Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 389: UNLOCKED Crowdcast with David Nichtern

Episode Date: July 4, 2020

David Nichtern joins the DTFH for our weekly Patreon crowdcast. Join us at patreon.com/dtfh and listen to the whole archive! You can learn more about David on his personal site and on his Facebook. And click here for more info on his Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training. This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Feals - Visit feals.com/duncan and get 50% off and FREE shipping on your first order.

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and we're going to start this. This is like some music I made, and just because of the way it sounds, it makes me want to talk in a certain way. This is so weird how powerful it is. Not like I'm bragging that my music is powerful, but just a certain background sound can literally change the way you talk. Whoa, that's crazy, man.

I'm turning the music off so I can talk like a normal person instead of like the host of some kind of like murder slash romance show. Welcome. Today's guest is David Nickturnies, my meditation teacher, and today I'm going to go Alex Jones on you for less than two minutes, only because Epstein's partner in crime just got busted by the FBI.

This is going to create some interesting moments for all of my fellow conspiracy theorists. I do not say that in a derogatory way. Conspiracy literally means breathing in unison, which is fascinating. That's a whole other thing to talk about. And I love Reddit conspiracy, and though I do know that some of the conspiracy theories that

pop up on Reddit conspiracy are being placed there by people who more than likely are sitting in some kind of hoarder's cottage on a throne made of cat turds, every once in a while you get some real interesting shit that pops up there, and then later comes on the news. It's your job to be able to discern the rantings of someone sitting on a throne of cat shit versus people who are actually leaking information.

PS, I'm not going to tell you what I'm sitting on right now. That being said, here's a conspiracy for you to investigate, and I'm beginning to think this might be the mother of all conspiracies. Actually, father, whatever you want to call it, grandfather, family, the origination point, the big bang from which all the great conspiracies emerge, and it's the most boring conspiracy I know of.

Well, I just thought of it, but I probably didn't. I probably read it somewhere, and so I'm ripping it off from some enlightened being more than likely. It's like something Chuggum Trump has said somewhere down the line, I just forgot, because I was stoned when I was reading. Regardless, here's the conspiracy. What does boredom feel like, and what do you do

when you're bored? And also, are there forces around you trying to convince you that there are solutions to that feeling you get when you're bored? That's it. Those are the, look at that. To me, that's the DNA of it all. It just popped into my head as I was staring at my phone

on the toilet, when de-antwered. I'm reading this great interview with de-antwered, and it was like just a wonderful admonishment of people staring at the phone saying, the phone tricks you into thinking you're doing something, when in fact, all you're doing is looking at other people doing stuff. P.S. de-antwered has a new album out.

I can't wait to listen to it. Now, friends, with us today is someone who has taught me a lot about boredom. David Nickturn, my meditation teacher, he's here. It's a great conversation that we recorded at our weekly DTFH family gatherings, which you can access at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. These are live events.

We don't always, I guess, sometimes just members of the family come on and talk, but it's a blast. And so if you're interested, patreon.com forward slash DTFH, we're gonna jump into this conversation, but first, some quick business. Hi, my name's Derek Plank. I live in a small cabin up in the Appalachian Mountains, and I just wanna say, if anybody out there

is feeling bored right now during COVID, come on up and fuck me. I don't care what you are. I don't care who you are. All I care about is that you are over 21 years of age and you can sitting at all. Just come on in my cabin and just fuck me down. You won't be bored anymore, trust me.

I will, at least for a few moments, completely take away that gnawing, deep, horrific, strange, never any feeling that you've been hiding from and all your various activities here in the material plane of existence. Come bang me down. I want you to come up in my cabin, go to Duncan's website and use offer code CabinFuck,

and I'll give you a free fuck. But if you don't use offer code, I'll let you fuck me for free anyway, because I just wanna lay up here till this pandemic ends, getting bang blasted, fucked, sprayed, and splashed on until this whole goddamn thing's over. Thanks for, uh, thanks so much for listening to my... What the fuck was that?

Are you making me listen to that? Why are you doing this to me? I wanna listen to a murder show. What? Watch the news. I wanna watch a murder show, or just the news. Not this, not this kind of shit. Something about somebody who got kidnapped, or just the news.

Or just the news. My apologies. Oh, sex, negative cortisol addicts that are enjoying my podcast. I'll do a whole episode on murder, don't worry. But for now, I'm gonna read as a form of incantation, a kind of counter spell against the dark forces that are currently working in the world to try to confuse us,

make us think that humanity itself is somehow a festering plague on the sweet flesh of the earth, ignoring the fact that the earth is what creates humanity itself. I'm gonna read a poem, a poem that was sent to me from a health food store, and I'm gonna ring this bowl as part of the ritual. There's a dead fly in the bowl. Hope that doesn't mess it up too much.

To the fig tree on 9th in Christian, and my deep apologies to the brilliant poet Rosgay for reading this in some wrong way. Tumbling through the city in my mind without once looking up, the racket and the lug work probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said or did, some crime or other.

The city, they say, is a lonely place until, yes, the sound of sweeping, and a woman, yes, with a broom beneath which you are now too. The canopy of a fig, its arms pulling the September sun to it, and she has a hose too, and so works hard,

rinsing and scrubbing the walk, lest some poor sod slip on the silk of a fig and break his hip, and not probably reach over to gobble up the perpetrator. The light catches the veins in her hands. When I ask about the tree, they flutter in the air, as much as you can, help me.

So I load my pockets and mouths and she points to the step ladder against the wall to mean more, but I was without a sack, so my meager plunder would have to suffice and an old woman whom gravity was pulling into the earth loosed one from a low-slung branch

in its eye-wept like hers, which she dabbed with a kerchief as she cleaved the fig with what remained of her teeth, and soon there was eight or nine people gathered beneath the tree, into it like a constellation pointing, do you see it? And I am tall and so good for these things

and a bald man even told me so when I grabbed three or four for him, reaching into the giddy throngs of yellow jackets, sugar-stoned, which he only pointed to, smiling and rubbing his stomach. I mean, he was really rubbing his stomach,

like there was a baby in there. It was hot. His head shone while he offered recipes to the group using words which I couldn't understand. And besides, I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling in my mouth,

pulling me down and down into the oldest countries of my body, where I ate my first fig from the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the night and maybe never said more than five words to me at once, but gave me figs

and a man on his way to work hops twice to reach at last his fig, which he smiles and calls baby. Come here, baby, he says and blows a kiss to the tree, which everyone knows cannot grow this far north,

being Mediterranean and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils of Jordan and Sicily. But no one told the fig tree or the immigrants there is a way the fig tree grows and groves at once. It seems to hold us.

Yes, I am anthropomorphizing. God damn it. I have twice in the last 30 seconds rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone else's sweaty shoulder, gleeful eating out of each other's hands on Christian Street in Philadelphia, a city like most,

which has murdered its own people. This is true. We are feeding each other from a tree at the corner of Christian and ninth. Strangers may be never again. Thank you, Ross Gay, for existing on this planet. If you like that poem,

check out catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. It's on Amazon. And if anybody knows Ross Gay, boy, I sure would like to interview him for the DTFH. I'm falling in love with his poetry. All right, pals, we are going to do an actual commercial,

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what an incredible substance it is. These people will actually help you figure out exactly dosage and pretty much anything you want to know about CBD. Fields, thank you for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. Oh, my sweet friends, I just gotta say this out loud. I got a beautiful baby.

I'm just gonna say it. I'm proud to add today. That's all. How cheesy am I? I am hyper cheesy right now. Ultimate cheesy level, but Jesus Christ. This has nothing to do with anything. Listen, if you want commercial free episodes of the DTFH,

if you want to dive deep into our thriving, brilliant, beautiful community, if you feel called to join the thrumming, sweet glory that is the DTFH family, then head over to patreon.com. DTFH and subscribe. You're gonna have access to hundreds of... I think it's probably hundreds of hours

by now of just extra stuff. If you subscribe to a video tier, we do a weekly meditation, we do a weekly gathering, and we're gonna be doing more stuff. We have an open mic coming up at some point as soon as I figure out a way to organize it, or one of my sweet, sweet darlings helps me organize it.

That's patreon.com. DTFH. We also have a shop located at dunkitrustle.com with such beautiful, beautiful garments and face masks. All of them sacred, special in their own way. And hopefully they will act as a kind of repellent to the never-ending darkness.

I don't really think there is a never-ending cloud of doom out there, in fact, but sometimes it sure as fuck seems like it. Come on! Paradise! Let's go! You're late! Today's guest is a brilliant author.

He's also my meditation teacher, and I highly recommend taking one of his workshops. He's got two coming up. He's got an intro to mindfulness in the path of meditation. It's a teacher training. You can go to www.kaiayoga.com. That's k-a-i-a-yoga.com-meditation-teacher-training. There's gonna be links at dunkitrustle.com.

There's too many dashes in that. Also, he's got a weekend workshop coming up. It's a weekend workshop on the five wisdom energies. That's at Tibethouse.us. And I'm not even gonna try to read this. It's an insanely long link. All the links are gonna be at davidnicturn.com. That's d-a-v-i-d-n-i-c-h-t-e-r-n.com.

Or at dunkitrustle.com. Definitely if you... I mean, this is one of the awesome things about this damn pandemic is that everyone's doing Zoom workshops now. So you don't have to fly across the country to get somewhere. You can just teleport in via Zoom, though I sure would love to rub shoulders and eat figs with some of you sweeties out there.

We're just not there yet. Now, without further ado, everyone welcome... David Nickturn. Welcome, welcome on you That you are with us Shake hands, no need to be blue Welcome to you It's the dunkitrustle video

It's the dunkitrustle video It's the dunkitrustle video It's the dunkitrustle video It's the dunkitrustle video Everybody, this is my meditation teacher David Nickturn. Who has been generous enough to join us for this family gathering. Hi, David. Greetings, everybody.

I can't see you, but I'll take it on faith that they're out there. They're out there, yeah. Well, it's a chat. I can't see them either, unfortunately. But they're out there. Okay, great. Wonderful. David, I am so lucky to have you as my meditation teacher. I'm not sure you're so lucky to have me as my meditation student.

They've heard me talk about you all the time or mention you or talk about you. Lately, I really have realized what a powerful role you play in my life. Even if we go weeks without talking, I'm always thinking about the conversations that we've had. And so it's exciting for me to, for people to get to actually see you on video. And for us to have one of the talks that we generally have over the phone. Are they surprised I'm not a cartoon? They knew about you prior to Midnight Gospel.

Are you, do people talk to you about Midnight Gospel or do you hear about? Sometimes, yeah. But that would be so badass if we could just animate me for these conversations. I agree. That guy would show up with my voice. It would be so wonderful if we could do that. You know, this is something I think in the future we can look forward to, actually. That's going to be a way to do it, not just in the blocky, weird CGI way that people are doing.

David, I wanted to start off, if we could, by reading something that Chogym Trumper wrote that I have found that I cannot get out of my head. I love it so much. And I just thought maybe we could unpack it. Well, just before you do that, just let's everybody know, who may not know, Chogym Trumper was a Tibetan teacher who brought Buddhism to the West in 1970, which is when I met him. So that's the teacher that I studied with.

Just to give it a little context, because everybody might not know that. So he's your grandfather. Okay. Well, he does feel like that. That is one of the qualities, I guess, of, I don't know why I feel like I know him, but it is a thing where I am, whenever I am reading him, I have this sense of familiarity with him that is very strange. Okay.

So here's the, here's this thing that I found in this book that I, that this was actually the book that triggered you becoming my meditation teacher, because I've been reading this, this book at a Ram Dass retreat that you were at, was becoming increasingly infuriated with Chogym Trumper by reading it, in a way that I've never been in any spiritual thing I've ever read. I've never been like, I've never become angry. And, and so I was angry at him at that point in time. And, but still, you know, recognizing that anger as a,

the anger coming from realizing what he was saying was resonating with what I thought could be true, but was fucking up what I wanted to be true. And so the, and so I was pissed and I, and I was up there and then I said something, I asked, because of this something on the line, do you think Hanuman is a, is permanent? And you heard me say that and I think that's when you thought, oh, well, maybe he's not such a dummy. I'm not sure what you thought, but we got to be friends after that. And I'm really lucky about because of that.

Okay, so here's the quote I thought we could start off with. Well, I never thought you're a dummy. No, I'm not. That's, yeah. Not even close. Thank you. You'd have to, you'd have to do some serious work to get to be a dummy. Yeah.

So I've been reading this chapter on fearlessness. And this is talking about Padma Sambhava's Padma Rajya, this prince that appears in a lotus flower. And this is the line metaphor metaphorically speaking, metaphorically speaking. And the way he, you know, yes, metaphorically speaking, but here is this paragraph I found that I just think really captures this joke in Trumpa, not just, you know, his philosophy, his ability, his writing. There is also a quality of fearlessness and enlightenment, not regarding the world as an enemy, not feeling that the world is going to attack us if we do not take care of ourselves. Instead, there is tremendous delight in exploring the razor's edge.

Like a child who happens to pick up a razor blade with honey on it, it starts to lick it. It encounters the sweet taste and the blood dripping off its tongue at the same time. Simultaneous pain and pleasure are worth exploring from the point of view of the sanity of crazy wisdom. This natural inquisitiveness is the youthful prince quality of Padma Sambhava. It is the epitome of non-caring, but at the same time caring very much, being eager to learn and eager to explore. What does that mean? Well, that describes you to a T, Duncan. Oh, really?

Don't you think? I think that what it does is, I want to give a real-world example. But wait, I want to ask you a question. If it does describe you, why did it make you angry? That's not what made me angry. The thing that made me angry was in the very beginning of the book where it said people who say, the thing I experienced was so powerful, I can't even describe it, are like people who have started lighting candles to their own insanity. And I'd been like, one of those people was like, oh, I was so high, that which I saw was beyond articulation.

And therefore it must have been something so incredible because you can't say what it was. And he's saying, well, it could be that you're just making your ignorance into a God and then worshiping that. And that was the part that was eating me alive because I spent my entire college career doing some version of that. But this in particular, as I mentioned to you yesterday, my dog, my Chihuahua fox, who I've had for since 2012, just suddenly couldn't breathe and I had to have him euthanized. The vet just said, yeah, we can try to keep him alive, but he's suffering greatly. And if there's probably not much we could do, he was an old dog. And so here you are in this suddenly your day goes from the day every day has been in the pandemic, annoyed with the dogs, if anything.

You know, the fox snapped at my kid and my child and Fox had started this new relationship where anytime the child walked by this like stuffed watermelon that Fox would sleep in, he would look in the watermelon, Fox would look in the watermelon and go, I have fun, which is really adorable and really sweet. And you know, anyway, so suddenly the dog is, you know, dying, you can tell. And now the dog is gone. So this in this situation, this is the razor is the loss is the now I have this empty watermelon sitting in my room. I can't even look out about crying. And but then the crying is the sweetness. And you have these two things smashing into each other at the same time.

And I guess what I love about that is it isn't tiptoeing around that this is a child cutting its tongue. It's not saying, oh, the dog is on the rainbow bridge. Oh, you know, all this stuff. It's saying, oh, you've, you looked a razor blade when you got that chihuahua you got a razor blade dipped in honey. And I just thought maybe we could talk about that idea. Well, first of all, I'm sorry for your loss. Yeah. And there's no doubt at all that if you look into our hearts and our psychology, that loss and impermanence and death is the most profound and provocative thing to contemplate.

And just for example, there was a great one of the wonderful things about studying with trunk room chase. He brought over many of the most accomplished and masterful Tibetan teachers of the last century, you know, the 20th century. So that through no good karma of my own, I got to meet many, you know, I saw that it's not just I thought maybe from which is a freak, you know, that he was so brilliant. And so, so accomplished in so many ways. But one of them was karma, 16th, who was the first. The original karma was the first reincarnation discovered in Tibet. So that's the oldest iteration of that whole idea of a tulkua reincarnate llama. So karma carries a heavy weight.

He's the head of the Kagu lineage of the Dalai Lama is the head of the Gaila lineage. And there's two other main ones. But karma, when we met karma, it was interesting because your own teacher, you see your own teacher a certain way, you know, you're up close and you see, you know, things. So him bringing one of his, his gurus over. And I just saw him, it wasn't karma, his job to work on my psyche and do the surgery and do the interaction. And, you know, it was more just man, you, you, you experienced the manifestation of the Buddha, basically, to be really blunt about it. Well, that's what a Buddha looks like. That's in the cooking show.

That's when they took the one out of the oven. You know, and we're the ones where we're like, oh, take this piece of pastry over here and do that. Then they come at the end because they don't have time. They take the one. Yeah, we're like the tray of ingredients or whatever. That's cool. Yeah. And so somebody asked karma, but well, what does an enlightened person experience?

And I thought, well, that's good. This is a smart person. They're looking for a shortcut. Most people are looking for the long way around, you know. Yeah. If I do 45 of these and I widget this and I wangle this and I kind of stand on my head and I hold my breath and pinch my eyeballs for 1100 years, you know. So this person's just going, well, you're, you're a Buddha. What's the deal?

Right. Great question. And so they asked him, yeah, right. They asked him, what does an enlightened person experience? And he just said impermanence, which was interesting. Think of the things he could have said, wisdom, compassion, skillful means, you know. But the unfolding of impermanence is really the closest we get to understanding reality. It's profound.

And it's the one thing most people don't want to consider. So therefore it's a kind of medicinal quality too. Right. Just like medicine, you know, you don't necessarily think, oh, this medicine is so sweet and delicious. Right? No. So impermanence has a bitter quality to it. Does it not?

Oh yeah. I mean, it's, you watch this animal that you've loved, its eyes roll back in its head, its tongue hang out. Yeah. And then there's no more life in this body. It's the first time I've ever, it's the most, it's a Chihuahua. It's the most nervous, it's the most nervous creature. And it's the first time I ever felt him like really relax, you know. Yeah.

And the, and so it's bitter as, I can't describe you. I mean, you're weeping in a, in a room you've never been in before. The, my, I didn't see the vet who, I couldn't even look at her. My wife said that she's crying. She's crying. She just put another dog to sleep. So she's in an hour, she's had to euthanize two dogs and, and so yeah, bitter, bitter, bitter. And then, and you know, broken heart right now.

And, but then also this other thing that no one wants to talk about either, which is, yeah, I'm fine. That's the part no one wants to talk about, you know, because then there's a performative aspect to grief. You know what I mean? Where you want to be like, Oh God. And actually I was looking at my grief and thinking, Holy shit, if this is a chance for me to be selfish for the whole fucking weekend, I could like order some whiskey. I could like do grief theater for my whole family. I could do, you know, but that, you know what I'm, but that's not completely, that's not really what's happening either. It's these two, if I, it's two things happening simultaneously.

One, I went, if I'm in the grief part, I'm crying. If I'm in the other part, I'm like, what am I some kind of fucking sociopath? Am I not honoring my dog? But when you, I like what he's saying because he's saying these two things have happened simultaneously. Yeah. So speaking about simultaneously, I know, you know, that I have a sweet tooth for synchronicity. And, you know, there's a whole chapter in my book called tendril auspicious coincidence. So in the Buddhist tradition, we call it synchronicity, but it's more than that even.

It's, and this is something like around somebody like Karmapa or Trungku Rinpoche, the atmosphere gets charged up with tendril or auspicious coincidence. So things seem to be firing synchronously. And I'm teaching in Japan this weekend. Now you might ask, how is that even possible? Well, I'm going to do it the same way I'm, I'm talking to UNL right now, but I'll be up from 8pm to 4am tonight and tomorrow night. And it'll be there Saturday and there Sunday because even though it's now in both places, it's a different time. So you can figure that one out when you, when you have time to think about it. How could it be now in both places and yet completely different day?

Right. Yeah. So, and yes, no, it was this morning at 6, 6am my time. I was on for a Friday evening workshop there. This could get your head spinning thinking about this. Don't think about it too much. And we came up, we actually were talking about impermanence. That topic arose there. So synchronously, and we came up with the words in Japanese, which is Mujo is impermanence in Japanese. And then what's the relationship between the equation we were trying to get to is how do you thrive?

How do you live a successful life? How do you live a full, rich existence that is not poverty-stricken, that's not desperate, that's not full of doubt and kind of fear? How do you live that way? And so the other word I was getting to was joy, tenoshi, which is Japanese. So we were just making this, we were jamming the way you and I jam. And so you put emptiness or impermanence together with joy. Now you have the third word was seiko, which is the same as your watch, which means fulfillment and enriching thriving. I was trying to get them to come up with a word for thrive in Japanese.

So impermanence plus joy equals thriving. That's cool, man. So if you don't, and if you don't understand both, you're not going to thrive. So if you're having joy, but you are stuck there, you know, and kind of don't understand the impermanent nature of it. You know, that's what we call the debilok or the god realm. But if you understand impermanence, but you don't, you can't feel the joy. Bliss really is actually the right technical word for it, bliss and emptiness. But if you can't feel the joy, but you'll experience the emptiness or the impermanence, that's called nihilism.

You just, you just root into a negative state of mind. So you're right on the edge of a powerful experience. I have one thought when you start telling me about it. I think about it from the dog's point of view, from Fox's point of view. That liberates everything when you think about it from other people's point of view. Everything gets much, much more expansive. And you also said, I killed my dog, but you did not kill your dog. You helped your dog die, that's the way I see it.

And it was time for your dog to die. And we don't know, we don't have the Buddha eye to see where Fox is right now. We just simply don't know. But you know, there are versions of reality in which his continuity is happening from his perspective. And maybe he's looking at you and going, maybe he can still see you in some, you know, kind of, let's say psychic kind of way. So how you can communicate with him anyhow. You just tell him you love him and you just say, it was so great. You can speak from your heart.

It was so great to have you with me. You're a great friend. And now you're at my couch. Well, you can say that. Sure. And just, but you're just sending it. We don't know where it's going to, but from your point of view, you can, you can do that. And then we have the practice of Tonglen, which is we take on whatever confusion or suffering that being might be having in transition.

And we send them, we send them delight. You know, we send them peace and we send them, we send them the tenoshita joy. And a key point, letting go. It's okay for Fox, wherever you are out there, it's okay for you to let go of this life and move on to the next one. Whatever you think that might be, it doesn't really matter. You're sending out that vibration. So, um, but you know, I've had, I've experienced what you've experienced, total grief and bliss at the same time when one of my best friends died in a car accident. I was sobbing, but I was also practicing with it and sort of staying with the energy of who that person is.

And we're human. That's our, that's, that's the deal. Sorry. That's just the deal. That's the deal. And that's the deal. And that's, you know, that is why I feel so lucky to have been working with you and, you know, the working with teachers because it, I did, I did get to, I did get to do the thing. You know, I, well, I did get to do the thing where I didn't completely try to escape into my head where I felt it when I was in there.

I felt, I'm feeling it. I'm not, you know, I'm not, because that's the, I mean, I am the master of numb, master of numbness. Sounds like the shittiest heavy metal album of all. No, it sounds like the sequel is what it sounds like. The what? The sequel. But I, I am really good at that. I've become quite, so the practice of like, no, I'm not going to do that.

This time I'm going to not just be a broken apart thing, but also have that mindfulness that, you know, let it exist within awareness. And in that it is a million times worse than succumbing just to the grief. If you succumb just to the grief, you'd go, you do go into just a sobbing, sweet, sobbing thing. But it's a weirdly it is. It's only one part of what's happening. But it's, yeah, impermanence and joy and the two things exist simultaneously. Or are they the same thing? Well, you know, here's, here's an interesting and this gets a little metaphysical and for our world that we shared with the Ram Dass retreats

and the Bhakti tradition. So you could say it's the same thing. Well, one, right? That would be saying it's the same thing. But in my tradition, we say it's the same, but it's also distinct, not one and not two. So they're interdependent. But otherwise you couldn't talk. You wouldn't have a word for each one if it was just the same thing.

Right. You'd go mush. That would be your only word in your whole language. Mush. Mush. Everything's mush. Yeah. Just mush together.

But this is Buddhist Tantra. This is, this is the, the duality is not something you just try to wipe out with the like wishful thinking. Duality is powerful. Right. You have a wife, don't you? Are you the same? I have a wife. One thing?

What? What kind of, what kind of relationship? We're definitely not the same thing. Can you hold on one second, please? Yeah, sure. It's a glorious thing that during this pandemic, we have a way to connect online. Can you imagine if we weren't lucky enough to have the internet? A tremendous thank you to Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH.

They are an all in one website service, but it's not just websites. You want to buy a domain? They've got it. You want to build an online store? They've got it. And they've got marketing tools that you can use for your online business. Also, if you want to see the power, beauty, glory, sweetness and all encompassing perfection of Squarespace, go no further than dunkintrosil.com.

That is a Squarespace website. Anytime we upload an episode of the DTFH, we use Squarespace. We've got a new feature, email campaigns. Now you can stand out in any inbox with Squarespace email campaigns. You can get consistent content from your website to email. They've got powerful editing tools so that you could... It's essentially like the email campaign is the new zine. And that's what I love about Squarespace is you're only going to be limited by what you can imagine with them.

They're so powerful and it's such an incredible thing and they keep evolving, which I think is a wonderful quality of that company. You can turn your cool idea into a website. You can showcase your work. You can announce an upcoming event or a special project. Look, you can even just make a website for your friend. It sounds weird, but it's a really cool, modern, strange pandemic gift to just build out some kind of website for your friend

who might be hesitating taking the leap into the online business world. Whatever you need to do online, Squarespace has everything you could possibly need. So head over to squarespace.com forward slash Duncan for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. This episode of your series, and the friends of mine who did get onto it, that eighth episode is pretty deep and I think it's true, you can correct me,

that your mother and I are the only people who play ourselves in your show. That is correct. I mean, everyone, it's all from me. I understand. Yeah, but for sure, yes. You and my mom were the only ones who were animated to be themselves and that was intentional. Yeah, but your mom really walked through that, you know,

not many people are going to have the experience you have with your mother, Duncan. That's just the bottom line. There's going to be a lot of confusion, a lot of anxiety around impermanence and dying and all that stuff. So your mom had really processed it, you know, and then she processed it with you in real time, very, very cool, very wonderful. And, you know, a lot of people can learn from that because most people fear death and they fear impermanence and they fear thinking about it

and they fear talking about it. And it's the one thing that made the Buddha get out into the search. He would have just been a comfy guy. He would have been, you know, a comfy guy if it wasn't for experiencing impermanence and old age and sickness and death. So it does jolt us, it jars us. A lot of people don't like to talk about it. A lot of people have fantasies about it that may or may not be true.

Right. I hear people talking about it as if they're like, you know, well, this happens and then the light and then the crystals. You know, I go like, OK, well, I'm glad that you have that view. But we don't know and that's the most powerful thing about it. May I ask you this question? This is something that's been haunting me throughout the pandemic because it seems like some kind of psychosis or something.

But how do we know that this isn't death? How do we know that we're not in the bardo between actual life and, you know, our past life and our future life? How do we know? How do we know this thing that we are calling reality isn't just death, that we've already died? Well, so that's pretty easy to clarify from a Buddhist point of view. The answer is it is.

We did already die. And from the point of view of what you're talking about is called the bardo teachings. Probably people have read the book of the dead or something. The bardo means in between state, in between, right? So in between what and what doesn't matter. It's the part in between. So this is one of the bardos. The obvious bardo, let's say the big print bardo as you died,

your consciousness is having certain experiences, qualities to it and then you actually end up in another body in some kind of, with some degree of discontinuity, some degree of continuity. But then there's six bardo states. That's just one of them. Dreams is a bardo. Right. Orgasm is a bardo.

What? Yes. Orgasm is a bardo state. And this very life, moment by moment life is considered a bardo. But that's more subtle, right? Like right now you're between your last thought and the next one you're about to think of. You're looking for it.

I can see it in your eyes. I'm listening to what you're saying and I'm just thinking like, I have really fast bardos. I was, it's a premature ejaculation joke, David. Oh, good. But what? Okay. So let's talk about the death bardo.

So the death bardo is described in the bardo, I think is that? Total. And so here we have all these descriptions of it. Now, how do we know for sure that that is real? And how do we know that this thing we're in right now, even though they would say, oh, this is the bardo of life, isn't just more confusion that happens in the bardo of death?

In other words. Oh, well, wait. Yeah, of course. It's the same. Okay. What is confusion is having a sense that what is appearing, what's apparent is literally true. Yes.

That's a good definition of confusion. Like you think a rope is a snake. Right. Right. That's the sort of obvious example. You think when you go to the football game and they go into the huddle that they're talking about you. Right.

That's called paranoia. Right. Yeah. I've never gotten that high, but now I probably think that. Right. So confusion is just mistaking the way things appear for how they actually are. And so, of course, 99% of our experience in this particular

wherever we think we are right now is has the texture of that. Right. You know, and so by tuning into in between states, you're actually glimpsing a kind of different aspect of consciousness or mind, which is extremely, it has certain qualities to it that are different than the confused state. And that's why when you practice meditation, what do you do?

What do you do? Well, I follow my breath. And when I'm thinking, I go thinking. Yeah. But the breath is irrelevant. The breath is just a technique, a method for what? Bringing your mind back to some kind of present presence and experience.

If you could do that, you don't need the breath. And the more progress techniques, you don't need the breath. You just come back to, I mean, like what? Just be here now. Wait. So that year now is considered in between the daydream or something? Yeah. Of course, if you're being here now, you're not in the past.

You're not in the future. Oh, shit. And therefore, there's not a lot of thought that's relevant to that experience. The thought comes afterwards. I'd like to describe this to somebody else. All right. Look about it.

The actual experience happens like that. That's how fast it is. And that's how death happens. So for Fox, Fox has one little minute there recognizing, you know, the reality and then the hallucinations come back because they have so much momentum. Right. That's what we all have strong habits and patterns.

They just kind of create a little bit of a, you know, loop. Gotcha. It's so quick. It's very fast. And this to me, it just happened. Did you see it? It just happened now. I missed that one.

But I want to chat with you a little bit about the concept of paradise, particularly the idea of the Amanides Buddha. Do you know how do you pronounce it? Yeah. Amitabha. I wonder if you can talk about that a little bit. Yeah. Well, there's, um, within the relative reality, within the

confused states, there's, you could say relatively more positive and relatively more threatening. Right. Like if you just look through a day, we go, I just had a nice walk. We saw the sunset, me and Aaron, you know, all kinds of things are evolving and cooking there that you, you're, and you feel a little bit of peace and happiness.

And, um, then you, you, um, come home and you see your dog, uh, Fox is, um, in distress. Yes. And your reality flips. It switches tone or mood. Yes. So that's, that's where the six realms come in that we've talked about, you know, from my book, Awakening from the

Daydream, if people want to read more about it, the six realms are either relatively more pleasurable or more painful, just like reality is, right? Just like our experiences. Right. So the, there are certain realms in the higher realms that where there's a lot of good karma happening, a lot of good energy.

I mean, Maui was that in a certain way. Yes. Right. You know, we, we got cranky and stuff like that, but nobody is serious about being cranky. Right. No. You know.

So that's, that's the notion of Amitabha is the Buddha, the form of Buddha that, um, kind of connects one with those kind of more positive energies. And so therefore you have a ease, much easier shot at awakening there and getting enlightened. You're just not like fighting mosquitoes all day. You know, it's just that the atmosphere is kind of more, more, um, pleasurable, more positive, um, more compassionate,

all those qualities. But what you're saying is, as I've read it, uh, the idea is that when you're dying somehow, just from the consideration of this being, you get transported or you, you travel to this realm, which is this paradise realm within, within which you can then, it still isn't considered enlightenment, but it's, it's, it's like a, I don't know. It's like the one time Rogan took me to some UFC in Europe

and like, I, like they took him in a, when, you know, when the plane, like that we went to some secret fucking, like, I don't know what it was. Robin Williams was there. It was like a little airport lounge where there's caviar and and I'm like, what the fuck is this? But it's like the, um, this is, this is the, it's that version of that, but in the spiritual realm.

So when you're making your soul pilgrimage or whatever you want to call it, if you're not quite ready to do whatever the hell it is, the letting go, the giving up the samsaric cycle or whatever that is, there's this place you can go that isn't human realm that isn't the, whatever full realization is, but it's a place where it's easier to practice. Well, it's like the first class lounge, isn't it? In a way.

It's perfect metaphor, perfect, perfect metaphor for what you're saying. Yeah. You know, but, but it could become, and again, this is all the wheel of life really clarifies a lot, those teachings clarify a lot of this. It can become its own little form of golden trap for people and they got to have that and any sense of irritation or anything

tricky to work with or challenging gets sort of swept under the rug, moved out to the side, you know, you have people who take care of those kind of things. And then it just becomes an ordinary God realm, which is completely samsaric, but it, you, you go like, well, I'm having a good time. So, um, don't, don't, don't bother me. And it's just another, it's another form of attachment.

Now I love your book, Awakening from the Daydream. It's one of my top go-tos, Gris for the Mill, Awakening for the Daydream, the beer now, of course. And in it, you're talking about this, these are psychological states. Um, in other words. And literal and literal and literal. So in, so maybe you could talk a little bit about in this realm,

the realm of the gods, and then I have a question after that regarding. Yeah. So basically the, the, the way that Trungpa Rinpoche taught this material, which is what I'm, what I carried on, carried forward with, is that for a modern Western person to understand these, uh, teachings, they clearly have an esoteric element to them.

It's describing states of mind. It's describing experiences that we have, way, ways that we shape our experience. That's what the realms are. So another way of thinking about it is once we shape our experience, it, it, it kind of becomes literal. You know, so think of a homeless person, uh, in L.A. That, of course, the person might have a certain amount of

depression, anxiety about their life, but the whole realm has kind of become quite literal. Um, you know, so, so it's hard to even get any frame of reference say, this is your state of mind. It doesn't have any meaning to say that to somebody who's in that situation. You'd have to work with the whole context of the situation. Right.

So, you know, and the best thing you could do is improve the situation. Right. Cause that's called the hell realm. So, um, you know, there's a literal, there are realms, they say, of existence in which that level of suffering is nothing. You know, people are being stabbed in the eye and then

recovering and being stabbed in the eye again or having molten lead poured down their throats and then revived and have, you know, real metaphor for suffering, which is the way I chose to talk about it in the Western context. But according to the fullest iteration of it, it's exoteric also. And like, for example, you're in a human body there. Right.

We talked about the animal. Yeah, you are. No doubt about it. And then Fox was in an animal body. Yes. Now, could, you know, could Fox go to, you know, Fox might have to go through some, uh, experiences and then dogs are like very close to human.

Maybe, maybe he's got some human qualities in him too. Or you look at people that you can see right in front of your eyes. They're turning into an animal as you're talking to them. Yes. Or I've watched myself turn into an animal. Yeah. Absolutely.

So that's what the realms are both illusory, but the illusion can get very solid. Let's put it that way. Okay. So we're in a solid illusion right now, I would say. The realm of the gods and you know, I, I, there's a, I saw this video and it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. It was a woman living in this ballet, this, you know, ballet

like mansion, just every beautiful and she's like tearing up as she's being interviewed because there's too much construction and they're having to deal with construction of vehicles going by her mansion and it's upsetting her. She's crying. And so for her, even though these physical surroundings are like, I mean, a person in a homeless encampment would probably wouldn't even think that I will ever be in that place.

You know, but for her, she, her mind state has produced a hell realm surrounded by, by God realm, by God realm. And if we take that to the mythological plane, there's this idea that there are these beat celestial beings that are disturbed somehow by their near omnipotence, by their eternal ability to have infinite resources, but then also the implication and this is what I, the real thing I want to ask you about. And I, and again, this is just maybe just literalism and

woo woo bullshit and just, but it really, is there the possibility that in the celestial realm of the gods that we're talking about, which I do believe exists, that some of these beings are looking down on the human realm as a kind of homeless encampment and thinking to themselves, I want to, we want to help. We don't want, we want to get in there. We want to, I think there's a way that we can actually give aid to the human realm to upshift it, to transform it.

Yes. Yeah. And I think one of the things about the Wheel of Life is there's a Buddha activating and manifesting in each realm. So there's always some possibility in every situation and this is, this is also impermanence, by the way. This is the positive, you know, remember Mad Magazine, the positive side of impermanence is that one, one thing that's impermanent is your, your embryo that was forest was impermanent

and now it's a baby. Yes. Right. So there's the flip side that change allows things to grow, to develop. That's not often understood as part of impermanence because other understanding of impermanence is nihilistic. Right. Oh, it's all just bad news, you're fucked, you know. Right. So that's, that's not it.

It's that things are shifting, changing by nature, dynamically, in real time and your mind is actually capable of working with that in that way without wishing it was other than it is. You have that potentiality, you can train it. But still, this, my question is more along the lines of aliens. The gods help helping. Yeah, like, like the, the, the, like, you know, one of the things when I started working with you and really reading Trump is writing

and you know, one of the things that's very confusing to me is the plurality of Buddhas. That's, you know, because when we first hear about Buddhas and we think there's one Buddha, but then you start reading it and it's, it seems like there's thousands of Buddhas out there. Well, it depends, you know, what level, what meaning you want to describe to the word. For example, there are billions of Buddhas because all sentient beings by nature are Buddha.

Right. Including ants crawling across your property. Their nature is Buddha. Oh, wow. Now, if you see it that way, that's called sacred view. Wow. And you don't just step on an ant because you're having a bad day, you know, and it doesn't deserve to live. And, you know, and you're more privileged or whatever.

So that's, that's the purest view is that all the beings are, have that potentiality. I don't know any Buddhas who don't hold that view. I don't know any great teachers who don't have that view. There are many great stories about this, but when you walk into a room full of people, what do you see? What do you actually see? You see their temporal situation and whatever overlay and confusion and anxiety is, and then you see

a certain kind of glistening, you know, kind of potency that may or may not be contacted or actualized to the extent that it can be, you know, and that's called compassion because you, it's not compassion because you feel this poor person is so, so low and I could help them. So if somebody was a God and was able to help somebody in a vertical way, the way you're talking about it, it would, they would have to have that recognition.

This person is, I'm not going to save this person from themselves. I'm going to just help to help them to realize what's possible for them. Because you see it in them. You have to see it. Otherwise it's not compassion. It's just codependence. Wow.

You don't, and you don't, and this is the ruiner of righteousness is the problem here because the moment you see that, you know, you can't unsee it. The moment you see it in all the, whatever the thing is that you have been enjoying scapegoating, the moment you see that thing you're talking about in there, it really, it's not like, how can you, how can you attack it? How can you be aggressive to it when you have seen what you're

talking about in it? It's a, it really is. It cracks you open. Yeah. And it's a tall order because we have our fear and our greed and our anxiety. You know, everybody has that. So it makes you want to tighten up and hold back and not take a

chance and have a strong point of view that's maybe got more force than it does in clarity. You know, so we're all in that, you know, that's also the seed of compassion is you were recognized to, you know, I mean, I guess the Christians say there, but for the grace of God, go I and that, and that what they would say. Yes. You know, that's compassion.

But not if you view the person as kind of like a destitute, incompetent, incapable, you have to see the Buddha nature, the consciousness. And then, then your relationship to whatever they're hallucinating is going to shift. And it doesn't mean you become a gooey, loving new age. He kind of, it's all, you know, it doesn't mean that because actually what it could mean is you become quite direct in terms

of communicating with people. So, you know, that's, that's kind of a possibility for us is to not shy away from other people's confusion. And then it manifests as skillful interaction with them, which has a number of different possibilities. One is nurturing and another one is being really direct. Like when you told me it was bullshit when I said that there, remember, do you remember?

I bet you do. You, I was trying to say that I don't have any intention. And because I, we were talking about intentionality. We were talking about intention. You remember this? And I was completely, completely bullshitting in front of the whole class because I wanted to see, I don't even know what I was going for.

It was very arrogant, I think, but I was trying to like say, I didn't have any intentionality in anything. Like I was just kind of like free Roman the world and just happened to end up sitting with you talking about Buddhism. And you said, you said in front of the whole class, you're like, that's bullshit. I did. Yes, you did.

And it was true, which is why I hurt so bad because, but in a good way, it helped me, you know, I needed that. I needed that. That was a good one. That's it. That was a good one. You never do that. You're very rarely do that.

But in that case, you had like really discovered or you had like had a chance to pull a thread of this, this story I've been trying to put into my life, which is because, you know, if we don't have intention, then we don't have culpability. If we don't have intention, you know, the moment you can remove intention, then all of a sudden, you're free of all karma or something, I guess. You know, you don't have to, you know, you can pretend that

Yes, pretend that people that you have hurt, you didn't mean to, but then also you can imagine that if you've helped anybody, it's you didn't really mean to do that either. It's nihilism. You turn into a kind of like blob of nothingness. Yeah. Yeah. Protoplasm.

Protoplasm. Well, the, the four skillful actions according to this Buddhist way of looking at it is first you pacify, you allocate space, you hold space for somebody or for the situation. So, so there's a calm or a kind of gentleness and expansiveness and everybody can just, okay, let's slow down. Let's not start talking right away. Let's sit for five minutes first or let's, let me listen to you

first. That is something that is not happening anywhere in America right now. Nobody is listening. Right. It's starting actually with the, it's just starting to happen that white people are starting to listen because they've been shooting their mouths off for centuries and a lot of people are just going

like, I might just need to listen here. Yes. I'm doing it. I'm just trying to go like, let me just be the student for a minute here and let me listen. That's pacifying energy. Then there's enriching, which is kind of suffusing. That's the honey part of the razor blade.

You know, there's some kind of joy. There's some kind of depth of experience. There's some kind of positive energy in the situation and you reinforce it. You go like, you know, you say you can do it. Let me help. Whatever, whatever form that takes. Then there's magnetizing, which is dealing with alienation, you know, and somebody just feels left out, you know, so you invite them in,

you include them, you draw them in. And then the fourth one is the wrathful one or destroying action, which to be very clear about it. If you're angry, don't try it. It's very simple because there's a danger with each of the four, the pacifying one, you could go to sleep. The enriching one is you sort of look over situations and you're not clear. The magnetizing one is it's all about kind of, you know,

what do you think about me thinking about you thinking about me thinking about your latest movie, you know, it turns into that kind of Hollywood. Yes. And then the destroying one is just cutting through to the straight shot and it can be so soft. It can be like a sharp knife cutting through butter. I mean, I was thinking as you're saying that it could be just somebody's eyebrow just goes up like that, like Spock, you know.

Right. Oh, really? Right. The person goes, you know, so for some, it's very rare that I would say that's bullshit, almost on a matter of principle. So I must have, if I did say it, either been out of my mind or understood that we were playing still, that you would get the joke. Oh, yeah.

Otherwise, I would never say it. I did. David, it was the other person's going to get the joke sooner or later. Then it's, you just, you saved both of you a lot of years of whatever. You just have to understand how much that helped me. I mean, it was, it was the beginning. That's what I mean by getting the job. Okay.

That was how I really started exploring intention and thinking about the offering of the merit with meditation and why am I sitting and what is, I really started to at the very least look at the, like the, what is going on here? I haven't really, I don't know that I've even come close to understanding intentionality, but at least I'm not tricking myself into thinking that I'm floating around like some unintentional protoplasmic goo or something like that. Like Clancy without the arms. Yeah.

Yes. Exactly. I also wanted to ask you, and here's a really weird question, but I thought this is a fun question. I think maybe after this question, we can, people are asking questions and we can go to their questions, but do you think we knew each other in previous incarnations? How long have you been my teacher? Because

And you never write and you never call. That's, that's, that's kind of a Jewish approach. I knew you. I knew him since he was in Mesopotamia and he never writes, he never calls. So, you know, here's, here's, I'm, I'm just going to answer this a little differently. I'm going to give you my theory of the Jell-O of time. Okay. Time is, time is like Jell-O with little, the fruit Jell-O that has those things, and

the things in the Jell-O are temporal events, but they're kind of in this giant blob of Jell-O. And so do we know each other in the past, present and future? Yes, of course, because that's how things unfold. So my guess would be, you know, if there was such a thing as previous incarnations, if I had the gift to be able to see them, which some people do, you know, I, I, I feel like we can get a feeling about it by what's happening now. If we believe there's any such thing as a future, which I have my doubts in my current

search, maybe the future doesn't really actually exist in a way, but the past has impact and the future does not yet exist. That's why I would say the past doesn't really exist either, but it has impact on what's happening right now. And you're a fool if you don't acknowledge that. If you say, oh, there's no past, you know, okay, that's like saying there's no intention. You know, things have gotten to this point by, by the virtue of the past. So of course we have an unusually, you know, potent and enjoyable conversation and there's

got to be some karma in that. But it's so, you know, what happens when I don't spend time talking to you and we are conversations go to my dreams. We have conversations of my dreams now. I, then I realized like, oh God, you really are taking this man for granted. Like you, it's such a, it's such a, I don't know. You know, I have friends who I don't talk to for years and I talk to them and not a second is past and it feels like that with you, you know, but then also, and this God forgive

me for even saying it out loud. Now I have this piece in my heart that's like, well, I don't know how long David's going to be around for. And I don't either. And that makes two of us. Yeah. And then now it, then it makes me feel like I'm rushed. Now it's like, you know, now I feel like I'm in a hurry with you or something.

Or I feel like, oh, you better like just, you know, I don't know, like Anaconda, David and squeeze out every single thing you did. Did you, did you feel like that about Joachim Trump or Rinpoche? Yes. But there were other feelings mixed with it. He was, and one of the things that I'm working on right now as a kind of spiritual friend, you know, doing that kind of work sometimes is a lot of people like you, Duncan. I just was online with somebody else.

Many, many people I meet are more like your age and even younger, you know, 30. I would say a lot of students are in their 30s or 40s. I'm 72. So if I get together with my clan, which is that we call them the old dogs, you know, of the Trump crowd, we have a certain way of, you know, skip, you know, we experienced a kind of clan quality and a lot of powerful experiences. But most of my orientation, you know, I'm not looking back. I'm looking forward.

That's just who I am right now. And so I'm very interested in the young students. Like I'm passionately interested in people like you. It's not a small thing. It's like when you call, I light up, I go, oh, Duncan's on the phone. We're going to be able to talk about real shit. You know, I don't have to, I don't have to like, you know, yeah, well, let me look at my calendar.

You know, I mean, it's like, we're going to just jump into it. And I experienced the same thing, which is that every gap is like a comma to me, even if it's a month or something like that. And then you call. I just feel like that was a comma. And now we're continuing. And it's very spontaneous. I just, I have a rule with you.

I'm not going to like think about too much about what I'm, you know, and it's also respecting the podcast quality. Yeah. You know, I have a lot of prepared stuff, but no, we're just going to see, we're going to jam basically. It's a jam session. But I want to talk about one last thing and then we'll take questions. And I'll wait.

You asked me about Trump. But so he said something in his will because he had a big group. He had a lot of students. So if you got a piece of him in live action, that was, that was, that was unusual because there was a lot of people, thousands of people. He said in his will, I will haunt you and he has haunted me. Wow. Whatever that means.

And so because he used was a master in my opinion of all four karmas. Sometimes it was the most fun person to be within the world. Really funny, really playful. He said, if it's not funny, it's not Buddhism. So there was jokes. There was hanging out. He was unafraid of the, of the toxicology of the world, both in terms of people's neurosis and literally physical substances.

So he, he was, as my opinion, and it's hard to frame this in current realities is that he was fearless in terms of how he interacted with all, all of us and all of that. But he also was challenging to be with at times, very, like very provocative. Yeah. And, and I had to keep deciding to go back in and many people who study with him will know what I'm talking about because he could, he had the skill to manifest the wrathful energy. And now misunderstanding with that was that he was a crazy person or something like that.

It was, it was not like that, but there was a sense of being pushed to the edge of your envelope by the mere, mere quality of his presence and the unrelenting, unrelenting quality of presence. Right. So that's in there. That's in the mix too, is what I'm saying. That's in you. And this is the thing.

Really? Oh, Dave, this is the thing. When I, well, I don't know about the substances thing necessarily, but the, I was thinking, okay, this is, and again, I'll cut this out of the podcast because I do feel like many of y'all, by y'all, I mean my teachers seem to get real squirmy whenever I mentioned the, the woo-woo stuff. So there's only, there's not a big crowd listening to this right now, but this is one of the many weird things that has happened in our work together.

I'm literally, we've been texting. I have my phone down and I'm thinking, I don't remember what it was you said. I'm getting on neurotic and wondering if you were saying that I was arrogant or something. And then I'm thinking, I am fucking arrogant. And then, and then, and then, and then I thought something like, yeah, I guess that's what a teacher does sometimes. They just like, they're good at like throwing jabs. Then I look at my phone.

I haven't even been talking to you. This is just my mental continuum. And you texted me. The real jab is you meditating for 20 minutes every day. What's that? I mean, seriously, what is that? Oh, well, that's tendril. That's synchronicity.

That's, that's exactly what we were talking about before. You know, I, I, when I think about something like that, I think, well, of course, why wouldn't that happen? See what I'm working with your people. I tell you why it doesn't happen. We're too busy in our heads to really notice the kind of flow, you know, the kind of, you know, like synchronicity is a powerful, powerful thing. And I always, I have a rule, pay attention when it happens. Right.

Pay attention. If you just notice two things at once, even like, for example, I was talking about impermanence and joy this morning in Tokyo online. And then you, your dog died. And so we're talking about impermanence, but I had this link prepared because we've talked about impermanence and enjoy this coming together. And that was exactly what you started talking about, licking honey from the razor blade. It's like this conversation you started this morning just continued in a different body. It just, to be honest, I feel a little bit Duncan, like the guy, the chess guy in the park who's playing 20 games.

Wow. That's cool. And it's like, oh, this, oh, this game. Okay. These moves. That's cool. And, you know, and, and it just seems like that's what we're all doing. We're all playing multiple chess games.

Right. Right. And you go like, okay, what's the now thing? So of course that can jump into, you know, kind of spontaneous bursts of knowledge, which is called intuition or called even when you, when you have intuition to another degree, it's called oracular, you know, oracle is always downloading that kind of information. And there are people who are trained to do that. Um, so, but our thing is just, there's, you know, kind of a commonality. We're walking on the same road.

You know, you're saying, oh, look at the flowers over here. I'm saying this. And then all of a sudden it's like the two of you say the same thing at the same time and it's going to happen. Right. Okay. Fair enough. I'll take that answer. It's a beautiful answer.

It's actually the most detailed you've ever been the many other times I go, what the fuck, David. But now let's take it to the quest, to questions from folks. Sure. How much more time do you have, David? I'm, I'm open on the back end. So it's up to you guys. Okay, great. You know, one second, let me, I was trying to be clever with dual monitors and hold on one second.

I'm going to open up something so it'll seem like I'm not paying attention for a second here. Okay. So we have a bunch of questions, but the cool thing about this is people vote the questions. But this is an unfortunate, the most voted question, David. Do you prefer raw or roasted cashews? Now, see, that is a perfect, perfect example of what we're just talking about. Why? I'll tell you why.

I'm at my house on Long Island. I've been here for three months by myself. I've seen people this way, but hardly ever an actual three-dimensional corpseable human being. Corpseable. So what am I doing? Well, I'm cooking. I don't usually cook that much for myself. I'm cleaning up.

I'm eating. That's like an event. I'm also, I'm not eating that much, but I'm trying to eat healthy and keep. I want to keep healthy right now with this situation. But what's one of my favorite thing? Nuts, because you can snack on nuts, even if you're on a kind of healthy diet and that's a good snacking thing. I've got about five different kinds of nuts in my kitchen, and I'll just go in and have three nuts. Now, the last batch of nuts that I dealt with was cashews.

And what the person said, cashews. Yeah. And I like them toasted. So when I get the nuts from the store, I put them in a frying pan, just low heat, and I toast the nuts and I put them back in the container. So that is a current issue for me. That's not just some random metaphor, allegorical question. Literally, I like my cashew nuts toast, and I just did it. Ah, cool.

That's unbelievable. That's so cool, man. Well, that was from Dr. Shudd. That person's probably intuitive, whoever said that. And in fact, you can write them back and say, I bet you're an intuitive person, and this happens to you one time. They're listening right now. Yeah. What's their name?

That's from Dr. Shudd. Dr. Oh, he's, I mean, you know. Oh, these are the names they give themselves. It could be a doctor. I don't know. Handles. Here we go.

This is the next question. People use the term meditate on it, something, as we can have a theme or object of meditation. But every practice I've encountered is basically trying to not think in simplistic term, parentheses and simplistic terms. So how does one meditate on a topic? For example, to reach a decision. That's a great question. And there are many, many different types of meditation. Even within Buddhism, there are probably thousands of different practices and things.

So it all depends on what you're trying to cultivate. So one way to think about, there's two ways to think about meditation. One is you're just becoming familiar with something. Maybe you're becoming more familiar with the feeling being present. Maybe you're becoming more familiar with your thoughts and emotions coming and going. So that's the word gaum in Tibetan. G-O-M means to become familiar with something. Another way of thinking about it is you're strengthening some quality that you have.

Compassion. You can meditate on compassion. You strengthen your relationship to compassion. You meditate on the quality of impermanence. You contemplate impermanence. I teach this one program that's called, it's the first leg of a teacher training program. And the first level is just an overview of meditation so people can get questions like this answered. So there are four practices that we do in that one weekend program.

The first one is the mindfulness, which that person's right, he or she, whatever, whichever they are, is saying, yeah, it's sort of more intuitive and I'm trying to just relate to the quality being present and maybe not repress the thoughts, but just let them come and go, come back, come back, come back. Then there's an awareness practice which is less focused on an object of meditation, you know, more surround sound. You know, just appreciate the whole play of phenomenon, but still in the intuitive and direct perception level. Then there's contemplative meditation, which is what our friend is really talking about there. You think, you're supposed to think. You're meditating, you're contemplating on a particular topic though.

You're not just going like, let me just, I'll just, I'll just think about anything I want to. That's called life, you know, you're already doing that. You don't need to practice that anymore. Now I'm going to think about impermanence. I'm going to hold my mind to that topic. How does that make me feel? Is everything subject to impermanence? Buddha said everything's, you know, conditioned things are subject to impermanence.

So you can think it through and there's, you're developing something called prajna, which is discernment. And you can apply that to sort of sublime topics and powerful, you know, deep topics. And you could apply it to how to use a Phillips head screwdriver. You know, that's called lower prajna, just ordinary prajna. Yeah, you know, you look at, for example, you look at the screw and you go, how come this screwdriver is not working? Right. What don't I know here? Right.

And you go to the wiki, you know, wiki, or you go to, and you go, here's the description of this screw. And I said, you need a Phillips head screwdriver. Right. And so the purpose of contemplative meditation is to generate insight and perspective. Right. And then the fourth one we do is a compassion practice. And that's, you contemplate loving kindness. You think about all your friends.

You think about all your enemies. You think about all the people you don't really know or care about. You think about yourself. You think about your mother. And just for goodness sake, just contour your thoughts and wishes for all those people in a positive direction. So that's kind of meditation too. Then there's visualizing deities and mandalas and chanting mantras. And there's a million things that are just working with different aspects of our minds.

Is there a hierarchy to these? Is it a hierarchy? It's a good question. In the terms of the, and again, that weekend program is meant to illuminate. It's kind of, it's kind of a frequently asked question, compendium in a way. There is a progression. Let's call it a progression. And in Buddhist terms, classically, it's Hinayana, Mahayana, Vajrayana.

So there's like narrow, middle, and kind of progressed. And they use different methods and techniques. The basis of the first round is kind of getting clarity about your own state of mind. That's what we're all really, we really got to start there. Then the second one is developing compassion and the interpersonal realm, you know, becoming more liberated. The first is becoming more liberated in the personal realm, then becoming more liberated interpersonal realm. And the third one is really trying to discover the nature of reality in a very direct way. Without any bias, without thinking, well, it's got to be compassionate.

It's got to be free. What is it actually? How do you feel right now? What are you experiencing? Is it a problem? You're angry. Is that a problem? Well, it's a problem because I heard somebody.

Okay. What is the anger without, without that aggression in it? What does it look like? Wow. And you get to the pure forms of those energies. So that's a little subtler. So obviously, and more transformative. Pure forms of anger?

Oh, sure. Wow. That is so wild. Oh, this is something that's another one. I hate to keep promoting my own programs. You should promote. Please do. I'm in it.

Well, okay. Well, this is one that I think would be great. It's in August. Again, this was going to be up at Tibet House, but it's all online now. And so they're all on my website. So the one that's coming up in August is there's another level one intro to Buddhism and mindfulness program that's going to be through Kaya Yoga in Connecticut. And that's July 22nd and 23rd.

And then July 29th and 30th, four evenings, three hours, stints, Kaya Yoga, K-A-I-A, yoga.com. And that's what's coming right up. That would be probably a great starting point. In August, there's a program which is called the Five Wisdom Energies. And this is something, I don't think you and I have gotten to this yet, Duncan, but we could do that soon. I'm still in one. I'm still just sitting. I'll try to do some deity visualization or something.

No, no, this is not deity visualization. The deities have come down to visit in a very practical way in this kind. It's basically saying the deities are your own energies. And guess where they really reside in your emotions. You want to know what a deity is? It's part of your emotional landscape. It's the enlightened part of the emotional landscape. So you go, what's enlightened about pride?

That's just stupid. You shouldn't be proud. But there's something in it. When you know somebody who's proud, they have a certain kind of richness about them. A certain kind of generosity that's usually part of the package. So what is that energy like in its pure form? And rather than throwing out the confusion, you transform the confusion into its wisdom aspect. That's alchemy.

That's some kind of crazy alchemy. It's alchemy. It's totally alchemy. It's Buddhist alchemy. Wow. That's heavy, man. That gives me a lot of energy. It's easy too.

It's easy to learn about it. It's not hard to learn about it. And so there's many different access points. And I like helping people find what they're looking for. I guess I'd be a good librarian or something like that. You're just a great, you're just one of the great teachers, man. Okay, we're going to take one more question. We have lots and lots and lots, but I'm having a little bit of paranoia because I want to make sure this is our recording.

I'm afraid I just want to just make sure we get all this. This is a great question. Hello, sweet friends Duncan and David. Can you guys talk about the Buddhist practice of cultivating love? How can we cultivate and project love energetically, especially for those of us who struggle a lot with self-hatred and anger toward the world? Thank you. So in that training that I talked about with the four modules, the fourth one is metta, loving kindness practice. That's your ticket.

What's the person's name? 10,000 grows in a trench coat. That's a very creative name. I know. I love that name. I mean, you can visualize that right away. And you open the trench coat and they all fly out. Oh, that's cool.

I never thought of that. That's what I saw. Yeah, I guess they could be static there too, but I would say open the trench coat would be the short answer to your question, let the crows fly out. But without being poetic about it, metta, loving kindness practice. That's your ticket. I think it's pretty easy to access. You can look in my, probably both my books have it and you can look online. And maybe you've done it.

10,000 crows. It's like an Indian name too. Native American name. 10,000 crows in a trench coat. Yes. What have you seen 10,000 crows in a trench coat? Where have you been? I've been opening my trench coats so the crows can fly out, take on their own true nature, which is love and compassion is already in there.

Of course, you know, maybe we receive certain impact from people and things in our life that made us doubt that that really happens. Unfortunately, fairly easily that people can doubt their own goodness. Yes. And that's, you could call that self hatred. I think it also has to do with doubt and not, not having the conviction that that's what's really in your heart in the first place. So the process has to be one tilting a little bit and you know, you're over on the hard right side of the boat, you go to the left side of the boat. You know, you emphasize the positive element and that's what that practice does. And you also explore.

You look at the root of your experience a little bit more. Sometimes that's meditation. Sometimes that can be therapy in other ways. But we got it at the end of the day. I feel we have to trust ourselves. There's no other choice. Literally, we have to trust ourselves. So you have to find a way to explore what you need to explore, cultivate what you need to cultivate and have some kind of basic faith that you have the potential, the capacity to do that.

I used to say, you can do it. You can do it. I didn't even know. I mean, he was even, he would just leave the room and say, you can do it. You don't even know what he's referring to. It's just a positive kind of iteration. So good luck to, and if we can help, if Duncan, I can help you, we will help you. Absolutely.

And David, I am so grateful to you for your time here today. This is, as always, these are my favorite conversations on earth. And I would love it if you could actually share some ways. I know you did already. You gave, you gave folks your email, which for the, when we released this as a big podcast episode, I'll have Aaron delete that. Cause that's just, that's opening the gates of, that's opening chaos into your life. A lot of people are going to email you, but, um, Well, I hope they have a purpose in mind other than just rattling the Venetian blinds.

Some people love to rattle those blinds. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, well anyhow, you use your judgment on that. Okay. I'm not, you know, as savvy probably as you are about what comes and goes. And I've deliberately maintained a certain level of ignorance about, you know, social media and stuff like that.

Would you, would you be interested in hopping in from time to time? We have this community that gathers on a sort of discord server. If I gave you a link, would you be into hopping in there and saying hi to folks? Of course. Great. Can I see them? Well, you'll see their chat. You'll see their chats.

I'll show, I'll show you how to use it. And it would be great for your students too. I mean, it's, it's one of my favorite, it's an amazing bit of technology. But David, could you let everybody know? You already did talk about your classes, but just a way for folks to connect to you who listen to this and probably are interested in taking some of your courses or reading your books. Well, the one, and here's the liberating fact of the pandemic. It doesn't matter where you are anymore. It used to matter.

So I would have been in LA. I know I would have been in Japan this week, but I'm going to Japan in a couple of hours, but I'm doing it this way. Magic carpet ride. So the program that's coming up next, which is a complete 100 hour mindfulness meditation teacher training program. This is what I'd recommend for people. At least the level one, the first weekend introductory program really gets a lot of this framed out and a lot of starting point. And that's at Kaya, K-A-I-A yoga. And it's, it'll be on my website, davidnickturn.com.

And just come, you can come for any of those four, there's four evenings, the 22nd, 23rd, 29th and 30th. So I would say if that's where you, if you, we could meet up there. That'd be a cool way to meet up to just to register for one of those programs. And we're going to be talking about this stuff and going into a little more depth about it and practicing too. Cool. So that would be a good first start. Wonderful. David, David, thank you so much.

Everybody connect with this man. You can see he's a beautiful soul. He, and now you know how he likes to bake his nuts. Roast, please. Sorry. David, you're the best. Thank you so much for sharing yourself with us. I really, I really am grateful to you for.

Thank you, Duncan. Just to say the folks out there, I couldn't see you this time, but I'm feeling you. And I hope that we get to meet and continue these kind of conversations are really important to have right now. They're not frivolous. We're being challenged to really go deeper. So I've kind of allocated my full resources for having these kind of conversations right now. Thank you. And Duncan, you're a great, you're a beacon for people, Duncan.

People, people, you know, they, they tune into stuff through you. You're a channel. Well, then I'm lucky. And I'm lucky I get to tune into you. Okay, David, let's talk soon. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay.

Bye, Duncan. Thank you so much for listening. My dear friends, that was David Nick turn all the links you need to find David are going to either be a David Nick turn.com, or you can go to Duncan trustle.com. And the various of upcoming events mentioned will have links there. Also, thank you to square space and to fields for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. You can find all the offer codes at Duncan trustle.com and thank you. You happy fourth of July weekend. If you're listening to this immediately when it comes out or happy next fourth of July weekend or whatever your particular forth upcoming fourth is, even if it's not July, I will see you next week until then.

Hare Krishna. Thank you.