Shownotes
In the movie There's Something About Mary, there's a scene where Ben Stiller's character picks up a hitchhiker who tries to pitch him on a business idea.
There's a popular exercise video called Eight Minute Abs, but the hitchhiker is going to capture market share by making a video called Seven Minute Abs.
He explains, "If you walk into the video store and you see Eight Minute Abs and Seven Minute Abs, which one are you going to take? Seven minutes, of course.
But he gets stumped by the question, "What if somebody else comes out with Six Minute Abs?"
I thought of that scene when I got pitched for a new book called Three Minutes a Day: A Fourteen-Week Course to Learn Meditation and Transform Your Life, by Richard Dixey.
I thought, boy, have we really dumbed down the tradition of meditation from its origins.
Starting with Buddha sitting under the tree for days or weeks at a time until enlightenment descended upon him, to the practices of of monks and nuns of the monastic orders in Europe who would sit and pray for several hours a day.
And now, just like everything else in the West, we've turned it into something that you can package and microwave and sell to the masses who just want a quick fix.
Then I took a look at the book and completely changed my mind.
And in fact, the conversation you're about to hear with Richard Dixey, the author, is actually one of the deepest explorations of spirituality I have ever had. It's changed how I think about my own spiritual practice. And it's been a couple of weeks now of going through the exercises in the book, and my spiritual practice has transformed for the better.
I understand if you're skeptical. So have a listen, and let me know what you think.
Transcripts
In the movie, there's something about Mary. There's a scene where a guy picks up a hitchhiker who tries to pitch him on his business idea. He says there's this video called Eight Minute Abs and this guy is going to make a video called Seven Minute Abs. He says, if you see you walk into the video store and you see eight minute abs and seven minute abs, which one are you going to take? Seven minutes, of course. And then, of course, the question is, what if somebody else comes out with six minute abs?
And he can't compute six minutes doesn't make any sense. And that's kind of what I thought of when I got pitched for a new book called three minutes, how to meditate in three minutes a day.
I thought, boy, have we really dumbed down the tradition of meditation from its origins, I guess, you know, Buddha sitting under the tree for days and weeks at a time until enlightenment descended upon him to the practices of of monks who and nuns who would sit.
pretty much all day to the monastic orders in Europe where people would sit and pray for several hours a day. And now, just like everything else in the West, we've turned it into something that you can package and microwave.
And then I took a look at the book and completely changed my mind.
And in fact, the conversation you're about to hear with Richard Dixey, the author, is actually one of the deepest explorations of spirituality I have ever had. It really has changed how I think about my own spiritual practice. And it's been a couple of weeks now and it has changed it. I can tell you for the better.
I'm going to say no more than that right now and invite you to come along on this conversation and see if you feel the same. So without further ado.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Richard Dixey, welcome to the Plant Yourself podcast. We're going to talk about your book that I have been reading and starting to practice three minutes. And what's the subtitle?
Richard Dixey (:Hi.
Great.
It's learned to meditate in three minutes a day. Sounds like a cookbook, doesn't it? anyway, it says what it says, I guess.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Yeah. Yeah, well, when I when I first saw the title, I kind of had this feeling like, OK, this like we've dumbed things down and we've made concessions and concessions and concessions. But this this is like really like a new low, like three minutes. And I found when I started reading it that that completely changed my mind that there's something there's something you know.
what you say in one of the chapters in response to a question someone asks about sitting for longer is to say, if we do it for longer, we just end up sitting in trance on our mats. Like, yeah, I've done my 20 minutes, but I only meditated for maybe a minute and a half of that whole time. was I was actually probably asleep for part of it.
Richard Dixey (:truth.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:So I'm finding it much more valuable than I thought. thought this was some sort of marketing ploy. And I've got to say it goes deep. It's philosophical. It's experiential. And I'm really getting a ton of value out of it. So I'm looking forward to sharing this with my audience.
Richard Dixey (:It's really wonderful. Someone's actually read it.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Yeah. Yeah. Well, you I was worried you say, well, you've read it, but you haven't done the 14 weeks yet. I'm I'm hoping this is this this will, you know, very often I get inspired by the actual conversation to go back and actually go through the process. But first, let's let's begin with you. Can you kind of tell us a little bit about who you are and how you came to write the book?
Richard Dixey (:No, no, no, no. You've got it all ready.
Yeah, well, I do tell a bit of the story in the book, actually. You know, I'm now retired, but I've had a long career that's kind of oscillated between two poles. One is a scientific so-called objective pole, where, you know, I was a biochemistry student at Oxford and, you know, landed up running my own laboratory and my own biotech company and looking for evidence-based information.
And the other has been a spiritual poll, realizing that the objective poll doesn't capture meaning, and it doesn't capture experience properly. In fact, it doesn't capture experience at all. And the two polls have been an issue for me, because of course they're pros and cons to both. The objective poll gives us fantastic technology. It demystifies many things we find confusing.
but it alienates us. Whereas the subjective poll is where we generate meaning, but unfortunately it can be abused and often is by politicians and liars basically, who basically take the subjective position as if it's true without even attempting to put it into fact. And of course we're seeing in modern politics this play to its extreme, this wonderful phrase, alternative facts.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Yeah.
Richard Dixey (:came up with this idea that somehow there is no fact and that's the subjective pole and you know in my life I've kind of danced between these two positions and only really when I began to deeply engage with meditation was I able to bring them together and that's why I think meditation is so important because it enables us to become
objectively subjective or maybe subjectively objective. We can unify the two poles and land up in as an agent in the world but not denying fact. And this is a very very important development and I think something of extreme value in modernity where so many
of the devices that we have made are enticing us away from ourselves into an advertising driven commercial market and people are being pulled away from themselves to an increasing extent and as a result suffering from alienation and stress and meaninglessness and all the other problems of modernity and at the same time we're seeing really I think you could probably call it societal
we're seeing the breakdown of civil society. And this is worldwide. And of course it's combined with economic and environmental and social changes and all the rest of it. But nonetheless, there has never been a time in history where unifying the objective and subjective is more important than now. And so again, that's made me quite passionate about meditation. The problem is...
that meditation as it is normally presented is presented in a style that is really predicated on being a monk, because that's where the meditation traditions came from. And there is this emphasis on very long periods of sitting without really a proper analysis of why you're doing it. And that, I teach in a college now.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Hmm.
Richard Dixey (:Dharma College, I'm Dean of Dharma College, which is a college in Berkeley which is dedicated to reimagining wisdom, really addressing these questions in the vernacular culture. And in teaching meditation, I realized, wow, you you could really shortcut a lot of this, you know, almost ritual obeisance to long sitting periods, if you really knew what you were doing, if you knew why meditation was valuable.
and you were able to focus on that, you could land up with really quite short periods of meditation being valuable. And indeed, was informed really by a Theravadan monk called Ajahn Tong, who I knew very well, who used to say, you Westerners, you're just sleeping on your cushions. Sleeping on your cushions was rather good. And I think it's true. I think mostly when people are sitting for an hour in meditation, they're probably doing a minute of meditation and 59 minutes of sleep.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Yeah
Richard Dixey (:And of course, it's nice. I mean, you get up, you feel good, you feel relaxed, but you haven't really done anything. And this is the key to it. Why would we meditate in the first place? What are we actually trying to achieve? And that's where I feel there is a definite problem in the way meditation is presented. It's not presented against the backdrop of modernity. So...
When people meditate, often have no idea really why they're doing it. It's meant to be a good idea, but they don't know why. And so again, all these factors triggered me to write this book.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Yeah.
So. Yeah, so there is so much to unpack there, so and I want to return to the subjective objective. And you said something I didn't quite get it all down, but somehow the objective ignores or denies our experience. Can you say more about what you mean by that?
Richard Dixey (:I can, yeah, well I mean, you know, a bit of history. the scientific revolution, which brings in this idea of objective knowledge, experimental knowledge, begins really with the dialogues of Galileo. And Galileo was a very funny guy, very insightful. And the point he made was that the medieval scholastic philosophers following Aristotle, which was entirely a subjective worldview,
were merely naming, they weren't knowing. And indeed, subjective naming is arbitrary and consequently is not true knowledge. And the only way you're gonna get true knowledge is to ignore the subjective poll entirely and merely do experiment in the world, whatever that is, in the world.
and use that data to generate true knowledge and that metaphysical change, which is a fundamental change in worldview, brings in modernity. And so now we hear about black holes and the universe and all this sort of stuff as if they are things we experience. But of course, we don't actually experience them at all. So a lot of what we read about as quote, true,
is not actually in our experience. And this is a very enigmatic problem because, you know, little Johnny goes to school as a happy four-year-old, the center of their world, completely embodied, totally kind of in their world, and comes out of school as an alienated teenager with a lot of words, but no longer embodied and no longer in their world, in a
big world somehow which doesn't care about them and you know all this talk. Now this is a really problematic consequence of over emphasis on quote objective knowledge because we only only ever experience our own mind. Einstein only ever experienced his own mind.
There is no scientist anywhere who ever experiences anything other than their own mind. This is a strange kind of, yeah, really? What, what, But when you start thinking about it, you realize that's true. We only ever experience our own mind. If we don't understand how we make a world from our perceptions in our mind, if we don't understand that,
We are fundamentally ignorant. Unfortunately, this is not a topic taught at school.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:So so I. Yeah, so I have read that and I have explored it and it makes sense, and yet I don't believe it in in my like if you're telling you're telling me that I make all this up and so I know I can put on glasses that would invert the world and that after a few days my eyes would adjust, my mind would adjust and I would even with those glasses on, I would see the world.
Richard Dixey (:I know you can't believe it!
Dr Howie Jacobson (:the way I do now, but if I took those glasses off, the world would be inverted. Right. I know that there is atoms that are moving around. never seen one like what you're saying fundamentally makes a kind of intellectual sense, but it doesn't make an experiential sense. And there's a huge paradox there that the experiential poll, the subjective poll, if you want me to believe it, it's almost like I have to believe
in black holes that I've never experienced because the only.
Richard Dixey (:No, no, no, I think we've to be careful here. I'm not saying you make it up. Well, I am saying you make it up, but make it up is kind of pejorative. What I'm really saying is experience is constructed. Now, in fact, the mainstream psychological theory is now called constructivist psychology. This is not complicated, really. We construct a world map from our senses.
But that process of construction is taken for granted as if it's not problematic. And people use metaphors like a camera as if that explains vision. But we're not a camera. We're not a microphone. We are not a transducer like that. We construct from those devices that we have, eyes and ears, et cetera, a world map.
And that can be demonstrated, you can demonstrate it in time with sophisticated psychological experiments. You can also demonstrate it yourself by looking at optical illusions, auditory illusions, they're all these illusions that you can see on the internet, which show you quite clearly that what we're seeing is actually made from inputs. Now the problem is we're not ever encouraged to explore that in our education.
So we come out of school with the idea that there's a real world, which is actually a construct. There's a real world, and we're nothing much. But actually, that real world is our construct. That's the thing that's never said, and it's very, very important to understand.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Hmm. Well, yeah. Well, it's funny you should compare us to a camera because I just got a new iPhone, so I've been reading all about the latest, you know, the new camera and all its functionality. And it turns out that there's a huge debate among the three big makers of cell phones, Samsung, Apple and Google about what is a photograph.
And Google has come down. A photograph is some representation of something that actually happened, but the others are have AI capability. You can remove a person you can. So a photograph is no longer even the most objective thing you could think of a machine that records the pixels, that records the photons is itself an interpretation.
And so you see, you know, was watching like here's five different phones taking a picture. The sky is a different color in each one. Some are blurry. Some have more bezels on the outside. like even even these machines can't agree that they're also constructing reality.
Richard Dixey (:So now, so we have a question. What is objectively real? Now the claim that was, now this is deep stuff and it may be what we're going to go, but the claim of scientific materialism is we can generate true knowledge of the objectively real by experiment. But again, what's actually occurred, particularly in how quantum mechanics has become so confirmed, is that is not the case. Actually, there is no real out there.
All real is, is what happens when we do a particular thing in a particular way. We get real. Even our objective knowledge is constructed. There is no absolute reality. And that is a firm conclusion now that's coming out of our basic physical sciences. And again, it points to the same thing, that, this is turtles all the way down. There's no point where there's a bottom
a world in which we are embedded. are participating in the world. We are participants. We belong. Now that belonging is really getting to the nub of meditation because alienation, if there was a disease of post-modernity, it's alienation. And that's because our educational systems tell us we don't belong.
and they tell us there's an external world that's somehow real and we're just evanescent, live for 80 years and die kind of thing. And this idea is fundamentally wrong. now the question is, can you generate true knowledge in some fashion for yourself? Now it turns out the medieval philosophers of India who were extraordinarily sophisticated, who were writing treatises on perception when
I don't know, King Arthur was lopping people's heads off on a horse. I mean, it was absolutely incredible how advanced these cultures were. And they're more advanced than us now in terms of this. They generated a whole knowledge system based upon the personal perspective. They were philosopher monks. So they were philosophers who meditated. And once you start generating a meditation practice, you realize your own perception is amenable.
her knowledge, you can start to know yourself. And as you do, many of the enigmas of modern life go away because they turn out to be illusions that are simply created by a very one-sided view of what's real. And once you realize no reality is always going to have two parts to it, there's always going to be me and it. And the me and it-ness is open to understanding. The moment that dawns on you,
you can start embodying yourself in the world without feeling alienated. And this is all the meditation part.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:So some of my favorite meditation teachers have been, I guess, in the Advaita school have been I would call the non dual and I have Trump like again, like, OK, sounds great. But I really think that I'm a self. I really think that there is a difference between me and the world. And one of things you say in the book, I think you you mentioned it earlier, is like you're not saying that there's nothing that nothing exists. Right. Like I listen to someone like Rupert Spira.
who who who base who will say like there's no nothing exists. It's all single consciousness. And I don't know how to go there. But you're you're not saying something entirely different either. Right. So.
Richard Dixey (:Yeah, yeah.
Well, careful, careful, there's a lot of absolute nonsense talked about non-duality. I always say to people, okay, you tell me the world doesn't exist, take a hammer, put your hand on the table, hit the table, and get closer and closer to your hand. Eventually, you're gonna hit one of your fingers. Tell me that isn't real. Just do it for me. no, no, no, the world isn't real. I'm sorry, guys. Don't go there. That's nonsense.
What we're really talking about is this. In the world construction that we actually are involved with moment to moment to moment, it's actually about 20 times a second, we're making a world map. And we can go into that if you like, but in our making of a world map, we construct a knower and a known from a sense input that is merely a sense input. It doesn't have a knower and a known, it's just got.
an image, a sound, whatever it is, it's just got a single thing. So we make two things out of one thing. That's duality. This is not a reference to the external world at all, because the external world is a construct. That's to say it is a constructed idea which arises from our binocular vision.
and from our auditory system that constructs a map we call the external world. But actually all we're getting is an image and a sound. From that we make a map. So a lot of this talk of non-duality is actually mistaken, and I'm sorry to be blunt, I think Advaita is mistaken, because of this. It is not sophisticated enough. The Buddhist view is far, far more sophisticated in terms of where it's going here.
because it's placing non-duality in a different place in the process of perception. It's really right at the very beginning of perception. That's where duality occurs. When the sense input is first received, we immediately create a polarity, me and it, from which the construction occurs. And that process can be observed in time. You can see it in your own experience.
and is an incredibly fruitful place to place your attention. So that's why, again, we come back to meditation. We have to learn not to be reactive to what's emerging in our experience. And when we become less reactive, which is called shamatha, we can then start focusing on this key arising of phenomena to observe how we...
create an er and an oen. All the time we're doing this from what is not actually two things. So we're making two from one. There's the duality. And then on top of that we then have nice, nasty, good, bad, want, don't want and all the rest of it. But those are secondary dualities based on the fundamental duality that arises in every moment of a
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Yeah.
OK, so I'm feeling slow and confused because you're talking about things that I thought I understood, even though I didn't quite believe them. And you're really helping reshape. So when I thought about sort of non-duality, but my principal responsibility was to recognize that I am not a self. Right, like there, you know, there's no self that it's made up.
Richard Dixey (:Hmm.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Like you talk in the book about phantom limbs, about right, like the body itself. But are we going that far or have I fallen into a unsophisticated and vitic trap? When I say like once I recognize that there's no self, then I can start figuring out the rest or then consciousness through my localized. You know what saying? Like.
Richard Dixey (:Yeah, yeah.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:I think you're really helping me get unconfused, but I think I need to dig a little deeper first before I can climb out.
Richard Dixey (:Okay, well let's unpack this wonderful sentence you just said. I am not a self. There it is. I am not a self. Jeez, what do you mean? I've just used the word I. How can that be what I said? So what's happening here? Okay, the fundamental...
Dr Howie Jacobson (:I'm having such a good time right now. Whatever I is or isn't is having a really good time.
Richard Dixey (:Thanks.
So what's happening in this process of construction is we construct a here and there. That's the first move. So the first move is outside, inside, here, there, whatever, you know, just a polarity. And from that polarity, we then construct a world map. Now the world map has things which are essentially remembered sense complexes that we know to name. And we spend a lot of our childhood developing a dictionary of...
Names were taught to do it at school, you know, and so we know it's a bike, it's a house, it's a whatever. These are all names. These are, the external world. And we develop a knower of those names, which is called I. Now, I am necessary in order for our memory to locate where we were when the name was laid down. If there wasn't an I,
There'd be no way our memory could make any sense of anything because there'd be no locator. So, is another name. It's a name. It's a name for a moment of perception that's been laid down in memory. And it is necessary to have an I to make any statement at all. So, I comes along with language. It comes along with grammar. It is required for communication.
Does it exist? Well, do names exist? Well, of course, names merely designate a sense impression. So they don't exist in and of themselves. What really exists was the sense impression from which the name is given. But nonetheless, the name has an existence inasmuch as it's a designator. I like to call them geotags. They're like those, you know, geotags you get in the phones, which tell you where you are, So...
Names are required in order to make sense of the world and one of them is I. And then I leads to me and me needs to mine. I, me and mine. The personal pronouns. These are names. Do they exist apart from designation? No, they don't. They don't designate anything other than themselves. They're merely required to locate you in space and time. That's a real big insight.
So they're not, so the so-called ego, which is an elaboration of naming into it being real, we say, believe this, I am right, you are wrong, all that stuff. That is merely an elaboration of a name. It's like your coffee cup having an opinion. And once you realize that, you realize, okay, so ego isn't an enemy. That's a complete misunderstanding. Ego is merely a device that we require
in order to make cognitive maps. Does it exist only in as much as it's a map reference? In actuality, it's not there. You can, but on the other hand, to suggest you can get along without one is ridiculous. You couldn't even form a sentence without one. All the enlightened masters use the personal pronoun. You have to, you can't communicate without it. So I think that really is the point.
And again, there's a confusion in this word existence. So we have a map and most of us are living in a map all the time. We barely ever touch real experience. We're living in a secondary map. It takes about four tenths of a second to make in time. And indeed I start the book with this wonderful video, which I recommend everyone watches, where this guy is nearly hit by lightning.
and takes a full step before he shudders. That's the lag we have between what we're living in and actuality. So the idea that we can be here now is utterly ridiculous. Of course we can't be here now. We're always gonna be half a second behind the here and now in a map of the here and now. But we can get closer to the here and now and we can get beneath the map. And when we get beneath the map,
we realize the map is a subset of experience. That actually there's a lot of experience that we map out in order to make a world. That's the spiritual path. The spiritual path is accessing that and developing it. And it's moment to moment, it's not in the Himalayas, it's not in some cave somewhere, it's right here in your armchair.
moment to moment to moment to moment to moment as we map our experience. That's the spiritual path. And once we see that, we realize, wow, there's no need to go anywhere to do this. But if I'm able to get beneath the map, all kinds of possibilities open to me. We can say I get more creative, get funnier, I get kinder, all kinds of good things happen. But what's really happening is we're no longer
reflexively reacting to sense input and creating a map of them in which I know it, which is how mapping works. And we're not thinking that map references are real. Map references are useful and in terms of maps, they're real. But in terms of things, they're not. They merely designate real things.
And this again is a very helpful insight. my gosh, okay, so a lot of what I think is real is actually a designation. It's useful, of course, but it's not real in the sense of being existent. It's merely a designation of something existent. And this is very clarifying. again, of course, talking about it's all very well. In meditation, you access it.
in this little book of mine, I've tried to give exercises precisely to do that. So you can begin to access the actual reference from which the map reference is made, the actual sense complex itself. And you can do that in very short periods because once you get the hang of it, it's kind of obvious. Then it's what you do.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Well, it's I'm putting a whole bunch of stuff together in in my potentially existent mind. So what one is when you talk about maps and the book is chock full of references to that kind of that kind of metaphor and speaking of constructivism. the way I do coaching and helping people is completely from a constructivist perspective. I never attached it, connected it to spiritual work until this conversation.
And when you're talking about the three minutes a day, the work I do with people to help them get unstuck, I specifically talk about map making, let's say in terms of someone who has a stress reaction to something somebody else says in a meeting, they get angry, they get frightened and their body reacts based on a map that's that that is constructed, but is also inherited around
their body is responding as if there is a predator. Right. Or a competitor for a mate, and it's requiring a physiological response. And when I say that, when I try to coach someone to change, the goal I'm going for is momentary, like a second of insight, which is all it takes. So what you're really saying is meditation doesn't have to be, you know, 20 hours a week.
in Lotus position, it can provide insights that allow us to see that our maps are, you know, paper mache and not, you know, iron and steel.
Richard Dixey (:Well, I mean, okay, so let's look at meditation in this context, because I think you're completely correct, by the way, everything you say is completely correct. Let's look at really how it's working. So what's happening to most people is they're living in a map without knowing it. Now that map necessarily comes from the past, because in order to know something, you've got to make a reference to a previous example of it. So it's a memory map, actually, of what happened, not what's happening.
Now it's a very useful shorthand. And indeed, the reason why naked apes like us, completely useless physiologically, able to dominate the world, is because we can map the world. Sabre-toothed tigers, who are much better than us at predation, couldn't. So we learned to defeat them through the maps. That's to say, if they're pointy ears in the bushes, jump! Because that's...
sabre-toothed tiger you don't go what is that you jump that's how map making works so we have a paranoid map maker that has learned from experience what works as a fundamental element of our psychology it's hard what is biological that's why the only news we care about is bad news we don't want to know about good news I'm a lot more interested in mudslides in North Carolina
even though I live in California, than I am in the fact that a little old lady was helped across the street right outside my window. Because the good news is of no interest to my map maker. All my map maker is caring about is bad news. Because it's bad news that the map maker wants to put into the map. Don't do that again. Don't do this again. Watch it, that's dangerous. So there is a baseline of paranoia.
in everybody and there always has been. All that's happened is mobile phones have come along and they have taken that paranoia up a couple of orders of magnitude. So now we are bombarded with bad news everywhere. It's a complete nightmare of bad news. Even though if you were a god-like being and you could tot up the number of good things that happened compared to the number of bad things that happened.
I guarantee you the good things are thousands of times more common than the bad things. But they don't get reported. They're not news. So we are being shaken up all the time by our map maker giving us injunctive warnings. You need that. You don't need that. This is good. That's bad. I feel bad. I feel good. All this stuff up and down, all these emotions, shaking us, shaking us, shaking us. So it's a bit like we're
muddy water or something being shaken up. So the first thing a meditation practice does is say calm. We have to learn to be less reactive. It's called shamatha. Now it's not an end in itself, but watching your breath is a classic shamatha exercise where you simply watch the sensation of the breath going in and out of your nose.
You don't have to do it for an hour. You can, if you want. But actually, after a few minutes, you find yourself calm. If you do it regularly, you only have to do it for a few minutes to get that base of calm. Now, why is that base of calm important? Because our intelligence is bewitched by language. It's bewitched by this math.
And it's only when we become less reactive that our intelligence can start to see what's happening to us. That seeing is called vipassana. It literally means v-clear, passana, seeing, clear seeing. Clear seeing is a fruit of shamatha. It's not a meditation. It isn't. It's a fruit of meditation. It's the ability to see clearly because you are calm. Calm and clear. It's pretty obvious, really. So vipassana.
is to then say, what should I look at if I want to understand what's happening? You want to look at where the map is made. Obviously, because that's really interesting. How's this mapping actually occurring? Well, if you have Vipassana, you can begin to focus calmly on the arising of phenomena. So somebody insults you. Immediately it triggers a memory.
of all the previous times you've been insulted. They go all the way back to daddy who beat you over the head because you knocked over his cup of coffee. All that propansa, all that propansa is a word for proliferation, all that associative proliferation gets triggered. Immediately the map maker says, you've got to do something. You can watch this whole process occur in time. The result, of course, is you don't.
People go, wow, you're sick, calm, what's happening to you? You don't seem to be reactive anymore. The reason is because you see how the reactivity is triggered. You've gone beneath the reflexive reactivity with your vipassana and you can see the ground of reactivity. This is sometimes called the ground of purification. You see where the problem is.
is. And the problem is pre-conscious. This is not about consciousness. This is about awareness. And we need to separate awareness from consciousness. It's quite possible to have awareness of a thing without being fully conscious of it. We call it intuition. You have an intuition. Actually, you can train your intuition. It's another word for this whole process. You can train your intuition.
so that your awareness is present before you are conscious of what you're doing. Actually, that's how it's always happening. But you're now doing it deliberately because you're a meditator. And when you do that, suddenly your intuition opens up all these doorways that you never knew were there because your reflexive reactivity has closed them off. And that's turning meditation into a way of life.
Suddenly, as a meditator, you aren't sitting on a cushion 24 hours a day trying to be calm and going into a little box of nothing. What you're doing is you're in the world, but instead of reacting, you're responding. I.e. you have laterality of choice in how you deal with circumstance. People say, you're wise. You've become wise. Why are you?
You are being flustered, you you're not getting freaked out, you know, you're wise. And that is because your natural intelligence can operate freely and clearly without being shaken up the whole time by memory-based reflexivity, which is what we normally live within. And so a meditation practice doesn't have to be long. What it has to be is clear. We have to know why we are meditating.
And this brings up this incredibly important word, mindfulness. Now, mindfulness is not trying to be a camera seeing, quote, things as they are now. Because we now realize that things and now are conceptual constructs. They're not real. What we are really wishing to do is being full of mind. What is being full of mind? Mind is...
is awareness. That's what mind is. Mind's presence. It's being present in our lives. Sometimes people call this being embodied. We're being embodied. The Buddhist term for it is we live in the heart mind. We live our heart is open. We're engaged with the world, responding in the world, but we're not reacting to the world.
using a map. Now of course, in order to choose the right course of action, we will recall various maps in our consciousness and we'll play out scenarios. I could do this, I could do that, I think I'll do that. We're then acting in a map. But the map is a map we have chosen rather than a map that's just been reflexively produced because of our history. This is a
absolute revolution in being that comes about really directly from our meditative insight.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:I'm trying to decide whether to keep going into this. feel like I feel like there's a full stop there and I want to talk about meditation itself. so, you know, you've got, I think, 14 weeks, 14 different methods of meditation. But maybe we could start with just the first couple because you lay it out as an educator in terms of you're not just saying, like, choose whatever meditation you want. They're all good. Just sit.
You're saying like the first thing we got to figure out is to use Shamatha to get to Vipassana. And we're going to we're going to you know, we're going to practice with a candle flame. Right. So can you so let's let's move from like the conceptual from the problem to the solution.
Richard Dixey (:Okay, so we started out this, me ranting on, we started out right at the very beginning talking about the fact that all experience is mind. Let's break that down a bit. What do we mean by that? Well, there are six ways we get experience basically. The five senses and thoughts and imaginations. They're sometimes called the six gates. And the metaphor is we're like a city with six entrances.
Those are the only ways we get anything. There's no other gate, right? So the first thing we learn to do, now the problem is we're getting inputs in all six gates at the same time. So our normal state's very muddled because our attention's being dragged this way and that by events at these gates. So the first thing a meditator does is simplify the gates.
Normally what they do is they take one gate only and they say I'm going to shut the other gates down. I'm just going to concentrate on one. And that's to get the hang of how this map making thing is being triggered. So I start the book looking at the eye gate, visual gate. It's our most dominant gate. That's because we're predators and we have binocular vision, eyes at the front, small ears. If you look at cows, prey animals, eyes on the side, big ears.
We're predators and our visual sense is very acute. So most people are very visually dominated. So it's their most distracted. It's the way you catch their attention visually. So I say, okay, look at a candle. Now I always say to people, don't look at a video of a candle, get a candle. And the reason is because it's a real thing. It's not a video of it, it's the real thing.
And when you look at a candle flame, all you're doing is you're looking at the flame and then every time a thought comes to the mind gate or sound comes to the ear gate or you get an itch at the touch gate or whatever it is, you simply bring your attention back. And what we're doing is we're gradually training our ability to control our attention. Now this control of attention is intensely important. It is not so much that we need to develop attention.
The first thing we need to do is control it. Now the proper term for this is if your attention is being pulled this way and that, the proper term is adverting. It's being adverted. Now we have this word advertisement, which quite literally means an image or a sound that captures your attention. And advertisers are trying to do this for a living because they want your attention.
That's how they make their money, right? So they're trying to capture your attention. So the first thing we need to do is to take back control of our attention. And so I run through a series of exercises at the different gates seeking to control attention and bring it back to the chosen object. Now, once we've done that and we have some control of attention,
We then need to look at attention itself, because it turns out that our modern conception of attention is incomplete. And again, it's quite remarkable how two and a half thousand years ago, they had a better understanding of this fundamental element of humanity than we do. Because they spit attention into two different things. They spit attention into adverting, which is to place your attention on.
and savouring which is to have experience of. They're quite separate things and we need to develop the ability to both place and savour what we place our attention on. Now these technically these two terms are vitaka and vikara. The classic way to introduce this is by with a fading sound. So
You hit a bell or a gong, again you want to get one, don't use a tape. Get a bell or a gong, a telephone bell, any kind of thing that rings. Hit it and your attention is adverted to it. Then stay with the sound and as it fades into silence, you find yourself being attentive without an object. That second state is savouring. Now notoriously in modernity,
We slurp our food, we gulp our coffee, we're going from one thing to the next multitasking. We're not savoring anything. We're just running from one adverted episode to the next. Now this is a disaster for our well-being because we're being shaken up all the time by one adverted object after another. So the early phases in developing a meditation practice are
get control of attention, and then learn to savour what you are attending. And this capacity then opens the door to a meditation practice. You suddenly realise that the brittleness of attention, which can be diverted this way and that by the next shiny object that comes along, can be stabilised into a state of awareness which is not brittle.
That is the platform from which Vipassana can arise. And so the first six weeks of this book are merely going through various iterations of this to get to a point where there is stability. experiences are arising, but we're not immediately reacting to them. Boom! Like everything arises, bang! I'm reacting. And this is very important. Now, a lot of people who meditate try to close off
all disturbances because they never achieve vikara, they never achieve the second state. They're merely stuck in the first type of attention. And consequently they say things like, I meditate four hours a day, I meditate five hours a day. That's their only idea of meditation. The moment they get off their meditation cushion, they're immediately distracted. This is because they haven't developed the ability to savour experience.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Mm.
Richard Dixey (:Once you can savour experience, you are no longer distractable because anything that arises to you is merely a flavour within the savouring of experience. It's no longer a diversion. This is a very, very important event. Once this occurs, a stability happens. Now, people sometimes say, that's becoming embodied. As I mentioned earlier, you become embodied.
that the Thais say you've discovered the heart mind. You suddenly realize, wow, I can be in the world, but not of the world. I can be in the world in a normal fashion, but not be being pushed this way and that by advertising. I've become immune to advertising. Now that's a very, very important moment. It's a moment where we take control of our lives. Maybe for the first
ever. And you know there I read biographies of people, famous people. There's a wonderful biography of Laurence van de Post for example, he was a wonderful man. The book was called Yet Being Someone Other. He said you know I've got to the end of my life, I've been successful, yet I now realize I wasn't living my own life. I was living a life driven by everybody else's expectations. This is a very common theme in
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Hmm.
Richard Dixey (:And this is because we never ever overcame our inability to control our attention. We were always being pulled this way and that into the world. And so getting control of ourselves as autonomous agents is one of the first fruits of meditation. You suddenly realize I can make decisions for myself, not because I'm being driven to
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Mm.
Richard Dixey (:do so by advertisers, by peer pressure, by expectation, etc. which otherwise are what determines our future.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:So three things come to mind. One is you happen to mention one of my favorite authors of all time. A story like The Wind is a phenomenal book. is Mantis. So did he his autobiography or someone else?
Richard Dixey (:phenomenal. biography is really interesting.
It's his autobiography, it's called Yet Being Someone Other, and that's what he says. Yet being someone other. I was someone other than myself. And I only realized it now I'm old.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:I'm going to I'm to I'm going to get I'm going to get that right right away because his fiction and then Mantis Carroll were some of the most important most important things I've ever read. So now if I remember the another thing is so I think I've skipped a whole part of this partly because I came to meditation in.
Richard Dixey (:they're amazing.
fabulous.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:in sort of a negative ab reaction to meditation as a tool of self-help. Right. So meditation will help me become a master of the universe, conquer the world. And therefore the person that I glommed onto as a meditation teacher initially was Adyashanti who talks about control.
as a bad thing, as if the meditative state is the natural state, then we don't want to exert control. And when I hear you talk about just having this basic faculty of choosing where our attention goes, I think that has been missing from the kinds of free flowing generalized awareness of everything that I was aiming for through his teachings.
Richard Dixey (:Well, I mean, I do want to say something. There's a lot of nonsense talked about universal consciousness and this sort of stuff. And again, it's because this word consciousness is not properly understood. Actually, we're only conscious a very short amount of time. And the only reason that anyone's ever come up for why consciousness matters is it's scenario playing. What you do when you're conscious is you're going, should I do this or should I do that? You're playing out these scenarios.
And they happen in dream as well and there's quite a lot of evidence that dream is actually scenario playing where we're simply trying to work out the best way forward. This is map making. so running through a lot of new age spiritualities, this idea of universal consciousness, as if there is some sort of universal scenario we're going to play. Be careful. And I'll tell you why this is. Learning is forgetting. So,
When you say learn to drive a car or play an instrument, you begin totally conscious of what you're doing. So supposing you get into a car for the first time as a 16 year old, right? You know exactly your hands are on the wheel, your feet are on the pedals. You are a useless driver. But over the course of a few months, you gradually forget what you're doing and start driving. I.e. the skill becomes unconscious.
You still have awareness. So if someone steps in front of the car, you put the brakes on, but that is not conscious. It is awareness that's operating. So we need to separate these two terms. They're very misleading. Now, the second point is this. We're in a hole. Let's all agree we're in a hole. We need a ladder. You can say to me, look, outside the hole,
is this beautiful verdant land of freedom and bliss. But that's not where we are. We're in a hole. That means we need a technique. We need to be purposive in the right way to get out of the hole. Once we're out of the hole, we're then free. And we won't need to be purposive anymore like that. But we do need to do this, or we're going to stay in the hole forever.
We can fantasize about what's outside the hole as much as we like, but if we're not outside the hole, that's kind of useless. So it was always taught in the Buddhist path, and I'm a Buddhist, that it's like a raft. You make a raft across a river. Once you've crossed the river, you don't carry the raft on your back. You put the raft down and walk on. It's just a tool. Now meditation is a tool.
It's a tool to get control of our attention, learn to savor our experience and see clearly. Once you see clearly, you no longer need to meditate because your seeing clearly will guide you. And I actually end three minutes a day saying this, that know, where you go once you've got to this point is your life. You might decide you want to be a concert pianist. You might decide you want to be a monk. There's no
proper end point to this. You are then free to make your own choices. You've got out of the well. But you've got to get out of the well. There is a training. And again, a lot of self-help gurus say, you don't need, you just have to experience. No, because you're in a well. And the problem with conceptual thought, dualistic thought we were talking about, is if you don't understand it,
And if you don't train yourself in controlling it, it will reassert itself round the back. And a good example of this is the hippies. The hippies, and you and I have kind of similar age, expect you were probably part of the hippies, certainly I was. The hippies, they had it right. They knew that there was something totally wrong about the squares, that they were stuck in a box. They thought they could just blow the box open and they'd be free. The problem is they had no path.
And consequently, after a while, the box reasserted itself. The hippies became the yuppies, and the yuppies ran Silicon Valley, and they gave us the iPhone. And boy, what a karmic consequence that has been. It is now worse than it was before the hippies. We are now into a new age of morality and self-judgment that makes the Victorians look like amateurs compared to what the kids are going through now.
And this is a really good example of why you must have a path. Now a path involves purposeive action. You need to do something. You only need to do it because you have a problem and you need to fix the problem. Once you fix the problem, you don't need the path anymore. But to suggest you don't need a path at all, because ultimate reality doesn't have one, is to miss the point. We're not there yet.
So that's my answer to this. Yes, ultimately we're going to be free to see clearly and react spontaneously. This is the leela, Shiva's leela, the wonderful play of being. But don't think you're Shiva because you're not. And unless you become Shiva, you won't play like that. When you are Shiva, that's how you'll be.
So to me this is something important to realise and again it makes perfect sense when you think about it, it's not that complicated but somehow you know this is the problem the new age literature and our spiritual smorgasbord that we've got of all these options on our bookshelves cause a lot of confusion about the part I mean boy I'm 73 years old it has taken me my whole life of reading and searching and planning to finally get
get it now, I understand why I was so confused. Because I was grasping at straws, thinking that if I just got there, I'd be good. But I wasn't doing anything to get there. It's just an idea that isn't going to work. We need to get control of our attention. Most of us have no ability to resist advertising.
We're just being manipulated by Google and Facebook and TikTok and it's a nightmare of manipulation in which our attention is being pulled and and pulled and pulled and clarity is lost. And without clarity of mind, we have no chance of escaping our habits, our reflexive reactivity, this structure that's been hardwired into us by evolution.
quote, protect us, lands up running our lives. And we land up alienated from ourselves at the end of our lives going, what did I do? I didn't do anything. I just did what came next. That's a really unfortunate situation. And of course, societal pressure, economic pressure, business exploitation, capitalism, whatever, there are a million things. They're all designed to exploit exam.
that. And so we land up with this weird world where you go well it's a very wonderful disease is down, technology is up, life spans up, diets up, wealth is up, happiness down. And this is a weird phenomenon of the future. No science fiction writer ever thought that the ideal robotic future that we are rapidly going towards
was going to be a hellhole. They always thought, it's going to be great. I want the machines doing work and we're going to be sitting around like kings and princes doing nothing and we'll be happy. Not true. We're going to be miserable unless we get control of our attention. If we do, then we can indeed live like princes. We can take our kingdom back.
There's this wonderful story which I tell in Revelations in three minutes a day, which is such a good one. So there's a king of a kingdom and his son is his one sole heir, he's living in the palace. His son decides to go and explore the city. So he leaves in disguise and he gets hit on the head and he forgets who he is and then he lands up wandering away as a beggar.
And the king dies and the son is lost and they don't know what to do. And then this beggar comes back to the city and he suddenly remembers he is the crown prince. And the people recognize him and re-enthrone him as the king. Now that story is profound. It's in Aladdin's cave. It's in the Lord of the Rings. It's all over the place, this story of the lost king. We are the lost king.
We lost our autonomy. We lost our capacity to make decisions for ourselves. We gave our power, our intelligence, our human birthright, our human potentiality away to a shorthand device which uses memory to make things. This shorthand device runs our life. We need to get our autonomy.
When we do, we can come back to being the king on the throne, the emperor on the throne, whatever metaphor you want. And this shorthand device becomes a tool that we use to manage our affairs. But it doesn't manage us. It is quite literally the evil vizier in Aladdin who takes over the emperor and tells him what to do. And the task of our life is to reclaim our autonomy.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Hmm.
Richard Dixey (:Meditation is how we do it because we reclaim within the six gates our attention. Our attention is the lifeblood from which this all runs. Once we control our attention, our natural intelligence can dawn like the sun rising. It is no longer being knocked this way and that by adverting. We can settle.
And as we settle, clarity emerges and we go, wow, I don't want to do this. I don't think this is right for me. We can start making those kinds of choices, which are the choices made by people who are truly successful, not people who appear to be successful. And of course, modernity is full of people appearing to be successful who are actually living miserable lives.
And you know, again, this is all part of the same pattern. We're reclaiming our life. Once we've reclaimed our life, we are free. That is our human birthright. We belong here. Again, most of us live in a life as if somehow we don't belong, we've to earn a living and, you know, we've got no right to do this. We absolutely have. This is our world. Not to exploit, to enjoy.
to engage with, to look after. We're not separate from the universe. We are part of the universe. But reclaiming our subjectivity in this way requires training. It is not coming free. And that's because we're a long way down a well. So we have to make that ladder. But making the ladder isn't that hard.
Once we know what we are doing and why we are doing it, making the ladder is not that hard. We just don't get fooled by big talk of freedom without the means to obtain it. If we just get fooled by stories of freedom, I'm afraid we'll go nowhere. We'll just live in a fantasy of freedom. What we need to do is train. And once we've trained, we can drop our training just like
Every great musician has played scales. They play the scales, it's boring as hell, then they get on the stage in a concert hall and give a magical performance. That performance is not scales, but it came about because of scales. That's the thing. And to me, that's what it's about. Our goal is to become the impresario craftsman of our own perception.
That's the musical instrument we've got, the six gates. The six gates are this incredible instrument of perception. God, when you look at a sunset, the beauty of that sunset, the exquisite detail is in you. It's not out there. You are making it. It's you. All the beautiful things you've ever seen are you. They're not outside. They are made by you.
Realizing that is to realize, wow, we are the most extraordinary being. Wonderful. All we have to do is learn how to be ourselves again. Maybe, you know, back in Adam and Eve's time, we were free. The story of the fool is very interesting. But right now, we are stuck in this box of conceptuality. We live in 5 % of our potentiality.
We're being manipulated this way and that by problem here, problem there, et cetera, et cetera. All of that can be undone if we learn to meditate.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:I want to leave it right there. I started tearing up as you were describing the way out and the true promise and the false promises. It really touched me deeply. I would like you to end by letting people know how they can find the book. I know you have an app as well. If there's ways that people can follow you, maybe say a little bit more about the Dharma culture.
Richard Dixey (:That's very kind of you, Harry. That's very sweet of you. Yeah, Dharma College. So yeah, well, the book's called Three Minutes a Day, available on Amazon. My name is Richard Dixey, Richard.Dixie. I teach classes. I'm Dean at Dharma College, dharma-college.com. You just look up Dharma College on Google, you'll see it. It's in Berkeley. It's all online. It's a Zoom-based college. And what we do in the college is we teach this. We are teaching people
encouraging people to discover within themselves the true source of freedom. We call it to reimagine wisdom. Now, of course, it's based in the Buddhist wisdom traditions, which are truly one of the most extraordinary cultural artifacts we still have. But we don't use Buddhist language at all. We're interested in addressing modernity in modernity. So we try not to use Buddhist terms. And we're not Buddhist Buddhist. In fact,
I'm absolutely certain if Buddha was alive today, he wouldn't be a Buddhist. What we're really trying to do is address actuality and address our actual experience and give people a path which they then travel with us to cognitive freedom. And so I teach there all the time. I'm teaching all the time. So Dharma College is called and it's online Zoom thing, all three minutes a day is on Amazon.
But you you can take three minutes a day and it will only take three minutes a day and don't do an hour. Because the idea is to be purposive for three minutes rather than aimless for an hour. Actually aimless for an hour can be worse than being, you you can actually go backwards. People land up with a meditation practice they've been doing 40 years that's done absolutely nothing. And that to me is problematic. And so...
Dr Howie Jacobson (:You
Richard Dixey (:I'd be much happier to hear somebody says, do my three minutes and I know what I'm doing and I do exactly what I'm told. That is more likely to be successful. So the three minutes a day thing is there. But let's say we're online, so anybody who wants to take classes with us, it's on Zoom.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:All right. Well, I'm sold. I would love to come back and have a second conversation because I've had a whole bunch of things because I'm here. I'll say it out loud so I can find it later because so I can remember. So there's a whole other part of sort of non dual spirituality that kind of dismisses emotions like anger, grief, sadness. And I feel like there's a lot to talk about, like
Richard Dixey (:more than welcome.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:You know, if things aren't real, then why should we be sad if anything happens or doesn't happen? But I want to leave that for another day and just.
Richard Dixey (:No, we can talk about that. Seriously interesting. You're really talking about tantra and working with emotions. And yes, absolutely.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:So I would love to come back and have another one soon. This has been this has been so wonderful. Richard Dixey, thank you so much for for your eloquence and caring and compassion and wisdom and wit and for taking the time to write the book and to teach and to spend this time with us today.
Richard Dixey (:Anytime. pleasure.
It's my pleasure, Harry.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:Take care.
Dr Howie Jacobson (:And that's a wrap. Show notes at plant yourself dot com slash six four. Movement News joined a paddle tournament coming up end of November. My friend Adam and I are going to play doubles together. And so that's going to be fun. Finally get to play against people who take this game seriously. We'll see some of the best players in the area. And I expect to whipped thoroughly and often and planning and having a great time.
other movement news, still getting over this kind of cough cold thing. It was at its worst a week ago Saturday. So that's nine, 10 days already. And I still have trouble fully breathing. So exercise cardio has proven difficult. I have decided to get to ramp back up to six days a week of exercise. So that means adding three morning jogs and I'm
starting small, I'm doing a little BJ Fogg Tiny Habits action here. So I just did three miles yesterday and I'll just stick to two and a half to three miles until it really becomes ingrained that I can go out in the morning and run around. And then, of course, the thing will grow to its proper size. I think that will help me both with my back issues and a little extra weight around the middle that it would be great to shed.
And of course, the cardio giving me more stamina for for Beach Ultimate tournaments. That's about all is going on right now. As always, be well, my friends.
