https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6G0ud0xSq94
But even in the best of times, right, even when things are going really well and everything experience is very smooth and we’re getting what we want and, you know, we’re, you know, our favorite treats are just an arm’s length away and we’re filling our mouths with gum drops or whatever it is. We’re gratifying this thing at the center of our experience. And it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent. It’s just, you know, it’s just, you get to the thing you want and you gorge yourself on it. And then not only- Then you want a new thing. You want a new thing. I mean, then you need to drink a water because this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is, is too cloying and too much. And you’ve got to wash that out so that you just, I mean, you wouldn’t want to stay in that state even if you could. And there’s some, there’s kind of this rolling dissatisfaction, even in satisfaction that we all encounter, even in the best of times, right? Even when you literally can get anything, more or less anything you want. And yet we know at any moment it can be subverted by something terrible happening. You know, at any moment you can suddenly feel like you’re, you might be having a heart attack, right? And then that becomes the thing that the, this sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon. And it makes life, I mean, this, again, the sense of being this vulnerable center, right? It makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by, you know, increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience, right? We have to control this thing because at any moment, we’re constantly, if you just look at- Yeah, well at any moment we might die. Yeah, we’re avoiding death, you know, but even, you know, even for those of us who don’t think about death very often, and there are those people, we’re constantly modifying our experience so as to avoid discomfort, whether it’s social discomfort or physical discomfort, or just every correction in our body. I mean, if you just try to sit still for an hour, you’ll notice that all of the micro adjustments of in posture that you’re now no longer making are made because you really don’t have to wait long before you feel miserable. I mean, your body, the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home and just resolving not to move is quite extraordinary. It’s just, you know, it’s just, there’s no position that’s comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now. Do you ever read the fine print that appears when you start browsing in incognito mode? 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Stop letting strangers invade your online privacy by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan yt. That’s ex pr ess vpn dot com slash jordan yt and get three extra months free. Expressvpn.com slash jordan yt. Okay, so when you when you rise out of that into this meditative state, what what’s your experience and what has that done for you personally and ethically? Okay, so the starting point, which I’ve just dimly sketched out of being a subject in the head, right? I mean, this is something that I will be familiar to 99% of our audience or, you know, 99.999% of our audience. People feel that they are, they don’t feel identical to their bodies, they feel like they have bodies, and now, you know, they might be told, okay, you might want to look into this practice of meditation, you might want to just understand yourself a little better. Here, start with this practice, you can close your eyes, and pay attention to the feeling of breathing, you know, the sensation of breathing in the in the in the rising falling of their chest or the air passing in their nostrils. And every time you get lost in thought, just come back to the raw sensation of breathing. It’s a very, you know, basic exercise of, you know, what’s called mindfulness. And the moment you try to try to do that, you begin to discover or, you know, some moments down the line, you discover that it’s very hard to do that your that your default state is to get distracted by a conversation you’re having with yourself. And to forget all about this project of paying attention to the present moment, and it could be it doesn’t matter what it is, but you know, the breath in this case. And, and so it is in fact, true to say that for most people, I mean, literally 99.9% of our audience, they couldn’t pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say, even if their lives depended on it, right? It’s just, it’s simply not in the cards, it’s not it’s, you know, the fate of the world could depend on it. And someone who’s not really fairly well trained in this, just couldn’t do it. And so that’s interesting, right? What’s interesting is that despite your best efforts, you get carried away by thought helplessly, moment after moment. Now, being able to break that spell, being able to see thought as thought, eventually, once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand, you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object, you begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience. So it’s just, you know, sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and, and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness. But when you can, but this is where this is the kind of crucial, the crucial, you know, almost binary difference, which, which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit. The moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness, rather than what you are in each moment, because what happens is, in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us, in some sense, they kind of come out of nowhere. And that just feels like me, right? So I’m, you know, I’m trying to get a reflexive identification. Well, you wouldn’t act the damn things out if they didn’t feel like you, you know, and so they have to have that impulse to action in them that that’s part of felt identity. Right. So you’re saying that you’re saying, and this is part of, I suppose, part of the Buddhist tradition, particularly, although not only that being the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering, at least under some circumstance, especially being a puppet of them. Yes. Yeah. And so, and so this is so, but the people listening to us now can feel this, you know, that, you know, we’re talking and people are trying to understand the thread of this conversation, but it’s that they have a voice in their head that’s competing with this, right? They, you know, they’re trying to listen to us, but they’re also thinking, right? And the thing is, they might think, well, what the hell is he talking about? Right? Like there’s just some, some intrusive thought comes in or like, oh, no, wait a minute. He didn’t answer the question. That thought that that feels if you’re identified with it, if you don’t see it as mere language appearing in consciousness or mere imagery, right? It feels like me. It’s like, that is the self that is, it feels like what I believe. That’s also interesting. Yeah. Well, one of the things you do in clinical work all the time, especially in the cognitive behavioral field is you help people identify those thoughts in some sense as, as objects that to no longer identify with them and to say, you know, just because you think that it’s not necessarily true, it’s not necessarily you, and it’s not necessarily helpful. Now we can check and see if any of those three, you know, propositions were true. Maybe it is you, maybe you do believe it, and maybe it is useful, but we’re going to start by hypothesizing that some of these automatic thoughts are actually what’s driving your misery. Right. And I really also see that as a tremendous danger of totalitarian ideologies, because they’re thought systems that are almost entirely foreign in some sense to the individual person that invade that cognitive space that you’re describing and then manifest themselves as unquestioning identity. And if they’re blinding the person to some underlying reality, that’s actually revivifying and nourishing and an antidote to suffering, then they’re a tremendous block to exactly that process. Yeah. Yeah. So there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and its connection to suffering. And one is at the level of thought itself, right? So you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts, right? And you can triangulate on your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself and engineer a better conversation with yourself, right? And that’s, yes, in cognitive behavioral therapies. Yeah, you can start thinking like a six-year-old, for example, and start thinking like a 30-year-old. Right. Right. And what’s more, a 30-year-old that actually has good intentions for you, right? Like, a friend, right? You can make your mind your friend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A loved one even. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine that? So, yeah, imagine that. So that’s a totally legitimate way to climb out of the great hole of suffering that people find themselves in. But there’s a more fundamental and I’m not saying, you know, what I’m recommending in terms of meditation and mindfulness here is more fundamental, but it is not, it’s completely compatible with that, you know, more conceptual discursive layer, right? And some things, I would argue some things are best addressed on the discursive layer and some things are better addressed on the more fundamental layer. Well, you know, when you’re sitting meditating, first of all, you’re sitting. And so it’s perfectly reasonable to adopt a mode of thought that’s healthful and productive in relationship to the fact that you’re sitting, you know, those more discursive propositional thoughts that we’ve been describing, they’re higher resolution in some sense and they’re more practically implementable. And so there’s going, you want to get that in order, but that doesn’t mean that this phenomenon that you’re describing that’s outside the entire discursive structure doesn’t exist. And it’s probably also the place we go, at least to some degree, when we go to sleep and we dream and get revivified. It’s outside that discursive landscape and that’s necessary for physiological rejuvenation.