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Insightful Storytelling
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Freud was an insightful storyteller, but his theories relied on whether people bought into the story.
Similarly, there’s a push to scientifically validate meditation’s benefits to prove its efficacy.
Ezra Klein
When I read that story in your book, and I’ve read other Freudian stories, what I think immediately is, well, how does he know? I feel like now there is a tendency to prize forms of knowing that can be validated in some external way. Oh, totally. Whereas Freud was a, it always seems to be a very insightful storyteller. Yeah. But you sort of either bought into the story or you didn’t.
Mark Epstein
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same with meditation.
Ezra Klein
Tell me about that.
Mark Epstein
Well, there’s a big effort now to-
Ram Dass’ Question
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Mark Epstein recalls Ram Dass asking if he sees his patients as already free.
This question encapsulated what Epstein had learned from meditation.
Mark Epstein
Had a conversation once with Ram Dass, who, you know, Richard Albert, blah, blah, who I was very, I’ll let you explain.
Ezra Klein
Yeah, Ram Dass, a great, eventually Hindu-influenced mystic, also crucial figure in the psychedelic revolution alongside Leary, one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century.
Mark Epstein
Started out as a psychology professor at Harvard. I met him when he was already in his Indian Ram Dass incarnation, but I was just at Harvard. I was in my early 20s. And then I went to medical school, became a psychiatrist, didn’t see him for 20 years. He had a bad stroke, could hardly talk. I went to visit him and he always sort of joked with me. He was like, oh, are you a Buddhist psychiatrist now? I was like, I guess so. He said, and he had trouble making the words because he’d had a stroke. Do you see them, meaning my patients, do you see them as already free? And it like took me up short, you know, do I see them as already free? But I had to say yes, that that was like, that’s what I had gotten from the meditation side of things. But the mind is capable of something so beyond what we normally think of our minds as doing that the shorthand for that would be love.
Ezra Klein
Are you talking about something we would understand as a mind or something more like what we would understand as like the shards of a soul?
Mark Epstein
From the Buddhist side, they use the same word to talk about mind and heart. So, put that together and I think you get a soul. So, if there’s any purpose behind our incarnations as humans, the purpose would be to-
Non-Judgmental Curiosity
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Mark Epstein finds value in the non-judgmental approach, whether as a therapist or a meditator, because it fosters openness.
Suspend judgment and give impartial attention to make space for someone.
Ezra Klein
This gets to a symmetry that you point out between how Freud advised the therapist to show up. Yeah. And how Buddhist meditation advises a meditator show up, which is with this unusual spirit of non-judgment.
Mark Epstein
Suspend judgment and give impartial attention to everything there is to observe. That’s Freud, sounding like a Buddhist teacher. So tell me what is valuable about that orientation. What that mental, emotional, even spiritual state permits is an openness to the other. So when I’m being the therapist, I’m just really curious and really trying to make room for whatever it is that you, if you were my patient, whatever it is that’s happening truthfully For you in this moment. That’s what I’m encouraging. Hopefully there’s no hint of judgment. And I think that’s something that Freud was very clear about. Suspend judgment and give impartial attention to everything there is to observe. That makes space for someone, and it’s very unusual that we engage in that kind of way with each other.
Ezra Klein
And how about from the meditative standpoint? Why is that? I think most people who initially get into meditation get
