Ezra Klein
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I mean, it was kind of an experiential koan, right?
Like, I'm not going to... I should have known, she's a Zen teacher, that she would be allergic to concepts and interpretation and everything I wanted to do.
It was like, duh, you know, so...
I had met her once or twice before.
I had a lot of admiration for her.
We'd been on a panel together because she had a lot of experience with psychedelics.
She was married to Stan Groff and administered huge doses of LSD to the dying back in the 70s.
And I thought I would go... It's such a wild project.
I know, it really is.
Although many people have been helped by this.
I mean, it's one of the better applications of psychedelics, I think, is helping people with terminal cancer.
But anyway, I was working on the self chapter at the time.
And, you know, there's this Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion, which I've struggled with in various ways.
I understand sort of how it's true, but yet...
Self seems to be still working in my life.
And I wanted to talk to her about that.
And she had described her retreat center, which is called Upaya, it's in Santa Fe, as a factory for the deconstruction of selves.
I was like, oh, that sounds interesting.
I should go get deconstructed.
So that's why I went.