Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 442: Neal Allen

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

Neal Allen, author and student of the Diamond Heart school, joins the DTFH! Be sure to read Neal's new book, Shapes of Truth, available now! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package. Upstart - Visit upstart.com/duncan and see how Upstart can help you with your debt.

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you run into super cool people. This happens only if you go to super weird places, usually. And this is how I was lucky enough to meet today's guest, Neil Allen. By the way, I don't mean weird in the pejorative. I mean, weird is in cool. Awesome. Outside the beaten path that you've been going on

in some terrible infinite circuit, which I've been going on before I started spending time at these Ramdas retreats. And I've met a lot of awesome people there. I got to meet Neil because I met his wife, Annie Lamott, and did a podcast with her, and he was there, and we talked a little bit, and over time, by some act of grace

or good fortune from the universe, I became friends with Annie and Neil, and we started talking more. He wrote a book called Shapes of Truth, which is wonderful. I was very interested in this book, not just because I like Neil, and because the book, the premise of the book is incredibly trippy,

but because Neil and my mom both spent time in something called a mystery school, this thing called Diamond Heart. I'm not gonna try to talk about it because I don't really understand it. If you're someone who watched the Midnight Gospel and watched the episode with my mom, then a lot of the things she was telling me

come from this Diamond Heart approach, as it's called. And because it was my mom, I intentionally avoided it as much as possible, but after she passed away, I've become more interested in it. And so I spent some time, some non-podcast time with Neil, where he was showing me some facets of this mystery school. And it was some of the most intense mind-expanding hours that I've had in my life.

There's this interesting thing that I began to notice when I was hanging out with the Rom-Dos people before COVID and going to the retreats and spending time with them, which is that the people who had been in the direct presence of Neem Karoli Baba, and honestly, many people who hadn't, but who had had some experience of this being's present, they all had a kind of sweetness to them,

like an energetic sweetness that was identical. And the more I began to see it in people, the more I realized that what I was looking at was some kind of metaphysical fingerprint or something, I guess it's not really that weird. I mean, if you meet people who all share the same shitty monstrous boss, you might notice that they have a kind of commonality

in their negativity, a sort of similar limp to their gait from being abused by some rotten manager or something like that. So if that happens at a Best Buy, then it's probably gonna happen in the reverse in other ways too. It's like these people exist in the world who are, I don't know, they're flowery,

they leave a sweetness on people who get to come into contact with them. And it's really trippy talking to Neal, today's guest, because there's something about him that reminds me of my mom. And I think what that thing is, is the shared experience they've had with the Diamond Heart approach and with this mysterious being called Almas.

I still don't know a lot about, which, by the way, is something I love about Neal's book, Shapes of Truth. I've never read anything like it before. I've never heard of anything like this. And it's somehow connected to a mystery school, which makes it really enticing for me. But more than that, having worked with Neal a little bit

and experienced some of what he writes about in this book, I can verify that it's really powerful. And I hope you will check out his book. You can go to ShapesofTruth.com, find everything you need to know about that book. You definitely should order it. As you're about to see, he's a genius and a wonderful, funny, brilliant person.

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Head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and subscribe. And now, everyone, please welcome to the DTFH the author of Shapes of Truth, Neil Allen. ["Welcome To The Blue Blue") by Neil Allen plays in the background.] Welcome, welcome on you That you are with us Shake hands, go get to be blue Welcome to you

It's the darkened castle DTFH Neil, welcome back to the DTFH. I gotta tell you, there's something that we've talked about. We've talked about by now a lot of cool things. One of the reasons we've talked about a lot of cool things is because we already did an episode of the DTFH, which I lost due to a technical error.

But of all the things that we've talked about, the one that really I find the most unnerving and kind of mind-blowing is your attitude when it comes to cancellations and like things not happening according to the expected schedule. And I wonder if we could just start off with you talking a little bit about that philosophy and what it is.

I guess the way I think about it is things don't go wrong quite the way we think they do. We think that things go wrong because they don't meet our expectations of how things are supposed to go, right? So we think that we're very accurate at predicting the future and when it doesn't happen that way, we blame ourselves or blame other people.

The problem with that viewpoint is that in fact, nothing goes wrong, we think things should happen a certain way, the only way things should happen is the way they do happen. Right. And that's called acceptance or letting go or there are a lot of kind of new age ways of doing this magic thing

where you can accept fate where it takes you. For most of us, that's kind of a crock of shit. You can't accept things going wrong. They went wrong and I've got to prevent them from going wrong in the future and thinking any other way is gonna get me into a lot of trouble, right? Yes, yes.

And I'm not gonna get what I want and people aren't gonna like me and I'm gonna end up homeless and with my body rotting on a sidewalk somewhere, right? Yep. And so everybody thinks that way. The problem with having a viewpoint of acceptance is it only works if instead of it being

an intellectual viewpoint, you actually try it out, right? And so you actually have to see what would happen if instead of complaining a lot about things not happening the way they should, I instead went out and pretended that I wasn't much of an actor in the world, that I had very little effect on the world and just pretending this, right?

I don't have to, I can just wear this for an hour or a minute or a day or preferably about a week and see what happens if I have no strong expectations about what's gonna happen next. The curious thing is that if I let the world just kind of drag me along and I don't pay much attention to my influence on the world, I get the same amount of stuff done.

In fact, the world actually drags me along in exactly the same way that I think that I am influencing my life. It's just that I have this weird app that tells me things are going wrong or things are going right and I think I'm making things go wrong or things go right or whatever,

but I'm really just being dragged along. I'm disrupting my background metaphysics essentially and saying, wait a minute, maybe I can live in a metaphysics that doesn't require me to spend so much energy on free will and maybe the world will evolve the exact same way. The Buddhists call this dependent arising, I think,

and it's a way of situating myself in the world without a lot of preconceptions. And if I don't have a lot of preconceptions, I can't think things go wrong. And most, yeah, one more thing, which is this is my discovery and I'm taking full credit for it. And if anybody ever mentions it to anybody else,

I want them to give me credit for it because I deserve credit of most everything that I say I've stolen, but this one I thought up on my own. You gotta come up with a name up for it then. I mean, we need a name for the philosophy. All right, we'll do it afterward because it's actually not a philosophy.

This is a discovery of human behavior that most people have not ever heard of. Nobody's heard of because I discovered it. When I was a kid, my favorite chore was wiping down the woodwork. I loved what, it's just aesthetically pleasing to get all that grime around a doorknob. And all it takes, you really can do it mostly

with warm water, you can put 409 on your rag or whatever. And so, but most of it just kind of wipes clear and you all of a sudden have a fresh doorknob. The other day, a few weeks, maybe a few months ago, I was looking at the doorknob and thinking about that. And all of a sudden I realized that all that grime, and Annie and I, we have our own bathroom. Nobody else goes into this bathroom.

It was pretty much ever. And so, any grime on that door handle on the inside of that bathroom door is Annie's and mine. And I was thinking about it, where'd that grime come from? You know where it came from? We're not very good as people at getting it right, how to open a door, right? Every bit of that grime was, I missed,

and I hit the woodwork with my finger. The efficient way to open a door would be to get my hand around the knob and open it, right? I don't do that. I put my hand, my grimey fingers above it, below it, next. I'm missing it, every thing, you know, not every time, but presumably a high enough percentage of the time that I'm a failure as a door opener, right?

Yeah, right. Who would think that I am, that's going wrong multiple times a day and it's just not even registering to me that, no, my predictive abilities, my ability to encounter the world and know what to expect is really much worse than I think. And in many ways, I live with it, right? I live with it by wiping down the woodwork

every once in a while. But in other ways, I think, no, this is something I need to control, well, maybe I don't. Why do you think this discovery sounds so black? Blasphemous to people like me. I mean, I've heard, I don't know how many hours of this podcast I have done, and I've heard many controversial viewpoints,

but this one, I find somehow to be the most, I've interviewed Satanists, I've interviewed, but I've never heard anything so blasphemous as this, this idea, I'm being a little tongue of cheek here, but this idea is, it really upsets me. Like anytime you've forgiven me for flaking out or for, you know, losing this podcast, which I was excited to release,

it was in my calendar when to release it. And I was just assuming I had it, but in my expectation, whenever I contact someone like you, I know I must be busy and say, you know, that hour you generously, that hour plus you gave to me way back when that I told you I had to release it this time, it's gone, it's just the fantasies of how you and Annie would treat me after this.

I was, my first time was, well, they'll never talk to me again. So there goes some friends, there's some friends down the tubes, because you fucked up, you're supposed to be a professional podcaster, what? You can't figure out a record audio, like the basic fundamental quality of this.

And so my assumption was, well, there, there you go. Another friendship lost to your disorganization. And so to be met with a response, such as what you just said is, I don't know why, but somehow it really burns. Can you explain why? Well, it's hard to, first of all, that was my public response.

Our private response was, huh, we thought Duncan was a pod head, but maybe it's heroin. I wish. Oh, I wish. If I was on heroin, you can blame it on the heroin. What do I blame it on? It went this far, which was, let's see, he had cancer,

so he probably did to heavy painkillers for a while. Maybe he sucked on morphine. Is that true? That's the conversation you had? Well, that's how we talk. So, yeah, we talk that way about everybody all the time, but we have zero belief that we're accurate. Oh, let me tell you something.

I'm so glad you're being honest about that, because that is more the conversation I figured y'all were having, because it's like, well, they definitely, Annie's in recovery, so this kind of stuff is gonna make her think that I just must be on some insane amount of weird drugs, because otherwise, how do you fuck up this bad?

But, yeah, you know, no, not even, sadly, I can't even really blame it on the weed. Yeah, so, okay, thank you for being honest about that. And also, thanks for not saying that as your first response, because then maybe I would have just gotten into heroin or something. Well, I mean, the fact is that that response was, and I'll be sincere now,

and that response was our having fun, right? Because we expect everything in our lives to screw up. We just do. And Annie's a good friend of a guy named David Roach, and he's, I think he titles himself the priest or pastor of the church of 80%, and his line is you can be 80% all right with just about anything,

but make sure that you preserve the right for things to be 20% off. Yeah. And my favorite line of his is that he says, for instance, darling, darling, instead of saying, I love you forever, he says, darling, I promise I love you, I love you till the end of dinner.

That's a, sometimes that's a pretty big promise. That is, that's a big promise. Why would we promise more? Why wouldn't we accept the fact that even our most beloved people are gonna be annoying and are going to insult us and irritate us and annoy us. And that's okay, because we're not supposed to be 100% at anything, right?

Including everyday life. But I think what's really annoying about it is we wanna have free will. We wanna have control. And we want to believe that we deserve accolades for the hard work of living. And there's no question that life is absurdly difficult, right?

As a humorist, you know full well that every single joke you tell is mocking the difficulty of being a human being. The absurd difficulty of life gives us all irony, all sarcasm, all humor. Maybe there's a, I guess there are bits of humor that don't do that little kids joking around don't know how hard life is yet.

But most sophisticated humor is, it's just hard. The hard part is we're expected to be productive and we're expected to get things done and we're expected to be rewarded with external value with being liked or getting money or being famous or being powerful, whatever, whatever. And for me to say, I gotta take life as it comes, I'm giving away my right to have control over life.

And that's scary as hell. Because I've got a little voice in me that says if I don't keep taking control of life I'm gonna end up homeless and on the sidewalk. Yep, yeah, this is it. That impulse to take control of everything tortures me and especially when it has to do with taking control of like things in the past, which,

because it doesn't seem to be able to distinguish the present from the past from the future. It just wants an all encompassing control over all aspects of reality when it's really bad. But anytime that I've allowed myself, the fantasy like you're saying, right now I'm gonna call it fantasy, I'm not sure. But anytime I've allowed myself that fantasy

and really pulled it off like a Meisner acting style where I really do it versus like you're saying intellectualize it, the relief is so tremendous, so immense. There's such a sense of peace and then I am able to connect and then I am able to connect with people over dinner or connect with people because I'm not completely broiling over with a sense of like, well, I must have sweared it, I fuck up.

Or even, everything was a fuck up. I don't know where I went right here. If you, this is kind of reminds me, is this similar to Ram Dass' idea, or Neem Karoli Baba's idea, everything's perfect? You know the famous story Ram Dass, when will you see? Everything's perfect. Yeah, it is, it is.

And I thought you were gonna say, is this similar to them saying, be here now? And they are the same thing, be here now, everything's perfect, let go, allow the world to organize itself on its own. One way of thinking about it is that we're taught that we can't escape from time and we can't escape from space.

And so we invent a God who's omniscient and is able to do those things. And we leave out a third thing we can't escape from and that is the world will organize itself without my input. And it will always organize itself. And in fact, the only people it doesn't organize itself for are people with disorganized minds, right?

Who have a mental illness or who, for some reason or another, have an organic problem where their minds are disorganized. But for everybody else, most of us, from moment to moment to moment to moment, the world is perfectly organized around us and perfectly supportive of where we are. If the world wasn't supportive of us, we wouldn't be alive still, right?

So if you're alive and you're however old you are, which means you're your own age, then the world has been supportive, right? And that doesn't mean that bad things don't happen. That doesn't mean there aren't natural disasters. That doesn't mean people don't die early. That doesn't mean we don't have wars. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't work

for justice systems that help people who are in danger. That doesn't mean that we act as if, oh, it's the best of all possible worlds and become a bunch of candies and Pollyanna's running around with little blissful grins on her faces. It's not like that. It's that at the same time that I have free will and an ability to vote and an ability to talk to you right

now and an ability to influence people and an ability to beat up my enemy, if that's what I wanna do. I also have going on at the exact same time, a perfect world that is always organizing itself perfectly. And it's weird, but I can hold both thoughts at the same time. So as Westerners were taught to look at free will

and determinism or the kind of God world that everything's determined for you, free will and determinism as opposites and they can't co-exist, right? If you're brought up as a child in India, you're more likely to be taught there is free world and at the same time there is determinism. And they coexist and sometimes you're better off

being in free world and when you're voting and other times you're better off being in a deterministic world when you're being carried along by the flow. Yeah, I've heard this described as relative and absolute reality. Relative and absolute reality. And there are, people talk about non-dualism

and they're, they mean several different things. There's sort of four different metaphysical systems I know of that call themselves non-dualism, but all of them involve some way to merge those two views. So they're always talking about, what in philosophy is called a materialist and an empiricist. That's how I was brought up, right?

I think a table is a table and it's got the essence of table in it. There's an ideal table out there, but it's solid and I can put my fist on it and I know what a table is and I'm an empiricist, I go around and I see things out there and I judge the world according to individual things I see out there. That's a very particular way,

very particular metaphysics that's grounded in us universally. So all these Eastern systems are doing is, and Western philosophy does this too in a little more tragically subtle and piecemeal way, but the Eastern systems go and say, well, let's disrupt your materialism, your empiricism. Let's give you some other metaphysical views

and by doing that, they're not saying, these are better metaphysical views. That's what happens, that's the mistake people find when they go into, oh, I wanna live as a hermit in absorption, right? That's better. No, that's another metaphysical view that you're gonna attach to.

The great thing about learning and having your materialist empiricism disrupted is that it lightens it up by knowing that I could be a materialist empiricist or I could be something else metaphysical. I get to not take being a materialist empiricist so seriously. And so my familiar life can go on,

but it doesn't take itself quite as seriously because I realize, well, there's other ways I could look at this. And the chief other way to look at it, the one that most of these systems hang onto at some point is, I'm materialist empiricist and I'm being dragged along by an interdependent world

that I can't find cause and effect in anywhere that would allow me free will because everything is so interlocked together. And it's a wonderful feeling to be able to notice that all I'm doing with free will is selecting out some fairly trivial variables and working with them while around that surrounding it is this wonderfully independent, dependent arising

universe that I have no control over and that has already put me in the exact right spot for me to be in and will take me to the exact right spot tomorrow. This reminds me of Tim Leary's advice that I read a very long time ago and I can't remember what book it was in, which was, lift up your legs and float downstream.

That's it. Yeah, and that is actually quite good advice if you've ever been, I bet you, have you ever gone rafting on a river? Oh yeah. Capsized in a river. And the first thing they tell you is don't fucking try to stand up.

It's a river, what are you doing? If you try to stand up, you're screwed, your foot's gonna get stuck under a rock. Who knows? You try to float down, cause you can't beat a river a lot of the times. But when you fall out of the boat, that's like the first thing you're gonna wanna do.

It's just built in, is to try to stand up, try to control it. I love the philosophy. I love lightening up that part of me. It feels like so subtly revolutionary. Suttly revolutionary. Wanna thank Upstart for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH Upstart.

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in your loan application. Go to upstart.com slash Duncan. You know, it feels like what you're talking about, which is a wonderful articulation of a lot of different lineages, how does it work? How does this work in the big picture? And maybe that's a dumb question

because we're not supposed to worry about that. We should just worry about ourselves. But I'm thinking, I'm trying to run a business or something. You know, I don't know what it is. Or let's say I'm running a hospital. And I'm thinking, I'm trying to run a business or something. And one of my doctors doesn't show up for an operation. This is not forgivable.

I'm not going to be able to be like, well, you know, everything happens. There's a bigger picture here. It's like, you know, someone died because you didn't show up for this job. Or sometimes I'll, you know, God, I don't know why Aaron and I have been doing this, but we just watched Dateline all the time now.

Maybe it's the pandemic to like resonate with the horror of the pandemic. Just story after story of murder. And at some point watching this, I realized how amazing it is that these detectives take their job so seriously. Like how lucky in society that there's people who are fully, seemingly,

dedicated to enforcing the law and getting justice for people who've been murdered. That they aren't just like, whatever. I mean, are we really going to, like everyone dies eventually. So how do we reckon with the reality? We do need an almost mechanistic way of running society. And that doesn't seem to fit in very well with lifting up your legs and floating downstream.

Or not everyone can do that, at least. Yeah, I think that so I vote. I do socially relevant things. I am appropriate in public. I drive a car. I stop at red lights. There are social restraints that are built into my species of human beings.

They're not moral. We're taught that they're moral, but what they are, I mean, they're moral if you accept the fact that morality is whatever is convenient for the species to expand and fill new niches. And so that's what we do as human beings. We're probably the second best species at it after bacteria, right?

They can go, they can fill it. Niches that we can't even imagine filling underwater and everything up at the top of Everest and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're pretty good at it. And that's what we call morality is protecting the species right, self taught right to expand its numbers. I participate in that.

And I have either a responsibility or maybe just a light social engagement that allows me to participate in that as part of my life. I have a huge part of my life that doesn't have to do that. That's called my individuality. When I'm dealing with public health authorities, I should have no individuality. They call it public health because it has to be public

and it has to be statistical and it has to be not based on my belief in science but on real science, right? But I have this other part of me that's private and that's individual and that is creative and is interested and fascinated by the world as it is and is apart from the social structures. So this me takes walks in the woods.

This me will gathers and this me can do all sorts of things. It can get into a kayak and float down a river, right? And that me is nonproductive unless it wants to be productive and its productivity can be for its own sake and not for a social sake, right? Now, my productive side, which has this control mechanism called a superego, a little voice in my head that keeps me productive

and keeps me stuck in the social moralistic side of expanding the species and filling more niches. That side of me doesn't want me to have an individual self. That side of me wants me to be spending all its time focused on the rules and the restraints and being productive in my... What it really wants me to do is be a mid-level manager in a big corporation, have a suburban house,

two kids, a dog and two nice cars, right? That's what it wants. That is the American dream for Americans and for immigrants and for refugees and for anybody. It's the exact same. And what's interesting about that is that it is a modest enterprise that has financial, economic, social, political moderation to it

that if everybody's aspiring to that, it's a pretty good balance for being able to spread the species and for the species to succeed. There isn't anything all that much better about a brick suburban house than a tin shack, right? If you think about it, they're mostly shelter, right? Most of us get our needs done very simply, but we end up doing this social dance

and improving our level of whatever, income or whatever. That doesn't mean that to focus on myself and to notice that I have self-worth built-in that doesn't need to be productive, that doesn't need external validation and doesn't need to be part of the financial system all the time. That self is allowed to run free at times. And the more that that self runs free,

the more it can sort of see through the game of the species expanding itself and how it kind of pulls me along into this very conservative world of a socially defined being. That's one way to answer is that I have a social life and I have an individual life and my individual life can involve people or not. My social life always involves people and my social life, I just want to make sure

that that productive social life doesn't take up all my time. I want other time elsewhere. The more I do that, the more I find that this other self that is okay with how things are, this individual self, the more I can bring it into my social life and it lightens up my social life. To the point where when I think about the extreme example, here's the extreme example, right?

The extreme example is it's World War II and I'm in the bunker and there is Hitler standing and we're eye to eye, right? Yeah. And I'm looking at him. Sounds like you're in the wrong bunker. What are you doing in Hitler's bunker? What's going on? Why are you in that bunker?

Keep in mind. Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry. So I'm looking him in the eyes and I'm thinking to myself, he didn't ask to be Hitler, right? He got brought up a certain way that made him Hitler, right? There isn't anything wrong with him being Hitler in that sense that he didn't decide this for him.

Lots and lots and lots of influences. He had no control over, brought him to this moment like me, right? I didn't ask to be the guy in the bunker with Hitler. Lots and lots of things brought me there and eventually I can get to empathy with Hitler, right? And I can say, I am capable of being him. He's capable of being me. I am him, right?

That's what empathy is. It's ultimately coming to the fact that we're, you know, it's like Kurt Vonnegut. Nice, nice, very nice. So many people in the same device, right? That's it. We're in the same device. That's humans.

And we are the same kind of people and we didn't ask for the life that we got, but some of us feel lucky. Some of us feel unlucky. Even that's not quite the way it is. But at any rate, I look him in the eyes. I am you. He is me, full compassion. And the right thing to do is I pull out my 45 and I shoot him

between the eyes because he's Hitler, right? Yes. You got to shoot Hitler, but you can do it. You can shoot Hitler compassion. But I know I'm shooting myself too. You know, I know that. Right. That's justice.

So there's a time and a place for justice and for voting and for trying to raise people, you know, equalize the opportunities for people and those are very, very important. You know, my wife and I engage with politics, but we also spend a lot of time not engaged with politics. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, this is what it's.

I'm curious about how you and Annie have fused together because she anyone who's read any of her books knows that she is a basically some kind of Christian mystic or something. And a lot of what you're saying like Meister Eckhart level, but for them for the modern era, like articulating all the deep metaphysics of Christianity, but in a way that are like we can digest, but in a way you, you, when you leave it, her books, you're, you don't know what to call yourself, except you're

just like, oh, I guess I am a Christian and I guess I do love Jesus, but you, you in your book, Shapes of Truth, it seems like this is a different lineage than Christianity. This is Sufism and hearing you talk, it just makes me wonder how do you, how do you two, how does it work metaphysically with you two? Are there places where you're at odds with, with her mystically? And I don't mean to stir up anything by the way.

I'm kind of, I feel a little clumsy with that question. Okay. We love this question. Annie and I both love this question because every time we're asked it, we get to think about this remarkable luck we had in finding each other because one of the, one of the underpinnings of our falling in love and our relationship was exactly this question, how to, to people with very strong

spiritual bents and kind of sort of belief systems, not just cooperate in, as Annie puts it, not looking for, you know, inviting our Jewish friends to Christmas dinner, right? Right. Like that. It's, it's that her spirituality has zero to do with the, with Christianity with the church, right? Her spirituality has to do with what she learns from having

a personal relationship with Jesus. She could care less about what the church says is Christian dogma or what she's supposed to believe, right? But she picks up on certain attitudes that Jesus has about suffering that are remarkable and just bent as shit, right? They are really bent ideas. And the bent ideas are the ones that take you into the radical bent ideas are the ones that take you into further possibilities

so that I can expand myself out of this very limited materialist empiricism that I was brought up in. What are the bent ideas? Can you name a few? Yeah, I'm going to get, I'm long winded. I'll get there. Okay, thank you. She's got some bent ideas.

I've got my own bent ideas like in this book, right? And they're just kind of, they're people who read them may or may not take to them, but their primary intent is to disrupt you from your typical way of looking at things. It doesn't matter to me how I'm disrupting you. I want to disrupt you. Yes. I want you to think that you can tear yourself away from the

little voice that tells you to keep yourself restrained and open yourself up and spend some part of your day in that more open place and that more open place has a name, which is a soul. And whether it's whether you're a Christian or a Buddhist or Vedantic or Vedic or Sufi, you're going to have a word like soul. Right? Yeah. And it's basically who am I before the outside world gets to

me? Right? Who am I when I have internal worth and I haven't even done anything yet? Yeah. I'm just a blob. I mean, who would ever say that a one month old baby didn't have value, right?

Right. And that one month old baby can't even objectify the world yet. It has no idea that there are things, right? Right. Can't build value. Can't can't engage in transactions even in her mind. She can't, right? Yeah.

And yet we know she has value, right? So we all know what a soul is. A soul is right there, right there, that one month infant. That's the soul, right there. You can point to it and you can see the kind of wiggly way of absorbing itself into the world around it that the infant does. The infant's free and in a strange way since it's so dependent, but maybe we're all dependent that way as adults and we forget

that, right? And we're wiggling just like babies. So she's got her kind of Jesus world and I've got my whatever I don't have a lineage, but I picked up the things here and there and particularly this guy, Hamid Ali, who has a mystery school in Berkeley called Diamond Heart that your mother was in. Yes.

And so I have my lineage that takes me to that soul and he has her lineage that takes her to that soul. That soul looks exactly the same. So where what we noticed was and we're both writers. And so I'll be writing about something that takes me toward the soul and some aspect of the soul and I'll walk in and I'll say, Hey, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm writing about the discriminatory power of the soul and she'll say, What are you talking about?

And, and I'll say, Well, you know how you've got a soul kind of and you don't really know what it is. And yet somehow it can kind of parse the world and pick things out and so go, Oh, Oh, you mean this and then she'll start talking about that and I'll take notes or whatever. And it, and it'll kind of amplify where I was at that moment trying to figure something out. So we'll, we'll kind of amplify each other.

By the way, we get totally buzzed when this is happening. Right. When you, when you're talking about the soul, the soul goes, Hey, this is cool. Talk about me. Talk about me. And it's like we're tripping all of a sudden, right? And we're talking about the soul.

So there's that fun aspect to it. There's also, um, because I'm a random Christian, I get to spend time more time than I would, uh, thinking particularly about Jesus's, um, lessons or parables or whatever, because they're kind of in the air. She's writing about them or I'm hearing her talk to somebody about them or whatever. And so it gets me thinking about them.

He's, he is the compassion guy. Right. So he's the forgiveness and compassion guy. Right. Just like, uh, uh, uh, uh, Buddha is the disrupt your metaphysics guy and, um, Krishna Murthy is, uh, don't trust institutions guy and give up your identities guy and all these, uh, Adyashanti is awakened to being awakened.

He's that guy, right? Yeah. Well, Jesus is the compassion guy. Compassion guy has a huge amount of force and importance in a, in a, um, uh, uh, an organized, particularly industrialized civilization, any organized civilization, because the problem with civilization is unlike tribal life, you live next door to strangers and that's what Jesus is about.

He's about, uh, question whether you should be suspicious of that guy, question whether you should call, separate people into friends and enemies and he's radical about it. And he's an important guy to listen to when he, Jesus is so amazing. He, he comes out of nowhere and one of the first things that he does is he gives a lecture on what he knows, right? Yeah.

It's called the Sermon on the Mount and the first line of the Sermon on the Mount is, uh, blessed are the poor and spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Yeah. Um, he comes out of the box and yells to people, Hey, you got it upside down. The losers, the poor and spirit, the people who no longer believe in wealth or fame or anything that they've been taught

the complete losers. They're usually poor also besides being poor in spirit. Yeah. I've been walking around the world and those are the coolest people around. He's not saying go feed the poor. He's going, he's going, he's going and saying, why don't you emulate the poor in spirit?

Why don't you get right down into the bottom of the dark night of the soul where you have no hope that, or that anything out there is going to help you be better or feel better or help get rid of this little strange feeling of not quite belonging in this world or not quite or feeling depressed or whatever. Go all the way down there become a big loser. And guess what?

The kingdom of heaven is yours now because there's a little portal there, right? Sometimes some people, I just heard a great, it might be a trap door at the bottom of the dark night of the soul at the bottom of the well. There's a, you think you're on the floor and there's a trap door and you fall through and there's God, right? Or you go, or it takes you to wormhole.

They're different metaphors for how the dark night of the soul works. But Jesus is saying, do that. Well, naturally, no one has ever believed that's what he was saying, right? And no one listened to him and very quickly after the sermon of the mount, he quit telling people what he actually believed them knew and then just talked in parables the rest of the

way because it doesn't work. You can't tell. Holy shit. You're saying, oh, wow, that is amazing. That was his first, that was like the beta test for Christianity and he realized, yeah, this isn't gonna, this doesn't work. They don't hear it at all. They don't, you've got to talk to them in stories.

And then he, that's when he started saying, let them who have ears to listen here because he realized, shit, this is their, wow, that is so intensely beautiful. I just love the fact that I just love the fact of thinking about him wandering around and just kind of, I just picture him as kind of a guy is just walking down streets. He goes down the rich people streets. He sees how they act behind their walls and their protectiveness

and their separateness and their caginess. And then if you walk down, I don't know about you, but I make a point when I'm in a city of walking down into crummy neighborhoods because I've learned that what I was told to be suspicious of I was wrong about. I was told to be suspicious of people coming up to you and talking to you, right? Of course, be suspicious of the drug dealers on the corner.

You know, I'm not saying don't be suspicious of the people who are actually up to something, but the people who are coming up to you and talking to you. That's just how you behave in a poor neighborhood. You go up to people and you say, Hey, what's happening? What you doing here? And they're really curious. Here I am.

This guy who looks this bourgeois way. They're curious. Why are you here? And so and if you talk to them, the nice thing about talking to people who are poor in spirit is they'll actually answer you truthfully. Yes. How are you doing?

They'll go, Yeah, you know, my feet are really hurting today. And yeah, they're not scared of their own suffering or talking about it or me relating to it. And they assume that I'm like them and I'm capable of absorbing their suffering in the sense of, Hey, tell me more. Yeah. And that's in the end, by the way, that's that's the Jesus way of compassion is just tell me more.

Tell me more. I'm not here to fix it. I'm not here. It's nice that their food pantry is an important and all of that. And that's one way of feeling compassionate. But true compassion is basically getting in someone's face who's suffering and saying, tell me about it.

Oh, yeah, because because we complain, we vent, we talk about our suffering because it's the best way to get rid of it. Oh, yeah. And you know, that is so beautiful. And if I could just add one piece, it's also believing them. There's a culture of not believing people when they say they're suffering or imagine they're putting on a show or something like that, that, you know, they're, or that their

suffering isn't justified. And that is that's so brutal to do to people. If you just, and also a lot of people, I think have resentment resentment for people in their lives who they consider to be whiny or whatever weak or all this like Machiavellian like an Machiavellian attitude towards people. But if you if we go back a few minutes to what you were talking about earlier, which is what was the quote?

The was it Tom Robbins or not? Oh, Vonnegut. Nice. Nice. Very nice. So many people in the same device that when you start there and realize that, yeah, maybe you're, you know, wherever you're at, can't understand why they're suffering or that

doesn't seem like something that would make you suffer. But when you just realize, no, they're really fucking suffering. They're not lying about it. That's real. For me, that's the how I that's the avenue to compassion is to trust when someone says they're not happy. They mean it with the logic behind it. Who cares?

They don't feel good. And that's how that's real and then I can listen and then and do what you're what Jesus was, I think advising. What is the kingdom of heaven? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's ease going with the flow being able to be fascinated by what is right around me. And I think that most of love is the same as most of truth,

which is fascination with the other. And I can't imagine that if you use the metaphor of God having created us or created the world and created us, I can't imagine that the God who created us as self-reflective so that it could know itself would want us to be focused on being productive for each other more than would want us to be fascinated in the world that the God had created. Well, what happened though?

I mean, you know, I'm not asking you to give me an explanation for why there's evil in the world. But what did happen? I mean, if we're going to do the theistic thing and we're going to go down that that route. We live next door to strangers. It's just we have not learned how to live next door to strangers and it's just it's a it's a kind of weird problem.

It as far as I know it hasn't happened to any other species where we had a way of living out of our instincts with a modest amount of self-reflection that didn't have to turn into a whole lot of social restraint when we lived in Stone Age tribes and they're right there are Stone Age tribes that are are still around in New Guinea and the Amazon couple other places and the anthropologists who kind of study them point out that they if you're if you're if you're in a closed tribe where

the enemy is a known other tribe the other side of a boundary that only enters in your life on very rare occasions or in a very patterned and defined way and you haven't been in battle with that tribe for years or maybe you have I suppose it wouldn't make much difference when you're around your own people in your tribe you have perfect trust. Yes, you and you live your life in perfect trust right there isn't a hierarchy of property there isn't a hierarchy of jobs

there aren't hierarchies there's division of labor no question but everybody's kind of in the same they're equal in the sense that you come up with tribal decisions by consensus that you don't even have votes in these in these kind of tribes and outsider has a hard time understanding how the tribe made a decision to move from here to there even though they had a tribal council the the consensus of people who trust each other is very different from the combative competitive kind of

way that we right we we behave there was a point at which the earth got too populated and tribes had to merge and without learning how to treat each other the way that they had treated themselves and while in the tribes and so then you have to have justice systems and you have private property and you have all this kind of crap we have but my main problem is as a civilized human being is that I have lots and lots of very nice neighbors and I know my neighbors and all my neighbors

have have have fences my neighbors have fences I'm fucked as soon as my neighbor has a fence I'm fucked right because I am no longer trusting I'm I'm living in a world where my default is distrust not trust and it gets crazy at that point I can't get out of it I you know we we just moved into a neighborhood and our neighbor came walking into our yard to say hello and I gotta tell you that that the part of me that is not the kingdom of heaven the reaction internally I had was

so embarrassing and ape like as I'm thinking like what you just you can't just walk in my yard man you don't know me why you walking into my yard and I it's an embarrassment because I you know I don't want to be like that but then also I don't know him who is he I don't know this guy's history or story or you know who knows what are his intentions I mean don't you think there is something to be said for boundary is them and fences and you know because we got these loons out there we got

loons the problem with taking that view and I take that view like anybody would is that we've taken it so far that we've trained our guardians our police forces to actually spend their time in a in an exercise of looking for suspicious looking people right it turns out that's that's a bad exercise yes you train what would be important would be for us to learn how not to look at people as suspicious right because of course they're going to be the bad actors but they're fairly

anomalous so that if you go into a bad neighborhood or go into a store or anywhere if you go in without looking for suspicious people without picking people out you're probably pretty safe you're probably we do have a decent civilization and a decent set of rules that behaves kind of like we can trust each other and has replacements for natural trust and we could actually live through them but we haven't figured out that we can and we can today and that we have to for instance I mean I you

know Black Lives Matter is so important but it's so focused on deaths and not on wait a minute our cops are trained to look for suspicious people let's get them to quit doing that we'll lose a modest amount of control over crime but what we will gain will far surpass that and will remove crime in the long run but anyway I have a neighbor moved in a little after we moved in here and my neighbor decided that he didn't like the redwood tree that I had planted because in 60 years

it'll block his view and so oh my God how old is he yeah well I tried to work with him on that and I think we worked it out and then he got furious when we had these power outages and because I'm from the East Coast I went and bought a generator that's what you in the East because you have blizzards and you have generators and everybody boy when there's a blizzard it is a racket you know walking down the street because everybody's got their generate well I was I happen to be the

first person on the block to get the generator when PG&E started their blackouts and so he didn't like the sound of the generator and the decibels were too loud and and so he became to me the bad neighbor right right and then one day I just started laughing at realizing to him I'm the bad neighbor and he has no idea that to me he's the bad neighbor right that's how distrust is so silly I mean any normal you know if we were smart about it we would actually instead of

sending tax and God he got at me through next door at one point and you know he went next door you know he kind of did and then I came in and it the whole thing is kind of funny but if we were truly tribal and we're living next door to strangers none of that is possible right none of that you're all you know there's such communal purpose when your only needs are true needs food shelter and the funny thing is so we gossip complaining about our social lives right that

that's 80% of what we do is gossip as human beings right yeah tribal people gossip too you know what they gossip about falling out of trees getting eaten by large mammals they got a drought yeah roots that you eat during the time of drought that are slightly toxic but it will keep you alive right yeah so they gossip about their actual needs in the world to stay alive we gossip about all this crap because we've got our actual needs largely taken care of massive

amounts of food around the world through our transportation system so drought for most of us isn't a possibility or a probability yeah we have shelter and we have clothes and that's it so most people think they have a bunch of needs you have three needs food shelter clothes and by the way you don't need them in the long run you need them in the short run right so living week to week that's fine you've got if you're living paycheck to paycheck you've got food

shelter and clothing yeah dealt with for the week right that's fine yes we think there's something wrong with both our belief that that's enough and our belief that there aren't other needs and so we build up all these other needs and complain when they are difficult to maintain so I don't know about you but I'd say at least half my life is maintenance of the stuff beyond food shelter and clothing that I have collected around me right and I and I think that I'm getting enjoyment

out of them when what I'm primarily doing is maintaining them it's funny no you know here's an ironic thing one of the most challenging events in my marriage right now is trying to get a fucking fence built around our yard so that we can keep the dogs in and getting a fence right now is is really like I'm not going to go into it by now my listeners are like I don't know how many lists I've lost complaining about fencing but this is like a it's really hard during the pandemic

to do this but yes and and I you know I'm one of my dear friends is having a rough go right now and part of what's bugging him is is that he feels guilty about not being some profoundly tremendous success not have you know the what you just said about the week to week thing I think for a lot of people is really going to make them feel a little better because so many people beat themselves up for being in that situation but in and not realizing that that that that's

actually that is you can call that success you're eating you're sheltered you have clothes I mean you think about it until what a hundred years ago a hundred fifty two years ago 99% of the world lived paycheck to paycheck the equivalent right nobody saved money right it wasn't an expectation there were there was some rich people and there was some politically powerful people but most people just kind of live their lives now were they animals no they were self-reflective human

beings with brains and interests and they had a huge amount of leisure time right and they used it right and we think everybody was a Puritan and spent 14 hours a day at work that's absolutely not true right sharecropping farmers and in them in the Middle Ages worked several hours a day and lived in shacks and and and drank and hung out and talked and watched the sunrise and sunset and presumably went holy cow do you see that isn't that beautiful right yeah and they didn't have

fame and they didn't have money and I'm not glorifying so people are going to get on my ass and tell me that I'm somehow glorifying the poor and they have real you know there was poor public health and people only lived half as long as they do today and all of that kind of stuff and all of that is also true right now I don't get that from you I feel like what's that what's coming out of you is more in along the lines of give yourself a break you're you're spending your

entire life torturing yourself tormenting yourself over these things that are so far away from authentic happiness that's what I get from you and not just these conversations but our private chats too and it's such a liberating it's such a liberating way of looking at the world and it's a great reminder for me because I I always get lost in the things that are so far away from just that and you know the scary about that is that if you're not careful you're just you'll

just be dead you know you blink and you're dying and you realize that the whole time you're doing some stupid compulsive masochistic internalized capitalism dance your family was at home your loved ones were wondering where you were and then eventually forgetting about you and that's pretty sad I mean the weird part it is sad I guess although I have another take on that which is particularly if you have the good luck of getting a immortal a fatal diagnosis

you know told you're going to die in a year year and a half rather than a sudden death unexpected but if it's not sudden and you have some warning about it my experiences most people virtually everybody wait did you say good luck I'm sorry did you say good luck so this is a great story actually Ram Dass wrote this for yoga journal many years ago he gets he got a phone call from Timothy Leary and Timothy Leary says to Ram Dass Ram Dass I have great news for you

and Ram Dass says what and he says Timothy Leary says I'm going to die in a year and a half and Ram Dass says how is that great news you're my friend you're my best friend how's it great news that you're going to die and Timothy Leary says I know I'm going to die that's what's a great news I get to prepare for it wow if you if you get a diagnosis that you have a disease that is in incurable and you have a certain amount of time to live the general most people who go

through that experience who I've seen very quickly adjust their thinking and very quickly let go of a huge number of unimportant things and very quickly bring their life together and the interesting thing about the divine or consciousness with the big C or unifying with God or non duality or any of these sorts of things is there's not much difference between spending five years in freedom and spending twenty minutes in freedom if you've spent twenty minutes in

freedom and that's what dying people often do is they get their twenty minutes of freedom it's plenty it's plenty just knowing it just having met it it's plenty and if you get more than that it just becomes familiar and it's plenty too Neil thank you so much for this conversation thank you for your friendship I hope that you and Annie and your next gossip session about me will forgive me I don't do I've never done heroin I don't believe you know I want you to bring us some

if anyone do it but I turned it down when I was a teenage I turned it down when I was a teenager it's one of the few regrets of my life no I feel the same way about heroin I feel about golf I'm not doing it I feel like I was like you know Iggy Stooge is a big golfer that is he really that shook my world I was like twenty five when I when I found out that Iggy golf and I was like how's that possible he's Iggy does he do what does he wear does he wear the outfit does

he put on the khakis and the stupid Neil thank you so much shapes of truth it's out now this is a wonderful book and you can find all the links to that at Duncan trustle.com but where can people find you if they want to connect with you Neil shapes of truth.com you can make your way into me that way the books available everywhere online have fun with it. It's it's a good old woo woo book. It's fucking great you will love it it's a mindblower and

you cannot see that that's the case just from listening to this genius I got to talk with not just for this hour maybe I'll just keep saying I erase the podcast just to continue talking with you thank you very much I really appreciate your time Neil thank you Duncan thank you. That was Neil Allen everybody all the links you need to find Neil are going to be at shapes of truth.com for some reason you can't remember that it'll be a dug at trustle.com tremendous

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