The Psychic Question

Welcome to Search Engine, I'm PJ vote. No question too big, no question too small. This week, Dan Harris, author of the best-selling memoir about meditation and Buddhism called 10% Happier, has a question of very intriguing one involving a psychic. That's after these ads. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello? Hey, Dan, how's it going? - Good, how are you? - I just ate an enormous bagel, (laughs) you know, like the ones where you got to take a nap. - I'm glad you're eating, it sounds like you had a stomach bug over the weekend. - I was very, I was, (laughs) God, I don't even want to fill in the picture for you. I've never been that ill. I've just never been that ill in my life. Nora virus, don't get up. - I've had it, I, oh. I've had food poisoning on pretty much every continent. (laughs) My father has a great expression about this. When you have a stomach flu like that, he says you switch between thinking you're gonna die and fearing you won't, that's exactly the reality. That was exactly it. Yeah, yeah. It made me realize that when I'm old, I'm not gonna be a fighter like at all. (laughs) I'm gonna cough twice and be like, "Take me off life support." They'll be like, "You're not off life support." (upbeat music) - Dan Harris to the rest of the world is not primarily known for all the food poisoning he's had. He's known these days as an author and host of a popular podcast called 10% Happier. That's about meditation and mindfulness and a lot of other things. Recently, Dan found himself investigating this question and I asked him if we could ride along on his journey to answer it. Can you just tell me like the story of how you arrived with this question? Okay, so the backstory is I have spent the last 15 years really taking a deep dive into the world of Buddhism or the Dharma, which was not in my life plan. I started my career in local news and then I became a network news anchor and I spent 20 years at ABC News. But in the late arts, I started to get interested in Buddhism and made friends with all of these teachers who were my parents' age. So I'm a Gen Xer and these guys were all boomers. And I don't think coincidentally, they're mostly Jewish. So they have like chewy last names like Salzburg and Epstein and Goldstein and Cornfield and I became really close with a lot of these folks and they really were kind of my guides as I got increasingly interested in Buddhism. These names Dan mentioned, they're big American meditation teachers, often credited with popularizing Buddhism in this country. Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzburg, Mark Epstein. For Dan, they're people who showed him away into Buddhism that didn't require him to surrender to a faith. What I liked about Buddhism coming from a skeptical secular background, my parents were both atheist scientists. What I liked about Buddhism is that it actually wasn't a religion. I mean, it could be practiced as a religion for sure and that's beautiful and fine, but you can practice it as a secular person. I mean, the Buddha himself said, "Don't take anything I say on face value, "come check it out for yourself." So that was really attractive to me and the basics of Buddhist philosophy and practice like meditation and ethical practices all really made sense and have come to be validated by modern science. Buddhist practices validated by modern science. This is what makes Dan so unusual. Most of us, when we encounter a new belief system, we either reject it or we explore it. And if we keep exploring it, it usually changes us. Dan though is a skeptic. He's remained somewhat of skeptic despite nearly two decades of studying Buddhism. So he's a skeptic who goes on silent meditation retreats, a skeptic who himself leads guided meditations, a skeptic who publishes podcasts about Buddhism three times a week. While Dan has certainly become more flexible over the years, become less zealous, he still kept his mind and people don't usually say this as a compliment, but I mean it as one, at least half closed. Anything he encounters in Buddhism that science can't prove or prove the benefits of, he just sets aside. I felt comfortable in this world largely. And a lot of these older Buddhist folks believed in stuff that and still believe in stuff that I found very hard to swallow. Like what? Well, I'll start with the easier stuff and this isn't even gonna sound easy for some people, but the notion of enlightenment, that there is an experience we can have of Nirvana. They call it Nibbana, which is the way it's pronounced in the language of Pali. And so you can have these zaps of Nirvana or Nirvana and it can upgrade the software of your mind permanently and that's enlightenment. But they also believe, and this stuff is in the Buddhist texts. They also believe in rebirth in different realms of existence. They believe that certain types of meditative adeps get superpowers like the ability to read other people's minds or duplicate their body or walk through walls. In America, we usually try to respect other people's religious beliefs. And Dan can respect these ideas that his teachers had, even if he didn't believe all of them. After all, they were rooted in Buddhism. But then Dan began to learn that some of his most respected teachers also held these other beliefs. Beliefs that didn't come from Buddhism. Beliefs that to him felt significantly wackier. The kinds of ideas someone trying to sell you crystals at a head shop in a strip mall might try to pitch you on. I have a memory and hopefully he won't mind me retelling this story, but I have a memory of walking down the street with Dr. Mark Epstein, who just by the way is an eminent psychiatrist who practices in the New York area and has written a series of books about the overlap between modern psychology and Buddhism. And he was really my first introduction to Buddhism. I read one of his books, called him up and essentially asked if he would be my friend. And we started having lunch and dinner together on the regular and he would just teach me stuff. And I remember walking down the street with him one time and I was really pressing him on some of the esoteric claims of Buddhism. And then he said something like he was talking about tarot or astrology or something like that. And I was like, you really believe in that? And he said, yeah, I believe in everything. I believe in everything. And this is a guy who went to Harvard Medical School. Yeah. And then I was start to think, is this an affinity scam? You know, like, you don't wear what people who seem normal to you start telling you, you know, like on a multi-level marketing thing, you know, like what is going on here? So I kind of lived with this. I kind of put this in a box off to the side while I continued my meditation practice. And it was in that context that he mentioned that he talked to a psychic medium whose name is Laura Lynn Jackson. Then over the years, I would hear other teachers in this cohort say that they too had had readings. Yeah. And this woman could apparently talk to the dead, like talk to my teacher's dead relatives. So she was a psychic, which means she could talk to you about your future and a medium. That means she can talk to the dead. Be clear as far as I know, Laura Lynn Jackson is not a Buddhist and has nothing to do with Buddhism. She's an ex-high school English teacher from Long Island, who became a professional psychic medium. So I started researching her, and her story's pretty easy to find because she's done a lot of public interviews. She appears somewhat regularly on the podcast and daytime TV circuit. It's always tough when a loved one dies. And for some people, psychic mediums help provide closure. But you don't have to be psychic to see the signs. At least that's according to a new book. Let's welcome Laura Lynn Jackson. She is the author of Signs, the secret language of the universe. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me here. Well, thank you for being here. I'll tell you her bio, as I understand it, from from what she said publicly. Laura Lynn Jackson grew up on Long Island, and she's told the story many times about how she first realized she had some unusual abilities. You've been doing this talking to the other side for years. Now, how did this all start for you? You know, it started for me as a child. I would see people in colors. I would feel what they were feeling. And when I was 11, I knew my grandfather was going to die right before he died. And right after he crossed, I had this dream where he visited me, and I had this beautiful communication. And ever since then, I've just understood that people who cross are really still with us, right? And they're very accessible to us to connect with. She says her mom told me. that these powers run in the family. And she continued to struggle with it to not know what exactly these powers were, whether they were real, what to do about them. In her wayward youth, she used to do psychic readings as a trick at a bar. Hey, look what I can do out at a bar. I know all about you, and I know that your dad's on the other side, and I know that you have a seven-year-old brother and this sort of thing. But it took me a while to honor it. And eventually, she kind of settled in. She says into her role as a psychic and decided to use it to help other people. I am a mom, I am a wife, and I happen to be a psychic medium. And it took me many, many decades to come to terms with that and accept that. I don't consider myself woo-woo. I was raised by two teachers, and I was raised to be a critical thinker in the world, and a critical thinker. Questions, always questions and explores. I found myself struggling a little bit with this story. I mean, at a minimum, I think of psychic powers as, you know, definitionally, woo-woo. And so knowing all that, I was like, all right, this is the final straw. I have to find out why do my teachers believe this? And is there any evidence for it? And what to make sure I understand what you're describing? It's like, you like a very sort of like, I believe things that there are empirical evidence for. I'm a skeptic. But you found a practice that is tied but loosely to spiritual beliefs, or sort of optionally to spiritual beliefs, and you found that practice so useful and such a way to gain more thoughtfulness and wisdom and ways of being in the world. And so for most of your path into this, you've just been like, okay, there's an optional sidecar of bonus beliefs here that I don't think are for me. I don't have to judge them, they can stay in the box. What is it about a psychic that you're like, okay, I kind of need to poke the box a little bit here? Well, I mean, it struck me as obvious bullshit. Like, there's no way to disprove that there are multiple realms of existence, you know, in the Buddhist cosmology. There's a hell realm, like a god realm, this human realm, the animal realm. I can't, that's an interesting metaphysical claim, but it doesn't seem like I have the resources in this realm to falsify it. Whereas the psychic thing, I hadn't thought deeply about it, but it just seemed obviously not true. So Dan approached Sir Tingen to help him understand what was going on here. His question, why were so many of his respected teachers seeing this psychic medium? I wanted to follow along because one, I just thought the situation was very funny. But two, for me personally, I've just spent more time in the past few years around New Age people, and sometimes they give me the same feeling I get around my very conservative family members, where there's things they say that give me almost an allergic reaction, trigger me. And I wondered, in this case, if I could soften that. I wondered if I even wanted to. This is not a story designed to change your mind about psychics. Proving or disproving the supernatural is a trap. Sir Tingen does not fall for traps. Instead, it's a story about what we do with other people's beliefs. How we decide how open to be. To the ideas that make our minds want to snap closed. That is our big quest this week. And as part of it, after short break, Dan Harris will visit a psychic medium. Welcome back to the show. Last spring, Dan Harris found himself reaching out to a psychic medium. He was asking himself what it meant that the people he followed were, in some sense, following her. And he was curious how far he could push his own mind. So he sent her an interview request, and they got together on Zoom. Before we dive in, any questions or concerns for me? No, I'm just very excited to be in conversation with you. I just read your book 10.5%. 10% happier, I just had an extra half. 10% happier, and I loved it. It's fantastic. We have a lot of people in common. Mark and Sharon and I love it. Yeah, that's how I came up with the idea of inviting you on it, because I've heard about you from these other folks. Oh, thank you. I started with some basic questions. Like, for example, what is the difference between a psychic and a medium? That's a great question. So a psychic is somebody who tunes into. You can call it someone's aura. And the concept there is that there's an energy field around every single person that emanates about two or three feet away from each person's body. And that within that field, we can energetically tap into it with our thoughts and connect with it and read a person's past, present, future. We can see who they're connected to in the here and now. We get all sorts of information from that. We can read information about their physical health, all sorts of things like that. So a psychic is somebody who would do that. A medium takes it a step farther. And we have a saying among all of us where it's every medium is psychic, but not every psychic is a medium. And what I mean by that is I feel that medium. And so I interviewed her for, I don't know, 90 minutes, maybe more. She doesn't have the same vibe that these super advanced meditation teachers do. She's much chattier and like you can ask her a question. She'll maybe take a half hour to answer it. I'm not kidding. She just is so excited about what she's talking about that she'll go for a half hour. There is something so much grander and more beautiful and magnificent going on behind the scenes in this sort of unseen energy realm of connection that we can't even begin to understand. But we can learn to trust in and we can learn to call upon. Okay, you said about 75 things that I need to follow up on. In those paragraphs that you just uttered there. But let me just say at the level of representing the skeptics and the audience. I'm imagining there are a couple of alarm bells going off for people, not having to do with you specifically, but with this topic. Which one is terms like, you know, unseen energy, it just reminds me of like poltergeist or, you know. Oh, that's scary. Right, so there's that. But even beyond that, it's like the stuff of movies we've all seen psychics and movies. We've all seen or heard stories about charlatans in this field. Oh, sure. Just the lexicon itself can be hard to swallow for somebody who, you know, is reasonably new to this or only has interacted with it through pop culture. So for anybody who's listening to this and, you know, considering whether to stop listening, what can you say to, like, keep us in the game here? Well, I think this is so important that you're bringing this up because when I talk about unseen energy, I don't mean this idea of, like, this concept of woo-woo stuff that's out there. I mean that I've researched and dived into, you know, quantum theory trying to understand this. I'm always on a search for answers myself. I asked her a bunch of skeptical questions and she answered them. She didn't convince me per se, but I also didn't walk away thinking it's absolutely demonstrably untrue. But I didn't get the feeling that she was, you know, and I've interviewed a lot of con men and cult leaders and fraudsters in my many years of being a journalist. I didn't get that vibe from her. I got the sense that whatever she's doing, she sincerely believes she's doing it. Yeah. Laura Lynn Jackson. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you so much for being in conversation with me. Yeah, I was like, "What do I do with this tape?" You know, I felt incomplete. But I just didn't know what to think and I didn't know how my audience would feel about it. So then I called her back and said, "We give me a reading." Apparently she's able to do these readings remotely over the phone. And she said, "Yes." Can you hear me all right? I hear you loudly and clearly. Sad you left. Well, I feel really honored to read for you. And I always feel about reading started divinely orchestrated, you know? So I always-- I couldn't see her. We were audio-only. We weren't in the same room. I've actually never been in the same room with her. And she warned me at events that when we do this, you know, she goes into a state where she kind of loses track of time. And first, she was reading my aura. I knew each people call it an aura. Scientists call it a biofield. It's a very real thing. You know, we have this energy field around us. And what's in that when I read for people is all sorts of information. Information about your past, your present, your future. People you're tied to in here and now. And the very first thing I'm going to be shown is something that I have come to call a core aura for the person I'm reading for. So for you. And all it means is I'm basically shown the blueprint for your soul mission, this lifetime. And the way that will appear to me is in a circle. Like a globe, sometimes it's like the 3D shape that comes. And which, you know, sounds like something that people say to you on the street corner in Sedona, Arizona. She was talking about the various colors that are there in my aura and what they mean. All right, let's talk a little bit about the orange, the green, and then the other color. Orange is interesting to me. Not that I didn't expect to see it in your core, but it was like, oh, wow, this is here. Um, because here's what it means when I see orange and somebody is caught or it It means the person that I am talking to you is marked as an artist for me in some capacity I feel like you've always been very connected to art. Like do were you very into music when you were younger, especially like teenage years? Yes Did you play like two instruments? One Okay, then did you play an instrument end thing? I'm not very well, but I did I did play one instrument. Okay, it has to be two because I'm seeing two It's like two different streams, but this one I feel like I'm going crazy So she's reading my aura and she says that I'm into music and she says that I play two instruments Which is 50% correct? I play the drums poorly, but she Is that I play two which is not true unless you can't like the triangle? Yeah, and then she so she goes from the aura to then she has this whole thing about how we all have a team of light each one and every one of us have a team of light on the other side That's three parts right got energy, which I see as this course of love that is just inherent in part of all of us and guides us to Become like more loving kind for giving it you know guides us into our highest path and connect us all right And then we also have in this part might sound a little woo-woo, but I've come to understand it What I'll refer to as spirit guides right throughout time and history of some religions have referred to That kind of conscious beings is you know guardian angels. I just call this spirit guides and The third part of the team a light of course with anybody who loved to cross for the other side pets included I like to point out as well and they and then my team of light showed up and Apparently they They were talking about how I'd gone through something very hard in the last couple of years There had to be like maybe some relationships that follow way I feel like they're the greatest appointment about one person in particular to make any sense to you. Yes Okay, I want to commend you. This is not for me. This is from your good because the main task was to come away from that Without bitterness without negativity and yeah We're gonna feel it at times, but that's not gonna be the takeaway and I really do feel you're getting a stand-go vision for Easing that they were saying at first You were thrashing about and not handling it very well But ultimately you handled it well and we applaud you for that and to me that seems pretty obviously a reference to My separation from the meditation app that I co-founded and went through a very painful separation from and it was a Three-year-long thing and there were many times where it brought up my absolute worst But toward the end I was able to kind of deal with it reasonably well And so all of that was really reassuring and it felt good that my grandparents might have approved of my Reportment during this and I'm aware that she could have I mean, I've talked about all this stuff publicly Yeah, so she could have just known this and was giving me a pep talk. Yeah What what happened next? Okay, so there's the medium part where she's Talking to your team of light. Yeah, and then there's the psychic part where she's Telling you what might happen in the future Now do you have three cats now, but are talking about a fourth? Yes, okay, you don't have the fourth yet. Do you know? It's coming like it's I already see it as if it's there even though it's not but like this fourth one is meant to come at the time that I was doing the reading we had three cats and She predicted we would get a fourth and I did not mention that to Bianca who several weeks later came home with a fourth cat So there's that I find that impressive. I find that challenging the fact that we have four fucking cats is that Because you're right. It's a lot of What else I also feel like are you gonna get your own show or something? Is that on the table somewhere? Beyond this show you mean beyond this podcast like a TV show Yeah, yeah, or somebody picks it up in a new way like I see my sign for like media coming I Mean that would be great. I'm actually in the works of pitching a TV show that would have me kind of traveling around the world investigating How to get happy. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. It's like it's a show, but it's you teaching this and Helping people find their own light and it's gonna be a little frustrating because it's an 11 months journey to having it come about I'm gonna tell you have to believe in this and you have to trust in this because you're in the midst of it right now She was like that show is gonna get made and it's gonna be a huge deal and now I want to believe that yeah, obviously Like I don't know if that's true, but I I really like hearing it and it felt to me like a very useful Pepp talk there was nothing in there that if I did believe it would have been harmful I don't think and most importantly the experience was positive because I have gone through a hard couple of years. Yeah, it's been really hard the hardest years in my life both because of What happened professionally and also as you know my wife's had some health problems So the idea that we could both as a couple be entering this period of thriving personally and professionally is really exciting maybe wrong but it motivates me to Effectuate it and so to me, I don't see any harm in any of that and so you're having the experience still of like Already spending this belief, but like the greater part of your skeptical intellect is still online and so it's like It's just sort of psychologically straight as somebody who was like Had psych agreement as a non-believer before I just very much understand the feeling that that conversation gives you Just like I don't want to get in the pool, but I'm a little bit in pool and it is warm but I don't even believe it So I didn't know you'd actually done this and so I'll say I'll run this by you and I think it builds on what you just said What surprised me the most about myself Was how much I wanted to believe it? Why do you think that is? It just sounds nice her whole philosophy is that Being alive and on earth is is like a school a training ground and then we ultimately cross back over to whatever it is on the other side And that when we get there, you know, we'll be reunited with our Antestors and that all just I mean, there's a reason why so many people at 11 o'clock on Sunday mornings go to church It's a very comforting story But Dan is somebody who tries not to believe in stories just because they're comfortable He doesn't usually get his aura red. He's not religious He does meditate and he's Buddhist enough that I've heard him use words like Dharma in casual conversation The story Dan tells himself though is that he came to Buddhism because he followed the evidence for it Which I'm sure is true Although I also think most of us decide what to believe at least partly socially It's much easier to surrender to an idea if we admire the people who already hold it if they seem happy Smart if they fit our arbitrary thumbnail sketch of a wise person As Dan and I kept talking over the months. I'd notice how many stories he had about his teachers Memories of the lessons he'd learned by observing them It's such a funny thing that happens in the human heart this decision that you're going to become somebody's student the surrender to their ideas or habits But now listening to this tape of Lorelin instructing Dan on the finer points of her metaphysical views I just heard no such surrender And while Dan said the conversation gave him a little more insight into why other people enjoy psychic readings He still didn't know why his mentors faced with the same experience were able to walk through that door Or if it meant he had to think any differently about them or think any differently about all the other ways he was following their lead After the break we watch live as a skilled practitioner tries to gently pry open the mind of Dan Harris You Welcome back to the show Last month Dan went back to Dr. Mark Epstein just to remind you Dr. Mark Epstein a hugely influential author Harvard medical trained psychotherapist as well as a prominent Buddhist The version in fact who turned Dan on to Buddhism, but who also subscribes to all sorts of beliefs Dan considers very woo The person who told Dan quote I believe in everything Do you remember Mark after one of our many many meals you and I were taking a walk from the restaurant? I think I was like walking you back to your apartment and Something came up like tarot or or astrology You referenced it in the conversation and then I turned to you This was back when I was a little bit more hard bitten in my skepticism I was like do you really believe in that and you turned to me and said I believe in everything Do you recall that conversation? It sounds familiar. Yeah I think we had that conversation a couple of times maybe What do you mean by that? Will you say I believe in everything? What does that mean? I'm not sure what I meant when I said it then, but you know I've been around longer than you So the Buddhist thing didn't come wrapped all by itself. So I've been exposed along the way to practitioners and practices of various occult types. And I've always gotten something useful from most of them. So I think that's what I was saying when I say I believe in everything. Like I'm open to them all. Maybe too open. So I've interviewed Mark scores of times and it's a bit like sparring with a cloud. I mean he is hard to pin down and he's got this kind of zen mischief about him. And so I knew that going in that I wasn't going to get some like clear answer. He doesn't talk that way. He, you know, I think for decades he's been a therapist and he wants the person he's talking to to come to their own conclusion. I see. He's like a person where you ask him a question and you get a question. Exactly. And he also likes to fuck with you a little bit. And in this case, in the case of I believe in everything, he was pushing me on some of my insistence on having scientific evidence for everything. I know I was encouraging you early on to open up your preconceptions to allow for the possibility of stuff that we don't really know about from science. Why was it important for you to push me on that score? I just always thought it was important for me to push you on any score. That was my job. But you're saying this like it's in the past tense. Well, it took you 16 years, but now you're doing your show without Laurel and Jackson. Okay. But I know that part of your job is to mess with me, but not mess with help. I was trying to help you. So why would it be helping me to prod me toward more openness toward things I might otherwise reflexively reject? Open is better than closed, right? Fluid is better than rigid. People who are too sure of themselves tend to be alienating to others. Listening to this conversation between Dan and his long-time guide, I thought I could recognize some truth in Mark's statement. I'm more like Dan, more of a non-believer, but my non-believe has softened some in the last few years. Some of that social. Well, I think the tarot people are wrong. They've frankly throw much better parties than the fact-checkers. So there's that, but then you spend enough time around the believers, and sometimes you feel your own kill-join-ness more acutely. Like, you're on a diet or fasting, for reasons nobody else quite understands. Wouldn't it be nicer to just give in? Dan told me the story of how Mark Epstein became, if not the most open-minded person he's ever met, then at least the most open-minded person he deeply respects. Young Mark Epstein was sort of anxious, insecure, really, really smart, really, really curious. I think the times that I grew up in were just the dawning of the Beatles and Transcendental Meditation and LSD and the naivete of that early '60s mindset hit me just in my adolescence. When he was young, it was bedlam. It was the '70s, and he's in Cambridge at Harvard, seeking out everybody on campus who has any interest in anything new AG. I found all the occultists at Harvard Medical School. I worked with Lester Grinspoon, who was the first person to advocate for the legalization of marijuana. I wrote a paper. Right to paper on ketamine. He's hanging out with psychics, and of course, there's the dharma and all of the metaphysical claims that are in that, and so he's just in this environment. And he's hanging out with a car mechanic named Carmou, who's also a psychic, but he's just in this world of drinking from this fire hose. And it's so interesting because he's doing that and getting his degree at Harvard Medical School at the same time. Okay. So then, how does the psychic medium in question enter his life? Like, what was the when and how of that? A friend of his tells him about Laurel and Jackson at a dinner in Woodstock, and I realize this all sounds like, you know, a subplot from a Portlandia episode, but he hears about this person, and it's like, yes, I want to talk to this medium. It was after my father had died, so it was like 16 years ago or so. So was it the death of your father that made you so intrigued? No. No, as I say, I'm always on the lookout for a good psychic, because you had a history of encounters. Well, good and bad. Yeah. I have a real history. Yeah. Okay, so good and bad. That means that you're not going in with zero skepticism. Oh, no. I'm going in with a lot of skepticism. Yeah. I'm both gullible and skeptical, which I find really interesting, gullible and skeptical. Okay. So when you first met her, what did you think? It blew me away. Say more, please. After the preliminaries, where the first thing she does is she gets the sense of your aura, a mix of colors, basically. So she went through that, and then the first thing she said to me was, oh, your father's here, he says to tell you you were right. That's the first thing she said. And immediately, I thought I knew what she was talking about. My father, who was a well-known professor of medicine, had a glioblastoma, which is a malignant brain tumor, and he got it scanned and it had already spread to both sides of his brain. And he knew that there was, you know, very little treatment that was available, and communicated that to me. And I was in my office in the city, realizing that despite all these years of being interested in spiritual stuff, I had never had a conversation with my father about anything spiritual. And certainly about what the Buddhists have taught about what dying is, or how to die, you know. So I called him up with some trepidation and said, you know, we've never talked about any of this. I don't know if you're interested, but do you want to know what the Buddhists said? And he was very welcoming. He's like, you know, sure, go ahead. So I needed to try to explain something using non-Buddhist or spiritual or new age language. And so I said something like, you know, that sense of yourself that you've always had inside that doesn't really change, no matter what age you are, you're 20, 40, 60, 80, but inside you're just sort of, you know, how it feels to be you. It's sort of transparent, that space. You know it, but you can't really find it, but it's a feeling. I said, what they seem to say is that if you can relax your mind into that kind of transparent feeling of who you've always been, that you can kind of ride that feeling out as the body shuts down. And he said, okay, darling, I'll try. And so when Loreland Jackson said, oh, your father's here, he says to tell you you were right. It resonated with that conversation. So that made me very receptive to anything else that she was going to tell me. Well, it's interesting, even in that story, you acknowledge she might have known that. She might have had ways to know things that informed her utterances directed at you totally. You're open to that and you're also open to the fact that she may be communicating with your dead father. And so that's such an interesting, I mean, she didn't know me at all at that time. She didn't know me at all and we were on the phone. The Google existed. Google existed. She could have Googled. She could have seen that my father had died, et cetera. But what I prefer to think not I would much rather be that's really my father talking forever. Mark's first reading with Loreland Jackson was many years ago. He's returned to her periodically sense. He says she's really helped him at various junctures in his life. And he's recommended her to friends, to other meditation teachers and eventually even to his hard-headed skeptical pal, Dan Harris. Here's one thing I'm open to it. I'm open to the fact that this is all true. I'm also open to the fact that she sincerely believes what she's doing is real and that she's a smart and pathic, helpful person. And that she is helping people, but that is actually not true strictly speaking. Is that possible? Of course. I mean, that's the most likely explanation in terms of the world that we operate in. You know, that's a generous interpretation that doesn't require any kind of supernatural anything. If I would have to explain it away, that's how I would explain it, yeah. And yet, it's possible that it, in your view, that it's totally legit, what's happening? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I would much prefer to believe that. So I think one of the things you're saying is that you have a real openness and maybe even more than openness, like a belief, that there's more going on than science can explain. Well, I'm just easy to convince. So. (both laughing) - So, you know, that has worked for me and against me over the years. - But I don't wanna let you off the hook that easily because you're easy to convince that's funny, it's funny. And like you're incredibly smart. And so I just wanna nail you down on having thought about this a great deal and having been alive for a non-trivial period of time. You're open to the supernatural to put it quite bluntly or to the things that might be natural, we call them supernatural now because science hasn't yet caught up. - Yeah, oh yes. I mean, if there's one thing I'm sure about is that science doesn't know everything. - I said in the beginning of all this that equality I admired about Dan is that he keeps his mind half closed. Dan, like me, is a journalist. It's not just his job. It's a big part of his identity. When journalism works, it's a system for learning about the world skeptically, so that you're wrong less often. You fact check, you double source. You try to write only what you can prove. But Mark Epstein is not a journalist and he models a different way to learn about the world. Radical open-mindedness. To be open-minded means you'll get bamboozled sometimes. Mark says people in his circle have certainly fallen for charlatans. But his mind also allows him to benefit from his conversations with psychic types in a way that Dan's can't. Mark's able to think about how his father may have passed peacefully. Might even still be out there somewhere watching him. Instead of like Dan or me, mainly getting stuck on stuff like how a triangle is not really much of a musical instrument at all, really. I mentioned before how new age beliefs have a way of internally setting me off a bit. Plenty that Dan had turned up had given me more of those feelings. But nothing about this conversation with Mark had. And it left me wondering about this balance mark described. The notion that you'd cultivate in your own mind, not just skepticism, but at the same time, credulity as another positive trait. I ask Dan about it. - It's a really tricky balance. And I think it's more art than science. Just to have the habit of mind to check your own impulse towards certainty. Of course you want to check other people's too, but not in a paralytic way. So this is where the art comes. Like openness plus skepticism, that is a recipe for moving through the world, I think in a little bit more supple fashion. Does that make sense what I'm saying? - It does. - To me, that's part of a skillful approach to life. It's like, can you resist certainty? You know, can you be really open in that way? It's in one of the many designs, flaws in the human operating system is that we live in this world where everything's changing all the time. Like we're just in a tsunami of uncertainty. And yet we are really allergic to uncertainty. So we are not well designed for the world we inhabit. And so I think that is one of the biggest problems facing the species. But we are shouting at each other over politics, over vaccines, over religion, over geopolitical divides, without any empathy, without being willing to understand, or even attempt to understand the way other people might view the world. And that was one thing when we were fighting with stones, but now we're fighting with nukes and AI. And so it's this addiction to certainty is an existential threat to the species. And so, you know, Buddhism and other practices or other schools of thought can help nudge you in the direction of the kind of openness that I think Mark is modeling here. - Can I say part of what I think is like, a little bit difficult about this? - Please. - Like, you and I have talked at extended length about how we believe in the importance of uncertainty. Like we're very certain about how it's important to be uncertain. I can say that. But like, once you start thinking about opening the door to things you can't prove, what I don't understand is like how you decide which things to believe. Like I don't know where you actually set your level. - Did I ever tell you the story about Joseph Goldstein's first meditation teacher? Joseph Goldstein is my meditation teacher and a friend of mine and Mark's. And he has a story about his first meditation teacher who he came across in a market in India. This guy had been his teacher for a long time. And one day Joseph was out for a stroll in India where he was learning from this guy and he came across his teacher haggling like fiercely with one of the vendors. So Joseph goes to his teacher, his name is Maninjara after seeing him haggling over a bag of peanuts or whatever it is. And he was like, hey, you are always telling us to keep it simple. - Yeah. - And what's that about? And the teacher said to him, yeah, I said, be simple, but not be a simpleton. And that speaks to me to the balance that Mark is striking here, like you should be open, but you should also have boundaries. - Yeah. - And can you do those two things at the same time? - Yeah, and knowing like, being able to think this might be true, this might not be true. But to notice that in Mark's case, he wants to believe in one belief because it's useful to him, it makes him feel good. Whereas another belief like would be really, not just not useful, but like damaging. - Yes. - His mind is open enough that he can talk to everyone and his mind is supple enough that he can know when for him it's good to change it and when for him it's good not to. - Yeah, and just to bring it back to the Buddha, the name Buddha, it means awake. And this is a way to not fall into the sleep of certainty, which is comforting for lots of reasons we've discussed, and not to fall into the opposite kind of sleep, which would be on remitting credulity. And if you're gonna make your mind a relentless reconsideration machine, well, you've got to be awake for that. And that's why I think the Buddha spent a lot of time talking about the dangers of being attached to your views. - He, in fact, said of himself, I'm not a dogmatist, I'm an analyst, and you got to be awake to analyze. - Yeah. But so then with your teachers, who, like for you, this started with a question of why are all my teachers seeing this like a medium? - Like, where do you Dan Harris land on that? - Specifically. - I land on not agreeing with them that the stuff they're open to is real, but being open to the fact that they might be right, and in that is a teaching, I think, around not being so close-minded, not being so rigid, not being so addicted to my certainty. It's like in doing this stuff that seemed so outlandish to me, they've taught me something. Maybe not what they were aiming to teach me, like they didn't teach me that psychic mediums are for sure a thing, but they did teach me that my reflexive judgmentalism is not super helpful. (gentle music) - Dan, thank you. - Pleasure. Thank you for letting me hate you part of my dilemma. - Oh, I really enjoyed it. - Dan Harris, you can find him at his podcast, 10% Happier. It's full of thoughtful, funny, meditative conversations, a great place to go if you are ever looking for any help at all with the glamorous voice in your head. You really recommend it. If you wanna go even deeper on all things 10% Happier, you can check out Dan's website, DanHarris.com, which features guided meditations. If you're curious about Mark's work, you can check out his books. The Zen of Therapy is one, the one that Dan found that made him wanna seek mark out is called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart. As for us, this is our last episode of the season. We're gonna take a month to read and think and find more things worth wondering about. In July, we'll be airing some of our favorite classic episodes. In August, to not forget about us, we will be back with new ones. In the meantime, please keep sending us your questions. We had such a fun time answering them for you this season. We're so excited that we get to do some more. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Third Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, Peach of Oat, and Shruthy Pinnaminating. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was fact-checked by Kate Gallagher, theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Vasarian. Additional production support on this episode from Hazel Nebrian. Our intern is Oscar Noxan. This was our last week with Oscar. He is a brilliant, wonderful, relentlessly enthusiastic presence in our office. We are going to miss him, but we are so excited to see what he does next. From the 10% happier podcast, thank you to Dan Harris, and senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman. At Odyssey, our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. And thanks to the rest. the team at Odyssey. Rob Randi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Moore Curran, Josephina Frances, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schott. Our agent is Warren Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support our show and get ad free episodes, zero reruns, and some bonus audio, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You'll learn more at searchengine.show. Follow and listen to search engine on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. Have a cool summer.