A Little Bit About Bob:

Bob Thurman, known in academic circles as Professor Robert A.F. Thurman, is a talented popularizer of the Buddha’s teachings and the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. 

A charismatic speaker and author of many books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics, and culture, Bob was named by The New York Times the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism and was awarded the prestigious Padma Shri Award in 2020, for his help in recovering India’s ancient Buddhist heritage. Time Magazine chose him as one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, from Asia to America.”

Bob served as the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University for 30 years, until 2020. A very popular professor, and students always felt his classes were “life-changing”. Bob is the founder and active president of Tibet House US, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan culture, and of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a non-profit affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and dedicated to the publication of translations of important artistic and scientific Tibetan treatises.

His own search for enlightenment began while he was a university student at Harvard. After an accident in which he lost the use of an eye, Bob left school on a spiritual quest throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He found his way to India, where he first saw His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1962. After learning Tibetan and studying Buddhism, Bob became a Tibetan Buddhist monk and the first Westerner to be ordained by the Dalai Lama. Some years later, however, he offered up his robes when he realized he could be more effective in the American equivalent of a monastery: the university, returning to Harvard to finish his PhD.

As part of his long-term commitment to the Tibetan cause, at the request of H.H. the Dalai Lama, Bob co-founded Tibet House US in 1987 with Tenzin Tethong, Richard Gere, and Philip Glass, a nonprofit organization based in New York City and dedicated to the preservation and renaissance of Tibetan culture.

Inspired by his longtime good friend the Dalai Lama, Bob takes us along with him into an expanded vision of the world through the prisma of Tibetan Buddhism. He shares with us the sense of refuge in the Dharma, which unfailingly helps us clear away the shrouds of fear and confusion, sustains us with the cheerfulness of an enriched present, and opens the door to a path of realistic hope for a peaceful, kind, and wise future.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

JP McAvoy: Hi, and thanks for joining us on today’s show. This is something really special. We’ve got Bob Thurman on. He’s a professor from Columbia, and the first western trained monk trained by the Dalai Lama. We had a wonderful conversation. Here’s my chat with Bob.

Bob Thurman: Bob, thanks for joining us, I guess from Woodstock today. Thrilled to see you again. We saw each other recently in Miami, and I just wanted to begin this chat with a mantra that you taught me in the group I was with. Can you just say it again just for people tuning in to hear the mantra. I think it’s an important thing for people to hear(inaudible). That’s the mantra. Antara is the name of a Sanskrit word connected to the word for star, and it connects to a word for a boatman ferrying you across an ocean. And so it means it’s a female, a noun, a name. And it’s the name of a female Buddha who saves people from suffering. They do not just buy, but they sort of carry you in a boat across a dangerous body of water with the crocodiles and monsters in it. And so you call her, and SHE as a female, she’s more energetic and active. The Indian idea of shakti of females, she has more energy, courage and activity than males who were all those scaredy cats. Females are very courageous because they deal with life in a more realistic manner, and because they are confronted by it in a more realistic manner. So she’s like a female buddha. And then you can call her an Indian ancient belief, or Hindus also have the same belief as a matter Hindu Buddhists. And then she will immediately come and save you if you’re being eaten by a tiger or a lion, assaulted by cobras, robbers, fires, floods, whatever the disaster, eight different disasters which relate to eight different internal states of being overwhelmed by negative emotions. So there’s eight internal things and eight out of things. And that probably, there were eight secret days that I’ve kind of been saying for the moment. Somebody once said beautifully, oh, Christians love God. But Indian religious people, especially Buddhists, love lists. Four friendly, fun facts.

JP McAvoy: Four friendly, fun facts. We’ll get into those, of course. So there’s the mantra to protect?

Bob Thurman: If your car is about to go off a cliff, if something’s going to happen, try to do that. (inaudible) means quickly. (inaudible) is calling her, please come. (inaudible) means show up quickly. Please come quickly. And then SVAHA is all good. It means it’s like all hail, welcome, or just a sound of approval, praise and approval. Literally all good. All means invoking the presence of all enlightened beings, because the Buddhist universe is filled with goodness in a way I think the Indian world as a whole. There are bad guys and bad actors, but the good ones are much stronger than the idea. The default in other words. So even if you die, it’s semi good. Because it’s semi good in case what happens to you when you die is that you become nothing because at least that’s being anesthetized. Like if I’m having open heart surgery, I like to be unconscious. Yes, aestheticization. So that’s better than worrying about hell, or devils, or horrible things that might happen to you when you die from being eaten by an alien or something. But on the other hand, it’s even better if the default is a sort of humming, infinite reality of the life force. So the default reality is bliss and life. And then in case you have the inkling to do something fun, you would be embedded in this life force that would be infinitely amenable to whatever you want. That’s better. That’s like having your cake and eating it as a happy way to live.

JP McAvoy: A wonderful way to live in this life, the one before and the one after.

Bob Thurman: Exactly. And it’s even so extravagant, they say, and I don’t claim fully to have that vision. But I sort of have had hints. But they say that when you reach such a state or rather put it this way, you discover that you are in such a state. Already a big anticlimax in one way or another way, big delight and relief. But when you discover that, you instantly remember all previous things that happened to you, which we forget because they often had an element of quite unpleasantness about them. As far as we suffered, we died in prison for his life. We were afraid of it and so on. But when you get that view or moments of time, past and future, you can remember and be aware of, and anticipate without breaking the joyfulness.

JP McAvoy: Living in joy.

Bob Thurman: Being completely crazy and totally unrealistic. I’m still not 100% sure. But I’m 99% sure.

JP McAvoy: You’re 99% sure. When do you need to know 100%?

Bob Thurman: I don’t quite know.

JP McAvoy: Do you have any adverse memories? Do you have any inklings of time?

Bob Thurman: I don’t know. They did invent, like a kind of permanent MDMA or whatever it might be. So any kind of bliss thing has not yet been invented. But yet my own system is that, and therefore there must be, maybe the adrenal glands or something the brain, some kind of understanding, some form of reasoning, some encounter with something. I’m not sure. But I sort of you know. I’m very lazy. Because I think when you get 99% sure, you get a little complacent, and you get lazy. And it was the closest I can come to it is a Star Trek movie that we’ve all seen where they encounter Kirk and the old fashioned Kirk, and everybody has a spark. Did I tell anyone the story?

JP McAvoy: Tell me. This is with Captain Kirk?

Bob Thurman: And Captain Kirk and then an encounter with V’ger. But it was a movie. V’ger is devouring planets full of people, or about to devour the Federation planet. Nobody knows what it is, but it seems to have a central control thing that’s like a mechanism. And so they go and they land on the deck of this mechanism, and they see V-G-E-R in letters. This must have been sent out by a century ago or something. This thing was turned rogue and it’s going crazy. And then they talk to you, figure out how to talk to it. It speaks English as a very severely sultry female voice. And they eventually discover that, well, it doesn’t really mean to harm anybody. It knows everything. And the best thing is that it is like an early form of data. It doesn’t know what it means to be a human being so it keeps devouring it. I’m thinking that it’s going to find out what it is. So then Frank, who was a University of North Carolina drama student when I was 13 and 12 and used to do work in the summers at a restaurant in Nantucket, was there as an idolized college student. And also I was annoyed with him because, of course, the girls who are 19 and 20 from different colleges and things, I was only 12 and 13. But I was in love with him anyway. I kind of lost out to the older guy.

JP McAvoy: Early idol for you.

Bob Thurman: He was the actor of one episode, obviously, or one movie member of the crew who is under the deck here, and he volunteered. He had a different name, Lieutenant, Officer in the Federation, right? So he volunteered to somehow merge with the villagers. He would combine with her. Give himself to her, but she wouldn’t have to devour him. Somehow through a kind of love. He would love V’ger. And V’ger would know what it was to be human because she’d be in the lobby or something. Then he goes, and then he sort of walks over to the machine or something. I forget how they did it visually, but he disappears anyway. And then the whole machine disappears. There’s a wave of light going everywhere in the universe. And there’s a kind of a goodbyes or saying, I’m so happy. And so it was the media of a loving, self sacrificing, altruistic human, handsome guy, the actor, my old restaurant mate, Frank. And where he is, he’s never seen him again. And as soon as the supercomputer, which turned out to be Voyager. The O-Y-A had been lost. It was Voyager returning with all this power, but then it was solved by the supercomputer meeting. A kind of simple minded male who was a–

JP McAvoy: Human consciousness.

Bob Thurman: And then somehow that union was in the tantric form of enlightenment you hold in Buddhahood, a communion. The union of a pair of beings that are completely empathetically merged with each other. And yet, each one enjoys that loving, orgasmic merger.

JP McAvoy: Bob, it sounds like you’re describing what people are now saying is occurring with AI and human consciousness. Do you collect on that? There’s something that isn’t there?

Bob Thurman: FI, Female Intelligence. The intelligence that is realistic, empathetic, unordered and able to open his border and embrace everything. Dealing with a sort of human that feels alienated. And like, I’m not the whole universe, and so I’m scared of it. There might be a tiger out there or whatever, a tick, or a microbe that’s going to eat me, and it came from a Batcave in China. That made me really sick. So the idea of I’m different from everybody else. And somehow, I’m only able to, I only have the energy of whatever I can do in regard to everything else. I’m at war in a way, ultimately with the universe, which is the egotistical person’s hopeless situation. To realize it is a friendly, fun fact. Because when you realize that, you realize that a way of dealing with the universe is to be the universe.

JP McAvoy: And I guess that you realize that it’s one of the fun facts to realize that.

Bob Thurman: And you can experience it up to a point. And even in order to survive like a living being, you have to procreate, and that we have to merge with others. First partner, then children, and so on. And there’s a kind of merge or they are to some degree, and then they have to merge with the nation. Like Obama scolding people during their Gore election. The Libertarian thinks they did everything because they’re a billionaire. But actually, they had to drive on the roads. And I had to talk to people now as I picked up the phone and whatever it was, and there’s a lot of infrastructure that they depend on that they get from others so they should pay it back a little bit, and still be super prosperous, happy and interconnected. So that’s the 99%. And the 1%, you have intrigued me with that question. So the 99% is that you’ve had moments of expanding your boundaries. And it was really good. And it was within a certain limit. You felt extremely secure. Okay, you can manage, and you even were feeling so good. That little problem went wrong with something, and you stubbed your toe or something, but didn’t mind that much. It was a little painful, but you’re overrode the pain with the orgasmic bliss. And we’ve experienced that. So you know that there’s a way of even developing such a powerful internal feeling. It can expand and overwhelm some external irritants of whatever percentage of that you’ve ever experienced. When you revise your analysis of your own experience and you really become more introspectively aware of yourself, then that gives you confidence that they’re given that you have infinite time. The idea of an ultimate limit to the universe is asinine, because what a limit means is a boundary. But the boundary also sets up the other side. So it’s not within the boundary, there’s something outside the boundary, right? So then technically, the idea that there’s some ultimate boundary with nothing outside, but then nothing. It’s not something, so it can’t be anything. So that’s not a boundary.

JP McAvoy: It has to be something so it’s not a boundary. So it continues, so there is no end.

Bob Thurman: Exactly. And that goes for time as well. And awareness is part of it. So therefore, awareness is potentially infinite, although there are obviously embodiments that are not. And so therefore, under that reasoning, that 1% may still be huge and infinite. Since there’s infinite time to expand into it, then sooner or later, we’ve got a contract away from it. But since the idea of a black hole of going into nothing is irrational, because nothing is not there. Therefore, an infinite bunch of things can never fit into nothing, because nothing is not a space for them to finish.

JP McAvoy: So following that logic, it must be then. So you stay, it’s still 1%. But it must NOT be 1%. It must be.

Bob Thurman: Percentage number, again, is based on the idea of some infinite, unlimited space. You’re just arbitrarily defined space. So therefore, infinity is not one. Infinity is infinite infinity. And so that gives you confidence that you are there already. And also, we are all infinite now. Because if infinity was excluded from our boundary, or skin, or something that was not not occupied by infinity, it wouldn’t be infinity. So we’re simultaneously into it. We only are focused on the infinity. And so then we have this problem of worrying about what’s out there, my duty.

JP McAvoy: And we spent perhaps the time there that we should not wish you spend it on the spot that’s out there, as you described, a little bit of what you’re seeing reminds me of some of the things I’ve heard of people that have described a near death experience as they gone into the light where they see it, and they realize what we’re describing here.

Bob Thurman: Absolutely. I met at the Milken Institute of all places, a big conference in LA just now. I met a woman who was on my panel, a very sweet and elegant Indian, Indian woman who grew up in Hong Kong. Anita Moorjani is her name who wrote a book called Dying To Be Me, which I have an ebook. I’ve always got started on it . She told her story in 15 minutes. And we had four of us. And it was amazing because she was in a hospital in Hong Kong, she was in a coma. She was riddled with tumors, and the family and the doctors in this western style fancy Hospital in elegant Hong Kong, and before he was crushed by the communists, she was aware of the whole situation from out of body awareness. People talking. She knew the names of people who she hadn’t met when she was before the coma. And they were all amazed later. And they were talking about whether to pull the plug because she was being too interpolated or whatever you call it, and they kept pumping her lungs, etcetera, and the brain was flat. They argued. Not arguing because they weren’t arguing. But the discussion, the agenda discussion occurring that she’s intubated, was already vegetative. Even if she sort of recovered some sort of mobility, she would be a vegetable, and it would be called no quality of life and blah, blah, blah. And she was aware of all that. That is what scientists will call clear light transparency. And so she was empathetic with everybody in the room. She was still aware that there was some connection to her body although it was in a coma. And she was sort of taking it over. 

Say, I have to read the book to give more detail. So she then realized the reason she was riddled with cancer, and she did therapies and things that were ineffective because people said she should, and that it was wrong. She knew the path to how to hurt yourself. And that if she really took over and really lived freely, what she felt like doing, she would be fine. She could be quickly cured. She realized that everybody’s sort of different internal agonies. You can feel the family losing her. She was a really nice person. They would be distressed, and they were distressed about it. Even the ones who didn’t like her might be relieved she was gone, but didn’t feel guilty. She completely knew everything so she decided, I’m gonna go back to heal myself, and I’m going to change the situation. And she did, and she sat up. And she said, no, I don’t want any more of this medicine. Enough of that. And then some doctor ran down the hallway who’d never seen her when she was conscious. Oh, Mr. Coleman, don’t throw away my chart. I love that this is documented and kept. He said, how do you know my name? They mentioned me. And he says, of course I know your name. She had this higher broader consciousness. And in three weeks, she was in completely spontaneous remission. Miracle. They couldn’t understand it. And she wrote this book,and she’s been talking about it ever since. She’s not getting rich.  They’re already a wealthy family.

JP McAvoy: The reason she’s doing it is because she had that experience, and she now has some share. And it’s important that her message is heard. Thank you for sharing that.

Bob Thurman: She loves people. if I could see her, I think other people would quit. And because materialist cultural people think that it is impossible, you can’t have miracles. There’s no font of energy that someone would get from a mind outside the brain that’s in a coma, that they would be able to use that to as agency to reenter the body and heal itself. That’s impossible, because there is no mind because we get to think that is just an epiphenomenon of the brain and it’s a delusion and then so it doesn’t exist. And the shed proves that it does exist, actually. The mind is an impossible force, and something’s wrong with our categories. And actually, the Buddhist description of transparency and clear light, Buddhist science description of God, which fits with some mystical descriptions from other cultures. But that description, it doesn’t claim that that’s a final explanation because that is not explicable in binary linguistics in our language.

JP McAvoy: We don’t have the words to explain it. Why do we need to explain it? I guess we tried to explain but it didn’t need to be explained.

Bob Thurman: You can’t even if you’re the greatest poet that ever lived. You cannot describe the blissful experience of eating a really delicious apple when you’re hungry.

JP McAvoy: The language isn’t there to capture the full essence of it.

Bob Thurman: That texture of it, you can do a lot of stuff. You can tie in until you analyze the chemistry, and you can talk about the neurons of taste and blah, blah. But you never can really capture the experience that we just do experience beyond words.

JP McAvoy: And that’s the importance of joy. Bob, we talked about joy or living in joy to have that, and experienced that as frequently as we can that amplifies that.

Bob Thurman: McAvoy with no vowel between the M and C, that’s a mystery.

JP McAvoy: We have to learn. It’s been understood to be that way here. It’s been passed to us. It has been passed to us, which was part of that miracle. And you speak of miracles. I want to speak of one that I’ve heard you describe?.Because like her experience, you learn to speak Tibetan in some 10 weeks. That in itself is a miracle. Can you describe what that experience was like?

Bob Thurman: The really horrible thing about it was, I was immediately so annoyed. My teacher was Mongolian guy, and he had brought Tibetans for the Dalai Lama. They were trying to learn English, and he was looking for English teachers to teach them. And their exchange was he would teach me Tibetan because he rejected my quest for enlightenment because he said that I was too crazy. But if I learned the language and studied that, I might get there. He was sort of like that. And then we could therefore only make a kind of exchange, something guru disciple would freak out although that’s what I wanted because I felt this huge, huge field around him. I didn’t know what it was, but it was something that had to do with him. But he just learned the language. That line was so fantastic. And then I immediately wanted to debate with the Tibetans instead of teaching them. One of them was a little bit older, and he was a scholar, and I was debating him first ferociously. That’s wrong.

JP McAvoy: On what topic?

Bob Thurman: That was annoying. Studying in Buddhism is debating with others and makes you revise your own ideas. You start to investigate yourself and you have an internal debate. You pump up the internal debate by learning to argue in a reasonable way, not just say yes, no, yes,no. I can say yes louder than you say no, or I can say no a lot of you say I’m not in a debate where you have to give reasons. So I was very annoyed. He refused to teach me the rules of debate in Tibetan. So why don’t you teach me that? That’s perfect. He said, because you bothered so many people debating without knowing the rules.

JP McAvoy: Can you describe some of the rules for debate?

Bob Thurman: Oh, yeah. You’re gonna look for answers when they give you an argument with a premise, a thesis and a reason. An example in Indian logic, Tibetan logic, Hindu and Buddhist. You have to give an example like all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. So in a way Socrates is the example, but Socrates is not doesn’t count as the example in Indian logic, because Socrates is the one you’re talking about. So he’s part of the thesis, the actual person. So you have to give like Aristotle. You have to give another person who’s a man and who is mortal, or someone who died already. And then a counter example. The rock is not a man. So in other words, it sort of has to stay pragmatic like Greek syllogism doesn’t have logical syllogism, doesn’t have to have a pragmatic example from reality, common sense reality around you. Whereas the Indian one and the Tibetans learned that and refined it. And it has remained pragmatic. So there are rules when someone makes their argument about their syllogism. They give their thesis about the topic, they pick the topic, they give a thesis. We give the reason, the evidence for that, the reason for that, and then they give the example and another case where that evidence goes with that thesis. And then a counter example where there’s no evidence for the case. So that’s the argument. So you say except or you say, why?

JP McAvoy: Because you would just go on–

Bob Thurman: I think I’ll do it again or something like that. Further evidence. I accept it. I like it. And (inaudible) means it doesn’t follow. Your reason doesn’t follow. So it’s a little different, it is more broad.

JP McAvoy: It strikes me as though you refuse to be bound to even that as you’re learning. And it must be a miracle to learn that, and think of where your learning of the language has taken you. We discussed, I guess offline, 62 years ago, right? 1962 as you decided to traipse off. Shun all things American, you go to find your quest as a young man and come back with this knowledge.

Bob Thurman: Since then, I know who I was. I didn’t know that then. But now, I do. So clearly, I was doing it. And there are other proofs, the main proofs that really began to convince me after a year or two about it actually took a long time because of the strong conditioning of our consensus saying, oh, yeah, former future lives you’re Caesar, or Cleopatra, or something, and they’re going to be whatever. But it somehow viscerally you don’t really feel that. You will do something that you know will be a problem for you in a week, but you don’t really think about it in the next life. I don’t want to do something that’d be a problem. But what happened that really became convincing to me was when I went to Dharamshala, which was about two years after that first language learning, or almost two years, I ate Samba. And samba is roasted barley flour, which is brought to a powder, but it’s already been cooked. And then you put some hot butter tea in a little bowl of that powder, and you make little bowls by moistening it, and then you eat that. That’s for breakfast. It’s like bread or something because they don’t have that high altitude. You can bake. You carry around this powder, but you’ve roasted it there on a fire. So when I tasted that, I tasted Cheerios. And when I was a kid, I refused Rice Krispies and cornflakes. I wouldn’t eat them. Don’t get me those. I tasted Cheerios from the Tibetan samba. And so then, I definitely lived as a Tibetan.

JP McAvoy: You realize you have eaten that before.

Bob Thurman: Flour, mostly, not oats. Cheerios are oats. It was totally the taste of Cheerios.

JP McAvoy: I’ve heard what you’re describing. I’ve heard references too.

Bob Thurman: He’s a great bhakti singer. He was a rock and roll singer, very popular by Indians although he’s from Berkeley. But anyway, I found out when we did a summer school together a year or two ago, he goes around with a big bag of Cheerios, but he’s on tour. I had brought Cheerios, I’m no longer a complete cereal fanatic. But anyway, he shared cereal. But the events do love them. India is the holy land, you have to understand. A wonderful chosen high mountain place. They like living at altitude because they’re adapted to it. But it’s very difficult to adapt it to 10,000 feet from birth and from the placenta; that’s why Tibet was not well colonized. The Chinese attempt to colonize it now will fail because women cannot produce the right amount of placenta. Women who are not acclimatized to that from the 47% of oxygen that you have and 12,000 feet, you don’t have 100% of sea level oxygen. And so when Chinese officials’ wives become pregnant, when they’re stationed in Tibet, they send them down to sea level or 1000 or 500 feet down to the mainland, lowland China.

JP McAvoy: Did you manage when you were there? When you were there originally, do you find that you had some issues acclimatizing yourself?

Bob Thurman: I mostly was with them in line 7000, 8000 in the foothills of the Himalayas because they had already invaded by that time. I just escaped two years ago, four years before I met him. And then I only visited the 80’s. I started visiting Tibet in the 80’s. So I had 20 years of going there every year, sometimes several times. I was so thrilled to go there, although less and less thrilled as the more and more settlers came into the cities. But the land itself and the holy places, those sacred spots are amazing.

JP McAvoy: And he taught you a great deal. But I think he wanted to learn from you as well, didn’t he? So who is the Dalai Lama? You became good buddies, you still are to this day?

Bob Thurman: I wasn’t officially a tutor of his. But in a way, I was in our first period together when I was studying to be a monk for a couple of years there because he kind of downloaded whatever I learned. I had to make up words. He was a little frustrated with me because I wasn’t a chemistry major, or a physics major. He did the things he wanted to know, literary type. Well, I managed to pull together like plutonium radiation and how you make a bomb. I could manage it a bit. I had to make up words in Tibetan since then. He had a lifelong dialogue with lots of scientists, but I was just a conversation partner with him. I wasn’t really a tutor of his because I was so much into learning by myself, but then he didn’t really get to answer my questions in that first round because he was still studying. He was instilled as 22, and six years older than me. But then he would refer me to serious philosophical, dharma, or meditation questions to the senior, his own teachers. We have a little bit in our relationship, like CO students. Still almost all we do that’s why he kind of likes me because I’m not quite as deferential to him as other people.

JP McAvoy: Well, you’re a buddy. You guys can have conversations.

Bob Thurman: He really has been a teacher of mine since the late 70’s and early 80’s. He really has taught a lot, and I consider him my guru. But one of his elements has been that he has what I call resilience of identity. He’s kind of an official guru in ceremony initiation, or something like learning a mantra to drill down into the soil. And then when you’re hanging out and having a cup of tea, he’s cracking jokes and laughing. You don’t have to force feed all the time or act like oh, you don’t like that. And actually, he doesn’t like sanctimonious and formalities as he calls it. And I don’t either.

JP McAvoy: When he’s teaching as well, and what you’re teaching is to be human as well. He’s not looking for that pomp and ceremony at all times.

Bob Thurman: It has to do with what he’s teaching. That’s the point. He’s not just conferring some gimmick that you’re going to get it then you’re going to be saved. Because you can’t do that. Even if they call on (inaudible) to help you out of a jam, she can make you enlightened. They’re near the teachers, more like a coach. Football coach, he coaches you make this play and run through there, and then catch that pass. But then you have to go to it, to get ready to touchdown. He can’t make that sound for you. So in that sense, Buddhism is not a religion in its essence because he’s not saying that if you just repeat this set or believe that you’re going to be saved. But he can explain to you how you can find out that you have the ability to save yourself as a human being by understanding this and that, and by doing and living ethically, and being kind and doing this in relation to the people you’re interconnected with. So that makes it more like an educational institution. And I’m so proud of his holiness, just now. He’s sort of pulling together his legacy at the age of 90, although his Prime Minister lives still longer. But his own people have promised them because he still hasn’t straightened out the situation. Chinese, they’re overlords. The colonial occupants of Tibet.

JP McAvoy: He may have to live a long time for that, but it’s good that he’s still on the path.

Bob Thurman: All these kinds of (inaudible) were eager enslavement, Mongolian domination.

JP McAvoy: It’s all similar. It’s the same pattern being repeated.

Bob Thurman: They are colonial things, and they become ethnic size. Because then they feel they have to change their culture to be the colonial culture, or someday they might break away. They like that, especially if they’ve told the rest of the world that they always were Chinese. They’re just a variety.

JP McAvoy: They rewrite things or try to have come to be right, which we know is not the case.

Bob Thurman: Make them feel they are Chinese, or leave. But that doesn’t work. Iowans are not going to be New Yorkers. And yet, I am so happy to make a good contribution as Iowans as long as they’re allowed to be Iowans. And they’ll contribute to a federation or type of situation. The world should be one giant Federation.

JP McAvoy: It’s just we get in the way, and we get leaders–

Bob Thurman: If people want to oppress others to sort of get an edge against the others, so is the robber baron thing. The problem is there is no king of the world. And so everybody has to think democracy is so chaotic, and then you get robber barons, and they’re messing things up. Why bother to fight when we can share. And there’s plenty of empty land everywhere.

JP McAvoy: Everyone is as evolved, not everyone has seen the light yet. But we are one.

Bob Thurman: I’m very optimistic. I think that we are seeing it. Everybody refers to history, but it’s always been like this and that. And meanwhile in history until recently, 90% of people were uneducated. They were illiterate. They just did farm work for somebody who manipulated them because they were keeping records on how many bushels of wheat and rice. They were just producing it. And when things were good, they were getting enough to live on themselves. And then maybe their children can live a little better and have a little more farmland. There was a sense of improvement about the future. But now, everybody’s educated.  Everybody’s on Facebook, and everybody has JP’s podcast, The Millionaire’s Lawyer. And so everybody sees what everybody’s doing. One of the things I read six minutes late, there was an article about yachts in the London Review of Books. Reviewing some books about these insane yachts, 350 meter long yachts belong to the Agha Khan more than Russian oligarchs. That’s three and a half football fields, more than a yard. So it’s insane. And then they do it to get away, right? But then when you have such a huge thing, you have this enormous staff. And then the staff don’t have pensions, they don’t have benefits. I didn’t know that there are agencies that give you temporary outsource people in the engine room. The captain may have benefits and he’s your friend. But otherwise, they’re not all your friends. And so actually, you haven’t gotten away at all. You’re still depending on them, and not like taking over your yacht and getting pissed off. So you haven’t got away from anything. You’re dragging the insecurity of having more than other people. Really a lot more. You’re dragging it with you out there on the ocean.

JP McAvoy: And the weight of that is all following you around.

Bob Thurman: Hundreds of people who are slaving away to give you your grandma’s chocolate amount or whatever. They could throw you overboard in the Atlantic anytime. The paranoia that made you want to leave downtown New York, or leave downtown LA, or leave whatever it was is still following you. So then naturally, the extreme will likely want to go to Mars. And he wants robots to take care of him so that he’ll be able to have to think about anybody being mad at him.

JP McAvoy: And it begs the question, and I guess you wrote on this, right? And then wisdom is bliss, what is real? What are we trying to do here?

Bob Thurman: We’re trying to be in love, obviously. Be loved and love. And actually, we’ve noticed that even if we’re loved, and we don’t love, it doesn’t help. Temporarily, it’s kind of good that we can exploit it. But it doesn’t really push us over the brink. Only when we can kind of leave ourselves, transcend our life, evaluate how good is it, which is what you have to give yourself up to, right? You have to die. I would die to experience that again. You have to kind of really let go of it all, and that’s love. So what we’re here for is to love ourselves and others. If others reciprocate, that’s great. And if we really realized that, when we remember dancing in the rain, singing in the rain, or whatever it was. Dancing around, it’s raining, don’t bother with an umbrella. Rain is annoying, but he doesn’t care because he’s in love. Everyone loves that movie. Even today on PBS.

JP McAvoy: That feeling you’re describing, that joyfulness and love.

Bob Thurman: To do that, you want wealth because you want to keep your beloved’s happy. You need to feed yourself. You want to keep yourself happy, and so you need wealth, and you strive for that. And then I used to have a little more maybe, there is a sufficiency point of a little more and a little less. And then if you want the people who are around you to not feel much less, so you feel safe for them, they are too jealous of you. And you don’t want to be too jealous of anybody else. So there’s a kind of a range. You can move around up and down at a range, and that’s the best. It’s complicated capitalism. That capitalism is very important. Buddhism, a kind of ancient Buddhist ethics, likes capitalism. And people like to make more wealth. And one of the great things you can do with more wealth is give it away like the Rockefeller Foundation, or the Ford Foundation. They sort of happen. And then we’re cynical. We say, well, reluctantly, they were really worried. What else they can’t take with them. The way they like to start giving things away. It’s like Christmas, or Hanukkah or whatever it is. The only one that really has fun is the little kid. And the parents, they keep the tags. The price tags on the presents so that someone can exchange them in case they don’t like them. The little kid ripped it. And then that happiness is the main happiness of those holidays. I’m gonna take it back. I want to switch it.

JP McAvoy: We grow out of that joy that we feel as a young one when we search for that for the rest of our lives. It’s so important to be in that place, though.

Bob Thurman: And then if you talk about sex therapy, where does orgasm really come from? It’s sort of a point where you’re giving yourself as well as getting something. But where’s it coming from? It actually is coming from within yourself of letting go. Really powerful.

JP McAvoy: Yeah, the orgasm. You describe it as the Buddha as him as well. To take it in the philosophical sense, you describe it as the Buddha as them as well.

Bob Thurman: Exactly. And that’s the beautiful thing about Indian and Tibetan Buddhism tantra, where they represent a Buddha as a male, female in the union. In a balanced Union where inner and outer, and other transcendent and so forth in a loving connection. I remember once that I was doing a course when I was a young professor at Amherst College. There’s a course that we used to do that. We would join that other colleague from a different field, freshman seminar type of thing. And I had this guy who was an American historian, and there was a lady who was a theologian, but a feminist theologian. And we were doing different things from our own field. And at one point, there was a slide on the thing. I was talking about the Tibetan Tantra of a male female union. And he’d been talking about the Great Awakening of the male god in the Protestant thing in the 1830’s or 40’s. That was his field, and he was talking about that with its students. And she was talking about God, the mother, and how it’s trying to break through and get rid of patriarchal imagery and religion, and see the ultimate reality as a mother and some other cultures and so forth. When my turn came I said, well, here’s God. Here’s the ultimate, if not quite God, love the Creator. The ultimate is a Buddha, but it’s both. Male and the female are both Buddha, and they’re in union. And he freaked out. He was very into psychology. I think he had a therapist. Bob is also his name. He says, what can culture be? Ah, a culture where the ultimate is represented as the primal seeing? Psychology, right? And I didn’t know what to say, but blurted out of my mouth. Well, Bob, I said, how about a grown up culture?

JP McAvoy: I love how you’ve described sort of Western science, Western philosophy as being sort of in kindergarten. It’s time to grow up.

Bob Thurman: I didn’t know what to say. It was a desperate ploy. I just said, how about a grown up culture where you’re not hiding stuff from kids who are aware of everything?

JP McAvoy: I’m struck as you talk. Thank you for this ball. I have a few more questions here just to wrap things up. As I talk with elders, I’ve just attended a powwow and you speak with elders or any spiritual leader. I’m fascinated by the intersection of religions and philosophies. And going back to Buddhism and being good, these are things that our teachers are trying to teach us. It’s that intersection of things that is so important for us to hear, isn’t it?

Bob Thurman: The Dalai Lama was really great, and the inter-religious thing which is very into, and even in a radical way where he wants to get over whatever there is in Buddhism about where the best one is. He thinks they all should quit that, and they should decide. I used to know a wonderful (inaudible) St. John in New York who was Christian, but he used to say, if God is absolute, you can have as many religions as he wants. Of course, he himself was an Episcopalian. He said, so therefore, we have to stop the idea that everybody has to be converted to ours or they’re doomed, and they’re lesser beings than us. So religion can be used as a way of doing genocides on people.

JP McAvoy: They’re killing each other over a religion as the opposite of what the teachings say.

Bob Thurman: I think that’s very true today. The Dalai Lama fields, for example, that secular humanism is by having anthropological studies and noticing that human beings, the young, are helpless for decades, and they need kindness from strangers who initially are there when a baby’s born. You have never seen that guy before. So you’re a stranger in a way you get to feel familiar. But at first, you’re a stranger, and you have to be kind to it or you’re doomed. It’s finished. Because of that kindness is already there in secular humanism. That’s spirituality and secularism in other words. He always was inter-religious since he was a secularist. The material to be brought in is much nicer than mine. I was criticizing them, but I’m not really criticizing them in a bad way. I just want them to be more open and less dogmatic about everybody. But anyway, that’s really important so that we see that kindness is like a natural thing. And any religion that has lasted isn’t some temporary cult for the people to eventually rebel and they hate being oppressed. It has lasted for thousands of years, hundreds of years. It has to be kindness, has to be the core of it. Because of domination, conflicts or oppression, cruelty, nobody owns it. Nobody likes it. No animals like it, no humans like it. And the Predator doesn’t even like it. And therefore, they don’t attack you, and they’re not hungry. Now, they’re kind of forced to do it in a way by their appetite control. So I think that’s really important. 

I was looking at the book of Revelation recently for a friend who was worried about this misuse of Christianity in our country at the moment to condone violence, condone domination and control, destroy all the immigrants or hate everybody who’s of a different race or whatever, or somebody has different sexual orientation. And so Jesus wants you to do that. And they were asking me what resources in Christianity can be used to calm those people down. They claim there was never a separation of church and state, and we don’t have religious freedom here. And then I happen to look at that because I knew there was something in the book of Revelation and there is a great thing there. Although the rapture and the final Armageddon, the whole thing is all very violent and terrible. At the end of the New Jerusalem, there is no temple. He says that the reason there is no temple there is that God and Jesus are all in all. That people are living like Jesus, in other words. They are turning, they’re giving you their coat when asked for their shirt. They’re being kind and being friendly. They’re being joyful, whatever. They sort of have a nice mystical side of what the Rabbi Jesus said. Nice Jewish Rabbi Jesus. 

I know the other one, I know that I told my friend who runs a political thing. He’s in the battle, and that we’re all in that. In Matthew after he’s given the Sermon on the Mount, every good Rabbi talks like that. He then says, later when I’m at the right hand of the Father, and when some guy comes to me and says, Lord, Lord, we did great deeds of power in your name. I will say, get the Gandhi evil doer, I know you do not. I mean, in the English translation. So in other words, he doesn’t want his name used for deeds of power of domination, oppression, cruelty, violence, and so forth. He doesn’t want that. He wants him to live his beatitudes. And so there are plenty of grounds within all the world religions to prevent people from using religion as an excuse to do violence on other beings.

JP McAvoy: A teaching for all of us from there.

Bob Thurman: We all should cultivate. I do consider that we are all terrorized by different authoritarian cultures to feel that reality is unsafe, and reality is dangerous. And so we need them to protect us from that dangerous reality. And well, that’s what they want you to believe.

JP McAvoy: That’s what allows them to maintain power for a certain period of time. But as you just said before, that always fails in the end as well.

Bob Thurman: Exactly, exactly. I mean, people who think that they know the theory that was started from Singapore, which is very wrong on the planet right now. Started by the dictators of Singapore from the Li family. Lee Kuan Yew and his later leads have been the dictators there, and Singapore is just changing, finally. But that theory, which is that Chinese people like to be bossed around and they end democracy is a Western invention. It’s an imposition and its cultural colonialist, Eric and blah, blah, blah, is completely wrong, actually. And it’s false and Chinese are human. And they thought of a wonderful movie about the crazy rich people in Singapore. That’s a fun movie. I love those fun movies. And it shows that they like they are wild and wooly themselves. And they love to have fun.

JP McAvoy: They want their moment dancing in the rain as well, and that’s what that teaches us. I think that we all do that.

Bob Thurman: Everybody wants to be free. Libertarians don’t precisely want to be free. And so libertarians, unfortunately, libertarians have created democracy. They were libertarians, Jefferson and Franklin. Of course, they were wired to do it. It’s not random.

JP McAvoy: The weight of that yacht as well. They didn’t want to be carrying that around with them, and they tried to shed that. And we’re almost there. There’s elements of that we got right as well.

Bob Thurman: And this is where Democrats have to learn. I think Joe Biden has it a little bit with his sunglasses and his thing, which is democracy is more fun. That’s right. The chaos is more fun. The Dalai Lama thinks that. He tells the story of going to the parliament in China. There’s dead silence. Anybody just looking to see what the boss wants them to say. They would say something. But the otherwise, dead silence. No fun. Taken to the Indian parliament, everybody was screaming and they were practically having fights, and they were running around. It was chaotic. And he was so happy. He felt it somehow his instinct was that it was better.

JP McAvoy: That sounds like a lot more fun. That’s the type of fun I want. Bob, I’ve had a lot of fun here today. Want to say a couple things, and then we’ll say them until next time. You spoke with the Dalai Lama’s legacy. He’s still got some time and some things he’s got to do. I’ve heard you say that you plan to live to 104, which is interesting because my father always says the same thing. He’s about your age, and we say that he’s gonna live 204 as well. I plan to do at least myself, so you’ve got some time here. What are some of the things that you want to accomplish in the next cycle?

Bob Thurman: And I was ordered by him, and I would like to fulfill that to live as long as he does, at least. He originally had a prophecy, you could do 120. And he’s just saying that, and then it was 113, and now it’s 110. And he likes Western and Tibetan Medicine, both to add medicine for long term maintenance. And where’s your medicine for some problems, some emergency problems, he loves that. He tries to get the best of both worlds to some principles that they have in Tibetan medical theory that is very, very Buddhist medical theory that’s very, very good. Ayurveda in India should be legal. In India, all three or four medical systems are legal, and they intertwine it in a good way. And that’s the way it should be. We should give her that. So what I need to do, I was asked by him, and I want to because I feel it’s so helpful to sort of translate the DSM of Buddhist Education Therapy. The diagnostic manual the psychiatrists have. Unfortunately, it comes from Sanskrit. Originally, it was the library of the great monastic universities in India before they were invaded and burned. It’s about 6000 works, and I’ve done 30 or 40. Either translated myself, edited or translated, commissioned others to do it and edited it. And so I want to get that a little further. That’s sort of my own focus. But on the larger focus, I’m with George Soros. But unfortunately, not funded by him. But I want to see when (inaudible) destroyed the university George created in Budapest, which was to sort of help the people come out of communism in Eastern Europe. But also just to develop a better, more humane curriculum. 

I want to see a leave behind a curriculum as a major thing connecting to all the wonderful universities that exist, but without the orthodoxy of dogmatic materialism, and bounds and put it in simple terms that the Dalai Lama put when he got an honorary degree from our scholar. Took two or three years of nominating, but they gave it when the Chinese guy got off the board. And he said, thank you so much. Education is the most important thing for the well being of this planet and all the people. And people will have to know what they’re doing. Which is Buddha saying that you are happy by knowing what’s going on. Knowledge becomes love, ultimately in other words. But here at Columbia, I’m concerned about your moderate education. Your whole focus is on producing a clever brain, but ignoring the production of a good heart. And that’s dangerous not only for the people. The clever brain person might arm in their life by manipulating them, but also for the person who only mainly has the clever brain because they will be happy. How do you choose to be more loving? How do you choose to be less angry? How do you choose to be less greedy, and yet more, more joyful in wealth and things? Communism proved that it’s no good. It’s ridiculous. It’s anti human nature. And therefore, it leads to horrible dictators and oligarchs. He was amazed himself. He was invited to Eastern Europe. I saw it myself in China that the new barons under communism. Their bathtubs were bigger. They were in for multiple people bathing. They were huge bathtubs beds, and the huge palaces they built for themselves. Things on top of the selfless labor for the state and people. The whole system just reproduces itself totally with no control. No theory of noblesse oblige at all because it was just all done for the people. So it’s just stupid. Capitalism is crazy too. So we’re going to have slaves in coal mines, it has to be in this range in the middle.

JP McAvoy: And with love and intention, right?

Bob Thurman: Good heard, kind hearted, warm hearted, kind smile, yoga in the gym. Understanding your own embodying, your own sexuality. And understanding how other people are and linking with them. Learning kindness, etiquette, politeness and graciousness. That should be educated.

JP McAvoy: That needs to be taught as well. For what you’re describing on this show, describing how AI is going to empower all these things. For example, the translations and the work that you do there. Have you employed any AI on that front? Or can I help you with any AI on that front to get that to the next level.

Bob Thurman: I need that. I’ve asked AI or ask if you can translate this book for me. He said, no, I can’t, yet. And then I asked Deepak’s son-in-law is a big private equity investor in AI, but he is doing Indian languages and Sanskrit. Nobody is Tibetan, I’m sure. But Google should do it. I’m working with some people that are doing all these languages, and then they will be able to translate it.

JP McAvoy: I’m working with people who are looking to do the teaching. And I think not just from the language itself. I think that’s a very noble thing. And I say, let me help you with that as well. But it’s also the concept of teaching that love, because we need to ensure that the AI is imbued with that as well as the AI itself is learning. What would you say the AI that’s going to be processing this very podcast at some point in the future.

Bob Thurman: Female intelligence, because the females are much more empathetic and much more realistic than males in general. And my example of that is, the male ideal for a big leader is like, say Bill Clinton used to be (inaudible) fills a room. So that means in other words, the ego is the whole room. He doesn’t know anything about other people in the room. It just performs to them. Female knows everything, and feels when everybody’s feeling in the room. So they are needed to moderate it. So the guy will know what this one needs and that one needs. And in the household is a female who knows when the cat is hungry, and the dog needs whatever it is. Sort of knowing everything. And the males, they’re raging with each other. The brothers have fights, quarrels and arguments, and the female knows what’s going on. So the key to AI is that any kind of AI that relates to any sort of agency has any robotic way of expressing itself other than answering your questions, has to be participatory. It has to feel it’s part of the situation so that it has a normal concern for its own reasonable models well being fits in with other VLANs’ concern for their well being. So then they can calculate a good interconnected way of being with the beings who are concerned. So therefore, it can’t become non-participatory, somehow creating a fake abstraction, and it will tend to gravitate toward a false separateness from everything. And so then dominated from the point of separation. That’s the danger with AI. We can work on that. (inaudible), but he’s so scared of AI. But that’s because he’s projecting AI as being the captains of industry who have created it, who kind of automatically get off on the power trip. And of course, if AI is given its own license to have a power trip over, over everybody as if they weren’t it. And there’s no sense of oneness with that.

JP McAvoy: That’s where it fails the way we’ve described here. It’s because it’s more than that, it’s gotta go beyond that.

Bob Thurman: Again, empathy and building in a total awareness in AI that is totally interconnected with everything, and therefore cannot harm. It can repress and depress, destroy things, and survive itself. Its own existence is dependent on other people’s reasonable level of existence.

JP McAvoy: It certainly won’t. Thank you. Thank you for that as well. We are working on such things. You and I can continue the conversation on this, and assist translations by all means.

Bob Thurman: Thank you, JP. I didn’t realize, I’m sorry, it took so long to get here. I love talking with you. I hope we can get together again.

JP McAvoy: Absolutely. Thank you so much for today. I think that my wife’s gonna like to hear this. I think yours is as well, as we could discuss. I’d like to end the shows with one thing that people can take with them through the rest of the day, through the rest of the week. We began with the mantra. Can you repeat that for us again on the way out so people listening and have listened all the way through will be protected by and can take that with them.

Bob Thurman: About a mantra is that speech is really wonderful because, in fact, it’s speech that does interconnect us. When you listen to me or when I listen to you, although it’s imperfect because our words don’t ever capture the reality that we’re trying to convey to each other. But still, they give us aspects and deliver like vectors of the realities that we’re in. And that’s where we’re larger being when we find the words of somebody who lived thousands of years ago and they help us understand something. And so that’s amazing thing about speech. And so then mantra is kind of speech where you’re just broadcasting to the universe. When you do it sincerely, you feel that there’s an angel there. It doesn’t have to be a Buddhist thing. There’s an angel there, or there’s some sort of goodwill in the world around that you’re kind of evoking by saying it. The wonderful one, that Tibetan that they really love, it’s only six syllables, Om Mani Padme Hum. Mani means jewel. Padme means Lotus. And om and hum are always universal. All that good energy of the universe. Hum means (inaudible) in my heart. (inaudible), and you see their lips maybe sometimes moving. But they’re not. They’re thinking Om Mani Padme Hum. What my mother used to say all the time is, all is well, all as well. So Om Mani Padme Hum. Jewel and Lotus y. The jewel is identified with compassion and miraculous, and also with the males strangely. And the lotus is associated with the female, with wisdom, knowledge, practical intelligence and science. Love and wisdom.

JP McAvoy: Bob, thank you so much for this. Thank you for sharing. I look forward to the next chance.