Beth Jacobs on Original Buddhist Psychology

you Feed dot net slash join. I think that even though we will always fail in the task to express the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we work with it, every time we play with it, we bring out something new for ourselves. 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 Beth Jacobs, a clinical psychologist in private practice and a former faculty member of the Fineberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University. She's also a teacher in the Soto's Entry addition, and incorporates Buddhist studies and meditation into her work as both a psychologist and a writer. Today, Eric and Beth discuss a couple of her books, including The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the Abi Dharma tells Us

about how we think, feel, and experience life. Hi, Beth, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Yeah. We're going to be discussing, among other things, a practice journal you have for writing and meditation, as well as your book, The Original Buddhist Psychology, What the Abby Dharma tells Us about how we think, feel, and experience life. But before we do that, we'll start, like

we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, 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 granddaughter stops, she thinks about this for a second, looks up at her grandmother, said, well, grandmother,

which one wins? And the grandmother 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. Thank you. I love the parable. I love your radial approach to this parable. How you just talk about it from so many angles, with so many people. So in the terms of original Buddhism, you might name these wolves kusla and akusla, which is usually translated as wholesome and unwholesome. But I think the real

key to this is the venue of the fight. It's not medicine square garden, it's not out in the woods, it's inside. So these wolves, it's very very important that that's how it's put. And what I think that's saying is that the battleground is the mind, and that what we feed these wolves is attention and we feed these

wolves energy. But it's an internal process, and no matter what we do externally, I think solutions are not complete unless we deal with our minds and our internal process, and if we can move those towards more generosity, more flow, more openness. That's what it says to me. I have an original If you would tolerate a little verse from

original Buddhism, sure of course. Okay. This is the opening verse of the Dama Pata, which is one of the very popular, early believed to be utterances of the Buddha. Maybe three something stands as a verse, A very practical down to earth and poetic advice stands a number one I think says the same thing as a parable mind precedes all phenomena. Mind is their chief. They are all mind wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows them like the wheel that follows

the foot of the ox. Mind proceeds all phenomena. Mind is their chief. They are all mind wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows them like they're never departing shadow. I've always loved that verse, and I've always loved that metaphor. Is it a metaphor? You know? The wheel follows the foot of the ox. I just have such a great visual to that same with your never departing shadow, and I can see why you love it because it is very much like the

parable to me, very much, very much. So yep, okay, So let's talk about what is the Abadharma, which I'm certain to mispronounce at least four or five times in this conversation, so you're welcome to say not quite, but enough. Let's start with what it is, because I think there's probably a lot of people who have studied Buddhism to a fair degree who have never heard of it. That's right, And it is an essential part of the original Buddhist cannon,

so it's very interesting. The original Buddhist cannon is called the Tippitaka three Baskets, and it's believed that even though it wasn't written down for a few hundred years um, that this is pretty close to what the Buddha actually taught. So one piece of this Tippitaka is called the Venaya, and that's the monastic code that describes the processes and rules for the monks and nuns. The second is the early Sutras, which many people are familiar within the Dama

Poto would be in there. The early Sutras are the parables and stories and narrative and discourses of the Buddha. The third part of the early cannon is the Abi Dharma, and this is a structural layout of the Buddhist vision of the universe, the multiple worlds, how consciousness interacts with all of it. It's in the form of lists and matrix is. It is a lot of cross referencing. It's ridiculously complicated. There are seven books of the terravann Abi Dharma,

and then there are some spinoffs of other schools. But if you think of the sutras as conveying to us the Buddha's original teachings, I think of the Abu Dharma as conveying to us the Buddha's original vision. And it's kind of like a right hemisphere left hemisphere thing a little bit. The sutures are very verbal and narrative, but many of the sutras when you read them, are lists,

and they get repetitive and didactic and teaching. But if you want to just look at the raw information, the pure lists, the way it all lays out the way it all fits together. It's laid out in this kind of very structural way in the Abi Dharma. That's what

it is. Yeah, I've often thought of it as sort of like the list of all the lists, which I know is a is an oversimplification, but you know, you don't spend much time around Buddhism before you're like, well, we've got the eight Full Path, we've got the four Noble Truths, we've got the seven Factors of Awakening, we've got the four Foundations of my I mean, it is list after list and then to me, the Abi Dharma has always seemed like a collection and cross referencing, like

you said, of all those lists, and extraordinarily complex. And this is not a show about deep Buddhist scholarship, which I'm sure you could more than hold your own in. Uh. This is a show about how people, you know, feed the good wolf in their own life. So I want to make sure we stay there. But what sort of key ideas from the Abi Dharma do you think we could pull out that help us in our day to

day life. And I've got a couple of my own that I made directest towards, but I'd love to hear kind of where you would start, because the other thing is, in addition to being an author, you have done a lot of work with clients, right, or a psychotherapist. Yes, And it all has a meaning to me, you know, as the Noble truths evolved in terms of how much suffering I see increasing around me and within me. Yeah, So it's not just an exercise in the technicalities and

the obsessions. What I think it tells us is that there are these extraordinarily complex but unchanging laws of how things come together and move in the universe, how our consciousness interacts with what we experience, with what we encounter. And the more we understand these laws, and the more we understand that they're so outrageously complex that we're not going to understand all of them, the more fluidly I think we can move with them and not fighting against them. Basically,

the Abi dharma is completely about meetings. Everything is in motion. There's no stuff in there. It's all just about how things, how forces, how events move together. And um, I think that kind of understanding really helps us move with more generosity and fluidity. There's a section you right, which speaks I think to very much what you're saying. You're talking about something known as the condas. I'm used to hearing it as the scandas, but you say they are a

roiling caldron of activity and momentum. As aspects of the different condas arise and fall away, combine and recombine, permutate, and develop, And I think that speaks to what you were just saying. Absolutely, I'm used to saying scandas to

we're kind of flipping between sanscrit and Polly. But the scandas are materials that we use to construct reality, and there are so many realities, and these materials are based on the fact that we're human bodies and we have human senses and they're set up a certain way, and because of that, we kind of combine these experiences into frameworks. But they are in constant motion, and what we choose to draw upon is constantly changing the selectivity and the

ways that we put things together. So it is really an amazing thing that you can study all these very detailed lists and feel like it's making you more fluid. But another way I think of it is that this is kind of aerating your mind or your consciousness. It's not that you need to memorize all this information. But by getting down there on that level where it's so detailed and atomic, you kind of aerate how you think

about things and how you feel. I've always heard of the five scandas they're also called the five aggregates, as being the things that put together, that combine together to create me and this sense of me. Mm hmmm, I think that's really good, and how you experience moment to moment. It's the framework you're using to experience and filter what's happening moment to moment. And so in Buddhism, when we talk about no self or non self, we're not saying

that there's nothing here. What we're saying is that what is here is actually a collection of these five things combining and countless permutations, roiling and broiling and rotiss ing and whatever cooking verbs that all comes together, and that is what makes up what I think of is this entity of me. Yes, I think that's a beautiful description. And this entity of you I think does exist. We're

all bodies in a particular lifetime that exists. That's real, but it's kind of encouraging the flexibility to think of it. The way, you just describe the flexibility to keep it moving, to not lock it up, and to realize that the framework that we're making moments a moment is fairly arbitrary. Maybe it's useful, maybe it's a little less useful, but just to remember there are infinite other ways it could be at any of a moment. And so let's maybe talk about what these five are, just to go through

them quickly and maybe give a sense of them. Again, you could study these five things for the rest of your life if you wanted to write. So obviously we're going to give it the three minute version, but let's walk through what the five are, because I do think it does frame up a basic idea of what this construction of me looks like. You'll read different translations of these depending on what era and what school of Buddhism

you're working with, But this is what I work with. Form, feelings, perceptions, habit, formations, and consciousness is I pluralize it. That's something that comes from my original teacher, because it helps you remember that there's no one thing that's a hunk of consciousness that we're in. So starting with form, that's the bodily material realities they are there. Um, we're not all mind making

up a universe. So it's the actual truth of physical reality and how we experience that in sensation continuously, and how we ignore so many aspects of it continuously. Feelings in this list is not emotion, but it's a kind of binary approach avoid plus or minus response to things that we create as we move through our life. On a very small scale, every moment of consciousness has an attached feeling, but the feeling it's just like it's just yes or no. It's just bimodal. In this arena. It

could be bodily or mental, but it's bimodal. And there's also a category for neither. But that's just like the typical abidermic complication. You can never say something without the exception. Okay. Then moving on to perceptions, the sensory perceptions the five senses that we're used to in Abidarma, there are six senses. The mind is considered as sense, but this perception is about how we put together experiences of our five senses habit formation. So you can kind of see this is

ascending in complexity as we go. The habit formations are sometimes called mental formations. Or karmic formations. Another term for that in modern psychologies cognitive schema. It's just mind wise, the way we filter what's happening in these terms of ourselves. And then the last category is consciousness. Is the word is cheetah, and cheetah is the essential unit of a consciousness experience. In the Abi dharma, that word you could spend your whole life on two yes, because you're at

about it. So cheetah is a moment of mind, object and field meeting. And it's no more than that. It's a bear coming together of these three elements. So let's take an experience that we have and see if we can deconstruct it. This may be a fool's errand, but I'm going to give it a shot, and you guide us through it with you. I stub my toe right, so all of a sudden, there is a physical reality the form rupa that we talked about. There's a physical reality.

My toe hit something else. There is a basic use the word feelings pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. So there's an immediate no, don't like it, you know, unpleasant. Then there is the sensory element, which scanda would we call that perception. I call that perception yep, so there would be a perception of pain also, um, I might include like that kind of frozen visual thing that you say, like when something happens, it's kind of shocking, how you suddenly like

see things real intensely. I would include that, or you know, if you're more of an auditory person like, I would include the other senses in your perception one there. In this case, though, the primary one would be the kinesthetic pain sense, because that's kind of what's radiating dominant. Then from there I would start to say something like, who is the idiot who left this block sitting here in front of me? So now I've moved into mental formation

exactly exactly. That all makes sense to me. It's the last one, the consciousness or action of consciousness or cheetah, that I don't really understand. And again I may not get it in this conversation, but in that example I'm giving where does that fit? Yet I'm right with you, And the difficult thing here is that the cheetah is a too small unit for the event that you're talking about. So maybe it would help to say the flow of cheetah, So your consciousness, maybe before you stubbed your toe was

flowing in a really positive, fluid way. You stubb your toe and suddenly there's like this, Jack, I get movement in the flow of your consciousness. I think a good analogy for this is like electrons in a wire, which I don't really know anything about, but you know, if you think of the cheetah like the electrons, you know it's a flow of things and short circuited. Maybe, So that's how I would think of it. Cheated, the very raw consciousness experience got diverted or spiked up or something.

This idea that reality is constructed of these forms, this basic one of feeling of like, don't like neutral? Is that conditioned or is some of that in built? And what I mean by that is there a situation in which with different conditioning, different DNA different if you want to believe in karma from previous existences, that stubbing my toe might be pleasant or is that happening at such a fast, such a base perceptual level that it has nothing to do with any sort of conscious or even

unconscious conditioning. I'm going to go with the latter part. That you know, in in the Abiderarma they say like, if you want to look at objects of consciousness as positive or negative. It's just sort of there in the object. Now, this is a kind of debatable point, but what happens is that we are so reactive and so quickly constructive. It's like fire and kindling the way we start thinking about things. This is where you're conditioning is coming in, I think in the kindling comes in as you move

into the mental formation. Yeah. Yes, I've asked a couple of neuroscientists about this, because there's something in the way in neuroscience called teroception, and inter reception is the body's very basic sense. It's believed that it is very much. I like it, I don't like it, I have no feeling about it. All creatures have it. All creatures have

inter reception to some degree. And so when I've heard feeling in the Buddhist sense of it, you know, it's often seen to me that that's what Buddhism was describing what a modern neuroscientist would call interoception. I think. So, I think that sounds very useful and accurate to me. There's another point of neuropsychould like to bring in with

those seventeen steps of perception. So if I could just briefly say that in the Abi Dharma they lay out seventeen moments of consciousness that are a full perception, and they're very neuropsychologically accurate, and there's a point in the middle there where if you compare it to neuropsychological view, where the limbic system is mixing in and the prefrontal cortex is mixing in, which is to say, and the hippocampus memory, association, emotion, planning, motivation, there's a point in

the seventeen steps where all that mixes in. This is where we're getting our conditioning. Every one of those steps has feeling with it. But in the middle where that happens is where we start having emotion, conditioning and reactivity. As I was reading in that book, it almost sounds like that's also the hinge on which our ability to change any of that starts. By change, I don't mean like, oh, well I just changed my mind and fifty years of

conditioning goes out the window. I don't mean that, but I mean the possibility exists for it to be different. That's right. Every moment is an opening for that. We're talking about a very small scale of time, so it's not like we can sit there every second and do three switches, which is basically how it would go. But this is another one. We're carrying the concept helps even

though we might not work on that scale. So carrying the concept that first you're taking in things, and then there's a moment where you bring in all of your material and your past essentially, and your associations and all of these ingrained things. And if you're just aware of that, you watch for it a little bit more and you get it quicker and quicker, and the quicker you get it, the more little moments you have that you can change.

There's a great quote from reb Anderson. I'm going to paraphrase, but he says something like everybody who's studying mindfulness is looking to extend presence for longer and longer. Bodhisata's in dead work on bringing mindfulness to smaller and smaller moments. Yeah,

I was telling you before we got started. We just closed enrollment for a program called Spiritual Habits and one of the things in that program, and the idea is little by little, a little becomes a lot, and it just means that we need to keep noticing these little moments. Now I know what he's saying, is your your perception is getting finer and finer. But again, it's not that we need to be present for fifteen straight minutes for us to get value out of mindfulness. That's right. I

think it's the same point. The smaller the moment is that you can reclaim, the more you're going to be doing it. It astounds me how looking at this original Buddhist psychology, this Abi dharma, how some of the stuff that they were able to figure out by sitting in meditation we are now monitoring and seeing in modern neuroscience.

It is staggering to me. That was kind of this huge moment when I saw the seventeen ups of perception, you know, a timeline, and then I thought, well, let me get out some biological something book and I opened it and there was a picture of a brain opened up. It was called something like from Stimulus to Response. And I looked at him and I'm like, these are the same thing. In detail, they are the same thing. And I ran around talking about this to everybody. I was

so excited. But I do think it says something about the acuity of those minds, and and they also functioned on very big scales too. This is the small scale, but you know, it's just a different language. Is pretty random too, that that's the language that I kind of

grew up in my professional training. But but the fact that these people could sit and perceive steps of awareness that are you know, about a sixty of a second with such finesse, it does blow me away, and it makes me just love the Abu Dharma a lot, and it makes me have a certain kind of faith in the aspects of it that I can't directly verify in my empirical experience. Yeah, what I'm hearing from Buddhism comes back and is verified by science. I love having two

verifications like it just gives me more confidence in it. Yes, it does. You know, I think that probably throughout history people have had some way to verify. But the main way I think we verifies that, you know, we continue feeling better and watching other people blossoming around us. That's the real verification, right and in our own lives is that happening. I want to move on to another line from the book that I thought was really interesting. I'm going to read it to you and then ask you

to say more about it. You said, I am convinced that plain emotion directly expressed rarely causes much harm, while second guessing, sugarcoating and avoidance of feelings can be disastrous. A feeling wasn't a state people were in, but a mental factor modulating contact with reality. But the dynamic abbidharma view opens potential for intervening with emotion. Those sentences weren't right after each other. I pulled a couple that were

very close together. But this idea of plain emotion can be directly expressed, And you know, how does the abi dharma open potential for us intervening with emotion in a skillful way. It's really a mindfulness type of point here. But even emotion can be observed dispassionately. And the first

statement comes from my work as a therapist. You know, for many, many years, it is always this avoidance and this you know, tripping over it, and this walking backwards into what you fear that causes the problems when people are clear with other people. It's just empirical to me. I just see it over and over when people are clear and just say calmly how they feel. Sometimes maybe not even entirely calmly, but when it's clear, people do Okay, they know what they're working with, and so it's kind

of the same point. When you have the capacity to understand the process, you have a bit of remove from it, and you're not so in the cloud of it, but you're looking at it and dealing with it, whether it's your own self or interpersonally. So I really do feel that strongly that one of the best descriptors for what we want to be is plain plane. Yeah, say more about that. I guess another thing they say about the Scandas is it's the upadana scandas. That's a problem, the

clinging to the Scandas. So maybe when I'm saying plane, I'm meaning a little more like not clinging to things, not clinging to what we make up, not proliferating, not complicating, not adorning our experience when experience is just taken in openly, and you know, I know a lot of Buddhist writers have written about this much more beautifu fully and I can say it, but when we just take things in plainly, it's gorgeous and it's beautiful, and the plane truth of

it has a kind of exquisiteness that all the adornment doesn't do. Thank you for that. There's another term that's used a lot in Buddhism and in the Abi Dharma that I thought we could talk about for a minute, and it's interdependent origination. What does that mean, Well, you've hit on the two big things, the non self idea and this that are core core Buddhism, but also core Abi Dharma. Interdependent origination gets back to the idea that

nothing happens other than things meeting. There really aren't things separate from meetings of forces. So it's just that everything is in motion and everything is incredibly complexly and multiply determined. The seventh book of the Abi Dharma, the terravan and Abidama, is called the Patana. That book is a list of twenty four ways that different phenomena interact, and then it filters all the phenomena of the rest of the Abidama through.

But apparently when the Buddha thought of this whole thing, as the story goes, he started emanating six color lights from every pore of his body, just to give an idea of how complicated it is. But interdependent origination is just saying that all we can really look at are the ways that things interact and that's all that's happening.

Consciousness is an interaction. Yeah, everything is an interaction. I think would another way of saying it be that this might be an oversimplification, but I think often about you know, sort of the infinite causes and conditions. You know, we tend to say like this happened, because that happened, and yes, there are some things that we could sort of loosely say Okay, but I mean you start following that train of thought back, it is literally infinite, Yes it is, Yes,

it is. You just described one of the twenty four modes, which is a predominant condition. Sometimes there's a condition that's really big, but it's never the whole thing. You start like a child asking why, but then why that? But then why that? You know how kids do that? And you keep going. You end up in independent origination, which is another way of saying you end up in emptiness. That's what I think the term emptiness is meant used

in Buddhism. There's so much if you keep expanding your view and the Abu Dharama does not have any real limits on the view point. Emptiness is a subject I love to think about and talk about. Like you I am a practicing zen person. I'm sort of in that school that's Soto and rinse I from the White Plum lineage. But the best definition of emptiness I've ever heard, the one that I really like, it's everything all at once

that is great. And it also comes back to that quote to everything at all one in this teeny teeny teeny view. Later on in your book about the Abadarma, you talk about a couple of lists of lists. There's a wholesome list and an unwholesome list. Basically, the wholesome list is called the thirty seven Aids to Enlightenment, and you say that this is seven different lists from the Abi Dharma that are all sort of put together into

one big list. But you kind of go through all those lists and you pull out a lot of things are mentioned multiple times, and you sort of sum those down a little bit or try and find some of the most common pieces. So, in the list of the thirty seven Aids to Enlightenment, what are some of the

most common factors that show up? Actually, energy is the most commonly referenced one, which is interesting because you know, there's a lot of talk about energy and the idea of not a balanced energy, not over using, not under using. But energy shows up a lot, and I think actually mindfulness as a word shows up a lot too, And you're going to stump me. There's a third one. I actually just looked at a chart about that this weekend,

and I can't remember the third one. But mindfulness is kind of a balancing within a lot of the other lists. I'll just throw an investigation, which is not so frequently referred to, but I like it, so I'll throw it in there. And by energy, you don't mean some strange, mysterious force that may or may not exist in different in different ways that people interpret it. You mean energy, as in energy to do things, to pursue things, is to engage, to be alive. To commits not the right word.

The word that's coming to mind is from you know Zen great determination. Yes, yes, all of that. Yeah, it's a kind of a practice energy. I do think commitment actually is in there. There's a great suiture about Buddha saying that Dave's ask him how did he cross the flood? He said, I pushed forward. I would have whirled about. If I stayed still, I would have drowned. I didn't push forward. I didn't stay still. That's his cryptic answer. But that's energy. There's a co on for you. Summing

up that seven lists. You see the result of this factor analysis determines the balancing act between the stimulating effect and the calming effective self improvement at the heart of positive change, momentum and focus have to be partners. I love that. I think it's a very important point that

is made in how the lists are arranged. You know, we're all different, and in the Abidama there even some meditation techniques that are arranged by temperament, so we all have to adjust our own like soundboard, you know, as we move, but essentially like keeping it moving, keeping it lively, but also keeping that kind of calmness and training in the capacity to be mindful and step away from the experience internally. That's a balance. I'd love to see that.

That sounds like a very useful tool. I mean, maybe the way it's presented is not useful, but is to be able to say, hey, based on these type of temperaments, here's type of meditation that works for you. I've always been so drawn to the idea in Hinduism of the different types of yoga, you know, that people have different

ways of making their way to God. You know. Some people do it via service to the world, some people do it via their intellect, some people do it through love and devotion, and you know, it says, okay, people are different. It seems to me that with Buddhism, very much in the Western presentation of it has been largely sit down and follow your breath. It's diversified a little bit now in the last few years, we're getting a

little bit more embodiment practices, some different things. And I feel like I spent fifteen years trying to do breath meditation and not being very good at it, you know, and it really struggling with it, and all of a sudden, at one point somebody was like, why don't you listen to sounds, And all of a sudden, I was like,

I can concentrate, my goodness. I would be really interested in that part of the Abi Dharma, which says, hey, what are the different types of meditation for the different temperaments? I have a chart on this. I'd love to see that. Yeah. It uses the forty meditation subjects that are in the Sati Pitana Sutra, and it breaks them into six temperaments

and recommends it for ones. But I do think, you know, both are useful those long periods where you struggle with something that doesn't fit, and then that click period where you're like, I could just adjust this and it's easier for me. But you're so right, And it's like the a fault path too. There are just different ways to enter, you know. I guess there are as many paths as there are Buddhists. So we talked about the main factors for good, the main factors for wholesomeness. You title the

chapter the Way Things Go Wrong. I don't know if the list has a name, but you say, basically, there's an equally complex system that lays out the unwholesome qualities. And you did the same thing. You kind of went through and tried to service area. Let me boil this down. Where do we end up there? I think where we end up there is the idea of the obstruction that basically we have what we need and we are removing obstructions, and that approach is gentler and easier to kind of

really sink into and use in a practical way. You know, I think the basic hindrances are good. I think the other thing that I would emphasize about the list of unwholesome obstructions. You know, there are hindrances, defilements, fetters, funds. Yea, it's just like all these different ways that that it's it's described, but it's again there is this kind of balance that's very personal about what kinds of things get in your way. And everything operates on many levels, and

that's important too. So in one list something will be described one way, and another list that same word will be described differently. And I know I give examples of this in the book, but you know there's like you know, a slight distraction and there's an intense rumination. Those are the same process, but they're on different scales. So part of what happens why these lists get so complicated, they're talking about the different scales of obstruction that can happen.

You sort of boil all those down to some degree to the things that show up in the four body soft vows that I say every morning after I meditate, right, Greed, hatred and delusion or craving, you know, aversion and ignorance. I mean there you wanting not wanting. I always sort of rephrase them like wanting, not wanting, and being confused about all of that. That's a nice summary of the hub of the wheel of life. Yes, yeah, yeah, you know, I want that, I want that, I want that, I

don't want that. I don't want that, I don't want that. And the realization or the confusion around the fact that, like, well, that's why you're not that's why you're struggling. It's really nice. I love in the body stuff of us. Again, there's lots of different translations, but one of them I like is agreed, hatred, and delusion rise endlessly. I vowed abandoned them, and I like that rise endlessly, not from a pessimistic perspective, but from a perspective of like, well, of course you're

still having them. That's what happens. They keep coming and you work with them as skillfully as you can. There's not a time, you know, at least that seems in my imminent future where those are disappearing. No, not at all mine either. But I think that, you know, that kind of brings me to the good fortune of the human birth is that we won't solve these things. Were on the edge of a mystery, we sort of sort

of sense it but we don't really get it. We keep trying to say it, but we can't really And these things are part of our human existence that they do just continuously arise, and you know, our our mission is to curate this flow of consciousness throughout this existence. Another plain thing I think of sometimes is like the purpose of life is to clean consciousness. You know, it's kind of boring, but I think it's sort of true that that has to do with obstructions again also as

removing obstructions. But it'll just keep going. And and that is our good fortune that we do have enough awareness and enough of the suffering to keep developing if we find a way to develop it. Yep, you said something there a moment ago about the mystery. We keep trying to sort of say things but we can't. Which is a great transition into the next area I wanted to go to, which is another book of yours that I unfortunately left sitting in the other room. But it's a

book about writing and meditation. And you know, you sort of start the book off by saying, in your tradition, Zen, which is also mine, we sort of pooh pooh words like you know, you know, burn your words. You can't say it every you know, every word is false. I mean, there's a there's a real like, hey, get rid of words. But you say that writing is a really powerful tool for us on the journey to awakening, along with meditation.

So tell me a little bit about why those two go so well together and why you wanted to create a book that really explicitly marries them. Again, this is something that's a little bit temperament bound, because I don't I don't think this is for everyone, but it's probably for more people than people might think. I think that even though we will always fail in the task to express the fundamental truth of the universe, every time we work with it, every time we play with it, we

bring out something new for ourselves. We articulate something that was half formed in our mind or our bodies, and then that is a useful process. Writing takes that process a little bit further. Because I've experimented with us how much I might sit and carefully think something through, something new will come out every single time I sit and write about it. It's different. It's a little bit of

a bodily remove And also you're making an object. You're making a literal object, even if it's you know, a file on a screen, you are still making something. And by seeing your internal process turn into an object, you remember, oh, my internal process is just a bunch of objects. And by bringing it out and articulating it, you carry it further, and you carry awareness further. Your pen carries your awareness. You don't even have to worry about it. I write pen,

but same with a keyboard. Yeah, it makes me think back to an earlier sentence of years I read there are a royal in Culdron of activity and momentum. And writing is one way, at least for me, of slowing that process down. I mean not literally slowing it down, but does but slowing down what's going on in my mind. It's you know, thoughts and emotions are so slippery, you know, they feel so real and yet they're so slippery. And writing is a way I can deconstruct, you know, what

are the elements that are going on here? What are the things? And you quote a bunch of studies that are that are pretty clear. We've talked about some of them with different people in the show. That expressive writing can be a really good tool in our growth and healing. Absolutely um And you know, they're all these very objective measures as well as subjective that you know, even at very small amounts, surprisingly small amounts of expressive writing have

some healing power. So I absolutely believe it. I've worked with kids, teenagers, grandparents, Expressive Writing group that I work with people that you just wouldn't even think might get anything out of it do, But I think you're right. Literally it does slow down thought processes. They move at different rates, and like those monks that could break down, you know, the split second into all these steps. Writing kind of does that is kind of deconstructing, mulching through

things that that you're talking about. It's very powerful. Um. Neona Panica Terror writes a lot about like what a mess the average mind is. He describes it as like I can't remember exactly. It's kind of poetic, like you know, cobwebs and and half baked thoughts and emotions flying around and this and that, and he just says, one thing we need to do is clean it up again. So writing forces it to this level of articulation that will always surprises you. That's my favorite thing about writing is

you can surprise yourself with what you write. Um, but it always kind of moves it out of your body. There's also that element of it being a physical act, and moving emotion out of your body is is critical for people. I don't think people do that enough to kind of help the process move through you. Yeah, you have a line I love slightly different than emotion. But you say meditation and writing rely on structure and repetition while they court surprise and revelation. I think it's a

beautifully written line and so true. You know, structure and repetition, but what we're after, right is surprise and revelation. It's it's a really nice way of thinking about it. So we're near the end of our time here. You and I are going to continue to talk a little bit in the post show conversation about um a couple of the exercises from the book, because there's some really great exercises that are very different than anything I have ever

seen before. A lot of journal writing prompts, I've just seen a lot of them at this point in my life, but your book, I was like, I've never seen anything quite like it about you know, a contemplative way. It's almost as if writing and meditation combined together to make something better and stronger. So we'll do a couple of

those exercises in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd like access to the post show conversation as well as a special episode I do called Teaching Song and a poem and the Joys of being a member of the one you Feed, you can go to when you feed dot net slash join. Is there any last things about the Abi Dharma that you feel like we haven't covered

that are really important? The thing that I would say is there's a ton of information and it's never going to be a super popular study in this in this current world. But if you can do anything where you just kind of dip into the complexity, the multiplicity and the interactivity of how we are experiencing. Whenever you do that, I think you open yourself and I think you dim the intensity of how hard you're holding onto yourself, and you'll feel it. There's this kind of weird, refreshing quality

in it. I think that makes people more generous. It's a beautiful way to end. And your book is called the original Buddhist Psychology. What the Abi Dharma tells us about how we think, feel, and experience life, and it is of anything I have read so far, one of the best introductions that I have read that made it very clear. So listeners, if you're interested in this topic, this is a great place to start. Thank you so much for that and for our conversation. Yeah, thank you

so much for coming on, Beth. I really appreciate it. 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.

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