Varela 2026: A Conversation with Michael Pollan (Part 9)

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 2655. It was recorded on August 22nd, 2026. And it is part 9 of a multi-part series titled Varela 2026. This episode is titled, A Conversation with Michael Pollan. The speakers for this episode are Joan Halifax and Michael Pollan. So good evening everybody. Hi. How are you doing? Wonderful. Really? The faculty is having a near-death experience. No, I'm just kidding. I'm the only one who feels just like, okay, let's go. I'm just kidding. Are you challenging? No, no, no, no. I, you know, you get to a certain age, just life is one humorous moment after another, even in the midst of tragedy and tangle. So I want to just give you a little bit of background here. Who has read Michael's latest book? Largely. Largely. Who has read it from beginning to end? Who skipped to the end without reading the rest of it? I'm sorry. I know. So, you know, to just give you a little background, Michael contacted me. We had a number of encounters that were completely delightful in the Berkeley area. In the Berkeley area over the years. In the Berkeley area. You know, over the years. And, you know, he's very interested in, he did this extraordinary book on kind of the history of psychedelics in, you know, our era, so to speak. And it was a great read for me. I was left out of it completely. We hadn't met by that time. But I knew everybody in it. And also I found it absolutely fascinating. You know, he didn't have his mushroom experience until he was, you know, late middle age. While the rest of the older people were practically teenagers when we were doing it. And it was so mind blowing. You know, it just was life transforming. He was communicating with flowers. And it made him so happy because he's an avid gardener. And in any case, so we connected over that part of my history which has remained subterranean for many years until I got old enough where I wouldn't be busted, so to speak. And, you know, I tell you, being a Zen person and a social activist, it's kind of interesting. You know, people are very ambivalent about, you know, people who've had complex histories that I happen to have had one of those. So, and anyway, we really hit it off. And one of the reasons he hit it off, he's so, so smart. And he is completely, he's a science nerd. And he also has this incredible sense of humor. But the most precious thing about him is that he is genuinely interested in life, in things. He is a naturally curious person. And he lacks cynicism. Honestly, he's so unmean spirited, you know, to the degree that many other people are not. And you feel when you're with him, you're able to really open up and to explore things and say smart things and stupid things. And for him, it's all the same. He receives everything equally. And so, you know, then I met his wife, Judith, who's an extraordinary painter, and she is fabulous. And I don't know if you know, but Michael Fox's wife is Michael Pollan's sister. That tall, beautiful woman is Michael Pollan's sister. And she is such a Bodhisattva, I tell you. She has stayed by the side of her husband with Parkinson's and supported this. Big Parkinson's Foundation, which is just, she has just beautiful integrity. And she's not a pathological altruist. She's taking care of herself and is beautiful and loves her husband and they have a great family. So Michael contacted me when he was doing this book on consciousness. And I really recommend the book from the point of view of covering not only the field of consciousness exploration because it is a field characterized by various heavies in the field as dealing with what is called the hard problem. What do we mean by consciousness in any case? And in fact, we've used, conflated some terms here that are quite interesting, consciousness and awareness. And I've been wanting to ask John to actually opine on these two words and from his point of view, what they actually mean. But in any case, Michael had spent very intensive several years interviewing really the most extraordinary people in the field. And the book covers not only what these remarkable remarkable, big brain primates that we've been talking about have been looking at in relation to the whole field of consciousness, which is not a unified field at all. But Michael had just this capacity by virtue of his kind of non-romantic goodness in becoming quite close with a number of the researchers and doing excellent interviews and then bringing us into those interactions in a way that was very narratively based. So you just felt like you were sitting with these thinkers and researchers. It's just really powerful. And I thought, I was gonna go back, I can't read print anymore, but I listened to Michael read the book. He did a great job on reading the book. I was like, wow, how did he sound it so fresh throughout? I just read one of my books and I practically had to be buried afterwards. It's awful. I don't know anybody else written a book and you sit there and read it. I was like, oh my God, I want to change this word and get rid of that phrase. Let's forget it. But anyway, he was so bright and cheerful throughout and consistent and brave because the book is a very complex and irresolvable subject. He requested to interview me and arrived here at UPI and spent several days practicing with us and checking out our kitchen. Turns out he's a good cook. And I realized I didn't want to be interviewed. He'd done enough interviews from my point of view. I interviewed him about what he'd been doing those two years, interviewing everybody in the field, mostly guys, white guys, some brown people, but I just didn't want to be interviewed because I didn't think it would really serve. And I said, you know, I have an idea. Let's go up to Prussia Mount Forest Refuge. It's surrounded this high valley at 9,400 feet, surrounded by 3 million acres of national forest soon to be logged by Donald Trump, but never mind. And let's just spend a few days and see what wants to happen. And so we went up there and he kept, and we had long walks. It's just a beautiful East West Valley up at this high altitude. Very, very remote, very inaccessible. And it's where Wendy and I actually spent the pandemic to get me out of harm's way. It's the best years of my life, I'm embarrassed to say. It's just beautiful up there. Wendy and her little cabin in mine. And the dog. And we'd meet at 11, we'd take a little walk, we'd make linner, and then we, you know, it's just perfect day after day. But at a certain point, I realized that Michael was mentalizing seriously. And that he actually, and he wanted me to join him in that. And I really felt that that was not necessary. And I made this, as anybody who read the last chapter called The Cave, I made this suggestion. Adam has been in that cave. Molly has been in that cave. I've been there. Noah spent four years in it. Wendy, we know the cave. And it's been a place in fact, a teravod monk is in that cave right now doing a range retreat there. But it's a place where really deep practices happened. I said, you know, what I think would be important to do is for you to go to the cave. He said, and he's like kind of parse of folly. He goes, okay. And he toodles off. I put him in the cave and then days later he emerges and he is completely like, he's sort of lit up like a Christmas tree. And so we went down the mountain and I bid Sianara to him. But I noticed something had kind of shifted at him. And then a year later, he said, I hope you don't mind, but you're the last chapter of my book and the cave. And I was like, and then he's, a year later he said, you know something Roshi, you could probably rent out that cave for a lot of money. And it would help support you Paya. So I'm gonna ask you to become members. You don't have to rent out the cave, but nonetheless. So something shifted in Michael and actually it brought him back to the beginning of his search. I mean, it's a complete or Boris, you know. He started out with a question and he ended up with a question. And that is really for me the beauty of not only the book, but his courage, his humility in coming to the place where direct practice realization brought him into the very thing Adam and we have been talking about the direct experience of what it is to drop out of the conceptual mind and simply to be present without seeking any kind of mystical anything, but to let the context and your relaxation and fundamental goodness, which he's, you know, an example of actually begin to turn the perception box into actually a field, not a box that is characterized by openness and precarity. So yes. Oh, there's the cave. Thanks. It's pretty nice. It's a five star cave. And that's the interior of the cave. Not bad. Any more photos, Kodasan? What do you do with psychedelics in there? No, he did nothing. No, I said it in general. That's not a place that's not what I'm referring to. Nope. No, no, no. Okay, I just wanted to clarify. No psychedelics. Okay. They better not. I mean, we're post psychedelic here. I was like, show us. All the middle-aged people are now in the middle of psychedelics, but we're post. Okay. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't this big. No, no, we, nope, not at 9,400 feet. And an hour and a half away from the local hospital on a road that is completely insane. Nope. But in any case, I was in Berkeley, Wendy and I were in Berkeley on the way to Japan for some dog on place. And we had lunch and I said, you know, Michael, I'd love for you to come to the program and be with us. Because, you know, this is really a hoot. You know, nobody does, Buddhism does a trip like this. This is, you know, like family joy, brainiac, you know, discovery. It's just, it's so, I just, we've been doing it for years and it's so warm and also kind of fascinating. And he said, well, you see, I go to Maine in August and I go totally offline and I can't do it. And I said, great. After lunch, let's go to your house and let's just do a little interview because it'll be fun for us. We will have had enough crazy stuff by the time Saturday night happens. And let's just have a sit down, you know, in your study and have a conversation. And so this is what this is. Nobody's seen this yet. It's very kind of, you know, it's kind of intimate and friendly and warm and it's very Michael. And I just invite you into the space with us. And then after that, we'll just have a short Q and A because we have tomorrow morning too. And I wanna liberate all of us to a good night's sleep. And, you know, so. But I just wanted so much for us to feel, feel this remarkable human being and the service he's done in terms of both food but also medicines. And this is not known yet. Commonly he's working on a new project on the human biome. That's his next thing. So, you know, Michael, he went from mushrooms to consciousness to, you know, how we survive actually by what grows on and in our body that is not part of our medium at the onset. Okay. Enjoy psychedelics in the cave. I just had to ask. I know, don't worry. Next lifetime. So, Michael, hi. Hi. We're not in. Wonderful to be with you. Sorry I'm not present at the conference but next best thing. The next best thing. And actually the best thing was I sending you off to the cave, Michael. That was the best thing of all. It was. Yes. We were very briefly together and then you disappeared indeed. Yeah. Now that was a transformative experience for me. I'm very grateful. Michael, I think I'm grateful too. Although the requests for the cave have increased exponentially. So it seems like people want to have a mystical experience. Yeah, there's a great hunger for it. Indeed. And so the session that we're pre-recording for is actually tonight, the very session that all of the rest of you are going to be hearing and viewing. But we're here in Berkeley before Wendy and I leave for Hong Kong and Michael at the time of our gathering with Adam and John and Molly will be when our beloved Michael and his wife Judith are in Maine. Yeah, we'll be on these coasts. Martha's Vineyard. Yeah, Martha's Vineyard. Good. Yeah, sorry to miss that. So I said to you earlier that your new book is not a one read book. And for me it's just an extraordinary exploration of consciousness from literally soup to nuts. So we want to talk about the nuts part. So to speak. OK, I'm game. So this evening session, we had planned to be around mystical experiences and consciousness. And I think one of the questions that we both have been exploring is of what use are they? Yeah, and having had a couple mostly due to psychedelics, I've struggled with that question. Like what's the truth value of insights you have on psychedelics? And one of them that motivated this book or part of this book was this experience of my plants, the plants in my garden being vividly conscious, very present to me, very returning my gaze. And it was a powerful and kind of wonderful experience. They were very well disposed to me. And I was their gardener after all. I pruned them. I watered them. I fertilized them. But so I emerged from the experience like, well, what good is this? What do you do with this? And I actually ended up following the advice of William James, who, of course, wrote about mystical experiences in varieties of religious experience. And he said, we can't really judge the metaphysical value of these experiences. We don't know enough to say whether they're true or not. Subject to science. But what we should do is his test, he had a couple tests. One was how useful is it to think this way? So it was a purely pragmatic test. And also that we should treat the insights we get on mystical experiences as hypotheses to be tested. And by that, he meant bringing other ways of knowing to the experience and see if that illuminates it. So I found that was useful. And that's what I ended up doing in the case of plants, which was exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience. There are people who have mystical experiences and just let the experience guide them, assuming it's truth value. We talked at lunch. I'm sorry, I talked earlier today with the guys who wrote the blind spot, some of whom are here, I guess. Adam is here. And Christoph Koch is a famous consciousness scientist who grew up thinking the brain was the center of consciousness and consciousness surely was generated by neurons. And then he had a mystical experience, in his case, on ayahuasca in Brazil that convinced him beyond a shadow of a doubt that consciousness exists outside of his skull. And for him, it was so vivid. He's accepted it. And it's guiding his thinking now. I would be more skeptical, I think, if it happened to me. But who knows? I mean, its power is hard to argue with too. So I think it's a mystery. And I think one of the, you know, they're not called mystical experiences for nothing. And that this word mystery is right there. And people put them into different uses. It's interesting to look at it from the Zen perspective, because we would say that it's simply phenomena and that the over-identification with it is a kind of nemesis or it's an obstacle to realization, to waking up. But there's another perspective. And I think it's important, and you are alluding to it in terms of Christoph Koch. And that is, there's a phrase, the taste that turns you around. And you don't keep seeking that taste. You can't replicate that taste. But it shifts your way of seeing reality. And you begin to see reality actually, not I take actually back, but you can potentially see reality from the point of view of Anitra and Nathapratichusamapada, you know, from the Buddhist perspective, from the precarity, the absolute slipperiness of our lived experience. There is nothing that is going to stay the same. In any, you know, every moment is unrepeatable. And I think another thing that is in that same vein is no scientist could analyze the present moment. No. Because the present moment is ungraspable. It's ungraspable. Yeah. And, you know, you can pretend to grasp it. But I think that in a way, that's what science tries to do. And it's the blind spot, of course, that the blind spot. And people who have mystical experiences also try to hold on to it and make them persist. And I think part of their power is simply the contrast with everyday reality and the sense of transcending everyday reality. And you can't, transcendence is always relative to something. And so trying to sustain them seems like a fool's errand. Well, if possible. You know, earlier we were saying, when they are sustained, it's called schizophrenia. Yeah. Yeah. That is a problem. And they're impractical, you know, in the sense of doing anything in the world that's transactional is just not accessible to somebody who's in that state, so to speak. But to classify them as just another phenomena is to, I mean, don't you think they have some special status? Do they? I don't know. They feel like they do. Why do you think they feel like they do? Because I think there's this feeling you've had this privileged access to something. You know, Huxley talked a lot about the reducing valve and that in everyday normal consciousness, we only receive what he called the measly trickle that we need for survival. And when he had his mystical experience, which was on mescaline, he had this sensation that the valve was opening wider and more of, I don't know what, he called it mind at large, was being admitted. And I get that. I've had that experience a couple of times that there's like, oh my god, there's more out there than I realized. I think he attributed it to consciousness. He had this Berksonian idea that consciousness was a field outside. But you could interpret it in other ways, simply more of reality, more of that your senses are bringing you more than they normally do. Or it could be material coming up from the unconscious. I mean, who knows? I don't know what it is. I don't know what Buddhism says it is. But what is that to which you have extra access? I think that's a great question. And I can't answer it. But in a way, it's reflected in a Buddhist text called the Abhidham Saka Sutra, the Flower of Garland Sutra. And Buddha's illumination is so exquisitely described for almost 1,334 pages, so to speak. So the gravity of that experience is something that I think we should take seriously. If it is so important in the Kagon school or the Abhidham Saka school that Buddha's illumination, but what was that illumination? He, in one text, that moment of awakening, is I and all beings simultaneously realized the way. So this really comes to this sense of both no self. The self kind of disappears. And it manifests in terms of some fundamental experience of non-separateness. And that, I think, is really one of the most important experiences in the varieties of mystical experiences that one can have and transpersonal experiences, as my ex-husband Stan Grof described. The sense of oneness of non-depiration. And I think that that's really a key factor of a lot of mystical experiences is what is being transcended is the separate self. And that I had one experience of complete ego dissolution when I was working on How to Change Your Mind. And it's a death. It's a death of the self. But what's left is you're still conscious. And that is the first, oh, I can be conscious without having a self? That's kind of big because we assume that I think most people assume that the two are identical. And you can't. We're so identified with ourself that we can't imagine its disappe