Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 344: Raghu Markus

Episode Date: July 13, 2019

Raghu Markus, host of the Mindrolling podcast and spiritual teacher, helps close out this defunct, spirit-baby version of this podcast. Next week: THE DUNCAN TRUSSELL POWER HOUR!!! Only movie stars from now on! This episode is brought to you by Squarespace (use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site). July 17th! If you're in LA head over to the Samarasa Center for a live podcast taping with David Nichtern. We're talking about chaos!

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Imagining yourself to be some wriggling skin-covered skeletal thing flopping about on the strange beach of existence. Looking around at all the other flopping little sentient fishies riding around in their flopping little sentient fishy cars. Listening to their sentient, style-floppy fish. Music, which many times is often the sound of a suffocating, sentient, confused fish dying slowly gasping for air. Trying to find any breath, anything that reminds them of the aquatic paradise that they emerge from. How terrible a thing to be a hyper-intelligent technology using sentient, primate, descendant fish with complete amnesia of the fact that you were once living in a beautiful ocean and now are flopping about on a very temporary, material, time-based shore. Just looking for anything.

Trying to find some sip of that sweet nectar used to swim about in. You try to find it by getting famous. You try to find it by getting rich. You try to find it in glory holes and on tender and various fuck logs in the forest that you squirm into. Laying in that mulchy pulp and feeling yourself being pleasured again and again by legions of strangers. And yet still, it's as though there is an untouchable, onyx stone deep inside of you. A thing that the world just can't quite get to. Like some horrific charlie horse and the tentacle of a cthulhu that no masseuse could ever fix.

And so, the life is spent flopping and flipping. Flops and the flips become precise, artistic, fancy. As we flop and flip, we flop and flip in fancy houses, fancy homes with fancy words that we use. Sometimes we say hyperbolic and we don't feel embarrassed. This, friends, is the reality of our human incarnation. But let me tell you something. The spiritual mumbo jumbo that I've been vomiting out for the last God knows how long. It's over.

I'm not doing it anymore outside of this podcast. From this point forward, the DTFH is becoming a competitive podcast. I just found out this is happening. Podcasts have gotten competitive. I was chatting with a friend who informed me that it's just a culture out there now of competitive hierarchical struggle. That the podcast universe has descended into something reminiscent of Game of Thrones. Some of my fellow podcasters have apparently begun to treat this gentle art form. Formerly based on recording authentic human communication with the intent of harvesting the sweet interpersonal wisdom fields of the very temporary shared mind

that forms between two truth seekers who've opened up their hearts and are listening to each other. As though it were a Wall Street style endeavor. They've taken a kind of Machiavellian approach to the situation and set their greedy sights not upon the noble goal of fishing for epiphanous moments on the sonic wind ships of technologically enhanced connectivity. But on the mundane goal of becoming massively wealthy by projecting warped, polished versions of themselves absorbed in conversation with stars of TV, film and music out on to the worldwide web. When I heard this news, I threw my chanting beads into my meditation fire and gritted my teeth in pure sanctimonious rage. I realized that to defeat my enemy, I would have to become like my enemy. I would have to become sleek, polished and competitive.

From this point forward, the Duncan Trussell family hour is just going to be the Duncan Trussell power hour. And we're only going to do interviews with the most refined guests. Anyone coming on the show will be processed through a nano swarm. Their atoms will be polished. I don't know what podcast you all are listening to. I don't know what pig troughs my sweet listeners have been poisoning themselves on. But in this podcast, when you hear a guest, you will know that he has been processed through an Anokian Reconfiguration Cube. Whoever that guest was when they came in here, they are not the same person when they leave. No, no, no, no. Their atoms have been scrubbed. Their memories have been erased and replaced with better memories. Their politics, their conceptualization of the way things should be has been replaced with a better conceptualization,

a more attuned conceptualization of the way reality actually is. And that attuned conceptualization is going to be completely based on what I think. From this point forward, if you're a listener, whether a new or longtime fan, it's no longer enough to just like and subscribe. Now you must unsubscribe from all the other podcasts that you listen to. Do it right now. Pause and go unsubscribe. If you're listening to this podcast and you're cheating on me basically, you're listening to whoever and this person and that person, you're on your way to work listening to some this or that murder show or this American life, then you might as well tie a millstone to your neck and throw yourself into the sea. A to Brutee or is it it to Brutee? Regardless, Brutee, you got to stop it.

No more listening to other podcasts. This will be your soul podcast. This will be your home. This will not be a place that welcomes polyamorous podcast listeners. This is a monogamous relationship, honey. You and me forever. So get on there and unsubscribe and like this podcast because we are going to the top. It's time for the DTFH to rise like a jealous, insecure, contemptuous, hypocritical phoenix from the pseudo spiritual ashes of its former life and crush all other podcasts until there is only one podcast. The Dunker Trussell fam, Power Hour, perched like a bloated, unspeakable primordial toddler god on the fucking festering corpses of all the other podcasts, scooping the yellowing, crusty, custard like ooze from their mortal wounds into its bloated, jagged-toothed, broken, purpley, swollen, herpified, agnified, chafed, and sliced mouth. Today, you will hear the last spiritual interview.

From this point forward, we are only going to interview A-listers and models. That's it. You're not going to hear spiritual authors who wrote a book about how to be happy. You're not going to hear people in the great Buddhist lineages. You're not going to hear people with some message of hope for the world. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I apologize to you for wasting your time with that blither-blather. From this point going forward, you are going to hear interviews with folks who have made fucking great films. Folks who you've seen on the view. This is the new DTFH, the DTPH Power Hour. Welcome to it. And if you're a new listener, don't forget to like and subscribe. We have a great episode for you today. Or I guess in the old days, it would have been great. It's with someone who I used to consider a spiritual teacher.

But now that I have realized that competition is the only way that we live in a world not of peace and interconnectivity, but a world of steel and fire. And thus I have abandoned all of my religion and spirituality. I'm wearing a suit of chain mail right now, oiled down and greased, a cod piece. I've got medals that I've given myself, dangling upon a beautiful triangular hat made of velvet. And do I have seven cats? Fuck yeah. And are they black? Fuck yeah. And did I start collecting baby skulls? Fuck yeah. Do I have a mummified corpse that I bought in Italy? Yeah, I do. Do I swim around in a Olympic sized swimming pool that I had placed in my backyard? No, not yet.

But I will. Because once this fucking podcast hits the top of the charts, I don't mean the top of the spirituality charts. I don't mean the top of the comedy charts. I mean the top of every chart there is. I'm talking about complete overthrow of all the governments of the world by this podcast. I'm talking about the entire planet vowing down at the altar of this podcast, where I will be sitting in a throne made of the logos of all the other podcasts that I have crushed. Are you a friend? Are you listening and you're a friend and you think I'm going to book you on the show? No! No more friendly this and that. No more after this. I'm going to plug a few of my friends' things on this. But after this, no fucking more. I laugh. I laugh.

As I think of the bloody baths I'm going to be taking, like Lady Bathory. Just cover myself in the blood of those who stood in my way when I didn't even know they were standing in my way. And I know I'll be happy someday. I know it. And I thought the way to be happy was to be happy with what you have and where you are. And just, you know, realize that actually there's no way to satiate the infinite, endless vortex of hunger inside of us by taking things from the material universe because anything in the material world is only that matter and we're things of spirit. That's just some shit you say at summer camp. From this point forward, it's fucking pirate ships, cannonballs.

It's axes like the kind you see on heavy metal album covers. We're talking about decapitations, eviscerations, disembowelments. We're talking about fucking corporate takeovers of small airports by Gordon fucking podcasting gecko, baby. We're talking about heads rolling down a sonic hill as I gallop to the top, swinging my magical, vengeance sword like a fucking cosmic weed eater. I'm going to burrow down, baby. I'm going to go straight to fucking hell and find out if there's anybody doing podcasts there. And I'm going to cancel those motherfuckers. And when I'm done with that, I will take the podcasting crown from Lucifer himself and place it on my head and climb up that great cosmic dangling dick that attaches to God's balls and cut them off.

And then at last, I will become the ubercaster as prophesied by all the world religions. But today we do have a spirituality podcast with one of my great teachers, Ragu Marcus. If you are somebody out there who is interested in this sort of thing, then I think you'll really enjoy this podcast. This is a person who has taught me a lot about being gentle and easy, easy on myself instead of always constantly hating myself and getting sucked into never ending self perpetuating cycles of deploring my identity and getting lost in my head. So just bear with me through this one because next week we're going to interview a fucking movie star. I will be right back. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and she told me that she was going to start her own business and she was going to at some point create a website. I knew why she was thinking that she had to wait to make the website.

She remembered a time when making a website could destroy your mind. Turn your guts into applesauce, make you vomit up your heart. But now we live in different days. You don't have to go crazy to make a website. You can use Squarespace. Don't have to lose your mind and claw out your eyes. You can use Squarespace. Squarespace has everything you need to create a beautiful website. You want to start a business smelling and selling your stinky socks smell and sell my stinky socks.com is probably available. I'm not going to look it up. You can do that yourself.

They've got shopping cart functionality, any Squarespace website instantly sizes to any device. They have fantastic customer service and they are the number one website design site on this planet or anywhere in the multiverse for that matter. And you can try them out now by heading over to Squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com forward slash Duncan and use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. You do not have to build a website to promote a business. Don't forget that you can make a website to glorify your friends. Think how excited your best friend will be when he sees that you made a website just for him that you can send to him and you could show him. Look at this. I put all those pictures we took that time. We were drunk in the Hamptons up here. Isn't it awesome? And then if he's like, you know, I'm not, I don't feel so good about that. You could say, oh, that's okay. Just, you know, since I made something beautiful for you, you could probably do something beautiful for me. Like, I don't know, tribute or something like that. And then this has worked for me so many times and has really strengthened many of my friendships.

You don't have to build a website just to make some Brooklyn eatery selling otter tusks to a very small subsection of a pretty much unknown demographic living in New York City. You can actually make a website just for the sake of pure chaos. You can worship the goddess of chaos using Squarespace. All you have to do is head over to squarespace.com forward slash Duncan. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan and you'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. My dear darling friends, are you ready to take the deep dive into the hardcore inner sanctum of the throbbing iron heart of the DTFH? Then it's time to head over to patreon forward slash DTFH and subscribe. You're going to get commercial free episodes of the DTFH. You're going to get long, rambling things, embarrassing things of me rambling on and on, which I actually love to do. It's my favorite thing on the planet.

In fact, if you want to hear me trying to work out not only my own coiled up neurotic knots and broken callous things that I have to rip open to find the pulpy painful shit I've been blocking out mixed in with more than likely completely incorrect interpretations of some of the great world religions. You can find it all over at patreon.com forward slash DTFH and for my subscribers there. I apologize. It's been a little sparse lately because of this unspeakable thing that I'm working on. I don't mean unspeakable and like a Mordor style unspeakable. I mean, I can't talk about it, but you'll see soon enough chaos. We're going to be talking about that July 17th at the Samarasah yoga studio. Head over there. It's basically a live podcast with David Nickturn, one of my friends who's also been teaching me a lot about meditation. And the subject of chaos is something that I'm quite fascinated by. And we're going to be talking about what is it and is it even bad?

Maybe I could even work in some chaos magic stuff in there. Check it out. It's on the Samarasah website. It's Friday. It's next Friday, the 17th. So I will see you there now without further ado, please welcome today's guest. He's a returning guest. He is the, he runs the Love Server Member Foundation, which is Ram Das' foundation. And he and I have some of my favorite conversations ever. And this is definitely one of them. So also he's got a fantastic podcast called the Mind Rolling Podcast. All the links you need to get to that will be at dunkatrustle.com.

Everyone, please welcome back to the DTFH, the lovely Raghu Marcus. Music playing Welcome, welcome on you That you are with us Shake hands, join me to be blue Welcome to you It's the dunkatrustle, dunkatrustle, dunkatrustle, dunkatrustle Oh, hey listen, I want to say something.

Sure. An ad. I want to do an ad. I'm going to India. All right. And I'm taking some people to India. I never do that. Okay. I'm going on middle of September. Do you want to come? When is it? Mid-September. I don't know, probably not.

Right. Busy guy. Yeah. Your whole spiritual life though will be. Do I want to come? Yes. Can I come? No. Well, maybe somebody else out there might want to come. And if you do, go to nourishinglife.com slash yatra, Y-A-T-R-A. We still got some spots to follow Ramdas' footsteps in the Himalayas. Yeah, so that's my little thing.

Anybody wants to go to India and be guided to some incredible places. That sounds awesome, Marco. I miss India. Yeah. But yeah, back to the valley of the shadow of death. So what I've found in this valley, been going through some tough stuff. How much of it can you talk about? You know, even if it was just you and me in private, I wouldn't be talking about it. It's just like rehashing slop, you know, just my own slop.

So it's like with these kinds of things, it's like inevitably if you're in a community, there's certain things that you, you know, you don't want to like involve people. You want to be tabloid. There's that too, yeah. Tabloid news. No, but basically really what's important is a lot of good stuff has come from this. Because really you get, when you're confronted with all kinds of obstacles and feeling as, I moved so I'm feeling unmoored and all of that kind of thing. So you start to see way more transparently the psychological stuff, right?

Well, yeah. So this is like, this is, I've heard it called liminality. Have you ever heard of this before? Yeah, but I'm not sure I know. The in between places are magical places. So in between dreams, in between jobs, in between, you name it. Any, when you're in the airplane, you know, when you're traveling places, the in between places are very special places and very magical places post losing someone close to you. Border areas are magical places, even if the border is one that's imposed upon just a chunk of land.

The moment you create a border, that border becomes very special. So you're in a liminal place. In between dreams, so to speak. A bardo, the bardo. It's a bardo. A bardo, yeah. And I do recognize that. Interestingly enough, at the same time, so I did a podcast introducing a talk of Ram Dass from some time back.

Again, an incredible talk was all around motives for spiritual practice. And he was basically saying, and I'm, he wouldn't quite characterize it the way I do. He's much more, not only eloquent, but also kind. I'm learning to be kinder through this process, by the way. Yeah. So he said most of us are doing spiritual practices that basically result in enhancing the ego story and the whole arc of how we think about ourselves, who we think we are, that instead of what's supposed to be doing, which is leveraging you from your head and thoughts and everything into the heart place, most of the time, it's supporting your ego identity, right?

And he said, so until, and this is what got me. He said, until you get at dealing with the psychological shit that comes up day to day, the habitual patterns, the neurotic, until you start to really deal with that, you can't even think of practicing the higher forms of spiritual practice, whatever they may be for you. And I really saw myself actually doing what we've, you and I have talked about before, spiritual bypass, right? Yeah, sure. So that's very much what it is. But it's really looking at all of these motives and you start to see more clear, which is a good thing around mindfulness and awareness and witness and all that stuff that we've talked about before. But I think it's really important to get at the psychological stuff that we really push away, you know, and they're all around anger.

You know, my reactivity has grown in the process of what I've been going through in the last number of months. I can see it. I can feel it. And it's pushed me into a place of, okay, this has to be dealt with now. This can't be shoved under with a lot of meditation and chanting and so on, you know, which is, which is, you know, very much a problem. What's the problem? The problem of instead of meeting head on these kinds of psychological things, you know, you're covering it with meditation. Okay, yeah, yeah.

By the way, if you think you can cover it up with meditation or if your practice is covering it up, I wonder if that's even a practice that seems like more like self-hypnosis or something. Well, most of us are doing all of these things and we're not aware, right? We just are not aware of these motivations and we're running on a treadmill and we built our story so well that we're going to stick to that story. Right. Right. It's not, being honest is a difficult thing. Well, it's not the, it's the sort of, you know, the fantasies, I think, related to spiritual bypass or the idea of spiritual bypass itself. Doesn't it seem to have like an implicit sort of delusion wrapped up in it?

In other words, if you think that you can spiritual bypass or you have hope, in other words, like the, okay, so the spiritual bypass concept is interesting. I love it because within it is a dream and the dream is that you can escape. So the idea is like spiritual bypass, even though it's looked down upon by many people, is it's a mess. Don't do it. What do you mean look down upon? Well, it's like that. I feel like it's generally, it's like a sign of you fucked up. You're using spiritual bypass to avoid, you're using some spirituality or religion, whatever, to avoid dealing with your real world situations.

So, but also what's interesting about spiritual bypass is it's a myth because spiritual bypass assumes that there is a way out. The idea is like, well, you know, at least I can always do spiritual bypass and get away. It implies there's a way out. It implies that you could even do that anyway. There's no way out. But people don't, they don't say themselves, oh, shit, I can go do an end around here. People are just ignoring the states that are very, very unmindful, shall we say. They're ignoring the anger, the jealousy, the polarization, the separateness.

They're making it whole by virtue of the story that they're telling. We are telling ourselves about should I be doing, I'm doing this wonderful meditation now and I'm getting better. I'm getting better. I'm getting more focused. I'm getting more one-pointed. I'm doing some chanting. And so in that space, I'm like, okay, you know, I'm okay. I'm not, I'm out of time and space for a moment and I'm okay.

So it's a, it's a much more subtle story. No one's saying, hey, where's the end around? I don't want to deal with this shit. It is, but that's why I think it's so insidious is because even within the term and within the terminology, spiritual bypass is another form of bypass in the sense that within it is there's like literally like if I've got a bypass. In other words, if there's something like, let's just say there's a, I don't know, a dragon in the path. And I imagine that there's a bypass. Then the bypass becomes a kind of hopeful situation like, yeah, sure, I didn't kill the dragon,

but I've like taken a little break from the dragon. But really there, it's spiritual bypass is to me a corrupted term in the sense that it's the idea you can ignore the shit on your shoe and other people can smell it. And it's like, if I chant the shit will not, I'm not going to smell the shit. If I go to Machu Picchu, I'm not going to spell the shit on my shoe. And it's like the truth of the matter is everyone smells the shit. Everyone knows that you have shit on your shoe. This comic, very funny comic Henry Phillips put this YouTube video up. It is one of the funniest stories of all time.

I'm sorry. Please watch the video. I don't mean to ruin it. But like basically he ended up in some like one of these tour houses. And, you know, like you like the fancy houses that you get a tour of. And halfway through the tour, everyone's complaining because they're like, I smell shit. And halfway through the tour, he realizes he's got shit on his shoe. And, and, you know, basically has to evade the house.

And he's just left a streak of shit through this like fancy fucking house. So it's the funniest video. He's a very, I'm sorry. I hope I didn't fuck up your thing. Please watch the YouTube video. He's such a brilliant storyteller. I do know justice the way he articulates his story. But the point is, this is spiritual bypass to me, which is that the concept is that there is hope. And even if it's a dark kind of hope, even if it is like, well, I can always go back to sleep. Oh, I can always, to me, it's like, it doesn't matter.

There is no, if you're chanting Hare Krishna, if you're drinking from the Grail Cup, if you're doing this or that, and you have shit on your shoe, you still have shit on your shoe. Yeah, and you cannot ignore it. You know, you know what it is? Frank Zappa had a great song. It can't happen here. You know, it's happening and you keep going, can't happen here. You have an accident. Oh my God, this can't be real. You know, even in the moment of impact, you know, I'm talking more obviously smaller things where you don't get really messed up. You go, oh my God, you know, you don't believe that it happened.

You don't want to believe, right? You are so separated from the experience because you're so trying for it not to happen. It didn't happen. It did happen. So that's, that's a gigantic example of bypass, right? Right. And let me bring up something now related to this that I think is quite interesting. There's a wonderful, wonderful YouTube video of Krishna Murthy and Chogyam Trumpa Rinpoche having a debate, essentially. It is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I've seen this phenomena emerge now more than a few times where you get these two spiritual people together who are leaders.

And there's a weird form of competitiveness there, which is really quite hilarious. And so Krishna Murthy is taking Chogyam Trumpa to task. He starts off with this, like, breakdown of why spiritual leadership, leaders in general, are bad news, catastrophic in fact. And also he's like, one of the brilliant things he said to Chogyam Trumpa was, why are you adding another problem in people's lives with this meditation? It's like life is already fucked up. Now you're going to have meditation to the problem of life. Like you're adding this other thing to it.

For real? Is this what he said? Yes. Now, there's a lot going on there that was brilliant because Chogyam, he was like, Chogyam Trumpa was just being very quiet, very, very humble. He was really listening to him and like really like not fighting back against essentially what was Krishna Murthy's like, chastising someone basically it seemed like, but the energies were so different because one was like really wound up. And the other one was just there listening. And it was, to me, it was like, you will know a tree by its fruit. And in this place, you know, one tree was pissed off and the other one was just there.

And it was a big difference, but Krishna Murthy did say a thing that has stuck with me. Well, asked a thing. He's asked Chogyam Trumpa, what happens when you see disorder? What happens when you're seeing disorder? And I would ask you the same question. When you're witnessing disorder in the world, Ragu, what is happening? Well, wait, that's too big a question. Disorder. Something's amiss. Something's awry. That's separate from my actual hands-on experience.

Something I'm watching the news. What are we talking about? Anytime you're walking down the street and you see a thing that seems amiss. Okay, there's a homeless encampment. Oh, look, there's a garbage on the floor. Oh, look, there's those scooters that are all around town now. Oh, look, there's this or that. When you're witnessing disorder, what's happening? What's happening?

So the first thing that happens is awareness. Awareness of a situation. The second thing that happens, depending in my case, depending on how relaxed here, present in the moment I am, I would go towards whatever that thing is to see what I could do. If I'm in a place of any kind of contraction, I might go, okay, I can't deal with this and make a left turn. So it depends on the moment. What that moment is, in my case, what's that moment when I encounter

and I become aware of whatever disorder it might be there? Prior to the action of avoidance or dealing with it, what is happening? Just awareness in the moment of my surroundings being here with whatever is in front of me. But I think, and again, it's Christian Emeriti, so who knows what he's fucking saying. But I think what he was saying is, you're seeing your own shadow when you see disorder. When you see disorder, I walk into a room that is a mess and I think this is a mess. Another person walks into that very same room and thinks this is a very clean room. So in these situations, what is happening?

But I guess you tripped me into seeing a homeless encampment. I had that in my mind. It's different because that involves suffering on other people's part. Walking into a bullshit room or walking into a room with people that are talking and you don't maybe know them and you're in a more clenched kind of place, then your shadow is just jumping the shit at you. Yes, of that. But in that situation, yes, absolutely most of the time,

in those kinds of situations where you're walking into something you have no idea about, you immediately start projecting and defending. Do you think it's safe to say that it's not just in that moment, but fundamentally when you're seeing disorder in the world, really what you're seeing is yourself. That you're carrying the lens of disorder around with you based on your expectations. Yeah, I do. But in a situation where there's people involved that are suffering in one way or the other,

if you're still in that place of projecting and defending, too bad. It's not a great thing. But even though I may walk into a room is what I'm saying. I may walk into a room and I see people I don't know whatever and I'm projecting in the shadows the whole nine yards that he's talking about. And the next moment, walk out of there and face an encampment where that shadow is gone. If I'm in an open place and I'm connecting with compassion in any way, you can't just walk into something like that and go, okay, I've got to ignore it.

So it's not black and white. And by the way, just to change the subject a little bit, not really, this thing of Krishnamurti meeting up with Trangpa. So one time Krishnamurti went to Kenchi to see Nimkaroli Baba. And he stopped by there. He must have been up in the Himalayas. And one of our mentors was with Maharajji and they went to the river, they asked the two of them to talk. They were sitting on rocks. He was close enough to hear what they were saying.

So Krishnamurti said, what's with you? You've got all these ashrams and building ashrams and you're a sadhu, you're a yogi. What do you need to have all these ashrams and buildings and brick and mortar? I don't know if he said brick and mortar, but Maharajji said, you're right. You're absolutely right. It's how I get my grub. That's what he said. And then he said, but you seem to go around lecturing around the world. Isn't that how you get your grub? Wow. What did Krishnamurti say?

The conversation ended there. Krishnamurti was like, he's like, he's still got a weird spirituality cop. Seems like you're just flopping around yelling at everybody. But to me, your answer, to go back to this concept of spiritual bypass, to me, the first thing is the recognition that as long as there is an identity, you're going to be carrying the disorder around with you. There's no way out of it. There's no way out of it. Spiritual bypass is not really anything. It's just more nonsense.

It's total nonsense. It's total, just self-indulgent bullshit. But it's not bullshit because we're human and that stuff happens all the time. Actually, here's something that addresses this that Krishnamurti said. I just happened to pick it up and I went, because I wanted to talk about this. I don't even like to term spiritual bypass because it's another one of those words, mindfulness. Ram Dass's thing about spiritual motives, really being able to witness your motives and see where you're just using this shit to feed your ego. He says, if we keep running away from stuff, how are we going to stop?

We'll keep running. We have to learn to turn and face some of these things head-on. That's what I was saying. It's funny, he said that. It takes courage and that's that whole story we've told a number of times about Maharaji being in a room. Krishnadas was in the room with him and there was a close Indian devotee and Maharaji who was translating, he said, courage is a very big thing. The Indian devotee said, no, it's bhakti yoga, the guru, grace does everything. Maharaji turned to Krishnadas and did that thing with his finger, exclamation finger. Courage is a very big thing.

That courage is what it takes to turn. It's to make the turn. It's that little turn. Courage is hard. Facing all these things inside of us, face all those miserable, selfish, self-centered, greedy, nasty crap that we think all the time about people, about ourselves. It's horrible. But you have to look at that. If you never look at that, it'll never go away. It'll stay in the background. You have to look at that stuff. And that's essentially, after all these years, Duncan, oh, by the way, yeah, we didn't say who you are. But if they don't know who you are by now, our listeners, they never will.

We could just do an intro. You can redo it. Who cares? Even who cares who I am? It doesn't matter if I'm the king of freaking Persia. Bhutan, I was going to say. Bhutan, who gives a shit? I can be a talking badger. It doesn't matter. So, yeah, facing this shit head on. And I was saying after all of the work, the big work I've been doing all these years on myself, that's another view, another story, another shadow.

It's like, who gives a shit? And I say that to myself, okay, that's okay. I'm having these habitual tendencies, neurotic tendencies, the psychological blah, blah, come up through that. What was that? Intermediate bardo you were talking about? Oh, luminality, the liminal place. Liminality, L-I? I think so. Okay, we'll have to check that out. Subliminal under the middle.

Uh-huh, right. Okay, so liminal. Subliminal, yeah. So within that, this has all come up. So you're absolutely correct that this has been a real opportunity. I mean, I'm seeing it as a real opportunity. You know, pain is there, though. Pain is there when you see. Because I moved. Here's just a stupid example.

I had to change addresses, change bank addresses for banks. So at one point I was doing this and it was getting tired. And the person on the other end kept, shall we say, making some small errors and it wasn't going through. And I was getting more and more reactive and frustrated and I just watched myself. I couldn't let go of it. I wanted to be there. And I couldn't believe that I wanted to be there going, what the fuck? I just told you. Here's the right address. One, two, four. I was, and I just looked at that and went, okay.

I must make an appointment now with... With who? With Mark Epstein. Oh, yeah, right. A psychologist. Psychiatrists. Forget psychologists. You can prescribe. Yeah. Anyhow, yes. Which reminds me of the show that you don't watch, Ray Donovan.

I told you about it. After he tries to kill himself at one point. So they had to get him a psychiatrist. Turned out Alan Alder played the role. Yeah. And I'll really help you. And Ray, here's my card if you want to call me. And he never calls me.

And then by the end of the season, though, after he's killed 14,000 people and gotten the shit beat out of himself and beat everyone else up, right at the last minute of the last show, he takes his phone out, he gets the card of the psychiatrist, and calls him and, are you ready, Ray? Yep. Are you ready?

That's how I feel after all this shit. I'm ready now. You're finally ready. I'm ready. For what? Just to face, as we just said, head on some of these psychological things that I am sure I've done the broom sweep on.

Okay. Okay. So I think, and so for everyone, that's extraordinarily important. And again, back to this thing with Ram Dass that I introduced. It's true. You can't have the openness and spaciousness that Trungpa Rinpoche talks about in relation to, say, meditation.

If you've got wrong motivation, it can't happen. You've got to dig back in to what those motivations are. I think I don't understand you there. I think I disagree with you there in the sense that- Well, that's two different things. Well, I mean, one or the other, both, I don't know. But like, I think that you sit down and you stay still for however,

whatever length of time it is. And within that, you start getting a sense of the world you're creating, the way your mind is like processing and outputting and creating a world. Within that is the bad motivations. Is, within that space, the bad motivation, it all becomes clear.

You have something to read. Yeah, I will, but I want just to address that. In fact, and we get a bad motivation, I don't like bad- All of it. You know, just motivation that is uneducated. I just saw a sticker. Uneducated action, karma.

Say it again. Uneducated action. Oh, karma. Yeah, I thought it was great. Anyhow, so it's uneducated. Just say it's uneducated. It's intention. You're going into something

and there's some subtle way down deep. It's not like, okay, I'm going to meditate, so I'm going to be enlightened now. It's way down deep where there's a, an effect is supposed to happen. There's something supposed to happen. Even if it's just, oh shit, I actually could watch my breath for two minutes.

Unbelievable. You know, whatever it is. It's, Joseph Goldstein had a great thing about this expectation. We did a whole podcast about this expectation, this motivation, so it's not bad, but it's supporting the ego structure. Well, this I want to talk about.

Wait, let me, let me just finish up. The, so it is, it is doing that, but at the same time, you are right. And what's happening is you're in the doing of it. These other states can come that actually undercut the bad motivation. Well, eventually you're doing it for the right reason. It's the difference between,

I think we talked about this. It's the difference between a fish shitting in a bowl and a fish shitting in the ocean. People don't complain about fish shit in the ocean. Plastic and stuff, they complain about fish shit. No one, I mean, I can't even think of a time I've seen fish shit in the ocean. It's too much water.

So to me, this thing that we're talking about is that, that we are dealing with the situation of hyper compression into something that we think is our identity, which is really just tuning into a very dense feeling state that if you start unraveling it has within it all the psychological stuff that we're talking about in past life stuff, probably at all that stuff. But the, this is what Trumpa says compares to,

he says, you know, you walk around the, you walk around and suddenly it feels like everyone's like, everything's against you some days. The horns, you're a car horn and you think it's someone beeping at you. You see a thing and you think someone's glaring at you. He's, this is happening relative to a practice and he says, suddenly you begin to get the suspicion

that you're haunted and what you're haunted with you begin to realize is yourself. You're haunting yourself and this is, as he puts it, quite natural and is normal because on the other side of that is this thing that he calls the remembering. It's a remembering state. So in other words, like that moment that happens

when you're sitting, that, that moment, I think he calls it the fourth moment, the gap, the liminal state. That fourth moment that happens where suddenly just out of who knows why or what or when or why, it just happens where all of a sudden, just for that wonderful moment, suddenly the liberation moment happens.

And in that moment, it isn't all that bad motivation. It's just, you're here, you're here, you're here. Yeah, you are, yeah. And, and so even let's say a motivation that has a cause behind it, hoping for an effect, it produces that state which, as I said, undercuts that kind of motivation. Then it just, it just dissipates.

Here's the thing with the- Before you eat that, Roku, just to finish the Trumpa point because there's an ending point to it. These two states, as he puts it, the fourth, whatever you want to call it, the moment, the in-between moment, the gap, this place where you're like that, whatever that is, and all the bad motivations and good motivations,

you can't have one without the other. In other words, for an identity to exist, for you to exist, for me to exist, for this to even be happening, we need the bundle of stuff, the bad motivations and all that stuff to meet this other thing, the awareness field, whatever you want to call it. What I'm saying is the two-

Yeah, of course, it's why we're in a body, it's why we're in an incarnation that has all this stuff, which is perfect for us to use to transcend, you know- No, transcending. This is where I think, this is what I'm trying to get at, is there is, the reality of it is this thing that we are with all the bundled motivations and all the shit that's good and all the shit that's bad, my fucking anger problems,

my latent alcoholism, my fucking, you know, evading reality to go into psychedelics or go into like, you know, trying to be a famous person or trying to be a fancy person, or all the stuff that is part of the Duncan Trussell package, unfortunately. All that stuff, right? This doesn't change.

No. But the, what is, that stuff is so dense and loud that that other thing that he's talking about gets drowned out. That's all I'm saying. So these two things, what I'm saying, these two things or at least what I'm thinking these days is that if I give up the project completely, which was my original conceptualization of what is possible,

in other words, I'm going to be loving awareness now or I'm going to be this or I'm going to be that. If I give it up, I think that's the courageous part. I was walking down the sidewalk today thinking, man, what if I just give up all this spiritual bullshit? Like literally just give it up, like forget it. It was a phase, whatever. It was just a thing that happened.

Give it up. What would happen then? It was really an exciting moment because I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. Because all of us, the courage part, I'm sorry, I want to get to the courage part. The courage part is Jesus is in the blind man or the rich man.

The rich man comes to Jesus and says, I want to follow you. And Jesus says, okay, give all your stuff away and we'll go hang out. And the rich man is like, I can't give all my stuff away. And Jesus says, well, it's easier for a rich man to get through the eye. It's either for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, right?

Now everyone interprets that as if you have a lot of money, you're fucked. But really what it means is what is the thing you value? What is it for you? It's your new Crowley Baba stories. It's your satsang. It's the community. It's all the stuff that you really cling to

and value that make you special. What happens if you give that up? Not in the sense of like, I'm finding a new, literally abandon it. Abandon all of it. Who are you minus all that stuff? What do you become when you drop the entire load? That is the purpose of all of this, isn't it?

And you know what? Your Duncan trusselness is not going to change. You are right. This is it. You got it for the rest of your life, right? Yeah. Isn't that a relief to be that hopeless? It's not a relief.

No, it's not a matter of hopelessness. It's a matter of like trungpa. I mean, I was in places with him more than once, and you could tell that his trungpaness, he was not stuck there. He was not glued to that thing. He was, and that's where we all aspire to get to. It's not like the raguness is not going to change,

you know, whatever my personality or your personality, I mean, what's going to change and what has been changing, it just took a little bit of a, I don't know why, a left turn here. Not really because it's given me more, much more bullshit to work with, but the glue starts to loosen up and you're not attached to that thing,

to that story, to anything. Yeah. Trungpa exemplified that, you know, because he was way out there in the world with his suits and all the shit that he was involved with, with Saki and the multiple partners and all of it. Yeah. I mean, he dug his way,

and of course people judged him big time for it. Sure, of course. But the reality is I could see that he had no glue with that Trungpa-ness, and he was delighting in it. He was having a good time. That's the best. And he was, yeah.

So he was, the gap between thoughts, this is from Mingjur Rinpoche, who is just phenomenal. We've talked about him. I did this podcast. Anybody out there hasn't seen, never mind listened, seen Mingjur Rinpoche with Krishnadasa and I,

because we, you know, we video everything we do. So just to see this level of clarity, awareness and love is extraordinary. You get to see somebody's really living it. He said, the gap between thoughts, like the gap between breaths or moods, allows us to glimpse the naked mind. That's what Trungpa's talking about.

That's what you were just talking about. The mind that is not obscured by preconceptions and patterns of memory, it's that fresh glimmer that startles us into a wakefulness and reminds us that clouds are temporary surface concerns and that the sun shines whether we see it or not. Exactly what you've been trying to say, right?

Noticing the gap. It's trying in italics. The noticing the gap introduces us to the mind that does not reach out to grasp a story of loss or love. Or a label of fame or disgrace or a house or a person or a pet. It's the mind liberated from those misperceptions that keeps us stuck in repetitive cycles.

It's the best. That's the best ever. And to me, it's like within that is so much, there's so much such an interesting series of sort of implications based on that. And I just love it so much. Because what I love is just this idea of like, okay, okay, okay.

We all have our bobbles and bells and whistles and glittering fakes and stories and all that stuff. If you and me were billionaires, for example, let's say, and we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of the woods and our phones aren't working and we're lost. The money is nothing. And the whatever, similarly, if you and I are heroes of sorts, you saved a bunch of kids one day

and I saved a bunch of kids another day or something. If we're in the middle of the woods and we're lost, the kids saving doesn't mean anything. And similarly, every single thing doesn't mean anything, literally, to the point where the only thing that really would matter is that moment and how we are there. That's it. That's it.

It doesn't matter. That's what I love about it. That concept is so beautifully blasphemous. Right, because to get back to the spiritual bypass stuff, really what we're talking about is you're not doing anything. Just face it. You're chanting and all your nonsense. It's not much of anything.

I really like that. It really isn't a thing. You're just roller skating around. You're doing backwards roller skating with your Mala beads or whatever. You're showing off your fancy tricks. You're pretending that there's a bank account where you store your japa that every single time you do a repetition of the

Holy Name, it gets clinked in some imaginary metaphysical bank account that builds up to some point where at some moment suddenly you gain some transcendent knowledge. All of it is complete, absolute horseshit. There's no medium it's getting stored in. There's no storehouse of your good chantings, your good meditations. You're not getting abs and some metaphysical astral body.

Once, if we were to present, if that was the presentation in the beginning, which I think is the honest presentation, then I think that people would be a lot less disappointed down the line. Because if you go to someone, you're like, you're not going to get better. This isn't going to change. You're not going to get some, you're not storing up this

and that, all of that stuff, that idea that you have, it's all just not what it is. You're literally, you should go to the gym. Just start working out. You need to go work out. Start painting and become a really great painting. Okay, wait, wait. Run that back.

I mean, really. I mean, the reality is people, you're too complex. People get in pain. They suffer. We suffer. Okay? Terrible suffering. Feeling of separateness, loneliness, all of it.

So you look for community. You look for, you read a book because you're looking for something that's going to give you a perspective that you so far have not encountered. You did that. I did that. That's true. Right?

And then you start, so then you do start to do these spiritual practices. And you are, yeah, you're told to meditate and get one pointed and you'll this and you'll that. Yeah. All of that goes on, but it doesn't matter. You know, it doesn't matter because you have a path, a Dharma, every one of us does.

And every one of us has a guide, whether you want to call it a guru or anything, you know, something in intuition that you, you're open to that's not colored by your, your judgments and wants and repulsions and all of that. So this thing happens on its own that, yes, it does hopefully proceed to the point where you actually go, wow, I am not believing in my thoughts the way I used to. I am not reacting and judging the way I used to.

I am now, I got, I did some psychedelics and I have the idea that, yeah, no, we are really connected. And what does that mean? And you do further investigation. Shit happens on its own and it has its own momentum. That is the, that is a, it is our true nature and it evolves in that way. You know, there's this great story. Again, something we've probably talked about before.

Ram Dass says to Nincor Obama, isn't it true that karma and grace are the same? Okay. Action. Whatever actions are going on that you are doing, they are completely within the universal Dharma. Okay, sure. Okay. You know what he said?

No. He said, I can't talk about that in public. What? Ram Dass went, what? And then he went back and he sat down for a while and he goes, I don't know. I'm sure that karma and grace are one and suddenly a messenger came, Dada, and said, Maharaj told me to tell you, oh no, Ram Dass had thought it can only be that karma and grace are one, action within grace, the universal Dharma.

It can only be that. And then he was sent a message, tell Ram Dass he and I understand each other very well. So I asked this question to Siddhima, of course, decades later, maybe only within the last 10 years, probably 10, 12 years, I said, I told her the whole story and she said, there is no way that a human in duality can understand that concept. So you act like it is not true and then wait. So that's a big thing. That's the mystery.

You got to respect that and go, okay, that's why I love his holiness, the Dalai Lama and his whole thing around secular ethics. You don't need to be a Buddhist. You need to be kinder, more compassionate. So we work on that. And my religion is kindness. All that stuff, I mean, again, let me just try to say it in a different way because I'm not saying the retreats are a waste of time or anything like that.

I'm so lucky to have come into contact with the spiritual community and for a lot of different reasons, one of them primarily being that if finally someone was able to get across to me, something that got me to start sitting every day and that like that, just that was great. And I'm so glad that happened. But within that place of a really wonderful thing has happened, which is that it just does not seem special. What I'm saying is I'm not saying it doesn't seem special.

It's not a big deal. And to me, that has been one of the greatest things is that really the like and hilarious to me is all of my God forsaken egoic spiritual bypass bullshit, which is to basically apply like a crunched gym or an equinox gym ethic to the spiritual path. You know what I mean? A sense of there being anything that's going to be different. I was talking to a friend of mine and he's like jokingly was like, I guess you don't get angry in traffic now that you meditate.

And I loved it because I was able to say now you're I got bad news for you. It's not going away, man. I didn't say that. But what I what to me, it's like the bad news is the good news. The bad news is where the delight happens. The bad news is where finally you really make friends with yourself. Not make friends in a bullshit way. The way like a fucking phony ass spiritual piece of shit, crystal bullshit, sanctimony

is fucking velvet glove on iron freak makes friends with you, which is the friendship of someone coming to you like they're a field medic and they found you blown apart on a battlefield and they're going to like sew your poor ass back together. That's not friendship. That's power and control and bullshit. But the friendship of someone who's like, I like you just the way you are to me. That's the best. That's real friendship and that's fun.

Then you can start having fun because okay, wait, I like you just the way you are. Maybe we could have a different mantra. You're just fine. We're doing fine. You're just, you know, we're human and it's fine. You freaked out at the fucking driver who cut you off, whatever it is. That's okay to immediately put in a different tone. You see, it's all about how we talk to ourselves, right?

It's just thinking about how you talk to yourself. God, I just, oh my God, I just freaked out. On the way here, okay, this is terrible. I had some business with somebody and I was, they had what I considered intensely wrong view. Okay, about a piece of art that we were using for promotion, right, a video. And he kept on a certain tack that I felt was very, very much part of self-cherishing. Because there was, what was involved was, you know, somebody that he would lose, that would lose faith with him and he was more concerned about that than anything else I felt.

So at one point, I couldn't take it. I started, are you fucking, I started yelling at this guy, okay? And then I was like, oh my God. You know, in that moment, it was, you get into the self-departure. Oh Jesus, what's wrong with, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. Whereas, okay, it's okay. Back into a nice little pool of warm water, perhaps, for a moment.

And then, and then, yeah, it just happens. And you're right, it just happens and we all do these things all the time. But here's why I want to add something to this point, because this is something that just occurred to me. Because like years and years ago, years ago, years and years and years ago. Years and years ago, this was like, you know, an hour ago. And for you, like, yeah, I mean, I haven't been angry in years. I'm just kidding. I'm just making a dumb joke.

I'm calling your wife. Some time ago, I was working, you know, I was helping somebody out. He was making this video and he was editing it. And we were like at a place that you had to pay for to do the edit. I got very frustrated because the machine that we were paying to work on wasn't quite working. And there were people there from this place, you know. And I felt bad for my friend, you know, he was stressed out about the thing and so I blew up. And I was like really like, you know, lost it and it was embarrassing.

And then afterwards, I kept thinking about the way I acted and how number one, just like how it didn't help the situation at all. Number two, it mainly just made people feel bad. But then what you're talking about was happening, which is the echo of the thing in my own mind. So anyway, then I was thinking about this, me and Nick turn to do this thing at Samarasah Studio in Echo Park. Sometimes we just have a, we talk about, you know, practice or Buddhism or some shit. And like, I was telling him, he's like, well, what's your intention for stuff? And I'm like, I don't have intention, man. And in front of a whole big group of people that goes, that is bullshit.

And it was true. It was deep, absolute horse shit. I was feeling all like lofty and fancy and I wanted to be fancy by having no intention. I have intention all the fucking time. It was just nonsense, really. I was just jabbering, trying to seem special or something, which I'm good at. And he are not good in this case. It was wonderful. It really burnt my ass though. For days, I was thinking about, I don't have intention.

And then I started thinking like, you have fucking intention. And then I started thinking, well, wait, what is my intention? And then I began to realize how muddy my intention was that I was basically taking my absolute confused state of having a sort of rotating list of weird intentions that change from moment to moment based on not much of anything. I was pretending that was a high state of, I guess, some glorious, holy ambivalence or something. You know what I mean? I love that holy ambivalence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good place. And I realized like, oh, the problem is that the truth is that it's not that you don't have an intention. It's that you have so many various intentions that you couldn't name one in the moment so you just said, oh, there isn't an intention, right? So then, as I was reading about this gap that he writes about and also reading Trump talking about like how the way he makes decisions is by being in the moment and allowing something to arise.

And then I realized, oh shit. Because this whole time I was like coming up with very dramatic ways of apologizing for this outburst. And I was coming up with lots of ways, just crazy ideas of how to apologize, insane ideas, plans. I was writing emails. I was like, you know, how do I express my remorse? Yeah, yeah. Really, like I was mapping out a whole drama around the thing. And then all of a sudden I realized, oh shit, what if I just have the intention

that I'm going to try to express gratitude to the people who are working so hard in this place the next time I see them. That's my intent. My intent is gentleness and that, and then don't worry about it. Right. And see what happens in that moment. For me, this abandoning all that stuff and just grabbing a very simple intention. Right, that's what you're trying to get at, which is absolutely wonderful way.

It's a great perspective instead of the rest of the stuff that we tend to. What a relief, right? Because then you don't have to do all this football level game planning. Yeah, exactly. It's really quite a joy to get to that point, or for me it was. Again, it's also about having a little bit of trust, faith, whatever you want to call it. I like trust better. It leads to real faith, which is a very difficult word for us to really understand.

But to have that, we are being taken care of. We are okay. We've got our stuff and we came in with it and we've developed a lot more since we came into this body. And it's okay. We're so judgmental. I am so judgmental. Like yelling at that guy today.

I mean, jeez. I had a moment where that gap was nowhere near to be found in that moment. And I know now that chasing it is just absolutely counterproductive and meaningless, empty. It's nothing and just being with it. And that's the courage to just make that turn. Okay. Here I am. This is what it is.

That turn feels so fucking vulnerable sometimes. That turn is like, my God, when you really make that turn and you end up doing it, I love the turn that you're talking about because you don't just make it once. You have to keep making that damn turn, depending on how fucked up your steering mechanism is. You know what I mean? You might have to hold the wheel all the time. But that turn to me, I love it because when you're making the turn, people maybe will pop up in your head.

You might literally have someone, I have people when I'm making vulnerable turns like that who influence me, who like usually like hyper masculine people pop into my head or like, what are you doing, you pussy? You can't do that. What are you just going to give up here? You're right. What the fuck? Let them know not to fuck with you.

I don't know why, but Aubrey Marcus came into my mind when you said, what the? I could see him there because he's so, you know, in the gym, Aubrey is just fantastic. But he's very sweet. But I know he's the sweetest guy alive and not to be in the Aubrey Marcus club, but I It's a great club. It's a great club because he's fairly honest with himself and that's what I love about Aubrey. Yeah.

So. But you know what I mean? I'm saying the turn is funny because as you're making the turn, it kind of knocks out like in the way when you're making a turn in a cart knocks up dirt. That turn knocks up all these mental things, which is like the first of all, the person who even gave you the impression that there was a turn to make or you know, the boundaries become clear. That's what I'm saying.

Big as well. That you know, there's a turn to make that you know, you can always start over. That's Sharon Salisbury's big thing. Just know you can start over. It's okay. You got that. We got it. It's human.

You can start over all the way down to the very last second. You can start over. I love that, which is why I love like particularly abandoning. This is why I love the Bhagavad Gita verse. Just abandon all varieties of religion and surrender unto me. God, Jesus, that's such a great, great thing to think about, which is like the invitation is forget it added to that as the, you know, he was attached to the flowery words of the scriptures as like someone who drinks water from a well and it flows everywhere.

These are two reminders of like, if you have the guts, not just to give up the obvious shit. I mean, on one level, think how easy it is to give away your money, give away your car, give away all that stuff. You know what I mean? I'm not giving mine away, but in a weird way, just think how easy it is. Like if someone came to you with a gun and they were like, give me your fucking car, you can give that up.

If someone's like, you can give up all your material stuff, but now think about the other stuff that's a little more difficult. For me, it's like, well, I don't want to give up. I'm a podcaster. Don't want to give that up. No. What I don't want, and this is why I like the name of this new Rom-Daz documentary. Becoming Nobody.

Yes. Yeah. Because it's like, really, not become nobody in the sense that you happen to be a nobody that everybody knows is a nobody. You know what I mean? Don't become a famous nobody. Become a nobody. Yeah.

Into the background. What about that? Can you do that? Can you sink back into the background? It's more than that. And the best example I have is my example with meeting Rom-Daz the first time. Because in that moment, physical encounter, there was nobody but me in that room. He wasn't in that room, the Rom-Daz-ness.

He had the ability at that time to just, I mean, now, even, he would do it from time to time with people. He may not necessarily have been doing it all the time. It took him to where he is now, where he is all the time in that place of not being Rom-Daz-ness. There's no somebody. And in the embracing of me in that moment, I got full on trust, full on trust that set me up for the rest of my life. Can I be honest with you about something?

That's one of the most frustrating things about Rom-Daz to me. I want him, like, when I'm around him, he is truly like what you're saying. And it's one of the most remarkable things ever to witness a person who has pulled this, I don't want to call pulling it off because it makes it seem trite or something. It's not like you did a jump rope trick. But simultaneously, my ego gets really squirmy around it and in the sense that when you're around someone, you know, else is like that. What's his friend?

He wears the kanga hats. He lives in India. Who's friend? Rom-Daz's friend. Your friend. Oh, KK. KK. KK.

Similar. Yeah. Similar no-bodiness. Yeah. And what's really fun when you get around that is if you're a somebody and like me, all fucking wanting to like blow trumpets all day and bubble machines and fog machines, laser lights, mugs. I want the whole fucking thing.

And you get around that emptiness that isn't giving you what you want. It's like my baby. Yeah. Right, same thing. I want him to fucking smile, man. Give me one flash, please, just one pure, beautiful ray. I love what you said to your baby. You know what, Forrest?

You better love me because if you don't love me, I'm not going to love you back now. You get that, Forrest? Yes. Yes. I love that. But again, I just want to say, I think that in our minds, we build up people like Rambaz to be walking human rainbows. We expect them to blow rainbow light out of them to be these kinds of like things that

we picture it. And when you encounter that kind of emptiness, you can only see your own like the fish on the. I got that. Yeah. Yeah. And that can be a very, very like. I know.

And that's all great. And you know, but the reality, the reality for us, I mean, Romdus is definitely in a very advanced state. There's no, no doubt about that. The reality for us, littler chickens here is that when you make that turn, the courageous turn to face whatever. And in my moment with this guy, I did by the end of the conversation, I made the turn and obviously I had calmed down.

And I just, as I made that turn and was a bit kinder in my tone, in my speech and everything because I was an unkind, he got receptive as well. He got kinder. So what, when you stop, you stop you, that's the becoming nobody. You stop the you, you, you, you, you know, John Leuker, you, you, you, you know, that's God, you stop that and the whole world changes. And it's, it's, you know, that's right. By the way, that thing you're saying there, because the idea is that, that Krishna Murthy

thing I really liked, which is that theoretically, if you're carrying the disorder around the moment you're not you anymore, you see a world where there's no disorder. Yeah. Right. And it's back to that. Yeah. And to me, that's a pretty wild thing. Because living in a world defined by order and in disorder, and maybe that's that world

that you're not supposed to talk about where karma and grace are the same thing and maybe that's not supposed to it. Not understandable through rational mind. That's all. It's not that we can't talk about Maharaj said that because he, he's living that. He's living non-duality. I mean, that's why they call beings like him Siddhas because they're actually living in non-duality, but still maintain a body by the love of their, they have for their devotees.

And they all have certain soul pods that Ram Dasa, you know, each one of these beings. And they do, you know, we're all little, look at us. We're all little puppies. They're puppets. Puppets or puppets, puppets. Puppy puppets. You know. That's a creepy situation.

Yeah. I don't want to be a fleet of puppet puppets, puppets. They're the puppiest of puppets that I ever saw. You are right. I think I've merged with the Buddha Buddha and become one thing. Can you tell? Can you see how? Don't you see how I've become nothing?

Don't scare me now. When you open those eyes and they're cold. Hey, so how about this? Glorify my nothingness. Glorify, bow down to my nothingness. Yeah. We'll do a video on that soon. I'm really the best at being nothing.

No one's better than me at being nothing. I've won the most nothingness-based being award. I want to do a meditation now. Okay. Okay. Because we're at the end of our festivities here. And I have gotten a transcription of a guru meditation from Ram Dass, since we're talking about him, from my son Noah.

And you ready? Yep. Okay. Now, oh, one of the things lately, by the way, we've been discussing with our brethren, teachers like Jack Hornfield and Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein. They've raised the idea of, don't worry so much about meditating a half hour, an hour, 40 minutes, whatever. Start doing mini-dose meditations, a couple of minutes here, just like step out, unhook

from your mind for a moment. You mean like micro-dosing acids? Like micro-dosing acids. Same thing. Except you just purposefully, with intention, step out, unglued from the mind. So this is one of those kind of meditations. It's going to be very brief, okay? With your eyes closed.

Because I only have two minutes. Two minutes. I'm just kidding. I know. You're busy. No, I'm not. I was a bad judge. I'm making bad jokes.

All right. Yeah. Don't worry. We'll edit them out. With your eyes closed, okay? Start to experience this body of light, of compassion, of love, of consciousness, growing in size. Just feel yourself expanding into the center of your being.

And just feel simple caring and kindness. Start to experience more and more of the universe as within you. Everything you can think of, say, I am that too, tat tvam asi, I am that too, everything you can think of, I am that too. And when you've moved out in space, in all directions, until there is no space, you can conceive of that you aren't. Now move in time, backwards. Everything you can think about in history, tat tvam asi, I am that too.

Now, future, all possibilities you could imagine, bring them all within yourself, bathe all of the future and all of the past and all of the present and all of there and all of here with self illuminating radiance, with compassion. See within yourself all the polarities, all the goods, all the evils, all the beauties and all the uglinesses, all the yin and all the yang. And now, of course, you include me and I include you. So in this place there is only one of us and this voice and this air is part of what we are and within us all the laws of the universe are reflected in all of the forms.

And if I am it all, then the word I has no more meaning because there is no not I and so there is no I. There and now there is only is-ness, just being, just being. That's kind of a nice overview. That meditation is everything we are talking about, where we want to get to just being. I like the part about the gentleness, that's cool, the kindness, the compact, I like plugging into that place. I am that.

We are everything and it's okay. We have it all. You think it's weird? I don't like guided meditations. Is something wrong with me? Yeah. No, I don't know. What do you mean you don't like them?

I thought, oh my God, I thought, I'm thinking while I'm reading this and I'm being in it and I'm feeling every note of it and I'm thinking, wow, Duncan seems so absorbed, isn't it wonderful? And now you're telling me it was a piece of shit. I didn't say that. But I do like it. I just like, I end up thinking I get stuck because in a guided meditation, they'll say a thing like expanding everything and somewhere in there, I'm like, what the fuck is that? How do I do that?

And then it's like, well, am I? You need special instructions, okay? So expand it. It's like Braille. You're going to need some help, okay? Expand into, it's just like letting go. It's like letting go of this, of mind, you know, of you doing in this thing going, what the fuck are they talking about?

It's too advanced. I'm telling you, and I don't mean that in a humble way. That's really advanced. That's what y'all do anyway. You all forget, like some of us are truly like preschool or like literally like I'm just enjoying just sitting still and like next time, we'll do a meditation where there's no guidance, but it's not very good on a podcast. It's unfortunate, but we'll have to figure it out.

There's going to be a guided meditation in front of this one that I will do. You will? Okay. Yeah, it'll be a good one. You turn into a giant vegetative plant and like you turn into the sentient sap oozing out of it, but it's a different style than what you're doing. But I do love guided meditations. I mean, it's a big thing right now with that, those apps and stuff.

Yeah, no, it can really help. Especially actually, I mean, these are, you know, what he said had so much in it that's more than a meditation. It's something to absorb. Right? This is my problem. I'm sorry, y'all. That was a great guided meditation.

My mind is so messed up that as you're talking about expanding into everything, I'm like, I got to expand to my house and my wife's going to kill me. Yeah, right. Okay. I'm sorry. I can't expand there. I understand that. And since I'm going with you, I don't want that to happen.

So kill both. Yeah, she'll kill us both. Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Trussell, for joining me here and... Thank you for letting... I don't mean... Sometimes I think I come across as like, edge-lording, as it's called. In other words, I'm going to say something blasphemous and edgy to be fancy.

I don't mean to be... I'm so lucky to be friends with you and all of this... No, I've really taken to heart this thing about the guided meditation. I'll never do it again. No, I just don't want the people listening to your podcast that they got being an ass. It's not that at all. I really am... When I am meditating and I do get lucky enough to get to the point afterwards where you know

you're expressing gratitude to the universe or trying to like put any attention... Expanding into space. I think of you all the time. I think of how lucky I am to have you as one of my teachers in the world. Yeah, no, I'm lucky to have you as a friend and everybody out there listening and how much joshing we do and all of that. But the reality is what's developed between us, not just the work and the friendship and the love that is a current through it all is really wonderful.

So... That's how I feel. All right. Cool. See you later, folks. Bye. That was great. Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

Please don't forget to like and subscribe to us on iTunes and to also unsubscribe from all the other podcasts that you may be listening to. Much thanks to Ragu Marcus for appearing on this episode of the DTFH. You could check out his podcast, the Mind Rolling Podcast, but you know the deal now. Fuck it. Subscribe to his podcast, too. Subscribe to all the other podcasts. I can't do it.

I can't be competitive. I give up. I'm defeated. Fuck it. I don't want to win. If winning means climbing up some trembling mountain of backs with your gross fucking hellraiser-style butcher knives, who wants to do that? That's not winning.

That's losing. Climbing up back mountain only gets you to the top of hell, motherfucker. So much thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Remember, head over to Squarespace.com forward slash Duncan, and when you're ready to launch your software code, Duncan, to get 10% of your first order of a website or a domain. Also subscribe to us at Patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Don't do any of it. Just have a good life.

Be as kind as you can. Even if a few seconds ago you were slinging psychic shit at someone who loves you or doing something dumb, it's just part of being human. We're dying. You can't really expect yourself to be graceful in the situation of being smashed into a gravity well in the middle of all fucking infinity. Give yourself a break. Have a great weekend.

I love y'all. Hopefully I'll see you at the David Nickturn thing on the 17th at Samarassa. Well then, may God bless you and all of your ancestors, both in heaven, in hell, in limbo, and all the places in between. Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two.

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