Steve Hagen on Perception, Conception, and Enlightenment

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 m Thanks for joining us. Today's guest is Steve Hoggen, founder and head teacher of the Dharma Field Zen Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Steve is the author of several books on Buddhism, among them as The Brilliant Buddhism, Plain and Simple which was one of the top five best selling Buddhism books in the United States. In two thousand twelve, Steve updated and revised his first book, How the World Can Be the Way It Is, and published it as Why the World Doesn't Seem to Make Sense,

An Inquiry into science, philosophy, and perception. This episode is sponsored by health i Q. To see if you qualify and get your free health quote, go to health i q dot com. Slash walf Or mentioned the promo code wolf when you talk to a health i Q agent, and here's the interview with Steve Hogan. Hi, Steve, Welcome to the shower. It's a pleasure to have you on.

I read one of your books, Buddhism, Plain and Simple, years and years ago, I think probably when it first came out, and I've revisited it a couple of times over the years. So it's a real pleasure to get you on and talk with you about it. Well, I'm pretty happy to be here. Excellent. Well, let's start like we always do, with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He 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 grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that terrible means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, that's an interesting story.

I hadn't heard it, you know, before you contacted me. But of course we all want to feed the good wolf inside us. The problem I think that we have it's kind of hard to determine exactly what is good and what is bad. You did outline a few things, they're examples of goodness and what is bad, But this isn't so easily discerned that. There's a an interesting Dawas story um of a Chinese farmer, wise Chinese farmer and uh. One day his horse runs off. Actually this is in

in my book Buddhism, Plan and Simple. His horse runs off and his neighbor comes to console him that he lost his horse. But the farmer said, well, who can say what's good or bad? And the next day the horse comes back, bringing some other horses with her, And now the neighbor comes to congratulate the farmer on his good luck, and the farmer says, who can say what's good or bad? And it goes on like this. The next day, the farmer's son breaks his leg trying to

break one of the horses, and uh. The neighbor says, well, commiserating with with the man, and uh, but the farmer I just keep saying, who can say what's good or bad? The next day the army's coming through, conscript conscripting young men for the for the army, and they pass over his son because he's got a broken leg. And so it just goes on like this, who can say what's good or bad? I've heard this story told by people saying the farmer just says maybe maybe good, maybe bad.

But I think it's a little bit more powerful, Uh, when we get down to what he's saying there, who can say? Who can say what's good or bad? You know? I always think of the those buildings in New York back in two thousand one when the planes flew into the buildings, and of course we would all say that this is bad. But of course to the people who flew the planes in, they probably thought they were doing something good. And we can find all kinds of examples

of of this. Just last year on the during the campaigns, somebody asked the heads of one of the networks about giving so much airspace to uh to Donald Trump and uh, and he said, well, you know, this might not be good for the nation, but it's good for us, he said. And uh, you know, so here we are good and bad and uh, pretty difficult to discern. And I listened to a couple of your other interviews that you did, and I noticed, uh, one person, it was Sean Carroll,

very interesting fellow. I really you know, like him what he had to say. Uh, But he he observed correctly. I would say that it's hard to be objective in

terms of determining what's good or bad. And I would agree with that, except there is a way of without expecting to arrive at some kind of objective view of good or bad, there is a way of viewing this that can actually get us out of our confusion, and rather than casting it in good and bad, if we just simply look at it in terms of homeless and and what is unwholesome, and this brings us You know that there's a teaching in the Dama Pada where the Buddha said, you just simply put it as do what

is wholesome, avoid what is unwholesome, and he said purify your own mind. And then he said, this is what the awaken teach. There. It is in a nutshell. Do it as a wholesome, avoid what is unwholesome. And then we have the pure precepts which my teacher used to express him in this way, it's just we do what is wholesome, avoid was unwholesome, consider the welfare of everyone

and everything you do. That's a way that helps us to avoid any kind of one on one confrontation between good and bad, which I think anyone if you stand back and look at it and get separate yourself from your own attached views con sided, well, it's hard to say that that itself is good to have that duality exactly. Another thing that you wrote talking about the Buddhist teachings, one of the things you said was that when Buddhoo was asked to sum up his teachings. In a single word,

he said, awareness. Yeah, not awareness of something in particular, but awareness itself. Can you talk to me about that difference between being aware of, say like the color of the wall or the sounds that I'm hearing, and being aware or awareness itself. Yeah. Normally we're so used to we're highly conceptual beings, and so we immediately conceptualize our experience and see things in terms of form and color, and and also for ways in which feeling and thought

get mixed in with all of that. But this is awareness of objects, awareness of the conceptual, and pure awareness is just simply that it's not formed in any way whatsoever. This is what I think the Buddha was speaking of there. It isn't that you're focused on something else. With that kind of a focus, you also having a strong sense of self at the same time, but just simply to be aware of tune end to settle down with the actual raw experience of this moment. And uh, that's kind

of a general awareness. And I would refer to this as perception and it's not conceptual at all. The conceptual is something where we try to describe what it is we're experiencing. We feel like we have to say something about it, but we actually can't describe the actual, immediate act experience of the moment. It's like tasting orange juice. You know, we know it immediately, but it's not a concept, it's not an idea. It's a direct experience, and there's

no way to describe it. If you had never tasted orange juice, there's no way I could describe it to you so that you would taste it. This is something that has to be done directly, and so awareness like that, just simply aware of what is the immediate, direct, unformed experience. In a different book, you refer to perception as knowledge and conception as belief. That's kind of what it boils down to. And we confuse what we believe with knowledge.

This has been an ancient problem, goes all the way back to the to the ancient Greeks, and probably before that. How do we parcel belief from knowledge? And again, the problem that we have is because we're so caught up in the conceptual and we're not paying much attention at all to the perceptual or to a media direct awareness. Right now, I'm just finishing another book where I get into this rather heavily and really spell it out in

quite a bit of detail. And so what we're talking about here when we say perception versus conception is perception being I am present in the current moment. I'm here now, As you said, I'm just experiencing the raw sensations that are coming from my perception, without categorizing them, putting them into concepts, labeling them, judging them as good or as bad. I'm just simply aware to them. Is that a way

to sum it up? Well? Actually, uh, what you just described as still conceptual, and mainly because you referenced everything in terms of I me and you know, my my perception. Uh, strictly speaking, with pure awareness, there's no such thing as my perception. There's perception. Once we get to my perception, now it's it's conceptualized and and I'm formed, and then there's something else out there they're formed as well, and so pure perception it is a very it's a very

subtle thing, but we're always experiencing it. It's impossible not to experience it. Uh, it's with every waking moment of well more than that, it's just continuously with us. It's just that the gap between that and the conceptualizing is almost non existent for most of us. Right, most of us were so quick with the conceptualizing that we don't even realize that there is any distinction here to be made. You know, and and we and we also uh intensify

that with just the way we talk. Like I'm sitting here in front of a microphone now, and I might say something like I perceived the microphone. Uh, well, that's how we would normally talk. I would never say that, Well, I just did, but I would never I don't I realized that the microphone is something conceived by me. It's it's a conceptual construct, and there's nothing wrong with that. I also don't mean to set out one against the other,

like perception is good and conception is bad. We need conceptual, we need the conceptual. But it's just that we can't arrive at truth that way. The truth doesn't go in the concept, but we can see it directly, and we omit that we overlook it simply because we so quickly wrap everything into a conceptual construct and we missed the actual media, direct experience that we that we know from

moment to moment all the time. Is that part of what you would say meditation helps to do is to allow us to get some gap between that perception and the conception. Yeah, well, that's what the meditation is. That's how we start out. We tune into a settled down. It's quieting the mind, settling down to what the actual experience of the moment is without adding anything to it.

And at some point we can start to become more discerning and realize, you know, how much we are adding to the experience of the moment, how much we're explaining to ourselves or just assuming in a conceptual way, and we're constantly acting out of that and and not really tuned into what the pure experiences. So the meditation is

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com slash one. You feed and enter the code one you feed at checkout. Terms and conditions apply again. That's Casper dot com slash one. You feed and enter the code one you feed at checkout. And here's the rest of the interview. You use the word enlightenment. You say it's nothing more or less than seeing things as they are, rather than as we wish or believe them to be. Do you think that enlightenment is something that happens for people semi regularly? Is it a pretty rare can audition?

What's your thought on that? Oh, it's not rare at all. I was gonna say, different people have different thoughts on that. You have to train for so many lifetimes before this could happen, and yeah, yeah, Well, actually, enlightenment is with us all the time. It's just that we're never tuned

into it. It's actually our true state. You know, if if we would just settle down and not play with so many different things, or at least if we would start to recognize what we're doing and and so we don't allow ourselves to get emotionally caught up with too many things, forming attachments all of that. Uh, the enlightenment is is right there. But with that, it's really the

perception itself. It's just that with enlightenment we kind of brought in the element of understanding, knowing, realizing, uh, what is taking place. And of course people could easily interpret what I just said as bringing in the conceptual. Now that wouldn't be enlightenment, because the enlightenment is the actual perceptual itself. But it is knowing reality and it isn't something foreign to us because we actually all no reality. You could not not no reality. It's all we ever experience.

It's just that we, in conceptualizing it, are attempting to we go with that with all the various things that we form, including ourselves and uh, and pay virtually no attention to what is actually taking place, what is actually happening. So let's go back to that idea of self for a minute. You're you're talking about the Buddhist conception of no self, and one of the ways that you describe it in the book that I think is great. Well, actually I guess the Buddha described it and you're just

passing on. But what we call a person the Buddha referred to simply as stream. What does that mean, Well, it's it's just that the actual momentum experience of the moment is stream. It is h nothing is holding still, there's nothing persisting. A self would have to be something that doesn't change. And if we look carefully at the experience moment by moment, there isn't anything that doesn't change. Everything within the experience, all thought, feeling, objects, everything appears

to be coming and going. The Buddha described himself the term he used to refer to himself. Rather than saying me or I, he used the term tatagata, which literally means coming and going. Thus, and what he meant by that is that the experience is nothing but this coming and going, just as we find it. And and so that's what he's referring to their rather than saying I or me, which is a mistaken view of that. Well, I am something here that's persisting from moment to moment.

We talked about what when I was five or six or whatever, but it's still me. We have this idea that there's something element here that's persisting from moment to moment. But if if you look carefully at your experience, you realize you'll never find that thing. That's just a conceptual construct that we live by. If we're tuned into the actual perceptual experience, it appears as continuous flux and change,

but there's actually nothing changing there. And describing the idea of stream a little bit, you give the analogy of a book, you know, the book that you were writing. Could you share that analogy, because I think it's a very helpful way to think of this idea of everything sort of being in flux, and also it being really difficult to determine where to draw a line that this thing begins and this thing ends. That's what the conceptualizing is, is that where we do draw the lines, and this

could be very functional and useful. Again, as I mentioned earlier, there's nothing wrong with conceptualizing, and we need we need to conceptualize. But if we look very carefully at the experience, though, you'll you'll see that there's actually no line, no border, no no boundary that we can actually discern beyond the conceptual So in other ways, the actual perceptual experience does give us any boundaries like that, And this is something

we can even notice if we really tune in. I like an experience I once had lying in my tent at night and listening in the deep wood. There, uh, in the distance was an owl and in an unpredictable way I could I never knew when he was gonna hoot next, But just lying there in the tent and listening, and Uh, I noticed that either the hoot was hooting or it wasn't. And it was like, even though it seems like now there's a hoot. Now there isn't. So it would seem that there would have to be a

boundary there. And yet just lying there, really tuned into it and focusing on it, you can't really find that. And uh, and that's that's getting in with the perceptual experience, just noting very carefully there. So there's nothing really bounded at all. Uh, though our experience certainly appears that way. And we don't deny the appearances, and we don't ignore

the appearances. It's very important that we to ane into these things, but we do make the mistake of thinking that the way things appear to be bounded and separated from other things, Um, that's actually more of a mental construct than an actual reality, an ultimate reality. It's an apparent reality. It called it smaller reality or a friend of mine. Once you use the term scenality is how

things seem to be. And I don't deny that. Yeah, the analogy that you used about a book was you you were saying, you know, how how do I tell this book as a as a distinct thing. I mean, on one hand, here it is in my hand, but you know, the paper came from a tree, so as the tree consider, you know, as the paper part of the book is the tree. Part of the book is

the water that came down to make the tree. Is the fact that you were taught by somebody in order to be able to write that book, you know, and that person was taught by somebody. And so that all these things flow into each other in a way. And again, on one hand, it's easy to say this is the book, you can hold it in your hand. But at the same time, it's also not just that. It's everything that had to happen, all the events that occurred all along

the way until that thing comes. And so and that's the idea of to some extent, when you don't put a conception on something, you are able to see that unfolding. Yeah. Yeah, and and uh, she you can realize that within any small uh sphere or object or whatever we find ourselves and or everything is there, everything comes together with it, totality is there. And this brings us back to wholeness again, which I talked about at the very beginning, and talking

about the two wolves. And uh, if we look carefully this wholeness, when the Buddhist said, do it is wholesome, avoid what is unwholesome. Uh. This wholeness is within every experience. It's just a matter of us being sensitive to it, open to it, and aware of it. And we can also see the divided and fractured and all of that, the unwholesome, those things that appear to be unwhole, and we honor that, we respect that. But if we look carefully,

we realize that these are not two different things. This world ultimately is without such boundaries, but they are apparent. They are there in the conceptual form, So we have to honor that. Right. It's sort of part of what makes life functional in the way that it is is being able to do that. But it's, as you said, it's not the only way to see things or necessarily the bottom line truth of it. And I always think

that's interesting. It's kind of like the the self no self question because on one hand, when that comes up, and this was my reaction for a long time, was like, well, that's ridiculous. Of course, there's a self here, I am yeah, And so on one hand and a in a relative sense, right, yes there, you know, I am here and I am you know, doing these things. But then at a deeper level, at a different level. It's you know, it's more what you talked about. It's the stream, it's the everything moves

together as one thing. Yeah, you can't pick out that individuated thing, you know, myself the way, we actually don't use the term no self because that's kind of going to an extreme, just as we would avoid using the term self in terms of grasping anything or thinking we've gotten hold of something. By using the term self, we also avoid grasping at the other extreme, which is that there's no self. We tend to speak of it more as that we just simply don't find a self. And again,

a self meaning that thing that doesn't change. This is what we don't find in our experience. So it's not that there's no such thing as itself or whatever. It's just that, you know, what are you gonna point to? We do talk about big self totality. Yeah, it's always us, but that's not an object. If you're enjoying this conversation, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. We are nearing the end of it. I wish you could

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pledge to access this additional weekly content. And now back to the interview. One of the things that you reference and you say is that picking and choosing is the mind's worst disease. Talk about what you're getting at their Yeah, that's that's from the Shin xing Ming early Zen poem by the third Patriarch of Zen in China. He starts out by saying, um, the Great Way is not difficult.

There's nothing it prefers. It's often translated is for those who have no preferences, But he's if you look at the Chinese, it's closer to saying that the Great Way

itself is without preference. So in our conceptualizing mind, where we divide things out and now we start evaluating them, some things that we think are good and some are bad, and we and some things we want, some things we don't want, and we start picking and choosing, and since on the author of that peace singing thing, he says, uh that this is the mind's worst disease, and it

leaves us. Um, we easily get caught up in a lot of frustrating and difficult situations or even terrifying and frightening and painful, whereas if we uh look at the larger picture, the larger experience of what's what is always being experienced, we can learn not to get caught up in these distinctions. We need to honor them with their distinctions, but we don't need to let them carry us away.

The other thing you talk about, I think, similar to choosing or preferring this or preferring that, you talk often about the idea of that our mind leans a certain way, explain that this is the best way really to get in touch with the awakened mind, which is right there with you always. Again we ignore it as we wake up. Our minds are leaning. And it has to do with that preference again that I was just talking about, where

the great Way doesn't have any preferences. And to the extent that we're not picking and choosing, the mind isn't leaning, so it's a matter of really getting in touch with that, noticing your own mind. You can feel the poll you can feel the attachment or the aversion that might be going on within your mind, rejecting, you know, shunning while one thing or another or a person or whatever else and being drawn towards another when you allow yourself to act out of that rather than out of the hole.

And Buddhism, plain and simple, I talk about this as really what we can do. It's called the mind that knows everything. And of course, in terms of the conceptual we can't know everything. It's just too much, and it's just just a sheer impossibility. But we can do that which is equivalent, which is knowing the whole. And and and this is this matter of being aware in any given moment,

particularly when you're interacting with others. Say, if you can detect some pull of your mind you're trying to bring about certain results or certain ends, and this sort of thing. This is what the Buddha meant by avoid what is unwholesome. Just see if you can stay away, you know, from this sort of thing. And to the extent that we can do this our own mind. Now it doesn't lean it's not leaning towards this. It isn't this position of

mind isn't constantly shifting like that. And uh, and this is characteristic of an awakened mind or a mind of of totality and wholeness and understanding. And so that is a very easy thing to say, easy to say, right. So it's a lifetime of practice. Lifetime of practice, yeah, exactly. But this is what most distinguishes a Buddha or an awakened person. And Buddha is a person, human being who's awake. But this is what most distinguishes one who's awake from

from one who's caught up in confusion. Is this matter of well, this disposition of mind, the leaning of of mine. Uh. The one who's awake, the mind doesn't lean or their inclination of mind is you could say zero, it's vertical, it's you know, it's not leaning. And that's that's characteristic

of an awakened mind. And you would say, I think, putting words in your mouth that we can't make our mind go this direction or that direction or not lean or yankee back up straight or push it back in that that what we can do is see that our mind is leaning and and come back to trying to be awake here and now that is the best way to get to the point where we have a mind that doesn't lean. It's simply to see that it's leaning, vers simply judging it, pushing it, forcing it by the

same token. And we also don't try to make it not lean. That doesn't work. That's more leaning actually, So it's just it is simply a matter of seeing. And and when I when I'm writing that word seeing, this is when I'll tell us size the word to distinguish it from our ordinary seeing where we're seeing an object. Here, what we're seeing is totality or the mind of totality. And uh, in the way in which things might be entering into it that you know, the conceptual to constructs,

the inclinations and this sort of thing. We can see that and uh, and then then we can stop or we can learn to do that. That that takes some time. But the way, the way that we learn it too is is through just acquaintance with this, tuning into it and becoming aware of what's going on. We start to realize all the pain and confusion and anger and anxiety, and you know that that coo along with that, and you know, the hatred and all of that. The mind

then can become more supple and open and magnanimous and tolerant. Uh. And that's the that's kind of the promise of learning to live without being caught by your inclinations. Yeah, so we're near the end of our time here. I'd love to have you tell the story about the problems. Oh yes, sometimes people get a little confused about this, but it's about a a man who who heard of the buddhas teachings and heard that he was a wise man and all of this. And the man thought, well, you know,

I'm gonna go talk with him. I have certain problems here that maybe he can help me with. And so the man went to see the Buddha, and the Buddha patiently sat and listened to him, and and the man when I turned out, he was a farmer, like the wise change farmer with this guy. Maybe it wasn't that man, but he said, you know, I'm a farmer and I like farming, but sometimes, uh, you know, it range too much, or it doesn't rain enough, and my crops fail, or

I don't get the yields I want. And you know, then the Buddhist listening and then says, you know what, I'm married and I have a wife. She is a good wife. I love her, but sometimes she nags me too much, you know. And uh, he says, I have kids and they're great kids, but sometimes they don't show me enough respect, you know. Anyway, the guys just going on like this, like any of us, could you know, we all have difficulties and problems in our life. And

that's what the Buddha said, I can't help you. And then said, well, what do you mean. He said, I thought you were a great teacher. And he he says, well, we all have problems, the Buddha said, and he says, as a matter of fact, eighty three problems. We all have eighty eighty three. Just sometimes people good up on the number, but it just means a lot of problems.

And and and then the Buddhist said, well, maybe you can solve one of them, but if you do, there'll be another one just pops right back in its place. And no matter what, it's always eighty three or you always have just going to be problems, is what he's saying. And the man just kind of kind of blew up at him. There, what what good is your is your teaching, he said then, And the Buddhist said, well, maybe it'll help you with the four problem problem, said the man,

and he said, what's that? And the buddhistaid, well, you don't want to have any problems and uh, and this is what we can learn to do. It isn't like, you know, we go to this heavenly place or whatever where everything is just hunky dory and wonderful from then that's just not reality. It's not it's not life. Uh, it will never be that way. But what we can learn to do is to not be this. This is

no appealing to this mind of totality. Is this wholesome mind, the mind of the whole, as opposed to the splintered mind in the divided mind. We can learn uh, to to find this. So even in this world of apparent differences and things coming and going and changing all around us, we can learn to live in this space without being tossed about, um, you know. And and so this is what the Buddha promise, this is what he teaches, This

is what he helps us with. Yeah, I love that idea that we all have problems and that they're not going they're not going away and I think that's just such a great thing to recognize and then realizing that most of the suffering comes from us one in there to be no problems. I just think it's such a profound, profound story. It's a little different than jay Z song problems and ain't one, but will that'll be for the more modern listeners unless you're a big jay Z face,

in which I don't think so. I know, I really don't know what you're talking about here, but I I know I couldn't really. I think it's a it's a hip hop star, rap star. So well, Steve, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I really appreciated talking with you. I've appreciated your writing over the years, so it was a real pleasure. Well, thank you. Eric, was good to be here. Okay, take

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