Dr. Robert Thurman
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
In education, when you go to medical school, the doctor doesn't say, believe you're a doctor and you'll be fine. And you can practice. No way. You have to study biology, you have to study anatomy, you have to study chemistry, pharmacology, blah, blah, blah. So Buddhism is like that. You have to study it. No authority can just tell you it's like so and so, and then you believe it, and that's that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And that's why the Four Noble Truths, the sort of main framework of Buddhism, they translate it as truth, and that's not wrong. But if you translate it as the Four Noble Facts,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
facts would be better yeah yeah you know there was aspects of reality yes and the first one is if you don't know what it is you're going to misunderstand where you are who you are and where you are and you're going to suffer but you can learn what it is that's the big kicker everyone else tells you in school the religious people told me you can't understand anything
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
You just have to believe, and you have to believe whether it makes sense to you or not, just believe." And I said, I don't like that. I refuse. That's no good. And then there's a great joke on that. Do you know the joke about that, the theologian's joke?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
where a theologian was asking the congregation, like, define faith. Tell me, folks, what is faith? Can you tell me? And nobody would speak. So then the little Johnny in the front row was going like, I can say, I can say. And he didn't go to him because he was a little kid. Then finally, nobody had grown up would speak. So he says, well, you all should be ashamed of yourself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Little John is the only one who's answering the question.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
okay little johnny you tell these good people here what is faith he says or i can say i know what it is well what is it he says faith is believing what you know ain't true langdon gilkey theologian at university of chicago told me that joke i love it turns out a little bit cynical you know yeah anyway anyway so the point is you just um uh you can understand
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
yourself and the world and you can and you don't have to be einstein every human being with a brain is a kind of einstein if they develop it you know and that's what he said the human life is so fortunate not because we animals are not former humans they are but because they have souls etc that he's like albert schreitzer but i was like was like schreitzer on that one yeah but the point is uh you
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
have the ability to understand, one. And two, you have to understand to be happy. And when you really understand your world, you will be happy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Exactly. And then they reinforce our misinterpretation by telling us ignorance is bliss. You don't want to know what it is because you'd be so scared of it, you know. And they misinterpret Darwin as thinking that it's red in nature, red in truth and claw. You know, they're going to all destroy us if we don't have nuclear weapons or something, which is absolutely wrong, you know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But the point is, you know, even death, they tell us, is so terrible and scary and they threaten us with hell and things like that. Then the scientists, they tell you, oh yeah we don't believe all that we're atheists and etc and then but we also think we're looking to understand this gene and this atom and this subatomic particle and that bacteria and this virus
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But we know that we'll never know everything. So we still never will know. So we just always keep looking for more stuff. But we have a preconceived idea that you can't understand everything. If any scientist jumped up and said, Eureka, I know everything now, like Buddha did, they would have him arrested or give him a tranquilizer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Because they have a preconceived idea that you also, you can't understand. But then I used to ask them, well, if you can't understand everything, how do you know you can't understand? And they could never answer that one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
That's it. But it's also, it says, you, your mind, you, Mark Hyman, your mind, Bob Thurman, you, whoever it is, if you really develop your mind, it is capable of understanding the world. And you, therefore, you can understand your world. Not only can you, but you experience it all the time. So you start...
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
The first one is that... If you don't understand it, it will bring you suffering, because you will always be dissatisfied with everything, and you will not understand what you are and where you are, and so you'll be afraid that different bad things will happen to you, and so you'll fight things, and you'll try to impose your own control on them rather than go with them, and then that will fail, and then you'll be frustrated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And even happiness, what you think of as happiness, you'll be dissatisfied with because it won't last. And then you won't enjoy it well enough to make it last. You actually can think there is happiness that lasts, but not the sort of ones that depend on some external circumstance. So that's the first thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Then second noble fact is that that suffering has a cause, and the causes are an inability to understand it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
No, no, that's just our habit. It actually is, luckily, less real than our ability to understand it. That's the good news. But in order to do that, we have to analyze it, we have to figure it out. And therefore, he was a scientist. He figured things out, the Buddha did. And meditation is not just shutting down your mind, that's wrongly taught. Meditation is...
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
focusing your mind to a very much higher degree of intelligence which we all have the capacity for and then then we will reach an experience of what reality is and the third of effect and the reason they're called noble is that they are factual for a noble person they're not factual for an ignorant person a person can i go back to the second one because my always my learning of that was that
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
No, that's correct. But the certain way that we're attached to them is that we can't understand them. They are not us. They are a vast, in the case of materialism, which is our mainstream view in America nowadays. It's a vast material realm that is, you know, nobody can count all the fish in the ocean, all this kind of thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So knowledge is quantifiable, has to be, and you never will get to, in an infinite universe, you'll never get to the full quantity, ever. So our misunderstanding of the way things are has to do with our inability to be all right within everything, you see. And the key component is that we're ignorant, but we know we're ignorant. So therefore we're attached to being ignorant, actually.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And if we really realize what ignorance means, then we will realize that we don't know, that we can't be sure that we're going to stay ignorant, and then we can change our mind. Follow me? So it's that first beginning point. It's a shift. That's the big shift. We can know. And we can develop wisdom. And the wisdom can overcome that cause. It's like that's the antidote, right? But wait.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Then the next thing is the third noble fact. and the third noble fact is freedom from suffering happiness and this is what nobody i'm afraid really teaches well who teaches buddhism they all stick on the suffering and that's joining and terrorizing people and the buddhists themselves do that and they say oh i'm so happy i'm allowed to suffer That's nonsense! Nobody's allowing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Buddha doesn't want anybody to suffer. He's compassionate. He doesn't want them to suffer. That's the whole point. The recognition of the suffering is just a way of starting to cure it. It's like when you're a doctor, if you go into the patient and you say, oh, you're a diabetic, yeah, yeah, you'll never get rid of that. Have you done the job as a doctor? I don't think so.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
You're just taunting people, basically. Right? That's no good. If you see a patient and they have a problem, sometimes you may have to say, I don't know how we can deal with this. You know, get ready to move on to a new life. But, of course, that's a big problem. And that's a big problem for materialist doctors, because their train that all people have is the physical life.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So they don't know how to help them across that frontier, you know, which is actually not that bad. Once you let go, they actually, it's, you know, French you know they have an expression for orgasm you know what that is and it's a little death and a pretty mall and So that's but that's not what you're fighting to stay alive.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
That's when you let go you know And you're no longer burdened with a body that's malfunctioning and then you think you're gonna be nothing and that of course is typical delusion it's like it's like science supposedly goes by experiencing things to experiment and Experimental experimental data is supposed to outweigh theory, dogma, like everything is matter, for example, that's a big dogma.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But experience is supposed to outweigh that, right? And yet, which scientist discovered the nothing that a materialist is so certain they're going to when they die? Which one discovered that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Nobody. Exactly. And not only did nobody do it, but common sense will tell you nobody ever will. Because nothing is a word for something that you don't discover. And therefore, you won't get there by dying. The law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy, goes for the mind. It's the conservation of energy of the mind.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But the exact what it is, well, that's an open question that we can investigate. And science should be investigated. And Buddhist science investigated that thousands of years ago and has some descriptions. But this is also the great thing. They say that no description of relative reality is the final description, the dogma. Except for that. You know, that it's open, in other words.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
That it's always open for a little more refined, better analysis and helpful in this context. But all such explanations are only good in certain contexts. And your mind is always open for further, deeper understanding. So wait, then the fourth noble fact, the fourth noble fact is the Eightfold Path, of education. And here's where typical mistraining comes from Buddhists, most Buddhists.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
They say training, they call it. But the word Adi Shiksha in Sanskrit or in Pali or in Tibetan, Shiksha, today in Hindi, is the word for the Department of Education in the Indian government.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Sanskrit. Yeah, but not Hindi.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
yeah yeah yeah oh yeah and so so you read the original text so you don't have to go through a filter third party you get to actually well somewhere directly to the source it all gets so rusty i'm getting to where i can barely speak english often you're doing okay but the point is the fourth noble truth therefore is a curriculum it's a higher education in uh reality science
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
discovery reality, which is the job of science, wisdom, which is the goal of science, should be not just a quantifiable data list, but wisdom, ethics, you know, how to behave in a realistic manner, and mind or meditation or how to cultivate your mind and how to manage your mind. So there's a higher education in those three things. And the eight branches fit into these three higher education.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But they say training. Why do they say training? I'll tell you why. Because in our culture, we're all totally overeducated. We've been four years here, eight years there, four years there, medical school, you know, totally. And we have these degrees and we're still pissed off.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Still suffering and still frustrated. So we think, and of course we think our education is the greatest that ever happened on the planet, in the universe. You know, maybe we're the only beings in the universe we stupidly think, and then also we, you know, that talk, you know, and then we think it's the greatest. So since we've had this huge education, it must suck.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So we want to think that Buddhism is just empty your mind and then you're fine. Don't have a mind, in other words, it's just absolutely the wrong thing to do. The greatest thing we have is the human mind. It's a little bit divine, you know? Yeah. And we agree with the religions on that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And it's vulnerable, which is the problem with the gods, is they are divine, but they're just in their thousand-year jacuzzi, and they never do anything. So they deny all about the suffering, you know? But we are not, because we bump into things. We stub our toes, you know? And so the point is,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
it's an education process and but it's a higher id the id part means higher you know intense education yeah because you're educating your whole being your mind and your body you're at also and this i love that you said you know our body You know, in your book, you say we have to do something with our body. Our body is, we are responsible for our body. When we save our body, we save the world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
That's just... That's the fourth noble truth. That's the fourth noble truth. That is the education process. And it's like really a doctor with a patient. You know this, and you call it functional medicine. But every doctor should do that. They have to educate the patient. The patient has gone wrong in this beautiful environment that is just suited for the human being.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
It's a perfect one for us if we didn't mess it up. You know, the plants are out there. They're in love with us. Give me your carbon, they say. Oh, I love that you breathe this carbon, noxious carbon, and I'm going to give you back oxygen because I love you. And it's a total gangbang with the plants.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But not if we screw them up, not if we mess them up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Well, thank you for asking that, that's good, and that's a great question. And the thing is this, first of all, you know, it is a suffering, but Just it also, you know first thing and first wisdom of Buddhism is ancient English Buddhism count your blessings You know if you're if you have if you're Isolated, but don't have the virus.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Hey, that's better than being sick If you have the virus, but you don't have a severe case, that's better than having Dying if you're dying
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
in a at least you know you're going to have another good life if you notice that you're dying and you you can't help it and you then realize you're not going to be nothing and also just because you believe in somebody else is going to help you that necessarily is not good
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But if you develop a positive view and relax yourself and let go into the light and you know, and there's movies that teach you how to do that, like Jacob's ladder, like, like ghosts, you know, there are movies even nowadays that help you do that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
and you just let go or you know close encounter of the third kind or uh 2010 you just go into one of those special effects zoom you know you let go of yourself and then you'll be you'll be out of the body you know so in other words no matter what there's no worst case
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
analysis that that is the ultimate horror no buddhism teaches you to look for the silver lining and focus on that on the other hand it doesn't teach you passively to accept
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
the bad stuff and therefore you can demand that the government pay your unemployment insurance you can demand that they'd they stopped a bank from foreclosing on your mortgage you can demand that they take the hundreds of billions that they give to the corrupt corporations and they give it to you and
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
to grow your garden and they start subsidizing regenerative agriculture yeah and they and they move 20 billion we give 20 billion dollars of direct subsidy to the oil industry which they use to lobby the government to buy the congressmen, like the Moscow Mitch, and other corrupt, also corrupt Democratic congressmen. And the president, they buy the president. Presidents are cheap.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
You give him a million dollars for his campaign and you get billions of dollars of subsidy. That's a total, that's like hiring somebody on the street.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Well, some not. When they understand Buddhism as meaning, shut yourself up in your shut down mind and just sit there and take the pain of sitting there uncomfortably.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Well, of course they are. They not only activists, but they are activists to be a political, any kind of activist has to be an educational activist that, you know, you don't hate the bad guys. You want to educate them. Sometimes people are harming you and you have to, you know, like even with demons, you know, the Buddhists usually try not to kill the demons.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
they try not to now and then you know you have to have been self-defense by accident you know some bomb goes off but they try to capture them sit them down and get into the classroom with them they have these legends of interminable multi-life lectures going on with the demon and then the demons shape up
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Once they realize that that's not going to make them happy to harm people and harm other beings, that never makes you happy, because that increases your isolation. If you're harmful to someone, that means you don't identify with them, and that means you're different from them, so you're divided up the world and you have stuck yourself in isolation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So the fact that we're all in isolation now, if we are under a sensible government, And with helping us to do that, to stop the plague, because our human life is so valuable, because it can give us the opportunity to understand the world, that is only showing us, actually, that we normally live in isolation. People are lonely. They are shut down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
They go on Facebook instead of having a friend who's their neighbor. They don't build their community. They're purposely isolated by industrialization. Because that makes them potential brainwashable consumers. They can do, as you said, 4,000 ads shown to children about some disgusting, poisonous, sugary...
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
color thing they have to they get brainwashed by their deep by the media so they don't want them to hang with their parents and the parents would who know about have a good doctor sell them don't eat that stuff don't drink that nasty diabesity drink yes
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
they they so in other words the isolation is in full imposed on us actually by industrial culture you know jerry manders work i'm sure you know that book four reasons why you throw out the television well i don't i don't agree with him it's the ultimate bottom line i don't agree but his awareness of that these things can be so badly misused Which are actually good things!
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
A great bodhisattva, who was once our president, told us how the only thing to fear is fear itself. FDR, one great bodhisattva.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
A bodhisattva or a noble person is someone who genuinely cares about other people. In other words, in the Buddhist education, the technical barrier of it is beyond having a theory about I should care for other people,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
you begin to have you open up your natural human empathy to feel what they feel which we all have everyone feels that about a newborn baby their newborn baby yeah yeah it's what's empathy and compassion is empathy actually but it's not only empathy beyond empathy it then is the sharing of happiness is what it is Because the only way to get rid of suffering is to feel happy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So compassion wants to spread happiness. That's what it does.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
That's right, that's right. But that's because that person, it isn't just because this person is automatically nicer than someone else, it's because that person has investigated reality enough to realize that no matter how cushy they feel, If there's 10 people around them in agony, the vibe is going to destroy their sense of feeling happy. So we feel each other's feelings.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
You know, the 60s, we have this wonderful expression from the 60s, good vibrations and bad vibration. But they have those kind of expressions in more enlightened languages than ours about how you do actually feel each other's feelings. You do do that. And of course, we cultivate that like military people. They cultivate, but out of, you know,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Sort of riding on anger and hatred for the enemy they cultivate a sense of expanding the kinship Empathy to your platoon members to your nation to your patriotism You know sir and only that far and then they do it only as an opposite of the hatred for the enemy so but they shut shows that you can shift the way the mind of a person is and
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But it's very hard for the military, and it creates great suffering for the soldier, because it means they have to do two opposite things at once. They have to cultivate their empathy for their fellow soldier and citizen, supposedly, but meanwhile hatred for someone else, which means no empathy for them. So it puts them in an internal conflict right away.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
hundred percent and then and that's pt then they come back with their ptsd and then pretty soon they don't have empathy for anybody and they're like like rambo you know they're they're impossible the sheriff is gonna get them you know they're gonna get the sheriff they're gonna shoot the sheriff