← The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show
This Question Can Change Your Life
01:05:34
I like to start the year with a few episodes on things I’m personally working on. Not resolutions, exactly. More like intentions. Or, even better, practices. One of those practices, strange as it sounds, is repeatedly asking the question: “What is this?” It’s a question I got from a book of the same name, by Stephen and Martine Batchelor. In that book, they are describing an approach to Buddhist meditation built on the cultivation of doubt and wonder. You can see that as a spiritual practice, but it’s also an intellectual and ethical one. It is, for me, a practice that has a lot of bearing on politics and journalism. Stephen Batchelor’s latest book, “Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times,” explores those dimensions of doubt more fully. And so I wanted to have him on the show to discuss the virtues of both certainty and uncertainty, the difficulty of living both ethically and openly. You can see this as a conversation about our inner lives or our outer lives,...
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- [00:00]
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This podcast is supported by GiveWell. When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? Many focus on low overhead, but what about real impact on people's lives? Over 150,000 donors have used GiveWell's research, collectively saving 300,000 lives and improving millions more. Make a tax deductible donation@givewell.org first time donors can have their donation matched up to $100 as long as matching funds last. Select podcast and Ezra Klein at checkout.
- [00:57]
Ezra Klein
So I was like at the beginning of the year to do a couple of episodes that are around things that I am working on in my own life, resolutions episodes, you might say. And something I've been working on over these past months, years is being able to sit with doubt. Not just doubt, being able to sit in the wonder of uncertainty. Because the first person we believe our own easiest marks are ourselves. The stories we tell, the things we think we already know. So maintaining an openness, a curiosity. I think it's important politically. I think it's very important in my work as a podcast host. But it is, as much as it is anything, a spiritual practice, a practice of remaining present in the fundamental unknowability of this life and this earth. And my guest today has helped me with those practices in ways that maybe he would not have known. Stephen Batchelor is the author of of many books on Buddhism and meditation, including this book he wrote with his wife, Martine Batchelor, called what Is this? Which is from a meditation retreat, a San meditation retreat that they held some time ago. And San meditation works around the question of what is this? Just asking it again and again and allowing it to arise in you, this feeling of doubt, and then to sit with that and to see what that might reveal. Boucher's latest book is Buddha, Socrates and Us Ethical Living in Uncertain Times. There he draws on a different tradition of doubt, Socratic questioning, and explores kind of the wisdom that Buddhist and Hellenistic philosophy might offer us today. So I want to invite him on the show to talk about doubt as practice and what it could open for us personally and even politically right now. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com. Stephen Batchelor, welcome to the show.
- [02:59]
Stephen Batchelor
Thank you, Ezra.
- [03:00]
Ezra Klein
So from the age of 27 to 31, you say you sat facing a wall for 10 to 12 hours a day asking the question, what is this? Repeatedly. So I guess the obvious first question is, why did you do that?
- [03:16]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, I became a Buddhist monk when I was 21 years old and I was involved with a Tibetan tradition that put a great deal of emphasis on studying the texts, studying logic, epistemology, and really trying to get a clear conceptual understanding of what Buddhist philosophy was really about. At a certain point, I found that this kind of inquiry, as fulfilling as it was, did not really delve deep enough into my existential experience, as it were. And I felt an increasing longing to be able to actually put all the books aside, all the things I'd learned, all of my knowledge about Buddhism, and go to a place where I could just go back to the primary questions of what it means to be human, basically. And I went to South Korea, and there I entered a Zen monastery. The teacher had one simple instruction. Ask yourself this question, what is this? And nothing else. Just get to grips with that primary question of your life. And initially, of course, the mind comes up with all kinds of clever answers. But after a while, you know, hour after hour after hour after hour, the mind kind of gives up and you find yourself actually in a state of puzzlement, curiosity, wonder, perplexity, in which a lot of my knowledge of Buddhism was just gently put to one side. A very good way of summing this all up is an aphorism that we find in Zen Buddhism. Great doubt, great awakening, little doubt, little awakening, no doubt, no awakening.
- [05:09]
Ezra Klein
So drop me then more into the existential experience of doing that. What is it like to sit staring at a wall for 10 to 12 hours a day, asking the question, what is this?
- [05:25]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, initially, when you start, then These retreats are three months, right? 90 days in the summer, 90 days in the winter. It's a long period of time. But what happens is that in the first couple of weeks, the mind still keeps coming up with all these clever answers and theories, and maybe even little enigmatic, little Zenish kind of poetry or whatever comes up. But at a certain point that sort of quietens down and you just come to rest in that quality of amazement, astonishment, that you're here at all and you're in this moment. It's not that the wonder or the questioning is just going on between your ears. It's not an intellectual question. It might start out in that way, but at a certain point you can actually let go of the words altogether. You don't need to keep repeating, what is this? What is this? But you begin to discover what they call the sensation of doubt, an actual physical feeling, as it were, that extends right down into your belly. And that quality, that embodied quality of wonder or questioning, then begins to actually infuse your doubt, day to day consciousness. More and more, it becomes Part and parcel of your fundamental experience of being conscious. The world is not something you just take for granted so much anymore. Or meeting another person is not just a sort of social interaction. But underlying that encounter with the nature or people or animals, you begin to be more and more attuned to the sheer strangeness that this is all going on at all. The world, other people, my cat, whatever it is. And that opens up a quality of relationship with life itself that I found deeply nurturing. It somehow reconnected me with the organic foundations of my life, but not in a way that they I just let go or stop thinking. I mean, as a human being, you're always thinking in a way, but this provides a framework, an embodied frame in which to maybe think from your belly rather than think from your head.
- [07:48]
Ezra Klein
I worry that somebody listening can think. I'm asking this from a point of gentle making fun. So I want to say that. What is this? The book that tracks a retreat you and your wife Martine, did is one of my very favorite books on meditation. And I reread it every couple of years. And so I've spent a lot of time doing this practice. And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is that I've been doing it a lot lately. My experience of it is right at the beginning. When I start doing it again, I get that sensation of doubt, that sensation of freshness in looking at the world. And then fairly quickly, my mind becomes dulled to the question. So I guess I'm curious if you're talking to somebody whose experience with meditation is counting their breath restarting every time they lose track, what is the actual instruction of this? How do you do it? But also, how do you keep it.
- [08:49]
Stephen Batchelor
From just becoming repetitive?
- [08:51]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, just becoming a chant.
- [08:54]
Stephen Batchelor
What is important is to drop the question in to the meditation at the point where the mind has already stabilized, either through observing the breath or just through the silent sitting practice itself. Once you sort of find yourself and you feel it in your body, a kind of a groundedness, a kind of a harmony, a balance, a calm, then you very gently ask yourself, but what is this? What's going on? And allowing yourself to not repeat the question, but somehow settle into the silence in which the question is asked, and to let yourself just listen, as it were, to whatever responses might come up. Listen to your body, listen to the world. And at a certain point, I think you become rather disinterested in finding an answer, to be honest, because there is no answer in the end. That's the secret, which I shouldn't perhaps have told you, as we don't have.
- [09:57]
Ezra Klein
To do it now.
- [10:01]
Stephen Batchelor
The point is not to come up with an answer that the teacher says, oh, very clever, you pass. No, it's actually about making that quality of inquiry, questioning, wonder, curiosity more and more permeate into your consciousness as a whole, whether you're meditating, whether you're working, whether you're doing whatever you do.
- [10:21]
Ezra Klein
I find doubt to be a very healthy and very difficult emotion to cultivate in my meditation practice, in my politics. I think people often hear it as skepticism, which can also be good, but can also be negative, particularly if only externally directed. You're skeptical of what everybody else believes, but you're quite certain of what you believe. And so I think I've latched onto this because I think the strengthening of a muscle of internal doubt is an important virtue. Actually. Doubt has really been structured across your books. It's been very present for you. What is, I guess, the definition of doubt to you, and what is the use of it?
- [11:05]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, I mean, doubt, even in Zen Buddhism is understood to have two quite separate meanings. There's the doubt that actually inhibits you from doing anything. For example, I'm not sure if this practice is really going to work. I'm not sure if I really believe all this stuff about Buddhism. So we're not talking about that kind of doubt, that vacillation, that uncertainty which is kind of inhibiting, but rather a quality of doubt that somehow lies at a much deeper place within your experience. I might call it an existential doubt. One way in which we might think of it, it's being uncertain about the great matter of birth and death. So it's a kind of existential uncertainty, the capacity to make your life into a question for yourself rather than relying upon the certainties or quasi certainties about, well, I know who I am. I'm this person, I've done that. I'm this important Buddhist or whatever. And to just let that go and recognize that although certainties can be comforting and uncertainty can be discomforting, as in think Voltaire said at one point, he said, uncertainty or doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty or not, doubt is stupid.
- [12:34]
Ezra Klein
I find that in your books and in that answer. Sometimes there are two things that feel different to me that you're describing. Cultivating one is doubt about, as you put it, the great matter of life and death. What is the nature of being here? And then there is also the reminding yourself that you are here. Sci fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson turned me onto this idea in sci fi of cognitive Estrangement. That one thing science fiction does is estrange you a little bit from the world as you know it by shifting something. And I find sometimes this practice can give me a useful kind of estrangement. Oh, it's strange that I'm here. But then sometimes what it's doing as like, what is this? Runs through my head during the day, is remembering, oh, this is My children are playing and it's a sunny day. Not this other set of thoughts and worries and stories running through my head. Or, you know, this is a moment in politics that I don't actually understand where it goes. It's not certain in the way that it can feel to me as dreadful or promising or whatever my interpretation might have been. How do you think about that difference between. I don't know, maybe it's existential doubt and then this is a kind of support of a more tangible, almost literal awareness?
- [13:58]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, I think they're not two separate things. So uncertainty gives you space. It gives you the time to ponder, to reflect, to think, to not just believe in what your mind is telling you. I think it's helpful perhaps to think of doubt as operating along a spectrum, maybe with the sort of practical doubts that we have all the time. Practical questions, where are my kids? Or what is that person up to on that building, whatever? And that could be quite necessary and useful to sort of work with that. But when we get into, say, the realm of, say, politics or in a really difficult emotional situation you have in a relationship, what you might notice is that when you're confronted with those sorts of challenges, your immediate reaction is to come up with some fixed view, some idea, this is terrible. These people are awful. It's all my wife's fault. And it's interesting to notice how automatically we latch onto these convictions. And that, I think, actually is an inhibitor not only in meditation, but I think, also in negotiating the social and political world in which we live, we perhaps would arrive at more appropriate judgments if we were able to pause, if we were able to notice what is rising up in us is just a reactive habit. Or what is rising up in us is something that is really emerging as an authentic response to the actuality of the situation at the time. To get a bit of space, to get a bit of distance, and also groundedness in your own body, bodily sensations, what you're really feeling in your gut. So very similar, in fact, to what you go through in the process of meditation. You need to quieten down in order to hear the question. And the question might be an issue in our political life, for example, to be able to hear it rather than just react to it.
- [15:57]
Ezra Klein
You brought up the word reactivity there. And another idea that has threaded through your books, which is building on a famed idea in Buddhism, but is the idea of the four tasks. Talk me through them.
- [16:11]
Stephen Batchelor
Okay, well, the four tasks are a way of understanding the primary logic of the Buddhist teaching, or the Dharma as we call it. And it derives from the Buddha's very first discourse. And these tasks are first to embrace life, to embrace suffering, in other words, to resist the tendency, whenever something disagreeable is happening, to sort of recoil away but be able to say yes to life. It's very much an affirmation of the reality you find yourself in that given moment. That's the first task. The second task is to let our reactivity be so if you're in a difficult situation and maybe it causes you a lot of anger, that's your initial reaction. To notice the anger, to be mindful of the anger and to watch the anger arise. And also if you leave it alone, to let the anger fade away. That's the second task of letting reactivity be, or letting reactivity go. The third task is when your mind is beginning to calm down and not be so reactive that you come to appreciate a non reactive space within you. And the third task is to dwell in that non reactive space. And in the Zen practice I've just been talking about, this means to dwell in that sense of not knowing, of questioning. Because questioning itself is a non reactive state of mind, at least in the context of, say, wonder or whatever. To dwell in that, to really get to feel it in your body, to become intimate in a sense, with your own non reactive potential. And that non reactivity is really, in classical Buddhist language, nirvana itself.
- [18:10]
Ezra Klein
What's that like, man?
- [18:12]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, it sounds a bit grandiose perhaps, but I think it's something we already all know. It's odd, I find that even if I haven't been meditating or people I know who never no interest in meditating, they have had experiences where all of their muddles and worrying thoughts for some reason just die down. People might find this in doing sport, for example, running every day or jogging. They might find it by going for hikes in the countryside or just working in their gardens. There's all manner of activities we do that have nothing to do with meditation in a formal sense, but are moments whereby suddenly we find ourselves at peace with ourselves. That to me, is the non reactive space. I think it's dangerous to present it as Something exotic and spiritual. I feel nirvana, these moments of stopping. And in that stopping, suddenly feeling at peace with ourselves, at harmony with our world. It may only last a few seconds, maybe longer, but that's non reactivity. It's not something we just get from meditation. We already know that. And when we find ourselves in those moments, and sometimes they come upon us out of the blue, you know, one day you're just leading your everyday life and you sit down on a park bench and for some reason that you cannot explain, you find yourself still and quiet. The mind's chatter has died down. And in that moment, and this is the other side of non reactivity, the world reveals itself more luminously. The problem with reactivity is not that it causes you suffering, although it often does, but it actually inhibits you from experiencing the wonder of life itself. So in moments of meditation, when you're on a meditation retreat, I'm sure you've had this experience, you sit for a few hours during the day and then you go out into the garden. And the colors are brighter, the sounds are more engaging, and there's something about the sheer joy in a way and mystery that we're able to encounter, which is the world is rendered more vivid and bright. So non reactivity feels like an inner peace if you wish, a quietening down. And in the doing of that, the world is subtly transformed in a way that brings forth its richness and its wonder. But that is not the end of the path. That is actually, in my understanding, where the path begins. So the fourth task is to cultivate a way of life, to cultivate a path. And that means that this non reactive space is not nirvana in the sense of the enlightenment or the goal of the path, but it's actually the most appropriate space for being able to make more useful and effective judgments. In other words, choices. A way of life that is not driven and inflected by these instinctive, reactive patterns, these conditioned responses of our society, but rather to be able to respond to life in a way that is according in alignment with my basic values.
- [22:07]
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This podcast is supported by GiveWell. When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? Many focus on low overhead. But what about real impact on people's lives?
- [22:15]
Stephen Batchelor
Lives?
- [22:16]
GiveWell Sponsor
Over 150,000 donors have used GiveWell's research, collectively saving 300,000 lives and improving millions more. Make a tax deductible donation@givewell.org first time donors can have their donation matched up to $100 as long as matching funds last. Select podcast and Ezra Klein at checkout Listen up guys.
- [22:35]
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Stephen Batchelor
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- [23:00]
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- [23:37]
Ezra Klein
Let me try to go through those in pieces. Okay, so the first one you walked through, which you're describing here as saying yes to life, to the extent people have heard it is something like life is suffering or there will always be suffering. And so what I hear you saying on some level is accepting life as it is.
- [24:04]
Stephen Batchelor
That's correct. But not accepting as resignation. Acceptance could be seen as a sort of rather passive, non involved kind of relationship to things. But I don't see it that way at all. And particularly in the framework of these four tasks. Acceptance of life, being able to say yes, this is the situation I'm in. That doesn't mean that that situation is good or has to be somehow not responded to at all. It's just the way the world is. But it's that capacity to actually own up not only to the external situation you're in, but also very much to how you habitually react to those external situations. You get locked into a certain pattern of your mind goes round and round and round in the same old thoughts. It's very circular, it's very repetitive. So to say yes is to establish a basis from which one can then make a more appropriate response. And I don't think this is just to do with Buddhist practice. It's got nothing really to do with Buddhism. It has to do with how to lead a fully flourishing life I always.
- [25:14]
Ezra Klein
Want to zoom in on the verbs here.
- [25:16]
Stephen Batchelor
Okay.
- [25:18]
Ezra Klein
Which I think a lot of mischief hides in them for people or confusion for me specifically. You'll hear accept. This is the situation you are in. I often am in a situation. I think, time to accept it. Then I think, okay, accept it and nothing happens.
- [25:42]
Stephen Batchelor
Yeah, that's right. No, that's true.
- [25:46]
Ezra Klein
What is supposed to be happening there? The verb accept is doing what for you. What action is taking place, if any.
- [25:54]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, it's a bit like questioning in a way, like, what is this? Ask the question, what is this? It can be what in Zen they call a dead word, or it can be a live word. I mean, what is this repeated as a mantra is a dead word. But what is this, asked from your guts is a living word. So I think we can make the same distinction between acceptance. Accept things as they are could be a kind of encouragement not to do anything and just to sort of be a passive recipient of whatever life is throwing at you with no recourse to do anything else. That would be a dead word, accept or embrace. But what would be the living version of accept? And that, to me, would be an embrace or a willingness to be in this world despite all of its problems and difficulties and things you don't like. And to be able to encompass that, to comprehend it in a way that you somehow acknowledge that this is, at this moment is your total experience. And this is where any answer or response to the situation will have to come.
- [27:08]
Ezra Klein
It sometimes feels to me like the distinction here is between you can be in a situation, you can face up to it or not.
- [27:14]
Stephen Batchelor
Yes, that's right.
- [27:16]
Ezra Klein
There is a famous meditation that has a structure of I'm of the nature to grow old, I'm of the nature to grow sick. I'm of the nature to lose people I love. I'm of the nature to die.
- [27:27]
Stephen Batchelor
And.
- [27:28]
Ezra Klein
And I understood that as simply. I mean, I know that's true, but I don't know that's true or I don't face up to that being true all that often.
- [27:39]
Stephen Batchelor
That's exactly the point. We all know we're going to die in theory, and we might even worry about it sometimes, but I don't think we really know. And another meditation that has been very, very effective in my life, which I learned from my Tibetan teachers, was the contemplation of death. Death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain. So once again you have this tension, certainty, uncertainty. The one certain thing is totally uncertain as to when it's going to occur. In other words, when you start thinking about death in a more contemplative way, as in that little exercise the Tibetans have, over time, your relationship to death becomes much more, paradoxically alive. With each breath you are taking, one breath less. So to experience something like death or old age from that kind of contemplative perspective gives it a whole different meaning, really. It forces you to think, well, how do I want to live if I could die at any moment? And I'm beginning to really feel that. And I think Buddhist meditation has helped me learn to live on that cusp. It very much inevitably, I feel, forces me into a deeper ethical relationship as to how I want to flourish as a person, what kind of world, what kind of society. I would wish my. I don't have children, so I would wish future generations to be able to enjoy. Meditation at that point becomes a kind of a bridge to allowing us to engage in our world, in allowing us to engage in our lives with a greater sense of depth and less of a sense of just jumping from one topic to the other in a superficial way.
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Ezra Klein
So the next, as I had written it down when you were speaking, was let reactivity be. You'd also used another term in there, which is let go.
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Stephen Batchelor
Yes. Yeah.
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Ezra Klein
Let go is maybe the verb structure. There's more complicated grammatical names for it. I'm sure that I find the most frustrating across Buddhist literature because I'll have those feelings, like, time to let them go, then nothing will happen.
- [29:55]
Stephen Batchelor
Exactly.
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Ezra Klein
But you also said it as let it be. I'd like to dwell in that difference a little bit for a minute between let go feels like one thing, and we hear it all the time. Let go of these things that are not serving you. I don't find that that is a tool in my toolkit. Letting be maybe a bit more so.
- [30:17]
Stephen Batchelor
Yeah. Well, you have to remember that traditionally, in 99% of Buddhist books you read, the word I'm translating is usually translated as abandon. It's much stronger. It's actually reject. Get rid of greed, hatred, these things. Abandon them. Abandon them. I found that way too aggressive.
- [30:38]
Ezra Klein
I think in Western pop Buddhism, they don't use that as much.
- [30:41]
Stephen Batchelor
No, they don't. But Western pop Buddhism has tended to pick up on the idea of letting go.
- [30:46]
Ezra Klein
Of letting go. Yes.
- [30:47]
Stephen Batchelor
Letting be, I find works way, way better. This is, I think, at the core of mindfulness practice, that all of the mindfulness approaches, it's learning to, you know, if you feel a feeling of jealousy or anxiety arise in your mind, you just notice it. You don't believe it and get caught up in its narrative. And you don't try to repress it or deny it either. You just let it be. Let it be works really well. And it works well also because the whole heart of any mindfulness intervention is to actually see things for what they are, which are transient, contingent. And just let them to follow their own natural course. And they will slowly, not immediately, but over time, they slowly diminish. And even if they don't diminish, you become more and more centered in the non reactive quality of mindfulness. As soon as you are mindful, you're already being non reactive. You're noticing rather than reactic. You're observing. And that's what frees you from entanglement in these often very powerful thoughts and emotions that surge up within us.
- [31:59]
Ezra Klein
In my very unawakened, amateurish attempts to work with all this, I have found it helpful for me to think about the. The thing you're not supposed to be doing. I sometimes think of it as trying not to act from it.
- [32:15]
Stephen Batchelor
That's right, exactly.
- [32:16]
Ezra Klein
I had an experience. I think it's useful because it's a small one the other night where I'm on a bunch of group chats and this particular group chat had gotten into an argument, including with me at like 11pm and I'd already meditated that night and I found myself getting upset and feeling like I needed to defend myself and you know, my chest getting tight and you know, feeling hotter and thinking, well, I should let this go, I should be non reactive. And then nothing happened. Happened. The best I was able to do was actually to not be non reactive. It was to not react.
- [32:59]
Stephen Batchelor
Yeah.
- [33:00]
Ezra Klein
And in not reacting, I didn't make things worse. I learned some things. I found the experience of trying to watch the way my body was reacting at least somewhat interesting. But it was unpleasant and it led me to this inquiry in some ways. It's one of the things that led me to this conversation about what it actually meant to be non reactive. Was it to have negative feelings but not feel negatively while having them because that didn't seem to be working? Or was it to just be feeling negatively and not doing anything like white knuckling your way through your feelings, which I'm able to do. I'm able to white knuckle my way into not reacting to certain things or something else? Like how do you actually understand the experience of non reactivity?
- [33:48]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, I think what you said also is part of it. I mean, at times, you know, if you're Practicing being non reactive, then at times it will be a white knuckling thing. You find you don't have the inner capacity to just sort of remain calm and joyful and so on at all. It overwhelms you. But what I think meditation allows over time is you slowly start to cultivate a more embedded sense of the feel of nonreactivity. And this is when we come to task number three. It's learning to dwell and to feel and to sense in the body. What nonreactivity feels like is to become somehow intimate with that quality of your embodied experience. So it's not non reactivity as an idea of something you may or may not do. You start to begin to feel this non reactive quality kind of infusing your body.
- [34:43]
Ezra Klein
Let me hold before you get to the place where you could feel that there are these times when you're not feeling that. And I think this is actually an important place for people. Right. This is on one level a conversation about meditation and Buddhism and what is this. And then on another, there's a podcast that spends its time in politics. And I have been thinking about how you maintain some clarity and some internal space, if only to think well and make good decisions at a time that is very overwhelming. And I guess one thing I noticed, or I've noticed across many years of meditating doing these practices, is that I'm often reacting to a sensation in my body. I think I'm reacting to a situation, but I'm not. I'm reacting to how I'm feeling.
- [35:40]
Stephen Batchelor
Yeah.
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Ezra Klein
So like with that text message thread that I'm using as my example here, I was reacting to try to release pressure in my chest. And it wasn't going to do that, it was going to increase it because nobody was going to chill out at 11:15pm Furiously texting each other. And I feel like this is one of the interesting realizations of meditation over long periods of time. Just that when you go into it, how much of a situation is just pretty modest sensations like a bit of tightness in the chest, a feeling of buzzing in the extremities, and you're like, that's the whole thing that's driving me right now. I just feel a little bit weird.
- [36:25]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, that is, I think one of the great insights that we find in the Buddhist tradition is the Buddha realized precisely that we don't react to the external object. We react to how the external object or person makes us feel. Feeling tone, it's sometimes translated as to pay more attention to how the environment and also Your own inner stuff is actually affecting your underlying tonality, whether that's pleasant or unpleasant or neutral or whatever. And that's something that is understood as simply a given. That whether you're the Buddha or whether you're me, the reality is if you are threatened, let's say by someone with a knife, the torture that will trigger a survival reaction which is entirely necessary and valuable, there's no problem with that. But there's lots of other reactive patterns that come up which are not helpful. They're often loop tapes or fears that you might have inherited from your family or your past experience or whatever. And these things surge into your mind, as I'm sure you've probably noticed. And you get trapped in these little loop tapes of worrying about something or feeling angry about something. And so it's a question really of learning how to first of all recognize these patterns, these conditions that keep repeating. That's very important. But also to begin to open up a space within that noticing in which you realize that the mindfulness, let's say, your attention to that reactivity itself is not reacting over time you learn to somehow strengthen that non reactive dimension of attention or mindfulness so that that becomes more and more a stabilized point from which you can then deal with these difficulties, whether it's personal, whether it's political. And in that way I feel you open up more and more a capacity to be with it. And also, as we would say in stoicism, for example, to recognize what it is about your situation that you cannot change and what is it about your situation that you can change. I cannot change the fact that I feel angry, for example, by saying, don't be angry, it's not going to work. But I can notice that that is a given in my life. At that point I. I can let it be. I don't need to get entangled with it or believe its narrative. And it's within that non reactive space. I think that you can exercise those judgments. Can I change this or do I have to accept it for what it is? That I think is the challenge of what we call the practice. Really.
- [39:14]
Ezra Klein
How do you think about the places where being what I'd call too regulated or judicious, or letting the emotions pass by, and only speaking from a grounded place can actually make it harder or more unlikely to deal with things that are difficult? I think about many relationships in my life and how often it has been important in them to lose my emotional self control. Not in a sense of getting incredibly angry or anything in that direction. But there are Things normal me doesn't deal with and things that people can't see in me, forms of hurt or upset or need that the part of me that tries to meditate 30 or 40 minutes a day, it's like we're keeping things stable here, right? We're keeping things level. And levelness is good, but there's much that levelness doesn't address. You know, when people go to therapy, the therapist is not trying to keep them incredibly solid. I find that the best therapists I've had often are in certain ways trying to push me out of my window of emotional regulation so that I am reacting to an emotion that I find very unpleasant and that to the extent I let things be, I tend to let it go away. So I don't have to deal with any of that.
- [40:47]
Stephen Batchelor
I think it is a quite valid criticism of Buddhism and meditation in general, that it can be used as a strategy of avoidance, like the business of using meditation as a way to, in a way, numb yourself to the world. And I'm sure that happens. Why not? You come to dwell in your own kind of spiritual bubble. And that to me, is not an appropriate response to the situation. The goal of this four task practice is not to come to rest in some blissful nirvana state at all, but it's actually to be able to respond more effectively to the world in which we find ourselves and the suffering and the confusion and so on that's going on. So you understand from the outset that this is a practice that is not giving absolute value to stillness and emotional equilibrium and so on. It's getting you into a space where you can then make the judgment to respond. And it could be that you need anger. I mean, I don't think anger is necessarily a bad thing. For example, you might have a mother with a little child, and the little child keeps running out into the road and she says, come back, come back, come back. Kids start running into the road. And then the mother loses it, we might say, and gets really angry with the child. But that's the appropriate thing to do. It's perfectly good for the welfare of the child. So I think one has to get out of this idea. That's a kind of a priori set of good reactions or good responses that Buddhism approves of or other religion approves of. I think we have to find an ethic in which we're much more situational, that what counts in an ethical situation is not following the Buddhist rule book or the Jewish rulebook or the Christian rulebook, but actually finding your own Voice finding your own way of being with that situation in an authentic, hopefully in an effective way that is both in tune with your own deepest values and also responds as optimally as you can to the situation at hand. But being fallible human, mortal creatures, we very often get it wrong. Because you can spend all the time you like trying to make the appropriate judgment as to what to do in a difficult situation. But we all know from experience, no matter what your motives are, you can end up making the situation worse. In other words, we don't know the future. We cannot actually tell what is in fact the response that would lead to a resolution or greater happiness all round for those involved, or whatever it might be. So it's also therefore recognizing that any kind of judgment or choice you make in your response is going to be a risk. I think of this as an ethics of risk and accepting the fact that it's a risk. But it's important to learn from the mistakes you make from the over. It's naive or whether we make mistakes, we're fallible. I make mistakes, I'm fallible. I can get really worked up about things. I've done all this meditation for years, but I still get really fed up with some sort of events in my life. And I'm not particularly proud of that. But I recognize that simply the way I've been conditioned, as it were, it's my biological, social, whatever, conditions that have led me that way. So I don't judge the quality of my meditation or my Buddhist practice in such a way that certain things just don't happen anymore. As a human being evolved in the way we have greed and hatred and violence and so forth, these are built into our makeup. We have to accept these things for what they are. Not to demonize them, not to think of them as evil or anything like that, but simply the way that we have evolved. But we have the capacity to live with that, to make better choices, to have disciplines that can stabilize a part of our attention, but for the express purpose of being able to make more appropriate responses, judgments, statements, acts. And then we learn from the consequences of what we've said and done. And we may find that that shows us something that we haven't done particularly well, or it shows a certain weakness in ourselves or whatever. So it's an ongoing practice. This idea of enlightenment that Buddhists have, I think it's often not very helpful because it gives you this idea that if you do this enough, you'll get to some point and suddenly all your problems will be over and you'll be it doesn't work. I think what the Buddha describes is a process of waking up, and that's something that will go on until our last breath. Foreign.
- [46:09]
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- [46:36]
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- [47:10]
Ezra Klein
So I want to turn a bit more directly into politics here, because if the fourth task is to live out your values, politics is one of the places where people try to do that. And it's not, I will say, for me, it's not exactly a zone of blissful non reactivity. So you talk in your new book, Buddha, Socrates and Us. You call our political culture highly opinionated, and you say that being opinionated is a reactive state. What do you mean by that?
- [47:36]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, I think it's helpful to think that the opinions and views we hold are not isolated, reified beliefs, but they are points within a spectrum from certainty to uncertainty in which I live the whole of my life. I'm a writer, I'm a thinker, and I'm very concerned about holding a view, a position that makes sense to me in terms of my values. It's rationally defensible in terms of my overall philosophy of life. But at the same time I'm also aware that over the years, and maybe even from year to year, those opinions can become more nuanced, more refined, and I might even let go of some of them altogether. So I see our journey through life is really about learning to negotiate and learning to continuously put into question some of the views and opinions that we hold in such a way that we don't let them become things in which we get trapped. And opinions can very often just keep us completely blocked. And we feel this feeling of stuckness. I find when we talk of reactivity, we normally speak of either wanting something or craving something, or being averse and hating something. But, but Buddhism also includes this other thing called confusion, which is very difficult to really understand what that means. What I understand that now to mean is one of the principal forms of reactivity that we experience as human beings is in fact our opinions and our views. And so when, for example, we're having a conversation, let's say someone who doesn't share our political perspective or so very quickly, once the conversation's gone past the polite stage, we find ourselves reacting incredibly not because of something that is desirable or undesirable, but simply because we are so convinced of the rightness of our own opinions and views. And so opinionatedness to me is on an equal stance with hatred and with greed. It's a space in which we cling quite desperately at times to the rightness of our political views, our religious views. And so reactivity is not just a personal thing. I think there is a collective reactivity which is, let's say, the culture to which we belong that holds certain values. And so if we are with Buddhists, for example, they'll collectively react against, say, killing animals, let's say. So in other words, we internalize also the reactive behaviors of our ancestors, of those, our educators and so forth and so on. Now that doesn't mean that we shouldn't think or we shouldn't have views about anything. Obviously not. But we should perhaps learn to live more lightly with our convictions and to notice when the conviction turns into a kind of sclerotic hold on things that we just take to be normative.
- [50:50]
Ezra Klein
But so this I think is such an interesting tension, speaking as an opinion journalist, and it's one I struggle with all the time, which is too many of us who are politically engaged, ethically engaged, you have this question of, well, is that my opinion or is that my ethical perspective? Is there even a difference that it seems, feels that acting ethically often requires acting from a point of view. They are doing this, this is bad, it will hurt people, I am trying to stop them from doing that. On the other hand, there is a tension between that and uncertainty and doubt, a tension between believing you have come to the right moral answer and being open and non reactive to people having answers that are different than the one you came to. And you're trying to balance this in the book. And you're balancing it in Buddhist ways and in ways that reflect the Socratic approach.
- [52:02]
Stephen Batchelor
That's right.
- [52:03]
Ezra Klein
But talk to me a bit about that tension.
- [52:07]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, there are times when those opinions, when they. When the rubber hits the road, when I meet someone, let's say, with an opinion that conflicts with my own, I notice in myself a kind of withdrawing from the engagement, a kind of, in a sense, sort of barricading myself into my own particular view. And that's where it becomes problematic. Often I form judgments about people on the basis of just one or two things they say. And that's an extremely, I think, disrespectful way to deal with another person, to treat them simply as the incarnation of their own opinions and views and their political stance or their religious beliefs. I think as soon as you make that sort of fixed separation, you've basically abandoned any genuine dialogue or conversation or inquiry. And I found that this capacity to be alert to my own tendency to freeze and hold on a fixed opinion and feel somehow angry immediately if someone contradicts it by opening up that space, it also opens up a kind of humility in which I recognize I need to know more about what this person believes.
- [53:23]
Ezra Klein
You create a very interesting distinction in the book between justice, which you say treasures certainty, and care, which treasures uncertainty.
- [53:33]
Stephen Batchelor
That's right.
- [53:34]
Ezra Klein
Talk me through that.
- [53:35]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, that's an idea that I picked up very much from the feminist ethicist Carol Gilligan, and it's sometimes called a feminist ethics of care. And she draws that distinction in a way that I found to be very helpful. Justice and care seem to be, again, poles of a spectrum rather than two totally separate things. And Gilligan recognizes that an ethics of justice tends to be what she talks of as a male. You have a system of law, you have rules, and you make your ethical judgments in terms of whether that's in accordance with the law, whether it's in accordance with the rules of your religious society, or so on. And so you're more concerned with a kind of abstract model of what is right and wrong that you seek to then use to guide you to make real world decisions. Now, we often find that justice alone can be cruel. I mean, you may believe, for example, that abortion is wrong under all circumstances without paying any particular attention to the plight of that particular woman and her unborn child. It's just wrong by definition. It's never to be allowed. On the other hand, of the ethical spectrum, you have an ethics of care, which we could also call a situational ethics. In other Words. What drives my response, my ethical response to a particular instance of human suffering is to understand as best I can the uniqueness of the moral dilemma, let's say, for the woman who has a pregnancy and wishes to terminate it or may risk dying or whatever it might be. And so to try to respond, not by trying to find out what is the right thing to do, but to respond to that situation in a way that is the most loving thing to do, the most caring thing to do. How can I respond to this situation that can minimize the suffering of this person, optimize their capacity to find a resolution to live a better life? But it may not fit neatly into some categories of justice, of right, wrong, good, fair, unfair. But it is responding to the actual deep experience of that suffering person at that moment. And I seek to respond to that as caringly and as lovingly, which might include, for example, recognizing that in her case, to proceed with an abortion would be the appropriate thing to do in that situation.
- [56:27]
Ezra Klein
This, I think, loops back to the conversation we're having about doubt.
- [56:30]
Stephen Batchelor
Yeah.
- [56:30]
Ezra Klein
One way I've come to think about doubt as a political emotion, not speaking here primarily of it as a spiritual orientation, is that it's like an inch of light or space between you and your certainty in your own views. And it's like that inch of space into which other people in their views can come in. Because one just reality of the age to me, like speaking from where I have to sit, is it as we, you know, as politics becomes more high stakes, the parties become more different, as people become more in conflict with each other, it's easier to feel quite sure.
- [57:21]
Stephen Batchelor
Yeah.
- [57:23]
Ezra Klein
And I think that that sense of certainty is really the enemy of curiosity.
- [57:29]
Stephen Batchelor
Yeah.
- [57:31]
Ezra Klein
And curiosity is a very essential democratic emotion. And doubt of oneself. Right. A little bit of doubt just sitting at the base of your own. Am I sure what is this really right? Am I sure of how this will all turn out? Am I sure I understand this position, this moment, this situation is just enough to maintain a conversation. But if you have certainty, then there's no reason for a conversation.
- [58:00]
Stephen Batchelor
That's right.
- [58:01]
Ezra Klein
And I think that's become for me a very important branching path in politics. It's a reason I found myself doing these, what is this meditations right now, that the work of maintaining enough self doubt to maintain a little bit of curiosity about others. So you can maintain a. And I'm not saying I do it well or do it all the time, but. But it feels very important and maybe it gets to the other side of your book which is about Socrates.
- [58:31]
Stephen Batchelor
Yes.
- [58:32]
Ezra Klein
Who's much more of an explicit political actor and talking about high stakes political topics of people in his time, but always from this place of probing.
- [58:42]
Stephen Batchelor
Yeah, exactly.
- [58:44]
Ezra Klein
Why in your, however many books you've now written, why turn to Socrates? Why turn to, to that kind of more philosophical, almost gleefully undogmatic approach to questions.
- [58:57]
Stephen Batchelor
As you're suggesting, what Socrates is famous for is this relentless probing of the interlocutor's mind and understanding, and also the relentless probing of his own mind, his own understanding of what the virtues are. And his analysis of the virtues of very often ends up in what he calls an aporia, which is a sort of a suspension of opinion and views. So Socrates will often say, actually I don't know what justice is, for example, I don't know what wisdom is, but on the other hand, I never will cease inquiring about them. And this I found very, very helpful. A clear definition of justice may always elude us, but that doesn't mean that we cannot benefit by constantly asking ourselves what justice is. And I think what Socrates in a way comes to in the end is recognizing that justice, for example, or wisdom are not things that you can define abstractly, but they are qualities of human life that are enacted in real world situations. So when we see a person in a situation acting justly, we intuitively know that that was a just or a wise or a courageous thing to do. But that doesn't require us to have some a priori definition of what that virtue is. And that's very similar to when the Buddha describes what he calls samadhi, which could be translated as the right view. It often is the right or the complete or the authentic view. Perhaps an authentic view is one in which you do not reduce your understanding to a definition about which you then claim certainty. That is what it is. We've pinned it down, but rather a constant ongoing quest into what the virtues are, what it is to be good, for example, with an understanding that you're probably always going to be asking that question as long as you are a living ethical being. After all of the reading I did of Plato and Xenophon and others, I really arrived at this sense that what united the Buddha and Socrates is that they both embodied an ethics of uncertainty, an ethics that is not founded on some metaphysical certainty, the belief in God or the belief in the law of karma, for example, but is very much about responding appropriately to the particular situations in life we have in a way that is acknowledging the centrality in our life of certain Values or virtues, and yet values and virtues which we cannot actually define.
- [61:55]
Ezra Klein
Is there comfort in all this or only discomfort? And what I mean by that is that something we so want and seek is certainty from religion, from spirituality. Tell me there is life after this. Tell me there is meaning to all this from politics. Tell me I have the right answers. Tell me this person will do the right thing. That this sort of radical ethic, spirituality of uncertainty that you're offering here, that you offer throughout your books, there's a beauty to it, I think, but also where does it leave you standing? What is this?
- [62:47]
Stephen Batchelor
Well, I have found, and I continue to find that this sort of understanding life as a work in progress, as an open ended journey to some final goal which we do not perhaps even know, to put it bluntly, really, this approach makes me feel more fully alive, it enlivens me, it keeps me on my toes. And I feel in our world today, which is so caught up in these binary conflicts that seem sometimes overwhelming politically or religiously, that there must be another way. And I think Socrates is a very, very good guide to help us perhaps let go of some of our certainties or at least release our grip on them, to allow the openness that there may be other ways of seeing these things that we may not agree with, but they have their validity, they have their role in this world too. And really to try to establish some kind of culture in which there's far greater tolerance and of difference amongst different communities, amongst different individuals, different religious groups, political groups. And I think we are witnessing in our world extreme polarization at the moment. And this may be one approach to perhaps overcome that polarization or at least to lessen its power over us. But in the end, I don't know. I mean, in the end all I can do is trust what I believe. I have a view, obviously, and to somehow try to live that.
- [64:28]
Ezra Klein
Then always. Our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
- [64:33]
Stephen Batchelor
One book I'd recommend is a book called Children of a Modest Star, subtitled Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises by Jonathan Blake and Niels Gilman, which is a wonderful reflection on how we need to imagine a form of. Of governance that has executive authority beyond the nation state itself. And they're struggling to find a way, effectively where different nations can come together to address issues like climate change. And these issues that really are not the unique, cannot be managed by national governments alone. They're not promoting a world government, but they are suggesting a form of subsidiarity which is the Sort of political concept where different areas of responsibility are nested in larger and larger ones. So I found that book extremely inspiring. Another book, and this is a Buddhist one called Work Like a How to Connect, Lead and Grow in a Noisy World by my friend Shokei Matsumoto, who is a Pure Land priest in Japan who I've got to know recently. And it's simple, it's down to earth, and it's basically based around a hypothetical conversation between a business person living in the world and a priest living in a temple in Japan. It's really good. And finally, a book called the Second Body by an English woman novelist called Daisy Hillyard. It's not a piece of fiction. It's an essay on what she calls the second body, which is a highly imaginative way of understanding that our physical body, which is sitting on this chair right here, is actually only a relatively small part of my wider body, which extends across the world in, let's say, the waste that I produce, the plastic bottles and so on that end up in the stomachs of whales or the working conditions of a garment factory worker in Bangladesh. This is an extension of my own body. And this is a short essay, and I found it was really, really brilliant. I've read it a couple of times. It's not making an argument so much as presenting a picture of our world in which we begin to feel that our own flesh and blood body is not all the body we have, but it is actually far more extended. And by recognizing the impact of our own particular physical life on this earth, we can perhaps have a greater empathy for the worldwide suffering, both economically, climactically and so forth, and so on. So they would be my three books.
- [67:26]
Ezra Klein
Stephen Batchelor. Thank you very much, Ezra.
- [67:28]
Stephen Batchelor
Thank you very much indeed. It was a wonderful conversation.
- [67:47]
Ezra Klein
This episode of the israel clancho is produced by kristen lin. Fact checking by michelle harris. Our senior audio engineer is jeff gelder. Our executive producer is claire gordon. The show's production team also includes annie galvin, marie cassione, roland hu, marina king, jack mccordick, emma kelbeck and jan kobel. Original music by dan powell and pat mccusker. Audience strategy by christina semiluski and shannon busta. The director of new york times opinion audio is annie rose strasser.