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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Miles Neale. Miles Neale is among the leading voices of the current generation of Buddhist teachers and a forerunner in the emerging field of contemplative psychotherapy. He’s a Buddhist psychotherapist in private practice, assistant director of the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, and faculty at Tibet House and Weill Cornell Medical College. With Sounds True, Miles Neale has written a new book called Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human. This book is for anyone seeking a path dedicated to both authentic personal growth and the overthrow of the nihilism, hedonism, and materialism that are currently threatening our planet.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Miles and I spoke about the tension and also the potential interplay between sudden awakening and gradual awakening. We talked about the seven-step mentor bonding process and how any one of us can do this process with an inspiring figure in our life—and Miles talked us through all seven steps in great detail. We also talked about the safeguards that exist on the gradual path of Tibetan Buddhism; three main realizations that Miles has named the discovery of evolutionary self-care, radical altruism, and quantum view. We talked about the gifts of contemporary neuroscience to Tibetan Buddhism and, finally, the courage that is currently being asked of each one of us at this time in human history. Here’s my conversation with the very impassioned Miles Neale.
Miles, in your new book, Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human, you share quite a few prayers and examples of ways that we can invoke help from the unseen world on our spiritual path. I want to start our dialogue together right there. Can you bring in some blessing power, both for us and our listeners, here at the beginning as we engage in this conversation?
Miles Neale: Yes. So, let’s ask all our inspiring beings, all the mentor beings, and all the awakened presence of the planet that have been watching over us and so delighted with all of our activities as we create a wellspring of optimism on this planet at a time that it desperately needs it. Let’s make our wavelength receptive to their blessing and their encouragement and their ongoing support so that we can be vehicles of service, of love, and compassion for the planet.
TS: Beautiful. Thank you. Your new book is based on the Lam Rim teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. For people who are hearing about the Lam Rim teachings for the first time, can you introduce us?
MN: Yes, sure. I mean, people on the marketplace are very fortunate these days. They’re not only found through so many outlets, they’re giving a vast array of teachings, from mindfulness to compassion to non-dual teachings and shamanism.
But, we are at a very interesting time in history where at one click from Amazon you can get a book delivered—an audio teaching. Somebody’s coming through your neighborhood to give you a teaching. And just like the tenth century Tibetans, there was a lot of dharma around. There were a lot of teachings and a lot of teachers around.
But at the same time, how do all these teachings relate? How does selflessness and the self—taking care of the self—relate? How does self-care and compassion relate? How does renunciation and non-dualism relate?
So, suddenly, if you have a wide shopping or supermarket of spiritual technologies, how do they come together? How do they work together? Which ones should you adopt? Which ones should you avoid?
So, for all of those kinds of questions, the Lam Rim in the tenth century was developed by a great master, Atisha. And what he did was he collected all the 10,000 teachings of the Buddha at the time—just like we have a vast data bank of technologies and methodologies—and he put them in a sequential order. And by doing so, he illuminated what was appearing at the time as contradictions.
He resolved those contradictions by showing that there are certain foundational teachings that are more effective for beginners and more effective at certain junctures in evolution, and where there are later-stage teachings that make more sense once those foundations are in place. And then there are the higher teachings that if you don’t have the safety, if you’re not wearing your safety belt, they could be dangerous.
So, the Lam Rim is really a roadmap not only of our own human odyssey towards awakening, but it is a strategic, comprehensive roadmap that includes all the major teachings and styles or methodologies put in a logical sequence so that a spiritual practitioner can make their way through that terrain effectively.
TS: Now, interestingly, you say that the Lam Rim resolved many of the seeming contradictions at the time. In your book on gradual awakening, you talk about how sudden awakening is like thinking you’re going to win the lottery. Does the Lam Rim somehow address this tension between gradual awakening and sudden awakening?
MN: Certainly, the Lam Rim is a genre of teaching that is more aligned with the gradual path. It actually means “staged path to enlightenment.” So, the idea there is that both are viable.
There’s no question, in my own experience. I believe it’s possible for human beings to have a very radical, sudden enlightenment. I think we have a number of leaders in the field right now who represent people who have had a very profound shift—a completely radical and profound shift in just a quick, spontaneous moment. But personally, after clocking thousands and thousands of hours as a psychologist with clients, I don’t think that that is actually applicable to the masses.
I think most of us are going to be very disappointed and feel left out if we’re going to be sitting in the meditation posture, waiting for a sudden flash of lightning, if you will. So, for us who are maybe more modest in our ability or maybe it’s just taken a long time, we don’t have to follow the spiritual path haphazardly. For us, there is a staged progression and a roadmap that we can follow that will keep us in line and keep us on target and help orient us to what we’re dealing with in any given moment.
So, the Lam Rim is really a counterpoint to this spontaneous enlightenment, but it doesn’t refute that spontaneous enlightenment can happen. Even if you take spontaneous enlightenment to be possible—and I would say here even spontaneous enlightenment by way of plant medicines, for example, which is becoming more popular. More and more people in the Western hemisphere are using plant medicines to have a radical awakening. And I would say even there—and again, my experience as a therapist now receiving clients who have had these spontaneous, very profound, very deep, far-reaching, mind-altering, consciousness-altering experiences. For them, even after having that experience, there needs to be, in many cases, a long road of metabolization and integration.
So, in a way, this dichotomy between spontaneous and gradual, it’s more like you can have a spontaneous [awakening], but you need a gradual to get to a spontaneous—and you need a gradual after a spontaneous to integrate all that material. Or you’re like me and many, many more people who are just on a very incremental, gradual, slow-cook process on the gradual path.
TS: Miles, for people who are meeting you here for the first time, help us know a little bit about your own journey and how you first encountered the Lam Rim and decided that this gradual path was the way for you.
MN: Well, I first found the Dharma, if you will—I had my first really deep, profound moment of meditation and finding home and coming back into a deeper connection with my own humanity when I was 20. I had left home at a very less-than-optimal childhood experience with an alcoholic father, and I was really looking and hungry at an early age. I mean, by the time I was 16, I was already entertaining all the classic existential questions about the meaning life and not finding any answers in materialism.
My family was well off, and we had a lot of the trappings of a modern, affluent family. We had a lot of options and opportunities, but we were very scarce on inner understanding and inner attunement.
So, I went elsewhere. I was starting my hero’s journey very early, and by the time I was 20, I was in India. There I met several Tibetan teachers—but at that time, to be honest, the Tibetan thing didn’t really resonate for me. What I needed at that time was a teacher who was just teaching very simple techniques of mindfulness and lovingkindness. I had a lot of self-hatred. I had a lot of aggression. I had a lot of mistrust because of the broken relationship I had with my own father. To find a teacher who was willing to walk hand in hand with me from the monastery to the Tree of Enlightenment in the darkness and sit there and breathe with me, and to create a holding environment in which I could be angry and be mistrusting—and yet feel that field of awareness hold me—I thought was very, very profound and exactly what I needed and exactly what the doctor ordered at that time.
Several years later, after that profound experience, I met Joe Loizzo and Bob Thurman in 1999 in New York City as a part of an independent master’s thesis that I was doing. Of course, Bob Thurman and Joe Loizzo are a direct lineage from the Dalai Lama.
Bob Thurman—most people know who Robert Thurman is. When he was in his early or late twenties, [he] discovered the Tibetan culture and the Dalai Lama. Then when Joe was in his early twenties, he met Bob Thurman at Amherst. Then when I was in my late twenties, I met Joe. So, they’re really the forerunners and legacy bearers, if you will, of the Lam Rim teachings to me.
It was very profound because I think—I had already done an undergraduate course. I had already done a master’s thesis, and my mind and brain were primed for information to be downloaded or disseminated in a particular kind of way. I think this is one of the wonderful benefits of the Lam Rim teachings to the Western world—is most of us know how to gradually move from 101 classes to 200-level classes, and in a few years graduate to a thesis of some sort where we’re becoming increasingly more specialized and more integrated.
The nature of the Lam Rim is to help move you along a process of conceptual understanding and slowly, slowly deepening that conceptual understanding into a lived experience. I think that is one of the wonderful contributions the Lam Rim can provide.
Also, to be fair—and this might come as quite a surprise—is that I wasn’t doing a lot of meditation with Bob Thurman and Joe Loizzo. I think meditation has become so front and center. The preference or the gold standard of the spiritual life is centered around meditation. But really, the Tibetans and the Buddhist curriculum—Buddhist sciences—don’t just teach meditation. They teach a lot of studying and a lot of quantum physics, if you will—the quantum physics, the nature of reality study. And they also prescribe certain ways of living.
I think just being around Bob Thurman and Joe Loizzo for almost 20 years this year—I’ve downloaded more than just meditation from them. I’ve really downloaded ways of being in the world and ways of dealing with problems and challenges. Joe Loizzo, my main teacher, is a psychiatrist. I mean, I have been able to witness from him how to deal with very challenging patients and very challenging situations with a kind of competence and kind of confidence and empathy that I think goes far beyond what one could learn in any book and in any classroom.
So, it has been a remarkable journey of being around human beings that have, in a way, evolved and have a kind of quality that I was looking for and have been looking for all my life. So, that’s a tremendous blessing.
Of course, one of the main hallmarks of the Lam Rim is you can’t just study it out of a book. There has to be a living ambassador and living traditions to help you integrate the material. The books are an important starting place, but the human lived experience is really how we evolve.
TS: We’re going to have to talk about that, and it’s a controversial (I think) area to talk about. You teach in the book something that you call a seven-step mentor bonding process, which I think is your psychological language for something that might traditionally be called guru yoga. Is that correct?
MN: That’s correct. Just that that sort of belongs to Joe Loizzo, whom I learned with. But that’s really—yes, his contribution is to make accessible the guru yoga tradition through the lens of psychology so that we don’t think it’s so mysterious, but actually see it as a natural process, a natural psychological development.
TS: [Yes.] So, let’s talk about that, because I think as soon as some listeners hear the word “guru yoga,” that they’ve now turned the channel. They’re not listening anymore. They left. But if they stayed and said, “Oh, maybe there’s something—”
MN: [Laughs.] Well, you never know.
TS: You never know.
MN: You never know these days. You never know these days with how those gurus are falling off their pedestals one by one. So, maybe it’s a survival instinct. Or maybe it’s just good common sense. [Laughs.]
TS: Well, exactly. So, how is it that it’s going to help me to go through a bonding process with these very flawed human beings who obviously want to collect students and engage in their power plays, et cetera? Of course, there are exceptions. Not all people are like that. But, we’re finding more and more and more of the people in positions of power—that they’re flawed in some really terrible and damaging ways.
MN: Yes. I mean, I think this is part and parcel. The built-in safety measure is that the guru yoga tradition has a set of recommendations, requirements, and pledges that both the student and teacher try to maintain. That’s first and foremost. This is not to be confused with therapy and not the same as a teacher-student relationship. Nor is it the same as a therapist and client relationship. This is a very unique relationship in which you see your teacher as the Buddha in order to have a land bridge or access to the possibility of your own mind taking on the qualities that you project onto that person. So, there is an understanding that a lot of it is projection.
There needs to be these very stringent contracts and pledges that are made—commitments that are made on both sides. But also, there is this deeper understanding that you know human beings are flawed and you know yourself to be flawed, and you are trying to consciously take what you can from a mixed situation. In other words, you consciously idealize rather than fall prey to an unconscious idealization. I think that’s one of the places you and I can get into a conversation about how maybe we’re getting into trouble—is that people . . . we are all children, first of all.
Our unconscious mind is walking around in a 30, 40, 50, or 60-year-old body. It’s a child and it wants to be loved and it wants to be understood, and most of us have not gotten enough of that in Western culture. So, we walk through the doors into the spiritual world, and there’s the spiritual teacher on the throne, and the little child inside of us goes, “Daddy,” or, “Mommy. I can get love here.” That sounds not all that sophisticated, but in a way we have to understand that that’s part of the makeup here. That’s part of the constituent factors.
If we don’t know that, then that’s what’s driving the bus. So, when Daddy falls or Mommy falls or does something inappropriate, we have a very, very deep breach in trust—profound, deep breach in trust; cataclysmic. It can have cataclysmic consequences. And I have been a therapist working with clients now from at least half a dozen scandals in the last 5 or 10 years. I cannot think of a more profound destabilizing factor than to be so devoted and committed to someone who assumes a spiritual position and who breaches in trust.
But we have to be very clear that the methodology has these built-in safety mechanisms, and sometimes they’re not well articulated. So, the book tries to articulate some of them—which is you can recognize limitations in people and yet you consciously say, “Well, I still want some of their aspects.” And so you try to focus on the positive, but you don’t neglect the negative.
So, I often tell people, “While you’re meditating and while you’re in session in the flight simulator,” is what I call it, “and you’re calling your mentor guide to appear before you, and you’re downloading their good qualities,” which is a—really, what you’re doing is you’re projecting good qualities that come from within you and then reminding yourself that you have them.
Well, the mind is incredibly complicated, but that’s essentially what you’re doing. The guru is a mirror, and you’re projecting your good qualities—which you don’t feel capable of—onto another. Then you’re consciously taking them back. But you’re doing it in a flight simulator scenario. Then you remember it’s just a flight simulator, and then you remember after you get out of the flight simulator that your teachers are also just human beings. And if we did both of those well—if we did the idealization successfully within the session and the coming to terms with the humanity, both as our own humanity and the humanity of the teachers that we’re with, and not jettison our good sense—then I think we would probably see a little less slack happening with teachers these days.
TS: Now, you were very careful, Miles, to say that the therapist-client relationship is not the same. And I can imagine people saying, “OK. Well, maybe it’s not my therapist, but there’s this person I really admire. The last thing I want to do is join some actual spiritual tradition and take on a ‘guru.’ First of all, most of them are men, and there’s this power thing going on. I don’t want to be the pillar in someone’s power game. Why can’t I do this with someone else in my life that I really respect and admire?”
MN: Well, the truth of the matter is you can’t. I mean, again, there are gradations and complexities. And no one’s saying that you have to do this wholeheartedly the way the Tibetans do at that very high standard in the Tantras. My book suggests that you can start with the basic preliminaries, and in the preliminaries you can just start with somebody whom you admire. That person doesn’t even need to be real. It can be a mystical or a mythological person. That person doesn’t have to be alive. That can be your deceased grandmother.
That person doesn’t even need to be someone whom you’ve had a relationship with. If you like Bono or you like—I don’t know—you like Tami Simon, then you can meditate on taking on Tami Simon’s radical truth and female empowerment.
And why not? I mean, why not? I mean, this is the power of our creative imagination—is that it will naturally absorb the qualities that lay before it, and what we normally expose our mind to is a lot of (pardon my French) but a lot of bullshit. I mean, a lot of fearmongering and a lot of disempowering messages. We are meditating on them all the time.
So, why not spend 15 or 20 minutes in a more sublime setting with a good intention in a structured way. Put whomever inspires you for a moment and imagine that they’re sending you ways of blessing and inspiration, and imagine them going to your crown. This simulates and stimulates nervous systems. You feel like you are getting something and you are creating a new network in your brain.
So, even if they’re not the exceptional case, you are getting something positive. And I think that that’s . . . we shouldn’t put ourselves in an all-or-nothing continuum. I think we have to really start where we are.
And by the way, if a lot of your viewers have resistance and reluctance to do these things, I would also say we should remember from trauma research that avoidance isn’t the best strategy. Understanding and incremental approachment is much better strategy. If we have had breaches in trust—which I’ve had many. And I understand the aversion and the kickback and the fallback and the fallout and the wanting to dismantle every goddamn authority figure and every hierarchy possible. I understand that. But if we looked at our history and we look at trauma research, it doesn’t behoove us. It doesn’t help mature us.
What actually helps is to incrementally—in a safe setting with support and with good intentions—incrementally allowing ourselves to metabolize and not generalize the trauma. OK?
Because if we throw out all authority, we’re not going to learn anything from anyone. Right? Think about how hard it is to even want to learn anything from someone who doesn’t occupy any position of power or authority. That would just be a completely level playing field. And suddenly everybody’s on the same playing field, and who are you going to learn from?
So, while I’m on the one hand completely sensitive to the fact that people have been hurt and it is a natural inclination to distance oneself, on the other hand I don’t know if in the long term it serves as a good resilience strategy. What’s more beneficial is that we work on our breaches in trust and we come closer to a deeper understanding and empathy both for ourselves as victims, but also potential abusers—and to not make overgeneralizations about any particular relationship in order for us to be able to grow.
I mean, that happens on a personal level. But it’s also happening on a cultural-social level. I mean, we’ve already survived 300 years of destroying religion. We’ve already dismantled religion and become secular. Right?
So, just imagine that in centuries of a pendulum swing or a reaction against religion. Now we find ourselves as a completely secular, reductionistic society. Well, there’s also an inherent limitation to that. The icecaps are melting. We are on the threat of global nuclear war. We have definitely enough abundance of food, and so many are impoverished and malnourished and don’t have enough to eat.
Well, something’s wrong with secular society. That rebound effect against religion—while it gave us tremendous gains, it also has created a very deeply problematic paradigm problem that we have on our hands here.
So, I would say that the goal is not throw out everything and dismantle everything and destroy everything. I think we’re entering into a new paradigm where integration is more important. Let’s have men and women together. And let’s have religion and science together. And let’s have left and right-brained together instead of letting the ping-pong ball go back and forth over the centuries.
TS: OK, Miles. So, it’s possible that here, as I want to explore the seven-step mentor bonding process, that I could pick someone I admire and deeply love and respect—someone in my life. Maybe it could be my dead grandmother or whomever. How do I do the process?
MN: So, the process begins first by creating a wonderful conducive environment. That’s left to your own discretion what that means. But I think what we’re talking about is really demarcating or prioritizing a spiritual practice and giving it an incubator. You need a place that you say, “Apart from my crazy life, this place is sacred for me.” And you set up a beautiful accoutrement or altar. Today I’m very happy to bring back a lot of these archaic religious practices because, as I’ve already mentioned, I don’t think we should throw them out. I think what happened was they lost meaning, and then they were meaningless. But if we reengage them with meaning, then they can become purposeful again.
For example, the altar is, in my estimation, a neurological workbench or architect’s work desk. It is a place for you to neurosculpt generosity. By setting up an altar and making an offering, you are cultivating generosity, for example, and that’s changing your brain. So, if you just use science as a lens to understand religion, suddenly you don’t have to throw one out for the other.
Once you’ve set up your altar and you’ve corrected your motivation—all our spiritual practices should be well motivated. That means, “May I be well, but may I also do something profound for others.” At the very least, let’s say that’s the opening caveat with our motivation.
Then you dissolve. OK? Dissolving means whomever you think you are right now as you’re listening to this, whomever you think you are—your job; your identification as a mother, a father, as a son or daughter; your job role; your body, whether it’s short or tall—all these identifications that feel suffocating and confining and limited and insufficient, that get us all bent out of shape—you practice letting them go and seeing them dissolve almost like on an acid trip. They turn and melt into light, and you return to primal openness. What you really are as quantum energy and awareness, and that’s what every spiritual tradition has always told you you are.
So, you get down to that quantum level, and then you don’t just hang out there as a drop in the ocean. You then imagine a sublime space emerging and you in it, in a kind of hologram body.
So, there you are in a hologram body in a sublime setting, and your brain is being bathed with beautiful imagery that [is] coming from the depths of your psyche, being projected out there. So, maybe you find yourself in a meadow, or on a beach, or in Bob Thurman’s Jewel Tree Refuge, or Bodh Gaya, or at Mecca, or wherever. And suddenly you’re using the holographic holodeck capacity of your mind to trump up and boost your nervous system.
Then you don’t even stop there. Then you ask this person to join you. OK? They come, and they’re within arms length, and you can see their beautiful eyes and their tearful smile or their reassuring smile and their presence. And then you start to do this bonding process.
So, that’s all the setup. And it’s an amazing setup. I mean, the Tibetans were really far-out creatures to come up with something like that. But I think in the coming years we’re going to understand just how profound—from a neuroscience perspective—[it is] what they’re setting up there. This is basically an organic virtual reality.
TS: OK. Let’s keep going. Let’s do the bonding process.
MN: But you want to keep rolling?
TS: Yes, let’s keep going. Yes.
MN: Oh, let’s roll.
TS: Oh, yes.
MN: OK. So, there we are. You’re in your hologram body. Don’t you feel uplifted and delightful in your hologram body? I mean, come on. It looks like Obi-Wan Kenobi’s body. It’s made of light, and you’re in this sublime setting, and there she is. Your grandmother is there. She’s looking her Sunday best, and you admire her particular traits.
So, Tami, what was it about your grandmother that you really enjoyed?
TS: I was just using that as an example, but keep going for our listeners.
MN: OK. Well, let’s say she was so sweet and tender with you. OK? While everything might’ve been chaotic, your grandmother really—she held your hand and she had this very soft touch, and she was very present, and she never scolded you. You knew she could be a safe harbor for you no matter what.
So, you admire that quality, which means neurologically you are bringing up that data file from the dark recesses. You’re dusting it off and it’s coming up from your psyche, and now it’s conscious. It’s superimposed on your grandmother, and it’s there for you to reintegrate from a conscious level. So, you admire her presence. That’s the first stage: to admire the quality.
When you admire something, you just think about what the human nervous system does when it’s in awe. The first thing is it drops the mouth and opens the eyes. You go, “Ah.” So, that’s the body’s way of saying, “I’m open for this. This is unbelievable. My windows and doors are wide open for you.”
So, there you are with your grandmother. Your windows and doors are wide open. She’s in her Sunday best, and she’s giving you her loving presence, and you’re ready to receive. Then you feel moved, and this is now into the second step.
You feel so moved that you want to offer her something. You feel moved to offer her something. It would just be like if you fell on the ground in the street and a pedestrian—a simple stranger—reached their hand down to get you. The humanity would move you. You’d feel indebted, and you would want to offer something back.
So, you see yourself offering your grandmother a flower or a sentimental object. Or you open your heart and you say, “Here I am. Take me.” You make some gesture of moving towards. That’s the second step. And what that does is it creates a deeper resonance circuitry between your brains—almost like the rapport that is created through unconditional positive regard between client and therapist, or the love that’s created between a child and parent.
So, now your highway system of deliveries are well oiled between you and this person by way of your active generosity and your giving. You feel that they have received it. So, now we have an open highway system; all systems go.
The third step is to disclose. OK? That means if we’re really going to evolve, we have to get real in the sense that we all feel ashamed of something. There’s a naughty little secret, a dirty little thing—a habit we don’t want to reveal, a little something in there that is off limits. That to me is like a boulder in the stream. It is really interrupting our flow.
So, in this closeness, you feel inclined—just like it takes six weeks in therapy for you to really begin to disclose why you’re there. Everything up until there is just like foreplay. It’s just like getting you ready for the show. So, then you let go of this thing. You confess it to another, and there’s something very deeply profound about unburdening yourself of something you were very ashamed of and then having the witness receive it without your anticipated judgment.
So, there’s something very vital as a human being to not be judged but to be received, even with our dirty bits. I think that is an incredibly profound moment in your visualization, where you are accepted radically for who you are with all your bits.
But they don’t just stop there. You imagine that they also see you with your bits and accept you, but they see you beyond your bits. So, whatever parts of you are going, “This is the real me. This little bit here, this is the scared little bit that I . . . this is the real me, but I won’t show that to anyone,” by showing it and having someone say, “Well, it’s OK. I was like that too,” or, “We can work on it together, and that’s not all there is to you.” Wow! What an unbelievable gesture of kindness.
So, imagine if part of your everyday workout was letting go of something and then seeing that you don’t have to claim it as your real estate and put a flagpole in there saying, “This is me.” That’s the third. Now we’re in to the fourth.
So, we have admiring then we have offering, then we have disclosing, then we have rejoicing. So, rejoicing is what Rick Hanson made his living and his bread and butter from. Rejoicing is taking in the positive.
So, you’ve just done your inventory, and you let go of your little bits—your dirty bits—and accepted them, and seen that they’re not totally you. Now you do your inventory and see all the amazing things that you do and you celebrate them.
Come on. Get real. That’s what Rick Hanson was talking about. How often do we actually stop and smell the roses and really take it in? Because of the evolutionary bias, not that often.
Why stop there with just your successes? Why not celebrate everybody else’s successes? Oh my God. That’s a novel concept in a consumeristic, competitive society. What if, instead of feeling jealous about how well Tami Simon is doing at Sounds True, I vicariously enjoy her successes as a powerful woman?
TS: Go for it!
MN: I mean, that’s a—yes! I mean, come on. Let’s get real. Why do I have to go, “Oh. Well, look how she’s doing, and I can’t do it?” What if I go, “Look how well she’s doing, and thank God. That’s so cool. That’s so cool.”
And then you start doing that. The Dalai Lama’s rocking it out over here, and this one’s rocking it out over there. Suddenly, you didn’t really need to go that far to feel good about humanity. So, now your brain is flush with positive endorphins—and now we’re getting into the fifth step.
At the fifth step is, “I understand I can be a decent human being, but I still have a long way to go.” OK? So, now I’m going to ask my grandmother for her blessing and her instruction and her guidance and her support in my development. She sends this beautiful rainbow nectar stream that comes from her heart, and it hits your crown and melts and drips down your crown, throat, and heart. The crown, throat, and heart are three places—the body, speech and mind—that comprise the human being.
You imagine that they are just like plaque in an artery. They are dissolved and you are flush with energy. That energy is moving in your system in a very profound, fluid way. And what it does is you imagine it go to the depths of your psyche where it illuminates you like a lantern—like a flame does a lantern. This is what we’re doing at this point, when we get the rainbow nectar—is simulating our own awakening.
So, like I’m sure you’ve heard, you can’t manifest it unless you see it first. So, what we’re doing is we’re role playing. We are imagining our own future enlightenment occurring so that we have a main feed in the mind—an impression created in the mind—that we are going to do this. We’re going to feel this tremendous opening and tremendous reconfiguration and tremendous reintegration of our nervous system. That’s going to happen, and we’re simulating it right now through the blessings of our teacher. And it doesn’t stop there.
So, then we move to the sixth step. And there a very interesting thing happens, where we now have been blessed and we feel anointed, if you will. We are recognizing our potential. Now we ask the entire lineage—all the grandmothers, all of the amazing grandmothers, if you will—to merge with us. They all are very happy to get inside of us. They’re eager to come into our nervous system, and they all melt into one single stream—all these great-grandmothers. And they can be sages and saints from all traditions, but let’s just keep going and keep rolling with our analogy here.
They all melt into a single drop, and they come to the crown, throat, and heart. And again, it purifies body, speech, and mind, and then it merges inseparably. And then boom! This time, the entire lineage is inside of you, and you’re the Buddha—but you’re the grandmother now. Now you are her. You have become her. Not only have you been anointed by her, but now you role play. Imagine seeing the world from the point of view of your grandmother.
So, instantaneously, you look around in your sacred setting and you see a bunch of little baby Tamis all over the place. And you go, “I’m now the grandmother, and there are the little Tamis.”
Little Tamis are a little concerned, and they’re a little roughed up, and they’re a little roughed around the edges, and they’re a little like this, and a little like that. I’m going to bring my presence and that tenderness to each and every one of them. So, you role play imagining now you’re the grandmother and the world is looking at you going, “Can I have a little bit of what you have? I’m struggling here. I’ve forgotten who—I don’t feel safe.”
Then you imagine rainbow lights from your heart. You’re sincerely rehearsing this altruism now not just as the recipient, but you have awoken as the next in the totem, if you will. You are the ambassador now of goodwill from the awakened lineage, and you’re sharing and emitting this beautiful rainbow light with living beings.
Now, this is all a simulation. We know that. But your brain doesn’t know the difference, and it doesn’t matter. A virtual reality is still giving you an internal experience and a memory bank to rely on, and it’s changing the structure of your brain.
TS: Now, Miles, I found that incredibly gorgeous—that process, the seven-step mentor bonding process. My question for you is you seem to imply that if I’m doing that process with my grandma or my therapist or writers that I admire—Sounds True teachers I admire—but I’m not working with a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who I also am learning to meditate from (and working with this person individually one on one, human to human) that I’m somehow missing something. What am I missing?
MN: No, no. I’m not saying that. I think you can get tremendous benefit, and you should use the power of your creative imagination to access positivity. There’s no problem with it.
What I’m suggesting is that the higher level Tantras—and it doesn’t have to be a Tibetan teacher—they have a higher order, higher level of understanding about what’s actually happening there. You’re not just trying to become your grandmother. You’re trying to become the Buddha. OK? That’s what we’re talking about is the difference.
You’re not just trying to become sweeter and tender. When you get into the Tantras, you’re using this technology for a more global aim, which is to become completely enlightened.
So, that would be the difference. You can use this technology for more modest gains, and you can use it all the way to the end of the path, and use it as a technology to rehearse and simulate and integrate a full awakening. Now, in order to do that, you would need to be in relationship with someone who had some pretty deep and profound realizations, because you’re actually using the real life human being as a land bridge and then augmenting it with the virtual reality.
So, when you have both a real person to work with and the virtual reality simulation to amplify it, and you’re doing it on the basis of an understanding that you’re using those technologies and that human being to gain access to awakening, liberation, Buddhahood, then you’re talking about the full Tantric methodology. You’re just using it—
TS: Sure, I understand.
MN: Go ahead.
TS: I understand your point. But someone could use it, let’s say, to go through the seven steps of bonding with a Christian mentor that they knew—who they thought was the most awake, free, beautiful, loving human being they’d ever met. No problem.
MN: Oh, that’s the wonderful thing about Bob Thurman—is once he learned these teachings from the Dalai Lama and came back to the United States, he wrote that seminal treatise, The Jewel Tree of Tibet, which inspired me so greatly. But he did a radical thing: he made it available to everybody.
He took it out of a thousand-year-old cultural milieu and, without tampering with the science and dulling it down and diluting it and McMindfulnessing it, he kept its sophistication intact. But, he opened the door for a Christian, a Muslim, a First Nation, even a secular person. I mean, he talks about if you’d like Carl Sagan to be your mentor and you’re a scientist, and you want to up your game, he opened that door. And I think rightfully so. I think that shares the technology with everyone.
On the other hand, let’s also not forget that the tradition makes sure that while it’s accessible to everyone, there are these safety measures in place. So, don’t go monkeying around with a power tool. I have a four-year-old. I don’t let him just play with the power drill. There’s a lock. There’s a lock on the toolkit, on the tool chest.
You need to have a firm foundation in self-care. And as I mention in the book, you need to have a very good foundation in evolutionary self-care, renunciation, and you have to have your altruism game intact. Then you have to have some competence with quantum vision or view. You have to have these three principles together in order to safeguard against using the flight simulator technology to your narcissistic ends.
TS: OK. Let’s make sure our listeners are following you with these three principles. You write about them in great depth in Gradual Awakening, but: evolutionary self-care, the first one; radical altruism, the second; and then what you call “quantum view.” Just briefly explain each of these and why it’s so important that we have a working fluency as we engage in the flight simulator that you just taught us.
MN: Yes. So, I think if anyone’s listening right now, think about what it is that causes you harm and what [it is] that you are repeating in your life that constantly brings you into an experience of repeated stress and trauma. Then what you would recognize is it’s not just that it’s happening to you, like circumstance that’s repeating itself over and over again. But, the Buddhist science is telling you there’s something that you’re unconsciously doing that bringing you to a situation where it feels like this shit is happening to me again and again and again.
Once you take responsibility for that—that piece of it—I’m not saying that there are not unkind people and unkind circumstances. I never said that. I don’t fall into that trap. A tsunami hits and people die; that’s devastating. If there’s a child abuser, that is unforgivable in a way. OK? But how we go forward in our lives based on those tragedies and those traumas, there is a fair amount of responsibility that we have to take about how we carry interpretive and reactive lenses with us.
So, once you’re able to mature to the place where you can take responsibility that there’s something inside of you that brings out this reoccurring habitual pattern that doesn’t feel good, now we are in the territory of understanding what is meant by “evolutionary self-care.” And what we are really suggesting is evolution self-care is using consciousness as a crowbar to get a leg up on theses unconscious dynamics that produce repeated cycles of stress and trauma, not just in this lifetime, but trans-generationally.
I mean, many of us are the inheritors of longstanding sexual abuse, for example—or Holocaust, or a genocide, or whatever it might be. So, there’s a trans-generational effect that we are inheritors [of]. If we’re not careful, we will be prone to that prejudice and that scarcity mentality and that mistrust. In a way, the mind is so powerful that it will have a creative effect of recreating that world again and again and then passing it on—passing it right down the chain to our next generation.
So, evolutionary self-care is about taking responsibility for our imprinting in our mind and getting a leg up on that so that we can create slowly and very incrementally and very modestly a new outcome by understanding that we are actually in the driver’s seat of our own world. Each and every one of us are creating our own worlds. Then together, we’re co-creating the world, but we have to start with our own little world first. That’s the evolutionary self-care.
The altruism is about—once you have competence, just think about the word “competence.” Some people are really fluent with the piano, and others are—I mean, today I was having a disaster with my computer, and I called my buddy, Josh. Within three minutes he can solve it. OK? There is facility that is developed in the mind once you have a repeated experience, a repeated positive outcome.
With altruism, it’s the same. We have these natural instincts for aggression, but we also have these natural instincts to be like a cooing, lovely, tender, sweet parent to a child. They’re both in us.
So, the second leg of the journey is not only about taking care of ourselves so that we don’t repeat cycles of stress and trauma, but we are now at a milestone in the journey up the mountain or a plateau, if you will, where we have a vantage point and we’re looking out at the world, and we’re going, “Oh my God. This is so sad. Look. Everybody out there is bumping their heads up unnecessarily because they’re being driven by their own instincts. They haven’t accessed their own capacity to leverage out of it and to wake up.”
So, if you’re going to go back into the society, you have to keep a cool mind because everybody’s freaking out and flailing. Then how are you going to impart and wake them up? Well, you’re going to have to keep a good presence about you and keep your wits about you. And those that are interested, they might ask you a few questions about how [you] do that.
So, the middle stages of the path are about training in altruism so that you can keep presence of mind so that you can be the kind of model parent for other people who are freaking out so that they can integrate. Just like the flight simulator simulates, we do this in real life.
Your nervous system is your calling card. So, if you can keep a good, buoyant, reasonable nervous system, you’re at least not doing any more harm, but you can flip it on its head and start to have a deeper impact.
Look at His Holiness at 80 years old. He travels around the planet. He has a Mick Jagger schedule. And what do people say about him? I mean, this is the greatest marketing for Buddhism—look at his cheery way. He has presence. He’s giggling and smiling. I mean, he’s facing a genocide. OK? He’s not frowning. He’s figuring it out, and he’s stepping forward in a very sweet [way], with a very openhearted message for all people. He’s not championing Buddhism. He’s saying, “We can do this. We’re mammals. We can do this.” So, that’s all because of his mastery of these middling lengths—these middle power tools from the middle stages of the path.
Then the final stage or final leg of the journey has to do with quantum view. By quantum view I mean we know from Newtonian science that there is an indivisible atom to everything, and we’re not saying that that’s not true. In order to send a man to the moon and create the internet and technology and medicine, we have had to rely on a Newtonian paradigm. But we are now breaking through the quantum, and what quantum is suggesting is even the atom is indivisible. If you go into the subatomic substrate, you get more spaciousness and openness, and suddenly the language gain that happens at that quantum level is more consistent with what the mystics are talking about—that there isn’t any indivisible self. There is no final substrate.
We are more like a vast field of awareness. We are in a harmonic resonance. It’s not that the quantum world view or paradigm is more real than the Newtonian one. They are both relatively real depending on which perspective you’re looking at it.
So, I can write on my desk and put a cup on it, and it will stay stable because of the Newtonian paradigm. But if we go quantum, we can’t find the cup, and we can’t find the table, and we can’t find the self looking. So, that means that things are far more creative and far more fluid and far more possible than meets the eye in any one moment.
That’s really the spirit of the teaching of quantum view—is perhaps the Dalai Lama, not only does he have an open heart, but he has this uncanny ability to remain optimistic in order to find real solutions for the real problems of the planet. That is because he has this open-mindedness. He’s not just going, “Oh. Well, it is an inherently existing genocide, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” He’s seeing that living beings are in pain and causing tremendous strife and difficulty and challenges unnecessarily, and we need to find a way forward. How do you find a way forward? You have flexibility of mind, and you start networking, and you start creating secular ethics, and you spend 50 years of your life coming up with amazing solutions. So, that is a testament to the result of refining one’s quantum view.
TS: Now, Miles, there’s a lot that I would still like to talk to you about, but I’m going to bring our conversation home here with just two final questions.
MN: Oh, Tami. I’m so sad to hear that.
TS: Well, I’m giving you a little warning. So, the first is: you’ve talked quite a lot here about contemporary neuroscience and how we can understand even the mentor bonding process as a way that we’re rewiring our nervous system. Even setting up our altar is a way to rewire our nervous system. Do you feel that there are discoveries from neuroscience that in your view have improved the Lam Rim teachings, or has it just made it more comprehendible for you in a different language?
MN: I do think that it’s bringing something to the table. I think that if we didn’t have neuroscience, we would be stuck in a very polarized situation. We would be falling into one of two camps. Either you have to believe in these things based on faith, which is the religious predicament—and I’m not judging it because there are many Buddhists that view these things based on incredible devotion, such an extreme devotion that it brings tears to my eyes. They don’t know the mechanisms, if you will. They don’t know the psychological mechanisms. Their guru has told them, or the Dalai Lama has recommended, or they have been raised in a culture where this is part and parcel how a spiritual aspirant conducts oneself, and they just do it.
Now, our modern, industrialized civilization, that won’t do. So, we are now seeing 300 years of legacy of tremendous skepticism and suspicion against religion, and there we fall into an opposite but equally anorexic position, which is, “Well, then there’s nothing. Nothing important can happen from a visualization. Why are you guys mantraing it out and playing the drums and imagining something on the holodeck with rainbow lights? You guys are a bunch of crazy, whacked out people, and nothing profound can happen to a human being. It’s all shit, and we all just . . . we’re here for a small amount of time. So just get on with it, and then we die.”
That’s really the unfortunate anorexic, position of a modern, secular, reductionistic paradigm. It’s like all we are is on a treadmill. We’re making a few shekels in our dead end job, and really, the world just goes to pot. You can try to get yours while you can and grab what you can. I think that is—I mean, look. This is the major dysfunction that we are seeing globally with a whole generation of apathetic people who basically have nothing to live for in a purposeless life in a cinderblock civilization. So bloody sad. I cannot tell you. I mean, really, it is.
So, those are the extremes we’re trying to avoid here by suggesting there can be a midpoint where there is a borrowing from both sides in a new integration, where you have the spiritual science from India and Tibet. I mean, I’ve studied now 20 years everything in Western science—psychology, for example. There’s nothing that even remotely touches this stuff in terms of what a person is capable of and what a mind is. So, we draw from that side—from the Tibetan side—that nuanced, sophisticated science about human development and the methodologies of compassion and introspection and meditation and visualization flight simulator.
But then we bring in the neuroscience and the psychotherapy. I mean, listen: the psychotherapists know how to have a relationship, and they know about development, and they know about trauma, and they know about resilience, and they know about the vagus system, and they know about—I mean, all this stuff that’s happening. We are in a very, very interesting period of time where our sciences and our psychotherapies are coming into contact with the East, and really becoming new hybrids that are really robust and very, very profound and very fruitful.
And it’s not just a language game. We’re bringing something to the table. I mean, our understanding of human development and early childhood, and our way of sitting down and communicating and working with the body, and knowing how the brain works in order to recover from trauma—I think these are revolutionary things. These are very, very profound things. And when they come together, I think we are—I mean, this is my call to action in the book. We are on the cusp of a global catastrophe with the demise of the species and all the geopolitical strife and the ecological devastation. We are at a very, very, very dangerous time, and anyone who’s trying to contend with that point isn’t looking at the research. We don’t have much time, really.
At the very same time, we are witnessing this massive burgeoning of consciousness, and everybody’s coming out of their little rock to provide some sustenance and some reassurance and some methodology way to come back to spirit. I mean, the people that I talk to in the plant medicine world and the proven shamans, they are saying that they have received a call from the mother, from the Earth, to serve as emissaries, to spread their knowledge. People in Goa—all the way in India and Western Europe, the shamans are there. They’re out. They’re saying, “Now is the time.”
So, that’s a very, very interesting time where these two paradigms—the best of both of them—are coming together, and we can be critical and know our history and know what to leave behind, what part of them don’t serve. So, blind faith does not serve. But also, being too reductionistic and forgetting spirit definitely does not serve. So, there you have this very opportune middle ground where you can have science with heart and spirit based in logic. That’s what I write about in the book.
TS: [Yes]. OK, Miles. Here’s my final question for you. At one point during this conversation, when I asked you about your own personal journey, you answered by saying, “Well, when I first started my hero’s journey,” and there’s a feeling throughout Gradual Awakening—your new book—The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human, that you’re teaching a hero’s journey—that you’re teaching (I’ll use my own language) a type of warriorship. There’s something that you’re calling on in people, and I wonder if you can speak to that—the qualities that we need to make the kind of journey you’re describing in Gradual Awakening.
MN: Well, I’ll give you a little story. I hope I have time. I was giving the book launch a couple days ago, and I was planning for months to have a colleague with me to give the dialogue—a very senior colleague who’s a very adept ceremonial ritual master. At 7:00 when the event was about to start, he wasn’t there as planned. So, I called him slightly in a panic going, “Where are you? Is it New York City traffic, or what?” He politely answered and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I double-booked, and I can’t make it.”
I was a little numb. I politely hung up. I honestly did politely hang up. I thought about it for about five minutes: what am I going to do? And then it dawned on me. I had this realization that we’re going to do the ritual together—not just me up there without my compadre, but me and the entire constituent, all those that showed up to support the book launch. We are going to empower us in a ceremony where each of us is giving ourselves permission to reacquaint ourselves with our fundamental nature.
I think that is a very profound message at this time—that we can’t wait for somebody else to do it. That somehow, waiting around for someone else to do it secretly implies that we don’t feel up to the job. We can’t afford on this planet right now to wait for others to do it. We are each going to have to rise up to the occasion and find our way to some sense of courage and some sense of dignity and some sense of perseverance in order to operate within our own sphere of influence, whether that be a Tami-style sphere of influence or a more modest one. But we can each make a change, and we can’t wait for somebody else to do it. It’s going to have to be not a top-down revolution on this planet with the icecaps melting. It is going to have to be a grassroots movement with everybody chipping in.
So, the book tour that I’m doing, starting with the first one in New York City, is less a book talk and signing. It is a ritual. It is a ritual in which I am bringing people who dare come, and bringing them into the flight simulator that you and I just discussed in order to realign them with the resonance of their own capacity or capability—but then to hold them to account that they are part of a membership of altruistic engagement. They are part and parcel the very members that are going to make the difference it takes to tip the balance away from the inevitable demise of this planet and all its species.
I think that that requires, above everything, confidence, which we have severely lost. Each and every one of us have lost our confidence. I know my own hero’s journey was a long sustained process of reclaiming my confidence. I hope with these technologies and the bells and whistles that come with it and the flight simulator—the spectacular flight simulator technology that comes with it—I hope to help initiate people; not because I’m special and I have the power to initiate it, but we each have the power to initiate ourselves into a global leadership.
TS: I love it! Very, very helpful.
MN: Well, thank you.
TS: Thank you. I’ve been speaking with Miles Neale, who has taken flight with his new book, Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human. He’s also created an audio series that includes a whole sequence of guided meditations called The Gradual Path.
Miles, thank you so much, and good luck with all the good work you’re doing. Thank you.
MN: Tami, thank you so much, and my love to all the Sounds True team. What a wonderful living example of the bodhisattva spirit you guys all are.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world. Thanks for listening.
