Do you ever feel like life is just one problem after another. You finally feel like maybe there's a break, and then bam, another problem. This is how it is for many of us. But there is a better way to respond, a way of responding that brings greater ease into your life and returns some of the energy that the problems drained from you. We are hosting a free live masterclass on Sunday, February called Learn the Spiritual Habit to unlock energy and ease in your life, even if each day seems to bring a fresh pile of problems in it. I will teach you how to tap into the resources that are already within you so that life feels less like a never ending fight and more like an ever evolving dance. You will learn the number one source of unhappiness that drains your energy and keeps you feeling stuck, and a simple mindset shift you can make right away so that life doesn't feel like such a constant struggle. This will be a live event and you'll have a chance to interact with me and with each other. I've really grown to love these community events where we get to meet each other and deepen our connections. I hope that you can become part of that. Go to when you feed dot net slash live to learn more and register for this free event. Again, that's when you feed dot net slash live and I really would love the chance to meet you and see you there. What you'll find in time when you really truly can let go of the various things that we otherwise are constantly reaching forward grasping, you'll find a kind of freedom. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Steve Hawkin. Steve was ordained as Zen Priest in nineteen seventy nine, and in nine he received Dharma Transmission, or the formal endorsement to teach, from Chakai Danen kategory Roschi. He's the author of several books on Buddhism, science, and philosophy. These include his most popular book, Buddhism Plain and Simple. In his most recent book, The and Delusion, he applies break through Eastern insights to seemingly indelible problems in Western science and philosophy. He founded Dharma Field Meditation and Learning Center in Minneapolis, where he continues to serve as senior teacher. I Steve, Welcome to the show. No Eric, it's good to be here. It's nice to have you back on again. Today we're gonna be talking about your book called The Grand Delusion, what we know but don't believe. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they said, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, it is an interesting story, and it does make you think a bit. But I would say many things come to mind, but one really kind of stuck off for me this time, in terms of what you feed and which one you feed, I would say, you know, we should feed them both, and but it depends on what you feed them. And you mentioned kindness that the good wolf shouls kindness, and we can show kindness to the bad wolf if we can identify the bad wolf. But sometimes it's difficult to know which is which. But I would say we can feed them both kindness and caring and love, and whichever one might be getting out of hand there a bit. If they know that someone cares and is giving him some kindness and feeding them some good, nourishing food, I think that might be the best best way to go. I love that. I don't recall anybody saying, you know, it's more about what you feed them. That's a that's an interesting perspective. And although we've had, you know, plenty of people that we've talked about, you know, showing kindness towards your bad wolf, which I think is important, but really thinking specifically about what the content of the food is is a really interesting idea. All right, let's go into your latest book called The Grand Delusion what We Know but Don't Believe. Could I started there just a second? Yeah, the actual title that I wrote the subtitle was what we know but can't believe, but that seemed a little harsh for uh, the reader just coming approaching the book right off. I'm hoping that when the reader gets through the book, uh, they might have that understanding to some degree, but it we don't believe it what we know because we can't and I explain all of that in the book, you know, So really the title would be what we know but can't believe, which probably seems like an odd thing when you first approached it, but it was pretty uh strange. I think for the you know, the publisher probably would have had our time with that word. So we changed it. Yeah, well, I think we can talk about why we can't believe the truth. Having read the book, I understand what you're saying. We may have to go step by step to get there. But let's start with the title the Grand Delusion. What is the Grand delusion? Well, the Grand delusion basically is that we devoutly believe in non emptiness, as Naga Juno would say, we believe in substantiality. We believe that things are whole and complete entities under themselves, separate and apart from everything else. And of course I myself, for each of us, I myself one of these things, and that puts us in a pretty difficult situation much of the time, where now we have to look all for ourselves and try to get what we can and greet and anger. These things begin to appear in the mind, and that's a pretty a common experience for us human beings. It's a delusion. The delusion is in thinking that there's actually something to this, that there's some actual substantiality here. And what I try to show in the book is that things aren't quite as substantial as they appear to be. But I also stressed the point and some people have missed this, even though I repeatedly say it in the book that I'm not advocating nothingness, because clearly isn't nothing, but it has a lack of substantiality about it. But when we open up to this and realize this, uh, now other things that are very puzzling for us, such as what is mind? What is consciousness? Uh, this all begins to clear up. We begin to see it an rotically different way. And the hard problem is identified by David Chalmers. Yeah, and uh back in the early nineties. Uh is, how do we get subjective experience from just electrochemical problem the seas in the brain and this sort of thing. And that's the hard problem. That's the one that hasn't been resolved. And people they can deal with the easy problems, so to speak, which aren't so easy themselves, but that's because these problems can be dealt with. The hard problem is something that we're imagining, and we're imagining it along with the idea that we have substantiality in the first place, or that same mind comes from matter. That's a belief. There's no evidence for that whatsoever. There's a lot of coincidental kind of things, but there's no actual proof proof of such a thing, and I try to supply in the book all sorts of things that might help us to doubt that a bit. Yeah, let's start there. So the grand delusion being substantiality. And you talk early on about a question that Bertrand Russell famously posed that has been out there a lot, which is why is there something rather than nothing? It is perhaps the most basic existential question you could have, why is there anything here at all versus nothing? Right? And so you talk about your hard questions, right, this is about as hard a question as you get. What's your answer to that? How do you respond to that question? Well, again, it's based on the assumption that we actually have something, And that's kind of where I start with the book. In chapter two. We get to that point, and I spend the rest of the book then just showing why this might be the case. I realized right off, of course, that's an absurd thing to say that we don't have something. But what I mean is we don't have substantiality, and that that's really what I'm saying. Of course, right away it seems like I'm people will take it this way that I'm saying that, Well, if we don't have something, then we must have nothing. But that's kind of a false dichotomy there. Clearly this isn't nothingness. It's just playing obvious. There's site and sound and feeling in color and taste and flavor and thought and feeling. So this isn't nothing. But to think that there's an actual distinct separateness and ego or self but belonging to things, including ourselves, this is actually an illusion, and to believe it then that that's probably the grand illusion this these things in terms of substance and delusion. The grand illusion is to believe, to believe that, and to carry on as if this were the case. And I try to give some indication as to how this entangles is in all sorts of suffering. In fact, virtually all existential suffering can be done away with in a flash, if we could see through the the illusion of substantiality. Yeah, And I want to pivot to an idea that is late in the book for a second, because I think it helps listeners to hear what we're saying and maybe settle down a little bit and lean in a little bit more. And it's really the idea of two truths. So share a little bit about what we mean by the two truths. As soon as we start talking about like, well, the self is not here in the way we think it is, and it all of a sudden, people start going, but hang on, no, I mean I still got a mortgage to pay. I still got it. And you're like, yes, of course you do. Right. So I think recognizing that there's two truths that are coexistent at the exact same time helps us to go, Okay, we're not denying one of them, right, This is very important. It's a subtle thing. It's not easy to see, and uh, I spent years approaching it before suddenly I realized it. Well, that was mainly studying Nago Juna, and I suddenly was able to see what he was what he was getting at, because using my rational mind was just very logical, and I happen to be kind of a logic sort of guy. But I delve into something here that doesn't require the normal logic that we follow Aristotelian logic or Boolean logic or any kind of other kind of logic you might want to find, and in doing that, and then it's very difficult to see what it's taking place here, and then we fall into this grand delusion. Yeah, the thing is that we're not talking about like, well, that's right here in front of me, I have a cup, where do I hold it? There it is, We might speak of it, and then we talk about that the cup is empty. Well it's got water in it. We can say, well, yeah, yeah, of course it's got water in it. But the cup itself, there's no particular you thing they're about it at all, And that just seems like a very strange thing to say. And yet there's all sorts of ways we can go in and take a close look what we're attributing substance too, and that the say there's a particular cup and it's made of atoms that are made of quarks and electrons and things like this, and you you keep moving in. Eventually we don't seem to have any particle, any substance there at all. And yet here's the cup. And so there's like two truths right there. Yes, we have a cup in a conventional way. I put it down here before we started, and it's I could get some water if I needed. So that's one truth, conventional truth, relative truth. But then if we really get down to it, exactly then what exactly is the cup? And m as we go in and look for it physically we want to look for it seems to turn into no particular thing at all, and uh, and there's other ways we can we can look at it as well. You can have all kinds of uses that might take us beyond what we might commonly think that a cup has. But even when we get down for a close look here, we actually don't seem to have anything at all in particular that it is that we're calling a cup. Same thing is certainly true of more complex things such as you know, like for each of us myself, what exactly are you referring to there? And it isn't like there's some people understand Buddhist teaching as that the Buddha pointed out that there's no self, which is an extreme. There's nowhere where the Buddha actually said at least well, of course we don't know exactly what he said, but from the earliest recordings we don't really find that what he's pointing out. What Naga Jona clarified about five hund years after the time of the Buddha is that a self can't be found and what would it self have to be while it would have to be something that endures. You know that the remains itself from moment to moment, if it became something else within what senses it itself, you know. So, And there's all kinds of way. It's just one of many ways we can begin to look at this and the whole thing begins to kind of fall apart. But still we are in this world of this and that, you and me, cups and water and soil and sky and all of this. And yet at the same time, as we go in and investigate these things as I do in the book in various ways, they begin to lose well their substantial nature. And also then try to help the readers see that this has is a great deal to do with mind and consciousness, that the reality is of a mental nature. It's a sound and color and feeling and thought. But these don't really have any particular substance behind them. So when you say that something doesn't have any substance behind it, it's sort of what you were just describing. There are multiple ways to arrive at that right. One, as you said, is we if we start zooming in closer and closer and closer and closer, we eventually find nothing. Like you said, I mean, that's what quantum physics is, sort of saying like there's nothing there. You know, even if you stay as simple is that you know, energy equals masked uh you know squared Right, You're like, well, okay, it's so at the end of the day, it's just what's energy? Yeah, so yeah, I think that's one way in. But but I don't go so far as to say nothing. We never get to nothing. It's just say, what you'll get to is it's something that you can't get hold of. Yes, that's what we have. That's that's the fabric of reality, is of that nature. It isn't nothing is that, but you'll never get hold of it. And one of the core ideas in your work, as I was saying to you before the call, I've noticed in in all your books and shows up again here is the idea that the reason we'll never get ahold of it is the minute we start trying to get ahold of it, we start applying concepts to it, which a concept cannot define or describe reality that right, but we believe it does. And until we begin to wake up to the fact that no, but never, And that's the two truths. Again, we have it in concept, that's the truth up to a point, But if you pursue that far enough, you realize that you actually haven't gripped reality itself. Reality remains kind of a mystery for us, which I talked about right at the very beginning of the book. Why is this the case, Well, it is because we think we can get hold of it. And that's what I'm trying to show in the book is and this is why we can't believe it in the end, the nature of reality, because we can't get hold of it. And so it isn't that we don't believe it is well, you know, we have all kinds of believe some things that we think we've gotten hold of. But if you stay with anything at all for a while, you start to realize how much how well they understand this. And you know, when you're granting realness or existence to this or that and or persistence, and if you look carefully enough, you realize it's that's never there, the persistence and that kind of absolute realness, It just isn't there. But it isn't nothing, but it has this very liquid and fluid nature, which bespeaks of mind and consciousness. This is what they are, and this is the nature of reality. This is the fabric of reality, is mind and consciousness. So that's one of the things that rather than substance and and and then we keep looking for, how do we get mind and consciousness from substance? How do we get the electoral chemical processes in the brain to yield subjective experience? And in the book, though identify that as the impossible problem. It's not just hard, it's it's you're never gonna then. Yeah, I'm going to read a line from the book that I really like, sort of talking about this mind thing. You said, you hear a bell, smell a rose, see a bird. Where does seeing, hearing, and smelling happen in the bell or the rose of the bird, in the sense organ that picks it up in the space in between, in the neurons of your brain. Remove any bit of this and there's no experience. So where is it happening? And I think that's such a great description of you know, when we talk about mind, what are we talking about? Because where does it end or begin? Yeah? Yeah, well, well that's one way in which to it. It shows itself as not being something that you can grasp because if it had a beginning or an end their head boundaries or surfaces or something like this, you'd be able to get hold of it. But as we investigate any of these things, we begin to realize that the smell of the roses could be very distinct. If this is what you're smelling now in this moment, and you see what as a rose there across the room or something, and you know, and so we're giving it location and this sort of thing. But as you start to think about, well, where where is this experience of the smell taking place, we might say watching my nose or yeah, but the stuff that rolls over there, and uh, you know, and there's various ways. We just keep by asking questions and investigating what it is we're assuming, you will start to realize. And this is true of virtually everything that we experience in terms of substance, this, and that if we continue to observe these things, you begin to realize you cannot get hold of anything. This is the beginning of awakening. This is the beginning of actually seeing the true nature of what is taking place here. And with that it is a great deal of freedom of mind and ease that otherwise, uh might be quite elusive for us to find. I wanted to maybe go the direction you just sort of went there a little bit, which is to bring this back to a personal sense, because one way of hearing the last twenty minutes of you and I talking is who cares? Like? So what if I don't care about why there's something rather than nothing? You know, it seems like an interesting question to ponder, But from my day to day life, why does this stuff matter? Yeah? And in the sense of trying to bring you to some point where you can grasp this or that that would make you feel better or or fulfilled or you know this is meaningful for me or or whatever. That's fine, but see that none of that ever lasts. We constantly have to go get some more or defend ourselves better against whatever might be seemingly attacking us now. And that's what we're doing with this is it's I'm not supplying any answers in the book. I'm not telling you what it is you need to think or believe in fact him and I am asking you to constantly question whatever it is you you do settle down with. But what you'll find in time when you really truly can let go of the various things that we otherwise are constantly reaching for and grasping, you'll find a kind of freedom in an ease of mind and a relaxation. I don't know, we're at ease in the world rather than fighting with it. And this is, uh, well is that valuable to you or not? I don't know. But if you turn that into something, then it's kind of like, well, now you grasp me again. So we don't have to do that. But I would say to have mine that is peaceful and present and isn't locked in all kinds of infusion and wondering and where do we come from? Where are we going? What happens to me after I die? All these big existential things that can all be eradicated not by finding answers to these questions, but by seeing that the questions themselves are kind of derived from a misunderstanding of what the experiences in the first place. The experience of just this life, you wrote once, the deep hollow ache of the heart arises from a life in search of meaning. So say a little bit more about that. So you're describing a very specific experience the deep hollow ache of the heart because I'm out there trying to go what is the meaning of life? And once we get to that, the meaning of life, then we're starting to get to these bigger questions, right where all of a sudden going well, why what's the point? Yeah, so talk about can we resolve that? If so, how do we resolve that? Yeah, we can't resolve it, But we can't resolve it by pursuing our normal way. We're actually trying to get to an answer. It's like that question, why is there something rather than nothing? Well, we can start to see that this isn't in a sense, this isn't even a legitimate question, because, as I was pointing out, if we look carefully, we don't really seem to have something. And yet this is not nothing. But what we do is when we're trying to get to answer that question about the meaning of life and this sort of thing, we're constantly looking for something we can put there. Every now and then we might come upon something where you think, a ha, no, I have it. This is it, But now you have to defend it against other people who might have a different view of it or thought of it in a different way. Than you had, and or else we can just isolate ourselves in some way and live in some kind of blissful ignorance. But it's still we're holding to something which doesn't supply us with any kind of support. But if we wake up to the fact that you don't need that kind of support at all, right from the very get go, you don't need that. There is a great freedom, you know that comes with this, an unspeakable freedom. But we can feel it, we can know it, we can realize it. That's why our normal pursuit of we're trying to answer the deep existential questions looking for answers is not where to go. But starting to realize the kind of the emptiness, the lack of substantiality within the questions themselves, and seeing that rather than being oh my god, no, everything's gonna fall up, that's not true, you also realize that you've been free all along. Yeah. I often think about finding meaning, and I make this analogy, which I'm not sure whether you would think is a good one or not. But trying to figure out meaning through the mind doesn't work. It's like the example I give his imagine, I walked outside my door and you know, I live right by a road and I saw a dog that had been hit by a car and it was laying there suffering. Right, If I try to argue why me taking care of that dog matters, I can't really make a good ultimate argument because eventually you get to what You're just one person and it's one dog dog, and there's billions of dogs, and suffering is endless, and you're just a planet floating in the middle of nowhere, and on and on and on. There is no resolution. But in that moment, you could not argue me out of believing that taking care of that dog was important, because that emerges from someplace beyond a rational meaning. It's a response of the heart that just happens. I couldn't convince you why it's meaningful, but you could not convince me it was not meaningful, right, because it would just appear to me. And and that's how I've often thought about this idea of trying to find meaning by asking rational questions, is that that's not where you can find it. That's right, Yeah, the fact that stopping to help the dog and you'll do it, and it isn't because I don't know, well, it could be because you think well, this is right, this would be what a good person does. And you can have all kinds of rational thoughts like that your heart is also going off for the suffering of the dog. And in all of us what is important here and this is really the true form basis of morality, really, which very few of us ever find. It's not in rules and regulations and thou shalts and dulshal nots. And this is what a definition of a good person or a bad person. It is in acting and seeing things in terms of wholeness, in terms of totality. And it's like with the two wolves at the beginning. And that's why I said, we feed the both. We don't throw one out or something, but watch what you're feeding them. You know, Kindness is something of the whole. The opposite of that is something of the part or the self, where this faction against that faction. So in helping someone who's suffering or a dog, and now it doesn't matter a plant even that's suffering in some way, this is action. And if your heart is there, that your heart is with the whole and with taking things as a whole. It isn't because it's right or wrong or because we can start to argue about these things and try to justify it. Now there's nothing to justify. You're acting a lollness, and the kindness extends to everything, even the air around us. You know, in the earth you live in a ratically a different way, and your heart and mind are at peace. And I wouldn't say that, well, this justifies than being kind to animals. There's no argument for that. Also, sometimes you're in a situation where it's not really clear what to do, or for whatever reason, you might not act here where you did there. And if then if you ask yourself, Eve, well why why did I do that? I wouldn't spend too much time with that. It's just because you're not gonna come up with or that you're not going to get something you can grasp there. Um, you're just gonna make your head spin. But it's just in your heart. We can learn to keep our heart open to do everything to the whole. That's the treat with kindness. That's why I said at the beginning to the treat the so called bad wolf, well, well treat them both, because it's hard to distinguish. How do you know for sure at the bad wolf there but if you treat everything with kindness, and we're kind it comes from you know, we're referring to our own kind. That's all you would treat those who are of your own kind. But if you can let that sense of what's of your own kind extent of everything, and you're there and there's no no need to justify anything, and the understanding of why you feel peaceful and calm and more at ease in the world than you would have otherwise becomes really apparent. One thing that you say very often is you make the distinction between perception and conception, and that that distinction is a big one, is a really important one. Describe what each of those are and what is so important about being clear about what's going on there. Yeah, well, perception is it's more subtle in this but the easiest way to talk about it at first, but it doesn't quite capture the whole thing. But perception is basically, you know, what we take in through our senses. There's all kinds of problems with me saying it that way, because there's a dinner's I and me and my senses and that. But just to kind of get us into the general ballpark, that's what we're talking about here. But the thing is, will take whatever sense object is appearing in the mind now, and we'll start to conceptualize about it. First of all, we'll turn it into a thing, into something that seems to have substance and it is a particular thing and that sort of thing. I use the example in the book where I say, I don't know if it's a common experience that it has happened to me where I'm often some distant place or something, and then I hear some kind of a rumbling sound and I wonder, was that thunder or was that a plane I heard in the distance or something like that, And the perceptual experience is that, well, there's that sensation. I don't even know if I want to call it sound. But immediately we try to conceptualize it, well, was that a plane or is it, you know, thunder, And then we start to go with that. And what cannot be doubted is the actual perceptual experience. But when we conceptualize it now it was a plane, Well, that can be doubted, and you might be mistaken, but we cannot be mistaken about the perceptual experience. And so there's a subtle difference there. Well, it might be subtle, but it's also huge in terms of how we might react to things. It's important to make that distinction. There's a much there's a great deal that comes from that. And all of our suffering, our human suffering, is tied up in the way we conceptualize the world. And if we realize that this is just our take on the world, it doesn't necessarily have to be wrong or or right or anything like that. It's hard to justify that any go in any direction. But we do need to conceptualize or experience in order the function in the world. So it isn't like conception is bad. And here's where, uh, you know, belief comes in and two where all of a sudden might take on the world is correct and right, and I believe it, and I'd lose everything if this weren't true. And you know all the kind of worries and threats that come about. And it's a kind of insanity, but it captures most of us unless we just wake up to the actual flu with nature of what it's being experienced. Here there is the sensation of say a sound, do we have to name what it is? Well, maybe we do it depending on what situation. If it's a say, you're in some jungle somewhere, and it could be a big cat that made some sound, it might be good to distinguish. But you know, so, I'm not saying conceptualizing is out of the question, but we have to realize that whatever we conceptualize isn't necessarily the way things are. If we don't look at this carefully, we'll be lost to that and we freeze ourselves into a particular viewpoint or a belief system or something like this. And virtually, I won't say all human stuffing comes with it, but that's a great deal of it right there, and there's no basis for any of it. You said earlier that seeing things more clearly, or if we were to see things clearly, would relieve all the existential human suffering like that, But that doesn't relieve all suffering. It relieves the suffering of a type. Is that sort of your feel or your belief on it or I guess it depends how you define suffering. Yeah, if there's some deep disturbance in the heart and the mind, this is coming from, you know, holding onto some delusional you know thought of some sort to the extent that we can be freed from this and relieved of this, will be relieved of a great deal of suffering. And what's important about this is that with that now our mind can settle down, and with a quiet and settled, tranquil mind, we can more easily see the nature of what is actually taking place here. This is sanity. Now to the extent that we can truly see what's going on, will be perfectly sane. But to the extent that we're caught up in what I believe about this, what I think about that, what must happen? No, No, we're kind of heading down the road of insanity. Yeah, it's important to wake up to this. Uh well, wake up to the fact that whatever it is you're gripping isn't ultimately true. Here's the two truths. Again. It might be relatively true, it might be functional and useful in particular circumstance, but ultimately there's a freedom beyond that. You say somewhere that the difference between a Buddha and ordinary person, the difference is not in perception, it's in conception. To a buddha, to a person with right wisdom, there's no and I think this word is key. There's no habitual overing if perceptual experience with concepts, with ideas, beliefs and notions, preformed habits of thought that are used to explain experience. And I think that the really important word there is habitual overlaying, because as we've said, putting things into concepts and forming things is a useful thing in certain cases, but in most of us we don't even know we're doing it. It just happens like that. And so the difference is in being able to choose, or maybe to move more freely between conception and perception. Yeah. Well, perception is always there if we turn our attention to it, but we have to learn to recognize it and see just what that is. It is always present. The conceptual take isn't they come and go? And the conceptualizing the mind can actually go quiet, But the perceptual aspect, it is very quiet, but it doesn't go away to the extent that we can start to wake up to what's going on there. We can calm ourselves when we're in a situation of great stress. It's just a very healthy mind way to go. But I want to say all of this without implying that our conceptualized versions of things are bad or wrong. I wouldn't say that. They can often be mostly probably very useful and functional. They can also be a pernicious and bring a lot of suffering into the world too. But it isn't a matter of trying to get rid of these things, or like getting rid of the bad wolf. You know, No, just take care of these things. But the sanity with which we can take care of these things is coming from that mind which is open to the whole, and this would be more resembles the mind of perception. There's a debate in spirituality between a sudden awakening and a gradual awakening. And as we think about this idea of what causes us to be not awake, is this layering of conception? Right, continuing to layer on conceptions are the degrees in your mind of being closer to awake Because I'm doing less conceptualizing with awakening, it's not relying on the conceptual at all. So in the realm of conceptualizing, you know, there's here and there's there, and there's you and me and all of this sort of thing, And this is relative reality. Everything's moving around a bit. But what we're talking about is waking up, getting a full blown understanding or realization of the perceptual experience. Since we're already there, we've been there all along, there's no way of approaching it, we're getting close to it or anything of this sort. Those kinds of terms approaching, moving, getting closer, that all belongs to the conceptual and you can't really apply that then to well, can I get closer to the perceptual? No, not really, because they're already in it. You can't get any closer than that. That's why we talk about waking up. We don't talk about figuring it out. Uh, you know, it's just a matter of seeing it. But if we use the analogy of let's say a diamond, right, the diamonds there, I'm already awake, right, but it's covered in things, you know, but it would be covered in this analogy. I think what it would be covered with would be our concepts, our ideas, and as a result that we don't notice the diamond for what it is. Yeah, I wonder to the degree in which there is instead of four inches of dirt, there's an inch of dirt, right, we're scraping. But but I do agree, ultimately you zen practice describes it often. I've had some experiences of it. There are moments where the whole veil sort of falls away. Yeah, to the extent that we keep playing with the conceptual, we kind of deprive ourselves of that. And and it isn't again like we have to get rid of the conceptual. There's literature that speaks that way that you know, but I wouldn't. That's going too far. Yeah, But it's just at some point realize there's something very quiet that's going on all the time that we're not paying attention to. And to the extent that we can suddenly open up to that, that's when these moments of insight might strike. Not necessarily in every case, but that's what we're opening up to. It's a vail will to all of us at any time. And if you can get the mind to settle down, be quiet, get a little tranquility there, could you know, finally open up widely for us if once we actually see this true whole nature of reality and things won't be the same after that. We'll go back into the conceptual, but with a different understanding than we had before. Yep, for sure. So I wanted to talk with you a little bit about coons, because coons are away, it seems of moving away from the conceptual and I wanted to read something you wrote about coons and then maybe we can discuss them. But you said, people think of Cohen's as riddles or problems that need to be solved. But that's not the case at all. With every coon. The point is not to arrive at an answer through our ordinary conceptualizing minds. Rather, the point is to see for ourselves that our concepts can never provide us with a satisfying answer. And I think that's such a great definition of how coons work. Yeah, they throw us back into that space where you really can't grasp it, which we find frustrating at first. You approach a coon and it just seems inscrutable, you know, it's just you can't identify anything there or read anything into it. But that's because we'll approach it what our conceptualizing mine. But we actually have the mind that sees it all right all along, and really what it sees is that there's not a problem here, But when we grasp we'll see it as a problem, that there are problems here and things that need to be figured out. Yeah, but we don't really get to the end of what the problem is until we can see that we're gripping something that doesn't hold up, doesn't make sense. It isn't really a part of the world. It's something we've imagined. So in your work with coons, do you still you know, as a senior teacher, still work on coon's yourself as part of your practice. Yeah. Well, my tradition is Soto's in which is different than say Rinsy, where they would use cons uh and you'd assign cons to students to help bring them along and you go from quan to kana and this sort of thing. In the Soto tradition, we spend more time just looking at the different cons and the teacher would work with them by just discussing the con, looking at the corn and rather than turning it over and saying, Okay, what figured this out? I don't know, So I don't know what goes on there. In Dogan Zenji, who was a great teacher from the thirteenth century, but Sotos and to Japan from China, his approach to the Qan, his approach to everything, and he doesn't see things in terms of that we're going along some kind of graduated course. We move from one step to another and to another. It's more a matter of we study this, we look at this, we steep in this. At some point the shackles may drop away and we finally realize where we are and what's going on. And so it's it has more of a flavor like that. But we'll use the coins in the way I use coins most of the time. On occasion I have assigned a con or two to to somebody because it might be a particular thing there that it would help them if they could see themselves. I don't want to tell them what to see. They have to see it for themselves. But otherwise, most of the time when I'm teaching with cons, I'm just lecturing on the pointing out there's all sorts of things that are going on here, and different ways of looking at our experience than we might, you know, habitually you know, fall into and uh, you know, so that we use it in a different way of that sort. I gave a description of kind of the sotal approach to this, and I wrote an introduction to a book. It was The Iron Flute. It's a collection of total cons a total collection which is unusual and uh, that came up with tuttle back, I don't know, around the year two thousand or so. Well, actually at our center where I teach. On our website you can find it if people there, and you can look at texts that are there. I forget the title of it now, but it's but it's on coins, and so it'll give you a kind of a total take on coins. That's a bit different from the RNZA, which is more commonly known the rnzay. The tradition I've been studying in is white plums. So it's it's a little of both, right, it's I'm not sure what am I getting. Example that you know, I'm getting some asota and some some rinzai. So yeah, well that that was from zum Rochi, I believe, so yeah, so and and he was trained in both. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Cohens were a big piece I want to talk about. There's a phrase in Zen that I've always loved. I don't know what order these are commonly set in the way I always hear it is great faith, great doubt, great determination. You write a little bit about great doubt, and you say great doubt is not like ordinary doubt. Share a little bit more about you know, when we're talking about great doubt, what do we mean normally? Well, it is it's it's it's a counter to believe and we believe this. Yeah, but if you believe this, well not there's room for doubt. Doubt will be there. It might be very minute and you don't notice it, you know, but it's kind of opposite end of the balance scale with belief. An adult could increase and uh and actually take over it. So there might still be a little thread of belief left in there. Uh. But this is when we're doubting and ordinary things or not just ideas and thoughts, but also you know, people and and uh and even objects of various kinds that we might you know, can being the again the doubt like here again, I have this cup in front of me. Here I can be again to doubt the realness of this cup in any number of ways. But great doubt does come with that question why is there anything at all? You know, you know, why is there something rather than nothing? Which I believe was originally voiced by Leibnitz, but I first learned about it through reading bertrand Russell. As I pointed out in the book there. But for someone who actually tastes this, say you're out on a alr night, doesn't have to be anything quite like that, perhaps, but you look up at the vastness of the sky and then the stars and all of this. At some point it could overwhelm you, like what you know, why why this at all? How can anything be? You know? And when you get to the point where you you even doubt the hand in front of your face, I mean truly doubt it, you truly realize you see that there's no reality, no substance to it. That's great doubt. But then what you need to see, hopefully it won't they do long You realize, yes, but there's a hand here, and uh, you know so with great doubt it it doesn't destroy everything momentarily maybe, and then everything is kind of recharged, but in an irahically different way. That's what was kind of depicted in that phrase of you know, before I studied zand mountains or mountains and rivers were rivers, and then I studied this stuff. Mounds are no longer, mountains, rivers no longer. If you can move from that one quickly to the third one when you realize but here's there's a hand here, even though you realize there's no hand, there's no particular thing that's the hand, and yet here's a hand. Now there's a full awakening, and we've broken through the great doubt, and we also, uh now can understand the nature of mind and consciousness and that what is being experienced here it is is just that there's a long pole great Chinese and Master said there is only the one mind, besides which nothing exists. And from the way that's written, I can tell he saw this, he realized this himself, and we can experience that great doubt and break through. This is what we're realized. This is what we'll see and there won't be any question about it. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up with that idea that you know, we can see for ourselves. We can see for ourselves. Yeah, thank you, Eric, Yeah, thank you so much. Steve. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. Yeah, it is. I've enjoyed it very much talking with you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the one you Feed community. Go to when you feed dot net slash Join the One You Feed podcast. Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.