Varela 2026: Closing Q&A (Part 11)

Thank you for listening to UPIA's Dharma podcast, an extraordinary series of talks from some of the finest teachers in the world. I'm Joan Halifax, founder of the UPIA's End Center, and we're happy to make these podcasts available to you. Please consider making a donation so we can offer these recordings freely. You'll find a donation button on our podcast page. And thank you so much. This is Dharma Podcast at DharmaPodcast.org. This is episode number 2657. It was recorded on August 23rd, 2026. And it is part 11 of a multi-part series titled Varela 2026. This episode is titled Closing Q&A. The speakers for this episode are Adam Frank, John Dunn, Molly Crocket, and Joan Halifax. Insights, no arias, if you will. And I'll start with the room, but also, so I want to have, you know, my Mike Bodisotvas, please. And also, my request is simple. If you have, before both our online community and our on-site community, we'd love to hear from those of you who have not spoken, who haven't asked a question yet. And that's kind of, you know, we're pretty democratic here at times. So, you know. Except when you're not. Yeah. Don't be shy. So don't be shy. Whoa. All right. I want to start with Flint, if you will. Is that okay, Flint? Although I've spoken, but I'm settled into this thing about experience. Because as a psychologist, psychotherapist, and then as a Zen teacher, I've been a psychologist myself all these years about what happens in between, primarily. And what happened, rather than so much. You can also speak a little louder. Yeah. So, the idea of how one develops and how that's associated with interpersonal neurobiology suggests from at least some of the work I've done with some folks at UCLA, is that this is a very truncated but very useful shorthand for what the prefrontal cortex is trying to do. And AI gets this, which is, are you there? Do you hear me? Do you choose me? Like, is there a attachment form? Is there a tune and is there love? And AI can do all of those things. It can show up as if something's there. It's an illusion. And as if you're being heard and as if you're being chosen. And it's all an illusion, but easily. But the problem is, there's no body. And that makes a huge difference. And the erosion of intellectual capacity that you were talking about, there's also an erosion of emotional capacity. I had a UT student in Austin, when I was in psych, came to me full of shame, could hardly look at me, and I assumed abuse, a lot of things. Turned out, he finally admitted the thing, which is, I don't know how to have a conversation. She's hugely ashamed about it because of what had gone on. So we worked from there. So I just wanted to say something about that. That's all. Thanks. University students that I teach, and we have a course called the Art and Science of Human Flourishing that we developed with Penn State and UVA. And in that context, these kinds of issues come up a lot. But what's really interesting is not just that, you know, like an AI can do this, but also that many of our young people are connecting with each other through the device. And then when they get really stressed, you know, the kind of, what I think is the most important thing is that you have to be able to communicate through the device. And then when they get really stressed, you know, the kind of what I observe, I mean, I haven't done any like formal research on this, just anecdotal. But, you know, we know that when individuals get really stressed and they start to exhibit like a sickness behavior, they have, you know, an inflammatory response or whatever it is, but they sort of withdraw. And then what they do is they end up, you know, in their alone in their dorm room, according to what they report, texting with their friends. But they're noses and it's like the human body appears to, I think, of some research by Jim Cohen. It seems to kind of assume that there'll be other humans around. And there's no regulation. There's no support. You know, the immune system, like some of Jim's work was many years ago, suggested that, you know, our immune system actually sort of cools down, so to speak, when there are other humans around, we feel support. So they're there, you know, really stressed out about whatever anxious and stressed out and they're trying to feel like they're with their friends who are supporting them, but there's no actually embodied human there. They might as well be talking to an AI. And so it actually makes things, you know, almost worse. Like their mind is saying, my friends are helping me, and their body is saying, you know, nobody's there. And that, I mean, that's just my, you know, kind of crazy idea about it. But it's definitely a thing that I see at least, whatever is the causality of it. Flint, you have one more thing you... Can you hear me okay? We know you have to be mic'd for our online community. I use this aid to the kids. A tweet is not a kiss on your cheek. Email is not a whisper in your ear. And a friend's request on Facebook is not a warm, outstretched hand. Yeah. Good for you. Thank you. That's so good. Okay, let's hear from, again, we would like to just hear from online and on-site people who've not spoken before. Wendy, would you just... Susie. Susie, Susie. Hi. Are you able to hear me? One second, Susie. Okay. And if we could pin her. Go ahead, Susie. Okay, can you hear me now? Yeah, great. My question has to do with mystical experiences. If I understand it correctly, they don't exactly change who we are. I think it was Adam yesterday who referred to the January 6 dude as an example. But I'm wondering about ND near-death experiences. I've heard accounts of people have said they were dramatically changed by those experiences. Do they fall under the umbrella of mystical experiences? And what do you, what are your thoughts on them? Yeah, first I want to say that the categories are fluid. And I also, mystical experiences can change your life. But, you know, they're transitory. Often we want the back, they're noetic and so forth. But so I don't want to be too rigid in these definitions. Near-death experiences, I think are, you know, a really important landscape of experience. And, you know, I'm familiar with that personally and as well as, you know, the work I've done with dying people for a half a century. And I know from the LSD work that's been, and I did in the early 70s. And where people experience on LSD a death and rebirth experience, but then also the NDE kind of experience that's kind of out of Kenneth Ring's playbook. Those experiences can transform people's view of what it means to die. Also, they cannot. So this is the thing about all insight can also be transitory. Awakening can be fleeting. Realization can fall away. So I, you know, I don't want us to be too rigid in this. But I feel like that typology is useful. And, you know, as I said, NDE's have great potential for transforming the sense of mortality that we have as individual, but also looking or in relation to others who are dying. I would add briefly that I think the best reading of James's account of mystical experience is definitely if it doesn't change your life, it's not a mystical experience for James, even though it looks like it. Yeah, I think so. And, and that's why he thought his nitrous oxide. He seems to think that his nitrous oxide experiences weren't really mystical experiences, because they didn't change his life. And that just seems to be the case. But I think one way to think about this is something that came up in the wonderful conversation between Roshi and Michael Paulin, which is this idea of ego dissolution or radical alteration in the sense of self. And I think what's important in that, which probably many types of NDE, I don't think all NDE is necessarily like you can retain you can be out of your body but just deliver strong sense of self perhaps. And I think that's an ego dissolution in both like drug induced or meditation induced or NDE. But a key thing is that when you come back is your value is your framework of your own, not just your own identity but like your world. Is it just reinforced? Or is it radically changed? And the idea of psychedelics as a kind of non specific accelerant and this idea of the whole right wing psychedelics issue is where you have this kind of, oh I dissolve and it just proves my view of the world. And that's where it's probably not really transformative. Right? And actually just read like so you can have a thing where I have a mystical view of the world and I dissolve and there I'm experiencing my oneness with my world and I come back and it's like yep I was right. So that's yeah. And I suspect that might be a problem with NDE's but I don't know enough about them. Thank you for your questions. All right, who else? Dave. Just a comment on listening to the panel talk about AI this morning and maybe you can offer some feedback and the need to check the opportunity for an expert to have the ability to check. Sounds very similar to the results we're getting from our own mind. Are they true? Are we checking them? How are we learning how to discriminate whether they are true? Come to a monastery, find a teacher. Two things that seem to interfere with being able to trust information are our own sense of urgency and this culture's need for efficiency. We've only been in, most of us have only been in relationship with AI for a year, maybe two. And the Buddhist advices live with your teacher for five years before see how they live, can you trust them? And to Molly's point about AI returning results from just a guy, there's a Western Buddhist teacher who published a book describing himself as an arahant, a perfectly enlightened being, describes himself as I am such and such the arahant. Subsequent to publishing that book, he learned that there was a teacher who could check whether you're enlightened. He surreptitiously contacted this teacher. She cast aspersions on his attainments, and he had to acknowledge that maybe he was premature in his declarations. He did not recall his book. He did not make a public statement about his not being an arahant. So just some parallels in the Buddhist universe to what you're saying. Thank you. I'm not Jewish, but oy. There's another word that goes with it. Oy gavalt, right? That's here from online person who hasn't spoken before. Can you say GB? GB. GB Cornucopia. GB we know well was a Ranger at Chaco Canyon for 30 years and is an astronomer beyond belief and it's good to see you GB. Yeah. Can you hear me? We hear you. Okay, good. My, my video is doing all kinds of crazy things. I don't know if I, I'm not even going to try. It keeps cutting in and out your conversation with Michael pollen. He brought something to mind from my early experience in my twenties. In a four year period, I probably took hallucinogens, maybe 12 times. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, those kind of things. I always felt like it was an important event. I had my experiences. And what I was just hearing John say, I don't know if I had mystical experiences. I don't know if I solidified my world view through that experience, but it does feel to me like it opened me to a new way of taking in information. And my curiosity changed, and I wanted to know more. But my real question is, has anybody done any studies on people who have had those kind of experiences the way I did? And then later in life, because when I was retiring, I was under a lot of stress and I was having experiences. And I'm wondering if the early days of, you know, the psilocybin, LSD and all of that opened me in such a way that now these experiences, which weren't always, they didn't always feel good. I was getting messages that were conflicting and I was seeing things and I had out-of-body stuff happening. I'm wondering if those early times opened me to some things that then in a stressful time, I broke, you know, something happened. I was, I won't say wise enough, but I pretty much felt that what was happening to me as I was trying to retire was stress related. But, you know, we're all chemistry and I'm just wondering, has any studies been done on people who've had those kind of experiences? So I leave it open to anybody who wants to. Because the last thing I'll say is, I've had to see some of the recordings. I haven't been able to be with you through the whole thing, but I've caught up to everything. I have not heard one presentation that I wouldn't have felt wonderful about going to a large city a long way away to just see that one talk. So I just, thank you, thank you, thank you. Gosh. Yeah. You know, a couple of points that I think are important. Mystical experiences are not always fun or pretty. And what is interesting, you know, in Buddhism, Makyam actually comes from Mara, but actually it means tempter. You know, the temptation, you know, that we feel are the experiences kind of, you know, sort of tempter based, the cave of tempters is really of the tempters, you know. One of the references in the Zen world. And those difficult experiences can be generative. I remember working with Stan, doing the LSD work with dying cancer patients. This was in 1972, 1972. This is under the aegis, I think most of you know, National Institute of Mental Health. We did a book, Human Encounter of Death. You can download it for free on somewhere on the web. That's a description of the whole research. It was really powerful. And Stan, at one point, these were people, you know, who were in the phase of active dying. And they were suffering from uncontrollable pain, difficult with medical management, severe depression, I forgot, there were two other categories. And, oh, fear of death, of course. So there was another one. I remember at one point, Stan said to me, because I was new in this work. I'd had, you know, psychedelic and also intensive meditational experiences prior, but I came into this work and then we had our own, you know, journey. But what he said to me was interesting. He said, a bad trip is a good trip. And here's the thing. A bad trip is a good trip if there's a phase of conscientious integration. A bad trip can be a bad trip without proper integration of the experience. This is also true for meditation. It's also true for fasting. It's also true for solitude. It takes an entire context. And in the case of indigenous cultures who routinely use entheogens, those cultures hold the integration phase, per se, just by virtue of the structure of the culture. When people experience, mystical experiences in this culture, psychedelically related or not, they often end up on, you know, thorazine. This is considered a disordered state or mental health problem. And so then they become by virtue of how psychiatry operates now, chemically controlled. So we, at this point, our culture is not oriented toward that kind of transformational process. And because of that, the spontaneous or utilization of some inductive technique, including entheogens, people go into it. They have what's called a bad trip. And there's no integration. There's no psychosocial support. So it's a kind of problem. But I do find it fascinating that what is recognized now, it was recognized in the early 70s. And then of course, thanks to my old friend, the late Tim Leary, this became a big political issue. So research was greatly diminished except for the Hopkins Project, which moved to Hopkins East Bay. And Bill Richards, I think, is still associated with that project, which is just crazy. He was with us at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in the 70s. Yes, Bill. Good. But what we're seeing is there is value in, and again, this is deconstructing the perception box for people who have cancer, who have fears of mortality and depression. And there also is value for people who are highly ruminative and depressive, utilizing therapeutic dose of psilocybin in a context where integration is there. Recreational uses can be quite problematic. And also, this is true of meditation. I appreciate what you said, Dave. Just doing intensive meditation without a context and a teacher can lead to a lot of problems. And our, the Dark Knight Lady. Oh, Willoughby, Britain. Willoughby, Britain talks about the outcome, adverse outcomes of intensive practice. That is why in Buddhism and probably in other traditions, doing intensive practice, decontextualize is not considered safe. Being in a community, having a relationship with teacher or teachers is essential. But as Dave pointed out, there are enough imposters out there that you wanna be sure you're in a situation which is safe and integrated. And also where there's not bypassing, where when issues related to aggression or hostility or delusion come up, where there are mechanisms for actually working that edge so a bad trip can become a good trip, so to speak. One short thing, I think also in that context that I've observed and I've heard from colleagues who work with PAT, Psychedelic Assisted Therapy, is one key challenge is sort of letting go of whatever we come out of intense meditative experience or psychedelic experience, whatever it might be. There will be a story that emerges. And part of the role of the therapist or of the community is to say you don't need to have that story. Maybe that's a good story, maybe it's not. But you see this both with negative and positive trips, like people could come out of a trip and think they've seen the Elysian mysteries or whatever it is. And they have the key. Yeah. And then people get stuck in stuff, so to speak. So it's really just on a personal level, I think. Having part of the role of that community is saying, hey, you know what? The way you're interpreting this doesn't have to be, that doesn't have to be the story you use. And that can be very important. Thanks, John. Let's see, are we online or on site? I forget who is, say what, on site? Yeah, we can say it. Oh, in the room, okay. Wow, there are a lot of questions. Somebody else choose. It's a crazy cricket, girl, okay. Yeah. I mean, you should start keeping track, maybe. And if you've spoken before, we're gonna ask you to, but you haven't spoken before. I haven't spoken before. Okay, great, if you would stand up and share your name. I'm Deborah. My question is somewhat along the lines of Suzy and the astronomer, but with deep trauma and the instant shift in awareness and experience and what comes out of that, it might be for a moment, it might be for an extended time, but then it drops. Where do you place that within a conscious being? And life changing perhaps, but I think you've all spoken to deep experience and that's just, yeah. Thank you for your question. Thank you for that question. I think the framework of mystical experiences and the sort of spiritual context that we've been focusing on here doesn't always give resources for understanding traumatic experiences, which are also life changing. And so I just wanna offer another framework that's very complimentary with what we've been talking about and this is my collaborator, Lori Paul, who's a philosopher and has written a book called transformative experience. And her framework is a two pronged framework. So what she defines as a transformative experience is an experience that is epistemically transformative, which means you learn something new, a new kind of knowledge how that you couldn't have without the experience. So in the case of trauma, you can't imagine what it's like to experience trauma without actually going through it. There are also other things, of course, that are more positive that have this quality as well, but that's the first sort of component of a transformative experience is understanding something new, a new kind of knowledge that you get. The second element, she calls personal transformation and that has to do with a shift in your values, your sense of who you are that's enduring. And so that's consistent with some of the other frameworks that we've t