by Harris, Dan
I don’t know what I’m expecting. Applause, maybe? As it turns out, he’s pretty much unimpressed. He smiles and gently tells me he’s heard this story a million times. This is, like, First Retreat 101.
I thought I’d achieved a front-row seat in the theater of my mind. He makes it clear that I really had loge seating. “As you continue your practice,” he says, “your NPMs—noticings per minute—will go way up.”
Then I tell him about the horrific jolt of restlessness from the night before last. Again, his response is: Nothing special. Happens all the time.
He is massively reassuring, though, on the inevitable vexations and vicissitudes of the practice. It is, he says, not unusual at all to go from bliss to misery within the space of an hour. He assures me that as I get more advanced, the ups and downs won’t be so jagged. I get up to leave, comforted by the knowledge that I am walking a well-trodden path. People have been doing this very practice for 2,500 years.
On my way to the door, he shouts after me and says I’m moving too fast. “You’re not being mindful enough,” he says. Like a sports coach, he exhorts me to up my game, to pay more attention as I do things like walk and open doors. “This is the stuff!”
I wonder: Is my growing reverence for Goldstein a form of Stockholm syndrome? Or is this person genuinely special? As I stand outside the office, soaking up the sunshine for a moment, the hummingbird reappears.
An hour or so later, in the morning question-and-answer period, a brassy redheaded woman in the front row asks the question that’s been nagging at me this whole time: “If enlightenment is real, where are all the enlightened people?”
It gets a good laugh, including from Goldstein, who promises that at tonight’s dharma talk he’s going to explain everything.
This I’m looking forward to. During the course of this retreat, he has repeatedly dropped words like “liberation,” “awakening,” and “realization.” But is this vaunted transformation actually achievable? If so, how? And what does it look like? In the Buddhist scriptures, people are getting enlightened left and right. They’re dropping like flies—even seven-year-olds. The Buddha had an entire lexicon to describe enlightenment: “the true,” “the beyond,” “the very hard to see,” “the wonderful,” “the marvelous,” “the island,” and more. All those words, and still I have no idea what he meant.
At seven o’clock, it’s time for the big show. We’re all assembled in the hall. Goldstein is finally going to explain enlightenment.
He starts by acknowledging that for “householders”—non-monks—the idea of an end to craving can seem unattainable. “Can we even imagine a mind free of craving? I think most of us resonate probably more closely with the famous prayer of Saint Augustine: ‘Dear Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.’ ”
There’s laughter, but then Goldstein launches into a dead-serious description of the various steps toward achieving the “unshakable deliverance of mind, the cessation of craving without remainder.” His description of the stages of enlightenment makes it sound like the most elaborate video game ever.
The process starts when the meditator becomes super-concentrated, when their NPMs reach epic velocity. It’s like my backbirdknee experience, only on steroids. You see things changing so quickly that nothing seems stable. The seemingly solid movie of the world breaks down to twenty-four frames per second. The universe is revealed to be a vast soup of causes and conditions.
From there, the path, as Goldstein describes it, involves moments of terror, periods of sublime bliss, pitfalls, trapdoors, and detours. At the end, the meditator arrives at the true goal of Buddhist meditation: to see that the “self” that we take to be the ridgepole of our lives is actually an illusion. The real superpower of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully but to see that the ego itself has no actual substance. Close your eyes and look for it, and you won’t find any “self” you can put your finger on. So, for example, in my backbirdknee jag, if I were more enlightened, I would have been able to see that not only is reality not as monolithic as it appears, but also the “me,” who was noting all the arising objects, isn’t solid either. “The strong, deeply entrenched reference point of ‘I’ has been seen through,” says Goldstein from the front of the room. “That’s Nibbana.” The illusion of the self is, per the Buddhists, the wellspring of all our negative emotions—specifically, greed and hatred and confusion about “the nature of reality” (i.e., that we’re much more than our egos, that we are connected to the whole). Once the self is seen as unreal, these emotions are uprooted from the mind, and the meditator becomes “perfected.” The mind goes from a monkey to a gazelle.
Sounds awesome, I guess, but as he concludes, I realize that he hasn’t answered some of my most basic questions. If it’s so rare and hard to reach enlightenment, why bother trying? Is Goldstein himself enlightened? If not, on what basis does he believe in it? What do enlightened beings look like? Is Nirvana/Nibbana a magical state? A place? Once I’ve achieved selflessness, do I then just return to my everyday life, or do I no longer need to put my pants on in the morning?
The Buddhists clearly figured out a workable, practical system for defanging the voice in the head, but to add on top of that the promise of a magical transformation seems to me too cute by half. I buy the thesis that nothing in an unreliable, impermanent world can make you sustainably happy, but how will a quest for an enlightenment that almost no one can achieve do so either?
When the talk is over, in a minor act of rebellion, I walk down to the dining hall and binge mindlessly on rice cakes.
Day Nine
In the morning question-and-answer session, Goldstein redeems himself with a little humor. In exhorting us not to tune out during these closing hours of the retreat, he says, “They’re like the dessert. Just maybe not the dessert you ordered.”
As he presses his case, he says something that bugs me. He urges us not to spend too much time thinking about the stuff we have to do when the retreat is over. It’s a waste of time, he says; they’re just thoughts. This provokes me to raise my hand for the first time. From the back of the echoey hall, in full-on reporter mode, with my overloud voice apparently not atrophied one bit from disuse, I ask, “How can you advise us not to worry about the things we have to do when we reenter the world? If I miss my plane, that’s a genuine problem. These are not just irrelevant thoughts.”
Fair enough, he concedes. “But when you find yourself running through your trip to the airport for the seventeenth time, perhaps ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this useful’?”
His answer is so smart I involuntarily jolt back in my chair and smile.
“Is this useful?” It’s a simple, elegant corrective to my “price of security” motto. It’s okay to worry, plot, and plan, he’s saying—but only until it’s not useful anymore. I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to balance my penchant for maniacal overthinking with the desire for peace of mind. And here, with one little phrase, Goldstein has handed me what seems like a hugely constructive tool for taming this impulse without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Achieving choiceless awareness and metta-induced blubbering may have been the most dramatic moments of the retreat, but this is unquestionably the most valuable.
Day Ten
I awake to the smell of freedom.
Today is a half day. We do some meditation in the morning, and then we “break silence.” The zombies reanimate, transforming from the mindful walking dead back into normal human beings. You can almost see the color return to their cheeks.
It’s fascinating to engage with the people around whom I’d spun rather elaborate stories during the silence. Turns out, they’re totally normal. I have lunch with a handsome German woman, who admits that she called her kids a couple of times. Also at the table is a middle-aged technology executive, who says he came on a lark and largely enjoyed it.
A young Asian guy approaches me. He’s athletic and good-looking. In observing him over th
e past days, I had assumed he would be stern and serious. Turns out, he’s super friendly. He tells me he felt “privileged” to be near me during that metta session when I cried. This produces a starburst of conflicting emotions, including gratitude and embarrassment. I mumble something and extricate myself.
The teachers warned us that the real world would seem clangorous and jangly after ten days of silence, but as I pull away from Spirit Rock in a cab, I turn on my BlackBerry and devour my email with curiosity more than dread. I visit my sister-in-law and enjoy being climbed on by her two young children. On the plane, I binge on TV shows on my iPhone. The habits of a lifetime reassert themselves with astonishing speed. It may have been one of—if not the—most meaningful experiences of my life, but I was nonetheless ready for it to end.
Chapter 8
10% Happier
I knew my television career had undergone a radical shift when I found myself reading the following line off the teleprompter: “Now to the story of Irwin the paralyzed kangaroo . . .” Cut to a live shot of a woman holding a handicapped marsupial dressed up in a shirt, tie, and vest. At which point I blurted out, with forced jollity, “I like Irwin’s new suit! He’s looking dashing!” I was smiling on-screen, but inside, my ego was hissing, You are a dope.
I was in the midst of an object lesson in the Buddhist concept of “suffering,” which in this case could be roughly translated into “Be careful what you wish for.”
On a Friday afternoon, shortly after I’d come back from the retreat, a particularly chipper David Westin strolled into my office, stuck out his hand, and offered me the job as weekend co-anchor of Good Morning America.
I was elated and relieved, light-headed with glee. It was as if I had totally forgotten all of Joseph’s dharma talks about the impossibility of lasting satisfaction. I felt as if months of worrying about my place in the news division and my future in the industry could finally cease. All of my problems were solved. Deliverance!
What came next was a series of developments that could have been authored by the Buddha himself. Two days after Westin strode into my office and confidently extended the offer, I was at home when I saw the following headline on the New York Times website: “Chief of ABC News Is Resigning.”
When I got back into work the next morning, it was quickly made clear to me by various senior executives that Westin would be staying on as president for many more months, and that the offer still stood. That meant it was time to negotiate my new contract, which produced a fresh whole set of challenges. Talks quickly got bogged down over a variety of minor issues. Both sides dug in their heels. There came a moment where the entire thing appeared to be in jeopardy.
After several weeks of stasis, in an attempt to break the impasse, the executive producer of GMA, Jim Murphy, called me in for a meeting. Murphy (everyone called him by his last name) had been EP for several years, during which time I had grown quite fond of him. He was a tall, nattily dressed guy with slicked-back, salt-and-pepper hair, a soul patch, and a taste for cigarettes, booze, and sardonic humor.
As I sat across from him in his corner office, which had a panoramic view of Lincoln Center, I was prepared for Murphy to try to convince me that I should drop my various demands. I expected him to make the case that these issues were really not as important as I was making them out to be. Instead, he chose a more aggressive tack.
“Can I tell you something as a friend?” he asked. “Because I know,” he said in his winning entre nous way, “that you, unlike other people around here, won’t get overly sensitive about it.”
“Sure,” I said, shifting in my chair, trying to affect nonchalance.
“You’re never going to be the anchor of a major weekday newscast,” he said with a casual certainty that made my stomach drop. “You don’t have the looks,” he went on, “and your voice is too grating.”
He had me in a funny spot. Having coolly promised him that I could take whatever he had to say without getting too sensitive, I couldn’t very well lash out as he killed my dreams. So I pretended not to be poleaxed as we wrapped up the meeting and I limped out of his office.
While my communication with my bosses was, to say the least, unsatisfying, I did meanwhile have a sudden epiphany about how to talk about meditation without looking like a freak.
My disappearing on retreat for ten days with no email or phone contact naturally provoked a lot of questions, which outed me as a meditator, and forced me to discuss my new practice with a much wider group.
At first, these conversations didn’t go so well. At my family’s annual summer pool party, just weeks after my time with Goldstein in California, my father pointedly told me a story about some people he knew who had discovered meditation and subsequently become “like, totally ineffective.” Later, he warily asked me, “So, are you a Buddhist now?” To which I muttered some sort of flustered nonanswer.
Among my broader group of friends and coworkers, the retreat spurred queries as skeptical as my father’s. “You did what on your summer vacation?” they’d ask. The subtext always seemed to be “So you’ve pretty much joined a cult, haven’t you?” I could tell that people were thinking what I certainly would have been thinking if I were in their shoes: that I had become one of those people, the formerly normal guy who arrives at middle age and adopts some sort of strange spirituality.
Whenever I was asked about meditation, I would either clam up and get a sheepish look on my face, the way dogs in Manhattan do when they’re going to the bathroom on the street, or I would launch into an off-putting, overly emphatic lecture about the benefits of mindfulness, how it was actually a superpower, how it really wasn’t as weird as everyone thought, and didn’t involve “clearing the mind,” and so on. I could see the tinge of mild terror in my listener’s eyes—the cornered interlocutor politely but frantically looking for any means of egress.
There were a few things I was attempting, with varying degrees of ham-handedness, to achieve in these interchanges. Mostly I was trying to defend my reputation, to make sure people didn’t think I was a loon. But there was something else. The more I meditated, the more I looked around and appreciated that we all have monkey minds—that everyone has their own Weirs and Muirs they’re competing against, their own manufactured balding crises (and, of course, the kinds of more serious collisions with impermanence from which I had mercifully been spared thus far). Especially after my powerful experiences on retreat, I felt compelled to share what I had learned. I just couldn’t figure out how to do this effectively. At one point, during a work meeting, for example, I mentioned to Barbara Walters that I was considering writing a book on mindfulness. She smiled and replied, “Don’t quit your day job.”
After several weeks of this, I had a fateful conversation with my friend Kris, a senior producer at GMA. She’d been a mentor of mine since my earliest days at ABC. We had a no-holds-barred relationship, which usually consisted of her making fun of me for some on- or off-air foible. One day, we were chatting at the GMA rim when the subject of my recent “vacation” came up. She shot me a funny look and said, “What’s with you and the whole meditation thing?”
Trying to avoid another long, unsuccessful answer, I blurted out, “I do it because it makes me 10% happier.” The look on her face instantly changed. What had been a tiny glimmer of scorn was suddenly transformed into an expression of genuine interest. “Really?” she said. “That sounds pretty good, actually.”
Boom: I’d found my shtick. 10% happier: it had the dual benefit of being catchy and true. It was the perfect answer, really—simultaneously counterprogramming against the overpromising of the self-helpers while also offering an attractive return on investment. It vaguely reminded me of the middling 1990s comedy Crazy People, in which Dudley Moore plays an ad exec who decides to start employing honesty in his taglines, coming up with such gems as “Volvos—Yes they are boxy, but they’re safe,” and “Jaguar—For men who’d like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know.” His company sends him to an
insane asylum.
My new slogan also jibed nicely with a major behind-the-scenes ethos in TV news: reporters, it was believed, should try never to oversell their stories. You don’t want to go around telling the people who run the various shows that you’ve got the most amazing material in the world, and then leave them underwhelmed. They’ll never put you on the air again. Always best to provide room for upside surprise. (Of course, you’d never know this by watching our product. On the air, we believe in the opposite of underselling; we slap “exclusive” labels on everything.)
I wished I’d had my 10% line at the ready when being questioned by my dad. I couldn’t blame him for being skeptical, but now my new slogan was an effective kryptonite against this kind of wariness. As I started test-driving it with others, it didn’t create any on-the-spot converts, but it did at least appear to prevent people from thinking I had gone completely off the deep end.
About a month or so after the retreat, I got the chance to test the slogan with Mr. Enlightenment himself. I had arranged to interview Joseph Goldstein for a new digital show on religion I’d started called Beliefs. On a sunny day in early September, he showed up at the ABC studios in his khakis and light blue dress shirt, wearing a BlackBerry holster attached to his belt. Outside of the retreat setting, he was looser and funnier—even charmingly goofy at times. We got along like a house on fire.
I started the interview by asking how he discovered Buddhism in the first place. As a young man, he told me, he had been quite brash—“very much in my own head,” he said. He went to Columbia University with the idea of becoming an architect or a lawyer, but he ended up majoring in philosophy. He then joined the Peace Corps. East Africa had been his first choice, but “karma being what it is,” he was shipped off to Thailand, where he got his first exposure to Buddhism. He joined a discussion group for Westerners at a famous temple in Bangkok, in which he proved to be a controversial presence.