Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 357: David Nichtern

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

David Nichtern, student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Duncan's meditation teacher, rejoins the DTFH! Click here to learn more about David's new book, Creativity, Spirituality & Making A Buck. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace (use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site). This episode is also brought to you by Feals (visit feals.com/duncan and get 50% off your first order).

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David Nickturn, my meditation teacher, author, musician, and all around genius is here with us today. We're going to jump right into it, but first some quick business. Squarespace is what I use anytime. I put a new episode of the DTFH

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Today's guest was a student of an amazing Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trumpa Rinpoche He's also a musician He plays in Krishnadasa's band He's won Grammys

Gold Records In his new book, Creativity, Spirituality and Making a Buck Just Hit the Shelfs David Nickturn It's been DuncanTrustle DuncanTrustle David

Duncan Welcome back to the DTFH Thank you so much Your new book, Creativity, Spirituality and Making a Buck which is fantastic and which is bringing some wires together

that tech and technology can bring some wires together that technically you're not supposed to bring together when, you know, if you just step over that line too much of selling

whatever your fucking thing is But everybody's selling things anyhow That's right, but if you don't do it in the right way in the sense that you don't like You have to deprecate it and deface it and kind of diminish it I don't know how you do it, right? In fact, I think many people

get really pissed off when people are making money Have a wallet? They want y'all to be photosynthetic Then there's this You know, there's like a I have to think about that one for a minute

If you're not, then there's some sense of some kind of corruption or something like that You know, when you hear about the great spiritual gurus of the world and then you see their ticket price and you realize how much they're charging

or they have like little meat and greets like Justin Bieber I've seen videos of this poor kid man, they put him in there and he has these meat and greets where parents are standing there their Bieber obsessed daughter has paid at $500 to stand with Bieber

for like two seconds and weep and then like a bodyguard grabs them and just like a hair! Don't touch him! It's the craziest thing to watch but when you see that replicate itself in a spiritual It's sort of like Amma without the hug

Yeah, that's right, man and I think Amma doesn't charge there He doesn't even give them a hug? Does Justin not even give them a hug? He can't Yeah, there's no way I can get in trouble for that stuff but the

this is one of the unspoken things like man, spirituality that's its own thing art, creativity, that's its own thing but the moment you start making anything spiritual or creative with some intent to get rich

Well, get rich, how about just livelihood? A livelihood I mean even how dare you call yourself spiritual, how dare you call yourself an artist? Who the fuck do you think you are? This is the attitude out there in the world it seems like on one side

the other side is people coming from the world of commerce and business who say how dare you get spiritual? How dare you apply a code of ethics? How dare you be mindful about what you're doing? Why would you even bring up that topic here? We're just making money here

That's right, it's just business So there's two sides to this paradigm They've been separated for thousands of years in my estimation it goes back literally thousands of years to some kind of sane, holistic lifestyle it pops its head up every once in a while

but I'm trying to talk about it directly You did a great job of it Thank you, sweet of you To me using Buddhism as a framework for the conversation is paradoxical in the sense that

at least paradoxical if you look at Buddhism from a certain perspective So I want to talk about that perspective that I sort of started off with about Buddhism prior to working with you and reading about it and studying it which is that

there's this sort of emptiness this emptiness The nothing The void, yeah, this sort of neutral emptiness within which there's this phenomena that we

have Whoa, cool There's some phenomena Hold on one second It goes to the machine? Yeah Yeah, we I didn't know where it came from That happened the last time we talked

God, man, that's cool So this sort of like vision of the Buddha the starving Buddha the Buddhist monk sitting with a begging bowl here in some scriptures that what did he call people

worldlings and he talks to the arhats or what do you say? Arhat Arhat and these are the congregations of monks that are have shaved their head or wearing robes and have tuned in or

let go or Well, the notion of arhat is they've realized some degree of egolessness There's a marker there sort of the level of individual liberation Yeah But it's trumped by the Bodhisattva by the Mahayana

teachings which say you have to give that up even and then dedicate all of it to the merit of all beings So that even the arhats, by the way in the heart sutra which is the famous sutra which the Mahayana is sort of proclaimed they say that some of the arhats

actually died of heart attacks on the spot when they heard this view because then they couldn't even hang out with their individual liberation they couldn't sustain it or hold on to it in any way And it just killed them Well, you know how much shock could you take to your sense of reality?

I don't know Before you jump out of that body I almost had that happen when the rumba ran over a dog shit That's about as much as I can stand as I'm coming into my living room and the rumba's done some kind of horrific spiraling of shit art

Now, the emptiness the letting go all of this that especially the emptiness which a lot of people think of as a black hole Yeah, a black hole

None of it seems to connect in any real way to investing in this world growing roots into this world producing a life in this world because who gives a fuck, man? We're all just rivulets of sentient matter

floating into the great void What? You want to start a website You're going to like, what are you going to do? You want to start making crochet shit for Etsy? Let go and die We're all drifting into nothingness Go into the forest and forget Yeah

I mean, that's an extreme version of it But you know what I mean? That's the romantic idea It's great to really like the actual Buddhist teachings to correct the misrepresented Buddhist teachings You're talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger and then he's in the room, you could ask him

You know what I mean? So here's the non-rumor part about emptiness It is not considered to be nihilistic in the sense that you're portraying it There's not a nothing valence to it

It's a kind of potentiality that is not limited in any way So it actually gives birth to everything So it's that kind of, it's like a womb and in tantra it becomes womb-like and it gives birth to all phenomena But they're not

distinguishable from the openness or the emptiness of that So when you talk about emptiness, you should always say empty of what? That would be the right way to talk about it And it's empty of three things, right? It's empty of permanent existence It's empty of

independent existence and it's empty of substantial singular existence Now, if you can qualify something those three ways you can say it's empty Right, yeah So take Duncan for example Are you permanent?

No Do you exist independently of all other phenomena? Nope Not yet And can you identify a singularity that is Duncan that is reduced down to a singular phenomenon like a soul or an atman

or something like that? Is there something you could identify as the singular Duncan-ness? Well, it's kind of like tattoos, right? That's why I don't get tattoos Well, that's right Because you get a tattoo and when you think you've figured it out And then down the line

you've got this awful fucking tattoo and you still have to explain to people what it is It's like my poor friend who, like, tattooed the initials of his girlfriend on his ankle in high school Never got a date again after that, right? Well, god, no, I mean, it just didn't work out I mean, and I have a friend who's a tattoo artist

who says that's one of the signs that it's ending if someone comes in and gets somebody else's tattoo their name on them because it's like a grasping situation Anyway, what I'm saying is any singular Duncan self that I have felt like, oh, that is it

has inevitably over time proven to be just some kind of dream-like state that I was in and then you look back and you're like, holy shit, I was gonna do that I was gonna get a crucifix that said resurgio

underneath it, resurrection on like my arm when I was in college after I took acid and read the New Testament Thank god I didn't Thank god, I don't want that tattoo I mean, it's not as embarrassing as the people who get the angry clown or whatever but still, it's an embarrassing tattoo

Now here's something I noticed about Duncan Phenomenon You change your identity quite frequently Like you change your name online Oh, you mean my Twitter handle? Yeah, absolutely You're a shapeshifter Well, I mean

And even in some of the work you do, you shapeshift I enjoy doing that It's a blast, yeah It's really fun to not be so solidified into some any given identity I mean, Duncan is more like a swarm of bees than an individual person in a way Isn't everyone like that?

The Gurjeev idea that we're just a swarm of various personalities living in the mansion of our self and most people are running amok because the great master who's running the house has vanished and that's your undisciplined state That's what Gurjeev says, it's really quite beautiful

Fantastic So you begin to like, the joy is the beginning of the realization that the master's returning which would be the moment that you start gaining some bit of internal harmony, a little bit of discipline a little bit of consistency

That's like the idea that you just got a letter saying, oh, I'm coming back, don't worry Or the prodigal to son would be the reverse of that It's like, you're the person out in the wilderness Anyway, the point is Yeah I'm a shapeshifter Anyone's a shapeshifter, if you dream you're a shapeshifter

I wonder about Gurjeev What did he do for a livelihood, do we know? He sold carpets Whoa Yeah, carpets Yeah, so he's a little bit, I mentioned in the book Charles Ives who was a famous composer

and he didn't want to have his creativity be his livelihood, so he sold insurance I wonder if that's the case with Gurjeev that he didn't want to have to put that on the line as like, okay, I buy and sell teaching these people so I'll sell carpets and then charge students money for studying

with him, you know I have no idea I've heard cool stories about him selling carpets though, like I read a story about when he was selling carpets, he would assume a completely different identity and wouldn't be Gurjeev the mystic he would sometimes act really like

dumb, he would act like he was sort of confused, he would act like he would just play games with his identity as the carpet seller but I think that he knew what I think a lot of people forget which is that every moment is

holy and sacred regardless if you're selling milkshakes or carpets or lectures or whatever it may be, that this is the this is it and it's okay to be any way that you are that's okay, which is why

to me, like a book that dives right into this, and also not just in a woo-woo-ee way, even though you have a chapter open that I do like that we've talked about before the concept of joining heaven and earth it's not just that it's just a lot of good practical advice

and when we were talking at our I don't know what you call it, the thing we do at Samarasah dialogue, that's what we call it you said this is you learning from my mistakes because you've been

to be clear, this is me learning from my own mistakes and passing it on I haven't learned anything from your mistakes yet you're gonna I've done it so sinister oh you're gonna do it yes you are no but

I mean what is, you know part of the concept in the book and in me working with people and talking to people is sharing the journey, and you know I think all of these traditions are passed on human being to human being, any of them that are worth anything have a human

chain of communication in it so the big part of that is mishaps and finding out how not to do something, so I figure at my stage of life I've had more mishaps than many of the people I hang out with just by longevity at this point

and it's things like as simple as if you're gonna start a record company, don't finance it yourself and put both your houses up for mortgages for second mortgages don't do that but you know what I mean, just some reasonable things that when we're in a

fever of creative outbursts that we can misappropriate misunderstand the situation and replace common sense with enthusiasm that's right, how easy to do that oh gosh everybody who's ever been in love has done that

this is what I love for sure this is what I love about the Hare Krishna this is what I love about the story of Krishna particularly the Rasalila which is you hear this flute out in the woods and it's so beautiful

that you leave your lanterns burning you leave your baby and you go out in the woods and you have sex with God and then when you're having sex with the divine who gives a fuck about whatever that old life was

it's like you're up from a dream and you're not mourning over whatever that used to be you know that past thing and this idea is to me when people finally have inspiration

and finally sort of merge or feel that first you follow the flute you have the idea and then you have to have the guts to go and do it and it does require some sacrifice divine contact

at last and then beauty is coming out of you and you're like this isn't even me I don't know what this is and then you're hungry and you're like I gotta fucking eat I gotta go somewhere to eat and I don't have enough money to eat

and if I can't eat then I can't make stuff and then you know what I'm talking about this is the to me well of course that's a famous part of the Buddhist story it was a hard core meditator and he got down to one grain of rice a day they say

and real aesthetic because a lot of the trajectory into the spiritual realm was based on asceticism that was one whole line of thinking if I shut it down, if I turn it off if I eliminate distraction then I will get to the

some kind of experience of spirit so he tried that because as far as I could tell he was an industrious kind of practitioner he had a teacher he did what the teacher said but then it got to a certain point that he was literally

passing out like so not able to meditate that's the starving Buddha but then there's and I've rendered this in some of my music on this topic a maiden named Sujatha was walking by

and kind of singing this song it's like a kind of yogurt drink that she was selling and she offered it to him and then he drank it and just thought kind of what choice do I have here

but he found it kind of pleasing and he also gave him strength to continuous practice so that's supposedly the discovery of the middle way kind of approach maybe you don't have to be checking into the seven greatest restaurants in LA one night a week you can become upset when you're

tortellini was a little bit overcooked that could be one extreme and the other extreme is starving yourself to death maybe there's a middle way and that goes a long long way into the depths of Buddhist teachings once you get past the renunciate stage of them

which really if you stay with the renunciate aspect of Buddhism it's very refining in a way it's like you learn how to stop lying stop cheating stop abusing but then it reaches a point

where you begin to explore reality in a much more in depth way and that's part of the tradition going all the way up to the highest tantras in which really they're saying this phenomenal world, just like you said this is the sacred world

it's nowhere else you cannot find it elsewhere like right now, this is it heaven if you want to call it that you could just call it probably wouldn't give it that much of a way bearing load

be more like suchness as it is so in the book I talk about as it is what is it and then the second metric is up to you like this is up to you this is not

there's no fate from a Buddhist point of view Duncan is not faded, Duncan's future is completely open yeah primarily open so it's like that as it isness is that that's where you start

the as it is it's a funny thing that people are saying is get back to what it is so how much time do we spend with what it isn't I guess you could say what it isn't is the fabricated part of the mind or the fantasy part or the part that is projecting reality

in kind of a hyperactive way instead of maybe pacing it a little differently and just seeing the actual texture and nature of things that you're working with including going to the office in the morning including making your cup of coffee including raising your child

yeah so if you see those things as unholy I feel you have a long journey ahead of you that's right there's like a fun exercise to just like scan through what you think is profane that you do

throughout your day what are the things you are doing where you're down on yourself and you're thinking this is not who I'm supposed to be for a lot of people that's their job they do it they feel out here in LA some people who have a job

that isn't immediately getting paid for art they feel really like failures like I'm waiting tables it really gets to people and for some people who are making art and have temporarily sustained themselves

but are entering a place where it's not for that moment they feel absolutely humiliated to go to work you know what I'm saying to me that's like a really interesting thing to start realizing you have zones

shame as the ground of your whole day embarrassment so this is one thing that Trump used to call negative negativity I think you and I have talked about it but the idea is you have the original confusion but on top of that

you're dumping on yourself for having that and he said you just strip that layer away first you know the kind of judgmental layer now you're working with what he used to call the manure of experience it's like a fertilizer so all your ambition

your anger, your jealousy these things are potentially fertile in that they can be viewed as energy they can be viewed as a pure form that's not so egocentric so for example you take something like

you know jealousy or competition that could be like just a genuine intense energy for excellence and perfection which people have so those things can overlap on each other but as long as you're dumping on the whole thing

you won't get any of the juice I want to talk about this with you I haven't finished it you recommended this fantastic book on alchemy that I started reading and then from time to time I'll just look up the emerald tablet which is that alchemical text

which seems to have the concept of samsara and nirvana that you find inside of it and then there's this invitation to take from any matter internal or external the impurities and within that

sliver of impurity somewhere in there is the thing you're looking for which is a really intense thing that krishnadas said to me once which was like he's always saying the most intensely profound things

they're really compact so once he said nuggets but you said the longing is the grace and that to me sort of translates into some other ideas

that's bhakti in a nutshell don't you think that's devotional yogas the longing has something about it that pulls you forward and upward you're right you know how we would say this

in our teachings in some of the buddhist teachings there's this notion of raising what we call wind torus your sort of personal presence and strength and magnetizing drahla energy

so the drahlas are the self existing sort of rich energies that are in the phenomenal world particularly in nature but not just in nature the level of some kind of confidence and presence then they love you they shower you so this is what

his tradition and my tradition have in common tantric buddhism is devotion is really hugely important and it's not so much it has a guru, it has a literally guru devotion as part of it but it also has just that sense of longing as opening your heart and making you a little less

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longing is to bring it back to what we were talking about earlier if I bring the longing into the thisness into the nowness and it's just the longing and then I'm experiencing it

it's those times when you're like weeping for your someone who's died and in that breakdown there's a moment where you realize it feels like I'm with them right now inside of the

that inside of it is them is the experience somehow of connection with them and then if you take that and you look at the thing that you want what you should people you shouldn't be ashamed of some people are ashamed of it because it's so tremendous

and it hurts this thing that they want then they think it's they'll never have it like true love or something but when you look at the feeling of it instead of running away from it then somewhere in that feeling

that desire want right there's a sliver of the thing you're looking for somehow it's already there but it doesn't make sense because nothing's there to induce it there's the person or the job or whatever and yet there it is in the sliver

you taught me this the way that if you really look at pain there's somehow it's not quite different from pleasure if you take a cold shower an ice cold shower and really feel it you realize it feels as good

as the hot water it's alive it's alive it's like so anyway to me I think that there is a possibility for people to find that sliver and then manifest it

right? into their world that's exactly what is in this book that's what I'm trying to get to the notion of finding a vision which is the heaven principle that arises spontaneously and freely

in your mind like the unobstructed version of what you'd like to do in life that's called heaven which is unobstructed then as you draw that down to earth it's always earth goes but but but no I don't think so what about this what about that so I say that

some people will have a strong relationship to heaven they're quite visionary but they're not connected to earth solidly enough so they can't manifest but on the other hand if you're connected to earth but you've lost heaven because you have this to-do list and you're checking it off and you I did this I did that

but you forgot why you're doing it so there's no vision unifying it so in the Asian paradigm joining heaven earth is the role of the human beings us and when we do that we manifest and we also manifest leadership and we can also manifest almost anything you want

at that point so heaven's like the wifi connection that downloads the system upgrade into your iphone if iphone is not plugged in is not taking the message is not whatever it may be

then forget it you're fucked and then when you add to this situation a taboo on taking that inspired heaven and bringing it into the world in a relatively mundane way if you think that that's not how it works

I'm a sell out if I start doing business calls then you're doomed that is such a taboo for a lot of people my uber driver was playing some music he made

and it's really quite beautiful but he was telling me I'm not good at the business stuff a lot of people will say that everyone says that but that's why there's 8 chapters in the book about business somebody could say I love music but I'm not good at

learning how to play the guitar okay but there's a way there's methods the reason I like business and I have really enjoyed entrepreneurial energy and business my whole life is because it's extremely creative A and B it's like you have to be

practical about things and you have to know how things work so the idea that I can't engage that energy is probably a miss perception because it's actually part of living you have to know how you're

I use the image of a Phillips head screwdriver or a Flathead screwdriver you have to know the difference if you want to unscrew something so just some kind of practical wisdom and mixed in with that is the notion of ethical conduct which is sort of right livelihood

no matter what scale you're operating in fact I quoted you in that chapter Duncan you said if you're lying, cheating and stealing it's not going to work out for you that was your quote and it's great it's because it's so to the point

people think oh I can manipulate this energy I can manipulate this wealth and that's just that's true that you will create spiritual imbalance when you do that that's no doubt about it also if you think about the mood state you have to be in to lie, cheat and steal

that means you're afraid of shit if you've gotten to that point that's how when people start robbing banks or whatever when people are like getting to crime which is extreme dishonesty why are they doing it they're not doing it because they're filled with some joy

and love and feeling like the world is an abundant place they're doing it because they're terrified that they're going to run out of money and they're pissed and that attitude of fear I think when that gets in you then what whatever heaven is

is being channeled heaven is unobstructed there's no hope no fear and no hope that's what's interesting about it Trump used to tag hope and fear as a pair when you can't have one without the other that's cool

so when he'd say this situation's totally hopeless and I mean that it's not a strategy how can I get hopeless so I could get enlightened it is hopeless and therefore it's also fearless yeah right well I mean it's like when you

get the thing that you wanted the hope goes away you will become hopeless in that sense and you know that the moment let's say for example you're out there in the middle of the woods and you're hoping to god someone finds you because you've been wandering for like a week

you think you've seen like a mountain line that's following you and you're hoping beyond hope and then someone comes and gets you you're now hopeless that hope is gone you've been alleviated of the burden of that hope and to me hopelessness

or fearlessness or heaven energy when it comes through the pipes and there's fear in the pipes it still comes out

in the same way that if you like shove some cat turds into a water fountain you're still going to get some water but no one's going to want to drink it and it's going to be disgusting and so that to me I've noticed when I make shit out of fear when I've gotten really into like

oh my god I got to make this work it works but within it there's the tonalities of fear whereas like if you do this insane thing which I from my very not long long term practice I associate

with the concept of fundamental goodness or this general sense of like my god this is this place is wonderful right now this if I'm like making stuff from that place which this guy Neville Goddard

describes as working from the end so working as though you already did achieve the thing you want with that state completely believing yeah a fruitional kind of point then good stuff comes out of me sure

where I get confused with that kind of manifestation stuff and Buddhism is sometimes it feels like there's a weird kind of like pushing or a visualization

of a life where all my needs are met and the world is abundant and I see myself held in the great eternal rainbow field of love and my life is completely actualized right now where I get we confused

when it comes to Buddhism is like well Buddhism so thus far to me is the practice of allowing things to be as they are and that other thing when you're doing your affirmations and stuff like that sometimes there feels like there's exertion is there a way to bring these two together so that they don't seem

this is exactly what we were talking about in the car on the way here in a way so you know a bridge let's say just for argument say things are like as you said clear water perfect the way they already are let's just say that

how come we don't perceive it that way and that you also said because there's cat turds in the water fountain what are they there are our own habitual patterns and confusions that have accumulated over time so nobody's denying that that part of reality that's called relative reality

and if you if you ignore that the law of karma the kind of sense of how did we get where we are what energies are we working with what confusions exist in the situation what doubt what hesitation if we ignore that we get a kind of

theoretical version of the purity an abstract version of it and you can see it on the cover of yoga magazines people with looking like they have an abstract version of the purity but you know that as soon as the photo shoots over the shit is going right back to the fan and life continues on right so

on the flip side if we if we can look at our actual life and that's why I'm talking about like the real life that we have and you see ah you know there's certain kind of karma here there's certain things I'm working with habitually maybe doubt maybe

a depression maybe anxiety these things are recurring in in the in my mind stream regularly they may not be permanent they may not be substantial but they're recurring frequently so then there's certain practices that are called purification where you're actually

cleaning the pipe cleaning the delivery system of course it's a relative thing because it's inherently though it's pure already but relatively speaking you know we have attitudes we have you know we have things where you know wish we could have done differently

we have regrets we definitely have anxiety about the future and these are kind of hyperactivity in the mind so part of it is allowing the mind to settle down so that you know in a way you can purify by just allowing the mind to settle you just feel the purity of it but otherwise

you can actually review look through your shit you know and there's a lot of ways to do that you know some the twelve step people have some of the best techniques for that I've ever seen and they're not dissimilar from certain Buddhist techniques where you recognize what you've done wrong you acknowledge it you kind of

attempt to rectify it and and make a vow not to create the same trouble going forward there's a so there's purification this purification what you just said there's a concept that this guy Neville Goddard was talking about which is really really trippy

which is that it's called revision you ever heard of this no vision I never heard Neville Goddard he's pretty intense but you sort of so you have the memory we all have one at least many many may probably where the thing you did that you

wish you hadn't there regret memory so that's the reoccurring thing so you're sitting and then this is one of the bubbles that floats up the recurring habitual pattern so Neville Goddard is saying

actually remember it differently as though you did something perfect at that time as though in that moment you you apologized and instead of trying to be right or at that moment you

walked away instead of fighting somebody or in that moment whatever visualize it you visualize the same event the same event right but as though it happened in this beautiful way it is really trippy to do and it sounds crazy

and he's not implying that this literally changes history but what it does do is it somehow leads to self forgiveness somehow because you see who you are now versus who you were then and you let the who you are now be

back then it's a pretty beautiful thing to do but the other thing that it does which I like where this splits from my understanding of mindfulness is that in mindfulness it's more I understand it too let's just watch the bubble there it is

and now it's gone let's look at it time travel revise see it in a more perfect light and then let it go so this comes to a really deep topic of East Meeting West which is trauma

and I really don't think after many decades of various Buddhist practices but obviously mindfulness being the foundational one I think mindfulness is a foundation practice to stabilize your attention

and it's really basic you know from there I think then you get out the tools to work with your experience and I don't think awareness itself unless it is just stunningly complete

will remove the stains of trauma so it might need other kinds of work and even some people I know in our field would say that some forms of Western therapy might be more effective

at that very deep kind of like stain of a traumatic experience so I myself am just exploring these things and I think there is a great phrase called spiritual bypassing that has been John Wellwood I think came up with it of the possibility

of spiritual techniques to avoid sort of encountering some of these deeper rooted aspects of one's personal development so we'll see how that shakes out but I also think within the Buddhist tradition there are many ways to work almost more

shamanically, energetically with things there is a whole map of the inner landscape of our you know our highways of energy going through the body and the idea of opening those channels and purifying those because really

what's ever stored has to be stored in either our physical body or our mind stream where else would it exist so you think oh I haven't thought about that for five minutes where was it it didn't really have much presence during that time but it recurs so I think the idea

of recurring is something that we have to address as part of practice how do you deal with recurring oh you can label the thinking and go back to your breath and then it comes back and then it also has a certain feeling tone to it when it comes back you say okay I recognize that feeling tone but at a certain point it's like there's ways

to get brillopads out and kind of clean out your psyche that's cool to know yeah that's good to know well that's just another prostrations 100,000 prostrations oh yeah you mean like when you're like doing the thing where you're like going around the temple bowing and stuff yeah but you dive all the way to the floor and you put your whole body

on the floor 100,000 times 100,000 how long does that take people months or years I don't have time for prostrations I've got a family I can't be flopping around like some Buddhist fish on a temple floor hoping for peace

there's no peace in it it's really connecting with your emotional life in a different way sounds cool you would love it actually prostrating yeah you would love it if you put it all right there you put it all right there

like if I'm like I'm tripping super super if I've taken the right amount of psychedelics sometimes I feel so overwhelmingly in love with the universe that I'll do that just on its own it's also known as passing out

I mean if somebody saw me there like Jesus fucking Christ he just passed out is he okay wake up face down yeah I love to hear that because this to me is it like for a lot of people Buddhism gets translated as a passive

yeah and I've been accused of passive hipster Buddhism yeah you know and just this sort of like you're not there's no action there and so to me to bring it back to your wonderful book it completely

exercises that perception and I think you've done a really good job of illuminating how there is there's action in this there is an ability to interact with this place we call it entering the action

even when somebody leaves a three-year retreat the name of that gesture is called re-entering the action so the retreat doesn't stand on its own it's how you manifest after it so and just to frame it out I see three

pathways for people like us we become renunciates, monastics what do you have to renounce probably pretty much most of the things that we do all day every day sex, you renounce, livelihood coffee probably coffee, definitely alcohol

definitely drugs and you pay attention all day long every day to every gesture every word you say to bring it into alignment with your prime focus which is to attain enlightenment that's a legit that's going to be a legitimate path forever

okay that's one group now the second group that arose were the lay people living outside the monastery who were receiving some teachings from those monastics and supporting them as part of a larger cultural initiative this is worth supporting we value this

and so they're called patrons and they somewhat have a household of practice they do mantras and little things and they have chachkis around the house and they have a general sense of appreciation so that's two paths there's a third path and that's the household of yogi

or the hidden yogi and this person or even Mahasiddhas they look like normal people living in a normal way and they're famous for that they could be running a delicatessen you wouldn't know but the person has pure view all the way through

and every moment there is practice so this is in all the traditions you have the Sufis, the Buddhists it's the hidden yogis or household of yogis and your view is the same as the monk essentially or the nun

it's that there is no wasted time there's no wasted gesture it's all to move towards a recognized enlightenment and yet at the same time you don't have to change the outer form you just change the inner form

you know what I love about that it makes it so there's no escape it's like the fantasy my god the fantasy you get it in college but there is always a fantasy of like shit maybe one day

I'll become a monk but until then I'm just gonna be a fucking asshole you know what I mean that's right because you've constructed a reality where oh no there's this thing I have to go to a temple, the place, the whatever but then to hear that

and I'm saying it in a negative way the positive version of it is that realization of like right now you can enter into something as potent as a monastic order sure in your life at this moment

you are in the monastery it's whatever your surrounding phenomena is and then within that place you can turn your life into something very instantly sacred in this magical and beautiful and real

no matter what it is you're doing and that's a really intensely beautiful path I think and for a lot of people I think that's liberating on its own because people really do feel like and it's a genuine path this is not wishful oh well

I missed that boat but this one I'll make up another boat and sail up on this one this is you know for many centuries this kind of path is acknowledged with but it's probably a little more inner a little more

less show about it there could be delusion on either path that's the thing for example if you're the patron you could just go well I'm just going to keep making money and running

my corrupt business or whatever but I'm giving some of it to charity right so there's a disruption distortion there the monks and the nuns could as you say be bypassing you know you want to talk

about bodhisattva activity try being a mother you know I mean just look at being a mother everything they say about bodhisattva's mothers are already doing and that's why they use it as the metaphor for it there's no time off you're just dedicating your life to the benefit of sentient beings you know that's right

and in the householder path you could talk the talk and you have this kind of view of what you're doing but it's really kind of flaky right we see that and that's why some western people they love zogchen and things like that they're a very fruitional view

because it feels like oh I don't have to do the prostrations I don't have to do the hard work you know well yeah so there's always room for self-deception there's always room to the last second there's room always room it's very exciting to realize that oh actually you're in the abyss right now

you're in the abyss and you whenever you're ready you can be in that place and I think that's one of the most spectacular the exciting things because you know this is the resurrection of the dead

this is the potential that this whole life that you decided was mundane profane mediocre lowered is in fact just as far out and mystical is some mountain monastery

up in the snow and you're the one deciding that it isn't that because you can't handle it man it's too much to have as Trump or Rinpoche says sometimes the floor drop out that moment of like

what the fuck you mean here my dirty fucking apartment with my ashtray filled with cigarette butts and my dust covered fan you know when you're like not taking care of your apartment your fan gets a

thick coat of dust on the top of it this place is it this is it as powerful as that I don't think people want to deal with that because they want to say it power now be here now

but that is not really tenable for some people because it's such a shocking it's a death wouldn't when you say it would be a death I guess you have to give it all up you have to like give up the fact that you're in a profane

situation all your attachment to being profane all your attachment to quote failure all your attachment to self abuse all your attachment to the cynicism that is you think is your personality or your witty quality all of it

has to be the moment you see it no longer as an aberration in the universe but as a beautiful outflow of your heart and soul as you are right now into time then you don't get to hate yourself anymore it's an attachment and that's

a death and then because if a lot of people that's the finding characteristic of who they are is a general secret disdain for themselves poverty mentality yeah yeah so what are we going to do

well I mean I think it requires a kind of waking up from a daydreamer some way of continuing to wake up first book awakening from the day I know I didn't mean to plug it in out of my head it's sitting right there

I'm not like trying to do some cheesy sound like I'm doing a fucking telethon but it is like that and that's what you're so good at teaching to me and to your students which I think is really quite beautiful is this like sudden awful moment where

you're like oh my god I don't have to fucking move to Bhutan I'm in Bhutan right now this is it and that I don't know how that applies to business necessarily but well and I was just thinking that Duncan

here's why I like business particularly for people who are spiritually inclined because if you're spiritually inclined you're usually working with like Pema Children says gentleness precision and letting go she has a chapter called that I went like every beginning meditator read that

be gentle be precise and also some sense of letting go the precision element is something that a lot of times people enter the spiritual arena they'd like to slough that off a little bit to shave that one off a little bit it's kind of all one or it's kind of all already

good and stuff so business just like does not tolerate that kind of imprecision and it can be corrupt easily and the motivation is what makes it corrupt like you know there's greed involved or if there's a kind of feeling of dominance

or those kind of toxic kind of emotional landscapes but just the pure act of exchange requires a certain level of precision right like even if you're just counting somebody's change they give you a dollar give them their change back you know where's your mind right then

if you're thinking about a retreat right then you give them the wrong change yeah it's in everything that precision but in business it's valued it's also kind of claustrophobic if you don't have it oh you're fucked

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your balls will thank you as will everyone smelling your balls thank you Manscaped to me the other sort of taboo about this and we've talked about it a little bit more is that

um you're not supposed to I've always been taught well before I was working with you don't meditate to get enlightened don't meditate to

gain realization don't meditate for any reason you read this all the time it's really frustrating or you'll hear certainly if you begin to experience some kind of like well like the famous Hare Krishna story a woman said to

Srila Prabhupada when I'm chanting Hare Krishna I see a light coming towards me and his response was keep chanting it'll go away you know this idea of like it's there really this isn't a thing that we do to produce

some future thing and then if you get caught up in that you're gonna get lost and yet when I've been practicing regularly for sure inspiration comes and more than that

synchronicities and more than that opportunities and it's like my whole life lights up like some coal that's getting blown on and I think when that's happening when it's good when that starts happening I start thinking well you're fucking up because you're getting good you're this is not for that

we're not doing magic we're not at a cauldron here we're not summoning this or that we're evaporating our beings in the great eternal nothingness and then you know what I mean and then I feel bad about it

but you know what I'm saying so to me it's really cool that you've written this book where it's not tiptoeing around the fact that if you start up a practice weirdly there seems to be a lot of stuff that happens that is abundant where abundance starts appearing

and you know it's just first correcting the notion of what richness actually is so you could say our whole culture is suffering from a misunderstanding about what wealth is

so there's nowhere in any of these teachings I've seen that doesn't say our actual nature is not abundant and rich and potentially thriving that's if people think you have to be

punished and then what well even then they say okay you could have some kind of brilliant retrieval from that so the thing wants to end on an up note it's like it wants to end on an up note so however you get there

is fine with me I'm really very open-minded at this point about what people do or don't do but if you're a creative which a lot of people are even if you don't think you're a creative but you're a secret closet creative and if you think that there's

some mitigating circumstance to just working with your mind in a day-to-day way to become more sane, more balanced you know use your intelligence in a creative way and a positive way which I'm just loosely calling spirituality

the mind aspect is spirituality means mind esprit mind if you have to live during a day living in this real world why can't that all be part of your journey and why do we have to parse it out and kind of pit one against the other

so that's the view I'm presenting it's what I was taught I didn't make it up, it's the first seminar I ever went to was called Work, Sex and Money by Chogem Trunker Rinpoche Boston 1970 first seminar, walked in off the street here's this high Tibetan Lama in a business suit

talking about these ordinary things and you know so it resonated with me so I'm passing it along and trying to make it accessible to people now and then more if you can give me the specifics of your situation

what I call the life puzzle there's definitely ways to sort through it so that you can remove obstacles so that's maybe the Ganesh element or something like that look at the obstacles not as obstacles but as a way for you to learn more to grow more to thrive that's the particular journey we're on

David Nickturn thank you so much creativity, spirituality making a buck check it out guys, it's really really good and also Awakening from the Daydream they're both fantastic and links to them will be at dunkertrustle.com

thanks David that was David Nickturn all the links you need to find David or his book will be at dunkertrustle.com much thanks to Handscaped, Fields and Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH those offer codes will be located

at dunkertrustle.com thank you all so much for listening I'll see you real soon Hare Krishna Dr. Rick here, another sign you're becoming your parents is getting particular about details that don't matter. The craziest thing happened when we got tacos the other day was it Wednesday or Thursday we got tacos

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and I'm gonna get my hair done and I'm gonna get my hair done and that's when I went to my hairdresser shoot, what day was it see how we all lost interest there Progressive can't help you from becoming your parents but we can help you compare rates on home insurance with home quoted explorer

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