# Homo Deus Meets the Dhamma: Information Diet, AI, & the Nexus of Awakening | Yuval Noah Harari Q&A **Channel:** Clear Mountain Monastery Project **Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OlzK0rc48 **Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/q3OlzK0rc48 ## Chapters - 0:00 — Introduction and First Meditation Retreat - 6:39 — Buddhism, Belief, and Noble Truths - 16:05 — Meditation's Role Amidst AI Revolution - 24:27 — Introspection and Healthy Information Diet - 34:05 — Extreme Lifestyles, Politics, and Inner Discomfort - 41:35 — Rebirth Theories and Attachment Pitfalls - 49:03 — Lightning Round: Personal Practice Questions - 54:25 — Lightning Round: Advice and Sutta Highlights - 1:03:35 — Closing Reflections and Dharma’s Future ## Transcript **[0:00] Speaker A:** Foreign. **[0:10] Speaker B:** Welcome everyone to a clear mountain monastery conversation. We're very happy to have Yuval Noah Harari joining us today. So Yuval, thank you so much for taking the time. **[0:21] Speaker A:** Thank you for inviting me. **[0:23] Speaker B:** So I'll just read a very short bio. **[0:25] Speaker B:** So Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher and best selling author of Sapiens Homo Deus 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in his newest book, Nexus. His books have sold over 45 million copies in 65 languages, making him one of the world's most influential intellectuals. Born in Israel in 1976, he earned his PhD from Oxford and has lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Most relevant for our conversation today, Yuval is a long term meditator, having set his first Goinka Vipassana retreat at the age of 24 I believe. And he maintains a daily sitting practice of two hours a day and each year we'll try to do a 30 or 60 day meditation retreat. **[1:09] Speaker B:** So yeah, just jumping in to that vein of things. Curious if you could talk about how that first, your first meditation retreat changed your life and maybe describe for people who don't know what a Goinka retreat looks like. **[1:28] Speaker A:** At the time I was doing my PhD in history at Oxford, but I was also looking to understand the deep cause of misery. Not in a theoretical way, but really of the misery in my life. It was quite a miserable period for me and I couldn't find any satisfying answers in all the books and articles that I read, in all the philosophical discussions I had with people in the lectures at the university. It seemed like humans have no idea what life is all about, what is the cause of suffering and what could be done about it. And I had a friend who constantly nagged me for more than a year to go and try a meditation retreat. **[2:31] Speaker A:** And it was quite annoying. But he kept, he was very persistent and I didn't, I had no idea what meditation is. I thought it was some kind of mystical ritual that has nothing for me there. But eventually I became so desperate that I said why not? And what really attracted me, it's a bit, is that when I began to show more interest, he sent me this friend. **[3:06] Speaker A:** The code of conduct of the meditation retreat previously didn't really talk too much about what I have to do there. He sent me the code of conduct and it says that you have to be silent for 10 days. And for many people this is a huge barrier. I mean there are many people who have this idea that oh, vipassana meditation, this is silence. It's not for us, but for me this was the main attraction. **[3:32] Speaker A:** Again, I thought the meditation itself, it's probably some kind of mystical nonsense, but ten days of silence. There was something like, irresistible in that idea. And I went. And the very first day, I was absolutely, kind of literally, mind boggled. My mind was boggled, was kind of. I was astounded. No, the practice was extremely simple. In the first days of the retreat, Goenka just instructs the students to focus all the attention on the breath coming in and out of the nostrils and just feel when the breath is coming in and when it's going out. And it sounded like the easiest thing in the world. And I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds. **[4:24] Speaker A:** My mind would constantly run somewhere. And again, I was astounded how little I knew about my mind, that I have no control of it, that I don't understand it. I thought I was a very intelligent person. I was doing my PhD at Oxford. I read all these philosophy books, but I really didn't know anything about my mind and how it works. **[4:53] Speaker A:** And Goenka kept saying that just observe the reality as it is. If your mind wanders away, it's perfectly fine. This is the reality of the present moment. That at the present moment, your mind is very agitated and it runs away to thoughts, to memories, to fantasies. This is the reality. **[5:16] Speaker A:** And this instruction, just observe the reality as it is. There is no judgment. There is no higher plane you need to reach. There is no goal. You just need to be with the reality of the present moment. **[5:33] Speaker A:** This was kind of the first instruction that I got in that first day of meditation. And I still think it's the most important thing anybody ever told me. **[5:44] Speaker A:** And it completely changed my life and also my work. I don't think I would have been able to write the books like Sapiens or Nexus without the clarity and the balance that the meditation provided. Or I don't think I would have been able to deal with all the tensions and the issues that success and fame and public attention brings with it. So I think that gives some taste of what, again, for me was. I think that the most important thing I ever did in my life was go to that first retreat. **[6:36] Speaker C:** I admit that as a monk, it's. **[6:39] Speaker C:** It's actually quite touching to hear someone speak about, you know, the Buddha's teachings and the practice as, you know, such a public figure as speak about the teachings in such a powerful way. And I'm curious. You're speaking about the moment of learning to put down stories. And Goenka, you know, has been so skillful in framing the teachings in a way that's quite palatable to a modern secular audience as a. Putting down a story so that you can see them more clearly. But as you do step deeper into kind of this. This world, you realize there is another story. You know, the Buddha and the Pali canon and the teachings as a whole ecosystem and landscape. So I'm curious, you know, how is your. **[7:26] Speaker C:** What's your relationship like with that kind of that vista of the Pauli canon and Buddhism beyond just say, the meditation retreat itself? How has that evolved? And would you characterize yourself as a Buddhist? **[7:41] Speaker B:** Actually, **[7:43] Speaker A:** I don't think so. I mean, I know for my day job as a historian how traditions and religions develop over centuries and thousands of years, how. How they accumulate this layer upon layer of stories and sometimes mythologies and traditions and rituals. And it becomes so difficult to know. **[8:16] Speaker A:** What was really the original teaching and what was added later. **[8:24] Speaker A:** People always project back so many things. **[8:30] Speaker A:** For me, what made it easy to say, coexist with all these stories and mythologies and rituals is again, this emphasis that maybe comes from Goenka and maybe is not part of the tradition. But this is how I got acquainted with the tradition. On the reality of the present moment, what is the reality? What is actually happening? **[9:00] Speaker A:** And the idea that just believing a story, just believing a theory won't help you. It could be true or it could be false. Even if you believe a true story, simply believing it changes nothing. **[9:22] Speaker A:** And the. **[9:28] Speaker A:** I remember in several of the instructions that Goenka again repeatedly said, every deity is mitzvah, every belief, every view is wrong view, that if you just hold on to the view, oh, I believe in this. So this means I'm a good person and such. And such wonderful things will happen to me just because I believe in this story, then you haven't understood anything. At least this is the way that he put it. And this is still my basic attitude, that it's less in contrast to, say, monotheistic traditions, especially Christianity and Islam, which place enormous emphasis on faith, that ultimately redemption, salvation depends on believing the right thing. **[10:27] Speaker A:** And, you know, in Christianity, at least in Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, you had entire committees of theologians and church leaders sitting together and cobbling and creating this credo, this very complex formula that you have to believe. This exact formula. You know, entire wars were fought in Christian religion about one word in this formula. Like, you have the Trinity, you have the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. What is the relation between them? **[11:11] Speaker A:** Are there different persons? Are there three aspects of the same person? Do they have the same essence. So many philosophical discussions that most people don't understand. But you have the idea that if I only say that I believe in the right formula, this will save me forever. **[11:33] Speaker A:** And for me, this makes no sense. One of the things I liked about Buddhism is that belief to some extent, is of course, important. If you don't believe that going to a meditation retreat will help you in some way, you won't go there. But the belief in itself doesn't do anything for you. It's your ability to actually observe the reality without reaction, without judgment, to just see things as they are. **[12:14] Speaker A:** This is what liberates **[12:19] Speaker B:** Yuva, is you've as we're trying to discern the difference between what's truth and what is a story. You've talked about just how we can see that suffering is undeniably real on a certain level. And that's the first truth of the four Noble Truths of Buddhism. What is your take on the other three of the Noble Truths? That craving is the cause of suffering. That there is a cessation. There's a way to completely transcend our mental experience of suffering. And that following this Eightfold path of harmlessness of body, speech and mind, of training the mind in right view and right understanding that there's reality in these as well. **[13:09] Speaker A:** My understanding is this is not a credo. This is not something that you kind of. I believe that there is suffering. I believe that suffering has a cause. No, it's about actually practicing it, witnessing it. **[13:24] Speaker A:** And it starts with the first Noble Truth that, you know, most practitioners, including myself, we try to find a shortcut around it. And it's very common in my practice, in Practice of Friends, I talk with that. You sit for meditation and you think, this is not a good meditation. I'm not focused. My mind is all over the place. **[13:50] Speaker A:** Or there is some very strong pain in my back, and I just can't accept it. I'm resisting the pain. This is not a good meditation. And actually this is potentially the best meditation in the world because you are in the presence of the First Noble Truth that you now are witnessing suffering. And you witness the little suffering of an agitated mind. **[14:21] Speaker A:** You witness the little suffering of a mind reacting to pain with rejection. And if I can only be with that and witness the first Noble truth, oh, this is suffering, then this is liberation. And it's the same with the other three Noble Truths. Like craving is the arising of suffering. **[14:49] Speaker A:** This is something that I sometimes witness directly, like I sit for meditation. **[14:55] Speaker A:** Everything is okay. And after, say, 40 minutes or 50 minutes. Suddenly a thought arises in the mind, oh, it's probably almost over. And when it's over, I'll be able to go and eat or call my friend or do this or do that. And then it becomes a little bit of misery because it's still not over, but my mind is already rolling in this, oh, it's almost over. It will soon be over. And I can do this. And the moment that craving arises, misery arises. So then it's not some kind of theory that I'm a good Buddhist, because I believe that craving is the source of suffering, but I can actually witness that how the arising of craving is simultaneously with it, suffering also arises. **[15:53] Speaker C:** So that's a very, you know, practical and moment to moment and practicable sort of vision of meditation and this path. **[16:05] Speaker C:** And it's interesting because in 21 lessons for the 21st century, you end the whole book with the chapter called Meditation, Just Observe. And for such an expansive book to end on, you know, such a practical and a practical note was interesting and surprising and heartening to me all at the same time. And, you know, you talked about how you were excited to have an interview that wasn't just about AI, but we are. I am curious. **[16:37] Speaker C:** You've talked about hackable humans and the importance of meditation in humanity encountering this new era. So why, why is meditation important right now? Why did you end that whole book on that note? And has your view on the importance and relevance of that chapter or your optimism changed in the last seven years since you wrote it? **[17:02] Speaker A:** So I think meditation only became more important for me because of the AI revolution. For me, the biggest question about AI is whether AI has consciousness, whether it has the capacity one day, perhaps, to develop consciousness. I don't know the answer, but I think it's the most important question of all. There is this huge confusion in the AI community and in the world at large between consciousness and intelligence, which is behind many of the dangers that we now witness in the world. To put it very briefly, intelligence is the ability to pursue goals and overcome problems on the way to the goal. **[17:48] Speaker A:** Like you play chess, you have a goal to take the opponent's king, and you have all kinds of obstacles on the way because the opponent is doing all kinds of things. And intelligence is what enables you to focus on the goal and overcome the problems on the way. If you're driving a car, so you have a goal to reach, say, the train station, and you have to navigate there, dealing with all kinds of issues, traffic lights, pedestrians, other cars, this is intelligence. And this Is something that, as we all know, AI is now able to do better than us. It defeats us in chess. **[18:27] Speaker A:** It will soon drive better than us. It has superior intelligence. But consciousness is something else. Consciousness, I would. It's the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate. **[18:42] Speaker A:** Ultimately, I think my definition of consciousness is simply the capacity to suffer. A conscious entity, a sentient entity, is an entity that has a capacity to suffer and also, of course, to be liberated from suffering. Now, the interesting thing about the capacity to suffer, because then you can ask, so what is suffering? And the best definition I've found in both science and meditation, for what is suffering? Suffering is the rejection of reality. **[19:22] Speaker A:** Like if you think about, say, a thermostat measuring the temperature in the room and may be connected to an air conditioning unit. So a thermostat measures that the room is now, say, 30 degrees and then starts the air conditioning unit to cool it down. So it made a decision. It has a goal. It has some level of intelligence, the thermostat. **[19:49] Speaker A:** But it has no consciousness. It doesn't suffer. Even if you throw a thermostat into a cauldron of boiling water, 100 degrees, if it's a good thermostat, it will not break. It will measure 100 degrees. That's it. **[20:05] Speaker A:** It will not suffer because it doesn't reject the reality. Suffering is something very, very strange that the only thing in the universe that is capable of experiencing, as far as we know, is consciousness, is conscious being that new experience, something. And even though it's the reality of the present moment, you somehow nevertheless reject it. Like you experience it's hot. And you don't say, oh, I wish it will be cooler tomorrow or in a minute, but I want it now not to be hot. **[20:48] Speaker A:** And this is illogical. I mean, it's now hot. You just measured that it's hot. So how is it possible for it not to be hot right now? You can take all kinds of. **[21:00] Speaker A:** Of actions, so it will be less hot later on, but right now it's hot. There is nothing you can do about it. So, but the, the suffering part is not that it's hot, is that I don't. I don't. I reject it. I don't like it. And this is also the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is just a sensation. You can feel pain and not suffer. The suffering comes when there is pain, and I refuse to accept it, that there is pain. **[21:32] Speaker A:** And what is it in the universe that can reject reality? What kind of thing can reject reality? **[21:43] Speaker A:** And this is again a big question about AIs. Also, are they able to reject reality and to suffer? Now, another related question is about truth and the pursuit of truth. A lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley, they hope that AI will reveal the truth about the world. They think that because it is highly intelligent, it will pursue the truth. **[22:17] Speaker A:** They create a link, which I think is a mistake, between intelligence and truth. Maybe they make the mistake because they themselves are highly intelligent people. So they overvalue and overemphasize intelligence. But I don't think that intelligence is linked to truth. Human beings are the most intelligent entities on the planet, as far as we know, and they are also the most delusional entities on the planet. **[22:54] Speaker A:** So if AI is super intelligent, it could also be super delusional. Why think that an intelligent entity will pursue truth and not, say, power? If AI learns from the people who develop it, from the tycoons of Silicon Valley, then children learn from how their parents behave, not from what their parents say. If the AI observes the tycoons of Silicon Valley, it will not pursue truth, it will pursue power. Now, what is it in the universe that really has a very deep, ingrained, passionate urge for the truth? **[23:39] Speaker A:** I would say it's consciousness, not intelligence. Why? Because, again, suffering is the rejection of reality. Truth is the recognition of reality. Conscious entities, they don't always do so, of course. **[23:56] Speaker A:** This is why we need all the practice. But conscious entities, because they have the capacity to suffer when they reject reality, they also have this deep urge to know the truth because this liberates them from suffering. And this tension between intelligence and consciousness, I think it's the most important issue with regard to the AI revolution. **[24:27] Speaker C:** So this is speaking about that tension with the AI entities we're creating. And yet that final chapter of 21 Lessons is directed at the reader and, you know, speaking about how we become less hackable or less vulnerable to these algorithmic steerings of our lives, where does that fall in? As sort of an adjacent issue in this AI revolution. How key do you see introspection in this moment in humanity's development? **[25:04] Speaker A:** It's a very important question. I mean, throughout history, people always gave this advice, know yourself, get to know yourself better. But previously, we didn't really have strong competition. Previously in history, nobody was in a position to know us better than we know ourselves. Maybe our parents, when we were children, understood us better than we understand ourselves. **[25:31] Speaker A:** But usually you could trust your parents to have your best interests in mind. So this was fine. But no government, no corporation, no church could actually get to know you better than you know yourself. Now we have something that can get to know us better than we know ourselves, AI and we cannot trust it the same way we trust our mother when we are little children. It's very dangerous. **[25:57] Speaker A:** We already see with social media how algorithms manipulate us. For their purposes, social media algorithms were given the task by the social media companies to increase user engagement. You know, engagement sounds like a nice thing. Who doesn't want to be engaged? But for the algorithms, if the only measure of success is engagement, this means their goal is to get people to spend more time on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram, whatever. **[26:35] Speaker A:** For them, one hour of anger or fear or greed is better than 10 minutes of joy or than two hours of sleep. **[26:49] Speaker A:** They reduced the whole complexity of human life to a single measure of engagement, which is measured mainly in minutes. How many minutes do you spend on the platform? And the algorithms experimented on billions of human beings and discovered that the easiest way to create engagement, to grab our attention is to press the hate button or the fear button or the greed button in the mind that if something makes me very angry, I can't stop watching it and I can't stop talking about it with other people. And this is what they do. And this is one of the reasons for this epidemic of distrust and outrage which is destroying societies all over the world. **[27:44] Speaker A:** So what the AIs are actually doing, they discovered our own weaknesses and use it against us. If there is some, let's say, group in society that you already dislike, the AIs discover it and then show you more and more videos or stories that make you hate this group even more. They need to understand our weaknesses to turn it against us. Now this is where the advice to get to know yourself through meditation or through other means becomes more important than ever. Because we are now in the presence of entities that are constantly watching us, looking for our own weaknesses. **[28:34] Speaker A:** And when they discover our weaknesses, they use it against us to protect ourselves. We need to get to know our weaknesses better, then we can protect ourselves to some extent. And this is what meditation enables us to do. It's like in a way, an antivirus for the mind. **[28:55] Speaker B:** Yeah. Seeing this liability of these huge algorithms to be able to hack us, hack our attention. You've talked about the importance of having an information diet, and I'm curious if you could give us any information diet advice. And is there a place ever for just a complete media fast, just totally putting down all news watching and all media for periods of time? **[29:21] Speaker A:** I think it's a good Analogy to think about information like food. **[29:24] Speaker A:** Information is the food of the mind. And we've learned about some things about the food of the body, that of course, the body needs food in order to survive and to grow and to be healthy. Food isn't bad, but we need a diet. First of all, we learned that too much food isn't a good idea. Yes, we need food, but not too much. **[29:48] Speaker A:** And secondly, we've learned that we need to be careful about the quality of the food we are feeding our body. And some people, you know, are extremely mindful these days about what they eat. And finally, we've learned that to really be healthy, it's important not just to eat, but but also to digest. If you just eat all day and you don't give your stomach time to digest, it's not good for you. Exactly the same principles hold for the mind and for the food of the mind, which is information. **[30:28] Speaker A:** Too much information just isn't good for us. If we flood the mind by an enormous amount of information, we don't give the mind any time to digest it. And as with food, also with information, digestion is actually more time consuming and in a way more important than just putting it in. So if you spend an X amount of time consuming information, you need to give the mind sufficient time to digest it. To how do you tell the difference? What is reliable information, what is unreliable, what to do with this information. And of course, we need to be mindful about the quality of the information we consume. So, you know, we have on food we have sometimes labels that show us the amount of sugar and fat and salt in what we eat. If you eat some crisps and it says that this contains 20% fat, 10% salt, 20% sugar, and you want to eat it. **[31:40] Speaker A:** So okay, it's a free country, you can eat it, but at least you know what you're putting inside your body. **[31:46] Speaker A:** Maybe we need something similar for the content. For instance, on social media that you will watch some video and you will see. This is 20% anger, 40% greed, 10% fear. If this is what you want to feed your mind, then okay, it's a free country, do it. But at least you know that. And you know, if you constantly feed your mind on a diet of anger and fear and greed, it's unlikely to be a healthy mind. And finally, with regard to information fasts. So I think it is recommended. Like with food fasts, people need to be aware of, you know, not to put the bow too high and to be mindful of what is good for them. Personally, the one thing I've learned about food diets in my life is that all of them are wrong because there is no one size fits all. **[32:43] Speaker A:** Like when I was in my 20s, I had irritable bowel syndrome. And so because I read about all these food diets, I tried to eat very healthy food. So I would eat only brown rice and never white rice and only wholemeal bread and not white bread and so forth. Until the doctor told me that's very nice for other people. But if you have irritable bowel syndrome, it means your stomach have difficulty digesting stuff. **[33:14] Speaker A:** So you need to give it something simple, not complicated. So you would better eat white rice and not brown rice. And it worked to some extent. So there is no food diet which is the best for everybody and there is no information diet which is the best for everybody. Nowadays I sometimes take these long retreats of one or two months of, you know, a 60 days information fast. **[33:42] Speaker A:** But I wouldn't recommend to all the, all our viewers to now go on a 60 days information fast. This could be extreme. But to start with a few hours or like a weekend, I, I think this would be a good start for everybody every now and then. **[33:59] Speaker B:** Do you think there's a place for a class of people say on the extreme end of information diet? **[34:05] Speaker B:** I mean there are monastics in our tradition who just don't watch any news, who just feel that it's improper to even say read non dharma books, Non dharma books that aren't, aren't Buddhism. **[34:16] Speaker B:** Do you think there's a place like a value of someone who comes with that perspective? If otherwise they're living a very healthy life, but they're just not watching news. **[34:25] Speaker A:** Absolutely. Again, I think there is a place in the world for a very wide spectrum of people and attitudes. **[34:36] Speaker A:** We need politicians that their life almost 24 hours a day. Is politics. Part of the problem today in the world is that not enough good people are going to be politicians because it's an extremely demanding job and for compassionate and sensitive people it's also an extremely unrewarding job. It's very so. But I said it because we also need the opposite. **[35:08] Speaker A:** We also need people who are completely not involved in any way with politics and they dedicate their lives to preserving and developing other things in reality. So I don't think it's mutually contradictory that because we need some politicians that nobody should be a monk who sits in a cave and is completely disconnected from politics, but also the opposite. Just because we need these monks in the caves and we admire them. It doesn't mean that, that if somebody goes to be a politician, then we say to them, no, you're wasting your life on the wrong thing. **[35:49] Speaker C:** Thank you, Yuval. And we wouldn't have taken it personally. If I'm curious about the information diet, you spoke about the kind of difficulties of someone in a position of authority and the diet of fame, of repute. You know, the Buddha was very. He singled it out. You know, gain, honor and praise are a harsh, bitter thing, an obstacle to the unexcelled relief from bondage or release from bondage. **[36:17] Speaker C:** And you know, I'm really curious what it's been like for you to go from a, you know, kind of normal college lecturer or at lecture at a university, a professor, to quite a bit of renown. And how have, how has that experience been as a practitioner? And how have you seen it affect others, like around you? Like, what are things like in that echelon of the zeitgeist of culture at the moment? Like, are people, you know, have you seen people able to hold their centers through that? **[36:49] Speaker C:** What's it been like to be in those waters for, for you? I'm really curious and do you need to a cave for a while? **[36:58] Speaker A:** It's a challenge, definitely. But I. What makes it possible for me to deal with it is the combination of my own practice that I can still every year go to a long retreat and almost every day maintain my practice of two hours. And in addition to that, I'm surrounded by people who are helping me. So my husband and me, we've established a social impact company a couple of years ago, and we have like 20 employees who serve as a kind of buffer between me and these waves of demands and attention. **[37:47] Speaker A:** And sometimes both positive and negative attention can really mess with your mind. So I don't have to deal with my social media channels. And like this interview, I didn't arrange it. I mean, I guess a lot of people exchange a lot of emails over weeks and months to arrange this interview. And I just come here and talk and that's my part. **[38:11] Speaker A:** And for instance, I don't carry a smartphone with me. I have it at home because these days with healthcare and other services, they really demand that you have a smartphone. So I have one, but I use it like a stupid phone from the 90s, basically. But that's a bit unfair because my husband is carrying the smartphone for me. So he gets a lot of all this kind of flood of attention and demand from the outside world. And he serves as a kind of shield for Me. So I'm very grateful for the people who allow me to maintain a degree of calmness even in the midst of this media storm or attention storm. **[39:01] Speaker B:** Yuval, I think my favorite non Buddhist quote is that is from Pascal and he says that all of humanity's suffering stems from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone. And I'm curious what you think about that. How do you think it's true or what? To what extent do you think it's true or where do you think it falls short? **[39:27] Speaker A:** Of course it's a bit of an extreme statement, but it has a very deep root of truthfulness. Because you look at the world today, and in the early 21st century, humanity has reached the best place it ever was. By most objective measurements, there are still many problems in the world, many wars, inequality and so forth. But it's not that it's a perfect world, it's a better world than ever before in history. By most objective measurements, death in childbirth of mothers and of infants, death from all kinds of infectious diseases, mortality from famine, levels of violence. **[40:23] Speaker A:** We are all in the best place we've ever been. And yet you see the level of outrage, of hate, of discomfort, of ungratefulness of people. And it creates the impression that something in the human mind just can't be satisfied, no matter with what. And that no matter what changes we make in the outside world, as long as we don't learn how to deal with the inner mechanisms of the mind, it will never be enough. So in this image that Pascal creates of like you sit alone in a room, everything seems okay, everything is calm, there is no danger, and yet there is so much discomfort, there is so much suffering there. **[41:28] Speaker A:** So yes, in a sense, this is the root of all the problems of humanity. **[41:35] Speaker C:** So to slightly shift the trajectory on this, in 21 Lessons, you write of the theory of rebirth. The second problem is the paucity of supporting evidence. While elsewhere acknowledging the power of stories to overwhelm facts, how can one be sure the story of secularism is not blinding people to legitimate evidence for rebirth, such as externally corroborated accounts of children's past life memories? And so I'm. I'm not saying one way or the other on that, but I am curious how you navigate as someone who has gained some confidence in the Buddhist teachings and all these things, how do you navigate that kind of tension between these wider vistas of cosmology or these other things, and the power that secularism sometimes thinks of itself as a non story, but it has elements of its own story and how do you kind of navigate that? **[42:29] Speaker A:** My basic principle is that if there is something that you really, really want to believe, then you need very strong supporting evidence. People in Christianity really want to believe in heaven. People who are Buddhists or Hindus, they really want to believe in rebirth. Especially all people are afraid of death, of complete annihilation. And it's very comforting and attractive to think there is something beyond. **[43:00] Speaker A:** And because it is so very attractive, we need very strong evidence. Because our mind has the tendency to latch on to even weak evidence. Oh, that's it. Now I have proof, I can relax. What I want to believe is really true. **[43:20] Speaker A:** So we need strong evidence. And also because if it's true, then it has so many far reaching implications. It's not something with just a little impact on the world. It changes everything from our perspective of our present life to our perspective on biology and physics and the laws of nature. Because science in its present form doesn't know of any mechanism that would allow rebirth. **[43:54] Speaker A:** Now it doesn't negate it either, if you understand. Again, it goes back to the issue of consciousness. The key thing with stories about rebirth or about heaven or any type of existence after death. What people care about is not the existence of the body after death, it's the existence of the mind, the soul, consciousness after death. Now because we don't understand consciousness, we don't know what kind of mechanisms could allow maybe some part of consciousness to go on existing after the death of the physical body. **[44:40] Speaker A:** So I don't think that science just says this is impossible. It says we don't understand this aspect of reality at all. We know that for thousands of years people had very strong beliefs with very concrete theories about how it happens. But all these theories tend to suffer from self contradictions. If you really go into the theory, there are things that don't really work very well. **[45:13] Speaker A:** And we know that people have a very, very strong motivation to believe in the story. Therefore our kind of the bar, what kind of evidence would we like in order to accept it? The bar is set very high. If you just find a few children that can apparently remember a past existence and identify people and identify objects, this is not considered again, it's not. Yeah, this is evidence. **[45:46] Speaker A:** It's good to collect this evidence and analyze it and try to learn things from it. But given what it is meant to prove, we need something stronger than that. **[46:01] Speaker B:** Hey Yuval, in one of my favorite quotes from you is you're talking about this tendency to hold on to views. And even in the history of Buddhism, the wars and arguments and, you know, fights that have occurred just attaching to ideas of emptiness. And the quote is, fighting other people because you believe in the glory of an eternal God is unfortunate but understandable. But fighting other people because you believe in the emptiness of all phenomenon is truly bizarre but so very human. How would you suggest we as Buddhists avoid attachment to views and narcissism of small differences that says only this is true and everything else is wrong? **[46:46] Speaker A:** That's the whole practice. Our whole practice is exactly how not to develop attachments. And you know, the more important the practice becomes in your life, the greater the danger that you will develop attachment to views about the practice. If you're one of those people who went to some retreat, say 10 years ago and sits every now and then for 10 minutes, then you probably don't. You're not in danger of developing very strong attachment to your views about the practice. **[47:22] Speaker A:** But if you go to 60 Days Retreats and sit two hours every day, or if you're a monk, the danger, this is your life. And then the danger of attaching, of developing very strong attachment is much, much bigger. And this is what we saw throughout Buddhist history. Again, I think that, and I try to be objective on that. The record of Buddhism is still much, much better than the record of Christianity or Islam. **[47:53] Speaker A:** Just if you count the bodies. How many people were killed sometimes in horrendous ways, burned at the stake? How many people were killed arguing about the correct view about God compared to how many people were killed in arguments about the correct view of emptiness? I think emptiness is in a better position. But still we should care more about our own behavior than about the behavior of others. **[48:32] Speaker A:** And you know, even friends are engaged in these kind of jhana battles that you now see in certain communities in the west. Different definitions of what is jhana and how to attain jhana. And if you believe the wrong thing about jhana, what is the first jhana, what is the second jhana? Then I won't talk with you or I will shout at you, which again, if it wasn't so sad, it would have been fun. **[49:03] Speaker C:** We wanted to finish Yuval with a lightning round of questions. **[49:08] Speaker C:** So we maybe 30 seconds or a minute or less on each of these answers, if you're able, because we have a few of them coming at you. See what you can do. So first, have you ever thought about ordaining? **[49:22] Speaker A:** Yes, but not seriously. I mean, it's one of these things that I realized this is just a trick of the mind. **[49:29] Speaker A:** I mean, this is actually a very Big subject. But I think it's an important point that it relates to the issue of free will. I don't think that we have free will. I don't think that people spend so much time trying to make the right decision when the decision is usually out of their hands and this is a waste of time and effort. I think we should focus on, on being aware of the consequences of our decisions because this is what will really change the next decision instead of on trying to make the right decision. **[50:11] Speaker A:** So one of the things I realized I'm not going to obtain, there is no point kind of spend wasting time and mental energy on that. The conscious mind is not the Prime Minister, it's the PR department. The decision has been taken elsewhere and I'm now just engaged in rationalizing it for myself and for other people. It's a waste of time. So I left it aside and I tried to be aware of the consequences instead of thinking maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't. **[50:50] Speaker B:** Yeah, and you already have the haircut. **[50:52] Speaker C:** So **[50:56] Speaker B:** next question is, if you were King Suddhodana, the Buddha's father, and as he's the Bodhisattva's a baby, and you had the choice to incline this Bodhisattva to becoming a wheel turning monarch, that is someone who could bring utter benefit and peace to the whole world versus this renunciate path to become a Buddha, attain enlightenment and teach others that path. Which path would you encourage the Bodhisattva to take? **[51:21] Speaker A:** Of course the path of enlightenment and not of becoming this universal monarch. I know from history that the universal monarchies, they didn't bring so much benefit to humanity. And whatever benefit they did manage to bring was very short term. **[51:42] Speaker A:** This is not a path to reeling. Save humanity from suffering **[51:50] Speaker C:** on a desert island with two books, what would they be? **[51:54] Speaker A:** Oh, I don't know. I mean. **[51:59] Speaker B:** Or no books. Or no books. **[52:02] Speaker B:** Yeah, **[52:05] Speaker A:** it's okay, we have another one for you. It doesn't matter. I mean, again, as somebody who writes books for a living, and I know both the advantages, but also the limitations of books, the most important things in life are not learned from books. Books can be very helpful to give you some kind of initial guidance. But the really difficult part of what you need to do is not reading books. **[52:38] Speaker B:** If you had 24 hours left to live, how would you spend that time? And how much of it might be in meditation, if any? **[52:46] Speaker A:** I have no idea. I mean, whatever I say now is meaningless. As I said before, this will just be the PR department trying to come up with some. **[52:55] Speaker A:** I mean, what I've learned in life is that we cannot really imagine how we would actually behave in a situation that we have never been in before. People surprise themselves both for good and for bad. **[53:13] Speaker C:** Your most unexpected or interesting meeting with a leading intellectual or world leader in the last few years, someone who you found to be quite surprising in how they presented or how they were. **[53:28] Speaker A:** Oh, I have to think about the **[53:30] Speaker C:** surprising or inspiring or something, something of that nature. **[53:39] Speaker A:** I've met Maria Ressa from the Philippines who won the Nobel Peace Prize, I think, for her activity there. And it was just very inspiring to see someone who works so hard under extremely difficult and dangerous and frightening conditions and is still kind of bubbling with joy. And she seems to be enjoying life in the midst of this extremely difficult situation that she's in. **[54:17] Speaker B:** Yuval, what one piece of advice might you give to Buddhists in general? **[54:25] Speaker A:** If you give the mind two things to do, one difficult and one easy, it will always go for the easy one. And so especially in the practice, what I see again and again with myself and with other people around me is that if we give ourselves too many things to do, we just forget about the difficult parts which tend to be the more important. **[54:55] Speaker A:** Maybe I give an example from my own practice that in the Goenka tradition, so during the retreat, there are times when you need to sit for one hour without moving at all. Like sittings of Adita, of strong determination. And this is just three times a day. And it's training the mind to deal to experience different things. But like many of my friends, I developed the wrong view that if I manage to sit longer and longer without changing my posture, this means I'm really progressing in my practice. **[55:36] Speaker A:** And so I would sit all the meditation sittings, not just these three hours. I would every sitting even of two hours, I would make it in a d time practice don't. And I became very good at it. But at a certain point I noticed it's not doing me any good at all, that even if you take just somebody from the street who never meditated in their life and you tell them if you manage to sit for an hour without moving, I will give you a million dollars, they will probably be able to do it. Very painful, excruciating pain. But they will remember the million dollars and they will be able to do it. It's easy to sit for one hour or two hours or three hours without moving. But if you told them, if you manage to say, focus on your breath for 10 minutes, for one minute without running to some thought, some memory. **[56:35] Speaker A:** All your attention is just on the reality of the breath. I will give you $10 million. **[56:40] Speaker A:** They will not be able to do is very, very difficult. Now if in my practice I have these two things, I need to stay with the present reality and I need not to move for one hour. The mind will tend towards the easy thing of not moving. And it's the same with fasting. Very easy to fast for a day. **[57:07] Speaker A:** Very difficult to not allow anger to arise in the mind. So try to, to not to give the mind too many things to do and, and not to kind of lean more and more towards the easy stuff which, which looks difficult, but it's really the less important part of the, of, of the practice. **[57:31] Speaker C:** One sutta other than the Satipatthana sutta that you find especially meaningful, **[57:39] Speaker A:** the easy answer would be the Anapana sutta, but it's the same thing. Basically. I'm not really much of a sutta person. **[57:50] Speaker A:** I've read some, some, some suttas, but, and I, I tend to think that if you, if you take just one small part of one sutta and really practice it, this will probably be more beneficial than reading the entire tipitika. **[58:09] Speaker C:** The Anapanasati sutta was a good choice. **[58:12] Speaker B:** Agree. And just. This doesn't have to be a quick answer, but yeah, I mean part of the heart of the Goinka tradition is, you know, when you sit to meditate, you're not inclining towards pleasant feelings or not climbing away from unpleasant feelings. **[58:29] Speaker B:** That section of the Satipatthana sutta. But there are other places in the canon when the Buddha does talk about actively encouraging sukha or encouraging happiness, encouraging pleasure, specifically in meditation towards jhna practice, or encouraging the pleasure, the happiness of morality, the blamelessness of morality. What do you, what do you feel about that type of encouraging, like healthy happiness, healthy pleasure? **[59:00] Speaker A:** I think that in Goenkaji's tradition this is not emphasized, at least not. It does talk about it in the instructions in the longer retreats, but in the initial courses, this is my interpretation is that again, the danger is that if you give people difficult things and more attractive things, they will increasingly lean towards the more attractive things. And the basic vipassana practice that I connected to, for me its power was that it was completely non judgmental and it was just observe the reality as it is now the practice of cultivating joy or compassion. **[59:53] Speaker A:** The potential problem there is that you can become judgmental. I'm here sitting, trying to, I'm practicing metta, I'm trying To develop compassion. And instead I feel anger or whatever. And then I start to judge myself. I'm not good, I'm not a good practitioner and I start to give myself grades. **[1:00:19] Speaker A:** And I think when people are more established in the practice, then it's a very important part of the practice to learn how to cultivate these good feelings, these good qualities. But in the initial stages, certainly from people who don't come from a Buddhist background, it can be even dangerous in a way because it's very easy to start building all kinds of stories and fantasies about these practices and become attached to them. And this is why I think Goenkaji did not. I mean, there is a little bit on it at the end of the 10 days retreat. But for most of the 10 days, the only instruction is just observe the reality as it is. **[1:01:19] Speaker A:** Don't give any preference to one state of mind over another state of mind. **[1:01:29] Speaker A:** And I think part of the issue is that people in different stages of their practice need different instructions. But Goenkaji's mission in a way was to build this kind of massive gamma factory. He was a businessman and he tried to create this mass scale system that people. You don't have a teacher who knows you personally. You come for a 10 days retreat, the teacher there is a volunteer. **[1:02:15] Speaker A:** Maybe they teach only one or two courses a year. They don't know you deeply and personally. How can we create a system that somebody without any background in meditation, like I was when I was doing his PhD in Oxford, how can we create a system that we can take someone with no background in meditation and within 10 days with a teacher who doesn't know me personally, to get established in a meditation practice in a way that is free of many of the potential dangers that you know, after the retreat ends, I will go home and then I'm completely alone. And then I try to do all kinds of things and if I have. I don't really have experience and I could go in really wrong directions. **[1:03:12] Speaker A:** So when could you try to kind of limit something which will be very, very basic, that people will. The danger of people kind of misinterpreting it and taking it in wrong direction will be minimal. Ideally in different settings. **[1:03:35] Speaker A:** Like if you are in a monastery for months and years and you have a teacher who knows you personally, or if you are a long term practitioner in say the Goenka tradition or some other tradition and you have years of experience, then it's important to also cultivate these other skills. **[1:03:59] Speaker C:** Bubel, we know we're about at the end of our hour, we just wanted to first say, I think you went out on a limb several times in your books around really speaking a bit to compassion for animals, to holding them in our hearts and awarenesses, and to speaking to meditation and the importance of introspection. And I just, you know, want to thank you for being willing to kind of go there in, you know, an intellectual culture that doesn't always support kind of revealing your. The heart or the hand in that way and feel like you're a bit of a secret agent for meditation out there in the world. **[1:04:37] Speaker A:** It's so secret. I mean, people know it. **[1:04:39] Speaker B:** Pretty. Pretty. **[1:04:40] Speaker C:** Yeah, fair enough. And just want to thank you for taking the time with us and for continuing to sort of have a voice in the current moment for all of us who are navigating this time. So thank you so much. **[1:04:53] Speaker A:** And so thank you very much for inviting me and for the very, very important work that you're doing of, you know, preserving and cultivating the seeds of Dharma. **[1:05:05] Speaker A:** And one last thing about the Goenka tradition is that it is a lay people's tradition, but its root, its seed was in communities, monastic communities in Myanmar. And without the monastics to preserve the seeds of Dhamma, we would have lost them completely. And I think that at this present moment in the world, when the world is in such chaos and nobody has any idea where we are going in a few years, it's also, you know, it's important to try and spread the Dhamma very wide, but it's also important to plant it very, very deeply so that at least some seeds remain for the future, no matter what happens. **[1:05:59] Speaker B:** Thank you, Yuval. Yeah. And many of us monastics, our first introduction into the Dhamma was through the Goinka retreats, a high percentage of the Western monastics. So. So very nice talking with you, Yuval. Come visit us in Seattle if you're ever anywhere near this part of the country. **[1:06:15] Speaker A:** If I come to Seattle, I'll definitely come and visit. **[1:06:18] Speaker A:** Thank you. **[1:06:19] Speaker B:** All right, thank you, Yuval. **[1:06:21] Speaker A:** Okay, bye. Bye.