Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 378: David Nichtern

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

David Nichtern, meditation teacher, author, and a stabilizing/balancing force during this brain-melting pandemic, joins the DTFH! You can learn more about David on his personal site and on his Facebook. Click here for more info on The Samarasa Center's Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training for 2020, and click here for their online training program being hosted by Tibet House US. This episode is brought to you by: BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. Feals - Visit feals.com/duncan and get 50% off and FREE shipping on your first order. Shudder - Use promo code DUNCAN for a FREE 30 Day Trial.

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Weren't some weird times, friends. Really strange times. It's a fascinating thing to just notice how weird the energy is right now, how things can go from completely normal, basically, to being really sinister. For example, I stepped on a piece of glass the other day and got a piece of glass in my foot.

And it got a little infected. And we didn't have any tweezers. And instead of just being a kind of normal, well, I'll just go to the store, get some tweezers, pull the glass out of my foot. The whole thing turned into like a weird mini-mental drama. You know, like, oh, fuck. I'm going to have to put the mask on, put some gloves on,

head out into the wastelands, get some tweezers. And then hopefully, I'll be able to pull the glass out of my foot. But what if I get an infection? I don't want to go to the doctor right now. I don't want to inhale some pestulent sneeze. I don't want somebody blowing their doom cough all over my face, just walking down the street, you know,

with the baby. And I'm so attuned to coughs right now. I don't know if you are. But like, I can hear a cough 100 miles away, saw some guy up ahead cough into his army, completely did the thing you're supposed to do, the cough into the crook of your arm thing. But still, I got a little pissed, you know,

just thinking like, what are you doing out? Where are you out? You got a cough. You got to stay inside. You got to quarantine yourself. But you know, this guy, he's working. He probably has a family he's got to support, you know? And who knows, most, it probably isn't the disease.

But the, just the attunement to the potentiality of getting this very brand new sickness is so interesting to experience, like how locked in the mind can get locked in to things when survival is involved, especially when now I've got a kid. Like, I think even without a kid, I would be, you know, flipped out.

But having a baby like seems to really amplify the survival quality of it all, which is why I feel so lucky to have friends like David Nickturn. I need friends like this, because otherwise I'll burrow. Without someone like David Nickturn in my life, I would probably just find a shovel

and just start digging into the ground and just burrow into a hole, just the right size for my body. Just kind of pull some loose dirt over my face and just lay there in the soil and wait for this thing to pass. Fuck it, let the dog shit and piss all over me, who cares? Just lay in the grass and the dirt

and just wait for this to end. But thank goodness I have friends like Nickturn, who keep me above ground. We need this, we need a stabilizing element. Right now I'm trying to like not, because I'm in quarantine with my wife and like we've got a time out when we freak out so that we don't freak out at the same time.

That's the main thing. If you gotta like sort of like make sure that if you're gonna have a mild freak out or a major freak out that you're the only one doing it. So you wanna, like if you're in a roommate situation, if you're married, if you're in a relationship, if you're with another person, the only bit of advice that I could offer you,

and this isn't even, I didn't even think of this, a friend of mine, I was talking to him, gave me this advice. He said, pretty much anytime anyone's freaking out, it's okay. Not that it's not okay to freak out, but right now everybody gets a hall pass for freaking out. So if somebody's like annoying the shit out of you

or if you feel guilty, because maybe you're annoying the shit out of somebody, don't beat yourself up right now. Give yourself a freak out hall pass. Have a pocket full of them. Make, write it out on notebook paper and just pass them out. The next time somebody you love is feeling a little weird.

Because why wouldn't you feel weird right now? You're supposed to feel weird right now. There's not a, if you can find a reason to not feel weird right now, congratulations. But this is the dawning of the age of weird, man. Like we're in the, you can't go to the grocery store without passing people in surgical. Like they're about to go do his fucking surgery.

They got a cart full of hummus. It's fucking weird. People in galoshes and rubber rain suits and goggles with weird BDSM gloves. Gloves are kind of sexy weirdly. Is that weird? I like to wear latex gloves. That's one of, that's just weird by itself.

I like strapping on surgical gloves and go into whole foods and dramatically looking for grits. Cause the baby loves grits. One thing's for certain, the pandemic has not silenced my poodle. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go take care of something. I should have taken care of a long time ago. And when I get back, we'll jump into the podcast.

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That's feels.com slash Duncan. Enjoy the pandemic with feels. Guy, guy, guy, guy, guys. Hey, if you want commercial free episodes of the DTFH, why don't you try my Patreon at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. You'll get commercial free episodes and also a lot of other weird stuff. Plus we just added new tiers.

If you stick around long enough over there, you'll get an exclusive mug, an exclusive t-shirt or an exclusive stick hair. Head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and try them out. We need your support during this pandemic. We also have a shop located at DuncanTrussell.com with lots of beautiful, beautiful pandemic clothes

for you to wear. Check us out. All right. Today's guest is one of my teachers. He teaches me how to meditate. Even though I don't meditate as much as I should, he has written a great many books, including most recently, creativity, spirituality

and making a buck. The link you need to find that book will be at DuncanTrussell.com. Also, he does meditation classes, meditation teacher training. All the links you need to find, David, will be at DuncanTrussell.com. If you are looking for an actual kind of stable,

balancing, energetic pattern to calm you down during this thing, then this conversation, I think, could serve that purpose. It certainly helped me, though I'm sad to say the effects have sort of worn off, which means I should probably give Nickturn a call after I finish uploading this thing. Regardless, everybody, please welcome

to the DuncanTrussell Family Hour Podcast, David Nickturn. David back. It's the Duncan sections. David. Welcome back, to the DTFH, Mr. Nickturn. Who would have thought that we would be recording this during a pandemic? Who would have thought that this is where

our conversation with Landis is in a pandemic? You know, like of all the things I would have predicted for us as far as podcasting goes, it wouldn't be under these circumstances. Well, Duncan, first of all, thank you for having me back. But I just want to say that it seems clear that the entire time we were heading exactly to this point. How? Inevitably.

You mean in the sense that we knew that eventually there was going to be another pandemic? Well, pandemic or something. So because we're in our conversations, we're sort of including the improbable as part of the ponderable, right? Right. So, and this is probably not that

unpredictable, right? We've had these before. People who are tracking these kind of things projected this would happen sooner or later. And here we are in the midst of it. And so I think I've been talking to different people about what their view is of the situation. So what's yours?

Well, it's that part I agree with. I knew and I've been told by various people and read in books that it's an inevitability. Pandemics are just one of the many global catastrophes that happen. We get pandemics, we get meteor impacts, which are hopefully rarer than pandemics.

We get world wars. There's a variety of global catastrophe that we can expect. So my view is, yeah, this is normal, but it's abnormal for us, for most of us, in the sense that we, I guess we got really lucky because it's been a long time since we've had, I guess they're comparing this to 1918 or something.

That was the last global pandemic, right? The Spanish. So we don't have the, my generation and your generation, we don't have a, in our memory banks, anything to compare this to, only historical things that we can compare it to. Sure, and another factor is, of course, in the United States, which is where we are,

you're in LA and I'm in New York. We're not, that used to having reality come back to us so much in our face, you know? Like war, even the world wars didn't happen here, you know? So I think we have, in terms of the Buddhist view, we were living in a sort of God realm kind of situations, pretty padded and for many people, they don't have to worry too much day-to-day.

And that is shifting a little bit and this is making it obvious that there's some kind of shift and that we have to face the music of cause and effect. You know, and this facing the music thing, I think, and particularly is melting the brains of the most privileged members of Western society, because if you're living in the United States and you're a certain demographic, you're a certain race,

you're a certain income bracket, you're worrying a lot every day, but now this thing has essentially saturated all classes, all races, all religions. Everything is being affected by this. So it's like the realm of the gods is a great way to put it and even within the realm of the gods, I imagine, there's another realm of the gods.

Like, you think, sure. And it's, and this is sweeping through the entirety of it, which is really fascinating to watch, you know, like Fox News pundits freak out because this is touching them and they don't know who do you get mad at? Like, who are you pissed at? Who can you lash out at?

You know, a virus, who are you gonna get mad at? What can you do? It's, this is anyone could be affected by this. Yeah. Oh my God, has there ever been a better time for watching TV in the history of humanity than right now during a pandemic? Much thanks to my friends at Shutter for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH.

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That's Shutter. You can try it for free for 30 days. Go to shutter.com, use promo code Duncan. That's S-H-U-D-D-E-R. Thank you, Shutter. It's interesting to look at pictures of things. And one of the things I've been saying, Duncan, is that there's some element of a Rorschach test going on

right now at a pretty big level, Rorschach. Which is that there's something happening and people are projecting different sort of views and versions of it based largely on their own perspective, their own way of looking at things. So it ranges from, oh, this is the enemy. There's a little virus, this little thing, this little tiny thing is some kind of military force

that's invading. Up into, then you go to the other side of the spectrum, it's sort of the people saying this is sort of God's way of communicating certain kind of purification ritual for the human race. So everything in between. So you know me for years now, Duncan. You know, I like to just look at things

and I try to look at it really cleanly or clearly. And the pictures that they're showing of it are really interesting. So I'm going like, well, what is this virus? What actually is it? You can make it clear what your projection is about what's happening. But the actual phenomenon itself is just this little thing

with spikes on it that has the fantastic capacity to reproduce and to permeate all the porous boundaries which are porous to it, you know, which, because it's so small. And so it's going, the virus is going viral. It's something that in other situations, we say this is very good news. Information is getting out.

Some kind of positive energy is going viral. A great song just went viral. But this thing in terms of the human host has a certain kind of symbiotic relationship that is, on the one hand, you could say dangerous. On the other hand, it's kind of intriguing because different people are responding it to so differently. Yeah.

Well, you've, let's see, you got the apocalyptic people who are responding to it that these are the end times. You've got just the basic denial people. Yeah. Just a bunch of bullshit. I feel good. Shut the fuck up. I'm going to the beach.

Then you, like the, I guess you could say validated preppers who are like, we've been saying this forever, y'all. Like, you thought we were crazy, huh? Thought I had too many cats, huh? No. Right, yeah. Don't have toxoplasmosis poisoning. I'm just aware of the fact that history shows certain

patterns and in those patterns, empires collapse. And then you've got like scientists, my favorite is the scientists. Yeah. Because they are the ones who are like, I don't know. Yeah. And that was the, I was watching, because we love watching Fox News.

I don't know why it's like this, it's just so vile and so hilarious and so edgy and dumb. It's just so funny to watch state media at that level. And, you know, Trump is pushing, and hopefully he's right, this old medication, I can't pronounce the name, chlorochlorosomethingqueen or something for the possible treatment. Hydrochloroquine. Hydrochloroquine.

Wow. Yeah. And, which seems to have some effect. So, you know, they get this guy on who was incredibly sick in the hospital. They gave it to him the next day, he was totally fine. Sure. The scientists, the doctor, what do you all,

who's like treating patients right now? And they said, well, what do you think about this? And the doctor's like, well, we don't know. It's so frustrating because he won that. Oh, it's a treatment, it's a cure, but they're like, well, we're not really sure. Yeah. If it is doing anything,

because we don't have all the data yet. And that's what produces this, like, Rorschach ink block mirror. Whenever you have the unknown, this mirror forms, right? Yes. That's the Rorschach element. That's exactly it. So, Duncan, it reminds me a lot of days in the recording studio.

You know, we would record like a big orchestra sometimes, you know, for a TV show or a movie or something like that. And you have maybe 50 or 60 musicians out there. You have the clients who are, you know, the ones who are producing whatever it is, commercial or TV show or whatever, five or six of those people. And then you have a timeline

because the union requires a certain amount of, you know, after three hours, you're going to overtime. After that, you're going to double overtime. So that's a disaster if that happens. Right. So let's say it's 10, you're almost done, but it's 10 minutes now before the session, official time of the session runs out,

you're going to overtime, and something's wrong with the gear, you know. Now, everybody's starting to freak out. Of course, the musicians are not necessarily freaking out because they might get paid more. Right. But the producers, the budget people, you know, are all freaking out.

And who comes into the studio at that point, and they used to have these before you guys all had your own little digital workstations, and man, every aspect of it by yourself. Who comes in as the maintenance guy in the studio? And these people always had a certain type of personality, which was everybody's freaking out, but they're completely calm.

In fact, they're twice as calm as they would have ordinarily been because they actually get to do their job now. And their job is just to completely relax and just look and see what is actually happening here. Yeah. That's the scientist you're talking about here, which is to be, to have clarity, we need impartiality.

Right. It's just, I know it's part of the human drama to get all involved with it, and your best friend just got it, and you know, and the president is whatever, and you know, and the republic is, but just look and see what's happening. And what I see is that something is going around fast,

and it's actually a good thing when you're talking about a hit record when it goes viral. It's a good thing when you're talking about your podcast going viral. It's a good thing when you're talking about your upcoming show going viral. You know, all those are good things,

but when a virus goes viral, it's not a good thing. Yeah. And it's the one who invented the whole gig. You know? All right. All right, so I'm not trying to, you know, look, I know people are gonna have tremendous suffering, so just dunking as a pragmatist,

which you know, that's really how I think of myself. I've sort of created a little, you know, mind calibration for all of us going through this, including myself, and it's really three steps. And the first one is assessing your physical safety and health and wellbeing. Okay. Just seeing, let's bring the scientist's point of view

to that. Right now, you're in your house, you're okay, you feel okay, you want to avoid, you know, getting too easily infected, so you're avoiding crowds and you're avoiding situations in which you move your risk ratio up too high. Yes. But how are you right now?

And so this is when I'm working with my meditation students and stuff right now, I'm saying, are you feeling okay? Is everything okay? Are people in your family safe? Is anybody in trouble? Physically. Second tier is, how's your mental landscape? How's your emotional and mental state in terms of,

are you panicking? Are you freaking out? Are you too blasé? You know, are you dull and ignoring stuff? Are you, do you feel awake and relaxed about it? And you're able to deal with it. I gotta go to the store and buy food. I'm gonna do that, and then I'm gonna come home

and have dinner with my family. Can you dial down the drama element of it and just relate to some kind of basic sanity, even in the midst of a challenging situation like this? Right. That's two. Third one is, how are you financially? Because the obvious implication of this

is it's just not just a physical health, but people's financial present and future is being affected by this in a variety of ways. Some people I talk to are fine. They actually have a year's worth of whatever in the tank and they're enjoying the time to work on a book or even take some contemplative time. Other people are, hmm, this is gonna tighten up

something that was already getting tight. And other people are in immediate jeopardy. They're losing, like, three of the yoga studios that I teach at are closed. Yeah. Most people are gonna be without a job. Yeah. And they're not, you know, they're not well-to-do people.

They are gonna pay next month's rent based on this month's salary. So, and then even more, we have to look at people who are, you know, maybe who weren't doing well in the first place and this is gonna be extra hardship. Right. So, but each one of us going through that three-tiered scrutiny of our situation

so that you can boil it down to like, what am I actually dealing with here? And then just dial the rest of the hyper drama to a, you know, to a nice gossip level, but not that it's taking over your whole state of mind. Right. Then the fourth one is like, once you put your oxygen mask on in that way,

look around and see what you could do to help other people. Right. Yeah, that fourth one seems somewhat challenging compared to the old models we had of helping other people in the sense that, you know, there's no human contact right now. Physical human contact. No physical human contact.

You can, for example, go to the grocery store to get food for someone else, but if you do that and you don't have the right protective equipment, and maybe even if you do, you're upping your chance of getting this disease. And there is, and if you, to me, it seems like, I guess the primary way

to help other people is to not get sick. Because if you get sick, you're going to take up a hospital bed. And if you take up a hospital bed, that's one less hospital bed for somebody else. And that could cost someone their life. So to me, Okay, well, right there, just like right there,

just to insert a little pause for that perspective. If you do get sick, one in 20 of the people who get sick is going to need some kind of medical care. And the other 19 out of 20 are not. Right, right. That's good to just, okay, you know, just balance your perspective on that.

I know, and I just got a message. I told my friends out here, I'm in Long Island, my house, and I'm hunkered down, complete them in total retreat mode at the moment. But, you know, I said, it's going to start happening that people we know are going to be calling us

or texting us and saying, I got this thing now. And that's a big shifting point. And then the second tier of shifting is it goes, somebody in my household has it. Right. And then of course, what's the final frontier?

I got it. Yeah. But as you go through those steps, I mean, it's good to evaluate realistically, even if you did know somebody, like for example, this morning, I got an email from a friend, and a good friend of ours said they have it.

But then the next wave of messaging was they're fine. The symptoms are not that powerful, and they're recovering nicely. And then of course, they will have the extra advantage of being immune. We don't know that. Well, do you think that's not the case? Well, I don't think that's not the case.

I heard a virologist saying that, because we don't have the data on that. We don't know. It's another question mark. It's like possible. But you know, you can catch the cold more than once. And so people do seem to be catching this thing more than once.

But those data sets could be, that could be from poor testing. That could be from false positives, false negatives. But that's the thing we don't know. Hopefully, the thing is, if the case is that you become vaccinated, quote, vaccinated when you get the thing, that's really great if that's the case.

And that leads, if they show that that is what happens, then that, from what I heard on NPR, that means that there's a, that's a vaccine. If you, if they don't know what else from get from it, then we can make a vaccine. Whether or not that's true or not, we don't know yet. So I don't know. I think that the thinking there

can lead some people down a self-destructive track, which is if you believe that you get an immunity from getting the thing, there might be people who are like, fuck it. I'm just gonna go get sick. Then I'll have an immunity and then I won't have to worry about it anymore. And now I can go out.

And if they're people who've had the thing and believe they have an immunity and because of that thing, they're somehow not gonna get it. If they're wrong, then they're gonna go around infecting a lot of people. So the problem is we don't know about the immunity thing yet, which I love all this stuff because it's like, you know,

you could see in what you just said, there's this hopefulness that is maybe not true, which is so, to me, that one thing, one to bring it into Buddhism. One of your areas of expertise, you can see how normal ignorance, like normal day-to-day ignorance, in general, is not deadly.

It's going to probably lead you into some places you don't wanna be. It's probably gonna make the people around you feel at the very least irritated with you. But normal... Ah! Yeah. Okay.

But normal day-to-day ignorance, it's not deadly. You know, when you're in any kind of survival situation, ignorance becomes deadly for you or for other people. And so you can see how many chances there are within this big swirling viral Rorschach test to use ignorance as a shield against the pain of not knowing.

And you can pretend you have an immunity. You can pretend that you got it. There's people I know who are like, oh yeah, I got it, I think I'm fine now. It's like, A, you don't know that you got it. You didn't get tested. B, you don't know if you got it that you're fine now. Exactly.

But what you get from that sort of ignorant deal that you've made with yourself is this false security, a feeling being protected and it's not real. That is not real. So it seems to me that the one quality and Buddhism that seems really useful here is the invitation to turn and look this insecurity right in the eye, which is, I would, and I also, you know,

of course, you know me well enough to know that I tend to use this lens or this framework of the Buddha's sort of perspective on things. And that can be, you know, you could have that wrong too. You could either, that could be the wrong perspective or you could be getting it wrong. And that's clearly the case so that there's nothing more penetrating than the actual truth itself

or the actual experience itself, even within the Buddha's framework, you would say that. It would contain the seeds of its own destruction if it became just an ignorant veil and filter for processing information. So you would destroy it. That would be the right thing to do. So I appreciate what you're saying.

But just still at the moment using that framework for just a second, you and I have talked about this before, but there's like these two primitive beliefs about reality called nihilism and eternalism. And lately I've just been seeing them everywhere. That's like one goes to the left, one goes to the right. If you either negate and you sustain your perspective by through negation, or on the other hand, you affirm

and you sustain your identity through affirmation. And they're both considered, it's a cute way of saying it. And I wonder what the original translation is, but a primitive belief about reality and it's not sophisticated in a way. So the nihilists are saying, yeah, we're all gonna die. And we always were gonna die. And this is, anybody who's sort of thinking

anything positive right now is missing the message of the whole thing, the whole message is about negation and kind of annihilation. And there's a certain truth in that. There's a certain falsity in that. Then on the eternalist side to say, everything's fine. It's all God's plan, whatever you have of looking at these things, there's the new age version.

And then there's the sort of old age version of it, like you bring out your prophecies, you bring out, you affirm some kind of, we knew it. And it's all part of a cohesive whole that is basically working for us. We're the children of this. And our parents are still alive, they're still doing well. And the nihilists are saying, you're an orphan.

You always were an orphan. So somewhere, is there a way to relate to it? And I guess my way is boiling down data, which is what I think you're exactly right. Scientists do. And you remember when I playfully gave you that nickname of sort of Prajna, that Prajna is the type of intelligence that scientists have, without a nihilistic bias though,

that's an important thing, there's no nihilism in it. It's just objective, you observe the phenomena, you come to conclusions that are verifiable, you know? So you're right, we don't know yet that you can. Let's just say that that's exactly right. I misspoke, we do not know yet that you can, you could get this disease and then get it again. But you can spread it.

The thing is, it's, this is the way things have been. And so it's a logical conclusion to draw. But this is where you get into the name of the virus itself, right? It's the novel coronavirus, called a novel virus, new, it's a brand new thing. Sure. This I love, because this is in the same way

that you were earlier talking about how in general, like a song is a hit and it goes viral, everyone loves it, bread, word of mouth. Which has a new meaning. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So it's a new song, people are like, wow, I've never heard anything like this before. And they love it and it spreads.

This is a new virus. So what that means is we don't know anything about what it does. Because it's new, we think of like, it's similar to when I was younger, and I guess you could say wilder, I wasn't afraid of ordering these things called experimental chemicals or psychedelic chemicals.

And like, so it was hilarious because there still is just a wide variety of psychedelics that have yet to be assigned an illegal status by the state because you just move a couple of molecules around, you got a new thing. Yeah, they're novel psychedelics. Novel psychedelics, yeah, exactly. And so you would go on these websites,

and it was so funny because the websites were like, these compounds are for laboratory testing only. You know, because the website didn't say like, these are going to get you fucking high, man. Now you're intentionally selling drugs. So the whole website was designed to look as though, I don't know, man, like chemists are shopping around for LSD analogs or something like that.

But I would order them, I did it once or twice, get completely blasted on this stuff and not really think too much about it. And then I was on the Vaults of Aeroid, which is a psychedelic website. And they said something that I should have obviously thought of, which is with LSD, marijuana, alcohol, or any drug that we've become familiar with,

we have hundreds of years, decades of data that we can draw from to understand what it does to our physiology. And even with LSD, we're still not quite sure what it does. With psilocybin, we're still learning what it does. So the warning was, listen, these drugs have been around for three weeks. You have no idea what this is going to do to you long term

because we don't have 80 year olds walking around the day who've been doing this drug since they were 20. You know, we don't know what. Well, you could take a look at them and maybe you think twice about it. Well, I mean, look at Hoffman, you know, LSD didn't live to a ripe old age, you was fine. And he was like, certainly a lab rat for LSD.

But you know, look at you, look at Raghu, look at all you, you're perfectly fine, you know? But anyway, the point is with this virus, we don't have any understanding. It could do anything. It's essentially a spaceship. It's- Well, wait Duncan, I wanna just interject one thought there.

Okay. Because you said it's a novel corona virus. So one part of that description is a known aspect. It is a virus. And so it is part of a family of things that have a certain group, you know, description of their tendency to behave in a certain way. So it's not totally, it's a novel virus.

It's not just like, wow, this is, you know, a novel fa-fa-fa, you know? It's like, it does have continuity with other experiences that we've had. Well, thank God it's not a novel fa-fa-fa. Those things are fa- I got one of those on the website, you're talking. Yo, that makes your face melt off.

But, well, okay, fair enough. But I guess what I'm saying is, you know, to get into the finding the, not the eternalist viewpoint on this thing. Sure. To try to zoom in on a realistic. Realistic. Magnetic.

Positive thing that's happening here that encapsulates within it. And when I say positive, I mean, you know, you're in prison and suddenly you realize that your mattress functions as a weight. And now you can work out in prison. You're still in prison, but you just, you can- Uh-huh.

Yeah, so, like looking at the situation and seeing, okay, how can I construct a kind of spiritual gem, spiritual gem equipment with this situation here? No, wait, Duncan, I gotta pause you right there. Everybody listen to what Duncan just said. That's a very, very powerful thing you just said and a really positive transformational kind of message. Oh, cool.

Yeah, I mean, and you came up with a cool metaphor, but I didn't know where you were going with that metaphor. But the idea that the turning, transforming the prison into a gem, I think is the central idea of Buddhism, as I understand it. Wow, cool. You know, you are working with the same things and it's maybe the more transformational dimension

rather than the renunciative kind of path. But you take those same things, those same anger, you take aggression, you take ignorance, you take passion and you transform them into gem equipment where you strengthen your positive qualities with them and you get them to express the intelligence aspect of it. And that is, I think, not just pie in the sky and that's not really just a spiritual,

mucky muck, wishful thinking. That's really skillful living. Cool, yeah, this to me is all, that's because we are kind of imprisoned depending on where you're at, we're quarantined at the very least we've been imprisoned in the paradigm that's being exploded out of every TV and radio

and website in this podcast. Because we are, and that's why I use the prison example and then it's like, here we've got this brand new thing which like you're saying is produced a reflective, a kind of reflective quality. No doubt. Which we're seeing our fear, our tendencies to ignore

or our tendencies to overreact or suddenly there's this wonderful, forget gathering the data sets on what this virus is unless you're working in the World Health Organization or you know, you hear something. But damn, this is a great chance to like start getting data sets just about yourself. Like, because the way you're reacting to this guaranteed

is the way you subtly have been reacting to any unpleasant situation, right? Like, this is, so yeah. And that's why Duncan, I'm highly, highly recommending to all the people that I work with directly and indirectly to include some time for training. Yeah, let's call it training, cultivation. Let's call it meditation practice,

but not the kind of meditation where you're spacing out and trying to get past or around what's going on. But right, looking at it very clearly and very straightforwardly, including your own state of mind, especially your own state of mind because that's one of the things that you actually can work with in any situation.

And the instruction oddly, corkily, if you really get with what the Buddhist original jam was is working with your own state of mind in a situation, not because there is no external reality to it, that's not the point. The point is you have some ability to shift perspective, to open the gate to your resourcefulness, to even thrive in a situation

in which your survival is threatened, which is the ultimate achievement. That's when you see great meditators, they thrive even in situations in which their survival is in question or even compromised or even ending as a personal thing. Yeah, now, this, okay. So this is benefit number one, I think,

in this gym of the COVID virus. First bit of gym equipment here that we have. I guess you could almost say this isn't really gym equipment, it's the music they're playing in the gym of the COVID virus, is music that is reminding every single one of us that there is some possibility, even though statistically, depending on your age,

it might be pretty slim, it's way more than it was prior to the COVID virus entering the scene. So one gift that the thing has given us reminds me of this, there's this great book by Krakauer, John Krakauer called End of Thin Air. Have you read that book? No.

I think that's what it's called. It's about climbing Everest. And one of the things he says in there, which is so wild, is like the only place where he can really feel connected, relaxed, and fully himself is like in a deadly situation. That the reason a lot of these people put themselves in the insane predicament

of climbing up a deadly mountain is because it gives them the feeling of fully, full presence, you can't fuck off. It's like, you know, not to put it, if you wanna put it in a little less extreme way, just skiing is like that, or any kind of sport that involves, if you make a mistake, you could get severely injured,

brings all of your senses in, and now you've gotta like, you really have to have your shit together. You know, like, I'm with my wife Erin, and a one year old, and it's stressful if you are with, you know, I've been reading this everywhere, married couples who find themselves in quarantine right now, I don't know,

maybe you're not going through, a lot of people are just experiencing like double the pressure of being in a relationship, because there's no way out. And so this is Duncan, this is what I'm calling the Petri dish principle, which is also another element of this. A cruise ship is a Petri dish, you know,

an apartment complex is a vertical cruise ship Petri dish, a family is a Petri dish, and so there you are. Now I happen to be physically alone in my Petri dish, so I can, and this is the value of retreat from a Buddhist point of view, I can bank on the fact that whatever is coming out into the atmosphere in this room is coming from me, and that's why I sometimes recommend retreating people,

there's no, you know, fussing around about it, you go, whatever environment is being created, that's coming from your mind, there's just nobody else there contributing, so I'm in that situation personally, although I am communicating with my beloved partners, stranded in Thailand at the same time, you know, Monica, so she's going through her journey

and we just are connecting, but I don't have to carry anybody, and I'm talking to my students and my friends online, so I'm sharing the journey with the people in that way, but I could see that you're in a, yeah, family, a young family like that is in a Petri dish, and including the kid, and you got to probably, you don't probably have a nanny now, ever,

or daycare or anything like that, right? No help, and a lot of people are getting out because the kids are out of school. Yes. So one thing that we both, what has come out of this, which is really good, is like in the past, when there wasn't this like, when the gym wasn't playing this message of this severity,

there's a luxury in bickering, there's like a kind of like recreational quality to it, because you know, like, you know, it's not like, if one of you decides, okay, I'm gonna, I'm leaving for a little bit, we're gonna go now, inhale viral spit somewhere, so we suddenly, because of the situation, we both have like, started dropping

these defense mechanism techniques, and we're really communicating, you know, we're really saying, here's what that thing you're doing, this is why it bothers me, and we're both saying, I love you, I want you to be okay, because there isn't the luxury anymore of fucking around, you can't, you know what I mean, you can't,

it's making me realize how so many sort of sloppy modes of social interaction are based on continuity of life, you know what I mean, are based on, like, if you're climbing a mountain with friends, there isn't real, that's not the time to get into a severe argument with them, it's not even a time to get in a little bit of an argument with them,

it's a time to focus on the mountain, and it's not- Well, and it's not also a time to get into a severe argument with yourself, so if you start for this singular retreat, it's a time to kind of work with your state of mind and really try to resolve it towards a very, you know, conscious and, you know, mindful perspective on what's happening so that you don't drive yourself crazy

to the beginning, then you have the retreats for two people, that's called a couple, and the same principle then spreads into a small group, and then you have the larger group, and then you have like a group retreat kind of situation, and then you have everyday life, which is the big retreat. Wow, that's so cool, yeah, it is, so that I think is the, if the music being played

is, watch out, there's this virus, then the gym, the structure of the gym, it's a retreat. It's a, it truly is a retreat, at the very least, you know, some people, thank God, are still working because they're doctors and they're clinicians and they're working at grocery stores and delivering food for us, thank God, and plumbers and electricians,

but even if you're still out there working and haven't self-quarantined or been forced to do what's it called, a huddle in place, it's a scary name, if you're not- Shelter in place. Shelter in place, not huddle, shelter, liver in place, regardless, the retreat that you were all, we find ourselves in, is that we have moved out of

a life that we had all become very familiar with, which is day-to-day life in the world and the, you know, what a default reality, which is if I need to go to the grocery store, I can go anytime I want, generally. If I want milk and eggs, I'm gonna be able to get milk and eggs, and more than likely, if I take a trip to the grocery store,

blah, blah, blah, I don't have to worry about some brand new virus infecting me and my family. So the retreat we're in now is one where that's not the case anymore. All the stuff we took for granted, we can't take for granted anymore. And that, I think, is the, wouldn't you, that's the structure of whatever this gym, temple thing

is that we're in, so- And none of that, Duncan, think of the traditional framework of it, like this is really a daily Buddhist practice for somebody who's doing this seriously, is chanting something called the Four Reminders of Renunciation. I don't know if you've heard this yet or not, but-

Listen to me. Listen to these four. They're very short and very simple. And think about this is something you remind yourself of, even in what you're calling normal reality, everyday reality, smooth reality, functional reality. You say these four things. The first one, joyful to have such a human birth,

difficult to find, free and well-favored. Just the very fact that you have a human body. Will you say that again? Joyful to have such a human birth. Difficult to find, free and well-favored. So that's the first one is you just remind- Free and well-favored part mean? Free and well-favored means that you actually have

some independent agency at the moment. You're health, relatively healthy, let's say. You're able to study, you're able to practice, you're able to learn from your experience. You're not in the gulag somewhere. You're not in a crippled body with six months to live. You have a recently good situation for yourself and it's not, you shouldn't take it for granted.

That's what that person is. Cool. Second one is impermanence. But death is real, comes without warning. This body will be a corpse. Now, who would remind themselves of that on a good, nice sunny spring day? Me.

Well, and it's not nihilism, by the way. It's realism. Death is real, comes without warning. This body will be a corpse. So even in a good, even an ideal situation, which is no coronavirus, there's no cancer. There's no, not even a cold. You still say death is real, comes without warning

and you recognize that it could happen any moment and it's actually the truth of the situation. Wow. Third one, laws of karma. Unalterable are the laws of karma. Cause and effect cannot be escaped. Cause and effect cannot be escaped. So in other words, you look at the situation,

you go, whatever I'm experiencing now, without any doubt, no hedging on this, is a result of previous causes and conditions that are my own, my societies, my families, whatever, however extensively you wanna look into it. And that is in spades with this stuff. You look at the causality of this virus and the likely origins of it,

whether you go conspiracy theory or just the conventional theory of the Wuhan wet markets, there's causality to it. And you can't just do stuff like that and you can't go out and go to the beach during a shelter in place situation. You're creating causality for whatever conditions and effects are gonna manifest.

Acknowledge the law of karma. And then finally, the fourth one is about samsara and understanding this is like really the key is that there's a cyclic web that is created, just like we've talked about in the wheel of life, where it goes around and around and around. Samsara is an ocean of suffering, unendurable, unbearably intense.

And samsara includes you're out on a spring day and having a great meal and your gourmet acid trip. It includes that. That's called the God realm. It's part of samsara. It's not easily recognized as sort of suffering, but the root of it actually is there's suffering underlying it. So those four are on a good day.

How about that idea? Ah, right. So this thing is like in an odd way, it's giving us those four reminders. But not giving them in such a clear way. Hey, it's the four reminders. It's the four reminders wearing the face mask. A demonic appearance.

Or the surgeon general. You know what I mean? It's the four reminders. We're getting them every time we turn on the TV. And so the CDC is saying, wash your hands because you can spread this to other people yourself. That's the law of karma. When the CDC is saying,

if you have pre-existing conditions, you have a higher chance of being hospitalized. That's the reminder that you're gonna die. And the unbearable situation is when you're in a fucking house with four goddamn dogs and a little kid. You know, you're challenged. And even to me, I would, this would be unbearable.

I'm really glad I'm with my family. But I think it would be more unbearable if I was just the one having to deal with my own emissions or however you put it. Sure. And because that to me, my mind keeps going to those people. The people who are in their apartments right now,

dealing with this kind of intense isolation. What? Well, see, just the other perspective on it is it's like in the whole world is sort of going into a retreat. So if you have the framework and understanding that retreat is an opportunity to address some of these underlying situations,

it's not you go, yeah, be, I can't go to have my favorite meal at such and such restaurant. But I just had some split pea soup for lunch and I just practiced some meditation and I'm working on some projects coming forward. Everything's okay. Right. You know, within, in other words,

nowhere in these instructions does it say, and on top of this, you should panic because I just read you the bad news, so you should freak out because this is all bad news, basically. The four reminders is to renounce your dependency on hope as the platform for your sanity and wellbeing. So then what is the platform?

Ah. First thought, best thought, right? There is no platform. And that's, you know, the Buddhists don't say, don't find an ideal state of mind and freeze, dry it. And that would be hope. So, you know, Tung Pramitra used to say, hope and fear are there like symbiotes, you know,

they're partners and you, when you cut the root of one, you cut the root of the other. So, part of the pain is that right now, if you're hanging out by yourself or if you're with others and you've gotten up in your head with some kind of fantasy.

You know, like Aaron and I have been saying, man, when this thing is over, we're gonna take a trip to Europe, we're gonna go to Paris and have Parisian wine or, you know, or just like, ah, we're gonna get some help, you know, we'll be able to get some help and help us. Those, is it that those fantasies

are actually just causing more pain and that we should renounce those kinds of fantasies and just sort of sink? It depends how seriously you engage it. If you engage in a way that it becomes, you know, craving, yeah, you definitely create some kind of torque in your state of mind. If you're just playing with it, you know,

for God's sake, it's like, you know, we're human, right? So it's okay. But I think the, just in contrast, like I'm in this house and it's a very comfortable physical situation, so I have that advantage to it. And I'm also like, if I asked myself those first three questions, which I asked everybody,

how's your health? My health is actually excellent at the moment. And I've been doing Tai Chi and Qigong every day and meditating every day. And I'm eating completely transformed diets since the beginning of 2020. I've lost 25 pounds. I wasn't that heavy to begin with,

but I feel light and good. I've decided to continue. I thought for a minute, maybe I should just push the pause button. I've got a lot of teacher training programs coming up in New York and LA and Japan, and I decided just to take them all online. And we had some preliminary meetings

and I just realized, gee, doing it online in New York, there was somebody from Colorado coming in and somebody from Montreal. That would have been impossible before. Right. So I'm saying, let's, let's, let's, I think I can work with people online with Zoom platform and communicate at least 99% of what needs to get across

on the situation. And so let's, so I'm just putting energy into like the digital reality, which I think a lot of people are thinking about. Yes. In an oncoming format, anyhow, you're already deeply into it, but that it's wise from a financial

and sort of occupational point of view to advising people to shift whatever part of their platform they can to that for now, you know, not right out the other thing. And so, you know, I find my state of mind is mostly manageable. Of course, I'm noticed I'm monitoring it, which is part of our practice mindfulness everyday life. You just look at your energy and watch your stomach

and your head and your heartbeat and stuff. And when we go on to these knuckleheads, you know, on the media and the leaders of some of the leaders that we're dealing with, it's so obvious that they're caught up in a kind of inertia and momentum. And to some extent, that's useful because as I said, caution is the enlightened part of panic, you know?

You know, you want to not be dulled out and asleep and you want to get those beds there for people, but it does not require a freak out. Right. You know, if you're freaking out, you're not helping anybody right now. Right. And if you're dreaming some kind of like,

like we're gonna, they just said, Trump just said, we're gonna open this all up by Easter. And I just went like, whoa, you're creating a noose for yourself. You're gonna be sticking your head in that noose because by Easter, this is gonna be worse and people are going, what are you doing, man? You're opening up all the gateways.

So, you know, avoiding the hope and the fear and just trying to stabilize, I don't think I could do it without some kind of meditation practice because it's almost like the gym that you mentioned. It's like you're lifting mindful weights. You're saying, let me just hold on and let everybody hold the horses. Let's just come back to where we are, what's going on.

And it's completely legitimate to look at your health, look at your state of mind and look at your financial situation. You don't have to ignore those things. Those are important and do what you need to do. If you need to make adjustments, make them. Now, as far as those adjustments go, do you have any outside of the beautiful advice

and recommendations that you've given so far? What are some, I think people who are by themselves right now are facing some really unique problems. Loneliness being probably one of them. Just how are you gonna spend your time all day? I'm lucky, we just moved. Every day I have shit to do. And if I'm not done, if I don't have to unpacking to do,

I gotta figure out a way to train these damn dogs. And if I don't have that to do, I've gotta be exercising. If I don't have that to do, I gotta be taking care of the relieving errand of childcare or she'll go completely bonkers. And if there's not that to do, there's my business to do. If there's not that, there's a million things for me to do. If I...

Well, I noticed you put right at the top of the list and I'm so happy that you did, that you're protecting your meditation practice during this time and that's the first priority. And it shows all these communications over the months and years have been fruitful. Yeah, man. That's my top one.

Yeah, you know, so you just, that putting at the top slows all the other ones down and then you go, okay, now I'm dealing with Aaron and now I'm dealing with the dogs. You know, meditation in everyday life becomes your next stopping point. So I'm highly recommended to people who are alone. What a great time to develop or learn about

or strengthen meditation practice. You're in retreat already. Right. So it's a, you know, you already have skipped a step and you already have the time and the space to do it. So A, that's my recommendation. B is, yes, I think people need to connect. It's just part of the human thing.

So I've been looking at Zoom and I've chosen groups of people that I feel, I don't want casual conversation right now, Duncan, personally, other people might, you wanna just talk about what new movies, what new movies are not coming out, you know, as a result of this, but you could find a group of people to consort with,

you know, and really kind of process with and just create like a regular Zoom session, you know, once a week, twice a week, three times a week. Yeah. And that's what people are taking that to extremes. They're having disco party, you know, dance parties on Zoom and they're having cocktail parties, but something a little bit more like that

has some element of sobriety mixed into it of, like, you know, good friends that you can, you can really check on, check about the news. What did you hear? What's going on? How are you feeling? Are you okay? You know, and to create a virtual community.

So I think there's a lot of that in play already and it's a good time to just maybe formalize that or create some kind of virtual song over yourself. That's cool. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, that's actually a really brilliant thing. So you're saying meditation,

figure out a way to build some kind of community using the tools you have around you and then exercise. And then anything else that, anything else that these people out there could do. Cause you know, I have friends who are like meeting in virtual reality and stuff, but God damn, you know, if I didn't have a family, I think I'd be up to my neck and ketamine and booze.

You know, I think I'd be blowing my mind on drugs and eating sugary stuff and just playing. My dear Duncan, Duncan, you are part of your family. You have to take care of the whole family. Oh, right. Right. Yeah. So even if you are alone,

you are still part of a community, a society and it's still everybody's primary responsibility to take care of themselves properly. It's the right thing to do. It's a compassionate thing to do. And it's an opportunity to take a second look at how am I at that? And, you know, so people should definitely

be taking good care of themselves. But in my mind, that means taking care of your body and your mind and your emotional life and learning, you know, I've said this till I'm blue in the face, but meditation is not just a way of focusing your energy and attention for productivity. And it's not a way of going into a trance state so that you don't have to worry about the, you know,

the problems and troubles that are happening in you and around you. It's also a process of discovering, giving yourself space and time in a friendly, gentle, non-aggressive environment just to really learn yourself and see who you are and make friends. And this is a perfect opportunity for it.

So it may take a shift of view and perspective, but I don't think the, you know, it could become really obvious to people that punishing themselves in this situation is extra and I'm really not necessary. I got you. Okay, so it's sort of like, you need to remember that even if you're separated from your family,

from your relatives, from your friends, you're still part of that community and that you've taken care of yourself is the primary act of service for that community. Cause if you're all fucked up, how are you going to help or do anything? Is that why? Yeah, I am saying that.

I'm also saying it's an interesting twist because sometimes for some of us, it's easier for us to think of the wellbeing of others as a primary directive for whatever karmic reasons. So use that. You say, I'm doing this for the benefit of my family. I'm practicing for the benefit of my son so that he has a wholesome environment to grow up in.

I'm doing it for the benefit of my community. If you need that motivation, the other way is you just do it for your own. You say, I'm doing this for my own benefit and because of that, then I'll be better able to benefit others. That's basically the summary of the Bodhisattva path. You both do it for your own benefit

so you'll be more productive and more helpful for other people and then you do it for other people. You're inspired by wanting to help other people so you take better care of yourself as a vehicle for that. David, that's where we should wrap it up. That's a beautiful, thank you so much. You are, I feel so lucky that we're friends and- Me too Duncan, I do too.

That was very inspiring. Where can people find you? I know you are doing these trainings online so when do those start? Well, that's the thing is they're starting and we are doing it online so I kind of want to get the word out that you can now participate from wherever you are

in the world actually. So one of them is through Samarasah Studio, Samarasah Center in Echo Park, Los Angeles. And so we're still going to be running under that banner and running that program the way we've run it for the last two years and you've helped with that a couple of those situations. So we'll be continuing that

so you could just go to Samarasahcenter.com. Maybe can I send you these links? Maybe that'd be easier for people. And then the other one is at Tibet House in New York which starts in May on Mother's Day. And that one you can include your mother for free. Wow, that's really cool. That's pretty awesome.

So that one, they run for four months and it'll be a chance, just like what we're talking about, it'll be a chance to be part of a community that is studying and practicing and trying to learn how to clarify some of these basic principles and practices and also for the benefit of learning how to present to others.

So I think it's a really, if you at all have thought about this for any period of time, this would be a way to do it. And I can send Duncan the links and he can post them. So you can check it out if you want to. All the links will be at ducatrestle.com. David, thank you so much. This was a joy.

Thank you, Duncan. I'll talk to you soon, okay? Talk to you soon. Bye. That was David Nickturn, everybody. All the links you need to find David or to sign up for his teacher training program will be at ducatrestle.com.

A huge thank you to my wonderful sponsors, Fields, Blue Chew, and Shutter. Try them out. It's a great way for you to support this podcast while improving your life. And if you like the DTFH, won't you please subscribe to us and give us a nice rating on iTunes.

I'll be seeing y'all next week. I wish you well, and I hope that you are healthy, happy, and have got all that you need to endure the next few weeks of this weird moment in history. Hare Krishna, my friends. I'll see you next week.

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