Our way of knowing seems seduced into seeing things – including ourselves as the self as the knower – as substantial. We believe and take for granted that the world is a myriad of things and objects, that the passage of time is real, and that we can rely on science to tell us how to live and what has meaning and value. Whether it’s our fascination with neuroscience or whether we are perpetual spiritual seekers, it seems the answers we find never seem to fully satisfy us.  And that’s because we suffer from a fundamental and deeply rooted belief and set of assumptions that there is a substantial external world ‘out there’ and a substantially existing internal world ‘in here’ in its givenness as “I-me-mind-mind and my-self”. 

This is what Zen Priest Steve Hagen calls "The Grand Delusion" – and it’s the topic of our conversation based on his book of the same title. Steve Hagen has been contemplating these deep existential questions and this great matter of liberation from delusion for nearly sixty years.  Now semi-retired, Steve Hagen is founder of the Dharma Field Learning and Meditation Center in Minneapolis, and author not only of The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don’t Believe (Wisdom, 2020) – but many other books, such as Buddhism Plain and Simple, Meditation Now or Never, Buddhism Is Not What You Think.

We cover a lot a difficult themes in this conversation, from how our modern worldview operates from unwarranted assumptions that perpetuates our belief in substantiality, to why our reliance on neuroscience to reveal the mysteries of the mind is a dead-end, to the challenge of using language to point out what cannot be grasped conceptually – and much more.  

Roshi Steve Hagen continues to teach occasional courses at Dharma Field. Although Steve trained and received Dharma transmission in Soto Zen, he has no formal ties to any Zen or Buddhist hierarchy. 

Is the climate crisis a reflection of our lack of understanding of our true nature as human beings in the cosmos? Could our inability to ask such difficult questions be at the root of our collective impotence to reduce carbon emissions and usher in the magnitude of cultural change necessary in order to avoid impending and irreversible tipping points?   

Graham Parkes, thinks so. In fact, Graham Parkes’ new book, HOW TO THINK ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS: A Philosophical Guide to Saner Ways of Living (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)  is exactly that - about how to think differently about the climate crisis – by learning from the great ancient wisdom traditions – particularly Chinese philosophies such as Confucianism and Taoism. Contrary to contemporary positive psychologists and happiness industry gurus,  so-called "human flourishing" is not individualistic in these ancient Chinese philosophical traditions, but rather, thriving is relational in and as a society - in a harmonious relationship with the natural world.

But as Graham discusses in his book and in our interview – our thinking in the West has been obstructed and taken over by very powerful libertarian ideologies and warped Far Right theologies with the backing of many billionaires and corporate special interests – particularly the fossil fuel industry. Graham painstakingly covers a lot of ground in his book – it’s a detailed, well researched and very sober analysis not only of the reality of global heating, but also of the social and political forces obstructing us, resulting in the predicament and political impasse we find ourselves in today.

Even in the hour and a half that we spoke, we still only scratched the surface of the many issues and ideas in his book, so I really do hope you get a chance to read his book.

A native of Glasgow, Graham Parkes has taught philosophy at universities in the United States, Europe, and East Asia, and is now Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Vienna. He has published widely in the fields of European, Chinese, and Japanese thought, with a long-standing emphasis on environmental philosophy.

Profesor Parkes was educated at the Queen’s College Oxford, in philosophy and psychology, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a PhD in philosophy in 1978. He he taught Asian and comparative philosophy for almost thirty years in the Philosophy Department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies,  and the Center for the Study of World Religions. In 2008 Parkes moved to University College Cork in Ireland, where he was the Professor of Philosophy and then Head of the School of Philosophy and Sociology. He founded the Irish Institute of Japanese Studies and served as Director for four years, until leaving Ireland in 2015. He has also held research appointments in France, Italy, and Japan, and has been a visiting professor in Austria, China, Japan, and Singapore.