A couple of months ago, I was in New York City for a conversation with Paul Miller at The Rubin Museum for the release of my recent book, How to Train a Happy Mind. Paul is an old friend who’d be famous enough for his incredible pioneering work with collage hip hop music as DJ Spooky but he has so many other identities as an author, public intellectual, artist, and someone with a relentless passion for one of my favorite things in life, friendship. I’ll let The Rubin Museum’s Tim McHenry carry on with the rest of the introductions which he did so eloquently.
This conversation was recorded at the Rubin Museum of Art.
Introductions
[00:01:42] Tim McHenry: Thanks for coming out to The Rubin everyone. I’m Tim McHenry, I’m a deputy executive director here, and I’m very happy to see you but I’m also happy because you’re going to experience some transmission of clarity about what happiness actually means and how we might train our minds to be happier.
Most of us think we’re happy for a minute and then suddenly decide we’re not. The consistency of actually being content and balanced with whatever might happen to you and register that you can actually see it for what it is and how it’s connected to this, that, and the other, and understand its relative being is really a skill.
That’s why I’m so happy to be able to celebrate Scott Snibbe’s book, How to Train a Happy Mind, tonight. Because it’s something that we can all do, and we don’t have to go through the hoops of a cultural religious context to find it.
Scott has really pared it away to its basic ingredients and practices, that allow anyone, regardless of their background, to be able to recalibrate their minds so that they can be less “Why is this happening to me?” and more “Oh, it’s just happening.” That distance, that realization, is something that’s really useful and will be increasingly useful in what may end up being an increasingly polarized and fractious world.
I’m really pleased to welcome, Scott, for the first time to The Rubin. It’s subtitled A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment, and that is also the name of the podcast that he issues on a regular basis. But to have it in writing, in a book form, this is the first time. I’m thrilled that you will get to learn some of its contents, and hopefully take a signed copy home with you this evening.
Scott is going to be in conversation with—I don’t know how best to describe Paul Miller, other than that he is a polymath. There’s nothing he hasn’t done or may yet want to do. His mind is that curious. You may know him as DJ Spooky, but he’s just as happy in a physics lab, as he is behind a turntable. The intersection of science and sound is kind of his sweet spot, and he continues to work in this field.
You may know him as DJ Spooky, but he’s just as happy in a physics lab, as he is behind a turntable.
His books, Rhythm Science, published by MIT, or the Book of Ice, published in 2011, really speak to this endless curiosity about how things work, and how things can work to your better understanding, if you just understood it. This conversation between Paul and Scott is going to be a really stimulating one.
Let’s welcome Scott Snibbe and Paul Miller to the stage to hear about happiness. Thank you guys.
[00:05:25] Paul Miller: Hey, good to see you, Scott. Well, first and foremost, I wanted to say thank you guys for coming out. I know it’s Friday, Happy Friday, and here we are talking about happiness on a Friday.
Let’s jump in, shall we? Me and Scott have known each other a long time, and I want to begin with a quick couple of autobiographical things to give people a sense of your evolution over the last several years. You’re a graphic designer, an entrepreneur, and above all, a conceptualist. You did the graphics for Bjork’s album, Biophilia, that was wildly popular. You also did a series of initiatives with Philip Glass and Beck.
[00:06:07] Scott Snibbe: Yeah, it was a remix album of Philip Glass’s work and then we did an app album where every song was interactive.
Scott Snibbe’s background
[00:06:14] Paul Miller: He’s also worked with Facebook and now is an independent author, and this is his first book. You said you’re from New York, give me the Scott beginnings, how did you come to get into graphics?
[00:06:31] Scott Snibbe: Well, I was born in New York City. When I was 10-years-old we moved to California and we had a special class where they took us into a room with Apple II computers and a language called Logo. They had this thing called turtle graphics, you could say go forward, go left. After about a couple hours with that I thought, That’s what I want to do with my life. My whole life I wanted to be some combination of an artist and inventor.
My whole life I wanted to be some combination of an artist and inventor.
Then I also had very deep spiritual yearnings. I have an odd spiritual background because I come from a Jewish background, a mostly Jewish family, but I was raised as a Christian scientist. Which is a very niche religion where you don’t go to the doctor, luckily I survived that.
[00:07:18] Paul Miller: Wow, and what section of New York did you grow up in?
[00:07:21] Scott Snibbe: I was born in the Upper West Side, and then it was like West Seventies, right near where John Lennon and Yoko Ono had been. One block off of that was my first three years of my life.
The relationship between art and happiness
[00:07:31] Paul Miller: You’ve had art at the Museum of Modern Art and your graphics have been presented in many major museums, how did that lead you to this idea of happiness? I know that’s a big leap.
[00:07:52] Scott Snibbe: That’s actually a really good question. What people labeled my work as was usually interactive art, software art, art that’s made through code. But my main goal in my artwork has always been to get people so involved in the experience that they’re not thinking about the past—regretting it or rewriting it—and not anticipating the future, but totally present in the moment.
It’s a good question you ask, because I think it does relate very much to what both science and Buddhism say happiness is, which is when you’re focused on the present—they started doing these studies to figure out what happiness is.
In one, they would buzz someone on their cell phone and say what are you doing? How happy are you? What are you thinking about? It turns out if you were thinking about what you’re doing, in general you were happy. Whether or not that’s necessarily a happy activity. If you were making love, but you were thinking about work, you were not happy.
It turns out if you were thinking about what you’re doing, in general you were happy. Whether or not that’s necessarily a happy activity.
But if you were in an argument, and you were really present for it, and engaged with that person, in some ways people would say, I am resolving something. That’s what they call mindfulness, if you’re actually focused on what you’re doing, that is the number one cause of happiness. There are some exceptions, obviously. You can be laser-focused on killing somebody, and that’s not a happy moment.
What is happiness?
[00:09:20] Paul Miller: I want to unpack some of those things. There’s a series of studies that have shown America’s happiness index is declining. Amazingly enough, one of the happiest countries on earth is Finland. Having been to Helsinki, that’s one where you’re like, Okay, where is the happiness? But the funny thing is we’re looking at this era of the quantified self and the notion that algorithms and these platforms thrive on keeping you engaged.
When you see clicks and likes, you get dopamine, serotonin, other kinds of neurotransmitters that keep you engaged. If you get an Amazon package, you get happiness. The neuroscience of that is really intriguing. But with your book, it’s about analytic meditation. When you say analytic meditation, normally that sounds paradoxical, like analyzing something to then meditate on it.
One could argue we’re in this era of anxiety, there’s all these wars, and there’s been wars throughout history, but other cultures have dealt with happiness through philosophy. For example, the ancient Greeks, Stoics, Aristotle had this idea of happiness as this notion of the greater good, and he felt it was a full-on constant state of being. Which one could argue influenced the West for centuries. But you’re kind of pivoting to more of a synthesis between East and West.
Do you want to unpack that for a second?
[00:10:54] Scott Snibbe: Sure, what is happiness? I’m quite an authentic practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, I studied for about 25 years with Tibetan and Western teachers. What this book does is it takes a thousand-year-old sequence, that is said to lead you to the greatest possible happiness, but updates it for a modern audience, for people who don’t believe in karma, rebirth, and other realms. These are core principles of at least Indo Tibetan Buddhism.
What this book does is it takes a thousand-year-old sequence, that is said to lead you to the greatest possible happiness, but updates it for a modern audience, for people who don’t believe in karma, rebirth, and other realms.
I gave a talk a few weeks ago, and someone was arguing that they didn’t want to be happy. This form of Buddhism is called Mahayana Buddhism, where it’s very focused on other people. The Dalai Lama says very simply to be selfish. He says, Sure, be selfish, but if you want to be selfish, be intelligently selfish, the true cause of happiness is from cherishing others, being kind, just thinking well of others, not to mention being kind to other people.
That’s an experiment each of us can run in our life. Try one day being a jerk to everybody and see how you feel at the end of the day. Try one day where you’re absolutely kind to every single person. How do you feel about yourself at the end? The perspective from this book, and the Tibetan Buddhist tradition I come from is that the causes of happiness are being kind to everybody, including yourself, which we can talk about. That’s the place where most people actually have the most problems is being kind to themselves.
Then what is happiness, and then from this Buddhist perspective, it’s not pleasure. I think that’s where we get duped a bit by advertising, cause advertising and our culture in general, it’s always saying, if you just get this one thing, you’ll be happy. But for those of us who’ve most of us have gotten that one thing, in fact, we’ve gotten thousands of those single things, and none of them made us permanently happy. That’s often when people come to a tradition like this.
What are the real causes of happiness? Some people have a little beef with the word happiness. Other words are satisfaction, self-respect, contentment, and even bliss. But a feeling of really being at peace with yourself, satisfied with yourself, and appreciating all that reality has to offer, with all its flaws. It’s not a Pollyanna-ish kind of happiness. It’s a happiness where you can go out and face the world’s problems without getting completely overwhelmed, burnt out, and depressed.
What is analytical meditation?
[00:13:32] Paul Miller: In the book there’s a constant theme that comes back with this idea of embracing impermanence. One of the things I found very charming about that is that, Okay, on one hand you have this notion of analytic meditation, which I want to circle back to that because when you think of meditation, you think of giving away to nothingness, to kind of clearing the mind. I do Vipassana meditation about once a year. It’s the one time of the year I don’t have to think about language. You don’t speak for basically ten days.
There’s a beauty to that. I feel supercharged when I’m done. It’s this incredible sense of rejuvenation. But with your style of meditation, how would you walk the audience through what is an analytic meditation?
[00:14:21] Scott Snibbe: Most people only know of one form of meditation. In this tradition, it’s often translated as stabilizing meditation, it’s well-known as mindfulness meditation. That’s the kind of meditation where you focus your mind typically on the breath. The point is to train your concentration so you can focus and diminish your reactivity so that you can watch things pass through your mind without necessarily reacting to them.
Now, from this tradition that comes from Tibetan Buddhism, that’s actually a very tiny part of meditation and the vast majority of other meditations are what we call the analytical meditation, where it’s almost the opposite. You’re deliberately cultivating, thoughts, feelings, and emotions that steer your mind. The definition of meditation in this tradition is thoughts that steer your mind toward virtue.
The definition of meditation in this tradition is thoughts that steer your mind toward virtue.
Another way to say it is thoughts that bring out your best qualities. That’s the purpose of meditation, at least from this tradition, to bring out your best qualities, like kindness, generosity, patience, resilience, compassion, love, and so on.
The way that happens is like telling a story, analytical meditation involves a couple different things, but it’s emotions, storytelling, and also critical thinking. You’re deliberately cultivating constructive emotions, you’re using thoughts to do that, you deliberately bring up thoughts of other people’s good qualities, your good qualities, and many other types of thoughts.
Then critical thinking, analyzing your thoughts and saying, Okay, is this thought something that brings about happiness? That makes me feel good, for lack of a better word. Or is this a thought that makes me feel worse and leads to a worse life, a worse world. That’s a quick summary of what analytical meditation is.
Toxic happiness or jealousy
[00:16:17] Paul Miller: There’s a term that’s becoming popular, toxic happiness, it has to do with the age of the internet where people are essentially always looking at everyone else’s posts and so on. So you get this sense of anxiety, being left out. There are a lot of studies that show the more you look at social media, there is a very depressive quality to it. Because your brain is processing, but it’s sort of a neurolinguistic loop, and I’m fascinated with how your book breaks the loop.
[00:16:46] Scott Snibbe: The thing you described as toxic happiness in Tibetan Buddhism, we would call that jealousy. It’s actually not happiness at all. That’s when you look at someone and you feel bad because you want what they have. Normally, we’d call that jealousy.
That’s one of these five root delusions, things that make you feel awful and make your life worse. Luckily there’s an antidote to every delusion. The antidote to jealousy is rejoicing. There is a way to scroll social media and to be happy. Although, I think even Buddhism wouldn’t recommend doing it more than like an hour a day. But a little bit is fine.
The antidote to jealousy is rejoicing. There is a way to scroll social media and to be happy.
You see other people like, Wonderful, they’re giving a talk tonight at The Rubin, good for them. We don’t tend to post on social media our bad days, and that’s the problem because compassion comes from showing other people’s suffering. We’re often depriving people of developing that other important positive skill of compassion by not sharing the things that are painful and ways of getting over them on social media.
The unhappy American
[00:17:58] Paul Miller: Yeah, the happy American or the unhappy American as it is because we’re declining in the happiness index.
[00:18:05] Scott Snibbe: Nothing I’m saying is mine. I have these wonderful teachers that come through the Tibetan tradition and this 2,500-year-old analysis is true back when the Buddha first taught it, we don’t understand the causes of happiness. We think that the causes of happiness are outside of yourself. Of course, there is a baseline. You cannot be some contented guru if you don’t have food or shelter, if there’s racial, racial, or gender oppression, you need some baseline of safety and security in life to have the luxury of talking about some of the things we’re talking about right now.
But once you do, you see a lot of people who have some level of safety and security and are still not happy. This is when a lot of people often come to a spiritual path of some sort, usually when they’re 30. They get a little bit of the things the world said would make them happy. Then they’re like, Wait a minute, this isn’t doing it. Even having a nice partner, a nice home, a job that you like, some money in the bank. That’s when you start to realize, there’s some other causes of happiness. In general, we don’t learn that in school.
That’s the main problem, believing the causes of happiness and suffering are outside of yourself. There is some contribution from external, but primarily it’s internal. There’s a very famous story from the Buddha, there’s these two arrows that hit you when something goes wrong. The first is the event, something bad happening, like seeing something awful on the news, and that genuinely hurts.
That’s the main problem, believing the causes of happiness and suffering are outside of yourself.
The second arrow is often the one that hurts much worse, it is the story you start to tell yourself about it, what we call rumination. It grows and grows in your mind with your family, sometimes with a partner, or an ex partner. That arrow is the avoidable one, they say in Buddhism. That is the one that you can apply antidotes to so that you don’t ruminate and tell yourself a story for days, months, and years that ruins your whole life. These techniques are particularly useful in quickly processing and letting go of pain, then doing something about it.
[00:20:17] Paul Miller: I’m a big fan of this idea of replication, like in science, if you do an experiment, you need to be able to replicate it. For example, David Lynch, I’m sure you know about his meditation institute, did a series of studies that showed if you taught people how to meditate in prison, violence decreased. With a lot of veterans returning from America’s various wars, they would teach veterans how to meditate, and that also helped them get over what you call post traumatic stress disorder. There’s a lot of very serious neuroscience about how the brain reformats with meditation and you touch on that as well.
[00:20:52] Scott Snibbe: This is kind of amazing because the Buddha was like a neuroscientist. A friend of mine put this in beautiful modern terms she said, Increments of positive thought lead to happiness. Increments of negative thought and action lead to unhappiness. That’s the fundamental Buddhist view, it’s moment by moment.
Increments of positive thought lead to happiness. Increments of negative thought and action lead to unhappiness.
We’re lucky to live in this current time because that’s been validated only in the last 20 years by the principle of neuroplasticity, which says exactly the same thing. They often use a kind of joke to summarize that field where they say, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Which means every time you think something or do something, the more you’re inclined to do it.
I think we’ve all had that feeling. Like the first time you did something very aggressive, or the first time you did something very gentle. There’s sort of a powerful moment the first time it happens, and then there’s a groove where you’re more and more likely to do it. You reinforce those thoughts.
I walked around New York all day today, and having gone through this training for 25 years, everybody looked really nice to me. Even this homeless guy, he’s yelling at some people trying to have a cup of tea. And I went over to him, put my arm around him, and he’s like, What’s wrong with you, white guy?
He did stop bothering those other people and I kind of walked away and smiled at him. I thought he was quite nice, a little bit mentally ill, but good at heart.
The Western Enlightenment
[00:22:29] Paul Miller: That’s a leap of faith. Buddhism is a philosophy rather than a religion, by the way, so we always have to think about this idea of thought tools. I’m not Buddhist, I’m just a Buddhist adjacent. I celebrate it, I find it really fascinating.
I do want to let the audience know you had the Dalai Lama write the introduction of the book. The Dalai Lama’s giving a really beautiful overview of some of the issues around Buddhism and science.
But when you’re kind of going through several of the chapters the theme that comes back that I’ve noticed from the Dalai Lama, going straight through the rest of the book, is this idea of the mind is always focused on neuroplasticity, and that’s something that these feedback loops can change.
I firmly believe that everything from addiction to unhappiness are learned things. Neuroplasticity can kind of evolve and that’s where critical thinking and tools like your book are very helpful. I wanted to ask you like a philosophical overview, Aristotle has a certain sense of happiness, the American Constitution is a document of certain ideas of the enlightenment and happiness.
What would you say is a 21st century update for that?
[00:23:44] Scott Snibbe: There’s a lot of great things about the Western enlightenment, it gets a bad rap these days, for some good reason, because you got like colonialism coming out of it. But the nice things about it was it was coming out of feudalism. Everyone was the subject of the king.
Out of enlightenment, you got the ideas of democracy. I’m not saying these were perfect, but the ideas of democracy, universal human rights, equal protection under the law, and private property, interestingly. The first three are imperfect, but those are all ideals we definitely aspire to, and it’s a lot better than feudalism.
Private property is the weird one, because it was a solution to a problem at the time, because no one was allowed to own anything except the king. People were kind of upset because the king owned all their stuff, all their land. He could take anything whenever he wanted it. That’s why people wanted this idea of private property.
A fundamental core idea of Buddhism it’s not possible for anyone to own something. This gets to the most advanced topic of Buddhism that they call, emptiness, that we’re in a continuum. That at best you can say you’re taking care of something. Let’s say you own a house, you don’t really, of course, because you have a loan, so you don’t really own it. Second of all, when you die, it belongs to somebody else, or when you sell it, or it gets repossessed, or whatever.
A fundamental core idea of Buddhism it’s not possible for anyone to own something.
That idea is one of the biggest problems, it’s one of the nice things about communism, this idea that people shouldn’t own things, it’s imperfectly implemented in current communist states. But that’s one issue with the Enlightenment. The bigger is this private property. I think we could potentially evolve beyond private property to see that we’re more in a continuity with our possessions, the way indigenous traditions saw that we’re stewards and caretakers and part of nature. One of the biggest problems is that we think we’re separate from nature, but we are part of nature.
One of the biggest problems is that we think we’re separate from nature, but we are part of nature.
Happiness in the modern world
[00:25:42] Paul Miller: There’s a really good book that I would recommend after you’ve read Scott’s book, Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, he’s a British philosopher, and I think you’re up in the same league, in the same sensibility. Architecture is much more about form versus formlessness, but there’s an architecture of mind.
A part of the book that really left an imprint on me, is that we’re in this era of the quantified self, how many followers you have, how many miles you’ve walked, what’s your update on whatever social media platform, how many clicks, likes, whatever, but the idea that America is becoming more and more of an unhappy place is very clear.
Let’s do a closing thought on that, skepticism for an unhealthy world.
[00:26:43] Scott Snibbe: The perspective again, even backed up by science now, is that happiness is a skill you can train. As you become more happy, you actually also embrace the suffering around. You’re not just blithely walking past all the suffering in the world and ignoring the wars and injustice.
I’m sure we’ve all felt this feeling, maybe even today, just totally overwhelmed by suffering in the world and just wanting to kind of blot it out some way. This true form of happiness that is a skill you can train gives you the energy to really be a force for good in the world continuously and to be happy even through watching a war and seeing injustice.
How do you make other people happy? It’s often by being happy. That’s one of the things. We all know people that walk into a room and just their presence makes other people happy. Maybe a lot of you are that kind of person. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself. One of the nicest things you can do, and it doesn’t have to be big heroic acts, is just smiling. I have a great quote from the Dalai Lama where he says, Sometimes I think just smiling at someone can be better than meditating.
One of the nicest things you can do, and it doesn’t have to be big heroic acts, is just smiling.
Thich Nhat Hanh said, Sometimes smiling is the cause of happiness. Sometimes happiness is the cause of smile. Both because our body and mind are interconnected, like you can smile and make yourself happy. It is a skill you can train. I’m not saying it’s easy, but there’s this ancient wisdom we can draw on to be happier.
[00:28:27] Paul Miller: Just by way of opening up to the audience, when I was reading the book, when I finished and put it down, I was reminded of a quote from the poet Rumi, who’s one of my favorite poets, and he says, Stop acting so small, you are the universe in ecstatic motion. We’re all made of particles from all of these different forms of making the self become, for lack of a better word, hyper complex. I just want to say thank you for a wonderful book. Let’s open up to questions.
Stop acting so small, you are the universe in ecstatic motion.
Is it just getting easier to measure unhappiness?
[00:29:20] Audience: Nice to be speaking to both of you. I haven’t gotten your book yet, but after this conversation, I definitely will because I love it. You guys have touched on an interesting topic, there’s a lot going on in the world, in New York, in America, and the happiness index is going down.
My question to you is do you think that it’s going down or is it maybe getting easier to measure unhappiness with the idea of like social media and everything is at the palm of our fingertips and in our face. You know when something bad is happening. Even with like something like the Citizen’s App, you know when crime is happening. Is it just getting easier to measure unhappiness?
[00:30:04] Scott Snibbe: I do think there is something in terms of unhappiness increasing in the modern world. There’s a wonderful phrase sometimes that says, The greatest gift you can give someone is your attention. I think we all know that. It’s so lovely when someone’s completely listening to you, not thinking about what they’re going to say next, not trying to solve your problem, and it’s just such a great feeling.
The greatest gift you can give someone is your attention.
We live in a world where attention has become very valuable and commodified. Before that it was television and newspapers, even newspapers were seen as like the scourge of civilization when they first came out for a lot of people for that same reason, it kind of robs you of the time you have with yourself, the time you have to completely focus with others. I do think there is something to that, that our attention is truly under assault. It takes an extraordinary amount of will and determination just to turn off the damn notifications. It’s very difficult.
I have all the notifications turned off but it’s not easy to do that. There’s not just one button to do that. But there are many things about earlier society and especially than indigenous societies, naturally promoted attention and human connection, which are the things that truly nourish people. Those are under assault by many other aspects of our civilization and they’re quite difficult.
You have to muscle them out, you literally have to muscle them out on your phone. Sometimes you’re completely surrounded with people all day long at your workplace. You just can’t get any time to yourself, that’s awful for people. Even just everyday life. I’m not even talking about the awful things like homelessness, oppression, injustice, violence, and so on. I’m talking about the everyday strains on quite well-to-do people’s happiness.
[00:31:57] Paul Miller: There’s studies that show that happiness correlated with wealth is always a tricky variable. You’re going to talk about a cranky or bitter billionaire versus someone whose income caps out at maybe 80,000 and then they might have a different quality of life relationship. There’s a lot of studies that show there’s enough room for everybody, there’s enough food for everybody.
One could argue in New York City, there’s an epidemic of empty spaces right now. We could have housing, but it’s the political will or bad codes for the buildings, you name it. That kind of inertia, and this unmindfulness. When I put your book down, I was like, Yeah, there are solutions, we just need to think better.
[00:32:38] Scott Snibbe: You can get kind of lost in saying, unhappiness. But what can you do? One thing I say in this book, a modern solution that isn’t part of Buddhist wisdom, because they didn’t have this problem, its first thing in the morning, don’t touch your phone. When you wake up in the morning, do something to connect with yourself before you pick up. Because it’s not usually healthy.
You’re seeking attention, entertainment, work, wealth, whatever. Leave all of that alone and do something to connect with yourself, whether it’s going for a run, meditating, playing music, sometimes just automatic writing, like just sitting and writing whatever comes out of your head for 10 minutes. Do something to connect with yourself, whatever that is. Everybody has that thing. Do that thing for yourself every morning and your life your happiness will greatly increase.
Parenting from a Buddhist perspective
[00:33:32] Tim McHenry: Okay, we have two questions at the back.
[00:33:35] Audience: Congratulations, I can’t wait to read the book. I just wonder with all this amazing knowledge and long time practice, how it’s affected you as a parent, and if there’s things that you’ve done or recommend parents doing that are kind of radically different from what you see your peers doing?
[00:33:51] Scott Snibbe: There is some Buddhist parenting advice I can share that I learned from other Buddhists and my own experience. One is to realize that a lot of the times you feel strongly negative or controlling about your kid it is just about you. Ask yourself quite deeply, Why do I want my child to do this? What’s my agenda here? I think that’s a very important one to really respect your child.
I learned this from a friend of mine who’s a high school counselor who’s a deep long-term Buddhist. Really respect the perspective of your children. What they want and say comes from a genuine place and they may be right. They actually may be right about what they need and what they want and your agenda is wrong. Honestly look at their perspective, and sometimes you are right.
The other thing is it’s kind of fun. I never forced my daughter to meditate or anything. Of course, she loves it. She comes into my meditation rooms like, What’s this? A couple years ago, I felt like she was ready, so I said to her—her name is Samaya—I said to her, You’re not a Samaya. And she said, What do you mean? I said, That’s just a sound when your body and mind slid out of your mother, I made it kind of graphic.
Your body and mind slid out of your mother and we gave you that sound. We said that sound we’ll use to refer to this body and mind and it totally blew her mind. She was like, Whoa, I’m not a Samaya. A lot of you in the room, it might be the first time you ever thought that. Like, wait a minute, I’m not a Scott, not a Paul, I’m not a Tim. That’s just a sound our parents attached to us.
Your body and mind slid out of your mother and we gave you that sound.
But what are you? So then that starts you on this incredible journey of self-discovery. Like, what am I? If I’m not a Scott, exactly. And then you reflect on that your whole life and you go deeper and deeper and deeper to discover what you really are, which is so much more subtle and interconnected than thinking I’m a separate Scott and I’m not part of this world, but I walk through it and try to obtain things.
[00:36:08] Tim McHenry: Nice. Thank you for that question.
Buddhist activists & Vladimir Putin
[00:36:13] Audience: Thank you both very much. This has been really inspiring. I’m not a Buddhist but I’m thinking about how we’re all part of each other, which is actually a beautiful way to think. I wonder about responsibility and action and where those things come in?
[00:36:39] Scott Snibbe: This has been a legitimate critique of Buddhism that Thich Nhat Hanh and His Holiness the Dalai Lama had. Thich Nhat Hanh is really the first one to unite like modern social action and Buddhism with what’s called engaged Buddhism. The perspective remains the same that social action is very important. Physical social action is quite important, but it pales in comparison to inner action because you won’t be effective as an activist without a mind that can really see both sides of a situation.
Physical social action is quite important, but it pales in comparison to inner action because you won’t be effective as an activist without a mind that can really see both sides of a situation.
We live in a time where we’re constantly dehumanizing the other side. You want to be on the side of humanity with respect for everybody. You want to acknowledge that everyone has the same needs for safety, security, justice, wealth, and so on. But then people take misguided strategies to meet those needs.
Let’s look at Vladimir Putin as an example. His country has a legitimate need for safety, security, autonomy, thriving, maintaining their culture and so on. His strategy for trying to achieve that goal, invading another country, killing hundreds of thousands of people, threatening the planet with destruction, is a poor strategy. To be able to separate those is so hard. I use that example because it’s so hard to think of Vladimir Putin as having legitimate human needs, but he does.
That’s the Buddhist perspective. To do that with every single person, to see however insanely misguided their actions, their strategies for meeting their needs, their fundamental needs are the same, the needs for happiness.
[00:38:24] Paul Miller: I don’t think Putin’s too happy. Just a guess.
[00:38:26] Scott Snibbe: He’s definitely not. This is why it’s worth having compassion when you do this meditation on Vladimir Putin, wishing him happiness. It doesn’t mean you think he’s a great guy. It means you think, Man, if that guy were happy he wouldn’t be invading Ukraine. He would just be nice and enjoying his country and making peace with the world. If he were truly happy, he wouldn’t need to do those awful things. That’s the Buddhist perspective.
[00:38:56] Paul Miller: I’d like to think of it maybe as a negation. The world might be a better place without him. That’s another part of the multiverse. You wake up one morning and you’re in a different universe.
[00:39:10] Scott Snibbe: But then that’s acceptance because we do have him. Killing, violence is never the solution in the Buddhist perspective. But that’s what we think, Oh, if only we didn’t have Putin, maybe someone should kill him. But that wouldn’t be a cause of a better world from a Buddhist perspective. It would cause more problems in the world.
[00:39:33] Paul Miller: I’d rather be in a slightly different universe.
[00:39:35] Scott Snibbe: This is the universe we’re in, so what can we do? If you believe, genuinely, that violence has never solved a problem, in the long run, then what do we do instead? Luckily, there’s many good books and Martin Luther King Jr. really codified those principles so well that many activists today still embody.
A wonderful man named Kazu Haga wrote a beautiful book called Healing Resistance that masterfully lays out how to be nonviolent and how to effectively fight injustice and violence in the world. It is possible, and it’s debatable, but that’s the Buddhist perspective.
[00:40:16] Paul Miller: David had a quick question.
What is the ultimate truth?
[00:40:19] Audience: First of all, thank you, Tim and the Rubin Museum, for welcoming Scott and Paul. Such an interesting and informed and elevated conversation. Even just the last topic you discussed—my family comes from the Ukraine, and trying to have the capacity for forgiveness to someone like Putin, especially when the Soviet Union rescued our family after World War II, and now it’s turned around. The world is crazy.
I think like many of us here, I listen to a lot of podcasts and recently with Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari, I find myself having images and at the beginning of your discussion I saw a tennis, not a match, but like a rally where you were both trying to get the ball back to one another so it could continue. It was just so wonderful.
Then the other image, which I was so surprised, was kind of a fractal. You actually look kind of like Benoit Mandelbrot. But every time you would start a topic, and then you would go deeper into it, and then something would open up, and then you’d go deeper into it, and the fractal in different forms would repeat itself.
My question is, what’s at the core of that? What’s at the core of going all those layers deep to discover an ultimate truth? I don’t know if it’s infinity or if it’s nothingness, but I’d love to hear what you think is at that deepest, fundamental, level for us.
[00:42:02] Scott Snibbe: From the Buddhist perspective, it’s just two things. It’s love and interdependence. We think love means thinking someone’s really adorable and wonderful, but the Buddhist definition of love is just wanting others to be happy. It’s so simple. That’s how you can love Putin. I wish he was happy because then he wouldn’t be doing all those awful things. You don’t think he’s a great guy. He’s not.
We think love means thinking someone’s really adorable and wonderful, but the Buddhist definition of love is just wanting others to be happy. It’s so simple. That’s how you can love Putin.
And then interdependence, to just remember that we’re not separate from each other. New York City is a great example. You depend on 10,000 people a day to get through your day, even though some of them might be a bit grumpy, still, they’re helping you, they’re benefiting you, every single person along the way. You’re handing them some money, but they’re handing you something back, and making your life wonderful with your latte and your kale salad and whatever else you enjoy. And the way you interact at work and make the world slightly better. Love and interdependence are the two core principles.
Love and interdependence are the two core principles.
[00:43:04] Paul Miller: To go to the heart of your question, let me give you a quote of an existential thing. It’s where 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula. There was these group of folks called dinosaurs. The dust from the Yucatan Peninsula was particularly thick.
It’s a wind in the air and caused a kind of a global winter and wiped out the dinosaurs. We wouldn’t be sitting here today if not for that asteroid. But if the asteroid had arrived 20 minutes earlier or later, it would have hit the ocean, whether the Caribbean or the Pacific, it would have just landed in the water and sent a bunch of steam up.
There’s a 20 minute window of time where millions of years of potentiality could have just never happened. I love that sense of like, We are the asteroid now, we’re kind of wiping out, and causing all these problems. We’re in very cynical times politically speaking, whether it’s Trump or Putin or Netanyahu. All these various people who are just cynical, destroyers of things. But the tools are there to kind of deconstruct that and give people better tools for critical thinking.
That’s where I think Scott’s book was very life affirming when I was reading it. Do you want to do that last reading?
Everyone Walks the Hero’s Journey guided meditation
[00:44:19] Tim McHenry: I think what we need to do, as Paul intimated, is actually experience the meditation through Scott’s writing. Because we’ve heard a lot about it, but what about actually doing it together? And doing it together, that’s significant. Because we want to leave you with the experience rather than just the words. Scott, will you guide us?
[00:44:51] Scott Snibbe: Sure, so we talked about what would be a good choice. This is actually slightly lighter than a meditation, but it’s actually maybe more beneficial, because this is just a page, and it’s called Everyone Walks the Hero’s Journey. It’s a way that you as a New Yorker can walk down the street and see every person as a beautiful human being.
Everyone walks the hero’s journey. From Jesus Christ to Luke Skywalker, the hero’s journey is a universal structure for mythical tales of growth and adventure. But each of us is also the hero of our own life. We may rarely acknowledge it, but each of us was born, and every one of us will die.
In between, we all experience our own struggles, conflicts, triumphs, and loves. As you encounter people in your daily life, a powerful meditation on impermanence is to picture the moment each one of them was born. Imagine their mother’s pain. Her exhaustion and joy at creating a fragile new being whose life depends on her.
Then try to imagine how that person will eventually die alone or surrounded by loved ones agitated or at peace. This technique is especially helpful when you’re angry with someone because it helps put your dispute into perspective. Picture the end of that person’s life, in a hospital bed or at home.
After a life that was long or short. A life of virtue or misbehavior. A life ending among friends or silently alone.
Then, try to imagine where that person is right now on their journey from cradle to grave. What dreams, goals, and disappointments they may have had moments of loneliness and intimacy.
Without this kind of reflection, the people around you can seem like video game characters, mere obstacles or aids to your life’s agenda, such a rigid, self-centered view of the people around you is disconnecting and inaccurate. They’re all constantly changing and each of them treasures their precious lives.
Just as much as you do yours. Each of them lives an epic hero’s journey. That’s a meditation you can take into your way of thinking about every day and every person you see.
