My guest this week is Dr. John Astin, author of the excellent book, This Extraordinary Moment (affiliate link). John has a really mind-blowing way of seeing all of reality, as you’ll hear in this great conversation. We talked about familiar concepts from meditation and mindfulness—for example, awareness of reality and finding equanimity—but John expands the frame in a way that’s truly liberating. He shows again and again how the reality we usually take for granted is way more stunning than we can even imagine. The upshot of seeing with new eyes is that our happiness is no longer tied to the ups and downs of whatever is happening. I know you’ll take a lot from the wisdom and insights John shares.

Topics we discussed included:

• Learning about my guest through the Waking Up app
• Finding a stable, indestructible well-being
• Our normal, everyday consensus experience of the world as describable and limited
• Two very different approaches to well-being
• The question of whether we can actually know and define life and what is happening
• Experience as pure mystery and inconceivability
• The concept of emptiness in Buddhism
• Finding absolute freedom from all the ideas that we hold about experience
• Linguistic descriptions as the true abstraction, vs. true reality as the infinite, indescribable nature of experience
• The absolute reality of impermanence
• The “present moment” as eternally becoming but never fully forming or freezing in place
• The nature of reality as already letting go of itself in each instant
• Reality as being already the radical acceptance of everything
• John’s ideas about God and the divine
• Divinity as the fundamental basis of all that is
• Believing that reality is identical to our concepts and judgments about it
• Discovering the “equalness of everything”
• My occasional befuddlement and frustration while following John’s practices
• Allowing specific practices to remind us that specific practices aren’t necessary
• Finding that meditation is no more meaningful or important than non-meditation

John Astin, PhD, is the author of four books exploring the nature of human experience—Too Intimate for Words, This Is Always Enough, Searching for Rain in a Monsoon and his most recent, This Extraordinary Moment.

He is also a singer, songwriter and recording artist having produced seven CDs of original spiritual-contemplative music.

In addition to his writing and music, John holds a PhD in health psychology.

He is an internationally acclaimed scholar in the field of mind-body medicine and a professor of counseling/clinical psychology at Santa Clara and Notre Dame de Namur University.

To learn more about John and his work, visit his website and follow him on Instagram and YouTube.