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Conversations about deep end meditation, skills for emotional fluidity, and living a life with more authenticity. All grounded in our work and relationships.
I'm here with Toby Sola, founder of the Brightmind app, longtime student of Shinzen Young,
and recently thinking and talking a lot about the role of meditation and responsibility, ~
practicality of meditation practice, and lots of other things that we're gonna dive into.
So Toby, welcome.
hi, Pranab.
Really excited to be here.
I'm excited for a conversation.
Yeah.
So ~ a few of the things that when I reach out to you, the initial idea was to talk about
and understand how Shin Zhen Young, ~ famous meditation teacher, has influenced many of
us, especially you, has said that I think in a YouTube video, ~ even after decades of
meditation practice, ~ procrastination was still something he struggled with and that he
needed to work on, ~ needed to have therapy to sort of sufficiently work through it.
so we'll get into that.
~ but I'm curious how you view sort of ~ meditation.
And the title of a lecture you did recently is Meditation is unnecessary and insufficient.
So I I'd love for you to just riff on that idea.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Right.
It's like it's it's it's
it's like crazy for for for meditators ~ and for people interested in the benefits.
So would love if you could just talk about that.
~ and eventually
we can get into Shinzen stuff.
Sounds good.
So yeah, I recently offered a a week long retreat and I gave a series of lectures which
was a really fun exercise, creative exercise in fleshing out some of these ideas.
~ I'll try to summarize what I went over in those lectures as succinctly as I can.
That first lecture meditation is unnecessary and insufficient.
~
It starts with kind of framing the discussion, which is
There's a lot of ways of talking about meditation.
For example, the modern secular mindfulness movement is very much interested.
It frames it as stress reduction, right?
MBSR, etc.
Another way of framing it is that's common these days is the Jhana movement and framing
meditation as ecstatic states.
~ so there are various movements that we see in the world, different emphases, way of
framing meditation.
And one of my main
Goals right now is to set up a framework that the North Star, the real frame of the
practice, is to develop a feedback loop between your practice and your ability to be
effective in the world.
So that the deeper your meditation practice becomes, the more effective you are in the
world.
And the more effective you are in the world, the deeper your meditation practice becomes.
So it's mutually supportive, mutually beneficial feedback loop.
And that's the North Star that we aim towards.
All of the practical theoretical decisions and ways of doing things are really just in
service of that North Star.
So it's a it's an orientation.
Importantly, I don't think I disagree with anything fundamental that other meditation
camps are saying.
Like, I think if I were to listen to a teacher that was talking about the Jhanas I would
agree with everything they say.
If I were to listen to a lecture from John Cabot Zinn,
The founder of MBSR, I would agree with everything they say.
And I think that they would probably agree with everything I say.
So really all I'm pointing to, at least the way I see it, is we're emphasizing stuff
differently, which I think that's important to understand.
Like there's a bunch of truths, and I'm choosing to emphasize one truth over some other
truths for various reasons.
So that's the context.
And so where I get to the fiery title for this talk is.
Basically starting out with kind of a make clear what I'm not saying.
So
What I am saying is you can create a feedback loop between meditation and responsibility.
What I'm not saying is that it always happens, or that you need meditation in order to be
effective, or that you need to be effective in order to be good at meditation.
So there's like a few different like corollaries logically of stuff that I want to make
clear that I'm not saying.
And the reason is like think about it for a moment.
There are lots of yogi yogis who are incredibly ineffective in the world.
What that means is meditation by itself doesn't necessarily lead to effectiveness.
There are also a lot of incredibly powerful people who are not awakened.
So what that means is you don't necessarily need meditation to be effective, which I think
a lot of meditators need to hear.
Like there are other ways up this mountain of being effective in the world.
It's not all about calming your mind or whatever.
So it's important to understand that what I'm really excited about is not a given and it's
not necessary, it's not sufficient.
but it's possible.
So this really great thing is possible.
The only thing that I'm asserting is that it's possible, not that it's necess not that
it's necessary or that it's even sufficient.
Does that make sense as a starting point?
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
hearing that, what makes it important or even useful at all to think about meditation as ~
increasing or altering our ability to be capable of doing things in the
Great question.
I think it, if set up skillfully, it is an incredibly effective and optimal way to work.
Talk to a lot of meditators and ask them, you know, how helpful has your practice been in
your relationships?
And some some of them will say it's been extremely helpful.
Like so I'll just start giving some examples.
Maybe that is a good way to bring it down to earth.
Like
For example, you can use concentration that you develop in meditation to focus on sounds
in your environment, right?
It's a basic focus strategy.
You can then use that when you're having a conversation with someone to focus on the sound
of their voice as an object of meditation.
So while the other person's talking, you're highly focused, which is inherently pleasant
and relaxing and calming, and you could say joyous.
And you also you don't miss anything they say because you're highly focused on every
single word, but each one even when every word begins and ends, ~ lot of clarity there.
So you could see how this simple practice, you know, when they're done talking and it's
your turn to respond, practically speaking, you've haven't missed anything they've said.
You're hyper aware of the meaning, the content of what they're talking about.
And because you've been highly focused, you're really like relaxed and present.
And so energetically you're coming from a really nice place.
And so this simple strategy can greatly increase the skillfulness the skillfulness with
which we respond during conversations.
So that's just one example.
There are a million examples that we could get into.
~ and there's some frameworks that I could present too that are that attempt to be
comprehensive, but
~ the the reason to be excited about it is the the potential is great.
The sky is the limit in terms of how how meditation can help you be more effective.
The sky is really the limit.
This is a very awesome way to work.
It's just ~
it it can sometimes be hard to set up this feedback and you need to do it skillfully, you
need to do it healthily, and there are dead ends that you can run into.
Yeah, I love to get into those loops.
before we do that, just to reflect back, I think how that lands for me is oftentimes I
think meditation is one of the few sort of categories of things where you actually can
tractably increase skills in a certain way.
I think a lot of other ways to be effective or sort of boil down to just do it, and
there's not much of a progression or much of a sort of ~
Certain thing.
And there are, but the thing I like a lot about meditation is that there are sort of paths
to actually like
notice your skills getting built over time.
and I think back in the mid 2010s when I was getting into meditation, thinking to Tim
Ferris and sort of the popularization of mindfulness, ~ sort of in the productivity space
and all that, ~ it was pretty obvious that like a little bit of meditation really does
help.
But there's something where like think getting into the deep end of practice where
Once I realized there was a deep end, you know, we're talking about things like awakening,
Jhanas all this sort of cool stuff.
Weirdly, this sort of like quote unquote practical benefit kind of falters.
And in some ways, people sort of de-emphasize practicality there because of getting into
the
deep end stuff.
There's sort of an it's actually important in some ways to de-emphasize practicality.
So I'd be curious if could talk about that.
And I just want to we'll we'll do that and then we'll get into some of those loops that
are really important on how to increase practice.
that's a really great question.
I think ultimately what I'm proposing is you don't ever really de-emphasize the
practicality or the way in which even a deep practice influences how you show up in the
world.
Now, that's not to say that.
Part of the way I think about the path is that there can be seasons in the path.
So you very well, it may be appropriate for someone to spend several years even in a
monastery, not really interacting with the world very much.
That still fits within my paradigm, right?
There can be seasons of practice where you're focused on transcendence or the deep end of
the path.
But ultimately, if you back up and zoom out and look at your whole life, there is.
An integration happening.
~ ultimately, that depth is in service of meeting the world and interacting with the world
and positively impacting the world.
And so that you trust yourself and you have you are because being a positive force in the
world isn't just an end of itself.
And this is kind of part of where I'm going.
Being a positive force in the world is going to then fuel your awakening.
Right.
It's not that that goes back into it because there's a deep sense of trust in your mind,
in your integrity.
And then when you go to meditate, you can actually let go of the mind.
Which I think, if you're not engaged in the world, at least periodically, it becomes very
hard to let go of the mind because you don't trust yourself at a deep level.
And so there's that.
The other thing I would say is.
You know, what I described with that example of focusing on what the other person is
saying and the sound of their voice, that's a relatively simple surface-level description
of how meditation can help you be more effective.
But there are much more subtle and profound ways that the deep end of practice starts
allowing you to be more effective.
For example, ~
Spontaneity is a flavor that's very common in the deep end of practice where thoughts,
actions, speech begin to arise spontaneously, and plug that into a leader who needs to
give public talks or someone who's doing creative work to solve creative problems in the
real world of housing or education or whatever, and you start to get really helpful
improvements.
And so there are
The deep end of the practice
expresses itself in s in subtle ways, but you could even argue more powerful ways in the
productivity space, but not a lot of people are talking about that, you know.
As yeah.
like that's really sort of the thing I think I'm ~ quite intellectually, personally, and
sort of ~ in a service-oriented lens, just deeply interested in.
~ I think over the last several years we've had a deepening of awareness of the deep end
of practice.
You have Dr.
Matthew Saket's lab at Harvard, Sarah Lazarus' lab at Harvard, like a bunch of people in
the consciousness study space talking about cessation and jhana and awakening and
~ that's just becoming stuff you can talk about now, you know.
And there's there are papers and institutions that show credibility there.
~ and I think, you know, in some ways this is a bit more boring than all that fun stuff,
but in some ways just more, much more practical and applicable.
And I really liked your emphasis of self-trust and integrity with all that.
yeah, that I mean, I think you could make the argument that it it's more interesting
because cessation, no self, transcendence.
~ I mean, at least to someone who's inexperienced with the space, it just sounds kind of
weird and dead and dry.
Whereas being able to integrate that into like the joy of human connection and the impact
of
Creativity in your work.
~ in a way it's more interesting because it's that it's the manifestation of the insight.
Like insights are kind of by definition archetypal and transcendent.
Whereas if you can chan if you can if you can maintain contact with an insight while doing
stuff in the world, it's like it's like the flower is blossoming.
It's like it's not just the insight is actually connected and expressing itself.
Yeah, I love that.
I would love for you to get into some of those loops.
So ~ that's something you bring up in that lecture series of like loops to set up to
actually make meditation something that can make you more effective and responsible.
~ assuming that one has a practice and it's sort of a thing that's already there.
Yeah, so it's a little hard to do only with audio.
Like there's a there's a table of happiness elements that Shinzen is known for.
Maybe we could include that in the sh a link to it in the show notes or something.
~ Okay, great.
partially describe it.
maybe in the video I could probably put a little thing
Okay, cool.
~ and is your podcast only YouTube or is it also on podcast players?
Also players.
Okay, all right.
So Shinzen Young, who's my main influence, my main teacher, is wonderful.
And one of the things he's well known for is being very comprehensive in the way that he
teaches.
~ he kind of tries to show students the options and lets them choose their path as opposed
to giving us a specific technique.
It's like, here are the different ways to meditate and to think about this path and
It's up to you to decide how how you really want to manifest that.
So instead of just saying that, you know, meditation is about achieving enlightenment,
Shin Zhen has this awesome like twenty, I guess it's five by four.
Yeah.
So it's twenty box grid of what he calls the happiness elements.
And so this is why you meditate.
Yeah, do you wanna like maybe just read off some of the boxes or describe what you're
seeing?
Yeah, so on the top it's five categories, and there are four levels for each category.
So the five categories are relief, fulfillment, insight, mastery, service.
And going into those, relief is minify minimizing suffering, fulfillment is maximizing
satisfaction, insight is understanding yourself, mastery is acting skillfully, and service
is serving from love.
And in the notes you sent me, you sort of boxed
relief fulfillment insight levels three and four.
Yeah, so I mean well let's put a pin in that box.
I can come back to that the the way that I separate that out.
But the basic idea is this table is attempting to be more comprehensive in terms of what
people really mean when they say the goal of this path or enlightenment.
And it it includes everything from you understand yourself as primordial perfection,
something like you know, that sounds a lot like what a lot of people associate with the
Word enlightened, but but it also includes things like you are able to eliminate
undesirable objective situations in your life.
And you are able to have desirable objective situations in your life.
So it's a very holistic conception of what the the pat what this path can lead to.
To be clear, Shinzhen nor I are subscribing to magical thinking in this regard.
It's not like we're
Saying that if you believe it, it will come true.
This is way more loose and broad, like basically the law of the law of karma that we've
all seen in our lives.
That if you in general, most people most of the time, if you have really good intentions
and you do good work, it c it tends to come back to you.
And of course there are structural issues in society.
~ I'm not we're not trying to say that that doesn't exist, but we're we're pointing at a
truth, something that does seem to happen, right?
but it also includes stuff like
Performance skills like like sports skills, ~ useful skills that you can use for your job.
~ deriving deep fulfillment from subtle service, which is like positively influencing
others by vibe and example.
Like that's kind of that's interesting, you know.
That's kind of related to what we were talking about before about this isn't just about
being calm and being more creative.
It's like you can positively influence people by your vibe.
so yeah, I don't want to get too nitty gritty, but
I think the important part is we're just there's this cool table of 20 different elements,
which breaks out all of the different it does a really comprehensive good job at breaking
out all of the different ways that meditation can impact your life.
And so taking that and bringing in my idea of awakening and responsibility and kind of
creating loops between these two things, you can basically
make loops between any of the boxes.
So you can take, okay, I understand myself as primordial perfection.
And you can tie that to you are able to eliminate undesirable objective situations.
And you can that can be a theme of your practice.
So how does my insight into the fact that I'm primordial perfection allow me to achieve
the elimination of undesirable objective situations?
And vice versa.
Maybe that's not the best example, but you get the idea.
You can tie boxes together with with loops.
~
I'm curious about getting more into the loop exactly.
So, so on that
example, or maybe a different even other example, so it sounds like a loop is basically
taking two aspects that may seem dissimilar, but are actually just happening somewhat in
parallel and tying them together and sort of creating a way in which they're emphasized
and ~ sort of more related than they may would be otherwise.
~ how does that seem right?
And what does that actually look like?
And what makes it so that doesn't
often happen on its own spontaneously.
question.
So maybe let's pick another example to flesh it out a little bit.
~
So one box in the table is you understand yourself as a sensory system.
Which is an insight that a lot of meditators achieve, especially if you're doing like
noting style practice.
There is an insight where you realize that the entirety of experience is made up of some
combination of mental image, mental talk, emotional body sensation, and the exterior
senses of like sight, sound, and physical body sensation.
And you know, this is a version of no-self where it's like there isn't really some kind of
permanent self, although I could I could lecture about that for a half an hour, but let's
put a pin in that for a second.
Most of or one way to conceive of experience is as is just a it's just a combination of
those six elements, of these six sensory experiences that are happening.
You can track it all in real time.
Right?
That's an insight.
And then let's say you have a character skill that you're working on, like
procrastination.
Let's bring in procrastination.
Okay.
So working on procrastination would fit into the following box.
You attain character skills.
That's how Shenzhen would would classify procrastination.
These are yeah, there it's it's a character skill that you can work on.
So
One experience of procrastination is you know you need to do something, but you don't want
to do it.
you can in the moment implement a meditation technique and that emphasizes this insight of
understanding yourself as a sensory system.
So that instead of experiencing I really don't want to do that, you break it up into what
what am I experiencing that's mental images, my imagination, what talk am I hearing in my
mind, met mental dialogue, and what am I feeling in the body?
A lot of people aren't aware of the ways in which it's not always affecting the body, but
a lot of people aren't aware that ~
something like procrastination absolutely or often exists in the body and like Shinzhen
describes it as like
your body's.
I I'm gonna be, I'm gonna take some agency here in terms of how he describes it, but it's
something like your body's like kind of covered in a molasses and it's like kind of hard
to move.
You know, there's some kind of it seems as though there's something physically blocking
your body.
Or that's something that some people report.
So importantly, procrastination exists in the body as some kind of felt sensation.
~ and you could imagine.
If you implement a mindfulness technique that allows you to see those parts as parts and
distinguish them, it becomes a lot more manageable.
The experience
of procrastination becomes simply, ~ I'm experiencing a mental image of this.
I experience some mental talk that is jabbering away about this, and it begins and ends,
and it seems to be up in my head.
And then I have this like kind of icky feeling in the body.
That's it.
There isn't some kind of like divine abstract thing that's preventing me from doing
something.
I'm experiencing sensory experiences, but I have a lot more agency and I'm all this is a
lot more manageable.
And so you're able to
decrease the impact that that has on your decision and you're able to just do what you
need to do.
You're able to overcome the procrastination
More easily.
And so, and then okay, we'll just complete the loop here.
Let's say you're able to get done what you're able to get done, which means you actually
have some free time in the evening, and therefore you can meditate more.
You have 20 minutes free in the evening because you got done what you needed to get done.
And so your ability to be effective in the world in this case is then supporting your
awakening practice.
And here there's the loop.
We just did a full loop.
We did a walk around the f the full block.
that's the that's the loop.
It's like great, you
you're applying it.
And then the loop aspect is that then with that extra benefit, whether it's more time or
maybe less stress, there's less like self-negative self-talk that sort of, you know, then
reverberates into more challenging mind states in the future.
Instead you have more positive mind states.
You can cultivate more mind states that then sort of lead to more virtuous cycles.
So it's this idea
of how to build virtuous cycles and how they all sort of fit in together.
Yeah, and making sure to making sure to tie them together because it takes some intention.
So this is, I think, to answer your question directly, what I just described is kind of
subtle and you might need to be coached through it.
Yes.
And that's that's why this doesn't always happen.
Right?
Like a lot of people meditate, but they don't know how to apply it to their
procrastination, and they certainly don't know how to
let the pride and joy that comes from these character changes, you know, fuel a meditation
practice.
These are subtle things that h need to be pointed out, working with a coach or something.
~ so
It doesn't always happen because it's subtle and you need to be coached on specific
strategies.
And even just bringing the intention of I I think having the intention of creating these
loops and noticing these loops and appreciating these loops is motivating and helpful.
Mm-hmm.
a lot.
I think there's an interesting thing where for some people this may happen spontaneously.
They may just for whatever reason actually just do
it and they sort of say, I spontaneously happened.
And then for many others, for reasons of conditioning, for reasons of whatever it is, ~ it
may just not happen as readily.
So it's helpful to sort of point out these aspects and show that this is actually
trainable, coachable, teachable.
Like there's actually ways to really get in.
It's just in some ways I just see it as just better pedagogy of getting really into
the details of
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it definitely
happens spontaneously sometimes.
And for most people it's helpful to have some framework for what we're doing here, you
know.
Yeah.
I'm curious to see or hear how ~ to me this feels it's it's like it's all deeply part of
like integration, liberate.
You know, some traditions call it liberation practice, other people call it ~ showing up
or sort of cleaning up practice in a way.
So, but it's really sort of this aspect of bringing practice and bringing the skills of
meditation to more things in life, ~ to more sort of situations.
But I really like the the use of that term character skill where it's ~ it's a thing
where, you know, we're all sort of give you know, based on roll of the dice or life
circumstances, we all have just various ~ skills, thinking of it as a video game maybe in
in these different areas.
~ but it's cool to see that certain areas can be improved upon or sort of altered based on
the way practice goes.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
~
Yeah, and I think I yeah, I'm not I'm not sure where else to go with that.
I just agree.
Yeah,
nice.
Sweet.
So I'm curious if you're open kind of doing a little bit of a branch, ~ just into Shenzhen
Young's experience ~ of procrastination.
And I'll
preface by ~ so so I think I really enjoyed that description of procrastination as sort of
feeling into the body sensations, you know, maybe it feels like molasses and that you once
it's broken down into this various subcomponents, one can realize, I thought it was this
whole thing that I'm a bad person, what's going on?
It actually that's just th that separation can reduce the weight of it and make it
Less challenging and eventually you can kind of do a thing, ~ work and actually get the
thing done.
One thing that I've noticed as well is procrastination can actually be a lot of different
things.
So there's like wanting to do a thing and then not doing it.
There's sort of the external aspect of commitment of like, I committed to doing this
thing, even though I didn't really want to, or maybe, you know, there's various, and then
there's maybe like, do I actually even want to do a thing?
But I should, but actually I
I don't actually just want to do it.
I'm just choosing to not do this.
~ and there's various th there may be more that all could be sort of discussed as this pro
procrastination.
~ that's sort of my understanding.
I'd be curious on sort of your ex with your experience of Chin Zen Young, his experience
of procrastination and how he related to it and how it changed over the years.
Yeah, so I've heard him talk publicly about his experience.
So everything I say here is is basically I've just heard him talk publicly.
I don't have any an an inside scoop, as they say.
but as you say, you know, he's a very well respected meditation teacher who spent decades
practicing.
And still he was struggling a lot with procrastination.
And so
He worked with a psychiatrist that I believe was trained in cognitive behavioral therapy.
And so he used that approach specifically.
~ and I think something about, I would imagine something about, you know, the rapport and
you know, going and meeting with a psychiatrist in person regularly, some something about
like the social accountability was also probably helpful for him.
~ but even as a very deep practitioner.
He still needed the support of a therapist working with cognitive behavioral therapy,
which, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy certainly has a meditative component in that
you're recognizing thoughts and feelings as distinct entities almost.
~ but ~ whatever.
It's it's it's this established approach in in modern therapy.
And
Only through that was he able to
at least somewhat get a h get the get a handle on this character trait.
But it didn't solve all the problems.
Like I know that even since then, like he met with a therapist dec probably like twenty
years ago.
~ since then he's still struggled.
So it wasn't even ~ a clear and total solution.
It's an ongoing struggle for him.
~
So I think maybe what this gets to is
It's one thing to understand that you can develop loops between your awakening practice
and your ability to be effective in the world, which we've been talking about.
~ as I was saying just now, there are a lot of dead ends and it can be tricky to set up
these loops.
And so the question becomes: what kind of support do we need in order to set up healthy
loops that work?
And in this example of Shinzhen, he needed the support of a CBT therapist.
So I think this opens up an interesting question, which is realistically, for most people,
you need other forms of support and other systems to be in place.
in order for these loops to grow healthily.
The way I another way to put it is that
I don't think in most cases you can rely on meditation instruction alone in order to set
up these loops.
They're it's too subtle, it's too complicated, it's too easy to make mistakes.
So we need other modalities.
Therapy is probably one of the best modalities ~ that can complement a meditation practice
and make it increase the chances that you'll be able to establish these loops.
But there are a lot of other
modalities or or ways of working.
And this is part of what I go into.
I give a long list in this in this lecture series that I went to, I kind of talked about a
long list of other practices, modalities that are that help us establish these loops
healthily.
I'll just talk about a few examples.
One example is like giving and receiving feedback just among peers and colleagues.
Like this is a practice that
Is I think probably the most helpful or one of the mo most helpful things you can do to
help you set up all these loops.
it's so hard to see clearly within your own mind, and giving and receiving feedback with
other people is just a way to tap the collective ~ intelligence of your community.
And another example is ~
The Serenity Prayer, I think, is another really good example.
It's not necessarily a modality, it's just a a framework that you can keep in mind.
It's a question that you can ask yourself.
As you may or may not know, the serenity prayer is like it's very popular in in AA
communities, alcoholic anonymous communities, but like may I have the courage to change
the things that I can and the openness to let things be that I can't change and the wisdom
to know the difference.
So, like that leads to if you're if you're in a situation, ask yourself what elements of
the situation can I change and what elements can I not change?
Okay, that's very helpful.
For the stuff that I can't change, the only tool I have is meditation.
The only tool I have is transcendence.
So that's good to know.
I'm not gonna waste
energy trying to change something I I can't change.
For the stuff that you do you can change, you best not only be using meditation.
You you you really should be thinking about this rationally, imaginatively, getting advice
from mentors and doing stuff to objectively make the situation better.
Right.
So ~ yeah, those are just some examples of like additional angles that are necessary in
order to get these loops to thrive.
Yeah.
And I think there's there's a whole thread there I want to dive into.
~ and that sort of I think the word for that would just be discernment, or that's the word
that sort of emerges that comes up
as a big theme your talk.
~ putting a bookmark just for a moment, I think that to reflect back on the Shinzen stuff,
it seems like a thing that I'm taking away is the value of external structures in the
sense like, ~ let's stop trying to do this by ourselves only.
Like you know.
Like the value of a, you know, meeting with someone and also sort of the value of what I'm
hearing is norms, ~ community, ~ in some ways, structure, expectations, sort of ~ rules,
like all that sort of stuff actually can be quite helpful and useful.
Being in a community of people who give each give give each other feedback from a certain
lens of frameworks and from a certain view seem to be seems to be really valuable and
useful compared to just, you know, spending the equivalent time by yourself meditating in
a room.
Trying to figure it out yourself just reading books.
While of course that's
all valuable and that can be ~ bootstrapped to a lot, ~ it shows to me the value of just
finding other people that sort of can support, ~ which then gets into the lack of how many
of those exist.
Like there aren't actually that many healthy organizations and structures that can support
this, which is ~ quite sad, ~ but also helpful in the sense that maybe a hundred years
from now, we can have many, many more of those that
make it easier for people to do this training.
And skill development.
Yeah.
~ t two things.
One is Shin Zhen has a term for what you're describing.
Or at least a more one one version of the thing that you're describing.
He calls them behaviorally oriented accountability and support structures.
Shin Zhen's such a nerd.
~ I'll say that again.
Behaviorally oriented accountability and support structures.
So
And he sees this as a as very, very helpful in the path, right?
So you need structures that are behavi behaviorally oriented.
This isn't about what you what your intentions were.
This is let's it's where the rubber meets the road.
How are you behaving?
So there's no way to fake it, right?
And it's accountability in that there's expectations, but this the structures also have to
support you.
Because
Realistically, we can't do this alone, as you say.
So ~ absolutely we need behaviorally oriented accountability and support structures.
The other thing I would say is it is optimal or important if these structures
Or are that these communities have meditation as a central theme, but it's not necessary.
You can rely on your good old circle of friends that may or may not meditate to do at
least some of this work.
So it's also just a return to the simplicity of being engaged with your immediate
community, regardless of how interested they are in meditation.
~
you can still do a lot of work, even with just your family and your friends.
Because there really is a wisdom in crowds.
And maybe to flesh that out a little bit more, like if one person gives you feedback about
something, you don't necessarily know if it's helpful feedback or not.
Because as we all know, people project a lot and it might be their own
their own problem more than your problem.
But one of the things when you get feedback from a variety of people, you can start to
notice patterns.
And that's really what we're interested in is a variety of people are giving me the same
feedback.
Therefore there probably is something there.
That's a real data point.
~ so the you don't need to be in contact with a sage or even a spiritual community.
You can be in contact with the everyday person.
Because you're because you're taking your relationships seriously, ~ many of them, ~
you'll still get truth because you'll be looking for patterns.
You get sage like wisdom just by listening to a variety of people.
I guess is kinda what I'm
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I this this sort of naturally segues into that bookmark of discernment and view.
And I'm
curious ~ how you sort of think about discernment in sort of the way that loops are and
and just if you could talk more about the role of discernment and how to build that.
Yeah, so we've been we've been circling this question of okay Toby, you can set up a loop,
but how do you make sure to do that?
How do you make sure to set up a loop correctly and healthily?
Briefly, my answer to that is discernment.
So this is a a somewhat distinct skill ~ that you can develop systematically.
So
You know, the dictionary definition of discernment is something like the ability to
understand and perceive things that aren't obvious.
And so the two important things there.
One is there's an element of perception.
So it's an ability to perceive very subtle phenomena, what is often subtle phenomena.
So
You know, if things are obviously wrong, most people can see that.
Where discernment helps is if it's a little unclear how you should act, right?
And then, yeah, the second piece of that definition, which I think is important, is ~
things that are not that are things that are not obvious.
So if you can develop the ability to notice subtle information that helps you make
calls when things aren't obvious.
That's one way to define what you need in order to set up these loops because
That's where a lot of the personal development goes awry, is you know, it seems like I
really just need to do more meditation practice.
And I really need to just figure this out in my own mind.
That seems like a good direction.
Let's just go do that.
Whereas, in fact, if you were aware of subtle phenomena, you might notice, you know what I
really need is to practice being in relationship with people.
That's going to be a much more beneficial practice for me right now.
So that's just an example of noticing something subtle.
And if you can't notice that, then you're just gonna, you don't have discernment, you're
just gonna land, your loop isn't gonna develop properly.
So ~ so discernment, I propose, is kind of a crucial skill.
And
So one way to talk about this is so what are the practices, what are the frameworks that
we can work on to systematically develop discernment so that it's not just random, so that
we can really see our discernment building and growing and getting better.
And that's kind of that whole list of practices that we we started exploring.
So that's how I I think about the term discernment.
I love that.
And it it feels inclusive of both practical or sort of more mundane views of discernment
of, you know, someone who's more senior than you at your job, or you sort of ~ let's say
you're a software engineer.
A senior software engineer tends to find things that can go wrong more than a junior
software engineer.
~ and
you don't have to meditate to do that.
That just comes from experience.
And at the same time, what does it mean to build that experience?
It's likely harder if you're sort of
not open to new information, or if you're really sort of ~ rigid about the concepts in
your head, or if you're sort of not actually listening to people in conversations and
meditation training and all the stuff that we talked about so far could be really helpful
for those things that then lead you to becoming better at acquiring skill and better at
acquiring discernment in that sort of more mundane way.
~
and yeah.
Yeah, no, exactly.
And so you can already start to see how meditation and it's and how meditation increases
like the resolution of your experience.
helps you see more clearly, that is a really important part of discernment.
So that yeah, there's a lot of interrelated skills here.
And discernment is something that's really simple.
It shows up, as you say, in software development.
But it also is this profound, it can also be a profound like intuition almost.
Yes.
And that's where it sort of gets into more
sensing into what needs to happen in a major decision where you don't have full
information.
Yes.
And this is where I think ~ in my own experience and just from seeing sort of wise coaches
or therapists or people that we typically see as as wise or, you know, sage like in our
society, they tend to have a deep understanding of human psychology, emotions, the nature
of things.
And this seems to be where ~ meditation is extra helpful at being able to really
understand and discern.
Yeah, exactly.
Yep.
Yeah.
Nice.
Cool.
Well, I'm curious about sort of ~ sort of rounding out the sort of loops and discernment
idea.
~ how do you typically close the lecture series of sort of creating a North Star between
awakening practices and responsibility?
~ and I'm curious sort of how ~ they can be fragile and how they can be more healthy.
Well, I'm not can you I'm not sure what you're asking.
Can you ask it in a different way?
So so I I think I want to emphasize ~ the fragility versus health aspect of this.
It sounds like there's ways to set
up these loops and sort of build discernment in a more robust way.
And there are ways to do it that maybe not as ~ standing up to cruft, ~ standing up to to
to to spec over time.
Yeah, I mean
The
My answer to how do you do that is the best answer that I have right now is a long list of
practices.
And maybe that is the best answer.
And I could list some of them out, but I think that's kind of where
I think some of these ideas are somewhat nascent.
~ I'm interested in developing some kind of framework or some kind of conceptual diagram
so that I can give a simple answer to that question.
Because right now all I have is like here's 20 things you can do.
~ so one way to answer your question is it's a it's an open question and I'm I'm still
kind of figuring that out.
Another way to answer your question is, you know, Buddhism has the eightfold path.
I think that's one answer.
~ so study and practice the eightfold path, which includes things like right view and
right thought and right speech.
Another answer is or another example of techniques is like I I teach a lot of what I call
blurry meditation techniques.
The reason I call them blurry is they blur the line between like
your life and meditation, like for example, a decision-making meditation, where you are
developing concentration and you're definitely meditating, but you're really unpacking and
spending time with a decision and the content of that decision in your life.
So there's a there's a whole variety of I would call blurry meditation techniques that
really weave these two worlds together.
mentorship is another thing that you can do.
~
So yeah, those are that those are my two answers, is is that like I'm working on it and
right now I have a list
of like twenty things.
And I'm curious, like, I don't know, how might you structure an answer to that question?
Or like how would you answer that question?
How do you do this?
Do you have any type of like conceptual framework or internal trick of the trade that
you're using in your own life?
it's I think it's something around reminding myself that this is important.
Is just how strong the inertia of ignorance is.
And I think in some ways that's what a lot of meditation fights against.
So it's definitely not comprehensive, but I think ~ I'm struck by how important sort of
keeping momentum on these emphases.
Mm.
a theme that's come up throughout the conversation is that, you know, there's a there's so
many different truths.
There's lots of ways to do it.
And you would be doing
it quote unquote right.
And to actually sort of have it morph in this way where it you get these loops and sort of
showing up to life and, you know, improving in responsibility does require a certain
emphasis that requires a certain form of mindfulness or sort of re remembering.
~ and that's just it's easy to sort of drift inside of, you know,
move away from that in a very valid way.
and
it in some ways it's sort of choosing between various good options, which I think is
harder than in sort of choosing between mindfulness where you're sort of mindful of
something versus restless.
It's like actually you could kind of emphasize a different way, but then realize later
that, I actually kind of want to be more into life, it seems like.
Yeah, that's a good point.
~ that is a good point.
I like that.
That that and then that matches my experience.
I think I'll I'll go I'll go I'll kind of coast for a bit and then you know some of my
relationships will have tension and I just have to kind of like take a breath, remind
myself like, okay, like I need to think of this as a training.
I need to like
Like how is my meditation practice gonna help me grow through this as opposed to just
suffer through this?
~
Yeah, and it definitely is i yeah, it's a constant reminding.
And and it's interesting because I think like it's it's ~ part of what makes me so
interested about this is ~ seeing how ~ while like very much worth it, in some ways the
deep end of practice and sort of getting a lot of these benefits can make life in some way
a little bit more complicated.
A little in a little bit of just like, I could kind of go in this direction or could go in
the direction,
could go in the direction of my own.
Deepening and awakening and understanding these things.
I
could go in the direction of showing up in these relationships or sort of doing this
thing.
I I think it's almost like this is maybe more of this is more exploratory, but you know,
like I think there's often the famous there's the there's a saying of happiness
independent of conditions.
and you know, and there's which is which is there's and there's clearly a truth there ~
that Shenzhen talks about and sort of ~ really gets into.
Yes, yes.
And I'm I I'm hearing how in some ways it's like, well, aren't all these relationships and
mentoring and therapy aren't those all conditions?
~ and I'm curious if you could ~ I think there's a sort of a sort of there's maybe a trap
in that view that yeah, I would love for you to talk.
a great, great point.
So
Personally, I think Xin Zen and many meditation teachers, in a way, this is kind of the
main point that I'm making.
~ they overemphasize happiness independent of conditions in a way that's not practically
helpful for most students.
It's inspiring to hear about it, it is true, it can be achieved, it works.
But practically speaking, for most people,
~ it can i when it's overemphasized it can lead to confusion and suffering.
So and especially with Shinzen, it's interesting because, you know, he's the one that maps
out the periodic table of happiness.
~ which is really impressive.
I mean, I think it's it's by far the most comprehensive mapping of the goal of the
meditative path that I've ever encountered.
~
So he gets it, at least on one level, Shinzen absolutely gets that happiness independent
of condition is not the whole shebang.
But still in in com in just in terms of emphasis, like I've been saying, in a lot of his
Dharma talks and a lot of his interviews, he's just, you know, often hammering away at the
importance of happiness independent of conditions.
And I'm I'm painting in a pretty broad brush and ~
My point isn't to well, whatever, you get what I'm saying.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I I mean I I ultimately think happiness independent of conditions, that goal is only
helpful within the context of a larger framework that recognizes the importance of
conditions.
It has to be part
of that larger holistic framework.
And
that's not to diminish happiness independent of conditions.
Like again, I'm trying to accelerate that.
Like I think that's part of what is kind of tricky about what I'm suggesting.
Like if you pay attention to conditions, you will transcend conditions more.
This isn't a zero game zero sum game.
Right?
If you if you
invest in your relationships, you will be supported in such a way that you will awaken
more.
You know?
And that's somewhat somewhat seen in traditional monasteries where
the Sangha and the community is a very important part of practice and the way in which
people support each other emotionally, physically, relationally.
~ that really does play an important role in some traditional settings.
So there's even, you know, traditional precedent for what I'm pointing to.
~ yeah.
Yeah.
And I think an interesting thing is, this is my interpretation as well, ~ and in response
to a lot of what you said as well, you can have or sort of experience happiness
independent of conditions as a way of being in a way that's actually quite deep, as I
imagine it was for Shinzen, and still choose to do other things or emphasize other things
or want other things or
not just go after happiness, but you know, choose to have conditions for other reasons,
you know, conditions
that sort of cause.
ups and downs and things like that.
~ to get, you know, to spread things into the world.
~ it reminds me of
sort of, you know, the Bodhisattva vow or even the yeah.
Exactly, exactly.
re you recognize that like, okay, happiness independent independent of conditions is real,
but I'm gonna choose to keep my hands dirty and keep interacting with these this world of
conditions because it's important.
Right.
ways I think that's where it just ~ it's quite fascinating how it just feels even deeper,
more mysterious and curious ~ of how one chooses these things.
~
Mm.
and it's which is which is ~ might be a good way to end this conversation.
hmm.
Yeah.
Well, one of the things I was talking about earlier is like
r ~ there are seasons.
So it's not like anyone ever really makes a choice one way or the other.
There can be themes, but I would encourage people to experiment and have seasons and
emphasize one or the other and go back and forth.
And s I mean in a way that that is walking the path.
I'll maybe this may this might be a nice inspirational way to end it.
~ when I was
When I told my teacher that I was leaving the monastery, he said, Don't think of it as
you're leaving a practice or you're switching directions.
Think about it as another step on the same path.
So, like what this path looks like is you spend time training in a monastery.
That's that's walking, that's taking a step forward with your left foot, and then you
re-enter the world.
That's taking a step forward with your right foot.
And then you train in the monastery, that's taking a step forward with your left foot.
And then you re-enter the world, that's taking a step forward with your right foot.
So this path really is fundamentally alternating between seasons of transcendence and
imminence and weaving in the insights that you make in the practice into your life and how
you show up.
Awesome.
Thank you, Toby.
~ what are a few links or ways that people can find you if they're excited about this
conversation?
So I run a meditation app called Bright Mind Meditation.
And pretty much all of my teaching, guided meditations, QA, lectures, stuff is all on the
app.
So it's it's pretty, it's like a one-stop shop.
So you can download it in the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, Brightmind.
and another like related thing is I I am gonna do a, I don't know when you're gonna
release this, but I'm gonna do
A virtual four-day retreat in September, ~ well, we'll explore a lot of these themes.
And I yeah, I regularly host like fully online retreats, some in-person retreats too,
actually.
But I regularly host online retreats.
But the best way to find out about all that is to just and create a bright mind account,
and then I'll just you'll be on my email list.
And recently, we'll see how long this lasts.
Recently, aka like
Two weeks ago, I started to post weekly on Instagram reels.
So you can follow me on Instagram, Toby or not to be three thousand.
But it's like it's all my name, Toby, you know, Toby or not Toby 3000, T-O-B-Y.
Pretty funny.
Pretty funny handle.
~
yeah, without the number it was taken, so I had to add 3000, which I think is kind of
funny because it makes me sound like a vacuum cleaner, you know?
Like,
Yes.
or not Toby, 3000.
get it today while supplies last.
So yeah, I'm excited about that.
We'll see.
~ I'm just, I just want to like share in real time the perspectives, the skills, the
techniques that are actually helpful for me in my real life.
I just want to share it like immediately on social media.
So that's another good way to just get like bike-size chunks.
And it absolutely is like I mentioned earlier in the discussion that some of these ideas
are nascent, and I'm kind of trying to
wrestle with them and figure them out.
Hopefully this practice of sharing weekly videos is gonna help me do some of that.
So it'll be a very creative process and I'm excited to to produce those videos.
Awesome.
Thank you, Toby.
Thank you, Pranam.
This has been ~ really epically mega super fun.
Thank you.