Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 613: UNLOCKED David Nichtern
Episode Date: April 27, 2024David Nichtern, author, musician, and meditation teacher, re-joins the DTFH! Heads up, this is an unlocked patreon episode! Subscribe at patreon.com/dtfh for the full video episode. On Tuesday, May ...7th, 2024, Duncan will join David for a FREE live online event exploring the profound practices of mindfulness and the journey of becoming a meditation teacher. Click here for more info and to reserve your spot. They will also discuss the Dharma Moon Meditation Teacher Training beginning in June 2024. Click here for more info about the Dharma Moon 100 Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg and Duncan Trussell. This episode is brought to you by: Aura Frames - Use code DUNCAN at checkout for $30 Off your first order and Free Shipping! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. 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.
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Hey DTFH fans, before we get going with this old episode
I wanted to let my family know that a video version of this episode of the DTFH is up on Duncan's YouTube
Which is at YouTube forward slash Duncan. It's a tube of you. They want you in a tube
They want a tube you and you are me and we are each other and you reflect me and I reflect you so I can
Be your mama or daddy or God or the devil or a little
Cutie pie if you need that you pick let's get into the podcast
Oogluba
Stink cubes cube tuba tuba stew cubes, please and a cold bowl of heated ice damn it
Thank you
Hi, it's me Duncan
And this is the video version of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast if you're not familiar with my podcast Thank you. And I know 99.9% of podcasts are not video. They just keep putting audio podcasts out.
And I want to push the boundaries of this medium
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I'm not used to it.
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I just want to look at it.
I feel like my face looks shiny.
Maybe I should have groomed my beard more.
This is a great episode today with David Nickturn.
You might know him as David from the Midnight Gospel.
He is an author, a musician, and my meditation teacher.
He also runs a wonderful
organization called Dharma Moon, and if you have any inclination of going deeper into meditation
or Buddhism, I would highly recommend checking them out. And they've got an upcoming course that
we'll talk about later. But first, I have special permission from Amanda and the Seven Nuns.
That's right, Amanda and the Seven Nuns, they are at the top of the charts right now and
they gave me permission to premiere their new video for their number one song, Dead
Mall.
So here we go.
It's Amanda and the Seven Nuns. your glowing halls your dark
dead mall
halls forever dark
dead mall
halls forever dark
dead mall
halls forever dark
Demo, demo
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All right, let's jump into this podcast
with David Nickturn.
It's that time again, do that and slap your ass.
Take a map you can't earn, smash your own glass.
If you can't earth and smash your out of land
Snort the sands of time, turn your mind into a flower
Then put your headphones on and listen
To the soot and the iron
David, it's great to see you. You too, Duncan.
It's been a minute.
It's been too long.
So here's something cool.
I was at a wedding this last weekend and had a great conversation with someone who went
to Naropa University for four years. And he told me about this incredible,
something, I don't know if it's a class,
you go into different colored rooms.
They're just one uniform color.
And the idea is you learn the difference
between your neurosis and just the color.
In other words, you walk into a room
that's one single color, it's just a color.
It's yellow, it's neutral, whatever, yellow.
But, you know, your mood, when you go into the room,
your ideas about maybe the shape of the room,
the other people in the room with you,
whatever you're thinking in there shows you the overlay
on top of just this basic color.
And I thought that was so cool to the point where
after that conversation, wherever I was going,
I wouldn't like, you know, cause I was in Myrtle beach.
And let me tell you, Myrtle beach is
everything you've heard that Myrtle Beach is.
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, just like someone hated the beach and was like,
let's just destroy a marsh.
Let's just just fuck this place up.
So it's like pup butt courses, waterslides.
And it's so easy to judge it so that you're not seeing anything other than like your own aversion
to not wanting to be at a desiccated, profaned, formerly no doubt beautiful beach.
But then I'm looking at that and thinking, yeah, but that's just my, that's one part
of this thing.
The other part is my kids, if they were there,
they would have been like, this is heaven on earth.
Roller coasters, water slides, pup pup courses,
all the stuff where I'm like roller coasters,
oh, pup pup courses, oh,
King Kong at the Ripley, believe it or not, museum, oh.
They would have seen it, their overlay would have been very excited.
But that's what I wanted to talk to you about.
This sort of bifurcation that gets brought up in Buddhism between some neutral reality situation
and what you bring to the table in your mind.
Yeah. So there, can you hear me okay, Duncan? reality situation and what you bring to the table in your mind.
Yeah. So there, um, can you hear me? Okay, Duncan? I hear you. Great.
There are three things I'm going to parse out from what you just said.
If that's okay. Great.
So the first you mentioned the color rooms, where were those?
That was at Naropa university.
Okay. And then you went to the Myrtle beach? Yeah, this was a wedding at Myrtle Beach.
And kind of the version of Samsara or Nirvana, according to who's perceiving it, right?
Yes.
Heaven or hell.
And then the third thing is the no doubt, the formerly no doubt beautiful beach.
So I thought I'll start there.
I think we should start a formerly no doubt beautiful beach. So I thought I'll start there. I think we should start a formerly no doubt beauty contest.
People who used to be beautiful
and you could sort of still tell.
Yeah.
Oh, I love that.
That would be amazing.
And you'll be the host and you'll have aging people on it
who, you know, with various degrees of attempts to preserve
And elongate their their sense of having been magnetizing and beautiful people. Yeah, so let's put that aside
That's it like a future project. Okay. Well, I would like to talk
But maybe after about these rooms with the colors because there's a lot more to that. It's called the five wisdom energies
It's a wonderful Buddhist topic about how
wisdom and confusion manifest in different styles
Okay, there are five basically of them and it's not just colors
But it's also the shape of the room the access to information
Where the windows are and it's putting you in a psychological space that's physically reinforced
windows are, and it's putting you in a psychological space that's physically reinforced so that you can experience that quality of confusion, which is also flippable into that quality
of wisdom.
So it's called five wisdom energies.
Buddha family is sometimes that's called Buddha family.
So that's a great topic and we can have fun with that.
Now whose beach is this anyhow, which is really what you're talking about, and, you
know, what experience is being engendered by different people's projections onto the
environment.
Right.
And that's a great topic because the whole world is trying to figure that out, is where,
what is worth restoring, what is worth carrying forward? What is worth keeping?
And what is worth destroying?
And I think we might have it backwards lately.
Yeah, how so?
Well, we're destroying some things
that probably would be good to keep,
like the natural beauty of the place and things like that
and our relationship to that.
We're destroying our relationship to patience
and discipline and cultivation of in a
slower, steadier, more earthy, grounded way of wisdom and appreciation of life.
And we're, we seem to be cultivating a mad rush into a speedy, dopamine-based, you
know, triggering system that gets everybody hopped up and jumping around
like frogs on a skillet, you know, on a hot skillet. Yes, yeah, right. That's what it looks like to me right now. Frogs on a hot skillet, they're kind of just jumping up
and down.
Yes, delicious.
So those are three topics there, yeah.
OK, so I like talking about the dopamine world
that we're living in, which is dopamine world.
I would go to that amusement park.
Dopamine world. Let's just cut to the chase. You're in it. We're in it, which is dopamine world. I would go to that amusement park, dopamine world.
Let's just cut to the chase.
We're in it already.
Dopamine world, that's what this is,
a hyperdimensional amusement park.
You become human for a little bit, you extract dopamine,
then you die and you leave the park.
But this, so especially in terms of this concept
of there being a sort of neutral reality and this capacity humans have to interpret that reality in varying ways.
And that interpretation produces not just a release of dopamine, it produces cortisol if it's freaking you out, it produces serotonin, all the neurotransmitters, because that is the interpretive mechanism
that we're using.
It's something that uses a variety of neurotransmitters to interpret neutral phenomena in some way,
and we are beginning to understand just how much control we have over that system.
And so this, so exter, so this is the interior.
Can I just interject one thought?
Instead of control, I would say agency.
Agency.
Okay.
What's the difference?
Well, I think control has this damping down kind of quality to it.
Like you're shutting things down, whereas agency is you're sort of navigating and interacting
with it in a skillful way.
Okay. Maybe there's no difference, but that's. Let's with it in a skillful way. Okay.
Maybe there's no difference.
But that's...
Let's call it agency.
It sounds nicer.
Controls little BDSM, I guess.
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make it lick your feet, which I would do. If it was possible, that's probably why I'll
never be a god. But the, so if you look at it as an interiorization, a sort of migration into the interior, into
the self, versus an exterior migration, which already happened.
We did an exterior migration.
We colonized the whole planet and we built our hive around the whole planet.
Now there's not much to do as far as that goes, other than tear shit down and rebuild it or
make it taller, wider, putting cooler stuff inside the buildings we've made.
But it's like we're beginning to realize, oh, it's so much more energy efficient to find a way to
transform the brain chemistry so that regardless of the exterior, the interior feels pleasant
or whatever way we might want it to feel.
That's what all of this stuff is about.
It's like, it's the famous quote that Claus,
whatever his name is,
the guy who runs the World Economic Forum said,
you will own nothing and be happy.
And I feel like he was trying to articulate
a transhumanist notion that ownership is meaningless,
but the feeling of ownership is incredible.
That's what you're going for.
You, you, you know, do you really want a mansion
or do you want the feeling of having a mansion? Do you want
a million dollars in the bank account or the feeling of having a million dollars in the bank
account? So sort of this realization of these every single thing around us, whether it's your
phone, video games, sex, toys, drugs, or wealth is a device, a clunky device to get your brain to squirt out happy juice.
And what if we can just get the happy juice to squirt minus a mortgage?
I think if people came in right there squirting the happy juice, they might think they were watching a different program.
But in any case, I think the word that might ground this whole is contentment.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's what you're really talking about.
When and how and what is the value of contentment and distinguishing contentment from acquiescence.
It's not the same.
Yes.
Not the same.
It's just, okay, I'll settle for this, you know.
Right.
Yes.
Genuinely content.
And acquiescence is, you could, I think we could argue that there are many
people who consider themselves spiritual and they have a spiritual practice, but what they've
actually learned how to do is acquiesce. They've confused their acquiescence with contentment.
By they, I mean me. I don't know how many times in some bitter way I'm like, okay, this is it.
But it's bullshit. You still don't want to be there. You want more.
And you could add to acquiesce, subdue or control
or attempt to control.
Yes.
That's why, that's why the notion of contentment is
you could add to that appreciating things
the way that they are.
You could add the idea of less struggle to achieve something in a particular way
that may not be the way it's going to happen. You can include being fluid with situations as they
evolve. So it's almost like two modes that you're talking about there. And one is fraught with tension and stress and, you know, anxiety,
and the other is, you know, transcendent via the ordinary route of being where you are
and who you are without as much struggle and tension.
So that might be an interesting paradigm.
And then, you know, you could live in a mansion too. And you could live in a tiny home.
Yeah.
I mean, the, like, I have a wonderful house.
And when I was living in a roach infested apartment in Echo Park, if I thought one day
I'd be living in the house I'm living in, I'd be like, dear God, that's insane. But I must
say, though I do love my house, and I'm happy not just to be in it, but that my family gets to be in
it. Same level of stress. Nothing's different from the roach-infested apartment in the house.
It's in fact, almost. And you having a cool,
nice house and saying that, you sound like the biggest asshole on earth. Because you would hear
people say that when you aren't living in a place like that. And you think, yeah, well, let me find
out for myself if it's true. But now it's like, oh, right, I get it. The stage dressing is having
very little impact on my mood state. If anything,
it's amplifying the stress because I got to pay the mortgage and there's more responsibility
involved in it. But to go back to the earlier point, the reason I think Buddhism is a fundamentally revolutionary system in the most intense way,
more revolutionary than communism, more revolutionary than anything I've encountered, is because
it goes upstream to the fountainhead of suffering and downstream is where the sorcerers live, the marketers
live, the people who say, if you arrange phenomena in this specific way, that on the other side
of that, my friend, is true happiness.
It is advanced snake oil salespeople.
It's no different than the person riding into town
with like, Uncle William's tincture of life.
It'll cure your flux.
It's no different.
It's no different.
But it's just, it's all snake oil disguised as robots,
AI, synthesizers, you name it.
Like once you get this thing, you're great.
And so to me, Buddhism in its purest form, the way you're articulating it, it subverts the economy.
Our entire economy depends on the belief that should you obtain this or that, you will be happier and thus you should work really hard
and like, and have a job and bust your ass to achieve this or that because there is happiness
on the other side. So it's the carrot is bullshit and running after the carrot is bullshit and
Buddhism is getting right to the root of that.
And theoretically, if everyone just adopted
what you're talking about and found a way
to find contentment in the midst of the confusion,
the madness, then the entire world economy would collapse.
I don't know what would happen after that.
Everything would be fucked.
Nobody would, you know what I mean?
Like truly though, truly.
That's where to me, there's some.
But Duncan, Duncan, so,
contentment also wouldn't mean nihilism.
No, I don't think so.
It would not lend itself towards nihilistic,
yeah, or the sense that, hey, it's all empty anyhow,
the big house, the small house, they're all empty.
No, it has to do with going where the salmon spawn.
Go upstream, you said go upstream,
find the mind where the thoughts spawn,
where those projections are spawned,
where the habits that we have formed spawn regularly respawn and
Touch into that space
You're able to kind of contour something that does not have the compulsive quality of what you're talking about
Yeah, good Buddhist should be less compulsive. That would be a good a good attribute of seeing somebody who's practiced there
There's more, you know, what we call Xinjiang or kind of stabilized awareness
that is less compulsive and Xinjiang means sort of processed in a certain way or tamed.
I love that word. And you can see it when people practice that should be some a sign
that shows up as they have a little bit more equanimity and stability. No matter what their
perspective is, there should be some grounded quality that is manifesting.
Do you agree?
Absolutely. And I think that this isn't an intellectual exercise. It's not that you are
sitting next to your eight-month-old daughter on an airplane who is screaming like she knows the plane is about
to crash and is like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like,
like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like,
and you intellectually think, well, here we have the phenomena of a screaming baby and, uh, my own,
like, desire for her to feel happy and my own desire for people around her to not experience
what I've experienced and we all hate, which is the screaming baby on the plane and to
comfort my wife who it's her daughter.
And in that, I have a theory that that is even more intense for a mom than a dad.
So she's getting freaked out.
And therefore this is just a projection. And now
I have peace. No, it's somehow identifying the simultaneous reality that this is fine. Not in a
passive bullshit way, because you're not disregarding the crying baby. You're not just like, you know
what? I'm going to take a nap now. you know what? I'm gonna take a nap now.
Yeah, you know what?
I'm just gonna sit here and smile like a buffoon.
It's not that at all.
It's that you have somehow rooted yourself
in something that isn't being rippled by the baby screaming.
You know, that to me is the practice of Buddhism
would allow you to grow roots into that rootless
space. So it's not bullshit.
A couple of quick thoughts on that. One, the eight month old baby probably does not know
she's on a plane. You said she thinks she's freaking out because the plane is going to
crash.
Where the fuck am I? What is this fucking bullshit?
Closer to that or I'm hungry or I just made a poop or whatever, whatever. And one of my
friends once said when I had a baby was like check first if they're hungry or tired. So
life is simpler than we might make it. And you can help people in simpler ways.
Life is simpler than we might make it, you know, and you can help people in simpler ways then.
Right.
So I was wondering if you saw this article, which I just happen to synchronously see this
morning about a comedian, one of your brothers in arms in Australia.
I didn't catch the name, but he's in Australia and he's at a club, a concert with 700 people.
And there's a baby, a mom with a baby
sitting in the fourth row, and the baby is crying.
You know, the baby is.
Okay.
And he asks them to leave because,
and of course, a furor in Australia
because they try to accommodate mothers and babies.
You didn't hear about this yet, I take it.
No, the baby was heckling.
Yeah, exactly.
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a website or a concert with 700 people, and there's a baby, a mom with a baby sitting
in the fourth row, and the baby is crying, you know, the baby is, and he asked them to
leave because, and of course a furor in, because they try to accommodate mothers and babies.
You didn't hear about this yet, I take it.
No, the baby was heckling.
Yeah, exactly.
And more complicatedly, the mother was trying
to breastfeed the baby to calm it down.
So they took it as a kind of a front
to that whole aspect of the world
in which children are included as part of reality.
So, you know, what would you have done?
Probably like bought the baby.
One of your shows?
Look, what he should have done is like, you know,
bought the baby a vodka soda.
You know.
Well, it was getting the vodka soda from the mind.
Look, so in that moment,
there's a few things that are gonna be going through my mind.
One, who the fuck brings a baby to a comedy show?
Are you nuts?
That's nuts.
That's not gonna work.
It's not music.
It's just some weirdo on stage yapping.
So that's gonna cross my mind, number oneapping. So that's going to cross my mind.
Number one.
The second thing that's going to cross my mind is if I eject a breastfeeding mother
from my show, I am. So, so the baby and the mother have created a perfect situation for comedy,
because I'm now have all your and for and for Dharma. Yeah, you will you just need to
say you know, obviously there's this is the worst kind of this is I thought I'd experienced
the worst heckler on earth,
but there can't be a worse heckler than a crying baby.
What are you gonna do?
Be like, get the fuck out of here.
Oh really, I guess you want attention, huh?
It's a show, baby.
You can't do anything, you are completely,
so if you eject, anytime you kick a heckler out of a show,
that's a high, that's like the nuclear option
and you only do that, you only do that if it's like
truly like an aggressive, shitty person
who's ruining the show for everybody,
but a baby, so you're doomed.
So yes, he made a terrible mistake
because all, basically at that point,
the show is going to have to just go off
the rails and you have to you know even maybe bring the mother on stage let her sit behind you
while you try to do jokes you just have to work with a baby that's how about a whole show whole
comedy show that's only for mothers and babies i Yeah, that would be amazing. Or only for babies.
Just get a bunch of strollers there.
Just see what, see how you do in front of a room full of babies.
So yeah, that is a, it's rough on the comic
because he's got to be thinking, like, why would you do this?
And that's the part where I was...
He was trying to, he was trying to protect
the investment of the other ticket holders, you know. So it's... But the point is that life actually is this complex.
And as we try to lay a dharma on top of it or a way of a perspective on top of it, you have to
get some point into the granularity of, you know, you could call it what would Buddha do or something
like that and, you know, somebody's kicking your chair in the movie theater and you want to, you know, you could call it what would Buddha do or something like that, and, you know, somebody's kicking your chair in the movie theater,
and you want to, you have all 49 Lojong slogans ready to go.
You know, you have your whole, you're armed and dangerous
with the dharmas that you've studied
and are trying to practice.
And reality just has this kind of, like, you know,
poky quality to it,
pokes right into where you think you're at, right?
But yes, but to me, the whole armed and dangerous
with the Lojong slogans,
which are like sort of mnemonic devices for the Dharma
or armed and dangerous
with any kind of spiritual information,
that means you're coming from your head.
And none of that shit's ever worked for me.
I could, I don't know how many times
I've remembered some Lojong slogan right before I blew up in a rage.
It's the last thing you think before you're like,
what the fuck?
So those things feel useless to me
in regards to the moment of that moment,
the moment you're talking about, which is,
look, riding through Myrtle Beach,
I might be able to have some semi-moment
of identifying with, you know,
there's something beautiful about the rundown nature
of this place.
There's something beautiful in its dilapidated quality.
There's something real that I can connect to here
that makes me less pointlessly neurotic about just a ride through a beach
town. But when it comes to the kicking of the seat, the screaming baby, you wake up
in the hospital and you don't have an arm or all the things that are forced.
Oh, it's quite elite. But go ahead, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, you could still leap. You just can't clap.
But in those moments, it feels like the only time any
of this stuff seems to work is if I have been meditating,
if I have actually been downshifting or whatever you want to call it, so that I have been meditating, if I have actually been, you know, downshifting or whatever you want to
call it so that I have a familiarity with that, with that state, that unconditioned state, then
it's more of a spontaneous reaction in the moment that is good. You know, not like, okay, what's the
17th Lojong slogan or let me remember the parameter of patience now. And all that stuff seems to me like a secondary thing to work on when
you're, you know, not dealing with stuff like that. And you know, we say, you know this, but we,
when we're in our training programs and training teachers,
the word for meditation that we more often use
is gom in Tibetan G-O-M.
And the meaning is to become familiar with something,
to familiarize yourself with something.
So that's a different way of talking about meditation
than it's trying to manage or manipulate something.
You're becoming familiar in a sense
when you, if you do spend 20 or 30 minutes a day just settling into a kind of attentive state, that's a non-reactive state.
That's the essence of the meditative state. It's non-reactive. You're not, you're not honing your that even might feel like to not rush into action,
to not, you know, judge harshly, to not jump into, you know, follow the footprints of passion and
aggression all the way down the rabbit hole, which is what how we spend most of the day.
So you're becoming familiar, you're gone with a more grounded state.
And then that will, in my humble opinion, when people say,
how long do I need to do this before it works?
I would say like 20 or 30 years would be a good start, you know,
with some kind of practice.
Yeah, yeah.
But everybody wants the zippity-doo-die, see that?
And that's part of that Myrtle Beach scenario, is they
want it fast and they want it hard. But as we know, that's not always the best sex, is
it?
I wouldn't know. It's the only sex I have, David. For 30 years, I've been practicing
that form of sex. You know, I, the, that, yeah, the, the, what's, to me, what's funny about meditation and
another sort of, maybe the word's too strong, but the reason it does seem to be a revolutionary
activity is in a world, in dopamine land, dopamine world, where you are the ideas, how quickly can I milk dopamine
out of the udders of my brain?
Like I need it fast, I need fast release Adderall.
I need like a powerful drug that gets me high right away.
I don't wanna wait 45 minutes, I wanna get high now.
So when you're, a few things for me that I've noticed when I'm sitting is all that momentum
of wanting to milk the cow.
It's still happening inside.
I might not be moving, but there's this like part of me that's like, okay, how do I wear
the udders here?
What do I do?
Right.
And then the sort of letting that do its thing, you know, at least I've noticed there's a
sort of, you have to give up controlling the situation completely, which is really revolutionary
in this sense.
That's all we're taught is control the situation, make it work for you.
And so that, and then you start trusting it, you know, that it's its own.
It's not like when you take Advil, you have to think anything after you swallow.
It's not like you're like, okay, now bloodstream, let's get this medicine to my head because I'm hungover.
It just will happen in its own time.
That to me is the revolutionary teaching of the thing.
It's like, watch this.
Look what happens if you just don't try to push it. And then that's the familiarity I think they're talking
about. Or avoid it. Or avoid it. Or avoid it. Or avoid it. Yeah. Don't push and don't avoid is a very
unusual because if you don't push it but you avoid it or repress it, that's what most people think meditation is, to be honest with you.
They think it's don't push it but you can avoid it and you can put something between you and it.
But if you also don't avoid it and you don't push it, which is the middle way kind of approach, where are you?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know, what do you mean?
Like a time space location, where are you?
You know, where is your access point
to interacting with the situation
if you're not pushing or avoiding?
Like let's say, take a domestic situation
with your child or your spouse or something like that.
If you're not pushing or avoiding, you're communicating.
Yeah, right.
Really?
I mean, I just thought that spontaneously.
So communication is this beautiful, intricate leave
of not pushing and not avoiding,
makes a very different type of communication also, no?
Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the, that's
spontaneous. The thing is this, no matter what you're doing, whether you're ordering,
or you're getting food, buying food at the grocery store, whether you're at a conversation
on a date, whether you work with coworkers talking, it's all spontaneous in the sense that you're not diving into the subconscious mind as summing up
instantaneously a series of words that you're linking together into a sentence that applies
to the situation added on top of whatever your agenda may be and some unacknowledged like other shit going on, it's all happening
spontaneously, habitually, habitually. And so you sort of, you, anytime that I have been
practicing for an extended period of time, you start realizing, oh, it's like all of
these things I've been doing are not bad.
They're just somewhere down the line. I figured out, well, this is the way to do this thing.
This is the way to do that thing. This is how you do that. And this is how you do that.
And now I just do them as though that is the way things are done spontaneously.
And that is how you end up with dishes in the sink and clothes all over the floor and
you know what I mean, food sitting out and you know people pissed off at you and because you're
not emailing them back or whatever. It's all of it is just like at some point I decided this is
how you do things in Duncanland and then when you when you start settling into this non-ignorant
start settling into this non ignorant, but not like wrestling state. Those things that you've been doing spontaneously, another thing starts emerging that to me feels
a little less spontaneous at first, especially when it's centered on this intention to help
this intention.
Okay. Okay, so you just said a great thing, not ignorant
and not aggressive. So of the three roots, you know, the three roots of the samsaric world that
you're talking about, you know, where everything's confused and, you know, you know, it's like a speed
a speed contest. The three roots are passion, aggression, and ignorance.
So you're saying if you stop ignoring, avoiding,
let's call it that, and you stop pushing your case
all the time, which is aggression,
the third one that's left is kind of an interesting one,
which is passion.
And that each one of them transforms
into an enlightened energy.
I'm just telling you the way I learned it.
The ignorance transforms into a spacious,
open, non-compulsive space.
The aggression transforms into a sharpness
and clarity of mind.
So the passion transforms into, you know,
you could say skillful and heartwarming communication
with everybody and everything, every situation.
So where, the passion is an interesting one though,
because without that, you don't even get started, right?
If you didn't have some passion for the Dharma,
for, you know, a particular type of training
that you're undergoing, you wouldn't do it.
So passion is a very important one.
And so you wouldn't be with a companion and working out your shit.
Passion is a really deep one.
Is transform the right word?
When you're experiencing these sort of negative qualities, it's really more that your awareness has been fixated on one side of a quality where
that other side, it's already there or the quality wouldn't be there anyway. So that, you know what
I mean? So it's not really, you're not transforming anything. You're just sort of going up the musical
scale, so to speak. You're like getting out of like one set of keys that you've been playing over
and over and you're realizing, shit, this keyboard
is much bigger than I expected and more in tune over here.
So it's always been there.
And to me that's-
Not only that, not only that.
It's always been there.
You just said, it's permanent, they say.
This is a word that you don't get to use in Buddhism
until you get into a certain level of perspective.
You say it's all the other things you're talking about,
the neurosis, the aggression, the wanting it your way,
they're all impermanent.
Like every rage that you've experienced
that has been part of your ecosystem
was impermanent without a doubt.
You call me the next day, you go like,
I don't feel that way anymore.
But while it's happening,
we don't recognize the impermanence.
The other qualities that you're talking about,
such as compassion, clarity of mind,
and a kind of spacious thing
are said to be indestructible aspects of your true nature.
Wow. That's, that's, that's a, that's called Vajra nature.
What part of you is not destructible, is not impermanent, is not coming and going.
And they say the awareness itself is actually try to find the source of
awareness, see if you can do that.
Not your brain.
Right. That's a big, that's a if you can do that. Not your brain. Right.
That's a big mistake to think that's what it is.
Your brain's like an organ like your liver.
It's an organ for thought processing.
Right, yeah, I don't buy into that materialist.
You need a liver as much as you need a brain.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
How did you know I needed a liver, actually?
No. Yeah, definitely. How did you know I needed a liver? Actually, you know, okay, we should talk about that if that's true.
I mean, but no, I don't need a liver.
Yeah, I mean, in other words, he's a new one.
Okay, good.
Yeah, well, wait a couple of decades, So, yeah, so in other words, what can we reside in?
What can we, you know, in the religious
and the theistic traditions, they say place your trust
or your faith in God.
You know, there's an old gospel song,
hold to things eternal, hold to God's unchanging hand.
I'm going to guess they mean maybe something similar, that there's something that's primordial,
that is fundamental, that is beyond our, you know, attempt to avoid or activate something
that we can rest in.
And I would say good meditation practice,
you should have some awareness of the fact
that you can rest in a primordial state when you meditate.
That's, you know, depending on the student,
I might just say rest in primordial awareness.
That's the whole instruction.
But we can't because we're jumping all,
we're at that Myrtle Beach supermarket,
you know, amusement park in our mind and
speed it up. So you have to give it a handle. And that's the
breath or something like that mindfulness.
Right? Yeah, not in doesn't have to be the breath. It could, it
could be, you know, that's at least in this book, I was
listening to it's sort of like you could, you could do breath,
you could do you one of the craziest ones was thought itself. He was saying, put
your awareness on your thinking. And then what he was saying, which definitely happens
when you decide to do that, is it's like your thoughts are like, fuck that, I'm gone. Your
thoughts just disappear. The moment you're like, okay, now I will let the thoughts be
the breath, which is really funny. But then again, this isn't, you know, that's the
other misconception. You think this is about, you know, removing your thoughts or whatever the
human thing is. And it's, it's, it's, to me, it's just like, you start seeing how somehow in the
midst of the baby screaming,
it's still there.
Like the awareness field is still there.
And the awareness field is the one thing
that doesn't give a shit about the baby crying,
not in a dark way, but it's not like furrowing its brow,
its shoulders aren't getting tight.
It's just the space within which this is happening.
And that, whatever that is to me, must be as far as
converting it to some theistic language. That would be what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven
or the Holy Spirit. And what's really interesting,
if you look in the book of John, the original Greek, in the beginning was the word.
Now you hear that, like, what does that even fucking mean? But it's logos is what that means.
It means the Dharma. And so it does connect to what you're saying, some kind of primordial,
non distorted reality. In the beginning was the Dharma. And then the Dharma... Locos also could mean mantra. Primordial sound. See, because primordial sound emanates from
primordial mind. It's like the next step up. And these things tap into a deeper aspect of our
experience. Take it one step deeper than sound.
Let's go, who was it?
I don't know, Euclid maybe, I don't know,
some famous ancient mathematician, it wasn't Euclid.
It doesn't matter.
He was saying that actually the closest we can get
to God or to like beauty, I think is how you put it, is math. Because sound is your
ears doing math. So it's your ears converting just the change in what air pressure into
mathematically converting that into what we call sound. So again, in the beginning,
there's this, and even math, you could say it's human symbols pointing towards this,
this inarguable situation. So in the beginning was the truth, dharma. And then the next part of that formula as it works out is the truth became a person. That's Jesus. But when we talk about, you know, Buddha means
the awakened one. So in other words, there is a capacity in humans to become that truth via
whatever you want to call it, enlightenment, whatever. Now, it's called Dharmakaya. That's
what it's actually called in the Buddhist tradition. It's the body of that, it's the domain of that kind of space of truth and suchness,
things as they are without the bias and the projections and the ego clinging.
And, you know, it could be very idealistic, but it also could be something that you could
access too.
Yeah, I mean, sure.
So what I love is that the toolbox we've been given from this perspective, and maybe this
is where it diverges a little bit from Christianity.
I haven't thought this one through all the way.
But whereas in Christianity, you have this sin state, unaligned state, that if you don't stop sinning, you will go to hell.
The sin is to be rejected. Get thee behind me, Satan! Whereas in this case, it's saying, actually,
these qualities that are causing you so much suffering, if you begin to follow them,
suffering, if you begin to follow them, they're leading to a state of bliss. It's not about
amputating these things, but actually keep following that deeper and deeper and deeper, see where it goes. This is why anytime I've met a true junkie,
there's something in them that has a saintly quality
because they are so invested in helping themselves
and serving themselves and altering their consciousness
in a divine state that if they just shifted that
to other people instead of themselves, if they had the same passion for blasting heroin in their arm, if they could convert that passion
to how do I help people in the world, they'd be like, they'd be Gandhi's, you know, they
would be Mother Teresa's, they would be, you know, tireless, tenacious, like outside of like
legal systems, they would self putting themselves they would
do they they literally destroy themselves for joy. Now, if it
but for their own joy, that's the problem. If they were just
like, yeah, I'll die for you if it means that I can help you in
some way. That's what's,
that's to me what's really interesting and I think underlines the point we're making.
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If they were just like, yeah, I'll die for you if it means that I can help you in some way.
That's what's that's to me what's really interesting and I think underlines the point we're making. It's true.
Maybe it's worth calling that transformation, if it's that radical.
And how it appears is so radically different than how it appeared. So what I was going to ask you is,
at what point does this kind of primordial awareness,
which doesn't really, as you said,
doesn't really bias towards the baby being happy
or not happy or you being happy or me not being happy,
at what point does that turn into,
does it have a tinge, the slightest like red drop
on a vast array of white snow of compassion and bias, point does that turn into, does it have a tinge, the slightest like red drop on
white, a vast array of white snow of compassion and bias towards goodness?
Does it have that or does it not have that?
Is it just pure cold space, vast and indifferent, or does it have a little bit
of a bias towards, towards goodness and compassion?
What do you think?
I don't think it has a bias.
I think that it, but I do think that if you're in,
so look at the opposite of that state.
Like if you're completely fixated on what,
how you want things to be right then and yourself,
and then applying all the distortions that,
at least I apply in situations like that,
such as the baby will cry forever,
is maybe the plane won't land.
Maybe this plane is just gonna keep flying
and the baby will scream forever, insanity.
And so all of those thoughts,
oh my God, I'm not helping enough.
I should know how to make the baby stop crying.
Or what are we doing?
Why do we even take this baby on a trip like this?
We're tormenting the baby.
All those things.
Those are going to lead me to saying some bullshit or you know what I mean, I'm going
to get angry.
Now I'm stressed. When I'm stressed, simplification.
When you're stressed, you act a certain way.
When you are compressed into yourself,
you act a certain way.
And that way for me is always sloppy.
And are you simultaneously cut off
from the basic nature of awareness and your own compassion?
Well, I don't, that's where it gets-
Don't you lose both threads at the same time in a way?
What's weird is you, you know, it's strange way,
you're not devoid of awareness.
It's like the awareness has been turned into a laser
or something, it's like the awareness is now
just so hyper compressed into this one fantasy or something. It's like the awareness is now just so hyper compressed into this one, like
fantasy or something. It's still there. It's very powerful. And you if whenever you get
into that state, realize like, Whoa, this is like, imagine if you could, if you could
rest this into your breath, the way you're resting it into like, how fucking pissed you
are, like, it's, because we that's what we've been practicing.
We're good at that.
Like it's natural.
So I don't think more like a laser and less like the sun radiating.
Yeah, it's the difference between a particle and a wave.
You're you're one of them is a it's converted into just some
zapping laser of neurosis and the other one, because it's just, it's a wave.
It's in that place, I mean,
this is such an idiot's way of describing it,
but just think of the last time you took good MDMA.
You know, try to be in a bad mood.
Try when you're in that state of like,
just flooded with dopamine.
Try to get mad at somebody in that state.
All you're doing is like, I just want you to know I really love you.
You mean the world to me.
The problem is you come down.
But it shows how in that place it's easier to be a wave than a particle and naturally things roll
out of your mouth or naturally you look back at things you wish you didn't do and you're like,
you know, I was doing my best. I love that there was love there. And then so to me that's
the biochemical way of describing what we're talking about. So no, I do not think the awareness field itself
is compassionate, benevolent,
has some like,
personality to it necessarily.
But I think that something about
letting go into that space
engenders all of the qualities
that we hear about in Buddhism.
And you're also saying that quote unquote sin is just an obscuration from that space.
Yeah.
It's not a thing in itself.
But it's the, it's you've been, and it's interesting the idea of being, you know, like Adam and
Eve being thrown out of the garden.
It's like you have been cut off.
In a way, neurosis is a kind of cut off state in which that laser focus is keeping you constricted
and tight.
And if you open and you relax, the flow of the qualities that we're talking about is
quite natural, actually.
I think that I would say in my experience that's true.
When you find that baby laughing
or somebody looking at that,
or you just look at water,
like I have the East River right outside my window,
I just watch the water and the waves,
you quite naturally open up to a kind of
non-neurotic and non-sinful,
you don't wanna hurt somebody.
Yeah.
And the world is constricted right now.
It's very tight to me.
I just watch people snapping, like snapping turtles.
I'm worried about it, Duncan.
This is the problem with the way we do democracy in America is it's like the presidential
elections are coming up, so you have just a shotgun blast of propaganda going into your
face anytime you go on the internet, anywhere, any social media, anything.
And all of that completely involves putting people into that constricted
state.
They want you afraid of this guy or that guy.
They want you to think the survival of the country and the planet, well, your vote is
going to determine whether or not there's a nuclear war or no more America.
And if you look back at every political season, it's always like that.
It's always, we are on the brink.
And if you don't, then we're going over the edge, baby.
And then once somebody gets elected,
what's the first thing they say?
Now is the time to heal.
So it's like the very same people
who've been paying billions of dollars
to just psychically just devastate
the population into voting for them.
They get in front of the podium and they're like, now we must come together as a country.
And it's bullshit.
It's like, it's, you know, I think who's the comedian talking about?
This is really awful.
Something that pimps do when they beat up a prostitute.
No, it wasn't a comedian.
It was some documentary on prostitution. Pimp beats up the prostitute, no it wasn't a comedian, it was some documentary on prostitution.
Pimp beats up the prostitute, then gives them a bath.
Like rubs their shoulders, it's like,
ah, you know, I love you so much.
And that's how you like induce the effect
where you fall in love with your kidnapper.
It's like the kidnapper gives you some kindness
after like mauling you and somehow your brain
is just like, okay, okay, I guess I love you.
That's what the president does.
That's exactly what, so we're in the mauling period
right now where both sides are just trying
to terrify the shit out of us.
And of course people are buying into that
because they don't realize this is the pattern
every time there's an election,
every time it's the end of the world,
every time it's horror.
And then that horror dissipates for four years
and then it starts again.
Look what this one has done.
Look at these last four years.
They brought us to the brink.
I will save us. So that's,
I think, why people are tight right now. You know, it just reminded me of a story
with my teacher Trungpa Rinpoche, and we were sitting around at an anniversary party of one
of the facilities. And he went around the room, he did two things, actually. One was he taught us about how to do divination,
which is kind of an interesting thing
that I'll talk to you about another time.
But the other was then he said, okay,
and this was all the, you know,
sort of leaders of the various communities.
He said, what would you do if you,
tomorrow you were made president or king or whatever,
you're now in charge, you're actually in charge.
What would be your course of action?
And he went around the room, everybody kind of to,
everybody spieled their spiel and presented their options.
And then at the end we went, well, Rinpoche,
what would you do?
And I remember this very vividly.
He said, the first thing I would do
is tell everybody, just keep doing what you're doing. Perfect. Perfect. I mean, you know,
can you imagine? Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't mean keep fucking things up and keep abusing people. It
doesn't mean that. It means there's, you know, this
notion of everything has to be cut, like what you're saying, the panic driven cutoff. There's
too much feed into our panic mind and not enough into the continuity of goodness.
100%.
Of possibilities.
It's horrible. It's wagging the dog, man. It's like, imagine if you, as if you and your siblings had
to vote for your next father, and there were two fathers running to be your next, your stepfather,
and they got to do propaganda campaigns. They got to talk shit about each other. They got to like,
just dig stuff up in the past of each father, what kind of house would you be living in?
What would that house be like for the six months leading up to the choosing that father?
And then after you get the father, since the other one has defamed them so much, half the
siblings don't trust him anyway and are like, man, we need a new father.
That other father would have been better.
Now this father sucks. And so you have this, all of these politicians
who are so audacious and so puffed up
in their proclamation of wanting to,
of loving the country when their entire mechanism
of maintaining power is to malign anyone
who doesn't agree with them.
And it's horrific.
And it's like the effect it has on people is like,
is brutal because people buy into this shit.
These people are so hypnotic and they're so good
at convincing you that the world is ending.
It's a cult.
I mean, the only way,
what is the difference between the way these people
are running their campaigns
and any garden variety suicide cult leader who's like, the world will
end soon, we must, or you know if you don't let me hump your wife, the sun will
vanish from the sky. You know it's, what is the difference? It might be a little
less like performative, but it's still, from the top to the bottom the whole
mechanism sucks it's just awful I mean you know what question I would
ask the stepfather who was vying for the job yeah I think I would ask are you
gonna be kind to my mother? of course I'm gonna be more kind than the other asshole let me tell you and he will tell you he going to be kind to my mother? Of course. I'm going to be more kind than the other asshole, let me tell you.
And he will tell you he's going to be kind to your mother,
but he's a piece of shit.
If you've seen his criminal record, I dug it up.
You know he went to jail.
Oh, Jesus, man.
Deep breath.
And if I became president, you know the first thing I would do, my friend?
No, not yet.
Quit.
Letter of resignation.
No, you wouldn't. Come on, Duncan. You can't do that. I'm not going to? No, not yet. Quit. Letter of resignation. No, no, you wouldn't.
Come on, Duncan.
You can't do that.
Oh, yeah.
I'm not going to get sucked into that bullshit.
Are you kidding?
I would rather.
You need to.
No, my friend.
I would rather be Donald Duck at Disney World.
If you're going to make me a mascot, I want to be one in an actual amusement park, not
an amusement park where people don't realize they're at Disney World.
I will wear, like, I will wear a president costume at a fair, but I'm not going to like
take the LARP as president.
No way.
It's a bit nihilistic, but I feel you on it.
It's just, it's not a great, I mean, there's no time.
What am I going to do?
I can't have synthesizers in the Oval Office.
What are you running for?
Right now?
Yeah.
That's funny. I don't know. I'm running for anything. I mean, I'm, you know, I don't know if I'd call it running because it's not a democracy. I'm just trying to, I enjoy making
things and I don't want to be an asshole. So I'm, it's sort of, I don't know if that's
too just basic and dumb, but I, that whatever that would be, if that's an office, then please
vote for me. I mean, maybe not. I'm pretty good at being an asshole. David, we, this
brings us to, I mean, there, I love chatting with you. The reason I'm even able to have this conversation
is because of you and all the stuff you've introduced me to.
I wouldn't have, I wouldn't, I don't think I,
I would have stumbled upon any of the stuff
we're talking about.
And I don't think I would have been as like magnetized
into Buddhism as I am now, not for meeting you.
If I had met somebody, it would have been easy for me to meet somebody who articulated this stuff in a way that made me think,
this is boring and pointless and absolutely a waste of time.
So you're so good at, I think, individually sort of identifying what people are like,
you're very good at like, speaking our language individually.
I don't think you could do this in some broad way.
You know, like, I think that it's very difficult.
I think that's the problem with books is they're great, but it's like, it's not individualized.
And the whole lineage of Buddhism seems to be one
where a teacher understands the psychology of the student
and then knows how to sort of speak to that psychology
to sort of lore maybe at first,
identifying the aggression and the neurosis
and not rejecting it, but say, oh, okay, that's a good,
I know what that is here, and giving things to it
that it eats and it doesn't know it's medicine.
Well, on that note, we are trying to train teachers
who can do that.
Both present the broad strokes and finesse,
the situation of communicating, you know, the value, the essence of these practices
to people without any attempt to create a monolith of any kind necessarily.
It's something that is in the wind right now and people want to learn these things.
So there's something natural
happening. But we are trying to train at Dharma Moon, you know this, we're trying to train teachers.
That's a very important part. And that's why I was talking to you earlier about the
intergenerational lineage aspect of how these things are transmitted. They are like I'm old,
you know, I'm getting older every minute and I'm going like,
well, what is gonna happen the next round?
You know, people like you are gonna take over
and Ethan and all the students.
And I was taken such good care of by my teachers,
it's just extraordinary that way, handed, you know,
can you imagine if you felt like somebody had handed you
a basket of gold, you know, and then you know, can you imagine if you felt like somebody had handed you a basket of gold, you know, and then you go, it's heavy, there's that quality to it, but
there's also a lustrous and rich quality to it, and you want to pass it along.
So for whatever it's worth, you know, that's what we're trying to do with the
Dharma Moon program, that you have so much helped out with, so many people have
come to these teacher training programs because of the connection
with you Duncan.
That's cool.
It's an interesting sidebar of your attempt not to, what did you say, not to be an asshole?
Yeah, running to not be an asshole.
You might have succeeded more than you know.
Well, that's good news. Look, I just think it's like sending people to,
it's like, you know, sending someone
like great music or something.
You know, it's such a, it's just a good way to learn
about something that just depending on which book
you stumble upon or what person you're talking to,
it can seem very confusing and easy to articulate it
in the wrong way completely.
It's easy to think, God knows I've done this
where you really think you figured it out.
And then you start like talking about it to someone
and later down the line, you realize like,
I literally told them the opposite of what that means.
Like the polar opposite.
What have I done? What have I, it's like telling someone how to swim.
It's like, just go down, just keep swimming down
and that's swimming.
Just flail, flail in the water.
So it's, that's the other thing about it is that it is,
it's nice to have somebody sort of bring you
into the deep waters of it.
And also, as you say, we do this in real time,
meaning like everyone does it at their own pace.
You don't wanna start taking trigonometry
before you know how to do basic math.
You know, and I like that about it.
It's systematic and I think that's part of the lineage
that you, it's a systematic it. It's systematic. And I think that's part of the lineage that you it's a systematic approach.
And it's an essentially ultimately an oral transmission lineage, or they call it ear
whispered. Yeah, sometimes, you know, there is a passing along of some essence of experience
that is very hard to, you know, calibrate as purely an intellectual set of ideas that's
being transmitted along.
There's something deeper going through.
And I feel a responsibility personally because I kind of, through no real virtue of my own,
got very seriously exposed to what I call the old blues masters,
the 20th century Tibetan, the last group of teachers that were raised in that system in Tibet.
Dilgokense Rinpoche,
Kalo Rinpoche, Tungpa Rinpoche, Karmapa, these were like incredible transmission beings.
You could remember what they said and things like that, but there's a feeling that got passed along
that I'm absolutely intent on sharing as much as I can possibly.
Yes, yeah.
I mean, to put it back in a stoner terminology,
it's a contact high.
I mean, it kind of is.
No, I don't know if you've had this experience.
If I get around people who are on acid,
I can start feeling like I'm tripping.
And it's not like breathing in smoke.
What's going on there?
And it's, their consciousness is so altered
and we tend to harmonize with each other
that my consciousness is harmonizing
with their consciousness.
And that harmonization is feeling like, whoa,
I am tripping.
And so I have a feeling it's sort of similar to that.
When I'm around comedians, it's the same thing when you're around comedians,
it's funnier.
When you're around negative people, you have to watch out or
you'll start getting negative.
Nihilists, you'll become a nihilist.
It's like Zellig, that movie Zellig.
Never saw it.
It's Woody Allen and it's like he just can absorb everything around him.
So the other part of it is that the next generation has to do it their own way at the same time.
And that's really, you know, frame it in their own terms, make it relevant to the current
reality.
So that's a tricky dance, you know, to absorb the ancestral wisdom and then to really, really flesh it out in
the time and place you're in.
So I think a lot of people-
All right, don't worry, David.
We're going to digitally clone you.
We're just going to clone you.
Like, that's it.
We don't have to worry about this problem.
You're going to be an infinite being whether you like it or it. We don't have to worry about this problem. You're gonna be an infinite being
whether you like it or not.
We gotcha.
Well, on that note.
I do.
Thank you, David.
Thank you so much.
This was a fun, fun chat.
And thank you for hosting us.
And we have another teacher training
coming along in the summer. and there'll be a link
there if you want to join this, whatever you're perceiving this algorithm to be, you know,
we'll have a link for you to, and I do welcome you to join in because there's more, and then,
and it is somewhat methodical, and we do go through it with people. So thank you, Duncan.
Thank you.
Let me know if you need anything, okay?
Yeah, likewise.
Thank you, David.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you so much, everybody.
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