• 00:01:00 Rick’s sabbatical
  • 00:03:00 The difference between mind, the brain and consciousness.
  • 00:13:09 Why change and interconnection can be difficult to recognize and how to find the benevolence in endings.
  • 00:19:00 The influence of the breath on the mind
  • 00:22:56 On empathy and boundaries
  • 00:29:00 Healing from being excluded or bullied
  • 00:32:00 Working with resentment and anger
  • 00:36:00 Two kinds of forgiveness
  • 00:38:12 Four types of awareness for yogic practice
  • 00:43:39 Different kinds of timelessness
  • 00:48:17 Rick’s current focus in spiritual practice
  • 00:42:00 Reseting the fundamental foundations of human society

Second Audio:

Guided 3 Breath meditation 

 

LINKS:

Rick Hanson

https://www.rickhanson.net

Podcast

https://oliviaclementine.com/podcasts

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RAW TRANSCRIPT Please excuse all errors

Olivia Clementine: I’m Olivia Clementine and this is Love and Liberation. Today our guest is Rick Hanson. Rick is a psychologist, senior fellow of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and New York Times bestselling author. His books are available in 31 languages with over a million copies in English alone. He has lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard. Taught in meditation centers worldwide and been featured on the BBC, CBS, NPR and other major media.

How are you doing? 

Rick Hanson: I’m great, honestly. And it’s a funny experience, which I imagine you may have as well, where there’s a lot of spaciousness really. And moving through that space feels like , a swollen river of tasks, lots of in jet sum, they’re all of my own creating essentially. So I have only myself to look at, hopefully I’m, the river is subsiding. I don’t know, cuz I’m not adding any new things to it upstream. But every so often it rains and the distant mountains and the next thing you know, the river’s in full flood again. 

Olivia Clementine: So well said. So poetically said, I mean, you’ve been in sabbatical, like you’ve taken some time off recently, is that what you call it? 

Rick Hanson: Yeah, I call it that, which is my languaging for a, a soft glide path, hopefully into a kind of retirement that’s still engaged, but more and more lightly so, and sabbatical is a good word for it. But it’s an extending, it’s an extending sabbatical. So I pick and choose and frankly you and your podcast were of particular interest to me. 

Olivia Clementine: Happy to hear that. 

Rick Hanson: I had this little saying on my wall for a while that I, I created. Life is simple. Just do whatever you should do right now. And then it just super simplifies just, oh, do that, do that, do that. Chop wood, carry water, empty the cup, help the child go to sleep. 

Olivia Clementine: I love hearing that from your, your perspective, cuz you’ve been in the world that’s quite structured and, and pressurized in many ways. So to actually embody that moment by moment I, I wonder what that’s been like for you. 

Rick Hanson: Yeah. It’s work in progress. But as people say one thing about a householder life, if you’re semi-serious, I think that’s okay. Semi-serious about practice. It really, really forces you, it pushes you right up against equanimity and aspiration, equanimity and compassion right there. And the feedback’s very quick from the world about, because if you can’t maintain your pace as it were, or deal with this email, or this relationship, or that financial question If you can’t deal with that, with the relative sense of wellbeing in the core, boom, instant friction between you and the rope of life, you know, that’s moving through your hands.

Olivia Clementine: I have a few introductory questions so we can all ground into the same language and – the first one is, what is the difference between the mind, brain, and consciousness? 

Rick Hanson: Ah-ha. I don’t know if that’ll ground us, because that kind of question has tended to take people up into the stratosphere, philosophers, deep practitioner, scientists, and ordinary folks.

Well, in the first place, you’re, you’re getting right out the distinction between well, information and matter. All right. Information exists. Intangibly matter exists tangibly, so what that means is that the brain is tangible. The brain is made of gooey tissues, weighs at three pounds.

A lot of what’s in it were atoms that are made inside a star at one time or another in the history of our universe. So it’s, it’s really quite extraordinary, the brain in the nervous system and the body embedded in life. There’s all this physical stuff. Okay? And factors and causes and conditions, you know, are, are involved in materiality, which includes energy since e equals mc squared.

Alright, so we got the, we got the stuff, the hardware, and then we have the mind. What do we mean by that? What I mean, what I mean by that is essentially what is at the bottom of most neuroscientific and neuropsychological and psychological accounts of the mind, which is to say that the mind is all the information represented by a nervous system, that’s how I define it. 

Now, most of that is not accessible to awareness in humans, and we don’t know, of course, what a cat or a lizard or a spider are accessing, but it’s a fairly straightforward definition. We’re used to information being represented by something physical, the meaning of a red light that’s informational.

It’s represented by the electromagnetic waves of a red light. So we have a very familiar distinction between tangible matter and intangible information, both of which are natural phenomena. This is a very important point. Just because information is intangible doesn’t mean that it’s not a natural phenomenon that does not require a supernatural or transcendental account of its existence.

So far so good. Then consciousness. I wanna start with the word awareness, cuz it’s a simple word that we can recognize in our non-human animal cousins. is a cat aware? I think so. Is a cat having experiences is really what I mean, is it hearing, sensing, tasting, touching, wanting? Is it having simple emotional experiences?

 Is it thinking about things in a cat-like way? Yes. It’s having experiences. So if we stay with experiences and experiences occurring in a field of awareness or co-constructed with awareness we then find an similarity, an extension, a kinship, which can feel very viscerally sweet with other non-human creatures.

Quick sidebar. I was just reading a study that came out just the other day about do spider’s dream and. Is a very common phenomenon in the animal kingdom, including all the way down to extremely simple crab light creatures and maybe spiders. And most recently they were scientists. They were observing that a jumping spider, a particular kind of spider while it’s sleeping is having correlations between twitches in its eight legs.

Eight, I guess six. I forget. Insects, spiders, whatever. And rapid movements in its retina, moving back and forth. Much like a dog will do the same. A dog seems to have Dr. Rem like sleep dreaming, which are involve often what are called re replay events or reenactment events. It’s a way for the spider or the dog or the human to kind of consolidate the learning from the day’s experiences, which is really quite helpful, you know, as you’re trying to stay alive in the wild.

So right here we have a connection immediately. Wow. Spiders dreaming. Whoa. What’s going on with that? You know? Okay. So, so far what I’ve been talking about is the ways in which humans and other animals, as best we can infer, are having experiences. They are aware. Aware sometimes, or not aware other times.

It’s all a natural phenomenon. Exactly how the meat makes the mind in terms of how do experiences arise from the information processing of the nervous system is not entirely clear, but absent a supernatural or transcendental explanation, our experiences must be arising from the information processing of the tangible nervous system.

That’s a long way into it, and, but I think it’s a credible and solid one. Then the question is very clear, is that all there is, and when we think about the streaming of consciousness of a squirrel or a cat, and I think it’s really important and not privilege, human consciousness at just right off the top, just in principle, let’s not privilege human consciousness.

Let’s not privilege it compared to the consciousness of a monkey, right? Or a gorilla or, or a cat or a little aunt perhaps, who knows? Do we need some kind of transcendental, universal cosmic consciousness, cosmic awareness to be the necessary condition we’re woven into the fabric of our own human and perhaps the fabric of squirrel like or cat-like experiencing.

That’s the key question, right? And hardcore dogmatic atheists would say no. I think skeptical, agnostic ish scientists would say, don’t know, maybe. But so far, you know, the nervous system itself seems to be both the necessary and sufficient basis for the hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, and so forth of squirrels, people, lizards, you know, and monkeys.

So do we need something more than that? And for me to just jump to the end of the story actually, Two parts. One, the relationship between mind and brain between deliberate mental activity that enlists underlying neural processes to leave lasting beneficial traces behind in the brain, that is hugely full of opportunity and practice and cultivation and reverse engineering of plausibly what might be going on in the brains of people who are dropped into a non-dual self transcendent experience or who are able to maintain deep equanimist love even toward their adversaries, amidst the challenges of everyday life. There’s plenty we can do inside the natural frame. And going all the way now, one view is that, in the fabric of reality as a ground of it, or woven together with it kind of either way. Is a transcendental aspect, which is the Buddha referred to as unconditioned, not subject to condition, passing away thus timeless and thus boundless.

That seems like the minimal necessary description of something transcendentally distinct from the clockwork unfolding deterministically conditioned of the Big Bang universe. Additionally. Additionally, does this ground, does this weave into reality in include perhaps mysteriously, I’d say definitely mysteriously, a universal kind of awareness or consciousness as some experience such that our material phenomena like a pizza or a rock or a sequoia tree or a human body are somehow necessarily woven through with that kind of infinite consciousness. And last, does that infinite consciousness have a quality of benevolence, lovingness, kindness, a generosity, these are deep matters, including as we explore in our practice, shifting the sense of identity increasingly into what you know conceptually is true, the nature of things.

But then you start to feel it more and more, and you start living from that underlying true nature into conventional reality rather than, which is a good intermediate step being in conventional reality, observing that deep nature and longing for it and having intimations of it from time to time, But there’s not yet a full shift of identity that we see around the world in the people who are utterly enlightened. However, we, we talk about it. 

Olivia Clementine: Mm-hmm. incredible. Yeah. 

Rick Hanson: Thanks for letting me just go there. . 

Olivia Clementine: So great, I feel the magnitude, especially, you know, the, the full circling around of, of what’s possible for, for each of us when we actually start to allow ourselves to, to notice how much the brain really shapes, is shaped by it, by what we, as you’ve said, place our attention on.

Rick Hanson: Yeah. 

Olivia Clementine: And I’m wondering too, You know, in speaking of the nature of things, the nature of the mind or the nature of the brain, you know, we always talk about impermanence. Impermanence is, is fundamental, and yet so many people feel very stuck, right? It’s like there’s a lot of feelings of like, but my life isn’t changing and nothing’s changing.

And, and I’m wondering from your perspective, what is happening in the mind that we’re not seeing the changes that are constantly at play, and how do we begin to both witness change and also just allow change to happen more easily? 

Rick Hanson: Well, you’re right, it has super deep question. One I personally have reflected a lot on. Locate the brain and the nervous system, really a, as a physical process and located in terms of evolution. So of course we’re thinking continuity here of early humans. Early homonids, primates, mammals, stretching back 600 million years of evolution has the nervous system evolved, One of its major functions is poignantly and hopelessly to attempt to s slow down.

Im permanent transient processes or extract from them something that seems stable. There is a stable banana there in the other tree that I want to get. I’m a monkey. Back in the day, see the banana. So there actually, as you know, the banana’s continually changing and in terms of matter, slowly changing, changing.

And then in terms of our constructed experience, the visual perception of the banana is being made by underlying metabolic processes that are themselves continually changing very rapidly actually. So how in the world does the brain generate a, a stable percept, a stable perception of a banana that is stable enough for the monkey to form a strategy to go get it?

So you see the necessity of that, and yet it’s within a context of utter turbulence in reality. So it, it’s like a constructed well-intended delusion. So now we have the first thing. And then the second thing is we gotta separate the banana out from the tree. We have to segment, partition, separate, isolate this and that, which is actually continuously embedded in a vast web of life and ultimately a reality in the ground of all, whatever that may be.

So the brain poignantly, to help us every second is trying to do two impossible things, right? Freeze what is changing and separate it from what is continuous. That’s an ongoing struggle. So of course it’s hard for us to recognize inter being because we have a brain that for survival purposes, is designed to construct separations, one of which we’re supposed to be identified with this particular separated body or, and ultimately in human psychology, a sense of a self inside, an entity of some kind that interacts with other entities behind the eyes of other human bodies, right? What, right. So we’re in the middle of this and a lot of what practice is about, and this is why I think it’s, it’s, this is one basis for feeling compassionate for yourself and friendly in your practice.

We’re swimming upstream against a lot of well-intended delusions and cravings and passions that kept our ancestors alive in the stone age and farther back into Jurassic Park a long time ago. So that’s, to me, that’s a why into this. 

And one of the things that I find really helpful in practice is to be able to be comfortable with the endless ending of all that is continuously.

Right, as you know, disappearing beneath our feet. You know, just, woo. There we are at the edge of the waterfall metaphor I used in Buddha’s Brain. We were talking about that book before we started. To be comfortable with the endless transcience, which can become alarming, including, as it’s noted in deep meditative practices, people can just feel a sense of despair or even disgust at existence because as it keeps sweeping away, it, it’s scary and it can feel like, oh, what’s the point? You know? It’s always going well. It’s also always arising. It’s always, always arising, and that arisingness could be well in aspect of the deep inherent benevolence of reality.

Of a kind of giving, a kind of endless generosity that right at the bubbling emergent edge of now continuously. Wow. What an extraordinary ongoing giving into us. As us of us continuously. Wow. So as we get more comfortable with and more in with a felt sense of the endless arising, it makes it easier to try to be comfortable with endless endings.

And as you know, in the Neurodharma book, which focuses on seven major ways of being that get developed as we move up the mountain of awakening as it were, one of them is being able to receive nowness is my poetic way of putting it, to be here now as Ram Dass put it or rest in the power of now as Eckart Tolle put it and other people, great teachers have talked about it in other ways and how to stay in the present. Right. Yeah. 

Olivia Clementine: That’s very helpful. Very clarifying. I also wanna ask you how the breath affects the mind. 

Rick Hanson: One of the amazing things about the time in which we live, which is that we have access now widely to all the contemplative, all the spiritual traditions around the world and in including deep secular trainings of various kinds.

And it’s really interesting, isn’t it, that around the world in all kinds of cultures, there are many practices that involve the breadth in one way or another. And we can start now with modern science in ways that are plausible and respectful and not reductionistic. But still, we know more than nothing.

So why not? Make use of the some things that are developing, we can start to plausibly reverse engineer what in the world is going on while people are doing breath of fire in pranayama, you know, right? How does that change your metabolism? Why does that suddenly make you feel like you’re on a kind of a drug trip?

If you do it for a little while, what? Right or what can be happening if you make your exhalation and your inhalation of roughly the same duration to promote a kind of smooth, coherent pattern of heart rate variability in which the heart rate speeds up as you inhale and then slows down as you exhale , in a symmetrical kind of and what might that do to the vagus nerve network, you know, and it’s two major branches, one in which extends down into the visceral heart and lungs. The other goes up into your face in your inner ear and gets involved with the social engagement system and is very involved with loving relatedness.

So that may be, as we do the kind of breathing pattern I described and force a certain rhythm in the physical heart, which then starts to ripple upward through the initial, the more ancient vagus nerve branch up into the social engagement system, making us more available for relationships. Whoa, what could be happening there?

So a lot going on about the breath in the, in terms of the connection, and I see it as a two-way street and pragmatism helps us move back and forth between the first person perspective in which we mobilize certain experiences where we, we rest in relationship to our experiences in a certain way, such as witnessing them as they float on by in the stream of consciousness.

 And we can also, know ourselves and intervene in ourselves from the third person perspective, the object of biological material perspective. So we could, for example, deliberately manipulate the heart rate or well deliberately do yoga positions that engage the physical body in ways that plausibly feed into our mental processes and experiences.

Which then in turn enlist underlying physical processes in the brain to leave lasting traces behind so that the benefit of our breath practice, let’s say, becomes increasingly woven into the fabric of our nervous system, increasingly hardwired into us in beneficial ways. And that two ways of knowing ourselves from the inside out, first person subjectively, and then outside in third person objectively.

The intersection of those two is what I considered, quote unquote Neurodharma, my made up term for that combination of the two. And at that intersection of those two circles, if you will, mind and matter, right? Mm-hmm. subjective, objective inside, outside is just tremendous. Available to us about ourselves, cuz we are a combined mind and matter process.

We’re a person, we’re a person, process, mind and matter. Mind and matter is one integrated eddy as it were in the streaming of reality. And so if we use those two ways of knowing ourselves and really explore the combination of the two, we’re coming home very close to our underlying true nature in terms of certain fundamental qualities of who we are.

Olivia Clementine: Mmm. And, and in terms of bringing in the significance of empathy. You’ve spoken about how closeness in relationship is so essential for deepening in empathy. Like we have to start to feel comfortable and closeness with other people, which is a big challenge for many people to really show themselves and be present, in that kind of vulnerable way. 

And so I’m wondering, would you share a few things in terms of how can somebody start to feel more comfortable being close and then they can start to have more of a pathway for empathy and, and any elaboration on that, because I think …

Rick Hanson: Oh, sure. 

Olivia Clementine: Empathy’s a word thrown around a lot, but I’m sure you have illumination on the matter you can share with us.

Rick Hanson: Ah, well you’re naming a real issue, which is if empathy simply defined as getting a sense over here of what it’s like for them over there and that sense, as it were, has three major elements of we can get a physical sense in our body of what it’s like to be in their body. We can get a sense emotionally, broadly defined of what their moods are like, their feelings are, like, what’s going on there? And we can get a sense broadly of what they’re thinking or their attitudes, their perspectives, their motivations underneath it all. Are they trying to trick us? Are they really loyal to us? You know, what’s their Enneagram type and how might that affect who they are?

Okay. Empathy, noting that empathy is morally neutral. Empathy itself is not inherently kind. We add forms of benevolence, including warmheartedness to it to bring in compassion, let’s say, or kindness or other responses based on our empathic understanding of another person. 

To be able to be really empathic, which is our nature. As children, we start out being really quite empathic and open, and yet over time we tend to, you know, pull in and create walls and create filters. Maybe cuz our parents were invasive or overwhelming or because maybe we had a parent who was clinically depressed.

Some many children do actually. And it just became overwhelming to, to be open to someone you loved but could not save, could not help. So, for various reasons we develop often, you know, guards, offenses that stop our empathy, what to do about it. Paradoxically, the more autonomous you feel, the more empathic you can be, the more you have a clarity about your own boundaries, your own ongoing resting in the okayness of yourself, then the more open you can be to other people. It’s kind of the classic saying that I think Robert Frost turned into a, you know, a poem: good fences make for good neighbors . 

So you can shore up that sense of your own safe abiding that enables you to really open wide by doing things like tuning into your breathing. Breathing again. Because as you tune into the internal sensations of your breathing, you are more able to have a grounded sense of your own ongoingness. And as you engage what’s called interoception internal sensations, you’re mobilizing activations in the insula, the part of the brain, two of them technically on either side on the inside of your temporal lobes. As you tune into your internal sensations and the insular starts getting more active, that’s like a circuit breaker that quiets activity in the rear word default mode network in your brain where people tend to go when they’re self-absorbed and kind of ruminating or daydreaming or spacing out.

It’s hard to be empathic when you’re self-absorbed. We’re not here. Cuz also in the default mode network is a lot of involvement with what’s called mental time travel. You’re in the past or the future, you’re not in the present. . The only place we can be empathic is in the present. Right? So that will, that will help you.

That’s a simple practice to do. I do little visualizations like imagine sometimes with some people that “shields up Scotty” and then there’s a force field around me or a kind of picket fence between me and the other person, or some of that foot thick glass they use in submarines, I guess whatever at the bottom of the ocean. That’s highly pressurized, but you can still see through. I think it’s also helpful to just have perspective. 

Maybe I’ll finish on this. Where you realize with compassion that the other person is suffering and you feel for them and you can wish them well, while recognizing that their fates are not your own. That the causes in the vast ocean of reality that manifested that wave alongside you, metaphorically in the sea, are not the causes that have manifested you. And there’s a fundamental differentiation between the two. And much as we are responsible for our karmas, as we were, they are responsible for theirs.

And so there’s a combination and integration of both compassion with also capacity to recognize differentiation in a context of personal equanimity, that’s not to be used as a spiritual bypass or as a way to turn away from the causes of suffering worldwide, which are so structural. Most of them are very structural and completely unnecessary, and it’s okay to have a feeling of outrage about that. It’s fiery even, and very direct. No, hopefully without hostility or hatred, you know, poisoning your heart. 

Olivia Clementine: I see a lot of people that have been very impacted by bullying, you know, being pushed out some kind of social rejection when they were younger and whether it’s subtly or physical, but it really impacts their current life.

There’s a lot of choices that are not aligned for them relationally, ways that they view themself. And I think you’ve spoken a little bit about self-rejection and, and ways to work in the mind around healing that, and I’m wondering if you would share, cause it seems something that most people have had some experience of.

Rick Hanson: Oh yeah. Yeah. So, huge, important, of course, it’s upsetting to be excluded and rejected. We’re profoundly social mammals. Profoundly social primates. Exile was a death sentence back in the Serengeti Plains. We need other people. Whether it’s being rejected by a caregiver, when you’re one year old, or being bullied when you’re three by your older sibling, or shamed and put down by your, the other kids in junior high school and all the way up to harassment and mistreatment, you know, in corporate America or wherever you might be.

It’s huge. So number one, of course, it’s gonna affect you. And to accept that and to realize there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Of course you’re rattled by this, you’re human, of course, you’re affected by it. You’re not a weakling. There’s nothing wrong with you. And of course it has a legacy cuz the brain is designed to learn, period.

Especially from negative experiences. Particularly negative experiences when we’re young, which particularly, particularly are involving relationships and the brain’s designed to hold onto that emotional learning. So of course you’re still affected by. 

Second point, bring compassion to yourself. Really important, be kind to yourself especially if they have not been kind to you as a compensation for that in part especially.

 Third, look for in the here and now, authentic experiences that are antidotes or soothing medicine for those other experiences of inadequacy, feeling hurt, feeling abandoned, feeling rejected, shamed. The internalization of those oppressors to use that language from diversity work, which we could broaden, I think perhaps.

 So look for legitimate, authentic, believable experiences that are opportunities for you today of feeling included or seen or appreciated, or liked or loved, or five major aspects of being cared about. Included, seen, appreciated, liked, and loved. And when you’re having those experiences today, bring a big spoon to the banquet.

Slow it down to really help those experiences sink in again and again and again, a breath or two at a time. Feeling them in your body, focusing on what feels good about them. These three, extending the duration of the experience, feeling it in your body, and tracking what is rewarding about it will heighten positive neuroplasticity will heighten the internalization of that experience so that gradually a breath at a time, a day at a time, as synapse at a time, you can actually fill that hole in your heart so that over time you carry with you a healing from that old bullying and a more general sense of self and lovableness and likable, that’s increasingly unconditional cuz you’ve hardwired it into your nervous system and it’s with you wherever you go. I really walked this path myself,. been personally super important to me, to gradually starting when I, I landed in college at 16, skipped a grade late birthday.

And so by the time, I’m sure my midway through my freshman year, I stumbled on this whole notion of taking in the good to fill up what was empty inside and to bring in healing for what was wounded inside. 

Olivia Clementine: I’m also wondering in terms of feeling the burden of resentment or somebody that feels wronged, how can they start to still imbue their minds with love and compassion rather than kind of going on that other trail that ends up being self-harming.

Rick Hanson: Yeah. Huge. When we are wronged, it’s natural to feel wronged, so again, when you’re bullied, it’s natural. It’s where we start. It’s not where we end , it’s where we start. I think to release over time authentically the, the affliction and the poison of resentment, which as the saying puts it, it’s like taking medicine or taking poison, rather, it’s like taking poison resentment is and waiting for others to die, right?

It harms us typically much more than it harms others, and people can become quite attached to grievance with others, and you can see how vulnerable we are as human animals to organizing around shared grievance. Even to the extent that’s quite delusional about imagining some other that has wronged us terribly and or is about to really harm us.

And you could see the way that authoritarian tyrants throughout history, including at the present time around the world, you know, can really delude people to organize around shared grievances, shared resentments in ways that it can become truly catastrophic in terms of terrible things throughout history and in the present.

So we’re very vulnerable to getting aggrieved, right? So watch out, watch out for the reward value. And it’s interesting, technically among the so-called negative emotions of sadness, fear, shame, and anger. Think of them as four broad categories. Anger’s the one that’s most rewarding. Sadness doesn’t feel very good. Feel fear and shame. Inadequacy hurt, doesn’t feel very good anger. You know, the saying in Buddhism about anger is that basically it’s got a honeyed tip and a poisoned barb. So what do we do? I think it’s really helpful to clarify in your own mind the justice or injustice that are involved. To what extent were you actually wronged and what actually happened factually and what are the relevant values?

That might sound kind of philosophical, but no, it’s very real. Like what did, what did they actually do factually? And what are the standards or values that were violated that are the basis for a resentment rather than just bumping up against you randomly, you know, walking through on, on a sidewalk side.

 I think it’s really helpful to both shrink exaggerated grievances. on the other hand to really own real grievance, to really own it. And I think if you belong to a group of people who have had their legitimate grievances, invalidated or even punished, if they’re expressed, like obviously as a group of people, females girls and women or other people that are been structurally mistreated throughout history and, and at the present time, it’s especially important to claim for yourself your, your grievance and your sense that, hey, this was not cool.

You know, arranging from a minor not cool to horrifyingly uncool, this is not cool. Weirdly enough to really claim your, your sense of, of justice related to whatever happened can help us move toward the release of resentment and even toward forgiveness of one kind or another. So that’s one. 

Second, be really careful. In resentments and grievances and, and see if you can help yourself keep releasing them. 

Third, it really helps to take, you know, action binds anxiety, actions empowering, action addresses the ways that we might have felt helpless. So we do what we can, maybe we, our action is to just disengage from that relationship. Or maybe our action is to talk with allies and friends and kind of get some agreement. Yeah. What a schmuck, who , you know? Yeah. That ain’t, that’s not right. And then you, you kind of, you get it off your chest and you take that action. And then last maybe, and if you want, move toward forgiveness.

There are two kinds of forgiveness for me. The first kind is disentangled forgiveness, where you maybe don’t wanna have anything to do with the person. Maybe if you see him, you still get mad, but it doesn’t preoccupy you. It has not in the language from the Buddha when he talked about his, you know, his runup to awakening, he got to a point, whereas he put it, painful, racking feelings arose, but they did not invade my mind remain.

Stuff arises this side of ultimate awakening, but it need not invade us and occupy us and thus remain. And that’s the key. So we can do a process in the last chapter of my book, resilient with our son Forrest. I wrote it with him, about generosity. There’s the generosity of the giving and forgiving, right?

Including forgiving yourself. And so you can use the practices in that last chapter and you’re trying to help yourself move into a release. You’re not up to a full pardon. That’s the highest level of forgiveness. It’s the classic form of forgiveness where you give them a full pardon. You could still pursue justice intensely. You can still wanna have nothing to do with them, but they’re not burdening you, you’re not burdened with resentment for that one. 

Olivia Clementine: I love your ability to go from the psychological, neuro perspective as well as the dharmic perspective. I mean, obviously that’s your gift, you’re bringing all of those pieces in. And I’m wondering, is there time for me to ask you one more question before we go into the meditation? 

Rick Hanson: Yeah, this is great. Let’s keep going. This is awesome. 

Olivia Clementine: So moving more into the yoga perspectives, can you speak on the four types of awareness and the benefits? So the four are aware of an object, open, aware, turning awareness on awareness, and then also abiding as awareness. Basically about each of them, but then also what are the benefits in our experience of liberation to turn our awareness towards those. 

Rick Hanson: Okay, great. So you’re tracking these four pretty common distinctions.

It gets a little fuzzy between each one, but still there’s a distinction and it’s a way to understand what we’re doing when we meditate. And it’s also a way to understand qualities that we’re developing over time that are operating more and more in the background of our stream of consciousness. And yet they color the whole streaming as they get more and more stabilized in us.

So, Now one, we’re aware of some object. We can do that. Ordinarily my gaze is glancing at my coffee cup. I’m aware of that coffee cup. I’m aware of you. We could meditate on sensations of breathing or a mantra or a image or a feeling. We can do that kind of practice in various concentration practices that you know well, including the Buddhist tradition that can involve even tapping into, through absorption and concentration in a single object that we’re focused on that can become non-ordinary states of consciousness known as the jhanas in the right concentration or wise concentration element of the eightfold path, and in other traditions, samadhis or other non-ordinary states of consciousness. 

Number one, focused attention. Number two, what’s called open awareness, which typically is what people are doing in most mindfulness practices. They’re called mindfulness practices in which you, you stabilize presence ongoing, present moment awareness to the necessary extent, maybe with a background sense of something like your ongoing breathing. And in that stabilized present moment awareness, you become more and more open to the entirety of what’s flowing through awareness at that moment in the present, just letting it go.

You’re basically witnessing the flotsam and jetsam in the streaming of consciousness as it wanders on by. Okay. 

Third, you can become aware of awareness. You can start recognizing awareness is a field right in which you, you experiences are occurring and disengage increasingly from those experiences and move more and more into the fourth stage of abiding as awareness, abiding as awareness.

And as soon as you start thinking about, oh, I’m abiding as awareness, well that thought is an object in awareness. You’re not abiding as awareness in that moment, but increasingly you can just sort of rest as awareness. 

And that then can even become a kind of the fifth step, as it were in which there can be common intimidation of, or a belief in a universal transcendental awareness that somehow infuses your personal related to a body awareness. And there can be sometimes even a shift in which there’s an abiding or resting in that universal consciousness, universal awareness that in effect takes your awareness and your consciousness as an object. Mm-hmm. as a switch potentially available there. So those, those are all good. They’re all useful.

And over time what can happen is that you can, in effect, have more and more of a background trust in. The ongoingness of the unfolding of reality, which over time you feel more and more, one with and lived by gratefully, God smacked with gratitude for how reality is manifesting you Continuously 13.8 or so billionaire after the Big Bang to thank you.

What an extraordinary gift and opportunity that we have. So many crazy things had to happen, including a big asteroid whacking Earth 65 million years ago to knock out all the dinosaurs and allow mammals to kind of move into a bunch of niches and biological niches, and ultimately evolve into us today having this conversation.

What I mean, if we’re not just gobsmacked with gratitude rolling out of bed in the morning, we’re not paying attention. 

Olivia Clementine: That’s so good. So true. Yeah. Bringing us back to the dinosaurs too. The, the full trajectory. Yeah what a journey it’s been. And, and, and thinking also just timelessness in those states.

Sometimes we can experience a state of timelessness or if we’ve heard stories of yogis, some of them go beyond the bounds of time to other times. And from your understanding of mind and meditation, is there a state of timelessness? Like, does that exist? What is timelessness?

Rick Hanson: I just dropped into timelessness with that question. 

Well, let’s see here. Depends kind of what we mean. So I wanna make a distinction between timelessness. I’m gonna do it philosophically. Bear with me. But basically I’m gonna get a distinction between ontology and phenomenology. What I mean is some might say, me included, that ontologically in terms of the nature of reality, in some sense, there is something, or other, and by something I don’t mean a noun, there is something or other that is meaningfully distinct from the time-bound conditioned unfolding of the Big Bang universe.

In which one significant theory is that what time actually is, is the ongoing expansion of the four-dimensional spacetime universe. Much as space is expanding in three dimensions, time is expanding in a single temporal dimension. And so each moment of now is the next instant of temporal expansion of the Big Bang Universe in a natural way.

So if we were to talk about something timeless that’s transcendentally distinct from that time bound expansion, that’s quite, that’s quite a possibility, isn’t it? We’re saying there is something. It is timeless and eternal. It could be. Some would deny that possibility. Some would say might be, who cares? Can’t know it. Anyway, pass the butter . You live, you love, you die. Deal with it, right? I’ve had teachers say that essentially. Guess what? , when you’re gone, you’re gone. Right? Well, others say no, there is eternity and we can identify with it increasingly in, in a sense, find our true home there and maybe in the sense of some kind of heaven realm that is eternal maybe. 

Then I think it’s also possible to have non-ordinary experiences of time of what seems timeless, which may not necessarily partake of ultimate ontologically categorized eternity.

So I just wanna make that distinction. And I think people blur that distinction a lot. Just because people are having experiences of eternity doesn’t necessarily mean there is eternity. I think there is eternity, but I just wanna make that distinction. 

It could also be true, and this is a really fundamental point, that maybe it’s through manipulating the body through breath work or deep, deep stillness or brainwave and train moon, you know, meditative, exotic practices, ecstatic dancing for two, three days, fasting, vision, questing, you know, a lot of mushrooms, an epileptic seizure, maybe even manipulating the hardware. But just because we may have manipulated the hardware. Inside the natural unfolding of the Big Bang universe does not itself necessarily mean that what we experience or that what we apprehend or what we become, what we, what we witness or know somehow is not itself actually true.

In other words, even if we’re taking LSD to, to have a sense of immersion in the, in the divine does not necessarily mean that, oh, that was just a drug trip. Maybe there really is a divine and we need to take LSD or some other thing to disrupt the well-intended ongoing construction of delusion inside the nervous system.

And that’s very important, actually. Very important. Some people critique mystical experiences, peak experiences as, oh, you’re just manipulating the body. Well, so what? These people who criticize that they carry the cloak of science, they wear the white lab coat, “they’re manipulating the body” and they act all smart.

But it’s a lack of smart to realize, to fail to realize that just because you’re manipulating the body doesn’t mean that what is perceived or known somehow or felted is not actually profoundly and importantly true. 

Olivia Clementine: Thank you so much for differentiating and laying all of that down. 

Is there anything that is particularly inspiring right now, you know, that your mind is in and, and any personal even mind training aspirations that you may have right now? 

Rick Hanson: Ah, well, thank you. Two-parter, maybe. Part one I, in my contemplative training, I would say I’m mostly studied in and trained in early Buddhism, which I love.

It’s so pragmatic and direct and a good translation. It’s not airy fairy. There’s not a lot of metaphysics involved. And it’s really pointed, you know, cling more, suffer more , cling less, suffer less, right? I walked out of a retreat once, some, some years ago, these four words just sort of as my own, you know, direction, post retreat, you know, love more, cling less, basically, kind of in a nutshell.

And so that said, lately, last decade or so, I’ve been more and more drawn into the Mahayana, the expansive later evolutions of Buddhism through Tibet, China and Japan, and now really into the western world in which I think we’re in the early days of witnessing and creating together a fifth so-called Yana or vehicle.

If we think of early Buddhism as the first vehicle. Then Tibetan, the second, chan zen the third, pure land Buddhism coming out of Japan, maybe the fourth vehicle now in the West, we’re developing a fifth vehicle that I think will be discernible a few centuries from now that. Includes radical developments, really of flattening hierarchies of lay people and monastics involving long overdue, greater diversity of women and others in leadership and teaching including sort of the benefits of secular information such as in psychology and brain science into serious contemplative practice.

It’s really an exciting time. Okay, so all that’s going on, and in that context, I’ve become more interested in the oneness aspects of Daoist infused Cha n and Zen as well as some of the teaching certainly through Tibetan Buddhism. So that’s kind of my own version. And more and more I’m, I, I think of practice as resting your mind on what draws your heart.

So that increasingly what you dwell in as your experience becomes what dwells within you through positive neuroplasticity. You’re internalizing, you know, the saying has it, that your mind takes its shape from what it rests upon repeatedly. Your brain takes its shape from what your mind rests upon repeatedly, literally, in terms of structure and function.

So, you know, if our heart is really drawn as I think yours is, mine is, many people are too, that, that sense of abiding as the meeting of emptiness and somethingness abiding in the meeting of absence, presence in the Daoist language, or abiding in the meeting of unconditioned conditioned you know, and more and more resting in the ultimate ground of all of that meeting.

 That is where we’re going. So why not rest your mind. Know what draws your heart, right? Why not help yourself? Try to dwell there increasingly amidst your ordinary days. So I’d say that’s my practice, both formally and, and informally. 

And then in terms of the other thing that really preoccupies these me, me, these days the personal and, and the political weave together in our lives.

They feed into each other. They affect each other, but we can emphasize one more than another at different times. More and more, my attention is drawn to the political, by which I mean very broadly, the, the life that most that people have in humanity we’re one single human tribe. Pushing 8 billion of us, imagine us as one human tribe.

 If you look back since agriculture, roughly 10,000 years, life has been relatively sweet for the few okay, for some horrible, for the many. Throughout most of that 10,000 year history that’s could be summarized as Game of Thrones. And what can we do to reset the fundamental foundations of human society so that compassion and justice are at their basis.

And to do that, we have to address the forces of entrenched wealth and power and stand together and find frameworks that enable the great majority of people worldwide, the compassionate majority of people worldwide, who are moved by suffering and want to, to respond effectively to suffering. And its causes, especially, its unnecessary causes.

And so I’m more and more engaged with reflecting on what will it actually take for humanity to stand up at scale, to reset the foundation of our life that got disturbed beginning 10,000 or so years ago when agriculture came in that enabled large surpluses and those concentrations of wealth and power.

 And so I’m very engaged with that process and interested in it, and I’ve helped to found a global compassion coalition that has actually formed and is just really getting off the ground. People who are involved in organizations worldwide, who are involved with the science, the education, the application, and then especially the advocacy of effective responses to suffering and the causes of suffering. Imagine these people coming together in a frame that helps them do what they do even better.

Supports community enables funding to flow through, starts helping people realize that others are doing this too and and so forth. And then, building on the coalescence of those resources, gathering resources from millions of people in organizations worldwide, including financial resources a little bit from each one, but together a mighty stream that can fund a sustained campaign, an influence campaign in both culture and politics to foreground compassion and justice as real values and to stick with that media campaign for 10, 20 years.

And also gathering together and focusing the shared resources of this large framework that can help the whole human tribe come together for the common good. Right? Focus on picket one or two major flagship projects that will take decades to achieve. And yet, if we’re really serious about it, we can have big change by 2100.

Imagine a potential project being educating all children worldwide, not just some boys. Being absolutely committed to the education of girls and women as they identify as such worldwide, or imagine getting really serious about capping global warming at three degrees Fahrenheit average worldwide by the end of the century which is the best we can do, rather than the catastrophic six or 10 degrees Fahrenheit that we’re rocketing toward without any real significant slowing down of that.

But actually, Yuval Harari and others have shown that if we were to commit something on the order of 2% of the gross domestic product worldwide, which is 1.7 trillion worldwide for the economists among us, sounds like a lot of money. You could cover a third of it by closing tax loopholes in America for corporations and rich people and those who are cheating on their taxes 600 billion or so a year.

Wow. You’re a third of the way there to the total annually to cap global warming at just three degrees Fahrenheit, which will be itself severe and terrible, but it won’t be utterly, utterly catastrophic by the end of this century. So in any case, that’s the notion of the Compassion Coalition to imagine basically it sounds quite extraordinary like fairytale? No, actually that’s how humans did their governance. That’s how humans operated for 300,000 years until the last 10,000. That’s how we did it. People would get together and they’d say, you the leader are screwing up . You know, you. You know, cheating on your partner, your advice is bad.

We’re getting rid of you. Either you go away or we go away, but you’re not the boss anymore. That would happen in a hunter gatherer band cuz your fates are so bound together and you could see directly what’s going on. And that leader couldn’t accumulate a bunch of warriors and a bunch of food, a bunch of bananas cuz you couldn’t store food.

Right? Humans ran their operation. We governed ourselves really well until there were giant surpluses and now we’re in deep trouble. So it might sound absurd to do what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is restoring the foundation of healthy governance that our species used to thrive and survive under harsh conditions without super sharp teeth or claws, but with our capacity to cooperate with each other on the basis of compassion and justice.