John Astin is a modern Renaissance man whose work transcends conventional boundaries. As the author of four profound books, including “Too Intimate for Words” and “This Extraordinary Moment,” he delves deeply into the nature of human experience. A gifted singer, songwriter, and recording artist, John has also produced seven CDs of original spiritual-contemplative music that resonate with audiences worldwide. His academic prowess is equally impressive, holding a PhD in health psychology and earning international acclaim as a scholar in mind-body medicine. With a focus on meditative and contemplative practices, John’s research has significantly influenced psychology and healthcare. Currently, he enriches minds as an adjunct professor at Santa Clara and Notre Dame de Namur Universities. In this exclusive Mystic Mag‘s interview, we explore the intersections of John’s multifaceted career, his insights into human experience, and the harmonious blend of his artistic and academic endeavors.
Your books explore the nature of human experience in depth. Are there particular things that have influenced your perspective on the intricacies of reality and human experience?
I’ve been exploring the nature of experience for a very long time, really my whole life because I think that’s what we do as humans, we explore our experience. But in a more intentional way, I guess I would say it began around age 19 when I got interested in meditation.
Over the years. I explored a number of different teachings and approaches to meditation. But in 2001, while on a retreat, I came to realize that all the things I’d been searching for—a sense of greater awareness, a sense of peace, the oneness of everything—were actually already present as my very own being, the being and presence of life itself.
My ordinary everyday experience revealed that the things I imagined were missing and that I was searching for through meditation were never actually missing but were always present. Realizing this was life-transforming at the time and led to my first book, Too Intimate for Words. The journey continued from there as I integrated that understanding into my life, culminating in the writing of another book in 2008, This Is Always Enough. In that second book, I wrote about that sense that we have that something’s not quite right, that feeling that something’s missing and that there’s something I need in order to feel more complete and full. This book highlighted the ways in which the moment is actually already full and complete; it’s just a matter of how we’re perceiving it.
I wrote another book in 2012 called Searching for Rain in a Monsoon that continued exploring that same theme while also highlighting an understanding that had been continuing to dawn on me and that is that our experience (which we could call reality since we only know reality through our experience) is fundamentally inconceivable. To be sure, we have all sorts of ideas about our experience, ways we seem able to describe and speak about and conceptualize it. However, when we feel into the nature of our experience, we discover that it cannot ultimately be captured by any of our ideas. Experience cannot be collapsed into any of our mental interpretations because it’s simply too vast and infinite to fit into the little box of our conceiving minds.
In my most recent book, This Extraordinary Moment, I continued to introduce ways that we can explore experience to discover the myriad ways it transcends everything we think about it and through that investigation, enjoy the profoundly liberating implications of that discovery.
In your view, how do conventional interpretations and mental frames limit our understanding of raw, unfiltered experience? And how can individuals transcend these limitations?
Reality can be viewed from two broad perspectives. One is what I call the seemingly describable world. In this view, it seems that we are able to describe the reality of the moment: “I’m sitting in a room, having a conversation with you, conducting an interview, experiencing different thoughts, feelings, and sensations, which I have words to describe.” This is the ordinary consensus world we believe we inhabit, a world in which we think we have a kind of certainty about what’s happening. We take it for granted, for example, that we are human beings existing in a world of time, space, cause and effect and so on.
So, there’s that perspective, which I refer to as the seemingly describable world because it seems like we can capture what’s appearing with our words and concepts. And then, there is what’s actually present that the mental narratives are purportedly referring to. I call this, the “perspective of experience itself.”
Our almost default orientation is to confuse the two, mistaking our mental interpretations of what’s being experienced for the experience itself, essentially smearing these two things together. In psychology, the term that used to describe this is “cognitive fusion,” the belief that our thoughts are true representations of and essentially equal to reality. Cognitive de-fusion, on the other hand, involves the discovery that our interpretations of reality are just that—interpretations, not facts.
My work is essentially about helping people to see the way in which direct experience deviates from everything that we think it is. Let me illustrate. Let’s say you’re having an experience you describe as insecurity. You perceive yourself as a person who is experiencing these feelings you call insecurity, feelings that you likely find uncomfortable or maybe even overwhelming. But the question that de-fusion invites us to explore is this: “What exactly is it that I’m experiencing that I’m calling insecurity?”
The word insecurity is a label, right? It refers to something that’s actually present in experience. But what exactly is it that’s present? What is happening experientially that that label is referring to? You might say, “Well, uncertainty is a combination of certain thoughts, emotions and sensations.” But such an answer begs the question, “what exactly is a thought? An emotion? A sensation? What are those experiences we label as thoughts, feelings and sensations actually made of?
When we explore what is actually present experientially, what’s discovered is that it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly what anything. When you look at what’s being experienced that’s being labeled as insecurity (or any other word), something is clearly present. But what is it that’s there? Look at what insecurity is, what’s actually present and you will find that it’s impossible to determine exactly what it is that’s there. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t get to the bottom of what it is. In short, what’s discovered is that every experience, regardless of its conventional descriptive label, is an infinite, boundless mystery that can’t ultimately be captured in words or concepts.
When we explore what is really there, beyond our ideas about it, what’s discovered is that there isn’t a fixed, identifiable thing you can put your finger on. What is there is open-ended, an inconceivable mystery made of pure indescribability.
What’s realized through this kind of experiential inquiry is that what’s present is not a thing we’re actually stuck in or overwhelmed by but an inconceivable dance of energy, a ceaseless movement of life. And in discovering this, one finds what I call the problem-free nature of experience.
It’s important to clarify that I’m not discounting the reality of people’s experiences. When I say there’s not a thing there you can put your finger on or define, I’m not dismissing any of the experiences people may have. Things can certainly be experienced as overwhelming, stressful, traumatizing, and in turn, we may understandably seek to do something to address them. But when you look more carefully and sensitively, you can discover that experience is never what we think or imagine it to be. In fact, whether we describe what’s happening as positive or negative, every moment is ultimately beyond the reach of our labels.
Let me explain why I’m saying that even though it seems that we know and can identify what experiences are, we ultimately can’t. Rainbows are a wonderful metaphor for this. A rainbow appears vividly. It looks like something, right? You and I can see the rainbow and talk about how beautiful it is. There it is, vividly appearing in the sky. But if I were to ask you, “What is that rainbow made of?” and you were to try to find the essence of the rainbow by going inside of it, you would find nothing there but pure space. It’s quite paradoxical for in one sense, there is most certainly a rainbow there that’s being perceived. But when we examine what the rainbow is made of, we come up empty-handed, literally. In other words, there’s no “rainbow” there, at least not one that can be found when looked for, even as, paradoxically, it continues to appear vividly!
This is very much the same with our experience. Experience shows up as something palpable, something present and concrete. But when you go to look for it, just like the rainbow, you find empty space. And why is this the case? Why do we fail in our efforts to find what experiences are fundamentally made of? The principal reason that the seemingly identifiable phenomena we encounter in life are ultimately not identifiable or definable is because everything is in a state of constant flux.
Let’s come back to the example of insecurity. Suppose you go to a party and feel these rising feelings you label as insecurity. If I were to ask you what’s present that’s being labeled as insecurity, you might say it’s a pattern of thoughts, emotions, and sensations, a pattern you can identify and talk with yourself or others about. But if we actually look at the experience and don’t just assume we know what it is because we have a label for it, we realize that this pattern is not static. It’s alive, and in its aliveness, not clearly patterned at all because it’s changing every flash instant.
An experience arises and the mind labels it. But before the mind can even label that experience as something it’s familiar with, the experience has transformed into something else, morphed into the next new shape. Why? Because it is alive!
Let me illustrate this using another metaphor. Imagine sitting by a fireplace and watching the flames dancing and flickering as they do. There is no identifiable shape of the fire because it’s constantly changing, right? And much like the fire, what experience is cannot be determined because the very instant we think we’ve captured its shape, its identity, that experience has turned into something else owing to its ever-shape-shifting nature. Before we can even label it, the experience has transformed into something else. So, just as it’s ultimately impossible to accurately describe the shape of the fire, so it is with experience.
If I were to ask you to think about this moment in order to determine what it is, the very minute you try to grasp hold of what’s happening with thought, it turns into something else. This is such a powerful thing to realize, to see that despite the seeming power of language to capture what’s present, because everything that’s being experienced is so alive, so dynamic, it’s not really possible to put what’s happening into any definitive box of understanding. Why? Because the minute we think we’ve understood what something is, it has already become something else!
Seeing this is very powerful and is true of all phenomena including what we think of as the “self.” We often think of ourselves as identifiable, like I’m John, someone with an enduring nature. I believe I am more or less the same person now that I was a year, a week, or a second ago. But when I feel my own existence, I find that the experience of “being John” is something that’s not holding still but constantly changing. And in that sense, I am not an enduring phenomenon but more like a shape-shifter, always moving and morphing. Just like the fire…
And so, both the experiences I think I’m having and the person I think I am who is having these experiences are ever-changing. Given this, what might be described as “being stuck in some experience or circumstance” is actually an ever-changing, fluid, dynamic flow of life energy. In other words, neither our experiences or circumstances ever concretize or stabilize as any “thing” fixed or identifiable.
What I’m describing here is what’s talked about in the Buddhist tradition as emptiness, the idea that each momentary perception is ultimately empty of identity in that we can’t pin down precisely what it is owing to its ever-changing nature. And yet, despite the impossibility of determining the identity of any form or pattern that’s appeared, reality shows up as incredibly patterned and seemingly identifiable. As the Buddhists say, the emptiness dances as form. We can see things, like rainbows and fires and insecurity, even if we can’t get to the bottom of what any of those are. We can touch things like a body or a tree, even if such “things” are fundamentally empty of findable identity.
When we look carefully, we realize that the seeming structure of the world, the forms of the world, and the things we seem to know about the world are fundamentally unstructured, unformed, and ungraspable in their constant flow, dynamism, and aliveness.
We imagine things are a certain way which leads us to believe they are knowable and definable as being that way. And yet, this is not the case. Things are never a certain fixed way. We might think that an experience appears as some “thing” and then, owing to its dynamic nature, changes into something else. But it’s not really like that. The appearance of what we call the moment is simultaneously its disappearance. And so, it’s more accurate to say that there is simply change rather than specific “things” that are changing.
One may think that I’m speaking poetically or philosophically here, but actually, what I’m pointing to about the nature of experience is, from my perspective, an undeniable empirical fact. Just look at experience and it will show you this is the case, that what we think of as the current perception is literally here for no time at all, even though it seems to be. Just look, right now, and see that the very second the mind tries to grasp hold of what has appeared experientially, that appearance is literally no longer here. It’s like the petals of a flower that just continue to open and bloom, but never actually become a fixed, unchanging flower.
Seeing this opens us up to a very different perspective on life, one that reveals a world that is free of language and concepts and their seemingly limiting, problematic implications.
To quote from my last book, This Extraordinary Moment: “In life, we often feel as if we’re somehow stuck in or confused by some experience or circumstance and then proceed to try to free ourselves from this supposed bondage and confusion. But what we call “being stuck or confused” is literally defined into existence because, when investigated, the conceptual categories of “stuck” and “confused” are seen to be neither stuck nor confused, but a swirling dance of miraculous, wide-open, inconceivable depth, intelligence, and energy.”
