Jon Kabat-zinn: Awareness As Medicine

THE ORIGINS

Cold Open

Cortland: But the gateway is the problem, right? Like, I need to hear, "Yeah, I'm burnt out right now. I'm stressed out. I have problems in my relationships," or whatever it is. And so you come for that, but then you start to see that it just opens up into this whole world of possibility for your life and for humanity, that just — it's kind of an amazing —

Jon: It's because you are met as who you are as a human being. It's not like there's something wrong with you. And you can carry the idea that there's something wrong with me because I've got pain or I'm depressed, or I'm anxious, or my life is all screwed up. But our perspective has always been right from the get-go, that as long as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you. And we are gonna pour energy in the form of attention into what's right with you. See what happens when we train and learn to exercise that muscle.

Introductions

Cortland: Welcome everyone. I am very honored and excited to be here with two really remarkable people and to have what hopefully — and I'm sure will be — a very interesting discussion. So I'm Cortland Dahl, one of the hosts here on Dharma Lab. And of course, you probably know Dr. Richard Davidson, who we all affectionately call Richie, one of the foremost neuroscientists on the planet. And we are joined today by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I'm guessing almost everybody who watches this, you've at least heard of, if not perhaps read some books or listened to some teachings, or at least aware of his amazing work and career.

Cortland: There's so much I could say. He's been a professor for almost his entire career at the University of Massachusetts. I think probably best known as the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, the program that really put mindfulness practice and meditation onto the map beyond the more fringes it was already living on historically, and really brought it out into the world. So people who might not have thought of themselves as being interested in meditation could see themselves getting interested in and benefiting from these practices.

Cortland: I myself have an incredible debt of gratitude, and Jon holds such an important place in my heart for many reasons, but the first and foremost because one of his books, Wherever You Go, There You Are — I think was maybe the second book I ever read on meditation, second or third book, one of the very first books. This is back in the early nineties, and it completely changed my life. Exactly the book I needed at exactly the right time. And it set my life on a course where a lot of the things that have defined my life and have been most meaningful and nourishing in my own life, I think in many ways were springing from the inspiration which in many ways I think came from reading that book. So Jon, I've told you this many times, but another, yet another thank you and note of gratitude.

Cortland: I should also say that if you haven't [caught anything with Jon and Richie before] — they go way, way back. There's another episode where we actually talk a little bit about this, so hopefully we'll release that one as well. But they were, back in the seventies, friends and dharma brothers. So this is just a very special moment to talk about mindfulness and a lot of the things that are going on these days, but really with two of the people who are gonna be literally in the history books, when people write the stories about how meditation and these ancient practices came into the modern world and the 21st century. Both of you play such an important role. So, such a gift to be here with the two of you.

What Is Mindfulness?

Cortland: I thought we could just start just by diving into: How do we even think about mindfulness? There's so many different ways you could think about it, and so many different ways it's talked about these days. You can go into a grocery store and find a magazine on mindful knitting or mindful cooking. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have the work, Richie, you've done doing research on monks who have meditated 30, 40, 50,000 hours over the course of their lives. So we have this just massive range of what we could even think about as the space of mindfulness. So Jon, how do you think about it? How, with all the work you've done and all your personal experience, how would you frame what mindfulness even means and how we should think about it?

Jon: Well, it's wonderful to be with the two of you and just such a pleasure and an honor to be a part of a conversation like this with both of you, since you go so far back in terms of your own deep connections with these kinds of practices and how they influence not only your own personal lives, but your professional trajectories, and through the professional trajectories, the world. So it's really wonderful to have these kinds of conversations.

Kapleau, Huston Smith, and a Talk at MIT

Jon: And I would say that I very purposefully, when I discovered Buddhist meditation back in 1965 — when I heard a talk by Philip Kapleau, who wrote the book The Three Pillars of Zen. And one of the first things he did, I think even before the book was published, was he gave a talk at MIT at the invitation of this wonderful professor of philosophy and religion at MIT named Huston Smith. And the talk was called "The Three Pillars of Zen." And I didn't know who Huston Smith was or Kapleau or what Zen was, but I went — I somehow went to that talk. And I started meditating that night. It so much blew the top of my head that I started meditating that night.

Mindfulness as an Umbrella for Dharma

Jon: Now, how we relate this to mindfulness is an interesting conversation that will never end, and everybody has their own perspectives about it. I have tried to use the word mindfulness as a kind of carryover or a container for what we would ordinarily call dharma. A kind of wisdom that's universal, but that was expressed incredibly profoundly and in great detail by the historical Buddha 2,600 years ago, that led to a continual flourishing of different streams of wisdom and compassion cultivated in different ways because of all sorts of cultural conditions and so forth, but that are all in certain ways different streams coming from the same source.

Jon: And so I've used mindfulness as a kind of umbrella term for all of these kinds of practices. And assuming — and I even wrote this in a paper — that down the road, historians and scholars of Buddhism and religion will work out all the fine points of how everything is different. But I wanted to emphasize how the fundamental unifying thread of it all was human awareness.

Jon: And I'm using the word mindfulness because that's what the Buddha taught. He said that it's the — I don't remember the exact phrasing, but the sole pathway for the liberation from pain and suffering. The four foundations of mindfulness. So he used the term mindfulness, of course not in English. He used the word sati. And so there's all sorts of conversations by scholars about what does sati mean and what does it not mean. Because it means memory, but it also means present-moment awareness, more than memory. But the memory part is important because you have to know what you just experienced, or you'd be basically completely inert to experience itself.

Jon: So mindfulness in a way has always been in my vocabulary an umbrella term for dharma. And not everybody agrees with my assertion that it should be that way. But I felt like what I most wanted to do was bring it to the mainstream world and to validate it to whatever degree was possible — or to put it to the test and see if it would be useful to train regular people who were falling through the cracks of the healthcare system because they were not getting satisfaction for the chronic medical conditions that medicine is really not that great at dealing with. And in particular, chronic pain, chronic anxiety, chronic depression.

A PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERIMENT

Falling Through the Cracks

Jon: And these are conditions that are huge in our society. It's like a gigantic proportion of the population that suffers from chronic pain. I think it's one quarter of the US population, and it's even worse in minority populations and native populations and so forth because of the lack of appropriate income and connectedness to the mainstream society. They suffer even more from all sorts of chronic conditions due to poverty and to discrimination of all sorts.

Jon: So would it be possible to create a safety net that catches people falling through the cracks of not just the healthcare system, but ultimately society, and in a public health kind of way — bit by bit over decades — move people in the direction of greater wellbeing and a certain kind of self-regulatory autonomy as a complement to whatever society and medicine could do, and healthcare could do for them, if they indeed have adequate access to medicine and healthcare?

Jon: So that was the basic idea, and it was always meant to be like a public health intervention that we'd slowly, over days, weeks, months, and decades, move the bell curve — if in fact people took to meditation. Because the basic idea was, in 1965, the idea that Americans would meditate was almost inconceivable — that Americans in large numbers would meditate. And now Americans in very, very large numbers are meditating. Now, what that means, and when people say they're meditating and so forth, we can have endless conversations about it. But there's no question, I think, that in the past 40 or 50 years, that millions and millions of Americans actually sit down at some point or other during the day and they actually drop into the present moment and into more a domain of being rather than doing, doing, doing.

The Digital Seduction

Jon: And that this is regulatory. It's a kind of retuning, it's a kind of rebooting, and people feel more and more the need to do that, especially with the onslaught of everything digital at the moment. That's designed to actually seduce our attention very effectively, by the way, with all the distractions and phones and various kinds of devices. They're so addictive that it's even more important now that we train in analog true nature, because otherwise we're gonna just become human doings and part of a digital seduction.

Jon: [That] is extremely toxic for young kids. I mean, there's lots of evidence that the more they use even laptops assigned in schools in junior high school, the less they actually perform well on basic tests of learning and basic knowledge, to say nothing of emotional intelligence. So we're at a crisis point in society.

Many Doors, One Room

Jon: So I think that, not dwelling too much on the past but just the arc of mindfulness over the past — you know, 1979, since I started the MBSR program, as one possible date to sort of talk from — the world has really come around to recognizing that practicing non-doing in a systematic way, according to — let's say — algorithms or practices that are thousands of years old, really does have some benefit. And that benefit, of course, has been shown by Richie in your lab and all sorts of other people — that to a very large degree it does have benefits. And the more research we do, the more those benefits become clear.

Jon: And then, so one question is, how do we actually make this really accessible to the people who need it the most? And so the kind of catchphrase that I've come around to using — for the diversity of practices and different streams of dharma over these [millennia] — to a first, and I always say to a first approximation, because I don't know what I don't know, and I can only speak from my own experience. And there are many, many people who have infinitely more deep dharma experience than I do. But to a first approximation, it's a situation of many doors into one room, and the one room is your humanity.

Jon: But let's call it awareness, because although we have thinking and emoting as really powerful aspects of our humanity that have evolved over millions of years — and nobody knows how thinking, how it came to be, how we can even wag our mouths and tongues and move the air out of our lungs, and you can decode what I'm saying. No one understands how that happens or how that came to be. So it's miraculous, but we take it so for granted, we don't even notice it.

Jon: No other species can do this, what we're doing. There may be other ways that species communicate, including dolphins and bonobos and so forth. But no one does what human beings do, and we should really honor that analog genius that we have, and also the mystery of it, because that's what research is really about, is understanding the mystery. And even Chomsky loved to use the word mystery in relationship to language. And he was supposedly the person who understood the core grammar of language better than anybody. Really is a total mystery.

Dropping Into Being

Jon: So to be able to, in some sense, stop all the doing and drop back into being human. So a human being — drop into the domain of being — is a skill, as Richie likes to emphasize. That's really valuable because you can take a moment and let go of all the momentum of one's thinking and emotions and drop into: how is it in this only moment? Because it really is the only moment we're ever alive in, but we're blasting through it all the time to get to better moments, or we're asleep at the wheel and hypnotized in a certain way by our own seductive desires.

Jon: And so the idea was this would be a benefit to mainstream Americans, and I think we can say without going into all the details that the preponderance of the evidence is, yes, this is beneficial, and we've barely scratched the surface on how beneficial. And there are many, many people who could benefit from it if it was made more available. And that's why people are trying to actually get it funded by Medicare so that it would be available much more broadly, and of course would need much more robust training programs to make it accessible in various kinds of cultures and communities and so forth. But it has already spread around the world in a way that's incredibly powerful and very satisfying.

Jon: And to me personally, because it's also a love affair. The community that is involved in this kind of thing — we practice, and by practicing, no matter how you practice, which door you go in, there's a certain sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. That's what the word sangha is pointing to — that we are a community of intentionality and of compassion or embodied caring that actually is healthy and healing. And, I would say, self-inspiring in a way, because we don't make too much of ourselves because we have this sense of being part of something — we hold ourselves, but at the same time, part of a much larger whole. So I'll stop there because I wanna have this be as much as possible a dialogue or conversation rather than just a stream of consciousness.

From the Basement to the Bell Curve

Richie: And maybe I can jump in and just first say that in addition to bringing mindfulness to the world, Jon, you've also been at the center of bringing scientific attention to this realm. And you began this in the basement of a medical facility. I remember visiting you there way back when. Of course I knew you before you developed MBSR, but the fact that you developed it in the context of a healthcare system, and you also developed it for patients that no one else had the wherewithal to see, to do anything helpful with. They gave you all the people that they didn't know what to do with, so to speak.

Jon: Yeah.

Richie: And you actually developed something that was genuinely helpful. But not only that, but you also — in part because you are a scientist yourself, in part because you were part of a medical facility — you had an unswerving commitment to do what you could to actually study this.

Jon: Absolutely. And I knew that if I didn't study it, I wouldn't be there more than a year. I had to produce results, if there were results to be produced. So either way, either there were results — [they stood for themselves] — and the chief of medicine said, "You'll be giving grand rounds in a year. I want to know what the results are."

Jon: So that's very true, Richie. Science is absolutely essential to this, for so many different reasons, but that's —

Richie: Yes. And I think you really invented something that I've benefited from enormously, which is a kind of hybrid science-dharma integration, which is really what Dharma Lab is now trying to take out to the world. But you actually started doing this in the late 1970s, which is kind of remarkable. There were — I mean, I think there were three scientific papers on meditation when you started.

Jon: That's right.

Cortland: Probably nobody read those three papers. There was probably —

Richie: No, we read them.

Jon: You read them.

Cortland: Were those, just out of curiosity, were they like fringe journal kind of things or were they mainstream? I mean, was Herb Benson's thing one of them?

Jon: No, they were psychological. They were psychological.

Jon: I think maybe fringe psych. I don't know, Richie, you could say —

Richie: Well, one was Kasamatsu and Hirai, on habituation and meditators. I mean, there were interesting phenomena that were being described. At least in some of them, they weren't — they were done on three participants.

The 2003 Inflection

Jon: Yeah. I cited that paper, by the way. But this is what the curve looks like — if I can hold it back. So you can see that, there's a very, very long lag time between 1980, the year after I started MBSR, and when you get — this is numbers of papers in the medical literature with the word mindfulness in the title, per year. And up here, this is like over a thousand papers a year.

Cortland: A graph of persistence.

Jon: Stick with it. Yeah. And there's something about that. Well, it's also like lighting — I sometimes think of it as like a fuse was lit here and it was a very long fuse, and then all of a sudden it ignited.

Richie: And at the point of inflection is a paper that Jon and I published together in 2003, which is actually, right, my most highly cited scientific paper.

Jon: So they tell me.

Richie: So they tell you? Yes. And this was a study that was actually done here in Madison, Wisconsin, which is where both Cort and I are now. And it was done with employees at a high-tech biotech company, who initially claimed that their lives were beautiful and there was — they had very little stress. But it was very clear that their lives were quite challenged. And we studied the impact of an MBSR course that was actually taught on site, that Jon himself taught, over the course of eight weeks. He flew out to Madison for 10 consecutive weeks to do this. But that was really a turning point.

Richie: And it was the first randomized controlled trial of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. And it showed that there were changes in the brain and changes in the immune system, including increased antibody titers to an influenza vaccine, indicating that the vaccine was working more effectively in the participants who were randomly assigned to the MBSR training. And so this was kind of a remarkable opening, and it really ushered in, I think, the modern era of research on the scientific study of meditation.

THE GATEWAY IS THE PROBLEM

Meet People Where They're At

Cortland: One of the pieces that I think is so brilliant about both the way you framed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and a lot of the scientific work, and everything that's happened since then — and I'm kind of a living example of what I'm about to say — is that it started not with some abstract meditative thing that people wouldn't understand or resonate with or be interested in. It started with real-world problems. It started with just the classical "meet people where they're at."

Cortland: I had a complete and total allergy to anything that felt like religion or organized religion. But I was suffering. I had a lot of anxiety, as I've shared many times. I had a huge phobia of public speaking. So I would've — I'd be having a panic attack if the me from 1993 was here on screen with you guys. I would be literally having a panic attack.

Cortland: And so for me, reading your book and the way you framed it, it did two things — two really, really important things that I think so many of us need and that open a door for us. Which is one: we're struggling, we all have some challenge in our life. If it's not anxiety, it's something. And these days, those numbers are through the roof, as you mentioned earlier, Jon.

Cortland: And so the first thing it did is just show, "Oh, here's something you can do. Here's a way to deal with this challenge you have in your life. And it's not as hard as you might think. It's just right there in front of you. You just need to learn some things."

Cortland: And the other thing is, then the problem — like for me, the anxiety — it opens up this whole world of things I didn't even know were possible for me. It's kind of like a world of possibility for the human mind that most of us just are oblivious to until that door is opened up. But the gateway is the problem, right? Like, I need to hear, "Yeah, I'm burnt out right now. I'm stressed out. I have problems in my relationships," or whatever it is. And so you come for that, but then you start to see that it just opens up into this whole world of possibility for your life, your humanity. That just is kind of amazing.

More Right With You Than Wrong

Jon: It's because you're met as who you are as a human being. It's not like there's something wrong with you. And you can carry the idea that there's something wrong with me because I've got pain, or I'm depressed, or I'm anxious, or my life is all screwed up. But our perspective has always been right from the get-go, that as long as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you. And we are gonna pour energy in the form of attention into what's right with you. See what happens when we exercise that muscle, when we train and learn to exercise that muscle.

Jon: So yeah, I'm just so touched to hear you speak in that way, because in a sense you're representing the heart of what MBSR was meant to do — is basically be a very big embrace of people falling through the cracks of healthcare for whatever reasons, and then challenging them to do something for themselves that no one on the planet can do for them, and believing that it was possible to do that something.

The Paradox of Non-Doing

Jon: Although here we get into the funny languaging thing, because it's not a doing. So it's like a little bit of an orthogonal rotation in consciousness that's required right from the beginning. And say, "Yeah, you've come here, but what are we gonna do? Nothing. We're gonna actually learn how to be instead of to do, and not identify ourselves as 'my diagnosis.'"

Jon: And one way to do that is to focus in on the personal pronouns, like "my diagnosis." Because it's like, well, are you your diagnosis, or are you more than your diagnosis? And then, well, who are you? And that's already a koan.

Jon: And if you do this skillfully so that you're not alienating people with some kind of Asian weird language, but coming from a place where you actually recognize the essential nature of every single human being — of course the first thing they're gonna do is feel it. And that's called compassion, but it's not fabricated compassion. It's authentic recognition of someone else's humanity. And all the MBSR teachers — I mean, you can't be a teacher unless you understand what I just said and how that gets brought out. Because I'm not sure you can train it even, but how it gets brought out in people who are drawn to do this kind of work.

Jon: Well, first thing is you have to have your own deep meditation practice and care very, very deeply about how to share it with other people without selling anything or beating them over the head, or making promises about even results, because the best results come from not being attached to outcome. So there's so many different paradoxes associated with this.

Befriending Pain

Jon: You could say that the chances of it succeeding back in 1979 were close to zero. And the reason it did succeed perhaps was because of what I just said, but also the fact that the people who were being sent to us were being sent from the pain clinic and other clinics where people had, on the average, an eight-year history of their major complaint and no improvement. So they were ready for anything. Because it's like, "Cut this out of me." But if you've had four surgeries and they've been unsuccessful, you can't cut out the pain anymore. You have to actually learn to — and this is not, I'm not saying this glibly — but learn to befriend it in a certain way.

Jon: And so, yeah, that's — and now I think you can tell me, the NIH, doesn't it emphasize participatory medicine as one of its four Ps, or whatever — that it's important to get people to participate in their own trajectory towards greater levels of health over the lifespan?

Richie: Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, no, I think it's making inroads in all kinds of ways. And I think that this body of work has been extraordinarily important in helping to move it in that direction.

Reaching the Ones Who Need It Most

Richie: One of the things that we wanted to talk to you about, Jon: while I think that what you said earlier on is certainly absolutely true — if you compare the number of people, the percentage of the population that's meditating today compared to when you started in the late seventies, it's very, very different. And yet it is still also the case that the majority of people don't meditate. And many of them are suffering. Many of them are interested in ways to reduce their suffering. And I wonder what your reflections these days are, for people who are like first responders, like public school teachers, various kinds of healthcare providers whose lives are super complicated — they'll tell you they don't have 45 minutes a day. Are there things that you would recommend to those people that you think would be helpful, genuinely helpful, in moving them along this path?

MEDICINE FOR HUMANITY

Full Catastrophe on Planet Earth

Jon: I'll start by saying, in 1990 — or in the late eighties, when I was writing my first book, Full Catastrophe Living — my editor said to me, "Jon, you cannot put the word 'catastrophe' in the title of this book. No one will ever read it." But I think from the perspective of 2026, everybody knows what the full catastrophe of life is. And it's really full catastrophe on planet Earth, not just in the US, but all of a sudden it's in the US in spades.

Jon: Just look at what's going on in Minnesota and everywhere else in the country where we're imprisoning people by the hundreds of thousands and deporting them, helter-skelter, willy-nilly, without any real process whatsoever, or respect for people's individuality, or even judges making decisions about whether things are legal or not. So all of a sudden the body politic — I mean, you could say medicine's oriented towards the body, right? And the mind of the human being. But now we're talking about the body politic of the world, not just the United States, but the world, and the mind of the world in a certain way.

Jon: Especially with AGI looming on, and interfacing everything that we're gonna be doing. We are in a kind of critical moment on planet Earth that's never ever happened before — but a lot of it's happened before. Violence has been forever. But now with the convergence of the polycrisis, as they call it — with the earth suffering from pollution, cutting down the rainforest, the lungs of planet earth, all of that kind of stuff — we are really in a moment where humanity itself has to wake up. In our organizations, in some sense our institutions have to kind of reboot to recognize that we're in a different world.

Jon: I mean, Canada — look at what the prime minister of Canada said just about the relationship to the United States. They're completely discarding it and rebooting for a new reality. Well, we are all in that kind of situation, wherever we live and whatever our jobs. And so we have to realize, no, we are in new territory now, and it's really important to trust in your own deep goodness, to trust that there's nothing wrong with you, even if you have 10 diagnoses, that there's much more right with you than wrong with you as long as you're breathing.

A Dharma Assignment

Jon: And so what we were saying to patients back in 1979, we need to now say to ourselves globally — to recognize what's worth saving in humanity and in cultures, and how do we regulate our own intrinsic propensity for violence and for othering at unbelievable scales, with nuclear weapons and robotic weapons and drones and stuff like that. It's untenable. No body could survive this kind of disease, and no body politic is gonna be able to survive it either.

Jon: So if mindfulness was important in 1979, it's infinitely more important now, that in some sense we need medicine for humanity. And how it will unfold, I don't know, but I feel like whether we explicitly agree with what I just said or we have some different formulation about it, the world is on fire in a certain way that we have caused, and that we need to also be the solution. And in order to do that, we need to wake up.

Jon: And this is why I feel like podcasts like this are really important, because we don't know who is listening, who is ever gonna be hearing this. But the hope is — and I'm guessing this is why you do it — that whenever we put stuff out into the world, we're putting it out for other beings who resonate for mysterious reasons maybe, but they're drawn to see their own lives in a kind of — maybe [they see] openings and potential for making the world maybe even slightly a better place, a less violent place, a less "us-ing" and "them-ing" kind of place. And over time, what else can we do in terms of hope for humanity? We need to not wind up in despair or endless depression, even though there's plenty of cause to be depressed, but instead to actually maintain a certain fundamental optimism and love the beauty of what life really is. All life. So we have to protect all life on planet Earth. And that's a dharma assignment.

Jon: I don't see a lot of different wisdom streams that actually have the potential — in some sense that we've demonstrated, at least in medicine and healthcare, and it's got a long way to go there — but have the potential to actually help people wake up to our true nature. Which maybe includes a propensity for violence, but it also includes a propensity to regulate that violence and understand that it can be extinguished, if you practice in the way that many, many, many people that you study, Richie, in your lab, have actually followed a path and have reached a point where they are representatives of a certain kind of benign compassion and wisdom that makes the world safe for other people and makes for the possibilities of creativity that don't have a shadow side.

Richie: That's wonderfully put.

Changing the Arc of History

Jon: It's a big thing to say, but I really do feel like, as a not just a father now but a grandfather, that there's no way that I can influence the world that my grandchildren are gonna be growing up in, in five or 10 or 15 years, other than trying to be true to what we are talking about and doing whatever I can without too tight an attachment to an outcome. Because it's so much bigger than any one of us that there's no way the human mind can actually conceptualize what the future of humanity is going to be.

Jon: But the more we can embody what the presence of humanity is — the true presence, which is what they call the Dalai Lama, I think: meaning "presence" — when we learn how to be more present, then the potential benefit for the future is immediate in the next moment. And that's how I think we change the arc of history.

AWARENESS AS SUPERPOWER

Ordinary and Extraordinary

Cortland: I think one thing that is so helpful about this is that on the one hand, it's this incredibly inspiring, expansive view of what it means to be human. And you can see why things like mindfulness — although that term might not be taken up in different religions and philosophies — there's something like it in every religion.

Jon: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Cortland: Something you've — I've heard you say, Jon, many times — which is this: there's nothing inherently religious about mindfulness per se. It's a human quality. It's like saying breathing is religious. You can work with the breath in a way that supports your religious practice, but in and of itself, it's just a fundamental quality of being human.

Cortland: So on the one hand it's got this so inspiring and expansive [quality], but on the other hand, it's just right here. It's something that's — like in this moment right now, I can feel my breath, I can feel my feet on the floor. I can feel your presence and our connection that we share. I can sense the people who might be listening to this and have an aspiration that this be of benefit — these are just little things, little tiny shifts in our mental, emotional heart space that just add up to a totally different way of being human, right?

Jon: Right.

Cortland: A little thing, grand vision, but this in-the-moment thing that's just always right here and actually kind of very easy to access. We just need to learn how to do it.

The Superpower

Jon: Yeah. Although I would say it's — I want the listeners to recognize that while it's totally ordinary, it's also totally extraordinary. It's unbelievably extraordinary, as is everybody who's on planet Earth. That we're all in some sense both ordinary and extraordinary. And I may have said this the last time we spoke, but I've come to see human awareness as a superpower.

Jon: In part because I'm so impressed with Greta Thunberg and her using the term "superpower" about her own challenges with being on the autism spectrum. And you can see that it's a superpower when she embodies it and when she speaks. It's like coming from a place that's just unbelievably profound. And I know she's been in dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama about those kinds of things. She is a very special person, but she wouldn't say — no special person ever says they're a special person, because they know they're not.

Jon: What she's in touch with, though, is something everybody can be in touch with. Like, awareness is a totally distributive function. There's nobody that's not born with the capacity for awareness, as far as I know, unless some kind of deep, deep brain damage at birth or in utero. But accessing that awareness, accessing that superpower when you need it — and the only time you ever need it is now. Well, that becomes challenging because the mind is so all over the place, that "yeah, I want that superpower, but I'll go with this superpower" — which is a degraded, less-than-superpower. Thinking's a superpower, but the thinking gets you into a lot of trouble. Awareness is liberative, intrinsically, and actually clarifying, intrinsically. And so we cultivate access to it. We don't have to acquire anything. We just have to exercise the muscle, so to speak, of capturing this moment in awareness by paying attention.

Greed, Hatred, and Delusion

Jon: And so it's both very practical and it's also transcendent in a certain way. And it puts us in touch with a certain kind of — if you pardon my saying this — transcendent wisdom. A wisdom that recognizes interconnectedness and how things lawfully relate to each other, and where that goes off when greed, hatred, and delusion come into the picture. Which was the Buddhist absolutely perfect diagnosis of humanity: that greed, hatred, and delusion is the source of all of our suffering.

Jon: Our own sense of "I want this and I'll get it at any cost." And we're seeing this played out by the president of the United States in a kind of pathologically amazing way, that many, many professionals have diagnosed him at a distance for that kind of behavior and speech and action. But the fact is that awareness is independent of that kind of ignorance and delusion, and it is in some sense the liberative vector for reclaiming, or actually recognizing for the first time ever, as individuals, the full dimensionality of what it means to be human.

Jon: And then living that. And we see it in children all the time. A baby's born — it's like a religious experience to see a newborn, and a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. They're just so cute. You go through the school and you see them running around and it's just unbelievable. How can we see 45- and 50-year-olds that way? Do you know what I'm saying? They're so cute. They're so lovable. Because we kind of lose a little bit of that intrinsic beauty, but it's there. His Holiness sees it in everybody independent of whether they're good guys or bad guys or anything like that. He sees it. That's something we can train.

Flourishing Is Contagious

Richie: We often say flourishing is contagious.

Jon: Yeah. It is contagious. The motivation to flourish is contagious, and then the training of the muscles to actually make it authentic and robust requires practice. And that's so beautiful that you're writing about this, that you're actually coming out with a book that is emphasizing a very practical way to go about making your day and your life — day by day, moment by moment — a project of deep appreciation of the beauty of the present moment, and how blind it would be not to flourish even under very difficult circumstances, with all the beauty and all the possibility that we are afforded.

Richie: And one of the premises of the book is that, just as you were saying, it's really the deep appreciation of the qualities that every human being is endowed with.

Jon: Yeah.

Cortland: They're trainable.

Jon: Say that again. I missed what you said, Cort.

Cortland: I was just gonna say that they're trainable. I think that's something that you both have pointed to — that we experience these things by accident. Sometimes you're out in nature and you have a moment of awe, or a feeling of connectedness, or you're with people you love and you have these moments where we would think of as flourishing, if we were to point to them. But it feels circumstantial. It feels like, "Oh, it's just based on whatever these external conditions were." And I think most of us don't realize you can train yourself to feel that connected all the time. You can train yourself — like, if you're not in awe every moment of your life, you're just not paying attention.

Jon: Exactly.

Cortland: Like, there is always something to be in awe of. It doesn't matter if you're in a trash dump — if you pay attention, life is amazing. And that feeling of connection and everything — it's all right here. We just need to cultivate it, we need to nurture it.

A Rhapsody for Paying Attention

Jon: Thich Nhat Hanh called his first book The Miracle of Mindfulness. I mean, it really is miraculous. And Dacher Keltner — all of his work is about supporting that notion that awe and wonder have incredible human benefits, not just health benefits, but all sorts of benefit, because we live in such a magical, unbelievable universe. And of course, all first peoples always knew that, and that was how they lived in harmony in a certain way with nature — that can be very powerful and potentially really harmful or destructive, but you find ways to live with that.

Jon: So it's like an insane kind of opportunity to not miss your life, because if you're missing this moment, what makes you think you won't miss the [next one]? And then pretty soon we're in Thoreau's place, where he said in Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see what they had to teach, and not, when it came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Jon: So Walden itself is a rhapsody for paying attention. And for mindfulness. He paid attention to every nail that he hammered into his house and every length of wood. And there were times when he stood in Walden Pond right up to almost his nose and just gazed at what was going on on the surface of the pond. Or sitting in his doorway for hours watching the sun just move across the sky, and he rhapsodizes about it. It's absolutely beautiful. So it really is a rhapsody for mindfulness in a certain way, and totally American, which is why I quoted it so much in Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Closing

Cortland: Well, this is amazing. I have a feeling we're gonna have hopefully many, many more conversations like this.

Jon: I'm up for it.

Cortland: It is such a gift and an honor to spend some time with you both. I know on behalf of everybody who watches and who listens — just thank you so much. Not only for taking time for this conversation, but for all of the work that you have done in the world. And a wonderful note to end on. Just imagine sitting there, taking in the surroundings, and connecting to these qualities that we already have, but which we need to learn to get in touch with. So maybe we'll call it here. But just wanted to thank you, and please come back and join us again.

Richie: Thank you, Jon.

Jon: My pleasure. Always wonderful. Thank you.