02/15/2024
Mindfulness in a Distracted World with Nate Klemp
A conversation with Nate Klemp, a philosopher, writer, and founding partner at Mindfulness Magazine, on practicing mindfulness in our fast-paced, technology-dependent world. He is also co-author of the New York Times bestseller “Start Here.” Songs in this episode: “Nausicaa” by Glass Wave and “Dayvan Cowboy” by Boards of Canada.
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[MUSIC]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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[MUSIC]
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Our guest today is Nate Klem, co-author of the New York Times Best Selling Book Start Here.
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He joins me to discuss a topic I've broached often on this show.
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Namely, how to take one's distance from a hyperconnected world and
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find one's way back to that inner place of reflective silence within the self.
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[MUSIC]
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He addresses this topic in his brand new book called Open Living with an expansive mind in a distracted world.
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But before I welcome Nate Klem to entitled opinions,
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let's hear from one of this radio programs, venerable trustees.
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I mean Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a poem called Alone,
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which opens with the following verses.
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From childhood's hour I have not been, as others were,
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I have not seen as others saw.
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I could not bring my passions from a common spring.
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From the same source I have not taken my sorrow.
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I could not awaken my heart to joy at the same tone and all I loved, I loved alone.
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From this uncommon spring deep within the self, everything essential.
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Everything personal, as well as interpersonal, comes forth into the world we share in common.
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Without the uncommon differences that separate one person from another,
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the world that comes between men, as Hannah Arand called it,
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would not have plurality as one of its basic constituents.
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If the world is defined by plurality, it's because each one of us, and each one of the citizens,
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in our polities, has an idiosyncratic first person singular.
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I say idiosyncratic because a subterranean place of ecstatic interiority hides in every one of us,
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whether we're aware of it or not.
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That place remains the self's native homeland,
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even though most of us abandon or flee from it,
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for reasons that remain mysterious.
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DH Lawrence puts it memorably in a passage from his work Phoenix, like quote.
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In the very darkest continent of the body, there is a God.
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And from him, issue the first dark rays of our feeling,
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wordless and utterly previous to words.
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The innermost rays, the first messengers,
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the primeval honorable beasts of our being,
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whose voice echoes wordless and forever wordless down the darkest avenues of the soul,
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but full of potent speech, our own inner meaning.
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The God who haunts this dark continent is not one of the traditional divinities,
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like Yahweh, Zeus, or Jesus.
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Give us God's before these Lawrence declares.
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The before God, see, as in mind, are utterly previous to words.
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There are the first messengers, whose messages reach you,
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only when the self is alone enough to bring its full attention to bear
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on that almost inaudible voice, which Lawrence says,
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is wordless but full of potent speech.
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In his poem, thought Lawrence evokes the kind of thinking that allows those innermost rays to shine.
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I've quoted these verses before on entitled opinions.
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Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness.
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Thought is a man in his wholeness, holy attending.
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My guest and I share the opinion that our digital age has declared all out war
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on the dark continent of inwardness and attention,
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on the self in his wholeness, holy attending.
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The devices that so enthrall us and that have compressed the world into a miniature screen
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are hostile to what Plato called the silent dialogue I have with myself inside my own head.
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That silent dialogue is what thought is all about.
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Let's find out if my guest today agrees with that Nate Clamp, welcome to the program.
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Robert, thank you so much for having me.
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I have to say that was probably the most beautiful warm up to a podcast.
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I've heard instead of starting with an ad for
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Target or Costco, starting with that girl and Poe on our rent,
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I think we need more of that.
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So thank you.
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I feel like I just dropped into a totally different
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plane of thought and discourse.
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Well, that's what entitled opinions aims to be.
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First thing, we don't have any sponsors, so we're not beholden to anyone.
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We don't make any money. We don't ask for any money.
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We're down in what I often call the catacombs of Pazy DSU,
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where we practice this persecuted religion of thinking.
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There you go.
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Nate, I mentioned your new book.
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It's titled open living with an expansive mind in a distracted world.
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And that book has two parts.
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In the first part, you describe what a closed mind is
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and how a closed mind is entangled with,
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I'll call it self-exile, screen addiction, and political polarization.
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In the second part, you discuss how to move from a closed to an open or expansive mind.
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And here you touch on various kinds of openings, different kinds of openings.
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The psychedelic opening, for example, is you call it opening to the enemy,
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open meditation and street opening to mention a few rubrics of part two.
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So let's start with the closed mind.
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Bear with me here a moment. By your own admission, you were once a screen addict yourself
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before you made a concerted effort to overcome that addiction.
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You mentioned that at one point, you imagined your late grandmother, Hilda,
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who grew up on a rural farm in North Carolina,
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shadowing you throughout the day.
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And you write, I quote you, she would be so confused, she would surely wonder,
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why aren't you going outside?
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Why aren't you talking to other people?
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Why do you keep staring into that screen?
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Hilda, of course, would be right. We're dealing here, which, well,
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I think it's a major pathology of the 21st century.
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You cite some statistics that come from global newswire that I'd like to share with our audience
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from the beginning of your book, which I found rather alarming.
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I'm going to read here about screen addiction.
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11 hours, that's the amount of time Nielsen found that the average American adult spends on
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electronic devices each day.
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150 daily phone pickups. That was the 2013 figure reported by venture firm,
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Kleiner Perkins. That is, until a more recent study of smartphone usage found that the average
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users taps, types, swipes or clicks their device 2,600 times a day.
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96%. That's the percentage of people who check their device within an hour of waking,
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according to a study conducted by Deloitte Consulting.
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They found that 61% of people check their device within five minutes of waking.
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"Half of all teenagers, this is how many adolescents openly describe themselves as having a
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significant addiction to their phone when finally 10%. That's the percentage of American adults who
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admit to having used their smartphone while showering or having sex. This is truly insane."
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So, question. Why are so many of us addicted to our screens and how difficult is it from your
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experience to recover from this fixation?
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Well, I love that you cited all those statistics because I think it presents a context here
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where sometimes we can argue, "Well, this isn't such a big deal. Everybody looks at their phone.
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What's wrong with that?" But I think those statistics are helpful in telling us,
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"No, there's something going on here that we need to pay attention to."
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And you mentioned my own screen addiction. In a way, it was surprising for me because
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I felt like on some level I had been training my mind for the last 25 or so years
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to have focus, to not fall into these sorts of cravings. And that training in some way started
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at Stanford in the late 90s when I got into philosophy and then became a philosophy professor
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and then really interested in practices like meditation and yoga where the whole purpose
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is to cultivate the skill of focused attention and learn how to use one's own mind more
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skillfully. So, here I was waking up every day, meditating, and yet still captured by these cravings.
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In some ways, what led me to take this question really seriously around,
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this might just be the problem of our time. And I think it's the problem of our time,
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both because it's ubiquitous and because it's so invisible. It's happening beneath the radar of
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awareness in such a way where we can't even see that it's going on for the most part.
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So, in terms of my own screen addiction, there's all these hacks out there. I've used many of those,
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right? Like redesign your environment, kick your phones out of your bedroom. There's even
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self-binding techniques where you can lock your phone in a safe that doesn't open until it's
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like two hours or three hours, whatever you specify. But one of the more interesting tactics I use,
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that was actually quite interesting and helped me understand the root of the addiction.
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It came from the tradition of tantric Buddhism where they have what's often called feast practice.
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And it's a practice where instead of practicing restraint or aestheticism, you're practicing
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indulgence, conscious indulgence. So, you know, in the traditions, it's often used with sex and
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decadent eating and drinking. But I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to use this with screens?
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And so, I spent three days all day, every day just gorging on digital outrage and Instagram and news,
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and just all the things that I normally see as like my favorite mind snacks. And what was really
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interesting about that is in a way, it actually worked because after those three days,
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I remember I woke up and I had the thought, this is when I would usually grab my phone,
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and the desire just totally fell flat. And what I realized in that moment is that
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at least for most of us, I think the root of this addiction is an addiction to novelty,
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that we pick up our device because it offers what technologists call a variable reward, that there's
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something new that we're going to see in our texts or our email or a new news feed or a new
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social media feed and by going all the way with my phone for such a long period of time,
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in a way I had annihilated its superpower, its superpower of novelty.
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Well, that is only part of the journey that you undertook, right?
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That's true. Yes. It wasn't enough just to gorg and feel a sense of satiation.
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It was necessary then to take the next step, which is disconnection and finding yourself
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essentially alone in a room where instead of staring at a screen,
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one is staring at a void if you want to put it away. Here, I was quite interested in the
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experiment that you referred to. I don't remember who it is. Timothy Wilson from University of
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Virginia. Yeah. Can you say a word about that experiment? Because I found that extremely enlightening
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revelatory or insightful is the right word, I guess. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because
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I think of screens as creating a behavioral addiction. So it's different from other forms of
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addiction, substance abuse addiction, things like that, but similar to something like gambling or
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shopping addiction. It's happening at the level of behavior. And one of the best ways to understand
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the reason for a behavioral addiction like that is that often that behavior is coming out of a
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desire to escape from some sort of unresolved emotional experience, difficult emotions, scary
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thoughts, traumas that we might have experienced. And so there's this subtle aversion that I think
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many of us have to our own mind to just sitting there in silence with our own mind. And that's
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what Timothy Wilson's team did in an experiment is they essentially revealed the ways in which
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for many of us, we live with this constant aversion to our own thinking. And so what they did is
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they put people in a room for 15 minutes, and they called it the 15 minute thinking period,
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people had to put away all their belongings, including their phone, so they didn't have their
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phone with them. And at first, they just had them go into this room and 50% of people said, wow,
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that was really unpleasant. You know, even though in our busy chaotic lives, like 15 minutes,
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just to sit there and not have to do anything, that sounds fantastic. Like who wouldn't want that?
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But then they shifted the experiment. And here's where I think it gets really interesting.
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They had people go in for 15 minutes again with nothing. Just do your 15 minute thinking period.
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But this time they gave them a choice. You can either sit there with your thoughts, or they attached
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two electrodes to their ankle and train them on how to self administer a high voltage shock to
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themselves. So another question became, would people just sort of sit there, relax with their thoughts,
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or would that be so aversive that they'd rather torture themselves using a high voltage shock?
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And it turned out 27% of women shocked themselves, 67% of men shocked themselves. And there was one
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guy, apparently, who shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. And the conclusion of this,
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which I think is really fascinating, is that there is something about idle time that,
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especially now that we're so conditioned with these phones and all the distractions we're
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surrounded by constantly, that's so aversive to us. We'd rather torture ourselves
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than just be there with our own minds. And the way that you talked about with Plato,
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right, like sitting in the silence of our own mind and allowing that deeper form of thought to
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arise. That is in a way, an aversion of the modern mind.
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Well, you've studied philosophy and it becomes a philosophical question, which is, what are the
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deeper sources of this aversion? And I couldn't help thinking of the 17th century French philosopher,
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we want to call blaze Pascal, a philosopher, but Pascal famous for his ponces or his thoughts,
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has very interesting things to say about the human need for diversion. Here, now we're talking
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about something more universal than our own distracted age in our present moment in history,
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because according to Pascal, I'll quote a few of his ponces, starting with this one, for example,
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nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest without passions, without business,
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without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency,
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his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his
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heart, weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, fixation, despair. And it's always like,
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you would rather have a shock, no, even a hundred times, yeah. And then it goes on to
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say I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact that they
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cannot stay quietly in their own room. A man who has enough to live on if he knew how to stay with
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pleasure at home would not leave to go to sea or beseech a town, a commission in the army would
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not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town, and men
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only seek conversation to enter in games because they cannot remain at peace at home.
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So there is here a more existential suggestion that when we are left without any diversion,
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we start thinking of the emptiness of our own condition and inevitably towards our mortality
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and death, and that therefore this is what existentialists would call the flight from this sort of
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genuine or authentic awareness of one's own abandonment by being. Anyway, I don't want to get too
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heavy on the existentialist thing, but it seems to me that social media and other forms of screen
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addiction would not have nearly the amount of crushing success that it has in our time,
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if it were not actually feeding off of or profiting from this dread or what Kiphegard called
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the anxiety that attends the human condition in general.
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I think you're right, and I love the Pascal and the Kiphegard.
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I think what you're saying is exactly true that there is this deep existential dread
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that when we really sink down to the recesses of our mind, we encounter, and this is why
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if you've ever done like a silent meditation retreat for a week or 10 days,
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I love those and a weird masochistic way, but this is one of the main things that
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one experiences is that for a couple of days it feels great to be off the grid.
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It's amazing not to have emails you have to worry about and distraction.
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And then all of a sudden the mind just starts to reveal all of this content that you might not
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have thought of for years, traumatic memories, really hard emotions.
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I think that's exactly right that it is maybe baked into human nature
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that being with our own mind is counter habitual.
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It's not what we're wired to do, but there's that existential dread baked into it.
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And yet I also think that what's going on or what has happened over the last 15 or so years
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since the advent of the smartphone in 2007 is that we now have a way of exiting from those encounters
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with our own mind so quickly, so reliably, so constantly that it's almost as though we're closing
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down on steroids. You know, we've always been doing it and in the book I quote, "Tokeville,"
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one of my other favorite French philosophers who talks about how Americans are turning inward
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and seeking pleasure and there's this closing happening which I think is very similar to what we're
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experiencing today, but I guess the tools we have now are just so much more powerful and
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carefully meticulously designed by the world's leading technologists and artificial intelligence
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algorithms specifically so that they can exploit these weaknesses of our brain.
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So that's what I think is so fascinating about our current times that we're doing with
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age-old existential content, but the tools that are being used to draw us into these worlds of
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Greenland are just so much more sophisticated than anything Pascal or Tokeville could even conceive.
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Exactly. And your experience and maybe you could tell us a little bit about the sort of discipline
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that is required in order to not just disconnect from the Borg Collective as I would call it where
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we're always plugged into the Beehive Collective and you're always hearing all the
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collective's voice always in your head, so you're never allowed to hear your own thoughts.
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So disconnecting from the Collective is one thing, but then it takes I gather from what you write about
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your own personal experience, a rather diligent discipline sort of commitment to go from the
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close mind to an open expansive mind. It's not just a question of curing yourself from an
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addiction, it's about cultivating some new possibilities on the other side of the addiction.
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I think that's right. It reminds me of this idea that freedom often requires some form of constraint.
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I remember we're so talking about this and this is back in my political philosophy,
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Professor Days, but I think that's true here as well, that if we just give ourselves total freedom
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to binge on our screens and addictive technologies and political outrage and all these kind of quick
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dopamine hits that are available to us. In one sense we're free, but the value of that freedom feels
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pretty limited. It actually feels like we're closing off a lot of possibilities that might be
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available to us. So if we want to experience an alternative to that Beehive mind that you're
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describing, and by the way, I think the distinction you were making in the opening was so important
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and beautiful. I was interpreting it as a distinction between our deepest authentic layer of thought
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or something like intuition and what's usually happening, which I would call mind wandering. That's
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the technical term in psychology of just like this super fast paced random thoughts about stuff
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| 00:23:29.320 |
you got to do or like something you saw on social media or whatever, that there is that
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essential distinction between those two and to spend more time in that more authentic zone of intuition,
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sometimes I think we do have to create some constraints. Anna Lemke, one of your colleagues at
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Stanford, she wrote a book called Dopamine Nation, which I thought was really interesting where
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she argues that this self binding approach is really one of the keys to overcoming any form of
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addiction, including an addiction to screens. So she actually goes so far as to say,
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go without whatever it is that causes your craving for a month and then reevaluate your relationship
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with that thing. So I think those kinds of things are really powerful and there's a lot of ways
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we can do it. Meditation is a practice we can use for that simply binding ourselves such that
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we don't have access to this kind of content or devices is a powerful way to do it. But I think
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you're right that it does require discipline to create that freedom. So in part two, you have these
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rubrics for sections. You talk about psychedelic opening, happy land opening to the enemy, open
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meditation street opening, and you actually underwent a number of behavioral changes. So I mean,
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just opening to the enemy, you join, you modify your arm, you went to fire ranges, you talk to
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people from the NR, did you join the NRA or? No, so yeah, yeah. So just to be clear, I did not buy a
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firearm. And the context here is I live in Boulder, a very liberal enclave. I'm a proponent of gun
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control. I go in this terrifying me. So I didn't buy a firearm, but what I did do is I underwent a
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national rifle association training and I got my concealed carry permit in the state of Colorado.
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So it was an attempt for me to really explore in a first-hand experiential way. What is it
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like to really open to the other side? So I ended up going to rural Colorado and doing this
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| 00:25:33.960 |
this sort of full immersion experience in gun culture and some pretty far out politics.
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| 00:25:40.760 |
But in the end, it was a really valuable experience. I mean, I think my main takeaway was that
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| 00:25:47.560 |
there is no enemy here. I mean, these, these people were just like me in so many ways. I could see
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| 00:25:53.160 |
the humanity behind all of it. And yeah, we disagree, but there's something deeper there that connects us.
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| 00:25:58.520 |
Yeah, we have so much more in common with any fellow human being than we have in terms of differences.
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And the enemy is more often than not or only rarely is the devil. The devil that we make the
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| 00:26:12.120 |
enemy in our own imaginations, no demonization or that. So you opened yourself in that regard. You
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| 00:26:19.160 |
also had not done drugs and that you also opened your mind to psychedelic experiences, right?
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Yeah, that was a really interesting thing. I wasn't planning to do that. That was not at all part of
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| 00:26:33.400 |
the original project as I laid this out. But I realized that there were so many amazing breakthroughs
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| 00:26:41.000 |
in the field of psychedelic science happening that it would be very difficult to write or explore
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| 00:26:47.560 |
this idea of opening without encountering this for myself. And just one quick anecdote from that.
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| 00:26:55.000 |
So what I experienced was what I would call psychedelic-assisted therapy. I had a therapist,
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| 00:27:02.440 |
I had a very extensive psychological evaluation before doing any of this. So this was very
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| 00:27:07.480 |
structured, very purposeful, very controlled. It wasn't just me in the backyard, like doing
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| 00:27:12.920 |
a much of LSD or something. And what I experienced that was quite amazing is I had had this
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| 00:27:19.000 |
fear of flying for about 20 years. And during one of these psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions
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| 00:27:25.080 |
on the compound ketamine with my therapist right next to me, I had this experience of actually
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| 00:27:30.440 |
being on a flight. And for the first time in 20 years, it was totally calm and there's nowhere
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| 00:27:36.520 |
I'd rather be. And then I actually watched myself die in a commercial plane crash. It was like
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| 00:27:43.400 |
the plane was going down and I saw the plane explode into a big fireball. And I watched myself
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| 00:27:49.160 |
incinerated. It was like one of the more beautiful things I had ever seen.
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| 00:27:53.560 |
Was that an out of body experience? Well, it was kind of just like this
|
| 00:27:56.920 |
total inversion of perspective, I guess is how I would describe it. And what was most amazing
|
| 00:28:02.520 |
about it is that it's not that my fear of flying has totally disappeared, but it has changed
|
| 00:28:08.600 |
in remarkable ways. I used to have dreams like this. Those dreams have gone away. When I'm on a flight
|
| 00:28:14.920 |
now and I feel some anxiety, I immediately see myself on this, I call it the ketamine express,
|
| 00:28:20.680 |
this sort of magical plane. And so what I realized is that to your point about existentialism
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| 00:28:26.920 |
earlier, I think for some of us who have experienced trauma in the past, there are corners of the
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| 00:28:31.960 |
mind that are almost impossible to encounter in our ordinary state of consciousness. And that
|
| 00:28:38.760 |
this new emerging practice of psychedelic assisted therapy, it gives us a way of opening to some of
|
| 00:28:45.560 |
these darkest corners of the mind and completely transforming our relationship to those places.
|
| 00:28:52.120 |
And so that I think is the promise of all this. And obviously there's a lot of dangers. There's a
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| 00:28:56.360 |
lot of risks. There's a lot we need to learn about the science of it. But I think it's a really
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| 00:29:01.000 |
powerful possibility. Yeah. Well, how about meditation? That is something that I'm curious about because
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| 00:29:11.480 |
I've never been particularly seduced by the idea of anjomy to some sort of discipline meditative
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| 00:29:20.440 |
practice. But many of my friends do meditate and they seem to have been enriched immeasurably
|
| 00:29:30.680 |
through it. And it philosophically, it seems to me the perfect sort of recipe for any kind of same
|
| 00:29:38.680 |
existence. But I don't know what it is in me that resists it. Maybe it's just my western,
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| 00:29:44.600 |
logo-centric sort of disposition where I feel like I should always be in some kind of
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| 00:29:49.960 |
dialogical relation to others, whether it's in actual conversation as we do one in title opinions
|
| 00:29:56.680 |
as we're doing right now where there's a kind of exchange of ideas or whether it's in
|
| 00:30:04.120 |
conversation with the dead in terms of reading books that come to us from the past.
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| 00:30:11.480 |
But can you say something about your incorporation of meditation into this project of going from
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| 00:30:19.320 |
a close to an open mind? Yeah. And it's interesting. I hear that perspective a lot about meditation.
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| 00:30:27.560 |
And it's certainly not something that's for everyone. So I'm not one of those people who says,
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| 00:30:31.640 |
"Oh, I've reached meditate." I think of meditation at its best as almost being like a conversation
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| 00:30:39.080 |
with the present moment that what we're cultivating in our mind is the ability to
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| 00:30:45.000 |
stay with something that's occurring in present time. So sometimes when you're meditating,
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| 00:30:50.520 |
you'll concentrate on the sensations of breath. Breath is always happening now, right? It's
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| 00:30:55.320 |
never happening yesterday. So that's one way of doing it. In the book though, and just in my own
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| 00:31:01.720 |
experience, I've been exploring sort of two sides of meditation. One is what I would think of as a
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| 00:31:08.840 |
more formal practice where you're sitting down for 30 minutes or 10 minutes or 20 minutes
|
| 00:31:14.600 |
or going to retreat and you're trying to block out distraction. I think that's really powerful.
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| 00:31:20.520 |
That's something I do. But I also think that can be a barrier for certain people,
|
| 00:31:25.560 |
maybe you fall in this camp. And so there's this other practice that I've come to call
|
| 00:31:31.720 |
street meditation or street opening, which in some ways is like the real practice. And I think
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| 00:31:36.920 |
the more exciting practice. And that's just the idea of when you're standing in line at the grocery
|
| 00:31:42.520 |
store or actually just earlier this week, we were driving down from the mountains, we were skiing
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| 00:31:49.160 |
here in Colorado. We got caught in like a four hour traffic jam, you know, just sitting there and I
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| 00:31:54.440 |
realized I could sit here in agony or I could meditate. And so the idea is like, can you bring this
|
| 00:32:02.120 |
practice of just really turning toward whatever it is that's happening in the present moment,
|
| 00:32:07.800 |
the sounds, the sights, the sensations, your breath and see if you can do that,
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| 00:32:13.640 |
even in the kind of crazy, weird circumstances of modern life, you know, at Costco,
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| 00:32:19.480 |
when you're at the airport standing in the long security line or whatever it is.
|
| 00:32:24.200 |
So I think for people who are like turned off by the formal practice, that can be a better on ramp.
|
| 00:32:31.080 |
And again, the goal I think is really to have that conversation with wow, what's actually happening
|
| 00:32:35.560 |
in present time? If I get out of this time traveling mental space and just into like,
|
| 00:32:40.280 |
what's happening here now?
|
| 00:32:42.280 |
So you would describe it not as a certain transcend of flight from reality, but actually an
|
| 00:32:49.880 |
altered sort of encounter with the real. It's almost yeah, an encounter with the pre-conceptual
|
| 00:32:55.720 |
nature of each moment, whereas a lot of thought for me is very conceptual and it's very story-based.
|
| 00:33:02.680 |
It's almost like what's happening below the story. And sometimes for me, that's a really
|
| 00:33:08.840 |
liberating place to be because the stories can be unnerving and distracting and terrifying at
|
| 00:33:16.040 |
times.
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| 00:33:16.440 |
Yeah. That's very interesting because you obviously undertook very deliberate way this sort of
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| 00:33:24.200 |
expansion and I take it from your book that not only was it worth it, but it's something that you
|
| 00:33:29.800 |
feel strongly enough to have written a whole book which invites your reader to
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| 00:33:36.200 |
actually not just follow your example. That wouldn't be the right way of putting it, but
|
| 00:33:43.480 |
seriously considering a very substantial alteration of mind in our own
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| 00:33:52.040 |
distracted world as you put it.
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| 00:33:53.560 |
Yeah. I mean, I think of this as something that our world could really use in the sense that
|
| 00:34:01.960 |
it just feels like life is moving faster, politics are becoming increasingly divisive,
|
| 00:34:10.040 |
distractions are becoming more powerful, they have more of a hold on us, and that if we're going
|
| 00:34:17.400 |
to survive in this increasingly uncertain, strange time, that openness might be one of the key
|
| 00:34:26.040 |
virtues that enable us to survive and even thrive in these times where everything seems
|
| 00:34:32.360 |
so just sort of radically contingent and wild and chaotic.
|
| 00:34:37.880 |
Yeah. I have one more issue that I'd like to raise with you, which is the role of nature,
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| 00:34:43.000 |
because what I find oppressive about screen addiction, I mean, I'm not a screen addict myself,
|
| 00:34:49.400 |
but I do spend a lot of time, I have to spend a lot of time on screen because I, you know,
|
| 00:34:55.240 |
writing is something that takes place on the screen now, communication emails and so forth.
|
| 00:35:00.120 |
But what I find so impoverished about this screen is the other of the screen for me is the
|
| 00:35:06.600 |
natural world is nature itself and nature is where I find that the most significant, deep thinking
|
| 00:35:15.800 |
takes place, at least for me, maybe because I have a particular sort of bond with the natural
|
| 00:35:24.040 |
world that I've had since I was kid or for other reasons, but do you think that nature is an
|
| 00:35:32.440 |
essential ingredient to the expansion of the mind? You know, as you're asking me that, I had this thought,
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| 00:35:40.040 |
that might have been a miss for me. I should have, should have emphasized nature a little bit more,
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| 00:35:46.040 |
because you were describing that. I was thinking about this essay, Thoreau wrote called,
|
| 00:35:50.600 |
"Balking," where he talks about his practice of walking for four hours a day, and he makes this
|
| 00:35:56.680 |
amazing point of like, when we're in nature we experience wildness, and it's that wildness that
|
| 00:36:03.560 |
allows us that unsettles our conventional forms of thinking. And so encountering wildness,
|
| 00:36:09.720 |
you're right. I mean, that's like an essential ingredient to having a more open experience and a
|
| 00:36:16.760 |
more open mind. And boy, if I had to do over, I might say more about that.
|
| 00:36:21.320 |
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
| 00:36:22.760 |
But I appreciate you bringing that up. And it's funny, even in this period where this is a really
|
| 00:36:27.800 |
intense period in my life, because anytime there's a new book, there's a lot of energy and a lot of
|
| 00:36:33.880 |
stress. And I've been trying to create an intentional practice of going outside every day for an hour to,
|
| 00:36:41.000 |
I live by the mountains here in Colorado. And just as you're saying, for me, it is such a
|
| 00:36:47.400 |
grounding experience. Yeah. You know, there's everything's moving a little bit more slowly.
|
| 00:36:52.920 |
It's in present time versus the past or the future.
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| 00:36:55.480 |
Well, Nate, there's no reason why you can't do a follow up on the, you know, having nature at the
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| 00:37:01.640 |
heart of your ongoing expansion of mind. I think that would be the next place I would go.
|
| 00:37:07.400 |
Well, yeah, thank you so much. I mean, I just have to say it's such an honor to be here. You
|
| 00:37:14.760 |
have interviewed many of my philosophical heroes, Richard Rorty. We talked about that a little bit. He's
|
| 00:37:19.640 |
it was one of my advisors. And just to be on this show is to me a real honor. So thank you.
|
| 00:37:25.800 |
Well, thank you. It's having people like you, you know, thoughtful people like you that makes
|
| 00:37:30.920 |
the show what it is. So I'd like to thank Nate Klempe for joining us here on entitled opinions
|
| 00:37:36.920 |
to discuss his brand new book called Open Living with an Expensive Mind in a Distracted World.
|
| 00:37:43.240 |
Thanks again for coming on, Nate. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
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| 00:37:55.480 |
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