Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 512: Monk Yun Rou

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Monk Yun Rou, daoist monk, accomplished martial artist, and brilliant author, joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Monk Yun Rou on his website, MonkYunRou.com. Subscribe to his newsletter here. Be sure to check out his new memoir The Monk of Park Avenue: A Modern Daoist Odyssey (A Taoist’s Memoir of Spiritual Transformation), available wherever you buy your books! Check out Monk Yun Rou's Wisdom Wednesday Zoom class too! 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. Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

You've been making better decisions for your busy family for years, and now little by little you're making decisions for yourself, like snacking a little better, going a little further, sleeping a little deeper. We're here to make that journey easier and even more rewarding with Acme's new Sincerely Health Platform featuring nutrition plans, prescription reminders, and more. Sign up in the Acme Mobile app to earn up to $25 in grocery rewards. Visit AcmeMarkets.com slash help for more details. Greetings friends, it's me Duncan, and you're listening to the DTFH.

This is a podcast being broadcast from deep underneath Mount St. Helens. I live in a tiny metal box and I don't know how to get the fuck out of here, but they've given me recording equipment and some top-tier Wi-Fi so I can blast my ramblings out to you. If you've noticed that the intros have seemed a little abbreviated lately, it's because right now I'm moving. All of my material possessions are in a truck headed towards Austin, Texas, and I'm traveling doing stand-up comedy, so I'm doing these short intros. I hope you don't mind.

Don't worry, starting next week I will once again drop the sweet flowers of my beautiful voice and my incredible musical ability deep into your waxy ear holes. I also want to invite you to come see me in person. If you're listening to this on the week of June 6th, you can come see me and Johnny Pemberton at the Helium Comedy Club in Philadelphia, and then two weeks later I'm going to be at Zany's in Rosemont, Illinois. All the links you need to get tickets are going to be at dougatrussell.com. And until then, we're going to do these abbreviated intros, and by the way, we don't need some

complex intro because today's podcast is with a Taoist monk, Monk Yanru, who blew my fucking mind. Are you kidding me? Wait till you hear this. This is why I podcast for conversations like this. You want to hear a Taoist monk's near-death experience and vision of the apocalypse? You're going to get that. You want to get an introduction to what Taoism is, or listen to a podcast that's probably

going to piss off the Chinese Communist Party? Then you've got that too! Oh my god, this is a glorious episode. Zany's guest is not only an accomplished martial artist, but he's also a brilliant author. He's written so many books, too many to name here, but I'd like to recommend the Monk of Park Avenue, which you can find on amazon.com, or by going to his website, which is monkyanru.com. Again that's monk-y-u-n-r-o-u.com, as always, all the links you need to find them are going to be at dunkintrussell.com, but you should for sure subscribe to this man's newsletter,

which you can again find at the website I just mentioned. Now everybody, strap in and get ready to get your mind blown by today's glorious guest. Everybody please welcome Monk Yuen Rue to the DTFH. Yeah, the alternative slash integrative slash complementary thing has been very much a topic of contention in my family, because my father was a very famous physician, and he went to China very early, like in the 70s and 80s, and he witnessed some open heart surgery using no anesthesia, and it was done with acupuncture in a valium, and when he came back with photos and descriptions of this, everyone said he was a fool, and he had been duped, and that

if you open the thoracic cage, you have no pressure on the lungs, so you can't breathe, and my dad should have known better than to be fooled by such a magician's trick, and he was so angry, he said, listen, you know, I'm a cardiologist, and I spend my life in ORs, and it wasn't a talking head with a body lying underneath, and that's not what happened, I'm not an idiot, and I saw what I saw, how it works, I don't know, but I ended up writing a whole book about it, so he was kind of a little more inclined in favor of Wiles' theories and thoughts than a lot of other alphabets. I mean, isn't that reaction, couldn't you say that's a form of racism? That's just a form of

Western racism, which is these people over there, they're savages, they're going to trick you, don't fall for their bullshit, whereas over here in the West, we've got it all figured out, and we've got it so figured out that we're going to just try to erase a culture's ancient practice as like being fraudulent or a grift. You're spot on, and it's sort of a pet thing of mine about which I speak and write often. At the same time, that doesn't mean that there aren't liars and cheats and charlatans in China, and it also doesn't mean that that regime should be mistaken for the people, because, you know, it's the epicenter of evil on planet Earth right now, and those poor people are suffering so much.

Oh, yeah. Oh, you mean the People's Republic of China? You mean there's the Chinese Communist state? Yeah, talking about the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah. Do you speak? Right. So I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a reason for some antipathy, but it's not a race. Oh, yeah, sure. Oh, yeah, I got you. Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, it's so crazy to imagine that this planet is a series of seems to be a bunch of cultural test tubes, trying out all these various reality tunnels, and that that seems to be the reality tunnel that if there is going to be one

that encompasses the planet, that's probably going to be it, whether we like it or not. Yeah, and we have to we have to do our best to let that not happen. But I especially with AI, all the money they're putting into AI and stuff, it's just a matter of time. They think it's they it seems like the their ability to not be in a hurry about how they're operating, you know, like in the United States, we seem to be in some kind of crazy rush. We're bombing anyone, you know, Iraq, we're bombing, you know, Vietnam, whatever, we're just but they just don't they kind of just wait and grow and wait and grow. And it's pretty it's not a terrible strategy. So so that so they have been doing for thousands of years. And, you know, we are defined by the

speed and greed culture, which, you know, we have exported to them. I remember going years ago to the Imperial City, the Forbidden City in Beijing. And like, I was just moved to tears because you know, I spent my life studying all that. And I get to that they had an art gallery, where there was, you know, some exhibitions. In fact, if you look right above me there, that horses on the top of the ceiling, that came from that art gallery. Anyway, I noticed it right next to it was a Starbucks in the Imperial City, you know, the seat of the most fantastic tea culture in the world. And they've got a Starbucks and everybody's lined up to have it. So you know, we attempted to export our speed and greed, hyper capitalistic stuff to them. And they're just doing it better than we are now. So

the whole world is besmirched on account of their aptitude and our hardiness. Yeah, I mean, how do you as a Taoist, do you recognize the like, does it seem like Taoism has actually in some way helped the CC? What do they call themselves? CCPR? Is that the Chinese Communist? Yeah, have you? Chinese Communist Party CCP, they don't like that they use a different acronym is like the people's Communist Party or something. But if they had there some if like, I don't know how that would have happened, but just thought experiment no Taoism. Would it be, would it even exist the CCP? Is it, you know, is the fact that they have absorbed, they must have absorbed in some way,

so much of that wisdom? Is that part of what's making them so powerful? So this is a really, really cool and interesting question, which nobody else has ever asked me in an interview that I can think of at least right now. So I'm glad you did ask that. So I'll give you this answer, but I'm going to give it to you in the context of, you know, what is personally very difficult and sad for me because, you know, there's a war against religion going on now, which as always is just about, you know, Xi Jinping's fear that spiritual people will rise in power and weaken his regime. He wants social control is the number one thing. He's trying to make a North, a large, sealed North Korea out of China, and he will eventually do it.

So I personally have this great suffering and pain in my heart because of how much I love traditional Chinese culture, how much I love to travel there, how many great friends I have there, and because of speaking frankly, as we are doing now about this subject, and writing articles and newsletters and books about all this, you know, any words against the government, according to their security law, the recent one that made such a hullabaloo in Hong Kong, that enables them, it gives them the right in their own eyes, you know, to come to Arizona, snatch me up and take me to jail, and they could do that. Dunkin, they could do it if I were in Pluto, according to their own legal system, you know, anywhere I am. So that makes it, you know, not

a desirable thing for me to travel there anymore or to go, you know, to Chinese protectorates like some places in Southeast Asia. Anyway, the answer, which is most fascinating, is that there is an age-old tradition. It really goes back to pre-dynastic China, that is to say, before there was a China, of the Taoist master being the one who whispers in the ear of the ruler. Right. And the Tao Te Ching is full of, you know, benameless exhortations, crafting an image of the sage as the one who isn't, you know, necessarily, the sage could be the emperor, but in a lot of cases he just whispers in the ear, tells him, you know, what princess his daughter should marry, you know, when he should conduct a military campaign, if at all,

you know, which spies to believe. And the emperors that listened to those guys grew their kingdoms in advance and eventually united China and the ones that didn't, didn't. So you're absolutely spot on. And it's one of the fantastically cool things about Taoist philosophy that, you know, I've engaged for so many years now. I think it's such a curious, it's such a curious philosophy and has always infuriated me more than any other one that I've ever tangled with. I'll read the Tao Te Ching to my toddler in the bathtub. He just likes the way the language sounds. He'll, it's so funny. I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old. I read it to them and they listen, but they don't know what it means. And they'll say, what does that mean? And

I'm like, don't ask me. I don't know. I don't know. But it's so beautiful. And yet I just so infuriating because I can't get my hands around it at all. And then that makes me feel depraved or something like I should be able to. I will, I will send you later some recommendations of translations, other things. And you should probably read, you might think about reading the Zhuangzi because it's storytelling, you know, is a lot of the same messages, but they're funny little stories, you know, like butchard ding, who never needs to sharpen his knife. And a lot of the same concepts are there, but kids can connect to them.

I want to thank ExpressVPN for supporting this episode of the DTFH. You don't want to bear back the internet friends. You don't want to plunge your digital probiscus into the festering, polluted, technologically, malarial waters of the worldwide web. This is why you need a VPN. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, cafes, hotels, airports, basically any network that's not your own, your online data is not secured. And any hacker on the same network can gain access to it and steal your personal data, passwords, financial details. You name it. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so that hackers can steal your data. They make a lot of money selling your personal information on the

dark web. ExpressVPN has made it easier than ever to keep your information safe. It's easy to use. That's the most important part. I just press a button and the thing turns on. And then I don't have to worry about unscrupulous hackers looking at what kind of porn I like to watch. And ExpressVPN works on all your devices like laptops, phones, and tablets so you can stay secure on the go. Secure your online data today. ExpressVPN.com slash Duncan. You're going to get three extra months for free. That's expressvpn.com slash Duncan expressvpn.com slash Duncan. Would you mind just giving us, before we go further, a working definition of Taoism? It's like asking me, what is, beside manic murder monkeys, what exactly is a human being?

Or asking me, can you just briefly explain gravity? It's a question that scholars, and I am not one by any means. I'm 280D and that's smart enough. But scholars have struggled with this for a really long time. What I can try to do is tell you that it's a very complex phenomenon that brings together history, culture, philosophy, religion, belief only in the observation purely of nature, but also the bunch of animism and shamanism thrown in. And it's all mixed up in a blender. And it comes out as a thing that is quite porous, permeable, so that it is able to go like one of those mycelia that grows and it occupies acres and acres is like the hugest living thing, but it's under the ground. You don't really see it,

but it connects everything. And that description really makes it so endlessly fun to study. And, as you say, totally infuriating. Just infuriating. Sometimes I feel that way. Most of the time I'm laughing and just amazed at the fact that it really is in the end nothing more at its core and a little seedlet, the little embryo in the middle of it, is nothing more than a really studious, patient, long view observation about the way nature works. So you asked me about, you know, Daoism and contributing to China's success, and I told you about the whispering in the ear. So how about this for an example? This is one I made up, but I've used it in some talks and people like it. It's like Laozi, you know, a probably, possibly fictional character, or maybe

like Moses or Jesus, an amalgam of people that really live that were turned into a legend or something for instructive purposes. You know, China has such, Chinese culture has such a history of ancestor worship that if you want to attribute and give something some gravitas, you attribute it to an ancestor. So Laozi just means the old boy or the old master. So, you know, there's a bunch of guys sitting in a coffee clutch, well, let's say a tea clutch, and, you know, they come up with some wise things, but they don't want to attribute it to themselves because who the hell are they? So they say, well, you know, the old master said, and so, you know, it's very possible that there was an old guy or there was an old guy, but it doesn't really matter because it's clear

there were several authors of that book. Anyway, and Matt, let's say for the moment, just for the fun of it, that, you know, that the putative Laozi, a librarian in the Joke Dynasty, gets summoned by the emperor one day, and the emperor says, listen Laozi, my wizard, long before Harry Potter, you know, my wizard, I got some news from spies that someone is going to attack, but I don't have enough army to like cover the entire perimeter of the country. I don't know where they're coming from. North, south, east, west, I don't know where to put the troops to save the kingdom. If I screw up, all could be lost. If I intercept at the right place, wherever that might be, we could save everything. Just, just tell me where they're coming from. And Laozi's

like, oh, shit. How do I know where they're coming from? This is your imperial son of heaven. Give me a couple of hours to think on this. So he goes off to the, he goes off and he stands under his favorite, you know, tree by the river, and he does a little meditation. And while he's meditating, he watches the river flowing just through slit eyes. He watches the river. And suddenly he notices that there's some little glinting stuff in the sand of the river, like what we would call Micah, right? Remember that shiny little stuff. And he happens to know because he watches the river all the time that Micah derives from some rocks that are up at the very top of the mountains that feed the river. And that if he's seeing that Micah now months early,

this means that the snowpack that feeds the river is melting. And it shouldn't be melting because it's only February today. And if the snowpack is melting, that leads to an opportunity for enemies to come through a mountain pass that would ordinarily be unpassable and make a sneak attack. So he goes back to the, to the emperor and says, you know, sire, son of heaven, your greatness, your, your holiness, put, put some troops up at the north pass, make an ambush. That's where they're going to come. And then, you know, the king says, are you sure? Like be damn sure because it's your head. And I was like, yeah, I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure. He says, no, I'm sure. I'm sure. Send them. And they come through, you know, on schedule and it's a route. Kingdom is saved and

kingdom is saved. And Laozi is elevated to the second most powerful guy in the kingdom. So this nature watching, and by nature, I don't just mean the river, of course, I mean, the heavens, the seasons, the little internecine wars between ants, you know, all that stuff, how it all works informs everything that we know. And in modern science, it does that also. And Taoists were ancient scientists. And some things we know better than they do now. We understand more in more detail. And other things they still, they still kind of have an edge. So this is sort of the as above so below idea and small things, all things, if you can, by watching any part of the natural world from that, you can extrapolate

everything else. This is the apple falling. Now, you know, just from that, you can understand how like planets orbit around the sun, just from this form of extrapolation. And then also, what I think is really interesting about it is this idea that it, yes, the natural world doesn't it's not a way for you to calculate other things in the natural world. But because humanity is part of the natural world, from watching these things, you can actually formulate how human societies behave. So is the in the in the Dao De Ching, when it's sort of talking about the how when things start malfunctioning, what you can expect when things start malfunctioning, how did Lao Zhu come to that from watching entropy, from watching the way ice melts or trees catch

on fire? How do you get, how do you, how did he, how did he reach that conclusion? You know what I'm talking about like, here's like when the king, when it's so many various warnings or signs when stuff is going wrong, here's what you can expect. Because if the moment, didn't he say the moment there's an emperor or a leader, the moment there, we even know of a king, things have already kind of started fucking up. So you've given me, you know, 10 different questions, and they're all, they're all good. They're all good. Let me, I didn't neglected my smart cap, but I'll do what I can with it. So, so first of all, the as above so below, let's start there. You actually touched on kind of a more accurate version of that when you said, when you mentioned that all things are

connected. So the essence of everything, understanding, predicting, repairing, rebalancing, reharmonizing, all of it, the essence of everything is predicated on this non dual idea, which is very unwestern, honestly, at least through the time of Descartes and in modern science until quantum mechanics and things began to change how we, we looked at it and we realized that the Taoists were right. But, but we went on our own thing, you know, for a couple thousand years anyway. The, the idea that it is all everything we can conceive of and perceive and imagine is all one thing. So I belong to a little app called Next Door. I got kicked out. But it's like, you know, for my hood. And, and I honestly, I don't do social media and I don't spend a lot of time

have a little Instagram that I go to sometimes. But honestly, that's not so much for me. So I don't go on this thing very much. But I live in the mountains of Arizona where there's a high fire danger. And so I started doing that app when we had a really bad fire here and people were losing their homes and I had to keep track, you know, like I could rely on my neighbors who said, you know, the fires in my backyard more than the canopy or a map. Right. So anyway, I start looking at that this morning, there was a post about somebody found a spider in their house. And all these people were talking about how to kill it, spray it, smash it, squish it. And, you know, as a harmless spider, a wolf spider, it looks kind of imposing, but really it's just eating the roaches and other

things in your house. You know, it's not worth other than saying good morning to it. There's nothing really to do. And anyway, I wrote a little line or two about what a wonderful opportunity to exercise, you know, awareness and compassion, recognize that that little spider is part of the exact same fabric that makes you. It's another finger in a glove animated by the same hand that moves you. It's all the same thing. And, you know, if you kill it, you damage that fabric and you damage you because it's all one thing. Being able to perceive that, like on an ongoing basis, is called, you know, in the vernacular for us waking up. Right. And we don't use, I mean, there are things that are good about the word enlightened and things that aren't really so great

about it. And I always get nervous about it. It's not a Taoist word. It's more of a Buddhist word, but it doesn't really exist. Strictly speaking, it's not in Buddhism either. It was applied to Lamas by some Germans or something, I think. I can't even remember more. But anyway, just on a little by little basis, trying to hold the perception of that connection between all things is kind of at the root of Taoism. Because once you have that perception, you can see well in advance of what others may see, where imbalances and disharmony are going to occur, where the pendulum has swung all the way to a terrible place because it was at the opposite terrible place and now has to come back to center.

And if you have this view and this kind of understanding, then, you know, when the guy flips you off because you didn't, you know, leap forward in your 500 horsepower vehicle in the first nanosecond, that the light turned green, and he's got to, you know, meet his mist and she's waiting. He gives you the finger. And rather than, you know, lowering your window and, you know, giving him, giving him a double, say, or, you know, exercising your lips with it or something, he just go, Hey, that's his mind. I'm looking at an unbalanced mind. It's part of something bigger and you wave and he goes by in a rush and you continue on your way. This kind of cultivation is sort of what I hope is an answer to at least some of this.

Yes, thank you. That's a great. Yeah, it's a wonderful answer. And the that one of the curious things about being in a technological society with all the hyperconnectivity that we that is being shown through next door apps or Instagram or whatever is that somehow interpersonally people don't seem to be aware of this at all. They, you know, we know like you, you, you see the telephone wires and you see the all the wires around you and you know, you all your followers and your likes and your tweets you see were so connected. And yet why are we, we all many people, it seems like have a sense of being completely disconnected from this web that you're talking about. And if there is a sense of connection, it certainly

isn't a benevolent sense of connection, but more like a feeling of being ensnared or trapped, angry, like locked into the damn thing inexorably stuck. So how does Taoism approach that suffering? You lead me you lead me yet again to for which I thank you to a very juicy subject. So the way we cancerous manic and murder monkeys are treating each other and the planet is not headed for a good ending. We are, you know, pushing the known universe, you know, our, our world anywhere, our planet into such an extreme position that the forces of nature, you could call it, you know, if you wish you could anthropomorphize this and say, you know, Mother Earth is going to fight back, you know, whatever metaphor you want

to use, but things to control the grotesque overgrowth of human populations require that human lives be taken, that, you know, the cancer be cut out in order for the organism to survive balance and harmony will restore whatever we do to, to destroy that balance and harmony will eventually be corrected whether we like it or not. And I promise you we're not going to like it. Right. So whether it's pandemics, global thermonuclear war, you know, other things, the earth in some form, perhaps not, I'm very greatly saddened and aggrieved to say not in, in the form of the biodiverse wonder that we call earth now, but in some version, whether it's tortoises and cockroaches or all that's left, you know,

it will survive us and, and come back to some kind of balance and then evolution will start a new, some, some people talk about evolution as being another word for, for, for Dow. I don't say the Dow because the Dow implies a thing. Right. So it's not a thing anymore than evolution is a thing. But, you know, this force is inexorable. And we made a lot of mistakes. And like a lot of other species in fast, in fact, a great, great, great species that have ever been on this planet are gone. Right. You know, they were experiments or manifestations of evolution that didn't work out. Why did they not work out? I don't know. An asteroid hit. You know, the earth tilted a little bit and it got too cold. One, one, you know, cancerous thing arose like people and started killing everybody

else. And then the last piece, she's died and it started off again. I mean, this is just the way the whole thing goes. So, you know, we made our first really huge mistake was to leave the hunting and gathering lifestyle, which has sort of been mis, misdescribed as mischaracterized, as being short, brutish and nasty. Now, you know, more, better anthropology says now that we, you know, we were all living till 80 without a hint of disease in our bones or anything, you know. And did the occasional tiger get us? Yes, but not as often as the drunk driver or the mad truck. And, you know, and did we occasionally get diseases? And did we have a bad winter where only if you survive? Yeah, exactly like what's going on now. But, you know, when we went to agriculture,

we went to, oh, that's Duncan's. And this is mine. I'm going to live a penury. I'm going to use this penurious diet of four things that I can grow. Forget all the abundance of everything that I evolved to need from berries and nuts to herbs and all this stuff that make me healthy. Forget that. I'm going to make me. Don't you come here. Yeah. That line in the dirt is this is mine. And that's your, we started all that. And then we made other terrible mistakes, industrialization and now virtual stuff and the digital world. And all that does is compound our initial errors and speed us up. So the tech you referred to, all it does is make everything happen faster. The same crappy decisions, the same alienation, the same poor choices, they're all there as they

were before. Right. Okay, right. So it's like technology is like an apocalyptic lubricant or something. It's just it's not it's not solving the what we are hoping that it would solve. I want to go jump back to what you were saying about population control, which is a obviously a very controversial subject that if you bring it up in the wrong way, people accuse you of being part of the new world order or some kind of a globalist agenda to depopulate the planet. They talk about the Georgia guide stones. I don't know if you're aware of them, but they're these, you know, someone carved like keep human population under this amount. To me, what's interesting about the conversation about depopulation is what you're saying, which is who, how do you want the

depopulation to happen? Do you want it to happen through chaos? Or do you want it to happen through some come some other way, a human way or whatever? Because no matter what, you can be certain that when things get out of balance enough, depopulation is going to happen. You know, it's it's there's no way around it when things get just like what you're saying when we've got when you get war, it's not just like you get war, war is followed by famine, war is followed by disease. You know, whenever things get really wonky, lots and lots and lots of people die. And right now, it seems like the idea, the compassionate idea is like, let the earth decide who to kill via complete ecological collapse. Because that we nobody wants to be in charge of like saying how many

kids you can have. I mean, someone did. We were talking about them earlier. You know, the the CCP. But so what are your thoughts on that? Like, how is that? How would if Lao Zhu did exist, and somehow we reanimate him using an artificial intelligent bot perfectly, what would he say that we're supposed to do to handle this problem of a massive exponentially accelerating human population or an imbalance in human population and resources? If if I asked him, he would probably look at me and say, you know, silly foreigner. But why do you worry about this kind of stuff? And and and you know,

change is, you know, is the only constant. The question really is, well, the answer, I think, is two two times on a little fork. The first time is to say, look, if we've just had this discussion about technology, and how all it does is magnify our foibles and put us in more and more and more extreme situations. Because we have not done, because of that wrong turn we took in the Neolithic, maybe even in the Paleolithic. But let's say in the Neolithic, because of that wrong turn we turn, we took all we have done is added an amplifier to our mistakes. And we keep on using the amplifier to try to fix those mistakes. Right. So so the more we have discussions about, shall we be like Charlton Heston and

Soylent Green and, you know, eating people in little cubes and line up, line up to die in a little gas chamber, because we got to 30 years old or whatever it was. So so, you know, asking these kinds of questions begs the point that all of that kind of solution, so-called solution, is exactly what got us here. And as you just said, nature is going to do what it's going to do, and it will always win. Because, you know, it's just us, plus, you know, a thousand times more wisdom and understanding. Okay, so that's one time. The other time of the fork is that what might be a solution to this. And I was very interested actually to hear Dr. Weil mention in that recent interview with you, the idea that psychedelics have a role

in what I have been writing and speaking about now for 25 years, I guess, which is a leap, an evolutionary leap in our consciousness, which in very rapid timeframe changes the way we see who we are, what we are, how we connect to other people, how we connect to all living things, how we connect to the entire web of sentient beings, even if it's on some planet in Alpha Centauri somewhere, right? But if we could have, and evolution shows that sometimes, whether it's the evolution of a thumb or a bipedal gate that suddenly brings us up, and now we have eyes in the front, we're looking at the felt in a way that, you know, we were, before we were looking at the ground up there, there's an apple, you know, now we're

looking at, oh, look miles away, there's a lion run, right? So we have a whole different view of things that I believe in the possibility of this kind of whether it's epigenetics or some other intervention of some sort. I believe in the possibility, in fact, I believe in the necessity that we have a leap of this kind of understanding that will just fundamentally shift our behavior, and that leap will not come from technology, although, you know, it might come from Ayahuasca. So, you know, that I don't know, not an expert in hallucinogens, because I've been more of a meditator in this life, but I do believe that this is the only answer, you know, when you have a double bind, the only way out of it is to comment upon it. You know, you're stuck either way,

but if you lift yourself and have the perspective of seeing actually, oh, I'm in a double bind, I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't, then all of a sudden you're in a different place to find solutions. Right, you mean like, yeah, you mean like the acknowledgement of the sort of trapped state? Yeah, so maybe instead of social media, you know, and I'm guilty of this, I have this little dog, you know, that I'm just, you know, I was really, really sick last fall, and it's the coma for a while, and when I woke up, and the first thing I said to my wife by my bedside was, you know, I want, I want a Kerry Blue terrier, and she, she looked at me like, you know, that you're, you're, the ambulance brings you to the hospital dead, they revive you, you've been

unconscious for a long time, been sitting here all the time, you wake up and that's the first thing you say, you talk about a puppy, do you not remember that we have four dogs? Would you like to open a kennel? And I said, yes, I know, it's a terrible idea, and I want a Kerry Blue terrier, and, and you know, she's, she looks it up on her phone, she says, you know, that's an Irish dog, they don't even have them here. And I said, look on the AKC website, they've got it. Anyway, long story short, she finds one, like there's one in the United States, there's a litter of six, and five are already sold, and there's one, and I end up getting this dog, and I got this thing for this little dog. And, you know, it's no way rational, I like my other four dogs to all little rat dogs. Yeah.

And, you know, I like them, but I put them up, I put pictures of this one little rat, this, this one that I thought of in my stupor, I put it up on social media, my digression is simply about, instead of using social media for that, and I just admitted that I put up like five or six pictures of the dog. We have to have a shift on what, what are we doing with, with that tool? And if all we're doing is the more or less the worst or the most trivial of us. And I'm not suggesting that loving your dog is trivial. Loving my dog makes my life a lot better. And it is a path to loving nature. So probably I picked a bad example, but you get a point. There are better things to do. Sure. With these technologies. But they have to be informed by a mind that sees

and understands what's really going on. I want to thank the HTML angels over its squares space for supporting the DTFH friends in the old days. If you wanted to get a website design, you had to go into a slimy, thick tunnel in the darkest, scariest part of your city and find someone to design your website. Maybe you get lucky and find a great designer. But more than likely you'd go through a protracted five, 10, 15 year process where you tried to get your website made by somebody who was three pages from the Necronomicon away from tearing their own head off and spraying cursed blood all over you and your family. Fortunately, we now have Squarespace. They've got everything you need to make a beautiful website. If you don't believe me,

check out DuncanTrussell.com. That is a Squarespace website. If you want to create a website for your podcast, it is the ultimate service for that. You can have members only content or you can give people who are really into your show special stuff. They've got shopping cart functionality. They've got incredible customer support and they've got mix and match templates so that you can in moments make an amazing website. Also, you can use Squarespace's powerful technology to send emails out to your client base. I love them and I'll be using them forever. You should try them out. Head over to squarespace.com. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan and you'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Again,

head over to squarespace.com. Try out the service for free when you realize how incredible it is. Use offer code Duncan. You'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. There are better things to do. Sure. With these technologies, but they have to be informed by a mind that sees and understands what's really going on. Otherwise, it's just a Bowie knife in the hand of a two-year-old. Right. It's a Bowie knife that is in the hand of a two-year-old that is transforming from a Bowie knife into a gun, into an assault rifle, into a nuclear weapon. It's growing in front of us. I just saw this, I think Musk just tweeted, retweeted someone saying that 56% of interaction with social media is bots. It's not even humans. It's artificial

intelligence bots that are just swarming and putting whatever their various agendas are into human culture. To me, that's where it's, look, I like that you think that there is some solution or there's a possibility. I love that you mentioned these things that do happen for sure to creatures. All of a sudden, you've got an eye. All of a sudden, you can see what used to be just whatever non-visionary existence for a fish was. Now you're starting to see a coral reef. Now you're starting, it transforms things. I imagine that transformation is very quick. To me, it's nice to hear you propose that maybe psychedelics could be one of the things that cause that transformation. Good Lord, I just don't buy it. I just feel like I've been around

enough megalomaniacal psychonauts, people who've been taking these substances where they're like, this will dissolve your ego and they're like, ego is only amplified by a trillion from whatever the thing is. To the point where it's like, I used to think that. I used to believe that when people would talk about the hippies putting acid in the water supply. They'd be like, well, why not? Give it a shot. But now I'm afraid, I don't know that that would work necessarily. I don't know if that's one of the paths for it. Yeah, I'm not a devotee or a practitioner of any of that. I only mentioned it more because, not because I believe in psychedelics having that power, and that was Dr. Wiles think, but more because I like to hear people talking about the necessity for that particular

kind of shift in consciousness as a solution and maybe the only solution to where we are. Massive global rebalancing that could happen. And I think I have to, why did I become a Daoist monk? Yeah, why? Well, I just released a memoir. We can talk more about it, but it traces my childhood from a privileged family in Manhattan to making all these choices that led me to become a lay monk, at least now. I can't go back to monastery so much. And maybe there's a little seed of seeker in me and in other people that there's some portion of the population that just understands this stuff. You may be one of those people. And so you just look aghast at so many things that happen. And if you have a practice like Daoism, which is, I think pick your poison,

that's the one that appealed to me. But if you have a practice, then what you can do is you can use the practice to enhance and strengthen, number one, your ability to stand against the weapons of mass distraction that are manipulating you, whether they are media or corporate interests or all that stuff that affects how you see the world, what you buy, how you spend your time. You can fight back against that, not with AR-15s, but fight back against it with awareness that, oh, I actually don't really believe that. And I don't really want to be manipulated that way. And I would like to look for some higher, better ways to live and better ideas than the ones that represent American anti-culture right now, a violent, imperial place. So I think the role of practice is important.

Without it, I'm not really sure what I would read. I choose to read as opposed to watch streaming or television. I choose to read because it gives me space. And all these practices, whether they're meditation, Tai Chi and Qigong, which I enjoy, these things give me space in which I can make decisions. So change is one thing. We agree, I think, that it's inevitable. It's going to happen. It doesn't matter whether we like it. Not relevant. Because it's not about us. Nothing is about us. But that simple sentence, it's not about you, is like the least popular thing. My publishers always scream at me for, why don't you write a book about it? It is all about you. Because the doubted jinx says, you got to work on yourself first and blah, blah, blah. We're already too

masturbatory and too self-indulgent and entitled and narcissistic. We don't need any more books about how to entitle yourself to a Rolls-Royce and a big person. It's not about you at all. And that message by itself seems to be so unpalatable to so many people that I get ugly mail sometimes. Oh, people don't want to hear that. Yeah. So without the practice, there is no space to interpret and handle those incoming things and find a higher way of looking at your life. So that's why I'm such a lazy bastard. You don't seem it. Oh, dude, I would lie around and watch Wuxia movies. I've watched Chinese kung fu movies all day long, play with my dog, have some tea, watch some more movies. I'm such a lazy bastard. The only reason that I've persisted

in all these things to achieve something with them is because the other choice is not acceptable. Really lying around is not really a very good way. So I do these things because I must. What are the things? What are the things? What does a Taoist practice look like? So those are some of the things I mentioned. I do a lot of Taoist meditation. When I've been very sick, I haven't been able to stand for long periods of time like I used to, but I hope to get back to that. There are some guys, I shouldn't say guys, there's some people in China. My own master seems to think that there's still some of these druids hiding in the forest somewhere. China is a really big country, but they spend six hours, four to 10 a.m., say, every day, standing with their arms

like this, hugging a tree, motionless, developing their chi. Yeah, six hours. Dude, let me tell you, I've been through a period in my life where I did three hours a day and I cannot imagine, you might say, wow, you could do three, you could do six. You mean three hours with your arms wrapped around a tree? Yeah, sometimes my arms got tired. I put them down, but I was still standing there. I put them back up, but that was sort of my physical peak. What is that like? Wait, what is that? What is hour two like as you're doing that? What happens? I have never in my life heard of that form of meditation before, but it makes me want to go run to the closest tree and try that.

So first of all, the posture, there are several different postures. They're not all the tree hugging. There's one where you fold your hands over your navel, another where your hands are by your sides, with your middle fingers going to an acupuncture meridian. There are at least three different postures and probably more. But the standing part, as opposed to the sitting or the lying versions, which are also legit, because not everybody is strong enough. I'm no longer strong enough. I got sick, so I can't do that anymore. I'm trying to work my way back to it. I don't know that I'll ever be able to do three hours again. But why stand, say, in the first place? It comes from Chinese medicine, although Chinese medicine itself is a very Taoist thing.

So we don't want to get into the chicken or egg thing. We'll be here all day. But let's just say that in Chinese medicine, there's an expression of this idea that there's something called the greater heavenly circle. Your energy circles up your back and down your front end. And all Taoist practices engage this. Some engage only your torso. So then it's called the lesser heavenly circle. It goes from, let's say, you're growing to the top of your head. And at the top of your head, there's a point, pai hui, which is your yang point. It's at the crown of your head. And you have the idea that someday after enough of this, you will open a connection to heaven, to pure yang. Actually, the temple in which I was ordained a monk and then a priest

is named for this idea of pure yang. It's called the pure yang temple. But that's kind of like celestial heaven, you know, everything awakening. Yes. But if you remember that it's a circle, there's that yang going to heaven. But there's also this idea of connecting with the earth through points in your feet, kidney acupuncture point, one kidney, one yang trend, it's called. And so you're suspended between heaven and earth because that is man's place. The idea of being suspended between heaven and earth does put people and our consciousness in a little bit different place. And sometimes honestly, I wrestle a little bit with that. And with a meditation thing, it's just to increase the strength of circulation of that

circle, connect you more with heaven and earth, make you physically and energetically stronger. And those amazing people, I started to say lunatics, but I caught myself, those amazing people who I so greatly admire and want to be when I grow up, who can, you know, stand like that for six hours. What they do, what they do, having achieved that ability to stand like that and made themselves so awake and so strong is they, they heal. They go off and heal people with that energy. And they are healers. And that's their work is to do the standing to become powerful enough to heal. Wow. Because, you know, the first treasure of Taoism is compassion. Wow. So can you imagine if we had a world of people who thought like that instead of

about a tactical nuke that'll solve the problem? Tactical nuke. That's the, that's one of the most hilarious terms maybe that humans have burped out in our history. Tactical nuke. They're killing me. This is how we know there's a Satan. You might not believe in God, but you know that that's a meeting where like Satan appears is like, listen, it's a tactical nuke. We're going to do precision nuclear weapons. It's going to be a mild, it's like a party nuke. It's just, you know, what, what is a precision nuclear weapon? A precision nuclear weapon is, is a medical technique that kills a cancer without killing the rest of you. Yeah. That, that should be the beginning and the end of any kind of tactical nuke. No. That I will accept

is a tactical nuke. Yeah. The rest. Please, never, whoever said that. I remember when the, the warmongers started throwing that out there to try to loosen us up. You're a little uptight when it comes to nuclear weapons humanity. Can't you just relax a little bit? Hey, I, but what is going on? What you are. So what, what do you, what's going on with you physiologically? What is your sickness? What is happening? Oh, yeah. So about that, you know, some people say, well, you know, if you do all these practices and you still get sick, like doesn't speak very well for your practice. Who says that? And well, some people do. And the answer is very simple. You know, without the practices, I wouldn't get sick. I would get dead. Yeah. Listen, I have to get sick,

get sick, practice and get sick. Don't practice and get dead. When, very simple. When I heard that I was going to be interviewing someone who was sick, possibly dying and also who had COVID today. I did not expect to see someone who seems to be far healthier than I currently am. As a dad, you're glowing. You seem, you know, and that's not, that's not blowing smoke. And, you know, my teachers of all, you actually taught me that, you know, telling someone that they're like looking great when they're dying is actually kind of the most rotten thing you could do. But you, do you seem far, you, what's going on with you? Are you, you, what, what is, do you, do you have, is it cancer? Is it? Yeah. So a few years ago, I moved here to Arizona from

South Florida, where I had lived for many years and initially moved there for my wife's job. And she really, she, she had moved years before to Hollywood for me when I was a screenwriter. And, and, you know, I couldn't do that anywhere else. So, you know, she moved there and we lived in, in California for a while. So I returned the favor and, and we, we moved to Florida for her corporate thing, which turned out to be really, really a wonderful career for her. And I was happy to do it. And as it turned out, I, I met my primary master and like it was a really wonderful quarter century there. And I developed quite a large school, you know, in one of the larger, yes, high G schools in the country. And, you know, really, I succeeded there and grew there.

And I'm very grateful for that time. But I also saw, you know, South Florida came, became kind of a hot New York and I don't know, you know, my, I had a house on a beach. I was fortunate enough to have a house on the beach. But, you know, the ocean was in our living room from time to time on a big moon or a storm came. And I thought, you know, this is my single largest investment. I don't want to leave it to my son, who by the way, as an evolutionary biologist, and we'll probably be rolling his eyes in my characterizations of pollution. But yeah, he just graduated from Yale. I'm so proud of him. Wow. Anyway, yeah, yeah, he's really, he's, he's eclipsing his, his dad already. And I hope he continues to do so and more. And anyway, so I didn't want to leave him a scuba

diving adventure. So, you know, we cashed out and we, yeah, we, we moved here to Arizona. I spent some time looking around. I wanted to live in Asia, which I always wanted to do. Yeah. You know, there are so many things politically and my wife didn't want to do that with the kid was still in school. No, no, no. So we got here to Arizona. And within the first year of moving here, I contracted something called valley fever, which is a fungal disease is the little fungus that lives in the soil. And many, many, many people, hundreds of thousands of people get this disease. Yes. And it typically either you don't know, you got it, you know, your immune system kicks it out or you feel like you're sick for a week and have a cold or never heard of it. It enters in the lungs.

It's coxio, coxidioides is the fungus. Anyway, some people, you know, get some nodules in the lungs and then it's diagnosed if they have a chest x-ray, which is what happened to me. Some people, the fungus disseminates throughout the body. So it could go to other places, typical places, the skin that creates lesions. There are medications for it in a class of medication. But they're kind of, in most cases, you take the medication and that's it. It doesn't necessarily totally kill the fungus, but it kind of puts it to sleep like being some cancerous remission, but you know, you don't really get it again. You know, you've developed antibodies to it. Yeah, that's that. So in my case, unfortunately, I am one of the tiny, tiny, tiny, thankfully,

number of people who had the misfortune for the fungus to reach my brain. And it went all over me. I had problems with my heart from it, my kidneys, my prostate, my lungs. It just really took me over. And I don't have a weak immune system, but perhaps genetically, not really clear why, but it really, when it ended up in my brain, that unfortunately is not a curable. That's a fatal condition. So I took the drugs that, you know, we're supposed to slow down its progress. And, you know, like cancer chemo sometimes used for this, it's not, it's not, it's not a pleasant experience to try to prolong your life taking those things. Right. You know, they reduce your quality of life greatly. And I had

trouble tolerating them. And I'll spare you the details, but let's just say it was very rough. Yeah. So there, there's an experimental medication, which was developed by a company in England. Some medical entrepreneurs saw that climate change, and this is connects to everything we're talking about, right? Climate change has caused these tropicopolitan fungi that are to be found in Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, you know, the humidity and changing temperature has a lot of these fungi growing and infecting more and more people. And many people die undiagnosed around the world from these things. And this, this group said, you know, in the short, maybe not in the short term, but at least in the medium term, this is going to become a global health problem.

And we want to develop a drug that works against a wide range of these fungi. And, you know, then we'll become trillionaires. Right. A lot of people. So, you know, I got on a clinical trial of this drug, which is, I will say, much easier to tolerate than the previous medications, whether or not it is a cure, which is to say whether it doesn't just stop the fungus from fucking, but stops the fungus dead. Yeah. That that is as yet unknown because it's too new. Right. And yeah, I was feeling a lot better. And I asked the doc who's running this thing, I said, you know, could I stop now? Because like I feel pretty good. He says, you could. And it would be very helpful for us in the study to know if you did, because on autopsy,

we'll have to see whether, you know, whether your body looks like a farmer's market, you know, I said, okay, all right, thank you very much for that. Let's say, and he is, he has a great sense of humor. And he's just the greatest guy saved my life. Yeah. But, but, you know, he was giving me the sign that like, you know, stay, stay on the stuff. Right. Until we're really sure that it's a cure. So, you know, that's where I'm, and I did, I went to my son's graduation, I got COVID up in Connecticut. And honestly, I had four, four vaccines. And, you know, they gave me the antiviral stuff. And I don't know, Duncan, all I can say is I'm very lucky. And compared to what I've been through in the last two years of my life, this is a snore. And it's not, it's not a snore for a lot

of people. It's very, very serious. But I'm just, you know, I just lucked out. Yeah, you just lucked out as an endorsement. You didn't luck out. It's this hugging tree thing. It's the G. It's your, it's, you know, you're glowing with it. I've seen this before in other people, they glow, you've got this, you're glowing. It's not just the, I mean, I don't know what it is. Who am I to say? I'm just some podcaster, but yeah, no, I, I, I, it's, first of all, I don't mean to just jump back to this, but if anyone online or anyone has said that bullshit to you about your, your, your spiritual practice is not great because you're, you're getting sick. You're fit. What do they think we're immortal? Every, it happens to everybody. There's no way, there's no way out of it. No, so that's

bullshit. But number two, I'm so happy to hear this experimental medication is working. Yeah. So, you know, it's a Taoist thing, like a Buddhist thing, not to get too attached. Right. And it's, you know, it's difficult when it's your life. Because, you know, you, you want, like, I want to be attached. Oh, I'm attached. Keep me alive. I'm loving the attachment. But, you know, it could stop working. It could turn out to kill me and some others, destroy my liver in a year. I mean, you know, anything, it's an experiment. We've only been talking for an hour. I'm attached to you. This has got to work. Seriously. You want to talk about a weak practice. Now, we can't lose you. You got to stick around. I mean, especially now that you've,

that must have been, I can't even imagine what that's like sitting at your son's graduation at Yale. And no, yeah, I was very weeping. I was very weepy. I'll tell you. Did you know that I was super weepy? Do you have a second longer to talk? We've already talked for an hour. It seems like it went by in a second. I'll talk as long as you wish. I'm enjoying it. Is this the dog? This is my baby. Oh, wow. This is Mimi. Oh, that is a beautiful dog. Mimi. We're about to go for a haircut. Mimi. Her name is Yoemi after a character in a novel I wrote. And, but Mimi is easier. So we just calling these daddy's baby. She knows it. Everybody knows that I get a lot of ridicule. To me, do you, it's, look, I have a few, I want to talk more about the dog, but I've got Daoist

questions I want to ask. And I'll Google that breed of dog. But I got to know. This, your master says that these beings living in the forest, hugging the trees for six hours or I, and also the, the, this conceptual is the, the Lao Zhu amalgam has always fascinated me because just of exactly what your master said, any, or, you know, they say the same thing about Pythagoras, you know, that what there wasn't a Pythagoras, Pythagoras represented some unknown community of people. Lao Zhu represents some unknown community of people, and especially with Daoism, in particular, as opposed to some of the other religions that I'm familiar with, centralized religions, you have this concept of the anonymous sage who is

basically like moving the gears of society. And when I am becoming despondent from over indulgence in the news or whatever I'm freaking myself out by watching, I fantasize that those beings are active and are influencing things in the most compassionate way possible, that they still whisper in the ears of people, that they're still out there and they're still doing their job. It's nothing, nothing's changed at all. So that's a big lead up to a probably annoying question. Have you ever encountered one of them? Have you ever encountered one of these people, one of the invisible, whatever you want to call them, the masters, Gerjeev called the, had names for them. If you ever rub shoulders with them or rub shoulders with anyone who claims to

have met one of them. So as usual, your questions bring up a bunch of stuff, but that's what makes you a good interviewer. So look, I'm gonna sidestep it for a moment. I'll come back to it. I'm gonna sidestep it for a moment and remind you of the, of the multiverse, right? So, so I think it's, it's very congruent with Taoist beliefs, although, you know, archetypal, traditional, really strict Taoist beliefs. And by the way, there's, I mentioned that this was a complex and porous phenomenon we call Taoism. So I would never say ever, ever that I'm an expert in all that, right? There are, there are Chinese texts I cannot read because my comprehension is too low. There are things that are not translated, they're not available, you can't trust the

translator, blah, blah, blah. There's just a zillion things from thousands of years of culture. So I can't make an absolute statement, but I would say that the idea of multiverses is congruent with a lot of things that I understand about Taoism and that the idea that there are levels of things. And, and please remember, this is something that not a lot of people really talk about when they talk about Taoism, because they talk about, you know, the Tai Chi to the little yin yang symbol being on the back of, you know, a surfer's, you know, Toyota pickup or something on the way to the beach. I have one tattooed right above my ass. That and also Star Wars, which is, you know, Lucas was fascinated with the interplay between

Taoism and Confucianism and that provided all that risk for that mill and that whole stuff. So, so, but what people don't talk about so much is the fact that, you know, there are shamanistic practices all around the world. And, you know, this is an ancillary, in some ancillary way connected to the, to the question of the hallucinogens that many of them, but not all of them use. And these people do their practices, whether they're chanting or dancing or, or, or smoking something and, or eating something. And what they all come up with in the end is sort of the same vision, even though they're spread all around the world. And arguments have been made that while they all started from some shaman, proto shamanistic ancestor. And so that, you know,

these visions are all from the same Mother Mary shamaness, you know, 100,000 years ago. I don't know about that. But what I can say is that whether it's in Mongolia or on Basin, you know, you take a trip and what you see is remarkably the same. And that is, you know, in some way, I'm going to rough this. Okay. I'm not an Amazonian shaman. But you could think of like a bunch of frisbees connected by a big pencil that goes right through the middle of, and there are all these different levels. And, you know, if you are, if you go to the medicine man, the shaman, the shamaness, and you say, look, I've really got a bad belly. And I can't, you know, nothing seems to help. And then, you know, the shaman entrances

and goes up, you know, four or five frisbees. And there it finds, you know, the tiger annoying on Duncan's belly. Yeah. It says, listen, I, I, I, I, I, I, I humbly request almighty tiger. And don't eat me for asking. But could, could you not, could I give you this a little bit of raw, raw. Instead, could you please stop knowing on Duncan's belly when, you know, the tiger takes the ride, you know, doggie chew from you and wanders off into the forest, and you come back to real world and your pain is gone. Right. No more bellyache for Duncan. Yeah. So this, this kind of, this kind of universality to perceptions of reality upon deep meditation or mind altering through substances is a lot more congruent globally. And people really talk much

about it. And a lot of dominant, you know, Taoism is a very, has a very strong Taoism, has very strong shamanistic roots is the sentence I was trying to, yes. So what you see, what you experience, whether it's in an altered state, whether you're in meditation, or whether it's in something as prosaic as Tai Chi walking practice in the forest, where you repetitively by repetitive movement, create a state of mind, which quiets impulses and leaves some space for you to see things better. I believe that many, many people have accessed little bits and pieces of these other metaverses or these spirit guides or whatever people like to call them. I can say that the best strongest experience I've had in that regard,

and I'm not going to mention, you know, a zillion little things that came and went during so many decades of meditation now, tens of thousands of hours, but rather that in that recent illness in September, you know, when my wife found me, you know, on the floor and gone, and she called I'm 11 and they got there fast enough to save me revive me. I can't tell you I know what they did, but I would presume, you know, extreme things to bring me back. You know, when I arrived at the ER, I was conscious. And there was a doctor, I remember his face very well, a Jewish guy was wearing a skull cap, a kippah, and a yarmulke, and he had thick glasses, and he was wearing his mask. And, you know, I looked up and I said to him, you know, in Yiddish, I said,

you know, like so new, like, so how am I, you know, and he said, I'm not going to lie, you know, it's not good. Yeah. And I'm going to do, I'm going to do what I can, but, you know, your kidneys have shut down and, you know, a lot of your organs are not working. And I don't know, but I'm going to try. And I said, thank you, please do, but I want to tell you something. I've spent most of the summer wishing to be dead. I've had so much suffering. And I've been through so much that I'm really, and I'm a monk. And I, you know, I spend a lot of time in consideration of such things. And I am not strongly resistant to dying. I'm kind of 50-50 right at this moment. And I have been for a little while. So please do your best.

But if you don't succeed, please don't let me be one of those patients that makes you, you know, that wakes you up tonight in the middle of the night going, damn, you know, I lost that guy. I said, because it's okay. It's okay. Do your best. But please know that I'm perfectly fine with whatever happens. And he thanked me for saying that. And I said, I do have one, you know, other small request. And I felt myself fading, you know, said, I'm pretty sure that my wife followed the ambulance just knowing how she is. And that she's going to burst in here any minute. And if I'm dying, I don't want her to hear me screaming and dying. So could you make sure that that, you know, I don't want to die in agony.

Can you make sure that, you know, that doesn't happen? You know, he held my hand and he said, I got you, bro. And that's the last thing I remember. And then I was at her a few days. And when I was, when I was gone, and this is the answer to your question, I was taken on a journey. I went on a curated journey. But it wasn't the journey was not about the curator. The journey was about what the curator wanted to show me. And I used the word curator so as to sidestep saying it was Lao Tzu or God or God of Abraham or Buddha or, you know, whatever. I never saw who or what this was. I didn't have a visual. I just had a presence and the clear, clear 1000% conviction that I was being shown specific things

that that entity wanted me to see. It's like if you go to a museum, you go to New York, and you get, you know, to the, to the Met, you say, you know, I'm Duncan Trussell. I'd like a special tour. I said, Oh, yeah, they're like, let's get the big curator for you. And he takes you for a couple hours through the museum. And he shows you, you know, the greatest things that you absolutely have to see. Yes. So it was a curated tour. And I, and I was way bigger subject than we have time for. But I saw a lot of things, which challenged my idea of non duality. And and they supported it. But they also, it wasn't exactly what I thought, you know, I saw the big bang, I zoomed through the galaxies, all kinds of stars and stuff. But this went on for days.

Wow. Days. It wasn't a 30 second blip or a three second blip. It went on for days. And at the end of it, I saw what is to come for us, for human beings. What is it? It was shown this, and I believe what I was shown, as much as I believe that, you know, that's my head. Yes. And I, and I resist this tell you, I was in awe of all of it. And there was no conversation because there was no space or appropriateness for a conversation. I just shut up and watched what that curator, I'm just using that word because I didn't have a better was showing me. When it came to that, what I saw we're going to become or what's going to happen to us. I reacted very badly. I wasn't, I didn't like it. And I, and I got, you know, a little bit of a tough love kind of slap

on the wrist from the curator, which is the only time the curator spoke. The only time I heard his voice, her voice, whatever. And the message was, sorry, you don't like it. It's not about you. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether you like it. Right. And, and I think that wrestling, my pushing back is what caused me to wake up. Of course, I was being given all kinds of things, you know, the hospitalists to wake me. But from my point of view, you know, they've been doing that all along and I didn't wake up. But, you know, I thrashed around and, you know, I guess I was told that I was very discomforted, might have been excited, you know, I don't know. But when I was shown that I pushed back. And now, of course, I've had lots of time to think about this. And

I think I was, I was wrong to push back because if I hadn't pushed back, maybe I would have gotten more, learned more, seen more, you know, I regret that reaction now. Wait, I'm sorry. Can you talk about what you were showing? What did you see? You know, we don't want to make a negative podcast. Let me say that people wouldn't probably like, you know, it has to do with sort of morphing into AI. And that, you know, what, what we think of as human will not be anymore. And, you know, we'll be sort of like, like these giant crab tentacles in space, like think of an Alaskan king crab leg that's, you know, 80 miles long, and made of some material that we can't identify now, carbon fibrous, you know, maybe nano tech kind of thing. But, you know, consciousness of everyone is in there. And

it's nothing to do with planet Earth anymore. And we're just sort of floating around. And, you know, I've had, I've had lots and lots of thoughts about this, as you would expect. And many of them have come to, well, the one thing I didn't get from that vision was that we are consciousness that there was any more suffering. And so the plus, which came to me later, I didn't realize it at the time of the vision, because I had just such a strong knee jerk thing that I wasn't thinking. I was just going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right. But, you know, thinking about it later, I wondered about my limitations and prejudices and judging that. And, you know, it's just, that was, it was like Buddhism, when it comes to discernment and judgment, you know,

one is good and the other one isn't. So, you know, better not, not to have those reactions. But I'm giving you the very barest bones of this. But, you know, that, that was kind of it. And I will say that since that experience, I have woken up a great deal. And I do see the non-dual pretty much 24-7 now, which is a very interesting way to live. The way that people respond to me, the way that you respond to me, is different than it might have been if we'd done this interview a year ago or something, you know. And I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant eating some tofu and reading the book the other day and a FedEx guy comes rushing in and I figure he's making a delivery, but it turns out he's waiting for, he's waiting for his lunch, you know, he came to pick up lunch.

And it wasn't ready. So, he's kind of agitated staying there because, you know, he's got to go, FedEx. Yeah. And he comes over to my table. I've never seen this guy before. He comes over to my table and he looks at me and says, who are you? Holy shit. So, like, you know, I'm a guy eating my, I mean, a guy eating my tofu. And he says, no, no, come on, really, who are you? And I said, you know, how can I help you? He says, I just got this life where I'm always running and I'm always running and I don't have time. I never see my kids and I got a truck and I got a deck and I gotta make the, and this one's a live animal and that was an emergency package and blah and my whole life is like that. And like, I don't want to live this way. And he spent seven or eight

minutes waiting for his noodles or whatever, you know, telling me about his life. Yeah. And I pretty much say nothing. And then he leaves. And that kind of stuff just happens nonstop now. Whereas it didn't really before. And I don't know what that is. An energetic thing, maybe. I don't know. I've seen it with, you know, like the Trudy Goodman. I don't know if you know, she is, she runs inside LA, but same thing. All the Ramdas teachers, I remember she, she came to do a podcast with me and I go to meet the Uber. The Uber driver is wiping tears away. He's just opened up to her for the whole ride about how he's struggling with alcoholism. And then he's like, listen, I'm going to wait, is it okay if I wait here to drive her back? I'll just drive her back. And that is, that's the healing

part, isn't it? That's what you're talking about, that you become a healer. Yeah, I guess so. So I don't like labels, but I do notice some shifts in this, you know. And I think it was a period of time in my early training where I went through a healing phase where I could do a lot of hands-on healing. I could see things like, see a woman is pregnant before she knows, or see an incipient cancer in somebody. And I could affect things. But my teacher, he said, you know, Lao Tzu says that the way is this really clear highway. For some reason, you know, everybody likes to get lost in little paths and shortcuts and so on in the mountains. And he said, you know, this is a very sticky, these abilities that you developed, you know, this is 20 years ago or more, are very sticky

because you're thinking, well, how could I ignore an ability to help people so directly and tangibly as that? Like, why would anything about me or my path be more important than being able to do that? Right. And he said, I understand why you feel that way. And all I can and I can't make up your mind for you about what you want to do. But as your teacher, I will tell you, that is not your path. Holy shit. And that was one of the hardest. It remains one of the most difficult things that I've gone through in these decades of this. You know, I still wonder about that. But, you know, I listened to him and I trusted him. These cities, you know, I don't know. All the teachers are always sort of,

they were cautionary about these things. I could talk to you. I have so many things I would love to ask you and mention you, but I know that it's been an hour and a half now. And you have COVID. I feel okay. I feel okay. Well, you know about John Lilly's vision, right? You know about John Lilly's vision? You saw that classic. You saw, well, no, his vision of the technological future, like his vision of the, he saw what you saw. He saw the same thing. He saw the thing. It's the thing. It's one of the possible things, the thing, whatever that is. I don't know what it is. Other people have reported in on it in different ways. But this, this, you know, Ray Kurzweil, this is like his idea of like things went right. He would be happy

to hear what you said. We figured out how to deconstruct ourselves at the atomic level and then become sort of cosmic, sentient, whatever it may be, a mist. He's an exponent of the idea that a lot of these AI guys are that, you know, our only purpose, actually, that the human race's purpose, organic life's purpose, is simply to facilitate the appearance of strong AI. And then after that, we, you know, let the universe understand itself. And then after that, we are irrelevant. And, you know, I am, I am far, far, far, far, far from in a position to judge whether that is true or not. Or even, well, how the hell do I know any of that? What I can say is that my, you know, my gut reaction was not, was not to like it.

Well, you went Job. You did the Job thing. That's what Job did too. Job, God fucks up his whole family, his whole life. And then the, isn't the answer to Job? Like, who are you to judge that which made the, the viathan? You know, who are you? Who are we to like, to judge? What are you? Like, what are you? It's like you're, it's like you're toddler telling you how to drive your car or whatever. But I don't blame you. If I saw a spindly, sentient crab legs is what like we're all headed towards. I wouldn't be like, wow, this is great. I'm like, could you make a more colorful or something? What is this shit? You know, what are we doing here? I will say that there was one other thing that came out of that.

So let, let's put the process in a different frame and sort of a more traditional Taoist frame. But let's say that I was climbing, you know, the stairs for the last 40 odd years in this. And, and I wanted to achieve some kind of awakening. Again, we don't use the E word, but, you know, to connect the greater heavenly circle with, you know, heaven and earth. And, and I get to a thousand steps. And, you know, from a thousand steps, I'm way, way up the mountain. I'm almost at the very top. And the view is good, you know, and I feel good about having done this work. And it's what's been important to me. I wanted to do it. And then, you know, some old sage, you know, drifts over and says, Hey, pretty good. You got to a thousand.

Uh, you know, you're only eight steps away from waking up. You know, I'll say, yeah. And he says, look, uh, I'm going to tell you that even though it's only eight, those eight are going to be the most horrible, miserable, torturous steps. They're going to be so grotesque that your mind cannot even conceive of how much you are going to mentally and physically suffer to get up those last eight steps. This of course is, you know, the last two years of my life with this stuff. Right. And, you know, in and out of the hospital and surgeries and, you know, everything, everything. Yes. Just, just misery beyond description. And, and, and what I would like to tell you is that I am the kind of monk that I would sort of like to be. And I'd like to say, yeah,

he told me that Duncan. And you know what I said, I said, bring it on baby. Yeah. I don't care about any of that. Cause I want those last eight, you know, I want to get up there. But in fact, I'm a pussy. And in fact, I'm a wretch, like in the amazing grace. Yeah. And, and I recognize when I came out of all this, I'm a wretch because if someone had given me that choice before the last two years started, and given me that scenario, I would have said, yeah, thanks. Look, I'm good here. I'm good. Yeah, I don't need those last eight. I like, you know, maybe I'll practice another 25 years. If I live that long, and you know, maybe I'll get somewhere, maybe I'll get two or three more stuff. I don't, I don't need that. No, because I'm a pussy. So, you know, I'm a wimp. And I wouldn't

need to know people have challenged when I, when I've said this to some friends that they said, well, you know, maybe your whole idea, like the macho monk who says bring it on is ridiculous that nobody would say that, that even the, but you know, I still in my, in my, you know, being a, a wusha Chinese martial arts devotee fantasy stuff, you know, I'd still like to be that guy that says, you know, bring it on. And I don't bat an eye and I go through. Yeah. That, that, that was not an is not me. And the, the gist of really understanding my own limitations and weakness is that, you know, whatever ego, you know, I still have ego like everybody else, but wherever it was before all this, it's, it's, it's not at the same place anymore because it's

not that I don't have urges or ambitions or anything. It's just that I realize it's all silly. Like all of that, there's no place for that. There's so much bigger things going on and more important that I don't get stuck in that little quagmire anymore. And if I do it's for three seconds, because there's just no room for it. Not, not anything special about me other than I see there's no room for it. That's it. Yeah. Wow. Mankun Rao. Thank you so much for this time that you've given us. Thank you. Thank you. This is so cool. Can we, I, I'm sorry to be rude, but can we do it again? Please assuming we can. I'd like to thank you. You're a great interviewer. You ask such good questions and I enjoy your sense of humor. Oh, bless you. Thank you. I,

this is, you have made my week, year. I don't know. That was such a wonderful conversation. And would you mind letting people know where they can find you? Thank you. Sure. I, I, I, my main way of communicating with people is I have some online classes. I have a monthly newsletter, which goes out, you know, one time a month. It's a few thousand words about current events and Taoist ideas and things. Talks about, you know, planet Earth and some politics and religious stuff and martial arts. It's, it's popular. And I'd love people to sign up for it. That's on my website, which is just Mankun Rao, M-O-N-K-Y-U-N-R-O-U dot com. It's easy to, it's a little subscription. It's very modest. But I also have 20 odd books and more in the

pipeline. I'm not sure when this is going to air, but I've got a few new ones coming out. I just, about three or four weeks ago, let, let my memoir, it just came out. It's called the Munk of Park Avenue. You can find it on Amazon. It's a fun description of how I got to what, what you're hearing from a little kid in New York. Yeah. So many books, websites, classes, online classes. Anyway, thank you for the opportunity and for the, having so much fun with you. That was really great. Thank you, Munk. Yuen Ru, everybody. And all the links you need to find them will be at dunkatrestle.com. Thank you so much. Hare Krishna, thank you. You're welcome. I look forward to the next one. Take care.

Thank you. That was Munk Yuen Ru, everybody. All the links you need to find them will be at dunkatrestle.com. A tremendous thank you to our sponsors. And thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. A Good Time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store. And we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JC Penney. Wireless headphones. That'll be $200. I'll use my Capital One Quicksilver card. Now that's a hit.

You used the Capital One Quicksilver card, which makes you the hero of every purchase. With Quicksilver, you earn unlimited 1.5% cashback on every purchase everywhere. I wanted running music, but unlimited 1.5% cashback is pretty heroic. Good instincts. Every hero needs a theme song. The Capital One Quicksilver card. What's in your wild? Terms apply. See capitalone.com for details.