Transcript

Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps.

Steve Paulson: And I'm Steve Paulson. Do you ever have those moments when everything feels new, like your glasses suddenly get unfogged and the world appears in technicolor?

Joan Halifax: I often quote Wordsworth, "seeing deeply into the life of things," a line he wrote above Tintern Abbey. And this is this invitation to abandon our conceptual mind as we know it, and to allow ourselves to be penetrated by the 10,000 things.

Anne Strainchamps: This is the Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax, abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. And those 10,000 things, that's Buddhist for everything from trees and stars and rivers to mittens and microwaves.

Steve Paulson: Joan Halifax has done so many things in her life. Back in the 60s, she was a medical anthropologist doing cross-cultural studies of music with the folklorist Alan Lomax. She went on to field work with traditional healers in Mali and Mexico and was also an anti-war activist. Then in the 70s, she did groundbreaking studies on the therapeutic value of LSD with the psychiatrist, Stan Grof, who she was briefly married to. And around that time, she also began her formal Zen practice.

Anne Strainchamps: So it seems like there is a through line here, that there is a deeper way to experience reality and different ways to get there.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, through music or hallucinogens or meditation. But it's never just been about individual transformation. Upaya, the Zen center she founded, is known for socially engaged Buddhism. They work with prisons and the homeless and have decades of experience with end-of-life care.

Anne Strainchamps: I remember you interviewing her years ago about her book, The Fruitful Darkness, but then you caught up with her again recently in Madison.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, at a symposium on the phenomenology of mystical experience. And this was a gathering of a few dozen people, scientists and philosophers, religious scholars. She didn't say much during those two days, but when she did talk, everyone would sit up and listen very intently. I mean, she's now in her 80s, and she brings so much wisdom to any conversation she's part of.

Anne Strainchamps: From what you told me, she talked a lot about death and dying.

Steve Paulson: Roshi Joan has spent years caring for people who are dying, comforting those who are scared of death, and training hospice workers and nurses and doctors to really be there, to be “present” with a dying person in their final hours. And the remarkable thing is, she talks about this as an experience of wonder.

Anne Strainchamps: That is not how we usually talk about death and dying.

Steve Paulson: That is why I really wanted to have her on Wonder Cabinet. It was a busy conference, and the only time we had was during a short break on the last day. So we found a small room. You can hear people milling around outside. And we sat down for this conversation.

Anne Strainchamps: Let's listen.

Steve Paulson: Roshi, we tend to think of wonder, I think, as a very simple experience. It's maybe awe, amazement, curiosity. And I'm hoping we can complicate this idea. How does wonder figure in your own life?

Joan Halifax: I think it's central to my life. Suzuki Roshi used a wonderful term, and it's “beginner's mind.” It's the sense of seeing things in a very fresh way, even in circumstances that are really challenging, like sitting with a dying person, which would not necessarily be termed wonderful. But also it's the sense of awe in being able to actually come alongside another human being in the threshold between life and death. That for me is a kind of ground of wonder.

I also feel this beginner's mind metaphor points to something else, and that is not knowing, of not using conceptual frameworks as a way to separate you from the brilliance and the depth of life. There's a wonderful fascicle in the collection of writings by Eihei Dogen, a 13th century Zen teacher in Japan. And it goes something like this. The fascicle is called the Genjokoan, and it goes, "To study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be entered by the 10,000 things."

And I think that experience is so critical in terms of this project of rehumanization that we're endeavoring to unfold in our time, which is to open up to the wonder of the 10,000 things. We are in fact inhabited, at least our awareness is, inhabited by those 10,000 things, if we can but see them and look deeply into the life of them as not separate from us.

Steve Paulson: You have raised so many things, there are various things that I want to follow up on. I'm so glad that you mentioned your work with death and dying, because that is something that I wanted to ask you about. I mean, you spent decades sitting at the bedside of people who are dying, counseling them, comforting them. You've worked on death row with prisoners. I think most people would assume, oh, my goodness, there's so much pain, there's so much suffering there. Where does the wonder come in in these experiences?

Joan Halifax: Ultimately, death is a mystery to me, and I find life is a mystery to me as well. I remember when I was sitting with a woman whose father was a quite well-known actor, comedian. And when she was younger, she had been put in a psychiatric institution because she was gay. This happened in those days. And she came out bitter and broken and tried to have a life for herself for decades after that and then developed a neurological disorder where her brain would want her to do something, but her body wouldn't do it.

And she ultimately got her body to pick up sleeping pills and take those pills in an endeavor to kill herself. But she was not successful, but she entered into a vegetative state. And her partner called me and begged me to come over and be with her. And when I entered her room, their bedroom, she had just been bathed by a nursing assistant and she was chaotic and gasping. And honestly, I was a little bit disturbed by the scene.

And I sat beside her and began to, after the nursing assistant left, began to kind of breathe with her, and I kind of breathed her down, so to speak. And it was, for me, just remarkable because, as they say in the clinical world, she was in a vegetative state. But she was able somehow, or somehow we were able, to attune into each other's breathing.

Steve Paulson: So she responded to your breathing, you think?

Joan Halifax: She did. And then what was even more remarkable, I said to her repeatedly, "Sarah, you are so loved. You are so loved and it's okay to let go." And I took a big in-breath, as did she, and I sighed an out-breath, and no in-breath came in. And I had this moment of total wonder, so to speak. I felt, well, how did that happen?

When I look back at it, it felt like a miracle to me that she could be liberated in this connection. It was ineffable. It was beyond anything that I understood, because I just went in there and was intuitive in terms of what I said and what I did. It wasn't prescriptive at all.

Steve Paulson: So do you think the wonder was the ability to connect? I mean, the two of you connecting? It seems like you helped create the space where she could die.

Joan Halifax: You know, Steve, I can't say. I just felt awe in the presence of being there for someone at the moment of death. Much like I was there for my father's death and as I have been there for others' deaths. There's something that is really beyond words when that threshold is met and then passed over, because we're all mortal. We will all pass over that threshold in one way or another. And we don't know, really.

The yogis and the great Tibetan practitioners have stories, accounts of what happens at that threshold moment or in the cascade of that dying and death process and the experience. They call it death point, but I think it's more of a cascade, death cascade. But the sense of wonder and awe, because it affects, we too are mortal.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. Is this the ultimate mystery for you, death?

Joan Halifax: I don't know what the ultimate mystery is, actually. I'm deeply interested, for example, in the cosmos. I mean, are there parallel universes? Are there other civilizations on other planets far distant from us? What is the fate of our Earth the next 100 years? I live in wonder much of the time, in questions and curiosity. And also, every day I’m surprised by something. I'm very open to not knowing and the kind of joy and delight of meeting the unknown and staying in the sort of landscape of the unknowable.

Steve Paulson: It's so interesting that you have referred a couple of times to the not knowing. That is the experience of wonder. And I'm just sort of trying to put that together with what scientists do, who are often spurred on by their curiosity. They want to understand things. They also want to explain things. They want to crack the mystery of the unknown. They want to make it known. How does what you're saying fit with that enterprise of making the unknown knowable?

Joan Halifax: Well, I think the practice of meditation, or we're here in this conference on mystical states, human beings or some human beings, maybe not all, are in positions where they want to understand the basic kind of existential questions about life, death, existence, mind, consciousness, afterlife and so forth. My sense is one of the reasons why you and I have re-encountered each other this weekend is because we want to find explanations because it makes us feel secure.

But it also has to do with, if we have a framework, we're not only internally feeling more secure, the ego's more secure, we have a frame of reference that we can explain the inexplicable, unexplainable, the inchoate, the mysterium tremendum, the fascinans, you know?

Steve Paulson: We want kind of a model of what reality is all about.

Joan Halifax: But it also is related to power in a way that's unfortunate.

Steve Paulson: What do you mean?

Joan Halifax: That is, the more data or information we can have access to, the more power we have in our society. It's a kind of irony, if you will, because life as it is, is deeper and more mysterious than language.

Steve Paulson: I mean, we need facts, but you're saying facts can also mislead us or we put too much trust in them?

Joan Halifax: Well, I think we put too much trust in them, honestly. I think we put too much trust in science, though I'm glad because I recently had surgery. But actually, the first time it didn't work so well, so I had to have it again. But in any case, modern science has given us many affordances for which I am grateful. I turn on the spigot and out comes relatively clean water, or I have eyeglasses on my face and so I can see a little more clearly.

So all of that, these are wonderful affordances that science has made possible for us. But the sense of wonder, which I associate in a certain way with the very young and the very old.

Steve Paulson: We definitely think about it as for the very young. We often think of wonder as a childlike experience. Why do you say the very old?

Joan Halifax: Because of the experience that I've had with certain elders, and it's not true of all children, and it's also not true of all elders. But somehow being in the lived experience moment by moment, which the great elders that I've met have, the sense of delight, even in the face of tragedy, like, for example, Maha Ghosananda, who is a beautiful Cambodian monk who walked the killing fields with his students, this great tragedy in Cambodia. And yet I've never met someone who had more delight about him than Maha Ghosananda as an elder.

Steve Paulson: Do you think it was related in some way to what he had seen in the killing fields of Cambodia?

Joan Halifax: I actually do. I do. I think that what compassion ignites, which is this non-prescriptive, spontaneous arising compassion, is it ignites the sense of love, actually, and love for me is very embedded in the experience of wonder.

Steve Paulson: So you mentioned your surgery that you had last year, and we were talking about this the other night at dinner, and you actually had two open-heart surgeries, what, 12 days apart from each other?

Joan Halifax: It's the case.

Steve Paulson: So you must have come very close to dying.

Joan Halifax: It was. It is the case.

Steve Paulson: Did you actually have a heart attack?

Joan Halifax: No, my mitral valve failed, and then the first surgery did not work at all. And I had every complication, not every, but most complications in the book. It was a very bad 12-day period, which I experienced in a very serene state.

Steve Paulson: Why do you think you were in a serene state?

Joan Halifax: Well, I think that, honestly, Steve, I've had so many experiences related to coming alongside dying people. But I've also been a practitioner of meditation since the mid-60s. And I think that somehow my mind has been restructured as a result of having practiced for many decades.

Steve Paulson: So you were not scared of dying?

Joan Halifax: No.

Steve Paulson: Did you think you were going to die?

Joan Halifax: It wasn't, I didn't really care, actually. I was not ruminating fearfully. I went into the surgery in a very bright state of mind. I had actually no fear whatsoever. And I felt this sense of incredible gratitude.

And also, I was taken care of by these selfless nurses who were just so generous. And I was more interested in them, honestly, than I was in myself. I wasn't able to do anything for myself at all. I couldn't even adjust my own pillow. I was so sick. But the care that I was given was so selfless. It was so unselfish that it brought me to the state of profound gratitude and appreciation for the selflessness of others.

Steve Paulson: You had an extraordinary experience coming out of, I think it was the second surgery, right? Something profound happened?

Joan Halifax: Yes. So, the second surgery was quite a surprise. It was not on my dashboard, so to speak, and I don't think it was on the surgeon's dashboard either. But I will say, because my assistant, Wendy, is an ER doctor, and she said you were very, very lucky. Mostly, they would have put cow and pig parts in you. He instead redid what he had done, but he did it better the second time.

But I was very battered physically when I went into the second surgery. But actually, I went into the second surgery completely at ease, and people around me were crying, and I felt love for them, but off I went. But then, needless to say, I was taken to the ICU and, actually, I don't know how long I was in there.

But as I was simmering out of deep anesthesia, I had this very strange experience. It was like I was a bat hanging upside down in a mossy cave. I mean, but I didn't think I'm a bat hanging upside down in a mossy cave. This is in retrospect.

Steve Paulson: Did you have, like, I mean, you were imagining you were the bat? I mean, did you sort of see the bat?

Joan Halifax: No, it's a direct, I was experiencing myself hanging upside down in this kind of dark, moist, mossy environment. There was no real metacognition, but just this sense of suddenly I could feel this kind of luminosity and warmth in my supposed heart area. And it began to expand and expand and expand. And it was really an exquisite experience.

And it was going and, in retrospect, I think that I looked on it, ah, this is death, if you will, as I thought about the experience in retrospect. And it was going, going, going, expanding, expanding, expanding. And then a voice said, "You are not done with your work yet." And I came back. But this happened again and again and again.

Steve Paulson: Wait, wait, wait. This happened more than once?

Joan Halifax: Oh, many times.

Steve Paulson: All in this process of coming out of, after the surgery, coming out of anesthesia?

Joan Halifax: Yeah. And it was, at the time of the experience, I wasn't analyzing. I wasn't objectifying. It was just happening to me. I was taken by the experience. And then it was so exquisite. When you say wonder, there's someone who experiences the wonder, and there was no one experiencing the wonder, so to speak.

Steve Paulson: You weren't experiencing it?

Joan Halifax: The experience, there was no subjectivity. There was no objectivity. And it was just, it was wonderful.

Steve Paulson: Wonderful sounds like an understatement.

Joan Halifax: And it was one of those moments, again, when I finally filtered out. Of course, I was intubated and I had all kinds of lines running out of me. And I was probably a pitiful sight for those standing outside of me. But it reminds me of the death of Ivan Ilyich in the Tolstoy story, where pain drops away and then there is no death. And that was the experience. There was kind of the end of death in that moment. But then I was called back to continue working.

And I think that coming alongside so many dying people over the years, that transition at the threshold, as I've observed it over the years, has not been a transition that's usually fraught, in fact. It's more like a kind of release or liberation or sort of like, finally, you're out of jail.

Steve Paulson: You're saying, for people who are dying, it is a release. Is that just right at the end, when death is imminent, or is that sort of a longer process?

Joan Halifax: Like the Tolstoy book, and the death of Ilyich, one of the points that Tolstoy makes in that 12th chapter is that time does not exist. Tolstoy had his perspective on it. And I feel very aligned with what Tolstoy has written because that's actually what I've observed in my own experience, but also in my experience of sitting with dying people who come back a little bit and then go into the final release experience.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. We're going to take a short break. And when we come back, Roshi Joan will talk about the unexpected pleasures of growing old.

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Anne Strainchamps: Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us. We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead. I'm really excited about them. And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed. I hope you like it.

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Steve Paulson: This is Wonder Cabinet. I'm Steve Paulson. Let's get back to my conversation with Joan Halifax, the founder of Upaya Zen Center.

So you said earlier that you think wonder is especially potent for children and for the elderly. And I'm wondering how this has changed for you. I mean, you're now in your 80s. Do you think how you experience wonder is different than, I don't know, 30, 40 years ago?

Joan Halifax: Yeah, I think I was trying to objectify what I experienced. I think I'm a natural-born bean counter. You know, so...

Steve Paulson: What do you mean by that?

Joan Halifax: Well, when I was at Columbia University, I worked on this big cross-cultural project, and this was in the 1960s. They had huge computers in the basement of Columbia University. It took years to get the programs written for these massive computers. And so things like all the scattergrams, histograms, chi-squares, p-factors, all of these, you know, plotting and statistical analysis, I actually loved doing it by hand.

And so in a way, I was like this mini computer doing all of this, bean counting before anybody arrived in the office and so on and so forth. And I always enjoyed understanding from the anthropological perspective, frames of reference, how people view reality, how they view death, how they view life, what sexuality means, what gender identity means, and so on. So frameworks were always interesting to me. Now I'm at the age where I look at them as frameworks.

Steve Paulson: It's just one more interpretive model of how to understand everything. What do you do with that?

Joan Halifax: Well, one's humor is enhanced by understanding that frameworks are simply constructs. So I enjoy life more deeply, and I find myself more and more curious not to objectify but to experience. And I think that's what happened to me in the hospital. In a certain way, the horizon suddenly deepened in this state of extreme physical vulnerability where I didn't have to give language or thought to what I was experiencing, but just simply be marinated or floating in the ocean of the experience itself.

Steve Paulson: You mentioned that we're right now at a conference on the phenomenology of mystical experiences. Of course, there's a lot of debate about what is a mystical experience, but you just gave a talk and there was something you said that I wrote down because it struck me so powerfully. You said, “how do we go deeply into the life of things?”

Joan Halifax: Oh yeah, this is a line from Wordsworth.

Steve Paulson: Which, it seems like, I mean, you talk about the experience of wonder. What does that mean? How do we go deeply into the life of things?

Joan Halifax: Well, Wordsworth kind of nailed it, actually. The two processes that Wordsworth pointed to were calm and joy. And I think it's exactly these two experiences, the experience of calm that arises in deep practice or being in the natural world in a circumstance that is congruent with the possibility for calmness arising, or holding a sleeping baby, or looking, as often I do, at the extraordinary sunsets in the Southwest.

So the calm is this medium that is cultivated in meditation practice by bringing your attention first to a single object and then dropping through that experience to where you are just in the arising of phenomena moment by moment, but the phenomena are not sticking to you, you're not grasping, you're not analyzing. And I think that that experience of calm is one of the ways that we are able to look deeply into the life of things and the wonder that arises therein.

And the other is the sense of joy. Somehow, I feel like age and children allow for the prospect of fearlessness to be present. Death is close to me, and they've forgotten. They don't know any better. They got born just recently. So the blessing of ignorance is there, and the blessing of having been through a lot in one's lifetime and to know that death is inevitable, and that sense of joy that arises when you're free of the grip of fear.

Steve Paulson: It's so interesting you talk about joy, because we all want joy in our lives. And I actually think it's incredibly hard. I'll speak for myself. I mean, if I look back at a typical day, I'm not sure how often I feel joy. And it makes me sad for that. And I don't know what gets in the way of the experience of joy. I mean, it should be so fundamental and primary, right? And yet, it seems kind of difficult. But I don't think I'm that unusual, actually.

Joan Halifax: Well, you seem pretty joyful to me, actually.

Steve Paulson: Well, I like talking to you.

Joan Halifax: Well, what gets in the way of joy is our thoughts, honestly. The experience that I've had with people who have suffered immensely, like, let's just bring one to mind, Malala. And having been shot in the head for doing the good work of trying to provide a context of education in a world that disallowed that for young women. And yet her love of the world, it shines through. That's in her near-death and then her resolve to use her resources around the education of girls.

Steve Paulson: And that's the other piece of this. I mean, for you, it's not just the experience of joy, it's then, what do you do with it? How do you translate that and put that out into the world?

Joan Halifax: Well, I think this is one of the things about compassion research that is so wonderful, is that we see that it benefits not only those who are served, and it also benefits those who observe a person who's compassionate, but it deeply benefits the person who is actually compassionate, in the sense that it's morally uplifting, and not as a way for social approval or merit, but really because it just feels wonderful to meet the world with life-affirming and life-giving hands.

Steve Paulson: Well, this has been wonderful talking with you. Thank you so much.

Joan Halifax: So good to see you again, Steve. Many years ago, maybe 30 or something.

Steve Paulson: Something like that, yes. Thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you. Roshi Joan Halifax, the founder and abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. We spoke at a recent gathering on the phenomenology of mystical experience.

Anne Strainchamps: Next week, poet and editor Hannah Fries joins us to talk about A Forest Language, her new book of essays about words and trees. I'm Anne Strainchamps.

Steve Paulson: And I'm Steve Paulson. Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin and Vershire, Vermont. Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer Steve Gotcher and our digital producer Mark Riechers.

Anne Strainchamps: Every week, you hear a little bit about what we've been reading and thinking about. But, you know, I would really love to know what you're thinking about. If you have a book or a guest to recommend, something you read or saw or heard that you think should be part of this conversation, let us know. Email us at wondercabinetproductions.com. And if you haven't yet, sign up for the newsletter while you're there.

Steve Paulson: Be well and stay in touch.