Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 612: Raghu Markus
Episode Date: April 19, 2024Raghu Markus, co-founder of the Love Serve Remember Foundation, and lifelong friend of Ram Dass, re-joins the DTFH! Duncan and Raghu collaborated on an audiobook! You can listen to The Movie of Me t...o the Movie of We on Audible right now! Raghu also hosts the podcasts Mindrolling and Ram Dass Here and Now, available everywhere you like to listen. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg and Duncan Trussell. This episode is brought to you by: VIIA - Use code DUNCAN at checkout for 15% Off your first order and a FREE sample pack of Dreams THC + CBN! 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. AG1 - Visit DrinkAG1.com/Duncan for a FREE 1-year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase!
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You are listening in the closed day. He's doing gun. He's through self-harm. You have a jab a walk me son That was Jabberwock by DJ Francois of the Seventh Legion of the Infernal Warlords of the Dark Bubble that Shall Not Pop.
A lot of people think, oh, well, but I disagree. They're pretty powerful warlords.
This is the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. You are a sentient being, a constellation of cells, excuse me, a constellation of cells, a constellation of subatomic particles,
atoms, neutrons, neutrinos, quarks, gluons, and a million other things we haven't quantified
yet all foaming together in this wonderful moment of self-awareness, which is why you're
probably going to enjoy this conversation with Raghu Marcus. Raghu Marcus
is one of the people who helps run the Love, Serve, Remember Foundation, which is Ram Dass's
foundation. If you're not aware of Ram Dass, you should check out, I guess, his most famous book,
Be Here Now. He's got millions of others. I've actually started re-listening to Experiments in Truth, which is available on Audible.
And it's sort of an autobiography, I guess you could say.
It starts with his journey into the psychedelic realm before anybody knew what that was, and
then his journey into the spiritual realm when he traveled to India because he was being
frustrated about the fact that he kept coming down. And not just that. into the spiritual realm when he traveled to India because he was being frustrated
about the fact that he kept coming down.
And not just that,
he was a brilliant intellectual Harvard professor.
And like any psychologist in those days,
they were very curious about what psychedelics
were doing to human consciousness.
And he wanted to know if there were any maps out there
for the states of consciousness made available
by the variety of weird psychedelics he and many
of his associates were taking.
So Raghu also traveled to India.
It was lifelong friends with Ram Dass.
They shared Neem Krolli Baba as their guru.
They're both lucky enough along with a lot of other people
in the Ram Dass community to get to hang out
with this wild being.
And I am lucky because I get to hang out with people
who hung out with this being.
And I know it sounds weird when you say being,
but something about
these people, even though they're very human, they're not aliens, there's something otherworldly
about them or extra-worldly, not in the sense of worldly as in being decadent, hedonistic,
selfish, but in the sense as being almost a mouthpiece for the universe itself. And the Earth is part of the universe.
I'm already rambling too much. I don't need to ramble much more. The conversation you're about
to hear is very personal. One of the things that I try to do whenever I'm having a kind of formal
conversation with people like Raghu is just present to them exactly what's going on with me,
with people like Raghu is just present to them exactly what's going on with me and not try to put too much lipstick on the fish because I've noticed that with Raghu,
Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Trudy Goodman, Krishna Das, all the other people that hopefully
I've introduced you to via this podcast, they have a knack for alchemizing my neurosis
into something that is at least slightly more bearable.
So this is a wonderful spiritual conversation
with one of my teachers and best friends in the world.
Before we jump into it, very quickly,
I got some shows coming up.
You can find all these shows at Duncan Trussell dot com
I'm gonna be in San Francisco not this weekend, but I'm gonna be in wise guys Las Vegas April 26 and
27th and you can catch me at Cobbs comedy club May 3rd and May 4th
Then I'm headed over to the Milwaukee improv May 9th through the 11th. Catch a little break. Then I'm back
at one of my favorite clubs on planet Earth, Helium, in Portland. That's May 30th and 31st
and June 1st. There's lots more dates coming up. You can find all of them at dunkintrustle.com.
If you want commercial-free episodes of the DTFH, you can subscribe at patreon.com forward slash DTFH.
And the final plug here is that Raghu and I, for a long time, we basically recorded an audio book.
I guess you could call it an extended podcast. It's called The Movie of Me to the Movie of We.
And you can find that on Audible audible and if you like this conversation definitely
grab the audible because the entire audible is a combination of us talking mixed in with some other
spiritual teachers and insights that we've gotten from them so that's the movie of me to the movie
of we can find that on audible now everybody welcome to the DTFH Raghu Marcus. Welcome to you.
It's the Duncan Trustful Family.
It's the Duncan Trustful Family.
Raghu, it's great to see you.
Always great to be here, Duncan.
I have something I want to talk about with you that I think you, more than most people I know are probably aware of.
And I don't think it gets brought up enough
when people are having conversations about spirituality
or the path or whatever you wanna call it.
Yeah.
The trajectory of awakening.
I wanna talk about this,
your thoughts on how circuitous this stuff can be.
thoughts on how circuitous this stuff can be. Because I, you know, I am in between periods of having a stable practice. I just went through probably the longest period of daily meditation,
twice a day, you know, listening to great audio books on Buddhism and was really experiencing
that reality that happens when you have a daily practice. Like suddenly
everything's organized, I'm clean, I'm not losing my keys as much, my wallet is
much, but relationship with Aaron is better, relationship with the
kids is better. And then with the kids is better.
And then as an experiment, I thought,
what happens if I just don't do this for one day?
So I stopped.
You know, I've been listening to this Buddhist stuff
and they're always like, you know,
don't get attached to your practice.
You should stop that sometimes too.
And now I can't get back into it.
It's so frustrating.
And not just that, but it's like watching
this old incarnation appear again.
I'm messier.
I'm a little more confused, a little more,
I don't know, sort of just lost than I was.
So what are your thoughts on this aspect
of the spiritual path?
We're fuck-ups.
Period. That's fuck ups. Period.
That's all you gotta know.
I've lost my keys.
I got my regular practice.
I lost my...I spent maybe,
I don't know, too much time
looking for
a very special
mailbox key for the foundation.
There's only one of them in existence.
So that was really frustrating.
Then you and I had a podcast with Sharon Salzberg.
I completely screwed that up.
You were right and you're usually wrong.
So when you thought you were right,
I thought, no, he's wrong because he's always wrong
about the timings of shit.
So yeah, I wandered into that zone myself.
Oh, God.
I mean, that's it?
We're fuck-ups?
That's it?
You just say, well, I'm a fuck-up.
Well, as Jack would say, we're human, so it's okay.
It's okay, but, and you know, my, it's not okay.
In the sense that you're,
if you were some singular individual
and you didn't have a family,
you didn't have a foundation you were running,
then it would be okay.
But when you start realizing how much you're impacting
the people around you by some lack of attention
on the basics, the basics that we've all heard
from people like Sharon Salzberg, from people like Jack
Kornfield, Rochy Joan Halifax, Ram Dass, that you actually are not just hurting yourself, but by
proxy, they have to deal with the neurotic, worried, anxious, unstable version of you.
Worried anxious
Unstable version of you. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I
Hate you know Cheap plugs are gonna happen, but there's nothing I can do about it. Okay last night
I did a Dharma thing with a talk
online to kick off our
Reimagined the life and teachings of Ram Dass. Yeah. So I started going
through it. So you know how many perspectives Ram Dass brought up over
his lifetime. I mean it really covered all the bases. So you know, there's there's the one that is so wonderfully embraced by his story of
the space suit.
We wear a space suit, we are completely uncomfortable in it, but we are comfortable with the story
we tell ourselves.
So you know, here we are in this spacesuit until the moment comes when a different perspective
lands and those of us that get that should be very, very grateful for that fact.
So it's the peekaboo thing.
Psychedelic say you get it.
You just get enough of a view so that things start to open up right and you realize wow there is a way that's to get out of this you just you know just to get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles in the classic Ram Dass stuff and then it goes on to oh next stages you actually maybe do a little bit of practice and then you get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles in the classic Ram Dass stuff and then it goes on to oh next stages you actually maybe do a little bit of practice and then you get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles in the classic Ram Dass stuff and then it goes on to oh next stages you actually maybe do a little bit of practice and then you get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles in the classic Ram Dass stuff and then it goes on to oh next stages you actually maybe do a little bit of practice and then you get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles in the classic Ram Dass stuff and then it goes on to oh next stages you actually maybe do a little bit of practice and then you get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles in the classic Ram Dass stuff and then it goes on to oh next stages you actually maybe do a little bit of practice and then you get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles in the classic Ram Dass stuff and then it goes on to oh next stages you actually maybe do a little bit of practice and then you get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles in the classic Ram Dass stuff and then it goes on to oh next stages you actually maybe do a little bit of practice and then you get out of this pain of being in that spacesuit right which with all of your identities and roles and all the classic Ram Dass stuff.
And then it goes on to, oh, next stage is you actually maybe do a little bit of practice
and a little blue sky comes through the clouds of the bullshit that we encounter on a daily
basis. Little blue sky, you know, and then it goes all the way to, wow, Ram Dass' loving awareness where we're not judging ourselves, right?
And if we're not judging ourselves, we probably have a better chance of not judging the people around us.
So just to point to and in answer to this dilemma of falling off the wagon,
or just feeling like,
okay, now I'm screwed up, I can't get back into the flow.
I got out of the flow because I was just screwing around
with it, but I can't get back into it.
When you look at all of these different perspectives,
like the first one, the spacesuit,
which is really, we're talking about survival.
So all we are is defense mechanisms to make sure
that our shit
is surrounded by a moat and we're going to protect ourselves and everything we believe in,
the family, the friends, our little cut of society. So we're going to protect all that.
of society, so we're going to protect all that. So then we graduate to these other spaces that allow us to see more clearly what it
is that is the potential of our lives, which in the East would be called getting with our
Dharma.
Ram Dass talked a lot about, listen, the karma that you have that presents all these different situation is perfect
to really let you combine into the Dharma that you are. But here's, here's the point. And it's my,
when you mentioned, you know, falling off the wagon, meditation wagon, whatever. I just, I thought of this.
It's not, you know, it's not sequential.
Okay, I saw that we're not just this body
with this reactive bullshit defense mechanism survival instinct.
We realize that and we've moved on.
But in fact, all of these things are happening at the same time.
And you're going to fall in, you're going to fall out, there'll be a new perspective.
Without falling off the wagons, so to speak, you can't get the wisdom that's needed to open up these vistas much further as you
said you know you may have a wake up again you did oh gee we did an ayahuasca
session and some stuff came out that I really started to understand some of
this trauma that my life is based on you know every step of the way, it opens up a little further.
And that can only happen by stepping back in the shit.
Well, OK, let's talk about stepping in shit, because this is, you know, making stuff.
I'm familiar with the way form of creating stuff now.
Like, I understand that when I am completely blocked and no
ideas are coming to me and I don't feel inspired that that is just part of the
waveform that if you can endure it an idea will pop into your head at some
random moment and then suddenly you're back on the wagon making stuff and it's a joy.
And it's painful in between moments of inspiration, but with the spiritual stuff,
it seems to be the same kind of wave form.
It doesn't seem very different at all.
The difference being that getting back into your shit
or falling off the wagon or whatever you wanna call it,
it's more painful.
Like, it's the worst.
Like once you have that glimpse or one and then you stabilize the glimpse and you start
experiencing the stuff you've only been reading about but haven't experienced, it becomes
such a joy and then when it's like you lose it,
it's for me it's just so brutal.
Like and yet that's not enough to get me back on the cushion.
That's not enough to get me back to where I was
for some reason, almost like I'm enjoying wallowing
in the shit or something.
Enjoying the-
Yeah, we love it.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Absolutely, 100%. I mean mean it's the way we
beat ourselves up that's really the key and by the way you you just put
spirituality into one kind of bucket and then artistic inspiration into another
bucket right you know and then you have another bucket is what we've
been discussing, stepping in the shit, falling off the wagon.
To me, in my experience, there's only one thing going on, which is the nature of consciousness,
which is the opening up from inside out into my world, world your world there's nothing else and that
inspiration that in terms of the creative process stems from that from
from our deepest nature right and yeah so I like to think of it as just there's
only one bucket and in that, we're mucking around.
We're problematic because we're not free.
And we're human.
And we're going to screw up.
We're going to make mistakes.
And in that, you really do find a deeper part of yourself
through pain and suffering.
I mean, as Ram Dass said, I'm not looking for it,
but when it's there, I realize that that's my,
as he called it, grist for the mill.
So-
Grist for the mill.
But you know, you're saying something truthful too, human,
which is every time it happens,
as you get further along the way,
you just are like, oh my God, I can't get back now,
and I'm like enjoying just wallowing and whatever.
And we can wallow for quite a while, and it's okay.
It's the, when we're judging it,
which you seem to be doing, I'm doing,
then we have a very difficult time to surrender
into that deeper place because we're judging ourselves.
It's very difficult what we do.
It really is.
It's something else.
Well, it's not just me judging me.
It's like, Aaron fell off a horse,
Yeah.
Brokerist.
Oh, God, yeah.
And I love her.
I care for her, but I got pissed.
Like, why are you on a horse?
What are you doing?
And like, so suddenly my ability to like be the person
that I would love to be, this open, compassionate, servant being.
It was being completely overridden
by just selfish irritation, annoyance, fear.
Like what if it had stomped your fucking head in
or something like that, you know?
And so I'm not the only one judging me.
Somebody who's just broken their wrist and is realizing that the person tending to
them is annoyed is going to say, justifiably, I think what Aaron said,
which is like, what, where's your Buddhist bullshit? Who is this?
What is this? You know, and, and, and it's, it's,
I'm making it sound a little funnier than it actually was. But the, um,
but the, but the, you know, that, that's the other part of it. I don't know why the algorithm has started on Instagram giving me fundamentalist
Christian reels, which are just a lot of the time just almost unbearable, but one popped up where some Christian is saying,
if people hate you because you love Jesus,
that's fine.
But if people don't like Jesus because of the way you're acting as a Christian, now that's a problem.
And so that's where you sort of get into the deeper levels of Buddhism,
which is if you are announcing to people that
this is your path, and then you're not meeting like the standards, you don't agree with that.
You can throw people, you make it seem like bullshit, you make it seem like, you know,
you make it seem like a hobby or something when you get into the shit.
And this is why sometimes I scratch my chin, though I
obviously love Ram Dass. And I love the self-compassion, self, the kindness to the
self. Sometimes I think, but maybe sometimes that isn't the answer. Maybe sometimes the answer is,
is this more important than frivolity, than enjoying being in the shed
or saying, oh, this is part of my path.
Actually, you owe it to like yourself
and all sentient beings to take care of that dip
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DUNCAN at checkout. Maybe sometimes the answer is, is this more important than frivolity, than enjoying being
in the shed or saying, oh, this is part of my path?
Actually, you owe it to yourself and all sentient beings to take care of that dip in the waveform
as quickly as possible.
Yeah, I mean,
God, we really kill ourselves.
It's unbelievable.
We really do.
And that, you know, you can never forget that,
the human part, you know you can never forget that the human part
You know it's it's it's we can operate on more than one plane of consciousness at the same time
absolutely 100% and
you're
You are absolute you're beating yourself to death over over
What seems to be this new reality.
It changed.
You had a reality where you spent all of this time really creating a habitual pattern that
was really productive for you, which was meditation schedule, whatever you were doing.
And then suddenly, wait a minute, what's this?
And you just let it go.
And now this is perfect, really.
I mean, now you've let it go,
and then you're realizing what the results are
by letting that go.
So there is a something involved with the reality
of mindfulness, of practice.
I mean, it's real.
It allows one to really touch the deeper part of ourselves
from which we have this, as Ram Dass said,
the loving awareness perspective.
And then you can look at this and go,
wow, this is really great.
This is great.
I think, in fact, I think I'll wallow a little bit more.
I mean, I do it, you know, watching basketball, you know,
I'll, boy, there's another game I can watch that game too.
It's just part of our nature.
And it has to be loved.
It really does because otherwise, what are you doing? You're just sitting around second guessing absolutely
everything in your life, you know?
Well, that part. So that part, that's where to me, it gets
really interesting and scary. Because this is, I was just
talking to my friend about this. If you ever heard of that, if
you've ever heard the term slave morality,
about this. If you ever heard of that, if you've ever heard the term slave morality,
slave morality.
I don't think so. Tell me.
So slave morality would be
tricking yourself into thinking you're a good person when really you're kind of a coward. In other words,
you believe because you're adhering to some societal norms
that you're good. But the reason you're adhering to the societal norms is not because you're
good, it's because you don't want to get caught. And so you've tricked yourself into thinking
you're a good person. We really, you're just afraid of consequence. You're afraid of getting
arrested. You're afraid of whatever it may. Maybe you're afraid of the guilt that might come from behaving in a way that doesn't match default reality's view of what
a good person is. And so this is where the spiritual audio Ram Dass talks about and what
you're talking about. It starts veering away from slave morality. It starts veering away
from that because a big part of slave morality
is that you police yourself.
That, and that policing.
Why is it slave morality?
Well, I don't get it, explain it to me.
Why is it called slave morality?
Yeah.
Well, it's called slave morality
because it puts you in a sort of underdog cowering position
where you, instead of fully being yourself, you're
being sort of some version of yourself that is wrapped up in chains that are all of the
ideas that you haven't really explored regarding right from wrong.
And another reason it's called slave morality is because those ideas happen to be the ideas
that if you wanted there to be like
a non-questioning working class, if you wanted like,
in other words, like people who,
a lot of the people who they call the global elites
or the super wealthy, they don't follow the same systems
of morality or ethics.
And they don't, and you know, the gen pop is usually
astounded when we find out that this person or that person
did some awful thing.
Oh my God, can you believe it?
But yeah, that's totally normal
because they're not adhering to societal norms.
They're outside of it now.
Realm of the gods or whatever, you know?
This is for people supporting a family.
This is for people maintaining a job.
And so that stuff gets baked into you from a very young age
and that creates the situation of deploring oneself for
breaking some rules or ideas that that you've never even explored. And so when
you're talking about this stuff where it gets scary for me and I think for most
people is there's an invitation in what you're saying to maybe see what happens
if you don't police yourself in the way that you have been.
Maybe you don't need to penalize yourself and torture yourself because you have behaved
in this way or that way.
What happens if you give the police in your head a week off?
Now what are you without the encumbrance of the moral, ethical systems that you place on
yourself. And with spirituality, it's very easy to look at those guidelines, apply them to oneself,
and then forget to apply the other thing which is in those guidelines, which is,
you have to
be compassionate with yourself about this stuff you've got to let yourself go
off go off the path you have to let yourself and not just let yourself but
when you do go off the path like what you're saying stop flogging yourself
mentally when it happens there's something I guess in me that's afraid that if I back off of myself, then I will only spiral.
You'll be running naked in the streets.
That, that, exactly.
Like how much is permissible then?
How much, like if we can wallow in our own shit,
then how much can I?
There's piles of shit I have yet to wallow in.
How far can I burrow down into my like karmic desire self
and it's still permissible?
Or is it all permissible?
Is it all permissible?
Is it all just part of the path?
This is all, you know,
this is pretty much mental construct though.
I mean, these are thoughts and ideas about what we believe
we should be or what we should not be, how we interact with society, how we
interact from career point of view. This is all mental construct as far as I can see the
reality is in the whole purpose spirituality is it's not a thing it's a
there's a reality to us being born into this body this incarnation, and you know, you study Buddhism from here to forever.
The reality is getting deeper into what they call true nature.
That is our purpose.
And what is part of that? that is is this most simplistic stuff which is just being kind to people
being compassionate being kind to yourself and compassionate to yourself
but it's whenever we get involved with the construct of I want I am well and
yours is a simple case I stopped the regular meditation practice and now I can't get back into it because I'm
kind of feeling just fine, you know, but you're not feeling fine because we're going through
a whole thing here about how you're not feeling fine.
So you're not going to feel fine for a while.
Maybe maybe not.
Maybe tonight it will be different. But the reality
is that something deeper will happen through this experience of in this most simplistic
way. And, and as, as you started out to say is with the very beginning of this podcast. Is it is there a sequential program here in terms of
getting free? And I say it's not sequential at all. It all takes place at one time or another.
Hodgepodge, because we're human. And we are going to stop meditating, thinking wonder what happened
if I just stopped
meditating you know because my life is pretty even now I've got a lot of sounds like you
had a lot of balance basically yeah and now you're feeling imbalance and totally to feel
that is to get deeper into what real balance is you can can't do it without some not very fun stuff happening.
I mean, for many people, of course, wake up
when really severe stuff happens,
that leads to an awakening, or obviously,
through the usual methodology of
ethnogens, et cetera, psychedelics.
So, it always goes back to it's okay
cause we're human.
Right.
Okay.
And as far as, as thinking that we are really backtracking
related to the, the norms that we morality norms
to the norms that we morality norms that we set up for ourselves backtrack you can't because once you realize I mean especially with with a psychedelic you
know once you realize the interconnected nature of everything which is so
prominent in everyone's experience at one
point or another. Once you realize that, then you can't backtrack because you can't keep
fucking people. You can't do it. You can't keep manipulate. It's our book. I'm going
to plug it. The movie of me to the movie of we, okay? Yeah. You just absolutely want to be able to be kinder,
more compassionate, more generous, period.
And once that happens, we fall off all the time
of that brass ring, shall we say?
But the reality is it's perfect to fall off.
Perfect.
Why is that so much more difficult to hear than, you're a bad boy!
Why is it somehow more difficult to hear that?
I don't, I don't, that's what's so weird about the instruction.
You know, to hear that, is it because we're suddenly confronted with our own
self-harm?
Is it because suddenly we're confronted with our own violence
and suddenly you just realize like,
you're the one at war with yourself here.
Like that's the last war.
Like if you could finally stop that,
even if stopping it means, yeah,
you're gonna be a slob for a little while,
you're gonna get addicted to video games,
yeah, you're gonna, whatever.
But that would be better maybe than to be all tight
and self and judging yourself,
trying to adhere to some fantastical notion
of what an enlightened being would look like,
then that would be better to be whatever you happen to be
at some given time than to be crucifying yourself
on an imaginary construct.
Why is that so hard?
Why is that so hard to accept for For me why am I like this?
Wait you know I would have to get paid a lot more money
God I mean listen I can say the same thing you're saying
Exactly in it, you exactly from my own experience.
What happened to me the other day?
My, okay, my housekeeper decided to accidentally unplug
the power supply to the TV
just before Golden State Warriors were gonna play.
Okay. Wow.
And so I couldn't find, I have a setup
where you can't really reach behind damn TV.
This is the worst thing that could have happened.
And I'm there with my partner with Katrina
and screaming epithets and just like,
I'm gonna fire right now I think I'll call
her right now yeah just completely lost anyhow obviously it got settled I found
the input and then I did what you're doing now I cannot believe that I'm
reacting over some technology bullshit that and blaming
somebody else.
Of course she did do it, but still and it was like it's like a setback and I felt really
bad.
Yes.
You know, I've decades of this stuff I've been doing.
Yes.
Oh, I have a better example.
Okay. This is been doing. Yes. Oh, I have a better example. Okay.
This is even better.
Yeah.
I'm in India and I'm with, we'll have to give some context here, a saint named Siddhima
who was very close to Neem Karoli Baba and was like our Indian mother for decades.
I'm just incredibly, you know, she was close to Krishnadas, close to me, and
close to the people that were there in the beginning with Ramdas. So
anyhow, someone said, oh she's sitting with people, go on in. So I go in and
Krishnadas was already there and he was on the right-hand side, not closer to
her, I was in the back of the group of people and she's carrying on this conversation with
Krishna Das and I and not even hello.
No, I didn't get nothing.
And I'm sitting there going, I can't believe fucking Krishna Das is taking all the
all these just absorbing the attention and
the energy and everything what what you know and I'm having this and then the
next thing the next thought was holy god after all these years you're still going
through the fucking jealousy with Krish. Yeah, you know in this situation and as soon as I had that thought,
this is of course the beauty of being around, you know a
free being as soon as I had that thought she goes
Raghu and points at me.
Yeah, oh god, okay.
You see that's the your idea goes back to okay. I'm a human God, okay. See that's the, you're identifying.
It goes back to, okay, I'm a human fuck up like everybody else, even though I've had
these decades, you know.
I have a couple more decades on you, but it's the same thing.
That's why I think the crux of this is these things happen, you know, we get into our survival jealous mode and then
you know, we it's like going through a buzz saw and it hurts more each time. I want to thank BetterHelp for supporting this episode of the DTFH.
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These things happen, you know, we get into our survival jealous mode and then, you know, we it's like going through a buzz saw and it hurts more each time.
That is it.
See that's I'm so glad you said that.
Because that is the thing I'm noticing,
where it's like, if I'm stuck trying to invent
some dumb song about a diaper that analyzes your urine
so it can feed you like better stuff on TikTok,
that sucks, but I'm not, you know, I'm not like,
I'm not like, I'm not killing myself over that.
But this is every time it happens.
It does feel worse.
It does feel.
And then I get worried because I think, well, what is this situation?
Is it a split personality?
Am I accidentally bifurcating my identity into the part of me that is in,
what I think, it might sound cheesy,
but I think you could call it almost a romance.
When it follows the same pattern of a romance,
when you know, there's somebody, you're at a party,
you notice somebody, and you think maybe they notice you,
but you're not sure, and then if you're me, you you're like there's no way that person is interested me and then
but then you run into the person again and you talk and then suddenly you start
realizing I think they oh my god I think there's something here and it's the same
thing with meditation it's the same thing with seeing this other place is it
when you see it and you stabilize it,
which takes forever just to get to the point
where when you see it, you don't go,
holy fuck, I saw it.
And then you don't see it anymore.
When you see it and then you stabilize it,
so you start getting more of a sense of what it might be,
then how do you not fall in love with that?
Now you're in love with it and you want it
because it's all you would want in the world.
It's better than anything in the world.
And so you just want it.
And for me, even as I'm like, you know,
I got in this great practice of every night,
washing whatever dishes were left, cleaning the kitchen.
And as I'm feeling happy as I'm doing that,
but I just started thinking it's gonna go away.
You're not gonna keep this up.
And it's the same fucking feeling
of like I'm gonna lose this person.
There's no way I'm holding onto this.
And so then you get, even when the midst of it,
you get this sense of sadness.
Cause you're like, I can't stabilize it this long.
Like for sure, based on the past,
based on the way my karma seems to be
or the way I habitually do this stuff,
I am sure as shit in a matter of time
gonna be laying in bed with fucking cups all around me
and cereal bowls, smelling like shit,
looking at fucking Drudge Report.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't deserve her.
And then it's gone, and then it hurts.
It's like hurts, hurts.
Because also the other reason it hurts
is when you study Buddhism long enough,
they nail into your mind, you're gonna fucking die.
Remember that, you're gonna die.
So there's no guarantee that when you die,
you're gonna be in a meditative space. You might die.
So this, so it hurts. And I don't think this gets brought up. I don't, this is,
when I think of all the spiritual lectures I've heard,
when I think of all the teachings that I've heard,
where is the conversation about the burn?
Where is the conversation about the burn of going back
into your old life? And also, is it good to create this split
personality between the sacred you and the depraved you?
impermanence, it's called Anitya.
Yeah.
You know, that's one of the realizations through practice that the Buddhists emphasize extraordinarily,
don't they?
Yeah.
Impermanence.
And so you can count on it.
You can count on it that whatever it is that you're enjoying isn't going to last.
You can count on it whatever it is that you're enjoying isn't going to last, you can count on it whatever
it is that you're completely horrified about, that's not going to last either.
So conceptually it's right on impermanence, it's right on.
But this is again intellectual, right? Right? We think about these things and when you're up, when you know rubber meets the road,
you react. Like I reacted to my television being unplugged and I had something that I really needed
to watch in that moment and you're reacting to this sudden loss of what seemed to be a beautiful,
habitual pattern that you created, which by the way is what is primarily what we
need to do. Neat, meaning if you want to be a little happier, if you want to be a
little bit more balanced, have more equilibrium in your life, then you tend to want to do these
kinds of things which support that.
So now we're, you know, we're, I'm back to square one with reacting to a ridiculous goddamn
thing.
And you're, you're square one, dropping something and feeling guilty about it.
Yeah.
Well, the reason I feel guilty about it is because,
like, okay, so my mom dies of breast cancer,
and I have all kinds of guilt about the way I was then.
And-
What, then you were terrific, what do you mean?
No, well, I don't think there's any way,
back then especially, I just, you know, I don't think there's any way back then especially I just you know, I
So I
Just feel guilt. I wish I'd been there more. I went on the road. I shouldn't have yeah. Okay. I got all okay
So here's Aaron laid up. I have to go on the road to do shows
I'm only thinking about myself. I'm like, I'm gonna be, there's no way,
I'm gonna be freaked out on stage,
I'm gonna be exhausted, I have so much to do.
Just, I'm not proud of this at all.
I mean, this is why I'm bringing it up with you.
It's really fucked with my head.
Because it's an echo.
Like, Aaron, thank God, is just, is a broken wrist.
It's not like, you know, some terminal prognosis though.
You know, I think the pain she was feeling
maybe made her wish it was.
And yet here I am again,
perfect opportunity to serve somebody who's sick.
And all I'm doing is thinking about my own sleep,
my own inconvenience, my own
just, you know, blaming. Why did you do it? It was making her so fucking happy, riding horses,
and yet here I am. Oh, why would you do something that made you happy? Like all of it. And, you know, so I think the disturbing thing about this
or seeing the kind of karmic patterns in your own life
is you realize like, even though you think
you've purified yourself to some degree,
you think that when that opportunity arises again,
you will have learned from your mistakes
and you won't sink back into self-cherishing.
And yet, fuck! There it was! Like on Price is Right!
You lost! You keep getting on the Price is Right!
And you keep guessing the wrong fucking thing on the Price is Right,
and finally you get back on and you've guessed the wrong thing again and then it's like how long Raghu how long do we have to do
these loops and and it's scary because I I'm now I'm thinking oh it's like you
lifetimes hundreds more hundreds more of these fucking echoes.
And there's something in that that is not spiritual feeling or pleasant or like,
oh, yes, this is part of the journey.
Just more like, fuck this.
This sucks.
It's like, how many times is my tire going to blow out?
How many times am I going gonna be on the interstate?
You know, with a bull?
Well, you know the wonderful story of Milarepa and Marpa.
How many times does he blow that house down?
He had to rebuild it.
That analogy is exactly what you're talking about.
I'll take that.
I'll take that.
For folks who don't know, Which one was the sorcerer?
Not Miller Epa.
What's his name?
The other one.
Marpa Marpa was the sorcerer or was it Miller Epa?
Miller Epa was the sorcerer.
So Miller Epa.
Guru Marpa is the guru.
Yeah.
So Miller Epa is a sorcerer.
And if you don't think there's still sorcerers,
you just need to, like, I don't know,
read art of the deal or like, sorcery is business.
Like, you know, it's when you use your city.
Action and result.
Yeah, but it's doing like kind of, like,
it's exploiting people. But in this this case we'll just say he was a
sorcerer, use magic or whatever. He kills people somehow even though he's killed people which by
the way this is a recurring theme in Buddhism. Another serial killer was one of the devotees of
the Buddha. He still gets lucky enough to wind up with this great teacher.
And to purify all the shitty karma you get,
I think he killed his family.
This is a fucked dude.
I don't know about that.
Something awful.
It wasn't just like he turned someone into a frog.
He, not a great, he wasn't great.
And so what was it he had to build?
His teacher's like build a-
I would see what he is, build a house
and I'll let you know whether or not I will take you on
once you build a house.
He'd build a house, he'd go, Marpa'd go over,
no, no, sorry.
Knocks it down.
Destroy this house, start again.
He had to destroy the house himself.
Yeah, so he's gotta not just build the house,
he's gotta do the demolition of that house that he built
and he made him do this countless times.
And then finally he took him on as a student.
But at least in that situation,
you still have this great teacher who's paying
attention to you, giving you some instruction, even though probably the fourth or fifth iteration
of this freaking house he built, he's like, I know he's knocking it down.
But in that case, you have this direct contact with a living teacher.
In the case of what I think a lot of us are going
through, we might have contact through like, Love, Serve, Remember Foundation, through
the classes, through the retreats, through whoever our own spiritual community is, the
books, the audibles, whatever, but there isn't the direct contact that you had, that Ram Dass
had. There isn't that. So the demolition, the self the self demolition of this bullshit spiritual house that we're all doing
It's it feels a little more like it's happening in the void
Because there's no like brilliant enlightened being coming around being like I just tried to build it one more time
age-old questions, isn't it? Yeah, but
Well, I mean you're a good example. You connected with
that being which we can't really have a name for it, except the one I like to use is a
being that no longer the duality is gone.
The way that we are split inside ourselves that we understand and which is what you're talking about,
good Duncan and shitty Duncan, right?
The way that, and that's how we relate with ourselves.
We absolutely judge every bullshit thing that we do,
every bad motivation, all self-interest, self-cherishing.
We judge it all.
And here we are.
I know.
Here we are.
And the fact is, you can't open up
and become free of the stuff that makes us so unhappy unless
you have the obstacles which was what Marpa was doing with Miller up you know
now that I think about it I'm being a dick saying I don't have that I'm
sitting here talking to you bitching about I don't have anyone telling me to
start building a house again I'm not that, but you have the somebody.
But you represent a community that is that for me.
I mean, I know that you don't let people put that on you.
And I think that's a beautiful thing.
But you do represent this community that
is that as a community. you know, in different,
they'll tell you different ways about rebuilding the house and they'll, they
may be, maybe have different opinions cosmologically about what that house is
supposed to be. But the general thing behind that, our community is that the
patients, the paramedas are all there. They're infinitely patient. They're
infinitely compassionate. They're infinitely compassionate
I mean, I mean as a community, I mean, none of us are as the individual but as the community that
Sometimes yeah. Yeah sometimes. Yeah sometimes but listen
This really does boil down to
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This really does boil down to not being happy with who we are in the moment. Yeah.
Right?
And just, it's just, the human part of us is okay.
It's what I realized when I first met Ram Dass and he
he was all, you know, his talks truthful about his fallibility and so on. I love that because
it allowed me to go, Oh, okay, I don't have to kill myself. Am I still killing myself?
Let me tell you Duncan, as big time as you are now going through what you're describing in this podcast, I'm right there with you.
Yeah.
You know, and I'm, you know, I did this couple of things happen the last couple of days.
We had a satsang here the other day, you know, in Ojai where the foundation is based,
and you know, just food and kirtan and all that.
And this, this person from Israel actually was going through a terrible divorce and he came over and he had found Ram Dass talks and me introducing or me on mind rolling, whatever.
And he wrote me a note. I'll talk about this. I had to sit there through this. It was a note to me that he read that he had written about how
he had been basically saved by the reality of meeting Ram Dass. And it was touching.
I did a thing last night where I did a Dharma thing to introduce that life and teachings
of Ram Das course.
And I got all this other feedback, you know, that was all of that.
Oh, wow, we're really thankful to you and all this stuff.
And I say to you that I'm doing what you did.
The human part of me is, are you crazy? Out of your mind?
I still got all of this polarization inside myself.
And that's what you're speaking to when you say there's the good dunk and the bad.
It's the polarization inside ourselves, which is why we are polarized as a country big time. Right? Yeah is just because of
It's happening inside ourselves, right?
And that's the thing that we really have to address and the only way it gets addressed is walking backwards
It's fucking up. This is the only way it gets addressed
Otherwise, you're you're in a you know, a gilded castle or something. Everything's perfect. I got my twice a day, I got this, meditate, whatever it is.
You got it all down. Nothing's gonna happen unless that thing, you know, unless
Marpas has just shattered that house. Just take it apart. Take it apart.
Try again. And that's a good analogy for our lives of moving through all of these difficult, difficult situations and back to for me the backtracking.
That was really bad. And this happened a few days ago. This this idiotic thing with technology, which gets me all the time, by the way. I'm a sucker. I'll tell you my version of that.
So I go to do these shows in Springfield that I've been freaking out about.
Amazing club, super great crowds, nothing to worry about.
So then I'm like sitting, you know, in between shows having a blast.
Now I'm like, God damn it.
You had nothing to worry about.
The whole time you're thinking about yourself,
you should have been excited
you're getting to do these shows.
Then I'm in between shows.
I have not been saying goodbye to people
because we got the baby.
I don't wanna get sick, don't wanna get the baby sick,
but there's somebody standing there
who clearly wanted to talk to me.
And sometimes you get good at seeing people
who have something they've gotta say. So at first first I'm like I can't talk and then I
told him like go get that guy I know he had something to tell me. They got this
guy very sweet man. His son I think three weeks two two weeks before, died in a motorcycle accident.
Yeah, like just the worst, you know, and we're both dads.
You don't have to be a dad to understand how fucked that is,
but when you're a dad, it's just like, what the fuck?
And then, and again, like the context here
is that I've just completely in my own mind,
like failed, like I've, you. Like I've been thinking about like,
I'm gonna make these like refuge vows
and I'm gonna do it and go,
the whole thing went out the window.
And so this guy starts telling me about how,
cause he's listening to conversations with us,
when I'm interviewing like cornfield or whatever,
been listening to the podcast for a long time, that he'd been sort of estranged
from his son, but the last weeks, like, you know, he was applying all this stuff
and being in the moment with his son and like the last conversation they had was
him saying, I love you. And his son saying, you're my best friend. And it's like the whole time I'm just thinking like,
oh, I'm glad the shit helped you, man.
It's like, I'm a fucking asshole.
You know what I mean?
The sense of being a charlatan,
the sense of hypocrisy, the sense of like,
I don't remember the conversations you're telling me.
I'm listening to him because it's like, Jesus, I need to remember that.
I don't remember saying that.
So you know what I mean?
That's the, that's where it gets really intense and frustrating because it's not just that
you're sort of letting yourself down.
You feel like, fuck, I'm, there's no way I can adhere.
There's no way I'm going to be as enlightened as this dad who was talking to me, who instead of avoiding looking at his son's body, because of conversations
we've had was there with the body who, you know what I mean?
It embraced, it was trying to embrace the grief as much as trying to be there.
And I literally am like
Barely able to handle my wife's broken wrist
You know what I mean? Like that's what I'm saying. I could that's where it gets
I love talking to you because you can go way further than I
Intervene so much about yourself
It's great. That makes me feel better.
Oh, thanks! Thanks, Raghu!
Oh, God.
Maybe that'll be what I teach. How to beat the shit out of yourself when you fail as a spiritual person.
Maybe that's my contribution to that.
Yeah, yeah. It's a follow-up to the movie of me.
We've done it, though. That's the reality. We have done it.
We have... I mean, your situation and mine... Just look.
I mean, we both went through very similar things.
We're both judging what our projection is of who we should be in this world.
And meanwhile, what's happening is happening.
People are opening up as a result of whatever interactions we have, like with every one
of us.
It doesn't have to be a public figure, podcast, comedian, none of it.
I mean, you are meeting people every day and whatever it is that's in you that is generous
is being shared.
Just that simple fact.
So the killing of ourselves because we feel we're not fulfilling the projection of what
a Dharmic being is, is fun.
You know, we've got to being is, is fun.
You know, we gotta think of it as fun.
Okay, there's no other way to look at it.
I mean, it's just fun.
It is fun, I guess you're right.
There is some kind of sport to it, I guess.
There is something sort of vaguely comedic about it even.
Is that, it's like like I guess the question is
who do we think we are like yeah exactly we think we are grandiose ideas we have
of ourselves that yeah we shouldn't fall back under any circumstances right and
this is it yeah it's the same thing this guy's talking to you. Of course, he's in, you know, this is a tragic situation
of one's son dying in a violent accident.
And he's telling you this, you know,
and I'm sitting there listening to someone praise me
and I'm going, this is bullshit.
Yeah.
Same kind of a thing, you know,
except it's how much you pay attention to those thoughts.
Right. It's how much you pay attention to those thoughts. Right.
It's how much you pay attention.
Right.
I mean, we do this and it is human and one level and the other level.
That's why a great teacher like Ram Dass came along and said,
Hey, this sense of seriousness about me.
Yeah.
Take a look at that.
Right.
Okay, why do you have such a tremendous sense
of seriousness about you and your life?
You know?
Right.
How about taking it a little bit more lightly
and then you stop beating yourself to death
every time you fall back.
Yeah.
I think that that's a reality. Thank you. I mean, I'm so glad that
I have you. I mean, I'm lucky I get to like, I have $500 an hour for I know you've gone
up on your rate. Yeah, I know. Because things got tougher and I'm I fall back myself. I
need to take some of that money and go to my therapist. I know you got to take all this
shit we all the letters you get and all the things that go to my therapist. I know you got to take all this shit. We all the letters you get and all the things
and go to your therapist with this.
They could tell you it's okay.
I mean, maybe that's it.
Maybe that's the song.
Maybe that's all we're doing
is just telling each other it's okay.
It's okay.
Hey, let's go to the key to everything.
What did Thich Nhat Hanh,
the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk
who died a few years ago.
The next Buddha is the Sangha, Satsang. And that is what you and I are doing, and sharing it with your constituency.
And that's what we're doing. That's all we can do is share with each other, you know?
And this is extraordinary support and we understand
that we're all going through the same thing. You're looking at me like, okay,
you've been doing this a few more decades than I have and I'm looking at
you going, you know, it doesn't make any difference. It's not sequential at all.
You know, we're gonna go back into these modes of defense mechanisms and protect everything we wrote about or we wrote we recorded on the movie of me is Israel.
You know, I know.
I mean, and I think that maybe if there isn't what's good about this is it's like this is at least in my experience more what it looks like, you know, what it looks like.
It's not, in the retreats and stuff,
the conversations you get into,
and the sort of meandering nature of those conversations
that inevitably leads to some synchronicity
where you're like, what the fuck?
It's uncontrollable.
Maybe that's why it sucks too, is it's like, you know, of all the things you would wanna control,
it would be your relationship
with the divine consciousness.
Of all the phone numbers you would want to work
whenever you wanted to call that number,
that would be the one.
And yet that is the one that is so
impossible to control.
Jesus on the cross said, father, why have you forsaken me?
Like that's the, I guess.
Yeah, that's what happens when you're human
is you just got a bad wifi connection to the ultimate.
You know what happened to me?
I mean, I know we're almost done here but what happened to me, it just just came up, I had a
really bad tooth problem, went to the dentist, anyhow they ultimately they put
me on nitrous gas which always gets me into a psychedelic something. And I did, and then suddenly,
Neem Kurali Bhava was in front of me,
and I'm seeing him and feeling him in that presence.
It's like Ram Dass when he sat down in front of him
for the first time, and he knew that he knew everything
about him because he had talked to him about his mother's passing and exactly what happened, Spleen
and all that stuff.
And then he started, he's sitting there thinking all this bullshit in his head and going, oh
my God, he knows that, he knows this stuff and I'm just a really bad person.
I was having the same thing in the dentist chair,
okay, and this is a couple of years ago, maybe. And what I heard was it absolutely doesn't
matter whatever you think about yourself or whatever you think in relation to your world has anything to do with your relation
with the divine.
Wow, that's so wild.
So I felt so free.
That's so good.
I'm not a shithead.
Okay, it's great.
But do you know, did I fall back?
Yeah. And so I, you know, we have to give ourselves the,
the permission to fall back.
And you know, that's what's difficult, very difficult.
Permission to fall back granted.
I'll take it.
Thank you, Ragu.
I'm sorry I've emotionally dumped on you
this whole episode.
I'm sorry.
No, it's perfect. I've been intentionally avoiding
conversations with people like you because I feel like such a piece of shit
that it's like I don't even want to talk anymore like I'm just gonna get just
gonna go Nietzsche and I'm gonna start reading Nietzsche. I'm gonna put a little soft? Jean-Paul soft? Yeah, nausea baby, that's all there is, nausea!
Hey, can, you know, I plug...
Yeah, of course.
Reimagine the Life and Teachings of Ram Dass, which starts starting this week,
but it's still open for registration everybody, just go to Ram Dass dot org.org slash slash reimagined and
you'll be taken through and you'll see what's entailed and it's a it's a big
there's a I listen to one of the talks in there I listen to all of them but the
first one is Ram Dass going through into India and it describes in D with Bhagavan
Das right yeah surfer from Laguna Beach and it described he describes in D with bug of on dust right yeah surfer from Laguna Beach
and it described he describes in detail going into he was in Banaras I believe
and walking barefoot because he was trying to be like a you know a mendicant
a sadhu yeah and he describes in detail avoiding the piles of shit, human, animal,
and then the worst was, you know,
how they eat this betel nut stuff with tobacco,
and it's like a red juice that they spit out,
so he's dancing between shit and betel juice.
That alone just, I was, oh God.
That's so cool.
I didn't even know that existed, that lecture.
That's so cool, because most of us have like the
sort of like the main hits and like that, that, that, whatever
that experience was with him and Bhagavan Das, I always
wondered about the details of that. What that must have been
like.
Yeah. Like you think be here now is a, you know, the iconic
iconic phrase, we actually trademarked it okay
the foundation and the reality was Ram Dass just kept going on about his past
experiences with acid and Millbrook and Leary and finally Bhagavan Das was
looking out the window he turned back to him says oh for God's sakes can you just
shut up and be here now? That's how it happened.
I know, I know.
And that was the perfect, that really ate it, Ram Dass.
I know that, that was such a slap down
and we've all had it.
If you've been around any spiritual people,
people like that or people who are,
I don't wanna use hierarchy here,
but they do not feed your ego.
And God damn you want them to.
You want them to be like, wow, you, oh, you are amazing.
And they won't do it.
And it burns.
It burns, like you and City Mods, it burns.
Yeah, and you know, I needed that.
And just like, Millarappa needed Marpa
to destroy that house how many times?
How many times?
Well, my friend, back to building my dumb old house again.
Yeah, okay.
I gotta start again, find some rocks, figure it out,
but I really appreciate your time.
And folks, obviously take this, what about the retreat?
Is that already sold out for Hawaii?
Is that too soon to mention that?
The retreat in Boone is not sold out.
It's a wonderful retreat in Boone, North Carolina,
which you can find on romdos.org.
And it is still available
in the most beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.
It's really lovely.
In Hawaii.
But Duncan, you are coming to Maui this year to teach the rosary. Oh, that's
beautiful. Yeah, I'm going to be there this year. I can't wait.
I'm so excited. It sucks. Later. Okay, Raghu. You are the
best. Thank you so much. Thank you. Love it. Thank you.
That was Raghu Marcus. Don't forget you can find our book The Thank you. Hare Krishna. Love it. Thank you. Brahma.
That was Raghu Marcus.
Don't forget, you can find our book, The Movie of Me to the Movie of We on Audible.
Come see my live shows.
Big thank you to our sponsors.
And if you want to start seeing video versions of the DDFH, I've slowly started uploading
those on my YouTube channel, which is YouTube Duncan Trussell.
So subscribe over there if you want to see
the entirety of the Stephen Armstrong interview that I did with the misinformation expert
that is at my YouTube channel, which is Duncan Trussell on YouTube. Alright everybody, I'll
see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna.