Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 365: Jack Kornfield

Episode Date: December 15, 2019

Jack Kornfield, Buddhist teacher and author, rejoins the DTFH! You can learn more about Jack on his website, here. Duncan is coming to Denver! January 23-25. Click here to buy tickets. This episode is brought to you by: The DTFH Store - We've refreshed the shop for the holidays! Use our offer code: CHRISTMASFEET to get 10% off any item in the store! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. I'm dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Greetings, pals. Watch out. I just got back from the Ram Dass retreat that

happens twice a year in Hawaii. So I'm going to be way too sappy. I'm going to be too. I'm going to attempt to be poetic. And even worse, I'm going to attempt to be spiritual. So get ready to get annoyed with me. But I don't care. It's my podcast, an invisible dark critic who floats out

there somewhere in the periphery of this fucking listening audience. I don't know who you are. I don't know where you are. I don't even know if you exist, man. Most people seem to like it when I go on and on about spiritual stuff. But in my mind, there's some dark, arachnid-like creature

that sits hunched over his awful web made of piss and fucking bitches about my podcast to himself, which, by the way, might be a little on the self-flattery side. Because who the fuck am I to think that there's actually arachnid beings out there, especially critical arachnid beings out there, that listen to my fucking podcast and talk shit about it? But this retreat really got me.

This one, I mean, the people who come to these retreats, they're the sweetest people. You're looking at the entire spectrum of spiritual seekers. We've got folks like Jack Cornfield who maintained a vow of silence for something like a year and a half, no words coming out of his mouth, to people like me who are drinking my ties during Kirtan.

But something happens with that mix of people. I don't know what it is. But I have some of my favorite conversations. I meet people that are some of the coolest people that I've ever met, and you run into folks who are experiencing every single possible thing that can happen, just about. There are people who come there

with only a few weeks left to live. There are people who come there pregnant. There are people who come there freshly divorced. There are people who go there and get married. And so you get this wonderful combination of various incarnations, but seemingly a shared intention, which isn't so specific. It's like, oh, we all want to be enlightened

or some bullshit like that. But I think in this case, the intention is figuring out, is it possible to open your heart? And what does that even mean? It sounds cheesy and embarrassing. It sounds like something you might see on a hallmark card sent to you by an asshole. But it's a real thing.

And I know for me, it's a real thing because I, over the course of my lifetime, I'm a fucking master of shutting down. If shutting down were a talent, I would be like one of the top shuttered downers in maybe on the planet, like outside of like hardcore sociopaths. Like I can lock down, I can numb down.

When I was younger, when I was a kid, I used to take some weird dark pride in the fact that I didn't really feel much of anything. And that's all a natural reaction, depending on what your incarnation is to your past. Because good God, in heaven, some people get blasted into an insane fucking childhood. And, or during their life, they run into a thing

that is so unbearably fucked that they're just like, well, you know what, we're closing down shop. I'm going full robot mode here because I don't wanna deal with the catastrophic heartbreak that comes from my apparently unintended incarnation as a human body in the time space continuum where everybody you know is gonna die.

And so this numbs you down. And this is where you run into like the fashionable cynic, the fashionable jaded person, the eye roller, all the different things on the great buffet of sadness. Cause that's one of the forms of sadness. Let me tell you, take your most sardonic, cynical, jaded friend. That is your most hurt friend, guaranteed.

Nobody gets that way naturally. How do you know this? Hang out with babies. They are the most open-hearted beings on earth. They don't, they just cry and love you and laugh. And there's no like neurosis in there. They just are open-hearted. Then take like a typical like, I don't know, teenager,

who's beginning to really feel the burdensome weight of human identity and having to be a thing and going to fucking high school and wanting to be cool. And you'll find like this a like, really like hyper-cynical personality that emerges as hyper-skeptical personality. Like a person who is in a fake way, hardened themselves based on some nonsense

or some person or thing that they've seen that is shut down. Cause shutting down is contagious. And you end up with certain people, they basically invite you to shut down by embarrassing you, making fun of you, raking you against the coals. Anytime you say anything that involves love, joy, bliss,

the idea that it's okay to feel, these kinds of things that are basically a result of the heart opening up, which by the way, it's like a chakra right there. It's a real energy center and it's, you know, it just, it hurts for it to be shut down. It's essentially a compass. You know, I read somewhere that there was a time

when people used to think that the brain was in the heart. There's neurons in there too, by the way. And so if you're not utilizing your heart because you've numbed down, you're living up in the top floor of the skyscraper, then basically you've got this incredible, God, this is a nerdy way to explain it. It's like having, oh God, I'm sorry.

It's like having all of these wonderful modular synthesizers and you're only using one, I'm sorry. Listen, as I, I'm gonna give you a chance to recover from that profound bit of wisdom coming from the DTFH. We're gonna cut to commercial, we'll be right back. A tremendous thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH.

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forward slash Duncan, use offer code Duncan, you'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. Loves, go to the DDFH shop now. We've got a bunch of new stuff. It's not too late to get incredible DTFH gear for your loved ones for Christmas.

You want crow's milk related Christmas sweaters? We've got them. You want me riding a horse with Kim Jong-un? It's there. Just go to DuncanTrustle.com and click on the shop. Also, if you are eager for more DTFH stuff, head over to patreon.com, forward slash DTFH and subscribe. Today's guest is a brilliant Buddhist teacher and author.

He's written some incredible books on Buddhism. If you're interested in Buddhism at all, you got to check out A Path With Heart. He has also written many other great books, including The Wise Heart and No Time Like The Present. And he's got a killer website with everything you need to find him over at jackcornfield.com.

That's J-A-C-K-K-O-R-N-F-I-E-L-D. Com, they've got online courses, meditations, and just an essays on Buddhism. So check out jackcornfield.com, please, because the fact that he even spends any amount of time yapping with me never stops blowing my mind because I've loved this guy for years. Long before I even met the Ram Dass people,

I was into Jack Cornfield. My mom, I think, had a crush on Jack Cornfield. And so I definitely get a little weird fanboy stuff happening any time I get a chance to talk with him. And then also, I have noticed that no matter what snowball of darkness I sling at him, he inevitably does some incredible alchemy that turns it into a snowball of light.

So please, everyone, strap yourself in, get ready for today's guest, the brilliant Jack Cornfield. ["Welcome To You"] ["Welcome To You"] It's the Duncan Chessel. Thank you. Chessel, chessel, chessel, chessel, chessel. Jack, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

My pleasure. I, my first question for you is difficult to ask. Good. Okay, great. Let's get down to it. Okay, good. Get down and then, downer than that. Okay, let's go, we'll go down, down, down.

Go full down, yeah, mom. But also, you know, I interviewed someone recently, we were talking a little bit about how with Buddhism in particular, all of us love it, but, you know, people will blaspheme Christianity all day long without even feeling bad, you know, except for Christians, you know, but, you know what I'm saying? It's like cool to blaspheme Christianity.

It's the stuff of death metal bands, and as opposed to almost all the world religions, and even other world religions get it. I've never heard anyone blaspheme Taoism, but with Buddhism, we feel, I feel, and many other people feel like it's the one thing you can't touch, don't mess with it. It's, we feel really, I feel superstitious talking about it,

and also in the podcast, and forgive me, this is gonna be a long question, and then I'm gonna shut up. But with, anytime I've talked about Buddhism on the podcast with people, and admittedly, I don't know much about it relative to scholars, you, the great teachers, which you are, I will get strangely like,

I don't know how to put it, really warning emails from people saying, watch out, don't tell people about that, you're corrupting the Dharma by doing that, you don't understand, you better watch out. And I always get spooked by it. These are people who, in their profiles, they're on robes, and I'm like,

oh, I don't wanna mess it up, you know, yet simultaneously. You could be in trouble, dude. Oh, really? I'm not huge. Ah, ah, ah, ah. So, so. But it's good trouble, keep going.

Okay, well, here's my question. I'm listening to this wonderful audio book, which is a compilation of Ajahn Chah's teachings. Some of them are to monks. Some of them are for lay people. I believe you did the Ford to it. I'm pretty sure you did. I realized that after I was sufficiently pissed off

at one of these lectures that I'd listened to, I'm like, what is this? And then I'm like, Jack did the Ford. This was one of his teachers. He, if you're upset with this person, clearly you must be in the wrong. That's where my brain goes. But here it is.

This guy Ajahn Chah, he talks about the human body as stinking. He seems to have a really dark outlook on human existence in particular. And I guess the end of my rope with this audio book, which by the way is a really good audio book if it gets you like where you're driving and you're like, what the hell?

I was talking to my wife about it. The end of my rope with the thing was when he said something along the lines of how easy it is to raise a baby. He said something like, they just want a banana. And I'm thinking this is a person who has clearly never raised a baby. And how can a person who seems so distant

from the day to day human experience that is supporting the monastic order? How can someone like that actually purely see already birds are screeching at me to stop? How can someone like that purely transmit the Dharma truth if they haven't, you know, this is the, we flew here with a baby, it wasn't disastrous. But I remember thinking, what if the Buddha

had flown with a baby? What would the teaching remain the same? And this is so my question is, how do we deal with this? Some of these great teachers, they never had a family in the way that we do. They never had a baby. They never had these experiences. How can someone like that?

How do they have the right to talk to us in a way as though what we're doing is somehow hierarchically lower? Isn't that a corruption of the Dharma? Corruption, it's always had a corrupted side because the bigger the front, the bigger the back, they sometimes say, or everything casts a shadow when you shine light on it. So here we are, we're starting your podcast

and you're talking to me as a former monk with Ajahn Chah and a lay teacher. And you're kind of looking at this and you've been inspired by Buddha, but at the same time you're listening to say, you know, a lot of great stuff in this, but there's some BS in this shit too. And how some of it doesn't smell good.

What do I do about that? Yes. Right? I thought Buddhism was all good. Yes. Tell me something that's all good, baby. Give me an example. Okay, color. Color?

Yeah, color. And I'm stealing that from Chogyam Trumpa. He was saying, you know, look at color is this elemental thing. You know, color can upset you if you ask for someone to paint your wall of color and it's the wrong color, but you can't really get upset with color.

It's perfect. It's... Well, that's your mind, whether you're upset with it or not. But what makes it good? I said, you know, you're looking for something to be all good. Yeah.

What's all good? I mean, I don't even know. I never asked that question quite in that way, but this is what I'm hearing, my friend. There's a kind of idealism in your question, which we all have. We start and we say, well, somebody out there must have the answer.

And when they have the answer, it's all good, right? Yes, that's right. That's sort of like a kid on a good day and they're very little thinking their parents know everything and they're all good until they get frustrated and then they hate their parents and they're, you know, they're all bad. And it takes a while for that child

to finally develop what in psychoanalysis is called ambivalence. Now, ambivalence in this psychoanalytic meaning, it doesn't mean that you're not sure whether you love your parents or not. What it means is that you can hold the opposites, that you realize that on a certain day, your parents are pretty cool on another's case.

They're stupid, blinded, not mean, bit you've been bad moods do. And then you start to realize, oh, as Whitman said, we are large, we contain multitudes. And you start to see that. So the same thing happens as you grow up spiritually. Now, Buddhism has a good rap. And I think it has a good rap

because it has really, really good teachings. There's a book that was published last year called Why Buddhism Is True. That was a big best seller. I didn't blurb it because I was kind of put off by the title because you could also say, why Buddhism isn't true and that would be a whole other volume too, right?

So it seemed like it was a little excessive. But nevertheless, we love it because there are a few things because it doesn't require you to believe a lot, even though you bring your crazy belief systems to it. But it's the Buddha says, no, test it out for yourself. See for yourself, what's good, do that, what's not beneficial,

what isn't helpful to you and others, then discard that, even if the Buddha said it's not valuable, trash it, dump it, all right. So we like that. Maybe because we're these hyper-individualists in the Western culture, we like to think I can find out for myself and all of that. But nevertheless, having been brainwashed

by so many systems, by the monotheistic systems of Islam or Christianity or Judaism or science or whatever it is, the Latter-day Saints or the Latter-day Physicists, it doesn't matter. It's like, okay, you can actually look for yourself. So we like that. Also, it offers practices rather than belief.

It says, if you want to live a life that's awake or liberated or free, here's how you do it. Here's the eight steps to it. Or it teaches ways that you open the heart. It doesn't just say, be loving like, you know, whatever their particular version of deity is. Here's a practice where you can learn compassion. You start step by step

and you become more and more compassionate. So it's cool. It's got all these good things. Yes. And we need them. In fact, we desperately need them right now because the world is a mess, an effing mess, at least, if not worse. I don't know why that's a swear word.

It's actually a really kind of fun and wonderful activity. Why should we use it as a swear, you know? I mean, we should maybe swear saying it's a celibate mess, right? It's a mess that people have like lost the fun of life. But anyway, it is. But the thing that's really clear, Duncan, is that no amount

of outer development, computers, internet, nanotechnology, space technology, biotechnology, all the amazing things where you have, you know, your cell phone in your pocket and it has the great library of Alexandria and, you know, three and a half million cat videos or whatever is gonna stop us from continuing warfare,

continuing racism, continuing climate destruction, continuing tribalism, because all those are rooted in the human heart, in the mind. Who is your enemy? Mind is your enemy. No one can harm you more than your own mind untrained. Who is your friend, says the Buddha.

Mind or heart is your friend. No one can help you more than your own heart. Mind, it's one word, jitta and Sanskrit, than your own heart and mind, awakened or trained, not even the most loving family member or friend. All right, so the thing that Buddhism at its core teaches is how to understand your own mind and heart and how to transform it, awaken it,

bring yourself to live in a more liberated way. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm doing a kind of infomercial here about why we like it. I love it. Now there are things not to like about it as well. People may have read, for example, that in these Buddhist countries, and those who are monks who don't have any hair to tear out,

would otherwise be tearing their hair out, that there are fundamentalist Buddhist monks who are saying, kill the Tamils, kill the Muslims, kill the Hindus in Sri Lanka or kill the Rohingya or kill the Muslims in Burma and things like, wait a second, you're a monk, you're supposed to be teaching peace. I went to Burma.

I brought this beautiful book we translated to Burmese, The Buddhist Teachings on Mutual Respect and Social Harmony by one of the greatest scholars in the world. I went to these temples and I said, here's what the Buddha taught. He didn't say like, protect the religion and go kill Muslims or who you think. Did they listen?

Some listened, some didn't. So then you start to get disappointed, but I was disappointed early on. I actually had a very, very, very helpful disappointment. And if you've never been spiritually disappointed, then you obviously have never done any spiritual practice. Because the first person you get disappointed with is you know who, right?

You say, okay, I'm gonna train my mind and make it quiet and open my heart. And your mind goes, are you kidding me? And it goes crazy, right? Because of Mara who attacked Buddha under the Bodhi tree, the night of enlightenment, the great Buddhist myth and the Buddhist sitting there or archetypally, I will not get up until I freed myself and awaken.

And then Mara appears and Mara comes in all these forms. Mara comes in the form of desire, the most beautiful sensual desire. You know, do you want the most beautiful dakinis and women or the most beautiful thing? I mean, in those days it was the golden chariot. Now it would be, you know, Lamborghini and, you know, okay. What do you want?

We can give you anything. Get off your seat. The world has, is your oyster, baby. We got something really good for you. Why would you be sitting here, like gazing at your navel when you could have, when you could taste the tastes of the world, when you could have the pleasures of the world?

And the Buddha says, yeah, thank you. I've been there, done that, tried that. Basically what he says is, oh, I see you Mara. This is Mara who's in India is the archetypal God of disruption, of desire, of fear. Is there, I've heard various descriptions of Mara, what it means. Is it synonymous with Satan?

I've heard that's a misunderstanding. Satan, you know, there's a whole theological thing about who Satan is, fallen angel and stuff. I don't know that you can make equivalence from that. But he holds some of those roles, the role of temptation, the role of unconsciousness, all of this, a lot of the things. He and Satan at least are in, you know, the same industry.

Let's put it that way, okay. So then the Buddha says, I see you Mara. I've tried all that. And the cool thing is that he was a householder and he had his pleasure palaces and he had all these, you know, orgies and all these feasts and all, you know. He had a harem.

He had a harem and he had not only that, you know, and he was trained in all the great arts and he had all the beauties of the world. And a harem. And a harem. And you keep mentioning that. And he had a harem as well. Although I personally have to say that having maybe,

I mean, one wife is already quite a lot. It has to be, but, you know, I mean, we all have. Yeah, when you're asking, you're the first person that gets disappointed, it's your wife. So then Mara comes back and Mara comes back in the form of aggression. The armies of Mara come and say, all right,

if I can't tempt you by my daughters, the most beautiful daughters in the world, the most beautiful temptations, then I'm gonna unseat you in another way and all the armies of Mara come of anger and violence and attack the Buddha. Right. And when you see the paintings that are done

of the Buddha seated under the Bodhi tree, looking so peaceful, and you see the armies of Mara shooting, flaming arrows and spears and all of the weapons of that time. And the Buddha has one hand raised in this very delicate gesture where his thumb and his forefinger touch

and make a circle and he reaches out and you see him touch one of the flaming arrows or the spears and it turns into flower petals and falls at his feet. And he does that by not getting angry about the aggression and all the hatred, but by touching it with love and saying, oh yeah, this is painful, touching with compassion,

touching it with his heart. There's a little red line that goes from his heart up through his chest and out his arm to his fingers. And when he touches it with love, the aggression melts and turns into flower petals. Finally, Mara comes and says, dude, what right do you think you have? Who the hell do you think you are, basically?

To sit on the seat and think you can get enlightened like you think you're special. Isn't that like another big ego trip? Why don't you get off it and be a regular human being? Come on, who do you, what do you think you're doing? What right? And the Buddha pauses according to the myth as we could pause when we have self-doubt

of all kinds, which will come. And he reaches down and touches the earth and a lot of the Buddha images, the statues that you see have one hand reaching down like it's touching the ground. And he calls upon the goddess of the earth to bear witness to the fact that he's lived a hundred thousand maha culpants of lifetimes, practicing patience, compassion, love, generosity,

steadiness, integrity, truthfulness, over and over and over again, and that he has a right to sit on the seat and awaken. And I love this moment because it's, he did all these years of wild austerities and meditations and in the end, he can't do it himself. He has to call on the feminine. He calls on the goddess of the earth or so

and say, you gotta help me, baby. Cause I can't just do it under my own steam. I can't do it as a guy. We're gonna trans, you know, we're gonna win the Super Bowl, right or whatever, the spiritual Super Bowl or the war or whatever it is. But in fact, at the moment of the final moment

of being attacked by Mara, the Buddha reaches down and asks the goddess herself, the goddess, the infinite goddess, to say, you have a right to be here and you have a good heart. This is what's true of you and you have a right to awaken. And then Mara says, oh no, I've been defeated and slinks away and the Buddha gets quieter and quieter

and opens himself and then in the story, as the last star in the sky, the morning star is about to fade. He looks out on the world with the eyes of infinite compassion and he sees he's nothing in everything and his heart is free. That's the story.

Jesus, that's beautiful. That is beautiful. I didn't know, I did not, this has always been a mysterious part of the story to me, the touching the earth. I never attributed it to the feminine. I never attributed it to reaching out to the feminine. And that is, to me, heartbreakingly beautiful

in that the earth is just... Well, it happens in another really critical point in the Buddha's enlightenment. And then I'll get back to your question about your spiritual disappointment. Don't get back to that. And you are a disappointment. I know that's true.

But then again, we're all disappointed. So okay, so I'll get back to that. But in the myth or the archetypal story of the Buddha's life, everybody who's looked into it even a little bit has heard the story. He was a prince, he had the palaces and he was supposed to become a king. And then after years with the harem

and the prince thing and stuff, he got bored. Okay, there gotta be something more than this. And he was taken out by his charioteer. He was protected for all those years. And then he had the vision, the sights of the four heavenly messengers which he'd been protected from. And he saw first a sick person, really sick.

And he said to the charioteer, who does that happen to? And the charioteer said, well, actually everybody pretty much Buddha had to reflect a little bit. Whoa, I've had such a good life. Uh-oh. Then he saw a really old person,

like, you know, tottering with broken limbs and just barely able to move and no teeth and shaking. And he said, well, who does that happen to? And the charioteer said, well, everyone, if they're lucky, if they live long enough, they would have said, okay, all right, whoa, well, this is our fate, huh? And then he saw a corpse for the first time. And you can remember this, Duncan,

I'm sure the first time you saw a dead body, it's like your eyes kind of fly open and you go, whoa. Right, holy shit, this actually happens. And not only does it happen, but it's gonna happen to you know who, as well as that person. And he said, who does this happen to? And the charioteer said, why?

Everyone, of course. And then the fourth heavenly messenger, when they were out riding, the Buddha saw in the distance along the edge of the forest, walking with great peacefulness and serenity, a yogi wearing an orange robe with shaven head and a bowl. He said, who's that? He said, this is someone who's renounced

the desires of the world, the grasping of the world to find the highest truth, to find liberation before they die, to find liberation. So then after that, the Buddha renounces, he sneaks out of the palace, he cuts off his hair, he sends his horse back, and he becomes a wandering mendicant and being a young man.

Young men like to say, is there anything dangerous to do around here? It's like you wanna test yourself. All right, let me show you my chops. Let me show you what I got. In the Masai, you'd be sent out as a young man with a spear to go and, you know, kill a lion and bring it back.

And then the tribal people and your people would come and say, this young man is now a man. He's not a boy. And there are initiations for women that are the same, powerful initiations among the Maya, you know, in the Central America, incredible initiations for women. But anyway, so the Buddha takes on

the most difficult ascetic practices of the time. May I press pause on this for a moment? Yeah. I'm sorry to cut you off. But this, before we skip over something, I can't think of a better person to address it. It goes back to my original question. I have tried to do revision on this thing.

But let's just face it. He's a, on paper, that's a deadbeat dad. Oh, right. Cause I didn't say that his wife had a baby and then he walked out. Right. Yeah, let's not forget that what happened is. But he did negotiate with a couple of lawyers

and make sure that there was the king and the queen and so forth, that there was like good child support while he ditched his wife and his kid. What happened to the Buddha's kid? But he's a deadbeat dad. You're absolutely right. I'm with you. What happened to his kid?

Oh, his kid grew up. When his kid was seven years old, the Buddha goes back. Oh. His wife says, like, where the hell have you been? She's very upset with him, as you could imagine. Seven years, that's everything. Yeah, seven years. Just think about it, seven years.

He comes back, he gives teachings. Everyone goes, oh, he's so wise, he's so good. He said, I had to leave in order to find these teachings to liberate the hearts of human beings and beings everywhere. Right. And now I've come back to liberate you and he teaches his parents,

who at first think he's nuts. Yep. And he has to do miracles. But that's it. It's like when Ramda says, if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family, right? Because they know who you really are, or at least who you were as a kid.

So he teaches his parents, he teaches his wife, or his ex, and she becomes a nun. And he teaches his, he says to his son, now come, I will be the father that you have needed. And his young son becomes a novice, becomes a little novice monk. This episode is sponsored by Blue Chew. Blue Chew brings you the first chewable

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You get your first shipment free, just five bucks, and they're gonna ship you glorious, powerful magic. Well, it's not magic, it's actually science. Totally works. Again, that's bluechew.com, promo code Duncan, to try it free. So, okay, so I'm gonna accept the story. I think it's really not a very good story.

Thank you. And there are some scholars who say this is all made up later. I'm not sure that's true. I think they're just trying to put a little gloss on something that's too painful to acknowledge. The way I tried to do it was, okay, back then was having a son and that was a big deal.

All right, you fulfilled your karma. You gave the king and queen a grandchild, a son and your wife. And leaving was sad. Leaving was, you did, and they had enough, they had alimony, they had whatever they needed, they took care of it. Right.

But again, no matter what, you tell this to a mother, and they get to that part, and most mothers have encountered like, what kind of religion is that? What kind of man is that? Yeah, exactly. That you would do that. Well, religion has a lot of really weird images.

I mean, think about having your main religious symbol as somebody who's being tortured on a cross. Okay, that's like your happy religious. People go all around wearing an instrument of torture without any commentary on the religion itself. That's a pretty weird symbol for, it's a symbol of transcendence. That's right.

And in a certain way, this is a story of transcendence. It's a story that says you're in your ordinary life, even if it's a glorious ordinary life with, you know, king and queen father and mother and harem and prince and stuff like that and a young child, but there's something bigger that you have to find of who you really are. This, what you're saying I've heard as a methodology

for interpreting all the antiquated stories, and which is- We hope. We hope, but if you, regardless of the historic, whether it happened or not, with Christianity, with Buddhism, I don't know as much about Islam, but with these two at least,

I have a little bit of experience with them. If you look at them as a psychological process, which is you are in some kind of palace. There is some kind of thing you're living in that you imagine is that's keeping you from reality. That's how I've thought of it. It's like, okay, he's actually leaving the comfort zone that people are invited to leave

by any bona fide, great religious tradition. Is that a fair interpretation of it? It's a healthy interpretation of it. I mean, if you take these religious myths completely, literally, because there's a part of a Buddhist myth that the Buddha was born out of his mother's side or her armpit or something like that,

I ain't seen it. I don't think it's how it happens. Any more than virgin births happen. But they have a very deep meaning. There's something about a virgin birth if you understand it in a different way, which is the original purity of it being. Instead of original sin,

and Buddhism has it quite explicitly, is original goodness. And you can see it in a child, yes, where they get hungry or cranky when they don't get their way. But there is a child of the spirit that was born in there with such wonder and innocence and beauty. And that's really what it speaks of,

that we come to this world, virginally, if you will, not tainted by all the culture and the fears and the language itself. And so it's not only appropriate to look at these stories as myths rather than as literal, but it's the only thing that makes sense. Right.

And that's not blasphemous to do. That's not something that is- Well, the blasphemy, all right. So if we look up the definition of blasphemy, which I did a moment ago while we were preparing for this, let me see if I can find it again. And it says, blasphemy, the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence to a deity

or sacred objects or toward something considered sacred or inviolable. Some religions consider blasphemy to be a religious crime. Right. So all right, so now we have a definition of blasphemy that you are disparaging something that's sacred. What's sacred? If you say, you have to believe every word

that's written in this sacred text as it is. And if you say anything other than that, it's blasphemy, because this is the word of the divine, whatever that sacred text is, you could be in a lot of trouble. Yes. You know? I could.

You could, okay. Methuselah lived 900 years, okay. And his wife got pregnant at age 850 or whatever she was. I mean, we're doing really good with IVF and there are now women who are giving birth at like 60 years old, but ain't seen nobody at 865 years have a baby. Or do anything other than mold her.

Perhaps to someone it would be blasphemy for you to say, that's not a literal story. That's a story about that teaches that it's possible someone who's been barren in their life as I recall that story in some way can have a new birth even in their old age. There's something new that can come to them. And it comes in a way from a spiritual awakening

because it happens because they love God or whatever it is in that story. So you have a choice. You can either interpret things literally in which case almost anything that you would have to say about it other than saying, yes, it's all true would be blasphemy. Or you can say, these are the great human stories.

And they point to something as you would say that in our own human heart. I had a friend, we're just riffing, right? We'll get back. I can feel the thread. It's gonna come back around. Don't worry about it. But anyway, excuse me for being sniffly today.

No problem. Those of you who are listening, please get me a tissue. Thank you. Do you want me to get your tissue? Anyway, I have one. So a friend of mine, Dr. Roger Walsh, MD, PhD had been on the faculty

of Stanford Medical School, very smart guy who's been a whole series of books and done a tremendous amount of meditation in every tradition, insight and, you know, Vipassana and Tibetan meditation and Zen practice and shamanic practice and mystical Christian, all these things, he's interested in it. So Roger sat down one day, scholar that he is,

along with practitioner and said, I'm gonna read the Encyclopedia of World Religions from a Hora Mazda all the way to the last volume of Zoroaster, right? And it's like a number of volumes, it's a big read. Yeah, I bet. He wanted to understand it. I said, so Roger, what did you learn?

And he said, the main thing that I learned is that life in this world is a mystery, the vastness of the universe, the existence of the sun, the existence of consciousness, a mystery. And each of these religions has a story about how it started, about who we are in some way, about what happens before life or after death.

And he said, basically each one of these religions is a group of human beings placing a story on the mystery. Wow. Now the depth of the Buddhist teaching, when he holds up a flower to teach, you know, his first Zen disciple, Mahakasipa, the wordless transmission is not to use words, but to hold up this lotus flower with its muddy roots

and its pure, beautiful white flower, and say, do you get it? Without any words at all, do you? Wordlessly, can you see the mystery that out of the mud comes beauty, that they're intertwined, that we're everything, all of us together? But he doesn't use words for that. He says, here's the teaching, and he holds up this flower.

So now we're ending our way back to Mara and the Buddha under the Tree of Enlightenment, where you paused me for a moment, as I recall. Yes. And the goddess came, and I said, there was another really important point where the feminine comes in, and this is, I was telling the story

of how the Buddha left home, and he became this kick-ass ascetic who fasted so that, as it said, when he touched his belly button, he would touch his spinal cord. He was so skinny, he was eating a few grains of rice a day. Look this up, y'all, the starving Buddha, there's statues that are scary. Yes, starving Buddha and lying on beds of nails

and being out in the sun and staring at the sun in the middle of the day, all those things, trying to beat his ego and his mind into submission. Yeah. And it didn't work, because what he found was that the person who was trying to get enlightened in that way was still there, trying to be something. So it was sort of like that ego that says,

now I'm gonna do those intense ascetic practices, and I'm gonna triumph. That didn't really get him where he needed to go, which was the freedom of the heart. So finally, as the story goes, he was wandering and he sat by a river, a beautiful river, and he had a memory of being in his father's garden. This whole part is really beautiful.

We never heard this. He had a memory of being in his father's garden at seven years old for the spring plowing festival. And he was seated under a rose apple tree, and watched his father and the court prepare and then the bullocks draw the plow across the field with his great sense of stillness and contentment and then closed his eyes.

And when he did, he felt this enormous sense of wellbeing that opened up into the joy of a totally quiet, beautiful state of inner peace that later is talked about as Samadhi and Jhana. There's different words for it, but it was the spontaneous stillness of heart that children can have on occasion. So there he was sitting by the river

and he realized, okay, I've almost died doing seven years of these ascetic practices, six or seven years, ain't got me where I wanted to go. Maybe I'm going the wrong direction. He remembered this moment of the original purity and he said, maybe the solution is not to grasp after enlightenment and try so hard. Maybe there's a middle path

where I neither beat my body into submission, which hasn't been working, nor go back to the harem and the feast. Maybe there's some other way of being still in the midst of it all and finding a freedom that isn't rejecting the world, nor is it grasping after the world. And when he had that revelation, as the story is told,

he realized that he had to change his path and who should be wandering by? But a young woman named Sujata, I believe was her name, which means good birth or good karma, I mean this way, birth of good karma. And she was carrying milk rice, a kind of beautiful sweet porridge. And she saw him and she made an offering of it

into a little bowl for him. And it's the first time he'd taken anything sweet in six or seven years of this wild austerity. She gave it to him in this bowl and in a way she was the second important incarnation of the feminine because he again had been trying to do it with will and then finally he remembered as a child, no, there's another way,

there's a goodness and purity that's borne in us that I don't have to make, that's who I am. And I have to find another way which is neither rejecting nor grasping. And then the goddess appears and says, yes, let me nourish you now that you've found this way, now that you've discovered. And he took the milk rice and then as the story is told

in one version, he took the little bowl down to the river and placed it in the water and he said, if I found the right way, now I'll place this bowl in the water and instead of going downstream, it will float upstream and it did, which is a very unusual thing. Which again, we can look at these archetypally. It, you know, the phrase is against the stream.

There's the stream of desires and fears and the ordinary life that we live. And there's a way of turning instead of following all that, turning back to say, well, who am I really? What is freedom that is not following that stream but seeking something deeper? Okay, I love that you're bringing this up because it has been mysterious to me.

I've heard this. Against the stream thing for a long time. In titles in Buddhism, like stream-enterer. That's a whole other thing. We'll get to stream-enterer. That's a whole other thing. That's different from this. That's different.

This was just realizing that he couldn't follow the ordinary program, you know, get through high school, go to junior college, go to college, get a job, you know, get married, buy a, you know, Chevy, whatever. He was gonna have to go off the map. He realized that he couldn't go in the ordinary way. And he'd already realized it, but the against the stream, it kind of cemented in him this understanding

that he had to follow something that was different. But this is, to me, so... We're getting close to answering your original question, right? Okay, great. It's fabulous. It's amazing and really beautiful. I just said, I'm sorry, I've never heard these two. In Buddhism, these get left out.

The ladies get... So we need the ladies get... And the truth is that if you look in the tradition of Zan or Theravada, all the stories almost with a few very rare exceptions are about practitioners with penises. Yes. And it turns out there are killer, great yoginis

and practitioners in all these traditions. They weren't written down. So there's some rare oral tradition and there's some from the time of the Buddha. There were nuns and some beautiful stories that Terigata, but mostly of the thousand years, 2,600 years, they've been erased. And yet they were there from the beginning.

And in fact, you can't get enlightened without the goddess of the earth saying, yes, I hold, protect you. You were showing you the way without the goddess coming by and saying, you need to take nourishment. You can't just fight against yourself. You need both of them.

Anyway. But this is an imbalance. You're identifying a real... Well, it's... Buddhism has been insanely patriarchal. And all you have to do is go to these Buddhist countries and see the monks are treated like princes. You know, the nuns get like the scraps from the table.

This is the answer to the... This is... Okay, so now we're wending our way back to your big question at the beginning, your disappointment in some way. And what I'm doing is further disillusioning you, but at the same time, what I'm trying to do is giving you, is open you to a bigger picture

and a bigger perspective. So now we go back to Buddha and Mara under the Bodhi tree. And there he says, I see you Mara and he doesn't get lost in the desires and he doesn't fight against the aggression and take it, identify with you. Just, oh, that's anger and that's hate and that's aggression. He touches it all with love.

And then doubt comes and he touches the earth. And the goddess of the earth says, oh, you were right to be here. We all do. We're all born with Buddha nature. And then he has his awakening. Now following that, he sits very quietly there for I don't know how many days the myth goes.

And then he casts his eye out across the world and he sees that there's many beings who are suffering. And some with but little dust in their eyes and he realizes that he could by teaching that the miracle of communion that we have with one another, he could wander the world and the delight and the joy and the liberation that he's experienced.

He could show, tell, demonstrate to others and they would share in it. And the great heart of compassion that is awakened as part of his enlightenment motivates him to get up and walk for 45 years to the dusty roads of India. Now, he mostly did really, really great things. No question about it.

He was bum all the stories extraordinary. Yes. And when the women came and said, we want you to ordain us and let us be like monks. He resisted that. He still had his patriarchal conditioning going in some way. And it was only when his own aunt first came and said, listen, I was the one who wet nursed you

after your mother died. You grew up on my milk. You have to let us. And then Ananda, his cousin, his closest disciple, the one who took care of him, came and begged the Buddha. He said, you have to, these women, Ananda did a cool thing actually. He said, I have a question to ask you,

which he asked three times and the Buddha can't refuse the third time of the question. He said, here is the question. Are women just as men are? Are women capable of getting enlightened? And the Buddha, having to answer truthfully, said, yes, they are. And Ananda said, you have now said it.

Now you have to ordain them. And he did. Anyway, so now- Why did he not want to say that? What is going on with this? Because of conditioning. Okay. Culture.

Who knows what was in his mind? We don't know. And this is all an archetypal story. Maybe he was afraid that if they were renunciates, they would be molested or raped. They weren't there in the household compound. Maybe he was afraid that somehow they would tempt all the monks

and everybody would disrobe and go have a big party. Who knows what he was thinking? We weren't there at the time, but it didn't look good. We'll just say that. Still doesn't. And it still don't look that good. That is correct. All right, so now your question

from the very beginning was about blasphemy about Buddhism. You don't want to say anything bad about it. That's a piece of it. The other piece was how can someone, and you're answering it. But it's the way you're answering it. I love it because I think it's just an invitation to deal with the fact that if you're trying to find

some perfect religion on this planet. Good luck. You better start making one. So right, so you go to Sri Lanka and some, not all of them, there are beautiful, wonderful monks and nuns, but then some of them are encouraging violence or Burma, encouraging hatred.

So when I was a young monk, Yes. I had first, the wisest teacher I've ever had in many ways, which was this teacher Ajahn Chah, and I spent some time in the forest monastery with him, learning. And then I went off because I'd heard

there's really killer intense meditation training from Mahasi Saito and Burma. You have all these experiences and things that I'd read about in the Zen books and things. And I wanted them, you know, I was 23 or whatever. So I went and I did a 500 day silent retreat, sitting and walking, you know, for 16, 18 hours a day for 500 days.

That is crazy. And the only person that you talk to on the retreat as a teacher every couple of days, you'd go and have five or 10 minutes and the teacher would say what's happening in your meditation, give you some instruction. So I started to meditate really intensively and although it was difficult,

after some weeks or longer, cool things started to happen. My body filled with light and dissolved into light and you know, waves of bliss or rapture or joy, visions, images, all the kind of stuff that you read about and more. Yes. Not all at once, but in a, you know,

and then insights about the way things happen and the emptiness of the world and, you know, phenomena and all the kinds of stuff. Meanwhile, the teacher, the sayadaw, this particular sayadaw means teacher, he was not a very nice guy. He was kind of a mean tempered, bit of a bastard. So I would look, I was given a really nice cottage

and I could see his in the distance in this particular monastery. And sometimes he'd be out just kind of schmoozing with the prettiest young nuns and eventually apparently he had an affair with one of them. Sometimes he would be out, you know, yelling at people because they weren't doing what he wanted or throwing rocks at the dogs that came in his garden

because they were gonna mess up his flowers or something, you know, smoking his Burmese cigar and belching. And I thought, okay. I'm learning from this dude. Ah Jin Chao was this like model teacher. But then I would go and see him and I'd say this is happening in meditation and he would give me exquisitely detailed

and skilled instructions. Do this, invite that, turn your attention there and all these cool things would happen or I would, you know, work through things that were difficult. And I had to realize that I could take the very good teachings that he had without imitating the teacher.

Right. And so we tend to wanna bring our idealism to everything that's good and Buddhism. Okay, we can't blaspheme it because, yes, but because it's all good. But it's not all good if you look at the teachers and all you have to do, you know, because I'm in the industry.

So I know swamis and llamas and mamas and gurus and reverends and whatever, many are good, but there's a whole bunch of them that have messed up. Right. You know, me too is not just the movie directors and the athletes, but there's Zen masters and swamis and mamas and llamas as well. All of whom have messed up, right? And so you start to see, okay,

now this is the ambulance that I was talking about where a child begins to realize that their parents aren't all good or all bad, depending if they fulfill their wishes or not. And you start to see them a little bit more as the complexity of a human being, which Buddhist over these thousands of years and people, you know, has complexity in it too.

It has beautiful, amazing teachings. But at the same time, it has things that either aren't good, as I described, or that aren't right for you. And so let's talk about Ajahn Chah. You had a question about monks and family and stuff like that and babies. He clearly doesn't understand.

Give me that question. The question again is this, the summary is, one of the things he said is having a little baby's easy. All you have to do is give it a banana from time to time. This was, I mean, again, I have to say, the preface that I think you wrote, you were involved in this somehow, was a lot of these teachings are for monks.

They aren't for- That is correct. Right, so don't forget- This is a sales pitch. He was a quite non-dual teacher. In many ways, what I mean is that he would talk about stepping out of good and bad, of resting in the pure loving awareness

that's your true nature, which he called the one who knows puru, when you can be the witness to all things, then the heart is liberated. All those really beautiful non-dual teachings that you find in Zen or Zogchen or non-dual Christian teachings or whatever. But then on certain days,

he would say being a monk is better than being a layperson. I see that. Or to monks, women will be your downfall. And stuff like that. And I go, wait a second, is this the same dude who's giving these beautiful non-dual teachings? What is this about?

Yes. Is he just hypocritical? Is it just his cultural conditioning? I don't think it's only that. There is cultural conditioning. And there's problems with that for sure. And that a lineage of conditioning that projects danger onto women as if they're the danger,

rather than men having to actually deal with their own greed and desire and all of that. But what I think is true is if he'd said, be a monk, be a layperson, they're really equal, have his monks would have left. They would leave. But he had to say, no, this is better.

And he believed it. He wasn't just lying about it. He believed that if you dedicated your life in that way to liberation and not to just open a stall in the marketplace or getting a career in business or whatever it is, that you were more likely to find freedom. He did believe that, whether it was for a monk or a nun.

But part of it was advertising. Do you believe that? Do I believe what? Let's get it clear. You're more likely to find freedom as a monk than as a layperson. I think it's a false question. You're more likely to find freedom,

depending on your level of dedication and intention. I've seen a lot of monks who are not all that dedicated and they're not all ain't that free. And I've seen some laypeople who really wanna know, who am I? What is this? How do I live with freedom?

And maybe because they're in difficult circumstances. And I mean, I think having a kid is like having to live in Zen master. At the Zen temple, you have to get up really early in the morning, you stay up late at night, you do long hours of sitting, you have to work in the kitchen and so forth. But if you get sick, you can go lie down and rest, right?

But if you have a sick kid crying there, you can't say, I'm sorry, somebody else take care of that. You have to get up. Your Zen master is saying, get the hell out of bed and 10 your child. And there's something so intense about the surrender needed to be a good parent

and a caring parent. It's not enlightening in itself, although it does mature us and you see it in all these ways. But a lot of the things that teach in the monastic life, patience, endurance, selflessness, dedication, compassion, steadiness, equanimity, you learn as a parent.

And they're here as well. So then you have these teachers. I mean, we also projected on them. I had, there was this Tibetan lama who had moved to Switzerland. He was living in the mountains and he had a bunch of disciples. Some of them also came to teachings I was doing.

And there was this woman who was quite pregnant. And she said, I went to see Hutsi Tutsi Rinpoche, whatever his name was, something or other Rinpoche. And I asked him about childbirth and he gave me these instructions. Now it turns out, and somebody else in that community had gone and asked Rinpoche about relationships. He'd never been married.

He'd never had a kid. And what he told her was some stuff he'd heard from the old wives in the village before he'd gone in the monastery. He knew nothing about childbirth. He'd never been there. He'd never seen it. But he was giving sort of the old Tibetan,

this is what they say in the village. Is that where you wanna go and get your instruction? No, there's this halo effect. You think, well, he's supposed to be enlightened. He must know everything about how you birthed a child. Complete nonsense. I got you. I think I'm getting it here, which is, it's-

You are slow, but I'm- I am slow! I'm messing with your child. I am, I like being slow. It's the, well, no I don't. I'd love to be enlightened. But it's, I think what you're talking about, there's two things that are really resonating with me.

One, you really did detect a naive idealism in me regarding it. Yeah, and longing for that, which is a beautiful thing. To find something that's so pure, but it's, I remember going to Jun Chao one day, I'm interrupting you. I don't mind. Because he was sitting there and he was like picking the dead skin off his feet.

I do that all the time. And I thought, he's sitting there. And I thought, now, how mindful is he? Because he was talking to somebody while he was picking the dead skin off his feet. When we walked barefoot to go our arms around stuff. I thought, is this guy really mindful? And then I saw him say something to one person.

And I saw him say something the opposite to a different person. And I thought, wait a second, he's not even consistent. Maybe he's not even honest. And so I said, hey, you know, Westerners are no shame. I mean, we just, you know, the people around Jun Chao from Thailand and Laos were so reverential. And I said, listen, I said, I've been watching you.

And sometimes you don't seem that enlightened to me. Well, you know, you say one thing, then you say the opposite to another, you know, you don't look so mindful. A laughed, he thought it was the greatest thing that someone would say that to him. And I said, why is that so funny? And he said, it's a great moment for you.

Because if I fit your model of the perfect teacher, you'd still be in the illusion that you can find the Buddha out here somewhere. And he's not out here. Oh, wow. Ah, man, we can't top that. Jack, right before you said that, I was about to say, well, you seem enlightened to me,

but now I feel like I'm insulting you if I say that. So you do though. And you are one of my favorite teachers. I don't know how you do the magic trick every time. I was certain this particular question I was bringing to you, you weren't gonna be able to turn it. And yet you have somehow. Thank you.

I feel like you've given me permission to be disappointed in Buddhism. Well, hallelujah. That's pretty great. I think that's, there must be a Buddhist word for hallelujah that's the equivalent of it. Yeah. What I've given you is the permission to be real,

to trust yourself. If you're a teacher, what you want in a student is dedication, somebody who's actually willing to look, to do, to practice, to do whatever it is, and common sense. Right. That's all, to see what's true. And that takes you really far.

Wow. Thank you so much, Jack. Is this it? This is it, we did an hour. Oh my God, I thought we just started. We have to do it again. We have to meet again. I would love that.

When shall we three meet again? The witches say, when shall we two meet again? Well, you know, the funny thing is, I realized if we live in the same city, I was telling Aaron, well, I'm gonna say, before we came to the retreat, I'm like, you've gotta listen to Jack and Trudy. These are my favorite teachers.

They're just incredible. We're so lucky to get to see them. And then I remember, y'all are at Inside LA. You live in LA, you're up in San Francisco. It's not like you live on the other side of the planet for me, and that's pretty cool. Yes, we should do that. The other thing is that I've got all kinds of stuff

online, jackcornfield.com. And I have a wonderful teacher training for people who are really crazy or inspired or both, who wanna learn how to teach mindfulness meditation to other people. When did you start doing that? I didn't know you did that. In the last few years, and we've had a couple thousand

people from 46 countries do this training, and it's really fun to work with people in this. Where do you do it? Well, we did some of it live, not a lot of it live, little bits of it, and most of it's online where you get mentors and teachers that work with you personally for the course of a couple of years. It's quite fun.

Couple of years. Yeah, well, that's a little training, really. Well, I know, I'm saying like a couple of years of somebody who was quiet for how long again? 400 days, did you say? 500. 500 days. Who's counting, right?

Okay, now. A little X is like you're in your prison cell, one more, one more day. That's a long time. Now, this is the, thank you so much, Jack. All the links you need to find, JackCornField are gonna be at duckatrustle.com. Thank you, I really appreciate it.

My pleasure. May I just throw one thing out? Here's a bonus question. I don't know why I- I thought you'd have some hard questions. This was like- I'll give me a break. I, this is to me-

Like death or something, come on, next time. Listen, I'll tell you, dying is a lot easier than dealing with the fact that some aspects of Buddhism that you thought weren't that great might not be that great instead of just realizing you were wrong or that Buddhism was, I was wrong. I would rather be wrong is what I'm saying.

I would rather be wrong and Buddhism be perfect than to find out, oh no, actually your instincts might be right and there's pieces- So here's a tough thing to say to you. That's why abused children stay with their parents. Yeah. Because it's still their parents and they, not only they stay with them,

but they think it must be that they did something wrong. I know, Jack. I know that, unfortunately, very well. Here's my question. Yeah. When you told the story about the cottage they put you in and right across from you- Yeah, some distance was what the master's called.

Teacher demonstrating these aspects that seemed to you to be completely not cool. Yeah. I don't know if you would call it paranoia or pronoia. The idea that actually things are going your way all the time, but I thought, perhaps here is an enlightened being. Who's doing just what I needed to get.

Yeah. Aware that you're watching him. They put you there on purpose and he's coming out and doing these shows. It's actually a beautiful question because archetypally it talks about how the universe gives us the difficulties that we need to awaken our mind and open our heart.

Now, would that it were true that this guy was actually doing that? But unfortunately, some years later, he was run out of the monastery by his own monks when they found him in a nun's cottage in the middle of the night. So, you know, it was a good story that you spun, but I'm sorry about that, Duncan.

More disappointment. Jack, thank you so much. What a pleasure. Thank you. I hope you're not too disappointed. Okay, take care. Thank you. That was Jack Kornfield, everybody.

Definitely check him out at jackkornfield.com. Much thanks to Squarespace and Blue Choo for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Go see me at the Denver Comedy Works in January. And if you like this podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes. Won't you? And subscribe.

Thank you all so much for listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. Ghost towns, dirty angel, out now. Dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer.

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