Listen or subscribe in your favorite player:

For many people I know one of our biggest dreams is to be interviewed on NPR by one of its star journalists. This dream came true for me a dozen years ago when Laura Sydell, NPRs digital culture correspondent, interviewed me about a beautiful project called Biophilia that I collaborated on with the musician Bjork.

A couple of months ago, I had the honor to again share the stage with Laura Sydell at San Francisco’s The Battery to speak about my new book, How to Train a Happy Mind. Laura and I talked at length about the most advanced topic in Buddhism, interdependence or emptiness, that teaches us how to let go of our inaccurate sense of separateness that we feel from the people and the world around us. In doing so we create the ultimate cause for a happy life.

We also talked about how great movies and comedians can capture Buddhism’s insights into how to live happy lives. And we riffed on a great Buddhist teaching Jerry Seinfeld gave in his most recent Netflix special.

[00:02:20] Laura Sydell: This is so great to be here with you. I do want to warn everyone here, you are about to swallow the red pill. If you were hoping for the blue pill, it might be time to go. We’re going to get to the truth here. Before we start though, I thought we’d just take one moment to just sit quietly. Just take a few breaths.

[One minute passes]

How’d that feel? It’s very interesting to do that on stage.

[00:03:20] Scott Snibbe: Performing meditation. It’s a good reminder, because some of my friends say, Oh I used to have a meditation practice, or I never developed a meditation practice, because I don’t have time. I would say, You can meditate for one minute. I used to do that a lot especially when I had a very busy life, on a bench or anywhere, and it’s extraordinary. We all could do that at any moment if we wanted to.

You can meditate for one minute.

How did meditation help you through difficult times?

[00:03:46] Laura Sydell: It is amazing. I wanted to talk about how you and I first met. We met when I did a story about the artist Bjork, for her album Biophilia, which was about the environment. She hired you to do the interactive parts of it, which were really beautiful. I highly recommend checking them out. But you came to that after going through a very difficult time where your practice and meditation were key to getting through it, so I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

[00:04:22] Scott Snibbe: This is a great question because there’s a standard way a lot of these talks go and I usually don’t get past the first chapter or two. You’ve just fast forwarded to the most advanced topic in the book, which proves you read the whole book by the way, and I appreciate it. They call it emptiness in Buddhism, which is very poorly named because it really means the opposite, it is total interdependence; His Holiness, the Dalai Lama actually says fullness is a better translation.

Some people here are entrepreneurs, and I had some long stretches of my life doing that. I had a company that was making science museum exhibitions, we were thriving and had millions of dollars of orders. Then all of a sudden, everything collapsed with the economy, and I had to lay off sixteen people to four people. I was personally in debt. I was newly married and we had a new child and I thought my life was over. How are you going to ever pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and this nightmare company that just keeps losing money month over month?

I tried everything. I tried every type of meditation as an antidote. Mindfulness is the one a lot of people know, that didn’t work. Compassion didn’t work that well for me. The only one that worked was the most advanced topic of emptiness, which is where you search for the thing that’s bothering you.

As I was walking to work every day, I would think, Where is this company that’s causing me so much misery? Is it in the bricks that make up its walls? Is it in the empty bank accounts? Is it in the broken contracts? Is it in the employees? And through that searching, you don’t find anything.

It’s this kind of magic trick. The ultimate topic of Buddhism is that you search for the thing that’s really bothering you and you can’t get at its essence. You don’t find it among its parts. That’s what really worked for me as I turned the door to the studio every morning, becaue it’s not really here.

It’s here in some subtle way, but it’s much more flexible. It’s not as solidly annoying and terrifying as it seems to me. There’s some opportunity for change here. That helped me go to work every day, rather than have a nervous breakdown, fall apart, and ruin even more people’s lives.

That’s what led, eventually, to working with Bjork, because I kept trudging in there day after day, using emptiness as an antidote to get through the day. Then eventually I got an email from Bjork or actually her manager, who said, Oh, Bjork’s a big fan of yours. I said, That’s funny, because I’m a big fan of hers.

Then that led to new opportunities, new companies. But without that lesson of interdependence, flexibility that the label of terrifying company was nothing but that label, nothing but words I was applying to a more flexible situation, I couldn’t have actually crawled out of it and emerged into a new and better life. There’s no guarantee that meditating on emptiness will get you an email from Bjork.

[00:07:17] Laura Sydell: Yes, I was thinking, we don’t want to give them the wrong idea.

[00:07:21] Scott Snibbe: But something will change, impermanence is the first topic in Buddhism in some ways, and knowing that things have to change. Change is the only constant. When things are the worst, often that’s the inflection point where the only direction to go is up.

Change is the only constant.

Why take the secular route?

[00:07:37] Laura Sydell: You have been following a Tibetan Buddhist path, which is very far from secular. What inspired you to write this book, to go in a more secular route?

[00:07:49] Scott Snibbe: It was a couple of things. One was that I got invited to start leading meditations about 18 years ago. Not because I had superior knowledge, but because I was an equal, my teacher said, It’d be good for students to have someone that they’re not too intimidated by, who was just like them, a peer or teaching assistant. That’s how I always think of myself, as a teaching assistant, not a teacher.

I was invited to lead the sequence that’s in this book. The sequence in this book, it’s based on a thousand-year-old sequence called the lamrim, which means the graduated path. It’s this very beautifully refined ordering of the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddha gave, they say, 84,000 teachings. He lived into his eighties, so he taught a lot, and then it was distilled a thousand years ago into these eight or nine topics. I was teaching those topics, but I was teaching them authentically. We were advertising these sessions as open to anybody, so you didn’t have to be Buddhist.

Then in the very first topic of The Precious Life, in the first sentence, it says, You’ve had infinite past lives, now you’re finally human, but you’re accumulating so much negative karma, you might die, and then you’ll be reborn a ghost, a turtle, in a hell realm. So in one sentence, the first topic, it mentions these three seemingly supernatural things of karma, rebirth, and other realms, which are quite intrinsic to Tibetan Buddhism.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote a book called Beyond Religion encouraging people like me, in the trenches, to try to be as authentic as possible, but welcome people where they are in a culture that wasn’t raised with those ideas. That was the gem of the idea. The other is actually some of the people here, because most of my friends aren’t Buddhists. Several of them are here. I was allowed to invite a bunch of people as the guest list. Much of the motivation is actually from my friends, because my friends kept asking me, Oh, you’re the only Buddhist I know, you’re the only religious person I know. How could I get started?

I could never point them to a book that could meet them where they were, that didn’t immediately talk about those seemingly supernatural elements. Finally, I decided to write this book and develop the sequence.

Cause and effect

[00:09:54] Laura Sydell: I should add, I actually am a practicing Zen Buddhist and have studied Tibetan Buddhism in the past. I really enjoyed the book, because I think it did distill a lot of things in a way that would make all the strange things in Buddhism seem more understandable.

I was going to ask you about things like Zen, karma, and passing through other lifetimes, which when people think about Buddhism, they do think about that. One of the most prominent Buddhists is the Dalai Lama, who is supposedly the reincarnation of Dalai Lamas going back centuries. Words like karma have a lot of baggage in the West.

You talked about karma a bit in the book, because I think getting people to think about karma in a way that’s more secular, and actually, in Zen Buddhism, there isn’t all this reincarnation, it is a bit more secular in a way. But still, I think getting people to think of it that way is important. You start by talking about a scene in the film, the Terence Malick film, The Tree of Life. I love this scene and where you took it when you were talking about karma.

[00:11:03] Scott Snibbe: It’s one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. So in this movie, there’s a mother in Texas, and one of her sons dies. And she’s praying – there’s very few words in this movie, it’s like a Kubrick film. But she’s praying to God, like why did you take my son, why did my son die?

Then all of a sudden in this movie, BAM! It cuts to the Big Bang. It goes all the way back to the beginning of time. It’s like a 20 minute sequence where the gradually dust clouds form, galaxies coalesce, we see stars form, we see our sun form, earth forms. Four billion years ago, the first life forms emerge on Earth.

Then it zooms in as we get to the dinosaur era, and you see this dinosaur like a velociraptor, about to kill a little vegetarian, gentler dinosaur. Then all of a sudden, that vicious dinosaur has this moment of compassion, Oh, maybe I won’t, kill this guy. It seems like the first moment of mercy on earth. It’s quite beautiful. Then that dinosaur looks up, and there’s an asteroid coming, and boom, everything’s wiped out on earth.

Then boom, boom, boom, it keeps going, and then you’re back to the woman all of a sudden. That’s God saying, that’s your answer. That’s your answer to why your son died. It requires going back to the very beginning of the universe. Because cause and effect has operated for as long as the universe existed and your son’s life and death is just one more moment in that infinite cause and effect. Very beautiful.

[00:12:44] Laura Sydell: It is beautiful and it seems in some ways empirically true. It’s hard to argue with, that anything that happens has a cause, and that’s how you’re boiling down karma.

[00:13:03] Scott Snibbe: Yeah, then of course, in the Buddhist perspective, there’s a material causes, but then there’s mental causes. Like all the things that we decide to do or not do. We live in kind of a nice time because we recently discovered neuroplasticity, which says that every single thought you have makes you more likely to have that thought in the future. Every action you do makes you more likely to do that action.

That is karma from a secular perspective. If you do something, you’re more likely to do it again. If you refrain from doing something, that strengthens the muscle of refraining from it too.

Emptiness

[00:13:37] Laura Sydell: I’m throwing this in here a little bit, but this goes back to—you’re talking about what happened with Björk and your company, and also this idea of things being connected and cause and effect, and there’s a metaphor you used for this in your book that I liked, which is you talked about a cell phone. How if you look at a cell phone, I think it really gets to the core of cause and effect, what something is, what it isn’t.

[00:14:04] Scott Snibbe: It’s very nice you’re sticking with this most advanced topic of Buddhism, it’s good. Traditionally in Buddhism when you’re thinking about interdependence, emptiness, you think about a cup. You talk about a cup or a table, there’s always a cup and a table around when you’re giving a talk, but I prefer to use this object because it turns out that a cell phone has 75 out of the 92 naturally occurring elements in the universe.

It’s a really extraordinary object, like a distillation of almost everything that there is in the universe. Yet, we see it so atomically. We see it as a phone and we have so much attachment for it. If we’re separated from it for just like 30 seconds, we freak out, right? When I lead the meditation on emptiness, I almost always use this object. Because I have you analyze it and you think in great detail. I had to learn elements names I didn’t even know or remember, like neodymium and praseodymium, and all of these things in the screen, very rare elements.

Why do we see this as a phone instead of a collection of little piles of 75 elements? Delusion, an evolutionary delusion, where we impose the idea of objects on collections of parts. That’s the fundamental illusion. You can start with something like a phone or a table but the ultimate object to analyze is yourself. Look at yourself and see, where is that person that’s annoyed or craving? Is it in my body? You go through silly, almost humorous exercises. Is my foot angry? Does my hand want a drink?

[00:15:34] Laura Sydell: Sometimes it does.

[00:15:36] Scott Snibbe: Yeah, so you go through that kind of exercise, and then you go through your mind. What part of my mind is it? Then you don’t find it. As you look for that person that’s annoying or annoyed, you don’t find them and it starts to break down that illusion. Nagarjuna was a great exponent of emptiness in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage. He said, even having the slightest doubt as that things don’t exist as they seem, that they’re not atomic, separate, dualistic, is so powerful, so helpful to living a happy life.

What is the lamrim?

[00:16:10] Laura Sydell: Let’s, get a little more basic now. Now that I’ve forced you to give the more advanced parts, but I guess I find that all of that fascinating and worth thinking about. In Tibetan Buddhism, there’s this path called lamrim. The book essentially lays out this path. Take us through what this path is about that you lay out in the book, this meditative path.

[00:16:35] Scott Snibbe: The path was created a thousand years ago by a teacher named Atiśa Dipankara, who came to Tibet and he resolved some conflict. There were people who had these beliefs that, you didn’t have to be moral, for example. If you really realized the ultimate nature of reality, then you could do anything, kind of like an existentialist, Nietzsche kind of view. He came and corrected that view. He was like, No, you need these basics, too. You always have to go back to these basics.

It was revised 500 years ago by Lama Tsongkhapa. It was during the Tibetan Renaissance. It was around 1492, the same kind of time, there was a Tibetan Renaissance of the mind. Anyway, the sequence, it starts with how precious life is. That’s the first topic, that life’s extraordinarily precious. That was almost the most difficult topic to adapt because normally you say it’s precious, because of all these karma and rebirth and so on. But I remembered this quote from Voltaire I heard when I was in college where he said, It’s no more miraculous to live two lives than one.

That became the core of that topic for this book. We’re missing the point that it’s way more miraculous that there’s anything at all. That we have one life. If you only believe you have one life, how much more precious is that than you have infinite ones? A lot of my Buddhist friends are a little bit lazy, actually. One of my friends, a reincarnated lama, and he was really amazing in his last life. He’s like, this life, I’m gonna relax, have fun, get married, have a kid, and skateboard.

I know a few people like this, actually, they’re kind of relaxing after their harder work in the past life. For those of us, probably most of us here, who think we have only one life that’s even more a responsibility to make it meaningful and find the true causes of happiness. Anyway, it starts with that. Then it goes to impermanence, everything changes. We have this terrible illusion that things are permanent.

I know a few people like this, actually, they’re kind of relaxing after their harder work in the past life.

Renunciation is the turning point where you start to acknowledge the true causes of suffering, that you stop blaming your suffering on external things and realize that it is fundamentally these delusions of anger, craving, and ignorance, which is not caring. You fundamentally say, Those are my problems. The only thing I should be angry at is anger. There’s really nothing else to be angry at.

The only thing I should be angry at is anger.

[00:19:15] Laura Sydell: I think a lot of people are familiar with the idea of mindfulness. I think that’s probably one of the most common kinds of meditation people talk about in the West. But what you’re doing in this book, you’re laying out what you call analytic meditations. What is the difference between doing mindfulness and an analytic meditation?

[00:19:37] Scott Snibbe: We call mindfulness meditation “stabilizing meditation” in Tibetan Buddhism. In general, they say there’s two kinds of meditation. One is the one you’re used to and probably the only one you thought existed, which is where you try to focus your mind on one thing, and that thing is usually your breath.

What you do is you try to stabilize your mind, calm your mind, and then whatever other things go through your mind, you let them pass by. You don’t have to push them away, you don’t have to pull them close. They’ll just naturally move by, and you keep your mind stable, that’s stabilizing meditation.

This other form of meditation, it’s almost the opposite of that, because you deliberately fill your mind with thoughts, feelings, emotions, and also critical thinking. Actually very critically looking into your mind and the stories you’re being told and asking, Is this true? Is this beneficial?

They’re like stories. They’re like your story, like a master storyteller journalist like yourself. It has a beginning, a middle, an end. It has dramatic tension. I find it’s much easier for people to meditate on. I regularly lead one-hour meditation sessions and I like to say no one’s ever walked out. But who can sit and meditate for an hour by yourself, it’s almost impossible.

That’s the benefit of analytical meditation. It’s like a story that brings out your best qualities. That’s one of the definitions of meditation, at least in the Buddhist tradition: stories that bring out your best qualities, thoughts that bring out your virtues.

Meditation isn’t always good

[00:21:06] Laura Sydell: I’ve been meditating almost daily now for nine years, and I would definitely say it’s made me calmer and happier. But there’s another side of it. It isn’t just, as you say, sitting and watching your breath or even doing these analytic meditations entirely. It is the role of compassion in this. Like you mentioned this in the book, Darth Vader has a meditation tank that he lies in.

[00:21:41] Scott Snibbe: In The Empire Strikes back. Whenever he’s not killing people, he’s meditating.

[00:21:47] Laura Sydell: Exactly, talk a little bit about this, because I think it’s important for people to really understand that meditation alone is not really going to be sufficient to happiness.

[00:22:01] Scott Snibbe: This is one of the surprises about meditation that you learn in our tradition is that meditation isn’t inherently virtuous. You can meditate with a neutral or even negative motivation. The most extreme example is that the US military uses mindfulness meditation in two ways. One is for soldiers trying to overcome PTSD, and they give them the mindfulness training, and it really helps to let those kind of feelings pass and realize, they don’t have to be as overwhelming as you think. It really works.

The other one is really frightening because they use it to train soldiers to kill better. The instructions are extraordinary. I went and looked it up a few months ago because I wanted to be really accurate when telling stories like this in front of an audience. You actually read the instructions like, “Breathe in as you put your finger over the trigger of your gun. Breathe out as you pull the trigger.”

It stabilizes the mind of the soldier so they can more effectively kill another human being. That’s the most extreme example. You can use mindfulness, stabilizing meditation to kill better. You can use it to do a harmful job better if you’re a CEO of a company that’s doing some things you don’t feel are ethical.

You can use mindfulness, stabilizing meditation to kill better.

In fact, I had this experience when I was working at a job. I didn’t totally believe in everything they were doing, and I would go home and meditate. But it was what you call “spiritual bypass,” which is a new and very useful word. Spiritual bypass is when you use spirituality meditation as more of like a spa treatment to kind of relax and then go back to whatever harmful thing you’re doing.

That’s one explanation of why meditation isn’t inherently virtuous. But to make it virtuous doesn’t take much, which is just to think in the beginning your motivation. From the Tibetan Buddhist path, in Mahayana Buddhism, motivation is the most important part. When we’re at a Buddhist center, we actually say it out loud before a meeting. We’ll say, May our work benefit others. If they had said that at that company I was working at before every meeting, I think they would have avoided so many problems, but it sounds so cheesy.

My wife and I were actually arguing about it the other day. She’s like, What would you do to make corporations more ethical? I’ said have everybody at the beginning of a meeting say, “May our work benefit others.” It sounds really cheesy, but I think it’d be a lot harder to do something really obviously harmful after you say that out loud.

[00:24:31] Laura Sydell: I like that. I’m going to then throw the next component at this because yes, it sounds cheesy and what does it have to do with me being happy? Your book is about how to be happy and there is a reason why if you just meditate you can shoot a gun or do something horrible. It doesn’t make you happier.

[00:24:52] Scott Snibbe: To quote the Dalai Lama, if you want to be happy, cherish others. In fact it was the first thing I ever read in a book by the Dalai Lama. He said, By all means be selfish, but be intelligently selfish. The stupid way to be selfish is just to think about yourself and your own needs and pursue them relentlessly.

The intelligent way to be selfish is to realize that all happiness comes from the times that you benefit others, whether you’re thinking about it or actually doing it. I invite each of you to do it as an experiment if you don’t believe this. Spend one day being totally selfish, doing things only for yourself. Spend the next day only doing things for others. How do you feel at the end of each of those days? Measure that and then do more of the one that made you happier and less of the one that made you less happy.

The intelligent way to be selfish is to realize that all happiness comes from the times that you benefit others

It’s like stoicism. People talk a lot about stoicism, affective altruism they talk about sometimes, that by thinking about the human condition logically, it leads you to be compassionate. That’s the true cause of happiness.

[00:25:51] Laura Sydell: Even going back to the early capitalist ideas, it’s sort of rational self-interest to some degree, except that I don’t think that quite works. I think the actual act of feeling something for others, and then the people around you are happy to see you too, because you make them feel better. It’s a kind of a virtuous circle.

I loved this quote. You brought up Robert Thurman, who is most famously probably Uma Thurman’s dad. But he is also one of the greatest scholars of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. I had this great quote basically that you talked about how self-absorbed we are, and I liked the way he put it, if you can remember.

[00:26:36] Scott Snibbe: Oh, I remember it. I’m so lucky I’ve gotten to see him speak so many times. He’s really like one of my gurus, such an incredible teacher. The first time I heard this and again, you keep bringing up emptiness, which is just wonderful because it’s the root delusion.

We were in a huge audience in Berkeley and he said, Here’s what Buddhism says is that, if you think about your situation, how you think about yourself, deep down, each of us thinks that of everybody alive, in fact, out of everyone that’s ever lived, we’re just a little bit more important. We’re a little bit more important than everyone else. As a side, I want to say that for some people you think you’re a little bit less important, but it’s the same thing. It’s actually the same thing, it’s your ego.

It’s the ego that gets in the way of all of our happiness. It’s a sense of separateness, that I’m more important, less important, or simply separate, that there’s any way to separate me from everyone else. That’s our root delusion.

It’s the ego that gets in the way of all of our happiness.

I think I quote John Muir in the book, where he says, If you examine anything in nature, it’s connected by a thousand invisible cords to everything else. Einstein has said it too, the Buddha didn’t call what he taught Buddhism. That would have been pretty egotistical. He just called it the truth. It’s like a scientific analysis of reality that shows the true nature of things but with a particular slant of how to be happy, how to live a happy life, a meaningful life, a beneficial life.

The Buddha didn’t call what he taught Buddhism. That would have been pretty egotistical.

The Four Fun Facts

[00:28:07] Laura Sydell: One of the things I love about Buddhism is that to my knowledge it’s really the only spiritual path that says, We’re here to show you how you can be really happy. I like that particular aspect of it. Getting to this skepticism and the idea here that you’re creating a “skeptic’s path to enlightenment.” Indeed, Buddha never said, Believe me. He always said check it out, figure it out yourself, you may discover in fact that I’m right. Then he gives us what are known as the four noble truths. You actually call them facts.

[00:28:44] Scott Snibbe: That’s quoting Robert Thurman, too, he used to call them the Four Facts. Now he calls them the Four Fun Facts. Which is wonderful. In his latest book, Wisdom is Bliss, he talks about that.

[00:28:56] Laura Sydell: Let’s talk about them a little bit. The first noble truth is that there is suffering. Suffering exists. Life is disappointing. Although, I really have a funny side story. My parents were asking me about Buddhism, we were having dinner and I said there’s these four noble truths and the first one is that, life can be disappointing. They looked at each other and they go, Not if you’re well-adjusted.

[00:29:21] Scott Snibbe: The irony is if you fully accept the first truth, then life isn’t disappointing. Everything in Buddhism is a paradox like that. It’s so weird that if you totally absorb the first of the noble truth (first fun fact) that conditioned phenomena are unsatisfactory, which is actually much better, because life actually isn’t suffering. I was talking to Rick Hansen, the great Buddhist teacher, he wrote Buddha’s Brain, and we were having a nice conversation, he says to me, Is life really suffering? Is this conversation we had just, we just talked for two hours. It was so much fun. Was that really suffering? Not exactly in the way we think about it.

It’s something more subtle, which is that all of the kind of material, transitory experiences we have, don’t have a lasting ability to make us happy and satisfied. Everything’s constantly dissolving. They call it disintegratedness. This is a beautiful term for it they’ve started to use in Tibetan Buddhism, that things are constantly falling apart, like Pema Chödrön says. When you accept that, life actually becomes quite beautiful because you accept things as they are. It’s actually nicer to kiss your partner a or to have a nice meal without expecting that you’ll have another one, or that it’s going to fulfill you forever and make you completely satisfied. You accept things the way they really are.

[00:30:43] Laura Sydell: That’s the red pill there, right? Seeing the world as it is. I just have to get you to bring this up, because of course you had to go to a Seinfeld episode where he really he gets to the heart of suffering.

[00:30:58] Scott Snibbe: This is actually a Netflix special, 23 Hours to Kill. I had to fight with my publisher a little bit, because I had quotes that were like, Oh, this is copyright infringement. No, it’s going to make people want to go see this show, subscribe to Netflix.

This riff that he does, it’s very meta, like all Seinfeld. The entire routine is about people coming to see his show. All the jokes are only about that. In the kind of culmination of this routine, he says, When you’re at home, all you want to do is get on your way to see me here at the show. When you’re in the car, you can’t wait to get there. Once you’re here, now you’re looking at your watch and wondering when you’re gonna leave. And he says something like, We’re tired, we’re cranky, and nobody wants to be anywhere.

Then in the book I say, This is the perfect teaching on what’s called the suffering of change. There’s three types of suffering in Buddhism, and the middle one, the suffering of change, is how what we call pleasurable experiences actually have an element of suffering to them, because they run out and we want them to last. Then our minds keep changing, and we’re never satisfied.

Pleasurable experiences actually have an element of suffering to them, because they run out and we want them to last.

In the book I actually say that I thought Jerry Seinfeld did a better job than the Dalai Lama in teaching about the suffering of change. The funny thing is if you look at this book, it has a forward by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, so his office read the whole book. And they gave me many corrections, and they did not correct that part.

[00:32:38] Laura Sydell: The second Noble Truth is that suffering has a cause, there is an actual cause, and this comes from this sense of change. Then the third noble truth is there is a way out. Your book really is meant to offer the way out. The way out in Buddhism is something called the eightfold path. But in this book, you actually take us through—many of these steps would normally have a much more spiritual component.

As you said, when you meditate in Buddhism, usually you begin a meditation with taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. But that’s not what a lot of people are going to do when they begin a meditation. You talk about these different ways to do all of this in a much more secular way that still brings about that same sense of being able to let go and accept change.

[00:33:36] Scott Snibbe: It’s funny because the most advanced topics of Buddhism, like emptiness and compassion, they don’t need any change. But it’s these earlier topics that were very difficult to adapt. With refuge, normally as a Buddhist, like you said, you take refuge in the Buddha, which needs no explanation, the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, and the Sangha, the other people who practice it. If you’re not Buddhist, that doesn’t make sense, those three.

But as a Mahayana Buddhist, this Buddhism concerned with the welfare of all beings, there’s two more things. And this fourth one’s amazing because it’s everybody. You actually take refuge in every single other person. They say that refuge in other beings is more powerful than refuge in the Buddha because you utterly depend on everyone else for everything in your life.

They say that refuge in other beings is more powerful than refuge in the Buddha.

Everything good comes from someone else. The roads that we drove or walked on to get here, the food that we ate, the clothes that we wear, everything here. It’s like 10,000 people that created everything in our pockets and what we’re wearing and that sustained us today.

You take refuge in all beings first of all for bringing us absolutely everything. No word we’re speaking tonight we made up. We learned it from somewhere else: our parents, our teachers, and so on. Then everything good in our lives we have only other people to thank. It’s sad when you see people speaking and saying, Oh, I did it myself. There’s no greater lie.

But then the second aspect, you also take refuge in the people who make your life difficult. Because we all want to be patient, we want to be compassionate, we want to be kind. The only people that really teach us how to do that are the ones that try our patience, who are hard to find compassion for, who are very difficult to treat kindly. That’s the Tibetan Buddhist view. That’s really extraordinary.

My teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche used to complain that everyone was too nice to him. That everyone was always giving him food, beautiful places to sleep. That’s how a very highly realized person thinks. It’s like, Oh, what a shame. Everyone is so nice to me. If only I had some people irritating me, then I could develop my patience.

Everyone is so nice to me. If only I had some people irritating me, then I could develop my patience.

[00:35:50] Laura Sydell: I have a number of people who I’m so thankful they’re making me miserable.

[00:35:56] Scott Snibbe: We all do, right? Every day. But the weird thing is it’s the exact opposite person for some of us.

[00:36:03] Laura Sydell: That’s the other thing is that you also realize, through this path, even somebody who’s making you miserable, somebody loves them. Somebody out there cares. Even the person that is making you miserable, somebody loves that person. This also gets to the idea of emptiness to some degree too, which is this idea of perspective.

I forget who said this quote, Buddhism does not guarantee that you will be free from problems, only that you will be happy and calm through whatever problems you face. In our culture, I feel like everybody’s always looking for what’s going to solve my problems?

[00:36:48] Scott Snibbe: Problems are natural. It’s so bizarre, the way it works in Buddhism, because somehow by expecting problems they don’t bother you when they finally come up. You prepare yourself too, especially in meditation, like in our tradition, We actually rehearse all the different ways we could die every morning. It’s like a horror show starring you.

You think of all the different ways: I could fall off a cliff, I could get hit by a car. But it makes you really present for the day, because you remind yourself every morning, Oh boy, I really better take advantage of this. This might be my last day. Let’s make the most of it.

[00:37:23] Laura Sydell: Doesn’t that sound like fun?

[00:37:24] Scott Snibbe: Make the most of it. That’s why Buddhists meditate on death. That’s what’s so odd, is people think Buddhists are so depressing and like, why are you thinking about suffering and death? If you do it the right way, it makes you quite cheery actually, it makes you quite happy. I better make the most of this day. This is nice. This is fun. This could be my last day. This is worthwhile. I would not be doing anything else.

[00:37:46] Laura Sydell: There’s a sort of famous Zen little story about the monk who’s being chased by a lion and the lion chases him to a cliff, and he grabs a branch of this cherry tree, and he’s hanging about to go to his death, and he sees there’s a nice fresh cherry, and he grabs it, picks it, and eats it, and then falls to his death. But at least he had the momentary experience of this beautiful cherry. Life is like that sometimes.

You do in this book try to bring in some scientific research about the practice and what the practice does for happiness, for your body. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you try to incorporate these things?

Science and Buddhism

[00:38:31] Scott Snibbe: Sure, and other authors have done that better than I have. I have a lot of references, Dr. Rick Hansen is particularly good at talking about the scientific evidence and how neuroplasticity validates meditation and so on. Something deeper though that’s worth mentioning is what Thupten Jinpa, who is the Dalai Lama’s translator, says about scientific method is that we have a bit of a narrow approach to science in our current culture, which is the kind of controlled experiment with external measurement.

He said there’s a broader type of science that’s existed before the Western Enlightenment, which is anything that can be replicated, any experience that can be replicated. That could be as simple as fishing equipment and so on that has worked over millennia. From the Buddhist perspective, there’s a science of the mind that can be validated through your inner experience. That’s where, in these dialogues between Buddhism and science, it’s turned out that it’s been about 95% Buddhism influencing science, and maybe 5 percent the other way.

It’s been about 95% Buddhism influencing science, and maybe 5% the other way.

Because these dialogues the Dalai Lama has had with scientists through the Mind and Life Institute over 25-30 years. They’ve all encouraged scientists to go study how meditation works, but also to think about expanding the definition of science to our subjective experience, because we all do have this instrument for measuring and understanding the mind.

Just looking at the flow of blood within your brain is actually quite crude. We couldn’t understand a computer by just looking at the flow of electricity through its circuits. You have to actually also understand the software. And that’s something I write about in the book.

For anyone who doesn’t believe the mind is immaterial, many scientists believe in, immaterial consciousness today, but they don’t believe in a soul. It’s this analogy to software: that nobody would think to bring out the phone and say, this is Instagram. None of us say my phone is Instagram. That’s nonsense. But where’s Instagram? Is it in any of the chips? Is it in the cloud? Where is it? Instagram doesn’t really exist materially. No app, no software. Yet we have no problem saying that it exists, and it’s the same thing.

I often use the example of mathematics too. I think we all believe in math, but where’s math? We don’t have a math detector, but none of us would say, Oh, it doesn’t really exist. Saying something is immaterial doesn’t mean that it’s supernatural and that there’s a soul or a ghost or something like that. It just means a pattern of information, the information is immaterial, yet it definitely exists and has an impact on our life. You can just think of your mind, your consciousness that way too.

I think we all believe in math, but where’s math?

[00:41:15] Laura Sydell: There is in fact research about how attitudes and a variety of things can impact your health. Right now, unfortunately, we have a mental health crisis, and I think some of it comes from the isolation so many of us feel. In some ways this path is, despite the ideas of a monk sitting on a hill, really not about that. It can ease your sense of isolation, and therefore make you happier to realize you’re that you’re actually not alone. And I forgot my question for you . . .

[00:41:58] Scott Snibbe: I’ll tell you something funny about that. My brother was the one who got me into Buddhism, and he once told me one of the earliest Buddhist teachers said, You know that feeling you had when you were about to say something and you forgot it? That’s the feeling you always want to have. I was like, Really? But that’s like truly being in the moment. That’s what they say also, the way to listen to a person. The best way to give someone all your attention is to not think at all about the next thing you’re going to say.

What were you going to say?

Practical advice from the book

[00:42:40] Laura Sydell: Alright, here’s the thing. When I met you, you were much more working full-time and now you have a substantial career as an artist but you said really these days you’re spending more of your time doing Buddhism. I’m sure the people in this room have jobs. They’re very busy people. I know that when I was full-time at NPR, I rarely worked less than 50 hours a week. How can this book help people who are in that state as so many people are?

[00:43:15] Scott Snibbe: People ask this question a lot, and it goes back to what we said at the very beginning about the one minute meditation. But, I’ll tell you that if there’s one thing that will truly change your life, it’s this: When you wake up in the morning, don’t reach for your phone. Do anything at all to connect with yourself. Of course, I can recommend meditation. I think that’s an excellent thing to do. But your job in life, in so many ways, is to get to know yourself.

Your job in life, in so many ways, is to get to know yourself.

We’re deprived of that in the way our culture exists today. You deprive yourself of it when you reach for your phone first thing in the morning. So, first thing in the morning, don’t reach for your phone. You can go to the bathroom, come back, and then do anything to connect with yourself. Some yoga, meditation, exercise, go for a run without headphones or something like that.

Automatic writing is quite good actually, especially if you’re a creative person. If you don’t think you’re a creative person, just take a blank page and write by hand everything that comes to your mind without thinking about it at all. You don’t have to have any punctuation or anything. Something to connect with the deeper aspects of yourself. That will transform your life, even if you do it for five minutes.

My Tibetan teacher instructed me to meditate for five minutes a day for the first three years. It’s a very slow path. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but if there’s one gem of advice, that’s it. Don’t reach for your phone. Ideally don’t sleep with your phone. Spend five minutes connecting with yourself first thing.

[00:44:44] Laura Sydell: And of course, read the book. But on that front, it feels appropriate is that if we go out by doing one of your analytic meditations. I think to give people a sense of the book has many of these different meditations that you can go through in different phases, but I thought we could do one.

[00:45:08] Scott Snibbe: Sure, so this is one that seems to be universally useful to people. All of these meditations are antidotes for specific problems. This is the problem of not caring about people. Like people you pass on the sidewalk as you’re walking around or at your workplace or something, you might not care about, not think about their lives, not care too much about them.

If you’re particularly angry at someone, like your boss is yelling at you, or a fight with somebody, it’s particularly useful for people you don’t know as well, or people that annoy you quite a bit. This is called Everyone Walks the Hero’s Journey. It’s a way to open up your compassion to everybody. It’s only at one page actually.

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. As you encounter people in your daily life, a powerful meditation on impermanence is to picture the moment each one of these people 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 to put your dispute in 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 are 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.

[00:48:46] Laura Sydell: Thank you, your radio voice competes with mine. This has been a lovely talk and I certainly enjoyed the book and I found it a pretty easy read. The book is How to Train a Happy Mind: A Skeptics Path to Enlightenment. Scott Snibbe, thank you so much.

[00:49:12] Scott Snibbe: Thank you.

[00:49:13] Laura Sydell: And thanks to The Battery.

[00:49:16] Scott Snibbe: One of my friends who’s a really fantastic, meditation teacher, read this and then she said, You’ve made a meditation page turner, which is one of my favorite compliments about the book. Because I tried to make it readable and fun.

[00:49:31] Laura Sydell: We can do a Q and A.

What is the fifth aspect we take refuge in?

[00:49:38] Audience Member: Hi Scott, I’m not sure I remembered right. You were talking about the refuges. There was three: Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha, and then you introduced a fourth, which was everybody. You said there were five. What’s the fifth?

[00:49:51] Scott Snibbe: There’s a fifth one we didn’t get to. That’s the one that’s always accessible to you, because it’s your own mind. I actually really debated, because it’s the first chapter, even before the first topic, that’s how they teach the Lamrim. And that refuge is that if you go deeply within your own mind, there’s—I’m glad you got to this, because actually the most important. But the very beginning of Mahayana Buddhism is an extraordinary belief that everybody is fundamentally good.

That our anger, our craving jealousy, pride, they’re shallow. They’re at the shallowest level of our consciousness. You go beneath that, you get a subtle consciousness. Beneath that is extremely subtle consciousness. And you can touch that in meditation. If we had time, I could lead people through a ten minute meditation. Many of you here would have the experience. It’s not difficult to have that experience. To see the fundamental goodness that’s inside everybody.

That’s the flip side of Buddha’s always meditating on suffering and death is actually fundamentally, we believe that everybody is good and that goodness is so much more intrinsic and powerful than the shallow delusions that seem to overpower us. That was actually maybe one of the most important points that we didn’t even touch. That’s the fifth refuge is your own mind. And that’s the one that’s always accessible to you anytime you want it. Thanks for asking that.

[00:51:17] Laura Sydell: Thank you.

[00:51:18] Scott Snibbe: Thank you, Laura.

Credits