Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 315: David Nichtern

Episode Date: December 1, 2018

David Nichtern, teacher, author, meditation guide, and award-winning musician, joins the DTFH! Check out David's website at [DavidNichtern.com](http://davidnichtern.com/). This episode is brought to you by [Squarespace](https://www.squarespace.com/duncan) (offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site).

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Guys, before we dive into this excellent podcast with David Nickturn, I just want to address some of the rumors that have been flying around related to the major record deal Brendan Walsh and I just got with the music industry for our album, the UN should regulate the internet to protect the children of the world. Number one, a lot of people have been accusing us of using subliminal messages in this album. This is not the case. We did not use any subliminal messages at all. It's just great rock and roll and it's a hit album. And here's an extra special treat. Lord Magnus, the producer of this album, has given us permission to release the, what's it called?

Single. Single, that's it. Thank you Lord Magnus. I forgot to mention Lord Magnus is in the studio with me now and will be in the studio with me for every opening for the DTFH from now until eternity. Without further ado, here is our single protocol 666 from the album. The UN should regulate the internet to protect the children of the world. Look into the face of the painted clown. See the priest kneeling down. Money's spent, money's spent. Get some fuck off of the president. Are you a wholeness? I'm going to need you to activate protocol 666. Release Jesus from his prison. It's time. Take this, come with me. I got the D. Uh, Niner 4 Niner, it looks like Jesus has escaped from his prison. Destroy him.

Destroy Jesus? I'm afraid we have no choice. But he's a son of God. Those are direct orders. Fire on Jesus. It's a great album. We had a blast recording it. The only hitch was one of the interns went mad and started raving about, I don't know, ancient ones who live beneath the sea. Guys, just because marijuana is legal in California doesn't mean that you should take it to the edge. Relax. You don't have to get so high. You claw your eyeballs out in a professional recording studio and scream about some kind of ancient force returning to the earth. A force that has always been here and will always be here long after the pesky little monkey descendants known as human beings are gone. We've got a wonderful podcast for you today. David Nickturn is here.

This is from NationalGeographic.com. On the morning of November 11th, just before 9 30, a mysterious rumble rolled around the world. The seismic waves began roughly 15 miles off the shore of myote, a French island sandwiched between Africa and the northern tip of Madagascar. The waters buzzed Africa, ringing sensors in Zambia, Kenya, Ethiopia, child, New Zealand, Canada and Hawaii, nearly 11,000 miles away. Scientists are flabbergasted. They have no idea what this could have been, but if you know websites, then you know exactly what happened. This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by Squarespace.com. The truth of the matter is that those seismic ripples, as the foolish scientists are calling them, are being caused by nanobots destroying the creators of horrific websites around the planet. That particular event was the disintegration of Larry Smith, who was a expat from the United States, who had a website so horrific that he was the first one to be dissolved by the AI nanobots that escaped from the inner sanctum of the Google hatchery.

These things are going to be swarming around the planet, and if your website sucks, unfortunately, this is in no way coercion. There is the potential that you will be atomically annihilated by a swarm of nanobots, which if someone saw it happen, all they would see is you would disappear and there would be a strange ripple as though reality itself were a movie screen and someone had pushed it from behind. But you yourself would experience a kind of infinite dissipation that from what I've heard from my friends over at Google is not only painful, but something that goes beyond pain, something that no one should ever experience. Fortunately, the kind folk over at Squarespace.com have made it simple to make a beautiful website with their award-winning templates. They've got everything you need. Head over to Squarespace.com forward slash Duncan. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain protocol 666.com. It's currently available. Could you imagine a domain with such power and potency not already being owned by some brilliant entrepreneur? It's right there. We're ready for you to snatch it. All you got to do is head over to Squarespace.com forward slash Duncan. Use offer code Duncan and you'll get 10% off a website or a domain. My sweet loves a big thank you to my Patreon patrons for supporting me. If you don't want any more commercials, if you want commercial free episodes of the DTFH or just extra stuff, including more rants and access to the DTFH discord server, head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and sign up.

We also have a shop located at DuncanTrussell.com with t-shirts, posters, and stickers, including bumper stickers will soon be available for something that I feel very strongly about. And I'll talk about it more in another intro. But it's the issue of so many people imagining that crows milk is a normal or healthy part of a human diet. Guys, it's not these beautiful mother crows are flying with their massive milk swollen breasts. And that's for their baby babies, not for your babies or your mouth, for example, this whole new thing of catching them and suckling at them in the grass of parks. It's disgusting to watch and just the horror of seeing so many crows milk bars popping up around the city is really unnerved me. So I usually don't get political, but I'm taking a stand for once and I hope you will too. And there's going to be some bumper stickers that say stop drinking crows milk. And also, I'm not saying you should do this. In fact, you shouldn't. We're also because of a manufacturing accident, we've got some that just say drinking crows milk. So my hope is that people who are into drinking crows milk don't buy this to tell people that they're drinking crows milk. And also my hope is that the activists out there don't buy these to put on stop signs so that it says stop drinking crows milk. Because I think that is I'm certain that must be illegal. Either way, if you want to put them on your car or some some place where you've gotten permission to put them, they're going to be available at Duncan trustle.com. Today's guest is an author. He's also a meditation teacher and he's an Emmy award winning musician. This is, I believe his second appearance on the DTFH maybe his third.

He has written a really great book called Awakening from the Daydream, which is a fantastic take on the Buddhist wheel of life. He and I have been doing some, I guess you call him live podcasts in Echo Park at the Samrasa Center, and I have been working with him. He's been giving me meditation instruction. If you're new to the DTFH and you just started listening, go back and listen to the last episode with David. That is when he taught me the basics of sitting meditation. And this is sort of a conversation about the practice itself because by some miracle, I've had a regular practice for longer than I ever have before, actually. And so this is kind of a conversation about some of the stuff that happens when you are sitting every day and not doing anything. And as simple as it sounds, it's somehow completely difficult to do, at least if you're me. I don't know. Maybe you're some kind of super enlightened being who just sits down and doesn't need to look at your phone or anything and just relaxes and merges with the universe and recognizes some non-dual state and then you pop out of it and go to work and then it's no big deal. You're enlightened. You're the Buddha. Congratulations. But if you're like me or are me, then you know that there's, for whatever reason, it's a really crazy thing to sit still for 30 minutes straight, which seems like it'd be the easiest thing ever. And this is a conversation about that along with some other interesting stuff. David is a really good teacher. And as simple as this stuff may sound, it really helps to have somebody who knows how to talk about it in a simple way. Also, David was a student of Chogyam Trumpa Rinpoche, who I consider one of the great teachers of the West. And he wrote one of my favorite books on meditation and spirituality called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.

And David worked with him for many years. Chogyam Trumpa has a lot of great videos on YouTube, which I would recommend checking out. But also, if you happen to be on the East Coast, David has, it does fairly regular workshops. And I'm going to have all the links to those at DuncanTrussell.com. And also next year in the spring, we're going to be doing something at Samarasah, the awesome yoga studio in Echo Park. All right, everybody, please welcome to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, David Nickturn. It's the Duncan Trussell Family Hour. David, thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's a pleasure. It's a very special conversation because now we can actually talk about meditating instead of me speculating. Instead of speculation. Yeah, and sorry.

This is a... It's meditation, not speculation. Right. And it's so, but this is, you know, it's so much easier to talk about meditating than to meditate. I think it's the other way around. Really? I do actually. Was it always like that for you? Well, I like talking as you know, you know, and I like talking about meditation.

But it seems like meditation is just very reduced activity. So it should be easier. Right. That's why I said, was it always like that for you? Well, no, there's the rub, though. It should be. I mean, if you look at it, if you were from another planet, you said, oh, that person's just sitting still and being quiet and just maybe breathing a little bit. And being attentive, that should be easier. Yeah. Why is it harder? Yeah. Well, to me, that's the first one of the interesting signs that you're doing something right, because it seems to just for fun.

Don't really believe this, but you know, it's fun to use little lenses. So it's fun to think if this were some kind of simulation. And there were certain things in the simulation that had walls built around it, where kinds of alarm systems went off when somebody started doing it, then meditation would definitely be one of those things. Because why and why in the world, just like what you're saying, why in the world would just sitting still for half an hour, make it feel sometimes as though someone who just ignited your body after pouring kerosene all over it. It seems a little odd. It's fishy. Yeah. It's intriguing in any case.

And when you see people settle in, you know, I teach a lot of beginning students, you know, so when you see somebody settle into sitting, you can almost see a sort of feeling of struggle about it. Yeah. As opposed to just, oh, this is, you know, kind of open. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, when I sit down for a nice night of watching 60 minutes, or whatever, Netflix, whatever, there is no feeling of like, boy, I hope my fucking mind doesn't go crazy here. No one's teaching those classes. Yeah.

There is no class where someone's like, I'm going to teach you how to sit on the couch and watch TV. Yeah. If there was, I would be teaching it. I'm pretty good at it. There's a lot of experts on that subject. Yeah. So what, you know, since, since you're now Vajrasword, cutting through all the way to the essence in one single stroke, Vajrasword, what, why is that? Why?

Why is it hard for people to sit down and be still? Because it seems like there is some kind of layer or reality of pain that is difficult to face, I would say. That becomes more apparent in the stillness? Yeah. Because you sort of, it's a, it's a, there's, it's like, well, double-edged sword. How wonderful to realize that actually you're always in the wrong direction. How terrible to realize that actually you're kind of always having some kind of pain and that, that all your solutions to the problem were not really going to fix it. How wonderful to realize that all your solutions to the problem weren't really going to fix it because in both.

Well, but that's, that's assuming anybody has acknowledged that there is a problem. I think that's the first bandaid that has to come off is realizing that there is a problem. That's why, but, you know, this is Buddhism 101, the first noble truth, the truth of suffering is not a dire prediction. Or, you know, Debbie Downer taking over the universe. It's not that kind of thing. It's just recognizing the texture of, of, you know, our nor ordinary experience without overlays. What is it actually like to be alive? And all the Buddha said was, you know, just there's a kind of layer of discomfort that's pretty profound.

And rather than ignoring it and trying to cover it up like we were talking about Friday night, you know, the spiritual materialism approach. Let's get some other kinds of spiritual entertainment into the picture, into the mix. You actually say, I'm going to kind of check this out. I'm going to explore this and look for the origin. So that's right. That's the second noble truth. Look at the origin of the suffering. And then people skip over this, but the third one is the cessation of suffering and the fourth one's a path.

So it's, it's ultimately extremely positive optimistic. That's, you know, I don't think a lot of people have penetrated far enough into Buddhism to get to that piece of it where they're saying, yeah, a truth of suffering. Don't try to work your way around it. And, but look at it. Look at the cause. And then there's a kind of way to work with it. That's completely transformative and very different. Right.

But it's not based on denial. Right. At all. Well, there's always going to be some denial, but it's not based on denial is denial and ignorance. Are they the same thing? Well, I guess denial would be the active muscle of ignorance. You know, ignorance can be kind of dull and spacey, but denial is you've got to really work at it. Like Trong Perimache, who I know you're very interested in, and Trong Perimache is a teacher, you know, used to call it not ignorance, but ignoring.

He turned it into a verb. Cool. It's an activity. Cool. Denial is an activity. You know, if somebody comes and says, you know, did you like a half a cookie is on the counter and crumbs? Did you eat this cookie? I need that cookie.

That's denial. It's pretty active. Yeah. But ignorance could also just be like, you know, what cookie? Right. I don't see any cookie. Right. But what he's saying is underneath that there's you do see the cookie and you're actively trying to manipulate the situation to make it disappear.

Yeah. Yeah, that. That's pretty cool. I find that to be really, really exciting to start seeing the not just like the overt pattern of a of ignoring. Which I have in so many different ways in the past. Done. And it's caused a lot of fucking pain, like the most overt example of it would be. I was just terrified of like going in and getting my scans to make sure that my cancer hadn't come back.

Now this is terrifying, you know, because you have to wait for results. You have to, you know, wait for results. And you don't know. Now the mind is telling you the results and the disease are the same thing when one is just a quantification of a thing and the other is an actual thing. They're not the same thing. If you have it, you have it. But there's a lot of superstition that can spring up. So I spent some time ignoring something I had to do.

And so I went to this great doctor and I, you know, he's like, well, when was the last time you got your scans? And I'm like, well, you know, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to, I don't want that radiation from the X-rays in my chest. He goes, oh, really? Well, you know, the radiation from the X-rays isn't quite so bad. But that being said, you know, once I did these scans with someone and they had cancer, it had come back and we stopped it. Now that was pretty ferocious. He's just looking at me like, and then he goes, well, if you decide not to do this, you know, I'm going to have to write down, refused. Like third grade.

Yeah, yeah. Refused this. Yeah. Refused this. And then I was like, all right, well, you know, let me think about it. I'll come back. Yeah. And so then I was sitting with the nurse.

He'd left. And the nurse goes, all right, we're going to take you in for your X-rays now for this game. And I'd already said, well, I'll come back. But he was somehow a size me up enough to know that I was going to actually do the tests. Good doctor. I did it. I did the test. Yeah.

I mean, you know, doctor has to choose the right medicine and also get you to take it. You know, you've heard me saying that at like all these meditation workshops, it's like in our tradition, the role of the teacher is to get the right prescription and get you to take it. And then kind of not babysit a lot beyond that. Yeah. You know, so there's kind of, but that is, it is prescriptive, you know, the Buddhist approaches prescriptive in that there's a particular situation you're applying a particular remedy. That, that, and that is why I brought the doctor because it reminded me of a good teacher. And then what happened is after I stopped ignoring that and I got the results back, then all the secret, stupid, shitty, awful anxiety, the dark shadow of knowing I need to get this looked at, it went away. That was fine.

Yeah. All those, all that time of like feeling just nervous secretly, but not wanting to express it. Also adding to it, this layer of rationalization based on, well, you know, it's the radiation I'm afraid of. Yeah. Shut up. You're not afraid of the fucking radiation. You go through radiation every day. You go through how many times you've gone through the scanner at the airport and not gotten pat down.

You know, instead, anyway, the point is, and the reason I brought that up is because the anxiety that was causing me secretly was manifesting in all these different ways. My fucking back was hurting. You know, I had all these physical symptoms, all these things that once that was like revealed, they all kind of vanished. So this is why it reminds me of this ignoring the act of ignoring. It's like when you turn him get in, you do the scan, so to speak, which I think you could say is sitting kind of scans starts happening. Yeah. Of the thing as it is. Yeah.

Not as you wish it were. Yeah. So even beyond that, they say that, you know, to illuminate the first noble truth has the truth of suffering. There's like four categories of suffering. I happen to really like I enjoy the precision of this kind of presentation. So the first one's called not getting what you want. That's the first type of suffering. The second is getting what you don't want.

Right. Which is slightly different. The third one is called the pain of alternation, which is you sort of get what you want and then you lose it and you get it. You know, it's like sometimes use the metaphor of when you're starting a romance. The first night, ah, this is going to be fantastic. It's going to be perfect. And then she doesn't call the next day or then she comes to the date the next day and sort of has garlic breath. Yes.

Gotcha. So it's the up and down ride, the roller coaster of expectations and disappointments. Then the fourth one is called all pervasive, which is that when I use sometimes the analogy of room tone. Just like, yeah, like everybody's talking in a restaurant, you know, but underneath the fan noise is going. Yes. So that's the kind of underlying anxiety is not a bad word for it. There's some kind of feeling even on a good day, even in a good moment where it's just, you know, it could slip away. So is this so that all pervasive as you're calling it?

Does that sort of the reservoir that the other ones are coming out of? Like if there's a fountain show? Is that what's, is that like all the when the fountain's spraying and being lit up? Yeah. Is so whatever the water is being pulled out of is that the all pervasive suffering? Well, this is where we, you know, you take out the Vajra sword, right? And look, instead of looking away from this part of experience, you look towards it, which is a very brave. That's what you did in your, in your with your doctor.

You said, instead of looking away from this experience, I mean, look towards it and see what I'm dealing with here. And then a certain level, the pain was dispersed. Yeah. The pain of ignorance or denial or actively trying to alter. So, of course, underlying your willingness to do that was you don't know what news is going to come. Oh, that's right. So that's a big mind that can reside in a space in which you don't know what the news is going to be. That's right.

The Zen people, they call that not knowing, right? Yeah. And the advice is to, to, to reside there. Right. A little bit tasted a little more than we usually do. And it's funny because a lot of, you know, it's like that thing where you turn on the lights in a, you know, when you're a kid and you were sure there were monsters in the room. So the light in that analogy is just awareness can kind of illuminate a situation and clarify. And then you don't at least have to have secondary tertiary, queduciary, whatever the next one is.

Fiduciary, douchebaggery, you know, different responses to it. You would have just dealt with what was happening. Right. Right. And you would have had to deal with it as you did with the onset of the cancer in the first place. That's right. You had to deal with it. Had to deal with it.

Even though I didn't want to. And even though like that doctor also was pretty great because I was like, well, you know, can I, um, when I found out about, I was like, well, I've got this tour coming up. Do you think I could go on the tour and then like do this stuff? And he got this look in his face simultaneous, like surprise. And also like that look doctors have like, Jesus Christ, man, I've got to deal with this every day. He looks at me and he goes, you have cancer. You can't go on tour, man. But the mind's scrambling, scrambling.

Let me like put it down. I can make, I can control. I could do, you can't, you have to deal with it now. It's here. The enemies of the gate. You don't get to go make a fire and cook dinner and have your regular dinner and a glass of wine and go to bed. There's mobs in front of your house. So this, that is, um,

Wow, powerful. Yeah, that's a pretty powerful moment. But this to sort of take it a little bit down or up. I don't know which direction, but, um, there's a thing. A very disturbing, uh, Ted talk I saw, which is showing on YouTube. There's this popular type of video that kids are watching young kids, young, young, young kids. And what it is is, uh, it's a video of people taking, I didn't even know these things existed. There's some kind of egg that you open it up and there's little prizes inside the egg.

It's, they're called like surprise eggs or something. I don't know what it is. And so there are videos on YouTube on just unbelievable, there's an unbelievable amount of these videos, which is just a hand opening an egg and showing a thing inside and then opening another egg and showing a thing inside and opening another egg and showing a thing inside. And kids, when they start watching it, they can't stop watching it. I mean, they look at egg after egg after egg. Yeah, they get glued to the egg. They can't stop watching it.

And if you try to, if you show a kid one of these things and you take the iPad away or whatever, the kid freaks the fuck out and gets really unhappy. And so the Ted talk was like, what appears to have happened here is people have, you know, stumbled upon a kind of like glitch in the programming of humans, which is the egg, of course, is the unknown. And the opening is it becoming known. And the prize inside is like the, the, you get a little excitement from like, oh, it was a little race car. And then the unknown returns and then the prize inside. So they've almost discovered like the samsaric pattern. And it's in, it's, it's hardwired into kids and they're using it to hold kids fixated on these programs.

And so, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's in a way it's reverse training of the mind. You know, if you look at, you know, any healthy tradition of cultivation or training the mind, it's almost the opposite of this is almost diabolical in a way, because it's reversed. Like, let us pray on, on this tendency to, to resist the unknown or unknowable. And in meditation, you train on creating a stable ability to reside with the unknown. Yeah. Now, how does that play into it? Like, you know, ultimately, ultimately, we would say it plays into the fact that you are ultimately going to unknown place called death.

Nobody really kind of can tell you what that experience is going to be like, because if they could, they would be dead. Yeah. So of course, there's a lot of. Or if they could, they wouldn't be dead, I guess. Well, or yeah, exactly. So the question is, can you work with your mind as long as you think you're alive and are sort of functioning in this reality, in a way that stabilizes it towards the unknown, so that you don't freak out, don't panic. So what happens to people, according to Trunko Rinpoche, when they die is there's a certain panic that sets in a loss of ground. That's the underlying experience of dying.

It's like, you know, I'm, you know, and people get very, very upset and the instruction, even not even just Buddhism, but people say, just try to go with the experience. If you're helping somebody to die, you say, you know, just don't don't be frightened of your own mind, don't be frightened of your own projections, right? So you're trying to develop a certain kind of equanimity going into that experience. Of course, if you wait till that moment to begin to train and cultivate that equanimity, it's the panic is going to be too strong. Right. So one notion of meditating, obviously beyond the mindfulness whole thing of just becoming a little more attentive and focused is to become more relaxed with a rising phenomenon, whatever they might be. And ultimately say, you know, there's a level of equanimity is called one taste that you really don't have so much bias anymore towards things turning out well or not. Right.

Because the awareness is penetrating the whole thing. Right. So we don't always know what's going to be a good outcome. Well, I mean, that that to get into that specifically. This is actually the one of the great like moments I've had working with you is this really cool realization of like, oh, OK, I get it now. Now I don't get it. But I get the bound. I get that I'm making eggs with my ignorance.

And then within the egg ignorance. Ignorance. Oh, God. Within the egg is always like, you know, in the YouTube videos, what's cool is like, at least within the egg, there's like variety. It's not every time they open the egg, it's the same thing. But in this case, I've noticed if I look back at my patterns in life, there's a thing of like, well, I'll imagine that this is not how it is. And that's the egg. And then somehow or another, the egg breaks.

And then the thing inside the egg is usually rotten. But it's the same kind of rotten that I've experienced over and over and over again. But when the rotten comes, I go, what the fuck? I can't even fucking believe this is that. Oh, what the fuck? How could it be? How could it be? And so weirdly hypnotized by the same cycle cycle.

Yeah. That's the samsara, right? Yeah. That's what is being described in the wheel of life. Yeah. Right? That. Just around and around and around.

Yeah. Yeah. And then when you start looking now with the practice, when you start sitting and you start watching the way that that big egg video that you've been making in your own life is actually in your head. In the form of your thoughts are constantly breaking open eggs, so to speak. There's this constant like, well, look at this. Yeah. Okay. Well, but then look at that.

Now look at this. What do you think of this one? This. Now that. Well, what about this? Oh, not that. This. Do you think this or this, but this one actually all the other ones, you were right about that.

That was all just thinking. But this one, this one's important, you know? Yeah. Well, wait, but what about this? Now here's another, but wait, you're going to fucking die. You're going to, but what about the poem? I had a great and you're going to call your teacher and tell them, or what about you're going to say it on the podcast? It's so important.

You're important. This isn't this and look at that. And you realize it's just a variety of these were awful egg videos. Wow, Duncan. In your own head. What a mind. Yeah. Yeah.

What a mind. And, and, and so that is one of those moments where you realize, not only am I doing this in the big way by, by act, by like imagining that there isn't going to be a moment where an egg breaks. Yeah. But then when the egg breaks, I act just as surprised as I did the first time the egg broke. So with you, unsheathing your Vajra sword and looking, you know, with Prajna insight clarity into the, into the, Oh, I'm sorry. Will you tell people what that means? I don't think they, they might, they might not know what Vajra means or they.

It's kind of my current nickname for you blazing Vajra sword. So Vajra means indestructible, indestructible. It's like, what was the one in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the green? That was that one special sword. It's, it's, it's tough steel. It's cosmic metal. It's not based on ordinary logic. Right.

It's real penetrating insight, real, the ability to look at something, ask what is really going on here. So that's called Prajna. Right. We've talked a lot about that. Maybe people out there have heard that word. You know, the ability to discriminate and see the situation clearly. So the sword metaphor is that it has the holder of that kind of intelligence is symbolized by holding a two-edged sword.

That's called the sword of Prajna and it has two sharp edges because it has the ability to cut through delusion. It really sees like just what you're just doing now. The egg, it sees the egg dilemma the way it is. That's the outer edge. And then the inner edge is cutting through any kind of sense of building up the observer into some kind of solid entity who's so proud of himself for being so clever. Yeah.

And that gets cut by the second blade. And then you have the emptiness coming out of that. The experience of Srinitar emptiness is, is liberated or revealed by, by the Prajna sword. So in just a playful way. I mean, there's obviously, I'm nobody special to give anybody some kind of name, but it's a nickname from my point of view is Vajra sword because that's what you do. That's your, your mind has that natural kind of capacity to, to penetrate into, you know, situations and try to see, separate out what's true, what's false, what's, you know,

what's based on some kind of created reality, what's unsconstructed. That's what the Prajna part is doing. So that's the sword image. The Vajra is that it's really a high level metal that is, you know, transcends worldly just, you know, just like it could cover knowing the difference between a Phillips head screwdriver and a flathead screwdriver. That's Prajna too, but that's called ordinary Prajna. But the higher Prajna is really sort of seeing the nature of the mind more clearly, the nature

of the emotions, the nature of the reality that you're in. So the Prajna sword, the Vajra sword is Prajna in a sort of immutable form. And then the blazing part is you just got a lot of fucking energy. I mean, really, everybody out there knows Duncan. You know, it's like, I don't see him yawning or napping that much. That's the blazing part. It's just a kind of sense of fiery energy. So that's my just affectionate nickname for you.

Thank you. Yeah. That's what that's all that is. Got it. Yeah. Well, they get back to the egg thing. Yeah. The, uh, and the YouTube.

Was that clear? Yes. Thank you. Okay. I love it. The so that that's a cool moment. I think when you realize like there, there's a little bit of a relief. I think when you realize like, Oh, I've just been like essentially creating these idiotic

egg videos in my own mind for my entire life. And there is a great sense of like, Oh, this is a, there's something that really is a, cause it's sort of like, if you start looking at the, the moment of suspense when the egg's going to open, when the egg opens, the feeling you get, the feeling you get when it's time for another egg, the, the sort of like the, the come down from the egg opening, hide down, down to the, to what is what many people call boredom. Yeah. And now you're bored.

You're, and you're just, and you're experiencing this kind of weird sense of itchiness. Yeah. I gotta go find. Remember, we talked about the two kinds of border. Remember that? Yeah. But I'd love for you to talk about it again. Well, and because perhaps people out there are not familiar, but, um, you know,

one of the great things about Trunker Rinpoche as a teacher and who I'm talking about is Joachim Trunker Rinpoche, who was, um, a great Tibetan, uh, and a very important Tibetan teacher who came to the United States in 1970, um, and, you know, passed away about 18 years later. Uh, but there was an intense period of him transmitting a lot of, um, classical Tibetan Buddhist teachings and some innovative ones in those 18 years. And I was, um, I was fortunate enough to meet him in 1970 when he got off the boat, so to speak.

And, um, so he was very influential, not just with me, but a lot of other students like Pema Chodron and other, there's many, many students of his out there in the universe in various disguises and, you know, um, you know, working, following up on what they learned from him. But, um, he had a sequence of phrases that I've been kind of, I think I've used the analogy with you of an old 45 record, the kind with those little plastic hubs in the middle and used to play them on a little turntable. Yeah.

Vintage, you know, like your little Volkswagen truck and the vintage things have a certain tracking to them that feels like, wow, this is really deep, authentic and very inspiring in a way, but steady as a rock. So like, you know, when you watch the oldies on a, on a, on a telethon and they're just playing one hit from the fifties after another, the sixties or the seventies. So his hits, I find myself lately really wanting to actively recycle a lot of his hits. And so, um, you know, things like first thought, best thought and, um, you know, the cutting through spiritual materialism, so forth.

So those phrases are going to come up, um, from time to time in this conversation. I love, yeah. Well, I love them. They're great. And they don't, it doesn't feel like an old 45 to me. It seems like it's just brand new. Yeah. And it's so, it's just, you know, this, uh, this, this discovery, so to speak of, uh, this

tendency to recreate and recreate and recreate, uh, some kind of ridiculous situation over and over and over again is exhausting. Yeah. It's exhausting. Eventually it becomes exhausting. At first it's not exhausting. Some people really love it. They love, I think it's addictive.

It's addictive. Yeah. And in the original sense of the word, it's compelling. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one of my friends talks about this in the sense that sometimes you'll run into people who are complainers and they'll come to you. And if they're a skilled complainer, they'll come to you with like, within their complaint

is there's implied idea that maybe you could help them. It activates a part of your brain that wants to help. And so then what ends up happening is you, you get caught in this person's field because you hear this complaint and you think, Oh, well, maybe this and this and this and that and that. And you start doing this ridiculous dance together, which is the, uh, what, and I think psychology is known as the rescue fantasy. Well, and here again, I'm going to just lay a couple of, of the phrases on, uh, from

the classic phrases. Uh, Trimper, which they also coined the phrase idiot compassion. Yeah. Which is what you're describing. You get, you get involved with a codependent dance with somebody that doesn't help them and doesn't actually help you either. And both of you end up feeling depleted. That's it.

Yeah. So it's idiot compassion, which is Jim, but the one that we were really talking about before the boredom, because that's a great, Oh yeah. I forgot about that. That's a great point of departure for, I think people who are out there trying to meditate, which is more and more people are trying to meditate, uh, and trying to learn about it in a way that, you know, makes sense with the way they live and is helpful.

But one of the helpful things, and when you said, when some of that activity dies down a little bit, the compulsive activity, the egg opening activity, what you experience is what we would normally call boredom because there's just less going on or you're chasing it less. And, but he called that hot boredom because it's really, as you said, closer to irritation or frustration or restlessness. Yeah. When most people say they're bored, they mean they're, I'm restless because they haven't

really gotten bored yet. They haven't settled in and gone, you know, there's not much happening and I'm okay with that. Right. Cause that's real boredom. Is that boredom? I wouldn't even call that boredom. I call that tranquility.

Boredom feels like it's got resistance. Well, but the hot boredom, that's why I'm saying we use that word to, uh, but it has a certain amount of ansiness or restlessness or frustration in it. But when you sit, everybody out there, if you're doing your meditation practice, try to be happy when you experience hot boredom and go, I'm making progress here. I'm going to keep going. And then there's another gateway there, which he called cool boredom, which is a little more that as you said, the tranquility or the spaciousness of, of the non-compulsive

activity starts to, you start to feel that texture. And sometimes I've said to people, it's like English people used to be. Right. Have a nice cup of tea. Yeah. You know, oh, okay. This, uh, where's the eggs? Well, we have some toast, you know, we don't have any eggs.

We have some toast. So, so there's a kind of, um, settling in. And then if you abide with that and stay there, then they say the dawn of spaciousness opens real, a real tranquility, but it's not based on suppression or repression at all. It's very wakeful. Right. So I just wanted to follow through on that thought because you really nailed that. And I wanted to keep going with that.

That's cool. See, I love that because that's one, one of the things I think I didn't know, or I hadn't considered one. And you said it, I remember the, I think I was describing like, Jesus, it's just when I sit, it's just a mess. I might feel terrible. It's crazy. I don't like, and you, and you said, that's in you.

I, so, so I hadn't even somehow through all of this, that hadn't dawned on me like, wait. Oh yeah. That's right. That's not like, it's not as though why, why is it when I said still my entire being is acting as though I'm sitting in the middle of a forest fire or something. Why is my mind reacting to this with like, you, you like, you got it. There's shit to be done here, friend. There's no time for whatever the fuck this thing is.

I don't know. It's a, it's an interesting thing to realize. Oh, okay. This is the, actually, I guess, kind of like the air in my balloon. Yeah. Um, and that, that's a, that was a very exciting moment. And then to add to that, when if you're lucky, kind of, you could say, you brought that date to the party.

Yeah, there you go. That's it. Yeah. You're the one. This girl, you brought that date to the party. Yeah. Yeah. You're the one.

You're the one who brought this person to the amusement park with all of us and we are going and this is a person who's afraid of roller coasters. Why did you do this? What's the person who's that thing? Yeah. Yes. So that's, they are your eggs. Ah, that's right.

It's another form of it. So that's another point, Duncan, is that, um, it's not a tragedy. I mean, it's probably closer to a comedy, but maybe, uh, you know, that's why comedy sometimes trip wires some of these kinds of insights, because there's something funny about it. Yes. That why would you create that reality? Yeah.

Just have it. That's what we say. It's just have it. There's no pernicious bottom line in it. So that's what, you know, um, we talk about it, some kind of fundamental goodness or awakened nature, whatever, voting, mind, whatever you call it. It's just habit. There's no pernicious bottom.

You know, the ground is not tainted. So in certain type of Buddhist teachings, we say it's, it's actually fundamentally pure. They use the word kadak. It means like pure from beginning this time, kadak. You're saying what's pure. The ground is not a pernicious ground or dark matter. It's just space.

Got it. And we, the way that, um, talk about it sometimes is we just get too active in that space and start to create a lot of stuff. And then it begins to double back on us and haunt us. Feedback loops. Yeah. Feedback loops. Yeah.

You know, so, so the antidote is not to do more. It's to do less. Right. And a lot of people are looking in our culture. Well, what can I do about this? So they want to either layer a nice sugary thing on top of it or have some kind of invasive procedures, you know, like have, you know, have the meditation become some kind of, um, intense spying of the drama, but really

a big part of it is just allowing enough, uh, room for the thing to unravel itself. This, uh, one of my senses, this wonderful thing called an echo fawn echo phone, and, uh, I can remember that relief when I realized I could actually just turn down the echoes and the feedback loops would stop. There's something so terrifying when you get, when a feedback loop starts happening and it just gets louder and louder and louder and louder and crazier and crazier. And then you're, it can blow your speakers.

And, and certainly so the solution in that is not to start screaming into the microphone, like, holy fucking shit. Is that just going to go? You actually do have to like reduce. If you could, you don't even have to stop the echoes. If you could just reduce it just a little bit, then the feedback loop will go away. And now you just have an echo and now you start messing around with that. And then the echo gets reduced.

And then you start getting, what's it called? Slap back or something. You start getting this weird, like it's still confusing. And then if you keep rolling that back a little bit, then suddenly it's just your voice and now there's no echo. So what's the essential instruction there embedded in what you just said? Well, I think it would be if you're experiencing a feedback loop. You don't, don't, don't freak out, don't panic.

Yeah, I didn't want to say don't panic. The reason there was a hesitation there was only because it's like, I'm thinking of the hitchhiker's guy to the galaxy. So jeez, even I did love that book growing up when I was a kid. Why is there a panic button in it? Well, I think in the hitchhiker's guy to the galaxy, that's the on the cover or something. So it's going panic?

Yeah, because it's about how to like hitchhike through the universe. So it's like the first thing is don't freak out. Another way to put it would be, I was riding my bike the other, well, to go, to go to the completion of your, your class, I was riding my bike and my shoelace got stuck in the pedal. And I, and I, and this is like, again, like I've been using these very heavy things about this practice is so important because when you're sitting with your dying parents, but also it's really great when your fucking shoelace

gets stuck in your paddle because instead of being like, oh, if I keep paddling, I'm fucked or like thinking you're going to get out of it by paddling, which you're not because the shoelace is going to get more intertwined. You, I did have a moment where I said, just don't panic. Yeah. We're going to slow that. And that's because you had enough credit in your account, mindfulness credit, right? You had enough credit in the account to, to be able to remember that instruction.

Yes. At a time when, when there was a lot of energy going on. And a lot of potential to wipe the fuck out and really get physically hurt. Absolutely. And that, and, and another example, someone sent me this, and this to me is an example of you as a teacher or why a teacher is good. Someone sent me this great, well, sad video of this. And I'm sure many of you have seen it because it probably went viral.

I think this must have been, I don't know where it was. India, maybe wherever there's anacondas, are there anacondas in India? I don't know. But like somewhere where there's anacondas, this dog, it got an anaconda wrapped around it. And it's around, it's, it's haunches. And what that sounds so familiar. What's that? The feeling of that.

Oh my, well, what was interesting is watching the dog and the people who are hitting the anaconda with machetes to get it off the dog. So what the dog did, which was fantastic, is the dog just relaxed. The dog, you know, people are commenting, that dog just thinks this is a game, but they didn't, they don't, those are not dog people. Because when the dog was panting, showing anxiety, the dog was yelping, and this dog was not but the dog was not struggling. It made it relaxed.

If the dog had been struggling on top of the anaconda, it would have tightened faster, but also would have made it really more difficult for the people with the machetes to cut the anaconda off the dog. The dog's only job was to relax. It just needed to relax. It had to stay as calm as possible. So the people with machetes could get this snake off of it. Wow.

What a powerful metaphor. Yeah. I mean, obviously it actually happened, right? Yeah, and the dog was saved. Now, here's a couple of thoughts in our ongoing dialogue. Nobody was thinking about the anaconda. Oh, I did. I felt bad for the anaconda.

It's like finally got this juicy fucking dog. Well, not only that, but it's a being too. Yeah. And all he was doing was having a sandwich for lunch from its point of view. That's right. So, you know, it would have been a really powerful thing to have tried to. Did they kill the anaconda? There's no other choice.

Well, there was a choice between the dog and the anaconda, which is kind of interesting. No, just anyhow, I just had that thought. And the second one was, so at a moment, well, really, I identify personally with that story, because I think a lot of times we feel, I feel like that, that anaconda is wrapping itself around you, whether it's oncoming situations, difficult situations, sickness, death. It's like it's going to tighten around you at some point and squeeze the life out of you. I really have that ability to kind of relate to that as a primary and serious metaphor.

But here's the thing that, again, because this is a, this show is a little bit of an oldies of Trungpa Rinpoche, because you asked me in the beginning, could I, you seem to want to meet him? Yes, I do. And so therefore I'm trying to act as a kind of a tube or a conduit for that, you know, to happen in some form or another. And these, these, I'm playing you his hit record, you know, and sort of as a way of saying, wow, you know, just like we were listening to Thelonious Monk before, you know, listen to the music, the music's still there, the words are still there. So I was having a time like that in my life. I was the dog, anaconda was a situation,

and I felt like this, I'm going down, this is not working. And I met with him, and he just said, and this is called pith instruction, it was a very simple instruction, he said, don't panic when things are going bad. But there was a second half to it, don't relax when they're going well. That is not one you'll hear too often. But it points towards that sort of equanimity of not trying to attach too much to what we perceive as the superficial outcome of the situation. Yeah, you got that check in the mail. But three days later, the government shows up and says, you always twice as much as that anyhow. So he's saying, don't don't kind of bliss out in a way. Even in institutions, it doesn't mean be negative or be uptight, it just means don't

give into the extremes in that way. So and what is the mitigating factor is awareness, that you stay awake, and you don't attach to any experience that's happening, any kind of superior importance. And that is the mind of the Buddhist, I'm, I'm, I feel confident saying that, that there's a kind of equanimity mind that I've seen over and over again, and great teachers, they just don't, they're not in a freak out mode. Even things are, you know, troublesome. And even to the extent of there's, I'm going to push it further and say, there's even a like a quality of delight, humor, appreciation of when things get particularly weird. Yeah. Like, you know, it's just our incessant desire to create a larger and larger comfort zone, that's really

causing us to be crazier than we need to be. So as, as things unfold, like, for example, we have a political situation unfolding, you know, panic is not going to help any of us. No. And I was on the plane with a woman who was coming out here to replant, they found out how to clone, I mean, I don't know how she ended up in the seat next to me in the airplane, and we were talking, they found out how to clone redwood trees. And they were going to plant a whole bunch of new redwood trees in California. That's why she was coming out here. Wow. And just by chance, and there was a, just a feeling of working around, working around the obstacle. You sometimes you can't go head on into an obstacle. You're not going to win. You're not going to win. So you go around.

Going head on. I mean, but if you're going to go ahead on into an obstacle, you need to actually go head on into the obstacle. Yeah, you better be aware of, you know, the full impact of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, you know, in a strange way, I think it would, there would be something sort of refreshing about people going head on into the obstacle. Because then you would see, if nothing else, like a lot of like heroic martyrs being, you know, torn to shreds by whatever the obstacle was. For example, the, you know, the, the thing that gets used over and over again is those tanks, the guy in the, in the. Ten minutes square. Yeah. Standing there. You know, I don't think they showed the people who got run over by the tanks, but that would be worth looking at too. Yeah. But

that, that attitude, that kind of like that, you know, that type of activism where. Like Gandhi. Yeah. Right. He's the essence of that. Yeah. He's standing there and he's not screaming and he's standing there and he's not gesticulating. He's standing there and he doesn't have someone filming him that he's aware of. He didn't station someone off to the side to film him. He's standing there and he's in his suit. The implication is either I just got off work or I respect this moment enough to put on a suit. Yeah. But I'm also willing to be completely flattened by a tank and probably he, I don't know what happened to him. Do we know, did he go to jail? I don't know, but I'd say that if you, if I was in

Vegas and I had to guess what happened to someone like that, that wasn't great. Yeah. So he decided in that moment, all right, well, this life was, was okay, but there are bigger things here. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna resist in a way. And because he did that, that image is being talked about now. It's reverberating through time in video form, story form. It's an inspiration. It's a teaching. You know, what's the flower sutra? How does that go? The flower sutra? Have you heard this? I don't even know if it's real or not. I'm not sure. Some sutra in Buddhism where the Buddha just holds up a flower. Yeah. No words. Yeah, but that's after a certain amount of exchange. There was a lot of sutras that he didn't speak. The famous heart sutra, which is the Prajnaparamita Sutra, the

Vajrasort Sutra, you know, is, he doesn't speak till the end. It's a dialogue between two of his students. And then at the end, he says, good job. That's it is. Well, you know, as you're saying, I was thinking Buddha lived a long life. He was for the time, especially lived to be 85 or something like that. And Jesus and Jimi Hendrix lived to be like 29. All right. So it depends how fast you want to burn through. And there's older people who've been practicing a long time. So whether it's your time to stand in front of the tank, or whether it's your time to organize friends, or whether it's your time to plant redwood trees, I can't say for somebody else. And but it is an amazing image of bravery, putting your and non aggression. So that's, that's very

unusual. You don't see much of that, right? Right. That that has within it, you know, there's, it's so, so many things happening at once in that moment, which you see, which does get repeated. Thank God. Because that, you know, the, the other way doesn't seem to do much. It's like, there, there might be some temporary thing that happens, but usually what ends up happening is fragmentation. It seems like some kind of never ending fragmentation. The fragments get fragmented. And then the fragments, like if you start fighting each other, and then in the fighting of each other, those fragments get fragmented until you end up with just piles of fragments that are like, just like, we're the right fragments, right? Yeah, we're most like what the thing that

got broken was, right? Remember that great glass? That's what we must be. But those other fragments, look, they're, they're all wrong. Don't you remember the glass? It was so important. And then, so to me, that's where you run into like this kind of problem, you know, that's a very astute and colorful way to describe that, that whole phenomenon you're talking about. Did you just make that up? Yes. That's a good one. Hold on to that one. Okay. The fragments are, you know, saying, I'm the whole. Yeah. Yeah. Remember the whole, I'm the whole, I'm protecting the whole, but they're not there. Well, they're, yeah, they're there. And that's a problem there. So, you know, there's almost an implication there that unless you take in, I guess in the

art of war, they call it taking whole yet when you capture in the enemy, you have to take the whole, you don't destroy it in the process of recapturing situation. So it's almost the implication that you can't create a sense of that others are necessarily totally wrong and you're totally right. That would not be completely healthy resolution to any situation. Yeah. Yeah. Now, this makes me set it right. It's poignant to think of that because you do it's so much easier and so much powerful feeling to just be on the side of, you know, the right thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, what's better than that? It's one of my, it's like one of my phone, fortunately used to be one of my favorite feelings. You know, like you end up in a situation where like there's

someone who's like just clearly wrong. Yeah. You know, one example of this, I guess could be flat earth. Flat earth? Yeah, there's, there's people who are passionate about the fact that the earth is flat. They believe the earth's flat. And so this is actually a really wonderful moment. I was getting a massage from a flat earth. And she was to this day, they think that yes, still now. Oh, yeah, it's a whole it's a whole thing. It was a whole movement. Wow. So I was getting a massage from a flat earth. And she was telling me the earth's flat. And I was starting as she's giving the massage that part of you that's like, well, I'm going to be right here. I'm going to go fucking kneel to cross Tyson on this masseuse. While I'm getting the massage, I'm going to get into this

like real like argument with her like, how can you even think the earth's flat? Like, do you really believe that? But then as she's describing her evidence for the earth being flat, I realized that my understanding of math, geography, cosmology was so limited, that I couldn't actually come up with a reason that the earth wasn't flat. It was a funny moment. Because I knew I was right. The earth is round. How could they possibly think that? Well, it all goes down to the premise. The premise would be how can you how do you like, I could say to you, how do you know that you have a brain? How do you know you have a brain? Is it's similar to flat earth theory, which is like, unless you have gone into surgery

and had and held a mirror up yourself to see your own brain, those people have brains. But unless you've done that, yeah, if you've gone and gotten a head x-ray and you've seen a brain, you don't know for sure that that that's just not what they do. Because they want to convince people that they have brains when actually there's not a brain in there. It's like it's wiring, you're a robot, right? So within it is the suspicion of there being a kind of malevolent power that does not want us to know that the earth is flat. If we knew the earth was flat, then and especially depending on the type of I love this stuff, it's like, you know, evolving mythologies, you know, so let's imagine the earth is not let's just pretend the earth

isn't round. So here's what the earth is. It is actually more akin to like, you know, like when you get like an egg carton and you have these dimples in it, yeah, so it's a plane that goes on and on and on and on and on and has these dimples in it. Yeah, the dimples in our case are surrounded by the ice caps. Now this is a fortress, we're in a prison, right? The prison that we're in is surrounded by the ice caps and this prison is being controlled by some kind of malevolence, aliens, maybe. And the aliens are have enslaved us and they're feeding off of our negative energy. We're basically like a little potted plant in this massive greenhouse of varying earths that are being harvested, fears being harvested out of it. So NASA is the masseuses point of view. This is one

of the forms of flatter. Wow. Yeah. So so like the the the NASA anyone who's ever gone off of the planet, anyone who's ever but that's all a big conspiracy, no one ever did that. It's like, there's no like if you did fly off the planet and you filmed around thing, that's just they used it Photoshop to do that. Like some poor NASA guy. How good a masseuse was she? Not that great. No offense if she's listening. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. So anyway, within there is like the the the problem of if somebody decide if someone's living in a distorted reality. Because the the the idea is like, okay, let's imagine that I could at that moment,

if I could take the masseuse, it just happens that I actually own a rocket ship. And I'm like, you know what, lucky for you, I'm about to do an orbit around the planet. I'm going to take you on my rocket ship and I'm going to show you the earth is round. So we go up into the rocket ship, and that we're looking out the window and look see it's round. She will think those are that's not actually a real window. Well, and then she'll become suspicious of you and your motivation and your you know, why are you joining the conspiracy to confound her exactly point of view. This is what we're talking about after the boredom part. This is where you run into the people who are actually not really interested in there being any kind of shift within or some kind of actual help

or some kind of actual change. They don't want that what they want to do is they want to sing a very specific type of song. And the song goes something along the lines of this life sucks. Oh my god, oh my god, I can't believe how bad it is. Everything always goes wrong. I cannot believe how bad it is and everything goes wrong. And then people come and they hear that song. And they go, let me help you. I know, let me help you. And then they go, what's your way? And then and then and but then you realize like they don't give a fuck about your way or being they like to sing this song of sorrow. That's actually what they're into right now is singing the song of sorrow. But they do enjoy a chorus where people come and sing a song of joy to try to help them maybe

sing a different song. And this is I think one of the problems you can run into the interesting thing among others about what you're talking about here is if you feel you want to connect with people, do you basically have that feeling in your life? I'd like to connect with people and you're moved by them and you want to be as helpful as possible and you know as much as you're able. Yes. Then you get into and this is what we spent the weekend we did a teacher training here at Samarasa Center out in Echo Park and this is one of the training the teachers one thing we say is first of all self assessing is important part of the process. You look at yourself and kind of get an accurate handle on where you're off the mark or on the mark and that there's no

point in anything other than real straightforward honesty about doing and humbleness and doing that process. Then when you're working with other people which is what we were doing this weekend is how do you teach somebody else to meditate is we talked about first listening hear what they say second look at them actually see what they look like third one is feel feeling how does it feel to feel the feeling that they're generating and then respond so that's a kind of like maybe diffusing some hair trigger reactivity kind of thing because now your goal is to help people so that's become the difference your intention is to put some energy and effort into being helpful to them which is a switch usually just you see what could they do for me so that's a kind of a

switch then we have what's in the traditional Buddhist teachings they call the four karmas which is let's say you do all that but now you want to respond skillfully in a way that's actually helpful to that person of course that is art of communication and empathy is not just feeling it but now you have to so what's the skillful response so we have four of those and the first one is called pacifying just giving it space helping to calm the situation down not adding gasoline to a to a fire you know then the second one is called enriching which means sometimes all the problem is coming from a lack of self-esteem and self-worth so you can help people to just feel better about themselves it's with generosity you know of spirit then the third one is called magnetizing these are all the

traditional translations magnetizing is including or decreasing the alienation a lot of people are feel alienated they're they're isolated they're separated so you draw them in you allow them to join you know sometimes say somebody join welcome to the human race yes it's that yeah and it could be you know even seductive it could be you something about your humor something about your point of view something about your way that is playful that draws them in and only the fourth one is the kind of direct confrontation or it's called destroying action so and also wrathful compassion or tough love yeah those kind of things so that one is you know cutting through that's the vajra you take out the vajra sword you cut through but there's no anger there's no aggression it's it's just pure

communication but you can say no or you can say stop that or you know somebody's whacking a child you go I have to I'm not gonna let you do that yeah the guy standing in front of the tank is is kind of destructive action in a way it's interrupting you know it's not going along with something but that's the fourth and so that's like considered more um you know if those were belts you know karate that would be more black belt territory right you know but is does that make sense to have that sort of it's just a framework for for interacting with your masseuse I mean because and and the other thing I just want to add is like that the one of the great teachers in in the classical Indian Buddhist tradition was Atisha and this guy

was really about trying to codify ways that you could be more compassionate so there's a lot of details that I won't go into but develop these slogans that people memorize and recite or just bring up in a situation so Atisha had um pretty deep practice and you've seen this in people they're really practice and they're they're steady and they're more compassionate and they're more able to hold space for all kinds of things to come up and and down and um so he got invited to go to Tibet you know and he's one of the people who actually we talked about Tibetan Buddhism as if it was always there it wasn't always there before the eighth century uh ad there that this version of Buddhism didn't exist in Tibet and he and one or two other teachers went up and actually

transformed the whole created the whole platform for Tibetan Buddhism so he's one of those guys but when they invited him to Tibet and it wasn't just like taking a plane it took like three months to get there or whatever you know it's a big deal the hermit kingdom yeah and who knows you know if you're gonna make it or whatever so he he but he was invited to come and spread the Dharma there and he went I'm not gonna be able to I'm working on perfecting my patience and I heard that Tibetan people are really nice and they're really easy going and really well mannered and I won't be able to practice my patience there so he thought this is gonna be screwed up you know so he had I mean this is a classic famous story but he had a a Bengali kid who was his chaiwala you know his tea

boy and the kid was obnoxious and you know and kind of rebellious and and you know irritating annoying said I know I'll take him with me so and the joke is that there were plenty of irritating people there anyhow it was there was no problem actually but we call that the tea boy when that person gets under your skin and irritates you it's the actual opportunity if you're a crazy Buddhist to practice patience or compassion so funny so we use that at phrase you can say oh this person was my tea boy today well now you can call the kettlebell kettlebell yeah because people you know tea kettles and people work out with kettlebell that's my kettlebell yeah she sounds interesting that trend and you you sound interesting that you would have such a conversation with somebody you

know weren't you concerned at all about getting uh massaged and having some relaxation for yourself to me it was you can get massages all the time but to be in a conversation with someone who passionately believed the earth was flat yeah that was a rare experience in a weird way it was it was like I have this person for an hour wow to like get into this cool chat about the earth being flat yeah and uh and it was fun because that is a great I I love that theory a lot and I think that all those theories are actually people who are coming are waking up because what's happening is they're getting a sense this doesn't I don't think this is quite real but then the way that that's translating for them is oh the earth must be flat that must be it and then the other

cool thing about flat earth theory is there's a boundary the ice caps that are keeping them from experiencing shunyatta absolute spaciousness right so there's the other piece of it which is there's this feeling where they think man how wonderful would it be if I could just start going north yeah and keep going north without having to repeat myself by going around a planet I could just keep going and going into uncharted unmapped territory things that are past boundaries because the map depends on their being boundaries and so there's even within it a kind of sense of like wanting to wake up yeah gain realization or become the true self so it kind of reminds me of like when somebody it's a sad idea that I've heard from the heart christians which is like you know

a heroin addict wakes up with full amnesia still addicted to heroin but doesn't know that heroin is the thing that's going to fix the problem so there's just this vast hunger this vast need this sickness hungry ghost right yeah yeah they want something but they don't know what it is we all know how that feels yeah I think everybody knows how that feels yeah that's the seat of it you know you go I know that feeling so um you would rather play with your vajra sword than get a rub down I mean I can't think of it at the same time it's more it's a more expensive oh that's very high level stuff more expensive massage no but I know it's a different topic but but that's interesting that your mind was very active in that space where you could have just got you know

whatever she's into my shoulders feeling great right now so I wonder if she was a great masseuse and a flat earth person like if you would have had to like lean more towards one experience than the other yeah I'm looking for the great massage you know but I'm like you a little bit that way yeah oh you're you think that's what's happening huh but that's the that's the vajra sword it's like you want to enter a conversation rather than control it that's right right that's right that's the sword that's what the project is you want to enter the conversation rather than controlling I want to we're going to pause for a second because some people are here but I have a question for you after that okay the vajra sword the sword an idea of gentleness within that you know sometimes with you

and other people who are teachers I have a sense where of anxiety kind of because I do have a feeling like there there's a potential to get cut here and I don't know if I want to be cut and I don't mean cut in a bad way either I mean you could say like a surgeon's using a vajra sword when they're using the scalpel to cut out disease or to open someone up and there's this feeling of like shit man I like there's this there's this I also have friends who are not not what what you would call spiritual teachers but if you get around them they're just going to say the truth now it might not be the truth truth it might be their own truth according to their frame of reference yet still there's the chance to get cut and there was no aggression behind it at all when a kid looks at you and's

like wow look at your bald spot the kid might really truly be fascinated by the bald spot there's no aggression there there's no sense of like I'm going to hurt you what's hurting is the fact that you didn't want to have a you have been ignoring this thing or that and and they're showing you the thing that you've been ignoring and the pain you're experiencing isn't pain being caused by necessarily them cutting you as much as the pain of them opening you up to a thing that was already there so in some way or another isn't it maybe a little for some people just being around the person I was thinking like man I would be terrified to spend 10 minutes with Chokim Trump or Rinpoche I would be afraid there would be a sense of like trepidation even though I would be

very excited about it and I wouldn't care if there was in any pain that originated from it I'd be grateful for that pain because from working with you and reading his writings I have absolute trust so whatever the fucking thing was that was hurting I would there would be a sense of like oh wow this is I didn't need that in here yeah yeah but maybe some people there isn't there there isn't a but remember the four comments that's why we had that conversation the four skillful actions so the use of the sword is the fourth one and personally myself when I'm teaching I rarely use but a sword is sword well you know good swordsmen they say they don't have to take it out of the sheath yeah well the sheath is getting cut no it's just you can feel the presence of that

potentiality and if you're not a total fool you don't need to see the blade ever so I think his thing was and here's another little twist on that because we're channeling and sort of talking about Trunk Room Jay I don't mean literally channeling I just mean tuning in and they say the blade principle comes from space from a spaciousness a kind of vast accommodation is the actual source of the blade so it's it's it's something that he for example when you would encounter him sometimes the space was so vast that that cut you it wasn't him cutting you oh that's crazy it just there was enough accommodation enough space so that you yeah what and they also say it's like mirror like so sometimes called cosmic mirror it's there's a mirror like principle

in good teachers that they don't need to um do do surgery necessarily there's like you're seeing yourself more clearly I think that was much more the case way more often with him than him actually saying something or doing something yeah it was just like there was this vast yawning opening space and you kind of were aware in that space of your own self-consciousness I think many people experience that they felt a heightened self-consciousness yeah so they were cutting themselves you see all right all right I experienced many times but there's another part to it the other part is this space is um appealing and magnetic in a way yeah it's very um and it's enriching it has all the karmas coming out of it so it can be pacifying enriching and magnetizing too so with somebody

like him he was one of the funniest people he was one of the you know kind of unexpected people one of the nicest people um sometimes just extremely tender and gentle all right so it's not like this guy's like you know get out of the way he's coming but it could the fourth karma it was he was from my perspective in command of it and it wasn't loose running around on a deck but when it needed to come out it did and if you were a close student you go like I'm signed up for this so that's a big difference you know but I don't I think myself as a teacher you could correct me if I'm wrong I like the enriching and magnetizing I like to to bring out the richness in people I find a lot of people are just too down on themselves oh yeah you definitely do that the cutting that

I've been getting from you is not from you at all it's from or it is from you though it's like I'll give you an example of one way you cut me uh uh well there was a moment where I can't when I really started sitting every day there was this moment where I realized I respect you so much I didn't want to waste your time and there was one thing you were telling me that wasn't changing at all which is you've got to sit you've got to have a practice it's experiential there's got to be and then you were in the then I then you didn't do any of this to me but I felt a like weird sense of shame because you were like well just try it for five minutes a day then just try for two minutes a day and then I'm thinking man how lucky am I I'm getting to work

with this teacher and he's having to do this kind of like ridiculous like really basic basic elementary level shit and we're having these conversations and you're not even and so then like within that I did feel for like cut embarrassed would be a better word for it a sudden like a sense of like wait you're getting to train with someone who is trained under what some I think some people compared chogim trumpet Rinpoche to Padma Sambhava I've heard the comparison for the west and and you know if you were to run into someone who trained under that person and you got to spend an hour just 10 minutes 20 whatever it would be that's a that's a lucky moment you know that's a cool moment that you're getting in your incarnation so there was that was a cutting

moment for me where it's like what are you doing this is actual a thing and you're just sort of brave being uh no you didn't say any of this you didn't I don't think I think if I told you you'd be like oh no not so intense it's just the second blade of your vajra sword got activated right started to come alive right and um yeah I mean just I can't you know say anything it's it's very traditional in our tradition to to say the teacher was so much more advanced and developed than the student but in this case I actually mean it couldn't hold a candle to him as any kind of communicator or teacher he was a major force in that way but you know the activation of that of that there's nothing we can do about the sorry about the background noise you guys it's just like

we I tried to time this out in a way that there would be quiet uh it's coming through the it might a little bit well I just wanted to address it in case people heard it so keep going I apologize you know uh it just like from my point of view I just want to encourage your practice it's not it's not good or bad it's not like oh if you don't do this I'm gonna have talking to you or something like that no that would never happen no I didn't and like there wasn't any sense of that at all like I didn't get that feeling of there being a threat or it was just more of a feeling of like um if if somebody was giving me something yeah you know like let's imagine like someone came over to your house yeah I get it and started playing violin yeah and you were

looking at your phone yeah that wouldn't be cool that would be a lame thing to do it would be in the person they might just love playing the violin they just enjoy playing violin you're looking at your phone or not they're not like oh they don't appreciate my music they're just love to play the violin be like wow it'd be really better I'm gonna enjoy this a lot more if I was like listening yeah that you know it's good to know what you're working with as in terms of self-assessing as a practitioner which I am and you are we're both sort of trying to be cultivating some kind of good qualities through some variation of the buddhist teachings or other teachings so that makes you a practitioner right as opposed to just to kind of let's just get through life

and get to the end of you're looking at the life as an opportunity to to cultivate yes right so um for me personally my my biggest inspiration right now is the bodhisattva path you know patience generosity compassion yeah I I think those are really about the right target for me personally yeah so when I see the bodhisattva energy and the great teachers that the fact that they're so patient with people that they have sort of unlimited energy for working with people they don't give up on people yeah that I find that frankly personally much more inspiring than any kind of magical display you could imagine yeah yeah that's way better well I'm just saying that's what it's that's what I feel I mean who cares if everyone is like there's

you know people learn how to fly but they're all assholes who cares flying assholes flying assholes from Uranus that's the thing where it's like I don't care if someone is telepathic I don't care if somebody well the thing is though those are called cities right we've talked about yeah they come they can come and they can visit a little while and um you go oh I was particularly intuitive in that situation you knew something that you didn't um there was a psychic in in California who used to I don't know if she's still around Helen Palmer she was quite famous and she wrote a book called intuition training which is quite interesting um and she said um it's knowing without knowing how

you know that's how she defined intuition wow without knowing how you know wow and that comes that we all have like moments of that you go out you feel particularly in sync with something or you know what somebody is about to say or um you know you feel coordinated that comes and it's a tricky thing you just go let it come and go I mean but there's no arguing about the idea that patience like becoming a patient person or less aggressive person is a real deep cultivation you don't cultivate intuition actually other than removing um you know removing your thick heavy self-serving version of reality that's that's and that you know is is one way to become more intuitive yeah you know it you may come naturally you just made me think of the guy who taught me

how to swim I still remember him Percy he uh he is there was Percy he he as he was teaching me to swim I was really scared of drowning and so after he touched you as he was because he's taking you into the deep end and you're a little kid and I remember he had all these tricks so as he was teaching me how to swim he would do this ridiculous thing where he would take his hands and squirt water in my face just squirt water you know and he would he would make jokes about that but as a kid it was really funny to watch and it would make me laugh in the midst of this very important swimming lesson yeah to me that's all the cities it's like a little like little like tricks that you could do that like Percy was doing so when I say I don't really care

what I don't mean it like it's cool it's certainly the water thing made me laugh as a kid and anytime I've seen demonstrations of authentic telepathy clairvoyance precognition whatever you want to call it it's it's amazing like the adult version of me is like what the fuck this is real how is this even possible but still where I'm at right now it's just eventually like I am so sick of drowning in my thoughts this is just so annoying I don't want to drown anymore and if like the telepathy stuff is awesome when I was younger that might have even been a reason and I actually might have rather learned how to do water tricks than learn how to swim but I would much rather learn how to swim than to do like tricks in the water you know that kind of stuff is cool though and I respect

all the people who are good at it wow amazing well as we've talked about and maybe this is a good way to end our our conversation in at least in the Buddhist tradition we offer any kind of benefit any kind of ripening any kind of merit they call it that comes from our practice we immediately offer that up to others it's called the dedication of merit or you know the four measurables may all beings of happiness and cause of happiness may all beings be free from suffering cause of suffering may all beings take joy and the happiness of others may all beings never be may all beings dwell in equanimity free from attachment aversion ignorance that's just that's how you finish so that's how you start that's how you finish so if a city comes you can just offer

it you know that way if you become too fascinated with it or too self-centered around it it's probably better to let it go what a wonderful podcast thank you so much David thank you for teaching me the meditation and if you guys want to find David I'll have all the links to my website you're welcome blazing bhaja sword Hare Krishna thank you that was David Nick turn everybody definitely go to one of his workshops all the links are going to be posted at dunkatrustle.com and everything you need to find him will be at dunkatrustle.com thank you Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH and thanks to y'all for listening if you enjoy the podcast why don't you give us a nice rating on iTunes

or subscribe I will see you soon Hare Krishna a good time starts with a great wardrobe next stop JCPenney family get-togethers to fancy occasions wedding season two we do it all in style dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Farrar oh and thereabouts for kids super cute and extra affordable check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at JCP.com all dressed up everywhere to go JCPenney a good time starts with a great wardrobe next stop JCPenney family get-togethers to fancy occasions wedding season two we do it all in style dresses suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington,

Stafford and Jay Farrar oh and thereabouts for kids super cute and extra affordable check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at JCP.com all dressed up everywhere to go JCPenney