What is Recovery Dharma? with Jordan Harris

What if your understanding of spirituality and recovery could be drastically transformed? Join us as we delve deep with our guest, Jordan Harris, a primary counselor at Fellowship House, who shares his enlightening journey of personal transformation. Jordan, raised in a conservative Protestant family, takes us through his journey from addiction to recovery and the crucial role spirituality played in it. 

The conversation explores the profound impact of religious trauma and theological beliefs on an individual's mental health. How did Jordan's evangelical conservative upbringing contribute to his idea of the "self"? How did he find solace in Buddhism and Eastern thought? We hear about Jordan's experiences with self-hatred, fear, and discontentment, and the role of isolation, religion and pharmaceutical pain medications in his addiction. We also delve into how his spiritual awakening helped him overcome the emotional and physical pain of alienation and addiction.

Our chat with Jordan is not just about his personal recovery but also about the potential of non-egoic spirituality in aiding recovery for others. Jordan shares his experiences with practices such as non-attachment, mindfulness, and meditation, emphasizing the importance of finding an approach that resonates personally. We explore the liberating concept of anata no self, a Zen Buddhist teaching that emphasizes the oneness underlying our individual perception. Tune in for an insightful discussion that promises to challenge your perceptions and potentially change your life.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:54

Testing one, two Testing, all right. Well, let me read something to get us started. What is recovery? Dharma? The word dharma doesn't have a single English meaning. It's a word in an ancient language called Sanskrit. It's great, and it can be translated as truth, phenomena or the nature of things. It's capitalized. The word dharma usually means the teachings of the Buddha and the practices based on those teachings. The Buddha knew that all human beings, to one degree or another, struggle with craving, the powerful, sometimes blinding, desire to change our thoughts, feelings and circumstances. Those of us who experience addiction have been more driven to use substances or behaviors to do this, but the underlining craving is the same. And even though the Buddha didn't talk specifically about addiction, he understood the obsessive nature of the human mind. He understood our attachment to pleasure and aversion to pain. He understood the extreme lengths we can sometimes go to chasing what we want to feel and running away from the feelings we fear, and he found the solution. What do you think of that?

Speaker 2: 2:26

I love it.

Speaker 1: 2:32

Hello and thanks again for listening to another episode of All Better. I'm your host, joe Van Wee. Today's guest is Jordan Harris. Jordan is our primary counselor at Fellowship House, our patient, a tenths of our patient, and our partial hospitalization program. We get to know Jordan today the summary of his background growing up in a religious family, when his addiction started and when it came to an end.

Speaker 1: 3:08

We also do a deep dive into theology, religion, influence, indoctrination on children and what happens when these children become adults, where critical thinking rises up and it's in conflict with the culture you grew up in. We also discuss what recovery dharma is and Jordan starting the first recovery dharma meeting in Lackawanna County. It's every Friday night at 7.30 at 1554 Sanderson Avenue. It's a nerd fest of two people who are attracted to theology and the tenets of Buddhism and how you can practice them without having to become a Buddhist. So let's meet Jordan Harris. All right, we're here with Jordan Harris. I'm at Jordan, I think I said in my intro maybe a little over a year ago, and now he's the new primary counselor at Fellowship House, our outpatient IOP and PHP program, jordan welcome.

Speaker 2: 4:29

Thank you, it is a pleasure to be here with you. I've been wanting to do this for quite some time, so, yeah, I'm glad to be here. Talk about a very important subject.

Speaker 1: 4:38

Jordan, if you can, can you pull that mic just straight forward? Do a little technical live technical right there? Yeah, is that a little better? Okay, jordan, is this your first podcast?

Speaker 2: 4:49

It is. It is my first podcast. I listened to quite a few podcasts, but I've never been on one myself, so first time.

Speaker 1: 4:56

Yes, what do you've been listening to? Oh, wow.

Speaker 2: 5:01

I've been back probably two decades. This American life was one of my favorite kind of original podcasts. I got into podcasting at least listening to podcasts a few decades ago. So yeah, this American life. I like a lot of true crime stuff. More recently, jack Cornfield, rom Doss there are a lot of old recordings on some podcasts that they kind of replay, and so I listened to a lot of that stuff really good, and so for contacts.

Speaker 1: 5:28

Jack Cornfield, American Buddhist. American Buddhist in the catastrophe living is that that's.

Speaker 2: 5:36

John Cabot-Zinn that's.

Speaker 1: 5:37

John Cabot-Zinn.

Speaker 2: 5:38

Yes mindfulness based stress reduction. But he's also another mindfulness practitioner who was influenced quite profoundly by Buddhist thought and practice. So, yeah, he's got some great stuff too just audio, youtube videos, books yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:54

Resources, yeah. So that's John Cabot-Zinn and then Jack Cornfield as a resource. What's your opinion?

Speaker 2: 6:01

Jack Cornfield. He studied with Ajahn Chah, who was a Thai forest monk, and Jack Cornfield, an American psychotherapist actually psychiatrist to be more specific who went over to Thailand, studied with Ajahn Chah, who was one of the foremost Buddhist teachers and practitioners in the 20th century, came back to America and kind of popularized Buddhism and mindfulness in a lot of ways. Some other figures too you might have heard of, like Tara Brock, stephen Levine, who's the father of Noah Levine, the guy that started refuge recovery. So yeah, this American, this movement in American Buddhism, is what was my kind of first introduction to the philosophy of the East and, yeah, I just really gravitated towards kind of the simplicity of the approach and presentation and guys like Cornfield and Tara Brock. So yeah, that was kind of my introduction to Buddhism. But I love listening to the podcasts, reading the books, you know that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 7:15

So if we got a field, let me put some lines on it For people maybe who don't have contacts to Eastern thought or studying a practice, a daily ritual, meditation. We're talking about people of the last hundred years, western people, and maybe some people would be definitely familiar with Ram Das or say Alan Watts, but these are other specific people.

Speaker 1: 7:44

These are almost like an academic echelon of practitioners of Buddhism, practitioners of meditation. So we're talking about people of the last 40 years that have really enlightened or brought to a really clear articulation of what Buddhism is in practice. So you got these characters like not character, I don't want to say character but great teachers. Jack Cornfield, who's never had a scandal. These legitimate guys that haven't subcum to having their own cult, which can happen to even an enlightened teacher, rise around them. Who is your? You weren't raised a Buddhist, were you?

Speaker 2: 8:28

I was not. I was raised in the evangelical church. My parents were kind of coming out of the stricter kind of earlier fundamentalism, more evangelical, conservative, theologically, a little bit looser on some other stuff. But yeah, christian evangelical, eventually Calvinist, very strict Calvinist, reform theology, yeah, and OG yeah. And you know, on a more serious, I think it is relevant, my background kind of and how I got into Buddhism, because I was raised in a theological context, in a spiritual context which was very which is looking back now very different from the kind of Eastern spirituality, buddhist practice that I gravitate towards now. So, yes, I was raised Christian in the church and, yeah, had kind of a spiritual and theological journey of my own. I was actually in the Christian ministry. I was a minister, a Protestant minister, at a Presbyterian church for seven years. I went to seminary, I studied theology. That was a big part of my life and existence. So this was, in the last few years, quite the radical change. But yeah, my spiritual kind of theological journey began with Christian theism. Wow, yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:03

So Calvinist? This is weird for me and I want you to unpack this and maybe educate me on this Sure. Sure, Calvin. You know, to my understanding and how I've come to understand Calvinistic movements, it's always put in context historically as the Christianity that became dominant in early America, Absolutely Through the Puritans.

Speaker 2: 10:27

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:28

Through the Puritans. It set the tone for capitalism of how it could be the most moral position economically. And Calvinists are a real departure from, say, lutherans. Oh sure they came. So, I guess, to educate any Catholic listeners you got the church Lutheran breaks free with some.

Speaker 2: 10:50

Yeah, let's even start earlier. I mean you've got the church, which after the time of Christ is one really united, up until about a thousand fifty years later the church splits east and west, right. So you've got the Russian Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox, the Greek Orthodox. They actually split over a phrase in the Apostles Creed. Actually, it's not even a phrase, it's a word filiokoi and the sun. So it was one word, one Greek word in the I'm sorry, not the Apostles Creed, it's a Nicene Creed that they disagreed on. They split in 1050. The 16th century rolls around. Even before that, 14th century, 13th century, you have a lot of agitators who aren't happy with what's going on in the Catholic Church.

Speaker 1: 11:36

You're kind of class wars with FB and Turkey.

Speaker 2: 11:38

Yeah, sure oh yeah, You've got the iconoclasm right. You have guys like Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, earlier than even Luther, who are saying you know I don't really like what's going on here in the Catholic Church, right?

Speaker 2: 11:52

So by the time Luther comes along in the 1500s, he's an Augustinian monk who is fed up with the practice of indulgences. And indulgences were literally paper tickets that the Catholic Church sold at the time, which, if you bought them or purchased them, you could get time off of purgatory, or you could get time off of purgatory for your loved ones, right? And that's how, in large part, St Peter's Cathedral was built off of these relevant indulgences. So this is pre-moneywheel at a church picnic.

Speaker 1: 12:24

Yes, you could buy tickets Very much so.

Speaker 2: 12:27

So Luther, as an Augustinian monk, is really fed up with that. He starts protesting. He's kicked out of the church. His big thing is justification by faith alone right. So he says oh, the Catholic Church teaches works, righteousness. You have to prove your worth to God and then maybe in the end he'll accept you. Luther says no, we're justified, we're accepted, we're saved by faith alone. Right, just by trusting, by believing. John Calvin comes along. He agrees with Luther, but he disagrees with Luther's understanding of the Lord's supper. Luther still holds to a very literal, physical view of the Eucharist. Calvin says no, it's a spiritual thing. You're not actually consuming the body and blood of Christ. But John Calvin also has a very strong kind of predestinarian emphasis. Yes, he realizes, before the world begins, the elect right and the damned right. There's absolute determination behind everything that happens. God's will is supreme right.

Speaker 1: 13:24

That's what makes him so interesting to me Manifest destiny, the kind of ideology that rises with America. This man believed in determinism and this allowed for cruelty in the sense of economic charity. Absolutely, don't worry about it. I've already decided that, absolutely. But I want to challenge one piece of history and you could correct me. Yeah, yeah, yeah sure. The other distinction I would know if I had to say the difference between Calvin and Lutheran One was really carved out of wood and that was. Calvin Luther kind of acquiesced to power. He did.

Speaker 1: 14:04

And when you know there was a letter written to him to now go out and quell the rioting throughout Germany Right. And what does he do? He says the church has righteous authority for violence and power Right and to crush these peasants.

Speaker 2: 14:21

Mm-hmm. Yeah, the peasants, the peasant revolt. Yeah, the wars, the rebellions, yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:25

And then I got a real, true character, the guy. This is how far he could go academically, he could challenge the church intellectually. But when violence broke out and people were desperate for food, he writes a letter endorsing the violence used by the nobles, the noble family, to quell the rebellion. Yeah, and I'm like there's the difference, because when it got hot he sighed it with power. He did, and it was very specific. It wasn't like everyone calmed down. He said people deserved to die.

Speaker 2: 14:56

Oh sure. That were riding against the crown of the church, yeah, and then when he went off into the Wartburg Castle I believe early on in his ministry there were agitators. Right, the peasants were rebelling yeah, and early on he supported violence. He was an advocate of violence. Later on he became very anti-Semitic and just verbally Deicide charging deicide everywhere. But yeah, luther individually is an interesting person, yeah, and cut from a different cloth slightly, I guess, when we kind of compare him to Calvin relative to Calvin.

Speaker 1: 17:26

But he was raised in privilege and he was adopted in that privilege so that probably you and I, coming from a clinical experience, could see what that formed in a personality. He's offered privilege through grace and adoption and an education. Calvin, that dude is like. He reminds me of some militant version of Wilmhoff, yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:51

He just looks ripped. Yeah, yeah, and that's Calvin. My father began exploring Calvinism when I was a teenager and he began just voraciously reading Puritan and Reformed literature and I was exposed to a lot of that, but Calvin was the golden standard. Calvin was as close to orthodox as you can possibly get. Calvin, some of the other later figures, but yeah.

Speaker 1: 18:18

Let's depart for a second. Let me ask. I'm Uncle General and Calvin. I better get Poppy the personal story you said your dad just started reading that. When you're a teenager, what were you and your youth, what was your understanding, say, the first 10 years of your life? Of what if there was a second realm operating a divinity somewhere? And then you kind of enter Calvinism in your teenage years?

Speaker 2: 18:41

So my parents were both raised kind of fundamentalist Southern Baptist and my father's theological journey I would say more kind of revivalistic evangelical. My first 10 years Well, I wouldn't even say first 10 years, that's first about like 15 years growing up so free will, so very different from kind of the Calvinism free will Baptist. That's kind of part of our family's heritage. That's another kind of interesting group of people. But yeah, we believed very strong theism so God's up there.

Speaker 2: 19:19

You know, in terms of predestination, things like that, we really didn't talk about that. We focused more growing up on the decision that was necessary in order to be safe. We needed to make this decision for Jesus, we need to accept him into our heart, we need to have this kind of faith and show that faith by deciding for Christ and for a life of holiness and also baptism. So we are Baptists in the outward sign of baptism was kind of very important, but it was evangelical conservative Protestantism I would say kind of my father's shift to Calvinism was was kind of an evolution, I guess, and grew out of his already existing kind of conservative evangelical theology. But we were taught that you know, god is loving but God is also just and filled with wrath.

Speaker 2: 20:15

And if you do not accept Jesus into your heart and follow him and give your life to him, you will experience in hell, eternal conscious torment forever. That was really at the center of our soteriology, our doctrine of salvation, heaven and hell right. If you choose to be a Christian right, you'll live with God in heaven forever or the new heavens and the new earth. If you rebel, your body and your soul will be tormented by God forever and ever. And imagine as a child being exposed to that kind of thing. I've become interested. I don't have to.

Speaker 2: 20:56

Just even more recently, in religious trauma and theological trauma. And as I look back, it's actually a new book coming out specifically on religious trauma, and I can't remember the lady's name who wrote it, but she talks about how theological systems and particular religious beliefs can have a profound effect upon the developing brain of a child. When you're told, or that God literally hates you, or an adult, or the planet, or the planet, yeah, whoever gets us all killed, yeah, it doesn't matter. I mean, god is kind of up there and he's mad at the world, right. So, and who's false? That, right, right. Well, it's your fault. You're dead in trespasses and sins. You're a spiritual zombie. We were, we referred to ourselves as worms. Right, we're worms, we're nothing. We're always having to kind of measure up and that's exhausting, spiritually exhausting.

Speaker 1: 21:52

And there's a paradox that can't be reconciled and I always note this in the sense Judaism they forgot to lift one piece of a religion that preceded them. They should have took that part in Zoroastorism that there's an equal.

Speaker 2: 22:09

Yes. Like the yin and yang that would have gave Mesopotamia the rest of it the yin and yang that there's another opposed to God, and you have, even in early Christianity, the Gnostics who you know. We're putting forward something like similar.

Speaker 1: 22:23

Yeah, they can reconcile what? Why does evil exist from an omnipotent purity? It's just a monk's game to think OK, what is it? Is it accidental creation or Lucifer or Satan? And he it just. It's nonsensical. But of course you would have to teach that to children, because a race, it's your memory, you're race, secular, and now a man approaches you and teaches you these things. You're not going to submit as easily to these. You know fantastical claims, right, and that's what they are. Yeah, yeah, and I get it. I get religions. But I think the consequences are much higher today, especially politically. Sure, oh yeah, politics can replace religion and that's even really scary.

Speaker 2: 23:15

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:16

The framework's there for a binary kind of opposition a leader, an enemy. A leader the real fun begins after you're dead, so it'll all come clean in the wash. Don't worry, we'll get our it's. It's madness. It is madness when we could split atoms. And people are thinking this way and are in charge of this kind of weaponry. Right, all right. I went on too long.

Speaker 2: 23:39

No, it's dualism, though, and I think, yeah, that's what you're talking about, you know, and Suzuki Roshi, and that gets kind of us back into Buddhism he talks about dualism as kind of a major source of suffering. So, yeah, dividing reality in that way and seeing ourselves and this higher power, this angry God, in this way, I just want to point out you've probably read Jonathan Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, right?

Speaker 1: 24:07

Yeah, or heard of it at least right, funny story.

Speaker 2: 24:10

That was actually the tract that we passed out on the streets of Scranton as when I was a teenager in the reform church, so that's, you know, that's kind of the, that's kind of the Christianity, the evangelicalism, the well reform theology that that all of that proceeding kind of Christian thought and practice eventually led to. But I think that's kind of funny that at one point I was handing out Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Yeah, funny and tragic, I guess.

Speaker 1: 24:40

Well, let's tie this off in a way that's really understood. Sure, the community is powerful and there's beautiful people.

Speaker 2: 24:48

Oh, absolutely. I'm sure you're raised around?

Speaker 1: 24:50

Oh, absolutely. We've discussed wonderful people, but are they?

Speaker 2: 24:53

wonderful because of Calvinism?

Speaker 2: 24:55

No, in spite of Calvinism they're wonderful because they have Buddha nature, because their essence is something good and worthy and compassionate and present, in spite of how much religious baggage they pile on top of that. I don't think it ever goes away. So you did and I certainly did, especially my mother. She's. She's someone who, who I love, and someone who, in spite of, I think, that kind of theology and practice, is a genuinely good person and a compassionate person, and the churches are filled with these people. It's sad because the delusion and the ignorance is there and yet you know, like I once was, it's nurtured weekly too.

Speaker 1: 25:43

Exactly yeah, it is nurtured weekly.

Speaker 2: 25:46

And it's and I'm not talking universally here about Christianity as a whole I want to make that clear. This is kind of this form of evangelicalism, calvinism. But yeah, when you're exposed to that week after week, it almost becomes a kind of cultish thing right when you know. I think there is manipulation and there's an in group.

Speaker 1: 26:09

There's an out group. Oh yeah, absolutely. The cults, apostates, are punished and it's painful, even if you're quietly know that you're being critical now of things that define the fiber of your community. How do you let go of it? You're going to be an outcast. This is why people are excited.

Speaker 2: 26:25

And you're excommunicated from the church too.

Speaker 1: 26:28

I've heard people, my friends, they're strictly Catholic, mocking Scientology. I'm like what do you think? What do you think you're standing? You drink blood, man. You drink blood of a carpenter who was Jewish, that you're calling Christian. Yeah, you're eating his flesh. What are you talking about? Yeah, so right. When did your suffering begin? In the midst of? This Like if someone had a point, I know you believe in trauma and informed base definitions of the rise of addiction.

Speaker 1: 26:57

This could this failed coping mechanism that becomes this complex response and connection with an addiction. When did your suffering begin and how did it begin?

Speaker 2: 27:10

That's a great question. Well, as far back as I can remember and I think this has probably a lot to do with what we just talked about I always remember having this inherent sense of just self-hatred. I never loved myself, never could accept myself, and again, we just talked about it. You sit in church, week after week, You're told that God hates you. That's going to have an effect, I think, upon your psyche, upon your self-concept.

Speaker 2: 27:44

So from a very early age I was afraid of the world, I would say I was afraid of myself. And that became just even more pronounced in my teenage years. I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease the age of 16, along with some other health issues liver problems, which we'll get into, but if we do talk about my story and addiction, kind of how that played out and how that affected it. But I began really suffering, I think, psychologically, with this underlying sense of self-hatred, this fear, this discomfort, this discontentment, which is really what the Buddha defines as suffering, right, Just discontentment, dissatisfaction, this sense of underlying just frustration which these illnesses only kind of compounded. But… and this is pre-addiction.

Speaker 2: 28:42

This is getting right up to about where the addiction began in my teenage years 15, 16 years old, yeah, so running parallel, interestingly, to my theological and religious journey, because around this time I actually became more interested in the church and more interested in actually spending my life in Christian ministry. So, running parallel to all this Crohn's disease, liver problems, this kind of religious evolution, spiritual evolution, wanting to become a minister was this very self-destructive addiction which I basically hid from everyone for a long time too, because I lived two different lives. One life was Jordan Harris, minister of the gospel right. One life as Jordan Harris, snorting pills and eating Xanax and drinking myself into oblivion.

Speaker 1: 29:37

Was there two sets of friends involved in this? No, this is isolation. It was isolation, pure isolation. Oh god yeah.

Speaker 2: 29:43

I mean at first… Sounds scary man. Yeah, it really was. And yeah, I think just the pain of that isolation, that disconnection, what the Buddha calls this sense of separateness, right Out of that just emerged a tidal wave of suffering in my own life. And yeah, we can talk about that kind of the addiction story too, I do.

Speaker 1: 30:08

I want….

Speaker 2: 30:09

That's kind of where a lot of this really just intense, profound dissatisfaction with life, alienation, felt, just kind of alienation. That's where it really just kind of started to begin for sure.

Speaker 1: 30:25

I want to pause kind of in that area, Before you found a drug of your choice a drug that bonded it made sense. What did you think was wrong? And did it go to the heart of you? You're not faithful enough, you're not practicing. Did you think there was any way that a faithful person should be able to experience pleasure or at least contentment, and did you think you were…? Was something missing in your faith that was blocking you from having an enjoyable life Like how did you?

Speaker 2: 31:01

reconcile that before you started One question, yeah Well, my faith pretty much consisted of knowledge, so I, as a Christian, was very interested in the theological and philosophical components of Christianity.

Speaker 1: 31:19

And you did this undergrad, just to know, and you have a master's in divinity.

Speaker 2: 31:24

Right, yes, so I love that aspect of it that took my mind off of the distractions, the sufferings, the pain. I just loved reading, I loved studying, I loved learning new things. I never felt that Christian practice was very powerful in my life to create any kind of felt sense of peace or joy. There were moments, but for me, my religion, my spirituality, was pretty much purely intellectual for a long time. Again, there were those practical components but, yeah, I filled my head with knowledge and my heart was essentially starved and just longing for something more, without even realizing it. So, yeah, I think knowledge and interestingly enough because the Calvinism we were just talking about is so nonsensical and irrational, so that became kind of the obsession.

Speaker 2: 32:33

The study of the scholastics and the ancient theologians and the fathers I love Greek and Hebrew and Latin, right Languages were a big kind of part of my early education. So I really threw myself into that part of it. But as I look back even today, like I don't see much practically coming out of that, as I gave myself more and more to this kind of life and way of thinking, I saw my life and my soul, my spirit, just fracture and suffer more. Yeah, and I think that's because I didn't have any kind of spiritual practice which helped liberate me from the pain and the suffering that I was experiencing at the time. I found that subsequently in Eastern thought and in Buddhism, but in Christianity I never did. That's not to say that there aren't those who do not profit from Christian practice.

Speaker 1: 33:36

But I think I'm hoping that's understood. Yeah, that's your position. So you're on a crash course for something that could be relieving this lack of intimacy, this view, perspective on yourself, which a lot of addicts, myself included, can have. What takes it away in the most meaningful way? How did you give birth? Or it's not even to you. How did an addiction make sense to you?

Speaker 2: 34:08

When did it give you relief? Wow, yeah Well, it began through opioid pain medications which were kind of thrown at me from an early age because I had so many illnesses. So it started with physical pain, I think because what's Crohn's disease? So Crohn's disease is a gastrointestinal disorder. It's an autoimmune disease which affects the gut. So symptoms include severe abdominal pain, cramping, profuse diarrhea. Having no control, I had to have surgery to take out the majority of my large intestine to actually somewhat fix what was going on in there. So it's all sort of colitis is similar, it's the inflammation of all this stuff down there. And when they did surgery on me they said they hadn't seen a case that was this red.

Speaker 2: 35:06

It was just bloody guts. So that's kind of what it was. It turned me into what's the word Blanking here, the person who can't get out of the house Agoraphob yeah, it turned me into an agoraphob, yeah, basically. So I isolated for a number of years in high school, didn't have friends, Didn't really have connections. I was really homebound and had access to pain medications.

Speaker 1: 35:32

Do you just subscribe to any ideas? Say like the ormate or the trauma when the body says no. Do you think there's an emotional or a relationship to this condition? Is just being internalized trauma? Yeah, even from the crones, or yeah, Diseases of inflammation, which are most you know, I guess you could say all diseases yeah. But do you subscribe to? There's an emotional component that can cause yes.

Speaker 2: 36:05

Disease. I agree, yeah, yeah. And Gabor Maté does a lot with that. I think he shows how brain and body are intimately connected. The release of cortisol in the brain ends up, oh yeah, just affecting everything. Yeah, and crones is actually a disease that Gabor Maté talks about as quite possibly, maybe even originally coming out of just this stressful, traumatic culture, traumatizing culture that we live in, right, all of the stress and the division and the strife and the warfare and the trauma contributes to illnesses like this. So, yes, I do hold to that view.

Speaker 1: 36:43

Yeah, absolutely Anyone interested. The book both of us are references when the body says no.

Speaker 2: 36:48

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 36:48

Wonderful book. It indicates a portion about inflammation, diseases of inflammation and generational trauma, which he widely specifically defines what that means.

Speaker 2: 37:00

Yes, the myth of normal is great too. I think it was one of his more recent ones.

Speaker 1: 37:05

Yeah, I didn't finish it.

Speaker 2: 37:07

Yeah, he talks a little bit about that as just the cultural implications of trauma stress and all those things.

Speaker 1: 37:16

So to get back to the kind of linear narrative, Jordan, you're introduced at an early age to pain relief, pharmaceutical pain relief. When did it become euphoria?

Speaker 2: 37:27

I think it probably did from the beginning. I think I was trying to solve, anesthetize emotional pain, right, because, as we had talked about, there's all that stuff. From childhood I think I already hated myself, I already was kind of alienated and divided against myself, and so I think that it became inseparable from the physical. I really actually think that physically opioid pain medications as kind of analgesic for physical pain, that was part of it. But I think the emotional component was probably the more significant one, the more significant thing there for sure.

Speaker 2: 38:11

So yeah, just using these drugs, because the pain of separateness was just too intolerable, this pain of self-alihanation was just too intolerable, and that only, I think, progressed as I continued on in my using. It is a progressive phenomenon.

Speaker 1: 38:29

How long did this addiction last afterwards, after the first introduction? How many years was this going on for?

Speaker 2: 38:36

So let's see here I use, I think let's see first time, 15 years old. I used pretty steadily consistently right up until just a few years ago. So my early 30s, yeah, it was.

Speaker 1: 38:56

What brought it to an end Like what?

Speaker 2: 38:58

Yeah, what brought it to an end? Well, there was an incident, an event kind of that brought it to an end. My children found me slumped over my toilet, passed out on Xanax. I think I had been snored and victed in that night drinking, basically wanting to get as close to death as possible without dying. That's why I love Downer's. You were doing an experiment.

Speaker 1: 39:22

Oh yeah, sure.

Speaker 2: 39:23

Yeah, if I could be unconscious, if I could black out right People usually don't use Xanax because they black out right. I liked that part of it. I didn't really want to live anymore, but I was too afraid to actually go through with it myself or do anything like that. But my children found me and I remember just the horror and the pain and the sadness in their faces, in their eyes. So that was when I woke up just to how I was destroying myself in a very profound, powerful way. I had alienated myself from my family, from my children. I had gone through a very toxic and difficult divorce in 2015. I was married for seven years. So talk about trauma. That kind of just contributed to, I think, some of the suffering in my life.

Speaker 2: 40:20

We moved from Philly, where I was going to seminary and living with my wife, back here to Scranton. I moved in with my parents and I began raising two kids by myself, with the help of my mom. It was very difficult. My addiction 2015, 2016 got really bad around that time and, yeah, I just continued to devolve until that night where I just talked about and my mother helped me find some rehabs to kind of look into.

Speaker 2: 40:50

I didn't know what Brookdale was. I had never heard of it but it looked like a nice place. So I called them up and they were wonderful, they got me in and that was, I think, the beginning of my transformation from sad, suffering, traumatized, separate, divided, alienated individual just dissatisfied with life, into someone who began enjoying and loving life again. I never thought it was possible, but it came about, and I attribute that to a number of things. But the people at Brookdale were instrumental in helping me recover. Yeah, so yeah, that was a number of years ago, a few years ago, and since then I've been progressing, I guess, evolving, in my spiritual journey, in my pursuit of spiritual practice, my interest in Buddhism, my counseling career, my interest in psychotherapy, those kinds of things. All of this just within the last few years. Have, all of this has kind of begun happening in the last few years.

Speaker 1: 42:10

So if you want to pick a portion of that solution you had, a clinical experience at.

Speaker 2: 42:14

Brookdale.

Speaker 1: 42:15

You are very well versed in a theological intellectual. Would you call the solution still in the realm of spirit? Would it be spiritual? Spiritual being that it's also including the idea of this transient personality, a temporal space. What do you call the spiritual transition of recovery today? How did that? That's great.

Speaker 2: 42:40

Yeah, talking about spirituality, I actually like to go to the big book I like to go to on spiritual experience, on the appendices in that book, because it's explained in such just a simple way. So spirituality for me is not about religion, it's not about God. It can be if you want it to be, but spirituality is fundamentally about connection, first of all, right, and the Buddha says that our suffering arises out of the sense of separateness, out of the sense of self, out of the sense of ego, right? So what is the, what's the solution to that? It's connection, right. And I learned in Brookdale, right, kind of that, that phrase, that cliche I guess, but it's true, I like it the opposite of addiction being connection, right. So, yeah, connection and transformation. And on spiritual experience, in the big book they talk about this, the educational variety of spiritual experience which is more slow and progressive, right, dr Bob's kind of experience. He talks about craving liquor for two years in his story. Bill Wilson has kind of this mountain top momentous change. He still struggles, right, with depression and.

Speaker 2: 43:49

PTSD and those kinds of things. But his addiction to alcohol is almost kind of just changed in a moment in a very significant and powerful way. So two kinds of religious experience. His mind was more kind of slow and educational, but there was also kind of that immediate nature to it as well, just going into Brookdale. But yeah, connection and transformation, you know, for me that is it's not so much connection to a personal God, it's connection to and grounding in the present moment. It's seeing suffering for what it is, seeing myself for who I am, as one piece connected to the larger whole. And growing out of that, transforming, out of that sense of connection, out of that sense of relation. Interbeing is what Tick-Not Hahn calls it right. So yeah, interbeing, so nothing can exist, nothing exists on it. So in the Buddha says after his enlightenment that if this exists, that must exist right.

Speaker 1: 44:53

So we're rendering our own reality. What kind of horror story would that be Right.

Speaker 2: 44:58

So you look at this piece of paper and Tick-Not Hahn says can you see the cloud and the sunshine in this piece of paper? And on the surface, no, but you know, when you really look deeply into it, you see the sunshine, right. That's necessary for the trees to grow and for this paper to become what it is. You see the clouds in this piece of paper right, the rain that causes the trees to grow, and all of it, right, made up of non paper elements. Yet still, here's this piece of paper, right.

Speaker 2: 45:24

So, interbeing, interconnection, my sense of oneness with the whole of reality, which I think is a sounder at least for me and more workable kind of version of spirituality than some of the spiritual practices that I had been exposed to in the past.

Speaker 1: 45:43

So yeah, I'd like to maybe just summarize some stuff we've been talking about before I would like to make a transition for the last portion of this short talk about art, but the summary.

Speaker 1: 45:57

take Christianity or any kind of labels aside. I like looking at the brain just in the terms of using different words, so it's just a little more concrete. You can see the input the brain. It's a hard drive. The brain has a couple choices for cultural perspective. Before it's a, you download it or it's given to you. It's a forced download and it comes with viruses, failed logical understandings of the world, science, psychology, and sometimes this predominantly comes in the form of a religion downloads.

Speaker 1: 46:34

This could cause a lot of physical problems to that hard drive. They can manifest throughout the whole body and it gives someone this illusion against a whole truth, that you're disconnected. There's me, subject and other. There's a separation of the world, as if there's a soul that operates in my brain, separate from my experience. This, this could cause, it could double suffering like that. There is some other sense of self that's behind my face, yeah, and I'm not the full body, just experience of what's emerging. I have to do nothing to cause reality, but somehow it's a religion will tell you, it's all in your hands and however this goes, you're gonna, you're, you're stationary and stuck with how this life goes forever. Right, what kind of?

Speaker 2: 47:30

way, is that Sure, sure.

Speaker 1: 47:33

This could cause a lot of pain. Yeah, and I think addiction, and I think it seems clear I don't want to be arrogant that civilization and culture cause addiction. I don't think hunter gatherers were really suffering too much from the pining. It's a good point, yeah, and so when people group together, we lose control of the sense of. Someone has to make my bread. He's the breadmaker. What if I'm alone? I don't know how to make bread. I don't know how to defend myself. I'm not a soldier. I don't know how to you know weld. I don't know how to get alone. This, this is all separated from my independence of taking care of myself. This, this is going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. Addiction is a great solution to this right. This anxiety, yeah, this, this, this, this, I guess disregard of the truth that we are a whole, connected. We were on the same planet, we came from these, the same mud. I think addiction is needs to be tackled existentially.

Speaker 2: 48:34

Some people always tell me oh your lecture.

Speaker 1: 48:38

I tell them about our lectures. They're like oh, that's too high brow for writing.

Speaker 1: 48:43

Yeah, tell me how many people you ignored that you're not keeping track of. They didn't give that lecture to right. I'm not having that experience. People want that to discuss this. This is where addiction could be confronted. Yeah, you'd, your story does that, and I think most stories I hear do that. Yeah, the connection is just like this. So this, this, this relief, that the charges on my shoulders, or that I'm alone, or that someone needs to be in my brain to have my experience. This is just what an exhausting game.

Speaker 1: 49:19

It is to make you feel alone. It is yeah. How did you, how did you vibrate, how did you connect? How did you get drawn to recovery dharma?

Speaker 2: 49:31

Yeah, great question. So, interestingly, in treatment I really wasn't interested in mindfulness. I remember the lady who led the mindfulness and meditation classes and I was just kind of impatient throughout the whole thing. I didn't really like it, Didn't really understand it. I guess, Coming out of Brookdale, I did a lot of AA and that's how I got sober through the 12 steps, and I am indebted to a into the 12 steps and helping me get sober. I liked the spirituality of AA. I like the spirituality of the program. What a lot of people don't understand, though, is that the spirituality of AA is is more of kind of a Western oriented spirituality that's rooted in Christianity and kind of generic kind of Protestantism. The Oxford movement, which is not to say anything against it. It has its own kind of distinguishing, you know, and unique features. I liked that spirituality.

Speaker 1: 50:34

What do you think it is? You absolutely agree, it's obvious. But what do you use? Isn't it wild that they use the word awakening? It is, yes, I mean that.

Speaker 2: 50:44

I think Bill Wilson was ahead of his time in so many respects really. I mean, before the explosion of mindfulness in the West, you have Bill Wilson talking about meditation daily.

Speaker 2: 50:55

Yeah, twice a day, absolutely yeah. So, and I love Bill Wilson and I think he was a genius of sorts who was just remarkably ahead of his time in a lot of ways. So I loved that aspect of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know the prayer, the theism, you know some of that stuff. I was kind of gradually coming out of that and I discovered through a counselor that there was this recovery program that emphasized kind of mindfulness and meditation and Buddhist practice. As you know what was central about their program? Using Buddhism to help individuals overcome addiction. So you know, I was interested in that because, again, I had kind of grown dissatisfied with, you know this, this kind of spirituality I was trying to, you know, put together from scratch really, because at that point I had kind of abandoned it, the religious and theological baggage of the past after Brookdale, post Brookdale. So I was like, okay, recovery Dharma, this sounds cool.

Speaker 2: 52:04

I started kind of reading about it. I knew about Buddhism because I had studied world religions, hinduism, eastern thought. So that was always an interest of mine. I was always more kind of focused on Western scholarship, but the East was always an area that I wanted to kind of study. So I started reading some books. Guys like Tick Nutt Han. Guys like Jack Cornfield, who we talked about. Individuals. Women like Tara Brock, ram Dass, who's more of kind of an Eastern spiritualist with with a lot of just Buddhism there as well, but started really just kind of voraciously reading these guys and attending online meetings of recovery Dharma. That's kind of how I got started.

Speaker 2: 52:45

Recovery Dharma has had, from its beginning in 2019, a very strong online presence and I would encourage anyone interested to go to the recovery Dharma website and if you're interested in just seeing what it's all about, you can hop on a meeting. They have them at any time. But that's kind of how I got started with that. I started attending online meetings. I started reading the recovery Dharma texts which they put out in 2019. And they just updated. Actually, it's a great update. I just read through some of it last night in preparation for this. But they put out that text and, yeah, slowly I began incorporating mindfulness and meditation into my practice and seeing the fruits of it, seeing myself transform, seeing myself able to just let some of these things go that I never had been able to let go of before Because, again, this was a different kind of spirituality.

Speaker 2: 53:42

It was a more indirect, mystical, non Western, precognitive kind of spirituality which really focused on the here and now right, the lived experience of awakening in the here and now. I loved that and it transformed me and I started a meeting. I began seeing the fruits of recovery Dharma my own life. I began really just getting passionate about it. So I was counseling at a facility here a few years ago and I started a meeting there. People started attending it. People started seeing their lives changed through mindfulness and meditation. So really it's been a few years now I've been doing recovery Dharma and that has become for me really central to my practice of recovery. I still do AA. I helped create an AA meeting at a previous facility but I love and I still attend AA meetings today, but I love recovery Dharma and that for me is kind of central to at least my journey.

Speaker 1: 54:42

Yeah, how many people in the population that comes to your meeting Sure, and for listeners that meeting, if you're from Scranton or Lake Wana County, that's Friday nights at 730. Yeah, 1554 Sanderson Avenue.

Speaker 2: 54:58

Yes.

Speaker 1: 55:00

That'll be recovery Dharma. It's an hour. But, how many people are in AA that attend the meeting? Yeah, if you had a shoot, throw dart at the wall.

Speaker 2: 55:08

Probably most of them.

Speaker 1: 55:09

I'll say over two thirds. Yeah, oh, for sure. Yeah, I've gone to recovery Dharma prior to meeting you and I connected.

Speaker 2: 55:17

I was going to refuge recovery.

Speaker 1: 55:18

Yes, so anyone who's listening started, yeah. There's refuge started first and there was a little offshoot and a faction break. But I go to recovery Dharma. I love their book but there's a lot of similarities. So, like for the Western idea, these are the similarities. There are exercises.

Speaker 2: 55:39

You are still taking an inventory.

Speaker 1: 55:41

Yeah fronting things. You're making amends, but there's a real specific lens to how to approach life and why it's sacred. And it doesn't involve Monoth like Monotheism, right, it doesn't involve. You know, bill's innovative way to say the God of your own understanding, right, skirts that a little to the just this open idea. So I want to ask you maybe just some really sure, tangible question Sure, what is Dharma?

Speaker 2: 56:12

so Dharma has been translated in a number of ways truth teaching phenomena, dharma in recovery Dharma is specifically referring to the group of teachings that we use as a tool in overcoming our addictions and our attachments. So, specifically, dharma in Recovery Dharma is the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and the Eightfold Noble Path. That's really the essence.

Speaker 1: 56:47

So what order do they come in? How do you like Mm-hmm? So if someone just took a brief synopsis or understood Buddhism and they could, say those two things four noble truths. Yeah, a full path right. How do they lay on top of each other? Yeah, inner wine, sure, sure. How was this program using? Do you have to be a Buddhist to?

Speaker 2: 57:07

do this Right? Great question. I'll answer the last question first. Absolutely not. No, you do not have to be a Buddhist. You don't have to Disavow any kind of theism, right? You don't have to step going to church. You don't have to stop reading your Bible. If that's what you do that's not what I do, but you know, if you want to have that kind of spirituality, a lot of people use the practice of Buddhism as a supplement to their practice of recovery or spirituality whatever that might be, or Christianity.

Speaker 2: 57:40

Yeah, there are a number of Christians who I've met who have profited immensely from Buddhist practice. Tick-not Han actually wrote a book called living living Buddha, leaving Christ, in which he talks about the intersections between Christianity and Buddhism, so there there is. There is that?

Speaker 1: 57:57

no, you don't quick one, quick interjection. There's always that quote Gandhi had. He goes. I would have been a Christian, but I've met too many, oh right.

Speaker 2: 58:06

Yes, I think there's a reason for that too. I do, and that's a different discussion. But yeah, so how do these two concepts right?

Speaker 1: 58:14

They're the two major morsels of what you would say Buddhism is, and Buddhism rose out of Hinduism. I guess, to oversimplify, al watts always said Buddhism is Hinduism for export. Yeah, you have the two huge ideas. Yeah, how does one even look at these two chunks for no and apply them towards a recovery program?

Speaker 2: 58:38

Sure, so the four noble truths of Buddhism, just to kind of give a little bit of a background. So the Buddha, right he's, he's raised in wealth. The story goes allegedly he's raised in privilege, he's still dissatisfied, senses that there's this suffering that exists In spite of the wealth and the pleasure that he experiences growing up. He leaves his family at the age of 29. The story goes, he becomes a wandering ascetic. And that day of Vedism, which had kind of morphed into Hinduism, in that religion the prop predominant form of spirituality was ascetic spirituality. So, punish the body, purify the spirit, right and the Buddha. And the Buddha thought initially that that might be a way to kind of rid ourselves from this suffering.

Speaker 2: 59:30

The Buddha was on a quest. He was on a quest to find an answer to the problem of suffering, a way to transform suffering An experience of, maybe we might say, the cessation of suffering. So that was kind of his Initial thought. Maybe I'll be hard on my body. He joined this kind of group of wandering ascetics, but one night he meditates under a tree.

Speaker 2: 59:55

The next day he says he's enlightened and he says that these four noble truths, along with the Eightfold Path, are, you know, kind of at the core of what was, I guess, what he was enlightened to. So the four noble truths, I would say, are descriptive. They describe Reality as it is. The Eightfold Path, I would say, is more prescriptive. Right, the Eightfold Path gives us A path that leads to the end of suffering. So the Eightfold Path is what the Buddha found, it's the tool that he uses, or used, I should say, to free himself from the suffering. The suffering, but, but the but. The four noble truths kind of start with the description of what reality is and why we need kind of freedom from this. Maya, yeah, the Maya.

Speaker 1: 1:00:46

The illusion, the real reality. So he describes reality, or you could say he's giving you the terms of the illusion. These are the four noble truths. Here's the game. Right, here's the game. This is what it is foundations of the game of reality you can't change. And now the Eightfold Path is, I believe he believed, the best way to navigate through this game.

Speaker 2: 1:01:06

Yes and not get, just have unintelligent suffering, dumb suffering, not suffering goes away right and that's a great point too it's not the annihilation of suffering, it's the transformation of suffering. So, unlike Christianity, which has this kind of get back to that, the eschatological emphasis, right, this kind of perfection, this paradise that we're all working towards, the Buddha says no, there's no state in which suffering doesn't exist. But we can transcend it, we can transform it, we can live without suffering, defining who we are or panicking.

Speaker 1: 1:01:41

Yeah, eating pleasure to be the cure. Yeah, to anesthetize.

Speaker 2: 1:01:44

Yeah, the pain of the suffering. Yeah, absolutely sure.

Speaker 1: 1:01:48

Let's go through a couple things, and then I have a couple questions.

Speaker 2: 1:01:52

Okay, I definitely want to.

Speaker 1: 1:01:54

So he comes to these terms. What are the four noble truths?

Speaker 2: 1:01:58

So the four noble truths. Do you want me to give you the recovery Dharma version or kind of my version? I'll do both.

Speaker 1: 1:02:05

How about I do?

Speaker 2: 1:02:05

both. Yeah. So the four noble truths, recovery Dharma and you'll find just different translations, maybe phrase it a little bit differently, but in this life there is suffering, the truth of suffering, that's. That's the first noble truth. And in recovery Dharma we do these readings before every meeting. We also, as we read this, add that we commit to understanding the truth of suffering. So suffering is a noble truth. Tick-naught Han says it's a holy truth, because when we look deeply into our suffering and the Buddha did this we see the path towards enlightenment. So if suffering exists right opposites there's dialectic here then its opposite must exist, well-being must exist. So included within the first noble truth is the answer, the path, and that's why it's so important we look deeply into our suffering, we identify the causes of our suffering and we Commit to the path which leads to the end of suffering. But that's the first one, right? That's the first suffering, yeah, and that's dissatisfaction, that's.

Speaker 1: 1:03:14

It's a knowledge, it's a note in this one before we go to Duke. Yeah, would it be similar to say someone's idea that foundation to To step one and say a that there's very, very good. Yeah. Is there any ownership that has to be subscribed to? Am I causing the suffering or is right that reality just has suffering this? Where does agency get more right first? Noble truth.

Speaker 2: 1:03:43

Yeah, great question. I think agency comes in more, probably with the second noble truth and the causes of suffering. But I think this is more, at least as I see it, descriptive of what reality is as a whole. Right, this sense of Frustration I shouldn't say reality as all it's it's our felt experience in this world as human beings, with this hunger yes, exactly, wandering mind desire right all of those things.

Speaker 2: 1:04:13

So this is how it is right. Right, it's, it's how it is, and I think it's somewhat similar to kind of step one right where we are admitting something, right where we're coming to terms with something we're being honest about something, but admitting two things, right, actually.

Speaker 1: 1:04:33

A the suffering is real, yeah, and the way I tried to solve it isn't working. This is a real panic attack, yeah, like, yeah, if you're really taking step one, you're making the admission that my solution doesn't work anymore. Right, right, and it Absolutely might have been working, right, sometimes. Right, right. So it's all an illusion everything I'm doing to relieve myself of this suffering, right? Not only isn't working anymore, it's all based in an illusion. So where does this put me? I don't know where reality even begins. That's kind of, I guess, my perception of step one versus the first noble truth right right, right, right, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:05:16

More of an emphasis, would you say, unlike the agency there, on yeah, I guess there's agency in the discovery.

Speaker 1: 1:05:22

But like what are you discovering?

Speaker 2: 1:05:23

except what's already happening. What's happening? Yeah sure.

Speaker 1: 1:05:26

I don't know if I caused it right. I just know I woke up. There's a new sense of understanding that, oh my god, is everything I'm believing false, like where does this end?

Speaker 2: 1:05:35

right, right, right, sure, yeah, no, I get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think, yeah, I think this is, it's just a great, I think, common sense, just very simple description of reality, right in this life. There is suffering. It should be, it should be pointed out. Yeah, some translations and some Buddhists will even say that the first noble truth is that life is suffering. Again, I hate to reference Tick not on, I read him so much, but he says that's an accurate it's inaccurate.

Speaker 2: 1:06:10

He says right because yeah, I know, the first noble truth is not saying, right, that everything is suffering or that all is suffering, but that in this life there is this sense of frustration, the sense of suffering, the sense of pain, the sense of longing and desire. The Buddha is not denying joy, he's not denying our capacity for experiencing profound joy. He's saying that there is this underlying suffering. That is the way things are, based on our experience as humans in this, in this world. But yeah, it's a great description of reality and helped me to kind of come to terms just with a lot of different things in my own life. Yeah, so the first noble truth. You want to move on to the second?

Speaker 1: 1:06:57

yeah, any more questions?

Speaker 2: 1:06:59

it's a, it's a. It's an important, foundational one.

Speaker 1: 1:07:01

It really is hard not to pick yeah, and want to talk about each look, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the ideas are simple, but they're so simple they put everything that you could consider into the. Yeah, how else to describe it?

Speaker 2: 1:07:15

it's a great way of putting it. Absolutely. Yeah, so the second noble truth there's a cause of suffering, right? So suffering exists. What causes suffering? In recovery Dharma, the word that's used is craving. You'll find, in different translations, different words used. Craving was actually in the ancient Buddhist scriptures, the anxious Buddhist texts. It was one of many causes of suffering. It was often put at the beginning of the list. So a lot of Buddhists have kind of identified craving as the sole cause of suffering. I tend to take a slightly different view. I think craving surely is a cause of suffering, but craving arises out of the more fundamental sense of alienation and separateness.

Speaker 1: 1:08:02

So suffering, the cause of suffering, civilization yeah, civilization proceeds, what proceeds right and ideas, cognition, ignorance, delusion suffering, could you could starve to death if you were mindless like a mammal, like, say, a homo erectus. Right, it's getting close to being us yeah and if one of them starved to death, it's that's suffering, but it's not that the cognitive suffering and the shame that comes with death. Right, that's a different kind of sure being a so filled with shame you die, right? So I different kinds, yeah, I like that.

Speaker 2: 1:08:43

Yeah, I guess I'm just mumbling on, yeah but the sense, yeah, out of the sense of separateness, out of this, this sense of I. And in Buddhism there's this, this doctrine, this teaching called a not or no self, and it's kind of wild maybe to individuals who encounter it at first, but it's basically this teaching that there is no I, there is no soul, there is no subject, there is no me. Right, I am something, much more than what my deluded mind tells me I am.

Speaker 1: 1:09:13

Is that the hardest part of, I think, any critical thing, or I still I have a hard time. I know that what it feels like to experience the sense of I follow what fall away, mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: 1:09:27

But if you approach me 10 years ago, I understand. I've heard this language, right. But what the fuck are you talking about? Like it almost makes sense and I'm just going to act. We ask and listen to someone, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure you find that is the greatest struggle, maybe even with yourself, right? Or with another individual who is a seeker, is trying to get out of addiction, mm-hmm. This has to be the hardest part of eastern philosophy. It's difficult to teach because you can maybe intellectually start to grasp an idea, but it's not understood until it's experience absolutely, that's a great way of putting it.

Speaker 2: 1:10:05

Yeah, you don't. You don't understand it fully until you experience it, and that's why I think this is it's a mystical way, it's an experiential way, it's an indirect way. This is not so much the way of reason and logic, it's the way of experience. So I really didn't know what this anata no self stuff was all about until I like communism to me.

Speaker 1: 1:10:30

I'm talking about, I'm not going anywhere.

Speaker 2: 1:10:33

Right, right, right. It's this felt experience of oneness and meditation that I think really seals for you the the truth that we are more than what we think we are. If I could just read really quickly, I've got, I think, here it's a, yes, it's a. It's a quote from Suzuki Roshi. He's a Zen master who came over to the US and taught Zen Buddhism, but he and Zen, buddhism, japanese yes, japanese lens and yes little distinctions Buddhism from Japan yes, yes, sorry about that.

Speaker 2: 1:11:12

Yes, zen Buddhism there's two kind of schools make majors. There's a number of Buddhist schools, but the two major ones, the ones most known, are the Theravada Buddhist. The Theravada Buddhists who are kind of the OG Buddhists, right Sri Lanka, places like Thailand. Jack cornfield, interestingly, study with Ajahn Chah, who is Theravada, the OG Buddhists, and there the the Mahayana Buddhists.

Speaker 1: 1:11:38

Zen Buddhism, some Tibetan Buddhism right, there's an emphasis more on the individual practitioner and Japanese is the newest school, being a couple, you know, maybe it's the terms of thousands of years old, right?

Speaker 2: 1:11:53

but it's the newer school of Buddhism. Yeah, it really is, but um, but where were we at we?

Speaker 2: 1:11:59

were Suzuki Roshi, yes, so he says this and this is kind of, I think, getting to this this whole thing. He says the meditation posture. He's talking about the lotus position, interestingly enough. But he says that the full lotus position, which is a position that we can take in meditation, it illustrates for us the nature of reality. So the position expresses the oneness of duality. Right, not to and not one. This is the most important teaching not to and not one. Our body and mind are not to and not one. If you think your body and mind or to, that is wrong. If you think they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both to and one. That's important.

Speaker 2: 1:12:42

We usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one. If it's not singular, it is plural, but an actual experience. Our life is not only plural but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent, right? So there is this sense of individuality. I think there's a sense of experience that we have. There's this sense of duality, right, this kind of subject versus object, this me versus you.

Speaker 2: 1:13:11

But within that distinction is this foundational and fundamental oneness that almost kind of informs it, and I don't even know what a word for it might be, but there's this sense of oneness that almost envelops this, this distinction, right, and that what he's talking about is what and who.

Speaker 2: 1:13:37

We are right, there's this sense of individuality yes, I'm a person, you're a person, we're talking. But behind this sense of distinction is oneness who are we? What are we? We are the universe in miniature form, according to Buddhism, right. So in that sense there is no self, right, in that, you know, we're not this self isolated soul, cut off from the rest of reality. We live as individuals, right? I don't think I'm going to literally deny the, the existence of right, the individual mind and things like that. But within this distinction there's this oneness, there's this connection to everything that I think is really at the heart of, kind of the no self doctrine. So it's not so much that, like you know, you don't exist, you know, and kind of some weird, you know, philosophical way it's, it's a sense of oneness and it's resting in that oneness it's.

Speaker 1: 1:14:36

It's hard to explain it is, it is, it is it's. We're both fans of Sam Harris and I use his app often and I heard him say, and this kind of resounded to me, to work as I've had the sense of oneness, I don't want to say in the shallow sense, the first layer, surface sense, when you, when I say would smoke pot as a teenager, when I would use psychedelics the bottom would fall out of how do you separate?

Speaker 1: 1:15:06

like, how does a hundred exist if the number 67 did it? Like can you get to a hundred? Like there's not. It's not so much oneness. He always wants to say, and I feel the oneness, he's trying to describe it as non-separation. I like that and that's the only first second Like if we're oneness. You know I couldn't find what you just said earlier, individuality. That would scare me a little bit. Like, where does Joe get?

Speaker 2: 1:15:34

to fit in Right, right, sure.

Speaker 1: 1:15:36

Sure, and it's hard to explain. It is, it's really hard to explain and I always feel like I'm a trippin' when I'm trying to tell someone with a sober mind who we're all one baby Right, like this, right. But how can it not be true? How can my story be isolated from the universe? So if the opposite was true, let's consider what that means. I exist and nothing else does, and somehow I've fundamentally tricked myself from knowing any sources, any pinpoints of, factually, how this starts and how it ends, and I'm rendering reality to trick myself. Right, right, that's oneness, but that's no other. That means no one else is having an experience.

Speaker 2: 1:16:20

Right how fucking nightmarish. Yeah sure, oh yeah, that's a different kind of oneness, sure, I wanted to kind of sum up get the other two truths in.

Speaker 1: 1:16:32

I have a final thought and question for you, and I'm curious because I learned a lot from you. Thank you, I learned a lot from you too I'm really looking forward to Recovery Dharma starting. So I think we only give the four noble truths today and if you want the eight fold path, pum to recovery, dharma.

Speaker 2: 1:16:50

Yeah, grab a book and we do these discussions like this and it doesn't take up the whole meeting. But right now we're reading Mindfulness and Action by Chog Young, trung Power and Poochay, who is a Tibetan Lama, another American Buddhist who has profoundly influenced me. But that book is amazing and we talk about all of these things eight fold path four, noble truths, no self. We read a chapter, discuss it and see how it applies practically, experientially, to our lives. How long is the meeting? The meeting's an hour, so it's a what's a breakout. It's an hour, you mean like what's it look like yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:17:29

So similar to kind of AA. We start with some readings four noble truths, eight fold path, the practice. We One kind of unique feature. We don't identify ourselves by any kind of particular designation. You can if you want, but in recovery Dharma right we're trying to focus more on kind of what's right with us as opposed to kind of what's wrong with us. So we're free to identify ourselves by whatever label we like.

Speaker 1: 1:17:57

So I can just say I'm Joe. Yeah, you're Joe yeah yeah, well, if I wanted to, I'm just so trained in it. Sure, I'm Joe. I'm an alcohol, absolutely. We have a number of people who do that. Yeah, who do that.

Speaker 2: 1:18:08

Okay, so that's fine, it's whatever you're comfortable with. Yeah, so we do that. We go around, we introduce ourselves, we do a meditation. We have a guy, marcus, who actually taught me meditation. He studied with Chogang Trangpa Rinpoche in the Buddhist in New York City and he has become a big part of our meeting. He leads our guided meditation and he teaches Buddhism. He's a really cool, eccentric, interesting guy. He's got his own podcast, I think. He's into like politics and some stuff too. But, yeah, cool guy who helps lead our guided meditation. It's about 10, 15 minutes and then we read some literature, either out of the Recovery Dharma book Right now we're reading Mindfulness in Action. I give you know just a, probably a three to five minute overview of the chapter, you know, clarifying important concepts, and then we just talk, we process the meditation, we talk about the literature, sponsorship how does that work? So sponsorship, yeah, sponsorship. The Recovery Dharma equivalent to sponsorship is mentorship.

Speaker 1: 1:19:17

So it's the same thing.

Speaker 2: 1:19:18

Essentially, the mentor is responsible for taking you through the Recovery Dharma literature, taking you through the inventories. The inventories are questions at the end of each truth and each part of the path that kind of help us dig deeper into what they are. So, yeah, we do the inventories, preferably with a mentor, although we've had groups where we do inventory discussion and that's cool too, because we we do. We talk about addiction, we talk about trauma. That's one thing I love about Recovery Dharma is that it's very trauma focused and it takes into account not only the suffering caused by addiction but the suffering that gives rise to addiction, addiction in the first place. It has a whole section on trauma and attachment injury. That's just wonderful. So it's a great program for people who maybe have some of that trauma, mental health struggles and they're interested in maybe a slightly different version of spirituality In Recovery, not just from chemical use. This program is for anyone. So in Buddhism, addiction is a species of attachment, so you can be addicted or attached to food or family members co-dependent, whatever it might be.

Speaker 2: 1:20:35

So we have people working, Recovery Dharma in the Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths around.

Speaker 1: 1:20:40

What are the last two Noble Truths? I teased them out so long and they're all these different little caveats.

Speaker 2: 1:20:46

Yeah, the right mindfulness and right concentration. Right, isn't that? The oh, the oh, I'm sorry. The Noble Truths. I'm getting into the path already, joe, I'm getting away.

Speaker 1: 1:20:54

The path you're going to have to save for Friday. Oh my God, we're doing that next time.

Speaker 2: 1:20:57

Yeah, I am so sorry. Yeah, so the last two Noble Truths, let me get to that. So there's a way out of suffering, right, there's a way leading to the end of suffering and that kind of parallels. That first Noble Truth, right, Going back to Tick Nutt Han, we see in our suffering the path leading out of suffering. So if suffering exists, its opposite must also exist. Yin and Yang. This is kind of the opposite. There's a way out of suffering, there's a way to liberate ourselves from the suffering of addiction Again, a little bit different from kind of the theistic emphasis on, you know, maybe a personal God rescuing you out of you know your problems, your struggles, your suffering. So it's self-liberation, it's self-empowerment.

Speaker 2: 1:21:43

I call it the cosmic self, not the egoic kind of individual self we're talking about here, this is the universal self, so it's drawing upon that for enlightenment, for freedom, for liberation from suffering. So there's a way out, and Recovery Dharma says. We commit to understanding that there is this way out of suffering. Is it capitalism? Absolutely not. No, that would be interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:22:14

So we got the first three down. What's the last?

Speaker 2: 1:22:17

So the last noble truth is that this way out of suffering, or this path leading to the end of suffering, is the eight-fold noble path. So the four noble truths kind of transition right there at the end, with the fourth transitions right into the eight-fold path. So there's a path leading to the end of suffering. Right, that's the specific way out, that's the way the Buddha found and used to free himself from suffering and that's the path that in Recovery, Dharma we strive to follow.

Speaker 1: 1:22:46

This path looks very similar to the journey, essentially in general, of the steps of psychoanalytic therapy of cognitive, behavioral therapy, it's being a good person, right. It's ethical living, Pay attention and be a good person.

Speaker 2: 1:23:02

Yeah that's what it is. It's as simple as that right. Stay mindful, be present, cultivate things like compassion, honesty, concentration.

Speaker 1: 1:23:13

Respect life.

Speaker 2: 1:23:14

Yeah, respect life. The five precepts don't murder, don't steal, don't use sexual disconduct to hurt other people.

Speaker 1: 1:23:19

How are you supposed to have fun?

Speaker 2: 1:23:22

But very again, very common sense very.

Speaker 1: 1:23:25

I want to end with this. You're going to be on as a guest and I'm really excited and I'm so glad you're part of the team and I look forward to learning from you and I love the way you treat people. I love the way you think. I love seeing people I knew who should have became cynics and drowned in their own cynicism. Get sober and approach spirituality, because it gives me hope.

Speaker 2: 1:23:51

I'm a cynic.

Speaker 1: 1:23:54

That being said, last question what can you say to the fact that say we're wrong? The eightfold path is just this distraction to get away from suffering. It's wrong.

Speaker 2: 1:24:10

The ego game is the ego.

Speaker 1: 1:24:12

We just couldn't cut it. You got to get out there and get things. You have to make generational wealth. Maybe you could do this on the eightfold path, but I'm saying this is what I should have focused on and I couldn't cut it. Ego is an expression of the best version of self. The suffering was too much for me to play the ego game. How is that wrong? How do you tell someone that your ego not only can't have this being charged of having a spiritual awakening? Why does this fail? Why is the ego not the authentic self? How would you explain that from your experiences now of you seeking the eightfold path as a way to practice your recovery.

Speaker 2: 1:25:02

Sure, I would say. For me, I would hesitate to say that Buddhism is right in the sense of orthodoxy, in the sense of how I went about viewing religious traditions in the past I don't know if there's a right way and a wrong way I found people who have gravitated more towards a personalized spirituality, which you might even find in something like Hinduism, where there is this spirit, there is this atman. It's more universal, but it's a more concrete sense of self. I don't know if it's the right way as opposed to the wrong way. It's the way that I myself, personally, have benefited from in terms of just finding liberation from my own addictions, from my own pathologies.

Speaker 2: 1:25:59

I think that if there was an answer, it would be that I found, at least in my experience. I think the Buddha found that this sense of ego, this sense of separateness, is delusion and you experience that when you try to live in that way. That's, I guess, really my answer. I've tried the egoic way of living and striving and attempting as much as possible to make my mark on existence, life, the world, whatever.

Speaker 2: 1:26:37

What I found is that the more I give into that, the more I separate myself from what I found to be the essence of reality the more I suffer, the more pain I experience and the more pain I inflict upon others so yeah, the sense of separateness, the sense of self for me, I've seen it in real time develop into something quite monstrous, and so I would say that for me, as an individual, I have found liberation through these practices, through the practice of nonattachment, through the practice of mindfulness and meditation. I'm not going to go out and evangelize the world and say that this is the right way for you, this is the right way for you, and that you have to follow it or you're going to suffer immeasurably. I think there are multiple ways to getting maybe at the same place, but I think non-egoic spirituality, just on an experiential level, for me just relieves so much suffering that I don't see any other alternative. I've experimented with a kind of again, personalism that for me brought about suffering, this kind of ego, this sense of separate self. It didn't work for me.

Speaker 2: 1:27:56

And I think that there are other approaches which, again, maybe in Christianity I know a number of Catholics, for instance, universalists. I know liberal, Protestant, theologians and Christians who believe in the soul, maybe believe in the ego, maybe believe in the self, and they're doing the same kind of thing we're doing in terms of the Eightfold Path they're trying to live ethically, they're trying to live wisely. They're trying to connect. The language might be a little different, the anthropology might be a little different, the underlying philosophy might be a little different, but we're trying to get kind of to the same place. That's kind of, I guess, as best I can kind of answer from experience. I think again, Buddhism is very kind of experiential. It's try it, see if it liberates you from your suffering. And if it does, it's a path which can lead to profound joy and liberation just from the suffering, especially of addiction, trying to just anesthetize this pain of separateness. That it's not.

Speaker 1: 1:29:04

It's not. You can't accomplish it. You said a word right, and your answer was delusion. And delusions of you. Know, it's just, it's a mini psychosis. That spell is what's broken, I think by letting the ego. You don't have to defend me anymore, like you did a great job, but now you've got me in a lot of trouble and disconnection rises from this. Someone can't have intimacy with my ego Right, and only have intimacy with the self or this eye that's in there. That is being truthful.

Speaker 1: 1:29:36

And I think the full path brings me the closest I get to experience, to the truth that I could share with someone else, which is hard for me.

Speaker 2: 1:29:46

And in Buddhism, ego is. It's attachment, it's rage, it's desire, it's all of these.

Speaker 1: 1:29:53

It's a manufactured narrative that I'm writing to protect me, and I'm writing it because it's a departure from reality. Terrified of the reality, it's too painful.

Speaker 2: 1:30:03

Right, right, the closer reality to truth it is. It's the AA's kind of life on life terms. Right, it's an inability to really experience and be there fully.

Speaker 1: 1:30:15

Speaking of suffering, I just realized I had a dentist appointment at 10.40. Oh no, I have to walk the full path to the dentist. Back to the reality of my identity. Absolutely, Jordan. We're going to be working a lot together and. I look forward to another chat. Thank you. How the recovery Dharma meeting grows over in Green Ridge.

Speaker 2: 1:30:39

Henderson Avenue.

Speaker 1: 1:30:40

That's Friday's at 7.30. Check it out. Any parting words?

Speaker 2: 1:30:45

Oh, thank you. I want to just really quickly, because I think really this is at the center of everything that we talked about. It's a quote from Chogin Trangpa Rinpoche who says this Let me just really quickly, if I have it here. He says we need to look within ourselves. When we look, what do we see? Ask yourself is there something worthwhile and trustworthy in me? Of course there is, but it's so simple that we tend to miss it or discount it.

Speaker 2: 1:31:22

When we look into ourselves, we tend to fixate on our neurosis, restlessness and aggression. We've just been talking about that right Ego. But there's something else. Take a look. There's something more than all of that. We are willing. We're willing to wait, willing to smile, willing to be decent.

Speaker 2: 1:31:38

We shouldn't discount that potential, that powerful seed of gentleness. We don't have to be embarrassed about it or hide it. We don't have to cast ourselves as bad boys and girls or as heroines, tough guys. We can afford to acknowledge and cultivate gentleness and, first of all, to treat ourselves better. If we don't appreciate ourselves, we have no ground to work with ourselves.

Speaker 2: 1:32:00

So I think this for me is everything Recognizing that there is strength, goodness, beauty, presence, awakening deep down inside. I'm not a flawed person. I'm not a bad person. I'm not a corrupt or totally depraved person. I'm a person, again, in union with everything, and that gives me strength, it gives me hope, it gives me the motivation to continue on, and I love talking about this stuff and helping people access that part of them that they think is just effective, right or just fucked up or whatever. There is goodness inside of us, there's strength, but it's not what we think it is right. It's not the ego, it's something else. So, yeah, I love that and I love his writings. I love just talking with you today, joe. This has been a pleasure and I'm really grateful for just this opportunity and the opportunity to continue working with you guys and Recovery Dharma. I'm looking forward to it. So thanks so much.

Speaker 1: 1:33:04

Yeah, it's just mine, man. Thanks for coming up. I'll be right back. Thanks for coming up. I'd like to thank you for listening to another episode of All Better. You can find us on allbetterfm or listen to us on Apple Podcasts, spotify, google Podcasts, stitcher, iheartradio and Alexa. Special thanks to our producer, john Edwards, an engineering company 570 Drone. Please like or subscribe to us on YouTube, facebook, instagram or Twitter and, if you're not, on social media, you're awesome. Looking forward to seeing you again. And remember, just because you're sober doesn't mean you're right.