Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 324: Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: February 3, 2019

**Sharon Salzberg**, author and amazing meditation teacher, joins the DTFH! This episode is brought to you by [BLUECHEW](https://www.bluechew.com/) (use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping) and [Robinhood Financial](http://duncan.robinhood.com/) (get one free stock when you sign up).

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It's a Saturday morning, and it's raining outside. And the reason it's a Saturday morning is because yesterday was Friday, and these things keep happening. But also the reason I'm recording this on a Saturday morning is because I spent all day yesterday after returning home from this glorious work that I'm involved in, that I can't talk about yet.

And I tried to record some kind of fancy podcast intro. Lots of bells and whistles. Try to be funny. That's always gonna be a disaster when you're trying to be funny. Just forget it. And also was like putting a lot of icing in there. You know, that's just clearly a sign of something's off.

It's like, you know what I mean? You're making up for your lack of cake with too much icing. Usually a sign that something is off. So simplicity is always the answer to those situations. And in this case, why am I trying to do some kind of fancy flowery podcast intro when I have one of the great meditation teachers alive today.

He's written so many great books on this podcast. It doesn't make any sense. It's weird. So I figure, you know what? I'm just gonna read this wonderful text I got today from Damien Eccles, who was on the podcast a couple months ago, I think. And what's kind of funny about this text

is that it actually is the podcast intro because it's a wonderful text about meditation. So I'm just gonna read this text. I asked for his permission, he said I could. This is from his journal. Exactly how does magic work? To answer this, we turn to quantum physics. This particular field of science has discovered

that we exist within a unified divine matrix. And the first law of how this matrix works is known as quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement stipulates that all things which have been physically linked remain linked on an energetic level, even if they become separated by vast distances. Experiments have shown that by taking two photons

which have been linked and then separating them, we can still interact with one and have an effect on the other, even if it's nowhere near us. So how does this explain magic? Because at one point, the matter of which we are made was touching all other matter. In fact, it said that if you removed all the empty space

or dark energy of the universe, you could compress all the remaining matter in the entire universe into an area the size of a green pea, which is exactly the state we were in before the Big Bang. The matter of which we are made is entangled on a quantum level with a matter of everything else in existence.

The implications of this are that by causing a change in ourselves, we also cause a change in the external universe. In fact, we now know this is true because of experiments which have shown that the universe is holographic, meaning that within each tiny piece of the universe, the reflection of the universe in its entirety can be found. What does this look like in a practical real-world scenario?

For the answer to that, we can look at a study conducted by the World Peace Group. What they found was that by gathering enough trained meditators together in one place, they could create what they called the super-radiance effect. Part of the super-radiance effect was that war-related deaths in the surrounding area of Lebanon dropped by as much as 76%.

Violent crime rates and even the number of house fires dropped dramatically. The experiment was conducted seven more times over the next two years, while other possible influences such as holiday, the weather, et cetera, were all statistically controlled for. One thing they found was that the greater the number of trained meditation practitioners taking part,

the greater the super-radiance effect was. And as the number of practitioners taking part fell, the number of war-deaths rose. The group, again, attempting to calculate just how many people in an area would need to practice some kind of technique that fills the practitioner with inner peace, be it transcendental meditation, ceremonial magic, et cetera, they found that the answer

was the square root of 1% of the population. This number was arrived at by another experiment conducted by the group in a Lebanese village called Baskinta, and Baskinta is 1% of the population began practicing meditation, fighting stopped entirely. Now, I have not checked these sources or looked at how these studies worked, but I can tell you anecdotal evidence from my own life, which I've noticed,

which is if I'm meditating, things do get way better. And I think maybe the way to look at that is instead of going into why that could be happening, though I love the quantum entanglement stuff, and I was just reading a tweet by Mitch Horowitz, another former guest in the podcast who said that Sherman Helmsley from, what's that show, Moving On Up? What's it called?

It's called The Jeffersons, and I loved it when I was a kid, but I had no idea that Sherman Helmsley was a disciplined follower of an ancient hermetic tradition that might have existed prior to the building of the pyramids, and it's all wrapped up in this book called The Qibalian, the Qibalian. I'd heard about it, but I never spent any time with it. Wow, what a cool book.

It has a lot of great ideas in it, a lot of very simple concepts that can become very complex, but one of them that I love is that opposites are actually the same thing at different degrees, which is crazy when you consider that, meaning that if you have some kind of, I don't know, an aspect of yourself that you're not happy with,

you could actually sort of connect, or you already are connected with that thing's opposite, because it's basically the same thing. If you're experiencing some kind of, I don't know, confusion, for example, that confusion is actually the experience of dawning realization, because if you didn't have dawning realization, you wouldn't know you were confused.

And similarly, this like happens in the natural world. For example, heat and cold, they're the same thing. It's just a continuum that we're all on. And so within these ideas are all these potential things, potentialities, which is that you could theoretically like jump, so to speak, jump opposites. I don't know if you saw Bandersnatch, the black mirror, the weird black mirror,

choose your own adventure thing on Netflix, pretty cool. But there is like kind of like, I don't know, I don't know how many versions of the story there, but I think there's this concept you could like jump through mirrors and to alternate dimensions, you know? And when you're looking in a mirror, you're essentially seeing the opposite of you.

I mean, it's you, but it's you in reverse. Left is right, right is left. This is like the, sounds crazy, but it's like, this is the, when you're watching a weatherman or woman, you're seeing someone who's like really good at doing everything in the opposite, because the weather map that they're seeing is on a green screen and they're having to look

at another thing anyway. I saw somebody do it at the CNN building in Atlanta and then when I realized what they were doing, it was crazy. If I had to do that, I would simultaneously shit my pants, piss myself, probably have some kind of seizure and collapse. Regardless, there was this idea in Bandersnatch that you could jump from one into a mirror

into another dimension, which is where you would be living a completely different life and sort of travel through the black mirror, cynical, depressing and annoying yet awesome multiverse. Similarly, this concept of opposites being the same thing on different levels has within it a weird potential for a kind of like form of mentation, a kind of like cognitive exploration of things

that you thought you were disconnected from, but that you were completely connected to. And that wonderful text I got from Damien also has within it this idea of the kind of interconnectivity of all things and how if you begin to meditate in whatever way that may be, because the meditation is just like a path, the destination or the sort of state

that it potentially could open up within you. It's like, there's lots of ways to get bicep muscles. That's what I tell all the people I train at my private gym. And some of my students, we lift, we lift like watermelons or like various types of fruit. Some of my students, we do kettlebells and some of my students, I just fill their biceps up with a kind of mucus

that forms muscles, but those are for the more advanced students, believe it or not. There's lots of ways to get biceps. Similarly, there's lots of ways to create some spaciousness within the medieval torture chamber you call your mind. Not that your mind is a medieval torture chamber, but sometimes I'm definitely putting myself on the rack.

And when you achieve that spaciousness, it's not just as though suddenly you feel better, it's that those around you, that the things around you also begin to conform to that bigger space. And so that's the weird thing that I have definitely noticed that happens, which is when you start working out, meditating, jogging,

whatever it is, if you start some consistent thing that runs counter to whatever particular pattern you're in that you don't like, it's not just like suddenly you start changing, it's like suddenly your luck gets a little better, suddenly colors seem a little brighter, suddenly people seem a little nicer, you know? It's like the radio station changes

from some kind of sad, weird, industrial loop to something a little sweeter. And then unfortunately, if you're me, you go back to the industrial loop and you keep doing that over and over again, which brings us to one of my favorite sayings which emanated from today's guest, Sharon Salzburg, which is the healing is in the return.

It's okay. If your pendulum is swinging to the opposite, if you find yourself going down degrees and up degrees and you feel a little woozy, it's okay. And Sharon has a real talent at expressing ways to sort of open up to that swinging pendulum that for some of us, sometimes we find ourselves sitting at a bar and sometimes we find ourselves

on a meditation cushion. Sometimes you're watching the Ted Bundy documentary on Netflix, which is awesome. And sometimes you're sitting in front of a candle watching your breath. And this pendulum is actually part of the process, but I don't wanna spoil it for you. I would like to invite you to go to Sharon's website

and sign up. I just signed up. I'm doing it this year. I've talked about this on the podcast in a previous year and I didn't do it. This year, I'm doing it. Go to SharonSolzburg.com and sign up.

If you're listening to this on the second of February, there's three more days that you could sign up for this thing. And basically, we're gonna meditate every day in February. And I don't know that I've ever pulled off an entire month of straight meditation. I'm gonna admit that right now. I haven't done it. It's like, I think I'm, I'll get to a point where I'm like,

I'm doing it. This is gonna be it. This is it. But I'll always miss a day or two, which is fine. But this time, we're gonna do it. We're gonna win the meditation challenge and our meditation biceps are gonna be engorged and ripped. And then we can lay on the beach of enlightenment

and make people jealous about our spiritual muscles. What a great podcast we have for you today. We're gonna jump right into it, but first, some quick business. Robinhood is an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETF options and cryptos all commission free. While other brokerages charge up to 10 bucks for every trade,

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where I'm gonna report in on the baby and he is adorable. He's beautiful. I can't believe I get to be hanging out with him. It's pretty incredible. And I never thought I'd be so happy at 5 a.m. in the morning holding a little baby. Seems to be not only causing my brain to release

some kind of incredible blast of pure sweet joy, but it's also teaching me about something I read in a book, of course. I mean, it wasn't on a bathroom wall, but it could have been, the book wasn't that long. The saying is, the great way is easy for he who holds no preferences. And that really applies to when you're hanging out with a baby

because if you've got something you wanna do, some place you wanna be, some thing that needs to get done, if you don't want there to be a sudden explosion of poop all over your shoes or maybe you're hoping to get a little bit more sleep, you're gonna be hurting. But if you just sorta go into the moment with the baby, suddenly it's like you're in paradise.

The other thing I figured out, well I didn't figure it out, who am I fooling? Erin, my wife, was a nanny for years. So she knows how to do this with babies. She's taught me a lot. One of the things is with a baby, you gotta, you gotta, you have to roll their cigarettes extra small

because they're, just kidding. With a baby, you have to, you should react to what's happening because when they're screaming, and this is what I was doing when he's screaming, I would sing to him. Because I like singing to him, but when they're upset,

you should acknowledge they're actually upset. So even though they don't speak English yet, you can talk to them and say, hey, I know you're upset, we're gonna get through this. Don't sing to them, like some weirdo. She didn't tell me that, I just figured that out. I was thinking, you know, if I was a tiny little thing, and I was legitimately freaking out,

some weirdo with an ungroomed beard came and started singing some babbling song to me about clowns would not be a great way to start the morning. So that's something that I really like about having a baby as it teaches you, not just how important it is to be in the moment, but how important it is to save your clown songs for moments when somebody isn't screaming.

That's the end of Baby Report. And now we shall blow the blessing horn. Every time we blow this, it causes over 5,000 spontaneous orgasms across the planet, you might be one of them. And also it purifies you of all your dark past karmas and cleanses your Akashic record collection, which is filthy.

So here we go, the horn of blessing. Also, there is a under a 15% chance that when you hear the horn of blessing, you go permanently blind, insane. But it's a very, odds are not, it's 15%. It's like, is it a 15% chance that it will happen? Or is it more like an 85% chance that it won't? Right?

See, that's the best way to look at it. So here we go, the horn of blessing, now. Try to take a good look at your eyes, for your eyes, for your eyes. Take a good look at your eyes, for your eyes. Boy, not the horn of blessing again. Guaranteed if there was a horn of blessing, and some angelic being would blow it every two years,

and it would cleanse all of the darkness from humanity. There would be at least 10 people, who would be like, great, fucking horn of blessing. And who does he think he is blowing that horn? You can just blow the horn of blessing. You can just cleanse Akashic records. You can just blow the horn. It's dangerous to blow the horn.

He's blowing it wrong. It's not the way the angels of the past blew the horn of blessing. What's happening? So horn blowing skills are not, by the way, who gave him the horn? There'd be news reports like, oh, what's happened to the horn of blessing angel?

The new horn of blessing angel, complaints surround the new horn of blessing angel. His blessing horn does not sound like the previous horns of previous generations. What's up with that angel? Well, I'm not an angel, and it's not a blessing horn. It's actually a hunting horn

that was hanging above my father's bed where he died. This is hunting horn. He wanted to die a wooden knight. So I like blowing his energy out into the universe because he was a really sweet, cool guy. Of course, I'm gonna think that. He was my dad. But according to something I read

on the wall of the bathroom, you're all my dad and my mom, and I love you. Speaking of dads and moms, there's something that connects dads and moms, and that thing is called, for lack of a better word, an erection. We need them.

Behind every great human is their father's erection. These are words perhaps better left unspoken if you're erection phobic, or if you are someone who just teleported in off of the Mayflower from a more puritanical time in human history where the body was considered to be vulgar, but the reality of the situation is that anyone who is wobbling around

on this wonderful planet was at least partially exploded out of an erection. And I hesitated. You know, I was like, oh man, I don't know, should I do a Bluetooth, I got a Bluetooth commercial. But then also it's this great teacher, and is it blasphemous? And then I realized, what's wrong with you?

Do you think the fountain of all existence is blasphemous? To quote George Washington, if boners are evil, I wanna live on another planet. We're gonna jump to this commercial and we'll be right back. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the erection, wizards, warlocks, priestesses, and shamans over at bluetchoo.com.

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Visit Bluetooth.com and get your first shipment free. When you use our special promo code Duncan, you just pay $5 shipping. Again, that's B-L-U-E-Chu.com. And much thanks to the Lingam Alchemists over at Bluetooth. Much thanks to my Patreon subscribers. You can subscribe over at patreon.com forward slash D-T-F-H. We also have a shop located at dunkitrustle.com

with such beautiful merchandise, including our now famous Stop Drinking Crows Milk Stickers. And also, if you're someone who falls on the other side of the Crows Milk Continuum, we've got drinking Crows Milk Stickers over there. I have no opinion on this at all. I just want my family to be safe and I don't have anything else to say

about the, that is raging around our planet. Now, without further ado, everybody please welcome to the Dunkitrustle Family Hour Podcast, the author of such incredible books as, Real Love, Loving Kindness, Real Happiness, Love Your Enemies, and Faith. She gives wonderful Dharma talks and lectures all over the planet.

She's also got some great online courses on her website and she's gonna be at the Ram Dass Spring Retreat, which is coming right up. I'm gonna be there too. You can find her by going to SharonSalsberg.com. And remember, if you're listening to this before February 5th, it's not too late to sign up for the Month Long Meditation Challenge,

which I will be taking. So now everyone, please open your heart chakras and zing some love through whatever the dark matter is that is separating you from SharonSalsberg and all of us from each other. And welcome to the Dunkitrustle Family Hour Podcast, SharonSalsberg. It's the Dunkitrustle Family Hour Podcast.

Welcome, welcome on you, that you are with us, shake hands, no need to be blue. Welcome to you, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, It's the Dunkitrustle Family Hour Podcast. Okay, Sharon, welcome back to the DTFH. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, it's been too long I think.

It's been way too long, way too long. But you know how time works with, especially when it comes with teachers and students forever reverberating in my mind is something you said to me at the Ramdas retreat when I asked you if drinking whiskey and watching Westworld was a practice. And you said, it's a practice,

but you're practicing the wrong thing. I'm kind of glad I was right in the moment. Well, there you go. I think about it every time I drink whiskey. But I wanted to sort of circle around the concept of practice for our conversation today because you have coming up your meditation challenge, which is something you do once a year.

It starts on February 1st. I wonder if you could just give a synopsis of what that is. Sure, well, something like seven years ago or so, I had a book come out called Real Happiness, which is kind of a guide to starting a meditation practice or renewing one, maybe if you used to have one. And the full title was Real Happiness, the Power of Meditation, a 28-day program,

and came out like in January or something. And I'm because it was my assistant at the time who was my mutual friend, said, why don't you do a challenge? Cause February has 28 days. And I said, I don't think so, but she was totally right. We did it and it's a beautiful expression.

It was all on my website. So people were practicing every day, they were sharing their experience. Some people were blogging, some people were commenting, some people were just reading, but it formed this tremendous sense of community. As we asked everyone to be really honest,

you know, I said, if you're not like sitting for two minutes and floating in the air, please don't say you are. So we got really hard to heart to connect to one another. I had done a series of guided meditations for this site called Hapify, which has lent us each February the meditations. So everybody gets a guided meditation they can stream,

like three months, I think, each day. And I write and people ask questions and they also have ways of talking to one another. So it's a beautiful experience. The, wait, you did it because there's, you chose February because it's the shortest month because there's only 28 days. No, because it's the subtitle of the book.

It's a 28 day program. Oh, I got you. Yes. There's something that I'd go back and forth on and I wonder if you could help clarify it for me. It's something I heard Ram Dass say once regarding meditation and he said, I don't often recommend it to people that I don't want it to help people to meditate.

Don't meditate, just forget about it. Don't, you know, when you're right, when it's time to do it, you'll do it. But then whenever I have a, an actual consistent practice, things become so wonderful in my life that it feels really difficult to not start advising people about this experience.

How do you think someone should go about conveying the idea that meditation is great without sounding like a jerk or without, you know, you don't, I believe it. Well, you know, I think people are different and I have the kind of mind where I'm very helped by structure. And so having a method, having a program, having a commitment, it needs to be a realistic one.

Like I'm not gonna say I'm gonna sit eight hours a day for 40 years, you know, but it's more like 10 minutes a day for a month or you know, whatever proves to be realistic. That helps me enormously because I'm the kind of person if I said, you know, I think I'll practice three times a week. It'd be Monday and I think,

ah, I think I'll start Wednesday. Every Wednesday, I think I'll do three times on Saturday and I'd never do it. But like every day is every day and it's just clear. And it also helped me tremendously with the very significant problem I had with self-judgment because this is when I was living in India in the early 70s and I wasn't always on retreat.

Sometimes you're just living a life. It was a very simple life because there were no computers, there were no faxes, there were no cell phones, no one had a job. Where were you in India? Practicing and buying vegetables or something, you know. Where were you in India, Sharon? I was in India from basically-

Which part of India? Oh, Northern India. Well, I was practicing in the winters in Burgaya, which is in the state of Bihar. And then we get very, very hot. And so we would just go up to the mountains somewhere and then go back when we could. And so we'd rent a house in the mountains,

we were just living together and cooking. And even in those situations, I found it was very hard for me to have a daily practice. That's like without a job, without a computer, without a cell phone. And my problem really was judgment because when I'd sit, it would feel lovely and I'd feel peaceful.

I'd think, oh, good, I'm gonna stay in India for the rest of my life, feeling exactly like this. And when I was cranky or restless or bored or my knee hurt, I'd get up and it doesn't work. And I went to one of my teachers, a man named Menindra, and I described that pattern. And he said, for you, I have just one piece of advice. And that is just put your body there.

He said, every day you put your body there. One day it's gonna feel one way, other days it's gonna feel another way. That's not up to us. And it's not even always that significant, because there's so much hidden going on and there's so much unknown going on. And we just have to do it

and keep putting our hearts in, putting our energy there. Have you ever watched the crystallization process, like crystals forming in liquid? Have you ever watched that? It's a fascinating thing to watch because there's so much beauty in crystals, snowflakes, so many patterns in crystals,

and they just form. They don't, like whatever the substrate is, the crystal's forming and isn't furrowing its brow to produce a perfectly unique and beautiful geometry. It just happens this way. Do you think meditation might be a little bit like that, that just sitting still for some reason is causing this kind of form to,

or something like that within? I think definitely. It sort of reminds me of the first time I ever walked to Labyrinth, and I was actually in San Francisco at Grace Cathedral and it was outdoors. So somebody had created this sort of stone sculpture so that it formed Labyrinth,

which I was just walking along, and of course it's a pre-patterned walk and with the goal, so to speak, of getting right into the center, right into the heart center of the whole maze. So I was walking along and there was one point where I was so close to the center. And then my path took me out almost to the edge

and I thought, oh no, I must have made a mistake. But it's only like one step in front of the other. So I kept going and I discovered that to my surprise having been so close to the center and then so far away, I just kept going and then there I was right in the center. And I just experienced that for a while and then I went inside where there was an identical Labyrinth

because it's the same pattern, but on a rug. And I started walking and I had the identical experience. I was almost in the center then I was way out of the edge and I thought, oh no, I must have made a mistake. I thought, didn't you just have this experience like five minutes ago? And sometimes our path is like that. It can be very mysterious and yet the call is to keep going

because otherwise it's just a story. Other people can do it and I can't do it or I can do it next year when things are calmer or whatever it is, it's just a story. We're telling what we have to do is actually walk it. And again, it needs to be reasonable. You don't want to make some crazy commitment to something that's abusive or endless

without seeing that kind of result. But once you have framed it in some way, then I come down on the side of having been very helped by the commitment to daily practice. Rhombus of course had the guru whom we loved, absolutely. The thought of being coerced or forced would be so antithetical to that relationship. Right, right, okay, sure.

That makes sense. That helps clarify that, thank you. There seems to be something suspicious either about the human nervous system, our brains, our energetic systems or the universe itself that this thing that is so simple to do, which is to sit, I'm sitting right now,

you're sitting right now. But you remove all the other stuff you might do while you're sitting so that you're just sitting. Something like that would be so incredibly difficult to keep doing over time. It's beyond suspicious. It reminds me, I was playing a video game and the character that I was controlling,

it just hit a wall, they didn't even try to explain why they couldn't go further. There's just an invisible barrier there. It's kind of bad game design. Similarly, there seems to be something fundamentally suspicious in the great difficulty of sitting still every single day. And especially when this act over time produces,

and I almost feel guilty talking about production or result as I've been taught that this isn't really the point necessarily, you can get caught in these things, but it does seem to produce better sleep, less anxiety, deeper connections with the people around you, a sense that you haven't actually ever been alive. Except now you're sort of alive, a feeling of being surrounded by a great deal of wisdom

that you had been missing for a long time. And even though there is this realization of these things, and you think, oh, okay, this must be the thing they're talking about then. This must be some form of enlightenment. The great meditator. The next day you're like, you know, I think I just want to play piano today.

I don't want to go and sit. What is that? Well, I think those results are worthy results. You know, I also don't condone on the side of there, you know, there's no goal or, I mean, you don't want to be obsessed with it, you know, because then you're never doing the thing. You're just thinking about what it's going to get you.

Right. It's a waste of time. And also we reify the goal in such a way, like it's got to feel exactly like this. Like when I started practice for some reason, I had this crazy idea in my head that good meditation meant being bathed in brilliant white light.

I don't have any white light. I had some other beautiful experiences of love and I had some really painful experiences that were super important, but I discounted everything because it wasn't a white light. No one ever said I had a white light and it wasn't true, but it was fixated, you know, that's how we get. We get fixated on an experience.

We say nothing else counts, and especially because we're so phobic about pain and sometimes pain is important. And even waking up during neutral times is a big part of mindfulness. Like all the times we're just sort of, you know, very pleasant and unpleasant. We're kind of waiting for something better to happen.

And we are half asleep. You know, we're not really alive. And so we want to be more present during every moment. And that's hard to believe when we get caught in that idea of what should be happening. But if you can unwind from that, then of course, I mean, you're putting effort into something it has to bring some benefit.

Another problem is that the real benefit and the kind of enduring benefit that comes from meditation practice happens in our life. It's not necessarily captured in like a great breakthrough moment. You can't necessarily say at 11 and 14, I loved myself completely and it was never an issue again, you know, but start to notice when you're in conversation

with somebody or you're meeting a stranger or you just really made a mistake in how you speak to yourself. You start to think, I'm changing. This is different than it used to be. And even before that happens, oddly enough, sometimes it's someone else who says it to us, like, you know, I have many people who come to me

and say, you'll have this experience maybe someday who come to me and say, I was gonna stop meditating because I thought nothing was happening. And then my kids came to me and said, please don't stop, you're much better. Wow. You know, things like that.

And, you know, not as kind of critical or a quick to anger or more patient, really listening. Those things, that's why we practice in the end is to have a different sort of life. And it really does have that effect. Why we resisted and we looked the other way and we're so conditioned, you know, it's got to feel a certain way.

It doesn't feel that way there for it's no good or I can't really do it. It's too selfish, I hear that a lot. It's too selfish, you know, it should be taking care of others. It should be like to do this is insane. Why am I sitting and doing nothing? Or, you know, I mean, there are lots of reasons

that we come up with and it's a very strong reality. It is a very strong reality. And that selfish idea, the idea that meditation, self-improvement, that form of self is selfish is really fascinating. It's also in that same box, you've got, well, if you love yourself, you must be narcissistic.

You know, the other day, I spontaneously told someone I like myself instead of, you know, saying, oh, I should say, like, I actually meant it. And I couldn't believe it. I was like, oh, wow, it just came out of my mouth. This is incredible. I, holy crap, this is incredible.

And then I apologized. I'm sorry. I felt weird and guilty. But it's interesting to me because meditation seems to be the opposite of selfishness. It seems to be that the problem is one of selfishness in the sense that we are compressed into these identities in such a tight way.

You know, like when you're in too small an apartment with roommates, it's the worst situation. But the human body is such a tiny little apartment. If that's all you think you are, and you're stuck in there with yourself. I know, all the time. And you're not going to work.

You're working from home. You're always there, you know? And so within this situation, this compressed situation, there is, it's fundamentally a selfish predicament. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the phenomena of the self. And how you, after so many, many years of a practice, how you can, what you consider yourself to be.

Well, you know, a lot of the long-waging and sort of the poetry and the imagery of some of the spirituality I encountered in India, not really within the Buddhist context, which is different. But there's a lot about killing the ego and annihilating the self. I'm just kind of scared. That doesn't sound that good, you know?

Yeah. There was this little part of me that had been with me all the time, I was now, you know, annihilated, didn't really feel good. But I'm within the Buddhist perspective. It's not that at all. It's sort of like the way we hold ourselves, the story we tell about who we are,

the conceptualization we have, that's what's wrong. So we consider ourselves very separate. We consider ourselves really isolated. We consider ourselves all powerful. Even though we meet the evidence moment after moment, I couldn't decide what thought to have. It just came. I couldn't keep sleeping as in Bay.

I couldn't say to myself, you've grieved enough, it's done. Or you'll never be great again. But we believe that we should be in control. Because that's what we're taught and that's reinforced all the time. So we tend to see the self as solitary, as in control, as disconnected, like independent and disconnected.

And what the whole spiritual path ultimately comes to is having a sense of self that's more intertwined or it's about interbeing. So it doesn't negate the individuality, which is what people also forget about. Like people say, well, if there's no self, how am I gonna walk out of the room? And the idea is, there's never been a self

in that old way of holding it. So you walked into the room and you're gonna be able to walk out of the room. Somebody once pointed randomly to someone in the room and said, well, there's no self, how come she's not doing my taxes? We're individual and yet we are also connected. So a common example would be like,

if you go out and you look at a tree, it's a tree. And it's just there, it's like an entity and that's true. But there's also a way of looking at the tree and sensing the soil, which is nourishing it and everything that affects that soil. Which means like the rainfall and everything that affects the rainfall, which we now know is kind of vast expanse of things.

And the sunlight and the moonlight, the quality of the air and who planted the tree and you get to see the tree as a network of relationship. That is also part, it's a pattern of life coming together right there. So it's tree on one level and on another level, it's a network and that's true of us as well. So more and more over time,

I see that interconnection is the opposite of the kind of old egoic solitary idea of self, but we tend to fear that the opposite of that idea is like a blank, you know, and that either we all become a soup and there's no individuality or we've killed ourselves in some way and it's not that appealing.

I think it's important to actually understand that and to look at things in the light of interconnection. The Vietnamese Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, he does this exercise or did this exercise. We've like hold up a string bean and say, now see the world. You know, you start thinking about the sun, you know, and everything that is happening in that string bean.

So about connections, about relationship. Why is something that is so obvious that it's been scientifically verified that everybody kind of knows on an intellectual level? Why is something like that a thing we have to learn and not a thing that we just naturally are? Are human beings as a species malfunctioning or are we malfunctioning

or is it just that we are sort of slowly growing into a different identity than the one that we currently seem to be stuck in and it does seem like that fixation is somewhat catastrophic right now. Yeah, well, that's a very interesting question. Of course, it's much nicer to think we're growing into it, isn't it?

Yes, yes. I think that's so much nicer. I think I'll think that way for now on. Okay, me too. Thank you so much. I mean, I don't really know, you know, the why's are difficult. They also had a teacher in India

who was very much trying to help us move from only asking why to just saying what, like what's happening right now? Because not that you never ask why, but we were very fixated on that. And his point was that if you're asking why, you're always gonna involve a belief system, which means someone else's vision of what's true.

And it would be different if you say, why am I experiencing this to a Jungian therapist? They might have one response. And if you take that very same experience and go to a Freudian therapist, they might have another response or a scholar of this or that or my sort of funniest experience of that was in India,

you know, with some teachers who are very, very in the kind of classical mode of Buddhist cosmology of say rebirth and many lives. And I mean, been many things in many lives. Other teachers I had would say, you don't have to believe that. You know, the whole point is the method and you're an awareness and practice.

And you don't have to just, and that my funniest teacher was probably from an injury said, you don't have to believe it. It's true, but you don't have to believe it. You know, it's okay, I'm not gonna deal with it, but I want to ask somebody a teacher because I had quite significant physical pain as well as emotional pain

when I was first starting to practice. And I said, why? Like, why do I have so much pain? Nobody else seems to have so much pain as I do. And he said, well, you must have tortured many small animals in the previous life. And then he felt needles. Not only did I have pain,

I felt like the slowniest person on earth, you know. I think animals, little animals, little baby animals. But in that context of that cosmology that made a certain sense, you're working off a kind of karma that you created by doing this thing. And I thought, that's not useful actually for me. You know, it's not a helpful context.

I see what you're saying. Yeah, sure. It's like, I remember you at one of the retreats, I think you were talking about add-ons. Yeah. You know, the problem of just the way that we seem to have some phenomena, we experienced some phenomena in the moment

and then create an infinite story around that phenomena. And I guess, metaphysically, that's an add-on, the reincarnation stuff. Yeah, yeah, I mean, unless it's useful for you, you know, it's fun to sort of see like what you just did. Like you reframed everything for me instead of being sort of doleful, you know. It was like, oh, we're getting better.

So it's useful to see the add-on as an add-on just to play, you know. Yes. When I reverse it, whoa. Right. Well, I do, you know, to defend my whying, my whying-ness. Okay. I think that the enlightenment of the Buddha

is a thing that some people think as like something that happened in antiquity and people of all kinds of ideas about it. But sometimes I think, no, I think this was some kind of nuclear bomb that went off. And I think it has barely, the first shock wave hasn't even gone around the planet yet. That it's just happening right now.

And I think that for whatever reason, it took a little bit longer to get to the West, but it's starting to sink in a little bit. And maybe the reason that it took longer to get to the West is because the West seems to be more fixated on the stories and on the identity or the ego and the stories surrounding the ego. So sometimes I think, oh, is this just the same thing

that happens when, you know, over the course of millennia, a thing suddenly begins to develop an optic nerve, for example, like in this case, it's odd because it seems like humans have created illusionary appendages, the past and the future and all the stories about what we are and have ignored the only appendage,

which seems to be the present moment, which makes us a really clumsy and sad creature in that sense. So yeah, sometimes I do get this feeling of, I wonder if this is like that there is actually the potential for what so many embarrassing people have bugled out about the age of Aquarius, the coming age of realization, the matreah,

the second coming of Christ, the singularity, so many different names for it. Do you have anything to say about that? Because that is a part of Buddhism, which is a mapping out of time. And from what I've read, we're in the state that sucks right before things get really wonderful. I think it could be possible.

I'm a New Yorker, it's a little hard for me. Look at the subways. How can you say that? Have you never been on the subways? They don't work anymore. I mean, it's really tough and I was, I don't know where I was teaching somewhere. I think just now Puerto Rico,

I was just, I just came back from Puerto Rico and I was saying, you know, in New York, it's like, if you get into an elevator with somebody, at least when I was growing up here, you don't look at them, you don't smile at them, you kind of turn around and you don't talk to them. People were looking at me like, ooh, tough, you know, that stuff, I don't remember if I could be like,

it's so warm, you know, gracious and generous. Yeah. I think there is room, certainly, to believe that because I mean, also we have to think of who has told our story so far, you know, the story of evolution and you don't hear a lot about survival of the fittest, you don't hear a lot about tendon befriend,

which is an alternative response to the amygdala taking over and fight and flight and freeze. You know, it doesn't get a lot of air time, but it also exists. You know, Sharon, someone just told me this and I didn't verify it, so I don't know if it's true, but apparently Darwin talks about love hundreds of more times than he talks about

survival of the fittest, but that's what we grabbed onto. Similarly in Buddhism, I'm working with David Nickton right now and sometimes he talks about how people really seem to be fixated on the first two noble truths, suffering, because we know that. And then the last, the end of suffering, no one, like that's the one that seems to get ignored quite a bit.

So yes, Darwin apparently did spend a lot of time talking about love, but what does that even mean? And you can't sell missiles if you're talking about love or prisons. But if we don't realize the potency of love, we think it's something stupid and something sentimental because that's what we've been taught. I mean, most people, maybe it's changing with age,

but I would venture, I guess, that more people are taught that it's a doggie dog world that are taught about the power of love. That's right. And so if you don't understand that it's potent, it's real, it's important, and you're gonna understand it's a training, but some people got it and I did not mean to luck, then we're not gonna do

the things we can do to really change the world. And I think we can't change the world. You mean a training, what do you mean by a training? Well, when I started teaching loving kindness practice in the West, no one else I knew was really doing it and it was a little bit controversial and largely around those two points, one is, well, that's stupid, that's just,

that's like what I say these days is that's kind of a girly practice, it's just like sentimental and gooey and ignoring real pain and being conflict avoidant and ignoring some real problems and just covering it with this goo. But the other point was that people didn't believe you could grow in love, you know, you can be more loved that you've got a dose, you know, maybe childhood,

I don't know why, but, or it was like, great, it would just come upon you and that there's nothing you could do. And, you know, because the Buddhist perspective is totally the opposite, it's a training and like it's an education, it's a training and awareness, paying attention differently. It's like, this is a little bit like what you're saying

before, if you think about yourself at the end of the day and you only think about the mistakes you made and the problems you have and nothing good, that's gonna form a reality for your world, but if you give it a little air time to like, did anything else happen today, is it good within me? It feels like discussing things too, but it's not pretending, it's not being hypocritical,

it's saying, you know what, I only go there pretty much as a matter of routine. What about a fuller picture of my day? What about a fuller picture of who I am that admits both things, the joy and the sorrow and all of that, that's the truth of things. The truth, yeah, the truth. And that's what we're broadening to, we pay attention

to the good, to the great things that come upon us, to the joy, as well as the power of just reaching out and having someone not feel so alone, even if you can't fix their problem, they don't have to feel all alone in it. But we realize, oh, this is like a training, this is moving out of one's comfort zone and taking a few risks and an awareness

and that's what the training means. When did love become synonymous with weakness? Well, that's an interesting question, I don't know, I guess I should be reading mid-Victorian novels, but it's sort of, yeah, I can, it's, I think that there seems to be something so backwards right now when it comes to love or the contemplation of love.

And it's insane that people don't think this is a thing that can be developed or they think that they could just be good at it right away. The greatest of things, everyone talks about, oh, love, love, love, love, love, the greatest of things. But you imagine that you're just sort of born with this ability, you know? My baby, my baby can't even burp, you know?

But love is there, there is love, there's love beyond, love, there's the most amazing love ever. But then this is a love that is at this moment sort of based on a phenomena. And if love is based on a phenomena, then we're in trouble because now we've got this nipple, so to speak, that we're suckling love from, in this case, a baby. And if that's the case, oh my God,

what are we all gonna have babies so we can experience love? Are we gonna use babies like nitrous oxide canisters at a Grateful Dead concert, or are you just gonna have babies scattered around when they start growing up? Forget it, no more love, it's a teenager now. Send it to the prison, you know what I mean? I'm gonna have to wait.

Oh boy, so much karma I'm gonna burn off when Sweet Forest becomes a teen. But what I mean is this, there seems to be so many misconceptions about love. One, it's romantic that it's flowery, that it's perfumey, oozy, that it's something temporary, and certainly something that happens just by luck. You turn the corner and there he is, there she is,

there it is, oh my God. So I would love it if you could talk a little bit about the basics of cultivating love, but maybe before that, if you could give your definition of what love is. I think my definition these days is really connection. It doesn't mean liking somebody, it doesn't mean approving of them,

but it's having some fundamental sense of connection that our lives have something to do with one another, and even if, and it doesn't mean a certain action, it doesn't mean I'm gonna invite you to dinner or spend any time with you. But in my heart, I can wish you to be free of suffering, I can wish you to be happy. And that sense of connection,

it can expand quite considerably too. In a funny way, we're all in this together. It's like we don't easily live in a time where you can't just silo off somebody and say, well, you do over there, doesn't matter. Because it's gonna affect me over here. We do live in an interconnected universe, that's why it's powerful, because it's true.

That's how things actually are. And so I would say connection, maybe the most startling change in view about love that I've had and I've seen is that it's not external to us, it's ours. I like everybody, so strongly had a view of love, it's almost like a commodity in someone else's hands. And if they chose to give it to me,

there would be love in my life, but they chose to take it away in whatever form, like maybe your kid is not gonna wanna be a scientist, they wanna be a musician, or maybe the other way around with you. You know, it's frustrating. You know, then it feels like, wait, you're taking away this person who loved him,

be reft, I don't have that anymore, but I saw a movie, I don't know, it was like 11 years old, my niece, something like that. My goddaughter was a chick, she had a tiny little partner, she was a little girl, but she didn't speak, she barked, because it was a talent show.

That was her audition, Mr. Bark, and it was a movie called Dan in Real Life, and one of the characters in the movie said, love is not a feeling, it's an ability. Love is not a feeling, it's an ability. And of course it is also a feeling, but I was captivated by this notion of love as an ability, because it's so resembled experiences I had had

during meditation where the image I used is like, it was almost like the UPS person was standing at my doorstep with a package of love, I looked down at the address and said, I don't think so, I'm sort of walking off, I said, wait a minute, I have nothing, but really love is inside of us. It's an ability, it's a capacity,

and some people or situations or art or many things may like spark it and enhance it or threaten it, but it's ours. It's ours to cultivate, it's ours to recognize. You know, it's a very different picture than what we grow up with most of us. It absolutely is. And it's also outside of us though, isn't it?

I mean, in Buddhism, the inside and the outside, aren't these sort of terms of convenience in relation to the reality of things, which is there just seems to be some kind of fundamental goodness to reality? Yeah, no, I think that is true, and it's almost more like we so exclusively tend to think of it as outside of ourselves

in the hands of another, like what if they leave me? What if they don't like what I wrote? What if they criticize me? Then I'm nothing. And to realize that we respond to people with appreciation, with compassion from within, that there's a wholeness within us that other people may bring forth

or people can't threaten us, you know? There's some really nasty people in this world too. Yeah, but we don't have to hold this hatred in our hearts for them. Yeah, look, we have this capacity no matter what we have to have love. Yeah, what I love about meditating and the exploration of the self

or just following the breath and all the things that seem to go along with that, I don't know, the byproducts of that, you know, watching your breath, you're also, I'm not really in control of my breath. It just seems to do its own thing. And then your thoughts, of course, mindfulness, it's like, I'm certainly not making these thoughts,

I hope I'm not, I would be so embarrassed and bummed by some of them. So these are just seem to be bubbling up. And obviously, like the external stuff, if you think you're controlling the wind, holy shit, you're out of your mind, you know? But then also, you know, what's going on with your lungs and within you, and it gets to the point

where you start running into a really perplexing place where it's like, wait, the birds are the same as my thoughts. The birds are in the trees, like my thoughts are in my mind, both of these things are doing their own thing where am I? And so then somewhere within that, it's the nasty people, where are they? What is that?

Fine, if there doesn't seem to be any kind of selfness in the normal sense of the word and within me, where is it in the people who are nasty? What is that? The growling people, the people who are manipulative, the people who are devious, and manipulative in the same way that you've had a lifetime of practice

cultivating love and kindness. Some people have a lifetime of practice cultivating, manipulating and exploiting and hurting. What is that? Is that a reflection? Is that a reflection of something? Is it a malfunction? Is it a distortion?

What is that? Well, it's a distortion, that's a good word for it. I think it's, you know, if I go back to the Buddha saying that everybody wants to be happy and not happy in a superficial sense, we want a sense of belonging. We want a sense of being at home somewhere in his body and his mind with one another on this planet.

Right. We all want that and we are also very ignorant often about, we don't often have a clue about where real happiness is to be found and we are taught so many things, including outright lies, you know, about where happiness will be found and we're taught them again and again and again.

And so we do absorb that and we do believe it and people do, you know, the most insane things to try to be happy because they think it will make them happy. And because we're not in a habit of introspection, really taking a look, you think, oh, that hurt, you know. Yeah, right. I had a great, it was so free, it was so amazing, you know.

Look at that, look how lonely I am now or, you know, look at how I alienated all these people or I diminished them in some way and now I have, you know, it's just like, and so it's a combination, I think, of the ignorance and then not looking to see the results. And so, but we can, we can really say what's really hard, I think, for people, including me is that, you know,

when we look at ourselves, when I look at myself and I've been, I've loved your sequence of words like growling, nasty, you know, whatever. Yeah. It does come from a place of pain in me. You know, not believing I'm worth anything or not believing in the consequences of action or, you know, things don't matter or whatever it is.

It's some real ignorance. But you look at some other people, somebody asked me this question once, I was on a panel, they said, I look at these people who are causing so much harm in this world and they don't look like they're suffering. They look pretty self-satisfied. You know, he said, if I could, oh, and I said, I agree,

you know, that's hard for me too. So they started fraying at the edges. I think, oh, good, you know, I can have compassion. Bleeding eyes, just one bloody tear every once in a while. Please, that would help so much. A tooth falls out, some kind of just like, like, you know, a slow motion, the same thing that happens to vampires

when you, in movies, when the light shines, it just has slow motion disintegration of evil would be amazing. But, yeah. But, you know, of course, the, I have, as I'm rolling through my mind, I can't bring up one single person who's an obvious jerk that actually seems happy. Like maybe, you know, you watch like your favorite,

like, hyper-conservative polemicist, whoever it may be, or hyper-leftist polemicist, watch it just to someone who's getting paid to get pissed off and say scandalous things. They don't look happy. In other words, they're having a baby's great because I could just think, would I want them to hold my baby?

You know what I mean? You, I wish I could hand the baby to this. I would love for you to hold the baby. Sean Hannity, no, I would not want him to hold the baby. You know? So I think, you know, there's some power in them. There's some, ah, in them. But they don't have enough power

that they would make you want them to hold the most precious thing there is. So I don't know if that's necessarily bloody tears, but it's pretty embarrassing if people don't want you to hold their baby. I think that's beautiful. I'm gonna try to quote you. Yes, absolutely.

Thank you. I would love that. But, Sharon, I, there's something I wanted to talk with you talk with you about, and it's, so I was, you know, as I was getting ready to chat with you and what time went by so fast

when I have about 10 more minutes. I became really fascinated with Deepa Ma. Deepa Ma. It's so beautiful. And I started researching her and I just wondered if I could ask you a few questions about your experience with her. I'm so happy.

You know, she's the person who told me to teach. Yes, I do, yes, I do know that. And I remember we talked about that in an interview and then so I wanted to look deeper into what she was talking about. And I was really thrilled to find out that, because now I have a real, you know, not that there aren't real families,

but now I have a, I guess you could say a typical family structure. And she's considered the patron saint of householders from what I read. Now, I just wanna, hopefully this will work. I'm gonna try this. I found this online. Are you seeing that?

That image on the screen, do you see that? See, I knew that would happen. Hang on Sharon, sorry. Sharon, can you hear me? Ah, bummer. Okay, hang on. Can you hear me Sharon? Yes.

Did you hear me when I was showing you that image? Okay, I don't know what's happening. For whatever reason, the audio just doesn't translate into the next place. I don't wanna mess with it because who needs the images? I can put them up later, it doesn't matter. But so I was really fascinated by her because she seems to be this connection

for some of the great Buddhist teachers of the West right now. Joseph Goldstein, Jack Cornfield, Sharon Salzburg, if you haven't heard of her, you should. She's wonderful, you should look into her. And what I found specifically wonderful about her was it seems like she was teaching a kind of, that there was no boundary

between formal meditation and life. And that the quote, and I'm gonna read it and I'll pop right back so we can hear you talk about it. The quote that I found, and I assume there will be sound in the next frame, so my apologies for this, but I'll just read the, I'm gonna read this quote. Can you still hear me Sharon? Yeah. Oh, perfect, okay.

If you are busy, then busyness is the meditation. And when you do calculations, know that you are doing calculations. Meditation is always possible at any time. If you are rushing to the office, then you should be mindful of rushing. Deepa ma, now, does that also mean that when I'm drinking whiskey, I'm meditating?

Oh, you're practicing something. I'm sorry, but can you talk a little bit about this because I love it, but it seems like an easy way to trick yourself into thinking you're meditating. You know, what you said to me really hit home. It was a kind of wrathful thing to say in the best possible sense of the word and it worked. It burned into me and I'm so happy that I practice now.

And I don't think that, I'm not at the point of realization where I can say, oh yes, this is meditating too. This is meditating, this is meditating. Some things don't seem like that at all. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the positive side of this and also the way you get caught in that kind of thinking. Yeah, well, I mean, one actual translation of the word

that we translate usually as meditation, the word is Bhavana, B-H-A-V-A-N-A in like a poly, language of the original Buddhist texts. It means cultivation. So yes, if you're drinking whiskey and watching something on TV, you are cultivating something. Right.

It's a meditation, but is it what you wanna be cultivating? Right. You know, and there's a point where we have to use the circumstance we are in and that may be that you're very busy. Maybe you don't have much time to sit down formally and close your eyes and you can certainly use those situations

and they're creative and they're important and it's part of bringing things into your life, but people do actually misuse that, not deepermore, of course, you know, but I've heard it many times, the most uncharming way is probably I was teaching a class in New York and somebody said, well, a lot of younger meditation teachers than you

say you don't have to do a formal period of practice every day. So, what do you think? So from my dotage, I said, well, you know, I think theoretically that is true and it's really a theory. That is really the story we tell. It can happen and it needs to happen, you know,

riding the subway, meeting a stranger, thanking somebody on the street, being asked for money on the street, holding your baby, you know, your baby's not sleeping, you know. We want to be able to bring more balance, more awareness, more love, more compassion to cultivate those states

in every one of those circumstances, but what's gonna make that easiest and what's gonna make that real? You know, there's a contemporary of Deepa Muzz who she wasn't actually my teacher, but she was a teacher and also a Bengali woman and who'd been put in an arranged marriage which is part of Deepa Muzz's story.

But she had a different story. She had very tyrannical in-laws and this other woman and they never let her formally meditate. They never let her go off on retreat. Yet she grew and advanced and became a teacher and so people used to ask her, how did you do that when you couldn't go on retreat? And she'd say it was very mindful, stirring the rice.

Wow. And I knew the difference between her and me is that she really was very mindful, stirring the rice. It's what she had. Right. Her intention to grow and understand was so strong. Whereas I could say very glibly, well, everything's meditation,

and you know, I'm mindful, stirring the rice, but am I really mindful, stirring the rice? Probably not. Right. You know, there's one thing. So to only practice without some kind of basis in a more formal practice is probably the hardest thing of all.

It's doable and it's important to look at, but if you can have both, how great is that, you know? Right. I've read some stuff about it and what comes across over and over again is, it is like just what you're saying. It's possible in the way some four-year-olds play Beethoven on the piano.

It happens, but you go and play the piano and see how it sounds. And if it's not Beethoven, don't act like it is, right? It's more like that. But then, as I was researching Deep of Mind, I wonder if you could talk about this or we could wrap up on this question. And it's a kind of frosting-style question,

but it's something that I'm interested in. In Buddhism, I have noticed that there does seem to be a mystical quality to it and that there, I've had my experiences that I don't wanna talk about right now just because I don't understand them at all and I don't, like I don't, I'm doing the Chogim Chrompa disowning thing,

so to speak, so whatever. But then there does seem to be this sort of secret in Buddhism. I don't know if you'd even call it a secret or I mean, it's out there, but you know what I mean. It's not what they focus on. It's not even mentioned. It's usually just, you know, go practice, watch your breath.

And then within that, some things can happen that I've read about merging with a Buddha mind, so to speak, potentially some kind of experience that might seem to be like making a connection with a higher self, so to speak, or something, you know, it's so funny. If you say, you know, I went and meditated and had an experience of hearing

or connecting with some kind of angelic form. People are like, watch out, man, are you okay? If you're like, I smoked DMT and I talked to entities, they're like, cool, that's awesome, right? If you do it, it's like so, but with Buddhism and it's really sort of, this stuff gets strangely swept under the rug. So I was reading the Wikipedia of Deepama

and it said that she was demonstrating miracles, that she had been studying a style of Buddhism that had within it some kind of esoteric, mystical, magical lessons or stages, and as described in Wikipedia, it's just Wikipedia, so who knows, walking through walls, flying through the air, I believe, there were some others, but those are the two that stuck out.

Can you talk a little bit about that? If I were going to sit somewhere, she could take a potato and bake it in her hands and make it taste like chocolate, that was pretty cool. Whoa, I will take that over walking through walls. We have doors, but can you talk a little bit about this? Did you witness anything like that? I never saw her do it, but it certainly was discussed.

I mean, she, I wouldn't call it esoteric exactly. It's like the definition of normality in a lot of Asian, a lot of the Asian worlds is very different than ours. It's much broader than ours, but there are practices and they're ordinary practices, but she was really good at them. Maybe the best way of describing it is,

within any kind of Buddhist approach, there are certain practices that rest primarily on the strength of concentration, I'll describe that in a minute, and then there are practices that rest primarily on the strength of mindfulness. Like David Nickton may have different vocabulary for this, but it's there somewhere.

So concentration is just gathering our scattered energy and awareness together. So you're aware of the breath and your mind is all over the place and you go back, right? And if you do that enough, your mind gets very focused. It's like the energy of the universe becomes available to you. And there are certain experiences you can have

if you only did that, if you only kept coming back to the breath and back to the breath, which are called jhana. It's like, sometimes it's translated as trance, which isn't right. It's like altered states of consciousness that are extraordinary. So if you pursue only that

and you're just gathering all this energy in it and claim to it, then that's said to be the path to psychic power. Most teachers do, and it's sort of in the Buddhist framework, is you practice that a little bit as we do, and when you get concentrated enough, you more start paying attention to a wider array of experiences, physical pain and pleasure

and sorrow and joy and all the different things that are coming up, restlessness and calm, and you're just opening your awareness so that what you're looking at is the kind of the changing nature of all those things, and you're almost looking at change itself in the end. So that's why mindfulness, which is that more open awareness, is said to lead to wisdom or insight,

whereas only concentration will lead to power. If you're only practicing concentration, it's not going to necessarily make you more loving. It's not going to make you wiser, but it will make you more powerful. So then there are ways of practicing. Mininja was also Deepama's teacher when she was in Burma, and she got to be a Dharma student

through incredible painful suffering. She was in an arranged marriage, but when she was like 12, I think, but she and her husband fell very deeply in love, and then they didn't have children for about 18 years, which was considered her problem and a disgrace. But her husband really loved her, and he didn't want to get another wife,

and then they had three children, two of which died, two of whom died. And they were living in Burma at the time, they were Bengali, but her husband was in civil service. They were living in Burma, and one day he came home from work who wasn't feeling that well, and he died by that night. So she was completely overcome by grief, and she developed a heart condition,

she couldn't get out of bed, and she just had Deepa. Deepama was like a nickname, Deepa's mother. She had Deepa to raise, but she couldn't get out of bed. The doctor came and said, you're actually gonna die of a broken heart, unless you do something about your mind, you should learn how to meditate. So she got up, she got out of bed,

and the meditation room was on what we would call the second floor, and they said she was too weak to actually walk up the stairs, she had to crawl up the stairs to get to the meditation room, and she practiced, and when she came out, it's like somehow she had metabolized the terrible suffering into compassion. And she was a beautiful, compassionate person,

although fierce. It's like when you were talking to me earlier, I thought, you know, you sit with her, and she said, no naps, like you sit, you know? Right. Like she was very fierce, but she was incredibly kind and loving, and I started with all kinds of people,

and she never deviated from that, because she knew, like anyone's life could change at a dime. You know, you pick up your phone, and you have a different life than the one you had before two seconds ago. Right. And she knew that, everyone was included in that kind of compassion.

So way back in that time, Mininja was her teacher in Burma, and he decided he wanted to take out some of the ancient texts to talk about how to develop those powers, and see if it was true. So she had phenomenal concentration, so we tried it with her. And it's something like, you know,

in those cultures that consider physical phenomenon to be earth, air, water, fire, and space, and she could focus so strongly, say, on space. They said she could see the space between the molecules and the wall. She could just go through. Wow. You know, it's interesting,

because I have friends who are so upset about that, and they were saying, did you see it? And I said, no, I didn't see it. But if they hear a story about New Coral Vava, who didn't do that necessarily, but could say to it, like you said, to a friend of mine, and this is, you know, it was so long ago, there were no cell phones.

This was the year when, if you wanted to call someone in the States, you had to go to a city like New Delhi, and go to an international hotel, and book a trunk call for 24 hours, and then, you know, to then scream into the phone. So, you know, a friend of mine was there once,

and Maharaja and New Coral Vava got everyone else to leave, except this guy and his wife, and on Monday, he said to them, you should call your mother, your family needs you. So then they had to go from like, Brindavan to New Delhi, check into the hotel, and 24 hours later, he was talking to his mother, and his mother said,

oh, thank God the State Department found you. Wow. Yeah. And so I asked these friends who are very upset, I said, do you believe that? And they said, oh yeah, you know, and I said, why do you believe that, and not someone being able to walk through walls?

And they said, because one is the mind, and the other is like physical reality. So, you know, is that different? You know, like, you know, it seemed to me that's a very impressive accomplishment, to be able to look at somebody and say, cool, oh, you know, I don't know where. Right.

You know, the world is just bigger and stranger than we take it to be. So, I just think of her, her sort of psychic attainments in that light, you know, like, I didn't see them, people I trusted saw them, like I'm an injured trainer in them. And at the same time,

they were so not what you think about, like, I never think about her making a potato in her hand. You know, they make me taste like chocolate. I think about her telling me to teach. I think about how loving she was, you know? Well, and also, you know, what's so funny about these miracles, and I think I understand why, not why not, I think,

because I think personally, it would be impolite for someone to demonstrate that to me at this moment in my life. It would throw me off if I saw someone walk through a wall. I'd never stop talking about it. It would be ridiculous. And I would also probably always have bloody noses from trying it myself.

So it'd be you. Make space, just keep changing the space. Find the space between the molecules. But also, there is something to me that is spectacularly miraculous about the fact that I'm talking to you right now using this incredible technology. And probably the reason that I'm having,

not only having this conversation with you, but also that my life is fundamentally improved because of a couple of sentences you said to me was because of your encounter with this person. Totally. That's way better than a chocolate potato or walking through walls. I can get a chocolate potato, theoretically.

I can go make one in the kitchen. And I can, if I wanna walk through a wall, I can do it. I have a door. It separates different areas in the house. So I think that's something that gets really overlooked with these people. Everyone's like, holy shit, they knew that.

They said, go call that person, but they don't even think about like, yeah. And also they created a ripple that is continuing to move through society in a way that we don't even know where it's gonna go. That, to me, is a grand miracle. And definitely would rather have one Sharon Salzburg than a trillion chocolate potatoes.

Thank you. Oh. An infinite number, a sea of chocolate potatoes. Sharon, thank you so much for giving me your time. I'm very grateful to you. And these moments are really special to me. And thank you very much. Thank you so much.

And I can't wait to see you and hold the baby. Oh, I cannot wait. I can't wait for the spring. And I'm gonna be, this time I'm doing the challenge. All right. Joining in, this time I signed up last time and I didn't pull it off. This time is different.

But could you please tell the listeners or the watchers potentially where they can find you and how they can connect with you? Yeah. That is to SharonSalsburg.com. And all the information about the challenge should be very prominent on there. We're gonna start February 1st.

And I think there's a little leeway if we wanna start a little bit later, but it does start. And really it's a beautiful, strengthened community kind of exercise. And people get a lot out of it. So I'm really happy. It's time we're rolling around again.

Me too. And I'll see you real soon. Sharon, thank you so much. Hare Krishna, thank you. Thank you. That was SharonSalsburg, everybody. You can find her at SharonSalsburg.com. Much thanks to Blue Choo and Robinhood

for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. And if you enjoy this podcast, won't you do me the great honor of subscribing and liking and faving and clicking and clicking. I'll see you next week. We got a wonderful episode coming up with Kyle Kingsbury. Until then, Hare Krishna.

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