SPENCER: Jay. Welcome.

JAY: Thank you very much, Spencer. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPENCER: Pleasure to have you. Why is it that we suffer?

JAY: Well, that's a huge question, of course. Different traditions answer it in different ways. The Buddhist tradition offers an interesting answer. It suggests that we suffer simply because we want things that we can't have, and we are averse to things that we do have, and that attraction and aversion are, in turn, grounded in fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of reality and our own nature. That's an interesting and challenging idea, and it suggests that our lives are, in fact, absolutely permeated by suffering, even when we don't notice it.

SPENCER: So is the idea that if we didn't have craving and we didn't have aversion, we would be free of suffering?

JAY: That's the idea because we suffer when something's happening to us that we don't want, or when something that we do want isn't happening to us. So without the attraction to things we don't have, or can't get, or the aversion to things that are happening to us, you don't have suffering. For example, Janis Joplin sings, "Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?" Janis is suffering from not having a Mercedes Benz, but not having a Mercedes Benz itself isn't enough to suffer. Most of us don't have Mercedes Benzes, and most of us don't suffer from that. You only suffer from that if you also want a Mercedes Benz and don't have it. Or Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks sing, "How can I miss you when you won't go away?" suggesting, of course, that he wants this person to go away and that he's suffering because he or she is with him. Now again, if he wanted the person to be with him, then their proximity wouldn't be a source of suffering. But if he wants them gone, it is.

SPENCER: Now, listeners might think, "Isn't this a little silly? Because it's saying, if nothing bad happened to you, you wouldn't suffer." But if someone pricks you with a pin, you're going to suffer no matter what. That's not really what's being said here. So could you clarify?

JAY: I'd put it differently. I'd say, when something bad happens to you, you don't need to suffer. The suffering is what is sometimes called in the Buddhist literature, the second arrow. Suppose, for instance, I go to the doctor to get a vaccination. I know it's going to hurt a little bit, but that hurting is only suffering if I really don't want it, and if I'm kind of happy to receive that little bit of pain, then that's not suffering. It's just pain. Another example that might be even more useful: some of our listeners might be athletes. Athletes do a lot of things that are very painful. If you've ever run a marathon, you know that it kind of hurts at the end. If you're playing football, you get hit and bruised and all of that stuff, but a lot of athletes really enjoy their athletic performance despite, or sometimes perhaps even because of that pain. That shows us that it's not the pain that's the suffering; it's the aversion to pain that would be the suffering. If you don't add the aversion, you don't get suffering out of pain. Just as if you don't add attraction, you don't get suffering out of not having a Mercedes Benz.

SPENCER: I'm a very amateur meditator, and I've done a bunch of experiments meditating and pain, for example, going out in the cold without a jacket and using that as a source of meditation. What I find during those experiences is that there are certain moments where I can get my brain to stop labeling the cold as being bad and just process the raw feeling of the cold. In those moments, it may only last two seconds, but during that two seconds, I'm actually not suffering. I think I'm still experiencing the cold; if anything, I might even be experiencing it more intensely than normal, but I actually don't feel like I'm suffering anymore. Do you think that that's actually true, that I'm not suffering in those moments based on what I'm describing?

JAY: It might well be, or it might be at least that you're suffering less than you would be suffering otherwise. I can't get too far inside your head to figure that out, but that's the idea. When we think about what a cessation of suffering would look like, in the Buddhist tradition, the word for that is Nirvana, a blowing out of the fires of suffering. When we think about what a cessation looks like, it doesn't mean we no longer have experiences. It means that we no longer reflexively react to our experiences with attraction and aversion. A way of putting that is we drop the egocentricity of our experiences and stop thinking it's all about me and what I want or what I don't want. That's perhaps a very useful thing to do.

SPENCER: That's interesting, because in these moments when I'm experiencing the cold intensely but feel like I'm not suffering, what I think is happening is that I'm not labeling it as bad. To me, the experience of not suffering anymore has to do with dropping the labels, but you're describing it as being related to the ego. I'm curious how that relates, if it does relate.

JAY: I think that they're probably related. Very often when we label things, we label them with reference to their relation to us. If I label something as delicious, it means it's something that I like to eat. If I label something as freezing, it means it's colder than I would like it to be. If I label somebody as friendly, it means it's somebody with whom I'd like to be a friend. I think that very often what labeling does is it inscribes or intensifies the sense of our relationship to that thing. Part of the secret to reducing our own suffering is to reduce our own ego attachment and to experience the world as the world, not as a whole bunch of things related to me.

SPENCER: When we experience something like suffering, I think it's very easy to say, "Oh, well, that thing inherently causes suffering." If someone's mean to you, of course you feel bad. Or if you get pricked with a pin, of course it hurts. But this view you're describing is saying, "No, the suffering is not located in the action happening to you. It's located in something related to the relationship between you and the thing, or the way that you're thinking about the thing." How would you pinpoint where the suffering is located?

JAY: I think the suffering is in my mind, and it's my own mental reaction to whatever is going on or not going on that constitutes the suffering, not something external that we might think of that way. I think that's really important. People will very often try to externalize the sources of suffering, or, for that matter, the sources of happiness. They see the Mercedes Benz or the chocolate ice cream cone, to be a little more prosaic, as something that intrinsically makes us happy, or they see the headache or the boredom in the airport as something that intrinsically is a source of suffering. I think that's a terrible and pervasive mistake. Those things might be occasions on which we become happy, or occasions on which we suffer, but the happiness or the suffering is very much our internal psychological reaction to what's going on around us. The eighth-century Buddhist philosopher Shanti Deva has a beautiful analogy for this. He says, "The world is full of rocks and thorns. One thing I could do to stop suffering would be to cover the whole world with leather. The other thing I could do would be to put on a pair of shoes." The analogy is really important. If you think that the route to happiness is to cover the entire world with leather and transform the world around you so that everything is just as you want it to be, that's pretty hopeless. But if you're willing to put on a pair of shoes and change your own psychological responses to the things around you, you can achieve happiness.

SPENCER: I think about the spectrum between locating problems as something that we need to solve internally versus externally. For example, let's say you're born with a disability, and there's really nothing you can do to remove this disability. You could be unhappy your whole life about the disability. It's very understandable. But on the other hand, it might benefit you to try to say, "Okay, I'm going to try to reframe this and live with this disability in a way that I can be as happy as I can be given the disability." So you're kind of taking it on as an internal change to try to live with this better, because you can't change it externally. On the other hand, let's say someone is dating an abusive partner. Yes, it's true that they could try to learn to think in a different way about the way their partner abuses them until they suffer less. But it seems very natural to say, "No, the solution here is that they should remove themselves from the abusive partner and protect themselves by leaving the partner," for example. There's kind of this spectrum, and it almost seems like Buddhism takes it all the way to one extreme, saying all suffering can be changed by changing yourself, rather than the world.

JAY: In the case of the abusive partner, you can change yourself. You can decide not to associate with that person anymore. That's probably better for you and for the partner, but that is part of changing yourself and changing your own circumstance. It's recognizing that the abuse is happening because you are in a relationship with this partner, and you can fix that by getting out. That's a lot easier than trying to fix the partner, which is probably impossible.

SPENCER: What I mean by that is Buddhism is kind of locating all suffering in something about the way that you're seeing things. And so even if you had an abusive partner — I think if I'm understanding properly — you could still free yourself from suffering based on processing what's happening differently. I think some people would be very resistant to that, saying, "No, you should leave the partner. Why would you try to free yourself from that suffering rather than changing the world?"

JAY: In any aspect of Buddhist philosophy, there is no urge to place oneself in a situation in which one is encouraging abuse, whether to oneself or somebody else. The point is that the way to escape an abusive relationship has to begin with a transformation of your own attitude towards that relationship. If you're remaining in an abusive relationship because of an attraction to this person, despite the fact that they are causing you suffering and that they're also causing suffering to themselves, then you've got to work on that attraction. You've got to decide why it is that you're staying in this relationship and transform that. The idea that the right thing to do is to somehow remain in an abusive relationship and decide that you like abuse is not something that I've ever encountered in any Buddhist text or teaching, and it would be incoherent.

SPENCER: The critique here is not that Buddhism would say you should remain in this abusive relationship or that allowing someone to mistreat you is fine. What I'm saying is that they locate suffering in yourself, in the way that you're processing what's around you, rather than in the external environment. Is that not true?

JAY: Yes, that's right, but some of the causes of that suffering may well be external, like the abusive partner, for instance. But note that it's not just external; it's also your aversion to that. It's also the fact that you're remaining in that relationship that's part of the cause. You can't possibly resolve an abusive relationship by transforming the abuser — we all know how well that works — and it becomes very important, if you find yourself in an abusive relationship, to transform your own relationship, your own relation to that person, by changing it from one of attraction to one of being willing to let go.

SPENCER: How does the notion of the self in Buddhism relate to the idea of freeing yourself from suffering?

JAY: As you may know, Buddhism is a philosophical system in which the existence of the self is rejected. Buddhism is a no-self tradition. In the Buddhist framework, the self is regarded as an illusion, as an illusory object, not as a real object. While Buddhists acknowledge that people grasp themselves and understand themselves in terms of a self, that's regarded as just as much an illusion as walking towards a mirage hoping to quench your thirst. Instead, we are sequences of causally interdependent processes in open causal interaction with the world around us. We are persons, but we're not self.

SPENCER: So a listener might wonder, "Okay, if I don't have a self when I am suffering or when I'm happy, what is that suffering or happiness happening to?"

JAY: That suffering or happiness is part of the psychological continuum of a person who mistakenly takes themselves to be a self. When you think about a self, a nice way to get a fix on that is to ask yourself, "Is my self my body?" You'll end up telling yourself, "No, I have a body, but I'm not identical to that body." You might justify that by saying, "Of course, I can imagine having a different body, a body transplant of some kind or swapping bodies with somebody else." You can get yourself to understand this just by trying to form that desire. For example, ask yourself, "Is there somebody whose body you'd like to have that's not you?" Maybe you only want to have that body for a few minutes or a few seconds, or maybe you'd like to have it permanently. I don't care. But if you can even formulate that desire, the desire to inhabit another body, then you know that you don't consider yourself to be your body. Instead, you consider yourself to be somebody who happens to have your body and could have another one, whether rightly or wrongly. You can do the same thing with your mind. You can say, "It's a drag that I have this mind. I'd like to have somebody else's mind." Imagine somebody else whose mind you'd like to have, maybe because they're smarter than you, maybe because they're happier than you, or maybe because they're more popular than you. I don't know. But even if that doesn't make much sense, if you can form the desire to have a different mind, that shows that you don't consider yourself to be identical to your mind, but rather, you consider yourself somebody who has a mind. If we focus on that owner, that thing that has a body and that has a mind, that's the thing with which we reflexively identify ourselves. The Buddhist insight is there is no such thing. There are just psychophysical processes. Do you want an analogy? I'll give you an analogy. I teach at a college, Smith College, and suppose my mom came to visit me and wanted to see the college — something she's done before — I start taking her on a tour, and I see there's the building where the philosophy department is, there's the building where the chemistry department is, there's the library, there's the administration building. She says, "No, no, no, I don't want to see the buildings. I want to see the college." "Okay, there's the dean, there's the president, there are some professors, there are some students." "I don't want to see a bunch of people. People come and go, and the college has been here for over 100 years. I want to see the college itself." I say, "Well, here's the grass and the buildings, and I'm showing you the people, what more do you want?" She says, "I want to see the college that has the buildings, the college that hires the professors, the college that has the students, not any of those things." If she said that, I just have to look at her and say, "Mom, either you're joking or you're insane, because over and above the people, the library, the buildings, the grass, and all that stuff, there isn't anything. Take that stuff away, you've taken the college away." In the same sense, I want to say that to somebody who believes that they are a self above and beyond their body and mind, I want to tell them, "If you take your physical nature away and you take your psychological nature away, there's nothing left. There's no self standing behind that." Part of what motivates all of this is the idea that a lot of our suffering derives from positing that self and seeing ourselves not as in the world, but as selves who are subjects of the world and the rest of the world as an object for us, or thinking of ourselves as acting on the world but not in the world, in which case we mistake the nature of our own agency. That illusion, unlike a lot of maybe more minor illusions, is not an innocent illusion, but it's an illusion that sits at the root of suffering.

SPENCER: I like that analogy and those thought experiments, and I imagine different people might react to them differently. The way that I react to them is I can very coherently imagine myself having someone else's body, but I can't imagine myself having someone else's mind, because then I wouldn't be me, I'd be them. I could imagine my mind being more like their mind; maybe you could somehow, with advanced future technology, modify my mind to be a little more like them, to have a little bit more of their personality. But I can't actually imagine having their mind, because then I just think we would have swapped.

JAY: Yeah, some people balk at that, but I think most people can get that kind of desire. So, I sort of think, wouldn't it be cool to have Carlo Rovelli's mind and really understand quantum gravity? I want it just for a few minutes, just long enough to get the idea of quantum gravity, and then I'll give it back. I think I can get myself into that desire even if I think it's incoherent. I think the nice thing about desires is it's possible to desire things that aren't even possible, but when we do focus on those desires, we find out that we really imagine ourselves in ways that aren't sustainable. Even the idea of a self doesn't make any sense. Nonetheless, we still think we've got them.

SPENCER: When I meditate, the thing that feels most self-like to me is this kind of spotlight of attention. It feels like there's a spotlight of attention, and then I'm having experiences in the spotlight. I'm seeing the color red, feeling the pillow I'm sitting on, etc. But it sounds like at a sort of deeper level still, that is still not the self. So I'm just curious to understand how do you go deeper below that?

JAY: Well, that spotlight of attention might very much be there, and what you're recognizing when you note that attention is that you are attending. But if you then say the way that spotlight works is like a flashlight that I'm holding, and it lights something up for me, the pure subject who's behind that, now you've got yourself into the self illusion. If you can understand that all the attention is a particular psychological state or a particular experience becoming the content of another experience, and you don't then posit an experiencer behind those experiences, then you're moving yourself into the terrain of no self. But as long as you interpret that spotlight as something that illuminates the world for something that's a pure subject, then you're falling into the self illusion.

SPENCER: So sometimes we feel we have a sense of self. Is one way to look at this as being the feeling of having a sense of self is itself just a feeling, your experience of red and so on.

JAY: Yes, that's right. It's just a feeling, just a sensation, and it's one that is illusory. We are certainly aware of succumbing to lots of illusions. Many of us have seen mirages, or we've seen standard optical illusions, like the Müller-Lyer illusion, where we draw two parallel lines of equal length and then put arrowheads on each one, outgoing arrowheads on one, incoming arrowheads on the other, and suddenly one of them looks much smaller, much shorter than the other. And so we know that we can fall for illusions. One of the illusions that it's really easy to fall for is the self illusion. And to think there has to be something permanent, continuous, purely subjective, free of causation, lying behind our experience and our actions. But there is nothing like that. I mean, imagine going into the doctor and the doctor saying, "Oh, you're really good physically and your mental health is really good, but your self is in trouble. We've just looked at it on the CAT scan, and look, your mind is okay and you're okay, but you've got a disorder of self." What would that even be? What would that even mean?

SPENCER: That's an interesting question. I mean, when you look at brain damage people can get, it could definitely alter something about them. That's very fundamental in deep ways. But is it altering the self, or is it altering the self's perception, or the way you're processing information?

JAY: Yeah, it's altering their psychophysical processes, and it might even alter the way they experience themselves as selves. But there's no experience that you can have that is of a self, but not illusory, because the very idea of a self just doesn't make any sense. It's an illusion that we seem to be born for, just like we're born for the Müller-Lyer illusion. But the fact that it's innate, the fact that we've evolved to suffer from that illusion, does not undermine the fact that it is always an illusion.

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SPENCER: How does saying, "There's no self," differ from saying, "Okay, there's this one part of you that is your attention, and there's this other part of you that is your imagination and so on," and none of those in particular are yourself, but you're kind of the collection of all these different things going on in your brain.

JAY: If you understand who you are as a collection of different things going on that are in constant open interaction with the environment, that are constantly changing with no core and no essential center, then that is not thinking of yourself as a self; that's thinking of yourself as a person. That's not illusory, just as thinking about the college as a collection of buildings, people, practices, classes, a bunch of grass, a football team, and all of those things is thinking of the college as a college, not as some essential thing that's got all of that stuff.

SPENCER: When we have a discussion like this, we're talking in analytical terms but it seems to me that a lot of people who say that they've come to see themselves as not having a self — or I don't even know how to say that in a way that's coherent — but the self being illusory, let's say that it's really experiential. It's actually about the way they experience reality, not an intellectual belief. Is that how you see it too?

JAY: I see both as possible. That is, I think that a lot of people can reason their way into seeing the world in terms of no self, and can see why that is a cogent position, and that the self position isn't. That's just learning how to do philosophy or reading the right books or talking to the right people. But it's one thing to know that intellectually, to have reasoned your way into it, and to know it inferentially. It's another thing to know it directly and to experience the world that way. For example, if somebody is drawing the Müller-Lyer illusion, it's a wonderful illusion because it's easy to draw, and you can draw it in front of somebody. You draw the illusion, and that person knows intellectually that those lines are still the same length. Drawing the little arrowheads at the end doesn't change their length, but they don't see them that way, and that's because our visual system is wired to succumb to that illusion. And so even when we know it's an illusion, we still fall for it. Similarly, we seem to be wired for the self-illusion. So even once we reason ourselves into it, all I have to do is slap you on the face, and that anger comes up because you see me as a self who deliberately did something bad to you, and you experience yourself as a self who's been offended. That anger comes up in that sense of two selves confronting each other. So I think that working your way into a position in which you don't succumb to the self-illusion has to be the result of very long-term restructuring of our perceptual and conceptual habits. That's what meditative practice is for. I don't think it's something that emerges when you just follow a philosophical argument; it requires a lot of practice. Again, think about it this way: maybe you or some of your listeners have studied art history before. Before you study art history, you walk through a museum, and it's a lot of pretty pictures, but after studying art history, your perceptual systems have been changed. Now you go through and you say, "Oh, abstract impressionism, abstract expressionism, oh Impressionism, oh cubism," and you start seeing these artistic movements instead of just pretty pictures. You start seeing pictures of instances of those artistic movements; your perceptual systems have been transformed. There's all the difference in the world between reading an art history book and kind of knowing intellectually what those traditions look like and just simply seeing them when you're in the museum. That takes practice and that takes time, and I think that the same is true about coming to experience the world in terms of no self.

SPENCER: So obviously you have an analytical belief about the self not being there. But I'm wondering, what is your experience of the self now? Do you no longer experience having a self?

JAY: I think that for all of us, that depends on when that question is being asked. One kind of time where the self illusion disappears for most of us is when we're in what are called in the sports psychology world, flow states. If you're a good skier, a really good skier, and you're going down a mountain, you're not consciously aware of, "Here's me now. I'm on the outside edge of my ski. Now I'm on the inside edge. Now I'm leaning forward." You're just in this flow state in which you kind of disappear from your own consciousness. Or if you're a soccer player and you're on the field, you're not thinking to yourself, "Oh, here I am on the right wing. There's my center. If I pass the ball 10 meters in front of him, given the speed at which he's running, he's going to get there. Now let me kick that ball." If you are thinking that explicitly, you're not a good soccer player. To be good requires transcending that kind of explicit thought and entering a flow state in which you are not consciously aware of yourself, the ball, your co-players, or the opposition on the field. You're just reacting. Some of us who play sports or play music or do things like that are lucky enough to enter some of those flow states and have this self-illusion kind of fall off. Here's a cool thing, though: most of us don't notice the fact that we're in flow more often than not with respect to parts of our existence. If you're a normal adult and not significantly disabled, and you're just walking down the street, you're not thinking, "Left foot, right foot. Make this left. Extend my left foot far enough out on this step so that I don't fall over. Then move my right foot, shift my balance. Now, from foot to foot." You walk in a state of flow. If you didn't, you'd be in trouble. When we talk with one another, we are in a state of flow with respect to our language. "I'm just talking. I'm not thinking. What word am I going to utter next? How will I pronounce that syllable? How will my lips and my larynx move in order to do that? If I had to do that, I couldn't talk." In all of those states, the self illusion kind of falls off. We're not thinking about it. It comes up less frequently than we sometimes think. It does for some of us, maybe a lot, but it's generally coming up in affectively charged states or introspective moments or times when we're planning or explicitly thematizing ourselves. It's worth focusing on the difference between the nature of our consciousness at those moments and the nature of our consciousness when we're in flow, to see that if we set our goal as increasing this percentage of our lives that we live in flow, then we've set our goal as living more of our life in which the self illusion falls away. The last thing to say is flow is associated with expertise and with pleasure and with joy, and the thematization of self is associated with incapacity, with amateur status or kind of beginner status, with discomfort, with self-consciousness, with pain and suffering. Moving into a place where we spend more time in flow and with respect to more parts of our lives is a way of moving ourselves into a happier life.

SPENCER: That's really interesting to me. Some of the meditation teachers I've had on the podcast before have described the loss of sense of self in a way that seemed really different than flow. It seemed like they were describing it as they had a meditation experience, and then the sense of self was kind of permanently gone. Do you think that in those states they're achieving something that is still very analogous to flow that we've all experienced? It's just that it's a more permanent state?

JAY: Yes, and a more global state, so that if I'm in flow with respect to language, I might not at that same time be in flow with respect to dicing onions or vice versa. But to be in a very generalized flow state for most of our life would be really cool, and I think that's what we're looking at when we try to imagine cultivating a pervasive sense of no self. That's difficult, and it may be something that many of us never achieve, but it might be something that many of us can get closer to than we think.

SPENCER: How does that state differ from being distracted? For example, let's say you're watching a really captivating movie. You may not, in that moment, be at all aware of yourself or have a sense of ego or sense of self. Is that different or the same?

JAY: I suppose it depends upon what your consciousness is like at that time. I can imagine being absorbed in a movie in a very self-absorbed way. I can also be absorbed in a movie in a very non-self-absorbed way. There are different kinds of attention, different kinds of focus, and different kinds of identification.

SPENCER: That's interesting for me. So what would a self-absorbed kind of focus on a movie be? Can you give an example?

JAY: Yeah, one instance is where I start feeling the emotions in the movie and start identifying with them. If you start getting scared in a scary movie, then you're projecting yourself in there. Or if you start crying in a movie, like when I'm watching Dr. Zhivago for the 100th time, and I cry at the end, as we all do, then I'm feeling as though something's happened to me as a result of that movie or that I'm implicated in this. Sometimes that can feel very pleasurable, and it's something that movie makers attempt to do for us because we're kind of addicted to that. But that's the kind of pleasure that Shanti Deva — the guy I mentioned before — describes as honey on a razor blade. It's really sweet, but what's under that is a real projection of self. I can also imagine being absorbed in a film in a way where I'm just appreciating the beauty and the success or the failure, for that matter, of the film, where the dominant emotion isn't how I feel as a result of seeing it, but rather a kind of admiration and gratitude for the filmmaker, the actors, or the cinematography. In that case, I discover that I'm just lost in this, and I'm not lost in a way that implicates my own affective life. I'm lost in a way that implicates real appreciation.

SPENCER: So what does this journey look like for you of reducing the sense of self? Is it a particular experience where your sense of self was reduced in some global way, or has it been a gradual learning of how to have less sense of self?

JAY: I don't really know what that is. I don't consider myself to be an expert on my own psychology, but what I try to do is become more attentive to those moments or periods when the sense of self isn't there, when I often feel like I'm better at whatever it is that I'm doing, and try to extend those and search for that kind of experience. I'm not saying that I succeed or that I succeed very much, but just that the way it works for me is to try to be aware of when self-grasping is there, ask myself what's making it, and see what I can do to ameliorate it — sometimes I'm more successful than others — but also to really actively notice those times when self has disappeared and to ask, "What led to that? How can I extend that?"

SPENCER: I've been doing an experiment on myself recently where I have this timer cube, where if you turn it on its side, it will run a timer for a certain amount of time, and whenever it goes off, I try to be mindful, and then I'll turn it back over, so it will reset the timer. It's nice. It's definitely increasing how much time I spend being mindful, present in the moment, just experiencing what's around me. But it's still so hard to do it when the timer is not going off. When the timer goes off, I can do it, but then one minute later, I'm just back to my ordinary ways.

JAY: Nobody ever said that this kind of cultivation is easy. If you read the classical Buddha scriptures, they don't talk about it as something that you succeed in over a lifetime. They think about it as something that takes many lifetimes. The rhetoric there is all about how very difficult this is, not about how easy it is. Each of us, I think, can take a little bit of solace in the fact that this isn't something you accomplish this afternoon. It's an ongoing project, and attempting to achieve a permanent, perfect experience of selflessness might be setting the bar way too high for most people.

SPENCER: Do you think that trying to reduce your own suffering is actually a good motivation to explore this? Or do you think that that's somehow self-defeating if that's why you're going into it?

JAY: I think it's much better to say that what you want to do is to release suffering, not to reduce suffering, not to reduce my suffering. Depersonalize suffering and recognize that suffering is suffering, and you do what you can to reduce it without needing to figure out whether it's mine or somebody else's. That has to be addressed.

SPENCER: An idea you sometimes hear in discussions of Buddhism is this idea of separateness, that we perceive ourselves as being separate from others in the world. Could you explain that concept, and how does it relate to what we've been discussing already?

JAY: I think it's very closely related. Now, there's an obvious sense in which you and I are different persons. If we don't recognize that, there's some psychopathology here. You're in New York, and I'm in Massachusetts. Your show, and I'm the guest, and so forth. There are differences between us. I'm older than you are. It's not to say that everybody is the same person if there are no distinctions to be drawn. It is to say that there is a certain kind of difference or distinction that is dangerous and pernicious and that we want to try to eradicate in our experience. One way to think about that is the difference between subject and object as implicated in the subject-object duality that emerges when we posit a self. Here's what I mean by that. There's something very natural about thinking that my relationship to the world is that, "I'm the experiencer of the world, and the world is the object that I experience." So when I think that way, I think, "Ah, I'm the subject here; Spencer's just the object among other objects, like my computer, at the desk that it's on, like other people somewhere else who might be objects, and so forth. There's something rather special about me because now I can distinguish between the people who are close to me and the people who are distant, the people I like, the people I don't like, the people I think of as friends, the people I think of as enemies, the people I think of as colleagues, the people I think of as adversaries." What I'm doing is seeing each of these beings as an object set out in space, or in a notional sort of space, in relation to me, and that I'm sitting at the origin of that. I call this the polar coordinate view of the world. There I am at the origin, and everything else is understood in relation to me. That gives me a very special place, a place at the center of the universe. One way of thinking about that is the way that economic theory asks us to think about it. In microeconomic theory, we say that somebody's rational if and only if they constantly work to maximize their own benefit without worrying about the benefit or suffering of others. Now I think that's totally irrational. Anybody who thinks that they can be happy while everybody else is unhappy is out of their minds. And anybody who thinks that there's something very special about their own happiness that makes it worthwhile for them to pursue it, as opposed to the happiness of others, is also out of their minds. That's what subject-object duality looks like. The idea is not that I start thinking of Spencer and Jay as identical. It's that I do not think of Jay as the subject and Spencer as my object.

SPENCER: Why is it out of one's mind to pursue your own happiness and not other people's happiness? What's the flaw in the thinking there?

JAY: Because there's no way that you can be happy if everybody around you is miserable. If you think about the gated community approach to life, and you say, "Okay, what I'm going to do is build a big wall around my life and maybe a few bodyguards to patrol it, and I'll make sure everything's cool for me and miserable for everybody else," then the response is that everybody else is going to kind of want what I got, and I'm going to have to hire a few more bodyguards, and I'm not going to have many friends, because each one of those friends is going to be a potential thief or enemy or invader, and I'm going to be a lonely, nasty person, as opposed to somebody who can simply relax in their lives. The Gershwins did this one — we're getting at this when they did Porgy and Bess — they wrote that beautiful song, I've Got Plenty of Nothing. The idea is that if you simply grasp things for yourself, you're going to end up being a lonely miser, whereas if you set your life as a mechanism for making other people happy, you're going to be able to bask in and enjoy the happiness of others that you produce.

SPENCER: So is that simply a pragmatic claim that pragmatically, if you want to be happy, you should also focus on making others happy, or is there a deeper philosophical claim there?

JAY: I think it's a deeper philosophical claim that also has pragmatic consequences. The deeper philosophical claim is that we are hyper-social beings. We are deeply interdependent. None of us gets to be a person without a whole lot of other persons around us, and none of us gets to be happy without relationships, and none of us can be happy when other people are miserable. That might feel like happiness, but it's not. And so if you want to be happy, the only way to do that is to work for the happiness of others.

SPENCER: Maybe this is a naive interpretation, but if you take this idea of craving and aversion, it seems like it's saying, "If you don't have craving, you don't have aversion, then you're happy." So how does this connect to this idea of interdependence?

JAY: Well, it connects to it because craving and aversion, or attraction and aversion, are egocentric attitudes. I crave or I'm attracted to something because I want it for me. I'm averse to something because I don't want it near me. All of that requires seeing myself as, again, at the center of the universe, the thing proximity to which could constitute happiness or suffering. If I stop seeing myself that way, stop seeing myself as having a special location in the universe that makes it the case that I'm the only person whose interests matter, then I'm able to enjoy the happiness of others. When you think about the states that Buddhist ethicists raise as states of moral maturity, one of those states that we don't even have a really good name for in English is mudita, and that is taking joy in the success of others. Curiously, we've got a word for the reverse of that, schadenfreude, taking joy in the misery of others, but we don't have a word for taking joy in the happiness of others. If you imagine being able to feel happy because somebody else is in a happy state, and then you recognize how many people there are in the world who can be happy, you recognize that you can really enhance your own well-being by simply allowing the success of others to be a source of your own joy, instead of a source of envy or resentment. Similarly, if you imagine your own suffering as no different from the suffering of others, and can recognize that there's always suffering that can be alleviated, you can lead a life that really does a lot to remove suffering and not simply focus on yourself.

SPENCER: Is this where Buddhist ethics gets tied in with the ideas of the illusion of the self and the illusion of separateness, because it's sort of saying, it's not really about your own ego. It's about your interconnectedness to everyone else.

JAY: That's exactly right. When we drop the self-illusion, then we see ourselves in terms of interdependence, and we see that our happiness is interdependent with the happiness of others. Our suffering is interdependent with the suffering of others, and our ability to make ourselves happy depends on our ability to make others happy.

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SPENCER: Even if they're not Christian, in terms of their religion, most people who grew up in America are at least influenced by kind of Christian thinking, because that's the kind of water you swim in. I'm wondering, how does the idea of Buddhist ethics differ fundamentally from these ideas of Christian ethics that many of our listeners will have been steeped in?

JAY: That's a good question, and it's worth seeing that a great deal of our ethical thought in the West, even when it's not explicitly religious, is grounded in ideas from the Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. One way of seeing that is that we often think of ethics in terms of rights and obligations. And obligations are things that are generated by commands, so we think about the 10 Commandments. For instance, why shouldn't you kill people? Because God says so. Why shouldn't you steal? Because it's wrong. Why is it wrong? Because God says so. In ethical thought, as opposed to religious thought, that gets transformed into our conscience or the voice of practical reason or something like that. But when you get right down to it, most of the way we think about ethical thought in the West is usually in terms of commands, obligations, rights that others are commanded to respect, and so forth. As a consequence, ethics is thought of very much as an individual thing. It's thought of as arising from my relationship to God or my relationship to pure reason or my relationship to conscience or something like that, and that is a relationship of obedience. Buddhist ethics doesn't work that way. For one thing, there's no God in the background. For another, Buddhists see the fundamental ethical problem as the problem of the ubiquity of suffering and the need to alleviate that suffering, and because that suffering arises from a particular way of seeing the world and seeing other beings. Buddhists see the path to the alleviation of suffering as one of transforming the nature of our experience. It's much more a moral phenomenology than a kind of deontology, a kind of study of obligations and permissions. When we see ourselves as selves standing in relationship to a commander, that's one way of seeing ethical life, but the Buddhist way of seeing ethical life is to see ourselves as part of a vast interdependent web of existence, a web that is permeated by suffering, but suffering that arises from seeing things the wrong way. It offers us a way out by coming to see things more correctly and by helping others to see things more correctly.

SPENCER: Is the suggestion that if you see reality as it actually is, then ethics will come out of that way of seeing?

JAY: That is what ethics is. The study of ethics and the practice of ethics is the study and practice of how to experience the world and how to experience oneself in the world. Action flows from that. But Buddhist ethical thought is not particularly concerned with what I ought to do or what I shouldn't do. It's concerned with how I see the world. Because somebody who sees the world in the right way doesn't go off doing really awful things and causing suffering. Somebody who sees the world in the wrong way does that.

SPENCER: Sometimes, when people think about a Buddhist monk, they think of someone who's sort of isolated at the top of a mountain meditating all day. They may wonder, how is that ethical? It's sort of just a detached existence.

JAY: Remember that most monks are not on tops of mountains, and most monks don't spend much time meditating. Most monks who are in monasteries are doing something like teaching, studying, running the monastery, managing the publication office, taking visitors on tours, cooking, cleaning, farming, or working as a monastic doctor. Meditators are a special subclass, and they're there to develop really deep insights that they can then share with others and help others cultivate. That is one specialty, but it's not about going off on a mountaintop or to a meditation hut or a forest for one's own purposes. It's in order to make oneself a better teacher and resource for others.

SPENCER: They're kind of like explorers of the mind, and they can bring back insights.

JAY: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So that's an important activity, but it's not by any means the central activity of monastic life, and it's not an activity that is done for one's own sake.

SPENCER: Because the way that this is sometimes described, it almost makes it seem like what they're trying to do is just free themselves from suffering. But it sounds like you'd say that that's a misconception of what's happening.

JAY: That's a deep misconception. One undergoes that kind of training in order to make oneself a better instrument to alleviate other suffering. So think of the analogy you want: if somebody goes to medical school, they're not going to medical school because they want to become a doctor as one hopes. They're going to medical school because they've recognized that by becoming a doctor, they can alleviate and cure illnesses and alleviate suffering in others. That's the doctor you want, by the way, not the one who said, "Damn, doctors drive a lot of Porsches. Doctors live in big houses. Maybe I'll do that." That's not the doctor you want. The doctor you want is the one who said, "Doctors can alleviate suffering. I'm going to undergo the arduous career of medical training in order to do that." And that's the kind of motivation that we see in serious meditators.

SPENCER: You mentioned that in Buddhism, we don't have a God saying what's right and wrong. But one thing that I think can be confusing to people is that in the stories of Buddha, Buddha does encounter gods, and it sort of was, as I understand it, kind of coming from or reacting to, in some way, Hinduism, where there are lots of gods. So what is the role of gods in Buddhism?

JAY: Well, it depends on what Buddhist tradition you're living in. When you look at the Indian roots of Buddhism, and Buddhism as it developed in India, it's developing in a culture that's got lots of gods running around all over the place. There are local gods, there are celestial gods, there are powerful gods, there are powerless gods. There are gods of all kinds, and they're just kind of regarded as part of the natural world. The important thing to point out is that those gods, those devas, or divinities, are not like the Abrahamic God. They're not the God who is omniscient, omnipotent and created the world and gets to tell us what to do. They're just kinds of powerful supernatural beings running around. And that is part of a kind of Indian cosmological context. If you look at Buddhism, if it then evolves, say in East Asia or in the West, those deities tend to drop out of the picture pretty quickly. And they drop out of the picture because they're Indic things. They're not Japanese or Chinese or Korean or American sorts of things, and there's no sense in which they're central to the Buddhist world. They're central to the Indic world in which Buddhism evolved.

SPENCER: Then is the view that they're just sort of part of the mythology and the storytelling, but they're not actually something that exists in?

JAY: Yeah, that's a useful way of thinking about them.

SPENCER: Got it. And then, what about reincarnation? Because sometimes when I talk to secular Buddhists, who are really serious meditators, I almost have this feeling that they're slightly embarrassed about reincarnation, rather than adopting it as part of the philosophy. So I'm curious, how do you think about reincarnation as part of Buddhism?

JAY: Okay, the first thing to do is to be careful about words. Buddhism is not a religious or philosophical tradition that endorses reincarnation. It does endorse, in a lot of its traditions, rebirth. And I want to really draw a sharp distinction between those two. When we think about reincarnation, which is a Hindu doctrine, we're thinking about having a self that is then incarnated or embodied in different bodies, and that self survives biological death and re-emerges after biological birth. To take the analogy that we have in the Bhagavad Gita, it's as Krishna says, "Just like putting on different clothes in the morning after you take the dirty ones off at night, it's still you, but it's a different body." That's reincarnation and Buddhism is poised against that. When Buddhists talk about rebirth, what they're talking about, if they're talking about cosmologically, is the idea that this kind of psychophysical continuum that constitutes you as a person during a life can survive as a continuum across death and birth, and in particular, the psychological end of it does so. Just as you are literally a different person or a different being right now than you were at the beginning of this discussion, because now you're half an hour or an hour older, you've been reborn constantly, moment by moment in this life. A lot of Buddhists, especially in countries like India, Southeast Asia, and Tibet, believe that that same kind of being reborn as a causal consequence of an earlier state of a person occurs after biological death and into biological birth, because they think that the psychological continuum is in some ways independent of the physical continuum. That's a belief that has kind of arisen out of, as I said, the Indic tradition in which thinking about identity and personhood in terms of multiple lives is pretty familiar. Now, when Buddhism went to China, nobody wanted to hear that their ancestors were reborn. That was not a cool thing. So rebirth just kind of quietly dropped out of central status in Buddhism in China. If you look at Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhist traditions, you don't see this emphasis on rebirth or much discussion of it at all, as you do, for instance, in Indian, Tibetan, and Southeast Asian traditions, where that is very much part of the cultural milieu. As Buddhism has gone to the West, and it's alive in places like the United States, Europe, Australia, and so forth, you don't see a whole lot of talk about rebirth either. It's not part of our cultural mix. But there is something important about talking about rebirth, and again, I want to point that out in two different respects. First, I think it's a very important metaphor for what happens to us constantly within our biological lives. We are reborn as different individuals with different views, different values, and different cares at many different stages of our life. To think of ourselves as selves with something continuous through that, instead of a sequence of beings, and to think of the being that we are now as hopefully a better being or a more mature being than the one who was there a few years ago, that's a very helpful way of thinking about us. When you think about the cosmology of rebirth in Buddhism, with all of the different realms — hell realms, deity realms, animal realms, pretas realms, or the hungry spirits, human realms — it's a way of thinking about how from moment to moment, we're constantly being reborn or re-emerging in different kinds of realms. You might be stuck in traffic and feel like you're in a hell realm, and a little bit later at home with your family and feel that you're in a deity realm. You might feel a really humane attachment to somebody and feel that you're in a human realm, or realize that you're snapping at somebody and reacting in a really vicious way, and recognize that you're in an animal realm. So thinking that way can be very useful psychologically, but we can also think between lives. One way to put this is people sometimes ask, "Do you believe in past and future lives?" As a kind of metonym for asking the question, "Do you believe in personal rebirth?" The important answer to that is, "Damn right, I believe there were past lives. Lots of people lived before I did, and I'm hoping that there will be future lives people will live after me." One of the points about those lives that's important is that those past lives all contributed to making me who I am now — my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my teachers, their teachers, people who established the laws and customs of the United States, the people who caused them to rebel against England, people who immigrated to this country — all of those past lives help determine who I am now, and everything that I do now has effects or will have effects on lives that come in the future. I don't need to think about those as my life; that's self-grasping. I don't have to think that I had a life before I was born or that I will have a life after I was born. But the very idea that there are causal connections between past lives, whoever they were, and my current life and my current life and future lives, whoever they will be, tells me that I have a moral debt of gratitude to those who went before me and a moral commitment to those who go after me. So I don't think the talk about rebirth is idle, even if we don't think of it in terms of personal rebirth.

SPENCER: How do you personally think about the Buddha? Do you think of the Buddha as a person who discovered really important truths about psychology? Or do you look at the Buddha in a totally different way? I'm just curious about your personal conception of the Buddha.

JAY: The word the Buddha, it's not a name, it's an epithet, and it means the guy who woke up and he had a name. His name was Siddhartha Gautama, and he was born, as far as we know, in a small kingdom of Kapilavastu in southern Nepal, and he lived for about 80 years and died in Kushinagar in present-day Uttar Pradesh in India. What we know about him is scanty, but we know that he spent most of his life as a wandering mendicant, giving a lot of talks and establishing a monastic order that has survived to this day. I think of him as one of the more profound philosophers, thinkers, and religious leaders in the history of the world, and somebody who lived about 2600 years ago in that region of northern India, southern Nepal.

SPENCER: One thing I find so fascinating about Buddhism is that it provides an entire psychological system about how the mind works, and a whole set of insights. Whereas it seems like systems like Christianity are not. They're not even attempting to do the same thing, as far as I can tell. They're trying to tell you about how the universe works, how you should live, but not give you personal psychological insight the way that Buddhism seems to do. Do you think that's right?

JAY: Well, yes and no. It depends on how you think about the boundaries of each tradition. A lot of us, when we approach Buddhism, spend a lot of time with philosophical texts, as opposed to specifically religious or ritual practices. Though, there are some people for whom ritual practices are what's important and the philosophy is not important at all. They might say, "Yeah, there's all that stuff, but what's really important is my particular practice." You have to remember that the Christian world gave us a lot of philosophy too. It gave us not just the big Christian philosophers like Aquinas, Plotinus, and Augustine, but it also gave us Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and all of those people who are doing a lot of philosophical and psychological work. It just depends on how broadly you define the boundaries of any one of these traditions. When we think about these things in the West, we tend to think about them in terms of religion versus philosophy, and we kind of put Christianity in the religious category. We don't do quite the same thing for Buddhism. If we thought of just ritual Buddhism and just ritual Christianity, I think we'd have a fair comparison. Then Buddhist philosophy and Christian-inspired philosophy would also provide a fair comparison. I don't think the differences are that huge in terms of scope; in doctrine, yes, but not in terms of scope.

SPENCER: If someone wants to explore some of the ideas we discussed today more deeply, what would you recommend? I know that you yourself have some books on the topic.

JAY: There's a great deal written in recent years about Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. I would recommend picking up a good introductory text on Buddhism, and there are many of those. I don't want to endorse one rather than others, but also give yourself the pleasure of reading some of the classic Buddhist scriptures, reading some of the Buddha's teachings in the Pali canon, reading some of the beautiful, poetic texts composed by Buddhists in India, and also finding your local Dharma Center, your local Buddhist Study Center, see who's teaching and whether there's something fun to listen to. That's what I would do.

SPENCER: Do you think these ideas can really be understood without meditating? Or do you think that meditation serves an experiential part of trying to understand some of these concepts?

JAY: I think that you can understand the concepts and the ideas without meditating. It may be more difficult, but I don't know if it's impossible for them to have a transformative effect on you without deep familiarity. Part of what meditation does is give you that deep familiarity, but long study and long conversations and immersion in the ideas could also constitute that familiarity.

SPENCER: Anything else you want to touch on before we wrap up?

JAY: No, just to thank you for a wonderful conversation and to wish all of your listeners very happy lives. Lives that are happy because they contribute to the happiness of others.

SPENCER: Jay, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

JAY: Okay. Thanks, Spencer, take care. Bye.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks, "If you had a billboard in Times Square but couldn't place an advertisement on it, what would it say?"

SPENCER: I don't know, but I can give you a meta answer, which is that I would go through probably thousands of different possibilities, trying to do it in a sort of semi-automated way based on some criteria, try to winnow it down to maybe a few hundred, manually review them and think about the trade-offs that they have, and probably then market-test some of them — [and] once I have my top 20, actually start testing them in a study, showing them to people, seeing their reactions, seeing what it provokes for them, seeing if it's producing the types of effects that I hope, and then eventually leading to my final attempt. What kind of effects would I want to create with it? I think there's a lot of different things you could try to do in the world that could be good. You could get people to try to be more nuanced, you could get people to try to be more understanding of each other, you could get people to try to see the other side of issues, and so on. What's achievable on a billboard? Well, that's a tough call, right? So you'd have to — I think — do a lot of experiments and actually test things out.