Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 568: RamDev Dale Borglum

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

RamDev Dale Borglum, contemporary of Ram Dass and executive director of the Living Dying Project, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about RamDev and The Living/Dying Project on their website, LivingDying.org, or through their podcast, Healing at the Edge. You can also follow them on social media, including Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self. Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package.

David Grush handed over extensive classified information to Congress and the intelligence community Inspector General, saying it exposes to secret programs that have retrieved and studied debris from alien spacecraft, which he says have been intentionally withheld from lawmakers and the American public. The loud sound it seemed to thank and came back like a slow voice on a wave of thank-and-a-s That one of DJ that was Izzy Cosmetics There's a star man waiting in the sky He likes to come and beat us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds. There's a star man waiting in the sky.

He told us not to blow it, because he knows it's all worth while it's all made. We've made a big contribution to this divorce. I can kill a snake and move to the club, I can rotate, and I can use my ZIF chain I had to phone someone so I picked on you Hey, that's far out So you heard them too So it's on the TV, we make the camera fun channel too Look out your window I can see

Is like, ah, ah, if we can sparkle, he may laugh Tonight, ah, ah, don't tell your papa Or he'll get us locked up in fright There's a song Man, why'd you get the sky? There's a starman Waging in the sky He'd like to come and meet us But he thinks he'd blow our minds

There's a starman Waging in the sky He told us not to blow it Because he knows it's all worthwhile He told me This is a fucking shit Starman Waging in the sky He knows it's all worth while he told me This is not the first time he's been a human Starman waiting in the sky

He liked it coming with us But he thinks he'd blow our minds There's a lot of starman waiting in the sky He's told us not to blow it Because he knows it's all worth while he told me Best of all, you can now react to messages by adding stickers to your records. Greetings to you, my sweet, pulsing, energetic blob of glorious organs, meat, and water. I'm so happy that you're here with me.

This is the Duck at Russell Family Hour podcast. And if you're like me and you're somebody who loves all the weird stuff, UFOs, pyramids, conspiracy theories, mud, flood, multiverse simulation theory. The list goes on and on. I could probably go on. You know what? Let's see how long I can go.

Listing weird theories, and I get to start over. UAPs, UFOs, government retrieval programs, pyramids, ancient civilizations, mud, flood, illuminati, the reptilian, Rothschilds, hollow earth theory, structures on the moon, the insolatists, Saturnian, satanic cults, ball, baffa, mystical, hidden orders of benevolent, clerics attempting to upshift global consciousness,

visitations from aliens, Crowley's encounter with a gray parallels in Tibetan Buddhism to current events in UFO history. The resurrection of Christ, the nostic interpretation of the resurrection of Christ, dangers of fluoride in the water, Chernobyl as a siop's to cover up something within the Chernobyl region. I just made that one up, but why not? Baffamette, the coming matreia? Okay, that's where I'm at right now.

Just a list of subjects that I'm interested in and that will definitely grab my attention if I see any post related to those subjects on reddit conspiracy or wherever else I go to slurp up my outside of default reality data sets. The point is, this is one of my favorite contemplative pastimes. Maybe that's not a good thing, but it's the way I am.

And so as someone who loves these things, and I know all of you out there who also love these things are probably somewhat delighted witnessing the shit show that is currently happening thanks to the whistleblower program that has been set up to allow private contractors to come forward with any data they might have regarding information related to the unidentified aerial phenomena that we have all been witnessing over the last few years,

a couple of years. I mean, for some reason they decided to change it from unidentified flying objects to unidentified aerial phenomena, which is obnoxious to say the least. I don't like people like that. Somebody just wanted to like, I don't know, reclaim UFOs. Maybe there's too much stigma attached to UFOs.

Maybe that was the idea, but the point is, thanks to this whistleblower program, we have all of these private, these people coming forward. Not all of them worked for private contractors. And most recently, one of them worked for the US government and some kind of faction of the US government that was investigating UAPs. And this person has come out and stated that, yeah, we have wreckage.

We've got smashed UFOs. We've got non-smashed UFOs. These are my words, not his. We have big UFOs, small UFOs, pretty UFOs, ugly UFOs. We've got wreckage. And not just that, we've got pilots, we've got alien bodies. Maybe some of them are still alive.

You didn't say that, I don't know, we just said pilots, which is hilarious. Now what's interesting about this is that it's not being met with the usual level of debunking that you often see, and coinciding with it, are all of these debriefings that have been happening with government officials not just from our country, but from other countries. So, this is fascinating in the sense that we're not looking at like third-hand reports. We're not hearing whispers of people who claim that private contractors have these crafts, have figured out how to reverse engineer these crafts. These are not the weird stories you hear about US presidents who had knowledge of these things, deathbed

confessions. This is coming from someone who just worked in a government program that was an IS trying to understand what the fuck these things are that we're suddenly seeing all over the place. Now even if this person did not come forward, I keep saying this person because I'm too lazy to Google search his name. David, I keep wanting to say David Grohlsch, but isn't that a famous drummer?

I'll look it up right now. Let's see, UFO whistle, blower, grush. His name's Grush. It's all over the place. You can just Google search UFO at this point. David Grush, a former intelligence official who led analysis of unexplained anomalous, not aerial anomalous phenomena. Now I get why they changed it. Some of it's not flying, I guess. Some of it's under the water. David Grush, a former intelligence official who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena

within the U.S. Department of Defense Agency, caused headlines around the world with this assertion that the U.S. had been collecting non-human craft for decades. That prompted the U.S. House of Representatives to announce an investigation into Russia's allegations with a hearing on the issue expected to be announced in the next few weeks. But skipping a little bit. Crush's whistle-blowing claims have grown more dramatic after he has emerged into the public eye and are now facing growing skepticism.

After initially telling the debris website, the government had possession of intact and partially intact alien vehicles. He's gone on to suggest the US has also encountered malevolent alien pilots. Now, malevolent is a strong word. Experts and you have a lore, has suggested his assertions should be taken with the grain of salt, question the veracity of his claims, and demanded proof. He is not presented anything like the evidence that we would expect to

believe something as extraordinary as this said Garrett Graff, a journalist, and who's an historian, who's upcoming book, UFO. The inside story of the US government search for alien life here and out there will be published in October. There's no firsthand knowledge. He didn't see these things himself. He didn't touch them.

He wasn't part of the operation to retrieve them. And we haven't heard from anyone who was. Well, you know, that's a pretty harsh criticism. But fair enough, until we set eyes on the damn thing, we should be skeptical. That's healthy. That makes sense, a little boring. But what are the benefits of having security clearance, having the resume of working for the DOD in a really weird department?

What are the benefits outside of some fleeting temporary UFO fame? What are the benefits of coming forward as a whistleblower at that level? Maybe I'm just an idiot and can't figure it out. Like a book deal, I guess there's some financial benefit, but surely there's equal if not more financial benefit to maintaining your security clearance and getting like a job with a private contractor. Surely. I mean, what's the point? Why would you do that? Doesn't make sense. And again, if this were just one person, you know, I think his critique would be more powerful, but the problem is we have multiple whistleblowers coming forward now. I talked about it on the Jeremy Corbell episode of this podcast.

You should listen to it if you haven't yet. And Jeremy talked about it. Lots coming forward, lots coming forward, not just one. So UFOs aside, just as like a cultural phenomenon, just as a fascinating blast of novelty. This is incredible, just that alone. Even if for whatever reason this guy thought it would make sense to destroy any hopes he would ever have of getting a job again with like security clearance access.

Even if he's just lost his mind, maybe he like somebody gave him bad toad venom. Maybe he went to a bad spiritual retreat. He lost his fucking mind and just he's having a manic episode or something. Even if no one had come forward to support who he was, not his claims, which has happened. It's still wild. It's wild that on top of all the other weird shit going on in the world, the planetary civilization must now contend

with an increasing number of leaks related to the existence of aliens. I mean, that by itself is wild and maddening. To me, if you wanna go meta on all the stuff that's been happening, including the pandemic, what is it all having common? And to me, it's confusion. It all has confusion

and common. The pandemic was confusing. It was frustrating the way that information was changing, the way that information was coming out that would seemingly negate prior information and then go back to affirming that information. I mean, you had, I think Fauci was saying, like, yeah, we don't masks. Don't want really going to work too. You just wear masks to the studies that came out. They're like, masks don't really work. All the stuff, the weird quality of confusion, the specific quality of confusion, seems identical in the sense that with a pandemic, with COVID,

and even with the conflict happening between Russia and the Ukraine, information right now, it's almost as though there's multiple timelines coexisting. On one timeline, Russia is winning. On one timeline, the vaccines help. On another timeline, Ukraine is winning. On another timeline, vaccines are poison on one timeline. The US government has wreckage on another info timeline. It's project blue beam. On another info timeline, it's just lies coming from fame seeking whistleblowers.

That to me is like the direct experience of this stuff. It all has, in common, whatever the particular historic moment is, is almost irrelevant compared to the confusion that it will instill in you if you get too caught by it. It's confusing. You have what is obviously some kind of arm wrestling match happening between people who are attempting to shape the narrative, who are attempting to get their version of reality out into the world. And where it gets really weird is we shouldn't be saying version of reality. It should just be something more related to like this is reality. There's just one reality.

But no, it's as though some kind of bullet had been fired into the windshield of default reality and all these cracks are appearing. And it's confusing. So have some compassion on yourself. You're not alone. If you feel completely confused, frustrated, overwhelmed because you have been grabbed by this. And why wouldn't you be?

Why wouldn't you be grabbed by a whistleblower saying, we have alien crafts? And why wouldn't you be grabbed by the videos of these senators post private debriefing when they are in the hallways and they tell us to lock our fucking doors? I don't know if you saw that with Senator Ted Kennedy, but it's not exactly comforting,

even if he is being tongue in cheek. And again, I'm fully comfortable with my lack of journalistic integrity. I didn't go to school to learn to do that. And I am easily, easily tricked, sadly. them easily, easily tricked, sadly. Often sending out pictures and memes that someone is like, that's 100% bullshit and showing me why.

So I admit it. I'm not ashamed to admit that. It's easy to get tricked. Sometimes it's fun to get tricked. But truly, if there's anything in the news cycle right now, worthy of your attention, worthy of contemplation, worthy of your own personal exploration of why right now. It's this stuff Why right now Maybe my naive idea is that they have so much control over the outflow of data that they release it intentionally

You know, so there is no that why is just because this is when it happened It's like asking why right now did a bird shit on your head? It wasn't a conspiracy. The bird had to shit. Your head was in range of it's shit. I mean, maybe that's the problem. Like the US government, the federal government has been so good at projecting this aura of control

that anytime stuff like this comes out, you assume it's intentional. They are intentionally dripping weird information into our brains with some mysterious motive behind that. And when in fact, it's just courageous people who are sick of holding on to secrets that have the potential to completely, permanently alter our paradigm regarding who we are and are we alone in physics. It could just be, this is the thing. This is the thing that like we knew would eventually happen. You stay on the planet long enough, you get born in the right timeline, you see the ships, they come by every once in a while. They don't care about who the government is. They don't care about which monkey descendants have have the gavel.

They just come back and do whatever the fuck they do. And that's a little creepy to think about. Or it's just a sign that we have too many cooks in the fucking kitchen. It's just a sign that once you like create like bizarre aspects of the federal government and then fragment those departments, separate people, control the flow of information

to the point where people who need to share information can't, then you could just expect shit like this. You could expect people who got confused regarding what they heard coming out. Or you could use the useful idiot model. I don't know if you've heard that or not. I think it's a Russian propaganda model, which is leak crazy information to people

knowing that they will spread that information and you won't be in the crosshairs as the messenger. I don't know what it is but I love it. Bottom line, I love it. What is more exciting? I mean the last time That we got even close to this was Roswell Which was very quickly debunked as a weather balloon now with what this was a blower saying we have to rethink all the stuff You have to go back all the way through Every UFO abduction you've heard about every fucking UFO story you've rolled your eyes at. You have to go back and if somehow these hearings are actually effective or if because this guy had the guts to come out and say he'd been told this stuff, other people come out. So you get like a kind of me to movement situation, but for UFOs,

then one of the delightful things we're all going to be able to do is go back and look at all the stuff that was intentionally debunked. It was fraudulently debunked. We get to debunk the debunkers. We get to go back and say, oh shit, maybe that was real. Fuck, maybe you're as well really was a, an alien ship. Think about all the cattle mutilations, the crop circles, the abductions. I mean, again, it's a thought experiment, but if by some bizarre miracle, all this stuff turns out to be true, I Think there is going to be so much anger From people so much anger at being misled It being told that the sophisticated mindset in relation to

UFOs u a p's Was to instantaneously not believe What people are saying if they were talking about UFOs. Oh, they're crazy. They're having a manic episode. They want attention. They're full of shit. That's not real. They couldn't be real. How could that be real? We would know by now. No one takes good pictures of these things. How come there's no real pictures? Where's the pictures of the wreckage? It's all bullshit.

Complete lies. Those people are going to feel embarrassed and angry probably when they realize that they were misled intentionally by a relatively small group of people, probably in the military industrial complex, who had some dark motivation for keeping this information from the rest of us. Maybe that's the thing. It's kind of like,

I don't know if you have that thing happen where someone texts you and you forget to text them back, but two days have passed and you're like, fuck. Now if I text them back, I seem like such a dick. My options are, I tell a lie and I'm like, oh shit, sorry, I missed your message, but you didn't, you saw it. Or you just text him back, like,

and apologize and just feel like an asshole for not texting back, or you just don't, if you're me, don't, because you get into this neurotic paralysis. And so then, by then, a month is passed, now you definitely can't text them back. Now you really seem we are texting someone back after a month. And this can go on forever. Maybe we're looking at that, but with UFOs.

Maybe they're just like, shit, we can't tell them now, because we should have told them two years ago. They're gonna be fucking pissed. So just don't tell them, we'll keep it a secret forever. I mean, probably there is some legal implications too, right? Like, again, thought experiment. The whistleblower is telling the truth. Maybe there's like some real like like ways people could

go to jail for hiding this information from us. I don't know, but enjoy it. Now there's lots of other UFO stuff going on. I will not ear be you about the Las Vegas UFO gray encounter, but I would invite you to Google search that and specifically to watch the video, the kid who saw this thing posted, it's so weird and so funny on one level and then just so strange. You know what it reminds me of? A low-budget, found footage movie. That's what it feels like. When you're watching that video, it feels like all of this.

Feels like you're watching Act One in some kind of found footage movie about an alien invasion. That's what it feels like. That's why it's so surreal, because we've encountered different versions of this except in the movies. We've encountered different versions of this on TV shows. I mean, why is a kid V? Oh my god. Did you guys see V? Whoa, it was so cool. Just all of a sudden these big ships appeared over the cities of the world.

They didn't do anything. They just kind of hovered there for a while, freaking everybody out. And then, you know, there's a whole dumb story about it, but the point is, this has been in the zeitgeist, just in the fiction part of the zeitgeist. And so to see manifestations of the exact scenarios that we've seen in movies, it's a little off-putting. It's surreal.

My brain can't really accept it. And I think a lot of people can't accept it and just don't want to deal with it, which is why don't do what I've been doing. Don't ear beat your partners, your wives, about this too much if they're not interested. If they don't want to hear it, even though you want to. They just, some people, they're just,

they got other fucking fish to fry. That's another wonderful explanation for why not to release this stuff. Maybe there's just a general understanding by sociologists working for the federal government that there's not going to be a real net positive from people shifting into a cosmology that involves extraterrestrial civilizations. I mean, it's not their place. Truth is truth. If it's upsetting, it's supposed to be upsetting.

And the upset theoretically helps you evolve as a person or a planet. But maybe that's it. There's like, yeah, okay. For you, maybe, but not for everybody. For some people, this could completely drive them permanently nuts. Some people won't be able to function in society anymore. If they have to deal with the reality that we're just one tiny part of an ever-growing galactic civilization

and that we're getting invited to join it right now. Some people might not like that. A lot of people might not like that. I mean, to me, if you ask me, it's a hell of a lot better than like we're completely alone in the universe, which by the way, it seems much more improbable, much more improbable than there could be aliens. But who knows? I'm no sociologist.

I'm no cultural anthropologist. Is that even a thing? Maybe this is supposed to be private information for a reason. And the reason isn't because they're trying to reverse engineer this stuff so that they can create a superior military. I mean, come on. Why would they want to do that? No.

We all know the truth. Most of the time, the US government, when it makes decisions, it's for us. It has nothing to do with making money or power. So probably the reason they haven't shared this information with us is because they want to protect us, because we need to be protected, because we need to be kept safe. And a nice circumference of truth, and separated from truth, they could upset our poor little human lives. Did you give us gas? And then the government will come and have to burp us.

We don't wanna get burped by Uncle Sam. That's not gonna feel good. Uncle Sam putting you down on his knee or throwing you over his shoulder, smacking your back with his big, thick, calloused hands. We have a wonderful podcast for you today. Returning guests. Rom Dave.

This was a member of the Rom Doss Satsang, as we call it, the communities. Friends with Rom Doss, he was fortunate enough to hang out with Neem Crowley Baba, the great guru that you are probably aware of if you're at B here now, and I love our conversations. He runs a foundation called the Living Dying Project, which I would invite you to check out. It's not hospice in the sense that hospice is a lot of what hospice does, is just getting you ready to die comfortably, taking care of the families of the dying people.

Hospice is incredible. This is a foundation that helps dying people live while they're still here. Teach us a mindfulness practice and spiritual techniques that allow people to fully spend whatever amount of time they have left in the human realm in a way that maybe isn't so marred by anxiety and fear and guilt and all the things that go along not just with life, but the end of life. So he's been working with dying people for a very long time and anytime you run into

people who have made that their lives work, you inevitably encounter a beautiful wisdom, a kind of expansive consciousness that comes from someone really experiencing every day the reality of our limited time and our human bodies here on Planet Earth. Also, he's just funny, I love him. So we're gonna jump right into that, but first this. This episode of the DTFH has been sponsored by Better Help.

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Every time that I go to my therapist, there is a moment, there's a pause, I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna cancel the day. I don't know if I wanna take a submarine down into the subterranean depths of my consciousness today. I don't know if I want to confront the demons, bats, warlocks, prants around down there.

But what's awesome about therapy is, there's this alchemical thing that happens where those demons, warlocks, and bats get transformed into angels. You're free to them. Not free to them in a sense that you gotta emulate them or throw them into some kind of deeper pit, but somehow just by confronting them, seeing them, knowing they're there, they change. It's something that isn't sinister anymore. If you're thinking of starting therapy,

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And we are back real quick. Won't you subscribe to my Patreon? It's patreon.com for slash DTFH. Next week, if you're listening to this on the week of June 9th, I'm gonna be at the Dania Beach improv in Florida. And for God's sake, please come to that. If you have to fly from Afghanistan,

you should come to these shows. This is the last standup show, standup weekend. I'm gonna be doing for a few months because after that I'm going on paternity leave. So to speak, I just have to be here. I can't be out on the road if Aaron, my wife, has the baby. Not cool, not cool to tell my daughter. I missed her birth because I was performing stand-up. It's a weird story. You got to be there. I want to be there. So

taking some time off from going on the road, that being said, if you live in Austin, I will have some shows coming up at the mothership that you can come see me at. And you can check the website for that. Now, everybody, please open your third eyes, stretch out your heart, chakra, since some sweet beams of perfect love light out into the cosmic, mycilial mystical web that connects all of us to today's guest feels all you love. Welcome back to the DTFH Ramdev. I do, I will, I do, take care of you.

I love you, I love you. It's the Duncan Trash, the William, the William, the William, Ramdev, welcome back. Yeah. How you doing off mic, you were telling me, you just finished your book. So this is a great day of a celebratory day. How are you feeling? Yeah. Well, about 30 years ago, I was teaching a workshop with a friend of mine who was a writer and he had a book agent who was the Polish Pope's book agent. And she said

to me, I'd never met somebody who was such a good book in them who hadn't written the book as you. And that was 30 years ago. So I finally wrote it. It's been kind of over my shoulder there for a really long time. What's the name of the book? It's called Life in a Body. Ah, subtitle. Subtitle. How to live your life so you can die without fear? Well, I mean, I would, one thing I love about what you teach and practice is just, you know, it helps me recognize that probably the way I'm doing right now is how I'm going to die, right? It's as simple as that. Like, if you're living every day with some level of fear,

some level of anxiety just under the surface, why would you think it's going to be any different when you die? Well, because what the first thing that happens when you die is you realize you're not your body. One of the big difficulties is it seems like you're in Texas and I'm in California. Yeah. And we're two separate people and we've got these bodies that are going to die. One of the big difficulties is it seems like you're in Texas and I'm in California. Yeah. And we're two separate people and we've got these bodies that are going to die. But at the same time, if you look at your hand, your body is an object.

Yes. But to say you're not the body is obviously ridiculous at the same time. You can look in a mirror and there's somebody there. But what I'm saying is that there's these two levels of reality. Relative reality where we're separate, we got a body, we suffer, we die, we elect Donald Trump, we do all these things. And there's another level of reality where it's all one.

Maraji said, I'm always with you, we said, somebody asked him, is the world real? He says it's completely real. It's completely false and it's both at the same time. Most people are lost and it's completely real. And when you die, one of the first things you see that it's not completely real. Like during a nerdy death experience, if somebody's been blind all of their life, they can see what's going on at the site of the accident or the operating room or whatever. Interesting.

If they've got like tons of narcotics in their bloodstream because of a surgery, analgesic medication, it's not affecting their consciousness. They're not the body. So that one way of looking at spiritual practices we're preparing to die by identifying more with who we really are than with all of our conditioning. And who we really are is pure consciousness. Round us at the end of his life was always saying, I am living awareness, right? Or loving awareness. Loving awareness, right?

That's what I meant. I know. You got it. Living awareness ain't bad though. Yeah, so like Gandhi when he was assassinated, somebody pumped three bullets into him and he was falling over, he said, Ram Ram Ram, the name of God. Right. And he didn't say Ram Ram Ram because he was shot. He said, Ram Ram Ram because he was shot. He said Ram Ram Ram because he was always saying Ram Ram Ram and dying was another moment of Ram Ram Ram.

Right. Right. So when Kennedy got shot, he probably wasn't saying Hail Mary or something like that. He was like, what the hell was that? I don't think he was saying anything. His brains were splattered all over the car. I'm pretty sure he was just out. There's still one second there.

Anyway, I just say it for sure. were splattered all over the car. I'm pretty sure he was just out. That's the second there were anyway. I was just saying for sure. So a lot of people wonder what is the difference between this kind of realignment with non-embodied consciousness and disassociation. What's the is there a difference between the, what you're talking about and what causes a lot of people anxiety if they happen to experience it, which is a sense of unreality, a sense of no longer being connected to the body, a sense of maybe not being anything at all other than some kind of awareness. Some people find that to be a really unnerving experience that happens during horrible experiences they're

having. Like almost an evasion of reality. Right. I got an email from a guide just last week saying I took your online course. I really liked it a lot. Plugged there. We got an online course on our website. But he said, there was a guided meditation in your course. And at the end of the meditation, I got to this place where I wasn't me. There was just, there was nobody and it was really kind of scary, right? So whether you get there through meditation or whether you get there through a dissociative experience or something, it can be really difficult because you're not who you thought you were. Traditionally, however, these practices to take you into this boundless spaciousness

are only done after a lot of mindfulness and a lot of compassion practice. So that the way into this spaciousness is through an open heart rather than if you just get dropped in there through serendipity or a random guided meditation or a drug or something like that, it's like so discontinuous from all of your assumptions that it can really be a freak out thing, right? It was my, one experience I had on drugs with it was the opposite, which was,

I mean, as I recall, I start remembering, I remembered I was doing something. So I'm thinking, what was I doing? I was doing something. I was, oh, I'm human. Oh, I was being human. Oh, I'm human. It was such a bummer to go. And whatever the state I was in, you know, I, the only way that I knew that I was no longer that state was, you know, when I started coming back into my, started coming back into my current incarnation. And I was not excited about it. I was a real bummer, kind of. I didn't want that.

I mean, it was going from some kind of beautiful, very earthy consciousness where there was no body to this hairy thing. And I didn't like it much at all. I mean, so is this a product of age? Maybe it's the younger people who are more freaked out by no longer being their body. maybe older folks, older we get. That's such a great way to start a paragraph. The Buddha say you could get away saying almost anything about it. Anything. But the Buddha say that this earth has the perfect amount of friction to wake up.

If we're harder, nobody'd want to do it. If we're easier, nobody would want to do it, right? Right. But yeah, it's a job to drag around the body and have a personality in all this childhood conditioning and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, there's this great line by Rumi where somebody's complaining to God, hey, I'm praying and I never hear back from you. God says in the poem, the yearning you cry out from is the return message. So feeling that sense of my body is like having on two types of a shoe and I really don't

like it, that sense of resistance and friction and uncomfortable is exactly what's driving us to want to figure out who we really are beyond that. It reminds me of things I've heard about regarding the experience in the womb, which gets increasingly uncomfortable, apparently, for the kid. You know, at first, you're floating around in there. There's lots of room, and then it gets tighter and tighter. As you grow, the tighter and tighter and tighter, until finally, at some point, I guess you're like, fuck this, pull whatever cord, baby's pulling there.

I know it's not a literal cord, but that's how I fantasize. It is a birth cord and then out you go. But it reminds me of that. I don't see any reason it wouldn't be like that. I don't see any reason. The assumption is we go from a womb into final reality. Like this is it.

But I don't see why we don't go from womb to womb to womb. I can jump in. It's like the same. But the big difference is when you're in the womb, you can't stay there. You got to get out. Right? Yeah, well, you can't stay here either, can you? But, but you don't get to what we're saying is that you can pull that cord before you leave the body. When you're in the womb, you're in the womb and nine months comes or whatever, and then it's time. I mean, like organically, you've got to leave. But what we're saying is like St. Paul in the Bible says, die before you die. Can you pull the cord before you leave the body? Can you dunk an N.E. Ramdev right now pull the cord

so that when we're together? Yeah, we get this thing that there's two bodies and we're having a conversation and it's gonna be a podcast. And there's just this one, this one thing. Like these three guys just got a Nobel Prize for quantum entanglement, Nobel Prize in Physics, which essentially says there's only one thing.

The universe, one song, there's only one. And that's going on at the same time as there's the two of us, and all of the separation and the duality. Can we pull the cord dropping into that spaciousness? So like Ramdha said, he had this metaphor that spiritual life is like jumping out of an airplane, and part of the way down realizing it's okay,

because I mean, part of the way down realizing, hey, because I mean part of the way down realizing hey, I don't want to run a parachute right and yeah really scary but then further the way down realizing it's okay because there's no ground Yeah, yes, I know in that moment Go Well, no, please continue. I'm sorry to cut you off. Then I'll make whatever point I was trying to make. Yeah, so I'm just saying that... That yeah, we suffer, yeah, we have a body.

And it's like pulling the cord you want to get out, but the baby doesn't have much choice. He's pushed out when nature tells him, we have a choice through practice, through introspection, through devotion, through surrender. To get out before nature says it's time to get out of the body. Like we're practicing dying, we're practicing the pulling the cord moment to moment day to day. Right. This is, you know, what I love about, like a mindfulness practice is, or my mindfulness practice, it's, it gets really interesting. At first, it's, at least for me, it was very, it's quite confusing. And then you start getting these little glimpses of what you're talking about.

And those glimpses seem astounding, at least for me. Like it's like, oh my God, like every single glimpse I've caught, I've been like, I am now and officially enlightened. Like I have woken up. And then plunged back into like the world or the body or the day-to-day stuff, you completely forget about the glimpse. And then the glimpse, you and you wonder, well, I ever have that again. Like, and you know, the first glimpse I caught of it was not for meditation.

It was like many people in the West LSD. It was really good LSD. And suddenly experiencing that unitive consciousness, whatever the word you want to use for it. And realizing this is why acid is so popular. It's not the skulls you see bubbling in the ceiling. It's this. This is whatever this is it.

And then, you know, years and years pass before anything like that happens again. But those moments for me, they do, they become more common, more familiar, less shocking. And then it seems like it kind of starts balancing itself out where you get to experience life at some fundamental level. And then you get lost, maybe a little less frequently into the body. And that for me, those are, that's a real shocking thing now where, you know, it's just weird. You just suddenly wake up and you're like, shit, I forgot all of it. How many days passed?

Where am I? Like an alcoholic in a hotel room. Where's the, where, what hotel is this? Where, what the fuck? I was so, you know that. It's like, whoa, I really lost it. I was back deep in the deep, trussle experience. I'm pissed. I'm like annoyed. My needs are not being met. And then you remember it again. And it's just an interesting game of ping pong between these two coexistent realities. So we started this conversation about the difference between this associate of experiences that are really scary and difficult and getting there through meditation or something like that.

Yeah. What? Whether it's taking a psychedelic or meditating, there's a very clear sense that this is not a hallucination, this is not a fantasy. It's the nature of reality that's always there, but I'm forgetting it. You use the term forgetting, but something's being revealed that's always always there. And if you're thrown into that suddenly, it's very disorienting. But if through mindfulness practice, Vapassana literally means self-inquiry, insight meditation. You have insight into the nature of reality. And so as the mind begins to calm down and the heart begins to open, then we have a foundation.

We have some sense of being able to deal with this continuity, which really isn't even discontinuous. It's like, okay, I trust my heart, I trust being here, and maybe it's not the way I think it is. So that really there's two kinds of suffering. There's suffering from early childhood conditioning and there's suffering that I think I'm a separate human being. I'm more self-kind of suffering. And psychotherapy deals with the first kind, meditation deals with the second kind, we

got to deal with both kinds to be comfortable in that spaciousness. Right. I mean, because you still, that's the thing. You're still, you know, there's all kinds of analogies we hear in the spiritual texts, the salt in the ocean, melting sugar, you know, the ocean, melting sugar, you know, but you, yeah, you're still you. So the, you know, the, truly, the human reality is so fucking painful. And the encounter or their realization, a recognition of this other nature that seems more real than the human realm or something like that, doesn't seem to do much for my own like

karmic bullshit for all the levels you just mentioned other than making me less engaged with it and you know less obsessed with it because that's the thing. The psychotherapy or the attempt to fix one's own personal suffering by a never-ending fetishistic obsession with the past, you know, it becomes just more of a kind of expression of one's own identity or ego, right? Like that's the danger of it. Suddenly you've just become even more obsessed with yourself, more obsessed with it. I was just listening to Thomas Merton and he said he thinks that if he continued

taking psychotherapy that if anything was going to drive him insane, it was psychotherapy that it was it was it somehow in the Western model of consciousness and addressing it, you just hit a wall of nihilism. You know, you're just a bundle of neurosis and that's it before you die. Smooth them out, get to a Freudian tolerable healthy level of pain and that's it. Go about your life and then die. Nothing else. Yeah, okay, a lot to unpack. level of pain and that's it. Go about your life and then die. Nothing else. Yeah, okay, a lot to add back. So you were saying something about being obsessed and being disengaged and to me the more I'm not obsessed with my

suffering, the more engaged I am, right? Yes. And that beyond that, there's a real difference between pain and suffering. So that in Tibetan Buddhism, they talk about compassion, being a mixture of sadness and joy, that sadness about how much pain and suffering there is in the world, and a joy that transcends happiness and sadness. So that can we be with both of these dimensions that we were talking about before of realizing that babies are starving to death and horrible people are amassing great wealth and all these things are happening and feel sad about how much suffering is really be moved by,

really be touched by it, really be touched by it. Not spiritual bypass, not pretend that's not happening, not use spiritual practice as a way of avoiding it, but at the same time, at least some of the time, inhabiting a level of consciousness where there is a sense of wholeness, that even with the pain in the world, it is... there is a joy of bodies at the atomic level that swarms and robots can figure you ourselves being anything we want. But right now in the present moment, your web site still sucks. That's why you need square space. My children will never know the horror of trying to design their own website using HTML to code their own website to get their website to work with all

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all you have to do is use offer code Duncan, and you get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain, again, squarespace.com, Ford slash Duncan, use offer code Duncan, and 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Get a beautiful website online. Prior to the singularity. It's time. Thank you Squarespace. What's up with another question? Is something I've been wondering, is the problem language? Let me explain.

One of my earliest childhood memories, I am probably three, two, and I'm smelling Jasmine in Georgia, in St. Simon's Island, Georgia. And I had no language to articulate what I was experiencing. But it's one of the most beautiful moments of my life. Like I remember it how overwhelming it was, how perfect it was, how it wasn't like I was smelling it as much as I was it and it was me and the world was perfect and everything was good.

And in contemplating that experience, I wonder, is the problem language? Is the problem that we have confused language with reality? Is this the mechanism with which what we call being human crystalizes? That we go from driving, looking out the window to having a camera,

that's our Neo Cortex filming reality, labeling it, and then giving us this kind of secondary, lifeless simulation of primary reality. And then we start thinking, well, that's what's happening. It's what I think is happening. It's though my description of what's happening. It's my understanding of what Jasmine is followed by well I'm not gonna be smelling the Jasmine much longer to because we've got to go to work

Or do you know what I'm saying? Is that the problem? It's a big part of the problem and I think there's a difference between Just smelling the Jasmine and thinking I'm smelling this flower called the jasmine and I like what I'm Yeah, it's smelling and you're all lost in those concepts like in English. Yeah, just as an example with fear We say I am afraid in Spanish. We say fear is here and it's a bet and they say I'm sorry. I screwed that up and In English we say, I am afraid. In Spanish we say, I have fear in Tibetan. They say fear is here. So just in the way we language things in English, it's a mistake. I'm not afraid. Fear is an emotion that I am experiencing. So that, like, you can imagine that your mind is like vast like the sky, right?

And through language, we put a window frame around the chunk of the sky that we think is ours. And to the extent you're identified with the thoughts in the language, the window frame gets smaller. And then if a cloud comes into that chunk of window frame, all you see is the cloud. Instead of if you have a bigger window frame, you see the context, the clouds, and the blue sky. So, are you the weather, are you the sky, right? Are you the clouds, or are you the sky? And Are you the sky, right? Are you the clouds or are you the sky? And language is one of the primary things that pulls us out of that direct perception.

In fact, at the end of meditation retreats, where I get sometimes, at least when I used to go to retreats, I would get in this wide open place, I would notice how beginning to talk to people at the end of the retreat was really what started bringing me back into being quad and duality again and like oh my god look at all this stuff look at here and there and So that there's this James Joyce novel where mr. So and so is living Outside of his body the whole time because he's living in his head, he's living in his thoughts. Yeah.

So there's a whole difference between, I love you as a thought and actually surrendering into that being that. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and that's where, to me, it gets infuriatingly simple. When, you know, the, the, the sort of issue is issue is, it's just like, where I'm not told me, you know, we've got to get you out of your head and your heart. And I was like, well, that's never going to happen.

Yeah, it's impossible. And he got a big smile and said, it's actually, it's easy. And on one level, it seems like that. That it's so simple. And then suddenly, there you are, back where you've always been. Now, what, the location of that specific place is, I have no idea. That's more labeling. That's just more labeling.

And tell me if I'm on the right track here, sometimes, I experience myself in the same way I experience other people when I'm people watching. Just another person, just another person going about some some Sarik loop, eating chicken and dumplings at 3 a.m. You know what I mean? Like here he goes again. Here we go.

Watching myself eat the chicken and dumplings and really feeling just compassion. There's no sense of like you piece of shit. What are you doing eating chicken and dumplings at 3 a.m.? This has got to be a bad sign. But more just like, well, this is what he's doing. This is the pattern. And then having the experience when you're looking at other people almost as though you're looking at yourself.

Now I don't have these experiences all the time, but sometimes I do, and it's really wonderful. Like, something seems to go along with it, that involves being less hung up, less judgmental. You know, less ferocious in my labeling of people is like, oh, look at that piece of shit. Look at the way they treat their kid. Can you believe that?

Oh, no, I'm talking to you. But just more of like, that's me. That's my mind. I'm looking at different versions of me. Is that narcissism or is that wisdom? Well, I love see, they're one of those things. But before you were talking about how sometimes you're in that place of being wide open, and then you feel guilty because you're not

doing something about the pain in the world. You're feeling like I'm just being spiritual. I ought to be out fixing the planet or something. Feel like I'm skipping school. Right. And the humorous EB White said, when I wake up in the morning, I'm torn between a desire to improve the world and to enjoy myself. It makes it very hard to plan the day. So what I'm saying is there's a real difference between those moments where it opens up and you feel the spaciousness. And then it closes down.

And even the feeling guilty, it's just your ego's way of taking you out of that place. Because that place is death to the ego. So the ego comes up with feeling guilty or all kinds of different manipulative tactics that it has. And using mindfulness to begin to feel when you're in that open place, how free it is, how you're acting, how you're connected with other people, you're connected with yourself, you're not judging people as being pieces of shit even though they're acting crazy or stupid or whatever they're doing. And what does it feel like when you're being in that judging mind, that lost in conceptual mind?

And when you're in that second place, there is suffering. And there's this fundamental assumption and Buddhism that we are basically good and whole. And if you begin to pay attention that gradually, and the essential word here is gradually, it might take a whole long, long time, we will be attracted toward what feels good, what feels whole, which is our true nature, which is good. Right?

And everybody's got that place in them. And some people, they're so afraid to feel that spaciousness, to let go of identification with separateness, that they're just locked in there. I mean, think about what it would take for Trump to have some compassion for himself. It's almost unthinkable, right? Oh, we don't know.

We don't know. I mean, that's the thing. We don't know. I mean, God, having you ever done the contemplation of like, like that in fact, Trump or whoever the particular despot or villain of the year may be, that in fact, if you were to experience their reality, you might be horrified to find

that they actually are experiencing compassion. If you ever played with that idea at all? I have, but compassion doesn't call it compassion. It has a quality of being connected to other people suffering it. I don't feel that. Well, in this particular case, right? Theoretically, what you're saying makes sense.

But, and maybe it was a bad example. All I'm saying is that, can you and I, in this moment right now, can the listeners ask, are we feeling connected to ourselves? Are we feeling connected to Duncan and Ramdev? Or is there some sense of, I'm lost in concepts? My ego's got to be here. I've got to reify my ego.

And there's all these stories of people let out a prison after a long time and they're freaked out. They don't want to leave her. An animal has been in a cage for a really long time. They open up the cage. The animal doesn't want to come out because he saw comfortable in a horrible way and being in the cage. And that's what the eagle does. It's created a cage. So that when you were that three-year-old who is just like smelling the jasmine, there was no cage built yet with all these concepts. But you needed the ego to survive. But you're not the ego. The ego's, its ego is a verb, but something we do. It's not a thing.

And we can become aware of it. We can have a kindness. We can have mercy toward it. You know my least favorite thing in the world is when I'm using a public bathroom and somebody opens the door. Yes, it's my fault, I should have locked it, but I didn't. Suddenly, I have cursed someone with having to watch me using the bathroom. And I am cursed by the look of horror as they as they as they look at me is that is they watched the way I use the bathroom.

And I won't go into details here about that. It's a nightmare. I have nightmares about it. It's horrible. And if you don't have a VPN protecting your activities online, you're doing the same thing technologically. You're just sitting there rubbing oil into your gills, pushing down on your stomach, squeezing your perviskis to make sure that you get everything out.

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expressvpn.com slash Duncan for three extra months free. Expressvpn.com slash Duncan, that's expressvpn.com slash Duncan for three extra months free, expressvpn.com slash Duncan. Yeah, see that's the, that's, that's as far as I must admit, I feel quite guilty when you're saying, you know, you wake up in the morning and you think, how do I help the world? This is not what I'm thinking. I wake up in the morning. I'm like, is there any coffee left?

I bet we drank all the fucking coffee and didn't order more. I'm a piece of shit from there. I wish I woke up and the first thought out of my mind was, ah, do I serve myself or help the world? Right. But the times that I have wanted to help the world, in retrospect, that feeling of wanting to help the world, if it's coming out of this sort of condensed,

crystallized, me state, it inevitably has a kind of aggression attached to it. Like the same way that I don't do it anymore, but in the old days, I would look in the mirror and be like, look at you, you fat piece of shit. I was so mean to myself. And so my attempts to improve myself

were similar to some brutal farmer whipping an ox or a donkey or something to try to get it to pull a cart, yelling expletives at the poor thing, like screaming at it, just fucking move. And so I think maybe one of the reasons the current political climate in the world is as it is, is because people are what they think is serving the world is just turning the horrible way they're trying

to improve themselves onto others. You know, thinking, oh, let me whip these people into shape. Let me punish these people, shame these people, humiliate the other, whoever they may be. Until finally, in a moment of absolute horrible, like anti-apiphany, they realize what a moment of absolute horrible, like anti-apiphany, they realize what a piece of shit they are, apologize, and then become like me. You know, and that's not really helping the world.

That's just whipping the world, like it's an old sad donkey. Yeah, but isn't that kind of behavior whether you're coming from the right or coming from the left? It's still based on donkey. Yeah, but isn't that kind of behavior, whether you're coming from the right or coming from the left, it's still based on being lost in concepts. Both sides are saying, you're gonna destroy the country.

I don't care what the rules are, I don't care what the laws, we've gotta do what we've gotta do because you guys are gonna ruin the whole American experiment. So we've gotta do whatever we can do to make sure that you are ground down into a piece of dust. Yeah. And it takes a bit of stability, a slightly quieter mind to feel what that behavior feels like. It feels, there's hatred there.

It hurts the heart. It's not a good feeling. No. And that feeling of, my God, where the fuck is the coffee in the morning or something, what does that feel like? So it really comes back to, can we begin to practice and feel the difference between being lost and being not lost and move toward a possibility of practicing and living from a place of abundance and richness rather than poverty and then adequacy and self-judgment?

Right? I mean, there have been times when the sun is out and you and your wife are having the greatest day ever and your kids are happy and the banker count looks good and whatever all the things are. And it's just there and then something changes and it's not there. And And can you, can you do you have cameras in my house? Are you observing me? Just microphones. Is that what my internet's weird? Everybody has it, everybody. So that, that, to me it all boils down to motivation.

And most people come to practice because they're really damn tired of it. To me, it all boils down to motivation. And most people come to practice because they're really damn tired of suffering. They want to not suffer so much. They want to be happier. And there is this thing. I mean, like, I'm not into all this Buddhist technology. I'm really not. But there are these things called the foreign-nobled truths.

And the first one is, there's suffering being in a human incarnation. And the second one is, you suffer because you're attached. The third one is let go of attachment, no more suffering. And the fourth one is, there's a way to do that. Right. So when you really begin to feel what it's like to wake up in the morning and freak out about the coffee, It hurts the heart, and it hurts your wife to see you have a hurt heart, right? And there's something inherent in us

that is moving toward that sense of homeless, that sense of connectedness. And how motivated are you? How deeply do you want to awaken? Right. And I'm thus wrote a book called, Grist for the Mill. It's all grist for the Mill. My favorite. He said, suffering is grace.

What does that mean? I mean, suffering is grace only if you want to wake up. If that is your motivation, that you want to use this life, this moment, to become a more awake, alive, passionate human being. You know what? I got to tell you, I disagree with what with that. I think suffering is great,

even if you don't want to wake up. You just don't know it's grace. I mean, I've spent some time thinking about this, and this is another thing where I'm, Rondas talks about, I don't some time thinking about this. And this is another thing Rondas talks about. I don't remember where it's from. But how there's this strange symbiosis between things that are seemingly antithetical, that the cops can't exist without criminals.

Like in another version of this that I've heard, which is Buddhist, I think it's Buddhist, is that something on the lines of all of your karma is mitigated. All of your past shity acts are forgiven, so to speak. That's not the language Buddhism uses, it's more of Christian language I'm using here. If those things have propelled you to a state of waking up. That, and so, you know, this is something that like, that was in playing around with the cosmology of multiple lifetimes,

looking at what is going on with you right now, not as some horrific accident, prison, a nightmare occurs, but as an intermediary state between you becoming the Buddha that apparently all of us become, at some point in the incarnational cycle, then it instantly transforms it.

You know, but I don't think that you need to have even the slightest inclination towards anything spiritual, necessarily, for that to be the case. You just don't, you just think your suffering is suffering. Yeah, you're right. I didn't say it accurately enough. Suffering is grace for everybody, but only if you're motivated to wake up, do you know that? Right. And if people are blindly trying to run away from suffering, then the spiritual path becomes, what can I say here? Like really tricky

year-olds almost on the veil, because the big paradox is that healing happens by contacting our suffering, going beyond the concepts, going beyond the narrative, directly nakedly feeling what's going on in my life right now, and then opening one's heart to it. Where is there such a condition tendency like you touch a hot stove you pull away. There's such a condition tendency when you're feeling suffering to push it away to run away from it to deny it. Suffering arises. The three things you can do. One is you push it away. I don't want to feel that. Second one is completely lost in it. Oh my God, this is a catastrophe. And the third one is a compassionate, embodied, mindful response to it.

Right. And it takes practice to get to that third one, particularly when the places are deeply conditioned. Oh, but God, I am so addicted to cynicism. Like all of the spiritual talk aside, I'm just realizing, God, I love being cynical. It's so gross too. It's so lazy and cowardly. But fuck, I just lately, I've just been thinking,

you know, like the way I used to think about my body, now I feel the same way about my cynicism. Like look at that, like if you could see my how absolutely, how horrible that aspect of my emotional body looks right now. I mean, my cynicism has moves with moves. My cynicism does not use the other end. My cynicism is unwashed and like really a beast, really a beast. And I don't, I don't know how to get out of that.

Like it's like, I should send you a picture of my feet, Rom Dave. That's good. I'm not into feet. I'm not into feet. That's not my thing. You definitely wouldn't be in the my feet. My kids. That's how they'll fungus. How about you? I let them.

I know. Somehow I shouldn't have avoided toenail fungus, along with all the other stuff going on with my feet. You know, maybe I do have it. I wouldn't know. You can't tell. My children look at my feet and they go boo boo, boo boo bandaid. They think they think I'm wounded. But this is what my cynicism is like,

my lazy reversion to just a general heart-hearted cynical attitude towards the world. I think Ramda saw that in me, and he was not... Plet, I could just feel, I could just feel he saw that. And like, and really found it to be like, not great. And I, not cute.

You know, not like anything more than like a kind of real fucked up waste of time. I mean, obviously that doesn't sound like Rondas. It could be my own projection. I think there might be a own projection effect In fact, I was reading this article by this psychotherapist guy and he said, I was talking to Ramdas and Ramdas asked me, can you see your clients as being whole, right? And that's what his work was, is to see you as whole even though you're thinking you're not whole. So I don't

think he was being cynical about your cynicism. I'd really go back, I'd like to go back to you saying that you're addicted to your cynicism. I am. Because the operative word is addiction, whether it's addicted to cynicism or bad relationships This is a bad relationship or drinker, drugs or whatever it is. Addiction is like living from implicit memory that you think you're living in the present, but you're actually five years old or three years old being mad at mommy or daddy or whatever it is going on. Yes, yes, right, right, right, right. And to begin to become alert to that feeling of, I'm helpless, I'm powerless,

I don't have any power here that my, I need this ego, I need this relationship with the world that might be really painful and cynical and all kinds of things, to be able to survive. This is almost like life and death. But if you're not cynical, the dunkin' that needs to survive is in real danger. And so there's this basic fundamental fear,

it's really fear of death at the root of all. And there are ways to deal with that. One of them is how deep is your faith in God or faith in the Dharma or faith in Maharaja or Hanuman or Christ or whatever it is. But the other is, can you feel the fear rather than fixate on the trigger? The trigger is that person out there who you're being cynical about or your feet or the guy in the mirror or whoever it is. And we get so caught up in relationship with the trigger. Let go of the trigger. What does it actually feel like to be afraid? What does it feel like to be cynical? It feels like shit, shit, but we're so busy fixating on the trigger that we don't feel it. So anger, sadness,

are difficult to be sure, but fear is the hardest one to really feel fear in your body without fixating on the object of fear. Like, now, think of something or somebody you're afraid of. And what does it feel like in your body? Let go of the story And what does it feel like in your body, let go of the story. What does it feel like in your belly? Was it feel like in your chest? Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's definitely, you know, for me, it's just like real tight energy in the chest,

real tight, real numb, you know, a kind of numb, exhausted, tight, shitty energy. It's like a, you ever get like a nice bottle of wine, but the court, the court's fucked up. Never have that happen. Not the one, but it's happened, yeah. I don't, I don't drink anymore, but the just remember sometimes having some nice bottle of wine in there,

you just maybe you're in too much of a hurry to get the cork out or who knows what, but the corks fucked up. You know there's wine under there. You can smell it kind of through the cork. That's what it feels like to me. It's like having some garbage cork shoved exactly in my whole. It's like, except you know on the other side of that is where all of what makes you wonderful is, you know it. Like that's what's so frustrating about it. Like to me, this is also the like the where you do get the un, generally unspoken side effects of some of this stuff. To me, this is also the, like, the, where you do get the un... generally unspoken side effects of some of this stuff.

Right. It's like you get the taste. You feel it, there it is. There was nothing to be afraid of, but it's right now where I'm at. It's just, it's so last thought. It's so fucking vulnerable, man. Like when I get into my heart, so fucking vulnerable man.

Like when I get into my heart, I am just as mushy as you can be. Like thinking about it, I can start tearing up right now. Like it's the, it feels so weak, so unfunny. And so absolutely just spineless. You know, it sucks because when I'm there, it's none of those things. But when I'm not there, from the other side of the cork, it just looks like embarrassment upon

embarrassment. Okay, whoa. Duncan, it's hard work. Yeah. So So let me give you a metaphor. I imagine that I've got this brain that's got grooves in it, right? Okay. I suppose that you have a groove of being a cynical guy. Yeah. And every time you become cynical and you're unconscious, you just do that because it's the pattern you've been doing for a long time. Yeah. conscious. You just do that because it's the pattern you've been doing for a long time.

Groove gets a little deeper and it's a little harder not to do it next time. But every time that you're aware of what it feels like to be in that pattern, what does it feel like? What's it like being mindful of being cynical? What does it feel like in your body instead of being lost in the trigger? God is pouring a little nectar into that groove so it's not quite as deep next time, right? And it's easier next time not to get caught in that place. You've been doing the same thing for decades. I've been doing the same kinds of things for a long time too. And those grooves are deep so that it's and those grooves are deep so that it's very unlikely that they're going to go away by watching it one or two times. It's a gradual process of becoming aware of what it feels like instead of being lost in the pattern and the trigger and that eventually then we won't be lost

and we'll just be noticing it and it doesn't feel good, we'll stop the pattern. The other thing is that being in the heart so that it gets all mushy and that is a really vulnerable place and to me the heart needs to be supported by the belly, like the martial art of being Duncan, having the the cheese, the hara, strong open. Right. So, so that you're not depending on the environment to keep the heart open. You can have your heart open whether it's a sunny day or not sunny day.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yes, I, you know, and I get it. Yeah, I get it. I totally get it. I should, I mean, I'm not, the good news is I'm not proud of it anymore.

Like I don't, I used to think of it as some kind of mark of sophistication. Like I've managed to become the most cynical person. I've managed to look down on people who seem to be emoting anything other than a general dismissal of time space. You know what I mean? A general like, I roll in all reality.

I used to think that meant I was smart. So at least I know that. And it's just, it's very frustrating, you know? It's very frustrating. It's like, to get back to the Jasmine idea, you know, it's like, there's so many Jasmine like things around me right now, my children, my marriage, my standup, my friends. And it's so annoying to have this sense of like,

fuck, man, I've got this thick, fungal callus that seems to be separating me from truly connecting with them. And in the way, I know I would if I could maintain a more stable, open-hearted way of being. It's very frustrating. But do you get how big a step it is that you're at the place in your life where you're aware of that? You're aware that it's an impediment, and you want it to change.

So from that point, it's all downhill. It might be a rocky road, it might be an up and down, but once you see that clearly, that you're causing suffering, it's over. And to feel guilty about it, to feel ashamed about it, to feel stupid about it, is just your ego's way of slowing down the process because it's holding on to it.

You know what I think is the most painful part of it, is that I have, thanks to people like you, been experiencing the other side of that cork, so to speak. And it's just so annoying to like have extended periods of that, extended periods not happening because I've like found a great catamene dealer or MDMA dealer, because they've extended periods of it that are just happening. And then it just, it's like, it goes away.

It's the worst, man. It really is. It's not the worst. It's not the worst. And the worst is not having it there in the first place. So, there is this guy, Shreer Bindo, who said, walking down the spiritual path, is like, you're going down the path

and God knocks you over into this mud puddle and you get up and you shake your fist and say why are you doing this to me I'm all muddy and you get up and you continue your way and then he knocks you over again or she whoever and you get up and you yell not quite as loudly and finally he knocks you over and you just get up and you keep walking that how much you complain about it and beat yourself up about it is just slowing you down. There's no need to do that. As soon as you notice, get back to doing it. And that quality of saying it's the worst, I'm guilty, a woe is me. Yeah. It is your ego's way of not feeling the suffering of it and moving on.

You know what? It's jumping into concepts about it. I just, I've been on a little bit of a Thomas Merton kick. Okay. And he was saying that despair is a form of laziness. Mm-hmm. He's so, I agree. He's fierce. Merton is so, do you ever get into him at all?

Yeah. He's so ferocious and simple simultaneously that it's really intense to listen to him. But yeah, it's like, that's the other thing. You sort of recognize like, man, this, whatever this game is I'm playing with myself, it really is just no different than what I do when I need to like write or make music for the podcast

and end up getting caught up in some technical thing. Maybe if I move this wire here or that wire there, or get a better keyboard or whatever, I will make more music, or write. And you just realize, my God, this is just procrastination disguised as like trying to align, trying to get your studio set up. It feels like that.

It feels like that. And you know, talking to you now, it's like I can feel the other side of the cork. You make me feel the other side of the cork every time we talk. You know what? And I think that's one of the reasons sometimes I reschedule our episodes

because it's so, it's so like dropping back into it is such an intense feeling. And, but when you're there, you're like, why did I ever not want to be here? St.terace of Lusso said, I would much rather speak to God than about him. Yeah. Ryan and Thomas Merton said, and I kind of paraphrase this quote of his, love and prayer are learned in the hour. When prayer becomes impossible, the heart turns to stone. So that's exactly the place you're talking about, like you're calling the cynicism. And you say, I can't do this. It's, I'm too cynical. I'm too messed up. And in that moment, that's when you need to pray. That's when you need to meditate. Yeah. That's the moment you just don't want to do any of that

shit. Like that is the moment where you, you, you, you, at least where I feel so far away from prayer, we, where it feels empty, but then also mixed in is this sense of like, well, if I pray, if I meditate, this feeling will chant, this will go away. Like, it'll melt the ice. You know it. And then that's where it gets interesting because you realize, oh, yeah, I don't want the ice to melt. I don't want the ice to melt. I want the boo-boo. I want to show people my bandaid, you know, like kids, they're proud of their boo-boo.

They, the first thing they'll show you if they have a nice wound, you know, it's like that. It's a very immature fixation on this shallow way of being. One time I was with my son and he was about six years old, maybe. We were in Maui at a shopping center. His mom was out shopping and he was running around and he fell down

and he scraped his knee. It wasn't bleeding, it wasn't an open cut, it was just an abrasion, but like he fell down and was shocking, started crying, he came running to me. And he expected that he was gonna get the comfort. And the, oh, Declan, it's okay, I love you, don't worry about it. Oh, I love you, let me hold you. But instead, I said, you know,

Declan, you're okay. It's only it's only a scrape. You're good to go. And he was kind of like shocked at first. And he realized he was okay. And he just went back to playing. And I realized that that we could condition into making our pain physical or emotional into catastrophe. So we get more love, we get more comfort. And then, it's a kind of a tricky thing to learn to love a child without encouraging them to get lost in emotion like that. Yes, God, I do that.

It's just, my wife has been calling me out on that because like, I do that, because you're sort of like, depending on what your childhood was like, you know, you accidentally become reactive. You know, you're projecting yourself as a child onto your kid. And you're, which is again, more selfishness because you're not even trying child onto your kid. And your, which is again, more selfishness,

because you're not even trying to help your kid. You're trying to help you as a child when your current child is suffering. You know, you're not even trying to mitigate that you might think you are, but really what you're trying to do is sooth some old wound via this wonderful child of yours. You know, and then, yeah, I know what you're trying to do is soothe some old wound via this wonderful child of yours. You know, and then, yeah, I know what you mean, like not doing that, letting them realize

they're fine. They're fine already. Yeah, you know, and how quickly they get better if you don't fan the flames of that behavior pattern. You know, it's like, God forbid you should scream when the gate falls down. But you know, Duncan, I got to confess, I listened to the midnight gospel episode

with your mother before she died. And I think there's even some YouTube of her talking about things, or maybe it's just the midnight gospel. She was a remarkable woman. Yeah, I mean, she must have been really a fantastic mother. And yet, here you are with all this baggage, so that, I mean, it is kind of the human condition. I mean, some people have a lot of mothers than you had for sure, right?

Oh, my God, yes. And I just loved her so much when I heard her talking, and particularly I think there's some YouTube of her or something, maybe I'm wrong about that, but one friend of mine who is a therapist said, if it's not one thing, it's your mother, right? And as long as your mother's not completely enlightened, as long as your father's not completely enlightened, there's going to be These places where we get lost in separateness where we're protecting ourselves where we're creating this ego that needs to Survive at all costs like holding on with our teeth Yeah, because now what do you I mean that you know, this is I'm sorry if I've already told you the story. When I first met Rob Dess,

one of my first questions then was, are you my guru and he goes, yeah, now what? What? What? What? What? What? What?

It was so funny and so perfect, but similarly, that's the other side of this stuff is it's like, now what? Okay, great. Now I am beyond, now I've dropped into my heart. Now I am there. Now what? Now what do I do? I mean, I've been living my whole life putting band-aids on imaginary wounds.

What do I... What are real wounds? Or both, a mix. But what do I do now? That's the other thing. What activity? What does the world do? Minus its suffering.

It's almost like a strangely parallel to what we're wondering with AI. What the fuck are we going to do? What are we going to do if it does everything for us? What if your entire life has been spent attempting to fix your suffering by rearranging things in your external world, by attempting varying levels of alcohol, acid, weed, sex, and suddenly you drop into that place. What now? Well in India they say the function of the Guru takes place in one second. That you meet the Guru and you see the possibility of love and then it's up to you to actualize that. It's up to you to get that into your life. So, I mean, Rambas is lying to what now is the perfect response really.

That if he is your guru, he shows you what love is, whether it's him or Maharaja, your Christ or Buddha, whatever. Right. And you see that there is another possible way to live. You get it. There's this direct transmission of connectedness with the one. And now the rest of your life is about bringing that

into manifestation. And it is really frustrating. Several times in our conversations, just now you've talked about how frustrated you are, how annoying it is, how upsetting it is. And that's the practice is dealing with those emotions and coming back to that initial connectedness. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a debt.

That's crazy what you just said about the guru. That is so, it's like a data packet that is, that you can, it's like a data packet that is, that you can, it's like DNA. You know, you can unfold DNA. It's massive if you unwind it apparently. I don't know, people say it could stretch to the moon or whatever, but it's like that.

It's like, yeah, I never thought of it that way. You get this thing that you must deal with now because there it is. There it is not in a book, but in the flesh. And now what? Now you see it's a possibility. It's like, imagine if the whole, like if somehow the whole planet was granted a vision of some alternate earth in a reality just next to ours, where somehow everyone figured out how to get along. No more war, no more violence, some kind of harmonious planet. And we saw that.

It's the exact same people on that planet that are on this planet. Now what? Because it's possible. Now we know it's possible, right? Now the whole idea of global planetary harmony piece seems like, you know, seems like something somebody, you know, thought up on like a nice blast of nitrous. But, you know, but yeah, I get it. It's like, you see it. And now what?

It's almost, yeah, that's amazing. To me, it's like the first time you have that taste like the first time I took acid, the first time I was with Maharaji, I got addicted to that feeling of wholeness. Yeah. At the same time, I'm addicted to these other things, right? So there's these competing addictions, right? There's this addiction to being back in that place when I first took acid, when I first met Maharajee, but there's also addiction to my ego structure, to being cynical for in your case or whatever my case was, right? And there's these competing threads going on that eventually the connection thread is going to win, but it's frustrating.

It's a torturous journey for most of us to let go of those other addictions, not even let go of them, but to be clearly in touch with them enough, they begin to dissolve through the power of mindfulness and compassion. And to really accept grace, like a lot of what we're talking about is here are two people with penises, you and me, two men who are talking about how to do this, what to do, but really in a way it gets to be more about receiving the blessing that's here. It's not doing it. It's getting out of the way, having God act through us, of accepting the blessing, accepting the grace. It's all grace, right? And to say, I've got to do it, and I'm not doing it well enough,

and I'm really a slump, or I'm really this, or I'm really the... Mistake. It's a mistake. My thinking is's no, I don't mean that's a mistake. I mean, generally with what you're talking about, when I allow myself to like kick around how lucky I am to like gotten hang out with Ramdass or that I get to have conversations like this with you or anything like that. My general feeling is like, well, something is malfunctioning here. Like I should, I don't deserve. Like I don't deserve this. I don't deserve this at all. Like there is no part of me that deserves anything

other than chaos. And that. But Duncan, who's saying that? Who's saying that? That's some wounded child part of you. I mean, you do deserve it. You're this really beautiful human being. I mean, even if you were not as beautiful as you are,

everybody deserves it, you deserve it. You've been working hard. Right, yeah, but I mean, I know it's just, you know, that sense of like, it's a really curious problem to have. You know, I know it's why, like, it's the source of depression and anger and all that stuff is you just, you sort of like,

you know, it's like there's some people who you give them a gift and they can't really take it. Like, they don't, they can't accept it. It seems to them like they, I don't know, they, they've conned you or something, they've tricked you. And that's how I feel. I mean, this, the anytime Raku or Ramdas or you or any people, you know, talk about named curly Baba, like just the idea, like if, if this being is in your life, if you somehow have made contact with this being embodied or not, that you're, it's taken care of from that point forward.

And I look at like my life after really connecting with that energy and truly, it's just been like blessing upon blessing upon blessing. But still to this day, like sometimes I look at this picture of my wall, It's just been like blessing upon blessing upon blessing. But still to this day, like sometimes I look at his picture on my wall. And I think, what am I doing hanging that there? That's just nonsense. There's nothing there. You don't, you're not like Ragu.

You're not like Ramdhaver, Ramdas. You didn't really make contact with that. You just wishful thinking, man. There's this poem by Hopfees where he says, in the eyes of your beloved, beloved with the capital B, in the eyes of your beloved, everything you ever do think or say is always, always beautiful. And yet then there's the voice of the super ego that was learned when you were almost helpless child that says,

I don't deserve this. I'm no good. I can't do it. Yeah. And to begin to hear that voice for what it is, it was needed when you were a tiny child to survive. And that scene now is the voice of survival. You believe it. You think, I don't believe it, I might die. But that's the little child is feeling that. And can you have compassion

for that part of Duncan? Can you do loving kindness practice or compassion practice for the part of you that feels so ashamed, so unworthy that having God's God in your life or Maharaj's picture on your wall is that you feel you might not deserve that. Of course you deserve it. He chose you. You didn't choose him. Yeah, right. And to really hear that voice for what it is, but it's such a hard voice to not see as only another thought. Here's a thought, what's for lunch, here's a thought, I like this, here's a thought, I'm no good, and that no good thought we take is real. I mean, even at the end of long meditation retreats, I would notice, my mind would go really, really still. And then there is this voice that says, oh, your practice is pretty good.

Oh, your practice, you can change it a little bit here or there. That I was still judging, that I have to get better. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's so many people right now just feel like pieces of shit. Like so many people feel completely useless or defeated or just yeah. But maybe there's no more people feeling that thing before,

but you're beginning to notice it because your heart is more open. Right, yeah. Yeah, right, you just, to me, it seems like this, the thing we're talking about, this is the path for all the social activist stuff, that like any activist,

anybody trying to make change in the world right now should start here. That somehow, and this is the great dream, if everyone just started doing, like just reconnecting like this, that things would drastically change. But maybe that's not the point. You ever play around with that idea

that maybe like part of what makes the world or the human incarnation perfect, according to the Buddhists, is that we need Trump's potions and all the many versions of them to play that condensed role to help wake us up that like they weirdly are the gurus too. You know what I'm talking about? I do, but I'm kind of recovering scientists.

What I want to know is, what can I do to wake up now? And what can I do to help the person I'm talking to? Right. I mean, there is the human condition and you're talking about drastic change. I kind of have some strong feeling that we're not going to change as a species suddenly unless we wipe ourselves out, but that change is gradual. I mean, there's a lot fewer hungry people now than there were a few decades ago. There's fewer starving babies, there's fewer wars going on.

There's a lot that's better, but it's a slow gradual process. Like a big ship, when you turn it, takes miles to turn the damn thing around, right? Right. So I'm not looking for, I'm not looking for immediate global change. I'm trying to be an individual who's changing and radiating that around me. And trusting that that's the best I can do and not really worry about the things I can't

do. Ronda has told this story that when he was at Harvard, the faculty got all upset because men had to wear neckties in the faculty club. So there's a big protest and they wanted Rambas to join the protest and they thought, well I agree with that but this is not my fight. Fighting about neckties is not something I want to put my energy into, right? Right. I got this other thing I'm doing. Right. Yeah, neck tie fights. My God, it's just, but I can imagine how in the moment of being invited to protest, how you just feel so much pressure to get involved in the dumbest protest of all time.

Yeah. But then again, maybe it's all necktie fights in a certain sense. Yes. That's what I'm saying. I mean, in every single one of them is like so powerful and so as the potential to really consume you, scare you, make you angry, make you hate yourself for not caring about it or even worse, making you pretend you care about, make you hate yourself for not caring about it, or even worse, making you pretend you care about it, because you wanna see him right. You wanna see like you're on the right team or something. You know, and that's the worst feeling of all. No.

Wow. Are you doing a retreat coming up? Is that what you're saying? No, I'm not, I didn't say that. I'm not doing a full fun. Oh, you should do one. I go where I'm invited. I just got back from along, retreat up in British Columbia,

but I'm not doing one. Just one closing thing here, Maharajee wants, the President of India came to see him. I don't know if I told this story on a previous podcast. Tell it again. So the President of India was a devotee of Maharaj. He's not the prime minister. The prime minister's a much bigger deal,

but still he's the President of India. And he came to see Maharaj and he brought cars full of followers and psychophants and baskets of fruit and candy. And he gave it all to Maharaj. He made a big production out of it, you know. and baskets of fruit and candy, and he gave it all to Maharaj. He made a big production out of it, you know. And then when they were leaving and their cars were winding the way up the side of the valley there in the Himalayas,

Maharaj, he turned to us and said, all that fuss in these just to worldly king. Wow. And it just blew my mind. Here is the president, and he could see that, here's the president, he's caught up and look, I'm the president, look at my mind. Here is the president, and he could see that. Here's the president that's caught up and look on the president, look at my power. It's just a worldly king.

So I try to remember that. It's like I run the Living Dying Project, but it's really Hanamon's Living Dying Project. It's Maharaj's Living Dying Project. W-W-W-W-W-W-LivingDying.org, making a plug there, of course. I know folks can directly connect with you, right? Like, is that possible? We've got ongoing groups, free, very complete website about meditation. And I know folks can directly connect with you, right?

We've got ongoing groups, free, very complete website about meditation. And I know folks can directly connect with you, right? Like, is that possible? We've got ongoing groups, free, that's very complete website about meditation and end of life stuff. Do you have to be dying to participate in these groups? No, no, it's the living dying project. There's the living part, conscious living, there's the dying part, conscious dying, conscious caregiving. So, I've got every other Saturday, Zoom group that's got like 430 people in it where we rarely talk about death at all. It's about the spiritual past and stuff

that you and I have been talking about. There's an online workshop, a lot of stuff like that. Beautiful. Thank you so much. You are the best. Can we please keep doing these? Are you done with me? I can say it to you. I really love you.

I enjoy it. I love you. Sometimes soon. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was Ram Day of Everybody. All the links you need to find them will be at Dunkatressel.com. Thank you so much to our wonderful sponsors.

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