This Question Can Change Your Life

So I was like at the beginning of the year to do a couple of episodes that are around things that I am working on in my own life. Resolutions episodes, you might say. And something I've been working on over these past months, years, is being able to sit with doubt. Not just doubt, being able to sit in the wonder of uncertainty. Because the first person we believe, our own easiest marks, are ourselves. The stories we tell, the things we think we already know. So maintaining, an openness, a curiosity, I think it's important politically. I think it's very important in my work as a podcast host, but it is, as much as it is anything, a spiritual practice, a practice of remaining present in the fundamental unknowability of this life and and this earth. And my guest today has helped me with those practices in in ways that that maybe he would not have known. Stephen Bachelor is the author of many books on Buddhism and meditation, including this book he wrote with his wife, Martine Bachelor, called What is This? Which is from a meditation retreat, a saan meditation retreat that that they held some time ago. And saan meditation works around the question of what is this, just asking it again and again and allowing it to arise in you, this feeling of doubt, and then to sit with that and to see what that might reveal. Bachelors' latest book is Buddha, Socrates and Us, Ethical Living in Uncertain Times. There he draws on a different tradition of doubt, Socratic questioning. And explores kind of the wisdom that that Buddhist and Hellenistic philosophy might offer us today. So I wanna invite him on the show to talk about doubt as practice and what it could open for us personally and even politically right now. There's always my email, EzraKleinshow@mytimestamps.com. Steven Bachelor, welcome to the show. Thank you, Ezra. So from the age of 27 to 31, you say you sat facing a wall for ten to twelve hours a day, asking the question, what is this, repeatedly. So I guess the obvious first question is, why did you do that? Well, I became a Buddhist monk when I was 21 years old. And I was involved, with a Tibetan tradition that put a great deal of emphasis on on studying the texts, studying logic, epistemology, and really trying to get a a clear conceptual understanding of what Buddhist philosophy was really about. At a certain point, I found that this kind of, inquiry, as fulfilling as it was, did not really delve deep enough into my existential experience, as it were. And I felt an increasing longing to be able to actually put all the books aside, all the things I'd learned, all of my knowledge about Buddhism, and go to a place where I could just go back to the primary questions of what it means to be human, basically. And I went …