL: Yeah, it's when I was back working as a practicing ER doctor in major trauma centers. She was like, "No, I don't want anything. Just go ahead and do it." I was like, "Really?" She was like, "Yeah." I put it in, and she was like, "Yeah, that wasn't so bad." I was like, "Wow, okay, you've amazed me, right? That's impressive." So there is a human range. Sorting out what is the human range versus what is someone's practice, you've got to kind of know what they were like before. My tolerance for pain was already actually pretty high, which is actually, I think, one of the reasons I was a pretty successful meditator is that reasonable amounts of knee pain and back pain or even emotional pain didn't throw me that much. It just didn't knock me off my game a lot, where for some people it really does. I'm not sure where I got that, but it's definitely a trait I have. My father's kind of like that. Actually, my mom's kind of like that too, in a lot of ways. It may just be a family trait, I don't know. Yeah, my sister actually, definitely too, now that I think about it. I was working an ER shift, and right as I was coming into the shift, I was taking over for my medical director, and it was a night shift, so I was going to be the only doctor there. I said, "Hey, I just started passing a kidney stone. I hope I can get through the shift, and usually I can, but if something really bad starts happening, I just wanted you to know that this is going to be happening during my shift." A little bit into the shift, I got called up to the floor to run a code, because I was the only doctor in the hospital and the lead doctor on the code team, and there was a woman I needed to intubate. Right as I bent over to intubate this lady and put a tube into her throat so we could breathe for her, because she was being bagged, the kidney stone pain hit it full on, just full on kidney stone pain, really at the top of it. I'm bending over this lady concentrating on finding her airway, getting the tube and passing it through, setting it to the right depth, blowing up the cuff, connecting the bag, checking the color change, checking the O2 sat, looking at her heart rate monitor, running the code, doing all this stuff at the same time, and the pain hit the body so hard that I nearly threw up on this lady, oh my gosh, as I was bending over her. Luckily I didn't, but I think the people around me couldn't tell because I just calmly kept telling them what to do, asking for people to do stuff, checking things, making sure that other help was on the way, and doing all the stuff you would ordinarily do, administering other medications, etc. Externally, I don't think they noticed anything. Or if they did, nobody mentioned it.

SPENCER: Was that before or after you had this kind of change in perception for medication?

DANIEL: : Oh, after. Eleven years. Ten or eleven years after.

SPENCER: I assume that if you hadn't had that, you think that would have gone very differently.

DANIEL: I think so, yeah.

SPENCER: You mentioned the kind of strange psychological phenomena that can occur while meditating. I'd love for you just to describe some of the stranger experiences you've had while meditating.

DANIEL: Wow, I don't even know where to begin. For better or for worse, I've been prone to a lot of weirdness on the spiritual path. So I'll start with some of the early stuff. Early on, I was dancing in a club, and I got into this massive vortex of powerful energy that seemed like a tornado of energy extending out of my head and body up through the ceiling of the club into the sky. It was unbelievably rapturous and blissful, spinning me around like I was being spun in my own personal mini energy tornado. That was a very visceral experience triggered by something in everyday life. I wasn't a meditator then; I was just a kid running sound for bands and dancing in clubs. Anyway, I've had my consciousness totally explode like a fireworks display a bunch of times. I've had a bunch of magical experiences, encounters with entities, and all kinds of weird perceptual distortions and visions. I've heard stuff, seen stuff, everything from outrageously beautiful lattices of hyper-multi-dimensional crystal geometry that mimic a lot of the stuff people describe on DMT, to the feeling of my body rotting through the floor, creepy crawly insects devouring it, and all kinds of stuff as very fully felt experiences. I've had super strange, intense pains and odd experiences with other people of energetic communication. So, yeah, a whole lot of weird stuff, but that's all described within the tradition. Odd things related to past lives and karma and prognostication occasionally got in the sense I could read other people's minds and had them confirm that I had clearly perceived something they seemed to be thinking. That's not something I can do on a regular basis; it just happened a few times, totally randomly, seen through closed eyelids. But that's all relatively ordinary described stuff. That's a bunch of the weirdness.

SPENCER: Okay, so let's talk about the magical experiences. Can you maybe describe just an example of one of those?

DANIEL: Yeah. This is what I've described a lot. If people are listening to this podcast and they've heard me talk about stuff before, sorry for using the same example again and again. I think it's one of the best ones. I'm on an intense retreat with two other guys at a rented medieval defense tower in Scotland in February, and we're about seven days into it at this point, and we're pretty powered up. We had run out of olive oil and lettuce and some of the perishable groceries.

SPENCER: By powered up, you mean you're deep in concentration?

DANIEL: We've been practicing 15 to 16 hours a day, and so we're super into this. All three of us are quite altered, and by this point our realities have become pretty bizarre. We didn't trust any of us to be in an ordinary enough frame of mind to actually take a taxi and go to the grocery store and get groceries, so we decided all three of us should go for safety and just try to keep everything on the rails, because at this point we're kind of tripping. I'm doing something very ordinary as we're waiting for the taxi. It's about 3:30 in the afternoon on a dusky February day, so it's kind of getting towards twilight, still plenty of light, and I'm just drawing amber pentagrams in the air with my finger. I can totally see these and feel the sort of amber fire energy flowing off my finger into space, and my friend looks over and says, "Hey, you just drew an amber pentagram in the air." That I had drawn a pentagram in the air was not surprising. It's a standard thing we were doing as part of a general sort of magical ritual related to the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, but powered up on Fire Kasina Buddhist practice. Nothing odd about that, but that he knew it was amber was totally surprising, because I hadn't told him it was amber. I hadn't told him I was working with the color amber, that he could see the amber pentagram I had drawn just hanging there in space, just like I could. That's pretty weird. I've had that actually happen a number of times with a number of other people, the same exact kind of thing. That wasn't just a one-off; that's been reproducible sometimes, but it's hit or miss, like all the magical stuff. That's just one of many possible magical stories I could tell.

SPENCER: From my worldview, my ontology, the way that I interpret a story like that is, okay, you were meditating really intensely, you were in some extremely altered state. I would interpret that very much like a bunch of people took LSD and then they said, "Oh yeah, I could draw in the air," and they could see me. I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm sure that was your experience." But I view that as sort of an altered experience you had, as opposed to, you know, this person could actually see this amber pentagram that you drew. I'm curious to hear your reaction to my interpretation of it.

DANIEL: If that interpretation is helpful for you, that might be an excellent interpretation for you.

SPENCER: But you don't see it that way, or you're agnostic on how to interpret it.

DANIEL: I am a strict ontological, agnostic, empirical pragmatist, and so notions of ontology, I don't think ontologies are provable. I side very strongly with David Hume on this. We can extrapolate a whole lot from the present moment and present experiences and the capacity of thought for pattern recognition, but to prove any of it is super difficult. Ontologies can be very useful if held lightly and help solve certain problems and be psychologically, practically, functionally, or for engineering purposes, or science very useful. But I hold all my ontologies extremely lightly and take none of them super seriously. If someone could definitively prove an ontology, I would be utterly astounded, and they should gain a Nobel Prize for something, because I have no idea how you would do that. I've been thinking about science and ontologies for a long time. I'm also an empirical empiricist. I like things that I have experienced myself, and I like things that are testable, so empirical in both senses of the word. These are reproducible experiments that I got out of the old books and was able to reproduce again. I found it really interesting that you could do these kinds of experiments and have these kinds of effects, which was interesting and just worth knowing. I'm also a pragmatist, so if you have an ontology about an experience or an interpretation, my question is very much, how does that interpretation help you, and what does it allow you to actually do? What's the utility of it? If it has demonstrable utility, excellent, but that's not the same as it being true in some ultimate sense, which I don't even know what that would be. The only thing that appears to me to be true is that experiences appear to be occurring that I could be as certain of as I could be of anything, and beyond that is very hard to say.

SPENCER: Even I think, therefore I am, there's a bit too much.

DANIEL: It's too much on multiple fronts.

SPENCER: This idea of holding ontologies loosely, am I correct that it relates to chaos magic?

DANIEL: Definitely, but it also relates to, I would say, good mental and ontological hygiene. We actually do this all the time. We routinely flip back and forth between paradigms and frames of reference in subtle and gross ways, constantly different ways of working, different ways of thinking about things, different ways of framing things. Imagine one was a quantum physicist working all day with equations and abstract differential math and whatever kind of complicated systems. Then, when they went home and started talking about their relationship with their partner, they would be doing massive code switching, massive ontological switching about what is true, what is real, how things are, and how they will operate on that. We do that all the time. Being metacognizant of that and recognizing it as a normal, healthy thing to do is a feature, not a bug. Hopefully, this is done with some sort of metacognitive awareness of which ontologies we're using, why, and what their pros and cons are in real time as we use them. These are skills that can be developed by someone interested in general mental well-being and function, as well as awareness of themselves in an ordinary sense, philosophical sense, psychological sense, or paradigmatic sense. It is also true that I got a lot of that from the teachings of chaos magic, but I was doing some of that before I even found chaos magic. When I found chaos magic, I really liked it because chaos magic has as one of its core tenets an emphasis on being aware of one's ontologies and being able to take them on and put them off, as one would do with clothing.

SPENCER: I find that really interesting, and I am sympathetic to the view that we want to switch between different models in different situations. A scientist in their work might say, in order to believe something, I need to have some kind of testable hypothesis, and someone needs to independently verify it. Whereas, when they go home to their wife or husband, if their wife or husband says, I love you, they don't need to confirm that in a randomized control trial to believe it. Right?

DANIEL: Exactly. Even if they didn't know what love was. If you asked, what is actually love, they might have a super hard time with it. Yet, functionally, they're very willing to work with the words, I love you, even if, as a scientist, they might wonder what that person means. What is I, what is love, and what is the you they're loving? The relationship between these things could rapidly get super complicated for a thinking person.

SPENCER: I think you and I see similarly in that way. But I think where we diverge is that I don't assign a uniform distribution across ontologies. I don't say we can't draw any conclusions about them, so they're all equally valid.

DANIEL: No, no. Saying all ontologies were equally valid would definitely be an ontology. I would have no way to even know how to begin to prove.

SPENCER: Okay, so ---

DANIEL: That would be an ontology I would hold extremely loosely. In fact, I wouldn't even subscribe to it at all. There are definitely ontologies I'm more comfortable in or less comfortable in, depending on various situations.

SPENCER: Is that just pragmatic, though, based on sort of ---

DANIEL: Yes, that is purely pragmatic.

SPENCER: So I think you're applying a more pragmatic heuristic, what ontologies work for me in different situations.

DANIEL: Right.

SPENCER: Whereas I think I'm thinking more about, okay, which ontologies do I think have the most evidence? By which I mean that if that ontology were true, the sort of world that you see is actually similar to the world that we're actually observing.

DANIEL: Yeah, good luck with that. And so the classic example that if people have heard me on podcasts before, I use is: let's be Bayesian about this, because you talk about the distribution of probabilities of which are more likely and have more evidence. Okay, so let's get all formally Bayesian. And let's say we were going to do a formal Bayesian study of fundamental ontologies, and we wrote down, let's just say, four ontologies on a piece of paper. One is pure solipsism. Two is this is all the dream of Vishnu. Three is consciousness is an emergent property of innate matter that somehow arises by magical hand waving. And four, this is a computer simulation, a la The Matrix. Okay?

SPENCER: I think that the evidence of reality actually differentiates between those. Go ahead.

DANIEL: You're the first person to ever make such a claim when I've raised this, so I'm amazed. But let's say we assign pre-test probabilities to these, whatever they were, you know, one-tenth probability of this one, and a three-tenth of that one, and whatever. And we said, here are pre-test probabilities. What experiment would you do that would move the needles off of your priors in one direction or another? And how would you craft that experiment, and what in the world would it look like? And how would you even know? I've never had anybody who came up with any answer to that question. If you can, you will be the first.

SPENCER: Well, I have an argument. I don't think you're going to buy it.

DANIEL: Rock it out.

SPENCER: Every second of our lives, we're getting more experience. And then we can ask the question, how likely would the next second of my experience have occurred if, let's say this is all a dream of Vishnu versus if solipsism is true, versus if we're biological beings that evolved from other species and so on. Just for example, if solipsism is true, and I'm essentially the only being in reality, why do all of these experiences in my life seem to involve all these other beings that seem to be essentially just like me? If solipsism is true, I see no particular reason that we would expect that sort of world, whereas, if we're all an evolved species that came about from millions of years of evolution, there's a lot of reason to keep encountering these other beings that seem similar to myself.

DANIEL: So in solipsism, you have no idea what it is that is the mind that is actually creating this, and what it may have come from, or why it is creating it, or the underlying mechanisms. How in the world can you know that that's a reasonable thing to say?

SPENCER: Yeah. I'm not saying that what we're experiencing is incompatible with solipsism. I'm just saying that it seems like a very weird and particular thing to occur if the entire world is just like my experience or something like that, whereas, if the world has to do with creatures evolving on a planet, what we're experiencing actually seems much, much more likely. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is kind of hard to talk about, but the sense experience that we experience at every moment does not seem to me equally compatible with all possible ontologies. And, you know, I don't know much about Vishnu, but ---

DANIEL: I don't even know what all possible ontologies would mean.

SPENCER: Well, you pick any particular ontology. What I'm arguing is that you should have some prediction about certain experiences being more or less likely, and that helps you differentiate between them.

DANIEL: How would you differentiate a dream of Vishnu from The Matrix?

SPENCER: I don't know much about Vishnu, so I don't know what sort of dreams Vishnu might have.

DANIEL: I applaud your skepticism.

SPENCER: If you're referring to Vishnu, presumably you have some beliefs about what Vishnu is like, and therefore what sort of dreams might be compatible with dreams of Vishnu.

DANIEL: A god with a grand enough dreaming capacity to dream an entire universe or system of universes.

SPENCER: So then, why is Vishnu dreaming being the same ape-like creature again and again for years and years? It seems like an incredibly strange, specific dream for Vishnu to have. Anyway, I don't know if we'll make much progress on this point, but I just think that these ontologies actually assign different probabilities to different things happening, and therefore they can be differentiated by just witnessing what we actually see.

DANIEL: What would you say to a Matrix that was Matrix-like, and thus based on some biological reality, but actually a simulation of it?

SPENCER: Well, I think there's some chance we're living in simulated reality. Nick Bostrom has his simulation argument, and it's hard to fully rule it out.

DANIEL: Solipsism is hard to fully rule out, as every philosopher who's ever gone up against it has noticed.

SPENCER: But I do think there's a difference between being able to fully rule something out and saying that the evidence of our experience that we live doesn't differentiate between these things at all.

DANIEL: And then what problem does that allow you to solve? What's the utility of one ontology of these versus another? Or is there any?

SPENCER: Well, ideally, one thing that it can do is help you make more accurate predictions about what you're going to experience. So maybe using some of your experiences of entities while meditating could be a good example. Could you actually give one example of that, of a kind of entity experience that you've had?

DANIEL: Sure, I was at the same Fire Kasina retreat with the pentagrams, and I was just sitting there on the cushion, and all of a sudden, the red-haired fire goddess appeared off to my right and screamed at me, "Become a king of fire." Not really sure what it meant, but it was interesting at the time.

SPENCER: Okay, so take an experience like that. There are things that I think are not going to happen. I do not think that that fire goddess is going to reach out and rip your arms off or tear your heart out. I don't think that is possible because the ontologies that I assign the highest probability to rule that kind of thing out. I do think that that fire goddess could talk to you and maybe convince you of things, but I would interpret that as your mind creating this experience for itself, much like occurs when dreaming. In other words, my ontology makes specific predictions about things that will and will not happen.

DANIEL: Are you up for a story about that kind of thing?

SPENCER: : Yeah, I'd love to hear it.

DANIEL: : So I've only done one formal, old-school exorcism with the circle, triangle stuff drawn on the ground, and all the candles, very medieval style command and control banishing of a tech demon that a friend of mine thought was plaguing them and every device they touched. It was by request, and we thought it would be a fun thing to do, and why not? This is how you learn. So I banished this tech demon, and suddenly, all the devices he had been having all these troubles with stopped having all these troubles. Six weeks later, I'm using a big, powerful drill with a big, wide spade bit, a flat bit on it to drill a wide hole into a big piece of wood to run a wire through it for some lighting in my pantry, and there was a nail in the piece of wood that I couldn't see, and the spade bit hit the nail. When it hit the nail, the spade bit stopped, the drill spun around, spiral fractured my right fourth metacarpal, which is a hand bone to my fourth finger. The instant the searing pain flashed through my brain, I saw the image of the demon, and it smiled and yelled at me, "Gotcha." That was not what I was expecting as searing pain was blasting through my experience as my spiral fractured hand broke. But take that for what it's worth; that was my experience. It doesn't mean that there's a true demon or even a true hand, for that matter, but that was the experience, and I applaud your certainty that they can't do these kinds of things. May that work out well for you and prove to be true.

SPENCER: This is vaguely menacing.

DANIEL: Yes, unfortunately.

SPENCER: I'm very sympathetic to the view that there's a lot more uncertainty than almost anyone acknowledges. I also agree with you that philosophers who've thought about this deeply generally conclude that we don't know much, and it's hard to see how we could ever know much. Even just take the problem with induction, right? People assume that because something worked in a certain way in the past, it's going to work that way in the future. How do you justify that rule? You could look at that rule and say, well, that rule worked for me in the past, so it will probably work in the future, but you're just using the rule to demonstrate itself, which is not allowed. These are really hard things, and I think we're all — my interpretation of this is that we're creatures evolved from apes, and we're just trying to grapple with this very confusing universe. I'm sympathetic to the view that it's hard to know what reality is. It's hard to know what's true. You've explored all of these weird corners of your mind, or maybe reality, so I imagine that that opens your horizons a lot to what's possible.

DANIEL: I've certainly been open to lots of possibilities, and again, I hold them all lightly, but I have found it a fascinating journey.

SPENCER: Another thing I want to discuss with you is, speaking of psychological effects, you mentioned the phrase the "Dark Night." Something that I think occurs a lot is people come to view meditation as maybe something like exercise. It's just this healthy thing, and everyone should do it, and you'll have these positive benefits. Yet I know that some people actually have pretty bad experiences, and there can be a crossover between bad meditative experiences and maybe mental health issues. Could you talk a bit about that?

DANIEL: Yeah, absolutely. Differentiating bad meditation experiences from mental health issues is a huge topic. Just two days ago, I was making a video on how to deal with the Dark Night and what it might be and what it can do, based on stuff I had done for the embodiment conference.

SPENCER: Can you define that term?

DANIEL: So, the Dark Night, technically, and again, the traditionalists don't like it when I do this, but coming from Jack Kornfield and the perennialists who think that the Christians, when they enter their dark night of the soul, is some sort of functional equivalent, in some ways, or similar enough, to the knowledges of suffering that Buddhist practitioners go through, or that other people may go through when they have their own existential crises or hero's journey into the underworld, or whatever it is on their own spiritual path. It has been noted routinely, time and time again, that after the spiritual peak of the arising and passing away, or a conversion experience, or whatever you want to call it, there is some period of time where things can involve a lot of fear, guilt, misery, anger, frustration, disgust, renunciation, disenchantment with life, seeing the danger in attachments or worldly concerns or in this body, or in politics, or whatever it is, and also having some sort of breach in the sense of who they are, actually physically, existentially at the deepest levels. Having that starting to change as they get different information with a higher grade of perception and resolution, fine-grained internal processes come more to light, and they begin to see maybe they aren't the thing they think they were. Maybe they aren't actually solid; maybe they aren't continuous. That can be very disconcerting for people. As we get the whole person tour on the meditative or spiritual journey, the tour of our dark sides, of our shadow sides, of our deepest, weirdest, craziest places can be quite a challenge. To be able to wake those up and go into those and see them as they are, and find something beneficial in the face of those is hugely important. Some people go through that territory very easily. It doesn't have to be super hard and difficult. Some people integrate and go through those phases quite quickly, quite rapidly. For some people, it can be super challenging with a high degree of mood instability, relationship instability, job instability, career education instability, weird physical pains, overwhelming emotions, anxiety, paranoia, bizarre distortions of perception, profound sense of lack and guilt, or whatever it is that can come bubbling up in ways that can be profoundly strong, disconcerting, and very destabilizing to our ordinary life and function, to love and work, as Sigmund Freud would put it. When that happens, luckily, the meditative traditions also have reasonable bodies of knowledge of things you can do about that. That doesn't mean it's always easy, and the degree to which this is necessary and required versus just something that happens to some people, and does it make you a better practitioner? Are there techniques that can get you around it entirely, as some people claim, and you don't really ever have to go through it? Those are all hotly debated topics that are not well resolved, but I'm actually trying to get together a research group that can do much better science on this and help differentiate it from conditions like whatever we think garden variety psychosis is, or whatever we think schizophrenia and the range of it is, or whatever we think bipolar and its variants are, because we can get into these weird high and low mood cycles. Do those involve similar pathways to classical bipolar? Are they the exact same thing? Is one the spiritual version of the other? Are they really totally unrelated processes that just happen to look very similar? Those are all biochemically and measurably testable, I think, with some current technologies, and we'll probably need a few more we don't have yet. Those are actually the kind of things that I am hoping to study with the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, which is, again, this large international group of neuroscientists, therapists, and all kinds of people who want to help sort this stuff out, which is still very much in the realm of expert opinion, case series, and orthodoxy.

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SPENCER: When someone is beginning to meditate for the first time, is there some advice you'd give them about these kinds of experiences?

DANIEL: I would actually give a lot of advice, and the biggest trick is to go in with your eyes open. That is part of the range that can happen to some people, and to just have informed consent. To the degree that one can understand something before one has experienced it, I think it's important to tell people when they meditate that the range of spiritual effects is quite wide. The high end of the amazing things that can happen is more profound than most people think. The low end of what can go terribly wrong is worse than most people think. It is true, plenty of people will stay in the middle and relatively not very interesting territory, get some mild effects, calm down, and maybe get a little better at dealing with their emotions. That's fine, and that's a lot of people, but that's certainly not everyone. There will be people who experience quite high and quite low experiences, and sometimes a weird mix of the two, who can gain incredible benefits that are profoundly transformative, as routinely described by the old texts, and also wreck their life and end up killing themselves at the far extreme of what can go horribly wrong, or end up hospitalized or on medications for long periods of time, or with bizarre energetic imbalances that years later they still can't figure out how to clear. Modern science has very little to offer people dealing with this stuff, and that's the range. They should just know by way of informed consent that that is true. For really good informed consent, we would have data on the range, the percentages, and the chances of all that happening — real good epidemiological data, like we have for medications, for example — but we don't have any of that because we don't even have good diagnostic criteria. There are no good longitudinal, large population-based studies. That's actually one of the other things I very much want to do with the EPRC, such that we have good diagnostic criteria, a medical establishment that can track the stuff. It's part of public health tracking and part of ICD-10 and 11 codes with the WHO. We have DSM-5 or 6 or whatever it becomes, billing codes that can help us track the stuff, and the therapists, practitioners, and doctors are aware of these things. We can actually give people real informed consent that involves real numbers of the actual risks of something going very right or very wrong. Even better, based on their predisposing factors, which would be awesome if we had that level of sophistication of knowing how to give proper informed consent, none of which we currently have.

SPENCER: I'm really glad that you're trying to approach doing that research, because it seems really important to better understand. Are certain meditation techniques that tend to be safer to use and less likely to produce bad effects?

DANIEL: Definitely, lower dose is clearly safer, right? Less potential for amazing effects as well, but less potential. There's clearly some dose dependency, though that's not true for everyone, and there are people who, on weirdly small doses, can get into some pretty wild stuff, both good and bad. But again, those are more rare, but not so rare that you know, I've talked to literally thousands. Thousands of these people, and in terms of the techniques that involve bodily awareness, they are generally safer than the visualization and mantras. Again, visualizations and mantras can lead to some pretty wild and amazing and magical effects, but they can also lead to some much weirder effects. So generally, grounding in the body and the breath and the feet and postures is usually safer, though not always. Techniques that involve less weird paradigms, like a technique where you're intentionally trying to become a god or goddess, are more likely to lead to weird effects than a technique where your intention and activity is just trying to calm down and be okay. Techniques that involve a tremendous amount of energy and power are generally not as safe as techniques that involve just gently settling into what is right here right now. But those are all generalizations, and I know people who, again, on small doses with lower power techniques that aren't really goal-oriented, still get into some very wild effects, because those can be quite profound also, and provide real insights and real existential change, which sometimes are reacted to really well and sometimes not. But those are some general bits of advice I would give. And in general, if you have higher ego strength in the ordinary Freudian sense, if you can face your issues and your dark stuff and your moods and your childhood history and things like anxiety and anticipation without freaking out, if you're able to do that in daily life and relationships and at work, you're also generally much more likely to be able to do those things on the cushion. So those skill sets in particular really do seem to translate.

SPENCER: If you start having a weird experience, and then that weird experience gives you a lot of anxiety or freaks you out a lot, then you may be at higher risk for some of these negative effects.

DANIEL: Yes, and people can get into feedback loops where they start getting all afraid, and then they're afraid because they're afraid. Maybe they've never been this afraid before, and so they're really afraid because now they're at a level of afraid that is a new level of afraid, and that becomes even more terrifying. And before you know it, they're afraid of the afraidness, and they're miserable. And so they stop exercising and they stop hanging out with friends, and because they're not exercising and hanging out with friends, now they're eating chips and drinking beer all day long. They're more miserable. And so you could get into these negative feedback loops that are weirdly predictable but also can be very pathological. Being very aware of not getting into those kinds of feedback loops is super important. Or you start getting into the disgust phase, and you find your partner's quirks a little more irritating, and so you're more likely to comment on those irritating quirks, which makes your partner then more irritated at you, and then they start getting irritated at you, which makes you more irritated at them, or your boss at work. You get more angry one day than you ordinarily would have, because meditation has gotten you into some agitated territory. And so you fire off a slightly more inflammatory email, which gets you hauled into their office for the meeting. And then you don't handle that so well. And then, you know, you get fired. You can get into these negative life spirals. You have an internal experience, some mode of your psychology that you're passing through that is showing itself, and then you have your reactions to that. Then there are daily life consequences, which can make things much, much worse, as things spiral out of control. Learning how to have good moral training, the ability to face your internal experience without doing something hopefully destructive or stupid or dysfunctional in the face of it, is really important, and people who have more of that together are substantially more likely, in my experience, to do well when they get into the realms of meditation. Though, there are exceptions, and I've noticed some highly sane, highly professional, highly stable people that when they got into some of this territory, it just kicked their ass and they weren't really prepared for it.

SPENCER: Are there certain techniques that you would suggest people only do if they're really advanced, just because they have so much potential for harm?

DANIEL: Not necessarily, no. I would never say people should only do these if they're really advanced. It's kind of like high adventure stuff. I could do some real mountain climbing if I had really good guides, some training, good ropes, good equipment, and the weather was good that day, and maybe some good Sherpas. I might be able to do some impressive climbing, but maybe on my own, I wouldn't have done nearly as well. It depends on guides, social support, your friend network, life circumstances, and risk tolerance. I'm not going to be paternalistic like a lot of people are and say nobody should ever do this technique, and I know because I'm the authority who has declared it so. I don't get paternalistic about this stuff, but I do want adults to have enough information to make reasonable, informed choices. I would never say that someone shouldn't skydive or hang glide. I mean, I myself have skydived, done rappelling, high adventure canoeing, white water rafting, and a bunch of seriously dangerous things. I wouldn't be paternalistic and say you shouldn't do those, but you should understand there are risks involved, have some sense of what they are, and hopefully be given a reasonable amount of technologies to mitigate them to the degree that they can be mitigated, while recognizing there's still risk.

SPENCER: So why do you think it is that some people deny that temptation has these dangers?

DANIEL: There is clearly a range. The first is that a lot of people don't believe in things they haven't experienced themselves, which is perfectly reasonable. I can't fault them for that at all. I don't believe in all kinds of things I haven't experienced. I don't think an alien spaceship is likely to descend on my lawn today. It doesn't mean it couldn't happen. But do I think it's highly unlikely? Yes, I do, because I've never experienced that. I'm not believing much in that. Are there probably aliens that have spaceships? Yeah, probably somewhere, but likely to come here? I don't know. There's a lot becoming declassified recently, which is actually quite fascinating. That's a whole other story. I don't want to get into the whole UFO thing, but probabilistically, it's highly unlikely. In the same kind of way, if they haven't experienced this themselves, I can see why they would be totally skeptical. I can also see why people coming from traditions that say this is all good believe they have tremendous faith in their traditions. Their tradition may have gotten them a lot of benefit, and they may believe their tradition. Belief in a tradition can be extremely powerful and psychologically healthy, and they may be getting a lot of personal benefit out of the power of the belief in the tradition and the sense of well-being and being taken care of and connection with truth that brings. If one of the stories of the tradition is that none of the stuff is ever harmful, that just learning to pay attention, how could that go wrong? It's not a part of their tradition, and they have faith that, in fact, the opposite is true. The stuff is all just beneficial, and everybody should meditate, or everybody should take psychedelics, or everybody should do Kundalini yoga, or whatever it is, or everybody should do intensive meditation retreats, or whatever people's views are. Then awakening is just a process of benevolently going through nicer and nicer until you wake up and everything's all nice, and if that's someone's trip and that really works for them, excellent. I can totally understand why people have that belief as well, and the psychological benefits and practical benefits that could come from that. I can't fault them for that. It is also true that some traditions, even knowing about the downsides, really don't like those kinds of things. The pharmaceutical industry usually knows about a lot of side effects of their medications, but they have active, powerful incentives not to spread that around or actively to deny it. The tobacco industry, the alcohol industry, the firearm industry, etc., are actively, financially, politically, and functionally disincentivized and often face cultural inertia as well from disclosing what can go wrong. We also see that basic style of motivation. Then we also see people who are really afraid that people will be scared off from this stuff, that we're really exaggerating, and it's not that bad. If you're going to scare a lot of people away from benefit, they know for certain that it's better to just tell them it's safe. Even if some stuff goes wrong, they, in a sort of paternalistic role, know they can make the right choice for these adults rather than giving the adults informed consent with all the information. They know they're making the right choice for these people by telling them it's all okay, even if it's not, because, on balance, they know more good will be done rather than bad. I think those are the basic categories of argument, and then some just sheer ignorance. They just don't know. They just say, "Well, no, I don't really see how it could go wrong," and that's just based on not particularly informed opinion. I think all of those are some mix of the possibilities.

SPENCER: So you mentioned people that have a more traditional view on meditation, where maybe they're coming from one particular school of thought, and I see you as someone who mixes and matches, tries to figure out what works. I think I've heard you mention this previously, where you talked about there's one viewpoint that says the most pure, the best stuff was the original stuff, and we should all be trying to get back to that. Another school of thought is, we're innovating. We're discovering new things. The best version is the version that's the most iterated upon. Do you want to just talk a little bit about that distinction?

DANIEL: I can totally appreciate both points of view and we're still sorting out which is really true. It is definitely true that there's something beautiful about the real old stuff. To give those people their due, there's a glory, a cleanliness, a straightforwardness, a logical elegance, a presentation style, a power that is magnificent. I have a sort of sense of sacred awe and wonder for the real old stuff at its best. It's just so nice and clean, so much of it, and its worldview so seemingly coherent and the logical consistency of it, if you don't kick the tires too hard, exquisite and all of that. And so I get the people who love that stuff.

SPENCER: Was that the early Buddhist scriptures? Is that what you're referring to?

DANIEL: Yes, the early Buddhist scriptures, or really old Upanishads, or Rumi. Just Rumi. Or some of the Christian mystics and their old school stuff, without going to the level of Thomas Merton, who also is cool, but has a different feel than, say, St. John of the Cross, or Interior Castle, or some of this stuff. I can super appreciate the beauty of the old things, and I have a reverence for those that is palpable, and I'm so grateful for them. And yet it is also true that I've gotten to see the pragmatic value of the stuff that has evolved out of that. Like the Visuddhimagga, which is only 1,000 years later, or something, and still 1,500 years old or so that is clearly profoundly more evolved, better organized with much more detailed phenomenology, a lot of techniques well flushed out. Is it perfect? No. Does it have its flaws? Yes, and its dogmas and its limitations and some exaggerations and distortions and other influences that you can debate the merits of those. And is it as clean from a certain old school point of view? Is there real old stuff? No, clearly not. But is it vastly better organized? Unquestionably, no comparison, and is it functionally much more detailed and clearly fleshed out and actually has more qualifiers and sort of downsides and is way easier to practice from a lot of points of view? That's just one example, and that's 1,500 years old. I super appreciate a lot of the map work that's been done in the last 100 years, and additional phenomenology and additional techniques that the Tibetans added over the last 1,000 years or so, and all the cool Zen tech and some of the interesting Pure Land stuff and all the weird esoteric stuff that got crushed when colonialism came in. That was even in the Theravada, which is super fascinating and just really interesting, magical and personally transformative tech. I like all that stuff, and that stuff is not original at all, and yet is clearly amazing and needs to be explored. I think we're finally at a point where hopefully there are enough people who have a sufficient maturity about their looking at all this and pragmatism to say, okay, let's take what seems to be best in all this and give it reasonable comparative trials, longitudinal perspective studies, big sample sizes, really give each of them a fair trial and just look and see what each of the techniques and traditions do well, what they don't do well with some objective measurement, because none of this has been subjected to the beauty and horror that is randomized, prospective trials, longitudinal studies and good statistics. Hopefully fair analysis, to the degree that we can take qualitative experience and lend fair analysis to it. It's going to be limited by the human instruments that we're doing this through, but I think that science does have a role to play in helping to sort out what's good, what's bad, and what we probably shouldn't be doing anymore, except under weird circumstances of all the spiritual stuff and what really does work and not so well. I'm really excited about the possibility of that happening, and super excited about the extremely large team that is also excited about this that I'm lucky enough to be friends with and a part of.

SPENCER: I think it would be great to run scientific studies on some of these techniques, learn about both the benefits and the potential harms they cause, and try to understand what should be recommended to people. I imagine some people have a very aversive reaction to that way of thinking, especially if they are part of a particular tradition. I know that when you wrote your book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, some people took issue with the way you talk about it. I'd love for you to say some things about that. What are people criticizing you for? What do you feel is fair, and what do you feel is unfair about what they're saying?

DANIEL: Oh yeah. We could just start with the cover, right? Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book by The Arahant, living within a redefinition of the term, and just hardcore practice in general, and some Buddha-like figure with energy flowing out in some mystical swirly way. The cover itself has probably pissed off countless thousands of people, if not more.

SPENCER: Did you know that was going to happen?

DANIEL: Oh yeah, absolutely. This was definitely quite conscious. There's obviously been a tremendous amount of harm, downside, and complexity, but also a lot of people who appreciated it, and it worked for them. There are so many Dharma books and teachers. I'm just one person among literally thousands, if not tens of thousands. God knows how many meditation teachers and traditions and books there are. Some people just happen to appreciate this weird, somewhat quirky, definitely moderately inflammatory style, and for whatever reason, it worked for them. If it doesn't, luckily, there's a ton of other material. If this was the only Dharma book, that would probably be a really moderately horrible choice of advertising and PR, and probably doing people a disservice. But in the grand mix of the massive spiritual marketplace that exists right now, I think it's okay that there's one book that just happens to do it this way. Other people have said they really appreciated something in that approach, the style, the presentation. I think it's important that we have the intellectual and cultural freedom to experiment, to put things in the mix that may be a little bit different or hadn't been done before, and to see what comes from those. This is very much in that style. It's also playful, kind of fun, sort of over the top, and a little bit dramatic. That works for some people and totally pisses off others. If someone wants a dry Dharma book without any of that, luckily, there are hundreds to choose from. I'm not causing a deficit in people by doing that.

SPENCER: Why did you choose that style? Because it fits your personality, or is it more particular?

DANIEL: It's sort of a reaction against three stones on a beach Dharma books. Very kind and soft and polite, and is this all good and it's all okay, and just be all right, and you're good, and we're good, and that kind of stuff. It glossed over both the high end and the low end, and really didn't want to talk about any of that, and certainly not the magical weird. I started writing this in my 20s. I'm now 51, and it very much started out as a young, angry man in his 20s who felt like he had been lied to and treated paternalistically, not given the straight truth about a whole lot of stuff, and had people be too heavy-handed in their patriarchal and matriarchal mushiness and really weren't giving the full story or full informed consent or the full range of the amazing. When they talked about the amazing, they talked about it in very sort of orthodoxy, mythological terms, but not very realistic, rigorous terms. It was definitely a reaction to all that, and arose in its time and place. That's okay. Hopefully, when we have a thesis, and then this comes in with an antithesis, we eventually get a synthesis, and then the synthesis becomes its own thesis that then gets reacted to with antithesis. Hopefully, through that iterative process, we come up with something better. But I didn't see people really articulating the antithesis to a tremendous amount of the thesis that was being sold, promulgated, taught, etc., that I was coming up in in the mid-90s to 2000s with regard to the Dharma. For whatever reason, quirk, rebellion, immaturity, or maybe maturity and vision and pioneering spirit, or however you want to rationalize it, that was what came out.

SPENCER: I've heard various criticisms levied at your perspective.

DANIEL: Oh yeah, tons.

SPENCER: One of them being that you mix and match stuff. Basically, something works for you, you keep it. If it doesn't work, you discard it.

DANIEL: True.

SPENCER: You end up with a mishmash of many different traditions, which I think there's a lot to be said for that approach.

DANIEL: All the traditions are basically a mix of traditions that came before them with usually very little new tech. There's usually one or two key innovations, and then some rephrasing and some re-emphasis. There are a few serious breaks. In some ways, Buddha talking about no self was a serious break from what we think came before, but even in the Buddhist tradition itself, it's a mix of all these different techniques and traditions that are pre-Buddhist. All the jhanic stuff is pre-Buddhist. A lot of the kasinas, the corpse meditations, mantra practice, all that stuff is clearly pre-Buddhist. Even at the time they were wandering around, if you read the stories, they would wander around and study with all these teachers. Each of them was influenced by a lot of different people and even different monks within the tradition that had their own tendencies and ways of talking about things. Maudgalyayana was very different. Ananda was very different. Each of them, even during the lifetime of the Buddha, the oldest stuff we have, there was this clear differentiation of styles, emphases, flavors, and qualities. That just continued to proliferate after. It's not like we've ever really had one pure thing that was the true tradition. Anyone who thinks we did just isn't reading, they're not paying attention, or they're willing to filter everything so thoroughly through that worldview that they ignore a tremendous amount of data, which is straightforward and obvious. I am definitely and explicitly, and I say in the first few pages of my book, a result of a hybrid of Buddhist traditions, modern and ancient. I list a tremendous number of my own influences. I came out of that, like IMS, Jack Kornfield's stuff, Christopher Titmuss, and Sharda Rogell. Rogell was part Vedanta trained, and then Theravada Vipassana and a bunch of other stuff. Fred von Allmen was Tibetan, and then Subhana was a mix of Vipassana and Zen. I had all these different teachers, and even Sri Lankan teachers who were the monastic ones, like Bhante Gunaratana. Sri Lankan Buddhism today is a mix of a complicated history of 2500 years of development. It looks nothing like the original stuff did, though it contains a lot of seemingly original elements, whatever that means. All of us are fusion practitioners. Have a nice day. I'm just very explicit about that.

SPENCER: So what do you feel are the most fair critiques of your work where you say, okay, yeah, I kind of see their point?

DANIEL: Redefining arahantship in some ways, you know, and using some criteria, and then sort of reframing.

SPENCER: You use that term to refer to yourself in your book, right?

DANIEL: I mean, this is actually considered relatively normal in Buddhism. There was even debate during the Buddha's lifetime about who the arahants were and who was an arahant. It was actually one of the last questions he was asked: how do we even know who the arahants are? That was, I think, the last major question he was asked before he died, and he didn't give that great an answer. Basically, be a light unto yourselves. Good luck.

SPENCER: What does arahant mean, though?

DANIEL: Well, that's a good question. You see, it's actually described in a bunch of different ways, and the different definitions don't line up. Even Bhikkhu Nagalio, for example, who's been extremely critical of the way I use the term, he himself rejects a bunch of the later criteria, like the questions of King Milinda and stuff, because he thinks they're too late, whereas plenty of other Theravadins would include those later texts and aspects of the tradition in the core definitions of our heart. Then when you get to the Tibetans of Mahayana, who redefine the concept of our heart in multiple different ways, it's usually always used as some sort of intermediate sage of awakening that is then contrasted very disfavorably with sages of the bodhisattva path, calling them selfish and prone to fear and dropping dead when they hear profound truths. The concept of the arahant you see coming out of them is highly redefined. If you look at it in Zen, you can't even make sense of it because they don't have any criteria that are rational or even approachable without bizarre mental gymnastics, koans, or sort of poetry reading. What does all that mean? I actually think I'm going back to a very original traditional definition, which is out of the Udana, one of the oldest texts, in the seeing, just the seen, in the hearing, just the heard, and in the thinking, just the thoughts, no separate doer, no controller, perceiver. I think, weirdly enough, I'm even more originalist than a lot of the people, and yet I get flack for using this hyper-old, very simplistic originalist definition. It is what it is. Redefining arahantship, for example, is a chronic sport in Buddhism, usually for one's own ends. At least I'm extraordinarily specific about how I mean to use the word and what it means and how I contrast it with other usages, so at least I'm clear, whereas tons of people who are using it don't actually list all their criteria. I think it's more important that we know what it means. But actually, way better will be the time when we have just a whole lot more terms and better descriptive phenomenology of the various states and effects. All of these kinds of term wars over one single term that's made to fill all these roles or have all these definitions really means that linguistically and conceptually, and as a functional technical lexicon, we just have to admit the profound degree to which we are immature and incompletely developed as a technical craft, as a guild, or as a series of guilds, or as a profession, or whatever. We really just need a whole lot more terms that can handle the load. The same with jhana, the same with a lot of terms that are defined in so many different ways by different people. We really just need a lot better language and a lot more words. As we try to cram all this different meaning onto single old words, we just run into trouble and argue with each other, and that's pretty immature of all of us equally, I think, and we're all guilty of that, myself totally included.

SPENCER: Cool. So you're applying this word to yourself. I mean, that was controversial, and maybe you could fairly be critiqued for it by some people. What's another critique lever you think is a fair critique?

DANIEL: A lot of people don't like the notion that you can get into insight stages of retreats, and it's almost a tautological argument where, if you're not doing a Theravada insight retreat, you can't, by definition, get into Theravada TM branded insight stages.

SPENCER: I see. So it becomes sort of semantic, again, right?

DANIEL: Is that something semantic? Is it really true? Is it functionally true? I think from a religious point of view, I definitely see why they might think that, from a branding point of view, that if you're not doing a Theravada practice, how could it be a Theravada insight stage? I mean, it's oddly unassailable logic within its limited scope. But then from a scientist, I also wonder, are you getting into territory with similar or identical underlying physiology or functionally might be the same, even if you don't call it that? To what degree are various meditative techniques playing on the same versus different brain centers and wiring and levels of development or connection? Those are all questions that are not only linguistic and semantic, but also functional and physiological and practical. And then, are there beneficial reasons to just say only Theravadan insight stages are on a Theravadan insight retreat? Maybe that actually gives people tremendous faith in the tradition, and then they practice in some way, I don't know. Or does it shut them off from the ability to use what, at the time, I think, was actually the old Theravadans who were very much thinking this is just the way life is? I mean, when I read the text, I don't get the sense when they're describing insight stages that this would only happen to Buddhists in a Theravadan insight context. I got the sense that they thought insight stages and jhanas could happen to all kinds of people, even not in the Theravada. And so we disagree on that. But I get why they disagree with me. And from a pure faith perspective, generating faith and purity and belief and galvanizing effort to a tradition, I could see how my perennialist views could be really distracting from that and almost dilute it and maybe be even detrimental to some people's practice and motivation and faith. And I get that, and that's okay. I could see why they're angry about that.

SPENCER: Right. Because if someone's going about their daily business and suddenly has an intense experience, like, for example, the one you mentioned on the dance floor, right? It's an interesting question of, is this really the sort of experience that is similar to the ones that people have in meditation, or is it fundamentally different?

DANIEL: And then how is that actually answered? Is that answered neurophysiologically? Is that answered biochemically? Is that answered phenomenologically, or is that answered through an orthodox lens?

SPENCER: Right.

DANIEL: And depending on which lens you prefer and your problem, I can see why intelligent, thoughtful, caring people come up with different answers. And that's all right, I get it.

SPENCER: That makes sense. And what do you think some of the unfair critiques are, where you really feel they don't even have a good point?

DANIEL: Yeah, people say things like, I've never had even a single insight stage of mind and body after having spent over a year on retreat and done countless thousands of hours of practice, and that literally nothing I say has any validity related to Buddhism. There are people who say this or that I'm doing it all just for the money and prestige. They say, "Isn't your book free?" There is a paid version. The cost to produce MCTB2 was about $40,000, and I haven't gotten anything like that much money, particularly after taxes are taken into account, out of the two books, much less the second one, which cost so much money to produce because I hired a bunch of for pay editors to help me with it, to make sure I didn't have some of the editorial problems I had in MCTB1. I wanted to try to up the level of quality. When people say stuff like that, and they say I'm just doing this for the money, my current count is that I've lost about $10,000 on the book. So if I'm doing this for the money, I seriously need to reconsider my business strategy. I do intentionally give away free copies of the book. The only reason I publish with my publisher is Aeon Books allows me to keep free copies online. There's a PDF, there's a website. Actually, I'm literally working with a guy now who I'm going to buy the material for a good audio booth so he can make an audiobook version of MCTB2, which I just haven't had the time to do, unfortunately. I'm going to make sure that I put that online and give it away for free. If you want to buy it from me, okay, you can buy it. That's fine. But if you want it for free, you can also have it for free. That's not a great strategy to make a lot of money. I also take money I get from the book and put it back into the Dharma Overground and tech development. This microphone that I'm talking to you through is something I bought with some money from the book so that I would have better audio recording quality for doing these kinds of podcasts. I do that kind of stuff with it. Critiques like that, saying I'm just doing this for the fame, let me tell you, when you do something radical like what I've done, you get a staggering amount of hate mail and hate emails and people trashing you on internet forums in really extreme ways, and you don't get that much fame. If someone was thinking this was a reasonable strategy for fame, I would consider lots of other ways to go that probably involved a lot less derision and conflict.

SPENCER: It's a little disappointing because you think that people in these communities would be kinder.

DANIEL: I actually don't think that. Curiously enough, I don't think that Buddhists are necessarily kinder than anybody else. That would be an interesting study to do and see if there was a way to measure that. I intentionally split apart progress in the retrainings because I have ample real-world evidence that even people who are very good, technically skilled meditators can sometimes not be the nicest people, much less people who are not skilled meditators. I have ample evidence that training in one of the three trainings, morality, concentration, or wisdom, doesn't necessarily give you good skills in any of the others. Luckily, I'm less disappointed than I might be if I held those kinds of ideals. But plenty about this, were I to hold those ideals, would be profoundly disappointing.

SPENCER: So before we finish up, I just want to hear from you what your goals are going forward. What are you trying to achieve?

DANIEL: The big stuff I'm trying to do these days is, again, to organize research teams and to get the funding to support them in doing really ontologically and tradition-neutral science on all of this stuff, all of these questions that we've been discussing, insight stages, how they relate to daily life, how they relate to ordinary people, how they go across traditions, doing all the phenomenological work of that, doing the neurophenomenology. So we have something of pathways, doing the neuropharmacology, so we understand how medication interacts with all of this stuff, looking at really solid database revision of a lot of the mental health criteria, upgrading the ability of mainstream therapists who aren't thoroughly immersed in the transpersonal literature, which the vast majority aren't, to have some functional clinical awareness of this stuff, as well as emergency room doctors and neurologists and primary care providers and people working in emergency psychiatry, as well as meditation teachers, to have data-driven strategies for how to promote good outcomes in the people they teach, as well as to recognize when people are getting into trouble, and to have good referral networks that have data-driven strategies for both diagnosis and management if things start going really wrong for practitioners. Basically, I'm pouring my time into figuring out how to network the teams, find the money, create the organizations, structures, boards, charities, research teams, and networks to get all that science done, which is a gigantic and absurd project that has been taken on lots of times by other people, but I don't think ever quite at the scale and with this degree of maniacal, semi-hypomanic vision, intent, and dedication to doing it in a way that really isn't bound to any tradition, but is just trying to get the straight read on what is true and useful.

SPENCER: Beautiful. I love that mission. For someone who is new to meditation, besides your own book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, are there one or two books that you think are really great places to start?

DANIEL: I actually don't recommend that most people start with my book. You can if you want to. I mean, it's cool, but I really like Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana.

SPENCER: That was one of the first books I read. It's probably the third book I read.

DANIEL: Yeah, it's a great one. I really like A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield. I actually like Shift into Freedom by Loch Kelly, which some people would think of as an advanced technique, but it actually works pretty well straight out of the gate. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is actually a pretty cool one. Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness is one I recommend by Sharon Salzberg a lot. What the Buddha Taught, by Walpola Rahula, is a good one if you want a little deeper dive into stuff. The Buddha's Path to Deliverance by Nyanatiloka Thera, if you're interested in a basic primer on old school Theravada dogma. Introduction to Tantra by Lama Yeshe is actually a pretty cool little book. There are a bunch of nice places to start. Those are all cool. I mean, these are just some of my favorites. And, oh, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield, also a great one. All his stuff is good. I really like it. And some of Joseph Goldstein's early stuff I really like. The Experience of Insight is a cool one. Some of those places, yeah, I like Michael Taft's stuff. If you're checking out podcasts, I like him a bunch. Shinzen Young's stuff is really cool for some good, basic, very secularized, stripped down, straightforward tech. There's a lot of cool stuff out there these days. I mean, that's one of the neat things in the era in which we live, is there are a lot more teachers, there's a lot more resources. There's a lot of free stuff, you know, a good app. I mean, some of the good apps are basic guided meditations and learning some basic skills and getting to explore a little bit, cool places to start. Realize there's vast worlds beyond them. And that's the important thing. I think that's the biggest downside to a lot of the basic mindfulness stuff and a lot of the apps is both the grand and amazing effects and the downsides and possible adverse side effects. They don't do as good a job handling either of those. So just if you start getting into something that seems more interesting, make sure to branch out and up the level of sources you're reading and know that world is there.

SPENCER: Daniel, this was a really fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming on.

DANIEL: This has been delightful, and thank you so much for sharing your experience. By the way, I really appreciated that.

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