Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries; community events; classes to start your day and relax in the evening, and special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Nate Klemp. Let me tell you a little bit about Nate. He’s a philosopher, writer, and mindfulness entrepreneur, and someone that I found, through his writing, has quite a quirky and delightful sense of humor. I’m eager for you to meet Nate. He has a master’s degree from Stanford, a PhD from Princeton, and he worked as an assistant professor at Pepperdine until he left his tenure-track job in 2012 to explore what he calls this crazy idea of philosophy as a way of life.
He’s the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller, Start Here: Master the Lifelong Skill of Wellbeing, and also the coauthor of a book he wrote with his wife, Kaley Klemp, The 80/80 Marriage. He’s also the author, and this is what we’ll be talking about in this conversation, of a new book called Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World. Nate, welcome.
Nate Klemp: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here, Tami.
TS: OK. Tell me a little bit about the inner impulse. What emerged in you to take on this notion of writing a book about having an expansive mind in a distracted world?
NK: Well, I feel like there are two kinds of books. There are books where I have a solution, and I want to communicate that solution through the book; and then there are books where I have a sense that there’s a really big problem here and I have no idea what the solution is. This was a book in that second class.
So for me, several years ago, I just started to notice that it almost felt like the size of my mind was getting smaller. And what I mean by that is when I would experience some uncomfortable emotion or difficult mind state, I would have this almost instantaneous urge to reach out for my phone to get some quick hit of digital distraction or quick hit of political outrage.
At the time, I remember thinking, is this just me? Am I the only one experiencing this? But then the deeper I looked, I started to see that on some level, I think many of us are having this experience, and that in some ways, it’s the problem of our time. And yet it’s almost invisible. It’s often happening underneath the radar of awareness. So I thought to myself, that’s exactly the project that I can get really excited about, because it feels like an adventure. I have no idea where I’m going to end up, no idea what the concepts are going to be or the practices, but I know that there’s something really interesting there that could be both helpful for me and hopefully others as well.
TS: I think it’s very interesting that you’re starting with naming this situation that I think a lot of us have felt in varying degrees and thought, I think there’s something going on with me. I’m more anxious than I used to be. The practices that I used to do to stay open, it doesn’t seem like they work as well as they used to. It’s interesting to me that you’re identifying this and helping people not feel necessarily isolated in their experience, but saying, “Oh, there are bigger waves in the collective that are creating this situation.”
One thing you write about in Open is how this phenomenon of being addicted to our screens is like a David and Goliath battle. It’s that extreme. And we are that much the underdog. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, how it’s so extreme.
NK: Well, so the macro-level concept here is really this idea of closure. So when I tried to put words to the experience I was having and come up with a conceptual framework, it seemed to me like the central distinction, at least in my own experience and in the experience I was observing other people have, was this distinction between the mind getting smaller—this compressed, contracted, closed state—and then the more expansive state that all of us have experienced from time to time. We all have our own experiences of that.
So looking [at], what are the drivers of closure? And why, for so many of us, do we feel more closed now, almost like our mind has compressed over the last decade or so? What are the drivers underneath that? There were really two that came up. One was political polarization, but the second was what you just identified, this addiction that we have to our screens. It’s an addiction that I think is really fueled by an underlying sense of uncertainty and underlying sense of the world is chaotic, uncomfortable emotions, uncomfortable sensations that we feel. These technologies, though, they give us a way to self-medicate those experiences where we don’t actually have to feel them directly and come into direct contact with them.
So the David and Goliath piece to it is really this idea that we’re at a disadvantage here, because these technologies have been programmed by many of the world’s leading technologists, the most sophisticated AI algorithms in all of human history, and they’re specifically designed to exploit the weaknesses of our human psychology. So I think that’s just a really important point to remember as we turn to, OK. Well, how can we be a little bit less addicted to our screens? The big insight there is, it’s not going to be one simple life hack that we do at the margins. We’re going to have to have a more ambitious, more holistic strategy if we want to succeed in our efforts to be a little bit more [open].
TS: In your quest to understand openness and closedness, you took on lots of experiments. And you write about them. And this is part of your quirky way—one of them was what you call “a screen-consumption binge.” I think most people are like, “Look, I’m already binging. What would a binge look like?” So I wonder if you could describe that and what you learned from that experience.
NK: Well, you’ve probably heard that old-school parenting advice that if you catch your kids smoking, the best thing you can do is have them finish the pack or maybe even force them to have two or three packs of cigarettes. I think that’s actually terrible parenting advice, so I’m not endorsing that, but there’s a really interesting insight underneath that, which is this idea that overindulgence can lead to repulsion. It’s also an idea that we can find in the tantric Buddhist tradition, this idea of feast practice. So in some of these practices, instead of abstaining from pleasures, they would actually indulge in pleasures consciously as a way to essentially begin to burn out the desires and the cravings underneath some of these addictive patterns that we have.
So this is usually used with things like drinking or overeating or sex, but I thought it would be really interesting to apply this to my primary source of craving, which is screens. So as you said, I spent three days, all day, every day just binging on this all-you-can-eat buffet of digital distraction—so my TV, my email, YouTube, news, just everything you can imagine. Out of this experience, I had two really interesting insights. One was that there is definitely a connection between sleep and screens. We hear about this a lot. I tested that as far as you could test it. Every night I was up at 2:40 in the morning, couldn’t go back to sleep.
I think the more interesting realization was that the thing that was driving me throughout this, and the thing that drives me in everyday life, I came to see, was novelty, the ability of my screen to give me something new, some new email, some new text, some new piece of news. And by overindulging, I was able to, in some ways, see everything there was to see—to go all the way with my phone to such a degree that I was able to burn out the superpower of my phone.
I remember after this experiment, I actually woke up and I thought to myself, this is when I usually grab my phone and go to the bathroom. And on that day, the desire just completely fell flat. So there’s a way in which we can use overindulgence as another way to just see our patterns and habits around screens from a different perspective. One thing we can do that I think is cool is even combine this screen binging experiment with a screen fasting experiment, again, just to see all of our habits from totally different angle, so we can decide a better way to structure them.
TS: I’m curious what you discovered, Nate, about what’s going on under the surface in you, and therefore probably and many of us, when we’re driven—this craving, this addiction. “I need the screen time. I need the novelty. Give me novelty.” What’s going on that’s so uncomfortable that we can’t just be with it without having that novelty distract us in some way? What’s the problem?
NK: Well, I think on one level, the problem is what we’re dealing with here is a behavioral addiction. So it’s different than a substance addiction; it’s different from alcoholism or something like that. But it’s in some ways eerily similar to something like a gambling addiction, where there’s a behavior we’re engaged in that fills some psychological need in the short term, for comfort, even though in the long term. it may undermine our best interests. It may lead us to prioritize screens over the things that really should matter more to us in our family, our career, projects that matter, things like that.
So I think there is this addiction craving, dopamine-driven feedback loop, but there’s also, for many of us I think, deeper discomfort with our own mind that’s triggering this, that we feel some uncomfortable emotion, anxiety. We feel fear. We feel anger. We feel outrage, something like that. And our screens just give us this really easy and convenient way to shift our experience almost instantaneously from this thing that feels really uncomfortable to something that actually gives us a burst of pleasure.
So that’s why I think, if we’re talking about something like screen addiction, yes, we need to use certain tools and habits to mitigate these addictive tendencies. We need to create friction between us and our devices. But if we want to go all the way with a solution to the problem, then I think we really do need to investigate, what are some of these deeper emotional patterns that we’re so averse to? And how can we begin to unwind and open to some of those?
TS: You share in Open a study that I thought really got my attention, really remarkable, about people being asked to sit idly in a room or, if that’s too uncomfortable, you can shock yourself by pressing a button and you’ll receive a shock. Maybe you can share a little bit about the results of this study and what was discovered.
NK: So this study is really important, I think, because it gets to the point we were just talking about of why are we reaching out for our screens. The reason is that at a very fundamental level, many of us have a pretty strong aversion to just being with our own minds, to sitting with our own thoughts. So this research team at the University of Virginia led by Timothy Wilson, they had this exquisite experiment where first they had people sit in a room. And they had to put away their phone and their backpack and all their stuff, and they just sat there for 15 minutes. They asked them afterwards, “How was that? Was that good? Did you like it?” Most people said, “That was extremely uncomfortable.” But then they tweaked the experiment, and that’s where I think they got the most interesting insight.
This time, they had people go into this room for 15 minutes, and they strapped an electrode to their ankle and taught them how to self-administer a shock. So now the question became, would you rather sit there with your own mind or essentially engage in a form of self-torture by self-administering a shock to yourself? They found 27% of women shock themselves, 67% of men shock themselves. Apparently, there was one guy who shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. The conclusion of their study was that there’s something really fascinating going on here. We would rather torture ourselves, many of us, than just sit there idly in the present moment, which seemingly would be a nice experience, to have a 15-minute break from the day where you don’t have to do anything and you can just be present. But that wasn’t what they found at all. There was this drive to engage in a form of torture and control that way rather than the uncontrollable experience of just sitting with your own mind stream.
TS: Now, you mentioned this notion that we want novelty, that novelty is a reward for us. And I get that. So that’s what we’re moving towards when we take out our phone after X number of seconds. But we’re also moving away, and you said this, from something that is uncomfortable. What I want to learn more about from you, Nate, is what you’ve discovered about how to be with that, whatever it is, which is uncomfortable in a way that, oh, I can just sit here. I can sit here, 15 minutes, idly in a room, sure, of course. Longer. Sure, no problem.
NK: I think you’re exactly right. There’s a turning away that’s happening. So to your point, we need to think about, well, OK, if it’s so hard for us to be with our thoughts, be with uncomfortable emotions, then what are some of the strategies we can use? What are some of the tools we can use to essentially develop this skill of being? Pema Chödrön calls it staying. How do we develop that skill? Really, a lot of this project in the book was about exactly that. What are the tools we can use?
So there were a number of different strategies and tools and things that I was looking into. One was psychedelic assisted therapy. The other was opening to my political enemies, people on the other side of the political spectrum. Meditation, what I call street opening.
I would say though, at a moment-to-moment level, probably the most powerful practice is an applied form of meditation, where in that moment we’re just allowing our awareness to expand and to include everything that’s happening, even if it might be uncomfortable or disagreeable to us, doing it nonjudgmentally and just seeing if we can stay there for even just a couple minutes.
In the “Street Opening” chapter, I talk about doing this when you’re in line at the grocery store, you’re stuck in traffic, or you go to your local mall. You just use that as an opportunity to develop this skill of opening. I think we have all sorts of moments built into our day where this is available to us, moments where we’re waiting, moments where we’re experiencing idle time. The key problem for most of us, the barrier, is that those are the very same moments where we tend to grab our phone and seek out some other source of digital distraction.
TS: In describing opening, you talk about these three different shifts, and I thought this was a very helpful architecture, if you will. I want to make sure that this is clearly communicated. One we’ve talked about, which is the attitude of our mind when it’s open, which is that we’re not withdrawing from what’s painful, that we’re willing to be with it. But you also talk about how the focus of our mind changes and the size of our mind. So talk about the focus and the size.
NK: This is—you’re seeing my inner philosopher here. All of my academic training was in philosophy, and one of the things we were really trained to do is this conceptual analysis, really getting clear, what is the concept? What’s the definition we’re working with here? So this was actually an interesting part of the project, because I was engaging in this nebulous quest to understand opening versus closing, but at a certain point, I also realized we have to have some definitional structure here. So even though the city of opening is just so vast and beyond concepts and beyond words, I felt like we did need to create some structure around it.
So the basic idea is that first stage or first shift that happens from a closed to open mind, it’s really about the focus of the mind or where our attention rests. And in a closed state, our attention is often caught in this experience that we’re all having all day, every day, but often not aware of, which is what psychologists call mind wandering. It’s that state of just time traveling through random stories about the past and the future. When we open, though, we’re experiencing something like what psychologists call meta-awareness, where there’s a little bit of space now between us and our thoughts, us and our emotions. There’s a disidentification that happens there. So that’s the first piece.
The second piece, which you alluded to, is this shift from avoidance to approach, which is that whole idea of turning toward rather than turning away from the things that might be uncomfortable. I really think the essence of opening and the magic of opening is this idea of size. When we’re closed down, and I think we’ve all had this experience, when you’re really stressed, frustrated, closed down, it’s almost like you’re looking at life through this long and dark tunnel, and all you can see is that one problem or that one person that’s driving you crazy.
That opening involves this kind of expansion of the space of the mind, such that the problem might still be there, the person might still be there, but there’s more space around it. I think that’s the real power of opening, is that it’s not a shift that’s designed to get rid of our problems. It’s not a shift that’s designed to have us live in this amazing utopian state of bliss all day, every day. It’s more of a shift that’s designed to give us bigger perspective, so we don’t have to change the world or the way things are around us, but we’re just changing the lens through which we view life.
TS: It’s interesting. I noticed when you talk about the size, I experienced that not just as the size of my mental processes or something, but almost like the size of the energy field, if you will, that I’m occupying and how that field of being can become more expansive and extended in every direction. I wonder if that’s also your experience, this experience of openness as in the size. I don’t know if I’d call it your aura or something, but it’s like a feeling that you can occupy a really huge space of being, something like that.
NK: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely my experience. Even we’ve been talking now for, I don’t know, 20, 30 minutes. When we first started talking, I could feel a little bit of contraction, a little bit of closure in myself. As we’ve been talking, I’ve been having this experience of just a little bit more space. For me, the best concept for that, to wrap around that, is something like awareness. It feels like the space of my awareness or my perception is just getting a little bigger. And instead of being really compressed down, where I’m caught in this little tiny room and you’re over there, it feels like, well, maybe we’re actually a little more connected in some way.
So I think that is the experience for me, and it’s funny, because it’s not an experience that we can necessarily measure. The brain doesn’t get bigger when we open. That’s not the expansion of size. It’s so much subtler, so much more ethereal, but I think it really does matter, because that expansion of size gives us the ability to respond instead of react when we’re triggered. It gives us that space between stimulus and response, where we can build new and better habits. It’s like the space of possibility, of creativity. So for me, you could say, “Well, the size of the mind, who cares? Big mind, small mind, doesn’t really matter.” But I think that’s the whole game. This expansion is really what most of us are after.
TS: A little bit more clarity here about these three different dimensions, if you will. For whatever reason, the size dimension feels very intuitive to me. I might even say something like a field of presence that you can also sense around people, like you sense this large, vast, dissolving sense of presence around someone. But the second quality that you talk about, the attitude of our mind, that instead of withdrawing from pain, we approach it. I want to ask about that, because I was like, look, I don’t know about that. I get not withdrawing, and I get accepting. I know I’m splitting hairs here, but maybe not, but I don’t want to approach the painful things. I’m just willing to let it be there. It’s OK. I don’t want to approach it, but yet you’re using this word approach. So help me out here, Nate, so I understand what you mean.
NK: I love that you’re pointing that out, and you’re the first person to point that out. I think that’s a really great idea, because you’re right. Approach has this aggressive nature to it. We’re consciously moving toward things that are really difficult and painful all the time, and we’re living this life where all we do is run ultra-marathons, and fast, and do really hard things, and never really take it easy and just enjoy life. So what you’re pointing out, I think, is absolutely true. If I had to just clarify what I mean by approach, it is a less aggressive stance, where the idea is something more like when discomfort arises, when pain arises, when challenging emotions arise, can you let go into those states, allow them to be exactly as they are? That’s really the nature of turning toward versus this more aggressive stance of just seeking out discomfort. So I think that’s a really great clarification.
TS: OK. Cool. You talked about the novelty that we find, one more time, in screen time. And I’m curious what kind of novelty you think we can find in a big open mind, because I like novelty, I want novelty. Am I going to be able to find that? Maybe it’s not going to come at me at the same speed, but there’s a lot of novelty, yes, in our changing inner landscape of expansiveness.
NK: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. Even right now, in this moment as we’re talking, I’m trying to also pay attention occasionally to the novelty of this moment. I’ve been listening to your work and interviews with people for 15 years or something. So for me, this is an incredibly novel moment. There’s also interesting sounds happening and things happening in the visual field that are interesting. So I think you’re absolutely right that, if we turn our attention toward the present moment in an intentional way, there is endless novelty to be found.
Yet I think there’s this barrier of discomfort that we have to move through sometimes to get there. Because, at least for me, my screen is so easy, and the pathway toward my screen is lined with all sorts of easy pleasures and dopamine hits, whereas the pathway to the present moment, sometimes that’s lined with afternoon anxiety or the feeling of my sciatica acting up in my left leg or tension in my neck. So there’s a way in which, I think, that’s one of the essential pieces of opening, is that there may be a little bit more discomfort. There may be a little bit of a barrier there internally that we have to make peace with or accept or be with. Once we are able to do that, then that novelty of the present moment emerges.
TS: Now, Nate, you write and talk a lot about this openness in terms of the openness of our mind, the openness of our being, but I haven’t heard you use a word like “heart” in terms of the openness of the heart center. I’m curious about that, how you see that coming along with openness or not.
NK: I think the two are very related and that the open mind is synonymous in some ways with an open heart. It’s interesting you point that out because, actually, after I wrote the book, I went back and read it, and I did have that thought like, oh, it’s so mind, mind, mind. I don’t speak that much about the heart. I think part of that is probably just a product of my own training and Western philosophy, being a very cognitive-centric person. But I think the idea of openness is that it’s an expansion on all levels, and it’s an expansion of the mind of awareness. And with that expansion, there’s an expansion of heart. If it weren’t that, and if it were just this austere intellectual practice that we were doing in our minds, I think it wouldn’t be that interesting and it wouldn’t have that byproduct of connection and overcoming separateness that I think is a really essential quality of the state.
TS: I think part of the reason I brought it up, Nate, is one of my favorite things you point to in Open is how we can become aware of the cues in our own life of closing. One of the best ways to bring on more openness is to notice when we’re closing. So that’s something for myself. I notice when my heart is closed down, and I can see the signs of it. I’m curious, what are your cues or clues of, oh, I think I’m closing right now?
NK: I think this is a really important practice that anybody can do, just taking a quick inventory of, what are the idiosyncratic ways in which I close down? Because we all have them, but we’re often not aware of them. So anybody who’s listening to this, this is something you could just do to say, “Oh, it’s Instagram for me,” or this or that. For me, I have a few different cues. One of them is definitely news binging. I just get really into the election analysis and what’s happening with polling of candidate X versus Y, all that sort of thing. The other is the Denver Broncos. I get really obsessed with roster moves on the football team, things like that.
Then there are also these internal cues for me. So I’ve had this experience of tinnitus, ringing in my ear, my left ear, for about 15 years now. For whatever reason, when I’m closing down, I become much more aware of the tinnitus, or it gets louder. I’m not actually sure which. So that’s something that happens. Then finally, one of the things I notice is that when I’m closing down, I don’t naturally seek out things like beautiful music or art. Instead, it’s like I have this built-in predisposition for news or random podcasts about the financial markets or whatever. It’s like I have this predisposition to check out of my current situation. So those are my cues that I use for myself.
TS: What do you think of this notion of respecting closing to some degree like, “I need time to process. I’ve had a big day. I’ve had a lot of openness. I’ve taken a lot in, a lot going on. Now’s my time to do those things”? You were just describing about the news or the Denver Broncos, because I’m sifting and processing, and things are settling, and this is actually functional in a certain way. How do I know when it’s functional and when I’m just turning myself into a small, flat, claustrophobic being?
NK: This was one of the most interesting junction points on this adventure for me, because I started out thinking opening was an unqualified good, that we just want more of this. We want to open to everything, opening is the goal, why would we ever close down? What emerged through my own experiences, through interviewing other people is this idea that opening is not always a good thing. We can overdo opening. We can overdose on this experience of the expansive mind. The way I learned that was, I decided it would be a good idea to turn down the sedation for a three-hour dental surgery and see if I could meditate through the surgery instead. It was a wild experience. I learned a lot. The main thing I learned is that it would’ve been kinder to myself, to my daughter who’s in the waiting room hearing me screaming to the dentist, to everybody involved to just skillfully close in that moment.
So the criterion that I lay out in the book is something like open unless it’s kinder to yourself and others to close. There may be those moments where it’s absolutely the right thing to Netflix binge a series or it’s absolutely the right thing to go on Instagram or it’s the right thing to not open to someone in your life who’s causing you harm. I ended up calling this skillful closing, the basic idea being that we need to have this discernment around when is it actually too much to open to certain things.
TS: You’re saying the way to use that discernment is to ask this question, “What would be kinder to myself and others right now?” I’m wondering if you have any tips, because this is one of those things where I notice I can get a little wily with myself.
NK: Totally.
TS: I don’t know what I’m doing, really. Am I being kinder or am I just being lazy? Because it’s painful to be that open, quite honestly, and even if I’m not trying to approach the pain, I know it’s there waiting for me, so anyway.
NK: I think it’s tricky, because we’re dealing with a really ethereal nature of mind here, and we’re also dealing with what you’re talking about, this false consciousness problem where you might say, “Oh, I’ve had a really hard day. I deserve three hours of Netflix,” or whatever it is. So it’s really tricky, and it’s also tricky because a criterion like that isn’t going to give us an exact answer on demand. It’s not like a math formula where we can just plug in the values and we get an answer and it’s really clear.
So I do think that this is the question that we have to drop into a meditation or a contemplation, that we maybe sit with for a little bit. So it’s not just a one-second question in the mind, hey, is this a good time to close? but more of a longer term inquiry like, is this really skillful? Maybe I discovered the answer over the course of weeks after experimenting with different things. I like to say that one of the key learnings I had is there’s actually real value in doing some of these things that close us down, but doing them consciously. For me, there’s incredible value in going on Instagram, really checking in with how I feel before, how I feel afterwards, and then having that experience of being like, oh, wow, this actually really does radically change my mood in a negative direction. That, I think, can be a teacher for the next time the decision comes up for me, and I’m faced with that question of, is going on Instagram skillful closing right now? Or do I need to maybe open and practice with this anxiety or fear that I’m experiencing?
TS: One thing I noticed just even in our conversation here together, Nate, when you said compared to the beginning where you felt more closed, and obviously in the beginning of a conversation like this, we’re both going to be, to some level I think, a little nervous, and then we’re getting to know each other. Oh, my God, it’s going well, we’re opening, we’re both getting more spacious. I noticed also what came from that was feeling connected, feeling connected with each other. So I wonder what you have to say about that, how openness brings forth this feeling of connection between a person in their environment, a person and another person.
NK: I think that’s absolutely true. There’s this concept in psychology of basically, the idea being that there’s a contagious nature of our mind state. Social contagion is the way it’s often described. My experience has validated that insight, the basic premise that when I’m really closed down and I’m really struggling to stay open, there’s a way in which the world reflects that back to me. My relationships reflect that back to me. My work reflects that back to me. There’s also a way in which, when I’m able to experience a little bit more space in my own mind, it ripples through the minds of others in this very subtle way that’s hard to describe.
I think connection is probably the right description of that, because when we close down, and the mind gets small, and we’re all stuck in our little tiny compartments of our heads, that’s an experience of separation. We’re all just moving through life in this very tight container, and yet when we open and it gets a little bit more expansive, some of the edges between where you start and I begin or where your community starts, your family starts, and you begin, those edges get a little bit more blurry. I think that that’s the ultimate value of this practice.
If it were just about changing your own individual state, I think that’s super interesting, but we live in a time where there’s so much division, and there’s so much closure, and there’s so much polarization that I feel like this is a practice that really could help us overcome some of that. And yeah, maybe it starts at an individual level and it’s just you, but if that spreads, that becomes really interesting to me as a way to maybe start to shift some of the dynamics underlying our culture right now.
TS: Now, it’s interesting that you brought up our current condition of polarization, because this is a topic that you’ve been interested in for quite a long time. I read that it was back in 2005, I think, when you were doing your PhD dissertation, that you actually devoted your dissertation to the topic of polarization. And it brought up for me, why is this such an important topic for Nate?
NK: Well, so I did my PhD in political philosophy. I think in some ways I grew up around polarization before it was as fragmented as today. But I grew up in Boulder, which is a very liberal enclave, and just down the road from us was Colorado Springs, very conservative town. In the 1990s, there were some pretty massive battles happening over gay rights. And Amendment II was passed in the early 1990s, constitutional amendment basically barring gay rights. In graduate school, I was on the liberal side of that divide, but I was somehow fascinated by what was going on on the other side. So I actually devoted my dissertation research to going down to Focus on the Family, James Dobson’s organization in Colorado Springs, and really getting to just understand, what is the difference between us? How are we arriving at such radically different political outcomes?
At the time, political polarization was a real thing, but I think over the last 20 or so years, it’s gone from being phenomenon that mostly happens at the elite level of politics, pundits, politicians, things like that, to a more mainstream experience, where we’re now experiencing polarization in our families, we’re experiencing it at school board meetings. All of life seemingly has been politicized in various ways.
So I really started to see that this is a key dimension of closure, that we can’t just think about how we’re closing to our own minds. In this day and age, we have to think about how are we closing down to other people, particularly those who disagree with us. So that became a central part of this adventure for me. How can I essentially immerse myself in the other side in my own political enemies, and what happens when I do?
TS: You took on the experiment of spending time looking at the world through the perspective of members of the NRA, the National Rifle Association. Tell us what you learned. I’m so far on the other side, so this would’ve been… I can’t imagine necessarily being in meetings like that. So tell me what happened for you.
NK: So it is funny, Tami. Here I am writing a book on self-development and spirituality, and I’m getting my concealed carry permit from the National Rifle Association. It’s bizarre, and I have to chuckle just saying that out loud. But the way in which that all unfolded is I, as a left-of-center Boulder resident, thought, well, I need to find a way to really feel like I’ve challenged myself and asked this question: what happens when we open to the other side? So I went to rural Colorado. I found out that even though I wasn’t an NRA member and didn’t have a gun, I could do this training, which would give me my concealed carry permit in the state of Colorado. I am a gun control advocate. I have just a fear, almost like paranoia, of guns. I don’t like touching them. They scare me. It was just this amazing experience.
One moment that I just have to highlight is, I wore my Denver Bronco hat to this training thinking, this is going to be a way to find some common ground. I came in there and one of my other classmates walked in with a Kansas City Chiefs jacket. I made a little joke, “I don’t know if we can be friends. I’m a Bronco fan, you’re a Kansas City Chiefs fan.” Her husband comes up to me and says, “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that at all. We stopped watching the NFL five years ago after the kneeling.” And I was like, “The kneeling? Oh, OK, Black Lives Matter. All right.” Then our instructor overheard and he’s like, “Yeah. I haven’t donated a cent to the NFL or I haven’t given them a cent since that happened.”
So I had this moment of total shock, just feeling like we can’t even agree on a shared passion for a modern gladiator sport. This is a problem. But then the most amazing thing happened. I walked up to a conversation between two of the folks who were there and overheard them say, “I just think the right has all the best answers.” And then one of the gentlemen turns toward me and says, “But we probably shouldn’t assume things. What side are you on?” And I was like, “Well,” shocked, reeling, what do I say? I told him what was true for me, which is, “I’m on the side of being open to all points of view.”
The most amazing thing happened. Everybody started nodding. The whole energy of the room shifted. Everybody there started talking about how we need to talk to each other, we need to engage each other. These are super-far-right gun enthusiasts. So to me, that was this amazing moment where I realized we can’t agree on anything except that we should be more open.
TS: Do you have any pith instructions, if you will, for people who feel polarized, say, with members of their family around certain topics that come up and it’s just like, “We just don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about it, we don’t talk about it”?
NK: Well, I would say two things. One is that that could be a time for skillful closing. If it’s with your family members and it’s a really delicate situation, that may be one of those moments where you say, “You know what? I’m interested in this idea of opening, but not here, not now,” and that’s totally fine. If you’re interested in opening up that conversation, the key distinction I would put out there comes from actually the research I did 20 years ago for my dissertation.
It comes from a man named Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, and basically super complicated theory, but to distill it down, he made this distinction between strategic action or strategic speech, which is speech where our intent is to win, to prove that we’re right, prove that our opponent is wrong, show that our party’s the better party, our candidate is the better candidate, et cetera. This, I would argue, is the default state that we fall into when talking about politics, this strategic mode of action. The alternative is really what I would call a more open approach, where instead of having this intent to win, the intent is to understand. That ends up being a radically different conversation if the intent is to really understand what is driving this position. What are the basic assumptions behind this position? It involves listening much more than telling them why they’re wrong or showing them the flaws in their argument.
TS: From your experiment getting your concealed carry license, what did you learn, what understanding about what’s motivating people?
NK: By the way, I do not concealed carry, so I do have my permit. I could, but I don’t do that. That wasn’t an outcome for me. I think what was most interesting is realizing that at the deepest level, our disagreement wasn’t about guns, it was about human nature. What I mean by that is my baseline assumption living in Boulder, Colorado, a pretty peaceful, even-keel town, my baseline assumption is that most people are good. Yes, there are occasional moments where there’s violence, but for the most part, life is fairly safe. And they started from a very different assumption, which was we live in a murderous hellscape. Our teacher talked about predators. That was the word he used. There are predators everywhere, there’s danger lurking everywhere, and nobody else is going to help you. You have to help yourself. You have to defend yourself.
So the mind-shattering insight for me was this realization that if I had that same view of human nature, maybe if I even lived in a different place, that the logic of the rest of the argument makes total sense to me. If you really are living in this Hobbesian state of war where people are murdering each other constantly and nobody’s out there to help you, I would probably do the same thing. So that was just really helpful.
Then I think the deeper thing was this realization that there is no enemy here. What I mean by that is, I just had some really cool and interesting connection experiences, like the two of us are having right now but with members of the NRA, over lunch, realizing that these are really good people. They care for their neighbors. They have projects that matter to them. They’re in so many ways just like me. And that was the realization that I think really shook me and changed my experience of politics, this realization that there isn’t an enemy here.
TS: Now, Nate, when I asked you to talk about these different dimensions of openness, you said, “Well, look, this is the philosopher in me. We can’t just throw a concept out without defining it,” and you’ve done a beautiful job. And you also write in Open about two of your own very early formative experiences, you could say spontaneous opening experiences that happened for you. Maybe very briefly, you can talk about the experience you had on the beach in Cuba, which is not as interesting to me as the second experience in the airplane, which I really want to get into, but go ahead and set the stage for us.
NK: I wanted to basically make sure that this discussion of opening wasn’t totally abstract and offer some examples from my own life, because I think we’ve all had these experiences of expansion of mind. So I wanted to give readers a couple different experiences and show them that this experience can happen in two radically different ways. So the first portal to a more open, expansive mind is the one I think we usually associate with an open state, which is the portal of bliss. For me that was, I spent six months studying in Cuba when I was in college, and there was one particular day where I went to the beach and the conditions were perfect. At the time, I didn’t really know how to meditate. I wasn’t thinking about open awareness. I wasn’t interested in any of this stuff, but I did just walk into the water, fall to my knees and just have this experience of the mind being wide open, just marveling at the horizon line where the sky meets the ocean.
That was one of these experiences in my life that was so different from my ordinary state of consciousness where there was a lot of anxiety and there’s a lot of stress and, what am I going to do with my life? At that moment, it just felt like everything got bigger. The view is panoramic. So that’s experience one. Then I guess you want me to talk about experience two.
TS: I do.
NK: So portal of bliss, that’s one way we can open. I think there’s also another portal, which is the door of suffering. For me, that happened about eight years after that Cuba experience when I was in my final year of graduate school, I got in a pretty serious bike accident where I got a concussion. In the aftermath of that bike accident, I had all sorts of anxiety, depression, fatigue, dizziness. That’s when the ringing in my left ear started. Really, for the first time in my life, I had this experience of not knowing how to manage my own mind, even though paradoxically I’d been studying philosophy for 10 years at some of the best universities with some of the best professors. None of those tools seemed to help me.
So all of this came to a head when I had to make this decision as to whether I was going to go visit my wife’s parents over the holidays. Just to give you some context, at that point, I was experiencing such extreme fatigue that just going to the grocery store felt like it was all I could do. So this would require me to fly across the country, but I knew that if I didn’t go, I could end up losing my marriage. So I got on this flight, and about halfway through the flight, the intensity of the suffering and the fear and everything that was going on got so intense that it was like a nervous breakdown type experience, I guess you could say.
It was one of those moments where I realized there was no way I could escape from what I was feeling. I couldn’t go off the plane, I couldn’t go to the ER, I couldn’t distract myself. So what showed up for me was just basically this moment of asking for help, of just praying, “God, please help me, please help me. I don’t know what to do.” This moment of feeling just totally stripped down, totally vulnerable. Paradoxically, that was another one of these experiences of feeling this expansion but, again, through a very different doorway than the first one.
TS: Would you say that the expansion came because you asked for help or because you stopped struggling or what created the expansion?
NK: I think the expansion was created by something that wasn’t really under my control. So I would like to say, oh, yeah, I discovered this really cool spiritual mind hack in that moment and that’s why I was able to get there. I don’t think that was it at all. I think it was that my life had been reduced down to such a raw state, and every defense mechanism I had been using was just gone and eviscerated, that there was this just naked state of vulnerability out of which that openness was able to emerge, and that wasn’t really me. That felt like, I don’t know, maybe something spiritual, maybe God, maybe life. I don’t know what the words would be. They seem to break down for me, but that’s one of the things that I think is really interesting about this state of openness is that, at least in my experience, the most profound moments of this expansion of mind often happen without any attempt to control them or manufacture them or manipulate them. They happen through us instead of bias, which is one of the beautiful things about this experience.
TS: There’s two things that are occurring to me. One is it almost sounds like a hitting bottom, if you will, and turning your life over or at least turning that moment over, being stuck in the airplane to a higher power of some kind asking for help. I’m bringing it up, Nate, because I always want to speak to that person who listens to a podcast like this because they don’t have the ability to switch off something in their mind that’s creating a whole lot of suffering for them. They can’t get out. It feels like it’s this claustrophobic small space, and they’ve turned on to listen to a conversation like this on openness because they’re seeking some way to make that shift. I’m wondering, this is why I really wanted to talk to you about it, what you learned from that experience that will be helpful to someone in that situation.
NK: Tami, I’m so glad you brought that up because I remember, if I go back to that state 15 years ago, it felt like there was no escape. My life was over, and that none of this was going to result in anything even remotely resembling joy or a life in a vocation that I loved. So I really have this deep connection to that feeling of stuckness. Part of the reason why I wrote this book is that ,at the time, it would’ve been really helpful to just know that there are tools, there are certain paths that we can take that don’t have instant results, necessarily, but they can put us on a path of gradually unwinding some of these knots and maybe starting to see our lives from a bigger perspective.
That’s really been one of the most interesting things about the last 15 years of my life, is that moment where it felt like my life was ending, essentially, I now see as really the moment where my life was beginning. There was a huge transformation that started to happen, where I started seeking out different kinds of tools. I started questioning the academic approach to philosophy, wondering if that was the right approach or if there were actually some really interesting practices one could use, and that brought me to a very intensive study and practice of meditation and yoga.
So really this horrifying moment for me was an opening not only in the moment, but an opening in my life. I think without that moment, I would be a tenured professor. I would probably have a pretty interesting life, so I don’t want to denigrate that, but what’s happened since has been far more interesting than anything I could have planned. So I guess that’s the main thing I would want to say is that there really is this paradoxical way where hitting some of those bottom experiences can be a moment of profound change that over time can result in something beautiful, even though it is impossible to see in the moment.
TS: Would you say there’s some choosing to let go that can be helpful?
NK: I think so. I think in many ways that idea of letting go is the essence of the whole game here. Because, at least for me, when I was experiencing a state like that, part of the frustration was that I would try and try and try and exert my will to control my mind and my emotions and my life. And then I would fail, and I’d be disappointed and devastated and hopeless. It becomes this cycle of trying to control, not being able to control, resisting losing control, and just you’re caught in a feedback loop there. I think the way out of that feedback loop is something like this act of letting go, which seems almost irrational and terrifying, and it’s certainly counter-habitual, but there’s something so powerful about that experience and a power that comes out of it that’s unexpected.
TS: OK. Just two final questions for you, Nate. One, you dedicate the book to your grandma, Grandma Hilda. And tell me about Hilda and your relationship with her and the dedication of Open to her.
NK: Grandma Hilda, she was this extraordinary woman in my life. She lived till 97, died about eight years ago. I like to think of my Grandma Hilda as my primary spiritual guru. I, actually before this conversation, was just asking her for a little bit of help. Throughout this whole journey of writing this book, she would show up in all these really interesting ways. I explored psychedelic assisted therapy, and she would occasionally just show up and remind me, “All you got to do is draft off me,” like this spiritual guide. I think also the person in my life who prompted me to start asking this question, I had the privilege of watching her in some of her final days, and she kept reminding me, “God is love, Nate. God loves you. God loves me.” In the final days of her life, when the pain was really excruciating, she just kept repeating this mantra of, “God, God, God.”
What I was struck by was seeing this person who I love so dearly in just the most excruciating pain, but somehow carrying with her this practice of letting go and of opening. I thought to myself, “If I can get even close to that by the time I die, that will be a win in terms of my spiritual journey.” So that’s why I devoted the book to her, dedicated it to her.
TS: Just a final question for you, Nate. I noticed, when I was reflecting on skillful closing and you can’t be open all the time, I thought to myself, huh, the thing that I value very, very, very highly is this notion of being free. Free, that I could be free not to stay in a closed state or to choose to switch from being closed to open or open to closed. I’m curious what you think about that.
NK: I think you’re absolutely right. I think freedom is the ultimate value of opening. This comes from a lot of different things, from experience, from all these various adventures and explorations that I did for this book, but even just from my philosophical training. When I look at this conceptually, this idea of the range of possibilities getting smaller, the size of the mind getting smaller, our ability to experience uncomfortable emotions, getting shorter, getting smaller, all of that has this experience of just constraining the field of possibilities that are available to us, of essentially creating a state of unfreedom or running off of habitual patterns or our cravings for digital distraction, things like that.
So there is a way in which expanding that field gives us freedom. The bigger the field, the more room there is to play with different possibilities. So I think you’re absolutely right. That is the ultimate benefit or the ultimate aim of opening, is to have that freedom to decide when you want to close, when you want to open, whether you’re OK with experiencing certain states. I think that’s the real gem underneath all of this.
TS: I’ve been talking to Nate Klemp. He’s the author of the new book, Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World. If you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
