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.