Ezra Klein

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.