Dr. Robert Thurman

speaker
71 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Dec 2024

Dr. Robert Thurman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months
No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment
The Dr. Hyman Show · How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace · 2 Dec 2024 podcast
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
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.
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,
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
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?
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.
Little John is the only one who's answering the question.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Then second noble fact is that that suffering has a cause, and the causes are an inability to understand it.
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...
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
Showing 1–20 of 71 · page 1 of 4 Next →