This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. We've got a good one for you today. I feel like this is one of those

episodes that's going to generate quite a reaction. So many of us are interested in our

family tree. We do 23 in me or ancestry.com. We look at black and white photos and quiz

our older relatives about the four bears. We never had a chance to meet. We want to know

what are our roots? What kind of lives did the people who came before us lead? And what

does it all say about us? Today, we're going to take this very natural human impulse to

a deeper and for some of you much stranger place before I dive into the basic information

about this episode. Let me just say a word here about magic. I, as I think you all probably

know, am naturally a skeptical person. I'm a journalist and agnostic raised by scientists,

blah, blah, blah. But I'm also a Buddhist, not in the sense that I pound a table and declare

that things like enlightenment or rebirth are absolutely true. I don't have any evidence

for either of those things. But instead in the sense that I practice quite a bit of Buddhist

meditation and have found that meditation and many of the other techniques that the Buddhists

recommend for doing life better really do work for me. And for me, at least it doesn't

hurt that modern researchers have lent a sheen of scientific validity to many of these

practices, all of which leaves me in a funny position vis-a-vis some of the more out there

claims that you can find in Buddhism, things like meditation giving you superpowers or

the existence of other realms populated by deities. The good news here is that the Buddha himself

explicitly said that you should not take anything he said at face value. You should check

it out for yourself, verify it through your own experience. Still, it's always jarring

for me when I realize that my teachers, people I know well and I'm personally very close

...