The Yoga Of Work - Andrew Taggart

[00:58] Paul: Today I am very excited to be talking with Andrew Taggart again. I believe the last conversation we had was somewhere in 2020 or 2021, losing track because of, uh, whatever was happening during the pandemic. But our initial conversation was in 2018. We had had a number of conversations throughout that year and your ideas around total work and how work was taking over our lives was really impactful on me. Not just that, but sort of the questions leading out of that and saying, if you're not a worker, who are you? And that's really been a question that's stuck with me over the last 7-odd years now.

And it's been incredibly helpful and it's been great to watch you continue your, your own philosophical and intellectual journey. Grappling with what I think are some of the hardest questions in today's world that is dominated by a certain stance toward work. And you shared with me some recent writings around what you're calling the yoga of work. And it was so cool to read this because one, it resonates incredibly deeply with my journey. It's been something I've been trying to explain to people about a certain stance I've been working with over the last 7 years, sometimes to better or worse success, and also something I'm observing just in how I'm approaching being a parent, which is a lot of work, but it's not the kind of work most people are talking about. And so welcome back to the podcast.

Welcome to the podcast, Andrew.

[02:49] Andrew Taggart: It's good to see you again. When we first met, you weren't married and you didn't have a child, and now you're married and you have a child and you're somewhere in Southeast Asia and all the rest.

[02:59] Paul: Amazing. I wanted to propose an outline for the conversation today. I could probably ask you questions for hours, but I thought we'd start with a quick sort of recap of your total work thesis. I think it was very powerful. I think it had an impact on a lot of people. And then I'd love to really touch on your own evolution of that idea and what you found wrong with it, where it was incomplete and where that led you from there.

It might be interesting to talk about some of my own journey. My second book is really an attempt to talk about the stance I have. Toward work. So we could talk about that a little bit, and then we can talk about what you're calling the yoga of work, which is sort of this, uh, synthesis of a lot of the ideas you've been working with over the last 7 years. Would you add anything? Do you wanna start in a different area?

[03:59] Andrew Taggart: No, I'm ready. Wherever you want to go, I'm game. Awesome.

[04:05] Paul: So what is total work?

[04:08] Andrew Taggart: I remember vaguely that it's 2018 and this is the pre-pandemic days. This is before the reign of AI or the imminent reign of AI. And I saw an Instagram post in which there was this little kid who was imagining himself in some kind of boardroom, if I remember correctly. And he's asked the question, something like, what do you love about kindergarten? He says, what I love about kindergarten is work because I was born to work. And I found that that was very shocking because I never thought that when I was a 5-year-old or a 6-year-old or a 7-year-old.

And I thought that it was a very good, what René Guénon would call a sign of the times. So I read it very symbolically, or I read it as a kind of gestalt shift that had been occurring. And so that led me to return to a little book by Joseph Pieper that we both know, which is called Leisure: The Basis of Culture. And he writes it, I think, just after World War II. And the idea is that there's a certain kind of concept creep, that is, that work is becoming total or it's spreading itself out in literal, metaphysical, literal and metaphorical, indeed also metaphysical ways. In such a way that it comes to seem as if more and more activities are agent-centered.

They're undertaken with a view to having me put my stamp on the world. The world is worked up, so to speak, into more and more work-like projects. And then the second part of the argument I wrote about a couple of years later in this article that was published with First Things called Secular Monks. And that was holding that you also see a certain kind of reflexive inward turn such that you start to regard yourself as an endless project of discipline. So we have a view of the world which is being worked up through work, and increasingly it's technologized, and we have a view of our lives that are such that my own personal project is a work-like project. So it's in those different ways that we begin to see the concept of work spreading out further and further into more and more domains.

[06:27] Paul: Yeah. What it's been really interesting to watch the seeds of what we might call hustle culture. And I've written a few things recently. There, there was a post by someone that is everything you want in life is on the other side of sort of suffering. Right. And it's this glorification of this stance toward work, that work is pain, and the more pain you can endure, the more greatness you will achieve.

And it's really weird to see that knowing that I had some form of that earlier in my life. And now knowing most of the stuff I do is enjoyable or sort of in the flow of my life. If it's not enjoyable. And so it's, this has become even a bit bigger thing since you coined this word secular monks. For some reason, this term secular monks doesn't seem to catch on, but people are performing this secular monk mode, waking up at 5:00 AM, doing an ice bath, doing hours of work in the morning. People recently have been bragging about Oh, you're only doing 12s, which is 12-hour workdays.

I do 16s when I'm really pushing. What, what is happening with this? Like, what, how do you think about that? Is it a deeper clinging for what like the average person is searching for in work that you saw in that Total Work Critique?

[08:06] Andrew Taggart: I think the argument has to be updated or complexified a little bit. And so I would first suggest with Jean-François Lyotard, a great French philosopher, 20th century, that there has been a meta— there's been what he calls the end of metanarratives in this little book called The Postmodern Condition that he writes in 1984. And I would put that a little bit differently. I would suggest that the West itself has been very slowly going through a critique of what Aristotle called the telos, right? Tiloi. A telos, as we may have discussed before, is a little bit different from a goal or a purpose because it's not like you have an arrow and you're aiming at something over there.

It's not— a telos is not a target that you're trying to hit. So there's no means-ends reasoning that's involved in it. Rather, I would metaphorically say that telos is the light in which you live your life. Imagine the sun shining on your life and it's pervasively shining in your life. Well, there's a certain cast or color that light is creating. So we can give examples.

The example that classical Athens subscribed to was that of the telos of wisdom. The idea that these different philosophical schools had was that notwithstanding their various disagreements on the details, The good life was the wise life. So there's a telos that held together a time and a culture. We knew what that light was, the light in which we were living. So the philosophers thought, in any case. As we come into Christianity, we have a novel idea for a telos.

I think it's very novel and it's very hard to grasp that it comes from Jesus who in the book of Matthew states that the essence of the gospel is to love God and to love thy neighbor as thyself. So you can just apply Occam's razor and say the essence of Christianity is universal love. I'm not suggesting that it was the case that everyone lived this out. You could call it an aspiration, but the idea was so powerful, so ubiquitous, that it made sense. It provided a certain kind of religious scaffolding for a people throughout the course of the West or Western history. So you see where I'm going with this.

We end up getting a broadside against teloi, against the idea that my life is not just my life. I should say, this is not à la carte or subjectivized. The key is that there's a culture that's held together by a shared telos. That's what comes under assault. You could say that begins perhaps the 19th century. You could suggest that it happens before then.

Suffice it to say, certainly by the middle of the 20th century and definitely after that, the telos, the metanarrative falls out of the equation. To me, this is the background. So you can say a religious understanding of man to use the old-fashioned language, is eviscerated. Now, the second step is that Philip Rieth, who was writing after the middle of the century, had a book that I think was written in the 1960s called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. He wasn't so much worried about therapy per se. He was worried about a dispensation, what you might call stance or a worldview.

And what he was seeing, very prophetically, we might say, is that in lieu of a religious notion of man or of human being, we have the beginning of a well-being conception. It's not a telos, but it is to say that the— what is life for? It's for well-being. You can update that if you want. It's for healthspan or longevity, since those are also terms that are used here. When you look at certain kind of social media like Instagram, you see As new concept creep again, the concept creep of wellbeing language, mental struggle, mental health for the sake of peace of mind or wellbeing, or I'm not that familiar with the most updated language, but it's a new wellbeing language, right?

A wellness language. So in lieu of this Right. And collective vision, for example, life is about perhaps salvation or most especially love of all beings. We now have a subjectivized version according to which the aim of actions, the goal of actions is wellbeing. There's more we can say, but generally speaking, once we get to those kinds of posts you're referring to, We no longer see someone living for something grand as mentioned. It's rather for a very narrowly construed, highly subjective notion that my life is only for the sake of healthspan or lifespan or wellbeing or wellness and work on myself.

Discipline is going to secure that. The old-time practices come in. This is what's very strange about this mashup in history, like fasting and ice baths and then the rest. These used to look like monastic practice, not the ice baths, but the, a lot of these actually—

[13:49] Paul: There's probably some form of that depending on where you are in the world.

[13:54] Andrew Taggart: Certainly. But the, they're kind of Brought back in as what is now called techniques, these isolable techniques that are functioning as a form of self-work whose goal typically is wellbeing, sometimes in certain circles of success, but increasingly it's a notion of calmness, wellbeing, easefulness, et cetera, some kind of mental state. Or lifestyle conception is now what it's for. That to me is, I would put it somewhat grandly and say that this is a decadence of a culture. When a culture loses its collective powerful understanding of what it's for, it dissolves or slowly becomes decadent. The entropic state sets in and you begin more and more people, more and more people start to have this low-grade conception of wellness.

You could say it's not very inspiring in the old-fashioned sense. It's not very inspiriting.

[15:00] Paul: Yeah. It's the interesting thing is I see in my past life, I, in my twenties, I was desperate for meaningful work and it was a conception of a certain way of living. Once I find this magical landing spot, I will be happy or whatever. When I quit my job, I realized that I am desperate to fill that same aim. And I see in front of me the path to do so. Launch a startup, become a successful entrepreneur, solopreneur.

And just, I think my curiosity just saying, Well, that seems like the wrong direction, but those paths are so— they're so enticing to people. Do you think it's tied to our broader conception of work? Because one thing I've been playing with, I think in my second book I was writing, the thing that helped me release from this is basically starting to see everything as work. And that sounds crazy. That sounds like going off the deep end on my former path, but it's actually a loosening because once you start seeing everything as work, everything is also worth doing, right? And it's work beyond the scope of defining it for a paycheck or for an aim or for some sort of path.

And so that's been my own journey of that. Do you think I'm missing anything in that?

[16:38] Andrew Taggart: How did you know it was the wrong direction? You said just a little while ago.

[16:42] Paul: So you wrote about this in the piece you shared with me about this waking up moment when you're like, whoa, I had it all wrong for 10 years. And it's just so obvious when you see it and It's not that my path wouldn't have worked for other people. It's that for me, I was, I ultimately ended up 10 years deep and incredibly cynical and not really caring about the underlying things I was doing. And so it was just like, yeah, that, that was silly. It was as simple as that. And it's also hard because then there's a different journey you go on, but I never struggled, like, looking back.

It was like, oh yes, that was an error. It happened to take 10 years of my life, but I can't move in that same way through the world anymore.

[17:42] Andrew Taggart: That sounds right. You would— the aha moment is that you do feel as though something, not about a particular action, but about a way of living, is just empty, or you feel empty-handed. And if you can trace it to the stance, as you were calling before, then it's not possible to go on with it. Or not for very long.

[18:05] Paul: No, it would have required more alcohol.

[18:09] Andrew Taggart: That's right.

[18:11] Paul: That's right. Or some other vice. Would you add anything to that?

[18:16] Andrew Taggart: Well, it's a meta remark that you're making. And then the meta remark has to go something like this. I think what is one's, I think the question is what is one's diagnosis of what has gone wrong or what the error is? Let's take a very simple example that might be more concrete. One is in a relationship with someone and one is cohabiting with that person to use the language of the day, or one is married to that person. Then there's usually about a 10-year time horizon that's sufficient to test out possibly all the errors that are being made in the relationship.

And there's a series of iterations one can go through in order to try to ensure the relationship itself is beautiful and loving and the like. However, at the end of that 10-year period, if there continue to be these error messages, then the, then there's a leap of understanding. It's not necessarily a logical argument that you might have in a college course. And that leap says there's something about the very nature of the relationship that is completely untenable. Once that realization has come to, then there's a certain unbearability and incapacity to go on with it. And you might say that it collapses or falls apart.

That collapse doesn't occur necessarily overnight. It can be unraveling over the course of a year, but that's an acceleration point right there when the realization is there is something fundamentally untenable about the very nature and shape of this relationship, then for all intents and purposes, it's over. Now I'm using that as an example to illustrate a general pattern that we can see over and over again. The same holds with work, but the problem is that most people will continue to iterate for quite some time and weak while holding on to an idea of success or an idea of necessary net worth or an idea of wellness. That's the problem. The trick is that somehow one has to get around to feeling that everything that suffuses that conception turns out to be empty.

At that moment, you can see a, you can see a paradigmatic change, or it's what I called in the first book you wrote about an existential opening. Right.

[21:05] Paul: Yeah. It's, you're sort of wandering around. I spent all my 20s wandering around and I'm like, okay, I, this is not working, but that, yes, that right over here, but I'm still Well, yeah, but I'm still in the wall. And then I think when I left my job, it was very clear that there was, oh, I can stay in this container of, you might call like formal work. Like André Gorz, he talks about your participation in society through formal work. And so I liked writing.

Now I could quickly see, oh, there's a way to try to get paid to be a to pay journalists, to get a paid book deal, all these things. Or I could simply leave the wall and go out there and just sit down and write. And this is sort of what I just continue doing. And I adopted a mantra.

[22:03] Andrew Taggart: How did you come to the difference between those, between in the wall and beyond the wall?

[22:09] Paul: I, I left America.

[22:13] Andrew Taggart: I see. There you are. The general prescription here.

[22:18] Paul: So I went to the East. I went to Taiwan and I sort of woke up to— I decided I would spend a month just seeing where my days took me and my days kept taking me to coffee and then writing in the morning. And one day it just dawned on me. It's like, oh, I'm writing every day. This is Nice. And I committed to a mantra then, which was write most days.

And that's really been the only core thing I've committed to in the like formal work sense for 8 years now. And so, yeah, it's been an interesting journey. You've talked with, starting in Talking about Total Work in 2018, you talked with many people, you have philosophical conversations with many people, many different backgrounds. Many of them likely woke up to similar conclusions, but you also found some struggled after, you were telling me. What happened in some of those cases and how did that lead you to sort of update some of your thinking?

[23:30] Andrew Taggart: Yeah, that's a great question. I think one of the errors that I made, and it's very common, is to take my own idiosyncratic life and then try to abstract from there. So there was obviously a fallacy. When I was a young, when I was a very young kid, I tended to be very contemplative. I had spent a lot of time on my own. I had two older sisters, but they were off doing work in the what we now call activities.

They used to be called sports and other such things. And I felt very, to a fair extent, notwithstanding some loneliness, I felt pretty at home with myself. And so when I was, when I'd been reading the liberal arts, as I started to read liberal arts texts in high school and then throughout college, I came to a certain confirmation bias, you might say. And that held that for a very long period of time in the West, there actually was a distinction drawn, as well as a privileging of one of these terms. The distinction was drawn between a contemplative life, the life devoted to variously the contemplation of the mind of God, as Aristotle put it, to the contemplation of God's creation, or to the nature of God, You could say it's a contemplation of higher things. You can see how I have this nice— here's a representation right here.

And that was contrasted with the active life, which was a life devoted to action. Plotinus very famously and quite critically says that those who cannot contemplate, he would say, the One, are stuck with having to act. So we can already see that these contemplative and philosophical thinkers are, are claiming that contemplation is highest and as such comes first, logically and metaphysically speaking, and that the life devoted to action comes second.

And I thought, and you can look back at a few, the couple of TEDx talks that I gave in 2018, 18 or so, that our time had gotten to a point in which there was a great enough crisis, or the crisis was coming, and that there would be the possibility of a pretty dramatic pivot, a slow pivot or a quick pivot, such that people would still continue to be involved in an active life but would somehow nest it within a broader conception of an examined or contemplative life. I would say that turns out to be huge. I'm going to just get my punchline. That turns out to be a law on my part.

[26:20] Paul: And to add to that, some Greeks did think leisure could be an active mode as well, I believe.

[26:29] Andrew Taggart: Well, there's certainly activity involved, but the leisure itself is an act of thinking. About highest things. Certainly. And so not the only one, obviously Taoists in the East held that there was to be the understanding of the nature of the Tao. Even Confucians, notwithstanding their interest in filial piety, have an idea that the good life is lived in accordance with Tao or the way of things. Just the mistake I began to see though is that didn't actually that didn't actually conform to the conditions on the ground as we find them in the modern world.

And it was becoming increasingly clear to me that when I was speaking with people about this, it wasn't suitable for many people whose temperaments remained active. Let me try to give a very concrete example to bring this out. There was a man living in Chicago, one who was in his 50s at the time, and he'd had had a heart condition, probably, probably if I recall correctly, it'd be a lifelong heart condition. He'd been in finance and had done very well financially. So in the very simple practical sense, he no longer needed to work. The survival mode had been achieved, certainly.

However, he had always been somebody who had been engaged in work various and sundry ways. And here we began contemplating the shape and substance of his life. And it turned out that he was just a very nervous, as it would be said in psychology, a fairly neurotic fellow. And so I'm asking him to meditate a little bit. I'm asking him to be engaged in what Abhidhamma calls the witness teaching, to be a witness to various kinds of thoughts and feelings. And indeed, for him, there was a certain compulsive behavior that he would engage in as well.

I'm certainly asking him to turn back around in the Socratic sense and to examine the basic constituents of his life and indeed about what it was all for. This all sounds to me very sensible, but to him it was, it exacerbated the condition in which he found himself because he wasn't able to, the word that Advaita Vedanta uses or proceed sattvically, sattvic is a sort of quiet, clear mind, in order to think about these things instead, it actually accentuated, you might say, his nervous tendencies. That was one of the first instances in which I saw something like this. I'm proceeding entirely in the wrong way, at least in certain cases. This guy should be starting a nonprofit and doing volunteer work. The Protestants are right, the idle hands of the devil, devil actually makes sense in that particular case.

I had tried to feng shui his basic temperament, and in his 50s, that's just not going to happen. Now, can we abstract from there? I think we can. There's a reason why I'm talking about the karma, the yoga of work, and that is because I think a fair number of people in the West, regardless of what happens with regard to this wave of AI, We'll continue to find that they are rajasic, a Vedantic word that means that they tend toward an active, somewhat energized, often feverish mode. So what Tantra says is, rather than trying to convert someone to a life of contemplation, I definitely put that word in quotes. One is better off working with that kind of energy.

And that's where karma yoga comes in. It says, in short, that your dominant domain is action in the large sense and work in the slightly narrower sense. If that's, so to speak, what makes sense to you or has made sense to you so far, and if you're in your 40s or 50s or 60s and so forth, then we need to find a way of meeting you while turning you inward. So the yoga of work is a backdoor way of allowing you to examine your life, but in the domain you're most accustomed to, it says you don't actually have to change. You don't have to change the conditions on the ground per se. You don't have to start reading Aristotle.

Or Plotinus. You don't have to, you're right, or whatever, right? I'm not asking you to think about the nature of reality and to get very interested in metaphysics. You can instead simply note that when work is happening, you can become much more aware of all the sorts of things you are passing over. That's the beginning of, I think, a more elegant, tantrically inspired spiritual path that I think is more suitable for a fair number of people, most notably, but not only Americans. That's where I came to it.

[31:38] Paul: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I think I'm probably wired like you. I quit my job and found myself with a bunch more time that I could devote to wandering and thinking, and I'm like, delightful, this is wonderful. But yeah, some people will come to me and they're just like, well, I just need to be doing stuff all the time. And it's, well, I'm not a good guide for you here. I don't quite know.

I don't, I'm not oriented like that. So yeah, that, that's pretty interesting. And you found others with a similar stance? There was a lot of work.

[32:16] Andrew Taggart: There was a woman working at, oh, for sure. The one has to be all of them. I'm being philosophical. I have to lead an examined life and I have to start to see that there's something If you prefer Taoist about being able to meet people where they are, to meet them in the way, right? So there's a woman who was working at Google and she would, she had long days. And then when she went home, she had two children and she would say, I always, I always need to be doing something.

Now, initially I would say, let us meditate on this matter. And when she's meditating with me, that you have Then there is a container for that guided meditation, and it's all well and good. But that says nothing about what it's like for her when that guided meditation is not taking place. She's back to fidgety hands. You might say you're dissatisfied with your husband, or it's indicative of a deeper dis-ease, or dukkha, as Buddhists would say, that could be examined. That sometimes will be an opening for that person.

But often the, let's, the Sanskrit term is skara. There are these very strong habitual tendencies. It's often translated as ego tendencies. These tendencies are so strong, so ingrained that my new argument is that you're better off working with them than working against them. I think this is a very common story that I've heard frequently. When we're meditating or philosophizing, there's a quietness about the scene.

You might say there's a container in which there's examination. You feel calm, you feel rested, you feel alert and awake. Afterward, there's a kind of glow or peacefulness that is—

[34:07] Paul: enter on their calendar so they can counted as the doing.

[34:12] Andrew Taggart: Yes, there you are. However, it doesn't take long, hours or days later for the same tendencies to emerge. So while it's true that there are people with temperaments like ours, that is true. There are plenty of people, and you can think back to the Harvard University of Virginia small study in which Students were in a room and they shocked, shocked themselves as indicative of probably a more general sensibility or temperament or series of tendencies. I don't think of this as being in any way cynical. I think of it as being very realistic.

And I think if one wishes to live a wise life, then one has to really understand. One of my favorite adages or epigrams, and that's for Jesus again, and that is to want us to live in the world but not of it. That's the— there's a bit of torsion there. So I'm not suggesting that one takes people at their word while I always need to be doing something. You don't have to take someone at his word. You just take that as a starting point.

And then you can begin to examine what happens when it's the case that you become more alert to and observant about how that life is unfolding in a very granular way.

[35:39] Paul: Early on, after I quit my job, I had this story in my head, well, I have to do these consulting gigs, otherwise I won't be able to make money. And so I think one thing that happened was I did start noticing just how I felt. And I noticed more and more the disconnect. And it got to the point where I was able to make some money to buy some time. And I said, well, now I'm going to run the experiment of not taking any of these and seeing if I run out of money. And so, yeah, I made it.

I made adjustments. I kept going. And that noticing practice took years. After 3 years later, I moved back to the US and immediately I took a consulting gig because I was scared. And after I said, okay, I now need to test this again. And it is this continuous practice.

[36:36] Andrew Taggart: But you're scared.

[36:38] Paul: What's that?

[36:39] Andrew Taggart: You saw that you took it because you were scared, probably after the fact, you know, that's what was taking place.

[36:45] Paul: Yeah. Well, it was pretty obvious. I mean, I'm in a call. With a senior executive and he's trying to like one-up me and be like, who are you? Why should I be talking to you as a consultant? Why are we paying you all this money?

I just sat there and was like, I don't know. And after the call, it was very clear. It's like, this is not the space I'm supposed to be in. But I wonder, is there something with writing with this? I do sense there's sort of some way I'm able to work writing into my life that feels natural and contemplative, but also in a sense of action where that is what actually helps me notice these things and pivot and shift. I'm wondering if you've seen any patterns with writers versus non-writers.

[37:34] Andrew Taggart: What more have you seen?

[37:35] Paul: I attract a lot of writers who are also contemplative and there's sort of a sense-making aspect. To it. It's confusing being on your own weird path, self-employed, underemployed, whatever you might even want to call it. And so without writing, I'd just be experiencing these things. I wouldn't be able to make sense of it. And I think with writing, I often find, well, I don't actually know what's going on.

I have to work through it in words and working through it. Helps me either notice further, evolve my thinking, shift my state, and things like that.

[38:14] Andrew Taggart: I don't think that writing is unique in this way, of course, but it can be said that most people will need some kind of form or medium which will help to make sense of what's going on in their lives. That's certainly true. It might have been— I notoriously misquote E.M. Forster, who might have said, I don't, how do I know what I think until I see what I say? It sounds like E.M. Forster, but it may not be.

In any case, typically there needs to be some commitment to something that allows you to actually turn over the matters of ordinary life. Maybe it's easier to quote here, Wordsworth, he stated about poetry that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. And if you think about that, it's not a very good definition of poetry, but I think it's a pretty good definition of a spiritual practice broadly understood. So let's try to unpack that a little bit because it might make sense to the question you asked. Let's just say that a spiritual practice is motion, motion recollected in tranquility. By motion, I mean something is going on or come up, or does it make any sense?

Or there might've been some kind of forms of reaction that's disproportionate to the situation at hand. There could be any number of things that we call here, loosely speaking, emotion. The task is to find a medium, mode, or form that enables one to recollect to bring back what was happening, but in a different manner. That is, it's in a state of tranquility. That's what writing does for some people.

[40:05] Paul: Yeah. What are some of the other practices you found with the people that would default more to the doing mode than the contemplative?

[40:15] Andrew Taggart: Well, the first one, Pierre Hadot in his book, Philosophy as a Way of Life. Refers to a learning to dialogue. This is how I got into all this some 15+ years ago. I was reading the books of Pierre Hadot, H-A-D-O-T, and he argued that there was a totally different understanding of what philosophy was. It was an ongoing examination of one's life, and it was centered on what he called ascesis or spiritual exercises. Was kind of a gateway drug that led me to Zen and to Advaita Vedanta more robustly.

But that's a story for another day. So one, one askesis or spiritual exercise is called learning dialogue. And I think what's amazing about a dialogue as opposed to other forms of communication, other forms of speech, even kind of garden variety therapy sessions, is that we're hashing out That is, the question itself is inviting you to think about things you've never thought about before, if all goes well, right? In this case, and the answer is something that could either be very intuitively clear to you or it could be quite a surprise. The next question comes, I think you and I talked about this in 2018 or so. It's that, so I won't go into it at great length, but it's that kind of dance that requires you to solicit forth your best possible thinking.

About the subject at hand. That's a practice. It doesn't have to happen through a particular conversation with me or someone like me. It can happen in other contexts with the proviso that the one asking the question and the proviso the one providing the answer are both being very rigorously honest and truthful. And you could say also open-minded. You can replicate that in writing, but there can be a little bit of sleight of hand that you can replicate a dialogue in writing.

Obviously, some philosophers have done that to great effect during the course of Western history, but there needs to be something that's not ChatGPT-esque. That is, it shouldn't be drawing from your prior tendencies. It needs to— the question needs to solicit something deeper. It puts you on the edge of your thinking. So that's one practice that's very common. That is some form of dialogue, I think, is just still quite unbeatable.

You could also say that there are obviously drilling practices, but then you get into the problem with people not keeping up with them and make it seem as if we're back to the same old subject. That's a kind of chore or toil or anything like that. People will pathologize all the ways in which, oh, I should be doing this, but I do not want to be doing this. It's good for me, but I don't like it, et cetera. I would say meditation is a very uncommon one. It was from Robert Wright in his book, Why Buddhism Is True, that I first, or maybe through a podcast interview you had, that I first learned that many people in Southeast Asia, most notably and not only Buddhists, don't actually have a seated meditation practice.

[43:25] Paul: Yeah. No one meditates here in Thailand.

[43:28] Andrew Taggart: That's, well, except for monks, et cetera, et cetera. Or hopefully.

[43:32] Paul: Right, right, right. But yeah, it's very rare with the everyday.

[43:37] Andrew Taggart: Maybe I can try to make a case for meditation in a different way. Very briefly. There's something I'm beginning to teach, which is called, which I'm calling self-observation. I'm actually borrowing the term from this, this mystic named Gurdjieff. I'm retooling. Self-observation would basically insist that one, you begin to notice that something is off.

That's hard for people, I think, already, because it's not entirely clear what we mean by something being off, something being amiss, something being out of joint. But once you can get the taste, is a question of sensibility, you need the taste that something is off. And self-observation would be basically a way of introducing what Advaita Vedanta calls the witness teaching. And I won't go through it at great length, but I'll briefly summarize that key point. It's simply going to say that whatever objective experience, thought, feeling, sensation, perception is occurring, there is a standpoint called the witness, which is that which is illuminating that thought, feeling, sensation, or perception. It's also going to say that if you mix up who you are with that object, hopefully I'm not losing you.

If you mix up who you are with that thought or feeling, something magical seems to happen and it's called Maya. You seem to become the thinker. You seem to become the dreamlike thinker who's now suffering the thinker's thoughts. If you prefer, you become the feeler, you seem to become the angry one, you seem to become the sad one, the melancholic one, and so forth. So what self-observation is doing in only a few steps is it's inviting you to disentangle the witness stand from the object that's appearing. And then you can test to see that's actually a peaceful stand.

For example, work is happening. There's nothing wrong with the fact that there is trash to be taken out. So far, everything is kosher. And yet something very strange happens very quickly for most people. And that is a thought appears and the thought is, I hate taking out the trash, or something like that. It could be a subtle thought, or it could be a discursive thought.

It could be an imagistic thought. Those are all ego thoughts, essentially. There's an I that's mixed itself up with the content of the thought such that I don't like doing this, and that's called suffering. So the first thing one might notice is that it's possible to simply observe. Let's just metaphorically speak say, from a higher standpoint, that's what Advaita Vedanta calls the witness, that dislike, that thought has appeared and that one is not involved in that thought. When one checks what it's like to be the witness, one finds that everything is fine.

The trash gets taken out. It's easy to put it in a passive voice in English language. It's like the trash takes itself out. It's all like Fantasia or something like this. It's just kind of taking itself out. What is it like for that to be taking itself out as I continue to maintain my stand as a witness?

It's not wondrous. It's just happily fine. So we mentioned 3 practices: writing, learning the dialogue, and I would say a retuned meditation is no longer a formal practice since, as you said, of the 7 billion people worldwide, a very small fraction of people will ever be ongoingly interested in a formal meditation practice. So self-observation basically says that I'm starting to notice that something is awry, and I'm given just a couple of cues. A couple of questions that will enable me to see that I'm actually not involved in that mistake, that error. Work happens to be the easiest domain to specify because as we said, work is unavoidable and that happens almost constantly during the course of the day.

[48:17] Paul: Yeah.

[48:17] Andrew Taggart: So you're either gonna, you're either give it the case. It's either the case that you're going to feel as if life is toil. Which I think is a dominant theme coming out of the Bible and following that, or you're open to the possibility that this same, it's like a counterfactual, the same sorts of activities are occurring, but you no longer feel as if you are implicated in the activities themselves.

[48:43] Paul: Yeah, this might be a good time to talk about the essay you sent me on the karma yoga. I'll read, I have a few passages and we can just talk about them.

[48:53] Andrew Taggart: Sure.

[48:53] Paul: These two facts: A, work is nearly everywhere, and B, the basic unit of modern work is decidedly not the epic project or the sweeping vision of heaven on earth, but the utterly mundane task, together invite us to rethink what karma yoga is in modernity. That is to say, which unique gauntlet it's throwing down for us.

[49:19] Andrew Taggart: Yeah. The first thing that's very curious is that, that work is almost ubiquitous after you open your eyes in the morning. Sometimes I think that the only point of a philosopher is to say the things that are almost trivial, but overlooked. That's the key. The first key is to say that there's something self-evident and to put your finger on it, because it seems as if the self-evident truth of the matter is inadvertently pass by. So the philosopher is a kind of leisurely figure who just says something that's possibly uncomfortable, but obvious once you see it.

So we can call it the elephant in the room statement. And the elephant in the room statement here is that it is true. And I challenge anyone to contradict this, that most of the day is given over to work. So we probably should say, What is work? And I don't want to go into some sophisticated distinctions between paid work and unpaid work, or between the English word work and the other word labor, or work and toil. I would rather suggest that this is— they're all of a piece.

And our attempts to try to disentangle one from the other, I think, suggest an aversion typically. Is it just an attachment and an aversion, as Buddhists would say? I want this. I don't want that. Delegating is an aversion. Over-delegating is an aversion.

And I have an attachment to insert new word here, creative work, impactful work, meaningful work, or any other adjectival work that seems laudable. I think that's already a dangerous and very slippery move because you're already suffering in the broad sense. You're already dissatisfied. And you're trying to sashimi split the good from the bad. And what I'm trying to suggest is the elephant in the room is that you still can't do that. Life is still going to show you that there's more work.

And that distinction falls apart phenomenologically speaking, that is your actual lived experience doesn't actually conform to that fanciful distinction. So what is work? I would say, and this hasn't really changed that much in 7 or 8 years for me, work is whatever is necessary to maintain material conditions for life. We can bubble that up and say some more sophisticated things about work, but the first and foremost fact is that there is a fragile, vulnerable, quite a hungry ghost-like body that needs to be fed. That's what in the Upanishads is called the food body, sort of the input, right? And work makes possible input.

Of course, you don't have a family, you know, it certainly spreads out, but it's still the case that you have a child, as you well know, that needs to be fed, right? You have a family that needs to eat and so on and so forth. So work is what makes possible that. On a daily basis, but increasingly as we get into a more complex society on an ongoing basis in the medium term and the long term. So that's the baseline understanding of work that I have. Once we accept that that's the baseline understanding, then once we open our eyes, all kinds of interesting things occur.

There are emails to be written, there are messages to be replied to. There are toys on the ground and they get, there is a mess here and there, trash to be taken out, recycling, compost, dishes to be washed. It really, I don't think one ordinarily conceptualizes things from the moment-by-moment basis in terms of high-order projects. There's pride we can get into, These are very important and these are BS. Nonetheless, your first perception followed by your thought states, here is more work. So I don't know.

I think we've overlooked that very simple fact that as much as I might sit here and want to meditate, and that's a very lovely thing, just before then, my dog toys are on the ground. Just after then, the dishes are to be cleaned up.

[53:48] Paul: Right.

[53:48] Andrew Taggart: So that's the first thing I'm trying to bring out is that very simple fact. The second thing, very briefly, is that I honestly think that people perhaps are only thinking about meaningful work or impactful work or dream jobs. They've really plunked a lot into whatever that category is, and it may— the terms may be updated over time, but that fetishization of great work is what I'm questioning once more, because that's not what it's actually like in your day-to-day experience. Most of it actually is what I was calling a mundane task, a mundiel, a mundiel, it's an of-the-world task. And we use words like ordinary. It's hard to really grasp this, the diurnal, daily, It's hard to find a good word for how pedestrian, how flat-footed these tasks are.

[54:47] Paul: Yeah, work, work is a word that it's so hard. I keep looking for, there's gotta be some language I can find a better word than what we have. But it was interesting. I reread the essay you sent me before spending 3 hours with my daughter this afternoon. And Wow. She does a lot of mundane tasks.

[55:11] Andrew Taggart: Yes. There you are. Sorry. Just begun.

[55:15] Paul: She, we stacked blocks and then we brought books from A to B and then we got food and then we had to go in a store and then we went for a walk and, um, it was so fun too. We're just, we're just at the whims of what, whatever she's called to do. And for the first 2 years of my daughter's life, I, would say my primary work was her and my wife. And what do you think the most common question I got?

[55:46] Andrew Taggart: Well, I don't know. In this day and age, someone would say, is it worth it? Or should you have a child? That's the question I get.

[55:52] Paul: No. When are you going to go back to work?

[55:55] Andrew Taggart: Oh, wow. That's a twist.

[55:58] Paul: Is that really worth it? Especially early on. But yeah, like, oh, are you, can you keep doing this? Are you nervous? Are you gonna start working more? But I had sort of redefined work as sort of the things that needed to be done for the life I'm living.

And it was work and it was so much more satisfying than the, it, it was both harder and more satisfying than the, like, I don't even know what to call it, career work or whatever we call it. But it was just so hard to talk about that because people don't even know this is a sort of possibility.

[56:37] Andrew Taggart: Their concepts are just too narrowly construed. If someone says, when are you going to go back to work? It just reveals a certain error. And that's what I'm suggesting is overlooked. The two points I'm making there were just overlooked when someone inadvertently asked that question. One, work of all sorts, work insofar as it's about the maintenance of life.

Is occurring throughout the course of the day in ways small and large. And second, regardless of the domain in which it's taking place, private life or so-called work life or corporate life or organizational life, it's still a mundane task. That's figuring out—

[57:18] Paul: Exactly. It just has a fancier story that other people like.

[57:22] Andrew Taggart: Some other people. Yeah. Advice. An AI that sounds grander than picking up toys that my daughter was playing with. But in both cases, most of what's going on, I'm suggesting, is not Elon Musk grand. Some things are grand, but most of what most knowledge workers are doing on an everyday basis is extraordinarily common and ordinary.

[57:52] Paul: Right. Literally this.

[57:55] Andrew Taggart: That's what we have to grapple with.

[57:57] Paul: Moving my keys.

[57:58] Andrew Taggart: I'm saying something about the nature of modernity and the human condition more generally when I say that. I'm saying that there's actually a spiritual journey that we're on. That's what I'm implying. And the spiritual journey has to do with something that's very close to the grappling with the ennui of life. Life is actually quite Boring. I don't know if you noticed, I noticed that from a young age, boredom or ennui or tedium or repetitiveness were actually what I had to grapple with and probably not very well at that time.

Work is very tedious. Yeah.

[58:37] Paul: And so this is the second part I highlighted. Most people are refusing this admission. Instead, they pretend that they love work or that they love their work, and then they go one step further and tell others that they love work or that they especially love their work. The problem is that they're not looking closely enough at their actual experiences. I guarantee there are people that would argue and say, no, I really do love my work. And I think I get what you're talking about because I love the feeling of like spending an extended part of my life writing and it feels good.

But when I do notice that in the moment there is a lot of really just boring, tedious, mundane stuff, and that is very hard to articulate. Is that sort of what you're getting at?

[59:36] Andrew Taggart: I, I think that we're just not looking closely enough. This is why I'm obviously very committed, at least in theory, to meditation in a broad, non-formal sense. So the confusion comes from the following mistake that we commonly make. It could be called an abstraction mistake. When someone says, I love the— come now, truly, I love the work that I do. That's an abstraction.

One has to, so to speak, step back and make some kind of summary statement. So far, so good. Yeah. The problem is that that's, that statement is made from the clouds in a manner of speaking. I would invite you to go back to what it was like to be sitting there in front of the keyboard, slow down, and actually experience what you're experiencing. This is what traditions call aversions or dislikes.

That's what I'm speaking about. At that very moment, what I was calling your actual experience, you didn't actually like it. In fact, this is a spiritual struggle because if I may say this, there are lots of things and people that you're not admitting that you actually, on a moment-by-moment basis, dislike. You cannot find love in your heart, the love of all things, until I suggest that you've gone through this muck. Your abstraction is, shall we say, a coping mechanism. That's my argument.

I'm not saying that there are not any cases in which "I love such and such" is true. I'm saying that it's a dodge by and large, and it's brought about through a certain kind of ignorance and a willingness to overlook the fact that you're sitting there in traffic en route to the office in the Bay Area. Do you like that? You're in a meeting that may be about implementing AI into healthcare, and you might have an abstract thought that says this is very impactful, or we are on the verge of a paradigmatic change. That's an abstraction. The actual meeting is dull.

Your actual experience is that I don't like this person. I don't like my boss. And I don't really like being here. This may sound almost trivial, but I'm suggesting that what it's really like to be to lead a good life is firstly to be able to see and to be honest with yourself and say, I don't like this. And then secondly, by the end of the essay, I'm suggesting that there actually is a beautiful, in this case, largely Taoist understanding according to which it's possible for all activities to unfold melodically, or let's just say naturally, and to feel as if you are well and right with the world. So I don't want to, I don't want to mislead.

I'm not saying something cynical here. I'm first starting with the actual evidence. If you want to be honest with me, you have to start with your actual body of evidence. To extract and to say something ethereal and to gesture your hand thus and so and say, I love this, so satisfying, period. Is to be making an error and to be, I'm suggesting, dodging the evidence at hand.

[01:03:15] Paul: Yeah, I think for me it really is when I ask myself the question, would I skip any of the things I'm doing to get the result? Less than 10% of the things I do now I skip. And so When I am writing, for the most part now, I'm sort of like laughing to myself often. It— I find it very delightful. There are challenging parts, but it's like good challenge. I've struggled to like articulate this, but I don't feel suffering in a lot of the like writing and a lot of the other things I'm doing.

Am I missing something here, or is this, is, have you seen this in other people as well?

[01:04:07] Andrew Taggart: There are two possible cases since I don't know you very well. Let's take the charitable case first. The charitable case is that you're basically taking your stand as the witness. I mean that you are this kind of openness. If you prefer a different metaphor, it's like a listening, listening without there being a listener. It's a non-egoic stand.

And whenever that is true, and many of us have experiences of this sort, it doesn't mean that the task itself is easier. Those words actually cease to be applicable.

[01:04:40] Paul: Right.

[01:04:41] Andrew Taggart: They are as they are, to speak somewhat tautologically. The trash could be fuller today than it was yesterday. It just finds itself getting taken out. The writing may flow or may not flow, but the words start to appear on the screen. There are fewer— we can try to say what isn't there. There are fewer judgments.

Oh, this is terrible writing, or I don't know what I'm talking about. These are all ego statements. Or if the statements do occur, they cease to be persuasive. You cease to think that I am that thought that's appearing, in which case it rather takes care of itself. Also. So I'm not suggesting that many of us don't have those kinds of experiences.

Those are the ones that are not flow states. I think that's a mistake. They're rather obvious ways in which we're standing as this open background to which the dog toys and the blocks and the cursor on this— the cursor going up and down the screen, etc., are appearing. We do find an ease, but not at that first order level. I mean, I'm saying it's not the case that the task itself becomes beautiful and wondrous and magical. I'm not saying that.

Rather, I'm saying that we're this open background that's allowing— and see, it sounds very meditational— that's allowing whatever comes to pass to come to pass. And with fewer and fewer ego thoughts. So that's my charitable case. The uncharitable second case is that it takes a long time to have enough acuity of vision to be observant enough to see the ways in which you're suffering. It's, I'm not contradicting myself by saying that it's still possible to stand as this open background, but let me introduce a term that I'm going to mean I'm going to use very specifically the word introspection. I want to define as a thought that arises in a labeling capacity to identify what's happened.

It's a thought. So in the West, we have a lot of interest in introspection. For example, the thought says I'm angry. That's a very helpful provisional thought. Technically, that's called a label. A thought has arisen.

And the thought says, oh, I've been angry all morning. That's an amazing provisional tool, if you will. And most people are missing that step. There are a lot of experiences that are occurring, but are not being introspectively labeled. Oh, I really don't like the pain that's ensuing in my legs right now. That's passed by and then there tends to be a post-fact abstraction.

Have you ever talked to people and you say, how are you doing? They say, I'm doing amazingly well. You look at them and you say, you look careworn. I don't say that, but, or you look careworn. And then, or midway through the conversation, someone's telling you, I've been really struggling for a while with this. The first thing that you said is that you're doing amazing well.

45 minutes later, it's very clear that that was either a cordial statement, or I would suggest it was an abstractive statement. That's something that you want to believe is the case, but is not actually the case. So it'd be a second-order statement. I want to believe that I am doing fine and well, but the first-order condition that becomes clear, for example, through a dialogue is, oh no, I've been struggling mightily. So that, that last example is meant to bring out the problem where there are all these introspective gaps.

[01:08:44] Paul: Yeah, that's helpful.

[01:08:46] Andrew Taggart: So it might be a mix of both. I honestly don't know. You could contemplate that.

[01:08:51] Paul: Yeah, I think it's helping me understand how I orient toward it. I think for me it's a practice. And so I'm not, I'm not like good at working or good at being in a state. I think early on in writing, I found that by setting my life up in a certain way, things flew, like flowed in my life. And so that was actually relatively easy before I had my daughter because I needed very little. To meet my needs and was living pretty simply and really just focused on doing what felt it was coming.

[01:09:35] Andrew Taggart: Right.

[01:09:35] Paul: When I had my daughter and I went back to work, I had less time because I said, okay, I'm going to slot my work into slots and then prioritize my daughter and family. And so I became very regimented on my work and I lost the connection. And it was very frustrating because I had experienced it before over extended time periods. And so for me, one, it was a humbling moment. I still am learning. This is a practice.

And two, it became this, okay, I just need to try different things. And so part of my practice came, became just trying random things. And so I think it's going to be something that's a continued practice, but I do think it's, it's a state you can experience perhaps over a month. And I think once you know that state exists in which orienting your life in which things flow, that not only can expand to other parts of your life, it does in a certain way become unable to ever want to move away from that permanently.

[01:10:50] Andrew Taggart: Let me offer a delightful pushback.

[01:10:53] Paul: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I want to sharpen my thinking around this.

[01:10:56] Andrew Taggart: I can understand what you're saying. So this is a, the common approach would be to distinguish between the state that I'm in and the objective conditions. So the first proposal we will often make is that I should probably as you said, in some form or another, experiment with the objective conditions to see perhaps what's optimal. I don't disagree with that, but there's still something that's really interesting about the paper that I cite, and it states the following: regardless of how many times you rejigger the objective conditions, there's still a question concerning what it would be like to be a Taoist sage for whom the objective conditions do not in any way impair his fundamental way of being. That's what we call happiness. Happiness is not contingent upon or dependent upon any objective conditions whatsoever.

That's what the great Eastern teaching says in many different wisdom traditions.

[01:11:59] Paul: So yeah, I think you're pointing to something that is present. I think I'm probably avoiding this deeper tension of, well, you, I ultimately, I do have to have money. I am not actually free to do what I wish and I am, I feel great doing these things, but I'm probably scared to interrogate this, these deeper assumptions.

[01:12:30] Andrew Taggart: I tried in the essay to point to a couple of things I called felt sense. This is a riff a little bit on this particular modality called focusing by Holland and Genlin. It's very difficult to get people to tune into this particular channel that is south of our ordinary rational approach. And I'm not saying a rational approach is bad, obviously I don't think so, but it's missing something. So sometimes I call this Channel 1. It's as if we're operating on Channel 2, and Channel 2, there is a multinational, multi-global world consisting of knowledge workers, nation-states, vast and complex ideas.

There's a very, loosely speaking, reasonable approach that we take, particularly with regard to our lives. That's missing channel 1. Now, when you go about trying to change the objective conditions of your life, that's not necessarily a problem. I'm not criticizing that experimentation per se, but I'm saying that there's a felt sense that firstly goes in like this: life is hard, or I don't like this. I think the Bible has that right after Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden. Something new emerges, which is this is this painfulness associated with the ordinary activities of life.

That felt sense, life is an ordeal, I think we've all had, but have possibly skated over unbeknownst to ourselves. That's the first thing that has to be, I think, reckoned with. Now, what typically happens is that people act very quickly without realizing that the impetus for the action was that I feel really bad about this experience. So there's a lot of doings that take place in virtue of the missing the introspective moment. I really dislike this. Secondly, there's another felt sense, which is commoner, and you can see more readily.

Iris Murdoch stated that most of us are living in fantasies, and the fantasizing, even if we don't call it that, is very commonplace. There shall come a time when the words will flow like milk and honey, and my daughter will finally be old enough, and at that time she will be slightly more autonomous. And as a result, the work will again flow and the words will come forth and the money will fall from the heavens or will be easy. In other words, because we have a felt sense that life actually is hard, and I would strongly urge someone to push back here, we have the other felt sense, which is that the objective conditions could be jiggered in such a way that life can be easeful.

And I suggest, I don't know if I put that in the essay, that there's actually a third felt sense, which is a deep sense of fear in connection with various and sundry sorts of things like not having enough or being enough. You know, psychology has a very good way of describing this, but the felt sense is that, wow, there is something quite terrifying about the condition in which I find myself, the condition of what it is to be E. I think those are the three commonest ones that we are passing by time and again. And action is action, which is whirling, seems to be papering over the fact that I don't like this, that I'm running toward that, and then I'm fearful of this. I don't like this. Life is hard.

I want it to be easy. It will be easy over here in this way. You could say this is sort of the fantasy of TikTok or Instagram or some such. I have come up with a way, I have come up with a way in which it shall be easy, but really I'm fearful of something. And you get on and on. That's why the wisdom traditions are not saying any of this.

Karma Yoga of the sort that I'm proposing, Yoga of Work, is actually just tracking. I'm inviting you to track all of these things. Why? Because I think that happiness is not involvement with or entwinement in this net. Happiness is actually, so to speak, just beyond it. Happiness is deeply subjective in the Eastern sense.

That is, it's an inward turn. Happiness is not ever going to be hinging upon modifying the conditions of life as if they were knobs on an old radio station over and over again to get this sweet clear sound. That itself is a dream or a fantasy.

[01:17:53] Paul: The one thing that works for me is doing less. And so I wonder if this is a practice to add to those practices, but whenever I try to do more things by tinkering and experimenting, I always just end up— I end up it's almost like, oh, I'm figuring things out. Things are— I'm finding my flow again, but then I'm always getting stuck again. But this earlier this year, I just decided, well, I'm not going to keep trying stuff. I'm going to do less and just basically going through days.

[01:18:35] Andrew Taggart: It's—

[01:18:36] Paul: I don't even know if there— there almost needs to be a way to Yeah, a very Taoist stance to life. I'm just gonna go through my days and that's always when things sort of unknot and un— and start feeling like I'm flowing through life again anyway. So I don't, I'm not even under the illusion that I can do anything about this, but I can do less. I've sort of asked, jokingly asked the question, have you tried doing less on the problem?

[01:19:07] Andrew Taggart: It's a good heuristic. There are also, I keep referencing loosely, wisdom traditions that speak as Aristotle does of the classical virtue of prudence or temperance. The translations aren't great at the present time because prudence seems as though it's an economic concept and temperance makes it seem as if we're not drinking, you know, after 1921 or something like this. But he didn't mean either of those things. He said that there was basically a proper assessment of what we might in our contemporary language call enough. That is a golden mean between too much and too little.

And one has to get a knack, as he says, for it. Furthermore, this is such an amazing virtue. And if he did think of it as being a virtue in that A, if you have a certain tendency in the wrong direction, he would suggest that you counter it in the other way to get closer to virtue. For example, a man who is headstrong would do well to learn to pull on the brake, whereas another man who is timid would do well to push forward some. Both are counteracting their mistaken erroneous tendencies in order to try to slowly hit upon the sweet knee between the excess and the defect. In this day and age, because the people you're speaking with tend to be in the realm of excess, if one is good, 10 is better, so to speak, then the invitation is to pull the brakes up in order to try to slowly find out what it means to be temperate.

That's the first part. The second part of his analysis is that There's a certain experiential understanding such that I'm not tempted in one direction or the other. For there to be enough, properly speaking, is to be at rest or at peace. This is different from the one who, the man who is incontinent, I'm sorry, continent. The continent man is the one who finds the mean, but is pulled You might say in Christian language, he feels tempted. I only want this much, but I, this is the right amount, but I want more or I want less.

So temperance is a very nice virtue to cultivate. I would then level up and say, once again, with regard to the Easterner study, that's also not sufficient because what I think is really going on at a deeper level is that one is withdrawing oneself, what I've been so far terming the objective conditions. And this is just a means by which one can draw the extrication of oneself with the activity. Said differently, when I believe I am the doer or I am the agent, then something magical happens. That is, I decouple on the content of that activity. Dream.

That's the best analogy to use in this context. When I feel I am the human agent who is fundamentally tasked with controlling or running my life, other experiences, actions, and activities are colored just as a dream is colored by the sequence that occurs when one is a dream character. Therefore, what the Eastern teaching says so great, what the particularly Advaita Vedanta, is that that virtue of temperance may be an expedient, a tool, you might say, used in order to reveal that you are actually outside of all those objective conditions, that is the excess of activity, the defect of activity, and the golden mean between the two. You're beyond all of them. That's really the crux. My argument in this essay, which is going to become a short book, is that you want to start to use work as an opportunity essentially to know thyself.

And you know thyself really by extricating thyself, oneself, from all the activities that are occurring.

[01:23:31] Paul: Yeah, work, I've sort of come to see work in the same stance as is the same way as it's sort of a— it's a beautiful journey if you allow it, right? And so it easily gets flipped up with this, oh, work is personal growth, right? But instead, you sort of— you don't want to take the two roads. You want to like turn around and take the more expansive journey with work.

[01:24:02] Andrew Taggart: For me, work is prompt to turn— let's just put it more succinctly— work is a prompt to turn inward, regardless of the content of working, because there are all these different ways in which error messages are showing up over and over again, at least for a time. What you discover when you turn inward is that there is, to riff on The Pathless Path, a placeless place There's a placeless place within that is totally unaffected by shootings in Minneapolis. I don't mean that there isn't compassion felt, or geopolitical situations in the Ukraine. I don't mean that there isn't compassion felt. I don't mean that there isn't compassion felt for flood victims, essentially for all the sorts of things that occur in the daily news. I'm not denying that, nor would I.

In fact, there's more compassion because of the disinterestedness, the non-personalness, the capacity to open oneself more and more to the suffering of others, as all these wisdom traditions say. In this placeless place though, you're no longer operating under the misconception that you're like a driver who's always in control. Of what's occurring. And you also don't feel as though you're a passive passenger who's sitting in the backseat of the car. You no longer really feel that either is the case. I know this is hard to describe, but it feels more like the car is just running.

If you prefer, it is just running. Case 1, it runs smoothly. That's very nice. Case 2, it doesn't run smooth. That's also nice. Case 3, it gets into an accident.

Actually, that's just fine too. That may sound somewhat unbelievable, but it basically— the key to this understanding of the yoga of work is that work is going to reveal that you are actually beyond all action. And as a result, nothing about your happiness hinges upon any of the notions that we had been fed: success, productivity, well-being, discipline, lack of discipline, and so forth. Work is used to go beyond work, but not for work to stop.

[01:26:39] Paul: Yeah, I think we talked about this in the past too, about, I think, trying to escape work. Is sort of a delusion. It's sort of like the, it can be a first step, I think, to eventually realizing work is not something to be escaped or can be escaped, but definitely. Yeah.

[01:26:58] Andrew Taggart: It's, there's, there's no escape, but there is freedom.

[01:27:05] Paul: Yeah. I think that's beautiful. I think once I stopped trying to escape. Yeah. I mean, Just, it's everything after that. You're just part of it all.

[01:27:16] Andrew Taggart: Yes.

[01:27:16] Paul: I wanted to read this final passage before we start to wrap up. With fresh eyes, you can then look at work in a totally different way, not in the first place as that arena in which you prove yourself and thus achieve success, but instead as a spiritual stage upon which your resistances and your desires being brought before you are slowly worked out. In brief, the yoga of work is just the working out of our stuff.

[01:27:47] Andrew Taggart: Love that.

[01:27:48] Paul: So maybe a little bit about the plans of, uh, publishing this. Uh, I know we've talked a little bit about happy to help in any way, but yeah, what are, what are you feeling called to do with, uh, this this kind of writing you're doing now?

[01:28:05] Andrew Taggart: Well, there's a broader project my wife and I are starting, an institute that might go beyond the scope of this conversation. Maybe another one would be one in which we take that up. I'm saying this is possibly the first book, a short one, a little book in an inner purification series. So maybe I can say something about that. Well, I think that there's a certain, there's a certain zone of life that I'm not sure is properly understood or conceptualized. So let's say there's something called self-realization or spiritual awakening or total liberation.

Buddhists and Hindus and so forth, and Taoists in their own way try to describe what this fundamentally different condition is. So let's put that on the north side in our map. Then I think that there are a fair number of modalities in the West that would be considered to be psychological or therapeutic. And I'd like to put that on the south side. So those will have various conceptions of healing. Those are largely healing metaphors that are being employed.

And therefore they assume that there's some kind of hurt or trauma or wound that through these particular modalities are going to be healed. There's a mid section between the south side and the north side. And that's where a number of these traditions have spoken about what variously is called polishing the mirror. There's a book some years ago by Rob Nosse called Polishing the Mirror. He's just drawing from, for example, Zen talks about ear polishing, or Christian mystics speak about purgation, which sounds a little out of order in our time. Xuanzi, the great Taoist philosopher, speaks of emptying the mind cup.

And then there's another word in Tantra called antvashuddhi, which means the elemental purification. India has tended to use purification metaphor throughout its very long spiritual and religious history. So what's that? Loosely speaking, or broadly speaking, inner purification pertains to what my wife and I are calling the attenuation of ego tendencies. The attenuation of ego identities. Because the great insight that's made in these Eastern traditions is that suffering is only possible when there is at least an ego.

So if you want to go to the root of the suffering, you don't keep managing the suffering symptom, so to speak. It's the fact of suffering on a certain occasion, the fact that there's anger arising, etc. You have to begin to look at the root, which is called ego or ego-self or ego-tendency or jiva. It goes by many names, but that's what you start to attenuate, which means to wither away or dissolve. It's a slow, gradual, very kindly process whereby, in virtue of the ego dissolving, suffering dissolves. That should be your grasp.

If all's going well, and it's not a linear graph, as the ego dissolves, ego forms dissolve, so the sense that there's something off or dis-ease-ful starts to go. That's where this book, Chop Wood, Carry Water, comes in on the yoga of work. In this case, as we've said at the very beginning of the conversation, I find it interesting and, to use a term we've both been using, humbling, to reckon with the fact that most modern people, possibly you could say since the advent of the Renaissance, possibly since the Protestant Reformation, have adopted a new view about what a human being or man is. Man is a practical animal. Chiefly involved in being an agent, an autonomous agent who is in one way or another in control of his or her life and whose dominant domain is activity in general and work in particular. That's the idea.

Man is a practical or practicing or active creature. How do we work with that if we're interested in inner purification, meaning dissolving the kinds of burdens, overwhelms, and dissatisfactions that ordinary modern people are facing? It's at this point that this particular book says we can do the work I'm even borrowing the language that I wouldn't have used in the past of inner purification by simply allowing for something like introspection and observation to take hold in the field of work, rather than trying to continue to hammer away at being successful, proving oneself, proving oneself, proving oneself as an actor.

The suggestion or invitation is that you slowly extricate yourself from that conception through seeing not only that there's suffering, but also through seeing that there is basically an ego center on whose behalf this kind of suffering in the field of work is taking place. As you're beginning to see that this ego center, ultimately speaking, doesn't exist— that's what Buddhists say— there's a new kind of peace that comes, as Jesus says, a peace that surpasses all understanding. Therefore, the end of the essay that you're reading actually utilizes that Zen adage: chop. Before enlightenment, chop would carry water. After enlightenment, chop would carry water. It's a deceptively beautiful and simple epitaph or epigram, because it suggests that the field of work, the objective conditions as of the calling of today, might not change that much.

When we speak about the transformation of a life, we often imagine that someone, the form went from something ugly to something beautiful, something unfit to something fit, something imperfect to something flawless. But in this case, this, the proposal is that there's probably still going to be various kinds of chopping wood and various kinds of carrying water. But what is it like for someone who starts to experience inner purification? I'm okay with all of it. Finally, I've come to rest with the modern world, and I can say to myself, whatever happens, What Ramana Maharshi: let it happen. Whatever is not happening, let it not happen.

I can say that and feel that it is true. That's what it's like after in a purification, for there to be the mere chopping of wood and the mere carrying of water. The sweetness comes from my stand, not from what's occurring.

[01:35:50] Paul: Before enlightenment, send emails, change diapers. After enlightenment, send emails, change diapers.

[01:35:57] Andrew Taggart: Yep. That's right. In one case, you're pulling your hair out though. In the other case, you're not. Something has changed within. There's a secret.

[01:36:08] Paul: That's beautiful. I'm glad you're pointing to these things and guiding people.

[01:36:15] Andrew Taggart: Thank you very much. This is a very enjoyable conversation to do.

[01:36:19] Paul: Where, anywhere you wanna point people? Digitally.

[01:36:22] Andrew Taggart: Digitally. I see. My website remains andrewtaggart.com and I, of course, as everyone else got dogs during the pandemic and started a Substack during the pandemic, in which case my Substack, not my dogs, is Pathways to the DAO.

[01:36:39] Paul: Nice. You didn't, I didn't end up with a dog, but I do have a Substack.

[01:36:44] Andrew Taggart: There you go.

[01:36:45] Paul: Beautiful. Well, I love our conversations. I look forward to future ones and really appreciate you engaging in conversation with me today. You're very welcome.

[01:36:55] Andrew Taggart: Thank you very much for inviting me.