Greg Voisen
Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. It's with great honor today that I talk with Richard Dixey, out of Oakland, California. And we're going to be speaking about a new book from New World library. And this book is Three Minutes a Day: A 14-week Course to Learn Meditation and Transform Your Life. Richard, good day to you. How are you doing?

Richard Dixey
I'm doing well. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for the introduction.

Greg Voisen
Well, it's a pleasure having you on the show. And it always excites me. When somebody is interested in helping busy people, try and figure out how they can meditate and kind of get rid of this monkey mind that keeps them from meditating most of the time. And you and I are going to talk about this 14 week course. And most importantly, to I know, we live in a, you know, digital world, there's an app for that there's an app for this book, and you can get it on Google. And you can get it for iPhone as well. And we'll put a link to those in the blog entry for everyone who's listening today. So, you know, not only is the book, inexpensive, but you're getting a free application that goes with it. So Richard is very committed to this. So let me let our listeners know a bit about you. Richard, he's a PhD, a scientist and lifelong student of Asian philosophy. He runs the light of Buddha Dharma foundation in India, with his wife, and I'm hopefully I'm pronouncing it right. So why don't you say it because I

Richard Dixey
don't want a flying moon, what powerful Wangmo

Greg Voisen
and eldest daughter, daughter of the Tibetan Lama, tell me that. Okay, and He is the senior faculty at Dharma College in Berkeley and divides his time between California and India. And I know in October, he goes to India. And we'll be there. You can learn more about Richard and his book, his videos, everything that he's got at Richard Dixie di x ey.com, that will also be linked in our blog. And here's the book, we'll have a link to it at Amazon. So you can go get this book at Amazon. And it's just been brought to us as I was telling everyone, by New World Library. Thank you, Kim Corbin, for always bringing us great authors, we really appreciate it. She's a wonderful person. Well, Richard, you know, first off, when you say three minutes a day, it's a kind of a conundrum, you know, I just got back from a meditation retreat on the orcas islands. And I don't think there was one meditation that was three minutes long. But I speak with us about this whole, what drove you to want to write a book, about three minutes a day, and you say, in less than five hours on this, you know, 14 week course, it's about five hours, that people could really get into meditation, and change their life.

Richard Dixey
Okay, um, so you know, I am a faculty member at Dharma College, which is a college we set up in Berkeley, and is dedicated to re-imagining wisdom. This means to take the Asian meditation traditions and express them in modern language. And it was because of that, I started teaching meditation. And I realized that the traditional methods of teaching meditation are essentially for monks. You know, that's their day job. And so, consequently, there are long meditation periods, because that's their day job. And really, I began thinking, I wonder if we could shorten this and make it more targeted. And indeed, within the Tibetan tradition, this is indeed the way they do it. They say a little and often is better than the long and badly. And so you know, it was really both informed by the Tibetan tradition, also, by my own interest in meditation,

Greg Voisen
That’s great. By the way, I not to interrupt that's a great state that little and often are long and not so good. I like it. I like

Richard Dixey
the issue. But the issue is this. And you know, it's really very simple. We're all victims of reflexive reactivity. Now, this is not a bug. It's a feature. It's a feature of how our cognitive apparatus works. And what's happening in modernity is sophisticated advertisers and very clever computer programs. Now, of course, artificial intelligence, are designed to capture our attention to make us reactive. So we'll buy things or whatever they want to do to influence us. And this is very, very stressful. And so modernity is becoming more and more stressful, because we're surrounded by More and more sophisticated devices, literally taking us away from our focus. And meditation is precisely designed to address this. This is

Greg Voisen
a space in between you're talking about? Well, yeah, because that's the space we're trying to get to, because I said a second ago, the monkey minds for the individuals that are out there that have a list a mile long to do something. And now you're saying three minutes a day, speak about that, because you talk about this concentrated repetition. But you also talked about this gap in between, which is where you are headed with this, this reactivity, right, that we get involved in? How can we combat that? What are your big hands here and the 14 week course?

Richard Dixey
Sure. Okay. So you know, we need to look at our common language to see something very interesting. We have the word cognition, and we have the word re cognition. And when we say I recalled nice something, it means I quote, know it, I know what I'm looking at, because I've recognized it. Now there in the language is an understanding of reflectiveness in our cognition, that's very important to understand what is recognition is where we remember, a prior example of whatever we've cognized and label it as one of those things. Now, normally, we live in recognition, we don't walk around going, I don't know what this all is, we're in a room, we know what everything is, because we're in recognition, which means we live in a memory, of experience, rather than experience itself, we're in a map. Now this mapping, that is really a feature, not a bug of our cognitive apparatus, is how we know what we're doing. It's how we learn from experience. And it's how we've gone from being naked apes on the savanna, to driving around sports cars. This is the powerful faculty of human beings, but it has a problem. And the problem is it is reactive, that's to say, the faster we can recognize, the more responsive we're going to be. So as a result, our read cognitive is on a hair trigger, triggering immediately something grabs it. Now the problem with that is, it's stressful. Because all the time we're being grabbed. And what meditation is about is it's about addressing our own cognition, and separating the RE cognitive, from the cognitive. And in that gap is something very, very important. Now, space serious, if you do it, there's no way of talking about it, you've got to do it. And we can go on and talk about how I might approach doing that. But that's essentially what meditation is about.

Greg Voisen
Well, so if that is what meditation is about, how does this 14 week course help us attain those spaces that between cognition and re cognition? I kind of I Bruce Lipton was on here the other day speaking about biology, bleef, talking about the programs that are fed in right into the subconscious. Now, that's a that's a big part of it. But we have those preprogrammed into us already. And we're saying now we need to reprogram those, we have to reprogram them. Now we Well what we're trying to do well tell us what you

Richard Dixey
Okay, so it's really, really important. So recognition arises from our memory banks, and those memory banks, everything we've learned, all the experiences we've ever had, our background, our country and all our beliefs, sport teams, we believe in our unconscious mind, all of it colors up our recognition. So we can the technical word is we condition, our experience by everything we know. Now, this is fine, if everything we knew was okay. And there weren't problems in what we know. But of course, we all know we have opinions that we wish we didn't have. And also it would be fine. If we didn't think that the world that we conditioned with our beliefs is the quote, real world. The problem is we do and furthermore, our education stresses, that there is a quote, real world out there that we can know. Now this is utterly nonsensical. The only world we ever know is the world given to us by our five senses and our mind. There is no other world we can experience. And yet in the schooling system that we've all been through in contemporary culture, there is no mention of this basic fact of life. So along with reading and writing, we should be taught meditation. Now, what are we really talking about here? Reactivity stirs us up. It's like a glass of water with a bit of dust in it is being stirred continuously by being stirred this way, in that way by things that are bothering us capturing our attention. So the first step in any meditation practice, and this is absolutely canonical, you'll find it in the meditations that you've been taught in every meditation practice, is to become calm. Now, the key is, what does one mean by calm. What happens if you become calm, is you get less reactive. And because you're less reactive, you're the water in the cup settles, the dust begins to settle out of it. And you start to see clearly, the word see clearly in Pali is Vi pasa, the famous vi pasa. So calm this shamatha leads to seeing clearly Vipassana, which means we make better decisions, because we're not being pulled this way. And that and being pulled around by our re our reflexive reactivity. So the key is to learn how to become less reactive. Now, there are two ways you can become less reactive. And it's in the old joke. If you've got something that bother you bothers your feet, you can cover the world with leather, or you can cover your feet with leather, one or the other. Now, modern culture has a habit of trying to cover the world with leather. So people literally go live in gated communities, hiding away from the world, retirement communities and all these things, to try and keep away from things that bother them, it will never work, what we need to do is cover our feet with lever. That way we can respond to what is happening without being reactive. Now to do that means to understand how our concentration works. And this is where there is an enormous key in the ancient traditions that I think is of enormous value to modernity. There is this, we've all been taught to concentrate, you know you go to school Johnny concentrate your mother's concentrate, we all know that concentration is about focusing attention on a given object. But that kind of concentration, which is strictly speaking, adverting concentration. It's where the word advertising comes from. You advert your attention to his chosen object is brittle. It's brittle, because if any other object turns out, it adverts to that. So it's essentially moving around, and indeed, beginning meditators all say the travel is I try to advert my attention to a given object. Now I've got all these thoughts. And then if someone slams a card or plays music, and I get disturbed, what do I do about that? Now the mistake that many people make when they try to meditate is I think the answer is to shut out all the disturbing sounds or the disturbing thoughts. In fact, many people think meditation is about having no thoughts. This is actually incorrect. totally incorrect, is a total misunderstanding of what meditation is about. And it's because of this, there is another element to concentration, it's good in again, to use the old meditation language adverting. Placing your attention on something is called vitarka. And the other aspect of concentration is savoring. It's called vichara. And the trick is to develop vichara. As you develop, the attacker is literally like picking up a cup of cup of coffee and putting it to your lips. That's the ticker. And then savoring the experience of drinking the coffee is vichara. They're both concentration. They're both calm. But the ability to savor experience is inherently stable. What happens is as you develop the capacity to savor experience, so when things come to quote, disturb you, they're merely added into the savoring, instead of dragging you away from one object to the next. So there are a series of exercises in this book I've written which I

Greg Voisen
am your application. So question, Richard, do you do you did you write this as a way for people to ramp up to it's like a plane taking off the runway? Right? Obviously pilots have to be very astute what's going on the other planes and so on, but once you get into the air, you can kind of go on automatic pilot and be that might not be a great analogy. But the analogy is the book to help people who are getting runway get off the runway, so that they then could create a deeper practice of meditation. Yeah,

Richard Dixey
what I mean? Which would be Hmm,

Greg Voisen
well, is that is that kind of how you would frame this? Or no? Yeah. Okay.

Richard Dixey
So if I was to say to you, I have a meditation experience I want to share with you. The problem is, I can't pick it up and show it to you. Like I couldn't object. Because it's internal. There's no way of me showing it to you. So how do we go about explaining what all this is? Well, I give a good a good analogy. If I was to say to you, I'd like you to experience chocolate, chocolates a bit sweet, it's a bit sticky, it melts in your mouth. No matter how many words I was to use to explain chocolate, you wouldn't have any idea what chocolate was, I could write you an encyclopedia on chocolate, you would have no idea what chocolate was, give you a piece of chocolate? Oh, I know what chocolate is. This book is designed to do just that. So I said, I say to the reader, I'll explain what I want you to experience how and why like this bit is about reactivity, why it might be worth doing. You just do it for three minutes a day for seven days. And then we'll come back to the second chapter. And we'll talk about something else another experience. And then you do that for seven days. And so it builds up like a very short course. And the idea is, in the end, people have a taste of meditation, they start getting what meditation is about. And meditation is a very unusual skill, it is a skill, it's like playing the piano or playing golf or something. But it is a skill to be able to see experience as experience, and not see through experience at an external world. You're seeing experience as experience. Now, this is an extraordinarily liberating moment, when one realizes that one is constructing a map of the world. And you start seeing that construction. At that point, all kinds of benefits happen, the most important of which are to, you get less reactive. So you're calmer and kinder, and you see alternatives that your map doesn't contain. Now, of course, as we all know, look with two white haired old guys, as you get older, them more and more rigid. And you just see one thing, because that's what it's telling you. And so you get less and less creative. But if you can see the map maker, suddenly you can look this way. And that because you're no longer trapped by a reactive prison that's driving you down one road, and that increasing creativity and cognitive freedom is the real benefit of meditation.

Greg Voisen
And I would advocate today, yeah, I would advocate to all of my listeners who have had challenges getting into meditation, this is definitely the book you want to pick up. This is definitely the book you want to read. I'm not saying it's not the book for the people that are seasoned meditators? Well, because we have challenges. Also, in this is a way for us to kind of rejigger our ship. I mean, I'm a SRF devotee, you know, you're talking about the crown chakra. And you're talking about how you can have these very wonderful experiences and you can you know that vibrating purple light in your forehead can become part of your meditation practice. What are the two elements of meditation? And and how are they kind of connected in your estimation?

Richard Dixey
Well, as I say, all meditation, in every school is of one or two types, there's calmness, and there's insight. It doesn't really matter what school you practice within, you'll always find these two phases. These are fundamental to meditation. And so being able to generate clarity of mind, what's often called calm and clear, is the great fruit of meditation. Now, clearly, the real object we need to concentrate on is the mind itself. Because really, at the end of the day, we're in a construct, which is mind created. And if we can come to understand the mind itself as a meditation object, really big benefits and see you, but there are many, many little tricks which one needs to learn to stabilize this for example, there are these obstacle obstacles that come up in the meditation manuals, there are five there's five obstacles. The five never islands, the five obstacles, and they are intensely interesting because really, although these were written down two and a half, 1000 years ago, they're still absolutely relevant today and all the meditators experienced them. So there are five there are there's, there's agitation and doubt and down this, there's attraction and aversion. And there's doubt. And these five features are very, very interesting. And learning how to overcome them with simple tricks, is another way of moving away from just beginning to meditate to actually exploring the realm that meditation makes available. So this is something else that is addressed in the 14 week program to try to address these points and show what they actually are. Because our reactivity is protective. Its paranoid, it's only interested in bad news. That's why the newspaper is always full of bad news, a newspaper headline that said something went well, isn't news, we're not interested in what went well. We're interested in what went badly. Why? Because our re cognitive faculty of mind is protective, it's looking for problems. Even if it's not our problem, we still read avidly about some community that's been hit by a tornado, or whatever it is, even if we weren't hit by a tornado, we're still interested to know what went wrong. We're never interested to know what went right. That's of no interest to our protective mechanism at all. But there's a real key. This means when we start meditating, the danger is our paranoid recommend evaporate apparatus begins going, Oh, you're meditating badly, or you're meditating? Well, who's getting all this judgment coming up from the very mechanism you're trying to see, and learning how to dance with that judgment, how to work with that judgment until in in the end, you're just meditating. And there isn't a voice telling you it's good or bad, or helpful or unhelpful, or this follow clear or any of this language, once one gets to the point of seeing, rather than knowing, suddenly, visitors appear, which are otherwise invisible, because our activity covers them over. And actually begin the book with a quote from Wittgenstein of a famous German philosopher who saw this, you said the aim of philosophy is to free our natural intelligence, from its bewitchment by language, that is such a close, it's a witch hunt, by language, we're caught in a linguistic re cognitive bubble. And that bubble is fine, as long as we're doing one thing. But of course, it's extraordinarily limited, and cannot deal with change. And so again, if you look at modern conditions, climate change, environmental change, technological change, all this stuff is happening. People are really struggling to get to grips with it, because they're not good at change. Well, due to is that flexibility?

Greg Voisen
That bewitchment of language is approaching it from an intellectual standpoint. Of course, that's what's getting in the way. And so I think that, you know, many people have approached meditation from an intellectual

Richard Dixey
capital, the word intellectual, it's a judgment. I'm not willing to accept, okay, it's a precise use of language. It is Lena, an issue about meditation is not intellectual.

Greg Voisen
Okay, so let's just say it's a way that it's explained. But what are the two phrases of concentration that you speak about in the book, the faith,

Richard Dixey
the Cara? Well, these are the two phases one is adverting savoring is two phases are absolutely important to understand. And it's very, very important to ride the taca ride one's ability to concentrate into savoring. So honestly, the second chapter of this book takes as a meditation objective bell. And the reason for that is the sound of the bell fades. And as you follow the fading sound into silence, you're developing the capacity to savor a meditation object rather than fixate on it. And this ability to follow movement with concentration is a really important skill. And when you look at sportsmen, musicians, performers, you see they enter their performance, they're suddenly inside their performance. That's why it's so bewitching. When you see a performer doing well, what they've done is they've entered concentration is obviously this zone, instead of them being here and the object being there and they're kind of separate. They kind of come into it. Now if I had an ambition, it will be that people become craftsmen of their own perception, into their perception. And in it, instead of being observers of their perception. And this is a fundamental change, it's not a change that's difficult to bring about, once one begins to understand how perception works. But that change means suddenly, you have this cognitive freedom that you always knew was there somewhere at your fingertips, and you're able to turn left and right, instead of being stuck reactively doing this, which is how many of us stand up living?

Greg Voisen
Well, there's all kinds of meditation and people, many of our listeners out there familiar with walking meditation, some might be familiar with Tong Lin, they might be familiar with different practices that are being used to help someone you know, in this case, breathe in, challenge, breathe out love. But the focus, whether it's a mantra, or it's anything else, speak with us about this, because there's a lot of listeners out there that have their Eastern philosophy, practices that maybe they approach meditation with. And I would like to know kind of what where you put all of that in this realm of the three minute. Sure. Meditation.

Richard Dixey
All right. So you're talking about meditation techniques. Now, how well, skillful means, right? These are devices, which you add on top of a fundamental skill, to enhance and promote it. They're not in themselves. Meditation, they are skillful means. So it's exactly I remember, I'll give you an example. As I you know, years back, I was visiting a Buddhist monk in Katmandu, and I gave him a portable computer. I said, Hey, look on that, I'm giving you this thing, you have no idea what this is. But you know, it's gonna make your monastery much more efficient, blah, blah, blah. He looked at me and went, Oh, this is a skillful means. This is like my bell and vadra. And my mantra, my Mala, thank you so much. He wasn't in any way fazed by what I thought was this amazing gift I've given him. And it suddenly dawned on me there, what this is, the fundamental skill is to become nonreactive. And cognitively free, then you can do your tongue land, you can do your breathing in and out, you can explore your chakras, you can do many, many, many different things they come after, you cannot do it the other way around. None of those techniques work. Unless you are calm and clear. They simply don't. All that happens is they become an object of attachment. And there are many, many long term meditators who have who have who I've interacted with, who thanked me for this point. Because often these techniques become an end in themselves, they are not, they are a means a skillful means they're not an end in themselves. And this is a really important distinction to make. So of course, there is a huge superstructure within these two and a half 1000 year old traditions of school. There are literally 1000s

Greg Voisen
of them. Well, your book is around the fundamentals. Let's surround the fundamentals. And, and that's what's important. And I relate this story, and you probably relate to it really well. When I was in the meditation retreat. The leaders of the retreat center, Rinpoche came to the United States and, you know, on one end was the Buddha on the other end was a skeleton was doing a walking meditation. I said, Is there anything that I get for you, Rinpoche, and he says, I'd like to get one of those watches that were set alarm. You've probably heard this. And I haven't said, so what do you want to watch to set alarm? So I'm going to set it for every 10 minutes. So the watch goes off? is like, what? What do you mean? He says, because every 10 minutes, it's gonna or every hour, I'm sorry, every hour, it reminds me I'm one hour closer to death. Now, the interesting part isn't that walking meditation at one end is a skeleton at the other end is enlightenment and Buddha. I thought that was a pretty interesting request that the Rinpoche had, which was to get a watch that would relate and you're talking about tools. It's another tool, like the bell, like the bowl that he wanted to use to remind himself that he was one hour closer to death. I thought that absolutely interesting story.

Richard Dixey
But you know, there's something there's something important here again, let's just say this. So there are 1000s of types of chocolate, sweet chocolate, whatever. If you've never tasted chocolate, they're all an enigma to you. A, once you've tasted chocolate, you can explore the world of chocolate. It's like that. So unless you can enter meditation and understand what meditation is, all of these techniques become essentially meaningless. They become Sophocles interesting, but they have no value. Now, of course, we should use death as an advisor. That's not because we're trying to be life negating. It's because actually, if we use death as an advisor, we will take wiser decisions. Of course, we won't be so stupid and go off to things that don't matter. But that really doesn't help us. If we're not already meditating. what it might do is make us pessimistic and you're there's something really, really interesting here, and it's the word nirvana. Now nirvana is normally translated as snuffing out, it sounds very nihilistic. And indeed many people, religious people, they go, Buddhism's nihilistic, it's life denying, not interested, actually, there is another translation of the word Nirvana, which I think is much closer to the truth of it, of varna is a prison. And nirvana is to have no prison. Now, the words of the Buddha is recorded as having said, at the moment of the Enlightenment was, oh, house builder, you have been seen, I will not let you build a house for me again, your roof beam is broken, your rafters are shattered. Now, this is an intensely interesting quote, what is it referring to? It's referring to the house of concept, the RE cognitive construction, within which we live, if we can become free of cognitive construction. So cognitive construction becomes an advisor, rather than a precursor to our experience, we will become free. And this freedom is nontrivial. There is no such thing as going on holiday and finding freedom, all you do is go on holiday, and take your prison with You, and sit there on the beach going, I'm still just as stressed. But I'm reading a book now. The freedom we all seek is before us, when our re cognitive prison is set to one side. And you know, there are many, many fairy tales about this, you know, it's the Emir in the Aladdin and the 1001 nights, the story of the EMEA who's sleeping on his throne, because the evil vizier has taken over the empire. And eventually, the Sultan awakens and says, look, vizier, you're an advisor, I'm the boss or in Lord of the Rings, where the king of Rohan is asleep on his throne. And, you know, the evil guy is taken away his empire, we're in that position, our cognitive freedom, our natural intelligence is bewitched, literally, all Witched by an advisor, and this advisor, quote, knows, but what does it know, it knows what it knew. That is the problem, it knows what it knew which funding round because you're wiping repeat what we know

Greg Voisen
what meditation will do for the listeners. And for those who have never practiced or for those that have practice, I think what we could say is in the eye of a storm, you know, where the calm is, and then the perimeter where it's very chaotic. It allows you to, to see the chaos in a completely different way. And it allows you to approach your life and things you do with much more calm and ease. That's why they say meditate in the morning. Whatever arises then gives you the ability to see it with much more opportunity to adjust to adjust to it. What are the three R's and how can you help us deal with those disruptive thoughts? During a meditation, you talk about relax, release and return. I think those would be really good ones for the listeners to know.

Richard Dixey
Sure. You know, I used to be a chief executive of a pharmaceutical company for 14 years. So I dealt with a lot of stress in business. I wish I had had then a stable meditation practice, because there were days when I got really frazzled. Now, when you start getting frazzled, what you need to do is release, relax, and respond. Now, the ability to release means we need to have the taste of chocolate. If we don't have the taste of chocolate, what are we releasing into? And so you can't just say to someone Oh, relax, because if they've never ever understood how to separate reflexive reactivity from their innate clarity to your mind, if they've never understood that distinction, that instruction is really quite useless or they'll do sleep at best, and probably won't even do that. But once you've had that taste, you can disconnect from things that are freaking you out, even for five seconds. And then that five seconds suddenly, clarity of money, I know what I need to do now. And that capacity to disconnect we normally assume we normally associated with wisdom, we talk about, you know, in sports, they say, Oh, I've had an experienced coach, who knows things. What they mean by that they mean is that guy, when the team is down stiff, you know, 20 points, is able to disconnect, have a look and say, I know what we need to do, we need to do this. That is the wisdom of experience. Now you can access that we all have it, we have huge amounts of information carried in our memory, the key is to be able to access that information without this reflexive knowing that otherwise takes us over. And I would say this is a fundamental element of success. And when you look at the biographies of successful people, you often see they have this capacity to step aside just for a moment, and think another way, and that, again, is a skill that can come from meditation.

Greg Voisen
Well, it's about connecting the dots when you're an adult, you can see. So if you learn how to connect the dots, you can make better decisions. You also can almost be a prognosticator of something that's going to happen, and Swart that, as a result of your meditation practice and those practices. Now, one of the things is you talk about is contrast meditation. Speak with the listeners about that. I don't think many of them have heard that term before. Sure. But I'd love to understand. Yeah,

Richard Dixey
so if you've got stiff shoulders, you're always told to tense your shoulders. Your right tense. Right, right. Well, it's exactly the same with contrast meditation, what you're trying to do is to make a contrast. Now the contrast, you know, the 14 week thing is particularly interested in is the contrast between re cognitive knowing and the knowing that can arise without that re cognitive signal. And that contrast is very interesting. Now we can generate that contrast, once we start accessing our sensations. The one that's particularly interesting is this is the sensation of hearing. Now interestingly, hearing is what makes meaning. For example, if you watch the TV with the sound off on his images, you really have no idea what's happening at all. If you watch a film with the sound off, it could be about almost anything. If you turn the images off and just have the sound, you have a complete story. Sound makes meaning. Now in exactly the same way, you can sit by the open window, and you can close your eyes and just listen. Now you can do this in two ways. In one way you listen intently, to try and work out what's going on what's happening, who's where, where the cars are, what's that? You really try to listen, then you drop it, and just let the sound wash over you. Now that contrast is very, very revealing. Because what it reveals is the difference between mapped experience and unmapped experience now in unmapped experience, suddenly there is a sense of freedom. And there's also no me, the me that seems such an irreducible center of experience is actually part of a map. No, me, in actuality, it is a mapped array, cognitive structure that is designed to enable memory to access prior examples. And anyone who has actually experienced their sensory inputs without mapping them realizes they're not two things. There's only one this one with the homeless discovery.

Greg Voisen
Yes, I think I think I say we're one with the whole meaning.

Richard Dixey
You could say the whole experience. I mean, whatever you

Greg Voisen
mean, I like I like to think that you know, it's like the drop of water in the ocean.

Richard Dixey
No, not really. No word ocean is a is a is a

Greg Voisen
confines that's true not just that

Richard Dixey
it's an inference you're making but there is an ocean So all we are is our experience. That's the truth of it. There's no ocean, there's merely the huge expanse of our own experience. That's where we are a drop in, but we are actually the ocean. That's the truth of it, we're being fooled by the waves, the waves look very real and interesting on top, underneath is this cognitive expanse. And again, once we learn not to be reflexive, we start feeling this cognitive expanse. Now, this, this idea of hidden inference is actually very important. And we often use hidden inferences, like the ocean, or the universal or whatever, as if they are, quote real. But when we start looking more closely, we'll see those are also inferential categories. And really what we have is just the actuality of experiential input. That's, that's where we live. That's

Greg Voisen
where using language, Richard to explain or try and put something in context. And while that may, at times, be restrictive in nature, it's a way for people to kind of understand things, but I think the most important thing is, is what do you want the readers in our time remaining to actually take away from your new book? Here it is, folks, it's three minutes a day, this is a 14 week course to learn meditation and transform your life. And don't forget, we'll put a link to the application for all those who want to do this on their iPhone or their Android device. So what do you want people to take away? We got a few minutes remaining.

Richard Dixey
Sure. So as I mentioned earlier on, the idea of this book is that we're going to explain in very simple language, why we do one thing, and then the hope is the reader will do that one thing. And then on the basis of that one thing, we then explain something else, in simple language, do that thing. And that takes about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. So it's about three minutes. And what was doing is accumulating a series of experiences, which act as a referent for this key word, meditation. So the hope is, at the end of the 14 weeks, if someone just does this for 14 weeks, and it really is almost no time at all, they're going to be able to have a meditation practice they can rely on. Now, of course, if they then want to go on, as you said, and meditate for hours or explore various skillful means they're welcome to do so. But the primary benefits of meditation are achievable in very, very short periods. And this is particularly valuable in modernity, where people have no time. And even more importantly, when they're being bombarded with sophisticated devices that attend to advert their attention, and the ability to recapture attention, and have attention at choice is the great benefit that I think this book can bring pretty much to anybody in modernity, who is dealing with this, because these technologies are now totally pervasive, everybody is exposed to them. And so dealing with the outbreak, the epidemic of alienation, in particular, and the epidemic of meaninglessness, and the epidemic of abandonment, the three phases of life which is so characteristic, unfortunately of modernity, or can be addressed once we take control of our cognition, and we take the throne of our being. And we go, okay, I see what you're trying to get me to do, do we really want to do that or not? And that capacity brings enormous feelings of well being centeredness, groundedness, embodiment, all these good things, which come along, once we're able to control our reactivity. And remember our read

Greg Voisen
aloud and get a copy at three times a day by resiliency. This is a great book, great summation. Richard, thank you for your time. This morning. I know you've got to rush off you've got to teach a class is very appreciative of your wisdom and knowledge. And giving people I'm just gonna say this a runway to meditation before they maybe take off the plane. This is an opportunity. So for all of my listeners who've been wanting to get into this, this is the book do it. For those that are into it. This is the book for you to rejigger what you may be are doing and give you a different viewpoint and vantage point. Namaste to you Richard, thanks for being with us.

Richard Dixey
Thank you for the opportunity.

Greg Voisen
And making some time with our listeners

Richard Dixey
Okay.