Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 407: Robert Ryan

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

Robert Ryan, incredible tattoo artist and the only person Duncan would trust to plunge a needle into his arm, joins the DTFH! You can read the Vice piece on Robert here. You can also check out some of Robert's work on Tattoodo and Raking Light Projects, or follow Robert's shop, Electric Tattoo in Asbury Park, NJ on Instagram. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Amazon Music Unlimited - Visit amazonmusic.com/trussell to try Amazon Music Unlimited FREE for 3 months! BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. BetterHelp - Visit betterhealth.com/duncan to find a great counselor and get 10% off of your first month of counseling!

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That song that you just heard is from Justin Bieber's new album, I'm Never Growing Up. It's a great album. Every single track is a true hit. Sweet friends, are you fucking feeling the grinding gears of the state propaganda mechanism? Do you feel like your hand has gotten trapped and wedged in some grinding rusty gear in a satanic cursed clock tower surrounded by robe occultists muttering strange patriotic incantations as they usher you into a hell labyrinth where you're forced to stick your hand into one gear or the other? Well, then hopefully this podcast will give you a little break because this podcast, I got to have a conversation with artist Robert Ryan. He is a legendary tattoo artist who also happens to have built a beautiful temple. And I don't mean like he set up like a bookshelf and put some Krishna statues on the bookshelf next to like a half empty bottle of wine and some like old roaches.

I mean, he literally did the traditional temple building and you'll hear about what goes into building an authentic temple in this episode. But wow, this is one of my favorite podcasts of the year, so I hope you will stay tuned. But first this. A tremendous thank you to Amazon Music for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Right now for a limited time, you can get your first three months of Amazon music unlimited for free. That's access to 70 million songs so you can play the songs you want when you want on demand and ad free for free for three months. Do you just want to stream free? Amazon Music still has over a million podcast episodes at no charge, along with thousands of stations and top playlists.

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and I want to invite you to subscribe to the DTFH on Patreon where you will get commercial-free episodes of the DTFH where we gather together three times a week. We've got a meditation on Tuesday, a family gathering on Friday, and we have a book club on Wednesdays. Right now, we're reading House of Leaves, and the last book we read was Dune. It's a great way for you to mingle with some of the most powerful, brilliant, beautiful, sweet, incredible humans on this planet.

Come home. Come home to your family at Patreon.com. All right, babies, let's get this show on the road. I don't have a tattoo yet, but if I were ever going to get one, today's guest is the only person that I would let plunge a needle into my trembling arm. He is an incredible artist. All the links you need to find him will be at DugatRussell.com. Pull up some of the images of the amazing tattoos that he has given people,

and you will get a sense for who today's guest is. We're going to have all the links. You need to find Robert Ryan at DugatRussell.com, including a great piece that Vice did on him. He is not just a tattoo artist, but he is a deeply spiritual, brilliant human who never fails to teach me new things about Eastern mysticism. And this is why I podcast for conversations like this. So now everybody, please welcome to the DTFH Robert Ryan.

Robert, welcome back to the DTFH. Man, I've been thinking about what I would love to chat with you about. And to me, I just want to talk about your temple, if that's okay. Okay, yeah, yeah. I'd love to talk about the temple. I don't know. You are the only person I know who has built a temple. And I wonder if you could just talk about what that means.

Like what is a temple? And most importantly, when did, what inspired you to, and maybe also if you could describe the temple and then tell me what inspired you to put so much time, energy, and money into making a temple. So the temple is called the Mahamrithanjaya temple, which is, that's one of the names for Shiva. Rithanjaya means conqueror of death. Wow.

So it's the death, death conquering temple. And it basically by conquering death, it doesn't mean that you, in this body, you will become immortal, but you will conquer all your attachments. So you'll gain immortality. You'll gain the essence of immortality, which is consciousness. Wow. So the temple is a place for myself to worship daily and try to achieve a better understanding of myself through connecting with consciousness

and where other people can come visit as well and try to connect it also. We have four mortis there, which are like the statues or are people called deities. One is of Shiva Lingam, which is the unmanifested version of Lord Shiva. There's a deity of Ganesha. There's a deity of Kali. There's a deity of Krishna. And there's a deity of Moragon, which is Ganesha's brother and Shiva's other son. And then there's a morti for the worship of the guru as well.

But can you talk a little bit about, it's not just like, this isn't like the kind of thing I do where maybe I'll see a cool deity and I'll put it on like a shelf in my office. Talk a little bit about what it means to install a deity. Well, the deities were installed by my guru whose name is Rudra Abhishek. And the ceremony that we performed for the installation of the deities is called Prana Pratishta. And the Prana Pratishta is the giving life into the deities. So a certain amount of mantras have to be done in a certain time of year in accordance with a lot of other things. You know, it's a real pinpointed kind of scientific approach to giving life to the, to give life force, to give essence, to give the energy to these deities.

And then after that, the deities are maintained by bathing, which is called Abhishek. And then giving food, which is called bog, the bog offering. So I'm offering them food and bathing them regularly. And then giving, offering flowers, incense and things like that. So there's daily maintenance beyond after the installation. This, as I've been thinking about that our conversation, I kept thinking like, wow, it, it's like, there's some parallel to having a family to having a temple. Yeah, it's the inner family. It's the family that you have inside you, which is the universe, you know?

So you're maintaining that little piece of that family within you each time you go into the temple. Wow, that's so cool. Cause like, you know, for us, we have to, it's a similar thing. You got to bathe the baby. And it's really the, like that's one of the best times of the day. He loves the bath. You know, it's fun to, to get in the bath with him and like you, it's like, you know what I mean? It's, there's, there's something so beautiful about that being the end of the day and like, it's a ritual, you know?

And there's purity. You're bathing him. You know, you're washing the dirt away. You're cleaning him. You're making him more, you're making him happy because you're taking away all the stuff that we incurred during the day. And that's also what you're doing with the deities and that worship. So we, but when you're bathing the deities, you're saying you're really bathing yourself. It's exactly what you're doing.

You're purifying yourself. You're sharpening the subtle energies. So you're able to comprehend these kind of, kind of theories and these, these, um, I guess, you know, these medicines that have been given to us by these saints over thousands and thousands of years. These are all prescriptions through them. Oh wow, man. And the, the, the, you know, for folks who haven't been to a temple, uh, cause so many people haven't. I mean, that's like a, you know, many people listening to this may have never stepped foot, especially in like a Shiva temple. And, um, so they, they may, you know, they, they may have had an experience in like a Christian church, a synagogue, a mosque, maybe.

And I think in a Christian church, synagogue, mosque, one of the wild things is when you begin to realize that the centerpiece, whatever it may be seems to be alive. Like there does seem to be in a great church that it's not just inanimate. There's this like perplexing sense of like Prana or energy emanating out of it. But can you talk, talk a little bit about breathing life into a deity? And don't, don't you think that's more than just a symbolic gesture? It's a highly, it's highly higher than a symbolic gesture, but as a symbolic gesture, it's very important too. You know, like, cause that's, that's where our minds kind of fall in these ideas of symbolism. You know, that's, and before there was language, they spoke through symbolism.

So the Shiva lingam, which is a stone, um, uh, worshiping of that, you know, you could just be pouring water over any stone. But when you, when you give the consciousness and the life force to that stone through these rituals, then you start to identify yourself within the deity. Wow. And see, yeah. So like you said, bathing yourself, you know, washing yourself, um, each step in this process of cleaning the deities is like a stage in your spiritual development. You know, so for each powder that I pour on top of the Shiva lingam is a stage in my development as, uh, from an embryo, you know,

from, from the egg to the flower to, um, you know, to the aspirant to the, from the devotee to the aspirant to the disciple, you know, all these things, these like evolutionary processes that each person goes through, not just in the spiritual practice, but in life. Yeah. So you're, you're, uh, kind of, that's like a frozen moment in time as you're, as you're bathing at each one is like you watch the, the birth and the rebirth and of creation each time you bathe this stone. Wow. But would you say there's a form of communication that happens with these deities? Yes, there is. And, um, that's the thing by sharpening the subtle senses that, you know, like someone might just look at it as a statue or a stone. But when you start to develop a relationship and you start to see yourself and you start to see your loved ones and you start to see all of humanity in these objects.

That's when, you know, the communication, the communication starts, you're opening like a channel between you and the divine. Yeah. Because you're recognizing the divine within yourself. So then you're able to hear the divine from outside the self. It's, to me, that was one of the more mind blowing experiences of my life is encountering the deities and, uh, the Laguna Beach, Hare Krishna temple, initially just seeing statues, like just thinking like, Oh, those are statues. I don't know. You know, they're like, you know, cause my mind at the time wasn't where it got to. But the first thing you do think is like, I guess it's just like a mannequin or something or, you know, and some people would even think that's kind of creepy. What is that? You know, that doesn't make sense.

Or some people get superstitious because of the prohibition of idolatry in Western Christianity, you know, like we don't worship false idols. So some people see that and they're like, they're idolaters. You know what I mean? And so I had a little bit of that from my Christian upbringing, too. Like, Oh my God, this is, this is the golden calf. This is the thing they warned against and they're doing it. They're worshiping an idol. I don't know who, who the fuck that is in me.

But then you start sitting in front of them and you're maybe chanting Hare Krishna a little bit and suddenly you start realizing like, I don't think that's just a statue. Like there's something way more to that than what I thought going in. And that part is the mind blowing part for me, the connectivity between it. And I go back to it all the time in my mind, you know, like I like the reflective idea. But also I got this real strong sense that it was not just a reflection I was seeing, but a living, for some reason, a thing that was deciding to represent itself in this dimension. Via those statues, you know, that it was very alive and very conscious and very advanced and somewhere in there that I got scared. Yeah. Well, to circle back to what we, what you asked me initially is like, how did this happen?

The temple pretty much built itself around me. So funny that our group, our sangha, the people that follow our guru, we were all meeting in Asheville where you are now. What? And yeah, in Hendersonville and at Flat Rock actually. Oh, I remember you telling me that. Oh shit. Yeah. That's cool.

We would gather there twice a year and we would, we'd worship there together and we had this place and then it was taken away from us. They stopped renting to us over some, some things that happened that had really nothing to do with us, but they just kind of stopped renting to these kind of communities in general. So we can sell under, you know, so it was through, through ayahuasca actually, you know, to be frank. So they were like, no ayahuasca ceremonies here. No more, you know, because they were, they were letting like a few different shamans come there. But they let people go there and get fucked up on booze guaranteed. They're like, you can have a wedding where people are puking, you know, you can have a wedding where people are going fully blacked out. But no, you're not going to drink some shit that lets you talk to the earth at our fucking convention center.

The pharmacological inquisition was a, was a foot. So how did they, how did they find out you were drinking ayahuasca? We were, we're upfront with them. And what it was, they were actually very cool about it. But what happened is another group had some problems there on the premises with an ayahuasca ceremony. So they just did away with them in general. So somebody freaked out. So we kind of felt, yeah, exactly.

Maybe the police came. I'm not sure what happened. It wasn't through our community, but they kind of put the kibosh on all ceremonies of that nature. I would. I'm sorry. Wait, I'm just, just to put pause on the spiritual talk for a second. But I swear to God, man, I would pay like a lot of money to see that episode of cops where they bust an ayahuasca ceremony. Like, wait, wait, what?

What are you guys on again? Wait, no, but it's a routine of bark. Every time I see one of those documentaries, which the none of them are good, because there's no way you could capture the experience of ayahuasca ceremony in a documentary. Drop the cord! Drop the cord now! Put it down! Drop those fucking beads, motherfucker!

Some guy's getting tased while he's purging. But anyway, yeah, so yeah, when you, when you see those documentaries, they, everyone's eyes are always like lit up because it's dark, you know, and they're like super freaked out. It just looks like it always reminded me of cops ayahuasca. No, that seems antithetical too. Like, it's like, how are you going to do an ayahuasca ceremony when there's like a camera guy is like zooming in on you. It sounds really disruptive to put it mildly. So go ahead. I'm sorry.

I never, I never saw a good one, but, and I've watched probably all of them. So anyway, yes, we would get together in Nashville and we lost our spot and I, we were going to install a lingam there. And I had actually been the one to procure it because I met this carver of statues in India. So I had him carve one and we lost the space. So I had this lingam and this Nandi, which is the bull that accompanies the lingam. He's always has his focus fixed on him as she was vehicle. He rides a bull named Nandi.

So I had this marble lingam and Nandi and I had no, you know, I was like, what am I going to do with this thing? And I had this old garage in the back of my house and it came to me one time in a meditation that like, maybe I should just install it here and turn this garbage garage into a temple. And I asked a friend to help me build it. And then all of a sudden, all these things happened. And by the grace of my guru, he was the one that kind of oversaw the whole project and kind of instructed us how to do it properly and where things should go

and when we should do it and things like that. Then he came and installed the deities. Who taught him how to do it? His guru, you know, and then his guru and his guru and, you know, it's the lineage. So you got the sense. Did you get the sense that you, you know, it didn't matter where you all thought you were going to build this thing. It already had decided where it was going to go and it wasn't going to be Hendersonville. No, and it was funny because through my guru, when I speak to my guru,

sometimes the side guru comes into his body and it's a really powerful experience. And his name is Tataswamy. And Tataswamy said, I have big plans for you. And that was still when things were, you know, happening in Asheville. And that's what I think the big plan was, was to be the facilitator of this temple. Wow. I want to thank BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Is there something interfering with your happiness that's preventing you from achieving your goals?

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Can you talk about that a little bit? So the Saad Guru is the manifestation of all the Guru's body into the one Guru. The overseeing Guru of all. Whether it be Adi Shankarya or in our case, it's Tathaswamy. It's these Guru's that keep incarnating and incarnating into other bodies. And they can be in multiple bodies at one time. Like Yukteswar, Paramahansa Yogananda's Guru was made famous for doing that. He'd be like three places at once.

Same with Nikoli Baba. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the cities which is the powers when you become a perfected master. You can travel from body to body. But yeah, so the Saad Guru is like this overreaching. It's all the Guru. It's like the accumulation of all the Guru's in one Guru.

And it's like probably like meeting someone you've known forever. It's probably like, you know... 100%. It's like the grandfather. It's like it's, you know, or the grandmother, regardless of whatever that Guru might be. But yeah. So yeah, it is. Like I've known you since before I was born.

Yeah. And when someone becomes an actual Guru, is it just that they are then the vehicle for that being basically, right? It's like the idea is I've understood it and I don't understand it well. But there's one Guru. That's it. There's not like a bunch of different Guru. There's one Guru who has different bodies.

Yes. Yes. And whatever manifestation it takes up, it takes up for the follower or, you know, for the aspirant, you know, it becomes the one that's going to be most suitable for him in that time and place. But there is one overreaching Guru. And it's like the Guru is darkness and Ruh is light. And the Guru is the remover of darkness.

And so, you know... But it doesn't have to be... Can it temporarily appear? It can temporarily appear in your friends' candidate. It can just show up. It should be in everything. When we hone our senses and when we do all this internal work and sharpening of the spiritual sword, we'll be able to see the Guru in everything, in every situation, in every moment.

And the idea is such a loaded term, but all the terms get loaded when we're talking about stuff, you know? The term Jesus Christ is such a loaded term. But Guru, you know, it connotates the most douchiest idea in the West, you know? Yeah. And because there are so many false Gurus, you know? Right. But the true Guru is the inner Guru, you know, the Guru you have in yourself.

And then if you long for that Guru enough in your life, the external Guru will make himself known. That's right. Which he did for you. He did for me. He did for so many. Yes. I mean, you know, I see it sometimes in my child.

Not like I'm going to saddle him with that. That would be a horrible thing to do. It's like, force your... Decide your kid as your Guru. But I've seen the... It's helped me understand why Krishna appears as a child. You know, it's helped me like see that. Like, oh, now I get that relationship.

I totally get it. Because like, you know, we were just... Me and him were just walking up a trail and he was holding my hand. And I'm looking down at him. And I'm thinking like, whoa, this is how you die. And this is one of the ways you die is these little beings walk you into your next incarnation, you know? Like how crazily perfect that was.

How beautiful that was that these sweet beams of light come to you. And then they like... Many times they're with you when you breathe your last breath. And how beautiful that is. What a beautiful way of seeing that. You know, like having your son who is now you, you know? Yeah. Walk you to the threshold.

But, you know, and he is your guru because you're getting to see undifferentiated light through him, you know? You know, through those eyes. Like when you see a child's eyes, you know, like the clarity, because they haven't been mucked up with all the things that we come in contact with over the course of your material existence. Yeah, that's right, man. That's it.

That's it. You know, it's just so simple and perfect, you know? And yeah, if you do... Even if you get to meet someone who has a guru, like I know you, I know Ragu, if you get to meet someone who has the real thing, you still get the reflection of that being. You know what I mean? It reflects through the devotee, you know? And I think that's where I've met Nimkolibaba is through Ramdas and Ragu and all of the,

his, the people who got to be with him, you know, and then also, of course, the other things, the other stuff that happens, which is crazy. Yeah, yeah. But that's the essence of the Sanatana Dharma, you know, which is the teaching of all the Dharma. You know, it's not just Hindu. It's also Islam. It's Christianity.

It's Buddhism. The Sanatana Dharma is the continuing of the teaching. And that's what we follow, you know? Like, you can follow a different strain of the Sanatana Dharma, but the overall Sanatana Dharma is everything. It's, it's the weaving of all those things together. And that means, that's the essence of its meaning is the continuing of it, you know? You keep knowledge going, you know, as a guru, as a disciple, as an aspirant, you keep it

going. And that's the prayer wheel with the Buddha, you know? You keep sending the prayer out, no matter what. Oh, wow. And you, you know, what's really beautiful about that idea is that even if you are someone who has yet to meet your guru or to meet someone who has met their guru, and you hear this stuff, but you haven't come in direct contact with it other than books or listening, maybe did it to a podcast or whatever, you still are in contact with it.

You know what, that there, it's always there. It's like you're saying it's in you and but also it's, you know, one of my teachers, David Nickton, I remember when we were working together, it was the craziest experience. He was just saying, Duncan, it was so simple. That's the other thing. These teachers, they're so simple. When you try to articulate moments with them, it sounds like the most, it can sound very mundane or not very exciting, but I remember I was talking to him and he said, Duncan,

do you believe there was a Buddha? And I thought about it and I'm like, yeah. And he was, he said, do you, would you think the Buddha gained realization? And I thought about it. I'm like, Oh God. And just in that moment, I felt it. I felt the, that the Buddha in that moment. It was like, whoa, whoa.

Not anything like I, in my mind, what I constructed is that being, it was completely, it was warm and love and, you know, it wasn't like, in my, somehow I constructed like an austere emotionless Buddha, but this moment was like, whoa, it's just love. It's like, it's the, it's like the voice of love. I can't explain it, but to me, what's cool about this transmission that goes from guru to disciple or devotee or whatever you want to call it, is that it produces temporal, it produces a telephone that goes all the way back probably to before the big bang. And that's crazy to me that the, you know what I'm talking about?

It's like the reflection of this Dharma through time in is not, it's not like somebody hears it and then conveys information to a person. It's that someone becomes a light, a mirror reflecting a light that is shining into this dimension through time. You know what I mean? It's not, and we're not, I'm not telling you how to do crunches here. You know, it's, you know what I'm saying? It's like you're getting a light is shining on you or through you in that relationship.

Well, as you said, you know, the word transmission, you know, as it transmits from guru to guru to guru, then eventually it transmits to you and into your body, you know, and then it works its way up your spine, you know, and then up into your third eye in between your eyes and then up into the top of your head. And then from there it just explodes and then it goes out again. So it travel even the way the current of the transmission from teacher's mouth to students here on, onward and onward, then to the spine and up through, you know, to have these like mystical revelations, you have to kind of, you know, it goes for our idea goes through

the chakras, you know, the chakra system, which are the five points in the spine and two points in the mind, you know, or in the brain. Do you think it's possible that these, that seed gets planted and you don't even, maybe you're not quite sure it's even happened, but it's growing inside of you. Even if you'd, what, like, what happens if you, if you do meet your guru and the guru teaches you something, but then you forget about it or you get distracted by life or whatever does that happens all the time. Yeah.

And, but does that seed continue to grow inside of you, regardless of your connection physically to that particular guru? The way it grows is, it happens for mantras, you know, that's, that's watering that seed. They plant the seed, you chant the mantras and it grows inside of you, you know, you know, oh, oh, you know, like that, that's the Bija, the word Bija is seed. And each mantra has a seed syllable. And, you know, once the seed is implanted, if you keep watering it and you keep

watering it, it will rise up the spine up to that third eye and then you'll have the revelation and that's the book of revelation. Since, you know, we're in the West, we can talk about the Bible a little bit. That is a description of Christ, Samadhi. What, what do you mean, describe that? So, so this, this comes from the teaching of Shri Yukdashwar. I think he might have been one of the first to enlighten this in English. But so the seven seals, the seven stars in Christ's hand represent the seven

rishis, the seven candlesticks represent the seven chakras, the seven seals represent the knowledge, you know, that you gain once you go through the chakra system and then, you know, all the things, all the descriptions of Christ, like the, the blade of the two blades of the tongue, you know, is the duality. And then he's, he's shining like a sun, you know, they, they describe like they kind of go up through his body and at the top of his head is this, this shining of a million suns or whatever it says in the book of revelations. So yeah, it's, it's the description, it's not so much like, I, I think a lot

of people attach like, you know, of course, Armageddon to, but I think it was Christ's apocalypse, it was Christ's Armageddon. It was him coming from the sun of man and turning into the sun of God. Whoa, that is so crazy. It's a mystic revelation. That's what, that's what happens, you know, and like, I think the nuclear bomb was a mystic revelation in some sense, you know. Yeah, right.

Yeah, that was definitely, I think about that sometimes is like, oh yeah, that was a summoning or a contact or a way that something came into the world. You know, it was more than just the atom getting a splitting of the atom. It represented more than that. Ho, I think it was, well, hopefully it wasn't like foreshadowing, but the, I, the, what you're saying, um, it makes me think of something I was just watching. There's a documentary camera in the name of a guy who went to visit Hermits and interviewed them and he ended up with his Buddhist monk who lived up at the top

of a mountain and the Buddhist monk was talking, was like, agreed to do the interview, which is pretty cool. Cause the guy you could tell he was cool. And so the Buddhist monk was like letting him have like Darshan with him. And the Buddhist monk was saying, you know, we don't really talk that much up here. There really isn't much that happens and there's not much to really say up here. And he's, and it was so crazy, like realizing like, I don't think that this monk has talked in a while, but any, and he said, we, there's monks who are down

there who come here and they say they wished that they were up here instead of the monastery, but they're also, they're, they're teaching too. What they're doing is fine too. But he says the lay people, they come here and we talked to them, but he's like, I don't know about if we, if telling them things actually works because they hear what we tell them, but then when life circumstances arise, they don't do, they don't follow the Dharma. They, and so, but what he said was, which is why we think, I don't know who

the we is, but he's like, which is why we think the recitation of mantras and sutras is best for lay people chanting. I just thought it gives me goosebumps because it was, it was just, it's exactly what you're saying, which is, you know, and maybe you could talk about this a little bit, the difference between hearing, because you can hear all kinds of beautiful things, the, particularly what you're talking about, the book of revelations being Christ's Samadhi process of realization. You can hear from the Bhagavad Gita, there was never a time we did, I did

not exist or you or anybody, or that the God is the original fragrance of the earth, you can hear that, but then all of a sudden you're screaming at some asshole on the highway, you know what I mean? It's like, but what is it, what is it about mantras in particular, or the recitation of sutras or the recitation of holy scripture? Why is it so powerful? I, it's the one thing I've never been able to wrap my mind around the idea that I can just chant Hare Krishna, I can just chant Hare Krishna and in my life

begins to shift in the most profound ways versus I can read Heidegger, I can read Nietzsche, or I can read Sartre, or I could, you know, read Alan Watts, or I could read Tecnoton, or I could read Ram Dass, and it's a much, if there's any progression, it's much slower than just the recitation of the holy names. Why, what's going on there? Why, what's your theory on that? Well, I think one way to look at it is, you know, think of music, like listening to music and your idea of a concept of a song, and then actually playing a song,

or then actually writing a song or being there when the song was created or happened, like spontaneous, that spontaneous feeling, you know, like where is a song born from? You know, and being part of that connection to the unified field that creates mantras, you know, and I think that's, that's what the power, it's the difference between hearing something and actually participating in it, you know, but also mantra is, you know, it means, you know, the quieting of the mind or the stilling of the mind, and through mantra, that's when you start

to notice more things because you slow your mind down, because it's the one time where your mind's not just racing like crazy, you know, like it's not, it's not the monkey, you know, on the stagecoach or on the, you know, a drunk monkey, you know, at the helms of four different horses that are all tangled up, you know, that's where your mind, you know, that just, you know, goes from thought, from thought, from thought, from thought, but when there's mantra involved, it's the only time that the mind knows what the next thought's going to be, you know, so it keeps the mind tranquil, so then you're able to

see more things, and I think that's where the power is, you know, that's where you start magnifying, you know, the microcosm with the macrocosm and vice versa, and start to see those things, that unity, the non-dual bliss that can exist out there, that does exist. Man, I, one of my favorite moments in the K-hole was I, I was in the K-hole on Ketamine. The Ketamine hole? Or Ketamine hole.

A lot of people say K-hole now, and they're using it in the wrong, you know, it's like, I went down the internet K-hole, it's like, no, it's a different kind of K-hole. What? There's no internet fucking K-hole, get out of town, man. There's an internet A-hole. Yeah, you went up the internet to asshole, baby, but there's no K-hole. As far as I'm aware, if there is a K-hole on the internet, I'd like to find it.

But the, you know, before Ketamine stopped working for me, I remember being in that spot, and then we were listening to Mantra, and like, seeing the, I don't, I don't know what, who that being was. I keep thinking like, who was that? It looked like Jaitanya Mahaprabhu, but it looked like all the other depictions I've seen of various monks, it could have been any, I don't know. But the being was chanting, and as it was chanting, it was like manifesting the world through the chant, like the, it was building reality from like saying

these chants, and I feel like sometimes I wonder when I'm chanting, did I decide to chant, or is that like me thinking I decided to chant, like thinking like a tree decided that birds were going to fly out of it? You know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, yeah, no, 100%. I, I, I agree with you. I don't, I don't think it is you, but it is you, you know, and that's like the, the whole science of self-realization is like the big you or the big I, you know,

you know, capital letter I, or capital letter S for self, you know, like the true self is the one that's chanting. The other self that we all identify with is the ego self, and that's, that's the Maya, you know, so the true self is always engaged with divine, you know, and it's just a matter of waking that up in the other self, you know, the day-to-day self, the lazy self, the egoic self, you know. Where is the true self? Where did, where does the true self live?

Does the true self live in this world? It lives in the heart. It lives in the heart of everyone. It lives in your kid walking you off the path, you know, that you were on earlier today, you know, it lives in the idea of it's the creative potential for anything. You know, it's the creative capacity for anything. It's like, you know, it's like potential and kinetic energy, you know, like that's in, in Sannathana Dharma, it's Purusha and Prakriti.

It's like Prakriti is the creative energy that, you know, that makes us material bodies and Purusha is the consciousness that recognizes the material body. Right. And it's the inner play. When they're unified, that's the Shiva Lingam, the Yoni, the male and the female principle, you know, that's when you start, that's when you have consciousness. And I'm interested in Shiva. I don't understand Shiva at all.

I ended up gravitating towards Krishna more than Shiva. So I know, and I don't, I mean, saying I understand Krish, so if you're ridiculous too, but I do, I've, you know, I know a little bit more of the stories of Krishna than I do of Shiva. Do any particular Shiva stories come to mind? Do you have a favorite Shiva story that you think about or that you've been told? Yeah, yeah, definitely. One, one that comes, comes to me right away is Neelakanta Mahadev, which means

he who has a blue throat, the great God with the blue throat. Shiva is depicted with his throat being blue. So the story goes that when the gods were churning the ocean of existence to create the Amrit, the sacred formula of immortality. So the gods were on one side and the demons were on the other and they had a giant serpent and they were like, you know, had it wrapped around a stone. So it was like a churning, you know, like, like you churn butter, you know? Yeah.

So back and forth, they're creating this like friction, you know, which is totally symbolic of the friction that happens in each one of us, you know, with our, you know, devil and angel on each shoulder, you know, our, you know, our, our, our laziness and our, um, our propensity to do things, you know, there's all these dualities that live inside of us. Yes. So the gods and the demon are churning, they're churning these, you know, this giant serpent and through the friction around this rock, this, this like sacred

mountain that they're doing it, um, they created poison. The first thing like, well, first of all, all of these mantras started coming out from that churning. Wow. Then some like gods and demigods, then all these animals start to come out of it. You know, so it's like creation story happening too. Yeah. And then the first thing before the Amrit comes out, comes poison and the

poison is just like, it's so potent that it's even the demons are afraid of it, you know, and it looks like the entire planet's just going to, or the universe is just going to be destroyed. And she, they asked the gods, Ashiva, if he would, um, help them. So he swallows it and, uh, he drinks the drinks the poison, but he doesn't swap, he actually doesn't swallow it. He holds it in his throat and it turns his throat blue, you know, and, uh, the, the real, the concept is like all the poison that's going to be

created in your life, all the bad things, you know, just through karma, they're doing things from action and inaction and everything. Um, it's important to hold it, you know, like to, to accept it, but not to spit it out. So it's harmful for everybody and not to swallow it. So it will kill you. So you hold it in your throat. Whoa.

That's crazy. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, and that, that's what happens to you in the, when you really start doing this kind of like inner work on like a, on a spiritual path, you know, because

you start chanting mantras and you start trying to like sit a goal for yourself and have like right conduct. And then the opposite starts happening because you start shaking up all that dust, you know, and you start having like some really bad thoughts. I know you, I, I've heard you talk about it before, like in meditation, you'll have these like really kind of like negative things will come out and you're like, where did that even come from? I haven't thought about that person that I hated in years or whatever.

Yeah. Um, it gets all stirred up. So Shiva, the power of infinite goodness, which is Shiva's, that's what the, the meaning of Shiva is the consciousness of infinite goodness. He can, he can hold that, you know, he can hold that poison. And that's another thing. Like we have to do it, we have to do the work and hold it in our throats, but we can also put the burdens to Shiva as well.

Cause he can take, you know, there's no fear in Shiva. There's no, you know, he's like surrounded by goblins and ghosts all the time. And yeah, he's, it's just like, you know, uh, he's like a destructive force. You know, he's, he's the destroyer in the, in the Trinity. In the, in the Hindu pantheon, you know, so he's also, you know, intoxicated. He's outside of society. He's not like a, you know, all the gods have like a real elaborate with like crowns and stuff.

He has like dreadlocks, you know, and he's got a tiger skin for clothes. And, um, you know, he's covered in ash. So he's like, he's like kind of the anti-hero in the pantheon as well. So anytime that there's any kind of serious, like fear related or intense negative energy related stuff, the gods would always go to Shiva to neutralize it. Wow. That is so cool, man. That is so beautiful.

It's just to think that these stories exist at all and that they've been, you know, told like the way you just told the story for millennia is, is so wild. I mean, just the, even though like, you know, if you were just like, I think telling them versus reading them is important too. You know, the reading of the story is way different from hearing someone tell it. And I, you know, obviously it started as a oral history, you know, oral tradition, you know, is before writing all these stories were way before writing. You know, and a lot of these rituals were way before writing.

So, and before, and before painting and, you know, before like the tools that you would use to make art and sculpture and stuff like that. So imagine like the creative capacity of these rishis who, who passed these stories down. See, they were the ones who were having the revelations. They were the ones that were doing, you know, their lifetime of topists of, you know, spiritual discipline to gain these, these revelations and pass them down to people and, you know, without any kind of context at all, you know, like they, they didn't have books to reference.

They didn't have, you know, like if I make a painting, I'm usually referencing like four or five different images and kind of trying to find the history of what they are, but they just did, they pulled them out of the, out of the unified field. Can, can you talk about the, where do these stories live in time? Because I feel like one of the mistakes people can make regarding these stories is to imagine, oh, that happened in the distant past. And wouldn't you say that actually the churning of the ocean is happening right now? Like that didn't.

Yeah, it's always happening. It is happening in each one of us. It's happening geopolitically. It's happening, happening internationally, worldwide, universally. It's always happening. You know, it's continual. All those stories, those like in time, you know, like when the Rishis were around on this planet, you're looking 5,000, 6,000, maybe 7,000 years ago.

All those problems that people were confronting, you know, and trying to better themselves with are just as relevant now as they were then. And we're, you know, the, the Philip K. Dick had some kind of, I don't know, an epiphany breakdown. Maybe there's no difference where he realized I am. We are all right now in the presence of Christ being crucified. It's just so powerful that we're hallucinating our lives or, or we're Christ being crucified, dreaming all, all of our individual lives.

Do you think that applies to this? Are we in Shiva's throat right now? Are we the poison in Shiva's throat? Exactly. We're a hundred percent. If we're lucky, yeah. But, but no, yeah, we are, we are, we're living for any of it to have any kind of meaning or potency, potency, potency, potency, potency, potency.

Yeah. Uh, for it to be serious business, it's got to be happening right now. You know, it wouldn't, if it wasn't relevant to what we're living at the present moment, it wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. And, but isn't that's one of the, to me, I think that's one of the tricks people play on themselves because it's too much to deal with. Like, because what you first, it's like the deities. You see them and you're like, I don't know what those are.

Some kind of mannequin or something that people are burning candles to. And then you're like, oh, wait a minute, that's not, that's not a mannequin. Similarly with these stories, you think, oh, that's cute. That's like some kind of primitive, you know, mythology and you get all intellectual about it and stuff. It, but when you shift into like that moment, we're like, oh, fuck. That's now, this didn't happen in the distant past. And it's not just a damn story.

And the Rishis weren't sitting around like, Hey, let's make up a cool story about where the universe came from. Yeah, they heard it. They saw it. They realized what was happening. They were realized they were in it. And then they started like, you know, the mantras that they're saying came out of it. I think that's what's, they just started saying the mantras.

They just, they were like, and then it came out. But I know the some Hare Krishna related mantras, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Hare Hare. What are the Shiva mantras? Om Nama Shivaya, which is the five syllable one is the main mantra for Shiva. Then there's the Mahabhritan Jaya mantra, which is Om Triyambakam Yejama He Sugham Him Pushkivar Dhanam, Orva Rukami Vabandhanam Rithyohamokshiyamam Rithahati that that loosely translate.

We worship you. Oh, three eyed one like a cucumber who is tied to the creeper. May you free us from bondage and liberation and bring us to immortality. Damn, that's I listen. I didn't know that was a Shiva mantra. I had an album that I bought called Indian Temple Music, and it was someone saying that with bells ringing. And I've heard it before, but I didn't know what it was that it was related to Shiva.

That's so cool. That's one of my favorite mantras. I didn't even know it was a mantra. I thought it was a prayer. I thought it was more than I guess a mantra is a prayer. Yeah. But yeah. And that's beautiful. They beautifully did a version of it on Emil's record on Om. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, they do have it in there.

It's such a beautiful version of it. When I heard that, you know, it brought me so much joy. So and then another one is the Shiva Gayatri Mantra, which is Tepurashaya Vidmahe, Mahadeva, Yadimohitanurutra Prachodayahati. And there's different Gayatri's for all the different gods and goddesses and stuff like that, but that she is. So those are the three main ones that we chant in the temple. And then there's a bunch of other ones as well that we also do.

And there's a lot of stotram. And one's called the Rudram that I'm trying to learn currently. Is it longer? Is it just? It's long. It's it takes about 45 minutes to do. One's called the Chamakam and the Namakam. So that's like the. That's Vedic. It's right. It's from the Krishna Ajurveda. But it's like the Hanuman Chalisa is an example of a very long mantra.

Yeah. So this is the Hanuman Chalisa times four. So it's pretty long. Yeah. And there's there's ones that are even longer, like the Devi Mahatmayam, which is the the story of Durga and like her conquering all the different demons. That's about chanted fast will take about four hours. And my guru will do it forwards and backwards. So eight hours.

In one sitting, without getting up or doing any, you know, like not taking any breaks, he'll do like eight hours straight chanting. That's powerful pranayama breathing techniques. And, you know, you have to be initiated to chant these kind of mantras. You know, you could really do a lot of damage to yourself or just to get the proper instruction and the proper pronunciation. You know, it's not the Om Namashivaya is one that anybody can chant, you know, or the Mohammedan Jaya, anybody can chant.

But the other ones, you need you need someone to teach you them. Yes. Yes. And I know people who when you hear that, I'm like, come on, it's just words. But it's like, you know, I think what I feel inspired to do now is to chant more after chatting with you, because it and I have been chanting a little bit. I know you love chanting. I do. You love it, don't you? Yeah, I love it. I love chanting the Hare Krishna Mahamantra more than it's so hard to do sometimes.

Yeah. And you know how when you're meditating, the big part of meditation is I've been taught is not it's like, yes, of course your mind wanders, but it's when you notice you've come back. That's what's cool about meditating is when suddenly and you realize like, oh, right, I'm always going in and out of the moment. But when with chanting in my life, it's the same thing where all of a sudden I'll be like, well, I'm chanting again. Why did I ever stop? Or I'll realize like, I've stopped chanting.

What's going wrong? Why would I stop chanting? That doesn't make any sense. And then I, you know, you start again and it's a it's some sort of relationship, I guess, right? Like it's like a I don't know why I go. I drift away from it. Is there some explanation that your guru is given? Yeah, it's the ego that's in the way. It's the ego is no indifferent from slothiness and laziness and things like that.

And just like finding better things to do and like, you know, your expectations in life or there's so many things that get in the way, but like it's keeping you for it's blocking your consciousness. You know, it's blocking you from attaining that unity that will bring you true happiness in your life. And I think that's what's happening when we're not doing what we think we should be or what we, what we love to do and what really moves us in our hearts once we're doing it, but then we don't do it because the ego gets in the way.

And that's the battle. That's the demons. That's the churning of the ocean. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's also like all the, every, all the stories of the gods, there's always demons involved, you know, even, you know, the Bible and everything. And the demons are the things that block us from the light, you know, the guru, you know, the guru is the one who brings us to the light, the demons are the ones that block us from the light. But I love the acknowledgement in that story.

You told that both are seemingly necessary aspects of whatever this, you know, progenitive mechanism of enlightenment is, right? It's like, Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I always got that with, with the Bible too, with like Christ and the devil, like devil gets a bad rap because he's a totally necessary aspect of the entire story, you know, and like, it doesn't exist without the devil. And yeah, same with the gods, you know, like you need, you need that. And that's, it's because it's a reality. That's what we are, you know, demon,

you know, you instantly think of, of, you know, the worst thing, you know, the demonic entities or, you know, these like, but really they're just thoughts, you know, it's, and it's the mind getting away from itself. And that, that's the demonic tendencies, you know, that's ego, greed, you know, jealousy, anger, all those things just come from bad thoughts, you know, a mess, wayward, wayward thoughts, you know, if you, you know, that's when, when, like the next time you find yourself in a messy house, you can do a little meditation with that and just ask yourself,

how the fuck did my house get like this? And the answer is you got distracted. You, you got distracted. And when you're not paying attention, shake its messy. When you're paying attention, things tend to, you know, organize, you tend to be clean when you're paying attention. All the qualities that are supposedly go, the great virtues seem to be solely related to not being distracted. You, if you're paying attention, you're a better listener. If you're paying attention, you're going to be more healthy. If you're paying attention, you're going to treat yourself better and the people around you.

And I guess the demons, you know, yeah, the trash demon, the mess demon, you know, we got a dog shit demon right now because I keep forgetting to order a pooper scooper and I've got three fucking dogs. So now every one of our, you lost attention. Yes. That's all I got to do is get one. But because I'm not, now it's literally manifesting as shit on my son's shoe, my wife's shoe, my shoe, because the leaves here, we're not used to the leaves. Dog shit looks exactly like leaves. See, it's camouflages perfectly. Where they're running through my yard.

You have to slay the dog shit demons. I do. I just need to get a concentration, but I will get you there, man. We'll get you the fucking thing that you need to clean up the dog shit. But I love it, man, because like, you know, these, this is the problem with these grand stories is you could just forget like you hear stories of demons and you're like, why don't I have demons? You know, I'm just, you know, I just smoke. I don't have deep, but it's like, that's a fucking demon. You have a demon that is like praying on you and devouring you. It has always been useful for me to identify things that I don't like in my life as demonic forces because it produces an adversarial relationship, which I, you, which I can you,

it helps me. It's easier for me to think of like any kind of addiction I have as a demonic problem, because then it's like, fuck, I don't want to de, I don't want a demon. And then I work with it, versus like, well, you know, it's just what I do. The, it's a, it's a, it's a convenient categorization of things, but also, you know, think of any time you've overcome a demon in your own life, that's what gives you confidence, right? That's what gives you, you know, that's part of the joy of life is overcoming these things. I was going to say, you pick the perfect word. That's the joy of the overcoming of something that has been bothering you about yourself for so long. You know, like I just, it happened to me. I just lost a bunch of weight and I'd been fighting this weight

for like, seriously, like 20 years. Like cause I'm, I'm sedimentary, you know, I tattooed for a living. So I'm always sitting and tattooers, even though I'm vegetarian, I eat like I'm on a steak out, you know, like Chinese food all the time, just real fast. Steak out eating. That's exactly what I do. That is so funny, except I'm not even on a steak out. I'm watching DateLine eating fucking noodles. Yeah, exactly. You're not even paying attention and all of a sudden you made this giant bowl of noodles. Just gone. So yeah, but by losing that weight, man, I really overcame something that had been, it just, I couldn't even buy clothes for myself anymore. They weren't fitting me properly. And I was just such a, and a pandemic, I was just

eating like, like it was a snow day on the East Coast that we would have growing up, you know, you're all from school, you just eat all day. Yeah. And so I was doing that. And my wife brought home a scale. I stood on the scale and was like, oh fuck, you got to, you got work to do. Yeah. And I just changed my diet the next day. And I used all the things that I worship with in the temple. I was actually doing a hundred day worship of Debbie. So I just added the diet into part of that. And I lost 55 pounds in three months. What? What? Yeah. I had exercise and stuff like that. But it was like, it was part of every day for a hundred days. I exercised, I dieted, and I worshiped Debbie, I worshiped Durga. Were you just eating salad? What were you eating? Like,

what was your diet? I was eating salad. I would have oatmeal in the morning, salad for lunch, and then saladed with like maybe some vegetarian meat, like with in the salad too as a protein for dinner. Congratulations. Yeah. Thank you, man. I feel great. But like you said, joy. It brought me so much joy to finally get rid of it. Because I know a lot of it was my bad diet and laziness, but a lot of it was also, it was karmic, man. I had this karmic weight that I had to get rid of. I knew like I could trace it back. I was putting on shirts that fit me 20 years ago that I still had for some reason, you know? And I would stand, you know, I was like, maybe a shirt you like, you're like, oh man, maybe one day I'll be able to do that again. And it's just like kind of false

sense of hope. But I was able to do it. But I was like, I remember when I was, I fit in this and all the stupid shit I did to make me not fit in this any longer, you know, or all this, you know, this is why my back hurts chronically, because I just neglected everything in my life. How's your back pain now? I don't know back pain. Wow. So this to me, this is where like, you know, this is where the rubber hits the road, because this is not just some abstract thing where you're doing puja, where you're doing mantra, where this has real world positive consequences that, that, you know, and I mean, I think there's a reason why in AA, they say you need a higher power. I think there's a reason why there is like

in any kind of 12 step thing, there's the, it's got to acknowledge that you need help in this regard that you need someone else to eat the poison. You, you, you, you, you need allies and not just allies that have bodies, but allies that are in, you know, that are in these stories, that you feel in the mantra, that there is legitimate transformation that happens through these practices that is, that is more than just like having like moments of epiphany, that your body changes, your physical form changes. You die. That part, that version of you, man, that's my toddler doesn't weigh that much. That's a whole toddler. That's you, you evaporated a whole being. That's like a creature that you is gone.

I was carrying around under my shirt, you know, that was like, you know, and like, I look at, I have two dogs and the larger of my two dogs weighs what I lost. I'm like, I had, I carried her around every day for like 15 years. Holy shit. That's heavy. Well, literally heavy. That's crazy. I never thought of that before. It's like you're carrying around a dog or a monkey or whatever you give it, a mollusk, a larva, a big 50 pound larva. Imagine if you were a thin guy and everywhere you went, you had a larva wrapped around your chest and stomach. This has been an incredible, I don't know how I'm going to end on that, but I am. This has been so inspirational, man.

And I, you know, every time, yeah. I'm sorry. I started to interrupt. I was just going to say when you were, when you were talking about like the things that you need, like the higher power and stuff like that, it's inspiration. That's what you need. That's what the guru is. That's what God is. That's what the divine is. It's inspiration. It's inspiration to, it's the creative capacity that you can like rise over the mundane self and become the best version of yourself. Robert Ryan, God bless you. God bless your guru. Thank you so much for this conversation. I love to talk to you. It is so good to talk to you. And can you, I, you know, I've skipped over, speaking of like the relative reality, we skipped over that you are this world-renowned

tattoo artist who you do some of the, you are, if I ever get a tattoo, you are the only person I'm going to let put ink into my skin, but maybe you could, can you tell people listening about that side of your life for a second where they can find you? Sure. Yeah. I tattoo at a shop that I own with my two business partners called Electric Tattoo here in Asbury Park, New Jersey. When there's not a worldwide pandemic happening, I'm traveling quite often to a lot of places. So once we get back into the travel mode, if we do, I will be coming to a city near you for sure. I have a new book coming out pretty soon that maybe I could talk about for a second. Please. I just finished it. It's coming out early next year and it's a description of a lot of the deities

that we just talked about and a lot more. It's over 100 new paintings and a lot of writing that have been working on. Oh, man. I can't wait to see it. You can find me on Instagram. That's probably the best place to find my work and it's Robert Ryan 323. I love you. Thank you so much. I love you too, man. Great to talk. I can't wait for this. Great to talk too. When this pandemic ends, I know of a place, if you all wanted to come back to this area, I found a place. I found a place. Awesome. We'll talk about it offline. Howdy, Krishna. Have you been to Mount Soma? Mount Soma, Noth, maybe? It's very close to you. It's a beautiful temple up in the mountains and a giant Hanuman,

Morty outside and the pundit there is really good. So when we're able to travel, we'll go visit there together. Well, you know, I'm sure you have places here already, but if you need a place, you can always come and stay with us, man. I would love to. All right. I love you, man. Thank you for all of this. All the links you need to find Robert Ryan are going to be at duckatrustle.com. Robert Ryan, thank you so much. That was Robert Ryan, everybody. All the links you need to find them will be at duckatrustle.com. A big thank you to our sponsors. All those offer codes will be at duckatrustle.com. And a big thank you to you for continuing to listen to the DTFH. If you're listening to this after Tuesday, we did it. You made it through the

fucking elections. Hopefully there isn't some horrific civil war happening. And if you're listening to this before Tuesday, and I'm sorry to be one of the many people banging you up with a vote hammer, go vote. This one actually matters. Just go do it. Put on a fucking hazmat suit, put some mints in your nose, fill your ass with a mixture of like molasses and kerosene, and go vote. Make it happen. Let's get the fuck out of this gristled, throbbing, dark, embarrassing, velvety, slivering, jibbling, jabbering graveyard troll style with big nipples all over its body, spraying gouts of poisonous milk into the mouth of baby kittens whose tongues are dissolving as they burst into flames. Part of our country's history. Go vote. Do it for me.

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